Hacker News: ahepp

New comment by ahepp in "Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism"

ahepp — Sat, 30 May 2026 16:51:32 +0000

> If you make money putting stuff into the stream of commerce, you're liable for unintended and evenunforseeable downstream damages

So if you’re a business offering poor quality services, and I come along and start offering higher quality services, I owe you damages for the impact I have on your business?

New comment by ahepp in "News about Raspberry Pi 6 and Microcontroller Development"

ahepp — Thu, 28 May 2026 22:21:29 +0000

This sounds like a great approach to me. I've thought some kind of pi zero 2w based smart speaker system would be an awesome project for a while. I am having a difficult time imagining a cheaper option, especially if you want something like the hat ecosystem.

New comment by ahepp in "Private equity bought America's essential services"

ahepp — Wed, 27 May 2026 19:13:27 +0000

I think you have this pretty backwards. Private equity does not exist because of pensions. Private equity is investment that has not taken additional steps to be a part of regulated public markets.

It's true that private equity is dominated by institutional investors. One reason for this is that the investments are generally deemed too complicated, illiquid, and risky for retail investors (although the Trump administration is trying to change this).

Additionally, if we added the kinds of regulations, reporting requirements, standardization, etc, that would be necessary to scale this model to hundreds of thousands or millions of investors participating in an informed manner, we would simply recreate public markets.

Freakonomics recently did an episode on this that I thought was pretty good: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-the-public-ready-for-pri...

They've done some pieces on private equity in the past too: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/are-private-equity-firms-pl...

New comment by ahepp in "Defeating Git Rigour Fatigue with Jujutsu"

ahepp — Sun, 24 May 2026 22:16:40 +0000

> Switch to a previous commit, make edits, changes propagate into the future commits

In what way is that different from using `git rebase -i` to edit a commit?

New comment by ahepp in "The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics"

ahepp — Fri, 22 May 2026 10:55:57 +0000

what share of the DRAM market does China control today?

New comment by ahepp in "Minnesota becomes first state to ban prediction markets"

ahepp — Tue, 19 May 2026 21:30:50 +0000

Couldn’t we say that any market rewards prediction? And that this is generally seen as a beneficial quality that results in more accurate valuations with better liquidity?

New comment by ahepp in "Git Is Not Fine"

ahepp — Sat, 16 May 2026 09:24:47 +0000

Do stacked PRs do something to avoid rebase conflicts if two people touched the same file?

New comment by ahepp in "Git Is Not Fine"

ahepp — Sat, 16 May 2026 09:21:47 +0000

I don't mean to suggest you're doing something wrong, but it's not clear to me why you need three separate branches for this? Why not have these related changes as individual commits on a single branch?

New comment by ahepp in "Git Is Not Fine"

ahepp — Sat, 16 May 2026 09:11:01 +0000

I've also seen teams struggling to review massive PRs as a single diff, but when I've seen that it's always because they aren't structuring commits to be individually reviewable.

New comment by ahepp in "Claude for Legal"

ahepp — Fri, 15 May 2026 08:20:15 +0000

who do you think stands out?

New comment by ahepp in ""Not Medically Necessary": Helping America's Health Insurers Deny Coverage"

ahepp — Fri, 15 May 2026 02:12:06 +0000

I'm not sure how you could deny it when you just wrote quite a bit of detail about how you think anyone doing that work is an evil sociopath.

New comment by ahepp in ""Not Medically Necessary": Helping America's Health Insurers Deny Coverage"

ahepp — Thu, 14 May 2026 20:00:24 +0000

Maybe I'm just not understanding what you're saying here, but it seems pretty straightforward that you can't run an insurance system without reviewing claims. That's true whether it's a for-profit, not-for-profit, or government run insurance provider.

There's broad consensus that there is a ton of unnecessary and unwarranted care being done in the US. Doctors are not all experts in population health. Even the most well-meaning doctors are still subject to incentives that can lead to excessive testing and expensive treatments that have a low likelihood of improving patient outcomes.

Obviously it is also true that having a profit motive to deny claims incentivizes improper denials. But to simply say "no claim should ever be subject to review or denial, and anyone working to make the system efficient is evil" is deeply ignorant and fundamentally incompatible with the concept of insurance.

New comment by ahepp in "Rewrite Bun in Rust has been merged"

ahepp — Thu, 14 May 2026 10:07:25 +0000

The really interesting thing to do would be to ask the agents to submit the diff as a coherent patchset...

New comment by ahepp in ""Not Medically Necessary": Helping America's Health Insurers Deny Coverage"

ahepp — Thu, 14 May 2026 09:31:28 +0000

What are you saying here? Do you just think it's unnecessary to audit the way 18% of US GDP is being spent? You think there is no waste, or it's so small to be negligible? Despite the fact that it's well established the US spends more and gets less benefit?

New comment by ahepp in ""Not Medically Necessary": Helping America's Health Insurers Deny Coverage"

ahepp — Thu, 14 May 2026 01:04:58 +0000

I understand that nobody likes to talk about setting this threshold, but it's not some kind of unique feature of the American healthcare system. I think the article raised some reasonable concerns about EviCore, but it would be a lot stronger if it did more to contextualize denials in terms of the other quadrants (correct approval, correct denial, incorrect approval, incorrect denial). It would also be interesting to compare those statistics across types of insurers (for-profit, not-for-profit, and government).

New comment by ahepp in "Diskless Linux boot using ZFS, iSCSI and PXE"

ahepp — Thu, 07 May 2026 05:34:30 +0000

You might find it worth upgrading to 10gbps if you continue to go down this road. The Mikrotik CRS-309 has served me well, and a couple Intel X520-DA2s. I believe those NICs can do iSCSI natively, and pass the session to the operating system with iBFT.

SFP28 might be cheap enough now too, I'm not sure...

New comment by ahepp in "Diskless Linux boot using ZFS, iSCSI and PXE"

ahepp — Thu, 07 May 2026 05:20:45 +0000

When I tried root-on-nfs I had a lot of issues. The Redhat and Arch package managers don't seem to like it (presumably a sqlite thing?).

New comment by ahepp in "California farmers to destroy 420k peach trees following Del Monte bankruptcy"

ahepp — Tue, 05 May 2026 23:23:03 +0000

If you don’t trust farmers to make the decision, who do you think should be making it?

New comment by ahepp in "I am worried about Bun"

ahepp — Mon, 04 May 2026 19:53:31 +0000

One thing I don’t understand about this viewpoint (which I understand isn’t your own): why does one benefit so tremendously from getting there a month before competitors? I’m sure having a month of superintelligence with no competition would be lucrative, but do they think achieving superintelligence first will impede competitors from also achieving it a month later?

New comment by ahepp in "I am worried about Bun"

ahepp — Mon, 04 May 2026 19:46:16 +0000

Are there any situations you would compare this to historically?

To me, the obvious comparison seems to be Docker. Their tooling revolutionized software development and made cgroups and containerization accessible to the masses. Yet they generally seem to have failed to extract payment from users, even with managed service opportunities.

It seems to me that there are substantial obstacles to monetizing a project licensed with even a weaker OSS license like MIT. I think this is especially true for projects that don’t have managed service / “open core” potential.

Any gratis project you rely on runs the risk that it will no longer be provided gratis. That alone is not a strong basis for making decisions.