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TinyBig

Re:Why American ambulance rides are so expensive on Friday July 10, 2026 @12:49AM (#48855863)
The law you've cited only applies for "emergency transport".

Falck has found a workaround: Bill emergencies as "non-emergency" so they can balance bill. This is, of course, fraud. I'm sure that enough don't understand the law that this makes them a lot of money.

On top of token tracking, they're also scoring employees on how much they teach Ai to their colleagues. As bad as the token dashboard sounds, employees being forced to try to mine each other for credit sounds worse.
Re:The most-disliked people in the publishing industry on Saturday April 04, 2026 @06:02PM (#47643963)
There are many hyper-credentialized, gatekept systems but most of them don't share the feature of producing structurally worse outcomes as literary fiction. I believe this system is already selling the seeds of its own demise.

A small group of agents hold most of the power, and the system has confused power for taste. This has also, in my experience, led to the outlets that hold the most power using that power to push agendas instead of seeking out the best literature. I do not believe this can persist indefinitely.

Re:The Game That Ate Itself on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @04:27PM (#46877543)
A game-theoretic model of why AI automation might be a trap: each firm's rational choice to automate erodes the aggregate demand all firms depend on. The Nash equilibrium is slow-motion collapse.
Re:Lessons from economies that closed their borders on Sunday February 01, 2026 @11:34AM (#46847323)
Tariffs continue to be a major topic of debate. The author examines what happened to countries that closed their borders and protected domestic industry with the promise of strength and self-sufficiency. The historical record is surprisingly consistent.
When Saks Fifth Avenue put out feelers to sell off pieces of BergdorfGoodman, I took it as a very bad sign.

Bergdorf is the crown jewel in that portfolio. Anytime you see a corporation pawning off its winners to fund its losers, they're in very, very deep trouble.

Re:Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (January 2026) on Sunday January 11, 2026 @01:33PM (#46578282)
I'm working on an app to make testing available to all brick and mortar retailers (proofpod.ai).

The most difficult technical challenge has been designing a pipeline to fully automate choosing test & control locations using synthetic difference-in-differences.

Re:ChatGPT Health Is a Marketplace, Guess Who Is the Product? on Saturday January 10, 2026 @07:50PM (#46571601)
A phrase I liked to describe what we're doing with LLMs is "building a personal panopticon". The benefits are immense but you're placing a huge bet on the landlord of the tower.
I've taken one of the electric roll-on/roll-off ferries that cross from Denmark to Sweden over the Øresund strait. Zero fumes, zero vibration, incredibly quiet. Awesome to see this tech being used for longer crossings.
Re:AI Is Breaking the Moral Foundation of Modern Society on Thursday December 04, 2025 @10:57AM (#46149021)
James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State is a useful lens here. Scott argues that modern states flattened human complexity into legible categories so they could govern: surnames, maps, censuses, standardized occupations. You lose a lot of nuance, but in theory the trade-off is that the state can then build institutions that serve the public.

AI feels like a more extreme version of that flattening, but without the civic purpose that justified it. You end up with legibility without legitimacy. That’s the part I think we don’t have a good framework for yet.

Re:One Handed Keyboard on Monday November 17, 2025 @10:58AM (#45954758)
If you already know how to touch type, I recommend using software to mirror your keyboard when the spacebar is held down. I lacked the use of my dominant arm for a few months while recovering from an injury, and by week 3, mirroring no longer required conscious thought.
Re:Minimum Effective Dose on Thursday February 06, 2025 @10:51AM (#42963534)
Muscle mass is lost quickly during detraining, but the additional myonuclei gained when someone puts on muscle are retained for much longer, potentially years. Myonuclei govern protein synthesis, so when training resumes, muscle returns more quickly.
How would it be possible to fix the problem at the expense of the lower working class?
Re:The Stutterer (2011) on Sunday February 19, 2023 @10:24AM (#34858335)
I am also surprised because it feels like stuttering must be less common than the article suggests, or they're using a looser definition than what I think of. I stutter and didn't encounter another person who stutters until I was almost 40, which seems statistically almost impossible if 1% of the population has a stutter.

The author of this piece also seems to have some self-limiting beliefs. Stuttering doesn't need to mean living in fear or a constant state of longing. I hope they've made some progress on this front over the past 12 years.

Re:Excess Management Is Costing the U.S. $3T Per Year (2016) on Saturday January 07, 2023 @09:39PM (#34295447)
The professional–managerial class
Re:Tipy – One Hand Keyboard on Saturday April 16, 2022 @01:12PM (#31054070)
This is a really good approach if you can already touch-type. I found I was able to type one handed immediately though it took some thinking and it became second nature after a few weeks. The ease of adapting a regular keyboard to one handed typing makes it very hard for me to wrap my head around learning a completely new layout.
Re:Bring back hydrogen lifting gas on Monday August 09, 2021 @03:40PM (#28121403)
"Floating in oxidizer" doesn't matter - airships are under such low pressure that leaks are too slow to maintain a flame front. I researched this quite a bit for the Army back in the day, even worked with a vendor who fired 50 caliber tracer rounds through an airship to try to get it to catch on fire, and it did not.
Re:Interview advice that got me offers on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @04:21PM (#25522351)
In what universe are whiteboard interviews used this way, as opposed to the interviewer expecting an exact answer regurgitated instantly?

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