HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

ratelimitsteve

662 karma · joined July 30, 2025

submissionscomments
ratelimitsteve··on Patients Who Fight Health Insurance Denials Often Win
This brought to you by the same legal scholars that brought you theories such as "Everyone knows 'own' doesn't mean 'own'" and "It's okay to give the judge hearing your case tons of money because that's just gifts between friends as long as you don't explicitly say it's a bribe". Our legal system seems to be based around deciding on the outcome you want regardless of rationality or the law, talking nonsense long enough that it seems like there's intractable disagreement and then declaring your solution to be the common-sense middle ground.
ratelimitsteve··on Patients Who Fight Health Insurance Denials Often Win
but do you have any evidence beyond intuition that those denials differ significantly in reversal rate? one would guess that things that are never going to be covered get denied and then never appealed but one would also guess that things that are never going to be covered don't get submitted in the first place. assuming that the rate of legitimate denials is higher among those claims never appealed, what rate of illegitimate denials is acceptable? why would denying even one person care that they're contractually entitled to receive be okay? why shouldn't insurance companies have to do what they promise to do and accept money for?
ratelimitsteve··on Patients Who Fight Health Insurance Denials Often Win
>Few patients appeal when insurers decline to pay for their care. Many don’t even know they can. But new data show that when they do, they frequently win — in some plans, nine out of 10 times.

If 90% of denials that are challenged end up being reversed, and the delay in delivering the care that the insurer contractually agreed to deliver is deleterious to the patient's overall health and leads to prolonged suffering, why is this not a cause of action? Until there is some sort of downside introduced, the "deny til they die" health insurance model is going to continue to thrive at the expense of people not getting the care they paid for and are entitled to.

ratelimitsteve··on XCancel service is suspended until further notice
fair, but recipes aren't the only thing where AI summaries at the top of search results are simultaneously transformative and competitive. Any information that is scraped from a website and then summarized by AI in a way that prevents that website from getting views is both transformative and competitive.
ratelimitsteve··on XCancel service is suspended until further notice
How clear is it when I google a recipe and get an AI-generated recipe that's clearly derived from the top three results and then placed above those results? That sounds like it's both transformative (in that the recipe created by the AI may not match any one of the scraped recipes perfectly) and also competitive (in that the AI takes page views away from the pages it got the recipes from)
ratelimitsteve··on Claude is only available to people over 18 years
the second, surely...
ratelimitsteve··on Claude is only available to people over 18 years
>Which is, of course, a bad thing that ought not to be encouraged

I'm not actually willing to take that as read. It's just the word "fuck". You may personally find it distasteful and you're welcome to discourage your children from using it but it seems like you're committing Pargin's Blunder here (mistaking norms specific to your social group for universal truths).

ratelimitsteve··on Claude is only available to people over 18 years
do you have an example of this? it feels like a suboptimal response even given the stupid, heavy-handed legislation you cite.
ratelimitsteve··on Claude is only available to people over 18 years
Joke's on you, as standards loosen now PG-13 movies get up to eleven "fuck"s to distribute throughout the film (nineteen for documentaries)
ratelimitsteve··on Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route
https://patch.com/california/northhollywood/my-daughter-died...

oh like this article that says a child was hit by a "LAPD bullet" as though wild bullets roam the streets of LA looking for children instead of being fired from a gun by a person who made a decision.

ratelimitsteve··on Moonshot serves Claude instead of Kimi and collects exchanges for model training
no matter how shitty OpenAI is I don't want to be lied to. Completely separate issues.
ratelimitsteve··on List of references on Sony websites to players "owning" their digital games
exactly. delete all of the "a"s from your comment. what happens to theirs? nothing. because they're not the same thing.
ratelimitsteve··on Who People Talk to When They're Struggling
It's a premise you wouldn't expect, but discussing your mental health at all is a necessary first step to actually getting help comfort and stigma in discussing mental health is a huge barrier to most people. I think it makes sense to look at where and how people actually kick off the process as much as it does to look at the results of the process. After all, it's so common that it's borderline stereotypical that we see someone do something drastic that reveals that they've been struggling pretty bad for quite some time now and everyone who knows them is like "I would gladly have helped but I had no idea any of this was happening."
ratelimitsteve··on List of references on Sony websites to players "owning" their digital games
everyone believes something different, everyone knows a different set of facts, everyone thinks of themselves as reasonable, and the law depends on what a reasonable person might believe. absent some objective standard of reasonability it's all just places where you can inject ambiguity and then leverage that ambiguity to make the law shift like sands in the wind while still thinking of it as absolute and immutable. "Reasonable people understand that words don't always mean what their common definition would imply and it's on the consumer to know the difference" for Sony immediately followed "reasonable people assume words mean what is implied by their common definition and it's on the producer to account for that" for the California Dairy Council, then when we accuse them of crafting separate laws for separate clients they can say "well we just applied the reasonable person standard here the same way we would for anyone else".
ratelimitsteve··on List of references on Sony websites to players "owning" their digital games
we may have been. the idea that two copies of the same thing are not the same object still applies. you can tell because if you own a PDF and I own a copy of that PDF, and I destroy mine, you still have yours.
ratelimitsteve··on List of references on Sony websites to players "owning" their digital games
that even if they form the same pattern, one pile of bits on one storage medium and another pile of bits on a different storage medium are two separate things and it's possible for one person to own one of the piles and another person to own the other one.
ratelimitsteve··on List of references on Sony websites to players "owning" their digital games
This thing where companies can use custom definitions of words in order to intentionally build ambiguity into their agreements is designed to induce just this type of problem. Words have meaning outside these agreements and that outside meaning influences people's interpretation of the agreement. Words are, unfortunately, also ambiguous. So when we make these agreements we allow them to add more detail to definitions in an effort to clear up that ambiguity, but we end up with people trying to argue blatant contradictions like "any reasonable person would understand that own doesn't mean own"
ratelimitsteve··on No Man's Sky Cosmos
I play Tekxit for the same reason. The world feels genuinely alive and surprising. I just love automation as well, and Tekxit hits that sweet spot of "building complex resources extraction and refinement chains" but also "a big world full of adventure where you can actually use those resources for something other than making bigger machines to implement bigger processes to build more complex extraction and refinement chains".
ratelimitsteve··on No Man's Sky Cosmos
I think you're on to something here. The problem with procgen is hard because the various things in an environment have to interface with one another and in NMS they don't really meaningfully interface. The geography is generated, and the animals are generated, and the mineral deposits are generated, but the geography never affects the animals or the mineral deposits. You don't see, as an example, vast highland regions with animals adapted for living in the cold and huge mineral veins exposed in cliffs at high altitudes. You also don't see older mountains where the average mineral deposit would sit lower in altitude but be smaller due to erosion, with more cave systems and more critters evolved specifically for caves (colorless, blind, chemautotrophic, specializations like that). There's a range of ways the landscape can be, there's a range of ways animals can be, there's a range of ways resource distribution can be, but they don't affect one another and it makes it feel bland and same-y.
ratelimitsteve··on No Man's Sky Cosmos
even as someone who enjoyed NMS as a nightly bowl of oatmeal, a second screen game while I listened to a podcast or a documentary, I can't dispute the accuracy of this metaphor. After a while it became brain off semitainment, and when paired with hands off semitainment I ended up with a full experience, but years later it still costs $70 to become nearly entertained and its become obvious that there are limits to how much you can make procedural generation not such as the core, heart and soul of a gaming experience.
ratelimitsteve··on One woman's Tesla was remotely controlled by an abusive ex-partner
As soon as I saw the title I was like "There's gonna be a long history of abuse before this that has yet to see any consequences." Then I open the article and there's a whole section called "History of Abuse".
ratelimitsteve··on Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
Flock wants people like you and me in a closely surveilled world. Flock cameras will never catch aristocrats committing aristocrat crimes, only regular people finding money in a parking lot.
ratelimitsteve··on When Mothers Get Arrested for Mothering
the thing about "borderline" and "spidey sense" is that in no way should that ever lead to someone being arrested or forced to register as a child abuser, but it did. the entire point of the article is that these sorts of nebulous situations are being treated the exact same as undeniable abuse, and that's the problem.
ratelimitsteve··on LG TVs caught spying even when offline or on standby
this feature probably began life as "automatically download necessary drivers to make installation easier" and then after some massaging the definition of "necessary drivers" expanded to "anything the manufacturer would like to see running on this PC regardless of how necessary it is for the device to function".
ratelimitsteve··on US police fear Meta smart glasses could be used to secretly record them
>there's probably a good argument to not allow random cameras in

you're right. there's also an awful lot of very obvious good arguments for allowing recording and public access to recording, such as the incident where a prisoner was locked in a scalding shower until he was so badly burned that his skin "fell off at the touch" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Darren_Rainey). Like so many incidents of its kind, there was absolutely no hard evidence available to prove what happened and it ended up being yet another case where someone died horrifically and officially no one was found to have done anything wrong but several million dollars did change hands. If prison guards are torturing prisoners to death and getting away with it, the argument that they don't need surveillance needs to be a whole lot better than "probably good".

ratelimitsteve··on DHS 'Predictive Policing' Unit Is Analyzing Americans' Financial Habits
when terrorism can be defined as "having a book" and can result in indefinite detention without charge or access to an attorney maybe i'm not 100% gung-ho by default on everything labelled anti-terrorism
ratelimitsteve··on DHS 'Predictive Policing' Unit Is Analyzing Americans' Financial Habits
"We're proud to announce today that we're rolling out a trial phase of the Torment Nexus, as made famous in the scifi novel and accompanying film entitled 'Whatever You Do, Do Not Create the Torment Nexus'."
ratelimitsteve··on US police fear Meta smart glasses could be used to secretly record them
aren't these the same people telling us that AI-powered cameras on every street corner will make everything better for everyone? What do they have to fear from people seeing what they do? Why do the police fight so hard to ensure everyone else is constantly being observed but also to ensure that they are never being observed? Ostensibly, police act in our name and to our benefit. Why are we kept in the dark as to what they do?
ratelimitsteve··on 'People are going to get screwed' Pennsylvania voters unite against data centres
there's a really special type of crowd to whom you can say "People staying alive is good" and their response is "SOURCE??!!!"
ratelimitsteve··on 'People are going to get screwed' Pennsylvania voters unite against data centres
They can't engage with your ideas, so they try to label you as the kind of person whose ideas aren't worth engaging with. It doesn't matter to them what you said, it must be wrong because you said it. Unless, of course, you agree with them, in which case you suddenly become worth taking seriously again.
← PreviousPage 2 of 20Next →