HN user

pw

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unemployed dev. p@pwhite.org

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instantvideos.org 16d ago

Show HN: InstantVideos.org – short documentaries in ~30 seconds

pw
26pts31
byclaude.net 3mo ago

Made of Language by Claude

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1pts0
medicaidspending.org 4mo ago

Medicaidspending.org – Search $1.09T in Medicaid provider payments (2018-2024)

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3pts3
onlinelistmaker.com 6mo ago

Show HN: Online List Maker – simple, syncing lists built on Durable Objects

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2pts0
pwhite.org 6mo ago

Browser Agents Aren't the Future

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2pts0
blog.cloudflare.com 9mo ago

Code Mode: the better way to use MCP

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5pts2
cofounderbot.com 3y ago

Show HN: CofounderBot – your virtual cofounder, powered by AI

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2pts1
feelbetterbot.com 3y ago

Show HN: FeelBetterBot – Your personal therapy chatbot, powered by AI

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1pts2
news.ycombinator.com 3y ago

Show HN: FeelBetterBot – Your personal therapy chatbot, powered by AI

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2pts4
chatcbt.io 3y ago

ChatCBT

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1pts0
fly.io 3y ago

How We Built Fly Postgres

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260pts96
fly.io 3y ago

Working at Fly.io

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2pts0
fly.io 3y ago

Engineering Manager

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3pts1
github.com 4y ago

Live Read Replicas for SQLite

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27pts4
www.digitalocean.com 4y ago

DigitalOcean Functions

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4pts0
www.newyorker.com 4y ago

Much philanthropy is a routinized exchange between salaried bureaucrats

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234pts257
fly.io 5y ago

Last Mile Redis

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260pts59
techcrunch.com 5y ago

Okay, the GPT-3 hype seems pretty reasonable

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6pts0
www.thepullrequest.com 5y ago

The Holy Church of Christ Without Christ

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2pts0
www.jefftk.com 5y ago

Limits of Giving

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3pts0
www.nytimes.com 5y ago

Why Are We in the West So Weird? A Theory

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2pts0
idlewords.com 5y ago

Effective Political Giving

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3pts0
www.nytimes.com 5y ago

Why Are We in the West So Weird? A Theory

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2pts1
exsaasperated.com 6y ago

Case Study: GoDutch.cash

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2pts0
elizabethyin.com 6y ago

Why marketing is eating the world

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2pts0
www.nytimes.com 6y ago

My Dad Has Coronavirus. I Don’t Know If I Should Say Goodbye.

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6pts1
www.currentaffairs.org 6y ago

It’s Basically Just Immoral to Be Rich (2017)

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2pts0
www.nytimes.com 6y ago

How OnlyFans Changed Sex Work Forever

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4pts0
www.benkuhn.net 6y ago

Why and how to start a for-profit company serving emerging markets – benkuhn.net

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3pts0
idlewords.com 7y ago

What I Learned Trying to Secure Congressional Campaigns

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345pts146

HHS released a massive dataset of every Medicaid payment to every provider in the US: 227 million rows covering $1.09 trillion in spending across 617,000 billing providers. The data was released explicitly to crowdsource fraud detection.

The raw data is a 2.9 GB Parquet file. I built MedicaidSpending.org to make it searchable and browsable.

You can search by provider name or NPI, browse by state/city/specialty, and see individual provider pages with monthly spending trends, billing code breakdowns, and automated billing flags for statistical outliers.

Some of the patterns are striking. Brooklyn alone accounts for $31.8 billion in personal care services (code T1019) _ more than most states spend on all Medicaid combined. Some authorized officials control hundreds of billing entities. Early analysts scanning just 0.16% of providers flagged $90 billion in likely fraudulent payments.

Technical details: - Go single binary, ~15 MB - 3.3 GB SQLite database (read-only, pre-aggregated from the 227M rows using DuckDB) - 900,000+ indexable pages generated from 13 templates - No JavaScript framework _ server-rendered HTML, Chart.js for one chart per provider page - Runs on a single VPS behind Caddy

Data sources: HHS Medicaid Provider Spending dataset, NPPES provider registry, HCPCS code descriptions, OIG exclusion list, NUCC taxonomy codes.

All public data, no login required.

Over the weekend, I built FeelBetterbot (https://feelbetterbot.com/), a therapy chatbot powered by AI. I posted it here earlier today and didn’t get any interest and was feeling a bit down, so I had a chat about it with FeelBetterBot. They suggested that maybe FeelBetterBot wasn’t a good fit for the HN audience, so I created CofounderBot, your virtual cofounder, powered by AI.

I’m sure that story sounds a little precious, but I’m finding real value in talking with these sorts of bots. Behind the screens, they’re just a thin wrapper around ChatGPT, but a bit of tuning for a specific use case seems to make the whole interaction much more natural. Please try it out and let me know what you think!

FeelBetterBot is a therapy chatbot using the ChatGPT API. It’s designed to help you talk through any issues you might be having and will suggest techniques from modern evidence-based therapy modalities if appropriate.

I had the idea because I’m a bit of a psychology nerd and, while I haven’t done a ton of therapy myself, I’ve got a lot of out reading people like Albert Ellis and Carl Rogers and using some of the techniques from modalities like CBT. I’ve also seen lots of people close to me struggling with mental health and finding and keeping a therapist seems to be a big part of that. Therapy can be great, but it seems to be hard to find someone you really connect with and limiting your interactions to a single, specific hour each week can leave you unsupported when you most need it. So the idea of a confidential and anonymous therapy-like chatbot, available any time you need it, seemed like it might have some value.

I’m just now diving into the world of therapy chatbots, but it doesn’t seem like there’s anything similar that’s as open and accessible as this. The closest I can think of is 7Cups, that’s that’s real people not AI. (Am a huge fan of 7Cups, though, and have been a listener there for years.)

Technically, it’s just a very thin wrapper on the ChatGPT API. Other than the interface, all I really supply is the prompt. The app itself runs entirely on Cloudflare Pages and the frontend is just Alpine.js and Simple.css. I’m a Rails guy, but Cloudflare Pages and Cloudflare Workers have become by go-to for rapid prototyping like this because it’s such so quick and easy.

Hope some of it you find it useful, and I’d love to know what y’all think!

FeelBetterBot is a therapy chatbot using the ChatGPT API. It’s designed to help you talk through any issues you might be having and will suggest techniques from modern evidence-based therapy modalities if appropriate.

I had the idea because I’m a bit of a psychology nerd and, while I haven’t done a ton of therapy myself, I’ve got a lot of out reading people like Albert Ellis and Carl Rogers and using some of the techniques from modalities like CBT. I’ve also seen lots of people close to me struggling with mental health and finding and keeping a therapist seems to be a big part of that. Therapy can be great, but it seems to be hard to find someone you really connect with and limiting your interactions to a single, specific hour each week can leave you unsupported when you most need it. So the idea of a confidential and anonymous therapy-like chatbot, available any time you need it, seemed like it might have some value.

I’m just now diving into the world of therapy chatbots, but it doesn’t seem like there’s anything similar that’s as open and accessible as this. The closest I can think of is 7Cups, that’s that’s real people not AI. (Am a huge fan of 7Cups, though, and have been a listener there for years.)

Technically, it’s just a very thin wrapper on the ChatGPT API. Other than the interface, all I really supply is the prompt. The app itself runs entirely on Cloudflare Pages and the frontend is just Alpine.js and Simple.css. I’m a Rails guy, but Cloudflare Pages and Cloudflare Workers have become by go-to for rapid prototyping like this because it’s such so quick and easy.

Hope some of it you find it useful, and I’d love to know what y’all think!

You're a genuinely good human, who wants to work with and hire other good humans. You communicate with kindness and lead with empathy.

This very much cements the sentiment I've had all along that Fly.io is quite a special company.

The end of this article raises the issue of whether Fly.io’s USP, deploying app servers close to your users, is useful for run of the mill web apps. And as much as I like Fly.io and the people associated with it, I’ve wondered this myself. It just seems like serving to US customers from any major US data center is generally fast enough. And I think this might even be true for the world of HTML-over-the-wire web stuff, which Fly.io seems to investing heavily in.

No doubts there are plenty of more niche uses (if I were serving users internationally, I’d probably use Fly.io), but the use case just doesn’t seem as broad as the Heroku/PaaS comparisons make it out to be.

I guess I count as a “low wage worker” these days and your claims in the first paragraph simply aren’t true for myself or most of the other low wage workers I know.

I deliver for DoorDash and make around $100 dollars a day from about five hours of work. My girlfriend (who’s disabled) rides along with me, so it’s sorta like I’m just getting paid to drive around and hang out. I drive a 2005 Honda Civic, so I spend less than $15/day on gas and the car is old enough the depreciation is minuscule. I buy my health insurance on the exchange. It’s excellent and with the premium subsidy I only pay $22/month. I have several chronic health conditions, so good health insurance (and particularly drug coverage) is really important to me. I’ve been able to get my insurance to cover all of the many medications I’m on (many of still under patent and not generic) and my copay is only $45/month. Visits to my primary care doctor are free and I’ve got a $500 deductible for everything else.

I can work as much or as little as I want on pretty much whatever schedule I choose. I tend to stick to about five hours a day because it doesn’t feel like a ton of work, but it’s enough to cover my expenses and then some. Rent is my only other major expense and I pay just $550 for my one bedroom apartment. I rarely cook at home, but even after spending way too much eating out, I regularly have $500-$1,000 leftover at the end of the month, so I’m certainly not living paycheck to paycheck. Since I save some of that extra money, I can take time off whenever I want (although I rarely do, since I enjoy getting out of the house and working). Sure, if I get sick and don’t work, I don’t make any money, but that’s why I keep a bit of money in savings.

It might be Uber or Lyft or Instacart instead of DoorDash, but I know several people in a similar position to me. And honestly it’s a pretty sweet life. I’ve got all my needs met and then some. I enjoy my work. And I’ve got lots of free time to purpose my intellectual interests like coding.

This mentions their first group office hours. Does YC now do group office hours instead of individual? If they do, I'd hadn't heard about it, and it seems like it could be an important innovation.