skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
$77.4 billion for the Department of Education across the entire US.

The article mentions that this $1 billion investment will go toward "free education and free healthcare for low-income students in the Palo Alto area".

So comparing the two it's obvious that the investment is going into an unsustainable model. The way I'm thinking about this, that could be for one of a few reasons.

1) They want to pour a lot of money into research and development to figure out how to improve education. Concentrate a bunch of money into one place to figure out how to improve the overall model.

2) They want to show how they can do better than public education system.

If they're after #1 I can see no reason why they wouldn't try to give back by sharing data from their research.

If they're after #2 then it's obvious they're simply creating a facade (an unsustainable "model" implementation of what primary education should look like). Depending on the results they'd be looking to sway public opinion that private sector can do better than government.

Needless to say, #1 is constructive, and #2 IMO is highly destructive.
Now with weekly progress reports: http://www.redox-os.org/news/this-week-in-redox-3/
I think you all missed the sarcasm here.
Heroku style application deployments with Docker
What he thinks is that people are going to be outraged over this and new regulations will drive down the stock price of other pharmaceuticals which he has shorted, and if that fails he will still make some money off the pills.

It's an excellent bet even if it is extremely immoral.
Is it also sad that there are a ton of geniuses working at the big 3 solving internet advertising and social media?
We don't need pharma to pay for R&D. Total pharma R&D on drug development comes to a paltry $26 billion a year. This could easily be paid for by the government. We already have the infrastructure, we just need to fund it.
The R&D costs argument is a diversion. Profit margins for Pharma companies are consistently 3-5x of more competitive industries (e.g. car makers [1], [2]). Health is a failed market full of rentier corporations.

It's hard to argue against them because they are doing good (inventing life saving medicines) but the opportunity cost of money paid out as profits instead of reinvested into research must be huge.

[1]
https://ycharts.com/companies/VLKPY/gross_profit_margin
https://ycharts.com/companies/BAMXY/gross_profit_margin

[2]
https://ycharts.com/companies/PFE/gross_profit_margin
This applies only to philosophy because it is about always using the first link in the article.
The key insight you probably miss to understand the article is that it doesn't regard a "UX Engineer" an Engineer.

The fact that the term "UX Engineer" is not even once mentioned in the article is a clear sign that it talks about regular engineers -- technicians and such building a physical product.

And that's OK, the term "UX engineer" is both quite abused and quite recent. Sometimes it's just some ex-designers pretending to be all serious about HCI -- and not any "engineering" with the traditional, robust, sense.
I prefer to write like a man reading his powerpoint slides verbatim
How is it a rant? He has first-hand, eye-witness experience.

There are enough anecdotes (I could supply a few) to suspect there is a welfare abuse problem - we just don't know the extent of it, as numbers are hard to come by (for reasons explained by the poster you criticize).

Stating the fact that _some_ people take advantage of the system does not make one a heartless bastard.
The hardest thing about communication is clarity.
The 1.5x the profits issues may not be enough.

A few years back, I read a story about a doctor who ran a scam that would assure the sex of your unborn child for $3000. Now, his treatment literally did nothing and he knew this. Half his patients didn't get the gender they paid for. He'd bring the distraught parents in, immediately hand over a full refund, talk about how the procedure was only 99.95% effective, then offer the parents another $1500 back as sign of his sincere regret.

Basic algebra shows that, despite doing nothing, he could expect to make $750 per patient, despite doing nothing, because the half of the children who had the sex desired by their parents more than paid for the half that didn't.

As you said, these people are masters of economics. If there is less than a 66% chance of being caught, a 1.5x fine means that there's still money to be made.
If you're interested in becoming a better non-fiction writer, I can't over-recommend William Zinsser's "On Writing Well".
Think this must be the first time I've gone out of my way to log in to post a reply.

Bloody brilliant. Care to explain how it works?

That is all. Tip of the cap to you sir.
Author here. I'm posting this anonymously because of conflicts of interest, as described in the post. But you can AMA here. If you know or figure out who I am (it won't be that hard) please don't out me.
Here's the subreddit I found for those interested:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SFBARF
> When you are insured and insurance is paying for everything patients don't care how much anything costs. (See Tragedy of the Commons).

Obamacare is the free market answer.

It encourages HDHP plans which forces the individuals to pay for those pills. Now that consumers are fronting the costs below $1300 or so, they really do care about huge pill costs like this now.

Before, consumers may have not cared. But now, people do care and people will pay attention.
>Engineers build products, period. Almost all ugly products and certainly all beautiful products are build by engineers, usually with the assistance of people who are proficient in design.

Maybe more of the "beautiful products" are build "with the assistance of people who are proficient in design" than the others, were an engineer is in charge of those kind of decisions...
By spreading data to enough mirrors, one can achieve arbitrary reliability. I doubt that any part of their business is only replicated to any particular device. After all, batteries die all the time, unpredictably.
See also the excellent rant "You're not a nerd, geeks aren't sexy and you don't "fucking love" science" http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=youre_not_a_nerd
A competitor has stated that they are going to make an equivalent available for $1:

http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/competitor-offer-1...
The Case for the Cab (1976)
We're talking about mobile internet service. "Two" is probably doable. "Four" OTOH would be less than 53 minutes of downtime a year, which I might believe if you were standing still, on a high point, in an area that didn't have much going on electrically. I would not expect to see that while driving, or perhaps I mean that I have not seen that while driving. But GP is wrong anyway; see sibling comment.
I've always written essays on ideas, but it wasn't until when I wanted to start publishing my writing on a blog that I found this idea true. Often times flowery language can sacrifice the clarity of your prose for attempting to appear more thoughtful than you are.

It's a lot like the Richard Feynman idea that if you can't distill something to a freshman lecture, you don't really understand it.[1]

[1]: Feynman, Six Not-So-Easy-Pieces: Einstein's Relativity, Symmetry, and Space-Time
It just depends upon your aims. If you're trying to convey an idea in hopes of transferring knowledge then yes -- write like you would talk to ease the others' cognitive load.

If you're a fantasy writer, it would get pretty drab pretty fast if you spoke to me like how most people speak to me. In fact, it'd be downright boring if you structured all dialogue between characters in such a manner. You need the pomp to make sentences glimmer or express significance.

I'm not sure what the thesis of this essay is since it starts out as "If you want more people to read what you write..." Well no, if you're a novelist, I wouldn't recommend this essay to you. And that's not just me being a pedant either; I think this whole essay is simply advice to CEOs who are trying to talk about their idea.

The thing that "comes over most people" is actually them trying to actually express their real selves, which often gets clouded in day-to-day interactions with others. The idea that you should just shut this off is nonsense and a barrier to increased creativity. You can write in a creative fashion while still maintaining a simple delivery. Just look at Larry Wall.
At least he was pretty honest.
As far as I can tell, Rust OS projects generally use gratuitous amounts of unsafe code and are not substantially different than if they were written in C. I could just be looking in the wrong places. Are there any that take advantage of Rust's type system to provide real guarantees?
That doesn't normally buy you a murder conspiracy unless there were overt acts that furthered a murder plot and you need a felony in there somewhere. There's no law against "economic harm" as such, but there are certain ways to compete unlawfully.

Rather, the article says there's a rule against disparaging other products. That sounds more like policy, rather than law, which is not usually a felony. It also merely says they're 'investigating', so there's nothing for us to even look at until we see whether or not they actually bring charges against anyone.
Philosophy was, of course, the progenitor of science, but it is harder to find current relevance. For example, was science in a state of confusion until Popper corrected the errors of the logical positivists? Did the development of plate tectonics have to wait until Kuhn explained the structure of scientific revolutions?
Oh yeah. This is why 5.0 feels ridiculously more responsive than 4.4: they finally addressed timer issues.
9.5 Low Latency Decision as a Service Design Patterns
If you can't say "mercurial Spaniard" to your friends, get new friends.
What America’s immigrants looked like when they arrived on Ellis Island
I feel like us Swiss german people have a leg up here. We grow up writing anything personal in our dialect (a language that doesn't officially exist in written form), so we're used to writing like we talk. I wonder if it has an effect on our more formal, business-related writing.
This is fairly popular advice, and I heard it at least a half dozen times at my (liberal arts) college. That's not to dismiss this post because its takeaway is commonplace: I agree with the sentiment. However, I think it's important to embrace the full implication of its thesis:

Informal language is the athletic clothing of ideas.

Athletic clothing is comfortable, it is functional, and it traffics in convenience.

But people wear clothes for aesthetics, for culture, for dozens of reasons.

When you optimize for, say, being as easily digestible by as many people as possible, you may reduce your nuance or your aesthetic or whatever. And words like mercurial tend to have unique depths and distinctions that keep them being used by the Neil Olivers of the world. That's a good thing.

(As a minor aside that doesn't detract from his point: You'd feel like an idiot using "pen" instead of "write" in a conversation with a friend. Really? Some people just feel more comfortable in suits than in sweatpants. There's nothing wrong with that.)
Show HN: Subslider.js – fix out of sync subtitles with Angular
Hemingway would disagree with you about novels.
The problem is not insurance. First of all insurance companies are not that good at shielding patients from costs; most people have deductibles and out of network expenses if they even have insurance at all. Second, even with insurance medical bankruptcy is rampant (the main cause of bankruptcy). Third, insurance companies have an obvious incentive to lower costs, it means they make more profit. They just don't have the power.

This is something that changed in the 90s, when attempts at managed care tried to use insurance companies to push down costs. Hospitals responded by consolidating into local monopolies (provider networks) that insurance could not out bargain.

The problem is simply that providers have too much power. Doctors regulate the supply of their profession; doctors in the US make 2X the oecd average. Pharma companies and medical get patent monopolies; drugs cost $300 billion a year above their generic price. Hospitals have local monopolies and patients don't know how to bargain for cheaper care; MRIs cost thousands of dollars.

Insurance takes home a few paltry percent of every dollar spent on health care. The real takers are the health care providers, but we are all too busy shutting on insurers to notice.
That may just be the impression given by tutorials, which spend most of their time dealing with the hardware. In a real OS, you'd wrap that up in safe interfaces and then the core of things like scheduling, file systems, etc. could be in a safe layer on top of the unsafe drivers.
Have you tried writing Rust and Go in a plain text editor and had problems, or are you a happy user of an IDE for another language and waiting for one to be available before you try them out?

Some languages (the prime example being Java) are designed to have simple syntax so that large-scale manipulations can be automated, and as a result you really do need an IDE to work with them: few humans have the patience to find all 59 places in a code-base where some function is called or overridden and add a new parameter.

On the other hand, some languages allow humans the complexity to define their own abstractions, like C++ templates or Scheme macros or Python's reflection and metaprogramming. This extra layer of complexity makes it much harder to write a good IDE, but it also makes an IDE much less necessary: instead of editing all those 59 uses individually, if they were generated by a template or a macro or reflection you can just edit the definition of that thing and get the same result.

I'm guessing Go is in the minimalist-syntax-and-heavy-IDE crowd, although the Go community seems to prefer to write their heavy automation as standalone tools (see: go fmt, go fix). Rust has a fairly impressive macro system, so I would have expected it to be a complex-syntax-and-text-editors language but the Rust authors seem very keen to have some kind of IDE support. Whether they believe Rust actually needs it, or if they just want to check off a commonly-requested feature, I don't know.
> alienate the property of those who already own such items

how does it alienate the property?

> further reduces the incentives for those who live near such animals to farm them, rather than to poach them.

why would they poach them if there is no market for ivory?

> The right thing to do, if one wishes to preserve endangered species, is to make it possible for people to legally raise, own and harvest elephants, rhinoceroses, tigers and the like.

Can you actually make a proposal how one would transition from the current state of affairs to the one you are proposing? Can you talk about some possible issues with your proposal? For example how would you prevent extinction of elephants in the wild?
24 states sue to overturn Obama’s climate-change initiative
Hmmmm. The defaults should be good. And some horrible things should maybe be off by default and strongly discouraged.

Underlining is a good example. It's a no-no on the web (looks too much like a hyperlink) and if your destination is print even then it's ugly and amateurish. I can't see it being too much of a stretch to just leave it out of an editor.
FullContact API Script – give an email address, get back the social media info
Hmm. For a machine-centric view there's the intriguing DBPedia[0].

One of the 'chunking' methods that Wikipedia uses is categories (you undoubtedly knew that) and here is the page that deals with that[1].

Indeed, there's entire category on Wikipedia Categorization[2].

There's the Category Tree page, dead useful, here's one for `semiotics' by way of example[3]

I'd be tickled pink if others could drop more pointers here! Without doubt, as Wikipedia continues to self-organize it is going reveal structural truths about the knowledge humanity is creating.

---

[0] http://wiki.dbpedia.org/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Category

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_categorizat...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ACategor...
I think that's hypothetically a legitimate point. I have friends who wear a yarmulke and I've never heard of anything happening, but I can see how there might be cities where that sort of thing goes on. Blatant discrimination against Jews happened in the American south in my father's youth, but not so much anymore. ("soft" discrimination is a different matter)

Doubly so for Muslims in these times, or Sikhs, and so on. I'm sure bad things happen.

I've got to tell you, though, withholding service is a pretty extreme thing and it's only been described as a common experience to me by one group of people. (and I should say, I've also witnessed it) It's the same dull, discriminatory bullshit we've been dealing with in America forever and I strongly suspect we aren't going to destroy it by taking a "we must also think of the Tories who are suffering from discrimination!" approach. That's very silly, and what it implies is dishonest.
Don't think it counts as looking past when you still feel the need to announce specific sentences you don't like.
Can you remove Trump from the internet?
Show HN: HTMLhouse – write and share some HTML
Germans Have a Burning Need for More Garbage
Yes, this is addressing electricity, which is ~30-40% of total present energy consumption. But:

1. Electricity substitutes for other energy uses. Electrically-supplied heat (heat exchange, direct resistance heating, induction heating), some motive power (personal EVs from bicycles to automobiles, catenary-supplied rail, possibly commutator-supplied intracity cargo freight). Cooking.

2. Much of present energy use combines storage + on-demand use. Coal, oil, and gas are _largely_ simply energy carriers (a non-negligible component is actually _chemical_ inputs -- 14% of coal, about 8% of oil, I'm unsure of the number for gas). If you can swap elecricity for those inputs (local on-demand power or heat), you're ahead of the game. Some options have poor substitutability at best, particularly marine and air transport, small handheld machinery away from mains power, and remote sites with generating needs. Take a look at small Alaskan towns above the Arctic Circle. The central feature of most is their fuel depot.

3. Generally, as fuels become more expensive (extraction costs, taxes, synthesis expenses), electricity will substitute for more of their uses.

Note that molten salt isn't a battery in the standard redox sense, but simply raw thermal storage capacity. Yes, there's the standard 60% Carnot loss, though actually that's _far_ better than the 65-85% PV losses for conventional single-layer PV technology (theoretical maximum efficiency about 40%, higher efficiencies are possible with multi-layer, and more expensive, technologies).
Doh... You're absolutely right...
Santa Claus is a great HD wallpaper
Here's an easy way to write a story about modern technology: go back to popular science and technology magazines of the 1980s, find a story you think is interesting (eg, isn't a now common-place item like a e-reader), and update with modern technology.

For example, MYCIN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin

> MYCIN was never actually used in practice but research indicated that it proposed an acceptable therapy in about 69% of cases, which was better than the performance of infectious disease experts who were judged using the same criteria.

which lead to CADUCEUS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CADUCEUS_%28expert_system%29 .
Thanks, I've updated the page with a fix.
Totally. I strongly disagree with the sentiment behind this article, which is odd considering how invaluable PG's advice usually is. I agree, nothing is more cringe than the misguided being overly-verbose. But dissauding the intelligent and capable from flexing their lexicon seems a little harsh. No Oscar Wilde or Robert Hughes? No thanks.
If you're going to do this, edit heavily afterwards.

Most conversation is pretty redundant. Because not everybody hears every word, it's acceptable to say things a couple different ways in order to make sure you're understood. That's less OK in an essay or email, because it's assumed you considered everything you wrote.

If you don't believe me, try transcribing an email instead of typing it. Simple transcriptions aren't good writing.
Better to swap heat exchanges or induction heating for resistors.

But electrical applications require access to ample amounts of demand-following supply. An inherent challenge with existing models.
Except that sitting all day watching TV is CERTAIN to keep them on welfare for the rest of their lives.

Perhaps buying them books instead would work better?
Community colleges are very inexpensive, there are state grants available to the poor. Why not create incentives to learn a skill/trade, perhaps a degree?

"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime"
"> You need to look inward and see what is causing the drift."

I'm rather dismayed that the post, every single comment on this thread (as of my writing this, et least) as well as what appears to be the gist of Guy Spier's book is about "me, me and me".

I'm all for finding oneself and personal improvement. Please, please do take better care of yourself, both mentally and physically. But if that does not lead you to realizing the best path to improving your lot is to improve the lot of others, then that makes me and the whole world quite sad.
Please can you add a function to sanitize the markup from Google Docs and MS Word (The HTML from Google Docs is actually worse than Word!).

One of the companies I work for has members of the public create pages and getting them to submit usable (clean) markup is one of their biggest pains.
> Is there a process to follow this up

Well, this was an opinion in U.S. District court, which is the first level. You can appeal dismissals to Appeals court. From there, it's on to the Supreme Court who can choose if they want to hear the case.

In Thank You for Smoking, the protagonist jokes that the thing that makes America great is "our endless appeals system" occasionally, I feel convinced that this really is true.
There are still plenty of open questions. No one has just "figured out" confirmation and dealing with evidence. In fact, the way a lot science is done is incorrect and journals could learn a lot from Bayesian Epistemologists.
But has anyone actually done that? Can you even express those as safe interfaces in Rust?
Someone care to explain why this is on the front page here? Skimmed through it but just seems like a pretty typical interview with a developer?
He's taking advantage of government imposed barrier to entry costs. Perhaps by going all out in extracting benefits from the government protection it will point out to the public how much they're being taken advantaged of by the pharmaceutical companies in general and prompt them to demand changes from the authorities. And by tearing down these walls it would benefit his company, because his company is very small startup in the pharmaceutical world. As a startup he doesn't have much incentive to keep the status quo as it is and it is advantageous for him to rock the boat as much as possible. Would he have gotten so much coverage of the inefficient part of the pharmaceutical industry by preaching to the converted, or as he's done and go all out and squeezing it for all he can?
I think that's his point. We wouldn't need launchers if there weren't 50 different chat ecosystems.

Someday I hope there won't be 50 different chat ecosystems anymore.
Public universities, public schools in "better" neighborhoods and public schools in other countries operate well. I think the commonality likely has to do with how devoted the constituents are.
I'd, gladly, substitute 'mercurial Spaniard' with an honest 'thank you'. To each their own when seeking friendship. Finding honest, humble friends, in my opinion, supersedes worldly, articulate fellows.