skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have health care through the exchange and it drives me crazy that I pay $300+ monthly and if I have to see a doctor I still have to cover the expense myself because I have to spend several thousand dollars out of pocket before my insurance begins to cover anything. It seems to me that ~$4,000 annually is a lot to pay for what is effectively disaster insurance. But if I don't pay it not only do I pay a fee but I run the risk that if anything truly horrible happened I would be bankrupt.

Health care in the US remains a disaster if you are not covered by your employer (I'm a contractor and thus not covered by any employer).
> 1. Interoperability code with some library or the OS.

If by "interoperability" you mean "binding a more modern language to a C library", no argument there. Binding to C is a legitimate reason to write C.

> 2. C as the closest thing to a portable assembler there is (e.g. to implement something like the Ruby interpreter).

My question is: why do you want a portable assembler? Why not write Ruby in, for example, Go? It could certainly be done; look at JRuby, for instance.

The vast majority of the time, the answer to this question is "performance". Which brings us back to the point of the article. Without compiler optimizations enabled by undefined behavior, you can easily lose 2x performance or more. A 2x performance loss for MRI is unacceptable.

Malloc implementations embody this even more. In fact, it's kind of hard to think of any piece of code that's more performance critical than malloc. Many large applications (apps, games) spend 10%-20% of their time in the malloc and free functions. Allocator performance is so important that Facebook and Google have invested a huge number of man-hours into these two routines (jemalloc and tcmalloc respectively). It all comes down to performance again: under these extreme contraints, malloc simply can't afford a 2x performance loss. A Friendly C that produced slower code would have little chance of being adopted by allocator writers.
No but is there any reason a small cabinet on a segue-like platform should cost $20k?
IMO, for Nvidia the *70's are the sweet spot at about $300. They perform well enough that they last for a while and aren't obsolete quickly (my main problem with buying at the lower-middle end), but don't have the absurd diminishing returns of something like the Titans.

The specs of the Oculus Rift are fairly steep and are basically a middle high end gaming PC, but they have said that the requirements won't change over the life of the device so it'll go down. It was about time for a GPU upgrade for me anyway, so I've been pondering over going for a new GPU + Rift.
I am kind of surprised that PG insist on confusing extreme economic inequality (which is the one most people are talking about when they say it's bad) with normal economic inequality (which most people are totally fine with.)

Edited to clear up confusion
carpentry isn't a closed domain. It is a wide range of skills. If you're in a country using inches and feet you would benefit from knowing the 12 times tables, more than you need 8x or 7x actually you'll have practical benefits from 12x. having comfort in fractions of a fourths, eighths and 16ths is also nice for applying measurements. It's for everyone to put things to use in their life.
It's pretty easy to avoid griefers/trolls when the community is closed or invite-only, or puts even the tiniest monetary barrier to entry. In the non-VR case, Metafilter and SomethingAwful do well. "Private servers" for most MMOs also do well, though they're rarely massively-multiplayer themselves.

But you're right that the concept of making literally any kind of social more into a "law of physics" of a VR space is basically impossible with current technology. We'd need somewhat-better AI (though not order-of-magnitude better) to recognize+classify e.g. speech and body-language that "break the rules" of a place, and refuse to transmit those to others.

And for one particular exception, I don't think any VR world could (or should) allow for enforcement regarding social norms of internal states—i.e. "thoughtcrime." Even if we figured out a way—even if it was inherent to the VR equipment to read your mind to do its job—thoughts are "yours", rather than being something one of your "faces" (i.e. the part of you people know as you in that space, which could itself have multiple avatar-characters) has on its own. Which further means that you can't really establish social norms about what you do outside of that VR space, using one of your other "faces." The "meta-norm" necessary there would be that a "face" is the root of identity, and so one "face" cannot be blamed for the actions of another, even if they have the same person behind them. (This presumes that there's still person-based authentication between the user and any VR space they interact with, and that there's one exactly one persistent "face" per {user, space} pair, that cannot be discarded and recreated.)
This is turning out to be a failure for some. It was for me personally. Was at a smaller company. Insurance premiums had been increased by a huge amount (probably 40% or so) in the 2 years _before_ Obamacare went into effect.

Representatives would come and would tell us a sad story about how all this legal environment is punishing them, and there is a lot of risk and uncertainty so they have not choice but to raise premiums.

So 3 years later premiums are way up, coverage is ... different. No lifetime maximums, that's nice, some free preventice checks and labs (unless the find something, then it becomes a paying lab or doctors' visit). Otherwise it is a about the same or worse coverage as before.

So far as far as the pocket is concerned, as far as the story I am told by employer, and by insurance representatives is that Obamacare is not a good thing. I want to believe, but I can't.

I knew it was going to be a so or so or failure when they striped the single payer option away early on. It wasn't agressive enough that's the problem. Without cost controls it is like plugging holes in hunk of swiss cheese. "Oh law wants to expand coverage for more people? Ok, everyone's premiums are higher now by 20%...."

I'll grant it that it might not be just the insurance companies to blame. Doctors, hospitals, pharma companies -- anyone in the money pipeline is guilty of abusing and taking advantage as much as they can.
> On one hand, you have a population that believes that no one should be left to die if they show up at a hospital (probably due to their religion and whatnot).

Or out of simple self-interest. Having health insurance doesn't guarantee you'll always show up at an ER capable of demonstrating to the hospital's satisfaction that you are insured, with the necessary documentation (e.g. after a car accident or a mugging).
Evey once in a while I have to go to the emergency room for a serious migraine. All I need is a few drop of morphine. But I also get a bill for over $3,000. Of course, it goes in the trashcan.

The real problem with the medical system is its total contrivance to prevent people from treating themselves and having access to treatments at their actual cost -- the inflated pricing for the non-insured is the racket of the health insurance "mafia".
The fake reviews are really frustrating. I try to work around it by focusing on longer reviews that discuss both pros and cons, but fake review writers are probably getting more sophisticated too. It'd be nice to have separate averages for verified purchasers and real name reviews, since those would at least cost more to rig. One could write a script for that, so long as Amazon doesn't throttle/block you. Sounds like a fun and useful small project.
"If only the plan worked as intended! We were close!" -- the same refrain after every single failed socialist endeavor.

But in this case we had the smartest people study the problem! Economists from the top universities designed the incentives! How could it fail?
Have you tried Hurricane Electric DNS? https://dns.he.net

You can update your IP with curl!
Nutrition for Endurance Athletes
The post he's responding to is the equivalent of watching a horror movie from the 70s and asking "why didn't they just use their cell phones?" It's not "important" or helpful to anyone reading this thread.
Economic Inequality Simulation: The Simplified version

http://nbviewer.ipython.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/Economics...

"Many have preconceptions about how economies work that will be challenged by the results shown here"
Only the last paragraph is original, but it is probably also wrong. So PG is saying that the major cause of inequality is technological advancement. But for example see that economic inequality decreased after WWII, but is it really that farfetched to imagine that technological power did not decrease during the war years? (E.g. Manhattan Project.) It is also not hard to imagine that wars would distribute technology more evenly.
My employer is a big group of people and has the power to bargain with the health insurance companies. I think there are groups you can join that provide the same advantage.

But what you might not understand (and I'm about to sound like a big jerk) is the idea that maybe the system that works best for the country might not work the best for you specifically. That doesn't make the entire system a disaster.

There's perspective here that might not make you healthy, but it would at least provide a modicum of understanding.
FWIW, reading the comments reminds me of Hilary Clinton's answer to "Is Obamacare helping or hurting the average U.S. citizen?" on Quora (https://www.quora.com/Is-Obamacare-helping-or-hurting-the-av...) The comments on Hilary's response seem resonate the comments here...
I built a simple bash script that just needs curl for AWS Route53 updates, https://github.com/systemx-xx/route53-bash
This joke bug was in response to the Comodo hack, which is believed to have been carried out by an Iranian hacker. I imagine the name was intended to be a reference to that person, not just a generic "Arab-sounding name = terrorist" sort of thing. (I know they speak Persian, not Arabic, in Iran, but it looks like the name exists in that language too.)
For cost, it varies by province, because health care is a provincial responsability.

Overall though, Canada's entire public medical system costs less per capita than America's public system (medicare + medicaid + whatever else they're including).

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/01/23/chart_us_gove...

I checked the stats for my province, Quebec. In 2013, costs were a bit under $4000 per capita for the public sector. So that's about $333 per month.

Per province breakdown stats: https://secure.cihi.ca/free_products/4.0_TotalHealthExpendit...

As for replicating it....I'd wager that it couldn't be done nationally. It could possibly be done in a small state. It probably could have been done back in the 1950s, but there's been so much drift in the two systems since then that it would be difficult to imagine implementing it.

Because there'd be pretty wholesale change: no private health insurers. Also the fact that medicare + medicaid cost more than Canada spends already doesn't bode well.

But that could just be status quo pessimism.
How much healthcare do you get in the US for $2928/year? That's how much the UK National Health Service cost the UK government per person in the 2013/2014 reporting period, for a comprehensive universal healthcare system with no deductibles, no co-pays other than a minor prescription charge (7 pounds, unless you're exempt due to low income), and which is consistently ranked higher than US healthcare by the WHO.

If we can cut that by 75% since government programs are apparently so wasteful, I'm assuming US insurers should be able to offer some insanely great programs in the ~$3000/year bracke, since the UK apparently ought to be able to get away with providing this level of service for $750/year.
Very, very well-said. There is no out when one is locked into broken architecture. Any escape comes at a cost.
>But economic inequality per se is not bad. It has multiple causes. Many are bad, but some are good.

This shows the confusion of the original essay, and this response.

There is the thesis, "economic equality is not bad", and then the support for the thesis, "some drivers of inequality are bad, some are good" that doesn't actually support it.

Saying that some things that concentrate wealth are not bad overall does nothing to shed light on whether vast disparities of wealth between classes of people is beneficial for a society.
Are there any good breakdowns for laymen you could point to about this behaviour? It sounds fascinating.
Most people I know that are concerned about economic inequality aren't super bothered by self-made billionaires (Jobs, Zuck, and Gates to a lesser degree.)

Mostly they are concerned about dynastic wealth (Waltons, Kochs) particularly when it's economic power intertwined with political power (Kennedys, Bushes, Clintons, Romneys).

Outside of San Francisco, where many people feel real downward economic pressure from tech, most of the US seems pretty happy with the self-made uber rich. In fact, I think people are downright fond of these people. The real discomfort comes when those oligarchs look to preserve dynastic wealth and power for generation after generation using trusts and other tax avoidance strategies.
It wouldn't have been as good, because then you lose the reference to the Iranian hacker who compromised Comodo.
I agree with the basic claim of this response: economic inequality itself it not a problem. I don't really think I would care too much about an extravagant billionare class if the lower classes had 100K household incomes in a robust democracy where the proletariat would have have fair representation. The problem of poverty, generalized, is a problem of access to essential resources. What counts as "essential" of course might be debatable, but the metric for improvement should be about reducing the fraction of the population that doesn't have access to essential resources. However...

>We will not do a good job of fixing the bad causes of economic inequality unless we attack them directly.

I would replace "will not" with "may not". If the "good" and "bad" forces at work are sufficiently correlated in their ultimate causes then a blunt metric of reducing overall inequality might turn out to be a nice strategy.

EDIT:
In particular if per capita income is known then the total variance and behavior in the tail may place strong constraints on the fraction of the population below a threshold.
You might want to look at Zile:

https://www.gnu.org/software/zile/
I see a lot of complaints about Sharepoint, but this one is new to me. What about it is outdated, and especially when you compare it to what other options? I'm no fan, and Sharepoint is super-heavy and requires enterprisey-typical levels of care & feeding, but it's a mature platform and offers a lot of pretty spiffy bells & whistles when correctly configured. None of the open source options remotely compare.
This comment doesn't make any sense without defining "extreme" vs "normal" income equality. That is far from obvious.

Do you think that technology alone can't produce extreme income inequality? Why?
> If the strict 79-character line length rule in flake8 bothers you, feel free to ignore or adjust that rule.

Thanks for remarking this. Too many people use flake8/pep8/pylint in commit hooks.

From the BDFL himself:

> "I personally hate with a vengeance tools named after style guide PEPs that claim to enforce the guidelines from those PEPs."

> "[stylechecker] tools' rigidity and simplicity reflects badly on the [style guide] PEPs, which try hard not to be rigid or simplistic"

> GvR

https://twitter.com/raymondh/status/683793667996303360

https://twitter.com/raymondh/status/683809696902332416
> economic inequality per se is not bad.

A lot of research shows that high society-wide economic inequality causes many bad effects, economically, politically and socially. I believe that is the basis of many concerns. According to that research, high inequality is per se bad (I don't know enough to define "high", but many others have).

> [inequality due to startup founder success is good]

Generally I agree, but:

1) The question isn't whether all inequality is bad but whether current levels are bad. Nobody argues for perfect equality.

2) It overlooks the problem that many are denied the opportunity of such success because of their race, gender, social networks, or economic class,[1] which deny them access to the important resources such as education, financing, contacts, or jobs.

That's bad for the people who otherwise would succeed; it's bad for our society socially and politically to have people who are and feel excluded; and it's very bad for our economy to not utilize the >70% [2] of human resources that aren't middle-class or wealthier white males.

----

[1] AFAIK, plenty of research shows that education depends significatly on the economic class of your family

[2] Around 33% of the U.S. population is white male and some of them are poor; therefore 70% seems a safe estimate.
An excellent write up. In 2013 I was afraid they were going to get rid of the 101, so I bought it. Still using it today, and I just purchased a hard drive upgrade to put in it. It will probably be my last MacBook for many years to come. Upgradability, is the most important feature in my book. I still have A 2009 model running Snow Leopard, and it works great. I see no reason to go to a retina machine
Sure, tracking how far down the page you read is a form of surveillance, but it's an incredibly anodyne one. It's possible to be upset about the government reading all your emails, and still find inoffensive a private company tracking (via an SSL-encrypted tunnel) how users interact with content they serve.
Atkinson and Barker’s Royal Infants’ Preservative (2010)
> Germany, too.

Yes, it's mostly either illegal immigrants or self-employed one man companies, and I don't like that either... but even if you're not insured, you'll be taken care of in a hospital in emergency cases and not be stuck with a 500k+ bill...
great article. i know it was written to clarify earlier misinterpretations, but i really found i took away more from this one than from the prior article. it reminds me of the mark twain quote "If I had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter.”
'I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.' -- Mark Twain
The FAQ says bi-directional:

http://www.semtech.com/wireless-rf/lora/LoRa-FAQs.pdf
Pretty unlikely. A large chunk of that data is not likely in ram, and uploading an image to fastboot will erase a lot of ram as well. You'll get some things maybe. But this isn't nearly the end of the world scenario the article seems to paint.

And also on more recent Android devices you cannot even perform an unlock of the bootoader without knowing the device PIN. Try it on a nexus 5x/6p/9.
Really the correctness of this argument hinges on what definition of inequality one uses. A single factor like standard deviation, for example, tells one much too little. Outliers have a disproportionate effect on this. On the other hand, the gap between what might be called "poor", and "middle-class" affects almost everybody, and the power imbalance that results from this difference leads to many negative effects for those who can't keep up. In summary: the disproportionate influence of the super-rich, and the relative condition of the lower classes are separate issues that are both sloppily discussed using the term "income inequality".
No it's not. Mine wouldn't be as apologetic to those repeating same mistakes for decades. It also would be low risk as I use text files and HTML 3.2. ;)
The Case of the Vanishing Blonde (2010)
Our employer-sponsored plan is roughly equivalent to this, and it costs the employer about $1,950 per month.
Your 100% vs 25% is for completely different metrics.

Insurers will pay out over 100% of premiums for some small percentage of people, but will pay out less than 100% of what they take in premiums overall, or else they go out of business.

Insurers seem to make enough money to pay a huge staff and process a lot of paperwork, but you also have to consider the higher costs of health care due to the health providers also needing more staff to do "coding" (looking up codes which precisely classify medical services administered, there are many thousands) and other paperwork (and IT systems etc) needed to get paid by insurance companies.
I think it varies a lot by jurisdiction, proximity to foreign centers, and type of procedure.

For instance, I live in Quebec. On the chart in the article, Quebec only had 6284 travelers, despite having a large population. Quebec's private medical system is more extensive than average, and I think you can buy more here than you can in some other provinces.

BC also has easier travel options to Asia. It would be quite a trip from Quebec, and possibly easier to buy locally.

Across the board, wait times tend to be long only for elective issues. I've generally had no trouble with them for and neither has my family.

Though some specialties seem worse off. For instance, if I needed a gastroenterologist in Montreal, I believe I'd have great difficulty finding one.

Also, in Montreal, much depends on your local hospital. Some have longer wait times than others, even within the same city. If someone doesn't know how to navigate that system, going abroad may seem simpler.
FWIW, part of the reason for Angular2's 'cringe-inducing template syntax' is so that it'll play nice with Web Components / Polymer.
I wish we had a cliff notes version for every PG essay. It's a nice way to make good ideas and arguments more approachable when you have just a few minutes to read.
Wordpress.com and Tumblr, the destinations for startup/tech blogging before Medium (especially Tumblr), do not crash under pressure either.

...huh, that's the first time I've thought of Tumblr in years. I guess Tumblr really is dead after Yahoo bought it.
With all due respect... what in the name of holy hell mobile app can possibly require 100 engineers working together over several years all on the parts that touch the UI?

I can barely think of even the most complicated thick-client enterprise apps (where the UX is just awful and customizable to death with window upon window upon pane upon tab upon tab upon pane clusterf*ck layouts) I've ever seen that required anywhere near that many core UI engineers.

That just seems like a number of engineers toiling away in parallel that raises a "maybe you're doing it wrong" flag for me. :-/

This is genuine curiosity because I find that just epically flabbergasting.
I would seriously love a tutorial on how to write Redux actions/reducers/etc in Purescript.
The fact that they haven't implemented a useful ratings sort drives me nuts.

http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating....
There are multiple factors that affect inequality, so a short term decrease in inequality can certainly still occur while technology continues to advance. In his other recent essay[1], pg goes into more detail on why inequality decreased in the postwar years, despite advances in technology.

[1]: http://www.paulgraham.com/re.html
I've used it for three projects so far, and I'm in love. The syntax is so clean, super easy to learn, and quick to get going. Bind to a parent element, add your data vars, methods, and add your data bindings. Done. It's certainly not as heavyweight as Angular, and that's a good thing. I played with the other big frameworks, and they were so complex for even the basics. I get 99.9% of the work done that I need to with it and should be at the top of these framework lists.
It is vastly less hassle for doctors to have to deal with a single entity for all reimbursements. No hiring collection agencies to hassle patients, no mysterious nonpayments, no switching networks, one set of rules to learn and that is it.

They'll also probably end up paid a bit less under such a system.

The tradeoff is worth it.
CES 2016: Hand-on with LG's roll-up flexible screen