skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What Gawande describes is more of a sysematic irrationality in the healthcare system than a flaw with a test.

The decision to over-treat is part of the tradeoff we get when physicians are viewed as authority figures. Their inaction (not doing a treatment) is viewed as a delegitimization of the patient's needs, and so there is social pressure to treat, even when harm could be caused. This is a psychological blind spot that equally effects patient and physician.

But with respect to tests, so long as a test has a known false positive and false negative rate, its result can be accurately factored into a probabilistic model of a patient's overall health.

Our healthcare system is biased toward acute conditions and extreme interventions. Things like early disease progression and wellness are generally not even considered relevant to most doctors.

The reasoning approach of an evidence-based differential diagnosis which is taught to medical students is a powerful heuristic, but it is designed to work within the constraints of acute illness and (potentially) urgent intervention. So of course if fails when test results are considered without appropriate measures to improve the signal to noise ratio of the first branch of the decision tree.

With any kind of broad-spectrum, speculative testing, any result would need to be considered over time and in the context of many other factors. It is not a drop-in replacement for any step of the traditional differential.
That's exactly what I'm after. Thanks for the link.

edit checked it out. screen is parallel to typing surface, looks like a recipe for hideous neck pain. I'll wait til v2 I guess. Still, nice to see that a market exists.
Please don't respond to a bad comment by making the thread worse.
Yeah, $75K is nearly 1.5 times median household income. So its substantially more than most households make.
I see it as a "high tech" interface to the same solution.
Value in volume: 10 notable 500 Startups investments
Curious what part of BC you are in? My wife and I had dreams to move to Vancouver one day but seems impossible given that we just had a baby, and housing prices. We looked at Surry but seems a bit gritty and at the border of affordability. We're sick of Toronto. The traffic, the cost of houses and the weather all suck (TO has fantastic ethnic diversity and all our family lives there). We have friends buying run-down semidetached houses for a million dollars in Toronto ... we're saying no to that.
Having written documentation for end users, that will work for only a portion of them. Probably most, which is good.

But there are a significant percentage of users who can't (or won't) read documentation. Even they do manage to read it, they don't understand it.

For some reason, human interaction works better for those people. They ask a question, and someone copies the answer from the documentation, and pastes it into the chat conversation. The user then goes "Oh, wow! That's helpful!"

But ask them to read a web page, and they get lost.

I would love to know the psychology behind this phenomenon.
I, as a rule, only use single-letter vars when iterating over an emumerable, in which it is clear what the single-letter var represents. Outside of that, never. The single-letter var also is usually the first letter of whatever actual items are being iterated over. Something like:

for c in customers:
do_something(c)
Windows is utter crap, Mac OSX is a slightly less smelly pile of crap, there is also Linux which is much less crap than both Windows and Linux.

> I prefer Windows for it's mix of flexibility and stability.

Not sure if this is supposed to be a joke.
> "Ask HN: Which remote island can I escape to and live comfortably and cheaply?"

This is really the fundamental problem in the modern world. The interconnectedness and shrinking of the globe in terms of distance means there is absolutely no where to escape to. Anywhere you would consider going there will be some government trying to dictate how you live your life and take a portion of your livelihood, and anywhere that you might avoid that you are usually risking that in conjunction with a humvee full of armed militants storming your home and murdering you.

Even a hundred years ago there were vast swathes of Australia, the central US, and South America generally uninhabited yet arable land, and the distances of the time made it infeasible for anyone to effectively police all of it. Today, not so much.

About the only hope left is setting up floating colonies in the Venusian atmosphere, but the problem is well before despondent settlers can migrate on a colony ship there will be governments establishing absolute control and monitoring of any habitable space someone could try to flee to.

It is like the "right to be forgotten" on Facebook - the right to be left alone was, fleetingly, a valuable thing that relatively few could enjoy, but in the same way the middle class shrinks the number of people capable of being in that state is also in dramatic decline.
The SHA256 of that file is exactly that of Firefox Setup Stub 35.0.1 (Win32), so of course Authenticode checks out.

I'm not 100% sure why some people thought it was a malicious file, but the comments on Virustotal mention [1] which, for me, redirects to the legitimate [2] but a comment seems to link it with [3] which is a completely different file. Perhaps the redirection is randomized so people got confused?

[1] hxxp://files.dodo-number-1.pw/p/MCLkP8Dzc3nUWJrG9fwGLA,1442015273/zte%20mf631%20firmware%20downlo_10924_i57945825_il345.exe (replace hxxp with http)

[2] https://download-installer.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/firefox/relea...

[3] https://www.virustotal.com/es/file/e6821e86a9d3fb693b32077e6...
Anyone have technical details about this story? What kind of bot used, languages, algorithms, etc?
I agree, thanks for calling it out and my apologies to toomanythings2. I'm not sure why I thought that was necessary.
German Company Claims It Can Deliver Baseload Solar Thermal Power At 64-85$/MWh
I don't think 1 and 2 are very important for the story, and the questions/posts thing seems like an honest mistake. No harm done. The meaning is basically the same, since the bot can presumably reply to any post, not just a top level question.
Difficulty there is collaboration with various groups that are completely set on Word. Some of those groups are external: in most cases contract format is dictated by the client and that invariably means a Word document laid out in their specific structure with tables for deliverables and subheadings and boilerplate and the rest. Reverse-engineering hundreds of those things into something Pandoc can spit out is a giant challenge and likely a bit fragile. Then you have internal legal function which uses Word and various workflow plugins to do their job of sense-checking all of it.

The obvious suggestion would be to have internal groups (excluding legal) collaborate on some common plaintext markdown format where DVCS tools would provide an advantage, then publish to docx and hand over to legal for review. Unfortunately what always happens is that major changes to the contract are needed after legal has done their work, and it's easier (and acceptable) for all groups to work on the final paper together. That's where it breaks down.

I really feel that in 2016 having some poor bastard do clerical coordination of this stuff is just wrong. It's a mechanical task that's highly both error prone and a major source of operational risk, and it should be doable by the computer.

I actually kind of want to build this. Word (and the rest of office, I have the same problems with spreadsheets and powerpoints) plus plugins as the IDE, solid version control in the backend.
You are on to something. But a similar company in say, Ames, Iowa would also command similar attention, I think. Like Ames, the median education of people of Udupi and the region around it are actually much better than national medians. Seen in light of this, it is hardly surprising. Just down the highway 10 miles is the birthplace and HQ of an international private university chain of some repute. Several now-nationalized banks also started around Udupi and the town 30 miles away, Mangalore. There is also an unusually dense cluster of good universities in and around Udupi. Udupi also ranks at the top in school performance in the state of Karnataka.
I know because it was publicly traded. (They raised a bunch of money and then bought a shell company.)

That wasn't the exact base salary, but that was basically total compensation not including stock. (So including a few hundred thousand dollars per year in an expense account and an additional couple hundred thousand for serving on the board.)
<i>I don't think owning my own home and having good schools is a particularly decadent expectation.</i><br>To the GOP, your just greedy.
Location still matters, though. At a Silicon Valley software company you'd expect around $100k starting salary with a bachelor's degree and you could get a modest place to live. Working in the mid-west or the south you'd almost cut that figure in half and would end up living in a larger house with a nicer car. I graduated with the highest starting salary that I know of out of anyone in my class but I still ended up living in a very "low-class" area and struggling to make ends meet. I lived far more comfortably before with less than half the income while paying my own tuition in a different state.
And where would you get said horse? Where would you keep it? What would you feed it? Who would take care of it?

Students should be capable of reading text. If they can't, they belong in kindergarten, not university.
Obviously you are correct that $125k does not go in far in SF, LA, or NYC as it does in Cleveland. But these cities are extreme outliers, and my main point remains that you need a little more perspective about what "definitely sucks" in America.

I make right around $125k and live in SF. I have the luxury of not having to think much about how I spend my money, and yet I still have $2000-$3000 left over every single month. For perspective, half of all Americans would not be able to afford a single unexpected $400 expense[1]. That's what definitely sucks, not the fact that I can't afford a house in Bernal Heights.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/06/03/tn...
Qualifying 125k as upper class is indicative of a gross misunderstanding of capitalism and wealth concentration. Upper class are business owners, old money heirs, celebrities and the like who find it odd that other people go into work 9-5 for 40 hours of their lives for 40 years. They are less than 1 percent of the population and have incomes from investments of generally over 500k/year and net worths of 10 million+.

This is a much more accurate description of the various levels of upper class from Economist Felix Dennis:

$2-4 million: The comfortable poor

$4-10 million: The comfortably off

$10-30 million: The comfortably wealthy

$30-80 million: The lesser rich

$80-150 million: The comfortably rich

$150-200 million: The rich

$200-400 million: The seriously rich

$400-800 million: The truly rich

$800 million - $1.998 billion: The filthy rich

$1.998 billion and Above: The super rich

citation: http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/blog/who-is-rich
You can even use the GCC ifunc attribute and get the dynamic linker to handle selecting the right function.
As Wittgenstein might put it, there are two language games at play here. The first one takes 'class' as defined in the (legitimate) Marxist way, used to represent the relationship to the means of production (Edit: we don't produce all that much anymore, making that definition harder to parse). The second takes it to be specifically defined as a range of income distribution. That second one is what most people typically take to mean by 'class'.

While I agree there's a lot more than income at play in social policy and understanding of society and economics, it's still an absolutely fascinating set of stats to bring up. I will say I'm more disappointed by the huge ranges of the various distributions in the study (as pointed out by other commenters)
> And if I'm reading the linked GitHub issue correctly, this is about a specific plugin that runs in a sandbox on the YubiKey NEO, where the main codebase of the NEO is still proprietary?

No, it's the code for the new YubiKey 4, which has been closed off.

> What guarantee do you have that the code on the device matches the code on GitHub

Ideally, you can build and flash the firmware yourself.
White House Launches the National Microbiome Initiative Pledging $500m
> Are you suggesting doing a find / grep inside the context of a current scope? Or just color codes / indents / marks in some way the scope? That works to a degree if an editor can do that though that still doesn't ultimately help the fact that it's a single file that you may need to search around for something.

At least IntelliJ will highlight all uses of the currently selected variable/method/whatever, and will quickly allow you to jump to any of them.

If I'm searching for something by name then it's almost always because it's in use somewhere, and a ctrl+click will take me there instantly, without getting bogged down in false positives.

> Plus not every environment will have your favorite editor setup how you like it.

Sure, but how often do you actually have to work with your regular codebase in such an environment? Sure, such a rule has its uses, but in 97% of cases it's just a symptom of a poor editor setup.
Yeah... your last sentence is the important part. It comes down to doing the math.

Also, while living frugally can make a huge difference in your net available income if you live in a high salary/high cost of living city, it can also be very hard to commit to that lifestyle when your friends/co-workers don't.
10% false positive rate is significantly lower than the quoted "50, 75, 90%"
I'm a T1 and poke my finger on average 10 times a day. It's led to A1C of a nearly non-diabetic person, 5.3%.
Elvis is Wikipedia's longest featured article
> Do you mean power intensive if you're updating the screen constantly, like you would if typing?

That's what I meant. (And I'm not sure; ISTR that they are more power intensive for updates, but I don't know in typical general-computer-use cycle how they would fare against more typical laptop displays, if it would just be reducing their advantage or flipping to a disadvantage.)
Website of Albanian Hitmen-For-Hire Hacked, Data Dumped Online
People were still using Vine?
Is the documentation going the be available via a chat bot or a web page? My guess is the second.

Screw the lazy users who won't look up documentation. If you can't read docs (he is a computer science professor), then do you really aren't in the right subject.
I think you'd be surprised at how often students don't read webpages and fire off an email to the class TA or instructor. Replying with a link to the relevant part of the webpage is something I'd love to automate.

(I teach a largish introductory university class)
Call it "result":

- "val" in "retval" carries no meaning. Everything stored in a variable is a value.

- "ret" is an annoying abbreviation for "return" that makes it harder read.

- "return" focuses on an implementation detail—that the function produces its value using the language's "return" statement. It doesn't matter how the result is emitted, just that it is.

If a function is simple enough that the variable storing the result doesn't need a more specific name, "result" is a good default. You could call it "sum" here, but that shadows the function itself—a common problem for result variables—and doesn't really tell us anything we don't already know. We know we're inside a "sum" function.
More sex-culture shaming. How about instead of wasting all this effort on law enforcement, 'company policy', and (extra creepy) banner-ads that display right when the john searches for sex, how about legalizing, taxing, and regulating it? I hear that worked pretty well for another popular human pasttime that was outlawed in the 30s, especially in Seattle.
Or the engineer's solution to a social problem :)
"If it can be done, it will be done" suggests a rational market (or rational system) that can explore all possibilities. However, arguments for "incompetent design" strongly suggest that the system is not rational:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_poor_design
Interesting. I must have misread something early on because I thought Startfighter was launched to improve recruiting of coders and stuff. I didn't know about games and such. Does that factor into recruiting or is there a nice post showing exactly what it's about? Tptacek?
$ strace python -c "print('hello world')" 2>&1 > /dev/null | wc -l
924

$ strace python3 -c "print('hello world')" 2>&1 > /dev/null | wc -l
543
Oops, that was unclear. What I meant was closer to "This is about a specific piece of functionality that, in the past, was an open-source sandboxed plugin on the YubiKey NEO, running inside the main NEO codebase, which was proprietary?"

Could you have flashed the proprietary part of the NEO codebase yourself, or just the plugin?
Yes, anyone attempting to say that living in a first world country on $125,000 "sucks" is open to this criticism. I'd probably avoid phrasing it this way.

However, I'm generally in agreement with the post. I live in a relatively unfashionable neighborhood south of 280 in SF. Dumping and graffiti are common, front easements (yards) are paved over for extra parking or broken down car storage (illegally, but with extremely indifferent enforcement). Local schools aren't highly ranked in terms of test scores (though this doesn't matter all that much in SF, which is run by lottery much to the chagrin of people who live in higher performing districts). It would be very, very difficult to buy into this neighborhood in SF on $125k a year. You'd have trouble buying for much under a mil. On two incomes you can, but keep in mind, child care runs about $25k per year per kid, and even with kids in SFUSD ("free"), you have to pay extra for after care and summer camps, which will run you about 10k per kid per year even if you're doing things relatively cheaply (YMCA or SF park and rec run programs). At "upper class" incomes, you will lose the tax break for these things, so the second spouse needs to make a substantial salary before things get better financially.

Does living here "suck" by global standards of poverty? No way, not even slightly. Is it the kind of "upper class" life you'd expect for a dual income household of highly educated and skilled workers living in ground zero for a severe labor shortage for wildly profitable companies?

San Francisco is wonky, but keep in mind, the companies that say that there is a severe shortage of workers often do demand that their workers live out here, so the $125k salary really should be considered in the context of SF or NY level housing prices.
I typically keep it consistent, using either k,v or key,val (I like the symmetry of var letter length in a weird OCD kind of way).
CO2 emissions from electricity generation in 2015 were lowest since 1993
> No, it's the code for the new YubiKey 4, which has been closed off.

yk4 firmware was never released; that particular issue is about NEO's openpgp applet.

>Ideally, you can build and flash the firmware yourself.

You couldn't do that with NEO(except from early dev version) as global platfrom management keys are unknown, which makes it impossible to delete/upload applets. I actually tried to get dev. version but they redirected me to NXP who never answered.
Human cancer cells are another interesting example besides hydras.
Also, I think assembly failed for a couple of reasons. 1. not enough respect for the marketing side of things. 2. free labor only gets you so far need actual cash to be contributed. 3. equity plan needs laid out early so people don't feel like equity is going to be hoarded. 4. 3. needs to be more like a holacracy and a benefits corporation.
Every mock.patch() is a little smell (2014)
There's a difference between false positive rate and positive predictive value:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_positive_rate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_and_negative_predicti...

The latter depends on the prevalence of the test condition in the population, which is one of the major points of the OP.

A test can have a low false positive rate but still have a low positive predictive value if the test condition is sufficiently rare (as it is for most diseases). brianwawok was probably referring to tests with a low positive predictive value.
Your biggest problem is that I have read several quite long blog posts about Starfighter, and I still don't understand what it is.

I am a developer, I like to believe of above average intelligence, I'm your captive audience. If I don't get it, what are the chances the rest of the world will?
They're not really GIFs, but Alex Andreev has been remaking his image art into animations set to music: http://coub.com/hermetic.art
To go full-on Machiavellian for a second:

The middle class has enough material wealth to have "something to lose", but not enough material wealth to individually upset the status quo too much. On top of that, there are enough resources to go around to allow a large group of people have that same approximate level of wealth.

Ergo, the middle class is a tremendous stabilizing force in a society, and they're "guillotine insurance" for the rich.
whenever you ask a smart person in tech what the hardest industries are to "disrupt" these days they always say healthcare and education. healthcare has so much money and inertia in it that nothing will happen fast.
but education, otoh, is ripe. all students have access to computers and phones, which was never the case. it won't be changed by a single good idea, but if you believe in Steve Case's Third Wave idea, then education is the place to look
No, sorry. I never asked him to not gush at me, nor did I find that offensive. Nor did i need to ask that. The detail that you are missing is that he turned something I said into sexual innuendo, something he had never done before. In other words, he took a non sexual comment by me and replied to it in a sexually suggestive manner. This was not something he had ever done before and I was very clear it was malicious behavior. He did not like the fact that I was replying to him in a more low key manner and he was upping the stakes.
This scale is silly and meaningless.
Amber's quite heavyweight and requires server-side support to do anything useful.

But Smalltalk's so simple that writing your own transpiler isn't that hard --- I have an entirely browser-side prototype in about 2kloc:

https://github.com/davidgiven/stellation/tree/stellation5/cl...

Performance is adequate, but not great. Method lookup is the dominating factor, because you need different code paths based on the type of the receiver (number, string, object...)

Of course, writing the libraries is the bulk of the work.
Is Storm still iterated and improved upon regularly? Curious if this is simpler than Storm because it's the single focus of the founders. Could be a big advantage of Concord, right?
When moving away from ST2 (too many workspace/plugin issues), I strongly considered Atom. With plugins, I could replicate nearly everything I had spent a couple years setting up in ST2 config and plugins.

But then I landed a contract using vim, and found it has more functionality than both, if you're willing to spend the time. I especially like being able to SSH/Tmux into a session from a tablet remotely and pick up where I left off, even over slow connections.
You can automate replying with a link to the course webpage ToC. Also, make it absolutely clear that the reply is automatic. Hopefully they'll get the hint.

Or heck, just make it a policy that if they haven't received an answer in a week, this means they need to look at the website. I don't know why some people strive to be so accommodating to laziness nowadays.
I'm not sure I follow, but the answer is probably that it would complicate things.