skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article discusses only premiums and does not discuss the overall cost of health care to the person who has the insurance.

Some deductibles are $5000 or more.
There are copays on some of the plans.

The overall costs have increased for most of the people who already had insurance prior to the implementation of the ACA.

A lot of the increased costs are that people who have very high medical costs have now been included on plans to be subsidized by others.

Much of the higher costs are from choices patients have made such as smoking cigarettes or overeating.

The ACA allows for smokers to be charged premiums 50% higher than non-smokers. But most plans do not implement this option and relatively few smokers report that they are smokers and the information is not verified.

Instead of having people paying higher costs not only in premiums but in large deductibles and high co-pays the ACA should have done what most developed countries (eg, Canada, UK, France) have done which is to increase the tobacco tax to $5.00 or more per pack (the US Federal tax is about $1). That way, it doesn't matter if smokers lie about their smoking status or of the plan charges the allowed 50% increase in costs for smokers.

The author is an MD PhD with the PhD has a sub specialization in Economics. He should know (as should the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine) that the proper economic analysis of insurance costs should include not only the premiums but the costs of deductibles and the costs of co-pays. The fact that this was not done suggests a political axe to grind and not giving complete and transparent information to their readership.
But why just target Microsoft? What about Google? Apple?

Big data is huge and there is no end in sight as far as growth goes! Telemetry is a big success. And we're talking about regular usage now. Hospitals use new state of the art EMR software with all kinds of telemetry built it as well.
Do you really believe that the world would be a safer place if Germany had a greater number of "battle ready tanks"?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-end-of-t...
Whoops, you are right, my posterior should have been Beta[2,100e6+1] (I chose a uniform prior). With that I get a median probability of 1.7e-8, and a mean probability of 2e-8. Good catch!

Note that this is not particularly sensitive to whether you choose beta[1,1] or Beta[1,3] as the prior.
How do you see those two as being different?

In my mind, products that make use of ML are using ML services as the back end. An example would be the recent wave of bot companies: many are not rolling their own NLU system but rather leveraging services like wit.ai or Microsoft's LUIS.
This is a good starting point.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/itpro/windows/manage/man...
DHS tried to seize WSJ reporter's phones
> China may follow a similar development history path to Japan. First the Japanese copied the west and made cheap bad quality items. Then the Japanese innovated and made very high quality items.

Same story with Italy. It started its industrial success of the '50s as a country where you could get cheap, unschooled (but not unskilled) workers that would work for 20 hours a day without any protection from the existing legal framework. (Plus a devalued currency.) Just like the eastern Europe of the '90s or China in this decade.

Now people forgot all that and like to think of "Made in Italy" as a symbol of innovation and style.

I think this is the pattern:

1. country attract foreign investors because of lower wages and little legal protection;

2. people work their ass off, without really understanding what they are doing;

3. workers get skilled in what they do, a culture of "doing X properly" springs up;

4. people realize that they are being exploited and demand more protection from their state;

5. slowly people get what they ask for, but this has a cost and so factories move somewhere else;

6. (This is the main point =>) You are left with a country filled with skilled workers and sense for the production of the good X, but it no longer makes sense to produce it there for the big market; you turn to the "luxury" market;

7. people start losing jobs because the luxury market is hard to please and it is not big enough;

8. the state gives away some of the rights acquired and starts the slow path towards becoming a state with lower wages and less legal protection.

I wonder if this vicious cycle can be broken with the advent of non-tangible products (for example services) and some kind of heavy taxation on transports (instead of VAT you would pay dist-in-km^0.12).
Replace America with Britain and China with America and travel back a few hundred years.
The YC company based in Shanghai is https://www.strikingly.com.
Qualities of Successful Pattern Libraries: Pick Any Two
How many of those decades will be human driven?
Exhaustive listing of financial news sources
Why Thiel’s GOP convention speech will be about him and not about Silicon Valley
what LMS if i may ask?
> Currently the US averages 1 fatality for every 89 million miles driven.

This is the average for all cars on all roads, in all driving conditions.

To have a meaningful comparison, we would need to know the fatality rate for new luxury sedans on divided highways in good weather conditions.
Twitter has a market cap of $13 billion mostly because of content produced by its users. The only possible way it can make money is by showing ads to users (getting them to do free labor).
BAT stands for baidu, alibaba, and tencent
First of all, Ruby has a very ambitious goal for version 3.0, which most likely involves some kind of thread parallelisation.

Second, I would not say Ruby is not a language for the multi-core world. There are tens of thousands Ruby production environments over the world that make excellent use of multi-core machines. They run Ruby on problems that are embarassingly parallel such as web applications using process managing application servers such as Phusion Passenger or Unicorn. This is the way many modern web application platforms parallelize, including Node.JS and Python.

Third lack of paralellization is not a language feature. Both JRuby and Rubininus support threads without a GIL. Projects like Celluloid and Concurrent-Ruby make use of this.
While many can, I'm pretty sure not many actually do :) (at least for technical topics).

It depends on whether the employer will care to check your book references or not, I guess.
All are characterized by free-roaming predators and very low population density. Seems unsurprising.
If it's protected, how are you ripping it?

If you're circumventing DRM then that's a crime. A practice that you shouldn't support with your hard-earned cash.
The Superbook: Turn your smartphone into a laptop for $99
This is exactly the problem. When you have a system that completely ignores inefficiency/overhead but goes berserk over fraud, you get totally absurd incentives. Those 1350 pages probably kept some managers from getting fired, but realistically have been a serious waste of time and money.

At a certain point, you either accept a low level of fraud or just make a rule saying "don't do bad, wasteful stuff." Then you fire anyone who breaks that rule and let things work themselves out. (This has other problems, but they can be addressed.)

Most of bureaucratic stupidity is ultimately moral hazard. Someone pays for one failure case but not another, so they spend absurd amounts minimizing what they're responsible for.
Yeeeeep.

I think the example and your reply neatly illustrate the problem.
For a decent overview of this, watch Steal This Movie, or look into the life and work of Abbie Hoffman.

The stated goal was to levitate the Pentagon, meaning to lift it in the air, and Hoffman claims that they actually did and many saw the Pentagon rise... but you're not supposed to take that seriously.

Hoffman was a prankster, and a self-admitted fadist. He went from straight laced voter registration in the racist South, to being a leader of the New Left and anti-war movement in the late 60's and early 70's.

He felt that the old and new left were both boring and their methods were outdated. He had a better understanding of the new media environment of television, and importantly that America was a post-literate society.

He adopted a lot of the ideas of the diggers from SF. He captured the attention of the media with his outlandish claims and antics, on purpose.

He was a pioneer in street theater. Some of his actions include:

Running a pig for president

Throwing money from the gallery in the NY stock exchange so that the traders on the floor could be photographed greedily picking it up, to illustrate the complicity and greed of wall street (through the investment in defense companies that profited from napalm) in what he saw as genocide in Vietnam

A free speech activist, he was arrested for writing the word Fuck on his forehead and for wearing an American flag motif shirt.

He was also tried for incitement of riot in the Chicago 7 trial. He turned the trial in a circus through things like coming into the trial dressed in judges robes and other antics.

He did all of this in an attempt to politicize youth and drug culture of the 60's and mobilize it against the war.

An anarchist, he published steal this book, a book chock full of practical advice for avoiding corporate employment and living free through cooperation and petty scams like methods of placing free phone calls. All of this was based on the idea that American middle class values were fundamentally morally bankrupt and hypocritical, due to it's support of what he saw as an active genocide in progress.

He was brilliant, charismatic and somewhere between brave and crazy. Women loved him, and he loved them. And he loved drugs.

A rare specimen, of the same stock as the founders of this country. A person motivated by extreme empathy and a sense of justice, and someone not afraid to die for his beliefs.

He was a man with the same kind of creativity and media insight of someone like David Ogilvy, he could have easily made a fortune on Madison Avenue.

Instead his got his head beat in and his nose broken registering black voters. All the money he made from sales of his book and his fleeting celebrity were donated to civil rights groups.

The FBI and COINTELPRO had him under near constant surveillance and eventually caught him in a drug deal.

He skipped bail and went underground, and eventually emerged in the 80's and started working on environmental campaigns and against the Reagan administrations support of the Contras in Nicaragua (which was expressly illegal due to the Boland Amendment).

He was found dead due to an overdose of sleeping pills, but many think he was murdered.
Fixed price or time and material – Which one should you choose for your project?
How about using the same tactic many smartphone makers use:

"We're allowing you to unlock your bootloader, but if you do, you're voiding your warranty."

Similarly car makers could say as soon as the user unlocks the car's systems for modification, the company is no longer responsible for any accident that might happen.

It seems like a rather good compromise to me.
Since no one even in concept has figured out how to give an AI motivations or goals other than ones specified by humans: all of them.
Because if you like a language and that language is popular, you're more likely to find a job using that language, which in turn will make you happier.
I worked in Shanghai, China for 3 years for Ubisoft (game developer).

Senior-level experienced talent is still hard to find, so it's relatively easy to get a job and work visa (which will be sponsored by your company once you accept a offer) compared to first-world countries. This is doubly true if you have a well known tech company on your resume (Google, FB, etc)

I'd recommend working for a multinational company (or at least a large well-known Chinese corporation like Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba); as others have said, they're used to foreigners and will make sure their written communications are in English and make sure their employees have a minimum standard of English proficiency. Any Mandarin Chinese you learn will give you brownie points (unless you're ethnically Chinese; then they'll criticize your slightest mistake ;) ).

Salary wise, you will make significantly more than locals. In absolute terms you will likely make less than you would in the West, but due to the MUCH cheaper cost of living, you can almost always lead a better "life". (I had a ~1200 square foot 3 bedroom apartment in one of the most prestigious districts of Shanghai for $800 US/month (covered by my company). That was ~10 years ago but I'd still expect the same relative price differential.) You will get a good health insurance/benefits package that covers treatment at international standard hospitals.

Shanghai and Beijing are the most foreigner friendly cities in (mainland) China; huge expat population, many western restaurants, signage in English, etc. Other cities not so much, but nothing a slight sense of adventure can't conquer.

Any specific questions feel free to ask.
Interesting insights from analyzing over a million hotel reviews
"France are not spending to their commitments"

You seem to have forgotten that France is one of the countries with the highest military spending in the world (not that it pleases me).
Stack Overflow goes beyond Q&As and launches crowdsourced documentation
Maybe if the job is in a field you like. Used to be learning COBOL guaranteed a job. As a drone in a bank. Very popular at the time.
I think that's why Chinese leadership want to separate themselves from the west, because they don't want western-style capitalism to influence their country, and end up negotiating economic advantages with developed countries. That's what state-capitalism is all about.

I think they want to have both the benefits of isolationism, and the benefits of exports.

Ultimately it's very easy to play with anti-US views. Much easier to blame the US than to blame the chinese government. For example the vietnam war, iraq war or japan nukes might sound much worse than the tiananmen square for a chinese.

But in the long run, a country like china should be able to catch up with how late they have developed. I believe they have excellent human capital. Not sure if they will be able to compete in very high tech fields, but they might one day.
Sadly yes but it hadn't I think when I originally posted...
Great. DMCA-1201 was always unconstitutional and was in practice used to stifle free speech. Good to see EFF actually bringing it to legal fight. It should be repealed completely.
Contracts written by a US company can be enforced far more easily in Arkansas than in India.
> it's equally easy for the outside company to poach a Google employee.

The effect doesn't become symmetric until we reach an equilibrium where TensorFlow is ubiquitous.

> Opening up the code to the world is more likely to be a net-good act, propelling everyone forward.

These things aren't contradictory. It can be a net good for the world, and also a net good for Google, and also a net bad for Facebook.
Eh, I think that's more SoCal (LA/SD) than NorCal (SV). SoCal feels like a giant sprawling suburb with great weather, and NorCal is just cold, expensive, and full of hipsters.

Like, there's a very large chance I'll end up moving to SoCal if I'm ever forced to leave Texas (which might actually happen next year), but I have no desire to live in NorCal even if you paid me seven figures.
You missed my point. I did not say reusability is the only factor that dictates the use of microservices.

If we wrote everything as one big service, we'd lose the dozen-or-so benefits of microservices.

Hypothetically, if we rewrote what we have today as one big monolith:

* We couldn't selectively open-source parts of it.

* It'd really all have to be a single language, as opposed to the three we use right now.

* ...and if we decided to change the language (like we're in the process of doing with a transition from Ruby to Go + Node.js), we'd have to rewrite all of it.

* Deployment would be potentially more brittle since you're deploying a single codebase. Our apps are designed to gracefully tolerate partial unavailability.

* We'd have to be careful to control individual services' resource footprint. We have some services which are super light and have very few dependencies — they don't carry a monolith on their back.

* We'd have to jam in product-specific stuff for N different products into a single codebase. Some of our microservices aren't reusable; they're completely product-specific. Squishing lots of unrelated concerns into a single codebase is not feasible.

* Developers would be trying to tightly couple services and violate separation of concerns faster than you can spell "technical debt".

...and so forth.

Maybe I didn't articulate it well enough, but my original point was that microservices are great for all sorts of reasons, but also a too-often missed point is the benefits of reusability if you just design thing right.

Put differently, microservices are a lot less powerful if you don't design them for reusability (and, as a prerequisite, multi-tenancy)
Aside from claims made by GW Bush, what evidence do we have that Baathists were any worse than the average ruling class in the region?
I remember trying out Google in the early days and deciding that it is about the same quality as other search engines. I might be wrong, but I would say that it's continuous improvement that gave them their current position. Later that history was kind of rewritten that it was the genius invention of PageRank.
A quick thanks for that one!
I'm guessing that none of the workers you're referring to are IIT graduates. I agree that American developers face little competition from the middle/lower end of developers in India. But the top developers in India (eg, the IIT grads and Google-India devs), in terms of raw talent and job performance, would easily out-compete the average American developer, while still being happy with a lower salary. This is where the physical-proximity-perks that American developers currently enjoy, really make a big difference.
"you can't argue that it's a GOOD thing to take those risks... who are you to decide that it is worth risking others lives to try to save one ?"

That's exactly what I argue about. In a rare (but very important) occasion where risk taking would be needed, you're forcing the moral dilemma of an even rarer occurrence with a presumed victim. We don't know if it would come to that. For all I care there might be only some speeding on a rainy road. My car will recommend going slowly for my own sake, but in that moment I care less for me personally and more for avoiding wife's impending death. Actually, I fear that my car will not limit itself to recommending, it will force that on me, because it knows better, because the people behind the said decisions won't be only the engineers trying give their best, but also lawyers doing "mercantile calculation of legal liability", politicians trying to score on public safety through their regulations, and so on!
Why he did all that may be at issue. Could have just been a publicity-seeker.
yeah, Elixir is a good option, indeed.
Simon Lewis' article from Nature fails as an example of a report "saying that the storm of the week is caused by fossil fuels". It is an editorial, not a scientific paper. And it says the opposite of this: that relating climate change to extreme weather events takes careful statistical analysis, that took two years to accomplish in the example treated. Hardly the "storm of the week".

Again, I don't think so, and I'm not surprised that you can't find any examples.
Top Blockchain Developer Makes Patent Non-Aggression Pledge
I believe it's 'Supply Chain' entities.
Barring some Einstein/Shannon-level of momentary insight that catapults understanding of the nature of intelligence forward by orders of magnitude from where it is now, likely all of them. And entirely likely that it will be more than decades.
This is big. VPNs are no longer a reliable way of getting to Gmail etc.
Somehow, I was totally unaware that CURL supported downloading via IMAP. Are people using CURL to download their email?
Parallel programming in JS is a total nightmare. It's a lot easier in Rust.
I'm not convinced about that.

Some organizations do startlingly well with good enforcement and a rule against circumventing the rules. Yes, that's subjective and messy, but it can actually work quite nicely.

Hell, it's basically what financial structuring laws are: a rule saying "no using loopholes if you find them". With that in place, it becomes surprisingly easy to address loopholes by punishing everyone who employs them.
https://blockstream.com/2016/07/19/blockstream-defensive-pat...

https://www.blockstream.com/about/patent_pledge/

https://www.blockstream.com/about/patent_faq/
Tesla can make the hardware and Uber can make the app, that's not a bad deal for either. And there's no reason why Tesla couldn't sell to Uber's competitors as well.
Concept of a blockchain-based financial and state system
Poppycock. It is widely known that miasmas such as chicken odour are the source of disease, not a cure. In fact even the name "malaria" means "bad air" for this reason.

"""
For when the morning breezes blow toward the town at sunrise, if they bring with them mist from marshes and, mingled with the mist, the poisonous breath of creatures of the marshes to be wafted into the bodies of the inhabitants, they will make the site unhealthy.
"""

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory
Something that's deep, nebulous, and legally deniable is better than an explicit law requiring enforcement. Therefore a language/culture barrier is better than any trade law. Likewise, something that's technologically enforceable (even if imperfectly so) is better than something requiring bureaucrats to enforce. Therefore the Great Firewall is better than any trade law.

Therefore the combination of the two -- Great Firewall plus language/culture barriers -- is a truly powerful combo. (What would that be in Magic the Gathering cards?)
The 7 Virtues of Entrepreneurship
A practical proposal for migrating to safe long sessions on the web
Well, I doubt they are going to open source a machine learning framework to rival TensorFlow anytime soon, but they recently added CNN API's to iOS and macOS, so you can do optimised inference on Apple devices.

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016/715/
Pinch zoom gestures library for Android
Which is oddly similar to Silicon Valley, where there's a very serious cultural problem with quality and attention to detail. People will work really long hours (due to a misguided hero belief, so we're different there). And sure, they do a lot of dumb things (Color? Uber for pet walking?), but at the end of the day it all seems to work out.

Except, it doesn't - not for China, which is slowly choking to death on the effects of costs externalized to the environment, nor for America, due to the costs externalized onto everybody who's not a company.
Thanks for letting me know what you are doing with J2V8. I can add jooby as a link on the main J2V8 GitHub (under the Who is using J2V8) if you'd like.

Regarding Grunt / J2V8, I got this working. However, I had to play with my working directory so Grunt could find it's dependencies. I will blog about this.
> If someone wants to be a serious software engineer they are going to have to commit to living in SF, DC, Boston, Austin, or Portland at some point in the beginning.

Well, given that I've never lived outside of Dallas and my career is well established, your claim is patently false.

> someone who wants to do 'web/social/mobile'

That is an awfully narrow definition of software engineering. I've never worked with web, social, or mobile, and I have quite a bit of experience as a software engineer under my belt. I've done platform software work for a telecom, platform software work for a robotics company, and NLP programming for a defense contractor in the past, and I currently work on network monitoring software for another telecom.