skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The situation is not helped when proponents of single-payer say things like "there will be no denial of claims." I think there are things to support about single-payer, but it really, truly, I swear to fucking God, has trade-offs, and since it has been sold as not having any honest trade-offs, we can't actually implement the hard parts of single-player.

http://www.vox.com/2016/1/17/10784528/bernie-sanders-single-...
Because it is drama, just like this post.

(A more precise answer would be that your question is impossible to really answer, since it's the users of the site who flag stories; it's like asking why something was upvoted.)
Well for starters, it serves no purpose to me. I just wanna log in. Spotlight can be disabled.
Huh, that's kind of interesting, although in this case the person in question was about as white as you can be.
The benefits of accessibility are largely PR-related: nobody wants to be the company that makes blind peoples' lives more difficult. There may be ADA-compliance issues as well when you get big enough.

That said, accessibility is something you do when you're a big company. When you're a startup, work on making it useful to the easy customers, and then only once you have something that lots of screen-reader people want to use is it worth investing time in making it usable.
this is a great link, too bad this got unnoticed
> Health care is done by the Provinces in Canada, with transfers from the Federal Government to help out. The most recent Alberta budget[0] puts the cost of health care at about $20B. This represents approximately 40% of Alberta government spending.

Worth considering:

Per http://www.chcf.org/publications/2016/05/health-care-costs-1...

> US health spending reached $3.0 trillion in 2014, or $9,523 per capita, and accounted for 17.5% of gross domestic product (GDP).

The Population of Alberta is around 4,196,457 per a statscan estimate for 2015.

4,196,457 * 9,523 = 39962860011

So we're spending ~20,000,000,000 CAD = ~15.5 Billion USD, versus 39,962,860,011 USD for the same population in the US.

edit: The US number seems to include prescription drug spending. Per http://www.statista.com/statistics/436305/medication-spendin..., it's $867 per person in Alberta, or $3,638,328,219 CAD -- so it's closer to $18.5 Billion USD for health spending in Alberta.

That's a better deal any way you look at it, especially when you bear in mind that Canada has better overall outcomes than the US.
From the point of view of people opposed to single-payer, you're not even asking the right question. It's not about which is more beneficial on the balance. It's about whether the private sector solution is so broken as to overcome the presumption against a government-run solution.
There's pretty enlightening chart on this article:
http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/20...

The general consensus is that the U.S. spends more on health care than other high-income countries but has worse outcomes.

"Data from the OECD show that the U.S. spent 17.1 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health care in 2013. This was almost 50 percent more than the next-highest spender (France, 11.6% of GDP) and almost double what was spent in the U.K. (8.8%)."

If there are benefits to a private system, we aren't seeing them. (That may be because we don't have a private system OR a public system. We have a frankenstein hybrid that's the worst of both and works for no one.)

The biggest problem is all the attention has been focused on who pays, rather than how much. The cost system for US Healthcare is so opaque, so disjointed that no one--not the providers, not the customers, not the insurers--have the required understanding or motivations to control costs.
Given that it's FAZ, I suspect all they need is a check that the comment is correctly punctuated, uses the subjunctive, and consists of 3 paragraphs written in 2 sentences :)
> If we required that all medical procedure costs and options at every facility had to be made available at a publicly searchable database.

Well, there's a couple of problems here:

1) People who fail to pay their bills cause financial losses, which have to be covered by the hospital. Therefore, given identical personnel/equipment/etc costs, a hospital in a "poorer" (= more unpaid bills) area will always be higher in cost than a hospital in a "richer" area, since losses have to be distributed among the fully paying customers.

2) You cannot just compare different hospitals on pricing alone. Factors that make this impossible include rent, personnel costs, and equipment costs (e.g. a hospital which uses an old MRT will operate at a cheaper rate than one which buys a new MRT every year).

3) Medical procedure costs can not be estimated at all, given just the diagnosis. Right now my cat is at the vet hospital, turns out the (relatively simple) laying of a pipe to the stomach (she doesn't eat/drink anymore due to liver inflammation, and syringe feeding a cat is cruel for both owner and cat) isn't so simple at all for this unique cat. (For the fellow cat owners, the only thing not healthy about this cat is the liver. The rest of her is in a pretty good condition, and the vets believe she'll make it and purr on for years).
> In theory, a competitive marketplace should be able to cut costs and improve outcomes

Outside of theory, can you think of any example where this has actually happened in US health care?

The only cost cutting I can think of are notably lower payments to doctors, the insurers fighting every claim, and higher deductibles and co-insurance for the patients. So I guess that cut costs for the health insurer, but the providers and patients costs have gone up directly and dramatically.
It took many thousands of years for humans to create a judicial process with rights for the accused. It's sad to see how quickly we can all fall back to mobs with pitch forks, with justice decided on platforms like Twitter.
>If you're doing random sampling* then the proportion of the population sampled doesn't really matter if the population is very large.

This is of course false. The sample size has to be calculated based on the size of the population.
I never understood this mindset. It assumes that the govn't is incompetent (which it often is in many areas, fair point), but then ignores the most obvious response, which is to diagnose and fix the problems at hand. Simply abandoning the government solution is not the only option. In fact, one of the government's biggest problems is that so many people are obsessed with neglecting/sabotaging it just to prove some point that it's bad.
How about pharmaceutical companies?

It seems to me that 'insurance' has become more like a group pre-paid debit card for predictable medical expenses than a lower cost hedge against statistically rare events.
I know this article is mostly about web development, but if you're interested in writing less Java code I encourage you to consider Lombok: https://projectlombok.org/
What corporate chicanery? They took a loss on exchange plans last year. They have every right to pull out of the exchanges until the government makes them stay.

I'm a supporter of single payer. But the health care market is a sterling example of the "worst of all solutions" espoused by the Democrats. Instead of simply raising everyone's taxes to pay for public services, they try to get companies to do hidden cross-subsidization, propping up money-losing individual plans with profits from group plans. And then they berate companies for pulling out of money-losing enterprises, as if providing healthcare for people who can't afford it is the job of private companies rather than the government.
Trump 2016: Blame the immigrants
Insurance, sure. But show me one vehicle warranty that varies between personal/commercial use. I've had Peugeots, Land Rover, Nissan, Citroen and most recently a Mercedes(some of those I've purchased under business contracts and used for work) - none of their warranty booklets made any distinction between personal and commercial use, and frankly - I don't think that by law they can. The only thing that maybe applies if you are using the car commercially is the "heavy use" servicing schedule, so instead of changing the oil every 16 thousand miles you have to do it every 10.
Show HN: Speech Generator for Republican and Democratic Conventions
Au contraire:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12290623

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12297530

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12292703

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12300947

HN's moderation practice around this sort of thing is well established: once a major story has had a major thread, the test for new submissions becomes "does this article add significant new information?" If yes, then the post is a new story in its own right and it makes sense to have a new discussion. If not, we treat it as a repost and downweight it.

We came up with this after the Great Snowden Flood of 2013, and it has held up well in practice. It allows for long-running stories to have repeated discussion while protecting the front page from being overwhelmed by follow-up posts that don't add anything new. The latter is important because major stories attract lots of copycat articles.
http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/press-releases/...
Phone covers. If functional, they will add some mm to the thickness of the phone. I believe overall smartphone thickness to be the sum of phone + cover.
> so the compromises are less ideal

Such is the nature of democracy and all design by committee, accept it, it's better than the alternative: dictatorship.

> than a more pragmatic approach

Forcing more pragmatic approaches would require dictatorship and thus is simply not the correct measure to be looking at.

> If I had the financial independence to run for Congress, I absolutely would..

That wouldn't make any difference, there'd still be a committee and the resulting solutions will never be the more pragmatic ones.
New features in Vim 8
because this is drama
Thanks - just enabled this and will see how things go.
You have to take into account that the electric motor in a tesla is more efficient than a gas motor (3-4x). The reasoning is that a gallon of has has about 33.6kwh in a gallon (see wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_per_gallon_gasoline_equi...). A tesla has 75 or 85 or 90 kwh onboard, so that's at most 3 gallons of gas!

Another way to think of it is that mpg equivalent of evs is around 90-100 mpg. The model S is a huge heavy car, and look how far it can go on 85kwh.
I totally agree with you that often times your first set of users aren't the users you end up serving at scale. There are so many examples of this that they are hard to count. What is great about your example is that Uber made a strategic decision to open up to a new user base. Pivoting and serving new users/usecases is totally okay. Where startups get in trouble is when they move from niche usecase to niche usecase blindly based on a customer request.
Pokémon Go API – A Closer Look at Automated Attacks
Sounds like a good thing for Canadians. Otherwise you end up with no citizens and have to do bulk-level importing which is difficult.

A party in Germany recently proposed a E10K load, per child, up to 3. More kids meant you didn't have to pay off the loan. Sounds like a good way to help the birthrate. I think it was considered too racist to limit it to citizens.
Their early experiments did pretty well with hardly any computation at all -- just recreating previously recorded patterns of activity. They can probably do some pretty cool stuff by adding machine learning (which they're definitely interested in based on who they're hiring)
It looks like a PR piece from a million miles away...
The Tor developers are such a mess. I'm surprised they get any work done with the needless paranoid drama they keep kicking up. This is even without considering all the rapes Appelbaum probably did. I think the project just attracts unprofessional weirdos.
The logical continuation of WinRT. "Store" apps that run identically on Windows 10 Desktop, Phone, IoT, etc. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/get-started/uni...
> You must be pretty healthy or never actually had to pay for care in the US.

Wrong. You probably shouldn't assume you know anything about me, or the situation I'm in.

> You also probably shouldn't assume you're the only one in the room who moved to the US from another country.

You probably shouldn't assume that it matters.

> The first place I lived had someone who lived

I was referring to problems with the system as a whole for entire groups of people, not just individual stories. My children being one of those where the Canadian system fails them horribly.

But no, continue believing that Canadian Health Care is perfect for everyone and that there are no benefits the US system for normal citizens.
Accessibility like scalability is far easer to bake in at the start than patch on at the end. However, punting until you start to gain traction is not a terrible idea.
Beyond Coal: Imagining Appalachia’s Future
"The purpose of government is about whatever the governed of the current day decide that purpose is" - I believe you can see that the logical conclusion of that point of view is not a world you'd want to live in. In the US, at least, we have a Constitution that prevents the worst uses of government (though not as much as it used to).
This is a worst case scenario for Obamacare -- the leverage that empowered the insurers to dictate the terms of the ACA never went away, and it won't anytime soon.

Anything less than the Federal government threatening to nationalize Aetna would be insufficient, lest the Obama administration wants to appear weak and invite further dissent.

Just another reason why single-payer is the best option.
What you're going to do when a telemetry patch comes bundled with a security one? MS just announced they are doing updates in bulk for 7 and 8.1.
I think you're being a bit black-and-white in your thinking. Plenty of people have kids and love them, but also don't want to spend literally every minute with them. Or conversely, want to also do other things in their life.
Install Never10
Ha! True :) Thanks for the tip! Will keep that in mind for the next one.
> We should ask ourselves what value on-article comment sections provide

When done well, comments on the article form a discussion, debate, or some other meaningful exchange of knowledge.

But with the modern web and social media, it's usually all bile and trolling.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/03/windows_10_upgrade_s...

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/4mcdon/i_live_i...
> Are you to judge how people should make use of their time?

This library did not born because of fun, but because of solving a (non-existing) problem from frustration. I would have not said one word if he was doing this for fun or just learning or something like that.
My comment to the original post explains the systems issues which has to do with "economic rents" caused by politics used to create artificial scarcity of housing to benefit landlords over renters.
Thanks for the feedback on that! Editing now!
Funny, if I search at work (using Chrome on Windows) for "Stopwatch" on google, I get the stopwatch "app". [I know, because I use is very often]

Now, at home, when logged in chrome with my google account, I get... search results for the term "stopwatch".

When I search for "stopwatch" in an incognito window, I get the "google search app", like so (just as I get at work): http://imgur.com/a/9r7Z2

So, some people following your "lmgtfy" link might just get... search results for a "5 minute timer".

When logged in, url-bar search redirects to https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome-psyapi2&ion=1&... (yields just the search terms, for me..)

When anonymous, url-bar search redirecty to https://www.google.com/search?q=stopwatch&oq=stopwatch&aqs=c... (yields the stopwatch)
Yes, there are trade-offs. In my opinion, they are worth the switch, and amount to a difference between "choosing which hand to reattach and letting the other go dead," and "No lap-band for you fatty." The latter being the single payer option.

Anyway, in almost all world single payer systems, rich people can still pay for vanity doctors.
I was thinking of dual booting and relegating Windows to gaming, have you had any trouble with your setup? Especially with Windows updates messing up the boot settings or wiping partitions that they shouldn't?

Seems particularly risky now that MS is pushing out regular "major updates" like the anniversary update, which get handled like a system reinstall.
I was commenting on his claims, which are obviously full or ultraleftist rhetoric, not on China.

Read again.
>Another is that it's harder to charge a phone if you have headphones plugged into its sole port.

>The new specification, due this quarter, adds features to ensure a USB headphone doesn't drain too much battery power...

The second isn't an answer to the problem of the first.

>As a result, with USB headphones, "the difference in battery life is negligible" compared with 3.5mm audio jacks.

It's not negligible because, so far it seems like we are going to have a choice of a charging cable or an audio cable. Currently I can listen to audio and charge my phone simultaneously, so in an hour my net battery life is +25%. The best the either/or situation can deliver is -0.0% (but likely something more along the lines of -5% in an hour of audio listening.)
Actually they do here as well in the states. My wife and I just had to deal with the rapid loss of our dog to skin cancer.

Her treatments were cheaper than paying a doctor here in cash. Normally I pay a doc $150 or less for a routine walk in with "I have the flu".

Our dog got chemo pills, checkups, hell the vet even called us each week to check her status between treatments cheaper than that $150 I would pay for fifteen minutes of doctor time.
I was kinda thinking the same thing but kept my mouth shut. My wife stays at home and I mostly work from home. We aren't rich, but are doing alright.
good point, but still, there are at least 3-4 libraries which do exactly what this library is trying to do and do a better job at it
Its called "google"
@supports is pretty necessary when you're using backdrop-filter. For instance, you want a navigation bar translucent with blurring on browsers that support it, and a solid colour for others.
I think you mean "Kotlin instead of Groovy"
Isn't that exactly what Kohler did with that Steward urinal at the end of the article?
Updated should be fixed.
I always thought it would be nice to sort by stars x reviewers or stars x log(reviews) -- something like that. Something that better balances rating and popularity. One of the most annoying things in amazon search by rating is scrolling through screens and screens of products with one user giving a product 5 stars.
Even assuming we could do a good brain prostethic, with our current computer hardware and software, what would it be able to do?

What springs first to mind is remembering lots of data, or doing arithmetic fast. But would such a brain prostethic offer any real-world benefits over a human using a laptop or calculator?

OTOH, I suppose you could record signals from someone skilled in something, and then use those to augment training of someone else. Like in The Matrix. But by then we would be bumping into what today are philosophical questions, like "how compatible are different people's mental models of self and of the world"?

Also, what would this mean for e.g. eyewitnesses used in court? In a dystopian world, you could always imagine some criminal gang "programming" otherwise reliable eyewitnesses to give them alibis. Or even a shady government implanting memories of a crime into someone's head, in order to make them confess to that crime.

Or, suppose that a government could literally read your mind and tell if you did something or not. Would you be protected from that under the Fifth Amendment?
I often wonder if John Galt ever found himself living alone in a room with no one to take care of him in his old age.
And this is why bundling destroys a la carte for zero-marginal-cost items.
> (3) Facebook would lower priority of conservative news sites.

I worked on the trending product. This did not happen. The whole thing goes back to one guy complaining now that he couldn't pick Breitbart for the highlighted slot for some story because it wasn't on the list of approved sites. And this list is actually available here https://cdn.ampproject.org/c/newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/05/in...
Of course no one ever asks why he wanted to pick a controversial site to highlight instead of say a boring straight forward wires service report like the AP.

Of course the story still appears, and the Brietbart could appear in slots 2-N by the personalized ranking algorithm, so it's not like it surpressed. He just wanted to shove it into the I personalized slot 1 where everyone would see it.
Unfair can simply mean not the same. Dunno about GP but this is a pretty popular sentiment. Look at e.g. GitHub saying they won't consider racial or sexist behaviour, depending on who is the offender. Look at recent popular protests in the US, where leaders organize people on skin colour.
Sorry about that. We are giving away a Surface 3 to one lucky respondent and it is hard to do that outside the US.
> All of the state options pay only ~10% of what they are billed no matter how large the bill (there is also usually a cap). This forces hospitals to charge exorbitant prices.

True or false?
Still very much care about your feedback!
Automatic (YC S11) launches first 3G connected car adapter with no monthly fees
...and google chrome is the mysterious, malicious entity that lurks between the user and facebook.

Users. Don't. Care. Computers and smartphones are devices most people use exclusively to put personal information onto the internet. Banking, social media, health care information, all of it. The battle isn't over -- it never even began.
Perhaps the root of issue here is with the tooling or language, but If I were them I wouldn't feel in control of my own code. And that should be terryfing.
> without paying their fair share

I see this argument a lot and there are never numbers to back it up.

If Walmart isn't paying the taxes it legally owes, then they should be fined and there should be charges brought. If they are, then they are already paying their fair share as determined by the law and implying otherwise is at best extremely disingenuous.

Let he who voluntarily donates additional money to the US Treasury cast the first snarky HN comment, or something.
>In the case of Justin.tv, pivoting to serve video gamers was the right move. Our video game broadcasters always represented a small but consistent group of users. It tooks us 4-5 years to realize how important they were.

This stuck out at me as an avid Twitch user/follower (and sometimes a streamer). I think they need to re-realize this.

The pivot result (extra effort and focus in Twitch) is being re-pivoted with the introduction of more general-content streams, like Creative, Music, and Social Eating:

https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Creative
https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Music
https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Social%20Eating

And then there are the streams that push the limit:

https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Poker
https://www.twitch.tv/directory/game/Games%20%2B%20Demos

I wonder why they didn't say 'No' to the users that these streams provide for, and revive/rebuild Justin.tv.

Edit: Formatting...?
>That's a better deal any way you look at it

I'm Canadian and can't get a family doctor (nor can my wife). I don't consider that a "good deal". Maybe if it was more lucrative (read: doctors made more money, budgets were higher) we could attract more talent and I could?
If Clinton brings us single payer, I will worship at her altar forever. She used to promise this stuff in the 90's, but basically gave it all up when she actually went into politics and gained public office, later saying single payer will not work.

If she does get us single payer, she's the greatest trojan horse ever in American politics.