skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not overly familiar with what happened with the Royal Mail privatisation, but thank you for suggesting it as a subject, it sounds like something worth investigating further.

I'm also not overly familiar with mainstream news media in other countries, but if you had to point the finger at any one group in terms of why there hasn't been more resistance in the UK to the dismantling of public institutions, a large portion of the blame lies with our crap mainstream news media. The public aren't kept informed about matters of substance, they're distracted by misinformation and personality politics. It may be a problem we share with other countries (from the outside, the US mainstream news media seems similar/worse), but it doesn't have to be this way. We could have mainstream news outlets that gave people a chance to get better informed about the issues being faced in their country/community. It's an essential part of society that is sadly missing, I don't think you can have an effective democracy (effective in the sense of standing up for public interest) without a well-informed public.
Church is a Scheme dialect. Scheme is a Lisp-1, meaning there's a single namespace for everything, including functions. That is, a variable can be bound to a function object, an integer, a list, etc. This is IMHO a very good thing.

Functions or macros can return other functions. It's not easy to say what is going on, unless you look a bit at the context to spot e.g. function applications.
A lot of what we today consider fallacies are in fact very reasonable heuristics if you live in the conditions of our ancestors from before civilization. Though with illusion of control, people are pretty good if inventing it for themselves if no external placebo is provided. Consider rain dances, or various folk beliefs around curing diseases...
In addition to being a member of the core team, I work at a company that uses Pony and working with it every day has been a pleasure. There are plenty of rough edges to work out but the compiler has stopped me from introducing subtle data-races into our code base on more than one occasion (more like at least once a week, if not more).
Just pointing out that what people experience from A&E is vastly different from what people experience from the GP system.

This article highlights the best part of the NHS, whereas the GP system is like being caught in limbo. If you are rich enough and plan in advance, it can be avoided by going private, otherwise it can mean months, even years of suffering through long waits.
It's interesting that you note the amount of waste in terms of money that you experienced (which is extremely anecdotal, obviously) and yet the publicly run healthcare systems are often substantially cheaper than the private ones in terms of overall cost.
>>> The reason the EU model works is that doctors (and other medical professionals) get paid less.

They also don't get sued so much. Or have crippling depth to pay of.

>>> You have a concern - you go to the doctor" is a waste of money

It's called preventive care and it actually saves money in the long run.
Ask HN: Which one should I use – Magento / Shopify / WooCommerce?
Hi hacker news, I'm looking for a new e-commerce solution for a mid size business (>$1M in expected yearly sales). Which of these would you recommend?
I like how all designers without fail put their meaningless design tickets as CRITICAL, BLOCKER in the ticket tracking system
A mail boat stays afloat
> [Citation needed]

Not if your name is James Altucher. boom headshot
> hiding what they are doing

Would you back up this claim? There is too much rumor and propaganda around about climate science, so I feel we should take extra care to substantiate any claims.

I generally like the idea of scientific data being public, but the theory that there is a conspiracy of climate scientists (of which the claim that data is being 'hidden' is a building block) is tiresome and distracting from the very real, critical problems.
> I would privatise it tomorrow

There are plenty of examples in this thread of how good the emergency treatment is, and some bad examples of GP treatment.

In the UK your "NHS GP" is paid for by the NHS, but is employed by a private company.

The private bits of the NHS fucking suck.
Because it's worked pretty well for Medicare and Medicaid? Large portions of both were privatized through Medicare Advantage and Managed Medicaid. The gov't pays private companies a flat rate per patient who selects their plan.

A majority of Medicare coverage is provided through private companies (100% for the drug benefit). Last I saw 80%+ of Medicaid patients are covered by a private plan.

What are the benfits? The private companies take on the risk. If the lump sum the gov't gives them isn't enough to cover costs, tough, the company takes a loss. Gov't loves it as it makes budgeting easy.

The other benefit is choice. A patient can select from a multitude of plans that benefit them the most. Want a top doctor? Pick a plan where his/her hospital is in network. Have a chronic disease where you take a lot of meds chronically? Pick a plan with better drug benefits.

Medicare Part D - the drug benefit created in 2005 that is entirely private - came in dramatically under cost forecasts.
They will take you but then send you a bill.

As a first time visitor to this country many years ago I went an clinic because I had severe strep throat. Waited 1 hour, then some intern saw me for 5 minutes. Gave me a codeine pill and later sent me a bill for $400. That was 1990's $400 dolars, and I had a stipend of only $200 month as a student.

That right there is fucked up. Actually, I would rather they just turned me a way -- "Sorry bud, this will be more than you can afford".

I know what people will say "Oh you don't have to pay, declare bankruptcy or call and haggle with the hospital". But you know where you haggle with the hospital -- in a 3rd world country when you are bribing the doctors to not kill you. You haggle there as well, and you also have to haggle here to get he "special, I can't pay" rate.
Can this be used to replace apps like 1Password for a skilled user?
I think it was Melbourne, Australia where I experienced this, but there were no automatic cycles for the crosswalk lights - they don't go green unless you press the button. Even after learning that, I would still forget sometimes that the buttons weren't just a placebo and would find myself getting frustrated at how long I was having to wait.
Try telling that to a gay person.
Yes, and I've given SystemTap plenty of chances and hours of my time. But right now let's give BPF a chance -- it's more in-kernel in 2 years than SystemTap did in 10 years.

> It's unfortunate that SystemTap never had much visbility.

Right. DTrace was marketed. I don't think SystemTap was.
I currently have Kaiser insurance. As an HMO, they integrate a lot of services, which has really helped save a lot of time for us (like using email to talk to a doctor, who calls the specialist, then replies, without making a visit).

However... when we do go in for a visit, I get the distinct feeling that there is a lot of pressure to keep appointments within a specific time interval and basically get patients in and out as fast as possible.

Overall though, the integration of doctors, specialist, labs, and hospitals does create a smoother and less stressful experience.
According to the USDA nutrient database, brewed coffee has no vitamin B1 and very little magnesium.

Can she take a vitamin supplement? Ideally, all her nutrients would be gotten through daily food.
I think this is usually because their profit engine breaks rather than being overwhelmed by waste. All big orgs seem to have one part of the business printing money while the rest tries to burn it. So long long as the printer prints, the bonfires burn.
Of course, those details are usually only discussed at the end of the interview process. So, while I actually think you make an interesting point - student loan burden requires higher salaries or, the lack of it could allow lower salaries - it won't be a competitive advantage unless our hiring process changes.
(Copied from below): Rust, but I think there are others that will fit people's needs as well. Rust suits my needs/wants perfectly.
Exactly, I want to see how well showing up to ER for chemotherapy works.
The sliding door thing is common for food / tea service in regular hotels / Onsen hot spring hotels. It's also common for their to be a scheduled visit by a concierge where they give you an instructional 'tour' of say when meal times are what time you can do X activity and when activity closes for the night. Worst thing you can do in any Japan hotel is start getting intimate soon after your arrival in the room. Expect to get a courtesy visit, sometimes from the owner of the hotel.
Prerequisite:

You have the stomach for a relatively immature language

Re Erlang/Elixir the number 1 selling point would be if you need performance that you can't get from Erlang/Elixir.

Re Akka on the JVM, the number 1 selling point would be you want predictable latencies from your GC that you can't get from the JVM.

Along with those, you get a type system that enforces data-race safety which now that I am using Pony daily, is the #1 selling point for me.
I went with biscuit because it writes to a simple file and I am not worried about updating 2 secrets at once, particularly since I have a different file per app per environment.
https://github.com/dcoker/biscuit/blob/master/README.md
If you want those people to change how they vote you need to stop talking down to them. "Hey stupid! You're voting for people that hurt you."

Or then again, maybe they just have a different opinion than you on what is important to them?
I find that the placebo elevator close buttons are a very North American kind of thing. In other countries that I've been to, I've surprisingly seen them working. In Brazil for example the door will close instantly. I'm pretty sure they worked in Germany as well.
If your competitor can produce the same output with less waste, they can lower prices and take your customers.

This is especially true of health care where there's not much salient differentiation or other dynamics that would naturally produce monopolies.
Even if education is left off the resume?
It hardly matters, since the Mac shortcut for back is Command-LeftArrow.
Cue dots were actually largely anachronisms in most commercial movie theaters before digital came along because multiplexes spliced most films onto one large platter--though cue dots may still have been present.

There were typically two cue dots for each ~15 minute reel. On the first cue dot, the projectionist would start the second projector running while the second was the cue to actually switch over.
From reading the comments here I get the impression that such crossings are only at intersections. In Drammen, Norway, where I work, we have in addition crossings that are not at intersections and the only time the lights change in favour of the pedestrian is when you press the button. In addition there are some at intersections that also require a button press because the one way system means that there is never a conflict between vehicles.
"It absolutely is scary to imagine being sick even with insurance. Without insurance, forget about it"

Hospitals are required to take care of you, even if you have no insurance in the US. If you get a bill you cannot afford, you can negotiate a much lower rate with the hospital (I have done this and my family members have also done this).

I run my own business and so I need to pay for myself and my spouses healthcare. Obamacare actually made things worse for me. It doubled my costs (which was promised not to happen) and I was forced out of an otherwise great plan.

Getting sick is not even an issue. Medication is fairly inexpensive and if I have major surgery, I will only be out a couple thousand (the cost of a laptop).

I have many relatives in Canada and the only reason the system works there is because it borders the US. They get all of their regular care paid for by their taxes and the middle class drive over the border and get major surgery done.

The waiting lines are pretty long for most major surgeries and many older people die before they actually get it. The government there continues to promote getting checkups for specific diseases and disorders later and later in life because they don't have the facilities to get it done in a timely fashion for everyone.

NHS isn't the panacea everyone makes it out to be. There are no free lunches and when it comes down to it, a finite resource like healthcare has to have a filter/limiter. Since the majority of government run services are not that efficient and will not be able to keep up with demand or technology, it's much better to have a free-market/private care solution.

I agree with the sentiment of your post. We need to get rid of the bloated government-supported insurance companies and let the free market decide the price of everything..and offer a form of insurance to the poorest.
This is exactly the use case of https://github.com/gtank/cryptopasta

Although, the only thing I can see it doing wrong is the use of passwords as keys https://github.com/domodwyer/cryptic/blob/6bd92fab6778dac26c... which is still an open issue in cryptopasta https://github.com/gtank/cryptopasta/issues/7
Perform an update or install a package, things break. Usually Macports itself would partially or entirely stop working. Not the same way every time. After the first couple times I learned that attempts to fix it usually didn't entirely solve the problem and/or took too long, so I just started deleting the whole thing and starting over when things went wrong. At least re-installing packages doesn't require my full attention.

2012 may have been around when I stopped using it, can't recall for sure. Maybe it improved after I dropped it.
> Medicare, Medicaid and the must stabilize mandate for ERs are underfunded. It's one of the reasons that out of pocket costs are so high.

Exactly. This is the hidden secret about US healthcare that very few people are aware of. Even providers usually don't see this anymore, because they're so removed from the billing process (especially now that most providers are salaried and not running their own practices).

Medicare and Medicaid are the reasons that sticker prices for treatment in the US are absurdly high. Incidentally - and most people don't know this - if you're uninsured and self-paying, you almost never have to pay the sticker price. Hospitals really don't care, and if you just tell them that you're self-paying and can only afford (say) 10% of what they billed you for, they'll almost always immediately agree to a 90% discount. The only reason they're showing you that bill is that they need to present high bills to private insurers (to make up for the loss on Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements) and they're not legally allowed to present differently-priced initial bills to patients based on their insurance status.
Neither Apple nor Sony have monopolies. Their respective offerings have plenty of competition. This is why "nobody seems to care." Don't like Apple's walled garden? Go elsewhere.
If you have evidence that providing more preventative care will either save money or make people healthier, present it. All the evidence I've seen (see my links in other posts on this thread) suggests the US provides too much of it.

Strangely, not a single person telling me I'm wrong has cited a single source or done a single back of the envelope calculation.
I think programming in assembly really teaches you how a computer work. That's its main benefit imho.
Why?

It looks easier for me; I'm far more likely to notice a missing comma.

But I'm sure you must have a valid point, if you would elucidate?
Another problem with 1ML is that it's only a research prototype for now, so we can't take it "for a spin". Given the 1ML inventor's main job, this is unlikely to change any time soon, unless some kind soul takes on the 1ML project lead.
Your NaI detector is rubbish for spectroscopy because of the lousy resolution. High resolution studies in the UK in the 80s corrected several misapprehensions about the physics from attempted spectroscopy with NaI. It was only useful for Compton suppression as far as we were concerned, and soon replaced for that.
Hell, simply the idea of programming is rife with potential for abuse.

Exactly. Everything you add has a cost/benefit for a particular context. Evidently you disagree with how the Golang team has calculated cost/benefit with regards to generics.

Because from my perspective, being able to define parametric data types and functions is a huge win for safety and terseness of code without a lot of downside.

Terseness is a good thing? Some people say terseness is bad. Is safety the only issue or always the top priority? All production code exists in a specific context. It's best to tailor to your specific context. This may well mean that you may encounter a context where you do not want to use Go.

http://anomaly.org/wade/blog/2013/07/coding_style_terse_vs_v...
Reminds me of this interesting wiki article, "American Civil Religion" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_civil_religion
Maybe they believe repeatedly hitting the button tells the machine they're angry and hurries it up? Like how yelling at the automated phone system can sometimes get you passed over to an actual person, or yelling at the social media staff on Twitter seems to be a quicker way of getting your support prioritised...
> "I'd also think that the US would have learned their lesson by looking an Enron... but since when have facts gotten in the way of a good story?"

I'm not sure what you meant by this, can you explain further?
On that note; why do I need two bars of soap when the hotel internet less than 1Mbps?
The hotel industry is in the US is strange and archaic. Hotel internet and toothpaste are great examples of issues that should be obvious.

Heck, I provide a bottle of wine to my Airbnb guests.
I couldn't imagine living like that.

We bitch and complain about the NHS in the UK but bloody hell I can't think of other systems that are better. I worry about losing my job and looking after gf/son in the aftermath like when I was made redundant from CSCO last year. But i've never had to pile on top of those worries having to worry about an illness taking my redundancy money and savings.

(I'm a Brit btw)
Some of these items are really difficult to make, such as a zooming viewer. It took me several years to get one that was right. Try to make one that works on mobile & desktop, doesn't crush your bandwidth, & operates at 60fps. There are so many plug-ins but none that feel exactly right.
Where does Pony's performance vis-a-vis Erlang/BEAM come from? The absence of dynamic typing? Better scheduler?
This is not really news.
This will probably be flagged soon. Please see the FAQ regarding job posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html .

PS1: If you have something interesting about the product, the technology stack or some user cases, then write an interesting blog post and add a "We are hiring" / "Looking for cofounder" at the bottom. But it must be interesting, don't try this trick with a lame blog post.

PS2: I read cofounder as something like 50%+50% (or 33%+33%+33%) equity split. (let's say, more than 20%) Is that correct, or this is a position with 1% equity and $0 salary?
I love the street art, but believe the article is fundamentally flawed. It picks three examples of placebo controls, crosswalk buttons, elevator door closing, and office thermostats. Let's go through those

Crosswalk buttons - When traffic through an intersection (both pedestrian and vehicle) merits "knowing" when pedestrians want to cross, the buttons are considered. When such information will not change the flow, they are not. At some point in time if the cycle of walk/dont walk red/yellow/green will not differ based on button input, you can stop considering the button input. However, we get into situations in the Bay Area where the button is important and people who don't push it never see a walk sign. So sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.

Elevator buttons have a similar issues. There are regulations about how quickly after the doors open that the doors can close, and there are mechanisms that control the speed of closure (also regulated for safety reasons). Few people feel consider the door open button is a placebo because they can see, "Yup the doors are still open" but they feel that close is a placebo because the doors don't immediately start to close when it is pushed.

And office thermostats. Having been responsible for a company move, and consequently dealing with the landlord of the old and new space. The HVAC system was always divided into "zones". The thermostats were placed based on some previous zone. So when you reconfigure the space, new thermostats get added (if necessary) but old ones don't get removed. The old ones are either useful in the new configuration, or not useful now, but may be at a future date. Since it was $300+ to add a thermostat into the space, the landlord kept all thermostats that exist, so that future tenents might be able to use one that wasn't needed before but is already installed, saving $300+ in tenant improvement costs.
> The contractors knew it and would milk it as long as they could

That would be one of those inefficiencies introduced by part-privatization... So it's hard to believe it's approaching zero. Not to mention that you have no real basis for making that statement from personal experience alone...
The last time I looked, a low deductible plan might cost $500-700/month for an individual. A high deductible plan can be under $200/month depending on the state. That's a pretty reasonable decrease.

Otherwise, yes, I agree that the private system is subsidizing the public system, particularly Medicaid.
Let me do the math and illustrate that you are arguing about irrelevancies. Let me assume all doctors spend $10,000/year in fees/etc, or 10x the number you suggest.

US ER doc: $209,161 - $5,000 = $199,161.

UK ER doc: $60,504 - $0 = 60,504. ($57,709 after adjusting for purchasing power, which is lower in the UK.)

This really doesn't change my conclusion at all. (PPP factors, salaries are taken from links I've posted in other comments.)
It's not primarily about the platform being open source, but relying on a SPOF. It's dangerous and empowers Github to pull all kinds of stuff while they have the marketshare. Today's github may not do shady things, but tomorrows can. It's irresponsible of us to put all our eggs in one basket. At the very least, helping them to be the place where 99% of projects are hosted will allow github to ignore complaints.

In fact, it's a good thing Gitlab is not a pure open source project, because there's leadership involved and business interests with real life problems to address. So, the chances of "endless experiments" is low. Sure, if Gitlab was fully open while keeping project leadership and all, it would be even better.
The German system is not really private in that sense though. What is covered by insurance and what isn't is proscribed by law, and how much a hospital/provider can charge for it is too. And whether you are allowed to treat under insurance is organized, too, limiting the number of doctors per location. It's also more expensive than the NHS.

In reality it is a different way to administer single payer health care that leaves the doctors and hospitals (and the patients) some more freedom, but at increased cost.

From a micro perspective large organisations are often dysfunctional. You need to look at the statistical measures to compare them against other systems. And the NHS manages to give universal coverage at half the cost of the US system.
Was that at the town end of Starowislna near the old newspaper offices? I may have passed you a few times; didn't accept the paper because I can't read Polish.
> you'll need... two

Or even less than that. At the level of everything's automated just hire another company or even the DC you're housed in to handle the odd issue.