skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Without a law requiring insurance companies to participate, why should they? Let's not pretend they have anything other than self-interest at stake.

Why not pass such a law? Because that would effectively mean semi-nationalizing a fairly large industry, and if we're going to do that, why not just create an actual single payer and a risk pool the size of the US population and skip the idea of having private firms involved at all.

The biggest problem with the idea of single payer "insurance" is that it's not actually insurance. It bundles in a variety of things such as pre-payment for services, wealth redistribution, price controls for services, and some actual insurance.

A social safety net is a good thing. But if we expect to benefit from the benefits of a competitive system, we have to let firms actually compete.

The core issues have to do with the lack of "insurance" market for things that are actually prepayment (like giving birth, dying of old age after $50K worth of end of life care, etc).

By mandating that consumers buy the "insurance" and mandating that insurers bundle all the non-insurance services into the package, the government essentially controls the market and avoids both the benefits of market competition and accountability for tough decisions such as which care should be covered, etc.

There have been many threats from industry and government. Government can nationalize and can pass laws that reduce profits, and firms can pull back, can merge with each other, and do other things to increase their market power.

The bottom line is that the entire system is ripe for corruption and lack of accountability. Let's face it, for a healthy young person, catastrophic insurance is next to free. Yet all of us are paying fairly high premiums so that old people can be exploited by a healthcare system that happily gives them ineffective surgeries and sells them overpriced and largely ineffective pharmaceuticals.

The system was already corrupt before Obamacare, Obamacare simply cemented many of the most lucrative public/private deals. Both sides intended to scheme a bit after the programs got underway. So we'll see a bit of tit for tat with regulators and perhaps watch one or two of the entrants leave the market allowing the profits to be divided fewer ways.
"Now that millions more of Americans have good coverage..."

This link is full of horse poop.

Good coverage? Have you seen what the new ACA plans cover and don't cover?? And the cost??

Good is not a word I would use to describe their coverage.

They should have said "access to coverage" and it would have been more believable.
> The less I write, the less there is to break

Not when you're writing consumable services IMO. The less you write in building a REST API, for example, the _more_ opportunity there is for someone to break it. It's important to catch exceptions, write detailed models, write tests for fail/success cases etc...

It's a good principle (optimizing for less code), but not always.
You said:

> anything accessible without any authorization.

Even if it does require authorization, it's considered public in regard to this discussion.
Who is John Galt? :)
So are the comment sections on news outlets. If you really want to be depressed check your local paper's comment sections.
I wish I could apply this to my 'internal customers', aka departments I don't want to work with.
> Belief that existing laws in the US are pathetic and don't go nearly far enough.

As you put it, it's a "Belief". I'd rather call it a point of view or even a political opinion.
I am running SteamOS on Zotac NEN with currently 39 AAA games and frankly barely spend any time on Windows for gaming, and prefer buying games that have announced SteamOS support. I also have Win 7 & Win 10 on that computer just in case I need it for Uplay/Origin stuff or DX12-only (1TB M.2 SSD with 500GB for SteamOS, 250GB for either Win 7 and Win 10 and 2TB HDD for storage). Surprisingly, everything works just fine (I had one complete freeze in the past few months). It can work nicely even in 4K in Tomb Raider, GRID Autosport or Metro, though on lower details. Frankly, I know I can get 25% more fps on Windows, but what difference would it make for me to run GRID at 120fps when it runs on 90fps already? And Linux can only get better so why sticking to Windows?
> If she does get us single payer, she's the greatest trojan horse ever in American politics.

Arguably, that'd be Trump instead of Clinton.
That is for sure -- I cant recall a single positive experience with a RE broker. I realize this is a city-specific example, but for the new yorkers - i was looking for an apartment in the upper west side (which is generally considered to end at 96th st, perhaps 100 or 110th.) The broker said sure, and started pitching me on something at 135th. If i was an out-of-towner, I would not have known better, and what does 1.5mi matter anyway? In town, this is like comparing night and day.

How do brokers have the gall to straight-faced sell people on this stuff?

I pray that technology can disrupt this market.
I am not so sure they really care about changing their search.

They only recently started to change their recommendation stack, after years of using outdated technologies. I think it is somewhat similar with search.

It's not so much that "it's complicated at their scale" as "It works somewhat okay, which translates into X hundreds of millions of $, so don't touch it".

I know they could (and they most probably do) run A/B tests, but the thing is, how do you run MVT tests on such a large infrastructure, with such a varied catalog, etc...it all gets very complicated at their scale, just from an org perspective.

Many "power users" complain about the state of Amazon search, but I doubt the average joe really cares about that.

A more recent (and with a much smaller catalog) player, zalando (rocket internet) has a modular org and a modular approach to their stacks and they, apparently, change or update their tools much more often than Amazon.

I am pretty sure zalando being more "agile" come from their much smaller size (both in inventory, turnover and org).

Large organisations have a harder time moving than smaller ones, after all...
DIY Motion Control with a Toy Train
I enjoyed the piece, thanks Michael.

Sorry for the boring feedback, but the post feels like it needs a bit more proofreading. Some of the syntax is a little confusing and I noticed a couple of definite typos:

> So what should to you?

Should be:

> So what should you do?

And:

> Does this user represent an even better opportunity for you to grow your business.

Should be:

> Does this user represent an even better opportunity for you to grow your business?
How I Explored a Real Volcano with a Jetpack Made of Pixels
The best is probably a mix, like Singapore. The citizens win in the case the government provider is efficient or inefficient, because in either scenario the government sets a floor of efficiency that private companies can't go under and survive. In a purely private market there's the potential for collusion, or in a heavily regulated market there's the potential for forced inefficiencies. When you just have the single government provider, you cut off the possibility of doing much better, and you create a big incentive for everyone in the industry to inflate their costs because the government always pays.
>Bad comparison. Taxi drivers losing business to Uber can easily go to work for Uber themselves.

The lower barrier to entry of Uber means that there are more people competing for those taxi jobs, like people who can do it part-time. How many taxi-drivers did you know pre-Uber? I knew zero. Now I know multiple people who are, basically, taxi-drivers. (I'm making no claim as to whether this development is good or bad, it just is).

So yeah, they can "easily go work for Uber" as a contractor for less money. I imagine that the Cisco workers could do the same if they wanted to be contractors for less money.
For me it looks like this (on an S5 with Firefox for Android):

http://i.imgur.com/K6ov1pv.png

What does it look like for you? You might want to let hn@ycombinator.com know.
Depends on what boards you go to. The topic boards are mostly good for serious discussion. Just avoid /v/ (neckbeards), /mu/ (circlejerk), and /pol/ (racists).
I see no other comments mentioning this. Nobody else thought the font was way too big and when zooming out until about 50% it's finally a nice size to read?
I would gladly pay for a higher tier (at least $50) that ships you physical copies of these books.
Most of their book bundles are comics, but not all. They've done 2 or 3 entrepreneur/startup bundles, some Make bundles and a few audiobook ones.
>They keep it in an offshore tax haven, often.

I guess that depends on what you consider often. Because the money outside of tax-havens "doing work"in the economy is vastly greater than money hidden in tax-havens.
Pretty cool. I realize it is mainly a proof-of-concept, but decided to try out variations of scribbles[1]. Does the code make explicit assumptions about orientation, or did the training data make certain assumptions?

[1] http://imgur.com/a/HCFzy
Do you scroll down on every site you come across to check for a comment section before you start reading?
Show HN: __transformers__ – future-like AST transformations for Python
There's a disruption possibility. CSS is now good enough and browsers are now compliant enough that a WYSIWYG HTML editor is feasible again. The parent article points out that you barely need Javascript any more. Lay off those overpaid "web designers".

Someone is trying: "https://www.tinymce.com". No idea how good this is.
> ... sterling example of the "worst of all solutions" espoused by the Democrats. Instead of simply raising everyone's taxes to pay for public services ...

Nope, I'm not letting this slide by. The Democrats did try to do exactly what you propose in the 90s. If it had worked, we would've had a first-world health care system two decades ago. But it was screamed down by the Republican Congress with the usual taxes-liberty-communism-Stalin rhetoric. The ACA was intended as an improvement over the nightmare we had pre-2010 that was still digestible to Republicans. Remember: it's fundamentally a Republican idea. It's similar to what Gingrich proposed as a counter to Clinton's plan (which is what really boils my blood about conservation opposition to it), and it's more-or-less identical to what Romney implemented when he was governor of Massachusetts.

So yes, the ACA is a "worst of all worlds" compromise, and of course it sucks. Almost all the Democrats I know agree that it should be scrapped and replaced by a single-payer system tomorrow. But since that doesn't seem likely to happen, the ACA is what we've got. And your blaming of the Democrats for the failure of a Republican idea implemented because the Democrat's much better idea isn't politically possible is despicable and disingenuous in the extreme.
Reality has a well-demonstrated liberal bias.
My point was that it incentivizes developers of server software to remove the "trouble" from your equation.

Of course (and to put it bluntly), you're free continue to put your users at risk, just like browser vendors are free to gradually break sites served via HTTP somewhere down the line.
Are Smartphone Makers Overdoing It?
I was replying to this part of the parent comment when I used the words "inefficiencies" and "waste":

> Does the lack of a large private insurance market in countries with government-provided health insurance cause lots of inefficiencies and waste?

I also acknowledged that I have no idea if $20B is good or bad. And I did not make the case that it's more or less expensive relative to the US.

Another commenter took the Alberta budget numbers and ran with it to get to a per-capita cost relative to the US.
If you have an API on a shared data structure, either you have distributed locking or you have conflicts. Distributed locking sucks, but CRDTs only prevent conflicts from messing up your data structure, not from existing.
They found the right woman for the interview!
Well, in that case, "leftist" does not mean what you think it means.

Protectionism is an ancient concept, and espoused by various leaders from all across the political spectrum. As I said, it doesn't suddenly become "leftist" because it's espoused by Xi Jinping instead of Donald Trump.
Have you ever listened to NPR? A large portion of the content has nothing to do with politics.
To be clear there has only been a single case where a website was found to be financially liable for lack of accessibility (in CA). Jurisdiction certainly covers most startups, but it's a single state. For the other ~88% of Americans there is no relevant case law on the subject.

If you run a website in North Carolina with $15k MRR accessibility is likely a waste of your time unless you're in a niche that is in some way related.
Keep Win 7 for your Windows games library and buy new stuff only if it has announced SteamOS/Linux support? That's what I am doing now. The more of us behaving like that, the sooner we can make Linux more attractive and profitable to game makers. Many game engines already have a Linux support, so it should be easier to port/test games to Linux.
What good would that do? Everybody thinks they're a pro. They'd just turn it on the instant they heard of it.
Benefit: It got the republican votes necessary to pass the law.

Benefit: It prevented a mass disruption of jobs. Health insurers have lots and lots of workers.
I believe statistics say that expanding Medicaid added 8 million covered folks, about 15% of uninsured Americans, and otherwise Obamacare has only gotten an additional few percent of uninsured Americans to become insured. I don't think the norm is that everyone should have access to health insurance any more than it was before due to Obamacare's negligible increases in coverage.

[http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2014/10/obamacares-...]
Is it possible to search for books that have been blurbed by certain authors? For example, if I'm interested in a list of books that Donald Knuth, or heaven forbid Gary Shteyngart, has blurbed and recommended, how would I go about doing that? Often the product descriptions will have blurbs or reviews from various sources listed on the Amazon page to induce individuals to read the book or atleast permit it to capture their attention.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12248604
Yep that's exactly what I mean.
Given the appalling amount of quacks already providing "alternative" therapies that have no medical value: No thanks. I'd rather live a long, healthy life.

I find it almost comical that you want to opt for such an extreme measure rather than accept systems that have a proven track record of delivering much cheaper care.

And as I've pointed out: Both in Canada where you live, and in the UK where I live (as well as in unlikely places like China, which doesn't have a proper socialised healthcare system) you can pay to go private if you for some reason don't get to see a doctor fast enough, or isn't happy with the service. But at least in these countries there is something in place for those who can't afford to.
Actually, the Iris branded GPUs are quite impressive, considering that they are essentially a co-processor inside the chip and they pull over 800 GFLOPs of compute power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_HD_and_Iris_Graphics#Sky...
I'm surprised at how many people think the answer is "no benefit" or political expediency.

The hope is that insurers will compete with each other and find ways to reduce costs. Obamacare has regulations designed to prevent the most egregious cost-saving measures (denying claims, rescission, etc), so insurers will have to find ways to reduce costs other than simply not paying. Because many insurers are small, they can try experiments that would be prohibitive in a larger insurer. We'll get a lot of data about what works and what doesn't, which will filter up to larger insurers (like Medicare!).

One example of a way that an insurer could save money is pay-for-performance, that pays health care providers based on the health improvements of their patients instead of volume of services. Aetna is trying this.

That's the case for a market. (There's definitely a case against it too.)

One thing missing from this discussion is the fact that the health care exchanges are small relative to the rest of the market: around 10 million enrollees on the exchanges, compared to ~150 million in employer sponsored plans. This is because Medicaid expansion covered more people, and fewer employers dropped their employee-sponsored health insurance, compared to predictions. So the exchanges aren't really a big player.
The one trick urinal physicists don't want you to know about!
It doesn't even have to be clicking a link, it can even be scrolling. And you don't even need a slow phone to experience this behavior on a daily basis.
Start My Online Store
Smalltalk ruined my life
Aside from [bot] spam, I agree with the statement of Those were your users.

What OP really wants are the good comments, which is more than just spam filtering and also more subjective. If an ill-informed, 13-year-old's comment would be considered low-value noise, website operators would need to engage in something resembling censorship, which has its own set of problems.
> Now, what happens if someone with an infant or developmentally challenged teenager signs up? Their needs present an entirely new set of problems, problems that could be solved by a startup but not necessarily by ours. Remember you don’t have to pivot your business because a customer needs something that you don’t offer.

If you open a restaurant, you bet that there are certain building codes you'll have to follow in order to accommodate e.g. people with disabilities.

Right now, as the article points out, it's not something that most tech companies have to worry about unless they choose to, but perhaps it should be.

As startups disrupt entire industries with little regard for the existing legislation, entire niche of users could find themselves marginalized. For instance, hotels have to build a number of accommodations for people with mobility problems. Airbnbs don't. What happens to that segment of the population when/if Airbnb completely kills off hotels in a particular geographic location?

The web is already hell when it comes to accessibility concerns; and it seems like tech companies with a foot in the real world are just carrying this trend over. This is what people mean when they talk about the need for inclusiveness when designing tech products and companies; otherwise, you're just building a world where parents of developmentally challenged teenagers are even more excluded than they already were.

I agree with the core point of the article, but the example chosen to illustrate it couldn't be worse. Yes, it isn't your responsibility to solve everything for everyone, but that doesn't mean you can just choose to ignore the social contract altogether.
Yes! So many startups in YC encounter this exact problem in their early days...
Where do you live that you are having these problems? I was able to find a family doctor within a month of searching and reading reviews. Granted I'm based in a major city (Ottawa), but I was normally directed to other physicians when I called one that wasn't accepting patients.
This is what the author herself says in the article. Specifically, that feature queries should be used when you only want to apply a set of styles if a given feature is supported.
You still have to write code, define your database schema and declare config files to specify how containers should be orchestrated but soon open source developers will start creating frameworks/boilerplates which capture some of these requirements and which can automatically run and scale on Kubernetes/Swarm/Mesos and this will greatly speed up application development and deployment.

Right now, we think of frameworks as being components (part of) larger software systems - But in the future, frameworks will provide the foundations for entire software systems - They will be be responsible for declaring their own network topologies and resource requirements and they will be capable of scaling automatically to any number of machines.

Developers will extend and customize the framework with their own logic but the framework itself will handle all the difficult stuff related to its own operations.
You really did jump in the deep end, yeah! There are sharks there. But hey, even if it didn't turn out quite the way you intended, you didn't drown or get eaten, so on the whole I'd call that kind of a win.

As I said before, I hope you keep going! You seem to have good ideas, and that's the thing that counts. I'm really looking forward to seeing what you'll accomplish with practice.

Edit: Which reminds me, how can I best find out when you publish again? I've followed you on Github, but maybe there's a better option you'd be so good as to let me know about.
Looks like im average new stack every 2-3 years

2008-2010: ios

2010-2013: python / machine learning

2014-2016: nodejs

2016 - present: iot devices (c++)

These are more additive as i still use prior stacks with current work.
If your content won't flow/flex into a grid well, then those parts should have custom CSS @media queries to begin with.. it's a matter of learning that.

Alternatively, you can use something like react with event triggering on window resize, and use the actual window size as part of your rendering... for example, I'll put the event to trigger my redux store so that state.window.size.height/width are set, I'll sometimes also do the window.scrollTop in the events as well.. this way I can use that in code for my components...

render(props) {
if (props.window.size.width < 600) return null;
if (props.window.size.width < 1024) return <div>...</div>;
...
}

Or similar changes in rendering... assuming something like redux with react-redux's connect. It's actually a pretty slick way to handle this. In this example, [1] I'm using the value to also adjust visual configuration from inputted configuration.

[1] https://github.com/tracker1/md-datepicker/blob/master/_src/D...
Are you able to disclose the speed and/or cost? I know people working on cheaper HSM's. They might find the numbers useful as an assessment of how practical their own are.
I almost exclusively work on problems can be solved(by a combinatorial algorithm) in polynomial time. I have never used theory of mixed integer linear programs, but that's because I focus on different aspects of combinatorial optimization.

If I teach an undergrad course, I would model after Michel Goemans's course. http://www-math.mit.edu/~goemans/18433S15/18433.html
I will also introduce some submodular functions(and touches submodular flow).
It captures half of the things encountered in the course, and general and simple enough to be the first thing to try.
For example, the following problem might be difficult if one tries to create an algorithm by modify the standard matching algorithms. However, one can easily show it is polynomial time solvable by proving some submodular property.

http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/20245/subset-of-...
Electric Cloud Advances DevOps
> they are treating my hardware like they own it

Next step: In the OEM license, include a provision that the ownership of the hardware is transferred to Microsoft and you're granted a license to plug a screen and use devices.