skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> How do you determine when "just in case" costs too much?

the physicians usually try to take the safe route just in case - if they deem it worth it. i'm still in the low risk category (~~young~~ not old, passably athletic) so my doctor told me more than once that it's probably nothing and we don't need to do the (expensive) X, the (cheap) Y is enough (maybe Y reveals something that justifies X).

it doesn't always work; as a personal anecdote - my uncle suffered a debilitating headache once and was told to take aspirin for several days until my aunt had enough and drove him to the hospital on her own. turned out to be cerebral bleeding. he barely survived and is now mentally disabled.

this a) takes him out of the workforce, which looses the state money through reduced taxes and b) ensures him an invalidity pension, which costs the state money.

was it worth it to save the money? on paper it's the additional cost of checking N people who're having headaches plus the cost of treating M people who're actually affected vs. the money he would have paid into the system plus the money he now costs the system over, say, 20 years. additionally he consumes less and his wife's business is struggling because he's not much help anymore.

for us, personally, it's still a tragedy, but those cases happen. you have to draw the line somewhere. it's not just additional costs though, it's still a trade off.
No argument here, hence my constaclicking.
Fracking doesn't dissolve rock. It fractures the rock so that pore spaces are connected and the oil or gas can freely flow out.
First Impressions of Visual Studio 2017 RC
So I'm not a pro unless I need 32GB of RAM? That's how we're going to define that term?
Wheres the source for this?
More than that, 300 / 52 / 4 = 1.44 books/week.
> Maybe the problem isn't Apple's hardware, but 20-50MLOC code bases?

As written, I'm running into issues in <1MLOC codebases, on hardware just a touch more limited than the max spec of Apple's latest line. The 1MLOC equivalent would break on Apple's hardware, I'm sure. So, no - I don't think 20-50MLOC code bases are to blame.

> Xerox PARC had, effectively, a simple version of what we consider "Personal Computing": word-processing, E-Mail, laser printers, software development, proto-Internet. Alan Kay claims it was less than 20KLOC, and that's a plausible figure considering the Alto had 128K RAM and a 2.5MB disk pack.

It's fine and all to pine for the good old days when computers were simpler than the computer within even your lowly modern hard drive - which is itself inside your modern computer - all in the name of the ever increasing performance we today take for granted. But it's sheer fantasy to think we can support the cambrian explosion of hardware options out there since then (all from different vendors with different interests and standards) with the same sized codebases as we had back then. Simply working around the hardware errata will take more code for many individual pieces of hardware - much cheaper and easier to fix things in software than fab a new revision of chips and toss out all the old, after all.

Nobody's claiming linear relationships between source quantity and product quality. Nobody goes to an all you can eat buffet expecting caviar. Hell, most would argue an inverse relationship - the less code you have, the better you can polish it. But can a modern kernel work with thousands of times more unique hardware SKUs? Wouldn't surprise me. And hardware's expensive to design! If the hardware options out there can multiply by such magnitudes, take a fraction of a second to think what must have happened to software options - relatively cheap by comparison.

It's a miracle we're not measuring individual software projects in BLOCs. Yet - give it time. If such compatability, flexibility, choice, and performance concerns don't interest you - well, I'd be quite interested in what you found necessary to get your Alto talking to the HN website!

> And if you think compile-times are the biggest problem with multi-MLOC code-bases, you're not paying attention.

I have mastered the skill of caring about a second problem at a time. I've heard legends of masters who could care about a third problem, but I have no evidence nor belief in such myths. But yes - link-times are worse ;). And refactoring. And testing. Security. And...
If you go to goodreads you can find thousands of people reading ~80 books a year with their lists publicly available. If you want to see what software engineers read just click on a popular software book and keep clicking on profiles that have read it until you find one with enough books.
It is easier for moat people to live with fossil fuel so it is preferable right? I'm going to pass on the tired discussion of meat is what we're meant to eat because we've been going it forever. Bottom line is you CAN live without meat, it is perfectly healthy so it comes down to a choice. Now my original point was that having this half measures that require constant policing from both the consumer and industries is harder than cutting down something you don't need for good. Both routes require an equal amount of convincing of people, from eating less meat to using your car less or buying particular types of products over others are changes that most people are not ready or willing to accept and most likely won't come to full fruition until a couple generations down the line (regardless of the route) but you can start one yourself that requires no action from increasingly hostile politicians or corporation whose sole purpose of existence is in direct contradiction with the objective. As it is said, you vote with your money. Also if a tax was to be put on hugely polluting industries it'd be self-defeating to not tax meat and dairy.
...or you can buy a high-powered desktop, and remote into it from your expensive, super-convenient luxury laptop that has long battery life and doesn't overheat, which you were going to buy as a fashion statement anyway.
I'm sorry you hate the avatar! I get lots of mixed feedback about it, but overall the feedback has been positive. I accept that I can't make everyone happy unfortunately.

I am trying to avoid walls of text, but I think it is an unfair statement to say that people don't like to read. People are reading the same amount of text regardless of whether pictures exist or not.

Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of the book, but there's one on brain science that discusses how people process text. Letters are still images as far as our eyes and brain are concerned. There's an extra processing step to turn one type of image (letters) into another type of image (what the letters are describing). This is exhausting and throwing in images act as "taking a break" even if that break is only a second or two.
I did not explain very well my thoughts on this. By "works", I mean healthcare as a commodity that everyone (including the poorest) can afford. In order to exist, the private system has to be better than the public one, which means better facilities, top doctors and therefore higher prices. The reason the public service is terrible is because the private system exists, top doctors are going private to get better salaries and the public one will never improve.

I'm pretty sure the private healthcare in Thailand is very good, but the only reason it's affordable for us is the difference of the cost of life, I doubt a farmer there can afford those services.
> Part of the fabric of the universe is a product of intelligence.

Look, it's simple: God made the whole thing. But you don't want to believe in God so you invent funny theories to explain away God.
... and the law is the current fashion. It too could change on a wave of unpopularity.
I'm addicted to HN like that. Should I quit it then?
HN offers this functionality itself. Go to your profile, enable 'noprocrast' and customize the intervals.
High dimensions are indeed very, what shall I say, non-intuitive. Bellman introduced, or perhaps popularized, the term 'curse of dimensionality'. High dimensions may also comes with its blessing, 'concentration of measure' a phenomenon where randomness concentrates into events of certainty in high dimensions. I checked out their Wikipedia pages, while the former has a lucid description, the page on the latter is quite technical.

Both these notions play a significant role in topics like machine learning, statistics, function approximations etc. Its sometimes a delight sometimes sheer frustration to see these two phenomena play it out.
The weather.
I couldn't help but see an irony in the Amazon description for this book considering the subject being discussed :)

"In this generation-defining self-help guide, a superstar blogger cuts through the crap to show us how to stop trying to be "positive" all the time so that we can truly become better, happier people."

That being said this looks interesting and I am going to give this a read. Thanks for the tip!
The wonderful thing about "or" is that you can keep adding on to it and only one statement has to be true. "or not". I'll go with "or not". In any world where you have beginning programmers, or programmers not used to Lisp seeing ))))))))) at the end of a line, this is cognitively difficult to keep track of the number of closing braces without having some editor assist you doing the counting for you. This reminds me of indenting in python being touted as easier than having brackets as whitespace matters but editing is terrible without having line guides turned on when any deeper nesting arises.
Bill Gates is really impressive guy, great insights.

tldw: Public toilets didn't get used due to bad smell, we fix the smell issue, we get more adoption and it improves health conditions in the area regarding hygiene due to more people using toilets now.
i remember reading immigrants (in austria) on average pay more into the system than they get out, because most of them are relatively young and thus still healthy.

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...
Sort of. If what you are doing is CPU bound then the Precision line has more options with their Xeon CPU.

But, if anything you do could even be mildly improved with GPU support you're better off looking elsewhere. Most of the precision line are on some old Quattro's which are simply annihilated but the new released GTX 10 series GPU's.

Most of the base line CPUs are the lower 6300HQ models too, rather than the 6700HQ you get in others like the XPS 15 line or nearly all of the gaming laptops now released, so you have to bump the price straight away to get comparable baseline performance on many other models.

I'm very much looking around at the moment for a new laptop as a MacBook Pro (2010) refugee and have looked at way too many to list here.

So do consider the Precision line but it's certainly not the 'best' one out there.

Incidentally, one of the best I've seen is actually the new Razer Blade (if you put a skin or cover over that horrible logo) or even the Alienware 13 with the OLED screen.

Whilst these are traditionally 'gaming' setups, the Razer Blade certainly has the style and form factor to mimic the MacBook and the Alienware with it's toned down styling looks far more like the business Dell's of yesteryear. The Alienware also has what almost all reviewers/users state to be an exceptional keyboard (something where the XPS line has not done so well).

As for upcoming models, the Q1 2017 release of the XPS 15 would most likely come with a GTX 1050 (unless they copy Razer and find some Vapour Chamber cooling magic and stick a GTX 1060 in there) and it'll also probably have one of the first of Intel's Kaby Lake quad core mobile series too.

So it may be worth waiting if you can to see what comes in the next few months as there is a MASSIVE amount of change occurring with Nvidia's new GPU and Intel's new CPU offerings.
Are they really nazis and zealots, or were they labeled as such? How would you discus these views with the person and change their mind if you label them as unworthy of your employer.

Free speech acts as Natural selection for ideas. Bad ideas never get checked and fester in filter bubbles if you don't let people express themselves openly.
Fetishizing Victimhood: How Colleges Promote Psychological Frailty
> More potent

Only in the short term.
Of course it would work for the US, if the US had sufficiently powerful insurance agencies. If hospitals and doctors want a certain amount of money and insurance agencies have the power to say no, these healthcare providers just won't see any patients or only rich ones.

This is how it works in Germany for example. As a hospital you have to accept the money you'll get or you won't get any at all.

The healthcare market in the US is not balanced and this gives healthcare providers to increase prices to ridiculous levels, especially in rural areas.
In your profile you can set 'noprocrast' to allow you a max visit length and a minimum time between visits. Wean yourself off to only browse at certain times of day or week where it is convenient and useful to you (ie. news catchup hour)
God is t an answer. It explains nothing. It's the absence of an explanation hand waved away and given a name.

Even IF a god existed the same questions would still apply
My common-sensometer demands it.
While I agree with your assessment, It is worth remembering that before the advent of the internet, even when speaking in public was not as widely public as it can be today.
I don't get how either of those quotes could be seen as attacking anyone.
Wow, that would be one of the first places I'd expect a restroom. Here in Vegas I continually find myself asking for a public restroom at convenience stores. It's usually hit or miss. Most do have seats for gamblers, so it's not the seats, most have hot prepared foods, so it's not that either. I've always thought that places that provide public facilities on their own initiative should maybe get some kind of subsidy for upkeep from the county or city government.
> Do you know about the Japanese saws and their benefits?

Yes, I use both, Japanese pull saws and Western "push" saws and both have their good and bad sides.

First: Japanese saws work on the pull stroke, Western saws with a push stroke. This requires very different handling of the saw (body position, etc). It's difficult (if not impossible) to rip straight with a Japanese saw in a typical stand-up position with the work piece in a workbench vice. Japanese woodworkers work sitting down on the floor, and rip saw by standing up, foot on the work piece.

Second: most modern Japanese saws have hardened teeth and can't be sharpened, the blade is disposable and you put in a new one. Western woodworking saws (not your big box store construction saw) can and need to be sharpened (they're not sharp out of the box), and it's pretty easy to sharpen. A good Western saw should last several lifetimes if kept in condition. My Japanese saw needs a replacement blade after two years of work.

Third: because of the pull stroke, the saw plate is much thinner and the cut is narrower. I might be able to use the piece straight off the cut with a Japanese saw if I saw straight enough. With a Western saw, I typically plane the end grain a little (optionally on a shooting board) but I often have to do this with a Japanese saw too (because my sawing skills aren't good enough to hit the knife mark on both sides).

If you're getting into woodworking and have no good saws, I'd recommend getting a Japanese Ryoba, which has a fine cross cut side and a coarse rip cut side (cheapest alternative for a fine woodworking saw IMO). The rip cut is too coarse for fine joinery, so you could get a Western Gent's saw or Dovetail saw to complement.

In Internet discussions, Japanese saws are often said to be "better" than Western saws but it's not true (unless you compare it to a big box store hardened teeth cross cut saw). Both Western and Japanese saws are capable tools in the hands of a craftsman and it boils down to getting practice with the tools you have.
Is that only if you make large dollar commits with additional terms and requirements?
Didn't know this. Thanks a ton for this. Awesome I just enabled it.

Oh funny thing I found I was wrong about showdead setting there... I had assumed if I wanted myself to be declared dead/offline I could set my profile to show dead.. lol
Seaweed has a long history of human consumption that may be true. But so has milk and only part of the adult human population can handle it.

We are only at the beginning of understanding how the gut micro-biome relates to human and animal health. Possibilities for complications exist e.g.

- Methane production keeps parasites in check

- Methane producing bacteria may be part of a synthesis chain for a specific nutrient.

- Recalibration of blood health indicator values

There are always risks in scaling up things to population levels. The history is full of them. Soylent recently ran into some problems. Gut biology is not an area where things are very predictable.
Dude I had no idea this was a thing! Just installed it!!!
Oh, funny, I'm working on something similar for a course at school, too: an IP over Avian Carrier modem. (I convinced some folks to build one with me :b). In our case we print the barcodes with a thermal printer, so there's an interesting constraint that we need really simple, easy to scan barcodes that fit on that paper but are still data rich. I have happily ignored the printing / scanning part of the project, but I think we're sticking with Data Matrix, and I've set an MTU of 300 bytes on our network interface just to be sure. We're using tun/tap, too! It's really handy.

Alas, carrier pigeons are difficult to employ, but that's okay. Part of our goal is to demonstrate network protocols in a tactile way, since you see every frame that gets sent and received as it happens. (And read them, too - we're including a hex dump with strings). I think it's a fun alternative use for projects like mine and like the article's :)

Haven't thought about performance much at all, so I'm curious to see what the author has in mind there.
doesn't like or know much about the algebraic side of math, and resents how much it dominates in math today.

That sounds unlikely given who he was and the fact that he's now dead.
Unbelievable version of Nightingale
My theory behind this is that the most efficient functioning market needs intelligent buyers and sellers. The buyers have to be able to discern what the specs mean, what the quality of the parts are, what the expected lifetime is, and with computers not only that, but they have to be able to evaluate the software options (Windows vs OS X, malware subsidized laptops versus not)? Even explaining malware to a layman is difficult.

So you had the two markets, business and professional consumers who knew what they were buying, and then regular consumers who mostly cared about price but are also swayed by large numbers (more GB, more HZ, bigger screen, more software a.k.a. malware).

Then I think the tide sort of turned in the past decade where even the common populace had realized Windows consumer laptops were full of crap that caused it to run slow and unexpectedly and people noticed Apple's laptops were more consistent with user experience (which they were), so now Apple has a reputation of being the no nonsense brand (which they deserve). Of course, now Apple can also charge a premium for this so you see people with disposable income sticking to Apple's ecosystem, and then the rest of the OEMs fight for price conscious consumers and getting barely any profit out of it.

Obviously for Apple, keeping things simple keeps their operating costs down, so they don't need to cater to every purchaser, and they probably decided that now they're the default brand to purchase if you have the money, they don't need to waste resources chasing after a small segment of the market looking for extremely high specifications.
It's interesting comparing Arnold's very anti-abstract approach to Gromov's (another great Russian mathematician from the same era and now a professor at the IHES). Gromov in his later writings take a very categorical approach in his work. For example in the following paper he attempts to define entropy from a very abstract view point
http://www.ihes.fr/~gromov/PDF/structre-serch-entropy-july5-...
Codex Silenda: The Book of Puzzles by Brady Whitney
>How can you then refer to the rooms that actually have something where then somebody can take a bath?

Brace yourself: in the US and from what I've seen of the UK, the toilet and the shower are in the same room.
Even if you believe the importance is to have played well, you can still fall into the trap of regretting how you played before.

The mind can generate demons in most any form.
High charges of low cost items are because of the amount of free care hospitals provide. I'm a physician in South Carolina and I take care of a tremendous number of fully employed people with no health insurance. Those of us with insurance pay for those without by paying higher costs. This gentleman would have probably received the same treatment in the US (at least at my facility) and received a $300,000 bill, of which he would probably never pay (bc he cannot). That artificial aortic graft sewn in probably cost the hospital $1500. It doesn't receive that for free. Nor does it expect the 7-8 people in the operating room or the post operative care to work for free. My hospital has an operating profit of less than 1% mainly because it provides so much free care. All I have to do to take care of a patient is declare it an emergency and there is no stopping of whatever care I feel is necessary to care for the patient, e.g., a newly diagnosed cancer patient. This, I believe, is true throughout the USA. And most of the people I take care of have jobs, but no insurance. Ask how many people that clean hotel rooms have insurance. How about people that work call centers? That, plus monopolist practices of the pharmaceutical industry and you have high costs.

And if you want physicians to make 100k - 150k, don't expect me to work 80+ hours a week, not including call. Attorneys give me $500 / hr for consultations, but in my real job I make $80 / hr, but just work a ton more hours a week (no overtime bonus, tho). I don't get sick days. I don't get vacation days. When I don't work, I don't get paid. When I was in private practice, when I didn't work, I not only didn't get paid, but still had to pay rent / malpractice / insurance / electric / employees which was about $5000/week for me. So taking a week off cost me lost revenue and $5000/week. Medicare pays $600 for taking out a gallbladder. Do the math to see how many have to be done to take care of the bills.
Doesn't that mean that MWI has "global" counterfactual definiteness (across universe branches), but lacks it "locally" (within individual branches)?
It really makes you wonder how the MBP would have been received if it was called the MacBook Air Retina, or just MacBook 13"/15". Traveling with a laptop sounds like the scenario the MBA is perfect for, and I think there are actually many people on HN who do just that.
I wish, I could do that with reddit, but I reddit isn't just for news and trending shit. For many things I am trying to find a reddit discussion first.

I can only block the whole domain, right?
New artist shows her incredible range with a rendition of Nightingale
Yeah, woodworking relies rather heavily on apprenticeship and oral tradition.

I'm more of a bodger than a structural engineer, but I will tell you two things: joints are the weak points, and triangle rigidity is your friend. If you go looking for pictures of stools, you'll see that only the very lowest "milking stools" consist of three legs and a slab. Almost all stools will have a subframe at the top which reinforces the seat and stops the legs from wobbling, and most will have pieces lower down making the legs into trapezoids (and providing footrests).

Furniture rarely fails with a clean snap in a structural member - more like a joint goes, rigidity is lost, and the thing folds over sideways.