skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Few people ask what the price will be in advance. I do know people that do, and they can and do shop around. You can get quite a bit better prices that way.

Few procedures are an emergency.
Notable changes

buffer:
Improve performance of Buffer allocation by ~11%. (Brian White) #10443
Improve performance of Buffer.from() by ~50%. (Brian White) #10443
events: Improve performance of EventEmitter.once() by ~27%. (Brian White) #10445
fs: Allow passing Uint8Array to fs methods where Buffers are supported. (Anna Henningsen) #10382
http: Improve performance of http server by ~7%. (Brian White) #6533
npm: Upgrade to v4.0.5 (Kat Marchán) #10330
"Offending people" isn't "being honest" or vice versa. If they seem to go hand in hand, that's failure on the part of the communicator almost 100% of the time. There are tons of people who are totally honest all the time, who somehow manage to not offend random people when interacting with them. It can be done, it's not magic.
>You can ask for a price and then will tell you a price but even if you pay that price, up front, in cash, you will later get bills for more "services", received or perceived. In any other industry people would go to prison.

Not arguing with you, but there's another field where this is common: Law.
I think what the parent is saying is that the parent likes to play this imaginary story in his head, and in this story, Tom Dale actually thinks React is better but can't work on it because he is known as a core contributor to Ember.

Parent is saying React is so clearly better that even Tom Dale knows it.

(I'm merely translating ... not stating any opinion of my own here).
Oh, you're preaching to the choir. They're the worst. By far, the worst mobile experience, and by far the most aggressive push for their mobile app. I choose not to open their mail on my mobile phone. And obviously I don't want their mobile app.

They must think of themselves as Facebook Messenger, which most people check with obsession, or at least aspire to become that.
The homepage says

brew cask install zazu

should work to install via Homebrew, but it doesn't.
Yes. My wife recently went for a physical, something covered fully under our plan. We were surprised to see a bill follow and a separate consultation charge (not covered) alongside the physical charge (covered and zero rated). It turns out because she asked the doctor a question the doctor decided that was outside the scope of the physical and constituted a separate consultation. Of course how you're supposed to know what is or isn't in scope I have no idea.
Yeah, totally. This would make for a very interesting RFC.

(There's also always been a disconnect between naming in this regard; that is, you can only use "unstable" things on the "nightly" build of Rust. And while we try to produce a nightly every night, it doesn't always happen, as these last few weeks have shown. That is changing, at least. But "proposed Rust" sounds stranger than "nightly Rust", so this disconnect might persist even if we decided to change "unstable" to "proposed". Side note: Ember and IIRC Chrome call their nightly versions "canary"...)
Happened to a friend of mine who shopped around and got a commitment in advance for the price. He reminded them of their commitment after they billed him for all the extras, and refused to pay it. They withdrew the extra charges.
Snapchat Has Been Faking Growth Numbers, Ex-Employee Alleges
I've evaluated a lot of digital whiteboards for classroom use, and if they're not super responsive, teachers just don't just them. It's absolutely crucial.
Donald Trump Nominates Wall Street Lawyer to Head S.E.C
How big was the medical facility? Might be the case that the doctor genuinely doesn't know since the hospital operations folks determine the price?
That's definitely part of the problem too.. but that exists because of the pricing structure hospitals use.

If I go into a store and buy a part, they don't say, well let me call the factory, and they'll get a list of all the things that were done to create this particular part, and a price for each. The store comes back with a list:
Raw materials: $
Packing materials: $
Surcharge for production delay caused by spill: $
Resurfacing of part because of material defect: $

If a manufacturer tried that, they would be out of business immediately. Yet that's exactly what hospitals do, even down to a charge for the 2 cents worth of aspirin.

In normal businesses, they charge a price for the product that covers the details, the mistakes, the extras required to delivery the product. The mistakes, etc are averaged out over all of the items produced, along with the cost of the misc supplies, equipment, etc.
I miss my Firefox OS phone (Flame). Chrome OS seems to have solved the apps problem here.

If Google were to release Chromium OS community builds for Nexus phones, I'd have a gander. (My Nexus 4 needs a new battery and I don't have the spare change to run out and purchase a Pixel!)

HTML5 for the phone and Android/Crouton compatibility via Wayland would make for a nice challenger to Ubuntu Convergence/MS Continuum.
This week my wife and I went to the hospital here in Waterloo and delivered our third child. Total cost was $16... to park our car overnight in the garage.

Now, our delivery was as close to perfect as you can get. We were only there overnight, but there are a million unknowns with a baby, and I'm just so thankful knowing that no matter what might have happened, we would have received what we needed, when we needed it, and if it wasn't available at our local hospital, we would be transferred to where we needed to go— all at no charge.

There isn't really a message here, just grateful to live in a country where my medical professionals can recommend me the care I need without having to have a conversation about costs. And most importantly, that that same care is available to everyone in my country, not just those who happen to work a salaried white collar job.
I think the pricing is an implicit way the cog in the engine works.

I don't necessarily agree with it, but I see it and always think about it when anybody points out how expensive medical care is here in the USA.

Biotech R&D advances in the USA are funded by monstrously price gouging insurance companies.

Are you a biotech innovator?
Your best bet is to start in the USA because you can charge a lot of money and nobody will lift a finger that influences your market potential like what happens in other countries.

Hopefully a large pharma company will buy your small pharma or medical device company because they have 2 things you don't:

1. Distribution - 1 sales rep for every doctor

2. Synthetic Scaling Insight - They have deep insights and grandfathered advantages in this arena, lest you can double down on putting in 40M-100M to make it happen.

---Or so this was the way it was explained to me through hundreds of interactions trying to build a genetics company in the USA. ---

The hunt for drug targets is the elusive hunt for the black swan. There's 8-10 new genetic tests that come out each day but very few if any of them can be tied to something specific, because it's tough.

Data doesn't necessarily make it easier, despite the notion of big-data optimization.

As such, prices will get higher, before they get lower. That or drug dev. stagnates.

The elephant in the room anytime we talk about US healthcare is our flawed food environment - Sugar. It's creeping up on other countries fast.....
> Changing the API of the standard library

Adding to the API of the standard library, as SemVer specs. Backwards incompatible changes aren't made. (Except for soundness reasons, which happens in extremely rare circumstances, and are made with great care with regards to the upgrade path.)
More likely it's tax incentives. For example:

Betsy Steinberg, managing director of the Illinois Film Office, acknowledges the cold financial calculations that go into site selection and the increasingly cutthroat competition: "Without a competitive tax credit, we'd be seeing very little business."

...

Paramount Pictures' "Transformers 3," which likely will spend at least $20 million during its six-week shoot here this summer, could qualify for a tax credit of at least $6 million, which it can use or sell, effectively cutting its local filming budget.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-07-27/business/ct-bi...
Rust releases follow SemVer, which is not exactly an uncommon standard for those things. Code that works in released version 1.X.Y is supposed to work in all following versions. Are there languages that won't add backwards-compatible features?
Don't let hyper-growth derail your startup: Five tips for startup CEOs
False. In California and some other states the vehicle code doesn't prohibit changing lanes in an intersection. Although depending on the circumstances an officer might cite you for an unsafe lane change.
Not to mention that arithmetic operations (including division) that overflow signed integers result in undefined behavior.
I've been using Powershell a lot lately. I keep hoping I'll get the hang of it, but everything sucks. It gives you Compare-Object, but what it returns is an object. Even if I waste 10 minutes converting it to text and want to then split the strings it returns there is a 99% chance it won't work. Sure it is great for automating a few IT things like installing new users, but the problem is it shouldn't be that hard. In bash I would just pipe the output of diff to Awk and simply split on "," and tell it to print what I want. I'm sure it is possible in Powershell, but the 6 ways I tried never worked.
The reason no one has countermanded the changes implemented in Bitcoin Core is that none of the changes have been unreasonable.
Will Erlang/Elixir ever be able to attain the raw performance speed of Go?

I'm not talking about concurrency, etc. Just raw computational speed.
I have asked, and also asked for a discount if I paid on the spot. You can often get a third off the price that way - just by asking.

It's the same with auto repairs. I'd take my car to the dealer for repairs, the service dept quotes me a price, I say that price sounds a little high, the price drops 30%.

In any negotiation, you're going to get the sucker price if you don't ask what the price is, or make no attempt to negotiate. Nobody is obliged to give you their best price automatically.
If the ACA had sought to create a competitive market between the consumer and the provider instead of between the consumer and the insurer, it would have been a truly revolutionary leap forward.

Instead, we got entitlement expansion.
Sometimes I fantasise about what would've happened if MS had decided, by some fluke, to push, say, OCaml as their big .Net initiative. Can you imagine MS Visual OCaml#? OCaml for Windows app development ... that would've turned some heads.
My wife's wheelchair that the insurance company is paying for costs $6,000. The "loaner" wheelchair she's using now costs $400. The $6,000 chair being built is essentially the same as the $400 chair. Fraud like this is the reason we have the most expensive per capita healthcare in the world.
How to Avoid “Captive” Company Counsel
The services are too expensive, yes, but that's not what I'm getting at. I'm saying that even the inflated sticker price won't prevent tons of random other bills from flying out of nowhere. Once I got an anesthesia bill -- for almost ten thousand dollars -- after an event that didn't involve anesthesia, at which the anesthesiologist was not even present. There was just some stored procedure in their database that fired off bills.
Also my first reaction
> They can continue to set their own rates, but a different rate for each patient must be prohibited.

This is a terrible idea. That means no discounts for people in need, and no doctors saying "don't charge her for that aspirin" as both would become illegal.

I'm all for transparency in pricing, but the lack of flexibility in charging customers is already a big problem. When you go to the hospital, everything is charged at max-price, then insurance companies pay out their negotiated rates. People without insurance don't have the ability to negotiate and end up with ludicrous bills that even the most generous insurance company wouldn't pay.
I've tried to do that for relatively routine care and it's a headache and a half. I spent half a workday (because, of course, I could only do it during business hours--good thing I have a job with a flexible schedule) calling up doctors' offices and waiting while they figured out how much they charged for a new patient appointment. If ZocDoc reliably had that information, it would make shopping around easier (my insurance had a directory but most of the price info was wrong).

In the absence of that, it's just not so easy to shop around for medical care.
Sure :) I'm still curious, although it happened a few months ago, and I got hired since. It's seems kinda unfair though, for the people who never got a message back, because they don't know the right person to ask, or they don't follow hacker news.
And ask for the price with insurance or out of pocket. Sometimes out of pocket is 50% less. Truly insane.
No, same as Go will never be able to match the unique characteristics of Erlang/OTP.
New Facebook IR release suggests Mark Zuckerberg will run for a government offic
You started with experienced Rust people?

Where'd you find them? I'd _love_ to find a vein of them to mine over time. :-)
Very often, the answer to that question is not known. I went through this when my wife was pregnant with out first and I was in graduate school. We were sitting down with the accounting rep from the hospital planning the next few months and she had zero idea of what the cost was going to be for routine procedures.
Honestly, having asked the question, I can tell you while so few people ask. The answers you get and the effort you have to put in to try to get a real answer is @#$@#$ing absurd.
Just curious but what happened to Dust? Is it still a thing with them?
https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc is getting closer. Currently it can compile rustc through to failing codegen.
"Windows 10 LTSB omits a lot of the new stuff in Windows 10. It doesn’t come with the Windows Store, Cortana, or Microsoft Edge browser. It also omits other Microsoft apps like Calendar, Camera, Clock, Mail, Money, Music, News, OneNote, Sports, and Weather."

This is the Windows for me.. none of the crap, but have to get enterprise.
He's lucky they just didn't send it to collections as many institutions would do if a patient refused to pay.
> If you try that with a hospital, they'll tell you no. Go ahead and try asking your doctor what something will cost.

My experience is they will tell you, and you can ask for a better price, and I've always gotten one.

The idea that one cannot negotiate with the hospital, the doctor, and the dentist is just incorrect. Try it next time.
Thanx for all the great work José we all really appreciate it.
> More fundamentally, Amazon sought to sell the phone through hardware and OS differentiation, much like Apple, but the company could not be more different organizationally and culturally from the iPhone maker; you don’t make good products because you really want to, you make good products by fostering the conditions in which great products can be made, and Amazon’s deeply rooted culture of modularity and services was completely ill-suited for building a highly differentiated physical product.

Eh, Amazon hit it out of the park with something in the Kindle line, no matter your e-book-reading taste. They have good reason to believe they can design products for the masses.
If you don't mind me asking, what kind of medical office/procedure were you able to get a cash price and discount on, in what setting, and which employee did you ask? I've never heard of that happening in the US before the fact; I have heard about negotiating down your medical bill with hospitals after the services have been rendered, though that seems like a crapshoot to me.
> Changing the API of the standard library on minor release versions is stable now

No it's not. A release version of rust cannot access that API. It's just there in the docs. We could possibly remove it from the release docs, or make the messaging clearer (this is being discussed), but you can't use it on a release. That is stable.

I mean, you have the same situation with https://gcc.gnu.org/projects/cxx-status.html#cxx1z . They, too, explicitly say that opting in to this may break backwards compatibility (i.e. it's unstable). http://clang.llvm.org/cxx_status.html says something similar.

In both those cases the default release compiler contains the ability to opt in. With Rust, even this isn't the case; you have to download a different compiler if you really really want those features, and even then you still have to explicitly opt in at a fine-grained level.
If they won't tell you, tell them you're going to their competitor hospital. That's all it takes to loosen things up.
Nobody asks because no one knows the price.

"Shopping around" for healthcare in the US is impossible.

Staff are not allowed to tell you negotiated prices. They don't even know. On top of that, medical billing will jack up the prices by adding extra billing codes.

Healthcare in the US is a scam. Without transparent prices it will stay this way.
I've definitely asked the price of some non-emergency procedures in advance before and it was rare I could get a straight answer (I live in California). But maybe for some things it's possible.
Any feedback is appreciated!
No, but wordpad does - use it in lieu of Notepad when you need to edit text on a Windows machine and don't want to install external tools.
When I needed an MRI, I called five different places and only one of them would actually tell me a price. All of the others said "we don't know the price until we submit the claim to insurance". Not sure if they were telling the truth or just being lazy at their jobs. Either way, getting a price in advance is not as simple as just asking.
It's like he's never heard of "price discrimination" ( https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-... ). Yes, medical care in the US is priced to basically be as expensive as you (or your insurer) can afford. That isn't uncommon, as Spolsky points out. Airline tickets are priced the same way. But so is everything that has a premium model and a basic model, etc.
> To get the same effect in a dynamic language, one would need to load this dictionary out of Redis and write a bunch of boilerplate to validate that the returned fields are correct.

How is this not what serde does internally? I could certainly imagine a nice library for a dynamic language that has a roughly equivalent API.
The hospital had no case as they had made an agreement. Collection agencies cannot collect money that you can document you do not owe.
Litecoin has the same blocksize as Bitcoin, but resolves blocks every 2.5 minutes instead of 10, giving it more 4x capacity. ZCash just forces block size increases as hard forks.

Like I said, different blockchains solves the blocksize differently, and Bitcoin has demonstrated that it's not capable of addressing it's blocksize issue and can't scale.

You can scoff and say, "That's a non-issue.", but even at the start of an NPR Planet Money podcast episode about Bitcoins, where they do a Bitcoin transfer, it hits the cap and gets lost.
Why Experimental Artist John Cage Was Obsessed with Mushrooms
About 70% of income, according to estimates. It varies for other taxes (capital, consumption, etc.).

Source article: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304393211...
The holdup here (as well in Chicago and LA, from what I've read) has always been his desire to get free land. If he had the land, I don't think it'd be difficult for him to get permission to put up his mausoleum, I mean, museum.
It is strange that you think you can reverse engineer it, strange that you would want to do so, and strangest of all that you would announce your intentions on a story that has nothing to do with HN's rankings.

It seems you are just angry that this post didn't get as much attention as you hoped.
Just duck typing based on this and other comments. You might not be a shill, but you're implementing a shill's interface.
It seems like a similar price inflation affects anything sold to the military.
Every time I hear comparisons involving the size of the US military budget, I always think "yeah but everything they buy (including hammers + toilets) are 5x-10x the price, so their effective budget is only 10%-20% of that"
Actually, I would think that handling unauthorized humans would be the smaller problem, similar to animals and other obstacles. Stop or maneuver as needed to avoid a collision, then you can try dealing with it, but always have the short term option of just staying put while things sort themselves out. In the case of a human authorized to give orders, you can't just sit still when the situation isn't understood, because you may be being ordered to move out of the way.
My experience is that few physicians have any idea what various procedures cost, especially in a hospital setting. Advance cost information is very difficult to obtain, and often there isn't time to obtain it.

I'd like to see at least the protocol used in automobile repairs. You get an estimate and approve it. If the estimate turns out to be incorrect, you have the option of deciding on another course of treatment. This scenario can't work in many situations, such as surgery, but knowing some costs up front would help everyone make better decisions.

If adherence to estimates can't be made to work, I'd like to see limits on how long after a procedure you can be billed. At present, it's not at all unusual to get a bill months after a procedure from a completely unexpected source. There's usually no way to determine whether the amount billed is correct.
Sometimes they need a little prodding. Tell them you're getting a price from [name of competitor].
The trade off is that a runaway process can't compromise everything else. The inherent performance difference comes from prescheduling vs cooperative scheduling. Prescheduling is slightly slower in exchange for consistency in the face of bad behavior.

Add in the supervision tree structure and you end up trading "super fast" for "very fast, consistent and runs forever"
Litecoin's capacity is still nothing compared to VISA or Mastercard.

The question is not whether a crytocurrency can do 4X. The question is whether it can do 1,000X or more.
I can one-up you: I had a doctor start up a conversation about going to the same college I did, which put the physical at just over 15m instead of just under, which doubled the bill. I don't think the doctor was maliciously driving up the price, just too abstracted away from the billing department.
I’m working on a series of tiny WebVR experiences for kids that run on the HTC Vive. (Personal project.) It’s a work in progress, but thought I’d share this first one now that it’s functional; to prompt other WebVR enthusiast to share what they’re playing with, compare notes and so on.

I wrote a little more about Day & Night here, including links to downloads and instructions for getting WebVR for the Vive up and running:
https://medium.com/@stew_rtsmith/day-and-night-f5f2a56112ea#...

Some of the ingredients in the kitchen:
WebVR, THREE.js, WebGL, binary data in JS, CSS animation, SVG sprites ... And just beginning to sprinkle in some ES6 goodies.
Scarcity, fungibility, divisibility, durability are not societal constructs. Plus all metals have some inherent value. On top of that you have desirability which you could perhaps explain as a societal construct although I think there is something ingrained in the human psyche about valuing very smooth and shiny things (perhaps there is even an evolutionary explanation). At any rate a societal construct that has persisted for milenia across vast swathes of the globe is not your typical societal construct.
Instead of subsidising those in need through price changes, the government can simply subsidise those in need directly, paying part of the bill itself. This is how it works in many other countries.