skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> On the other hand, after a few years playing with bash and posix shell -- I'm fairly certain I'd prefer bash, to posix shell

What are some bashisms that you find particularly useful? I wonder if I can just reproduce them in POSIX. So far, I haven't found POSIX too bad, although I don't have much experience making huge and complicated shell scripts. posixcube does support some optional Bashisms already like tab auto-completion and `caller`.

> And shell script is a fickle language -- I'd at least consider using "trap" and/or "set -e"

I didn't like `set -e` because it disallows using "benign" error codes. For example, one of the most commonly used APIs in posixcube is cube_set_file_contents. You pass the file you want to update and the source file. If the file is updated, it returns 0; otherwise, it returns 1. This is commonly used like this:

if cube_set_file_contents "/etc/npt.conf" "templates/ntp.conf"; then
cube_service restart ntpd
fi

I hadn't considered `set -u` and it's part of POSIX. My initial reaction is that it's a nice feature, so thanks for pointing it out, and I might set it.

pipefail is a Bashism, and I'm torn on this. Handling errors in a pipeline is one of the worst parts of POSIX shell scripts. However, using something like pipefail means exiting with an error without a stack. I think it's always useful to have a stack to quickly jump to where the error is in which script. So I still prefer this guideline:

There are non-standard mechanisms like pipefail and PIPESTATUS, but the standardized
approach is to run each command separately and check the status. For example:
cube_app_result1="$(command1 || cube_check_return)" || cube_check_return
cube_app_result2="$(printf '%s' "${cube_app_result1}" | command2 || cube_check_return)" || cube_check_return

> I agree that ansible is far from perfect - but I'm not convinced posixcube is a great alternative right now.

Please see my reply to another comment in this thread, asking how a simple firewall whitelist configuration would be done. I think this would be a useful example to debate around.

> From a brief look at the code, it does look nicely structured and commented, though!

That's very nice to hear, thanks! This was my first time doing anything hardcore in shell scripting.

> I've seen people here on HN recommending some makefiles for deployment (along with simple shell scripts) -- and I've played a bit with using m4 for templates rather than here-documents -- and it looks like that might work fine. Does mean your base-installs/bootstraps/images will need m4 (or "compile" the templates on the workstation you run your automation from).

I really like that posixcube has 0 requirements, but I'm not philosophically opposed to requirements, so I'm certainly curious what a make-based system would look like. Does make have imperative programming like shell scripts?

> But right now, I feel GNU guix is the right approach: have a small, minimal, vm/container host (right now I'm playing with Ubuntu and LXD/LXC - Xen and KVM also works nicely), and have all images be managed by something like guix.

I'm not aware of that, I'll check it out.

Thanks for the comments.
A fine example of confirmation bias: ACA aligns with Sam's ideological position, so he hand picks some examples to support it. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that people with preexisting conditions can't be denied coverage. But is it OK that plans are three times more expensive now, with three times the deductible? I don't think so. Seems like a trillion dollar money trough for Big Pharma and Big Insurance to me.
Do you feel the same way about the liability collision insurance your state government requires you to buy to drive on their roads?
Several companies have grown to rely on this type of employee (H1B) so they have some flexibility and don't have to take on permanent employees.

Many companies that hire H1B's are already paying these contracting firms 100k for a contractor employee who earns 60-80k at the end of the day. So will this proposal change things? Probably not.

Possible solutions could be regulate contracting firms and don't allow more than a certain percentage of H1B employees in their workforce pool or H1B employees can't work for a contracting firm. Reduce the number of H1B's granted to a much smaller percentage. Any company that hires a H1B employee must prove every 6 months that their are still no possible Americans that can do the job.

This program is being exploited at the expense of Americans. It was not set up as a charity to help poor people come and work in America. It was set up to bring in talent that was not available. If company truly can't find someone locally and needs to hire someone from India then they need to sponsor/pay for that person to become a permanent/citizen of the USA.
Its not about my pennies. Its about my faith.
Apple TV Is About to Get More Compelling Thanks to Less Restrictive File Sizes
It seemed weird to me that ycombinator wasn't at Trump's Tech meeting (considering they're at the center of silicon valley in a sense). This post makes me wonder if that was not an accident...
If you look at the numbers, the rate increases didn't change significantly when the ACA was put into practice. The only exception is the first year, when companies weren't sure what the appropriate pricing should be.

http://blogs-images.forbes.com/mikepatton/files/2015/06/Heal...
Doesn't this have more to do with Babel and less to do with Webpack? I think this originates with how Babel treats ES6 Modules differently from CommonJS, and if you were to instead do:

const foo = require('./bar').foo

it would keep the name the same?

EDIT: https://github.com/jamietre/babel-plugin-transform-es2015-mo...

There is a better explanation with a partial solution.
The ACA tamped down the second derivative of the premium increases, but not the first derivative. Your premiums would have been much higher if it weren't for the ACA, and it will likely continue to rise after the repeal.
> Especially HERE is quite strong when it comes to navigation.

IIRC, HERE maps is built by actual navigation rather than crowd sourcing which makes it more accurate than other ones.
"As a rule of thumb: if both parties are angry at you, you're on the right track."

That's the same fallacy as saying "The truth is somewhere in between". If everybody is angry at you, maybe you just said something universally stupid. Or maybe you were right. You can't make this a rule.
The "impulse issues" are reinforced by the phone. I've very often noticed when I've set aside my phone for a few hours (the rest of the evening until bed or whatever) that I have to literally set it aside at some distance from myself because otherwise it ends up in my hand without my even consciously deciding to check it. It's like a reflex. And then once it's safely at a distance, I repeatedly experience the urge to check it whenever I don't happen to be very focused on something else. The frequency of that urge diminishes over the course of a few hours and is accompanied by an increase in my ability to focus on something else for stretches of time. Sometimes I've even taken a weekend offline completely, and the effects are even more pronounced, and they last beyond the offline time. This is what the author means by "attention is a muscle". It's not that there's some baseline impulse issue and the device is merely an outlet. The device is causing the issue, or at least exacerbating it.
Death and Taxes. Not Death, healthcare, vaccines, education.

The government doesn't require me to get vaccines. Nor does it require me to educate my children.
A semantician strikes again!

If you are actually confused about my meaning I'd be glad to explain further.
Agree with you. Ability to code and moreover an ability to contribute to the company codebase is something that should be present even at senior levels for a tech focused company.

At the same time, IMHO, somebody in a techno-managerial role with responsibilities of one or more tech teams may find it hard to devote more than 20% of their time to coding.
Sure, with even larger taxpayer handouts to insurance companies.
I wonder how much "shielding" is good, however, for the programmer. This is exciting for me, but I also think the assemblers should teach programmers the deep technical components of quantum computing systems like D-Wave's adiabatic quantum computers. A project to watch, for sure.
I would like to see prices published and anti-trust exemptions for the industry scrapped. There is absolutely no transparency in the pricing.
here's a better version of the first chart:
https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CUUR0000SAM?output_view=pct_...
This is medical cost inflation for all urban consumers.

If you put the starting date at 1970/1980/1990.. it really puts things in perspective.
Banana pi is probably overkill for a low-key git repo. Its double the price of a raspberry pi.

That said, I'll actually be looking into this to possibly run arm stuff that needs more power.
Not true. The senate has already voted down the pre-existing protections plan, letting young adults stay on their parents' plans, and keeping contraceptive coverage.

American's don't follow the actual machinations of the senate much so it's not "politically unpopular" to do this. We think electing a President every 4 years who's a radical departure from what we had before will fix all our problems and prevent us from actually having to pay attention to the details.
Videos vs. Books for Training
There is no responsibility of healthcare by the states or federal if you remove this. Just medicare and medicaid.
What are they called, anyway? I know them as "that crap that lives in /etc/systemd where you can define services in easy to read INI-like files".
His point was what ever positive effects it had were temporary and those positive effects do not exist any more for most of the people.
Similar idea to what we've been working on over at Signl.fm - here's our first prototype:

https://geekouts.xyz/
Just being insured doesn't mean you're covered.

Those private plans you researched had crap coverage compared to the standards that the ACA set for all health insurance.

By raising the standard, premiums have gone up on some private plans and overall healthcare costs have been reduced for all Americans.
That almost sounds like server-side rendering :)
science != engineering
> I think the GOP has yet to figure out what their health care policy even is. They really need to figure out how to be for something again.

I'm not sure what the policy is, but I know they don't have a plan. I can't find the link, but I heard a spot on NPR (either Fresh Air or Here & Now) talking about the plan to repeal the ACA. The purported goal was to vote immediately to repeal it but delay the effective date. There's no plan. In the mean time, they're supposed to figure it all out.
The potential upshot is democratization of AI technologoy.
I could decide to live in a tiny apartment, turn off the heater and eat ramen. With a chronic condition, there's no way I could have made healthcare a similarly manageable expense (other than maintain a full-time job and limit my entrepreneurship to nights/weekends).

(I'm the first story in the article)
No. If you exclude preexisting conditions, how do you prevent the case where someone decides to buy insurance the day after they're diagnosed with cancer?

You do that by requiring everyone to have insurance when they're well to help cover those that are sick. That's the mandate. If you try to separate them, the system collapses under the weight of even more cost.
Most people that are pissed in our modern age are so, because of a feeling. This really is starting to become an issue. If you don't know that there's really a problem, please stop being pissed. How many people I see having strong partisan like opinions on issues they know nothing about, aren't even affected by, and don't understand the full context of is just staggering.
An existential reminder that bowing to Facebook is our eventual "fate/F8"?
A tax benefit works only if the person has income to offset. If you are a freelance developer and you get sick with a life threatening or chronic illness or even just injured, you may not be able to work while you are getting treatment. If you want more job freedom, a needs based subsidy based on tax income allows cost shifting from years of productive work and tax earnings to years where you can't work, even if your productive work comes later in life, after treatment.

It also provides for those who may never be able to earn enough working to pay for current health insurance, those who are retraining latter in life, and those starting a company.
You're safe :-)

First, the virus isn't found in the wild--it's been modified to carry the gene coding for a light-sensitive protein (opsin). When the cells are infected, they start producing these proteins themselves. To do this, the virus is typically applied directly to the brain tissue.

Light causes these opsins to change shape, which then allows specific types of ions to flow through the cell (typically sodium to excite cells, chloride to suppress them). However, for this to work, the channels need to be illuminated directly, with the correct wavelength of light, so an optical fiber is implanted in or just above the brain.

If someone were to do this to you, you would have already had a pair of fairly invasive neurosurgeries, so being mind-controlled is probably the least of your worries! However, this technique only lets you activate all neurons or all neurons of a specific type within the light's path. It would be fairly hard to induce a complex behavior, unless there's a pre-existing circuit for one (as shown here, which is why this paper is so interesting) or they can find an illumination pattern to mimic one.
> Voting outside the mainstream over time (for some definition of "substantially outside") can normalize and legitimize viewpoints that would otherwise be regarded as fringe forever.

What's the scale of the timeframe we're talking about here? Doesn't seem like the Green Party in the US has a chance of getting normalized on a scale of 2 generations (~50 yrs), based on the past history of voting.

Having people vote based on the idea that at some point in the future, possibly not in their lifetime, their viewpoint may (or may not) become mainstream/legitimate is absurd. People are not that far forward thinkers.
I addressed this in the other comment. It was a shitty way to convey a slightly different point. Sorry about that.
I have nothing to say for or against Republicans, Dems, Trump or any other political entity.

BUT

If they start pulling away Healthcare for millions of Americans ... and Americans start dying because of this - well, there will be a revolution of sorts.

It's inhumane for the wealthiest country in the world to take away basic healthcare for it's most vulnerable citizens.

If you are so 'smart' and so 'great' - then figure out a way to introduce efficiencies, pricing intelligence etc. to get people more and better coverage - instead of just smashing some law because it's not perfect and it was written by 'Obama'.
The creation of exchanges was so that insurance companies would have to compete in a market where customers had an apples to apples comparison tool. Theoretically, that should drive down rates in places where there are enough insurance companies for market forces to take over.
I know I can say it.

Married, two kids. Everybody reasonably healthy, have a decent job.

Healthcare costs have become expensive as shit because of the ACA. That's not a partisan talking-point: that's the bottom line in our household budget.

The happy-face anecdotes the ACA's advocates trot out are lovely, but there are far more people in my position.
> We are now on an ACA plan. $270 with subsidies. Think about that. The government doubled the price of the plan or more, and is paying with our tax dollars the difference between my $270 and $780.

Can you provide any proof of that? According to Obama, an average insurance will be as affordable as a cellphone bill. Perhaps your plan had some perks in it, no?

Also there was a lot of fake stories about people getting tripled their insurance cost, all have been pretty much debunked as not real. Even Harry Reed was mentioning that in his speech.
A) Yes I have had to write init scripts for production servers, and I've had to write whatever the hell they were before we had sysvinit. It wasn't always pleasant. There were times when you'd just edit things like /etc/rc.d/network and hack in some more commands.

B) I'm talking specifically about systemd init files, or whatever they're called. Given that they initialize things, that they replace conventional init files, the term applies.
Implementing HTTP/2 for Squarespace Websites
Labor unions... we also know what it's like to be dependent on a crucial services that are no longer being supported...
>The total cost of my health insurance premiums is about 20k/year;

That doesn't sound right - What is your maximum out of pocket?
Have you? What do you think is the reason?
> False. The ACA imposed a minimum 80-85% medical loss ratio on insurance companies. This is a cost control.

That's not a cost control. That's a price inflater!

If the only way for them to make more money is to have the price of things go up, what do you expect they're going to be in favor of? In a perfect world (from the perspective of the insurance company), everything from premiums to procedures goes up X% so that their profits go up X%.

That's a seriously messed up system and may be the most egregious part of the entire ACA.
Healthcare is a touchy subject because people's quality-of-life and their actual lives (vs. death) are on the line. But food and shelter are similarly crucial to existence, yet they aren't provided at no cost, but must be acquired through their own labor, or reliance on family, charity, etc.

It's interesting to me that we as a society have long accepted that people have to work for food and shelter, leaving a permanent underclass in the dust, while we're uncomfortable to say the same about healthcare.

But of course, it doesn't matter. Those who oppose the ACA or the individual mandate or employer requirements or the notion of healthcare subsidies are dancing around their justifications and are reluctant to come out and say that people with health complications should just be out of luck. Instead, they'll dismantle, maybe introduce an alibi entitlement scheme to save some political face, and leave a status quo with the exact same result.
Admittedly off-topic, but why add unnecessarily ignorant asides (in the first sentence to boot):

"...I lived on the grounds of an old estate down in central Virginia, next to a town called — terrifyingly — Lynchburg..."

...when a 10-second Google search reveals the less-than-terrifying reality:

First settled in 1757, Lynchburg was named for its founder, John Lynch, who at the age of 17 started a ferry service at a ford across the James River to carry traffic to and from New London.
Learn Elixir and Phoenix with Simple Screencasts
I think their main focus now is to provide an engineering infrastructure for AI researchers, which in my opinion is extremely valuable: Today, if you want to develop new algorithms in AI (not only but particularly in reinforcement learning) you often need to invest a significant amount of time just to get the the data that you want to use for training your model into a form where you can actually use it. Having an API or library that takes care of this for you allows people to focus more on the research and less on the engineering around it, speeding up the discovery of new insights and giving more people access to the tools they need to make a meaningful contribution. So overall a really great approach!
the seen: people it helps
the (mostly) unseen: the higher burden on everybody else

Is the tradeoff worth it? That's the question.
I'm not sure to what extent that factors in productivity improvements from workers with better health though, in terms of overall economic activity and GDP.
Maximize stops to make sense at some point when your screen gets large enough. You can have at least two windows side by side and maybe a console below without having to sacrifice some sidebar in your IDE or whatever.

I have the habit of maximizing the browser on windows, but on most pages that leaves a lot of empty space to the sides that isn't used anyway.

Under i3 on the other hand I keep the browser on maybe 1/3rd of the screen width because managing the whole layout (not just one window at a time) is so much easier.

And the alternative, overlapping/floating rarely seems useful for me.
Something of note - not a single woman on here. Pregnancy, birth control... so many expensive, and common medical procedures that are very relevant to all female founders have been overlooked or neglected.
> People, please stay away from Tox.

By actually following the thread, I got the opposite idea. Its current active developers are well aware of Tox's flaws, do actually know what they're doing, and have a plan. They're being addressed.

This is a much better attitude than seen elsewhere (such as in Telegram).

And, in the first place, this is being overblown. As GrayHatter succintly puts it:

> For anyone reading this, without a crypto background. The assertions being made are the same as saying: the lock on your house is broken because if someone steals your keys they can unlock your door.
I don't know if you realized it, but you are close to saying "government should tighten its belt unless it's stuff I believe in". Then, both sides can make the argument, and there is never any deficit reduction, we keep spending on things we want.
A lot of these supposed "secure messaging" applications seem to roll their own crypto systems and hope that is secure. And then there users seem to promote the insecure protocol. I think we need to make a new word for this like cryptohipster .
What makes your insurance go up is the fact that insurance companies are beholden to investors and not the people they insure. They must exceed each and every last quarter or they take a hit.
> It's heavy reading, I don't know why it's getting upvoted here.

Advocacy?
Absolutely. Although it can be difficult to unwind all of their effects.
It did for our company, we had an HMO as the insurance provider for us. Company of about 40 people or so.
4) A deliberate UX trade-off that, while clearly suboptimal for the kind of people who read HN, still leaves WhatsApp's massive base of everyday users in a much better position than they were prior to integrating the Signal protocol: immune to the more mundane threats of passive mass surveillance and the exfiltration of message history from Facebook's servers.
1. Like ALL companies, which a hospital is, They can write it off, but ALSO they allocate that already into their budget..... All companies have expected losses. What gives the right of the govt to take charge of hospitals and say otherwise. All companies have expected losses and they allocate those into their budget.

2. Then prices will increase within each insurance company and as a user, I will pay for the insurance I want, rather than be forced.

3. Oh Stop. I didn't say I wouldn't pay taxes.

When did Healthcare become a government problem, rather than something that can be done through businesses. Its a business! If you can't afford to pay the bills then work a little harder to do something better with your life.