skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That article gives a bit of a summary, but its own arguments are pretty weak - a lot of arguments about why Arrow is wrong, but no explanation whatsoever for the empirical observation that Arrow is right: just compare per-capita costs of health insurance with similar results between countries with mostly free-market systems like the USA with mostly single-payer/public systems like France.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/01/america_...
I agree with you on vaccines. I'm not sure, legally, that you are correct about education (look into truancy laws).

Now, you can homeschool if you choose, or place your children in a private school. But I'm not sure, legally, that you can leave them completely uneducated.
Why I moved from Java to Dart
Viruses are already inserted into your DNA and your physical and emotional behavior is different when exposed to sunlight compared to darkness.
They're offering USB ports and an Ethernet port. Apple will sell you both of those if you want them.

Though it also has an SD card reader and more battery, neither of which Apple has dongles for.
Less about influencing the velocity, more about influencing the direction. Technologies tend to reflect the values of their inventors. We want to ensure this technology is beneficial to humanity — meaning, that it's good at all, and that it benefits the many rather than the few.

We also think safety matters, and it should be researched in lockstep with advances in the capabilities. We have good relationships with MIRI and FHI. Our safety researchers published (together with Google Brain) a roadmap of concrete safety problems [1] and work to provide tools to prevent ML systems from being subverted [2].

No one yet knows the precise details of how AI should play out. But I'd certainly prefer that, whenever it gets close, one of the organizations actually making the advances has no incentives besides ensuring a good outcome.

[1] https://openai.com/blog/concrete-ai-safety-problems/
[2] https://github.com/openai/cleverhans
more information: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11033/owc-previews-dec-addon-f...
One thing I can't stand is the resolution, it really needs to be 2x-10x increased for me not to feel like I'm staring really closely at a screen. And when you increase the resolution by an order of magnitude, you need more processing power, which makes it harder to solve the giant problem of the size, cost, and awkwardness of the hardware. I can't wait until contact lenses are VR enabled.
> So, now legally the maximum is below the old threshold for 'high' deductible.

The HSA-tied minimum was the old threshold for "high-deductible" since the HSA/HDHP pairing was created, which was several years before Obama was elected.
The ACA pretty clearly made health care more affordable than it would have otherwise been[0]. Still, it was an incremental change and a huge compromise compared to what I'd really like. It doesn't make sense to mock the name of the Affordable Care Act when it is in fact helping with affordability. We should do a lot more, but your criticism seems misdirected.

[0]: Here's one source, although there may be better ones http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-obamac...
So turn the entire population into H1B visa employees. Leave and you lose your health coverage forever?
> We should be able to opt out paying for it, especially if it goes against my religion and frankly it does

First, separation of church and state, your faith doesn't get to be part of government decisions.

Second, do Jehovah's Witnesses get to not pay for blood transfusions in other people? And before you cite that blood transfusions are far more necessary, I think you should hold fast to your fiscal conservative tenets and help prevent unwanted burdens on the state from being born.
I think the real test is how many of those who complained that they would be happier if Apple had just made it thicker and included all the ports would actually buy something like this. (And also if they are more than a very, very tiny minority)
Why you should ask questions at your next tech company interview
Of course. Switching back and forth between async and threads can be a bad sign. I didn't mean to say that you should do it all the time, rather just to put some context around this:

> You can only call a red function from within another red function.

That's really really true in JS. There's no way to call an async function from a sync function, if you need to return its result. You are Capital-S-Screwed if you need to do that.

But it's going to far to apply that absolute rule to other languages. When you have threads, it's pretty easy to mix sync and async code. It can be a bad idea, just like having a codebase that's half exceptions and half error returns is usually a bad idea, but you're certainly allowed to do it when it makes sense.
Democrats have never said they want the government to stay out of people's private lives. That's strictly a Republican talking point that goes in tandem with their criticisms of "Big Gubment".
I think one needs to only look as far as usage of gifs and emoji and Snapchat/Instagram to see how fast that will be adopted once the I/O devices improve.
Why?

Telepathy seems like a nightmare or curse. Esp if it comes quickly. As in without millions of years of evolution to adapt socially to it.
> The ACA enshrines insurance, pharma, and hospital companies, including those that are the biggest parts of the problem in health care in the USA.

Absolutely agree. The ACA (or repealing the ACA) are both "solutions" to the wrong problem. So much potential innovation in the health care space is illegal. If it wasn't illegal, someone might (gasp!) find a way to provide a valuable service for less money than in the current system.

It will not, and cannot, be fixed by regulation, because of what you said - any regulation MUST be approved by the big companies. They'll never approve something that goes against their interests.
Blown away? Hyperbole of the century. At CES this year, I tried all the VR/AR tech I could get my hands on. Microsoft HoloLens, HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Sony VR, Galaxy Gear, and everything in between.

I wasn't expecting much and yet I was still underwhelmed. There is zero immersion, primarily due to the poor resolution, the screen door effect, and the crippled field of view. It felt like watching a scene through a pair of binoculars, but that's not a fair comparison either, as physical binoculars are more immersive than any of these devices.

I feel like I the only one that feels such disappointment!
Which it no doubt will. The only question for me is whether it will use wires to route the signal into your brain directly, magnetically 'beam' it in (by inducing neuron activity), or sent chemically through additional specialized neurons grown on your brain for that purpose.

My father (and no doubt me at some point) has hearing aids that have bluetooth in them. He can answer the phone and talk on it without an additional earpiece. Cochlear implants can be augmented to use it[1]. So at some point understanding how to inject sound into your head will become so well understood it will simply be a matter of how much you're willing to spend.

[1] http://www.medel.com/us/bluetooth-wireless-connectivity-and-...
I read some rumours it's using the screws the normal aluminium panel in the bottom is attached with.
It's not going to take off until someone solves the movement issue. The only games VR is currently suitable for are if you are stationary somehow -- pilot, tank gunner, etc. Which limits it pretty severely.

Something like the Ghostbusters Experience[1] is what people want in their own homes.

Also, maybe it's because I've been gaming my whole life, but the resolution in VR is still not good enough to "blow" me away, like I keep reading about. How people are so amazed at current gen VR confuses me.

[1] https://ghostbusters.madametussauds.com/
I bought a Vive the week of Thanksgiving and have been using it roughly 2 hours a day. Every other day is my workout day most of the week (unless I'm playing hockey that day/night) and the VIVE has become part of my workout now too. After I complete my normal workout - a mixture of hockey specific training, free weights, aerobic and of course tons of pull-ups - I now spend an additional hour+ in VR.

I typically play Space Pirate Trainer first; once I get around level 15-20 things are so hectic I'm moving a ton and often going to one, or both knees. My abs and back can feel it big-time. I start with this game because it's not quite so intense at the start and is a good VR warmup.

More impressive is Holopoint - a bow and arrow game. That is easily the most physically demanding VR activity that I've found so far. I'm usually sweeting pretty solidly when I complete 8-10 games of Holopoint. I'm also noticeably fatigued in my arms, back, legs, hips, all over. And just to be clear most would classify me as extremely fit (regularly skate with/against NHL bound Junior players, the minimum pull-ups I do in my workout are 30 consecutive, body fat <10% etc).

Lastly I find I am no longer interested in 'regular games'... such as Madden, NHL 16, Gran Turismo, etc (on PS4), or even my all time favorite Dark Souls (series). I simply can't go back to not being physically engaged the way VR games are.

VR is going to be absolutely huge in the health/fitness space.
> A hospital cannot "publish prices" because prices vary wildly based on many factors.

Here's a question: Dentists routinely publish prices. If you ask them how much some procedure will cost, they will tell you. If there is uncertainty, they will give you a range (e.g. to account for the possibility that complications will arise during an oral surgery). What is different in the hospital situation, apart from some rather extreme measures taken to obfuscate pricing?

> And, of course, the most expensive medical care is emergency

Is it? Or is it end-of-life? Genuinely curious to see numbers here!

> I also have no idea how it will drive down costs

Prices, not costs. The current situation is that in a lot of states there are somewhere on the order of 1-3 companies offering insurance of certain types at all. For example, for Maryland, I believe there is only one company offering an ACA-compatible PPO (everyone else has HMOs or even EPOs). See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13393287 for where I got that data.

Of course in a monopoly situation there is absolutely no incentive for a monopolist to cut prices. Why would they? So to the extent that prices represent excessive profits (as opposed to the actual costs of health care), allowing cross-state insurance sales should drive them down. People who believe insurance companies are price-gouging should be _very_ in favor of removing restrictions on such sales.
Rivality is the counterpoint of virality.

Information is free. Attention is inherently rivalrous. The author, Craig Mod, seems to get this:

Time boxed disconnection has proven to be both generative and — most importantly — sustainable.

Time-boxing is setting bounds on attention. Depending on what you do, it can be difficult to enforce -- some types of creative work simply want to expand to fill time, and rebuilding state is difficult. If that work requires online access ... beware the manfalls.

Attention is a muscle. It must be exercised.

Muscles also need recovery time. Alvin Toffler's Futurshock is one of the earliest works I've seen which seems to grasp that intellectual effort has similar bounds.

There's also Gleick's The Information, which notes the opposition of information and attention.
There isn't any winning or losing here though - it's horses for courses. There's no way you could sensibly author complex technical documentation in JSON, for instance - and I'd contend there's precious little reason to these days, when the two formats can be treated more or less interchangeably (at least with the right tools).
To play it on my nice TV it does.
Oh come on, you've got to provide slightly more detail, because that just sounds absurdly hyperbolic and exaggerated.
> In my experience, the best VR experiences are sit down.

This will be as subjective as which non-VR games consumers prefer. I have a friend that can (and has!) happily spent hours playing Fruit Ninja VR, which can be quite the workout. I personally really enjoy AudioShield and The Lab's Longbow game, which are also fairly active.

Honestly I think the biggest impediments to "active VR" are the cable and the buildup of sweat in the headset's padding.
>>“And I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s strange. That’s me, many years ago,’” says Kennis, who was momentarily stunned by the sight of all that beautiful hair. Three weeks earlier she had completed chemotherapy for breast cancer, and her hair was just starting to grow back."

I'm going to avoid the diatribe on whether or not one should own the recorded pattern of electromagnetic energy reflected off of the surface of an "owned" object (and all of the implications that has for localization maps), and simply highlight that in a beautiful ironic twist, VW actually brought Ms. Kennis "a moment [she] thought [she'd] forgotten."
> so people have starting calling that a 'high' deductible.

It's not 'people', it's the government, for what that's worth.

https://www.irs.gov/publications/p969/ar02.html#en_US_2015_p...
Hello? Which ones do you disagree with?
That plan won't work because people constantly change insurance companies and there are too many conditions that are life long.

Most people develop many pre-existing conditions as they get older. By the time you're 70 you'll have 5 different insurance companies all treating different conditions that you developed at various times in your life.

Not to mention what happens when companies go out of business. This plan isn't workable at all.
For what it is worth, judging from CES this year the first round in the VR war was won by the Vive and GearVR. There were zero Rift demos that I could find. Of the two, the GearVR was better even though it lacked controls, the Vive hardware just just on the wrong side of crappy and the fuzzy muddy pictures I saw were a big dealbreaker, especially when compared to the GearVR.

That said, GearVR suffered from overheating the phone and crapping out.
As a non US Citizen, I have a question:

If Obamacare is repelled at the Federal level, could a state just implement its local ACA? what prevents California for instance of giving health coverage for its residents? California is a good example since it "the world's sixth-largest economy" (If California was a country)
I'm sure healthcare companies wouldn't want to cut themselves out of this market?

This would give California and SV an even bigger advantage regarding what is described in Sam's post.
It's not even clear whether it refers to battery or disk.
If anyone interested in running a DNSCrypt enabled DNS resolver, try https://github.com/jedisct1/dnscrypt-server-docker
Yup. From a hedge standpoint that makes the most sense. But lets say you're a Facebook employee, what is your hedge? Google? Apple?
Not quite so fast. If it's their healthcare, paid for with their money, then you have a point. If it's "their" healthcare, but paid for with my (the employer's) money, and I have moral objections to abortion and birth control, but you're going to require me to pay for it anyway? Who's forcing their beliefs on others now?
Awesome. I have been waiting on this feature for ages. Passing objects by their primary key worked kinda ok, but being able to safely pass lists and query results is a game changer.
"How could you possibly just assert there are far more people in your position?"

Because I fall well within the middle class, have 2 kids, and am in reasonable health yet am paying far more for poorer health care than I did a decade ago, and beyond the anecdotal evidence that is the same for every family I've spoken to for the last few years it is clear that the ADA is deeply disliked by a vast swath of America for precisely that reason.

The ACA is a shell game that siphoned money from people who had it, dropped it into a big corporate hole, and spat out a bit of it at people who didn't have as much. As a political issue, we are seeing "success stories" trotted out so as to convince the rest of us that gosh, isn't this worth it?

No, it isn't. There has been no net gain with the ACA. It was passed so we could see what was in it, and turns out most of what was in it was a lobbyist Christmas wrapped in a ton of politician incompetence.

It was wealth-destroying political nonsense in the same sense as "cash for clunkers". Feel good, think less.
Joe Lieberman threatened to filibuster any bill that had a public option. We wouldn't have had the votes to pass single payer, even when the Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate.
You are putting the poster on the spot in a public forum about something that, depending on the circumstances, could be very personal and private (or not, but we don't know and nor should we ask). There are plenty of examples elsewhere. See Sam's post.
Funny, I thought the price was really cheap, I was more worried about the relatively high prices on accessories.

Battery life is on par with portable gaming devices currently so I am not sure if your expectations are a bit unrealistic. That said, it's 2.5 - 6 hours depending on the game. Something like Pokemon on the go might be a lot longer than 2.5 hours for something like Legend of Zelda.

Storage is probably ok. First, it's a cartridge based system so I don't expect game installs to take as much space as something like the PS4. Moreover, as others have pointed out, you can expand it by adding an SD card fairly cheaply...which is more than can be said for most consoles currently.

Online offering is pretty weak and I am disappointed that the industry has now made it "normal" for users to pay for online play in the console world...but oh well. On the other hand, local multiplayer and up to 8 device LANs is awesome!

Titles at launch are limited...but to be honest Zelda at launch will probably be enough to carry them through.

Regarding your killers, consider that the Switch has a USB-C connector so it may be possible to charge it on the go with a portable battery (perhaps even during use). That is huge when compared against the limitations of most gaming laptops (I am not familiar with other gaming portables though). Price is price, but I would focus more on the accessory costs than the console cost itself.
Exactly. I have a very strong hunch this is what they're referring to.
VR advancements to look out for in 2017:

- Eye tracking (it already works perfectly, I've tried it myself at SIGGRAPH), this will enable a few cool things:

- Foveated Rendering - rendering only what is in the fovea view at high quality and using a lower quality method for the periphery. Reduces rendering requirement by ~75%, enabling either higher-end graphics on the desktop, or the ability to move many desktop-bound VR applications to mobile.

- Eye-assisted interactivity - SMI had a demo at SIGGRAPH where they demonstrated using where your eyes were looking to increase precision of interactions with controllers in VR (for example, grabbing very small objects in VR accurately).

- Inside-Out Tracking - using computer vision to provide 6DoF tracking for headsets without the need for external trackers. Will allow mobile headsets to have positional tracking (which is SO VERY important for VR) and will allow desktop headsets to have lower setup complexity (less important).
- note: Microsoft will likely dominate this by my guess, seeing as probably the strongest part of the Hololens is it's excellent tracking.

- Wireless adapters for existing headsets - these made a big splash at CES and apparently work pretty well. Making the existing experience un-tethered will definitely help room-scale experiences.

- Self-Contained headsets - this is vital to mass-adoption of VR imo. I think we'll see some of these this year, though probably not from HTC/Oculus yet.

AR, while definitely more the "consumer" product in the long run, is still far off as the display tech just isn't there yet. But the above advancements in VR pave a way for AR in the future, until there is no longer a distinction between them device-wise, but it rather becomes a slider of "how much reality do you want to replace?".
For what it's worth, FireFox has a similar reader view on Android and desktop.
Movement with the Vive and room scale works (walk around small area and teleport to new small areas). I think it solves the problem and feels pretty intuitive.
It sounds like you're implying that you shouldn't have to pay to help those people.
Researchers already do this in the neuroimaging community. The technique is called MVPA (see http://www.pymvpa.org/index.html for an implementation). The problems of machine learning in general also apply here, as nom pointed out. Classifiers applied to brain images are only as good as the training datasets used.
I won't ever use mental health services. Personal choice. The old plan didn't offer that. I could get another plan to cover that. Why should I be forced to purchase something I have no intention of using?

Insurance, as a product, was highly customizable. You could get riders and other policies to cover various risks. You see this all the time with fleet insurance. Health insurance use to be the same.

The ACA set a floor on the offerings. If you don't those features, you can get a non ACA approved plan. You then have to pay the tax penalty. Now the penalty is an oddity. There is no lean. The government removes from your refund $X until you either pay the penalty or have no refund.

I looked at such a plan. Best I found was $438. Assuming an income of > $100,000 (I thought that 2017 insurance rates were set using 2016 actual income, I was wrong), the penalty was north of $3.5k total for my wife and I. This made the ACA plan cheaper since I didn't have to worry about filing quarterly estimates since I always have a refund (I'm giving a price to the time and effort required to file).

So the subsidies make the ACA plan cheaper that the non-ACA plan. I went with that. The question I pose to society is "Should we require government, funded through taxes, handout to make medical costs affordable?"
But SSR means you send everything around the content again and again.
This brings up another point... VR is much more dependent on the user's body characteristics than past technologies. One person's eye distance and head/body shape can be a completely different experience from someone else's.

One person, like you, can have a much worse view and experience than someone else.
Undo send originated there as well.
Yeah I did, thanks. That's what I get for multitasking. Unfortunately its too late to delete :(
The fact that its USB-C actually makes the "more battery" thing pretty easy and standardized, even if apple doesn't sell it themselves.
Have you tried ratpoison? Same author, but in C, so it's fast.
The problem is that you have a tripple system. You have the insurance for unlikely but expensive accidents/cancer/etc which is what insurance is good for; you have subscriptions for things like annual health screenings, common care etc and finally you have subsidies for those who have shit health.

It would be much better to split the system into those three components: a relatively cheap insurance that you would be unlikely to ever draw on, an optional subscription service that you probably would just pay out of pocket at whatever doctor you trust at whatever price you could get and then something for those who have expensive, preexistent conditions, which is either a government scheme, charity or a required insurance that parents have to take out on their children.

There is no need to require everybody to buy an overprized service bundle.
I should move to India, become a citizen and then H-1B myself back into the country.

I'd be getting a substantial raise.
Well then you have to pay for the cancer treatment...

Are you even remotely aware of what something like that would typically cost?