skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, they are the same thing. Insurance is fundamentally a redistribution of risk with money being shifted from those who have not fallen victim to that risk to those who have. If you have a problem with that aspect of the ACA, you have a problem with the general idea of insurance.

This comment is so profoundly misguided that I have to comment.

Insurance does not work the way you describe. When companies do a fundraiser where someone gets to take a half-court shot with a basketball and win $1M if they make the shot, an insurance policy sells the company doing the fundraiser a policy that reflects the odds that a person chosen at random from the audience will sink the shot. That policy might cost $7K, since the shot will very likely be missed.

The insurance company makes a profit by charging a bit more than the actual odds reflect, so that over time if 200 shots are taken, it pays the $1M once and profits $400K. In a competitive market, the price of insurance will approach the probability.

Similarly, an insurance company might offer insurance that it will not rain on the last weekend in July. Perhaps an outdoor wedding facility wishes to buy that policy, but a farmer wishes to buy the other side of that risk. In such cases, the insurance company can charge less because there is a market for both sides of the uncertain event. Futures markets are also used for this purpose.

Most of our modern health care is not really risk-driven, it's based on markets that are highly regulated and prices that are influenced by lobbyists from various industries etc.

The key problem with your assertion is that at the time insurance is purchased, nobody knows who will be the victim or whether there will be a victim. Purchasers of insurance would rather spend a little bit of money just in case a bad outcome occurs, so they don't bear the full brunt of that bad outcome. Those who don't end up with a bad outcome don't get their money back, which is why the system works.

We all know there is a need for social services to provide healthcare for those who can't afford it or who have really bad luck. That's not insurance, however, it's social services.
It makes more sense to err on the side of committing too often. When you're ready to submit, use 'git rebase -i' to squash away any silly commits. Done. No blog post needed for this topic.
I don't remember arguing that developing a modern browser is cheap - I'm responding to the strange notion that the availability of a full open source browser from Google somehow makes things harder for competitors. It doesn't. And, again, as to forking - Apple created a competitive browser by forking an opensource project, Google created another one forking Apple's. This is demonstrably a viable and arguably more effective way of developing a browser.
>What I can expect is to shoulder the tax burden of a large population of people who have not saved nearly enough for retirement

Them saving more wouldn't help much. Saving has a counter-party, someone who gets real goods and services now in exchange for repaying the debt later. Who's the counter-party for the retirees' savings? Obviously it can't be the retirees, since they're busy, you know, being retired.

What'd increased saving would cash out to is shoveling money into repaying education loans held by pension funds that pay the boomers, rather than paying taxes that fund retirement programs. It doesn't mean you don't support retiring boomers, it just means that you get better compensation today for doing so.
What's the desperate situation you're referring to w/regard to health care? Do you mean the imminent dismantling of the "pernicious and arbitrary" system which brought 20 million people health care who didn't have it previously, saving untold thousands of lives per year?
More people can be as much of a liability as not. A core team of 40 people can certainly make the software and hardware design. It's as big as a core team should ever be for a product the scale of a smartphone, IMO.

Obviously it takes 1000s to scale, and optimize, and automate every last thing. But to build the first 1? Team of 40.
This is a good reason for Apple to avoid going further down market. With 43% market share [1] they're unlikely to be considered to have monopoly power by courts [2]:

>Following Alcoa and American Tobacco, courts typically have required a dominant market share before inferring the existence of monopoly power. The Fifth Circuit observed that "monopolization is rarely found when the defendant's share of the relevant market is below 70%."(22) Similarly, the Tenth Circuit noted that to establish "monopoly power, lower courts generally require a minimum market share of between 70% and 80%."(23) Likewise, the Third Circuit stated that "a share significantly larger than 55% has been required to establish prima facie market power"(24) and held that a market share between seventy-five percent and eighty percent of sales is "more than adequate to establish a prima facie case of power."(25)

>It is also important to consider the share levels that have been held insufficient to allow courts to conclude that a defendant possesses monopoly power. The Eleventh Circuit held that a "market share at or less than 50% is inadequate as a matter of law to constitute monopoly power."(26) The Seventh Circuit observed that "[f]ifty percent is below any accepted benchmark for inferring monopoly power from market share."(27) A treatise agrees, contending that "it would be rare indeed to find that a firm with half of a market could individually control price over any significant period."(28)

When they're capturing over 90% of the profit in the smartphone industry there's no advantage to increasing market share, and some pretty big costs.

[1] http://www.macrumors.com/2017/01/11/iphone-31-smartphone-sal...

[2] https://www.justice.gov/atr/competition-and-monopoly-single-...
Ask HN: Do all founders need to be present at a pitch?
I have an upcoming seed funding pitch (it's a xoogler event). There are two founders, one of us can't make it unfortunately. Will this be a deal-breaker, do you think?
I know he got downvoted to hell but he's making a solid point. Of course the Earth is not flat, but there are times when the consensus view proves to be incorrect. In 100 years, who knows what "truths" we hold to today will be proven to be falsehoods?
I propose 1991 due to the adoption of computer. Also, this way I don't get associated with safe spaces.
Sorry, but Sam Altman (and many others) are missing the point.

Without actual PRICE DISCOVERY nothing(in terms of reform) works.

I got a tetanus shot (booster as an adult, Tdap) and called around to different clinics. Prices ranged from $131 to $39. For what is required by law to be exactly the same thing.

That "well your insurance might mean you will pay a different amount" is EXACTLY the problem. No one can easily determine the price of anything.

Is there a base-model Chevy that is sold at one dealership for $35K and at another dealership in the same city, for $65K?

No, because people would very quickly do price discovery...
I agree with you. Our whole economy has been restructured around fat cats finding ways to eek people out of more and more. Without taking a step back, it's hard to realize just how pervasive that's become. I don't attribute this as much to greater discipline by older generations as to cultural and economic differences that made a simpler, more sustainable life the default course.

There are a lot of things about life that are much better now than they were a long time ago. There are new challenges too. To me, this sounds less like an opportunity for a cross-generational blame game and more like an opportunity to collaborate and work to find a good solution.

I personally don't think we're on a stable trajectory as a civilization. Many boomers have virtually no retirement savings (I've heard numbers that say up to half) and over the next decade, continuing to work is not going to be an option anymore for lots of them. They're not going to be able to pay their house payments anymore, let alone anything else. This is what I see as the next major economic crisis.

People don't realize how different our lifestyle today is from any commonly established convention of human habitation. That's been increasingly true over the course of the last 100 years, and we may be far enough detached from the roots now that toppling over is a concern.

People usually live on land that's established as familial territory, aren't required to "pay rent" for much of anything, and use their own land to feed themselves. While this may sound "primitive", it's a lifestyle that can be maintained without the permission of an outside employer, and if you can't make it to your 9-5, you're not imperiled.

Suburban lifestyles are dependent at least on a large existing distribution network and supply chain, and in most cases, the continuing ability to pay rent (or "a mortgage payment") for a very, very long time. Then the children move out and reboot that cycle instead of using the advantages that their progenitors had secured (somewhere to live without paying rent). More traditional family living arrangements are likely going to be needed moving forward.
There is danger in the middle ground as well, though. Many middle grounds are factually incorrect, for example between evolutionists and people who believe god put fossils underground to troll archaeologists.

Further, as a strategy it is exploitable: say you have opinion X and I want you at X+1. I can manipulate you by loudly proclaiming X+2.

tl;dr: there are no easy heuristics here. Treat the entire communication environment as hostile and manipulative, form your opinions with great care, and double check all your sources.
Hm, yes, I think I have seen that once on HN.
It does for particular members of society, but not necessarily for society as a whole. Like, if the best half of the jobs always went to the half of society that went to college, but college did literally nothing but waste your time for four years, you'd want to go to college and college would not increase your generation's overall wealth.
While there are a lot of cost-control measures, just about everything you listed except the first item is pretty small - it's only in the aggregate that most of those measures make a big difference.

In addition while this is a contentious subject telling people to "reconsider your certainty [...] if you don't know basic facts" is needlessly confrontational.
Couldn't shake that Maxtor curse. Good riddance, I say. I'm involved in the Seagate class action over bad drives, but like many other class actions I've been involved in, I seriously doubt I'll see much of the thousands of dollars I've sunk into drives Seagate sold me knowing they had atrocious failure rates. Perhaps a five or ten dollar consolation check like usual.
Explorers find disease-cursed City of the Monkey God
The game has moved from devices to services those devices provide. Having those services costs billions of dollars per year, to both keep up on the data side and to pay a small army of extremely in-demand engineers. And then, unless you're Apple or Samsung, the only significant profit stream is ads, since people have been conditioned by Google that services should be "free". I don't care how much of a genius Andy is, there's no way to really win this one.
> is discrimination in only the sense that companies can discriminate between whom we want to do business with.

And when the southern bakery refuses to sell to democrats ?

The rule is that if you sell to the public you don't get to discriminate. I don't know the details about how that applies in this particular case, but ... It seems an entirely reasonable rule to me.
>carrying debt to maximize life now can potentially destroy your future, but the alternative is minimizing life now to improve your potential (and non-guaranteed) future later.

Isn't this just called "work" or "discipline"? You put up with the drudgery of effort because you want to be able to enjoy the benefits of your labor later. Everything works that way. Not going to get around it.

You're right, though: there is absolutely a balance to be struck. I think the parent's point is that the balance is not being struck well by many. My POV is that that's true, and that cultural and economic forces that encourage this imbalance make it difficult for your average Millennial to avoid.
My day job is working as an HPC Sysadmin on a decent sized supercomputer with petabyte scale storage for a private consulting company. I spend a lot of time dealing with and thinking about storage and honestly I don't think mechanical disks are long for this world.

For our next storage expansion it's ALMOST worth ditching storage tiering and going to an all flash/SSD configuration. There is so much hassle involved with mechanical disks relative to SSD. SSDs are by no means perfect but I don't have a steady stream of SSDs being pulled out of production due to mechanical failures.
Same here. Me and my friends would take shareware games and edit all of the text, graphic and audio resources to essentially make our own games.
> As examples, there are people like Casey Neistat and various Vloggers that live seemingly great lives.

What seemingly great times we live in indeed.
Agile – High Performing Teams
How to Make Money Online 2017 Edition
While slightly costly, you can buy a 4TB 2.5" SSD in a normal thickness drive. You can not do that with a HDD, the only 4TB 2.5" HDD I am aware of is a 15mm thick one which does not fit in, well, pretty much anything, not laptops, not most bays, nothing, they are only usable as an external drive (but it's useful that way, I have one). I believe this is the first time the capacity crown goes to an SSD at any given time (at least in the consumer space -- in the server space the 16TB 2.5" Samsung SSD and the 60TB 3.5" Seagate are both out of this world but so are their prices too).
What about those of us who changed from employer-paid insurance to self-bought and got pre-existing condition exemptions without a lapse?
Having multiple middlemen selling the same app to the same customer isn't an incentive for the developer to lower their prices. Given that app developers set their own prices, Apple's effect on prices with their store "monopoly" would be hard capped at 30%.

And unlike a traditional retail store, the whole process is exceptionally transparent — every developer pays the same 30%, every developer gets boned by the same restrictions.

Anyway, there is a competitor to the App Store, it's the Play Store and it's available to any consumer who wishes to shop there. Apple certainly doesn't have a monopoly on app sales.
I've launched multiple side projects since the early 1970s. Nothing in the way of marketing has worked for me, but I think I have finally found an approach that works.

I know it's counter-intuitive, but, trying to find customers is actually a mistake! It's too much work for too little return.

The right approach is to devise a method to find someone who will find customers for you. This might be deeper than it first appears. Consider this example.

My current budding project (call it E) is a tool for students who are having academic problems. Before, I would have tried to convince students that E would help them. Instead, my current approach is to find people whose problem is not to improve their own academic work but to improve the work of others. My value proposition is directed at them not at students. It is their problem I am trying to solve. E solves their problem by giving them something they can offer to students needing help.

Now my effort is to approach academic advisors, tutors, remedial educators, learning disability psychologists, and the like via professional associations and activities. In a sense, these people have become my market NOT the students. They will work for years for free and share their success stories to fellow workers. This sustained compounding effort is the sort that can lead to exponential growth.

Devising a method to find such people can be difficult. Deep thought is needed.

Who really are your customers?
I wonder how bad this is going to get with the recently announced French report on flight MS80 being downed by faulty Apple equipment (battery fire from either iPad or iPhone 6S.) I smell lawyers. Lots of them.
Its safe to assume that it was obvious to everybody involved. And therefore was quid-pro-quo for passing ACA.
Many people weren't living in SF when they applied (though they do live here now). We will happily sponsor visas!
OS-level sandboxing for the content process is enabled for macOS as of Firefox 52, which is the current release on the Developer Edition (Aurora) channel and will be rolling out to stable come March. It's currently in stable on Windows and Nightly on Linux. Sandboxing for media plugins is already stable on macOS, Windows, and Linux.
I forgot about the phone. My sister and her husband fell for that trap. They went further into debt and locked themselves into an expensive family plan for 3 years for their new iPhones.

We live in a really odd time. The concept of money is abstracted away in virtual credit cards - at amounts our parents never had access to. We buy computers and cell phones - things our parents never had. The very idea of spending that kind of money for what you get in return would have been entirely inconceivable for their generation. Today, these things are considered as necessary essentials rather than luxuries.

Good on you for your hard work. I can attest to the fact that it is extremely difficult to ignore conventional modern consumerism. It took me a suicidal "early life crisis" 4 years ago - at the age of 27 - to "get it". I went from being severely in debt (no student loans, just a voluntarily repossessed car and maxed out credit cards), to responsibly paying off every penny. For the first time in my life, I actually have a savings account with some money put away. My spending habits are still not ideal, but I'm doing far better now than I ever did before I hit bottom.
"Anyway, there is a competitor to the App Store, it's the Play Store and it's available to any consumer who wishes to shop there."

Except Android apps don't work on iPhone.
Most of them went into the workforce when the Great recession hit.

The ability to write off a student loan as a bankruptcy was removed in 2005. While part of this law has been thrown out, many people are still stuck as indentured servants to the loan sharks.

Housing is insane... around here in the bay area, but from the older people I've chatted with, it was always a tough market. Now, if you moved to my hometown, you could get a beautiful home for $200k.
dlang uses several. One notable one is the "autotester" written by Brad Roberts. It's built to ensure that breaking the D compiler (as tested by the test suite) does not result in commits.

It's incredibly useful.
I will say this for Emacs, though: while bad interactions between packages do happen, they're surprisingly rare given the number and variety of packages that are available.
The whole wife/girlfriend part was too forced in my opinion. Post would have been better without it.
I love this post for the in-depth explanation of the UX challenges around e2e encryption and why they made the decisions they did. It's educational.

I think Moxie highlights a very good point that is commonly underrated among "security Dunning-Krugers": Opening yourself to the possibility of an attack is often OK if the attack is easily detectable, and if the identity of the attacker would be obvious upon detection. Yes, Facebook could intercept and decrypt a message without your advance knowledge. However, you would be able to detect it after the fact. And if you detected an attack, the attacker could be no one other than Facebook. You could then expose them and ruin their reputation. Given this, it's unlikely that Facebook would risk carrying out such an attack in the first place.

Security is not binary, it's risk management. The goal is to minimize the risk of an attack, not to rule it out entirely (hint: you can't). I think WhatsApp has made the right choices here.
do you have any suggested reading (for a layperson)?
You don't need to be a monopoly to be convicted of anti-trust violations.
I take it you don't deal with enterprise storage then. 15mm is the size of basically every enterprise 2.5" drive sled. That's the form factor of all 10k RPM 2.5" drives. The only thing the drive you described DOESN'T work with are laptops. Pretty much anything else it's a perfect fit.

The laptop drive thickness is the abnormality for the rest of the storage world.
No, it was supernatural because it was about allegedly existing non-material entities and forces that cannot be observed through the senses, and that have will and the ability to influence the material world. Think spirits or gods. In Christianity from the beginning this was described in terms of reason versus faith.

Human beings have two basic ways of thinking about reality, the natural and the supernatural, and until modern science came along they habitually mixed the two together. So for instance if I asked someone why a tree was black, they would answer "it was hit by lightening" which is a natural explanation, and then "and the lightening was thrown by the God Thor" which is a supernatural explanation.

The great innovation of modern science (inspired by the Greeks) was to decide to stick entirely with natural ideas. It took centuries to make this change, and many battles, and it made possible modern technology.

Let me add that the way I am using the term "natural" and "supernatural" is not my invention, it is the standard way philosophers and scientists have spoken about these matters for many centuries.
That and another one, yes!
A more obvious answer would be "Bring back the ability to host our own servers in-game, the hardware is obviously powerful enough."
Let me just answer this one: Why can't I buy insurance across state lines like other insurances?

Because then pretty much EVERY insurance company will pick up and move to the one most desperate state that writes laws in their favor, doesn't tax them, allows them to sell substandard insurance, gives them liability protection and forced arbitration and in every way abuse the customer.

And the industry will become abusive, fraudulant, manipulative, and untouchable. Every state will lower its standards and revenue streams to keep insurers from leaving and taking jobs with them. And the customer will have very few if any good choices and no recourse when screwed over. Over time, the industry's power over the state will become even more entrenched. Exhibit one: The credit card industry, and south dakota. Go watch the Frontline episode I refer to in another thread.

I'd like to answer some of your other questions like "why do I have to buy a plan that covers obgyn" but I'm too pissed over having to pay for rear seatbelts I'll never wear, a space program I'll never use, fire hydrants I'll probably never need, and taxes for schools I'll never attend. Living in a society sucks. I mean, I have to pay for roads I'll never drive on. It's bullshit. I mean even my freaking insurance-- I have to pay for all these diseases that it'll cover! I'm NEVER gonna get ALL of them at once. And only one of them can even possibly kill me, maybe two max. Why should I pay for protection from a heart attack AND cancer treatment?!!! Bullshit, man. That's how they get you. I mean, I saw tonsilectimy on the list and I don't even have tonsils any more. Tyranny. I want an a la cart health insurance plan where I can figure out what I'm likely to get and only get insurance against that specific disease!!!
Thanks for the suggestion -- I expanded on this idea in a blog post:

http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/01/13.html

Feedback appreciated!
This is a fantastic point I've never heard raised on discussions of this topic. However, I think this would address the total wealth/income of the nation, but wealth disparity wouldn't be caused by this, would it?
Need to get a T-Shirt with Trumps picture and the following line...

"Welcome to the era of bullshit"

I'm in TX. I have met only 2 people that will admit to voting for him.