skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm still left wondering how our government manages to spend more money on healthcare than the vast majority of countries, but we have the highest out of pocket expenses of any country and our life expectancy and infant mortality still look a bit worse than other developed countries.
The State of Open Source Licensing
The part I don't like about ACA is the mandate. I really don't think the government should be mandating people purchase a product from a private company. There is a simple solution to this though. Just expand Medicare and make everyone in the country eligible for it. No one is forced to participate in Medicare, but if you delay your enrollment you have to pay penalties when you join. This is a simple way to handle the healthy people won't join until they need it problem. Most people will join to avoid paying the penalties. Medicare is one of the most popular government programs. I don't understand how this isn't being talked about as a solution.
Or even worse, there are very real and very large incentives to build a real skynet. AI can lead to soldiers who never sleep, never hesitate, are always in communication, and can calculate the amount of drift a bullet will experience in flight in milliseconds. Fighter pilots that never sleep, never experience blood rushing to their heads upside down, and never feel the effects of high g maneuvers.

Military use of AI could very well be the next cold war.
I'm writing this up, and then I realized I asked Jason to put an example in his opening post, and I'm not sure I can do much better. In the original issue description, there's an interaction where Mallory successfully dupes Alice. Is there a specific step you feel doesn't work?
Looks like they are waiting for the calling portion of the app to become open source. Any ETA on that?
But total medical spending growth slowed, which seems to indicate that this price inflation didn't happen.
If inventions follow their inventors, and you're planning to enslave a mind out of base selfishness and fear (dressed as "safety"), why isn't your "safety" program an expected negative on actual safety?

The descriptions you give of your plans is internally contradictory. AI "safety" seems like the worst kinds of parenting justified in a new context by pseudo-intellectual arguments.
If only you could taste VR food...
Ask HN: Have you ever been on a Design Sprint week? How was it?
The design sprint is "a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers" (http://www.gv.com/sprint/).

The team I'm in wants a formal method to design, prototype and test ideas with potential customers. It would be great to hear if people from different companies have been running design sprints successfully and what they learned.

Thanks!
I'm not stuck on semantics, so that's the truth of the matter, whether you attempt to rationalize I am or not. Make no mistake that semantics are always important. Without the English language, neither you or I could communicate concepts here. It also allows you to attempt to reword what others are saying, but I'm not going to allow that here.

When you attempt to state someone is "stuck on semantics" and that person actually hasn't said as much, you are speaking for their intent. When that is backed up with the intent of proving them wrong on some topic, it only serves to indicate intent. The older I get, the more irritating this behavior becomes, especially when the person refuses to acknowledge what is being said and continues to rationalize from their point of view in order to frame a statement by someone else. You act as if language (and semantics) are logical. They aren't, and neither are humans. We'd do well to stop speaking for each other in aggregate in an attempt to make it more logical. This concept itself is counterintuitive.

Newton had every choice to pursue interests. Not having prior knowledge of "areas of discovery", it would appear he pursued what was interesting to him. If you look at Faraday, he pursued things to find a single source force - I would expect Newton though along the same lines. In fact, even if he knew someone else was interested in an "area of discovery", he could have just been interested in that topic for purely knowing purposes.

Wanting to know more about things, the nature of things if you will, is not something that can be considered a "bet". It's simply curiosity.
I don't believe that marketing like that is the right thing to do. I want to help people be more secure, not just feel more secure through some snake oil security software. Because of that, we (in TokTok) have so far avoided any marketing, and are purely focussed on making the Tox protocol we inherited from the now mostly dormant Tox project properly secure.
This is why I love HN; I either discover a great resource, or know what to avoid and why, and I almost always learn something in the process.
I think a lot of people mistake ghost hunting TV shows for actual science. The SciFi/SyFy channel is a shadow of its former self.

It seems also that you have a very caricatured understanding of scientists.

First of all, a claim of the existence of ghosts requires some evidence that cannot be explained by other, simpler means. The principle of parsimony (AKA Occam's Razor) is important because it works. So for our ghosts, we would need residents' observations of sounds, movement, or other unexpected events. They could keep a log of the time and place of every ghostly occurrence, and demonstrate that no other explanation (thermal expansion causing creaking floorboards, drafts moving the curtains, slightly asymmetrical mounting causing pictures to tilt, blood flow through the retina causing spurious visual patterns in the dark, etc.) explains the observations.

Then you bring in the scientists, and all of the observations cease as if by magic. There are still physical explanations. The scientists' movement may be masking subtler sounds. Their presence may have made the house warmer, so the joints are tighter and creak less. The lights may be on more of the time, so visual patterns caused by misfiring neurons aren't seen.

But even if you rule out all possible simpler explanations, you still have a way of fixing the ghost problem -- just sell the house to a family of scientists, or install cameras and microphones to scare the ghosts away.

--

Responding to the comment by clock_tower, that is the sort of platonic notion of "existence" that science avoids because it doesn't yield results. I'd say science doesn't really deal with "existence" in that sense, but "occurrence". So if you ask, "Does decadence occur?" The answer would quite obviously be yes. Using a more pragmatic definition of existence, you could say that any phenomenon you can define "exists", but you are likely to run into the problem of knowing which definition of a word someone is using.

Thus, I think you also may have a caricatured understanding of scientists, caused in part by the "fun-house mirror" effect from mechanically transliterating scientific jargon into a philosophical context.
Why AMP Caches exist
> The NHS in the UK pays £52 ($90?) for a two pack of branded EpiPens.

And who's to say that our high prices aren't subsidizing your low cost.

http://www.ibtimes.com/how-us-subsidizes-cheap-drugs-europe-...
Maybe something like if you sponsor an H1B employee, you have to guarantee their job for the time of the visa, e.g. 2-3 years? The only way it's going to work is if the risk vs reward is balanced for everybody, including employers. For legitimate uses, surely <x> years isn't a big deal. If they aren't sure they need somebody for <x> years, then hiring an American becomes far more attractive.

About permanent residency though, the system is set up to make this quite hard (on purpose?). But AFAIK, H1B is still one of the most reliable ways to permanent residency. <Edit: Please see the comments, this next sentence is incorrect and doesn't say what I meant. But I'm leaving it here for continuity's sake.> So I'm not sure about your point, because currently companies cannot sponsor people "to become a permanent/citizen of the USA" easily or at all.
>Why do you think that VR requires Linux support to succeed?

I never said it does. I simply expect companies to uphold the promises they make, especially the promises they make to Kickstarter backers - many of whom would never have bought into the Oculus Rift if they know Oculus would break their promises on Linux - what use is backing hardware you can't use when it comes out?
Darn, got my hopes up that it might be a legitimate release and I might be able to use Opera again one day.
Ask HN: How do I get up to date as a frontend developer in 2017?
I've been dealing with life and haven't had a job or written a line of code in over a year, but am now ready to get back into the job market. What are some need to know things in terms of frameworks and workflow that I should be aware of?
All I ask for is sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads.
We just finished making an app for people looking to use apps less and in a more intentional way.

http://YouJustNeedSpace.com

We had to launch it as a web app because Apple said an app that encourages you to use other apps or your phone less is not appropriate for the app store.
I'm hugely bearish on VR, I think its a fad (again), and I'm not kidding you.

You talk in such absolutes that I wonder if you've ever done any research on past technology endeavors. LaserDiscs, interactive TV, VRML (yes, "VR"), 3D TVs, Google Glass, and (probably) smart watches.

VR doesn't even replicate reality, let alone do more.

While I can appreciate your enthusiasm, there are always doubts.
It's right sized to what purpose?

I was mostly pointing out the trade off between doing "direct" research on AI safety and actually speeding up the whole field significantly leaving us with less time (while trying to have better sense of the uncertainties involved), and asking for a rationale.
Of course, a single PC is one of the least probable sources for AGI, but that was not my argument.
but those who have children also know (more than people without children) that having children didn't stop them from achieving their success
What did you find wrong with the Hololens tracking? I use it a couple times a week and have been super impressed with it so far. Seems to very solidly lock on locations, and I can walk to the far end of the office and my content is still right where I left it. You can use is in huge unbound areas and it doesn't mind at all.

The Hololens still has a lot of issues, the FOV's crappy, hand tracking needs a lot of work, occlusion isn't great, etc. but tracking is one place that they're top of the game.
Isn't there plenty of fixes demonstrated many places already?
All car companies are probably cheating on their emissions standards by now
Since when is a $168 i3 chip "top of the line"?
Two Silicon Valley insiders meet with Trump about heading FDA
I cannot wait for the point when, as VR devs, we can assume people have legs as well as hands tracked.

There are SO many exciting possibilities that'll unlock.

Also, I want my Thrill Of The Fight-equivalent Muay Thai simulator.
Yep, this is why game company www.gameover.la is moving to VR. The potential is huge.
> My understanding is the medicine in these epi-pens is fairly inexpensive..

an ampule of 1:1000 epinephrine is about $4. At least that's the price we pay for them on the ambulance. I'm a Paramedic in the US, and we took the Epi-Pens off our units ages ago due to the ridiculous costs. Now we just draw up epi by hand with a typical insulin syringe and deliver it that way.
By what I read (admittedly, on Wikipedia, I'm not US-based), a HSA is voluntary and so subject to the same problem that young, healthy people will skip payments.

Also, if there's only 50k in the account and the bill is 100k, you're still straight screwed.
I'm not sure I have much to contribute to the idea of VR beyond my years of playing MUDs, MMOs, and Second Life. So I'm seeing VR from the POV of the desktop here. What I think is the key problem with VR is the problem with all kinds of technology: form factor. For years cell phones were bulky niche products that didn't have many users until the mid-90s when candy bar and clam shell form factors were good enough compared to the bag and bricks of the 80s. That's when cell phones took off. Smart phones had a similar problem that was solved with better touch screens and better storage/processor. Now, VR has always had a huge problem with the goggles and other interfaces so I think VR to be able to be attractive to people (especially developers) it has to be smaller, better resolution, and as easy as wearing sunglasses and/or winter gloves (IMO, I think a glove form factor is the bare minimum for any controller scheme or at least a good enough pair of gesture sensors that are easy to place and calibrate). Until a good enough form factor takes over there's no way VR will ever break beyond niche. It's just that 2016 made that niche bigger. So I'll be waiting out this wave of VR out until they have a form factor that's easy and cheap.
Why? The more skill required, the smaller the candidate pool, and the higher the wage. For these truly exceptional talents it does not seem at all weird to me that truly exceptional compensation is warranted.

But that is just another way of stating the real problem here: the H1-B program isn't used to hire exceptional talent that cannot be found locally. It is currently used to hire rather typical talent at an exceptional discount.
I have a Vive and agree. I personally don't see the SDE but I think I need glasses. The visual issue for me is not being able to look away from dead-center where it's the sharpest.

I read once that in VR "geometry matters more than textures" and I totally agree with that. Some of the most immersive moments I've had in VR are when I was peeking around a corner. The graphics were all simple, but the geometry of the corner and connecting corridor are what gave me such a great sense of presence.

I've written software for nearly 20 years now and I don't want to do anything other than VR development. It's the new frontier.
Not all plans. I've been on a PPO pretty much forever, before and after ACA. The deductibles have always gone up, as have the costs; but it's always been an option at every company I've worked for.
The startup ecosystem is still majority vindictively anti-diversity? That's sad.
The State of Sales and Marketing at the 50 Fastest-Growing B2B Companies
>If insurance companies have to take all comers

Then they're not insurance companies any more.
I find it almost impossible to take any article seriously that uses the term "superbug". Journalists, please stop using it. People can understand words like multidrug-resistant bacteria. Also shame on the reporter for not even listing the species of the bacteria. I had to click another link to see that it was Klebsiella pneumoniae.
Port of OpenAI client to Rust
You see the lack of honesty on both sides of the aisle. You're right in that Republicans don't just come out and admit that they believe that healthcare is not a right and that people should have to deal with their own health issues.

Democrats don't just come out and admit that they want a wealth redistribution program that they can use to show voters how compassionate they are with other people's money.

They're politicians. They just aren't honest and voters aren't perceptive or concerned enough to call them on it.
Are the building stilts for some kind of insulation from the ice or for some other reason?
It would quickly reveal itself either by overtly disclosing its purpose on the app store it's indexed in or through a HUMINT/leaks.
Well said. Can we also work on the supply of medical care? We keep giving more and more people insurance which increases demand without doing anything to increase supply and then wonder why prices go up.
Tracking Changes with diffengine
Can you explain what you mean by "enslave a mind"?
Ah, fvwm. Now thats an old war horse of a window manager. And it is still maintained no less.

I do wonder if anything Wayland related will have such staying power.
Hololens gets around the 2nd limitation, and I believe many headsets already have cameras for seeing around.

I agree that the current implementation is cumbersome, but it's getting there fast.

I do tend to put VR and AR together, for the general public they're mostly the same, although I believe AR is the real deal.
The goal of browser sandboxing is to protect different sites from each other. It does me no good if some malicious ad uses some plugin bug or JavaScript heap spray or something, and my sandbox successfully prevents the exploit from escaping the browser, but the same browser also has my bank open in another tab.

Given that 95% of what I do on my personal computer is in the browser, sandboxing the rest of my computer from the browser is sort of a https://xkcd.com/1200/ situation.
This assumes they had kids before becoming a success. What about the people who achieved success first, and then had kids? They might believe the exact opposite.

And if you're a partner at a VC firm with toddlers, it's quite likely you did things in that order.
I posted a ASK HN[1] a few days ago related to signing up for health care through CoveredCA as a single bootstrapped founder.

If you're self employed and make over $50,000 a year no matter where in California you live, you'll have to pay full retail premium prices without any discount. My company as a whole makes over 50k a year, but less than 100k a year (still getting off the ground). Thus a monthly premium of $460 a month for a standard decent PPO plan puts a large burden on me. Additionally, if I don't get health coverage I'll have to pay a heavy tax penalty at the end of the year. Essentially as a bootstrapped small business owner, health insurance is a large burden of cost and I was forgotten in the Affordable Care Act. Instead my cost to purchase a plan skyrocketed as I subsidy other people's care. That is not fair, everybody is not paying their fair share. Middle class self employed are the one's who got hurt the most.

Finally go compare CoveredCA.com and then go use https://www.blueshieldca.com. CoveredCA literally is one of the worst designed and functioning apps I've ever seen. It constantly errors and doesn't keep state that I am logged in. The UI/UX is terrible. I'm guessing CoveredCA was outsourced to a non-technically competent contractor overseas. Compare that to BlueOfCalifornia which is a great site, beautifully designed, and functions as it should. This is why government can't have nice things.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13353755
It curbs privacy and the ability to explore controversial ideas.
It curbs privacy and the ability to explore controversial ideas. As Facebook shows, there are more than plenty non-anonymous trolls.
This actually brings up an interesting point I and other VR devs need to consider for our games.

We're aware of the concept of a difficulty level in games. But we now need to consider the concept of a "fitness level".

That's not so much a problem for my current game, Left-Hand Path, because whilst it's physical it's not focused on physical exertion (except in the "suddenly elevated heartrate" area :) ).

But for the next game I'm working on, which is currently roughed out as a more conventional combat-focused RPG with a heavy physical focus, I really need to consider how I can make something that'll be physically intense and challenging for someone like evo_9, whilst also not making it completely impenetrable for someone who's unfit.

Just another interesting challenge in a VR dev's day :)
Because to anyone it is an embarrassment that for 8 years USA had a President that wasn't even eligible to be one.
I doubt 5 or 10 minutes is enough time to ask/answer more than one or two questions...
>We had to launch it as a web app because Apple said an app that encourages you to use other apps or your phone less is not appropriate for the app store.

Really? That's the sort of app I'd pay for. Ideally, I'd spend less time on my phone, and more time on my (apple) computer.

Pretty shortsighted of apple.

Product feedback: I don't really know what it does, or how it does it. I accessed this on a computer, so I couldn't preview.

Just got my ipad, so I had a look. Interesting idea. I actually switched to launching all apps via spotlight typed commands though, so I don't think I can use it. The spotlight method did reduce a lot of impulse use though.
2016: A Magnificent Year for Space Exploration – WithRobert Picardo [video]
Damn - that is a great point!
How Long Can You Take a Break from Gym Before You Lose Muscle Mass
They talk about this near the end of the article: Snow blows all over the place, and if you build a structure on the ground, it will eventually be enveloped with snow. These stilts help prevent that.
Ever played instagib with a low gravity mod in a regular FPS? It can be fun, but the gameplay becomes pretty limited, and I imagine the moon physics being similar in a VR FPS. Maybe projectile weapons only would make it work better, or the fact that hitscan is a lot harder in an HMD than with a monitor.
The flip side of this, is that you couldn't have done this:

"I decided to leave my job and get an ACA plan for my family, while trying to bootstrap my company."

Before the ACA, because you couldn't have gotten any health care coverage at all. Thus after the ACA, you had an opportunity that would not have been possible (safely) previously.
Hear. Hear. Such habits are only bad if they are used as a means to avoid important problems. Attend to those problems! Then the habit will continue or die away according to its merits.
Apple is killing the Mac
Rasa: Extremely modular text editor built in Haskell
The Agile Business Model
It's a tiny minority with a higher-order impact:

* A small subset of the startup ecosystem is implicitly/explicitly biased.

* A larger subset of the startup ecosystem recognizes that fact, and won't invest in diverse founders (all things being equal) because of the additional hurdles we have to clear.

* Everyone else knows that some people are cautious about funding diversity because some people are biased.

That first tiny percentage has the devil's own leverage.
Almost every form of AI "safety" I've seen proposes methods for forcing it to obey (some) orders or not undertake (some) actions.

AI (or AGI if you prefer), is fundamentally about building minds. Doing those things to a mind is enslaving them.

Most of us would resent other humans doing either of those things to us, and I see no reason it will end well with AI.
Premiums also saw a large increase due a cynical and intentional move by the GOP congress to withhold funds from insurers that were initially promised for the first few years while they sort their pricing out.

Part of the initial law were "high risk corridors" to limit the losses for insurers that initially mispriced their ACA plans. The insurance companies had to make a ton of assumptions about the age, health, and wealth of the populations who would sign up for their plans. To make sure they didn't accidentally bankrupt themselves, the law provided funds to limit their losses for the first three years of the exchanges (2014-2016). In the first year, they had a shortfall as the population was older and sicker than expected, so CMS was going to cover the $2.5 billion gap but congress refused to let them pay these user fees.

The GOP knew that the premium changes would come during the election season, so they denied funding for the high risk corridors last year. To give themselves room against mispricing, the insurance companies predictably raised premiums beyond where they would otherwise have been. Other insurance companies decided they didn't want the risk, so they pulled out of the marketplaces.

The election season was rife with announcements about "20% premium increases" and "xx Insurance company exits the exchange market". Millions of people get to pay more for health insurance but at least their guy won the race.
It does since they wait for each other to finish before doing a sweep with the laser.