skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The basic concept of health insurance works fine. Yes, your probability of dying approaches 1 as you age, but the costs you incur along the way can vary enormously. Somebody who's wonderfully healthy until they instantly die in bed of a heart attack will cost the insurer basically nothing, while somebody with a chronic condition can easily cost millions of dollars over decades. Costs can vary enormously depending on your luck, which is just the sort of thing insurance is good for.

There are big problems with running the whole system using insurance, of course. It's fairly easy to predict future costs for a lot of people. Given free reign, insurers will charge completely unaffordable premiums to those people, effectively excluding them from the system. You see the same thing with other types of insurance: if you have a horrible driving record, or if your house is in an area that gets a devastating hurricane every ten years, your premiums will be huge. The difference is that those are optional activities, and if you can't afford the premiums then you can walk, bike, hitch a ride, buy a different house, etc. A sick person can't switch to a healthy body.

That's why the ACA has the mandate. If you require everyone to pay in, then you can also require insurers to ignore certain predictors of future risk when determining premiums.

Fundamentally, there are only two choices. One choice is to have lots of people dying of easily treated conditions because they can't afford the treatment, and the other choice is to have government step in and socialize the system to some extent. The system was already socialized before the ACA with the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, which requires hospital emergency rooms to treat all patients regardless of ability to pay. This was horribly inefficient, of course, but that's how it was.

So: choose your poison. If you think the advantages of going full free market in health care outweigh having poor people die of easily treatable diseases, then that's a valid opinion, but you should acknowledge the negative consequences. If you want poor people to be able to obtain treatment, then you'll need to accept some interference, the only question is how you'd like to have it be structured.

Edit: rather than "poor people," I really should say "people whom the hospital thinks are poor." If you get beaten up and mugged and left for dead, the ER won't know if you have money, and might decide not to take the risk. There are good reasons for even a selfish wealthy person to want some form of universal treatment.
Take a look at EToys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etoys_(programming_language)
I've never heard of anyone getting hit with a million-dollar bill for dental work, so I don't think that's quite the existence proof you want it to be.
Before the article even begins it gives erroneous information:
"Morphine is extracted from opium, a compound found in the seeds of the opium poppy."

Edit: The research looks interesting though.
Microsoft to end support for Office 2013 starting February 28th 2017
> I do not believe that "any-protection batteries" work, ever.

Is this belief based on having studied historical precedent or axiomatic? I'm not an expert, but from what I know both the older European and newer Asian industrial powerhouses have all instituted protectionist policies and strong state/private sector ties in areas they perceived of strategic importance (e.g. the Korean chaebols or the Japanese zaibatsu/kairetsu). And although this did not always succeed (e.g. Japan's bet on Prolog based AI), as far as I can tell, it's the only thing that ever did work in an area where one's country was not already a natural leader.

The most obvious example right now is the Chinese IT industry as a whole. And then there's of course also Samsung.

Have you read Ha-Joon Chang's "Kicking away the ladder"? I haven't but the core thesis seems much more plausible in view of the historical facts I'm aware of than the neo-liberal mantra (googling finds http://akarlin.com/2009/10/kicking-away-the-ladder-review/ as a positive review that also contains links to critical reviews in the comments).
John Romero's Principles for Programmers
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/doubts-cloud-clai...
Teach them how to solve problems before you even start talking about code.
And the civilian SSR system was built on the released frequencies and protocols of Mode 3 of the military Mark X IFF system, which was adopted by civilian agencies in the mid-1950s after a particularly nasty airborne collision.

Sixty years later and we're still bounded by legacy. As a result of shortage the general-use squawk codes are namespaced into each national ATC region, so aircraft have to constantly change squawks even in supposedly contiguous regions such as Eurocontrol. Squawk 4463 means a different thing in UK airspace than in French.

Ironically, military aircraft still support Mode 3 in order to integrate with civilian ATC, who call it Mode-A, but all their special don't-shoot-me-I'm-friendly stuff is handled by more modern encrypted protocols.
There's too much to unpack and critique in here, but No True Scotsman applies when people move categorical goalposts (to mix metaphors), it doesn't apply when talking about people who don't meet the basic tenets of their professed beliefs (hatred is evil).

I haven't been beaten for seeming effeminate, but I have been ridiculed and bullied for the same reasons. I don't decide to find which demographics about the bullies are salient (some were latino, some were athletes, are either of those fair game?) to form prejudices around.

More importantly, you misunderstood my core point:

> Except in America, people do shop around for religions.

I agree, but whether people shop or not, the existence of God is a factual question. It's either true or not. Same goes for a particular moral framework. Either it's true or not. We are all making our best bets on those dimensions. It's important not to judge, hate, outgroup, closet, ostracize, or despise because we happened to weigh available evidence and experiences differently.

In this specific case (to stay on topic), it's fair to criticize the science of whether embryos count as people. It's fair to discuss, philosophically, the benefits and drawbacks of using embryos in research. It's fair, again, to discuss whether we want corporate industries involved in embryo production to improve health outcomes.

I think we need better empathy and reasoning if we're going to act like bringing God into existence was a choice people made some day and could just as easily unmake. That's where there are very strong parallels with other justice issues like the treatment of people based on sexual orientation, immigration status, marital status, or mental health conditions.
Not hosting private medical data on a server controlled by a country with no regard for privacy of those patients is not an unreasonable expectation. It is a basic requirement for this kind of business. There will come a crackdown on that kind of malpractice. I hope you reconsidered till then.
Thanks all. For some reason I thought we usually hear about who's in the batch at the beginning of the term...but it makes more sense to reveal on demo day.
I felt the same way at first, but I read through the rails guides and it all made sense. And for people who work on a bunch of different CRUD apps all that conformity is a big win. You can jump back into a project and already know where everything is and how it fits together.
Logo -- it helped me learn when I was younger. The best part is as it is visual, kids can see how what they type changes what happens on the screen. It gives them instant feedback in to learning how to give machines instructions. This software can be loaded on any laptop or other computer. It doesn't require any crazy hardware either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)
Yeah, wanting reasonable evidence before believing in the casual relationship between two events is fair.

But in this case, the Redditor can't provide scientific proof, because he's a layman. What he can provide is evidence that he couldn't walk, received stem cell treatment, and then could walk.

90% of the top level comments effectively said "No, impossible, there must be some other reason that you can now walk". That is to say, they feel that because there's no evidence that it's possible, it's impossible until scientists prove that it is possible. Well no, that doesn't make sense and it isn't usually how things work. These people's small amount of knowledge of the scientific method has caused them to arrogantly discredit potentially real phenomenon.

What's interesting is that one of the main top level comments which says "wow, I had a feeling this would be possible" is from an actual stem cell researcher.
> One day you might be the 'washed-up' 40 year old programmer who the younger guys curse for your outdated skill set.

Or who the younger guys curse for being stubborn and not adapting to reality. I've seen plenty experienced engineers think they can get away with not knowing git (released 2005) or ISO C99 (released 2000) because "they have seen it all and done it all".

The skill set is not outdated because of age; it's outdated because someone refuses to learn. It usually happens at graduation: "I learned my job and now it's time to earn money". The reason it only shows up at 40yo is that it takes a while for one's skills to become antique enough to become a burning problem.
Isn't "(sic)" used to mark a misspelling in the original material? That's all I've ever seen it used for.
Who is going to need a database engine in 2020?
Metallic hydrogen, once theory, becomes reality
What happens if the immutable file is borked in transfer, leading to a partial file sitting in cache? Will this lead to a new class of problem that can only be solved by nuking the entire browser cache? It seems to me the way to do this right would have included a checksum of the content.
LTE smartphones too?
Reactor shutdown threatens world’s medical-isotope supply
What bubble is that may I ask?
Your long sentence is not hate speech. "I hate muslims" is. It is similar to how you mustn't say "I hate women" just because you have an enemy that happens to have two X chromosomes.

Although your real argument here is not about hate speech; it relates to proselytism, which definitely requires a legal framework.
Merkel/Brussels/EU telling how to handle refugees, how many should (independent) EU state take them, when etc. People don't like it or want it. They want to decide decisions like that on their own.
I taught a group of 9-12 year old basic logic and algorithms using Scratch to animate a scene.

One kid wrote a basic brick breaker and another pong.
They all seemed to enjoy the process since it's pretty straight forward drag/drop logic.

https://scratch.mit.edu/
Linear programming on paper first, then linear programming by code. I have no idea how to do that one with kids, without being present (since I barely managed to do it with adults, while being present).

Doing it on paper by hand first is more important then it sounds, so they can really understand a)what they are coding, b)how fricking awesome computers really are.
Yes exactly. Market participants all knew what Libor was and how it was computed. I mean some tenors never even traded - they were always made up!
The subpoena – or at the very least, the concrete call to give the data – would not be issued against you. It would be issued against Amazon. You will have no course of defense in that case.
>"It becomes immediately obvious why, eg, ^[ becomes escape. Or that the alphabet is just 40h + the ordinal position of the letter (or 60h for lower-case). Or that we shift between upper & lower-case with a single bit."

I am not following, can you explain why ^[ becomes escape. Or that the alphabet is just 40h + the ordinal position? Can you elaborate? I feel like I am missing the elegance you are pointing out.
Pretty soon we'll have to start telling them what a command line interface is, commonly known today as a foreign and abstract concept defined by an acronym, "CLI".
What Entrepreneurs Have to Know About Failure and Why It's Overrated
Everybody wants a pure meritocracy. The social justice crowd believes it doesn't and can't exist, while the anti-PC crowd believes it does exist and in fact they and their friends are members of it.

I'm happier in teams where people try to promote people and work due to some shared understanding of merit, but realise that a lot of success in a group is due to its member's preferences and behaviours, and not to any objective measure of value. People should be able to concentrate on doing what they consider to be quality work, without getting depressed over not being seen as 'objectively good'.
Ask HN: Looking for Communication Systems lab manuals using Simulink/Matlab
Hi,
I am looking for Communication System (channel coding, modulation, cdma,...) Matlab/Simulink exercises to get a more in depth knowledge. Unfortunately I couldn't find high quality lab manuals after googling. Do you have any suggestions on where to look?
This doesn't stand up to evidence.

A large portion of the fake news in closed political Facebook groups is actually fake – it's Macedonian in origin, tends to use throwaway domains like http://usainfonews.com and http://usapoliticszone.com (seriously, do a WHOIS on those), uses plagiarized and/or demonstrably false content, and results in compensation for the people who post it. The purported compensation often far outstrips what anyone could reasonably expect from advertising revenue. You can join these groups and watch Americans comment on the stories – apparently believing the blatantly false news stories, by the thousands.

1: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/fake-news-how-partying-mac...

2: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fake-news-macedonia-teen-shows-h...

3: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-38168281

4: https://www.ft.com/content/333fe6bc-c1ea-11e6-81c2-f57d90f67...

5: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/macedonian-teen-claims-t...

6: http://www.npr.org/2016/12/14/505547295/fake-news-expert-on-...

7: http://www.msnbc.com/kate-snow/watch/macedonian-teen-capital...

8: http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/national_world/2016/...
Hedge Funds Strike Paydirt on Actelion Deal After Tracking J&J's Jet
Seeing this reminds me of how things were and to be thankful for how far things have come.
If it meets the guidelines, this may be better submitted as a "Show HN".

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
No, the electricity flowing will still generate heat. Flipping bits may not take a lot of power, but it does take power, and some of that power is converted into heat regardless of what material you use. Except maybe superconductors, but I'm not sure.
> Brussels have too much power and byrocracy.

Well, it may be about immigration but your bureaucracy point is precisely about bananas. The EU has been positioned by the UK media as being a pointless bureaucracy that obsesses about how bent bananas are... which is a huge charicature.

There are undoubtedly bureaucratic aspects to the EU but speaking in broad generalisations isn't useful.. they need to be discussed on a case by case basis.

> It's mainly about mass immigration.

Again, immigration is broadly speaking a problem because of a lack of investment in infrastructure. The immigration itself is a net benefit.

The UK economy is stronger with immigrants than without. Outside the EU the UK will actually require increased immigration to grow, rather than decreased.

[Edit: missed a point...]

>* People want nation states, no one voted for mass immigration. You can say racist all you want but that doesn't change the fact.*

What makes you so confident in speaking for what "people want"?

Clearly at least 48% of referendum voters disagree with you; saying "people want" when you're talking about a razor-thin majority (after a campaign packed with proven lies) seems like a huge overstatement.

Even amongst the 52% there are different groups. Some voted for soverignty, some because of fear of immigration, some out of anger against the political system, and some because they're just racist... for example YouGov polls measured that UKIP have double the national average of people who self-identify as having racist opinions, and that ~50% of UKIP voters support repatriation of 1st and 2nd generation immigrants, which is a policy even the BNP dropped. I don't think you should hold any illusions about who the racist vote is allied with, so you should be very careful how you speak and think about immigration to avoid finding yourself standing on the wrong side of that line.
There are libraries that allow C programs and Java programs to interact with Erlang as though they were Erlang processes. From the Erlang Interoperability guide: http://erlang.org/doc/tutorial/overview.html#id61008

The team at Github took another approach, described here: https://github.com/blog/531-introducing-bert-and-bert-rpc It's an old article - so I no idea if it's still in use. The Github sources haven't been updated since 2010.

I don't know how effective it is to chuck around 8MB data structures via message-passing. I have no experience of this myself.
I always loved this TED talk:

https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_...
Dynamic imports with webpack 2
I read another report,which says they are in-fact teaching others on this. So that wild-life organizers can take of themselves :)
"That is the entire point of insurance"

If you are allowed to buy "health insurance" after you are already sick, it's not "insurance" at all. Sorry, it just isn't.

Do you also think that you should be able to buy fire insurance after your house is already on fire, or car insurance after you've already had the accident?

Note again, and note well, that I'm not saying that people who are already sick should be abandoned. That is a real problem and one which should be addressed. I'm saying that bundling them into an "insurance" program makes no sense whatsoever.

It makes even less sense when you bundle them into Obamacare, the other users of which tend to be poor. I mean, they weren't able to afford insurance before... and now they're expected to not only cover their own costs, but the costs of all those with preexisting conditions? How did anyone expect that to work?

If you insist on funding the preexisting folks by charges on another risk pool, it probably should be done across the board (i.e., by charging the costs of the preexisting folks to all recipients of health insurance, not just the ones unfortunate enough to be stuck with Obamacare). That, at least, would have spread those costs over a much larger pool.
Still, some user intervention is required. Assuming you found a vulnerability in Office, it'd be preferable to have a vector where the user just had to open the file.
The Best Tech and STEAM Toys from the London Toy Fair
1st sentence of wikipedia, "Morphine is a pain medication of the opiate type which is found naturally in a number of plants and animals."
Discussions of larger work:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12168828

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11064762
More specifically: point us to a lie of the kind of severity that http://usainfonews.com and http://usapoliticszone.com peddle. Do a WHOIS on those sites or visit them in a sandbox; they're Macedonian in origin, demonstrably falsified, and have been spotted in the wild on Facebook.
What is your online privacy profile?
AWS S3 compatible storage on Kubernetes
A hard refresh (Ctrl+F5) of the page will refresh immutable resources too, so you won't need to clear the whole browser cache.
I wonder if this will have such high failure rates as other high-capacity hard drives. It's less cost effective to buy many smaller HDDs, but it's probably better for long-term data retention.

I wish there were a cheap and easy way to buy magnetic storage and the associated drive. I have no idea where to start, as I just want to back things up on tape.
Switzerland (though it's not really a EU member) had a "votation" where people decided to expand some surveillance power, ProtonMail blog post about it : https://protonmail.com/blog/swiss-surveillance-law/ . Yet I think Switzerland is still not too bad in terms of privacy but for how long...
Unless email is E2E encrypted from all the sources I care about like banks and stuff I don't see the point.
Some articles have suggested that ACA repeal poses an existential threat to rural hospitals and even the private healthcare industry, so those groups definitely care about remaining in business.
If anything, i'd argue that it's incorrect. I first tried `ls -l`, then realized "oh, there could be hidden files so `-l` is not correct. Yet, `ls -la` failed too.

To list "all files", you'd need to include hidden right? Well, to be sure, at least.
Security is a mindset. Carrying your master password around with you isn't safe, it's only perceived to be safe because you're not a target, like waking down a dark alley is 'safe' only because you're not carrying any cash.

If someone wants access to your stuff and you're carrying your master password then you may as well just not bother using a password in the first place!
Ireland too. We (essentially) don't have a military, let alone a budget line item for US-style mass surveillance projects. We're non-NATO, non-five eyes (or it's derivatives) and have a strong mechanism in place to preserve our neutrality (see "triple lock"[1]).

Being in the EU allowed this[2] landmark case to happen, which forced the issue of US companies complying with EU privacy protections.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_neutrality

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13499096
Actually, I have one :)
I did that once. No response from that recruiter after that. But a few months later, another one spammed!
Very timely - I am teaching students ages 8-12 & 10-15 coding this summer.

I've been planning on using Mozilla's Learning program (https://learning.mozilla.org/en-US/) a shot.

It's 2 separate sessions (1 for each age group) and 2 weeks in total. I have already outlined my plan based on it that I'm happy to share.

Does anyone have experience using their platform - share some thoughts?
One downside of protonmail is that they don't provide access via IMAP, so once you migrated it would be hard to back up your emails or leave them for another vendor.

They apparently now have a beta of IMAP access though: https://protonmail.uservoice.com/forums/284483-feedback/sugg...
Both of those sites can be instructed not to store copies of your pages for their caches or archives; and they will dutifully follow your instructions.

Also, the library analogy doesn't work in copyright law. Copyright protects the act of copying, not the act of transferring an already-authorized copy of a work to someone else.
If you have native code that wants to access a database, not round trip though Java, and not incur the size hit of shipping a separate copy OR (and this is key) want your Java code to be able to read the same database without writing your own Java->JNI SQLite wrapper.