skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not me, but I can tell you why I would pay more taxes.

For one, having health care tied to a job is a big burden. As an employee, it makes choosing to leave my job extremely worrisome, especially if the federal government repeals the pre-existing conditions portion of the ACA. I can never leave my job while I am sick, or my kids are sick.

Tying your health care to work also makes it harder to start a small business. You need to offer your employees health care to compete for good workers, but it costs a lot more per employee for a small company to get insurance than for a big company (a big company can get a better deal because they have a larger cohort).

An even more insidious fact of employer based health care is that it doesn't cost the same for everyone. If I am going to hire someone and offer health care, it will be MUCH more expensive for an employer if the person is going to have their children and/or spouse covered as well. It will cost more if they are older. It will cost more if they have medical conditions.

This adds a perverse incentive to employers to favor hiring younger, single, people. As an employer, I should not be worried about the marital and familial status of my employee. I should pay them the salary we agree to. There are laws against discriminating against some of these groups, but if you are a small company it makes a huge difference to your bottom line.

I also fear getting a major illness. Suppose I am doing everything right, working and I have health insurance. I get cancer, and it is treatable, but it might take years to beat. I start out fine, with my good insurance. One year in, it becomes clear I can't keep working my job, so I am let go. I can keep paying for my own insurance through COBRA, but my savings are dwindling because I am no longer working. Even if I am suddenly able to work again, I wouldn't be able to get new insurance because of my pre-existing condition.

There is literally NO amount of planning I could have done to avoid this situation. I was doing everything right, and an illness can make you go bankrupt.

The last argument for why I would pay more for health insurance is a moral one. I find it immoral to not provide basic health care to everyone. I feel it is an obligation we have to each other, and the most efficient way to meet that obligation is through a single payer system. Insurance works best with the largest possible pool of people to spread the risk, and you can't get a larger pool than everyone.

So yes, I am willing to pay a little more for a single payer system, for both selfish and altruistic reasons.
Ολυμπιακός – Μπεσίκτας στο Καραϊσκάκη
I will 100% be moving to Cali if this passes. I won't mind paying higher taxes for this as well. Right now my shit health care plan costs me $260/month in MI. If the taxes increase by 300-400/month I'm all for it and will gladly pay it.
How about we get rid of Prop 13, a not-so-stealth tax on the young.
Will there be a private insurance alternative? Many of my parents' Canadian friends visit the US for complex procedures and surgeries (because of both quality and wait times).
Insurance companies acting as profit-seeking middlemen between doctors and patients create a perverse incentive to drive up costs on both ends. It's a terrible feedback loop caused by treating health care (which is ultimately a cost center) as a for-profit enterprise. Every other modern country has managed to figure this out except the United States.
> Would love a counter opinion.

Every other first world country?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_univers...
For one, doctors educational costs are astronomical in the U.S compared to other countries. The amount of people able to become doctors is artificially limited. Drug prices are unregulated. The cost of developing drugs is high and has been getting higher.

Hospitals have little price transparency and the cost of same procedures at different hospitals is wildly different. The same bag of saline can cost 10x more at one hospital vs another. In markets where there is price transparency, like Lasik surgery or other elective procedures, the prices are far more sane.

One thing that spending double as a percent of GDP on health care and getting worse outcomes proves is that THE SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM IS NOT TO SPEND MORE MONEY. Unfortunately, this is the only thing American politics knows how to do as more money means more money for every special interest with their hand out.
Off the top of my head, and certainly some are up for debate. But consider how well these systems worked prior to government intervention.

You may think medicare, for instance, is run horribly -- but I'm pretty confident that seniors are far happier with it than they were pawning off their possessions to get medical treatment prior to it being created.

- Medicaid

- Medicare

- The USPS (which, let's be honest, is freaking amazing for the price)

- Social security

- Basic research

- The military (remember our private security contractors and how much more horrible they were?)

- The fire department

- The police (can you imagine how horrible a private police force would be?)

And on the flip side, consider how atrocious private prisons are compared to federally operated ones.

I'm sure there are many, many others...
Many. Start with highways, aviation safety, and prisons. Oh, and the history of private fire departments is a carnival of horrors. I mean, the list goes on (and on, and on).
SpaceX Will Launch Its First Reused Rocket Later This Month
This is quite an interesting discussion.

Has anyone here initially decided to not ever have kids (say, in their 20s) and then much later changed their minds (say, in their 40s or 50s)?

Alternatively, has anyone here simply put off having kids for a few decades and then had them?

How has that worked out for you, from both personal and career perspectives?
So you drank the Kuhnaid huh? Bradley Kuhn has done more to turn companies away from the GPL than anyone else...

Is this anti-GPL too? Helping companies get it right?

https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/3/8/158
Still, in any consistent way of assigning probabilities to events, if A implies B, then P(A) <= P(B).

Neural network outputs are not probabilities. I think that's the main lesson here.
California legislature is much more financially reckless than Vermont's
my latest search was "century city makati" and set it to "past 24hrs", google list a never ending of unrelated results. bing list as much related results as needed, and lead me to a forum in the top result which gives me good idea of what i am looking... in the past few days i have to check Bing for results after I queried google, now i have to set bing permanently.
Tesla Completes Hawaii Storage Project That Sells Solar at Night
It's hard to quantify 'better' but there are some major advantages to a single payer systems in terms of efficiencies. For example, a single standard for billing is in itself a major win.
Knowing health care prices doesn't help much, though. If you break your leg, you aren't going to go to a bunch of different hospitals, compare prices, and choose the best value option. If you are in a car accident and unconscious, the paramedic isn't going to figure out where you can get the best deal.

Medical decisions are a TERRIBLE candidate for a free market. You are never in a position to be a rational actor in them.
It wasn't profound -- an improvement for an existing product. The idea came from suggestions made by users on a web forum. Since it's an electronic gadget that means a new design. It's a fairly specialized audio related device. What I needed to do was a circuit board design spin and prototyping stage, then a bunch of testing.

One good thing was that the effort could be broken into chunks, and interrupted. I didn't need the kind of "flow" that programmers often talk about.
That requires an effort to repeal Prop 13 asap.
This sort of result has been showed repeatedly. We really need more (and better) nutrition education. The level of obesity and overeating in our society is astounding. I'd be surprised if most people could even implement basic calorie counting.
Physician pay (last I checked) only makes up about 20%, including the costs of them practicing. They see about half of it in the end. There is even more spent on administration, which makes up about 25% of spending. Compare that 25% to the 9% in Canada and it becomes pretty obvious where you can save money.
So what is Apple's decision about what code is?
I recently gave interviews and did my preparation from https://www.educative.io/collection/5668639101419520/5649050.... It was pretty useful.
Please do not try to connect the shitstorm that is the White House these days to something that is actually functional (Silicon Valley). ugh.
Have your contractor friends check out NASE. I used to have amazing health coverage through them for about $150 (pre-Obamacare).
Because they didn't add provisions to control pharma and hospital gouging. Let them run free and they'll suck you dry.
> Which is to say: Women are more likely to work part time jobs.

Please stop trying to mislead people.

From your link on the very first page:

> However, even among full-time workers (those usually working 35 hours or more per week), men worked longer than women—8.2 hours compared with 7.8 hours. (See table 4.)

Like I said this is an ~5% difference. If you don't like this particular study the results have been replicated dozens of times across a wide range of industries.

If you have some evidence that full time male tech workers work fewer hours than full time female tech workers I'd love to see it.
> Here's the only thing I'm confused about. Do we have examples of the government running a service better than the private sector?

Medicare is a good case study, because Medicare has both publicly managed plans and privately managed plans.

As it turns out Medicare Advantage (the privately managed plans) consistently beat Original Medicare on the three primary metrics: cost, medical outcomes, and patient satisfaction scores.

(In fact, Original Medicare has the lowest satisfaction rates of all major Medicare plans).
It's generally just good for the entire community with benefits felt in a myriad of other issues, like gun violence, suicides, abortions, mental health, crime, drug and alcohol abuse, homelessness etc...

The question is, why wouldn't a society or community want universal healthcare for it's people?
So these 'lower value' people should just die when they get cancer?

I find the idea that not being able to earn a high enough salary means you are unworthy of basic medical care repugnant.
As an amateur programmer, I'm intrigued in how this is achieved, would you happen to have any references you could point me to?

My first encounter with recursion was when I needed to traverse a directory tree. I couldn't figure how to go arbritrarily deep without writing tens of nested for-loops. Then recursion somehow hit me, or I found something interesting on Google, can't remember, it was over 10 years ago, pretty sure SO wasn't around.

...and then a while later I found out about os.walk (this was python).
Slows glaucoma: https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep33950

Effects in long-lived mice: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exger.2013.06.009

Protective of the aging heart: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.freeradbiomed.2009.10.003

Benefits without calorie reduction: https://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1035720100

In nematodes, looking at signaling: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature07583

And so on. There is a lot more out there on this topic:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=alternate+day+fast...

Researchers still have a very long way to go in order to understand the calorie restriction and intermittent fasting responses completely. In order to do that one pretty much as to have a complete map of cellular biochemistry. Don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen; decades is a very reasonable expectation, I think, based on watching progress in understanding sirtuins over more than a decade, which is just one very thin slice of a very large problem. Practical rejuvenation based on repair of damage after the SENS vision (such as via clearing senescent cells) will be a going concern well before researchers can fully explain calorie restriction in the context of age-related changes and cause and effect in the operation of mammalian biochemistry.
I simultaneously believe in universal coverage as a moral imperative, but also the efficiency of markets over government AND basic income as a necessity as automation displaces millions of workers.

So, why not combine concepts - start off with basic income that has to be spent on health care insurance. Start with enough for coverage against major issues, but people can spend more for more coverage.

Universal coverage is attained immediately without any individual mandates. Giant, wasteful bureaucracies go away. Prices are controlled via market forces.

And it paves the way for a system of basic income...
assuming you're asking in good faith, the answer is pretty simple. A larger population has more leverage, and if all of the citizens bargain as one bloc (i.e., if the government does so on their behalf), it drives the market. Note that a tremendous chunk of the market needs to be involved for this to have maximum effect -- if a physician can "opt out" of Medicare/MediCal and make more money, they will, by and large. (There's a reason that being on call instead of waiting for referrals is called "service")

Most physicians in (e.g.) the UK do participate in the single-payer market (there are a small number who make a living offering pay-as-you-go services, but they are the vanishing minority), since it dominates demand. In the US there are a great many physicians who simply won't accept Medicare rates (they're viewed as too low by most) and since there are alternative sources of patients, that's who they treat (typically privately insured). This leads to the cases that show up at County or the ER being a hell of a lot more expensive than necessary as they tend not to be survivable for long. (A running joke at most county hospitals is that conditions believed "incompatible with life" routinely walk or roll into the ER and clinics.)

If you have 1-3 insurance companies and MediCal/Medicaid and Medicare then you have different rates for different groups, almost all of it horrendously opaque, and the 3rd party insurers are not incentivized to pay for anything.

As far as private vs. public, the issue here is the same as for schools, a private insurer or school can choose not to insure or educate a "customer", the government by law cannot. In the handful of cross-over studies of charter schools or vouchers, after controlling for subject-specific effects, the children who switched from public to charter or private tended to do slightly worse than expected based on their test scores from public schools. (It is a difficult experiment to run for numerous reasons.)

Medical care, unlike most goods and services, is stunningly inelastic in demand -- you either need it and will do whatever is required to get it, or you don't and won't, by and large. (Elective surgeries for cosmetic purposes are a separate matter; nobody goes in for a stent "just because" or visits the trauma unit just to poke their head in) Furthermore, a substantial amount of the cost is centered on the first and last few years of a person's life. Unless you would like the "market driven solution" of even higher infant mortality and elderly culling to proceed, 3rd party insurers don't have the incentives to make it go.
Contracts and practice plans are considerably simplified ;-)
Urgency does wonders for the political process.
If you read it carefully, "the major complaint from parents" is one of my top complaints. I simply had been trying to be polite and analytical in other posts, but seeing the usual putdown thrown out there caused me to see red.

If it wasn't the stock way of ignoring complaints for Common Core, I'm sure that I would have responded differently.
I am the author of this post! If you notice inaccuracies or have thoughts, please comment here. I will be reading and responding to all comments as always.
(ML engineer from Twizoo here)

We use a multitude of models - linear and non-linear, supervised and unsupervised - to surface the best user-generated content from social for our clients.

Our ML stack is written almost entirely in Python - because of the readily available excellent libraries that give you many of the tools you'll need in your ML toolbox (matplotlib, numpy, pandas, scikit-image, scikit-learn, scipy to mention just a few). We have some more sophisticated image processing in C++. We find ourselves attacking quite a number of machine learning problems so to make our workflow more efficient we have built a layer of functionality above these libraries to manage the flow of data and speed up model prototyping and assessment. Processing input data and model fitting is usually done locally, with any hyper-parameter grid search or other computationally intensive tasks being run on a remote, cloud hosted cluster spun up on-demand.

Our tech is built around lambda architecture principles - we have a live path that processes new social content to the extent required to make content immediately available to relevant clients, and a batch path that processes complete datasets daily. Our ML models get used on both paths.

With a neat set of Python libraries for data manipulation and model definitions and our own model prototyping and assessment rig the biggest challenge is always building big, quality datasets. This continues to be our biggest learning and we are always keen to explore how others tackle this. We rely on a combination of in-house turking (which we consider a vital model development stage), external turking services (for volume) and have additionally looked at some knowledge transfer techniques.

See https://www.periscope.tv/w/1RDGlYXeDpOJL for a quick talk where I expanded on why and how Twizoo uses ML.
One problem is that "private industry enabled by competition" is not really an option. Deregulating healthcare would be close to impossible politically.
You would do well to start questioning the idea that the private sector does anything "better". After all, it was them that gave us Enron, Deepwater Horizon, and most recently, the subprime mortgage crisis, which brought the entire world economy to its knees. Those are only a few examples that spring to mind.

In addition, comparing the government with the private sector is pretty silly. They have different goals. Private companies try to maximize profit, even if it comes with massive externalities (which, barring regulations, they happily pass on to others). Governments aim to serve their citizens, even if it comes at the expense of efficiency. This means that any given problem will be handled very differently by the private sector compared to the government. The route we pick really depends on our priorities as a society.
Great insights - never considered this.

I can't imagine that insurance not being available for purchase across state lines is helping here, either.
The article you cite points at resistance to tax increases as the culprit. No state can afford single payer without a tax increase to fund it, so the talk of "budget issues" is misleading. It's simply a matter of convincing everyone to trade paying private insurers for a tax increase. Vermont got pushback from the business community saying it would hurt the economy, but that seems suspect to me considering they would not have to pay private premiums anymore. That and the economic benefits of a healthy population.
My motto is "Design for deletion."

Your first priority is to design your code for the inevitable day when your successor (or perhaps you yourself) dislikes it. The less effort/risk to uncouple and remove it, the better.

This helps avoid the well-meaning pitfall where you design things to be "customizable in the future", but the ways it needs to be customized aren't well known, and it turns out you've only complexity that gets in the way of the changes you eventually want.

In contrast, any code that's easy to remove implies that there's a good boundary, interface, or contract.
This is gonna be great for a startup in California!
Um no, no one was talking about fashion. Funny how you accuse me of not being frank while you make disingenuous statements like "mandated by law".
If that's a Ponzi scheme, then every insurance policy is a Ponzi scheme. These programs are insurance against getting too old or sick to work; they are not a retirement fund.
How an Atari Chip Set Off a War Among Neuroscientists
My wife has a great Rab jacket. Some other very high quality brands I've bought from that people might not have heard of: Mont-Bell (Japan), Montane (UK).
What effects would this have on the currently generous insurance plans of $huge_tech_company_based_in_CA?
> But now it looks more like there's no ideology involved ...

It's the Linux Foundation, not the GPL Foundation or the FOSS Foundation. And Linus has made his position abundantly clear on the LKML that the GPL is a tool that serves Linux, not the other way around. Therefore, it shouldn't be all that surprising that there is no ideology involved.
>> For one, doctors educational costs are astronomical in the U.S compared to other countries.

Doesn't this apply to all US educational costs (at the college level)? On the other hand doctors in the US seem to get paid a lot more than in, say, the UK.
so should the government force those people to spend their earned income on healthcare for others?

Absolutely not. Pretty much any question that starts with "should the government force ..." can be answered "no". You earned your income, it's yours and it should be up to you how to spend it.

Using force / aggression (aka the government forcing you to do something) is a violation of your most fundamental rights, and strips you of your agency and dignity as a human being. And while the end may sound noble ("everybody should have free health care") the truth is that nobody is in a better position to determine how your income should be spent than you, and nobody other than you has any standing to decide what kind of charity (if any) you should engage in.

Rather than stealing from Bobby to pay for Suzy's health-care, it would be better to enact policies that A. reduce the cost of health-care, and B. encourage general economic welfare, job creation, etc., such that both Bobby and Suzy can pay for their own health-care from the get-go.
Hey, thanks for sharing that. I hope it was as helpful to you sharing it as it was for me reading it.

I really relate to your need to support your mom and sister. Whether I wanted it or not, I was the 'man of the house' very early on. It's extremely unfair and affected every relationship I had up until I got divorced.

I also relate to your missing/foggy memories. For a long time I couldn't remember the happy parts of my childhood. It was like life began for me when my parents divorced; and life was hell.

If you haven't, consider therapy. I can't really describe how it helped me move past the emotions of my childhood, but it did. I have no issues remembering the happier times, and I can remember the miserable times without really feeling that black dread spreading across my stomach anymore. If you're still feeling it, you're stuck, and it's okay to get help with it.

Trust me when I say you are not utterly broken. You've been tenacious in your pursuit of peace, be tenacious in your pursuit of a whole self.
+1 to this, this was one of the best podcasts I've heard recently. I didn't know anything about Patagonia at all before listening, but it really made me respect him and his company.
> they didn't control for hours worked

Are the programmers in question being paid by the hour? Does programmer pay within each gender correlate closely to hours worked?