skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We probably don't hear about doctors' salaries as part of the problem because they're not a huge problem. A cursory web search indicates theres about a million doctors in the US. If you cut each of their salaries by 100,000 (which probably isn't feasible) then you would save 100 billion.

Sounds like a lot, right? Until you note its just $300 out of $10,000 spent per person each year.

And what's the trade-off? Despite your opinion that it's boring or potentially not very challenging... there are pretty logical reasons why people would still want a relatively disciplined, intelligent and careful person as their doctor. The lengthy and onerous requirements for schooling are filtering for more than just the ability to perform a series of carefully defined procedures.
It's certainly a better option than reading straight HTML, but it never quite does a complete job, and whenever I use mutt these days I routinely find myself having to kick in a mail client with full HTML support.

I like mutt, I used it for nearly a decade as my primary method for handling work emails, but unfortunately HTML email is the way of the world and it got to a point where mutt was hindering me (and others) more than it was aiding me.
Why not write tests that make sense then?

It would definitely help in maintaining the code (not to mention not having to go through the entire code base when debugging a production issue).
Digital products are hard to sell – don't be sucked in
It's by design - this syntax intentionally expresses such contract.

As a matter of policy Rust doesn't try to figure out behavior of functions from their bodies, because that would mean changes in the implementation could accidentally break the API.

While in this example taking ownership is pointless, there are cases where it's meanigful: e.g. a method that closes a file handle would take ownership of the handle to ensure that the handle can't be used anywhere else after it's closed.

In Rust ownership allows mutability (if you own an object, and there are no other references to it, you can do whatever you want to it).
...yes?

Cost of living between Mexico to San Francisco probably in the neighborhood of 4x, depending on which part of Mexico. 500000 MXN rounds to $25k, which is 1/4 of $100k.
If you preordered when it was first announced, it was $99. Once it was released, the price returned to full $199.
> It's poorly named, and so are most of the concepts it introduces

Hostility towards academia check

Anyway it's fine not to have proper linear types in Rust, but I don't think linear types are the enemy here.
No. Not unless you get lucky or are incredible and in demand from other SF companies they know. Remote work is fantastic for people who don't care about living in a place with a higher cost of living. I personally think it's a huge perk that companies are willing to pay your rent if you move to a beautiful place, but then again I've come to dislike a fully remote job after doing it for a couple years.
Also, if this DAW understands something about music, will it constrain me to its understanding about music?

Most of what I write is highly dissonant or straight up microtonal.
Introducing Echo Show – Amazon Official Site
I can't be bothered for anything behind a paywall. Seems like a deathknell for any article you actually want read.
The link could be more clickbaity by adding "this": This teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns ;)
Because we're old and the slow transition through accumulation of new experience have made us forget what it's like to be on the other side.

*Edit: words
But if ownership was returned then it could be freed in main. And because it was allocated on the stack in the first place there doesn't seem to be any reasonable way for the callee to, say, return a reference to an element of the vector because then the caller could return that reference again but then you'd have a value still referred to by the outside context sitting where the stack should be able to grow so I assume that Rust would disallow this and force you to make a copy of anything you want to return.
> But once your code has been written, are all those unit tests still useful?

The reason for this question is the naming mistake that was made in the beginning. They are not TESTS, they are SPECIFICATIONS.

Once your code has been written, are the specifications still useful? Well, duh... unless the business has changed them then yes, they're still useful.
The Changing Nature of Sovereignty
Also: the fundamental undecidability of the Halting Problem
And entirely ignored seems to be the demand side of the question, why is that? Could expenses be higher than we want if we are less healthy that we should be? I see a lot of unhealthy habits associated with the subsequent associated costly interventions required. Just because we see no path forward to affect demand, leaving it out of the discussion will ensure the debate is framed only as which system can provide that volume of healthcare for a little more or a little less.
They claim the reason for it is that Wikipedia refused to take down articles of which Turkish government is "sensitive" about. These include evidence suggesting govermental support to ISIL.

What I don't understand is why do they block ALL versions of wikipedia?
They could have at least provided us with a "safe version" of wikipedia under a governmental domain like wikipedia.diyanet.gov.tr

As a citizen residing in Turkey, I'm concerned, afraid, but mostly frustrated.
Sounds really cool! Actually, I'm close to releasing a (looper) DAW -- kinda geared towards live use, but I've thought a lot about composition too.

https://zenaud.io

Send me an email at mpercossi at zenaud.io , always fun to talk to fellow audio devs :)

And for all the vim lovers out there -- my app supports vi commands for movement and editing :)
Prime subscribers were offered it for $99 when it was first announced. I think you had to get put on a waiting list but that's how I ended up with mine.
You can disable quantizing and "warp" for clips (or just some clips if you like).

I sometimes use Ableton for noise shows, you can definitely get weird and off the grid with it. Record in 2 loops, not quantized so their lengths don't match exactly, duplicate each loop a few times. Disable warp on a few copies, enable repitching on a few others. Then when you twist the tempo knob some loops rise in pitch while getting faster, some just get faster but keep constant pitch, and some stay the same length and timbre. Record that to another track, then duplicate THAT and repeat, etc.
That's true. I should have qualified my response with that I pretty much exclusively do live instrument recording.
Defmacro is convenient. Debugging when the lack of hygiene leads to weird errors is not.

It happens once ever blue moon, but every time I would kill for a proper syntax-case for CL. Racket's is fine, but I'd be happy with a one like the plain R6RS as well
I've seen it done onsite.

There was a guy who worked an 8-5 job in my building and the building next door simultaneously. He would show up, look busy, then run next door and do the same thing. He did this for about 8 months before one of his managers caught on and told his other manager. He ended up losing both jobs at the same time.
We're not talking about broadband here, we're talking about cable TV. Cable TV isn't that much of a free market, admittedly, but it does have competition: satellite TV (Dish, DirecTV) and internet programming (Hulu etc.). But most importantly to my argument, cable TV (unlike broadband internet) is purely a luxury. You don't need to watch TV, and countless people do just fine without it, even in societies where it's commonplace, and in fact lots of news articles are discussing people who are voluntarily giving it up ("cutting the cord") because they're spending their free time with other pursuits such as internet usage.
Check out synfire, it's the only sw that somewhat similar. but it's very expensive, and the ui isn't great (sometimes it looks like writing music in excel, like it can provide "intelligence" but you have to check check boxes and click on things, aintnobodygottimeforthat.maymay. Some people might find it interesting that it's written in Smalltalk tho.
"I have sort of come to the same conclusion that these home assistants would be best as plug ins to a TV with HDMI pass through."

Wait - is "HDMI passthrough" a thing ?

I wouldn't think so - HDMI has copy protection on it and so an HDMI passthrough device would need to MITM the normal signal ...

Would be very interested to know if this exists and if so, how it works ...
Trust in fast and slow decisions
Source Code Management and the New Age of Software Development
PSA: Every legitimate long term study of non surgical weight loss shows that it doesn't happen for the vast, vast majority of people.

1) ["In controlled settings, participants who remain in weight loss programs usually lose approximately 10% of their weight. However, one third to two thirds of the weight is regained within 1 year, and almost all is regained within 5 years. "](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1580453)

2) Giant meta study of long term weight loss: ["Five years after completing structured weight-loss programs, the average individual maintained a weight loss of >3% of initial body weight."](http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/74/5/579.full)

3) Less Scientific: [Weight Watcher's Failure - "about two out of a thousand Weight Watchers participants who reached goal weight stayed there for more than five years."](https://fatfu.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/weight-watchers/)

4) [The reason why it's impossible seems to be that although calories in < calories out works, the body of a fat person makes it extremely difficult psychologically to eat less.](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/magazine/tara-parker-pope-...) This is borne out by the above data.

5) [The only thing that does seem to work in the long term is gastric surgery.](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1421028/)

Moreover, you won't find any reputable study on the web where the average person lost 10%+ of their body weight and kept it off for five years. Not even one.

The study people sometimes bring up is the national weight control registry. But it is a heavily self selected group of people who have already lost significant weight before joining - therefore weeding out most of the failure rate. And even then, only 20% of their audience lost over 10% of their initial body weight and kept it off for one year.
Isn't knowing something about music something of a prerequisite for someone who wants to make music? Of course everyone has to start somewhere, but as musician of 20 years who loves DAWs, I would say learn an instrument first, or at least concurrently, if you want to start producing music.
I wrote a little script for viewing the data as a heatmap a while ago, if you're interested: https://github.com/olane/locationheatmap
Rage against the machines: New technology and violent unrest
That's potentially one philosophy on it, sure. Yet that still doesn't preclude private methods from being an independently testable unit. Implementation details are the meat of the whole thing, and so they seem inherently testworthy. The glue code itself, less so.

Thanks for that thought though, definitely something I'll think on :)
I would even narrow that list down to one: Harmonics. Once it clicked in my mind that every sound is just a combination of sine waves, and that it's the intervals, amplitudes, and dynamics of those sines that make up everything we hear, it made sound design a lot clearer for me.

Of course, finding the right waveforms, filters, and envelopes required to get to a particular pattern of sines is still the challenge, but having that understanding of the medium underlying it all makes experimentation that much more productive (and fun).
Is this a common distinction to acknowledge in general education environments? You pretty succinctly described the struggles I've tended to have in my education, and described it in a refreshing/revealing (for me) way.

I love looking at systems and peeling back the layers to find out what makes something tick. That's not an approach to learning that I really encountered until I entered the workforce and was met with complex systems that I needed to understand. And I loved it!
It seems that users will be very tempted to write additional "session" information, for example some kind of visitor id to the logs. They would need that to, for example, correlate which people visit the homepage with which referrer then buy a product. That's a core use of most analytics products.

Considering the raw logs are timestamped and public, that then sounds like a rather large privacy hole for the users.

I would imagine some kind of pre-aggregation happening, and then making available aggregated data instead of raw logs.
It breaks. But now you're just adding arbitrary conditions. If you want it to loop without breaking when the tempo changes, load it into Simpler, turn off warping, and create loop points around all of the audio that you want. And then create a single MIDI note holding it on for as long as you need. Or if you need something really unusual, load a looper plugin into Ableton--there are tons. You're acting as if problems that only require a few minutes of cursory thought are impossible to solve.
I was a student of calculus once. But it was long ago and I no longer remember what it was like. Human memory is bad and we are prone to hyperbole when it comes to recalling struggles/good times. A reminder is not a bad idea from time to time.

I suppose there are past experiences that you have forgotten what it was really like.
Learning by flip-flopping
Yes, in places like Seattle, NYC, Boston, DC, etc., where the housing costs are also astronomical, and your salary is commensurately lower.
Depends on your product and audience I would guess. Another tip could be to hire someone.
Anything in particular that they are doing with their user data? I am curious.
Never attribute to malice what can be explained through ignorance.
I don't see the problem with choice #2. Being "the smartass jerk that doesn't socialize" means you don't get bothered with stupid questions as much, and having to "fix the mess" means that you get to be the hero when someone else's crap doesn't work, and you can put that in your weekly summary.
You are taking a quote out of my sentence in such a way that it changes the point of what I was saying. I am confused about your motivation.

Do you think I don't know why Ableton Live is a great tool?

I do know it is great. And I feel I understand the tool deeply enough to give real criticism regarding unnecessary limitations.
Guys if you haven't seen Sonic PI (http://sonic-pi.net/), this is also a great tool! You can write beats using a Ruby DSL and it runs them real time.

I sat down and did this in an hour: https://github.com/exabrial/sonic-pi-beats/blob/master/house...

Sam Aaron is the guy behind the project, he does a lot of ambient type stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1m0aX9Lpts
The Swiss government spends about the same per head as the US government (and partly that's a currency problem).

However, US private spending is much higher, so the total cost of healthcare is higher.

The OECD numbers for 2013 put US per capita spending at $9,086 compared with Swiss spending of $6,325. The OECD median is $3,661.

It would be better to compare the USA with Canada, which has a universal healthcare system at a lower cost to the state ($3,974 vs $4,197).
> if you take into account population and wealth.

Yes, if we normalize by the things we're measuring, we reduce the observed effect... but that's a statistical tautology.

For example, take Western European country prices as a reference point, and assume that the difference in price to the US is entirely an excess premium. That's already a dramatic overestimate, because it assumes that the prices in Europe would still be as low even without the US market, which we already know is not the case.

In that case, Norvartis earned $8.6 billion from inflated prices in the US in 2015. And in 2015, their entire R&D budget was $9.9 billion, on a net income of $6.7 billion.

In other words, if US prices were magically brought down to European levels, Novartis would somehow have to find another way to make up a sum of money that accounts for almost their entire R&D budget.

And even if you assume that the second largest pharmaceutical company in the world would operate the exact same way without an explicit profit motive, without the inflated prices in the US, they would literally be losing money.

> Stop spreading nonsense.

From the Hacker New Guidelines:

> Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation. Avoid gratuitous negativity.
Who needs to replace a car door handle? Almost no one. If you do, it's easy to go to a pick and pull junkyard to get one. If you are making new car door handles, and have to widely distribute and store them so they are available for the few people who need a new replacement, are you going to sell at a low markup or a high markup? Being cheap won't attract pick and pullers. A low margin won't convince stores to stock slow selling parts.

And if you run a restaurant, do you really want two soft drink delivery services coming in while your staff is doing food prep? Do you want to make space for two fountain machines, double sets of replacement canisters and twice as many possible customer problems with bad mix settings, running out of syrup, etc?
Cool, I added myself to your list. What would you say makes your interface different than others?
I always thought that backers were paying a lower price because in a sense they were bearing a lot more risk than later buyers.

I.e. lots of quirks will be fixed after the kickstarter version precisely because lots of experience is gained after you actually try to produce something at scale.

I agree that in the beginning the original idea could have been for people to be able to buy product X (usually not existing yet) plus some small reward thanking you for your support.

However after a while people started realizing that scaling production for widget X is actually much harder than it looks at first, and since a lot of kickstarters underestimated the challenge they kind of lost the "faith" of the backers.

Could it be then that as a "community" of sorts things evolved such that, since as a backer I know that the amount of failure is high, I expect a heavy discount in exchange for the higher perceived risk and so kickstarters who don't do that just don't get off the ground?

On the other hand, I think Kickstarter suffers from the same problem as Steam's Early Access games: development stagnation over time.

Lots of products I've seen, and even some that I've backed have some kind of app, and so even if you got the hardware piece as expected and you loved it, you still rely on the app being updated at least to fix current bugs but ideally also to introduce missing promised features (if any). But what happens when the kickstarters feel like doing something else now, or just feel like the project ran long enough that they don't want to work on it anymore, it was too stressful/dissapoiting, etc?

So aside from the different opinions on when exactly is a product maker ethically able to be "off the hook" for its creation, in hindsight it seems obvious that there's definitely an "unspoken" risk regarding the kickstarters' commitment, that backers might assume will be indefinite when in reality is usually more limited than even a couple of years.

In the end this causes a feedback loop such that as a creator you need to promise a low pre-order price, which might in turn not be profitable enough to actually deliver the product as promised, causing the backers to feel frustrated when the delivery date doesn't materialize (I've waited 2+ years and even longer for software projects), further causing them to distrust new projects and finally making them demand a very attractive price because it's considered an unsafe bet, which turns into a low pre-order price...
Mind-Reading Algorithms Reconstruct What You’re Seeing Using Brain-Scan Data
Ask HN: Technical book publishing?
I'm writing my first technical book and am looking for advice on publishing.

There are so many options these days with Amazon self publishing, or more technical niche publishers like PragProg, PacktPub, Leanpub, etc...

Then there is the more traditional route like O'Reilly or Manning.

I'm curious what others' experiences have been and what is the best approach to take?

My longer term goal is to also create some online training courses and potentially speak at technical conferences.

While extra income is not bad, that is not my primary goal here and a lot of what I would be writing about is somewhat niche.

All advice is appreciated.
"Alexa, show me the kids' room."

Am I the only one that's creeped up by that?
ofc, This is kinda standard. Generally I'll try to go well above and beyond what possible today.

Note that I'm on the core team of AudioKit https://github.com/audiokit/AudioKit which is a platform for AudioUnit development so I know all about how dope plugins are :-).
There's already one:
- https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2016/09/26/introduci...
I've done plenty of volunteer work while working a salaried position over the last couple decades. My day job has nothing to do with swinging a hammer, being a youth group treasurer, serving on a youth group advisory board, grunt work at the food pantry, grunt work on hiking trails, being a member of the Army Reserve (although scheduling was an unholy PITA for that and the pay rounded down to nothing once I got a real job). All of those volunteer jobs are paid by someone, I just wasn't charging. Technically my salaried day job owned all that I produced like a slave (which I was), so I was stealing from the company when I cleared hiking trails with the club on a Saturday afternoon, no different than if I broke into the cash box and helped myself.
Career Advice – Is $40K normal for Developer with 5 or 10 yrs experience?
I work for a rural American wireless telecommunications company. Our service area covers half of the state. The company employs a little over 200 people. The IT department is small, but has a few System Admins who also are responsible for VMWare, ~200 Linux Servers, Windows and Exchange. As well as tasked with all internal development. This includes custom intranet tools, command line scripts, public websites, telco integrations ( SMSC integrations, Apple API integrations ), web applications for the customers, etc. We work with lots of technologies, Oracle, Postgres, MySQL, multiple API's, PHP, Python, JS.
All of us make around $40k per year regardless if we have been here for 1 year or 15 years. Considering the amount of responsibility and the type of work involved, is this level of compensation standard ? We manage a fairly large infrastructure and continually work on new software projects. Does anyone have similar experiences ?
How Heat Kills Cells
This may help...

$ /cygdrive/c/Program\ Files/Windows\ Defender/MpCmdRun.exe /h
Windows Defender Command Line Utility (c)2006-2008 Microsoft Corp
Use this tool to automate and troubleshoot Windows Defender

[...]
I feel like it's kinda impressive that he managed to keep that up for 8 months. What were the two jobs exactly?
> this field here is ripe for disruption

meaning what? that a VC funded startup should come in and start offering health insurance? what are you suggesting? what does disruption even mean in this context?

let's get away from those corner cases where it's even thinkable to fly to Dubai for surgery. that's a high cost intervention for specific (wealthy) individuals. that isn't solving the problem of providing health care for 300 million people. how do you propose we do that?
Might help:

<code>
$ /cygdrive/c/Program\ Files/Windows\ Defender/MpCmdRun.exe /h
Windows Defender Command Line Utility (c)2006-2008 Microsoft Corp
Use this tool to automate and troubleshoot Windows Defender
</code>
Top Algorithms Every Software Engineer Should Know by Heart