skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reminds me of a good SSC post.

> The problem with the pharmaceutical industry isn’t that they’re unregulated just like chairs and mugs. The problem with the pharmaceutical industry is that they’re part of a highly-regulated cronyist system that works completely differently from chairs and mugs.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/29/reverse-voxsplaining-dr...
They used to be $3.99, but even at $5 they are twice as big and 1/2 the cost of grocery store chickens.
Didn't mention spinning up an SMTP server on the domain. That might catch some interesting info.
It's interesting to me that the word "wrong" is used in the title. This is assigning a moral code to capitalism and I think that is misplaced.

It's fine to have a moral code. It's fine to be a capitalist. Just don't expect capitalism to always fit in a moral code.

I think the article's main unspoken gripe is about bad actors (folks acting in a non-altruistic way) in human society in general.
Ask HN: What insightful predictions made in past HN discussions came true?
You could insulate here by simply transferring to a hardcoded user wallet at relatively frequent intervals (like once a day). Worst case then, you lose a day of sales.
Really? I write almost nix every day at work and I have no problem with the syntax. I think it's pretty elegant and well-suited to its use case. There are a few minor tweaks I would make but nothing big at the syntactic level.

EDIT: probably the only gripe I would make is to have comma-separated lists instead of having to use parentheses to separate non-atomic expressions.
I agree with you. I wonder if the best use case for ethereum scripts is actually with private block chains. For private chains the trust problem with external input to the scripts (which is needed for any serious dapp) would be minimized.

I've seen so many technologies hyped, fail to live up to expectations, and then disappear. Etheruem has some interesting ideas, I'm worried that they have grossly over-stated its potential and it will soon fall off the hype cliff.
Do employers really negotiate that much lower health insurance rates compared to what a self-employed can get?
What kind of flights do you take that you get to see the pilot in this post 9/11 world? (I agree with the sentiment though.)
Asked two flight attendants I know, neither agree with this. But hey, more coffee for me.
I'm not super knowledgeable in this field, so maybe somebody can set me straight regarding VPNs.

I have always assumed that VPN services like PIA, AirVPN, etc. are useful for, among other things:

1. To make the content you are viewing private from your ISP, employer, public WiFi, etc.

2. To make it more difficult for some remote host/website/actor to link your activity on their site with you.

Isn't point (2) negated if you host your own VPN on AWS? In the sense that if you're in a country with a nefarious government, wouldn't it be easier for them to subpoena AWS than to get info from some VPN service over in ________ country that doesn't store logs, and has a million other users using the same IP?

An example situation might be the RIAA notices that an IP is downloading Janet Jackson MP3s, and all they need to do is subpoena AWS if you're hosting your own VPN which has a unique IP, versus tracking down some Caribbean company who has given you an IP that's shared among thousands of users and has a public reputation for trustworthiness to hold?
F⁠ingerprinting documents​ with steganography​
Taking a flight can contribute to dehydration because the air in the cabin is dry and low humidity. Drinking coffee and tea doesn't help.
okay this is hackernews and there are tons of similar sites to videocyborg ... so can you tell us what's so special about yours ? thanks
Actually, that's good. Now that anyone can with ease exploit unmaintained systems, people will need to start caring about security.
Rarely.

I studied computer science with dreams of saving the world. My two areas of interests were 1) building medical systems/devices to help decrease overall cost of medicine and 2) building robots to explore and colonize Mars.

My first job was at health care facility, but soon I learned our IT departments goal was not to save money for patients but maximize what we can bill them.

Since then I had multiple jobs in tech and non-tech industries, sometimes I get to work on interesting projects but most of the time it is really about building another flashy feature so user/customer stay on our site or app.

I know there are programmers working on world saving projects at NASA, SpaceX, medical research labs, analyzing data to find good solutions to real problems. But most programmers are simply helping other people sell junks to masses.

But this how I feel good about my work. By building technologies for selling crap, we are lowering overall cost for everyone. This should indirectly help non-profits, governments, universities by lowering their cost to use technology.
Now just figure out a way to sell the whole solution back to the university, and you'll have paid for your tuition fees.
I don't like differential privacy very much.

Take GPS data, for example: NYC has released a taxicab dataset showing the "anonymized" location of every pickup and dropoff.

This is bad for privacy. One attack is that now if you know when and where someone got in a cab (perhaps because you were with them when they got in), you can find out if they were telling the truth to you about where they were going -- if there are no hits in the dataset showing a trip from the starting location that you know to the ending location that they claimed, then they didn't go where they said they did.

Differential privacy researchers claim to help fix these problems by making the data less granular, so that you can't unmask specific riders: blurring the datapoints so that each location is at a city block's resolution, say. But that doesn't help in this case -- if no-one near the starting location you know went to the claimed destination, blurring doesn't help to fix the information leak. You didn't need to unmask a specific rider to disprove a claim about the destination of a trip.

I think that flaws like these mean that we should just say that GPS trip data is "un-de-identifiable". I suspect the same is true for all sorts of other data. For example, Y chromosomes are inherited the same way that surnames often are, meaning that you can make a good guess at the surname of a given "deidentified" DNA sequence, and thus unmask its owner from a candidate pool, given a genetic ancestry database of the type that companies are rapidly building.
"According to a 2004 EPA sample of 158 planes, 13 percent contained coliform. Two of the airplanes were found to have dangerous E.coli in the water."

That is kinda gross, but realistically all that bacteria would be killed by heating the water.

More of a concern is that is the same tap water in the bathroom for washing hands. Last flight I took I noticed there was a Purell dispenser in the bathroom next to the sink and I wondered why that was necessary given there was soap and water.
It's interesting to me how this article frames crony capitalism as a use or abuse of government by corporations, almost as if the government is a victim. But it's the government that has all of the power in this context. There's something to be said for corporate money influencing elections, but even there it's elected officials who are deciding on policies after getting there, and if they are making decisions based on how to most easily keep their job (ex. take corporate money for reelection campaign), that's their unethical doing, not the corporations.
I wonder if anyone has written software that takes Amazon Prime listings and copies them to eBay with a tiny markup then automates the payment transfer.
My companies current scenario is about 64% renewal rate from all years before but a 50% of that is from the year before current and 25% percent of that is from 2 years before current and so on and so on..

So how does all this differ if you're looking at renewal from year before and renewals from all time ?
I think the great problem of our time is that the challenges get easier to solve every day but we mostly spend our time making rent. And not the kind of rent mentioned in the article - just plain old fashioned too-much-month-not-enough-money kind of rent. When we’re desperate, we grovel and do whatever work we need to to survive. This is akin to how researchers spend inordinate amounts of time applying for grants rather than, you know, saving the world and all that. This is because any free capital in the economy gets vacuumed up by a few large players who only divvy it out through "sanctioned" channels that most people no longer have access to.

In the olden days, the main force balancing this was taxation. Even if you look at it as a purely zero-sum game, any money paid by the very wealthy had to go somewhere, and that somewhere was the masses. This didn't sit right with the very wealthy and they rigged the system to such a degree that I've never seen an appreciable tax increase in my lifetime, even in the face of trillion dollar deficits and the loss of the middle class in the US. Mathematically, trickle-down economics has given us just exactly the system it was designed to. I mourn for the millions (billions) of people left out, but for whatever reason a lot of people don’t even see them.

Maybe the great problem of our time is ignorance..
> "First, let's assume the cow is a sphere".

It is worse than that, because at least physics is validated by experimental data.

Much of (macro in particular) Economics is a set of axioms that are seldom predictive.
The concept of "crony capitalism" is a misnomer. "Crony" is not a type of capitalism, it's the antithesis of capitalism. It's enabled by giving too much power to government.

For example. When insurance companies jack-up rates or impose customer "unfriendly" terms, they are not acting within the "free market." They are exploiting "crony'esque" rules that limit competition by restricting insurance companies from competing across state-lines.
At one point, I know someone who wanted to give money to a large medical organization so that they could show their patients the tradeoff between various interventions. (efficacy vs side-effects).

It was going to be donated money to build an app that belonged to the institution.

The institution would not let their own researches publish the data on the app even though it was anonymous. They didn't want to take the risk.

It would be great if this lead to accepted protocols that made it so that people didn't have to think about it. "Oh yeah, we'll share it using DP" and then people could move ahead using data.
> Medicaid and Medicare are heavily subsidized in practice by private insurance covered patients. If we implemented single-payer in the form of Medicare as it is now, the healthcare industry would quickly collapse.

In addition to everything you said (which is true), Medicare's apparent success is also boosted by the portion of Medicare patients who receive their non-pharmaceutical Medicare benefits through a private insurer.

Original Medicare (which is the part of Medicare that is purely government-run[0]) has dramatically lower ratings for both medical outcomes and patient satisfaction scores[1] than Medicare Advantage, which is privately run. Medicare Advantage also consistently outperforms Original Medicare on cost as well.

Unfortunately, when statistics are cited for Medicare as a whole by laypeople and in mass-media, Original Medicare and Medicare Advantage are lumped together, giving the impression that Original Medicare is much more effective and well-liked than it actually is.

The same applies to Medicaid, but because that's state-run, the exact details vary from state-to-state. Overall, though, nearly ever state has some form of private management for Medicaid plans, and those consistently outperform the state-run counterparts, for reasons which are immediately clear to anybody who's experienced both firsthand.

[0] except for drug benefits under Part D

[1] In 2015, Original Medicare's patient satisfaction scores were lower than the very worst Medicare Advantage provider - they were literally the bottom of the rung.
It's a big leap to say 400 million pools of one is inefficient therefore the best option is one pool of 400 million.
What doesn't work about it? The only thing that doesn't seem to be working is that some people feel entitled to go as fast as they can get away with all the time.

It works fine if people adjust their expectations. Cyclists in the way rarely cause real stretches of backed up traffic. Your average speed might go down slightly, big whoop.
> study the systems of other first-world countries and incorporate the things that work best into ours

The problem with this line of thought is that the US is orders of magnitude larger, more diverse, and more complex than most European nations. For any single European nation I'd wager at least two of those are the case.

But we have a way to do this already without massive Federal overhauls - allow individual states to do what they want. This means the decisions are made closer to the people, so California can do what California wants while Mississippi can do what Mississippi wants. It also has the side benefit of California not paying for services in Mississippi.

Personally if one of the US states offered non-employer-based, single-payer healthcare I would move there in a heartbeat. If it's as successful as proposed, it would not take very long to most states to offer something similar. At that point, depending on individual implementations, it would be much easier to extend it to the Federal level.
I agree my comment was an oversimplification but I think it is fairer to say that "the health care industry as we know it would change"

I think you are unlikely to see immedaite adoption but over time you would have many other/new/different problems to address just as we have many problems now. It is worth mentioning that it would like cause significant employment reductions in the non-governmental insurance providers which are not without an impact.

But for starters, both medicare and medicaid are effectively a concentration of very high risk/high cost customer pools (the elderly and the low income). Opening it up would likely positively impact that cost calculation as well
Click on "Tips" at the top. http://binarypuzzle.com/tips.php
You might be wrong about the politicians involved, let me tell you why.

The main politician that proposed the bill, MP Stefano Quintarelli, is the "father" of the Internet in Italy (he founded i.Net, the first ISP in Italy, who was later sold to BT). He is well known in Italy for being one of the smartest, more honest, intellectually bright members of the parliament.
I worked with an international shipping insurance company for a little while as a QA tester (contracted). They required almost this level of scrutiny for just testing software.
But this is because Medicare reimbursement rates are set by a panel of specialists (I believe there is one internal medicine doc and then every specialty is represented, so getting a stent sure does get reimbursed well while counseling a diabetic about keeping that A1c down or working on the toe of a homeless guy get reimbursed approximately not at all) who don't necessarily care if Medicare is that fair.

Tangentially, note Medicare spends about 3% on overhead, compared to private industry's previous 30%. (There are now caps on overhead expenditures -- trying to keep it to 20% or less.)
I'm 99% sure that any boiling will kill nearly all germs in water. I don't have facts on hand, but I do remember that once you get above ~160F, nearly all germs are dead. So boiling water will definitely kill everything.
Well, if those are side effects then it is intentional. There may be a good reason for it but it is intentional.
this page has to be bookmarked. well done
The most vulnerable part of symmetric crypto algorithms is the S-box tables, (8 to 8 bits in AES) in most AES implementation realized as 8 to 32 bit T-tables. It is possible, but harder and slower to implement AES without, so it is usually not done.

Of software implementations, the Serpent algorithm, that was one of the candidates for AES, can be implemented without any lookup tables and fully key-independent memory access patters. That will make an attack like this very unlikely to succeed.
I like https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2016/06/15/what-is-... as an introduction.

Differential privacy is cool. However, I looked at Google's RAPPOR algorithm (deployed in Chrome, and clearly designed with real-world considerations in mind) in some depth, and I found that RAPPOR needs millions to billions of measurements to become useful, even while exposing users to potentially serious security risks (epsilon = ln(3), so "bad things become at most 3x more likely"). Much better than doing nothing, but we'll continue to need non-cryptographic solutions (NDA's etc.) for many cases.
I think to kill all bacteria you need to boil for several minutes. A typical tea kettle turns off immediately after reaching the boiling point. Coffee is a similar story I guess.
I would bet it still sold in the realm of affordability though. Out west we have many completely average mediocre homes selling for 10x-25x regional median income levels, which is beyond absurd when historically an affordability marker is somewhere from 1.5x-3x.
US Investors in China’s Tech Sector Must Navigate Through Uncertainty
IoT Security: A Distributed Product Failure for the Ages
>You can't legislate away a cultural problem.

[Lots of places beg to differ](https://www.treehugger.com/bikes/dutch-kids-have-different-r...).

You can't bully people into being good, but there are lots of nudges like education and more thoughtful design that can move culture to work better.
Bought treasury bonds instead (Brazil).
AFAICT, there are 2 major differences between Nix and Guix. Language choice is the obvious one. The other is that Guix takes a hard-line stance on the GNU philosophy and therefore refuses to distribute pre-compiled binaries. I don't think CUDA will ever be an option on Guix.
A First Reason React App for JavaScript Developers
That's a great idea for an app and it looks very nice. Congratulations. I assume it's generating enough income for you to work on it full time?

You're right I should focus on retention.
If you're paying attention you'll notice that, typically after cabin beverage service ends, the flight attendants will make and deliver coffee to the cockpit. What happens to that coffee once it's behind the door is, of course, purely speculation.
Also, all coffee and (especially) tea drinkers know that the coffee or tea has to be really hot to be enjoyable.

But you can't distribute weaponized fluids when your entire world is literally being rocked.

So they hand out lukewarm tea or coffee. Yes it is safe but not fit for human consumption.

Looks like they saved us from e.coli as well by giving us that tepid stuff.
I can second this. Infidelity was pretty much the last thing that happened, and by then I was already done.
The goal of a capitalistic government is still unfortunately to have a wholly predictable economy. There is competition, but only until a winner is declared, i.e. a monopoly is granted. After this the rents that the winner charges can be raised and lowered freely, but in a controlled manner, in order to manage where and when the value is actually generated.

This gets weird with software businesses as these companies tend to insulate from losses relatively well. This coupled with the fact that in some markets there is no way to generate additional value without a huge public investment happening upstream (utilities) is why a lot of VC goes so crazy for it. Keeping the cash flowing is the only way to avoid being taxed profusely – All you can do in some situations is raise rents and spend hastily, for better or for worse.
Possibly non-US ones. Europe is much more relaxed.
Tesla has pledged that the Gigafactory would be net zero: https://www.treehugger.com/renewable-energy/teslas-gigafacto...

If this is accurate and comes to pass, then assuming like the Swedes did that the batteries would have 50% fossil fuel sources for production wouldn't apply.
Yes, but what is the quality? What have they been fed and injected with on their way to an assembly line that kills them at the rate of 200/minute?
I've done a similar thing with Southwest Airline's check-in. They let people get seated based on the order in which they check in for their flight. So right before the 24 hour period began I would run a script that tried to check me in repeatedly until it succeeded. Usually got really good seats.

EDIT: to those asking for the source, it was just a bash script that I have probably lost. The GitHub linked in this subthread looks a lot better than what I had.
An STL file is literally just a list of triangles. Each triangle has three vertices, each vertex has X, Y, Z floating point coordinates.
I was initially concerned, expecting a "heavy metals" story. Those are also common, but they're a bit less overhyped, and do predictable, cumulative harm. A vague threat of E. Coli just isn't as disturbing to me.
> you can't blame one voter for a lost ballot

You can't do this in popular elections but you can absolutely do it in the legislature where everyone has a different constituency, policy portfolio, campaign contribution history, etc. Lieberman wouldn't vote for a bill with a public option, full stop. The math worked out such that Lieberman was necessary. Ergo, Lieberman killed the public option if there was no other Senator for whom the existence of a public option would have changed their Nay to a Yea. There was not, so you can absolutely lay the lack of a present day public option for health care in the US at his feet.
Portability isn't stupid. However, one could argue that embedding a full web browser to achieve portability is.
That urban legend has been long debunked.

http://www.abc.net.au/health/talkinghealth/factbuster/storie...
The water is boiled to thermo-nuclear levels so I'd be shocked if anything nasty could survive it - certainly the flavor can't!

I'm not sure if it's because there's more content available these days, but the "germs are everywhere" movement has far greater prominence than when I grew up. We'd spend all summer barefoot, put our hands in places they shouldn't and then in our mouths, eat food that we almost certainly shouldn't have and yet we somehow survived.

There's some things that we absolutely shouldn't consume, but airplane tea and coffee are pretty low down that list.
You don't. By the time you've read a few of those books, the rest will be rather boring.

I also wouldn't bother with Effective STL or More Effective C++. They're ancillary to the main books of that series and are somewhat outdated.
Well, that's obviously not true. I've seen bicyclists.
The coolest part about differential privacy is its guarantees about over fitting.
> You'll have to see whether you're attracting the right first time users.

Also an interesting point. You're right. Maybe they are just curious. But even then, I might still try to convert them.

My users can vote on features [1]. I know what the top 20 are. The problem is, the highest ones are difficult to implement. But as I said, I believe I first need to (still) improve onboarding.

[1]: https://fman.io/issues
Yep! I'm really excited to see the future of AI on the cloud. I have a feeling it will have the same effect as AWS had to the cloud computing market: make it possible for smaller companies/teams to quickly spin up AI based products and provide better services to consumers.