skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a substantial difference between something like automobile, homeowners, or renter's insurance; and health care "insurance" which is arguably wrongly named.

Automobile insurance is mandated by law in all 50 states (Maine lets you self insure but you have to stipulate you can do this, in effect it's still a mandate). Homeowner's insurance isn't required by law but might be required by the mortgage company. And renter's insurance may be required by a landlord. All of these only protect you against almost random events, or at least pretty much unpredictable events.

Health care insurance is weighted by being one part warranty and two parts aging payment plan. How many people use their health insurance every single year in some form or another? Dental? Eye doctor? Cold or flu? That's not insurance. It's a payment plan for predictable services. Even pregnancy is predictable. Something like cancer, congenital disease, are not predictable. So we've conflated a bunch of things into a giant payment plan, with nearly a dozen layers of middle men, every one of whom expects a profit cut. And so in the U.S. we have the most expensive per capita health care cost in the industrialized world, and yet not everyone is covered. Basically we are so stupid, that we are willing to pay more for health care services to deny other people being covered, and to jack ourselves off proudly that this is the best health care system in the world and it's (mostly) free market. It's a big fat stupid hand job.

So I would not consider health care insurance in the same category as other insurance types. It's a sick care payment plan, and if it weren't for the government making it illegal now, you'd still see lifetime maximum caps. Get too sick? Go fuck yourself. Die, don't die, go to the ER, charge it to a credit card, declare bankruptcy, we do not care about you. We don't care. We don't give a fuck about you.

That is the American healthcare and insurance system.
Neither. Why not dream bigger than that?

We have unprecedented means to distribute information for "free" (or at least cheaply enough that even homeless people can access insane amounts of information, unlike in the past when a lot of stuff was only accessible to the elite) and diet and lifestyle are cited over and over and over as contributing to deadly conditions. There is lots of room here to do good things for everyone, quite cheaply.

Though I am for the U.S. transitioning to universal basic health coverage for its citizens. The current situation is terribly broken.
The "Concepts" and "Debugging" sections are very strong signals in my experience. "Coding" is much less useful IMO, but this blog post is to help you practice the sorts of questions that are asked in practice, rather than what I ask specifically.
Hi Chuck

I didn't get this part of the prospectus either, the language was pretty thick. It's probably some kind of cleanup/recapitalization? Probably wanted to shed some protective provisions or something. Please do comment if you find out more.
You lead with "no chance", and subsequently acknowledge that the NYC subways used to be privately owned, and that it worked well.

Ever wonder why airplanes had wifi before the subway? Private vs public.

Ever compare the privately owned NYC ferries (fully open to the public) with the publicly owned ferries?
Very true. Even as someone who isn't a policy wonk, I could probably guess Heritage Foundation positions with 80% accuracy or better.

The "missing" info is where the conflict lay!
Honestly repurchase rate being flat is kind of surprising as they make it extremely difficult to cancel and even shadily dodge requests to cancel by deferring you for a long period of time instead until a surprise shipment you didn't ask for shows up. The reality check is a good thing for a business that thinks it's okay to treat their customers like that.
Quote: "The rich have, Drezner writes, empowered a new kind of thinker—the “thought leader”—at the expense of the much-fretted-over “public intellectual.” Whereas public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky or Martha Nussbaum are skeptical and analytical, thought leaders like Thomas Friedman and Sheryl Sandberg “develop their own singular lens to explain the world, and then proselytize that worldview to anyone within earshot.” While public intellectuals traffic in complexity and criticism, thought leaders burst with the evangelist’s desire to “change the world.” Many readers, Drezner observes, prefer the “big ideas” of the latter to the complexity of the former. In a marketplace of ideas awash in plutocrat cash, it has become “increasingly profitable for thought leaders to hawk their wares to both billionaires and a broader public,” to become “superstars with their own brands, sharing a space previously reserved for moguls, celebrities, and athletes.”"

Where does one start when trying to critique such muddle-headed dreck. You could start with 1) the article fails to address the fragmentation of the modern media landscape (any modern "big media" commentator's influence is minor next to that once yielded by Walter Lippmann of yore), or 2) quibble with the false dichotomies of a) "skeptical and analytical" versus "singluar lens" or b) "complexity and criticism" versus "change the world" 3) "marketplace of ideas awash in plutocrat cash" totally misses the point - it's an attention economy now, stupid. "Plutocracy" applies more to the old media oligarchy of the 20th century than it does today. 4) I don't even know what "increasingly profitable to hawk their wares to both billionaires and a broader public" even means. What's the mechanism here? That there's something new about the fact that commentators write books and give speeches?

A much better critique of public intellectuals comes from Philip Tetlock, who at least tries to hold them to account for their bad predictions. In that vein, I like Bryan Caplan's "bettors oath": "Blathering talk surrounds us, but I will take no part in it. My word is my bet; I will always put my money where my mouth is. When challenged, I will bet on my words, refine them, or recant. When no one is present to challenge me, I will weigh my words and thoughts as if my fellow oath-takers were listening... " http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/05/the_bettors_oat....
If you go into your profile settings and turn on the [showdead] option, you'll be able to see all of the comments that were flagkilled. That will give you a better picture of just how nasty a lot of them were.
> billionaire is sometimes used as a stand-in for "the superrich"

wait. doesn't that basically work? if you're a billionaire, you are super rich. if you're super rich and you're not a billionaire, are you really super rich?

i don't quite get your point there.
Govt could subsidize based on need -- like they do for the Obama Cell Phones.
Authors are prestigious because it's assumed that they've written their books -- with help from friends and editors, of course, but still, they're the one who structured their thoughts and churned through a few hundred thousand words of drafts and revisions. (Ever tried to write? I have, but I've never created anything publishable; this is why I have so much respect for those who do, and so little patience for those who don't but pretend they did.)

If such-and-such a person can't write a book, they shouldn't get the credit for having written one; there was a time when a politician or general had to either write his own memoirs, or live with their not existing.
Huh, well I definitely learned something today.

As for anti-market biases, I suspect we might disagree on the definition of the phrase 'the market'. Admittedly, I mentally put the word 'free' in-front of the word 'market' when I hear it used without qualification. I feel like it's the only safe assumption to make.

Otherwise, chances are, the regulated, distorted and interfered with market that I have in my head is very likely different to the one you have in yours. And unless we both explain what we mean exactly when we say 'the market', we're just kinda talking past each other.
Do they have appreciably different incentives in London?
Are they? What would "not hiding" it look like, a clear statement of it in their S-1, of the form "X is our churn rate?"

I'm just not sure what people want. They show cohorts and give a lot of data on aggregate performance, but I agree, the lack of clarity is a bit alarming. Is there some kind of precedent people are comparing this to, a membership-style S-1 with clearer statement of what's going on?
Not necessarily. In my view, all insurance is a creature of regulation. Insurance needs regulatory oversight to manage substantial moral hazards and arbitrages, otherwise nobody would buy it. The enabling regulations for health insurance could include provisions for managing the care of people who have pre-existing conditions.
Scientific theories and predictions should be presented to the public with a confidence attached. When people group gravity, evolution, dark energy, global warming, economics, psychological theories, etc. under a single banner of "science", it obscures the fact that some of these things can be modeled with far greater certainty than others.
I'm not sure I agree. If my insurance is on the hook for prostate cancer treatment, then they may expect a prostate exam to save them money, in which case they would have an incentive to pay for it.
thinkfluenza
Raspberry pi controlled Greenhouse
BMW and Volkswagen Try to Beat Apple and Google at Their Own Game
Hey, the hospitals could even hire actuaries to statistically analyze costs and charge everybody the expected average.

We could call that...oh wait. Nevermind.
There are certain brands that I will go out of my way to purchase... Nokia is one of them.

They could be selling euthanasia kits and I'd get in line for one.
We are actually setting up an insurer in the UK which is doing exactly that by changing the business model to taking fees on settled insurance claims instead of betting on an underwriting/investment profit.

Have a look.

insureathing.com
I used this with a dataset for stocks here https://hackernoon.com/unsupervised-machine-learning-for-fun... and it's great for getting a handle on your data and reorganizing it even before any exploratory data analysis (EDA).
Subways are the most efficient way to move people in terms of square footage needed to move a person at speed, with heavy rail a close second, and walking third. You can fit 4-6 adults comfortably on a subway train with less space than those same people in a private automobile.
Most of these problems are what I call "paper safety" noncompliance (e.g. somebody not taking a refresher safety class on time). The problem will be solved by employees taking even more mind numbing safety training. You can also apply these principles to security violations.
I'm saying that with dynamic pricing grid loads no longer have to be noise. Everyone can charge, heat, clean when energy is cheap/available.
The easiest way to see that health insurance is not pure insurance is to notice that if your auto insurance behaved like health your gas, oil and windshield wiper replacements would be reimbursed also.
I commute in from Jersey and I have booked a few hotel stays since the derailments because I would have to leave the house well before 7 to guarantee making it in by 9.
Was your problem with the term or with socialized healthcare?
Boss tại tình yêu đã chết
How did you get started hacking
This is taking the discussion in circles, but the only reason people cared about his ideas was his prior success.
A friend I was working with in 2004 also ran a social network for North Carolina State University. The difference was (and is) that it was just an online bullentin board system.

Zuck's genius is his execution ability and making a prime product combined withthe exclusivity of elite Universities. He was also on CNBC in 2004 so that combination of skill and Harvard created a grand opportunity.

Surely people thought easy social networks would be a big business -- MySpace and AOL proved that. Of course, no one could had reasonably predicted it'd be as big as it is.
CIS Benchmark -- https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/tag/cis-aws-foundation...
Is there an iOS app in the App Store?
It can also be an external mismanagement problem. If funds are only allocated to the subway to pay upkeep and the state never funds improvements, you can easily end up with huge maintenance costs to keep dilapidated ancient systems in place that could have been upgraded a decade ago and have been saving money most of this time.
this is the best answer. we should contact Jerry Brown.
There really is no nice way to put it: Republicans are assholes. Back with ACA, the risk reduction pools were called insurance company bailouts. And Republicans sabotaged it by drastically defunding it. And right now? Oh, we'll just bump those subsidies right back up to stabilize the market, make us look like fucking heros! This is market stabilizing now. Dicks.

This is what's insidious about them: it's not that they're stupid. They think everyone else is stupid, and won't learn about these things, and they'll get away with it.

But when the time came to pay up for risk reduction in the Obamacare exchanges, Congress reneged and paid only 12% of what was owed to the insurers.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/im-a-former-health-insuranc...
This is what makes this issue so frustrating to discuss. People care so very much about it, yet often know surprisingly little.
Unless you're in an egregiously unfavorable options contract (do these even exist?), an options contract should have the underlying number of shares it pays out adjusted in such a way that a stock split has no effect on your payout in USD.
Huh, I suppose it depends on what you're looking for. Getting in depth about politics, religion, attitudes towards rearing children, commitment to finding a partner, etc. doesn't tend to be appropriate at parties (since most people are there for a good time, not to find a partner), but they are perfectly appropriate online dating chats.

I don't find it hard to find attractive, fun people who want to date me. I find it hard to find a partner; online dating it takes me usually 2-4 months. IRL it can be years.
The best solution is to become a contractor with this employer, and charge a flat rate per result or per week/month.
Or to supplement capital investments beyond getting loans. Building out a logistics chain for any food company is very expensive.
>CC (by email): Christopher Poole

Very interesting - it does make sense that moot would have relationships with the EFF.
I don't think self sustaining subways are a good thing. You want tax subsidies on ridership to bring the price really low, to enable as many people as possible to use it as often as possible. Profitable infrastructure defeats the purpose of infrastructure, which is to be a force multiplier on others productivity. Introducing profit motive diminishes the potential effectiveness.
Btudo
> I almost never use `this` and therefore don't remember all of its nuances. My team specifically avoids using it because it is harder for junior devs to grasp and makes things harder to read. I tend to agree.

Honestly I think `this` (and any OOP technique) should be avoided except under very specific circumstances, regardless of whether junior devs are involved. Exceptions include (but are not limited to):

- Interaction with native APIs or legacy libraries which mandate its use
- React lifecycle or other modern lib equivalent, if absolutely necessary
- When using a `class`, and only if it would be substantially more clear than a functional alternative

> Writing a reduce function? That's what I use lodash for.

Unless you need it for non-`Array` collections, just use `Array#reduce`.

> The event loop? I know what it is but I have never needed to know what it is.

Every time you do anything asynchronously in JS, you are interacting with the event loop. It would be a good idea to familiarize yourself with it, to understand the constraints and performance impacts of single-threaded asynchrony.
Yeah, there's lots of potential issues, I don't know. It's true that the air is much thinner higher up, but I'm not sure how much that will help--I think a large part of the sonic boom comes from air displaced by the plane to create lift, and of course the momentum imparted by the plane to the air is constant (= the weight of the plane).

Also, I'm not sure the fact that the rays that forms the sonic boom are curved makes the sound itself weaker, it just takes longer to propagate down the the ground. But the fact that the sound spreads out towards the sides of the plane should help, the circumference of the shock cone at the point where it touches ground is proportional to the height of the airplane, so I'd expect things to scale down because of that?

I found and skimmed this document, "Review of Sonic Boom Theory" by K.J. Plotking (http://adl.stanford.edu/aa210b/Lecture_Notes_files/AIAA-1989...), which has some helpful information.

First, it notes that the shape of the wave does change while it propagates, but it turns out that the effect is in the opposite direction from what you suggested. That is, close to the aircraft the pressure forms a smooth S (the "mid-field" shape), but then as it moves further away, nonlinear effects causes the wave to bunch up to create the discontinuous N-shape. (See fig 1 and 2 on page 30.) So it seems, in this respect flying higher is actually worse---most research about reducing sonic booms tries to shape the aircraft to be long and thin, in order to make the waveform smoother, so we'd want there to less time for the wave to bunch up again.

Second, the document actually has a diagram of how the over-pressure depends on altitude! In fig 10 on page 34 it plots the calculated overpressure from a hypothetical Mach 2.7 supersonic transport. As I eyeball it, the over-pressure goes from 212 pounds/ft^2 at 40,000 feet (airliner level) to 129 pounds/ft^2 at 80,000 feet (SR-71 level), so it went down by a factor of 0.6. (In a cute coincidence, that 60% is almost exactly what's predicted by the scaling law eq. 25 on page 16, even though that equation is only intended for hypersonic aircraft.)
JuMP, in Julia: https://github.com/JuliaOpt/JuMP.jl/blob/master/examples/bas...

It's rapidly displacing proprietary DSL's like AMPL and GAMS in operations research. Neither of those happen to be embedded in a host language, they're special-purpose. Though there are comparable tools out there embedded in Python or Matlab, they don't perform as well as JuMP or the special-purpose tools.
you do that
> take one of the most personally rewarding and edifying experiences and completely formalize one of the most exciting parts of it (if not the most). what becomes the point of your life???

Yea, so the early part of dating may be the most "exciting", but that's not why I date. I find that love goggle time period to be a huge waste of time when 6 months to 1 year later you realize you're completely incompatible on core issues. God help the people who got married during that time period.

Online dating let's you pre-screen for basic compatibility before meeting (and confirming physical interest). It keeps you from making silly mistakes with people who can't make you happy long term.
Even if you use a pencil you still have one more step that on a smart scale! You said the advantage was it's faster and it isn't.
New York City's population is what, half of New York State? How do NYC concerns not dominate state politics?
> point out exact where I suggested Hong Kong people should hate their local government, and appeal to a higher authority.

That would be the first line I quoted. Not sure how you missed it.

Here's another,

> there was never any direct "order" from Beijing, well, sorta until recently, when Beijing began to see the failure of the local Hong Kong government.

That's an unsubstantiated and unprovable claim. Also implies Beijing is benevolent. Nobody knows exactly what strings Beijing is pulling. It's hidden behind lack of free press and habit of politicians to never quite say exactly what they mean.

> when the ruling rich saw the rebellion of lower class, without knowing/admitting themselves are to be blamed, they seek help from Beijing

That's completely made up. You have no source showing "HK elite" sought Beijing's guidance.

Honestly, your whole post is thick with "blame HK elite" instead of Beijing for whatever ails HK. Everyone knows Beijing isn't loved, so you throw in a dash of "Beijing only knows control", yet you point to them as being capable. The narrative you're pushing is really easy to discover.
I do work on web based systems and I can tell you, without a doubt, that the performance gain is bugger all.

I flatly disagree with you, this is exactly the cargo-cult programming I'm talking about.

You're thinking about it totally wrong. Async/await is useful if you have a million pipes, but need 2,000,000. Thats millions of requests per second. Virtually no ASP.Net programmer has that need. They usually need 10 or 20 pipes per second, but they need really, really fat ones. Async/await does not make fatter pipes, it lets you use a single pipe as multiple pipes. But for decades IIS already, by default, supplies loads of pipes.

To make it clear, practically speaking, for virtually every asp.net programmer in the world, async/await is utterly pointless.

It's ok for external website calls. Or something you really need to multi-thread. Like the once in a blue moon tasks.

I work in ASP.Net, I rewrite bad async await code, get rid of it AND improve the performance by orders of magnitude.

Performance problems are almost always, in my experience, SQL bottle necks, bad EF queries or stupid loops. And I have fixed serious performance problems for various businesses. Once in 12 years have I seen IIS running out of threads and that was in 2006 when CPUs sucked. And that was fixed by, amazingly, fixing a bad SQL query.

Littering several hundred 40ms controller calls with asynchronous EF calls that run in 3ms won't make your site faster. Fixing that shitty report that locks 20 tables and takes 2000ms to run causing multiple deadlocks and gets called 5 times everytime someone opens your dashboard because you suck at JavaScript will. Put all the async awaits you want into that bugger, it's still going to screw your site over.

Async/await is a load of utter nonsense for the vast majority of MS customers. And yet now I see people using it for the most asinine calls that clearly do not need it.
I am not making assumptions. I'm providing my own opinion that the problems he mentions are best addressed by funding healthcare with taxes instead of having an insurance system.
I don't know which school of Marx's economics you went to but Marx argued entirely by value created. That is, the value of a worker's labour is the value that they should receive.
This comment seems to have touched a nerve; it's voted way down.

Can anyone rebut Shivetya's claims?

1. Subway is the most expensive transportation option per passenger mile, when you include subsidies.

2. Only one other US city (besides NYC) has 10% of workers riding the subway. (If I'm reading that right - is heavy transit distinct from "light rail" here?)

If you can't rebut them, what good is voting them down?
Mexico court suspends sale of Roku TV streaming gadgets
It's refreshing to hear generated piano music that isn't either strictly metrical or entirely freeform, but with patches where you do get a somewhat natural sense of rubato and sensitive dynamic shaping. It's sort of convincingly improvisatory. The constantly shifting harmonic idiom is disorienting in a not very pleasant way – the worst kind of Chopin + Ligeti mashup – especially when you raise the temperature. It would be interesting to use period/style-specific training sets.

To my ears the 5:00 clip does have a larger structure, there are clearly extended passages of building up to and ebbing away from large climaxes, where you get a real sense of sustained intensification, but of course if you follow the detail everything is built up from lots of fleeting and unrelated ideas.