skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is it that the USA is paying more than we should? Or is it that other nations are paying less than they should?

Also, doctors aren't the only thing we should be talking about. That's probably the easiest subject to think about.

It's much, much more difficult to talk about drug and device prices. Should the government dictate how much a new drug or device costs? What are the risks and downsides of doing that?
Using Data to Drive Outbound Sales
We switched over to VSTS from on premises TFS early this year and it has been great (Had our first hiccup yesterday).

The 10+10 hosted windows/linux agents + a bit of work to make our builds concurrent have been fantastic.
To some of us, the "sprawling throw-it-over-the-wall approach to development" is the problem. Particularly when they decide to reimplement services instead of using battle-hardened code, and revive old bugs that haven't been seen in the wild in years. As has happened with their DNS resolver, which was initially shipped missing measures that everyone else had shipped years ago to deter cache poisoning, and had buffer overflow problems on top of that.

There are not fundamental design flaws. They don't have to be, to be a problem. And it's a problem exacerbated by the developers' typical response to problem reports -- to try to transfer blame, or treat them as personal attacks, rather than dealing with the issue. An example of that is CVE-2017-1000082 -- a rare example of a real problem that was assigned a CVE number by request of someone other than the developer, because the developers are still insisting, after a week of well-deserved mockery, that it's not a problem (or not their problem, or something)...

Refs:

Buffer overflow: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/29/systemd_pwned_by_dn...

Cache poisoning: http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2014/q4/592
I'm still wondering if it's possible to little by little add single-payer. If we could agree for basic 6-month checks at a doctor for preventive heads-up, basic immunizations, a single child delivery, and potentially a few other things; I wonder whom would get on-board. If at least very basic healthcare is guaranteed, why couldn't we as a nation at least provide that?
Interested to see what someone more knowledgable would say is wrong with trying that.
> Because Lennart has a lot of pull at Red Hat... We don't need a reinvent-the-world solution like systemd to address the most complained about problems with init.

You work in software right?

You never ever "just" replace a system with an improved feature-alike product, you go apeshit crazy with cool stuff you wanted for the past 5 years but couldn't get approved, until you run out of budget. Duh.
property is defined by the government. unless you can defend it yourself.
No, if we're implementing universal healthcare, they're negotiating in a labor market which has decided to collectively bargain for the purchase of services.

Consider it the physcians version of labor globalization. Or workers labor negotiations vs ever larger corporations. Only this time its for a public good.
To the parenthetical part of your post: I thought Wayland and NVidia sorted out their differences several months ago and agreed to write a new protocol that addressed the valid concerns of both parties.
Wow ... this blows me away ... in a few short hours, so many people chimed in sharing thoughts ... It is great ... Would like to share mine as well.
Fundamentally, math to me is like a language. It's meant to help us to describe things a bit more quantitatively and to reason a bit more abstractly and consistently ... if it can be made mechanical and reduce the burden on one's brain, it would be ideal. Since it's like a language, as long as one knows the basics, such as some basic things of set theory, function, etc., one should be ready to explore the world with it. Math is often perceived as a set of concepts, theorems, rules, etc. But if one gets behind the scene to get to know some of the original stories of the things, it would become very nature. At some point, one would have one's mind liberated and start to use math or create math like we usually do with day to day languages such as English.
What is more likely, insurance companies beat more than 50% more care per dollar out of doctors/hospitals etc, or people would be better of getting rid of the giant middleman? Insurance companies don't heal you. Medicine does. Get rid of the 33% overhead of insurance and gain the free 50% extra money for healthcare. Then all the people in that industry can move on to better gainful employment.
Afterward, they changed their policies so that this can't happen again.
Introducing: Channels – Q&A for Engineering Teams – Meta Stack Overflow
>Do you just in your head have to tack on 10 to 20 percent (depending on the context)?

Yes - and I actually prefer shopping at places that don't use manipulative ($x.99) pricing or if they do, at least tax has already been included in the price (a local card shop does that). If something is $0.99 I should be able to buy it if I only have $1.00 with me, but after tax it comes out to $1.08. Infuriating.

I just tack 10% onto everything mentally, actual rate is 8.25% but 10% is easier to do mentally.
This is flat wrong mis-statement of both the facts and the outcomes.

The NHS does not assess cost-effectiveness of treatment in the UK in that fashion, and does not deny it on that basis.

Cost-effectiveness by QALY is one factor included in assessments by a separate body, NICE, which a) is not part of the NHS and b) does not inhibit NHS bodies from offering any particular treatment. If NICE gives a treatment option the green light, then the NHS trusts are obliged to offer it in applicable circumstances. If NICE does not, then individual (local) NHS trusts can make their own assessment. If there is a local cost constraint, that is considered as a matter of simple necessity.

It is a common falsehood often repeated by opponents of single-payer systems that doctors in such systems are directly prevented from offering treatments by faceless beancounters. It simply isn't so. Quite the opposite. The assessors may say "you must offer this treatment". They do not say "you must not".

However, QALY itself is IMO a terrible metric mainly because it is sufficiently describable to non-practitioners to become a political football.
> The problem is when patents last too long or thing are patented that are obvious and should have failed that criteria.

This. Particularly in software, if someone who doesn't know about the patent comes up with the idea independently, that should be prima facie evidence that the patent doesn't meet the criteria of not being obvious.

Of course, the lack of knowledge of the patent may be subject to challenge, but this would eliminate a lot of ridiculous patents.
iPad, iPad 2, The New iPad, iPad, iPad Air, iPad Air 2, iPad Pro, iPad
I'm reluctant to trust the brand...
>, thereby violating the so-called Unix Philosophy of doing one-thing well. For a user app to do that is one thing, but for a core OS component to do that just smells way too much like forcing Linux to be more like Windows, which a lot of hard-core Linux users are ideologically opposed to.

That ship sailed a long ago when Linus ranted against microkernels :) Linux was never meant to follow a 'do one-thing well' design. It was designed to be a monolithic do-all-things design that's also highly modular.
Which is a purely religious problem as libsystemd0 basically does nothing if systemd is not running. Debian is a binary distribution, a lot of stuff is linked against libs you probably never use, that's just how it is.
Wow, do you mean that for profit companies base their decisions on profit and not on niceness ?
It's almost as if people can live their own lives and figure out if note taking on a computer works or doesn't for them?
Honest question: Are chatbots really used or is just a nice-thing to have? When I visit website and the chatbot pops up it really feels like it disrupts MY browsing, I immediately turn it off. I really wanted to if chatbots can translate into new sales.
And so we should put government in control of health care. But who runs government? Oh, it's people, who you just argued are all hopelessly greedy and self-centered.
I agree with you.

But what Google does is as far as any sane donator/sponsor would go. We can't really expect them to keep sponsoring more doughnut shops after they find out their money is not being put into good use.
I think GP meant that Shopify themselves actually funded their app, not just that they built it on top of Shopify.
But that's how most research funding works. The same is true if you get a government research grant - do what you want, but if they don't like your results, they are unlikely to fund you another round.
Yes, this tetralogy* is spellbinding. The world is vast and cannot be fully comprehended. As you said, it feels quite real, and everything that happens around Severian hints at so much more. This book ought to be at the top of every SF aficionado's reading list. It's that good. I'm glad yours is the top comment right now.

I have been thinking about how the trend in long-form television would be very favorable for translating some of Wolfe's books into film and exposing them to a broader audience. There are so many things in New Sun that would make for compelling television, and we have the technology to do the special effects right--that is, not a CG-fest, but (mostly) subtle and in service of the story. His fuligin cloak alone I would love to see in motion. Though I think the way the story is told would have to change drastically, unless they were to keep the narration--which is a tricky prospect. Part of the book's charm is that you never know if what you are imagining based on what the narrator says really happened that way, and people put enough faith in what they see to lose that aspect.

For that reason, and because a film translation would have to expose a number of the puzzles that Gene put into New Sun for us, I've latched onto the idea of a TV series for Book of the Long Sun instead. It is just as imaginative, the world (or should I say the whorl) just as vast, and the book follows almost as grand an adventure. Patera Silk, in my opinion, makes for an even more compelling protagonist than Severian, and the other characters are even more human than those in New Sun. On the surface it is not as dramatic, or fantastic, but the interactions of the gods of the Whorl with the humans gets at one of those central philosophical and technological questions, as does Silk's enlightenment (which happens on page one, so I'm not giving anything away) among other things.

So if anyone here happens to be a producer, or knows one, get the first book of either series into their hands. They'll get the rest on their own. And hurry up, please--Gene's getting up there in age and you'll want his help.

* though of course there is Urth of the New Sun...
I'd agree with this completely. It's less about teaching what, how and when than it is teaching WHY you need to know this.

In high school, if you can convince a single person that they need to know calculus, more power to you. 99% of people don't and it's literally a waste of time. Teach people finance though...suddenly we have math that people will know is important.
0xffff2 - that's correct. Personally I am more lenient, given that my country of birth struggles.

But in the context of the conversation, I think #18 is good enough to make the cutoff for single payer. After all, other countries with lower healthcare transparency are still more efficient with their universal systems.

krupan - I don't have the data for what has happened with transparency when countries implemented universal healthcare. So I don't have the answer for that.
Of course it has a chilling effect on the researchers. If Google stops paying for your research you would have to find another source of money, that's not easy for everyone. So they will tend to write stuff in a Google-friendly fashion just to secure the money. That does not mean they will spin everything but it will surely influence the tone of their publications.
> If you have ample open source code, lots of experience that's relevant to what I'm doing, then gosh yes - nobody should be giving you homework to do.

So last time I needed a job, I interviewed at something like 38 places. All had my Github, smack dab at the top of the resume. Exactly two (2) out of a total of like 10 responses that passed through the first phone screen and wanted a coding test said "you have a Github so we don't need you to do the coding test."

So...I agree with you, but they totally do ask anyway. ;)

...

> That's a time investment too.

Those devs are getting paid for it, though. If you want to pay for my time, then that obviously changes things.

(If you are picking up that I do not care that the company spends money, you would be correct. People matter, not LLCs or corporations. ;)

> The argument against homework from the candidate always comes down to "Why should I have to prove I can do what I say I can do?"

I disagree. The argument I generally hear (and I'm more sympathetic to your position if somebody is a non-person on the internet) is "you aren't paying me for work you are asking for." Which is the framing that, IMO, makes much more sense. Neither of us should be working for free and we should be pushing back against upper management if they want you to be complicit in trying to make me work for free (or vice versa).

> Hiring people for a team is extra work. If I spent 3 hours in interviews today, guess what? I still have to get my work done too.

I 100% empathize, but this speaks to a failure of management. If an interview isn't being counted as filling space/reducing story points for that sprint/whatever-Agile-Agile-Agile, then management dun goofed.
How to Build a Serverless API with Amazon Web Services' API Gateway
Suppose the current price for "two tylenol handed to a patient in a paper cup" is $50, and a giant insurer^W^W EVIL GOVERNMENT says it will only pay $40 next year. What do you suppose will happen? Societal collapse?
I love how there's a mix of simple things like why you can't tile things with more than 6 edges and really complex things like what the headline is about.
A nitpick regarding the comment on the 8XXX series which is targeted pretty much only for 8 socket systems (or 4 in non-fully populated configs).

> This pricing seems crazy, but it is worth pointing out a couple of things. The companies that buy these parts, namely the big HPC clients, do not pay these prices.

We in HPC would not touch these outside big memory systems which is even niche for us. The consumers of these are far more likely to be those with data warehouse style needs (a.k.a Oracle customers).

Much like the rest of the world 2 socket systems in HPC are by far the most common.
This is the best solution when you are building a whole system from scratch.
If you have to build a feature or whatever it is then it already got implicit permission from the jira sponsor or the product owner or whatever stakeholders are in charge.
And for a feature I don't have to lose days writing long documents.
I just think how it should work, I discuss it with the senior members of the team and with the stakeholders if needed.
From that point on I just speak with the users to understand exactly what they want showing them whatever I'm building to have an early feedback.
I think that is much more productive spending several days in a tight feedback cycle with your users than spending the same amount of times drafting the architecture in a document.
In my view, speed plays a role, though I can't say that it should play such a central role.

I think that in a lot of disciplines, you have to become fluent at manipulations, and at seeing and thinking in higher level patterns. Being able to think your way through a more complex problem would seem to benefit from, if not require, seeing multiple steps ahead in a progression. At least this is my perception.

My experience in school math was that it wasn't enough to satisfy myself that I knew how to solve a problem. I then had to work my way through a whole bunch of similar problems until I could perform the manipulations quickly. This is also how I managed to commit the definitions, axioms, and theorems to memory. If I didn't do that stuff, then I got my arse handed to me on the exam. I gave my kids pretty much the same advice.
In lower-level courses, Greek letters aren't used that much (at least, I don't use them that much), so I wouldn't describe it as a fixation (or a major problem). Examples of use:

College algebra: pi.

Calc 1/2: pi, theta, capital sigma for sums. epsilon and delta to state the definition of a limit (but epsilon-delta proofs have largely disappeared from mainstream calc courses, so those two letters actually don't appear much).

Linear algebra: pi, capital sigma. Some people like to use stuff like phi or psi for linear maps. I don't.

On the one hand, in writing my course notes I have moved away from Greek letters somewhat in courses like abstract algebra. On the other hand, there is at least one good reason to use them: It helps you distinguish different kinds of objects by using different kinds of symbols. So, for example, I can write "f(x)" for a group map f applied to a group element x. If you follow the rule of picking letters from disparate parts of the alphabet for different kinds of things, that's okay. But I think some people prefer "phi(x)" exactly because the function phi "stands out" from the argument x.

Also, if I need 4 functions "in parallel", I could use alpha-beta-gamma-delta. If I try to do this using Roman letters, I use f, g, h, ... now what? ("i" is sort of reserved for indexing; "e" might mean the constant, but in any case is not often used to name a function.) You can subscript (f_1, f_2, f_3, f_4) but that introduces another kind of notational density and possibility of confusion. There are tradeoffs both ways.

There are places where I'm definitely in sympathy with the your general point. I've sometimes read something and wondered why the writer didn't just use a Roman letter (particularly when I don't recognize the Greek letter - is that a capital Greek whatsis or an emoji?). Sometimes, people use calligraphic script caps (e.g. for ideals), not realizing that they will be a pain for handwriting or TeXing notes. And in some subfields of math, people seem to like Fraktur or Hebrew characters which are a real nuisance (it took me a few tries to learn how to handwrite a passable aleph), particuarly when they're handwritten and the person writing has shitty penmanship so you can't tell what letter they wrote.

I agree with the general point, though: Greek letters should be used like seasoning.
It's a documentry, not just the patent troll part, but the whole thing.
Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" posits something like this; FTL travel is impossible, but it is possible to help civilizations bootstrap via an internet-like broadcast system that is inherently built to operate at the speed of light.

(Those who have read the novel(s) in question will probably find my description of the Qeng Ho network incomplete at best, but I don't want to write too many spoilers.)
Just wanted to give a huge shout-out to PostgREST:

https://postgrest.com

https://github.com/begriffs/postgrest

You can get many of the benefits of GraphQL using postgrest's resource embedding:

https://postgrest.com/en/v4.1/api.html#resource-embedding

We're using it in production.

PS: To be clear, you can't expose it directly to your users. We wrap it in a proxy service that provides authentication and authorization, and parses and transforms the users' URL queries destined for PostgREST. We also apply some transformations to the data coming back from PostgREST, such as encoding our internal UUIDs. It may sound complicated, but it's actually only about 200 lines of Erlang.
Usually that only disallows reassignment of function arguments. For example, eslint's no-param-reassign rule by default allows modifying the properties of the function argument. However, the "props" parameter for this rule can disallow even the modification of properties of a function's argument.
The bigger problem is the one you didn't respond to. You're showing up in an HN thread with a single-purpose account armed with seasoned ideological talking points. That's very much not what this site is for, regardless of which battle it is and which side you're on.
Went to college with a guy. Freshman year calculus. He was really slow with it. I helped him, and we did homework together. Now he's a math major. Totally surprised me, but he's now majoring in a subject that he wasn't super good at.

People need good teachers at all ages. I'm glad his college professors helped him out enough to lead him to major in math.
I have hard time imaginig a popup that the user wants.
Do you just in your head have to tack on 10 to 20 percent (depending on the context)?

Most people do that. They just assume that it will be some multiplier above the advertised price.
Be careful about what drives you do this with - I've seen reports of some of these drives not having standard SATA headers once they're shucked.
>AWB: Alternatively we could add this to a standard Dict module.

>BT: Assuming we get standard modules?

>AWB: We'll get them.

lol
This is good work! I might reference your project in an article I've been writing about responsible affiliate sites.
Eric Nylund's "Signal to Noise" and "A Signal Shattered" posits something similar - they're out there, and they're out to get you - but FTL communications exist and the others are more rabidly mercantile than invasive.

(To be fair, I've only read The Three Body Problem, and I'm not sure how it evolves from there.)
Check this out: https://gist.github.com/torgeir/e528337e7a9a41c96ac9
PROFIT is not the only economic factor.

Let's say I'm in the business of selling normal goods (say, backpacks). Now, instead of just people going to my website or looking at crowdsourced backpack reviews, there's some cartel that has figured out how to dominate search engines and other sources so that almost all the customers see their middle-man stuff and buy through them instead of directly (even more extreme, maybe they spend massively on lobbying to achieve real rent-seeking via outlawing direct purchases by consumers, although that's not necessary for my argument).

These middle-men charge much higher prices than we'd see if everyone bought directly. But dominating the search-engines while the algorithms constantly change is ENORMOUS work, so these cartel companies pay almost all their revenue to a huge number of employees who work constantly to update their systems and maintain their middle-man dominance. You could say they "barely make a profit!"

So, in that scenario above, it's painfully obvious that the system is horribly wasteful and all-around negative for the economy aside from all the bullshit work of the cartel employees directly providing them income. The room for efficiency improvements are, in this case, nearly the entire REVENUE of the middle-men, minus only the costs of the goods themselves, not just their profits!!

Insurance companies do TONS of bullshit economic waste that is both necessary to the system as it is today yet unnecessary in a single-payer system. All of that waste is NOT profit but IS available margin for efficiency improvements.

But really, insurers are just one aspect. There's also total craziness in the core pricing that providers set and lots of other complete insanity in the status quo.

P.S. the middle-man issues described above are potential market-failures for any market system and just one of many reasons that dogmatic "free market" ideology is bullshit. That said, there's cases where actions to fix market failures only make things worse. Recognizing that free-market dogma is bullshit does NOT mean the opposing dogma is correct.