skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The very year ACA took effect my health plan was canceled, my doctor went off-network, my new plan had 3x the annual premium and has grown 30% year over year, and I fight tooth and nail every single charge to make sure it is in network and covered."

Same here, and I hear the same exact story from most people I talk to. Plans dropped, premiums skyrocketing. Here in Phoenix we've got a single insurer left, and we'll see if we have anybody next year.

What I haven't seen is stories of average joes who were substantially helped by ACA. Sure, if you didn't have coverage before by cost or pre-existing condition, or get subsidies now, maybe you're happier. But the vast middle class, not so much.
Lots of different types of stores limit orders per customer for lots of reasons. We don't need regulations to prevent it.
Good question. IANAL, but i would imagine the floor plan is public record. If, someone were to build a new building using a previous designed floor plan, I can see how that could be an issue. But that's not even whats going on here. they aren't using the ACTUAL plans that the architect drafted - they're making their own map, which is akin to taking photos of the space. Like how record companies can own a recording but not a song. Where you get it from matters.

But, not a lawyer. Curious what others make of it.
> HN is the same way when it relates to political news (i.e. liberal, one-sided, pretty much echo-chamber)

HN is one of those places where everyone thinks that there are plenty of "the other side" here. There are plenty of fiscal and social conservatives on this site. Probably the only sector of the conservative world that isn't well-represented here are war hawks.
I've never had a GP that doesn't care about their patient's in-network costs. Get a new one.
I suspect if you went into 100 Apple stores, and asked 100 of the bubbly sales persons with their cute little Apple shirts if Macs can get viruses, you'd get 50%+ to say no.
Deprecation is not the same thing as removal.
They're not removing Paint. They are just not developing it any more. They may still leave it in the OS for years to come; maybe even indefinitely. There are a lot of deprecated programs that still ship with Windows.
You're right, but I think this paper is the first step on a (potentially very, very) very long road to building machines that could "imagine no possessions"
Star Trek and its revolutionary debt
What the hell are you talking about, just because NPR report the news that not pro Trump doesn't make them liberal or left.
Ask HN: What sites do you use to become a good engineering manager?
I visited Kerala for a week for work. The roads in Thiruvananthapuram make me think the traffic conditions aren't really suitable for cars with drivers either.
Moreover, data-driven control isn't a new concept. It's not my field so I can't comment on what's new here, but I've heard about learning dynamics and rewards in a control theory context plenty of times.
The article mentions "bitcoin tumbling" - is this actually effective? Does anyone know of any good resources to read up on the theory behind it?

It seems to me like it wouldn't work - you're basically just adding a single hop between the stolen coins and you...
I am thinking exactly the same thing. Maybe they are trying to get some hype from media?
Ah, another ban. Welcome to the new age governance in India. Some government official in Karnataka wanted to ban ride sharing as well. I hear the government's sentiment about creating jobs, but hey have these guys ever sat in that shitty truck and driven all night ? Fucking armchair politicians.

Anyways, I used to think why hasn't any company invested in self driving tech in India - and now the answer becomes pretty clear. One can possibly take the government head on and challenge the ban in the Supreme court.
Ok, changed to that from https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2017/07/24/TLS-1-3-W.... Thanks!

Edit: actually this looks like a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14832517.
Skeptics Stack Exchange has some good content (and also some not so good content)

There's content there about Snopes research: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/2094/is-a-write...
All Ethereum contracts will incorporate the entirety of the relevant national, state, and local laws into their code.
AFAIU this happened because of where Esperanto was created--among the rapidly shifting cultural and political mores of Central Europe. The emigration of both ideas, particularly communism and anarchism, and people (e.g. educated Jews) helped carry it across Europe. The global spread of communism then carried it around the world.

It's unsurprising that the promise of a single, unifying, constructed, internationalist language would appeal to leftists. Which isn't to say leftists are naive, just that it would be much more odd to see initial interest from nationalists or other conservatives.
Our (rural wireless ISP) does something along these lines ... data between something like 1am and 7am does not count towards the monthly data cap.

At (peak) times they actively traffic shape and penalize the heaviest users. It sucks, but I don't see people willing to pay the $$$ to upgrade infrastructure faster.
Sandboxing. All third party apps in the Mac app store, and many system apps. Safari, Mail, Messages, FaceTime, Calendar, Contacts, Photos, Notes, and Reminders are all sandboxed.

I also really like how Gatekeeper ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatekeeper_(macOS) ) works – it quarantines documents such as word files, so that on first open you get a dialog pointing out that it's been downloaded. This is great, because you see the dialog very infrequently. I actually pay attention to it when it comes up.
Why Do Cats Eat Grass?
What's the point of making things cheaper when it centers the wealth on just a few owners? When there are lots of workers working low income jobs versus just a few workers working high income jobs, it creates a healthier more distributed economy.
Along these lines, can anyone suggest tools to monitor the 'weather' on social media by tracking bot and flamewar like activity? I don't mean in terms of the actual content of what's posted, just how active different networks are and suchlike. I've looked at some social media monitoring tools but they seem both expensive and centered on a particular user's account or brand mentions.

I'm looking for a high-level semi-realtime tool; it doesn't need to do sentiment analysis or anything like that.
That's more of a history lesson than a political one. Democrats and Republicans have wildly different perspectives on healthcare. Democrats tend to believe it's a universal human right. Republicans seem to think whatever solution the free market decides is the right solution, even if it means not everyone gets access to healthcare.

It's been that way for decades.
But jobs are how those goods and services are distributed. A country like India is not in a state to transition to basic income yet.
The flip side of that is supposedly tech literate IT managers who insist that my company implement "industry standard" virus detection software on a fleet of MacBook Pros. The stupid cuts both ways.
I'm honestly surprised it's not a bigger deal, particularly since it's easy to draw vehicular safety along class lines - rich people have big safe cars and drivers and poor people don't. I'd think India's class-conscious politicians would make some noise.
Spoken like the generation taught to not conserve data. /s

The phone itself could easily record the returned file size of all requests within a threshold. My old Note3 has these alerts built in with separate limits for mobile vs wifi.
I am one of those people who never get hungry. I don't fast, but don't eat breakfast, skip lunches once in a while. Usually have a large dinner. I am not skinny but slightly overweight, according to BMI (25.1).

But when I purposefully eat as much as possible on vacations (trying out all of the famous places, you know), then for next week or two I get hungry all the time. It takes a lot of time before I could get back to my normal eating schedule. I really don't care one way or other but my busy schedule just get in the way of regular lunches.

Also I have been going to same doctor for last decade and he says my health is as great as of someone 15 years younger than me.
> The sad thing about the FT is how expensive it is.

Real journalism costs money, and ad revenues aren't what they used to be.
At first, I thought it was referring to AMD's new Vega GPU family. I was hoping they found a particularly good use case for it.
Care to elaborate what bits of Clean Code are damaging?

I've read it and I thought it has some good ideas. It's the #3 most discussed book on StackOverflow. However, I've been downvoted on HN for recommending something the book talks about (comments are usually misused)

Maybe I'm missing something more experienced developers know.
We get to see those because they're advertising. That's the whole point of "you have to pay." When I read a hype story about a company someone else is paying.

Really good, cheap or free info about the present and future tends to lie not in a consumer paper but in dense, wordy PDFs that are cast offs of internal researchers at major multinationals and government bureaus. Those documents are often released to tell investors and taxpayers "here is how we view the situation and why" and their structural mission is to get the assessment right so that they make correct moves. There is little storytelling or human interest to these documents, but they are valuable for the same reason that knowing about the weather is valuable.
No, cryptocurrency tumbling is usually not "a single hop".

Even if you consider the simplest case, address A (clean) and B (stolen) put their money into address C, and then split them into addresses X, Y, Z, you already can't tell where the stolen money went.

Now do that multiple times with randomly generated address, random amounts, it becomes indistinguishable from regular transactions. Everything blends together.
Elon Musk’s “Innovations” Make the Middle Class Poorer
As a consumer now, is the problem that I have to save up my money and carefully choose which expensive web browser to "buy"?

At most, that's evidence of a new dynamic coming to a market, but I don't see the evidence of consumer harm from the phase 2 raising of prices in the browser market.
- The story of the world is largely a military history. For brutal facts, figures and movements and minimum pathos: http://strategypage.com

- Dan Carlin's Common Sense podcast is a relatively unbiased source for US politics.
NPR has been known as being a left leaning news outlet long before Trump entered the picture.
I bet if we start testing self driving cars in India, we'll get there in perhaps another 10-20 years. What's needed is an extremely good path planning algorithm. Rest of the self driving tech SLAM et al is already solved.

However, the bigger problem on Indian roads is congestion. I think you need smaller autonomous vehicles that can navigate through the crevices and cracks ( gallis ). Something smaller than the Tata Nano.
The brilliance of the Friedman anecdote is that it reveals something Higher-Life-Form types like Nitin Gadkari, who propose to save you with the wonderful power of regulation, miss. What they miss is that in their world there's no logically sound riposte to Friedman's question. It should be spoons. Teaspoons, even. Creates more jobs.

But actually what works is, perhaps, shovels. And then, if you can afford it, earth-moving equipment.

Who says shovels are best?

Prices say shovels are best. And then, later, prices say earth-moving equipment is best. You don't have to be a Randian absolutist to conclude that governments inevitably distort outcomes and impoverish people, even at the margin, when they control prices.

I think what is implicit in a move like Gadkari's is a belief that the idea of a "market-clearing price" is an economic textbook proposal that one is free to adopt or not adopt. In fact these concepts are not theories but reality-reflecting lenses. Prices are actual facts. The ban on driverless cars will create grey markets, criminals, cartelize commercial driving, artificially enhance transport costs, and, perhaps most insidiously, marginally nudge a young man or woman on the edge of deciding between (say) driving and doing a Masters degree, to drive.
I agree that the claim is probably an empty boast, but depending on jurisdiction and heist mechanics, the laptop theft could be the more severely punished offense.
Aviation uses English, although that was a change from the widespread tradition of using French for international purposes, at least throughout the 19th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English
I don't care about larger companies or companies that make more than $10 million a year. There is a real problem with money in America's smaller companies. Just because you want giant companies to pay $15+ an hour for labor is not fair to smaller companies.
I paid my last attorney around $250 per hour and was very satisfied. Something like this might only be a couple of hours. Have an initial meeting with the attorney (usually free). They'll develop a strategy with you, in this case it would probably be to document the situation and send a letter explaining that a lawyer is engaged. Then the whole thing might stop there.
It's not a negative tone, the poster is just observing that the Economist has bias. I have no problem with its bias considering that it's clearly stated on a regular basis; I've read it for years and greatly respect it even though I don't agree with its editorial stance.
A Developer at Slack on the Importance of Diversity in Tech
The problem with Moonlight is lack of companies on it. The large amount of developers on there compared to the number of projects and the lack of a real site (the app is just Google forms and emails) make this site feel like a waste of time.

I really wanted to like Moonlight, but I think it has some issue right now.
On contrary it might actually bring some order in traffic situation.
A search tree in something like chess is quite small, and very discrete. You can enumerate every possible action, and exploring the tree to a useful depth is computationally tractable. By contrast, for an agent operating in a complex environment, like a robot in the real world, even if you somehow came up with a coherent process for listing every possible action the robot could take, you might not even be able to store them all, let alone compute their consequences. Think about the sheer amount of information you'd need to process. Moreover, the real world is (for practical purposes) continuous. The robot would have the option of engaging one of it's motor for one millisecond, or two milliseconds, or three milliseconds, etc.

This seems to be tackling the issue of what to do when there are just too many options, and the depth of exploration necessary to make useful predictions is too high, for you to just enumerate everything, heuristically prune, and pick the optimum.
Not sure if this is right but maybe because wages were lower back then even with inflation?
I use BTC to purchase prescription drugs that I have a script for but refuse to pay absurd marked-up US prices for. Is that illegal? I suppose it is by the letter of the law. But certainly not by the spirit of it.

I am also a notable figure in some circles and do not want my name or credit card information to appear in the ledgers of certain vendors, despite them being legitimate businesses, due to potential records being exposed from hacking. I therefore use BTC and I've used mixing services on top of that.

There's plenty of other reasons, but those are my first-world ones. And I'm not even a privacy nut.
> The content providers don't have a product to sell to local distributors if they don't have significant control over online distribution

Why so? It only happens in unhealthy monopolized markets. In healthy competitive markets, content providers should be independent from distributors. They create something (films for instance) and distribute them as widely as possible (i.e. through all distributors), to maximize reach and in turn profit. That would include global unrestricted distribution. But when market is monopolized and there are cartels, all that becomes totally messed up and restrictions pop up all over the place.
I find the Wall Street Journal to be quite solid if you're willing to fork over ~$350/yr... Well worth it.

Just a side note for Reddit - cat and dog pictures are overrunning the community.
"Democracy now" is usually pretty neutral in their headlines. The guests are often far to the left, though.
Precise measurement of proton's mass finds it 3σ lower than previous estimates
Give this essay a read: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/05/how-the-economist-thi...

> The Economist is not, therefore, an honest examiner of the facts. It is constantly at pains not to risk conclusions that may hurt the case for unregulated markets. This tendency reached its absurd apotheosis in the magazine’s infamous 2014 review of Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. The magazine objected to Baptist’s brutal depiction of the slave trade, saying the book did not qualify as “an objective history of slavery” because “almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains.” When outraged readers pointed out that this is because, well, the victims of slavery tended to be black, The Economist retracted the review. But as Baptist observed in response, there was a reason why the magazine felt the need to mitigate the evils of slavery. Baptist’s book portrayed slavery as an integral part of the history of capitalism. As he wrote: “If slavery was profitable—and it was—then it creates an unforgiving paradox for the moral authority of markets—and market fundamentalists. What else, today, might be immoral and yet profitable?” The implications of Baptist’s work would have unsettling implications for The Economist. They would damn the foundations of the very Western free enterprise system that the magazine is devoted to championing. Thus The Economist needed to find a way to soften its verdict on slavery. (It was not the first time they had done so, either. In a tepid review of Greg Grandin’s The Empire of Necessity with the hilariously offensive title of “Slavery: Not Black or White,” the magazine lamented that “the horrors in Mr Grandin’s history are unrelenting.” And the magazine’ long tradition of defending misery stretches back to the 19th century, when it blamed the Irish potato famine on irresponsible decisions made by destitute peasants.)
I can also say that, as a personal user of filtering proxies[1], I'd want to have TLS 1.3 support too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxomitron
Contrarily, I would be surprised if the devs sold their code without asking, “why do you want it?”
Anecdotal story: I have a friend who works for the Indiana State Police and was on the committee to procure new service pistols. In every category, the Springfield XD won. Problem was, it had a grip safety. ISP requirements dictate that no safeties could interfere with operation when needed, as they may have to fire in a compromising situation if in a struggle, for example. Not being able to firmly grip the pistol and engage the safety was a non-starter. When drawn, the firearm had to fire if the trigger was pulled every time. So Glock it was, which only has a trigger safety.
This smells like cheap and irresponsible journalism. For one, the CEO is quoted as saying “There’s an entire ecosystem of things and services that the smart home can deliver once you have a rich map of the home that the user has allowed to be shared.” Further evidence is given in the form of part of the TOS where you essentially agree that if iRobot goes under, the buyer will get all the data. Obviously.

That's one blatant ignoring of the CEO's full statement, and one unfounded misinterpretation of the terms of service. Hardly justification for both the title and the premise of the article.
Well aware, thanks. I only ever stated that the Luhn algorithm would validate just the numbers.
I’m sure it will be of great interest when the company that sold me my internet connected garage door opener starts selling my open times.
Think how much regulatory red tape there must be for that to be a better way to do things! There is the point at which laws designed to protect people end up hurting them. The Seattle minimum wage experiment is a good example: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/06/sea... (https://evans.uw.edu/sites/default/files/NBER%20Working%20Pa...)

> – The numbers of hours worked by low-wage workers fell by 3.5 million hours per quarter. This was reflected both in thousands of job losses and reductions in hours worked by those who retained their jobs.
>
> – The losses were so dramatic that this increase “reduced income paid to low-wage employees of single-location Seattle businesses by roughly $120 million on an annual basis.” On average, low-wage workers lost $125 per month. The minimum wage has always been a lousy income transfer program, but at this level you’d come out ahead just setting a hundred million dollars a year on fire. And that’s before we get into who kept vs lost their jobs.

When laws with one goal achieve the exact opposite, we need to rethink the laws. Unfortunately, pyrrhic victories are rather common in politics.
Just look at it... 30% of all posts are dog/cat related. 10% are top news sources that I could get from news.google.com beforehand and the remaining is just a void of randomized "cool" posts that many will forget within hours. Nevertheless, I still go on it everyday and am pleasantly entertained.
Capitalism is supposed to be an equitable trade for BOTH sides of the transaction. I am also quite certain a socialist government would be happy to have this information.
You're missing all of the QA conferences!

http://testingconferences.org/
It is funny how the US focuses on "intellectual property" over selling actual goods. We have been running a trade deficit since the 1980s I think. This reminds me of patent trolls for example.
Facebook messenger experiencing issues
I've been impressed by the Sourcegraph blog lately:

https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/
I like the concept but I don't like the fact that BlockBlock needs to install a kernel extension. It says it does this to minter process creation. Why can't it do it with dtrace?

Example: https://github.com/kenorb/dtrace-tools#processes
This video gives a little more context: https://youtu.be/fhnMUc36opI
> lingua franca

Ironically, the term lingua franca doesn't actually refer to French as many people think, but to the Frankic language Sabir. Sabir was similar to modern Romance languages, but still distinct from them.

The language no longer exists, because as it spread across the Mediterranean, it ended up forking and influencing the local languages there instead.

Such is typically the fate of common languages.
Paint rollers? Really?

Pull that paint roller out of your pocket and paint the wall next to you, then go to the restroom and pull it out again to paint over the graffiti on the stall wall. Then walk your dog and use it to paint the neighbors houses...

Never gunna happen. When do you need a paint roller? About once every 5 years on average, vs WIRELESS connectivity once every 5 minutes on average.
That's a pretty weird definition for joy. I can certainly conceive of some fleeting pleasure from a feeling of winning a game or somesuch, but this is no deeper than the pleasure I get from a refreshing drink on a hot day or a fun social interaction. But this doesn't admit of transcendent emotional, spiritual, or aesthetic experiences.
> imagination is a distinctly human ability

Right...