skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
PatientPal [patientpal.health] | Full-Time | Fully Remote

Full-stack Javascript developers, Angular frontend, serverless TypeScript backend.

PatientPal is reducing the cost of healthcare, from clipboard to claim. Our ambitious goal is not taken lightly and it is not easy to achieve. We're looking for talented engineers with lots of passion to truly make a difference in this incredibly difficult industry.

PatientPal is an early stage startup with seed investment, we have several clients and are looking to be profitable quickly as we also seek outside investment to help the company grow.

PatientPal is completely serverless, HIPPA-compliant, and we expect each developer to ensure their work is good quality, write unit tests, and work on all aspects of the project.

PatientPal offers benefits and all the usual stuff.

If you're interested, please email hn@patientpal.health with your resume, optional cover letter, and any questions you have.

We are just our first round of hiring, future posts may include links to job boards.
> turning retirement savers into passive investors

I.e. stealing money from pension accounts so you can satisfy your urge to gamble with money you don't have for money you'll inevitably lose in the next bubble or blow on unnecessarily expensive shit noone needs?

Cool, so when I rob someone on the street, I could tell the judge I just turned the victim into a passive investor for that new phone I want to buy...
Very briefly:

Process calculus, such as the pi-calculus and join calculus. Prototype implementation in Scala here: https://github.com/Chymyst/chymyst-core

Lasp and Bloom: http://christophermeiklejohn.com/lasp/2018/03/02/lasp-vs-blo...
Can't you just revoke the location permission?
Passengers still get trapped for hours on airplanes sitting on tarmacs. I feel like there's a couple of stories about that per year, and that's just what gets reported in the media.
It's an Op-ed opinion piece...

Although, I agree pensions are... sub-optimal.
Just like Amazon's search for a new HQ, taxation based on borders is broken in a globalized world. Megacorporations can shop around to find a tax regime they like, playing countries off against each other to get a good deal. [0]

Reaching for solutions that either provide for extraterritoriality is only logical, given how impossible it is to unify the whole world behind a common tax scheme. It's a typical tragedy of the commons.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-tax/google-account...
Where I'm sitting, authoritarians all look alike to me.
I completely agree with the sentiment of this article.

(Caveat that the below advice applies to the type of people who read HN and probably not the average college student.)

What I value most from my college experience is the close friendships that I made. At no other time in your life are you able to live within a couple blocks (or even in the same building) as your best friends and have enough time to hang out and shoot the shit with them. Spending a lot of time together is necessary to create bonds for deep friendships. This is a big part of the reason it is so tough to make friends later in life, when everyone is busy.

I think that it is common for smart, driven people at Ivies and comparable universities to spend their time optimizing for career success in their first 1-4 years out of college, rather than thinking about optimizing happiness over their entire lives. My GPA was off of my resume after I got my first job, and no employer has ever asked about it. However, I'll never forget the fun, stupid things my friends and I did together, and I have ~5 people that I know would be there for me at the drop of a hat if I needed them.

Loneliness is a huge problem in society and terrible for an individual's long-term happiness and health. Given that college is essentially all of the freedoms of adulthood without any of the responsibilities, it is the perfect time to make the friendships that you'll view later in life as invaluable.
Oh please. Incumbents love USF, just like they love all other goofy surcharges. That's whey they invented them in the first place. Sure, their customers pay more than those of their competitors, but through their complete domination of PUCs and FCC they get to decide exactly how the programs are administered. As if they actually needed more barriers to entry for any potential competition, the rules of these programs are continually adjusted to fit exactly what incumbents are doing anyway, while imposing ruinous costs on competitors.
I would recommend checking out the channel “phlearn” on YouTube. It is photoshop based, but honestly learning photoshop is worth the time and effort.

Most of the skills are transferable to other editors just by learning the different menu options.
> When I make a loss for a year, I still have to pay income tax.

Where are you? When I write off business losses that are paid through my personal income taxes I can end up owing no income tax in the U.S.
> as the income annuities offered by insurance companies are

To which kind of insurance are you referring?
LA Tech News Supports the Los Angeles Community
So maybe we just need to invent the Vanguard of annuities? An annuity provider with a governance model designed to work in the interest of its customers that can build trust as a reliable player?

EDIT: it appears that Vanguard itself offers annuities, but they're not particularly transparent so I'm unsure if they're "good enough" for general-purpose retirement savings.
Stephen Hawking: The Beginning of Time
Do you have similar concerns with annuities?
Without setting location access to "always", this shouldn't be possible, right? He might only be talking about the customers who have it enabled. So yeah, will wait for the clarification.
Teamwork Analysis tool for GitHub
Huh, I did a similar thing a few years ago with much fewer ingredients to come up with a low budget diet (I also used multivitamins to fill in the gaps). I just threw a simple evolutionary approach at the problem, because modern computers reward laziness.
> why commuting to Manhattan doubles one's salary

"Mr Glaeser, a Harvard economist who grew up in Manhattan...calls cities 'our species' greatest invention': proximity makes people more inventive, as bright minds feed off one another; more productive, as scale gives rise to finer degrees of specialisation; and kinder to the planet, as city-dwellers are more likely to go by foot, bus or train than the car-slaves of suburbia and the sticks."

TL; DR People become more productive in cities. That translates to higher wages.

https://www.economist.com/node/18111592
I should have made clear that I was discussing corporation tax where the principle is that where the value is created determines how the generated profit should be subjected to tax. This is the principle behind the current international tax system for corporations, I believe.

But actually my point was really to try to refute the intuitively attractive idea that intangibles are more difficult to tax than physical goods within this framework. Taxing consumer goods is extremely complex these days because of global supply chains and vertical integration. On the other hand in many cases, services like legal work, consulting, etc. are simple to tax under this system despite the fact that intangibles are being traded.
It's a ponzi-like system. When the population pyramid inverts it becomes insolvent. This is happening everywhere. Then the taxpayers have to foot the bill.
The way TechCrunch presents this, it seems even shadier than Uber's "we'll track you for the 5 minutes after you get dropped off" tactic from last year.

With no language addressing such tracking in the EULA, how is that legal?
Such a polynomial only makes sense when x is a dimensionless quantity, or alternatively when the coefficients have appropriate dimensions to compensate.
That's absolutely true, and it's also self-reinforcing in that rich people pitted against each other with two parties helps ensure the lack of a third party.

I do think it's a far cry from money and power being interchangeable, though, as parent claimed.
Virtual Reality for Non-Ordinary Consciousness
You could try fermenting the cabbage to get a lot more flavor.
That is a valid point. Pensions probably made a lot more sense when life expectancy was lower. Today? Not so much. Probably the reason why so many pensions went bankrupt.

401(k)'s do seem like a much better option. However not all employers provide that. I'm not sure what the solution is.
I think they did buy Niman Ranch.
Indeed nothing was written about city/state pensions that do not make projected returns year after year and require significant funding which most cities can't afford.
I think that to some extent it's a case of 'who takes the risk' or 'what happens if things don't work out'.

Anyway, consider that this is all quite new to us. A highly financialized pension setup is not something multiple generations have done and the pension demographics have never really been what they are now, or will be soon.

I'm not sure the macroeconomics of that many pensioners, living for 30-40 years on savings... it goes beyond just financial math, or even political-financial math.
It's not so simple, what if I reinvest for 3 years all my profits ? I have no profits for those 3 years because I am investing in my company long term.
On HN:

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16463572

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14733829
You're absolutely right! Pensions exist to serve retirees, not their former overlords. Looking after the needs of the retired is the kind, decent, humane thing to do.

It's not about whose interests they serve so much as it is how sustainable and practical they actually are. Is it kind to make a commitment to someone around which they will organize their life at the cost of crippling the lives of their successors? What if that organization isn't a company, but a government, and the resulting costs cripple its ability to perform other functions? Is it kind to cripple a city's services or a school's ability to teach in order to meet pension obligations that were poorly planned for decades? Who will pay a company's pension bill if the pensions push it into insolvency?

These aren't trivial questions with easy, pre-baked answers. They also are real, pressing questions that face us today. Your heart is unquestionably in the right place - it's not about the investor class! It's about the retirees who have given their lives! But there might be some room for subtlety.
My favorite rating system was Netflix's back when they had a star system. I rated a large chunk of movies and it gave me expected ratings based on the opinions of users with similar tastes. I miss that system.
> 401(k) is a poor solution that requires individual initiative to deploy successfully

That's why 401k's are good. I have control, and if my retirement is underfunded it's my own fault. Compare this to pensions (both public and private) which are chronically underfunded:

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-state-pension-fundin...
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-corporate-pensions/
Organic doesn't mean pesticide-free at all. It only bans certain classes of pesticides.
As an Indonesian who was kept in a labor camp by the Japanese, my grandma (aforementioned Grandpa's wife) will attest that the Japanese were absolutely brutal. Her sisters were raped in prison. They starved on one cup of rice per day. In occupied Jakarta, a town square with water fountain in the center was filled with crocodiles, and people who resisted the Japanese were thrown inside it - any one who closed their eyes or turned their head to look away was punished. Japanese occupation was objectively bad, although the Dutch were known to be extremely harsh at times too.
I think the upbeat conclusion trying to downplay the dangers of Fukushima is misleading. The long term escape of large amounts of radioactive materials at Fukushima is a very different situation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In fact, it is a logical fallacy to argue that Hiroshima and Nagasaki recovered well because of next to no radioactive materials being left there and therefore that Fukushima is no problem.

Though it is easy to see where the funding and motivation for these kinds of "arguments" is coming from.
I think this is right. The problem is people being forced or coerced to do things that don't actually make them happy. An ideological rigidity about expectations. But this tribalism is what makes human beings human. We're not going to get rid of that anytime soon, at least not without fundamentally changing the nature of the human animal. The best we can do is tell people "Prefer doing things that make you happy" and hope they don't commit their lives, careers, families, etc. to things that don't make them happy. And make "happiness discovery" much easier by changing the way we educate our young. Perhaps also it would help to give people an easy way out of things they don't enjoy doing? Kinda hard if those "things" are marriages or children, so I'm not sure how feasible it is.
You conflate mismanagement with the act itself...

I agree with you that increased lifespans throw a wrench in the works, but that is not enough of a problem to justify throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Pensions represent a HUGE portion of market actors' institutional conservatism and that is a necessary counterweight to the sort of irrational exuberance that is endemic to tech and other forward-thinking sectors

You want to talk about skyrocketing costs? Why not focus that energy on sorting out the mountains of institutional waste found elsewhere in the economy? Like, why the fuck does infrastructure here cost 10x other industrialized countries? Lots more money to be freed up that way
In all these discussions about make, everyone argues about using it for everything. Personally, I don't know another tool that makes it straight forward to glue together all kinds of different build tools (for example webpack for frontend and maven/sbt for the backend).

Even if you don't directly use make, it makes for great, verifiable documentation.
> excesses of unregulated capitalism

The issue being discussed in this sub-thread is regulatory capture. It is disingenuous to blame that on unregulated capitalism, when in fact it is an issue of excess regulation.
A HomePod Intervention
And it allows for reflection: How would our troubleshooting and alerting handle this?

We had a similar haproxy session saturation problem a couple of month ago. By now, our alerting would pick this up within a minute and trigger alerts. Those include a runbook to resolve it. Our standard resolution would fail in a case like this, but I'm pretty sure we'd solve it in a second iteration.
The content becomes a part of the problem when it is liable to spread the "disease" (to continue the allegory).

I get the feeling we're discussing this on differing levels of severity, here.

I'm not talking about dissenting political opinions or pseudoscience or conspiracy theories or counter-culture or drugs or anything silly like that, but things more impactful and corrosive to humanity.

The persistence of certain content that isn't proliferated as a study has [arguably] the effect of normalizing itself, and whatever it resulted from.

---

I've been avoiding semantics, but let's go with a relatively specific example:

A person was raped. It was recorded.The gruesome story was detailed as entertainment for a sick (yeah, letting my bias out here) group of fans and interested or curious parties. The guilty party is found and apprehended, sentenced, and punished according to local law. Justice was served according to society's mandate. We consider this good.

Now of the persistent content. It's now in the hands of hundreds to tens or hundreds of thousands of people globally. Curious parties become interested parties, interested parties become fans, fans become culprits.

And all the while the victims get to live, not only with the experience, but with the knowledge that there are swathes of people enjoying the repeat viewing of the situation and the knowledge that it will never go away.

---

It's a big 'what if'. I could say the same about your position that if we don't gain total and open ability to publish whatever information whenever and have it persist forever that we will succumb to evil, oppressive forces. It's speculative.

I don't want to come across as if I'm coming down on the IPFS platform, or the interface Stavros ingeniously developed for it. Quite the opposite. I think that not enough thought goes into how powerful the platform really has the potential of being.

Software and network developers have a lot of inherent power to move large ideas with relatively few resources, and it should be recognized more often. And it should be discussed, honestly, whether one implementation or another is the best we can do before releasing it on society.

I'm of the opinion that ethical questions should be asked of engineers, and that empathy needs a larger role in the process of [not necessarily research, invention and development, but] implementation.

---

"We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."

Ellie Wiesel

---

Feynman on a Buddhist saying:

“To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven. The same key opens the gates of hell.

And so it is with science.”
"I’d likely be able to replace just the front element, but I picked up this lens for a hundred bucks, so if I want to do a fisheye shot for a future launch, I’ll probably just buy another one."

Basically any setup to protect the lens will end up costing about as much as the lens.
Who ever said "the right features" were limited to function pointers? Who ever even talked about function pointers? My example didn't even use function pointers! Are your imagination so limited that you cannot think of language features that would reduce the need for any specific pattern? I just showed you one, dammit!

Let's step back a little:

> 9 out of 10 patterns are nothing more than specific uses of inheritance and polymorphism.

Of course, inheritance and polymorphism are the only thing Java has! Or had, back in 1995. Hammer & nail. There are other ways of expressing those patterns, other ways of solving the same problems that do not require those patterns at all. You just need to wake the fuck up and realise OOP is not the only game in town.

> design patterns help clarify technical discussions as they communicate clear concepts as well as solutions to particular problems they solve.

I have yet to witness a single instance of that in my job, and I've seen loads. On the contrary, naming patterns often clouds the underlying concepts. A pet peeve of mine is the Singleton. It's overused for sure, but that also makes it one of the most widely understood patterns. Yet few seem to realise that singletons are nothing more than global variables with a couple bells and whistles. And since the thing is not called "global variable", it doesn't trigger the appropriate mental warnings.

What good are pattern names when programmers can't think clearly to begin with?

It's not just the conversations. Every time I saw a pattern name in real code, I could find a simpler way. I also saw misapplied patterns, like factories that actually were memory pools. Whoever did that didn't know what they were talking about, and patterns didn't save them.
I normally swear by seriouseats but I call BS on this one.

While I can get behind some explanations for taste differences arising from "physical" reasons such as a larger salt grains offering different texture, which affects how it may mix with your food and air / dissolve on your tongue, I refuse to believe that the chemical differences are negligible.

Take water for instance, anyone with remotely sensitive palette can taste the difference in water. Whether it's straight tap water, filtered water or various brands of mineral water.

Considering the concentrations of minerals which govern the taste differences, I would be astounded to hear that trace minerals in salt don't affect its taste.

I mean, not only can I taste the difference with reverse osmosis water used for coffee, but if you look carefully at it, it tends to have a slightly different viscosity from regular water.

What a disappointingly unrigorous serious eats article.
The Left Shouldn’t Be Too Proud to Meme
Today, I am able to get Gigabit fiber (1000/1000) in my area for $80/month. It's not from Google, but from a major ISP.

I am pretty confident if Google Fiber never existed, it would not have pushed other ISP's into fiber expansion at such an affordable consumer price.

Hopefully the fall of net neutrality is stopped before all this progress goes to shit.
> but no one can legislate for equality of outcome...

Actually, we can. We can ensure that even if your gamble goes very very wrong, then there is a base living standard that will be provided for you.

We're not talking about eliminating inequality, merely limiting the bounds. So people who make a bad gamble don't end up living in squabbles.

This enables both slackers and risk takers. I would argue we need to find the balance where society works, keeps making progress, and people don't go homeless, etc..
This doesn't seem to even try to explain by what measure 401(k)'s have failed (if the problem is low contributions, that is not the fault of the 401(k)), or back up the suggestion that pensions are not bankrupting municipalities.

It seems to mostly invoke the Koch brothers and paint a target on The Investor Class, and hope that is proof enough.

If the Koch brothers favor pension reform, then by definition pensions are not failing!

(I'm sure it is for some)
I suspect you're wrong, and that the connection between video and parent was that they were both Numberphile videos. An expanded comment might have read something like:

"Not only is today's Numberphile video potentially relevant, Numberphile actually directly addressed the article's exact topic several months ago."
the Dirty Dozen is a dramatic way of saying "don't eat the outer skin of foods that are not-organic". It backed by reasoning from simplistic assumptions (non-organic chemicals on skin == bad), not scientific tests.
The way I see it, there are three pension scenarios:

1. You are promised a pension and the company delivers.

2. You are promised a pension and the company does some creative accounting to screw you.

3. You are not promised a pension and plan for your own retirement accordingly.

4. You are not promised a pension and fail to plan for your retirement.

I don't believe #1 is reliable enough. Unless (and maybe even if) you are working for a government, your pension isn't rock solid. If you (more likely) run into #2 you end up betrayed, and have to scramble to make things work in your retirement.

I am 100% in camp #3. Plan for your own retirement-- No expectations; no disappointment.

Option #4? Well... there are consequences to your actions.
For a given definition of 'suburb'. My commute is 10 miles each way, not a problem.
On Android, that is not a setting you get.
I don't think there's too much of a difference between the sentiment of how you two want retirees to be treated. I think the main difference is that he respects people enough to believe they can plan for themselves, but you think they need to be coddled. But you both want them to have a prosperous and comfortable retirement.