skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do I need coverage from my food insurance every time I take a trip to Trader Joe's, Chipotle, or even Walmart? There is every reason for flu shots to be cheap enough that they don't require a special mechanism of payment. Yes, vaccine is delicate and it must be handled with care ... but the same is true for most foods and many other necessities that we somehow manage to buy and sell without an insurer butting in.

The goal has to be making medicine work like everything else we buy, including the daily non-negotiables like food, water, clothing, and energy resources. There's no reason medicine shouldn't or can't work that way in the general case.

But as long as we make it about moving numbers around so that Group X is slightly less inconvenienced by this farce, we're playing their game. We need to be talking about how to break their stranglehold, and I don't think just "move it into the government so we can get installed as bureaucrats, who are even harder to get rid than executives!" is necessarily a great macro-scale response (though I continue to believe it's better than doing nothing).

I don't suggest taking anything from anyone who is actually involved in the thing here. The only people I want to take out of the equation are the pencil-pushers leeching gargantuan quantities of otherwise-useful time and money away from the public.

That so many people find it so difficult to conceive of routine medical care without an insurance carrier of some type is a testament to the work we have ahead of us.
Skimming the article, it mentions they banned Overwatch, which has only cosmetic rewards from lootboxes ("skins" which change what your in-game character looks like slightly), so it would seem they're banning even non-progression related lootboxes.

Personally, I'm rather happy to see this action being taken; loot boxes are a predatory and frequently deceptive business model.
While Hermel certainly appears to have no idea what he's talking about, that doesn't make this reply of yours correct either. In particular, the incompleteness theorems are not physics.
Wouldn't

>Today's media is too decentralized to create the wave of panic that is necessary to burst a bubble

mean bubbles would be common but not burst? Anyway I suspect history will continue in the usual manner rather than it being very different this time.
I see your point but it's not that clear cut in my experience because even if two languages share the same alphabet the way it maps to pronunciation can vary wildly. If you take random made up words like "tothon", "ylho", "sturcti" or "boqurkït" and ask English, German, French and Portuguese people to pronounce them as words in their native language you'll get wildly different results. So in a way you have to learn to override your native language and re-learn to read when you're switching to a foreign tongue, even if it uses the same alphabet.

Latin alphabet might give you the illusion that you can read a text aloud but it's really just that, an illusion. Ask a French speaker with no knowledge of English to read this comment aloud "phonetically" and see if you can even recognize the words.

It's even conceivable that using a different alphabet actually helps you getting the pronunciation right since you might be less tempted to read it in English.
> My larger point is I used to live in the 4th largest city in the US and could afford a relatively new, relatively nice house for a pittance, a short distance from my office.

(For what it's worth, I assume that you know most of what I'm about to write but I'm making the point anyway for others who might read.)

You said in another reply that the city in which you used to live was Houston. The key difference between Houston (or Dallas/Fort Worth or San Antonio or almost anywhere in Texas--yes, including Austin) is that it is a relatively flat, geographically plain metropolitan area. In Houston and in Dallas, housing can sprawl for days. I'm from Texas, the Dallas area specifically, and the areas where housing and other development has been built is staggering to me. The entire DFW metro area has developed across a five-county area that's 1/3rd the physical size of the entire state of Massachusetts. I haven't even run the numbers on the Houston metro area but I'd wager it's a quarter again as large.

Meanwhile, Boston is on a harbor and backs up to an area that was pretty urban back when Galveston was the main hub of Texas commerce and Houston was a sleepy town an hour north on the river. Boston--and San Francisco--are constrained by buildable area, geography (all that water, both on the coast and inland), and many, many years of "we build small areas to live in" type of thinking.

My point is that the oft-made comparisons between east and west coast living to Texas are rather unequal. Texas is generally flat, dry, hot, and almost entirely dirt. You can build pretty much anything anywhere you're willing to connect to water and power. (Though that first bit is pretty hard to come by.) But it also means that a lot of those amenities that people really like are super difficult to access without at least two cars per household and the attendant problems of traffic--and where to put the roads[0] and who gets to pay for them[1]--infrastructure (back to that whole "water is getting scarce" thing), and the rest that come along with them.

0 - The Houston metro area is home to the widest freeway in the country, Katy Freeway, which is 26 lanes at its widest point including service roads.

1 - That's one thing Texas was happy to import from the northeast: toll roads literally everywhere. I don't think TxDOT has built a new or even expanded, taxpayer-funded, limited-access freeway in the past decade.
Still waiting for a source on cities like SF having spent "many billions" on bike infrastructure. You really did just make that up, didn't you?

Look, if you want a serious discussion, maybe don't, like, lie?

> In LA less than 50% of the transit budget is spent on roads, despite them being the primary facilitator of transport.

1. What's the cumulative investment there? LA spent decades building out freeways, after all. It takes a while to turn that ship around.

2. LA is explicitly turning away from car-centric design and spending because it didn't work. They're the poster child for it, and traffic is the worst in the country. Maybe more transit and bike spending won't completely 'solve' traffic, but going by other cities' examples, they should be able to make it less bad.
You really should give Julia a go. It's as or more expressive in the general purpose sense of things as Python. It's the best of MATLAB and Python in one neat package.

Edit: Plus, you can pass your data structures out to Python or C for processing. And you can use a whole host of visualization tools.
I just want to have ? Functionality in js like Ruby...

So I can do

let name = obj?.data[i]?.name;

And not get error can't read property data of undefined, when there is something wrong, just have undefined as value.

To fix this I've to write redudant checks for each level of nested property. Or do stuff like (obj || {}).prop....
You have to own an internet-connected device and have internet access.

My point is, Facebook is a de-facto standard for almost any non-technical community these days, and if not Facebook, then it's some other social platform, like Whatsapp or Telegram. Turns out, centralized platforms are much more user-friendly, have better network effects and easier to set up and administer for majority of users.
You want good pay go to Romania IT pays more than in some W. Europe countries and you pay little to no tax due to incentives.
Poor people can't raise rents

The poor people in many cases aren't paying the rents directly. The local governments are renting places at or above market rates to house poor people.

But on the whole the rising rents in Berlin is more due to the influx of European tech workers and the like, rather than refugees.
In case the game progression is not affected by the content of the boxes, how is it deceptive (honestly, I have that talk with my kids) ?
"Motorized scooter" in California law is referring to one of these: http://www.vespa.com/us_EN/vespa-models/primavera.html#
Facebook's DataLoader helps with deduping data requests. It also maintains a request-scoped cache as well.
Pretty sure getting into Ethereum is easier and fairer than getting into Stock Market.

If you wanted to be an early investor of facebook and you are a pleb, then you're out of luck. And you should have a big capital to join.

If you wanted to be an early adopter of Ethereum, then you only need an internet connection and a computer. You invest put practically any amount, so any pleb can join.

There's also a law that requires you to be big capitalist before you can do early big investments right?

Pretty sure this is better than stock market.
Expensive things can break too, or even arrive DOA which has happened to me.
In LA all you need is a train from Sherman Oaks into one of the stations in Santa Monica or Culver City. That would cut way down on the 405 congestion. It gets tedious reading articles that come up with "stop funding public transit" as a conclusion. In math class that would be the "trivial" therefore useless answer. Seeing as how cities have more roadway now than ever, yet congestion is arguably getting worse...Clearly, building more roads doesn't work. Because WE HAVE built more roads. The Sepulveda pass in LA is not that old, yet it is so congested as to be useless every single day of the week, at almost every hour of the day (ok maybe this is an exaggeration).

One thing I have noticed is Google Maps will suggest going off a main street for a few blocks then merge back into the said main route. This cuts off everyone who's been waiting in line, and potentially puts me in a situation of having to make a left across perhaps 4 lanes of congested traffic, with no light or turn signal. This _IS_ kind of assinine, and it certainly wouldn't hurt for Google/Waze et. al. to feel some pressure to cut these suggestions out.
A simple guide to Reinforcement Learning (with embedded demos)
So if we assume gambling should be regulated, and that pay-to-play loot boxes are gambling...

Why haven’t the licensed gambling venues (casinos, lotto, and what have you) pressured the regulators to stop the unlicensed gambling? Or have they and I’m not aware / the regulator is dragging its feet?

Do the licensed gambling entities not perceive this as a threat? Or has gambling revenue increase overall because these games / apps basically groom young people in to being habitual gamblers as they age?
The source is about road use, which is more specific than your claim. The top modes of transport are walking, the underground, long-haul rail infrastructure.

I think the source goes against both your claim and its own headline. Diagram 3.11 shows cycling to be a small part of the makeup.
But that's not the reason _at all_ that the rents are skyrocketing. Were it implemented properly the "rent-brake" would prohibit high rents.
tbh this is a very bad example.
$300 (247€) for 570 square-foot (53m²) are just not realistic for a city like Berlin. The real price for such an appartment (in that district) is around 700-800€.

Not to be "that guy" with the unpopular opinion here, but I'm not even sure if the landlord can even cover the costs for the apartment from what she's paying.
I was a bit torn on crypto as someone from a value investing background.

My conclusion was to punt on the stuff - where else can you buy something and sell it for 10x within the year? - but to cash out a good chunk of the winnings so if they go to zero I'll have the cash. So far so good.

I regard the nuttiness as a bit of a make hay while the sun shines situation.
It seems you don't understand how renting works in Germany. Tenants have rights very similar to what property owners have in the US, and have the equivalent of California's Proposition 13 to ratecap their rent (just like how property taxes get ratecapped in California).

Its quite refreshing to see a different perspective on housing, as it isn't a fungible commodity like you suggest, where the dollar is the ultimate arbiter. People build their lives around where they live and make deep investments in their community. Some artificial "free" market that is terribly dysfunctional (and irrational) like we have here in the US is a poor choice when most of your society isn't landed gentry.
I really need to take a day or so and stick those 10 odd static pages in a jekyll theme to get rid of this ageing D7 site I am maintaining. This endless stream of updates is getting very tiresome.

The price one pays for being somewhat lazy (and bad at designing websites).
Do we have an income distribution of salaries in Berlin (or Germany)?
> There’s a very small number of cities in the world where cycling is popular, and their success comes down almost entirely to geography and climate.

This is wrong.

Biking is popular in Copenhagen and Amsterdam, it's popular in Munich, it's recently gained popularity in Vancouver, it's popular in Davis, CA, it's popular in Tokyo. Believe it or not, those cities don't all have the same climate.

Geography is more of an issue, but it's becoming less and less of one over time thanks to the steadily increasing popularity -- and steadily decreasing cost -- of ebikes.

Also, you claimed SF spent many billions on bike infrastructure. Where's the source?
It seems rather far fetched to have such low rents over time in a big EU city like Berlin. It is unavoidable that capital will flow into the city and compete for real estate. Not only that, but how they expect to get investments if you cannot increase rent?

Having a housing market based mostly on rent obfuscates the other side of housing, namely the owners need to take care of said house.
It's different in that the prices in these loot boxes can be sold for hundreds of (real) dollars.
It's happening all over Europe. We have very low influx of refugees/poor immigrants in Portugal, but rents in Lisbon/Porto are skyrocketing.
Not sure when chance is considered gambling, I presume artificial chance?

Does that include bitcin mining, the probability that your facebook post is visible for your friends, the probability that an advertisement is shown to a specific user, is sortition illegal?
I legitimately wish that there were procedures and infrastructures in place for the core teams of things like Drupal to exploit such RCE vulnerabilities themselves (finding installations by the standard means that the bad guys also use) with a payload that applies a suitable patch to fix the vulnerability (definitely in a very-cautious way, e.g. only if the entire file to be patched matches an expected checksum), and then email the site owner if possible to declare what has been done.
The key here is "verified". The only way a blockchain is more trustworthy than a regular centralized database is if the nodes are distributed across a large number of stakeholders, and there isn't a chance of anyone gaining control of a majority. That itself becomes impossible since they are using a single account owner (Walmart) on a single cloud provider (IBM).
How is it better than reading a book in lamp light? You can just buy a sensible lamp for reading.
Anecdote time:
A long time ago I was put on a javascript project. It was a greenfield one but I had to use js because it was a browser app.
I've also heard this Scheme myth but having worked with Common Lisp I thought that this must be a mistake.
So I took a look at JSON and thought that well json is homoiconic. The problem is that you don't have a homoiconic syntax for functions so I tried the eval way but it became ovbious tha this is an ugly hack at best. I concluded that js has anything to do with scheme.
I think because with the Kinder Surprise you’re always purchasing pretty much the same worthless piece of plastic.
New Jersey Borough Solves Its Traffic Problem by Banning Commuters
It's not that it's deceptive, it's that it's a game of chance. Which is perfectly OK, as long as you're part of the government mandated monopoly on such games or have a license.
Why not simply regulate it like gambling, instead of outright banning?

Are cosmetic item lootboxes affected too, and if so, why, if they're completely optional and offer no advantage? Are "lootboxes" that can be purchased with in-game resources affected as well, even when the game offers no option to purchase them for real money?
How does this compare to Superscriptjs? https://github.com/superscriptjs/superscript
It may sound weird, but
I believe if any data scientists switch to a ‘nontypical’ language for the domain, it should be JavaScript.

What’s required for data science is a healthy ecosystem of scientific computing tools. While js obviously isn’t as mature as python (anaconda stack + Jupiter, etc) or R (tidyverse etc) in this aspect, it has made great strides recently:
- tensorflow.js
- observable notebooks
- mathjs
- simple-statistics / jstat

Furthermore, with tools like d3 + leaflet, js has very little competition when it comes to data visualiation.

A big thing holding js back is a mature library for data manipulation, hopefully this changes in the future (anybody know of any potential fills for this gap?).
So Mosaic was also a local file browser? I always thought this stupid idea to combine web and local file browsing into one app was invented by Microsoft and then later adopted by KDE (Konqueror)...
> There was an influx of 1-2 million migrants and refugees, all of which need living space.

This seems to be a possible hypothesis. Could you validate it?
I assume that their definition of gambling also requires a payment to be sent to some party who is offering the probabilistic reward. I doubt that bitcoin mining and Facebook posting would qualify.
It's clearly a social argument, along the lines of: why should you get to live there just because you earn more?

It comes down to what you think money is for. In Europe the general consensus is that there are constraints the effects money should have.
Great points on the T2 Unlimited and an interesting solution for enabling T2 Unlimited and alerting.

I was sure to add a note to the article after a few people here mentioned it.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts :).
A huge contributor to my being comfortable with all server distros (RHEL, SLES, Debian, Ubuntu) is actually systemd. It has its issues, but its UI is pretty consistent. Log files for all applications are in one place, enabling/disabling/masking services works the same on all distros, and so on.
So, like, pokemon card packs and lego packs and friends should be illegal too.

There are you tube videos my kids liked to watch of people just literally opening pokemon packs. I'd actually be OK with making this illegal.

Especially considered the frenzied buying and selling of pokemon cards at their school..

This is actually pretty huge. There is a very massive industry both virtual and non that relies on preying on kids and their gambling instinct.

Steam makes a lot of money on Counter Strike via this.
There used to be many Drupal-based sites which offer anonymous registration. Last time I worked with Drupal was 5 years ago so maybe the situation changed.
that's now how an economy works
The Netherlands also gets a lot of wind, which is not optimal for biking. And even when it rains or snows there, people keep biking.

Hills are becoming less of an issue due to ebikes (and electric bikeshare). The other possible solution is installing bike lifts, but, well, most cities still treat biking as a toy, and are unwilling to spend significant sums on it.
Same here. If I have to cycle on the sidewalk, I go very slow and I do my best not to scare pedestrians, especially older people who don't feel safe near bikes. Unfortunately, not all cyclists are respectful and it creates tensions. I regularly get scolded by pedestrians.
I think those stickers were useful for me and my classmates to learn about economy when I was a child. We traded with them and the rarest ones naturally fetched very high values (in terms of other stickers), so we got to experiment scarcity of resources, supply and demand, etc.

I never thought of opening a random pack of stickers and gambling, but you definitely have a point. It is not trivial where to draw the line. In my case, I had a lot of fun (and no gambling addiction) with stickers, and even more with Magic the Gathering a few years later! (and I made some actual money with MtG card speculation when I was like 14).

Virtual loot boxes I see as quite evil though, I need to think for a while on what the differences are. Perhaps it's just prejudices due to my age but I never knew stickers or MtG gambling addicts and with loot boxes there seems to be much more risk of addiction.
Windows 10 now supports flux-like behavior (night light) out of box. I no longer have need to even install flux. Not sure about Apple.
And also trading cards that come in packets with a random selection, like Pokemon.
On the one side I am glad that they banned such in-app purchases because sometimes it can get ridiculous on how much people (especially young children without realizing the cost) spend on them but I can't help but feel the irony because many "more legacy" things offer similar system. I remember spending far more then $100 for soccer stickers. You would basically buy a pack of maybe 10 stickers and you didn't know if you needed them or not. There were also stickers that were less common so in the end you ended up with over 300 excess stickers just to complete a book and you ended up doing that every other year for the euro and world championship.

I don't think there is much of a difference and both cases should be more regulated (especially those catering to children who do not know any better).
Good intentions but honestly, that would be a legal nightmare.
Netherlands is close to drawing similar conclusions.

And it makes sense. You can buy, using real money, a virtual ticket for a virtual item. Then that virtual item can in turn often be sold to others for real money. In other words, players can participate by gambling real money in return for less or more real money.

In short, it is gambling. Not all countries make gambling illegal, but those who do, should treat loot boxes the same. And virtually all countries make gambling illegal for minors, and there's currently no working mechanism in play for 15 year olds not to be able to play these games.

Currently in the Netherlands it's required for the proceeds of loot boxes to be tradeable in the real world, giving them economic value, for it to be considered gambling. If it's purely virtual, it's not gambling but just part of the game. (you can question this of course.) The problem is that it didn't matter for the Dutch government whether the items were traded on external platforms (which are often in violation of the games EULA itself), or on a platform of the game itself.

What would help stay legit is for the games to prevent loot box items from being traded between characters at all.

Here's the weird thing though. My entire childhood was filled with opaque plastic packs of cards, pokemon cards, football cards etc. You didn't know which 5 cards were in there. The cards were semi-randomly distributed in the packs in the factory, just like these loot boxes are semi-randomly generated by an algorithm. And you'd pay, not knowing what you'd get. And indeed, sometimes you paid $10 for a pack with a rare pokemon you could sell for $100. That was gambling too under this definition.