skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a few thoughts on these issues.

- Hygiene hypothesis: Cleaner environments and changes in social patterns (for example, less undirected outdoor play, fewer siblings) are leading to being exposed to less germs as kids, which causes the immune system to become oversensitive and trigger itself.

- Diet / exercise: Particularly for diabetes and obesity. The cheapest, most convenient food is unhealthy due to subsidies and a less local supply chain (100 years ago local stores probably stocked a lot of local produce and little packaged / heavily processed food, not so today). Restaurants increase portion size (I suspect this may have something to do with labor costs increasing due to Baumol cost disease and other factors). Fewer people have jobs with lots of physical activity. Erosion of traditional gender roles and modern economic pressures mean fewer couples/families have someone who stays at home and cooks a labor-intensive dinner every day.

- Low-hanging fruit: Diseases that are easy to vaccinate or otherwise cure have already been mostly eliminated from advanced nations (and in some cases, worldwide). Diseases that are hard to cure have been turned from death sentences into chronic conditions. (If you had diabetes before the medical community knew much about blood sugar or insulin, you'd probably die pretty quickly.)

- Perverse incentive structure: As other posters have noted, it's a lot more profitable to develop a drug that alleviates symptoms. Possible solutions: Cash prizes for curing diseases (money comes from a non-profit-oriented party, risk taken on by private sector), government/non-profit funding of research (money and risk both borne by non-profit-oriented party), and government/insurance allowing cures to charge equivalent rates (e.g. a shot for diabetes "should" cost about $36,000, because that's the price of taking $100 of insulin every month for 30 years, but would the developer be allowed to charge that much? Money comes from patients or their insurance, risk taken on by private sector).
This is one area I think Netflix format puts them at a disadvantage. At any one time how many shows does HBO have running the one person likes? A couple? But HBO stretches thoes shows out over 3 or 4 months. By the time those couple things you like end, something else is on.

On Netflix some people go through a season of a show in a day or 2. Then they complain there is nothing on for a couple months until they spend a weekend watching something.
True, judges often don't come right out and say it in so many words, but many, many courtroom decisions involve an underlying assessment of the "fairness" of the situation presented. The concept of fairness is a fundamental component of scores of legal doctrines and it simply isn't possible--in either the analytical sense or the psychological sense--to make these sorts of decisions without taking a view on what is "fair" or "just", etc.

For example, "unconscionable contracts" are unenforceable [1], custody disputes are resolved based on the "best interests of the child" test [2], and a cop's reasonable suspicion is judged by the "totality of the circumstances" [3].

All of these and many more require (some more explicitly than others) the judge to determine what is "fair" so that he or she can fairly apply law and precedent to a specific set of facts. This is much more common than you might think (and than many in the legal community would like to admit).

If you find this topic interesting, I would encourage you to read about the differences between deductive reasoning (like math) and inductive reasoning (like fairness). Some court decisions truly are deductive, but most are not.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscionability

[2] http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/134/Supplement...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totality_of_the_circumstances
Let me debunk that for you.

We want a system optimized for transportation. We do not want a system optimized for wealth extraction.

Say someone is buying a house. He will look for the stuff he needs. If they have kids that have to go to school or if they cant drive for some reason they look at the bus and train schedule and kinda expect that service to be there the next month.

How you imagine it actually doesn't happen. You don't get a substantial number of people with kids, old and disabled people moving to an area without public transport so that you can move in for the killer profits. Even if there is a bus it would be unreliable if profit rather than transportation is the goal.

Its just like we don't wait until the entire region smells like human poop before we put the sewers in. Oh and no more internet and electricity for you! You are just not using enough of it to be relevant compared to urban centers!

Meanwhile in the already overly crowded city centers real estate prices will explode and force families to live in tiny single room apartments. From a strict profit driven perspective utopia is now happening!
I think the faux window title bars take away from being able to look at the actual design underneath — they often clash.
They just stick the contrived cliffhangers on the end of each "episode" instead.
I agree that cars are not good for cities.
When I was in S. Korea few years ago, I got to visit a newer apartment complex, with dozens of 20 - 30 stories tall apartment buildings. One important feature the builder/architect added is underground parking for all cars of visitors/residents. The entrance to the parking lot is right next to the street.

There are roads within the complex for Fire/emergency/moving-trucks, but no other cars are allowed onto the ground of the complex. So there are no cars driving around within the complex.

Not having to worry about dodging cars or dealing with car-noise/engine-exhaust-smell all combined to make the quality of life so much better. With some grass and greenery planted, walking within the complex felt like walking on a hiking trail. And this is in the of a huge apartment complex with thousands of units.
Ask HN: How to build something very complex like Google Maps?
I'm a professional front-end developer with 5 years of experience. I have only worked on building websites and web-apps. When I started as a front-end developer 5 yers ago, I thought if I stick with it, I'll definitely be able to at least understand how Google Maps' front-end worked in about 5 years' time. But 5 years later, I'm still as clueless as I was when I started. I have skilled up a lot and my peers and my manager do consider my skills as one of the best, but when I see projects like Google Maps, the front-end wizardy puts my skills to shame. These projects seem so huge and ambitious and make complicated front-end actions effortless and graceful, while I struggle to make simple websites and web-apps work smoothly.

What am I doing wrong exactly and where do I even start to improve my skills to work with teams like that or at least start to undertstand in an abstract sense, how some of the front-end magic was achieved, when I look at complex projects like Maps.
Horrible article. No evidence.
I think PyPy is relatively unused because of the difficulty in using C extensions written for CPython. With PyPy, everything will work until suddenly things go horribly wrong or the library you need is just not available (numpy). The work they've done is fantastic, it's just a very difficult situation.
Black Mirror has gone downhill in an effort to create a mass audience. (Mostly the fourth season) What they do is create "hit" content that is very consumable not necessarily great or timeless.

"We need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art" ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

That said, their documentary productions are way better than the crap Discovery, History Chanel, et al. have been producing this past decades or so.
Maybe use ML to generate the right type of noise?
5 Easiest Ways to Make Money Blogging
Yes, doctors should focus on the patient and the family, not the computer. Technology should be scrutinized to be more supportive.

Yet a significant problem with this article is that it provides no comparison to other professions.

"A clinician will make roughly 4,000 keyboard clicks during a busy 10-hour emergency-room shift" -- I doubt that 4,000 "keyboard clicks" is unusual for any profession at present, even one where attention is moving across interactions with patients, colleagues, machines, and the computer. A page of text is about 3,000 characters.

(Aside: I'm actually not quite sure what is meant by a "keyboard click" is -- maybe the author is talking about mouse clicks or toggling checkboxes; elsewhere in the article the phrase is "4,000-key-clicks-a-day" -- if it's just 4,000 taps to keyboard keys, that's a pretty low number. I don't think that 4,000 checkbox or mouse clicks is even really such a big number. Answers here (https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-avarage-number-of-mouse-cl...) suggest between 5000 and 7000 mouse clicks/day. Another resources says a doc does about 2500 clicks/day -- http://www.healthcareitnews.com/infographic/infographic-one-... -- and that's for a 16 hour shift.)

In any case, is there something distinct about clinician work with regard to the use of computers, compared to what we're all doing? A claim that there is would strike me as special pleading. If there is an argument to be made, it must be made comparatively.

The author also claims that "Even if the E.H.R. is not the sole cause of what ails us, believe me, it has become the symbol of burnout" -- do doctors _really_ suffer from more burnout than other professions? _Doctor-authored_ studies may say so, but we need to have unbiased studies of burnout across the professions, and understand generally how being lassoed to a computer affects morale.
‘My Data Request’ lists guides to get data about you
Nice and succinct. This is exactly what I did for DNSimple.
The stable marriage problem and the Gale-Shapley algorithm for it are good for introducing someone who is a good, self-taught programmer but whose mathematical background is a bit lacking to the idea of proving that a program works by reasoning about it instead of just doing empirical testing.

Define a person's unhappiness as one less than the position in their ranking of the person they paired with. If someone is not paired, define their unhappiness as N, where N is the number of men and the number of women being paired.

For example, in a set of 10 men and 10 women, a women paired with her 1st choice man has unhappiness 0. A man in that set not yet paired has unhappiness 10.

The key to understanding Gale-Shapley is female unhappiness (in the version where the men propose to the women...if you do it with women proposing to men, then male unhappiness is the key).

When the algorithm runs a man through the gauntlet and his proposal is tentatively accepted by a women, her unhappiness decreases (and no other woman's happiness changes). Hence total female unhappiness decreases every round. Total female unhappiness is a non-negative integer, and it is bounded by N^2 where N is the number of females. This shows that the algorithm must terminate, and must do so in at most N^2 rounds. It is also easy to see that the algorithm only terminates when all men are paired. Thus, we can conclude that the algorithm will produce a final pairing in which everyone is paired, and it will do this in at most O(N^2).

Consider any man, M1, paired by this algorithm with woman W1. Because men propose in order of their rankings, M1 has already proposed to every woman he prefers over W1. Either they were rejected (meaning those women were already paired with men they prefer over M1) or they were tentatively accepted but then later he was jilted when someone better came along. From this, we see that the pairings produced by the algorithm (including the partial pairings after each round) are such that no man is willing to cheat on his currently assigned partner. Hence, they are stable.
Unfortunately many of the entities like google and facebook and others are too entrenched to fail in the next 8 years or so. There isn't enough political will (currently) to impose strong regulations in the US, as evidenced by the Zuckerberg hearing, and it will likely take an entire political party embracing the ideals to actually build up the regulatory framework
The Nanny Tax and the Miracle of Government Loaves
If anyone in this thread is a physician, and is looking for more autonomy in the way that they practice medicine my email is in my profile. We're working on fixing these problems at our clinic and what we've built could be of interest to you.
You've been getting deep into nationalistic flamewars. You've also repeatedly been uncivil. We ban accounts that do these things, regardless of which nation (or ideology or opinion) you're for or against. It needs to stop, so please stop.

You've been spreading the toxin you're deploring, which is generally how it spreads on HN. That's not ok, regardless of how wrong someone else may be. If you think you see abuse, you're welcome to email us about it so we can take a look and take action if we find it. But you're not welcome to bring the site down in flames in your own right.
> So when you buy a discounted item is it a charade?

It being valid in one instance does not justify it at every instance.

> How can two people being prevented to perform an exchange make things better globally? I don’t think that obvious at all.

It is an instance of an optimization problem. It is algorithmically true that there are instances of optimization problems where local strategies, e.g hill climbing or trade between individuals, can only find local optima. Since the real world is far more complicated than any particular optimization problem...

This does not even touch market failures such as externalities where exchange isn't even aware of all the interested parties involved.

Frankly, this whole business about trade being better than any other way of distributing resources is so naive it boggles the mind how it can be such a widespread meme. Except, of course, for the fact that millions of dollars of propaganda are pumped into it by institutions far larger than individuals who have an interest in individuals thinking they're playing the same game and it's the best game in town.
I second this. Writing a 2-4 sentence blurb about yourself can paint a good picture of who you are.
Mmhmm. Now you see why naming things is so hard.
Well, maybe. From the article, the judge argued that allowing the swap would enable strategizing:

> So to allow trading would be to enable strategic behavior in future years. This would make the workings of the lottery system less clear. But it could also give an unfair advantage to students that are better at strategizing — and to students that have more resources to make good strategic decisions.

I would argue that there is a "greater good" at play, and that while this particular instance would not change anything, allowing it would open the door for future problems.

I then believe that Europeans are more willing to accept that consequence than Americans are. (YMMV, not science, just a feeling, etc) (edit: formatting the quote)
Connecting every bit of knowledge (2014)
Which part of Google Maps front end isn't clear to you? They used to use tiles, I think they switched to vectors a few years ago. The routes and such are drawn dynamically on canvas. The routing itself is done on the server side (though there's a quick rough pre-route done on the front end when you drag points).
Note that non-residents probably already bring in enough money to the economy to cover the cost of some bus/tram rides, even if they're not explicitly charged for them.
And it is simple. I haven't written C since college and it's mostly very readable, really great for exploration. In many ways, I agree that should be kept.

But memoizing lookups can be a single branch at the top of a few functions. We should strive to have our cake and eat it too, not simply declare we shouldn't bother.
it may be just sheer luck. Or there may be a ring of influencers effectively rigging the votes. But I guess luck explains it: there are thousands of dumb products like this that don't get many votes also.
FYI numpy both works these days and it's officially supported
Unicorn, but the idea is the same. Forcing a GC between requests can have consequences on overall request throughput.
I didn't communicate clearly. What I was trying to say is that "why didn't you just do X" critiques have to be viewed in the context that this person has already decided to live with these particular constraints. Which is why "just plug it into the wall outlet" isn't useful feedback.
How Each Myers Briggs Type Deals with Grief – Astroligion.com
It's not like the doctors themselves are going to drive down the cost of healthcare. Machine driven medicine is the only way we can replace overpaid doctors who aren't doing anything much more intellectually challenging than car mechanics and yet are exploiting the American health care system for all it's got. At first the machines are going to be used for those without good health insurance, as those machines get smarter eventually even rich people will use them, and we can finally start to lower health care costs for everyone.
It's not really clear that the author got anything out of doing a math degree that he wouldn't have gotten out of doing most other degrees. I was expecting a bit more from this.

(That said, it would be very interesting to see the same article written by someone with a PhD in math. That's a completely different animal, and might be much more interesting to discuss.)
Cynbe ru Taren
The "Bill bale pale mayo" video is my second favorite after this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JATjMZJuX1c
Which is why I'm very excited about Graal Python (https://github.com/graalvm/graalpython/blob/master/README.md)

It has the potential to bring an underlying framework which is built on industrial quality VM+JIT and it's primary goal is being compatible with the Scipy ecosystem at least ...Which is reason enough for unlimited optimism.
This was done so that people from neighboring municipalities who commute to Tallinn and would like to not pay for the public transport would register themselves as residents of Tallinn and the local municipality share of income taxes (roughly half iirc) would go to Tallinn instead of the others. The price for the 30 day pass was significantly raised as well.

In this light the taxes are redistributed, Tallinn local government has been incredibly corrupt (but strangely functional and with moves like this pretty bold and not dumb) and so one could argue that there has been more theft through corruption but that would assume that the neighboring municipalities are less corrupt, which is not exactly given.

As the goal is to entice people to register as Tallinn residents the tracking part of the plan is absolutely vital.

So in the end this is still a zero sum game or even net negative as it accelerates regional income and by extension brain drain.
Android app: https://opensource.srlabs.de/projects/snoopsnitch/wiki/FAQ#W...

> SnoopSnitch offers tests to assess whether a device is exposed to attacks or surveillance from the mobile network. Here, the primary goal is to help mobile users detect network originated attacks, such as via SS7, SMS, or ISMI catchers. Our secondary goal is to provide a fact-based incentive to Mobile Network Operators to better improve the security of their networks.

GSM ratings: https://gsmmap.org/#!/about

> GSM Security Map compares the protection capabilities of mobile networks. Networks are rated in their protection capabilities relative to a reference network that implements all protection measures that have been seen “in the wild”. The reference is regularly updated to reflect new protection ideas becoming commercially available. Networks, therefore, have to improve continuously to maintain their score, just as hackers are continuously improving their capabilities.
Ah. I assume you’re talking about electric kick scooters, in which case forget my comment as I was talking about regular electric scooters.
Episode-ending cliffhangers are present in almost all television shows. Netflix hasn't led to an increase in these, in my cursory experience.
I'm not saying it's an either/or proposition. I think it's great to see characters develop over as they encounter different situations and the long term implications of their actions.

But I think it's also interesting to sometimes explore idea in a shorter period of time... I don't think there's much space for that anymore. And sometimes that can explore certain ideas more succinctly.

You mention DS9, I think a few characters developed in quite interesting ways over the course of the series actually Dukat and Kai Winn for example.
Whataboutism is a powerful disease of modern discourse. Pretty soon we will start letting killers go because John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer killed more people.

I think it arises from a misguided attempt at calling out hypocrisy, but the result is a race to the bottom where any other example negates any criticism. Nobody is perfect so if you have to be perfect to criticize no criticism is possible.
Philosopher's never knew the empirical method? The idea has it's roots in Aristotelian philosophy, and was developed by people like Bacon and Descartes.
Amazon vs. Google: Steve Yegges's Rant from 2011
Google Maps is the work of thousands of engineers that has evolved over more than a decade.
Exactly. My guess is that's why they passed on The Expanse - it's a great story that is absolutely impossible for the majority to watch because it actually requires you to look up from your phone and pay attention. That's also why sense8 got the axe.
The Casimir effect was both predicted by quantum field theory and observed to behave more or less exactly as predicted, so there's very little room for supposed etheric effects. If they were observable, we probably would have seen them just by accident already.
See my comment [0] for the reason why tracking is necessary for them.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17108804
Sorry maybe I’m making it more confusing than it needs to be, I think you do understand the terms.

What we’re talking about is the difference between calling a function recursively (a function that calls itself) and instead simulating recursion using a data structure posing as a stack and an iterative function that doesn’t call itself but instead pushes and pops into your fake stack data structure.

You can either use the system’s built-in stack (by calling functions), or create your own fake stack (by pushing/popping, writing/reading an array, etc.).

Using sys.setrecursionlimit() as mentioned at the very top of this thread only affects the system stack. By “native function calls”, I just mean regular function calls. These are subject to the system’s stack limit.

When you allocate an object and use it as a fake stack to replace the system stack, the size of the object is not subject to the system’s stack limit (which is small — on PCs often a megabyte or two), it’s only limited by the available size of the heap (which is normally large relative to the system stack limit, often gigabytes).

When you make your own fake stack and use an iterative function, you can achieve a much greater recursion depth because your fake stack size is on the heap and not actually in the system stack.

Does that make more sense? The two cases are very different in Python, and using a fake heap-allocated stack, i.e. a Python object, is super useful.