skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I had an HSA I also tried to get prices upfront. It's pretty much impossible to get any quote from medical providers. They just won't tell you.
John Cochrane, a well known financial economist and former president of the American Finance Association, last month wrote a blog post [0] reacting to a similar article in Bloomberg about the pricing of air ambulance services. If you want to see how bizarre the structure of our markets for healthcare services looks to an economist, I encourage you to read it.

I wonder if there’s a collection of this sort of article somewhere, all these journalistic accounts of ordinary people’s financially nightmarish encounters with the American market for healthcare. It feels like I’ve read dozens of them, and they’re all basically similar, not just in the facts they relate of each debacle, but also in their lack of insight into what’s really so fundamentally broken about our healthcare markets.

0. https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2018/06/cross-subsidies.h...
I was helping my grandmother cancel her twc cable package since she doesn't watch it and only watches a few shows on Netflix.

I told the agent that same thing, and he said "Is that really what she wants, or is that just what you want?"

I kept things polite, but he really had me boiling by the end of the call, which took way too much time.
During my university times, I often used EvalDraw as quick 2D/3D graphing calculator:

http://advsys.net/ken/download.htm

You type in some C-ish code, it gets immediately executed and drawn. Instant feedback was a winner feature here. Graphing y=f(x) was AFAIR as simple as typing "(x)" in the first line and writing an expression in the next. "(x,t)" for time-varying singals, "(x,y)" for 2-d functions with values viewed as colors, "(x,y,z,&r,&g,&b)" for full-voxels, etc.

I don't even remember how this little program found its way to my hard drive, but I had a lot of good times with it.
Indeed, reading his wikipedia page, it's curious that those dudes perceived this particular author as an authority on the things they wanted to know about.
A Century of Findings on Intellectual Precocity: Some Highlights
What if AI made actors immortal?
Europeans are open with their salaries?
It's a system so mad that there is no way to do it right even no matter how hard you try.
Also could be worried that their only advantage in life is that they are already rich. They're not necessarily smarter or better skilled than everyone else. If you reset everyone's bank accounts to zero, the same people would not eventually end up back on top, and that terrifies them.
I think also they get put on a list if they ever enter the country again.
Hi guys thanks for the comments, and yes, I see what you mean. Will be reviewing these in full.
It's entirely possible that the hospital charged the insurance $51k and the insurance only allowed $500, of which $150 was your portion. No one knows what the real cost of anything is at hospitals, and even if you do have the time to shop around, you can't. There's no way to price compare as no one will tell you the price of everything in advance, and often surgeons pick their hospital anyway.
What I find unreasonable is doing all this without knowing what the model is doing. It's blind with no way to steer and correct it.

That is what feed forward networks and back propagation do for us. So why do we keep using them?

Then there's the statistics of it all.. what are we actually modeling? 'The real world' you say? Think again.

Data has to be changed and manipulated into i.i.d. form, or the algorithms won't work. How does an independent set of random variables give us a model of the actual dataset which is a very limited representation of the real world? It doesn't. It's modeling something else.

Okay, why don't we take dependence into account? Surely that would represent the real world better. Good question! (Shirley has nothing to do with it.)

It's because there is no formal definition of dependence in statistics. Let that sink in for a minute.

So the math needs work, statistics needs a revolution, and then we can begin to change AI enough for it to finally start making sense. Focus on explainable algorithms and actual ability to validate that what models generate make sense and will not be unlawfully biased or have outliers that will cause harm.

There appears to be only one company who has something like this. But few actually care.
It's a reprint of an article from 2010, so perhaps (2010) should be added to the HN title, in case people are expecting to read something new about BeOS in 2018.
Ask HN: How can a skilless person make money online?
Given a person with very few marketable skills, how can this person make money online?

There are services such as Amazon’s mechanical turk that fit the bill, though the given example usually nets less than $8 an hour.
This is a little like that, in that the oligarchs massively duplicate minds, with random tweaks, and then select. That's the basis of the opening line:

> As always, before the warmind and I shoot each other, I try to make small talk.

They're selecting for cooperation.
yea, ingress is free on the aws side, and egress is expensive.

The other thing is with a large amount of data you hit weird performance issues. Say you want to copy all your files on s3. One typical way of doing this is s3distcp in emr/hadoop, so you get distributed copying. But generally listing is single threaded, and if you have billions of files your cluster spends a noticeable amount of time idle while the master is doing the listing operation. Also list api costs can add up. S3 inventory probably alleviates this, it didnt exist at the time.

So ignoring 'BigData', how would you shift a mysql database out. its either take downtime or do streaming replication or something. Gotta keep consistency, not lose writes, etc.

moving stateless code around is so much easier than dealing with data. theres basically zero straight monetary cost to the move, you just deploy it somewhere else.
10/8 is a class A range (high order bit = 0), but CIDR says that you can separately describe which bits are for the network. Unless this interview was conducted more than 20 years ago I'd say your interviewer was mistaken.
Maybe Waymo is onto something...
The amount an health insurance company pays is kept secret and we can assume is far less. Otherwise, insurance companies would find ways to open up more hospitals to compete with the large irrational ones, or face huge costs. The hospitals know they can get away these amounts on paper, so they do.

We should demand price transparency -- as we do for almost all direct-to-consumer purchases. Businesses can charge different amounts for volume purchases to other businesses, but it would be considered discriminatory if a restaurant didn't show their prices and then when you got your bill, it said -- oh, your company's not paying for it -- so it's $15,000 in extra fees.
Could you provide a source for the maintainers of redux-form admitting that Redux was a poor fit for forms? I'm inclined to agree and am kind of interested to see their reasons.
Thailand cave rescue: Diver dies while taking in supplies
Yes, if he merchant is not operating in good faith, it’s easy to outmaneuver their collections efforts provided you’ve kept good documentation.

If they are operating in good faith, and your chargeback is not legitimate, expect a blemish on your credit until you settle the debt (if sent to collections).
I honestly can not understand how a credit card company call center can claim to legally decide a civil matter like this. I know in the US they regularly do this just as I know of a couple of counties that absolutely don't allow it.

I honestly wonder what legal theory my bank or financial service is using to justify transferring my money or incurring debt under my name to pay someone I explicitly tell them not to simply because a guy at a call center making a snap judgement believes there is a valid contract and that the other party has honored it.
Will banks accept a faxed photograph to rebut a claim that the membership was cancelled?
Instead of "“How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?" How about

How can I protect the most possible people and build the best functioning society post collapse to ensure the survival of myself and my progeny.

This gives the lie to the idea that the captains of industry are great men they aren't great men they are toads towering above our lives and yet beneath our contempt.
So you weren't actually comparing reactive with dataflow?

Because what you write certainly sounds a lot like just dataflow.
That's the price we pay for the weakening of patents and the strengthening of trade secrets. Nobody knows how the newer stuff works.
I guess till then I had not really appreciated how bad the situation was, how far in the kids are.
I am not sure you understood. This sentence--

"You are right though that money needs to be set aside for bad years - in insurance we call it "reserving", and actually it is already accounted for before the 5-15%. It is stashed away in the loss ratio as "incurred but not reported"

Is not correct. CAT reserves are not related to IBNR. IBNR is a) we know the loss has already occurred b) the policyholder has not reported the loss yet. (Or at least in a probabilistic sense, like the hurricane has landed, and we know it will take 10 days for all the claims to be reported, and that 2 days after landfall, say 20% of claims have been reported, and the other 80% of those hurricane claims will be reported over the next 8 days. So at that moment "2 days after landfall" the actuaries will estimate how much IBNR there is.)

What you described is a CAT reserve...it's a seperate reserve taking into account, say, over a 10 year period, the odds and severity of a CAT risk.

If you still are unclear about the distinction, please consult your local actuary or CPCU :-)
You sure about this? Any citations? I saw somewhere that it'd be Saudi Arabia.
An open source, modern and powerful wiki app built on Node.js, Git and Markdown
This looks really, really nice.

https://github.com/Requarks/wiki
Don't underestimate the ability for money to insulate you from needing common sense. Everyone is nicer to you, everyone humors your oddities, and everything remotely laborious you can just pay someone to do. And if you're a raging asshole with the maturity of a 15 year old well into their 30s, that's no obstacle.

The money will be the reason people don't _walk away_ sooner, but you can rationalize it as them being shallow and only interested in your dough when they finally do, and never need to gain that particular self awareness. There's always more people to churn through.

Source: dealt with such a client.
This is something I really hope Trump hits on. He's proven repeatedly he doesn't care what is popular, and was booed during the debates for saying that he wouldn't let people die in the streets, as sick as that situation is. I like that about Trump, he sets popularity aside in his decisions.
That said, this is my single biggest issue at the moment. I have great health insurance, probably better than 90 pct of people here. It's not about me, it's about a broken system. I, or any of us, could lose our coverage in the blink of an eye. I will fully support any candidate who runs on nationalised healthcare. I don't care if my taxes go up. Our country is gross that people are afraid to seek treatment, or even ride an ambulance, because of our broken system. And I say this as a fiscal conservative...
What kind of list?
Arrows create a brand new function on each render call. Say you have a pure component that you pass an onChange handler. If it’s an arrow function, the component needs to re-render as you created a new function. If it’s a pre bound function reference, the sub component will not receive any prop changes.

Otherwise, yeah.
I any other business tried to operate like hospitals do people would go to jail. Because what they do is fraud and extortion.
I had the same experience. I was straight up lied to by the salesmen. I talked about it to my bank, they were aware of the problem as it happens to a lot of people. BMO offered to open a new bank account, and move all my funds to it and close my account that goodlife tricked me into using.

I was told that I could cancel any time after a free trial. It turns out I was lied to. I went to see the salesman again as it was on my way. Telling him that I switched my accounts made shut up and look defeated. Felt so good.
The healthcare system is a literal financial minefield. Seems like you better have a lawyer by your side to negotiate these arbitrary prices the instant you realize you're going in for anything non-trivial.
Go give $75mm to your local hospital. I'm sure they're willing to do the same.
Priority Wiki
They better be for the money being spent to fund them.
If you are a foreign traveller in the US, and you need medical attention, if at all possible use a drop-in clinic instead of any hospital. Even the so-called non-profit hospitals charge outrageous fees.
The current system is Obamacare, which is objectively terrible. It's just that the system before ACA was even worse. Until conservatives realize that there is no free market in health care without government intervention, guilds and cartels will continue.
I'm upfront with doctors, I will not allow a hospital to do any labs at all. Full stop.
Postel’s Law is good advice for life in general
127/8 exists for this purpose. IPv6 funny enough went conservative here and only has a single address, ::1/128.
You don't have to watch retards playing with their balls? Why do you?
Not to mention the median for a developer in the Bay Area is around $125-130k [1] [2]. Those $200k+ salaries often quoted here on HN are top outlier employees at top outlier companies, not rank-and-file mid-level engineers at average no-name companies.

1: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-software-en...

2: https://www1.salary.com/CA/San-Francisco/Software-Engineer-I...
I've felt the same way. Vuex, Redux, MobX, or other application state libraries, all help in the event when passing data down through components that don't care about the data they are passing along becomes tedious. I like the general idea of "data down, actions up", but when it comes to separation of concerns, what is the point of a component taking parameters that it is just going to pass to a subcomponent? When components don't use the parameters in a meaningful way, the parameters are just noise. I came to this realization after passing the same parameters down about seven levels deep through components to question the mantra. I try to avoid shared and global state, but there are times that it just becomes very useful. It is important to now and again question if the dogmatic approach is pragmatic.
Paying emergency/trauma patients get hit with the accumulated losses from all the trauma/emergency services they have to supply without compensation from the indigent and those here illegally. They have to accept everyone and treat them until stable. One MRSA or resistant-TB patient can ultimately cost them seven figures.
Holy $#17. I was in Stanford’s cardiac unit for some days, the actual bill must be $35k.
If you look at your insurance paperwork it will tell you exactly what the hospital is paid and what your portion is.

Not uncommon for the hospital to be paid 25-33% of the bill. Sometimes a lot less than that.

One of the reasons the list price is so high is due to “usual and customary” laws. An insurance company can’t pay for than that, so hospitals set it extraordinarily high.

Also, contract negotiations are based on chargemaster rate and discount. They keep cranking up the list price and insurance comes back and increases the discount.
I've had a bank (Bank of America), tell me that the only way to stop a recurring, fraudulent ACH charge was to close my account and open a different one.

I did close the account, but saw no reason to reopen one with boa.

The kicker is that a few months later, I get a delinquent negative balance notice from boa. The ACH charge had struck again. I called and asked how in the world I could get an ACH charge on a closed account with $0 in it. The agent said that the account will automatically reopen!!! anytime someone tries to charge it.

They will also automatically charge you overdraft fees, and then an overdraft fee when the overdraft fee bounces, and then a negative balance fee... and an overdraft fee when that one hits.

Just telling the story gets my blood boiling again. Never ever deal with any large corporation if you can help it.
Why I will no longer buy Hardkernel products or deal with the ODroid Magazine
Many of the problems caused by warming would effectively be permanent though. Melted ice caps wont reform any time soon, especially since when they stop reflecting sunlight, the Albedo change alone will kick in even more warming. It could also take thousands of years to melt the tundra, slowly releasing vast quantities of methane, so even though individual molecules break down they will get replenished constantly over a long period.

Finally the biggest sink of methane in the atmosphere is the hydroxyl reaction in the troposphere which - generates carbon dioxide.
imo having a kid now is like buying a horse (or maybe 2 horses). By the time a baby born today would have graduated college, there's a good chance we'll have achieved artificial general intelligence. Pretty much impossible to say what exactly would happen at that point, but, in the past kids were a pretty immediate roi, they could work on the farm, more recently arguably the roi is possibly negative but, for instance, one of my uncles takes care of my aging grandparents; but if we are anywhere near to agi a kid wouldn't even be useful for that. I mean I like kids but we're talking easily 250k+ dollars for a single one. In practice for me it would be a lot more than that since the cost of my lifestyle would go up dramatically. (source: am 25 year old american male)
You forgot more crap that SPA introduces: Crazy build pipelines with webpack, chunked JS bundles with asynchronous module loading, and the huge mess that is error reporting from the browser.
Not a container, but IF you manage to get Qubes running, it's really easy to create temp VM off fedora or debian that cannot access your other stuffs. You can even swap distro from under your homedir later.
Not at all. My current method is to block all numbers not in my contact list.. if they are important, they'll leave a voicemail. Works surprisingly well, actually.
lol, reminds me of a twitter thread. A guy said "As a hiring manager, job hopping is a red flag" . Then someone else posted that guy's LinkedIn page, which was a succession of short stings.
the strangest is when if you were a new hire you would have gotten the salary you asked for..
>The administration is extending the life of coal plants that aren’t profitable.

Those free market lovers at it again!
Obama/Pelosi/Reid could have implemented single-payer instead of Obamacare, but the latter makes their donors much more money.
The models from "limits to growth" have been disproved? This would be good news. Please post a link.
I recall a story about people whose job it is to sail rich people's yachts from place to place because they of course don't do it.
>The harms that come from being poor are not the same as those that come from being a member of a historically disfavored minority.

That's where you are fundamentally wrong. Every person who worries about where their next meal is going to come from, or whether or not they are going to be homeless next month because they can't afford the rent is equally important. Nothing matters less than the "historical" reasons why people are mired in poverty. What matters is that we have a fundamentally broken society where hundreds of millions of Americans are a paycheck away from being destitute. There are far more whites than blacks living in poverty. The destitute white child living in a trailer in Appalachia, born to a single, drug-addicted mother has absolutely no privilege. To suggest that we should favor someone of a different skin color because their ancestors had different historical disadvantages is absolutely absurd.

>But we if solely address the class-based harms, we ratify and perpetuate the race-based harms.

Again, your logic is absolutely upside down. By codifying race-based favoritism, we are perpetuating the racist policies of the past that you are decrying. Suggesting that we should factor the skin color of the child born into a poverty-ridden, drug-addicted slum when considering how much help he deserves from society is not only disgusting, its offensive. That it is our official national policy is an absolute disgrace, and one of many symptoms of our sick society. If we want to evolve as a society, we need to move past our archaic, artificially created divisions. Those of you who seek to judge people based on the color of their skin are all the same, whether or not you wear the hoods.
Maybe food in caves after The Event. Such as potatoes ;)
If you've seen places that offer 10, then 15 is by definition not the bare minimum. In my experience, most places offer 10 days, and often it's PTO (combined vacation + sick leave).
Books that you would recommend that most people here probably haven't read?
I agree with the point that one of the biggest warts on Vue are the corners of the reactivity system (first point in the "Not so magic" section of the article") and how it can surprise you. IMO if Vue had reactivity like KnockoutJS did, it'd be perfect on that front.

I disagreed with the "unclear architectural patterns" -- I've found just writing Vue components that function as Services to hold all that kind of logic more than adequate, and have never really needed to follow the Flux-ish/Vuex approach. 90% of the time all you're doing is making web requests and possibly displaying data or results to the user on the frontend... If you're clever, you're doing a little caching and figuring out when to perform remote fetches, or storing stuff in local/session storage.

I think Model-Service-View frameworks are the (minimal) future, where you just pair a view library with a data management component (something like Backbone, if not Backbone itself). MVC was the dominant paradigm (angular 1 days), then MVVM made an appearance (knockoutjs), and now MV-? where the ? is some event-driven system or flux/vuex style system. I think abstracting to Services allows flexibility at the model-management layer -- if you want your services to send out events (and wire up your components to listen), then good. If you want them to have promised based interfaces, that's fine too.
Is it insane? Did people read the article? The critical trauma unit was activated. I suppose if people are called in to work, they shouldn't get paid if it turns out they aren't needed?
With the exception of Amazon, I haven't received an offer with base pay lower than 150k in a long time. I'm a mid tier SWE at best.

I think people are downvoting out of jealously.
There is also no reason to think a well supplied and we'll armed military will care about them either.

I know in most apocalyptic movies they aren't around, but it seems likely some of them would be.
Or just shoot you and cut the locks. There's nothing that is accessible to only one person.
the amount of farmland area you could substitute with urban vertical farming is neglible. way below one percent.
People mainly use Redux because they don't understand that React isn't Angular. React is meant to care only about UI state. Your application state should be kept separately, and React should just be a function from app state to UI.

Redux is what you get when people try to use React as a "full-app" framework instead of what it's meant to be: a view layer.
I remember 2008, and the path to 60 votes, and this was simply not true. Perhaps if Obama had started negotiating from single-payer, they maybe had would have gotten a public option. But a decade ago not enough democratic voters supported single-payer.