skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What if the doctors were correct in their assessment that the patient was unfit to make medical decisions and that she was being coerced by parents to act against her own best interest?

The article asks that very question, and answers that she was making her own medical decisions on everything except being able to leave the hospital.

The hospital doesn't get to have it both ways.

Read here: https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/13/health/mayo-clinic-escape-2-e...

"That hadn't jibed with the captain of investigations for the Rochester police. Sherwin said it didn't make sense that Mayo staffers told police Alyssa had been making her own decisions, yet in the discharge note, they stated she wasn't capable of making her own decisions."

And the two Judges they went to both agreed, and refused to let the Mayo become her guardian. Not to mention the hospital could have tried to get a different family member to be her guardian - but that's not what they did, they wanted themself to be the guardian.

And on top of all of that when they went to a different hospital the Dr's there agreed with the parents!

> because the hospital is legally prohibited from releasing any medical information but the patient can choose to reveal as much or as little as they wish.

That's not correct: The hospital said they would talk if the patient signed a form consenting - so she did (which they were probably not expecting), and they still refused to talk. That's pretty damning.

> I would be interested in looking at her medical record to try and understand what was really going on but that is unlikely to ever happen.

The article makes it clear enough: The parents argued with a Dr. who got a hissy fit basically and decided to cut them out of all decisions as a form of revenge.

The Mayo is losing a TON of respect here, and they should publicly fire this Dr. before it gets worse.
Yes. But webseeds also go away over time when a department shuts down a server or a student account expires.
BREAK OF JOURNEY

Rules vary by train company and route. In general you cannot break your outward journey (except for necessary changes of train) but you can break your return journey.

Source: https://www.splityourticket.co.uk/info/fare-types.aspx

I've already dealt with the legality of split ticketing in another post.
Should we click on the article to learn more? Does he have a clever trick that seniors are dying for?

No. The article is basically a press release for an unpublished paper. At best, it's not even wrong.
We tried it a couple of times, but it was always more serious than we were willing to invest into.

The great thing about our arrangement with the NHS was we gave them the IP, so they owned the app. They were also the only people using the app (the have an effective monopoly on emergency medicine in the UK), so if something went wrong it's the NHS using an NHS app and they could work it out themselves, and not companies suing companies.

I don't think that kind of simple arrangement would be possible in the US, but I don't know much about US healthcare apart from it isn't nationalised.
The patent wrapper containing it was obtained and scanned by Sean Riddle (seanriddle.com).

This is where it came from, in case anyone (including me) was wondering --- there are a handful of articles online claiming it was "leaked", but it doesn't appear to be so.

It is probably not coincidental that this marks the 20-year expiry of that patent.

Patents can have very interesting things in them, including source code. I can't find the reference now but I remember reading that a famous early calculator (TI? HP?) was reverse-engineered and emulated down to the transistor level because of the detailed chip layout and source code from a patent.
Google was and likely still is in the running for JEDI, because Eric Schmidt is an advisor for the DoD and nudges them towards Google, and JEDI was the whole point of signing the relatively small Maven contract. Google offers pretrained AI models and hands-on consulting to put AI on drones, and in exchange the DoD gives them a piece of JEDI. But Maven turned into a huge controversy which doesn't make Google leadership look good in the eyes of the DoD, and they probably wanted to go all-in with the market leader anyway (seeing as they're very conservative), so now maybe Amazon will just win the whole thing.
I'm confused by the idea that this is bad in some way. The point of business is to make money. For startups in particular, the entire commercial goal can roughly be broken down into one of three things:

1. Build a lasting private business (Mailchimp)
2. Go public (Facebook)
3. Get acquired (Instagram)

Obviously, I'm ball-parking here, but 99% of startups with "successful" outcomes happen via acquisition. For the vast majority of most startups, acquisition is the only viable outcome other than failure.
> A flat tax is closer to good than our current system.

No, it's not.

> People that oppose flat taxes do so because they want other people to pay more. People that oppose flat taxes do so because they want other people to pay more. It’s that simple.

Some of the richest people oppose the flat tax. And they do so because they want people poorer than themselves to pay less than they would in a flat tax scheme funding the same services.

> See what Milton Friedman had to say about tax code complexity. TLDR: it gives politicians the ability to curry favor or punish and it’s the source of their real power.

Maybe Friedman said that, but it's wrong; the monopoly on violence does that, and the tax system isn't particularly special among the avenues by which the power that monopoly grants can be applied.
It doesn't need to be that equivalent though. Some changes can be / are beneficial.

The last time I had to send a fax was when my back account had fraudulent charges made against it. My now-former bank wanted me to fill out a form — fine — which they would only snail-mail or fax to me.

This form could simply be hosted on their website, as a PDF. In fact, the form I received had something like Z:\BigBankCo_Shared\Docs\Forms\Fraud.docx on the bottom of it, and in the end, I gave them a number of a service that automatically converts faxes into PDFs in emails.

Now, they wanted me to fax (or snail mail) it back. A email with an attachment to a support address, such as fraud-form-returns@bigbank.example.com, would have suffice. Directly, bit for bit equivalent? No. Gets the job done? Yes.

All together, the entire thing was a few simple questions (my info, information about the transactions, and a statement essentially swearing up and down it wasn't my fault) that could also have just been gathered by an HTML form.

(And, I'm not saying these should replace the snail mail/fax; keep them, if there is sufficient demand for them. Which I suspect that once you have an HTML form, there won't be.)
The top post in /r/machinists is a picture of a rubber glove with a face drawn on it.
Not specific to robots, but i found your question very interesting to compare with this video which is specifically about managing empathy, and it's dangers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wlwDdzlpuk

"Can you run out of empathy" by Kati Morton (professional therapist).
Crickets Carve Tools to Amplify Their Chirps
Now we have evidence that lack of exercise is not good for the mood.
Raven[Ops] | Senior Software Engineer - Go | San Francisco, Boston, Pittsburgh | On-site | Full-Time

Advances in AI, inexpensive sensors, and growing computational power are finally making it possible for autonomous systems to operate out in the world. Self-driving cars to ease our commutes, delivery robots to reinvent local commerce, and construction robots to make building faster and safer... they're all coming.

Our mission is to foster a thriving ecosystem of hundreds of innovative robotics companies as they solve an unimaginable array of important problems. To succeed, they are going to need access to the same quality of development tools and data infrastructure that made the web and mobile revolutions possible, but built to their needs.

That's where Raven[Ops] comes in.

Each of our customer's robots can generate 1-7TB of data per hour. Our first challenge is triaging that data flow. At that data scale we have fascinating challenges with even simple tasks like aggregation, transmission and storage. We are working on many novel ways to work with and process robotics data, both real-time and post-processed and are in the process of filing several patents.

We've recently raised $3.5M led by Accel and are looking for several go backend engineers to join the team. Our stack consists of Go (golang), gRPC, AWS, Docker, and React.

If any of this sounds interesting, feel free to reach out to me directly, randall@raven-ops.com (but please apply to the link). Our open positions are listed at https://jobs.lever.co/raven-ops.
The important thing to realize is that this is par for the course with huge government contracts. There is always rancorous mudslinging, submarine stories, etc.

The reality is probably that Amazon is using some shady tactics to try and close this deal, but so are all the other bidders (it's not like Microsoft, who is probably the second-most likely to win JEDI, doesn't have an extensive set of Pentagon connections too). This is just how the game is played and you've gotta roll with it. Eventually this will be awarded one way or the other and we'll all move on.
Thanks very much.

Katahdin sort of lives on in Truffle and TruffleRuby https://chrisseaton.com/truffleruby/ - Truffle is a framework for implementing languages that use partial evaluation of ASTs.
Vitamania: The sense and nonsense of vitamins with Dr Derek Muller
(1993)
Stopped reading when it started talking about pipelines in military terms. This isnt 1942. A fixed pipeline is a vulnerable asset of little use in any substantial conflict.
> Remember, you're part of the government.

This is a really important idea, and I don't think I've seen it expressed so clearly before. Thank you.
Maybe. But I think the benefit to society of publicly knowing violations outweighs this potential abuse. Also, it would be a problem to allow government to secretly prosecute, even for very minor offenses.
Devops inspired Imagine(devopsdays 2011)
How Out-Law came to be the world’s most-visited law firm website
I think almost everyone on the web in 1994 hit his page!
Experimental gene therapies for hemophillia have yielded promising results
If a policy would bring a small benefit to a large number of people, but a large loss to a small number, the small group is much more motivated to fight against the policy, and will often win. This is why it is generally not possible to abolish special programs, shrink the size of the government, etc.

Also note that the "pure flat tax" idea earlier in this discussion and the "universal basic income" idea discussed elsewhere on this website have the same problem: the promised simplification comes from eliminating a bunch of special programs, exemptions, benefits etc., which is impossible.
I too struggle very often with the pause and the recognition of emotion before acting on it.

Something that has been somewhat helpful to me is a meditation method called mental noting. Please note no method will work for everyone but in case it's useful to you, here goes.

Basically, my version, please do search for more qualified people's version of mental noting on the internet:

1) Rest attention on my breathing

2) Notice (I don't always notice, I don't often notice, but sometimes I do) that I'm distracted

3) Note and label the distraction (mentally say "I'm thinking" or "I'm itching" or "I'm worrying" or "I'm replaying conversation" etc)

4) Thank the distraction for allowing me to flex the mental "noticing muscle"

4.5) Remind myself not to beat myself up about how long I was distracted, haha

5) GOTO 1

This practice has helped me in slowly building up a mental observer that can pause from time to time. But, as I said, I still struggle with the pause.
This is a very common reaction that shows a lack of experience in dealing with scale IT systems.

You're correct that a simple DB with some forms would be cheap.

But integration tends to be crazy expense. For this sort of system, other things that also need to be covered:
1. Billing integration. Including changes to billing codes, bill (fine) printing, testing.
2. Audit integration. Because whenever money is handled, audit follows.
3. Customer support integration. Including UI for customer service, training, testing. This is often a very complex item because customer service already have a zillion systems they have to use and their training requirements are ongoing and expensive, so they want you to integrate with their existing systems instead of giving them a brand new thing, and integrate with their existing training processes, etc etc.
4. Integrate with all those hand-held readers. inc vendor compliance, testing etc.
5. Contract management. You have a contract with the government and they'd like to know that you did what you claim you did. So there's teams of people to deal with on an ongoing basis.
6. Project management. There's more than one person working on this, and a lot of complex integration requiring changes in other systems => extensive project management.
7. Ongoing changes to requirements, often conflicting. All the integration points above are moving targets, so expect that they'll have to be re-done a few times both before and after launch.
8. Arse covering. You now have a large contract with the US Government. You will sued and they will get sued (typically by whomever didn't win the contract). Vast amounts of documentation covering _everything_, including documenting the process by which documents are written => tech writers galore, plus lawyers plus lawyers.

Honestly, this is barely scratching the surface. I haven't even touched the (expensive) work before the contract is even signed.

$190M doesn't go very far!
Can this be used in a VR setting? Is this the first step toward building a viable holodeck?
Hmmm... data in the article isn’t that compelling. You’d need to go back decades to see if recent fires are out of the norm.
We could cut the size of the military... but simply making the observation that we have a large number of people doesn't explain anything. China's military is 2x the size of the US by number of people.

It certainly doesn't follow that the richer and more valuable a country becomes (and therefore more expensive personnel), the smaller their military should be.
This one should be easy to fix: Unplug the phone cable from the fax machine. Who needs a fax machine these days?
You might want to try postal address lookup/verification software to fix the addresses.
In case it's not clear from the above: Crystal supports type annotations, they are enforced by the compiler, and it's not uncommon to use them in practice.

However, there are some cases where the interface for an object is obvious but hasn't been named formally. For example, consider the following valid Crystal method:

def json_vs_yaml(obj)
puts obj.to_json
puts obj.to_yaml
end

In a more strictly typed language (that doesn't support intersection types), I couldn't do that without first defining some interface that includes `to_json` and `to_yaml` and then maybe convincing the compiler that my objects qualify for the interface (by extending their class definitions or casting at the call site), which is a lot of work to enable a trivial method whose purpose is already clear. In Crystal, the compiler just checks that whatever you're passing into the method has `to_json` and `to_yaml` defined and lets you get on with life.

In more complex cases, I almost always find myself including type annotations in method signatures (which will be enforced at compile time) anyway because it makes writing the method easier. And I certainly won't tell you you're wrong to prefer a language with more stringent requirements, especially if you have to work with other people's code a lot. But I do believe that there is a minority of cases where leaving off the type increases the clarity and conciseness of the code.

Another good case is removing redundancy on wrapper methods:

def foo(x : Int32) : Bool
x == 12
end

def add_and_foo(left, right)
foo(left + right)
end

Here, `foo` is fully specified and doesn't rely on type inference at all. `add_and_foo` automagically works on any types that return an Int32 when you add them. If I later update `foo` to operate on a different numeric type, `add_and_foo` still just does the right thing without needing any edits. Even though in practice `add_and_foo` as written is probably going to operate on other Int32's all the time, conceptually the method's parameters are of type "whatever foo takes" and its return type is "whatever foo returns" and letting the compiler enforce that via type inference communicates this intention more clearly than specifying those types concretely.
Don't get me started on the requirements for Charm and Strange secret!
Google seems to be joining the tinfoil crowd

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=No-Speck...
If she's blaming climate change, doesn't that make PG&E culpable? IIRC the majority of their power is generated from natural gas (at least since they shut down San Ohnofre and planned closure of Diablo Canyon), not to mention what the "G" stands for.
Coincidence, data compression, and Mach’s concept of “economy of thought”
It's really hard to get a precise number of how much money we spend on military. The budget for the military is snuck into other line items and obscures the true cost. For instance the VA is not included, even though we only need the VA due to having veterans. And the costs for nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants are included in the Department of Energy's budget.
It is. If you get a parking ticket that means you are being charged with a crime, the crime is just a minor infraction.
This episode didn't happen yesterday. The patient has since recovered, attended and graduated from high school, and enrolled in college. She is as competent to make health care decisions as any other 20yo. She is glad that her parents helped her escape, because she got better care that led to her recovery at a different hospital. She was clearly not critically ill, because she arrived at that hospital in a different state in fine shape. We consider the medical judgments of trained physicians (the untrained ones, not so much...) but only until they are clearly contradicted by reality.

Properly understood, the duty of physicians is also to serve those patients who are "ignorant, suspicious and contrary". They are also humans with dignity and autonomy.
According to the article, the hospital had attempted to gain medical guardianship and that was rejected by a court. So unless I'm missing something here, how on earth does a hospital justify keeping someone prisoner when a judge has ordered you to allow them to transfer hospitals if they want? They went through the rigamarole and lost. That sounds criminal. Did they lie to the cops, too, and say they were allowed to keep her there? How did they get an entire hospital to go along with this?
> I can't remove the Google search box from my home screen for example.

Or the new tab page in Chrome. (I haven't been able to find it, at least.)
I have personally witnessed doctors order surgically implanted feeding tubes (aka gtube) for literally no sound reasoning other than “just incase”. I would not put it past an overworked, egotistical doc who spent all of 15minutes involved in the case and got his or her feelings hurt by a parent or relative who dared to question their medical treatment.

It’s nuts but I have seen this play out in my personal life and people around me: people have no idea that they are in charge of their own medical care, and on occasion accept terrible advice. Wish I had solutions other than “be informed and willing to assert your rights” - because in the situation, that is damned difficult.
I'm really trying. Some things some people think are just nonsensical because their model of reality is too inaccurate.
Of course, but that isn't related to the current discussion
> kick me up to someone who knew what she was talking about...

Obligatory reference: https://xkcd.com/806/, which the other day I had occasion to pass along to a really-great [seriously] AT&T U-Verse TSR who'd never heard of it (XKCD). This one is in the running for greatest XKCD of all time.
Finally, iMessage on Android via Slack
Learning to Optimize Join Queries with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Novel, but likely ultimately to fail. IIUC, the CEO is claiming liability to PG&E is negated by the overall affect of climate change. That would likely have to be argued in court but that undertaking sounds quite massive, and would require a tremendous amount of science. What I think is really going on here is that she's trying to find someone else to take the blame, financially, and probably pushing the state to indemnify PG&E. A novel idea, but I think a court would rule this an act of God and tell PG&E that's what its insurance is for.
Developing a superior lightweight cipher design doesn't mean Google is joining any particular criticism of SPECK.
Sometimes if a torrent doesn't have seeds it is a signal that people do not value that data. Not all data should be stored forever. The community should vote with their servers what we should store forever and at what level of redundancy.
according this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War, the direct spending of DoD on Iraq war is about $757.8 billion, do you think most of that spending on the labor?
Soylent Green.
What about "strikethrough" and "slashthrough"?[0,1,2]

P.S.: It's look like you reinvent YayText[3] website ;-)

[0] http://adamvarga.com/strike/

[1] https://yaytext.com/strike/

[2] https://yaytext.com/slash/

[3] https://yaytext.com/
Anthropogenic climate change is a real and significant threat to the current state of our planet. That being said...

It is likely a fairly minor player in the uptick in major wildfires over the past few decades. That is more due to mismanagement of forests, and a "zero tolerance" policy towards fires allowing a huge build up of fuel loads.
Cheater UR Busted
Another thing to look at:
Microsoft is almost definitely going to land DoD/IC-wide O365.
AWS taking IaaS compute might be the way of giving both Seattle juggernauts some love.
This article is from 2015.

So does the posting of this have anything to do with the recent Interrobang episode on the 99% Invisible podcast‽

(99pi is an awesome podcast btw!).

After listening to this episode, I even added a binding to the "C-x 8" map in Emacs[0]. This key map is mainly used for inserting various Unicode characters. So now in my Emacs, "C-x 8 ?" inserts ‽.

[0]: https://github.com/kaushalmodi/.emacs.d/commit/a70dd6b7c39f0...
I wrote in to Vermin Supreme asking for endorsement when I ran for hugh school president, promising to make a whole bunch of whacky and unsustainable rules.

Unfortunately (and understandably) I wasn't elected, but getting to say that I was backed by a US presidential candidate over the PA system was fun. I still have his email printed out in a memory box somewhere.
This cuts the opposite way. The practice of withholding and the overcomplicated code leads Americans to greatly over-estimate how much they pay in taxes.

Increasing tax transparency would lead to surprise at how little we actually pay in taxes.

http://time.com/money/5224749/how-much-americans-pay-taxes-i...
> Because I'm pretty sure every rank and file Democrat I know would agree with me on this issue.

And yet, here we are, despite voting machines and paper ballots have been a topic of discussion for a very long time in the US.

Above you say "The GOP won't, for, um, reasons", but I'm not aware of Democrat politicians and the overall party pushing this initiative in any particularly noteworthy way either.

Am I missing something, or are you holding them to a lower standard?