skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a critical statement from the article, "Data from California illustrate how hospitals have exploited this situation. From 2002 to 2016, total billed charges by hospitals rose by a staggering $263 billion, to $386 billion, even though the number of patients admitted did not increase.".

That feels like statistical butchery. Two immediate things come to mind. Obesity has skyrocketed in the US between those time periods and thus more people are going to be facing more severe and more expensive health issues. How much of the cost is due to increased severity of issues? And second, does that account for inflation? Inflation alone, which increased 33% between 2002 and 2016, would explain the cost differences if that was not adjusted. Though also why in the world would the number of people admitted not increase even though the population grew substantially in that time period? I tried to answer these questions myself, but the link provided in the article just leads to dozens of links to other PDFs, which also inspires some skepticism. It would be nice if they specified exactly where they information came from.

There's also a third possible issue. In the US all public emergency rooms are required to treat and care for individuals regardless of whether or not they can pay. I have no idea how the billing for this works behind the scenes, but it's likely hospitals are recouped for most/all of these costs from the government. However, that would indeed create a huge incentive to charge as much as they could while also providing as expensive of care as possible. Not dissimilar to how government guaranteed student loans have created an incentive for universities to charge as much as they possibly can. In any case if the number of people utilizing this 'benefit' increased, we'd also expect to see a change in costs.

Articles like this just make me think of that old quote, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
I'd love to read more about that. Do you have a source?
Agreed. Would love facts on this.
I suggest major cloud providers should exchange their critical services hosting on each other, at least status page or some critical authentication/authorization API functions.
The Hierarchy of Investor Needs
I found such too. But the quality of discussion is sub par even when the original idea was good.

Large share of the people who are still active on facebook seem to be types of people who have very few friends and like to shout their ideas into the abyss. Or alternatively very connected people who promote slogans to mindless crowd of agreeing zombies.

It's mostly result of "your aunt sees what you just said" which means that you rarely see anybody genuinely argue anything. Because the feeling of your aunt briging up your facebook discussion from two years back at summer cottage is not worth it. Facebook is shitty at managing interpersonal connections, kinda weird at this point. Then the lack of dislike button keeps noise levels high from people with no aunts. Even the few actual discussions typically develop into pointless drama.

Reddit has very bad problems with eternal September, but its not nearly brainless if you dig deep enough into subreddits.
It reminds me of the old GPU vendors when we were still using AGP bus(or pre-AGP era I forgot). Good evil days.
This is not a feature. Make users understand this, don't hide it, make the main domain glowing green, wash out the rest, anything, but this trend of hiding complexity will only lead to severe undereducation on the topic, and, eventually, it will reach professionals as well, who also won't understand, what they should.
Hardening machine learning defenses against adversarial attacks
I'd like to see a reference for that number, $1M sounds awfully high.
A great use for the power, but also another destabilising thing for them and all the interested foreign powers to fight over.
If the bridge is fine, there is no problem.

If the bridge is rotten, you have lot fewer victims.

You want to do pre-emptive repairs? OK, the bridge ought to be fine. We can then proceed with the destructive testing.

You could do the testing with something like 110% of the typical max traffic load. A rotten bridge would then collapse within 6 months of it's "natural collapse". Only things you do is to make the collapse more predictable and you save lives.
I’m neither a behaviour geneticist nor an evolutionary psychologist, merely an interested amateur so if I can think up ways to test these hypotheses I’m sure actual experts can do better.

We’re learning more and more about the genetic underpinnings of personality traits and getting betterat extracting ancient DNA. It’s also trivial to compute indices of relatedness between two people if you have either a full genotype or just SNPs. If the personality traits associated with WEIRD populations are highly correlated with declines in inbreeding it’s not proof of the hypothesis but it makes it more likely. We don’t have proof outside of Math anyway, Science is about more or less likely.

If you want to learn more about Evolutionary Psychology the Oxford Handbook is excellent and it’s on libgen.io. The introduction is only about 60 pages and addresses the most common and uncommon criticisms ably.

If you think that being unusually individualistic and unfamilistic is morally superior that’s a personal preference you are of course free to indulge.
It’s stupid that they require a static IP. However, the cost might be somewhat justified since IP addresses are block allocated. However, $10 per month seems very high, especially if it is for a static IPv6 address for which there is no shortage nor will there be in many lifetimes.
Smaller stores, less diverse customers, in the upscale area of the city and the company respects their employees. That’s why they are content. Needless to say, they would also benefit from unionization
This is officially the coolest project I've seen on HN since https://github.com/fogleman/primitive
Math and Science FlexBooks
> I would be hard pressed to think of a single beneficial thing about cigarette. Facebook certainly has more productive uses than just making you feel good...

When I ask young people why they smoke, the most popular answer is: "I wouldn't have met so many people, if I didn't". When I ask them why they are still on Facebook, I get the same answer.
Hospital "billing" is mostly BS opaque negotiations between them and insurance companies. Those numbers mean nothing for individual patients.
http://selfpaypatient.com/2014/01/03/insured-patients-can-sa...
If it's a temporarily biased coin, you can make some money off of it.
Yeah, why work a dead end low paying job? Just go get more money!
This is just what is expected: the vendors do this because they need to shine in these meaningless benchmarks because that's merely the name of the game. The tech magazines are in between: they publish results in reviews and phone comparisons but it seems that not many people really buy phones based on benchmark scores. They might give some overall idea of whether the phone is middle-end or high-end, but differences within one category tend to be small enough to not matter for the general buyer.

To fix this, there should be different runs for these benchmarks. A max-clocks run with the phone set in an actively cooled cabin to see what the hardware can theoretically do at its very best, and another run in non-actively cooled room temperature with the test running for about an hour to rule out any benefits from temporary boosts or ignoring thermal limits to get an idea of continuously supported performance.

Even those results wouldn't really tell much to the end-user. I always suggest my friends and relatives to buy a phone with excessively large memory and storage space because lack of memory and storage really is what turns phones slow after a few rounds of application and system updates.

The performance edge on mobile is thinning out pretty much what happened with PCs. Ditto for memory and storage. Early on, vendors competed on who has the highest MHz cpus but somewhere between 1-2GHz the performance got high enough in nearly any case. 95% of people could buy about just any PC or laptop and it would be "fast enough". There's gigabytes of memory in even the sloppiest laptop these days, and enough SSD to make things fly. The same will happen with phones which makes it impossible to buy a phone that is too slow. At that point components with lower performance and less capacity will become more expensive due to the lack of volumes, that no vendor will bother any longer.
Yes, this would definitely reduce the SoundFont size but it would make multi-instrument songs sound pretty awful!
Roku ultra activation and setup
The outliers that surprised me the most are the big Chinese providers (ChinaNet and China Unicom) in the provider table. Despite them having much less IPv4 addresses than users, they appear to make no significant effort to get IPv6 deployed.

What are they doing instead? Putting all users behind carrier-grade NAT that don't need dedicated IPv4 addresses? That must be hundreds or even thousands of users behind a single address, considering that they must have a range of users (businesses and such) that need dedicated, static addresses for practical purposes, thereby reducing the IP address and user pools at a minimum 1:1 relationship.

Or is it maybe the Chinese surveillance infrastructure that is not yet capable of snooping and manipulating IPv6 traffic, so the providers aren't allowed to roll it out?
There needs to be a productivity tool to help you keep track of productivity tools. I'm surprised there isn't a startup yet for that
Also, who are the “unwitting agents”?

You are one of them, as an example.

What evidence is there that it’s a Russian psyop?

Have you noticed that if someone disagrees with a Qanon claim the followers ask, “What evidence is there that my claim is false?”

But if someone makes a claim contrary to Qanon orthodoxy, the followers ask, “What evidence is there that your claim is true?”

You can’t have it both ways.

You can’t make claims and expect people to prove that you’re wrong when they don’t believe you, then turn around and expect them to prove that they’re right when you don’t believe them.
First-in-last-out is an objectively terrible way to hire and fire though. As an employee I feel personally invested in the success of the business I work for. I don't want to work with less competent employees because of an arbitrary rule. I want the weaker people to eventually be let go. I do want a safe secure workplace. I don't want people fired on a whim. I want training opportunities to be provided first. I want people's performance to be judged over the whole course of their employment not just the last quarter. But at crunch time I want the less well performing people to be let go rather than just the newest.

EDIT
Re-reading this I realised I missed some perspective. A key ingredient related to hiring and firing in the society I want to (and do) live in is that when someone loses their job they have unemployment benefits that cover a significant fraction of their salary. This gives them time to find another job and makes losing your job a much less traumatic event.
Fellow HN's, why the hell are you still using chrome?
If you reduce the Formula 1 car's performance by as little as 25%, you would be able to get a much much higher mileage. Those things are so optimized that they break down much faster and easier.
We don't have pricing yet since we're still in beta. But in general, it'll be around 20-200$/month based on features (number of participants, storage space etc.).
Scaling Slack • Keith Adams
I like seeing all the 1-sentence descriptions on a long list!

Also, since when is Macy's a tech company...?
Pragmatic Event-Driven Microservices
> employers can't choose (freely) who to fire. It's first in last out, or if you want to sidestep that, you'll have to compensate the employee quite heavily

Do you mean "lay off"? Employers should be able to fire anyone with cause regardless of when they were hired.
> I'm also not sure what you're judging my competence in it on exactly as you've likely never seen a single line of code that I've written in it.

And I don’t need to. I (and anyone proficient in Haskell, really) can infer your competence with somewhat reasonable confidence based on your comments, like this one.

People who’ve just read LYAH are able to contribute to production codebases already, no problem, but they still may not have even understood basic concepts, such as functors or monads (this is firsthand experience from work), let alone monad transformers, arrows or lenses - which I consider to be a good thing. Based on your comments (and not only this thread here), this is where I’d place you in terms of competency, but of course you are more than welcome to correct me.
Today is a great day to own www.com
Interactive STEM textbooks
I like the concept of kensho. I find the idea that certain ideas can only be accurately conveyed through experience to be interesting as well.

I'm working my way through a book called "The Book Of Secrets", which has 114 different meditative techniques for different kinds of minds. One of which, is practically certain to work for any given individual.
Interesting. I think I only ever heard the term in context with politicians that that were elected "too many times" by someone's standard. There, it certainly isn't meant positively -- the funny thing is that this goes rather well with the phrase mentioning Angela Merkel at the beginning of the article. There are more and more voices now that would prefer someone new taking her post.
Absolutely. People don't have a single coherent model of identity in the real world. It's hard to glue certs to a pile of sand. Did I buy lunch from "Tim Horton's", from "The TDL Group Corp." or from some random company with an address for a name? The answer is yes to all three, despite only buying one lunch.
Just because they are content now, doesn't mean they will be in the future. Union is prep for when shit hits the fan.
It's crucial, in the US, to research general practitioners, relevant specialists, and hospitals in ones area that accept ones insurance plan. And if possible, to do that before selecting an insurance plan. In most states, in-network providers can't collect uncovered charges from patients. But it's good to check on that too. Many providers will bill anyway, even if they can't collect. Also, if at all possible, in situations that aren't life threatening, it's prudent to confirm network status and coverage, before accepting care.
Yup I had a whole UI to add the MIDI’s and apply a genre. Plus I would get the time and size etc from the file when I uploaded it. Much of it was manual. Also the reason why I never got to 100k :(
hard-code peaks in performance specifically for the benchmark app

Everyone does that. Are you really surprised? This has been a thing for many years.
Google organizes the world's information. Facebook organizes the world's delusions.
That "strategy" only works when markets are behaving irrationally, such as they have been for the last 10 years, where basically everything just goes up. If you tried that in 2000 (like I did) or 2008, you'd be quickly destroyed.
That’s starting to change though. United is reconfiguring a lot of their aircraft for Polaris seating even domestically. The seats are more comfortable though I agree it doesn’t make as big a difference on even long daytime flights.
This is exactly it. Fast food companies have spent the past decade trying to scare everyone to death whenever the thought of raising the minimum wage comes up. We'll be forced to build self-checkout lanes and self-serve order kiosks if you raise it! You don't want that, do you?

The scare tactics worked in much of the country; the federal minimum wage hasn't budged since 2009 and most states are at the same level. What did we get in exchange for that act of kindness towards the service sector? More self-checkout lanes and kiosks.
Great article. Though I know some basic calculas but I never really thought about calculas this way.

This is an interesting and eye opening perspective. Wish to see more of such articles.
> they're run by actual people who have to
> interact with other humans such as their
> friends and family

Human beings are very talented at rationalizing all manner of terrible decisions. It's no problem enacting shameful policies. Just dream up a narrative where "it turns out, this is actually a good thing for customers!" Then fool yourself into believing it, and you won't lose sleep at night.
I feel like the core product is pretty easily replicated with Freeswitch and tailored with a little configuration. Eg: Ring a phone for 30 seconds (so as not to leave a message accidentally), if answered read back the issue (using text to speech), otherwise send the phone a text and <insert whatever else you want to do>.

Having set systems like this up for numerous clients, the latter bit is usually a case of waiting a few minutes for the on call person to either accept the alert, or failing that move onto whoever the fallback is for that person.
True enough. I've realized that my investment strategy would be completely different if I was using Monopoly money, and I'd probably have made 10x as much money.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with shader replacement. Quite the opposite, as it shows the OEM cares about performance. They have two options: convince the game developer to use a better optimised shader or just replace it themselves. The latter is obviously better.
I also re-tried Alacritty recently, but I had severe issues using it in Sway. If it's one of two tiled windows, it warps the text in the terminal, so it isn't really usable for me.
Destiny 2: Forsaken Slated for Launch on September 4
Dude, I've written papers on population genetics. I know exactly how hard what he's trying to do is. He's full of it.
They have a large e-commerce operation.
I disagree that they are shitty... hardware and software is great. Their ethical standards maybe not.

Besides, if you want to install custom roms just get a phone that is supported officially (e.g. Pixel). I don't care about custom rom scene so it doesn't bother me that the bootlocker is locked. Though it was definitely a nice to have while it still existed.
There are a number of problems with TFA such as below:

1. No mention of EMTALA & No mention of the uninsured exploiting ERs.

2. No caps on Doctors and other providers charging out-of-network rates 20x in-network (not hospitals)

3. No discussion of emergent in-network vs out-of-network, whether through the ER, or not.

4. Legal Liability, defensive medicine, and malpractice at 20k to 100k+ a year, depending on specialty

5. Doctors spending 20% of their time doing billing & coding or more, depending on specialty

6. The Profit-Center certification bandwagon (Maintenance of Certification scams)

7. The reboarding scam (7-10 year reboarding)

8. The growth of non-clinical "hospital administrators & middle management"

9. The bureaucracy of Medicine ever-increasing ICD 9/10/11

10. Overpaid "Nonprofit" Hospital Executives making 10x any doctor for smaller hospital groups

11. Duplicate State Medical Licenses, Duplicate State DEA licenses, and Hospital Credentialing, just to name a few

12. The US subsidizing all medical research for the entire planet

Fixing the problems with out-of-control health care costs is more complex than many realize
This is really worth a read, easily one of the best articles in HN in the last month or so.

Not sure why this is sinking so fast.
Estimating likely changes in the future based on current information is different from divining the outcome of a completely independent chance-based event.
I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm happy with CG-NAT because of the security and privacy benefits.

This thing of having a per-device IP address looks like the wet dream of marketers and those newspapers that won't let you look at more than X articles a month. No thanks.
Given that this is HN, my comment probably came across as a disappointment and most people were already aware of the surface level details of caching.

Hope I kept them at least mildly entertained while waiting for the real deal to drop : )
>and that is when you will make mistakes.

While some trades using this method may not work out, the idea that he must make mistakes simply because he is risking larger amounts is not at all a given. Some people have no sensitivity to such things.

I know a couple of advantage gamblers that sometimes play $10,000+/hand on blackjack, and it might as well be $5 to them - not because they are super wealthy, but because they know they have an advantage, and understand that the math will work out over the long term. Whether they win or lose on a given hand, or wind up winning or losing on a given day, is meaningless to them and they rarely get emotional about it. The same certainly applies to many stock traders.
This guy has it.

I used to vape around the equivalent of a pack a day. It helped me with my adhd.

I ended up stopping when I learned that getting up and going to vape in the bathroom constantly was becoming an even greater distraction than my own mind.
As an aside, Let go is such an interesting term. It's such a well accepted piece of corporate doublespeak.

It's like they want to go, and their employer is letting them. They're straining at the leash to be unemployed, and the employer graciously releases them from the burden of their contract.

They're being fired.
So how come Ms. Sandberg isn't charged with perjury?
I had to start using vscode at a certain level because .net core doesn't have a free debugger (as it seems.) I would have to study vscode-omnisharp source to get a clue how the debugger actually works to use it in emacs - something I don't have time for.

But I started to use it more because the autocompletion is nice. It's not perfect, but out-of-the-box experience is nicer.

After a few months though working in it, I want to go back to Emacs, and as such, Emacs is usually running. Magit for example, or being able to split your screen up as needed, or quickly jumping between files, etc. is something that is burnt into my brain. VScode is terrible at these things.

I am watching the lsp-mode and lsp-ui projects. They seem promising because it answers a concern I have : I need to float between projects in different languages and want the typical set of IDE-like features in each one. It would be nice to have a single set of keybindings regardless of language, which vscode excels at now. VScode has a good debugging story out-of-the-box lsp-ui is promising because it is implementing vscode-like features (like peek mode).
From the chrome flags [1] page: "On Mac, this enables MacViews, which uses toolkit-views for native browser dialogs."
What is MacViews and how do I check if it is enabled?

[1] chrome://flags/#omnibox-ui-hide-steady-state-url-scheme-and-subdomains
>> there's a difference between "www.example.com" and "example.com"

> Can you link to a site where these two are different?

There are 3rd level domains where everyone can register "www.{TLD}". E.g., .com.kg, .net.kg, .org.kg. Look at the www.com.kg. It's also available as www.www.com.kg. Or www.org.kg that's in fact www.www.org.kg. If you display just the last part (com.kg, org.kg), does that mean that you're viewing the root website? Nope, that doesn't. That means that chrome is fucked up.
Weird as in they keep doing shady things even though they don't need the shady practices.
It looks like it could be made usable on a phone with little work.