skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's fantastic here too. I had a scare recently and called the ambulance, was at the hospital pretty quickly, got an x-ray, stayed overnight, turned out not to be a serious thing but finally figured out what was causing it. No drama and no crazy $100,000 bills. Just healthcare of an acceptable quality when you need it.

There is just no way that any perceived marginal improvement in the quality of care on an individual basis warrants an off chance of maybe being bankrupted. I can't say I've ever found the quality of care of be poor or unacceptable. It's always been available and served me well.

I kind of liken it to being forced to drive an $80,000 BMW as opposed to being provided with a reasonable Toyota that does the job.

The economic experiment has been tried and the US is on the wrong side of it.
> With respect to financial responsibility, if the cost of the delivery is a concern...

As the GP noted, if you don't even know the order of magnitude to expect, the cost will always be a concern. The upper bound on the price is in the trillions, after all.

> If we start making hospitals list prices beforehand, then they're going to have to raise the base price for an uncomplicated birth in order to subsidize those that do experience complications.

This function is currently performed by insurance companies; a frequent criticism is that insurance should limit itself to true emergency situations, but when any routine operation can balloon in price unexpectedly, it's not irrational to want its purchase mediated through the insurance provider.
Let's be careful to not look at one type of health care, emergency care, and generalize to all types of health care. Right now we all (Americans at least) don't really have insurance. We are part of pre-paid health clubs and we try to use the health club membership to pay for everything. For true time-sensitive emergencies we should all have traditional insurance, and yes, the services should probably be supplied, like fire fighting, by non-profit organizations.

Health care that is not time critical should not work like the fire department. In fact, emergency rooms, once they diagnose something as not being an emergency should be able to say, "sorry, this isn't the right place for this, go to a doctors office."

With non-emergency care we should all be able to get price quotes up front, we should be completely aware of our choices and the be able to shop around. We could maybe outsource that to health care clubs like Aetna and UHC if we choose to (knowing that we are getting less choice and that we'll have to deal with those bureaucracies as a trade-off), but there shouldn't be any tax breaks or employee incentives for using those health clubs.

I recently had surgery to have my vision corrected with no "insurance" (or health care club) involved and it was so nice. I shopped around, the doctors all competed for my business and treated me like royalty, there was absolutely no confusion over price, there were financing options available, the technology was cutting edge (or I could have chosen to go less cutting edge and paid less), it was incredibly refreshing. I'd love if most of my health care could be like that.
python3 -m pip install foo

It also works for python2. I try to avoid using python tools that installs their own scripts and go for calling the module through python. This also works for python3/2 -m venv venv
I wonder if he regrets selling the idea for peanuts more?
Facebook's really bad, horrible 2018 can only improve next year, right?
Zuck: They "trust me"

Zuck: Dumb fucks

Has FB acknowledged this quote?

Have you acknowledged this quote? I tend to agree with it.
> I'm nitpicking one detail of your overall point here, but you didn't serve the time; that's why you're on parole.

Colorado has mandatory parole period that applies on top of the base sentence of imprisonment for felonies. They may not be unique in doing something like that; the US has more than 50 different criminal justice systems, and most generalizations about them that aren't federal Constitutional mandates have exceptions.
My previous Norwegian employer gave me private health care as a perk. You had to get a recommendation from a government general practitioner first, but after that, it was all private, presumably to get employees back to work faster instead of having them wait for months for an operation.

Of course, most people/companies can't be bothered with this, since the government health care is good enough, but paying for private healthcare is definitely a non-theoretical option.
What's the Weissman score?
Where is all the money going? Does the ambulance have a solid-gold steering wheel?
I built a Disqus like commenting system, where you can configure manual review of [the first X posts a new person posts at your blog]. If they write say 5 make-sense interesting things, hopefully thereafter it's ok to auto approve their subsequent posts. — How does this affect (if at all) how you feel about spam? (Here it is: https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments )

If you think someone might become a spammer, and is just posting "I like it" and "Wow great" comments to get past any first-comments manual reviews, then you can mark that user as a possible threat, and forever get notifieid about his/her posts (before they're made visible).
I have no idea if this is still the case, but I was surprised to learn about twenty years ago that Brazil’s constitution prevented anyone from getting a prison sentence longer than 35 years. Brazil also doesn’t have capital punishment.

Most violent crimes are committed by young men, say from teenagers to early twenties. I don’t know anything about Brazil’s juvenile justice system, but a twenty year old who gets a 35 year sentence is very unlikely to be a violent person at 55. And if not, another 35 year sentence puts him away until he’s 90. It doesn’t take very many prison sentences like that to completely get rid of the risk of recidivism.
With Medicaid (in New York, at least) a provider isn't allowed to bill a beneficiary for treatment. It is such a huge stress reliever. I can't figure out how so many people continually fall for the propaganda against single payer / Medicaid/care-for-all.

Source:
https://www.nyacep.org/practice-resources-2/resources/practi...
These private firefighters are generally contracted to government agencies. This is the same thing the US government or CALFIRE will do during any Type 1 incident.

The same as a concert promoter hiring off-duty cops.
Why should car owners just get a steep tax when owning a car is more polluting that eating meat?

The closest to serious discussing that actually follow the model of worst offender having to pay the most is the concept of carbon tax that is strictly based on how much carbon get released, which would then cover everything from aircraft, meat, cars, ships and everything else.
> law schools need to pivot away from judicially oriented activism to make room for a new kind of engagement with the public.

How about pivoting away from social change altogether. There's a fundamental tension between explaining the law and advocating for change. Lawyers who abuse their credentials and authority by advocating in public forums harm the rule of law. When two lawyers dispute abstract legal questions in a popular public forum it gives people the impression that the law is more malleable and more capricious than it is.

The shift of scholarly discourse, legal and otherwise, into the political culture hasn't increased the intelligence of the conversation, but merely served to pour gasoline onto the fire. Few people not educated (formally or informally) in the field appreciate the nuance nor are they capable of differentiating substantive arguments from arcane technicalities. There's not even any incentive to do this. Rather, the incentive is almost entirely to weaponize an argument by divorcing it from its context. In this way credentials and scholarly authority are abused and debased, regardless of the scholar's intention.

For lawyers in particular this should be an ethics issue. If a lawyer wants to engage in any sort of public advocacy, it should be ethically improper to reference their degree or bar membership. And it should generally be frowned upon in the profession for lawyers to use lawyerly, matter-of-fact language when engaging in such advocacy.

For a recent example of the perils, this recent Popehat post and the subsequent comments are a somewhat decent example: https://www.popehat.com/2018/12/18/alan-dershowitz-is-lying-... Though to be clear the issues are far more numerous and complex than exemplified in that post.
A company is liable for its agent's false statements.
Usually coinsurance is limited by an 'out of pocket maximum'. So even if something happens where you end up with like 600k in medical bills the most you will pay will be like 8-20k (depending on in-network vs out of network). Which is still insane but not as scary as six-figure medical bills despite being insured.
I assume they could have done some kind of "firewalled plugin" architecture? Where there's Facebook code running alongside Spotify code but where the latter has no access to what the former is doing?

Edit: But more generally, this seems like a hard thing to get right, and I just don't see the mind-blowing value-add of being able to FB-message within Spotify!!omg that would justify it.
While the Ivy League has been associated with "selectivity," was anyone under the impression that admission came down to "meritocracy"? The Ivys have always been shorthand for "America's Aristocratic Schools" and the dumping ground for rich people's kids. That random people from disadvantaged upbringings can thrive there is hardly a surprise. The only question is where the aristocracy would send their kids if the Ivys opened up admissions to everyone.
> bestowing a title of permanent employment and business advantage on a select group of people of average intellect

I don't think that elite colleges are a racket who hand out privilege like lottery tickets.

It has been shown in previous studies that people accepted to elite colleges and who don't attend do as well in life as those accepted who do attend. So that does suggest that the advantage is that elite colleges simply are able to select from people who are already very talented and confer no advantage through mere attendance.

On the other hand we have the Landry case. These were not random students but students who had been through a fairly unorthodox education to date, granted one that some have claimed to be fraudulent. However that education involved self study and online classes and possibly may have introduced students to the self discipline and initiative in study needed to succeed.

There are also cases such as Jaime Escalante and a few others who did things such as take over a class of the worst performing drop out bone headed students at a failing school, brought them enough up to speed to be able to score well on the AP Calculus test, and to this day all of them are doing much better than any of their peers who did not have Jaime Escalante as a teacher who said he believed in them and did something that enabled them to get into good colleges when their previous chance of getting into any college at all was nil.

These are not normal teachers though. The commonality is that all of them have been accused of fraud when their students do well. But their students do do well.
I don't think this argument fully makes sense, because there are already separate charges for the services you describe. The physician who sees you will send you a bill, as will the facility.

> I charge clients similarly. I overbid projects that I don't really want to do. If you want me to setup Wordpress for you, I'll charge you out the nose. Granted, you get to accept my fees before I ever send you a bill. It's not a perfect analogy.

A more apt analogy might be you installing a Wordpress plugin that costs $10 for a client, then sending them a bill that looks like this:

$1,000 - Install fee

$1,000 - Plugin license

=========

$2,000 - Total

Then, when the client complains that you sold them a $10 plugin for $1,000, you say "Yeah, well, you weren't just paying for the plugin, you were paying for my time to install it" even though you had an additional charge for the time you spent installing it.
Is there any chance that facilities that don't "accept" my credit card would be able to:

* Not inform me they don't accept my credit card

* Provide the goods and/or render the services

* Charge my 10 times the standard price for those goods and/or services because my card was not accepted?

No sane person would agree that this would be an acceptable regime for credit cards. Yet it's the world we live in with health insurance.

A "free market" is only effective with price transparency and discovery mechanisms. This is not possible in the current healthcare and insurance system as it exists today.

---

Aside from that, you failed to even engage or address the following points from my earlier comment.

> Further, even if the facility you visit does accept the insurance, that's no guarantee that all doctors within that facility accept that insurance.

> Even further, there's no guarantee you'll be conscious to validate that you go to a facility that accepts your insurance.

I think both of those points address and rebut your "check who accepts it" argument. Do you have any response to those?
I'd really like to thank Cyan for their contributions. `zstd` and `lz4` are great. I'm pretty much exclusively using `zstd` for my tarball needs in the present day as it beats the pants off `gzip` and for plane text code (most of what I compress) it performs amazingly. (shameless self promotion) I wrote my own tar clone to make usage of it [1].

It is nice to have disk IO be the limiting factor on decompression even when you are using NVMe drives.

[1] https://github.com/valarauca/car
Thankfully no.
> IMO, the reason is that newer developers faced the choice of learning SQL or learning to use something with a Javascript API.

The thing I dislike about this type of comment – although I now notice yours doesn't explicitly say this – is the implication that devs don't like SQL because they're lazy or stupid. Well, sometimes that is probably true! But there are some tasks where you need to build the query dynamically at run time, and for those tasks MongoDB's usual query API, or especially its aggregation pipeline API, are genuinely better than stitching together fragments of SQL in the form of text strings. Injection attacks and inserting commas (but not trailing commas) come to mind as obvious difficulties. For anyone not familiar, just look at how close to being a native Python API pymongo is:

pipeline = [
{"$unwind": "$tags"},
{"$group": {"_id": "$tags", "count": {"$sum": 1}}},
{"$sort": SON([("count", -1), ("_id", -1)])}
]
result_cursor = db.things.aggregate(pipeline)

Of course you could write an SQL query that does this particular job and is probably clearer. But if you need to compose a bunch of operations arbitrarily at runtime then using dicts and lists like this is clearly better.

Of course pipelines like this will typically be slow as hell because arbitrary queries, by their nature, cannot take advantage of indices. But sometimes that's OK. We do this in one of our products and it works great.

With JSONB and replication enhancements, Postgres is close to wiping out all of MongoDB's advantages. I would love to see a more native-like API like Mongo's aggregation pipeline, even if it's just a wrapper for composing SQL strings. I think that would finish off the job.
Most of us don't invent world-changing products to "pay the mortgage" and our regret over our work isn't featured in articles on major news websites.

We're talking apples and oranges here.
Thank you very much. 2019 is my year!
Fancy new buildings, giant endowments, amenities for staff, raising administrator salaries "to retain premium talent", etc.

"Non-profit" doesn't mean "can't make a profit".
If a tax is prohibitive, then by the same logic there will be loopholes for necessary usage.
We all benefit from innovation and risk-taking. The advances and comforts of modern society would be impossible without the risk imposed by factories, machinery, and so forth.

If starting or joining a business venture meant putting everything you're worth on the line in the case that one employee is negligent, then no sane person would do it.

When limited liability is abused, such as when a corporations are undercapitalized[1], then courts can "pierce the corporate veil" and hold its owners personally liable for judgments against the company.

[1] Undercapitalization is when not enough assets are kept in the business to pay for its debts or reasonably expected liabilities.
Ah, I understand that happens, but that's not what I was referring to. I was referring to private homeowners and insurance companies hiring firefighters.

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-private-firefig...
US population: 325 million
World population: 7.7 billion

Somehow, I don't think that's were "most" of the people live.
Well I don't have any legislation on the docket anywhere, but I would fully support the complete separation of health insurance from employment compensation. It's just another layer of obfuscation between the consumer and provider in the marketplace.
I mean, I know people that moved away from Hawaii precisely because they couldn't afford the milk there.

Believe it or not there are people who move into cities because of better fire departments, police departments, etc.
In many cases, Medicare doesn't even cover the actual cost to provide the service. The providers make up the shortfall by charging other patients more - including charging uninsured patients a LOT more.

So if everybody was covered by Medicare, either the providers would be going bankrupt left and right, or the Medicare reimbursements would have to rise - i.e., the price to the government would increase, and the only thing to do about that is to pass it on to the taxpayers.

It's a common misconceptions that Medicare is more efficient than commercial insurance, because on paper it looks that way. But in fact they're hiding their administrative expenses by forcing the providers to do much of their bookkeeping. (Source: my wife used to manage the department in the hospital that did that Medicare financial stuff)
The way the thermal constant works in a tube is unique to its construction. As a result when you saturate an amplifier built with tubes rather than getting square wave clipping (which is full of odd harmonics) you get a modulated overtone. In Music systems this overtone has energy at musically compatible harmonics and so it still sounds good. In radios it can be easier to filter out the spurs (spurious overtones from non-linear operation) without swamping the modulation on the signal.
And the reason that healthcare costs $1,000/month, is because this system has caused prices to spiral completely out of control, beyond the level of lunacy. Due to multiple agents in the market behaving of their own free will.

Every other developed country manages to provide equivalent care for a fraction of the price. So much for the free market optimizing for better outcomes, eh?
If you accept 'areas of preference' don't you also accept that other positions, even those in direct conflict with your own, are not necessarily wrong or false, but could simply be different?
Sorry mate, your assumptions on what I "really mean" are incorrect. I was looking to promote divergent thinking to see what other interpretations were out there. Everyone can have a different subjective opinion on which is best and whether I agree or not is beside the point. Not every conversation has to be a debate, you know?

> he's happy to use casual racism and homophobia until someone calls him out on it

I don't listen to this fellow often because I find the sound of his voice irritating and I don't like how he cherry-picks evidence to support his views on UK politics. But none of the limited output I have consumed contained any casual racism. Can anyone link to any other examples that demonstrate this?
Having lived in Arizona, it is a perfect place to train autonomous vehicles. Most of the Phoenix region is a grid with wide roads. No inclement weather. Very few pedestrians. Clear road markings, isolated turn lanes. Basically no crazy scenarios like turning right on market street in SF. Given that autonomous cars are struggling in the most friendly environment tells me that they are decades away from ubiquitous rollout
Wait so...

a
..b
..c

Would be interpreted as (a (b (c)))
Please enlighten me on the worth of LinkedIn because I have yet to find it. It’s basically become Facebook For Old People where said old people gripe about Facebook and post absolutely stupid comments on Facebook-like videos.
Not everywhere, though. In Denmark, private operators have been handling emergency services since 1926; currently one company (Falck) is handling 65 percent of municipal fire brigades and 85 percent of ambulance services. No particular nastiness has been reported afaik.
It does apply to all EU users and they risk fines if they don’t comply.
You can load your own keys: https://github.com/Microsoft/mu_basecore/tree/release/201808...
The problem with those tubes is that when things get stuck underground it is very expensive to repair them.
Der Spiegel journalist messed with the wrong small

https://medium.com/@micheleanderson/der-spiegel-journalist-m...
Suppose I want to get into hacking UEFI firmware. Does this mean I can buy some Microsoft device, download the C++ code for the firmware, make some changes if I want to, compile it, and load it onto the device?

If so, that's really cool.
I think you'd need to account for some behavioral economics in assigning positive or negative dollar values to free services
>unless you interpret "my data" to mean something in the last bullet point that's much broader than the three above...

Hmm. It seems this may sound weird to you and many others, but that's exactly how I interpreted it. When looking at that screen I was wondering why anyone in their right mind would grant Spotify these rights?

The only thing Spotify does is play songs for you, right? They shouldn't really need access to any of your FB data to do that.
Estimating value of heroin by paying user to stop using it.
I've heard the 2/3 number (sometimes a little less, most recently slightly over, 68%) from a few reputable sources recently. At the same time, I generally consider Kaiser pretty reliable. I think the discrepancy comes from what is being included in the total -- all costs, direct payments only, tax subsidies, etc. At least from what research I've done.

Even if we take the value to be 50%, my point stands -- the gov't is already heavily involved in funding healthcare in this country. Implementing single payer at this point would simplify quite a lot of bureaucracy.
Einstein.

I was reading him this morning and, although elegant and eloquent, he is "brutal". (I'm thinking of Brutalist architecture more than raw violence.)

The velocity of light in a vacuum is fixed.

The laws of physics are the same from every (inertial framework) viewpoint.

Ergo, from just those two ideas, everything we thought we knew as fundamental truths about time and space was wrong and the real world is stranger than anyone ever guessed.

Yah, it's brutal.
The New Project Management App for DevOps
Subsidies seem like the wrong approach, in that they require copious extra administration and are subject to abuse. Some economics theorists argue for securitizing externalities in some fashion, but I think the market for shipping recyclables to China is a good example of how this too can break down. I don't have a definite solution but I like the idea of disallowing deduction of all costs for tax purposes where they're a large increase in post-consumer waste, on the grounds that it's simpler to address the problem at source rather than in the large. I had to install some new light bulbs yesterday and I swear there's as much plastic in the containers they came in as in the ballast of the bulb itself.
A quick look at Polymath, how it works, and why it was created