skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read that book too, and agree it's phenomenal. It's not just about capping insurance profits. The countries doing the best also have price controls on the healthcare providers. Doctors make a lot less money. On the other hand they generally don't have to pay for medical school.

France, Germany, and Japan all have similar systems, according to the book. They have private nonprofit insurance, some kind of mandate to purchase it, a government price list on services, guaranteed coverage of anything on the list, and digital medical records.

A lot of German primary care doctors don't even hire office staff. They prescribe whatever they want, swipe your medical card, and they're guaranteed to be paid in a week, no questions asked.

Japan has a clever way to handle the mandate. If you don't pay your premiums, nothing happens, but if you need healthcare you're not covered until you pay your back premiums.

I wish all the Americans who think the rest of the developed world runs on single payer would read this book. None of the three countries I just mentioned use single payer. The book also covers Canada and the UK, both of which are single payer (and single provider in the UK), and while their results are pretty good, they're not as good as the other three.
VR sounds great. Where it falls apart, IMHO, is biology. Tech is a world of plastic, glass, and metal. Eukaryotes just don't get along with those things in close contact for very long. Dermatitides are a thing.
They don't though. They get lured in by news of the "NSA spying on them", install this app, and later find out all of the caveats after they're committed and end up losing data. It sucks.
I have a pretty good ISP - I get a /56 but the original idea was /48 for everyone. I only have 256 subnets available. With /48 I would have say 256 x 256 subnets which would be ideal for my family. With /56 I have very little elbow room.

Each subnet (/64) is 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 addresses - which is nice.
Compassionate, sure, once - but surely not for someone's entire life.
I don't think the question, as stated, is useful. Any problem big enough to be worth dedicating your life to solving is not likely to be solved by one person. Even if it is, you are unlikely to be the one to do so.

That doesn't mean that you shouldn't work on such problems. But the question seems like it's saying "I need to fix one of these in order to not waste my life", which seems line an unhealthy way of trying to find one's identity.
GitHub GraphQL API Example App Based on Angular, Material and Apollo
I’d say this is because the concept of a “stare down” is instictive to us primates (or even mammals in general). That is, asserting dominance via staring at others is something we’re born with, and for good reason: our ancestors’ survival hinged on this when being confronted with someone bigger/stronger. That’s why you look down when you’re anxious or ashamed. Canines and felines do the same.

So it’s just natural that people subconsciously transfer this dominance-via-staring to inanimate objects as well, because it comes from a very ancient mammalian instinct.
Where does the money go? Aside from the waste and fraud, two places. First, we pay for convenience. We want to see a doctor now. We want immediate access to all the best equipment, and specialists, and drugs, and we don't want to wait around or travel far. And we increasingly want it for every citizen. Second, over treatment of the dying - no subject is more uncomfortable. When asked what the biggest problem Kaiser Permanente faced, Charlie Munger, board member, responded over treatment of the dying. Various estimates are half of all healthcare spending takes place in the final two years of peoples' lives. In both cases, we've essentially deemed care as "cost no object", and when that happens, things get sideways fast.

I'm not saying what is right or wrong, just what the problem is. Fast, cheap, good - you can always only pick two.
Thanks.

So far I haven't had to use GitHub.

I've done a LOT of computing for a LONG time. The code for my startup runs fine. I Want to do a few, easy late tweaks before going live.

I have the first server running and am doing a few last little things.

The code is 100,000 lines of typing, 24,000 programming language statements, nearly all in Microsoft's Visual Basic .NET.

The next major step is to gather a lot of data for my database, much more than the data I have for testing now.

I taught computing at Georgetown and Ohio State, published in artificial intelligence and more in computer science and applied math at IBM's Watson lab, and cooked up some maybe new algorithms for my startup.

But I've never needed to use GitHub! I'm not against it, but so far the computing unique to my project has been fast, fun, and easy for me. The main bottleneck has been poor documentation. Then my development computer got sick, then I got sick, but now both I and my computers are all healthy!

The times I tried GitHub, it said that my Web browser is out of date! I have the latest from Firefox and was using my HP laptop with Windows 10 64 bit Home Edition -- what came with the laptop I got just to have something to order parts and gather information for my first server after my development computer quit -- some motherboard data corruption problem.

My server is an Asus old BIOS style motherboard with an AMD FX-8350 processor, 8 cores with standard clock at 4.0 GHz, 16 GB of DDR3 ECC main memory, 7 TB of hard disk, and Windows 7 64 bit Professional. If my startup gets traffic enough to keep that server busy, then I'll have a nice step up!

Especially since I'm using Microsoft,
I'll likely use GitHub eventually.
Will AI take your job away?
“I think startup employees should re-evaluate the growth trajectory of their startup every year.”

At a bare minimum. Probably more often.
Yup, our ops call themselves DevOps and SREs in the same meeting, not doing any of it.
the one thing that was befuddling to me, is that there wasn't a single smart company during the mist of the great recession (as far as I could tell) .

What I mean by that is, when a company has massive layoffs, presumably they keep their best employees. This gives other companies insight into what you have left, and they can now poach your best. likewise if you don't lay off, you dont convey that data to competitors.

If I were CEO during such a recession, I'd hire, not fire.
Just a few days ago actually, and probably will again later this week. It still lacks a decent stdlib.
>Scientists have found a biological clue that could help explain why African-Americans appear to be more vulnerable than white Americans to Alzheimer's disease

Yet comments supporting genetic differences among races in the thread from last week regarding Nobel laureate Watson's remarks were nuked and the thread eventually flagged. Should we flag this one now and get it over with?
> The only reasonable default value, sometimes, is all-zeroes (or all-ones...).

That's very false. Consider a basic string container with a small-size optimization. The default value for capacity is neither 0 nor 1, but the size of the inline array.

Similarly it could be an enum value, and the default for a given class isn't whatever the 0 value happened to line up with because that's arbitrary anyway. An example being a basic type id of a fixed number of types.
Thank you Gov. Gavin Newsom for making CA even more attractive to illegal aliens.
> If you are presenting a breakthrough in compilers in a compilers workshop, maybe you don't want to start your talk explaining what a compiler is. Step 0 of every presentation should be "know your audience", and if your audience is expecting complex information you will have to get into details at some point.

My personal pet peeve of nearly every astronomy documentary/talk/youtube video is that they have to explain what black holes are. By aiming at a way to general audience it wastes the time of the (usually) 99.9% who understand it at least as well as the somewhat brief description they include.
The history of theories of vision contains repeated cases of "extramission" hypotheses, even if you don't believe that 50% of adults now subscribe to a folk "emission" theory of vision.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emission_theory_(vision)

Most proponents of the theory lived before lasers were invented, though not before the first sunbeams, jets of water, shouts etc.
A Technical Deep Dive on Using Certbot to Secure Your Mailserver
Deployment automation is an engineering task that can be designed, implemented, deployed by an engineering team.
It could be an internal Software Delivery product
I have never understood why people are so hot for fusion.

Fusion gives you 10^15 energy density, fission gives you 10^12 already. So the difference between fusion and fission is really not relevant compared to what we have now.

Fusion has many of the same potential practical problem as fission and many even worse.

Yet fission is here, its the highest low-carbon energy source, it has proven to be able to replace fossil on a MASSIVE scale, see France, US, South Korea, Japan, Switzerland, Sweden and so on.

Fusion is the dream in the future that makes it easy for people to dismiss fission. And that is keeping us back. I'm not saying studying fusion is not useful, but a we should put 10x more resources in fission research.

The world just does not make sense to me.
Really fascinating ideas! I would think that one of the difficulties would be dealing with expansion of the plumbing. Anything using flexible hoses will have to deal with this issue.

It might be easier to solve with small 3-D printed digital parts (AND, NAND, etc) that could be fitted together with rigid PVC off a plumbing manifold.

This might allow you to make smaller parts also.

I think you’d also need some sort of hydraulic expansion tank that would act like capacitors - necessary for storing memory and improving signaling.
So what if carriers enable 5G-ish radio access, but still use a 4G core network? This is an inevitable transition strategy.

Should they still market this as some kind of progress towards 5G, or wait until "5G is finished" (which doesn't happen because there is always a next release...)?
I think the commenter was asking about quality regardless of cost, especially for the upper tier.
September 11, 2017 - not exactly the latest news...
The current crop of VR software is way past the ‘tech demo’ phase. Once the new Oculus comes along ditching the cables and PC requirement, things will move very, very fast.
I think it would be worthwhile to discuss more than just per capita cost. The way that these costs are distributed is important and, I believe, problematic. The problem here is not just that per capita cost is high, it’s that for reasons that are partly structural, and partly demographic, healthy young payers with lower incomes can be burdened with the full, un-subsidised, costs of insurance, while others consume services without seeing the price. Some people have tax subsidized employer sponsored health care, some people have socialized health care, some people pay for insurance out of pocket with post-tax income, and some people have nothing and have to negotiate costs under duress after they have already consumed services. Doctors will not commit to a price in writing in advance. If you think will, try it sometime ;)

I’m currently paying more then %100 of my annual income into an insurance pool, because I need insurance to protect my assets. (It’s complicated...) Moreover, the cost is not tax exempt because it is not employer sponsored. I’m healthy and don’t really consume much in the way of services. Meanwhile, others in the same insurance pool I’m paying into never see the price of their premiums, and don’t pay taxes on them. I understand that the point of insurance is to pool risk for insurable events, but how can we ever have an efficient market without price information?

As Milton Friedman put it “No one is as careful with other people’s money, as he is with his own.”
I would've made that argument then, and it's the reason I have a Blackberry today. It's just straight up not as good, in my opinion. But yes, people in general seem to be fine with it. I just wanted to push back against the idea that "Well, everyone said it would be bad and then it was fine.". The people who thought it was awful in many cases probably still do, they're just quieter about it 'cause it's a lost cause.
we are the only developed nation whose government allows for-profit health insurance companies to exist with ZERO regulation to cap healthcare prices.

So what are you going to do about it?
Very similar to equities purchases. You want to be buying “when there’s blood in the streets” (heavily distressed markets) not at the market peak.

This takes enough management savvy and foresight to manage your cash flow and reserves to enable absorbing talent from disadvantaged firms during times of economic uncertainty.
Developers often joke about job ads that require "5 or more years of experience" in about 10 different technologies. I once calculated the probability of a real person matching such a description and came to something like 1 out 500 trillion people. Unless the job ad is published to the entire Virgo Galactic Supercluster, they won't likely get a match.

There are rumors such ads are written so companies can officially reject citizens for H1B visa workers. However, Hanlon's Razor could be at play.
Tons, but they're all really boring.

For example the company that likely makes the carpet you walk on everyday if you're in A class office space is made by a company that's had a carbon neutral 2020 goal since 2007, and is in line to meet that goal now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface,_Inc.

Patagonia is likely another one you've heard of. (Or i've fallen for their marketing hook line and sinker)
Interesting observation. There is a personal angle, and a group identity one. Some people tend to view personal decisions through the lense of group identity, especially as it pertains to power struggles between groups.

Class struggle was a common point of analysis, and still is, though intersectionality tends to emphasize racial and gender struggles.

For a mainstream news source, The nytimes leans heavily left and often will analyze social phenomena through the framework of group identity and power structures.
How does allowing Chrome on iPad/iPhone equate to being forced to use them?
The thing is, just because it's theoretically possible to interface "naturally", that doesn't mean it will feel natural. Much like interacting with voice-based assistants is stilted, constrained, and often awkward with misunderstandings and false starts.

Interactive VR will be no different. Either it will be very simple but entirely artificial, or it will be complex and "natural" but ultimately unsatisfying. We are nowhere near being able to implement anything approaching "reality".

But even if we were, I think you overstate the promise. "Having to learn a new UI" is exactly what you will always have to do to learn to do anything new, whether it's in a mobile app, on a computer, in VR, or in the real world with physical objects. Guitars, power tools, ping pong tables, pressure cookers... they all have new and different user interfaces.
do you think it's rare that there are paid posters on hn?

It depends on definitions. There are certainly URL submissions done by PR firms, but I think most of these are low quality and flagged. There are all sorts of small businesses that do self-promotion through HN, with varying degrees of success. There are certainly others who tend to upvote the companies that pay them, but I think this is usually because they like their job rather than because upvoting is considered part of their job.

I don't think that any significant number of prominent upvoted comments are created for hire, though. I think most comments are written by people who believe what they are saying, and that there are just so many ways for people to disagree that the things that seem unbelievable are just evidence that people are different.

i think its fairly common for pr firms on behalf of tech companies

It's certainly possible, but I'd love to see stronger evidence for it. Specifically, I'd guess that it is rare for major companies to pay individuals specifically to write comments on HN they don't believe so as to put that company in a positive light. For example, although people are frequently accused of being shills for Apple and Google, I'm doubtful that these companies pay anyone on a per comment basis to make pro-Apple or pro-Google comments. But I'd very eagerly read proof to the contrary.

less so but still very probable for political special interests

This is actually the one that I'm more inclined to believe. I think at least some of the pro-China, pro-Russia, pro-Israel, and probably even pro-America comments are being written by people paid to represent the interests of these countries online. But I think in most cases, the writer is also a patriotic citizen of those countries, and thus is likely to believe the propaganda they are spreading. But I'd be interested to see proof of this too.

As a counter-question, do you know anyone who is being paid for their comments here? Or read articles written by anyone confessing to being paid to be a commenter here?
Thanks for your great comment and I agree especially with your last paragraph. While reading the book, I was so frustrated with how poorly my county has handled such an important issue, probably the most important.
Have you been profiled by judges? Cops don't get to decide Assange's fate if he's tried in United States court of law. And that trial would have international eyes on it, not a lot of opportunity for shenanigans without lasting repurcussions.
I was thinking that Bitbucket still has its promise to always be free.

However, I don't think it will be an issue. As hosting costs drop to zero, if someone starts charging, they lose customers to a free competitor. (as is happening here).
The Disappearing Poor
Is there a difference between CDROM and USB drive images? I write Ubuntu iso images to a USB drive with dd, and it seems to work.
> ...rather they fear that it will result in them receiving worse care.

In Canada, we have free healthcare. If you have the money you still can go private if you think you'll get a better care.

But I guarantee you won't go private for hearth surgery. There's not market for it because the care you get is already the best in the public sector.
At CES 2019, Apple finally sets iTunes, AirPlay loose
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap
I have a problem with the title. They could’ve named it: SLQ schema management.
Is there blood in the streets right now? If so, why aren't you buying right now?
I think it's more likely to be a component of bootstrapping intelligence when you're a baby, by having having built-in algorithms telling you what those around you are looking at.
Like me. I will hug windows 7 goodbye on my way to Neon OSville, with redoubled hope my sim City 3k and rct2 may now work without having to be in a VM
Sufficiently advanced regulation is indistinguishable from single-payer - insurance is completely reliable, covers everything, and is completely fungible. Who cares what name is on the card? The easiest way to accomplish that is just to have a single government insurer. But you can finagle your way in the back door by regulating the shit out of insurance companies too.

One-third of the US population is on a US single-payer system right now.
But right now people who interact with their own partners/housemates in MMOs, chat, etc. when in close proximity to each other are a tiny minority (although probably a heavily overrepresented one at HN). I don't see why that would change with VR.

You also can't conveniently eat, drink, or go to the bathroom while using VR, and those are very common things for people to do in the midst of a period of social interaction. Imagine in how many households any given night the following happens in a group of friends or a family: people are watching TV or a movie, someone gets up, maybe goes to relieve themselves, stops by the kitchen to grab a snack or a can of pop, asks if anyone else wants anything, grabs what was asked for, comes back, hands over the item, sits down, and resumes watching.

Because TV and movies tend to be designed to be comprehensible with partial attention, that person very well have kept track of what was happening. Maybe they have to ask "who's that guy?" This kind of thing might happen multiple times a night. This doesn't have to be a planned or organized event -- it's a totally casual domestic interaction.

VR as it currently exists, and as far as can be reasonably predicted based on our understanding of the technology, is something that requires a great deal of physical and mental focus. That will necessarily limit its reach, unless it manages to fundamentally rewrite human society. (And I don't think I, for one, am eager to see what that new society would look like.)

I think there's a lot of interesting opportunities for VR technology. But should I live another 4-5 decades I doubt that I will live to see VR attain anything close to the social pervasiveness of video games, much less TV.
I have no clue what Vonnegut's speaking voice/manner is like, but I read this with Feynman's voice, and it worked very perfectly.
You need to drink a lot of caffeine (or pills I suppose) to go over the limits (unless they're a lot lower now?). We're talking like on the order of a gallon of coffee or something.
Both equities and labor are still relatively expensive at the moment.
NIH has also kicked in vast sums of capital to help fund that research, though. And actually considering the scale of healthcare spending (3.5T in 2017), you could probably publicly fund drug development outright within the savings window of something like full public funding of healthcare. Total drug R&D expenditure was like 70B in 2017, it's not some giant gift (though appreciated, temper the enthusiasm, so to speak).
I've seen that people are quite good at tracking the gaze of others for mating purposes. Who is looking at whom and how they are looking is all quite interesting and informative.
Interestingly one of the more popular VR apps is Bigscreen which let's you watch video content on a large virtual screen in a shared space with other remote users. The use case is consuming passive and mostly 2D content while chatting with your friends which is quite similar to what you're describing but for people who aren't physically in the same space as the people they want to consume content with.

It's not something I've found much use for (but I don't own a TV so your scenario isn't one that has much relevance to me) but it is a common thing and one that already translates quite successfully into VR.
Current 4G plans aren't "actual" 4G either.