skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is unfortunate, but what do you want to do, have the government pay for it? Maybe there are a lot of people with cancer who will get better and live for X number of years. But many people are going to die in a year or two and we would just end up spending millions of dollars on them, essentially wasting the government's money. How much money would you spend to increase someone's life by a minute, an hour, a day, a month, etc?

And if there was a maximum amount the government was willing to pay, then people would just be talking about how the government is deciding the price of life. Maybe you could devise a fair system in which every individual has a certain dollar amount allocated to all the healthcare in their life, and then if they go over that, they would have to pay it themselves. But I think people would be upset about that as well.

At the end of the day, every system we create (bridges, power plants, cars, etc) is implicitly or explicitly deciding the price of a human life. People are uncomfortable with that idea, so they try to think of things in different terms.

Our healthcare system is broken, but not for the reason people think. It's broken because it's this public-private Frankenstein monster of rent-seeking, self-dealing, and corruption. It was terrible to begin with, but Obamacare made it so much worse. The system has become so complex that the government can't properly model or anticipate how legislation would affect the long-term stability of the system. Over the years, the government has legislated bug fixes over bug fixes, patches over patches.

What needs to be done is replace this horrible and inefficient beast with a completely free market system. Just get rid of all of the laws and start anew. I guarantee you that the free market would be able to offer reasonably priced insurance plans that would service a variety of needs.

The solution isn't free healthcare for everyone. The US government does not have the money to even begin to do something like that.
What they say doesn't matter. What matter is what they do.

http://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/RI_...

---start quote---

Contrary to the industry’s claims, unaffordable prescription drugs are not the price we must pay for the industry to find cures and innovate affordable medicines; rather, it is the price tag we pay for an industry that values profits over patients and public health.

...

Despite ample revenue and profits, however, R&D spending has been relatively stagnant. While industry revenue increased by 45 percent, or $241 billion from 2008 to 2014, industry spending on R&D increased just 8.5 percent in that same period, from $82 billion to $89 billion (GAO 2017). By some measures, R&D expenditures are actually falling, as more firms are outsourcing R&D to third parties. In that seven-year period, purchased R&D increased from $20.5 billion to $31.2 billion while in-house R&D fell from $61.7 to $58.2 billion (GAO 2017). Finally, the industry can only claim partial credit for recent medical breakthroughs. The federal funding provided
by taxpayers contributes around 25 to 30 percent of all R&D spending per year, and a Bentley College study found that all 210 drugs approved between 2010 and 2016 were rooted, in whole or in part, on National Institute of Health (NIH)-funded research (Cleary et al. 2017).

--- end quote ---
Yes, you should. When my wife gave birth the first time there was an endless parade of idiots who uselessly entered the room for a moment and then left and later sent a huge bill. We also got a bill from the anesthesiologist who was not present because my wife didn't want it and for the supposed attending obstetrician who, although they were paged, never showed up. We had to go through disputes of all those things and even though we prevailed on all of them, my attorney had to get paid.
I’m not entirely convinced that they do. Many say that they do, but then don’t treat it the way they would treat a similar quantity of cash, lose it, and are befuddled as to how it happened.
1973: Chile's bold 1970s-era plan to network and automate their economy (2012)
So what? If you are used to freelancing, it's the same thing.

I would prefer that 80% of people are fired in the first month.
> by the public

by technical users

I imagine the general public still trusts them all the same or maybe even more.
Hmm, I appreciate the link, but it only says "leaving some to accuse the USA of subsidizing..." I didn't see a very strong argument for this point.

>The United States, which leaves pricing to market competition, has higher drug prices than other countries where governments directly or indirectly control medicine costs.

Leads me to believe that it's so expensive because it can be.
A arbeidsongeschiktheidsverzekering will cost around €4000 per year and they usually don't pay when you are sick. If you get cancer but can still sort mail, assemble key-chains or fill out an online inquiry chances are that they will not pay you. They will go through all your medical records to find any excuse not to pay you. You will have to sue them to get a payout. And you have to pay income tax on that.
Still not rational. Just because people want to do something, does not mean it is the best decision for them.
Ask HN: How often do you use online coupons?
I'm doing a small research in order to improve User experience of coupons usage, so if you have few minutes to answer few questions regarding coupons, it would be very helpful:

https://couponsandgiftcards.typeform.com/to/XmKNTP
Mindful Message: Receive a daily mindful text message during March 2019
I’ve never bought this argument about r&d for drug companies, and I have even less faith in the argument after learning recently that much of this r&d is used to modify an existing drug, not to make it better, but to essentially earn another patent on said drug and keep it out of the public domain for longer.

Couple this with the fact that there is a large focus on designer drugs, and dependency rather than curative drugs, and there’s snake oil being sold by drug companies that they absolutely need a regional monopoly to bring us new and life changing drugs.
Y Combinator Et Les Startups Africaines
The United States currently has the highest 5 year survival rate for all cancers combined. I think it's a fair question to ask if that would continue to be the case in a MFA system for 300 million patients.

Considering what a disaster the insurance marketplace was, I'm very skeptical.

Edit: what I mean by "disaster": when it launched, the site completely crashed for over a month and then, when it finally came back up, the policies offered weren't accepted by most doctors, because they had crazy restrictions.
It happens more frequently with non-life-threatening conditions where you slowly get ground down not from hospital bills, those don't really exist, but from ongoing medical costs, like expensive prescription medication or other supplies.
The wikipedia article misstates the figure in the underlying paper. The underlying paper is talking about "basic research" not R&D. I.e. it doesn't count money spent on e.g. making improvements to use of known molecules, it doesn't count the cost of bringing a new molecule to market, it doesn't count the cost of testing, etc.

That's a non-sequitur. Companies have no incentive to spend any more on marketing than they have to. Tech companies also spend more on marketing than R&D--would innovation increase if the government forced that number downward?
Money Out of Nowhere: How Internet Marketplaces Unlock Economic Wealth
That's brilliant. I didn't know the bacteria could survive drying and rehydration.
And that's the essence of this: In the developed world, this is all but a US specific issue. Cancer and other life threatening diseases rarely bankrupt Europeans, Canadians, Australians, Kiwis, Japanese etc.
I'm from Europe, so I will say why I don't want to work in London (and I get a lot of offers from there!)

The salaries that are offered are a joke in London. The expenses are so huge there! Even if the salary is a bit higher than my current one, I would spend much more.

There are a lot of joke startups, some new cryptocurrency or blockchain startups... Nope, I'm not gonna join anything like that.

Also, I'm not a huge fan of big cities and London is too crowded (for me).

Allow remote and I'm sure you are gonna find someone.
It still is behind technically isn't it? Does Firefox support Site Isolation yet?
I suspect the idea is that a VPN will provide encryption for all network traffic by default, preventing others on the local network from packet sniffing.
Mentorship and teaching are also valuable skills. Many good senior engineers would love to focus on them if their employer recognized it as valuable.
A certain pay level is necessary, but not sufficient, to keep talented staff.
I think he's saying that normally a person isn't coding while someone is watching you. I have no problem implementing a data structure on my own but if you ask me to do it in 15 minutes while you're watching every typo I'll probably freeze up.
Asana Crosses $100M ARR After Eight Quarters of Accelerating Growth
How do you take notes on your commute? I find when I'm driving I can't take notes, any voice note taking app is too cumbersome. I assume your commuting let's you use your hands though.
I wonder if, even with a reduction in new drug development, cheaper healthcare would nonetheless work out as a net win. If all the drugs that currently exist getting much cheaper would improve people's lives (both now and into the future) to a degree that outweighed the benefits of continuing R&D at the current pace.
Pharmaceutical companies spend way more on marketing than research.

If drug companies are willing to sell the exact same drug in Canada or the UK or Germany or France for less than a percent (in some cases) of what they sell it here for then why can't US insurance companies, hospitals and consumers buy it for that price? There's no reason other than an artificial monopoly.

You'll note that I didn't say "anywhere" and that was deliberate. India, for example, has decided that drug companies largely (it's complicated) don't get monopolies from patents and thus you can buy a lot of low-cost high-quality generics in India because no drug company is getting paid.

Obviously this is untenable at the global scale.

And before anyone lambasts India for not respecting patents here, countries do this sort of thing all the time. In the US, for example, you can't patent nuclear technology as a matter of national security.
I agree, and I think one consequence of using up my family's assets would be a decrease in the probability of my kids' having secure futures, which I wouldn't want either.
Yep, paying off my debt (except mortgage, which is affordable and only 15-year term) has been the most liberating thing I've done. Learning to live below my means was difficult (still is), but absolutely worth it.
There was another instance of a massive coin theft a year or so ago and the weak link again was the recovery seed being sent to a Google server. The guy described his operational security and it seemed like he did everything right. The only slip up he could point to was that he had mistakenly pasted his seed into his Chrome address bar (which then performs an automatic lookup). It was shortly after that when his funds were drained.

I'm certainly not saying it was someone at Google, but it would be a mistake to not consider them an adversary in the battle to secure your funds.
>China doesn't hide its spying,

Because they don't have to, because they cannot be democratically removed from power and their people accept a high level of human rights abuses as status quo. US citizens do not.
Fortunately (ironically, sardonically), thanks to the precedents being set by the sitting president, future presidents will be free to declare healthcare a national emergency and divert funds away from, say, the defense department in order to pay for it. A slim majority in the senate and a minority in the house won't be near enough to stop them. The current senate dissolves the checks and balances at their own institutional peril (and no, this isn't a situation anyone ought to be celebrating, except for the authoritarians).
Firstly, are you proposing that people should have windmills that have no generator at all, only a brake for generating heat?

If we already have electric generation and conveyance in the picture, then the pump and tube system is additional.

Electric generation and conveyance is "low tech": we've had it for over a hundred years now. It has few moving parts.

Pipes can leak. The fluid needs to be drained and replaced. the system needs to be bled. Pumps break; seals wear out, and such.
It says nothing about who the Dark Intelligence Team is, but this Google cache[0] has a little bit more info:

>We are security enthusiasts from China, Germany, France, Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Mexico, India and Russia. Some of us have used *nix systems since 1999.

>Coding && DeCoding && Talks && Beers && Wine && Pizzas && Good Music && Stuff && Hacking.

So at least nine contributors, unless they're counting one person as being from multiple countries.

[0] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:E2OiV-...
They were insured, and insurance covered treatment, but they lacked savings to begin with, so they drained assets to make up for lost income. Most Americans don’t save and only have “savings” in their house, which is usually mortgaged.

From the article: Since she's unable to work, the family lost her nursing salary.
Wait, by "water" did you mean "electrons" and by "tubes" you meant "wires"?

Electronics can get phenomenally complicated, but electricity itself can be pretty fantastically simple. There's no such thing as electrons leaking out of a poorly sealed wire onto your floor, for example, and you'll never accumulate sediment and corrosion inside your wires...
At that size I'm sure there would be delivery options.
I've thought about trying to get a job at SpaceX just so I could get some stocks. I fully believe that company could have a trillion dollar valuation in 10 years, which means working there for just a year could allow me to retire early. However, knowing how much pressure these people are under, and seeing they recently fired a large portion of their workforce at once, I was like, nope. Maybe if I were an American, but as a foreigner, no way I'm relocating to the US so I can be under pressure and risk getting fired and sent back for no fault of my own.
Sorry to break this to you, but as a web developer you should only care about standards, otherwise you have no standards.

The standards are a single source of truth for your production, if you build solely to a single browsers quirks (in this case Chrome) then those quirks can change at any time.
> these kids will never let fairness and unbiased reporting happen and the more prestigious the school this happens at, the more likely these students will affect the media in their lifetimes

You're not wrong, but I see that as self-correcting. If the media continues to undermine their credibility, then independent journalism will continue to rise. We're already seeing YouTube creators with bigger followings than any of the traditional media channels. This is a double-edged sword because a lot of these channels don't have the same level of journalistic training that traditional media champions, but training is also a moot point when the traditional actors have abandoned their best practices to chase sensational headlines.

We are rapidly approaching a place where people can choose whatever facts they want to believe because everything is questionable. That is more dangerous to democracy than the so-called fascist president the media is railing against.
https://www.elizabethblog.com.ng/2019/02/shocking-one-hundre...
Great question!

I wouldn't say if you're just looking for something in Gmail that we will be better. The main benefit is that you're able to search through all of them in one place.

The way it works is, we show you "instant" results from files/documents that we have cached from your providers and your browser history. However, we also show you below that results that come direct from Gmail, Slack, Drive...etc.

That way if we don't find the result you're after, you're able to see the same results as if you'd opened up all the tabs and performed the searches in each tool as well. We do this using their OAuth search functionalities.

We do do full text search for documents that you have visited in the past, and the cloud providers often do this as well so that helps ensure we can find you good results.

One big difference is that our search uses a less precise search, which means we support spelling mistakes, different ordering...etc. Which can help us find documents that are hard to find.
Yeah, I'm seeing more and more people pick up products like UniFi, and putting IoT stuff over on a Private VLAN so that they only get to talk to the gateway and not be able to pivot to anywhere else on the network.
Thanks for putting this out! I caught a Gremlin talk at a recent conference and was very impressed with how knowledgeable the developers were.

How does the Gremlin platform interact with one of my hosts? Do I need to install an agent or something? Does it need root access to my host, hypervisor, cloud console?
I heard about this on Gimlet's Reply All podcast[1] last week. It's a great overview of what went down with Evan Ratliff himself.

Immediately after listening I bought the book from Amazon. I'm only a few pages in and there's already so much more to the story which is great as I found it really fascinating.

It's a big book, so be prepared for some good bed time reading!

[1] https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/the-founder#episode-pl...
I'm sure the drug companies prefer the barrier to entry to be really high so that it discourages others from even trying.

Sure, they hate paying that much to get a drug approved, but they'd hate having to compete even more.
The crime is the action, not who is doing it. Why should US firms be allowed to not only get away but seek to normalize and profit from global surveillance while Huawei is penalized for FUD? What sort of global system is this?

This just won't fly for anyone concerned with the ethical issues. The point is not that Huawei should get away with anything but no one should. This not only makes a mockery of concern with surveillance but also exposes globalization and free markets as self serving political tools.

Huawei is a perfect example of how ethical issues are hijacked by vested interests with zero interest in the ethics to encourage an empty culture of jingoistic finger pointing that serve to distract and deny while advancing their own financial interests at the cost of everyone else.
That's a whole lot of work for a result that's indistinguishable from a Markov chain generator..
Nice and I agree. But the convenience from Audible is hard to beat especially if you have an Echo.
I see. Are doctors unable to tell you which treatments are defined as “necessary” ahead of time? Or, do you have to do this research yourself?

Also, do ‘good’ insurance plans typically deem any signicantly life saving treatment as necessary?

Sorry, I’ve always been healthy so have never taken the time to understand this but my parents are getting old.
You need >120 FOV for an immersive experience

Where does this come from? Is this a reference to research? I find the 110-120 degree FOV is pretty immersive in current day VR.

Does it have to do with: "Objects that we don't first (subconsciously) notice in our peripheral vision, we simply don't believe." (From another thread.)
All components, expressions, etc are in template curlies `${}` so type checking works out of the box. If you mean type checking on HTML properties, no it does not.

Lit HTML seems very extensible, so it should be possible to add support for thus.
Yea, um, nothing wrong with mentoring and teaching but when management wants me to turn things out on a dime at the same time. Not happening. That junior is getting MINIMAL possible attention for me to work on what ultimately keeps my job not theirs.
Googles browser offers functionality to Googles websites that it does not offer to any other website.

When you log into an Google owned site, it interacts with the browser so that you are 'logged into your browser' with that Google account.

That is not pushing standards into a direction. That is blatant exploitation of ther market position.
Just for fun, here's a link to their solar+storage server:

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2019/02/heat-your-house-wi...

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/
Ok, but how does this relate to the problem in this post. If I get cancer in Austria, do I spend all my money first and when that's gone, how much more is spent? Or do I only spend some of my money first (or maybe none), but still, how much gets spent on me - what constrains it?
Calorie Poisoning: Civilization's Exploding Killer Disease
Death, the next constraint would be death. If the patient doesn't get better, they don't just keep piling up bills forever, eventually the Cancer kills them.
Everything acts like a wave. The term to Google for is "de broglie wavelength". Even you have an effective wavelength and you refract (slightly) when passing through a slit (door)
I read comments like this all the time and I feel like I'm in a different world.

I just write standards compliant ES6 code, put it through a transpiler and some polyfills, and my code runs on every browser. I haven't had to think about which browser I'm targeting for years.
Hacker News Meetups
> landfills are mountains of energy

If you're talking about literally turning garbage into fuel, there's, as I understand it, very rapidly diminishing returns unfortunately.

Even the apparently simple act of just burning garbage to generate electricity is complex, because you have to be concerned about what the heck is in there and what you're releasing into the air.
Not to mention users who enjoy using ChromeOS and do not share the privacy alarmist feeings of HN. Go ahead and downvote this.
> What confuses me is that TSLA's price hasn't suffered.

If I'm to speculate, it's because last time Tesla tangoed with the SEC, it got a slap on the wrist. Perhaps the market is expecting more of the same.

Tangentally - I don't know how common this belief is, but Matt Levine in his newsletter argued that the best way the SEC could protect Tesla's shareholders is to not get rid of Elon Musk regardless of his behaviour. I'm not saying that is Levine's belief - it might have been a thought experiment - and I disagree wholeheartedly with it because it doesn't consider 2nd order effects on CEO behaviour against a powerless SEC and how this would impact other non-Tesla shareholders.
Node.js Task Runners: Are They Right for You?
I would definitely recommend actually doing that, but I kind of meant "should we do that" in a sense of "should we be behaving like this in a civilized society"?
A fully-inferable, testable effect system for Scala
How?

It was open source from start. Yes, Firefox as well, but it had Google as a brand behind it which put lots of trust in it because of the engineering talent they have.
> A bad hire causes tons more damage than not hiring a good person.

I think it is true, but only if you don't identify it quickly and/or don't reassign or fire them as necessary. I'm a firm believer of a holistic and lightweight interview process followed by a trial period. The only way to really understand if someone will work well in the position is to let them give it a try.
Hey y'all,

there's a huge tech talent shortage in Prague, which has approximately 1000x higher quality of life than the bay area. You can make a high salary here and live extremely well. Bonus: no human feces on your front doorstep!
Very unfortunate this is being downvoted. It's simply true. Lots of resources and time are wasted on pointless things. If we organised our society better we could end so much suffering and have more time for the things that really matter in life.