skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point of health insurance is to pay into a risk pool as a collective so that the small percentage of people who end up needing the largest percentage of health care, nobody dies or goes into monumental debt. This can be done via taxes but insurance is a private market solution which should in theory make it more efficient for the sake of maximizing profit.

So then if it's supposedly more efficient, why do I waste multiple hours dealing with insurance bullshit literally every few months?

Start a new job at a startup, need to go to trainings to understand the health care options and choose one, get new cards and website logins, update my info at every provider

New dentist is having difficulty getting my routine care billed to insurance and calls me every week asking for my insurance information again.

Wifes doctor didn't do something correctly when I updated insurance so now I need to call and deal with this big medical bill that I shouldn't have gotten.

Startup got acquired so I get another training for the new insurance options. And get new cards and logins and update with all providers again

Planning to get a surgical operation but nobody can tell me how much it will cost, doctor says "probably whatever your deductible is" except I have a high deductible plan so is it really going to cost me $2500?

Etc cetera. There's no end to the nuisance. If I could choose to just pay more in taxes (hell I'll pay way more than my current premiums) and never deal with insurance again, I would do it in a heartbeat.
No real signs that I picked up on at the time. I talked with his ex-fiancee when I found out, and she said it manifested itself into a paranoid schizophrenia where he was worried about being listened in on. One time I emailed him and I asked him "how are you doing, enquiring minds want to know?" His response was "Who are these enquiring minds that you are asking on behalf of?" I thought he was joking at the time, but I guess that was a sign.
All you need is `mov`:

https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator/

Including the obligatory port of doom:

https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator/tree/master/vali...

Note: The mov-only DOOM renders approximately one frame every 7 hours, so playing this version requires somewhat increased patience.
If it's inside US territorial waters, yes. But if it's outside...
There aren't any technical limitations to adding multithreaded decompression zstd. We just need a compelling enough use case to justify the work it would take to add it.

pzstd is now obsoleted by zstd -T0, but it offers multithreaded decompression for files compressed by pzstd (it will still be single threaded for files compressed by zstd).
No matter how hard I think, I cannot seem to manifest any true pain in my mind. I doubt a pig could either.
Among Eastern Christians (Catholics / Orthodox) eggs are traditionally abstained from during all or parts of Lent, it depends on the particular church.
> as well as the loose independent collective of progressive organizations around similar national and local causes who have also sprung up,

The problem being that none of their candidates won competitive seats. Now, some like Kara Eastman came close..but candidates closer to the Obama/Hillary mold, veterans, and pro-gun control candidates in suburbs made up the bulk of the wins in the midterms.
>Sun doesn’t think Vancouver’s market is going to come back to its highs, especially at the top end. “Why would they come here and pay all that tax and feel like a criminal?”

Please let this happen in the SF Bay area
This is from the Nature article on the same subject [1]:

> [...] Nevertheless, the development of technology with the potential to support sentient, disembodied organs has broad ethical implications for the welfare of animals and people. “There isn’t really an oversight mechanism in place for worrying about the possible ethical consequences of creating consciousness in something that isn’t a living animal,” says Stephen Latham, a bioethicist at Yale who worked with Sestan’s team. He says that doing so might be ethically justifiable in some cases — for instance, if it enable scientists to test drugs for degenerative brain diseases on the organs, rather than people.

Gauging awareness in a brain outside a body would probably be difficult, given that the organ’s surroundings would differ so radically from its natural environment. “We could imagine that brain could be capable of consciousness,” says George Mashour, a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who studies near-death experiences. “But it’s very interesting to think about what kind of consciousness, in the absence of organs and peripheral stimulation. [...]”

It's also 'very interesting to think' how many more dimensions this could add to torture. This is the end of the article:

> [...] In the meantime, scientists and governments are left to confront the legal and ethical quandaries related to the possibility of creating a conscious brain without a body. “This really is a no-man’s land,” says Koch. “The law will probably have to evolve to keep up.”

Koch wants a broader ethical discussion to take place before any researcher tries to induce awareness in a disembodied brain. “It is a big, big step,” he says. “And once we do it, it’s impossible to reverse it.”

Sobering.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01216-4
I'd say about 1946, or whenever the cold war is said to have officially begun. Or maybe even earlier during WW2.

That being said the sentiment was never a good one, and we do need to move on from it.
Without the U.S. subsidizing the drug research R&D, who pays for it?

You could fill notebooks with worthy, approachable hypotheses for any number of diseases that could show promise if given the funding.

But if everyone makes it law to cap prices - fewer scientists, labs, studies are performed.

The money has to come from somewhere.

I think countries take for granted the progress we've made. No progress is made without incredible intellectual efforts and monetary backings.
You don't need that in the checklist. But what you do need is a periodic review of checklists and other procedure and process documents.

Suppose you have training material for new hires ("How we use git 101"). Do you hand them the same document from 10 years ago? Does it have accurate setup instructions (now you use Bitbucket and not Gitlab or vice versa, and it presents internally on a different domain).

All of these kinds of documents should be reviewed with some frequency (and ideally you should have a way to submit changes outside of the explicit review times, the explicit reviews are to catch things that weren't found earlier; wikis can help here). If you don't, then you do end up with the problem being discussed. You'll have a lot of checklists or procedures being done "because it says so" and not because they're needed.
The Economist did a nice comparison of different systems a few years back:

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2017/08/10/the-fix-f...
This is just as bad, if not worse, in other career fields too. I am an active duty EE. The Air Force paid for my undergrad then paid for my Masters. I am on my payback tour in a research lab, and I spend more then 80% of my time managing contractual requirements, finances, and other "inherently government functions" that they need a warm body to do (and that I have only gotten on the job training for). This is not even close to the unique story. Active Duty get tapped for all of the "odds and ends" duties because they can be tasked to, they either won't hire someone or taking the time to hire someone takes too much time/resources.

I had a friend of mine (also with a fully paid Undergrad and Grad in engineering) with the same experience get tapped to do Honor Guard Duty for six months. Seriously.
So can we agree that the system (which I'm taking to mean the combination of tech, people and procedure) is doing a really shit job then, because, beyond not doing what it's supposed to do, it's disproportionately singling out certain races?

Perhaps if it's singling out dense hair vs. actual places where people are hiding something, despite any evidence being presented that it's useful to do so, we should... I dunno, not use it? Definitely not spend millions of dollars on it.

I'm not sure what problem it's solving, when the solution involves humans mindlessly following a procedure, that dictates that a machine that happens to single out black hair and 'turbans' decides someone is suspect.
This confused me too. To take the example, I'd prefer the following:

tabs-close-warning-multiple = {$count ->
[2..4] Chystáte se zavřít {$count} panely. Opravdu chcete pokračovat?
*[] Chystáte se zavřít {$count} panelů. Opravdu chcete pokračovat?
}

Specify a range (2..4). The second option shouldn't need to match as it is the default value anyway (signified by the *)
It is not. This is another example of "looks like, but doesn't work like". You often see people print noses, ears, whatever that have cells in them. That doesn't make it functional tissue.

Source: I lead a tissue engineering project to print human organs for transplantation.
Anecdotally, it feels like credit card cash back rewards have gone up a bit over time. 2% cash back was not normal until several years ago.

I'd guess that market competition would drive up rewards as new entrants pass back more of the savings to consumers.
Because so many people HATE the open office?
Tech’s new stars have it all–except a path to high profits
What an obscene comment.
If there's an active plan as you mention, that works, then I say go for it. But it sounds like a far cry from the magical wonder lands you see in cities where people are just shooting up and passing out where kids used to go play. Anything that is actively getting people help and minimizing damage sounds great.
Fulltext: https://www.gwern.net/docs/longevity/2019-vrselja.pdf

_Nature_ overview/discussions: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01216-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01168-9
Interesting article about "flying while trans" in the NY times today: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/opinion/tsa-transgender.h...

Yet another reason to opt out of the body scanners. No one wants a pat down due to a machine deciding that their genitals are an "anomaly"
How conveniently unfalsifiable.
Yeah pretty much. I was reading Debt the first 50,000 years by David Graeber and he also expounded that many ideas from Adam Smith's the invisible hand can be found in the economic thought of the Persians during Islamic times. There is a whole revisionist history going on that fails to credit Persians and Arabs for their contributions to Western civilization.
I like to organise things in groups (for example, for paragliding I had 3 x 3 items, one for environment, equipment on the body, equipment "off" the body, respectively), or use mnemonics (before leaving plane: MaSeLToF (Main switch off, Sun guards set (and sun glasses removed from cockpit...), Logbook completed and hours noted, Tie down and chocks installed, Flight plan closed).
Well I'm sure you doing the thought exercise is the same as killing yourself and then reviving yourself 4 hours later to see if you feel any pain, we should all really defer to your scientific ethical expertise in the future.
> Given that TSA has never stopped a terrorist

This is a pretty bold conclusion to make. Why do you assert this isn't so? There's no way to be certain of this because we can't read people's minds. A potential terrorist may have been thwarted simply because a TSA Agent refused to allow a weapon into the secured area.
Introduction to Multi-Armed Bandits
But in the current political climate I don't see anyone being motivated to do a nuclear strike against another nuclear power (with the possible exception of India/Pakistan against each other), much less one that could retaliate against a preemptive strike with nuclear submarines. And historically in many situations with much clearer incentives it still didn't happen. In that sense it's out of the blue.
How many terrorist incidents has TSA credibly prevented? The answer is zero.
I would argue Bing or Baidu having the same power isn't inherently better.
Few is languages specific, so the logic for it should live with the language. Another language might have a plural for 3-6 but you would then need another way to describe it. I've mentioned this in another comment, but I think a range would be better such as 2..4 or 3..6
> I suppose I checklist myself when I rappel or go skiing ("Skins, skis, boots, ... working up the body")

This is a perfect example. I have a snowboarding checklist and it's reduced the cognitive load of packing tremendously.

Things to do the night before, stuff to wear for the drive, stuff to pack, what to include if I'm expecting extra cold weather, and a final checklist for things to do in the morning (e.g. get lunch out of the fridge).

For travel I have a checklist of things that I always need to take (toiletries, spare phone battery, Nalgene, pajamas) and then the stuff that varies is all I have to think about. Almost every time I travel there's something on my list of "stuff that always gets packed" which I would have forgotten.
You have no way of really understanding the magnitude of endless existential dread or physical pain a disembodied brain might perceive, which I think is the primary concern of ethicists.

In order for these sorts of experiments to be ethical with an apparent consciousness we definitely need BCI technology that can simulate input / output stimuli, at least reasonably.
I think your phenomena might be due to startups? Obviously this is a startup focused board so I am not saying this to mean go one way or another, but I ditched the startup, job hopping life a little while ago, and had to deal with "insurance bs" roughly two times in 7 years.

I am either the luckiest person alive, or maybe there is additional benefits not obviously well represented here to working for a stable, revenue producing organization, but I don't seem to encounter what seems to be the well-represented insurance pains documented here (probably a little bit of both, in my guess).
You're right you can't blame the machine. I'm blaming the people who designed it, who defined what the 1 and the 0 are.

If everyone in the country had the "certain hairstyles we'd have no problem saying "this machine doesn't work".

And frankly I don't think anyone who knows a lot of African-American Women would even consider asking them to change their hair.
Very interesting character indeed.

And as you point out, the reception of 'The Life of Brian' is almost more interesting than the film itself.
Throwing it out there—when I'm dead, you are totally allowed to resuscitate my brain. Better than being dead.

Please make sure I am supplied with some good books to read, if at all possible.
Seems kinda harsh. A giant glowing ball traveling insanely fast in the sky is a very bizarre event and it's reasonable for people to get a little scared.
Cute. Remember the fad for "energy generating sidewalks"? That got far enough that there's a startup.[1] It's useless as a power generator, so they figured out how to market it as a hype generator. "Pavegen creates high engagement with citizens by converting their footsteps into energy, data and rewards." They're on Instagram, etc.

[1] http://www.pavegen.com/
You are accidentally correct in saying that there is no conspiracy to oppress minorities. Conspiracy implies that it's hidden. It isn't.

We have mountains of malicious intent established and chronicled to the point where the burden of proof is not on those downstream of that malice to substantiate it. That mountain is conveniently labeled "American policing and jurisprudence relating thereto, 1620-Present".

> There's a problem with people smuggling dangerous items on to aircraft

That problem is a vanishingly small rounding error and the good-faith effort to fix it would be more air marshals. Instead, we get nonsense like this which, because the scanning devices look scary and dehumanize those who go through them, entrench a threat in the minds of the populace--because a threat must be serious, otherwise why would we be putting ourselves through all this?

These tools exist to scare people into seeking solutions to the problem they purport to, and yet do not, solve.
Really cool, especially now that Autodesk's photogrammetry software is no longer available for free. I think this is a good example of academic/public research resulting in useful free software!
Privacy Loss in Apple’s Implementation of Differential Privacy (2017)
The bird-like Boston Dynamics bots aren't flying drones, they are more like ostriches in shape, and they balance on two wheels on legs with a neck-like arm for manipulating things
I don't think it's that hard to imagine that at a minimum a sensation like phantom pain existing in this scenario.
...they are pigs.
Just because your brain is where all feelings 'exist' doesn't mean you have the ability to manifest it at will. But the brain does plenty of things to us that we don't want. I don't think excruciating pain would be something a brain-in-a-jar would feel - but it's possible that being deprived of all sensory connections would cause things to get weird quickly. Sort of like phantom limb syndrome!
The truth has a tendency of coming off that way.
Django: Keeping logic out of templates (and views)
Has TSA ever taken credit for stopping something? No. If they could plausibly claim they stopped a "major plot", it'd be 3-4 news cycles.

They've caught idiots with handguns and drugs in their luggage, which is fine, but there was no intention of doing anyone harm.

So no. They're as useless as a security blanket.
I mean, it is an option.

The machine is one part of a hugely flawed system, and I think its totally valid to argue that we shouldn't be substituting a machine for, I dunno, actual human judgement.

The machine in this case doesn't seem to be demonstrably solving any problems, but it is disproportionately flagging black people, people with hair coverings ('turbans' in the article), etc. as suspicious, and that flagging is being used as part of a procedure to single those people out for further scrutiny. These systems don't seem to be solving any problems, and I'm not seeing a lot of defensible positions of why it should work that way, besides "eh, that's just how it is"
One of the fundamental reasons why I haven't really bothered doing startups or running a small business myself is the radical uncertainty over health insurance for myself and my family. It's not just plain $$$ and career risk, it's the "suppose you will go bankrupt and your family has permanent medical issues now" risk. That game is for the wealthy or healthy single people

In addition, each insurance plan has slightly different doctors that sign on, so when there are changes, you might wind up needing to use different doctors or worse, health systems.

It'd be much better for me, personally, to require providers to all accept some US Public Single Payer plan (or whatever you call it) as part of opening a practice and seeing patients.

(I don't speak in any sense for my employer, who is in the health care space: this is just an engineer's personal musings)
I intuitively believed the strongest explanation in this excellent essay (the common application) but it is likely easy to test for.

Right at the top of the essay is a list of rejection rate increases. OF those only the UCs (which have their own common app I believe) and MIT have their own application. All the others use the common application. Now that chart is merely the most affected, but 85% use the common so that is pretty indicative. In addition MIT is pretty low out of that 20 (which is still distressingly high).

As anecdote: my son applied for early action, got in before the general deadline, and didn't apply elsewhere. But his plan was that if he had not been accepted he would simply have pushed the button on the common app to blast the rest of his pool. The cost was only in application fees, nothing else. Whereas as Alexander notes, before the common app every application was unique and a hassle. So my kid's plan clearly supports this theory.
> Throwing it out there—when I'm dead, you are totally allowed to resuscitate my brain. Better than being dead.

Are you comfortable with the possibility that those who are reviving you might not be doing it for your benefit?
Kim Dotcom's privacy game
Ask HN: How to Memorise?
Do you have some tips, books suggestion, blogs to increase/develop memorizing skill? I find hard in retaining information that I read, study or learn. Are there any techniques to actively improve our memory so that I can retain more information about what I studied?
It's because you see so many people that you want to retract a bit and not have to directly deal with them...
We have a high-deductible health plan and live in Reno. When my gf recently had the need for a CAT scan, the first choice was here in Reno, and it was priced at over $800. She cancelled her appointment, called over in Carson City (20 minutes south of Reno), and got one done, by someone in our network, for $400. The doctor's office who referred her said, "$800? Really!?"

The Reno specialist made her a follow-up appointment in June. The Carson City specialist saw her in 4 days.

Etc, etc.

We're our own LLC, and we got our own group health plan, as a function of being self-employed and having experienced the employment-related gaps in health insurance coverage.

None of this is interesting, but it's stupid and risky. This system has to be changed.
This is exactly what happens at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich. By law, ETH is required to admit any Swiss secondary school graduate - to compensate, the courses are designed to filter out students. As a result, about 50% [1] of the entering class will drop out. This system is not likely to be popular in the US.

[1] http://tech.mit.edu/V126/N41/41Switz.html
If you want to do the same from the command line, AppleScript makes it straightforward to do from your shell in a single line:

osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to tell appearance preferences to get dark mode' # Get current mode
osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to tell appearance preferences to set dark mode to true' # Set dark mode
osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to tell appearance preferences to set dark mode to false' # Set light mode
UW is a prestigious university and you already earned tenure. Even if you quit your job and the project fails, you're going to be just fine. Probably still a scary decision, but in my eyes you have already "made it".

(I'm a tenure-track first year prof.)
>Functional programming IS immutable programming the two are one and the same.

Yes, and many imperative languages allow you to use, in an idiomatic manner, a functional style that avoids mutable state, even though these languages aren't designed around the functional paradigm, and don't require you to adhere purely, in the colloquial sense that means "strictly" or "completely" but has fewer letters, to it. And the reason for this is that people have taken ideas from languages that were designed to be functional rather than imperative.

If you want to bring up map and reduce, what's their genealogy? Did the imperative world get the idea from ALGOL? Maybe they did, but I'd be surprised.

>See? Concatenative programming in javascript. And it's not less convenient.

It still isn't great. To avoid stepping outside the paradigm, you have to be willing to curry every function that needs multiple parameters. And I don't know what that recursion is doing there - presumably I don't know what I'm talking about again, but it seems to me that the entire body of `xToYPower` could be replaced with `return y => x y`.
"Judeo-Christian tradition" is a cultural label of dubious value and ambiguous meaning. I don't see what we have to gain by using the term.