skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Also, just having the ability to comparison shop tends to hold down prices, because firms know that you could go elsewhere if they're gouging you and that information tends to escape. It's like how when the wage-fixing cartel among Silicon Valley employers was discovered, everybody at Google got an immediate ~50% pay bump. You didn't need to actively interview at Facebook, because they knew you could and would rather that you not get that idea in your head.
Competitors are tightly controlled, thus someone hiding their prices isn't easily supplanted by someone who is revealing them. A free market solution would be to let anyone choose to hide their prices but to not protect their market share from more customer friendly competitors.

The existing system is nothing like a free market and anyone trying to justify keeping things the way they are with that reasoning is either being intentionally dishonest or is completely naive about the situation.
Define work?

My day is 10 hours, door to door.

I spend (realistically)

-- 3 hours commuting on the bus, doing emails, sheets, bugs, easy stuff

-- 2-3 hours in meetings

-- 2-3 hours of individual focussed work

-- 1-2 hours lunch, snacks, coffee, chatting, non work errands, personal email, shopping
My fault, could've expressed it better. And as someone who actually like(d) Tcl/Tk, I understand the urge to defend it perfectly.

If we're comparing UI implementation languages, it doesn't look good from a historic perspective. PostScript was pretty much better than all its successors. Tcl/Tk had a decent approach as something Unix-y, and I don't even want to know what will come after JS/CSS/HTML if we're continuing that arc.
All drugs are regulated by the FDA, even if a drug patent is expired you need to get FDA approval to sell a generic version, which would cost millions. The only way around this, is if you market your product as not for human consumption or make some obscure research drug and market it as a health supplement.

Of course the latter two eventually will get you in deep shit with the FDA.
I don't think mandates can solve price transparency. I think in order for price transparency to happen we need to eliminate employer-provided insurance, and have insurance companies competing directly for consumers. Eliminating minimum coverage mandates could also help by allowing companies to compete on different levels of coverage.

Additionally, patents and the onerous burden of the FDA need to be reduced to encourage competition.
The author explained this (quoted below). Even though FB doesn't control Libra (protocol), they do own Calibra (digital wallet). If Libra takes off, Calibra stands a good chance of becoming the default way of transacting in Libra. FB then becomes the de facto leader and holds outsized influence over the direction of the project/industry, much like Gmail/email, Chrome/web and Google/web search.

> And this is when this bet would pay off for Facebook (and the second point I missed in my earlier analysis): the implication that digital currencies will do for money what the Internet did for information is that the very long-term trend will be towards centralization around Aggregators. When there is no friction, control shifts from gatekeepers controlling supply to Aggregators controlling demand. To that end, by pioneering Libra, building what will almost certainly be the first wallet for the currency, and bringing to bear its unmatched network for facilitating payments, Facebook is betting it will offer the best experience for digital currency flows, giving it power not by controlling Libra but rather by controlling the most users of Libra.
The president is not a CEO; the executive branch is not a corporation. [0] Moreover, the executive branch does not need to be "run" from the top; instead, it operates in a distributed and semi-autonomous fashion. Think not of the Cartesian brain, but the octopus.

The Constitution outlines specific responsibilities of the President in Article Two. [1] Those responsibilities:

* Command the armed forces

* Have a Cabinet (have the heads of subbranches as direct reports)

* Conduct foreign diplomacy

* Give State-of-the-Union addresses

* Not be bad at carrying out the will of the law; "faithfully execute" whatever the law tells them to do

* Get impeached if Congress says so

There are some things that the President is enabled to do at a whim, but they are not as broad as you'd think:

* Issue pardons

* Appoint judges, diplomats, etc. with Congress's approval

* Call special sessions of Congress

I agree that, in order to be aware of the full nature of the law, the President needs to be surrounded with legal professionals who can advise them on how to not violate the law. But, in Article Two, it's clearly spelled out that the President should have a Cabinet in order to delegate day-to-day responsibilities further.

Finally, as a reminder, the President wasn't supposed to be chosen by the people, but by the Electoral College. [2] The Presidency should not be a popularity contest.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism#Fascist_corporatis...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_Stat...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_Colleg...
It's not that strange for new medications. Here's a personal example.

Lots of people suffer from hyperhidrosis, which is excessive sweating, generally on the palms, feet, or armpits, where sweat glands are clustered.

There have never been great treatments. There are all sorts of them, but many of them just don't work, or have horrific side effects.

Among these is a drug called glycopyrronium bromide, which is an anticholinergic. Taken orally, it absolutely cures hyperhidrosis dead in its tracks. It also has a tendency to dry up every part of your body that should naturally be lubricated in some way.

Imagine your mouth, tongue and throat so dry you can barely form the movements necessary to speak. Imagine your eyes so dry you can barely blink. Imagine your nose dry and cracking and frequently bleeding.

Lots of people would have talked to their physicians about this in the past, and lots of people would have tried options available to solve the problem, including surgical options. But all of those options were either terrible, or did little to alleviate the fundamental problem.

And then in 2018 there was a new treatment developed, qbrexza, essentially the same drug, but delivered as a topical cloth treatment. It turns out this drug is not readily absorbed into the surrounding bloodstream, and in any event doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier at all. It turns out that topical treatment works quite well for the primary purpose, with significantly reduced side effects.

But imagine you've already talked to your doctor about this problem, years ago, tried several remedies, and none of them worked. Imagine you had already given up on seeking treatment.

Then you see an advertisement on TV for your particular affliction. It sounds like a new, and promising avenue of treatment. And so you decide to go back to your doctor, and ask about this new treatment, which never existed before. And you never would have done that, probably ever, if you hadn't seen the advertisement.

How many drug advertisements do you see for old drugs? Not that many. There are some, for very common ailments like hypertension. But primarily drug advertisements are focused on new drugs.

It's not that odd to advertise a new treatment. There are still doctors that need to evaluate patients and prescribe the medication. If doctors are prescribing useless medication to patients, that seems like the primary problem to me, not the advertisements.
You can do all that without needing advertisements, if you're so inclined.
I don't know how much he knows about mental health or how it's practice in the US. But in the US there are things that are classified as clinical and those that aren't. The DSM-V is a guidebook to those issues and people who make those determinations has to go through a graduate program (Masters, Ph.D. etc) with a certain period of training akin to residency (these requirements do vary from state to state but in California it is fairly extensive and strict). I can't speak to what's going on in the UK but one can't simply show up to a therapist or psychiatrist because one's having a bad day and start getting drugs or some long term therapy program.
I wonder if this holds up for those that grow up only typing.

It might because writing makes you slow down a bit. But would be interesting to see.
I was a Dyn customer since the late 90s (I think...). In the early(ish) days they offered a lifetime DNS service for something like $30, so I jumped on the opportunity. I don't think there was much else around at the time...

All things considered, I managed to get a pretty good deal out of it. Can't really complain, can I?

Anyone knows a good alternative with simple DDNS updaters?
David Graeber describes this "fluff work" as "bullshit jobs", a sense of purpose in a job seems to be increasingly rare for many people. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/25/bullshit-jobs-...
Yes, insurance companies are not on your side. They want all prices to rise so their competitors pay the same... and we wonder why there is price fixing?
I was punching some numbers into Covered California marketplace and for $12K you could get some pretty good plans. And if you qualify for the subsidy it is much lower. Some of the HMO plans have no or low deductibles.
> To wipe that benefit away would be a step backwards for a lot of people.

Welcome to vested interests.

> It should be possible to reopen those negotiations and reach a fair conclusion

As much as Uber can negotiate with taxis. The solution here is to cut all the bs out and dereg. Import free doctors from all the world for cheap, by allowing them to practice medicine and to apply to a Doctor visa. US can triple its doctoral staff in 5 years with no educational cost by simply doing less things.
Right now I code two days a week and do academic/journalistic writing the other three days a week. The work styles are totally different.

With programming, I work at nearly full capacity until I'm almost done with the task, and then get sort of distracted during that last little bit of testing and documenting.

Writing I find far less conducive to a "flow" state though. I alternate pretty much the entire day between 30-60 minute chunks of working and 10-20 minute chunks walking outside or checking HN.

In the rare instances when I have to switch between the two modes, my productivity basically collapses.
My Flight Simulator story: I lived in Philadelphia well into adulthood and played extensively with MS Flight Simulator. At the time, the game would start in Oakland and you would fly across the bay to San Francisco International airport.

One day, I had to fly for business to San Francisco, my first time being there. As the jet approached for landing, I got an overwhelming sense of deja vu looking out the window. I almost jumped out of my seat! Then I realized I recognized the scenery from all those hours flying across the bay in MS Flight Simulator.
DIY: Recurring crypto purchasing so you can dollar-cost average into positions
Ask HN: Best practice for diagraming the output/side effects of complex scripts?
I'm a SWE, and part of my job right now is migrating a legacy data pipeline to the cloud. Part of that is understanding layers of complex bash scripts that have tons of side effects and do lots of things at once (make 2 copies of this, awk that, over write this, copy it again, rename, append to this one, change the name, append again, copy again, etc).

I'm a very visual person, and my dream goal would be to have some robust diagramming system that allows me to read the script, and, line-by-line, physically diagram it out in such a way that it's very easy for anyone who reads the diagram to understand what's going on.

Some goals I have for this system:

- never having to erase what I've already drawn as I iterate through each line

- the end result makes it easy to spot unnecessary logic

- borrows a lot of symbolism from existing diagrams (state machines, UML/Sequence/etc)

Does this exist? Do I need to invent this? Does this seem useful?
Is this new AI Model under Watson?
This is not exactly new. I remember seeing models that did really well many years ago. And again caught many that humans had miss.

The problem is that they fail differently than humans do, in a way that humans wind up not trusting the results.

It turns out that there are parts of the breast that are easy to spot tumors in, and parts that are hard. A human scans quickly over the easy areas, and focuses on the hard. The result is that humans make careless errors on the easy areas, and catch hard tumors. Computers make no careless errors, but can't catch the hard ones. Thus when a human sees what the computer caught that the human did not, the mistake is easily dismissed. But when the human sees the ones that the computer missed, it becomes, "It doesn't know how to do the real work."

Ideally the two would be used together for better results than either alone. But humans wind up resenting the computer...
That is the plan [1].

[1] https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/meet-the-eco...
And the guy who goes to the ER with a serious heart problem gets admitted and leaves bankrupt? Seems important to avoid that. Even for the cancer - you're in the most stressful situation of your life, you want to evaluate prices? What about your vulnerable grampa?

In the UK, where I'm originally from, I've never met anyone who wishes they had a role in evaluating healthcare pricing. In the US, I personally don't either.
Maybe they are thinking about such things as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox , or https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist... . Or perhaps they feel the modern lifestyle is not delivering happiness. Or, to be more specific, they may be noting as J.S. Mill did that paradoxically technology was improving and at the same time people were working more.
> If one argues in favor of "free market" solutions for healthcare, then one MUST argue in favor of pricing transparency.

Absolutely not.

> A functioning free market requires the open and honest sharing of price information for consumers to make informed choices.

A free market does not require any of this. In a free market the producer can do whatever they want, in a free market the consumer is free to choose different options if given producer does not adhere to their personal standards thus driving other providers to either change their behavior or just losing business. A free market does not require a government ruling them to adhere to some business practices. That is regulation and not a free market.
Can you email me? I'd love to chat.

jared at nillium dot com
Wow. So you've decided to propagate only the negative behavior from that incident? "Someone did it to me so I'm going to do it to someone else" - is that the thinking? There were also no shortage of people who showed support and understanding for your folks during that time(me included.)

What's the old adage - "be the change you want to see in the world." Seems like a real missed leadership opportunity.
Not trying to downtalk, but it took you 11 years to pull this off? This is some massively slow growth :D
Moral thought experiment: who do you think deserves a greater punishment - a drug addict who stabbed your child during a high, or a CEO who knowingly prevented your child and hundreds of others from being able to afford the only life-critical medicine available in order to maximise their profits, even though the cost to manufacture that medicine is 1/100000th of what it was being sold at?

This isn't hypothetical, GP is talking about a treatment that went from ~$200/mo to ~$43k/mo simply because a bunch of heartless assholes figured that was the point of max profit even if it ruins the lives of a bunch of people and kills a bunch more.

Is my viewpoint hypocrisy? I don't think so. Your comment seems to be centred around the alleged part, and I also strongly oppose the death penalty because of the false-positive rate of convictions. But take an hour out of your life to study Valeant and its leadership, and come back and tell me that you believe that there is room for error in their motive or the outcome of their actions. These are people who have found loopholes in the law and have grossly crossed any imaginable ethical boundaries. The only contentious part of my viewpoint is that I believe ethics supersedes law, and the heads of Valeant have technically complied with the law despite falling to the lowest low of ethics. These people are gaming the system at a level that most hard convicts wouldn't consider.

I upvoted your comment, it is a good avenue of discussion.
The Obamacare push is the most powerful and organized push that we will likely ever get. It failed to reach that mark. Not sure what could possibly do it now.
Its not a real cryptocurrency. It doesn't need to be robust or use a lot of power.
The healthcare market isn't even close to free, it's the most tightly regulated industry. Until that changes, nothing will get better.
If you're using Brave, I'm assuming you're using the browser's main claim to fame: the ad-blocking/ad-switching functionality, yes?

So, you won't support content creators who publish on a website which uses advertising.

You won't support content creators who publish on a website which allows non-members and free-tier members access to a limited number of articles a month and charges a fee, distributed to the content creators, for unlimited access.

You won't support content creators who publish in print, in magazines or newspapers.

I'm sensing a theme, here: you won't support content creators.

I would love to host my own website (actually, I host several) and write the same kind of content I do now, but how exactly am I going to feed the bills and pay my children? This is literally my job - I'm not just dashing out a quick blog post as I Segway to the London office of my cryptocurrency startup for a day of find-and-replace in the whitepaper. If I'm not getting paid for my words I'm not getting paid at all.

Brave is not the answer, I'm sorry to say. Something like Brave may be - I used to play around with Flattr, which was the same kind of micropayments model as Medium but applicable to any third-party web content, and doesn't have the ethical issue of blocking everybody's adverts but its own - but Brave ain't it, at least as it stands.

You don't want to support content creators, you want to support Brave. That's fine, but don't frame it as wanting to support content creators but only in one very specific and questionably-ethical way.

Otherwise, put your money where your mouth is: pop me a payment across, in the currency or cryptocurrency of your choosing, and I'll publish the same piece on my main website. No adverts, unless you count the cover shots of the books I've published (hey, there's another way you could support me - and if you're worried about ethics, some of them are available for free download under a Creative Commons licence!) down the side.
It's not MS doing the game, those guys are: http://www.asobostudio.com
>The best thing for the doctor is to get paid (and pay taxes on) $400.

No...the best thing is for the doctor to not upset the insurance company and get dropped from their network and lose all their patients.

Remember the famous line if you like your insurance/doctor you can keep your insurance/doctor. Turns out the president has no control over whether insurance will outright drop doctors from their networks.

As to your point on accounting, it simply depends on the doctors/hospitals accounting practices. It’s possible there is no deduction as you say (no big deal to the doctor, they got paid their fee anyway) or they can use an actual method of accounting and carry the loss forward.
The longer I spend in a corporate job the more I realize that Office Space was a documentary.
Great idea, but I agree with codingdave. Too opinionated and only makes things more difficult.

The more important things to a SaaS is the actual product and not the authentication / backend / DB.

99.99999% of all early stage SaaS have absolutely no need for even 2FA, let alone multitudes of authentication.

It's just a lot of clutter and cruft for an MVP, which is what should be built.

I think a better framework would be focusing on the essentials, a very simple username + pwd, drop-in DB with a generic schema (Put it in JSON and export it from a file, rather than wrapping in an ODM / ORM object).

Finally you could wrap it up with a nice landing page template.

I would pay money for someone to give me a light, nice-looking landing page that is easily templated and it focuses on being light.

---

One issue with this kind of project is that it is difficult to adopt and build on to. It might be a great starting place, but it presents a fork of either total rebuild or stumbling through unfamiliar, cluttered code.
I believe it is. I'm also not describing a p-zombie, since I find the whole concept of p-zombies utter nonsense.

The general AI I described would have self-reflection, agency and arguably consciousness, yet - per orthogonality thesis - it may not have anything resembling human values.
That's the one I was thinking of!

Specifically, the passage:

>Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed.[1]

A sincere thank-you for finding it for me.

---
[1]https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/
I want them to succeed, but it will be difficult. Looks like they're following Tesla's model of starting with the top-of-market so they can "fundraise" via early adopter sales. Will they ever be able to hit mass production? Not sure.

In-wheel motors are interesting. That changes the dynamics of the vehicle by adding what we mech-e's call "unsprung mass". Vehicle handling takes a huge hit. There's a reason there are no cars on the market with in-wheel motors at present. Additionally, you're putting expensive components in a place where they can be more easily damaged. There's also the fact that in-wheel motors can be very dangerous if there's a failure of the control system. Since there are no cars on the road like this, I'm wondering if the team truly has the expertise to tackle these issues.

But I'm not trying to be a cynic. I spent 8 years as a mechanical engineer designing hybrid and electric cars; these are simply challenges that need to be engineered around. This is a cool car, and I hope it makes it to market. We need more of this.
Yes, that's the one! There were at least to versions (generations?) - at least one had a slider, and the other had a dome shaped knob; both worked for throttle.
https://www.x-fish.org/blog_picture/110607_01.jpg
I dont think that deduction idea makes sense. You would have had to actually report the income of the 400, pay taxes on that, and then deduct the next year. Unless there is trickery involved I'm not savvy of.
> Flutter gets away with this because it owns the drawing layer as well as the widget layer. I know that something drawn in Flutter is going to look exactly the same no matter where I run it.

Isn't this pretty unfriendly to users? As an iOS user, I occasionally encounter apps written with Material guidelines in mind, and it's a bit jarring because they don't fit the guidelines of the device I'm using.

These are all great solutions for developers, but for consumers, it all kind of sucks to varying degrees.