skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Maybe 40 years ago only MD doctors were qualified to perform medical procedures and thus to have NPI's, but things change. Now states are all over the place on what professional is qualified to provide what service. Most states probably require some kind of registration, but I also wouldn't be shocked to learn some ancillary physical therapy or acupuncture or chiropractic service can be billed somewhere by someone who only has a PhD. Not in Texas apparently, but somewhere.

The article was about a brazen 'slam dunk' fraud, but for the 99% of other schemes that inflate a bill 5%, 10%, 15%, the blame is laid more correctly at the feet of the AMA and it's CPT Codebook (the 99215 in the article) which at once makes billing for things an awful chore and makes prosecuting less brazen schemes a total headache.

Look up 99215, for example. First of all, the description is copyrighted IP not freely available for use. Second, if you find it, it's a timed procedure that doesn't have a specific time attached to it. Just proving 'you billed for a long examination and didn't actually spend much time with the patient' generally will not suffice to prove fraud. Instead you need to delve into medical notes, interviews and compare the lengths of other examinations, just to demonstrate falsity for one occasion, one exam. This, and all the secrecy attached to medical records, is a big reason why medical billing anomalies are so unlikely to generate legal department responses.
Open offices have the benefit mostly of cutting costs as less floorspace is needed but they're on average a less productive and more stressful environment for the employee. The 90s cube farm was already pretty short on privacy and the open office is even more extreme.

From what I've seen people who work in open offices try to find ways to work somewhere quieter when possible.

If open offices are worth it entirely depends on if saving on rent or having more productive employees is more worth it. Generally I see a trend towards open office + shared semiprivate spaces. Like meeting rooms or phone booth like cubicles with doors.
For reference, small portable devices containing Iridium-192 are frequently used for on-site NDT weld inspections. NDT inspectors often have a truck full of valuable equipment, they are frequently alone on the job site, and the welds being inspected are usually in remote locations. This is not a rare occurrence and odds are the thief has no idea how thoroughly unlucky they are.

https://www.ndt.com.au/product/qsa-sentinel-iridium-ir-192-s...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_radiography
Ask HN: Online Platform for Boycotting?
I’ve been thinking a lot about consumer activism, and curious if anyone knows of an online platform to create boycotts (of a company, or entity)? I see them organically pop up on Twitter every once in awhile, but other than that nothing feels very organized. Something similar to a petition on Change.org but more focused on getting a bunch of people to specifically pledge not to buy or engage with a specific entity.
TL;DR: no tests.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

again?! Different isotope, different country -- let's hope for different outcome.
I wonder how many Dropbox users are like me. I still pay for it, for one reason only: all the stuff I have shared with a Dropbox link.

I set up Syncthing, and it completely and flawlessly replaced the Dropbox folder syncing. (It's actually way better, because the sync part is as reliable, but unlike Dropbox it also supports symlinks, meaning I can sync my active ongoing work, including stuff like git repos with uncommitted changes — no need to commit some unfinished work-in-progress before moving to a new location. Plus, since I'm not sharing my data with Dropbox employees and thus by extension the US government plus whoever hacks them, I can store even private data in the folders I sync.)

But the "share with link" feature of Dropbox works really, really well. Want to paste a video into a bug report, but not deal with horridly slow JIRA? Just paste the Dropbox link. Want to share a 500MB cute video of your kids? Dropbox link. Want to paste an image into an HN discussion? You can't, but you can easily paste a Dropbox link. Giving a talk at a conference and want a few friends to critique your delivery beforehand? Record yourself practicing and email/text/whatever them the Dropbox link.

I suspect (without evidence) that lots of Dropbox users are like me. I've shared hundreds of things that way over the years, and although it isn't mission-critical or anything, I don't want those links to go dark.

So I keep paying. That's why I think their tiny 2GB free plan is important. If the stuff you've shared includes even a handful of videos, you quickly exceed that limit.

In my case, if they upped the free limit to 25GB, I would cancel my paid service immediately.
I don't really want to bash anyone's flying, because as it turns out:

1. There's no real alternative like I said
2. It's actually pretty damn efficient compared to personal vehicles
3. There is very tangible value produced by flying, compared to other forms of CO2 emissions (e.g. commuting in large personal vehicles or recreational boating)

And yes, it's hard not to take health care issues personally. Until someone figures out how to grow redundant organs from stem cells on the cheap.
https://youtu.be/FhnwPMx8wuQ

Cannot deny that these are pretty useful for catching rogue Amazon delivery drivers, among other things.
can someone re-edit the title to change "Csail" back to "CSAIL", the way i had it in the first place? a moderator must have incorrectly edited the title, because "Csail" is incorrect.
Everyone is missing the most important contribution of vi[m].

Vim defines an ergonomic set of rules for text navigation and manipulation, often implemented by very simple key bindings. This is wonderful.

The Vim editor implements all these rules, but the Vim's plugin ecosystem is a disaster. Hacks pile upon hacks. Noone understand Vim scripts. Vim scripts are easily broken and do not interoperate well with other scripts.

These set of rules can be easily implemented by other editors, as evidenced by many IDEs supporting Vim key bindings. Although these editors may not support all the above rules, they are pretty close (see the evil plugin in Emacs) and can replace Vim in daily usage.

The editor war is over. Vim's keybinding is superior. But the longevity of a text editor lies in its extensibility. For this, Emacs wins in the long run.
It's not my claim that they've made Netflix more entertaining, just that it's likely made it more sticky.
Ah, no there is not. Haven't gotten around to that yet. My primary use case here was editing existing files.
Great- gay crossdresser from sex education is one of my favorite characters ever. Didn’t find it political at all and it just fit the story.

Bad- stranger things overly sexist men and the constant putting men down. Detracted from the show, annoying me.

Unbearable- Sabrina
Sorry, but the cat is out of the bag. HIBP is evening the playing field, making the data less valuable to those who have the skills to collect it.

It's the same thing as responsible/full disclosure; by making this information available to anyone (publish a vulnerability), you greatly reduce the power of those who have the skills to collect it anyway (the person who found the 0day).

So yes, this information needs to be available, or it'll only be some people who have it, not none, and those few people who do have it will be 10x stronger than they are now.

This is the old Antisec debate all over again, let's skip to the part where we end up agreeing generally that disclosure is better, okay? No need to relive 2009 or whatever.
I feel his pain.

I run a SaaS with what I think is a pretty generous free tier (PhantomJsCloud dot com), and yeah, I have numerous people from all over the world doing their best to shit all over it:

- switching IP addresses every request to circumvent "demo user" rate limiting

- creating upwards of 100 fake accounts to get free credits ($0.05/day each account)

- embedding api calls into their webpages so their users ip address is used for "demo user" credits

- API driven credit cards and hijinks around that.

- using url shorteners to circumvent blacklisted domains

I'm not sure if it's a case of people being incapable of paying credit cards, or just their ethics allow stealing anything that's not bolted down?

I don't mind people signing up with a burner email address, but unfortunately most these abusers are too. I am going to be banning all throw away email accounts soon. And if that doesn't work (which it probably wont) I'm going to have to kill my free tier.
Smart Money Said ‘Skip Bitcoin, Bet on Blockchain.’ Not Any More
I very recently set out to start bringing my vimrc with me when logging into remote hosts and came up with this.

Host * !github.com
RemoteCommand echo -e "syntax enable\nset ts=2\nset sw=2\n" > ~/.tmp_vimrc && bash -c 'set -a; vi() { vim -u ~/.tmp_vimrc "$@"; }; set +a;bash -l'
RequestTTY yes

It gets ugly when you get a lot of options in there.

It's possible to just curl or scp something in place via RemoteCommand above, or `source: https://foo.io/vimrc` but my security paranoia lead me to this instead.
I think the only thing that would work that way would be product placement. The problem would be one person cutting out ads and reuploading it, there'd be no reason to watch the original
Can you be more detailed about this subpopulation?
Data point: We're actively working on migrating from Autonomy to Elastic Search.
Nah, I've seen people downloading their preferred configs right to the production server, because they, understandably, feel more comfy with that.

But, it may not be for everyone.

Where I work, we are in the process of reaching some compliance targets, and all this downloading unknown stuff from unknown servers is out the window. For the best, I think.
Funding carbon sequestration efforts? Depending on the magnitude of the tax we could fund a net reduction of carbon in the atmosphere.
The fact that 15+ year old tech developed by some hobbyists (over asymmetrical networks not optimized for it mind you) provides a better service than anything modern corporations can deliver really is amazing to me.
Very sad, he was an amazing teacher. I love his MIT 6.034 lectures on youtube. One of the best is the SVM lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PwhiWxHK8o -- it's awesome how he gives the lecture to completion without any notes.
It blew my mind a little when he said the name “Diablo” came from Mt. Diablo, which sits practically on top of Silicon Valley.
1) Either life in the modern world has become more and more unpredictable, and/or it was always less predictable than I used to be aware of.

2) The trouble with 'living in the now' is that eventually tomorrow will become now. Sufficient preparation for -that- now is not a strong suit for many of us. Consequently, humanity has built an existential debt which mere bankruptcy cannot erase. GOTO 1).
> I'd probably go with Postgresql FTS if possible. Sphinx/Solr for anything with indices smaller than a couple 100GBs After that, ES seems reasonable & worth the overhead

why do you think you can't throw 1TB of data on postgresql?
Libra Association: A Menace and an Opportunity for Blockchain Ecosystems
sqlite to the rescue?
We have on prem Coveo, which is based on ES. It is/they are horrible. We pay a large amount in Enterprise support and maintenance, and it is next to nonexistent.

Thankfully we are moving to Azure Cloud Search services, which just work, over the next year.

Good bye manure pile, hello compost.
You can't just affix the word realtime to everything and expect it to make sense. And of course every car manufactured in the last 30 years used tools with exact torques, no worker is pressing on a drill until it feels just right.
Thread from 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12280702

2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8218980

2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=980043
"We don't think they vote the right way, so we should deny them the right to vote" is a really shaky moral foundation for actions that rapidly destroy democracy.

And you don't like it when the other side does it...
The New York Times app shows me ads in Spanish. Don't speak Spanish. No one in my house does.
Thanks a lot - zstd is reaaaally fast for the compression ratios that it achieves.

I personally use it all the time in Clickhouse tables (the "Yandex Clickhouse" database). I admit that I'm still using "xz" when I focus on hardcore max compression (max compression within an "acceptable" timeframe) when doing specific tests with their focus on max final compression.
QuickBooks Online does not have a native backup or restore, at all, and it's pretty ridiculous. QBO told me they also can't do on-request restorations with their backups.

There's a third-party or two that can use the API to do a backup/restore, but also, still, not all of the QBO data has an API. Eg, IIRC, recurring transaction tasks.

Just a matter of time for ransomware to replace data via APIs.
Also, in a situation where interests are not very aligned, there is a benefit for the stronger side to seem "dumb" and "clueless" to the other side. It both eases the tension a bit (being the smarter guy is flattering), and allows to use the veil of "acting stupid" to conceal calculated adversarial actions.
Curl it, check the sha256 of the download vs a hardcoded one and then source it if they match?

The URL you curl could be a GitHub blob URL (theoretically immutable) but if you check the hash you’re not trusting GH for anything other than availability.
Upgrading my home server
I just find discovery really hard on Netflix.

If it isn't a Netflix original I feel like I'm scrounging around / fighting Netflix to find something...it feels like there is little to offer.
I'm not sure if WaPo just made their paywall more aggressive, but I can't seem to read this URL now w/o logging in. They do provide a direct URL from Cloudflare to the raw data, which is about 7GB compressed and uncompresses to a single tab-delimited text file with 180M rows at 80GB:

https://d2ty8gaf6rmowa.cloudfront.net/dea-pain-pill-database/bulk/arcos_all_washpost.tsv.gz

There is also individual state level data with the following format (replace `il` – i.e. IL for Illinois – with the state postal code of your choice):

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-stat/dea-pain-pill-database/summary/arcos-il-statewide-itemized.tsv.gz

That said, the data is fairly hard to understand without reading the article so it's likely much more efficient to login to read it and download. Here's a tweet thread with context from the WaPo's data editor:

https://twitter.com/dataeditor/status/1151904218095194112

And here's a 10K row random sample to preview in Google Sheets:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19NZtjOEPxNdNfZS9l-yZ...
1) when getting things done: the connective tissue of human relationships is at least of equal importance as the technical merits of a solution

2) in relationships: over and explicit communicating is never bad

3) always be an optimist - the world has always had problems, and not every problem will be solved in my lifetime - so push the needle, and live happily.

*spacing
Oh, rings a bell.. :P thanks!
Also see https://www.eff.org/observatory and https://www.grc.com/fingerprints.htm
Netflix is becoming more and more of a frustrating experience. First they removed all user reviews. Then they removed ratings. (or vice versa. Whatever.) They constantly shift things around in their UI. Even things like "My List" and "Continue Watching" will spontaneously move. They hide categories, and sub-categories, making browsing and discovery a pain. They constantly throw crap at me that I don't care about and will never care about. They auto-play previews, with audio, and there is no damn way to turn it off. Thumbs up/down seems to have no effect on this either. I thumbs down what I don't want to see, and it keeps coming back anyway.

It's almost as if there is a concerted effort at Netflix to force specific content down your throat. They don't want you going beyond what's visible on their idiotic horizontal scrollers, and they don't want you to know what people actually think about the content they are forcing on you.
That's pretty horrible - but I skimmed through that and I didn't see any eider ducks (could be wrong though) - they are quite distinctive looking birds.
> objects and arrays are programming language constructs, not data format constructs.

Debatable. To me there is a clear difference between a list of things of the same type, and a mapping of names to values of potentially varying types. I don't think the specific programming language really matters, they are two totally different concepts with much different applications.

> There's also no way in JSON to distinguish between an int and a float and a decimal type

True, but they are just small literals which are easy to differentiate at a glance, not big multi-line structures like objects or lists. Plus s-expressions have the same issue.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Art of Fiction No. 35 (1965)
Disagree. It's inherently in the public interest to have access to this data as easily as possible. If it's too embarrassing then that's a cultural problem.
Hellgate: London is fun!! I haven't played it in a long time though.
It's because the corporations aren't really interested in providing a better service to the viewer, they're interested in providing a better service to their advertisers. That said, the idea of embedding the advertising freely is an interesting one, and I wonder if it's been seriously considered by the networks. Probably harder to convince the cheque-writers of the value they're getting, though.
I am able to read the site without trouble. I have all cookies from washingtonpost.com blocked though, so I don't know if that's what lets me get through.
Can you do what the big cloud providers do, and demand a "real" phone number be verified for sign-up? Not impossible to beat, but more costly. Or maybe there's a market for paying customers somewhere between your free and paid tiers?
Alan Lomax and the Search for the Origins of Music
Once upon a time, Netflix gave away $1 million to contest winners in an attempt to get the best recommendation algorithm they could ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize ).

Now the recommendations are just not that great. It's like they're not trying too hard because they are comfy in their market position.

I have never watched any anime at all (really not my thing), but Netflix keeps recommending it to me despite the fact that I haven't taken the bait once.

Also it recommends shows to me that it should know through history I've already watched every episode of. Maybe that's on purpose since people watch things again, but I still don't find it useful.

Also it leaves stuff in "Continue Watching" for like a month after I give it a thumbs down rating and remove it from "My List". That should be a strong enough signal to act on.

And it seems to recommend stuff based on stuff that I only "watched" because it auto-played. That should not be a strong enough signal to act on.

The overall point is they seem to have several obvious opportunities to be smarter with content discovery, but they're not taking them.
Thank you for sharing. I have a 10m old son, who had some complications at birth too (he's well now) and as his condition was comparatively mild I cannot begin to imagine the trials and fears you have gone through. I'm very glad to read that Lucy is doing better now. Best wishes for the future!
> I assume there is something specific you’re not mentioning

Yes, I'm shy, which is pretty much a universal deal-breaker.
Mmm.. I see there are also vim plugins for multiple cursors, like https://github.com/terryma/vim-multiple-cursors ..
People hated cable and they are now struggling, people are always looking for something better
> That's nuts, and it shows that what we have right now is not a 1-person-1-vote system.

How does that show any such thing? Unless you're defining someone with dementia as "not a person".

> Go ask any climate scientist what our future on this current trajectory looks like. Trying to stay the course is suicide.

Ah. You're against old people voting because they don't vote the way you want on your hot-button issue. And you're willing to sacrifice the right to vote on the altar of climate change. No thanks. (But it makes me wonder what else you're willing to sacrifice there...)
> a moderator must have incorrectly edited the title, because "Csail" is incorrect.

It's not a human moderator, it's the ALGORITHM (TM)! It seems Hacker News has a capitalization algorithm that automatically capitalizes the title to proper news headlines.

Most of the time it works well, but sometimes it would ruin intentional caps and it's pretty annoying. And mysteriously, it doesn't always trigger for all titles, it must have a set of hardcoded pattern-matching code.
First, I'll admit that I'm still a subscriber.

For me, the biggest problem with Netflix is the user interface. The auto-playing audio and video at every corner is extremely annoying. The used car dealership feel of it is stressful, which is exactly the opposite of what I want when I'm ready to watch a show or movie.

They have some content that I like and I'll watch it when I know exactly what I want to see before I open the app. If not, then I don't go to Netflix anymore, it is just too hostile.
Pick a data sequence number, and back up each region sperately at the same sequence number.

Keep your backups on-site but off-line - you already have many locations. You should practice a location (and it's backups) going offline at the same time as a code bug screws with data in the active system.
Sure thing. From Planned Parenthood:

> If you use condoms perfectly every single time you have sex, they’re 98% effective at preventing pregnancy. But people aren’t perfect, so in real life condoms are about 85% effective — that means about 15 out of 100 people who use condoms as their only birth control method will get pregnant each year.

( https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/birth-control/condom... )

This applies to all forms of active birth control, and is the major reason people push for passive forms such as IUDs and long-term implants.
Wait where's the thumbs down rating?
It seems like they're about as secure as self-storage companies.
There's something I don't understand, but I'd like to. Most of the criticisms of Netflix I see fall into two buckets:

One common criticism is that Netflix is worse than regular TV, because having to actively choose a Netflix show is more stressful than regular TV, where you can just turn it on, sit back, and relax.

The second common criticism I read is that Netflix is annoying, because as soon as you turn it on, it starts autoplaying videos at you in obnoxious attempt to grab your interest and attention.

Like, aren't these two criticisms completely opposite? Regular TV always autoplays at full volume. What nuance would help me understand why autoplaying is annoying on Netflix but not annoying on regular TV?

(Disclosure: I work at Netflix, am speaking purely in a personal capacity, but would love to make things better for people to the extent that I can.)
Personally I often don't want to invest too much into starting a new series, and I don't have time for an entire movie.

I also often want to learn new things, or see something interesting. So I turn to YouTube, with all the creative folks uploading interesting and engaging videos about all sorts.

I think Netflix is missing something by focusing entirely on TV series and movies. Give me something interesting I can watch for 15, 30, 45 minutes that doesn't require the kind of mental investment a TV series does.
Fandango put that on their movie theater web site. It's so annoying that I never buy tickets online any more. I just find out the time and buy at the theater.
Two years ago I decided to go with Postgres' built-in fulltext search instead of adding another dependency like ElasticSearch, and I believe I've profited from that in much less maintenance while still getting quite good performance/features.