skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>The tumor and the dogs aren’t competing against each other anymore,” Baez-Ortega says. “They’re coexisting. The cells behave like cancer cells, but the ecology of the tumor is that of a parasite.” And a fairly benign one at that."

This is pretty much the story of any “old” virus; new viruses (new mutations, species jumping, etc) tend to kill, but they optimize towards coexistence, since killing the host reduces reproduction/spread opportunity.

So eventually they become benign within a population (both by their evolution, and adaptation of human immune system) and only become threatening again when encountering a new population (eg an “infected” city-man visiting rural populations).

Notably, due to the more rapid spread of disease in cities, due to higher density, city-folk tend to have more benign/evolved diseases than rural populations.

Which I think is also the answer to my childhood question: why did the europeans famously have diseases to spread and kill native americans with.. but the native americans could offer no such devastating disease in return? Both groups should have been encountering new diseases; my answer being that the native americans were carrying fewer suppressed diseases.

There’s of course the popular answer that europeans were more evil/willing to spread disease with things like chicken-pox blankets.. (and catapulting rotting animals), but it’s really difficult to imagine native americans would be so primitive that couldn’t learn/mimick the idea... or perhaps its just written out of the history books..

But I never found confirmation on this
There are dash mounts for mobile phones that key into the CD slot. Works great on my Subaru. The latest ones have integral wireless charging and motorized grippers (!).
Ironically the stored CO2 destroyed the 'civilisation' that fixed it in the first place
It's important to remember that an insurance company has very little to zero incentive to lower costs. The only incentive an insurer has is to ensure costs are predictable. It doesn't matter if costs go up 20% next year as long as they know costs will not go up 25%. The extra cost gets shunted into the premium.

There is no party in the current healthcare system whose incentive is to lower prices. Medicare/Medicaid can achieve low costs by fiat, but it's broadly accepted that the whole system as structured today couldn't operate on those prices [1]. This means private insurance picks up the delta.

Doctors, Hospitals, Pharmacies, Drug companies, Medical device companies all have zero incentive to lower prices. You might think technology that makes doctors visits (to pick one example) would just win out in the marketplace, but there's a flawed assumption there. Most people are insured, so most people are paying the insured cost. For something like a doctor's visit, you pay your copay (say, $25) and the insurer pays the rest (lets say up to $70). Assume you could get an app or a technology that gets that price down to $35. This would be a huge achievement and you'd go out of business because it's more expensive than what the consumer sees.

Ah yes, but maybe you can pitch to insurers, surely they would love a lower cost! Probably not. You're small so you can't reduce their costs across the board. Even if you succeed, they have caps on how many profits they can take (usually something like 15-20%) so if you drop their costs, that might actually force them to refund customers. Good, but not the primary driver for profitability.

Let's even grant that the above isn't true. You're still a small player, you basically need to fit inside their (extremely cumbersome) protocols to be able to bill them. Now you have to do all sorts of billing and management, maybe you need to hire extra staff to run billing. That $35 now financially doesn't make sense, maybe it's now $55. Still cheaper but now you're in the system and don't have much of a competitive advantage that's visible to the consumer. Now you differentiate by offering better services, maybe a good online portal, that costs more engineers, and now we're back up to $70. Insurer doesn't care much, you're just another provider, they'll pay, you'll make money, and we're back to square one.

We're not even considering the, "Is the cancer doc that costs 25% less the same value as the other guy?" problem, which is damn hard on its own.

Healthcare is really hard, and the incentives across the board are perverse. I'm increasingly skeptical a solution that doesn't dramatically reshape the market is likely to make a difference.

[1] https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/mgma-majority-pra...
Q: What's a modem?

A: It's like Wifi you can hear.
This is a minor plot point in the sci fi novel "A deepness in the sky", where a spacefaring culture has their systems built on top of so many, ancestral layers of software, that there is a career called "code archeologist" that dives deep into the bowels of systems to find undocumented functionality.
This is called "having a company, and employees", yes.
The difference with New York City is that it’s old and spent a lot of time and money on parks.

Any modern development will be a tree wasteland long term, as all of the topsoil is generally scraped away and sold, and the heavy equipment packs down the soil.

I agree re: suburbia, but for different reasons.
Zipf Function / power law distributions.

Comparison: G+ Communities, by size (log-log scale):

https://joindiaspora.com/people/d8210c0de509264f/photos/2830...
And the number of concurrent users was directly correlated to the number of phone lines there were for the BBS.

So there were a lot of indie BBSes that scaled to... 1 concurrent user.
> But even languages this site hates, such as C, C++, C#, and Java

What makes you think this? I have been on here for years and have never really got this impression.
So why doesn't the triage nurse hand out the Benadryl, tell the patient to wait in the lobby for an hour, and see if that resolves it? They could charge $75 for the single pill, and still avoid using a bed or the services of additional staff.
That is true, I recall they mentioned $150 but we are in the same ballpark.

It wasn't the cost that steered me away from the X-ray, I just didn't want to take the time to wait in line after I felt sure that it was just a sprain and all I needed to do was take it easy on my hand. (I updated my original comment to note some of these details.)
I don't think many employers are interested in training anyone at any age anymore. Margins are often too lean to dedicate productive resources to training. When switching jobs, I always emphasize the aspects of previous jobs and accomplishments that would be most relevant to the employer (eg, delivering on time, under budget, reduction in reported defects). Having projects in GitHub or a portfolio also speaks volumes.
Differential privacy is almost entirely unrelated to obliviousness; the context of the paper you're talking about is "hiding access patterns", and yes, in that case relaxing to differential privacy doesn't buy you any efficiency benefits.

However, DP is useful for much more than hiding access patterns, and was originally developed for hiding information in statistical analyses; obliviousness cannot help you in those use cases
I disagree, I would think that imaging centers produce comparable results. On the medical side, the substitute good isn't a different procedure, it's the same procedure done by a different provider.

Most people do not currently make any of those evaluations anyway, so as far as the consumer is concerned, they are de facto substitute goods since they have no rationale for making a choice.
Is there something on that dragged your attention away from the fact that your earlier assertions about the US's continued dominance of semiconductor fab were incorrect?
Money doesn't buy happiness; money buys what is needed in order to allow happiness.
My Points on Flutter as a React Native Developer
That's a fucking extraordinary statement. I'm almost willing to defend Zuckerberg where it counts - I do try - but "not given enough credit"? Facebook gets so many complaints about privacy and disrespect to the user, they buy up their competition, and Zuck has the gall to say "people don't give us enough credit!"? Insta and Whatsapp were ALREADY big before you fucking bought them up you snivelling idiot.

Edit: Want to explain the downvotes?
> As society, we seem to be ok with millennials fresh out of college making hundreds of thousands of $$$ a year for a bunch Javascript that allows people to share pictures of their butt with their friends BUT we are not ok with doctors who literally - save lives - getting paid according to their responsibilities?

Programmers only make that because the services they build are extremely scalable, profitable, and wanted by many driving up demand for programmers. Eventually, supply should drive down wages which is fair. I also don't mind doctors making good money but they should not be able to artificially constrain supply just so they can jack up their prices.
Amazon's :CueCat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat

https://hackaday.com/tag/dash-button/
I was visiting the Polar Star when it was in the Hobart Harbour in Tasmania in 2005 or 2006. It was really awesome talking to crew and touring the ship. The twin turbines inside left a lasting impression. We also got invited to the crew reception that evening by the Australian Antarctic Division. I still remember the mountain bike and snowboards on deck of the ship :). Good times.
Did they not have the ellipsis back then?
To go with the guitar playing analogy, there's plenty of people that have played the guitar for 20 years and always play the same 4 chords.
When I started BBSing, chatting was still a luxury feature available only from the larger corporate BBSes or the indie sysops who could afford multiple lines. Back then, the indie sysops didn't have access to stuff like ads to monetize their efforts.
It depends. Are you paying for the visit or per hour / per treatment? Paying by visit aligns the doctor to perform the minimum required treatment instead of something expensive “just in case”.
Suburbs around Central London don't have a super high population density, and are quite green. Many houses have a garden, and there are lots of parks.
boredom comes from within
I don't comment much, but I feel compelled to mention how this currently has a 36:1 vote-to-comment ratio. The kinds of thing the US military is testing on their own people is horrific, and it's our duty as American citizens to oppose this kind of surveillance.

I sometimes feel I'm talking to a ghost. It is truly terrifying that my fellow Americans are selling themselves out. Ring will let the government, Amazon, and your neighbors spy on you. Grammarly will keylog and text-capture each webpage. The FBI will fly planes overhead. Balloons will be launched, always watching everyone.

There is no way to opt-out of this. I can't believe how stupid the "Hacker" "News" community is--commenting on things that don't matter, then shutting up for matters of grave importance.

You all deserve the tyranny that is coming.
All of which is just details, which are much less important than the fundamental skills of building systems with whatever people and tools are available. (And I'm sorry, are you implying no significant changes have occurred in the tools and practice of medicine in 20 years?)
I suggest Instaface and WhatsFace
Well I’m already a few years into my plan B which became working for gov. This article assumes that government tech is static but it is changing rather quickly. I’m knocking on the door of 40 and regarded as one of the younger leads. My commute is a 6 minute walk home and the high quality projects sometimes get scheduled out for completion in between 3-6 months or even a year if it’s a big one. Medical care and family time for all devs is a huge priority for management. Lots of vacation time, amazing benefits, and employer matched savings (or pension if you go that route). I’ve worked for a startup before and for a big corp as well but feel more secure now. Also, there is a tech allowance fund for equipment for home use and if you want to take classes part time they pay for some of the tuition. They pay for training and events (room and board, food, transportation). I’ve nearly doubled my salary since I started. I also get to mentor recent grads at times one of whom just got a position with Mozilla. So there ya go- with all the negativity this topic invokes there CAN be a silver lining (just like silver hairs beginning to appear on my head). For the younger devs: whenever you get tired of the ‘culture fit’ shenanigans or feel like you are more playing a role like an actor than solving real problems you may find yourself in my shoes. Whenever you get tired of practically living with ‘the team’ knowing that your reward for good work is even more caffeine you may find yourself wanting to get off the tilt-a-whirl just like I did. That day may come where you actually want to have your own uninterrupted thoughts as you work— then it’s time for Plan B.
<insert joke about how nobody wants to suffer through anyone else’s Jira anyway>

Seriously though, this isn’t good. Not because of this hack specifically but because of the greater problem of which this is a symptom. Software these days is really hard to configure and get right, so lots of big companies just offshore things like this as they don’t want to deal with it with FTEs. Then the budget for maintenance gets deprioritized and cut as a whole for all these little systems that keep projects humming along. Probably just as many misconfigured wikis, git servers, etc through a rats nest of different VPNs and providers. It gets really expensive really fast to host these things right and in a way where accessibility for valid folks is still reasonable.
Related experience in the opposite direction: I'm a relatively new software engineer that works on a 13 year old product. It's fun to see a particular commit and think about what I was doing in middle school, high school, or college at the time it was committed.
Yes. If the price was 1/7th, people would pay. $70 for ibuprofen is still a huge ripoff, but they would pay it. No one will pay $700.
I'm surprised transfer learning via fine-tuning large transformer models hasn't taken off more in the public consciousness a la image recognition models. In my experience, the results can be staggering with very small amounts of training data.
While that’s true, even single-line BBSes were still technically multi-user, as the sysop could be logged in locally while another user was on the line.
Sorry, conflating frequency of price discovery for efficient investment allocation with payments (as you here) or with internet speed or aircraft control systems (as someone else above) is really disingenuous.

Being closed on weekends is just fine for the market (unlike credit cards, the internet, or aircraft control systems).
> As society, we seem to be ok with millennials fresh out of college making hundreds of thousands of $$$ a year for a bunch Javascript that allows people to share pictures of their butt with their friends BUT we are not ok with doctors who literally - save lives - getting paid according to their responsibilities?

FAANG companies make from 500k to over 1 million dollars in revenue per employee.

Paying someone 1/10th to 1/4rd of what they bring in is hardly outrageous.
The most important thing one can do is write, AND call, their legislature. Don't ever shut up about it. Does it stand a chance against corporate lobbyists? Probably not, but it leaves one with a clear conscience.
Because 1.5 hours is a lot of time out if only 24? Unless you live to work.
Oh my. This brings me back to my teens. Spending all days on Swapper BBS (they had all the best warez), downloading Top Gun over a week. Me and my friend alternated disks (it was zipped into 14 1.4MB chunks) then trading floppy disks at school. The joy when we, after a week, had the whole game.

My mom used to kill me over hogging the phone-line all day and night. And the phone bills where Out of this world (pun intended).

Brings tears to my eyes. One of the happiest periods
of my life.
Hmm when I signed up for WhatsApp recently it clearly said that I would be accepting the terms of blabla Facebook companies, so...
We ran into additional troubles based on ZK client bugs in the version that Kafka used. It would only ever resolve the ZK hostname once, at startup. Our workaround required some additional work to allocate an EIP for each host (3 AZs -> 3 EIPs) and then have the ZK host grab the EIP on startup.

Even though Netflix hasn't updated it in a while, Exhibitor was helpful as well, in that it allowed ZK to bootstrap nodes off of state stored in S3. That did come at the cost of an extra 2-3 minutes per node on initial quorum startup.
> New research finds that, when a neighborhood’s green space leads to better health outcomes, tree canopy provides most of the benefits.

Is it the trees? Or is it the higher income status of the people who can afford to live in the nicer neighborhood?

Complete lack of control for irrelevant variables here.
I think you've misread the paper, which is about differentially private RAM. Differential privacy (w/o "RAM") is neither weaker nor stronger than ORAM.
> Yes, a person owning their data should mean they can change it!

Well being able to change data is of course needed; so that goes without saying (I should hope). However what I mean by immutability is rather that I think the web should allow me to link to a piece of content, and ensure that what I link cannot be changed from underneath me if I choose not to.

I feel like I'm describing features and you're describing implementation. To me, immutability is a feature. I'm not at all referring to blockchain or any of that junk - merely that I want to be able to link (in the web sense, url/etc) to content - to discuss it with other people and etc, and have that content not change.

Optionally of course I should be able to link to mutable content. However we have mutability down. The feature add I'm talking about, is immutability.

> It is trivial to build immutability on mutability, this is what MD5/SHA checksums do all the time on things like downloads. But if your base system is immutability, it is hard to do anything else well.

Sure, but that's an implementation detail. I was not (or did not intent to, at least) say that the "base implementation" must be immutable. All I care about is that immutability is a first class citizen, and linking immutable content is possible. To build user features around immutability, where as nothing like that exists in the current "web".
This may be true, but your company always wants the most business value, not the best/most elegant/most maintainable code. If you can deliver your boss's business interests at even 1.5x, I think you will have a long career.
Hi nudpiedo,

This is Paul from Human Interest. I'm a co-founder of the company and wrote the job post in question.

That job post was intended purely as a statement of our work culture. Our only goal in posting it was to attract the sort of folks who might enjoy working within that culture.

It's worth noting that there's a lot of cultural diversity between companies in the tech industry these days, and there are some in which "10x engineers" might thrive. And that's okay! We just wanted to find a way to catch the attention of people who might be a good fit for us.

I think a big part of building a company is deciding what you do (and don't) stand for. For example, Gusto, a company that we greatly admire, did so by saying that they were "not hiring hackers" (https://gusto.com/company-news/gusto-is-not-hiring-hackers). Again, there are plenty of companies that are.

YC kindly provides us the platform to advertise job postings on Hacker News, and doesn't allow direct comments on those job posts. I'm glad you posted this here on HN, because it gave me an opportunity to better explain where we're coming from.

Does that make sense? Let me know what you think -- I'm happy to chat more about this here or directly by email (paul@humaninterest.com).
Some kind of computerized historical analysis might read your comment, but it's hard to imagine how it would be practical for future historians to read more than a tiny sample of the enormous flood of ephemeral writing we're producing today, such as message board comments. They'll have both the challenge and the advantage of being able to see into many types of conversations that were once unrecorded.
I think there are some orgs that definitely benefit, but it’s an 80/20 thing: 80% of software shops are more than content to hire junior devs and live with the costs of their mistakes. (Especially because most of those
costs never really get experienced by the people who make the decisions.)
Two points.

While Steve Jobs was alive, they had four iPods by 2011: the shuffle, the Nano, the Classic, and the Touch. The iPhone was really just an iPod with cellular capabilities during its first four years and it was treated as such - same connector, still required iTunes, and to this day it still can use the old iPod protocol to connect to iPod compatible devices.

When Jobs came back they were a struggling company. Worth $4 billion. Now they are worth $1 trillion depending on the month. He had to focus Apple. He had to focus Apple.
My reading of the ORAM paper is that it is trying to solve a different problem - namely the situation where the threat you’re protecting against is an observer in the middle.

The purpose of differential privacy is to allow one a processor to compute an approximately accurate model without ever knowing the exact details of any origin.

Eg the example for ORAM is a secure element talking to main memory, and wanting to prevent an observer from knowing the actual structure of memory being used by the SE.

This is compared to the use case of differential privacy which is an endpoint wishing to process data without ever knowing what the actual source data was. For example as deployed by Apple: many metrics are bludgeoned with noise on the customers device before being sent to Apple servers. That way (theoretically) Apple never knows exact details of user behaviour, but can accumulate enough info to make approximations at scale.
Excellent quote, propaganda is used to manipulate people, especially those lack of calm mind and neutral view. Sadly though, today's media, especially those online ones, tend to feed you what audience interest with, not neutral on story, nor whole facts, e.g. the same event could be reported very differently on CNN and Fox. I wouldn't be surprised both sides of the arguments here read more news in their interest, or pro-their-views. Doesn't that put them in the situation German had, siloed in one side of the story, even for those educated and intelligent persons.

Perhaps a way to having a peaceful conversation is helping both sides to hear, read, understand others' points. It might not be easy though, the media are very much dominated by one language, that majority of one side in this argument doesn't speak, according to [1], 19.3% internet users contributes 1.7% content. In fact, it's VERY hard in this situation, to tell if we are the intelligent German in the story, or the William Shirer, regardless which side you are on.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_used_on_the_Internet
Don't be so confident. MySpace lost basically all the original music uploaded to that site, much of which only existed there. I've personally seen one off masters of tons of video and audio content destroyed to make room for new stuff or because the media can't easily be played anymore. Much of our digital archives are only maintained with constant and fragile upkeep.