skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People are fond of blaming health insurance companies for our (demonstrable) health economics woes, but the evidence suggests that they --- in fact, the payer and benefits management side of the equation in general! --- aren't nearly as big a contributor to costs as the provider side. We pay more than Europeans do for health care administration, but we get walloped on costs for outpatient and hospital procedures.

It doesn't help that there are lots of circulating analyses about insurers and management overhead that are probably just false; for instance, a popular chart depicting a 4x increase in admin costs starting in the 1990s was debunked by Kevin Drum and others, who observed that it was probably accounting for people like MRI operators on the payer rather than the provider side.

Two things pundits say that are red flags for me that they haven't really studied health economics:

1. Blaming pharmaceutical companies and prescription drug costs, which are one of the smaller overall drivers of health care expenses in the US.

2. Blaming health insurance companies for taking an outsized and material chunk of health spending.

You could $0 out pharma and insurance companies, indenturing everyone who worked for them, and we might not be meaningfully better off. We'd be paying less, but not, like, a huge amount less; people who can't afford silver-class health insurance for a family of four today still couldn't afford it in that alternate reality.
Thanks for writing this, BeeOnRope!

I'm not all the way though it yet, but I'm having trouble understanding the "eligible" column. There are a few nops with a nonzero entries, and I haven't been able to figure out the pattern yet. I'd appreciate a clarification if you have a moment to spare.
> a perverse goal for some people?

Its not a perverse goal.
This isn't quite true. It was never disallowed for IE to be bundled.

There was a court case about it, and then they lost the case, and then Bush took over the White House and the DOJ just completely dropped the whole case, so MS was never punished nor made to unbundle IE.

IE is still bundled in Windows to this day.
Warren is a really frustrating candidate. She's the kind of candidate I want to like. At least by the way she brands herself as a thinking person--a serious wonk. A nerd. All in ways that are good to me. She wants to say, "Look, I'm doing the hard work of figuring out good solutions to all these complex and difficult problems so that you don't have to. You can trust me and read all about it here."

But when you do read her policies, you can see she hasn't thought about these problems at all. She's basically just doing what the loudest, most ignorant complainers and pundits are saying to do.

She doesn't seem to understand that Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon present incredibly different problems. Beating them all up with the same stick is pointless and won't fix any of the problems.

The fact that they are big isn't really the worst of the problems they cause. In incredibly simplistic terms, Facebook is bad because of what they do with your data. Google is bad because of what it does with all the rest of the data on the internet. Apple is bad because of what they won't let people do. And Amazon is bad because of what they will let anyone do.

Chopping them up into smaller entities won't solve any of those problems. None of it addresses any of the problems at all. But in a time where doing anything is far more important to people than doing something useful, it gets traction. She also clearly does not understand section 230 of the CDA, and would like to get rid of that, which will do nothing but ensure that only the big companies--even broken up--will ever be able to compete.

The same kind of thing applies to the wealth tax idea. It's just a base appeal to class animosity. There's no nuance, and even if it did happen, it wouldn't make that much difference in our overall tax revenues. Certainly not enough to fund the kinds of programs she wants to fund. If you want to fix taxes, you have to shut down loopholes for wealthy people and corporations. The latter will make much more of an impact than the former.

I'm certainly on board with higher taxes to a certain extent. But this is just pandering to angry people who don't think the world is fair, and that's not healthy for society.

All of this really makes me question her bona fides on topics I really don't know anything about. Is it more of the same shallow pandering? I haven't really heard any good policy ideas from her so far, and as much as I want to like her as my kind of candidate, I just don't have any reason to believe she'll do anything worthwhile if she does get elected aside from not being Trump. Which is valuable to me, I admit. But . . . is a huge swath of awful social, tax, economic, and tech policy actually better than having to deal with the buffoonery we have right now? I hope we don't have to find out. I suspect that many people will not like that choice and keep things as they are.
1. You need to cite statistics instead of just saying they exist and systematically disprove my argument. In fact I think cities spend a lot per capita exactly for the reason I describe. Federal policies that hollow out city centers and job opportunity means more people will need services and per capita spending will increase as those that can afford to relocate (and don’t need services leave). Those that stay by definition need more services; this distorts the per capita spending and decouples it from causation. You have to look at all government policy for accurate causation not just local government policy.

2. Yes, some government social safety net programs are new. But they weren’t designed to fix or replace local services or bring the cost of those services down. In fact since they were enacted elderly and child poverty is drastically lower. Generally very successful result as what they were intended to address. But other many programs like food stamps, Medicaid, housing benefits have been drastically cut. Those that haven’t have been tied to work requirements that end up pushing people out of the system. The US has among the lowest social mobility among peer nations because the safety net isn’t there when people need it. So my point stands.

3. I did not refer to any conspiracy theory.
- Republicans policies have been clear and public. Reagan vilified welfare queens and said government was the problem.
- The rhetoric about “starve the beast” is as out in the open as you could ever have.
- The recent tax bill that explicitly targeted democratic states is easy to find.
- The history of the damage from highways cutting through minority neighborhoods and destroying their business districts is as clear and documented as anything in social science as is the racist motive and attitude of the leadership that pushed the actual design.
- Redline mortgages to prevent lending in minority communities was explicitly in the contract and you can read examples. You can find actual maps that were used to approve or reject loan origination based on race.

- There is a Supreme Court case dealing with property covenants that made it impossible to sell property to non-white buyers. Many suburbs were +90% white until these provisions were ruled unconstitutional.
-Should I go on? You’re telling me Baltimore should be able to single handedly fight these trends?

By all means hold the Democratic Party accountable. But first be accurate and complete in was is causing the problem. I never even said these were republican policies. I merely said federal vs local.

However, In reality only the Republican Party is on record saying they want to literally destroy the government because it shouldn’t exist in its present form. Only the Republican Party is on record supporting policies that target “takers” and target people based on race.

I don’t have a preconceived ideological narrative. I have an informed, descriptive theory of political economy based on years of fact gathering, research, and predictive testing. I was a libertarian when I started, now I am here.
> Copyright infringement is undoubtedly a malicious act...

You're seriously trying to argue that people who commit copyright infringement do so maliciously, i.e. with the intent of harming the copyright holder? That seems... novel. And not very plausible. If true, however, it would be much more effective to ignore the work altogether, thus denying the copyright holder both direct income and free publicity.

> Any kind of security, authentication, or encryption software ever written was done so to "limit what you can do", so I don't think that is enough to constitute maliciousness.

The point of security, authentication, and encryption software is to protect the interests of the owner of the device. Defending yourself from malicious attacks by others is not an act of malice. DRM is malicious because it perverts the owner's computing resources to thwart the owner's interests and subverts their control over their own device.
You're probably correct, but what product owner is going to take the chance on purposefully chasing lower engagement?
But it would be brain dead for Netflix to not take the deal. If the base cost of everyone is going to be USD100M, then everyone's base cost is USD100M. The law would also require Amazon to give Netflix the same access to its networking platform that it gives its own divisions. (In fact, by my understanding of this whole "platform utility" thing, I'm pretty sure Amazon Prime would have to split from Amazon and buy access to the Amazon network services at the same market price as Netflix and everyone else.)

So any way this whole thing shakes out, Netflix wins. Because whatever it costs, it costs that much for everyone, and Netflix gets the same content catalog as everyone.
"But of course you have to borrow to roll old debt."

Not if you have your own currency. Currency issuers never need to borrow.

It makes no sense to even suggest borrowing something that you can create at will.
Hopefully it will come back. (It may be a ghost of its former self if it does, because they announced the EPUB and PDF readers are definitely dead. Chrome Edge will have Chromium's [arguably inferior] PDF support instead.)

It probably won't; Chrome Edge can't directly share so much OneNote code in the same way, and so presumably the focus will move to "Share with OneNote"/"Print to OneNote" instead.

In maybe better news, at least the "Collections" tools currently in "Experimental Options" sound like they may, when fully baked, be improved experiences over the venerable "Set Tabs Aside", maybe.
According to the OPs response to one of my comments in this thread, this is just his opinion in a short blog post, so we should "deal with it." Doesnt particularly incline me to cut him any slack or to trust that his arguments are made with any sort of rigor at all - it's like there's no sound foundation to even start a debate or engage with what he wrote.
Consumer choice in broadband is restricted mainly by regulatory capture. Consider the trouble Google Fiber had to actually get into cities because they were constantly fighting red tape brought about by telecoms.
IBM is dead until it gets Z mainframes and Power servers in big a three data center (AWS, GCP, Azure).

Guessing Microsoft will start with putting mainframes in the West Des Moines data center since so many insurance companies are still dependent on DB2 batch crunching.
I think simply adding "Agree" and "Disagree" buttons and separate "off topic" or "downvote" button would make a big difference. What "up" and "down" means is a bit vague and everyone has a different opinion on the matter. I will readily upvote comments I agree with but I usually only downvote comments that add no value to the discussion rather than being something I disagree with. So even my own voting pattern on HN is asymmetric.
The absolute dream is to have a single nonprofit OAuth identity provider against which people can prove their identities with FIDO U2F, then use the issued tokens to auth with services of their choosing. Building this network is incredibly hard, though (what website would accept an identity provider without any users, and what users would use an identity provider not accepted by any websites?) so the most popular implementations are hosted by Google or Facebook - but there you have all the obvious privacy issues.
> Especially when you consider that 500W computer needs 500W of Air-conditioning, so the "True cost" of a 500W computer is roughly ~1200W or so (500W from the computer, 700W to power an air-conditioner to move 500W of heat)

I thought air conditioners/heat pumps were supposed to be substantially better than 1w of heat moved outside per watt of electricity?
So is it a cornucopia of terrible ideas, or just a platform that has different goals and therefore tradeoffs?
Smartphones are based on Free Software. This is part of what makes them so frustrating from a user freedom point of view - they lock some of the most successful Free Software out of the user's reach while sitting in their own hands.
Wouldn't this basically start by destroying many American companies? Nest would have nothing but it's IP seeing as Google owns the platform, same for IG. On the other hand, what is stopping IG/ Nest from licensing the old parent's services? seeing as I imagine all of these post-breakup companies would still have the same investors, what's the difference?

Basically, how would you stop Google from shadow-running Google Ads? What would stop them from preferring Google Ads?
Same thing with British student accomodation. Room size was ~ 10 m^2, but the building conformed to fire and sanitary code.
Open source POWER ISA takes aim at Intel, ARM for accelerator-driven computing
Although that's not the attitude of the managers at my current company, the result is the same: remote work is discouraged to the point of being exceptional. Which makes me want to look for remote-only jobs, that unfortunately are relatively rare in Europe.
Yes, oral.

Triclosan has little effect on anything except being toxic to humans and wildlife.
> they tend towards pure rent-seeking models rather than production or innovation.

I don't know how anyone can make the case that there isn't innovation and production isn't the end all be all of a functioning market. You can't buy goods and services that you aren't aware of and even if you are aware of them, you need a way to buy them.

25 years ago I couldn't type something into a box, discover a product that satisfies a need/want related to that query, buy it and have it delivered to my home in 24-48 hours all from the comfort of my home while I sit in my underwear.

Once upon a time you had to pick up a big yellow book, hunt around by category, find some businesses that may or not be related to what you're looking for if you find any business at all, make some phone calls, eventually get in your car, drive there, taking out cash from the bank along the way. The alternative was catalog companies if you knew that a company existed and had a copy of their catalog (or you had to wait for a catalog to be delivered).

And even long before that the only option was to go down to the local market and buy whatever was produced locally. If it wasn't produced locally, then you had to produce it yourself or you were SOL.
Exactly. I can't speak for big iron and server usage because last time I used a POWER based server at work it was still AIX restricted (though IBM was already aiming at Linux for the future), however on PPC about everything user level was available 15 years ago, including USB devices support and compilers.
When the very first PPC Mac Mini came out I purchased one to be used as a living room media PC connected to a projector and running a customized Debian which would load a media player (Freevo) just after boot. Worked like charm for years, no complains at all save for the atrocious loud "boonnnngggg" sound at power up that I was never able to turn off:^)
Racking up "Internet points" is not a perverse goal? I don't see how it provides value to either the person attempting to acquire these points or the visitors providing them.
A Beginner’s Introduction to Python Web Frameworks (2018)
That a handy assertion, but what replaced IE was not Netscape, but Firefox and later Chrome. IE6, IE7, and IE8 had massive market share up until recently. Now Chrome is the king.
"Thank you very much, but I will buy the Computable numbers, instead. They do not require abandoning my sanity (although I am aware I must still abandon rationality)."

In particular, the reals mean you accept measure theory, which in one of its key results says you can build two spheres of radius x from one sphere of radius x, and no holes. The computables don't go there.

There are infinitely many computable numbers, but only countably many -- no more than of natural or rational numbers. That turns out to be enough for everything sane you want to do.

Of course you need altered versions of the key theorems of calculus, because the computables are not continuous in the "real" sense. The numbers blur a bit, instead, to cover the gaps, much as water manages to behave like a fluid despite being made of nothing but discrete particles. The differences are a PITA but keep you on the straight and narrow. You get the same answers for everything that makes sense, and no answer for things that don't.

All the supposedly real numbers you will ever encounter are computable (too). Roots, pi, e, anything representable with a Taylor series. So you don't really give anything up.

Reals make a good enough approximation, which means you don't need to go hungry. Pretend you're using reals. Nobody needs to know. Everybody else is, too. The sane, anyway.
No, that's completely impossible. Publicly-traded corporations in America simply can't operate that way these days, they have to be constantly growing or else they implode.
It’s the difference between having 4 seconds to avoid a collision, and having 30 or more (I’ve seen a few well outfitted bikers over a mile away before).

Reflectors make that big of a difference; they don’t look or move naturally, and thus play well to our night vision strengths, even to a distracted driver.
Having read the riveting book Bad Blood it seems Theranos failed for two reasons:

1. Elizabeth Holmes concocted a product that defied the laws of chemistry and physics and couldn't actually be built. She refused to relax constraints like size/packaging that may have made it plausible.

2. She engaged in fraud in the hopes that eventually #1 would be solved and created a culture without transparency that further hampered the product from ever working.

This wasn't a case of a gamble that didn't pay off. This was a case of an infeasible idea, poorly executed, and compounding the issue with outright fraud. No startup advice necessary to avoid this.
Still waiting for that modern POWER9 based laptop with 7-row classic ThinkPad keyboard ...
Modern Monetary Theory tells us that the important limits are "when you run out of Labor" and "when you run out of resources".

So what nations are facing low unemployment, and what nations are facing resource shortages?
Who incidentally just passed away, bless her ‘locked and loaded’, ‘shoot to kill’, “Wake up Louisiana before it ‘s too late (to elect a ‘n_____’ like Bobby Jindal)” heart
I don't mean comment karma, I mean user karma.
In what way is a "public option"[0] not socialised medicine?

> In the 2008 Obama-Biden health care plan on the campaign’s website, candidate Obama promised that “any American will have the opportunity to enroll in [a] new public plan.”

[0]https://thinkprogress.org/flashback-obama-repeatedly-touted-...
I think it is valid to check the sources... However let's not get bogged down in the details and forget that a gigantic totalitarian nation is crushing the human rights of its citizens and trying to subvert the human rights of people in other nations. We must take action!

The tree of liberty must be periodically watered with blood of Patriots and Tyrants.
discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20746346
Depends on the role. Some dev jobs don't have a support role where one has to "quickly respond to incidents". Or if they do, those incidents are rare. Regardless, you can always call the person if something urgent arises. I have found remote workers more likely to be available than "office" employees, because the latter are in more likely to be in meetings, or at lunch off site.
Porn producers seem to only advertise on actual porn sites, which means if an underage person is seeing them, the damage is already done. The problem there would be ineffective age gating by the websites, not the marketing itself. I have seen ads outside porn sites for other adult services like sex toy stores, phone sex hotlines, adult "dating" sites, etc. Some of those ads might appeal to underage people, but I don't think underage use of those services is widespread. If it is, and we as a society consider it a problem, then yes my logic would apply.

I don't think there is any legal basis for video game ratings. In fact, any such law would probably be unconstitutional: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Entertainment_Merchan...

Long way to say that yes, we can extend my logic. If your marketing, or any activity you're doing, is encouraging kids to do something harmful, stop. It doesn't matter if you're breaking the law, just be a good person and try to do the right thing.
Technically there were neither ethical nor legal frameworks at the time. That isn't a statement of relativism but to point out there was no legal construct for it.

In my opinion using her treatment samples was grey to permissible (they already took them with permission and for a purpose serving her and it wasn't established as owned) but the deliberate morgue harvesting without permission crossed the line.

Just keeping the samples could be like keeping say a record size tumor a surgeon removed in a formaldehyde barrel is creepy but precedented and doesn't do harm. Doing it to a patient's body without permission or another valid overriding reason (say epidemiology or diagnosis to living patients infected with the same disease) is just descreation.
More like Goodhart‘s law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
The MRGO project concentrating storm surge also didn’t help matters
> Restore faith in government; which entails restoring faith in elected officials; which involves electing people who support the common good; which requires people to take an active, thoughtful place in political discourse.

Which requires people to work 30 hours a week (not 50) and requires removing money from politics, which requires an incredibly complex rebirth of the political system...

Not saying it can't happen, but the time frames don't add up.

We need to solve this problem right fucking now not in 50 years. And with a large segment of people still even denying the existence of climate change, it's hard to be hopeful about meaningful reforms in the right direction when so much has to change.
That doesn't work when there's no other viable options.
So then there's just a race to the bottom.

Why can't we as a society dictate that there will be minimum standards that have to be met?
So Valve Software would no longer be allowed to distribute Dota 2 through Steam? Most of the people I know who installed Steam were drawn there by Dota 2, CS, Half Life, Portal or Left 4 Dead (all Valve titles). In this case, the third party sellers directly benefited from the user base who were drawn to the platform.

Who really benefits if Valve stops developing games?