skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The hospital definitely didn't carefully consider the $40 price to cover the actual cost of delivering the medicine to you. They just multiply their cost by some number and call it a day.

The fact is that hospitals aren't built for itemized bills because very few patients pay the posted prices out of pocket. Medical debt is extremely hard to recover in the US, so why bother expending the resources to figure out a sensible pricing structure for a small minority of your customers who mostly aren't going to pay that price anyway?
Underfunding certainly can(has?) interfere with their ability to do their job. But proper funding might not help if regulatory capture is also in play.

I'm of the persuasion that governmental organisations need to be shaken up from time to time to prevent ossification, stagnation, inefficiencies, regulatory capture, ideological capture, etc... but the new agency needs to utilize the pieces from the old agency (not to start from scratch).
Not sure how active it still is, but there's a site called VC Fund My Life (http://www.vcfml.com/) which catalogs coupons offered by start-ups for growth hacking (likely just VC money).
>Show me anything...

Sure.

>The whole point here is not to find one or two nitpicking example...

Oh, OK then.
Let's revisit this in 10 years
Global software collaboration in the face of sanctions
I don't think we'll have a specific "internet bubble" anymore. The profits of the internet (Amazon, Apple, Google, etc.) are heavily tied to the health of the general economy. The internet bit isn't that novel anymore.
Technically, a wrist watch is AR since it is augmenting your reality with information.
That is how also news articles should be written.
I'm very sorry for your loss.

This is the only country in the world where there are people who will divorce on their hospital death bed, because they are so fearful of the financial impact on their remaining family.

And a non-insignificant part of the population finds this acceptable because they see the alternative as "the government treading on me".
nr 1. is a good point. i am actually doing that, and most of my current leads come from that.

nr 2. is something i heard frequently, but always leaves me at a loss. i just don't have enough past contacts to get anything out of that. it requires me to keep in touch with friends and colleagues remotely, which is something i find very hard to do.

for nr 3. i'd take a part-time remote job in a heartbeat, if i could find one. all jobs i have seen so far are full-time and not a good fit.

i forgot to mention, pretty much all work i got in the past few years was referrals. there just weren't enough of them. which means my referral network is not strong enough and i see no way to make it larger other than getting work elsewhere.
>then over the next weeks, I received about 20 bills

I'm going through this now! It is completely baffling! I went to the ER, and then I received a steady stream of bills over a period of months. They were so numerous and so devoid of useful context that I began to worry that they were illegitimate. The billing process is absolutely insane.
Apple, Services and Moats
Waterfall had its place in military and aerospace, where the requirements and API were well-defined, and to a lesser extent in life-critical medical systems development.

But in even those cases, it was largely replaced by Spiral, which is similar to agile and pre-dates it.

Edit: Spiral is like going down the Waterfall two or more times. Similar to agile, but formally documented, with management and customer sign-off up the line, and with a much longer cycle time.
According to Steve Mann, the father of AR, any wearable compute is AR.
List of American Utopian Communities
How is a fee the government mandates everyone pay not a tax?
Lol . Biggest irony nobody points out . Professor title of Ito involved key word “Ethics”.
Isn’t that irony at its best ?
How ethical is it to conduct business deals with some counter party like Epstein ? How ethical is it to conceal its name so that deal does get approved .
Even more, how ethical is it to keep receiving side pocket cash envelopes for startup funds and personal travel and gadgets.

mit has to work on ethics a bit more.
Ig Nobel 2019 Winners
Yes, clearly modern day Jordan was filled with white people in Roman times.
To be honest, QC and testing has never really been the FDA's job. They perform a one time assessment for safety and effectiveness to prevent the sale of snake oil equivalents. They also have the power to inspect manufacturers periodically (maybe 1 in 100 manufacturers per year). Otherwise testing, QC, and release is self-regulated by the manufacturers.
Switch to Firefox, go to addons.mozilla.org and install the extension NoScript. Or just go to about:config, search for "javascript.enabled" and turn it to false. Then go to the NYT page. Magic.
You are overthinking the problem. It isn't that there is no advantage in explaining things, but often times the enlisted really don't want to listen to some officer drone on about why something is being done. For the trivial stuff, stuff like my example above, they really have no immediate interest in why something has to be done. That can come later. The published SOP, the checklist in the guard shack, doesn't need to include the history behind the decision.

One thing that most leaders ignore is that explaining a decision to people who have no real input into that decision can often be really bad for moral. It makes the decision maker look less than confident, like they are seeking reassurance in their decision by explaining all the background behind it.
Shape Up sounds interesting, particularly for remote-only teams in non-massive companies. Haven't tried it but it sounds interesting.

https://basecamp.com/shapeup
The Effectiveness of Targeted Nutrient Therapy for Mental Illness (2010) [pdf]
I'm not sure I can say this with authority, but no one cares about the instagram website. It's primarily a mobile app, so they've been ignoring development on the website's bugs for as long as I can remember using it.

Besides most of those problems are UI-related, this article is about the backend and really python is perfectly fine for a backend that has a huge focus on data (for obvious reasons)
It's not that simple. The members of Congress aren't telling you that they aren't doing proper oversight on Clapper. The NSA isn't telling you that they're exceeding their charter (and the Constitution). So how do you know who to start voting out, if you don't know that there's anything going on for which you should be voting people out?
Folks should remember that Rafael Reif was the provost under Susan Hockfield who orchestrated the whitewashing of research misconduct allegations that MIT Professor Ted Postol launched against MIT Lincoln Laboratory for using fabricated data to report results of a critical ballistic missile defense test to the Pentagon. MIT was found "guiltless" by Provost Reif after an "internal investigation" was conducted over the course of almost a decade. Steve Weiner (a highly respected former director of ballistic defense research at Lincoln for almost 20 years) has since accused MIT of engaging in a "kickback scheme" whereby Lincoln would tell the MDA whatever it needed to hear about the viability of a Starwars-inspired missile defense shield in order for executives at Raytheon to receive multi-billion dollar contracts to build it. The phony missile defense tests that Postol challenged intensely for almost a decade were one small but critical piece of the massive fraud that MIT has perpetrated against the United States taxpayer here. President Reif needs to be incarcerated, not just fired!
Someone tell Jeff Dean he should be ashamed of himself.

https://twitter.com/JeffDean/status/1093953731756867584
The iron and zinc from vegetarian diets are generally less bioavailable than from nonvegetarian diets because of reduced meat intake as well as the tendency to consume more phytic acid and other plant-based inhibitors of iron and zinc absorption. However, in Western countries with varied and abundant food supplies, it is not clear that this reduced bioavailability has any functional consequences. Although vegetarians tend to have lower iron stores than omnivores, they appear to have no greater incidence of iron deficiency anemia.

-- Your Link
Retinal projection work for display tech. https://www.bynorth.com/focals
The Constitution in the 100 Mile Border Zone
I'd strongly recommend this longer read by Jason Guerrasio about the rise and fall MoviePass: https://outline.com/ZPqaXs — really captures the whole story end to end.

Original link with ad-block paywall: https://www.businessinsider.com/inside-story-moviepass-rise-...
For one, probably because these stories are the exception? I know a bunch of people will probably tell me I'm wrong and I might be (haven't used the US health system in a 3 or 4 years since I moved out) but for most people their insurance just covers it (or medicade if they're old).

Otherwise most people don't want to leave their friends and family

Note: not defending the horrible system. Only suggesting that most people using their company provided insurance probably don't run into these issues.
Here in europe we don't get to see the bill at all. The hospital sends the bill directly to the insurance company. Think about it. The negotiation of the costs will take place between two companies (B2B). In this case the insurance company becomes the advocate of the people not their opponent.
The subject of the verb "to entitle" is that which grants entitlement. The recipient is the object. I think we can legitimately read the sentence as passive.

Active; "applicable regulations" are doing something:

"Applicable regulations entitle you to jump pay for the time you spent in training last year."

Passive; "applicable regulations" are still doing something:

"You are entitled by applicable regulations to jump pay for the time you spent in training last year."

Still passive; vague about what's doing something:

"You are entitled to jump pay for the time you spent in training last year."

As you point out, "entitled" is often used as an adjective. I think you're right that the sentence can be read that way, and in that case it is indeed active.

After consideration, I think the passive read is more correct, but I can't yet put my finger on why.
I believe it was $200. For our first daughter ours was helpful. We took a class (paid by ourselves) before hand but it definitely helps to have someone walk through it with your actual baby. However for each delivery the nurses knew enough to be helpful too.

Also, since my wife has had surgery to remove a benign tumor in her breast, lactation consultation was covered the first time. No idea WTF happened the second time. This is the US medical system for you.

I'd also like to add we received a random bill for our first daughter 2 years later. No idea what it was, but the insurance covered all of it so I didn't care.
Thanks for the reference. I'm not Canadian, but it was very enlightening to browse through and surprisingly well organized.
That's less of a K8s issue and more of a general multiprocessing issue. Would you rather have:

* 96x single-core CPUs with no multithreading

* 1x 96-core CPU with multithreading, but running all cores at full power all the time

* 1x 96-core CPU that can turn off sets of 16 cores at a time when they're not in use.
I have had amazing and bland Strawberries from Safeway in the US. Not sure how to pick the good ones. Time of year?
I like your explanation better. The general concept is hidden in the original essay. How did you figure out the generalization?
While I totally agree that the Sacklers should be considered like a criminal organization conspiring to kill people and would deserve long jail time, there is another goal to this confiscation than punishment.

It is a way to change incentives. I don't know what part of their $13B wealth comes from opioids, but this tax made it suddenly far, far less profitable. They will make their calculation of what would have been a better course of action, but if they had found a way to stay within the law and only lost $3B in revenues, it would have been profitable.

Fines are an efficient way to regulate companies and always welcomed, even if insufficient.

Not only this is like a tax, but there is a randomness factor it: it depends on a court decision. A lot of companies are risk-adverse so such a fine can have a chilling multiplier.
Operating K8 on you own is risky. Google Cloud Run has K8 as foundation. You get all benefits but you don’t manage K8.
“People rationalize it by saying that voting for a 3rd party is "wasting" their vote,”

I guess I am stubborn but I will never vote for one of the two big parties. However it would be great if smaller parties got some kind of representation in Congress. It seems ridiculous that in the 90s Ross Perot got 20% of the vote but that resulted in zero representation.
The centerpiece of their plan is removing the protections provided by Obamacare, like pre-existing conditions coverage, the state insurance exchanges, and getting rid of the Medicaid expansion. They don't want to talk about any of that right now, even though it was the central refrain of what they ran on 4 years ago.

But that's smart actually. They correctly realize that it is political suicide to run on taking health protections away from people at this time.
Volvo Penta and Fountaine Pajot present electric sailing yacht
Ask HN: What are you building with Rust? for fun or profit
I really enjoy dabbling with rust and I am curious what kind of applications its getting used in.
>Show me anything revolutionary that was done by a group of people that weren't obsessed to the point of neglecting the rest of their life.

Newton invented calculus in a few months goofing off on his family farm while avoiding the plague. This "work yourself to death" mentality is moronic. It's about 1000x more moronic when you're working on some dumb ass app which makes life worse and which makes someone else rich, which is, realistically what most of you are working on.
Wow thank you so much for your reply! I hadn’t thought that medications could make me deficient in nutrients, but it makes sense in hindsight.

What makes Celtic sea salt the best?
And saying it wasn't one is equally inaccurate. :D
Indeed, but we don't /know/.
A Labor Shortage Could Explain Negative Interest Rates
It’s a problem because if you’re not a “qualified investor” you don’t get to take advantage of most of the gains as long as the company stays private.
There is no single European one. There is a whole range of systems that are very different.
By themselves, paywalls are the very definition of "fair": you offer what you think is a valuable service and would like to be paid for it. That's fair. You're free to ask, I'm free to not read your stuff if I don't want to pay.

What makes linking to paywalls unacceptable is that links are not marked with a "paywall" tag of some sort. So it ends up being bait and switch and a waste of time.

Regarding subscriptions: I'm just not going to separately subscribe to three dozen news sources I regularly read, I'm sorry.
I noticed the striking difference between strawberries grown in Thailand (yes, it's true, during the cool season in the mountainous regions) which are small, non-uniform in shape and intensely flavored, compared to the huge, beautiful and watery tasteless hothouse grown strawberries imported from Korea.
I worked on a bio-intensive organic farm in Washington State via https://wwoofinternational.org/. This was one of the articles that got passed around:

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129629...

Volunteering there was the first time I realized strawberries were red all the way through and incredibly dense with flavor, since they were allowed to ripen naturally and benefit from richly amended soil full of microbes.
Weddings: you pay the caterer directly, even if the facility dictates which caterer you use
As I read it, it seems to be saying that our brains are multi-threaded, but not multi-core or multi-processor.

The lower priority 'threads' which are not the intended focus still do take cycles in brief moments when the main task is idle only to be preemptively interrupted at the cost of many context switches and adding very little value. The same happens with hardware CPUs which is why coroutines are much more effective when the number of tasks >> number of processing units.
I think the argument of the comment you're replying to is that it was profitable and they did make the calculation. They're left with $7B, which is a lot. It's hard to make $7B.

And the multiplier works in the other way. Because of the non-deterministic chance of whether you get caught and whether you get punished and whether all of this happens before you donate all your money to charitable causes and die, the expected value of your loss is a fraction of the fine. A truly effective penalty would fine them many times the illegal profit to account for that.
> how do you know who to start voting out, if you don't know that there's anything going on for which you should be voting people out?

Even if you didn't know it before, you know it now (assuming you think that they should be voted out based on what you know now).

But really, if you didn't know, or at least suspect, what was going on before, why not? This isn't the first time information has leaked about government agencies doing questionable things. As I said, the government is going to do whatever it takes to protect our security and stop terrorist attacks, because that's what we, through our elected representatives, have told them we want. Once you give the government that job, you can't just sit back and assume all is well. Our form of government depends on the constant vigilance of citizens, particularly when we know we've given the government a job that can't be done under Marquess of Queensberry rules.
Sorry about your friend.

Similar to your situation, I went to a dermatologist concerned about a bump. Turned out to be a skin tag which she cheerily said "We can take care of this right now" and snipped. That snip cost $250 (wasn't on the genitals but was close enough for them to bump up the cost). I called their billing company and spoke to their office manager. She said that "the doctor just wants to make sure customers are happy and doesn't really concern herself with the billing part" when I brought up that if something is going to cost something they should say so upfront if it's something not necessary.

Thanks for the heads up about the glue. They really do take advantage even when you're a bad situation.
I find that most of the time those written statements between staff and commanders are just the tip of a huge iceberg. Lots of non-official communications back and forth have already happened. The commanders are already aware of the reasoning behind the decision because they probably briefed it to the staff. So the eventual official communication is indeed very brief.
And yet UK companies can still freely deal with Huawei, which is the context here. Canonical's US based competition are handcuffed.
Also we do have multiprocessing abilities, just not multiple 'foreground' conscious ones.
I'm so, so sorry for your loss.
:( sorry - it sucks

We had insurance so we didn’t pay that crazy amount but it’s just absurd what these places charge.
100% false! That would be totally illegal. California CLEARLY bans hospitals from doing this.
The people who are are paying attention are not the problem.
We "ordinary citizens" were not informed of the extent of the spying. How were we supposed to hold the governments accountable? They lied. He exposed them. A lot of speculation just vanished and was replaced by certainty. The discussions could move on to what to do about the intrusions instead of arguing over how extensive they are.

With the heavy information asymmetry in this case it's laughable to even talk about accountability. How should accountability be possible when the people in charge lie with impunity?

> When you tell the government you want it to protect your security and stop terrorist attacks, it's going to do whatever it takes to do that.

Whatever it takes? At some point it's reasonable to provide to the public evidence of the government's actions. Disregarding any laws. For me, that point was well reached. Snowden was justified in exposing the extensive spying. By all means he chose to use.
The USDA National Organic Program used to put it quite nicely on an older version of their home page:

Our regulations do not address food safety or nutrition.

( https://web.archive.org/web/20190103075936/https://www.ams.u... )
When you want to " pull minerals from the underlying bedrock and transport it to the top layer", trees do that. Composting with tree leaves would seem to be beneficial, although perhaps a rather slow process. And of course you need lots of trees around. Incompatible with large scale monoculture farming.
Also look at Inverted pyramid (journalism): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)
Inverted Pyramid (Journalism)
It will probably be cheaper and lower risk for these big companies to pay someone to backport security patches to Python 2.7 than to upgrade 35M lines of code to Python 3.7.
I hope there’s a similar precedent set to Alice vs. CLS Bank [0], stating that the same idea but implemented on a computer isn’t sufficient for a patent. It seems reasonable to me that solving a problem with artificial intelligence should follow similar rules.

[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/06/bad-day-bad-patents-su...
First of all, this is a huge topic, about which entire books could be written. And, in fact, entire books have been written on this topic. So don't expect anything approaching a comprehensive treatment in a post here.

That said... start with empathy. Put yourself in your prospects shoes, so to speak. Think about the things you will talk about with someone you don't know, the things you won't, and why they differ. Further consider how you decide who you will and won't talk about certain things with.

Example: let's say you're a guy and you have ED. Most guys consider this incredibly embarrassing and wouldn't talk about it with many people. You might even be reluctant to tell your doctor. But you probably would, eventually. OTOH, you might be sitting at a bar, have a stranger sit down next to you who asks "how's it going", and then you blurt out "Ah, hell, my dick doesn't work, the transmission in my car is shot, and my dog died. How about you?"

So, why would you tell your doctor about your embarrassing condition? Probably because your doctor has massive credibility in your eyes and represents a source of a resolution to your problem.

But why tell the stranger in the bar? He/she can't help right? Maybe not, but since they are a total stranger that you'll probably never see again, you can safely tell them without caring one whit about their judgment of your condition.

So, maybe demonstrating credibility and a non-judgmental attitude are keys to getting people to talk about things? Granted, this is an over-simplified example, but think through some similar scenarios and see where it leads you.

Regarding credibility: a lot of this is tied up in the research you've already done (you did do preliminary research, right?) related to your prospect (in terms of industry vertical, demographics, geography, etc.), and the questions you ask. Asking good questions is a good way to demonstrate that you know what you're talking about and may represent - as your doctor does - a viable source to some mitigation of the problem at hand.

Beyond that: many/most books written on the topic of selling and sales cover this ground to varying degrees. Search the HN archives for the (many) threads on "sales book recommendations" and peruse some of the titles. There are also a lot of books written to target consultants or would-be consultants that deal with similar material.
Disappointing but expected.