skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a compilation and revision of my comments nested deeper in the thread. Let's start from the absurdum argument that was posed:

> There's no incentive for them [Google] to improve health care for the patients

Ignoring the fact that Google is staffed by humans, and humans have a deep visceral response to engaging in healthcare, the healthcare systems they are collaborating with (e.g. Mayo) are strongly motivated to improve health of their patients, particularly in capitated models like accountable care organizations. Mayo is actually pretty famous for adopting the ACO model. Note the author on this article (1) from Mayo Clinic Proceedings is by David Shulkin, who went on to become the Secretary of Veterans Affairs.

You may also be interested to know Ascension is another ACO (2).

So why would an ACO be motivated to work with Google? Because they know reducing diagnostic variance is almost certainly identical to improving quality of diagnosis, which will reduce poor outcomes and reduce malpractice, cost of overtreatment, cost of undertreatment, and so on.

Further, let me present evidence that I believe indicates Google Health is going to be laser-focused on improving care and will actively shed any work that doesn't advance that goal. Not only their business actions, but also their leadership choices.

In terms of business actions, lets look at the NHS brew-haha. Hard to blame Google for NHS screwing up the research protocol that led to the specific 1.6M patient records being transferred to Deep Mind. And they corrected that research process years ago. Do you really think Google wants to be seen anywhere near the mishandling of private information? That presents an existential risk to their business. They passed muster with Mayo (a deal that no doubt had to pass muster with Shulkin among other world-renown physicians and administrators). They have deals with McKesson, Cleveland Clinic, and now Ascension. These are major players.

Their leadership choices give you additional insight on their motives. Their new Chief Health Officer is Karen DeSalvo, former National Coordinator for Health IT and Acting Assistant Secretary of HHS (and no doubt candidate for next Secretary of HHS). David Feinberg, their new VP for Health, is coming from serving as CEO of Geisinger and UCLA prior to that. These people are reputationally allergic to mixing medicine with adtech.

Finally, keep in mind that healthcare is widely regarded as one of the weakest points in Western cyber security. Bringing in grown-ups sounds like a phenomenal move to me.

Would it be nice if the company's core business wasn't adtech? I suppose. But for all the reasons above, I genuinely believe Google getting into this space is a better net outcome than the status quo.

(1) https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(12)...

(2) https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/acos-to-know-2019.html
> I benefited from a work ethic of a grandfather that knew poverty and hunger...

I am not sure who these virtues serve in an economy maximizing extraction from the people contributing the work. The working class will always be pushed as much as possible, to the point of breaking, with no benefit to the workers themselves.

> It would be better for a child to inherit my father's work ethic than mine.

It may be good for them, but only if they work in a scenario where the work adds value for them.

Currently someone who knows to define boundaries and not destroy their own life and health in order to let more be extracted from their effort, is a better option.
Black Facebook Workers Open Letter: We Are Treated as If We Don't Belong Here
> This sounds really cool, but could use better docs.

I agree. As the creator, it can be hard to write documentation for a beginner audience, so I'd be great to hear your input. What would you suggest?

Right now, here is the documentation that exists now:

Some intro tutorials can be found in the Sporth cookbook:

http://paulbatchelor.github.io/proj/cook/

An interactive version can be found here:

https://audiomasher.org/learn

Once you understand the syntax fundamentals, most of the work is just remembering all the ugens and the argument order. For this, there's a reference guide:

https://github.com/PaulBatchelor/Sporth/blob/master/ugen_ref...

There's a command line utility that comes with sporth called "ugen_lookup" that allows you to look up entries from here:

https://github.com/PaulBatchelor/Sporth/blob/master/util/uge...

Most Sporth ugens are wrappers around Soundpipe modules, for which there is also a reference manual for. It also provides more information about what the module does:

http://paulbatchelor.github.io/res/soundpipe/docs/
They could do without me if they tried. There’s at least one member that could pick up the slack (and code quality might actually improve a bit).
I have bipolar disorder, and the behavior of these "brilliant" engineers working late at night and exhausting themselves for days runs very true for me. It's really the only way that I've found to work successfully in any sort of deep manner. Essentially, this sort of behavior is in response to my disorder.

Mental health disorders are very, very, very, very hard. Not giving engineers with mental health disorders the room that they need to grow is doing everyone a disservice. And yet, the stigma around mental health disorders is so high that that conversation will not happen anytime in my lifetime. At the end of the day, myself and the others like me, are pushed into the dark further and further. It really sucks, and the only place for conversation about it is in therapy and close friends. Mentioning it at work leads to risk of retaliation. So, we cope. And then people write blogs about people like us, without taking into consideration that there's likely some mental health issue going on.

And, for what it's worth, talking about things in terms of MBTI isn't helpful in a conversation about mental health disorders. You might as well be talking about horoscopes.
Sure but they can get access to the claims data from whomever is managing it as they're paying for them.
Found a brand new/sealed 2015 MBP on eBay about 3 months ago.. top of the line i7, 32gb ram, 512gb SSD, still the best laptop that exists IMO.
The problem is that our society is terrible at rewarding positive externalities. Even worse than we are at punishing negative externalities.

I do object to your phrasing. Quantitative finance isn't hacking a casino. It does generate actual value. The problem is that finance is one of the few fields where you can expect to be rewarded in proportion to the value you generate because the amount of value you generate is easy to measure. Cue all the smart, realistic people rushing into finance instead of having a larger impact for peanuts doing fundamental science or something.
what i m seeing with these "safety badges", "lightning icons", "green thumbs up" are attempts by google and apple to control the web the same way they control their app gardens. i m hopeful that they can't though.
Ask HN: What's the best place to hire part-time Python consultants?
The ghosts of ancient hurricanes live in Caribbean blue holes
Short version is that a medical image, like a typical MRI, is a 3D picture at least 1024 x 1024 x 1024 pixels, meaning each image is multiple gigabytes. SQL databases don't do well at storing huge binary blobs like that.
Taplytics (YC W14) Is Expanding Our Experience Platform. Hiring Node Engineers
Junior Architect

Senior Architect

Legendary Architect
If you like the weirdness, also see his (first film?) Eraserhead.

Also Rabbits is disturbing and unsettling. But not entertaining for long.
Yeah but Trump says the stupidest garbage all the time. I don't have time to fact check if every word he says really came out of his mouth. I'll just presume it's true until pointed out in the comments.
NASA identified California's 'super-emitters' of greenhouse gases
This is a lovely sentiment. I’m in awe of my own father’s capacity for work. He grew up in a village in Bangladesh and raised us in privilege in America.

Russell I should add, was born into aristocracy, and was a romantic and communist sympathizer.

> Russell expressed great hope in "the Communist experiment." However, when he visited the Soviet Union and met Vladimir Lenin in 1920, he was unimpressed with the system in place. On his return he wrote a critical tract, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism. He was "infinitely unhappy in this atmosphere—stifled by its utilitarianism, its indifference to love and beauty and the life of impulse." Although critical of its implementation in Soviet Russia, he still believed "that Communism is necessary to the world."

The world has tremendous labor to be done. Billions of people yearn to live the kind of comfortable life Russell lived. That won’t come to pass through idleness.
I'm confused. The Github link just has PHP code to perform the check, but the linked page clearly shows javascript usage. Maybe the link is wrong?

Since Tor users may also have javascript disabled, I'd suggest that the PHP could add a link for the user to click manually.
If their speed assessment works as "great" as their "mobile usability" tool works, i doubt their indicator will be actually meaningful. YEah speed matters a lot , but it's self-correcting. If a website cannot load after a minute on a spotty cellular connection , i ll just close the browser and they lose the impresison
Isn't that why it is even more important that deepfakes aren't on there?
Regardless of the scientific or historical significant here; imagine how amazing it would have been to be a prehistoric hunter and to kill one of these.

It's like the modern version of winning the lottery.

One of these could feed your family for the entire winter.
Upon hearing this, the student achieved enlightenment.
The only PC where I saw Gmail being fast was a Ryzen 9 3900x build, I suspect that if Google devs were given shittier PCs they'd build faster products that would appeal more to the average user.
How could we find a wormhole hiding in the Milky Way?
Radiation tolerant space grade CPUs
I think browsers are sandboxed even for GPU access. But I am now curious if persistent tracking can be done using GPU memory due to warm reboot resilience.
This is Googles blueprint to eradicate apple. They want Web apps to dominate because they already have a standing there and apple has a large marketshare in native apps.
or just:

cat -n file
> Both species later became extinct in the Americas.

It might sound odd to suggest that the extinction was caused by people. The conventional view is that there weren't many of them in North America. So how could anything have been hunted to extinction back then?

As documented in 1491 by Mann, this view of a sparsely-populated North America prior to Columbus may not be correct. As many as 10x more people might have lived there, wiped out by one European-borne plague after another. Before they went, they had developed sophisticated technologies to change the landscape and surrounding ecosystems to suit them.

Given all of this, it's much easier to imagine that the mammoths were indeed hunted to extinction by the inhabitants of North America.
> Especially with only stone cutting tools.

If they were using obsidian other than the issue of constantly having to knap new blades it should have been somewhat easy to work with.

The only reason we don't use this in modern times is that the blades break apart over the long term.
Curious, why not just use invidio.us?
Computing e to thousands of decimal places is an interesting exercise for the mathematically inclined students in a beginning programming class. If you use the ∑1/n! series you can fairly easily do it even in a language that does not have built in arbitrary precision or an arbitrary precision library.

Let's say you want to deal with numbers to 1000 decimal places. Pick a base that is a power of 10, such as 10000. Represent a number as an array of 251 base 10000 digits, with the first item of the array being the integer part, and the remaining 250 being 250 base 10000 "decimal" digits.

You need two of these arrays. One represents 1/n!, and the other is the cumulative sum of the series so far.

You need two large precision operations. To go from 1/n! to 1/(n+1)! involves simply dividing by n+1. As long as we limit n+1 to under 10000, we only have to handle division with a single digit denominator. Limiting n thusly is not a problem--it's enough to actually support calculating e to over 35000 decimal places, so our modest goal of 1000 is no problem.

Implement the division exactly like you would do division by a single digit with pencil and paper. The only thing you have to worry about is dealing with carry. You can have intermediate values as large as the carry x the base + base - 1, and since carry can be as large as base - 1, this means you can have intermediate values as large as base^2 - 1. Just pick base (10000 in my example) so that base^2 - 1 doesn't overflow the basic integer type of the language you are using.

The other large precision operation you need is addition, to accumulate the result from the division into the sum. Same as with division--just write it using the same algorithm you would use with pencil and paper. Add digits right to left, with carry.

By using a base that is a power of 10, it is easy to figure out the base 10 representation of the final result for printing.
1 & 2. Not really and not really.

Curious, have you ever heard of Boron-Nitride Nanotubes (BNNT)? Basically a new nanomaterial that is similar to carbon nanotubes except it has the rare property of being a high energy band-width semiconductor whilst having excellent thermal conductivity (basically solves problems 1. and 2.). Only problem is that its really hard to produce in mass quantity... well maybe... have a look at the company PPK
I haven’t written a book (and calling myself an author is a long stretch), but I did write up a series of personal narratives based on the Wikileaks War Diary document dump and I touch on how we (myself and my battle-buddies) felt about the “war” once we had been there for several months. A lot of us started identifying with the Afghan people.

https://hornor.space/projects/afghanistan/

One item that didn’t make it into the narratives (because there is no Wikileaks cable) was my CO getting replaced in the middle of our deployment because he began refusing to take the company out on spurious missions.
And forensic analysis too. I think lack of existing tools that analyze and protect GPU based anomalies is what this project highlights.
Can a private (or corporate) entity take the IRS to court?

As a non-American, I always assumed a big reason of why the rich aren't taxed/audited as much was because tying the funds up in infinite legality was cheaper than actually paying taxes.
Mods: Could you please add 2015 to the title?
Agreed, this sounds like the pontificating of someone who has not studied language and culture. As soon as the machine can understand any "natural language" say to it, the language is dead. Before you teach your database to interpret upper class out of sight "White" English, try teaching it "Ebonics."

I guess my point is, there's nothing "natural" about language.
I think you misspelled AMP.
Survey of Expert Opinion on Intelligence
And then there's people like me not noticing their phone ran out of charge yesterday...
Some of these comments are great

# the lord saw how wicked man's sawtooth had become,
# and it was phat

# "yea," sayth the lord, "i will uphold your snares
# and your hi-hats with my righteous filters"

# and gave unto man a sine wave,
# that he may craft a kick drum,
# and bob his head in green pastures

https://audiomasher.org/patch/WRZXQH
With the O() notation the units are some arbitrary computation step or arbitrary unit of memory, which could even mean matrix multiplication of two 1024x1024 matrices of doubles. The whole point of big-O notation is that you don’t care about how fast/expensive it is, but how it scales.
> Depend on it to do /what/ though?

My specific worry is that some "firewalls" will try to use the little that's still visible (the spin bit, packet sizes, packet timing, etc) to try to guess whether the connection comes from a "legitimate" source like a common web browser, and discard the packets otherwise. "You flipped the bit when you should have flopped it, so you're a malware and I'm going to blackhole your whole IP address for the rest of the day", things like that.
> Not for any virtue other than its capacity to promote thriving and survival in an unstable future.

It does not have this capacity. The overconsumption fetish (and its close ally, overwork) has brought the world's ecosystems to the brink of collapse. They have made the future critically unstable.

If we had cultivated instead a cultural ethic of sufficiency, with so-called 'productivity' gains invested in increased leisure and sociality rather than multiplying raids on complex sustainable evolved systems to build crude unsustainable technological ones, we'd be in much better shape now.
The black hole would be trying to elaborate a whole lot on top of a completely broken foundation, or trying to fix the analogy in intense detail when you should start from scratch, etc.

I just said one line about how that analogy didn't fit.
> If Google can't even meet their own metrics and standards then they have no place telling other people what they should be doing with their websites.

The fact that they are failing their own if anything, shows that the tests don't discriminate. It's defeatist to say that we shouldn't strive for faster websites if some webpage fails. I really like how dumb f*s making 40MiB pages are now finally punished.
There’s a device called Burger on the Go which allows one to obtain six hamburgers (or twelve sliders) from a horse without killing the animal.
Just because they can terminate a Google account doesn't mean they have too... I do not understand what point you are trying to make
Throughput optimization in database engines often relies on operation latency being visible and predictable to the execution scheduler. Disk I/O has this property, a GC does not, so they are not comparable in terms of their impact on throughput. An important class of schedule-based architectural optimizations are rendered ineffective if you are running a GC in the background.

This only matters to databases that actually implement these optimizations. If a database does not then a GC has a much smaller impact. But it also means that, all other things being equal, the database will never be competitive with a non-GC design since those optimizations can provide an integer factor improvement in performance.

Also, many database engines aren't doing malloc() at runtime. 100 microseconds of CPU time is an integer factor larger than many atomic database operations in a fast database engine. An operation taking an order of magnitude longer than the scheduler would expect based on runtime state has real adverse consequences.
I think compromises at the application layer are the trick here. Instead of trying to make every possible aspect of the business system ACID compliant, perhaps only small aspects of it actually need this level of transactional isolation.

Alternatively, perhaps you have a business model which is amenable to document-based storage. If you can reduce your business modeling to:

Serializable GUID-keyed objects - Any arbitrary business type instance that can be turned into JSON bytes.

GUID-keyed transactions - Document the specific object GUID(s) to be locked for a transaction.

You can very easily entertain a resilient, clustered solution. Going wide on GUID keys is trivial compared to alternative approaches. If you need to support any degree of SQL grammar or row-based storage, you are in for a completely different dimension of pain. I would never subject myself to this. Instead, I would reach for SQLite or Postgres.
> I never carry a charger for my phone or laptop unless I plan to spend more than a day out

Me neither, but a different reason: my laptop battery lasts 6 hours or so, and for my phone I just carry a tiny USB cable to charge my phone from my laptop. I'm already carrying around this 97Whr battery in my laptop, might as well use it to charge my phone.
I'm working on storing data in a log-structure persistently without the overhead of a transaction log in my spare time (Open Source[1]). Instead, an UberPage which guarantees consistency is atomically swapped during a transaction commit (inspired by ZFS). It should be used for data, which doesn't fit into main memory. Revisions are always appended, whereas almost only changed data plus some metadata is written to a file during commits.

You can easily retain the full version history in a log structure, but you need fast random access (option of parallel "real" access would be best) on a flash drive -- PCIe SSDs for instance.

Basically in order to balance read and write performance only a fraction of each database page (with changed records) needs to be written sequentially in batches to the end of a file.

Each revision is indexed under a RevisionRootPage and these are indexed under the UberPage with keyed tries.

This opens up a lot of opportunities for analysing data and its history.

[1] https://github.com/sirixdb/sirix
Considering how many people have trackers I'd argue that I don't really have a choice, unless I'm planning on completely leaving society. My bank, cell phone company, my electric company, my water bill- all of these are on websites that have trackers of various sorts.
Great! When do I get paid for the data you stole from me to build your product?
> I just don't have time to figure out

https://developers.cloudflare.com/images/about/

Also Chrome doesn't collect or aggregate performance data for sites without a decent amount of traffic. They are not going to label your hobby sites as slow as there is not enough data to do so. https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/v5/about#f...
As another commenter noted, propeller speeds are limited by multiple factors, and generally complex aircraft use a constant-speed propeller that changes pitch. Because of this the increased electric speed likely isn't a factor.
"Did Google run out of actual features to implement?"

That question is kind of coming in at the wrong angle. Google has identified the speed at which web sites load as a problem, and have determined that is a problem worth their while to try and solve.

The problem is that it's all the tracking and advertising that's the cause of the slow loading and Google, being as that tracking and advertising pays their bills, can't solve that as the fundamental problem, so they're doing a very odd looking Twister-Limbo set of actions in trying to reframe what the problem is: speed of page loading.

Google are attempting to treat the symptoms, because they profit from the cause.

Google needs to solve the speed symptom before someone else solves the ad and tracking cause (ad blockers, PiHole, etc.) in a more fundamentally non-technical-user accessible way.
Which is why proper monitoring and understanding of the system as a whole is imperative. Utilization doesn't come from nowhere, be it CPU, memory, or anything else. If you understand that requests per second x generates CPU usage y then you can monitor at the edge and scale according to actual need.
Precisely these two items.
I mean, the same situation could happen even with medical records, unless you give every hospital instant access to everyone's medical info. I assume you're referring to the sort of situation where one is taken to the ER for emergency treatment; even were an electronic record system to be implemented, how would the hospital obtain records from an unconscious person? That's absolutely the sort of situation where doctors must try emergency treatment and have to risk an adverse reaction. I acknowledge there are flaws to the system, but I fail to see how an electronic system mitigates those flaws.
That is tremendous.

"Just sitting taking a smoke, thinking of all those little quinoas bubbling away in that pan"