skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The tragedy of the inert beurocracy. The decline of the physical supports of this radio telescope was known for years. Maintenance was neglected for years, a well paid beurocracy used up all available funds. All well documented.
They needed to allocate funds to maintain that cannot be used to swell bureaocrat's pockets - Puerto Rico is well known for this. It is possible that funders became exhausted at this political game that they starved it of funds intentionally - intending to direct funds to mm arrays and other new projects where there is less political cronyism.
Now it is dead - how big is the budget now?
> dissent is orthogonal to quality

If you said 2 + 2 = 5, I would disagree. This is a trivial example of dissent completely entangled with quality.
The ironic thing is that now many physicists are studying non-falsifiable theories like the multiverse.
We built our Python Client that's mostly Rust
These plans are often known as "Direct Primary Care", and from what I understand have to be approved by state regulatory boards (largely comprised of established or retired doctors) before a provider can offer such a service.

This would be a great alternative to "no healthcare" for the uninsured, even though it in no way covers catastrophic scenarios. At least it would provide general health/wellness and preventative care (what most people need on an annual basis) at a far cheaper price point than insurance premiums + deductibles.

Here's some more reading on this: https://www.goodrx.com/insurance/direct-primary-care
But then the best facilities and the best doctors would all be in private practice where they could earn more money, and the public care would be done by whoever was left over.
For those curious about Original Antigenic Sin [1].

It's basically the immune system keeping and using an old weapon that is no longer effective just because the intruder has the same haircut as his great great grandfather.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_antigenic_sin
This was an area that improved hugely at my workplace, because we're spread across multiple buildings in multiple cities anyway; the pre-COVID dynamic was that people were in the habit of including only those in physical proximity. COVID has made cross-city collab instinctive for people.

The comment you're responding to sounds like a team resenting the inability to have the (bad) habit of only talking to people in physical proximity.
Personally, I have frequently wished that the downvote button on youtube _comments_ wasn’t fake. (Last I heard, it currently doesn’t even send a packet to any servers when you click it. It used to, until google+ iirc [edit: see correction/update provided by voussoir in the reply. Turns out it does now. Thanks for the update/correction.])

The inability to downvote substantially alters what is said/ranked highly, I think.
I have a few thoughts on this:

- If the waiting times are too long, then ultimately it's a supply issue which can be solved by increasing supply (i.e. more funding). Of course, this is obviously easier said than done but it's not really an inherent problem of the system.

- What would your grandmother do in a situation with a privatized system and she couldn't afford surgery? This isn't theoretical: this happens in the US all the time. While I agree that being blind for a year is not acceptable, it's only in certain positions of privilege in the US in the current system where you would even be treated and again is more inherently about funding than it is about an inherent fault of a socialized system.

- I think that if you don't force everyone to pay in the system and allow for private healthcare, people (and politicians!) don't have incentive to improve the system because they can just take private insurance and ignore a languishing public system. The public system doesn't have to be bad, but creating a two-tier public/private system incentivizes people to not care about public healthcare.
Indeed. In Canada we have free healthcare and preventative screening but not everyone takes advantage of it.

No doubt a comprehensive screen at age 65 would explain some of it.

Edit: Indeed it does! Even those who have insurances prior to 65 see a spike.

https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/cms/asset/094169...
Insurance startup doubles valuation to $4B in 6 months
In the major metropolitan area in Germany where I live, I've seen this only once at a hairdresser last summer. None of the grocery stores I've been to has required this (though many now offer it)
The only thing I've seen Dislike count used for on videos I watch is to drive a snowclone about what hypothetical type of viewers would dislike this particular video, like say there's a video showing how to correctly position Protoss buildings to prevent a Reaper jumping into your base in the video game Starcraft 2 [an early game harassment which is annoying and could win if you defend it poorly], and the video has 12 dislikes, the snowclone comment might be "12 Reapers saw this video".

I have never seen a video which I thought "This is a bad video, nobody should watch this video" and had lots of dislikes. I don't think clicking that would even achieve its goal, clicking the dislike button is engagement and shows you cared about this content enough to do something.

So this change seems fine to me. Dislike will still exist, but now it won't cause a snowclone we didn't really need and it doesn't make numbers go up visibly.
Maybe it's the shortest total distance, but has a lot of stop lights along the way causing frequent total stops/starts
I don't have accidents, accidents have me. I refuse to ride the road anymore. Wisdom.
Google also explicitly says that it only does it when the ETAs are very close, so realistically, it will still be doing what you want. It feels pretty extreme to write such an angry comment about maybe getting a route than 1-2% slower.
Yes, I was so happy to get a $1,400 payment that costs me $5,000. Not that I didn't deposit the check....
Maybe do it as Roll20 does: use labels for known systems but allow field to be free if entry does not match any of the labels. It makes search a bit more complicated, but nothing crazy.
My favorite test is to check whether life is anywhere else in the universe.

If we were to follow the science, then absolutely there is. But if you checked and there wasn’t?

Unfortunately it would take more energy than exists in the universe to travel and a check everywhere. :)
If you read the article, there's an option in the settings to not have this option "forced" on you. Even when it's "forced", it's only defaulting to more carbon-positive routes when the ETAs are comparable, so it shouldn't have much of an effect on whether you care about the feature or not.
It is warranted
> Change a word, get a third

:D
Because the fastest route doesn't have to be the shortest route. Where I live, it's often faster to drive in the opposite direction of my destination to get on a highway. It's generally slower (by a tiny amount) to take surface streets.
According to Rhodes A-Bomb book, for the original Pile in Chicago there was a rope, and there was a guy with an axe.

There was a backup to the backup: people with a solution of something (borate?) to pour into the pile to soak up surplus neutrons. This was a really bad thing to do, for the future use of the pile: the carbon would be soaked, useless, the reactivity of the pile would be next to impossible to get back without completely re-constructing it so the Scram by lowering rods, was the preference, and was done by a counter for accellerated scaling aside from the guy with the axe after a while.
Gnome's dependency on logind came about because there originally was a dependency on a different library that one person had written, had pretty much stopped working on, and nobody wanted to take on maintaining it or adding it to Gnome itself.

The dependency no longer exists because some people took logind from systemd, made it a standalone package and called it elogind lol, and now you can use that instead of logind.
Why did the slave trade survive so long?
This looks like it’s bee inspired by Dave Ramsey. Great project. I’ve been debt free for 4 years now and I intend to stay this way.
facebook still has no way to voice disapproval.

They have like, love, care, haha, wow, sad, angry

Angry != disapprove because in the context of the other "emotions" it does not distinguish between disliking the post itself, or what it's referencing. If you post "Candidate X did Y" are you angry because the candidate did Y or because your friend posted something anti candidate X?
> If they aren't, it'll tell you that in 20 years everyone will be having -0.2 children and all the other species on the planet will start having to birth human babies just so they can be thrown into the smoking pit of bad statistical analysis.

https://xkcd.com/605/
Military and spy agencies accused of stiff-arming investigators on UFO sightings
I never had it super bad, but I started getting the signs: numbness, strange tingles, shooting pain and got one of these [0] from amz ~$20 (the green one), to help strengthen things and it helped (for me) immensely.

Oh.. I also got a trackball (Logitech MX Ergo Wireless Trackball Mouse).

[0] https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00066D6K4 "TheraBand FlexBar Resistance Bar For Improving Grip Strength, Tennis Elbow, Golfers Elbow, Tendonitis "
Canadian here. We have an extreme version of this, which includes a ban on private pay for anything covered by the public system.

It's a bad system, and what's worse is that it has become politically impossible to even talk of reform. Every politician just promises "more money for hospitals", "more money to reduce wait times", etc. and yet little progress is made on addressing these issues because nobody is willing to tackle the root causes, primarily misaligned incentives.

Our wait times for elective surgeries are terrible. Our use of electronic health records is still patchy at best. Innovation is extremely difficult - health tech startups simply cannot sell into the giant health insurance bureaucracy without going under.

Co-pays for "medically necessary services" are illegal, meaning there's rampant overuse that drives up costs. The patient experience is often brutal, because nobody is incentivized to provide a good one. If you have a chronic condition the odds are good that you will have poorly coordinated care. Specialist appointments can take months or sometimes over a year to get.

We have far fewer imaging machines per capita than almost any other Western country. Getting an MRI or CT can take a long, long time.

Instead of money, influence buys you faster access. Hockey players get primo access to imaging and specialists, as do politicians. If you know someone they can help you skip the line.

So if you mean "Medicare for all" a la Canada, this is a disaster in the making. If you mean "it would be nice if we found a way to provide basic coverage for everyone", this is a laudable goal that is eminently achievable with a mixed public/private system, where public insurance should really focus on the basics.

Healthcare is not as magically different from other industries as people think. Doctors still care about how much they get paid, how many hours they have to work, and how much time they get to spend with their families. Skill and efficiency varies widely across practitioners. Egos are involved. All of the human elements don't simply vanish because you declare that healthcare must be available to everyone for free.

Markets do a lot of things well. America does not have truly free-market healthcare, unfortunately, but you do not want the Kafkaesque, bureaucratic disaster we have up north.
I don’t know a health care system where you can’t buy secondary insurance on top of national health care.
"the code was all filled with hardcoded values, wrong structure, difficult to debug bugs and similar things."

If you can identify the problems you are 70% of the way there.

Also, PMs don't need to be able to code.

If you have good interpersonal skills, you might just shine in such a role.
I think you avoided addressing the most important part of the comment above.

| If you're reading this in China, or are native Chinese, I ask you...do you feel there would be consequences for you if you spoke up in defense of the protests? Put aside whether you think the protests are a good idea or not. If you defended them publicly, what would happen? Whether or not you support the protests, I think you should consider that question, and decide if you like the answer.

It's ok if you don't want to address it, but maybe you shall take some time to think about why.
It is about race. If you refuse to discuss that you will never understand American politics.
I agree that his views should have no bearing on his achievements, and for what it’s worth I found myself disagreeing more with his tone.
> We were all "locked into" shell scripts for service management not so long ago.

I don't think that's the case. Systemd was introduced with a SysV init backwards compatibility mode, so it was trivial to port services over to using it. Porting a systemd-only service over to SysV init is much harder, though. I'll be charitable and say that this one-way "interoperability" wasn't deliberate, but it does seem reminiscent of the way some proprietary software supports open standards for importing files but not exporting them.

> Either open source and software freedom affords us endless amounts of choice and capability

Software freedom is not a binary matter (excuse the pun), and different licences have given people different amounts of freedom in the past. For example, the FSF considered the pre-1999 BSD licence to be non-free simply because it required a sentence to be included in any advertisement of the product[0]. Another example would be "the Dissident test"[1] that Debian applies to licenses, considering them non-free if they require that modifications to the source code be reported back to the original author.

I think that when trying to determine the freeness of a piece of software, we have to consider the second-order effects it has on the free software ecosystem generally. If the adoption of a (hypothetical) piece of nominally free software caused other unrelated pieces of software to run artificially slower, or become insecure, or to no longer be developed, then that could be a net loss to the free software community, even if the new software has some shiny new features.

> It's got large adoption, because it's actually useful.

That's a rather self-serving interpretation of events. As another comment in this thread[2] explains, systemd at every stage of its adoption was made hard to avoid, and adopting it was made a one-way process. I also gave a more thorough analysis in a comment on another thread a couple of years ago[3], but it seems that the myths about systemd's path to world domination are becoming more and more accepted as people forget the actual history.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/bsd.html

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_Free_Software_Guideline...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26647130

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18879657
The vast majority of Democrats do support a public option, which is universal healthcare, and that's currently part of the party's platform. Whether to limit or abolish private insurance is where it gets contentious, and where support isn't as strong. While I'm sure the insurance industry is also a factor, the Democrats are more or less following the poll numbers on this.
Ironically, if there were a feature that only cut through small side streets and avoided larger streets, I'd use that all the time!
(April first) clowns.help – Uber for social workers
URL: http://clowns.help

This is a pitch I wrote during the last lockdown. Since German branding humor is currently is high in demand, I decided to share it today.

Firstly, the idea is inspired by the “UBER for X” analogy prominent in startups 5-8 years ago: Others get your dog groomed in 15 minutes. We get you a social worker.

Secondly, it is a reaction to the Covid denier movement in Germany. The protests literally look like clown parades. Maybe the government has to adjust?

Lastly, I don’t like that clown emojis are basically a trolling tool on Twitter now. I am a fan of humor. That’s why I wanted to leave a positive note.

I am not sure it would make a good startup. There is nothing proprietary – everybody can copy it and I am totally fine with that. Good jokes are meant to be told.

Maybe it is an idea to turn it into a Spinal Tap-like mockumentary. It could be epic scenes: Hundreds of clowns going from door to door to help.

If you have any “1. April” startup ideas maybe post them below or start a new thread - there should be plenty today! Happy April Fools' Day :-)
I understand, and I didn't mean to come across like I wanted you to write a dissertation on the topic.

I do find all of these issues related though, and that your comment is only naive because it isn't nuanced enough. Naive wouldn't have been the word I would have led with, as it is your word for yourself willing to be open to another perspective.

I don't find that action immoral because I don't find the state's goal grounded in morality. I find both agents to be amoral, with the individual's amorality being both compliant and reactionary to the state's amoral aggregate legislative process where the legislatures are inattentive and misguided and misled.
This is trolling, but as most of the HN comments here mention the dragon book and a careless reader may get the same impression, let me reply seriously anyway, and point out that the Turing award is not for that: https://awards.acm.org/about/2020-turing

It is for their pioneering research work in algorithms and theory related to compilers (some of which indeed went into some of their books later). Also, even if you consider only books, they wrote nine books, and neither of the two mentioned as most influential is "the dragon book". The first mentioned is the book by Aho, Hopcraft and Ullman: Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms (1974)

> a classic in the field and was one of the most cited books in computer science research for more than a decade. It became the standard textbook for algorithms courses throughout the world when computer science was still an emerging field.

This predates other major algorithms textbooks like say Kleinberg and Tardos (2005), Skiena (1st ed 1997), CLRS (1st ed 1990), or Sedgewick (1st ed 1983). Easily the standard textbook for more than a decade (and still used in some universities; it's still in print in some countries).

> Principles of Compiler Design (1977)

This is the "green dragon book", not to be confused with Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (1986, 2nd ed 2006) aka the "red dragon book" and the one people usually mean by "dragon book". This book is not even mentioned in the award citation. (Their automata book was widely used too.)

So the idea that the award was given solely or even primarily for the dragon book seems entirely inaccurate. The Wikipedia pages on Aho and Ullman give some idea of their work: indexed grammars, nested-stack automata, egrep, fgrep / Aho-Corasick algorithm, the algorithms that went into yacc and lex, AWK (Aho), and "one of the founders of the field of database theory" (Ullman).

[Edit: Shortened my very long comment.]
This looks like a governmental issue in my eyes: it's the government's responsibility to ensure that the roads are reasonable safe and the traffic reasonable regulated, not Google's. If a route is dangerous, something should be done with the route itself (not the suggestion). But if Maps' suggestions breaks regulations and propose an illegal route, I agree!
> I constantly hear anecdotes about people waiting 6+ months for minor operations in the UK

Emphasis on the "minor operations". Things are prioritised by need and urgency, so naturally you end up with a long tail of non-urgent, minor operations.

> how the wealthy/elites of Canada fly into the US for treatments

There's a reasonable argument here that the US system has advantages for the wealthy. Generally however this is seen as undesirable.

> Everyone in the US already does have access to healthcare

There's several issues with this statement. The first is that 32.8 million people (12% of the population) were uninsured in 2019[1]. The second is that even if you have health insurance on paper, it's generally prohibitively expensive to use, only kicking in once a deductible is reached that will bankrupt you regardless (40% of Americans can't cover a surprise $400 expense [2] and these deductibles can run into several $1000). The reality for many is that if they're sick, they tough it out because going to a doctor may cause them financial ruin.

> above a certain income level you're expected to shop for your own. I much rather prefer that instead of it coming out of my paycheck in another mandatory tax without choice of provider.

I'm not sure what your experiences have been, but the only context where I've been able to "shop for my own" provider was when an employer happened to offer one of two providers in their available plans, which wasn't always. Functionally I had almost no choice in my health insurance coverage short of specifically finding a job that offered what I wanted, which given my priveliged position as a software engineer would be possible but would be laughable for most professions. Functionally, my health insurance was a mandatory tax without a choice of provider, it just wasn't a tax paid to the government.

I should also note that I now live in Australia, where we have a universal public system where I am still able to choose my doctor and other care providers. In fact, I feel that I have far more choice here than I ever did while living in the US.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/health-insurance.htm
[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nearly-40-of-americans-cant-cov...
I'd be curious to know if that maps onto the lowest energy use in an electric car.

Because I've been wanting that feature for long-distance EV trips for a while now.
Indeed. Though, there are suppliers that will sell you thousands and thousands and batteries recycled from former low-stress applications at fair prices, so it would probably be feasible to set up commercially?
I'm happy about this, and I really hope they provide a transparent explanation why they suggest each route. I would welcome a list of the primary attributes of each suggested route like "this route has many stoplights", "this highway can be dangerous during twilight", "this route avoids quiet neighborhoods".

One routing algorithm I'm really hoping for:

Instead of navigating to a point, I wish Google Maps would let me draw a circle on the map and navigate to wherever within the circle I can drive to the quickest.

Often, Google will send me on a circuitous route to the destination pin, which takes ten minutes longer than it would to go to the parking lot off the big avenue a couple blocks away.
The government is on the hook for the majority of the sickest (most expensive) people in our system. Private insurance companies take your money for the majority of your healthy life and hand you off to the government as you move into your most expensive days. It's absolutely insane.
> than Google is secretly manipulating the routes of the masses for profit

That's the first I hear of this conspiracy, are there really people that believe this? FUD has honestly gotten out of control into very strange territory.
YouTube is a good example of players adapting to the game. Since view time became such an important metric, it’s been frustratingly difficult to find straight-to-the-point videos (that aren’t 10-second memes or TikTok reposts). It incentivizes repetition and meandering to stretch 1 minute of content into a 10 minute video.
I would still find it very ironic if Google would actually try to affect real world businesses that way. After all racketeering of online companies is why US ISPs wanted to repeal net neutrality so much.