skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the insurance companies have posted record profits. They're not having money trouble

"UHC’s parent company UnitedHealth Group posted a 35 percent year-over-year jump in operating profits in the first quarter of 2021"
> I've done enough research to know what I'm talking about

The standard practice is for those making the assertion to provide their references or data. Since you've done the research, can you please link any published and peer reviewed research establishing that the health risks from the vaccine are within two orders of magnitude of the health risks from the virus? Including morbidity, mortality, etc.

> The smartest people I know have reached the same conclusion.

Can you please reference them as well so I can read their published content?
Edit: misunderstood, cannot delete. Sorry.
No one in their right mind should be using the default HTTP client or server. They only exist to allow you to quick hack something together. For any serious application you should always define your own.
Netflix: The Store
That's a good point in general, though the product example I gave was primarily funded by government contracts and (at least based on the negotiations) the contracts were far more sensitive to price than quality.

But I will say that my experience in enterprise software has been similar. The relationship between software quality and company success is more a bell curve than a linear one: if you neglect quality you'll certainly lose customers, but above a certain point if you spend too much of your budget fixing every bug you'll eventually lose to competitors with mediocre quality but lower prices and/or more capabilities.

It's all about finding the right balance.
This is why I find it hard to trust Apple products - if Apple funnels the request through their servers Apple also now has access to this data. Now, your personal data / metadata is available with more people than before. But you are supposed to believe this is all to protect you. /s

(And no, I don't trust Apple not to associate this data with a user's Apple ID and datamine it in the future - if your country has lax privacy laws Apple will exploit it till the law says otherwise.)

Edit:

Here's another perspective - now, even if I don't use Apple's iCloud backup or email services, Apple has found another clever way to learn about some of the marketing emails I receive. That information is very valuable.
There are fragments of discussion about the download timeout throughout the issue tracker, which end up leading back to this still-open but seemingly forgotten issue about adding InactivityTimeout: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/22982

I'd love to see this one addressed but it's not looking too hopeful at this stage.
That game box art is amazing. Lot of the concept art too. I was ready to laugh, but this seems like might have genuinely been a fun little game. Too bad Sega had no idea what they were doing around that time.

Seems pretty straightforward too. Could probably be mocked up with modern graphics in Unreal or Unity pretty easily. Though it might be worth keeping some of the 90s aesthetic.
Questions are more than welcome :)

No treatment, just a follow up cardiac MRI after 3 months which showed (thankfully) a resolution of inflammation and normal heart function. Was prescribed low-dose beta blockers if the palpitations bothered me too much though didn’t end up needing them.

As I understand it the typical approach is to wait and see since the majority of cases resolve without treatment - though I’ve noticed in the US it’s more popular to prescribe a low-dose cocktail of various heart meds. Not aware of any clinical data on their effectiveness in mild cases.
The way I think of it, which makes sense to me and maybe nobody else:

Quantum mechanics is completely deterministic. But the point from which we are observing it is random. (Not our origin in space, but our origin in possibilities.) The spread of a waveform is deterministic, but it seems random because we can't predict from which outcome our perspective will originate.

That's why the multiverse interpretation is (imo) the simplest way to reason about QM.
Thank you for the comment, I wasn’t aware of the BQN project, sounds very interesting to me.
It wouldn't make too much sense to run a distributed raft-based SQLite system in its entirety in a browser (via WASM). However, you can run an individual SQLite instance in the browser (via WASM) using this: https://sql.js.org/#/
> mechanical door lock

Power central locking doesn't need a microcontroller, code, or a touch screen, or updates.

> manual windows

Electric windows doesn't need a microcontroller, code, or a touch screen, or updates.

> no car stereo

Car stereos do not need a microcontroller, code, or a touch screen, or updates.

> no power steering

Power steering doesn't need a microcontroller, code, or a touch screen, or updates. Hell it doesn't even require electronics.

> no thermostat

Thermostats are mechanical...

> no cruise control

Cruise control doesn't need a microcontroller, code, or a touch screen, or updates.
I didn't really notice this resurgence of newsletters to be honest. But because mail is one of the few federalized systems it's pretty cool to see (maybe RSS will come back too? :o )

I also understand that you want to collect some data on how your newsletter is doing, it's just because mail isn't really designed for this that we can't separate between anonymized data collection and user tracking. That's maybe something RSS is better suited for.
But then it seems the problem is not ads, but the gaping holes in peoples souls?
Sure, at very small sizes where everyone personally knows everyone, there are a lot of things you can get away with.

I like the story of google, however. They theorized they didn't need managers, tried to prove it, and ended up proving the opposite. It's almost the kind of thing only google could do, that is a large enough company with the resources to run large scale studies internally, yet is curious and cares enough that they're willing to run such a study to definitively determine the direct value of managers and manager traits.

https://www.inc.com/scott-mautz/google-tried-to-prove-manage...
I think it's basically economics (the allocation of scarce resources that have rival uses). Farmer A may have water rights to B amount of water that let him grow $C worth of alfalfa per year. But if the people of city D would value that water at ten times $C, then they should buy the water rights from farmer A at, say, three times $C, and everybody's good.

> To continue to demand we accept the mistakes of the past forever to preserve the sense that government can be trusted is a gordian knot of a conundrum, but one we must, imo, slice open.

We do it to preserve the rule of law, which is a really big deal. If it costs more money and effort to do it that way, it's worth it.
Be that as it may, this is not a decision made due to financial pressure on the insurance companies.

"UHC’s parent company UnitedHealth Group posted a 35 percent year-over-year jump in operating profits in the first quarter of 2021. Despite earning $6.7 billion in a single quarter, UHC enrollees are being asked to pay more for their coverage."
Most solar panels from 40 years ago did in fact last 40 years, though some fraction have broken or clouded. Moreover, the rate of degradation slows substantially after about 20 years. NREL has published extensive studies on this. But manufacturers do not guarantee this (because nobody gets power plants financed with a 40-year term), and whether today's solar panels make it to 40 years is anybody's guess. It's common for manufacturers' ratings to be conservative, but that may have changed as they battle every last percentage point of avoidable costs.
This is in part COVID driven.

* Significant reductions in demand for standard services.
* Generous compensation for COVID services.
Shingles can cause blindness. Early treatment is very important. A friend of mine was hospitalised and left with bad scaring because they delayed seeking help. At least she didn't have any large bills because she was not in the US. No one should be afraid of going to the hospital.
Not every company embraces those sorts of worst practices. Especially hardware companies. Tesla and Apple are good examples of this. They have strong QA policies and make their money from hardware so they don't have to do all those "you must be connected" tricks. Sure, both still have bugs, but not like web apps and games.

Most of what you listed applies to web apps and games, not bespoke software for hardware.
Note that backup cameras are now a mandate for US cars: https://www.autotrader.com/car-news/new-backup-camera-rule-c...
In case someone has never heard it before, above is a variant of "Stallman GNU/Linux copypasta"
https://univ20.com/107631

There's an interesting article regarding behavioral observations on personalized advertisements, though it's in Korean. Summary for those who doesn't want to use a translator (KR to EN performance is typically bad):

* Generation Z's reaction to ads personalization category (from Google and FB) is somewhat positive in that they don't really care about its creepiness but think more accurate categorization on each personality as a better thing. The report thinks that they consider it as more of utility rather than just privacy invasion.
* More interestingly, sometime they "guide" ad targeting systems to show information that matches to their interests to save their efforts on searching for perfect matches. Honestly, I was super surprised since I haven't thought about this kind of usage even though I'm working on ads.
* Some of them (though the tone indicates that it's not majority?) does not skip video ads to "pay" a subscription fee for creators who they want to support. I saw some similar cases even in the US though.
* Sometime they're actively looking for explicitly sponsored reviews, which is actually an ad. It's because they sometime decide to buy specific products before watching its ads. This inversion of causality seems very odd to me, but the rationale is that they just want to better understand the product and don't care whether it's an ad or not.

It's written by a marketer who seems to be negative about personalized ads and genuinely surprised by these observations. Honestly... I still cannot get this but yeah, it seems there's some people who consider personalized ads as a tool.
Shingles could be one, actually. It can lead to permanent neurological issues.
There are also many types of steel that have widely varying properties.

There are some (expensive) printers that print powdered metals (including steel) that is later sintered in an oven. They're certainly not large enough to make a car, and even if they were the properties of the material are likely not ideal, and the process would be prohibitively expensive.
Centaurs at War
What a cool plugin. Didn't know it, thanks :)
this has been going on since before COVID
https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/payer/big-name-payers-earne...

In particular see the chart that shows 2018 and 2019 profits
> Basing the inflation definition on basic goods and needs at the time is a reasonable proxy due to their broad-based requirement by individuals

But what of non-luxury goods that aren't included like housing? If the CPI is to measure essentially the value of the dollar to what is required to live, isn't it useless without housing?

Why is housing left out? I surmise it wouldn't fit the inflation targets the fed claims to be attempting.

Either way, when a measure becomes a target it fails to be a measure.

Edit: Just another thought. Is today's produce even equivalent to that of 60 years ago?

Today's corn is genetically modified and soaked in `safe` glyphosate. If the CPI was honest they'd at least have to acknowledge that the food we eat today is of extremely so lesser quality.

Today's nearest equivalent would be to eat a wholly organic diet. If one were to hold the quality of food stable, that too would have to show a _much_ higher rate of inflation.
You know, I had some beef with the word 'engaged' a few years ago, especially because I worked for a startup that cared about happiness instead (an active question rather than passive inference). In that context, we realised it was ridiculous to ask if you were engaged with your job, we wanted to know if you were happy and so we asked the questions instead of trying to secretly gather the data by spying on your activity.

Now I downright hate it. What does 'engaged' even fucking mean? One definition is that you're 'locked', so your attention is locked with them and not someone else. A public toilet cubicle will say 'engaged' when someone is in it.

For an email newsletter, you can see how well it's doing both by the number of subscribers on the list, and also by how many people click through and read the full article on your site. No tracking involved, you just send out an email and look at your logs for an uptick in traffic.
If you're looking to invoice a customer, Stripe Invoicing is VAT-compliant. It allows you to customize your invoices according to your customers' jurisdiction requirements (like sequential numbering): https://stripe.com/docs/invoicing/customize. We're also working on providing VAT invoices after a payment too. Give us a poke if you have any questions. edwin@stripe.com
Dogs are a great alarm, decent deterrent, and wonderful companion. They somehow react to the very human uncertainty that someone feels when a big-toothed animal is acting aggressively. It's unsettling on a primal level.

If we need more deterrent, there are other options in the house, but it's nice to have early warning at least, I'd imagine.
Not to mention the preceding paragraph:

> When I started at Stripe, I asked to delay my start date until after a family vacation, but my manager just told me to start sooner and take time off later (Stripe was just shy of 100 employees and moving incredibly quickly). I now had an artificial deadline of one month to ship my first project.

That’s a reasonably sized red flag. Asking someone to miss a family vacation so they can go after some arbitrary deadline?

Yikes.
+1 that car was first produced in 1977 and it's still in full production with the exact same design.
Honestly, with Twitter and Facebook actually being more noxious than anonymous forums like Reddit or HN, I'm not so sure that anonymity is the driver.
Heh. So I ride with mostly Harley guys though I don’t ride a Harley. One of the reasons we don’t wave back when riding as a group is that we use hand signals to communicate and waving looks like a left turn signal. As a result, we aren’t allowed to wave on group rides.

Secondary thing is that motorcycling is just a larger and looser consumer tribe than Harley or Yamaha or Ducati riders. Not quite as large as motorcycles + trikes, which is still smaller than bikes, trikes, and scooters. To some degree it is turtles all the way down in terms of how exclusive vs inclusive you want to be.

I personally don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with consumer tribes. The question is how does each one treat its members and newcomers and is it a healthy environment for everyone involved?
> If you do not have a physical presence, you generally do not have to collect sales tax for online sales.

That was how it stood before the Wayfair ruling. Under Quill Corp. v. North Dakota (1992) and others, the Court had ruled that states did not have the power to force out of state sellers to collect tax for remote sales unless the seller had a physical presence in the state.

Wayfair overruled Quill. The Court created a new kind of nexus, an "economic" nexus, and ruled that an economic nexus was sufficient to allow states to force out of state sellers to collect.

Merely selling a sufficient volume into a state is sufficient to create an economic nexus. They didn't give any hard and fast rule for deciding what is a sufficient volume, but the state involved in the Wayfair case, South Dakota, was trying to charge tax on any out of state seller that had more than $100 000/year in sales or more than 200 sales per year in South Dakota so we know that is on the "sufficient volume" side of things.

The rule for online sales tax in the US is now this:

1. If you sell online to customers in state X, you need to look up that state's economic nexus law to see what their threshold is. Here's a good place for this [1].

2. If your sales volume is not under the threshold, you need to check to see if that state exempts your particular product or service.

If you hit the threshold and there is no exemption, welcome to hell.

[1] https://www.avalara.com/us/en/learn/guides/state-by-state-gu...
Crazy coincidence. I'm in my late 30s, now 3 days out from my first dose of Pfizer.

I woke up kinda uncomfortable today. Like I'd already had too much coffee just getting out of bed. Within an hour I felt significanty stressed, and I had vague pressure throughout my upper chest, both sides. I was convinced it was my first ever panic attack since it didn't feel like a life ending threat.

No acute or vague pains either. My heart rate was elevated like I was currently on a pleasant walk (I was laying on the floor wondering what to do). Apple Watch didn't think anything was worth alerting about.

The peak of the "event" lasted about 20 minutes, and I went for an actual walk once I calmed down a bit. I felt comfortable enough to join my personal trainer for a pretty heavy workout a couple hours later. No issues during the workout, but a few hours post-workout now, I don't feel the usual calm/tired feeling. Still kinda feeling like I've had too much caffeine.

I'm now wondering if this is what happened to me.
Can you tell us more about what they do well? I’m a dev who has often been encouraged to consider management but I’ve scared of the Peter Principle. I’m keen to learn from good examples.
Show HN: Hypergraph, a Rust data structure library to create directed hypegraphs
> People shouldn't be publishing such libraries, nor should people be using them.

That's why we have pre-1.0 version numbers (and alphas and betas) - they let us release code early for people to provide feedback before we've committed to a non-breaking API.

Even with a stable 1.0 release things change. People using the library may come up with logical feature requests that the original design didn't consider, and which require backwards incompatible changes. That's when you bump to a 2.0 release.

My dream project would have a version number of something like 1.237 - meaning there have been 237 new features releases since the 1.0 release without backwards compatibility breaks. My hat is off to any project that pulls that off though, it's a rare accomplishment!
Sure, in this different hypothetical world with no deflation or inflation the Rockefeller heirs preserve rather than increase the buying power of their capital by refusing to allow it contribute to growth for several decades. That doesn't necessarily sound deserved either.

Especially when we consider that zero inflation is achieved by higher interest rates, generating higher compounding returns for the wealthy who do invest, imposing higher borrowing costs on everyone else, and leading to slightly lower growth compared with a modest, predictable rate of inflation. Probably more recessions too, since struggling companies can't cancel pay rises they never award and probably go straight for redundancies. These aren't upsides for people who don't have piles of cash they're uninterested in doing anything with
Classically, you have gastroenteritis (stomach flu) and appendicitis both presenting with stomach pain, or myocardial infarction and heart burn both presenting with chest pain. A policy like this will result in deaths for those that occupy the middle ground between Medicaid and having enough money to not worry about medical bankruptcy.
>Autonomous driving is an extremely difficult problem,

Is it really that difficult? I often assume this difficulty comes from real world situation where you have human drivers on the same street and people walking pass.

What if none of these are problems. And all cars in the X state have to be AV Lv4?
The US considered ETIM a terrorist organization before they became useful got reframed as freedom fighters: https://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/p...
I never understood the idea of newsletters.

If you have the material for one, why not just put it up as a website? Provide people with RSS feeds? Maybe link the posts to FB/Instagram/TikTok whatever.

Why do I need to get that stuff as an email?
Ok ok I see it in e.g., https://nn-512.com/browse/NN-512#64.

The anchor tags for the listings go to top instead of being self-referencing. Is that a bug?

Like

format = `<h3 id="%d"><a href="#0">%s</a></h3>` +

Should be

format = `<h3 id="%d"><a href="#%d">%s</a></h3>` +

And Fprintf should duplicate a parameter?
> Given Apple's monopoly advantage with their preinstalled Mail app, we don't need much of an uptake from what they're calling Mail Privacy Protection to break the dam on spy pixels. You can't really say anything authoritatively about open rates if 5-10-30-50% of your recipients are protected against snooping, as you won't know whether that's why your spy pixel isn't tripping, or it's because they're just not opening your email.

This doesn't seem true -- I imagine that most tracking providers will start to simply ignore all link opens from Apple's proxy (I assume they'll be using Apple's IP ranges or otherwise be 'detectable').

DHH doesn't seem to recognize that Apple opens the link irrespective (the spy pixel will /always/ trip, not /never/ trip), so it should even be really easy to figure out which users are using Apple Mail.

That being the case, folks will only lack open data for Apple customers, without polluting the rest of the dataset.
Kraftful (YC S19) hiring a founding engineer to build an IoT platform
Healthcare providers tend to overcharge in proportion to how unnegotiable the service is. For example, ambulance charges are a great way to make money, because the person on the hook for the ambulance typically isn't in a position to decline ambulance service.

I agree with the implementation because it puts the burden in the right place. The error here is not that the insurer is denying payment, but that the hospital is then passing the bills onto the patient.

Somehow, we have to reduce unnecessary use of emergency services. The doctors correctly point out that patients can't make that decision. Since the doctors _can_ make that decision, they should be involved in helping reduce ER misusage. The insurance company is setting up the correct incentives for the hospital to do exactly that; however, the hospital is dodging the incentives by passing costs to the patient. So the hospital is in the wrong here.
I think you are missing the point. The problem is what do those features mean?

Is the stereo just an AM/FM radio? Does it have a CD player? A CD changer (how many people even buy CDs anymore)? Does it get satellite radio? Does it have AUX input? Does it have Bluetooth? Is there an interface to communicate to the the Bluetooth device (people driving around controlling their stereo from their phone is more dangerous than people doing the same on their car's touchscreen)? Can it stream music without a Bluetooth connection? Does it have Spotify? What about Apple Music? Does it offer handsfree control? And so on.

There simply isn't a universal definition of what a "dumb car" would be and not everyone is going to desire the same set of features.
i use to help my uncle bale hay. I would drive the truck and pull the trailer in the pasture while he and my cousin loaded the bales. I was around 9 or 10 and it was the coolest thing i had ever done ( at the time ) hah.
> This is only a problem if you're already assuming we do everything based on our biological reward systems

Is there some other way that we are do it beside our biological reward system? It sure looks like we get an apple and not an infinite reward when we pick the right answer to be selecting button B. I understand that might not satisfy you.