skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The bankruptcy stat is that ~60% bankruptcies were contributed to by medical issues or debt. Here is the study it comes from: [0]. Many people misquote this as the bankruptcies having been caused by medical debt. For example, the 60% stat includes income loss due to illness (40% of bankruptcies involved this). Only for about 30% of bankruptcies did the debtor actually say medical bills were a reason for the bankruptcy.

This is not to say the healthcare system in the US has no flaws. But it bothers me that a stat which found “loss of income due to illness” was more common among bankruptcies than medical bills greater than $5k or 10% of pretax income (~35%), constantly gets construed as “medical debt is responsible for 60% of bankruptcies” when debt doesn’t even appear to be the largest factor of medical-related bankruptcies.

And this misconception is everywhere. This article [1] says “The same researchers' 2009 study claimed that 62.1% of all bankruptcies were caused by medical bills.” and was the top result on google when I searched “bankruptcies caused by medical debt”.

Even Bernie Sanders [2] doesn’t get it right, saying that “500,000 people go bankrupt every year because they cannot pay their outrageous medical bills.” 500,000 is a little over 60% of the 750,000 bankruptcies that happen every year, and his campaign said they were referencing this study. I think there’s a meaningful difference between losing income due to not working while you’re sick and not being able to pay your “insane medical bills”.

Also, other studies have found much lower numbers, but I guess they aren’t as fun to quote. This is mentioned in the washington post article I linked:

> “Based on our estimate of 4 percent of bankruptcy filings per year and the approximately 800,000 bankruptcy filings per year, our number would be much closer to something on the order of 30,000-50,000 bankruptcies caused by a hospitalization,” one of the co-authors of the NEJM study, economist Raymond Kluender of Harvard Business School, wrote in an email

> “This would lead us to be skeptical of the 500,000 medical bankruptcies statistic, but that very much depends on how one defines a medical bankruptcy. … An enormous share of households have some amount of medical debt, so any survey of individuals will report a high share of them have medical debt but this does not imply that the debt caused them to file for bankruptcy.”

Again, not saying any of this is fine, just that if we’re talking about solutions it’s probably wise to at least represent studies accurately.

[0]: https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-9343%2809%2900404-5/pdf

[1]: https://www.thebalance.com/medical-bankruptcy-statistics-415...

[2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/08/28/sanderss-...
Meritocracy Worsens Inequality–and Makes Even the Rich Miserable
Sure! Thanks for saying that. It's very hard to know how to approach such a large topic with different audiences. We have a lot of materials out there with different aims.

The TL;DR is documents are wrong and often out of date. People rely on incorrect information and that screws up the work and the workflow. We are fixing this with a language designed to track and correct text as facts change.

Here's our new pitch deck with the 10,000 ft overview: http://invest.mimix.io
> Any of our HN readers playing around with shorting the stock of public companies as an individual investor?

This seems really risky without any institutional backing. If the market is volatile or "irrational" (WSB + GME for example), you can be margin called and lose a lot of money even if you're eventually right. Unlike a normal equity you can't just hold your short through volatility.
The chance of it producing any result is incredibly low. Imagine trying to pin point the start of an outbreak when the US might have had a handful of cases each month, by randomly sampling people. You'd basically have to sample 100% of the population every month to catch a rare event like that.
Yeah, that was one of the ones I was thinking of, I just couldn't remember the details— here it is for anyone else out of the loop:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/th...
In Europe, everybody wants to be a manager because mere developers is not high enough status. In the US, a 45yo DB engineer is akin to highly skilled wizard.
I have all google maps tracking "turned off" in my google settings console and it still allows you to save locations manually.
So you are saying that HN-types got theirs (the huge salary), so they should not care about others? Or are you causing them of a "I got mine, fuck you" attitude? I am still not sure what you are trying to say. But the fact that you LEFT the US that has that kind of dynamic for Germany, where income inequality is smaller and many things -- including medicine -- are more widely accessible makes me scratch my head.
Stick the macbook in a mini fridge and reap the cooling benefits
I was responding to this comment: "Even a line Googler doesn't normally have domestic staff do they?"
> > I think there are a lot of people who believe they understand Python because it kindof looks like Java.

> Have you actually met anyone who's asserted that Python "kind of looks like Java"

That's unfair.

> let alone that its resemblance to Java makes it easier for them to understand?

Yes, but maybe not in the way you're expecting.

Guido himself remarked on many of their similarities back in 1997[1]; They definitely have a very similar execution model, the syntax can be directly translated almost like a cheat-sheet[2], and yeah, I think people can easily convince themselves into thinking the knowledge -- even superficial knowledge like the aesthetics of one language can help them "comprehend" the other. If you haven't observed this, I think you either haven't been programming that long or you're just trying to look at what I'm saying too narrowly in an effort to troll for a fight. And it's not just Python: Norvig even (reportedly) almost convinced himself (in this way) that Python is the same as Lisp[3], and that's just bananas!

Now, if you still don't know what I'm talking about, this next thing isn't going to make any sense at all either, but I'm hopeful you can try to understand after some reflection, and if not you, someone else who reads this with an open mind: If you are using one language to understand another, you're not actually understanding that language.

That has a very significant implication that turns out to make Array programming really hard for experienced programmers: Because you already know Java when you learn Python (for example) you think you're learning Python faster than you actually are. It still takes a few years to get really good at Python, but in the meantime, you can lean so heavily on your Java-think you don't even realise it. You've benchmarked the rate at which you "learn", and you just can't get APL, so you might just say something impossibly stupid like "APL is hard to understand" when Iverson won a freakin' Turing award for how understandable it was[4]!

Maybe that helps you understand what I mean, but if not, maybe this[5] will.

[1]: https://www.python.org/doc/essays/comparisons/

[2]: http://math-cs.gordon.edu/courses/cps122/handouts-2014/From%...

[3]: http://smuglispweeny.blogspot.com/2008/02/ooh-ooh-my-turn-wh....

[4]: https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm

[5]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cBtqhq5P28
Maybe there should be some sort of condition, like minimum MAU or something. Only regulate those that grow to be huge enough for many people to depend on them. This would exclude startups but would still apply to Facebook and Twitter.
Funny, every therapist I've ever seen (4/4, none were Psychiatrists) has started discussions with me on spirituality. some even talked about christianity and/or god on their webpages etc.

As a very non-spiritual person it didn't do anything for me
If it wasn’t successfully performing the functions of an image viewer, don’t you think the user would notice?
My favorite part: "company’s recent hire of supermodel Gisele Bundchen to advise on governance issues."
I think you're API key might be out of requests. I'm getting this error, no matter what location I put in, even though the Location block correctly returns the coordinates for whatever city I put in.

Exception
Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-5-9b29f394b1fd> in <module>
7 location_response = requests.get(f'https://api.opencagedata.com/geocode/v1/json?key={OPENCAGEDATA_API_KEY}&q={Location}&no_annotations=1&limit=1')
8 if not location_response.ok:
----> 9 raise Exception('Location not found')
10
11 location_json = location_response.json()

Exception: Location not found
The first integral can be solved replacing the integrand with a series of sort. Notice that the expression inside the logarithm has zeros at

$\alpha = e^{\pm ix}$

So we can rewrite the function we're integrating as

$log((\alpha - e^{ix})(\alpha - e^{-ix}))$

which is just

$2log(\alpha) + log(1 - \frac{e^{ix}}{\alpha}) + log(1 - \frac{e^{-ix}}{\alpha})$

Using

$log(1 - x) = -\sum_{n=1}^{\infty} \frac{x^n}{n}$

We get

$2log(\alpha) - \sum\frac{e^{inx}}{n\alpha^{n}}-\sum\frac{e^{-inx}}{n\alpha^{n}}$

which is just

$2log(\alpha) -2\sum \frac{cos(nx)}{n\alpha^n}$

The integral of the second half of this involves a $sin(nx)$ term which will evaluate to zero for all values of \alpha at 0 and \pi.

Leaving just the integral of $2log(\alpha)$ which is just
$2\pi log(\alpha)$
A deep dive inside the Tesla Model S Plaid (UI, Yoke, interior, ANC, more)
$30000 bounty from Facebook for Instagram Bug
I'll take your word for that because I'm not privy to the details of early Amazon.

The better way to handle that is for Scott to get actual equity which belongs to her, not to rely on divorce courts to split up assets in a way which is sometimes fair. If she had been a 'trophy wife', courts would tend to award her the same amount.

HN isn't really the place to solve problems with marital law, however.
> buried in a 7 foot tall cupboard plastered in lights and fans that occasionally, randomly, sounded like a jet engine taking off...

There might be a market for rackmountable hardware with the much-needed addition of proper RGB lighting (for improved performance).
Biden Names Lina Khan, a Big-Tech Critic, as FTC Chair
Rents for single-family homes just saw the largest gains in nearly 15 years
Even a single person making mid-high 5 figures can be doing really well if they don't live somewhere super expensive
We literally just dumped Zoom at work. Why? Because Teams was "free" (Included in our o365 agreement), and it was just good enough. We have had both for a couple of years now, but nobody ever went to Teams for a meeting, and everybody is pissed... because it really wasn't as good.

We just had our first Teams meeting this morning, in fact... we could not figure out how to simply view the person speaking. Seems like it's always in split view, or that goofy "Together" view. Nothing makes you want to turn off the camera more than having your face on everybody's screen through 100% of the meeting.
But aren't eggs themselves overall much more an O-6 source than O-3?
I was referring to how well European electrical utilities like Enel and Iberdrola are doing. They seem to be leaders in renewable energy construction, not only in Europe, but also internationally. I guess they have lots of practice dealing with regulators?

> All international cooperation in Europe is controlled by the EU which means ultimately by the agenda of just one person (Currently von der Leyen).

1. All international cooperation in Europe is not controlled by the EU.
2. The EU is not controlled by the President of the Commission. There's also the Council and the Parliament, none of which can do anything without approval from the two others.
My sister got it and had to skip Christmas. Tested positive for influenza.
> Finance workstations with many monitors and Bloomberg terminals

The only person I know who has a bloomberg terminal uses a remote machine and just a laptop at home and he works from home. However he is not involved in day trading directly so maybe those would need desktop computers just for the graphics.... although maybe even that can be done via external graphics card since the processing power I think is already there on powerful laptops.... now I'm curious.
As a musician's tool, it's hard to beat a computer that fits neatly on a music stand and lasts all day on battery.
Agree, an Emacs-like environment might be the only place where dynamic scoping makes ergonomic sense. Sometimes I get actively annoyed when something in Emacs isn’t dynamically scoped because it impedes my ability to get stuff done.
A centralized blockchain can be a publicly readable ledger that is still only writable by trusted parties. A git repo works in a similar way.

For example: a bank uses a public ledger to store all transactions. If a mistake is made, they can correct it, but not by removing/changing the past transaction, only by adding another transaction to the chain which corrects it. Everything is transparent to observers, but obviously I can’t mutate my own account balance without transfering money to my account.

The major drawback of these write-only ledgers is the same as in git: if you accidentally write a secret to the chain, it’s there forever.
> In a world where free public spaces are becoming increasingly rare, we should strive to retain and protect them rather than make everything private and controlled.

by empowering a private company to profit from what this person considers to be private?
sure. but the point is, current "sso for the web" offerings have three problems:

1) the sso provider has full visibility into where you use their service.

2) sso provider operations are opaque.

3) other internet services don't trust them. (i can't sign into my bank with Google yet)

maybe we need an iana for authentication, but a decentralized database may be an easier sell.

or maybe with more time more adoption will take place of the big sso providers.

it still seems to be a problem to me and i favor an open solution over more reliance on large internet companies.
Ask HN: Best advice for Director of Operations at a software development agency?
I recently became a manager for a custom software development agency. I have the opportunity to lead our operations initiatives and become the director of operations. We have a lot that we need to improve upon operationally.

I have a lot of ideas and thoughts about how we can improve our software development process, project management, and project scheduling, but I would be curious to hear from other people with experience operating a software development agency.

What is your best advice for a Director of Operations at a software development agency? Are there any good articles/books about operating a software development agency that would be worth reading?
Repeating, insisting, exaggerating, emoting, etc. don't make something more likely to be true, or have any relationship with truth (nor does fabricating, of course). They have no value in science, law, serious news, or in reason in general. Somehow, they still do on some social media (though not as much on HN). IMHO, those kinds of rhetoric make something less likely - there's a reason people don't make a substantive argument, and the rhetoric distracts us from getting anywhere (which is sometimes intentional).

We can see now in the world that these aren't trivial issues, not sport and not isolated in effect to a fictional online universe; they have real, very serious impact on the real world. To me, this rhetoric is also boorish and a waste of my time. I am moving on to something worth my time. I hope it goes better next time.

Edit: I want to preserve this part, in case the parent is edited. Maybe you don't understand evidence and reason and argument? Sincerely, that would explain it and I'd be happy to help out.

> I guess I'll point out that my comments are more highly upvoted than yours
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27503656.
The GAO not being able to audit the CIA != CIA currently committing atrocities.

Your last sentence is also needlessly inflammatory.
Forzak: A website that curates high-quality educational content
A quick Google tells me that there are 17,500 au pairs in the US in a given year. That's not a lot in the grand scheme of things but probably doesn't capture all live-in or otherwise more or less full-time child care arrangements. And of course, it's only an arrangement a couple will need for a bounded length of time.

It's not very common much less routine but if I heard a presumably well-paid tech person tell me they had an au pair or nanny, it wouldn't cause me to think "They must have family money" or anything like that.
I think the real lock in is with serverless deployments. Its currently pretty hard to deploy nextjs to aws lambda on your own.

I thought they would announce a vercel@edge product since they made everything work with webassembly. Maybe later?
Indeed, I think there's a 3 layers of encodings to protect against different corruption scenarios. Trick is some equipment only does a partial implementation, thus the need for a tool like cdparanoia to recovery data from corrupted CDs.
I started to program when I entered university about 10 years ago, so I guess I'm a little bit younger than the average Emacs enthusiast at this point given that in particular here people's stories often go way further back, but I'm extremely grateful that our professor introduced us to Emacs.

I think I could have easily missed out on truly getting to learn a programmable and customizeable environment because IDEs and finished products in teaching were already pretty dominant at this point and it wasn't as much about tinkering any more and more utilitarian.

But Emacs really made me curious about reading documentation, tinkering with minor modes, doing simple things like writing my own status bar, and I think the great thing about it is that everything is in one place and interacts organically. The ability to introspect everything, change things on the fly, led me down a huge rabbit hole of reading about Smalltalk, papers from Licklider in the 60s about human-computer interaction, at some point later back to Pharo and a whole bunch of stuff I don't think I would have ever heard about in my CS education to be honest.

And all that aside it's still an incredibly useful piece of software practically. It's my editor of choice and people keep building new stuff for it. 'org-roam' is one of the better roam research alternatives out there I think and it's incredible to me how there's always someone who has ported some new thing to emacs.
It's definitely not perfect and potentially more fragile than it looks -- but when was the last time a 51% attack happened on Bitcoin?

Clearly this shows there is real potential for networks outside anyone's control...
I got a water based one which doesn’t feel bad but then I’m not sure if it stays in when I sweat.
That aspect gets largely ignored in any discussion regarding Covids origin. Impossible to follow those really early cases up, tracing the infection lines I guess.
> Wouldn't even be surprised if Windows itself would do a similar thing like GPU drivers and fix some compatibility problems for well-known applications

Raymond Chen (Microsoft) wrote a book about it all, and runs a blog which mentions instances too - sorry, I don't have the links to hand, but he is easily found.

For important stuff like SimCity and Doom for example the Windows developers tested those apps to find any issues, debugged them, and actually made Windows change its behaviour depending upon the app that was running.

It didn't even matter that a bug was down to a game using undocumented features as the team knew Windows would still get the blame from the public/press for it not running, so it became necessary to make sure they worked even if Windows itself had to have per-program hacks added.
And bitcoin powered through it all the same. The price dropped briefly, but recovered.

That’s pretty resilient if you ask me.
What is hilarious is that the thin imac weighs the same 20lbs as the one that was a few inches thicker and had better cooling and user replaceable parts.
Seems to me that the whole point of venture capital is to get in on the bubble, any bubble, before too many others do.
> A plumber needs formal education, at least in Germany. Three years of it, to be exact. And then some more to run his own shop.

Here's Europe's problem.

The same way you don't need 5+ years university education to put together whatever piece of hardware / software together, the same way I don't need studying hydraulic to put together hydraulic implements.
This kind of thinking is not, in the end, going to make you safer. Shunning actual criminals out of polite society - let alone people who have merely been suspects - guarantees they will turn to crime for subsistence.
To me, this doesn't feel like a bubble so much as fiat currencies like the dollar losing lots of value. Using gold price as a reference, gold has gone from ~$300 in 2000 to ~$1850 today. As the dollar loses value, things denominated in dollars but with real value like land go up. IMO, it doesn't seem like a bubble so much as the dollar is only worth about 15% of what it was 20 years ago.
I thought I had covid before news of covid even came out. Was googling “novel pneumonia type illnesses” and reading about sequelae. I had had close contact with wuhan travelers in late dec. 2020. Mostly fatigue and headache for a week, then the lung issues started and lasted a month or more. A few weeks later the first couple of California cases from China presented at a local er. Few cared at that point as the politics were inverted early on due to the travel ban, and also the super bowl and impeachment vying for the public’s attention.
I'm a gamer and my rig is a mini itx tucked away. I like it quiet and performant. Yes the market slaps RGB lighting on anything and everything gamer but it's up to gamers to buy them.
I don't have a reference, but I feel it's important to find something as recent as possible. Bike geometries, MTB bike geometries in particular, have changed in the last 10 years. And full suspension became mainstream.
.... I'd pay for that if its a good docking station as well!
Oof, that really is even worse, because you only have yourself to blame
>>So I went home and wrote them a check for $1,500, marked as paid in full, with a cover letter explaining my side of it. It worked. They cashed the check and I never heard another word

I hope it ends as you say (think of collection agencies)
That's a setup I wanted for quite some time and I know it was available for some time, but ubiquitous fast and cheap wireless Internet is something new I guess, also with all-day batteries all in a lightweight package.
Oh, I absolutely _don't_ want PDF reflow! The PDFs I read are formatted a specific way for a reason. 2-column, latex-generated academic papers, etc.

Reflow is one of the worst things to happen to digital publishing, IMO. I get it that it makes ebooks readable, but typesetting is an art, and one we haven't even come close to nailing in the digital realm.
I agree with your comment. When I look at various respiratory viral dashboards for North America, we had a pretty typical year in 2019-2020. Therefore all these people likely just had some viral infection (flu, enterovirus, rhinovirus etc).

The crazy part is how much that has changed now though. Now if they said they had a bad cold in 2020-2021 flu season (and weren't tested), it is almost 100% chance to be COVID. Almost every other resp virus has disappeared.
I am very price conscious and want an e-book just to read research paper pdf. I don't care if it does ssh or it has memory or i can write on it. I just want it to read pdfs. What do you guys suggest.