skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, I disagree.

What I think would be more beneficial would be not only healthcare - but the health insurance market.

We need to commoditize hospital services while paying a great wage to nursing and physician staff and make for an easy payment protection plan.

This was ostensibly the basis for the health ins industry - but when they realized they could easily get evil/greedy they farked everyone.

The better model would be ubiquitous clinics with hospital services deployed via low-cost modular modality units. Think "MRI in a shipping crate" "OR in a shipping crate" "Davinci OR in a shipping crate with recovery attached - lower cost nursing staff on-site but the actual surgeon is remote from their home in Boston/SF/Dallas"

You build these modality modules like legos. You then take these legos and deploy them to places like walmart, target and malls.

You pay a set scale for physicians and offer STOCK and recruit med staff students to be lead by higher paid leaders who are the first generations mentors.

You then provide an insurance plan through this service that is a set stepped payment scale based on income that is much more competitive than modern insurance.

You have a fixed fee, transparent schedule of services.

So, you have a known cost for the modules. You have a set fee schedule, pay schedule and premiums schedule.

Make all this COMPLETELY transparent and partner with walmart, target and other entities to place these modular, full service, clinics.

The common questions that will come up will be: how do you provide ICU, ER, Acute etc.. care.

These services could be provided - but the truth is that this overall model is needed to disrupt the current failure of the US health system.

We are building multi-billion-dollar hospitals EVERYEWHERE - but have you seen a reduction in cost of services ANYEWHERE?

There is a clear way to disrupt US health, but it takes a multi billion dollar commitment over 10 years.

This is the type of problem Elon is perfect to get moving...

(Disclaimer: I design hospital systems, consult on healthcare operations for opening these new facilities and do technology consulting for the design of very large hospital networks - although at the very moment I am focusing on enterprise infrastructure consulting.)
In Haskell I guess it would look like this:
I'm still new to Haskell hopefully someone can improve it?

data M = M1 | M2 | M3 deriving(Show, Eq, Ord)

fromM M1 = 1
fromM M2 = 2
fromM M3 = 3

instance Num M where
abs = abs
a + b = fromInteger (mod ((fromM a) + (fromM b)) 3)
a * b = fromInteger (mod ((fromM a) * (fromM b)) 3)
a - b = fromInteger (mod (abs $ (fromM a) - (fromM b)) 3)
fromInteger 0 = M3
fromInteger 1 = M1
fromInteger 2 = M2
fromInteger 3 = M3

Is this what you're looking for? :)
The question of leverage can be an extremely difficult question to answer honestly to oneself. that gets even harder when you have to show the press/investors that you're staying relevant and continuing to evolve. Innovation for the web tends to mean redesigns, which users hate. if you admit to yourself that users have all the leverage, then you're taking away the go-to tool to prove you're innovating. Most CEOs and product teams would rather justify they're like Facebook or Apple in their own special way and do a shiny new redesign.
I never said they did, and I never said that Project Euler improved your programming skills (I agree with you there)

I was just commenting that IMO the reason that Project Euler comes up often in discussions amongst programmers is because many programmers tend to be the type of people that enjoy Project Euler style problems.
What part of the US are you living in where ensure is not used? As an American living in the US, this would wind me up too! But for all "intensive purposes" some just don't know any better and don't have the "gaul" to "care less."
99% of the time I read these articles that say $commonly_used_thing [1] sucks, the arguments are always "it is fundamentally incorrect" or some variant thereof [2], and strawmen [3] abound.

Where these arguments fall short are in addressing the simple fact that highly-skilled people produce very neat, well-designed systems that they are pretty happy with from a technical standpoint, and that make money every single day using $commonly_used_thing. If you can't acknowledge that $commonly_used_thing has some good attributes, and that it actually works well for many cases, I don't understand why I should take you seriously.

[1]: Examples of commonly_used_thing: ORMs, OOP, SQL databases, NoSQL databases, operating systems, platforms.

[2]: There are a handful of variants. I think my favorite is the magical phrase "impedance mismatch", which I think in non-buzzword-speak translates to "fuck you, I'm right"

[3]: Most-frequent strawman: the most essentialist, rigidly-formal version of $commonly_used_thing, when in reality, nearly every version of $commonly_used_thing compromises to cope with reality.
Agreed. Long ago I remember trying to get a non-developer to use cvs, which is much less complicated than git. It's not for everybody.
> The thing to keep in mind here is that NFC requires interoperability to be useful.

You could say the same thing about facetime, iMessage or airplay or other things Apple has released. Apple seems to be quite satisfied with improving the experience of people who live only in their ecosystem while leaving others out, even at times to their own detriment. I think they have enough power to pull off exclusive deals with enough financial institutions and retailers to get their own tech deployed into a lot of stores. So I don't really buy that they can't go their own way on this.
> What about the benefits of abstraction?

You seem to have a strangely narrow definition of "abstraction". Start here: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-4.html#...
No it doesn't. 17 USC 117 refers to software that you already have a licence for, and covers exemptions to copyright. ie. you're allowed to make a backup of software, you're allowed to transfer your licence to someone else and you're allowed to run it if you only use it to fix .

Note the phrasing (from http://www.bitlaw.com/source/17usc/117.html) of these bits:

...all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.

...that lawfully contains an authorized copy of the computer program...
We're already changing the applicable conditions. Not changing them is not an option at this point.

I understand there are always risks to sticking our fingers into something we don't understand well. But those risks have to be weighed against the risks of inaction, which seem in this situation to be quite substantial.

I suggested sodium hydroxide because adding sodium ions to the ocean is obviously benign. Seems to me the greatest risk from doing this is that the concentrated alkalinity will kill marine life before it disperses. I don't know whether that's a show-stopper.

I also haven't penciled out the numbers to see how much NaOH would be required, and how that compares to current world production. I have no idea whether this is practical. But I think we should be asking these kinds of questions.
hackpad op here. give me a ping, i think we can support you.
It is possible in principle to implement one in terms of the other, but in practice this is not what typically happens.
This is clearly his opinion, based on experience. There isn't really any good way to collect data on why a company fails. So basically by definition, it is impossible to do an analysis that would provide you with a citation.
or get the nobel prize, or start a company

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_E._Shaw

But, those are fringe cases, of course
There's a massive difference between "here's a little something to say thanks for fighting for our country"

Why should that gesture be coming from the Red Cross, an organisation that's supposed to transcend nationalities and help all people regardless of politics?
"But from a practical perspective OO is a great idea because it makes many things so much easier."

This seems true at first, but after having worked with C# a while I'm not so sure about that. OO introduces some weird issues that aren't immediately apparent:
1. Verbosity
When the shortest method call looks like "abcObject.functionXYZ()", code gets huge really fast character-wise. This actually does make it harder to read and debug existing code.

2. Multithreading
Multithreading in any programming paradigm is a pain, I'd give you that. But OO exacerbates the problem because of the way each property of an object is essentially a global state within its local scope. It makes it quite tricky to enforce thread safety.

Having said that, I'm not sure that rewriting it in, say, a functional style would make things simpler. Sure it is easier to prove correctness, but as soon as you introduce IOs, everything goes to hell. I guess OO seems to be the worst pattern, except for all others that have been tried.
OO is just one design pattern of many; it should be used when the mental model is a good fit for the problem domain. It does annoy me, though, when languages or frameworks force the use OO when it's unneeded.

Use a function when you need a function, and a class when you need a class.
How to Protect Yourself From the Flu
Try reading.

OMG There's a comet hurtling toward the Earth. Let's spend more money to model the collision! Will insects survive or just single-celled life? Let's spend millions on computer simulations of the collision itself, answering important questions about geology and previous extinction level events. Let's figure out precisely how bad it will be.

vs

OMG There's a comet hurtling toward the Earth. Let's spend some money developing a plan to mitigate the risk - move the comet out of the way, or destroy it, or in the worst case, prepare an "ark" so that humans can survive, or at least launch some of our most precious info into space (or on the moon) so that a future alien civilization will at least know we existed.

#

Obviously, the first case has no merit.
I'm surprised to see the above comment got downvoted. Do people think that excited acolytes contribute nothing?
I find grouping functional code along with the data the code is supposed to work on reasonably intuitive. The OO religionists definitely sold the world a bill of goods on the reuse arguments, and the religious fervor was silly (just like it is with todays functional zealots) but still.

Having an 'x' and hitting '.' and seeing what 'x' knows to do with itself doesn't suck.
"" When I would suggest that it might be better to start editing in some other area not directly theirs ""

Every hair on Buffy Summer's head has an article on Wikipedia. The above is not going to create a better encyclopedia, it is going to create an elitist, insular clique.
I'm given to understand [1] that cars, or at least buggies and coaches and other things like them, are the reason cloaks got replaced with coats and jackets, to the eternal detriment of cool. If you've ever tried driving anywhere with a full circle cloak on, this requires no explanation.

[1] Handwave, handwave... feel free to add [citation needed] there if you want to
The key word there is gigantic not OO.

All gigantic systems are crappy, no matter what their underlying language/paradigm is. Slightly less crappy is a win.
This is true to some extent, but a lot of it has to do with the fact that some OOP environments abstract too much.

The tricky part is in defining your interfaces and getting that right. OOP is one option, not the only one, and not something which is strictly an either-or thing.

The object oriented paradigm is a useful tool, but not every problem is a nail, and not every hammer is useful for driving nails.
Predictably Irrational covers the case of an Israeli day care center, though it's actually a slightly different story - in that case, the parents felt an implicit moral duty not to pick their kids up late, which vanished once the cost was quantified (in terms of a 'late pickup fee'), causing more parents to pick up their kids late, even though it was technically free before.

More importantly, when the fee was removed again, parents continued late pickups at the higher (with-fee) rate. That's the real point of both stories - once the terms of the agreement have been moved from the social to the monetary realm, it's very hard to get people's brains to switch back to the social terms.
Bing is a new-comer. But I bet when Google started up, they would have gained a lot by having good relationships with Yahoo and Lycos. Moreover, I would be surprised if Google is not pursuing a good relationship overall with Microsoft even if it tense and filled with lawsuits around the edges.
I've had a conversation about it on HN in the past:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4112517

I wouldn't mind discussing it again.
Probably as a garment designed to be easy to wash (it's small, and not visible so wear and discoloration from washing is not seen) and be changed more often than pants.
God I wish that attitude were more common.
That is an implementation detail due to python's object support. Dicts are a native type, that are hashmaps.

Unless you mean "object" as in "a thing"....
Ditto on the reminder of the permanence of any electronic communication.

My dad didn't work at Atari but years ago I worked with Eddie Babcock at Vicinity Corp (one of the early internet map services), so there is some nostalgia in reading his emails there.
Java is the reason that Scala has had any significant interest at all.
S-expressions don't excel at anything--the claim to fame is that they're good enough for everything. If we wanted to put macros into 1956-era Lisp, it'd just be something along the lines of:

(defmacro add-two (x) (quote ((quote +) 2 x)))

Not as clean, but not awful. Everything that should have a comma doesn't, and everything that shouldn't have a comma has a QUOTE.

So yes, I really like the `,@-style notation, but also think the alternative is tolerable.

(It bugs me that I can't think of a simple example that must be a macro (and not a function), but you get the idea.)
Ask HN: How do I start being a consultant?
I've been a PHP developer for 4 years (not in the US), doing typically normal web development stuff. I was wondering if someone could give me advice on how to break out and start a consulting practice. I love working with people and another motivation for me is to stumble upon a problem that I can build a app for.

I'd really appreciate your advice and suggestions. I hope to be successful with this and forge my future. Thank you in advance.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean here. Last I programmed Ruby, objects had member variables.
Alumni mentoring mobile app for students
A facile prejudice against fracking has proven an excellent litmus test to identify dilletante pseudo-environmentalists. It's an indication they have no clue what they are talking about and also don't consider carbon emissions a serious problem.

Many studies have been done on fracking, and there is every indication that with sound regulation and proper practices it is a perfectly safe technique for extracting natural gas. More so, using natural gas for energy instead of oil or especially coal is an enormous carbon emissions win. Far greater than any hybrid or even all electric vehicle technology can achieve. To write it off as an evil because you heard some anecdotal evidence somewhere just proves you don't take the fundamental problems of energy production and the environment seriously.
The problem is that OO thinking tends to inflate systems, spreading code all over the place even though it logically belongs in one place and adding object wrappers to things that don't need it. In my experience taking over Python code written by Java developers, I can usually shrink their OO code and make it more reliable by refactoring it into conceptually equivalent functional code wherever it makes sense and falling back on procedural style where appropriate.
Obama's healthcare reform is almost exactly the same plan the Republicans advanced as the conservative alternative to Hillarycare in the 1990's.

On the other hand, he did nationalize two car companies....
> OO vs. FP is just a matter of whether you focus the nouns or the verbs.

Indeed: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom...
I think they might actually be able to pull it off. $99 is probably too low a price point, but they might be able to attract some investment based on this so that they can get away with selling the first million at a loss. In that scenario there is a good chance the company would eventually go bankrupt, but they would still be able to ship what they initially promised. So in short, I think there is a fairly good chance of at least a break-even scenario.
You're right, it had nothing to do with it. It was a side effect that was predominant in male fashion before it came to women's fashion.
Well, that's cool. However, these are just incremental improvements and really don't serve any ideal of github being the most important social network. This would be more for a thread like "What are some bugs we should fix on Github?"
It takes all kinds. The world would be a duller place if all of us were chasing current goals.
The most straight-forward way to counter ocean acidification is to reduce the amount of atmospheric CO2. If the atmospheric concentration shifts, the ocean will release the CO2 it's absorbed and its pH will go up.

Granted, that's a pretty tall order. Ideally, we would reduce the atmospheric CO2 from ~400ppm (where it's out now) to 200ppm (where it was before the whole industrial revolution began). At the very least, we probably want to reverse the current trend of +2.0ppm / year to (say) -2.0ppm / year, so hopefully we skim under whatever the wire is.

Some researches claim that the Little Ice Age was caused by the reforestation of the Americas after Europeans accidentally killed all of the Americans who were keeping the content pretty clear of trees. [1] It is estimated that reforesting the Americas sucked about 6ppm to 10ppm of CO2 out of the atmosphere.

So one way to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere is to grow a lot of trees (or other plant life). And then do that every year for about a century; it's not enough to simply reforest even the entire world once, because that would probably only suck (say) 20ppm of CO2 out of the atmosphere, a mere tenth of the target. So after you grow your primordial forest, you need to chop it all down, bury it (or do anything else with the wood that doesn't release its carbon back into the atmosphere), and then plant a new forest, and keep doing it over and over again for however long it takes to get the atmospheric CO2 levels to where you want them to be.

So it's possible to counter ocean acidification, and maybe not even that hard (hell, you're even creating a bit of a "wood rush", since you're going to have lumber coming out of your ears by the time you've regrown enough trees to cover the world ten times over), but I don't really see it happening.

ETA: Based on the figures for tree productivity [2] it looks like you'd need to add about 90 million square km (5% of the Earth's land area) of forests operating at peak productivity to go from +2ppm to -2ppm atmospheric CO2.

[1] http://phys.org/news/2011-10-team-european-ice-age-due.html
[2] http://www.safnet.org/answer/kids_corner.cfm
You're probably right on a lot of this. But being a programmer doesn't require exceptional intelligence. Normal intelligence, yes. And a fair amount of patience. An ability to not get frustrated, to understand that things NOT working right away is normal. But it's not that hard. And you don't need to go through a formal CS curriculum to be a productive programmer. I don't think it's a cakewalk; I certainly know 50-somthings who I don't think could do it. Not a chance in fact. But I do think it's possible for some.

I wonder what we're all going to do when humans doing app development by writing code becomes obsolete. Yes, it will happen.
> No, it's not offensive at all....and it's kind of a sad commentary on humanity,

So what you are saying is that if it's not offensive to you then clearly everyone else is wrong?
>better response would be a prohibition on self-promotion or some other clear guideline, rather than a vague requirement of notability.

Eh, I'm pretty sure that is already prohibited. Or, at the very least, looked down upon:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_interest_editing_on...

Hm. So it's not okay to edit your own article, but it /is/ okay to pay someone else to do so?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Plain_and_simple_conf...

That... seems really weird. Well, not weird, but disappointing.
Analyst calls agile a scam
Bad Python by Graham Poulter
The list of the article reminds me of this post http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/1168/what-papers...
If tens of thousands of people in the world can dance better than you, then let's assume the maximum number of "tens of thousands" before hitting "hundreds of thousands" -- 99999. Let's assume there are 7 billion people on Earth (not perfect, but good enough for back-of-the-napkin). That means you are (1-99999/7000000000)*100th percentile at dancing: 99.9986th percentile.

If tens of thousands of people in the world are better than you at dancing, you're a really good dancer.
Thank you for saying it. I like Github. It's fine. Is it the new resume? No but it makes feel better to say, especially if we are under 22. As much as I like Github, I feel all these groupthink and just mutual masturbation about it makes me tend to want to not like it. This whole attitude just makes me feel like this industry is like lemmings in a way that no other one is. But maybe there is hope yet, maybe after four or five more years of this we may see the light and stop over hyping anything remotely social.
You have to be careful though.

Consider the question, "Why do we ritualize procreative marriages so universally?" Here we is pretty clearly all of humanity and there are probably some good functional explanations. For example, modern technology, reproduction is pretty heavily tied to sex, and men and women are biologically situated differently relative to parenthood. Everywhere, mothers are mothers because they give birth. Everywhere fathers are fathers because they are recognized as such by society (and this is only loosely tied to biological parenthood even in the most strict cultures like our own).

At the same time, what message does this send to folks who are GLBT? Is it saying "you aren't human?"

I think at some point you just have to come to terms with the fact that "we" will always have some exclusions and not worry too much about it.
Intel Core 2 Duo Remote Exec Exploit in JavaScript?
Maybe it taught you something else too. Maybe it has taught you, and anyone else who reads this only to add to the conversation when you have something worthwhile to say in real life as well. This isn't trying to be offending, am I am glad you found that, I just thought I would point out that you can carry that to your real life as well.
Every time someone says $commonly_used_thing sucks, people come out and point out that $commonly_used_thing is being used for $productive_activity.

It is possible to do amazing work with broken tools, or with the wrong tools. That doesn't mean these tools aren't broken or that they couldn't be better matched to the job.

Not that I think OOP is inherently evil. Reading the article, I don't think the author quite understands OOP. One example:

"In an OOPL I have to choose some base object in which I will define the ubiquitous data structure, all other objects that want to use this data structure must inherit this object."

If he really believes this, no wonder he's railing against OOP. That would be horribly broken.
If we fail to point out the harmful effects of excessive OO usage then there is a higher likelihood of encountering it as legacy code written by people who didn't know any better. This can lead to wasted time and decreased job satisfaction.
Startup metrics for pirates: AARRR