skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, insurance is effectively a form of voluntary socialism implemented on top of the free market. That's why it sucks so much in the first place. (Which isn't to say a purely market based system would be better; people buy insurance for a reason.)

As I see it, health insurance is uniquely bad for a few additional reasons:

1. People don't treat it as insurance against catastrophic events so much as a subscription for ongoing care, which greatly expands the scope of what costs are socialized.

2. It's often paid for through employers, which reduces consumer choice in deciding what plans to purchase.

3. Demand for healthcare services is relatively inelastic and with modern medicine there's often almost no limit to how much it can cost. If you wreck your car, at most your car insurance company is on the hook for the cost of the vehicle (and perhaps some additional costs up to a fixed limit). But if you're suffering from some disease with no known cure, you could easily spend tens of millions trying hundreds of different procedures trying to find something that will work to mitigate the effects of the disease, and that's an ongoing cost that goes on forever until you're either cured or dead. Somebody has to decide which procedures are worth it or not, and if you're not paying for it yourself that "somebody" isn't going to be you, which creates lots of inefficiencies and is heartbreaking for everyone involved. This is also why we end up with systems such as "in network" and "out of network" providers, and government regulations intended to make things more fair at the cost of even more layers of inefficient bureaucracy.

A few other thoughts:

> If you are anti-socialism, cancel your healthcare and just private pay for your healthcare.

Even for those who might be inclined to do so, this often isn't viable because of #2; they'd be leaving a bunch of free money on the table. I've also heard stories of some healthcare providers charging private individuals many times what they'd charge an insurance company for the same thing, though I'm not sure how common that still is today.

> inserting a group of middlemen into an already expensive system is going to make it more expensive

This is true, though note that government healthcare just replaces one set of middlemen with another.
It's good in some ways - value goes up, independent of governments - but bad in others - too unstable in value for day to day transactions, wages, mortgages and the like.
Google has invested and also drawn external funding. From what I've seen in the last 15 years since founding the lower bound for their cost seems to be higher than $12bn and I can only imagine expenses will only accelerate.
The Limits of Formalism in the Separation of Powers
Yes, that's the nature of free speech. Butt-Head is clearly a statement of opinion and not of fact. Apple is entitled to communicate their opinion of people. It is clearly not defamatory.
My guess is that journalism failed this election and social media won it.

* Advertising is failing for news sites, so paywalls are becoming the new thing. Those are a barrier to entry for most potential readers.

* As one of the largest social media platforms, X did made two key moves. First, they limited reach for users who share external links.[1] That breaks news sites' revenue and readership models. Second, the CEO of X came out as a massive Trump amplifier on that platform. Neither of these things limited users' access to information, but it deeply affected their access to truth.

* At the same time Meta backed completely out of the "breaking news" business (maybe on both FB and Threads ... I don't keep track that well).

* Trust in MSM was already declining.

Once the fourth estate was hobbled, social media, podcasts and chat platforms became the dominant means for storytelling. Not only were the Democrats not getting their act together on those platforms, but neither was the press.

Personally? Measured by the number of homeless people I see around me I think the economy is still pretty crappy even though my stock and crypto portfolio is doing great.

[1] https://techround.co.uk/news/musk-limiting-external-links-x/
That's honestly not the worst thing involved.

Another is that Nix as language is yet another of those "functional programming sounds fun, let's do bare minimal pure language and forget about all the niceties that proper ones figured out".
One thing I've noticed about the SF deployment is that it's slowly gotten better at this. At first it was very cautious about where it would pick you up/drop you off, but now it offers much closer options (from a menu -- a bit like Uber at airports).

I suspect this might be something that is human-added from data collected in past trips.
SolidJS[1] took the best from React and seems to be quite stable, check it out. It is fairly small and doesn't try to be everything at once.

[1]: https://www.solidjs.com/
iirc Trump campaigned on the sluggishness of the Obama-era economy. It was characterized as burdened and shackled, but not downright terrible.
You can actually do this in PICO-8 to display up to 32 colors at once.

https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=38565
Show HN: Screen Sharing via Browser
And it's no longer even legal to make basic cars without luxury toys like built in screens. Oh I'm sorry, I mean ""essential safety features"", that we managed to get on fine without only a few years ago.
List of all books, luxuries, and songs since 1942 on BBC's Desert Island Discs
https://pragprog.com/titles/pwrdata/seven-databases-in-seven... - A book by the same name. Instead of giving you a brief blurb on each database, the authors attempt to give you more context and exercises with them. Last updated in 2018 it covers PostgreSQL, HBase, MongoDB, CouchDB, Neo4J, DynamoDB, and Redis. The first edition covered Riak instead of DynamDB.
Hmm, seem to be some missed opportunities here. Has your son even considered adding some affiliate links? Maybe some sponsorship from some great brands, I'm thinking Geico, maybe Disney, you know work with me here. Instead of math (borrrring..) how about some fun product related questions? Like: how many calories in Diet Coke (if your son can clinch the endorsement). Maybe he could start reaching out to influencers for some word of mouth, you know what I'm talking about.
There's an ongoing trend of increased polarization, you shouldn't assume that politics and partisanship is the same as 20 years ago.
Not only people feel that the non viability of peaceful dialogue doesn't exist, it is a reality that such dialogue is not going anywhere. As reiterated by the Genocidal regime's prime minister, peace in Palestine is not an option for Zionists.

The solutions are not appearing to shrink, rather the solutions are made to shrik, deliberately.
That’s right you’d need to eliminate most administrative jobs, all the jobs at PBMs, etc

Then these folks can contribute to the economy constructively, somewhere else instead of being a giant helksink of cost. A win-win for everyone
Also, contracting out the menial labor makes Waymo's labor practices look much better. They can tell their engineers that all employees make a living wage and get excellent health insurance.

When the actual labor is done by part-timers with no health insurance making not much over minimum wage.
a scheduled day
I would LOVE it if there were reliable studies about whether specific vaccines cause specific conditions, how common those conditions are, etc. The CDC does not share my interest. Instead, they mostly just publish information-free booklets that attempt to guilt trip me into getting the vaccine. My experience as a parent is pediatricians attempting to coerce me to allow the vaccination of my child AND accept legal responsibility for any side effects. That is fucked up.

I was predisposed to be favorable towards vaccines when I first became a parent. But experience has taught me that those who push vaccines are simply uninterested in a convincing me, they are only interested in coercing me.

At this point if the CDC has a LOT of work to do to rebuild trust. I don't see it happening anytime soon.
> The interesting part here is... the Waymo has no reason to. There is no driver. All cameras and sensors are outside. It's just for not freaking out the passenger :)

We have very different thresholds for what's interesting.

The platform provides this feature out of the box, why would waymo go out of their way to disable it. Obviously potential occupants would appreciate seeing out the windshield if it's raining, why that is interesting escapes me.
With car usage on most roads free of charge at use and maintenance also footed largely by the Federal Government, it probably comes out cheaper long term to invest in rail.

And every car off the toad makes driving more pleasant for everyone who stays.
Ask HN: How do you get organized?
Hey HN,

I'm in desperate need of some help getting organized. I recently started a new gig at a big tech company after a bunch of startups. I'm starting to feel a bit overwhelmed due to the volume of stuff I need to keep tabs on, report on, etc.

In discussions with my manager he suggested I figure out some system to get organized and mentioned Getting Things Done.

For anyone who has struggled through this before, what did you do? Can you share some thoughts/tips/systems/encouragement?

How did you get organized?
Languages have deep features. That's why people create new ones (except for PHP perhaps). You can write BASIC in any language you want, it's still BASIC.

Languages systems or environments have still other deep features themselves. The library or module systems in Python or Perl or Raku do not work the same.

Being able to write "a short, personally useful script.", is a great start. And does not count as "knowing Python" except for the purpose of inflated resumes. The clichés of complaining about "line noise" or WORN (write once read never) - since the fine article was about Perl - counts specifically as "not having learned Perl".
And the tools are better than ever. Unreal is even moving towards not needing 3rd party dcc apps like Maya anymore.

All for free unless your funded or successful.
A nerd’s nerd. I am exactly the same, I think it’s because folks like a lot of the people that hang out around these comments are easily excited and self-motivated for the creative, engineering challenges involved, but struggle to produce the same kind of get up and go when it comes to the basic, fundamental packaging and presentation involved with marketing and/or sales.

As a graphic artist, I even get enthusiastic for a lot of the marketing, but as a freelance IT consultant, I tend to lose all motivation for selling my services the nanosecond I achieve sufficient income to get by, and revert to spending my time exploring and tinkering. We all have our own blind/weak spots.

I have often thought that some kind of service to pair creatives/engineers with professional development/managers would be really useful. I think that’s just called “LinkedIn”, but something more explicitly about entrepreneurial endeavors would be nice.
France's Gravely Mistaken View on Immunity at the International Criminal Court
That's something that Telegram always seems to get right, I've never seen messages out of order in different clients, and if I do something like upload a video then immediately send more text messages before it's done, it will shove the video in between the messages where it should be when the upload is done.

I know it's a much harder problem without a central server managing things. But consistency is very important for messages, out of order they could have a very different meaning and be very confusing.
Perhaps doing less in the user table and adding an auth table?

Split out the internal_id and external_id from the auth_id and dates.

Of course, this assumes you are controlling the input of the value for the external_id column. In the example below, the external_id is populated by calling a function to get a cuid version 2 ID by default. You may have some other mechanism that gives you a unique external_id.

Here is an example (in Postgresql):

create table users_hn
(internal_id int primary key generated always as identity,
external_id text not null default cuid2(''::character varying, 12, 'hackernewsusersxmpl'::character varying), -- or whatever method to generate an external_id
display_name text,
access_level int not null
);

create table users_hn_auth
(users_hn_auth_id int generated always as identity,
users_hn_internal_id int,
auth_id text not null,
start_date timestamptz check(start_date >= ((current_timestamp::date)::timestamp)),
constraint fk_users_hn_internal_id foreign key (users_hn_internal_id)
references users_hn(internal_id)
);

/* Intial insert of new user. Only generate this user row once. /
with insert_user_hn as
(
insert into users_hn(display_name, access_level) values ('John Doe 1', 1)
returning internal_id
)
insert into users_hn_auth(users_hn_internal_id, auth_id, start_date)
select insert_user_hn.internal_id, 'johndoe1@example.com', current_timestamp
from insert_user_hn
;

/ Update user auth table with new data, for a specific user. All changes to auth_id and when that event occurs are recorded here. /
insert into users_hn_auth(users_hn_internal_id, auth_id, start_date)
--values (2, 'johndoe1@example.com', current_timestamp)
--values (2, 'jdoe1@example.com', current_timestamp)
--values (2, 'johnd1@example.com', current_timestamp)
values (2, '(555) 555-1234', current_timestamp)
;

/ Get user info
This query will need changes as more users are inserted into the table. A function with parameter of the internal_id to retrieve a specific user, for example.

*/
select u.internal_id, u.external_id, u.display_name, u.access_level,
a.users_hn_auth_id, a.auth_id, a.start_date
from users_hn u
join users_hn_auth a
on u.internal_id = a.users_hn_internal_id
and a.start_date = (select au.start_date
from users_hn_auth au
group by au.users_hn_internal_id, au.start_date
order by au.start_date desc
limit 1
)
;
you have to schedule retooling, it's not something you randomly do
>DX7s don't go for a high price

It's a 40 years old digital synth (so trivial to replicate one to one), with no special hands on controls as a keyboard, and one with 150,000+ units sold, with about a dozen modern replications.

$400 would already be an impressive sum for such constraints.

But it regularly goes for 800+ in Reverb.com for example.
Ironically enough, the skills needed are so specialized that it's hard to make as a last resort unless you're focusing more on server backends than the core game loop itself.

>rewards are non existent for the <1% of games that are a success since there’s no significant profit sharing in the industry.

yeah, that's why the ideal endgame is to make your own game. Something you own, and/or possibly gather funding/teams for so you can play on your own terms.

But you gotta grind to get to that point. I'd say it's more important to have a plan going in than to necessarily steer clear overall.
*50% of your fare goes to the driver, as well as paying for fuel, vehicle maintenance and depreciation, insurance, etc.

Without a driver those other costs don’t go away.
Is that a wheel of time MUD? I feel like I missed out on something amazing…
He is legally the “founder” of Tesla.
// Fetch stars when page loads
fetchGitHubStars();

I do not understand why in the world so much of the code is related to poking the GH api to fetch the star count
Still getting the "dropped the ball" and I get every time more curious to try it.
Posted to reddit four months ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/1elfo3q/m...

Backstory: My son has been learning to code. We had a breakthrough recently. I wanted him to figure out how to use the Internet as a resource, so I gave him a set of increasingly harder tasks. He was encouraged to ask Gemini and Google for help, but to try not to ask me. Although it was a rough start, he eventually figured out how to leverage Gemini. This is interesting part: When he'd ask it for information, the AI would give him a wall of text. He would rephrase what he learned in his own words and ask the AI if his understanding was correct. When he did this, the AI would give him back a nuanced response identifying where he was right and where was wrong. This feedback loop leveled up his coding skills big time. In a few weeks of this he felt confident and comfortable enough to build his game.

Here's a link to his game (called The Gamey Game)
https://www.armaansahni.com/game/

And here's a blog post he wrote about his experience making The Gamey Game:
https://www.armaansahni.com/how-i-coded-a-game-using-ai/

He'd appreciate any feedback (about the game, writing, code, etc). He'll be reading all the comments.
> why was it successful this time and not every time?

The tools for fooling people are becoming easier to develop and deploy.
Surgeon General says loneliness is driving US into anxiety and pessimism
"If I told you, 'I went into my backyard, I made this pill. It's amazing. It's free. If you take it, it'll actually improve your health, make you feel better, improve your performance at work, improve your grades, boost your immunity,' you'd be like, 'Sign me up. I'll take that tomorrow.'" It turns out that's what social connection is. Just a little connection can go a long way in keeping us healthy.
This strengthens the Out-of-India hypothesis for Indo-European languages. The hardest evidence we have is the paleoarcheology of the Sarasvati river.

The peak flow of the Sarasvati was 10,000 BCE - 3000 BCE. Tectonic shifts and climate change caused the river to dwindle from 2600 BCE - 1900 BCE. From ~1900 BCE on the river fully desiccated and no longer reached the Arabian Sea.

We see hundreds of urban sites along the dried path of the ancient Sarasvati. For example, Bhirrana in northern India which has its earliest radiocarbon-dated layers at 7500 BCE.

There is cultural continuity between the early IVC sites (7000 BCE) and later (3000 - 2000 BCE) sites.

Now connect this with the vast corpus of Sanskrit works, particularly archaic Rig Vedic Sanskrit. We know the Sarasvati was described as perennial and large river reaching the sea in those works.

Later Sanskrit texts like the Mahabharata, with language features implying hundreds or thousands of years of linguistic evolution, describe the river dwindling and eventually disappearing "underground".

This means Rig Vedic Sanskrit was being used in parallel with the extremely large and advanced urban society in the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC), which was larger than Egypt and Mesopotamia combined, at least in 3000 BCE.

The drying of the Sarasvati, which is known to have preceded vast migrations from the northwest Indian subcontinent to the northeast Gangetic plain, may have well forced climate-change migrants north into Central Asia, Mesopotamia and the steppes as well in the gradual lead-up to the Sarasvati's full collapse.

The current idea that Indo-European language entered India ~1500 BCE is completely incorrect, and oddly there's been no attempt to re-formulate the Indo-European language origins theory to match the data.
Never could stand fall of civilizations. It just seems like an amateur that read through some Wikipedia articles.

I much prefer alternative like Dan Carlin hardcore history or the rest of History
To be fair, vaccinating all humans, dogs, cats and other animals that can carry COVID-19 was never going to happen before the virus mutated, so you could also apply the label to reality itself.
PowerGraph: A power grid benchmark dataset for graph neural networks
I've found it very helpful to make the following distinction:

Spec: Do X in situation Y.

Correctness bug: It doesn't do X in situation Y.

Fitness-for-purpose (FFP) bug: It does X in situation Y, but, knowing this, you decide you don't actually want it to do X in situation Y.

Hallucination is an FFP bug.
In my experience, it's incredibly common. I don't think I've ever worked at a place where this didn't happen.

It's not mystery as to why, either. Upgrading tools is expensive by just about every metric, not just financially but also in terms of disruption. Also, using the latest version of anything carries a real risk: the latest version is generally the one that is most likely to contain serious problems. It's better to sit at N-1 as a general rule.

Deciding not to upgrade, in the absence of a benefit that can offset the cost, is not entirely irrational.
It's a joke comment but it made me realize people see the "bit" shortening coming about differently. It could be any one of (and maybe even more, I just had to stop thinking about this before I ended up spending all day on it):

- BInary digiT [BIT]

- BInary digIT [BIT[ (i.e. "merge on the shared vowel")

- Binary digIT [BIT]

That's consistent with the common usage of trit if you take it as a "trinary digit":

- TRInary digiT [TRIT]

- TRInary digIT [TRIT]

- TRinary digIT [TRIT]

But if you're one to stick to ternary digit then you can end up with all sorts of unique combos:

- TErnary digiT [TET]

- TErnary digIT [TEIT] (no shared vowel to merge on)

- Ternary digIT [TIT] (the above humor)

Personally, the middle options for the first 2 sections (BIT and TRIT via shared vowel) are what I always mentally jumped to. If I was going to stick with "ternary" terminology I think, from a pure mapping of mental mechanics, I'd have ended up on TET (i.e. when there is no shared vowel assume the vowel was from the first word instead of the 2nd). The problem with that being TET conflicts with base 4, leaving you with either the awkward double vowel or the awkward end vowel pull. Or just calling it a trinary digit where you get the same consistency results as from BIT.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk (the things a hacker thinks about while burning their PTO I suppose?)
Or ANS if you want an equally general packing to AC but you care about performance. ;P
You are right and I do not think anyone making AI has much control over it either because too many people who make it are addicted to the process in a very similar way in which drug users are addicted to drugs. And also, the prisoner's dilemma solution is almost forcing a lot of people to control it.

So I really do believe that NO human has control over it, really.
I've worked at companies on both ends of this spectrum, so I can speak to this with some authority.

Company A(CA) had tons of open channels between sales, engineering and machining. Sakes reps had to spend time with the service dept every few months, helping with repairs and what not. One sales guy opted to do it more often because it helped him understand the products better, which helped him sell. Engineering and machining were constantly showing each other different things that could improve production. We barely needed management, leavjng them to focus on administrative crap nobody else wanted to do. It was quite wonderful and remarkably effective. I miss that job, actually.

Company B(CB) did the opposite. All departments, and I mean all had walls between them, both metaphorical and physical. Department heads were the only conduits and they were unreliable at moving info between depts, not to mention reluctant to work with each other. Things constantly had to be reworked, tons of money wasted on parts nobody could use, quality assurance was always an after-thought, etc. The company suffered and the customers suffered more, but under all that was embitterment between the engineers and the production team. Everyone felt miserable and micromanaged to death. It was nonsense, and even resulted in a short alternation just before I left the company.

So, guess who is still in business? CA or CB? Both shops are the same size and offered very similar products and services. Those are just two of my examples, too. I've been with a handful of shops for a long time, and the latter is always a hellscape to work in.