skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Umm, the point was more about the rule, not the specific numbers. Most of the little quad's like the parrot(1) can free-fall unpowered right onto your head and cause little injury, but you are absolutely not allowed to use the pictures your parrot sends back for any commercial purpose whatsoever. Even as a hobbyist, you are not allowed to fly your parrot outside of direct line of sight, even though its technology clearly begs to be used this way.

Also bear in mind that a 5 pound sponge that hits you at 30 might be a bit more pleasant than a 5 pound chunk of concrete. Perhaps I should have worked out a formula for average density per unit of speed modulated by compressibility,
but again, that's not the point. First, acknowledge we need common sense rules that allow a great deal of freedom at the bottom end. Worry about the specifics later.

The worst thing that can happen is that all unapproved drone flights remain off limits "for our safety" and exceptions are made only for those rich and patient enough to clear a bunch of bureaucratic hurdles (which will become higher each year as bigcorps dominate the space and lobby to "increase our safety" and keep the upstarts out).

(1) I am well aware that a parrot weighs less than 5 lbs.
For complex reasons, I was without insurance for a couple days last week.

I happened to have an appointment schedule. I went into the clinic and, since it was my first time there, I filled out a stack of paperwork. And then they told me my insurance was inactive.

So I figured, whatever, I'll pay it out of pocket and file for reimbursement. I asked how much the specific service I was requesting would cost. And they had no idea. They refused to tell me, other than to say "well, we charge a hundred dollars up front and then you pay the rest of the bill after you are done".

I ask to see their cash price list, because every sane facility I've ever been to has a cash price list with prices that are 1/2 to 1/4 of the insurance price. And they don't have one.

So I ended up leaving. It's amazing just how perverse health insurance has become, that it can so affect the delivery of medical care that the facility cant/wont give an up front estimate.

I wasnt even there for anything complex - just a standard glucose diabetes test. They probably do ten a day.
But then again: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2y2/willpower_not_a_limited_resource...
how do we know we're caring about "very bad" things in the right proportions?

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_military_confli...

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_2003-2010

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents,_Ja...

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Drone_Strikes_in_Pakist...

- (if this is really only about deaths, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate)
I read the book a few months ago and thought it was excellent. If anyone is interested, I took extensive notes (warning, they kind of spoil reading the book, which I think is very much worth reading): http://leopolovets.com/blog/2011/10/23/book-notes-on-willpow...
I lived in Canada for 10 years. I left precisely because of the awful healthcare being denied my son, despite laws stating to the contrary. My son suffers because so-called medical professionals sat on his case (Autism) for more than a year, with excuse after excuse, problem after problem. Some of the people blamed budget issues, others lied, others through sheer incompetence. I'm not exaggerating. There is nothing that will piss you off more than being lied to by multiple people from one of Montreal's "leading" children's hospitals.

My wife is Canadian. She was just as fearful hearing the stories, and loved Canada's health care. Until we needed it, and it failed our son.

He got more help in the first 2 weeks here in Pennsylvania then he got in Canada after more than a year of fighting to get every bit of care he could get. Do you know what it was like being told of the additional challenges he would face because he didn't get help when he was first diagnosed (1 1/2 years). Now my second son is getting tested, as he might be autistic as well. But the process is massively different. He will do much better, and the system is already working for him. The cost to us? Nothing. Not a dime, and not because I have insurance. It's provided, by the state. I pay less now then I was paying before for my health care. Sorry, but the taxes in Quebec are steep, and everything gets taxed.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: it was nothing more than child abuse. My son suffered because the system failed him willingly. Knowingly. They knowingly harmed him, and others like him (I kid you not, the government mandated what effectively is abuse).

If you choose to have children in Quebec, good luck. If they have special needs, flee. Do not wait and try to work with the system. Leave as soon as you can. Do not wait. I wish someone had told me that.

Edit: At the time (and I imagine it's still the case) the law required he be given help within 3 months. This couldn't happen, because of budget issues we were told. These budget issues were set by the government, in part, because they don't believe in science. The politicians voted to limit the budget for autism cases to, iirc, around $20 million. This is despite the fact that all the research points to early intervention being critical. If he'd gotten help at 1 1/2 years old, or at least within the time dictated by the law, he would be far more along then he is now.

So no. No respect for a government that places government mandated culture ahead of the health and well being of its citizenry.
A large number of people happen to select the iPhone over alternatives. That does not mean Apple loses the right to design the iPhone.

Ask Microsoft how that reasoning worked out for them.
I agree, and I feel it used to work even better in that respect, when educated Americans typically had lifetime employment. I would guess that's one reason the debate is growing louder lately. The West basically solved the healthcare problem via collective coverage, but in different ways: the European countries did it nationwide, but the US did it with employer group plans. That was almost equivalent, for people with good jobs, as long as people stayed in jobs for life: having the IBM group plan was about as good as having state health coverage, as long as the IBM job was more or less for life.

It's more broken if you're middle-class-or-below (as you mention) or an entrepreneur who isn't either early-20s-and-healthy or raking in huge piles of cash. The part that seems most out of keeping with the American ethos is how anti-entrepreneur it is: you get good collectivized coverage if you work for IBM or Microsoft or Google (because it's socialized across their employee base), but if you start your own company or are trying to buy insurance for a 10-person company's employees, well then you're screwed.
I think you're over blowing the latency problem. European users interact with US hosted startups all day long and it's not like you hear us complaining.

Re: hardware.
The choice is nice to have and their EX6 and up packages are "proper" server grade (as in Xeon and ECC). EX6 machines start at EUR69 which is fantastic if you ask me.

Edit: as for rudeness - chalk it up more to a disagreement over what constitutes "desktop-grade hardware" (and your omission of their higher level hardware offerings)
This is putting things exactly backwards. The argument is roughly "Treating a minor condition cost $24k, which could wipe people out financially, therefore PPACA is important."

Where is the outrage over this price? What part of PPACA does ANYTHING to reduce this cost? PPACA does essentially 2 things: 1) It makes insurance "affordable" for people who previously couldn't obtain it at all. 2) Drastically increases demand for health care, without adding to supply or controlling costs any other way.

Insurance is simply a distribution of cost over a risk pool. If relatively mundane life happenings cost $24k, and nothing is being done to fix that, we're in real trouble, and I think we are.

Nothing done to increase the pool of doctors. Nothing done to control medical lawsuit costs, which transfer money from the insurance pool to individuals. Nothing done to control the cost of drugs (and in some cases, aggravated by making more expensive drugs "free").

Bring the cost down to $2,400 and "wiping people out" isn't as big a concern.
I think you've misread my comment. I said prescription medication is not covered by Canadian healthcare, except for some provincial policies which cover some low-income families.

Price control for medication != free medication for Canadians or the removal of the burden of paying for medication for people with a serious health condition, which can still be significant. Which was the original point of the OP (in addition to the cost of dental work).
Having experienced emergency care in both Denmark and the U.S., this is also the main reason I won't relocate to the U.S. until this is sorted out.

LOL. Go to the emergency room now in the US, with a real emergency, wait for hours. After this is sorted? Wait for days, maybe?

Our health system is completely broken in every way, and building up more bureaucracy is just going to make it worse.

I am counting on hospital visits not even being an option in the future, in the US.
>You're paying for the ability to drop in on a broadway show every day even though you'll likely do it only once every 3-5 years.

That's true for some people, and for them it's probably not a great idea to pay extra for a theoretical access to things they barely use. On the other hand, when I lived in London I went to see a play 2-3 times a month for the four years I lived there. If I moved back there, the theatre would be major reason why.
> They hate the 1% (which created a lot of jobs and innovation) for no good reason.

Envy and covetousness aren't "good" reasons, but they are certainly reasons humans have used to hate each other throughout history.

> France made it so easy to get welfare and taxes so high (40-50%) that it's better to collect welfare then actually do any work

Romney's ad criticizing Obama's rollback of the requirement established under President Clinton, that welfare recipients must actively look for work, speaks to exactly this point.

I wonder if technology will ever make this model sustainable -- if we have most of our farms, factories and mines run by robots and computers with minimal human intervention, could we produce enough food, clothing, shelter, and basic necessities for everyone if the only people who work are those who wish to do so?

The reason Republicans have produced mediocre candidates for a while is that the party has too many constituencies: You have the religious right (mainly concerned about moral decay and social issues, think Huckabee), the neocon faction (pro-big-government and foreign policy hawks, think GWB), and the libertarians (Tea Party, Ron Paul -- mainly in favor of smaller government and lower taxes).

Their traditional base is dwindling; a near-majority of people don't pay any federal taxes, so can't be bribed by tax cuts and are very uncomfortable with social-program cuts. Religion is on the decline. We haven't suffered any major terrorist attacks lately, and GWB's wars have left many interventionists with a sour taste in their mouths. So they're trying to reach out to new constituencies; in this election cycle, it's immigrants and women, judging by the convention speeches.

We need a strong candidate who can fix the mess before we become locked circling the drain that France has gone down. It's hard to see this candidate coming from either party.
It wasn't a minor condition. It was a staph infection. Don't let the term bugbite mislead you. His son wasn't in the hospital for a bugbite. He was in the hospital for a life threatening infection from an antibiotic resistant infection. That is far from minor.

Disclaimer: I'm not arguing for PPACA in any way but if you are going to base you argument on billing for a "minor" condition then make sure it's actually a minor condition.
Curious. It seems either Canadian healthcare isn't the panacea we Americans think it is or there a number of Canadians who post here that don't know about their plans.

My thought is the situation is analogous to each US state and their safety net medical programs. Means based? Is this correct?
Researchers Expose Locations of Pirate Bay Uploaders
I don't think they're very fast. On HN we've kicked around the idea of attaching a balloon to a quadcopter or similar to extend its range.
> The don't need to, they got Microsoft to buy a license.

I'd be willing to bet good money the the reason that Apple licensed iOS UI patents to Microsoft was to make Microsoft sign something saying that they wouldn't copy the iOS UI too closely, rather than for Apple to make a killing on licensing fees. Making a killing on licensing fees is Microsoft's approach, which they have used successfully against Android.

Apple took this same approach they're taking now back with Windows 1: They licensed Mac OS UI elements to Microsoft, but then ultimately sued Microsoft when Apple felt that Microsoft violated the terms of that license and made a UI that was too similar in look-and-feel to Mac OS.

If anything, this is evidence that Apple is not trying to squelch competition or innovation. They don't seem to mind competition at all, and will even license their technologies, as long as other companies aren't slavishly copying Apple's design.
Yes, I'm aware of PharmaCare. Sure, they theoretically cover insulin; but if you read the fine print about which insulins they cover, it's not so helpful.

An example of their craziness: They cover insulin pumps for children under 18, but they don't cover the types of insulin which work in insulin pumps.
We already have progressive tax rates which try to capture this.

The problem that is being struggled with is that HNWI don't have frequent taxable events, generally because they hold assets and make savings. However there is a perception they aren't providing value (which is mostly wrong).

Generally any scheme you come up with to get at them will also affect everyone else, and to a far greater degree since they have less money and diversity to start with. And the HNWI have far greater incentive to move their money and themselves, as well as pay people to work out how to retain their money. You can move to almost any country in the world by plonking down a lump sum as an "investment" or as savings. (eg see how Dotcom ended up living in New Zealand.)

The usual solution to this is to try tweaking the tax code, seeing what the effects are and repeating. However scumbag politicians and the people who vote for them distort that process, so it doesn't have the intended effect.

An actually representative democracy would be a good first step rather than tax rate changes. Watch this talk about the US - the UK pretty much follows behind a few years later https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik1AK56FtVc
A young coworker had an ATV accident. It was ugly, but not so bad that they weren't on IM within days talking about work.

Total bill: just shy of $100,000.

A friend's son had appendicitis. Uneventful appendicitis.

Total bill: neighborhood of $35,000.

Add to this: tens of millions of people are, despite any debilitating medical conditions or even better-than-even likelihood of incurring anomalous medical expenses at all, actuarially precluded from getting insurance on the private market. There are very long lists of widespread health conditions, most of them "chronic", most of them minor, that will land you on automatic exclusion lists (not "we will cover you but not for this condition", but, "we will not issue a policy for you at all"). Particularly if you are a woman with a functioning reproductive system.

Once again I say: I cannot understand how anybody who runs a software business or who aspires to run a software business could possibly oppose guaranteed-issue health insurance. I dealt with many dramatic problems during the operation of the company I cofounded in 2005, but the only one that was almost intractable was trying to obtain private coverage for my family. Fortunately, my wife Erin got a tech job with group health coverage and we dodged the bullet until Matasano got its own group plan.

Employer-sponsored group health insurance is a terrible system. It increases costs on new businesses and adds uncertainty to their financial planning, while at the same time retarding labor mobility. It introduces a principal/agent problem between the people selecting plans and the people who use them. Because this idiotic scheme is tax-advantaged, it incentivizes the creation of a bizarre slush fund with warped, collusive prices. At the same time, because users of health care never directly pay for it, it encourages people to make dumb decisions about their own care.

People should buy their own insurance. Insurance companies should be forbidden to decline applicants, or to constructively deter them with shady pricing schemes. People should not be allowed to exploit that requirement by waiting until they get sick to apply for coverage. The requirement should be nationwide, so that states that offer sane insurance regulations don't get sabotaged sick refugees from other states without sane insurance regs.

Minus the Medicaid expansion, which I'm ambivalent about, this is what we worked out in 2010.
I have also seen these places. Some of them will tell you the doctor has gone to lunch when you tell them you have individual insurance.

There are "direct access" clinics that can perform lots of blood tests without a doctor's help at a low cost -- $5 to $20 per panel. Fill out a form, draw a couple vials, go home and your results come in the next day.

What's frustrating is that you aren't typically told about these options, and so you end up paying five times as much out of pocket to have the doctor be your gatekeeper. So then you're tempted to say screw the doctors and use the internet to perform your own diagnoses.

It's a shame we have such an antagonistic healthcare system, and I don't see how it can get better as long as the medical industry expects to book profits at a faster rate than the growth of the population.
> Most other industrialized countries have heavy government involvement and pay half what we do with the same outcomes.

I lived in Canada for 10 years. I live in the US now. While living in Canada, I paid more to the government then I pay now. My health care costs for myself and my family are much cheaper. In fact, ignoring the costs of insurance (which was effectively the same) and taxes (which were 3 times higher in Canada, and on everything), my costs for equal service I receive now would have been more than $36,000 more in Canada. That's partly a lie though. The services would not have been equal, as we can get home care here, whereas in Canada, we could not.

This also ignores the 1-2 year waiting list for private care we would have had to deal with in Canada. In the US, we had treatment started within 2 weeks of moving here.
This simplifies the process even further than typical midi editors do - lowering the barrier to entry for creating music.

But as a professional drummer and tutor, a tool like this could seriously help me, if you decide to expand the feature set beyond a novelty. For example, this could be a way for me to take notes of drum beats that come to me when I'm not at the kit, if it supported tuplets.
Worth noting that the US leads Europe in outcomes for serious illnesses (particularly cancer), and the US provides access to specialists in days where other countries often have multi-week or even multi-month delays.
One solution (which obviously won't for everybody): live in Massachusetts. We have excellent health insurance plans available here: https://www.mahealthconnector.org/ I'm using one now.
Exactly what part of an emergency room visit is going to change in 2014, when PPACA is fully implemented? Please be as specific as you can, while limiting the detail you provide to the "amount of time taken to see someone at an emergency room" example you've used in this comment.
It's not hard to get insurance for a 10 person company, but it is expensive.
The (big) problem isn't really that there are people who may or may not have insurance to protect them from 24 kilobuck bug bites, its that we've let so much friction build up in our system that it has come to cost this much to treat even simple maladies.

We're so busy worrying about who should pay what we don't ask the big one: why the hell does it cost so much in the first place?
I disagree. It's really common for small software companies not to provide insurance, and of course anyone who wants to strike out on their own, either selling software or contracting, has to deal with the question. I would wager that the average programmer is more exposed to the problem of health insurance than the average.
Bushwick rocks. Stinks, but it is the best hood in the city. However it is not very techie. Great art scene.
That's just as much an argument against democracy. The difference is, in the market, a 0.1% niche can be sustainable, while in democracy, a 0.1% niche is meaningless.
So... MRSA Staph Infection... what is the cost to correctly diagnose? And what is the cost of the antibiotics?

I'm not a doctor, but most non-boutique antibiotics are dirt cheap.

I didn't intend to trivialize the illness. I more meant that this could happen to _anyone_. And if this is the cost for things that can happen to anyone, we have a real problem on our hands. Much like it's a problem that a basic, no-complications, baby delivery costs $15-20k.

Insurance is math, and the math gets scary quickly unless costs are controlled.
That's not different than what PHP does now.

I think you might be confused. I'm referring to the GP post that has the example with the yield call in it, the ruby example.
> Different presently-recogized civilizations, such as Western, Muslim, Indian, and Chinese civilizations, will be indistinguishable by the time a pan-solar civilization arises.

I very much doubt it. We will have distances where lightspeed comms are delayed by minutes or hours. It will take longer than a century for the differences to dissolve, and there will be enough accelerated cultural change to produce more differences with more distance to preserve them.

The economics of agriculture combined with the smaller gravity well will ensure Mars has the highest population. I agree that Titan, with local access to the energy wealth of Saturn, may well be a major power also.
Ask HN: Can donations sustain an open source software? 
When creating an open source software, do you think that it's better to finish the product and ask for donations or show the ideias and bet on crowdfunding?
Thanks so much for replying and the links. Actually the third one, permanent residency, is quite encouraging for me as I would be a "pensioner" and thus the 3-year work requirement is waived.
MRSA-infected bug bites which require hospitalization are not "relatively mundane".

The PPACA does not reduce this cost. It does prevent it from bankrupting individuals.
Living in a city does not lend itself well to getting stuff done at night "when there are no distractions" precisely because those environments provide those nighttime distractions.

Early founder schedules tend to be necessarily isolating. Once you're to the point of having employees and semi-sane work hours, then the rest tends to be personal preference because you can once again coexist with the rest of the world.
Rather than paying to patent, how about being paid not to patent? Have an open database of invention and track the market, paying money out to inventors whose ideas are the most widely used by using money from the VAT budget.