skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Issues with private health care:

1) Private health insurers haven't been able to run anything efficiently as long as I've been alive. My premiums go up by double digit percentages every year because "costs" keep increasing, but at the same time, insurers' profits go up by double digit percentages every year. It seems like this is simply a money transfer to health care executives.

2) The more private companies run our lives (especially something like healthcare), the more they will be able to dictate our choices (what we eat, risky behavior etc). Oh wait... corporations already do dictate what we eat, what sort of medicine we use, where we work, how we communicate, how we move around, what we wear...The only difference between corporate control and government control is that we actually have some say in how the government controls us because at the end of the day we control the government.

3) I haven't seen on person that supports privated health care tell me the downside. I know they exist and we need to know the risks and talk about them openly before we stick with such a horrible system.

But anyways, the downsides to public health care: cafeteria health care (i.e., standardized treatments) which is good for most patients but not for the few who have nonstandard variations of ailments; higher taxes; less personalized care as a consequence of standardized treatments; potentially reduced choice of health care provider(s) (but if the entire system is UHC this may not be the case); potentially longer waits for medical treatment that cannot be handled in a day (i.e., anything that cannot be handled outpatient or by nurses or nurse practitioners).

And the downsides to private health care: all of the above, plus: risk of claim denial for valid claims (though admittedly less of a risk now as a consequence of numerous state and federal laws cracking down on claim denials); double-digit increases in premiums every year despite no corresponding increase in costs (this is actually happening, and has been happening, every year for the past decade); reduced choice of health care providers (which is actually the case now, i.e., in-network vs. out-of-network); ruinous medical bills; unnecessary tests and treatments; private health information being shared with "business partners"; inadequate medical facilities as a result of lack of capital investment due to premiums being redirected to marketing or executive retention.

It turns out the downsides of a private health care system outweigh the downsides of a public health care system, since you have all of the same downsides but the additional downsides that come with a profit-seeking business. And as history has amptly demonstrated, cost-cutting is not one of the benefits of a private health care system (costs are cut in a way that benefits the insurer's profits, but in ways which are detrimental to the insured).
I thought this was going to be something different based on the title. A few years ago I had a realisation: we are each of us every day working on our life's work. Your life's work doesn't begin on some nebulous future date after you land that dream job or get to start a clean project in a fresh new codebase. The bug you fixed yesterday, the optional parameter you added to that method today: that's your life's work.

This was a transformative realisation for me. It empowered me to take the pride in my work that I knew I wanted to, and drove me to push myself a little harder. It was also useful in helping me see my long term career goals more clearly. Once you've thought "this is what I'm going to spend my one and only lifetime doing" all the bullshit falls away.
No, it is not helping people get into hardware hacking. There is no more "hardware hacking" going on here than there is on my macbook.

Arduino AVR is helping people get into hardware.

Raspberry pi is helping people build cheap netflix settop boxes.

edit: maybe I'm jaded. We've got about 4 totally idle raspis at our hackerspace that have been donated by people who have no idea what to do with them, but bought them anyway.

Yet, our stack of arduinos get use constantly.
poppycock. Not everybody is going to need the same amount of healthcare. You can insure against the risk that something dire is going to strike you.

Your argument may work for old-age care, where the cost of care for most people soars off the charts for last-ditch, cutting-edge efforts to stay alive. But there is no reason the insurance model can't work for most of the population.
The resolution in any digital theater already is 4k. 1080p would look silly on a large screen.
What about the Kinect video chat? Isn't that based on Messenger? I would be happy to see that change to Skype.
Does the G Train Suck?
Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5032504
I thought that would be the big draw for 3D, having sports matches in 3D but it quickly disappeared out of the interest and went back to normal within 6 months.
Great link. I remember him saying something to the effect of libraries not mattering in his decision to use Common Lisp for Viaweb, but that's not the same thing as him saying that they're unimportant for language adoption. So I guess my memory is inaccurate.

Where there is disagreement is that most CTO's are afraid to adopt "weird" languages out of library FUD, which PG asserts doesn't matter. On that, I think PG is right.
I would recommend Kaiser coverage to anyone thinking about switching from one of those plans with big increases. Their doctors don't get extra money for performing extra procedures as is the case in a lot of plans, so there is more incentive to just do what's necessary.
Well, for one thing, if it doesn't pay enough, teachers end up not being as well educated, since the costs aren't justified.
Only client stuff, skip...
Don't do that, please.

Sometimes charts are bad.

Nothing to do with data, or the potential learning of data.
This is a great insight, not just for work but for life in general.

When I moved to the Bay Area both my wife and I were scrimping and saving to come up with a down payment for a house. After living there six years we 'traded up' to a roomier house, and in the process of getting our existing house ready for sale, we did a lot of the stuff we had planned to do 'someday' but in this case to make the house more attractive. We redid the hall bathroom, fixed the lights in the den, simple stuff. It was a lot nicer house to live in just before we moved out. We decided our next house would be different, we would do the things that made the house more livable/nice when we thought of them, that way we could enjoy them ourselves.

The tricky bit is doing this even if you aren't "sure" you're going to be in the same place in 10 years. The fear is that if you suddenly are going to be doing something else, living somewhere else, well you could have used those resources better by not spending them on something you wouldn't use/enjoy.

My experience has been that it is always the right thing to invest for the long haul.
Ruby Rogues podcast discussed it with the author (1hr mp3, transcript available): http://rubyrogues.com/043-rr-book-club-land-of-list-with-con...

Incidentally, the author (Conrad Barski) says in that discussion that Clojure is his favorite Lisp now and he finds it much more elegant than Common Lisp. I have a similar background (CL programming, now doing Clojure) and I agree.
>Second, is how to provide healthcare for the boomer generation.

There absolutely has to be a dollar cap on how much the government will spend on health care on an individual. Then, we must absolutely stick to it. If the limit is reached, then no more money for that person.

I'd support such a limit on baby boomers only since those idiots are the ones who got us into this mess but I can't think of a way to implement that without a big discrimination lawsuit.
I've heard good things about Gumroad... anyone has experience with it?
a blank where clause throws an error (in mySQL at least) as it should do. Or will the query generator respond to missing arguments by removing the where clause altogether? In which case that's some pretty nasty behaviour.
Sorry, I mentioned in my initial submission that it was for this last weekend's Foursqaure hackathon but I guess it does not show the initial text if you include a link.

So, yeah... you have to have an account to use it. In another comment, I included a link to a simple video we made to explain how it works.
CES: Hands on with Intel's latest tablets, smartphones and ultrabooks (videos)
I think Chicken[1] is a very attractive Scheme alternative. It's full-featured, fast, compiles down to C, has a very nice library (egg) system, and a relatively large and active user community (as far as Schemes go).

[1] - http://call-cc.org/
It works now. Had to run:

sudo chmod -R go+w /Library/Python/2.7/site-packages/

which is noted at the bottom of the readme and I missed it.
I far prefer the Singapore model to Canada's. Have you informed yourself of the variety of different public healthcare models out there? UK and Canada seem to have issues with very long wait times and bad options for private care for niche conditions (private care was illegal in Canada not too long ago)

Singapore has good health outcomes, low health expenditure, and a high quality of care. They use a forced-savings model with a public backstop, giving consumers market incentive to conserve healthcare and keep costs down (unlike the US all-you-can-eat model). It's very effective and not too far from our current system for political feasibility.

There are economists who have been studying the problems and benefits of various universal public healthcare for years. Are you aware of their arguments?
"The government hasn't been able to run anything efficiently as long as I've been alive."

I'm not so sure private insurance companies and hospitals are all that "efficient" either, but define "efficient" first. Private insurance companies are motivated by making a profit, and the easiest way to do that is to take in money, but pay out as little as possible.

There's very little competition in insurance, as 'the market' is primarily larger employers, so insurance companies by and large cater towards the needs of their biggest customers.

We need to get rid of employer-provided health care benefits, and focus on getting people to buy it directly themselves. This will bring more market forces to bear, getting more companies to compete for our business, not the employers', and perhaps we can then talk about 'efficiency' and having that be something positive for end recipients of health care.
This actually may not be true. Not sure if you're familiar with Modern Monetary Theory, but I highly recommend checking out this video: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/309410-1

I wouldn't say that I'm a full blown MMT'er but over time the arguments make more and more sense, and I haven't been presented with many credible counter-arguments yet.
Networking Impact and How To
I don't suggest you model it after Canada's system. It's good, but it could be better.

I moved to Canada from Australia, so I'll compare the two systems for you.

Canada: "healthcare for all" provides basic coverage of everything you need. Works pretty well. Even homeless / out of work people are fully covered. Things like dental and chiropractor are not covered, so you pay for those. Employers give "health care" which really just means they will pay a percentage of your costs for things like dental, chiropractors, prescriptions, etc.

The problem here is that if you want "better than basic" healthcare, it's tied to your employer, which has all the negative impacts of the US system of being stuck to your job. This sucks.

Australia: Same as Canada in that basic coverage covers emergencies and what-not for everyone. Again dental, chiropractors are not covered. BUT if you want "better than basic" care, it's your choice if you want to go out (with your own cash) and buy "private health care" which again will pay a percentage of your out-of-pocket costs for those extras (dental, etc.).

The massive, massive, massive advantage here is that your health is in not directly linked to your job. Your employer has no say or impact on your choice of healthcare provider, or if you even want to buy that extra coverage. As a single, healthy 30 year old, I've never seen the need to pay the extra, but in Canada I'm forced to because my employer says so.

I've been in Canada 7 years, and I actually think I'll go back to Australia, primarily for exactly that reason.

EDIT: OK, sure. In Canada you can also choose to buy your own "extra" health care from your own money. What I think is bad is how employers do it for you, without you having much say in the matter. In this way, Canadians feel their health is connected to their employer (a great example is when you interview for a job in Canada, people ask "what are the benefits like"? - In Australia, that is not a question.)
I'm not a backer, but I've heard people on Twitter make fun of the Pebble for being a bit bulky, a bit dorky, or even "a useless novelty product that will burn out faster than the Slap Chop". But these people are short-sighted, and should be ignored, because they're missing what the Pebble represents.

The Pebble is one of the first entrants into the relatively young hardware category of wearable computers. So is Google Glass, FitBit, Jawbone, and others. But the Pebble has a place in there too. Being able to access your iMessages, Email or Calendar without taking out your phone is actually a pretty useful skill. And once people get over the "dork factor" (remember the first iPhone users?), they'll pay for a device like Pebble if it offers enough convenience.
I’d be happy if 37signals is the last place I work. In an industry so focused on the booms and busts, I find myself a kindred spirit with the firms of old. Places where people happily reported to work for 40 years, picking up a snazzy gold watch at the end as a token of life-long loyalty.

I'm sure picking up the odd Lamborghini ( http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/coyotes-pulitzer-... ) as a token of last month's worth of effort is also a good plus... :-)
The author of this post (presumably the submitter) doesn't seem to understand what growth means.

Saying 'Svbtle' is anti-growth because of a clean interface and a curated set of authors/posts is like saying Twitter is an anti-growth hack because they don't let people use more than 140 characters.

Traditionally, 'growth' is taken to mean consumers of the service: in this case, that isn't Svbtle's writers but Svbtle's readers -- which, regardless of whether or not you like the service, is a number that's certainly growing.
Me too. I wasn't very good making friends and that C64 sure looked like fun.
Medicare has been run for decades at a pay-out efficiency significantly higher than private insurance companies. There's a model that's in place and works even when loaded down with high-risk individuals.

The government already "runs your life" by dictating speed limits, acceptable levels of toxins in your foods, safety standards for cars, etc. You're freaking out about things that don't matter.

You know what the downsides to public health care are? Fewer jobs in the insurance industry. You also won't be able to expedite your care by paying a premium, everyone gets roughly the same treatment. For 99% of the people out there, this is a non-issue.
We need to get rid of the unregulated, manifest "socialist" medical system that the United States has today and replace it with something that is a known quantity. A public system is one option (and one that I'm in favor of), but there could be other solutions too.

In general, the current system doesn't stop people who can't pay from receiving care. If we agree that allowing someone to die because they can't pay isn't acceptable then we need to have some kind of public system. Care is rationed by insurers and providers who make judgement calls that, largely, aren't subject to public scrutiny or regulation. (We have the "death panels" that those opposed to public healthcare railed against, but these "panels" are made up of insurers and providers working in a decentralizd, uncoordianted, and uncontrolled manner.)

What we have is a "shadow socialist" system where those parties who can afford to pay have to carry the slack for everybody who can't. Individuals and employers end up paying higher premiums to insurers. Healthcare providers increase the cost of procedures to cover the write-offs for the uninsured. Insurers negotiate relationships that limit consumer choice or access to procedures that providers aren't willing or able to discount.

It's like the entire mess is designed to be suboptimal for all parties involved. It's depressing that, as a country, we can't have reasonable discourse, agree to compromise, and come up with some kind of substantive strategy.
Things I Won't Work With: Azidoazide Azides, More Or Less.
Being a bit of a pedant: do you mean "mutual recursion" instead of "corecursion"? The former means multiple functions calling each other, thus being recursive indirectly. The latter is more like an inverse of recursion: instead of starting with some data and reducing to base cases, you start with base cases and produce (co)data.

Defining a lazy list in terms of itself is an example of corecursion, which Clojure can do (albeit a bit awkwardly because you have to make the laziness explicit).
If you don't support the standard you don't have a C compiler; MSVC is a lot of things but a C compiler is not one of them.
Yep. I'm learning Python so I can program for Leap Motion
At the very least his point about continuation-based webservers is a good one.

I recently realized why the arc webserver needed to track IPs to ignore almost from day 1: everytime somebody requests a page, memory usage goes up. This includes crawlers, drive-by users, everybody. The standard way arc encourages webapps to be programmed (http://paulgraham.com/arcchallenge.html) is by leaking memory. Every load of the front-page creates 30 closures just for the 'flag' links. Ignoring IPs is just a band-aid to cover up this huge sink[1].

I've been programming in arc for 3 years and am still active on the arc forum. I love that arc is a small and simple language without lots of bells and whistles[2]. I really couldn't care less that it's 'not taken off'. But there's a different between toys that encourage exploratory play, and painting yourself into a corner design-wise. I now think of continuation-based webservers as an evolutionary dead end.

[1] Another ill-effect of the ip-ignoring is that every newcomer to arc who tries to run it behind a proxy server immediately runs into a gotcha: The arc webserver now thinks all requests are coming from the same IP address and so throttles everybody. http://www.arclanguage.org/item?id=11199

[2] If you spend any time with it it literally begs to be tinkered with. And the experience of programming in a language while referring to its compiler in another window is something everybody should experience.
Does this mean that Skype - Lync Online (Office 365) federation will be live by then? Right now Messenger is the only outside service organizations using Lync Online are allowed to federate to (IM and presence only) [1].

I know plans have been in the work for a long time now to add Skype federation, but something seems to have stalled it --perhaps that 600M+ Skype users is a scary federation partner to a service a couple orders of magnitude smaller.

[1]: http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-enterprises/...
If all you want is USB, there are (seemingly hundreds of) Allwinner sticks available via Aliexpress, e.g. http://goo.gl/th1bO as low as $34, which is supported via the linux-sunxi port. Boards generally cost more, I've less information on that.
Boy writes letter to Lego after losing minifigure, gets awesome response
See http://stackoverflow.com/a/12412774/48015 for the rationale behind the introduction of VLAs.
Here in Canada, if you want "better than basic" health-care you can pay for it yourself. The net cost is under $1,000 a year for a typical individual who wants the deluxe treatment.
Building an Ember app with RailsAPI – Part 2
I have Canadian friends, and although they would do anything to preserve their health care, they complain about how long it takes them to make appointments for specialists, tests, etc. I live in the Bay Area, and I have Kaiser HMO, and I love them. They seem vastly superior to Canadian health care in every respect. Even in cost, my friends in Toronto have to pay $100/month each as a Health Tax.

Case in point, I got an endoscopy scheduled in 9 days. My friend told me that the average wait time in Canada for an endoscopy is 9 months. I had an MRI scheduled within 1 day. My friend's wife, who was suffering from gallstones, waited 4 months for her MRI. I just made an appointment to see a GI specialist, and it took 1 day. My friend who is a pharmacist for Shoppers Drug Mart in Toronto told me she was amazed at how quick that was.
Productivity is about language + libraries + frameworks + community + your own familiarity with all of the above. The language is really the least concern when actually delivering features in a timely manner.

Programming is a high-variance activity. It's not that some programmers are 10x faster than others -- it's that an individual programmer may have 10x variance in performance on different days/weeks.

So, the two most effective things a programmer can do to become more productive are: (1) Get enough sleep. (2) Don't write code -- use libraries.

To the extent that Lisp's meta-programming support can help with (2), it's useful, but usually the lack of discoverable, minimalist, production-tested libraries is a worse tradeoff.

Essentially, the other ecosystems are good enough, and the Lisp ecosystem is not great for the bang-out-10-features-today style of most app development.
It took me a while to figure out what this was. At first I thought Codecademy was providing lessons VIA API. I thought, "wow, they've essentially built a framework for education...pretty cool". Then I went to the actual website and saw that it just teaches you how to program OTHER APIs. Maybe their title should more accurately be "Learn How to Program APIs" instead.
This is not an article, this is just an attempt to push an advertisement and seo spam for backerkit on to hacker news
Check out the source code https://github.com/bcardarella/ember-railsapi
And check out Part 1
Amazing example of customer service.

The last line says it all: "And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how companies score lifelong customers."
Which was only done to get it narrowly passed by the U.S. Congress.