skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you guys are on to something.

I choose to fix my own car when it has small issues, I choose to fix my own computer when things go haywire (whether it's a hardware or software problem), I choose to install/fix issues relating to the washing machine & dryer, furniture, faucets, etc. etc.

To get to the point where I could fix these things I had to learn various things from others, from reading up, and so on.

I can do that quite easily when it comes to my own body too. Only in the most extraordinary of circumstances will I seek medical healthcare.

To relate this to HN: make systems that facilitate acquisition of knowledge, conducting tests, studying those tests, etc. Maybe hook the other end of the system to a database of vetted doctors in India and China who could study the test results and suggest future options?

By golly does this industry need some disruption. Please make it happen guys.
Primecoin paper released. Client to follow soon.
They can keep it.
Yes, if prices are skyrocketing it must be a "Crime" caused by all the dirty capitalists enriching themselves. There could be no possible explanation for it. Unless, of course, you want to consider:

1) The stifling HIPAA regime that makes it almost impossible for small, potentially competitive practices to stay open without insane amounts of overhead, explaining their sellouts to larger at-scale healthcare corporations
2) The necessity to offset insanely low negotiated and subsidized Medicare/Medicaid rates with bills on the uninsured, thus bifurcating healthcare recipients into "pays too little" and "pays too much" categories with no in-between
3) The employer-provided insurance scheme--another government-subsidized program--which hides prices from consumers and incentivizes providers to hike up prices
4) Let's not forget about the inability for insurance companies to hedge risk and lower costs by selling insurance across state lines
5) Obamacare destroying any potentially new avenues for innovation by forcing the uninsured to buy into a broken system

What would happen if a doctor or hospital today started practicing medicine at affordable prices, competitively? What's stopping that from happening? If you look for what isn't there instead of what is there, you'd see how we've completely eviscerated any hope of competition, innovation or lower prices in our system.

The "moral outrage" we should have as Americans is not toward the doctors who--as even this article grudgingly acknowledges--are good people working in a bad system. The outrage we should have is toward the captured healthcare-industrial complex that has a stranglehold on our Congress and President, using its influence to send more profits its own way at the expense of patients.

High prices are not a crime. Bad policy is.
My Uncle is a doctor, went the full 9 years at Tulane and everything. He had to close his own practice because Medicare paid dirt, insurers would delay payments for years, and malpractice insurance was thousands a month. He was running around a 2,000 a month deficit when he had to fire his secretary and close down. He now works in a general hospital as a surgeon, and is actually happier not having to try to haggle getting paid or getting people to pay more.

Some doctors may be profiting off this, but the principle beneficiary is private insurance companies, at least from my experiences. Doctors spend an eighth of their life learning some of the hardest science and discipline of any profession and you do want to compensate the good ones well. We need more people entering medicine, not fewer.
SunnyKing (behind ppcoin, the first proof of stake crypto coin) has released his paper for primecoin.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=245953.msg2671790#ms...

This is apparently the first non hash cash based crypto currency.
Effective next year up to 400% of the poverty line is eligible for some fraction of their expenses covered under Medicaid. If you are beyond that threshold is the infamous "uninsured tax". Note that 400% of the poverty line is around $50k a year.
There is no such thing as the free market when it comes to healthcare. Not only is the consumer not in a position to shop around when dealing with health issues, partly because you're often not in a position of even knowing what treatment you need until you've decided on a provider and undergone expensive consultations, but also, providers are put in positions of not being allowed to refuse service based on ability to pay.

Not to mention, the "free market" solution doesn't actually involve consumers "voting with their wallets" and choosing the healthcare they want, but rather choosing from a very limited set of insurance options where they have no real choice or power. And the choices they are offered basically amount to a small array of socialized healthcare options: you have no control over your benefits and extremely little ability to choose a different one, but everyone pays into a large pool and costs are shared by the group as a whole so outlier costs are not overly burdensome to individuals. It is wholly baffling to me that anyone can support this system but be against socialized healthcare. Our model is socialized healthcare, but instead of being socialized across the nation as a whole, it's socialized across a particular employer or purchasing group. Does this actually give us choice? No. Go analyze your health plan "options" offered by your employer and tell me you're participating in the free market and I will laugh in your face.
Agreed, this is exactly why I said "predictable". The dilution of techies among the more casual crowd on the Internet was supposed to happen (or we'd be out of jobs), but I wish they had been taught some important concepts of software before learning how to use a browser.
Learning Flash can help him grasp the basics of timeline and keyframe animation. If he's more interested in character animation/making animated films, I'd recommend looking into Maya or 3Ds Max, which will also expose him to modeling and lighting..etc.
Haha, no, but English is becoming the global language, I should have also mentioned. So Western culture is dictating global usability standards - be it good or bad, its happening.
E.g. libraries that can be implemented in pure Scheme should arguably target R*RS rather than any particular implementation, to save on reimplementation efforts.
I put this site together, glad it's useful for you. The graphs are my take on climatographs.

The data is from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Climatic Data Center, see http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/. The dataset has good coverage of the US, but as people have pointed out, there are gaps in many places, such as the UK. The comparison is based on the monthly average max and min temperatures.
What's the "^sa" that it keeps appending at the end?
The ability to shop around is great and all, but hardly something I could reasonably expect of somebody currently suffering from kidney stones, or worse (if you can even imagine a worse state).
Seventy-two killed resisting gun confiscation in Boston
$2000 isn't that ridiculous depending on the circumstances, but $75 is impossibly low with America's system. In Canada they bill ~$200 +/- 100 depending on the details. A comparable figure in the states (again factoring insurance non-payment issues and convenience factors, i.e. how soon you can get it, having facilities close by) would be reasonable at $800-$1500.
See a collection of mine on stackoverflow, specifically constrained to products, where solving the intelligence problem have a direct impact on the bottom line:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1050696/the-business-of-a...
Surf the Web without annoying ads
Eliminate drug patents, remove the annual cap on medical students in doctoral programs, remove that requirement entirely from a medical license and let anyone practice medicine that wants to (albeit with some regulation requiring a practitioner explicitly state their qualifications, and you would have to prosecute impostors).

That would probably lead to what we have today - people only trust literal doctorates from top medical schools - but you could open new medical schools to placate demand, and hopefully reduce the workload required to obtain a medical license (the current 8+ years of schooling is excessive for any profession) or provide some kind of doctoral certification program outside the bounds of academia, though I have no intimate knowledge to know how you would do it.

It does become buyer beware, but it also means you would have treatment at most pay grades. Also, if it wasn't illegal to produce chemical compounds (really, that is dumb, and all the arguments of how they produce progress because of profit motive is pointless if nobody can afford the result, and the investment funds in big pharma would find other avenues to stimulate growth and research). The costs of care would fall absurdly fast if there weren't a dozen golden gates on the road to being a medical professional or medical facility, I wouldn't even mind if they just reduced the barriers, but they are too high and too plentiful right now.
I will admit, I've had good success recently with some promoted posts from our FB page. It's anywhere from $5-50.

Much better than traditional FB ads, but that's not saying much.
I think those were real, un-empowered humans using a script. My favourite? The "I would feel that way too" script that Google Play uses: straight from an email, no joke, I once got "Thank you for contacting the Google Play Support team. I understand you are waiting on a response. If I was feeling ignored, I would be upset as well. I assure you I have the information for you on your return." or the variant "Thank you for your response. I understand you are having trouble with the tracking number. If I was not receiving necessary information, I would be upset as well. I assure you I have the solution for this brief hang up." (and says there is no tracking number for the item I sent in 3 weeks ago to return! So I replied I was being ignored and got that little gem above...)

I think my favourite has to be the "nothing to say here..." email which emphasizes how they should really cut down the customer service drone talk to the simple sentence "We're looking into it, I'll get back to you." Instead:

Thank you for contacting the Google Play Support team. I understand you are having trouble with your return. If I was experiencing return issues, I would be upset as well. I assure you I have the information to confirm the movement of your refund.

In order to get this issue resolved, I am going to go ahead and let you know that this matter is being consulted, and I will send a follow up email when I receive the information pertaining to your return.

Cordially,

X, Google Play Support Team

Sometimes they forget to personalize entirely, as in the one sent to kick off the botched return process: (the following is unedited)

Hello ,

Thank you for contacting Google concerning your Nexus _. My name is Æsa and I will be taking over your case from this point forward. I understand your concern and why this is important to you and will do the best I can to assist you.
How are credit unions affected by mobile and crowdfunding?
I'd factor in the fact that the people density is lower up front, probably aiding you in getting off the plane faster.
As that guy from Wire said, the difference between war and War on Drugs, is that wars end. Best to declare War on War.
Get AirDroid for your Android device. You'll never look back.
No one can open a new, competing hospital without the permission of the lousy overpriced hospitals that its intended to compete with.

Yes, you need your competitor's permission to enter the market. Its the law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_need
It's precisely this conundrum and others like it that have lead me to take two controversial opinions that are far less firm than the real thought that your describing: 1) mathematics and what is taught as physics are not "real," but merely leaky abstractions. Even though they can capture reality very well, they are not reality itself. There is no perfect circle that exists in physical space, and not necessarily a pi represented anywhere in physical space. You'll notice that a lot of the wonder that is expressed in this post comes from thinking that 3sin(57) is something that is exactly* reality. And 2) all of mathematics is invented, not discovered. The particular math we use may be discovered independently by different, unconnected, civilizations, because there are certain thought processes that fit well with human intelligence. If we discover other intelligent life forms, there may be some small overlap by coincidence in our mathematics, it's likely that it could be quite different. Perhaps even arithmetic could be considerably different.

We are taught from day one in class that mathematics is some sort of ideal plane of existence, pure, and real. However I see it only as technology for our squishy gray matter to help navigate a mysterious universe. I get huge huge resistance on this from engineers and some young scientists; they see the textbook science and math where everything has a nice closed-form answer you can look up in the back of the book. More mature scientists object less, but that may just be because they think it's pointless to discuss these things with me.

Trying to use mathematical technology in the real world in new areas makes one realize that only a tiny percentage of questions are answerable with the tools they teach us in school. The lack of a closed solution to the 3-body problem is not due to a lack of cleverness in answering, but a lack of cleverness in questioning. And further study leads to the paradoxes and the holes that were discovered in the previous century, at which point, most people's faith in math's fidelity to reality begins to become less than absolute.
I always have to look twice, because sometimes they really look like friend's updates.

What I have started to do is to mark them as spam.
Ask HN: Can you count on users to use the backspace/Back button to go back?
I'm designing the pagination for my site. I noticed HN simply has a "More" and assume this is because users, if they want to go back, can simply click Back on their browser. Can we trust users to do this?
I agree. Most of the vim defaults are fine (expect for tabs!), but NERDTree is a must!
Can anyone describe a bit about titanium and how it is hard to work with?

Are there special considerations that you have to take when working with the metal?
The EU is not a country. The EU has no single healthcare system.

Every country has it's own system, which range from anything between 100% government provided to mostly privatized. No system is the same. And it's not just the EU, it's the entire Western civilization outside the US.

This is extremely important, because the healthcare debate in the US is falsely framed as a choice for or against "socialized medicine", were in reality socialized medicine is a rarity amongst the various healthcare systems.

Whether or not to make quality healthcare accessible to everyone is not an ideological choice, the problem can be solved within the framework of any political ideology.

It's strictly a choice between decent healthcare for everyone or bigger profits for the healthcare industry.
Unless you're paying cash for books and not using any sort of membership/discount card when you do, your privacy is just as gone at a physical bookstore as it is at Amazon.
I think that has a lot to do with upbringing and culture.

We here at HN know a lot about computers and programming -- even some of us for whom it isn't even our profession. We learned a lot of this stuff because it was a hobby.

Several of my real-life friends are this way when it comes to a lot of medical stuff -- despite not being in the medical profession they still know all sorts of odd things you'd expect just doctors to know just because they have been so extensively reading up on their own.

So, I guess what I'm saying is, remember the post a few months back preaching that we should 'all' learn programming? I say we should all learn more about our bodies. If and when we do, that very education will probably affect what we consume, how often we exercise, etc., ultimately improving our lives either way.
A safe pattern for this without the None check is keyword expansion which will define defaults when a function is called.

def foo(**kwargs):
numbers = kwargs.pop('numbers', [])
numbers.append(9)
print numbers
Just tried it and was amazed by how much ads it was already blocking especially on youtube.
| The necessity to offset insanely low negotiated
| and subsidized Medicare/Medicaid rates

My understanding is that insurance companies often get rates lower than Medicare. It goes something like this:

1) Government mandates the rates for procedure X to make sure that the government is getting the 'best' deal.

2) Hospitals charge insurance companies using these rates (they aren't allowed to be lower, or it wouldn't be the 'best' deal).

3) Insurance companies trim the difference between the Medicare rate and the real rate from the bill with newspeak like, "charge beyond negotiated rates," or, "over-charge of contractual limits."

It basically amounts to the hospital charging the 'correct' rate, the insurance company refusing to pay that rate, and the hospital not pushing it any further since this is all laid out in their formal agreements.

So, I'm not sure if Medicare can be said to have 'insanely low' rates, if the insurance companies end up with even lower rates. (I'd love for someone to correct me if my understanding is wrong, though)
Love will keep RSS alive
Write out e^x as a power series, then just plug in ix instead of x :) Fun stuff happens.
Can you provide a reference? Did I link to the wrong paper? That's an important detail and it's not in the article.

I'm not sure if you can get past the paywall but:

Section 2, paragraph 4, last sentence. "Carbon doped TiO2 from Kronos International was used."

How much more effective?

It varies from 2x-10x depending on the reaction conditions. Here is a paper that shows 2x-4x based on a relatively primitive doping technique.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apcatb.2007.09.046

Italcementi

Their TX Active may or may not be carbon doped, I couldn't find a straight answer on their website. Self-cleaning TiO2 is almost certainly doped (Ag or SiO2).
I broke an arm while in US and this is the breakup of the expense
ER 1800:
Ambulance: 1400
Treatment (no surgery. Just a cast and X-rays for 3 months): 700
Directives are the game changer. Dreams of dynamic markup come true. There are still a few limitations especially wrt routing/view/state, but that is being actively worked on. It's hard to see a future of the web where angularjs doesn't play a starring role. Get your head around dependency injection and eureeka!
I have no claim to be an experienced developer or so, just asking for opinions: doesn't this huge number of complex features implemented in modern programming language give you a feeling of something being wrong? And why?
The Grandmother Of The Data Center Is Missing At Sea
Not exactly, manufacturing plants release emissions very high into the air. To my understanding the pavement has an effective radius of < 150m (from the article).
Left-handed Dvorak?
Generally, it's the initials of the Support rep who's replying to the tweet.
If there is anyway you can get in to see someone with a pre-arranged plan of payment please do. A debt that takes some years to pay off is just that. But a messed up joint may be causing permanent damage (as you well know judging by your comment). I'd be saying that you need an MRI too btw. It may be worth ringing around and seeing what you can get it for. If you ask to speak to the practice manager you might get lucky. Source: I'm a radiographer, our practice manager would check with the managing director would would almost certainly cut you a break - he is a soft touch. I'm not in the US I'm sorry to say.
If you know that arthritis is coming, adjust now and move to Germany (or another similar place). Waiting times for specialists might be a little longer, but you (=everybody) will be treated for treatable diseases and injuries. What you have to do, of course, is to move here legally (work visum?).
Its not "fascinating" about the phone. It's 100% normal. You could say it's a pretty interesting turn of events in the history of keyboards however.

Qwerty was designed for typing machines (typewriters) where you needed enough space between keys so that the machine wouldn't jam. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter)

That's exactly why qwerty is better on the phone as well as fingers, like the metal tyepbar, can't type letters too close to each other. Except its flesh and bones instead of metal.
You point out the very problems that free market competition has in this market. Given that you know the problem, now try to find a solution. Hint: most of them are policy changes.
Interestingly, the home row issue you experienced on the phone is rather similar to the reason qwerty was invented in the first place, to avoid key jamming on mechanical typewriters.
If you have the premonition to research it ahead of time and keep updated on it, then good for you. I suspect that the people who do that are the real minority, not HN type people.

Once you are actually in a jam... trust me, you are not going to be spending your time googling for shit when you are in a bad way with kidney stones. Lobbed off a limb with your table saw? By all means, go check the internet first ...but not with kidney stones...
I think his point was that some injuries might incapacitate you to such a degree that shopping around is not an option.
Awkward I would agree with, but probably only because we're much more used to the usual approach (cf the "awkwardness" of Haskell).

Still, you'll see in that paper that the reals he constructs are complete. The get out clause is that they are not a set, but a class.
Exactly right. Shopping around is entirely impractical many, if not most, emergencies (and that is assuming that you are actually conscious in the first place.)
I suppose this is all off-topic, but is that common syntax? I've never seen it before.
A quicker way would've been to run document.querySelectorAll('the_selector') in your console to identify the elements to click
NSA provides German intelligence service with tools for eavesdropping
Better translation:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/edward-snowden-accuses-germany-of-aiding-nsa-in-spying-efforts-a-909847.html
English isn't necessarily becoming the global language. I would wager that Chinese has a good shot at the future depending on things play out.
DWave's Adiabatic Quantum Annealer does not run python. It is not Turing Complete. The python component is used to manually generate a matrix that corresponds to a travelling salesman problem. QCL (and Quibble) are languages designed to describe quantum programs that would actually run on a qunatum computer. What DWaves python module does is more akin to writing OpenCL code in a string and passing that to the OpenCL runtime to be compiled.
NSA 'In Bed Together with the Germans'
When learning about CSS people typically don't choose to specifically learn what isn't in IE n
I would say it's extremely common, all Twitter based customer support channels I've ever used have signed off with it.
@XboxSupport does that too.
> As you say, you can use ‘do’ notation in simple cases, but it’s just syntactic sugar and the unsugared version quickly becomes unwieldy if you need more flexibility.

I've actually found that it's much better to compose monadic functions with (<=<) than use long do blocks. It forces you to structure your code much more appropriately.
Newbie here with limited Python experience. What would you suggest? I have no projects in mind, just want to learn and have been mashing away at Python for months. What ever it is I make needs to run on a Mac or iDevice - via browser is fine.