skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Or worse, some providers won't even provide care if you are a high deductible insured person paying cash.

On more than one occasion after having an appointment scheduled, and mentioning to the provider that we have a high deductible, doctors' office staff have changed their stories and claim that they didn't accept our insurance or that they weren't accepting new patients (after already putting family members "into the book" for an appointment, even; one provider used one excuse after another, despite prominently advertising in the local paper that they are looking for new patients and "accept all insurance"). Another office actually claimed that the doctor had gone to lunch and wouldn't be back for 3 hours...immediately after I told her our deductible amount--her mouth dropped open and she ran back into the back and came back with the lunch story. I don't understand it, because I offered to pay up front and the care was always for simple issues that never would have hit the deductible nor broken the bank anyway (a flu in one case, a basic checkup and blood tests in another). I assume it's illegal, too, otherwise the universal response wouldn't be a stammered excuse.

This kind of behavior does help to weed out bad doctors/doctor's offices (net good, I guess?), but in a situation where your issue isn't bad/acute enough for the emergency room and not forestallable enough to wait a month to get an appointment for a good doctor, it's really frustrating.

Luckily, there's a nice urgent care locally with prices on the walls, accepts real money and even gives a cash discount, and handles the basics...but for traditional/specialist doctor's visits, I no longer offer up any information about the fact that the deductible is high and we're paying for services ourselves before the appointment.
For the silence/ambient noise problem: http://coffitivity.com/
And most android devices are on what version of android?
The US has also had very real terrorist attacks, like the 9/11. That isn't a excuse for a surveillance state.

Security is NEVER a valid excuse for a surveillance state.
How is this even on the front page?
Software Project Estimates: Go Fly a Kite
Yeah, this study is a joke-- Berea is really atypical, I've visited. The town is charming with a serious mountain artistic vibe. The school has a religious mission and outreach to non-traditional students in Appalachia.
I am not saying that it is right. But I just don't know how a non-US compliant government can stay in power without questionable tactics.

If you create enough internal fraction by pumping up a pro-US opposition and external through embargos and sanctions, even the most anti-US electorate will soon or later question their positions.
We don't have support for multiple people working on the same code yet (at least with the Mac app).

But the benefit of editing locally and committing to Github is that that's not typically work flow - with Nitrous.IO for Mac - you can edit code, run tests (or refresh a page), make more edits, run tests again, repeat, and when you're done, then commit to a remote git repo (all with your dev environment being in the cloud, making it accessible from anywhere)
Versions of the app for different OS's are in the pipeline
Birds do not get picked up by radar set to war-time sensitivity levels. A a former UAV pilot who flew the Shadow 200 TUAV for 3rd Brigade 2nd Infantry Division in Iraq from 2003-2004, we did training with our attached air defense patriot battery. The Shadow is designed to have an exceptionally low radar and thermal cross signature. We wanted to prove it when doing our combat certifications before going to war. They told us they had to set their gear sensitive enough to pick up birds of prey (eagles, falcons, etc) to see anything meaningful and that they aren't able to do that in combat due to the numerous false positives. After initial takeoff and climbing up to mission altitude, those planes are effectively (meaning in practice) "stealth" although I'm saying that very loosely
Setters are an anti-feature.

They give the illusion that they can be set in any order, but most meaningful classes have invariants that are ambiguous to preserve with single-value setters. Object Oriented designs jump through some serious hoops to preserve the pretty `object.property = value` syntax. Besides, there are considerable advantages to immutability even in the absence of concurrency. `new_object = frob(object, value)` is generally preferable in the long run.
Perhaps related: theshittoget.com
Materials, coating, and shape all contributes to what is commonly referred to as stealth. You can't just put radar absorbing paint on a 747 and it suddenly becomes stealth, otherwise all of the USAF would do that
Chrome 28 arrives with Blink, rich notifications for apps
Unmasking organised crime networks with data
Hey, I do that too! It's an easy way of telling if I'm logged in.
While I agree with you on the medical, a GFE is exactly what you are asking for. Mortgages are complicated, so there's a lot of credits and debts involved. Just because you don't understand the terms doesn't mean they shouldn't be noted. The GFE(and HUD) are thankfully the two things that are absolutely legally binding and can be counted on for being a correct representation of everything.
Will do! Sorry coach!
This is likely an unpopular opinion, but: Math and Science are hard because most people simply aren't wired for high level abstract logical thinking. Teaching Shakespear or physics to a monkey are equally as hard. Teaching Shakespear to a human is much easier because we are wired for that type of reasoning. Most people are not wired for scientific thinking.
This has a lot of lessons for marketing commercial software.
This reminds me of one of my first year university maths classes.

With two weeks to go, the class was getting a bit restless and a few people where mucking up throwing paper air planes.

Unfortunately one stray plane smashed into the blackboard nearly hit the prof in the back of the head.

The lecture theatre went deadly silent. The prof turned around, collected his notes, wished us all good luck in the upcoming end of year exam and walk out of the lecture.

He also went M.I.A. for the remaining four lectures in the two weeks that followed.

But he got his revenge, by setting one of the hardest first year maths exams, which ended up having an average mark well below 50%.

So many people failed the faculty had to lower the pass mark.
I have seen such notes, but you have to take them with a grain of salt. When a department posts a note like that it's sort of the corporate equivalent of "Don't talk to our managers: submit your resume on this web form right here." So you should still talk to professors (but don't waste their time).

When a professor writes that on his/her personal/research website, it means "I already have grad students coming out of my ears, and I don't have enough grant money to support even half of them." This is useful information, because you (should) pick a grad school based on who you want to work with. You need to look elsewhere if all the professors you want to work with at a particular school are over-subscribed. Some professors also become jaded by the sheer number of unqualified candidates who can't hack it: None of the string theory groups in my school will talk to you until after you've been admitted, gotten good grades for a couple semesters and the passed department's second-year screening exam with a good score.

Let me part with this: I got into grad school (probably) mostly because I sent an email to the professor who ended up being my research advisor. I described what I did in the past (which was sorta-kinda tangentially in the same field), omitted any mention of my (not very good) grades, and asked a non-time-waste-y question about the research group. The thing about grad school (at least in the hard sciences) is that one of the criteria for admission is "doesn't anybody want this candidate in his/her research group??" When you have someone pulling for you on the inside, getting in is a whole lot easier.
It's just a link blog. Reverse chronological posting date is the default for blogs.
Basically yes, I believe there are some novel ideas here worth patenting. Specifically, the unified coordinate system between 2D and 3D, and the methods of implementing it (here by using a virtual camera to align 3D coordinates with pixels and sandwiching the 2D page with fullscreen canvases). To date, I don't believe this idea has been suggested anywhere else, and while it might seem obvious in hindsight, it took many late nights of experimenting developing it. There was no promise that the research would pay off or the end result would even work. You should see the early prototypes.

Also, you're right. Voodoo needs a different logo.
To sell ads you don't need to show exact size of audience, estimation is enough as proven by TV.
Logdown, The MISSING blogging platoform for Hackers
Why the Harlan compiler was written in Scheme
Well, as you say, you work on a large Ruby codebase, so I apologize if the following comes off as condescending. I don't follow this first bit, though.

You say, "Ruby's allowing you to elide parentheses means you can't assume that a property is a property or a function."

There's no such "thing" as a property in Ruby, yeah? Everything+ is an object and objects respond to methods. IMO this is one of the places where Ruby is not being magical. attr_reader and friends are built on top of this to give programmer's a convenient shorthand way of defining boilerplate getters and setters when you need them.

In this regard Ruby is more homoiconic. "getters" and "setters" are just plain ol' methods!

It'd be much more confusing, IMO, if there were now two types of "things" that could be attached to an object: methods and properties/attributes. You'd have to develop a separate convention, syntactic or otherwise, for information hiding, e.g., how would private properties work? You're now in a funny situation where one kind of variable (instance variables) might differ from other kinds of variables in a dimension other than scope.

Python's answer is "neither properties nor methods are ever really private" which is internally consistent but very un-Ruby.

+: I know this isn't literally true. Methods aren't objects, for example, and there are plenty of keywords like case, when, if, etc. which are neither methods nor objects but units of pure syntax.
The NTSB wants to make forward collision avoidance systems in cars standard. I wonder if it would be possible to spoof radar and/or IR return signals so as to trip the autonomous braking in a car that gets too close to a bike?
"My argument is that sorting is not what schools were invented for"

Hmmm, are you sure about that?

Being a student and learning are not the same thing. To be successful in school, you have to excel at the former.
Is this done? Are there screens?
Personally, I think this is more an indicator that, whatever you do, growth sucks. Semco is most likely still doing well because they have an enormous amount of small subsidiaries.

Something similar happened to Toyota - once the poster child of lean companies, then they wanted to become the largest car producer in the world, the rest is history.

I wonder - maybe it is time to pick up these clues and start being satisfied with working at companies that are fun and stable and stay small?
NTSB’s findings on San Francisco plane crash at a glance
All the attr_* class methods do is define precisely the instance methods the author wrote by hand. Indeed, if attr_reader, attr_writer, and attr_accessor weren't part of Ruby's Module class you could write them yourself, like so: https://gist.github.com/jfarmer/6b4deeb8bcfbe030f876

If using an "eval" method seems smelly to you, you can achieve the same result in pure Ruby using define_method, instance_exec, and instance_variable_get. There are good practical reasons to use module_eval, though.

Regardless, I think the author's point was more that there's nothing "special" about getters and setters in Ruby. They're just plain ol' methods. As a class of methods we write them often enough that we've also defined a higher-order method that takes an instance variable name as input and dynamically defines those getters and setters on the underlying object.

We wouldn't "lose" anything by not having attr_reader and friends, though. Our code would just be slightly more verbose.
I actually agree with you about the appointment issue --- in the sense that my guess is that FISC court appointment procedures mean it isn't an Article III court. But a couple problems with that for this line of argument:

* There are Article I courts; Congress is empowered to create tribunals for which the Article III appointment rules don't apply. Since the FISC is adjudicating policies that Congress is already empowered to legislate (the Constitution being as silent on foreign surveillance as it is on the makeup of the Air Force), not adhering to Article III doesn't automatically make the FISC unconstitutional.

* In trying to pursue my leg of this argument over the past couple days, I've been pretty well slapped down on the idea that appointment issues damage the Article III standing of the FISC:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6010406
I thought that too but late last year one of these Bradley Manning articles seemed to suggest that data might be able to persist after a simple zero-fill, so I thought I'd use my prng script before zero-filling, because it's as fast as zero-filling and it seems unlikely you could decipher more than two layers.

I looked up the article; the statement is actually more ambiguous than I recall:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/manning-assange-lap...

"Johnson testified that he found two attempts to delete data on Manning’s laptop. Sometime in January 2010, the computer’s OS was re-installed, deleting information prior to that time. Then, on or around Jan. 31, someone attempted to erase the drive by doing what’s called a “zerofill” — a process of overwriting data with zeroes. Whoever initiated the process chose an option for overwriting the data 35 times — a high-security option that results in thorough deletion — but that operation was canceled. Later, the operation was initiated again, but the person chose the option to overwrite the information only once — a much less secure and less thorough option. All the data that Johnson was able to retrieve from un-allocated space came after that overwrite, he said."

It's not clear what "after" means exactly, but it surprised me that he learned about the first attempt after the second attempt was complete. What may have happened -- making this much less impressive -- is that maybe /dev/sda1 was filled with /dev/zero rather than /dev/sda, so that the first part of the drive was totally untouched. So it might be much less impressive than it sounds, but it sounded impressive to me at the time.
Dropbox aims to replace the hard drive altogether
It seemed like a pretty resilient system. Those parts were right side up by the time the flight ended.
Haskell is a puzzle language (http://prog21.dadgum.com/38.html).

I intend to learn some Haskell but I keep wondering if it might be more useful to spend some time with Clojure or F#
Dear Google, Please integrate Mr. Jingles to Chrome. KTHXBAI.
There are geniuses in every field, therefore every field is just as difficult intellectually? I don't follow your reasoning here. What sort of evidence would convince you that math/science are in fact harder for humans than history or art? (Edit: A somewhat different perspective I have is expressed by Feynman here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWjV0bNBPY4 The good men and women of a field are more important than the field, and you can probably find good men and women in every field if you look hard enough.)
While true for the aggregate, there are always exceptions. I know someone who had a GPA <= 2.3 from a mediocre state school that went to medical school in the Caribbean.

The person did so well on Step 2 that s/he was invited to transfer back to the US at a fist tier medical school, and is now the director of cardiology at a prestigious hospital.
Austin is a cool town, but the property taxes are between 2 and 3% (per year.)

That means if you buy a normal house worth about $400K, you will pay an additional 11K per year in property tax, which is a little less than a grand per month.

Hopefully they will eliminate this horrible system, which favors rich people. Some might say, "Well it's better than an income tax" but I think if you asked Thomas Jefferson about the matter he would say that neither is morally acceptable.
I agree, this site is a better aggregation of resources for web devs, alas, without the explitive in the URL.
I am myself struggling with my post. But I just don't see how a nation can withstand US power in the long run without dirty tactics or becoming some outpost of another superpower.

It looks to me that even the Snowden case has shown so far little to no consequences for the US internal situation. But it has shown that a counter point to the US perspective is internationally needed.
IFTTT is pretty awesome but I've been using the Postalicious plugin for a while to create a linkblog out of my Pinboard bookmarkings via RSS. Speaking of, RSS + IFTTT is great as well. I'm hoping the Google Reader demise indirectly cultivates additional innovation with RSS for these kinds of things.
Thanks for the link to this library. It seems like I would still need to implement a lot of features like login, but it's a great start.
Venezuela has not received any embargoes or sanctions from the US. If anything, the biggest financing source this government has had to prop up the disastrous economy are oil prices and the income they get from the US as the first buyer of venezuelan oil.

I would say that having one of the highest criminal rates in the world, highest inflation in the world, constant blackouts, constant basic products scarcity should be enough to make the electorate question their positions.
I hope the smirking picture was an old one though (not from after he ran a bicyclist over).

Also, I wonder what the chances are that he waited till he sobered up to turn himself in.
"Really makes you wonder whether the priority decisions you made today will seem similarly ludicrous in 30 years."

My bet is on yes.
To give you an idea of how big of a problem not paying is, I'll relate a story I heard from a small business owner in California:

In an effort to provide his blue collar workers with a decent benefits package, he setup a health insurance plan. After 6 months or so, his HR person came back and said "none of the employees have used the insurance at all!" This was weird since these workers had families and obviously children get sick on a regular basis.

He spoke to his employees and asked why they weren't using their insurance. The answer? Instead of having to pay a $20 co-pay to see a doctor, they could just go to the hospital and say they were uninsured. If they did that, they didn't pay a dime for their healthcare.
Uber feels the heat after jacking up prices during storm
Read this as shirt for making websites. I was expecting some satire on the millions of websites for making shirts.
You cleverly avoid my analogy. I'll give another.

You teach someone how to do X, lets assume this goes something like: Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, Step 4, done. You then teach someone how to do Y, this goes like: Step 5, Step 6, done. On the exam you ask someone to do Z. This follows from a nontrivial combination of Step 1, Step 3, Step 6, done. If anyone gets it right, don't flatter yourself. You didn't teach them how to do Z.

Either they have a sort of a priori intuition of the material (this is how I get by most of the time), they got lucky, or they had someone else teach them. Mathematicians (and other academics) feel the need to make their subjects so obtuse they seem insurmountable. Math is not hard - some guy saw an interesting behavior of a function and wanted to see what happens when he tries to differentiate it. Programming is not hard - some girl thought she could make her life easier by writing a program that writes other programs. This pretty much exemplifies all of human understanding. It's not much more than that.

Of course I'm not suggesting that complex analysis or the Dragon Book are trivial, all I'm saying is that they are not hard. But academics themselves often discourage people from pursuing science and math (numerous examples in this thread alone). We can blame the government, elementary schools, and parents all we want, but it's blatantly obvious that universities are broken. The fact that students are tested on material not covered in class (or nontrivial combinations of material covered in class) is inane.
I'd love to see a Plotly-Serial bridge, which could be as simple as a tiny CLI. I keep most of my Arduino projects tethered to my computer anyway, so this wouldn't require any extra hardware. All I'd have to do is send something like "PLOT <number>" over the usb-serial connection.

In fact, it'd be completely device-agnostic--it shouldn't matter if the device is an Arduino or a Propeller or a custom board as long as it can talk over serial.

I might be in the minority of users who tether, and it'd be pretty easy to roll my own solution using the Python API. Nevertheless, it'd sure be convenient.
I agree the 'democracy promotion' angle was a little play for ironic guilt. But it's his piece, his audience, and his editor.

When I hear people speaking as if 'democracy promotion' were a policy begun under Bush 43, I figure they're just young. Folks under the age of (gasp) about 38 are just not going to remember.
That's actually a good solution.

Giving them codes that relate to the total cost of their receipt, so for example 1 coffee = 30 minutes, 2 = 60 so that way when you have a group you each get 30 minutes or something.

Now there is a good startup idea... ;-)
PaaS or IaaS? What's the difference in practice?
Every time Firefox introduces a cool new feature, they emphasize how it's standard, or being put into the standardization process, and how every web developer will be able to use it.

Chrome? Not so much. And it isn't just that this news article left something out — the official Chrome blog[1] never hints that this feature will ever work on anything but Chrome.

To me it's uncomfortable how much Google's tactics with Chrome resemble Microsoft's "embrace and extend" from the late 90s. They seem to want everyone to make Chrome apps, not web apps. If that happens, ultimately we all suffer from the loss of an open web.

[1] http://chrome.blogspot.com/2013/05/richer-notifications-comi...
I can second this, thetoolbox.cc is far superior.
Government, Not Business, Has Been the Source of Breakthrough Innovation
The neuroscience of social influence
My first thought is that this limits your employee pool to people who will put up with that type of environment. I don't want to have to inform on my fellow employees' possibly-suspicious behavior, and I don't want to live with the possibility of being investigated because someone else reported something benign I did that triggered some kind of behavioral flag. My personal increased disinterest in working for an intelligence agency is not exactly going to hurt their applicant pools, but a general attitude shift could.
I'd post an NP-complete joke but if you've heard one, you've heard them all.
They are actually quite common in the US. You'll often drive by billboards on the freeway where hospitals claim "No more than a 30 min wait in our emergency rooms!"

I personally think it's a good thing.
Tizen App Challenge
You mean...all this time... !

Reminds me of the story of the old monk who emerges from the basement of the monestary holding an ancient parchment. Tears are streaming down his face. The student asks "What's wrong?" The old monk replies "All this time! We were supposed to be celebRate!"
Are we screwing ourselves by transmitting radio signals into space?