skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I stand corrected. I misinterpreted this sentence: "The researchers found that from age 20 to 56, obese people racked up the most expensive health costs." I should indeed have done the math.

You are correct that for long term health insurance contracts (i.e., contracts which are guaranteed to cover people past the age of 56 at a fixed cost), fatties and smokers should pay less.

In a single payer health system, the "insurance provider" sees ROI from peoples' productivity, meaning the single payer system has incentive to keep people healthy even if it costs more.

This makes no sense. According to your link, the healthy people cost more due to medical costs incurred during their unproductive years. There is no incentive for a single payer system to keep people alive in their unproductive years.
As a very smart former lawyer, I have no doubt that he's going to ask every question, knowing full well the answer to the question and that those testifying on behalf of the NSA are going to be left with no choice but to lie either directly or through some sort of doublespeak. They should assume that everything he asks or talks about is backed up by evidence.

Only one of two things are likely to happen on Wednesday. He discusses the truth and they admit it or he discusses the truth, they deny it, he provides evidence to the contrary that confirms both the truth and that those at the NSA blatantly lied to Congress. Either way, there is no way this can go down well for those protecting these abuses of Constitutional rights.

I'm really looking forward to this hearing.
...it is American!
Agreed. He is so very adept at reducing a complicated system into simple relationships of cause and effect.

No government is to be trusted not to manipulate the population through fear. That should be taught in grade school.
Q: How do you recognize experienced Emacs user?

A: Foot pedals.

http://bc.tech.coop/blog/041024.html

http://www.cb1.com/~john/computing/emacs/handsfree/pedals.ht...
I have a flight to LA tomorrow. Any chance this will be ready by tonight?
I'm not quite sure how to respond to that. You might agree that some arrests and taxes are necessary. I'm not really sure what you're saying (like, how capitalists are any more "ordinary" than elected officials).

One thing is sure, though. If you think corporations can't, or won't do all those things if they could (putting aside the fact that governments are elected while corporations aren't), then you're not familiar with US history:

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_Government_Services

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_the...
Snowden left the NSA a few months ago. If the monitoring of emails had truly ceased 2-3 years ago, I would have expected that information to already have been aired since Snowden and the classified material he has is likely to be current enough to corroborate this claim.
I don't think there is any distinction. He's just reblogging. He did link the original at least.
This is only true to the extent that they can monetize that discoverability. The problem is that Amazon can freeload by offering a lower price without facing the high costs of retail real estate, etc. and people will discover books at B&N but buy them on Amazon.
And handwriting can be (a) drastically slower and (b) less legible (therefore more prone to mistakes or lost information). In a 911 environment, either of these alone can cost lives. Throw in all of gregd's additional variables, and it would be a nightmare of the sort described in the article.
Any protocol that runs over SSL on port 443?
Errr, but this one doesn't sound like it's quite that bad, from the OP it's a "find the address and dispatch to fire, police or EMS" system. Only the police system, which is I assume a bigger part of this 2 billion total "upgrade" really needs most of what you've outlined. Doesn't sound like there's anything particularly sensitive in this system, although it's certainly harder than Twitter, which thezach in this subthread tells us is still presenting Fail Whales.
Apparently I don't know how to use docker. You are right, I was just starting the base image every time. Starting it creates a new container which you can find with "ps -a", and you can start/attach to it later the way you said. Thanks for the tip, I need to find a good tutorial or write one.
I wonder if eventually an immunity to the disease will start to occur within certain trees.
How might one get on and off this thing at these speeds? Perhaps a 2nd loop near entry/exit points?
Yup, the gasoline splashes out of the bubble carb on every stroke!
1. When people say "but what about monopolies?" they seem to forget that we do currently have a giant monopoly, which is government, that prohibits others from entering the market by force, not just by market instruments such as predatory pricing (although that's the case too, since it is claimed the price of government services is zero). Even if you disagree with me that monopolies historically never remained monopolies for long without government support, wouldn't you at least agree that a private monopoly is still better than government, because I can still stop paying immediately and not expect men in suits from IRS on my doorstep?

2. Proponents of government services always bring up cases where grandmas or disabled or poor people somehow suffer because they don't have enough money/physical abilities/brains to handle things. I agree those cases exists, but it very often is presented as if half of the society is in someway dysfunctional and requires government help (even if that's indeed the case, we should rightly see this situation as abnormal and fix it, not feed it). But the truth is, in a society there's indeed always a % of people who are dysfunctional. My guess is, it should be no more than 5-10%. Those people can be helped by voluntary donations and charities. Beyond that, we got people who made their choices in life (not buying insurance, eating unhealthy, drunk driving etc.). While I'm not necessarily claiming those people should not be helped when they need it, but the decision to help or not should lie with the body that actually does the job: that is, if a drunk uninsured driver is brought to a hospital, it is up to the charity that sponsors it and the hospital managers or doctors to decide whether to help him or not. By leaving this decision up to the government we simply incentivize all sorts of bad behaviors at the expense of people who have no intention of supporting it.
Efficient != lazy
Inquisitive != dumb

I agree with the overall gist of the article, but the title is obvious link-bait and his valid points have been twisted just to fit it.
> Lowest bidder? No one loses their job for someone dying?

Government is not as bad as you think. It's worse.

Lowest bidder really causes a lot of problems. My company recently bid for a contract for an EU agency.

We were not chosen, because the winning bid offered senior staff at a rate of 0.1 euro per hour.

The bloody idiots at Government procurement calculated the average as (senior+junior)/2 and awarded the contract to these crooks with the flawed bid as their average was the lowest.

It's not unreasonable to assume they will debit enough extra junior hours to offset the senior time.

I am not even allowed to tell media about this, by contract.
I don't think it's a rare event.

Just my €0.02.
If it had Android, I wouldn't consider buying it.
BOOM project came up with a very impressive ideas. Their half page long paxos implementation in Overlog blew my mind.
I don't think they new Bloom language is as expressive, however.
At least they have been keeping their website's copyright up to date:

"
&copy; Copyright
<SCRIPT>
<!--
var year=new Date();
year=year.getYear();
if (year<1900) year+=1900;
document.write(year);
//-->
</SCRIPT>
"
That policy is about as backwards and fucked up as the idea of privatizing a 911 service. Those "firefighters" should be ashamed.

As a counterpoint, I refer you to all the other counties in the US where receiving this vital service isn't contingent on your bills being paid. I can see these people losing their home to a fire because they failed to acquire home insurance, but I can't see how moral people would stand by and let a house burn to the ground over an unpaid bill.
Regarding the "court order" mentioned as being needed to listen/read/monitor, a helpful followup question might be, what court gives the order and how many such orders are in effect on average for each of the past five years.
Not to be funny, but it seems like every other day has another "hyperloop uses acoustic waves" article. It's a good guess, but it doesn't even contain new speculation (another article went into detailed theorising about how cars would accelerate and decelerate).

Seriously, until we have a solid info, or even a new guess, can we lay off Hyperloop?
Can you also stop paying and subscribe to a different service provider?
So this is basically something that can either be made with 100 usd for pizza and diet coke or 100 billion? Makes sence, we should probably make more of the first kinds of systems.
Unsurprisingly, non-Americans take exception to American exceptionalism.

America is literally pulling a, "We're better than you so we can violate any of your laws - including our own - and then murder, torture & kidnap. We are sovereign over the entire world."

Few non-Americans think that's a swell idea, so it will only last as long as American power lasts.

If you agree with Chomsky or not or if you think American power will last or not, you at least have to be able to concede that everybody else in the world has a valid gripe about the benevolent bully who really likes his big stick. Chomsky is just an American who noticed that...
Even worse, this is a small, at least in $$$ part of a $2 billion total upgrade of emergency services. And it's the "customer's" entry into the rest of those systems.
The only "prohibiting competition" rule is that currently insurance companies have to create plans for each state they want to operate in, and those plans have to follow the laws in that state.

Since not every state insurance commissioner is captured by the insurance industry, this is a big problem for them so they're heavily lobbying the feds to create a situation where insurance policies are regulated by the state the company is based out of.

This will let them set up an operation like corporate governance and consumer lending have, where one of the most corrupt states like Delaware sets up rules that let insurance companies do whatever they want.
The core issue for me in the privacy debate is not about our personal life choices - we as humans are becoming more and more tolerant every day, witness the rise of gay marriage rights and marijuana acceptance. For me it's about needing privacy between you and the power structure - restrictive laws are constantly being proposed and overturned thanks to our ability to organize in private. To go back to gay marriage as an example: there was a time when homosexuality was illegal. We'd never have gay marriage if we had the ability to shuffle through everyone's innuendo and crosstalk in the last decades and put restrictions on that activity, or know that a group of people regularly gathered at certain locations.

Take civil rights: imagine Rosa Parks calls MLK while she's waiting to get on the bus (she was a community leader, not a random instant-activist). If she made and communicated that decision to sit at the front before she got on she could have been arrested, significantly delaying historical change.

We need privacy from the power structures to maintain those rights to organize and protest and change laws, and I honestly don't see why those who are yelling about not giving up their guns because of the right to keep arms against government overrule aren't applying exactly the same concept to their right to privacy.
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Yes, APL is Turing-complete, whereas SQL is not... until you consider vendor extensions. I guess I should have included the obligatory "I know that..." in the original post. The fact remains that SQL allows you to do complicated queries without having a computer science degree, something I have never seen with APL/J/K, Java, or any other programming language. SQL arrived on the scene in 1974, by the way-- it's not a "21st century" anything.

I agree that the JVM does not use memory well. For example, it has a high per-object memory overhead. And there are things such as lock widening which are a real design problem. But even considering these things, the JVM still manages to consistently beat other choices such as Perl, Python, Ruby, and so forth.

Yes, vector instructions are great, and Java can't really use them. There are also other builtin instructions such as the CRC ones which would be nice to have at the language level. We have been adding JNI segments to make use of these. It isn't the syntax of loops that is the problem, but rather, the presence of side effects in the language, that makes auto-vectorization difficult. Probably annotations should be added to make this easier, like Intel has done for C/C++.

None of this means that APL is going to come back. The scientists and engineers who originally used it back when 4kb was a lot of memory are just going to use R, MATLAB, Mathematica, or another choice like that and gain a lot of the same micro-optimizations you love. People who want to do big queries over giant data sets are going to keep using Hadoop.

The one thing that could maybe dethrone Hadoop is a system that made use of GPUs (graphics processors). Some of them have 512 cores now-- that's a lot of power, and Java can't really harness it at all. But GPU processors are really restricted in how they can communicate and how much memory they can access, so it would not be as much of a general purpose solution.
I think main difference is Charles thought it with his brain, whereas I felt it with my gut.

No, jokes aside, the reason I wrote this up is that I wasn't entirely convinced of the exact physics laid out in Charles' post (I think e.g. Daniele Foresti et al [1] liked from my post may have more interesting model). Also, Charles seemed to assume that the wave would be there only to reduce drag, not to propel the capsule/car. That doesn't sound like Musk to me.

But most importantly I think I bring to the table a careful poetic analysis of the Hyperloop. My work in this case is not in physics (where I actually do have my training), but in literature.

1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/07/10/1301860110
I am a huge fan of Snowdens, of ending the Orwellian institutionalization of our democratic society, and even of Chomsky's statements in this instance but in Soup10's defence, Noam Chomsky IS an anti-American/anti-Government liberal socialist anarchist (in fact that is how he would describe HIMSELF) who uses linguistic gymnastics to de-construct cultural norms in a way the reflects his own ideology. As such he almost exclusively preaches to those already with a natural sympathy towards his world-view, in such language as is meant to incite.

Finally, while Chomsky is obviously a genius well beyond the trite use of that word; he undoubted can be described as both self righteous and egotistical regardless of their justification.

Honestly, Soup10's only real mistake was in suggested that Chomsky's ideas should not be taken seriously. Even if one doesn't agree with him, many will based solely on the position he holds in the pantheon of liberal intelligentsia. Meaning that his words are likely to effect the debase of this issue going forward and should not, therefore, be lightly cast aside.
Is there a specific problem with people with Indian-sounding names answering questions, or is this just casual racism?
I downvoted you because you asked people to explain why they were downvoting you. This adds nothing to the conversation (everyone who gets downvoted wants to know why, everyone who downvotes knows that the person who they are downvoting would want to know why) and is bad for HN (talking about the moderation system distracts from actual on-topic conversation, and leads to gaming of the moderation system - indeed, I would say even that line can be gaming the moderation system, as it can lead people to reconsider whether to downvote).
It appears that Clay's last released update was over a year ago.
How about fact? If I may be so free to cite Wikipedia: The EU country that has the hightest per GDP expenses on health care, according to [1] is The Netherlands with 12.0% compared to the US with 17.6. EVERY other EU country has a lower percentage.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_heal...
Is Fracking Good or Bad?
Well that would mean they would have to block most non-mainstream sites or alternatively block a ton of things. Of course with a whitelist it is more difficult but it is almost certainly not they way they will do it.
I've done Lean work for hospital new patient intake centers. When it comes to triaging patients in extremely homogenous centers, the real training period is a few months long (formally it's one month, but that's really just to learn your way around the computer systems). In disease centers where the patients are calling with heterogenous complaints, the formal training period is also a month, but everyone agrees the real training period is just about two years plus weekly meetings with docs to learn about how to triage that week's oddball/edge cases.

I suspect 911 calls are no less complex than scheduling people for a doctor's appointment.
I'm just saying that 20 years ago handwriting was the only option, and police still managed to get the job done.
I agree with the sentiment, but since BN has crushed independent booksellers the problem now is that if BN closes, lots of more isolated places like suburbs and exurbs will have no good place to browse and buy books. I'm currently staying in a suburb of a major American city and BN is quite literally the only place to buy physical books for a 50 mile radius, if not more.

It's kind of a crappy situation, but it's one that we've put ourselves in. I'm not confident that we'd see a renaissance of indie booksellers should BN close.

Personally I think that with Nook, BN for various reasons bungled what could easily have been a very successful product. They might still have been able to turn it around by pressuring publishers to sell ebooks for cheaper, removing DRM, and focusing on a true ereading experience and owning a niche instead of competing with full-blown tablets.

Since they've thrown in the towel with Nook, their only hope seems to be dropping prices to give people a reason to walk in instead of going to Amazon, or to make money on ancillary physical experiences, like drinking coffee while browsing. But they already made a possibly fatal mistake in that strategy by renting out space to Starbucks instead of doing their own coffee thing.

BN closing would be a pretty big blow to books in general, regardless of Amazon's sales. While I can't pity the corporation for being affected by market forces, nor can I pity it considering what it's done to indie sellers, neither do I want to see books completely disappearing from the average American's sight.
If you're not actually going to read anything, you can probably use any book to equal effect. I recommend Vollman's You Bright And Risen Angels.
No worries. I do have some suggestions though, from my own perspective as an always learning developer. I took interest in go because of the website, the tour, and the hundred million blog posts that explain why go is good. This may be code beauty, a neat trick, or even benchmarks. But never would I try a language based only on a comment "you should check out go.". Why? Because people for the most part who do that are rather ignorant fanboys...the kind who try to bang nails with a screwdriver if you catch my drift. My time, to me, is valuable...I do a lot of skimming and am easily disinterested. Keep in mind many developers are like this. What I need to become interested is a concise, well laid out page telling me why Nimrod is better than what I have. I don't want to pour through docs or src, I want you to show me. Show me some snippets, some comparisons, some benchmarks, etc. And maybe not even at the same time. Plant the seed in our ears and keep us interested. I didn't try out go, or rust, or even python after the first mention, but after a progression of reads that told me it was right for me. Submit them here, to reddit, to your blog, etc.
Also, don't narrow your focus to one language. It's not a competition...see what you like about other languages, what you don't, what works well, etc. With this, you learn to pick the right tool for the job. Further, you can borrow the good parts for nimrod :).
(This has nothing to do with Snowden but Chomsky's main point.)

One thing I found troubling about all this is you can't expect the victims in other countries to decouple the intentions of the American gov't from American citizens.

Except (even more troubling) is that citizens seem to support drone warfare (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/03/10/m...).
Because the beneficiary of the 911 provider isn't likely to be you, it's the person who needs the emergency who probably can't come to the phone.

If someone needs to call 911 for me, I want to know it's regulated and up to quality - not based on whether the person who happened to pick their provider actually bothered to research a good one, etc
Using sslh one can actually host both https sites and ssh on one port. I used this to hop over a very restrictive firewall in my company, it works great.
I like the attention Chomsky brings to the NSA surveillance problem, but I think he does Snowden a disservice by using him in any kind of comparison to the true terrorists he lists. In attempting to point out the unevenness of America's extradition requests, he inadvertently puts him in the same "moral high ground" as the terrorists, which doesn't help.
Not so, I felt it with my own gut!

Another difference is in Charles' model you would have to travel at the speed of sound. Due to the shape not being a perfect line airflow will have to be supersonic somewhere over the surface of the craft. That's generally not good for energy efficient travel. My "design" allows for the capsule traveling at subsonic speeds.
Yeah, the company that I worked at went from PPO to HDHP in 2008. I guess somehow Obamacare caused that too, despite the fact that Bush was still President. Oh wait, nevermind. My employer was just trying to save themselves money by transferring the 10% per year inflation of health care cost to its employees. It just so happens that every other company that did the same thing in 2009/2010 was able to scapegoat Obamacare for saving themselves money with a move that was always going to be unpopular with employees.

HDHPs were always cheaper for employers than PPOs. Its just that making the shift is hard for a company, because it pisses employees off, and some leave. Many, many companies made the shift when they were able to transfer blame onto a little understood, complex law, despite the fact that the real driver for them doing so was double digit health premium inflation, year after year.