skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm nowhere near having an answer, but pricing transparency needs to be a major part of the solution. I realize OPEC isn't exactly a popular entity, but I wonder whether a similar model might have some benefits here. Form a group comprised of representatives from interested parties tasked with establishing pricing for services rendered that is consistent across the entire nation. Perhaps allow regional adjustments based on cost-of-living deviations, or some other relevant metric - but cap how much those deviations can actually influence the price of care.

End the idiotic "billed rate" vs. the "negotiated rate" nonsense.

Include patient transportation in the equation. If singular pricing isn't attainable, a local hospital's care is too expensive, and the patient can receive similar care at an alternate location in a cost-effective way - cover the transportation cost under their insurance.

Tort reform. Liability insurance premiums for health care professionals is as crazy as the price for the care they provide. This is as big a problem as the price of a bag of saline.

I know these aren't the answers - but pricing of services is key to the problem, and the Affordable Care Act did little to get that under control beyond attempting to move more individuals under the umbrella of insurance and outside of emergency care.
I'm extremely sensitive to sound, and I've been hoping that the the powers that be will eventually come to the realization that open seating plans are highly suboptimal (http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/08/open-office-layout, for example).

I've used a decibel meter on occasion and have observed that my current office sometimes averages 75-80 db. Which, were I in a coffee shop, I could tolerate for some reason[1] much better than at the office.

In any event, I'm now highly dependent on noise canceling headphones (these I highly recommend: http://www.bose.com/controller?url=/shop_online/headphones/n...)

[1] My guesses are a) local conversations at work capture my attention in ways that anonymous ones at a coffee shop don't, b) coffee shops play music and tend to have other noise that create a generalized din that actually works a bit like white noise.
What would happen if a hospital opened up that just had reasonable rates? It wouldn't make any deals with insurance companies other than to take payments. It posts all it's prices online and transparently for everyone to see. You can shop for treatments on their website. Could they make money this way?
There is no "custom Java installation" required, although they do offer one (called "DrJava") to get people up and running quickly and presumably to make support easier. I used IDEA and it worked just fine.

They do require one JAR file, stdlib.jar, to handle things like file I/O that are boring and take away from the algorithms themselves.

There is a second JAR, algs4.jar that contains all of the completed classes, which is useful if you want to implement one particular algorithm yourself, without going back and implementing the others that it relies on.
Not really, I had already a different blog post on the frontpage here and it went well, so I assumed it is stable enough, which it is not.

Before the next submit I will redo the website as static files, since I removed the comments there is no point of doing things dynamically anyway.
Only fools and ideologues argue against systems which have been demonstrated to work.
Many in this thread are claiming that price fixing wouldn't occur in a "truly free" market. This is misty-eyed naivety.

In a completely deregulated free market, it is even more in the hospitals' interest to form a price-fixing cartel. Any new player in the market trying to set reasonable market prices could be excluded through market pressure tactics (eg, tell distributors don't sell to them or our cartel will no longer use you).

It seems to me that the parlous state of the US healthcare system is in fact a perfect demonstration of the dangers of a completely free market, and claims that "oh no it's not actually free enough" are merely handwaving.
A rather spectacular example of MSR's work making it into a very successful consumer product is the pose estimator used by Kinect: http://videolectures.net/ecmlpkdd2011_bishop_embracing/
+1 to the use of Riak. It is great.

But if you are stuck using Postgresql or similar you put your live servers on Ephemeral instances and put one (unused otherwise) slave on EBS so you can snapshot it for backups. And you need at least 2 ephemeral systems so you have a slave to fail over to.
I've heard this statement used frequently to shut down debates re using market dynamics to improve the healthcare system in this country.

However, the substantial majority of healthcare services provisioned are non-emergency.

It is absolutely possible for us to have a freer market in those services (Lasik procedures are just one frequently cited example) and IMO that would be a huge improvement over the current Frankenstein system we have today.
There was no SQL Server 2003. Do you mean 2005?
Emulating a Sun
> But there's several comments in the Koushik Dutta thread from people who "spoke to Googlers"

To be fair, I only see the one comment mentioning that and it's by Koushik Dutta himself, so I don't think that really says anything beyond what's in the initial post. In fact, there is a googler in there asking for patience, though it doesn't appear that he actually works on chromecast.

On the side of patience, it doesn't make much sense to make an SDK and tell people about it if making apps is going to be more or less invitation only. And it would be pretty weird to allow arbitrary browser tab broadcasting but not arbitrary app broadcasting, since it's media that's (ridiculously) licensed to be played in a browser but not on a TV that made all the media companies go apoplectic with google TV in the first place.

All that said, I agree that cat and mouse games with potential device hackers is super lame and makes it not that much more valuable than an hdmi cord. On the one hand, it's (sort of) wireless hdmi, on the other, it only works with a tiny list of whitelisted apps! Not exactly a glowing advertising slogan.
Hacker School Residents
1) Sound isn't necessarily distracting. Sometimes it could be helpful. Focus@Will (https://www.focusatwill.com/science/science-primer/) is based on this.

2) You can usually find quiet if you want to rather easily.

3) If you're going to argue that society (or parts of society) should be more quiet, you have to be specific about what parts, and about why restricting sound outweighs the costs. The costs of restricting sound weren't addressed at all.
So I can't find an online reference to this anywhere, but years ago I read a relevant anecdote about (I'm pretty sure) Isaac Asimov.

He used to go into the most noisy environments he could find to write; places like a noisy restaurant or cafe. He found that this forced him to focus in a way that a quiet environment did not. For example, in a quiet environment, you occasionally still hear sounds, but it's rare enough that you don't have to keep your focus actively engaged. So when the sounds inevitably do happen, they distract.

Note that I'm not suggesting that this would work for most people. I've tried it, and maybe it's worked for me once or twice. It's an interesting way to try to get of writer's block, if nothing else.
After spending six months in the hospital for orthopedic care for my news it became very apparent that unless you had a negotiated rate with your HMO or were on Medicare, pricing was the wild west. If you could discern what the bills were for via the medical codes, you would become outraged by the overhead. The best part is that hospitals get to hide behind HIPAA as they gouge and steal.
I much prefer wkhtmltopdf: https://wkhtmltopdf.googlecode.com/

It essentially allows you to make an HTML page and convert it to a PDF. It has powerful options around making footers, headers etc. The best part is you can run jQuery on it. It comes in handy when you don't know what the data will be like.
What's the price of water in the desert? Somebody clearly realized this and appplied it to US healthcare system. Way to go capitalism.
I was going to say something similar -- that it might not be because of age, but rather intelligence and self-awareness.

"Kids don't seem to care", but kids also often don't have the slightest idea of what's good for them. They might prefer to study with the TV on instead of in silence, but that doesn't mean their studying isn't worse because of it.
That's sort of a useless distinction to make, in practice. If jQuery isn't usable as-is, then it could very well be said that this problem is at least partially due to using jQuery.

Having to play games with jQuery to strip out or alter some of its functionality just to get it to appease Mozilla really isn't much different than any other bug that might need to be patched to get jQuery to work in a certain situation.
What a baffling industry. Wish great things to any startup that tries to get through the bureaucratic/legal/insurance hurdles to take a crack at some of this.
Title kinda stinks. Seems like they're working out the quirks in their review process. Nothing to see here, really.
AAPL stock would stay at $400 for the next ten years?

Fuck Ballmer.
A trick I use to really get in the zone is to blast a good song on repeat. I suspect the reason this works is that the repeating song blends with itself. You don't have the distinct transitions every 3-4 minutes, making it easy to lose track of time.
It's an opinion piece, so it's sort of anecdotal and hazy by nature, I guess (ymmv). I'm not going to complain too viscerally about it.

The problem I have, though, is that the entire piece basically says "noise kills productivity" but the only linked research is saying that "exposure to aircraft noise increases morning saliva cortisol levels in women, which could be of relevance for noise-related cardiovascular effects." [0]

So I basically have an article saying "noise is bad for productivity and concentration" and a research article saying "loud noise at night might raise stress levels in women, even if it doesn't wake them up."

To me, the former is meaningless. I wouldn't even start to make an argument about it based on the provided material without bringing other sources to bat. It would just be anecdote v anecdote. However, I find the latter interesting, and makes me want to do a little more reading on that particular subject. I happen to be male, but the idea that extra noise might inherently increase levels of a stress hormone in the human body is just as interesting and important to me as whether or not I'm more or less productive in a quiet room.

tl;dr = The article content is fluffy, but the linked research is kind of interesting (albeit saying something almost totally unrelated)

[0] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2801169/#__ffn_s...
Weekend project Sunrise/Sunset API server in Go
> I can understand that e-books by themselves are not dirt
> cheap, since most of the cost goes does not come from the
> printing and physical distribution process.

Umm... this is incorrect. Most of the cost does come from printing and distribution. The next largest chunk is editing, but it is still smaller than the other.
I've noticed convoluted pricing happens in these industries for consumers:

- Airfare
- Cell phones
- Many telecom services
- Banking & finance
- Healthcare
- Lawyers?
- Accountants?

One common pattern they have is they're prone to monopoly effects either through regulation or network effects.
I code in bars for exactly this reason.
I used to go this route (before I too started a telecommute job), but I've found that Sennheiser's PMX series of running headphones do a great job of isolation without the ear-sweat that comes with the giant cans. They don't have the fuck-off effect, but you are not hearing anything around you and they're super lightweight with great sound.

Which, if you think about it, is probably kind of bad for runners, but I wear them only for code.
Apparently the bar isn't too high:

http://www.zorotools.com/g/00107210/k-G4226537?utm_source=go...
Live Demos might Save Your Startup
Did you buy it? I checked and it's free now, but maybe it wasn't before.

If you really did pay money for it, there's no excuse for it to annoy you in that way.
That is absolutely false. All French citizens and even foreigners enrolled in the "securite sociale" scheme have access to the same facilities, procedures and doctors. There is no discrimination in the public service. Any claims to the contrary are at best unfamiliarity with the subject if not deliberate misinformation.
The most streamlined installation is "apt-get install gitlab." ;) What happened with the ITP for an official debian package? All of a sudden it seemed like it ran out of steam in February.

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=700630
I'm sure competition fits in there somewhere.
You could already do this by having a way for the new version to connect an AF_UNIX socket to the old version and request that the listening file descriptor be passed from old to new.
Being sensitive to useless noise, I want to make love to this article.

But most people I know seem uncomfortable with silence, and sleep through any noise. There are exceptions, but that's what they are, exceptions (in my anecdotal experience). If the science mentioned in the article is right, does it mean most people I know are what: either out of touch with themselves, or trying to cope with the fear of the noise by burying it under a stream of constant sound?
They list the manufacturer sale price right there ($1.07 a liter). The manufacturer is the one who has to go through the certifications, capital costs, and part of the overhead. All the remaining cost (the remaining 89 dollars) is overhead from the hospital, middle distributors (if they exist) and the such.

The the majority of the cost of capital, dealing with regulation, and other "justified" increases is absorbed into the manufacturer sale price.
The government is wasteful and inefficient, but it is not the most wasteful and inefficient system possible.

Politics is the art of figuring out when to burn the extra resources on the government method because all of the other available methods are even worse.
Yup. Android/Google fanboys already have Android HDMI sticks to get their Google + TV fix - little Chinese no-names like Smallart are actually making some very nice devices. Chromecast is Google's answer to Apple TV, not iTV. It's just the latest iteration of GoogleTV and will do just as well.

I'm happily waiting for my Android stick to come in the mail for my kids' TV.
Does "illegal" really mean anything in the international system? Certainly governments cite "international law" to score propaganda points, but to show that it really means something, it's not enough to show cases where weak nations were punished for violating it—one would need an example of a strong nation being punished for violating it. Without that, it isn't the rule of law, only the rule of the strong. Has there been any such case? (Certainly there are many examples of strong nations violating so-called international law with impunity.)
They dont operate in a free market. Everything is closely regulated and the patient cannot compare costs. Companies which would like to provide lower costs services would not be allowed to advertise them.
I have the opposite preference. If there are a big bag of breakages when I change the schema, at least I see where they are. I'm not a fan of relying solely on tests when the DB itself can notice introduced discrepancies.
The current sense of the term in which I use it now is capital-maximizing. If you have money, if you're capitalistic, you should be investing in what can make you the most money, or, if you're bought in to a system, you should be extracting the most "value" from it as possible.

I'm not using it as a political term, rather to describe our current, quarter-profit-maximization system driven by the stock market and public company board + CEO directives for how to run a company.

It's great for efficiently using capital to exploit existing innovations but it's really bad at things like investing in the public, social good of things like healthcare.
> I found the video lectures for this course extraordinarily boring compared to the Stanford algorithms courses taught by Roughgarden. Sedgewick is a brilliant computer scientist, but those videos really put me to sleep.

At the risk of sounding overly negative when it's not intended: they're both very boring lecturers. I actually wonder if that might change a bit when they're interacting with a real audience.
Health expenditure per country (as a fraction of their GDP). The US spends 50% more than France while in France, health care is free and universal.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
It's the past. This isn't news. PCs have always sat in a happy little bubble of freedom while the rest of consumer electronics are a wasteland of vendor-controlled devices or low-rent poorly-interoperable crap.

The gaming consoles have been struggling in a war of control against their developers and hackers since the '80s. Sony has been trying to control the world of video and audio media since Betamax.

The only thing that's changed is that app-driven devices and always-on internet connections make this back-and-forth far more obvious. You download app from some guy, and the next system update kills it. You couldn't do that on your Discman.
I took this class in Princeton - COS226 http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spring13/cos226/...

It was easily one of my favorite classes. It's very straightforward and the lecture slides are great. I highly recommend flipping through them.
Where would you put Austin in terms of racism compare to SF/LA ?
I'd believe that noise universally causes more stress, but that doesn't mean that more noise is always bad. An interesting thing about stress is that we're most productive with some stress; not too much or too little. (Sorry I don't have a citation for that). So it could be that Von Neumann used that noise to reach the sweet spot of stress.
The paranoid part of me sees an untimely coincidence between this and the recent outages at Google and Amazon.
Even if there were perfect competition, it doesn't matter much, people don't comparison shop for ERs. If you are having a heart attack, you're not in a position to compare prices at local hospitals.
It couldn't add up to more than the cost of a bottle of cheap vodka.
This is interesting. I like teaching and have thought about doing something similar for iOS development in/around NYC as a means of supplemental income but I haven't quite worked out how to go about it yet.

I'd be really interested in hearing how this goes for you!
T-SNE over MNIST in python
"If you think that an arab living in france gets the same quality of healthcare as a european french person at the same poverty level, you're kidding yourself."

Funnily enough, medic in French is an Arabic loanword, toubib.

Also, I am not sure how you think the French health system works, but at every level through it there are enough people of Arabic background in it that your idea of there being massive differences in health care for people of Arabic background in France seems unlikely. It is true that there will be instances of racism, however I think that you are pretty far off the mark here in general.

"Ultimately, different ethnicities get different diseases, too, so the bureaucrats in charge of deciding what gets covered and to what extent are basically institutionalizing racial privilege."

There is some variation in susceptibility to disease between different ethnicities, sure, but there is such a large and established Arabic population in France that it would make no sense for the health service to be acting in the way you are suggesting.

Also what particular diseases are you talking about? As far as I am aware there has been so much mixing between Arabic populations and European ones over history that the differences are not really all that great, especially when you look at the differences in care required anyway for two individuals from the same ethnic background.

At the end of the day, given that the French health system gets some of the best ratings in the world and that France also has a very large amount of people who are not of European ancestry, it would be very hard for there be a vast gulf in care based on the ancestry of such a sizeable percentage of the population, otherwise France simply would not hold those ratings.

Out of interest, how much time have you spent in France? I have been there a few times, some of my family have lived there for several years and I am currently sharing a house with someone French, who is not of European background.
Why can't Facebook be both? Ability to easily connect and find people on a personal level but also have the ability to have personas?
I find music too distracting, so I use ambient rain or wave noises - nothing with too much sonic contrast, no details to stand out and draw my attention.

The "focus at will" app is pretty good for minimally distracting music though.
Oops, I was thinking something and typed something else entirely. I meant to say that since the insured pay for the uninsured (through marked up prices), the hospitals are incentivized to jack up prices.
You can stream your Mac's screen with a VLC video playing full-screen and effectively watch whatever you want on an Apple TV.
Tain't Scheme---err Racket, 'tis Common Lisp, warts and all...
I look forward to reading this, however I object to the first reviewer comment: "The first book that really explains what Lisp is all about."

No, I think the first book to explain that was Godel, Escher, Bach.
> at least in the US, companies have a legal obligation to be unscrupulous money making machines. Nothing, not one thing, can come between the bottom line

Might want to talk to Amazon about that[0][1]. Also: nope[2].

Seriously - If you claim that you have to be an immoral asshole corporation driven by nothing but monetary success, you can find all sorts of reasons for it and the more money you have, the more you can invest in making it seem like you're "just following orders". But the main reason is that you're an sociopath and care more about money than you care about people. And yes, those people are destroying the fabric of our society proportional to the amount of money and power they wield.

[0] http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/01/29/amazon-earnings-stron...

[1] Most likely what you're thinking about is 'shareholder value', the "worlds dumbest idea" http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/06/26/the-orig...

[2] http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-com...
21st century scanvenger hunt
The main danger with mixing SELECT * and ORMs when you only need some particular columns is the performance hit.

Not just on the database itself. You also need to ship surplus data to your application and then instantiate objects with surplus fields. All of this takes bandwidth, RAM and time.

I also once saw someone write idiomatic ruby that performed a sum over an ActiveRecord .each. In dev, nobody noticed. In production it pulled a 9 million row table across, iterated over 9 million ruby objects, all to sum up a few hundred kb of actual data that the database could do in a few hundred ms.

The problem is hoping that ORMs will make those icky databases go away. They don't. They can't.
Start making the negative externalities of this pricing known to the bureaucrats in those hospital systems.

Preferably with a lead pipe.
All of those involve heavy regulation by the state and most were state granted monopolies.
The NYPD Division of Un-American Activities