skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oil changes are a very poor analogy for health care.

First, the argument that insurance disrupts market pricing is wrong. Car insurance does cover car repairs and the car repair market is quite competitive, since insurers are heavily invested in managing prices.

The problem here is not insurance. It's that health care is a poor fit for free market dynamics.

In order for markets to function, consumers need to have the ability to comparison shop. That core requirement is often severely constrained in the health care "market".

One reason is urgency. A great deal of the most expensive health care offers no opportunity for the consumer to comparison shop whatsoever, because it's an emergency situation. You're wheeled in unconscious on a gurney. Even for non-emergency care, like cancer treatment, it's often urgent.

Another reason is capital requirements. Doctors and hospitals are extremely expensive to create. In order for markets to function there need to be multiple options to choose from. But the capital requirements of doing so with expensive specialities like oncology significantly retard competition.

There is a reason why every other industrialized country in the western world coordinates health care via a single-payer government instead of the free market. And usually with better public health outcomes.

Markets are not always the best solution. Consider the fire department "market". We actually tried that once in the U.S., a long time ago. Houses would pick their own fire company, which competed with one another. You'd affix an emblem on the front of your house with the company you subscribed to. It was something out of a 20th century Libertarian fantasy. Not so great a solution for fighting fires though.
As we disclaim on the page itself, we aren't experts on all of these databases, so it's possible that we've made a mistake. We are relying on the documentation of other products (but on the specific documented claims rather than whether they throw around the term "ACID").

'Snapshot isolation' is a level of isolation guarantee, not an implementation technique. It means that a transaction will read values consistently at one point in history and then write values at a later point, even though the read values may change in between. To give a classic example, pure snapshot isolation doesn't allow you to soundly transfer $100 from Alice's account to Bob's account. FoundationDB uses MVCC and optimistic concurrency, but provides serializable isolation.

Besides this, and the asynchronous indexing that you mention, RavenDB uses an "XA" type technique for cross-node transactions which relies on the durability of an external transaction coordinator. Various public statements of the developers lead me to think that they don't find this arrangement more trustworthy than I do.

"Local" transactions on a single document don't qualify as ACID transactions; that's one of the primary messages of the page you are linking to.
Cloudera Articulates a 'Data Hub' Future for Hadoop
I want to see community discussion about the submission.
(A disclaimer: I work for Flywheel -- we're an Uber competitor. Take anything I say about Uber with a grain of salt.)

I'm not sure how much synergy there actually is between "get a taxi on demand" and "deliver goods on demand." I mean, taxis have existed forever. Presumably, if someone thought it was cost effective, they could have used taxis as a logistics network long ago. But taxis are really, really, really expensive (and Uber black cars are yet more expensive) in terms of what people expect to pay for shipping. UPS or the postal service will ship a small package across the country for me for $10 or less. A taxi in SF won't go a mile for $10.

Is there some reason to believe that Uber changes the game with regard to all that? They aren't drastically lowering the price of taxis. Their success has been in raising the service level of taxi-like-services, and in reducing the inconvenience of getting a taxi dispatched to you. I don't say this to take anything away from Uber -- I think they have a fantastic service -- but I don't see their successes as being things that really have a lot to do with what you want from a goods distribution network. If what you want to do is have a very expensive courier service for some kind of physical good, do you really mind calling dispatch and talking to a person?
I don't use Java.
Mad respect to the contributors and developers of Firefox. I've been loving the updates lately. Firefox has become my browser of choice again :)
If you have a 1.4.2 cluster you can do a rolling upgrade to 2.0 without doing a "dump/restore". Please remember, this is a tech-preview, don't upgrade your production cluster to 2.0 until it's been released for production use. Feel free to test drive this preview, and if you do so please send us feeback! #disclaimer I work for Basho
Digital Ocean: NY2 Network Upgrade Postmortem
solar : stellar/star :: coke : soda
The whole "international waters" thing isn't as much of a right, as it is a liability. Think of it like traveling internationally, you are far less protected by your home country, and you don't gain any magical new protections.

At sea you are always subject to the laws of the countries flag you are flying, and sometimes the laws of the port you are arriving at or departing from. If you upset a specific country, you are dependent on their respect for your flagged country to not board and seize your vessel. The US Coast Guard for example claims the right to board anything in the Pacific or Atlantic if they suspect it of being used in the commission of a crime. Good luck getting Panama or The Marshall Islands to come defend you.

In Google's case they would also be subject to laws wherever the fiber or satellite connection they are using makes landfall.
From what I hear, that's what happened to Slashdot.
We have been told by people who should know that Clustrix does not provide serializable transactions, but since this claim is unspecific and not based on publically available information we haven't put it on the page.
notice that 1000$/LOC in a car with 1000000 units solds amounts to little more than 11$ (in the case of the article, IIRC: 11000 LOC), so economies of scale do make it perfectly feasable, I guess.
This looks nice but what I really still like about Adium is the size of the text entry and the contacts. It can sit unobtrusively at the corner of my screen and I can send/respond to messages without it affecting my work. Personal opinion obviously but one of the reasons I don't like Skype on the Mac now is the size of the text entry
Here in Norway, we were refused a c-section as my wife being fed up after 26 hours wasn't a valid reason for having one.

It also cost $0 total, with a baby delivered and 5 days in the 'new-parents-hotel' at the hospital, which included monitoring, help and instruction, and vaccines.
Yes, I know. nginx is explicitly not designed for being an app launcher; I don't blame Passenger for this.
Apple’s stripped-down iWork suite is free, but there's a cost
Oh FFS, if this were "Ask HN: What are the hottest startups in The Valley right now?" it would be summarily ignored.

At least I hope.
Funny. I posted below on why I like my Surface so much (Pro 2), but didn't touch on screen size.

The screen size is perfect for me. The resolution is phenomenal so I fit more onto it than my old Samsung Series 7, which had 11", same as my MBA. The other problem with 11" is that it's the tipping point for bag size. I like to travel light, and the 10.3" of the Surface fits onto as large a bag as I like to comfortably carry over one shoulder.

Luckily price is not a factor for me.
Michael Barr didn't find Toyota guilty, a court in Oklahoma did. Michael Barr provided testimony to that court.

If you're implying that Michael Barr somehow stretched the truth of what he found, and did so under a legal oath, then I think you're implying that he perjured himself, which is a pretty serious allegation.
Quite so.

Reminds me of the song "Stuck in the middle with you":

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right.
looks a lot like http://airmailapp.com/, is that a standard osx design philosophy or something?
They originally had this plan with The Dalles datacenter. Pump the year around cold water from the Columbia river, cool with it, and return it.

The EPA shut that down right quick because even a degree temperature change has dramatic effects on the wildlife population.
YouTube most likely decided to pay for videos to encourage more and better content. Without paying their content creators, YouTube would just be the place where you get started and then moved somewhere else to profit.
I think corruption is closer to the natural state of man and doesn't need any explanation. What needs an explanation is how do you get from a natural state of disorder to a society and government that function like clockwork? There's obviously no easy answer, because few countries have done it.
hot as being defined by what?
Bigger, Lighter, Deadlier Navy launches new stealth destroyer
I'd really like to see Amazon figure out a way to handle the purchase of books as gifts with the Matchbook program. Books I bought for someone else, how can they get the Matchbook Kindle version. Also, books I've received as gifts from others, how can I get the Matchbook version?
Show HN - Vidsy.tv video CMS: add playlists, sidebars & pre-rolls via widgets.
Looks really awesome – however, as some other people have already said – please make a build for a trial .dmg that you can download directly from your webside (Coda, Versions and other does this) – just so that we can try if it fits into our workflow without puting out $10 up front.

The price seems alright, if it works like intended though.
What about RethinkDB?
Good catch! The only difference appears to be the band.
Why is the total going down in the after picture? Because our points only belong to the set of natural numbers ;)?

We're assuming in this totally contrived example that points are a measure of total resources + opportunity in our closed system, since we're implying a redistribution of a fixed pool of resources^1.

So, the total in the "after" picture would still be 94 and thus the mean would remain at 9.4 and the median would be 9.4 - (and down from 10).

I'm not a fan of arguing from averages - realistically, the picture is more like
1 - 1000pts, 2 - 100pts, 3-50pts, 4-30pts, 5, 6-7 - 20pts, 8-10 10pts

~ 1270 total, avg 127, median 20.

But these are all contrived examples (in the above I'm more leaning on income distribution, which I've reproduced from memory and may be skewed). If we equalize the above, the median would go up.

The argument for redistribution can be made on an economic/statistical basis - but the argument for equality, I think, is ultimately moral. It's not about fairness per se, but about justice.

^1 Not quite my stance but for the sake of argument.
Very cool. I did a similar thing a while back using the IMDB data files. It has a few views.

Director ranking
http://godsofluxury.com:5001/

Director detail
http://godsofluxury.com:5001/person/263239
http://godsofluxury.com:5001/person/56779

TV show by seasons
http://godsofluxury.com:5001/tvshow/191909

Hopefully that can give you some inspiration.
Datomic Console Released
moon != Moon
Perhaps the concepts of gender and race are so foreign that it is literally difficult to think about and therefore "debilitating".
> and worst of all, they don't know their way around the city at all.

This is my main concern. I am notoriously bad at directions and hate having a driver that I basically need to direct. Especially because that just means I'll be pulling out my Maps app instead of him using the navigation that I can clearly see sitting on his dashboard (I am SO confused by this behavior). Sometimes they'll just get frustrated with me (because I don't know how to get there!) and then finally type it in themselves as if its some huge inconvenience.
You are, of course, correct. While Cruz was essentially the face of the wing of the party responsible for the shutdown, he didn't have a direct vote causing it.

The point still stands, however, that the party leadership did not want that fight and knew that they were unlikely to get any real concessions. Boehner, for all his flaws, got pushed into it by the even more unreasonable element of the GOP.
This is more than side work though, this is a week of being a salaried employee of two companies. This would certainly violate the terms of employment of any standard salaried employment contract.
There is a distinction between the Startup Battlefield (companies that are launching) and the Hackathon (apps and hacks made in a constrained time period). His criticism seems to be leveled at the Battlefield judging.
Isn't ALTER TABLE a fundamentally slow and blocking action anyway? It's easy enough to make a new table and swap it in. Transactions for row-level actions are far more important.
I'd bet that I'm a lot more cautious buying apps from the Mac App Store than I am from Google's Play Store, simply because Google's got that safety net of "Eh, this app isn't as good as it looked in the screenshots. I'll just return it." Trial periods also usually go a long way in convincing me to spend money on an app, especially things more costly than a dollar or two. A few months ago, I found myself debating between Totalfinder and Pathfinder- luckily, they both had a few weeks of free trials and I was able to determine that while pathfinder looked like it had more features, Totalfinder just felt a lot more seamless in day-to-day use. If I hadn't had the ability to sit down and get a feel for the apps, I'd probably have just said "fuck it, I don't need tabs and split panes that much anyways."
I agree. What I'm trying to determine is whether or not it's a rabbit hole going down. Am I using a very powerful tool that's user interface is fine, but takes a little bit of time to learn. Or am I using a very powerful tool that has a user interface that's just bad. I'm honestly not sure - I haven't spent enough time with it to tell.

And yes. A programming language or framework is/has a user interface.
Aren't those things signs of health?

Shitty companies not going public, shitty companies failing silently, retail investors not getting burned, professional investors in high risk ventures taking the big losses.
The plugin is quite dangerous, an "aggressive" stance sounds reasonable to me.

But what would persisting with claims that Java plug-ins are always dangerous have achieved? By a similar argument, the Firefox team fixes several security vulnerabilities they themselves describe as "critical" in each new six-weekly release, so they ought to have advised users not to run Firefox either. Software has bugs, and security flaws need to be fixed, but something about glass houses and stones kept coming to mind with the previous stance. The new one seems a reasonable balance and a constructive policy, and I welcome it as such.
From RethinkDB FAQ (http://www.rethinkdb.com/faq/)
"RethinkDB is not a good choice if you need full ACID support or strong schema enforcement — in this case you are better off using a relational database such as MySQL or PostgreSQL."
Any particular advice on how to not lose data when map-reducing from a sharded collection into another sharded collection? Because we had to migrate away from mongodb in a hurry when we had ~20-40% of our data just not get written (basically 1-2 shards worth) from that scenario. And by in a hurry, I mean we spent a significant amount of time debugging, troubleshooting and tracking down what was causing the issue (we were on 2.2 at the time, not sure if it's been fixed since...) and realized there was no way to fix the bug unless we were willing to delve into how mongo did the writes from map-reduces. So once we found the underlying issue, we quickly migrated away.

The number of conditions where it will silently lose data and you have no control over the write consistency is absurd. However, every time it's brought up, people shout it down because they assume you're talking about the known (32-bit version and dataset size/ram size, not setting it to confirm the write, etc) write issues, and not completely different ones that aren't resolvable.
I can imagine, like you said, that the growth is forcing them to hire less qualified drivers as the pool of great drivers has already been tapped. Here in Dallas Uber is still a great experience, for now.
The property you are looking for - that every SQL command can take place in a transaction - is surely a very desirable property for a SQL database to have, but from my perspective a database can provide genuine ACID transactions even if it only supports a subset of read and write operations within them.

Actually, I think we are giving too much credit to Oracle! There are (relatively subtle, but real) concurrency anomalies in their so-called "serializable" isolation level.
The biggest problem I have with Adium is bad facebook chat history support. E.g. if I accidentally talk with someone on android phone or on web site I can't see this in Adium's history. Do you know if Flamingo fixes it?
So turn it off and stow it when you get there.
Can you estimate your probability of being wrong on this one?
Dell's Go-Private Deal is Complete
What's this do for your willingness to use a driverless car?

My outsider's impression is similar to your insiders - the complexity of external systems is catching up with embedded systems, but perhaps not the practices and talent.
Not even just alter table, it's all DDL, I believe.

This has a way of biting one in the ass in the worst possible moment, during a migration.
"whatever your definition is...I'm trying to curate a really top-notch list. Mainly just whatever your favorite startups are"
I'm afraid there were more 'databases' created in last 2 years than in all earlier history of human civilization. This suggests authors of some of these products have yet to discover what ACID means and how many problems they didn't even think of have already been solved many years ago.
Skype does a clever trick when bandwidth is scarce
On a Skype video conference this morning, I noticed the software did something very interesting. Instead of pixelating video when my crappy broadband internet connection slowed down briefly, it zoomed.

It was accomplished so smoothly I wouldn't even have noticed except that I was talking with a room full of people on the other end and suddenly I couldn't see the people on the sides any more.

Instead of reducing the full-frame video resolution when bandwidth grew scarce, as it usually does, instead this time Skype selected the middle portion of the frame and showed it clearly. It was very subtle. It was done completely smoothly. The effect was aesthetically pleasing, not disruptive at all, and an elegant solution.

Well done, Skype.
2 and 8 minutes? Are you serious? Sure you're being promised something and getting something else, but....

At least it's better than being promised that a cab would come in 15 minutes, and then having to wait in the rain for 50 minutes instead.
Oh, I see! I wasn't really considering a zero-sum situation. In the argument from justice, you think it's a moral mandate to take money away from people because other people have less money?
I hear this argument brought up a lot, but the majority of situations are not this type of situation, and those are also not the things that cost the most (which are more things like extending an unconscious, never-to-recover terminally ill patient's life another 2 months).

Even a large percentage of ER visits would likely see people acting with price sensitivity -- This is why in some places of the country you see Emergency Rooms advertising about how low their current wait time is. The wait time isn't really relevant to true emergencies (you get seen right away), but people without true emergencies don't want to wait. Financial cost is irrelevant (someone else is paying), but the cost to their time is relevant, and so people select emergency rooms (and urgent care clinics) where they will have to wait less. Hospitals are acting on the one thing that the patient cares about (sitting in a waiting room), since the other (price) doesn't matter.

For the really expensive things, like end of life care, governments with universal healthcare systems are the ones that act with price sensitivity and ration this care and refuse in some cases to pay for the most expensive treatments. For example, the UK has the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which set a maximum of about $47,000 per quality-adjusted year gained. What we refuse to do in the US is allow patients to make a choice like that (instead, we mandate that insurance cover far more in health care expenses, driving up the cost of that insurance). As a comparison, the US sets it supposedly to about $50,000 per QALY, but in practice it tends to be far more, with some regulation-required treatments requiring as much as $500,000 per quality adjusted year (some heart pumps, and kidney dialysis being another very expensive example).
Bitcoin to reach $1,820 by 2020
I had this idea too. Except I want a kitten or a puppy, then like Netflix I can send it back and get a new one as it ages.
Or that he has a conflict of interest which can subtly, and subconsciously, affect ones decisions and conclusions.
Expressing an opinion via the use of concrete but in-this-case-not-actually-demonstrated examples from the code is not normally considered perjury. He believed what he said was true, and had good reasons for that belief.

That doesn't mean it's the truth though. I too read through that looking for something more damning than I found:

The memory wasn't ECC and the code didn't do anything to mitigate that risk, but that doesn't prove that a memory fault occured or even tell us what the likelihood is. Toyota screwed up the stack depth analysis. But AFAICT no stack overflow condition was found. Apparently some other stuff was found (probably with a static analysis tool) on which the article doesn't elaborate.

These are bugs, and certainly don't make me feel good about the system. But they're not a specific finding of fault either.
This seems like yet another case of unnecessarily Earth/Sol-centric terminology, much like "apogee" being Earth specific such that you have to use "apoapsis" if you want to be generic. I mean, do we really need a new word for every planet, the sun, a star in general, a black hole specifically, and galaxies? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apsis#Terminology

We should declare terminology bankruptcy to wipe out our existing terminology/language debt, then pick sensible terms for everything. While I'm the topic, we should also do "kilogram"->"grave", "gram"->"micrograve".
> Car insurance does cover car repairs and the car repair market is quite competitive, since insurers are heavily invested in managing prices.

Are you really sure? It seems to me that functional changes are competitive but aesthetic changes are not. I wonder if that is because the primary buyer of aesthetic fixes is car insurance companies, while more functional fixes are financed by consumers directly.

> That core requirement is often severely constrained in the health care "market".

I am curious why you go off on emergency service, when the bigger elephant is the inability to price.

Ask any physician how much it will cost you on a high deductible plan to have anything done. If you are lucky they might be able to figure out an office visit, but usually they don't know and won't tell you anything about more complex procedures.

Since the person who chooses to have the procedure doesn't pay, we have not attempted to keep the ability to predict prices. Even if you could comparison shop, you aren't comparing real prices.

> And usually with better public health outcomes.

Except single payer doesn't solve any of the problems that we are discussing here. The only thing it solves is the silly system of marking up "standard" rates to make contracts more attractive resulting in impossibly high prices for uninsured people.