skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I doubt they were trying their best, I mean other than trying to kill her and "extract wealth."

What's sad to me is the general populace thinking a "doctor" is anything more than a spineless vulture pushing whatever status-quo pill regime is hot in the pharma industry. Doctors like this should be fucking hung, I'm not joking. I don't care if you are desperate for that third mercedes. You're a scum bag trying to milk the death of an elderly lady that doesn't know any better. Really, what the fuck is the point of "healthcare" in this obviously broken industry built on exploiting health rather than fixing it.
> Why shouldn't pre-existing conditions be used to determine the price of your premiums? It directly impacts the amount of the insurance you're going to consume.

I never said it shouldn't - but people seem to be under the impression that it doesn't. I commonly see statements to the effect of, "I don't care what the insurance companies know about me, since they have to provide me coverage." Maybe that's true if the only thing that matters to you is whether or not you have some form of insurance, at any cost, but that's not the case for most people.

As for whether or not it should be considered, that's a value judgement (and therefore inherently subjective). Do you believe that all people should pay the same amount for insurance that covers events beyond their control (ie, congenital diseases/defects[0])? You might argue that it's unfair to hide that information from the insurance companies or prevent them from acting on that (because information asymmetry in free markets is bad[1]), or you could argue that it's the responsibility of society to care for those who have conditions that require expensive treatment just to stay alive (because letting people die of preventable diseases is bad).

[I don't have an answer for that - I'm just clarifying the question, since you brought it up. :)]

[0] I use the example of congenital diseases because one does have influence over one's own chance of getting lung cancer (ie, if you don't smoke, the chances are far lower), but not for congenital diseases (your mother may have had some influence over that, but you yourself certainly didn't).

[1] Alternative argument: These costs just get spread to everyone who is insured. Assume the country consists of two people (Alice and Bob). If the true (expected) cost of insuring Alice and Bob are $50 and $100, it's unfair to Alice to force them both to "split the difference" and be insured at $75 each.
Yes, it seems that is the new word companies and governments are now using to describe data that isn't quite as sensitive as other data and thereby OK to collect.
Thanks, that document looks very impressive and will now sit at the top of my reading list :)

Oddly following that link gives me a 404 ('The requested URL /~dyb/papers/3imp.pdfâ€Ž was not found on this server.', seems there is a trailing character '%E2%80%8E').

I was able to find it on google and open it, yielding the link http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/papers/3imp.pdf
Hey, if it works for you then go for it, I just didn't like the way it seemed to be foisted on me. Perhaps it was an easier break for me as I've never cared too much about having my stuff—aside from email and calendar—perfectly synchronized between my phone and computer.
I agree with this. I also stopped watching the "The News" and quit following politics altogether. Much healthier and the time sink is gone.

I found over time that most people's idea of following politics was spending an inordinate amount of time memorizing either side's talking points. And to get really good at it (ie. arguing on forums) you'd simply need to memorize more of these talking points and exchange the proper insults (which always seemed to originate everywhere but my own mind).

Basically, I was done being a parrot and I'm healthier for it.
Because it's inhumane to jack the premiums so high that you basically refuse coverage. It's better to force everyone to buy coverage at the same price and just diffuse the risks/costs amongst a large population.
I had the same reaction.. I always tend to use the word "affordable" since I personally interpret "cheap"as low quality.

However, I usually interpret "affordable" as a good value for whatever price (even if it is actually expensive)
Texting Made Our Plainest Punctuation Aggressive
Why is the zip function different in Ruby, Python and Javascript?
Meh, just like a Paypal debit card.
Math is a good analogy, because I think it illustrates the real question here -- to what degree should we care about the pipeline into the meritocracy?

Is a meritocracy effective if it's selecting the most deserving candidates from a skewed pool? Can we call it a meritocracy? Is it fair, for that matter, to evaluate a meritocracy by expecting an even distribution among attributes like gender or ethnicity?
I think Hacker News also has a great deal of people with a personal interest in anthropology and human psychology, since both are very relevant to a startups success, knowing people is valuable.

This is where this story brings value, because it reveals dark and sinister sides of humans, to leech from people, exploiting their generousity. Regardless of how big the fortunes are, that is incredibly deplorable.
Papa Carlo - Constructor of incremental parsers in Scala using PEG grammars
> But their marketing is incautious and might need to be tuned up.

You're probably right. Unfortunately it's too easy to create a gap between the public-facing marketing messaging and the real spirit of the product. I can think of many companies who struggle with this.

If you do become a customer, it's evident that they perform an admirable effort to make the results appear as neutrally educational as possible. Every data interpretation is heavily cited and explained, all the while urging further clarification from a medical professional. (Let me know if you'd like some screenshots.)

Personally, this is above and beyond of what I would expect, and there are competitors (especially foreign) who do far less. I can see why the FDA would prefer to have everything that could be interpreted as medical advice to be regulated and controlled, but I'm not convinced that it would yield a net benefit to consumers in this case.
Old homes may have assumed cheap heating, but new homes seem to assume AC (cheap electricity). I have comfortably lived in 100-150 year old row homes without AC, and have sweltered in a 25 year old row home with broken AC in the same city during comparable summers.

Those drafts are a godsend in the summer, homes without drafts or AC turn into solar ovens.

(Other properties of old homes, like high ceilings, also contribute to livability in the summer (at the expense of being more expensive to heat during the winter))

So basically you have a seemingly balanced tradeoff; do you want to waste energy in the summer, or in the winter? Of course the tradeoff is not really balanced, you can put on more clothing in the winter so long as you keep your home above 0C (for the pipes), but you can only take off so much clothing in the summer.
> I understand that in the strictest bayesian sense, any data that doesn't could directly reject a hypothesis, but doesn't, 'partially supports' the hypothesis.
>
> But, I'm not sure that, in practice, its meaningful to differentiate between which of the two methodological problems is the generally bigger or smaller issue.

I'd disagree there, you can do more than simply throw up your hands and say correlation!=causation. Some of the work stemming from Pearl's causality formalism has been about conditions under which one can make causal inference even in the absence of an explicit randomization step, and one can attack it from another direction by compiling correlations which have been later examined with randomization, and estimating how many of the correlations turned out to be causation in the same direction (the numbers tend to look like ~10%) and how much they are due to other factors.

> Isn't [potential selection bias etc.] just as bad as [potential expectancy effects etc.]

No. Expectancy effects can be manipulated and measured and one could arguably then adjust for it in other results where expectancy is mixed in. It's a fact about human psychologies, as measurable as anything else there. Selection effects are too wild and unpredictable to hope to do such a thing.
yes, but getting a mammogram has an additional layer of regulation in between the end-user of 23andMe. A licensed radiologist should look the person askew when they insist on getting extra mammograms because of 23andMe, and order a follow-up BRCA test before proceeding.
P2P Tech start up requires a lead Web Developer
Neural Networks and Deep Learning: first chapter now live
Did the old lady deserve the wealth of the indians who owned the land from which the copper was taken?
...by knowing something about yourself that you're not ready to handle yet?

I surmise from observation that this is a common human sentiment, but I don't understand it. It affects more than just medical information. What aspect of human nature drives many of us to avoid the truth?

One cannot solve a problem of which one is unaware, whether it's climate change or a potentially harmful recessive gene.
FDA has a purpose. They did not go through the FDA approval
for medical devices. They should .
its free
Miners earn bitcoin from 2 sources when they find a block. One source is the award. This award is halved periodically so each block is worth fewer and fewer bitcoin. Theoretically, these awards will continue to decrease until the awards are extremely tiny and eventually (A REALLY LONG TIME FROM NOW) the last award will be given and there will be about 21 million bitcoins.

The second source is transaction fees. When you make a transaction (for instance when you buy a flight on Virgin Galactic) you have no guarantee that the rest of the world agrees that you made that transaction until someone finds a block which includes your transaction. You increase the likelihood of your transaction being approved by offering a transaction fee. This incentivizes miners to look for blocks which include your transaction.

Eventually, the awards will be very very small but there will be more transactions and thus more transaction fees available to miners. Thus miners must continue for as long as bitcoin transaction are being made.
Show HN: Rack Rack'em Rack Rack'em PHP
Yes, it's horrible that these people took advantage of her, but I find it very difficult to get that worked up over it.

I'll be outraged for you. My family is very good about caring for our elderly. The predation is real. The woman in this article could easily have been my grandparents.

People over 70 start to lose their skepticism and can become easy prey for cons, high pressure sales, and other grifters. Just subscribe to your state's attorney general's newsletters to see how rampant this is.

Yes, she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth. But if this article is accurate, Huguette Clark was held as a virtual prisoner by Beth Israel Hospital, and was exploited many others. That just makes me sad.

Gross wealth inequity is a terrible societal problem. Fixing the tax codes is the solution, not stealing from little old ladies.

TL;DR: Two wrongs don't make a right.
Are you saying there should be no culpability for negligence?
Inspiration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GkC0IHCtdc
You Don't Get Our Bootstrapped Company
How do you personally measure "a good day's work?" Is it based on gut feelings or do you have specific hours that you work? Also, do you follow a strict schedule, or leave your day open for "sporadic" opportunities?
No I get what you're saying. I'm not suggesting that the burden is somehow on the customer to figure out their genome, what I'm saying is that the problem described in the blog is not because of some inherent fuzziness in the science, but just a problem with the web-app.

All systems have bugs, even the ones which lives depend on. It's cool that the author was able to bring the issue to 23AM's attention, but it's also cool that they were able to correct it.
Definitely true that labs/imaging without good pretest probability or indications are frowned upon. The check everything mentality, at least to me, seems to reflect liability concerns for serious missed diagnoses as opposed to profit scheming. Many of these fishing expeditions are in emergent care settings where the hospital ends up eating most of the cost.
If you are new to bitcoin-related sites, you might find this story close to legitimate. But anyone that reads the article will see there is this "basic" flaw mentioning that DDoS attacks gave access to the server. If you read past (paid) articles about this very same service, you will see claims about how secure the system is, and how expert everyone that developed it is. The same was claimed by inputs.io, I'm sure you have read about that story earlier.

The thing is, if you want to use bitcoin, you cannot trust third parties to hold your coins for you. If you want to support bitcoin in your business, you cannot trust other sites to handle the payment for you. Yes, it is not convenient. But you have everything available to handle this yourself and, yes, you will need someone competent to do that for you if you are not into it. Bitcoin is not meant for the average user or the unaware merchant and it might never be, people need to start accepting this fact.

This is almost an exact copy from the other thread here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6793984. I assume it is fine as it is ok to post duplicates like this topic.
OK, you picked two TV shows in your analogy to show that one "bad" show, I guess, does not discount good shows ... Well, so that is the point I am kind of making .. TV gets berated and YouTube gets lifted up? Why, other than, Internet? This just reiterates my point.

There is a clear attitude that "TV megacorporation junk bad" in the sense that it will "rot your brain" or "it has ads" or something vague and "YouTube good" and that is just naive.
I still think this misses the point. We're looking at a 'report' of a fictional user session when suddenly the user, who we believe we're watching interact with the app, begins to address us. It's clever and shouldn't have been done any other way!
Hey, how about just disconnecting the critical machines from the network when under such an attack?
Building Third-Party JavaScript libraries with RequirejS
My thought as well - it sucks how one comment can kill the credibility of the entire blog post.
Short statement from 23andMe regarding FDA warning letter
I believe there is no such thing as "downvoted into oblivion" any longer. Still, the point about Eugenics is valid: even without the unfortunate associations with the events of the previous century, the term is rather vague.
You just need to let in exclusively the crazy startups, the insane ones. That's the only metric.

90% failure rates, but the remaining 10% (5 startups) is all Dropboxes and AirBNBs --> Average YC startup valuation up 10-fold.
2.5 billion people in the world have internet access. Statistically speaking, the chances that the best person for us to hire for any position is among the 0.023 billion people in the New York metro area is unlikely.

Of course, we all know that all the good programmers live in SF.</sarcasm>
I am not into eugenics, and I'm not the poster you're responding to, but eugenics, as a theory, is perfectly harmless, until such time as one begins imposing eugenic criteria for others.

Given his interest in his own genetic data, and his interest in eugenics, it could well just be that he sees himself as less likely to reproduce if doing so would be to pass along a detrimental illness or genetic abnormality.
Year 2140 is when issuance will stop. So we have more than 100 years left: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply

Beside that, transaction fees should make mining profitable for ever, in theory. Transaction fees, or transaction volume, only needs to grow by 10x in the next 10 years (from ~0.3 to 3 BTC per block), in order to make them generate more profits to miners than coin issuance.
I had those same fears, and I relayed them to my girlfriend in medical school. She told me within a decade this data will be collected at a standard checkup, so you are only delaying the inevitable.
Redistributing wealth from a rich, out of touch heiress might count as a superior allocation of capital if it were taxed and used to fund construction projects or given to responsible charities, but when it is redistributed to opportunistic parasites who preyed on her cluelessness and possible senility, I have trouble believing the world is better off as a result.
The distributed network of human physicians probably has a higher error rate than the software described in the article.
He/she is implying that Doctor's want to keep people alive so that they can bill them for services rendered longer and make more money.
The japanese are even more insane there. Their inspections are insanely expensive, to the point where cars older than 5-6 years have essentially negative value, as the biannual inspection would cost something like $5k.

http://followrory.blogspot.com/2013/06/shaken-car-inspection...
You can check out this presentation on business models for APIs http://www.slideshare.net/mashapeinc/the-art-of-selling-api-... (Disclosure: I work for Mashape)
I think the takeaway here is stop worrying about your health at such a silly level.
Live a good healthy lifestyle, free from stress, smoking, have a balanced diet, plenty of exercise.

If you go in search of a "diagnosis", you'll get one. Everyone will.

23 and me is an awful thing to do IMHO. It preys on people and turns them into hypercondriacs (For a fee).
The best way to deal with tail call "optimization" is to not treat it as an optimization at all. Tail calls are a syntactic property of source code. You can easily determine whether a given call is in a tail position by recursively traversing the AST. Then you just have to generate tail calls in a way that uses constant stack space. This is mostly a matter of properly designing the calling convention. See: www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/schani/diplarb.ps‎.
I'd avoid setting too much stock in Modern Monetary Theory unless you have a decent grounding in the basic operation of the monetary system already. Whilst their explanations of the banking system are very detailed, very accessible and mostly correct, their monetary theory is very much a view of how a fiat currency regime could work as opposed to how it does work, and they wildly misrepresent basic macroeconomic concepts when it suits them to make a point.
(the most relevant example here is their model's assumption that governments can and do spend money into existence. Whilst this is theoretically possible in a fiat currency system, it's very different from the actual mechanisms in place, and entirely impossible with the Euro)
Presenting Assassination Market: The Bounty Killer Crowdfunding Website
The 21 questions you need to ask in a job interview
That's disingenuous. The FDA's 2012 budget was $4.3B. The fact that our government chooses to pour $1/2T into the military, that has very little sway on this.
No. This was (insignificant but) true in the CPU and GPU mining days, but ASICs dedicated to double hash collisions do not have any non-Bitcoin use, nor do these appear to push the state of the art in any way.
If 23AM ever starts handing it out to anyone who asks, then it would become a concern. In which case you could make it illegal to disclose the information to anyone but the principal.
>Thus in the common case if you ask a random person to log their network they will only log their own computer's traffic.

Wrong. The common case is wifi.
Nothing gets more techy than servers. Why I would hire a tech company that uses pre 2000 design and static pages from 2006 to sell me on their modern tech solution is beyond me.
Because the quality of code correlates with the school prestige -- which, in turn, is built on the quality of education (or, at least, the quality of the graduates, may not be the same thing, if the quality of the applicants is also different).
This is what I always thought.
If only SableCC could compile its Java 1.7 grammar without blowing up in memory usage, I would love it even more. As it is, I used it in my research when I needed a parser. Can't recommend it enough!
libgfshare[1] was mentioned[2] last time this project was discussed.

[1] http://www.digital-scurf.org/software/libgfshare

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6780346
> She is the only scientist in Congress

Not true, fortunately.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush_Holt
Hypothetically, if i were in OP's shoes and 'really' scared, I would be going to a genetic doctor instead of conducting my own research. (i would still look up stuff, but that would be too risky to depend on)
UPDATE: Apparently folks are saying this is NOT how it works, although I read a write up that indicated this was how it works.

I'm leaving the original below anyway...

I believe it is linked. The idea is that you'll tell the app you want to pay with your Amex. You hand the Google Wallet Card to the retailer/waiter/etc and when they run the card it will be piggy-back-charged to your Amex by Google.

The difference to Coin is the switching to your "real" card is done in the datacenter not on the card itself via the mag strip.

And when the world evolves to contactless payments as the norm, you've already been trained to use the Google Wallet App (which supports that), whereas Coin will be obsolete.

Google is playing the long game.
>23andme is a 'device' that takes a bodily fluid sample as input, and provides genetic information as output.

I don't think that's true, which is the problem. They don't just provide genetic information. They provide information detailing the impact of those genes, as medical science understands them.

>Even if you could somehow draw a line at some point in this process of translation from physical measurements to medical information, some point at which the 'interpretation' begins, I'm not sure why one would suggest that either side of that line would be exempt from FDA regulation!

Neither side would be exempt, but the physical side would be trivially approved as "yes, this does in fact measure those genes, good work everyone, pop the champagne".
Maybe I'm blind, but did he mention what liquid they're using for immersion cooling?

Something like 3M Novec maybe?
That reminds me of a video I saw about something called restricted boltzmann machines:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M&t=24m0s
But an LFSR only gives you a pseudorandom result, right? I mean, I'd rather load thermal noise than use a shift.
Should have gone with the name "Crimson Tide", as that movie was actually relevant...
Not sure in italy but your going to probably pay a buyers agent some %. But, I could see spending some money on an ad directly in google with: {your city} homes for sale, etc. assmuing you have a good way to price your home, you have a good sales contract that protects you, have all the buyer disclosures you need, etc.

Adwords Costs: probably about $80-$120 a lead.
When I see a new distributed database, the first thing I want to know is "Is it AP or CP?"

If you haven't answered that question yourself, it's likely you have a partition-intolerant system, and that in real-life scenarios people will lose data.