skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's two dumb questions you might want to answer in a follow-up (and I encourage you to write more articles).

1. If it's a principle that "everybody" has a copy of the block chain, and the block chain records every transaction ever, isn't that going to be a storage problem? How big is one person's copy of the block chain now, and how many petabytes might it grow to be in a few years?

2. The way to spend a fractional coin is to have one input and two outputs, one back to yourself with the unspent change. But doesn't one's wallet begin to be cluttered with lots and lots of little fractional items? Like having a pocketful of small coins... So is there an automated way to every so often, do a many-small-input, one-big-output payment to yourself to consolidate the change?
The issue is that if you have insurance, you're not paying the charge master rate or the Medicare rate, you're paying the negotiated (and likely non-public) rate for your insurer. The 20% co-insurance you pay is based on the negotiated rate.
The overloading of exchanges with orders has actually become an intentional strategy in the real world. High frequency firms send large quantities of junk orders to create arbitrage possibilites or even as an offensive measure for the purpose of slowing down the competition by making them waste ressources processing useless orders.
This is what I came here to say. All of the 'raw language' niceties that Geoffrey mentioned in the article are true, but for me one of the greatest things in Elixir is processes. Just, the way the Erlang system operates is so well thought out, I'm more impressed every time I learn something new.

Shameless self-promotion here - I run http://www.elixirsips.com, which is a screencast series that releases 2 new episodes per week covering some topic in Elixir. I started it out as I started learning Elixir, and I've been going for quite a while now (I'm on Episode 33 next, so 16 weeks so far). It's the most fun I've had with a programming language since I first saw Ruby, and I think the BEAM VM is the future (as is Rust/Go/clojure's core.async, other concurrency-oriented programming models, etc).

So yeah, Elixir's amazing and everyone should play with it. I think just looking at these items mentioned in the article aren't even giving it a fair shake - learn about Erlang's concurrency and distribution models, or else you aren't even scratching the surface :)
Yes, in the short term. But in the long term, your insurance premiums are decided based on the cost of your health care. So if everyone spent wisely, the premiums would go down or stop rocketing the way they have been.
Thanks for the feedback. My next goal is to look more into why the price varies so much.

The price spread is pretty crazy. Some hospitals have higher fixed costs or salaries depending on the geography. Also, if a hospital is more research-oriented, R&D funds are normally tacked onto the price (one of the reasons why Stanford's Hospital is really expensive).

It's hard to find quantifiable data on the breakdown of bills, but based on a great article in Time a few months ago, prices are almost entirely arbitrarily defined: http://swampland.time.com/2013/05/08/an-end-to-medical-billi...
Actually, it's perfectly fine if your password has many characters that Telepathwords is able to guess. The question is whether the password has a sufficient number of characters that are hard to guess. A 40 character password with 25 characters that are easy to guess is almost certain to be better than a four character password with none that Telepathwords could guess.
Your point is a good one, but maybe a different procedure would be a better example- most people suffering from an intracranial hemorrhage aren't in a position to do a whole of of comparison shopping on where to have it taken care of.
Like many of you, I have some pretty serious concerns about soylent. I encourage you to check out http://diy.soylent.me/ and consider mixing your own formula or trying one of the others that have been developed in an open-source manner.
Pure CSS3 3D city experiment
So it does. I wonder what language I was thinking of then.
Heart Disease Risk Calculator
I've backed around 40 KS projects. I'm happy to microfund projects that have a realistic timeplan. I think if you're selling alpha access to something that has been in development for 4+ years and doesn't seem to have a clear time plan for completion, maybe you need a disclaimer -- especially when dealing with PayPal, which is infamous for being strict about what you can sell through it.
I actually purchased a few domain of erroneous domain names spellings for the purpose of experimentation and ended up with A LOT of traffic.

Because I got so much traffic, I decided to make the sites useful, and I wrote a little php script that downloads the latest technology RSS feeds and displayed the headlines.

On one particular domain I was getting more than 20 hits per day.
Stroustrup elected to Electronic Design Hall of Fame
Thanks! The goal was to shed some light on price discrepancies within the US, and not just the US vs other countries.
The NSA and FBI don't like competition.
This looks awesome! If it works the way suggested, it is going to save me a lot of time modeling the Bayesian Analysis in coming projects.
CMS is actually doing that already (at least for hospitals).

Early next year, CMS will post healthcare quality metrics that it's collected from providers who bill to CMS. In 2015, hospitals will start getting reimbursed based on quality, which is a step in the right direction, however, it is chocked with problems (i.e. treating the best patients will advantage a hospital)
Exactly. If this knew what my insurance company had negotiated for the procedure, and I could input my policy details to figure out what my personal cost would be then I can totally see the usefulness. But as a consumer I just have no idea at all what knowing the Medicare reimbursement prices tells me.

If I assume that the relative differences that Medicare has negotiated are similar to the relative differences my insurance company has negotiated (which I'm guessing is an invalid assumption), and if I accurately know what my policy will cover vs not cover (again, a nearly impossible thing to know given how complicated these things are), then maybe you can make a decision with this data. But the system is so complicated that I don't think that works at all by just using this dataset.
Setting up Less and/or Sass (scss) CSS pre-processors in Visual Studio.
This was an evaluation of the Less and Sass (scss) tools available for developers using Visual Studio to find the best of breed.
The only thing that I got out of it was, if you are using GitHub, why not use it to manage your DNS. This type of service would be interesting to me since I do need to create a lot of short term sub domains but I wasn't sold. This is my current workflow:

- User requests a free trial for my product

- I spin up a private VPS for them.

- I create a temp subdomain so the user can access the newly created VPS. I use Amazon Route 53 and their command line tool dnscurl.pl to create a new DNS record set.

- I keep an eye on the VPS and after an hour, I'll destroy the VPS and remove the temp subdomain with Amazon's dnscurl.pl

All of this is automated and adding/removing DNS records takes seconds and I pay about a buck a month. The only thing that I find annoying about working with Amazon S5 is you have to use XML files and they do not support IPV6. I would rather use JSON to manage my domains but I'm not sure it's $50/month nice.

I also have concerns about introducing a layer in front my DNS management. GitHub is not available from time to time and I'd hate to have this be another thing to worry about. Maybe I'm not the type of customer you (Namecast) are looking for, but I can see how this would benefit novices. From their point of view, they'll just have to know how to edit a file and do a git push to GitHub.
unbundle is probably closest to git reflog
Hi!

I went back and checked the data. If you search for chest pain, and look at Cedar-Sinai Medical Center around Santa Monica,

we are showing this piece of information.

313 - CHEST PAIN,50625,CEDARS-SINAI MEDICAL CENTER,8700 BEVERLY BLVD,LOS ANGELES,CA,90048,CA - Los Angeles,229,43714.62445,5094.71179

In the PriceMaps we made, we are showing the last value, which is the 'Average Total Payments' for the operation.

Not exactly sure if the site mentioned in the HN is using the same data.
I was under the impression that those machines evaluate Lisp forms at the hardware. How could a C compiler work? Does it translate your code into Lisp s-expressions, or is there like a bytecode layer in between?
usually hacking with Ruby/Python/PHP etc

Erlang is designed to create solid production systems. If someone is obsessed with quick hacks and fad-of-the-week programming, they will feel uncomfortable in a real development environment.
Is asking a question that's likely to be offensive to female readers the only way to stand out on HN?
I get your point, but people seem to have the ability to shop on quality!

Let's say you suddenly lose your ability to speak, you think it's a stroke, so you head to the closest clinic. They freak out because you need to go to a stroke center. People (or their family) often ask "What's the best stroke center around here? I want to go there!".

If they had the info available to them, why couldn't they include cost in that equation?
Let's parse what Schneier said (and didn't say):

Mostly, he didn't say it was "good". Or that he
liked it.

"Telepathwords is a pretty clever research project"

Clever doesn't mean "good".

"It's different from normal strength meters, and I think better."

"better and different" doesn't mean "good". (Burger King is different and better than a hamburger at a local high school).

"I like seeing new research in this area."

Also does not mean "good".

So Schneier is not doing anymore than reporting on
this password strength estimator (his words). He is smartly
not getting trapped into saying he likes it or thinks it
does a good job only that it does a better job than
"normal strength meters" and that he likes "seeing new
research in this area".

Which is clever. Because nobody can come back and say
he was wrong.
This looks great. It has similarities to PreQL, the query language from Prior Knowledge (acq. Saleforce).

I would love to see a full set of QL primitives for common data science operations.
Lists are meant to be linked.
As someone with a disabled mother on medicaid (whom I spend tens of thousands of dollars a year on for prescriptions and care), thank you.
...or more likely to be identified due to poor skills.
Thanks!

I think, when are showing some numbers, it looks much more perceivable when you have something to compare to, in our case, the top hospitals ranking from the US News.

Some more work will mostly likely be done soon to enrich the data we are showing.
But precision isn't really required, because it is a huge mistake to think that investors use precision.

You dismiss the notion of precision in the <Legal> sense. Which is what we are talking about here. EG

But precision isn't really required, because it is a huge mistake to think that investors use <lawyers>.

The problem with the earlier discussion is that it confuses concepts (zero, non-zero returns) and actions (investments made, not made) etc.

The precision needed simply relates to the classes of actions taken (or not) as well as the classes of contracts negotiated (or not), in other words.
I actually left this project alone after I got the very basics running... It's very very slow and rather buggy. I guess a profiling run could help a lot though.
The cost adjustments you're talking about are MS-DRG adjustments (the amount the hospital actually gets paid by CMS). From what I can gather, the numbers on the website, are cost numbers, i.e. what the hospital tells CMS it costs them (which is a number they are free to make whatever).

If you want to know why costs vary so much, starting looking at reimbursement. Hospitals are incentivized to raise their list prices because many of them are paid a set percentage.
Despite the negative parent, wouldn't you agree that the cost of integration has to be absorbed by somebody?

That's the point I'm making. Of course the integration has a cost. I believe that it simply costs a whole lot more of if everyone does that integration themselves. I can pay Clever a monthly fee or I can pay several developers to go out and learn how to do it at $100k a pop. Even if Clever is charging me $10k/month I'm still coming out pretty far ahead.

Not to mention the cost of ongoing maintenance every time something changes at an individual school.

tldr; you can spread the cost of integrating one time out among a bunch of companies, or each company can do it themselves. One of those is (by far) not only more efficient, but very likely much cheaper as well.
haha, I don't mean to imply that it's impossible that it did that, just that it shouldn't be normal :) usually bugs like that are fixed pretty quickly, especially for something as widely-used as gmail.
friend got a 2nd degree burn yesterday. she waited 2h to decide if she went to a hospital because she was out of insurance... so yeah, i think she would have used this site :)
Cool! Did you get the data from: http://health.usnews.com/best-hospitals/rankings

I'd love to talk more about how this can be taken to the next step. Can't find your contact info in your profile--mind pinging me at:
neilsharma101 at gmail dot com
Yep.

We tried to compare the hospital quality with the prices.
You can always pick out the guys who have done real work in the DC area, because they don't even flinch when you say cyber. Valley geeks freak out like you just questioned their startups valuation.
The latter. When you type a passphrase, you get a lot of discouraging X marks.
1-Man-Startups - A manager-less team structure; inspired by the Angellist team
Circuit breakers stop trading temporarily, they do not undo trades done in the past. There are other procedures for undoing "clearly erroneous" trades but those are generally less automated and sometimes less transparent.
1. This is something that has come up in discussion a fair amount, as the blockchain is already GBs in size and takes a fair amount of time to even sync with peers to download it all. There are a number of proposals for "thin" clients that will hopefully address this:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Thin_Client_Security

2. I'm not sure what you are asking here. Transactions are almost always fractional as is - you can send as little as 0.00000001BTC at a time. I think I am missing what you are asking.
“I even say, ‘I’ll do the work. Just give me the go ahead and I’ll do it myself,’”

That's the difference between a leader and a follower: if you strongly believe that you are indeed correct, work on the system on your own time and then you either learn a valuable lesson that youre not as "good" as you think you are or you teach the others a valuable lesson that you're better than they think you are. This way people who are good will become leaders and have a better say in what goes on and people who are not will learn and one day be good. The shame is in the people who are good, but remain inactive because they dont figure out if they are actually correct and neither does the management.
I feel like the inability to focus for long periods of time is holding back progress in many areas. If we can't even stay away from email for a few days, how can we clear our minds of conventional thinking?
Credit card and financial fraud? That's the common thread across all these postings.
Bitcoin Price Slumps Again
At The Last Gates
Example of very useful and transparent system that should be available for everyone. Keep going in this direction...
True, but because you don't foot the bill aside from a relatively small co-pay, hospitals/insurance companies can get by charging more and more. This ruins it for the ~50M Americans who don't have insurance.

We'll see how Obamacare deals with it though.
…published fewer than 10 papers after his groundbreaking work, which identified the mechanism by which subatomic material acquires mass, was published in 1964.

What are you talking about?
Yeah, unfortunately what CMS pays for procedures bears little relation as to what private insurers pay. It all depends on the local market for the provider. If most of the population goes to only a few providers, the providers have a lot of sway in negotiations. They will often ask for (and get) per-diem rates or percentage of charge.

If the population goes to a number of different providers, then the insurance company can play hardball and say "if you don't take this rate, you're out of our network, good luck with that". In those cases, they'll negotiate an MS-DRG + X% rate.

The reason why negotiated rates with private insurers are non-public is because it's a negotiating tool. If hospital A gets paid $5K for a heart attack and finds out hospital B a block away gets paid $7K for the same thing, the next round of negotiations will be very rowdy.
This is great. Please sort the items in the drop down list. (I'm on Chrome)
Whenever someone asks me what a Y combinator is, I tell them it is basically like a Klein bottle -- that's the closest analogy I've found. Of course, then they ask me what a Klein bottle is. After explaining that, they look at me weird.
A family member who needs to find treatment for a relative could benefit greatly from this service.
who cares? you get tenure for what you did, not for what you're going to do.
Can I ask why you're spending thousands of dollars on Rx and care? From what I've gathered Medicaid patients have co-pays of $3-$5 on drugs and very small office visit co-pays.

I'm not questioning your story, just genuinely curious what the extra costs are.
The analogy between Adams and the IRA and Mandela and the ANC is seriously inapt. To begin with, the IRA's objective was not civil rights for Northern Ireland's Catholic/Nationalist minority. The Provisional Sinn Féin/Provisional IRA hydra always made it absolutely clear that their goal was the establishment of "a thirty-two county socialist republic". That means that they were seeking to impose, by force, a single all-Ireland state on the Protestant/Unionist majority of Northern Ireland against its wishes. This is a straightforward small-n nationalist objective, not a democratic or ("clasically") liberal or humanitarian one. Secondly, and secondarily, even at their worst the civil disabilities imposed on Northern Ireland's Catholic/Nationalist minority (though real and serious) were not really comparable with what South Africa's black majority was made to suffer. And when those disabilities were corrected (and when the UK government began massively and even-handedly subsidising the whole Northern Ireland economy, to keep both Catholics and Protestants in jobs and forestall a collapse of the NI economy brought on by the IRA's campaign) it made not a blind bit of difference to the IRA, because, once again, Northern Ireland Catholics/Nationalists enjoying political and personal freedom within the UK was contrary to their objective. Finally, when the population of Northern Ireland participated in largely free and fair elections to the UK parliament, not only most Northern Ireland voters overall, but most voters from the Catholic/Nationalist community in Northern Ireland consistently rejected the IRA's campaign by voting for politicians who opposed it and rejecting the IRA's candidates (running under its Sinn Féin political wing). They had no mandate from anyone.

The "peace process" basically consisted of SF/IRA giving up and accepting the political arrangement which they had been violently opposing for decades, in exchange for goodies for themselves. As such it's a bit much to laud Adams for his role in it, beyond noting his success in persuading his fellow desperadoes to accept the goodies instead of continuing their deeply beloved war. (Though it turns out his success at this was pretty partial too.) Nonetheless if you don't think Adams has been glorified you're quite mistaken. As soon as the "peace process" began Adams (and Martin McGuinness, the Tweedledum to his Tweedledee) were the beneficiaries of an almost full-spectrum political and media bulldozing campaign in the Republic of Ireland, the UK and worldwide in support of the peace process and its heroes and against any hard questions. You wouldn't believe some of the soft-focused fawning and cooing Adams has received from mainstream sources, if you somehow haven't seen it yourself already.
True re: negotiated rate. However, the whole premise here is that there is some correspondence between this rate and the negotiated rate. If the negotiated rate is the same across the country across all hospital systems ("the magical mid point price") then this chart is not useful. I doubt thats the case.

US Patients go to south america and Asia to get treated. I don't think shopping around the country hospitals to figure out a good option is going to be a big problem. This is a good first step.
I think it's easier to reason about in the long run although the initial period of wondering why you don't just set up a data structure and bang on it in place is a little bumpy.

The syntax is always[0] (procedure argument-1 argument-2 ...) where the procedure is applied to the arguments.

about half-hour in to this lecture the syntax is explained: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

[0] - almost always. Macros look the same and often get treated the same but they are very different.
Due to a 1997 Bill Clinton memo directing federal agencies develop and share online educational resources. http://clinton2.nara.gov/WH/New/NetDay/memorandum.html
Trying to answer:
1. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability#Storage
2. This is actually implemented by the client and is not visible to the user, the bitcoin-qt client creates hidden change addresses that are not shown to the user, so you should see it as a "backend implementation" and not something you'll see in your transaction list.
Startup Comedy 'Betas' Tries To Be Too Cool With 'Girls'-Type Humor
> The problem is that while nuclear power may be potentially have the best cost-benefit of any power source...

Over what time horizon?

The problem with Nuclear Fission is that it leaves behind waste that is no longer be put to any constructive use but...

1) Must be stored securely for decades, since it can be used in dirty bombs.
2) Must be stored safely for centuries/millennia, since it can leak in the environment an make a large area unsuitable for human dwelling over time frames way longer than any (most) of our current institutions have been around (and thus there is no guarantee that knowledge about the risks will be preserved).

This pretty much rules out any private, for-profit entity. The risk of their owners realizing the commercial benefits upfront and then disbanding the corporation without assuming the cost of cleanup is simply too high for this to be even considered from the point of view of the public good.

I am willing to give governments the benefit of doubt concerning requirement #1. They already have to deal with this type of problems and have the know how to do it, but the legal framework must be defined very clearly to prevent some demagogue from abjuring of commitments taken 20 years ago in the name of some pie-in-the-sky scheme. For requirement #2, it is impossible to be certain. Changes of regime do happen, and it would be unwise to expect any particular government to stay around for more than a couple of centuries.

There is only one institution known to me to have a proven record of muddling through and even waxing during uncertain times, (more or less) committing to a mission over millennia. And you can add knowledge preservation over dark ages as the cherry on top of the cake. So I guess you can have your nuclear power plan, and enjoy a relative certainty that it will continue to be taken care of, for as long as it needs to be, if you are willing to let the Catholic Church manage and operate it.