skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Given finite dollars to spend on healthcare, how to prioritize it is a fair question, though answering it ends up very emotionally and politically loaded. Just in terms of where the money goes, though, money spent on babies is not really a huge problem in the western world: the biggest part of our "heroic care" medical spending is in the last few months of life of elderly and/or terminally ill people.

I don't know of a good way to solve it. I would like to prioritize solid evidence-based decisions as much as possible, but those have a tendency to come across as unfeeling, or worse (one might even gloss such decisions as amounting to "death panels"). I think part of it is that intellectually all of us agree that we cannot spend infinite resources on every possible health problem, but it's difficult to decide that this specific person should not be treated because it's "hopeless" (a gloss for "poor likelihood of success relative to costs"). That would mostly not be babies, but mostly would be a mixture of elderly people (prognosis for nearly anything declines with age) and people with terminal illnesses that are statistically very unlikely to be cured. But even still, difficult to stomach. In part, because it goes against the psychological messages we're sending at the same time, which is that people should never give up hope, etc.

I don't actually know what I personally think about it, given some recent personal experience. One of my friends died a few weeks ago (in his early 30s) of melanoma, which was discovered in Stage 4, and treated unsuccessfully for about 9 months. The prognosis wasn't very good to begin with, given the advanced stage at discovery. Probably, this treatment had little statistical likelihood of success, though redeeming factors included: 1) at a young age, it was at least distinguishable from zero likelihood, and 2) it was part of a clinical trial, so may give some scientific information even if unsuccessful. However in a psychological sense both he and his friends/family seemed to benefit from the treatment, and would have been much less happy with a "not treatable" decision. Enough to be worth the cost, given the low odds of success? Difficult to say, and anyone who tried to say "no" would end up with a tough sell. And yet intellectually I obviously realize that if I were to advocate that we must "pull out the stops" to the maximum extent possible for every sick person, this isn't going to work under any economic system, whether it has a more right- or left-wing flavor.
Could be the next Einstein, in which case a million bucks is a pittance :)

In all seriousness, it is a challenging question though. The issue of how to spend healthcare dollars wisely is one that as a country we are currently unwilling to address honestly.
Is the code available for this version too?
I grew up playing the golden era of N64. I was solidly addicted (Ocarina, Mario, Golden Eye, and Mario Kart). I played a good deal of Civilization in late high school and early College, but as I got good at programming I started to play less and less.

My philosophy has morphed into seeing video games as a waste of my time. I could be building something, reading a good history book or novel, learning more about x in computer science, OR getting closer to my friends and family.

I have a friend who tells me that I need at least one trashy addiction in my life. For a while I thought his argument had some merit, but I just don't agree with him anymore. I feel most alive and happy when I'm pursuing activities that increase my understanding of the world, open my eyes to ideas I hadn't considered, or brings me closer to my friends and family. Maybe video games can be these things for other people, but not for me.
This seems strange to me. I would come up with a list of business ideas every day and hand that into the employer. Maybe even come up with a list of places where I could host a micro site for free, piggy back off their domain name and put up a landing page for the idea. To monetize it, add Adsense.
And yet for those without family, there was nobody to prosecute their murder even not being a slave. If you had no real legal protection anyone could kill you. If you were a slave, only your owner could. That's still a major step up.
I don't know if you're right about this. If you know which industries will beat the market at large, then you could make money by getting a loan and investing it in that industry, spread across all the companies, and weighted by doing some due diligence on the companies (basic financials, how close they are to mass market, team, product-market fit, etc)
she says "you can pick it up in a day".
To paraphrase my high school physics teacher:

> Yeah, electromagnetism isn't as intuitive as kinematics. But maybe it would be if kids grew up playing with circuits instead of wooden blocks.

Some kids have an aptitude for programming, and some don't. Perhaps initiatives like these will introduce "the discipline that is CS" to some whom otherwise would not have known it exists?
You keep using that term MAD. I do not think it means what you think it means.

You seem to imply that it's simply a policy of retaliating against any first strike with massive and lethal force. In fact, MAD, as a theory of nuclear deterrence, requires creating a situation in which a first strike from either side results in the total destruction of both sides, that is, mutually assured destruction. To be workable, this requires two things not present in the situations you describe (North Korea and Iran, or any other rogue state):

1. a rational enemy, i.e. an enemy for whom death is a bad thing. As much as American propaganda tried to paint the Soviets as godless monsters, they respected them as rational. Fundamentalists and North Koreans, not so much.

2. strategic parity - a nuke or two held together by duct tape, while certainly capable of causing much destruction, hardly gives anyone the capability of assuring the destruction of the US.
And the article doesn't really match either of those reasons!
And this is why no one should ever use vanity addresses.
'Flappy Bird' Creator Says He's Taking The Game Down
Fascinating work. I wish I could do this.
"You could speculate that he is trying to make a name for himself, so that the upcoming games would make him a stable income."

$50k a day ... even if it only runs a couple weeks ... is beyond "stable" for Vietnam. As a reference-point, the average monthly income in that country is under $200.
So long as you don't have to learn a language, API, or framework to do it... I'm not sure what things are left you could do differently? Your list excludes all technology-related changes, so the rest becomes meta-activities: pair programming, documentation, planning, a good nights sleep, etc. Those are excellent, but I'm curious why are you willing to change those other areas but are resistant to technological ones?

That irrational fear of technological change is exactly what I'm talking about. There's a joke around some of my friends, "What's the best way to get a mediocre .NET programmer to stop talking about safety and reducing bugs? Bring up the safest most secure .NET language that exists: F#."

As the joke goes, most of these developers are confronted with the reality that they don't really care about bugs enough to even bother learning a different fully supported .NET language that will find entire classes of bugs automatically and is orders of magnitude safer than C# and is faster to write.

Most people when they have told me they "care about bugs, not languages" have been just saying something nebulous to kill the discussion and defend their life choices.

I'm not trying to be snarky to you, I'm actually very interested to know what changes you've made that are not technological to reduce bugs, fix security holes, etc. I'm always on the prowl for such stuff, and this sounds intriguing.
put your money down on the side walk then when someone goes to pick it up, mug them.
Clickbait/misleading title.

1) They will only block donations should Wikipedia not comply with the new Finnish law that states any fundraising needs a special permit that ensures fundraising is withing guidelines for Finnish regulations

2) They aren't targeting Wikipedia, this rule is for any nonprofit.
Why haven't you already?
...how very human

I see were you are coming from, and for sake of intellectual discussion of speculative fiction even up-voted. But I think there's a whole load of possibilities you've missed.

The most basic one is simply that you're attributing human values to something decidedly not human. That learning from each mistaken life is actually a desirable feature. Perhaps only the aggregate matters. Perhaps, in fact, that which is being studied is so alien to us that we can't see how they are in fact learning through the process. Perhaps the point of existence is experience itself, rather than to be able to make decisions based on that experience. Perhaps we do learn from what we don't directly remember - that glass of warm water still effects the finger we dip in ;)

Then there's the passage of time and characters. Let's pretend for the sake of being able to follow an argument that concepts of "before" and "after" can be applied at all. Perhaps all those minds which we consider horrendous are the earlier ones, and those which come after are increasingly better? Perhaps it is the complete opposite, as we all have the wrong idea as to the way around things should be!

And, of course, we should be careful when interpreting "With each new life you grow and mature and become a larger and greater intellect". After all, we are assuming it is the experiences and learnings of the life which give those results, rather than the process itself. Perhaps it is not that at all, but rather those are simply a bi-product of whatever is really going on. The foetus requires stimulation and its nascent mind simply occupying whilst it grows and matures, and the nature of that stimulation has no effect what so ever.

I must admit, though, I have a fondness for your lovecraftian horror twist interpretation ;)
The benefit of gmail to Google is the intelligence gained for targeted marketing by scanning your email.

The worry that Google will disable IMAP misses this point. Google gains so much ancillary intelligence from scanning your email, that if they lose market share, their overall ability to target unrelated ads (e.g. during search).
https://github.com/dkoston/thedaywefightback

The banner code is pulled in from the awesome work that thedaywefightback.org folks did. The repo basically shows how to package an app for CloudFlare.
I'm talking about developers who when offered a chance to learn something new at work reject it, usually while getting pretty defensive.

My current hypothesis is people get so used to internally defending their neglect of the skills that earn them travel and shelter that when the opportunity arises to actually get paid to improve, all the reasons they normally use prevent them from even doing that.
Honestly they should just have a comment:

// This triggers layout. Needed for some browsers.

But agreed that you shouldn't require relying on history for this context. It's bad news. Yes code happens, but it should be obvious what it does (via clear code) and why (via comments as needed).
The thing is - if he didn't care about the money, couldn't he just release an update without the ads?
Wget is also single threading which is a slow strategy to download pages.
I'm not a Go developer (...yet), so I was wondering what about the discoverability of it sucks. I ask because I'm working on package management tooling for JavaScript and it's always interesting to see what is done well and poorly in other ecosystems.
Because people made it work. People can do that for AOSP, but they haven't yet. Go do it!
Population growth is a fundamentally exponential process, even if that exponent is very close to 1 in some cases, or even less than 1.
The odds that anyone will think "The Third World" is a good name for their virtual reality seem minimal at best.
Most technical articles that I have some background understanding of are so wrong. It makes me wonder why I should trust all the articles on subjects that I don't know anything about.
I'd be interested to hear from our friends over the pond how this compares to the Code.org initiative.

It seems to me there are some similarities in the 'boneheadedness' of the approach. What do people think?

Reminder: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7045202
It's insurance. We pool together a bunch of people's money (plus money the company puts in on behalf of the people in this case). We say that some of them will cost a bunch and some of them next to nothing. With enough people, the costs average out and it should be manageable. Because AOL is self-insuring, they take the risk that the high cost folks will balance out the low cost folks.

The answer to your question is simple. We pay $1,000,000 not to keep one person alive, but because that person is part of a risk pool which only works if it pays out when something catastrophic happens. The pool would quickly fall apart if it could say, "your parents paid in, but we don't think you're worth that much money."

I'm not an expert, but I believe that Obamacare removed lifetime maximums and the ability to deny coverage based on preexisting conditions. Anderson is probably angry that his costs per individual aren't capped anymore. He happened to pick the least sympathetic way to get that message across.
Storyteller has ways to filter out your misspellings, dumb decisions, and irrelevant debugging.

While the process for filtering out dumb decisions and irrelevant debugging is a little convoluted at present, filtering out misspellings is really easy if they're made within X seconds (where X is defined by you). Because Storyteller currently only supports IDEs (specifically Eclipse, hopefully with support for Visual Studio soon) you should be able to notice those quickly.

As for processing out dumb decisions, you don't really know they're dumb until after you've made them, and someone new to a part of the project might also have the same idea you had when made those decisions, and seeing that you made them, hopefully coupled with some comments on what went wrong with those choices could push them in a different direction, or help them fill in a piece you were missing. Watching those past decisions could also help you in the future when you come back to some code and can't remember what you did before or why.

Exploratory sessions only happen in REPLs when the language has a REPL. Considering that Storyteller's written in Java, has support only for an IDE that was initially built for Java, and has been written by a bunch of college students and one professor at a college where most CS courses use C++ or Java, REPLs aren't really things most of us use (I want to change that, but there's only so much you can do through an extracurricular organization).

Plus, we're developers. Why store only some data when you can store ALL THE DATA!
Build anything and someone (usually the top comment on Hacker News) will dismiss it, mock you for wasting your time, and talk about how X was already solved years ago.
that's a pretty weak meaning of "logical" though. you can always get internal self-consistency by ignoring parts of a system until what's left is a coherent subset, but that seems like a pretty meaningless operation.
You are absolutely correct. But by properly locking things down, you can reduce the probability of giving an attacker write privileges.

If you simply split your connections into readonly and read/write pools, you've already drastically reduced your attack surface. (A third DDL role exists for migrations only, and does not exist in your app.) Now SQL injection on your homepage or "display content" page cannot give the attacker INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE.

You can go a little further and split your tables/columns into public ("I could reconstruct these by scraping the site") and private ("I might need to login for these"). Then create a role with access to the public data only, and use it for public views. Now an attack on your homepage/other public views can give the attacker only a limited SELECT.

This is all pretty easy to do and it can drastically reduce your attack surface. It also gives you a useful way to prioritize fixing vulnerabilities. First lock down read/write views. Then lock down read. Lastly lock down readpublic.
Long comments get out of date quickly because it isn't clear how the comments relate to the code on a quick scan. In this case, you want a quick note as to why the code is there. You can add external references if needed.

You don't want to make someone who is editing code stop to think about how it affects the comments.
The word "worse" might be worse than some other term Gabriel could have picked. But this article (written in 1989) was really pretty influential at the time, and cemented the phrase "worse is better" in a lot of peoples' minds.

The article even has its own Wikipedia page. Apart from whatever merits it might or might not have in itself, I think it's a worthwhile read because it made an impression on a lot of people back in 1989. It's one of the first explicit attempts to discuss the "Unix philosophy."
Three machines. How could you overlook the three machines that will change our future forever?

One to extract food from the soil. One to extract water from the air. One to extract energy from the sun.

With these three machines we will free human beings from the scarcity problem leaving plenty of time to pursue more gratifying endeavors like terraforming the moon.
That pains me.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6855145
Yep. Sounds unfeeling. What if you were that "one person in a billion"? Or your own child?
My frequent path is Orgmode (which is just text and very md-like) which can export to Markdown proper and a bunch of other formats including PDF. It can autogenerate leverage pandoc and also make a TOC for you.
Just called their administration ENFP.

Oh snap.
I don't think money is his problem. He got an Apple product to code his app. That costs him something.
Can you change the title? The current title is so misleading that I feel like flagging it is in order.
I have 6 Gmail accounts I use on a regular basis. I also like having archives of all my emails going back decades.

However, I use POP3 and SMTP with a desktop client, not IMAP.
The problem is that salt water is not available everywhere. Pumping water everywhere will be a problem.
What is there to be or to not "be fair" about? mjn's comment was a value neutral statement of fact. There was nothing prejudicial in his comment.
Incompatible with Free Will

The story is incompatible with free will. The only way the universe could be the way it is, with the one person living all those lives, yet always choosing such that the other people (him in another re-incarnation) also always choose as they (he) did, it would be necessary for free will not to exist.

But this would also mean that the "god" in this story also didn't have free will, because the man was "of his (god's) kind".

But if God does not have free will, he isn't the greatest possible being. The universe thus described therefore fails Anselm's Ontological Argument for the Existence of God. The hypothetical God who is identical to the God in this story, with the exception that He DOES have free will, is obviously a greater being.

I conclude that this story cannot possibly describe Reality, as It actually Is.
I feel like they are a 'waste of time' as well since I could be using that time to become better at my programming skills. But my BF is addicted and it seems the only way I would be able to spend time with him is by playing video games with him and his friends, but my whole being resists it.
The reason I spent 13 years working on figuring out the tech (and more importantly, process) of doing virtual filmmaking is because it's not possible to do films with the level of character development/interaction I want them to have on a six week, marathon shooting schedule. I'm not even sure it's possible for people to do it period, even given infinite time.

But when it's virtual, I can get the performance from my actors, and then just completely nail the timing, camera, cuts down to the faintest of facial expressions, and I don't have to get it in realtime, on set. I can capture things, then cut performance together like you'd cut together images now, and iterate, iterate, iterate until it's exactly what I'm shooting for.

I've got a dozen films ready to go, and basically all of them can't be done today because the character development and interaction is just too damn unforgiving to do live, on set. I wouldn't even know how to start. For some of our films, we had to switch from a script to a prose description of the scene, the character's motivations, goals, etc. along with all of the cinematic cues need to accomplish that. A script is a very blunt story-telling instrument at the end of the day, and leaves out so much that is necessary to make a film that actually works.

Anyway, I guess I just wanted to say that not all filmmakers want to use virtual filmmaking to film the impossible, at least as far as action goes. I do want to film the impossible, but only because it'd be impossible in a one-shot live setting. I'm incredibly excited about how good filmmaking can be once we can do it the way I envision.
One huge thing that the average citizen can do is to write down (and properly file and certify, as needed) their end of life wishes. Too often it is that people end up in the later stages of their life (young or old) without formal directives as to their wishes. It then falls upon impassioned family members to make decisions: do they ventilate, for how long, and do they tube feed, and under what circumstances do they resuscitate?

It is a discussion everyone should have with their family, _today_, before you or your loved ones are not lucid enough to make the call.

I would love to see the healthcare space, along with the government, advocate for these difficult, yet vitally important, conversations.
It also says a lot about armstrong that he saw fit to comment on this in the way he did. by the time you get to the executive level, you should know when to check yourself, or at least to run comments by a good PR team.
Charts: The Most Ridiculously Expensive Olympics Ever
The only people who suggest that are the people who are in the "allowed to survive" bucket.