skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not that simple. A society cannot afford the triple-A gold standard of everything for everybody. Not everybody can live in a McMansion and not everybody can afford to have an MD/CS for their every single health need, no matter how minor or how routine. Tradeoffs have to be made.

US medicine has been very successful at creating a guild system that's prevented lower-cost provision of care for decades, all under the concern of "it'll lower the standards of patient care." End result has been millions of people who can't afford medical care at all.

One anecdote: for a time I was splitting living in the UK and the US and had health care experiences in both places. It was fascinating to see the differences in treating my (very ordinary) health issues. One time I came down with a mild rash that rebounded a few times before it finally went away. In the UK, the GP looked at the rash, punctured the pustules with little pokey thing so they'd drain, and they cleared up in a few days. In the US, the dermatologist wheeled in a big machine filled with liquid nitrogen and froze the pustules; they went away in a few days after that too. End result the same; cost to administer - orders of magnitude different. In the US, it seems like there's no medical treatment that we can't make more expensive by requiring more specialists with more years of training, using ever more expensive machines and medications.

I love modern medicine. My dad's a retired doctor and I almost became an MD myself. But the system we've created has costs out of control while simultaneously creating worse societal health outcomes than other countries.
I took ads off my site and replaced with Bitcoin donations, it didn't work.
"Just processing the insurance forms costs $58 for every patient encounter, according to Dr. Stephen Schimpff, an internist and former CEO of University of Maryland Medical Center who is writing a book about the crisis in primary care."

I'm curious how the arithmetic on that works out. The median pay for medical assistants is $14.12/hour [1], which means that assuming the assistant is handling the insurance form, that works out to just over 4 hours per patient encounter. There might be some fixed costs (filing space, for instance, is not free), and some costs associated with communicating with the insurance company, but it's really not obvious to me how any of those can add up to $58/visit.

[1] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/medical-assistants.htm
Now broken? It was always broken in this manner. Merchants have always had to account for the risk of unconfirmed transactions in one way or another (and if they were ignoring that they were negligent).

With online shopping it's relatively easier in that you can wait until the payment posts to the network before you complete the transaction, but this definitely would interfere with brick-and-mortar types of activities, ATMs, etc.
> This doesn't mean that AirBNB's business can't work, but it does mean that AirBNB needs to work with regulators to find a solution acceptable to the communities in which it operates.

I don't see there being a solution at all; hotels are zoned differently than residential for a reason.

The fact that AirBNB managed to popularize "breaking zoning laws ON THE WEB" doesn't mean that the zoning laws need to change.
Working as intended. Zero confirmation transactions are exactly as they described.
It isn't necessarily the case. When individuals optimize their outcomes, they often make decisions that are not optimal from the whole group perspective. In such cases regulations are necessarily to achieve optimal global solution.
Side note (as a scientist who uses the site): there are lots of different ways to share an arXiv.org link, but in almost every case the best option is this:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.1211

That links to an abstract page for the same paper you linked to rather than the full PDF, and it's a lot shorter to type (and less specific about format). This form often avoids accidentally linking to an outdated version of the file, too.
Higher-Kinded Polymorphism
I think what he's saying is the architectural decisions outweigh the implementation language.

When I was taught Verilog for IP implementation, one thing I noticed is that people get caught in the trap of trying to abstract away the hardware or approach it from a higher level. Haskell/Verilog 2001/SystemVerilog all give us tools to do this. However, when trying to make real silicon, you need to understand what is actually getting built (i.e. know exactly how many flip flops you're creating and how they fan out) and then use the language to describe it. If you use a 'for' loop to try to do computation, as you might in a programming language, you could end up with something entirely unexpected or unsynthesizable.

Traditionally you first design your module conceptually on a whiteboard (or Excel, Viso, etc.), then implement it in an HDL. Because of the influx of software engineers trying to get into hardware (via FPGAs, etc.), there has been a trend in trying to obfuscate away the details of the implementation, and this can cause a lot of confusion.

That said, I've heard of projects that already translate native Haskell to HDL with some success. I'm not a programmer so I don't claim to understand if it's a good idea, but I still think understanding exactly what's being output is important to knowing if it can perform in a reasonable way, especially if you're doing something of any complexity.
Thermal fuses are actually pretty small, this one (which is pretty representative): http://uk.farnell.com/nte-electronics/nte8065/fuse-thermal-c... is about the size of a 1/4W resistor at 12mm long.
A fuse isn't too big either, this 0402 fuse: http://uk.farnell.com/te-connectivity-raychem/dp/1843788 is rated at 4A and is only 1mm long!

The real thing for size is the transformer and other magnetics, which decrease with frequency, hence why this uses VHF frequencies. Output filters can also be made smaller at higher frequencies, and Ken Shirriff's iPhone charger teardown above shows a small ferrite ring _inside_ the charger case for high frequencies.

UL Approval is probably under on the "Production Timeline" (2/3rds down) under "Submit for initial regulatory certification (4 months)", which is set to begin now (Apr-May).

As for the wire thickness, it doesn't seem that much thinner than my Macbook Charger, which is also 65W. The production timeline on the kickstarter leaves them time to change to a thicker one.

The big question of course, is the feasibility of the VHF AC-DC conversion. FINsix have a paper (http://finsix.com/assets/files/FINsix_Tech.pdf) but its not very long or detailed, and I don't know enough to criticise it if it was.
> Bitcoin users have acted very aggressively to the idea -- and felt best to censor it.

It's not even ironic anymore when they respond in this fashion. They'd probably even remind you that only the government can technically "censor" something, and that if people want accurate news on Bitcoin they are free to pick a competitor to /r/bitcoin that will provide it.
> processors and merchants accepting bitcoin payments

Citation needed. The existing behavior is very easy to rip off: You write two transactions, the one paying yourself, one paying the merchant. Simultaneously you hand a big miner the first while handing every other node you can reach the second. It's very likely that the first doesn't propagate at all, but you'll have a decent successrate at reversing.

Blockchain.info even had a handy tool before to author double spends but they've removed it.

In any case; there is some real subtly here. Both the case where miners are alturistic and don't help doublespends even if bribed and where miners always just take the highest bidder are consistent models which can enable safe zero conf transactions. But the transaction styles you use to get safe zeroconf are very different, and inconsistent behavior in the network is basically pessimal. There has been some debate in the past if the greedy behavior shouldn't already be the default: most people believe that it will eventually be in that state, and so there is a tradeoff between setting the right expectations for the long term but requiring more advanced handling of zero-conf vs having the best security for the simplest possible ways of using Bitcoin. I don't think there is a clear answer to the tradeoff, but because the inconsistency is bad I think if non-trivial hashpower picks this up the network will need to change the default behavior.

(Since I expect someone will ask: To get safe-zero-conf in the greedy miner world, you have the party pay you (optionally with an additional security fee if they are really untrusted), and if you see them a doublespend you spend the entire payment to fees (so you'll win the auction very likely). If they've provided any security at all their expectation is negative, if you make them provide enough security (E.g. security = tx value plus ε) then you can give them negative expectation without losing money yourself.)
Hey, shana. Haven't seen you on here before.
They did an awesome job putting it together. I'm a huge fan of the app now. All tweets have a mention of them. :)
I was expecting a story about airbnb getting to the waterborne rental market.
Software Engineers Think They're The Best
Noted.

I'll change that damn _blank......

thanks mucho.
I don't think your example is very strong. It's not exactly clear what you mean by government "sticks its nose in your internet business" but for most that probably means regulation. But in your example Medicare is just a really big insurance company; if a private sector insurance company denied your claim for some stupid reason would you complain about the private sector? I'm sure there are examples of onerous regulations that would make a better example?
Nicely written, and a fun exploration.
I'd give yourself a gift for getting the company off the ground. 5% seems right, but I suppose 10% is not out of the question. Then split the remainder with your co-founder. This process would lead to 52.5/47.5 and 55/45 splits respectively. 60/40 is a 20% gift; I think that's a little high but it could be justified if significant progress has been made. Also, your vesting should of course have an earlier start date.
Ah, I didn't catch that part. 10% of the transaction seems like quite a steep fee. I don't really like how they hide the fee breakdown buried in the developer documentation.
I can't seem to be able to find good examples of kinectJS in action. Could you please point me to some solid examples or in-depth tutorials?
"...but nothing beyond that. As long as Node.js exists in this world, I can't truly hate anything else."

I found this hilarious. I am also rather underwhelmed (to be nice) with Nodejs and a little bothered at its wide adoption.

I have also been learning racket recently; my formal language and functional programming class uses it. I had some previous experience with common lisp but the raw nature of scheme still pleasantly surprised me a little bit.

EDIT: From what I remember, javascript was "inspired" by scheme. Obviously that when well...
The last time I did a wire transfer in the US (admittedly a couple years ago now) it was anything but instant. IIRC there was a lot of manual work that had to be done behind the scenes to complete the transaction. And you have to do into a branch to do it as well - no internet banking!
I think this feeling is often eliminated by hindsight and change of circumstance. I've had the same sensation at a few points in my life until I broadened my fields of study, took on new roles, went broke etc.

In my own experience it's in the category of "You don't know what you don't know". If you are highly focussed on a narrow field of study or experience, yes, you definitely feel like you have "peaked" with respect to mastery. However, once you get exposed to "You now know what you don't know", a lot of things suddenly change.
I totally agree and sympathize here. I've seen a few solutions that compile to VHDL or Verilog, as most platforms support one of those, to work around this.
I live in a downtown residential building one block away from a hotel, so that's not always the case. Of course, some communities may choose to prohibit AirBNB altogether.

I think the bigger issue is if the externalities imposed by normal usage are so high that, when properly internalized, AirBNB no longer presents a compelling value proposition in the majority of cases. This is certainly possible.

From AirBNB's perspective, perhaps they just fight the internalization as hard as possible. There are businesses with much costlier externalities, such as energy companies, that are actually subsidized and not taxed. In the AirBNB case, however, they may have a tougher fight as the harm, while lower in aggregate, is also less diffuse.
Sure, I've no doubt it's more common there - that's very much my understanding. The wording of the above just struck me very much as if it were meant to be hypothetical, which I found amusing given that it's nothing like.
1) I've actually spoken with Mattermark before (not about this), they're really cool guys and if I get super-serious about this idea then I'll definitely reach out to them. I'm actually planning on using their API for part of this (see below).

2) Yknow, believe it or not I didn't actually think too much about this. I guess I assumed the details would be too different for me to borrow much from them. I'll definitely give it a look though.

3) Not a bad idea. I would hope to monetize somehow, but a monthly subscription would have fairly little value if I'm only checking in with them once every few months.

4) I wish! Chances are any accredited investors would already be using AngelList for that, and obviously I can't let unaccredited investors make investments (plus then startups would have to be on board, basically a whole giant mess).

Thanks a lot for your thoughts!

One thing I'm thinking for the whole "returns" mechanism is to have startups return a fixed amount per hour/day/week based on their Mattermark score (basically, how much mindshare momentum they have), similar to how properties in social games give you a certain amount of currency back every [interval].

I could also consider income: most investors have some sort of regular income they use for investments, as opposed to purely bootstrapping off of the first few investments. That could be interesting (perhaps as you level up, by making sound investments, your income rises?).
That kind of progression really happened. "Perhaps allowing interracial marriage today will lead to men marrying other men tomorrow". Gay marriage was unthinkable a hundred years ago. The ideas that are acceptable to society change over time and we can't be so arrogant as to assume our current set of values is correct while all the previous ones were wrong and no future ones will make ours look wrong. You can already see attitudes towards drug use changing to the point where Krueger's "drug operations" seem harmless to many people today.
C11 has atomics which works similarly to C++11's.
> Are you kidding me? There are plenty of other cities in seismically active regions where they've built upwards with great success. All of you people who blame earthquakes for SF's inability to build upwards should put your money where your mouth is and get rid of all the red tape - then we'll see what really happens.

You mean the "red tape" meant to ensure that buildings don't collapse on you while you work, or in your sleep as the ground the building is built on turns into quicksand?

Or maybe the "red tape" that exists to ensure that there is adequate transportation and services to support increased density.

I think what would happen is a lot of shitty housing would be built that would kill a lot of people and bring the city to a halt during the next sizable earthquake.
This is definitely incorrect. You can use d3.js to target svg, canvas, html, or any other data format that you want. Check out http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/2647922 for a canvas based example.

I've actually built very similar graphs to the examples shown in vis.js with d3.js. I was a bit surprised that it wasn't just a wrapper library on top of d3.js (plenty of those exist to make working with d3 a little easier).
I'm a Systems Administrator, but have done development before, mostly fixing and patching stuff on the different projects I've worked on.
Part of why I thought of doing this is because there is another project that I am working on that needs to implement something similar, but I thought that maybe I could do a service instead of a module in that project. The aim of that project is to deliver publicity (promotions, discount codes, etc.) to customers from different providers of their choice, this will be limited to a certain area, so basically it attacks a local need since we don't have a widespread service like that yet.
>AirBNB also imposes these risks on communities...

The person renting to AirBNB is the one imposing the risks. If communities are being put at risk it is by the willful actions of their own members.

>...AirBNB needs to work with regulators...

Why involve more parties than needed? How do communities currently deal with "bad apples?"

If we assume the community is functionally equipped to handle permanent residents who are undesirable, but not temporary ones, why not just apply the same rules to temporary residents? The permanent resident would bear responsibility for their guest(s). This would keep the solution in the same domain as the problem, the community.
Does anyone know why most graph libraries that I see of this type have nodes that seem to bounce all over the place? Is there a practical motivation for this? I would think a less animated version would be more usable.
Well, this throws a real wrench into services like BitPay that rely on verifying _only_ that a transaction has been broadcast, instead of making you wait until 1 or more confirmations (which can take 10 minutes, or 30, who knows). This always seemed like a hack to me anyway. Bitcoin is just not really set up well for quick transactions, which is just about the only kind of transaction you actually want on the internet.
Tests generated by GUI systems are extremely fragile and you wouldn't them hanging around your codebase.

OTOH, often a video recording is a great way to demonstrate a bug without having to (be able to) write an automated test, and pretty easy for even a non-technical user to produce.
so what you're saying is no matter how the healthcare system is designed, the healthy (or maybe just wealthy?) always end up paying for the rest?
> But in your example Medicare is just a really big insurance company

I agree that there are better examples of government regulation directly impacting medical practice, but this example illustrates the power of a monopsony[0].

To overgeneralize, the same way that monopolists (single suppliers) can exercise power over purchasers in ways that we might deem unfair, monopsonists (single consumers) can exercise power over suppliers in ways that we may also deem unfair or harmful.

These effects are not limited to Medicare patients or providers, by the way. It's not hard to make the case that customers who can choose between Comcast and Verizon FiOS are harmed by the fact that cable companies are regional monopolies in most other markets.

Similarly, even if you have a private insurance plan, there are a number of ways that you are affected by Medicare's policies indirectly, in ways that you would not if they weren't such a big player.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony
Looks awesome! Is there a reason you chose Meteor over other options? Was there some key functionality or development requirement that made Meteor the obvious (or only) choice?
i'm a reader more than a member
They are useful in customer-merchant contexts because the merchant can cancel the order after anyway in case of a double spend, and in in-person contexts because you're in person so the risk of trying to cheat is too high. That's the main reason why zero-confs are fine; you only really need the preliminary notification to be instant, not total security.
Thanks for sharing - this is an excellent article.
Well the article near the end says that the data for the experiment was 1.8 PB. I am not sure what the answer is, but given a mouse brain is significantly smaller than a human brain I would say Wolfram Alpha and Wikipedia are wrong.
Agreed. But the laws of today have to apply to society as we know of today. I'm all for forward progress but we can't make laws for how our evolved selves.

In 10 years same opposing sex marriage might the same as opposing interracial marriage is today. But we're not there and the laws have to reflect what society as a whole is ready for.

Sad but true.
The article lists 1.8P for a brain with 75 million neurons. Unless I've misplaced my zeroes, that's over ~20M per neuron, which seems much higher than I'd expect.
> It's not that simple. A society cannot afford the triple-A gold standard of everything for everybody.

The society in question has not realized it.

> US medicine has been very successful at creating a guild system that's prevented lower-cost provision of care for decades, all under the concern of "it'll lower the standards of patient care." End result has been millions of people who can't afford medical care at all.

Even the bottom rungs of the doctors in the "guild system" are not very good - lowering standards even more is very hard to agree with when push comes to shove. Especially there is no guarantee that this will actually lower costs to society.

But I guess this is what will have to happen, at least in primary care, because that is a miserable field that I am incredibly glad I didn't go into. I hope that at least some kind of care turns out to be better than none at all.
I don't know any cardiologists who would perform that kind of surgery on a 90yo.
You seem to be saying stable prostitutes or brothels are OK even though they are also illegal in those buildings. I agree with the parent that a promiscuous person is effectively a prostitute with the distinction being only an arbitrary legal one. As you say though, the temporary nature of their stay is probably the real problem.
I thought about using one of such services, but I think they're way too general(ist?) for me, what I want to do is basically have a way to either send a message, login to a panel and submit a message from there or schedule a message that will be distributed among several "subscribers" via different methods, like a newsletter system but using a method selected by the end-user (SMS, email, twitter, etc.)

But you might be right, I could probably do something similar on top of IFTTT, Zapier or Yahoo! Pipelines...
Oh, I thought your point was what you actually wrote:

> with as many architectural challenges (seismic, geographic, etc.) the limiting factor for new construction is land and materials, not red tape
What are the supported browsers?

Would be good if I could easily find that info somewhere on the site
Market Projected Pricing And Availability
If security and privacy are of absolute priority to you (journalist, activist) then using a OS with closed source essentials is absolutely absurd.

If security and privacy are of some importance to you then using a OS with closed source essentials due to ease of use or development environment only increases the number of years until a strong privacy easy to use OSS system gets rolled out more widely. Your actions have broader impact than just your priorities.

Finally, there is more than just the software. Getting closer to the metal you have to contemplate bootloaders trust and verifiability.
Would you say that oil companies do not impose environmental externalities, but that the guilt solely falls on drivers who consume gasoline? No, the company bears some responsibility.

As to your second question, this is a public policy issue, and there will be a policy response whether AirBNB likes it or not. I think it would be smart for AirBNB to engage in the policy conversation.