skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> True, but as it turns out, most doctors are sons and daughters of rich folks
> (at least that's what sister tells me, who's doing her residency now).

Lets pretend that anecdata is useful and assume that it is generalizable to the entire population of med students. Do you think the prevalence of rich kids is alarming? Possibly an indication that something needs to change in the financing of healthcare or healthcare education?

ADDENDUM Feel free to ignore this: (obviously you are morally bound to respond to the above;)

The way you speak about being the sons and daughters of rich kids seems to indicate that you and your sister feel separate from that group. Did you come from an affluent family?
They can't give consent to what they eat, when they go to bed, where they live/vacation, when/whether they see a doctor, whether they are vaccinated, whether their caregiver drives obeying all traffic laws/not drinking, etc, either.

I believe that parents (/guardians) have responsibility for the children and that responsibility logically extends to giving consent for choices like this. My mother performed "experiments" on me in conjunction with her master's degree work in education; I was probably 8-10. It was clearly her call; I couldn't give fully informed consent, but there wasn't any risk of physical harm and vanishingly small risk of any possible harm, so I believe her consent by proxy was appropriate.
> EDIT 2: This topic has been flagged already, but I'm writing this for future reference. What this seems to imply is that if a new Greenwald or Snowden comes along, they are explicitly not welcome. This is not affirmative action at all, it's just an unreflected usage of it, without understanding the true meaning or function of affirmative action.

Go back and read the question. You're perpetuating a narrative that takes his words out of context. The question was asked if there was anything they were specifically looking for. He said yes, people who are not white males. They are already mostly white males and they want to write something that is less from the perspective of mostly white males.

That is affirmative action. You have the definition correct.

Also, what are you trying to do by name dropping Simone de Beauvoir? It doesn't earn you any credibility. It does sound though like you think of yourself as a feminist or at least a supporter of equality if you won't use that label, since you're also creating strawmen feminists (who the hell says most books are not worth reading because they're written by men? Please tell me about which feminist scholar or author wrote about that). Read things more critically before you promote a narrative established by taking things out of context to pretend that First Look is discriminating against white straight men by being a bunch of white straight men and not trying to become MORE white straight men while not explicitly ruling that out at all.
And now, the KQED version of the article: http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2014/04/14/San-Franciscos-Curr...
In Sydney (GMT+10), it's already the 16th, so I feel like we've had to wait a whole extra day because we've been so fixated on the "15th of April"
I read this yesterday and rejected it for coverage by us... the small sample size, the single strategy for measurement, the questionable value of that measurement, and the questionable extrapolation of that value all contributed to what I would call some pretty bad science.
Illegal gambling is hardly a problem anymore since there are so many legal places to gamble. I think she just picked a random item from her mental bucket of "things that sound scary and bad".
The Association of American Medical Colleges (www.aamc.org) sets number of medical students, and not AMA.
> "We expect to collect 60 cents of every dollar we bill"

you have to be careful with that statement since it can be a clever way of talking about what insurance agrees to pay with the chain versus the "retail" rate the doctors charge.

my father is a general practitioner and I was always amazed when he started saying about 25 years ago that he wouldn't let me become a GP if I had gone into medicine. and this article covers all of his concerns well.

malpractice is a big part of the issue and it varies state to state. for example, in pennsylvania malpractice insurance is amazingly expensive. and people sue all the time, which is sad unless it is gross incompetence, since every doctor I've met is trying their best.
Some important pre investments questions
>I believe the way forward is to shift the discussion away from procedures and more toward outcomes, and give medical professionals more operational and financial freedom to run their practices using tried-and-true free-market principles

Holy meaningless platitudes Batman. How do you have a system that is simultaneously profit driven and that allows everyone a fundamental right to healthcare? Short answer: you can't! You can either have a system that avoids treating the most expensive (free market), or you have a system that ensures a certain level of care for all (socialism), or you have some bastardized hybrid that costs ungodly amounts of money and does not serve the sick and poor well. (the system we have).
You mean that people would use AirBNBs for the same things they use normal apartments for?!?!?!?

Most likely it's that most of HN doesn't care what consenting adults do on their own time.
I should have plugged it; Code Triage was actually directly inspired by the events in this post.
Thanks for the feedback. We're still working through the pricing model, but we erred on the side of making it easy to get on board. I hadn't thought about it the way you put it, though, so we may re-evaluate this sooner than later.

The other aspect of this is that we have other features coming that we expect to be able to charge more for. Complicating the pricing matrix was something we're concerned about, but we were thinking something like Github's two-tier pricing model when we got those features out.

But, like I said, the way you explained it was not a perspective I had considered. Thanks for the feedback, was helpful.
Anecdote: I've been using ungrounded (two-prong) genuine Thinkpad power adapters for close to a decade now with no issues.
I should note that Mozilla's "rr" is actually similar conceptually to the Elm debugger, since it records an input stream rather than a snapshot of the program's states or actions. But the mechanism is quite different, since C++ doesn't naturally isolate nondetermistic "inputs" in the way Elm does.
Either that or I never thought of the possibility that one could actually master these kinds of things to some extent.
I'm guessing that since the person in the article was informed by the police and not her neighbors, that no one had any clue.
Hiring Engineers, Designers, Sales, Ops, Marketing at Caviar (YC S11)
It might not be reasonable, but there is an explanation. It's been a while since I heared the podcast but Planet Money explained something along the lines that all the American banks are invested in an old, inefficient system of processing these transfers and there is no incentive to change. Here's the episode:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/10/04/229224964/episode-...

In Europe, the EU recently established the rule that all money transfers within the entire EU must be concluded within one business day. Thus most Europeans are surprised when they hear that it takes so much longer in the US.

EDIT: Another commenter pointed out that the EU directive is actually still somewhere within the legislative process. My misconception arose from the fact that I can't remember the last bank transfer that took longer than one business day.
I don't think people are taking "offense", but rather smell the faint aroma of yet another non-repeatable study of very dubious quality. There are many very direct, easily quantified and repeated ways of measuring things like response time, StarCraft not being one of them.
A New Privacy Idea for Facebook
I got an email like 2 weeks ago saying I was auto-enrolled in the two day transfer. I guess I'm just special where I don't have to fill out beta signups?
I don't think it's either-or. Conditional and unconditional cash transfers [1] have many of the benefits of free-market competition (focus on efficiency and cost reduction) with many of the social benefits of an expanded welfare state. I could easily see a system where people get "medical vouchers" to spend on their most pressing care problems, and providers compete to supply care at the lowest possible price to either vouchered payers, or those paying in cash.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_cash_transfer

See also: http://www.economist.com/news/international/21588385-giving-...
Interesting article, but it's clear they've never played Risk:

"Starcraft 2 is a popular strategy game, similar in concept to Risk, where players compete to build armies and conquer a science fictional world."

It's tough to imagine two games more dissimilar in gameplay than Starcraft II and Risk. Also I'm pretty sure Risk isn't played in a "science fictional world"...
Yeah... I totally agree that this is a huge risk, and in fact I would expect abuse to happen because cops. Also, to be honest, I really don't like the idea of making software for the man. However, I'll probably still work on the idea this summer, just because it'll probably be an interesting project :)
@moron4hire: It's a good point. But there are side effects of reducing residential property. What happens to the city's economy when everyone's commute is doubled because housing in the city is becoming prohibitively expensive as supply shrinks? Without zoning laws, how do you attract people to move to your city when there's no guarantee their apartment building will still be an apartment building once the lease is up?

To answer the question, I think it's the city government's job to balance the interests of people and businesses that reside in the city. In a perfect world, every side effect and externality would be neatly quantifiable, and municipal leadership would be fair and evenhanded. For now, we have to trust that the feedback loop of election will produce pretty good solutions to problems. I can't think of a better way to approach things in the current system.
So... possibly put real patients at risk on a regular basis in order to train doctors for hypothetical situations that they may face at some point in their career? That doesn't sound like a solid justification to me.
A Haskell Programmer Tries to Learn Racket
The value here, IMHO, is that this leaves an artifact behind of what's been done in a way that stand ups, at least the way I've experienced them, doesn't.

The "realtime" aspect of it is less important than it seems at first. Our team, for example, updates 3-4 times a day on average, sometimes a bit more if we're just jumping from project to project to cleanup bugs or do general maintenance.

The fact that we've positioned this as a status board just reinforces that perception - that seems to be a common sentiment, and something we're going to have to consider again.

Thanks for the feedback.
"It’s hard to comprehend how, in this age of advanced science, experts don’t know more about how the brain works. But it has a vastly complex structure."

Yes, we have a map of 75 million thingies and how they interact in some ways ... but we don't really know what even the interactions of just two neurons "really mean," which parts of their many interactions are the important ones, how they change over time and so-forth.

It does we humans a lot time to figure what an artifact from an alien human civilization does, even a fairly simple one - and that figuring generally involves something like figuring out the "blue print", the "purpose", the "programming" and so-forth of such an artifact. These are all analogies with our own intentional processes.

"Figuring out" the brain even as if it was a human-created artifact seems immensely hard. Yet like DNA, the brain isn't human-created or created at least-all. It just happened, in ways whose understanding will clearly take a lot of unraveling to really understand.

Not sure where I'm going with this aside from awe of the challenge.
True, that is the experiment to do.

It is not without ethical concern though. Unfortunately, most patients are not sufficiently informed about medicine to make a rational market choice. (Indeed, outside my specialty, I am not really either, and would seek the advice of a trusted physician friend, which is a luxury most don't have.)

For example, the PA and expert system would not reliably know when they are in over their heads and require an MD. Some subset of people would suffer serious injury or death through no fault of their own other than not having had the information necessary to allocate their funds in a manner most benefiting their interests.
Thanks - we're going to look at the pricing again based on the comments here. (Love CircleCI, btw - I used it at a previous gig).
Except that her guest was slashed with a knife by a client in her apartment; I think you missed that part.
International comparison: http://healthcarereform.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourc...

Administrative overhead of government vs private insurance: http://healthcarereform.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourc...
have you played starcraft at high level?

this is actually very demanding on brain functions. i find the "high speed chess" description not too far from the truth. it's not because it's a "game" that it's simple, easy, or "just require no-life practicing".

Don't make that mistake.

Top players are actually geniuses at making the best choice the fastest and tracking multiple tasks at the same time. All this happens in milliseconds, constantly, there is no break until the game is over.

I believe that the basic brain function is actually choice-making, which makes.. this benchmark pretty accurate. Wisdom, etc.. all this comes with experience and isn't related to the brain's ability to function at it's peak level.
In a lot of cases, they're making money despite them, not because of them.

I suspect in most mid and large sized companies that the top 10% of developers are creating more value than the next 50%, and that below that, the value could easily be negative.
Show HN: Measuring day to day improvements doing push-ups for 100 days
Presumably would require cross compilers for each architecture, but it would be very interesting to see what you could do with it, for example comparing side by side.
To expand on what to3m said. The code was transformed into something like this:

int launched = 0;
start_thread(...);
if (!launched) {
while (true) {}
}

That's a perfectly legal optimization. The integer here isn't atomic and if another thread modifies the variable, that would be a data race and those have undefined behavior. Therefore, the compiler can assume that there is no race and move the comparison out of the loop.

Changing it to be "std::atomic<int> launched;" fixes that problem.
One of our beta testers during our closed beta brought iDoneThis to our attention. It looks like a good product. We don't have the email replies built in yet, but it's something we're looking at based on that early feedback.

and, the naming conundrum - we just stuck with what we called it when it was an internal tool. I can respect the confusion angle, though. Still, you should give it a try :)
I hate to make this a common refrain, but I make this same comment every time I see a comment like yours:

The supply of doctors is not restricted by the AMA. The supply of doctors is determined by the number of residency spots available to new graduates; that number is entirely determined by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS). Thanks to the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, Graduate Medical Education (GME) was dramatically slowed due to decreases in Medicare funding of residency positions. [1]

As long as we require physicians to be US trained and to have completed a US residency, the bottleneck will be GME funding. To fix that, the AMA or any other concerned citizen can lobby Congress for an increase.

[1]: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=182532
you were so much better last year. ;-)
How do outcomes compare?
On the list. We focused on what our beta testers used first. We're trying to roll through more integrations as fast as we can.
Nodejs Easy S3 Uploader
Not trying to be snarky, just genuinely curious: why would I use this?

My team uses an issue tracker right now (YouTrack, from JetBrains) as a central hub for our activity. Telling people what you're working on is as easy as changing the status of a ticket to "In Progress".

Is there something about this system that reduces the friction of that process (simply selecting an item from a dropdown)? It seems like having to actually go type out what you're working on would be more work (not to mention that if someone wants more detail about the ticket you're working on, they have to look it up themselves instead of clicking on it).
Database Version Control MySQL
Thanks for the kind words. We really should get a technical blog going - we've learnt a lot about MeteorJS over the last year.
I'm hoping this article left out a lot of criteria from this description of the methodology:

"The study analyzed the way 3,305 people, aged 16 to 44, played the game against a single random opponent of similar skill, in order to measure the gamers' cognitive motor performance."

The "similar skill" is an incredibly subjective measure. Especially if they relied on the user's scores recorded on battle.net. As someone else noted, they really need to control for the fact that younger people have a lot more free time to play and practice.

A good follow-up study would be to follow a set of gamers for a couple of years as they cross this hypothetical threshold to see if the results still persist and the overall performance decreases.

Of course, they'd need to control for a number of environmental factors and hardware differences, as gaming rigs change quite quickly.
Automated Static Code Analysis with Xcode 5.1 and Jenkins
That correction cycle could take decades, and some neighborhoods could be altered dramatically in the process. It really doesn't affect me at all either way, but I can acknowledge that some people have concerns, or at least a legitimate interest in managing probable outcomes.
If the AirBnb rentals complied with hotel regulations you would have a point, but it's not an apples to apples comparison. Renters/owners like to take advantage of the fact that by not being in compliance with hotel laws they can undercut hotel prices and make an illegal profit. That's not the same as what the underlying property value is if you comply with regulations.

Investors in NYC given the choice of building hotels, office buildings, or residential properties are generally building residential properties. In fact a lot of the rezoning has been turning commercial space into residential space over the last 5-10 years. The market is clearly demanding residential space (specifically luxury units) first and foremost.
We have some inconsistent intuitions about what the government should be allowed to regulate.

It seems like I should be able to give a neighbor's kid a 20 to pick up some leaves without getting the government involved. It seems like I should be able to give a friend a dollar for running and grabbing me a coke without consulting minimum wage laws or local sales taxes. I should be able to lend my cousin some money without registering as a bank.

A business hiring leafblowers or messengers with a "no questions asked" policy, or even an individual loan shark, seems like the law should get involved.

The internet as a communication platform blurs these lines. It lowers the barriers between strangers and acquaintances and friends. It lets private individuals behave like businesses some of the time. It lets small transactions rapidly scale.

I don't think one set of intuitions is necessarily right or wrong. But I think these conflicting intuitions make some people libertarians towards businesses like airbnb and uber, and other people think those businesses are just profiting off of skirting regulations.
I love these network diagrams...but I've never seen anyone actually use them!
The issue is not between AirBNB and its customers; its customers can evaluate the risks of renting on AirBNB, and factor that into their rental price, as well as insure for adverse outcomes.

The real issue is that AirBNB also imposes these risks on communities (i.e., AirBNB's customers' neighbors) by exposing them to, in the worst case, criminal elements, but even in a normal case, temporary renters who lack incentive to follow social norms or respect communal property.

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. Such a solution would most likely be a combination of technical solutions to minimize bad outcomes and perhaps a tax on AirBNB, the proceeds of which could compensate communities for the externality imposed by AirBNB.
Nothing really new here - just the acknowledgement that the ability to steal private ssl keys requires a massive effort to replace those keys.

"If anything is compromised, assume everything is compromised."

Our keys have been updated (and the old certs revoked), our servers patched, our sessions expired, and passwords expired. Mitigation more or less complete. Helps we're running a very small site, for sure, but the steps were clear from the beginning.
All the time. I find it helps me get started on problems I might otherwise have found too overwhelming or complex, and also helps me find solutions when I get stuck.

Especially things like reverse engineering - sometimes I get lost in all the random variable/function names - a little THC and I have it figured out in no time. It's amazing really.
She recorded herself on giveit100.com which is the startup we're working on

https://giveit100.com/@estella/n70kcr
My threshold for considering automation is doing it once :) but if the work to automate is non-trivial, then I usually don't get around to it until the 3rd cycle.

I usually evaluate a few things, in this order:
1. How much time will it take to do manually vs automated?
2. What are the chances I'm going to have to do this again?
3. Is it useful to just me, or other people too?
4. Do I get any value by doing this without automation? (e.g. will I gain insight by taking time to go through this process, that I would miss if I built a tool to just do it)

...but I suppose that's mostly for "tasks" whereas you mean "processes" in the sense that a process is more difficult to automate because it has more steps and dependencies. In that case, I think there are more evaluation criteria like:

-What is the risk of doing this manually and screwing it up?
How does that conclusion make even the smallest bit of sense to you?
Virtually all problems of civilization are "self-correcting" in one fashion or other.

But that doesn't mean that the residents of a city are obligated to just sit around until a problem, say gang violence or murder-for-hire, corrects itself. "Society" is about taking action to, uh, "proactively" correct these things.
What is the malpractice liability exposure for a Canadian doctor? In the US, malpractice insurance is a huge expense for most doctors, and for some specialties (e.g. obstetrics) it's very close to prohibitive.