skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agree that technology enabling better health care delivery is a great thing and still completely under-delivered. But as for technology replacing doctors...

I think in general it is misunderstood what doctors actually do... ie that they perform some kind of analysis to produce some kind of output. What they actually do, is take responsibility for the well being of a complete stranger. There are certainly a number of doctors that don't understand this, and have some other kind of agenda like making money, getting through another day etc... but ultimately, a doctor's 'special' role is to take responsibility. This is not really measured or paid for or even expected, but I would say that the success of a healthcare system relates to how much it helps or interferes with this process. People don't really get this, because there are very few jobs like this, and we are used to not having anyone take responsibility for anything. Government and business are masters of diluting responsibility in an ocean of bureaucracy. Accountability/transparency are not a substitute for responsibility either.

I don't know how a computer is going to take responsibility for my health, or my child's health. It seems a frankly ridiculous idea to me, like replacing the world's violinists with robots.

There is probably a role for a 'computer' to deal with nuisance (as in, currently a nuisance for the person who has to take time off work, go to a medical centre, wait for the doctor) medical problems like routine blood tests, rewriting a script, routine screening. These jobs are already being taken on by non-doctor health practitioners like physician assistants, nurse practitioners. This is a reimbursement issue really, and it can be done because:

1. There is strong evidence base for the activity (eg doing a pap smear for pre-cancerous cervical lesions, or vaccinating a baby).

2. It is easy to measure the success or failure of the outcome (eg the pap smear is done, or not done).

3. There is a very small risk of legal action. (so that the intervention can be indemnified in such a way that it is still economically viable).

Much of medicine is not like this however. There is not a clear evidence base. There are not easy to measure outcomes. The consequences when things go wrong can be significant for the patient and the doctor/treating team. Health systems are already ruined by an irrational focus on optimizing the wrong thing eg surgical waiting times, time to hospital discharge, profits, so lets not make the problem worse with technology that is apparently better at the outcome we've decided to apply to the cornucopia of human disease and dysfunction.

Disclaimer: I'm a doctor (in Australia). I'm sorry for the waiting times. The truth is, I don't have the skills to invent an adaptive appointment queuing algorithm. Isn't that an engineering problem?

edit: clarity
I have tried many of them except dwm at this point. This is not because I dislike dwm (on the contrary, I love the idea and its "if you can't compile me you don't deserve me attitude), but i3wm and dwm are all derivitaves, of well, dwm user modifications that either stay dwm (with patchsets) or emerge into something different (uh, Mosca, i3wm, awesomewm for sure, and many others of the pure C variety; I am certain XMonad and others follow dwm aesthetics and philosophy in a very general sense because dwm went backwards by throwing out the kitchen sink and going for pure, raw simplicity). If you try any of the derivatives, you will notice they usually take one dwm patchset notion and focus on it, or try different window management logic (many of the new one try b-tree sorting and management of windows). But they all focus on doing one window management style or feature, and doing it well for those people (my favorite example: stumpwm/ratpoision were very much unique and popular, spawning many look-alikes by eschewing the mouse altogether).

I use i3wm and really liked StumpWM (will probably return to it soon), but to make this dichotomy is to oversimplify and not realize WM systems usually focus on one-feature for the tool and do it well. Not all WMs are alike and that is why, as a StumpWM fanboy, giving control to another one arbitrarily (I think it is the only WM that totes that as a feature btw), shoes a very unique that I vainly believe lines up with mine.

Just my 0.02.
Url changed from [1], which points to this. It was on HN yesterday [2], but didn't quite exceed the "significant attention" threshold for dupes [3].

1. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTc5MzA

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8344059

3. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
One missing point in this thread: there is no such thing as HIPAA compliant. There is no government organization that will sanction your set up as "compliant". The HIPAA legislation imposes fines if you leak data, but does not prescribe how you prevent that.

That said, the thread does have some great safe guards and industry best practices you should look at.
Comparison works as expected in Ruby
Have checked in ruby 2.1.2p95

code:

> (250).class #=> Fixnum
> (250) == (250) #=> true
> (2100).class #=> Bignum
> (2100) == (2100) #=> true
You can go simpler than slock: vlock -sna will switch to a locked console tty and prevent you from switching out until you've unlocked it. This avoids all of the problems with X-based lockers, some hinted at on https://github.com/google/xsecurelock#security-design

(Note: don't sudo vlock -sna if you haven't set a root password, add yourself to the vlock group instead.)
"Nearly anything with a soapbox seems to be a front for something that reduces to political propaganda or wallet emptying. Right or left, religious or secular, green or whatever, it doesn't seem to matter. Nothing is true; everything is an advertisement."

This seems to be an incredibly disempowering perspective.
Uh, just do yourself a huge favor - grab the milk and forget the coke.
And I just want to say suckless tools are wonderful. I vascilate about studying C well enough to be dangerous, and I do see a very wonderful beauty in the aggressive Suckless C dogma. There is kid is so, to a novice, small and clean that I love their philosophy and orthodoxy.

Long live suckless! Does any use their st terminal emulator?
> ps3 had opengl available

Again this urban legend.

PS3 had PSGL, which was OpenGL ES 1.0 using Cg as shading language.

This is quite different than OpenGL.

Wii uses GX and the Wii U uses GX2, they are modeled on OpenGL, which is also a bit different than being OpenGL.
I don't see it that way. I see it as a simple recognition of a reality and a call to engage in primary research and reasoning from first principles.

It is herds and movements that are disempowering.

It's still possible to organize too. People should organize on concrete issues and leave the ideology (levers for mass manipulation) at the door. That way it's a lot harder to leverage group identity signifiers and mythological elements to manipulate large numbers of people while masking ones real agenda. For example, we might create an agency whose goal is to reduce CO2 emissions. That's it. No other bandwagons are implied.

Don't get me wrong. I do see the universality of manipulation as a serious social pathology. I just don't know what to do about it in a world where people have to get paid. Seems to me that if money is required to make things happen, only things that are motivated by money or that serve the agendas of those with it will happen.
import your OhLife-diary-export into maildiary and start over.
>It was the search engine before Bing! came along.

IIRC there where (quite) a few before bing. More to the point google was the pinnacle of web searches long before bing came into existence.
That's beside the point. What you are interested in and what the majority of people are interested in do not align. And where there are more consumers, there are more developers.
Remember this -

You have FOUR HOURS to get a person with a stroke to the emergency.

If you do, their chances of survival are dramatically higher.
Very cool tip. This is one of the most useful Linux power user tips I got in a while. Thanks!

Now to script it as I spent most of my time in a X term emulator with a tmux session. Can someone effectively script X -> tty console then vlock?
Show HN: Sound in front of YouTube for mp3
They'd never be truly self-sustaining - that's borderline impossible if you want any kind of quality and growth. There will always be a supply line from Earth and other colonies.
I was addressing your definition of true free market in which you make it sound as if in a true free market anything would go down. Free market still has provisions to protect consumers. The market you describe is not a free but anarchic.
Whats your point? that the 20 year old web service used what they had available at their time?

They also didn't get as much traffic as TBP, since there wasn't that many connected back then.

I would also imagine that they didn't have to HIDE their services either.
Awesome! This is a great service; I've often wondered why YouTube doesn't offer this on its own?
Google's privacy policy make a fair number of assurances about what they do with data.
Sounds good.

Because systemd always sounded like it solved some init problems but then sprawled over so many other systems that it seems invasive and monolithic.

KISS.
Maybe take a look at OxDoc: http://oxjs.org/#examples/oxdoc_tutorial
Some Virgin Galactic customers demanding refunds
You don't need to switch to a tty console yourself, you can run vlock -n while in X and it'll switch for you.
Thanks, I saw the gifyoutube one and made this. I was reluctant to share though because I was afraid they'd shut it down.
Does HIPAA really require "physical server isolation"? I wasn't able to find anything specifying that in my reading. (Encrypting data at rest is definitely required. I suspect the S3 functionality was built to address the requirement.)

AFAICT the whole "can't do HIPAA in the cloud" meme arose from the reluctance of cloud services to sign BAAs, Google only got on board with that earlier this year.
Does this even work properly for Lisps with lexical scoping? I'm not that familiar...

Modulo scoping, you can do that in JavaScript.
I'm very similar: same age, skills, background.

Off the top of my head:

1) You've got to stop calling yourself a "freelance developer". Start using "consultant" (and then read lots about what that means and behave accordingly). You are not a hammer.

2) You seem jealous of younger project managers. Are they paid better? Have they more prestige? More control? More influence? What specifically bothers you? And then…

3) Stop just coding. It's a great skill to have but you and me can be coded under the table by a 22yo who costs less, drinks more Red Bull, has more energy and fewer commitments/distractions.

4) We can keep learning new technical things but there's far more value in learning how to apply our existing skills to specific domains. Get closer to the "business". Learning more about marketing. Understand sales. Use your coding skills in those areas and you can side-step comparison to younger developers and the typical software project hierarchy.
Privacy policies don't mean jack shit. They're one-sided and can be changed unilaterally at any time. If you're putting your faith in a corporate policy, you're incredibly naïve.
What's my account number? Switching cell carriers, be sure yo know yours
I bet it would be pretty mild - like a cup of ephedrine tea (banned for a while now, how stupid). Cocaine, even in its pure form, is not that much of a stimulant and it has a short half-life - methamphetamine or even amphetamine would be much better choices. Or just grab some phenylethylamine while it's still legal.
This site could be named unix_hunt :D
I'm not buying it. Having worked at a company which did all their software in a purely functional language, I haven't seen any evidence which would support his points.

> You do not have to build a mental model of the whole system and its libraries to reason about it.

You have to build a mental model of the part which you are looking at if you want to reason about it. If you're looking at a single function, you need to build yourself a mental model of that one function. If you want to reason about the whole app, well, then you have to build a mental model of it all. The language you use doens't change that.

> Corollary, you can reason about any subset of the system, however small, without having to even understand what the whole system does.

That is true in any programing language.

In practice however this doesn't hold. You very often can't reason about the correctness of a single function without also knowing it's immediate surrounding code. or in which context it is used.

> You don’t have to rely on your memory of something you did possibly years ago to deal with new requirements, changes or to track down bugs.

Neither do you in any other language. Just follow the code. And: badly structured FP code is harder to follow than clean procedural code. FP alone doesn't buy you anything.

> For the managers out there: key-person dependencies (“the guy who knows everything about the system”) become less of an issue.

It is exactly the same issue as if you were writing the code in any other language. Having a single person who knows about a certain part of your application is bad. Functional language doesn't protect you from it.

The measure should be how long it takes a new person to get familiar with the code. Well-structured code written in any language should be equally easy to understand and follow. I've seen some really bad code written in a functional language. Here again, FP doesn't protect you from bad code or its consequences.

> New people can become productive much faster, no longer having to spend the time building a mental model of everything.

Any reasonably complex app will require programers to know about many aspects of the app. You can't make changes to one part without knowing what consequences it will have to other parts. This is especially true for logic-heavy apps.

A new programmer you just hired may have the impression that changing that one little knob in a small function there fixes the bug. But it may have to him unknown consequences because he doesn't know where and how that function is used, what pre/post-conditions the callers are expecting etc.
> More cameras are cool, but you need to know how to process the data and present it clearly to the user.

Thanks for the state of the art, good to know.

I assumed the relevant sensor tech was cheap and ubiquitous because every time I rent a car these days, it seems to have both a backup camera and radar. Maybe that's all we've got though, and maybe tricky to point that gear in every direction and have it always on, and as you mention, usefully conveyed to a driver is the big hurdle.

Though I have one crazy idea for that, thanks to George Lucas.

Some people pick on this one scene in Star Wars, when Han and Luke are fighting in the turrets, and you hear all these ships whizzing past, even though there's no sound in space. In one of the more contrived retcons, some fans insist that the sounds of whizzing ships are actually just a different approach to HCI. The ship detects threats, then pumps in naturalish-sounding audio telling you where they are in relation to the Falcon.

I know that's not a mass market idea, but my dream car would use fancy radar to make nearby cars sounds a bit like starfighters. (So long as I can turn it off, probably gets old fast.)

So yes, my primary interest in sensor tech is not reducing drag, or even accidents, but in feeling like I'm piloting a spaceship. Don't judge. :)
This, +1000: 'Isn't "no solutions that can be deployed with minimal security expertise" just about the whole point of this compliance?'

If you aren't a trained, competent security analyst/engineer (or working with one) then don't accept sensitive information. PHI, credit card numbers, even contact lists: all of these are considered "sensitive" for a reason, and you are being reckless in the extreme if you accept them from your customers without the proper protections in place.

I have seen and even been responsible for (many years ago) the implementation of some horrifyingly bad "security controls" by people who simply didn't understand the field.

It's not just crypto, or disabling root logins via SSH, or preventing XSS on your web forms; you need to plan for a multitude of possible attack vectors, internal and external. Many of those aren't likely to be intuitive without some real training and exposure to best practices.
From what I've read in this thread, Parse isn't that good for production, but there isn't anything better, is that correct? If not, what are good alternatives to it?
Make the drawing area bigger! It's extremely hard to write signature fluidly in tiny area with digital devices.
Sounds shit. Why not just use systemd? It's not as though the FreeBSD port will be useful, FreeBSD are all regressive and hate good things. Basically uselessd is right name, because it is USELESS!

I hope the owner just stops using the internet forever. What a stupid bsd idiot
"It is herds and movements that are disempowering."

The Civil Rights movement.

The labor movement.

The environmental movement.

The suffragette movement.

The abolitionist movement.

The free speech movement.

The list can go on and on.

Whatever else you could say about these movements, agree or disagree with their aims or effects, its difficult to give credence to the view that they weren't effective or empowering to their members or that their goals could have been achieved without organization.
The problem with homomorphic encryption in this case is that you need access to the private key in order to interpret the results of the computation. Joe Public encrypts queries using a public key, and the query runs on a possibly compromised server without the attackers learning anything about the database or the query, but then the result of the query looks like absolute gibberish to Joe Public.

Giving Joe Public access to the private key necessary for interpreting the query result allows attackers to inspect all of the intermediate states of the query finite state machine, which allows debugging and inspection just as if homomorphic encryption wasn't in use.

I suppose the routing proxy could hold the private key and decrypt the query result for the general public. However, the location of the routing proxy is almost certainly going to be compromised before the locations of the servers executing the queries, so in the decrypting proxy scenario, the attackers will almost certainly have the secret keys before they get access to the boxes executing the queries. There's also the problem that the messages being decrypted are the final states of finite state machines that executed the queries, so the messages to be copied over the network add up in size to at least the size of the dataset being queried. (The data can be sharded into many smaller databases, and almost certainly would be in order to speed up the homomorphic computation steps, but this doesn't cut down on the amount of network traffic necessary to retrieve all search results for a single query. A simple query on 1 TB of data, split into 10,000 databases each of 100 MB would require copying and remotely decrypting 10,000 messages, each over 100 MB in size.)

It might be possible to discover a homomorphic encryption scheme whereby knowledge of the private key allows one to devise a mapping from a higher dimensional finite state to a lower dimensional finite state machine, where the secret key for the smaller dimensional machine doesn't leak information about the secret key for the larger machine. In this case, it may be possible to perform some finishing operations on the query to prepare it for conversion to the smaller state machine and give the public the private key to the smaller state machine so that the query result could be read from the machine by the public without the public being able to observe intermediate states of the query computation. However, I believe this is far beyond our current mathematical understanding.
Fair. That's partly what motivated my desire to be able to script within Haskell in the first place, I often find myself tredding that gray area. Half way through a Bash script (or a pipe chain) before realising I can't express what I want to express. A bunch of times I've given up and started writing a Haskell file. That's my personal experience, anyway. So I'd rather avoid bumping my head on the ceiling altogether.

Although I just saw this comic which seems somewhat germane :) http://www.catacrac.net/crac/w-16
http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html
Legendary. I'd love to see this installable as a .deb / apt repo / ansible and puppet modules one day. Let's make fixing this mess as easy as possible for the masses.
I believe there's no better alternative for my needs.
I would say it's an extremely important article, and I'm glad the Times is covering it.

The meeting feels strangely reminiscent of http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/21/so-a-blogger-walks-into-a-b... (though the Bin 38 meeting was probably a lot more overtly evil happening).

Basically, whenever a private entity is having kind-of-secret or completely secret parties, you can bet a lot of weird business deals are happening, or at least, steps that take place before decisions are made (buttering people up, exchanging lavish gifts, etc.). This meeting was possibly a move by Bezos to win favour of writers and artists who are currently positioning themselves against Amazon, and kind of threaten the ones against him by not inviting (in the sort of "you won't have a career if you go against me" message kind of way, I'm guessing, I don't know).

But at any rate, I do think whenever meetings of this sort happen, newspapers should cover it.
You sir are going to cause some late night geekage. Damn you!

UPDATE: So am I missing something, because I get more or less the man page below:

http://linux.die.net/man/1/vlock

And I see no -n argument. Are you using Linux or some other Unix? What version do you use?

(Sorry, I really need to sleep early, but you have to keep telling me how to improve my laptop!)
As someone who had two grandparents have strokes absolutely this, prompt medical attention significantly reduced both the damage and the recovery/rehabilitation time.

If you think even remotely it's a stroke then straight to the hospital you go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXONEHmupy0 (UK National Health Service Advert about strokes)
This is interesting as fallout from the Hachette fight, or news that Bezos was more interested in literature than anyone ever thought, or news that Bezos was talking to (or perhaps even attempting to influence) certain authors. As a company that can now singlehandedly move the books market in the US, Amazon is pretty tight lipped. This inevitably leads to essentially Kremlinology.

Whereas east coast media elite is generally used to refer to lack of concern about the needs of Americans making under $250k per year (see eg how can I possibly live on just $400k [1]), or the vapid times wedding announcements.

[1] http://www.wsj.com/video/do-you-make-400000-a-year-but-feel-...
Personally I'd compare it to meteorology. Meteorologists used to interpret images from satellites and I suppose they made predictions based on a bit of science, but also a lot of heuristics. Now (still a supposition, I'm just a layman about this) computers do most of the heavy work. Yet meteorologists still exist : their work consists in choosing the computer, operating it, understanding the output and other stuff like that. You can't just give a supercomputer to someone and expect him to predict the weather. It's still a job for an expert.

Medicine could become kind of like this.
I think this might just be a stipulation to sign a BAA with Amazon, combined with my tendency to err on the side of safety. I can't find anything to cite either. On a slightly related note, lack of memory safety happens to be how Home Depot lost all those credit card numbers.

I am not a lawyer.