skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was thinking of putting together a crude hack to implement just a subset of what this offers. I cannot thank the authors enough. I'm trying this out the moment I get home.

I feel as though we should have had first-class support for portable environments all along, and it shocks me that we haven't considered building this kind of facility before. This could be a game changer. Like vim package managers and other sensibly modern things, I totally expect to see this evolve to become the new norm.

I see this kind of configuration:

* global personal configs (lightweight, truly global settings for work and home)

* local overrides (work, home, per machine, non-SSH)

* remote overrides (SSH machines)

Global configs should be portable everywhere. For everything else, I see a system capable of merging several such configs and matching the current environmental and capability context.
It's a racket. There is one and only way of solving this problem for good. It's for your life insurer to also be your doctor. I wrote an article about it about 4 or so years ago (linked here): http://housecall.md
> It sounds like private insurers are hugely subsidizing Medicare by paying 100x the price

More like they are billed 100x the price, negotiate down to 10x the price in general, and otherwise default to a point where the business collects .85x the price.
Strangeloop 2014 slides and videos
Isn't it a bit dodgy? I would be afraid for my photos to disappear without notice.
> It looks like the author of this is just some random engineer without a lot of backround in marketing or persuasion psychology. That's a shame because he's clearly interested in it.

Little parenthesis: if you're interested in a subject, make the effort to read about it from well established sources (very often, books). The author of the posted article relies on sources like LifeHacker and pop psychology journalism to build his knowledge and make his claims, but those are clearly shallow, insufficient, and inaccurate.

I feel like this is a problem that the internet has created- it makes it possible to feel knowledgeable in certain topics after reading a lot of informal web pages on a given topic, but very often that content is far from being authoritative. Reading less blogs/pop journalism/etc. and more books from established academics is one of the most beneficial moves you can do for the depth and accuracy of your various bodies of knowledge.
You're mistaken on the Medicare only paying 1% for the assistant's work. They only pay 16% of the primary physician for the assistant, which in this case was 1% of Dr Mu's fee.
I bet someone clever could hack together a quick script that makes a laptop screen dim instantly when you look away, provided your face is in the field of view of the builtin camera...
I really like the part of the article that talks about taking breaks. Entrepreneurs = work hard. I am a big believer in working on nights when others are having a good time, but you got to take care of yourself. Burning out only slows you down ultimately.

I like to surround myself with family and activities I love to recharge my battery. Often when I come back to working on my project the creative ideas come flowing out.
So this practice is made more obvious in the US, simply because individuals are left with the bill. Although having a single-payer (i.e. universal health care) system might help to identify these patterns and reduce costs, the fact is that it occurs all the time, even in these systems. I'd be willing to bet that it happens more often in single-payer systems, simply because it's easier to justify and get away with. When I volunteered in the ER, I saw it all the time.

In fact, I remember when I was preparing to apply for med school in Canada/Ontario, I had to read a number of articles, journals, and books about medical ethics, and one thing that stood out was the consistent push to have future physicians account for the impact of their decisions on the system as a whole. So not only was it imperative to promote patient health, but it was also important to balance that with the overall cost. A good example is a simple blood test. A full spectrum blood test may help identify potential problems in a patient, but it costs OHIP a lot of money to run those tests (especially since they're done in private for-profit labs). That's why your family doctor should really only order the required tests.
Are you suggesting that there is a distinction between "searches people want to do" and "results they want to find" (besides the purely functional one of search -> result). e.g. there are search results people want, even though they don't know they want them? Unknown unknowns that people will retrospectively be grateful for?
This argument is spot on but we resist it because we think we are above culture, too smart for it, that we can reduce everything to science, analysis, and engineering. The opposite is true. Culture is everything. Your brain does not receive ads in a kind of tabula rasa clean room environment. Thanks for articulating this!
It is a game of survival. You have to try several tricks to keep yourself afloat until you reach what you call as success. Being lean (in my case I am a single founder), fit physically and mentally (I did not do this so aggressively when I was employed:-), keeping track of your expenses (some sort of cash flow), going for little money once in a while in a consulting mode, having sufficient capital to not disturb your family all and more are needed till you think you have reached the point where you have exhausted all options - research, market, positioning, customer demos , partnering and so on.
Its not about the tech perspective of the mechanics, its about the fact that a human being crafted by hand this amazing mechanical watch. Personally, I am blown away that its even humanly possible to craft watches like this Golden Bridge by hand. Its like wearing an original picasso on your wrist.

There are plenty of people that can afford to purchase them that don't as well. I think you need a deep appreciation for the art to be comfortable dropping $20k on a watch even if its a drop in the bucket for you.
> Entrepreneurs = work hard

Not if you're picking your battles, planning ahead, and executing right.

[I assume you mean "work late". There's nothing wrong with working hard, 9-5, 5 days a week.]

The entrepreneur is the responsible one that will work hard and work late when he has to. The trick is never having to.
I wholeheartedly disagree. A much more important factor is how ready you are and what kind of support structure you have to start out with. If that is later in a career (and when you have a family) so be it. It's the right time.

Founded current company with two young kids and just had a third. Pulling together the right team way more of a factor than having a family.
Wait did I miss it, he did not have insurance? Otherwise he wouldn't pay 117k. Unless it is one of those EPO plans, but even then you can argue that you could not have known about the oon doctor. It is likely to take a couple of months though
> the fact is that it occurs all the time, even in [single payer] systems

The "single payer" has a hell of a lot more leverage than individuals in the US which, as far as I can tell, don't need to consent in any way (hell, they can even explicitly refuse to consent) and get stuck with the bill regardless. That trick wouldn't work so well on an organization the size of the government.
In this context, I find Charles Bukowski's poem [1] "Roll the Dice" resonating. I love to re-read it over again from time to time and remind myself that it's a long-term plan and a massive grind.

[1] Roll the Dice - https://vimeo.com/78472610

if you’re going to try, go all the way.
otherwise, don’t even start.

if you’re going to try, go all the way.
this could mean losing girlfriends,
wives, relatives, jobs and
maybe your mind.

go all the way.
it could mean not eating for 3 or 4 days.
it could mean freezing on a
park bench.
it could mean jail,
it could mean derision,
mockery,
isolation.
isolation is the gift,
all the others are a test of your
endurance, of
how much you really want to
do it.
and you’ll do it
despite rejection and the worst odds
and it will be better than
anything else
you can imagine.

if you’re going to try,
go all the way.
there is no other feeling like
that.
you will be alone with the gods
and the nights will flame with
fire.

do it, do it, do it.
do it.

all the way
all the way.

you will ride life straight to
perfect laughter, its
the only good fight
there is.
It's also about how solar power prevented the world from reaching utopia.
Health care -- where Libertarian, free-market ideology goes to die.

The free market simply doesn't work when there is zero price transparency, 3rd parties are often responsible for payment, and purchasers are often in great distress right when they need to be able to negotiate.

Laissez faire market philosophy fails in this case for the same reason it fails during major crises and disasters. Purchasers are nearly powerless but have needs that they must meet immediately; vendors can price-gauge and make out like bandits. A climate of scarcity and desperation prevail over hypothetical rational actors participating in a stable market at equilibrium.
I was just alluding to the fact that garbage collection runtimes are quite less than ideal if another system calls into them sporadically. It just doesn't fit well for software libraries intended to be language-agnostic.
"And yet, there's an amazing satisfaction that comes from entrepreneurship that you just can't get by working for someone else.".

Are you sure about this? For everyone? How?
https://ssls.com
If you don't want to worry about losing your data in the future, try Chronicle of Life. As a non-profit with an endowment fund, we're probably the safest guardian of your data.

You can already get a daily reminder email and hit reply to save your thoughts. We're currently reworking the website (long overdue), and will add the option to see a previous post in the reminder email by mid October.
> What I want from NYT is an article which really examines the situation, and not just sensationalizing numbers.
...

> For example, Medicare would have paid only 1% for the assistant's work... It sounds like private insurers are hugely subsidizing Medicare by paying 100x the price.

I don't think they're sensationalizing the numbers.

Private insurers are not paying 100x Medicare. They pay negotiated rates to in-network professionals, which is typically 20-100x lower than the list price.

But doctors and companies are being creative, and using out-of-network services as a cover-up, so the private insurances can't enforce their negotiated rates. In some cases it's better to just settle with doctors, to avoid lawsuits and problems with patients' employers. But this rewards the bad behavior.

With layers and more layers of companies, hospitals, consultants and lawyers, all trying to maximize their revenue targets, it's not a surprise that we're seeing six-digit bills for an assistant surgeon. The system is completely broken.

Until we have a complete reform, and more strict laws like New York's Surprise Bill Law [1], I'm afraid we'll see more cases like this.

The only solution is to (try to) stay healthy. If you can.

[1] http://www.nyacp.org/files/public/169463_Health_Alert_3JUNE2...
I still prefer Metric, but, I have a very good sense of what an acre, 10 acres, and 640 acres are (I have family that farms, and a "section (640 acres)" is a pretty common unit of measurement.

57,910 acre feet would actually be more "intuitive" to me than 70,000 cubic meters (though much harder for me to do calculations and almost impossible to do unit shifting).

57,910 acre feet is roughly 100' deep of water on a section of land. I can "visualize" what that reservoir would would like.

Or, for more practical/relevant to irrigation purposes, it's 100 sections of land, 1' deep.

But yes, I'm still going to argue for the metric system. I promise.
His insurer agreed to pay -- but the guy was just bothered by the ridiculous unethical situation and balked at reimbursing the overcharging physician.

Read to the end bro!
Again, forest for the trees. Your laser focus on one particular type of bug blinds you to the fact that complex systems lead to bugs in general. I'm not interested in defending C++ (or Go, or anything else). I'm saying I see Rust falling down the same "cool new ideas" rabbit hole as C++, and Haskell, and Erlang, and Common Lisp, and... Of those languages only one has achieved any notable success.

And btw: the idea of calling something a "systems programming language" that can't even make a system call is laughable. Can I mmap a buffer to pass to a hardware video codec or make an ioctl to an audio driver in rust? Guess which language I can do that in? If "Go doesn't live in the same world as Rust", then Rust isn't in the same galaxy as C/C++.
>> Q: Have you ever seen an ad for bed sheets? Can you even name a brand of bed sheet? If ads work by emotional inception, wouldn't you expect to have seen at least a few ads trying to incept you with the idea that Brand X bed sheets are going to brighten your day? [2]

By the same theory we should rarely ever see ads for mattresses too, since their "consumption is purely obscure". And yet, I'm bombarded by ads for mattresses everywhere.
I imagine he'd be dodging collections.

EDIT: If his insurance hadn't paid it, obviously.
I get why someone would think that speech is going to be more widely used: the computing world is moving to devices - phones and tablets - that are awkward to type on. Wearables (if they ever become a big thing) won't usually have a keyboard at all. I don't really see why picture searches would be that big.
Gandi looks good, especially if one already use them for DNS. We intend to start using them for SSL.
The US health system is FUBAR'd, but the right answer isn't a blank check from the government.
Reasons I am dubious of the author's agenda, based on the structure of their arguments:

1. anchoring to high numbers, without contextualizing how big this issue is: "This contributes to the nation’s $2.8 trillion in annual health costs." How much does it contribute?

2. unequal metrics -- when discussing the expected charges: "Mr. Drier was prepared when the bills started arriving: $56,000 from Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, $4,300 from the anesthesiologist and even $133,000 from his orthopedist, who he knew would accept a fraction of that fee." When discussing the out-of-network bills: "Two plastic surgeons billed more than $250,000 to sew up the incision, a task done by a resident during previous operations for Ms. Kaufman’s chronic neurological condition." Now we're thinking $133k isn't so bad b/c he'll only pay part of it, but the $250k is frightening because there is no mention of an expected discount. As a counterpoint, the author mentions the insurance company pays the full amount to Dr. Mu for the other anecdote in the story.

3. fearful language -- 'He was blindsided, though, by a bill of about $117,000 from an “assistant surgeon,” a Queens-based neurosurgeon whom Mr. Drier did not recall meeting.' Sounds like a 24-hour-news-cycle headline: "Patients billed by doctors while under anesthesia".

4. mentioning there are marketing firms who specialize in helping maximize billing with insurance, as if it's an unethical business. This happens every time a provider of a service or product interacts with a bureaucracy -- there is a whole layer of these services for defense contracting, for example.

5. they mention how the US has more neurosurgeons per capita, then link that (by proximity in the same paragraph) to providing motive by mentioning how neurosurgeon compensation has decreased recently. A more honest article would have given absolute numbers about how the costs of neurosurgery relate to overall health care costs, rather than making the niche appear large relative to the story, so the reader implicitly compares that impact to the $2.8 trillion number.

Medical billing is absurdly complex and byzantine. I'm don't doubt the veracity of the anecdotes, but the structure of the presentation make me suspect the intent of the author.
They give up after a while and you can discharge the debt in a bankruptcy. More than half of all US bankruptcy cases are related to medical bills, so this is a very common issue. In the United States, having a major medical problem is synonymous with destroyed credit.
SpaceX CRS-4 Launch
Complete nonsense. Do you really believe that comms majors are being tought cultural inception in undergrad? The Corona ad, like all ads, is a response ne to a brief that is designed to address a business objective. In this case get people to drink Corona not just in the Summer. Hence find your own beach even if you live in Minnesota in the Winter and would normally reach for a winter beer. We don't sit around at agencies with our clients discussing the best way to mind fuck the public. Ads are tested on awareness, purchase intent, brand association and message association. Creatives reach for the stars. Clients and strategists pull them back to earth. Depending on the people involved. Some ads are great. Some suck. Case closed. - Ad Agency Guy (BTW none of us watch Mad Men)
I don't understand what you're getting at. What do you suspect the author's agenda to be? What should we take away from this instead?
I completely agree, but how likely is it that big government will be able to accurately audit whether a procedure was actually required or not? In fact, I'd prefer if big government would stay out of it and just pay for my healthcare to keep me healthy & alive. I am not an expert on the procedures I need, and neither is big government. We put our trust in medical practitioners to make those decisions for us. The problem is that they benefit financially from those decisions.

If you ask me, the answer is to stop conducting these services as fee-for-service. Pay physicians a salary. Pay them well, but keep costs somewhat fixed.
You can see more on this link: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152720188975747&se...
Whole story: http://appricot.com/post/69685530021/we-built-it-everybody-l...
Ah thah crap missed that one paragraph, thanks
Google deprecates OpenID 2.0, moves to OpenID Connect
How interesting. The patient is not in a position where consent is meaningful but is charged an exorbitant amount. At least a little unethical, I think.
It's sad that the only surprising part is "He Didn't Know", not the actual price.
Rust has inline asm support, so system calls are easy and efficient, e.g. http://mainisusuallyafunction.blogspot.com/2014/09/raw-syste... .

If you quibble that it's not in the standard library, note that we are talking about the actual languages here, not their standard libraries (that crate could easily be pulled into the official distribution if it was deemed sensible to do so).
I think it depends on how we define what a 'search' is exactly. When you wear a future Google Glass and it's discovering that you're drinking an iced coffee instead of a regular coffee, did it do that by searching? If so, did it do 100 'searches' to discover this fact, where a search is a really an image search of static frames from your vision?

Or is a 'search' something that a person dictates to a computer to answer a question?
Two weeks notice before a service that was meant to help "privately remember your memorable days" deleted all of those memories? Time to find out who runs this and never trust them with anything again.

Two weeks is laughably short and disrespectful to your users. If at least they were open about the issue that forces them to shutdown, maybe users would be able to help out by donating to keep it online for longer? Shit like this makes me hate startup culture.
The other weird thing is the billing happens after the fact with no visibility before hand.

If you're building a house you don't start by saying «let's build a house» and then wait for bills from various contractors you've never met to arrive once the house is built. That would be considered crazy.

Why is it acceptable in health care? What prevents praticians from establishing a budget? What prevents patients from demanding one?
Thumbs up for critical analysis of the article.
tooshay
There is no free market here.

This isn't a price transparency thing either. This is about having created a culture where every doctor in the country is constantly hustling, committing borderline fraud.

Sociologically, the idea that doctors and medical care workers are always looking out for what's best for their patients helps to mask the idea that they might be doing so from a health perspective but are ignoring any other consideration. And so bringing in a friend who's also a surgeon so he can get a little kickback doesn't really raise any ethical alarms.

But this isn't the fault of the libertarians.

Government has meddled in this industry and even with the ideas that the typical Americans think about for so long that this was inevitable. Nor can government fix it now... the AMA and other quasi-unions won't stand for it. They'll negotiate.

And, as usual, our politicians will sell us down the river.

If you want to fix this (and every other problem), the answer is simple (though not particularly libertarian): outlaw all health insurance. Make everyone pay for their own care. Make them pay out of pocket.

In such a nation at that, none of these shenanigans could continue. Not that I expect anyone reading this to get it. You cry "But NoMoreNicksLeft, how could that man afford $117,000 out of pocket!"

And the answer is that he couldn't. The doctor (if he billed after the fact) might sue, but winning a lawsuit doesn't make someone magically capable of paying. If the doctor insisted on payment up front, then the man would just forgo his particular service (which, since he was unaware that he needed it and it sound like bullshit... wouldn't have mattered).

There aren't enough rich people who can afford to pay the current prices out of pocket for 100% of the doctors to continue to bill/earn what they do currently. Maybe just enough for 1% to continue like that... the other 99% are going to have to shape up, and in a hurry.

They can't hold out prices where they are now (we can't pay that out of pocket), nor can they spitefully punish us and refuse to do it at lower prices. They have bills to pay just like the rest of us, they have mortgages, they need to buy groceries, etc.

Nor will they decide to become plumbers and HVAC repairmen so that they don't have to give away their surgeries for less.

But again, this is lost on anyone I've ever explained it to. You all think it will result in millions of deaths and untold suffering.

> Laissez faire market philosophy fails

Bullshit. There hasn't been a laissez fair in the healthcare industry in the United States in 100 years.
280daily may be of interest to you.
That isn't enough. Most doctors have disclaimers that you sign stating that if it turns out they don't take your insurance, even if they say they're in your network, you are still responsible for out-of-network costs. You need to consult with your insurance company and get it in writing, ideally.
To fellow startups claiming to "change healthcare": this is not about nicer online forms. This is about destroying this.
Simply maintaining a web application unfortunately requires a fair bit more than just paying the hosting bill, even if you're not adding features.
I don't know where you got the idea that you can't mmap a buffer or call an ioctl in Rust. You certainly can do those things.
Search Engine Optimization Services India
I agree completely. The way healthcare works in the United States is usually so sensible, frugal, and conflict-free. I can't believe someone could be gaming the system just to make a buck. The author must have some sinister agenda.
I took the username from a Monty Python skit.
Thank god nobody has actually proposed giving the healthcare industry a "blank check."
He was given 6 months and should have taken it.

Many people who violate the law think what they did wasn't wrong, but this has no bearing in the matter when it comes to sentencing.