telchar

Exactly, barriers to looking up a patient's information can be fatal. I need to give someone medication now to stabilize them. What medications are they on now? Can't look it up? Better give it to them and hope there's no adverse reaction.

Better to avoid that situation and implement auditing while making sure people know the rules are enforced.

Somehow I never considered hover-text for math. Now I'm actually rather angry that it's not already standard, what with papers being distributed digitally. Keeping track of notation when reading papers is the bane of my existence.

Your opinion here goes beyond "caveat emptor" right to "vae victus". Although you seem to support the idea of cities bargaining with Amazon here, your statements make a good argument for cities to decline.

This right here is extremely frustrating to me. There is approximately zero marginal cost to distribute that back-catalog, but they just keep it locked away. I think Amazon does the best job of the legal sources I have seen, though I find it hard to stomach paying $4 to watch a movie made before my parents were born.

They could have used the budget reconciliation process to bypass the filibuster. Instead they used their one opportunity this year to do that to get the tax bill passed. If they hadn't insisted on forcing through a (historically unpopular) tax bill, they could have passed a funding bill over any Democratic opposition.

I worked with electron microscopes back in the day, for that I would say 10^-6 atmospheres. But it probably depends somewhat on your application, I don't think there is a solid definition.

Interesting, thanks!

I'll bite.. what are the huge implications?

Mostly the expensive people are, as you say, the ones screwed by fortune or those whose health declined in the past for whatever reason and their present behavior is not going to be able to fix things even if it contributed to their present poor health. Still it doesn't make much difference to the hospital when they have to explain why a routine knee replacement is going to cost 20k.

Last time I had a procedure done it took 9 months before a bill showed up. It's a many to many communication problem so they only bother to figure it out when they need to, and then it can take a while for the hospital and insurer to hash things out. I'm not saying 9 mos is typical, but I wouldn't wait anywhere near that long to get an answer on how long something will cost me. They just don't have the incentives to form all the necessary lines of communication among themselves prospectively.

It's frustrating. Neither the hospital nor the insurer typically has sufficient information to give you an answer. It's even worse when your information like age or diagnosis history factors into it.

In that case I may be able to look it up. Granted this isn't the area I work in but in theory I have access to the necessary data. The people who do work in this area should be able to tell you, at least for some outpatient procedures. But more to the point if you have an inpatient stay or show up in the ER it's pretty uncertain what procedures you'll actually wind up having, which is where the price opacity really comes in.

I work for a hospital and I agree with you that the billing practices are shitty, but I couldn't tell you what a procedure will cost you even if ordered to. At best I could give you an average for a procedure but if you're in for a few days you may see dozens of doctors and have hundreds of procedures including an operating room procedure or two and a whole lot of blood tests, imaging, poking and prodding (e.g. assessing your risk of pressure ulcers). Each of these has a base cost and then each insurance company has a different amount they're willing to cover of that base cost and an discount rate that varies by company. Many of these factors will also depend on your personal history of diagnosis and treatment.

It's a big mess and I don't see billing practices improving significantly until the reimbursement system changes. Single payer could really simplify things for the end user.

To use a metaphor as a counterargument, if there were a 6 foot spider in my shower you'd better believe I would talk about it at least a few times a day. That doesn't mean the spider has charisma, just that it's a clear and present danger weighing heavily on my mind.

If anyone is exercising political sleight of hand I'd say it's the legislators and executive staff who are getting in all their unpopular actions while the getting is good, like a looter in a riot. Trump doesn't have to be politically savvy or even aware of what they're doing for that to happen.

There's no enabling here in the usual sense of the word, they just made it cheaper. It'd be like a headline "copious butter enables little Tommy to eat vegetables". Apple could have repatriated that money at any time, and likely would have if they didn't know that they could hold out for a feckless Republican administration to give them a big tax holiday. Pretending otherwise is a fiction that supports repeated corporate tax rate reductions and encourages companies like Apple to make use of elaborate tax avoidance schemes.

I feel this way with regard to the many, many forum posts containing the exact answers to questions I want to know. So much subject-specific, often hobbyist information seems to exist primarily on forums yet I almost never see forum posts turning up in search results these days. More typically I'll get (e.g.) five results at variations of the hp.com landing page or some other contentless nonsense.

Can they not index bigrams or trigrams, then chain together index hits? E.g. "It never rains in december" would hit on "It never rains", "never rains in", and "rains in december". Any result that hits on all of the indexes is not guaranteed to hit on the entire phrase but it would be a good candidate for the top result. The longer the phrase, the more likely a candidate hitting all necessary index phrases would match the exact phrase. This would at least put a limit on how large the indexes need to get.

Further, if they retain copies of the full text in their database they could do a filtered scan of the documents that hit on all subphrases to guarantee exact match. I could see that having too much of a performance impact at scale though.

In any case the dumbing down of Google search over the last few years is immensely frustrating to me.

You may enjoy reading Ringworld - it involves life on the inside of a Dyson ring totalling 3*10^6 the surface area of Earth.

It is. Sure there is a spectrum, like autism is a spectrum, but if you're insinuating that ADHD isn't real you're wrong. The medical field has a pretty good consensus about this one.

IMHO I don't believe GM is serious about electric cars yet. They may be, but they haven't demonstrated it sufficiently for me to depend on it. Until they show large commitments and demonstrate that they are betting the company's future on being able to do electric cars well and to continue doing so, I'm more interested in an electric car from a company that I know does have that commitment.

Where are the billions of dollars in contracts for batteries? Until I see that or a gigafactory of their own the Bolt will be a compliance car in my eyes. Albeit perhaps the best compliance car on the market at the moment.

No, the fiduciary duty the company has to shareholders is vague in this regard and practically speaking they can define the shareholders interest broadly, for example maximising returns at some indeterminate point in the far future. Shareholders can try to sue over this but almost certainly would lose the suit unless real malfeasance is uncovered. IANAL though.

That's encouraging to hear. I'm 30 problems in so far since starting ~1.5 months ago. I starting working through the PE problems to develop my python and general programming skills since I have been primarily using R as a data scientist. I'm glad someone else has found it useful for this field.

That's a useful talking point to use when Republicans are in the midst of passing terrible legislation, it really spreads the blame. But it's a nonsense false equivalence in this era when they are undoing every single that the Democrats did under Obama's administration that they can, including and especially protections put in place to protect people from financial abuse by powerful incumbent players. You have taken a point about the very rich and used it to propagate the party equivalence meme.

In comparison to the last few hundred years, and with a few notable exceptions in time and place, we have spent the great majority of the past not progressing. Compare the progress made from 10000 BCE to 1700 CE to the progress made since. The rate isn't zero but comparatively very low.

That said, I haven't put much thought into this viewpoint and was mostly extending the parent poster's idea. Proper discussion of this would require a great deal of care and nuance and I honestly don't feel like putting in the effort for that. Apologies if you were looking for a substantive debate.

I would argue that those things historically have drowned out actual meaning, if by actual meaning you mean factually correct and significant information. Only with the advent of science have we been able to reliably sort the meaningless from the meaningful.

I think the major concern here, aside from the general deleterious effects of addiction of any sort on people, is that the tide of meaningless factoids and useless information is swelling and drowning out substantive, useful information which is generated with greater difficulty and spreads less easily.

A greater ratio of meaninglessness to meaningfulness is part of the problem, compounded by the aggressive way our attention is directed toward it. I think the filter you mention exists but is struggling in this environment more than in the recent past.

This concerns me as well. I would downvote such comments if I could but I don't have downvote powers yet, and don't know how to get them. Can anyone shed light on that?

Forgive me, but it seems that you're taking a common argument (X policy that works in Scandinavia won't work in the US because the US isn't homogeneous) and extending it to some sort of xenophobic dog-whistle (i.e. kids in the US can't roam because the US isn't homogeneous). Is there a more charitable way to interpret your comment?

Parent's comment is copied verbatim from another comment. I'd downvote or flag it but don't have the ability to do so.

Making desperate people less desperate can be pro-social. UBI could drive down the crime rate.

Also you're assuming all paid jobs are pro-social. Is coal mining? Advertising? SEO for MLM firms? Lobbying for kleptocratic foreign governments? Some of these may have some positive effects but may be net negative in their effect on society.

Finally, I disagree that charity isn't a legitimate role for government. Since neither of us is the arbiter of government legitimacy I think we can agree to disagree here.

I'm tempted to make a sarcastic, hyperbolic reply to this hyperbolic and aggressive comment, but in the spirit of hacker news I'll address the content directly.

You imply that the only way to mitigate the problem of fake news (no need for scare quotes, we're talking about news that is fake here) is to hand over total control of the internet to some single entity. You have failed to make any case that every other action that could be taken to mitigate fake news would be insufficient. This is far from clear to me. I think there is a great deal that could be done to mitigate fake news aside from that. Note that I say mitigate because I do not think it would need to be eliminated entirely to be effectively made powerless.

Further, it's an old propagandist trick to claim that people who disagree with you are "screaming", to make them seem less rational and thus wrong. The language you choose to use in this post undercuts your points. Show me the data that fake news didn't affect the election results in any way. The probability of some effect is much greater than the probability of no effect at all, given the complexity of the system and the obvious mechanism. I think the burden of proof is on you.