HN user

Paul-ish

1,986 karma
Posts1
Comments613
View on HN

You will see a lot of people using the (expensive) ER to treat their health issues. The reason they are there in the first place is that they couldn't pay for preventative care, so naturally they can't pay for the ER either. As a society when someone who can't pay ends up in the ER we have two options: treat them anyways, or turn them away.

New Defaults 6 years ago

If the COVID-19 vaccine is botched, multiple generations will lose trust in the medical community. The medical would lose their cultural authority and their rhetorical high ground against the anti-vaccine crowd and other health disinformation hucksters. The damage from a loss of trust is difficult to understate.

Modern healthcare may be expensive and advances may be slow, but it generally works and people trust their doctor.

The fact that the dashboards and alerts have a delay sounds like there might be difficult consistency stuff going on. Many nodes need to coordinate their usage and billing. It may be a difficult problem, but solving billing problems might not really motivate anyone at the company. It's not a "cool" problem for engineers and not profitable for product.

Edit to add: I don't think they'll kill off the old.reddit interface. I think they'll just stop updating and more and more things won't work there, like i.reddit.com.

I've noticed this drift is already happening. It's like there are two reddits. It can be really confusing as a moderator when you are looking at a different website from your users. Eg new sidebar and the old sidebar.

I have mixed feelings about this, but what if someone bankrolled this lawsuit? eg paid out to the author and pursued the case on their own. In the event of the author's death the suit still would continue, while the author gets the money they need immediately. It would change the incentives for Disney.

There's still low hanging fruit in OSM. There are still areas with official government GIS data that hasn't been imported to OSM. For example Irvine County in CA. I wanted to try it but I don't have the GIS skills. It would be nice if someone created a tutorial to teach the bare minimum GIS skills to do an import that is up to OSM standards. Importing whole counties would be a huge boost.

The piece seems to be arguing from a general principle. Repudiation is a feature of most secure messaging applications and it is a feature that should be introduced to GMail. This argument doesn't fully address how technologies are actually used today.

As far as I can tell, people who need repudiation are already using apps that have repudiation (eg Signal), because they know they are in a vulnerable position. The people who need repudiation already have it. So far we have seen DKIM authentication used against individuals in positions of power. With things as they are, cryptography is leveling the playing field by empowering the vulnerable while holding those in power responsible. If this situation or balance were to change perhaps it would make sense to rethink DKIM non-repudiation. I understand this is an opinionated/political take on cryptography that not everyone would share.

This reminds me of a tangential matter. The Rasberry Pi has a built in hardware decoder for MPEG-2. You can pay a licensing fee and enable the decoder. This is despite the fact that the relevant patents on MPEG-2 have expired in the US and much of the world[1]. The issue is that there are still active patents in Malaysia[2].

[1] https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/939

[2] https://bryanquigley.com/pages/mpeg2-patent-tracker.html

Do we have more evidence? I generally don't like to take the claims of a single anonymous poster at face value. I certainly appreciate the irony in this case.