Hacker News Reader

ecounysison Quality of care declines after private equity takes over hospitals

The writing of the article was not as precise as it needed to be (I assume for the sake of saving space and words). It was a summary given in lay terms to an audience that could dig deeper into the source research results if they needed further clarification.

"After private equity acquisition, Medicare beneficiaries admitted to private equity hospitals experienced a 25.4% increase in hospital-acquired conditions compared with those treated at control hospitals. ... This increase in hospital-acquired conditions was driven by a 27.3% increase in falls and a 37.7% increase in central line–associated bloodstream infections at private equity hospitals, despite placing 16.2% fewer central lines."

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2813379

ecounysison Ask HN: What companies have blown you away with their customer support?

Misen Cookware - https://misen.com/ They replaced a couple pans I ruined ... no charge. Just had to take a picture of them and send it to them.

ecounysison Hominin head-scratcher: who butchered this rhino 700k years ago?

visitors from another planet

ecounysison Aaron’s Law Takes Shape

I did not claim it was exactly the same. I asked a question.

ecounysison Aaron’s Law Takes Shape

How is what Aaron did legally different from what Google does with Google Books and Scholar?

ecounysison Why We’re Raising the Signature Threshold for We the People

Why are you disappointed? Was it because they launched the site or because they raised the threshold? Since there has never been another site like this the effective threshold for past administrations was infinite. I think 100,000 is better than nothing.

ecounysison Not one Microsoft product on Kaspersky’s top 10 vulnerabilities list

Yes. I wonder what percentage of vulnerabilities 11-20 belong to Microsoft?

ecounysison Not one Microsoft product on Kaspersky’s top 10 vulnerabilities list

Glancing at the list, I see there are only four companies in the world who cannot claim they don't have a single product on Kapersky's top 10 vulnerabilities list.

ecounysison Some Schools Actually Want Students To Play With Their Smartphones In Class

I think it would be even better for schools if we could get an OLPC (or some device that runs sugar linux) with touchscreen.

ecounysison So You Want to be a Programmer

You don't need to be a mechanic to change oil, but a small amount of mechanical knowledge helps quite a bit. I am talking about knowledge such as what is a drain plug, what is oil, what is an oil filter. Most people have at least a rudimentary knowledge of how a car works. Computing is still magic to many people, and it should not be.

ecounysison So You Want to be a Programmer

I appreciated his sharing the email from the attorney/CPA. Now I know there are others out there like me that enjoy computing more than counting money. We should start a recovering CPA support group.

ecounysison The US recording industry is stealing from me

That's probably why YT is being so aggressive then: to keep the FBI off them. It is truly a depressing world when film/recording industry lobbies and law enforcement agencies get away with stifling free market competition in order to maintain the status quo distribution of wealth.

ecounysison The US recording industry is stealing from me

Is there a viable alternative to YouTube that isn't as persuaded by the powers that be? If so, and if this problem were pervasive enough, wouldn't the independent content providers prefer that service over YouTube. Then most independent content would eventually be on the other service which would drastically reduce the value of YouTube.

ecounysison Javascript Stroke Recognizer

Funny story: When I first saw this headline, I thought it was something to help people recognize the symptoms of a stroke. It could have have been something that runs on a mobile device and detects "sudden problems with walking or balance." http://www.webmd.com/stroke/guide/stroke-symptoms

ecounysison ‘Stand with us or with the child pornographers’

"Only a Sith deals in absolutes."

ecounysison Put your programming skills to the test

> The Python version seems to be using an interpreter that frankly just doesn't work:

  NameError: name 'reduce' is not defined

ecounysison A "Moneyball" statician predicted Jeremy Lin's success 2 years ago

How many false positives has this statistician had over their career?

ecounysison Simple example using python's map() and reduce()

  reduce(lambda x,y:x+y, map(lambda x:x*x, range(1,6)))

ecounysison In the past 30 years, 96% of income growth has gone to the richest 10% of the US

"From 1981-2008, average incomes grew by a healthy $12,000. But a shocking 96% of that growth went to the richest 10% of the country. Only 4% of it went to the other 90%."

We are trained to stretch everything - laws, resources, work hours, employee benefits, you name it - to be profitable and make money. We can think of all kinds of schemes and business models to legally extract wealth - whether it is adjustable rate mortgages with balloon payments, absurdly exorbitant executive compensation packages, interest rate swaps, bailouts to subsidize the worthless yet powerful, or government contracts. We think that because something is legal it is right. Being legal is a very low standard when you are the one making the laws. Just because we can doesn't mean we should. This, in my opinion is a major problem with the American economy right now. The most powerful people and businesses appear to be more interested in extracting wealth than in creating wealth.

ecounysison What is your favourite C programming trick?

Where would one start learning to script C with Lua?

ecounysison Learn How to make Angry Birds

throw rocks at them

ecounysison Serving at the Pleasure of the King

http://www.joeydevilla.com/2009/01/03/from-sun-chips-to-sun-...

ecounysison Eagles singer Don Henley: EFF, Google "aid and abet" criminals

But the auto industry is not accusing search engines, and anyone else who opposes the PROTECT IP Act, of aiding and abetting criminal behavior.

ecounysison Eagles singer Don Henley: EFF, Google "aid and abet" criminals

> Critics of this pending legislation need to be honest about the company they keep and why they essentially aid and abet these criminal endeavors.

Music is the only business where you can get away with calling potential buyers of your product "criminals".

ecounysison So you want to learn to code?

I would recommend reading a highly regarded book on the programming language you are interested in. To do this, go to Hacker Books (http://www.hackerbooks.com/) and search by what interests you.

Many people recommend Python as a good first language. This is what Eric Raymond suggests in his How to Become a Hacker essay (http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html): "It is cleanly designed, well documented, and relatively kind to beginners. Despite being a good first language, it is not just a toy; it is very powerful and flexible and well suited for large projects."

ecounysison Rob Pike on regular expressions in lexing and parsing

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.

~jwz

ecounysison The curious case of DuckDuckGo

you must use a lot of very unusual words

No. I just type more accurately than the average Google user, so when I do type an unusual word it is more likely that I intended to type it.

Google could fix this (with logged in users) by using some type of Bayesian classification algorithm. They could track how often a user subsequently clicks "Showing results for _____" compared to "Search instead for ______". That would give them a self-rated user typing accuracy score they could use to adjust which results to display when they detect a potential misspelling.

For all I know they already do this. However, based on anecdotal evidence from my own experience (admittedly non-scientific), it does not appear that they do.

ecounysison The curious case of DuckDuckGo

The article does a good job of highlighting certain instances where using Google is a pain in the ass. I personally don't like the spell-correct feature. For me, it is only correct in its conclusion that I mistyped a word about 10% of the time. The other 90% is a nuisance because I have to go back and explicitly tell it that I meant to tell it what I told it.

ecounysison Port of PG's "On Lisp" to Clojure

Michael Fogus has also done some work porting On Lisp to Clojure. Chapters 2-5 are here: http://blog.fogus.me/tag/onlisp/

Halloway picked up where Fogus left off.

ecounysison Best Buy Sitting on a Pile of HP Tablets

I wonder if sales of these devices are slow in part because of the OS it runs on. Everything cool in mobile seems to be either Android or iOS. If developers don't do webOS, there aren't going to be killer apps for it. And apps sell devices.