This might be a downvote target, but I think it's worth it. So here I go.
I'm curious to know why HN is overall supportive of Zuckerberg in this matter (based on top voted comments in similar threads). Here are my views and logics about this:
1. Just because a person is a billionaire, it does not mean that they should be treated the same as Buffett or Gates. If today there is a chance if winning a lottery worth tens of billions, and tomorrow a random person is a winner, is does not mean that winner is comparable to Buffett and Gates.
2. Warren Buffett became a millionaire in early 60s, then it took him 3 decades to be a billionaire on paper. Compared to this, Zuckerberg's path to be a billionaire was at least one order of magnitude faster. This does not mean that he was a genius developer, or a great business man. Many people tried building the same app as Facebook. In my view, Zuckerberg simply won that lottery, the very same way that there were many pubsub apps out there, older and arguably better designed than Twitter, but Twitter happened to win the lottery.
3. The way Zuckerberg ended up with Facebook has always been questionable. The business model of Facebook is questionable. The way Facebook handles its users privacy is questionable. In a more similar space, Larry Page also had a fast track to the billionaires club, but what he built, and how he built it, is way more sound. There are many apps hat could replace Facebook, bit there aren't search algorithms as effective as Google. You can live without Facebook without making a difference to you life, when was the last day in your life that you did not Google?
4. If we put Buffett, Gates and Page in one group, and people who won big lotteries in another, and I'm asked to play a machine learning classification algorithm, my brain would give Zuckerberg a high score of being a member of the second group.
Well, they say that naming things is one of the hard problems in CS, right? Use this to generate names for all your functions/classes/variables. Just preprocess your source code before you compile!
I thought LuaJIT and other Lua runtimes are great for scripting and embedded environments, while Julia focused primarily on being a MATLAB replacement (i.e. desktop environments).
EDIT: Based on comments in the thread, seems both could do the same job but Torch7 has libraries that make running on GPUs easier vs. Julia.
UK doesn't not work as described in [1], and I don't think any other country works like that.
In the UK, if you have a certain income (as low as £8,000), you must pay for national insurance, whether you like it or not, whether you're going to use it or not. If you want to use the faster/better service, that is private insurance, then you have to pay for your private insurance, as well as national insurance, both in full.
That's pretty close to how it works in Canada. The difference is the difference between "free" and $60/mo if your income is sufficiently high.
So, in addition to the nominal required subscription, we optionally pay for additional services at hospitals like private rooms, etc. We also pay for additional health insurance that covers prescriptions, full dental and some discretionary medical procedures that aren't, or are partially covered in the universal plan.
The efficacy of the system is manifest in one of it's largest problems: Large numbers of non-Canadians scamming the system with fake medical cards. In BC, we're currently rolling out a revised personal identification system, in large part, to address this.
In case a US cousin here on HN is tempted to make some hay with that "non-Canadian" thing, please, reconsider. :) Also note, the reason that we bother to harass you folks with how far from optimal you've strayed on this topic is that the wacky ideology 'free market blah blah', leaks into our countries and is a huge distraction from pushing our systems forward. We have to keep fighting these fights that, in all practical terms, are long dead. If you guys were to get a grip on your own setup, the rest of the world would heave a huge sigh.
I used to live in the UK, but now live in Canada. There are a few problems, but for the most part healthcare works very well in both countries and the vast majority of people are happy with it. You just get issues in fast-growing cities like Calgary, but those issues are being resolved. I agree that most of the objection to free healthcare in the US is wacky ideology. The ridiculous thing is that they have free education, but nobody is whining about having a commie education system :)
The point is, you're forced to pay for the government "insurance" (which is actually called insurance, although it's not actually insurance), even if you have private insurance on the side that pays for most things the government insurance would, and more. Thus, "don't need it".
The point still stands: even if you have private health insurance, you still have to pay your share of the NHS, even if that share is not a line-item anywhere.
Yes, it does "cover" other stuff, and gaps in your NI payments can leave you not getting that other stuff. That's why you're allowed to top up your NI payments.
EDIT: Also, while it's true about health insurance (if you go private you have to pay both) it's not true for pensions. You get a reduced rate of NI if you opt out of the national pension scheme and opt in to a recognised provider.
National Insurance for an employee on £50k would be under £5k, tax just under £10k, the other £5k for National Insurance comes from the employer, not the employee. Total deductions on £50k are under £15k.
Personally (as a British citizen paying British taxes and paying taxes on over £50k) I don't mind it much. I've been to the hospital once in my life (when I was born) and I've only been to a doctor once in my life too (I was 16, given antibiotics) and I would much rather I personally "lose" money on taxation while everyone in the country gets the healthcare they need than an American style system where I save money but there are people that can't get the healthcare they need. I also have private health insurance.
As a private individual that does not make use of national services National Insurance isn't great but as a British citizen it's fantastic. My other tax paying family members feel the same.
The fact that the £5k is charged to your employer, not you, doesn't mean you didn't "pay" it (you never "paid" taxes anyway, they were deducted before the money was ever in your hands), it just makes the system more opaque (and makes people believe they pay less in taxes than they actually do).
I agree that it's a fundamental property of modern societies to ensure universal health care, one way or the other. What angers me about the UK model is how the system handles a scandals like Stafford Hospital: with anything less than total fury. At Stafford Hospital (est. 400-1200 patients died as a result of poor care 2005-2009). One manager resigned, one was suspended on full pay. Years later, some meagre compensations has been paid out, some apologies and an inquiry which one party will now use to push the same reforms (maybe they're sensible, maybe they're not) they always wanted to push, and the other party will try to block them for the same reasons they will always try to block them.
Yadda yadda yadda, in the meantime, people died, no-one felt any consequences. The same people in the same organisation that let this happen are still here. And no, I'm not vengeful-blood-in-the-street-type person, but I'm not seeing the whole "Shit, this is a systemic failure, we're all part of the system, thus we're all responsible. How do we fix this?"
If you were earning £50,000 as a self employed person (after all expenses) the national insurance contributions would be less than the national insurance contributions of an employed person. For 2013/2014:
You pay national insurance if you earn over £149 per week. (Which is less than your £8,000!!) You pay 12% on anything between £149 and £797, and then 2% on anything over £797.
That sounds like a lot. English NI isn't just for health care, it's for some benefits and pensions too.
And people are eligible for Working Tax credits, which cuts that number down a bit.
You get a reduction in national insurance if you opt out of the pension and opt in to a recognised scheme.
I understand how the UK works as I lived there - I was just simplifying it. However I don't believe it's a big issue that you pay twice. People in the USA still pay school taxes when they send their kids to private schools and nobody seems to be complaining. If it's a big deal then you could refund the school/health portion that people pay in taxes.
I guess setting up discourse is too heavy for this use case. The same may be applied to the original reddit source, but at least reddit comes with a VM image.
Like when Romans invented the scalpel forgotten only to be reinvented in the 19th century (stretching a bit since IIRC the Arab kept using it) ?
That a subject that never cease to amaze me. Civilizations rises and fall and with them knowledge. To me, Dan Simmons kind of use that in Ilium and Olympos as background. What will happen when our digital civilisation falls ?
We can never 'fall' again as thoroughly as we did in the past. Too many artifacts; too many documents/cds/books/computers containing the technology to restart a civilization.
Books fall apart (especially those made in recent times). Computers, cds etc all require electricity, which would probably be one of the first things to go, taking with it reams of digital information. Then account for lack of maintenance (except in isolated environments) and within a century or two, it would be very difficult to recover from.
Exactly. Even though we have a many more means of storage today than we did in antiquity, they're brittle in innumerable ways. The only sort of "permanent" storage would be in the form of a hologram (if the media is durable), however without technology to read it, that's still a gamble.
This is why messages for nuclear waste disposal sites are meant to transcend not only modern media, but also modern language.
‘Documentation’ was not always as cheap as it is today. If it takes hours to engrave a few words in a stone board or if a single page of paper is worth more than a simple meal, you think twice about what you ‘document’. Chances are that such common practices were considered that obvious that they didn’t need documentation on their own, similarly how you would likely not include ‘plug the computer into a power supply’ when asked to tell a relative how to set up theirs.
Why document something that everyone does? History is captured in sources like published news, government statistics, personal letters, etc. A personal behavior that is widely understood would not necessarily be newsworthy enough to capture in any of those places.
This is a real problem for historians: unusual occurrences are usually well-documented in permanent media; everyday life usually is not.
The thought of lisp coming back to life as other forms like clojure, makes me wonder if in a couple of decades a modern form of c++ will be trendy. In that universe, the current hate of java and c++ will be the cool stuff.
Is this the technology keep evolving, or is it us keep changing our minds?
Lisp is like Gothic architecture that can and has stood the test of time. C++ is more like Brutalist architecture that had its appeal and still appeals to some...
I'm curious to know why HN is overall supportive of Zuckerberg in this matter (based on top voted comments in similar threads). Here are my views and logics about this:
1. Just because a person is a billionaire, it does not mean that they should be treated the same as Buffett or Gates. If today there is a chance if winning a lottery worth tens of billions, and tomorrow a random person is a winner, is does not mean that winner is comparable to Buffett and Gates.
2. Warren Buffett became a millionaire in early 60s, then it took him 3 decades to be a billionaire on paper. Compared to this, Zuckerberg's path to be a billionaire was at least one order of magnitude faster. This does not mean that he was a genius developer, or a great business man. Many people tried building the same app as Facebook. In my view, Zuckerberg simply won that lottery, the very same way that there were many pubsub apps out there, older and arguably better designed than Twitter, but Twitter happened to win the lottery.
3. The way Zuckerberg ended up with Facebook has always been questionable. The business model of Facebook is questionable. The way Facebook handles its users privacy is questionable. In a more similar space, Larry Page also had a fast track to the billionaires club, but what he built, and how he built it, is way more sound. There are many apps hat could replace Facebook, bit there aren't search algorithms as effective as Google. You can live without Facebook without making a difference to you life, when was the last day in your life that you did not Google?
4. If we put Buffett, Gates and Page in one group, and people who won big lotteries in another, and I'm asked to play a machine learning classification algorithm, my brain would give Zuckerberg a high score of being a member of the second group.