i have the most bare-bones plan with an HSA.. for me and my three kids, it was 19K per year.. and that was basically nothing more than catastrophic insurance.. I don't think my provider actually paid for anything in the last 4 years except for my son's hospital stay (which I paid the max per person out-of-pocket for). Everything else has been paid out of my HSA.. which is at least discounted by my tax rate. Interesting tidbit, I was actually almost broke about 8 years ago after my divorce, so I didn't pay for healthcare for myself for one year, just my kids. When I notified by doctors about this, they actually were very helpful getting me prices for each procedure.. and they were very helpful directing me to hospitals in the area that actually cater to those without health insurance. Grand total for healthcare for me in that year : $300. I pay 500 per month each month for myself now (because of my age).. yet i use almost none of it... and if I did, I would have to pay out of my HSA. Now, I know that I'm paying for catastrophic conditions.. yada yada.. but being mostly 'healthy' I literally use none of that.. there is no way that health insurance providers will ever cover for anything other than what my age is.. and why? because they'll say that it is the most accurate indicator of general 'health'.. ignoring anything related to how much of the health care system that I use, or much prevention that I personally enage in (diet, exercise, etc, etc).. in the same way car value is a function of miles.. not necessarily how much maintenance has been put into it. It's a simple metric, and easy to fleece healthy people to cover those not healthy. There's only one thing that matters at all: profit margin.
Readit Newscmollis commented on The Average Cost of a Family Health Insurance Plan Is Now $27,000 wsj.com/health/healthcare... · Posted by u/impish9208
It seems to me that if I were actually the Antichrist, the first thing I would do is identify the antichrist as someone else. Then, I would give a lot of pseudo scientific reasons why I think that the antichrist is someone other than me, so the idiots who listen to my bs will give me their money so I can continue my work as the antichrist.
have your kid suffer through measles because you believe some clown on tv.. when you could completely prevent it if you had your kid get the same vaccine you yourself got.
cmollis commented on Polars Cloud and Distributed Polars now available pola.rs/posts/polars-clou... · Posted by u/jonbaer
can i run a distributed computation in pola.rs cloud on my own AWS infra? or do I need to run it on-prem?
cmollis commented on DeepSeek's smallpond: Bringing Distributed Computing to DuckDB mehdio.substack.com/p/duc... · Posted by u/xkgt
spark is getting a bit long in the tooth.. interesting to see duckdb integrated with Ray for data-access partitioning across (currently) 3FS. probably a matter of time before they (or someone) supports S3. It should be noted that duckdb (standalone) actually does a pretty good job scanning s3 parquet on its own.
...and that's why he spent 250MM on the election. (SpaceX contracts coming soon).
cmollis commented on How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley into Trump's Arms nytimes.com/2025/01/17/op... · Posted by u/reducesuffering
clearly talking his book. whatever.
cmollis commented on Farewell Pandas, and thanks for all the fish ibis-project.org/posts/fa... · Posted by u/nojito
Frankly, pandas/dask/polars - all are trying to recreate something that has existed for years (ie. sql, spark) and with a terrible API.
I truly thought I was terrible at python for a long time because of pandas - turns out it just has an absolutely terrible API surface
true spark has existed for years and is a great toolset.. i use it ever day. it's also a huge hassle spinning clusters up and down and configuration is complex.
I can execute some pretty hairy scans against a huge s3 parquet dataset in Duckdb that I would typically have to run in either spark or athena.. it's a little slower, but not ridiculously slower. And, it does all of that from my desktop.. no clusters, no mem or task configs.. just run the query. Being able to integrate all of the expensive historical scanning and knitting that back into an ML pipeline with desktop python is pretty nice.
cmollis commented on Amazon's exabyte-scale migration from Apache Spark to Ray on EC2 aws.amazon.com/blogs/open... · Posted by u/nojito
There are folks who still directly query CSV formats in a data lake using a query engine like Athena or Spark or Redshift Spectrum — which ends up being much slower and consuming more resources than is necessary due to full table scans.
CSV is only good for append only.
But so is Parquet and if you can write Parquet from the get go, you save on storage as well has have a directly queryable column store from the start.
CSV still exists because of legacy data generating processes and dearth of Parquet familiarity among many software engineers. CSV is simple to generate and easy to troubleshoot without specialized tools (compared to Parquet which requires tools like Visidata). But you pay for it elsewhere.
exactly.. parquet is good for append only.. stream mods to parquet in new partitions.. compact, repeat.
cmollis commented on Ask HN: What brought back the joy of programming for you? · Posted by u/endorphine
Rust and scala