skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small."

-- Henry Kissinger
The problem for healthcare insurers is that healthcare is a product often obtained while under duress. Patients have to trust their doctors, so they'd much rather call their insurers greedy than the people to whom they entrust their most valuable asset.

If you want to look for greed in healthcare, look at medical schools, hospitals, doctors, and pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers. Insurance costs are a simple reflection of the incomes of those parties. State regulators (for small group and individuals) and shopping around by sophisticated consumers (large groups) assures that.
Ok, so if you have lots of 64 kB files they're all PUT separately, using 15625 PUTs/GB (i.e., $0.15/GB)? I guess that's not too bad.

I guess I could ask you to choose the threshold instead of picking 64k, but generally I've tried to choose reasonable defaults so that the user doesn't have to make those kinds of decisions.

Good to see someone who believes in openness. (How about the source code, so that people can confirm that you're doing what the spec says?)

Well, you could actually write your own code to read the files, since the format is open.

That's the SHA1 hash of the encrypted data, right?

It's the SHA1 of the contents of the object, and the object is encrypted data, so yes.
Imagine how much potential Steve Jobs would have if he got any of that "easy stuff" right.
It stops me sitting there hitting refresh on a web page to check my stats every 45 seconds.

Smart man. Aside from customer support information, everything on my dashboard is cached for 24 hours. I do this specifically because I used to waste far, far too much time sitting on Google Analytics mashing refresh. Mashing refresh on the dashboard just shows me the same thing I saw that morning. (I have a URL available which forcibly purges the cache, but it requires me to type in something like i-have-nothing-more-important-to-do-than-this in my URL bar. I think I've used it maybe twice.)
Can I ask why everyone cares so much about Mahalo? Up to a week ago I didn't even know "human powered search" existed and the consensus seems to be it's an epic fail.
The professor is the founder of redenvelope.com. Potentially relevant to mixergy, but I'm not sure how interesting an interview it would be.
I agree with this post 100%. Working from home mostly leads to working longer and less productive hours. You need to separate your work place from your living space.

Does it not seem like a conflict of interest to anyone else that 37signals preaches the work-from-home lifestyle while selling remote collaboration tools?
I listened to an episode of the 37signals Podcast where Jason mentioned that some days they all show up at the office but are forbidden to speak to each other for productivity reasons. Many of his business decisions are questionable, glad to see someone challenging them.
We made an internal one early January, 2010.

Here's a mockup of it:

http://www.massiveblue.com/clients/carbonmade/pulse/

Note: The figures are bogus.
I originally thought you were wrong about this, because a lot of the other articles seemed to suggest they only understood the citrus connection as a cure for some mysterious disease. Which would have made it the wrong theory, but coincidentally the right practice.

But at least according to Wikipedia, there were plenty of people who understood scurvy as a dietary deficiency, even in the 1600s. They thought it was more about acidity, but that's close enough. So, I was wrong and you are right.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy
How does that constitute a conflict of interest? They make software that they find useful.
Hi, thanks for your feedback. The 3G comes through an external micro USB dongle, which is designed to be as smallest as possible. Stay tuned on the web site, in the next days we will be posting detailed pictures. Thanks!
I remember reading years ago that Amazon had a similar feature in their warehouse in their early days. They also had to turn it off once it became a constant ringing bell!
MixergyNotes on Haroon Mokhtarzada, from $2,000 to over $5 million a year.
If the student's course sampling story is genuine, then this professor has accomplished nothing more than being a jerk to an engaged student. There is no reason to interpret 1 hour tardiness of a single student as disrespect. Consistent 10 minute tardiness of a large portion of a class or a single disengaged student? Now that's a different story. The only time students entering or exiting make much of a distraction is when the instructor calls them out on it.

However, it is more likely that the student's story is bullshit. In which case he or she shouldn't have bothered to send that email. Both people are at fault here. The student shouldn't have written an email when a simple "I'm sorry, bye." had already resolved the issue. The professor should have assumed good intentions and kept his unsolicited advice to himself. Especially if he was going to be that rude about it. He could have simply ignored the email. That is what my political experiences have proven the safest course of action to be.
Now there's a moving target. Given the amount of testing that is required just to get modern games to work across most hardware without problems (on Windows), Linux (which distros?) as a tier-1 platform is wishful thinking. The mass gaming market exists on stable, more or less predictable platforms.
The wikipedia article is kind of iffy, I would recommend this great overview instead:

http://idlewords.com/sailors_scurvy.pdf

Or 'The History of Scurvy and Vitamin C' by Kenneth Carpenter if you want to really dig in.
What it (and other Wikipedia readers) really should use is the new Cocoa Touch NSSplitView to keep the table of contents visible (maybe with some kind of cool position indicator as well). Like the mail app, it could do split in landscape and pop-over in portrait.
I don't understand the negative comments towards drm in this thread. I thought the problems with drm were: I can't play the game without the internet, I can't play the game anywhere I want, I can't resell the game and treat it like there wasn't any drm. Isn't this exactly what we want in drm?! Are people here so angry about these protections they would refuse to shop at a store with a lock on the cash register. Or refuse to shop at a bookstore which refused to allow people to photocopy a book without purchasing said book?
Golden Peak Hotel & Suites website - Cebu
If you're really upset about having topics you personally don't like on HN...
Lately I have seen more than a few "why is this here?" type comments on topics that have already gone popular on HN. The bottom line is that happens because not everyone has the same interests, and this is a social site with many different people on it.

If the fact that you have to share this wonderful digital playground with the other kids really, really bothers you, then this is for you. It's a Greasemonkey script called "HN Toolkit":

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039

Part of the functionality is the ability to blacklist submissions, either by keyword in the title or in the domain (or entire domains, whichever way you want to look at it). It cycles through the list of stories and matches each against the blacklist, adding style = 'display: none;' to each match found.

Hope this helps.
Indeed, a couple of OS X updates have mentioned OpenGL changes made specifically to boost performance in WoW. For instance, http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1525 "... improves the reliability of OpenGL-accelerated graphics in Blizzard's World of Warcraft".
I like the idea of having a big number to represent your "score."

Once I was on a team using Flyspray and one of our developers hacked it to display a real-time score. He had some convoluted algorithm that took into account percent completed, criticals, and priority. Everybody started working the number, trying to get it higher. It was great and become quite competitive. We'd even talk about our score with marketing and clients. The only problem followed a beta test when the client opened a ton of fixes. The number sank like stone. Not a big problem though. The developer tweaked his algorithm and bingo. . . our score was soon back where it belonged.
I'd say that your belief that this is true is pretty much proof that it's not.

On what grounds do you believe that you can do better than the average Fortune 500 CEO? I assert that you're engaging in empty boasting, with absolutely nothing to back this up. How could there be? Have you any experience near the top management of a company this large and complex?
http://www.portfolio.com/executives/features/2008/01/31/Scot...

He co-founded Red Envelope and ran an activist campaign against the NYT. The combination of high IQ, strong opinions, and borrowed money more or less requires asshole behavior (every minute you fail to convince someone is a minute you're paying interest on. Replace "interest" with "rent," and you can explain New York City.)
5 reasons why your company should be distributed by Toni Schneider
Don't ignore some of the good traits this student is showing, namely the interest to try 3 different lectures and the guts to email the prof. This person could easily turn out to be a star. We can't only focus on one part of the data.
It's not a conflict of interest per se. I think I just consciously try to ignore their blog because I feel like its purpose is to sucker you into buying their stuff.
The author gets frustratingly close to insight, but ultimately retreats to "blame the user". Only now, instead of the usual accusations of stupidity and/or laziness, they're irresponsible for being afraid to take what they perceive as risks.

Why not ask why they're afraid? Why do they see risks that you do not? To what degree are these fears rational? What can be done to assuage these fears so that they can actually learn something positive from the experience?[1] Oh no, too many questions! Quick, blame the user!

Most of the time it seems that the fear of breaking the computer expands into something like: "If I meddle with this thing I don't understand, I might break it.[2] If I break it, I won't know how to fix it. If I don't know how to fix it, I will have to ask or pay for help. If I have to ask or pay for help, I will feel stupid, lose money, and won't understand the thing any better." (Note that none of this is specific to computers.)

Implicit here is the perception both a high probability of failure and the perception that failure will be costly. This is the kind of risk that people respond to with fear instead of curiosity. When it appears cheap to make mistakes, people are much more willing to risk making them.

In light of this, comparing this sense of fear that a computer user may experience to the "risk" of trying to make your own kettle corn is absurd. There was no perception that failure was going to be costly. Even if there was a high probability of doing so, making a mess of your kitchen costs almost nothing, is easily reversible, and involves no hidden mechanisms. You just clean it up.

[1]: Emphasis on learn because much effort has been expended on interfaces that are usable without being learnable. That is, even if you successfully navigate them, you gain no new understanding. The low point historically was probably when Windows XP shipped with a animated talking cartoon dog to help find your files.

[2]: "Broken" can be something technically trivial, but if the user doesn't know how to fix it, it doesn't matter how trivial it is--it's still broken for them. The idea that you can't break software only holds true if you believe that reinitializing/reformatting/reinstalling is just part of normal operation and not a "nuke the site from orbit" solution to real problems.
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That sounded promising but then I did some googling and got things like:

Red Envelope Saga All But Over (http://techcrunch.com/2008/04/03/red-envelope-may-be-heading...)

Deadpool: Red Envelope Files For Bankruptcy (http://techcrunch.com/2008/04/19/deadpool-red-envelope-files...)

It's not necessarily Scott Galloway's fault, as he was kicked off the board in 2004 (although he did get back on the board in 2006 after buying up enough stock to push it through) but I'm not sure it passes the 'successful' test.
Interesting that this isn't an "accidental" vulnerability like most other vulnerabilities. From the article it looks like it's malware which presumably Energizer didn't know about.
Microsoft Games to Fail on Three Platforms at Once.
The iPad SDK is still NDA but my impression is that the new UI components make up for the lack of multi-tasking by facilitating rapid switching/quick actions. The new Mail app - you can rebuild that using the new UI elements. The iPad is probably the first tablet computer that will matter.
Nothing but supposition. Some of what you say is plausible, but can you offer any evidence that this is actually happening?

Let me offer you another possible explanation. When people are making this much money, it's not really about the money at all; they've already got FU money, and they're taking what they can get only because that's the arbiter of where their skills are most needed. Instead, they're doing what they do because they really like the business, or the challenge, or they really want to contribute something to society. I know the CEO of my company (not Fortune 500-sized, but nothing to sneeze at), and I'm absolutely certain that this is the reason that she does it.
I totally agree. I currently am a student at a public university, although on the other side of the country, and this behavior in any of my classes would result in the teacher refusing to enroll a student in the class. You are older than 18, grow a pair and learn to respect others time and energy. The quote that I'm hoping the kid really gets is of course "having manners, demonstrating a level of humility…these are all (relatively) easy. Get the easy stuff right".

Hope this kid grows up before he joins the workforce, or hell, attends another day of class, because this behavior is just not OK for an adult.
If you find one that's not, let me know!
There is nothing disrespectful here. It is simply a symptom of how universities operate. It's even more blatantly obvious in lower division math classes.
I knew about pgf, in fact I've made learning it my new year's resolution. It is indeed amazing. I didn't know the texample.net website though, thanks.
I came away with the impression that he didn't study other languages in order to improve Perl....

That's an unfortunate impression. I've worked with Larry for several years, and he's most assuredly a polyglot, as are many of the other Perl 6 developers.
haha It's all in good humour. I did post a more editorial piece here for a better perspective.
A proposal: employees will maintain respectable office hours (a la be physically present when senior mgmt is around) if you ditch the cubes and halt the perpetual musical chairs.
Gruber covers Apple-related issues much better than most journalists or professional analysts. Often accurate or otherwise, well thought out analysis.
Have you read the first quarter of the article? If there were a Programmer's Tool Academy, he could just read that as his introduction speech.
Ok, well, you win again.
Extremely cool:

"The centrifuge is a genuinely terrifying device. The lights dim when it is switched on. A strong wind is produced as the centrifuge induces a cyclone in the room. The smell of boiling insulation emanates from the overloaded 25 amp cables. If not perfectly adjusted and lubricated, it will shred the teeth off solid brass gears in under a second. Runs were conducted from the relative safety of the next room while peeking through a crack in the door."

Read the rest to learn if a lava lamp will work on Jupiter or during a space shuttle launch (2.3 or 3 Gs).
Nike Air Force 1 Low Supreme INFL6 Marok
Apple Supplier Responsibility Report
I've studied direct mail a little bit, and one of the more counterintuitive things is that generally long sales letters perform a lot better than short ones. I believe the recommended length for letters by mail - at least in the past - was 5-6 pages.
Agreed. There is nothing wrong with protecting your work, just so long as that aspect is at no expense to your customer, and that's exactly what this is tailored to do. It's thoughtful, compassionate and convenient for everyone concerned.

Nothing to argue against.

Sadly it's likely to be hacked and cracked open within days, but I sincerely hope it gets the respect it deserves.
Jobs dropped out of Reed not because he wouldn't/couldn't play by the rules, but because he didn't think he was getting value for the top dollar his parents were spending to send him there. He ended up 'dropping in' on classes (like calligraphy), but there's no indication that he just strolled in an hour late and disrespected the professors he was trying to learn from.
I read it as a sort of parody. The point of the article wasn't to sell the video but to demonstrate how to sell the video. It's a lesson on advertising in the form of an add. Very clever.

Some things were a little over done, but I'd assume that it's to emphasise techniques.
As has been pointed out here many times (e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1132721), Firefox's performance problems have to do with DOM and rendering, not JS execution. They continue to pour effort into optimizing the wrong thing, perhaps because that's where the benchmarks and bloggy coolness are. The old joke comes to mind about the drunk looking for his car keys under the street lamp, instead of where he dropped them, "because the light's better here"...
There is a Wordpress plugin that accepts a LaTeX formula between "$latex" and "$" and places a PNG image. Handy when you have webpages for math-related teaching.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-latex/
ROWE (Results Oriented Work Environment) isn't about working from home, however. It's about supporting an environment that allows employees to nicely integrate their professional and personal lives in ways that work best for them.

We have an office. We are a results oriented shop that measures our performance on results, not hours worked. While sometimes we might choose to work from home, we generally work in our office. My employees, however, have no mandate to actually be in the office at any specific time except for one Monday afternoon meeting a week (which you can call into if you really need to).

I agree with the author, working from home isn't always a good idea. I'm not sure it's ever really a good idea actually. However, the flexibility for a parent to pick their kids up from school or take a day to go fishing to ponder a problem is huge. It results in happier employees, but also much more productive ones (at least in my experience stretching into teams of 50+).

This extends to vacation days, btw. We have unlimited vacation days. I only ask that for extended vacations (more than a couple of days) that you work with me so that we can keep the project nicely staffed and scheduled. That caveat is, of course, that your meeting my high expectations for actually getting stuff done. In part because of the character of person we hire, that's never been an issue.

I don't see why we have to confuse the two issues. Remote is not the same as flexible.
And now it's LaTex. Almost there...
How could a lack of multitasking be made up for by rapid switching between tasks? Like, if I keep rapidly switching back to my mail client from my browser and then to my music player and back again, I'll feel like I'm actually getting something done?
I have also updated the page with the missing RAM specs. Thank you. The RAM is 256MB DDR
Online Revenue Business Models
I hate to break it to you, but school is just not that important. Getting a degree is a stepping stone (or as you say, obstacle course) to something that people actually want.
I don't know about hiring him as a programmer, but I would definitely hire him to write sales copy.
I don't see any particular aversion to buying games among Linux users, at least more than among Mac or Windows users. Linux users actually account for substantially larger proportions of indie-game sales than Linux marketshare would predict: http://www.koonsolo.com/news/linux-users-show-their-love-for...
Have worked with a few fellows just like described in this post. Temper tantrums, throwing chairs, yelling and verbally hostile, etc.…

Would never hire somebody with that type of track record.

Smarts and programming chops is good and all, but one needs to "play well with others".
I think it's a little misleading to judge carriers and phone manufacturers by open source standards. Although open source standards often promote innovation and bring value to the market because of the service oriented industries that pop up based on them I don't see the same kind of thing happening for phones. So tighter control is not necessarily a bad thing.
Ya, you're right! It's too bad there isn't more of a vibrant startup scene though. However, we're working to change that. Are you involved in a startup?
If there are other one-man bands here, I'd appreciate hearing your experiences on this. I'm considering renting a room at my local tech incubator after going full-time, just to achieve mental separation of work and non-work: if I've biked over to "the office" I'm working, if I'm not at the office I'm not.
For other cases (Where you don't want to create a new model, just change it's behavior) proxy models are incredibly useful.

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/models/#id8
Don't expect much from a 9400M. I hope you went for the iMac with the better graphics chip.

Edit: hopefully this move helps prod Apple toward including better graphics chips by default, as paying three times as much for a computer vs DIY from Newegg shouldn't give one third the performance for games.
Having the office hours be two hours a day every day, as opposed to, say, having two days a week of office-hour days, seems pretty inefficient from a commute perspective, unless everyone lives next door to your office. Part of the advantage of not having to go in every day is not having to commute there every day.

I also personally find frequent interruptions in my ability to manage my own schedule pretty damaging. If I know I'm going to have to be somewhere 1-3pm on Wednesday, I will probably not get anything done Wednesday morning, either, in anticipation of being interrupted: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
I want my time back
Both Canvas and Raphael work on the iPhone (and well, I might say: I don’t think I’ve run into hiccups with using Canvas or SVG, but I haven’t stretched them to their limits either).
Nice Presentation From Cameron Daigle on iPad UI Design
We're always up for doing more dinners, would you be able to get a venue set up? Someone's house perhaps that can seat 15-20? Shoot me an email, it's in my profile!
Note point #5. There are variations on this which are very effective at limiting casual piracy. (I personally like "For your convenience, any computer you put your Registration Key into automatically gets to see your saved data." Obviously, you want to think through the security implications of that verrrrrrry carefully.)
It's never the A students who show up late and then complain about getting in trouble for it :-)

No, the A students seldom attend class, show up late for the final exam, leave the exam early, and still get As ;)
For the anti-establishment types automatically siding with students: Remember that this is a total of 4 class interruptions for every other student in the course.