skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I promise +1 Karma to the first person that puts together an infographic actually explaining where, exactly, $100 billion a year of tax payer money is going to go, and what we are going to get in exchange.

I am all for affordable healthcare for everybody, just desperately afraid of how the gov't typically overspends.
The long term trend is about the company.
I think this is one of the parts of the bill where the imperative and desired result is outlined clearly, but the mechanism to that end is left up to an independent commission to start implementing in the next several years.

I think it's a very smart move: lets them avoid 'Big Design up Front' and the associated bickering + reification.
PHP Fat Free Framework aka F3
My pre-existing conditions are the #1 reason scaring me to start a business in the US.

Starting a business in the US is overall a lot easier than in Europe, but the advantage would be even greater if entrepreneurs wouldn't have to worry about health coverage.
If you want a multisite search engine, check out http://startbox.org/ -- something I hacked together a while back and still use as the start page.
Suppose I have a processor that runs at 1GHz, and furthermore suppose that it has a built-in hash primitive that can hash one salt+password in a single clock cycle. Thus, I can try 1 billion passwords per second. That means I can try every item in an English dictionary in merely 0.1 milliseconds, or a very thorough password cracker's dictionary in 2 milliseconds. If a site has 1000 users, I can try the cracker's dictionary against all of them in only 2 seconds. That's less time than it takes for me to browse through the list of password hashes using the scroll wheel on my mouse. For password hashing primitives, speed DOES matter. A lot.

What's more, if I could do 1 billion MD5s per second, then I could brute force every possible 8 character base-64 password (for one user at a time) in merely 3.25 days. Even if that one user has chosen his or her individual password by pulling it straight from /dev/random. Impractical against a site with 1000 low-value users? Sure, most black hats won't want to spend 5 to 10 years of compute power on that. But that's an utterly practical attack against a single, high-value account. If you're Twitter and someone just stole your salted password hashes, you'd better ring up Ashton Kutcher in the next 24 hours and tell him to change his password right now.

Something truly scary: this level of computer power can be easily achieved today using parallelism. I just now ran a benchmark on my personal Linux machine against 10,000 small files on a ramdisk, each of a size appropriate for salted passwords and each with unique data. According to this benchmark, my Athlon64 running at 800MHz can MD5 100,000 passwords per second using md5sum, complete with the system call overhead of opening and closing ten thousand files. Even so, my machine is only 4 orders of magnitude slower than the monster I described, and one of those orders of magnitude should be written off because my processor is years behind the times (sub-1GHz and single core). Shave off another order of magnitude due to the useless system calls, and one hundred modern $100 commodity processors could do this job today, and you could probably do it for half the price or less if you used DSPs or video card GPUs. This is trivially within the range of a project like Seti@Home or Folding@Home, or a dark-hat version of the same (running on a botnet of stolen CPU cycles).

Addendum: also note, these figures imply that one computer with a modern CPU can dictionary attack a salted password hash file from a 1000-user site in merely 200 seconds, i.e. about the time it takes to microwave a burrito. No need to build a botnet first.
Any bets on when technologizer.com will be joining HN's domain blacklist?
TBH, I don't want/need DDG's privacy. I'm working with VoIP - what I want to get when I look for "yate" is the softswitch, not the city. When I look for "asterisk", I want the pbx, not the page about "*". I'm ok with google knowing that - it's search profile works great for me.

I think we've got too many words with multiple meanings to accept the same results page for every person.
Ok. So, here is my take on that:

Kids are cruel, but they grow up to become adults and those adults can be just as cruel, only they're more clever about it. It never goes away, unfortunately. Pettiness seems to be somehow part and parcel of groups of people.

You have to have a fairly tough skin to get around, and one of the things that being shy is a real problem with is that it opens you up to people that 'use' you simply by being normal to you, they might gain an edge that way.

I've been on the receiving side of that twice, always looking for that pat on the head or if someone is simply nice to me I'll nearly kill myself to please them. It's a weak point in my character.

The cruelty you can learn to deal with, the other part I'm not so sure. Every time something like that happens it dents my self confidence for years.

Still, like that famous ancient story, this too shall pass, and in the end whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, sometimes much stronger.

I'm going to make a really weird suggestion: forget about a startup or something like that for now, go and do some volunteer work for a while.

It's two birds with one stone, it will have a real and measurably positive impact on peoples lives which will help you to build confidence and it will cure your shyness like nothing else can because it reverses the usual role patterns that you fall in to.

A friend of mine from Canada did that in order to find a way to deal with the aftermath of a car accident she was in, it worked very well for her, I figure it should help you deal with your shyness for much the same reasons.

There are always people below you on the ladder, simply being confronted with a lot of real world hardship will help to give you the tools with which to deal with your own, and will put you in a position of having to deal with people on a daily basis.
Silence. I rarely listen to music when I'm working, because I like music, and when it's playing I pay attention to it. And then I can't work.
It seems worrying that the best solution to a more efficient and cost effective system they come up with involves spending a lot more money now.

Looking at American policies from an outside perspective, it seems the government is unwilling to be the one that will actually suggest that maybe the answer to many current budget problems is to spend less.
There is inertia, and then there is actively keeping us in the dark ages to retain revenue. Ninety percent of transactions at branches are check deposits. People bringing in bits of paper to transfer money.

But the branch remains the number one channel for upsell opportunities. Banks are desperate to keep people walking into branches so that they can push more products on their customers. Brand apathy is rampant due to undifferentiated crappy products from the top banks, so they rely on branch upsells.

This is why more banks don't offer remote check deposit capabilities. If they did, they'd lose the sales channel.

We at banksimple figure that its better to just give you the product features that you actually want to use instead of relying on expensive sales channels to grow our customer base.
Yeah I thought it was off topic and deserved a delete. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
In a lot of cases "this looks bad, fix it" is the correct response. If you look at a problem from a naive engineering standpoint and imagine the mountain of work it would be necessary to fix it and then weigh that against the seriousness of the problem before ever lodging a bug report you'll probably decide that a lot of problems aren't worth fixing, and thus aren't worth even mentioning.

But this is wrong. You always need to keep aware of all the defects and problems with your system even if you have no intention of fixing them now, or ever. Having a thorough understanding of the limitations of your system can give you the impetus for a redesign. And it can also give you the clarity to be able to push for fixes to these problems in the future after redesigns, likely for completely different reasons, make the solutions tractable. Otherwise you just end up in an increasingly deepening pit of mediocrity that you never escape from while your competition pulls farther and farther ahead.
Practice practice practice. Like anything else you get better by trying (and occasionally failing). You have to put yourself out there to overcome shyness, leaving your comfort zone. There is no switch to flick that makes it go away. I'm not much for formal education, but one thing it has given me is required presentations. With a few very painful public speaking experiences under my belt I am far less scared of it because I know I am getting better. At some point you just have to say "fuck it" and do it. No pain no gain.

Maybe this is a reach, but I'll use the Woz as an example. When he was making the Apple I doubt very much he was capable of managing a coherent conversation. He was the quintessential socially inept nerd. 30 years later he's still no Jobs, but he can give a decent interview. I suppose it helps having "fuck you" money, but really he's just had a couple decades of practice.
You are incorrect, and it's why you are being downvoted. Please read this article to learn why: http://chargen.matasano.com/chargen/2007/9/7/enough-with-the...

Essentially, MD5 and SHA were designed to be fast hashing algorithms. This is NOT what you want with password hashing, as you need to be able to tune the complexity of your algorithm to scale with Moore's Law and other factors.
> As I see it, the US spends a fortune on health, and gets a dodgy system.

Too true. One of my favorite infographics regarding health care:
http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/cliff-kuang/design-innovatio...

We see doctors less, spend more than twice the average anyway, and have below average life expectancy.
I used to be shy and have a bit of a speech impediment. To get over it, I joined the forensics club (competitive public speaking). It is amazing how much that has helped me over the years. ("Presenting my new idea to the CEO? Pfft, just another speech. Need a joke for the intro... always start with a joke for the intro...")

If you're still in school, I recommend that or debate. If you're not, I hear Toastmasters is pretty decent.
Enjoy getting screwed by your group rate with a pre-existing condition in a risk pool of that size.
After many revisions, I present my "pocket planner". I hope HN finds it useful
Hey guys, read this
This is What Change Looks Like
To be honest when someone working on wall street commodities market floor can come out as gay, THEN I will accept that the culture finally accepted gays.

My friend has to pretend that he is straight and tell stories of him and his gf, because if found out that he was gay, not only would be lose most business, his life would be put through hell.

Congrats Randi!
It's a really good documentary, and I understand what you are saying, but it is for people who already realize the importance of the design.
You just wrote a description of my job. I only got there 6 weeks ago, so I haven't had the chance to do all that yet, but I will take the first chance I get.
Ok these 10 node branches are becoming a pain.

It sounds like this community has some fundamental issues with privacy at google et al and is willing to sacrifice some obvious perks to relieve that.

If google made it possible to do anonymous searches would google be the ideal solution? or is there something wrong with the paradigm such that alternative solutions give us a glimpse of something different and the ideal solution is really yet to be realized?

I've got to point out that your average old man user clicks on the ads and doesn't care about privacy (or doesn't know anyway.)
The idea is to print out a sheet, cut it in half, and fold them in half twice. You write your weekly plans on the left pane, and your agenda on the right. The grey area marks roughly when it is dark out. I didn't include between 0000 and 0600 as I figured it took up too much space and isn't useful for an agenda.

It's an Inkscape SVG, by the way. I'd love to hear about any forks :)
The smartest person was the co-founder who quit early on :)
>>As a counterpoint, countries that already have this are far behind the US in small business creation.

Do you have any data to back up your assertion ?

According to http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/small-business-20... "By every measure of small-business employment, the United States has among the world’s
smallest small-business sectors (as a proportion of total national employment)."
Have you tried a job in retail? I did computer sales for a while and I know it sucks but it did help me by forcing human interaction in mass numbers. The company was bad, but it was good on a few fronts: coworkers were generally interesting to talk to, I got a part time job on the side from a customer that gave me a lot of experience, I started a company with a few coworkers doing computer networking which afforded me some interesting experiences. Overall it was a net win.

This will get you practice in human interaction which is invaluable.
Mmm, a better quiz would be how much do you read hacker news and include answering questions about a heap of the bigger threads.
Oops I upvoted and realized it was on 42 points. :-( sorry!
I always have and always will take umbrage with how people downplay the government's role in ameliorating the lives of people.

Case in point, can anyone really deny that the overwhelming majority of the cures and vaccines for deadly afflictions that have plagued the US (and the planet, for that matter) have been developed in a university or non-profit lab under the funding, technology transfer, and/or support of governments (in the US case, the NIH)? Polio (Salk), TB vaccine (Calmette), the list goes on. Hell, even Norman Borlaug helped eradicate famine in several parts of the 3rd world under the encouragement (and part-funding) of the Roosevelt administration.

You're right that it's not just about socialized interstates and bunker bombs. It's truly about doing those things that just _cannot_ fit on any sane balance sheet trading on Wall Street (or if they tried, investors would truly revolt).
This is true only in the most technical sense -- health insurers are known for dropping entire small companies that have unusually high claims. The smaller the company, the faster they'll drop you.
Subsidies on premiums. In exchange, on top of the healthcare for everyone, we'll hopefully reduce current costs (for those who are covered by medicare) for last-minute emergency care by earlier diagnosis and treatment.
Is it possible that the actual problem is fear of failure, and/or fear of mediocrity, rather than shyness per se?

When you meet new people, do you show them a different you, one who doesn't write songs or think about writing apps or starting businesses? One who is safe from criticism, because he/she doesn't do anything that would be worth criticising?

The two things are not necessarily related, but I've come to see both of them in myself. For a long time I've had two very different sets of thoughts and activities, internal ones that I didn't tell people about and external ones that I did. I convinced myself that noone IRL was interested in the first set of stuff (projects, niche interests, thought experiments) so I just kept it all to myself, sharing it online or (mostly) not at all. It's only recently that I'm starting to let more of that out, overcoming the fear of either boring people, sounding silly, or being ridiculed.

Things that have helped me have been:

- Getting involved with a group of people (IRL) who are interested in the same things. In my case it's been helping found a Hackerspace, but in your case music could be an equally good outlet and support group. This has helped me get used to talking about those things, and it's helped me feel more legitimate about these things being of interest and worth to other people, and not lame/useless/boring.

- Social media. It's convenient to be able to occasionally give notice of your thoughts and activities to a fairly wide group of people you know in person, without any obligation for them to respond if they don't want to or are not interested. I've been surprised at how many people have shown interest (both online and offline in social situations), though.

I still have a fair way to go. For example, I created a blog to help encourage me to push projects through to completion (or failure) instead of abandoning them early on. However, I haven't written up any of the things that I'm working on yet, instead I can always rationalise an excuse about "no time to write about it" or "not quite good enough for public consumption yet".
I was actually considering the same thing. This does seem like a big step, so it's like step 2 or 3 of the plan.
- Why start your own business? Why start early?
Have you seen the job market? Most of the job offers you will get (if they get any) will be low pay and low responsibility, essentially digging yourself a hole at the beginning of your careers. Even if unsuccessful, starting your own business builds experience and skills making yourself more marketable in a few years when the job market is better.
Upvoted for your last paragraph, the final sentence in particular (sometimes I think it's helpful to know why a post is voted up or down).
Ah, I wasn't aware. (Shows what I know about this bill.)

While catastrophic insurance is a good deal for young unmarried people, part of me thinks it's not how health insurance is supposed to work. If you're not spreading the cost of caring for old/sick people among young/healthy people then what's the point?

The other part of me thinks it's just a handout to the insurance industry and people such as yourself shouldn't have to pay a dime for someone else's overpriced cholesterol drugs or 3D ultrasound.
exactly, the models for the overall cost are based upon a long term savings of TRILLIONS of dollars in treatment costs by making preventative medicine be very very strongly encouraged. There are actually financial penalties in the form of ~2.5% tax on income for those who are not insured, and a 2.5k+ tax penalty per uninsured employee for businesses, and other things on top of that too.
Part of the problem is that people are living longer, and are mostly healthy and able to work longer

You're right about the demographics, but I'm not sure this part is correct. Yes people are living longer, but it seems that a great deal of that is that when a 70 year old contracts condition A which used to be fatal, we can now often keep them alive at great expense until they die at 80 of condition B. It doesn't mean they'd be effective workers at 70.

My "obvious" solution is to focus on curing aging, which is generally the fundamental cause of both A and B. Until that happens, means-test benefits. Warren Buffett doesn't need to be getting checks from the government.
Definitely still too new to know. I'm no good at comprehending code, and some simple bugs can elude me for hours at a time.

My 'architecture' skills are not so great. My naming is inconsistent (something to work on), and I'm still not sure when to separate something out into an object or when to leave it in.

My plain ole' coding skills are skill developing as well. Whenever I pick up a new library, I spend hours poking through documentation and examples, and I usually end up doing things twice when I realize my first approach was totally wrong.

Someday, someday...
Find a good therapist (psychologist) to talk to about this. Working through shyness will be a long process, and having a smart caring person to coach you through it will be a big help. Therapists are people who are genuinely interested in helping people in this way, and they have been developing and honing the relevant set of skills. I'd say it's important to find someone who works well for you and your personality, so maybe it would help to talk to a few to see who you have the best rapport/connection with.
Find your local Toastmasters chapter. The pitch is to learn how to become a better public speaker and leader; everyone I've ever known that's been a part of it has raved about how it rounded off their shy edges and made them massively more confident. They'll make you uncomfortable as hell, but just remember that everyone else is there for the same reason to some degree.
Conducting research on social networks/location based services for college paper
Additionally, if it actually worked that way, others would be doing it too. Doctors aren't the only people who would like to "attain expert-level knowledge in only a few years"!

Maybe some of us are doing so indeliberately, by going on marathon code sprees and working 80 hours a week on startups.
The ban on pre-existing condition screening doesn't kick in until ¿2014?

There's a temporary public option for the people who would otherwise still be fucked until then. I'm not sure if you'll be able to get that on short notice.
I adblocked that "Green Certified Site" nonsense a while ago. Did you know that it sends information about your machine back to their servers whenever HN is open in any tab... every five minutes or so?

It is also really invasive; your pointer goes anywhere near it, and it starts pulsing like crazy. That thing is the epitome of annoying malware.
> Why did it "blossom"?

Because health care costs skyrocketed, which led to skyrocketing insurance premiums. Something that was previously 1-2% of compensation is now often >10%.

> Why did it not get corrected after WW2?

It's a rare thing for Congress to pass a bill that reduces complexity... just look at the tax system.

This bill is a case in point. There were numerous way to reduce complexity (and hence costs), but instead they just added more. More complexity isn't always bad, but it's very rarely cheaper.

Ways to reduce complexity: remove the market distorting tax break, regulate insurance at a national instead of state-by-state level, make insurance compulsory, make health insurance actually act like other insurance. (You don't expect your car insurance to pay for oil changes or your homeowner's insurance to pay for smoke detector batteries do you? And in that vein, when was the last time you lost your car insurance because you lost your job?)
But the majority of music that people listen to today is throwaway 'confection'.

The fact is that in our current system, people who produce music of genius quality starve, while the people who write about big booty women and bananas become super rich.

The problem is that the act of making music fulfills a basic human need. It isn't about making good music or making a song that will last for the ages. It is more like the need to have sex, make out and go dancing.

I just think it is incredibly sad that regular people can no longer compete with the mass market saturation of spun-sugar-pop-music. If we look at market trends it would appear that all music should be pitch-corrected, re-mixed, stamped onto plastic disks, and played as background noise to a music video. I, personally, reject the market trends as I know there is something much deeper that I actually need.
'Curing' aging is really going to break the economy. Pension systems were not meant to take care of people for ever, if 'aging' gets cured then you can expect to work until you drop dead.
puffythefish was just arguing the arguer's argument was arguably arguable.
In order to bring down the cost of health care, the government would have to operate the system more efficiently than the market does. I can't think of anything the government operates more efficiently than the market does.
I had to make some lucky guesses on #7 and #8, but I'm a bit embarrassed by my perfect score. It's a sign that I'm succumbing to the hive mind :(

Probably time to turn on noprocrast.
There is also a BBC programme by the same name.

edit: and it has a website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/lastchancetosee/