skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not willing to pay an extra 10-20% taxes in order to have 'free" healthcare

And just what percentage of your income goes toward healthcare right now -- both for you and for other people?

My wife and I pay $600 per month in post-tax dollars for our health insurance, thanks to Massachusetts' healthcare plan which lets anybody buy group insurance through the state. (If it wasn't for Massachusetts, I'm not sure what we'd be doing for healthcare -- we're both independent contractors, and you can't buy health insurance through IEEE anymore -- so I consider myself lucky to get that rate. And if that sounds incredibly expensive to you -- well, congratulations on being 23 years old! But don't expect to be 23 forever!!)

The median annual household income in Massachusetts is 60K. (Source: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/elections/keyraces/census... ). That's in the 25% federal tax bracket. (http://www.moneychimp.com/features/tax_brackets.htm ) State income tax here is 5%. So $600 per month post-tax is $857 per month pretax. Thus, the median couple in Massachusetts can expect to pay $10,285 per year for their own health insurance, or about 17% of the median annual income.

Now, you could argue that your median couple might be getting their insurance "free" from their employer. In increasingly many cases this is not true -- fewer and fewer employers provide health insurance -- but even if it is true it merely raises the couple's real income to $70,285 -- of which 14.6% goes toward health care.

Now, that doesn't count the percentage of their federal taxes that goes towards health care for themselves and other people. As a quick estimate, a handy website (http://www.nationalpriorities.org/taxday2008 ) tells me that 22% of each Massachusetts resident's tax dollar went toward health in 2006. 60K * 30% * 22% is $3960, so that's another 6.6% of pretax income toward health care.

Thus, health care costs consume something between 20% and 24% of the median family income in MA. So, if you ask the median Massachusetts resident if they're willing to have taxes raised "10-20%" in exchange for free, guaranteed, universal healthcare the first-order answer is "hell, yes" -- even if you assume that the U.S. healthcare system would remain terribly inefficient relative to other systems worldwide. Which I would hope it wouldn't.
A Tale of Two Steves (Jobs & Ballmer)
Yikes... front page.

Please be sure to contact me if you are interested (bfox at zgi dot com). Here are the potential projects (vague enough so as to not disclose anything):

1. make a nicer interface and better code base for a data viewer I wrote which integrates a bunch of different biological databases.

2. Follow through on an ambitious project which involves some stats, validation, and making a nicer web interface to a big database that I have (about 200 million rows).

3. Totally new project with AI/machine learning that I know nothing about and need to learn from you.

We use linux, mysql, php, perl, python.
Don't plan on growing old then. :-)

The best part about a government plan is that in the grand scheme of things, moochers are a small subset of the picture.

It poses problems for sure, like "crowded" emerge rooms, (brackets because the crowds vanish if you have a real issue) but overall the numbers all show that it's cheaper both to the consumer and to the system overall.
Xobni For Outlook Is Here To Deal With Your Messy Inbox
.. and one needs the aggravation because?

with all the easy pickings (that pay well) out there.

i say take advantage that 80% of people don't know anything, and take it easy. 8 hr works days, and i'm at the lake.
Great, thanks, but - no.

(a) it doesn't exactly do what I want it to

(b) it's a third party (officially unsupported) extension

(c) GreaseMonkey itself is just too much of a security risk.

PS. I did upmod your post though :)
Look both ways before you cross the street. You're only one car accident away from being disabled for life.
The "more room" argument is silly. The techcrunch articles aren't just "taking up room", they're on the main page because people are voting them up. People like them more than the articles that aren't being voted up.
Rackspace IPO - Invest or Not?
This is neat. A complete Ruby-to-pyc compiler might be a faster implementation of Ruby than the original one.
The point is that you can add an opensource and distributed intermediary because of the API.
Interestingly, in a different post here I compute our (Massachusetts, USA) family's per-capita expenditure for health insurance as $5142. That's exclusive of the percentage of our income that goes toward health care via taxes: 6.6% of every dollar of income, for Massachusetts families in the 25% federal bracket.

Sometimes it's almost eerie how well statistics work.

Moral: Believe the OECD -- Our health care is incredibly expensive.
Changing Your Address
Very true indeed - perhaps it would be better to have filters :-)
or markdown please...
Canadians Planning 'First Massively Multi-User Online Music Festival'
PHP gives you more slack than any other language. . .

which is just enough rope to hang yourself with.

To be honest, part of it will depend on your style and part of it will depend on your discipline.

I'm a fan of Python. PHP is not my style. I like one way of doing things. I like namespaces. I don't like all the extra syntax that I feel is useless ({};$).

But that's just me personally. Many people hate python for those reasons - it's constraining.

Objectively, PHP allows you to do what you want easily. The only problem is that taking those shortcuts can come back to bite you later. If you appropriately use include(), make sure to template out design, and avoid some of those oh-so-irresistible hacky things, you'll be fine. Digg has done well with PHP.

The problem is that it's hard to know exactly where you're screwing up sometimes. For example, in python, every name used in a python source was defined either in that file or in one of the imports. That makes it trivial to figure out why that "I can't find that name" error is occurring. With PHP, that name could be meant to be included 10 files back. They simply all carry over.

So, is PHP bad? I personally think it is, but I'm a little conservative an authoritarian when it comes to programming rather than PHP's more loose style. Can PHP's style help you? Yes.
The site was open sourced...
That sort of divide and conquer method does not work well for all scenarios, and certainly will not get you the optimal solution for all scenarios.

Consider writing a connection counter for linked in. How many connections do you have, and how many 2nd level connections do you have through those people. If you decide to break this down into smaller problems, you are going about it the wrong way in all likelyhood. An optimal solution will involve a dynamic programming algorithm, which solves the entire problem in a tricky way (a clever hack).
As I said below, I pay $270 a month for my family with a $5k deductible. Worst case, I'm out $8200 before my 100% coinsurance kicks in. I am self employed as well, so this is my total out of pocket cost, no employer contribution.

Without getting into specifics, $8,200 is less than 10% of my income. I realize I am not in the "average" spectrum, but realize thay my opinion on the subject is just as valid as those on the other end of the income spectrum.

When I was broke, sure I wanted the government to pay for everything (college, etc.). Now that I'm not broke, I don't want the government to pay for anything (for anyone) if it's going to cost me money. It's funny how things work like that :).
It's a part of your system, perhaps it just isn't as prevalent as in other jurisdictions.

See here: http://www.workindenmark.dk/Private_health_insurance
i dont think dns can solve the problem. dns info is cached in all sorts of places including at isps all over the internet. if your server (or cluster of servers) in ec2 goes down, and your dns server redirects to a different IP, the old IP will still be cached. this is far from a highly availalble system.
And this has 0 impact on the cost of my health insurance. It has a real cost in terms of long term care insurance (which is horrendously expensive, but not what the OP was asking about).
Like I said our system is screwed up, but getting rid of it is a HUGE ordeal with millions of jobs likely to be cut and a HUGE expense to cut over to it.

And in this country, where big pharma and big medical business runs the show (congress, etc.) it is likely that a "universal" healthcare system will result in a crappy, inefficient implementation that everyone will hate.
i use pbwiki. i have not found something else that has easy interface and wysiwyg editing.
Being Open is hard, as we have seen this week
i recently stopped paying for health insurance, for me, it was $1800 a year. $5k deductible, and I got the healthy living discount.

In one of my first jobs out of college I worked for a medical billing company, here is what we learned, while writing the software.

I am not sure on the math, but I think you are more likely to come out ahead when you buy blackjack insurance, than you are in the US when you buy health insurance. HSA's are great and on average most Americans would come out ahead over their life expectancy. And I am almost positive, that if more than 50% of the US paid for healthcare without going through an insurance company, health care would become much more affordable.

The health insurance industry is broken in this country, more than 50% of claims do not get paid, so doctors jack up the rates 50% to cover the failed claims process. Not to mention the frivolous law suits, and hospitals adding crazy crap to the bill of better insurance companies to pay for care. The whole system is more corrupt than the Mob.

HSA's offer the advantage to save and invest that money tax free, so that you can put the buying power back in your hands. Since its your money and you want to save it for old age, you will have the option to opt out of care that is extra. If you feel fine, you go home. Hospitals will need to get better at explaining your risks, and the decision are put in your hands.

Did you know that if you talk to a doc, most will give you a discount on the procedure if you pay for it out of pocket and up front? We saw bills go through that were at 25% of a docs normal billing rate when people paid out of pocket and up front. An example, might be if you had a broken arm, instead of your insurance company paying $1200 for casting, and x-rays, you could walk in and pay $300-600 if you payed up front. The down side to this, for people who do this and have insurance, come in that it does not go against their deductible, so a future incident that year would need to be covered again out of pocket.

In a previous company I started, I set up a $5k HSA for each of my employees, and then they only had a $5k deductible. It was up to them to control costs, and health insurance with a $5k is pretty cheap, if you know how to shop for it.
When I was broke, sure I wanted the government to pay for everything (college, etc.). Now that I'm not broke, I don't want the government to pay for anything (for anyone) if it's going to cost me money. It's funny how things work like that :).

I have friends with a) cancer and b) no insurance, because they can't afford it.

I'm not laughing.
Having dealt with a lot of really awful PHP in my programming career (including some of my earlier stuff), it tends to unfairly taint my view of the language.

It's not terrible, but I've found that the clunky syntax for slightly more advanced stuff (e.g. anonymous blocks) really discourages some labor-saving and repetition-avoiding coding practices that a language like Ruby encourages.

It's a really good fit for small-scale sites with well-defined requirements. But it requires some well-thought-out conventions to scale well, the sort of stuff you can't come up with unless you've done it wrong a couple of times yourself. Unless you borrow someone else's work by using one of the frameworks out there.
This article throws the term "hook" around. Do they mean binary rewriting or some other kind of hooking? That's awesome if Xobni went the rewriting route.
It's strange that nobody has mentioned that Yahoo! uses PHP to power a lot of their software, and it obviously scales very well if you know what you're doing.

They also remarked that they are looking into using Symfony framework in their software.
Ask HN: Transitioning From PHP to Django
If I’ve written a web application in PHP as a learning project, but at some point I may want to re-write using the Django framework, what would be the difficulties?

I feel like my primary concern would be getting the new Django app to play nice with the existing mysql database.

Has anyone had any experience doing this? Thanks.
Citi’s Mahaney Says Microsoft/Yahoo Merger Still 15% Likely
Read all about it… before it disappears: Rewritable Paper
Here's how I do it:

1. Add a

2. blank line

3. between

4. each

5. list member

Crude hack, but it works.
Keep your data safe at the border: Dealing with Customs
Crazy Digg Stats - Year of Year - And Charts
Honestly Techcrunch is such a tabloid.

You know when I first started frequenting this board, it was because of links that would challenge my existing understanding of coding and teach me something new, or thought-provoking questions challenging the establishment party-line, such as needing to go to a name-brand college or even going to college in order to be successful.

How is reading about the latest trials and tribulations of Microsoft and Yahoo any different from reading about the latest exploits of Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus? Less gossip more ideas please!
Yahoo's yang lost over $200 million today
$120/month with an HSA and a $1800 max out of pocket every year. found it through http://www.ehealthinsurance.com
That's mostly a semantic game you're playing. What you term "monolithic framework" is what the author (and, IMHO, most developers) mean by the term "framework". The rest of your post describes what most people are happy to call a "library" or "toolkit", or "utility".

Frameworks, as understood by common industry terminology, are defined by providing the vertical integration you are talking about.
does anyone else here like blunt people who are not mean? i like criticism, but once is enough sort of thing.
People work at Apple to change the world. Seriously.

Steve Jobs is a genius at imbuing the concept of revolution into computing.
Good find - yes there is private health insurance in Denmark, but its primary role is to get ahead of the waiting list for non-lethal operations such as bad knees, new hips, etc. And you get cushier treatment since you pay for it of course. But with the government program you can always see a doctor (I was there the other day, and I got an appointment the day after I called) and you will always get treated for whatever illness you have. The private health insurance will pay for glasses, etc. and it costs around $40 a month.
Ask YC: Taxes for selling user-generated content
Part of our startup's functionality is to offer the ability for users to create content and then sell it to other users through our service. We handle the payment processing and issue cheques at the end of the month (minus our small fee). We're doing tax research right now and wanted to know others' experiences with this type of thing.

We're in Canada, and we've got the Canadian stuff mostly figured out, but we're trying to figure out if and what taxes we need to deal with when a US customer sells to another US customer, for example (or any combination of US, Canadian or international customers).

Any advice, experiences or resources anyone might have would be fantastic!
Healthy 20yr Old M.

115/mo + 1500 deductible.
It's an HSA plan, with 100% covered after the deductible.
Because it's easier at the beginning. Doing a big application from scratch requires doing stuff like requirements analysis, which means you need to understand the universe of tools available to make good decisions. Then you need to prototype for a while before settling on the final design (i.e. your custom framework).

With rails (or whatever) you get something that works immediately, which feels safer to a lot of folks who don't have the deep toolkit expertise required above. The problem is that while the framework works, you don't actually understand it any better than you do the toolkits, it's just handling stuff for you with (what you understand as) voodoo. So when it comes time to make big design changes in the future, the toolkit folks know exactly where to start, while the framework people are completely lost.

I'm not completely against frameworks, but I've seen so many misused that I'm very wary. A stupidly-applied library is usually a point-source bug that can be fixed in one place. A stupidly-applied framework infects the whole application with its mess.
OVirt - Open Virtual Machine Management
One third of Techmeme’s headlines come from the Long Tail
I vote to NOT ban it. I stopped following tc because the best tc articles always floated to the top here on HN, and I didn't need to sort through the riffraff myself.
PHP simply requires discipline, which unfortunately many people in the PHP world lack due to its initial target audience. Provided you find real hackers and not just designer-turned-coder types, PHP is totally workable.

Mind you, when you're getting into the more functional side of Ruby or Python, PHP starts to show its limits as a language. But it's still fast to code in and to do so well if you know what you're doing.
You guys should check out Qcodo!!
FogBugz has an intelligent design that makes it easy to get issues and customer interaction into the tracker so that it gets in and stays there rather than being scrawled on sticky notes and gone over verbally between only two people in someone's office.

It has a good spam filter that does n-category email classification like JGC's POPFile.

It has data entry interfaces that combine the best of an unorganized PIM like 37Signals' Backpack with an organized issue tracker like Trac. (Personal experience: Backpack is great to start out with for just about anything, but does not scale over time.)

But, these are more about good design than turbogenius brilliance, and good design does not require rocket science, it requires perspective and taste.
I don't think adding real lists would add any functionality.
Am I the only one who thinks his writing is a bit obscure? I don't mean that what he's talking about is obscure but that the angles he takes come from seemingly weird directions.
I wouldn't consider Yahoo the pinacle of software engineering, or a hotbed for inovation. For a company of their size, they are not releasing any groundbreaking features, or anything too advanced, and they are obviously trailing google by a big margin.

Facebook and Digg are two other notable mention of php usage. Both are handling very high traffic loads ok (not spectacular), and I know that facebook is using a lot of C/C++ and some Java on the backend. The main reason that they are php is b/c it was the better choice for the founders, to do something quick at the time (2004-2005).

Ruby on Rails was not even out, and Python didn't have great and simple frameworks with simple learning curve.

So, at the time the two sensible choices were Java or. Php. A great question would be: If facebook or digg had to redo everything from the beginning, would have still chosen php?
Ask HN: Please review this site from my friend.
>Predictive scheduling is a novel and useful feature that separates them from pretty much every other free and commercial bug tracker I've used.

Not for long. I'm working on an EBS (improved) implementation as a Trac plugin. Haven't decided if I'll open source it though.
No. Techcrunch is a good source of technology and startup news. I agree sometime there is too much of fabricated stories and rumor stuff. Nevertheless, techcrunch does an amazing job of introducing new startups. I guess it acts like an advertisement platform for many of the YC startups. As long as we can control the submission on YC through voting, it’s good to submit techcrunch article
Correct me if I'm wrong but I think the origin of the 80-character width in computers is actually from the width of the first punch cards. AFAIK it was just an arbitrary decision not related to typesetting. The optimal width generally quoted by typesetters is 66.
That _why_the_lucky_ guy sure is a bright one.
Gladwell seems to be picking and choosing the data he discusses. Look at the data presented in his article, just averaging fatality rates (assuming all models are roughly equally popular): the minivans are staggeringly safer than the other classes, followed by mid-size, SUV, and large vehicles -- all roughly equivalent -- trailed by compact, sub-compact, and pickup vehicles, also roughly equivalent. This is pretty similar to the report that you linked.

Gladwell seems to be looking for data to support his thesis that SUVs feel safer but are really less safe, which overall the data doesn't seem to support; for instance, he chooses to compare the subcompact Jetta to the SUVs, instead of one of the other subcompacts, which are among the least-safe cars. He is right that we do not expect the Jetta to be more safe than the larger cars, and it would be interesting to know the reason behind it. But the reason seems unlikely to be a false sense of safety in SUVs or increased maneuverability in subcompacts, since the other subcompacts should then be roughly as safe.

On the other hand, the data does support his assertion that minivans are safer, and maybe this is because, as he says, they are driven by more experienced drivers with children on board. This would also explain why SUVs are somewhat safer than trucks, even though they are practically the same vehicles.
Analysis: Fail

I need to create an account to even get a hint at what value the site might have to me. Barrier to entry is too high, how do I know there is any value waiting on the other side of the account registration screen?

Now, my guess is that it's one of those kinds of sites that you'll use only a few times (you only need to connect your receiver to your plasma TV so many times). So, a freemium model may be a tough play here. Perhaps something like without an account you can select your components (to confirm they are known in the system) and see a low-def (composite audio/video) connection path, but not a high-def connection path.

End result, IMO, is that if everything is hidden behind an account registration it will be hard to get a good user base.
I spend $125 a month on aetna's individual plan, low copays / deductibles
Remove the safety net: why making a fool of yourself is a good thing
Here's a video of him talking about "The Good Parts" last year:
http://video.yahoo.com/watch/630959

I also liked his first video series on Javascript language on YUI Theater:
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/
He missed a step:

After wiping your laptop and hiding the data on the internet, remember to generate some fake browsing history.

Even if they don't chuck you in jail as a suspected terrorist, having a totally virgin laptop will get you nailed for import duty at the very least. Touch is your friend so you can add entries backdated a couple of months.
1. Create list syntax

2. ?

3. Profit
Last time I threw up a patch, it wasn't really all that well-received. In part because I didn't submit it on the "feature requests" thread?

Without a real regex library, adding things to the 'markdown' parser in news.yc is pretty rough stuff.
Though the feature he is requesting is 'lists', what he is actually asking for is a way to have more expressive text.
Why the hell do I need to create an account!

Homepage is good, I think it is fulfilling a painpoint that myself and others have. I'm not creating an account just to try it out.

Solution: Provide the option of allowing me to create an account AFTER I have entered my components and it has solved my problem. Similar to an "anonymous checkout" on an ecommerce site.