skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 1. Health insurance, but not treatment, is fully tax deductible. So if you buy your own penicillin, it's with after tax money, but if your insurance company buys it, it's pre-tax money. That's one of the reasons that health insurance is so widespred in America even for routine medicine like antibiotics and checkups. That's a major contributing factor in why the administrative costs are so high.

That's not completely true - someone else mentioned Health Savings Accounts.

There are also flex spending accounts, which are tax deductible. However, you only get to change the Flex Spending amount once a year or when you change jobs, get married, divorced, or have children (and possibly a couple of other events). That's okay for chronic problems and other things that you can plan for, but not so good for unexpected events.

Under previous law, there was no legal limit on flex spending accounts. Obama care limits them to $4k.
It would indeed.

I think SVG is a great idea, in theory; however, I've found SVG creation tools to be uniformly disappointing. Your suggestion, if reasonably well executed, would definitely be a step in the right direction.
True 8-bit Color Cycling tags:HTML5, games
Synchronous microcontroller communication interfaces
Google releases WebP, a static image format based on VP8
I agree the design was a critical piece of Mint's victory.

So how does a startup find a designer who's THAT good vs. just PRETTY good?
As a startup entrepreneur I think it's tremendously helpful. By the way, when you mentioned about the $1 user acquisition by Mint, I couldn't but help think of Andreessen Horowitz's (as championed by Ben)'s view of "fat" startups - "sometimes you got to eat" (his counterpoint against being "lean").

I know this is all speculation since it's already played out, but suppose you decided to outspend Mint and when they spent $1, you spent $2 per user. How do you think that would have changed things in the equation for you?
I completely agree here. Mint is too simple and automates too much that shouldn't be automated. I have been toying around a web based finance project of my own and if you'd be interested I'd love to talk more about what exactly you might find useful.
New style for Ciscozine.com
Sounds like Atwood's Law: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/07/the-principle-of-le...
A scooter would be a fun way to get around SF.

It's theoretically possible (I think?) to get to San Jose on local roads but it would take so long it would be impractical. It wouldn't be much faster than bicycling there.

I had a motorcycle in SF and found the freeways to and from the South Bay terrifying on a motorcycle. You can lane split in California, though... so a motorcycle is probably the most practical vehicle for getting over the Bay Bridge in rush hour...
Nice. And all those downvotes are telling me that nothing will change for the better. There are simply too many smart and educated professionals who, not surprisingly, get outraged by the idea that charging money for healthcare is unethical and refuse the believe that capitalism just can't work in every facet of the society. (hey, why not switch to a private army then?)
Your reasoning can be applied on a micro level also, comparing the name mint to wesabe. The former is unquestionably easier to remember, type, and tell friends. Is it worth spending a lot of money to get a premium domain? The question sounds very similar to asking 'how much effort should I spend making 1% improvements in usability?'.

One of my friends spent (from what I heard) over 200K for a very good domain. It seems wasteful on one hand, but on the other hand they must get a lot of credibility because of it.
Design makes a better verb than a noun.
Firstly, I was referring to the resulting citizen-facing services being anti-competitive.

Secondly, I disagree. A small handful of would-be suitors is preferable. But a large field would only be possible if the firms were each smaller, which means they have less money for lobbying efforts in general. Which simultaneously means less graft up-front and a less-lucrative position as a lobbyist when your term is up.
I like all the small conference rooms. Would love to have a ton of small rooms. Not for meetings, but when we want to pair/talk something out, often go somewhere where we wouldn't disrupt others. Plus easier for video/phone conferencing with someone remote. Small room, few chairs, phone, table, and a whiteboard. Plenty of markers and erasers, since those always get stolen.
Or we can tell companies to charge amicably across the board else they risk losing patents on drugs sold to Americans at grossly inflated rates. A drug patent should give a company the right to sell/license the drug, not the right to gouge people with it.

> Clearly this lacks details, but the concept would work after the first few nullified patents.

Of course it will "work", but are you sure that you'll be happy with the result?

Some other countries have said exactly that, the result being that folks in those countries are paying production costs but not R&D costs. If the drug companies can't recover R&D costs in the US, how do you think that the R&D costs will be paid?

If they don't think that they'll be able to recover R&D costs, what do you think that they'll do?

If you think that they can charge less and recover their costs, why don't you do so and drive them out of biz?
Render first. JS second.
Is Chartbeat the only real time analytics engine on the market ? ( I'm asking this because I assume you invested more than me, and I'm interested in knowing the current state of this market )
Clues can be faked too.
You could look in to customizing Hummingbird Stats (http://hummingbirdstats.com/) - the real time factor is already there; you would just have to add some additional things to track against.
I'm confused as to why this is being posted, the service has been available since 2008.
Not Old DDJ, the 'text:code' relationship is still very much in favor of text with relatively little code, and the code is definitely not of the kind that used to be features in (old) DDJ.
Taliban pulled from Medal of Honor game
Google releases whitepaper on Percolator (their new indexing system)
Maybe for an independent investor. But how can a t-bill be an investment for the government itself?

I am naively assuming that what backs the value of a t-bill is the US government's ability to accrue future tax revenue to pay it back.

What is it that makes a t-bill owed to Social security an investment rather than a tax deficit when it comes time to cut a social security check?
And how would the crawler know when the website is done loading?
HTML5 - The End of PSD to HTML Conversion Services?
As opposed to Google? I'm pretty sure everyone has spelled it gogle at one point. Whereas Ask.com is the possibly the best domain name in the world for the search business.
While Valve's continued development is impressive, as someone who hasn't played since what must be 2008, the stream of new systems and facets that have been laid over the game make it intimidating to return (harshly: game bloat).
I would love to have an HSA that is completely portable that I could drop some tax free money in each month and save up for when I need to get healthcare (like when I had ACL reconstruction).

IMHO, the fact that Obamacare did not expand on HSAs shows affordability is less important than control.
Does anybody know how being a non-US citizen affects incorporation?
Let me tell you, choosing "historio.us" as the name was a bad decision (for two reasons). People are surprised by the extension and it takes some explaining to get them to spell it as ".us" (here, something like historious.net would help a lot), and they always spell it "historius". We might just rename it to historius and redirect to historius.com just to get rid of all the hassle...

The moral of the story is that you should try to minimise homophones of your name, so "lessonauts" would basically be impossible to tell people, they would parse it as "lessonnauts", "lessonnotes", "lessonotes", etc etc. Unambiguity is a big advantage.
I guess this is your way of saying that you do not agree with the way this is done, but I can't help but notice that you are not a contributor to any of the articles above, so why would you feel the need to do this?

Or are you trying to make Cheng Soon feel what it is like when your works are 'ripped off'?

For me all this does is to emphasize that those that have the strongest opinion about this being free (or not) are not the ones affected by it.
Check out Joose, which is an object layer built with JavaScript on top of Javascript, amazing stuff!!

http://joose.it/

http://openjsan.org/doc/s/sa/samuraijack/Joose/3.011/lib/Joo...
> Living in Canada, I've never had to deal with the government making decisions, it's always been the doctors.

Oh really? The doctors decide whether the pharmacy has a given drug? The doctors decide how many doctors are available in a given area? The doctors decide what equipment is in a given hospital, where the hospital is, etc?
From the series conclusion:

"The first [thing we need to own up to] is that most of the “extra” spending is in areas of care. So, please, let’s stop pretending that cost containment can be painless or unnoticed."
It's not too terrible to get all the way up/down the peninsula on local roads, but it does take a while (~2 hours). The directions are easy, though, because El Camino Real (CA-82) goes the whole way.
Facebook Announces 5-To-1 Stock Split
Look for potential cofounders. Make friends with people who have similar interests as you (hacking, startups) and whom you get along with really well. Building trust and learning what people are really like takes time and being friends for a longer time gives you the chance to do that.
Psyco is unmaintained, the developer of it (Armin Rigo) is working on PyPy (a Python compiler written in Python) instead: http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/

They are already seeing quite nice results for computation-heavy benchmarks with the (tracing) JIT: http://speed.pypy.org/comparison/
40 Striking Showcases Of CSS+Flash Based Websites
In this showcase, I have collected “dark” designs from both ecommerce and non-ecommerce sites. While these sorts of designs won’t work for every ecommerce implementation, they offer interesting elements that can infuse your projects with new energy.
Hilarious. This sort of story is worth significantly more to me than the $3 I get per book.

You should buy mst and kd's book, it's much more up to date: http://apress.com/book/view/1430223650
It's a super dump, but you can get a studio for $1k/month at Trinity Plaza on Market St. Expect to lose your deposit from what I'm told, but hey it has a pool, and plenty of meth dealers, and it's right at Market & 9th so it's central to everything.

But seriously, for $1k -> $1,200 you can actually find a decent studio on nob hill. I just helped my ex-girlfriend move into a beautiful and very well-laid out 450 square foot studio for $1,100/month at Clay & Leavenworth with all utilities included.
HTML5, JavaScript and Canvas - Conway's Game of Life
I hadn't heard of it before so I figured others might not have either.

More importantly, with the introduction of micro instances, this creates a very low barrier of entry into creating a service behind a paywall. I'm looking to do just that, so I'm also curious to hear other people's experiences with DevPay.
You have been able to for a long time. On windows there's windows scripting host which includes JS support. On *nix there's no standard way of doing it but there are plenty of options for rolling your own though node.js is becoming a de facto standard.
Percolator provides two main abstractions for performing incremental processing at large scale: ACID transactions over a random-access repository (makes it easier for programmers to reason about the state of the repository)and observers, a way to organize an incremental computation.
Gated by the needs of FaceTime, I would suspect. 720x480 @ 30fps, baseline? H.264 is highly asymmetric, so they're not going to waste silicon on encoding hardware beyond the basics.
He gave his own examples, all are mediocre.
Fantastic demo. Layering and simulated motion were dead-on. I've only done this kind of stuff in more traditional game engines. I'd be willing to be it was less of a headache within a web framework.

Thanks for the share!
Is this the sort of thing that you should say in a forum that you've already admitted your boss reads and makes purchasing decisions based on?
This article http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-amer... lays out the reasons in a convincing manner. Very illuminating is the article pointing out that Lasik eye surgery is decreasing in cost, and why, while other health care costs are soaring.
Yeah, CA-82 was what I was thinking of. But even driving a car on CA-82 from SF to MV(?) takes 2+ hours (I actually don't remember where I was coming from; just that it took forever). Riding a motorcycle would suck because of all the stops and starts. A scooter might actually be better for this as the step through design makes it a bit less painful to wait at intersections.
New JSON format for the Google Calendar API [API]
Wow, I'm a native greek speaker and I never made the connection Nike -> Νίκη; they're pronounced completely differently.
Your favorite programmer doesn't like coding
I know this is a fluff comment, but I would upvote point #3 many more times. I see a big movement with everyone jumping onto the entrepreneurial bandwagon similar to the dot com era of yore. Many ideas are pretty solid, but don't start a business to "get in on a good thing" if you don't have a passion for what you're doing. You might hit a very THIN margin of luck, but chances are more likely that you'll fail. I believe passion drives innovation above all else.
I see. Incidentally, Haskell has a nice solution to this problem:

http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/vector/0.7/doc/h...
(1) Learn what people will pay for and how to convince them to do so.

(2) Make friends with and keep track of your talented classmates, especially those whose talents are in other areas.

(3) Learn how to evaluate folks in those other areas.
i filed 0 for several years in a row (before 2009), I will probably file 0 for 2010.
I allow by default and simply block a (large) number of stat tracking domains and other dubious sites. (Generally I just compiled a large domain list of advertising / stat bug / malware domains, rather than actively patrol my cookies for domains I wanted to block.)

I’ve toyed with doing it the other way around (block by default, use whitelist) but generally it’s too much of a hassle.

This is all more or less a carryover from when I used to be really privacy paranoid — I don’t really have a valid reason outside of that these days. Force of habit. :)
Also, Fantom can generate javascript

http://fantom.org/
I agree, but those $3 broke my heart. I am cash strapped down to $.50 and this magazine was amongst the things I look forward to and in fact I used to make people read it despite their too obvious protests. The sad part is that now it can't work that way. I cannot refer them on due to their paywall (yes I know it's online, but the PDF was really pretty and I loved passing it around in a package to my friend) and that's just sad.

Moreover, it was neat convenient and made me loyal to them I can't find a better branding exercise than that.

Sigh. I really wish that it didn't have to be this way, but perhaps they could try an alternate model of revenue (after all they're hackers). I would love to help these guys out in this regard.
I guess I had missed this when they rolled it out. It definitely gives me some new ideas about leasing value-added EC2 instances to others.
An Area 51 Apology — and Clarification
Ditto on "stay away from the Tenderloin." I can't stress this enough. Homeless people and drug addicts there think nothing of dumping a giant brown turd on the sidewalk wherever they happen to be walking at the time.
Depends on the situation and the name. I can't imagine many situations where it would be worth paying 200k. You can get good enough names for free usually, or at most 10k. It just takes some ingenuity.
Immigrants often bring with them the stigma of poverty, lack of opportunities and, sometimes, even persecution.
However badly skewed the ladder to the top is in America, it is still the most advanced implementation of a merit-based system.
It's no surprise that immigrant parents impress that on their children very early and may sacrifice more of their own well-being to ensure their kids take full advantage of it.
An explanation for the waning of that powerful drive could be that parents of 2nd and 3rd generations become complacent. Probably pushing the envelope but as a huge "Sopranos" fan, I'm often reminded of Tony's talk about the strong, silent type "now, that was an American!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZQ9r7rogNg
I cant tell you how many years I've been hearing this. Wasnt Vista supposed to be almost instant?
I would definitely add practicing design/UX/etc. to #1.

A big part of creating a high-quality product is about good presentation & interaction - even if you have a designer in your future team it helps to speak their language.

Previous HN threads on design:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1604915
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1103578
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1474315
You can apply this elsewhere - like people who are born into wealth. Those who are given the riches from the start are less likely to develop a strong work ethic/will feel a sense of self-entitlement. This goes beyond immigration - it might better be imagined as a genealogical luxury work-ethic bell curve - one starts at nothing, and works incredibly hard to get to the top for their family, and most of the time, the gene pool begins returning back to 0 as it comes to work ethic - or at least until the pull of said wealth dissipating begins pulling it back up.
"No it's not. The salaries are in fact the only reason we have this problem, so that's the key to the solution. And no, we don't consume "more care" than any other country (Japanese do way more)."

We should first figure out why it costs doctors so much to go through medical school. I know a few people in medical school right now and they will end up with around $200,000 in debt when they are finished. How can you ever expect to pay this off with an average salary?

The problem isn't the salaries. It's the insurance companies. The cost of everything is inflated because the insurance companies cover it for most people (and the hospitals can raise the price to ridiculous levels without the average person noticing)

If everyone had to pay out of pocket for most things (and had to use insurance for only emergencies), hospitals wouldn't be able to charge everyone $80 for a bottle of aspirin. The market would naturally lower the cost.
It's been shown that in the US when you add more doctors into the system the amount of treatment and procedures done scales up. There is an incentive for a doctors office to stay busy, after all.
I think the individual transactions can be quite small. You just have to commit to making $5 of them because of the non-micro-transaction handlers.

Apparently you can buy gear. I haven't played TF2, but from my "too many" TF days, there were many times I'd have gladly payed $0.10 to see a sniper lagged for just 200ms.
Revenge of the Introvert
An additional problem with an FSA (you can only get an HSA if you have a high-deductable policy) is that the list of acceptable expeditures is limited and the funds expire every year.

I would love to have some tax-free healthcare money to spend, but I cannot guarantee that I will need penicillin, surgery, etc. this year.

I don't want to consign $5,000 to an account with a significant chance that I will simply have to forfeit the money at year's end.
How did people not learn from Greece? Yes, an entire country can tell an extreme lie and get away with it for a long time. Skepticism is justified, but not because "they couldn't have done it so badly for so long".
I like the tin-foil hat...nice addition.
Lisp is not particularly unique in that regard. Forth is even simpler (perhaps too simple), and it's not that hard to write a naive implementation of Joy or Tcl.

Besides, piggybacking off the existing Lisp implementation doesn't help much when you're trying to figure out how the infrastructure (GC, etc.) is implemented. I learned a LOT implementing a Scheme interpreter in OCaml a couple years ago, and wouldn't discourage anyone from doing so in whatever language they feel most comfortable with. (I'm actually taking a break from writing a small compiler right now, for a proprietary database query language we need to convert.)

I think you are/were mostly being voted down because of your tone.
Now you have me confused.

Algorithmic Traders are quite a different species than High-Frequency Traders.

How did the article conflate these?
Is open source a dead end for desktop applications?
It is not in poor taste because (I take this a priori) TechCrunch does not target an audience offended by remarks like that.

So, the logic is that if the target audience is sufficiently horrible, anything can still be in the bounds of good taste, just not in the bounds of political correctness? By this standard, dive bar rest room stall graffiti comments are not in bad taste.
Dead Bodies Captured By Brazil’s Google Street View Debut
How I learned to make decisions and love causation
how did YOU think wesabe should be pronounced? I pronounce it like it was spanglish.
"we" like in english
"sabe" sa (sayonara) be (better) sabe = "know" in spanish

follow up comment. I signed up for wesabe EARLY on, but didn't get what it was supposed to do. none of my friends could easily explain it to me "its supposed to help save money" whereas mint was VERY clear on its value proposition early on. great post btw, commendable to write a post-mortem like that.
Ask HN: How to deploy a [Ruby on Rails] site in a scalable way?
I have been working on my [first] startup for a month now, and while it's probably atleast one more month away from an alpha release, I want to know how to deploy it the right way. The site will have an initial high amount of load (network + CPU) for a new user, so I am thinking of having a separate server/queue for this initial process, so that it doesn't slow down the site for existing users.

Based on my research so far, I am currently leaning towards nginx + haproxy + unicorn/thin + memcached + mysql, and deploying on Linode. However, I have no prior experience in any of the above; hence I am hoping to tap the HN community's experience.

- Does the above architecture seem reasonable? Any suggestions/articles/books that you would recommend?

- Is Linode a good choice? Heroku/EY seem too expensive for me (atleast until I have enough revenue), but am I missing some other better option? MediaTemple?

- Any good suggestions on the load balancing architecture? I am still reading up on this.

- Is it better have 2 separate Rails server instances on 2 separate linodes, or running 1 instance on a linode of twice capacity (in terms of RAM/storage/bandwidth)? How many Linodes should I start with?

- Which Linux distribution should I choose (Linode offers 8 different ones - http://www.linode.com/faq.cfm)? Are there any relative [dis]advantages w.r.t. a Rails stack?

I apologize if any of my questions are stupid or contradictory; please attribute it to my inexperience.