skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a tricky point. I don't think you're always right. There are two different factors† you're bringing up: high vs. low deductable insurance and short-term health insurance.

High- vs. low- deductable isn't a charged issue. Only slightly oversimplified:

For high-deductable plans, you end up paying for doctor visits and basic meds out of pocket; for low-deductable insurance, you're basically paying a higher monthly fee to treat your medical care like a utility bill, and paying only copays for services. Most people have low-deductable plans (most company plans are low-deductable). Especially if you're young, low-deductable plans are kind of a rip-off. You can cut your payments in half with a high-deductable plan and use the difference to fund an HSA and thus not pay a huge premium for a health insurer to manage your money for you.

Short-term health insurance on the other hand is a bad idea. The reason you pay insurance is to manage the risk that something terrible will happen. Of the major medical events that can bankrupt you (in other words, "of the major medical events"), most can easily take several months to resolve. Not only does this expose you to huge fees when your insurance lapses and you (obviously) don't get re-insured, but you can also be assured of never getting private insurance again.

Don't buy short-term health insurance.

† Recission is an unrelated issue that affects all health insurance plans; no matter who you buy insurance from, if they can claim there was something you could have disclosed to them but didn't that would have allowed them to predict a medical event and no law prevents them from doing so, they will attempt to withdraw coverage.
Well, I am having trouble setting up this Linux server, so I might as well use this Gameboy.
http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/
Reminds me of pgs "Fundrising Survival Guide":

"More often than not the company comes to a standstill while raising money. And that is dangerous for so many reasons. Raising money always takes longer than you expect. What seems like it's going to be a 2 week interruption turns into a 4 month interruption. That can be very demoralizing. And worse still, it can make you less attractive to investors. They want to invest in companies that are dynamic. A company that hasn't done anything new in 4 months doesn't seem dynamic, so they start to lose interest. Investors rarely grasp this, but much of what they're responding to when they lose interest in a startup is the damage done by their own indecision."

http://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html
You can hire 1 full-time Silicon Valley engineer for a year with $150K. While it's a great deal, let's not get too ahead of ourselves.
I do have huge respect to YC personnel and companies, but not sure performance so far is at a level that makes it a sure investment. Even so, YC's model is small fiscal investments and large time/mentoring investment. I doubt that the opposite would work as well.
100% Renewable Energy in 40 Years Not Limited to Our Wildest Dreams: Study
> "They do seem" as a claim on it's own has no persuasive power.

Sorry. I meant they seem to _me_ I wasn't asserting a general truth. I am just one of the HNers here. So it is more of a personal observation.

> Look, it even comes with allusions to the comparison of Israel and the Nazis!

---- excerpt from first article ------

In mid-January, dozens of young Jews attacked Muslims at a mosque in Yafo or Jaffa, the historically Arab city just south of Tel Aviv. An Israeli media outlet reports that the youth, who were armed with stones and Israeli flags, shouted "Mohammed is a pig" and "Death to Arabs" just as the Muslims were preparing to pray.

When the police arrived, they did not arrest any of the assailants.

------- end of excerpt -------

Sure I wasn't there on the ground witnessing this, but I believe that story to be true. Why? Because other stories on Al-Jazeera seem to _me_ to be true. Yes I throw the word "seems" around too much, this is all just my person observation, but I try to be as objective as possible.

They list other incidents, about 3 or 4 total.

Imagine that your local American small town a group of white youths attacked a black family. And then there would 3 or 4 similar racially motivated incidents. I believe nobody would blink an eye if _any_ media source would start writing editorials wondering about the resurgence of racism in the region. If it happens in Israel all of the sudden there is a lot of defense and touchiness about the issue. Why is that? Why is it so hard to believe that a country in the Middle East would have a problem with racism. It seems denying it and covering it up, is a larger sign of a problem.
It's neither. It's just part of the aristocracy (the other part being the willingness of the rest of society to humor old money in their self-perception as being aristocratic).
In future, they keep a very up-to-date status page at

http://status.github.com/
Antisemitism has never meant racism directed at Semitic peoples in general. It has a very specific meaning. Not only that, but 'hacker' doesn't have a literal etymological meaning ('hacker' is derived from...?).

This whole comment thread has me extremely disappointed with HN.
Why is it a bubble buy? They are getting in on the A round of every YC company with the same terms as the other participants and with their deep pockets the ability to lead A rounds as well as B, and C rounds for those that take off is worth way more than the $150k each.

Consider this acquisition costs, like buying a really expensive key word on Google. The ~$6M every 6 months is worth it for the seat at the table. An additional benefit is getting to see the terms at which all of these rounds are financed at -- this will help them ensure they are paying properly on non-YC deals they get in.
I would like to watch the HD version?

What is this RealPlayer thing? sounds like a virus.
Is it just me or has guthub's performance and reliability been getting progressively worse over the past month or two? Even putting this issue aside, and the outages, pushing to a private repo takes _minutes_ now, and file lists in the web interface often don't load without a page refresh.
I'm usually most productive from 2am to whenever I fall asleep, which has been somewhere between 10am and noon as of late. Great sleeping cycle, I know :) It's almost impossible to get anything done during the day, especially on a college campus - so many distractions!
There is nothing useful on that page. The error is in full effect right now.
They can't just ban accounts off PSN now?
I thought MEMRI was accused of being Israel's PR department because it was founded by "ex-" Israeli intelligence officers, refused to disclose its funding, tends to distort meanings in its translations, is highly selective in translating inflammatory pieces while ignoring opposing pieces adjacent to them, etc.
True, but pick any notion and there would be some people who believe that. The question is whether the belief is correct or not. Correctness is hard to determine in the absolutes. It is a skill that adults usually acquire to a lesser or greater degree from experience and corroboration.

Since it's a difficult skill, like it or not the identity of the group espousing the belief does play a role in coloring the credibility. It is one of the multitude of variables by which human's judge potential correctness. My personal coefficient for BBC is higher than most of US cable news (and honestreporting.com as well). The coefficients are issue specific too, though there is a certain issue independent component that different issues inherit from the base.

It so happens that there are issues that I care about, for which there are no US main stream source that has significantly positive coefficient. It is for (not uncommon) situations like this that I need alternative sources like Al Jazeera. In addition to un-affiliated blogs
At the price and size of Linode instances, it's cheaper and I feel better knowing I'm in control when I run Redmine+Gitosis. When I had my github account and something went wrong, I couldn't just ssh in and fix it. All I could do is wait.

Now, for some people, I can see how waiting is an easier solution. I personally just don't like it.

(of course, this is reffering to private repos. public repos are still king on github)
Ask HN:  Why hasn't Ticketmaster been killed yet?
So last night I realized what it's like to live in a bigger city, when I tried to go to three different shows and realized they were all sold out. Thinking "hey, that would suck if this happened again" I went online to buy a ticket. The ticket I was gonna buy was a "$20" ticket. After the convenience fee, it came to be 28.60 or something. Sucks, but whatever. Then it asks me how I would like my ticket shipped. Apparently internet delivery is $3.50, so I chose snail mail (free). Finally, I go to check out and notice an extra $6 transaction fee.

So the minimum I'm gonna pay for a "$20" ticket is $34.

Do they still have an overall monopoly, or is it just market fragmentation?
Found I had to disable CSS (there's something wonky hiding their content) but I'm glad to see their documents are still usable if you don't blindly trust everyone's js by default. A lot of sloppy or ignorant authors would have done the js version first and then failed to finish the job.
Whatever!

I grew up in a poor country: I've been poor. Other than a profound desire to never be poor again, I don't know how that "perspective" has ever helped me.
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...

for me, the 10th result is:

www.questionhub.com/StackOverflow/3910933 - Cached

I think it is safe to say they are scraping, and, while there are some SO answers, that particular answer does correctly interpret what my intention was.

In fact, the SO page scraped shows up as the 12th entry.
And IIRC Oracle had been actively attempting to exert this degree of control, to the point of interfering in infrastructure changes that project contributors wanted to make.
You need two things to build your own CPU from scratch:

1) Understanding that computers are not magic, but actually state machines built from relatively simple and understandable parts.

2) Enough patience and self-discipline to actually design and build something like that, which at least to me seems like larger problem. In software you get some meaningful partial results that are to some extent interesting by themselves pretty early in development (mostly). In hardware project of this kind you have to build it almost completely for it to do something meaningful.
People have been talking about how crazy deals he's lead have been already for several years. History has quickly proven them foolish.
It's a monopoly, and they have exclusivity deals with venues.
Dear Honorable Mashmac, Esquire,

Congratulations on your recent promotion. My uncle the late ambassador Professor Bubba Watts deposited $419 million dollars in the first National Bank of Montgomery prior to his departure. Due to my recent marriage to a close relative, I am unable to access these Funds. Please forward your social security number and Bank Account password so that I may deposit these funds for your finders fee.

Sincerely and respectfully your humble servant,

brudgers of Alabama=Nigeria
As for inequality of investment (time, effort) between you and your partners, this happens, a lot, and there is an important lesson you need to learn from it; when it comes to picking co-founders and employees, chose wisely.

> Risking big and falling on your face is something that I really don't want to experience, but I seem to be headed in that direction. advice?

Learn to fail gracefully. Failure happens to everyone, so the differentiating factor is how well you fail.

On HN, you'll hear the term "pivot" a lot. It's just an overly polite way to say "failure and change of direction." This is one of the may forms of failing gracefully.

If the people you are working with are unable to fail gracefully, walk away. You'll never get anywhere with them.
The differences between your eyes and your camera
It’s Not Twitter or Facebook, It’s the Power of the Network
Does anyone else see that this offer will drastically change the tone and success rate of YC startups?

Constraints (in the form of funding and time) were a large part of YC. Entrants got a low (but livable) amount of money and 3 months to come up with something great. That something would either sink or swim on demo day.(for more on how constraints help creativity: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1530) Within those constraints, past YC classes did pretty well, and came up with amazing companies. Those that didn't failed quickly, and could go on to bigger and better things. But YC is now throwing those constraints away.

Because the $150k offer is guaranteed runway, it fundamentally changes the behavioral economics behind startups participating in YC. Products no longer have to be demoable by demo day, and startups won't have to think about profitability/funding, in the short term. This means that we should expect YC startups to dream -and fail- bigger in the future.
It is easy to draw intuitive statistical conclusions in a small town; you bet if there weren't usually race based violence in a small town, that if you saw 4-5 incidents in a short period of time, there would be very few non-racism based explanations that were plausible.

Israel is 7.5 million people with 75% Jews. That provides a large enough pool of incidents of Jews attacking Muslims to draw from just because there are a given number of violent people in any country. Now they can easily misrepresent these stories because you can cram an article with them. You can't do intuitive statistics with a country of 7.5 million, or even 500,000. You need to do statistics, period. Anything less is irresponsible, and any article from any organization that tries to interpret anecdotes into patterns when you're drawing from such large sample pools is not practicing professional journalism. And with Al Jazeera's "In Depth" page basically dedicating it's Israeli/Palestinian focus on these types of articles, there is little room to interpret there ME coverage as objective.

> If it happens in Israel all of the sudden there is a lot of defense and touchiness about the issue. Why is that? Why is it so hard to believe that a country in the Middle East would have a problem with racism.

Because there's never any evidence except these anecdote based articles. At a certain point, if you want to make such a serious accusation that deviates from the assumptions that people operate on, the burden is on you to prove it, with some sort of comprehensive proof.
Student here.

What confuses me is why 90% of the companies, according to TechCrunch, took the funding. From what it seems like, the $150k is for each YC company to decide upon. Why now?

Surely most (if not all) YC companies don't need an additional $150k after just a few weeks in the program. It's great that the $150k is there for everyone when they need it. Raising money, which is usually a distraction, is now much more easily expedited.

While that's great, I just question the timing. Why did 90% accept the money now? No one needs it. Within the next few weeks, we might see better deals. Sequoia and others might want to compete. There might be better offers.

That's my one concern so far with this.
Ohaipuzzle - a somewhat tough puzzle.
Why not Facebook.com? It was one of the social network sites that stood out in terms of its clean and simple interface and still todate they've kept improving the many UI elements and have brought some nice touch to some of the UI elements (Facebox etc.)
From all I have read ...YC founders are pretty focused on building their dream ...I dont think the money will get blown on foolishness...and I do think it will enable them to keep their minds on the most important things ...and not where do we get our next dime.
Quite an intelligent response. I appreciate it.

If you're looking for a solid US based news agency, I would suggest PBS news. They have a pretty high 'coefficient' in my book. They've been covering the various Arab riots quite extensively.

Main site: http://www.pbs.org/newshour

Nightly news: http://video.pbs.org/program/979359630/
I've lived in Washington for about eight years, now, and I'm tired of people east of the Cascades bleating about how Western Washingtonians have the East under our thumb.

The people in the Eastern part of the state are more than welcome to split off if they want to, seeing how us Seattle liberals underwrite their existence (cf. http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/01/25/since-r..., http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/01/25/welfare..., and http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/01/27/6495426...)

The tl; dr version is that King county taxpayers (which includes Seattle) receive $0.62 back in benefits for every dollar they pay to the state, whereas people in Republican-leaning counties (i.e the eastern part of the state) get back an average of $1.40 for every buck they kick into state coffers.
Apple follows Amazon with 1-click purchasing.
Early Social Security Projections
Some context (for non-Canadians):

TekSavvy is one of the leading independent ISPs in Canada.

The CRTC is (roughly) the Canadian version of the FCC.

This price increase is in response to a CRTC judgment that allows Bell to force usage-based billing (UBB) onto its wholesale customers (who are, for the most part, independent ISPs). Before this decision, Bell was unable to sell them packages that took bandwidth used into account - so they could force their own individual customers onto UBB, but not the customers of their wholesale purchasers. This is no longer the case - now they can (and will) charge independents a per-customer fee (like they used to), plus a fee for bandwidth used.

The rates at which they're now able to sell independent are the same as those they charge their own customers, meaning Bell can now effectively set a floor price for the DSL market. Furthermore, independent ISPs can no longer offer unlimited plans.
Ah, the premise of http://www.urbanarchipelago.com/, a stirring response to the backwards hellhole that seems to surround anywhere I'd want to live.
Couldn't agree more. And now that I can see how my competitor app ranks right next to mine, pure awesome.
Anti-Semitism is a term that, in the western culture, is used to mean anti-jewish. When you treat it literally, you are ignoring a long and established history associated with it. See this for much more articulate explanation than mine:

http://www.ibishblog.com/blog/hibish/2010/12/16/arabs_and_an...

<quote>
anti-Semitism is not the optimal term for anti-Jewish sentiment, among other things because there are other Semites than Jews, but it is the one we have, and comes with a long history and a well-established meaning. Rather than critiquing the term or coining a neologism to substitute for it, speakers of English should simply understand the term's history and commonly accepted definition and use it accordingly.
</quote>

edit: corrected typos
I grew up in SF, but I've spent a lot of time living in SoCal as well. I can't stand the kneejerk anti-socal mentality you sometimes find up north either (1). It seems to mainly be a mentality of northerners (though when I lived in LA, the LATimes did take the occasional potshot at the "boutique empire of san francisco", some of which were kind of amusing). The whole thing seems to be fading, though. There isn't nearly as much of a north/south gap as there used to be - now, the political rivalries in California tend to be more coastal/insland. Plus, LA has become far more urban in the last 20 years than it used to be.

That said, I think you go too far in attributing this viewpoint to an irrational hatred of socal. I really like LA, and I just don't think you can find an equivalent of LA's beach towns (I'm thinking particularly of Manhattan, Hermosa, Santa Monica, or Venice) in San Francisco (including Santa Cruz, which I also like but has a very different vibe).

You definitely lined up some similar areas. But a mirror image? No way, that's going way too far.

(1) Some of this has its origins in the "water wars" of the mid 1970s.
The Reason The Rich & Famous Commit Suicide
I'd definitely agree that Facebook used to be clean and simple. These days it's too busy, redundant, and disorganized.
Ask HN: I think I've been scammed - what now?
Hey guys, I posted on HN back in August last year asking about meeting potential technical cofounders. After recently moving to San Francisco, I wanted to make a few of the ideas I was thinking about happen. I got a number of emails, including help from HN'er 'mahmud' and eventually partnered with someone. We created a first site www.crushtease.com, which I paid a reasonable sum for 50% equity.

Our product didn't initially go viral, and I mentioned another idea to my cofounder, who thought it was interesting as well. We ended up working on this second project (wikizu.com), while shelving the first project for the time being, identifying a few errors to the concept and presentation. I paid for that, plus some sort of marketing campaign that I knew far too little about.

This was back in November, right before Thanksgiving. From then until now, I have been asking him about the status of Wikizu and he has given me a variety of excuses. I believed them until a few friends started questioning the situation. Today I confronted him about it and he dodged every question I posed.

I suggested he send back the advertising money (which I sent back in November, thinking we were launching very shortly) to prove my friends wrong. He concluded I was being "annoying", said he had work to do, and mentioned contacting a lawyer a few times. I can upload the chat conversation somewhere if anyone wants to read it, but this is pretty much what happened.

I understand that I was horribly naive, and blindly trusted what I was told without really understanding what was going on. I sent money to someone I didn't know simply because we had long IM conversations and he seemed to know what he was talking about. He even made the sites functional with facebook, which I thought meant for sure there was no reason to question him.

I don't know what to do at this point. I'm out a good chunk of change, but I'm also frustrated that I've spent six months waiting around instead of implementing some of my ideas. I even posted on here earlier today asking about doing another project with someone, since I was tired of waiting around.

The alleged scammer posts on HN, and to my knowledge has a minimum of two accounts, one that he has posted as recently as this week on. A google search including his name and "scammer" brings up results, as does one with a pseudonym he uses for various sites. I'm not sure if I should out this information at this time. Any help would be appreciated.
There's a pretty good article here[1] that explains a lot about how Ticketmaster got where they are, and how hard it is to compete against them.

[1]: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/11/mf_ticketmaster/
Status markers are much more complicated than you imagine, and they tend to be extremely expensive to produce. If you think that the govt. could make a status marker that rich people actually care about, you're dreaming.

The finer things in life really are finer, and it becomes nonlinearly more expensive to produce them the finer they are.

A $500 meal at Per Se in NYC isn't just for signalling, if it is at all. It's an extremely memorable experience.
I'm still on the fence about that whole cloud thing, personally.
Someone had shared a public repo with me on Monday. It started 404ing the next day and I had assumed he took it down. I realize now that it must have been this issue. I just checked for it and it is back.
London doesn't allow you to tranfer to another bus with a single ticket? Here in Ottawa busses are $3.25 and about to go up, and I think that's more than fair.

(I suppose pun intended)