skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
to me, an affordable health insurance plan would be between $50-$100 a month.

Fat chance of that happening. And if it did, the deductible would be so high as to make the plan worthless for anything short of a car-crash-emergency-type-situation.

Actually, that's exactly the policy you want as a healthy 26 year old: $5,000 deductible catastrophic coverage, and nothing more. It'll cost you $86 per month from Blue Shield.

Health insurance, in the sense that you see it in group policies from your employer, is not worth the cost if you're buying it yourself. It will be 15 years before you get to the point where a $50 copay and low deductible make sense. Think about it. How often are you at the doctor? Once a year? Once every 3 years? And it costs you a hundred bucks or so. That's not something you need to be insuring yourself against.

The key is to keep a bit of insurance just in case you get in that car crash and need new hip joints, or if you suddenly develop bone cancer and are looking at $10k/month health care bills. Those things are crazy rare, and the policy that protects you against them is priced accordingly.
And that argument is exactly why the comment should be linked here. If the Reddit comment had been a blog post, everything would have been fine, right? I want to see the comment and get to stay here for the conversation.
Yeah, that's true. I think the point of the source is that the first line of defense is with the originator of the code. Sure, the context switch is expensive, but that's the price of higher quality.

It's not really about firing the QA team. Instead, it's about having a QA function that does not entirely relieve the original author of his duty to ensure quality.
I hadn't thought about it, but this is what they should do.
Physicists Discover Quantum Law Of Protein Folding
I do not understand the author's vehement opposition to marketing that encourages parents to take an interest in their children's development. (Actually, I do. Like Amy Chua, she is using the WSJ to promote her book, while she hypocritically condemns toymakers for promoting their work)

Sure, these claims are cheesy and not backed by scientific method; most advertising shares these flaws. But I would rather these toys be marketed by promoting actual meaningful developmental benefits and getting parents thinking, rather than relying on Mickey Mouse's or Dora's face. It is a step in the right direction.

Is the author similarly opposed to foodmakers promoting nutritional benefits? Would she argue that parents should just thoughtlessly feed their kids whatever seems like kid food?

About the stationary trike she resents, I think that is a great toy for a city family that doesn't want Junior triking into the street in front of the apartment. Live and let live.
Software Tools in Pascal. There was a previous version with examples written in something called Ratfor, which from what I've read is a hybrid of fortran and C.
http://www.amazon.com/Software-Tools-Pascal-Brian-Kernighan/...
Why ask them? Just price the Apple-payment-system version 30% higher than your own and let customers see the difference.
Please review my startup: IS2Monitor
Hello guys and girls from HN community!

We are looking for feedback about our startup http://is2monitor.com - this is web site monitoring service.

We know there are many similar solutions but our service is simple that's why not expensive and has satellite iPhone application.

Future development plans include Android application and some specific offers for blog owners and hosting companies. Do you think it may be interesting for someone?
Steve Jobs Email Suggests In-App Subscriptions Don't Apply to SaaS?
This question belongs to StackOverflow.com
Lenovo trots out new ThinkPad T, L, and W series laptops | HiTechPedia.com
"First, the analysis does not pertain to a nationally representative sample of schools, as the sample is derived from the 27 colleges and universities in the C&B dataset, the majority of which are very selective."

The schools are listed in footnotes on pages 8 and 9, and the ones that don't qualify as "elite" aren't exactly shabby either.
Have you ever asked yourself why you're in business?
We have copies on local machines too.
enumeration type?
For the non-web (and sometimes even for the web) programmer, strace can be a real life saver.

An application complains about not being able to find a file, but doesn't report where it looked for it? strace can tell.

Do you want to know why a system call failed, and the app is too crappy to report the error? strace to the rescue!

Of course, if you're lucky you might even have access to dtrace...
Ah,

And then every ISP will demand a cut of every sale that happens on the Internet part of their network. Finally, the telecos implement some good natural language processing and demand a cut of every sale you negotiate over their voice network...

...Their network, their rules...

... that will work well till the Oxygen cartel starts making demands....
You can't do this. Apple states you must price it the same.
That's like not keeping a multitool at home. I can go on and on about weird problems emacs's has saved me from.

But sure, google a solution, download and compile it, then learn it and fix your problem...

I'll just emacs's ;)
Wasn't that the financial industry again? VCs and IPO backers and share prices?
Feynman's essay is describing a QA team, is it not?
Peopleware has a chapter about "the black team" that was at IBM. The chapter is about team work but they describe how in the process of gelling the QA team delighted in finding programmer bugs. They describe how creation of a reputation and ethos in the black team not only made them a little better than other QA teams but significantly better.

While it's easy to say that QA isn't important many of the QA teams I've worked with weren't respected or valued, and often saw QA as a stepping stone. If you want to increase the quality of the code, don't fire the QA team, motivate them.
Pylons perhaps should be "Pylons or Pyramid": http://docs.pylonsproject.org/#faq

I use Pylons because I love not having design decisions about my application fixed ahead of time. I like being able to swap out the template language if I want, structure my directories in whatever way makes sense to me, and be free to use another ORM or whatever else makes sense to back my model.

I've previously used Symfony, Rails and Django and I always found that a) a lot of things were provided that I didn't need, and in some case these things interfered with my use case or required extra effort to circumvent, and b) in general, some decision had been made by a dev that went against the way I work.

Pylons is basically glue code bringing together a bunch of independent packages providing different pieces of a functional web app. To me, this approach works well, as the framework code is lightweight and stays out of my way.
Ternyata Kalau Berhenti Merokok Itu Berbahaya gan
Yeah, I agree, please add Flask to this list.
I'm really surprised: this is what I've always been taught to call bad revenue.

Interesting. Do you mean it is more like a move to squeeze the last available dollar out of an existing business rather than a move to grow a business?
> I flagged the story.

Thanks!

In terms of actual data, I believe that countries like Germany have more small businesses than in the US, so I think that, at the margin, health care probably is important to potential founders. I know it's one reason against moving back to the US for me, although probably not the deciding one for or against.
10 Extremely Useful iPhone Apps for Weather
I was also thinking about something similar. If users find your service on your website, you should encourage them to subscribe through it, no through in-app purchase. I think all app developers should educate people about that, so the number of in-app purchases will be as low as possible, so the apple cut of all sales will not be 30%, but less.
The HN crowd might be turned off, but they have six or seven digits of apps in the app store.
Do you think that your unpleasant situation is attributable to QA being an unhelpful discipline, or to a particular person performing poorly in their QA role?
Hey nhebb, Joseph here, co-founder of HelloFax. Check out the third option for signing, which is taking a picture of your signature and emailing it to sign@hellofax.com. Then, we automatically place it on top of your document. That skips the scanner :)
Actually, the whole U-verse system is running off of Microsoft Mediaroom 2.
You got me at the House reference. Good one.
Why It Counts to Think About The Big Business Ideas of The Future
Apple does not allow that.
This mostly-web programmer finds strace and (more often) ngrep (http://linux.die.net/man/8/ngrep) to be some of the most useful tools out there for debugging errors both strange and mundane.
I would love for you to rewrite the Instrumental Variable Wikipedia page's intro to make it comprehensible.
Ask HN: Please rate my startup
Hello list,

Together with a friend we have started an online accommodation market for Indonesia for end users, home owners and real estate agents which is free to use for all [1]. The site is in pre-launch status, hence all data is from syndication.

I'm looking very much forward to your comments!

Regards,
George

[1] English:
http://en.bazarooma.com

[1] Indonesian:
http://bazarooma.com
In Canada the company in the west that's running this is Telus and they have the exact same issue. Originally they were offering it with the 15mb and 19mb ADSL 2+ profiles with a Thomson Speedtouch modem and a D-Link gateway or you could substitute your own router. When they moved to the VDSL2 profiles they started using the Actiontec VDSL modem/router combo which is a requirement.

There's no way to turn bridge mode on and the best you can do is turn on the DMZ and run your own router out of that. However, you're then double NAT'd which possibly could slow your connection down and it also allows the ISP to have a direct line into your personal network with wich they can mess any settings.

The main complaint is that the ISPs used to just own the line form the node to your modem and now they are DEMANDING to control your internal network as well which is a fucking joke.
Thanks, very helpful.

I've done web development, database design & reporting, email marketing, and a brief stint at a small bond fund, but the only thing I really enjoyed was web development, so focusing back on that now.
> XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear.

Yes, that's true, as stated in http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-xml-20081126/#sec-origin-goals. Nevertheless, I stand by my point that human readability does not necessarily imply easy human comprehension. For that matter I believe that the working group introduces that design goal to ease problem tracking and not to imply that xml is suitable for human to human communication (which imho should be the main design goal of computer languages). I have great respect for your mental abilities but for me its difficult to understand larger ant scripts as xml is a data container and not a control flow language.
Enigma Simulation
Sure that would cover 1% of the reasons I have to fax. Normally I am dealing with someone like a real estate agent or a government department or something I have to have witnessed etc I can't do that.
Investment Bankers get a couple percent and a bit of cash. 10-15% is way too high. Maybe 5% if you you think he could make it happen and you couldn't.

This guy is probably full of it though. The expression goes "Companies are not sold, they are bought." If you haven't even been contacted by potential acquirers it's unlikely any would want to buy you. Make sure you don't owe this guy anything unless there's a successful acquisition AND he introduced you to the buyer. Put a term limit on this agreement, like 6 months.
In the past five years, Ivy League schools have massively increased financial aid to make tuition negligible for students of median (or lower) income families in the USA.

There will always be a "legacy super class" contingent, and much has been written about why this is good overall (1. it helps the school stay funded; 2. it is good for morale to have the bottom quartile of GPA be filled with people who are happy there), but elite schools are not exclusivly upper-class in this century.

Also, it is worth noting that Ivy League schools go to extreme efforts to democratize and "socialismise" their student bodies, through dormitory and dining and academic arrangements, much more deeply and intentionally than public schools.
And on the opposite end of the spectrum, you can find: http://githubissues.heroku.com/
I just realized it could be great if stackoverflow.com would integrate with this site's API, so web development questions would get a better platform for posting the "code/markup in question" and getting answers that way as well.
Second most popular article in CNN's "Tech" category, at the time of posting.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/social.media/02/21/facebook.rel...

Wow, what a quick way to get your name out there... Congrats OP.
We started using JIRA this year after using unfuddle and pivotal tracker. The ability to have issue and story tracking in one place has been great. Greenhopper is really nice, since we now have much more visibility across the teams; testing, product, ops, engineering.

It does take time to get setup to fit your organization but it has been worth it.
We use Indefero http://www.indefero.net It is both offered as free software (GPL) and you have hosting options. A bit like WordPress.
Thanks, asked on Quora.
Wolframalpha is nice, but doesn't use natural language/machine learning, it follows certain syntaxes. I personally have had a <30% success rate with it.
Not sure if trolling..
With desktop applications you can use the same language/code on both the client and the server side. That did not lead to decentralization. Well, that isn't cross platform you might say. However, Java mostly covers that and still it did not happen. There are also numerous tools that allow you to write in one language (Java with GWT, some lisp one I cannot name) that runs on the server side that automatically generates equivalent javascript for the client.

There is no reason (and you provide no argument) that using the same code on the client/server results in decentralization. Furthermore, we have the fact that it already exists and still did not lead to decentralization.
Why PHP is better than Ruby
Engineers solve problems. Why shouldn't they be able to solve a problem like recruiting?

that sounds a bit over-confident, eh? i read that as, "Engineers solve problems. Why shouldn't they be able to solve a problem like X?" where X has nothing to do with their training or specialty.
Really one of the most useful startups I've seen in a while. I would definitely use their service.. but, unfortunately, I usually need to send faxes to non-US numbers and that is, at this moment, still not supported.
Still, great job, you guys, I wish you all the luck!
> Did you forgot about the dot-com bubble when the tech industry was the one guilty of being over-rewarded for what was often was no value (pet.com)?

You forget that while tech entrepreneurs made some money in dot-com IPOs, the financial industry made an absolute killing.

You also seem to imply that everyone is rewarded according to the value they add, leaving out the possibility that a group of people get together and form a de facto monopoly, which is somewhat reminiscent of the big players in the IPO industry.
Or $50-100 change fees.
You also owe it to yourself to learn the newer techniques.

The article is true and useful and contains many good pointers, but my god is it annoying when you either misunderstand the concept or take it too far. This kind of rot sets in when you refuse to use a tool or technique for no good reason.

Maybe this is a function of age or, more precisely, maturity level: Young people use bad tools to be 'hardcore', old people use bad tools because they stop learning new ones. Either way, the image I immediately dredge up when someone says 'old-school' in this context is someone writing a program using a machine code debugger instead of getting a decent text editor and development tools. Unless you can actually tell the difference in the resulting output, and I guarantee you almost certainly can't when it's assembler vs debugger, use the best (most likely, newest) tools you can get.

(The above doesn't apply to people doing things a certain way for fun. Heck, I run obsolete OSes on emulated hardware for fun. I just don't confuse that with reality.)
Flagged for being vacuous. The author is misusing a word as an excuse to claim everyone is making false assertions about referents they didn't even have in mind. Technology is the study of tools and techniques, not anything else ("dehumanization"? seriously?) on his laundry list.
http://www.google.co.uk/#q=%22enumeration+type%22

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enumerated_type

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming/Types/Enumerati...

In essence, an "enumerated type" is a collection of uninterpreted values. You can assign them to variables, you can compare them to each other, but they have no intrinsic structure. Unlike ints you can't add or multiply, unlike strings you can't concatenate or search for substrings.

Hence the observation that symbols are not strings, but are elements of an infinite enumerated type. You can only refer to them, copy them, assign them, and compare them. They are atomic.

No disrespect intended - different people have different backgrounds, and I know some very fine coders who don't know this sort of thing - but this is very, very elementary CS material, and easily found with a Google search. You may find it interesting to learn more about these sorts of basics. Although it often doesn't help directly, it can provide useful insights to have different points of view and points of reference.
Nicely written, and an important point. Technologies are developed by people to make something easier or to make something harder (or some combination of the two). This is never going to be value neutral.

Developing weapons technology is making killing easier. Developing communications technologies is making communications easier. Developing systems that collect personal data is making surveillance easier. All technology choices are value choices.
360 Health: How Do I Get Rid Of Acne Naturally?
Thanks!

MongoDB and Python coolness, mixed with some Google Closure. =)
Fruitless search
Wine Ship to PA and Wine Ship to Georgia
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Steve's very short reply is: "We created subscriptions for publishing apps, not SaaS apps."
non-LISP derived?

There's no difference between code and data in assembly language, but it's not LISP derived.

Having no distinction between code and data isn't a LISP invention, it's the 'default' on computers.
I can't see that anything specific about the correlation is implied.

And why not care now? Which is worse - to care too late, or to not care at all?
Not true: the former border police (Bundesgrenzschutz, parent organization to the famous GSG 9) has been officially the Bundespolizeit (federal police) since 2005, and there has always (well, since the 1951) been a federal investigation agency (Bundeskriminalamt). Most claims of police violence are actually against the Bereitschaftspolizei (riot police units, exist both at state and federal level), which is not surprising since they are deployed (and trained) mainly for potentially violent situations.
It will be great if someone from Apple officially confirms that the IAP subscription policy will not apply to SaaS. It will also be interesting to see whether they provide clear definitions for what they consider as SaaS.

In general, the mandatory subscription policy was a bad idea - for SaaS it is an even worse idea.

I think that Apple will ultimately back down from this policy (not just for SaaS, but for all apps) - partly because of DOJ concerns (antitrust regulators are looking at the policy as per the NYT) and also because they will lose a lot of apps from companies ranging from Rhapsody to Netflix.

Losing the "there is an app for that" slogan will be a huge loss to Apple and someone at the company is bound to realize that.
I'm just going to leave this here...
Why you should learn brainfuck (or: learn you a brainfuck for great good)
Reflections on Qt, Nokia and what it takes to succeed in smartphones
What about SaaS apps that serve up content as part of their service? It starts to get gray at some point.
Lighthouse along with github's service hook has been great for me so far on a personal project.

On a related note, why can't we have public bug tracking on a private repo on github? This was the primary reason I went with Lighthouse.
I agree with your main point, I think, but c and pi are different. c has a unit and so can take any numerical value under a compensating choice of units.
Pi is unitless, however, and cannot be defined as any other value.

C and pi are similar also: c would be different, if the universe's geometry where scaled differently, even if meters and seconds were unchanged in transition to the alternate universe (assuming one can formalize what I am saying in a sensible way). Likewise, pi (circumference divided by diameter) would take a different value (or not even be a constant) in an alternate (non-Euclidean) geometry (assuming that a circle could still be defined there, which is more obviously possible than the c/spacetime hypothetical)
The Dreaded Smartphone
Looking forward to that. In the meanwhile I find Redmine absolutely wonderful after I've configured it after our needs and process.
Marco didn't mention the possibility that more people would begin to jailbreak their phones and use Cydia or another site, where Apple can't control the applications on offer. Am I underestimating the difficulty of jailbreaking an iPhone and setting that up?
You do realize how terrible that idea is right? We'd see the rates of antibiotic resistant bacteria go through the roof in the first week.
I have read it, but evidently I'm misunderstanding something, either in the parent post or the PEP. Would you care to be a bit more explicit in pointing it out?
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Also, you'd have to increase the price by 43% to account for Apple's cut.
I went down this path myself, the company I was with in California went under and I had ended up consulting, COBRA runs out after 6 mos so I decided to buy some health insurance and I got denied. The reason being that years previously I had "asked" a consultant about a procedure that I never actually went ahead with and that was in my records which they dug up.

I moved back to the UK and now enjoy the wonders of the NHS and this was one of the biggest reasons I left since I really didn't want to lose my house to pay medical bills if I got seriously ill.
It all seems very subjective at this point doesn't it? What's the difference here exactly? If you're selling your content then you pay, if you're moving data around you don't?

On top of that I'd be HUGELY nervous if I was a SAAS provider that Apple might change their mind... they've done it before.
The code highlighting and indentation is pretty good. Sure beats Stack Overflow's editing experience
1. How many people do you know that bought a Nook?

2. [reply with numbers and context]

3. [downvoted]
Sure there is, as long as the reciever can give instructions to the sender. It wouldn't be too hard to OCR a customer number.

Or, more likely, very short term number rental. Pay $1.95 to be able to recieve faxes on a particular number for a period of an hour.