skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know exactly how it works, but I had an uncle who had a large boat, and was short around $10,000 on a bill to the yard it was located in. The boat was worth around $80,000. He couldn't pay the last bit of the bill (well, $10k worth) and the yard foreclosed on his boat. It ended up being sold for around $40k. I'm not sure if the yard got its $10k and my uncle got $30k, or if the yard got $40k and he got 0.

I do know that my (other) uncle owns a car repair business and has the towing contract for the town police department. Whenever they tow abandoned cars, he charges a daily rate. If no one steps forward to pay the bill, at some point he can get the title for the car and own it. You would think people would claim their cars, but in a lot of situations there is evidence in the car (drugs, guns, etc) that the police take and then he ends up with a car on his lot nobody wants to claim. Six months later, he forecloses on it and ends up owning a car. Sometimes it can be a really nice car too.

So foreclosures/seizures/liens are not always banks evicting families that are late on their mortgage, I just don't understand all the details.
Me neither, but he made a point!

"Readability’s business model is to charge a subscription fee, keep 30 percent, and pass 70 percent along to the writers/publishers of the articles being read by Readability users. Sound familiar?"
I wonder what percentage of the companies surveyed plan to employ R&D employees directly. Were Boeing's problems due to offshoring or outsourcing?
Worms have emerged, so I'm leaving well enough alone.
I'm all for it but please replace 'programming interview' with 'a job as a programmer'.

Edit for clarity: I'm not sure interviews are the ideal test-case for programming performance and thus I'm not sure it makes sense to prepare students for that.

Along the same lines I wouldn't agree with professors preparing their students for the GRE because that has little real-world relevance.
We prefer this method of buying software compared to pesky license keys for a couple of reasons. First of all it reduces piracy, you don’t get many people sharing their login details to an online service.

I thought that the version of in-app purchases that's dependent on a back-end server hasn't yet been hacked.
The article is clearly marked as an op-ed piece. Obviously the person who wrote it has an opinion and a call to action, else he/she would not have written the article.

Edit: Downvotes? Really?
I left the Army where I had free healthcare for me and my family - I got spoiled. I really can't afford it now that I'm out and not with a big company. I've thought of going into the Reserves just to have the option to buy it again.

Healthcare really does suck.
> That makes it a political article.

Expressing political opinions has been the entire point of the New York Times’s op-ed page for 40 years. What did you expect?
> R&D is not a zero sum game like manufacturing. With manufacturing there is only so much demand for the manufactured goods; only so much material with which to make the goods etc.

The material wasn't really a problem in most industries since early 1950s. The demand is also permanently growing, with population levels increasing, wealth being created etc.

R&D however always follows manufacturing, it's just the nature of their relationship. It can not last long in ivory tower, no matter what politicians tell.
> these guys claiming to be surprised and disappointed by Apple’s insistence on a 30 percent cut of subscriptions...

They're surprised by the language Apple used, not Apple's insistence. But I guess being accurate would make for a less sensational blog post.

>And how can they claim that Readability isn’t “serving up content”? That’s exactly what Readability does.

It doesn't serve up unique content, and it doesn't serve up its own content (eg NY Times, USA Today). In that sense, it doesn't serve up content. But I guess not saying that would result in a less-sensational blog post.

> Readability needs Apple to publish an app in the App Store. Apple doesn’t need Readability.

They don't need Readability. But they do need TinyGrab, Readability, et al. But I guess not making broad generalizations wouldn't make for a sensational blog post.
A TFAer Speaks Out in Philadelphia
I find that if the article slants one way, it can be the third cousin of a long-distant relative who knew Bill Gates and suddenly it's something hackers are direly interested in. If it slants another, it can be study of small startups and the economic principles that drive success or failure using a double-blind study and suddenly it's too political for us to touch.

For me, the best metric is just looking at what kind of discussion the article brings. If the discussion is full of "me too!" and emotional rants, lots of vindictive voting up or down, it's probably a bad idea, politics or not. If folks can maintain their composure, difficult subjects are a lot more rewarding to talk about than Erlang Innards because they challenge us to be civil and reach middle ground. But somehow I doubt health insurance -- yet again -- is going to be like that today. Hopefully I'm wrong.
I suggest rereading "The Scorpion and the Frog" as well as "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish."
That's not true. Before you rent a car, you sign a long contract agreeing to all the various restrictions. When you buy software, you typically don't agree to anything until you run the software. At that point, you already own the software, and as far as I know, no court has held that you must abide by the license in order to use the software.
This is just an example of a corporation shoring its bets. If it ever chooses to go in this direction it had better have a patent, and even then, 4 companies will sue Apple for having a similar idea that they patented. Just one example of how a corp is to function when the patent system is completely broken.
Bad analogy (on the author's part re: surgeons). That example is precisely like the oral portion of board exams for specialties that have them. When you hire a board-certified surgeon, they have already demonstrated the ability to jump through this (important) hoop.
It's not the difference between a family and a company, its the size of the group. Thus the costs for a company with 10,000 people is far different than a company with 10.

Also, if you have a group of 2,5,10 or 20, the insurance company has an easier time denying you because if you get pissed and drop them, its not a big loss for them. In contrast, if you deny the right person at a 10,000 person company, they lose a big account.
Plan to bring UK clocks forward
A two-person group is not going to fare much better than an individual plan, and I'm not so sure that there are that many companies that accept two-person groups anyway.
This looks like a good resource--thanks for that.

Right now my current location is Monterrey, Mexico, so again, doctor visits are cheaper to simply pay out of pocket. As an example, my uninsured girlfriend had to visit a doctor last week--a walk in appointment at the major Monterrey hospital plus lab test, technician, and prescription medication: 800 pesos, or about $66. And this is in a modern hospital in the most expensive city in Mexico.
If you ever want Gruber's take on an Apple controversy, Fake Steve let him guest post. Copy/paste for whatever controversy you may encounter: http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/05/guest-blogger-john-gruber.h...
Sharding: "We just take the modulo of the owning user's ID against the number of nodes we have to decide which node to read/write from/to."

What's your procedure for adding new nodes to increase capacity? Would you have to take your redis cluster offline to redistribute data from all nodes over the new keyspace?

I like the simplicity of your approach, but wonder if consistent hashing might be a bigger win in the long run.
"War on Drugs nor a meth problem"

You say that as if the first does not cause the second. America's 'war on drugs' is the cause of the problems, not an excuse.
As Ruby instance variables are private, you need a getter to read them. Doing it this way (making everything private, but giving you simple methods for creating getters and setters) gives you the best of both worlds: Encapsulation and simple and concise code. attr_accessor simply creates the boilerplate code you would write yourself or use an IDE for in other languages. If you want to change a getter, just write a new method with the name of the variable and do whatever you want. This makes it easy to change your class logic later, but won't fill your classes with generic getter/setter code.
I'm reasonably sure that Google doesn't index punctuation marks.
It seemed to work for me. Either they pulled another "bad" font, or a recent Ubuntu update (according to the Google bug it's a pango update) fixed the root cause.
I'm well aware of this, in fact I made the exact same point higher up in this discussion, but as much as I love politics (and thats not sarcasm, I'm probably even more into politics than technology, I've actively campaigned, gone on TV & radio for interviews about politics etc) this is not a site I come to for politics.
>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.

This fits a fair number of cost complaints I hear over healthcare. Who wouldn't like to pay $50-100/month to have something better than emergency healthcare support? But think about the costs of such a system, regardless of inefficiencies / the problems of the current system that make things cost hundreds of thousands:

Doctors and nurses and supporting staff must exist. So must hospitals. They are highly trained, and will be expensive - period. They also have to keep learning, so they can't be busy making money all the time. And they must have such people available all the time, or people die.

Given that, and the equipment and check-up and hospital time, how much should a minor surgery cost? Not in cost to you, in cost. If the cost to you is mitigated in any way, it's extracted another way (taxes). I'd have trouble seeing it cost less than a few thousand dollars in the best, highly-used system. That's a lot of training and a lot of supporting necessities for any random surgery.

At $50-100/month, they would have to sap you for nearly a decade to make up a single surgery. It might even out for the insurance company if that was it - but certainly not when you get older, and not with any kind of routine, preventative care. Scale that up to emergency situations where major surgery and years of rehab for even 0.1% of the people they're covering - how many hundreds of years does that cost everyone on the plan?

Cataclysmic health insurance is cheap because it only covers cataclysms. Because one in a hundred lives cost an utterly enormous amount more than a single person generates.

---

None of this is to say that I think the healthcare system is efficient by any means, nor not full of corruption, waste, frivolous lawsuits, or damaging dogma. Merely that there is simply a bottom limit that the prices that people want to pay will never be able to support, unless all cataclysmic protection is dropped. And would you rather die from a car crash, or be rehab'd for a couple years and continue your life for another 60 years? So people choose the cataclysmic protection, and prices jump.

---

edit: because this seems it will come up often, some evidence for my claim based on Canada's setup, copied from another comment I made below: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Canada

>In 2009, the government funded about 70% of Canadians' health care costs.

>Per capita expenditure in 2009: 3,895

$227 per month, per person, comes from the government, which means it comes from taxes. And an additional $100 per person is spent per month on average ($324.58 per month). Far in excess of $50-$100.
The server is being hammered pretty hard at the moment. It's taken on 30-40 simultaneous users before, and worked without a glitch. Now it's around 50, and a few seem to be going beyond the normal update rate.

At some point I will have to enforce a harder rate limit, and/or build better spam protection. The app has been pretty much unused for the last 5 months though, so there hasn't been any real reason to focus on that part :)
If the insurance company suspects that you've done something like this, they will wait until you need to claim (so they can take in the premiums) and then deny a payout on the basis that you formed a company purely to get round having been denied insurance. Every day, insurance companies look for ways to deny payouts, and they've thought of this one.
You need an intro to get a deferred fee deal. You can't just contact people cold.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - the MA health care law ("RomneyCare", which is functionally very similar to "ObamaCare") is really what let me start a startup - the money wasn't the issue, but the ability to get an individual policy at a reasonable (not at all subsidized, just group-negotiated) rate was.
If you are inclined to move somewhere else, there are lots of countries with affordable healthcare (most of Europe, and I guess Canada for example).
Firefox 3.6.13 on Ubuntu massacres the typography (at least with my DPI/hinting/smoothing settings). The lowercase letters are not uniform in height. Chrome looks much better.
I am, the problem is that my wife isn't...yet. I'm working on it for sure.
Or, perhaps, they don't buy 'em when they make 'em like they used to. (Or, they don't publish 'em when they make 'em like they used to?)

Fortunately, the popularity of simple indie games is waxing.

A golden opportunity for these sorts of things currently exists on mobile platforms, Android/iOS, before big-budgets conquer the market. The dearth of even passably good Android games surprises me.
I'd love to make the introduction for you. The guy who runs The Collide Factory has great vision. Interview: http://vimeo.com/19892444
No, that wouldn't harm your application. We often fund people who already have C corps.
It's a big factor for many people in deciding whether they want to quit their cube jobs that keep them insured to strike out on their own.

And I think that's total bullshit and people who don't want to strike out won't and will find lots of reasons not to, while people who want to strike out will, and figure out how to make it work.

Kind of takes us to a rhetorical dead end, since we're both wildly speculating about what some imaginary people we dream up might or might not do. All we're really doing is inventing examples to support opinions that we've already decided to hold.

Look -- I think health insurance needs fixing. I also think the current solution is so bad we should fire every Congressman who voted for it and run them out of town on a rail. I further believe that if two reasonable people sat down, they'd find that most of us really aren't that far apart on the issues. But this looks like picking a fight. For no reason.
Well, Mitnick was kept in solitary because they were afraid he could start a nuclear exchange if given access to a phone. I think a bit of paranoia is common procedure for hackers because what they do seems like magic to most people.

As for the taxes, that's entirely dependent on your behavior. There have definitely been stand-offs between tax protesters and armed law enforcement personnel.
I'm an example -- I have private health insurance out of necessity. It was an arduous process, and I'm lucky to have managed to get it -- even though I'm healthy. If I had so much as one serious problem, I'm convinced I would have been turned down.

It is broken. Seriously broken.
This blog entry reminded me of Martin Fowler's Semantic Diffusion and Flaccid Scrum discussions:
http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/SemanticDiffusion.html
http://martinfowler.com/bliki/FlaccidScrum.html
Great story, but I wonder if this is a situation where you 'only hear about the winners'? I'd love to know if anyone has tried something similar on eBay? I suppose the question is this: is eBay really a good market for fledging startups looking to liquidize or was this story one of those million-dollar homepage things?
» Geohot plans to hack Sony Xperia Play (aka PlayStation Phone)
Would you be willing to add another event? http://ftlhackandtell.eventbrite.com/
> Apple's only control of the hardware is how you use it via their software. The hardware is not sold to you under the provision that you must only use Apple's software with it.

You have to jailbreak an iPhone to install other software, or so claims PC World. That's definitely a technical barrier, just like I explained. And a legal one, with the DMCA "trafficking" problem. Having established that their opposition is not merely passive, your complaint rings hollow, unless when you said that, you were trying to say that they were less than upfront about disclosing the restrictions?

No link will be given to those instructions. They're incredibly easy to find, but I don't want to run afoul of the nebulous contributory infringement claims like "inducement." My recommendation is for people like me with a problem with this to avoid buying the products to begin with. It's the approach I have selected.
Autorun bad and all, but Windows was pretty obviously a huge win as a productivity multiplier. I'd be kind of surprised if Windows hasn't done more for GDP[1] than Walmart.

Practically any commercial software package ever sold probably had a greater positive effect on the world than pre 19## medicine. This will hold more strongly for shrinkwrap software that stays around long enough for the company producing it to build a rep.

[1]Or total world utility/happiness, if we could measure that
I haven't done games before, but lately I've had the urge to do the same. How badass would a Zelda clone be to make? Sadly I have no time to invest.
Wow, this looks super useful. Thanks a lot!
All good points, but the fact remains that at my income, it simply doesn't make financial sense for me to be insured. If I must declare bankruptcy in case of cataclysm, then the system just lost much more money than they would have were I paying an affordable (sliding?) amount per month over my lifespan.

Anyway, this isn't the place to get in a discussion about how to fix the system. But as it stands now, it's just a fact that my bank account is better served by not being insured, having minor procedures done in another country, and declaring bankruptcy in the event of a cataclysm. That's not what the system in the richest and most powerful country in the world should look like.
Stress reduction? I have a novel idea for stress reduction: Stop stressing. Are you going to die tomorrow? No? Then settle down and stop worrying.

I tell this to everyone I know who "suffers" from stress, and I get some variation on the same response, "it's not that easy for me".

Actually, it is easy. It's 2011. Predators aren't chasing you across the savannah. You're not more than 3 days away from a source of potable water. You're not more than 7 days away from safe, nutritious, calorie dense food. You aren't in immediate danger of being washed away in a flood or dying of heatstroke in the desert or freezing to death.

Realize that your "stress" is so far removed from its genetic origins as to be laughable, realize how good you really have it, and enjoy life.
Everything on this list is harmless. You're taking it way too seriously.

He's just saying that a good way out of a rut is to "mix it up" a little, do things you don't usually do. It's good advice, and can make stressful things not seem so important and final.
Interview with IMVU: The Startup Dashboard
شبكة مجالسبللحمر
http://www.q-ballahmar.com/vb/external.php?type=rss2
"Group of 2" in California can be husband and wife. (We did this, because the plans are better, the rates are better, and they can't limit you based on pre-existing conditions.) Just make a partnership and pay the state taxes annually (ugh).
Deal With Negative Online Sentiment About Your Brand
Comprehensive Comparison of iPhone Notes Apps
Would you have them continue to use their time developing for the iOS platform despite the changes being accepted or rejected is a function of who they get to review their application and how strictly they follow their own rules? Didn't Apple post the guidelines to avoid this exact situation?

And what if they are small? How many companies had a large user-base from the beginning? Also, while small companies may not be of much interest to the readers of HN, they make up a decent chunk of the world's economy.

Honestly, it feels like they are trying to add to the pressure on Apple to drop this ridiculous cash-grab. If in the process they get some free publicity, all the better for them.
"Spot on"
This is one of the few blatantly political articles I've upvoted here. Healthcare in the US is broken, and this article points out one of the big reasons why.
What is PBL? I'm guessing "problem-based learning"?
I would have died at the age of 19 if it weren't for the help of the UK's National Health Service. My parents and I didn't have to worry about hospital bills, future insurance issues, being tied to a job, any of that crap. Just get some rest, get better, go out there and be productive again. The American system looks like a horrible joke from over here. I just can't understand any of it.
I'm 28 in Florida. I have a very decent plan for $75 a month. I have to pay for office vists (tho I am reimbused $50 for each one, they're usually around $125 or so) but i have a very low deductible that will cover me for any major illness or accident, and even for services beyond my coverage I get the benefit of the lower negotiated insurance company rates.

You can see these plans for yourself by checking our Blue Cross or Humana in Florida, among others.
3DS version of Ocarina is coming out soon:
http://www.joystiq.com/2011/01/20/the-legend-of-zelda-ocarin...
Why use --firehose instead of the more-standard -v/vv/vvv way?
I just did a round of interviews in San Francisco. Some were agile and executed it very well. Others were agile but said things like:

"yeah, we only pair if one person is new or you are re-architecturing something"

"we like to keep our iterations a bit longer so we have time to write the tests at the end"

"we have found tests take too long to write..."
+1

I bought my phone because I could use Rhapsody (replaced by Mog), Pandora, and other subscription applications. I'm also the exact type of customer who doesn't blink at spending 5 dollars at an application. Why would Apple drive off its most lucrative customers for a relatively small piece of the pie?
So true. There was another article on HN about the Danish welfare system and how it encourages people to go out on their own and take business risks because basic things like healthcare isn't out of reach.
I believe it meant that his insurance premiums were doubling due to a (new?) requirement that his house have $1mil insurance.

I admit the article is incredibly unclear, but I don't see how an increase in mortgage rate would result in increased insurance premiums.