skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You heard the man! Get on it!! (Though, I don't know how we'll collect confirmations to a free event. You know how Hack and Tell went last time.)
I could be wrong on the exact dates, but I'm quite certain it wasn't widespread. I didn't see it until the early 2000's.

Regardless, you certainly didn't do it in 1986 (which is jbooth's timeline).
> "Break a leg? Probably not a big deal. Get cancer? Better look out."

This is a horrifying, inhumane, uncivilized concept. Why the American public simply accepts this is mind-boggling.
Unless it is a small project and works without a dataceter the sourcecode itself is useless.
Yet, so many people believe that there is actually any (usable) value in the source code alone.

I flunked (thank god) an interview with a company once that ended up going belly up.
The capital came from angel investors (mostly lawyers). When they ran out of money they locked everybody out of the premises (even though all their stuff was still in the building) for the fear somebody would take the source. This was 6 or 7 years ago.. To this date these lawyers still sit on their precious source code.
Speaking of paid email services, there's no way to subscribe to Mobile Me with an in-app purchase. If Apple cared about fairly enforcing the rules, they'd yank iDisk and Find My iPhone until in-app subscription to Mobile Me was added.
I think he is paying Mechanical Turkers to look up the prices.

But it's suspicious that AA is missing, who is also not listed on many search sites.

(But in general, Southwest is often not the cheapest fare. They do have cheap fares, but if some other airline wants its market, it can use its high-profit routes where Southwest does not fly to subsidize its low-profit routes where Southwest does fly. Southwest is 50% advertising and 50% good customer service, where the other airlines are 100% "revenue management". Both models seem to be working.)
I'm kinda wondering if YCombinator or one of the other incubators could do something like that. For me, a major reason why I'm not doing a startup now is that I'm not sure I could get health insurance. My last startup was done in Massachusetts when I was 25, so it was no problem to get an individual high-deductible policy. I'm not sure I could do the same thing in California, now that I'm pushing 30.
Ask HN: Will Apple sub fees apply to in app payments?
I'm working on an app that will allow users to charge fees for the services they provide to each other. Is Apple likely to want a cut of this type of transaction also? I'm assuming that it will.
Because "firehose" is what Twitter calls it?
That sounds incredibly selfish.

This is what will actually happen if you get sick enough that your family loses everything: you will go to a hospital, you will get covered by the hospital because you can't be denied for lack of insurance coverage, and then the hospital will never recoup its expenses.

Of course this also means you will have bankrupted your family.

Why?
See also Feynman on "Why?" questions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM&t=28s
This works as long as your developers are talented in QA and are motivated to do it. That sounds like it requires a lucky constellation of events.
You need to stop ignoring the massive amount of lies and fraud that was going on. Entire companies knew they were dealing with fraudulent/extremely risky transactions, yet no one wanted to be the one that stopped the buck. Not even ratings agencies, who's job it was to oversee the quality of these investments piped up when they knew that what they were rating as AAA was really garbage.

One example:

http://www.businessinsider.com/embarrassing-wall-street-emai...

That was about a 1.5 years before the $%$% really hit the fan. There are other e-mails floating around with investment brokers gloating about selling off "pieces of $%$@" to people. They knew what they were doing & profited handsomely from it, they have yet to really pay any price for it.
This is awesome - at work, we didn't have any PC drivers for Kinect either (and we weren't allowed to use the OSS driver), we actually had to resort to rigging up an Xbox Dev kit whose sole job was to dump out the Kinect data over UDP to a PC.
I wonder how these prices change over time. e.g. are tickets for travel in February cheapest if bought in July?
Journalist TR Reid had doctors in a variety of countries (U.S., France, Germany, Japan, England and India) take a look at a shoulder injury he had and wrote about the results: http://www.amazon.com/Healing-America-Global-Better-Cheaper/...
Apple, I bought an iPad because I could watch movies in Netflix and read bookmarks in Instapaper, news in Reeder, and books in Kindle. Please send each $37.50 (30% of the iPad sale shared four ways) to each developer for bringing you a customer.

Or, optionally, stop acting like you, as a middle man, provides more added value than the developers that make your platform so damn profitable.

P.S. WebOS still looks pretty damn nice.
What's a fax? Wasn't that my grandmother's email provider or something?
Yes! That is exactly the kind of bullshit that made me write this.
Congrats guys - huge moment and just a sign of bigger things to come
If it's not repealed first. I believe that's what this article's addressing - she's trying to educate people enough that they will not support a repeal of Obamacare.
I think that you're mis-interpreting the statement. He's not stating that he doesn't believe in morality. He's stating that he doesn't fully buy this concept of "morally wrong." I.e. He's doesn't believe in the same ideas as the poster he was replying to.
Would you guys be really happy to make $258K from a startup sale? I don't think I would be that excited. Once you subtract all the fees, taxes, investors share, you're left with maybe $150K. Then you split it among team members, and you end up with something you can make doing a regular job in like a year.

Yes, it's fun and independent, but I think if you're taking a risk of creating a startup, it should be at least rewarded with a nice sum of money when you sell it.
Australian private health insurance isn't necessarily a good comparison for two reasons.

First, it's a complimentary insurance meaning that it's for extras that people otherwise pay out of pocket or go without like dental, private hospital rooms, etc. It doesn't cover the really expensive unpredictable things like major surgery, cancer treatment. The basics (eg GP visits) and the big expenses are covered by medicare.

Second, it is subsidized from both ends. The insurance companies get paid by the commonwealth and the expense is mostly tax deductible.

You really can't use the cost to us as a measure of what it costs to run.
This is great. I have a fax/printer/scanner at home for this purpose, but I am lucky if I send 5 faxes a year. Plus, if I ever drop the landline, it won't work. I really like the idea of paying per fax. None of the subscription services make sense for a casual user. Good luck HelloFax.
New Zealand!!
Lol!

The population of NZ is just 4.3 Million (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+new+zeala...)

A single city in India has more people and thus more trained engineers and researchers than all of NZ!!

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+Mumbai

If you haven't heard, NZ currently welcomes trained engineers to immigrate from India.

The sad fact is that Europe/Japan/Aus+NZ combined dont train engineers to match India + China forget about rest of the world. Not to forget the fact that the former continents are rapidly ageing.

And when you are doing research on next gen. materials or algorithms or drugs, timezones are immaterial. As far as language is concerned, while you might not find cheap Java devs with good English skills, people who do research, generally have much better English skills.
Wouldn't be too terribly difficult. I'd make one and keep it simple. Was thinking of doing it on Android possibly.
> Also, the moment anything serious comes up, they can cleverly drop me

Actually they can't any more, as the "no rescission" part of the health care law came into effect in September of 2010: http://www.healthcare.gov/law/timeline/index.html

They now have to prove you intentionally misled them about your condition.

EDIT - More detailed link: http://www.healthcare.gov/law/provisions/Curbing%20Insurance...
I don't know, it took about a year for them to pass it. I understand it fairly well because I've read a lot of perspectives on it from both sides. The "IT'S SO DAMN LONG NOBODY CAN UNDERSTAND IT AND THEY SHOVED IT DOWN OUR THROATS SO FAST" is just a tactic to try and sway people who haven't been following in detail to be against it. Anything trying to change this convoluted system is going to be complicated.

I do engineering for government contracts. The spec for the system I work on covers thousands of pages. I've read about 6" thick worth of it and that is less than 10%. But they detail down to the most minute thing what you are allowed to do and not allowed to do. The big picture stuff fits on the first 10 pages, and then they drill down into exactly what kind of thread you can have on a fastener and exactly how you are allowed to stress a weld for the next 1,000 pages. But it stems from previous experiences and errors, and it leads to a better product (though a more expensive one).

So I don't think "# of pages" should ever be a metric for judging a law.
Yammer Gets a New Head of Community
I loved the Zelda games. If I list my top 10 games ever, Ocarina of Time and Link to the Past occupy the one and two spot. Nevertheless, flagged. Not sure this belongs on HN.
Possibly they could go with something along the lines of "Never have to find a fax machine again", as I see it useful for when your dealing with some large company one off with crazy old processes that require you to fax something through.
Automatic weapons were pointing at his head and the words "Get out of bed. Do not touch the keyboard" were ringing in his ears.

Would they really have shot him in the head if he touched the keyboard? My guess is no.
Rates are not directly dependent on the inflation rate. Yes, in the real world they are, but the Fed can set them wherever they want and have been doing that.

In fact, the lower the rate, the more we all borrow and bid up prices for things. Most of that inflation since 2001 has been in things that the government likes to overlook, such as oil and housing. But the inflation does actually exist, whether they wish to ignore it or not.

Going to market rates would go a long way to fixing the distortions, to be sure. But many things would not survive in that environment and have only been viable because they've been able to shift the true cost via inflation to the larger economy.
The article didn't mention it, but you can also sign and send the document via email (with the document as a PDF attachment). Or just download it as a PDF. We eliminate the print/sign/scan steps.
Nice. I guess whoever lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. is getting a few extra bucks a month now.
hmmmm - perhaps if one indeed had to worry about the next drink of water etc... one wouldn't "stress" in the modern sense.
Artist makes fashion accessories from pills
I agree - something like that. Something that every visitor would identify with and say "Ohh, cool."
Um, yes it does matter. You do realize that businesses get sued because they don't fulfill six-nines availibility? A change in rate of 10^-6 is extremely important, especially in the geomagnetic fields where the rotation of the inner core needs to be precisely measured.
A small quibble: the Find My iPhone service is free for all iPhone4 (maybe all?) owners. That is a good point though, although the rule doesn't come into effect until June.
I love HelloFax. Really, I do. Started using it a few weeks ago, and discovered undocumented features that were EXACTLY what I wanted. Before when I ran a web dev company I had to sign contracts all the time, and this was my process: save from email -> word -> enter text / insert image (signature) -> print to pdf -> efax. Now I can do it via HelloFax in about 1 minute.
The takeaway - you're actually paying for what should be your healthcare in your taxes as an American, but you're not actually getting the healthcare, because that would be socialism.
Adobe: Flash Coming To Android Tablets "Within A Few Weeks"
Is there a "generic" e-mail address (like "plans@tripit.com") or is it a unique / obfuscated e-mail address per user (like "2V6CFI@hellofax.com")?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean it isn't true.

Honestly, I don't think blocking paying customers from installing applications and using root permissions effectively is a sound business strategy for the desktop / laptop / OS X market. A macbook pro is fundamentally different from an iphone.
My company spent maybe $1500 last year in fax marketing.
I was in France not too long ago and had to go to the emergency room for stitches. The wait was not much longer than in the US--we started talking about payment (I didn't have my insurance card on me...doh!. Finally, I asked them what the bill was--around 20 Euro. I paid cash...I talked to a doctor on the bus ride back and part of it is a combination of low malpractice suits (I think a minor part) , taxes, and the fact that doctor salaries are much lower than they are here in the US...

I agree that the system is broke here.
I think what it really comes down to is profit margins. Over the years I've heard many times that a company with a 30% profit margin is a very profitable company. Apple is destroying any incentive for companies, operating at or below a 30% profit margin, to make their products available via the app store.

If a company is operating on a 30% profit margin, then apple is not taking away 30% of what that company is making off of that user, they are taking away 100% of what that company is making off of that user. At that point, the company is better off moving their developer resources towards creating additional functionality for other platforms to up sell current customers on.

You already have great services jumping ship like pandora and last.fm. I use pandora everyday, and if I can't get pandora on an iPhone, that is a purchase killer for me. These content providers are typically operating on a 10% profit margin, so I think they would actually lose money by servicing iphone users.

I do think development for the iPhone will continue for many of these companies for the time being, since as I understand it you can still install apps on the iPhone from outside the app store. But if this changes, I think many of them will cease to develop for it, since it would be economic suicide.

Please forgive me if I misused any eco terms above. After all Jim, I'm a programmer not an economist!
Apple already charges 30% on in-app purchases
I've been using Freelancers for about a year, paying ~350/month for a decent PPO and dental. Not incredible, but it's the best option I could find apart from high deductible plans. NY only unfortunately, and I'm not aware of any similar things elsewhere.
I mentioned it above, but the closest I've seen to this idea is Freelancers Union / Insurance ( freelancersinsuranceco.com )
Yes, very cool indeed. I wish python had something like that.
I'm looking at the code but it's not obvious how this thing works ...
the one we released (adafruit) with hector is open source, commercial use allowed.

to use microsoft's you'll need to wait until they allow commercial use (from what is reported that's later in the year, maybe even 2012).
Not true.

We beat Japan on life expectancy, provided you restrict the comparison to people of Japanese descent. Japanese Americans live 84.5 years on average, Japanese only 82.6.

http://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/templates/browse.aspx?lvl=2...

http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=sp_dyn_le...

(Would love to see data doing similar comparisons to other G8 nations.)
He should contact Adioso, I'd imagine they would have all sorts of data on this!
A great line from that article:

"As a music event promoter, he says he's put up a lot of posters, but these were the most satisfying he's ever hung."
I wonder how the airlines set prices?
Achievement Unlocked: God of Nerds
I was just hoping to drive home the relativity of frames of reference using something more concrete than time dilation. It's less of a stretch to think of time having different values to different observers once you've already given up the idea of absolute position.
A Coherent Portal into the Lisp World
Let's keep perspective here. Because, your critique of the health insurance system seems to simultaneously affirm and entirely miss the point of the article.

A close read of your first three grafs --- the only ones that respond to the article --- suggests that you wish you could get something better than "car-crash-emergency" insurance for 50-100. Well. Let's unpack what you're missing here.

(1) The author of this article, like my own family, can't get "car-crash-emergency" insurance for 50, 100, or 500 dollars a month. Never mind the deductable. If your records include a shred of evidence of 150+ seemingly-random conditions†, you're an automatic decline. That's the problem the article is bringing up.

(2) A system in which only "car-crash-emergency" care was automatically covered would be workable; a vast improvement over what we have today! Outside of car crashes and appendicitis††, you in fact don't spend $1200/year on health care. We're a family of four, and we don't spend $1200/year on health care, let alone $4800/year or (gak) the significantly greater amount we really spend on the low-deductable group coverage we set up for Matasano.

A $5k deductable would suit us just fine; we'd save, significantly, simply by plowing the money we would have spent on crazy bullshit low-deductable insurance into an interest-bearing vehicle and shelling out from it when we actually needed care, all the while secure in the knowledge that when someone ends up in the ICU, our liability is capped. Not for nothing, but this is a scheme that both Dems and Republicans buy into.

Health care in America is broken. But it's not "utterly, utterly" broken. Whatever the number of random medical bk's we have in the US, it's too high. But we don't need to transform our health insurance system into the National Health or the French system. We are epsilon away from a Swiss-style system of mandatory and guaranteed-issue private insurance.

† http://www.thecasongroup.com/forms/enrollment/Humana/H1%20Un... .

†† Many tens of thousands of dollars. Happened to a friend.
I think there is a little bit more to this atricle than just a simple push for moving r&d to emerging markets to get cheaper labor. For example, I heard some pharmaceutical companies bhave started developing labs in Russia, not to reduce costs, but as a way to make it easier to get past a lot of beaurocratic red tape. I had heard there were some laws requiring the company to use only Russian companies in the transportation of their pills, the pharma used some companies not approved by the state, and thus were slapped with some big antitrust suits. In order to make the suits go away, they set up a big, rather costly, lab facility, and then they didn't have to worry any more about these regulations.
(I heard the story recently on NPR, but I can't find a link to a written story about it).

I guess what I'm getting at, is that I wonder how much of these R&D facilities are being set up as a way to reduce costs as some people are speculating, and how many are being forced in order to side step red tape and continue pushing their products into new markets?
This is a follow-up to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2245765
Follow-up here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2248114
He's testing the wrong thing. It's not (just) the time of year, it's the time to flight that determines fare (which is why he's seeing the highest fares for flights in the upcoming week.

Airlines use complex loading systems to maximize both capacity utilization and total revenue. So when a flight is far off, the fare is moderate (because they still have a long time left until the flight). If there's extra capacity on a flight, they'll start lower the price to use up capacity as its date approaches. When you're in the last week or two before the flight, the fare may go way up (because there are only a few seats left and they are looking to maximize their price) or go down (because they have a lot of seats left and they're looking to fill them.)

Generally, if an airline is doing things right then a lot of flights will be fairly full, so you'll most often see prices rising in the last week or two before the flight date.

(An additional factor is that if you're looking for a ticket next week, you probably have less date flexibility than someone booking a month in advance.)

(Conversely someone once told me that the actual marginal cost of an empty seat on a commercial flight is around $35. In theory, if a flight is about to leave the gate and a seat is empty, the airline should be willing to sell a ticket for any price over $35... )

There are some other factors as well, such as trying to segregate business travelers from vacation travelers. Business travelers tend to book last-minute, want refundable fare and don't want their trip to extend over a weekend day. Hence the spike on traveling from LAX to the east on Thursdays - many flights from LAX to JFK or MIA on a Friday won't arrive until late Friday night at best.
We used HelloFax to sign our incorporation documents- was a real timesaver!
Now if I could only buy into it without moving to MA...
>The US pays more money because it has more health care being provided

Reference for this, too, please.
What could possibly have given you the idea that the Republicans want an economic recovery?
Montreal girls make up for the climate ;)
Johnny Chung Lee, original investor in Kinect hacking
Or the lawyering. The law department seems like a very costly line item, one that could be done remotely, as long as you set up the proper procedure for the outsourced lawyers to follw.
Not in Indiana, they don't. Right now my wife is teaching, so we have insurance - but last year we normally got a 10% discount for being uninsured. Lots less hassle for the office, so they're willing to kick back a little for you.
Twitter Hires Away MySpace Director of Business Development
This is basically a recap of the Japan segment of the Frontline special "Sick Around The World", which you can watch online at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/.

The Japanese system is not without its problems. More importantly, the "price fixing" approach to health insurance simply isn't going to happen in the US. What parts of it do you think we really can adopt? Because nobody is going to fix US healthcare by fiat.
What people don't like to admit is that free markets don't work for healthcare. What is the price you're willing to pay for curing that tumor in your gut? Everything you have. There is no supply vs. demand. Only supply vs infinity.

What would happen to the food market were it not for the generally high supply of food? It wouldn't be pretty.

Because of that, some sort of non-market intervention is simply unavoidable. As are the inefficiencies that go along with price controls and other similar endeavors. Ugly stuff, this healthcare business.
Just curious, where did you acquire this knowledge? Is there somewhere that I can read up on the industry, or did you learn all this from experience?
I think its pretty awesome that one of the Microsoft Kinect developers actually sponsored hacking it, even more so now that Microsoft is promoting it (http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/38701/microsoft-kinect-sdk-o...)