skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's viable in theory but not in praxis. Unconscious decision making bias will creep into everything that you do. That's hard to filter, especially for all those non-binary decisions in between "firing or not" (e.g. promotions, assigning of responsibilities, approval of proposals, etc.).

The bias will be there, it will negatively affect the activities of that employee, and, more importantly, it will negatively affect everybody else in the company. Human beings are extremely sensitive to group dynamics and will (subconsciously) either align with the bonding strategy of the "successful" employee or hate him (or you). Both outcomes are bad for the company.

PS: A lot of these biases are in place all the time anyhow as some amount of emotional attachment always occurs. You just need to watch it fairly carefully.
Actually, has anyone tried banding a group of startups together until they have several thousand employees, then buy insurance as a bloc?

Another idea I've kicked around: Create a sort-of incubator where, on paper, all of the startup founders and employees are employees of the incubator group. Then the incubator can handle the whole mess of both insurance and income taxes. (Bonus: Since the "incubator" now has a ton of developers on tap, it could double as a consulting agency.)
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It's not really moral hazard, since that implies a rational choice is being made to make themselves sick because they know that they won't be bearing the financial costs. However, there are a plethora of non-financial costs to the diseases you've mentioned - up to and including death - so the moral hazard is mostly avoided.

It's simply that some people make irrational, bad choices, and the incentives on the whole make no difference.
Yes and no. For one, Readability isn't a monopoly. Second, Readability isn't prohibiting (so far as I'm aware) authors from selling via other channels at other prices. While Apple and Readability are both offering a service to their various audiences, Apple goes further by demanding that developers on iOS use their IAP API and that they match prices offered via cheaper methods.
In the past three years, I have made significant career decisions based on the insurance costs and coverage of the employer.

In one case, I turned down what was clearly a great hacking gig with a hacker whose work I really respected. The root issue there was that not only was the position a lot less in salary than I was previously making (this was fine and known when I started looking into the job), but the huge cost of obtaining a private policy for myself and my family blew me away. I was quite naive and assume I would be paying a small multiple more (2x or 3x) but the numbers looked to be at least double that.

So, the cost of health insurance prevented me from taking a pay cut to do more interesting work. Of course, the employer was pretty strapped, if they had higher money to offer, I would have been all over it. The private health policy costs just took me by surprise.
Minor problem: nobody uses Zune or Windows Phone.
From the Review Guidelines:

11.14 -- Apps that link to external mechanisms for purchasing content to be used in the app, such as a “buy" button that goes to a web site to purchase a digital book, will be rejected

I'd say it's safe to assume they'd reject you for even asking users to sign up through Safari, instead.
Fuzzy Brain Day
The truth of the matter is that everything that can be outsourced will be outsourced. The idea that "brain work" would remain in the US was just a rationalization to enable the first wave of outsourcing to get underway.

In the 1980's the driving force was quality and the ones to emulate were the Japanese. Now the driving force is cost, quality is not that important, and the ones to emulate are the Chinese/Indians.
Do they count as users if they dont use the site?
a wiki! Mine started as a toy to experiment evented programming with nodejs. A year later it's now 26KLOC (in one big file)... :)
I find it absolutely impossible to believe that her coverage was denied for the reasons she described - I have been approved for and paid for my own insurance for years (including my family's insurance) with medical issues far more serious than those.

I concede that the system is totally messed up and the new health care bill makes it even worse.

Employers shouldn't be required to provide health benefits - eliminate the necessity of group plans.

Open up the state lines, allow insurance companies to compete for your business and watch prices drop dramatically. I'm certainly in favor of some basic oversight but not the egregiously burdensome regulation of the current system.

Anecdotally speaking, I have several friends, colleagues and family from various backgrounds that are doctors and nurses in different states and I have yet to find one of them that agrees the new health care bill is a good idea. They all think it dramatically complicate how they treat patients and ultimately marginalize the overall quality of care they will be able to provide. (Again, this is anecdotal but has definitely influenced my opinion. I have been shocked to find out that not one of these people I know actually support the new bill. Having said that, I know there are those that agree with the new bill.)
That's covered by guideline 11.13, which reads: "Apps can read or play approved content (magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, video) that is sold outside of the app, for which Apple will not receive any portion of the revenues, provided that the same content is also offered in the app using IAP at the same price or less than it is offered outside the app. This applies to both purchased content and subscriptions."
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The idea isn't that stupid. You just need to be more than 2 people. Is there any reason why a group of self-employed people can't go together and get insurance as a group? If the group is relatively homogenous and are able to pay the bills, surely the insurance companies would be interested?
When aggregating stats in this manner (by Day) how do people deal with Time Zones?

For instance, if I have one user in, say, NZST, their "Tuesday, 22 February" is still "Monday, 21 February" in PST - and the real issue is that the buckets are off. So you can't just store in UTC and then move it by whatever timezone offset, as then you are grabbing different "buckets".

I don't think that explanation is very clear (I had to draw a diagram to figure it out myself). Hopefully someone smarter than I am can figure it out anyway.

We've worked around it by just storing hour aggregates, but I'm interested in case someone else has a smart solution :)
The article does not mention that money _can_ buy you health _care_. Given this, there should be market opportunity for a company which courts the supposed legions of people denied for picayune reasons.
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Australia has a hybrid public/private system. You can rely on the public system for pretty much everything, but only catastrophic medical services are well-funded (and even then ...). Otherwise you will need to get used to waiting in a queue.

Private health insurance then allows you to get the frills and to do so without waiting.

If you have private cover and need surgery to treat a non life-threatening issue, then you can usually get it done almost immediately. If you don't have private cover, you may be waiting for years.

Still, in US terms, our private cover is very cheap. I'm a single, non-smoking, exercising male, 30 years old. I pay about $1200 a year with a $500 gap. But I also pay $20,000 in taxes, a goodly portion of which make their way into the public health system (and far too much of which goes into middle class welfare, but that's by the by).
If this were something the health insurance lobbyists wanted, why have the health insurance companies spent so much in the last election to try and overturn it?
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I posted earlier on this and submitted it here a few days ago. Apple is taking myopia into the realm of an artform.

As the app developers find out they can't get to there customers in the "approved" way through the AppStore, they can either give up all or most of their profit to Apple, give up on iOS devices, or start selling in the Cydia AppStore for jailbroken devices and go back to providing their users products they want to use and making money. More "mainstream" apps in Cydia legitimizes it, and more apps and users will follow.

My Earlier Post Links:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2228804
http://mickdarling.posterous.com/apple-just-made-jailbreakin...
It is kind of crazy how many companies have the glue in the background written in perl. I have worked for a few large and small firms and there is always a plethora of perl scripts moving data around or loading data and if they did not exist nothing would work. Also, no one dares rewrite them because they work well, and who wants to write data manipulation in java?
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4G!
It implies that Amazon could get around this just by removing the "get books" button from their kindle iPhone client, requiring people to make purchases from a browser.
How many decades do you expect there to be twenty-somethings, period? (Isn't this also the operating principle behind social security?)
Watches as companion devices seem like a straight-forward upselling move. I don't think it'll work.

While we're still using physically constrained screens to show information, I doubt wristwatches will make a comeback. Even if we could fit the functionality of an iPhone into them, the screen is just too tiny to be really useful.

Somewhat related: A friend once told me that the cut-off age for wristwatches is 25 years. People that are older have one and younger people generally don't. I found this to be pretty accurate.

Edit: Just watched the video, too. The one-button design seems to be an ill-fated attempt at apple-like simplicity.
I'm 35, single, and paying something like $120 per month for Blue Cross coverage that I found on ehealthinsurance. I've used them each time I've not been actively employed, and I've always found an acceptable deal.

Mind you, I took the high deductible route since I'm only concerned with catastrophic illness at right now. Also, the moment anything serious comes up, they can cleverly drop me, since they have ludicrous things on their forms like, "have you EVER received ANY medical treatment not listed on this form." It would be essentially impossible to answer that question unless writing about a newborn.

By the way, Blue Cross tried to ratchet up my rates last year. I went back to ehealthinsurance and found a plan for about 25% less than the exact same plan directly through Blue Cross. There is no loyalty incentive whatsoever.
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The basic problem is the cost. The cost of health care is so outrageous the only way to make it bearable on the population is just to give the government a license to print unlimited money in order to pay everyone's health care bills.

Insurance (which is a horrible system for health care, since insurance depends on people who buy it not to use it, and all of us need health care, usually multiple times per year) and government programs merely mask the root of all of this, which is that health care is completely and utterly unsustainable at its current rates. Something has to change about the way we administer medicine because nobody can afford it.

Everyone outside of the US has seen that people can't afford it and instead of fixing it, they've just said "the government will pay whatever it costs, don't worry any more, peasants!" In the US the problem has existed so long because we've covered it with insurance companies, but that system is crumbling as it gets harder for anyone without a job at BigCo to get reasonable care.

Our options are to figure out how to make health care cost a reasonable and affordable amount of money or let the government print money to fix it all for all of us (in the short term, ignoring the consequences of printing a bunch of money to keep an unsustainable system alive).

The current plan to force everyone in the United States onto an insurance policy with minimal modifications from existing policies is a pretty bad plan imo. The rates will be about the same and I'm sure the insurance companies are going to be thrilled to get tens of millions of new customers to suck dry by legal mandate. The people that will qualify for state subsidized insurance rates are only a handful more than the people that currently qualify for state medical programs like Medicaid anyway.
i own a 360 but haven't touched it in several months. bought my kinect 2 months ago. really just awesome to work with.
+1 on mass health care, very reasonable rates and abundance of good options. I was very much against it and actually voted no but came to see the benefits and changed my opinion
Adding game elements to our Twilio SMS Door Buzzer
Ironically I have a 3 year old and a 8 month old and also an iPad. It's exactly from their use of the iPad, my parent's use of the iPad and my own and my wife's that I make these observations.

Re: form factor - I agree that these things are linked - but I'm saying the touch screen is the killer innovation. Yes, the form factor allows the touch screen to be used comfortably, but people don't really care about the form factor per se. Lack of a keyboard doesn't enable me to flick photos to browse my photo album, or to pinch to zoom on them, or to draw with my fingers on the screen - the touch screen does. A device with a slide out keyboard would do that just as well. It's just that there are significant design challenges in building such a thing so we haven't seen a convincing version of it yet. But we might.
WSJ article seems to be talking about offshore R&D work, not necessarily outsourced R&D work. 787 Dreamliner problems seems to be due to outsourcing to contractors and subcontractors (combined with offshoring): http://articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/15/business/la-fi-hiltz...
I have to be honest as someone else from a country with universal health care I'm not sure I can tell if the reforms are actually an improvement.
I'm astounded that something that expensive can find a market. Out of curiosity, do you know what it is ?
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The thing to do, is if your health care is paid for by taxes (like the NHS), is for taxes to be levied proportionately on the higher-risk things that will hospitalize you. The UK already has sky-high taxation on tobacco. I rather like the idea of the Fat Tax as well.

Placing a tax on fat content would increase the proportion of earnings used for the NHS by those who would use it the most. It would also provide a disincentive to eat unhealthy in the first place. Of course, many many people think this smells a lot like social engineering (what isn't at government level?), so this wouldn't pass in the UK, let alone the US.

Lots of good background on Fat Tax in the References at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_tax
Doctors and nurses and supporting staff must exist

I got a $800 bill for 10 minutes doctor visit (swollen toe). Not exaggerating a tiny bit. No insurance company involved. "Must exist" is not an argument. Something is broken in the system where a doctor charges you $4,800 per hour. Insurance companies, obesity, poor lifestyle choices (all usual BS reasons I hear on TV) do not explain why this particular ####le charged me $4,800 per hour.

This saddens me hearing that most discussions about healthcare are circling around the question of "how?" instead of asking ourselves "why so much?".
The "what" is that our so-called "lawmakers" hadn't written it, much less read it, understood it, and debated it in any rational way before they voted on it.

Call me an idealist, but I think that's bad.

Like a tax code, usually these kinds of things end up working out mostly to the benefit of the larger parties who pay the most lawyers and professional staff to find and execute on the loopholes.
Who needs it? Awkward, annoying, and I find too many clocks in my life already. Remember when Daylight Savings changed? How many did you set? I counted 13 in my house. Why does the freaking stove need a clock?
Its debatable whether it counts as actual "programming", but one of my first related learning experiences was designing starcraft and warcraft 3 maps. While I almost didn't write any _code_, I nevertheless had to construct conditionals, triggers, events, loops etc through the GUI which probably helped a lot when I started actual coding during my Java class.

Plus it was so fun too - I could make something quite tangible and "braggable" (a custom game map I could play with friends) without too much difficulty and syntax overhead. Sometimes I wonder if such game map editors should be utilized more in teaching programming to students; they certainly got _me_ interested in programming.
Something is broken in the system where a doctor charges you $4,800 per hour

That's about right. A few years ago, I thought I had food poisoning and 40 uninsured minutes in the ER set me back $3800. But I was "lucky." I've had friends who were in bicycle accidents and ended up with $13,000 and $37,000 hospital bills.
Ironically the US actually spends more $/person for health care than the UK or Canada do to cover everyone.

Simply because the insurance and billing drive costs so much higher
You say it, but you don't back it up with evidence. How is it that the US already pays more money per person for health care but with measurably worse results (measured as life expectancy, infant mortality, etc).

How do they achieve what you call impossible?
I knew you could allow subscriptions that signed up on the web, but I had no idea you couldn't even link to it from inside your app. Jeebus.
Love this service. I've used it for years on all my sites, great to know if you have a traffic serge before Google Analytics catches up. Amazing UI too. Receives far too little buzz for how great of product it is.
Keep in mind that when you receive a new message, inPulse vibrates and the messages pops up automatically on screen...you don't even need to press anything.

We designed inPulse to be useful in the 1-to-10 second timeframe. We knew that if it got too complicated or required too much fiddling, people would just pull out their cellphone. With one button, you can navigate with gloves, when your hands are wet, under the table...etc.

That's why it has one button.
From your earlier post:

<i>while people who want to strike out will, and figure out how to make it work.</i>

You claim that anyone who wants to be self-employed is able to do so. The next post provides a counterexample to your blanket statement.

Then you get angry that he's telling an "anecdote"?
I was also confused about that. I may be misunderstanding how the law works, but isn't it true that group coverage can deny pre-existing conditions only for a limited time (6 months)?

In California you need at least 2 employees to qualify for group coverage. So you start an actual company, perform business (presumably turning in some money to cover your costs), and also get coverage for your dependents. There's one caveat that the coverage does not start until your company has been around for 6 months (unrelated to the pre-existing 6 months figure above.)

Or was the author's post related to (presumably) retiring earlier and specifically not wanting to start a company again?
Note that there is R&D and 'corporate R&D'

These aren't necessarily research positions, they are often just offshored software development work and even tech support call centers.

Anything that isn't billed per widget is often counted as R&D - especially when it comes to tax breaks!
Haven't much looked into this (being as it now pertains to me, maybe I should!), but the Freelancers Union was making a bit of news last year[1].

Also, there are HR-outsourcing companies like TriNet that negotiate as a group for smaller/startup companies[2].

1. http://www.freelancersunion.org/

2. http://www.trinet.com/about_us/default.htm
ASk HN: Subscription and One-time payment
I am thinking of adding payment to my new service. I want to know what the difference is between subscription and one-time payment. My service would not be one that would be used avery month so i was thinking of using a one-time payment.

What do you think HN?
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"I will do X because my kind of people do X" is substituting stereotypes for reasoning. The very existence of standard expectations about how individual human beings conduct their lives is toxic, and I heartily approve of any resistance. Society can't possibly compensate you for sacrificing what you want in favor of what the majority is doing (whether or not they actually wanted to).
What has become of my beloved HN? Doesn't a devout 20 minutes three times a day on HN count as meditation.

Next we'll be discussing horoscopes...
Capitalism in the U.S. is not new. That sucking sound has been around for over a century. Maybe two.
Aren't events generally cleaner/easier to use than threads? And python doesn't even have true coroutines, does it?
No, it's not. I pay $120/month for a family of three, and get pretty good care for it.

I know that smug Canadians are a cliche in any discussion of health care, but we are an existence proof that acabal's expectations are totally reasonable.
> Realize that your "stress" is so far removed from its genetic origins as to be laughable,

Realize that your "diagnosis" is based on absolute rather than relative terms; it's laughable.

This really isn't the place to try to dissolve a complex psychological subject in to such flippancy as "well life is so much better than back in hunter-gatherer days". If you wish to try to trivialise mental illnesses with unsourced off-the-cuff remarks then take it elsewhere; I've no interest in engaging you in the conversation.
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Last year visiting California I was sick for over a week. 30 minutes for a prescription (which I knew would be the result of that visit) cost me $600. $300 for the doctor and the same for the hospital. In New Mexico (one of the poorest states in the US), the equivalent a few years previous cost me about $100.

I stopped getting insurance because as a self-employed person it was expensive and rising. I played the odds and won. Sure doesn't make me feel happy.
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