skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The person who wrote this article has never tried to obtain independent health insurance.

For a family of 4, private health insurance with a typical deductable costs something like $1200 per month. That's half a reasonable mortgage, or 3 times the monthly cost of two parents each commuting 50 miles a day on $4 gas, or 3 concurrent car lease payments. Over 60% of Americans today are covered by their employers, who in addition to accessing lower-rate group plans, cover some or all of this expense.

But that's not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that out of the 163,000,000 people that would need to switch to private health insurance in these schemes, a huge portion of them will be unable to access a competitive plan. Private health insurers can and do decline coverage for a myriad of reasons. My daughter had a (drug reaction) seizure when she was 3. NO COVERAGE. A friend's wife had a minor women's health issue. NO COVERAGE.

Advocates for private health insurance are quick to point out that they'll work with states to set up "last-resort" health insurance coverage for these people. Those advocates don't understand what the word "competition" means. Those "last-resort" plans already exist (at least in Illinois, Michigan, and California), but they're far more expensive than Blue Cross or United. Insurance works efficiently by creating pools of shared risk. What happens to the plans that get all the "risky" people?

With a couple obvious exceptions, my sense is that no country loves its health insurance system. Canadians bitch about theirs, British people bitch about theirs. But our system is an international joke. We pay more than everyone else, we shift the burden of those payments to the least convenient places in our economy, the average patient receives poorer care, and we still manage to bankrupt people with the system at random intervals.
Usually that does work but there are a few issues.

First of all, since there is no package management to speak of, you often run into dependency hell (A requires B requires C requires D ...). Thankfully, we have macports (think of it like a limited version of apt) to get around most of those problems.

The real issue, for graphical apps at least, is that X11 apps don't look and feel like native Mac apps which run on Quartz (correct me if I'm mistaken).
Most hedge funds are collapsing.

The leverage trick is dead end since last year, and it brings debt.

(transcript from Financial Times)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1988234/posts

"Their performance is shocking"
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/d679aefe-8f93-11dd-9890-0000779fd18c...

For fun
http://news.google.co.uk/news?hl=en&ned=uk&nolr=1...(bust|redemption|crash|leverage|short+selling)&btnG=Search

Oh and the more ruthless ones, the ones short selling and even naked short selling on the stock market are only postponing the inevitable. Gordon Gekko would be proud.
For every frustrated HR peon who hates it when people send a link instead of a Word resume, there is another who hates it when people send a Word resume instead of a link. Of course, both will invariably come to the conclusion that people are stupid.

Attachments? Only stupid people don't know about viruses. No attachments? Only stupid people don't know about the MS Word-compatible software used by HR departments to sort through resumes. And so on and so forth, ad nauseum.

How about you take a long, hard look at yourself, Ms. HR and consider that one is by definition a "total raging bitch" when one refers to their fellow human beings as "whiney fucksicles".
Here's a persistent image for the average of all faces:

http://img389.imageshack.us/my.php?image=img2184713jpgimg218...
there is more risk, no doubt, and the financial woes will be harder.

a) No easy credit = you won't be able to self fund your startup with a credit card
b) No easy VC = you won't be able to get 20 million dollars to build yourself a widget.

It'll also be much more invovled, you'll need to come up with a business model that starts turning a profit from day 1. And you will probably need to start thinking in 10 years, instead of the typical 5.

But if you started your startup w/o planning to go for VC or a short-term acquisition, then the market really didn't change that much.
Several additional products mentioned in the comments. In particular, this commentor points to a separate review he wrote that addresses some different products:

http://bulletproofbox.com/web-based-rich-text-editors-compar...
Great. Why do the two pieces of Russian software that I know of have to have the same name: the nginx web server and the NGENIX CDN?

It's DIVX vs DivX all over again.

Is this a coincidence? Or is there a Russian word for "awesome" that sounds like "engine X"? Or what?
I don't know how much tax planning Gates does. He may think that avoiding cap gains on $40M (which is what I heard that his house cost) isn't worth the trouble.

I previously mentioned using donations to shelter income. His house offers some additional opportunities.

I think that a huge fraction of the cost went to cool custom gadgets. If Gates set up a company to research/develop those gadgets, he can deduct the "losses" when said company doesn't manage to sell them. Yes, he should pay for the gadgets themselves, but they're cheap compared to the NRE.

There are some ways to do tax-free roll-over to fund companies, so the deductions would shelter other income.

Even if Gates had to pay cap gains to fund the company that developed the gadgets, he's way ahead if the deductions are at ordinary income rates. If he both pays and deducts at cap gains rates, he's just out cap gains on the gadgets themselves.

However, like I said, I don't know how much tax planning Gates does. He has over $60B, so avoiding cap gains on $40M is like someone with $2M avoiding cap gains on a cheap used car. Then again, he may have set up a system 20 years ago to pull out money tax-free every year. Putting $40M through it may be just SOP.
Live global party happening now, streaming from 17 different countries.
This is a really bizarre clip of their ad: http://www.break.com/index/sfw-porn-clips.html (kinda SFW, but I wouldn't risk it)
Please don't do it this way. Google, Yahoo and Windows Live now all have APIs you can access to fetch contacts without having to handle the users credentials.

Getting contacts via delegated authentication should avoid aggravating the technophiles/hackers/security-aware (too much) whilst still allowing you to 'go viral'.
Rights are those things that are inherent parts of being a human. When something infringes on my rights, the power of the state is used to maintain them. We have rights to represent the minimal amount of state-sanctioned force that is required to keep us all civil.

You cannot have a right to goods and services that somebody else currently owns. Using the power of the state to acquire medical goods and services is not a basic necessity of being a human.

We've lived millions of years without the state caring for our daily health. We can live millions more without the state and we'll be just be fine.

For a constitutionally-trained lawyer to say that is to engage in demagoguery over substance. We have a problem with health care -- some free market principles do not work when you are dying. But cartoon solutions and slogans are not going to fix complex problems. Mark my words: we'll just end up more in debt, more frustrated, and more vulnerable to even more bullshit promises.
ha ha, good article.
1. Swap Ctrl and CapsLock (using whatever method)

I did this until I realised I never use CapsLock. Tada, two Ctrl keys.
> cartoon solutions and slogans are not going to fix complex problems.

Good point. E.g.:
"Competition will cause insurance companies to drop price and increase service. Innovation will come to insurance and new and different types of policies will enter the market, making it even more competitive. Consumer behavior will cause people to shop for insurance and minimize costs while trying to increase coverage."
Community Response to Loic's Layoffs @ Seesmic is Fascinating
Health care is not a human right.

You may want to read Article 25.1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights before reconsidering that statement.

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html
It's not working for me. Execution Fail. :(
What's the significance of this? How is this interesting to hackers?
Anyone here ever used this lib for any side project?
> Goodness, no. What kind of weird keyboard did that?

The point is to avoid using your pinky (weakest finger) for too many things. Mapping caps to ctrl means you're going to be using your pinky a lot. Congratulations, you've just introduced RSI to your left hand.

Check out the kinesis keyboard, where your thumbs do the major lifting: http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/advantage.htm
If I were to have an accident or to fall sick right now, I'd worry about my health, and nothing more, because I live in a country with socialized healthcare. If this were to happen in the U.S, I'd have tens of thousands of dollars of debt. To work my way out of this debt would make me a slave for years.

Support for social heathcare is to recongize that one day you may be in the same position. In fact, when you are a really old man, you WILL be in that position. You'll be on a pension and you'll have lots of illnesses. I pay 8% of my income so that this never has to be a worry.

Social healthcare may not be a fundamental human right, but it's a hell of a convenient thing!
Broker... but they have no minimums.
a) I have a theory that hackers have a tendancy to like electronic music more than the average joe.

b) Multinational streaming isn't that easy to pull off...

c) I think that people sometimes need a break from thought.

d) If one decided that they do, in fact, need to think about this, they can think about how to make it better.

e) The advertising was strangely entertaining... and since we're all geeks (I'm guessing), I'm going to play the geek = no love life card :-D
And it's also very much politics, something that doesn't belong here. To properly discuss the candidates, parties, and whatnot, you can't stop at their economic policies that might affect people here, but have to consider foreign relations, civil liberties, and a slew of other things that would just bog this site down. Back to hacking.
Two and a Half Men TV Show
Click here for more information
Deal or No Deal: Episode 406
Click here for more information
Meebo is looking (or just found) a bigger office. Something tells me they won't be going away anytime soon
I don't think the pentagon is cooking this, but I wouldn't be surprised if they use it.
I guess it heavily depends on how much you're planning to spend. I'm not sure if the EU-wide tuition equality is already in place for Bulgarian and Romanian nationals, but if it is, that will make Sweden substantially cheaper than the US, unless you can get some kind of grant or scholarship.

EDIT: If you're planning to go to a top university, the US or the UK are probably good places to go. Unfortunately, the Times' university table http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/hybrid.asp?typeCode=24... seems to be down at the moment.
She's his wife now. I wonder if the order has changed. (Probably not. :-)
What if people honestly believed that they were actually going to make money if they shuffled things around in the way that they did? What if they thought that the risks from the bad loans were acceptable because of bad simplifications in their models? What if this is explainable by stupidity and not malice?

People are stupid, but they're not (usually) deliberately self-destructive.
Do you have any details as to how they pulled off the multinational streaming? That would be interesting.

The streaming didn't work for me, and seeing the other link to SFW porn, I wasn't sure what it was all about.
Using Patterns in Space Dust to Detect Earth-like Extrasolar Planets
This challenge to overconfident amateurs is relevant and well argued. In short, get out the pencil and paper, it's time for a renaissance of sketching. In Ch 3 he critiques [amateur design technique] which he views as too cerebral. In Ch 4 he evangelizes a more pragmatic, physical approach which he calls cognitive interaction. The paper is involved - he backs up his thesis by citing its philosophical, evolutionary basis among other tediousness - so you might want to skim Ch 0 and skip to Ch 3.

From Ch 5:

Why are experiments (and simulations) in the physical world superior to models and simulations in the head? The reason is that you want to find out both what you can figure out and what you can't figure out, i.e. what you cannot simulate mentally. That is, you want to know also about the effects of your actions that you cannot predict or forsee.

[Then he talks about iterating over "fine-grained pieces of activity, a continuous attention to feedback that replaces complex pre-planned actions, and simpler and smaller actions..."]

Why is this better? Remember dead reckoning: it starts from a known position, but the shortcomings of prediction yield an accumulating error that makes the computed position deviate more and more from the actual position. Position fixing instead reestablishes accuracy each time a fix is made. So the more often you make fixes, the more often you can make the proper adjustments to your course, and the less will your measured position drift away from the actual one.
Try it again, they just added some stuff to the site
They just added some stuff to their site, so it should be working well now...

I'm guessing that XunPlay has to do with their streaming, but I honestly don't know anything about it. I'll ask around though.
Relationships would be awesome:

.col1 {
height: {col2.height};
}

Basically what people do with JavaScript, but built-in. Implementation-wise, I don't think it would be very difficult to make two block-level elements abide by each other's box model (determine height of .col1 as if it were .col2's parent).

This would have very good consequences for user-customizable pages as well.
The startup squeeze
Thanks -- really glad you're finding it useful. Yeah, don't mind the self references if there's meta discussions people want to have :)
All that money you've lost — where did it go?
Where are we going?
It'll be interesting to see if the prediction of more acquisitions but less funding turns out to be correct. It would appear to continue the (perceived, from my point of view) trend of early exits through acquisition. This could be some more good news for early startups in all this doom & gloom.
Arguing performance and scalability and footprint can be less than fruitful; a distraction.

If you're serious about this, build your test cases, and benchmark.

But before you invest here, ensure you have nothing better to do with your time, and ensure that the probable payback can be justified against the aggregate investment; against the costs of the testing and of the migration. And nothing better to debate, for that matter.
downmodded for incorrect implementation.

Never sue a man who buys ink by the barrel.
s/buys ink by the barrel/has a subscription count in the sextuple digits/
Is Imagination a Partisan Concept?
Twitter to IM: Drop Dead
Sony Ericsson K610i Urban Silver Unlocked
A small and slim 3G phone with all you need to communicate with high-speed messaging and quality voice and video calling – the K610i. Enjoy entertaining multimedia services and a fast and satisfying mobile internet experience with the Sony Ericsson K610i.
I recently switched to my first mac last week. Vim is great, but theres a few things I dont like which prevent me from using it as my primary editor. Since my switch to mac I gave up zend in favor or textmate. I found a great plugin for textmate called vimate, which as it sounds is vim for textmate. While its not a full implementation is definitely a fantastic middle ground. http://www.fowpas.net/vimate
Your cheek or hers? ;-)
Delicious, Upcoming Founders To Show You Political Bias Of News Sites
My Dayton Ohio Mortgage Source
Recently I was looking for a Dayton Ohio mortgage company and I found this guy`s website. I called and have an appointment set up today.
They benefit, but not enough to pay for it?

More importantly, what's the difference between "private company" and "people?"
Mafiaboy Grows Up; a Hacker Seeks Redemption
If you're quoting the UN on human rights, you've already lost.

Current members of the UN Human Rights Council:

China
Cuba
Ghana
Nigeria
What we're talking about is human ethics, and what you just spouted back at me was a muddled vomit of sociology, if that.
Satyam Computer Services banned from offshoring work with World Bank
That looks cool, but I'm with etrade an a little hesitant to change.
I had to stop reading half way through because it was so awful on the eyes. I felt like I was reading the dot com bubble off Scoble's belly.

Anyways, here it is in plain text (the formatting and capitalization errors are still annoying, however):

http://tinypaste.com/c87ae
more efficient? what planet are you from?

Canada: 8 weeks for heart surgery

America: Next Week.

Nova Scotia: 25 weeks for a specialty consult

Iowa: 1 week for a specialty consult

http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2007/10/15/waittimes-fraser.h...
You think you know it all, but you forget that all you know is one perspective. Have you ever actually walked in another mans shoes? Not observed, but walked.

Being a web developer does not make you intelligent. Insulting people who disagree with you shows stupidity.

You have a lot to learn, but it's only experience that can teach you that stuff.
Sweden/Finland: Free tuition. Only cost comes from the obligation that you must be a member of the Student Government/Union. That's about $100 / year.
Living is more expensive than in the US.

If you are Bulgarian as your profile states, you come from inside the EU/EEA area, thus also Danish universities would be free for you.

If you want to build best networks for business, get into top universities in the USA. Tuition isn't that much better.
Start-up scene is also nearly non-existent in Scandinavia - severe lack of funding opportunities.

If you plan to work in the USA, go to a US-based university. If in EU-area...
It's not the pentagon I'd be worried about. Both China and Russia now have their backs against the wall. Their economies have been hit much harder than ours.

I suspect something bad is on the horizon. Hopefully our species has outgrown the need for disastrous world wars every so often, but I cant say I'm optimistic.
MerbCamp Keynote and Introducing Nanite
Beyond the critique of the amateur, he's also tackling larger trends of thinking about design methodology. The trend is from formal to informal, from abstract to concrete. From ideas without context to ideas that receive immediate feedback from their environment...

Gedenryd quotes: "The writings of design theorists imply that the traditional method of design-by-drawing is too simple for the growing complexity of the man-made world. This belief is widely held and may not require any further justification. (Jones 1970, p. 27)"

But recently we've seen a resurgence of such "simple" methods like sketching, storyboarding, model-building, etc. Here's where we see the Renaissance of Sketching.

Basically it seems to me the trend is that a bunch of theoreticians in the mid-20th century thought that abstract thought and logic could (by themselves) produce perfect designs. But in fact recent research and writing about design are suggesting that the world's best designs come about because they were designed using processes like sketching that have a direct, real-world, tangible feedback. My favorite passage is maybe "Quist's demonstration of sketching" in ch 4, which directly addresses this dichotomy of formal/abstract vs informal/specific design processes.

I think many people have realized that overly formal methods do not produce designs that are all that beautiful or engaging. Most people hate cube-farms. Most programmers can't stand the waterfall model. Most consumers hate corporate bloat-ware. Maybe it's always better to use paper prototypes, sketches, extreme programming, and so on.

In some ways this whole debate was foreshadowed by Spock's musings in Star Trek I: it is an embrace of what is most human.
Techcrunchywag
Privacy and Security Issues in Social Networking
This is one reason why its so important to keep your home computer secure. A single cable connection doesn't do much, but tens or hundreds of thousands can easily bring down a big site.

It takes half a brain to build a botnet to DDOS. It takes much more skill to be on the other side protecting against these attacks. Good for Mafiaboy.
In much the same way Microsoft Office 2007 is just called Office 2007, OpenOffice.org is just called OpenOffice by regular folks.
The trend continues. However, there are more Internet startups than ever. They need fund to start. But what they do, mostly, are the same: SNS, or vertical-sns, search, or vertical-search. The market is overloaded, but thank God, the fund is not so easy to get now.
Just hover your mouse over a lot of them are random rapidly, and you'll see a pretty nice effect.
Alas a 'make install' won't cut it.

There a bunch of things from the system call level (eg, Linux specific locking methods) to the UI level (Macs don't use freedesktop.org specs, instead they have their own standards).

So things need to be ported, and that's why there's less OSS software for Macs.
Look and feel play a big part, even once you get things to compile.

A "Native" OS X application should (largely) follow the Apple Human Interface Guidelines[1], but the same application following those guidelines in another operating system would probably feel out of place. Hence the need to "port".

This applies less to command line tools etc, since they don't need a GUI and can just follow POSIX CLI standards to fit in.

[1] http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conc...
this could be a game changer
Ask YC: Is your startup bootstrapped, funded, or both?
Would be interesting to see the diversity of startups and their funding situation given all the turmoil and doom/gloom postings recently.
great presentation! i saw it by webcast and it was really good experience, like i was there.
"You think you know it all."
"Insulting people who disagree with you shows stupidity."

Self-referential. I dig it.
I'll start: I'm cofounder of NewsCred. We are 100% boostrapped so far with very negligible burn rate. About to close a small angel round.
Will somebody please post a mirror? Tried downloading video from his blog and it is dog slow...
sorry about the slow download speeds. We will get it on a faster mirror later today and I will repost the link.
What if the US doesn't make it a right? What is the UN going to do? Write us some angry letters that threaten us with more angry letters? Fuck the UN and their bullshit.

This nation was built on individual liberty and responsibility, not as a nanny state.
The UN is the worst institution we have for advancing international human rights, except for all the others.
pets.com actually sold things
http://vimperator.mozdev.org/
Neither. Tarsnap isn't profitable yet, so I can't really say that it's bootstrapped; but I don't have any external funding, either.

Rather than being bootstrapped or funded, tarsnap is a living-in-the-parents'-basement startup.
Could you explain file streaming in more detail?