skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have spent a week in a hospital twice, once in the late 90s, once in the lates 00s. Different hospitals, different health plans.

Here's the thing: in the 90s experience, I received a complete itemized bill, organized by time and day, for everything that was done to me. I didn't have to pay, my insurance did, but I received copies of the bill. In the 00s, I received virtually nothing. Again, my insurance paid, and I was just given the very briefest of letters explaining that I was covered, and how to handle short term disability, and the like.

I found receiving the complete itemized bill truly enlightening. What I learned was:

+ exactly what was done to me in the hospital and when
(I was not in a position to understand when I was admitted)
+ exactly what was being charged
+ exactly how expensive everything was
+ some charges did seem erroneous, perhaps for treatments that did not take place

The sum of the bill was staggering. But it was truly a good thing to see the bill. It helped me understand exactly what had happened. It served as a reference for googling my illness and treatment. It helped me understand the costs.

It helped me appreciate the efforts by others to get me that coverage. And it let me return some of that by giving me a way to check for mistakes in the billing.

I hope everyone has the coverage they need when they need it.

I do think that part of every medical service should be a completely itemized bill. I think it's a useful reference for the patient, I think it's a simple way to inform everyone on the complexities and costs of healthcare, and it's a simple way to encourage informed use, and correct mistakes.

If everyone had these bills, there would be websites developed to explain, compare, manage them, and it would help eliminate many of the games that hospitals seem forced to play.

So it would also encourage better accounting and put better incentives in place to have that better accounting.
Nuclear is not as scary as bioterror.

I'm a college senior, and last spring I and two class teammates were able to re-engineer virus Phi X 174 in only 10 weeks, starting from zero knowledge of genetic engineering. Then we payed DNA 2.0 (a DNA synthesis contractor) to build us the custom virus for only $2k.

Also: on the third day of class, the prof showed us the complete genome of Ebola, and that based on DNA 2.0's price per length, it would only cost $20k to make.
A Visual History of Twitter
How to Take Control Over Your Social Media Proliferation
Optimizing the Obvious
I am somewhat serious about this. Tony Hoare even called them his "Billion Dollar mistake" in a talk he gave a while ago (http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Billi...)
Sometimes that guess is as simple as "just multiply what Medicare pays by 3...

Interestingly, medicare does roughly the same thing - multiply the private sector cost by some number less than 1.
We’re still quite far from my example. The next and previous buttons are images instead of text, and I don’t want the close button or the caption above the image. If you still don’t get my point, you can try actually reproducing my example.
Oracle, Cloudera PR Flaks: Your data is like a stripper, and we want to help you throw dollars at it to make it wiggle?
I know exactly what you mean. I have also vouched for someone in the past and watched it flame out. I try not to let it cause me to be less generous in the future.
Would be great if this included my twitter timeline (am amazed Twitter still don't let you search that). Possibly even my Gmail.
Sales increases by 86% by showing a help section (above the fold)
This is completely counterintuitive to me. How are you going to remotely copy my fingerprint or iris?

Isn't the fact that scanned fingerprints are still used by immigration control and criminal investigators evidence against this?
NJ Roofing Blog: Top Articles of 2011 | NJ Roofing Blog
There are many objections to universal healthcare, but not healthcare reform (Healthcare Reform != Universal Healthcare). The government has broken healthcare in the US through all sorts scams and tax incentives (why is employment tied to healthcare, wage controls in the 1940s), the solution is not to give the government more control. We can already see this with the medicare "doctor fix" and other broken government programs that actually encourage spending.

A better solution would be to allow nonprofits to hold large amounts of money, i.e. save during the good times, and to allow them to operate across state lines.
Those look like two facets of the same problem to me: "Women being treated differently".
This is why I asked this question. Fingerprint scanning in Japan is so convenient.
My experience with our educational app is that we actually sold less units(!) when we tried going down from $3 to $1 - we changed nothing other than the price so we have to assume our target group (teachers, mainly) is more attracted to apps > $1 - presumably because they assume them to be higher quality (and may actually be right about that).
Has anyone had a similar experience?
Codecademy Founder on The Importance of Programming
Louis CK has a great bit about how white people can take a time machine and end up anywhere and be worshipped (at least, in the past):
http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Louis-C.K.-Chewed-Up/70108425
FYI: there is a recent big thread on reddit about how a man was charged $105k for one night hospital stay: http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/ngngy/merry_fucking_chr...
Service to let people rent out their parking spaces
it's a small nitpick, sure, but he(?) is right - it does change the partiality of the sentence.

i didn't notice when i read the text; now that it has been pointed out to me, i find it interesting. thanks, iftn.
You make it sound like one follows from the other in an obvious way.

I think it does follow logically. I'm assuming that the regulations were intended to serve some purpose. If the system was working as the regulators/legislators wanted, there would have been no point in regulation. The regulations were created for the purpose of altering the way things would normally work out.

By analogy, if we see a canal, it's probably a safe assumption that the waterway doesn't resemble the natural flow of water. The only reason to build the canal is that something was needed to be different from the water features that were present.
if you click on the options button before you start to play you can toggle the 'Drag to cut' button to 'click to cut', then the game is playable.
A terminal emulator for running on bare x86 machines
I think the riskier chemicals that might be included in a chemistry kit aren't today because of the potential for lawsuits. It's also probably a lot cheaper to produce a chemistry kit with non-toxic chemicals.

The US government doesn't care much about the chemicals that might be reasonably used for chemistry experiments. The DEA watchlist is pretty specific and I don't believe the DHS/FBI/ATF are going after people buying small quantities of chemicals that have legitimate uses.
Thank you. I think a lot of people aren't aware of the sacrifices that Jesse, you, and your entire family make to give all of us a community that is simply amazing and really the best out there.
I can't think of an example of Facebook taking away a preference setting that users have adopted. Even Facebook doesn't take away controls it has freely given. It would be one thing to take away the toggle button. That might happen, and it would suck if it did. But to go in and pull out a user setting that people are using, that would be astonishing.
Nope, that's capitalism. Someone (the insurance) is willing to pay that price.

It'd only be fraud if the government was paying for it.

[Edit]Some hate against my comment. For those that fail to understand...

It isn't fraud if you go to a gas station that is charging $0.10 more a gallon, and fill up there. It's fraud if you pay for that gas, and its water. The insurance is still buying the same drug, they have just chosen to negotiate a price that is higher with one hospital than another. They have their own reasons for deciding that price.

Likewise it would be fraud if the government was paying for it, since they have set rates. To achieve a higher payment would require billing them for some other product.
This is an old article but still relevant, especially since Clojure allows co-mingling Java and Clojure (Lisp) code. I find Clojure especially useful on my own projects because there are no problems finding developers or getting customer approval for using a very nice, but niche language.

I still like (J)Ruby a lot but the runtime performance of Clojure is better and the two languages seem, to me, to be equally "agile" - both are a pleasure to code in.
JVM hacks lipsum.org
Check it out! just generate some lipsum text at lipsum.org and paste it somewhere...
I don't think that this article focuses on the right problem at all. The real problem in my eyes is that the semantics of 'null' is not agreed upon. It can mean anything, including but not limited to:

* Wrong username
* Wrong password
* Login procedure aborted due to external factor
* Programming error

This causes a headache, since the client might forget to check for the magic value 'null' and the symptom might therefore accidentally be deferred to any later time.

Instead of using a callback method, why not just return an instance of some more sophisticated class, i.e something like this:

public AuthenticationResult authenticateUser(User user) {
...
}

with a possible usage:

AuthenticationResult authResult = authenticateUser(user);
if (authResult.failed()) {
notifyUser(authResult.getFailureReason());
}

If the client then tries to use a failed AuthenticationResult as a successful one, or use a successful AuthenticationResult as a failed one, the programmer is free to throw any informative exception. Example:

class AuthenticationResult {
...
public FailureReason getFailureReason() {
if (!failed) {
throw new IllegalStateException("you cannot fetch a failure reason from a sucessful AuthenticationResult!");
}
}

public AuthToken getAuthToken() {
if (failed) {
throw new IllegalStateException("you cannot fetch a auth token from a failed AuthenticationResult!");
}
}
}

If one instead would use 'null' as a magic value for 'auth failed', the dreaded NPE would show up instead!
Show HN: Our startup - AnswerJoy, a multiplayer trivia-like web game
Hackers: not only sitting killing you, RSI can make you got fired
You can turn off personalization by appending &pws=0 to the URL.

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/04/how-to-disable-goog...
Not updated since May of last year. But what's there is certainly quality.
Google Search gets Personal with Search plus Your World
How does one forge biometrics? (Notice that I'm not asking how to spoof biometric readers with insecure designs, e.g., the one mythbusters busted).

Anyway, this is already the case – fingerprints are used as evidence of criminal liability. If someone forges my fingerprints, they could get me into a huge amount of trouble, in theory.
Are you referring to Wilbur Mercer from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Thanks for this. Been using Cyanogen since I had my G1. Hadn't heard of MIUI before.
We are a team of four. We started working on this project at the end of 2008 and we ran out of gas in 2010 in a slow and painful way.

Two days ago we decided to put it online even if it's not finished. I hope some of you enjoy it.
Foxconn workers threatened mass suicide for their working conditions
I strongly considered stopping reading at "Uranium is the heaviest element on earth"...
I think there’s a usability concern only when the dialog presented is in some way dependent on the main page, e.g. if it provides some information that requires the original context. If you’re just showing zoomed-in photographs from a gallery, for example, I don’t see a problem.
Yeah, and Java is referred to as "3-4 times slower than C++", which makes me think it's probably from the late 90s or early 00s.

That said, most of the arguments for Java around improved speed might apply to any language that runs on the JVM, though someone else might want to chime in here (I'm a little out of my depth trying to talk about how Lisp, Ruby, etc are implemented on the JVM).
Why Every Company Needs To Be More Like IBM And Less Like Apple
I've used frickle's ngx_cache_purge in production for over a year: it is rock solid. I'm looking forward to finding a use for this plugin!

thanks!
The tragic occurrences you cite are not specific to China, even if some Chinese themselves seem to think so.
Being refused a job that you're qualified for affects someone's life very much. I don't know what you're trying to justify here.
Further obfuscation on the part of the medical industry to hide the cost of covering the uninsured. Hospitals need reimbursement, insurance only wants to pay for your procedures, not the cost of others receiving treatment without insurance.

Taxed as single payer or taxed as hidden costs, anyone with insurance is being taxed for those without insurance. At least with single payer, you know those receiving treatment are now kicking something in as well.
Test cases were not that fashionable back in the day.

Surprisingly, people still got work done.
>> Medical care is the most highly regulated industry in the economy, and so nothing you see happening is going to bear very much resemblance to reality.

>You make it sound like one follows from the other in an obvious way. Can you expand on why that would be?

Two factors: incentives and information.

Regulators do not, by definition and intent, have the same incentives as participants.

They're also not involved, so they lack information.

Here's another way to think of it. When a biz goes bankrupt, employees lose their jobs, owners lose equity, and regulators go to lunch as usual.

If a regulator mis-estimates costs by 1%, that's fantastic. If a supermarket mis-estimates costs by 1%, it goes out of biz (because their margins are less than 1%).
Label machines
ALS make industrial labelling machines and systems for applying self-adhesive labels, security elements, tags and RFID inlets, to just about anything! If you need to apply labels accurately and reliably to your products, then they’ve probably already built a machine to apply them!
> Medical care is the most highly regulated industry in the economy, and so nothing you see happening is going to bear very much resemblance to reality.

This is a pretty big logical jump.

I'm American, but have been living in the Netherlands for a while. Health care is probably more regulated here than in the US, yet in all of the ER visits I've experienced (myself or friends/family) I've never seen bills like that. Regulation does not have to cause bills like that.

Something is very wrong if sick people in life threatening situations are being charged hundreds (or thousands!) of times for the same care based on whether or not they have insurance. That screams "more regulation is necessary" to me.
I completely agree. I think this problem is rather pervasive in Django (it goes far beyond just the authentication system).
In The Netherlands an all-inclusive package starts at 37.50 Euro per month (20MBit DSL-only subscriptions are around 20 Euro per month). Extra bandwidth is also relatively cheap, I am on a 120/10 MBit [1] cable connection (with TV and telephone) for 67 Euro per month.

There is also healthy competition, most ISPs offer comparable prices, except for one ISP (XS4All) who use their reputation from their glory years to overcharge royally.

[1] In practice I usually get speeds between 120 and 130 MBit downstream.
You've found it easy to hire people with existing Clojure experience? That surprises me, great news though.
The current healthcare model doesn't promote competition. Providers must inflate prices to cover costs, since they know they will be reimbursed by insurance based on the insurers pricing model, not their own.

Private healthcare would have to start providing actual costs to insurers, and insurers would have to accept that those costs include losses from people without insurance for competition to take effect.
PEAR has had a lot of issues, but recently the PEAR community is addressing them. For instance you do NOT have to deal with the PEAR process if you want to use PEAR to distribute your code. You may setup your own channel* and do whatever you please. Secondly PEAR is in the process of setting up it's packages at Github to make it a lot easier to collaborate on code.

I think these changes are great and PEAR's future is looking a lot brighter due to the people driving these changes.

*Personally I think it's a good idea to have some kind of vetting process in place. If you look at for instance the WordPress plugin repository as an example of a repository without it you'll notice loads of crappy plugins or abandoned code. I presume that with a vetting process (and maintainer process) one could prevent this from happening.
As I explicitly wrote: "TL;DR;".

Tons of other articles on the same matter do, and though I saved myself some time.

Now I have to go read TFA. Thanks for nothing, killjoy.
Tracking and Controlling you Phone
After successful payment you will immediately be sent an email by Plimus, our payment processing provider, containing a link to download your software and instructions for installation/usage.

You will instantly be Listening to Live Phone Conversations, Reading SMS/Text Messages, Viewing Call Logs and lots more. You can also map the targets everywhere they are going. It can tell where they are at anytime. All of this is done in stealth mode. This means no one will ever find out who you are targeting. Nothing is logged. You leave absolutely no trace on the targets phone.
This is why high deductible insurance offers the best hope for cost control.

Too bad it becomes illegal in 2014.
You don't need to be a monopoly to dump lethal levels of arsenic into groundwater. Regulation takes many forms for many reasons, and even minor players can be vary destructive.
> There's many valid reasons not to support TCO. The first one that comes to mind: it makes generating stack traces more difficult.

> Another reason: the JVM doesn't natively support TCO. This means to implement it you'll either need to use a trampoline (e.g. Erjang) or convert recursion to iteration (e.g. Clojure)

So you avoid a 35 years old functionality that makes many procedures smaller, faster and more understandable just to make the compilers simpler?

Isn't this one of the usual tradeoffs where you (should) prefer having the compiler doing the boring and dirty job of converting a recursion to a loop, with all the bookkeeping of maintaining the state and making it thread-safe, simplifying the life of the application programmer at the expenses of the compiler programmer?
College essay
Doing corporations will generate thoroughly submitted college essay at the specifically discreet price, you will be purely gob smacked with the specific final consequents.
No, but I imagine you want to find what you're looking for. Google knowing about you is part of what makes this possible.
Tangent: I was curious about the widget the article uses to present the bill as it's really well done. It's provided by DocumentCloud, which I'd never heard of before:

DocumentCloud is a catalog of primary source documents and a tool for annotating, organizing and publishing them on the web. Documents are contributed by journalists, researchers and archivists.

http://documentcloud.org/
Anandtech confirmed that a similar machine can run the game though

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5359/intel-confirms-working-dx...
Is this the same company that "reinvented" the GPL by claiming that as you "rent" your modem (chock-full of GPL software) from them, they are not distributing anything and they do not have to abide by the GPL?

(Feel free to correct me if they have changed their stance)
I was listening to http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ recently and they were talking about http://www.earthclassmail.com/ which sounds like a pretty cool service. I've no experience myself yet but considering putting my own home address down for my business in future.
Top Electronic Components For The Hobbyist’s Handbag - My List
Groupon's new spiny thing called clicky
Do you understand you're totally off-topic? Distributors of Android also distribute the Linux Kernel, which is GPL. So they must comply with the GPL parts. That's it.
Meet the new political elite: Computer programmers
I don't think it's obvious at all. I prefer to sit, but I am by nature a restless individual. A standing desk would allow me to make some of my pacing time productive.

To put it another way: every person may have a different use pattern when given the option of equal comfort at seated and standing heights.
WordPress has left the building
The print-friendly version, with no ads and all on one page:
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/anatomy-a-ripoff-article-...
An alternative approach to password confirmation
As just one example, look at the RBRVS:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/prescription...

Paying people on a cost-plus basis provides them with an incentive to maximize costs, whether they're doctors or defense contractors.

Then there's also the FDA's use of production quotas for drug production. We had a big shortage of Aderall recently because the FDA has to give permission ahead of time for a given amount of production of the drug for each company. And when the FDA decided that one of the producers wasn't up to snuff and was no longer allowed to make the drug, it failed to raise the quotas of the other producers to compensate.

To the extent that you run a section of the economy like the USSR was run, you shouldn't expect it to be run efficiently. The US healthcare system would still have quite a ways to go before it becomes quite that bad, but its closer than most people seem to think.
2 Nuevos Negocios gracias a Google
And where exactly is the "problem" part?

Why shouldn't they? Because one woman protests? Tons of other women protest if you DO treat them differently. It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't kind of situation.

Try treating women exactly like men and see how far you will go...
Tried loading the game in android browser, no go... also tried loading it in the dophin browser within android... no go (both just site at 00%).

Dolphin is just a different GUI for the Android browser, so this will never help. You need to try Firefox or Opera Mobile, which have their own rendering engines.
Actually, for a programming genius, those exact comments in the article seems lazy and ignorant.
I agree. I've been active in helping my grandparents manage their affairs the last few years and I find it interesting how frictionless it is for them, under the Kaiser HMO, to get medical services, especially prescriptions. I find it a little too frictionless at times.

They sometimes show me the paperwork Kaiser gives them, but I don't remember ever seeing an itemized bill. I'd find it insightful, as I think they would too, to see a list of expenses. I'd also like them, and everyone (especially seniors), to see how much of those costs the government bears.

Although I don't get too deeply into the politics of it with them, my grandparents are part of that Fox News senior demographic that would probably happily repeal "Obamacare" while being kept blissfully unaware of the benefits they enjoy because of government assistance.
He is saying that he uses Clojure for personal projects because those are the projects where he doesn't have to recruit for or justify his choice of a niche language.
Congratulations. If you don't mind me asking, what do you use for data storage in iOS? In other words do you use Core Data, SQLite, or something else?