skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Last year, my daughter caught a stomach bug and for a few days woke up each morning nauseous. We took her to her pediatrician and were surprised to find out that "waking up nauseous" is a Big Deal; it can be a neurological symptom. We were pretty sure that wasn't it (there were... other symptoms... corroborating our "stomach bug" hypothesis) but the doctor was adamant: if she kept waking up and puking, she'd need to get imaged.

She got better and we cleared her to go on vacation with her grandparents, and were just about to get on a plane to go give a talk at Black Hat, when we got a call from our parents in Michigan telling us she was puking again. We called the doctor, who demanded we retrieve her and scheduled a CAT scan.

We are at this point freaked out for a variety of reasons, some of them logistical (trip to conference, driving back/forth to Michigan, &c) but also from the fact that our doctor knew what an epic inconvenience all was and was absolutely clear "daughter needs CAT scan" --- so in the back of our heads there's gnawing "something could really be wrong" (Adia had seizures when she was 4, which, by the way, GUESS WHAT DING DING DING UNINSURABLE ON PRIVATE MARKET NOW, and now 7 years later I still can't even hear she has a headache without taking an inventory of all other possible symptoms.)

So anyways, we want that CAT scan done now now now yesterday now. We get to the hospital for our appointment and: problem with our insurance card. No big deal, we'll just resched--- fuck that, I'm paying cash.

Head scratching ensues, long story short, very large hospital in Chicago doesn't have any price list for a CAT scan at all. Not even an insurance cost to pass on to me, let alone a cash-basis discounted price. Getting imaging done at a top hospital in Chicago without insurance: unheard of. They ended up just making up a price on the spot; $1000.
And the regex engine is amazingly fast (there is one faster I believe). Try throwing a 20,000 item list at this little program, and then use the resulting regex to match another 20,000 items and see how long it runs (hint: not very, considering):

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use Regexp::Assemble;
my $ra = Regexp::Assemble->new;
while (<>) {
chomp;
$ra->add($_);
}
print $ra->re . "\n";
I, for one in many others, love the iPad at the first sight, because that is obviously the only way that an ideal tablet could be.

As a customer, I surely don't like the idea only Apple could produce tablets in this shape and size. OK, 5 years, at most.

Why is Apple so nervous about the "look and feel" copycats? Their success roots deep in their core technologies.
Need to count things quickly on App Engine? Try "Fast counters"
Really? Nobody ever asks? Whenever the subject of American hospitalization comes up, the question of why the bills are so insanely high is pretty much the only question people ask!
From the author of gaesessions
https://github.com/dound/gae-sessions
Looks like iPad/tablet was the "preferred" device for watching olympics (source - http://bbc.in/PdDBtY). If you need some solid data that tablets are going to rule for consuming entertainment then here it is. We are in a major shift of computing and tablets are becoming "default" PCs.
Sounds more like energy depletion that "ego depletion".

The more stress the person is undergoing the more energy is drained. Isn't this obvious? I thought Ariely was known for brilliant insights on human behaviour. Maybe he's become a dieting guru? That's where the money is?

People overeat when they're stressed. Everyone knows that. But why? I've sometimes thought it's because overeating is like an opiate. Think about how you feel after a big meal.
The blood rushes to your stomach, you might even feel sleepy and it's much more difficult to "get stressed" than it is on an empty stomach.
Because you vote based on the likelihood of getting good homebrew recipes from the President?
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jobs at flutterapp.com
New iPhone Predictions
There goes my favorite trivia question. There are really few people at IBM who know about this past tradition. Actually, I don't know if there is still an IBM chorus, perhaps it is still being kept alive.
good set of notes, thanks.
It's a huge problem if you want to start a company. It's an even bigger problem if you want to hang up a sign and do business as a freelancer.

I agree with your point: the reason the country isn't completely behind health care reform is that they get it from their employer and don't understand how it works. Of course, they're also getting screwed financially in the process.
It's more than just diagnoses and antibiotics. It's monitoring the child for 2+ days. And broad spectrum antibiotics than can kill resistant staph infections I imagine aren't cheap either. Not to mention you can't just administer them. You have to monitor their effect continuously to make sure they actually are having an effect.

As to happening to anyone yes in the same way that anyone could get hit by a car. It's a rare occurrence. most people will not be getting staph from a bug bite. It's totally possible that 23k is an egregious amount to bill for his treatment but I think you are going about making that argument from the wrong position.

Are you capable of diagnosing an MRSA Staph infection? What all exactly is involved in diagnosing it? Looking at it? or do you need complicated lab tests? Does it require a consult with someone who specializes in infectious diseases or can just anyone do it? How do you dispose of medical waste from treatment? Are there any complicated regulations that increase the cost there?

All of these questions should be what fuels the debate around medical billing. The fact that you as a patient have very little visibility into all of that is in my mind the issue.

Arguing about how anyone could be hit with life threatening illness or injury is a potent and emotional distraction.
Yes but a gamble with benefits.

A gamble with benefits is not a real business, and sounds like evidence that we're reaching the dangerous stages of a bubble.
I've been thinking about this as I need to implement it soon. I think I'm going to send to S3 then just send a message to a worker to grab it an resize it in the background. My workers are on different VMs so I need some sort of shared storage. That said I've also considered stuffing the image into redis but that seems gross even though my image volume is low.

The other benefit I see in going straight to S3 is that I can use the S3 URL to display the image to the user in context immediately after upload even though it hasn't been resized. The worker can just update the image URL when its done with its resizing.
What I mean for "redesigning" is to do what they are doing now (adding what was clearly missing), but at the same time doing what they are not doing now, that is, removing what was clearly not ok and is now taken inside just for backward compatibility. With a switch to allow for backward compatibility, that is disabled by default.
Just finished building a drag and drop uploader feature for http://commando.io. I went back and forth between storing files in S3, on disk, or using database backed storage. Unfortunately CORS was not released yet, because if it was, I would have gone with S3.

I went MongoDB + GridFS. It has worked out well so far. Really like that I can store the meta-data right with the binary data in MongoDB, and can query and filter directly on the meta-data. Also, using a MongoDB replica set, I get automatic redundancy of files.

I made a quick demo video of the upload feature showing drag & drop, and the files interface, check it out if you please: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru7YZ2E65YU
Interesting. I mostly know people trying to buy individual health insurance, whose difficulty really varies, depending on age and health history. Is even a 10-person company big enough that buying it isn't a problem, if you're willing to pay the "10-person company" premium? In particular, do they inquire into the distribution of health among those 10 people? I would've guessed that if 1 of your 10 employees happened to have some disqualifying condition you'd be SOL.

Not entirely a theoretical question, b/c one of my friends has a congenital heart defect, and is himself not 100% sure how his condition would impact a small company. They aren't allowed to inquire into such things when hiring, but could it possibly tank their group health-insurance plan, if 1 of [small-N] members had a major preexisting condition?
It seems that most people get confused between ER & "trauma" service. If it was a "real emergency" (chest pain/stroke etc) the patient would go straight to the trauma service. Not so critical emergencies are treated in the ER, and that can involve 3-4 hour wait.

Quite a few hospitals with ERs also have a 'urgent care' or 'express care' clinic attached which are quite effective as they can a lot of things a ER can do, and expedite transfer to the ER if can't be treated there.
>"obvious" ideas.

What was their idea exactly? Be the first to adopt working capacitive touch technology for a phone, and implement absolutely obvious and natural user interface for it? Really? Idea?

To me their success lies in timely choice of technologies to use and good implementation. Not in unobvious ideas.
http://mlink.20x200.com/view/503d2c2fdc87ac0b4f19128alyyl.v2...

Can't beat means it sets the standard.
I've built a few high performance rc cars and lipo batteries terrify me for all of the reasons you said. It seems like they are always just a hair away from bursting into uncontrollable flames. I quit using them because I was afraid to leave them at home unattended. I wouldn't want a swarm of these flying over my city.
Grubwithus (YC W'11) - Los Angeles (Venice), CA - Full time

Grubwithus is built on Ruby on Rails and is looking for engineers to help us add new features and build a great experience for our users.

Requirements

- Experience with building and deploying Ruby on Rails applications

- Strong understanding of computer science fundamentals

Good to Haves

- Experience with building an API for a web-service

- Experience integrating with social networks (Facebook Open Graph, Twitter, etc)

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http://grubwithus.theresumator.com/apply/Uxeq9w/Developer-Ru...
join my battle cry: just stay alive until 2014

portability is a key provision will take away the chains employers use to bind, threaten, and subjugate employees; using their families health.
I started learning C++ during my freshman year of High School, that was at about 14. I don't really consider myself an outlier... Hell, I was a pretty typical B+ student from grade school, straight through to my bachelor degree.

C++ was hard, but I had already fallen in love with the magic of making the computer do things with some VB. As a result, I was motivated enough to fight my way through a C++ book.

Kids need a special blend of internal motivation, external motivation, love, and support. Given those things, I promise you that kids will surprise you. Every. Single. Time.

I've met some 14 year olds at http://www.studentrnd.com that code circles around most college graduates. It's not because these kids are intellectual outliers. It's because they have a place to gather with other smart kids and challenge each other to build something just a little bigger and just a little better.

We need to start expecting more from kids and providing them the opportunities to prove that they are deserving of those expectations.
From the article, at least a two day hospital stay, IV, antibiotics, the time of the nurses checking in on him, the doctor(s) rounding on him, and the orderlies and cleaning staff keeping the place clean. Staying in the hospital is not cheap.
I can imagine several issues, but is hackernews the right forum to discuss tax reform? You can either go the respectable economic modelling route and be prepared to do a lot of work to justify it or perhaps try a tea-party forum where simplistic tax gets kicked around all the time.

Tax is complex because the more complex it is, the harder it is for people to reason and try to work around it. A good tax system is like a secure computer, with defense practised in depth. You might breach one layer but another will catch you.

Another issue is wealth is something that is difficult to assess and can cause severe disruption. Say for example you are a FB employee and get a nice asset boost in an IPO. You get a big tax bill, but your shares haven't vested. Now you owe the tax office a whole lot of money that you are unable to raise. By the time your shares vest, they might be worth a fraction of the tax bill.

How about if you start a business. You earn enough to feed your family and suddenly, your "business" is an asset which could be sold, so you get taxed on wealth you are now purported to hold. Is the tax office going to require you to assess how much your business is worth? What if they disagreed with you? You have a family home and its worth has gone up in a property boom. Now you have to pay 4% of the market value, but when the boom is over, you have been out of pocket of those extra amount without enjoying any benefit of it.
You mean the guy who thinks you should email yourself your passwords to store them safely?
Canada is a single-payer health care system. A common problem with single-payer health care systems is access to specialty care. It is indeed tragic to care for someone you know is sick while being stuck in multi-week delays waiting for a doctor who can actually help.

It's also true that this is not one of America's big problems. Now, our specialists will bankrupt you, that's true, but you will actually get to see them pretty quickly.

Like Switzerland's system, the PPACA guaranteed-issue/mandatory-coverage system is potentially a best-of-both-worlds solution. The market for health insurance stays private, modulo federal (contentious, bureaucratic definitions of "minimum care" to qualify plans), but consumer costs are predictable.
You can get group coverage (by which I mean, "insurance plans in which individual members of the team will not need to fill out applications") for teams smaller than 10 people, but probably not much smaller.

In the US, group health coverage is distinguished in part by not "qualifying" patients, so that latter example doesn't really come up. There are horror stories about companies being forced out of their insurance plans by prohibitive cost spikes after major medical events, but I don't have any of them ready to deploy on this thread.
How to get that native iOS feel with PhoneGap
As others have said, it's a problem for anyone who wants to do work outside of the "middle class employment cocoon".

I'm self employed, and even if I go back to working for a larger company, I would prefer to continue to keep my private insurance. I have private homeowner's insurance. I have private car insurance. I have private life insurance. Why oh why do we demand/insist that employers provide health care, to the detriment of market forces favoring individual purchasing?

Conservatives in this country should be in an uproar that the 'free market' isn't allowed to run its course because of the combined interference of big business, big labor and big govt over the past several decades, but they're not.
Ask HN: library to produce nice-looking installers for web apps?
I'm talking about the "add to home screen" prompt you get with some installable web apps under iOS.

Ideally, the prompt would also explain how to add the web app as a bookmark in Android.

I've got one that I've written, but I'm not entirely happy with the way that it looks.

Also, I'd really like to see something that's themable via CSS so it matches the rest of the app.

If there's nothing good out there, I'll work on mine some more and put it on github.

Edit: I'm using jQuery Mobile for the project I'm working on now, but independence of the underlying framework would also be great.
As someone who spent the last two years of his life helping people learn canvas: Love love love.

These are wonderful, and its especially wonderful that it's open source so others can learn from it. Even more so since there are so few good examples of animation(s) out there right now.

...On the other hand, demos/intros/effects that use a library that is explicitly made for just old-school demos/intros (http://code.google.com/p/codef/) are not as helpful to would-be canvas programmers and artists as it might be otherwise (if the demos/intros were made from scratch and stood alone).

> "PLEASE USE Chrome / Chromium to browse this Website !!"

I use chrome but this line reminds me of "This site best viewed in Netscape Navigator", which is a tad irksome :(
I put together a FileAPI based uploader using signed PUTs. I hadn't gotten around to releasing it yet but here is a gist for those who might be interested: https://gist.github.com/3593744
Participation in the automobile risk pool is mandatory in all 50 states, even in states with no-fault accident laws. Nobody questions whether auto insurance companies are really insurers. Similarly, while huge companies aren't required to insure their commercial activities, virtually all of them do.

Mandatory coverage is orthogonal to the question of whether health insurance is a proper insurance scheme, or some kind of social safety net entitlement, or a utility. The sole purpose of the mandate is to make free-riding on the insurance market unlawful; it's a mitigation for an asymmetric information problem.
I can't speak to frats or Harvard, but I can speak of personal experience of MIT. When I began taking courses at MIT, I worked my proverbial ass off in a very difficult class in CS (course 6 by their parlance) and got an A. After the semester was over, I found out that students generally work together on labs, which was a major portion of the class, and would have significantly lightened my load. (Talking about spending entire weekends with hands-on-keyboard, very unreasonable amount of work for one person, even an overachieving one such as myself)

This is a _cultural_ difference of MIT; people tend to work with one another, or they tend to fail. They learn it freshman year, and it's ingrained in their psyche from then on.

Interestingly, the line between cooperative work and cheating is difficult to discern and mostly set up by the professor. When the professor does not say one way or another if the work is collaborative, students will generally consider it collaborative.

As for the "[n]ever build cool things" troll, I'll let you google the number of neat inventions by famous MIT / Harvard alums; I won't waste my time.
I think the BBC underestimated the amount of traffic they'd be doing. I watched a lot of the weightlifting (as that's the sport I participate in) and it paused about every 30 seconds.

And I heard a lot of complaints from other BBC viewers too.
It costs $121/month for 100% coinsurance, no copay, and a 3000 yearly maximum cost in network. Can no one spend <10% of their income on their health?
It's pretty normal these days to rely on GCC varargs. Among my people (the unix tribe), few care if Microsoft will ever support C99 or anything else for that matter.

You can use a macro to swap between varargs/stdarg.h if you want to be able to use the LLVM toolchain in addition to gcc.

MSVC++ can go suck fruit wax.
Mind Hack: Use Postcard Moments to Bend Time
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We use principled machine learning approaches, and encode product-level intuition and needs, but are comfortable with using heuristics to get the last mile.

You should be familiar with recent ML literature.

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+ information retrieval / search ranking, natural language processing
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I have never picked up a software dev book and used it to learn development, mostly just learned by doing. I was curious though, how do most of you read these things? Do you practice while reading, or can I take my iPad to a secluded area and just read my way through it? Any response would be appreciate, thanks!
By realizing the payout matrix for me isn't positive and not wasting my time?
37Signals described how they tackled this problem in Basecamp Next (see the "Thou shall share a cache between people" section)
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3112-how-basecamp-next-got-to...

Their solution is similar to #4.

To your concern about disabled javascript, you can still do what they describe but add CSS classes to all elements that would need to be hidden for non-admin/logged in users and just use display:none;

Finally, I would given some serious thought to who the audience is for the application. For most applications the % of users for whom javascript is disabled is so tiny for the amount of work it would require that it is not worth the effort.
Herbert Stein's Law: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."

The only question is how the rate of growth will slow/stop.
Participation in the automobile risk pool is mandatory in all 50 states

Only if you own a car and drive it on public roads.