skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's deductible no matter who pays. I've had a private policy paid for by myself for my family for years. I deduct the cost of that from my taxes.

The bigger issue is people generally are accustomed to larger/bigger plan coverage from employers, and employers contribute a portion, skewing the 'real' price.

High deductible policies help A LOT, but I fear those are going to be harder to use under Obamacare (for seemingly ridiculous reasons). We're paying $330/month for a high deductible policy with $5k deductible. Would be close to $250/month for a $10k I think. And, I think, that's likely how it should be, vs paying $800-$1000/month for a plan with a low (or no!) deductible.

I've had friends say "well, I don't have $10k just sitting around in case there's a medical bill!" A few rebuttals to that mentality:

1. Some of these same people have no issues with financing new cars every few years.

2. You'd have $10k in savings much faster if you were only paying $400/month instead of $1400/month for insurance.

3. We had a big issue a couple years ago, and had an emergency room visit. That was January - we didn't get a bill until April, and it had a number to call to work out a payment plan - you can finance your emergency medical expenses.

I realize these numbers don't work out for everyone in all cases, but neither does employer-provided health care.
Cost Effectiveness for Open Access Journals
In defence of my comment, we have never tested a human-carrying craft in non-earth-orbit-space, during a solar mass ejection event (or other unexpected radiation event). We may know how to guess at building one, but actually trying it is the only way to know if we're right (i.e. if our model fits the universe.) Maybe I was wrong to say "no idea" - but it's still not a solved, easy problem.
This is a great example of the point the guy is making:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36BPql6Nl_U

That's 128 bytes. You could encode that as a 43 pixel RGB888 image. That's less than 7x7 pixel icon!

Now as Jare mentioned in another comment, this video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB0vBmiTr6o

contains less bytes than a basic 32-bit 32x32 pixel icon. Some of the whole essence of this demoscene stuff is to work within these constraints(256 bytes, 1024 bytes, 4096 bytes, 64 kbytes, ...) to produce this kind of art. Custom virtual machines, on-fly decompression algorithms and methods, carefully crafted data and ingenious ways of data re-use are the key. It's like black magic.
I think our attention disorder deficit world (1) and the lack of transparency (2) lead to just that: Lack of demand for high quality journalism.
(1) Quality journalism usually demands time and attention from the reader since it presents itself in multi-page articles that try to distill down to the important facts. Oftentimes reality is so complex, that even this distilled view is difficult to read and takes some time to understand. People who just want to read some news between checking facebook or tweeting are not interested in these long and elaborate articles.
(2) Even for short articles, it is difficult to assess the quality of it since there's no way (or only a difficult way) of figuring out whether an article is high quality or low quality. In order to find out, you'd need to be an expert in the specific domain or re-do the work of the journalist (fact checking, etc). Since most readers neither can do the one or the other, for a normal reader this lack of transparency (or information asymmetry, as the economists say) means that he doesn't see the difference between high and low quality. So there's little demand, too.

I do think that there'll be a future where high quality journalism is flourishing, but not with the current business models, and not with the current way of news publishing. My hope is that at some point a startup will figure out the correct ingredients (and I doubt social news, or anything in that domain is the answer)
Scringo doubles time-in-app and recurring sessions
Greek and Latin can do this in "indirect speech" ("He said that ..."). Depending on the verb forms, the actual speaker can indicate either that he agrees himself, or that it is just an assertion of the other person. So maybe not so esoteric!
Brain-to-brain interface lets rats share information via Internet
Police robot shot
How is that for a startup idea? I'd probably pay a few hundred bucks to get some time programming a robot for a mission on the Moon.

What's the cost for launch? What's the R&D cost? What's the specs?

Incidently, we already have people developing rovers and lander for the moon, thanks to the Google Lunar X Prize. Maybe by the end of the decade, we will be able to do what you want.
It's a dialog that shows up every time I log into youtube, and requires (as of the last time I went through it) clicking about 5 different buttons to keep my real name off the service. I didn't have to lie, but it DEMANDED that I select a reason for not wanting my name on the service, and you can tell they're trying to get users to cave and just click "yes" once. It's shitty, argumentative, and unpleasant to use.
> For something you can't (custom items, small parts, little toys, ...), home printing is (or will be) great.

Custom items? Order them online (if they're semi-custom, e.g. a standard T-shirt with your custom text on it) - it takes less time and will probably be cheaper, despite the shipping cost. If it's a custom item you're 3D-modeling yourself, that's a different story - but that's for hobbyists - it won't be mainstream.

Toys? So instead of picking up that $5 doll in the supermarket, busy parents will find something online and wait a half hour while a noisy printer prints a product which is even more expensive than the $5?
Not really. Hospital networks are merging, affiliating and consolidating. So if your primary care doctor is affiliated with Hospital X, and specialist group Y is also affiliated with hospital X, there's a good chance that you're going to be referred to specialist group Y.

The exception is when you have some unusual circumstance, and they try to find the world's authority on your condition.
I'm amazed by the number of people in this thread that think a desktop GUI is the end-all be-all of an operating system.

'Hacker' News, indeed.
> writing is a leisure activity and not a profession

I think writing as a profession was a market anomaly created by the concentrated means of publishing. 30 years ago no private person could dream of publishing their writings as they had simply no access to print presses, etc.

But now everyone can put their writings for $free on the internet. And because there's no pressure to generate profit from their content people tend to write about things they are passionate about which results in higher quality articles than those that can be profitably produced for $100 by a 'professional' writer.

Now there's still a market for special expert services like effective copywriting - but that market is small and not every writer can (or wants to) fit in such a niche.
There is an entire company (Castlight Health) that is centered around trying to allow people to "shop around" for healthcare. Despite cutting edge technology and access to data no one else gets (through member companies insurance statements) the general public can't use it unless their employer signs up for the service.

Without this capability, shopping around for healthcare is absolutely impossible. How can you shop around when the prices aren't publically listed and aren't known by the staff/physicians?

This article, by the way, is terrible. He gives horrifically bad advice, acting as if the majority of clinics/hospitals actually discount costs for the uninsured. THEY DON'T, as the vastly better researched article "The Bitter Pill" from Time Magazine last week clearly illustrated.

I've been a consumer asking for prices as part of a HSA high deductible health plan before. There is no mechanism to support shopping around at all, and the clinics/hospitals still act on a zero price transparency model. See the "chargemasters" discussed in the Time article. They are databases of prices which are not at all publically accessible.

The federal gov't should step in, and, at a minimum, force hospitals/clinics to make their chargemaster databases publically accessible. This would be a game changer for consumers in health care.
> This is like saying... be sure to never copy more bytes than the buffer capacity. Easier said than done.

A solved problem except when people insist on using approaches where it's not a solved problem? I couldn't agree more! :-)

firstly, the update example is a bait and switch. Partially updating an array is not inconsistent. It may be wrong depending on what the contract of the function says but that's but the same as inconsistent.

Indeed the example that prompted this article back when I wrote it many moons ago was a case where you wouldn't want the state restored

> In general, however, this is not sufﬁcient since update may also have modiﬁed global variables and other objects on the heap

"Doctor! It hurts when I do this!" "Well don't do that then"

It's hard to write any correct code when you're mutating globals and arguments all over the place. Exceptions can certainly make this worse.

In general if you're not using globals or mutating your arguments this isn't a hard problem. If you are mutating arguments and you want to ensure a "restore all state if an exception is thrown behaviour then yes this is sometimes hard (unless your argument supports a rollback mechanism - e.g. it's a database) but I submit that a large part of why you haven't seen that is that it's a contract people don't care enough about to support
Two envelopes paradox
Like tobiasu pointed out, there is no BSD user community. Having split off from the same code base 20 years ago doesn't make the projects into a single entity.
No. What makes it so enjoyable is that it doesn't happen every day. That makes it a special occasion. It means that when you meet your co-workers in person, the quality of the interaction is most likely higher than if you saw them 5 times a week.

Take any single enjoyable thing and do it 5 times a week, every week. You'd have a law of diminishing returns situation. You'd get to a point where you no longer derive enjoyment from it and you may start to resent it.
I think what's happening is that more physicians are getting sick (pun intended!) of dealing with insurance providers so while that Time article is correct, so is this one.

I have only once come across a physician that didn't take any kind of insurance, but know from other anecdotes that it is becoming more prevalent.

I also had an experience recently where I went to a specialty provider that didn't accept my insurance, so it was handled as out-of-network. However, they billed me only what I would have paid had it been an in-network provider, which was considerably less.
For those who practice SEO, there is a bit of irony here.

I suspect a couple of do-follow links from The Atlantic placed within the text of the article would be relatively valuable from an SEO perspective...

The market value of "acquiring" those links from a highly reputable site is likely far in excess of $100 / article; SEO considerations have disrupted value creation in the lower end of the content market. An article is often worth more for its links than readership / advertising. This was something that popped out of a study I did a while back:

http://www.marginhound.com/revenue-model-study-for-small-web...
Wow, do they pay for all their employees air fare + hotel to come in for a week?
This is only "hurting free software" if you are a complete radical like rms, who believes that any closed source software is an affront to humanity, blah, blah. Otherwise, it doesn't matter what Apple closes, as everything that was Free before, is still Free afterwards. If you don't like Apple's stuff, fork it. If you don't like closed source software, don't use it. I don't see anybody putting a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to use Apple stuff.
" [charged with] vandalism of government property [...]"

Will this be an de-facto charge added to similar situations where government robots are damaged in the line of duty?
Why do you need to understand monads? Nobody explains groups to people using integers, either.
Great Recommendations Are Half Placebo
Someone in the Vatican's technology team is either very stupid or very, very smart.

I'm coming to wonder if Comic Sans might actually be a valuable tool of propaganda in the hands of a group beset by controversy. It helps endear you to a beleaguered base while distracting your opposition: classic plain-folks and derailing tactics in one neat package. As a bonus, bickering over the choice of a font makes the opposition look ridiculous, which poisons the well against them just a little bit more when they stop being distracted, AND gets them to do all of this work for you.

A part of me likes making up conspiracy theories for fun. Maybe this is just that part of me talking. But it's still fun, and I wonder how feasible it would really be to use Comic Sans this way.
"I make everybody else that is using the US Dollar standard richer if I hoard gold. It means they can buy more real goods with their dollar."

Conversely it means that everyone exchanging labour or goods for dollars gets less, and the incentive for those of you with dollars is to keep hold of them, thereby increasing your wealth while not actually producing any economic output.

Not so good from that angle is it?
Mars gravity is weaker (so taking off again is easier), but the atmosphere is much thinner, so landing is actually harder. It's relatively easy for lightweight/robust things, but not particularly easy for humans. Parachutes, low-angle aerobraking, etc. all don't work so well. Expending rocket fuel in a retro burn is very expensive (since you have to carry it with you all the way from earth -- a lot of the "take off again" plans involve fuel either cached on Mars or made on Mars).
So the question is given: why does Facebook use different login sites?
I mean, it is not just changing the background, the message is also different. Why it is good?
Not unless Southwest opens up their flight data, as it's currently closed to everyone. AA tried this once and pulled Orbitz's access (Expedia followed in support of Orbitz), then AA realized no one had any brand loyalty and "patched their differences" with the companies.
Gosling sees promise in JNI as a way for Java in iOS
Demonstration of using very few bytes of data to generate art. The same snippet of code can (very probably) be written as a < 128 byte ELF binary on Linux.
I'm using it on soft combined with music, and I'm into it! Helping me out.
Great Entrepreneurs – Less Thinking and More Action
If it asks you more than once after selecting a reason for picking no, then its a bug. I hear your complaint a lot, but I've never seen it happen in person to anyone I know personally.
I'm reminded of Kent Pitman's essay "Condition Handling in the Lisp Language Family" (http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Condition-Handling-2001.h...):

To properly understand condition handling, it is critical to understand that it is primarily about protocol, rather than mere computational ability. The establishment of protocols is a sort of before-the-fact hedge against the "prisoner's dilemma"; that is, it creates an obvious way for two people who are not directly communicating to structure independently developed code so that it works in a manner that remains coherent when such code is later combined.
Thanks for pointing it out. I intended used the term LGPL to refer to the concept of allowing open source software to be used for commercial purposes. But in reality, this idea would need a license of it's own. Do you think such a license would be feasible?
Don't drink the kool aid. There is still a lot of money being made. You don't hear about it because only an idiot would talk about his/her amazing sales.
> One could easily poke holes in this complaint; the characterization of PAM as "modern" is somewhat amusing; it is 1990s technology. There is an evident case of cognitive dissonance shown in the simultaneous desire for the comfortable "Posix and Unix" world of decades past and the ability to "innovate and do cool things." It is difficult to simultaneously innovate and stand still, but that is what Marc seems to be asking for here.

There's a bit of nitpicking in the above. PAM may not be a new technology, but it's not used by every OS. The problem is the implicit assumption by many devs that it is being used. Multiply this by every choice that the Linux kernel and various distros have made differently than other Unix-like OSs and you end up with a ton of open source software that is effectively locked into Linux.

In my (limited) open source experience, most devs using Linux do NOT do this on purpose. They just assume that they're writing UNIX software when they are not. They end up using GNUisms, #defines only available in Linux, assume PAM and other things, ad nauseam. When I've pointed such things out, I usually get a bewildered look. Many Linux people think they're using vi when they're using vim. They don't understand that their sed scripts are really gsed and won't work on traditional sed. They don't know their sh scripts are really bash scripts and break on traditional /bin/sh. And C code is a similar story. In most cases these little things do not improve the code; they only introduce incompatibility. So when Espie uses scare quotes on "progress" and "modern" I get his point. When progress and modern mean an equivalent but incompatible system, then they deserve scare quotes.
In Lisp, every bind-exit or unwind-protect may be doing something like a setjmp. That's how it is implemented in the C runtime for Dylan as well.

In JavaScript, you have the ability to break to a label to escape nested loops. That's a limited form of a non-local exit.

Ola Bini was working with a condition system in his experimental / hobby language Ioke as well. These ideas get around.

You'd probably be surprised at how some of this works in Smalltalk as well.
Home laser printers haven't replaced books, magazines, or professional marketing materials like brochures or flyers. The same way that 3D printing won't replace factory manufacturing.
Actually story this post is about: 3 tweets 5 facebook likes.

This story: 2K tweets 3K facebook likes.

Seems like people are about 1000 times more interested in behind the scenes of freelancing than his research into NK basketball.
If your care is good but major media outlets smear it by providing misleading information instead of balanced coverage, then people will never form their own assessment. Tesla provided vehicles to these companies for review with the understanding that a good faith effort would be made at balanced coverage; in this situation, deliberately painting a false portrait of the product's qualities is tortious and a valid grounds for legal action.
I hope so... With the Nexus 4 and the Walmart iPhone payment plans, you can do much better than locking yourself into 2 years and $1k extra in payments.
Wayland has support from NVidia and AMD behind it? That's news to me. Last time I heard NVidia announced that they will never support KMS.
I see this all the time too.

This, despite the fact that my audience knows me by my pseudonym and not my real name.
Bad ass to that guy - must be a VCU guy or something
This is exactly why I stopped using linux. It seems that in their attempt to compete with windows, linux has forgotten about trying to be a decent unix OS. A modern linux distro is every bit as complex, disorganized, undocumented and buggy as windows. So now linux distros feel to me like the worst of both worlds, a bad unix platform, and a bad desktop experience. I end up running windows 7 for a desktop, with an openbsd virtual machine for my unix/dev environment, and get the best of both worlds.
Is the fact that it's "Perl based" relevant? Perl is not a "hot technology" these days, so I'm not sure I'd use that as part of your advertising. If it does the job well, that's what counts.
Yeah, I ran into the same thing trying to argue a charge.

Me: This is outrageous, they charged me $800 to examine my shoulder and called it "external surgery".

Receptionist: Oh, let me transfer you to billing.

Billing: Oh, that is what was coded on your chart, so we billed accordingly. Let me transfer you to the doctor's staffer.

Staffer: Oh, that is what the doctor said he did, and he can't change that to say he did something else or that would be dishonest. He doesn't deal with billing at all.

Me: Arrrrrrgh.
You're right, hackers don't produce intellectual property, and they never have issues with people not valuing it. If you think being able to sling code or design a webpage makes you immune from this trend, then maybe you don't have enough imagination to get the most out of this site.
Words do change, you still used it wrong. Good day.
Why I Chose Google Maps Instead of Apple Maps For a Recent Trip
The Affordable Care Act (popularly known as Obamacare) removes lifetime and annual coverage caps on essential healthcare benefits starting in 2014.
Huh?

Say you're a parent. You have a house and three kids. Your spouse makes alot less than you do. Then you get afflicted with a chronic disease like MS.

Without healthcare, you eventually cannot perform at work and get fired or laid off. You have some sort of episode, and end up in the ER. You can't pay your mortgage, and you cannot replace your income. So you stop paying the mortgage and go on food stamps. Then your house gets foreclosed.

Next, your spouse leaves you and takes the kids. You're indigent, your kids are now on Medicaid (at taxpayer expense) and getting assistance for housing. You're behind on child support because your disability case was rejected and your appealing it.

If you add up the costs, you'll find that the cost of providing deductiblity is lower than the costs of all of the other outcomes. Actually, a year of healthcare probably costs less than that 1 ER visit.
Are there any comments as to the maturity of Pandas as compared to R?

I am used to the Python syntax, and while R is another language to learn, my assumption is that for data analysis its age compared to Pandas implies stability.

I could of course be wrong.
Perl has traditionally been a sysadmin-glue language, so I think it is worth mentioning in that context.

Sure it might not be the new-shiny, but it still works, and thanks to CPAN there is a hell of a lot of Perl code out there, neatly packaged and available for use.
The statement was that appreciating currencies are a disaster. The counter point is that the Yuan has been appreciating for the last decade while China has simultaneously gotten much wealthier and maintained a fast growth rate.
You don't see an external benefit in encouraging people to buy healthcare so that society doesn't have to pay for it later (via Medicare or the emergency room)?
They worry because they want G+ etc to be your real identity much like facebook. I had a nickname in Facebook, they found out and they put my name and I can't change it back. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, there are some very valid arguments for allowing fictional names (privacy, security, etc).

They mainly not want to go back to the day were everything was mydodoname123.
Very happy to be featured in this. Thanks a lot Franco!
I think the power of your comment will be lost in this noisy thread. What all of this hemming and hawing comes down to is that people are showing that they're willing to give up their creations for absolutely nothing, just to gain some sense of notariety.

We have a celebrity-obsessed culture in the US in particular, and it's becoming clear that too many people would sell their soul just to be noticed. That's the overabundant supply side. I think, at the end of the day. That's the real problem.
My anecdote beats yours. I've never seen it do anything other than ask on every login.
It actually works: Free WiFi in NYC
5 things startups should know (about product development) - Timeles