skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem isn't the insurance negotiating a discount - it is that if your insurance has agreed to pay 80% of the cost of your care, and then is able to negotiate a discount, you should pay 20% of the discounted price, not 20% of the pre discount price.
That is an awesome story, good job Zaphar! You make it sound easy and it can be. Just keep taking the next step, keep learning, moving forward and getting feedback and almost anyone can take themselves somewhere.

What is you blog BTW? It's not listed on your profile or twitter.
Outstanding work, Mozilla.
Parallel to when they broke the I-E monopoly, Mozilla is truly impressive lately.

Best way to support the new creativity surge by Mozilla -
re-adopt Firefox as your MAIN browser.

With each search worth $1 (approximately), every time you search using Firfox, Mozilla receives $1.
(payment by Google, for using their search engine)

Mozilla currently receives $300 million/year via search. Increasing search $ income ... rewards Mozilla as the most open platform and amongst the most innovative organizations on Earth.
If you're worried about FeedBurner going away, I would think you'd be worried about this free service going away one day too.
I don't update it as much anymore but it's at http://jeremy.marzhillstudios.com/
For most people, they already use an email account to authenticate. Pretty much every single login I have, someone with access to my primary email account could co-opt with the snap of their fingers.

If your email provider is vulnerable, you're already fucked, except for those accounts which use two-factor auth. And persona isn't intended for your bank/etc.
The idea's very much to the lines I've been thinking, and something like this will likely make its way into a future update.

And thank you for the link! Very cool.
My partner and I were Australians working for a couple of months in Scotland back in 2003. My now wife had had a melanoma removed while in Australia and we visited a doctor in the UK to have one of the follow-up checks.

There was no cost.

I believe there was compulsory insurance coming out of our UK earnings (NIS or whatever it's called) but the entire process was so easy it was suspicious. Can't even remember paperwork. Needed a check-up, got referred to the specialist and they just ran through it and off we went.

The processes here in Australia are pretty simple too.

At no point should people be fearful of checks/tests or treatment for their personal health because of cost.
Will your company have a yogurt cup for a logo? I'll let you have that idea for $500 - $600.
The DMV in New Jersey is not great. It is, however, better than it was ten years ago.

It also depends greatly on which office you go to. Trenton is, unsurprisingly, horrible.
"Programming is hard." No it's not. Resources are everywhere today ,tons of books , Stackoverflow , tutorials ,etc ... you cant accuse programmers of not wanting to share their knowledge ,that's not true , they all do.

You have entire and complex projects on github available for free , so no Programming is not hard , it takes time to become a good programmer yes but like everything else in life. You want to try something hard ? try to be a doctor instead.
Reverse the sell/buy and you could get something.
i just signed up today for this thursday at 6AM - will someone be available to drop me off at the airport then? will the parking lot be open also?
Make that $20k the cost of living in Australia (especially the Sydney or Melbourne areas) is very high at the moment. $2.5kAUD/month is average for a single bed apartment.

Also getting a rental unit without previous references from Australian landlords/agents is particularly difficult.

Be prepared to spend out a lot of $$$ getting set up.
Yes I'm trying to find a less intrusive way of doing some of the ad placements on the site.
At every hospital I've ever been to (N=3) that answer is a firm "no". With one hospital the price was automatically knocked down 75% before any negotiations took place and this policy was advertised everywhere. At another hospital I simply had to speak to a account manager to get a drastic reduction (> 80%). The third hospital took a harder line, but ultimately caved. If you are uninsured you should never pay more than 15% spread out over 6-12 months (less if you're going to pay in a lump sum). Everything is negotiable.
Javascript can (ISTR there is a pure JS DNS library for node) but perhaps not in the browser without specific browser support. You can say the same about trustworthy crypto, incidentally.

SRV is definitely the ideal record. In this case I can see why a pure HTTP approach was chosen (it avoids browser dependancies) and it irks me that developers of web-based tools tend to develop inside the HTTP bubble rather than using the broad and highly capable infrastructure of the Internet, because this kind of constraining outcome is the result.

SRV would be an excellent choice for HTTP/2.0 as well, rescuing us all from apex quasi-CNAME hacks and the like.

However in my initial remark you can substitute in the use of "a well-known subdomain"[1] for "SRV record" and still achieve a better separation of concerns than simply using the RHS of the identity string.

[1] c.f. DKIM's slightly hackish but effective use of an intermediate underscore to denote infrastructure DNS entries. Won't work for A records though IIRC.
It's hard not to respect Mozilla in 2013. I know i've personally moved away from Chrome back to FireFox. Mozilla seems like a young Google in a way.
> Wouldn't it make more sense for Google to first shut down FeedBurner and then Google Reader?

Not particularly. As it stands now, FeedBurner feels more like a utility whereas Reader is a service.
> (I gathered from these exchanges that programmers have a perpetual competition to see who can claim the most things as 'simple.')

Amusingly, I've noticed the same thing: I do claim that a surprising amount of things are simple. And you know why? Because they are. A whole bunch of things (most recently F-algebras and F-coalgebras) really are simple: you start with a very simple concept (say sets and functions) and build up to them, taking very simple steps along the way. Maybe you have to bring in a couple of other concepts that are similarly simple.

EDIT: I should have made this clearer: I say something is simple before trying to explain it rather than instead of. I mainly do it to avoid scaring people without reason, and everyone gets far too scared of words like "F-coalgebra" or even "monoid".

Every single step along the way? Virtually trivial. But put them together and you get something genuinely difficult to follow.

It turns out that enough trivial steps all building upon each other becomes difficult to follow for anyone. Yet, once you've finally understood it, you can't see why it was difficult any more: after all, all the components are so simple, and it all makes sense! (Now.)

I realized this in a pretty direct way: I was trying to explain the aforementioned algebras to some of the smartest people I know--people with much more mathematical experience and aptitude than me--and they all found it a bit hard to follow. Not because they couldn't follow any particular step, but because putting it all together in your head is difficult.

So really, the ultimate conclusion is: just because something is simple does not mean it is easy. Having some trouble with simple concepts like this is not an issue at all; everybody does. But that doesn't mean they aren't simple!

Another, more surprising, conclusion is just how shallow the stack of concepts has to be to cause people trouble. It's not like there are hundreds of parts in these definitions: there are maybe 10. (Say: set, function, algebra, identity, category, morphism, functor, dual.) And yet this is more than enough to confuse.
Increasingly Prevalent, Realistic, and Irrelevant
>This creates a significant barrier to adoption.

No, not really. Because Mozilla is running the Fallback server in the meantime.
I Don't Write for Pageviews
I fail to see how Medicare can be considered effective and efficient when it costs about as much per capita as what other countries pay to cover everyone, it covers less than 1/6 of the population, and only covers about half the total health care costs of the covered population.

It may be better than the private US healthcare system, but that's not saying much.
Dan Bricklin wrote a very nice article on the subject: http://changethis.com/manifesto/show/6.200YearSoftware
You are my hero, Zaphar. Great job.
Everyone I know who codes or designs is anxious to help others learn to do the same. However, it's just common decency and respect to Google it, try to do it, and then have specific questions about what you couldn't get past.

Just a rebuttal to one point that irked me.
That's my solution right now. There's a bug I don't kown if you can grt rid of it or not.

When I type `cd a\ dir`, it works, while `c a\ dir` fails. `$1` seems not to cover the whole parameter. Can you fix this?
They seem to help students with housing in terms of hooking them up with hacker houses, hostel locations etc. I could be wrong, but that was the info I got when I was talking with them. I know one student even slept on a couch in App Academy when he was attending.
> Why should, for example, google, ever trust, say, fred's discount web hosting, enough to let them login to gmail?

They're not. They're letting users who use Fred's discount web hosting as their authenticator to log in. Fred's discount web hosting won't even know when their users try to log in to gmail.

Letting someone authenticate that way is no different than allowing passwords than many users reuse all over the net, including on dodgy sites that might very well take that gmail address and password they were handed and see if they can log in to the gmail account with it (want to be on how many users use the same password on their e-mail and other sites they sign up to _using_ that e-mail?), or writing it down all over the place.

> Long term, how are we not going to end up with just a mishmash of who accepts what?

If we do, we're no worse off than we are today.
As an international student, what would the consequences of just not paying that bill be?
Patient (and not unnaturally unlucky) use of http://satoshidice.com/ is probably more efficient.
I think it doesn't metter if this command gives several lines more logs. It doesn't do anything else that may break the faollowing command.
Having script run in your shell when it starts breaks X login sessions. Most terms do this actually, just no on Linux ironically. e.g. iTerm2, Terminal.app, Putty.
Yeah, I use tmux though. I wish I had cycles to add it to tmux.
This might be the Microsoft paper you're referring to: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/144888/eurosys84-nighting...

I worked on one of the Windows Error Reporting (WER) server components that detected memory corruption from bluescreen memory dumps submitted to the WER service. It's a debugger extension called !chkimg (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff5...). It compares the executable code in the memory dumps with the actual binaries that Microsoft shipped and flags differences between the two. This way you can tell what code was actually running on the machine vs what it should have been running. It was quite effective at detecting corruption patterns this way. Usually one-bit corruptions (just a single bit flip) and stride patterns (i.e. one corruption after every 4, 8, 16 or 32 bytes etc) were a good indicator of hardware problems.
David Heinemeier Hansson on Apple, Yahoo, startups, lifestyle biz, and more
Can you elaborate re: fivetran? The name means nothing to me, so I'm wondering if it's something from the States or some other thing I don't recognize.
Here's Why Marissa Mayer Is About To Spend ~$200 Million On A YouTube Wannabe
> but at some point you have to trust someone not to hurt you.

Rule number #1 of working for corporations: cover your ass. It's a game, and the corp will throw you to the wolves if they think it's necessary.

It's not even malicious; as long as you play the game with your eyes open, it can actually be fun (in a "Game of Thrones" kind of way).
I don't have a lot of experience doing this but I was asked a few days ago and recommended using http://fiverr.com/ for finding a good voice.
I recently set up my personal domain as an identity provider, using static HTML/javascript files and a bit of crypto:

https://www.rfk.id.au/blog/entry/persona-identity-provider/

There are some things to be mindful of w.r.t. security in this approach, but it seems to work very nicely for me.
Ask HN: Fully funded MS  in Computer Science?
Do you know of any fully funded MS Computer Science programs for someone with a decent GPA and GRE?I have been on HN for over two years now,but created this throwaway a/c specifically for this question.
Not anything wrong with being polite. Plenty wrong with requiring people to be polite.
But your argument is essentially "we're just as fucked as we are now". Okay, so then, uh, what problem have we solved?

Now we are fucked, after we're just as fucked but not using facebook as the identity provider?

I guess i don't see this as much of an improvement?
Honestly, i'm not trying to be snarky. I'm just trying to understand why this seems to be presented as leaps and bounds above what we have now when it seems to be just as bad, just more distributed :)
See, getting value out of Google is something that's learned over time. At the very beginning it was hard to get very far at all with just Googling and when I asked others they pointed me back to Google--some of them unhelpfully, but others showed me how to use better search terms for the subject at hand.

That helped a lot, and I don't resent them for that type of help at all. I'm sorry if it came across that way in the writing.
Nice. Exactly what I was looking for.

The forum comments about how people weren't able to break the system by fast forwarding time were great. I love how Randall beat the internets :).
Depends on your definition of "good programmer".
OP is in a pretty unique form of callback hell. a list, a function, and a for loop would suffice.
Justice Flunks Math
The sucky thing is ecc memory does not need to be so much more expensive than non-ecc. It is only more expensive because those who make it, and server vendors have conspired to use it as a margin driver.
State regulatory or university requirements for health insurance for international students are often stricter (e.g., no limits on coverage).
We're discussing the addition of a DNS discovery option. Not clear yet that this is something that can be secured as well as HTTPS discovery (which I don't consider abusive, given the number of systems that do it already.) But it's on our radar: https://github.com/mozilla/browserid/issues/1523
We have a mantra in the engineering dept at my current gig. We should all have "strong opinions; loosely held".
I think that really depends on whom you ask. For many (maybe even most) people I know, you would get too much information. With maybe a nice detour into theory. (Most of the best things in CS come with deep but surprisingly simple and elegant mathematics behind it.)

Of course, the information might also be a bit biased: everyone has their own preferences and opinions, and usually present them fairly strongly. Some people hedge about other options half-heartedly, but I doubt anyone would give you an even spiel on more than a couple of different options. Which is entirely natural: chances are, nobody has much experience with more than a couple of different options.

This might also vary a bit by community. I haven't spent much time recently talking to web developers. But the general programming languages/functional programming community is certainly fairly talkative.
The comments about the use of percentiles biasing the data are very true, in particular because there are effectively 3 pools of patients in the US: private/employer insured, Medicare/Medicaid and uninsured.

Medicare and Medicaid pay far less than private (employer) insurance (and the uninsured frequently do not pay at all). As a result, many hospitals and outpatient physicians charge private insurance disproportionately more than what the services actually cost in order to cover the operational losses from medicare/medicaid and uninsured patients. It's astounding how many articles that discuss the "ludicrous" prices of health-care in the US fail to mention that the prices for goods and services billed to uninsured patients are designed to offset the losses from other patients. That $80 aspirin is $0.01 for the aspirin and $79.99 for the cost of the nurse to bring it to you and a variable $ amount that helps offset losses.

The only fair analysis is to compare averages to averages, which in the US should include both charges to medicare/medicaid and private insurance.

I'm not arguing that health care costs in the US are lower or even the same as in other countries, by the way. I'm merely trying to point out that the differences are not what they seem at first glance.

More importantly: a brief look at the IFHP website and the report itself (http://www.ifhp.com/news153.html) leads me to question whether medicare was even included in this dataset. The relevant lines from the report are "The International Federation of Health Plans was founded in 1968 by a small group of health plan industry leaders. It is now the leading global network in the industry, with more than one hundred member companies from twenty-five countries" and "Prices for the United States are calculated from a database with over 100 million paid claims that reflect prices negotiated between thousands of providers and almost a hundred health plans." Draw your own conclusions (or perhaps someone should contact them).

Edit: I've emailed them to try and find out. I'll post back here what I find.

Edit 2: Another document put together by IFHP in 2009 (http://tinyurl.com/bn9qtvm
warning: PDF) compares other countries to US private insurance and medicare separately. Medicare prices are far more in line with other countries than the averaged data would suggest.
Yes, that is exactly right, and it's also why certs are short-lived (hours). When certs are renewed, the site the user plans on logging into is not revealed to the Identity Provider.
And unfortunately the Supreme Court ruled the tax penalty is the only penalty legal under the Constitution.
This looks good, but one of the things that could stop us from using it, is Paypal, we can't withdraw money from Paypal where we are located.
By my understanding, yes and yes. The third-party service caches the public key (with timestamp) and the browser caches the signed certificate (with timestamp). The timestamp gives the credentials a relatively short TTL to prevent a stolen cert from being used indefinitely.
Well put. I have the same experience with compilers and program transformation. Many small steps, all of them simple , lead to a lot of heavy lifting if you put them all together. In some sense all those steps are "orthogonal", each taking the path into a completely new direction, ending up far away from the initial point, conceptually.
Exactly right: we hate the NASCAR array of buttons that is publisher-centric, rather than user-centric. I wrote about this a few days ago on the Persona blog:

http://identity.mozilla.com/post/45842909320/users-dont-like...
Lmppos Pos
LMP-POS Co., Ltd. provides Full range POS solutions for customer needs. Our extensive product line consist of POS Printer, Wireless&Wired Barcode Scanner,Handheld RFID Reader,Handheld Data Terminal,Card Reader,Cash Drawer and other POS products.
I believe you are making the assumption that doctors are pocketing this money (or at least much of it). I am not saying that you are wrong, but I am saying that you need to identify this as an assumption and re-examine it.

(As it turns out, you are wrong, but I don't have time to go into it right now :-P.)
I should say it was anything but easy. It took a lot of hard work and there was a lot of stress along the way.
I recall being a novice and learning Java, and trying to solve http://projecteuler.net/problem=5 - I had nested if statements like "if(x % 20 == 0) { if (x % 19 == 0) {..." and I was thrilled that it worked. I have since learned far better ways to accomplish things like that; but I probably wouldn't have if I had just given up in frustration and never become a professional developer. Cool job by the author in posting the original code. I'm too embarrassed to post my nested-if business :)
The verdict please, New Shipping Routes in Arctic
I didn't find a good book, I cobbled this together between a few different books and personal experience. Not sure if it is what you are looking for exactly:

I find the benefit in meditating comes from trying to fix how my conscious mind and unconscious behavior are misaligned. The practice starts with switching attention from inner dialogue and visualizations, and moving it to the physical sensations in the body. So you are reading your code, then you silently search around within for feelings. You feel the pressure of the chair on your butt, the air as it moves over the rim of your nostrils, physical feelings like that. Regarding self-regulation, I might notice a scrunched up forehead that I've held for hours, that is tiring me out and completely unnecessary. So I relax it.

The more I do it, the more perceptive I become.
No, if you choose a shitty email provider you're fucked. But currenty, you're also fucked on a site by site basis if whoever you have an account stores your password in plaintext/etc.

It's an improvement on having dozens of accounts on dozens of sites, both from a security standpoint and a UX one.
Note:
both 2 digits passwords and webcam based retina scans are terribly weak. Always upsets me when sarcasm like this is used, and the author is horribly wrong;-)
It's worth pointing out that, a couple of years ago, we tried to make OpenID easier through Firefox integration. There was no good way to do it. The OpenID protocol doesn't lend itself to browser mediation. (In addition to the other usability and privacy problems mentioned above.)
Design lessons from Gmail web app
When my last gig's industry came under attack from targeted hackers, our newly hired vp of security had a fake phishing email go out to our staff (which was about 1k). Even though we were an email marketing conpany doing SAAS, a shocking number of our employees failed the most obvious of email safety tests. It's not a matter of if you'll get a security breach, it's a matter of when. Luckily, we flushed this before it caused real damage.
Bitcoin on BBC Newsnight [video]
You can still us pg_pool with heroku.
Thanks!

Another good way to help Mozilla make the Web better for all is to implement Persona on web sites you build. It's easy and respects your users. Here's how you can do it in an hour or less:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/persona
Good point, but I didn't want to find out.
You're not required to be polite, but you may be downvoted.
On the contrary, it means that companies (already deterred by the technical issues) don't even have to bother. It's actually another barrier to entry, only more subtle. It's an incentive not to bother deploying an IdP, which is the adoption I'm talking about and that is necessary to call it "federated". One might liken it to government subsidies for the incumbents in an industry.

There's no "meantime" here - unless a Very Large Social Network adopts this protocol, I suspect the Fallback server will be the IdP most people use.