skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Been there.

$1,500/mo is a typical quote for "normal"-deductable health insurance. If you're a young family, that's not what you want; you want high-deductable health insurance, which has a low monthly payment but effectively means you're paying for all your doctors visits and medications out of pocket.

The real goal of insurance is to keep you from going bankrupt over appendectomies and broken bones. You can afford to pay your pediatrician yourself.

If you have a qualifying high-deductable plan, you can also create an HSA account and fund it to pay for routine health expenses; those costs are then tax-advantaged.

I agree with the other posters that recommend brokers. Especially for a family, you can wind up in a rats nest of preexisting coverage denials if anyone has ever been to the hospital before. I got the sense that insurers simply don't like covering women who might have children. Brokers will not resolve this problem for you, but they'll make most of the paperwork go away.

Couple more thoughts.

First, there may be an engineering union style group you can join to get health insurance from. Jeremy, one of my NYC partners, had a group like this he got coverage through. So look around for things like that.

Second, beware of temporary/month-to-month insurance, which reputable insurers offer very cheaply. It doesn't take a lot of thought to see why this is a bad deal: they're under no obligation to pick you up once the term ends. If you get sick April 29th and your plan runs out April 30th, you're completely fucked.

Matasano got group coverage (through United, and I'm not a fan) a couple years ago. It made hiring much easier; health insurance was often the first question candidates asked, before base comp. Be aware that group coverage isn't a magic bullet either. What it does is make preexisting condition issues go away. But it isn't cheaper than what you can get on your own.
In my opinion, by the time you are paying money managers far, far in excess of what any academic could ever hope to earn, you have crossed that line.

Yeah, there is certainly a legitimate question about whether the high rates of compensation across the entire finance industry are justified, and correlated with improved job performance.

What do they say to someone who reached deep and gave a hundred K or so to express their thanks and hope to guarantee the university's future academic service?

Well, they did earn an annual ~15% return for the past 15 years, which is a pretty stellar record; the recent financial turmoil was hard for anyone to predict. But sure, you've definitely got a point: the Harvard money managers screwed up bigtime, and took on far too much risk. My point is that I have no problem with the Harvard endowment being run as a private hedge fund in pursuit of good returns at an acceptable level of risk, and being compensated at about the same level they'd get in the private sector. The problem is they just ran the fund incompetently.
Meh. Why not just write in python? It's a better language in almost every way anyway.
C++ requires that all overloaded versions exist at compile time; Haskell allows them to exist at runtime. For example, in Haskell you can make a datatype like

data Foo a = Blah a | Bar (Foo [a])

and you'll have no trouble making a function "showFoo :: Show a => Foo a -> String" using straightforward programming. If you try to do that in C++ you'll get infinite template recursion.

Also, C++ templates don't restrict you to match the right type signatures, the way Haskell typeclasses do.

But other than that, they are pretty much the same kind of thing and are used in the same way.
In Haskell, you can't have `(+) :: String -> String -> String`, or `(+) :: Float -> Int -> Maybe String`. Maybe I chose a poor phrasing -- I meant that, when debugging, in Haskell it's easier to figure out which function implements the operator. In C++, I usually have to resort to a debugger.
I've come to feel this intuitively over the last five years as I have become my father despite a strong determination not to. Moreover, I've been shocked to realize that I enjoy being him. Its me. Feels like a magnetic, genetic force more so than environment.
Venture Voice #56 - Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software
Which is why any sane health care reform will likely include a mandate requiring people like you to carry coverage; insurance works best with a large pool of risk, where coverage isn't biased towards those at most risk of making claims.

That's not a dig at you. You might be right that there's economic rationale for you to carry coverage; the risk is remote and the cost is high. That's a problem the system needs to fix.
How many of these do we have to stare down before the internet punditry learns to take three deep breaths before clicking "post"? Remedial reporting here would have saved a lot of faces from a lot of egg.
World's highest-energy laser begins operating
Wow, it's much cheaper if you're a single male (no maternity benefits included) in Calif. at least (and Wyoming and Mass. from experience). I have a Blue Cross PPO right now for $85/month. They are upping the rate to $140. I will be leaving on principle.

I plan on getting a high-deductible/HSA plan. If the deductible is $X I will put $X into an HSA. Thus any care I might need over the next year will "feel" free. If I'm lucky and my current health trend continues I will not need to take any money out of the HSA. And it will simply be a tax benefit. In future years I'd replenish the HSA up to or over the deductible level of whatever my present plan is.

I would look at the high-deductible/HSA options. Assuming you have the cash around to buy the policy and stock the HSA with cash you'll not have to worry about health bills until next year. Psychologically, this could be comforting. Whether it makes sense probably depends on how much you and your family actually use insurance. And the specific costs of the plans available to you.
Grafitter , A Twitter-Based Graphing Tool, wins CMU Smiley Award
Thanks for sharing! What surprised me was the comment by DreamIT Ventures who said "competing with eBay is crazy". Quite frankly, I haven't used eBay in quite some time... it's turned into more or less a storefront for drop-ship merchants and less like the glory days I remember.

I know the critical mass issues makes challenging eBay/Craigslist rather difficult, and probably turns off investors... But, I think there's room for a new, much improved bidding platform.
I use Tonik. It may not be right for a family of four but for a young single guy it works well enough.

https://www.tonikhealth.com/
You are misrepresenting the paper - it requires assigning weight to each particular area. You can assign "business plan" smaller weight than "execution" if you and co-founders agree on the relative importance. But you have to have this conversation.

Also, the argument has value separately from the person behind it.
It wouldn't surprise me.

Let's face it, Amazon's system probably doesn't require large numbers of users flagging something before it takes automated action, because the average book just isn't going to get that much attention. So combine a likely low barrier to removal with a CSRF hole that lets you trick people into flagging whatever you want them to, and... you get exactly the result people are raging about all over the internets.
As a lesson, this is a good idea, horribly executed.

As a sketch for preparing a lesson, it's useful.
VCs already eyeing potential in new Chinese health care reforms
I had a Prof once that said there were two ways to become a Psychiatrist.

1. Go to medical school

2. Read The Bible, Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky

I'd tell them to read The Bible, Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky

Cheers
That sounds like a good idea. Any tips on finding a broker in my area?
Supercomputer As A Service
For some reason the health insurance industry has settled on a model of "pay your health insurance company scads of money and pay relatively little for the rationed routine care you get". Since health insurance is a heavily regulated market, I doubt this is the most market-efficient solution. Maybe if you shop around for routine care and offer to pay with cash (or HSA) it won't end up costing as much, and I've seen informal studies done by friends that show, for instance, that certain prescription drugs cost hundreds of dollars less at different pharmacies (once you can coax the pharmacies to actually tell you the price, since they're so used to working within the insurance cartels).

It all depends on your health, too. If you have sleep apnea and want to get it treated, that's hundreds of thousands of dollars if you don't have insurance. Probably better to get a full time job for a few years until your apnea is treated. If you have hypothyroidism, you can take remarkably inexpensive prescription drugs and get an annual checkup for cash cheaper than you can get insurance to cover the thing.

My working hypothesis is that high-deductible catastrophic insurance is the best solution for broke, comparatively healthy adults. In this model, you're using health insurance as insurance qua insurance, to make sure you don't go bankrupt if a medical emergency costing more than $10,000 happens to you. (This of course requires you to be able to raise $10,000 if something DOES happen to you.) This does nothing for drugs or routine care, and needless to say there is no dental plan. I pay $40 a month for this. I don't get anything out of my $40 a month, but on the same token, insurance qua insurance is something you pay for but you hope you never have to use. An HSA is not a bad feature if you're going with this model.

Depending upon state law, you can leave out things like maternity coverage, or get further discounts if you're in good health. A good female friend of mine doesn't have maternity coverage but she is very aggressive about birth control and has no qualms about abortion, though, so I would carefully consider whether this also applies to you or your spouse. I would also hasten to add that if there's a possibility of having more children, the expense of health insurance is not your biggest problem here.

In fact, I don't know how well this model works if you have kids. Or how founding a startup works if you have kids, for that matter.
This is the best flash game I have ever played. warning: very addictive. The puzzles will make you feel stupid, until of course you figure them out :)
http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/games/bloxorz
> text steganography

http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/soft/snowdrop.tgz

http://coderrr.wordpress.com/2008/03/23/simple-text-watermar...
I disagree that formatting is important. I can read code written in any style, and I don't find it much harder than reading my own. I think the problem is that most programmers don't read much code, they only write it. That's the problem, not how many spaces you indent stuff.

(If I am working on a project with other people, indentation style is the least of my worries. There are a lot more pressing issues to worry about.)
Feature request for Paul Graham. After we get so much karma on our account could you give us some simple blacklist ability so we can filter some of these sites that always go to the top for every post they produce.
Analyst: Apple placed chip order for 32GB iPhones
Sliding Boxes and Captions with JQuery
I have to clarify. :-) I am also one of those people who "just see" things. I meant that for a problem just at the edge of my abilities, someone who was just a little smarter (or who had the right representation/point of view - worth 80 IQ points) would be able to "just see" the answer to that one.

I think one can solve more complex problems "just by looking at them " - if one can find a representation that makes them simple. For example, switching from Roman numerals to Arabic numerals makes multiplication so simple a child can do it. (last paragraph http://ecotopia.com/webpress/futures.htm)

In a way, our brilliance as children is a gift from the ancients. I think it's deeply meaningful to create new representations to pass on in turn.
The second paragraph was meant to refer to laws, not a programming language.
In at least one language (TCL), the interpreter cannot detect the block unless the brace is at the end of the line. Granted, I hate TCL as a language, so I won't defend it...but if someone were accustomed to moving between TCL and other things, they may tend to retain this habit.
All I can do is guess: for most German professionals, that'd be within 5 years of getting out of college anyway (Germans usually start college at 20 or 21 and it takes 6 years, typically.). It's possible that given that, anyone younger than 30 was still seen as a "new hire" rather than "a career person". Since I started there when I was 22 though it was rather a disappointment. It might have kept me around longer, since after 4 years I wanted out -- but might have stuck around for that break at 5 years, and then who knows afterwards.
That's actually something I've been wanting to do for a while, I just haven't gotten around to it - basically a full "save state".

A workaround is to save something in the neighborhood to your favorites list, and then save the favorites list. This'll shoot you an email with a link that can restore that list, and you can send/forward that link to your friend. Once the list is loaded up, they can click on the go to marker button/graphic in the saved favorites list.
In general, I suspect that most people don't like feeling stupid, even temporarily, especially those that would take a very long time to eventually solve the more difficult puzzles.
The best solution was (for me anyway) to treat insurance as insurance instead of a health care plan, and take advantage of all the tax breaks I could for doing so. I put my family on a $10k deductible plan, primarily to cover catastrophes. This gave me two things: negotiated rates for health services (typically a 40-60% discount) and eligibility for an HSA. The plan ran us $190/mo.

Now, $10k is kind of a scary number for something like that, but I felt comfortable with it given that we'd never have to write a $10k check. At the very worst we'd rack up a $10k debt to a hospital or something, which (given the current state of healthcare) we could reasonably expect to pay off over like 15 - 20years. It seemed reasonable to me, for what we needed.

The HSA is helpful because it's effectively another IRA you can use for pretty much any medical expense. So for normal health care, we ended up paying about 40% of the "list" costs for things, and pre-tax.

Doing this requires that you be a little aggressive about getting good deals on care, though. My daughter broke her arm about three months in to this, so we took her to a minor emergency clinic. I told them what was up and they "coded" the visit at a much lower rate than it would have been. The next day, we actually called around to find out what people were going to charge us for a real cast to replace the splint the clinic put on. It worked out to be about $600 total, including the minor emergency clinic visit.

So in summary: get coverage for catastrophic health events with a "cheap" plan, abuse the negotiated rates that plan gets you, get an HSA, and be an intelligent consumer of health care. Oh, and minor emergency clinics are your friend.
These stories always scare me because, if true, they mean that someday we'll be able to customize not only the physical aspects of a child but the emotional ones as well. That in turn could lead to a devastating change in the makeup of our world.

To give an example, I think a large percentage of people would select an "easy going" kid if given the chance. But if we're honest with ourselves we find the people who have something to prove are the ones who make the major break throughs.

Bottom Line: Society's need for mal-adjusted people might be in conflict with a parents desire to have an affable child.
Well I take his point that expressing quantities in ratios may make more sense that absolute values. But aside from baking (and in particular anything involving yeast), cooking is not very sensitive to quantity variations. For people that cook a lot, these things come easy after a while, and for people that don't, they will have to follow a recipe anyway.

I remember when I first taught myself to cook obsessing about what constituted "a medium onion". Medium compared to what? Others in the bag? Others in the store? How I am i supposed to know what the smallest or largest onions in the world look like, so that I could figure out whether my onion was the golden medium?

After a while, I learned that I can have a 50% error in the size of the onion and the food will still be edible. If it's an onion, it will do, much as the OCD geek is screaming "looks a bit small for a medium onion" inside my head.
This sounds similar to vortex generators, which are small strips of metal attached to an airplane's wings to smooth the airflow:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex_generator
i'm going to use this to create a graph detailing the number of twitter-based programs/startups over time. maybe someone will come up with an idea of their own soon.
To follow up on this thread, what health insurance do contracts get? I'm looking for something for myself. Thanks.
I've been meaning to write about this subject. During the Ruby Array#sum thing from last week, some rubyists were suggesting that adding Array#sum to the core lang would fix it. No, the problem is not that Array#sum is missing, the problem is that Ruby doesn't have a good way to safely monkey patch classes.
PATExpert: Faster, better patent processing
If you fix it, try not to break it. In some european countries people shy away from starting a startup because social security contributions are very high from day one even if your income is near zero (Not so in the UK fortunately)

It's actually pretty simple to get right. Everyone must be in and everyone must pay proportional to their earnings. The key is not to have minimum contributions because that's what kills you while you earn next to nothing.
I'm mainly wondering if he can get his face sued off over this.

I've got NO doubt that this is going to have a noticable negative impact on Amazon's profits. Not world shaking, but more than enough to make the lawyers angry.

As another commenter mentioned, he's been in a NYT article, with his face and full name displayed. Amazon won't have any trouble finding him.
How can a snapshot sampling of (presumably) adult brains yield the conclusion that personality is decided at birth?

I have always assumed that environment is a large factor in personality. What evidence is there in this data set to suggest that it isn't?

It strikes me as entirely plausible that they have the causal relationship reversed.
Researchers develop first "flying" micro-robot
The War of the Worlds, so that they know that they can't mess with humans.
I fail to see how measuring adults' brains tells us what they were like at birth. Can't brains change? I can recall recently reading about how neurons actually can be created anew, in contradiction with ancient established fact. Can the structures of brains not change as well? Perhaps the brains of these adults have shifted along with their personalities.
A large reason to do this research is that our intuitions are often wrong. Your instrospective conclusions could easily have credited your father's early influence on you, instead of genetics.
Okay, but what's the point? Yes, it's possible to write down the Hamiltonian and Lagrangian formulations in a form that high school kids can understand. To what end? The reason these formulations are preferred is that certain classes of problems and generalizations become easy when you look at mechanics from these points of view, whereas in the "usual" setup there's no obvious way to proceed, but most of these problems are too difficult for high school kids to touch, and the utility of the abstractions will be lost on them altogether. They just become another set of equations to memorize, with no idea why anyone would write them that way...

This is particularly true with the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations - as presented, they are absolutely trivial rearrangements of the equations of motion. Their power only presents when you look at how they generalize to more complex situations.

It always bothers me when people try to slip advanced material into lower level education without addressing the "why?" question. A shallow explanation backed by a few equations doesn't help anyone, and in the worst cases it can make the material seem even more obscure and mysterious.
I'd second that, and add that pricing is particularly competitive if you're 26 or under (which I realize the OP probably isn't if s/he has a family of 4, but it might apply to others).

This is one of the more startup-friendly features of living in MA as opposed to the Valley.
Will social payment platforms really work long-term?
We realize there'd no way to eliminate piracy altogether.

We're just looking for the simplest way to make casual piracy tricky enough to discourage anyone who might want to pay for it. And of course a way that doesn't piss off paying users.

I'm not too concerned about piracy by people who would never have paid in the first place.
I got the sense that insurers simply don't like covering women who might have children.

This is probably because of an adverse selection problem: childbirth is usually planned (unlike serious illness). This means families planning to give birth are more likely to purchase insurance.

Is it possible to avoid the adverse selection problem by purchasing health insurance which does not pay for childbirth or childbirth related health problems?
Can I procedurally change my website style without affecting PageRank?
Hey folks,

I have an ugly, but old personal web page. I'm thinking of writing some code that would procedurally create snazzy styles, perhaps even changing the style every day. Do you have any idea whether this would decrease my Google PageRank?
I was using Wordsworth as a proxy for Romantic poetry, which I consider to be (as a whole) overly-flowerly and trite. The article stuck me the same way.

I don't rank Tennyson much as a poet. The inequality would hold on their performance as Poet Laureate though.
its just the mooninites taking pictures
Worse still, it may become illegal, or at least highly socially unacceptable, to have anything but an affable child.
New York Times Landing Pages: All the Irrelevance That Fits the Pixels
Wow. Anyone who owns, or hopes to own, an internet-based community of any type should read this, just to get a sense of the sophisticated methods and the lengths trolls will go to. While I have to hand it to this guy for deviousness and persistence, he is, after all, the "enemy" as far as the Web Site Owner is concerned.

It boggles the mind that anyone would do this, but they evidently do, and you may well have to defend against it.
some similar experiences here http://stackoverflow.com/questions/572620/is-a-great-memory-...
The reluctant Twitterer's dilemma
Thats true, the research is valuable. I just feel better if its genetics, because I think I could fight environment better :)
Yes, the author of Proc::UID discussed his module in public. That's not what I'm talking about here, I'm talking about the Ruby community's general love for cut-n-paste instead of actual library writing.

Anyway, compare planet perl and planet ruby some time. The Ruby posts are overwhelmingly "cut-n-paste this code" and the Perl posts are generally "here is a module I wrote". Different cultures.
I think its far more likely that engineering a better child will be illegal, for the foreseeable future.
Thanks for the advice!

I see how it would make sense if we had the money to go after people with lawyers. However, I can neither afford that nor am I particularly interested in having to do that.

I mostly see it as a deterrent.

Surely the same effect could be achieved by putting the purchaser's name / email address on there, without the hassle of steganography.

The impact of seeing your data emblazoned on the PDF would probably be a bigger deterrent than a hidden watermark, though of course it could quite easily be removed by a determined pirate.