skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think I'll ever forget the 7-day Zen meditation retreat when word had gotten out that I was good with computers, so instead of digging in the garden or peeling potatoes, I spent my work period scraping their old members' registry page into Excel with some Emacs macros and a Ruby script. That evening's zazen had a lot of distracting thoughts about refactoring and extensibility. Back to the practice... Just breathing... Hmm, maybe I could make a convenient web service out of it...
> The so-called social healthcare as pushed by the government will inherently waste a lot of money because government is always wasteful with it's resources.

This just isn't the case. Healthcare/health insurance, for a number of reasons, is one place where government-provided solutions have traditionally been less wasteful than private market solutions.

One reason is that single-payer systems are monopsonies: The single payer (which need not be the government, and in some countries actually isn't the government) has much greater bargaining power than any individual or company and can negotiate better prices.

Second, the big cost drivers for health insurances are things that happen either way; the 80/20 rule applies, and most actual costs are caused by chronic illnesses, surgery, etc. These costs will occur either way and will have to be paid for. They will eventually come out of your paycheck (or somebody's paycheck), no matter who's being charged and how. There's no taxing people more or less, because most of the costs are fixed. Single-payer systems allow us to structure payment for these costs to minimize inefficiencies, medical debts, etc.; universal healthcare furthermore reduces the risk of treatment for acute conditions being delayed, which drives costs up further.

Third, healthcare/health insurance markets are less efficient than other markets. One reason is that people do not have a desire to shop around when getting sick; evaluating healthcare options takes time, and that's the last thing you have when you need treatment. Another reason is that healthcare and health insurance is simply too complex and time-consuming for patients to fully understand and to appreciate, especially with the arcane complexity of health plans as they tend to develop in a free market. Finally, insurers in a free market will do their darnedest to insure healthy people and avoid insuring sick people. All of this breaks the normal demand and supply constraints in a fairly fundamental fashion.

Health insurance in the Netherlands may be becoming more expensive, but that's because health insurance is becoming more expensive everywhere as a consequence of population aging and advanced treatment options. In the end, your per capita health care expenditures are still 2/3 of that of the United States. Under the US system, you could expect to pay a couple thousand Euro more annually.
There is no trade-off: In the UK, postcodes are much more specific, and there's always manual address entry.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..
Jeff Hanneman memorial Blooderator
ISRAEL ON RUN, CALLUP ENFORCED, kills 1 in 5, stop flying?
"This level of diligence is why when I state something on the record, I’m always — always — right."

Warning sign #1

"If there’s anything I can do to protect the health of my employees and their families, shouldn’t I just close the fucking spreadsheet and do it?"

Asking to use emotion instead of reason - check

"And — fuck you, Papa John"

Insult or ad-hominem - check

"I’m going to have to work even harder to raise more money"

Call for self sacrifice. We're done there.

This is at best a populist opinion, and NOT a reasonable analysis, as per the author own suggestion to use emotions instead of reason.

Also, when someone tells you about 100% accuracy, think about Dunning–Kruger cognitive biais.

"If I made the wrong business decision, I’m an idiot but fewer people will get sick. If I made the right decision, I’m a genius and fewer people will get sick"

Hey genius - that's assuming the medical care paid for will have a significant effect. Modern medicine treat all kind of things, but for some we've just not found the right answer yet. And I sleep quite well.
I see it as a slight annoyance that comes bundled with this wonderful trackpoint. Really, my point was that this is a major issue if the system costs 500€, but about two thirds less important if it costs 1500€.
> To clarify: it is an excise tax and applies to the _gross sale price_, not the profits (so even if the division runs at a loss, they still have to pay). http://www.irs.gov/uac/Medical-Device-Excise-Tax:-Frequently.... I'd agree with your skepticism if it were affecting net (after employee salaries etc)

AKA a sales tax. Which don't generally lead to broad-scale layoffs when they're imposed. Did California have massive layoffs when they raised their tax on everything in the entire economy in January? How about when Canada introduced a brand new 7% across the board sales tax in 1991?

As a business, the standard way of responding to that kind of tax is to raise your prices correspondingly (to an appropriate level set by your supply/demand curves of course).
For fast development, I like Clojure + Compojure + Hiccup using IntelliJ. If you like Clojure then Hiccup is awesome to use: it is an efficient Clojure library for rendering HTML. A bonus: this combination also provides very good runtime performance. This combination has replaced Ruby + Sinatra in my little world.
To tell me to "just use" it seems a bit glib considering that it's apparently nowhere being ready for production (the current code even has failng tests), let alone available as a swap-in replacement for Ruby.

That said: It looks like a really interesting project. I do wish they would phrase the project description as a "Ruby VM" instead of a separate programming language, through. There should not be any need to fork the entire language just to provide better performance.
I think HSAs are overrated. My biggest problem purchasing healthcare isn't that I can't scrape up the funds, it's that as an uninsured individual I'm charged a much higher price for services than the insurance companies will pay. So $1000 of my money in an HSA doesn't go as far as $1000 from Kaiser Permenante. Not nearly as far.
Now I know what I missed.
> 45,000 Americans die every year due to lack of coverage

Sorry, no. That claim is often made, but it's just nonsense.

Every time we've had a BETTER sort of study - had the chance to examine a situation in which people are randomly assigned to either have low-deductible health coverage or not have it - there has been no significant health benefit to having the "better" health coverage.

The first such study was the RAND study in the 1970s. The most recent one was the Oregon study described here:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/01/shocker-ore...

Quote:
"a large-scale randomized controlled trial (RCT) of what happens to people when they gain Medicaid eligibility shows no impact on objective measures of health. Utilization went up, out-of-pocket expenditure went down, and the freqency of depression diagnoses was lower. But on the three important health measures they checked that we can measure objectively--glycated hemoglobin, a measure of blood sugar levels; blood pressure; and cholesterol levels--there was no significant improvement."

Good followup analysis here:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/03/how-the-ore...
If you're playing with Node checkout Drywall:
http://jedireza.github.io/drywall/

I'd really like to know what people think. Collaboration and feedback are welcome.
Are you then implying that there is no corruption in the USA?
60 Minutes did a two-part segment on this last year, if anyone is interested:

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7417242n

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7417240n
When did you install? Testing/Unstable are relatively quiet during a freeze, so just wait till everybody realises that Wheezy is out and you should get plenty of breakage :)
I recently made a switch from an advertising agency (where I was working on many different website for as many different clients) to a product company where I just work on a single aspect of a single product that has been in development for many years.

We use scrum and I find that the environment and this particular way of programming in a team has made an incredible difference in my ability to focus on a single task. What I mean to say by this, is that sometimes (and for some people) it may help to you change your surroundings if you have trouble with focus.
>OpenGL is simply not a good option for 2D text-heavy graphics. So I'm left with <canvas>, and <canvas> is slow.

That's what we call throwing the baby out with the bath water. What's wrong with using an orthographic frustrum?
To all the Indians here who are saying collusion / cheating is deeply ingrained in the culture - I'm just curious, is this true at IITs as well? Those schools are generally well-regarded, so I'd be interested to hear what things are like there.
The Heritage Foundation may be slightly biased on these issues...
Agree with a lot of points and appreciate someone writing it down. Way back in the days, I used to be a pencil and paper type programmer; there used to be very little distractions like social networks or even an online help systems.

As a result, I still have a more comprehensive knowledge of the standard library of a language or the instruction set of a microprocessor. Today, my learning is very need based. While programming, I cherry pick the information I need based on Google searches.

This leaves me extremely dependent on externalities and am faced with too many distractions. Maybe, I need to learn to tune everything else out and focus more.
All good thoughts, and similar to why I develop native apps for iOS vs web apps.

I think John Gruber summarized it nicely when he said: "Facebook, bless them, has it right. What's great about the web is ubiquitous network availability, not running within a browser tab. Websites are just services, and what you see in a browser tab is merely one possible interface to that service. The best possible interface to that service is often, if not usually, going to be a native app, not a web app."[1]

1. http://daringfireball.net/2013/04/web_apps_native_apps
Here is a summary of how Ceph works.
http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2011/03/ceph-scalable-high-...
It's only a debate for organizations that are trying to minimize costs where quality does not matter. See the concurrent discussions about full-time employment becoming rarer for service industry jobs.

If your organization is trying to get and keep the best people and keep them productive, there is no debate. Provide health care and health insurance. I don't understand how a venture capital backed organization could be confused about this, as they should be going after huge value adds with fewer employees instead of grinding out low margin labor.
Another vote for Meteor. To me, it looks the most promising for a full JS stack framework for prototyping and rapid development.

As with all things though, what's new and edge may not necessarily scale or be supported in the long-term so caveat emptor (I think we need a developer specific latin phrase here). Once a service/site has become successful, key considerations such as community, active development, roadmaps, extendability etc. become paramount.

For those, you really can't beat some of the time-tested communities around PHP (Symfony/Cake), Python (Django/Flask/Bottle), Ruby (Rails/Sinatra) and Java (Spring).

I'd say that Node.js is entering this space from the backend perspective, but the front-end JS frameworks are an open battlefield right now (which is awesome, just fragile).
Excellent point. Leaving insurance decisions to the individual would take these issues out of your hands, and let you operate more efficiently. And to elaborate on the employee side, employees wouldn't have to feel so tied down to particular employment situations simply because of health issues.
> The wire transfer makes me think these guys are hosting auteurs or the like.

Or realise that to ask for 1EUR or more the fees they pay on wire transfer are much lower. WE encourage clients to pay us via bank transfer for this reason - it's free for us to receive with our bank, vs 0.20 + 2.9%.

Sure, we're not trying to do it in bulk (with the wrong reference numbers etc) but given (here in the UK and I imagine Europe) everyone pays their tax this way each year, it's not unusual.
I don't think the issue is the same as tivo, ie people have no problem getting locked out of their devices, I think the problem is that people are being deceived by the smokescreen that secure boot can (currently) be disabled (Through undefined, and very commonly broken/buggy mechanisms).
>benefits tied to employment [...] is also the only economical path currently for medical insurance.

It's the least economical path ever come up with for the financing of health care. No one has ever come up with a more expensive way. All other ways that have ever been implemented have been cheaper.
Your assuming it makes it that far, I still think Bitcoins will be dead within 50 years and a far more useful cripto currency will take it's place.
The title when I commented was "inventor of the Power Hour defeats domain squatter"
Pretty frustrating to read this.

Question for HN: Many CodeJam competitors (this is not limited to CodeJam, though) do these competitions so often that they essentially have a library of similar problems and solutions to reference. In which case, a top competitor can identify a similar problem, copy the source code from his previous solution, and slightly modify it to the problem's specifics.

Is this considered cheating? It's incredibly frustrating for a competitor like me - who makes it into Round 2 by the skin of his teeth (rank 768 in round 1A) - to see the top guys (whose names I recognize!) finish problems in minutes. Is it possible for them to just be that fast? Maybe, but it's well-known that many copy solutions from previous problems.
Specialized biked and specialized docks - when you park a bike in a dock, a heavy bolt locks it into place. This is done within an enclosure that covers much of he front wheel, and the only way to get at the lock would be to dismantle the entire apparatus. The bikes themselves have no detachable parts and are _extremely_ distinctive with a street value of "You have the right to remain silent".
knocking one up is the best way to clone
I agree, I feel that the average productivity of a programmer before the dawn of social networking and Facebook was much higher than it is today.
"right-wing/Austrian economists"

Stopped reading right there. Seriously, if you want to frame Austrians as evil at least try a little harder to be subtle about it.
I recommend http://www.amazon.com/COMPLEXITY-EMERGING-SCIENCE-ORDER-CHAO... which addresses this question in fascinating detail, and of course http://www.amazon.com/Blind-Watchmaker-Evidence-Evolution-Un...
路过拜大牛 +1
Http://www.kinox.to/Stream/Priscilla-Koenigin_der_Wueste.html
http://www.reasonwell.com/:06d4d5/The_Patient_Protection_and...

I have no idea.
Yeah Flask is great, check http://blog.close.io/post/45202900854/the-tech-stack-behind-...
Yes, but deflationary currency discourages that sort of saving, because holding on to the currency works as an investment.
What about people who want to dual-boot?
Basic income does seem to work as a solution to this; also gets rid of the need for minimum wage statutes. Any other schemes?
The worst possible cybersecurity breaches could be far worse than you imagined
Try out Yesod (http://www.yesodweb.com) or snap (http://snapframework.com), if you are, or want to be haskell guy.

Also xkcd uses happstack, another haskell web framework...
"Another reason is that healthcare and health insurance is simply too complex and time-consuming for patients to fully understand and to appreciate, especially with the arcane complexity of health plans as they tend to develop in a free market. "

Yet another reason: it's not like most simple commerce transactions with 'satisfaction guaranteed or your money back". If I choose option A over option B when looking at medical procedures, I may live or die. No going back for a refund. Or I may be permanently scarred, brain-damaged, or otherwise harmed for the rest of my life. Or... I might be cured. There's very little ability to 'shop around' and 'compare' options when talking about life-critical situations.

It's somewhat similar to housing, in that most people only buy a few houses (at most) over several decades - trying to shop around and compare options only goes so far - once you've made a decision, there's rarely ever a quick 'undo and start over' option.
World War II Code Is Broken, Decades After POW Used It : The Two-Way
You are the first person whom I have encountered who acknowledges the grass-root and "common man" level of corruption in India.

In the last 5 years or so, I am finding this corruption becoming even more widespread even, as you rightly pointed out, in the tiniest of the day-to-day transactions!
But... don't you wanna buy like eighteen subscriptions to his startup so he can feed is surrogate family of employees?
They sort of go hand-in-hand. Right now I've got a Blue Cross plan with an HSA. I pay for the majority of stuff from the HSA, but I'm generally paying a 'Blue Cross negotiated' rate for things.
Inktank is the professional services company backing Ceph. Here is their youtube channel with a whole lot of up-to-date videos:

http://www.youtube.com/user/inktankstorage
http://blog.close.io/post/45202900854/the-tech-stack-behind-...
Love the article! It does make me wish there was an app I could use to proof-read your site, correct your writing mistakes and share the link with you.

Some fixes: Been a printer’s engineer > Being a printer engineer | hell been > hell being | heart and sole > heart and soul | the company are happy > the company is happy
I see an interesting point in this:

How much of a difference is there between using pre-existing code in the form of slapping down some copy-pasta vs. using a known and established library? If someone has a bank of algorithms commonly used for just these types of problems, how different is using that as opposed to the real-world usage of apache-commons or boost?

I realize that copying from other competitors is wrong, but where is the line between standing on the shoulders of others and copying-as-cheating?
I'm going to take a wild stab at the primary reason he develops on the Mac is his own comfort and expertise with it - which is fine, of course. With the advancements made in web tech today, I don't think all the performance reasons he listed ring entirely true. See for example Google Refine https://code.google.com/p/google-refine/ which is a similar tool to his Wizard tool, with a web front-end.
I recall being in a similar situation. I had done significant marketing/PR for my project and that helped me avoid this issue. Since mine was an original project (a rare phenomenon), it was not very difficult to get the project famous amongst other students and then the professors.

The students in the next semester started asking me for the project files to copy it for submission as their own project. I had to be very polite to not give while maintaining my relationship with them.
> Which large companies that sell health insurance have gone bankrupt due to being wasteful with money?

Was not necessarily talking about companies in a specific market. But plenty companies have gone bankrupt through bad financial management. I think in the Netherlands some insurance companies might have gone bankrupt if our government allowed them to (because many insurance companies in the Netherlands are linked with banking companies). But instead our government thought it wiser to spend taxpayers money to keep these companies alive.

> The incentive to "not waste money" in the health insurance industry is "deny coverage when possible". Is that really the best way to provide healthcare for all Americans? Presumably that's the real goal that we all share, and we're just arguing about the best way to do it.

I think this is a prime example where government legislation should provide consumer security that insurance companies keep to their end of the contract.

> If government-provided health insurance is too wasteful, why does the American federal government spend more money on healthcare than most other countries (not even counting the American private healthcare expenses), with worse outcomes?

Of course the cause might be in many areas, I'm not sure the US example compared to many other countries is proof that government supplied social healthcare is always cheaper.

Then again, even F.A. Hayek argues in his book "The Road to Serfdom" that perhaps in very few situations government supplied services might be worth the loss in freedom [1]. Perhaps healthcare could be one of these services.

[1]: "In instances like these it is at least possible that we might all be better off, and should prefer the new situation if we had the choice-but that no individual ever gets the choice, because the alternative is that either we should all use the same cheap car (or all should use only electricity), or that we should have the choice between these things with each of them at a much higher price. I do not know whether this is true in either of the instances given. But it must be admitted that it is possible that by compulsory standardisation or the prohibition of variety beyond a certain degree, abundance might be increased in some fields more than sufficiently to compensate for the restriction of the choice of the consumer."
I don't know. I mean, the trend has been hand-held devices and laptops for the past decade or so. They don't get booted every day and will be less and less. All the while, devices are getting faster hardware, making the difference even less.

Too me, it still seems not worth breaking a working standard (SysV) over.
Here's something from the news last year. Without the reference genome this wouldn't be possible.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/health/in-gene-sequencing-...

This was just one person, sure, but there are a lot of smart people working very hard on making this scale.
In Tech We Trust? A Debate with Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen [video]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5641799
Great work there.

I've had same experience when in my first year, I made a GUI app with Win32 API while others were giving command line stuff. Teacher clearly said, "This is too complex, even I will need 2-3 days to understand it. Did you buy it?"

I have to make fourth year project soon, hope I get same reaction!
I'm an international student from China, and now I'm TAing a CS intro class in an US university(it's ranked top 30).

I found many Chinese students cheating and am not surprised, but what surprised me was that many US students cheated as well. Since I'm from China I know very well the kind of collusion culture : people care their grades too much and make mistakes. However, from what I have heard, US universities have strict policy against cheating, and students from US generally don't cheat.

To put it into figure: 15 out of 60 cheated, and 4 are Chinese while 9 are from US. I'm really disappointed as my college is even ranked top 30, and this changed my impression about US colleges. I'm transferring out to an ivy and hope there won't be much cheating in these prestigious ivies, but then Harvard Cheating Scandal came.

Now I feel really bad about US. I thought it is a place where ingenuity and honesty are upheld most.. Sigh.
Some Americans can't even find Canada on a map.

http://www.pajamadeen.com/world-news/canada/why-americans-ca...