skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When an ACL costs $68k in California and $20k in Illinois and $32K in Delaware, you know that it's not an issue with simply the cost of getting medical training. Something else (I agree, something a lot more complicated than simply the cost of education or differencies in country-specific medical practices) is at work.

I think we actually agree here - the dramatic rise in health care costs doesn't have a single root cause, or even perhaps a readily identifiable root cause. It's systemic, rather than simplistic. Education is a factor, but a small one. Insurance and health liabilities are probably an equal factor. But neither explain disparities in cost within the US (no need to look at comparisons between Japan for that). See my [1] reference two comment posts up for the chart on cost disparities intra-US.

It's quite possible that medical suppliers are using information asymmetry to overcharge in some instances and properly charge in others. Could it be as simple as that? Why is it that the same procedure with the same equipment using similarly trained staff in similar hospitals with similar liability exposures would have such different costs? The only thing I can think of is that medical purchasing is sufficiently complex and with such little visibility and transparency between different establishments that medical suppliers and providers can get away with pricing them "as much as the market can support". But that's just an unsubstantiated theory and maybe there is a reason why the same procedure is cheaper in another state, county, or city.
This is an article about the ideal world. The actual world will be using the Dollar for the next 50 - 100 years. Why? Two main reasons, the UN would never agree on something new and because the Dollar works well for enough of the world as is.

Yes, there are valid criticisms of the current system. But what is required to supplant it requires so much power and authority that one group can not amass it. And even if they did such power would corrupt and ruin them.

The Euro is interesting, but the ECB does not have the same powers that the US federal reserve and treasury dept. do. The ECB shares a lot of policy making with the sovereign member states.
No, they're not. Alot of data is flawed though, based on assumptions that usually aren't true... Go on the ground yourself and see what makes a difference though. You can't sit on your computer in a 1st world country and think you know what happens in the 3rd world...
I generally agree with DHH's assessment of CRM and think it is ridiculous it trades such a high p/e compared to similar companies like Adobe.

That said, moving email providers is likely a huge pain in the ass for those 6000 customers. They are basically locked in for years and years. There may be potential to raise prices and gain profit from those customers. Internal investment to move vendors is likely in the hundreds of thousands.

Salesforce already has a few of these same clients through BuddyMedia and other B2C offerings, but the cross sell of a marketing suite is what they are envisioning. I expect that outside of a potential Marketo purchase, they will purchase companies with more b2c or general marketing offerings, potentially search, display or other ad related products to compliment Social.com.
Literature & Mathematics
Ask HN: What do you think of my idea to help create resumes and find jobs?
I have an idea and would like to gauge how much interest there is in using it. I'm interested in whether or not you'd use it and general feedback about the idea.

Here is the description:

Our service lets you manage everything typically associated with a resume including work experience, education and skills built up over your entire career and it’s all only visible to you. With no limit on the amount of information stored, you have the freedom to keep track of more career history than a typical 1-page resume would allow. You can easily categorize your work experience with tags to quickly create custom resumes, apply any of the several attractive styles and export the file to PDF. The application provides analytics and scoring to help you improve the quality of your resume. If you are currently looking for a new job, we can help connect you with jobs for which you’d be a good fit based on all your career history and even periodically introduce you to recruiters.

I am trying to capture as much information as I can and have set up a really basic survey. It takes about 5 minutes to complete. I'd really appreciate any responses in the survey but appreciate comments here on HN as well.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1NUCa9tatrr2-wtsyCyIHr7ASnyNJ0opS-xF9Y5plqEA/viewform

Thanks.
One could argue that the system is currently set up to benefit executives (who often end up winning, regardless of whether the company loses) at the expense of shareholders and/or the general public. One could argue that this is a problem that market forces can't fix, and therefore that a regulatory solution is called for. One might refer to this sort of regulation as "taking back" the unfair advantages the executives currently.enjoy.

Suggesting that we all are free to become executives and take part in the problem may be true, but it doesn't fix the problem or eve address whether one exists.
A clickable link to the survey --> https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1NUCa9tatrr2-wtsyCyIHr7ASnyN...
Yes, and the question is, how can you really separate these things out? But now that I think of it, there may be a way to actually test this. Did the Japanese leaders' private deliberations diverge significantly from their public statements? If we have access to them and they did, that would be evidence in favor of the face-saving interpretation.
Also the fact that since the CSS is the same for every site, design decisions gets pushed to the HTML. Bootstrap is not very semantic.
The author forget the value that programming in the small holds.

With few hundreds of lines of code, you can write a useful extension for firefox, or a usefull plugin for some content management system , or connect few API's data in a way that offers great value[1], or just massage some excel table and save tons of work, or build a simple but very valuable arduino project[2].

And the situation is just getting better with more powerful libraries.

[1]There's an application that just takes real-time data on when trees shed out leafs and shows it on a map. Really helpfull for people with allergies/asthma to certain kinds of trees , to plan their route.

[2]A group of girls in palestine(one of their relatives is blind) built a walking cane for the blind that detects obstacles using ultrasound and vibrates in response. This is an improvement to current walking canes.
Quite so. Add to that list an increasing willingness of the SV venture community to invest outside the Valley - alot of that money is finding a home in the DFW area. Used to be that only companies that could exist independent of venture funding for most of their life cycle could get going here, but that's starting to change.
I'd thought I'd add a bit about the Phoenix heat as someone who lived in Phoenix until moving to Austin for university.

Saying Phoenix is a 'rough place to be' is an exaggeration. Yeah it gets pretty hot in the dead of summer, however the low humidity makes being outdoors far more tolerable (on average) compared to most places in the southern United States (such as Texas). Even then, I wouldn't think of it as a big deal other than the larger-than-average electricity bill for air conditioning.

You're definitely right about the tech scene though, it's why I came to Austin.
Code Quality (How horrible is your code?), Will my attempt to push initiatives be welcomed or rejected?, Frameworks in Use, Architecture, use of OOP / OOD, Scaling considerations, Direction of the company (This can influence the way we build things, Some stake holders do not see this, through thier push to iterate), will it be fun to work there? and is there Redbull?
>Sure, if you have skills that are needed in Africa or Bangladesh, it's best to go there. But not everyone has such skills.

That's the key. It sounds like Trigg has found a way to combine his skills with his values in a unique way.
Beyond Recognition: The Incredible Story of a Face Transplant
I'm guessing it's a little exaggerated...

I live in the Denver/Boulder area, and I'm 90% confident that if I were laid off today I could have an approximately equal job in less than 3 months. I wouldn't say I have a new job lined up, but somebody could spin it that way.

Also, I'd imagine people from a well known company like OMGPOP, in a big tech hub like SF or NYC, would have an easier time finding something new.
Turns out the Netherlands also knows this kind of "happy box" as we call it, and my parents had one as well. I never knew!
I might be wrong, but I was under the opposite impression. I've done a bit of googling around and I've found some fairly reliable-looking sources arguing both ways. Anybody a lawyer? :)
The ability to set up a dev or test environment to test integration has been a problem with ET in past, maybe it still is (I did Drupal to ET integration several years ago).

However, from what I have seen of Salesforce, which is not direct experience but in watching demos over people's shoulders, their test environment setup is very smooth. I think you have to pay more for it, but you can get a copy of your environment, if you are writing custom plugins it checks that you wrote tests, that those tests pass, and that those tests aren't stubs, before it lets you put anything live. It seemed a legit best practices operation.

Maybe Salesforce can implement that setup for the ET service and APIs. In the meantime I will checkout customer.io for the next project that needs email campaigns.
Danielle's new blog strategy now makes a lot more sense! :)
This has got to be one of the worst articles in a while to make the frontpage of HN. There is an Editorial (!) explaining why we should NOT follow the example of a person holding a legal well-paying job making a great effort to donate most of his high income to charitable good causes.

The cynicism and moralizing is laid on thick - what a sad, messed up world exists inside Mr. Brooks' head. I hope HN'ers are more optimistic than listening to this claptrap and believing any of it.
I dont think anyone here is saying "he failed, what an idiot".
Here's a great idea
For companies who are smart enough to try and learn from the piracy of their products instead of trying to stop piracy: an analytics report of sharing. Is it possible track IRC, torrents and newsgroups and present an analytics report to companies? Does this exist?
Scoble doesn’t seem to care about anything. He behaves like a highly uncultured person who haven’t got a clue about pretty much everything except his job.
The Idiot Ratio
Government documents of Sean Parker's illegal & eco-destructive wedding
Libsregex - A non-backtracking regex engine library for large data streams
Most newspapers still have classified sections. The term hasn't been replaced, it's just more common for people to use Craigslist (at least among younger people) than to use newspaper classifieds.
ResearchGate sounds like a political scandal.
Well said. It's a useful tool. But does not standardize HTML.
Sync iCloud Photostream with SkyDrive
Yeah. I would love to read a retrospective about refer.ly if one exists.
Exactly, if anything it should be cheaper for the U.S. to do this per capita due to economies of scale.
Generics (outside of C++'s templates which are a pretty odd duck[1]) generate very little compiler costs and little to no runtime costs (depending whether they're erased or reified), unless you decide to (optionally) trade some added compiler costs for some runtime improvements by generating type-specialized collections behind the scenes.

[1] and their cost is seriously compounded by the rest of C++, D has C++-style generics with a far lower compilation cost
Russ Cox, one of programmers working on Go, described the dilemma as: "do you want slow programmers, slow compilers and bloated binaries, or slow execution times?"

He expanded on this dilemma with examples from major languages: http://research.swtch.com/generic
It always reminds me to not be the median dumbass, as NYC taxis used to be one of the few remaining places I didn't put mine on.

Then again I'm an elitist prick, so perhaps this wouldn't have the desired effect on the median user.
How many times have you seen a large application grind to a halt or become unusably slow due to reference counting overhead?

Perhaps it happens sometimes, but compare that to leak-it-all-as-garbage and scan-all-the-address-space style collection.
What is a good salary for a (full stack) software engineer in NYC with 7 years of experience in the field?
San Francisco, CA. Full Time

Company: Nextbit

We are currently in stealth mode so all we can really say is that we’re working on the next generation of mobile technology. Our team is made up of technical rockstars from Google, Amazon, & Apple that are looking to build something bigger. We love to solve crazy complex problems by architecting elegant solutions. We’re not in the business of building “me too” products. We believe that the future of mobile is just getting started and we’re building the groundbreaking technology that will take mobile to the next level; so of course, we’re pee-in-your-pants excited about sharing our product with you... & the world.

We are offering competitive salaries and meaningful equity packages. All new hires get sweet set-ups (Macbook Pro/Air, 30 inch monitors, a tablet, a phone, the works), catered meals, an office full of snacks & goodies, full health coverage, and an easy commute from just about anywhere (we’re located in SoMa near the Caltrain station near plenty of major muni lines!).

You can apply through the Google Ventures Job board postings, open roles are listed below:

- Backend Engineer: http://www.googleventures.com/jobs#job:162073

- Software Engineer: http://www.googleventures.com/jobs#job:162074

- UI/UX Lead Designer: http://www.googleventures.com/jobs#job:162075
that is not true. some failures are predictable, egregious, and symptomatic of cultural rot. what was easy was knowing ahead of time that Zynga was a terrible company. "skin in the game" is a meaningless cliche.

do I need skin in the game to create a histogram? to do multiple regression? to get a hunch that something is foul? judgement and critical thinking have nothing to do with skin in the game. business is not lacrosse.
Giving 101: the basics
> Now think about public speaking - 100's or 1000's of people all staring at you, the speaker, at the same time. It's no wonder this triggers a fear (or fight/flight) response in most people.

This is true for all public performance, though. Sure, in a football game, maybe it's just triggering all of their fight responses, but that doesn't explain the downtime between plays. Stage performers of every kind have to deal with this. And so on and so on.

I'm not suggesting that you can snap your fingers and lose your fear of public speaking: I'm saying that you can develop confidence. What's the point of a rehearsal, after all, other than to have something safe and ritualized that you can fall back on in case of wetting your pants? The things I'm suggesting aren't easy. They're quite demanding, in fact; you're not going to be able to get to know most audiences except vaguely and through repeated exposure.

> To stare at someone is generally a threatening gesture, certainly there are many social cues about when it is appropriate to maintain a fixed gaze, and if a stare is held to long or without reciprocal give-and-take then it is usually interpreted as threatening/aggressive.

There are ways to deal with this. My suggestion is essentially to learn how to break the ice. Give them reasons to laugh or applaud, which fills you up with positive emotion. Get them to talk to their neighbors, which breaks the staring effect. Focus and engage with random audience members throughout the talk. Pace, slowly, which is a posturing response.
I doubt it. It seems to me that this American Life was responding to the fact that patent trolling was already very much on the radar, not putting it there themselves.
The epiphany we had was that whilst machines do access
the API, the developer is always the customer and user.
Everything we do should help the developer, and if we
have to break rules to help them... then largely we
should.

Thank you, this articulates my disagreement with the idea of hashing all URLs so that client developers are forced to follow links returned by the API instead of generating their own URLs

http://blog.ploeh.dk/2013/05/01/rest-lesson-learned-avoid-ha...
C++ templates aren't generic (or more specifically, aren't parametric) for a few reasons, one of which being that they contain a hidden overloading mechanism.
Criticism can be legitimate, constructive analytical criticism can be enlightening (studying what went wrong). Claiming that all of the execs made a terrible effort and implying that it is "unfair" they are being paid well (maybe they aren't being paid well!?!) is silly, unless of course he's an insider. Even if he was an insider, it would still be silly because of its emotional content which is what the commenter above you replied about: if it bothers you, go build your own company and exemplify all of the character and ideology you uphold as "ethical" or "moral".

His comment wasn't aggressive either. It was firm. Zynga's major flaw isn't "cronyism" or "leeches" as far as I can tell; its major flaw happens to be a confluence of bad choices and poor insight; I however, do not know enough to actually constructively criticize the company and its leadership.
Poll: How do you book personal trips?
Personal trip includes air travel booking, hotel booking etc. Travel could be inter-city, inter-state or international.
I use an aggregator site (like kayak) that shows all options/prices/hotels/airlines together.
I ask around, go to individual sites (airlines, hotels etc) and figure out the best deal myself.
I am a frequent flier with specific hotels/airline(s). So i always book with them.
I call up a travel agency that takes care of it for me
That's why it's a good idea to maintain good relationships with recruiters on LinkedIn even when you're not looking. I recently went through the process of losing my job (more accurately, a job I had been offered and had accepted was rescinded mid-relocation). Thanks to existing contacts, I called some people, told them I had changed my mind, and had multiple interviews that day.
I mean both. When we look out into space, we're not looking at/for anyone in particular. I think all features of the Universe from any perspective are by definition worth peering at. Similar to the interesting number paradox.[1] Look at the Hubble Deep Field, for example[2]; that photo was taken of an evidently starless/empty patch of sky.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Deep_Field
Acquihire: ExitRound plays matchmaker for startups with nowhere else to turn
My own experience is that their internal sales teams and enterprise consultants are separate islands based on the product and they are very poor at cross-selling. We're a pretty decent size Salesforce.com customer and they have never even attempted to sell us other services. Not Radian6, not Buddy Media - hell, we had to ask them about Data.com.

So I'm doubting their ability to cross-sell. And then the integration is absolutely important - if you looked at the integration between Salesforce and ExactTarget, you'd be shocked by how primitive it is. Now, they might try and then sell them Pardot.
In general, I think patents slow innovation. My intuition is trade secrets would work well enough for most industries. It usually takes a significant amount of time to reverse engineer a product, and in doing so one might gain new insights into how said product can be improved. Drugs are an exception, I admit, but I don't think most of the innovation in medicine this century will be in easily-synthesized drugs as we understand them.
Presumably none of us are able to criticise politicians, then? Or our bosses?
I'm baffled. Who is arguing for Tesla to get special rules? They're simply not going to sell in markets that don't allow them to sell how they want to.
I don't really consider it fickleness when the casual game market is aimed at 'non hardcore gamers who want simple non challenging experiences that require no commitment and little depth' by definition.
I'm curious how you know so much about me. How do you know what I've done? I've already started my own companies bud and sold them, twice. I'm working on my third now after just building a startup with some others called Brabble. Here it is: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/brabble/id570281083?mt=8

To the post below: BKRGB which was an signage platform and ShaiSoft, which sold networking library software. The rest of the details are none of your business sir. I like how you belittle me because my numbers aren't big enough on the Brabble app. I've heard all this type of BS before. Don't listen to me then. Just keep attacking other developers for trying.

BTW, we have a NASCAR running this on June 7th in the Party in the Poconos 400 with our logo on it. Keep an eye out for it. We're just starting.
What Happens to Donated Cars?
Regardless of the crazy dealership laws I would love to rent a Tesla for a day.
When client connects to server, first it does the SSL handshake. Then it sends HTTP headers.

As a result, SSL really has nothing to do with HTTP and could be used to wrap other protocols. Check out stunnel ( https://www.stunnel.org/index.html ) which can be used to arbitrarily encrypt communications for any TCP based protocol
The US $ may stay the official reserve currency but I expect many pairs of countries to start dealing directly in one of their own currencies. The effective transition off of the dollar as the reserve currency will probably be gradual as more alternative currencies are used by trading partners.
No peep show apps: Google nixes Google Glass porn
Well, the core problem is that the freemium model is not sustainable for most businesses. There are very very few companies that can remain cash flow positive (let alone making large profits).

The execs get paid well because the owners of those companies assume (rightly or wrongly) that the execs performance determines the outcome of the business. The average engineer working in that company is assumed to not have such power (which is true for a lot of companies).

BTW If any company started holding up salaries of their employees dependent on profit, nobody would join that company !
Washington and Hamilton -- the Federalists you mentioned -- desperately wanted a strong federal gov't with supremacy over state laws. Washington wanted the powers of the federal gov't enumerated in the constitution (and many of them), and his desire was for a unicameral legislature with direct popular representation.

That our constitution ended up vague on these issues-- and the existence of the Senate with its state-appointed representitives-- is owed to negotiation and comprimise. Of course, Washington presided over the congress on these issues, he was not himself a delegate, so you don't have a lot of direct quotes on these topics but what we know has been pieced together over the years from his (limited) correspondence and 2nd party accounts.
I can verify that $70k outside of SF/NYC is very achievable for less than exceptional programmers doing Ruby/Python work.
I feel the Kent State shootings give some kind of scale to the event. There, four people were killed, and we still listen to the Neil Young song about it. It's hard to imagine what hundreds or thousands of deaths (Wikipedia) would feel like.
Flatiron School Prework (Ruby, webdev syllabus)
Do Product Managers Really Need a Background in CS?
I had so much trouble reading this article just trying to interpret if every sentence was serious or some kind of dry Swiftian satire.