skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The fraction of patients without insurance but with enough cash and motivation to fly to the UK purely to seek savings on medical treatment has got to be fairly tiny.

Well, if my options are to spend 60 grand on an ACL repair in the U.S., or significantly less than that on a first-class ticket to London, some serious fun, and an ACL repair...I know which one I would choose.
You are probably right but for some reason I guess I missed the sarcasm. I haven't followed Mark Pincus so I wasn't sure and this isn't reddit so I guess I'm just used to people being more sincere.
It makes a lot of difference to some PHB's, though.

I'm pretty sure I can upgrade to a service pack. Changing versions, OTOH, probably requires approval from management.
No you're looking at the 15:29:51 halt, which is a circuit breaker.

We were discussing the T3 halt at 14:48:44 which is due to pending news.
There are other words around those words. ajross is describing a corporate environment where the choice is sometimes made for you.
That's not as bad as if you were in the bay area, but it's not good. I assume you're in the Denver area and not out in the boonies?

FTE software engineers in Denver should be $80k minimum.

4 weeks vacation/sick time + 10 paid holidays, $80,000 + $9,230 = $89,230

Medical, $89,230 + $3600 = $92,830

Self-employment tax, $92,830 * 1.0765 = $99,931

That by itself calls for almost $50/hour. Add vision/dental, retirement plan, and whatever else regular employees get, plus the fact that you spend more time on your taxes, and do it throughout the year (you're remembering to pay quarterly estimated tax, right?).

Now, where's your risk compensation? The company is hiring contractors because they're easily disposable. You could be dropped at any moment.

Where's the compensation for the value of the flexibility you're providing the company?

Contracting as a 1099 calls for a 2x multiplier over nominal FTE rates. At least. You should be getting $80+/hour just for breathing.

And would you really only be worth an $80,000 salary? Just how junior are you?
why on earth would you want to do this? this seems insane

Don't get me wrong, the idea is non trivial and the writeup is great.
Internally, a big leading indicator is usually a constant series of reorgs. Reorgs goeth before the layoffs.

Last-ditch attempts to shuffle the deck chairs usually mean that shit's about to hit the fan. These are usually coupled with the secrecy/fiefdom mentality you mention.

There are only two types of employees in a reorg: those doing the reorganizing, and those being reorganized. If you're frequently among the latter, know that you're also considered expendable enough in a layoff scenario. If your company's gone through several reorgs in rapid succession (more than 2 in a 6-month period, say), it's probably not a bad idea to start planning accordingly.
Recently, I've been treating Facebook the way Flipboard intends to be used. I use it for news directly relevant to me (because at some point I liked certain websites so that I would get their updates). I find that they provide more relevant content to me than my "friends" do. A brand that uses their Facebook well, with an interesting image and grabbing headline, is a link I will click on.
I agree. If somehow Facebook plummeted and bankrupted it would absolutely raise doubts about the tech sector. 1/7 of the world can't use a service it trusts any more is a big deal.
Not too interested in those stats actually, but being a huge hip hop fan I think Rap Genius is a great site and if they can stand that kind of mass-crawling, even better for them!
Your comment on tendency to notice imperfection is correct.

Do you think that working in SEO keeps an arms race going with Google? SEOs find something to exploit, Google does something to counteract. This process leads to unintended consequences throughout the "order of magnitude" system.

My point is more directed to Google trying to include "quality" indicators that having nothing really to do with finding things on the internet.

Yet, I cannot quantify those indicators since Google never spells them out. lol

Folks who work in SEO have to ferret those indicators out and develop plans to take advantage of them.
From Wikipedia's entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag):

"... during the period of 1928–53, about 14 million prisoners passed through the system of GULAG labour camps and 4-5 passed through the labour colonies."

Original source: Robert Conquest in 'Victims of Stalinism: A Comment.' Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 49, No. 7 (Nov., 1997), pp. 1317-1319 states: "We are all inclined to accept the Zemskov totals (even if not as complete) with their 14 million intake to Gulag 'camps' alone, to which must be added 4-5 million going to Gulag 'colonies', to say nothing of the 3.5 million already in, or sent to, 'labor settlements'."

Subtracting the ~1.5M foreign prisoners of war, the 12M estimate seemed like a reasonable minimum number of Russians sent to the Gulag.
| a convenient shorthand for initially finding people
| you can talk with intelligently about getting stuff
| done.

I agree. I mostly use the term "full-stack web developer" to convey the idea that my experience isn't confined to a niche of solely "front-end" or solely "back-end" development.
That's a good observation. I didn't consider the cost of converting signups to paying customers though, as in my experience, the cost is little to non (when talking the type of SaaS products in the report). But in a scenario where there is significant cost pr acquisition, then the point is very valid.

I think jasonkester below nailed it when stating if you need to interact individually with customers or in any other way have significant expense supporting trials, then that's really something to address. Again, at least in these kinds of products, obviously it does not apply to enterprise etc.
You're right. I can relate to what you are saying. (eg most of the nanotech/cancer stuff posted here is not as interesting as metal chelators. But it sounds "cool" and "hi-tech" to most people.)

The main reason I posted it was to get other people's opinion on it (since I don't have a degree in science).

What are your thoughts on the comedic potential? (ie a Farnsworth getting kicked out of a science fair despite building a reactor.)
Show HN: An easy way to host your own code blog
Maybe you could try the Makefile Project for this : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/txcwa2xx(v=vs.110).a...
You get to decide what happens on build events as far as I remember.
Works great for me for all purposes required. I don't have any specific needs in this area, so it's a fun website for when I want a diversion. None of the author's complaints make sense to me, except yes, I do notice advertising.

The original post author seems to have specific interests and needs that are not being fulfilled? That sounds like a personal problem. My suggestion would be to move to another social media platform that better fits his needs.

But, in reality, I think the author's problem is PEBKAC. If he doesn't like the website, he should make one that he does like. Nobody is stopping him.
wish there were a video...
Next Generation Web Layout: National Geographic Forest Giant
Will we get variadic templates so that

I can std::thread(a,b,c,d,e,f,g) more than 5 arguments?
I agree that people should be careful in judging happenings in countries they have limited knowledge of, however, I see that you have no links to back your points so people have to rely on what you're saying. All the things I have observed so far are in direct contradiction to your points. Specifically,

* "social media campaign backed by yet to be seen figures", I don't know what you are referring here, it could be the typical conspiracy theory fueled thinking (e.g. "Israel/US was behind the twin tower attacks"). What I see from my Facebook and Twitter feeds is that all my friends, both in Turkey and in US, have been busy for the past 4-5 days in backing the protests by sharing information, etc. Naturally, some misinformation was communicated but that doesn't prove the point that everything was done by "outside powers".

* BDP was not heavily involved in the protests; however, a BDP representative was the first government person to try to stop the dozers in the park.

* I wish CHP were more involved! As you no doubt know, Kilicdaroglu, CHP's president, is a clueless guy who is incapable of seizing the moment even now. He tried to have large gathering on Saturday but did not have much effect.

* Your point that DHKP and TKP are somehow involved and/or masterminded the protests is ludicrous. True, these groups have in the past organized protests in Turkey and may have been involved in the protests (I saw people holding DHKP flags among the crowds a few times). That doesn't change the fact that the protests were middle-class-based at their peak. How else to explain involvement of groups such as BJK Carsi (btw these guys are quite a phenomenon, if you want to know more check out Elif Batuman's piece in The New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/03/07/110307fa_fact_...).

It is a fact that PM Erdogan has kept Turkey's economy alive and well, no small feat considering the fact that Europe is having its worst recession since WWII. It is equally obvious that he has become very authoritarian in the past 1-2 years. I can give quite a number of links but just listening to his news brief with a Turkish Reuters reporter is enough to showcase his impatience, I think: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abxc0b0J2UY
Here's an interesting social networking concept: the mixture of real names with anonymity. Your name would appear if you "liked" something, but dislikes would be anonymous. You could also have the option to post comments anonymously. Of course, bullying and drama would certainly be more prevalent, but nonetheless, it'd be an interesting experiment. (I also think people would be less afraid to speak their mind when a friend posts something incredibly stupid.)
Interesting -- my home page works at https://twitter.com/.
Well, congratulations on Facebooking more intelligently than most, I guess?
Is there any way to get data about how much insurance companies actually pay? I'm assuming it's different from amount billed.
Coming from the mobile app market where consumers are reluctant to spend 99 cents on your app/game, this is revolting.
Something has to be done (in the medical field and in the mobile app field as well)
You can't search anything on twitter. It might be because of protest in Taksim, Istanbul. I think servers were overloaded.
I have an above average understanding of RDBMS/Data-Persistence as well as back-end services, communications interfaces, front-end services (jsonp/cors) and their interfaces along with front-end (HTML/CSS/JS) and related tools at each tier from the backend (in the .Net world this includes WCF, ASP.Net Webforms, MVC, Unity/IoC/DI in addition to other toolchains such as NodeJS) to the frontend (grunt, bootstrap, amd, less, jquery).

I have no formal training of any kind and have been developing web based applications for the better part of 18 years now. In my experience, a C.S. degree provides absolutely no guarantee of mastery of any portion of software development, let alone a full-stack.
It's a fair point that taking investment money, as opposed to debt, changes the equation. Even so, I personally don't mind seeing founders get rewarded for taking the initiative and stress involved in founding a company, as long as all the transactions involved (re: employees, investors, etc.) are all voluntary.

then there's no reason you couldn't run the whole thing as a Mondragon-style cooperative in the first place, with some charter modifications to allow for issuing equity.

I'm not real familiar with the Mondragon Corporation specifically, but from looking at the Wikipedia article[1] just now, it sounds pretty interesting. I'm a fan of the idea of employee owned collectives and cooperatives (both for profit and non-profit), and see them as just as much a desirable part of our overall society / economy as "traditional" corporations. Maybe more so.

Being a libertarian / voluntaryist / anarcho-capitalist / $pick_your_label, I find the modern corporation problematic, in that it explicitly breaks the premise of "liability for the outcome of your actions" for the individual investors. Arguably that's a good thing, because it makes it easier for people to pool their capital and more or less allows for the existence of the modern mega-corporation. Arguably it's a bad thing, because it allows for the existence of the modern mega-corporation.

In either case, I'd love to see worker owned collectives, and /or private coops replace both many traditional for-profit companies AND many government agencies / services.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
>But you're right, that clearly the "devs" have preferences. The problem with your mechanism is that they don't express them to you in customer service requests. They just job-hop to another environment, doing Javascript work, or Linux, or Ruby. And you never hear from them.

>Basically, the way feedback works in this world is with feet, not bug reports. If you build it they will come. If you don't they will leave.

Is there any quantifiable metric to measure this so called exodus beyond anecdotes and the ".NET is dying" posts on here?

If there was an IDE for .NET on par with VS, it will definitely see uptake regardless of suits.
They are complete Bds. I am still very unhappy about what they did with the win7 phone. I feel like such a sucker. I was so enthusiastic about the interface, I showed to all my workmates and tried to convince them it was better than their phones (with little success). And then they went and left me with a ghost town of a phone. I felt quite foolish after that.

I took it all a bit personally :)
It seems to me that the balance of power has shifted far over to the providers and away from the insurance companies. Would allowing more mergers give them more bargaining power and bring these costs down? Or is that just too simple?
And if they were really "brothers and sisters", they wouldn't have just been tossed out the door when the going got tough (at least most people wouldn't do that to their actual siblings). So it's puke-worthy whichever way you look at it.
Twitter Having Major Service Issues | iEverythingTech
Send me an email (address in profile) and I'll be happy to send you an essay that explores these ideas in more detail.
What do you mean by C being officially deprecated? As a whole this can't be possible as codes like the Linux kernel are written in C.
Dear Leader Dreams of Sushi
I hadn't heard the vitamin/painkiller analogy before, and that's a trap I've definitely fallen into. Great list!
(Bracing myself for downvotes here)

I think the start-up community sometimes feels more like a self-help community than a bunch of cool dudes (and girls, occasionally) building cool shit. There's no secret to success and these kinds of lists are both trivial and highly tautological (sometimes even wrong, but plenty of people are posting about that).

Come up with an idea you think is good. Implement it. Get people to use it. Pay attention to feedback. There's nothing mythical about being successful. Sometimes, it's nice to get lucky, and many (many) times, you will fail. Go back to Step 1.

I'm only reading the OP because I'm at work, but if I were at home working on my "next big thing," the time spent would be much better invested opening up Eclipse or Notepad++.

Go ahead, downvote me. But after that, close HN and get back to work!
Thanks for noticing—they're going to fix it up and have things back to normal soon.
Timeline seems to work but most other pages don't.
Google Updates Chrome For iOS With Conversational Voice Search
Can you explain why you think so, or provide examples of "other groups pushing into it trying to use the protests for their own ends"? Up to know this has been largely backed by people who normally don't get involved with government protests.
Streaming music and video? Realtime updates?

While I agree that a 30 second limit is to be expected in order to conserve resources, saying long requests aren't needed shows a lack of imagination.
I can write a good essay, too, but I don't really attribute that to my schooling. Learning to write a good essay has one essential ingredient: you have to care about what you're trying to express. If you're just writing to the specification, you won't improve at anything except creating filler content.

I learned how to write a good essay because I thought I had something to say and I wanted people to hear it and understand it. Same with other facets of communication, like public speaking.
Everything but search & user streams seems to be down.
https://dev.twitter.com/status
me too. But nothing else works.
Twitter is Down Right Now
To be fair, you're doing exceedingly delicate machine and test equipment manufacture. The machine shops I know will buy new tools as needed, but reuse them on large job runs--and throw them out once they lose tolerance.

Something like the $900 knife in the article is/could be a mass-produced stamped piece of metal, perhaps sharpened on-site or at the factory; unit cost for that should be easily less than $10.
There has been a long-standing tension between capital and labor. The problem now is that labor is losing in a way that is no longer tenable for the maintenance of a stable system.

So, ironically, I think it's this "free market at any cost and by any manner" ideology that is the unstable idealization. Witness the grave economic disparity that it is producing.

It's funny, because the "democratic capitalism" system that I'm referencing consists of the capitalism that is defined in economic textbooks and the democracy that is described in the U.S. Constitution, etc. It's what we have now that is the bastardization of these principles: the crony-capitalism and pay-to-play political system into which we've devolved.

So, I'm arguing for a true meritocracy and economic opportunity for more than just a handful of bankers and gatekeepers. It would need to start with a true democratic government vs. one that has sold out to those same bankers and gatekeepers.
Nope. I just talked to a friend who works in the SF office and he said he was in the middle of writing an email to his family saying that he wasn't affected when he realized they were still walking around telling people.
Twitter is hard down.
Find the current owner and offer a small token reward. The fact that you found (him) is terrifying. If this doesn't work, PD.
> A true historian is a die hard revisionist

Nonsense. A true historian is one who connects the present to the past, allowing us to make informed decisions for a better future. Not someone who sits in an armchair concocting new theories about what really happened. That's nothing more than mental masturbation.
It's so weird, Zynga started auspiciously with a core team of some amazingly season develepors and rather than building up an amazing portfolio suddenly ended up doing...well, nothing good.

The writing has been on the wall for a while, if we even see Zynga make it through this year I'd be surprised. You can't assume you're going to win by just thinking 'this will appeal to the masses', you need a hook to engage them. FarmVille worked because people enjoyed it, not the concept, you can't try and shovel the same shit twice.

Plus, Draw Something was a dumb purchase. A great game with low revenues destroyed by high ads and shitty backed service. It was doomed to failure and a massive waste of money that they were too young to afford to risk.
That is true, but what is the command line tooling like for java? I build java all day inside god-awful IDEs. The last time I tried compiling Java on the command line it was really a lot of work.

I suppose there is some maven support for building Android. An even better reason to hope for the best for FFOS.
Always when Twitter goes down: "Ah damn. Is it down? Let's see if people on Twitter is mentioning something about it?"
You're right, there is a discrepancy and I didn't think to put it in the article.

I couldn't find the doctor's charges on-hand, but the total cost for the facilities/drugs/equipment was $48,851.82. The insurance ended up paying $14,742.88 of that post-adjustments.
Fair enough. Given that I'm a libertarian that thinks that "social responsibility" is a personal virtue, I'm clearly not his audience, since I have some pretty serious quarrels with his starting assumptions.
Wanting to stay connected and communicate with other humans is not a disorder, it's actually quite healthy!

I think it is fascinating that people feel compelled to visit Facebook or any website, and don't know why. It's like calling someone every morning: you want to communicate. If you stop doing that suddenly, you'll miss it.

Calling it an 'addiction' or 'some strange social force' or other conspiracy ideas are interesting, but flawed arguments.
Actual article title: Chrome for iOS Update

I'm looking forward to checking this out!
Finally, a really good list of this sort of advice.
It might be because of protest in Taksim, Istanbul. Everyone here was tweeting for/against RTE. I think servers were overloaded.
The most useful aspect of this article is the pie charts and line-item comparisons. Ignore the dollar amounts themselves. Why? Because almost no one pays that. Why?

- In California, MediCal (state-wide health insurance safety net) pays about 20% of the cost (not price) of treatment for those without insurance. So if a surgery costs $10k, MediCal says "Here's your $2k. That's all you get."

- Nationwide, Medicare pays something closer to 90%. Much better, but still a loss to the hospitals.

- Insurance companies negotiate with hospitals, but (from what I've heard) generally pay 115-125% of the cost, giving hospitals a 15-25% margin. Certainly better, but not necessarily making up for the above.

- Some patients with no insurance, especially at major academic medical centers, are rich folks looking trying to get the best care in the world for something particularly complicated. UCSF in my neighborhood even has an in-house Saudi liaison for Saudi royals. These folks pay the full rate, which may represent an enormous markup, which does help subsidize the care of the top two categories.

For those without insurance, who don't have the money to pay the full fare (meaning you're not a foreign prince or similar), you're going to get freaked out by the bill, which is based on the last category. But in reality, the moment you ask a billing person about the costs, you'll almost always get knocked down into the insurance rate tier, just for asking. Show proof that you have next to nothing, and you could get well down into MediCal levels.

In order to get the ultra-rich to subsidize the patients that generate the loss, the price card needs to be high. Really high. So they give breaks to everyone else, since you can't do it the other way -- "Oh, you look rich, so we're going to charge you double the rate sheet."

This doesn't happen in community hospitals quite as dramatically, since they don't have the ability to handle the crazy conditions that will result in the high-revenue customers. So their rack rate for an ACL will be at the low end, while the academic medical centers that offer the $2MM neurosurgery will have rack rates for every procedure on the high end.

Is it messed up? Sure. But does it mean that normal people are paying $65k for this ACL procedure? Usually not.