skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a huge story that is really difficult to get a handle on, because the premiums changes are affecting everyone very differently, and the patterns behind them are very tough to tease out. I myself saw my premium go down by over 20%, with better benefits. I've also seen a lot of accusations of lying on either side, which isn't helpful either.

Some factors to keep in mind:

Health insurance plans have to be ACA-compliant. Plans that aren't have to be canceled and replaced.

Just because your new plan is ACA-compliant doesn't mean it's on the exchange. Check the exchange, too, as the price differences could be extreme.

Some companies (Humana in particular) have been sending out inaccurate cancellation letters, with inaccurate "new premium" amounts. They got in trouble a few weeks ago in Kentucky for implying that people had to switch to the replacement plan even before the Kentucky exchange was up. Humana also recently got in trouble in Colorado and had to send out a second letter retracting their first one.

It's possible that some companies may be sending out inflated premium amounts to lower risk, while knowing they will have to send out refunds in a year.

Your old plan may not have been ACA-compliant. Specifically, it may have had annual or lifetime maximums (where the insurance company says, "Sorry, we have spent enough money on you; you are on your own now.") These are now prohibited. Even though this raises premiums, this is a good thing.

Some states have crappy competition - Wyoming for example. There's no one else there to encourage an expensive hospital to lower prices, which means expensive premiums. That's a failure of the free market, not a failure of the ACA. (I say that because if the solution to an ACA's woes would mean MORE ACA instead of less - say a public plan - then it doesn't really fit the narrative of the ACA causing these problems.)

And most importantly, the chief goal of the ACA was not to lower your premium! It was to lower health care costs over time (not compared to now, but compared to what they would otherwise be). It was to raise society's health over time (compared to now). And it was to protect people from going bankrupt from health care costs. (This is already successful thanks to the elimination of pre-existing condition rejections, and the elimination of annual/lifetime maximums.)
This thing is written in ML, not in Haskell, and the GHC docs themselves claim that Cmm (the GHC thingy) is "is rather like C--. The syntax is almost C-- (a few constructs are missing), and it is augmented with some macros that are expanded by GHC's code generator". So "GHC's Cmm/C--" sounds rather like an independent reimplementation of a superset of a subset of "this C--".
> guarantees that neither the interviewer nor the candidate is wasting the other’s time

Yeah, it guarantees that only the interviewer is wasting the candidate's time. If you're hiring off the street I could possibly see some value in FizzBuzz, even though it's going to turn off any actual A player you happen to interview, but if I sent in a portfolio/past project/etc and you FizzBuzz me, I'm walking out. If you distrust a candidate that badly I can't imagine how micromanaged your employees must be.

FizzBuzz both saves you time by filtering out incompetent people, and saves actual competent people time by demonstrating that you're not willing to do what it takes to attract great hires. There's no shortcut to real interviews.
Actually, I would say that MVP is critical with deep integration. In my experience with deep-integration projects, often the most important aspect is cutting through the clutter.

I've worked with some of the federal agencies that have been listed here, and it's true -- some of these things are nightmares. But, there are architectural patterns and development approaches to deal with those.

Integration makes things challenging, but not impossible.
I have a ton of Moleskine notebooks because I value the quality. I have 5 or so filled with class notes, another one as my design sketchbook, and another to practice my daily drawing. They stay in much better shape and for longer than almost every other cheap notebook I've ever purchased. The Moleskine pages are bound more securely, the paper is of a thicker and higher quality. I've had my sketchbook for about 2 years now. I stuff it in my backpack, fold it open, toss it on my desk, etc. It gets a lot of use and holds up really well, which is certainly not something I've seen with the FiveStar or other notebooks you can buy at Staples for $3 or less.
Every modern dictionary disagree. English usage of singular they dates back to 15th century still you assert it here without any argument.
Nothing wrong with asserting things if you do that with stuff disprovable by one dictionary/wikipedia search though you make not too bright impression to put it mildly.

As to using she it's very common convention these days in some domains. Many books on games use that for example (chess, bridge, go, poker - you need to a pronoun for black/white/last to act player there ). I also saw some computer science books using it. At this point I would say it's so common that it becomes part of the language. I personally like it although I can see how it raises eyebrows when encountered for the first time :)
One of the most important musicians of all time. The Velvet Underground inspired countless musicians and greatly influenced whole genres of music, it's hard to see how Punk would have existed without the Velvet Underground.

Lou Reed's greatest contribution though was his ability to mix great song writing with artful experimentation. From ST with Nico to Loaded to White Light White Heat to Vicious and Metal Machine Music, Lou consistently wrote great songs and expanded the worlds musical pallet. He will be missed.
Note, you're having labeled me as dishonest, that ... frees me a bit from my usual constraints (not that that's costing you upvotes from me for posts like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6623010):

How about, "Because I have a fucking clue and could see that the ACA would make things at net a lot worse, and very possibly result in my premature death?"

Did you even note the vote was almost certainly symbolic? Not that making the most firmest statement (almost 2/3rds of Missouri voters) was pointless.

Anyway, you're focusing way too much on the micro-details of political promises. I prefer macro reality.

ADDED: ah hah, I now see the ACA is in theory going to save you 20% over your previous costs. No wonder you're defending it. I just hope for your sake you don't e.g. experience a shift from access to healthcare to access to a waiting line, or as Obama himself said, Liverpool Care Pathway style, you don't get a pain pill instead of treatment that will save your life.
When I try to see if a person knows how to "think", I start with fizzbuzz and then ask them to do it again without if or case statements. The first time a person is asked something like that you see if they're a thinker or if they just go "that can't be done." That question does a good job dividing people into a group that in 5 years time will ether have 5 years of experience or 1 year of experience repeated 5 times.
That's fine, but apple makes more profit every quarter than amazon has ever made I think. They have made several hundred billion dollars over the last few years. Who knows if amazon ever gets to flip the switch. Maybe they do, but even then apple will have a several hundred billion dollar head start.

Perhaps both strategies will end up working, but you can't say apples strategy is a failure. It is clearly not, even if they never sell another phone.
When hiring "Experienced C Programmers", I would just show them a the short version of strcpy() out of K&R, but with variable names change from 'src' and 'dst' to 'x' and 'y'.

Just to read it and say what it did. This eliminated the vast majority of the applicants:

void strcpy(char x, char y)
{
while(x++ = y++);
}
You're not missing anything. They are overpriced, and the quality isn't anywhere near what they used to be. Moleskins are trendy, that is all.

That being said, to an extent the suitability of the paper you are using depends largely on what you are using to write with. So, in spite of the fact that they are overpriced and the paper feels cheap, they still might be one of the best options depending on what kind of pen you use.

Personally, I write with a wide variety of vintage and modern fountain pens, and Moleskins just don't seem premium enough to warrant the expense.
>If you're hiring off the street I could possibly see some value in FizzBuzz, even though it's going to turn off any actual A player you happen to interview

I think this is the use case that they're referring to. If you're getting a job referral from someone you trust, you probably shouldn't do it. It's also not that much time. I've never done any professional coding in my entire life, and I could write fizzbuzz in at least three languages in less than 10 minutes.

Edit: 10 minutes EACH. I'm not that good.
Sex and Brunch: 11 Reasons Why Bloody Marys Make You A Better Lover
>The dose makes the poision; analyze everything around you and you may find a very small percentage of unwanted and dangerous chemicals.

Very good point. Toxicologists hate the term "poison" because it is misleading. Water is poisonous when we take too much.

There was some terrible anti-ecig research recently that reported all of this dangerous stuff in them (still vastly less dangerous if you look at it merely because there is no burning lignins).

Anyhow, the flaw in this study was burning e-liquid at 900 degrees C, the temperature of the cone of a burning cigarette, versus the 200-250 C of an ecig. It is sort of like saying a car isn't safe to drive on a highway because we tested it at 200 MPH.

All of these people raising concern in this thread, writing NYT articles, etc. are not informed about the body of research and able to put it in perspective.

BTW, with how much is consumed on average taken into account, FDA-approved gums/patches contain more tobacco-specific nitrosamines than ecigs (and this is so minor to not be a concern).
Cable provider in the US.
I question "doesn't use your bandwidth." BT is a DSL provider. Your circuit is provisioned for the speed you pay for, and the maximum attainable speed is limited based on distance from the DSLAM as well as other factors (copper gauge, copper condition, etc.).

If you're paying for the highest speed BT offers at your location and you're near the limit for that speed, they don't have any capability to overprovision a few extra mbps on that circuit for guest Wi-Fi use. The closest they can do is provision a new circuit entirely, but that isn't a very cost-effective solution just to provide Wi-Fi as it requires another physical pair, another DSLAM port, and more expensive CPE that can support 2 pairs.

Comcast on the other hand is a cable provider and due to the shared architecture of DOCSIS, can conceivably do that. In fact, since they're saying guest Wi-Fi users will not impact your connection speed, I am betting that is exactly what they are doing - guest Wi-Fi users probably have access to any unused capacity on the node.

* maybe they have FTTP in some areas (like pretty much every telco) in which case this won't apply. And I know they have FTTC in many areas too, but that's still xDSL and these shortcomings still apply (just to a lesser extent since the loops are much shorter).
This is interesting and certainly solves the problems mentioned in the article. However, it does introduce a whole bunch of new attack vectors.

Have you thought about the idea of selling the product as a machine that clients can run in house? Something that is only accessible to them, similar to how GitHub enterprise works.
Worse, road wear goes up with the fourth power of vehicle weight. http://thatmansscope.blogspot.com/2009/10/trucks-and-fourth-...

Looking at it that way it becomes clear that bikes and cars do effectively zero road wear and that trucks effectively cause all road wear.

As a result there should be "commercial" diesel for big trucks and non-commercial diesel for cars, pickups, etc. You can use dye the same way they do with farm diesel which is untaxed. And then charge about an extra dollar per gallon of tax on the commercial diesel which might roughly offset the actual wear these vehicles cause.

What that will do is shift a lot of cargo transport from truck to rail (which wouldn't pay the commercial diesel tax) and which is more fuel efficient anyhow. And if the train companies wanted to they could easily run their trains on natural gas; what's a single extra fuel car when you're already pulling 100 cars worth of cargo?

I don't know how you'd get legislation like that passed but it would solve a lot of problems by going after the source of said problems. I'd like to see real problem solving, not can-kicking.
I had no idea that's how strcpy is implemented. Buffer overflow exploits and the like aside (ah the good old days) that is really elegant!
Puzzling moose deaths hint at climate shock to forests.
> I also happen to know that calc() doesn't work on Safari 6.x, among others.

Works fine on Safari 6.x, you just need to add the prefix -webkit.

http://caniuse.com/#feat=calc
Show HN: Simple analytics for restaurants. Feedback on launch page?
But monospaced fonts aren't good for reading prose.
http://modernizr.com/docs/#html5inie
To ameliorate my point; I use LYAH as a reference piece a lot. It's well written and is a really takes time over many subjects. I mostly wanted to make (badly!) a point that there are resources out there that will push experienced and non-experienced alike. And they don't need to be in the language you're looking to learn right now.

Either way - I hope to give Write Yourself a Scheme... a go sometime soon. Looks good.
> Most medicens have easily measurable LD50's

Well, most medicines could be considered medically toxic. It's just a matter of dosing and whether their desired effect outweighs any risk (whether negligible or non-negligible) of adverse reactions[0].

LD50 is only one of many ways to express toxicity; water can be considered toxic under some circumstances as well. It all depends on the context in which we're discussing the usage.

We don't say that Advil is "harmless", or aspirin, or caffeine, or any other substance, even in normal dosage. We simply say that any risk of harm is sufficiently small as to fall within tolerable limits, given the expected benefit of using that substance. But we can't say that about e-cigarettes - at least not yet.

In short, the medical impacts of drugs are difficult to predict, and oftentimes counter-intuitive. I'm just rather tired of the refrain that "e-cigarettes are harmless", because frankly,

(A) we don't have sufficient evidence-based research either to support or to reject that claim, and

(B) extrapolating based on existing evidence-based research and fundamental medical principles suggests that e-cigarettes are not "harmless".

Whether they are less harmful than cigarettes is a separate question, as is whether they are harmful enough to recommend avoiding usage (or regulation, or what have you) is a separate question.

I don't object to any logical arguments surrounding either of those two questions; I just object to fallacious interpretations of medical research to support illogical arguments.

[0] Unlike the word "toxic", I do not use the word "adverse" in the medical sense, which also has a very precise definition - I use it in the colloquial sense.
... Compile one?

http://gopher.quux.org:70/give-me-gopher/
So does Portugal Telecom (in Portugal), at least in its triple-/quad-play services, locally known as MEO and M4O packages. Those who enable this sharing service (called "community hotspot") can also benefit from it.
I believe it started out as a response to the competition giving their clients access to the (global?) Fon WiFi network.
Essentially you have two WiFi networks in your house. What they call your "private WiFi" network and the Xfinity WiFi network. The biggest question I have is - do they both utilize the same publicly facing IP address?

This brings up some interesting questions. Consider 6 residents in an apartment building, each with their own Comcast Internet connection. I utilize my private network and the other 5 people for whatever strange reason chose to connect to my Xfinity WiFi connection instead of their own connection. One of them surfs for highly illegal content (take your pick). Whose door are the police going to break down?
I love the five years experience vs. one year of experience repeated five times idea
Markdown ate the asterisks in the code snippet. Important to realize that if you're not terribly familiar with C.
As others have said in this thread, just raise taxation on fuel.

In the UK ($8.50 per US gallon) it has encouraged people towards more efficient vehicles and the government has made electric vehicles free from yearly charges (Vehicle Excise Duty is based on emissions which again punish bigger engined cars).

Of note it is quite unusual to see an 18 year old with a car these days. Cost of fuel and insurance discourages the young from getting a car.

In fact there is a major push towards 'Active travel' (Cycling/walking/public transport).

Where I can see these type of devices finding a home is in reducing your insurance premiums. In fact I can see the Russian situation where something like this box with a dashboard cam will almost become mandatory. Well not so much mandatory, but as the only way to get cheap insurance.
One of the reasons running jenkins on EC2 sucks for developers :( The data is stored on the machine, and there's a big risk of losing all your CI/CD infrastructure.

Have you given any thought to moving to something like https://circleci.com? [disclosure: I work there]
I'm in love with the idea of a profitless company for the reason that this company passes on all the value to employees and contractors providing the services instead of extracting that value their employees create for the benefit of shareholders.
The target audience of FizzBuzz (i.e., those who fail it badly) are indistinguishable from you otherwise, and they outnumber you. They also do send in portfolios and past projects, simply they lie about who did the actual coding in those projects.

The exception is when a company is approaching you directly - then it would be insulting. However, if an outside recruiter approaches you, and then hands over to the company... again, you need FizzBuzz or such, because some recruiters are cheaters and will even help hopeless candidates fake their portfolios.

Wasting people time hurts - but accidentally hiring someone who'd fail FizzBuzz hurts orders of magnitude more.
Also you have to use their crappy router with DNS hijacking.
Would you also walk out on your first day if your new boss asked you to do something you considered simple or boring?

If so it sounds like FizzBuzz may still serve as a valuable filter!
If you're going to quote something, make sure that it doesn't directly contradict your position:

"If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
I am not sure I really get what you say (probably due to my ignorance in this matter), could you elaborate bit more the 'driven by the Fed' part ?
John Cale was an equally large part of what made the VU great, and he's still touring and making great music. I'd be interested to hear his thoughts.
Not much more work than any decent administrator has to do if he controls the updates to his own network. Note that even if you don't have in the database "all files ever" every entry lessens your chances of false positives. Actually I can't imagine that they can do their business while not having such databases.
I'd take Tom Daschle over Harry Reid running the Senate (or at HHS over Sebelius) any day, but I am skeptical of the theory he was "shivved". You're right that the car service issue should not have been enough to sink him, but I think that was a convenient out: IIRC, Republicans were getting ready to ask some uncomfortable questions about his wife's lobbying efforts, and I can understand why neither he nor the President were excited about going down that road.

Also keep in mind that his tax troubles came to light after Geithner's and others', so there was less slack left to give.
A lot of the people going to an interview will be incompetent. With other people's projects as references. (Or so they say it is in many places, these days.)

If you insist on just working where they have evolved perfect routines to weed out the incompetents before interviewing, you'll miss out on most new places with smart people.
I'm not an experienced C programmer but I assume there's missing some '*' somewhere?
Tech, social media employers offer perks aplenty
Taking a page from FON, it seems.

I'm curious how they do traffic shaping for the second network - does it happen in router or upstream?
The lesson here is that you can't just value a company by taking its current performance into account. You really need to have a view towards its future performance. And you need to understand why the company is not currently profitable.

Just co-incidently, TWTR is going through its IPO. This is just a little nudge to remeber that profits don't matter, and you should just go buy some stock. =D
One thing these e-cig companies could try in order to boost their rep is raising public awareness of the importance of recycling batteries.

Imagine battery recycling stations at all the places that cell these e-cigs which contain batteries themselves.
That's why you use EBS and snapshots...
Having integrated with these kind of systems, they aren't up to internet-scale traffic. Apart from raw capacity they are usually architected for transactional consistency, not large indeterminate numbers of concurrent users. This is why we have things like ESB's and async enterprise integration patterns.

I'd be surprised if those weren't already in place on this project but bet it's really poorly done. My money is on a totally manual test process which means a deployment misses loads of cases and takes weeks and where a load test is 10 guys in India hitting f5.
I have been doing a lot of phone screens for our company lately. We ask a FizzBuzz like question in our first phone screen.

So far, only 30% of applicants manage to go pass this point.

It's actually quite hard to believe. Guys who claim to have multiple apps under their belt simply cannot write code. I often question them on what they did in their past and what was their actual contribution to their team. The two most common scenarios are either the so-called technical manager who got promoted there become of lack of coding abilities or the self-taught programmer who was hired by the technical manager. By self-taught, I mean someone who can write HTML and copy/paste JavaScript code from somewhere.
Thanks for the heads-up on the author; you're not the only one doubting the story: http://trilema.com/2013/badbios-aka-badlydonedamagecontrol/

At a minimum, this will inform a few more people about real work that's been done with USB and hard drive controllers (by @travisgoodspeed, @SpritesMods).

https://twitter.com/dragosr/status/393584001534812160
Is this only if I use a comcast wireless router? I use a Comcast cable modem and then my own configured wireless router. Does this apply to me too?
Wow, so simple, and yet it leads to all kinds of discussions of space complexity, what counts as branching, etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6622621
Lawyer up, baby!

Seriously. Start by paying a lawyer to write a nasty demand for payment note with a hard deadline. This works for me 95% of the time.