skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
COBRA does not cost "exactly the same amount it cost you while you were employed". It costs you what your employer paid for that coverage. Virtually all employer-provided health care is heavily subsidized, often to the tune of 50-90%.

It's weird that you have such strong opinions about this subject, given your superficial grasp of it.
The "Willie Sutton" business lesson is also good:

When asked why he robbed banks, Sutton simply replied, "Because that's where the money is."

http://www.fbi.gov/libref/historic/famcases/sutton/sutton.ht...
Is there a simple paragraph that describes what "Being RESTful means/what problem it solves"? I know it's "so hot right now", but I'm not sure if I'm missing something, or if it's just restating previous results.

Is it just simply revising what the HTTP methods were designed for and how they behave on browsers/servers/caches/proxies?
Book'em, Github.
Google Chrome: Meet the New Boss
NearlyFreeSpeech. Excellent DNS management, optional anonymising service and they don't gouge you, any extra fees are upfront.
* - Host your CSS, JS and images on a CDN -- Serve them from a different domain. Otherwise every element request requires cookies to be sent in the headers. Waste of overhead for end users.*

One thing that you have to worry about here is serving these files through https://. A lot of CDNs either (a) don't support https:// or (b) charge a monster fee for it.
Tool of the Day: Cardstar: Lose the Cards, Keep the Savings
Great doc to make screeners with.
IPhone 3D Texture Mapped City: Paris [video]
You seem to be confusing Nazi's for actual socialists. They were corporatist fascists. Corporatism may look a lot like socialism but it isn't necessarily so.

Saying socialism leads to Totalitarian fascism is a gigantic line to cross. I'd say that maybe the #1 reason of totalitarianism is introducing democracy to a country that hasn't learned to question its leaders. Hitler and the Nazi's came to power legally through the introduction of several bills, but no one opposed them. The German constitution at that time was riddled with holes because it was a franken-constitution from the US UK and Switzerland. Checks and balances were already weak, and separation of powers was weak, but people didn't press them which was mot of the problem. Much of the Nazi's rise to power has nothing to do with socialism but much more to do with corporatist control via the marriage of industry and government. As well as the failure of the people to uphold their own democracy.

Remember that fascism is the antithesis of democracy because it puts people in groups and manages them. This marries corporatism in a way that it allows certain groups to affect the economy more. While in some sectors there was much top down corporatism, in Nazi Germany especially supplies for war. In others there was bottom up where companies would request things of the government to do.

Not only that you seem to be confusing Germany and Austria. Austria was conquered by propaganda, some democratic means, but mostly a marching of troops into it.

Your argument falls flat because in any democratic system where people don't take it upon themselves to uphold the checks and balances of government will decline as government gains more power. Just look at Putin's Russia, or the "Democratic" PRC.
I believe you can just reset your phone and make a new account to get it working again. I suppose you might lose contacts, calendar entries, chat logs, mail, and/or applications.
I'm not a YC founder but I got an individual plan from Blue Cross Blue Shield (MN) through ehealthinsurance.com. It is an excellent plan (so far) and wasn't nearly what I was expecting to pay (<$150/mo).
i dont like pop based backup options. i prefer doing an imap sync to local for which offlineimap has been doing an excellent job for me:

http://software.complete.org/software/projects/show/offlinei...
HTML, The Movie -or- The Resolution Will Not Be Televised
Ask HN: Entering a highly saturated market with the new business
I have a side project for some time now (cloud communications thing) and for me it seems pretty mature (well, mature for two-people project) at the moment. I would like to give it more publicity, i.e. gain customers, and maybe talk to investors.

The market I'm targeting is pretty saturated now -- smaller companies like Sipgate and giants like Google (with Google Voice) all present there. I would not compete with Google, but I would try to launch in the countries where Google Voice is not available yet to get the share of the hype results. In those places I have to compete with smaller locals.

Smaller locals are usually basing their services on the hardware solutions (meaning no new services could be launched quickly, functionality is limited and innovation is restrained); our approach is pure software. As a small team we implemented the bare minimum of the needed functionality, so despite the fundamental advantage we potentially have (their vendor-locked hardware vs. our open software) no market advantages are visible to the customers yet.

What would you do in this situation? Release anyway, even if the product now hardly could compete? Try to find investors and deliver more functionality? Anything else?

Thanks for the advice.
Good point, I should have linked it.
Very interesting. I was just going off the ethical arguments and data raised from a course I took while at the university where we studied the Milgram experiment.

I guess that's what I get for just going along with someone who was an "authority" on the subject.
Minor correction, the US government and Canadian government spend the same per capita on healthcare, but there the average person does not need extra insurance. Per capita countries with universal healthcare spend less.

The reason should be obvious, less paperwork.
Is it a high-deductible plan?

Also, I've dealt with BCBS in the past and could never get anyone on the phone if I had an issue.
Aesop's Fable - or fact? Meet the world's cleverest bird
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch...

It's not that long. I have yet to see a paragraph-length description that is an accurate summary of it (and blog-entry-length descriptions cause a lot of confusion).
How much to reveal to potential funders or business partners?
My team started talking about the yc winter 2010 app and it brought to light some questions about secrecy, honesty and the fear of being scooped.

How often are ideas presented by one group given to a different group? How often does trying to secure funding actually create competition.

The usual answer is that ideas are cheap; time, effort, resource and drive to implement ideas is rare. This seems to be true in general, but venture companies are in the unique position of have the financial and people resources to actually make use of ideas.

Lots of people are likely moved by similar cultural forces and experiences, and thus moved to similar ideas. Most ideas are fairly general compared to the specific insights and mission that influence a company's success.

Nonetheless, every year after the new yc teams are announced at least one person on the discussion list says, Hey, that's my idea (or insight)--why isn't my team good enough? Even when multiple teams are vying for the same niche, which I expect happens far more often than actual scooping, this is a bad feeling to have. Not a big deal business-wise, of course, other than the fact that one's business now has a better connected and more well known competitor getting better advice, etc (at least for the time being :-).

I'm curious what people here think: Is trying for YC funding worth getting the ball rolling on a competitor, complete with the yc experience you're not getting? Should teams not reveal the whole idea or vision on their application, especially if it is the team not the
idea that really counts? Is this an issue at all in the general world of acquiring funding?

(context: i'm very much a backend, always honest (though at times wrong) developer. i believe most code should always be open source from the beginning, and i try to live up to my ideals about code and inclusive collaboration. i'm proud of my honesty and naive (or lazy, depending on how you look at it) willingness to trust. i also try to trust the person who is actually in charge of the business and funding side of things...still, i can't help but feel that secrecy is motivated by fear and not worth the loss it entails. is there some kind of balance that successful business-folk and entrepreneurs strike? holding back information from the good folks who read the yc apps seems wrong, even though i know it's a competition and we want to impress them more than other folks and not risk get scooped...if that is indeed a risk at all.)
As long as I can, somehow, redirect the communication to other programs, I'm happy. I'll give you an example: if I have a text editor that I really really like, lets say notepad.exe for arguments sake, then I should be able to use this for all my text input. It should go further than this though: if I'm talking to you over pidgin, not only should I (somehow) be able to use notepad.exe, but I should also be able to redirect your responses to, for example, another pidgin conversations input, or a text-to-speech device or anywhere really.

The idea is that all input and output can be redirected, filtered, scripted etc. I posted a blog post about some of these ideas once, but I'm not gonna post a link :-D been meaning to clean it up for ages, so maybe after I finally get to doing so, I'll share, heh.
In Japan an MRI's total cost is ~200$ which is 1/5 of the cost in the US. They are just machines so not using them does not really save money. In the US they sit there unused most of the time, so when they are used it's expensive. If you just use them more the cost per examination quickly drops off.

http://gateway.nlm.nih.gov/MeetingAbstracts/ma?f=102211467.h...

Edit: That's from 1991 today I think it's closer to 50 - 100$.
Cost of living adjusted, NYC poorest city in America?
Or just use archive.py in libgmail (it asks for username, password, then you select 'all' folders).
What are the specific advantages?
The Church-Turing Thesis: Story and Recent Progress
When I've had the option in the past of using COBRA, it's always been so astronomically expensive that I've passed, and instead taken out a policy elsewhere.

My guess has always been that COBRA is probably something that's required by law for employers to offer, but there's probably some loophole somewhere that allows them to price it so high that very few people actual take them up on it.
Silly me: I should have searched Twitter before posting here. It's a bug. If you shrink your browser some, it works.

http://twitter.com/andrewbadr
> If they knew where stuff was, they wouldn't lose it,

That doesn't follow. For one, knowing where some thing is doesn't imply that said thing is accessible.

Also, how do you know that they "lost" it? Lost suggests an accident. Suppose that they discarded it (which can be a rational thing to do). Do you really think that they'd admit that?
It seems bank information here is scant. I had actually made an "Ask HN" post and only got 1 response :(

I'm in a similar situation...team is remote, I'm in NY and we're INC'd in DE. We're actually using HSBC Small Business for banking now. Go into your local branch and they can tell you what you need. From my experience, we had to submit: Application for Authority showing my ability to do business on behalf of our legal entity, DBA filed in New York, opening deposit, and proof/cert of incorporation.
Actually, I think this quote posted in the comments is more interesting:

“If you find yourself in need of a distributed transaction
protocol, then how can you possibly say that your architecture is based on REST? I simply cannot see how you can get from one situation (of using RESTful application state on the client and hypermedia to determine all state transitions) to the next situation of needing distributed agreement of transaction semantics wherein the client has to tell the server how to manage its own resources.”

— Roy Fielding, rest-discuss, 2009-06-09
The nice advantage of using a desktop mail client is I can have it download all my email always. So I have a local backup of all my mail, just in case Gmail ever goes down.
Good to know. It was my first choice, but seemed complicated/slow. I'll definitely give it a shot next time.
This really is nothing new. EAI platforms have had to deal with this for years, they solve it with idempotent updates e.g. UPDATE WHERE rather than relying on locks - ensure transaction tables have timestamps which can be used for this purpose. This also improves your throughput and avoids all the problems that locking brings e.g. deadly embrace and poor performance.

Trying to perform guaranteed updates across HTTP transactions is always going to be tricky. The other factor is old database principals atomicity and ACID.
The pricing for COBRA is the same price that your plan cost overall through the company (I think maybe they can charge an additional 5% to cover administration costs). So you're just seeing the true cost of the plan your old employer provided. They can't jack up the price on you.
Yeah, because people who clip coupons have great insurance that doesn't force them to use a specific provider which has a specific product for a specific rate?

You ever HAD an HMO? The M is for "Managed" and trust me, they manage it. When I had to see an orthopedist because I sprained both my ankles, I not only had to wait 1.5 weeks, but I had to drive to some random office park 45 minutes away to get the subsequent CT scan he prescribed me afterwards, because that was the option my insurance co. gave me.

Health services are not - NOT! - too expensive because people don't have to pay directly. That is not the problem in the US.

As I described in the above posts, I have paid out of pocket for several healthcare things in Austria -- before I had the social insurance -- and it cost less than the equivalent in the US, with the exchange rate.

The extremely high cost of education, the overhead of insurance company management (it takes time and money to deny all those claims), handling insurance claims (a huge % of administrative work for doctors' offices), the usurious cost of malpractice insurance, and of course, the profit motive in creation of medicine (which naturally raises the cost of the FDA's resources), etc., etc. all conspire to create the expense.

These costs can be drastically reduced in a single-payer system, or one close to it, especially one with free higher education.

(Austria is not quite single-payer, although every single citizen is insured by the govt. There are, I think, 3 types of social insurance, and some people have additional "hospital memberships" (~US$700/yr) or additional private insurance.)

Not to mention that taking away the costs of preventative care, tests, and early intervention can, over a lifetime, reduce the total cost of a person's required healthcare.

Why on earth do you want to blame the people who need the MRI, whether they choose the Budget Rent-a-Wreck or the Premium version? (How ridiculous!)
As everyone who has written a C program of sufficient complexity knows, these warnings are not always correct. Google for "spurious warnings uninitialized", e.g:

http://kerneltrap.org/node/6591

An unrelated example where gcc (and icc) emit needless warnings about integer types is this:

int x = foo();
unsigned y = (x == 0);

Don't get me wrong, I'm in favor of cranking up the warning levels, but there is a reason why not everything is included in -Wall (yes, "uninitialized" is included, I know).
Fantastic idea! This screams for a cameo by MacGyver and some duct tape too.
It seemed clear as day to me which would do what from just looking at the registration form. It is however reprehensible to ask a user to divulge their email password for any reason, and this is not the only site to do so by a long shot. The only difference that I can see between this and (facebook? twitter?) is that they actively spam your contact list and send you a rude (but personalized!) service email when you complain. Stupid user, for giving up her email password.
The other problem is that you're seeing the AVERAGE cost of the plan. So, while you as a 20-something single guy would get a great rate from Aetna/whoever, you're paying for old fat smoker when you go with COBRA.

I've bought insurance through Cleveland's COSE (Council of Smaller Enterprises) in the past. Pretty expensive, but really good coverage (I have a family).
Ask HN: Finding old stories in HN, best practices
I remember reading a blog about a guy selling software on his website and things he did to improve sales (something with bingo maybe?)

How in the world would you find something like that again?
if i delete mail from gmail, it gets reflected in local copy.
it has the negative, of if i lose everything from gmail and run a backup, it gets deleted from the local. but, i protect against that by having local backups. so my backups of local machine reflect the state of the gmail through time without growing and growing.
Chinese Microsoft Office Rival Launching on Web Soon
Better title would be "self-promotion lessons from two fat dudes who learned how to game HN"
Google Maps Shows Foreclosure Status
I believe Silverlight works in Firefox actually.

I don't use it, but the trypython.org page has a statement:

"Target browsers are Firefox 2 & 3, Safari and IE 7 & 8. (It won't work in other browsers until there is a version of Silverlight that works with them.)"
Nah, the kitten needs some attendants, like a wise old pony or a funny sidekick. Killing one or the other is often a good way to ramp up the tears.
This Is Quite Possibly The Spotify Cap Table
Lazarus: New Version Available
Ask YC: Does interviewing developers leave you depressed?
I'm hiring a senior developer right now. Our first interview has a 4-question screen, where I ask them to implement a simple function, implement a recursive function, write a simple SQL select (join across two tables), and create a simple object model (how would you represent a car as an object).

~70% of the "senior developer" applicants fail

We're extremely happy with our process--this is only step 1--and it's been amazing at yielding a great set of candidates for each hire, but two weeks of administering the tech screen to applicants leaves me a bit depressed. (sigh)
Ask HN: Powered Exoskeletons; What's stopping us?
Why hasn't anyone invented an exoskeleton that handicapped people could wear to help them walk? It seems like it would just be some motors on a frame. Are there challenges that make this kind of technology infeasible?
Ask HN: What are the signs that you are a Good, Better, or Best programmer?
With all due respect to the earlier post, "Signs that you're a bad programmer", I thought I'd add a post of my own about how to tell if you're a Good, Better, or Best programmer...

Good: You help your users write their specs.
Better: You write what you anticipate your users want.
Best: You users figure out what they want after seeing your prototype.

Good: When someone asks you what a variable means, you answer quickly.
Better: No one asks you what your variables mean.
Best: Others compliment your variable naming.

Good: When questions arise, you look at your code and answer them.
Better: When questions arise, you answer them without looking at your code.
Best: Questions don't arise.

Good: You are deft at using your favorite IDE.
Better: You use an IDE with the colors turned off.
Best: You don't use an IDE.

Good: You are an expert at debugging.
Better: Your error conditions anticipate problems before you need a debugger.
Best: What's a debugger?

Good: There are no bugs.
Better: There are no bugs and it runs fast.
Best: It generates code with no bugs that runs fast.

Good: Common logic is consolidated into common code.
Better: Common code is consolidated into parameter-driven common code.
Best: All code is parameter-driven common logic.

Good: Your code is easily copied and changed by others.
Better: Your code is easily used by others through your API.
Best: Others read your code in order to learn how to do it.

Good: The next programmer can easily debug any run time errors.
Better: There are no run time errors.
Best: Your program fixes itself when it encounters run time errors.

Good: Your app has many good data base access routines.
Better: Your app has several good data base access routines.
Best: Your app has one good data base access routine.

Good: You can easily add special processing logic at any point.
Better: You have hooks to easily access any special processing logic.
Best: Your built in Boolean logic already handles any special processing logic.

Good: Your code runs so well you have time to lurk at Hacker News.
Better: Your code runs so well you have time to participate at Hacker News.
Best: You hang out at Hacker News while your code generators crank away.
Agreed. Besides, this isn't news: stupid user giving away their password and "social networks" that do the spam-all-your-contact-list-shit.
Very neat and all, but why not let the browser handle the input instead of emulating a US keyboard layout? Makes it hard to write stuff on non-US keyboards...
Returning to the moon - A debate
I really love www.railscasts.com

While some of this stuff has changed over time due to changes in the Rails API, it's still a great resource to learn things you didn't even know you could do and to see how certain situations can be handled. Ryan does a great job making the screencasts short and very focused too, so you can always go there looking for something specific, and chances are Ryan has covered it.
do you screen them over the phone? seems to me like it would be much easier and less depressing if you just gave them the work, gave them an hour, and told them to email the results back to you. stuff that is nontrivially difficult such that they can't just search and find answers. they have to know.

edit: i think i'd prefer having to do this myself, as well, because i'm a shy person in person and i find myself floundering when i'm on the phone and have to "explain my thought process" to someone as i'm working through it. i'd much rather write down an explanation.
I highly do not recommend BlueCross Blue Shield. They are not a reputable company. They will cancel your plan without telling you. I went to a doctor once thinking my plan was fine only to be told days later that my insurance had been canceled months before with no notification from BCBS and becuase it was beyond 60 days, they would not reactivate my plan, even when I offered to pay for the months when it was canceled.

YMMV, but I will never be a BCBS customer again.
> And something like 80% of US bankruptcies are due to unexpected medical bills.

Actually, the claim (by proponents) is a bit over 60% and even that is fishy.

http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/06/why_war...
iirc, they have. i can't find a link on it though.

i imagine the problem is cost. handicapped people can afford a wheelchair, but not an exoskeleton.
Way to ad-hominem.
Wow, I love this. Here's an example skin: http://omgponi.es/img/4b96f925ebb7572b7891c1fb64792d9d.png
http://www.searchyc.com/

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/articles/rails-seo-tips.htm
Finally, someone there said it.

They own many of the top content properties on the internet and they are very profitable (not as profitable as they could be, but pretty darn profitable). Sure they could have bought Google, Facebook, or any of the other companies that ended up being the top of search or social networking, but they didn't. So it makes sense to play in the games where they're successful.

It's like saying Michael Phelps isn't also a great athlete because he can't beat Usain Bolt in the 100 meter. Or vice versa. Google's content properties universally have failed to make a dent against Yahoo's strengths. So Google can't be the Yahoo of content and Yahoo can't be the Google of search. We should be okay with that.

At some point the market needs to stop judging them on what they might have been, and see what they actually are and might become.