skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
...but spending ten times that to save the life of one of his employee's children is absolutely unacceptable.

It's not unacceptable according to TA. AOL insurance (pre-Obamacare) did pay for it:

"Two things that happened in 2012. We had two AOL-ers that had distressed babies that were born that we paid a million dollars each to make sure those babies were OK in general. And those are the things that add up into our benefits cost. So when we had the final decision about what benefits to cut because of the increased healthcare costs..."

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-07/aol-ceo-blam...
I can see it now...

"Be aware that just having Youtube in your browser history is enough to deny your warranty."
Objective C vs C Speed (2012)
Watch out for the fibonacci flim-flam http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/pseudo/fibonacc.htm
The craziest thing to me is what an utterly small drop in the bucket this is and how Tim embarrassed the entire company and their stockholders over an expense that is <1% of AOLs revenue and is less than his yearly salary. He should have been immediately fired for both insensitivity and short-sightedness to the point of incompetence.
I think this should be the top comment here. I taught myself to program as kid, not because I was interested in Computer Science (I'd never heard of it, and if I had, it wouldn't have been appealing to my 7 year old brain). I learnt to program because I wanted to make things, specifically games. That's what kept me typing in those lines and lines of BASIC, that's what inspired me to keep learning new languages and technologies - so that I could make better stuff! And this continues to this day. If I'd been pressured into learning Computer Science instead, I would certainly not be a programmer today. Back then, and even now, I just wanted to make stuff and experiment - Computer Science has only been something I've become interested in in the last few years, and has been completely inconsequential to my career development.

So I disagree with this article. Programming is a creative, fun thing which is much more accessible to children (and adults!) than the comparably dry, stuffy subject of Computer Science. And it's not even true to say that people with formal computer science backgrounds make better programmers, so what is the benefit here?
There are two free software answers to "the cloud:"

1. Open APIs that allow useful, meaningful, and complete interoperability between different services and local software. This is a compromise that allows cloud services to continue to be proprietary while not locking users in to any one particular service or platform.

2. The Affero GPL, which requires service providers to make their source available to their users.

Personally I think that (1) is not only a more realistic option, but in the long run a more beneficial option for users.
Don't forget that your laptop hasn't moved from the table where you unpacked it in months, you are located in a hermetically sealed, temperature and humidity controlled room, the laptop has absolutely no software on it other then the software it came with (updated to the latest version, of course), and on normal days you simply turn it on and lightly brush it's casing. Come to think about it, maybe skip the part about turning it on, that could be grounds for voiding the warranty.
If you make your own location provider, Google will call you non-compatible and not let you have the Google Play store. They consider users using someone else's location services to be terrible for their company, as per internal emails:
http://www.engadget.com/2011/05/10/internal-emails-reveal-go...
Fully agreed. I don't really like the RPM format, though, it's a glorified makefile which makes it inconvenient to generate in an automated fashion. Though, from what I can see, the Debian maintainers have done a good effort at bringing together the various packaging resources in a single document [1]. And, well, packaging is a complicated topic.

1: http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/
This is the fun part in this like working!

There is always something new to learn, something new pick up and explore.

I am doing this for over 20 years now, and it was like changing my job completely every 2-4 years. If one is open to change and adaptable there is no steamroller.
I woke up this morning and decided I need to buy out my partners
Video: In-depth introduction to Orbit.js by dgeb
.. and in the universal-healthcare UK, my brother survived being 12 weeks premature.

Do you have a cite for the French system, specifically that withdrawal of care in NICU? English or French will be fine.
* Tim Maly - Time, Again - http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TimeAgai.sh...

* Ray Bradbury - The Veldt - http://www.veddma.com/veddma/Veldt.htm
I think of the steamroller in a slightly different way. When a technology is in its infancy, you get paid more because it is still an evolving space - demand is increasing, but supply is still short (think node right now). Then the technology reaches mass market - cost becomes a factor in whether we write the app in Foo or Bar and rates drop (java). Then, on the tail end of a tech life time (cobol), rates are high again as people retire or move on to the Next Big Thing and supply is low - demand may be low too, but the install base really depends on the tech so will pay a premium. So, will you get steamrolled? Only if you are expecting to make a premium but don't recognize where you are in the lifecycle.
>A square wave has twice the power of a sine wave of identical amplitude.

1.41 x

>Playing metal at full volume is not as damaging as playing anything intensely digitally clipped at full volume.

The output of the amplifier really ought to be bandwidth limited either as a natural consequence of the components used or explicitly with a filter. It is silly to spend power on things that can't be heard.
Ars is not one voice. Imho Peter Bright's articles esp. related to OSS and MS should always be read with an "open mind".
The word she's looking for is: union.
It is unfortunate that Tim Armstrong made these statements and all of us who have had this experience need to relive it.

My daughter also had an extraordinary birth, and was saved by the incredibly expert care of a dedicated team of medical professionals at multiple hospitals in Seattle and Bellevue. The bill I saw was north of 250K and I paid the max of that (which was a few thousand)

It occurred while I was at a startup which i had co-founded (and currently employs over 100 people). I tend to go from startup to startup, with some contract / FTE work in between, and have swung from COBRA to COBRA to keep my health insurance consistent.

Because of ACA, this is the first year that I didn't have to "get a real job" in order to keep pursuing startups.
not disagreeing with anything here, nor did i in the previous post, merely a light anecdote relating to how thick the writer is 'laying it on'
Looks like the operator had seconds thoughts--or plain got scared. I was interested in how trackable he is.

The domain is registered under a fake name and DNS is from Namecheap. It's a funny whois entry, lacking all the usual boilerplate, so I'm not entirely sure it's Namecheap; some sort of reseller? Doesn't match what I see from Namecheap itself, but Namecheap does take bitcoin now, so it seems plausible.

Hosting is libertyvps.net, a bitcoin-paid host. Hosted "offshore"; company appears to be in US.

If a US authority leans on libertyvps, they can get an email and blockchain address, and maybe an IP. Tracing the person would be hard if Tor was used for setting up (and using) the email and all host access, and a decently anonymous acquisition of the bitcoin.

A US authority could also get to Namecheap. Using the registrar safely requires about the same precautions, notably access via Tor and acquiring the payment BTC (or pre-paid card) in a non-traceable manner. Done right, they could shut the domain down, but not find the person.

Anyway, looks like the top-level bases were covered. But there's a lot of links in the chain. Perhaps the operator got nervous that he didn't cover all of them--and it only takes one. (Against a determined LE agency with jurisdiction or no scruples.)
> Healthcare for distressed infants is certainly not an example of inelastic demand where people have to pay for it themselves

Are you kidding me? If it was a question of saving my child's life, I'd spend every last cent I had and then go sell a kidney.
Those statistics aren't exactly Apples to Apples between countries. There are just too many ways countries can cheat.

For instance, some countries (like France) ignore births before x weeks whereas most countries (including the U.S.) include all births.

Beyond that, the U.S. leads the world in premature birth survival despite also leading the world in assisting people with fertility problems to become pregnant and add to the statistics that on the surface seem problematic for the U.S.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db23.htm
Thats the real shocking part here. AOL made a poor business decision, paid for it, and the CEO, the very person in charge of business decisions, blames medical complications from a fucking baby. It is absolutely unfathomably terrible from a quality human being perspective.
An amazing, baring article that brought back too many memories (our first son was early and classified "distressed", though not nearly to this degree). I'm glad to see she's doing so well, and I really have to wonder why pay health insurance premiums (that claim to cover this sort of catastrophic event), if you can't cash in on that policy should you ever need to (all the while praying that you don't).

It's not like CEOs of large companies are selected for being empathetic, but in this case I'll predict that he doesn't survive the publicity surrounding his statements. Children are (and should be) important to a civilized society regardless of their present capabilities or future expectations.
> Could you explain more about how self insuring works?

In normal insurance, the policy payments go into an investment pool that benefits the corporation's stockholders. In self-insurance, the set-aside funds go into an investment pool that benefits you (or your company).

The drawback to self-insurance are outlier claims that can more than wipe out the set-aside (as in the case under discussion). Obviously an insurance corporation has (or should have) a larger pool to deal with outliers than an individual or small company.

This is not to say that big insurance companies aren't sometimes wiped out by a sudden unexpected uptick in legitimate claims. In that case, the company may simply declare bankruptcy and the policy holders are left out in the cold -- just as though they had self-insured. But that's a rare occurrence.

More here: http://arachnoid.com/wrong/index.html#Insurance
Wired 101: Passionate and knowledgeable individuals, not massive media outlets
Working on the WunderBar - Internet of Things Starter Kit for App Developers.

Why cool?
1. You can build IoT connected apps in under 10 minutes.
2. SDKs for iOS, Android & Node.js.
3. It's open source.

We'd love your feedback, thoughts & comments.

Check it out here: http://www.dragoninnovation.com/projects/35-wunderbar-by-rel...
There is no such rule[1]:

Feel free to post links to your own content (within reason). But if that's all you ever post, or it always seems to get voted down, take a good hard look in the mirror — you just might be a spammer. A widely used rule of thumb is the 9:1 ratio, i.e. only 1 out of every 10 of your submissions should be your own content.

Make sure you're in an appropriate subreddit and be transparent and you should be fine.

1:http://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette
There were protests in Istanbul yesterday over the law, and as usual they were met by police brutality and tear gas.

I'm not hopeful for the next decade for them.
I love that! Difficulty level is similar to Flappy Bird; the only difference is that slowing the game down doesn't give you an advantage in the text version.
> in these sorts of cases withhold NICU services for infants with statistically low outcomes

Do you have any source for these claims?
You place more importance on $1M than on a human life? What if it was your child, would you be doing a cost/benefit analysis and turning to your wife and saying "sorry honey, it will cost more than $100,000 to save our child. might as well get her put down"?
> one-and-a-half-pound globs

This is a human being we are talking about. A child.

I like to think of myself as someone who can usually empathize with folks who hold a different point of view, but I have never been able to understand someone who looks at a human life in terms of a "cost-benefit" analysis.
Your quote is a good one, but I like this one even better:

I came to the Open Source world because I liked being part of a community where my ideas, my skills and my experience mattered, not my boobs. That's changed, and it's changed at the hands of the people who say they want a community where ideas, skills and experience matter more than boobs.

I don't at all see her failing to acknowledge that she was fortunate--she had that community, at least for a while, and she explicitly says that others who came later did not. And she makes a number of good practical suggestions for improving the situation.
At least you got to skip going through such wonders as Source Safe, ClearCase, MKS Source Integrity or Serena Version Manager.

I'm not sure what MPW Projector is, but the rest are pretty mainstream.

It's amazing how many proprietary revision control systems there are, and how much worse they are than the free ones.

RCS clearly wasn't good enough for a team (distributed or not) or concurrent development, but CVS was good enough, with incremental improvements by SVN & Git.

The proprietary systems usually offer integration with a but tracker (mandatory ticket ID on check-in/commit) to lure the ignorant who don't know about commit triggers. Otherwise, they tend to be very slow, frequently time-out their licenses / login-sessions, and/or have a very deficient command line interface making it difficult to script a build system.
Tex – Show off your best scientific illustration
If several dollars a day will keep people in certain parts of the world alive, doesn't the question become how many must die to save this one life?
http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-sta...

I am hopeful that this is not a zero-sum game...

And for the record, I think this is the wrong battle, health care is entirely too expensive in the first place.
maybe nutch?
Frankly I find it hard to believe based on empirical data.
While almost everybody agrees that pure rote memorization is not usually the right approach in (any kind of) teaching, I tend also to be very skeptical of the oppositely pure approach.

We might reason that the programming languages we usually use today are not likely to be the ones used tomorrow, but the tremendous amount of understanding one can achieve using the languages of today can still be useful tomorrow.

Notation/code are purely conventions -- the idea they can express can be expressed in any number of ways. Nevertheless, ignoring notation/code can be harmful. Paraphrasing Leibniz, notation can be the difference since the necessary labor of thought is wonderfully diminished.
I stopped reading the post because it was extremely opinionated and the author seemed to have a personal axe to grind against his or her subject, making me question the integrity of the information.
WOOO HACKBEANPOT
For the record, that's not actually what Tolstoy said. He actually said, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

I only post this because some people who don't read very much might propagate the prior non-quote and allow it to assume an authority through repetition that it doesn't have.
Agreed. Say what you want about Google, but I can't think of many, although they might be hotter, start ups that provide an equivalent service.
There are already clones: https://play.google.com/store/search?q=flappy
Add to that the butter smooth scrolling of Safari on Retina displays.
When you die you have to use the mouse to restart. That is super annoying, I want to keep my hands on space.
done is best
Terror and wonder in Kiev: This is what real protest feels like
Seems pretty bogus, sure you can damage a speaker hooked directly up to some audio source, but there so many components between the DirectSound API and the speaker that making a system that can be damaged using the OS API's seems quite lame.
You haven't kept up with the times. Here Nigel Tufnel is introduced to Marshall amplifiers that go all the way to 20. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwuZePiQHLI#t=170
Setting up Eclipse as your IDE for Bitcoin C++ development on MacOSX
It's unnerving.
How? Has the non-OSX VLC UI changed recently without my noticing, or is it a change in max volume or something?
Full article (thanks Google Cache!): http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:mMuR8w4...
Woz misquoted... again
What is the type of site you're showing? There may be a specific subreddit that would be good.
The enter key works for me...
The sad reality about invoking "Google" for click-bait puposes is that it works. Ad hominem attacks and using an imaginary feud to promote your previous posts is a new low.
Not to mention that using N different sorting algorithms as your introduction to computer science (as is often the case) has to be the most boring, un-motivating content to choose from. The only thing worse is "lets learn about recursion using the fibonacci sequence." Ugh.
You know I don't agree with the point you've tried to make but it's good to read arguments from various perspectives. Having said that, your last sentence is unnecessarily and (perhaps intentionally?) hurtful to Paul. Would you really call someone else's child "the thing" in person?
Sorry, no that wasn't clear now that I look at it.

I tried to type out another paragraph but it was equally as bad. Here is another shot at what I'm trying to get at: They're not the same because I'm willing to bet there are orders of magnitude more users using imap than there were technical people who used and cared about Jabber. Even as a technical person, I hadn't realized Google had removed it and I'm someone who previously used it. And I'm in the small group, not the general public, but I know several people off the top of my head that aren't technical and myself that use imap on a daily basis.
Show HN: AreYouSure.js, the 2Kb library for saner confirmation dialogs
Perhaps he had to write Peter instead of Ars.

Siracusa understands very well Apple ecosystem :)
I'm going to freely admit, this is a biased comment, which probably doesn't belong here, but I think it has to be said.

This isn't the first time that Ars Technica, an otherwise reasonable source of information, has published an utter crap article written by Peter Bright.

If Ars wants to maintain any shred of credibility (and a technically intelligent readership) in the future, they need to can this author, or label all of his articles as "op-ed", because that's the best that can be said of them. These articles contain no facts, no intelligent reasoning; just a spewing of one man's ill-formed opinions. Ars has already lost my paid subscription (and my ad revenue) due to other crap articles by this author, and I can't imagine them not losing more as a result of this article.

Get rid of him, Ars. You'll be better off for it.
Amazing, I love it!
Hello aardwolf, you can press the enter button to go back!
In my country (Norway) we are already protected better by law than the warranty in most cases, so what producers say will void it is often meaningless.

If Dell said VLC was installed so warranty is void, I'd say I want the computer fixed as a "reklamasjon"-case, and so they can't hide between stupid rules like this. This also means that we are allowed to swap RAM, CPU's etc. in our computers without fear of not getting the computer fixed if it later breaks down for unrelated reasons.
Read Peter's Bright response, the answer is there,
Nobody knows how brain works exactly, but I believe that some sort of compression is there. This has been done in computer vision some time ago and there is a nice application which essentially represents a face by 100 dimensional vector: www.facegen.com. Starting form average face, its possible to get any face you like by varying those dimensions.
In the UK they give services, and reasses on an ongoing basis, so different than the French. Added some info for under 37 weeks, where the US comes out on top.
How about AOL stop whining about paying for medical care, and stop employing "digital prophets"? Perhaps then they could afford both the insurance costs and 401(k)s.

http://www.uproxx.com/technology/2014/02/meet-david-shing-ak...
I took this clone and tweaked it so that pipe gap starts out big and gets narrower as time goes by. Makes a good little coding exercise, and I find it a lot less frustrating to play that way.
Hello dapak! Will check this out!
As someone that has never played the game, what's there more?
Are there, but now Google has departed from them, it will be considered like second class citizens, you really need to read Peter's Bright response.
> The real issue is that the open source world doesn't have an answer to the rise of the cloud.

Nonsense. you're speaking as though open-source and cloud storage are somehow related or in competition. But they're orthogonal -- one can obviously make open-source applications available from the cloud, and you can construct the cloud's infrastructure out of open-source elements.

> The open source movement was born when the pendulum was swinging from the centralized mainframe to the PC revolution.

That's true, but the two were coincidental and unrelated. Correlation doesn't prove causation.

> But now as the pendulum is swinging back to centralized computing there will be fewer chances for small individualistic rebels to make an impact.

Wait, what? How does open-source relate to centralized computing? For that matter, how does cloud storage relate to centralized computing? It's not as though cloud storage requires a central repository, any more than the Internet must be a central repository in order to function.

Just one example: Linux (a) dominates the Internet's servers and (b) is open-source.
No it doesn't - these are not mutually exclusive choice. How are expenses for US health care and aid to foreign countries related? You could just as well budget the money for the latter against the expense for a coffee, an aircraft carrier or Armstrong's salary.

I totally agree that health care is too expensive at the moment.
Or, you could crowdsource an open-source abstraction layer; this would level the playing field again.
Depending on the state of your site, http://reddit.com/r/AlphaAndBetaUsers
> Peter Bright gives a very good comeback to the statements that the google employee made

No,they are almost as bad as the article.

And it is funny that he tries to discuss about Android implementation with Dianne Hackborn.
It depends on the subreddit. Some encourage on-topic self posts. eg http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/wiki/greatpost
The primary reason for this is that we are currently at a phase where we are encouraging people to program who might not otherwise bother with it. As a consequence, we're making the lessons fun and appealing right off the bat. Writing an iPhone app is more entertaining than writing a command line guess-the-number program, but the latter is a more applicable teaching tool (mostly by virtue of there being far less knowledge necessary understand what's going on).
This sums up my time with Flappy Bird perfectly