skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going to take your post at face value. But I once was an Aetna employee several years ago, with very similar personal and insurance plan attributes as those listed in your first four bullets, but my premium was quite a bit more expensive than yours. I'm a little incredulous at how low your premium is.

Aetna is not in the business of losing money on the policies it issues. I can only think that either (1) you have failed to mention attributes of your health plan that are less than ideal (e.g., coverage cap of $25,000, but you claim that you have no coverage limit(?)), (2) that you have been placed in a very low risk pool, or (3) that you have a significant subsidy that allows to you to purchase a plan that would seem to be actuarially unsound for a for-profit company like Aetna.
I've given some thought to this, and the answer is it might be. Consider a future where we've managed to eliminate all diseases. By then our natural resistance to disease might have atrophied to a point where we will absolutely be unprepared to deal with new diseases (biologically), before we've managed to develop a cure for them.
One neat feature I remember being around but can't seem to find a reference to so that I can use it again is some GET flag that reorganizes the front page to only count votes from users with old enough accounts. (Interestingly it didn't change that much so I stopped using it.)
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
"In 2013, the total Social Security expenditures were $1.3 trillion, 8.4% of the $16.3 trillion GNP (2013) and 37% of the Federal expenditures of $3.684 trillion" (Wikipedia). Medicare adds another half billion, rapidly increasing.

We could get between $6k and $7k annually per citizen by swapping those plans for a basic income. If children don't count, we could bump that to maybe $10k. Obviously, this change would need to be taken gradually to not cause too much disruption.

To hit that $20k number, we'd need to increase taxes. Increasing consumption taxes would be fair. Since the flat credits is very progressive, it's OK to pay for it with a regressive sales or value-added tax.
I seriously doubt he's "constantly" thinking of ways to improve the site. That aside, (and I really apologize for anyone interpreting this as a negative comment), I highly respect pg but at the same time, wtf? Are the comments really that bad to deserve this honestly draconian new approach? This might seem like a short-term solution to the "problem" of poor comments but it is not a true solution! Rather, it is a poorly thought out filtering mechanism that doesn't apply merit into the determination of filtering, but instead uses the totally superficial criterion of "karma point count" instead of anything other than a time-based evaluation strategy. I think it only further contributes to the "redditization" of online communities and this inevitably lowers the quality of comments by increasing the barrier to entry of commenters and will over time force inter-comment dynamics into becoming increasingly censored.

Imagine an oldguy commenter with 2400 karma is in a discussion with a newb. He could be prowling the pending comments and could simply flag a newbreply just because he disagrees, thereby artificially making it look like he has "won" an argument even though he has just forced a newbreply into oblivion, despite whatever logical argumentation newb has employed in his reply.

This is bad. :(
Disqus just turned off the ability to see how many people have downvoted a comment.

So now every comment will look positive and be re-affirming instead of challenging someone to think, "Hey, I agree with that comment, but hundreds of others have disagreed, maybe I should read the thread to see why people disagree, maybe there is something I should learn about."

There is too much gaming of comments. Let people speak freely, moderate for illegal stuff, and be done with it.
No, it's time for something proven: Australian style welfare. Maybe in 50 years time, it will be time for basic income.

The problem with giving people free money, is it reduces the incentive to work. Australia, and other countries, have introduced systems with minimal requirements for receiving welfare: making an effort to find a job, based on simple objective criteria.
There are enough people to assist in fixing a website, so there should be enough users to [endorse] posts?
Pretty sure it was just about incorrect pluralization.
If you want to spend quality time with Knuth without picking up TAoCP, this extensive video interview is awesome:

http://www.webofstories.com/play/donald.knuth/1
I come to HN to learn new things and to get the opinions of people who are well-trained in their fields. In that respect, I don't really care what a new user's, student's, or novice's opinion on something is unless they've had valuable firsthand experience, in which case the comment would definitely add to the discussion. IMO any change to this site that encourages listening over speaking is quite welcome.
Cool, I like how you guys show the Low/High $ amount. Is high the same thing as 'out-of-pocket maximum' on hc.gov?
>Who gets money and who doesn't?

Easy question. Nobody. Stop all government welfare and redistribution. Sever the dependence of unproductive citizens on the productive. Return to each citizen their natural right to freely distribute their resources. End all perverse incentives. And force each citizen to provide for themselves through the value they can offer to other freely-choosing citizens in consensual trade relationships, rather than through wielding populist political pressures to enforce coercive redistribution.
What are these magical ways to hedge against inflation that wealthy have access to and middle class don't? By definition, inflation equates to higher salaries for the middle class.
Integer expressions with + - * / and () converted to x86_64 assembly creating a stack machine code.

http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Demo/Lectures/MiniCompiler.html
I've been a subscriber for months.

Their selection of the larger sets is limited, which is understandable. They've been getting better, but there have been times when it took days or weeks to ship the next set because I only wanted a 1000+ piece set, and they didn't have enough of them.

The sets I've received have either been brand new (still in original plastic bags), or missing several minor pieces. You can log in and tell them which exact pieces are missing and they'll ship them to you (or supposedly add them to the set for the next person), but it's only after you've tried to build the full thing that you know all the pieces that are missing.

Unlike Netlix DVDs, it's hard to turn around a set quickly. I end up holding onto each one for a week or three.

I enjoyed the Lego Movie, it touched on the idea of following the instructions vs building something unique. Pley/Pleygo is trying to encourage inventiveness, with photo contests.

Still, I'm happy with the service, and have recommended it to friends.
okay, I have a pitch for an MVP.

It's an independent organization that functions as a voluntary tax collection. Everybody who believes in basic income signs up for it, and makes a monthly donation. At the end of each month, we divide the total pot of all donations by the number of users: if you need the money, you withdraw your portion. If you don't need it, you can leave it in, so that the next month's pot will be bigger.

That's the whole algorithm.

I think it's self-balancing - if I, as a software developer, have the opportunity to withdraw a small sum, I won't bother - I don't need an extra $5 or $50 or $500, really. But to someone in a lower income bracket, that might be a significant amount of money.
I have a 3 year old and he's too young to make lego city sets from the instructions but he loves playing with them and watching me make a set and helping. However, when I leave him with the bricks, he plays on his own, makes funky looking cars and planes. I've seen him spent a lot of time figuring a brick out by keep trying it with different bricks. It's very cool to see the learning process in real time.

I think children learn more by mixing, matching and making their own creations not just following the instructions. It was nice to see that the Lego movie was about this too.
The comments are good because it's a Friday night and the only people now on Hacker News are the people who care about it too much. :P
Completely agree. As a convicted monopolist Microsoft at the very least needs this kind of behavior, especially conducting search on its own without any law enforcement order.
Both this blog post and the Netflix blog post it is responding to seem intentionally confusing. The core issue is that the interests of the consumer and provider are misaligned. In a normal market if the consumer wants more or better service, the provider will make more money by providing the service.

In this case the consumer wants more service in the form of more data for streaming video. In a normal market, the additional sales from the extra data would fund the required infrastructure.
In reality, however, since the ISP sells a data rate, not data, they do not get extra revenue from heavy usage customers.

Both of these blog posts miss the mark by misinterpreting the probably rational consequences of this misalignment as unreasonable greed or unfairness. I assume that both of the authors know the real issue here and that these posts are meant to manipulate the public regardless of accuracy.
Most situations do not involve genocide.
In Australia we have a single system, where the test for qualifying for welfare is almost entirely based on (1) total assets and (2) income. This disproves the theory that excessive complexity is inherent in welfare systems.
That's not why communism didn't work. Communism didn't work because they tried to micromanage every aspect of the economy. It was central planning that failed, not guaranteed minimums.

A guaranteed minimum income without economic micromanagement or other central planning is what I'd like to see tried.
On a technical note, kudos to Cambridge for developing this beautiful platform for interacting with documents -- and for doing it without Flash.

On a personal note, everything I wrote during my college career suddenly seems a little less substantial...
I have been a lurker and infrequent poster here for a number of years and have lately been feeling increasingly alienated from the HN community. I am not on "the in" by any means in startup culture or silicon valley (in fact, I live in Southern California). As somebody who very much feels on the outside looking in on the craziness that is silicon valley and the startup culture (although my entire career has been spent in startups) I feel like this move only serves to further alienate people like me.

I think that once I break the habit of typing "news.ycombinator.com" when I open a browser I won't miss this place very much.
"Remember, though, that my opinion on economic questions is highly suspect, since I’m just an educator and scientist. I understand almost nothing about the marketplace."

How wonderful to hear a person say that. Like, hey, I'm an expert at just this one field, not every field. Rare to see that attitude these days.
It sounds like if your comment is stuck in pending for 24 hours, it will just be removed altogether.
Does that count health care for wounded veterans and other "side effects" that last far longer than any single war or Presidential term?
"So, neither MS online mail products, nor online office systems can be trusted any more! Any business owner should know this and withdraw from usage of any MS owned online systems"

FYI: Google and Yahoo have similar policies and similar histories of abuse.

If you feel this way about Microsoft, you should feel this way about Google products, sites and services too.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/21/yahoo-goog...

http://uncrunched.com/2014/03/21/google-spied-gmail/
Because your comment was very stupid.
Disclaimer: I am a long-time lurker who has only logged in a handful of times but browses daily.

It seems to me that this change moves further toward a select group of individuals owning and controlling the dialog on this site. This is bad news for the people who are not in this select group.

Before this change, a hacker news thread represented the collective dialog of the users on this site. Now, even though everyone can still comment, a hacker news thread is the collective dialog of everyone who can approve comments.

This is a dramatization; of course people with 1K karma will approve any reasonable comments and do so without any sort of agenda. Still, we can afford to be knitpicky about this change because the current system isn't broken. There is, in my mind, not any significant problem with comment quality. Why make a change now when it can potentially make the site worse and doesn't offer that great of an upside?
Those are fair concerns. Mental illness is a serious problem as an estimated 1 in 4 adults suffers from some form of mental illness in a given year. Perhaps, those problems could be solved with conservatorships, better healthcare, and private services built around providing basic needs. The latter is done for free by volunteers in many cities already; Meals on Wheels, for example.
Behind the sales numbers of mobile hit Badland
+1. I never comment but have been lurking HN for 3 years now. This is my first comment.
Its like applying plaster to an uneven wall. The dents gets filled with plaster but the bumps stays at the same level!
Its much better than giving tax breaks since you need income to begin with.
Are there any wifi standards that are actually "secure" that are available for soho users? (Short of the ssh/open VPN solution)
What? You didn't take 1 in a million odds because? The challenge was free. I took the challenge (and lost). To dismiss the challenge because of the long odds is silly. You left a free lunch on the table.
This "natural instinct to truck and barter" only showed up about 200 to 300 years ago. Before then there was feudalism, chieftains, etc. Humans have had other technologies for distributing social assets.
Well, I should specify that I work for an agency that does work for HuffPost, so I don't make strategic decisions and can't represent their point of view. From a personal standpoint, I agree that there are definitely ways to improve upon what we've built. My point is just that nesting is broken, and that I'm all about alternatives.

I find Disqus great for content with only a small amount of commentary, but extremely unpleasant to use on articles that have more than say 400 comments (and CNN regularly has articles in the thousands of comments). At that point, if you're viewing either the oldest or most liked comments, it's damn near impossible to browse the comments that are directly on the article. I think even HN's low tech interface is better.
I'll be honest, this just makes me feel terrible. I like to think of HN as the one online community where the comments are usually on point and there's no "power user" bullshit going on.

Slashdot devolved into irrelevant memes by their moderation point system. Every Subreddit eventually becomes an echo chamber. Only on hacker news can you find very divergent opinions expressed side by side without banning, censoring, downvoting or trolling. I'm not saying that pending comments will destroy that, but I already while writing this comment I'm worried about being liked by the big guys. New people with valid opinions who might not know how to appeal to the site's group-think will have a bad time. People with poor language skills will have a bad time. And of course, jokes will have a bad time, and too much seriousness can just as surely dry up a forum as too much frivolity.
Our accounts are of a similar age (and probably like you, I read passively before ever even creating an account) and we've commented a similar number of times. Like others, I've also participated in mini-threads that add detail, but occur after the heated discussion has died down (here's a recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7295384). I almost never get to HN during peak hours, so it's my main form of interaction.

But I don't feel disincentivized to comment - if anything I may try to find ways to contribute more valuable comments. I'd wager that the chances of a good comment being read will be higher, not lower.
And either way, c'est la vie. HN is provided for free, and it's tremendous. It'll be a learning experience to observe the experiment.
Spinoffs from Spyland
Could you provide a list of "good" online service providers who respect my privacy and have it in their privacy statement so that I know who to trust?
These are the types of comments that will soon disappear thanks to the magic of Pending Comments™.
Is not being endorsed a penalty, or is it just neutral?

On one hand, it doesn't subtract from your karma, but on the other it may discourage you from posting in the future.
I think the moderation system in use on HN is inferior to moderation systems seen on some forums as far back as the turn of the century. I am not a fan of it (see my profile page) and don't like it in the least.

I think it's better than having nothing at all (no up/down at all), but that's not saying much.
S.F. Austin had a 4-point play with 3.6 seconds left in the game to tie. Then they won in overtime. That guy is still perfect!
Deauth is a not a new attack.
I can't see any plausible way that these numbers will even approach the ballpark of $5 trillion. Back of the envelope calculation please.
Perhaps. Or maybe not. If I had enough Karma I'd endorse this stuff.
Not without violating your Eula
I agree with you and share your concerns, as someone with similar posting habits.
It just hit me the reason the page is blank is my karma is lower than 1000.
The goal of HN isn't to become large and popular. It's to be a useful forum for discussion. See the Guidelines and FAQ links on every HN page for more on this:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

As for gaining points: given time and quality contributions (as well as winning the front-page lottery a time or two), it's possible to gain 1000 karma in a year or so, pretty easily, if you want to (and quite possibly faster). Which is as it should be: you need to make your bones.
Docker and the Future of the PaaS Layer – AppFog Blog
Why prioritise this over an API for HN? 2014 and we are still screen scraping.
'Dark Souls II' Review Part One: Bringing Back The Demons
Why increase consumption taxes? Why add friction? Wouldn't it be better to tax the assets at rest -- real estate, property.
Having the best hospitals in the world doesn't matter if only a tiny subset of your population can actually use them.

The wait times for life threatening issues in Canada really isn't that bad as someone who spent last year with my mother going through Cancer treatments and has a few friends here going through the same at the moment. Less urgent procedures due tend to take a long time though.

So while Canadians may wait up to 6 weeks for non-essential/urgent surgeries, 45,000 americans die each year because they lack the insurance to pay for their medical treatments.
Chasing karma and gaming the system are entirely different in the context of HN.

Chasing karma means you're actively participating and gaining the positive attention of your peers.

Gaming the system would mean that you're somehow gaining karma without participating or without making positive contributions. I'm not sure how link baiting will work, unless you mean that people will go out of their way to be the first person to post a URL. That may become the best way to get karma, but it's also a positive for HN because relevant links will be getting posted immediately. Therefore you wouldn't technically be gaming the system.

I appreciate your commenting and believe that we're on similar tracks (I've been around for about a year and have about 250 karma), but maybe this feature is a signal that we could be doing a better job.
To hit that $20k number, we'd need to increase taxes.

I'm glad we are in agreement that a BI will cost a lot more than the current targeted welfare state. (Or alternately will require a drastic cut in benefits for the current crop of non-workers.)
> Now, they're just a paint-by-numbers

No, they're both. The sets we loved as kids still exist, they just don't advertise them as much as the licensed properties, but they sure as hell haven't discontinued them:

http://www.lego.com/en-us/creator/products/all-models
http://www.lego.com/en-us/city/products
http://www.lego.com/en-us/castle
http://galaxysquad.lego.com/en-us
A truly insane and stupid idea befitting an insane and stupid political culture.

And lo and behold! Embraced with open arms by the Hacker News community. What a surprise.
I can't believe Arrington would not have posted a techcrunch article when and if this had happened. This seems just another attention grabbing article.
Let me just say it straight out: I think this is a truly terrible idea.

I've been reading HN for over 3 years and I am more than happy to use my own judgment to ignore comments that do not contribute to the discussion. I rather have that than miss a comment that others have not deemed important.

(technically this does not apply to me as I have karma > 1000, but I am speaking from the viewpoint of somebody who hasn't)

We do not need rules like this. We need good judgment.

Good judgment cannot be enforced; it has to be cultivated. It'd be better to post reminders about etiquette somewhere prominently and trust that people tend to do the right thing (and most people do).
Ask HN: What testing tools do you use?
Aside from the city of Munich, are their any other governments that are using Linux as their main operating system?
I wish that people would stop writing tutorials on "getting started" with Docker, and actually start writing up examples of how to work with multiple containers, hosts, and linking.

That's the part that I (and I'm sure other beginners) get totally stuck on. Anyone can do docker commit/pull.
So...is there actually anything new here? Doesn't look like it.
High is the premium for 12 months + annual max out of pocket. We included it so people who know they'll have a lot of expenses can pick a plan based on what they'll likely pay that year rather than just the premium.
"Making an AI as smart as an animal would be an incredible advancement btw."

Only if your goal was to make an artificial (non-human) animal. But would that be a step toward making an artificial human?
This is actually a very current topic right now in Switzerland. There will a national vote to decide if every Swiss citizen should get a basic income of 2500 swiss francs (approximately 2700$) a month. Some interesting details can be read in this (kind of) recent article (most other ones are in German)
http://themindunleashed.org/2014/03/swiss-pay-basic-income-2...
This is basically supplemental insurance (think Aflac) - the caveat with those insurance companies is that their incentive is to not pay anything out unless a very specific set of circumstances is met.
This reminds me of a blog I read by Stephen Wolfram discussing his viewing of Leibniz's notes.

http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2013/05/dropping-in-on-gottfr...
I agree. I dislike slashdot because of their over-agressive moderation tactics. I think HN feels like a more natural conversation. As long as bad comments aren't in the majority I still like reading the threads.
According to Maslow's Hierarchy, at least as I interpret it, charity increases as an individual is able to meet their lower needs. How you go about getting more individuals to that level is a matter of debate that is difficult to give any definitive answers to.
That's not a philanthropist. That's a fool!
https://news.ycombinator.com/classic
That is very true.

I would maintain, though, that besides the involved parties nobody can possibly know what really happened, and hence everything is just idle speculation.
I beat it on the first try with nothing but 2's before I read the instructions and found out I could use 4's.
the french "gendarmerie",a mix of military and police, moved their computers to Linux.