skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
DavidAdams has a good explanation of why the Obamacare premiums will be higher than the one you are currently paying.

One thing that Obamacare is supposed to do, and it seems that it has done this in general, is make sure that the insurance plan you purchase (via monthly premiums) is worthwhile. Health insurance is cognitively difficult to evaluate, and before the Affordable Care Act many people purchased plans that offered rather poor coverage because these plans had very low premiums. (Many people are either unable or unwilling to learn the details of their health plan, or if they know the details don't mind gambling, so these types of "you think you have insurance, until you have a calamity" plans flourished.)

The ACA is supposed to prevent people from buying these "lemons" by outlawing these plans. So some plans offered by insurers were supposed to be discontinued, i.e., you couldn't stay on them, but others were "grandfathered", i.e., you could stay on them because they met the minimum qualifications set.

Obama got into a lot of trouble because he said (paraphrasing) that if you liked your health plan, you could keep it, which was false. So politically he had to backtrack and now, for the next two years, whether a plan meets the ACA standards is irrelevant, you can keep your plan regardless of how lousy it may or may not be.

It sounds, as DavidAdams speculates, that you are in a very low-risk pool, which is certainly possible. You are on the right side of 30 and may have a great medical history, which puts you in "very low risk" pool, in which case the premium you're being charged could make actuarial sense for the insurer. However, what you have not yet experienced is the flip side of age bracketing and the inevitable detriments to your health that eventually will occur. Once you turn 30, you will be in a new bracket, and your premium will go up. Percentage-wise, it will be considerable, but since you're starting from such a low base it will be modest in an absolute sense. However, as the years accumulate, assuming your plan has been grandfathered, you will likely notice that these premium increases will start accumulating to the point where you may feel the insurer is gouging you.

That is, unless the ACA remains the law of the land, in which you can just sign up for one of the Obamacare plans to join a better risk pool than the one the insurer has placed you in.

So from a game-theoretical perspective, assuming your plan is grandfathered, you should stay on it as long as you can, until the premium increases to the point to where switching to an Obamacare plan makes financial sense. This assumes that your insurer has no grounds for rescission (i.e., to retroactively rescind its coverage of your health care costs because you misled them about your medical history at enrollment). If there are grounds, then the "guaranteed issue" aspect of Obamacare plans becomes attractive.
Huge win: lower security exposure. Image codecs are complex and a perennial source of exploitable bugs.

There's also the cost of optimizing and testing code. I hope WebP has been improving because in the past it was very slow – as bad as JPEG-2000 – and it takes non-trivial effort to change that. Again, not a burden you'd jump to take on without some very clear wins.

The case will become much stronger if the next generation codec delivers more of a win on file size.
No, they're separate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7446344
Dynamic content can be done pretty well with just JavaScript, depending on what your needs are.

As for trouble you've had with AWS, I'd encourage you to take a second look at S3 specifically. It's been pretty bulletproof for a long time now.
probably you already have a computer, start with that one!
"This fellow has about a 1 in 25 chance of making it through the next 10 years"

Maybe you meant 20 years? There is no way this stat is right - he's 77. Making it to 87 isn't unusual
Just a heads up, you're going to want to translate your readme to rst if you want it to render right on pypi.
There was a spate of high profile "why we moved from MongoDB to $other_database" articles a year or so ago of startups getting burned when they realised that the all-signing all-dancing cure-all database they (thought they) had been sold, in fact wasn't.

The issues encountered ranged from MongoDB failing to scale out as easily as promised, to significant loss of data. There was also some backlash because MongoDB didn't (and perhaps still doesn't) persist data to disk when it acknowledged it as received[0].

A general perception grew, rightly or not, than MongoDB was being marketed by 10Gen[1] over and above its capabilities. Then the actual message of "MongoDB is not a drop-in replacement for traditional RDBMSs like PostgreSQL and MySQL, and is not the ideal solution to every problem" has been filtered down to "MongoDB is a terrible product with no use cases whatsoever." Such is the effect of the HN echo chamber.

Much like PHP, MongoDB is now simply a product that you cannot say anything good about on HN, even if you are in fact finding it an effective tool for your use case in spite of its shortcomings.

[0] Cynically, because they were trying to win benchmarks. Less cynically, because the use case was semi-ephemeral data where possibly losing some data is acceptable.

[1] Now also called MongoDB
Hey, just to be clear: I don't think it's wrong to charge less than the market rate, and while I'm more likely to do a project gratis than at 1/2 or 1/3 my rate, we've given people breaks before.
I'm not sure if it still does, but twitter used to hijack F5 so you can't reload the page. Rather annoying when it has been sitting in the background, and hasn't updated.
20 bucks a month over the duration of a development cycle could be pretty significant. This will basically allow people to develop their game to the point where success or failure could be predicted, and Epic will miss out on the development cycle revenues from the failures.
Yes, in Safari there's a more obvious visual indication.

I suspect that back and forth in Safari may be non-destructive as well (though I can't confirm this right now)

One of the things that makes it easy to swipe back by mistake is the apple trackpad, so I suspect Safari developers are aware of this and added the indication
Cash drops out of circulation after a cut-off point in the UK. E.g. the current £20 note was introduced in 2007, and the previous one went out of circulation in 2010. If you want to use your coins you’ll have a grace period to exchange them.
Sadly that is not the only concern, when companies outsource like Orange to cheaper climates http://telecomtv.com/comspace_newsDetail.aspx?n=47495&id=e93...

Then they also expose the potentual for questionable employee's. Also such outsoureced locations have less defined data protection laws and regulations than the customer base they serve.

So say what you like but I'd trust the French goverment not to sell on my bank details, pass my phone number onto a scammers list and PPI spammers etc etc.

I used to be with Orange msyelf, but left for various related reasons that also entailed changing bank account numbers as well.
> Generally, web technologies have a somewhat gentler learning curve than iOS/Android

I have not enough experience with iOS/Android development to know, but I wonder if it isn't somewhat more easier to learn iOS for instance since it's just one language and IDE you have to focus on, while for web-dev you need to learn multiple languages. (Though at a certain point you'll need a server-side language to give your app the ability to communicate with a server...)

> If you're starting from scratch, learn HTML and CSS and make some simple static pages. Then once you're comfortable, learn a high level language (eg. Ruby or Python). Then learn a web framework for that language (Rails if you're focusing on Ruby, Django if Python). You'll probably want to pick up some Javascript too.

Exactly what I was thinking, but you gave actually steps.
Oh, for unjustified expenses? I pass those as personal expenses, and get they out of my corporate accounts.

Sounds tight, but Denmark has a history of corporate corruption in the 70-80s they are trying to curb.

More importantly, not sure how that is related to individual benefits; on the contrary: seems like they are focusing on tax dodging.
Gresham's law doesn't apply as it's ~3% of £1 coins in circulation, not of all.
You cant live from a job that the government doesnt already consider worhthy of paying a salary for.

It doesnt work and never have. Denmark tried this too it does nothing cause it doesnt solve the basic problem.

There is not enough jobs for all of us and will increasingly be so.

BI is the best solution we know of and we should try it.
https://codility.com/ is that. I have never used it, so I cannot comment on effectiveness. It is pitched as a pre-filter, not a total replacement for the interviewing process.
Not sure if this helps, you can send imessages from the Messages app in Mac. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5395
Again you should really do some research with the countries who tried or is trying this. It helps no one and cost more than it helps.
In order to reduce anxiety Exercise: Healthful Way Of calming Away Your Stress
The 8 Best Industries for Starting a Business
I'm curious what percentage of smart watch wearers, having sported one for a while, view their devices as essential to having them on their person every single day. Did the anticipated use cases map with reality? Execution-wise I see a lot of complaints, but I wonder how much of what they're getting right is still "wrong".
While I agree that generally the quality is high, I do feel that over the past two years (or so) that I've been active here, I've been seeing more and more reddit-like puns or empty comments. They're not overwhelming, and generally harmless enough, content-wise, but I do find them annoying. I welcome this attempt to fix the situation before it becomes too bad.
A real synth with patch cables, what more could you want and nice to see such products still about.
His name is Chris Sawyer, the creator of Transport Tycoon and Roller Coaster Tycoon 1+2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Sawyer

He has kept low profile for at least 10 years :(

Another similar single person developer is Geoff Crammond of the Grand Prix formula 1 series games (also low profile since 10 years): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoff_Crammond
"No true Scotsman" is only a fallacy when one uses irrelevant criteria to exclude people from a group.

It's not NtS to point out that James "Scotty" Doohan wasn't Scottish (he was a Canadian of Irish descent.) Nor is it NtS to point out that certain people don't hold various relevant defining characteristics and therefore to claim that they don't count as being in a particular category. Of course, that exclusion is contextual -- it can apply to a particular use of a label without applying to all uses of it.

Note that I disagree with Sam Harris overall. His claim is that the only way Muslims can be reasonably said to exist is his definition; I would argue that one way Muslims can be said to exist is his definition. I would further argue that some people who use other definitions of Islam have irrational/unjustified/disproportionate fear, and can therefore be said to be Islamophobic.
I agree: as long as we restrict ourselves to tech stories in which (a) no startup is implicated in any way (lest the thread devolve into litigation of San Francisco real estate prices) and (b) no sharks/jets rivalry exists (rails v node, rust v go, mongo v cassandra), the comments on HN are pretty good.

Every other story has mean, uninformed, badly-written, unproductive comments

I also agree that the stories are the bigger problem.
Ah, brain issues. I blame aging. I was getting confused with Murdoch, who is 90-something. I'll correct that.
Just try saying "my favorite language is _" and you'll see what he's saying. I tried that once, on a thread about favorite languages I added a comment saying, I use these languages for these things, thinking I might get some good advice and I got downvoted. I was respectful about how I phrased it but I still got people ticked at me.
Obelisk.js – JavaScript Engine for building isometric pixel objects.
I would not use Mongo over Redis. TBH, I would just not use it. Ever. In my experience, it has proven itself to not be worthy of my trust. It corrupts the data.
Consistency across applications isn't a bad thing per se. Ask all those who argue that emacs or vi keybindings should be available everywhere ;-)
Bye Bye Bye, Twitter Music
You came here to write a one-word comment about a database too, found it already written, so instead decided to write "me too"?

Or did you instead have a detailed and carefully plotted comment about the problems with Mongodb, but then you read "nasalgoat's" comment and found his concision so bold and bracing that you were intimidated from contributing your comment?

If so, I urge you to reconsider.
This already exists, but you have to click "link" on the comment first to see the "flag" link.
It is time for basic government.
Which phone are you using? I haven't experienced any issues like that with my iPhone 5S. Charging is a pain, but I've given up trying to make it last multiple days and just started charging it every night when I plug in my phone.
> Internet connections were so slow that it was impossible for most people to download a Linux distro on off the internet. But there were a lot of computer magazines distributing various Linux distros on CDs for a Rs. 100 or thereabout.

As a teenager, the only Internet access I could afford was Netzero. Any time I had $13 to spare, I'd head to Books-a-Million and buy a copy of the Linux Format, if only so I could upgrade my Linux partition. Good times :) Do Linux mags still come with discs?
This. http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/01/29/mongo-ft/

Also this. http://nyeggen.com/blog/2013/10/18/the-genius-and-folly-of-m...
"Vigorous, varied cardio is Diniz’s cornerstone. Running backward in the dark hones coordination and proprioception -- the sense of where his core and limbs are in space."
The entire article read like a bad infomercial to me. Just. Bunch of anecdotes and unsubstantiated claims and promises.
I am not stating that it is _the_ solution, but here are some thoughts as to why it would help.

We spend billions just paying accountants to fool around wit millions of rules that most people do not understand. Sales tax is very simple. Rich people get out of paying taxes by doing inefficient things like tax shelters.

Now, the sales tax would need to be refunded for those in the basic income bracket, especially on food, housing, etc..

Remember that HN article about "We'll not incorporate in the US" by some Danish group? What needs to happen is to encourage businesses to run locally, and part of that is simplifying the entire structure to represent what the economy is closest to--consumption.
Write libraries, not services
Because people would rather pay a small fraction of their wages to buy a machine to do their job for them. And they should. Basic income basically allows that to happen - you're employer gets the extra profit from automating you away, but the money is taxed and given back.
Hi Krapp,

You're right. WYSIWYG editor is easier to use than writing code but the aim is to make program running on the internet, not creating web page.

You're also right that my examples are using concepts than non-technical people could be afraid of.

What I'm thinking right now is that I should have created an interface to produce the code like scratch : http://scratch.mit.edu/
Ask pg: What does the pg of today (the pg with kids) think about what the pg of the past (circa 2004) wrote about the parts of the essay related to kids?

If there's something interesting to diff, it's the ideas people have that pertain to taboos and taboo subjects before and after kids.

I suspect if more developers and engineers had kids, iPads would have a kid mode. I wonder how thinkers and writers (and painters?) would think and write and paint differently with/without kids.
I have some experience in this area, I'm the main author of 3 programming frameworks targeting this (two created for two failed startups ). Now, I got great results like doing 4 products in an year ( with hundreds of concepts, database tables, complex processes) with only 2 programmers. An visible speed improvement but still was not the case that non programmers could program easily. Because of financial constraints we abandoned the creation of the GUI for creating apps and used the framework (targeting Flex/Flash ). Now, I outsourced an MVVM framework for JS (https://github.com/salboaie/SwarmShape) that is created with an architecture that serve the purpose of having visual UI to speed up the development. There is no GUI and tools but the framework is constructed to make tooling possible. I see such UI behave like better spreadsheets usable for creation of simple apps (using reusable components and simple scripting) by intelligent people having only a few days of training. It is feasible, only the business aspects should be clarified. If you want an discussion on this topics, feel free to contact me. salboaie@gmail.com
Ask HN: What did you do after launching app...
Just launched our app, DormChat. Getting good traction. Now what?

That's the oversimplified thought process. What I'm curious to hear though is personal experiences on what you did for the days, weeks, month, after launch.
This system should be rolled out, but not before the karma of all users is reset to zero. This would provide a level playing field. (ok, no comments could be endorsed either.)
I agree with this entirely. As it currently stands, implementing this policy in such a abrupt way will hurt discussion and negatively impact the quality of the community.

And although there are ways to improve the actual implementation of the system, I still think it is fundamentally flawed for a few reasons.

First, any system in which a comment is assumed to be spam or trash until proven otherwise will produce less meaningful discussion. Maybe most of the good comments will be filtered through; but some will invariably be missed, and people with valid ideas will not have their comments seen by anyone. Moreover, from my understanding, the HN user base is primarily in North America. (I could be wrong.) If this is true, won't users in other countries be disproportionately affected by this kind of oversight because there are simply fewer high-karma users in the rest of the world?

This is fundamentally a debate over whether HN should have 50% fewer good comments and 100% fewer bad ones, or whether we should just get everything. I believe that latter.

Second, this program places excess responsibility in the hands of high-karma users. HN is now moving from a passive system (eg. one where everything is visible and the best stuff gets voted to the top), to one where every comment must be scrutinized and evaluated just to be visible. Logistically, I don't see how this works. Users with over 1000 karma are rare. From what I've seen they are less than 5% of the total HN user base. This minority is now going to be responsible for evaluating every single comment?! I truly do not see the small number of high-karma users on HN being able to sort through every comment. Many, many comments will be missed or ignored.

Overall, I believe that any effort to stop spam on HN should be given consideration, but this system poses substantial logistical problems and will, in all likelihood, hurt the community.
Ask HN: How much do you spend on SaaS a month?
I've recently started working on a side project with a couple of friends, nothing crazy, but we're already spending over $200 a month on supporting services. It's nothing to write home about (yet!) but it was a little surprising.

For those of you who have side projects (or a startup for that matter) and don't mind sharing, how many services are you using and what's your total monthly SaaS spend?

Cheers
Luke
I missed the part were he talks about his "plan". I'd bet on Larry Page to have any impact on longevity. Funding Calico and hiring Ray Kurzweil seems like steps in the right direction.
It's not about running a caloric deficit, but a caloric restriction. Usually the goal is reducing your caloric intake by 20-40% compared to your regular diet. You don't need to run a deficit and burn more than you take in or you would waste away.
Well so what? If you are going to consume more of the economy's resources to choose to live in a more expensive place, then you should have to pay for it.

Conversely, why should we give less to people who live in more affordable places?
fwiw, when i used to work in finance, the team i was in used to handle very sensitive market-moving data. one day, without warning, all of the offices keyboards and mouse where changed to "more secure hardware/peripherals" by orders of the cio and its staff. this was in 06/07, at the time i thought they were paranoid - now i think otherwise.
Retro Mac Computing: MPW: The Long View (2010)
Ask HN: Will soon have lots of time and little money – how to spend it?
Hi HN,

A week from now I'll be leaving a high-paying/high-stress job at a big law firm for a part-time remote position (bitcoin related) that pays (comparatively) very little. I decided I wanted time to seriously pursue music, while also having time to read and learn new things (something I haven't done much of the last few years). Diving into the workings of bitcoin has also made me want to get back into learning programming, which I haven't really done since college. It's a big change and a bit scary, but I figure now is the time to do something like this, as kids are still at least a few years off.

So I'm looking to HN for general advice on budgeting my time and money -- I'll have plenty of the former and little of the latter. I really want to maximize this experience, but I also know that I tend to be a bit over-ambitious ("5 hours a day of music! Learn python! Work through euclid's elements! Start an exercise regimen!".) I've read plenty of great posts on HN about productivity, efficient use of time, and ultra-budgeting, so I thought this would be a good place to start. I'm also looking for any general tips about staying engaged and active while working from home.

If anyone has any advice or stories to share, I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks, all!
Related: (sp)iPhone: Decoding Vibrations From Nearby Keyboards Using Mobile Phone Accelerometers

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~traynor/papers/traynor-ccs11.pdf‎ (Not working for me right now.)

http://dl.packetstormsecurity.net/papers/general/traynor-ccs...
Building software is about tradeoffs. Moving things into a services encapsulates functionality and allows separate teams of developers to work independently. For a new startup with two developers, it's overkill and will slow you down.

However, if your team is the size of LinkedIn's or Netflix's, you need this independence and factoring things into services can be a great way to do it.
The problem is that downvotes affect karma, so someone with unpopular opinions will likely have lower karma than what their level of contribution indicates. Thus leading to an echo chamber of 1000+ endorsed popular comments only.
>>> he really isn't doing anything material other than having a good time, and perhaps deluding himself as to how well he is impacting his life span.

I would add a third motivation to the list that was best articulated by Ernest Becker:

“For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as he survives transfixed with rapture.”

I highly recommend the work of Ernest Becker to anyone interested in this topic. It is amazing how well the theory of Generative Death Anxiety explains human behavior.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death