DavidAdams

That's a cold calculation. It's also worth noting that in many cases these extremely expensive drug regimens replace invasive surgical procedures of dubious merit that were just as expensive. Part of the problem is that sometimes Medicaid covers expensive surgeries more readily than it covers expensive drugs. Our entire health care system is unprepared for expensive drug therapies, even as they long ago became comfortable with expensive surgeries.

I find the taboo around discussing compensation to be a very interesting phenomenon. As a former CEO, I prefer to have the leeway to, for example, pay an individual who drives a hard bargain at hiring a little more without feeling the pressure to pay other people more. Then there's the flipside, which is that some people undervalue themselves, and who doesn't like getting a bargain. In this sense, secrecy around pay benefits employers.

As a member of a team, I also understand that pay differential is a potential source of tremendous discord. While everyone instinctively understands that some roles earn more than others, it's definitely better for that knowledge to be general rather than specific. I don't think that radical transparency about comp would promote good morale, in general. In this case, secrecy about pay is compatible with psychological well-being among employees.

However, I'll have to say that I agree with the regulators here. Its one thing for social decorum to dictate the secrecy. It's another for the company to have an official policy about it.

My son was bitten by a copperhead snake (a viper) near Washington DC. He received a very large dose of poison into a very small hand, and ran a high risk of losing his arm without proper treatment. He received 14 doses of anti-venom, $70,000 worth, and recovered fully. Two years later, we found out that the company that made the anti-venom for copperheads had ceased production, since it wasn't cost-effective. My wife blogged about it: http://www.crazyus.com/2010/07/19/washington-dc-snakes-once-...

This is a time-honored technique. Consumerist coined the term "Executive Email Carpet Bomb." http://consumerist.com/2007/05/11/how-to-launch-an-executive...

Mormons use genealogy data to proxy-baptize their own ancestors. Like many Christians, they have a rather literal interpretation of the New Testament: if you don't get baptized, you won't be "saved." Like many Christian denominations, they also believe that not any old baptism will do. You have to be baptized by someone with the proper authority and in the proper way (by immersion). Unlike most Christians, they believe that if you died without getting baptized properly, you're not damned. You just have to wait until one of your ancestors baptizes you by proxy. They believe that before the "end of the world" every human being who has ever been born will receive one of these proxy baptisms. That way, nobody goes to hell on a technicality.

It's an interesting loophole to get around a completely sick and twisted part of Christian theology: that many innocents are damned just because they didn't accept Christ and baptism in their lifetimes.

Now, I personally think Christianity is hogwash, and I don't believe in Mormonism. But to be worried that some well-meaning Mormon descendent is going to retroactively make you Mormon after your death is pretty silly. If you don't believe in Mormonism then the proxy baptism is meaningless.

(3) They're in it for the lulz, and realized that going after an unsavory company with unsavory clients they'd create a Schadenfreude-fueled media sensation they'd have extra lulz.

When my son was about 5, he picked up on the fact that the number 88 sounds a lot like "idiot," so he got a lot of pleasure out of yelling "88" all the time. It's become part of our family folklore. I take a lot of pleasure associating white nationalism with the word idiot now.

Interconnected stands of Aspen are actually common in areas where Aspen trees grow. Pando is just a particularly old and huge one. In the autumn, you can sometimes tell where two separate stands share a mountainside, because the clones tend to turn yellow all at once, and you can see that one side of the mountain is still somewhat green while the other has turned yellow. I lived in an Aspen forest in Park City that was like that.

There's a co-work space and startup hub in Park City, Utah called Pando Labs that's named after Pando: http://www.pandolabs.org/

Youtube

The game's actual source code would be under copyright, but presumably you could re-write a game and exactly copy its gameplay and that wouldn't be copyright infringement any more than writing a poem using the same meter with different words as a famous poem would infringe.

I agree. What Finland is doing is a good idea, but it's not particularly radical or unique. My kids are doing a scaled down version of this right now, in that their history and English class is combined, so they read and write about things on a particular historical subject, instead of random stuff.

It sounds like you're talking about the Medicaid "donut hole." The ACA intended for states to expand Medicaid to cover the poorest Americans, but thanks to an unexpected supreme court challenge many Republican-controlled states opted not to expand Medicaid, putting a lot of people into the catch 22 of making too much to qualify for the existing Medicaid program, but not making enough to qualify for the new Obamacare subsidies. It's a crappy situation that's being rectified little by little as those states are cutting deals with the Obama administration.

Here's how you can hack the system, though. The IRS (who's in charge of enforcing the subidies) has determined that there's no penalty if you end up making less money in a year than you had estimated that you'd make. So if you make $20k per year, but you need to make $25k to qualify for a subsidy, you can just enter $25k at healthcare.gov, and you'll get the subsidy. If you end up making less than that when you submit that year's taxes, you won't be penalized, and you won't have to give the subsidy back. IANAL, etc.

I heard the story on the podcast, so I'd think it's still available.

Ugh, the drones "might be" flown by eco warriors or terrorists. Thanks for the silly speculation, BBC. They might also be flown by Raelians, the Russian Mafia, Simon Cowell, the ghost of Napoleon, Nigerian 419 scammers, Snookie, or Kim Kardashian's butt.

The Hacker News crowd and the tech entrepreneurship ecosystem in general has a deserved reputation for a bias toward trying to fix problems that are prominent in their own line of sight. In other words, a lot of startups trying to fix problems that vex prosperous, tech-savvy single people in San Francisco. But here's a geek-world problem that's staring us all right in the face.

Despite the enormous potential benefit of the internet as a place for open, respectful discourse among people from all walks of life, it seems that every forum must eventually devolve into ad-hominem rancor and trolling, unless it's aggressively and time-consumingly moderated by dedicated human beings.

I've been involved in trying to crack this particular nut since 1997 as publisher of OSNews, and I've been a participant in some relatively good forums such as HN over the years, but I can't help but think that there's an opportunity start with what Disqus has done and take it to the next level.

In the article, Coates bemoans the limited moderation toolset that he got from Disqus, and I can't help but think that there's a potential big data play to fingerprint the most obvious kinds of trolling and give human moderators a quiver of time-saving tools to keep their forums on the straight and narrow.

If anyone here has some ideas about how we might go about executing on this idea, let me know. I'd be interested in being involved.

Fraud. A false representation of a matter of fact—whether by words or by conduct. . .

The article states that she's going to finish high school online.

One of my biggest regrets is that when I was sixteen I didn't pursue an opportunity to quit high school and do something more fulfilling. I spent the last two years of high school working at a grocery store, working at a game store, and trying to stay awake in class while coasting through with a B average. I got to college, changed majors half a dozen times, got an English degree, worked as a research assistant for a biology professor, where I was in charge of the website and became a self-taught web developer. This lead to me co-founding a software startup and becoming a successful entrepreneur and product manager.

Just because this young woman is currently learning to code and is going through a good old-fashioned apprenticeship with her dad doesn't mean that she'll necessarily become a professional programmer, any more than my profession at 16 led me to be a grocer or retailer. But what I learned about retail and mail-order sales at the game store really helped me when I went on to build one of the first ecommerce engines in the 90s. What I learned about HTML and design doing websites about ecology in college was essential to my entrepreneurship later on.

So the negative comments about this father pressuring his daughter or all the fabulous high school opportunities she'll miss out on are really rubbing me the wrong way. High school kids need guidance, and there's no harm whatsoever in encouraging them to focus their energies in one particular area, even if that means shutting out other opportunities. She's a young person, and she'll have plenty of time to consider other things, especially if she ends up going to college in a couple of years. Even if she doesn't end up being a software developer for her permanent career, this youthful experience will form a firm foundation, even if she ends up in finance, or business, or medicine. Couldn't all of those fields use a few more people who know (or once knew) how to code?

My coding skills are now woefully out of date. But I understand enough about how to make software that when I'm working with an engineering team, I have realistic notions about what can and can't be done, and roughly how hard it will be. But because my dad wasn't as engaged as this guy, I also have some ace grocery bagging skills are are really just wasting space in my brain.

I'm glad there were other nerds who were bothered by this like I was. Thanks HN!

Actually, it sounds like she had plenty of money and just ended up being desperate to be covered by health insurance.

I don't think it was about the article. It was an attempt to get a job with health insurance because she messed up her health insurance situation after she lost her previous job.

This article brings up a very important point that I don't think the author intended to make: do not sign up for COBRA. If the author had signed up for an individual plan under Obamacare within the 60 day period from when she lost her job, she would have at least had health insurance, and if she remained unemployed, she would qualify for increasingly large subsidies.

In the olden days (before 2013) you had to sign up for COBRA to stay insured unless you were healthy enough to qualify for individual insurance. But now you can't be turned down, but you can only sign up during specific enrollment periods. Problem is, COBRA is still around, and companies are still required to offer it to you, even though for most people it's going to be way more expensive than individual insurance (because it's unsubsidized), and if something goes wrong or you become unable to afford the premiums, you can end up like the author, unable to sign up for an individual plan because you're out of the enrollment period.

This is one of a few holes and pitfalls that were created by the Affordable Care Act.

I know a lot about this stuff because my startup helps companies save money and design health benefits programs that take advantage of recent changes in the health care law (benefitter.com). If you have any Obamacare questions, let me know.

The average age of a successful entrepreneur is 40. So for every Zuckerberg, there's a 60-something balancing him out: http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/06/entrepreneurs-get-better-with/

You're not alone. I listened to a podcast a while back on this subject, and the reason that the blood "market" runs solely and strictly on donations it's because earlier in history, when the medical establishment paid for blood, they were only able to get skid row types to contribute, and needless to say, the quality of the blood wasn't good.

http://freakonomics.com/2013/06/05/is-paying-for-blood-a-goo...

Just today I was reading in a short article in this month's Wired about how the latest Air Jordan was using advanced textiles woven with a Jacquard Loom. I couldn't find that article, but here's a longer one: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3029192/innovation-by-design/how...

We're selective in our use of the metric system here in USA, and therefore Americans will generally have an intuitive sense for how big metric units are for some measurements but not others. If you say 5mm or 1L, no problem. If you say 250km or 22kg, not so much. Americans have an intuitive sense for long distance in miles, small volume measurements in teaspoons or cups, distances in inches, feet, and miles. But micro distances in mm are generally okay, largely due to things like nuts and bolts being largely metric, and the proliferation of beverage containers in 1L and 2L bottles and engine displacements measured in liters give us a hand there.

What's often missing from the discussion around Apple's new encryption regime is that it serves two primary important purposes: it gives privacy-oriented consumers a little bit of peace-of-mind about the surveillance state and the safety of their personal data (a plus for Apple) and it relieves Apple from having to be involved in routine, low-stakes law enforcement subpoenas and other requests (a plus for Apple), so it's a double win for Apple to make he change. Whether or not it actually deters NSA snooping is beside the point.

Keep in mind that laws may also exist to inhibit the powers of regulatory agencies. I believe that's what wyager is suggesting.

The Apple Watch promises haptic feedback to use in, for example, turn-by-turn navigation. I doubt that anything that crude could come close to achieving what the "hearing glove" inventors are/were after, but I'd be interested to see whether, upon putting such capabilities on the wrists of so many people, and opening up access to them for countless app developers, whether we might be able to come up with some extremely interesting cybernetic user experiences, both for hearing or sight-disabled people and for those will their full senses who could benefit from the various kinds of augmented reality that's on offer.

I recall reading about a guy who wore a device that gave him an indication of his North south east west orientation through a vibration, and how he used that to gain a instinctive sense of his place, perhaps similar to how pigeons experience the world. I think that's only scratching the surface of cybernetic potential that we could be unlocking by making even simple haptic feedback devices like the Apple watch widely available.