staringispolite's comments

An error that large may be rare, but the overall experience of massive/unexpected financial load is fairly common via my experience hearing from customers (full disclosure: I founded a medical tourism startup called Emissary two years ago: https://www.emissarymed.com)

We talk to people all the time who don't have insurance (20-30M last time I checked), don't have dental insurance (~150M), or whose insurance comes with coverage caps as low as $1K-$2K that render insurance effectively useless for them in large operations. Most of the time, customers we talk to actually don't even get as far as the author did, because they can't afford the estimate, let alone the risk of over-shooting it. They just avoid getting treatment (and often get worse in the meantime).

The trick then is how to find a doctor you can both afford AND trust. If you'll excuse the plug, we started Emissary to solve that when a friend's mother had this problem. Our mission is to help connect people to high-quality options they can afford, regardless of where they live in the world.

I was also thinking through which rules would apply here. (What entity owns a Stripe account? What constitutes a transfer of data? How does this case differ from say, an acquisition?)

The medium article only shows info you can get from a Stripe card_id request. Not using https on that page is troublesome, but I don't think there's any evidence to suggest FlyMaids (or even HomeJoy) ever had access to actual CC information.

It seems more likely that this depends on Homejoy's ToS/Privacy Policy. (Although it's certainly possible the transfer was done in a way that violates Stripe's policies, I'm just not familiar with those)

Edit: It might even be the same business entity with different d.b.a names. Good discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10468161

Interesting case study - he's "just" a full-time gamer, but there are tons of parallels in market timing, luck, peristence, positioning yourself in the market, getting to your first $100K revenue, and balancing founder-level time commitments with raising a family.

Just verified this myself... pretty cool! I searched for the following:

  * Mutex lock (from the article)
  * Mutex lock C++
  * Python list comprehension

Third time's a charm! The prompt came up, and now I've got a simulated shell of sorts that looks a bit like linux but doesn't have most commands.

The main command is "request", which lets you request challenges through this shell. Requests are defined as follows:

  foobar:~/ guest$ help
  [snip]
  request	- request new challenge (of type 'tag') [tag]

  foobar:~/ guest$ tags
  Requesting tags...
  algo         	algorithms
  data_struct    	data structures
  low_level      	low-level representation (binary representations, endianness)
  math           	math
  crypto         	security and cryptography

Had a 2nd friend try the same who's not a coder, and it didn't work, so they're looking at more than very-recent search history.

Haha I don't mind. Was more worried about having to scale up my little blog server if it took off :)

Do I know you in real life by the way?

lol. uh oh.

If your position is that the word censorship does not have a negative connotation, I don't know anyone who would agree with you, including, it would seem, your earlier comments.

I'm positing that filtering has neither a positive nor a negative connotation; that all information gets through anyway, it's only low-quality sources of the same information that are filtered; and that calling it censorship in a comment inappropriately pre-disposes the reader to a negative reaction.

Filtering is not always bad, especially not when it's done transparently, and in pursuit of a better community. To claim that filtering out those low-quality sites, when there are many higher quality sites covering the exact same topics, in just as timely a manner is somehow equivalent to censoring Google results in China - is just disingenuous.

A couple problems with your analysis: the population down-voting that post was preselected for those who had not already left/unsubscribed as /r/politics went downhill for the last couple years.

"Censorship" is a biased word, usually chosen by people who don't like what's being enforced. I would perhaps use the word "filtering" and it's perfectly common in a lot of subreddits. I don't think "censoring" is fair because all the same topics and events will still get discussed. The theory being that now, discussion starts with - on average - better reporting.

This is a good point, and one I hadn't thought of. But I wasn't smelling cat pee often either.

If we had two sets of items, one of which we had some cats pee on, and one of which we had some humans pee on, you think you could sort them into cat/human groups with a high degree of success?

Users do vote: with their subreddit subscriptions (also PMs to moderators, and/or text submissions complaining about policy). I don't get the sense that this was unwanted from the community either.

I don't know if this makes me biased, but I for one welcome fewer low-quality, link-bait, and/or recycled-story articles.

Specifically cat urine, not other urine? I must be thankfully smell-deficient because I wouldn't be able to tell the difference, and I grew up with cats for 20 years

Thanks for the article. It seems unlikely that you could scale the first step: harvesting the iPhone profiles in the first place. I was under the impression this is a one-time download. Is there any realistic way to get a significant number of these?

"Growth slackers", perhaps. You know, because rhyming :)

Somehow I don't think my mom would trade her iPad for an e1505 with a broken display, external monitor, plus the periodic need to upgrade the hard-drive and install/upgrade Ubuntu :)

Two friends and I are working on exactly this! Would love to talk. I'll PM you with my contact info.

Another good place to start understanding the (dis)incentives in US healthcare pricing is Time magazine's "The Bitter Pill" http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2136864,00..... Though it's important to note it's not just a US -> abroad market, it's a many-many graph. People travel for cost, procedure availability, doctor specialization, for the experience of travel, etc.

If anyone is interested in talking and passionate about this topic, I'd be happy to treat you to coffee with my co-founder and I in downtown SF. Feel free to email me, my email is in my HN profile.

Heh, yeah in this first case the optimal economic choice would've been to bid, then lose the auction but get the 10% off code, then buy at slimfoldwallet.com for a price of $18. EDIT: But then again, one point of auctions is that the retail price is not necessarily perfect in the supply/demand curve, and there's nothing inherently wrong with paying a bit more if you value it more (For instance, maybe "I won the first ever shoptheshelf.com auction" was worth $2)

I bought one retail for $20 from his site. Love the Etsy tie-in. I was hesitant about giving payment info to a new auction site, but this helps the trust factor a lot. (May want to emphasize the seller info early on for this reason?)

Bug report: I got the email Subject: "Your graph has been updated!". But the link inside took me to http://knowitapp.com//graph

Is that an employee trying to sell? Or a dealer trying to get employees to buy? Because that would be an ingeniously evil strategy, had it been timed close to IPO.

I don't know how I feel about a blog that drives you to click an Amazon affiliate link. Nevertheless, the points seem valid and thought-provoking. Thanks for sharing.