staringispolite

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

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

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.

Google works for me... Gmail still down.

Feedback incoming! I enjoy the idea, it makes me imagine being a better, happier person, given the context I already have with gratitude and journaling. Looking forward to the invite! A few points that come to mind from my past usage of similar apps:

* Have you checked out OhLife? I love that it optionally reminds me once a day at the time of my choosing, with an email (Subject: "It's Tuesday, Oct 30 - How did your day go?"). Anecdotally, this greatly increases my retention and activation. Not sure about others.

* OhLife also reminds me of moments in my past, as it learns more about me. (It ends emails with "Remember a year ago? You were all like...".). I've always wanted it to be associated with a mood so it could constantly remind me of good things in my life (filter by mood > X or something). Think 'gratitude' journaling. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratitude_journal. I've always wanted an app that would make me happier. Gratitude journaling 'coach' app would be as close as I can think of for this vertical, and MVP could be some simple notifications on top of your app.

Your app in particular:

* Mobile will be great for photos and quick notes, but web input (likelihood I'll be able to use a real keyboard) is important to me for journaling. I hope that'll be an available feature.

* I'm on a 15" Macbook Pro and the path that is supposed to visually draw you down through the product explanation to 'invite' were way off the fold for me. I almost thought you'd removed the invite link. I'd suggest scooting things up a bit, maybe cut off the bottom X% of the phones, since by then I get that it's a mobile app.

* I agree with others that I didn't immediately get that it was private. I'd also want assurances that I can get my data out at any time, but the latter may be a bias among HN people.

* This will suffer from a "Mint"-like bootstrapping problem. It's value is extremely low at the very beginning. Any chance it could import moments from an existing timeline (FB? Path?) that I then choose to keep or not in the app?

* There's a certain "one app to rule them all" mentality, and I'm curious what, in practice, I'll do with events that I want to both (a) remember privately, and (b) share with FB friends. Have you noticed anything with this in your own personal use?

This is a very good point, and one I didn't address in the post. In fact I may go back and add this.

From my understanding in talking with some of the ex-employees: it doesn't seem to have been the issue in this case. But it's a huge point to consider if you're looking for take-aways for your own startup.

Do you have a reference for the 150M number? Disclaimer: This would've been over a year ago, and I don't remember specifics. I was an engineer, so my main focus was elsewhere.

1) We had a TON of users across many apps and not just our games (many thousands of apps when you include our user-generated ones).

2) These types of numbers were often "sum(MAU-app1 + MAU-app2 + ... + MAU-appN)". This point was always communicated clearly, but may not have been in the press, or could be a source of confusion? Even if communicated clearly, this may still seem like bloating the numbers: but my understanding is it more accurately represents the amount of impressions one would expect (from say a cross-promo with other games, or ad sales) than if you were to de-dupe them by Facebook ID. In other words, say you have 2 games with 10M MAU each, and 2M users play both: it's preferable to make decisions based on 20M as opposed to 18.

3) All apps' MAU/DAU numbers are public anyway, so there's not much to hide.

Thanks for complementing Ravenwood, btw. I really appreciate that. (I was a pre-alpha engineer)

20x'ed the RAM & CPU. Should be resolved

Perhaps not surprising, but I think those are drastic mischaracterizations of the company. I was there for the merger and the almost-Facebook-ban From anything I saw, numbers weren't cooked.

The Facebook ban was due to one of many small ad tests (<<1% of users each IIRC) we did with third parties, and had already stopped. Turns out one of them was later banned from Facebook, as was anyone who did business with them, regardless of how small or how short. IIRC we weren't even working with them when we got the punishment. But once accused, this kind of thing tends to stick with public perception.

Can't speak to the indie dev thing as I wasn't there at the time and haven't followed it. I will say that the studio that shut down wasn't the same studio as this controversy, but another in the "6L" umbrella.

The fact remains that the people there were some of the best I've worked with, and no one I knew wanted to screw anyone over or copy games. If anything, we had to scale back our vision at times. They were mostly engineers/artists/etc just incredibly happy to be getting paid to make original games after trying to 'break in' to the industry for so long. And the many people who played our games & our competitors' - even other game designers - thought that ours were pushing the boundaries of the industry forward.

...and going up another two server sizes. Rackspace Cloud is easily scalable but painfully slow in practice. Lesson learned.

LOL well you don't know me so perhaps I should expect that you don't believe me. It's pretty obvious it's not /literally/ everyone I know - my parents, for instance, happily retain their jobs on the other side of the country :) I think the intent is pretty clear from the content of the article, but I'm sorry if you felt mislead

Update: Oh ok! I misunderstood

Everyone I know at Lolapps - the company that moved me out to SF in the first place - and then some. Roughly 100 out of ~114 people. And probably 80% of my friends in the SF bay area. You're right that I did use hyperbole, but it wasn't to deceive, it was to avoid an awkwardly over-specific title.

Doubled the server, looks to be still a bit slow as the cache warms up, but loading again. Will keep an eye on it. Thanks for your patience!