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ljoshuaon ‘Hypatia’ Stone Contains Compounds Not Found in the Solar System

I originally read this as "It might be an issue of time travel," which would be another very fun possibility to consider. ;)

ljoshuaon SMBC on Healthcare for Small Business Owners

Self-employed people are in the same demographic as other individuals without any access to group insurance, such as those working lower-end, lower-paying jobs. As a matter of sheer statistics, a larger proportion of this population ends up sicker and incurs greater medical expenses.

Something similar to what your grandmother had or other unions is a PEO, or professional employer organization. It's a collection of small businesses (usually) that band together to get access to services otherwise only available to larger groups. It's a little interesting because technically you become an employee of the PEO as well as your own company, and there are certainly costs associated with it, but it's in the same vein as union dues, for example. Just not as clear cut and not required.

ljoshuaon SMBC on Healthcare for Small Business Owners

There are actually very good reasons for keeping the group market. For example, many larger companies will be what is called "self-funded," meaning that they are actually fronting a large part of the healthcare costs for their employees, beyond just the premiums. This is a risk-sharing strategy, administered by the insurance companies, in exchange for lower overall costs to the company. But it has to be done on a per-company basis to optimize it.

Killing the group market could create certain efficiencies, but it would lose many others. And like you said, that is politically infeasible.

Other options, like looking at cross-state competition and capping certain medical expenses are likely better possibilities.

ljoshuaon SMBC on Healthcare for Small Business Owners

Insurance premium increases this year have seriously made me consider whether it's worth it to continue running co-founder with my startup, or whether I should just jump back into "normal" employment. I'd love to continue growing my company to the point where we're hiring enough people to qualify for group insurance or where a PEO makes sense, but we're just not there yet and we want to continue to bootstrap it.

I am probably more familiar with insurance than most, having done detailed research in the arena and knowing pros in the industry. My premiums this year increased by only 40%, on top of the 65% from last year's increase; a pleasant surprise. I have a 25 sheet Excel doc that models out my family's expected healthcare costs for the year to compare individual plans. If I were to stay with my current plan (which I won't) it would cost me well over $32,000 in total next year. I've spent many hours trying to figure out what the best financial path forward is, and I still have some huge question marks. (Ever tried to get coverage information for particular CPT codes from an insurer? Ha, good luck!)

Unfortunately, a lot of the cost comes down to the demographics of the individual market, and I don't know much of what can be done about that. I don't fault the actuaries at the insurance cos for doing their job, and it's true that despite the crazy premiums and poor coverage the insurance cos are still bleeding money in the individual markets. Having also lived in countries with single-payer systems I don't believe that is the solution either. But something's got to give or entrepreneurs just won't be able to afford being entrepreneurs anymore. (And the situation will just get worse for non-entrepreneurs who don't have access to group coverage).

ljoshuaon Show HN: Reddit-powered TV annotations

Seems like this could be fun, but I feel like a really need an example URL that I could copy and paste in to see how it works. Right now I don't even know what subreddit I'd head into to grab as a sample.

ljoshuaon Ask HN: What service do you use for audio conference calls?

Another vote for Uberconference. Call quality is consistently good, it's nice to get the visuals of callers along with the LinkedIn data (though that's only right maybe half the time) and the controls are easy to use.

Screen sharing is very slick as well, so long as the sharer is using Chrome. The only thing I find missing is the ability to share mouse/keyboard control, but in typical conference settings that's usually not a frequently used feature.

ljoshuaon Reserved-usernames: Usernames to prevent url collision with resource paths

Twitter, for example, will place the username at the first level (twitter.com/username). Most of the other interactions occur under a small group of other addresses, such as /i/ and /settings/. However, I can still see this being a helpful resource so that you don't have to think about all possibilities from the outset.

ljoshuaon Show HN: A zero-configuration static pre-renderer for create-react-app

I used this to enhance a microsite I made just the other day (https://www.churnratecalculator.com), and it was a snap to integrate (ba-dum psh!).

Used the following guide to set up react-snap into an existing CRA application in just a couple minutes: https://medium.com/superhighfives/an-almost-static-stack-6df...

I want to investigate the CSS inlining feature--that's one of the areas where I still am loading a decently large external resource. Experimental, but could be a nice win.

(Edit: added the guide I used where I originally found out about react-snap)

ljoshuaon Show HN: Churn Rate Calculator

OP here. I initially started making this calculator as a handy way to help me calculate churn rates and lost revenue on the fly when talking with potential customers, and realized it might be useful to others as a microsite.

It obviously contains a business CTA, as I’m also trying to gain experience on the sales side of things since I’m coming from a technical background.

I would love any and all feedback! It’s all about the learning process right now as I try to stairstep up the experience ladder.

ljoshuaon Ask HN: What do you care about the most in a tech job post?

I understand the thinking behind that and have been there, but now that I'm getting into positions of hiring and having previously worked for an org where salaries were public and fixed at each level, I can't imagine having it work any other way.

In my future postings, I will evaluate the market for the type of position I'm posting, decide on a pretty narrow range (even a specific number), and make it part of the posting and the job overall. It worked well for me and many others, and removes so many issues.

ljoshuaon Ask HN: What do you care about the most in a tech job post?

At the risk of sounding shallow, the salary (and NOT "competitive rates" or "DOE"). I don't want to waste my time or a potential employer's if expectations won't line up.

It's not, of course, the only thing I care about, but far too few postings offer this level of transparency. Love the other ideas of work week length and problem to be solved as well.

ljoshuaon Say no to Electron: use JavaFX to write a fast, responsive desktop app

Once the runtime is bundled in, what does the size of the standalone application come in at? Curious if it is close that of a bare Electron app (around 50-90 MB, depending on the platform).

ljoshuaon Three Years in Identity Theft Hell

Freezing doesn't protect the information, but it does protect your credit account from being added to. Once frozen, you are almost in a 2FA scenario where creditors are required to request any new accounts or credit hits, and the credit agency is required to then obtain your approval using the private information only you (should) know.

ljoshuaon On React and WordPress

It's too bad that this particular point has become an issue with so many good open source projects. I still think that the risk, even for startups considering acquisition exits, is low (see this great post from a patent/IP attorney [1]), but the fact that it's enough to cause players like the ASF and WordPress to move away from it just means fewer players and less innovation in the ecosystem.

IANAL, but I wish the lawyers at Facebook would take one for the team and relax a bit on this (hey, more work for them, a plus!). If you're going to sue Facebook over patent infringement, you're probably going to spend a lot more on the suit itself than the eng costs rewriting a view layer.

[1] https://medium.com/@dwalsh.sdlr/react-facebook-and-the-revok...

ljoshuaon GM and Cruise announce first mass-production self-driving car

One of the more interesting parts to me:

> "...but [Vogt] added that these are destined for deployment in fleets, rather than as individually owned consumer vehicles."

I think this really clarifies the direction that GM (and I believe other auto manufacturers) see as the way forward: moving from an individual-ownership model to an on-demand rent model.

ljoshuaon The Life and Death of the Touch Bar: Revisiting the MacBook Pro

Tangential, but I recently discovered how to find refurbished (read: early 2015, pre-Touch Bar/USB-C models) for sale on Apple's store site, even when not listed in the refurb section. Found it when trying to avoid buying a new one myself.

I wrote up a quick explanation here: http://www.joshualyman.com/2017/08/find-hidden-apple-refurbs...

ljoshuaon The Man Who Picked Victorian London's Unpickable Lock

> Patented in 1818, the Detector spent decades as one of England’s greatest assurances. Whatever valuables lay beyond the lock were guaranteed to remain safe and secure, immune to even the most sophisticated or skilled attempts at a breach.

When transported to the current day conceptions around the strength of cryptography, this particular line makes me also think of Dr. Janek's line from Sneakers, where while discussing the virtues of encryption, he says:

> The numbers are so unbelievably big, all the computers in the world could not break them down. But maybe, just maybe, there's a shortcut.

Not that I hope we find a shortcut any time soon, but time has a way of letting us discover interesting shortcuts, be they lockpicking strategies or prime number weaknesses.

ljoshuaon Plane flies in a plane pattern

Ha that's awesome! To more clearly see the flight path, click the filter button on the side and add the plane's callsign, BOE004, to the filter list.

ljoshuaon Native Directory: a curated list of 250 React Native libraries

Awesome! Does it follow a similar pattern of finding libraries as https://js.coach/, or is it a more manual process because of the curation?

ljoshuaon A Huge Diamond Mine That Helped Build The Soviet Union (2014)

I was curious about that particular aspect as well. A little Googling brought me to this rather interesting account of Silver Bears and the market forces at play:

http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/diamond/chap17.htm

(tl;dr: though unconfirmed a noted diamond expert believed the Soviets had created a diamond cutting machine instead of relying on human cutters, though others disputed the idea.)

ljoshuaon React v15.6.0 Released

Downgrading the deprecation warnings to console.warn instead of console.error will be nice until all the third-party libraries catch up with the changes in v15.5. It's the small things.

ljoshuaon Don't publicly expose .git (2015)

This sounds like an awesome approach. Do you have any resources you could share on a few of the details? Using --bare I get, but I've not yet played with hooks and such.

ljoshuaon Apple adds a tracker blocker to desktop Safari

Is it a randomized number per card per merchant, or just a randomized number per card?

ljoshuaon Safari 11.0

Love seeing WebRTC and WebAssembly in the new version!

But truth be told, the only thing I really want from Safari is favicons on tabs along with page title. Kills usability for me otherwise.

ljoshuaon I’d Pay You $500k a Year, but You Can’t Do the Work

Some days I think about the 18-25% cut of first year salaries that recruiters are collecting, and I think about transitioning from being a technical person to being a technical recruiter!

Unlike most tech recruiters, I actually could vet candidates before presenting them, in theory generating higher quality candidates who are more likely to get placed. There's still a supply-side issue though...

ljoshuaon Ask HN: Any startups using oracle?

Among small or early stage startups? No. Oracle charges kingly rates to go along with their kingly title, rates which pretty much only big companies can pay. Oracle DB setups often tie into other Oracle products as well, which can be more useful to established and larger companies.

Your professor is correct in that it's widely used amongst such companies, though other competitors are very often in place as well such as Sybase or Microsoft SQL Server.

The right tool for the right job (or in the startup world, the tool you can afford.)

ljoshuaon Why Did My Patient Leave Me?

That's virtually the exact same thing as the question we're asking, which is virtually exactly the same as NPS (net promoter score). Thank you for the links, I hadn't seen those ones before.

ljoshuaon Why Did My Patient Leave Me?

Thanks! No incentives right now, as we don't want to bias the data. Response rates have been high enough though to blow other mediums away (by a factor of 5x roughly).

ljoshuaon Why Did My Patient Leave Me?

Indeed, you're right. It follows a similar model to services that do appointment reminders via text message, which is becoming very common.

The permission check becomes vital: it's part of the patient authorization at, for example, a first visit, and is best when also followed by a verbal authorization upon checkout. It's one of the big hurdles we're trying to overcome obviously, but we believe there are proper ways to do it and make it work within the boundaries of regulation and privacy. No good problem worth solving is without difficulties, right? :)

ljoshuaon Why Did My Patient Leave Me?

This is a growing and very important aspect of value-based care, and really factors into the discussion of quality that will be more a part of reimbursement than it ever has been. The article focused mostly on the provider him or herself, but patients also take into account the entire experience, including office staff, scheduling and billing procedures, etc.

Shameless self promotion: this is the exact problem my co-founder and I are working to address: https://www.perspexilabs.com/ (site currently looks broadly-focused, but we're targeting medical).

We're finding patients are actually very happy to give feedback, especially when given a neutral medium to discuss their experiences and when doing so very quickly after an interaction. The super-tight feedback loop not only makes everyone more satisfied, but it also has the chance to improve quality of care too.