staringispolite
Joined 17 years ago
Karma
146
Submissions
47
Member since
Sep 15
Jonathan Howard
http://www.staringispolite.com
Programmer, artist, entrepreneur
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 11 years ago
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.
Comment · 11 years ago
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
Comment · 11 years ago
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 $100K revenue, and balancing founder-level time commitments with raising a family.
Comment · 11 years ago
Just verified this myself... pretty cool! I searched for the following:
* Mutex lock (from the article)
* Mutex lock C++
* Python list comprehension
The main command is "request", which lets you request challenges through this shell. Requests are defined as follows:
foobar:~/ guest$ 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
Comment · 12 years ago
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?
Comment · 12 years ago
lol. uh oh.
Comment · 13 years ago
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.
Comment · 13 years ago
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.
Comment · 13 years ago
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.
Comment · 13 years ago
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?
Comment · 13 years ago
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.
Comment · 13 years ago
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