Switzerland: How buying real-estate can kill you financially/reasons for stocks - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/switzerland-how-buying-real-estate-can-kill-you-financially-and-two-reasons-to-go-for-stocks-79704213b229 <comment><USER2> I would suspect a few of these wealthy foreigners buying property are trying to make sure there wealth is tied up in something their home state cannot take away ownership of. If it depreciates a bit, it's probably fine. 97% of something is better than nothing. I also suspect they have nice stock portfolios already as well.

<comment><USER3> Makes sense

A lot of Chinese nationals are buying property in the states and Canada in order to accomplish the same thing

I wonder how this kind of cash parking affects property values?

<comment><USER4> Is it possible to create "real estate" which is basically geared towards this kind of thing?

Eg. a large vertical block of tiny, tiny rooms which are just good enough to be livable, but with extremely expensive components.. designed to be parked and traded and never lived in.

<comment><USER5> Such highrises seem to exist in china. (Refer to their real estate speculation bubble)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yeah Switzerland is great as long as you don't have children. Once you get a child, well, you're out of luck. Childcare in Switzerland is the craziest expense I've seen in my life, where having your kid looked after for 5 days a week will cost you 2-2,5k CHF / USD per month! And if you have a second child, they might give you 10% discount. So around 4,5k USD per month for 2 kids. It's madness!

Besides that, you will need to leave your shared apartment and go looking for one with at least 4 rooms. That'll easily cost you 2.5k-3.5k per month.

So while I agree that Switzerland is a nice place to be while 20-30, after that age it hugely depends on your situation. Got 2 kids and know some German? You might actually be better off in Germany.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. I disagree with everything you said.

> having your kid looked after for 5 days2-2,5k CHF / USD per month!

Yes but only when your kid is 2-3 years old. After that kindergarten is free. Superb elementary school, high-school is free; and on top Uni-Zurich and ETH, the MIT of Europe, is also almost free (costs like 500$ a semester).

> Besides that, you will need to leave your shared apartment and go looking > for one with at least 4 rooms. That'll easily cost you 2.5k-3.5k per month.

Why? You're probably referring to some regulations. Well, if you have a wife and one kid, you can legally even live in a 1-bedroom apartment (formula for legal limit of grown-up people per apartment is "# of people = # of rooms + 1" \- source p. 29: [https://www.ekm.admin.ch/dam/data/ekm/dokumentation/material...](https://www.ekm.admin.ch/dam/data/ekm/dokumentation/materialien/mat_wohnung.pdf))

<comment><USER6> Of course you disagree. You literally make money off people who want to buy into the "Swiss dream". While certainly it is a great country to live in, it has its shortcomings. What I'm pointing out might not be a big deal for many people who are not planning to have children. But for others it sure might be a deal breaker.

> Yes but only when your kid is 2-3 years old. After that kindergarten is > free.

Yeah, you just forgot to mention that kindergarten starts at the age of 4, and is not 5 days a week, the whole day. It's 4 days a week, 3,5 hours a day. The rest still needs to be paid at the same rate I mentioned before. So you are talking here without really knowing your facts.

> Why? You're probably referring to some regulations. Well, if you have a wife > and one kid, you can legally even live in a 1-bedroom apartment (formula for > legal limit of grown-up people per apartment is "# of people = # of rooms + > 1" \- source p. 29: > [https://www.ekm.admin.ch/dam/data/ekm/dokumentation/material...](https://www.ekm.admin.ch/dam/data/ekm/dokumentation/material...))

So you are basically saying that someone who earns a shit-ton of money should live in a 1 bedroom apartment with their partner and child? I just can't answer to that...

<comment><AUTHOR> >So you are basically saying that someone who earns a shit-ton of money should live in a 1 bedroom apartment

No, I am not telling anybody to do anything. I am pointing to the existing legal possibilities because Zurich's landlords are arrogant and sometimes write clauses in their rent-contracts that "break" Swiss law ("only 1 person can live here"). I am trying to highlight that Zurich's jurisdiction is renter-friendly and laws are applied rigorously.

You can calmly rent-sign a contract with weird clauses, because they are invalid, so you can break them and the landlord can't kick you out for it. Worst case is you get infront of the "Schlichtungsbehörde" which is a pre-step before the court, where a volunteer-landlord, volunteer-renter-representative and a neutral party will decide over a dispute quickly (and cheaply). So please make sure you are member of mieterverband.ch, if you live in Zurich.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For my follow Americans thinking about commenting on this, keep in mind that mortgages vary quite a lot from country to country.

The mortgage system we have in the United States--characterized by: domination by the government (in the form of GSEs), long (30 year) fixed rate mortgages with no prepayment penalties, high leverage ratios (up to 19:1 or higher), and low spreads--is not the system used elsewhere. Other countries also tax mortgages and homes differently, and may have far more widespread rent regulations in place.

Rules of thumb and folksy wisdom that was developed in the context of the US system probably won't translate well to a very different one.

<comment><USER8> Mortgages in Switzerland can still take on the literal meaning of the word(s), running for 50 or even 100 years with the debtor's pension fund placed as security.

FWIW the OP's cost of living figures in the video included in the linked article seem a little low or are assuming best case. Sure you can get health insurance cover at 250.- CHF a month but that will be at the highest franchise (i forget the English word) so if you do get sick it's going to cost you 2,500 CHF before the insurance kicks in.

1,200.- CHF a month seems low for Zürich, but also high for a single room with no kitchen. I'm paying a little more than that for 3.5 rooms with a kitchen, garage, cave, etc. No, I'm not in Zürich or Genève.

400.- CHF a month on food seems about right if you never eat out at all ever. And sure you can spend as little as 100.- CHF a month on travel, but you're in Switzerland - get out and see a bit of it, go snowboarding/skiing in the winter season.

<comment><USER9> > (i forget the English word) so if you do get sick it's going to cost you > 2,500 CHF before the insurance kicks in

I think the word you're looking for is deductible

<comment><USER10> In NZ the word is excess e.g. The excess is $500 means the customer pays the first $500 of any claim. I assume deductable is a North American term.

<comment><USER11> Correct

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not so sure that it's a safe bet to assume that stocks will keep going up by 10% per year every year in the future.

I think we've already reached a point where people are starting to complain about corporations getting too big and becoming too powerful.

What drove increases in the stock market in the past few decades has been the replacement of many small businesses by few large corporate entities.

Economies of scale have been a double-edged sword; while they have allowed consumers to purchase non-essential goods and services (such as electronic devices and appliances, holidays, clothing, entertainment...) for cheaper, they have also been responsible for driving up the prices of essentials likes housing, transport, electricity, medicine, education, etc (e.g. by shifting the workforce to big cities where corporate HQs are)...

I think we'll reach a point in the near future when city-dwellers will start running out of resources to support basic living essentials and this will force them out of cities - This will drive real estate prices down but it will also drive down stock prices which depend on that lifestyle.

I think the bubble that we're in now affects every person on the planet so if/when it bursts, the repercussions will be massive.

<comment><USER13> yeh a lot of investment pros are worried that the market is getting to high I am wondering if I ought to take some of my profits and buy gold etf's or just got cash and wait for the fall to buy back in

<comment><USER14> Professionals are often wrong, and timing the market is more difficult than it might seem - in no small part because many investors are unable to prevent emotions from affecting their trading decisions.

That said, it's entirely possible that the market is irrationally high; the question then becomes how long it can remain that way. There's a famous Keynes quote - "The market can stay irrational a lot longer than you can stay solvent."

If you do think stocks are overpriced, it may be advisable to create a disciplined strategy for profit taking - selling a few percent of your net assets each time the market increases by, say, 10%.

<comment><USER15> I seriously wonder how index funds have affected the volatility of the stock market. The stock market has been growing independent of popular sentiment or trust in growth, which makes me wonder if the growth is driven by a massive number of people automating their investments through index funds and just forgetting about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A couple flaws in the article. If you don't buy a house but buy stocks, you will pay rent. According to the numbers in the article, this nearly cuts the stock return in half. Also, the article states you will lose money on the depreciation of the building, but does not take into account the appreciation of the land. The land appreciation is highly leveraged, as well, since most people typically place only 20% down on the property, but you gain the appreciation on the gross price of the estate.

But I would say that, here is Seattle, and probably all along the West coast, you do have foreign investment, mainly from China, driving up the cost of real estate.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here.

I think I wrote:

> "the land doubled in value and is worth 200k CHF"

Even if you add up not having to pay rent and possible sale of the house (on which y) you would still end up much better with stocks:

House: You buy the house, after 30 years let's say the value stays the same: You own 500.000 CHF worth of house. (Assuming you had no repairs and the value stayed the same, which is VERY optimistic). You sell the house. you pay a _whopping tax on that_.

Stocks: You paid rent of 1600 CHF (numbers I used in the article). Within 30 years, you burn ~500.000 CHF on rent but you make 4-8 million CHF with conservative stocks assuming a 7-10% compound interest rate. In Switzerland, you sell this stock _tax-free_.

Is there anything I am missing?

<comment><USER17> The article is also assuming exchange rates stay the same over that period. Unlikely.

<comment><USER18> If your crystal ball can forecast future exchange rates accurately, you can ignore all other investment advice and make millions off forex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > A financially rational person would consider buying a house if the P/R ratio > is 15 or lower.

How does one go about calculating that? Or reading someone else's calculations? For real estate prices I can check out the Case-Shiller, for P/R I got nothing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I linked to that source in the article: [http://affordanything.com/2015/11/24/is-renting-better- than-...](http://affordanything.com/2015/11/24/is-renting-better-than-buying- should-i-rent-or-buy/)

<comment><USER19> Ah, I figured that underline was for emphasis. Sadly your source doesn't cite its own sources.

It's pretty rare to see a home both for sale and for rent, so you'd likely be comparing oranges for sale with apples for rent. A lot of the magic of Case- Shiller is in finding valid comparables over time, so I'm hoping someone has put together a similar time regional series for rents themselves. Maybe not -- it's not like there's a huge market for derivatives on rental properties.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Well, if I have to buy a property in Switzerland, it wouldn't be to make living for ma retirement, but more for not to pay a crazy rent. A property which you rent for 2.2k is easily 1.2k in mortgage, which means if you are a owner, you're making 1k per month and in the top of it, if you play it well, you could lower much more your taxes.

At the end, I pay fewer taxes (I'm not expecting ever to finish paying my property in Switzerland), I pay less rent and I invest more in stocks.

</comment><comment><USER21> For anyone reading this in the US: don't take this at face value.

This (my opinion) is coming from someone who's indifferent between renting vs. owning, so is trying to make the decision purely on financial factors.

Reasons why this article does't apply in the US:

(1) The "eigenmietwert" the author writes about is known as an "imputed income tax". The idea is, most assets generate income: bonds pay interest, stocks pay dividends, etc. A house, which is an asset, always generates economic benefit, it's just a question of the owner (who lives in it), or to a renter (who pays rent). When you think about it, it's kind of absurd that in the US, an owner pays income tax if they rent their house to someone else, but not to themself. Taxes like this are an attempt to level the playing field.

(2) The US allows homeowners to deduct mortgage interest (up to a point) from taxable income. Why you can't deduct interest on credit cards or auto loans, but you can on mortgage interest, beats the hell out of me?

(3) The US taxes capital gains. California, where I live, has a state-level _surtax_ on capital gains. I'm not sure whether the author is correct about Swiss tax treatment of capital gains, but have no reason to think he's wrong.

(4) Interest rates are artificially cheap in the US, as some others have pointed out, due to GSE interference in the mortgage market. There's absolutely no reason Fannie/Freddie should encourage people to buy houses. I also think it's ridiculous that the FHA uses taxpayer funds to let low-income borrowers get cheap loans. Let them rent. Renting isn't some kind of hardship, in many ways, it's better than owning, you have less downside risk and it's easier to relocate for a job.

(5) In places like California, where we have Prop 13, property taxes don't reassess -- ever. So, barring a sale, someone who bought a house 30 years ago pays essentially what they paid in property tax then, now. This encourages exactly what you'd think, people move less and try to stay in their homes as long as possible, even performing absurd tax gymnastics like "one-wall remodels" to avoid having their tear-down "remodels" reassessed.

(6) "1031 exchanges" and other gimmicks let property owners sell their properties--AT A GAIN--and trade up to a larger place, without ever paying tax. How crazy is this!?

(7) In most jurisdictions, property taxes are federally deductible; I get no such deduction as a renter, though it could be argued that my rent is lower as a result (due to the owner's tax writeoff).

At bottom, this stems from a cultural attitude we have in the US (really the entire Anglosphere) that homeownership is some sort of God-given right/natural thing to aspire to. I wish this attitude would change. I wouldn't mind renting but it's hard to justify given how tilted US law is toward homeownership.

<comment><USER22> Which other "Anglosphere" countries promote home ownership the same way that the US does with e.g. mortgage interest deductions? There are many pairs of otherwise culturally similar countries with differing policies on this (e.g. US & Canada, Belgium & the Netherlands).

<comment> J-dawg Could you explain what you mean by mortgage interest deductions? Does it mean that mortgage interest can be deducted from taxable income? Even if that income is unrelated to the property?

In the UK landlords are allowed to deduct mortgage interest from taxable rental income, but this is currently being phased out. (A good thing in my opinion)

<comment><USER23> Right, in the US, you can deduct mortgage interest and property taxes to lower your taxable income.

There is a mortgage cap of around a million dollars where the deduction ends, which is only relevant in a small number of real estate markets like California, Seattle, New York, and so on.

<comment><USER24> Note that this only applies to the mortgage on the house you live in, not for landlords.

<comment><USER25> You can deduct the mortgage interest on a rental property against the income from that property.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> In switzerand, you buy a house to live on, not to profit on. First 5 years you are heavily taxed if you sell. When I got my mortgage they capped morgages as they knew there was a bubble starting. As a single, somewhat lonesome country the objective function is to manage stability. (Not that I know anything about economics)

</comment><comment><USER27> So what happens when if you move back to USA would you still get advantages of 0 percent capital gains? Or would you have to move everything to the USA ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question. I think usually you are taxed where you live. Unless you are a US citizen, then you are taxed also by the US if you earn more than $100k.

(As an American, if you open a bank account in Switzerland you have to declare a special form, stating that you will correctly declare taxes to the US etc. I think you even have to fill this form if you hold a green-card or ever worked/paid taxes in your life in the US).

<comment><USER28> One of the very first things they ask you when you open a bank account in Switzerland is whether you are from the US. When I was asked this, and I asked them why this was important (I'm not from the US btw.), the person on the other side of the table told me that if I was, she'd have to get her manager.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, all that changed heavily since the bank-secrecy laws were removed in 2013. Some decades ago it was probably really like in Wolf of Wallstreet: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndTbiDQjbiE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndTbiDQjbiE)

People coming here with suitcases full of money was one thing but a totally other level was that some Swiss bankers really flew over to the US with encrypted laptops "to get new customers".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> See, it's about right approach and method to things, it is irrelevant whether its real-estate, stocks, binary or Forex, it's just for right way. As a Binary Option trader, I have found things relatively easier thanks to binopt.co.uk, which not only explain about the ways of trading but also strategies and help us with picking the BEST broker.

</comment><comment><USER30> rich people problems

</comment><comment><USER31> > While in the US you have regions where people make $50k a year and a house > costs $50k — $100k

LOL, not on the coastal states.

If it's the west coast, people earn 50k while starting house prices are 500k+

<comment><AUTHOR> In the article, I explicitly mention cities like San Antonio, Houston etc. and link to my source: [https://www.numbeo.com/property- investment/rankings_current....](https://www.numbeo.com/property- investment/rankings_current.jsp)

<comment><USER31> Texas is on the Atlantic gulf coast, it is not on the west coast of the USA.

As far as Houston goes, look for yourself:

[https://www.zillow.com/houston-tx/houses/](https://www.zillow.com/houston- tx/houses/)

A dilapidated tear down in an undesirable area is about what you'll get for under $100k in Houston

[https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/6858-Evans-St-Houston- TX-...](https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/6858-Evans-St-Houston- TX-77061/27840739_zpid/)

Anyway, on the west coast of the USA housing is extraordinarily expensive and many multiples of median income.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Buy a small place enough to live. If you take a mortgage pay it as soon as possible to be debt-free. Then invest in diverse things with best return while being tax smart. Perhaps barbell method.

<comment><USER33> Switzerland makes home owners pay taxes as if they rented the house out for 12 months each year. This could add a nice chunk to your net cost of owning.

<comment><USER34> Which I guess most landlords would simply pass on to the tenants?

<comment><USER35> If they rent it they pay income tax anyway (or rather the company that owns the place does). The "virtual rent" added to income is for people who own the place where they live.

Switzerland is not very home ownership friendly, at least there are very little tax incentives for it (personally I'd rather have people invest their wealth into productive things rather than real estate, so I find it good). In large cities most places are owned by banks/insurances/other real estate companies and rented out.

<comment><USER36> I wouldn't call not giving special privileges to home owners over renters unfriendly, I'd call it neutral and fair.

<comment><USER24> They didn't say it was unfriendly, they said it was not friendly. So, neutral.

<comment><USER36> That's a distinction without a difference, they mean the same thing. Not friendly does not imply neutral, it implies not friendly. If I said don't walk through that neighborhood it's not friendly, you would not interpret that as saying it's neutral.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Instead of IPOs, startups look to be acquired - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/09/11/BUEA1FBF91.DTL <comment><USER2> Founders are pretty determined, I'm pretty sure if an IPO was their metric of success, you'd see a lot more IPOs.

</comment><comment><USER3> _prompted lawmakers to issue new regulations, like the Sarbannes-Oxley accounting rules, that made it more costly for young companies to go public_

I can vouch for this part -- having dealt directly with SOX audits for several years, the cost of regulatory compliance and audits would be prohibitive. And worse: the regulations do nothing to prevent another Enron. They enforce compliance for mid-level employees, and do little or nothing to stop executives from messing with the numbers. Yes, the CFO and CEO have to sign off on reports and cannot use ignorance as an excuse. But that wouldn't stop another Jeff Skilling (Enron CFO) from routing money to an offshore account; he wouldn't be taking any more of a chance now than in 2000. SOX regulations don't protect investors, and are a boon for only one group: big accounting firms -- the same firms that were part of the accounting scam to begin with.

</comment><comment><USER3> So sfgate is just catching up to 2005 news, now? :-)</comment>


Microsoft old school page - <AUTHOR> http://www.microsoft.com/games/empires/

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure what surprised me more, the fact that the page had .mid (MIDI) music embedded (something I've last heard many years ago), or the fact that a modern browser (Safari 5) still supports playing that sort of thing back.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think i am going to install the trial version! who wants to play?</comment>


Ask HN: My country is getting worse. Where to go? - <AUTHOR> I am 20 y.o, I live in Indonesia. I don't know what's going on with my country, but it looks like everything is getting worse. I don't see a bright future here, so I am looking for a better country. I am willing to move abroad.
The problems are, I don't know where to go, and how much does it cost. Right now, I have around $1,000 in my bank account. It's all the money that I save from my job.
Unfortunately, I don't have any degree. I am a high school graduate. But I'm good at design and good enough at front-end dev. I am also into fitness, I workout alot, mostly calisthenics.
I'm thinking about to move to Canada or Japan. But I don't think I have the money. Probably some of you can help me. I just want to get out. Where to go? Thank you! <comment><USER2> As other posters have pointed out, getting to another country is likely to be very difficult for you right now so my advice is to think about what you can do where you are to improve your situation.

It seems to me that the answer to your problems is money. Yes, I know that can seem obvious but if you have a goal to earn western wages while living on Indonesian costs you should be able to save a fair bit.

This means you could try freelancing your front-end dev skills out to western clients. There are lots of platforms out there where you can do this.

Alternatively look for a remote only job as these are becoming more and more popular and front-end development is a highly desired skillset.

Thinking outside the box a bit, if you're willing to stay put a little while longer you could potentially build software products, such as WordPress plugins and use a platform like Codecanyon to sell them.

Or if you'd rather use your fitness interest/skills why not consider setting up some kind of bootcamp class? You could create a course on bookmartialarts.com (or similar) that is tailored to foreigners that want to come work out in another country? With your development skills you'd likely have an edge with marketing it and making it look very professional.

You've got a tough but not impossible road ahead of you. Good luck!

<comment><USER3> I agree with most of this, but if you like programming and front-end development, I would suggest you focus on getting REALLY good at that first. Optimize for learning and master your craft. If you become among the top 5% - 10% of front-end devs in Indonesia by the time you're 30, you will have many options.

I would get some formal computer science education while working for a startup where you can get relevant experience with modern technologies and improve your team-work skills. Don't optimize for money now, optimize for mastery. Fortunately, software development is among the most lucrative professions on the planet and you like it.

Fast-forward 5-10 years and your chances of landing a great job in US, Canada, etc would be dramatically improved. Many experienced React Devs make 90,000/year+ in the US [1].

* EDIT: also, if you want to work in an English-speaking country, mastering the English language would help too (you may already have this ability).

Good luck! You got this!

1\. [https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/salary/results?l=United+State...](https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/salary/results?l=United+States&ed=1&ex=5&ff=1&dr%5B0%5D=FrontendDeveloper&tl%5B0%5D=css&tl%5B1%5D=javascript&tl%5B2%5D=reactjs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What about the Netherlands? The country has, for reasons you will be well aware of, a sizeable Indonesian population, albeit mostly consisting of people who moved from Indonesia before or around the beginning of the republic. It will be easy for you to get acclimatised there (apart from the weather that is but given that you mention Canada as an option the Netherlands should not be a problem here). It is one of the most 'advanced' countries in the world in many ways, things generally work the way you'd want them to. Everybody speaks English and using English in the workplace is quite common, especially in the IT sector.

</comment><comment><USER5> What is your thinking behind "the country is getting worse?" What is the threshold between "it is bad but ill carry on" and " I need to move out?" What are the factors?

Genuinly interested as these types of decisions are immensly interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Reasons why I am thinking my country is getting worse:

1) Currency. Its value just keep sinking.

2) Safety. What I fear the most is terrorism. There are a bunch of people in the name of religion doing scary things at night just because they think you're wrong. But cops don't care. I honestly never saw cops fight those people. It's scary.

3) Government. Something is wrong here. Even if next year we will have a presidential election, I don't think it'll make things better.

<comment><USER6> 1\. You can use this to your advantage. You can set a lower bid online freelance work. As long as you can get paid in US$ and convert it, you will be making more money than if you moved.

2\. Can't help you there.

3\. This is a problem pretty much all over. Everyone has a different opinion about it,but I believe globalization has caused a dramatic increase in competition, which creates stress, leading people to act irrational and short sighted. Cooler heads will prevail.

I'm not trying to convince you to stay, just to use what resources you do have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have travelled in Indonesia and I'm Canadian. I've worked in tech for a long time and I've lived in Japan. I've met an engineer from Indonesia who immigrated to Canada about 10 years ago.

So, a few things. Indonesia has progressed very well over the past 20 years and that is likely to continue. From a low base though.

Between Canada and Japan, Canada is a better choice unless you already speak Japanese. Japan is not fond of foreigners while Canada is full of foreigners.

You can apply directly to immigrate to Canada. There's a "point system" that determines if you qualify. Your English seems to be very good so that's a big thing in your favour. No university degree is a big impediment.

It can be very difficult to get a first job in Canada when you don't have experience.

It seems to me that Singapore might be a better option. At least in the short term. Pay is higher than in Canada or Japan, Singapore is desperate for immigrants and it's right next door.

<comment><USER8> All this is true, but as someone who moves to Canada, I'd encourage you to have a plan for housing. Big cities are tough, and $1000 is barely enough for a month of renting a room (if you can find one that is). You're probably going to be asked for first and last months rent upon lease signing, so you'll need a minimum of $1500 just to live for your first 30 days, assuming you can quickly earn money to eat. I also think Canada requires proof of funds up to something like $5000 CAD (although I've never been asked, or known anyone that was asked).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You seem smart and honest and I hope it works out for you. I also feel that my country is getting worse, and I also don't know where to go, but I live in a "first-world" country (UK) and have relatively high wealth for my age thanks to starting my own company 7 years ago (when I was in my early 20s) and having decent luck with it. But I also want to get out, and some facts about my life and minority status make it quite difficult to know where I will be physically safe and generally happy. Just wanted to share a similar perspective from a very different situation.

<comment><USER10> Egocentric :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not an expert on this, but I heard once that even foreigners can get free college tuition in Germany. That might be wrong or inaccessible to you for some reason, but I think leaving your country by attending college would be ideal.

<comment><USER12> Second hand knowledge, but I seem to think it was free for Germans, and they're expected to stay in the country something like 4 years after finishing.

<comment><USER13> Can confirm that there is no residency requirement tied to this. Universities are just public institutions here.

Not sure about tuition for foreign students.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think you can move to Canada to purse a course in a community college. Not a degree but a 2 year course. Can you get a loan from your home contry ? If so you can move to Canada spend 2 years studying/earning and you will be set. You will have to take a loan to cover your airfare and first semester college fees. Worth exploring I suppose.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Purse a course in a community college.

It sounds interesting. How do I do that? Can you explain a bit more?

<comment><USER14> I don't know much but a rudimentary Google led me to this college of Rockies. There might be others like this. GOod luck !

[http://www.cotr.bc.ca/programs/](http://www.cotr.bc.ca/programs/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Get a college degree, preferably in CS or engineering. It's almost definitely cheaper for you to do that in Indonesia than in any other country you might be interested in, and having that credential helps you in visa and job applications.

Once you have the degree, work for a while to build up more savings. How you do this is up to you, but you'll need a lot more than $1000 to get yourself established in a developed country.

Once you have the money, you will be eligible for many more visa programs than you are currently. One common "backdoor" route is to get a master's degree using a student visa that allows you to work in the country for a period of time afterwards. The US OPT[1] program is the one I'm familiar with, but there similar systems in other countries. It's much easier to get employers to sponsor you for visa programs if you're already working in the country.

Also, you should apply for the US Diversity Visa[2] program every year. It's an extreme long shot, because there are so many more applicants than spots, but you never know.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optional_Practical_Training](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optional_Practical_Training)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity_Immigrant_Visa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity_Immigrant_Visa)

</comment><comment><USER16> You should be able to work as a freelancer until you've saved enough to go abroad. Or maybe go abroad to a low cost location (Chang Mai, ...) and freelance from there. There are a few websites that would help you find freelance (gig economy) work (15 freelance sites listed here [https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/245953](https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/245953)).

If you're really, really smart you might be able to get a full college scholarship somewhere.

There's Ecole 42 in Paris (also Silicon Valley) that's tuition free. "No degrees or special skills are required to apply, and those who are accepted attend for free for three to five years. Around 80% of students get jobs before they finish the course; 100% are employed by the end." [https://qz.com/1054412/a-french-billionaires-free-teacher- le...](https://qz.com/1054412/a-french-billionaires-free-teacher-less- university-is-designing-thousands-of-future-proof-employees/). But Ecole 42 is hard to get into. And Ecole 42 might only accept French students. (The answer is an email away.)

</comment><comment><USER17> Like many things in life, it can be solved with money. So:

1\. become a really good front-end developer, do remote work. Be very professional about it. You'll start making good $$$.

2\. Search HN for tips on remote/contract work, there's a whole lot of wisdom about it.

3\. Once you start making >$3 k/month, a lot of possibilities open up, including some EU countries. You can get a student visa, and running your own business also might be a possibility.

4\. You might be able to study in EU right away. Make a list of universities you're interested in, email each and every one of them, asking if you can become a student and if there's a scholarship that might be available to you. I know a few people who did this successfully with very little of their own money.

</comment><comment><USER18> Throw away account.

There are a lot of great opportunities for great front-end and designer in US/Canada. However, the biggest thing against you will most likely be your accent and your english. People won't tell you straight in your face, but unless you can communicate very fluidly you'll have a hard time finding a full-time job.. even more if working remotely.

I don't know how good is your english/accent, but I'd recommend taking english lesson with someone that could teach you how to improve your accent. IMHO that will yield SO MUCH more opportunity than learning another web framework .

While learning that, I'd recommend picking a modern web framework and getting really good at it. I.e. React/Redux/Graphql/html/css.

Once you have your english communication + base front-end knowledge, apply to startup that offer visa. Startups are great because they often can't pay a huge salary so they need to be more creative and give more chance to people with different background. I wouldn't be too picky about the startup vision or whatever, as long as they have cash in the bank, aren't toxic and can help you move.

Once you've moved and landed a job, keep learning and improving in your spare time, stack cash, and after 1-2 years, feel free to move to better company.

But again, the strong accent / bad english is what will most likely make it very hard so I'd invest in that first.

<comment><USER19> Are you kidding me? I barely speak english (native speaker) and I didn't have that much trouble landing a gig. Most people are willing to ignore most of the nonsense I speak as long as I produce a bit of work now and again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> You probably read a lot about that 90% of the start-ups fail. So consider your options and propabilities of success.

a) Try to legally migrate to a first world country. Given your background the chances are very slim. Your best chance is probably to find a western partner willing to marry you.

b) Illegally migrate to another country. This is very difficult for the countries you mentioned because you have to cross an ocean. Illegal immigration into Europe is possible but 1,000 USD is not enough. From what I read you would need about 10,000 USD. It also comes with certain risks. About 0.1-3% of the migrants die during the journey depending on the route. Many get abused on the way. Do you want to play this kind of Russian roulette? Assuming that you have the money and you are willing to take the risk, your chances are not that bad, probably above 30% to make it within a year. If you make it, a lot of things will be better, but a lot of other things will be much worse than you expect. Your chances to be better off than the median are very slim. Most likely you will be sourended by 90% people being better off than you. If you work hard, chances for your children are much better though.

c) Migrate within your country to a better comunity. This should be feasable, even though you seem to have only about a few month of savings. Maybe you find a better comunity in your own country? This has many advantages over above options. You stay within your own language and culture, you can continue to use your existing network and you can easily reverse your move if the new community turns out worse than expected. I would assume, this option has the highest success rage. If you succeed here another option may open at a later point with higher success probabilities.

<comment><USER21> I don't mean to detract from the general value of this comment, but a nitpick...

> Your chances to be better off than the median are very slim.

Chances to be better off than the median are exactly 50%.

<comment><USER22> If you were selecting randomly from the population, yes.

OP would have significant disadvantages that would make them likely to be below the median.

<comment><USER21> I pointed it out because the post doesn't make it clear what the sentence means. "The median" is undefined, and to get the implied meaning, there's only one reference: the group of people including the OP. Obviously, it doesn't make sense in this context, but it's never clarified.

Actually, your post also doesn't specify that: median of what group?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> From what I have read about Japan, it is a deeply tribalist and racist country with extensive government controls that has led to nearly 3 decades of continuous stagnation. I would not move there. I could be completely wrong and do not have first hand experience with that culture.

Have you considered Singapore or Hong Kong?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am actually considering Singapore. Not sure with what I am going to do. Probably just make more money as fast as I can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> $1,000 won't get you far. That's less than a month's rent for a studio in Toronto for example. Also I'm pretty sure both Canada and Japan have pretty strict immigration laws. If you want to migrate you should figure out realistically what your opinions are. That includes legal and budget restrictions.

If you're a good front-end dev, try remote work as others suggested. It's probably your best bet to gather some money and grow from there on. If higher education is free or affordable in Indonesia, I'd suggest going there to study first and get yourself a degree. This will make everything, including migration, much easier in the future.

</comment><comment><USER25> You could try to get sponsored by an employer. We've had two or three folks start out in different countries come to the US through our company. Each started as a contractor and became an employee. I'm not sure the success rate of this technique.

<comment><USER26> Are you referring to H1Bs or a different Visa? I couldn't even get an H1B from inside with a sponsor due to the lottery. Damn the "RNG."

<comment><USER25> It was probably that, yeah. We actually had a guy who came over from singapore. He was here. Then something came up with it and they deported him. It took like a year or two for him to win the lottery to get back into the states. Crazy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Before thinking to move abroad. Are willing to move to another city? Try balikpapan or makassar. Indonesia is vast, there are many opportunities in another cities if willing to search for jobs.

</comment><comment> irq-1 For cost of living, check out [https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of- living](https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living)

From Indonesia to the Netherlands:

[https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of- living/country_result.jsp?cou...](https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of- living/country_result.jsp?country=Netherlands&displayCurrency=IDR)

If you're getting a job there, the numbers won't be as important.

</comment><comment><USER28> Why not get involved in your country's politics and try to make it better? Running away from problems whatever they are just helps the bad guys, but be warned, you will pop up on your security services radar, so everything like your school reports, your health records, anything documented by the state or in the public domain like facebook will be used to build up a psychological profile and this could then be used against you, if your remit is different to their remit like protecting a country's GDP or current political leaders. The good thing about this, is foreign intelligence will also like to you use like a pawn to help further their own foreign policy interests and global criminals may also like to use you for their own ends as well. So be careful if you do decide to get vocal, I know I've had it done to me as well.

</comment><comment><USER29> You could try getting a degree in one of the central European universities. Total cost for 3 years should be a fraction of what you need to pay in northern America. Getting a work permit is also ten times easer.

<comment><USER30> I imagine getting a degree in Indonesia itself would be much cheaper, and having that degree would then make moving to another country much more viable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Try to connect with recruiters from Europe via LinkedIn. If you are good enough frontend developer or designer, some large companies will be willing to help you get work permit and assist you with relocation. Just ask. The fact that you don't have a degree, especially as a frontend developer, is not a problem in most of job offers for frontend developers. Western Europe and Eastern Europe offer similar pays for developers, so it's not like you have to go to England or Germany. Try Estonia, Poland, Czech Republic, or Romania.

</comment><comment><USER32> Consider including an email or other contact info here or in profile, some may want to help you but not publicly.

</comment><comment><USER33> Try and find or do remote work.

</comment><comment><USER34> i cant say i can recommend the UK! also you may find Japan a little difficult for now, it can be particularly difficult to get a visa there although it is supposedly being relaxed soon

</comment><comment><USER35> Would highly suggest that you marry a foreigner somehow, work as a dishwasher or cookor busboy in an expensive restaurant. save a ton of money.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER36> Why not try to move to another city? Bali maybe?

</comment><comment><USER37> I m going to sounds more philosophical but, please hear me out. Recently I heard the quote somewhere " the only zen you get at the top of a mountain is the one you bring along". Similarly if you are not happy with your OWN country then you will never be happy anywhere in the world. Everything is getting worst. You are better off where you are and work hard to make a content life there. I have spent 10 years in a first world country and came by to my third world country 10 years back and I am happy.

<comment><USER38> "If you can't be happy in Somalia you won't be happy in France."

Right.</comment></comment>


Amazingly, a killer app of OSes is possible - <AUTHOR> http://scripting.com/stories/2010/10/23/amazinglyAKillerAppOfOsesI.html <comment><USER2> Yeah nice, but "cloud OS", what does that even mean? Syncing all your data with a remote server isn't really that new. I'm a Unix nerd and have been doing it with scripts for more than a decade. Sure, OS integration could always be better, but who wants to be locked in to a specific provider with all their data for an outrageous monthly sum?

<comment><AUTHOR> This would be for non-technical people, not script writers.

<comment><USER2> And I can see the value in that, but would people really trust MS and some yet-to-be-named partner with the entirety of their digital possessions?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Genius IQ or using the product you're working on? - <AUTHOR>

I've noticed some feel that "being a genius" is great advantage while other feel that "using the products you're working on" is of more value.
Thoughts??? Let's not just say...both <comment><USER2> Using the product your working on, _as long as_ your use case matches a sufficiently large number of other people.

You can think of starting a company as being an investment decision where the stock you're investing in doesn't exist yet. As with any investment, the way to beat the market is to have an information advantage.

Being a genius gives you a decent global information advantage in that you can process more information about whatever topic you happen to run across. However, it's nothing compared to the specific, targeted information advantage of being a user of that product. An average person who uses a product, day-in- and-day-out, will know far more about that product than a genius who heard about it once on the news.

Of course, this all assumes that that specific, targeted knowledge targets a niche that's big enough to support a business. Knowing a whole lot about AD&D probably is not going to make a billion dollar business.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well said!!!</comment></comment>


The human impact of having too few nurses - <AUTHOR> https://digest.bps.org.uk/2019/07/03/the-price-of-austerity-new-observational-research-suggests-lower-nurse-patient-ratios-really-do-result-in-poorer-health-care-interactions/ <comment><USER2> Interesting; on the one hand, one could dismiss this as an 'in other news, water is wet'-type of study, but such evidence is probably very helpful in the overall debate around healthcare funding.

Another factor not mentioned here but which might be relevant, is that as long as nursing is undervalued (particularly economically, but in less tangible ways too) to the extent that the system is short of nurses, it is unlikely that employers would able to choose pick and choose better nurses from those available, and/or remove bad ones. It seems obvious from an organisational perspective that nurse > no nurse, but there's a direct link (in my experience) between the quality of care patients receive, and the attitude/experience/quality of the individual nursing staff.

<comment><USER3> One lesson might well be that the relative pay gap between senior nurses and senior doctors is too big - i.e. senior doctors should be paid less / we should employ fewer doctors and more nurses. But that's probably a very very hard thing to actually do politically both in terms of internal hospital/NHS politics and national politics.

There are strongly entrenched interests in the NHS which I suspect constrain relative pay between professions and grades much more tightly than they constrain absolute pay numbers.

<comment><USER4> In the US I typically receive very poor care from people with the title "Nurse Practitioner" who are usually hired for the exact purpose of getting people to do doctor-like work for cheaper. They are ok at dealing with very normal conditions like the flu/cold, acute non-critical injuries, etc. (which you honestly don't even need to get care for anyway) but not good at dealing with issues outside of that

<comment> barry-cotter There's no evidence to suggest inferior results or standards of care from nurse practitioners than primary care doctors.

COMPARISON OF PRIMARY CARE OUTCOMES OF NURSE PRACTITIONERS AND PHYSICIANS

[https://research.libraries.wsu.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/23...](https://research.libraries.wsu.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/2376/3781/K_Stidham_010083140.pdf?sequence=1)

> Relevant Research Findings There are two landmark studies on the quality of > the primary care delivered by nurse practitioners in regards to that of > physicians. The first was by Mundinger, et al. (2000) and a follow-up study > by Lenz, Mundinger, Kane, Hopkins & Lin (2004).

...

> The results indicated tllat there were no significant differences in patient > outconles regarding health status, physiologic test results or health status > utilization. Patients seen by NPs did have a statistically significant, but > not clinically significant lower diastolic blood pressure (82 vs. 85 mm Hg; > p==.04).

...

> The outcomes compared were health status, utilization of health services, > and satisfaction with health care. The investigators found no significant > differences in outcomes between the two groups, one seen by MDs and the > other seen by NPs. The only difference in the results is the average number > of primary care visits during year two for each discipline

<comment><USER4> You left out a crucial sentence from the paragraph you cited:

> The study was a randomized double-blind trial to compare outcomes of > patients assigned to either NPs or MDs for follow-up care after initial > management at either an emergency department or urgent care clinic for > asthma, diabetes, and/or hypertension.

This excludes what I originally meant to refer to, which is non-routine care. I am fully confident that NPs can handle routine care, what I was asserting is that they are (anecdotally) bad at handling more complex/infrequent issues

<comment> barry-cotter Well if that's what you were referring to I'd say the average NP would agree. They're not meant to handle non-routine care, they're meant to kick that upstairs to someone more qualified.

<comment><USER5> The bigger issue this discussion is pointing to is how too much power/status/etc is concentrated among physicians in healthcare. It's too hierarchical. Not saying physicians are poor at their jobs, but there's very little evidence, when any evidence has been collected, that when another type of provider, with a different educational and training history, has moved into roles previously occupied by physicians, that outcomes are any different.

So, for example, I doubt that if NPs were specifically trained in specialty area X, you'd see any real differences. If we're going to do anecdotes, my personal experiences have been that the care provided by NPs (or PAs) has not been any different from physicians, even in relatively specialty areas I've dealt with. In fact, in some ways the care was better because we weren't trying to pressured into expensive procedures with absolutely zero scientific evidence of improved outcomes (having a hammer makes everything a nail).

What seems to be going under the radar is that the vast majority of MD programs are moving to 1.5 years or even less of academic training, with the rest being a variety of clinical experiences and quick rotations. This is fine, but what it means is that if you have a need for a provider in specialty area X, there's little difference between an MD + 4 years of specialty training, and something like a PA or NP + 6 years of training. We could get into discussions about academic preparedness, but at that point you're making a lot of assumptions averaging over individual variability, and ignoring things like nurses often having a ton of very technical training in actual physical technique.

I would love nothing more than for competition to open up dramatically in healthcare in terms of access, training, provider, and administrator models. This is happening to some extent now but it needs to be dramatically expanded. I see very little empirical or logical reason to assume that 4 years of general MD/DO training to something more specialized, is better than alternate training trajectories. Many of the professions in healthcare, such as nurses, PAs, pharmacists, psychologists, dentists, optometrists, etc. could be dramatically increased in scope of care, and new roles created that don't even exist currently, if there wasn't such territoriality and hierarchy in healthcare. Costs are spiraling currently in part because of rent-seeking problems. We've built our current system on a very dated set of stereotypes and outmoded assumptions, and are paying for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nurses in the UK are relatively poorly paid: [https://nursingnotes.co.uk/agenda-for-change-pay- scales-2019...](https://nursingnotes.co.uk/agenda-for-change-pay- scales-2019-2020). They start at Band 5, which is about 24,000 pounds annually. That's about $30,000 per year for a job that requires a three-year university education. (Somewhere between an ADN and BSN in the US.) London gets a 20% or so bump, so let's say $36,000. A VA nurse in NYC starts at more than double that, over $78,000: [https://www.va.gov/OHRM/Pay/2019/LPS/NY.xls](https://www.va.gov/OHRM/Pay/2019/LPS/NY.xls).

<comment><USER7> It's too crude to compare salaries like that.

That said, it's true that nursing is relatively under-paid in the UK. Part of that however is because the state is the largest employer of nurses which keeps wages down but that in turn keeps the cost of healthcare down.

When your state only provides a minority of nursing then it has to pay higher wages to compete with the profit-driven sector.

But it's crude to say "Nurses make less than half than in the US", because so do software developers, but no-one's saying "think of the devs!".

<comment><USER8> Why is it too crude to compare those salaries? The gulf between 30k and 78k is enormous. The UK nurse certainly isn't making up all, or even most, of that difference in government benefits.

<comment><USER9> Every salary in the US should be prefaced with "this sounds really high, but to compensate if anything goes wrong you will literally live in the streets forever". Thus, comparing a US salary to another country's salary should be taken with a mountain of salt: In most other countries where you'd want to live the height of the salary is modulated by the necessity of providing the less fortunate a liveable existence, including potentially you.

<comment><USER8> This is one of the special-est pleadings I've ever seen on HN. You might has well have said the privilege of living in the shadow of Big Ben compensates UK nurses. We are comparing financial transactions.

<comment><USER10> The point (not very well communicated) is that the comparison is pre-tax when it should be post-tax.

<comment><USER8> Doesn't that make the difference even more stark?

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I guess I should have said "post-tax and post-insurance/wellfare parity". Though you're right, the US salary would have lower taxes and the difference would look larger. I suppose the GP was weighting tail events quite heavily. Comparing the distribution of financial outcomes accross countries, given a certain salary would be very interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> You can find the original study here (open access): [https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/node/156220.full](https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/node/156220.full)

Abstract:

 _Background_ \- Existing evidence indicates that reducing nurse staffing and/or skill mix adversely affects care quality. Nursing shortages may lead managers to dilute nursing team skill mix, substituting assistant personnel for registered nurses (RNs). However, no previous studies have described the relationship between nurse staffing and staff–patient interactions.

 _Setting_ \- Six wards at two English National Health Service hospitals.

 _Methods_ \- We observed 238 hours of care (n=270 patients). Staff–patient interactions were rated using the Quality of Interactions Schedule. RN, healthcare assistant (HCA) and patient numbers were used to calculate patient- to-staff ratios. Multilevel regression models explored the association between staffing levels, skill mix and the chance of an interaction being rated as 'negative' quality, rate at which patients experienced interactions and total amount of time patients spent interacting with staff per observed hour.

 _Results_ \- 10% of the 3076 observed interactions were rated as negative. The odds of a negative interaction increased significantly as the number of patients per RN increased (p=0.035, OR of 2.82 for ≥8 patients/RN compared with >6 to <8 patients/RN). A similar pattern was observed for HCA staffing but the relationship was not significant (p=0.056). When RN staffing was low, the odds of a negative interaction increased with higher HCA staffing. Rate of interactions per patient hour, but not total amount of interaction time, was related to RN and HCA staffing levels.

 _Conclusion_ \- Low RN staffing levels are associated with changes in quality and quantity of staff–patient interactions. When RN staffing is low, increases in assistant staff levels are not associated with improved quality of staff–patient interactions. Beneficial effects from adding assistant staff are likely to be dependent on having sufficient RNs to supervise, limiting the scope for substitution.

</comment><comment><USER11> So obviously this comes down to cost.

> in the aftermath of austerity and with not enough staff to go round

Pay more, get more nurses.

Or you can trade-off nurses for less-good health care.

\- - - -

Just to show an "existence proof" of an alternate universe, there are two _totally free_ hospitals in India. They have no billing desk because they do not bill.

So how is it funded?

The people who work there and who support them financially believe that they are literally working for God. It is as if a Christian was volunteering to work at hospitals established by Jesus.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Sathya_Sai_Super_Specialit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Sathya_Sai_Super_Speciality_Hospital)

> The Sri Sathya Sai Institutes of Higher Medical Sciences also popularly > known as Super Specialty Hospitals are tertiary health care hospitals > established by Sri Sathya Sai Baba to provide patient care facilities to all > irrespective of caste, class, creed, gender, religion or nationality totally > free of charge.

<comment><USER12> > So how is it funded?

Actually it's funded by the billions of dollars donated to his charitable trust.

> Just to show an "existence proof" of an alternate universe, there are two > totally free hospitals in India. They have no billing desk because they do > not bill.

That's not an alt universe, that's just free healthcare, just like in the UK, Fiji, New Zealand, and numerous other nations.

<comment><USER11> I'm not sure what point you're making, and I don't want to be disagreeable, but I would point out that those nations' healthcare systems are paid for by taxes, not charitable donations.

To me it seems impressive and wonderful that people have been inspired to contribute billions of dollars to support health care and clean drinking water and other charitable good works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It beggars belief that such a topic is even up for debate.

We're at such a state of technological advancement now in a place like the UK that we're essentially post scarcity. We need very few people any more to provide the basic building blocks of life.

In such a scenario, what we should be doing is taking advantage of that fact to distribute labour more appropriately - more hospital work, more social work, more housing, etcetera.

Instead what we have is seemingly some sort of race to put half the population on retail/delivery/general grunt work to please the whims of the other half, who don't actually end up happy because they're working their arse off and generally stressed by the lack of 'life infrastructure' as well.

How has this gone so wrong?

<comment><USER14> The successive governments have been utterly idiotic about it too for a long time, even recently cutting nursing bursaries, constantly freezing pay, while simultaneously claiming for the last two decades we need mass immigration for the nursing shortage.

Scrap the high income cap on national insurance contributions and pay for the nurses!

<comment><USER15> > claiming for the last two decades we need mass immigration for the nursing > shortage.

Which is particularly funny, as immigrants are usually claimed to not take jobs from natives because they create demand, thus creating more jobs. Is nursing supposed to be an exception?

<comment><USER16> On the other hand wouldn't mass immigration increase the load on healthcare, thus exacerbating the shortage?

NHS is centrally planned, which explains some of the supply shortage and why demand-driven supply arguments don't apply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In Poland by the end of 2020 half of the nurses will be eligible to retire.

Not to mention that Poland already has low number of nurses for its population.

If you want to study how bad it can be keep an eye on Poland.

</comment><comment><USER18> Better pay and recruitment might help move the needle on the number of nurses in the short to medium term, but long term, the demographic time-bomb in western countries means they will never have enough nurses to care for their entire aged population in the manner they do now. So either a lot of people are going to get sick and die without anybody to care for them, or, one way or another, nursing and healthcare is going to have to change to become more efficient. That will mean it becomes a lot more impersonal, with much greater use of mechanisation, automation and robotics.

I don't see this as being entirely a bad thing. While nurses and other caregivers can be an important source of human contact for the sick and elderly, caring and being cared for by another person can be an emotionally and physically fraught and draining process. If we can build automated systems that allow baseline physical and hygienic needs to be met, even for the frailest and sickest people, I think that had to be good for the mental health of both those needing care, as it will reduce their sense of being a burden, and on the caregivers themselves, as they will be able to focus on the most important quality-of-life issues instead of being stuck on a treadmill of providing basic care.

<comment><USER19> I would assume pay rates are relatively locked in and restricted under the government health care program in the UK. Not sure if there's a general Nurses union, but much like police, they may be legally unable to unionize or strike.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> You can look at healthcare as a cost or as a benefit.

If you look at it as a cost, you will attempt to minimize it.

If you look at it as a benefit, you will attempt to maximize it.

The State looks at healthcare as a cost to be minimized. The State does not get sick or need healthcare.

Likewise, employers also look at healthcare as a cost to be minimized, but they do have some motivation to provide better quality insurance if they wish to attract employees.

Only you, the potential patient, really care about the benefits side of healthcare, and the quality of healthcare.

Health insurance has been screwed up by having the State and/or employers provide it for decades. What is required is for people to be able to purchase health insurance themselves just like they do any other kind of insurance. That would be a start anyway.

</comment><comment><USER21> Obviously? It's like saying "reducing the number of hole diggers on your staff reduces the number of holes they dug." Almost all care in hospitals is provided by nurses, doctors function like high level executives who drop in for a few minutes every day to look at the dashboards.

</comment><comment><USER22> At least give me a diff-in-diff, guys.

To be fair, they acknowledge their limitations and the fact that they can't make a causal interpretation. (Bad hospitals -> nurses leave?) But why the hell design the study this way?

<comment><USER2> How would you design it otherwise? An interventional study would presumably be ideal, but probably impossible to achieve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Too few nurses and too many share buybacks.

</comment><comment><USER24> The UK has free public health care but maybe introducing a price for a doctors or hospital visit would help lessen this problem?

One could introduce a fee of say 20 pound pr. visit. Something that is low enough that anyone in UK could pay it but also high enough to remind people that what they are consuming is finite resource.

<comment><USER25> >Something that is low enough that anyone in UK could pay it //

The problem is with such things that they're regressive taxes. Rich people can still afford to go to the doctors when they have a sniffle but poor people will re-consider even when they have a life-threatening illness because £20 is a months food bills for the poor person.

<comment><USER26> Your hypothetical poor person isn't just poor, they're suffering in extreme poverty, and the system could be designed to accommodate them.

Tolls on a congested bridge are "regressive" but are practical and make sense. We shouldn't structure society around what makes things less convenient for the rich, _there just isn 't very many of them_ by definition. We should structure society around what improves the lives of most people, within the current realities that exists. This is the classic sin of envy where we'd actually rather be worse off if the person we envied was also worse off.

Now maybe there are other reasons to avoid co-pays, such as higher death rates in areas with co-pays. I'd be interested to see a study that demonstrated the tradeoffs of co-pays.

<comment><USER27> I don't feel comparing healthcare to tolls is that useful. Systems to accomodate people based on economic need have a tendency to introduce more costs and overhead which will reduce the efficiency that the system was attempting to solve in the first place! This cannot be said for tolls.

<comment><USER26> I was comparing copays to tolls, not healthcare costs in general. Copays should generally be small, bearable even for a minimum wage worker, perhaps pegged to an hour of the local minimum wage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> What happens with Brexit, with all the health care workers from the Continent?

Do they have to go home?

Special rules to allow them to stay?

</comment><comment><USER29> There's never too few nurses, there's only not enough money to pay for "enough" nurses

</comment><comment><USER30> There is no shortage, my gf just finished nursing school and can't find a job and many of her peers are in the same boat.

Hospitals don't want to hire nurses because it loses them money. They only care about staying at the federally-mandated minimum staffing ratio, which they can skirt by only staffing adequate numbers when the oversight agencies come around. Seems like this is happening in every industry - CS appears to not want to hire either unless they absolutely are forced to fill a void. They'd rather just have one person do the work of two people since that person won't be able to find a job elsewhere anyway.

<comment><USER31> This article is about the UK where the NHS has been chronically underfunded for the last decade.

<comment><USER32> The NHS has been chronically underfunded for 40 years.

In 2007, before the crash, after 10 years of New Labour, the U.S. spent 15% of its GDP on healthcare. German 10%, the Netherlands 9%.

The UK spent 7.4%.

In fact it's over the last 10 years that the UK has begun to catch up with the rest of Europe.

[http://imgur.com/mUI9oWil.png](http://imgur.com/mUI9oWil.png)

<comment> barry-cotter Life Expectancy at Birth

Netherlands 81.6

U.K. 81.2

Germany 81.1

USA 78.6

[https://data.oecd.org/healthstat/life-expectancy-at- birth.ht...](https://data.oecd.org/healthstat/life-expectancy-at-birth.htm)

<comment><USER32> Which just goes to show how superior the NHS is. It's still underfunded though.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Project Stream - <AUTHOR> http://projectstream.google.com/ "Sorry, this project is currently open in the U.S. only".
I tried many VPNs, but then I fail the speed test. Do you know any way to change my location that won't affect my speed? <comment><USER2> Get a Windows VM that you can RDP/VNC into. Amazon Workspaces could work.

It's going to suck, but you can try it out.</comment>


ReadMe (YC W15) Creates Crisp Documentation for Developers Using Your APIs - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/13/readme-creates-crisp-documentation-for-developers-using-your-apis/

<comment><USER2> This is somewhat hidden on the page:

> ReadMe was built almost entirely on Open Source projects, so we want to give > back. If you're an open source project, shoot us an email and we'll upgrade > you to the Developer Hub tier for free. It's the least we can do to give > back.

Very cool.

<comment><AUTHOR> We need to make that more apparent :) But yeah, email firstname.lastname@example.com and we'll upgrade you for free!

<comment><USER3> Tried to email you and google bounced it. Turns out they have really obtuse policies for blacklists, and I can't figure out how to get my emails through. Any side channels to go through?

<comment><USER4> I've had this happen to me a lot lately, and my assumption is that it has to do with my VPN – are you using a VPN?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We ([https://commando.io](https://commando.io)) use ReadMe for our API documentation. Beautiful docs, created easily. Can't wait for automatic client lib generation and what the future holds for ReadMe. Here are our docs [http://docs.commando.io](http://docs.commando.io) to view what is possible.

<comment><USER6> Do they host the docs for you?

Honestly, it's disappointingly slow. Each page takes over a second to load. Your docs is one of those things that you can very easily cache heavily.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that's our fault. We have a new super-quick template coming out soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For those that want a lower-tech but scalable solution that can integrate easily with your build tool:

AWS S3, NGINX + AWS Signing Plugin + Basic Auth, reStructuredText, and CircleCI.

Very cheap, super easy to scale, and basic authentication for private. Use your own domain, have full control over the domains and which S3 buckets your route to, and use ReadTheDocs templates which are great for documentation.

</comment><comment><USER8> [https://dash.readme.io/login](https://dash.readme.io/login)

Really love the animation here. Attention to detail matters.

<comment><USER9> @gkoberger I'm curious to know how long you estimate this took you to implement and how many people comment on it. I'd estimate < 15 minutes and hundreds of people. Am I close?

<comment><AUTHOR> You're almost exactly correct! About 15 minutes, and we got almost 200k hits because of it. It was on Smashing Magazine, Little Big Details, and just about every designer I like tweeted about it. Totally worth the time it took :)

<comment><USER9> Those are incredible results. You'll never implement a feature with a better ROI :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How does this compare to Swagger, Mashery, Apigee, etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have Swagger support is (super early) beta; basically you can use your Swagger Spec right in ReadMe.

The focus is on more than just reference docs, though. ReadMe also has space for tutorials, topical guides, support, etc. And soon, we'll have things like onboarding flows and other things that customize the experience for each individual user.

As for Mashery and Apigee, features aside, last I checked, both start at about $10k/mo. They are more focused on API management; a "developer hub" is just a side effect for them.

<comment><USER11> Apigee just uses Drupal for their developer hub with some loose integrations into their api management (users, authentication keys, etc).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's nothing I like more than some great API documentation. Seriously, whenever I see that the author of an API/library writes good documentation (and examples!), it improves the quality of open source software a lot.

This is a super cool startup and I love that you are giving back to the community.

</comment><comment><USER13> Noticed a bug: If you click on "Custom CSS" in the Examples section, the description starts out awkwardly with just "to stand out?" In the markup that paragraph is enclosed in an element called <Looking>. Maybe a misplaced character in a template?

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Few apps have impressed me as much as Readme.io. The attention to detail and beautiful yet functional UI are superb! It was a delight to create the docs for [http://www.js-data.io](http://www.js-data.io) with Readme.io.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much for the kind words :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> We're using Swagger incorporated with Flask-Restful, which has been quite straightforward to setup and maintain. I like ReadMe, but I feel like it needs stronger integrations to be compelling - e.g. autogenerating code examples for various languages.

<comment><AUTHOR> Both Swagger support and code generation are coming in the next release :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Documentation is one of those very unsexy things that's so important but so many people and companies just tend to overlook. It's good to know there are companies aiming to fix this.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm a bit confused by the "use your own domain" option. I'm actively looking for a product with functionality like this, but it needs to be 100% self- hosted. "Use your own domain" suggests that ReadMe still handles data storage. Are there any fully self-hosted products that are similar to this?

<comment><USER18> Feel free to use this template -> [https://github.com/catalyzeio/HIPAA](https://github.com/catalyzeio/HIPAA) I made for our HIPAA docs. It uses middleman, slate, erb and sass. To password protect it you could use something like this -> [https://github.com/agoragames/nginx-google- oauth](https://github.com/agoragames/nginx-google-oauth)

<comment><USER19> This approach to documentation works really well with netlify ([https://www.netlify.com](https://www.netlify.com)).

We let you link your middleman repository to a netlify site and instantly setup automated builds with continuous deployment to our CDN.

It's great for developer docs since you can let people submit pull requests for fixes or improvements, and we'll auto deploy when you merge them in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> @Mashape we're fan of Greg and Gabriel since long time now.

They have done an amazing work with very limited resources. If all you need is a Documentation w/ Support they are the faster/cheaper solution for you. And the GUI is details oriented, unlike other complex/heavy Enterprise solutions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Augusto :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'd like to see it develop into a more generalized thing. Rather than offering nice looking docs, make it The Way to view docs for anything. Man/info pages 2.0 if you will. This should be to documentation what Github is to opensource.

<comment><USER22> Will you feel the same when when say, GitHub buys ReadMe and Oracle buys GitHub?

<comment><USER21> I actually wanted to say Github should buy and integrate it (if it went the direction I Imagine). But on a second thought you want to incentivize proprietary stuff to be on there too, so it would have to remain somewhat separate from core Github. And Oracle, haha. Oracle buying anything you like is scary :-D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've got an internal API that isn't available for public consumption, but would enjoy having beautiful documentation. Does ReadMe have an option for that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course! Many of our users use it internally. All plans have an option to make documentation internal: either by inviting collaborators, or a site-wide password.

<comment><USER23> Where's that option? I created a project, and the closest thing I could find was in Versions. I clicked on the "(?) Public" thing, and it said that I couldn't change it or something. I don't want it to be public, but it never changed to a yes or no option, just stayed the same orange with a question mark.

<comment><AUTHOR> In the sidebar, called "Internal Documentation"

[http://cl.ly/image/0L3P0S312u3X](http://cl.ly/image/0L3P0S312u3X)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> using swagger and quite satisfied with it .

will be good if the OP points out some unique features that I am missing by not using ReadMe ?

Use case : Private / Internal API with less than 10 Devs .

<comment><AUTHOR> They aren't necessarily incompatible. ReadMe will very soon support Swagger, and adds things like commenting, topical guides, code snippet generation, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Any chance of being able to login with GitHub/BitBucket?

</comment><comment><USER26> gkoberger is there a roadmap for this?

<comment><USER27> Hey Colin! I'm @gkoberger's cofounder. We don't have a published roadmap, but we're hard at work. First priority is to release a rewritten template that will accommodate larger, more sophisticated documentation projects (another level of subcategorization, multiple documentation sections within one project, better search). Then, we'll start tackling more automatic ways of consuming code and creating documentation. We're ambitious, stay tuned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Url changed from [http://blog.ycombinator.com/readme-yc-w15-creates-crisp- docu...](http://blog.ycombinator.com/readme-yc-w15-creates-crisp- documentation-for-developers-using-your-apis), which points to this.</comment>


She Was Homeless Until a Detroit Library Stepped in to Help - <AUTHOR> https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2018/06/29/detroit-library-services/690373002/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm a huge fan of libraries and grew up in Detroit. Most of the articles are how libraries are slowly moving away from entirely books and going digital.

Detroit has some unique problems and libraries are changing to fill them. Not solely providing computers to sign up for food stamps in a city where 70% of residents lack home Internet access. But as the story shows helping people find jobs and work to find affordable housing.

Sadly two thirds of the cities libraries have closed in the past twenty years, victims of Detroit's financial problems.</comment>


A hubot script to create appear.in chat rooms and link to them - <AUTHOR> https://npmjs.org/package/hubot-appearin

<comment><USER2> This is truly awesome.

I was looking at how the ideas behind Kandan (A Hipchat clone) and appear.in can be combined for remote work, and I came up with what Sqwiggle already does for $9/head :|

Too late to the game, I guess.</comment>


Stripe: We reached our goal of net-zero emissions in a matter of months - <AUTHOR> https://stripe.com/environment <comment><USER2> It is positive to see stripe is voluntarily doing this.

That said, the analysis ignores net emissions (positive or negative) that may arise as a consequence of how stripe's business impacts their customers and the overall economy and environment. This impact is plausibly dramatically larger than any of the categories like servers or employee travel that were accounted for.

E.g. thought experiment: suppose your business helps other businesses lift their revenues by selling more stuff to "consumers". Suppose these other businesses have a profit margin of around 20%, and your service is priced at around 10% of the value that it provides your customers.

Then if your business has a revenue of $X, this revenue is created by generating about $10X of value for your customers, which in turn is their profit margin from your helping them increase their revenue by about $50X. So the obvious direct and indirect greenhouse emissions generated by your business with $X of revenue (including energy use, renting servers, flying employees about the place) are likely going to be insignificant compared to the change in greenhouse emissions generated by whatever change in economic activity was triggered by the $50X lift in customer revenue driven by the core purpose of your business.

This change in economic activity could be hugely negative from an environmental perspective (eg if your customers advertise and sell unnecessary physical stuff to "consumers") or perhaps positive (e.g. maybe you audit your customers and only take them on if they sell products/services that have a positive environmental impact compared to alternatives).

It's probably a bit rough to expect individuals or business to be able to assess and measure this- it'd be much easier everyone participating in these economic activities agreed to a carbon price.

</comment><comment><USER3> No Stripe, you are not carbon neutral, because people turn their computers on and turn their routers on to connect to your service. That's like saying the natural gas headquarters is carbon neutral because the plumbing is the customer's problem. You took a great informational page on Global Climate Progression but made the headline some pompous clickbait title. Since when is Global Climate Progression a competition? We're all going to suffer greatly, so No you are not carbon neutral and I am appalled you'd be so daring to make such a sweeping claim when clearly every kiosk that runs Stripe contributes to the problem. Not as much as some things, true, but certainly not neutral.

<comment><USER4> I would still consider them carbon neutral, if the kiosks want to be carbon neutral that is their responsibility. By your logic essentially no service or company can be carbon neutral because their customers are not.

<comment><USER3> Correct. Since we all share one planet it's worthless for half of us to be carbon neutral.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are militaries doing to ensure readiness during outbreak? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Right now - moving 37000 NATO troops across Europe including Italy for "excersizes" on Belarusian border. Because their troops are _probably_ virus immunized, never fighting on own territory and likes mocking and bombing with _American_ democracy souveren countries all over the world then to blame Russia of being too defensive and too military with own opinion.</comment>


Is the Voynich manuscript in fact just gibberish? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nationalpost.com/m/wp/full-comment/blog.html?b=fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/11/16/scott-van-wynsberghe-deciphering-the-mysterious-voynich-manuscript

<comment><USER2> Even if noone is ever able to pry open the box and decode it, it may have meant something to the author.

Edit Sherwood's work on it is an enjoyable read. <http://www.edithsherwood.com/index.php></comment>


Ask HN: Credit Card reader similar to Square but with API - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I have a client who is looking to integrate card reader into their application and they really like the square card reader and they want to offer a similar card reader to their customers to use it with the app.
Does anyone know where can I buy the card readers (in bulk) with SDK for iOS and Android? <comment><USER2> Have you had a look at the Square Commerce API? If Android is not a hard requirement, there is an iOS SDK:

[https://connect.squareup.com/docs/api#commerce-api- overview](https://connect.squareup.com/docs/api#commerce-api-overview)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://getcardflight.com](https://getcardflight.com)

<comment><USER4> If I were to allow someone to swipe my card through one of these readers, or any similar reader, how do I know there isn't a software 'skimmer' bundled with whichever app they're using to process the payment?

<comment><USER5> For the same price, how do you know the phone using Square isn't using a skimmer? I've heard that Square doesn't encrypt the data...

<comment><USER4> That's why I wrote "or any similar reader".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> amazon just released one today !

<comment><USER7> yep. You find it here: [http://localregister.amazon.com/](http://localregister.amazon.com/)</comment></comment>


Show HN: [TG BOT] Millions of chat zones based in geographical areas - <AUTHOR> https://qwasap.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Now, you can ban annoying users. We try to improve this bot every day ;-)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Qwasapbot works fine now. We are sorry for the inconvenience. Despite the incident, all messages eventually reach their destination.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am sorry. We have some technical problems just now May 31, 02:24 (UTC/GMT). We are working for solving them.</comment>


Kube-scan: Octarine K8s cluster risk assessment tool - <AUTHOR> https://www.octarinesec.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> TL;DR:

 _Octarine, a startup that helps automate security of Kubernetes workloads, released an open-source scanning tool called Kube-scan, designed to help developers understand the level of security risk in their Kubernetes clusters._

 _They also open-sourced a second tool called The Kubernetes Common Configuration Scoring System, or KCCSS for short, which is the underlying configuration framework used in Kube-scan._

 _"There are 30 security settings in Kubernetes, and Kube-scan can help you see where you might be vulnerable on any one of them, measured on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being extremely vulnerable."_

Kube-Scan: [https://github.com/octarinesec/kube- scan](https://github.com/octarinesec/kube-scan)

KCSS: [https://github.com/octarinesec/kccss](https://github.com/octarinesec/kccss)

Press release: [https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/22/octarine-releases-open- sou...](https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/22/octarine-releases-open-source- security-scanning-tool-for-kubernetes/)

<comment><USER2> This seems pretty neat to me. I'll definitely try it out.</comment></comment>


Golang: Context isn't for cancellation - <AUTHOR> https://dave.cheney.net/2017/08/20/context-isnt-for-cancellation <comment><AUTHOR> Especially interesting and limiting with the current implementation is the lack of feedback that a cancellation has been properly done.</comment>


Statically typed SQL for F# compiled to SQLite/TSQL/Postgres - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rspeele/Rezoom.SQL <comment><AUTHOR> Discussion on reddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6qizpb/statica...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6qizpb/statically_typed_sql_for_f/)</comment>


'New Rembrandt' to be unveiled in Amsterdam - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/apr/05/new-rembrandt-to-be-unveiled-in-amsterdam <comment><USER2> [https://www.nextrembrandt.com/](https://www.nextrembrandt.com/)

for more technical info</comment>


Rent a Raspberry Pi 3 on a native IPv6-only network - <AUTHOR> https://www.mythic-beasts.com/order/rpi <comment><USER2> Mythic Beasts ran raspberrypi.org for a while on the RPi3 [0] and also host the RPi site. The price is pretty competitive (AUD96.40) compared to Czech [1] and Au hosting. [2] It's not only cost that would tempt me, it's the ISPs specialist knowledge of RPi.

Reference

[0] [https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/the-little-computer-that- co...](https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/the-little-computer-that-could/)

[1] [https://raspberry-hosting.com/en/order](https://raspberry- hosting.com/en/order)

[2] [https://www.micron21.com/services/cloud-infrastructure- servi...](https://www.micron21.com/services/cloud-infrastructure- services/datacentre-solutions/raspberry-pi/)

</comment><comment><USER3> The part that I like the best about this one is that it gives you 1TB of transfer. Why? Overkill, no?

I think you'd still be better off going with Digital Ocean or something comparable. Probably performs about the same for a lower price.

<comment><AUTHOR> Digital Ocean don't rent out Raspberry Pi or provide IPv6-only connectivity, so it's quite a different kettle of fish

<comment><USER3> True, DO has no Pis. Why does it have to be a Pi, though? With the 1TB of bandwidth and the focus on IPv6, I'd think it would be geared towards networking, so that makes the machine irrelevant.

DO does, rent out decent machines that have IPv6 connections. At that point you can just turn off the IPv4 interface. Done.

<comment><AUTHOR> To address your 2nd point: as far as I know, Digital Ocean's IPv6 doesn't provide the things you'd need to run an IPv6-only server (e.g. there is no NAT64 or DNS64 gateway, no v4-to-v6 proxy for letting the v4 Internet reach your server).

And sure, if you just want a little bit of computing power and literally don't care where from, you might as well get a VM from somewhere like Digital Ocean instead of a Pi from Mythic Beasts, but that is beside the point. This is an offer to rent a Pi on an IPv6-only network, which nobody else is doing.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Robomotion.io – Automate your manual tasks with visual programming - <AUTHOR> https://www.robomotion.io <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN!

I am Faik from Robomotion ( [https://www.robomotion.io](https://www.robomotion.io) ). Robomotion is a low- code automation development platform inspired by Node-RED. It is a web-based and cloud-native Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform deployed into your Kubernetes cluster. It is entirely written in Golang.

We help companies to automate their manual tasks. These tasks mostly involve data-intensive repeated work, dealing with multiple-systems either web or desktop applications. To do this you install a software robot (agent software) into your physical or virtual machine. Software robots can automate these tasks by mimicking the way humans interact with applications through user interfaces.

We have been working on this project for some time now. We are currently working on our Cloudbot implementation which will eliminate the need for a software robot installation. Cloudbots will be created on-demand on your Kubernetes cluster and deleted when its work is done. The other WIP feature is our plugin system, which will enable you to develop your own custom nodes. It is still in experimental phase but we plan to support 5 different programming languages (Golang, JS, Python, Java and .NET) for custom node creation.

We are very excited to share with you and we'd love to hear your feedback and thoughts.

Thanks,

\- Faik</comment>


Why is the USA building the world's largest drone base in Niger? - <AUTHOR> http://newsletters.iafrikan.com/issues/iafrikan-daily-brief-robot-army-183261 <comment><USER2> Looks centrally located to the African continent, Europe and the Middle East. Makes sense to me.</comment>


Are birds smarter than mathematicians?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20175592 <comment><USER2> That's interesting. Unfortunately the text isn't free. Do they have any guess as to why?

My guess is that there's some fairly simple heuristic that gives the right answer, which birds are using but which we, for some reason, are not. Either we lost / never had the instinctive heuristic or it gets vetoed by confused conscious thought.

<comment><USER3> From the abstract, _Across experiments, the probability of gaining reinforcement for switching and staying was manipulated, and birds adjusted their probability of switching and staying to approximate the optimal strategy._

From that, I'd guess that the birds are making their selection based on experience about what has and hasn't worked in the recent past.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I didn't read the full article, but I'm curious: how did they explain to the pigeons that there was a reward behind exactly one door.

</comment><comment><USER5> Reminds me of the experiment Lisa does in the Simpsons: "Is My Brother Dumber Than A Hamster?" :)

</comment><comment><USER6> Yeah. I believe everything I read even if I see obvious reasons why something is false.

</comment><comment><USER7> No.</comment>


An (Important) Disproof of the One-Time Pad - chris-at http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/16/a-disproof-of-the-one-time-pad/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 <comment><AUTHOR> This entire article is utterly false and misconceived. It asserts that because "ONETIMEPAD" will be encrypted as "ONETIMEPAD" one time in 141167095653376, one time pads are not actually secure. The reason this is false is that just as often, "ONETIMEPAD" will be encrpted as "TWOTIMEPAD", or any other 10 letter string. Thus, the encryped string provides no information about the plain text, and so is perfectly encrypted. This article utterly wrong.

<comment><USER2> Yes.

For a different illustration, sure, with the right key, a plaintext of "ATTACK US AT DAWN" will have a ciphertext of "ATTACK US AT DAWN". Which, you know, in isolation, sounds undesirable. But a ciphertext of "ATTACK US AT DAWN" will be equally likely (from an attacker's perspective, who has no advance knowledge of the plaintext content or the key) to correspond to a plaintext of "ATTACK US AT DUSK" or "ABORT US ATTACKS" or "DEFEND UK AT DUSK" or "LAUNCH FAST DRONE".

(In fact, if you could guarantee that the ciphertext was never the plaintext, that would be an undesirable feature, because then if you knew the ciphertext and the encryption method _without_ knowing the key or plaintext, you would learn information about the plaintext -- specifically, that it was not whatever the ciphertext was.)

<comment><USER3> In fact, the fact that a letter could not encrypt to itself was part of the weaknesses of the Enigma machines used by the Germans during WWII, which eventually led to its breakage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, I now have a conclusive proof that I will never trust Zendo with my messages.

<comment><USER5> pretty much yeah.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So it still fits the definition of perfect secrecy, but (with vanishingly small probability when the key is large) it's possible for a key to be chosen that is more "guessable"?

I don't think this is a problem. Depending on the guess for the key an attacker could get back _any possible message_ as the plaintext. So there is no reason for them to believe that the message they obtain by using a simple key (e.g. AAAAAAAAAAAA as in the example) is the original plaintext?

<comment><USER7> Yes. They don't know if the string ONETIMEPAD was produced by the key AAAAAAAAAA or GHASDIJAWE. And thus they don't know if ONETIMEPAD is actually the plaintext or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was skeptical at first, but it looks like TechCrunch's foray into academic publishing is finally starting to pay off. It's been amazing to follow their transition from a tech tabloid to a place you can find groundbreaking work in fields like cryptography.

<comment><USER9> Academic tabloid, FTFY

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This article makes me not trust Zendo.

If you're going to take a pop at Shannon (and all the other cryptographers who support that) you probably need to i) have a cleaer description of what you're doing and ii) do some math.

</comment><comment><USER11> And, sadly, completely incorrect.

</comment><comment><USER12> Next up: TechCrunch solves the halting problem by using

        while(1){
            ;
        }

and

        exit(1);

as counterexamples.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a case where the article author is _either_ a moron, _or_ a liar.

Either genuinely believe that he is correct (in which case he is a moron) or he _doesn 't_ genuinely believe it, but is saying it for some reason (in which case he is a liar).

Those are the only two possibilities here, and neither is flattering.

</comment><comment><USER14> tldr:

an adversary could make a really lucky guess at the key therefore onetime pad is insecure.</comment>