Is There a Future for the Professions? - <AUTHOR> http://www.thegoodproject.org/is-there-a-future-for-the-professions-an-interim-verdict/ <comment><USER2> I think it's a question of barriers. You can't charge tens of thousands (often totaling hundreds of thousands) of dollars and many years for a professional degree and expect folks to buy it over other options that cost far less time and far less money.

I'm not saying coding bootcamps are panacean, but hiring does occur at such places and their cost (again, in terms of time & money) is a fraction of the cost of traditional professional education.

Professional education will need to adapt. I've heard of disaster-prone areas producing doctors in a matter of weeks. I don't want to be treated by a doctor who only has 8 weeks of training, but I don't think it's a bad start to a more, immersive, apprenticeship-based program that allows candidates to earn decent money while learning the full profession.

<comment><USER3> >I don't want to be treated by a doctor who only has 8 weeks of training, but I don't think it's a bad start to a more, immersive, apprenticeship-based program that allows candidates to earn decent money while learning the full profession.

I think we need multiple grades of doctor. Even something as simple as being able to stitch up a wound is useful and could lead to positive health outcomes for those who couldn't otherwise afford a trip to the doctor. Better to get some healthcare than have all doctors be the best possible, but inaccessible to the masses.

I'd liken it to gas stations that also have small garages that can change your oil and top off your fluids. You'd probably never want to have them replace your transmission, but oil changes alone are in high enough demand that I'm sure they make up a good portion of all visits to mechanics.

I'm guessing that a similar situation exists with doctors; physicals, vaccines, and a handful of common diseases (like colds) probably make up a sizable percentage of visits. There's a market for someone who can just handle these cases and pass them off to the higher grade doctor when the need arises.

To an extent we have this in the form of various grades of nurses and the dazzling array of specialists that now exist, but it's not quite there yet.

<comment><USER4> > I think we need multiple grades of doctor.

Don't we have that already?

Doctor / Physician

Physician Assistant

Nurse Practitioner

Registered Nurse

Nursing Aid / Nurse Assistant

<comment><USER3> You can't book an appointment with most of these directly, and not all of them can write prescriptions legally. For instance, I can't just book an appointment with a nurse to take a look at a cut to see if it needs stitches. The nurse might be the one to actually do the work, but I can't cut out the middleman legally.

<comment><USER5> > You can't book an appointment with most of these directly, and not all of > them can write prescriptions legally.

You can with many nurse practitioners (and maybe physician assistants, but I've had no experience with them) at places like minute clinic ([http://www.cvs.com/minuteclinic/](http://www.cvs.com/minuteclinic/)).

I've gone to a similar place that's in my office for some minor routine things, and it's been cheaper and easier to schedule than a proper doctor visit.

<comment><USER3> Nurse practitioners are special in that they can do roughly 80-90% of what doctors can do, including writing prescriptions. In some cases they can act as specialists, such as handling mental health needs that your standard GP wouldn't handle.

They certainly do have an important role to play, but we need a lower level medical professional that can accept appointments and perhaps write a limited set of prescriptions and handle treatment of basic ailments.

One shouldn't need a masters for the 'oil change' of medicine, just as one needn't be a registered engineer to change an air filter.

<comment><USER6> PAs fill much of that role. Yes, they do require physician supervision, but at many practices you can make appointments directly with them, never seeing an MD.

The last time I needed a basic physical, I saw the PA. She ordered blood-work and reviewed the results with me. I'm sure one of the physicians signed off on everything, but as far as I know, she did the work.

Likewise, the last time I had the flu, I made an appointment with one of the PAs. She did everything, with the physician just signing off on the prescription at the end.

Post-surgery, my follow-ups were with PAs or NPs, not the physician. He did drop in to say "Hi." but that was about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The problem I see is that these jobs already exist (e.g. paralegals, nurse practitioners, dental hygienists), but are baked into the total practice. My primary care physician costs the same whether I see him or the nurse practitioner, and they are performing the same tasks, so why am I wasting my doctor's time for rudimentary work and simultaneously paying much more for an NP when I don't need to?

<comment><USER8> My brother and I started a "member/concierge" primary care network for uninsured/under-insured patients. Members pay $20/month (individuals) or $15/month (business plans) and the patients can set appointments to see an ARNP/PA for $10 copay or the MD for $25 copay. Most primary practices can't take this issue into consideration because your copay is set by your insurance policy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Consumers in the West are choosing between pyramidal corporations vs independent professionals in many industries. While the former are often less expensive to the end user, they drain money out of the local economy towards fiscal havens. On the other hand, the latter often exploit their local connections to supercharge clients. For the health of my local environment, I tend to pay some more to keep the money within my community.

</comment><comment><USER10> > But bits can never yield singular values; like any tool, they can be used to > promote harmony or discord, greed or selflessness. [...] Valid values > require constant human construction, surveillance, critique, reflection, > rebuilding, and a commons in which we all have a stake, over which we all > care, or, to put it more sharply, we all should care.

One thing I don't get from this argument is: does he consider programming a profession? It seems like his argument is that, replacing professionals with a strong code of ethics by automated systems might lead to some sort of societal decay. But that's only true if the people building those systems are inherently less ethical or perhaps less aware of the issues than the original professionals. Otherwise, the systems can be build to bias towards a very high ethical standard, even as they crowdsource some of their functions (there might be an ethics vs economics trade-off for some systems, but if the trade- off is approached in an informed manner by ethical people, then a 'reasonable' compromise should be often found).

Perhaps his argument for the eroding effect of technology is tied to his argument about the eroding effect of markets: because programmers are employed by large corporations which have strong incentives to increase profits[1] at the cost of much everything else they will eventually be led to bend any professional codes of ethics if market forces act against those. This could very well be true, but I am not sure that's what the article says.

The article seems to imply than a doctor or a lawyer is likely a more moral person than a programmer or at least than the system the programmer can build. I am not sure I understand why it would be so.

[1] Long-term profits, being generous. But still.

<comment><USER11> > One thing I don't get from this argument is: does he consider programming a > profession?

If an engineer that programs, probably. But not likely programming by itself. When I worked at an integration company (industry contractor), we had to be careful about the language we used on timesheets. We were strictly forbidden from using "engineer" (verb) since we were not an engineering firm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "One could say that, in theory, these needs and roles could be satisfied in a completely marketized society—but we have seen that they are not. Indeed, as amply documented in 2001 (following the collapse of Enron) and 2008 (following the collapse of Lehman Brothers), the avowedly marketized society does not even prevent economic disaster; we need to regulate markets firmly and fairly."

The author jumps to a conclusion fairly quickly: that free-market capitalism caused Enron and Lehman Brothers (and not perverse incentives wholly separate from free-market ideology). This isn't the place to debate that, but rather it's illustrative of a larger point about academic professionals: they spend most of their effort engaged in very deep speciality, but occasionally they come up for air and assert broad knowledge, usually about politically charged topics.

In those cases, there's a palpable anxiety based on the knowledge that they do not make as much money as their intellectual inferiors who went off to work in business, or even worse, to use their professional credentials in the service of business (as a side note, for proof of this dynamic go read university professors' blogs about Mark Zuckerberg and his billions -- in the hierarchy of "deserves their money," tech nerds rank last, because they're simultaneously capitalists and social inferiors). This must be explained, internally and then externally -- their life choices are admirable, others' are not, and something must be done so that elites in the university and in government institutions can reign in the parasites.

I agree professional certification is important for healthcare and law -- when my life or liberty is at stake, I want to be sure my chosen expert actually has expertise. But the author is arguing that some sort of quality of life and cultural recognition should be automatically granted in exchange for completing training and passing tests -- something I don't think is worth caring about too much.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a fantastically presented and well-written essay. It's too bad the author stops short of providing any clear, actionable steps towards the reinvigoration of the professions:

> It's high time for those of us who continue to value the professions to > reinvigorate and, as necessary, reinvent the professions. We need to > acknowledge our complicity in the current undesirable situation, embody the > principles and values that have enabled professional practice at its best, > and work to ensure that they will be strengthened, not undermined, by the > technologies to come, and insofar as possible, in harmony with the ever > unpredictable winds of history and culture.

This is about as close as he gets to an actual suggestion:

> we need to regulate markets firmly and fairly

Who is "we"? How do "we" do that? Perhaps Prof. Gardner should have had a word with Larry Summers over a pint at the 2001 Harvard faculty Xmas party when Prof. Summers returned as the university's president, having helped repeal Glass-Steagall a few years prior.

More seriously, Prof. Gardner is in a position of power within an institution that does more to shape the future of the world than any other. He should have one of the best vantage points in the world to suggest changes, given his access to the students and faculty that go on to make many of the governing decisions within the country. It would have been interesting to read more about how the culture of a pivotal institution such as Harvard has changed over the past 30 years, and whether that has been in response to, or the cause of the decline in profession.

</comment><comment><USER14> > a profession consists of individuals who have undergone a standard form of > training, culminating in some kind of recognized title and degree.

So the professions were pillars of society when the world changed little and education was scarce. Now most people complete college and "the professions" are a quaint old-timey thing.

It would have been nice if the author weren't such a meandering windbag, but maybe he has trouble getting to the point because he can't bring himself to say he just wishes they professions were still considered "elite".

<comment><USER15> >> a profession consists of individuals who have undergone a standard form of training, culminating in some kind of recognized title and degree.

Yes, and basically ending there, except for being able to teach it to the next generation. The professions were things like philosophy, geometry, theology, etc.

As I understand it, the title "doctor" was used by scholars, e.g., PhDs, long before medicine even existed as a respectable field, and physicians started calling themselves "doctor" to assume an air of respectability.

The trades may have been respected, but were a couple of notches below the nobility and the clergy. The idea of achieving a high social status for actually _doing_ something is a newfangled concept.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > contemporary professions are failing economically, technologically, > psychologically, morally, and qualitatively, and by virtue of their > inscrutability (p. 33). Or, as they put it colloquially, "We cannot afford > them, they are often antiquated, the expertise of the best is enjoyed only > by a few, and their workings are not transparent. For these and other > reasons, we believe today's professions should and will be replaced by > feasible alternatives"

Anyone retain an attorney for a will lately versus downloading Legal Zoom?

</comment><comment><USER17> For professions to be viable, there has to be a large dip between people starting out and people who had mastered it already. Otherwise there is no real incentive for people to start out in the first place; noone will pay a lot of money and invest years of their time if anyone with a few weeks of education can do essentially 99% of what they can.

This brings me to the point of software development. Software development is aweful as a choice of a profession if you work for someone else, and not for yourself, due to constantly increasing competition (every kid needs to learn how to code). Most work doesn't need a real understanding of the subject matter (algorithms, protocols) and can be performed using frameworks and libraries that "encapsulate" those concepts. I foresee something alike the split of nurses and nurseaides happening to software developers. There'll be a few software developers capable of understanding computing from A to Z who will write the libraries and the tools, and everybody else will be a consumer of these tools writing apps for the end users.

The only real rewarding part of software development is being able to design your own product and bring it to life, and reap whatever rewards the market allows you.

<comment><USER18> I beg to differ. I don't see constantly increasing competition, partly because the demand for (good) programmers is also increasing, and partly because (in my opinion) most programming work actually does need real understanding.

Besides, programming is a very rewarding activity in itself, due to the creative nature of it [1].

So I have the complete opposite view - software developer is a great career: [http://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/08/5-reasons-why-software- dev...](http://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/08/5-reasons-why-software-developer-is- a-great-career-choice/)

[1] Why I Love Programming: [http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/02/why-i-love- coding/](http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/02/why-i-love-coding/)

<comment><USER19> The great thing about software is that each new piece of software that is written opens up more opportunities for writing new software than it closes off.

And the great thing about software writers is that each new writer creates more work opportunities for experienced code maintainers and rehabilitators than they could possibly create for themselves.

Combine those two great things, and you realize that as long as the software industry can grow wider faster than it can grow deeper, it must. The tide of crap software with huge technical debt that will eventually have to be fixed by someone with real experience will only abate when everyone with the aptitude for writing software has already been doing it for a while.

At that time, people will be able to distinguish between a software writer that can maintain an existing CRUD app and one that can write new business- infrastructure software that scales across the entire enterprise.

That last category will be able to demand high compensation well into the foreseeable future, simply because the type of personality that has competitive advantage there is relatively rare in the general population.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Given ready access to information and knowledge, and eventually cognitive enhancement, maybe the focus of professional education ought to be on core values and skills. Plus enough general background to know where to start with any particular project.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is almost like a reverse Betteridge's Law of Headlines. So maybe the real law is, if the headline asks if there will be a huge change of the status quo, the answer is no. If the headline asks if the status quo will remain, the answer is yes.

<comment> vezzy-fnord Why are people even trying to formulate a consistent model out of Betteridge's law? It's puerile and missing the point. It's nothing but a sardonic aphorism that observes how tabloids tend to structure their headlines. It's absolutely trivial to subvert: "Did six million Jews really die in the Holocaust?".

Is there a law about people egregiously overestimating the applicability of Internet laws?

<comment><USER22> It's called a "joke."

<comment> vezzy-fnord AnimalMuppet seems to be trying to make something serious out of it, hence my response.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


DropJar, transfer up to 10GB free, pause and continue - <AUTHOR> http://www.dropjar.com

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8204126](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8204126)</comment>


Stripe's New Recurring Billing Features - <AUTHOR> https://stripe.com/blog/new-recurring-billing-features

<comment><USER2> It pains me to see all this awesome stuff (CTF, Apps, improvements) from Stripe all the time here on HN only to be reminded that I can't use it and that my only actual option is Paypal or really expensive and cumbersome merchant accounts.

I hope Stripe, Braintree or another 2.0 payment solution will launch here in Norway soon.

<comment><USER3> Didn't Braintree just expand to a lot of countries: <https://www.braintreepayments.com/tour/international>

<comment><USER4> I signed up for the rollout to Australia, but it requires a merchant account with Westpac (!) first.

(It almost defeats the point of using it at all over one of the existing merchant-account-requiring solutions here.)

<comment><USER5> I thought it was a merchant account with NAB? (According to the application forms I have received.)

AFAIK only NAB has multi-currency acquiring solution at the moment.

It seems that Braintree's pricing isn't attractive at all, so I'll probably still go for eWay.

<comment><USER4> Ah! Sorry, I misremembered. You're right, it's NAB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Groovy. Not sure I'll actually use any of these particular features, but it's good to see they're moving forward.

The one feature I'm still waiting for is prorated refunds on cancellation. As it stands, they'll prorate plan changes, but not cancellations.

I actually had to change my policy on that so that I could switch off my old payment provider and onto Stripe. I can only imagine that it's not Stripe's plan to force policy changes like that onto their customers, so hopefully they have this feature in their pipeline.

<comment><USER7> This is an excellent point and one you should send to Stripe if you haven't already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> These seem like good improvements, although I'm still not really clear on the benefits of using Stripe's recurring billing system rather than building your own. Given that you still have to send out your own emails and handle adjustments to the plans, it seems like basically the same amount of work either way.

I built my own recurring billing system using Stripe about 9 months ago because I need the per-seat pricing. It was incredibly easy, it gave me access to functionality that Stripe will probably never offer, and it allows me to plug in other payment providers if I ever need to.

<comment><USER9> Anything Stripe builds is going to be orders of magnitude more battle-tested and reliable than anything I could possibly build. This is such a mission critical piece of an application, _I don't want to avoid touching it as much as possible_.

Now it will take a couple lines of code to add another unit to a customer's monthly bill instead of dozens of lines of code and an extra database table. It's not too complicated, but it's enough to make it much likelier that I'd introduce a stupid bug.

For me, that's the benefit.

Context -- I'm a young programmer and don't trust my own code as a matter of course, and I'm working in a bootstrapped-to-the-hilt startup where any ounce of effort saved is gold.

<comment><USER10> "Context -- I'm a young programmer and don't trust my own code as a matter of course, and I'm working in a bootstrapped-to-the-hilt startup where any ounce of effort saved is gold."

Seeing this on a young developers resume will get you an interview immediately with me.

This sort of concern is a mature trait to exhibit. It's also risky to exhibit when around the unskilled (It's very subtle), which makes it an even more potent indicator.

<comment><USER9> Thanks spitfire, kind and encouraging words. Most of my understanding of programming as a craft I've picked up here, probably from people who are like you (and maybe you yourself).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> (sorry for the offtopic). Any news from the beta version of Stripe in Canada? Has any canadian here used it? Edit: hadnt seen this <https://twitter.com/stripe/status/245159999674933249>

<comment><USER12> I bugged them on Twitter and they let me on. Everything's working really well, a pleasure to use. No AMEX yet though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The new quantity option for per-seat pricing is a welcome relief. I was soon thinking of setting up N number of plans (1 User, 2 User, etc.) and this eliminates that headache.

<comment><USER14> It was actually possible to use per-seat pricing with Stripe before this without creating numerous plans. You'd just have to do most of the work in the application layer, adding/removing individual charges to an invoice when seats are added/removed, and calculating the pro-rating charges on your own. I did this for TaskforceApp.com over a year ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Great additions, I know I'll be using the arbitrary pay period feature.

On my wishlist is more recurring billing analytics, on top of the simple "volume" metrics.

</comment><comment><USER16> Any news of a UK beta?

Would love to give this a go, only today did I experience yet another PayPal mishap that leaves me desperate to try something else (preferably something much better).

<comment><USER17> I think I signed up to hear about the UK rollout 12 months ago. Any year now I reckon ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Stripe should write a gem or a plugin for the most common recurring billing functionalities in a SaaS app.

I imagine that many of their customers need this functionality - and while I know different apps have different needs, there must be some conventions they can adopt and enforce that will make building such a system much easier.

I imagine something like that might even drive adoption of their service - like they need anything to do that.

</comment><comment><USER19> I tried Stripe for a while and thought it was great, but AMEX charges kept getting flagged, so I had to go back to authorize.net. How's it going for everybody else?

</comment><comment><USER20> I first saw the arbitrary billing intervals and then realized they still don't do what I need (weekly billing).

</comment><comment><USER21> Chargify user here. Love chargify, hate the merchant account fees I pay each month. For subscription SaaS products, is this now a viable alternative to a merchanct account with a recurring payment service on top?

<comment><USER7> No sarcasm intended, but how can you justify paying $65/mo for something like Chargify? Does it offer some value that I'm not seeing on their site?

<comment><USER22> I use Recurly, which is similar to all these guys and they have a monthly fee. What makes it with paying is: Easier PCI, prebuilt code to process cards against different merchants and more code that handles the whole billing process which I don't have to write.

<comment><USER7> That is a good point; having some code to look at (or even copy) before writing my first ticketing application could have easily saved me a few hundred hours. Still, $65/mo seems a bit much. Best of luck, though.

<comment><USER23> "could have easily saved me a few hundred hours. Still, $65/mo seems a bit much"

I'm curious about the scenarios in which saving a few hundred hours is not worth $65/month.

<comment><USER24> Exactly. If you value yourself at $65 p/hour or more, that's a few hundred months of paying Chargify to break even.

I am as optimistic about my software product as anyone, but I need the break even point to be sooner than that if I am going to spend the time coding.

This is also completely discounting the fact that they probably have a more comprehensive system that you wrote, it's all they do. They keep updating it too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Awesome updates, thanks guys!

</comment><comment><USER26> Glad to see progress, but the big gotcha is that even though you can specify quantity of subscriptions, you still can't subscribe them to multiple types of plans. Seems like thats the next step...

</comment><comment><USER27> I think stripe should make it 1st priority to invest in anti-fraud tools. Right now almost none of the frauds we had were stopped by them but rather by a 3rd party API we use.

<comment><USER28> How did you confirm they were fraud?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Maybe I'm missing something, but what about a flat price + per seat? For example, what if I want to offer a three user plan for $30 and each additional user is $5?</comment>


Building a business while in high school: a 5-year journey full of learnings - <AUTHOR> https://phoenixdown.co/building-business-high-school/ <comment><AUTHOR> Duncan has been building businesses with his best friend Tyler since they were in high school. From mowing lawns to memberships and gated content no-code platform called Memberstack.

This is the story about Formatically, an instant citation tool that didn't take off.</comment>


Show HN: Prolifi.cc, a weekend project - <AUTHOR> http://www.prolifi.cc

<comment><USER2> No text-based summary, introduction, or blurb? Not everyone is able to view video at the moment they come across your site; if they can't immediately read what it's about, they may not come back to find out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed and great point. Thanks.

<comment><USER3> The video won't play in my Android by the way.

How about that blurb? ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Eek. It's supposed to be WebM-friendly. I'll see what I can do.

Meanwhile, I've posted a blurb.

<comment><USER3> Thank you.

Flowplayer is really good by the way, check out <http://j.mp/NBFTze> if you're interested.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So. You created an application to blog and to be able to post that on twitter.

I don't get why this is #3 on HN right now.

<comment> DanI-S HN likes people who ship.

<comment><USER5> Any weekend project is "shipping" (in that sense) now? Good grief.

Not hating on OP or his site, just sayin'.

<comment><USER6> Of course it's "shipping." Why wouldn't it be?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A quick critique on the video.

1.) The screenshot of the prolifi.cc landing page has the large black coming soon banner.

2.) At the point where you show the creation of a blog post, I think the left pane with all the markdown instructions is so visually distracting. Perhaps the video can just focus only the right pane...

I really liked the fact that you stated "you don't have a blog and you don't need one.." I think that really reinforces the concept and value of your product.

Just my $0.02.

</comment><comment><USER8> You know what would be really killer? Fork a couple popular open source desktop Twitter clients and add Prolifi.cc integration.

Whenever you start typing past the character limit, have the edit window morph to add your blog title field and change the button to "Post via Prolifi.cc", and have it hit your back end.

</comment><comment><USER9> Would be cool as a browser plugin, so that when a message goes over the character limit, a button to post via Prolificc appears, all within the natural flow of using the Twitter website. You could even extend this concept by creating a Prolificc API to allow third party developers to integrate into popular twitter clients.

Awesome weekend project!

</comment><comment><USER10> I think this is pretty cool, if for no other reason that it's a next step (not "the") in the evolution of the platforms.

It used to be you wrote a blog. Then you started using Twitter as a toy. Then you linked to blog posts on Twitter. Then you got lazy about updating your blog (i.e. Robert Scoble). Then you used only Twitter. Then you realized occasionally you want to say more than you can Tweet. Then.. Voila!

</comment><comment><USER11> TweetDeck used to let you post long messages. Have they stopped doing that, or is Prolifi.cc trying to let you do something else?

<comment><AUTHOR> There are quite a few long message services. Most (if not all) are plain text. Prolifi.cc allows styling via Markdown, images, etc. More of a proper article post and less wall of text.

<comment><USER11> So basically tumblr with zero sign-up?

<comment><AUTHOR> Less than that. Tumblr has it's own followers/following/social network. This does nothing more than "attach" a blog post to a tweet. apitaru put it quite well elsewhere in the comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Would be more useful if prolifi has an extension. That way, when I exceed 160 chars on twitter, I am reminded that I can post the blurp through prolifi instead and have the link posted to twitter automatically. Similar to how Facebook implemented their Notes concept, which never made sense in the Facebook context.

</comment><comment><USER13> I might actually use this... Markdown, Twitter auth, nice interface. Really low friction. Sticky domain name, too!

</comment><comment><USER14> Where's the target group?

Because the question is: how many people use twitter and don't have a blog or website?

<comment><AUTHOR> TBH the only person I built it for is me. I had an itch and scratched it.

<comment><USER15> Great reply and great attitude!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Can it do code markup? I was looking for something the other day and I didn't want to set up my own 'blog'. Tumblr couldn't support Github gists for some reason, so really that' all you need.

Edit: On first glance, it doesn't seem to be able to embed Github gists. Darn.

<comment><USER17> I run <https://snipt.net/>, and I just built in a blogging platform, seems like it might be what you're looking for: [https://blog.snipt.net/announcing- the-sniptnet-blogging-plat...](https://blog.snipt.net/announcing-the-sniptnet- blogging-platform/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> i really like this idea! i do not have a blog but i would love to start one, and i also do not use twitter much. but like this idea. but before i would love to see some posts examples.

<comment><USER4> So you don't have a blog, you don't use twitter. But you like the idea.

This thread is getting really suspicious.

<comment><USER18> This is my twitter <https://twitter.com/#!/SimoneMasieroDv> with a grand total of 6 tweets this year. I agree with you that this thread is suspicious due to the number of votes it receive, when i first commented it had 11 votes and no comments. But anyway i can grant you i have nothing to do with it. I have a personal website, but it's sadly unfinished, <http://hackertyper.net/portfolio>

I just like the idea of not having to register to a new service to make some posts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's nice, but don't get why it should be able to

* Read Tweets from my timeline. * See who I follow, and follow new people. * Update my profile.

so, not registering, sry...

<comment><AUTHOR> Twitter has three permission levels: Read Only, Read and Write, and Read, Write, and Direct Messages.

In order to have it Tweet on your behalf it needs Read and Write permissions. Along with that comes all the other permissions. If I could exclude it I would.

<comment><USER19> Oh, ok, got it. Not a twitter app dev. You are forgiven ;-) - registered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Glad you shipped it :) Any plans of monetization? Open-source?

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe ;) There are opportunities for both. I'm not committed to any one path yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Reminds me a lot like <http://checkthis.com/> except a micro-micro blog form

</comment><comment><USER22> It took me a while to figure out this isn't a C++ program. C++ source files sometimes use the .cc extension.

<comment><USER23> the <http://> wasn't a big clue?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> How is it different from <http://cpypst.me/>

<comment><AUTHOR> It appears similar, except your posts are tied to your Twitter account instead of just floating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Weekend project as in "done-in-a-weekend", or as in a side-project?

<comment><AUTHOR> Technically done-in-a-long-weekend (last Thanksgiving).

I'm attempting to turn it into a side-project to justify buying a Retina MacBook Pro, so I dusted it off, recorded the video, and updated a few bits.

</comment></comment><comment> fahad-sheikh What's the tech stack for this, if you don't mind me asking?

<comment><AUTHOR> Rails on Passenger on nginx, omniauth for Twitter authentication, redcarpet for Markdown support.

<comment> fahad-sheikh Thanks for sharing that. I was looking for something like this, keep up the good work :)

Also, would be cool, if you decided at some point to open-source it or unless you went the startup route, and end up monetizing the hell out of it. Then again, making money and open-sourcing are not mutually exclusive, methinks...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'll this in mind, thanks, it might come in handy.

</comment><comment><USER27> Similar to TwitLonger?

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted this elsewhere in the comments: "There are quite a few long message services. Most (if not all) are plain text. Prolifi.cc allows styling via Markdown, images, etc. More of a proper article post and less wall of text."

<comment><USER27> Cool I see the difference now, thanks for clarifying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Thanks this is great!

</comment><comment><USER29> Fine application, except for the wood grain background.</comment>


License Changes for Confluent Platform - <AUTHOR> https://www.confluent.io/blog/license-changes-confluent-platform <comment><USER2> This is a really negative trend for Open Source, and I hope it runs its course and dies out soon. License proliferation, bizarre "field of use" restrictions, blurring the line between what is open and what isn't, none of this stuff is a win for anybody. If you want to make something proprietary, make it proprietary, call it proprietary, and let that be the end of it. If you want to make something Open Source, then make it Open Source and don't try to straddle the line.

<comment><USER3> Open source is not synonymous with free software. The world is evolving and so open source should also evolve with it. Confluent have made it abundantly clear that the Apache Kafka project is and always will be Apache 2 licensed. Therefore that's where you go for your completely free solution. The community license is additional features free for use but not for you to provide as a managed service. Enterprise is something you have to pay for.

There's clear distinction and delineation between these. To an outside observer this might seem confusing and nuanced. In which case use the apache 2 licensed software which should unquestionably be open source and free. But otherwise those building businesses around open source technology have to find a way to protect against cloud providers. Licensing innovation is the only path forward right now until the cloud providers start to philosophically realign themselves back with what open source stood for and stop being bad actors.

<comment><USER2> _Open source is not synonymous with free software._

Nobody is saying that it is.

 _The community license is additional features free for use but not for you to provide as a managed service._

IOW, "not Open Source". And that's fine... a company has a right to create software using any licensing terms they want. But making something that's "almost OSS, but not quite" and trying to steal the sheen of respectability that comes from being OSS, while not _actually_ being OSS, is disingenuous and misleading.

Additionally, license proliferation in general is a Bad Thing because it muddles the issue around what's really Open Source and what isn't, especially for new-comers.

 _The world is evolving and so open source should also evolve with it._

Not all evolutionary steps are good things, in real life, or in metaphor- space.

 _until the cloud providers start to philosophically realign themselves back with what open source stood for and stop being bad actors._

There have always been people who used OSS without contributing back. There's nothing novel about this w/r/t cloud providers. And it's very questionable how you can consider somebody a "bad actor" for using a project under the terms that it was explicitly licensed under.

<comment><USER4> Why, the _source_ is open. You can use it to look for bugs, to make your own optimized / customized / verified build, etc.

The change applies to making the running code available in certain ways, not to access to the source.

I wonder how "free as in freedom" such software is, though. OTOH AGPL is considered "free software" by GNU, so this likely is, too.

<comment><USER2> "Open Source" has a very specific meaning[1], that goes beyond the mere availability of the source code. And these terms violate article 6 of the OSD, meaning that code licensed this way is not Open Source.

And yes, yes, I know the old saw that "The OSI doesn't have a trademark on Open Source". That's irrelevant. In practical terms, the de-facto definition of "Open Source" _is_ the OSD.

[1]: [https://opensource.org/osd-annotated](https://opensource.org/osd- annotated)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Speaking as someone who makes a living contributing to open source, it's a frustrating trend that the major cloud providers (Amazon being the worst offender) have decided that it's in their interests to take open source projects and never contribute back or even interact with the community.

It's less clear to me whether this is rational on their part - whether the incentives have actually changed. It's generally been in companies' best interest to contribute back to open source projects they are building products around, because:

You need to contribute to projects to influence the direction of them.

And you _will_ need to make changes or fixes to your version of the project, and the maintenance cost of an upstreamed patch is much lower than the cost of maintaining an ever-growing stack of custom patches.

I've seen companies before make the bet that they are better off forking a large project because they can "move faster". And it is true for the first year or two, but after a while the burden of keeping up with the backporting of changes from upstream takes multiple engineers spending large chunks of their time to keep up with.

In some cases you might be able to offset this just by hiring more engineers, but how many of the best engineers really want to work on backporting changes to a bizarro fork of an open source project? I suspect this is the bet the cloud providers are making - that they can grow the product fast enough to the point where they can throw money at it. We'll see how that works out for them.

<comment><USER6> Hi,

I work for Amazon Web Services, and I will risk responding to the first and only comment from a brand new account.

Amazon does contribute back and does interact with open source communities. You can find information on AWS's open source activities here: [https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/](https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/)

The page hasn't been updated for some of the latest news, such as releasing the Firecracker virtualization technology as open source: [https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/](https://firecracker- microvm.github.io/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hi all, I'm Jay Kreps, the CEO of Confluent and author of that blog post. I'm happy to answer any questions.

<comment><USER3> Hey Jay. Just want to say good job on the execution on this. It's clearly articulated and goes along way to show the industry how and why this needs to happen.

<comment><USER8> I also give it a +1. There's a lot of debate presently around what I call the "Little Red Hen" problem. Everyone wants to "eat the bread" when y'all are done, but very few people want to help grind the grain or knead the dough.

There's a document gathering people's thoughts on the current state of Open Source here, started by Jesse Anderson (formerly Cloudera):

"Viewpoints on Open Source Interview Responses" [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tLNerYJ5ce8PjGjGgRFfzKha...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tLNerYJ5ce8PjGjGgRFfzKhanFK0hwHHXdBPqI4t-48/edit#heading=h.8rsq5d34nuoy)

<comment><USER9> +1 from me as well. Well done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I kinda expected this after recently revealed AWS Managed Kafka. AWS can afford to release half baked products because platform inertia and that will easily cannibalize whatever traction SaaS offerings of Elastic, Kafka, Mongo etc has.

<comment><USER11> That's a great point. I can only hope that platform providers who productize open-source packages are giving back a significant chunk of revenue to the project, either in cash or in employees contributing labor.

<comment><USER12> It's safest to assume they are not giving back anything, unless they provide evidence otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The submission title is misleading ("License Changes for Confluent Platform (Kafka)" at time of commenting) - the license changes do not apply to Kafka itself, as the article specifically states.

<comment><USER14> Yes, we've dropped the mention of Kafka. Submitters: please, if you follow the guidelines by not editorializing titles we won't have this confusion.

<comment><USER15> The way it was mentioned in the title was misleading, but mentioning Kafka at all was useful. How about `License Changes for Confluent Platform (Kafka distribution)`?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> ScyllaDB's Dor Laor weighs in with his opinion on the new Confluent license: [https://www.scylladb.com/2018/12/15/saas-vs-oss-fight-or- fli...](https://www.scylladb.com/2018/12/15/saas-vs-oss-fight-or-flight- round-2/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Is aws now in violation of the license if they ever upgrade kafka version?

<comment><USER7> No, this has no effect on Kafka, which is part of the ASF and under the Apache 2.0 license. This just impacts things like KSQL that are part of Confluent Platform.

<comment><USER16> oh ok. I was confused by "(kafka)" in the title. Mods can you please remove kafka from the title.

<comment><USER14> Done.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Jobspice: Solution to your resume nightmares - <AUTHOR> http://ycombinator.posterous.com/jobspice-the-solution-to-your-resume-nightmar

<comment><USER2> I just made a resume on here to try it out. I like the concept, but the styles need some serious work... Keep at it!</comment>


Why no Steam, Notch? - <AUTHOR> http://notch.tumblr.com/post/9550850116/why-no-steam-notch <comment><USER2> I really admire how much Notch seems to understand opposing viewpoints that most people would simply make inflammatory posts about. His diplomacy here, as well as with Bethesda, has been stellar: Not "Steam is a DRM-ridden mess that I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole, bwa ha ha!", but instead, "I understand why they'd want to control their platform." Not "Bethesda are an Orwellian corporate giant trying to crush the little guy, bwa ha ha!", but instead, "This is probably just lawyers being lawyers." Never a bridge burned. What respect and maturity! Hats off to you, Notch. I'm proud to be a part of the same community of developers as you.

<comment><USER3> He has worked hard to torch the bridges between Mojang and the open-source communities surrounding Minecraft. He doesn't like people hacking his code, or creating tools which interoperate with his releases. You might have noticed that some mods have been pulled into the main Minecraft tree; the person doing that pulling is always jeb, another Mojang employee. Notch himself isn't very happy about it.

Projects like Bravo and Bukkit don't have any official endorsement or acknowledgement. Our channels of communication keep getting narrower and narrower. It's to the point where I've personally given up on actually talking to Mojang at all.

<comment><USER4> Probably rather offtopic but: I've never understood the motivation behind "modding". Why put so much work into someone other's project instead of starting something own?

I understand modifying/augmenting open source - because it's a community effort and the result belongs to all of us. But creating modifications for commercial products you will never have any real rights on and then being angry with the owner when he tries to protect his baby/vision - that's just behind my horizon.

<comment><USER5> > _Probably rather offtopic but: I've never understood the motivation behind > "modding". Why put so much work into someone other's project instead of > starting something own?_

Why do people spend so much work into learning to sing someone else's song or arrange it instead of just writing their own?

Maybe they like the work despite the fact that it's not their creation. Maybe they don't have the skill to create something from scratch but they can do a great deal standing on the shoulders of others. Maybe they just aren't that concerned with how lawyers divvy up who "owns" what ideas.

It's probably a combination of the above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Valve: Xbox 360 is too closed for Steam [1]

Notch: Steam is too closed for Minecraft [2]

Minecraft is coming to Xbox 360 [3]

Head Asplode!

[1] [http://www.vg247.com/2011/08/25/valve-ms-needs-to-be- comfort...](http://www.vg247.com/2011/08/25/valve-ms-needs-to-be-comfortable- in-opening-up-xbox-live/)

[2] <http://notch.tumblr.com/post/9550850116/why-no-steam-notch>

[3] [http://www.ifc.com/news/2011/06/e3-2011-minecraft-kinect- xbo...](http://www.ifc.com/news/2011/06/e3-2011-minecraft-kinect-xbox-360.php)

<comment><USER7> AFAIK a very restricted version of Minecraft is coming to the 360.

<comment><USER6> That's true, but then I'm not sure why a less restricted Minecraft on Steam on the PC is a problem... I'd actually buy it then.

I do very little PC gaming these days, 100% of it via titles bought on Steam -- people can argue about the DRM issues with it all day long, but the cloud features of it that allow me to access my game library from whichever of my computers I am currently logged into is huge as is the centralized updating, etc. I realize I'm hardly representative of the entire PC gaming world (since I'm barely a PC gamer anymore), but if it isn't on Steam it doesn't really exist for me and I'd love to pay for and play a slightly dumbed down Minecraft.. looks like I'll have to do that on the 360 instead of on the PC.

<comment><USER8> Minecraft on 360 is never going to be more than a niche, given the type of game it is. If it's available through Steam, however, the majority of PC players will end up buying through Steam and that population will pressure the non-Steam PC players to move to Steam.

<comment><USER9> There's precedent for games purchased outside of Steam being available in steam, so there's no technical barrier to giving all existing Minecraft owners a copy of the Steam version.

<comment><USER10> But when Notch says that he is avoiding Steam due to the restrictions it will place on what he can do with Minecraft in the future, I'm not sure why this would be a positive outcome from Notch's perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _This_ is how the battle for openness is won. Not by endless online argument, but by building stuff. Stuff that, by virtue of its openness and flexibility, is too awesome to be needlessly and arbitrarily constrained.

Beats the shit out of dogma.

Good on ya, Notch.

<comment><USER12> The battle for openness is won by building proprietary software?

<comment><USER13> He's been saying that eventually it'll be open-source, once it gets a 1.0 version? I don't know, maybe it's time to bug him some more about it...

<comment><USER3> Presume that he was only saying that to string along the people that would not have been otherwise interested, like the burgeoning community of open-source hackers working on various Minecraft tools.

<comment><USER14> Does he have any history of open sourcing his software?

<comment><USER15> He released the source to several of his 4k/LD games (which are most of his games).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Honest question from an iPhone developer...

I know many people on HN are rooting for walled gardens to fail (App Store) and for openness to triumph. Do these same people willingly use Steam and think it's great? Isn't Steam's delivery platform for games and the App Store's delivery platform for iOS apps pretty much the same concept? If someone is against the App Store on principle, shouldn't they also be against Steam and not use it?

<comment><USER17> A big problem with the iOS App Store is that it's a monopoly.

<comment><USER18> While I also dislike the walled garden approach of the IOS App Store I feel I should point out that it's only a monopoly if you define a monopoly narrowly. E.G it's only a monopoly on the iOS family of devices which is hardly a monopoly on installing apps on mobile devices. It may be a large chunk of the market but there are still competitors with a sizeable chunk themselves.

Walled Garden != Monopoly

<comment><USER19> It is a monopoly on installing software on iOS. Steam does not have a monopoly on installing software on Windows.

<comment><USER20> But iOS is only 18% of all mobile devices. Windows is 90% of all laptops/desktops. You are not comparing oranges with oranges.

<comment><USER7> You aren't locked into Steam for all game purchases.

<comment><USER18> You also aren't locked into iOS for all mobile app purchases. My point is that this debate is usually really about whether you do or don't want to participate in a walled garden and less about whether you want to participate in a monopoly.

Using the loaded term monopoly feels like an attempt to use emotional persuasion rather than debate on the merits. Which is a shame because I think the walled garden deserves some good criticism in a lot of ways.

<comment><USER7> The barrier to buying a game off Steam given that you own a PC/Mac is much lower than the barrier to buying an app off the App Store given that you own an iOS device (ignoring jailbreaking as usual). These sorts of barriers are characteristic of monopolies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sounds like good reasons, to me. They're a company with on-the-edge games and they can't afford to be held back.

I'm actually quite surprised that Valve has -any- say in what they do on their own website, or what they implement in the game. I could understand having to implement certain features (like not crashing with the Steam overlay) but to prevent features, marketing, non-game sales, or anything else that doesn't directly affect Valve?

Inconceivable.

<comment><USER22> You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Apple and XBLA have similar restrictions about interaction outside of their walled gardens. There are good reasons for this: Preventing fraud (they trust their credit card processing much more than some random app developer), filtering objectionable content for those under 18, ensuring a certain minimum standard of quality, etc.

Also sorry, I accidentally downvoted you when I meant to upvote you. (Can someone please move those arrows farther apart?)

<comment><USER21> Actually, I'm still pretty sure Apple and XBLA do that because they can make more money, not because they are trying to protect their image.

It's still the first time I've seen anyone say that physical goods based on the game were a problem. I really can't quite believe that.

In-game stuff, yeah, I can see it. Ratings and whatnot. But I don't think Mojang/Notch would have a problem on the ratings end of things, unless the ratings board was out of control. Still, I could see him not taking the chance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I can understand Notch's position here, because really, the only thing Steam can provide Majong with is... eyeballs and distribution? Some sort of community? I don't know, but I don't think Minecraft needs any help with those.

<comment><USER24> Nit-pick: it's "Mojang", not "Majong". The latter is almost a classical board game (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahjong>), the former is most probably the Swedish word "mojäng" but with our exotic dots removed for a change. "Mojäng", btw, means roughly "gizmo", or "contraption".

<comment><USER23> Ah, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Then why are they bringing Minecraft to the XBOX 360 which is a much more locked down platform than steam?

<comment><USER26> Steam is merely a new distribution system for a platform Notch has already shipped on while the XBOX 360 is a totally new platform with its own required distribution system.

<comment><USER27> Wonder how well this is going to go...I bought the Orange Box for the 360 when it first came out. TF2 has not seen any of the updates that the PC has had for the past 3 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is there some crevice here that can be made into a startup? A digital distribution platform for indie game devs who want more freedom with what they are selling?

<comment><USER29> It's not really a _platform_ , but I think that's close to what the company formed around the Humble Indie Bundle is doing. I think all of their releases have been DRM free and without any other strings attached, but I actually have no idea what the terms are like for the individual game dev companies. So I think the answer is probably "yes".

<comment><USER15> The humble bundle _is_ anomalously well performing, but they sell a couple of dozen games per year, each in batches of 5-6 that only sell for 2 weeks.

Steam sell a couple of hundreds indie games (out of many thousands currently on the market) throughout the year.

I think the HIB is by design not a service that the average indie (or even the exceptionally good indie) can get on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I personally added Minecraft in my steam's library so I can launch it from steam and people can see when I'm playing Minecraft. The only shortcoming is, if you are not on your main computer you have to download the game from minecraft.net and not steam. Is it really a huge hassle?

</comment><comment><USER31> I really hope Notch comes up with something more interesting than capes for the Minecraft market. I could see something like a robust world generator being extremely interesting, but premium hats and capes has to be one of the stupidest concepts in the history of gaming.

I don't like DLC's either, but I guess I just don't like any games enough to care. What I'm trying to say is that I'd like minecraft to stay in it's current innocent state. Perhaps if it grows like World of Warcraft did it will make sense, but it's a tough sell for me now. The simplicity is what makes it so charming.

<comment><USER32> _premium hats and capes has to be one of the stupidest concepts in the history of gaming._

Apparently you are unaware of the runaway success of the Mann Co Store in TF2, which has done so well that TF2 is now Free-to-Play. Hats are among the variety of items that are sold on the Mann Co Store.

<comment><USER33> Just because something is popular doesn't mean it's not stupid.

<comment><USER34> If it works, how's it stupid?

<comment><USER35> TF2 public games turned into constant trade for goddamn hats and metal.

<comment><USER36> When people make comments like this, it makes me think you've never played TF2.

I have never had a problem where a number of people on a server are trading (except on dedicated trading servers).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> But he is not saying the truth. The truth is: his game have enough success to not be in steam.</comment>


Remind me why I love you – why showing up in person is everything - <AUTHOR> https://bothsidesofthetable.com/remind-me-why-i-love-you-why-in-person-is-everything-dd5ba8514bc1 <comment><USER2> Sigh.

These "Im the center of the world" posts by VCs really make me want to snark in response.

<comment><USER3> Eh we're all the center of our own worlds. This seems like a slightly embellished but ultimately plausible view into that world. If someone can leverage it to help them achieve their objective then it was worth the time.

I'd like to see the same from a product management point of view. Why do seemingly trivial and broadly useful enhancement requests get stuffed in favor of nonsensical and broadly discongruous features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've run in to this in the funding context, but even more often in the sales context. You really do wonder what happened; you imagine it's a real reason; but you suspect it's a non-reason like this.

Thx for the post. I will take a few more swings with a bit more confidence that I'm not necessarily harassing someone who wants to be left alone.

And I will continue to make the travel effort for in-person meetings, in which I am already a true believer - the nod, the glance.

<comment><USER5> I found it to be a really great reminder for just that reason. When someone has shown a lot of interest in my product and then just disappear, it's up to me to find a way to re-engage with them. Often it's not lack of interest, they've just become so busy that it fell to the bottom to the priority list. Getting a phone call/email from me usually brings it back to the top.

protip: be persistent :-)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best examples of life style businesses? - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone, I'm looking for best life style businesses, something in the lines of patio11, but more recent examples.<p>Anyone knows just bushiness and willing to share? Thx! <comment><USER2> Are you looking for software only examples? SPI[1] has several non-software examples.

[1] [http://www.smartpassiveincome.com](http://www.smartpassiveincome.com)

<comment><USER3> Yes, software only, but thanks for the link.</comment></comment>


Google Plus's Circles For Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.circlehack.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Just for the record, this isn't my project. I just happen to like it both as a future (Tuesday) Facebook employee, but more so as a long-time enthusiastic user of the service.

How long do you think the group chat feature would take?</comment>


Show HN: Opensource webapp that aims to teach beginners to code - <AUTHOR>

I've been working on this prototype for a bit of a website that tries to get beginners interested in coding.
I learned to program on a TI calculator by making ascii games using TI-Basic's draw text function. With this webapp I tried to recreate that kind of simplistic exploratory programming that I enjoyed.
Also I wanted to maybe get kind of a demoscene feel where beginners would try to create cool stuff right away and then share them with the world.
The basic idea is that it lets users write javascript programs that interact with a matrix of grids. By setting the color of each grid you can make graphical apps kind of like screensavers. Then you can save your program and share it with other people and other people can 'remix' or modify your program.
It's at an early but playable state now so I would love to get some feedback from the community on the direction this is going. Also its open sourced on github so I would also love anyone with ideas for improvements to contribute.
The URL is http://grids.cavecode.com
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I guess you know of BlueJ Java is a bit like this, lots of schools use it to teach programming.

Some kind of logging would help people follow what is going on. When I teach, logs often help clear up a miss conception.

I guess you are aiming at minimal setup and maximum learning. Which is a nice idea. But the next step, after they learn how to use loops etc, is still required. They will need to setup Java etc, you are changing the order of the steps. Does this make things simpler, or just different?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah interesting, I haven't heard of blueJ. Will download it today to check it out.

I agree logging will be cool, just need to find a way to cleanly display it in a way that is not confusing.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> clickable: [http://grids.cavecode.com](http://grids.cavecode.com)</comment>


Digital music sales top physical music sales - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2012/01/05/technology/digital_music_sales/index.htm

<comment><AUTHOR> This is why SOPA/PIPA shouldn't exist. People aren't criminals. I wish the corporate sponsors of these bills would open their eyes and see this.</comment>


The sad state of markdown processors - <AUTHOR> http://eigenclass.org/R2/writings/fast-extensible-simplified-markdown-in-ocaml <comment><USER2> Wow does simple_markup ever totally miss the point of Markdown. By replacing #-headers with !, and replacing 1.-lists with #, and replacing _-emphasis with __, "Simple" is violating the spirit of the format to make implementation easier.

The point of Markdown isn't to create a super-flexible text2html replacement. The point of Markdown is to come up with rules that match the way people write existing email/Usenet messages as closely as possible. Any time you add a semantic to the format --- like !-headers --- that are virtually never used in email or Usenet, you might as well go all the way off the reservation and implement Textile. I hear Textile does tables, too; I'm sure someone's got an implementation that will generate HTML FORM tags as well. Knock yourself out!

<comment><USER3> That's interesting, but it doesn't really have any bearing on the thrust of the article; none of those things are cause for the slowness of current Markdown implementations.

(Also, numbered lists are one of my pet peeves with Markdown, since renumbering lists sucks. His way seems more usable.)

<comment><USER2> You don't have to renumber lists in Markdown; it numbers them independently anyways.

<comment><USER4> Still, I can see that bugging me. I could number a list with all 1.s, but that's like writing code with no indentation or extra spacing. The style of source material matters to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The paragraph type in his OCaml program is a compelling reason for why it OCaml is well-suited for writing compilers:

      type paragraph =
          Normal of par_text
        | Pre of string * string option
        | Heading of int * par_text
        | Quote of paragraph list
        | Ulist of paragraph list * paragraph list list
        | Olist of paragraph list * paragraph list list

The type definition is stated almost the same as the grammar rule would be.

<comment><USER6> OCaml is exceptionally well-suited to writing compilers, or anything dealing with complex structures of tagged data, really. (See, for instance, <http://flint.cs.yale.edu/cs421/case-for-ml.html> )

It's a neat language. It's got some implementation and usability quirks, and it seems to have a rather small / quiet community (so there aren't many books, though this one is quite good, IMHO: <http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/oreilly- book/> ), but it's worth a look.

<comment><USER5> I've been reading through The Objective Caml Tutorial, <http://www.ocaml- tutorial.org/>, but I've yet had an opportunity to implement anything with OCaml.

I've actually that essay already about how OCaml is good for compilers, but it really struck me with this example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Summarized: parsers are better than heaps of regexes, and idiomatic OCaml is pretty fast.

<comment><USER6> ...and the OCaml version is a tenth as many lines of code as the C, and a quarter as many as Python, Ruby, and Perl. Also, it uses only a seventh more memory than the C version.

For what it's worth, the OCaml version is a markup processor of the author's design, and not _exactly_ Markdown-compatible. He argues that it's close enough for benchmarking purposes, though. (I agree.)</comment></comment>


California's 'Surprise' Billing Law Is Protecting Patients and Angering Doctors - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/upshot/california-surprise-medical-billing-law-effects.html <comment><USER2> Physician here.

The problem with this law is it takes the medical reimbursement contract system and then shoots the physicians in the back.

When insurance companies are trying to get people to join their network, they offer competitive rates. Once they are large enough, they start to exert downward pressure on physician reimbursement to both existing and new medical service providers (hospitals and physicians). The only way to counteract their pricing power is to be willing to walk. Physicians do not like going out of network; the insurance companies make it incredibly painful, refuse to pay you, and instead send the check to the patient who is expected to deposit it and forward it to the patient (if they pay at all).

However, what has happened post-ACA is massive consolidation across the medical services sector so that large staffing companies would deliberately go out of network to force better rates strategically. It was no longer the individual physicians choice whether or not to out of network; rather their employers'.

However, these laws are a huge gift to the insurance companies. They remove the physician/hospital's ability to negotiate, and already, we are seeing insurance carriers refuse to negotiate or offer rates greater than 125% of Medicare. It also completely eliminates the incentive for insurance carriers to even bother creating a provider network. This is not the intent of the law and fundamentally is acting as a wage-cap.

Medicare rates are intentionally set by fiat and often below the cost of goods sold. 125% of Medicare is an arbitrary "sounds good" number that is not helping anyone but the insurance companies.

Instead, a better version of the law would be to have payments indexed to the FAIR health claims database [[https://www.fairhealth.org](https://www.fairhealth.org)].

Yes, I agree the medical reimbursement system in the US is not ideal; however, this is tantamount to price fixing which in EVERY thread on compensation for software engineers, people think what Google/Apple/et Al did to prevent wage increases and poaching was unethical and unfair to workers. I don't think this is any different.

<comment><USER3> > we are seeing insurance carriers refuse to negotiate or offer rates greater > than 125% of Medicare... fundamentally is acting as a wage-cap.

Sounds good to me.

Sorry I feel your pain but medical costs are out of control and you're part of the problem.

Consult with your friends in the industry and figure out how to make billing reasonable and fair or it's going to be imposed on you.

<comment><USER2> Right, I'll get on repealing Medicare, EMTALA, and now Balance Billing legislation before I can legally offer a sane bill. /s

The proposed solution to balance billing is linking the "out of network rate" to the FAIR health claims database. It keeps the insurers honest and allows competition at the market rate.

If you gut everyone, hospitals will close and access to care will shrink.

<comment><USER4> FAIR Health is a claims db. It doesn't have a single price. You think every doctor should be paid at what percentile - 90th? Doesn't make that much sense to me. I know that's typical UCR.

Also, you don't have to do everything, but you could start by doing something other than complaining about doctors who have ruined many people's lives getting paid less.

I'm working on setting up a Bay Area chapter of [https://rightcarealliance.org/](https://rightcarealliance.org/) (which is national) for grassroots healthcare organizing - feel free to hit me up if you'd like to participate.

<comment><USER2> I'd settle for 75th percentile to force insurance carriers to actually negotiate and not deliberately keep pruning their provider networks by offering terrible rates.

<comment><USER3> You can't have all the doctors paid at the 75th percentile. That's like saying you want everyone's children to be above average. It doesn't make mathematical sense.

At some point someone actually has to set the rate for things. If market mechanisms aren't working there needs to be another method.

The point here is that sticking customers with out of control surprise bills they have no way of foreseeing or avoiding needs to be removed from the list of options.

<comment><USER2> 75th percentile would be for when out of network. It would work to reduce ridiculous charge-master surprise bills but still provide a redress mechanism for monopolistic insurance companies playing hardball and cutting reimbursement 60% in one year (see Anthem BC/BS to pathology in multiple states).

The argument here is that by destroying the threat of out of network, the insurance company has literally no incentive to offer rates better than Medicare. That's a huge unfair advantage to insurance companies.

<comment><USER3> > The argument here is that by destroying the threat of out of network, the > insurance company has literally no incentive to offer rates better than > Medicare.

Yup. Works for me.

> That's a huge unfair advantage to insurance companies.

Not so much. Guess what I think the next part of the plan should be?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I once got a surprise bill from in-network ER because they invited a specialist for consultation, That specialist sent me a separate bill later.

No one told me upfront it will cost additional $450 to hear from the specialist that "sometimes kids are having stomach pain for no any reason".

Edit: Additional information - Blue Shield CA HMO, Cedars-Sinai ER , circa 2012. $150 ER co-pay, later $10,000 bill fully paid by insurance + $450 specialist bill not covered by insurance.

<comment><USER6> I'm an ER doc. A couple of points:

1\. If we consult a specialist, that usually means we have no idea what's going on. Sometimes, we do it for "customer service" if a patient really wants the consult and doesn't seem to trust what we're telling them. If we know ahead of time that a specialist is going to say that they don't know the cause of the pain and there's nothing to be done, then in absence of customer service issues we usually don't consult the specialist. I'm sorry you feel you got a raw deal on that.

Why we focus on customer service issues is another interesting topic. It basically comes down to hospital admin, like most other bureaucrats, love customer feedback surveys (Press-Ganey being the most common) and doctors can get in trouble or even lose their jobs if their customer service scores drop low enough.

2\. Unfortunately doctors are completely ignorant about the financial aspects of this. Likely the specialist didn't even know you would be charged $450 for his consult. I don't see any good solution to this problem, especially as we're taught in med school that the patient's health is the most important thing and financial aspects should be secondary. Not saying I agree or disagree with this, just that even if a doctor disagrees with this there's no way for them to change the facts.

<comment><USER7> [https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/us/d...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/us/drive- by-doctoring-surprise-medical-bills.amp.html) <— this sort of thing is completely indefensible.

I'm just about the most free-market person you'll ever meet, but the current situation in the US is completely untenable. I'm beyond caring about how the insurance companies tie your hands, how you're just a doctor focused on patient-care/"customer service" (that's a new one) or anything else. Here's the bottom line: doctors have the most to lose by not fixing this nonsense. Insurance execs, hospital administrators, and other various parasites can go _MBA_ something else. You lot are the ones with specialized and non- transferable skills. If you all collectively don't start using your knowledge of the medical system to propose _real changes_ , then the rest of us about going to _impose changes on your profession that I promise you will not like._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It should go further. End the in-network / out-of-network crap. One price per procedure that is the same for all customers. All providers should accept all insurances. The system we have is insane.

<comment><USER9> Currently rates are set via negotiation between providers and insurers. Roughly, when the provider and insurer can't agree on a price, then the provider will be out of network for that insurer.

Let's say we remove this, and now we have a doctor who wants to charge $200 and an insurer that wants to pay $100. How should it be resolved?

<comment><USER8> The insurance company could do their freaking job and crunch the numbers to figure out what the average price is going to be at the providers their customers go to and set their premiums accordingly so they can cover what they expect to pay.

Some of their customers will go to a doctor where a procedure costs $200, some where it costs $50, some where it costs $100. If the prices were published patients could actually make a choice based on that information.

<comment><USER10> Insurance should be just that - insurance. It's for catastrophies, not for sore throat visits. You should only claim health insurance benefits in exceptional circumstances. You don't use Geico for oil changes. And at the same time there shouldn't be any place that would charge you without warning about cost. Analogy: when you go to Firestone to rotate tires, they tell you upfront what's it gonna cost. You don't go there and they would be like: "we can not tell you how much it would cost. Every car is different. We might need to call for specialist from discount tire and he would bill you for consultation separately". No, that does not happen. They take your car, and they tell you exactly what they need to do and what will be the cost. Health care should be the same, competition on price and quality, and none of this insurance third party nonsense

<comment><USER9> _> And at the same time there shouldn't be any place that would charge you without warning about cost_

This isn't unique to healthcare, though it's worse in healthcare than other places. Say I hire a plumber to put in a toilet, and when they open up the wall to run their pipes they find major problems that need dealing with. It wouldn't be code compliant to seal things back up without fixing them. Now it's going to cost me $10k instead of $1k. (Analogy to complications during surgery, though it's less time sensitive and I would have the option of evaluating multiple people to fix the bigger problem.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just today I called my local hospital asking them how much they were going to charge me for an ultrasound _Id already preformed_. I'm in the middle of a qualifying life event and the new insurance retroactively kicks in.

I need to know how much this will cost to decide which plan is better, mine or my spouses.

The lady didn't know how much they would charge. This is the only industry where they don't know how much they're going to chi argue me _after the procedure_

An orange farmer has a price for his oranges months before his orange trees blossom.

These geniuses can't figure out the price after they delivered the product.

BS

<comment><USER12> > An orange farmer has a price for his oranges months before his orange trees > blossom

The futures market, how can we do that for people?

Joke.

<comment><USER13> Seriously though, if you applied cold rationality to healthcare and did not let human dignity get in the way, we would treat the healthcare industry more like an auto-repair shop or a veterinarian office.

<comment><USER10> It is only undignified in your mind. There's nothing wrong with being open about your prices, healthcare or not

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here's the report the NYT drew much of their data from: [https://health- access.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ha-ab72...](https://health- access.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ha-ab72report-092619.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER15> This is extremely welcome and much needed change BUT please, everyone reading this, pay attention to the fact that IF you get healthcare through your employer (aka "Group" health plan), this regulation MIGHT NOT APPLY to you and your plan if your employer did not purchase the plan through the ACA marketplace!

Group health plans are, EXEMPT, from most state regulations. I know it does not make sense and sounds unbelievable but unfortunately your employer has more lobbying power than you do!

As a result you, the employed, could still be on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars in surprise medical bills with little recourse (because you are employed and don't qualify for financial relief) and can have your wages garnished, which WILL be exercised by the provider if you refuse to pay the bill.

The providers are OON precisely because they make more money that way and there's little reason for them to be in-network (they have nothing to gain by being in network!)

So if you go to the ER today in an ambulance - that's highly likely to be OON - and have your XRays and/or CT scans read by a radiologist that's also highly likely to be OON and attended to by specialists that are also highly likely to be OON, you ARE on the hook for everything unless you're lucky enough to have a CA state regulated health plan.

Most individual plans purchased through the ACA marketplace are required to be in compliance with the regulations of the state that the employee is resident of.

Group health plans are not.

If your employer did not purchase the plan through the ACA marketplace, even if the plan is ACA compliant, it might not be required to comply with the regulations of the state that the employee is resident of as long as it's in compliance with current federal regulation of health benefits.

This can take a lot of employees by surprise, specially employees of multistate employers where the employer chooses the cheapest plan in compliance with current federal regulations without necessarily looking into state level details.

I put in some details here: [https://www.quora.com/In-the-US-the-majority-of- people-under...](https://www.quora.com/In-the-US-the-majority-of-people- under-65-years-old-have-health-insurance-through-their-employers-What-is-the- logic-behind-tying-health-insurance-to-an-employer/answer/Subhobroto-Sinha-1)

I really hope each of you take measures to decouple health insurance from employment.

How do we, in this day and age, still think, an employer has the right to solely dictate the standard of care we receive?

Please, if you think it's logical to so severely and tightly couple health insurance with your employer, let's have a discussion.

<comment><USER4> Yes, self-insured employer plans are exempt from state law under ERISA. It sucks but the big multi-state corporate lobby doesn't want to have to deal with the patchwork of state laws.

I believe the DOL could fix this via regulation, but doubt they will.

S 1895 Lower Healthcare Costs Act would fix this nationally [https://www.natlawreview.com/article/beyond-surprise- billing...](https://www.natlawreview.com/article/beyond-surprise-billing- lower-health-care-costs-act-2019)

<comment><USER15> Loved the link, thank you.

I personally believe, the main way to untangle this mess is to make it indifferent for employers to provide primary care plans and repeal Executive Order 9250 that allows employers to claim exemptions.

They are free to provide any secondary and supplementary plans

It's past the time employers and health insurance are tightly coupled.

It's holding back progress.

<comment><USER4> Everyone who knows anything about healthcare policy has been on board with decoupling for decades, but the big corporate self-insured plans lobby plus the union lobby plus the loosely-informed general public is too strong.

ACA exchanges set up the infrastructure to decouple in a market-oriented way.

But single-payer would also fix it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> tl;dr version, law works as expected and takes money out of the pockets of people who were over charging. They are mad and so they are throwing around as much FUD as they can dig up in an effort to keep this from spreading.

I know, the question of "over charging" is a difficult one to answer. All of the evidence on people willing to be doctors in California suggests that there are plenty of suppliers who will work willingly in the new system. That says to me it is working as intended.

<comment><USER17> Good. Free market doesn't work when refusing to pay for the product costs you in health or even life.

<comment><USER18> > Free market doesn't work when refusing to pay for the product costs you in > health or even life.

The free market works great to provide food.

<comment><USER19> If you are in the US, food is one of the most heavily subsidized items people typically buy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> had a child born in a hospital in the bay area before this law and had the anaesthesiologist send a bill that looked he typed it on his typewriter. Wasn't even one of the official one's you see from a dr's group. No website, no email, just the guy's personal #.

</comment><comment><USER21> Socialized healthcare works. Capitalistic healthcare works. This ungodly mess we've created in the US that combines the worst aspects of both doesn't work. When everything is secret and there's no actual competition between providers but also no regulatory controls to prevent abuse you get the worst possible results.

<comment><USER22> In which countries does capitalistic healthcare work well? Or do you mean just within your theory it works well and that there are none that actually do it?

<comment><USER23> Switzerland. Netherlands. In one ranking they are the best systems in Europe.

<comment><USER24> Do any of them not have price controls and a "public option" of some sort? And sometimes prohibition on for-profit insurance (Switzerland, for example, IIRC)?

<comment><USER23> No public option from what I know. Insurance is all private, Swiss require no profits while Netherlands allows for profit. Government subsidies and restrictions exist on the plans, similar to Obamacare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> While I agree with the sentiment behind the article I think it is disgustingly and unnecessarily subjective. They have stripped their readers of the basic human desire to make up our own minds about what they read. Shame on them. The irony with my comment it that it is not in the least bit objective. Shame on me.</comment>


Ask HN: What little decision has created the most happiness in your career? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Leave a job that doesn't make you happy

<comment><USER3> Arguably not a _little_ decision, but yes I totally agree

<comment><USER2> You're right I missed that!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1st decision - working remote. I guess you could call it a huge decision, but yes - it's amazing!

2nd decision - getting a dog. I can't say it enough - how much it helps. I now have two dogs (long story!), and without them, I don't think I could handle the stress.

</comment><comment><USER5> I work remotely, but opt to work in a co-working space that I walk to, year round. The social aspect is great, but the built in 3.5 to 4km of walking and fresh air every day along with music/podcasts is the clearest win of anything I do.

It's exercise, and mental and spiritual time. Allows me to get into work mode in the morning and back to dad mode on the way home without any commute stress.

</comment><comment><USER6> Decision to seek financial independence and to retire as early as possible. I'm not there yet, but I already mentally don't give a damn - if they fire me, there are plenty of other jobs when I can get the capital I'm still missing to reachy goal. This is a very freeing way to work, otherwise I'd go crazy with stress from my job.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you think of something, create it out. No point keeping it in the head.</comment>


Hulu is eliminating its free, ad-supported streaming service - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/8/12401884/hulu-cancels-free-streaming-move-to-yahoo-view <comment><USER2> A couple years ago I was watching Hulu and noticed the ads always felt like they took much longer to play than they should.

I got out my iPhone and timed the seconds as they counted down during ad time on Hulu. Each second of ad time on Hulu took 1.34 seconds of actual time to pass. They were telling you for example, that there were 2 minutes of ads about to play, but the 120 second countdown would actually take 160 seconds to pass.

I stopped watching Hulu altogether after that discovery. I think I checked back in more recently and they had stopped doing that, but it's still a little telling about where their head is at regarding ads and their customers.

<comment><USER3> Youtube uses some magical time calculation as well. When I watch on my roku it says "you can skip this ad in 5 sec", it usually takes ~7-10 for it to pop-up.

<comment><USER3> I just timed this, and yes, it took 10 seconds for the 5-second skip to pop-up

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hulu has always seemed like its primary goal is to serve the incumbent television providers, and not their viewers. I don't know if it's still this way, but when the paid version was first introduced, I tried it for a while, but they often only had the most recent season of a show. What am I supposed to do with that? Start watching a show at season 5?

Netflix gets it: I want to either watch the whole show from the beginning (not necessarily in a binge, but sometimes), or watch the first episode and stop. There is _never_ a time where I think "Oh, let's watch episode 9 from season 3 from this show I've never watched before".

I have Netflix and Amazon Prime; is there a reason to add Hulu to the mix, at this point? Are there shows or movies on Hulu that I'm not getting from Netflix or Prime? I am becoming more and more disappointed in the selection at Netflix, even while their exclusive content has gotten better their movie selection has begun to _suck_. I'd really like it if there were a good movie service, like Netflix once was. Hulu obviously isn't that, of course.

<comment><USER5> > I have Netflix and Amazon Prime; is there a reason to add Hulu to the mix, > at this point?

If you want to watch currently airing shows on your own schedule, instead of when they actually air. If you only like to watch back catalogs, maybe it isn't for you. But you can't watch the very latest episodes of in-season shows on Netflix or Prime (for the most part).

Hulu is mostly a replacement for DVR/cable On Demand, not DVD box sets (although they do have a decent number of full runs these days).

<comment><USER4> I don't own a TV and have never had cable. I have no idea what's currently on television. I don't really care to watch shows as they happen, in the general case; I'm fine watching them at the end of the season (or all at once from the beginning, the way Netflix does their shows). There are very few shows I'd be extra excited to get as they air (Game of Thrones is the only one that comes to mind, and I would pay to watch it in a reasonable way online, but HBO doesn't provide a reasonable way to do so).

Netflix has historically been my favorite of the available options; but their selection, particularly movies but also shows, has gotten pretty weak in recent years, so I always vaguely consider alternatives. But, mostly I just end up renting via Amazon Instant Video when it's something that Netflix and Prime don't have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Cool, now if they could not show ads for their paid service, that'd be great.

<comment><USER7> We pay $12/month so Hulu diesn't show us ads. Really worth the extra money.

<comment><USER8> There are still ads on some shows even if you pay $12.

<comment><USER5> In case anyone was wondering, from [https://help.hulu.com/articles/52427902#list](https://help.hulu.com/articles/52427902#list)

"In response to feedback from our viewers, we started offering a commercial free experience on Hulu. For a small number of shows, however, we have not obtained the rights to stream commercial free and they are not included in our No Commercials plan. You can still easily access these shows with a short commercial before and after each episode with no interruptions during the episode. Specific shows that still have commercials accessible through the No Commercials plan will be noted throughout the signup, switching and playback experience. While the list of shows may change, they are currently: Grey's Anatomy, Once Upon a Time, Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Scandal, Grimm, New Girl, and How To Get Away With Murder."

It's seven shows, and even on those the ads are only at the beginning and end they don't interrupt the show. I say we cut them some slack.

<comment><USER9> _cringes_ Well, I admit there are only a few things they don't have the full rights to, and they're shows I don't watch, but I still find this grating. They said "ad-free" and I pay for that. Not "almost ad-free".

<comment><USER10> So they pull the content that they'd have to show ads on, and now you're complaining that the paid tier has less content than the free tier does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Between Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, HBO Go, Showtime, etc on-demand services... what is left keeping people from cutting the cable TV cord? Just awareness and inertia? (Which are powerful, witness AOL dial-up ISP for a decade+.) Or are there other things keeping people tethered still? Sports? Reality TV series which don't all make it onto these on-demand services?

Think this a smart move on Hulu's part. And depending on the economics, potentially smart for Yahoo+Verizon too.

<comment><USER12> In the US, you cannot get Olympic coverage without a cable subscription. The streaming from NBC demands authentication with the credentials from your cable subscription. I don't have one. I can't even try to use my internet service credentials, because my current apartment includes 50/50 fiber for free (the most first world problem. Maybe even a .5 world problem).

I signed up for Sling[0] for a free trial to watch the games. The annoying part is that the event I truly care about (Judo) is minimally covered on network television and at awkward hours.

[0][http://www.sling.com](http://www.sling.com)

<comment><USER13> _In the US, you cannot get Olympic coverage without a cable subscription._

Not _entirely_ true if one doesn't mind a little grey area by SSH tunneling to your London, UK Linode and watching it on BBC. There was a good step-by-step post at [http://bearsfightingbears.com/how-to-watch-the-olympics- live...](http://bearsfightingbears.com/how-to-watch-the-olympics-live-from- the-united-states), but it doesn't work for me anymore. It's what I did in 2012. Now I just don't care enough to bother. :-)

<comment><USER12> Yes, my "In the US" means for a network endpoint in the US. There are always ways to exert control over where the apparent endpoint of your connection is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I remember when Hulu first launched. Hulu was the future.

I than remember my IP being blocked by Hulu because I was running a Tor node. Before you say that sounds reasonable, it wasn't an exit node. And Tor provides methods to tell the diference.

I was forced to take the node down, because my brother wanted Hulu, and we live together.

Goodbye Hulu. Goodbye and good riddance. I know you think your customers will join your paid service. They won't. Most of your users are bound for either the richer streaming services, or PopcornTime and similar.

Way to make yourself less relevant.

<comment><USER15> Considering Hulu is owned by ABC, Fox, and Comcast, any optimism of a delighted customer would have been misplaced. They were basically competing against their own model and had every reason to make you miserable.

They refused to validate the netflix model.

<comment><USER14> Speaking as a member of an area Comcast serves, they are the devil. They're actually worse than other ISPs. Somehow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Hulu was amazing when it launched, but it's gone downhill ever since. The last couple of times I've tried it, they show more commercials than I'd see just watching the show live or on-demand. Plus it was a 1:1 relationship so if a show had 10 commercials, it was the same one repeated 10 times.

Even if it was a free service, I can't justify using it over literally any other streaming option out there, including on-demand where you can't fast forward through commercials.

</comment><comment><USER17> So you can PAY to see ads just like cable TV.

<comment><USER18> Or like most any magazine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Don't know why they still force you to watch commercials for anything that is on FOX even when you pay the upgrade.

<comment><USER20> Only if you are on the $7.99 plan. To me, if you're willing to pay $7.99 for Hulu, why wouldn't you pay $4 more to avoid ads (unless you really like ads, I guess)?

<comment><USER21> > To me, if you're willing to pay $7.99 for Hulu, why wouldn't you pay $4 more > to avoid ads (unless you really like ads, I guess)?

One can not like ads, but have the expected total disutility experienced in Hulu-based ads on the $7.99 plan that would be avoided on the $11.99 be worth less than $4/month, in which case the rational choice would be to not upgrade to the ad-free tier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > main product appeal: choose what to watch.

> free, ad-supported version: you can't choose what to watch.

I may be wrong here, but why even call them by the same name?

</comment><comment><USER23> Thats fine. The only option that makes sense to me is the highest plan. It's all or nothing</comment>


Lever (YC S12) raises $10M to make hiring awesome - <AUTHOR> https://blog.lever.co/the-next-chapter/

<comment><USER2> > _Quora has used time freed up by Lever's communication workflows to double > down on strategic sourcing. Last quarter, over 40% of their hires were > sourced, top-tier passive candidates, a rate 5-6x greater than before._

Can someone explain what this means, in English?

<comment><USER3> Hey! I'm Nate, one of the founders of Lever and our CTO. Sourcing is a word that companies and recruiters use to mean going out and finding candidates that aren't looking for a job (passive), but that have a really high relevance to what the company is looking for.

As hiring has gotten increasingly competitive, companies have been finding that the best candidates usually come from a personal connection. The best candidates usually come via a referral from someone's personal network or via sourcing efforts, where the company goes out and finds people that are a really strong fit based on their interests and experience.

Lever has a number of features that specifically make sourcing easier: [https://lever.co/features.html](https://lever.co/features.html). The best is our Chrome Extension for easily creating candidates in Lever from a web profile. We also have really great 2-way email sync that uses IMAP to sync Gmail threads in realtime, so that your company can follow along on what is happening with candidates and make sure that you don't drop the ball.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It would be cool if this helps Derby go somewhere!</comment>


Stop Watching Us – Find a Viewing Party or Satellite Protest Near You - <AUTHOR> https://rally.stopwatching.us/viewing-parties/

<comment><USER2> Funny how none of the PRISM companies support this initiative. However, say, Google's participation would highly increase the awareness of the cause. But all they came up with are copycat press releases to deny NSA revelations and a non-significant motion to allow for full FISA orders statistics be published (which was denied, incidentally).

<comment><USER3> Remember SOPA, when the NSA partner companies threw their weight in to stop it from happening?

Apparently SOPA was more of a cause to them than a movement bound to turn western society into of couple of police states.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Washington DC rally stream will be live on the home page at this time also.

Thanks to Ustream.com and also Tintup.com which will be sponsoring a live event feed on the home page.

</comment><comment><USER5> just heard about it 3 days again but to organize something in Austria, you usually need some weeks of preparation. Hopefully we can support you next year here in Austria as well.</comment>