Operation Shady Rat Is The Largest Cyber Attack Ever Uncovered - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/09/chinese-hacking-201109

<comment><USER2> The most shocking revelation IMO is that "less than 10 percent of [RSA's] customers have requested replacement tokens". IOW, everybody knows the entire SecurID system was compromised, yet _90% of its users decided to do nothing about it_!

<comment><USER3> I believe that is weasely at best, I've been given the impression previously that over 50% of the tokens in active use had been switched out before the public announcement of the free replacements was made. Perhaps they're doing something like counting every company that bought a few for an eval and aren't using them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A better account of the story at the McAfee Blog: [http://blogs.mcafee.com/mcafee-labs/revealed-operation- shady...](http://blogs.mcafee.com/mcafee-labs/revealed-operation-shady-rat)

<comment><USER5> In the comments of this the blogger notes that malware put in place to launch the exploits were all for Windows machines. It sounds like it mostly works by getting unwitting users to click on unknown emails. It's been 15 years and we're _still_ doing that?

<comment><USER6> Not quite 'unknown' e-mails as I would think of them - these were e-mails that appeared to be from co-workers and addressed specifically to another individual, hence _spear_ -phishing, rather than just phishing. For all intents and purposes, it probably had all the appearances of a legit e-mail.

<comment><USER5> If I understand it, then, someone opens the initial payload which allows malware to be downloaded- and this downloaded malware orchestrates the "spear phishing?"

I haven't seen this as I've been out of an organization for quite a while. Thanks for clarifying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The sidebar can be slightly NSFW. Here is a version of the same article without the distractions: [http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/09/chinese-h...](http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/09/chinese- hacking-201109?printable=true)

</comment><comment><USER8> Fascinating reading - my take-home is that US corporates are going to have to have disclosure rules whether they want to or not. The question is whether this will come from Congress or the regulators.

</comment><comment><USER9> > As spring gave way to summer, bloggers and computer-security experts found > evidence that the attack on RSA had come from China

They never say what evidence, which is the most interesting part of the article. Does anyone have a more detailed description of how they identified it was China?

<comment><USER10> I worked on the technical side of the RSA attack analysis and not the attribution/political side but some guy on Twitter (<https://twitter.com/yuange1975>) who pretends to be Chinese has claimed responsibility for the RSA 0-day and some other high profile 0-day exploits on his Twitter feed in a way that makes him the credible original source of those exploits.

I am sure the people on the attribution side dug deeper than this (for example they most likely tried to verify that this guy is really Chinese and not just pretend-Chinese) but I don't know anything about the non-technical side of things.

<comment><USER9> That's cool. Much better than the blah acticle. 袁哥 is actually a very skilled hacker and reputable in China. IIRC He works for NSFocus, NSFocus used to be the de facto operator of China's G.F.W., it was replace by another firm after a Taiwan spy issue.

edit: [http://jeffreycarr.blogspot.com/2011/06/18-days-from-0day- to...](http://jeffreycarr.blogspot.com/2011/06/18-days-from-0day-to-8k-rsa- attack.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So much drama, handwaving and name calling in this VF's article...

</comment><comment><USER12> While I support the opinions with regard to security and disclosure as presented, the rest of the article is regrettably lacking in detail, specifics, evidence, or attributable quotes on what has actually occurred. It's hard to say if this is just the typical style of a piece for general audiences on this topic, or the tail wagging the dog on attributing these things to china in the public eye.

Frankly, what's more alarming; the dedicated resources of a single state actor, or a complex, emergent network of self-interested individuals and groups persuing their own aims?

I find the Chinese explanation a little too convenient and a little too amenable to typical national defense thinking. What this article really says to me is that if you want to hack an American company, own a Chinese box first. Nobody will look any further.

<comment><USER3> The truth is that both are happening. When you talk to people who are pragmatic and watch the strategic elements they are often saying things like "or someone operating with chinese cover". There is definitely evidence that other actors are using chinese IPs, working hours and techniques to muddy the water. But at the same time, a preponderance of evidence suggests strongly that a majority of these attacks are from chinese sources. Keep in mind that military and national security investigators - even private sector investigators - have access to a lot more intelligence about these matters than simply what IP launched what. So, yes, while some intrusions from china are undoubtedly the work of non-chinese it still makes sense to focus a lot of your efforts on the dragon in the room.

<comment><USER12> i totally believe that there is more evidence out there, it is just rarely actually revealed.

so it seems at least possible that there is some collusion, conscious or not, between journalists and cybersecurity spooks to name an enemy in order to get traction in the public mind, vs. saying "well, it's from a lot of different people, lots of stuff from china, and who knows what else."

I even think this might be a good strategy - I guess my point is i'd like to see more real public evidence before we accuse foreign governments of attacking us in the press. not because i don't believe it is happening, but because i feel those assertions should be backed up if they're going to be made.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Let's review Computer Security 101 with a case study in Mainstream Media Morality Play Nonsense 102:

The article is garbage. Nonsense. Brain-dead. Trying to jerk people around by the gut.

'Vanity Fair' is for what, overly emotional, determinedly non-technical, easily scared, fundamentally incompetent and, thus, dependent, young woman who want to gossip about fashion and celebrities?

If the article had anything, then it would have explained something solid; since nothing solid was explained, it must not have had anything.

So, the article starts with:

"Lying there in the junk-mail folder, in the spammy mess of mortgage offers and erectile-dysfunction drug ads, an e-mail from an associate with a subject line that looked legitimate caught the man's eye. The subject line said '2011 Recruitment Plan.' It was late winter of 2011. The man clicked on the message, downloaded the attached Excel spreadsheet file, and unwittingly set in motion a chain of events allowing hackers to raid the computer networks of his employer, RSA. RSA is the security division of the high-tech company EMC. Its products protect computer networks at the White House, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, most top defense contractors, and a majority of Fortune 500 corporations."

and in particular:

"The man clicked on the message, downloaded the attached Excel spreadsheet file, and unwittingly set in motion a chain of events allowing hackers to raid the computer networks of his employer, RSA."

Garbage. Absolute reeking, fuming, bubbling, flaming, smelly, gooey, sticky, yucky nonsense.

So, he received an e-mail message. Okay, we're talking likely post office protocol 3 (POP 3).

Back when I was using OS/2 and had no decent e-mail software, I took out an afternoon and wrote my own POP 3 client e-mail software. I used it for years. I'm about to ditch Outlook 2003 and return to what I wrote (in Rexx) on OS/2.

Gotta tell you, no way, not a chance, was there any way to infect my computer by sending me e-mail. Not in this galaxy. Send me anything you want, pictures, viruses, root-kits, Flash, infected, 'active' PDF files, EXE files, Active-X files, spreadsheets, etc., and no way will my computer be 'infected'. Just impossible.

Why: First, the data that comes via POP 3 is lines of text of just 8 bit characters. Period.

At the beginning are the 'header lines'. The end of the header lines is denoted by one blank line.

The rest of the e-mail is just the 'body', and it is just more lines of text of 8 bit characters.

Harmless. It's just some simple minded data as lines of 8 bit characters. Can put the data in an ordinary file, edit it with an ordinary editor, view it on the screen, print it out, etc. All harmlessly.

The body may have a PDF file, a movie, some audio, some Flash, and EXE file, a spreadsheet, etc., and still it's all just harmless data. Period.

If there is one or more 'attachments', then each of these is delimited by a line with some text indicated in the header. Each such attachment is just more lines of text. To permit sending any data at all, these lines of text consist of just 65 simple-minded, old ASCII printable characters. You can print them out, and they won't hurt you, steal your bank records, install software on your computer, etc. They are 100% harmless.

Those 65 characters are part of a scheme called 'base 64 encoding' which is part of the e-mail 'multi-media internet mail extensions' (MIME).

For such an attachment. can follow the base 64 rules and 'decode' the attachment back to the original data in the file. The file, then, will be a sequence of 8 bit bytes. Give the file any name you want and put it in any directory ('folder') you want. Yes, you do NOT want to put the file where other software will use that file without your knowledge; but why would you do that? E.g., don't overwrite some important operating system DLL file.

The file may be in the format of an EXE file, JPG file, GIF file, PNG file, XLS file, etc. Still it is just a file, just a sequence of bytes. Like any other sequence of bytes, it's harmless, will not cause blindness, falling hair, black toenails, or an infected computer. You can copy it, back it up, send it as an attachment via e-mail, etc. all harmlessly.

The file can be a virus, a root-kit, a Trojan, malicious, malevolent, nasty, etc., but STILL is just 100% harmless, safe, and innocuous. No rubber gloves needed.

Now, if the computer is being used by a total dummy, idiot, drooling on the keyboard, licking the screen, etc., then there might be a threat: The rube might permit such a file to execute as software on their computer. Dumb. Stupid. Brain-dead. Don't do that. Never do that.

First rule of computer security:

         Never, ever permit data from an untrusted
         source to execute as software.

Never. Ever. Don't do that.

So, if there was a computer security problem, then it was NOT the e-mail, the attachment, or the spreadsheet but JUST some total idiot who let such an attachment execute as software.

Any author of any e-mail program that lets data execute as software without very explicit approval of a user should be dragged through the streets while peasants throw garbage, two week old dead animals, night soil, upchuck, toxic witch's brew, effluent from tanning animal skins, etc., racked, excoriated, eviscerated, drawn, quartered, hung, dried, roasted, and fed to sick animals.

<comment><USER14> You are sorely mistaken. First, the article clearly states that the user downloaded and opened the file. It was not some automatic process put into motion by the mere fact that someone emailed him, as you suggest in your rant.

Second, I suggest you take a moment to reconsider your position that "a virus, a root-kit, a Trojan, malicious, malevolent, nasty, etc., but STILL is just 100% harmless, safe, and innocuous" unless the computer is being operated by an idiot. That is, unless you have never, on any occasion, been a victim of malware yourself. If that is the case, I suppose it is possible that you are superior, in every way, to the rest of the computing world. Has it occurred to you that perhaps there is a legitimate reason for the thriving computer security industry?

It is a fact that there are very competent people behind these attacks. You don't slip through the security of the likes of major defense contractors and multi-billion dollar internet companies like Google without some skill. It is also a fact that even the most competent computer users make mistakes from time to time. The whole scenario seemed quite plausible to me, without my having to assume that RSA employs a bunch of idiots.

As for your gripe about the quality of the article, think about the target audience. You are obviously not a part of it. It was directed at the mainstream, and it would have been inappropriate to fill it with technical details that only another hacker would understand. That said, I thought it was a pretty decent article. It explained in relatively easy to understand terms how the attack worked and the possible rationale behind it. The tech-savvy readers can use a little imagination to fill in the technical gaps. You probably already have a pretty good idea how some parts of it worked. You don't need to trash the author for not spelling it out for you. It's not supposed to be a howto guide.

<comment><USER13> Part I

Please seriously entertain my claim that the article is not to inform computer users about how to avoid 'malware' but, instead, is just a case of a standard practice in journalism to distort a real situation to create uninformed fears to grab people by the gut to get their eyeballs for the ads.

In particular, the article is very far from reality about computer security.

Next, you are just not reading; instead, you wrote:

"You are sorely mistaken. First, the article clearly states that the user downloaded and opened the file. It was not some automatic process put into motion by the mere fact that someone emailed him, as you suggest in your rant."

Totally, flatly, clearly, absolutely wrong. Your "and opened the file" is just wrong. The article never said any such thing. I just went through the whole article and looked at every case of the string 'open', and at no point did the article mention that the file was open or opened. And in the first paragraph with the start of the story, nothing like 'opened' was described or even implied.

Instead, the situation in the article was just as I quoted in the key statement from the first paragraph of the article:

"The man clicked on the message, downloaded the attached Excel spreadsheet file, and unwittingly set in motion a chain of events allowing hackers to raid the computer networks of his employer, RSA."

There is nothing here about 'open' in any sense.

Indeed, if this sentence were correct, then with any decent e-mail software his computer would have been quite safe.

Of course, "downloaded the attached Excel spreadsheet file" has to be wrong: The e-mail message would have already been received, in total, with the "attached" file so that the file did not need to be "downloaded". Of course, if the file was "downloaded" from just a URL in the e-mail message, then the file was not "attached" to the e-mail message. So, either the spreadsheet file was attached or downloaded but not both.

With irony, your:

"It was not some automatic process put into motion by the mere fact that someone emailed him, as you suggest in your rant."

gets at the main bad point in the article: The author is interested in drama, just drama, to grab readers by the gut, and in the special case of drama as some threat from some inexplicable, unfathomable, hidden evil forces of darkness. In particular the article did NOT include your "opened" the file and, instead, just had its:

"unwittingly set in motion a chain of events allowing hackers to raid ..."

So the threat was not from your "opened" but from its "unwittingly", that is, synonymous with my "inexplicable, unfathomable, hidden" and, with irony, also with your "some automatic process ...". The author IS claiming that the 'infection' was from some "automatic process" which, of course, is nonsense.

Again, the main claim early in the article is that any computer user is vulnerable to a massively destructive infection and security breach MERELY, "unwittingly", from an "automatic process", of receiving a bad e-mail and then downloading an attachment. This claim is nonsense, total 100% fuming, flaming, reeking nonsense. It's wrong, and from an effort to create confusion to scare people.

For your

"Second, I suggest you take a moment to reconsider your position that 'a virus, a root-kit, a Trojan, malicious, malevolent, nasty, etc., but STILL is just 100% harmless, safe, and innocuous' unless the computer is being operated by an idiot."

No, my statement is correct, a nice contribution, and fully appropriate for the subject of computer security for users of e-mail and personal computers.

To repeat, the key point for the target audience is not some "unwittingly" but just what I wrote:

         Never, ever permit data from an untrusted
         source to execute as software.

That's the key rule that everyone using a personal computer today needs to commit to memory, tattoo on the back of their right hand if necessary, pray to God each day at bedtime if necessary, and follow in all computer usage without exception.

The rule is simple and plenty within the ability of nearly any computer user.

And the rule insists that computer users know the difference between data just sitting in a file and data permitted to execute as software; this difference is just crucial.

Of course, the article, out of convenient ignorance or deliberate confusion or both, wanted to avoid mentioning your "opened", to avoid saying that the problem was not receiving the e-mail with an attachment, was not downloading a spreadsheet file, but WAS 'opening', and thus executing as software, data from an untrusted source.

The poor computer user was fine, safe, secure, etc. up to the moment they 'opened' the file. Again, the problem was 'opening' the file and not just receiving or downloading, unwittingly or not, the file.

"That is, unless you have never, on any occasion, been a victim of malware yourself."

The usual approach of the losing side of an argument is to attack the other person, not the other ideas. So, you are now after me, personally. I'm not the subject here; the article and computer security are the subject.

I've never gotten an infected computer via e-mail. With any decent e-mail software used in any decent way, it's essentially impossible for anyone to get an infected computer via e-mail. Again, as I explained, all standard SMTP and POP 3 e-mail is is just some lines of text of 8 bit bytes. This data is super simple to handle safely. To get an infection from such data, have to work at it. I made this point clear; it's good news; apparently you missed it.

<comment><USER13> Part II

Sadly, last year I did have at least three infections, my first ever. All three were from Web browser usage. I don't know the sources of the first two, but the third infection was from one use of the Akamai download manager software to get a PDF file from an Asus Web site. As I since discovered, that Akamai program is a common source of viruses: There are some obscure parameters in the program with some bugs, and passing the right string from an HTML page to the program can infect a computer. So, again, the problem was that the Web browser and the Akamai software permitted software from an untrusted source to execute.

My solution:

(1) Except for a few, essential, explicitly trusted Web sites, do Web browsing only in Windows User mode and not Windows Administrator mode.

(2) Severely restrict what Web browsers can do. For each browser, spend hours or a few days going over each browser security option in detail and block everything at all questionable until have a browser that barely works on common Web sites. When on some Web sites the security options are too severe, f'get about the sites. For the options, document each click. Of course, must block Java and Active-X as if they were bytes of Anthrax.

(3) Disable all Web browser plug-ins except Flash. Due to the security threats of Flash, restrict Web browsing only to 'mainstream' Web sites and hope and pray.

In particular, never even entertain enabling anything like the Akamai download manager. If want a PDF file from Asus, then try to get one sent as an e-mail attachment instead of via a browser plug-in. For now and into the future, regard essentially all browser plug-ins as never to be used. Period.

(4) For PDF files, let Adobe Acrobat read only files from relatively trusted sources. Disable the ability of a Web browser to call Adobe Acrobat automatically. That is, do not let any PDF reading software be an enabled browser plug-in.

(5) After any software changes, review again what browser plug-ins are enabled and again disable all but Flash (many software installations install and enable browser plug-ins without permission or notification). Swat back all those plug-ins like infected insects.

(6) Once a month download and run the latest Microsoft Malicious Software Removal tool (MRT).

(7) Keep a copy of the boot partition when all the software on it was freshly installed and still virus free, and be able to restore that copy of the partition given any symptom of a virus. With some effort, some careful usage of options, 'decoding' some really obscure Microsoft documentation, some experiments, some guessing, some detective work, and a few days of work, maybe two weeks full time, this saving and restoring are possible via the standard Windows program NTBACKUP.

(8) Of course, block all automatic software updates and downloads, and minimize all software updates. When the system is working, essentially FREEZE it -- if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

(9) Try hard to block any automatic execution of any software on removable media. Here, Microsoft tries really, really, really hard to keep people from blocking such automatic execution. Microsoft really, really, REALLY wants such automatic execution and wants to sweep under the rug the outrageously obvious security threats. So, have to be very careful about what removable media insert into a Windows system.

(10) Have Windows Firewall enabled with severe restrictions.

(11) Be very careful about any software source where permit its software to execute. This means, permit third party software to execute only from essentially impeccable sources, e.g., with signed software, etc. This also means, for nearly all third party software, f'get about it.

So far these steps have worked.

For infections as in the article, that is, via e-mail, I am not concerned. In particular, for some progress on PC computer security, pay attention to my 11 steps above. Also pay close attention to the first rule of computer security. For the article and its "unwittingly" via e-mail and downloads, f'get about those. I'm passing out stuff that is from good up to great; the article is passing out nonsense.

You wrote:

"It is a fact that there are very competent people behind these attacks."

That statement is true but a 'non sequitur' in this discussion and, thus, off the subject.

The issue from the article is getting infected "unwittingly" via an attachment via e-mail, and, with anything like a decent e-mail program used in anything like a decent way, that's nonsense even for "very competent people".

In particular, the article is pointing people in the wrong direction: The problems were not from e-mail or downloading but, presumably, that is, taking the minimum from the article, from 'opening' a spreadsheet file. That distinction is key, crucial. There's nothing "unwittingly" about it. The problem was that word you claimed was there but was not -- OPEN.

"The whole scenario seemed quite plausible to me, without my having to assume that RSA employs a bunch of idiots."

It's not "plausible" to me: The problem had to be "open" and not e-mail or downloading. And "unwittingly" had no role. Again, once again, still again, over again, once more, the first rule of computer security is:

         Never, ever permit data from an untrusted
         source to execute as software.

The problem in the article was a violation of this rule.

Just what is it about this rule you are having such a really difficult time understanding? Why are you so determined to believe in "unwittingly" instead of rationality?

This rule is really good news; why are you being so determined to keep struggling in the 31 F waters instead of reaching for the lifeboat and warm, dry blankets of this rule?

"As for your gripe about the quality of the article, think about the target audience."

I am: The audience needs to f'get about the article and "unwittingly" and pay close and careful attention to the first rule of computer security. For that rule, did I mention:

         Never, ever permit data from an untrusted
         source to execute as software.

"That said, I thought it was a pretty decent article. It explained in relatively easy to understand terms how the attack worked and the possible rationale behind it."

No: That is definitely what the article, deliberately and/or incompetently, did NOT do. The article claimed that "how the attack worked" was via its "unwittingly" and downloading, which are nonsense. Again, once again, to repeat yet again, still again, the problem was OPEN and, in particular, violation of:

         Never, ever permit data from an untrusted
         source to execute as software.

That's enough. If I continue to respond to your writing from not having read what I wrote, I will be just repeating the same, simple, on target points over a dozen times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Thanks for posting this - perfect read for right before bed!</comment>


2 Counterintuitive Lessons for Technical People from the Ashes of Fyre Festival - <AUTHOR> https://exponents.co/playing-with-fyre/ <comment><AUTHOR> This post tries to look beyond the schadenfreude and extract unexpected insights from the epic fiasco that was Fyre Festival.</comment>


The need for timezone awareness - <AUTHOR> http://www.creativedeletion.com/2015/05/10/the-need-timezones.html

<comment><USER2> Trivia questions, easily answered by programmers who appreciate the subtleties of time math:

1\. If someone leaves Vancouver at 1 am and arrives in Seattle at 4 am on the same day, and you know the distance they travelled is 240 km, what was their average rate of speed? (Correct answer: 120 km/h, 80 km/h, or 60 km/h, depending on what day it is. UTC storage helps here.)

2\. If it's noon in Vancouver, what time is it in London, England? (Correct answer: 7 pm, 8 pm, or 9 pm, depending on what day it is. Knowledge of regional DST schedule differences helps here.)

It's my experience that when the programmers get date math _correct_ , they may still find themselves fielding "bug" reports from enterprise customers who _should_ understand the concept but don't (particularly if their business is billing or rate calculation -- think of short term billing for hourly parking or CPU hours as an example).

<comment><USER3> 3\. How many simultaneous "days" are active at any given time on Earth? (3; 11pm Wednesday on Baker Island is 11am Thursday in London and 1am Friday in Kiribati)

<comment><USER4> Of course that's not at 'any' given time. That is only between 10am and 11.59am GMT each day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I watch Tom Scott's "The Problem WIth Time And Time Zones" from time to time just as a reminder

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm- gesOY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY)

<comment><AUTHOR> It is a good video. The good thing about using a library like Kalends is that it takes into account everything he mentions about different timezones into account. Just tell it the time, date, and timezone name.

Just be careful about generalizing too much and assuming things such as: "this time will exist again tomorrow". Or "next month also has a 31st day". Or "DST is always a 3600 second difference from standard time".

Here is another article I wrote which also talks about some pitfalls of time and timezones: [http://www.creativedeletion.com/2015/01/28/falsehoods- progra...](http://www.creativedeletion.com/2015/01/28/falsehoods-programmers- date-time-zones.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In my experience, the simplest way to program with times and dates is nearly always to convert to Unix epoch as early as you can in the process. Do all processing in Epoch, then convert back to something readable by humans at the last possible moment. This approach won't work in all circumstances, but it should be the standard approach unless there's a compelling reason not to.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm the author of the blog post and the library used in the examples.

For many operations the Kalends library actually converts to UTC (and UTC is almost the same as epoch). For instance to calculate the amount of seconds between two datetimes.

Your advice might work in a lot of cases, but if you have a good datetime library you should not need to IMO. But I am sorry to say that I do not think most datetime libraries are very good when it comes to timezones.

You don't have to manually say: oh this datetime is not UTC, I better convert it as soon as possible. If you need to save a future datatime which is not UTC, it is actually error prone to convert to UTC.

What Kalends does instead is to have a struct with an unambiguous, validated datetime and the timezone along with it.

That way, if for instance you are dealing with a datetime entered by a user, you have the actual datetime entered, but you still have all information you need to convert to UTC.

<comment><USER7> _> If you need to save a future datatime which is not UTC, [...] a struct with an unambiguous, validated datetime and the timezone along with it._

It's _less_ ambiguous but it's not 100% unambiguous because _future_ policies of Daylight Saving Time and Time Zone / Time offset boundaries can be changed by governments.

Even if the struct had extra fields for flags such as "obey future DST changes" or "ignore present TZ if different from historic TZ at time of data entry", it's still ambiguous if geographic coordinates are not embedded within the struct. Then again, there's probably some more edge cases even with latitude/longitude coordinates. (E.g. should the future time be interpreted at lat/long of where he _data-entered_ the datetime, or the lat/long of where he later _experiences_ the datetime?!)

Dates specifying future events are very tricky++. Unless, it's a future date for something celestial such as a solar eclipse; in such cases, a future date as UTC is unambiguous.

++Because we all conflate concepts of "socially-constructed future datetime as shown on a wall clock" and "scientific future datetime". We stuff both concepts into the same data structures. Nevertheless, we write software that makes educated guesses about the user intentions for "future dates" and it works for 99% of the typical use cases. (e.g. "send smartphone notification for 12:30 lunch with Bob next week.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, it is unambiguous for the current rules and zone. Usually if the rules change, you want to do the calculation again. I made a library for persisting future DateTimes to a database. Whenever a DateTime is loaded from the database, the calculation is done again. A blog post about it can be found at [http://www.creativedeletion.com/2015/03/19/persisting_future...](http://www.creativedeletion.com/2015/03/19/persisting_future_datetimes.html)

If the "borders of the timezones" change, that does not make it unambiguous, because the struct is defined as belong to a timezone name, not a specific geographical location.

<comment><USER8> What I find missing from most, if not all, date/time libraries is a three-arg timezone conversion function (i.e. one that is pure and doesn't rely on the current time or locale). Most timezone conversions take a zoned date and time and convert it to a different timezone. But it matters when/where you're doing the conversion for the reasons you're discussing. If you also supply a UTC timestamp indicating when the conversion should take place (note, not a zoned date and time, since the conversion to the universal timeline can be affected by DST changes), that conversion can be consistent no matter when/where the function runs.

I find this approach to be cleaner than saving wall time since it allows you to keep uniform times on the server and simplify server-side logic that acts on those times in bulk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Try living in a time zone that is a half-hour deviation from standard time (Newfoundland & Labrador). When I first got an iPod my time zone simply wasn't supported by the software: [https://discussions.apple.com/thread/179539](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/179539)

<comment><USER10> Try living in Nepal [0] ;)

[0] [http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/nepal/kathmandu](http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/nepal/kathmandu)

<comment><USER11> My favorite is Amsterdam Time.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTC%2B00:20](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTC%2B00:20)

> The exact timezone was GMT +0h 19m 32.13s until March 17, 1937...

Yes, 32.13 seconds.

<comment><USER12> Wow, TIL. Any idea why?

<comment><USER13> Every town used to have their own local time based on the sun being at zenith at local noon. For example, a place like Oxford would be a few minutes behind London.

With the advent of railways, it became necessary to standardize things a bit. You can imagine the difficulty if each town a train stopped in had its own timezone!

There's an interesting podcast from BBC that covers this: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/u6Qnc25jQ5OI...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/u6Qnc25jQ5OIO-X92mZz6Q)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Living in germany I often times have to raise eyebrows at the basic assumptions american coders often have with regards to encoding, timezone awareness and other common defaults.

An american friend with french heritage noticed happily after moving to germany that the accent de gue on his last name was finally printed correctly on his mail and packages.

<comment><USER15> Lets not get carried away - everyone in Germany misspells my Swedish first name. (Because I use a spelling that is not used in Germany everyone here "corrects" my name, even when I enter myself it on websites, etc.)

<comment><USER16> My French friend Stéphane (male) had a lot of trouble in the US. A very large number of sites and services don't let you enter the accent. Many places that had any kind of the human in the loop would also "correct" his gender to female and name to Stephanie.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Well that answers the question I've been asking people for years: why do people keep using PST when everyone in the world understands UTC+/-X but nobody has a timezone table in their heads? Well, timezones change (using summertime or not changes the most).

<comment><USER18> > why do people keep using PST

Especially when, for most of the year, even the US west coast doesn't use PST (they use PDT).

You may think I'm being pedantic, but most naive timezone conversion tools won't pick up this error for you, if you ask them to convert "1PM in PST to my local time". I once ended up on a conference call at the right time by myself because the other party assumed that London time was the same as UTC (it's not - they were in Daylight Saving Time, so they were an hour ahead).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Time is huge. You cannot get it right in all cases. You can only get it right for your particular case. If you try to get it right for all cases, you waste resources on something that mostly doesn't matter, and dwarf your other resources.

Time is not just calendar apps, or cron. Consider relative dates in historical studies that span past, present and future.

Study the fuck out of your use case, get it right, don't worry about others' opinions and don't think that your solution applies generally to most other use cases.

Also, among the many resources for general and specific solutions to time problems is "Calendrical Calculations," by Dershowitz and Reingold. I found it randomly, bought it on a lark, and hope to $DEITY I never haver to care about time for anything critical.

[http://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q=calendr...](http://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q=calendrical+calculations)

<comment><USER20> $265.90

Bought it on a lark??

<comment><USER19> Really? Wow. I was cruising the shelves of SoftPro books (back when they had shelves and a physical presence). The sticker on my copy says $32.99.

Well, the link I provided was to a worldwide library catalog, you should be able to interlibrary loan it to your branch if you're interested.

Or you can get a copy on Abe Books for pretty cheap.

[http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t&tn=Calen...](http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t&tn=Calendrical+calculations)

But no, my upper lark limit is considerably lower than $265.90. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I find most people doen't understand the difference between timezone and time offset.

I reciently had a huge issue trying to explain to people why we couldn't (easily) show the offset next to the city on a date time input, because we didn't have a native library to do it. They couldn't grasp that a date in the future could have a different offset for the same city and that they didn't all change at the same time.

If anyone is using JS checkout moment.js and also be aware that date objects in most client side runtimes are in the users timezone by default, and often doen't let you change the offset.

</comment><comment><USER22> According to cron's man page on Debian the "fix" that makes cron work on DST is "Debian specific". What happens on other distributions?

On Debian: [http://debian-handbook.info/browse/stable/sect.task- scheduli...](http://debian-handbook.info/browse/stable/sect.task-scheduling- cron-atd.html#idm139883800332112)

<comment><USER23> Fedora uses cronie as crond, which does something similar: [https://git.fedorahosted.org/cgit/cronie.git/tree/man/cron.8...](https://git.fedorahosted.org/cgit/cronie.git/tree/man/cron.8#n112)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm pretty sure we had a big discussion on this a couple of months ago, but I cannot find the link.

Don't forget that for a lot of applications your users don't care about time zones. "I have a meeting every Monday morning at 10:00AM and some folks from around the world call in". Its up the the programmer to figure that out for all involved.

</comment><comment><USER25> This was our topic from our local dev meetup last month. We have a video of it here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQAELeiY68E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQAELeiY68E). Interesting discussion of weird time bugs too.

</comment><comment><USER26> Even when using a library that supports timezones (and DST), handling them is still a pain, especially if one has to deal with timezone aware and _floating_ datetimes at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER27> Its not just your code that needs timezone awareness, users are all shockingly bad at understanding timezones. Daylight savings in particular needs to die.

<comment><USER28> The hardest I have noticed is to make them understand that it is not only the time, but also the date that change.

So when discussing whole timestamp or time - everybody is somewhat aware there is going to be timezone involved.

Good luck however, if you need to ask the question: "Is the instruction date (yyyy-mm-dd) in the Counterparty (Sidney), Party (London) or System timezone (Brussels) ?"</comment></comment>


The Japanese art of not sleeping - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160506-the-japanese-art-of-not-sleeping <comment><USER2> My impression of working in Japan around five years ago was that it felt like an economy medicated on caffeine.

Work goes on from 8am - 9pm, after which many are expected to go out and socialize with their colleagues (karaoke etc) and get drunk until 3am. Rinse and repeat, most days of the week. It wasn't at all unusual to see rows of salarymen asleep on the subway every morning.

Japan's most popular drink is a brand of canned coffee which is on sale everywhere and in the vending machines that line the streets. Coca Cola's brand of this coffee accounts for an outsize proportion of their global profits (something like 12%, only sold in Japan).

All of this seems to be totally okay and accepted despite the obvious impact on productivity of regularly going for long periods without sleep. This is the offices of Dentsu, Japan's largest media agency, at night: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EWX6--sQtsA](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EWX6 --sQtsA)

<comment><USER3> > after which many are expected to go out and socialize with their colleagues > (karaoke etc) and get drunk until 3am.

Is it socially acceptable not to do so? Or is there high pressure from peers or superiors to do it?

When do people spend time with their families there? If they even have families...

<comment><USER4> I wonder if one can even make it in Japan if they don't drink.

<comment><USER5> No, it's fine if you just drink tea non-alcoholic beer. You just have to act the part. At least at my wife's company it's fine (it may help she has the excuse of having to drive)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just a note (and this is only my opinion):

The photos you see of people sleeping on the stairs, etc are probably late- night drunks, not _inemuri_

The phenomenon described is real, but people do it more slumped over on the train, meetings, etc. not sprawled out on the sidewalk.

Furthermore, it extends beyond salarymen on trains; my wife & teenage daughter both do it simply as a way of life almost. They could go to bed at a decent hour but usually stay up late & catnap instead.

<comment><USER5> > They could go to bed at a decent hour but usually stay up late & catnap > instead.

My wife (as a Japanese salarywoman) is perpetually tired, but still stays up late watching TV/SNS. Why? "If I went to bed early, my whole life would just be work and sleep"

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, what part of this seems surprising, bad, unusual, etc from a western/USA perspective?

Sleeping in public, sleeping on a train, napping whenever?

The fact of time management that puts you into position that require such naps?

Or something else?

The article implies, but it's not clear for me on what.

<comment><USER8> I love the Japanese culture and I've lived there for a while.

Personally, what most shocked me is how accepted and common this is.

To the point that when I friend came to study to Spain she asked me: "Why is no one sleeping in the library?"

On the other side, I believe it's also dangerous. I visited Malaysia with my gf, and she would fall asleep in every train and taxi because it's just what they do.

<comment><USER9> I live in Tokyo and I think it's great. You can often see people at McDonalds early in the morning after a night out catching a nap before the trains start running. Just buy a coffee or something, grab a table, take an hour nap -- great. And this is Japan so you don't have to worry about your stuff getting stolen! Even if you sleep at the train station!

I also commonly see people taking naps during lunchtime in Starbucks. Someone will come in, grab a coffee, take a nap for 30 min, drink the coffee and go back to work. There's nothing wrong with that! (other than I want the table :P)

Unfortunately the corporate culture is not where it should be. There are some companies that want to be like western startups where taking a nap on the office sofa wouldn't raise an eyebrow but those are _very rare_. In most Japanese companies it would be totally unacceptable to sleep in the office.

<comment><USER10> Having a broken work/life balance is "great"?

They're cultures that you can see "see people at McDonalds early in the morning after a night out" all the time, without having to go there directly from working late...

<comment><USER9> No, you are taking "great" out of context.

It is great that you can safely take a nap in a public space without fear of being robbed or worse (as one would have to fear outside Japan), without having police called on you, and with general public acceptance of such action.

Nobody will think you're a bum or a mad or look at you funny. Try that somewhere else and let's see what happens!

Japanese corporate culture is terrible and that is sad. I don't have an answer to that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I remember the first time I visited Tokyo. The subway to Shinjuku station was packed. People seemed annoyed by my bags. We were really crammed in. Someone remarked to me that it was "rush hour" for people going home from their offices.

It was 10pm on a weeknight.

<comment><USER12> 10pm on a weeknight is around when the post-drinking going home rush hour starts. The last and second to last trains are miserable experiences for me since they reek of alcohol and I'm terrified of someone projectile vomiting on me.

<comment><USER13> A guy I know from Tokyo witnessed just such an event. He was on a train so packed you couldn't move, and when one of the commuters started yakking on his neighbor neither of them could move, so the victim had to just sit there and take it.

<comment><USER11> "So sorry!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Are the pavements really that clean or is that photo with the stairs just unrealistic? I guess it's possible, although that would require near constant vacuuming.

<comment><USER15> Someone from Germany please correct me, but aren't you required to keep the street in front of your house clean? I was amazed at how clean Germany was, then I went to Switzerland, even cleaner. Amazing.

<comment><USER16> Only in terms of hazards like snow and ice.

<comment><USER17> Exactly. There is no cleanliness requirement, but if someone gets injured because of snow and ice on your part of the way, you are liable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This seems like a simplification. Surely some Japanese prefer to try to get a good night's sleep, or would rather their colleagues didn't need to nap during a meeting.

Anyway, napping is something most cultures appreciate. Just seems we don't accommodate it as well as the Japanese.

</comment><comment><USER19> Happens in Tokyo, not in other parts of Japan;

</comment><comment><USER20> The people in the photographs accompanying the article are drunk, not sleeping.

</comment><comment><USER21> this is why the culture we have in the us, uk and other countries like it is so important. in countries like japan and korea nobody feels as though they can say or do anything on their own. they have to do what is expected of them. is it any surprise that they all end up throwing their health into the toilet under that kind of system?

<comment><USER22> The Japanese are healthier than anyone else on the planet.

<comment><USER21> then why do they kill themselves more than anyone else on the planet?

<comment><USER23> They don't?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate)

<comment><USER21> the only countries that are higher than it are developing countries and south korea, which has the same cultural problem. you cant just throw a wikipedia page at me with no context and expect me to revise my views. especially when you punctuate a declaration with a question mark like a twelve year old. japan has a high suicide rate. deal with it.

<comment><USER24> Your original phrase is factually incorrect. Had you said what's actually true instead of exaggerating for effect, you might have gotten a different answer. And about context, question marks and twelve year olds, that's rather out of place and it's exactly what you did with your original phrase.

<comment><USER21> its nitpicking. everyone knows the japanese have a very high suicide rate. i could have pointed out that the japanese are not the healthiest people in the world. the healthiest people in the world are singapore, italy and australia. but i didnt point that out because everyone knows that the japanese are very healthy. these details are not relevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> only their metro can be this clean after a flood : [https://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/chinese- citi...](https://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/chinese-citizens- amazed-by-cleanliness-of-japans-floodwater/57205)

</comment><comment><USER26> Here's a photography series on Japanese people sleeping: [http://www.kirainet.com/japoneses- durmiendo-15/](http://www.kirainet.com/japoneses-durmiendo-15/)</comment>


The World's Cheapest Hospital Has to Get Even Cheaper - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-26/the-world-s-cheapest-hospital-has-to-get-even-cheaper <comment><USER3> This article is really informative, and makes me feel proud to be an Indian. Medical care really is one of those things that no person should have to beg or borrow for, in a civil society. We're still not there yet as a country, but the signs are positive.

FWIW, I'm relatively well off and have medical insurance, but the cost is absolutely negligible compared to what I hear is prevalent in the US - <USER2> $10 / month.

It's probably just my bad luck, but I've had three surgeries in the last 10 years - an appendectomy, an ACL replacement, and a septoplasty. Each one of these was done in highly regarded (and expensive) hospitals in Delhi - Apollo, Max, and Fortis. Each time I walked out of the hospital without paying a single dime. I just had to show my insurance card, and the entire stay was cashless. In fact, after my last surgery I realised that I could have even been reimbursed for my medication post surgery if I'd kept the receipts (which I unfortunately didn't).

Anyhow, more power to Narayana.

<comment><USER4> I am not saying you should not be proud of Indian progress, but I suspect the experiences of a businessman in a big city in India are vastly different to a low caste woman with TB in rural India.

A friend of mine is a nurse who did social work in rural India. What she told me about the local hospitals was horrifying, not just the condition of the hospital and how patients with infectious diseases were sleeping on the corridors because of lack of beds, but how the doctors had a total disinterest (bordering on contempt) of the uneducated woman who she went to appointments with.

<comment><USER5> The use of the word "low caste" is in quite mean considering "poor" would be more appropriate.

Just as Black or Native American would be a poor substitute for poor american.

Or Roma/Eskimo/Greenlander/Sami for Europe

Especially considering that the current prime minister and president of India are from so called backward communities.

India has come a long way in social development and using the "caste card" is quite out of taste.

The word "Caste" is of European origin and does not have a proper native equivalent.

The "caste system" itself is again a European concept imported into India to aid the colonial powers in their divide and rule.

Unlike the persecution of the Native Americans, Blacks, Jews or Aboriginal which were systematic state run pogroms often in democracies.

The fate of the "low caste" can be attributed to the fact that they were the most exploited, often to the point of death or slavery under colonial rule. While the so called "Upper caste" enjoyed second rung positions as peons, clerks and teachers. This experience is universal in the other colonies like Rwanda, Syria or Iraq where the words "Tribes" or "Clans" have come to substitute "Caste".

It must be noted that the newly independent India gave all Indians of both sexes the right to vote and went on further to provide "reservations" the equivalent of "affirmative action". This was long before the black American even got the right to vote. Less said about Europe the better, the "Roma" still get rounded up and "deported" even though as EU citizens they have the right to mobility.

"Caste" is a powerful tool for the unscrupulous politician inside India. The excuse of colonial apologists or more markedly the evangelists (if they are not the former) outside India.

Caste a European concept so prominent in the family names of Americans and Europeans, has today become synonymous with India thanks to the relentless propaganda of the colonialists/evangelists.

<comment><USER6> It is not out of taste. Caste System(Jati System) though weakened still alive and kicking in India. (Dalits) Lowest caste layer in India is still subjugated to things like Cow vigilantism, Honour killing, Social boycott, Caste clashes and discrimination in various/all forms of life. It is interesting to note that Dalits are almost always on the receiving end of these issues.

Giving example of the Prime Minister/President is equivalent to saying since Barack Obama is the president of US, black discrimination.

PS: I belong to the so called Lower Caste in India and I have myself experienced instances of subtle/blatant discrimination. Thankfully haven't experienced anything serious yet, maybe because I became an Software Engineer and now live in a major city, thanks to the affirmative actions adopted by India, but poorer strata of lower caste living in tier-3 cities/villages face a lot of cases of discrimination even today.

While India has a long way in social development, it still has a long to go. This narrative of bashing Europeans/Outsiders/Pakistanis for anything negative has to stop. Jati System has been in practise for thousands of years now.

<comment><USER7> > I became an Software Engineer and now live in a major city, thanks to the > affirmative actions adopted by India...

You mean from reservations in school / university admissions? Or does that even extend to private employment? Is there widespread resentment?

I'm really curious about the parallels (or not) between racism in the US and caste in India, esp. affirmative action. The US never really went all-in on AA like India did with reservations -- more like pretending if we mostly ignore race then racism will go away -- but it seems like neither approach has really gotten to good place (yet).

<comment> barry-cotter If you're interested there's an interview on the Brown Pundits Podcast, "The Life and Views of a Middle Class Indian Dalit",

> In this episode, I had a conversation with a middle-class Dalit who lives in > Gujarat. For me, Dalits are people who are reported on, written on, people > who I hear about spoken of (usually sympathetically). But I wanted to talk > to a Dalit who was a university educated middle-class person, to zero in on > the essential aspect of being SC in India today. At least urban India.

> One interesting observation is that his own experience in India is filled > with slights, but not day to day oppression. It doesn't seem the lot of > Dalits in urban India is anything like that of black Americans during Jim > Crow. He seemed to assume that America had solved much of its race problem > and that that's what Dalits should aspire to. Curiously, Americans at this > point, at least on the Left, perceive our racial problems as dire.

[https://www.brownpundits.com/2019/03/06/browncast-podcast- ep...](https://www.brownpundits.com/2019/03/06/browncast-podcast- episode-20-conversation-with-a-middle-class-dalit/)

Podcast links [https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/brown- pundits/id14390070...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/brown- pundits/id1439007022)

[http://brownpundits.libsyn.com/the-life-and-views-of-a- middl...](http://brownpundits.libsyn.com/the-life-and-views-of-a-middle-class- indian-dalit)

[https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/razib-khan/brown-pundits- po...](https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/razib-khan/brown-pundits- podcast/e/59244063)

[https://player.fm/series/brown-pundits/the-life-and-views- of...](https://player.fm/series/brown-pundits/the-life-and-views-of-a-middle- class-indian-dalit)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The US healthcare system is absurdly inefficient but the nominal cost comparison given in the article is meaningless since wages make up a huge proportion of costs in healthcare (either directly or embedded in supplies and services.)

Nominal per capita income in India is ~$2000 while in the US it is ~$60,000. Simplistically one would expect costs to be approximately 30x higher in the US so a 20x difference in cost of $200,000 to $10,00 doesn't seem absurd.

<comment><USER9> Agree. I have seen estimates place purchasing power parity of USD in India as 0.3, implying that $100 spent in India purchases as much value as $300 in the USA. This would imply a $10,000 surgery in India is somewhere in the realm of $33,000 in the USA.

I have no idea on the DRG associated with pulmonary thrombectomy to even estimate what Medicare allows for reimbursement, but it's not going to be $200,000. If I find it, I will reply to this comment with an estimate.

Purchasing power parity compared to USA: [https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/PA.NUS.PPPC.RF](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/PA.NUS.PPPC.RF)

<comment><USER9> I looked into the data. This would probably be under DRG 252, 253, or 254 (DRG 252 OTHER VASCULAR PROCEDURES WITH MAJOR COMPLICATION OR COMORBIDITY, 253 OTHER VASCULAR PROCEDURES WITH COMPLICATION OR COMORBIDITY, 254 OTHER VASCULAR PROCEDURES WITHOUT COMPLICATION OR COMORBIDITY)

The medicare DRG data is available here [https://www.cms.gov/research- statistics-data-and-systems/sta...](https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics- data-and-systems/statistics-trends-and-reports/medicare-provider-charge- data/inpatient.html)

Covered charges for 2016 ranged from ~$64,000 to ~$110,000, with ACTUAL average total payments ranging $13,000 to $26,000.

This article is using differences in purchasing power parity AND the difference in charges / actual payments to generate an eye-popping headline. At the actual data level, India is more expensive compared to the US.

<comment><USER10> Hospitals usually lose money on Medicare and that's part of the reason other payors have to pay subsidy rates. Not saying they pay sticker price they are billed but I doubt 13-26k is the average reimbursement for any procedure that ties up an OR for a full day (according to the article).

<comment><USER9> Inpatient care for many major procedures are bundled under Medicare. This is actually the reimbursement for the entire hospitalization.

Yes many places lose money in Medicare as it probably reimburses at around 80% of cost but it's the only data we have, so it provides the closest thing to a national comparison.

My point is that what this article ultimately shows is that the cross border comparison can generate striking numbers but almost all articles like this never place the Indian "cheap" numbers in context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Compared to high margin low volume surgeries in the US, this is low margin high volume. Its ingenious how the highest skilled individuals only step in for the trickiest part of the surgery, but the simpler tasks like getting to a heart are performed by lesser doctors or nurses.

Some things make sense like having medical machines maintained in house. Other things, like sterilizing and reusing IV lines seem pretty risky. But perhaps the risk is approachable in this case since a patient is less likely to sue if complications arise from something that could somehow be twisted into a jackpot lawsuit?

<comment><USER12> Sterilizing and re-using IV lines definitely carries some risk. The alternative to that "risk" in India seems to be letting most not-rich people die because they can not afford to do those things differently. And the Indian health service is telling him he's _still_ costing too much. The result will be taking more risks, with some people paying the price for them. Because that is what India can afford.

Meanwhile, in the U.S. we can afford spending two orders of magnitude more. Something is not right.

<comment><USER13> For certain values of 'can afford' given the prevalence of medical debt driven bankruptcies.

<comment><USER10> The hospital afforded to write off that bad debt; after all, the procedure was done, doctors and nurses got paid, supplies bought

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> He succesfully performed a complicated surgery for $10K that would cost $200K in the US.

And India still can't afford to pay those prices.

The problem is obviously not that THIS guy is not working efficiently. It's that the distribution of wealth under our planetary economic system is deeply unfair.

<comment><USER14> Idk if I'd agree that it's "unfair" because that implies there's some natural balance we've disrupted, when in reality wealth is largely the result of labor and ingenuity. If a group of people gets together and creates wealth for themselves and their offspring, is it unfair that they are wealthier than the rest of the population? That kind of thinking at some level is fundamentally unfair itself - if you go collect and store nuts for winter you're less likely to starve. If we say that it's unfair now that you have all these nuts and winter is coming, then how does one provide for one's self fairly?

Wealth isn't distributed, it's created. I mean you can distribute after that but it would be theft.

Nonetheless I hate that some people are just born into economic situations where they are severely less able to actuakize their potential, so I share your sentiment. I just don't like the word unfair as it seems to disregard accomplishment and to me it demonizes people who have succeeded.

<comment><USER15> > in reality wealth is largely the result of labor and ingenuity

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people that this is true.

<comment><USER14> OK so if humans didn't toil to create tools and housing and technology then how did it arise?

<comment><USER16> The fundamental assertion of capitalism is that capital should beget capital.

Under capitalism, wealth is created by labor and taken by those already wealthy.

<comment><USER17> > The fundamental assertion of capitalism is that capital should beget > capital.

This quote explains just half the story. The half of the story being: "success".

Pray tell me how is wealth created by labor without someone investing the necessary capital required to begin with? It is not like the labor worked for free.

The "wealthy" laboured at one point to earn that capital. They just "chose" to invest their hard-earned capital wisely which helped them beget more capital. Upto that point, your assertion holds true.

There are many who were "wealthy" who made blunders when they did not invest their capital wisely and lost it all. Would the fundamental assertion of capitalism "capital should beget capital" hold true in this case? And for all the Zuckerbergs, Jobs and Gates out there, there are a million more who failed. Those million are proof that the fundamental assertion of "capital should beget capital" is false.

The only assertion that fits Capitalism is "Survival of the fittest". I can live with that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This was shocking to read:

> The data appear to back Shetty up. In part because its huge volumes help > surgeons quickly develop proficiency, the chain's mortality rates are > comparable to or lower than those in the developed world, at least for some > procedures. About 1.4 percent of Narayana patients die within 30 days > following a heart bypass, according to the Commonwealth Fund, which studies > public health, compared with 1.9 percent in the U.S. Narayana also > outperforms Western systems in results for valve replacements and heart- > attack treatment, the group found.

I'd always heard that although the US's healthcare is the most expensive, it also has the best outcome for specialist care. But the fact that this hospital outperforms the US while charging a fiftieth as much makes me wonder how much better the specialist care could be outside of the US given the same resources.

<comment><USER19> One of the most interesting discoveries in US medicine is that there is essentially no relationship between cost and outcomes- even within the US. The Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care has shown that there are wide price disparities within the US (and not necessarily in predictable ways, e.g. [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/06/01/the-cost- conun...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/06/01/the-cost-conundrum) ) and that they don't correlate with improved outcomes. To some extent, prices are a random walk that is orthogonal to a different random walk that is 'quality.'

Then again, repetition helps. People who do more procedures generally get better results. In colonoscopies, studies show that the fastest doctors also have the lowest false positive/negative rates, because the way you get fast and the way you get good is to do it again and again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> $2k for major surgery, nice! Last time I went to ER it was $2k for the doctor's assistant to ask a few questions and put a band aid on.

<comment><USER20> Actually it wasn't a critically urgent problem but needed doctors attention. If someone wants an idea for an app or website - a way to lookup local ERs by price would be great.

<comment><USER21> My fear is that if hospitals start to make their prices publicly available, it will drive prices _upward_ not downward.

Why? Because hospitals have no incentive to compete on price. The majority of people get ambulance'd to the nearest hospital, not necessarily the cheapest one.

So any hospital that notices it's charging less than its competitors will raise its price, because, why not? It's a very inelastic demand.

<comment><USER22> > The majority of people get ambulance'd to the nearest hospital, not > necessarily the cheapest one.

But is ambulanced-in patients the majority of hospital business?

<comment><USER21> I suppose it depends on the operation. You might find price competition in non-emergency operations, but price fixing in emergency operations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've read about this "assembly line surgery" being tried in the US as well. But the purpose was to experiment with replacing some of the more junior doctors with technicians. For example, there would be a technician who is only trained in opening the chest for heart surgery. That would be all they do, going from room to room opening chest cavities. Another technician would only do suturing at the end. These technicians would not be doctors, they would be folks who would get about as much training as an EMT (about 150 hours).

The next step after that is replacing the technicians with robots.

The only downside to this system (robots or technicians) is how will you ever get experienced doctors to do the hard stuff if they never get to practice doing the routine stuff first?

<comment><USER24> I've worked as a surgical technician and can say that this already occurs in most hospitals. It was within my scope of practice to help the doctor suture at the end of the case as well as apply staples and bandaging so that they didn't need to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> One of the bigger problems I observed in the US is a defensive approach against being sued by the patient. The doctor prescribes a battery of tests even though he is more or less sure what the symptom might be. But let's play it safe and not get sued approach to everything! Healthcare professionals carry insurances in millions against being sued. The cost ultimately gets passed on to customers. Accountability is good, but not at this cost! At the other end of the spectrum accountability is much harder in a country like India hence the incentive to take risks.

<comment><USER26> Ordering a test and not acting on the results can create liability too.

Not all tests are binary: you have to correctly interpret the levels.

And no test has 100% sensitivity and specificity.

What is clear, is that the provider can charge for these tests and their interpretation, so it creates income.

The liability talk may be a smokescreen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The problem I see in the US is a defensive approach against being sued by the patient. The doctor prescribes a battery of tests even though he is more or less sure what the symptom might be. But let's play it safe and not get sued! Healthcare professionals carry insurances in millions against being sued. This ultimately gets passed on to customers. Accountability is good, but not at this cost!

<comment><USER27> The hospital or larger healthcare organization derives real monetary value from the prescribing of these tests, I don't think it all boils down to "cover your ass". In a lot of cases it's to charge more per patient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The moment teacher sowed the seed of change: "But his attitude to school changed drastically in 1967, when a teacher informed the class that a South African doctor had just performed the world's first heart transplant."

</comment><comment><USER29> I applaud the ends but I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the means.

In circles where discipline is valued, rote tasks aren't worthless. Considering them to be beneath you can be a trap.

Those easy steps help keep you centered on your craft. They might even give you time to prepare for what comes after. Taken too far they can rob you of the time to pursue skill advancement, sure. But eliminating them completely? I think that will turn out to be a mistake in ways we can't anticipate (possibly very different from the concerns I already stated above).

</comment><comment><USER30> >Narayana has been able to get the retail cost of a heart bypass, its most common operation, down to $2,000, about 98 percent less than the U.S. average.

I'd like to see where they got these numbers. The average Medicare payment for DRG 236 (Coronary Bypass without Cardiac Catheter and without MCC) is $23,500. Something doesn't add up here. After adjusting for wage differences I'd imagine the numbers are much closer than this article implies.

<comment><USER31> There are non-assembly line private hospitals which cost 4x. Narayana doens't have AC rooms (OTOH) and otherwise cuts cost:

> right from design and construction, Narayana Hrudayalaya has sought new ways > to cut costs. It has kept the design compact, reduced empty spaces and used > prefabricated structures. Also, instead of marbles and expensive furniture, > the hospital has used simple tiles and low-cost seating, reducing the cost > per bed to Rs 12-18 lakh, compared with Rs 60-80 lakh at other corporate > hospitals.

economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/17768149.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Really interesting article. As always, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

I wonder what would happen if a company known for affordable quality, like Toyota, could make an efficient assembly-line for health care.

<comment><USER33> I think applying methods that for manufacturing to healthcare is not a good idea. Manufacturing is generally very predictable whereas health care often isn't. We already have tried to manage software development like an assembly line. That didn't work for software and I don't think it will work for health care.

<comment><USER34> > We already have tried to manage software development like an assembly line. > That didn't work for software

What makes you say that? Assemblies like:

\- product owner writes detailed user stories from communications with client

\- developers pick them, implement them, and put them up for review

\- CI server runs automated tests

\- reviewers check the code for maintainability issues

\- QA folks check the feature from the perspective of a user, ensuring that the acceptance criteria are met

\- product owner accepts and merges to shared branch

What problems do you see or have you experienced in something like this?

<comment><USER33> The usually the part that fails is this:

"\- developers pick them, implement them, and put them up for review"

In quite a few cases it turns out that it's not so easy to implement what you thought first because there is a bug in some system you are using or some other component needs to be changed too and suddenly the whole plan falls apart. There is no amount of planning you can do to avoid this. Unexpected things come up all the time.

I am not saying that health care can't improve but by nature it's much less predictable than manufacturing a car.

<comment><USER35> I think I am uniquely positioned to refute your claims.

I was a mechanical engineer at an automobile company before moving to software. The two are actually quite similar.

It is common to run into implementation issues when going from concept to production.

The big difference is, being a mature branch in an area where safety is vital, the rigor, scrutiny and time alloted to each step are significantly greater than software.

The similarity is especially pronounced on enterprise software products that have long intervals between releases.

A lot of unexpected things happen with cars that go into production all the time. Thankfully cars have a lot of redundancy required by safety. So, small problems can often be glossed over.

<comment><USER33> "I was a mechanical engineer at an automobile company before moving to software. The two are actually quite similar"

Me too :-)

Yes, things happen when you get something in production but at some time you reach a fairly stable state and things are predictable and easy to measure and quantify. With medical procedures you often encounter surprises.

I agree there is something to learned but it would be terribly arrogant to say "We have figured it out for cars and therefore we have figured out medical care and software development"

<comment><USER35> > Me too :-)

I am pleasantly surprised. Always nice to see people who have made such a transition.

I agree with you on all points here. Once in production, stability is achieved and car companies certainly do not hold all the secrets to resource allocation and administrative approaches to healthcare.

The degree of unpredictability is higher in software and medical procedures. The supply chain - production approach can only get so far.

That being said, the production approach can work splendidly well for low risk diagnoses. The production approach has already been adopted by some software companies. Especially contract based companies that involve a well defined repetitive grind and set of tools. Think developing a Cash-of-clans like mobile game or making websites for certain organizations. Both industries are quite mature. The software problem isn't interesting, but it also rarely throws curve balls.

_______

I am going on a slight tangent, but here goes.

I think there are some medical low hanging fruits. This is especially true in the US, where the escalation of service is extreme. Either you get no service or a $200/hr medical expert. If the disease is going to be a low risk common illness 95% of the time, then maybe the patient could go through a $40/hr medical practitioner whose job would be to attends to 'easy' cases and only escalates it to the $200/hr doctor if the case is serious enough. A similar case applies to the ER and ambulances too. There is, "I am about to die" emergency and then there is the "I am hurt, but 20 more minutes to the hospital in car won't change much" type of emergency.

Off topic: But, This approach is quite similar to a popular ML approach called Cascade Classifiers used for resource efficient applications. It is apt, that it would come up in a discussion about how to make Healthcare more resource efficient.

Lastly, I find the requirement of 4 year college to enter medical school to be preposterous. It is a waste of money and time for applicants and serves only to line pockets of academic institutions.

<comment><USER36> You could surely make a case for parking the local urgent care center (and make it 24/7) right next to the ER.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> to me what Shetty shows is how the power of smart and thoughtful entrepreneurship can not only thrive profit-wise, but can produce results that benefit for everyone even in such high risk (surgeries), low reward (large chunk of clientele appears to be made of India's lower income population) industry

I don't think one could naively apply his methods to the US healthcare system and get the same results, but what he has done at least demonstrates once again that the healthcare system is likely irrevocably broken

</comment><comment><USER38> Some equipment is too expensive to be disposable and therefore requires enhanced cleaning protocols[0], but reusing as much equipment as possible just to save a few bucks seems penny wise but pound foolish. Why add unnecessary risk [1] if you can easily avoid it?

[0][https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3623380/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3623380/)

[1][https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evidence-for- pers...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evidence-for-person-to- person-transmission-of-alzheimer-s-pathology/)

<comment><USER18> Except his hospital has better outcomes for those procedures, according to TFA.

<comment><USER38> Where does it discuss long-term outcomes in TFA? Not all transmissible disease manifests within 30 days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Meanwhile, people in Sub-Saharan Africa manage to feed themselves on less than a dollar a day. They must have a much more efficient food delivery system than our own.

</comment><comment><USER40> >> _The tubes that carry blood to heart-and-lung machines are sterilized and reused after each surgery; in the West, they're thrown away._

Just cancelled my surgery :). Seriously, this is not an area to maximize savings.

<comment><USER41> It sounds like a bad idea - but scalpels and metal tools are not thrown away either - they're sterilized. Something like a plastic tube may have 2 or 3 uses in it instead of just 1 - as long as the sterilization is within acceptable tolerances - why not? A reusable rocket too was unthinkable until a private company did it. One shouldn't discard experimental evidence just because it conflicts with one's belief systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Good article that raises some very good questions. I had a few specific takeaways out of it.

>"Everyone does as much as they can," Ashwinikumar Kudari, a senior gastrointestinal surgeon, says toward the end of a busy day at the Bangalore hospital. He's just removed two malignant tumors the size of golf balls from a middle-aged woman's intestines—the seventh surgery he's performed or supervised since morning. A compact man with a trim mustache and a wry smile, Kudari is soon on the move again, checking in briefly on a gallstone removal next door before dashing up a spiral staircase to another operating theater. There, he takes over from a colleague who's struggling to locate a particularly tricky fistula. "Our margins are low on one surgery, but because we do so many in a day, we can make enough," he remarks after the elusive fistula—the longest he's ever seen—is found, running from the man's anus to above his groin. By working at this pace, the average Narayana surgeon performs as many as six times more procedures annually than an American counterpart.

I'm wondering how overworked doctors are in these conditions, or how long a senior doctor lasts in a hospital like this. It might be a good place to gain experience, but how feasible it is to work there for 10 years?

>It's all a far cry from the high-touch treatment Westerners expect, but Shetty is adamant that none of the practices compromise safety. Sterilizing and reusing clamps and tubing is permitted under the standards of the Joint Commission, a U.S.-based body that vets and accredits hospitals worldwide, including Narayana's cardiac hub. Involving properly instructed family members in the simplest care tasks isn't unheard of in Europe and North America, and some studies suggest it may improve patients' prospects. (Unlike busy nurses, relatives have just one person to focus on.)

I growing up in the soviet block I remember family members taking care of relatives in the hospital, and I never really questioned this at that time. Now looking at the western medical system, it seems like nurses are doing work that there not supposed to be doing and there aren't enough of them all the time.

> Yet even for bypasses—Narayana's bread-and-butter procedure, with greater > economies of scale than any other—Shetty needs to cut costs further, because > Modicare will reimburse only about $1,300 for each surgery. For other > treatments, the difference between current price tags and Modicare payment > schedules is much wider. "They are paying less than what it costs," Shetty > says.

It seems that politicians have established a system that covers everyone. Not always effective, that underpays a lot, but it's there, now as society gradually accepts that the system is their and it is fair, it may be possible to expand in in the next 5-10 years either with the amount of coverage it provides or with the amount of money it pays per procedure.

</comment><comment><USER43> I think they need to qualify 'cheapest' because as a Brit I wouldn't have to pay anything (directly) for any of these things.

Now the costs of doing the procedures are probably lower, but I have no idea what they would cost in this country.

<comment><USER44> Somebody is paying, and even if you're not paying out of pocket it definitely matters how much the government is paying and economizing, because they have to stretch your tax dollar/pound too.

<comment><USER43> That's why I said "(directly)". But yes I agree with your point.

Its unclear to me whether figures quoted are prices you pay, or cost to do the procedure. Some at least appear to be the price you pay ("Shetty did it for about $10,000 and turned a profit"), which as I don't pay anything _directly_ , suggests that they need to qualify 'cheapest'.</comment></comment></comment>


Farewell, Cortana - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/farewell-cortana-1839907363 <comment><USER2> The big howler for me was Cortana running as part of Windows Server 2016, by default.

Look: I'm not really happy running Windows Server to begin with [HN crowd: a decision that was not mine, by the way], so why do you have to have this stupid thing downloading and running all kinds of random executables that I have no idea what they do _in my bloody server farm_? And yup, I have logs off all those things, and pager traffic as a witness.

Yes, you can turn Cortana off. No, you shouldn't have to. This decision beggars the imagination.

(I like to think that the PM behind Cortana-makes-sense-in-a-server was the same nimrod who also shipped the touchscreen support in Server 2012R2 and the all-caps menu nonsense that plagued Visual Studio and Office for a few years, until Microsoft got a clue and realized they were honestly, really and truly pissing off customers. Someone needs to take that person out back of Building 9 and show them the instruments).

<comment><USER3> >The big howler for me was Cortana running as part of Windows Server 2016, by default.

Cortana is _not_ running as part of Windows Server 2016 by default . The default install option is no GUI and that option does not install Cortana. You will explicit have to choose that you want to install the "Desktop experience" in order to get Cortana. If you select to add an optional feature named "Desktop experience" it is fair enough that Cortana is there since she is (or now was) a part of Microsoft Desktop experience. Most typical server workloads run fine without the GUI (and Cortana).

Windows Server 2016 Installation Options: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/previous-versions/windows/d...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous- versions/windows/desktop/legacy/mt588481\(v=vs.85\))

<comment><USER4> Yes. As a very happy Windows user, both server and desktop, I'm always scratching my head about the FUD comments I see here about Windows. Most are simply untrue, else they're vast distortions. It makes me wonder whose behind them and why. Is it just ultra-fandom, or is someone trying an orgranized attempt to manipulate markets through mis-information?

<comment><USER5> > I'm always scratching my head about the FUD comments I see here about > Windows. Most are simply untrue, else they're vast distortions.

Were they always untrue, or were they true for some older version of Windows? Many non-Windows users here have used Windows some time in the past, and their views on Windows are based on that experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would have been fine using Cortana in Windows 10, but unfortunately, it slowed down the Windows key search UI just enough to be frustrating and worth the time to disable in settings. I don't at all mind its existence but it really needs to add functionality without introducing new drawbacks, especially for frequently used areas of the OS.

(MacOS was little better as it didn't even try to integrate Siri with Spotlight and kept it in its own, infrequently-used app.)

<comment><USER7> Agreed entirely. In Windows 7, I could hit the Winkey, type the first few letters of a program, then hit enter. The results were instant and consistent, so I could build muscle memory on it. In Windows 10, the search results take several seconds to show up, and change depending on what new files there are, how many starting characters I typed, whether the index is up to date, and the phase of the moon.

<comment><USER8> There must be a lot of macs or linux machines in the department responsible for the search because there's no way any developer is dogfooding that user hostile mess

<comment><USER9> IIRC the conversation I've had with a former Microsoft employee, some features are developed as mini competitions. Requirements are sent to the group(s) and first acceptable implementation gets merged.

e.g. for the Ribbon-UI in Office, there was 3-4 implementations until one was selected as final.

So the Windows search UI is the fastest developed one with acceptable features.

<comment><USER10> Ouch.

If I wanted to create a process with the goal of generating technical debt, I wouldn't get something that effective. It's even beaultiful how it leverages all the competition flaws to get this result.

I imagine the result is reflected on the employees productivity assessment and the worst performers fired, so it can exploit evolutionary dynamics to create the highest possible amount of debit.

<comment><USER9> Remember, this is the same Microsoft where people are frowned upon for merging fixes and optimizations to the Windows kernel instead of implementing new-and- shiny features [0].

[0]: [http://blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows- kernel-w...](http://blog.zorinaq.com/i-contribute-to-the-windows-kernel-we- are-slower-than-other-oper/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Despite dropping the app in these regions, Cortana itself remains "an integral part" of the company's business model to incorporate "conversational computing and productivity" into its products according to the spokesperson, so Microsoft doesn't appear to be closing the coffin on it entirely."

Don't make a girl a promise... if you know you can't keep it.

</comment><comment><USER12> Cortana was doomed the moment Microsoft gave up on Windows Phone. It could never become as integrated with the mobile os as the competing assistants. Even if Cortana was better, it wasn't always listening. And on a desktop the assistants are still not sufficiently versatile at home, and not compatible with the open office environments at work.

Also Cortana was always good at languages it suported, but it couldn't provide good localized content for most of the world.

</comment><comment><USER13> I won't be crying since it never worked on my WP devices in first place and setting up device only to talk to the virtual voice assistant in English, in non-English language country was some weird acrobatics; once finally I managed to test it out, I had this feeling the voice had kind of mocking tone. The substitute or basic assistant for Poland was capable of understanding the language but you'd have to skip all grammar so it could understand you correctly - notably skipping noun grammatical cases. Perhaps the complexity of Slavic languages (and other non-English ones) is still a barrier for this technology.

The presence of voice assistants on desktop operating systems is a completely different issue - personally, I don't see how these can be useful; they're more of a gimmick feature aimed at less experienced users.

</comment><comment><USER14> In what concerns me, farewell Alexa and Echo as well. I don't see a need for such intrusive devices.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've never used it and I'm not sure how it even works.

</comment><comment><USER16> Does an offline voice assistant fit on a watch or a smart phone? Is it possible to open source one?

<comment><USER17> Have a look at [https://snips.ai/](https://snips.ai/)

<comment><USER18> That site has the most GDPR compliant, transparent, easy to configure cookie settings I've ever seen.

I've got my eyes on that dev kit for sure. Having an offline voice assistant is something I've wanted for a while, privacy is much more important to me than the hardware support that echo and Google home have. Thanks for dropping that link!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Shabby journalism again by Gizmodo.

Cortana isn't removed, MS only removed it from the core Windows feature set.

When the 19H2 is released Cortana will still be around, but not as part of Windows but as a separate app.

People who update their Windows to the Fast Ring can even play with the new Cortana app right now.

Microsoft also have plans to deeply integrate it into its 365 line of productivity apps, so it isn't going anywhere in that area too.

And given that Siri and Google Assistant both dominate the Assistant area on the smartphones due to the fact that they are both preinstalled makes discontinuing the standalone smartphone apps and putting the money and resources involved to good use elsewhere is actually a good move business wise.

</comment><comment><USER20> _" Farewell, Chief"_

</comment><comment><USER21> I actually like the Google voice assistant so I tried to get Cortana working on my surface. I honestly could not figure out how to turn it on.

</comment><comment><USER22> "To make your personal digital assistant as helpful as possible, we're integrating Cortana into your Microsoft 365 productivity apps,"

Doesn't sound like its farewell at all...

just possibly giving Cortana direct access to everything you type in email, documents, excel.. the list goes on

<comment><USER23> The return of clippy?

<comment><USER18> As irritating as clippy was, I actually miss the little guy. Always so enthusiastic about formatting my essays into letters!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Please open source Cortana

<comment> apk-d I imagine open-sourcing something that's _both_ cloud-based and tightly integrated into the operating system would require a complete rewrite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> try saying "hey cortana" to your siri or google devices.

<comment><USER26> "Hey Siri"

::double chime::

"Hey Cortana"

Siri: "That's like comparing apples and... Not apples."

<comment><USER25> i think you can ask siri about cortana. i've gotten back something about how siri understands how hard being an assistant is, and has respect for all assistants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't know a single person using Cortana, so it's not a surprise I guess. At least the push to use it in Windows will finally go away... A bit too late I have migrated to Ubuntu earlier this year... Puting an end to 20 years of Windows on my computer.

Farewell Microsoft.

<comment><USER28> Does anyone use any voice assistant anywhere? Other than people trying it out for the first time, I've literally never seen it in the wild.

<comment><USER29> I use Google assistant to set reminders. It's so much more convenient than clicking through and typing the same thing on my phone especially or even my laptop. Literally works in 3 seconds. It's great!

<comment><USER30> I don't think that is worth the privacy lost by having Google parse voice commands. 15-30 seconds inputting data versus privacy lost by having a profile generated on me by Google.

A Google VP literally said that you should warn guests if you have voice assistants in your home.

<comment><USER31> I think it should be federal law that devices like these that are always listening come with stickers for purchasers to put on the front door warning guests that they are being recorded. Of course no one is going to use those stickers, but it will remind everyone of how big of a privacy violation these things are.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Turning 8-Bit Sprites into Printable 3D Models (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://0fps.net/2012/09/18/turning-8-bit-sprites-into-printable-3d-models/ <comment><USER2> A very cool idea with impressive results, but sadly, side-scrollers will only have left/right sprites, and top-down games will only have front/back/left/right. Whereas the Mario example in the article also has top/bottom.

So to actually use this, you're going to have to be able to make the missing sides yourself. And if you can do that, you can probably design a better 3D block model as well.

<comment><USER3> Not necessarily. 3D modelling and sprite artistry are very different skills.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Related: [http://voxelbuilder.com/](http://voxelbuilder.com/) \- supports building your own models and either printing them to build paper models, or generating STL files.</comment>


Instacart (YC S12) Raises $44 Million From Andreessen Horowitz - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/16/instacart-a16z/

<comment><USER2> Not surprising since their service and customer service is pretty amazing. I'm still not 100% sure how they can be profitable at their current prices though.</comment>


Does Marla Singer Exist? - <AUTHOR> http://ach.al/1d Does Marla Singer exist? <comment><AUTHOR> Marla Singer from Fight Club. Some people say that she does not exist. I say she does...</comment>


Ask HN: What is the best way to find developer talent in my city? - <AUTHOR>

I am looking to find/hire another developer and I have never had to look for or hire anybody before.
What is the best way to go about this? What are the best resources?
Specifically, I am located in Austin, Texas.
Also if there are any HN'ers in the area that are interested in meeting with me, I am looking for a front-end developer with emphasis on mobile web app development and a knack for design and aesthetics.
Email me at brennen at qlobe dot com
Thank you! <comment><USER2> Post in the hiring thread. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2387910>

UT is right there, try contacting their career center.</comment>