Capitalism is making way for the age of free - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/31/capitalism-age-of-free-internet-of-things-economic-shift <comment><USER3> "Anyone will be able to access the internet of things and use big data and analytics to develop predictive algorithms that can speed efficiency, dramatically increase productivity and lower the marginal cost of producing and distributing physical things, including energy, products and services, to near zero, just as we now do with information goods."

Saying that the Internet of things will bring the marginal cost of energy prices to near zero because of big data seems like a stretch to me, as well as some amazing buzzword bingo.

<comment><USER4> That's a lot of buzzwords in one sentence. Reminds me of the early 90s when everything had to use neuro fuzzy wavelets.

<comment><USER5> It's almost as if that sentence itself were pieced together by some kind of blagosphere-mining machine learning algorithm. I guess that's kind of what writers do?

<comment><USER6> Either they do that, or the press a button on one and then go do what they really wanted to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's interesting to me is that the real tipping point is when we are able to produce energy easily and cheaply in a virtually unlimited fashion, without relying on scarce resources.

It will accelerate our means to produce virtually anything locally, making the whole chain of production much less vulnerable to disaster. You could build vertical farms driven by technology (eliminating the need for pesticides, or huge land resources) and optimize food production. We'll be able to produce enough of what we need 10x over and with a small ecological foot print.

It's really interesting the things that become possible and economically viable once you have virtually unlimited energy. If there is one reason to keep living and be excited it is to see that day. It will be monumental. It will be bigger than the printing press or the electrical grid and maybe even the advent of the computer.

With unlimited, cheap energy, just imagine what we'll be able to do. Just imagine what the human race has been able to do in the 19th and 20th century with the advent of factories and machines. We built amazing tunnels, skyscrapers and road networks.

Imagine what we could in a different context, with different objectives. What if cleaning up the environment and creating beautiful buildings, parks and infrastructure again became the equivalent of what used to spur the economy on in the 19th and 20th century.

The cool thing is it could _potentially_ happen in the next 30 years. There are so many different promising energy production technologies being worked on right now. It is only a matter of time.

<comment><USER8> US spends a whopping 8.3% of GDP on energy.

Cheap(er) abundant(er) energy would be great but not transformative.

<comment><USER7> I think you're vastly underestimating what it means to have (virtually) unlimited energy. Things that we are not doing now because it's not economically viable, become viable. Water filtration for drinkable water is huge and also happens to be one of the main problems in the world. That problem becomes more approachable when you have an excess of energy at your disposal.

Recycling materials is also heavily constrained by energy costs. With so much energy available you can employ recycling techniques that are not viable right now and/or do it at a larger scale.

There are also huge reductions possible when you have abundant energy. Take out costs associated with driving your car, or the cost of cleaning up ongoing pollution, or the costs of extracting energy from scarce resources. Those could all be dramatically reduced once abundant energy becomes a reality.

It will be impactful for people who are not rich (99% of the planet), not having to pay huge chunks of income for energy. After rent costs, the biggest part of my living costs come from energy production (elec, gas, water etc).

Abundant energy also makes a more distributed form of general production more viable. The more communities become self reliant, the less vulnerable the world becomes to localized disasters (political and environmental) and the stronger our ability to help out communities that are suffering. All the costs we are making (money & environmental) for the purpose of transporting goods and resources around the world can be scaled back.

Think about this for a minute, if you have access to cheap abundant energy, you have some source of water and the technology to filter it than you have all the basic necessities to supply basic survival needs to a community. That is huge.

<comment><USER8> In fact you've overestimated it.

The processes you describe may be energy intensive, but the systems which surround said processes - and the design required to deploy them - <USER2> intensive in man hours. Labor is of course a far larger portion of GDP, and lowering the cost of labor would of course have a far more dramatic impact on our lives than would lowering the cost of energy. Prof Hanson has written on this subject if you care to read a more comprehensive academic take on it.

In summation, much of the focus people place upon lowering the cost of energy is misplaced and quite silly when one stops to think about it in an unbiased manner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is overblown. We still need food, we still need heavy engineering, we still need nanotech. Yes, there are some simple things that can be manufactured differently to how they had been in the past, but even those are still not free. The printers are not free, their consumables are not free and they can't produce more than a small fraction of the things we currently buy.

I think this tech will be revolutionary, don't get me wrong, but I don't think everything is going to be free nor do I think capitalism is going anywhere fast (at least, not on account of 3d printers!)

</comment><comment><USER10> > Over the past decade millions of consumers have become prosumers, producing > and sharing music, videos, news, and knowledge at near-zero marginal cost > and nearly for free, shrinking revenues in the music, newspaper and book- > publishing industries.

No, these things aren't produced for "free". They're replicated for "free". Huge difference.

The first cancer vaccine will "cost" trillions of spent research dollars. The second one? Probably a few cents, if that.

Let's not, especially on this site, forget about how important investors are.

<comment><USER6> I don't think that's what they are talking about. I think they are talking about how fast things are getting cheaper to design, including, eventually, vaccines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Rifkin has been pushing these ideas (basically advancing technology will require his preferred political positions) for 20+ years (see "End of Work" (1995)). He just updates the buzzwords and publishes it as a new book (see "The Age of Access" (2000) and "The Zero Marginal Cost Society" (2014)). As usual there are a few grains of truth (jobs replaced by technology, drastically lower costs for some products) but it is mostly just well known falsehoods (lump of labor fallacy). In the end you will know less after listening to Rifkin's arguments.

<comment><USER12> Well robotics will make about anything possible as time and tedium will be removed as barriers. In a society where supply is merely a result of time there won't be much to want or steal. At least if your in that first world part of the world.

Yeah there are costs involved in setting it all up, but with robotics it comes down to material access to build with. The nice thing about robotics is you can put them into inhospitable areas for about, well forever.

I fully expect there will be a generation not too far off whose primary source of work is creating things just because and not for whom. Oh sure there will be people who do and do for others, but it won't be a real requirement. Just like a small number of people get the real work done in most work environments so will society migrate too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> _" with information goods the social marginal cost of distribution is close to zero ... If information goods are to be distributed at their marginal cost of production – zero – they cannot be created and produced by entrepreneurial firms that use revenues obtained from sales to consumers to cover their [fixed set-up] costs … [companies] must be able to anticipate selling their products at a profit to someone."_

1/N > 0 for N = (1,∞)

There is a very significant difference between a cost of distribution close to zero vs actually zero. So long as revenue costs are above zero, entrepreneurial firms can find a way to profit enough for food, clothing, and shelter.

There is a basic cost to survival (food/clothing/shelter/healthcare is not, and never will be, free), requiring everyone contribute _something_ which another will consider valuable enough to exchange their work for. Confiscation of "excess" fails as it disincentives increased productivity. So long as people have a motive to either elicit value from their environment, or persuade others to trade that value in a mutually beneficial manner, capitalism will ensure enough productivity to provide for all ... and as marginal costs decrease towards (but not reach!) zero, incentive is there to accelerate productivity to match.

<comment><USER14> I don't understand why companies won't simply ignore his suggestion that they can't do what he says they can't, and use revenues obtained from sales to cover their fixed costs. The fact that their marginal cost is zero has precisely no relevance; they've spent money making whatever it is they've made, and they need it made back. And the burden of paying for all of this will fall on the customer, just as it does today.

As an example, consider some top-selling video game on the iOS app store. The $100/year fee for the development licence isn't nothing, but compared to the cost of the staff and their equipment, it really might as well be. And yet it's perfectly possible for these things to make money, and in the cases they don't, the zero marginal cost thing has absolutely nothing to do with it. In fact the zero marginal cost is a major draw, for exactly the reasons I give in my first paragraph.

This seems like some an obvious rebuttal that I can only imagine I've missed something...

(Another article from this chap reached the front page a couple of weeks ago - see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7406894](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7406894) \- basically the same thing.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'll believe it when people don't have to work in order to eat.

<comment><USER16> This is why I feel like farm to plate automation is the core technology that makes the future real. My concern is that people will reject it out of the lack of variety at the start.

<comment><USER17> >farm to plate automation

I'm not sure what you mean. Are you referring to a specific technology (like Soylent) or just automating the process of growing, harvesting, and distributing food?

<comment><USER16> The latter, where growing, harvesting, processing and delivery is done through a repeatable automated process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Unfortunately since the US chose to go with Friedman/supply side economics since about the 80s, we're in a race to the bottom. Lower production costs used to equate to increased consumption, but that didn't account for finite resources. If we factor in externalities like pollution, the value being produced in the world has been constant for quite some time, maybe as far back as the 80s also. And worse, a whole slew of markets like oil/fishing/timber/mining are in decline. So we're in this bizarre situation of everything being destroyed, but hey, prices are cheaper than ever. Too bad incomes are in decline too so nobody can afford to buy anything anyway.

Contrast this with Keynesian/demand side economics that countries like Germany and Finland have adopted, where one of the top priorities is per-capita income. In Germany, 50% of a company's board must be made up of labor, and during downturns the government pays people to go on furloughs while they are still employed (to maintain demand by propping up buying power) . And in Finland, they redistribute the North Sea oil money back into the economy (I realize this is not sustainable, I'm just saying that it's arguably better than what the US does). Education, maternity leave, healthcare, pretty much everything that contributes to a higher quality of life is given priority over profit. They've been at it so long that their customer base is huge and companies are able to invest in long term planning and research. Jobs are plentiful, one can't hardly even get fired, and the middle class is huge.

Regardless of political ideology, if we look out 10, 20, 30 years, it's pretty obvious that natural resources are going to go into the toilet and more and more work is going to be done by machines. Communism was able to absorb that by forcing everyone to work unproductive jobs. Socialism seems to be able to absorb it to some degree by focussing on people first. But capitalism.. I don't know. It's the economic form of darwinism. If it's going to survive into the future then I think it's going to evolve into something unrecognizable. To me it looks like there are two extremes: a Star Trek economy with guaranteed basic incomes or a new gilded age where perhaps 1000 people own all of the wealth on the planet and people's labor/personal profit is on an ever declining trajectory.

<comment><USER19> > And in Finland, they redistribute the North Sea oil money back into the > economy

Finland doesn't border the North Sea, nor does it produce a drop of oil from anywhere else. I'm not quite sure which country you were thinking of there -- Norway quite explicitly doesn't pump the oil money into the local economy but runs a giant fund that invests the proceeds elsewhere, to be used once the oil runs out.

It's also completely absurd to claim that Germany and Finland are somehow optimizing for per-capita income (wtf?), or that profit is the last priority, or that jobs are plentiful, or that one can't even get fired, etc. You appear to have built up some idealized version of Europe that has little to do with reality.

<comment><USER18> I stand corrected, it's Norway that has the North Sea oil money, not Finland.

But Germany does have the policy I mentioned, that inject money directly into employees' pockets during downturns rather than firing them, it's called Kurzarbeit:

[http://www.aei.org/article/economics/fiscal-policy/us- should...](http://www.aei.org/article/economics/fiscal-policy/us-should-try- germanys-unemployment-medicine/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The end of scarcity, which is a necessary condition for reducing the marginal cost of non-digital goods to zero, is still a ways away.

<comment><USER21> Exactly. What this article fails to mention is that during the same golden decade of the "prosumer", the costs of commodities have skyrocketed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> There's a fundamental difference between goods and services composed of bits, and those composed of other forms of energy and matter. The marginal cost of many physical goods will never be zero. At least not until we have limitless amounts of energy to recompose molecules as we wish. I think that's a long way off.

What Rifkin isn't really analyzing is the _role of free._ Why do people provide free goods and services? It's usually for the same reason grocery stores and heroine dealers do: to let you test the merchandise, so they can make money if you want more. "Free" is simply a way to lower the friction points for consumers, and draw public attention.

</comment><comment><USER23> "Marx never asked what might happen if intense global competition some time in the future forced entrepreneurs to introduce ever more efficient technologies, accelerating productivity to the point where the marginal cost of production approached zero, making goods and services "priceless" and potentially free, putting an end to profit and rendering the market exchange economy obsolete."

Uh, Marx did ask that question. It's called the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

The problem with increased productivity and lower marginal costs is that labor, too, becomes less and less valuable. Supply of labor goes up; demand of labor goes down. People are more easily exploited.

<comment><USER24> I wonder why so many people always assume that increased productivity means fewer workers instead of more goods.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It seems to me that capitalism is struggling because of a _lack_ of technological progress, not because of a surplus of it. There really haven't been any major breakthroughs for a while for improving access to energy or materials. Manufacturing is if anything degrading; the new hotness is finding people to work cheap. That's probably because robotics has been stagnant for too long. Food production is more or less a fight to stay even.

This is an age of improvements in computing/communications. That is eventually going to help other areas but for now people seem to be determined to stop that from happening...

</comment><comment><USER26> "Summers and DeLong focused their presentation on the new communication technologies that were already reducing the marginal (per-unit) cost of producing and sending information goods to near zero."

Yes, sending an email can be free.

But the infrastructure for the Internet? The article really ignored how many tax payer dollars went into different public institutions to make the Internet a reality, e.g. Big Government and universities.

<comment><USER27> > _The article really ignored how many tax payer dollars went into different > public institutions to make the Internet a reality_ "

Which is why their analysis focuses on the _marginal_ cost, which is the cost of producing the _next_ unit (or sending the next piece of information electronically). Even if you amortize infrastructure costs over each piece of information sent, the costs are on their way to near-zero.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> What about innovation and quality? Let's assume that digital technologies finally make entertainment essentially free. Who will make the good movies? Do we have lower quality entertainment since it started becoming increasingly cheaper? It would be interesting to see studies on that.

Now suppose an analogous situation occurs with food, energy etc. Does this mean we will eventually end up eating pizza every day?

</comment><comment><USER29> What's most troublesome is statements like this, typical of the guardian:

 _" A new economic paradigm – the collaborative commons – has leaped onto the world stage as a powerful challenger to the capitalist market."_

Whereas capitalism as a philosophy is about individual rights and private property, this _" new collaborative economy"_ stinks of failed historical experiments.

</comment><comment><USER30> Very odd that there was no mention of IP and the monopolies that copyright and patents bestow.

</comment><comment><USER31> "the most basic condition for economic efficiency: [is] that price equal marginal cost"

Huh? I would think that economic efficiency is when something that is hugely desired gets delivered, meaning that price would be way higher than marginal cost.

</comment><comment><USER32> The most realistic case of something close to this scenario happening, is that virtual reality will greatly improve and people will prefer to mostly live there.

And in virtual reality ,marginal cost does go to zero.

</comment><comment><USER33> If it reads 'Capitalism is making way for basic income' it would have make sense. Not that way. Freemium is often paving the way for even more agressive capitalsim by crowding out competitors to raise prices afterwards.

</comment><comment><USER34> inb4 the lawsuits.

<comment><USER34> Despite the comical form, this comment is totally serious. Lawsuits also apply in domains where copyright is not an object (e.g. construction): look at what happened between Uber and the taxi unions.</comment></comment>


Natural Selection and Information Retrieval - <AUTHOR> https://adiya.co/2012/11/13/natural-selection-and-information-retrieval-part-1-discounted-cumulative-gain/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is part 1 of the 3 part series for measuring search relevancy.... links in post also here - [https://adiya.co/2017/01/01/natural-selection-and- informatio...](https://adiya.co/2017/01/01/natural-selection-and-information- retrieval-part-2-f-measure/) [https://adiya.co/2017/01/01/natural-selection- and-informatio...](https://adiya.co/2017/01/01/natural-selection-and- information-retrieval-part-3-mean-reciprocal-rank/)</comment>


Map: The Rise and Fall of the French Empire - <AUTHOR> http://thesoundingline.com/map-of-the-day-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-french-empire/ <comment><USER2> Blogspam of

[https://youtu.be/DqcRau1dntg](https://youtu.be/DqcRau1dntg)</comment>


Paypal closed an account that I opened yesterday. I only tried to buy on eBay - <AUTHOR>

Hi XXXX,<p>For the safety and security of the PayPal network, we often review accounts for potential risks. After reviewing your account, we have decided to close it because of security issues. We are making every effort to minimize any disruption to your business. If your PayPal account balance is zero, and you have no unresolved buyer complaints or chargebacks, your account will remain limited.<p>... ... ... <comment><USER2> It's possible that it looks like this is a duplicate account to them, I've seen that happen before.</comment>


Robpike.io - <AUTHOR> http://robpike.io/ <comment><USER2> Wondered how this was working and it appears to just leave your connection open and continuously send a response of poo.

Here's a toy Node.js server that does the same thing: [https://gist.github.com/donspaulding/224edec0232d13e32f33](https://gist.github.com/donspaulding/224edec0232d13e32f33)

</comment><comment><USER3> What am I looking at here ?

<comment><USER4> shit? I guess, that's what I saw and then I closed the tab.</comment></comment>


3x Improvement: Great sign-up page split-test for a web-app - <AUTHOR> http://www.abtests.com/test/35001/homepage-for-ebox-platform Great A/B split-test posted by @bokardo <comment><USER2> Hi, I'm one of the creators of <http://www.abtests.com>. The issue of statistical significance has come up over and over, so I'll try to explain our view of it.

We ask people to input their raw data...both trials and conversions. If they do this honestly (anybody can fake data about anything) then in our view the results speak for themselves. We've had folks upload data that was obviously not statistically significant, and we've had people write blog posts denouncing those results. We've also had folks upload test data that was statistically significant and people say they're learning a lot.

So we've had both solid and suspect data uploaded to the site with good discussion around it. This is exactly what we hoped for...I think in the future as more tests get uploaded the wheat will be separated from the chaff, so to speak, and those tests with significant data will get lots more attention than those that don't. In fact, we're already seeing this in the traffic logs.

And, as several folks have mentioned, many tools do the hard stats math for you, telling you when your data is statistically significant. This helps people know when they can be confident in sharing their data with others.

<comment><USER3> Doing the math here. A/B Tests with conversions are modeled as binomial variables. So the standard error of the conversions here is sqrt(p _(1-p)/n) where p is conversion rate and n is number of hits (p_ (1-p) is standard deviation of binomial distribution). Calculating standard error for both of your versions - sqrt(0.002*(1-0.002)/2834) = 0.0008 and for the other SE is 0.0017. Now since there are large number of trials, you can model the difference of two binomial distributions as a normal distribution, standard deviation of whose is sqrt(se_1^2 + se_2^2) = 0.0019.

Now the way significance is checked is by using single tailed z score (we are testing if the difference in two distributions is statistically significant and greater than zero). Z score in this case is p_1 - p_2/std that is (0.008-0.002)/0.0019 = 3.1579 which is way larger than the critical value of 1.65 (which corresponds to 95% confidence).

So, the difference is indeed statistically significant. A note of caution is that some theory says that you cannot model a binomial distribution as a normal distribution until you have at least 10 successes or failures, which is the case here.

<comment><USER4> See my reply lower in the thread - I worked out the numbers using Bayesian inference to find the exact probability that B is better than A, subject to a number of assumptions. The benefit of this approach is that it's exact so you don't need a certain number of samples to properly approximate a normal distribution. The answer is that B is almost certainly better than A. Here's the calculation I plugged into Wolfram Alpha:

2835 2837 choose[2834,6] choose[2836,24] NIntegrate[(f^6) (1-f)^2828 (g^24) (1-g)^2812,{f,0,1},{g,f,1}]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm extremely rusty on my statistics, and I upvoted this because I find A/B tests interesting, but... are these numbers statistically significant? For the population of internet users, are they actually practically significant? It just seems like the sample sizes and differences aren't really big enough to draw solid conclusions from. It doesn't say how long each test lasted for, either--what if the second test was done during peak hours?

<comment><USER6> This is exactly why I _don't_ read other people's A/B experiment results. I haven't seen a single A/B experiment that listed it's statistical significance (and how that was calculated). I fear that bad data is worse than no data at all.

<comment> brown9-2 Google Website Optimizer will give you a plus minus rate for your estimated conversion rate, which helps you to at least estimate what the significance/confidence is.

For example, one of the pages in one of my current tests shows up as "Est. Conversion Rate: 17.0% +/- 1.4%".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 2 vs 6 orders doesn't seem like enough. There are people in affiliate programs that don't change anything and yet one day they have 20 orders and 0 the next day. It seems like something doesn't work, but it's back to normal next day - just a fluctuation in stats. I really wouldn't consider 2 vs 6 orders a significant sample.

</comment><comment><USER8> Even if this has a G-test significance of 99.86%, it doesn't mean it is valid. You need to have AT LEAST 10 results for the formulas to work correctly. Also, saying 300% conversion is madness. I'm not even fully statistically convinced that the challenger is at ALL better, let alone a certainty of 300% better.

<comment><USER4> If you model the two alternatives as Bernoulli processes with unknown success rates, and assume that the only difference between the two is what is specified on the page, and that they don't interact, and you assume a uniform prior on both parameters, B's conversion rate is higher than A's with probability 0.999572.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Front end, components and browser support - <AUTHOR> A few years ago I started as a front-end developer using stuff like jQuery UI. I learned a lot about the stack but quickly switched to back-end where I work right now.
Now I need to make an admin panel, I'm already pretty ok with things again but noticed the same problems from years ago.
How the hell we still don't have basic crossbrowser components like http://caniuse.com/#search=datetime? Am I looking at the wrong places?
Here's how it went: spent the whole day looking for good datetimepicker on GitHub (ORDER BY stars DESC). All of the top 3 components have major issues (e.g. missing localization on a few bits, problems on mobile, closed issues with no reply and no fix). Now I need a better <select> so I go with select2 (I like this one!) but the bootstrap 3 theme is not really maintained.
Why are we making new JS frameworks if it's so hard to work with the basics? There are problems still unsolved. I mean the base UI components that shouldn't go to the garbage when Angular "replaces" jQuery and when React "replaces" Angular. When bootstrap releases version 4 most of the components will move and/or stop being maintained. It's like we can make awesome specialized libraries but when you need a component that "just works" you're screwed.
I'm sure most of them works fine on the latest Chrome and I'm not asking for IE8 support but man, most of the stuff I test is somehow broken on Firefox for Linux.
How do I solve this problem? I need base components that I can trust will work fine on most modern things. Datetimepicker, something like select2, a modal that doesn't piss it self to deliver ajax (B3 modal events are not reliable and IIRC it's deprecated now), etc. Should I just go with a UX library like FuelUX? Any recommendations?
ps: Yes I'm using bootstrap 3, ES6, npm and all the shiny things. Yes I know how open-source works, I've been the maintainer of a popular (back-end) repo for years. <comment><USER2> 1\. Bootstrap,2. Foundation by ZURB,3. Semantic UI,4. Pure by Yahoo!,5. UIkit by YOOtheme.This is important and a deciding factor for many.

[http://aimsely.com/](http://aimsely.com/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> ahem [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10086651](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10086651)</comment>


Coronavirus may have spread undetected in US for weeks - <AUTHOR> https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/public-global-health/485389-coronavirus-may-have-spread-undetected-in-us-for-weeks <comment><USER2> I heard that China tests literally everyone who shows up a a doctor's office with symptoms of a common cold. Why isn't the US testing more people?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because CDC didn't authorized the local/state to perform typical RT-PCR testing[1] for COVID-19 until a few days ago and their guideline for testing COVID-19 super strict probably due to funding and they have been bottlenecked in delivering results. We know it is very expensive in the U.S. for such testings (so it's likely related the fundings are not ready, given that Trump just recently announced budget with significant cuts to CDC and WHO) and U.S. is obviously NOT prepared.[2][3]

However, CT scans are a much better, cheaper and economical way in clinical settings to confirm COVID-19[1]. Results come out in minutes and in negligible costs vs. thousands of dollars for RT-PCR testing. Chinese government's website has the most comprehensive guidelines and treatments recommendations on their official website.[4]

Washington State today is like the early January of Wuhan, where infections aren't officially confirmed even though it's been outbreak for weeks.

[1]: [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200226151951.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200226151951.htm)

[2]: [https://www.wired.com/story/covid-19-will-mark-the-end-of- af...](https://www.wired.com/story/covid-19-will-mark-the-end-of-affluence- politics/)

[3]: [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/health/coronavirus- prepar...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/health/coronavirus-preparation- united-states.html)

[4]: [http://www.gov.cn/zhengce/2020-02/19/content_5480958.htm](http://www.gov.cn/zhengce/2020-02/19/content_5480958.htm)

<comment><USER3> > However, CT scans are a much better, cheaper and economical way in clinical > settings to confirm COVID-19[1].

Unfortunately CT scans have their own risk for the patient that traditional blood tests don't have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/28/coronavirus- ma...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/28/coronavirus-may-have- been-in-italy-for-weeks-before-it-was-detected)

</comment><comment><USER5> Doesn't the fact that so many people have it, and the vast majority of them don't even get sick enough to request medical care -- or to make it obvious in retrospect who they got the virus from -- suggest that the virus is much less deadly than originally feared?

<comment><USER6> No. Based on the cases so far, we have a decent idea of the mortality rate. 2-3% is a reasonable figure.

That's anywhere from - roughly - 30 to 60 times higher than the common flu depending on the year you source.

It might suggest that not very many people are multiple weeks into having it; possibly that not very many older people have it yet (drastically higher mortality rate for people over ~50-60 years of age); and or a combination of the two.

If 3,000 people have it in the US right now, undetected (some may be at home, sick, in the second week of having it, thinking it's the common flu; or the symptoms may be mild enough to not alarm in most cases), they may be in the first week or two of having it. If 300 of those people have had it long enough to die from it, and 2-3% of those people do die from it, you're only talking about maybe 6-10 people (point being, it'd be a small number).

<comment><USER5> 2-3% is not a reasonable estimate. It keeps getting lowered, especially in a western context with better medical care. 2% was an early estimate in a Chinese context, but even there it's going down as more cases are identified.

Now people are estimating 1.5%, 1%, or even less.

[https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387)

<comment><USER6> 2-3% wasn't an early estimate for China. It's _the_ figure. It's based on the reported total cases and reported deaths. We have no other figures to go on out of China other than what they've officially reported (anything else is pointless speculation, we could each claim anything). The death rate there is in that 2-3% range so far.

I do agree, generally, with your point that highly developed healthcare systems should be able to get the mortality rate under whatever the figures are in China. That might only mean 1.5% to 2% though, given China's reported mortality figure is closer to the high 3% area.

<comment><USER5> It's the figure of deaths in china / verified cases -- and we know that the verified cases is low. In any case, I'll just go with The New England Journal of Medicine on this one, not some online spook.

[https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387)

<comment><USER6> So far China has around ~3,000 deaths on ~80,000 cases.

3.75%

What are you trying to refute about that exactly? Those are China's reported numbers. Online spook? I have no idea what you're talking about.

Your only alternative is to say, flat out, that China's figures are wrong / a lie (Which figures though - deaths? Cases? Both? Is the mortality rate even higher?). And once you do that, we can all just start making up numbers at will.

<comment><USER7> Here's an amateur rejoinder: It's possible, if not probable, that the infections have actually spread far more widely than what has currently been detected. Those wider cases may have been almost entirely silent, and resolved without significant incident.

If that's true, then the actual rate of fatalities (or even serious cases) might be a lot lower than first thought.

The truth, of course, is that currently no one really knows at present. Right now we have educated guesses at best.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can anyone explain to me why in Asia the authorities seem to be going all in with extraordinary containment measures and testing larger groups of people, whilst in Europe and North America the authorities are responding very different? Almost no lock downs, very limited testing etc. In one country a single patient is enough to lock thousands in a hotel or on a cruise ship for days, while in e.g. the Netherlands everyone is assumed to be corona free. You can only get a test if you have a fever, are coughing and have been in contact with a known patient.

Either China is hugely overreacting, or we in Europe/US are in deep trouble. There is not a chance the virus can be contained here I think. In the last week he Netherlands has gone from 0 known patients to about ten, which each have probably infected multiple others. E.g. one was in the ICU (not in isolation) for a week just before diagnosed.

<comment><USER5> China thought this was more like SARS.

SARS kills 10% of people infected.

Now we know that COVID-19 is much, much less deadly than SARS.

But China didn't know that when the virus was first spreading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Dupe.

Earlier submission and more commentary here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22461301](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22461301)</comment>


'Physics was built by men': Cern scientist's remark sparks fury - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/oct/01/physics-was-built-by-men-cern-scientist-alessandro-strumia-remark-sparks-fury <comment><USER2> Equality political correctness maintains that the male brain and female brain are equal. Evolution has built the male body physically different to the female body. These physical differences are obvious, and mainly deal with their roles in procreation. Overlaid on this are mental optimizations that deal with existential aspects, such as child nurturing, hunting, combat etc. These overlays, over time, have led to the larger male physiology - we can see this. Are there mental differences that are not visible, but show up in some metric. One aspect of combat is the ability to co-ordinate the muscular aspects of combat. (here I include such aspects as fist fighting, stone throwing, spear throwing etc). Does the male brain have a superior functional ability in this area? There is some evidence of this. Most ancient armies had more men than women in them. Why? - I suspect it is due to the fact that the average man can defeat the average woman in assorted forms of combat, which would cause army selection to be slanted towards men. This holds true in modern armies where physical combat is a factor. Many armies, most notable of Israel, have found modern combat has a lower need for strength, and have added women to almost all roles. (Elite tactical units, like US Navy Seals, tend to still be fully male - as far as I know) Now this CERN scientist is alleging that some aspect of the male brain shows up in the mental capacity to master particle physics. It is true that if you count heads, or count papers, that men are more highly represented. Is this true to a difference in capabilities, or a physics culture so hostile to women that it is an effective barrier? If it is a hostile culture, we need to change it to level things, as why waste the potential abilities of women in this field.

</comment><comment><USER3> He isn't a 'Cern scientist' \- he worked _at_ CERN, not _for_ CERN.

Thus CERN have little, if any, control over what he says.

It's a shame the media can't cover the actual science that takes place there rather than some nutcase creating drama.</comment>


First Foray into SDL/OpenGL - <AUTHOR> http://www.sdltutorials.com/first-foray-into-sdl-opengl-with-csharp

<comment><USER2> there's some stuff wrong with that example; I've dutifully commented on the article but its awaiting moderation so for everyone here instead:

Just some very quick code review:

1) you aren't initialising the TimeCatcher (strange variable name) to the start-time, so your very first tick will have an absolutely massive value. Its normal to set it to the GetTicks() on the first frame and then to not update it each move

2) its very buggy to be computing and storing the tile delta every frame; if frames are very close together (and can happen even on todays midrange-end hardware) your will get time precision problems which will make game time seem to go slow-mo. Its imperative that you store your 'start' time at the beginning, and then always work in a delta from that to the current time when ticking. You have to then treat all movement as having some specified start- time to interpolate from. This extra hassle is completely necessary.

3) Its not helping people learning from this example code that you use the legacy, deprecated fixed function pipeline. You really ought to use shaders and vertex attribute arrays from the very beginning; it will be massively less problems later, and you might save some poor souls from going down a blind alley.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, awesome, a knowledgeable reply to my "using HN as my bookmarking app" submission! :) Not the author btw.

3) indeed, but I was just interested in getting SDL+OpenGL to work together (from Go rather than C no less) -- from that point of course, it's shaders all the way down and no fixed-function pipeline as the author seems to be using

1) and 2) yes absolutely agreed. I'm aware of this but good thing you're pointing it out to other readers of the article.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are you dropping your rate during Covid? - <AUTHOR> I'm negotiating a new contract, and they asked if I could reduce my rate "during the challenging times of COVID-19".
They're a large global company, with a rising stock price. I know they're fine. If anything I'm tempted to raise it due to "trickle down economics" being important now more than ever, from $4 trillion of stimulus packages sent to corporations in the US.
Should I drop my rate? Are you dropping yours? <comment><USER2> Your rate is determined by what you do and how much work you get.

People will always try it on with sob stories. Coming from a large, global company to one contractor it sounds pathetic, really.

If _you_ do not need to lower your rate to get work, don't.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Should I drop my rate?

The only thing people have to do right now is spend all day on the web, so if anything the hourly rate for web developers right now should be higher. Look at Amazon, its growing like crazy. And not just their retail business, but AWS also.</comment>


1M/1M: Looking For A Pilot Entrepreneur To Invest In - <AUTHOR> http://www.sramanamitra.com/2010/02/23/1m1m-looking-for-a-pilot-entrepreneur-to-invest-in/ Entrepreneurs, I am looking for an entrepreneur with whom to pilot a new service that will be part of the 1M/1M initiative. In collaboration with an outsourced product development company in India, we will invest engineering resources to bring a product to market for an early stage startup. <comment><USER2> Registered. :)</comment>


Extreme weather is pummeling the Midwest, and farmers are in deep trouble - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/05/30/extreme-weather-is-pummeling-midwest-farmers-are-deep-trouble/ <comment><USER2> This is what the climate disaster is going to look like in most places: No single apocalyptic catastrophe, just more extreme weather, poorer harvests, fewer fish. Things are only going to keep getting worse, and it's an open question what secondary effects this will have on human society.

Sustained droughts and famines have toppled civilizations in the past.

<comment><USER3> Yeap. Tragedy of the Commons / highly-diffused externalities.

And a combination of slow and rapid food price increases such that the eventual sole focus of nearly everyone's existence will be mass distractions from insanely unaffordable food, mass starvation and potential genocides. If a modern person wants food security, they better have a climate-controlled, well-defended and discrete area to grow enough for their family... otherwise X.X.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure if I'd consider it extreme weather, but it was a very late String for Minnesota this year. Cold through most of February with lots of rain. My brother crop dusts, and figures he is likely around 20% behind the number of acres he would spray in a season. The early season crops will be poor this year.

I'm glad there was not major flooding. With a very late fast thaw, there is a real potential for flooding this year. Was not near as bad as I was expecting it be.

</comment><comment><USER5> No one I know has their crops in yet. It's going to be a mess.</comment>


The wrong way to search Google in Firefox - <AUTHOR> http://jsomers.net/blog/the-wrong-way-to-search-google-in-firefox

<comment><USER2> One of the 'hidden' features of bookmarks I like a lot lets you set a 'keyword' to select a search in the address bar.

For example: Bookmark a 'Bing' search. In 'Organize bookmarks', select that bookmark. Click the 'More' menu at bottom left. Choose the keyword 'b' for Bing. Then change the 'location' to '<http://www.bing.com/search?q=%s>.

Now type 'b mysearchterm' in the address field. Viola. Works for most searches I've tried, just bookmark and replace the search text with '%s'.</comment>


Critique our startup: HeavyInk.com - <AUTHOR> http://heavyink.com Our team of 2.5 engineers (two real engineers, and one half business guy / half engineer) have spent the last three months coding up HeavyInk.com in Rails - it's a mashup of an Amazon.com style retailer for comic books (individual issues, graphic novels, subscriptions to issues, subscriptions to graphic novels - you name it), and Facebook style social networking (yeah, I know: "Oh, God, not ANOTHER social netowrking site..."), with some other goodies thrown in.
The comic book retailer space is a bit crowded, but after doing a bunch of research (see details elsewhere at news.ycombinator: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75296), we concluded that the existing firms all failed in major ways.
There are some cool technologies under the hood (Coco/R for Ruby to parse out details on authors and artists from free-form human-readable text descriptions), and a lot of cool code reuse (Sanskrit, Beast, etc.).
So: please check out the site, and give your feedback, either here, or in the HeavyInk forums (http://heavyink.com/forum/forums/1 )
We really do take all feedback seriously, and have prioritized various features and bug fixes based on customer comments.
 Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Our team of 2.5 engineers (two real engineers, and one half business guy / half engineer) have spent the last three months coding up HeavyInk.com in Rails - it's a mashup of an Amazon.com style retailer for comic books (individual issues, graphic novels, subscriptions to issues, subscriptions to graphic novels - you name it), and Facebook style social networking (yeah, I know: "Oh, God, not ANOTHER social netowrking site..."), with some other goodies thrown in.

The comic book retailer space is a bit crowded, but after doing a bunch of research (see details elsewhere at news.ycombinator: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75296>), we concluded that the existing firms all failed in major ways.

There are some cool technologies under the hood (Coco/R for Ruby to parse out details on authors and artists from free-form human-readable text descriptions), and a lot of cool code reuse (Sanskrit, Beast, etc.).

So: please check out the site, and give your feedback, either here, or in the HeavyInk forums (<http://heavyink.com/forum/forums/1> )

We really do take all feedback seriously, and have prioritized various features and bug fixes based on customer comments.

Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER2> I like the site overall, but here's some initial gripes:

"20% off Everything and Free Shipping on All Orders"

Could probably stand to qualify this with 'Special Offer' or if it's something you always do, 'We always offer...' or something. Maybe it's just me, but the way it just sits there right now, my first thought was something like, "Is this place going out of business?"

Search results page is a bit confusing, and it would be really nice to have an advanced search so I could exclude fields (first search I tried was for Priest (example: [http://www.amazon.com/Priest-VOL-3-Min-woo- Hyung/dp/15918201...](http://www.amazon.com/Priest-VOL-3-Min-woo- Hyung/dp/1591820103/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/103-0865395-6261467?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1194565489&sr=1-2) \- if somebody can tell me how to make a link into a single word on N.YC I'll clean this up). It doesn't appear you have the series anyways, but it would have been nice to specify that I was searching for a Title and get a 'No Results' page instead of browsing through 3 pages of 'Not What I'm Looking For'.

If buttons (like 'Subscribe To Issues') aren't going to be an actual link (i.e., your pointer doesn't turn into a hand when you hover over it), there should be some sort of mouseover effect to indicate it's not just a dead link (and maybe a click effect, too, for people with slower computers / connections that won't load the next page straight away.)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I agree regarding the search results being confusing. It didn't turn out exactly as I wanted, but its on my ever-growing list of tasks to improve it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, I don't know anything about the size or statistics of your industry. I don't read comments, so I can't really buy anything.

Your design is ok, but why not make it a little more comic-bookish? Maybe get a designer to give you something similar to the cover of Amory Wars you have at the top there.

In retail your success is going to come down to things we YC denizens can't see from a glance. Prices, selection, service.

<comment><AUTHOR> The market is about $500 million/year. We're not going to get VC funding, because there's no chance to become a billion dollar player. However, we'd be more than happy to get 2% of the market, and make a 10% profit!

As far as why the design isn't overly comic-booky: we did a ton of customer and competitor research before we picked the feature list or started writing the code, or doing the design, and we found that one objection many people have to comic book stores is that they feel like ghettos: they're perceived as not welcoming if you're not already part of the subculture. With that in mind, we consciously chose a design that was fresh and exciting, but didn't echo the super-hero motifs and stylings that many other comic book websites use.

<comment><USER5> For what it's worth, I like the design a lot. Was there some kind of process you went through to get it looking like this? Did you prototype and show users, do some sketches, photoshop, etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

You can read a lot more about our design process on our old blog ( <http://heavyink.com/blog/> ), but the short version is:

1) come up with basic idea for website 2) put up a survey 3) ping comic bloggers; get 400 people to take survey 4) narrow down feature list 5) get a UI consultant to help us design how the features get spread across the various pages (lots of "scenario" stuff: "say that you're a young woman shopping for manga. What do you type? Where do you click?"). 6) hand the "wireframes" from the UI consultant off to our graphic designer 7) review the sketches; decide to pick a new graphic designer 8) get sketches back from second graphic designer; tell him "No, make the color scheme more like Netflix". Repeat this last step in 100 different steps: feedback on size of elements, etc. The engineering team provided the feedback, the graphic designer provided the expertise with fonts, layout, etc. 9) done!

...well, actually, nothing is every done. We've got to revamp the tabbed navigation, the RSS customization buttons, and a ton of other stuff...but it was well enough done to go live!

<comment><USER6> Cool. This and the salaries for your employees were all self funded from your other venture without debt?

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty much.

SmartFlix is profitable, but it has debt.

All of the salaries, rent, startup inventory, consultant fees, trademark fees, legal fees, etc. for HeavyInk were payed for by profits from SmartFlix.

That said, SmartFlix itself has debt. Why? Because it's really capital intensive. If a given DVD rents out once every 60 days, and we make $4 in profit on a rental, and the DVD costs $60, then an upfront investment of $60 breaks even two years later. So: SmartFlix has incurred a bit of debt (half of it real debt owed to banks and other small lendors, and half of it paper debt, in the form of promissory notes to engineers who were on half salary for six months, etc.).

The capital intensive nature of SmartFlix was fine, but it means that it's hard to grow past a certain size - in the absence of VCs rushing to give us $1 or $5 million (and, frankly, they're right not to - SmartFlix isn't going to have the return that they're looking for), then growth slows to the rate at which we can purchase inventory with profits.

...which is one of the reasons that we looked for a second startup idea that leveraged a lot of our core competencies (ecommerce, fulfillment, datamining, etc.) but did not require nearly as much cash tied up in inventory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Instead of having that huge arrow to get people to install the OpenSearch plugin (or at least in addition to the arrow), you should use OpenSearch autodiscovery. When you go to a site with autodiscovery implemented, the logo box of the search bar glows blue. Go to Wikipedia and look at your search bar to get an idea of what happens.

Most users probably either don't notice or don't know what the blue glow means, so I can understand keeping the arrow, but you might as well add the autodiscovery too. Someone might do something nifty someday by crawling the web and scraping those autodiscovery links to build some sort of meta-search engine... that still wouldn't be as useful as Google, but it'd still be nifty.

[http://www.opensearch.org/Specifications/OpenSearch/1.1#Auto...](http://www.opensearch.org/Specifications/OpenSearch/1.1#Autodiscovery_in_HTML.2FXHTML)

<comment><USER8> I really really liked the yellow search bar, but I think you should make it point to something more useful than adding a firefox search. I personally don't use that for anything but very major searches(google, ebay, occasionally wikipedia). what if you used that bar to point to a sales special or something that can drive revenue or would be really appealing to users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You're in a pretty cool area. Like I said from a previous post though, I would suggest that you either talk to the guys from ComicVine (to see what they did wrong- they're now working on a another startup even though ComicVine is doing fabulously well) or figure out a way to beat them (I would suggest cribbing the stuff you like from them and then just making it better)..

As someone who read too many comic books when young, the digital comic phenomenon is really gaining serious steam. If you could let people upload their fan drawings and do licensing with the major publishers, you could really get a better in. Comicvine did not have that and as a result was never approached by Marvel or DC to acquire (the two companies just were pissed).

</comment><comment><USER10> Good luck! The days when I bought comic books are long past, but your site is inspiring. Perhaps I'll find something new worthy of buying.

<comment><USER3> Thats awesome. If you sign up and rate the kind of stuff you used to like, as well as stuff you specifically don't like... the recommendation system should give you some decent suggestions. (If it doesn't, I suck.) They're not as good as they will be, because our data set is still fairly limited, but its getting better daily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The website looks slick and I'm a big superhero/comics geek. I signed up and will poke around when I get a chance.

<comment><USER12> Awesome, thanks!

Go rate a few of your favorite comics, and then click the "recommendations" tab up top - we've been getting a lot of compliments on this feature.

<comment><USER10> Can you get recommendations without having to log in, too?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not personalized recommendations, no.

A question for YC-ers: does this sound like a valuable feature? My inclination is to think "no", but I might be wrong...

<comment><USER13> Use the current session history to do personal recommendations to users that aren't logged in. As a user browses through the comics he will generally click the things that interest him and a single great on the spot recommendation can be a deal sealer for a new user browsing your site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [http://www.boingboing.net/2007/11/08/heavyinkcom-a- mashup.ht...](http://www.boingboing.net/2007/11/08/heavyinkcom-a-mashup.html)

Boing Boing! Congratulations. The pagerank gods have smiled upon you. Let us know how much traffic/repeat traffic _that_ gets you.

<comment><AUTHOR> My personal blog once got linked by BoingBoing.

The machine glowed fiery red, just before it caught fire and died. :-)

Hopefully the fact that we've got a dedicated box with extra memory for HeavyInk will stop a repeat of that story...

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's clean but I feel it looks too much like netflix. Suggestion: Put the black splotch on red effect to one or both of the sides.

</comment><comment><USER15> When you're browsing for titles, it would be nice to put page navigation links at the bottom too aside fromt he ones at the top.

</comment><comment><USER16> Looks good, just one thing, in my browser (firefox 18.104.22.168 on linux) the signup button display is funny.

<comment><USER12> Yep. It worked fine in 18.104.22.168 on linux (that's what we used during devel), and then Firefox released 18.104.22.168, which regressed a bit, and reintroduced an old Firefox bug. There was uproar (we weren't the only site that looked bad in 18.104.22.168) and the Firefox team expedited the release of 188.8.131.52, and the site looks great again.

We actually held off on the announcement until 184.108.40.206 was ut!

So: consider upgrading Firefox right now, and give it another shot!

<comment><USER3> Problem is that Ubuntu hasn't updated Firefox to 184.108.40.206 in the repositories yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I like the idea but I think you need a designer

Good Luck

</comment><comment><USER18> the ratings don't work in firefox 2 on osx.

<comment><USER3> Interesting. Its been a while since I did any testing on the MacBook. Thanks.</comment></comment>


China submersible will go deeper than any others - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/science/12deepsea.html?_r=1&hp

<comment><USER2> Can for an article, got a paywall, left with my dignity.

<comment><USER3> Not quite correct, the paywall is coming in 2011, which will likely kill NYT as a source of news for me.

But for now, a free account still gives you access to the content.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: A credit card swiper for authorize.net? - <AUTHOR>

I have a non-profit client who wants to be able to accept credit card donations at charity events. They have an authorize.net account and are looking at http://www.usbswiper.com/
I've also seen https://squareup.com/
Have you used any mobile credit card solutions and what did you think of them? <comment><USER2> I don't have a lot of experience with them, but I'll share my thoughts on the 2 I have used.

I have a Square swiper that I use with my Droid X. I don't use it very often, but it seems to work well. Square's pricing is really good if you are doing low volume or low value transactions.

I just had a client that ordered one of Intuit's GoPayment swipers. It apparently doesn't work with every Android phone; it doesn't work with a Droid X or Droid X2. It did work alright with a iPhone 4S. I didn't think the swiper itself was as good as Square's.</comment>


Researchers create new computer combining optical and electronic technology - hn-user http://news.stanford.edu/2016/10/20/stanford-researchers-create-new-special-purpose-computer/ <comment> hn-user A fully-programmable 100-spin coherent Ising machine with all-to-all connections

[http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2016/10/21/scien...](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2016/10/21/science.aah5178)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This group at Stanford, collaborates closely with the Takesue group in Japan, who have the scaled version (2000 Node) ising machine in another article in Science:

[http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2016/10/19/scien...](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2016/10/19/science.aah4243)

</comment><comment><USER2> Is there any sense in which this is solving NP-complete problems in polynomial time? They're clearly aiming at NP-complete problems, but it's not clear how efficient this machine is or how general it is.

<comment><USER3> They are developing system that could provide good heuristic solutions to NP- complete problem. That does not count as being able to _solve_ NP-complete problems. It won't find optimal solution in all cases, but it can be practically very useful.

Their approach falls into the same category as simulated annealing or shrinking bubbles: [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/512821/shrinking-blob- com...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/512821/shrinking-blob-computes- traveling-salesman-solutions/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> D-Wave does that with supposedly quantum version of 'spin glass' model, a generalization of the Ising model.</comment>


The Secret to a Longer Life? Don't Ask These Dead Longevity Researchers - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/09/opinion/sunday/longevity-pritikin-atkins.html <comment><USER2> Make sure to read the article all the way to the end; I think it's quite a powerful statement.

We're too focussed on our individual choices, looking for elusive cures for aging; instead of fighting for things we know will help.

Reducing engine emmissions will make us live longer. Reducing pesticides will also make us live longer. Limiting work hours will make us healthier.

But instead, we pretend that our health is defined only by our individual life style decisions, and let the industry do whatever they want.

<comment><USER3> > Make sure to read the article all the way to the end;

> Today, the greatest threat to your life span may be the Trump > administration's assault on public health and medical research

Yeah, the end turns it into "what you can do to live longer is fight the trump administration". When paired with the lack of information presented in the article, makes it seem like some pedestrian political clickbait.

<comment><USER2> Don't get too hung up on the Trump part, it's not the important part.

The important argument is that our incredible success in extending human age over the last century is not due to individual lifestyle changes, but societal changes.

If we want to live longer, we need to stop poisoning our environment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the article is saying that there are way too many confounding variables in determining the probabilistic nature of longevity and so far due to the fragments of data, contradictions in data, challenges in tracking, uncaptured info, it is extremely difficulty to meaningful understand what people could do to slowdown aging without running controlled study on thousands if not millions of people.

However, say someone really wants to figure this out, they really want to know every component of every meal people eat, every activity or habit and every moment of their lives in terms of heart rate and metabolism and provide a device to easily track all these and make sure the data is for anonymized for research only, and they managed to convince millions of people to implant such device at their birth, and they figured this out in 500 years and found a formula to extend life indefinitely, I wonder if this would introduce the classic "the rich/wealthy lives forever" scenario, or the alternative scenario where the knowledge of longevity could hurt genetic evolution as a whole.

</comment><comment><USER5> I believe to know, what might make me live longer, my body often tells me: sleep more, eat less, avoid too much meat, fat and sugar, don't drink etc.

Many times, I catch myself thinking though: do I really wanna miss out on a great moment/feeling just to live a couple of years longer with a broken body and/or mind?

I can enjoy now. Who knows if I can then.

<comment><USER6> Males in the USA have an 81% chance of living to age 65 [1]. I think it makes sense to take care of yourself. Of course, allow yourself the occasional indulgence.

Your habits of your 20s and 30s could significantly impact your 40s and 50s. Taking care of yourself means enjoying more great moments later on too. Also, taking care of yourself can be in itself enjoyable. Pick up a sport, or if you're not competitive, make going to the gym a social thing. And eating healthy can certainly be tasty.

[1]: [https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TO65.MA.ZS?locat...](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TO65.MA.ZS?locations=US&view=chart)

<comment><USER7> >Pick up a sport, or if you're not competitive, make going to the gym a social thing.

Gross. Just run or, preferably, swim for 40 minutes to some hardcore music[0]. Let the endorphin high melt the pain and carry you through!

>And eating healthy can certainly be tasty.

It can be tasty when you consider fruit. When you consider everything else, it's misery. We evolved to crave sugar and fat. Gg

But you have to _deprecate_ mouth pleasure for a more durable basis of well- being, which is being healthier, and well-being is important because you want to live for as long as possible so you can someday witness the year of the Linux desktop!

[0]: [https://youtu.be/Ihi_kJJj_8A](https://youtu.be/Ihi_kJJj_8A)

<comment><USER8> > When you consider everything else, it's misery.

You're really missing out there. A friend of mine has given up meat for lent, and we're now trying a bunch of vegetarian recipes. It fits quite well because I've recently started looking into Indian cooking where you can do a lot without meat.

The only problem is that I absolutely despise all the stuff around cooking (searching for recipes, shopping for ingredients, doing the dishes, people that insist that cooking is super-easy and judge you for not doing it more often).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Mildly amusing, but basically silly. There is a reason why everyone in the past failed, and that is because they didn't have sufficiently advanced biotechnology to (a) understand the causes of aging in terms of specific low- level cell and tissue damage, and (b) identify and build ways to repair those forms of damage.

We've only had a way to progress towards therapies for aging with this model of development for somewhere between 30-50 years, and no way to make progress towards therapies for aging with anything short of massive war-on-cancer style programs prior to the last 20 years. (Those programs didn't happen, but in a different world could have; arguably it wouldn't have made much difference as to where we are now, just as the war on cancer has only been a foundational effort for the last ten years of exponentially rapid development just prior to the advent of universal effective cancer therapies. It is possible that senolytics could have happened much earlier, decades ago, but finding and validating the candidate drugs would have been very hard back then). But now everything in biotech costs 100 times less than it did not so very long ago - that is really why things are heating up in applied longevity science.

The article also commits the usual journalistic sin of equating every effort. There is a vast difference between all of: eating a different diet; running a pharmaceutical discovery program aimed at a mechanism of aging; running that program to build a way to replicate calorie restriction; running that program to kill senescent cells or clear glucosepane cross-links. These activities have radically different expectation values in terms of best plausible outcome.

The biggest mistake most people make in their approach to the new world of rejuvenation science is to think of every possible methodology as having similar best plausible outcomes in terms of years gained. Nothing could be further from the truth.

<comment><USER10> Suppose short of an eccentric bankrolling a jumpstart to institutionalizing a longevity research culture (for discussions sake, lets say Elon or the ghost of howard hughes) how do you imagine todays research culture would evolve into the necessary scale such longevity research would allegedly require?

<comment><USER9> An aging research community already exists that is ten times or more larger than would be needed to get to a comprehensive implementation of mouse rejuvenation after the SENS Research Foundation model in ten to twenty years. They are just largely not working on that. Amyloid removal is about the only area that does have a lot of attention focused on it.

The next few decades will be a slow process of proving that the SENS model works well, and that other models don't work well, when it comes to reversing age-related disease and producing rejuvenation in older individuals. There will be reluctant acceptance on the part of the mainstream, and development will largely shift to what works, slowly and late.

This can be seen in its infancy today in the rapid progression of work on senolytics. In just six years, clearance of senescent cells has already far outpaced the past few decades of work on calorie restriction mimetics, producing more impressive and reliable results in animal studies. Things that work are hard to ignore, so everyone now retrofits senescent cells into their models of aging and development - that didn't include them seven years ago - and continues to try to ignore the rest of the SENS to-do list. Senolytics development is becoming heavily funded, and is on its way to the clinic.

This process will reoccur every time the poorly funded bootstrapping side of the SENS research community manages to advance to the point of a technology demonstration, which happened in 2011 for cellular senescence. Expect this to happen for cross-link breaking sometime in the next few years, which will be just as impressive for cardiovascular aging as senescent cell clearance is for inflammatory/fibrotic conditions of aging.

One would hope that at some point, some people involving in this process make the realization that they could just implement the rest of SENS themselves, with the successful biotech company they are involved in. There are a number of existing companies/groups where this may well happen, if they grow sufficiently large.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Allow me to ask this related question: of our modern (if I may say so) societies, in our modern era; we see a lot of improvements and optimisations. But I rarely see ideas about the simple question of happiness.

It's as if we think happinnes comes by x or y (in here longer existence).

<comment><USER12> Well, what would a society that optimizes for happiness actually do differently?

<comment><USER13> Kill all the unhappy people. Such an action would be be the most effective way of raising the average level of happiness.

No society should ever optimise for a single simple factor.

<comment><USER8> That's Goodhart's law, by the way. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Because people game it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)

There's a related memorable, though probably untrue, anecdote about a Soviet nail factory: [https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22375/did-a- sov...](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22375/did-a-soviet-nail- factory-produce-useless-nails-to-improve-metrics)

<comment><USER13> It is not quite the same as Goodhart's law as it is more a philosophical position in that even if it was not possible to game, we should never do it.

<comment><USER11> it's odd because recently I felt most "modern" society is based on gaming things until things break.

<comment><USER13> Yes that certain is true :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Deathism appear to be rather popular here on HN [0].

0\. [https://hpluspedia.org/wiki/Deathism](https://hpluspedia.org/wiki/Deathism)

<comment><USER14> I think individual death is necessary for the greater of tapestry of life to flourish and to be something worth being involved. Most great people I ever knew or read seem to share this "live and let live" attitude. In contrast, the individuals who really really want to live forever are the ones that bore me to death after 5 minutes.

<comment><USER15> Some people are boring, therefore everyone should die? Are you sure you've thought that through?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It is easier to market something as the "cure" than to actually discover and _validate_ a cure

<comment><USER17> Just like, in spite of the fact that cancer cannot be cured, it's a lot easier to market research to "cure" it rather than "treat" it.

<comment><USER13> Of course cancer can be cured. What I wish we did is spend more on preventing cnacer, but the regulatory system basically makes this impossible.

<comment><USER17> I don't think so. Cancer is constantly being evolutionarily selected for. Eventually it finds a way to circumvent the cell's regulatory system. In a way that you didn't intend, you're right it's a problem with regulation.

It seems to me to be a truism, much more akin to thermodynamics than typical biology.

<comment><USER13> Yes but we know from large long lived animals like elephants and bowhead whales that the cancer rate can be very significantly reduced. If we had the same anticancer systems as the bowhead whales basically no one would get cancer even if they lived for a 1000 years. This is what we need to be working on.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Optometrists Feel Threatened by Technology, So Guess What They Do - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeleef/2017/06/13/optometrists-feel-threatened-by-technology-so-guess-what-do-they-do/amp/?__twitter_impression=true <comment><USER2> I have perfect vision now but massive genetic risks for ARMD and glaucoma; when I get much older, blindness is likely without proper lifestyle and care. I'm fine with periodically going to optometrists who's expertise will catch such issues. I can understand people whom have stable prescriptions not needing expertise all the time, but effectively decimating optometrists would be a horrible idea. As a diversification of risk, optometrists need to specialize and/or get side businesses because automation will incessantly nibble away at every profession and risk institutional wisdom that isn't easily rebuilt.

<comment><USER3> Part of the problem is that this regulation works from the other side too, but doesn't get as much attention. Optometrists have been trying to expand their practice into other areas in ways that seem reasonable to me, but then physician groups start to wield FUD tactics to stop them.

So what should happen is smartphone app provides another option, optometrists shrug because they have so many other things to offer, physicians shrug because they have other things to offer, etc.

But what's happening instead is the physician groups are staking their turf, and the smartphone apps are coming out, and optometrists are kind of squeezed, and fight back in all directions.

The problem isn't that optometrists aren't capable of offering other services in a capitalist-competitive sense, it's that licensing regulations are preventing those services from existing.

If the congress wasn't so busy in some damn pissing contest over payments in the health care system, they might try to enact more structural improvements, like massive licensing deregulation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have some examples of proposed OD practices blocked by MDs?

<comment><USER3> It depends on the state, but what I've read of so far is mostly expanding the range of eye diseases that can be treated with medication, and expanding their prescription privileges. Some of it focuses on lasik surgery, which probably merits more scrutiny, but certain states already allow it.

E.g.,

[http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op- ed/soapbox/article75185362....](http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op- ed/soapbox/article75185362.html) [https://www.reviewofoptometry.com/article/new-york-ods- push-...](https://www.reviewofoptometry.com/article/new-york-ods-push-for-- expanded-practice-scope)

Here's examples of discussion from the physician side, which tends to be a bit more FUD-focused, and to be biased in how certain topics are approached:

[http://journalofethics.ama- assn.org/2010/12/pfor1-1012.html](http://journalofethics.ama- assn.org/2010/12/pfor1-1012.html) [https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaophthalmology/fullartic...](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaophthalmology/fullarticle/2664079)

One of the articles starts by discussing psychologists, where similar issues arise. The typical AMA/physician group argument goes like this:

Profession X has specialized training in area A but limited to that, and not in area A+B. Physicians, in contrast, have training across a wide scope including B, and then in addition specialize in A.

The problem with this argument is that it presupposes that the only way to obtain training is by going from B, and then adding A, and ignores the argument that one could go from starting with A and then adding B. Optometrists aren't saying "everyone should be able to do lasik, or prescribe everything without training," they're saying "we are qualified to learn how to do it." Psychologists aren't saying "everyone with a license should prescribe," they're saying "people who have a license and then get additional training can prescribe."

The other problem is the physician groups tend to vastly undercharacterize the amount of training that often accompanies e.g., psychologists or optometrists. A psychologist was recent interim head of the National Institute of Mental Health, and many of them do research in psychophysiology, interventional and observational brain imaging, pharmacology, and so forth, and enter with the bio backgrounds. Conversely, the amount of actual coursework in medical school is increasingly less and less, and because they are covering so many areas of medicine, the amount of training they get across areas is relatively small.

My point isn't to belittle MD training, it's just to say that people have to be careful in the assumption that going from broader -> specific is necessarily better than going from specific -> broad, or that you have to start with certain education and then specialize, as opposed to picking up additional education along the way.

The issue is really a monopoly of (a) specific educational and training model(s) in the health care setting. Licensing is not actually competency- based, it's credential-based.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So is this an ad for Opternative?

<comment><USER5> It worked, I'm looking at their page right now. And you know why? Because optometrists have been so hit-or-miss for me that I can't see why a phone app doesn't have shot at doing just as well.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Will joining EMC' Data science & Big data analytics course ensure a job? - <AUTHOR>

I would like to join EMC' Data Science and Big Data Analytics training(https://education.emc.com/guest/campaign/data_science.aspx). Is it worth for a data scientist job? Right now I am programmer skilled in Java and interests in big data. Please advice<p>Thanks <comment><USER2> Would 1 week of java training turn a novice into a expert programmer? I took a quick peak at the course page and it does look very interesting. However, I dont think you can call yourself a data scientist after taking this course. If you want some free resources, check out coursera's machine learning course. You can also find some free map reduce training from google. In my opinion, becoming a data scientist takes years - not days.</comment>


Ask HN: What healthcare options exist for entrepreneurs? - <AUTHOR> Would like to know what are the best options for healthcare when working for yourself in California. How much should I expect to pay? <comment><USER2> This is a bit political; but relevant - vote for Universal Healthcare (Medicare for All), and this won't even be a thought for you.

I'm from Australia and don't need to ever worry about health care costs; and you'd never in my life get me to vote to have a system like yours here.

I say this not to rant, but to hope in my heart that America can deliver this level of care to its citizens, and free you and your family from this burden.

<comment><USER3> Also relevant if you want nationalized healthcare expect to pay a significant amount more in taxes. America is the third most populous country in the world with over 320M documented citizens + an unknown amount of undocumented citizens. Roughly half of the us population does not pay income taxes yet still need to be covered by healthcare. It's probably much more affordable and of better quality to get a private insurance plan. So either be an entrepreneur who makes money so that you can afford that option or get healthcare through a company and moonlight your way to the top. Edit: also you can elect S-Corp and get a payroll system like ADP with a healthcare plan they provide

<comment><USER4> Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt.

Insured families pay $1200-1500/m for premiums with thousands of dollars of deductibles and annual limit on spending. And the. Have to fight for every cent the insurance companies do their damn best to not pay.

How will we pay for single payer? We take all the money that goes for healthcare right now, burn half of it and use the other half. Or less.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I pay something like $430/month through Kaiser. My experience there is they are really good unless you need mental health stuff. I would especially recommend cancer—the views of SF from the chemo lounge are spectacular.

Kaiser is their own insurer/pharmacy, and works like a mini version of single payer. If you're younger than me (I'm 43) you may find some plans with them that are cheaper.

Another option is OneMedical, which is kind of boutique health care for wealthier people, but lets you do a lot more online than most medical services and may be worth a look. [https://www.onemedical.com](https://www.onemedical.com)

<comment><USER6> Why do you say One Medical is for "wealthier people"? Outside of the $200 annual membership fee, it's no different than seeing any other physician if they are in-network for your insurance plan.

<comment><USER7> I had several doctors from One Medical and they were not the best. However, there were a number of things that made up for it. Setting up appointments was easy, the locations were convenient, and you could even talk to the doctors via messaging on the website. Viewing and downloading test results could be done via their website also, and I've had to jump through hoops to get test results elsewhere.

However, to call it a true concierge practice would be a joke, in my opinion. I've never had the money for one (10k+ per year fee), but a friend of mine did have one of these, and at least in his case they were able to cure a serious back problem of his through cutting edge and non-invasive therapies. I wouldn't expect to find anything close to that at One Medical.

Still would say the One Medical membership fee ($200) is worth it if you can find a decent doctor there and if you're not happy with what you currently have.

<comment><USER6> For me, the best thing about One Medical is that they have walk in labs and you can do your labs in their office without going to a Quest Labs or LabCorp office, which are not pleasant at all and usually have long waits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Your best choice will likely be a plan from the ACA. In California, this is [https://www.coveredca.com/](https://www.coveredca.com/). You can try and get cute and find something like a MEWA, which have theoretically been cleaned up from the disaster that they were in the past (bankrupt and not covering claims.) There's also professional organizations that you can purchase through, but I've never seen one that isn't just a gateway for the ACA.

As far as price, just check the market. There should be a way to see prices without even creating an account. The total price to account for is premium*12 + out_of_pocket_max, which should be between $11-15k for the year for a single person regardless of what plan you have. For me, I'm at about $490/month for a $7900 out of pocket max, which puts my total liability at $13780 for the year. Though, it will probably be less than that given that I'm healthy. That said, I'm not in CA.

Anyway, good luck! Running your own business is exciting and this is an expense. Also worth noting that your premiums are completely deductible as a self-employed person, which is normally not the case.

</comment><comment><USER9> We get group insurance (with BC/BS) through a local broker. One thing to have a look at: we found that the high-deductable plans were so much cheaper that we could put enough into everybody's HSA account to cover the deductible and still come out ahead. I think it's one of the best moves we ever made, and I've stress-tested the insurance pretty hard...

</comment><comment><USER10> I pay $1,050 for myself, my wife, and my son. It is crazy, that is with a $6k+ deductible per person... It is terrible insurance and just for catastrophic.

I hope we do Medicare for all. This system is so broken, it is time to learn from Europe, Japan, etc. I don't get why we don't steal great ideas because we are doing terrible.

</comment><comment><USER11> I am self-employed as a software contractor. I think my wife and I pay around $500 combined for the two of us via Oscar. We had BC/BS for a while but as two relatively healthy people we opted to reduce our monthly expenses a bit and switch to Oscar when BC/BS raised their prices _again_ at the start of 2019.

</comment><comment><USER12> Family of 4, I pay 1250$ for the cheapest Blue Shield CA plan. I got the plan comparison on [https://www.stridehealth.com/](https://www.stridehealth.com/) but the enrollment period is over already for this year, unless you qualify for an event.

<comment><AUTHOR> I assume that is per month?

<comment><USER12> Yes

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Look at the MarketPlace, HealthSherpa, or ehealthinsurance.

I'm not sure the rules on posting links. I'm not associated with any of the above. But whenever I'm relocating and working a contract without benefits. I use those three sites to narrow down my options.

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you tried healthcare.gov?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I run a 1-person LLC in NYC. I initially used healthcare.gov for my coverage, but once my business started making money, I found that I was paying a lot for mediocre coverage. The providers I used also stopped offering coverage after 2016/2017, so I decided to switch to TriNet. They are an HR service, but also offer health insurance, which is all I use them for. I also looked at Gusto and JustWorks, but they required 1+ employees. I currently pay about $1500 for me and my family for pretty good coverage from Aetna (including dental and vision).

<comment><USER15> How did you get just the insurance? I reached out to them and was told I needed a full service plan ($500/mo before the insurance) with them to get the insurance. I have a 2-person LLC partnership, and we don't need the business services.

How'd you do what you did?

<comment><USER14> I pay for the full service plan (it is less for me since I am just 1 person), but I don't use any of the other services. Even with the fee, it is still a good deal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't know how applicable it is, but if you are big enough to have an employee or two, check with whomever you contract with to handle payroll processing and see if they've got an offering. My wife's last gig was for a three-employee company and their payroll provider was able to offer group insurance rates that were pretty competitive.

</comment><comment><USER17> In the US, if you are under age 26, you can still be covered by your parents insurance thanks to the ACA ("Obamacare").

</comment><comment><USER18> If you pay yourself little enough you can get free or subsidised healthcare through Obamacare. There are no asset tests.

<comment><USER8> This is false and will likely get you into trouble. ACA uses your last year's income tax return in order to determine whether a subsidy should be awarded. While it is true that you do not send in your tax return while applying for coverage, your insurance company does send in paperwork through a 1095-A. In the past, 1095-A was used primarily to show that coverage was carried in order to avoid a tax penalty, so, yes, you may be able to get away with it, but you'd still be lying and there will be documentation that you are lying.

Also, sole-proprietorships and S-corps, LLC or not, are considered pass through and all company income is considered personal income as far as the IRS is concerned. There's no such thing as not paying yourself in this context to drive down your income.

<comment><USER19> There is nothing false about his comment (maybe it was updated).

ACA is fully based on projected income for the year. Previous year's tax returns are one way of substantiating your projected income. But not required. If you are living off of savings and not making a profit yet on your business, you can pay yourself a small salary and qualify for full subsidies from ACA.

If you file as a C Corp (which you can do with an LLC), you could even hold profits in retained earnings and not pay them to yourself yet. You would of course have to pay corporate tax on those retained earnings.

<comment><USER8> Yes, ACA is based on projected income:

[https://www.healthcare.gov/income-and-household- information/...](https://www.healthcare.gov/income-and-household- information/income/)

However, for most people, the primary number to estimate this is your adjusted gross income, which they explicitly instruct to use line 7 on the 1040. It's not entirely clear to me who the regulatory authority is now that the tax penalty has been taken away for not carrying insurance, but I'm pretty sure it's going to look bad if you say that your income is near $0 to get a subsidized plan and your actual income is above the subsidy level and the IRS will have this information.

As far as holding the money in a C-corp, sure. However, then you're going to pay the corporate income tax rate for keeping the money in C-corp, file much more complicated paperwork than you would as a sole-proprietorship (depending on the state), and then likely have to pay additional taxes or play games once that money turns into income. All of this is to save on what's going to turn out to be likely less than $5k in premiums, which are already tax deductible as a self-employed person.

I'll still contend that the comment is largely false given the idea is to save money by pretending that there's no income. The IRS isn't dumb and they'll get their taxes eventually even if it requires an audit. It seems like a huge hassle and liability to play this game to save such a small amount of money. If this isn't a small amount of money, then the OP isn't in a position to start a business, unfortunately.

<comment><USER18> I don't know why you latched on to the notion that I was suggesting something dishonest.

You might be prioritizing developing your product over making income, or reinvesting income rather than spending that income personally. Or you might have savings or existing investment funding. There are many common scenarios such as these and none of them involve fraud.

You can be building up a substantial asset and living frugally and it doesn't affect your eligibility because of the lack of an asset test and because any capital gains are not realized) or assessed) until the business is sold.

Also as a single person you can earn up about $12K and not pay any premiums under Obamacare, or get up to about $48K and still get a subsidy. If you have a family of 4 these figures and $23K and $96K respectively. So obviously you don't have to get your income down to $0.

<comment><USER19> Those minimum/maximum rates are different depending on if you state has medicaid expansion or not.

But I think the rates you posted are federal poverty level for a family of 4. Obamacare coverage kicks in at 138% of FPL all the way up to 400% of fpl.

Below 138% FPL disqualifies you for obamacare because you would qualify for state medicaid coverage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> You're looking for network healthcare plans? It was news to me to learn about 'sliding scale' pricing at many county hospitals. Same for clinics.

If you're young and in good overall health, this might be a choice to consider.

</comment><comment><USER21> Use the exchange.

</comment><comment><USER22> I pay $150/mo using a health sharing service called Christian Healthcare Ministries. There are others not religious in nature like Liberty Health Share. Would be $450 for entire family.

<comment><USER23> I vouched for this dead comment. I know a few self-employed consultants or business owners who use this kind of mutual expense sharing for their insurance. (I learned about the concept from my auto insurance agent several years ago.) It seems like something entrepreneurs actually use and may be more viable than high deductible insurance for people who would actually use their insurance (but more expensive than Medicaid.)

<comment><USER24> It is worth highlighting the major difference: these products are not at all health insurances, and they cannot be labelled as such.

When you have a contract with an insurance company, that service provider has to pay up or you can sue them if they don't. Sure, there might be a co-pay or a high deductible, but if you draw an unlucky card with cancer / heart / cardio disorders, they will fork out six-seven figure sums to get you better.

"Christian Healthcare Ministries" and the like have no obligation to pay out and you are gambling on their goodwill, which can be revoked at any moment with no recourse. Further, they often have _lifetime_ caps of ~$100k per diagnosis/condition, and in case of any serious illness this will be chewed up in 3-4 months, then you are on your own.

<comment><USER23> Yes, that all is important to consider. My understanding is that this was especially true before the ACA, when certified continuous coverage was a big deal.

The lifetime limit is more complicated than that as they seem to have separate programs for up to a maximum and everything beyond that. For example, Samaritan Ministries (one of these programs) costs ~$500/mo for a family for everything up to $250,000 and about $500/year to cover $250,000 with no limit. I'm guessing that's done because they have members who live in inexpensive countries, but it seems like the extra annual cost should just be rolled into the monthly so no one makes the wrong choice about how much to cover.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> saving thread

<comment><USER26> (and loans.. hopefully not student loans)</comment></comment>


AI landlord speculating in American housing market - <AUTHOR> https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/meet-the-ai-landlord-thats-building-a-single-family-home-empire/ar-AADdgJM <comment><USER2> Somewhat interesting article. A little about cutting edge house buying and mostly about one company involved. Grossly misleading title.</comment>


The myth of the cheat proof digital exam - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@haspaker/the-myth-of-the-cheat-proof-digital-exam-dcbafcf62613#.1kuxzgd0q <comment><USER2> I suspect this has a similar effect as anti-cheat measures in games: it only becomes more difficult to detect the cheaters as their methods necessarily become more sophisticated. It's just another arms race.</comment>


I integrated a Bootstrap Dashboard theme into Rails – with a step-by-step guide - <AUTHOR> https://www.dinosaas.com/articles/starter-app-1-argon <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all! OP here.

Here's the Github Link in case you missed it in the article - [https://github.com/Dino-SaaS/Argon](https://github.com/Dino-SaaS/Argon).

I have an engineering background but I'm not a designer. So when I discovered that there were all these awesome Bootstrap themes out there - with huge libraries of pages and components - I got excited.

Rails is my framework of choice, but I couldn't find any solid tutorials for integrating a Bootstrap theme into Rails. After figuring it all out, I decided to share and open-source the result.

 _I'd love to hear from all of you:_

\- Have you used a Bootstrap theme? What did you like/dislike? If not, why not?

\- What's missing from my tutorial?

\- What would you want to see next?</comment>