Show HN: authors, here's a new idea for promoting your book - <AUTHOR>

Last year, I was running an independent marketplace for ebooks (similar to Smashwords), which failed.
After its demise, we took a long look at ebooks and decided rather than competing with Amazon and iTunes, we should focus on solving a more pressing problem most authors face: how to get their books noticed in the first place.
The result is BookHunch, which is an attempt to mobilize people via social media to read, review, and create buzz about a given book.
That's the quick summary, but there's a more detailed history on my blog, as well as a preview article on the Digital Reader blog.
We started with a few public domain books, but now we're opening up to new content.
So if there any authors here who'd like to try it, please comment here, or contact us through twitter @bookhunch, and I'll send you an invite. <comment><AUTHOR> Here are some clickable links.

The site: <http://bookhunch.com/>

My blog post about its history: <http://denis.papathanasiou.org/?p=620>

The Digital Reader preview article: [http://www.the-digital- reader.com/2011/08/30/new-crowd-sourc...](http://www.the-digital- reader.com/2011/08/30/new-crowd-sourced-book-review-site-launching-soon- bookhunch/)

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm an avid reader and I'd love to know how you would incentivize me to read, share, and promote on my social channels.

Reading your Digital Reader preview article, it seems like the more I read and share, the more content I have access to? Just a personal opinion, but I wouldn't want to share my opinion on a book just because I get greater access to other books.

Sneak peeks, access to the author, discounts to buying the books, those would all be decent incentives for me!

</comment><comment><USER3> If you're looking to advertise, try helpareporter.com -- they have hundreds and hundreds of authors on their mailing list that I have personally worked with.</comment>


OS X Mountain Lion Galaxy Photo Identified - <AUTHOR> http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/os_x_mountain_lion_galaxy_photo_identified/ <comment><USER2> The second result on TinEye has this information. [https://www.tineye.com/search/f905c9ccd742a9f7a6ceb9f566b795...](https://www.tineye.com/search/f905c9ccd742a9f7a6ceb9f566b795bb260d228a/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'll admit it – the new galaxy desktop background is one of the things I look forward to in new Mac OS releases. So pretty…

</comment><comment><USER4> A TMO Scoop</comment>


Why Sweden Clears Snow-Covered Walkways Before Roads - <AUTHOR> https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/01/24/why-sweden-clears-walkways-before-roads/ <comment><USER2> Coupling sexism to snow clearing order. I have now seen it all. This is getting to be quite the stretch. The correlation is tenious at best from the data they presented.

<comment><USER3> Don't see that. This seems pretty clear, and (as usual for Scandanavia, unlike almost everywhere else) rational:

"Three times as many people are injured while walking in icy conditions in Sweden than while driving. And the cost of those injuries far exceeds the cost of snow clearance."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Everyone knows that this is the next level of crazy. In the winter, people don't walk their kids long distances to kindergarden - they drive. And the unlucky souls who walk, it never was a problem because it's easier to put on a better pair of shoes than to replace your car with a snowmobile.

Since this began there has been absolute chaos in society, last year people was abandoning their cars on the biggest road in Sweden(E4) and walked home - because the roads weren't plowed.

More side effects of this was that all shipments were delayed which caused billions in financial loss for the society, emergency personell was unable to get around and people died, all buses and trains were cancelled.

<comment><USER5> What would a change in the prioritization of how roads, bike paths, and sidewalks are cleared cause all the trains to be cancelled? I thought the trains had their own routes and own clearing equipment?

I tried researching this but nearly all the news in English is from the pro- Trump/right-wing press using this to ridicule feminism. [https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/gender-equal-snow- removal-...](https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/gender-equal-snow-removal- procedures-left-stockholm-paralyzed) said the trains were running at half- speed, which make me think that the feminist-based snow clearing policy wasn't the main problem.

I did read that it was the biggest snowfall in 111 years - surely that played a role as well, yes?

Almost all of the articles I found were published within a couple of days of the event, and all referencing the same Swedish news sources. I didn't find anything which described how many of the chaos was due to the different snow cleaning prioritization and how much was due to the amount of snow. I imagine other factors might also be important, like the amount of lead time in knowing there would be that much snow, or if (since it was an early season snow) people hadn't expected such a storm, and perhaps not yet switched to winter tires.

No doubt the Swedish news all covered these details, but that doesn't help me much.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Remove mentions of 2016 Elections from your browser - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/elections-filter/affempeipilpnpmhfgomiooonfjahoij <comment><USER2> Do you think you're going to solve the problem by hiding from it?

<comment><USER3> If you think the problem is political posts and arguments taking up much of your attention and diverting you from your family, career and personal happiness - yes.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: I'm visiting Palo Alto tonight. What should I do? - <AUTHOR>

I'm in Palo Alto tonight by myself for my day job. I'd love suggestions on what to do tonight. <comment><USER2> [http://www.quora.com/What-do-young-people-in-Palo-Alto-do- fo...](http://www.quora.com/What-do-young-people-in-Palo-Alto-do-for-fun)

</comment><comment><USER3> If a movie is playing, go to the Stanford theatre downtown. Eat Mediterranean Wraps next door. Go to Hookah Spot afterwards. : )

</comment><comment><USER4> if you're looking for an adventure, go down to the google headquarters in Mountain View and take a ride around the campus on one of the colored employee bikes.

</comment><comment><USER5> visit Stanford</comment>


Populus.js - <AUTHOR> https://lukyvj.github.io/populus.js/ <comment><USER2> If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good 'Show HN'. Show HN guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)</comment>


The Village and the Village - <AUTHOR> http://www.iamdanw.com/wrote/what-are-borders-anyway/ <comment><USER2> > A letter sent from the Belgian half of a house to the Dutch side, posted > into a Baarle-Hertog post box would be transported by van to Turnhout, then > to Brussels, flown by plane to Amsterdam, then by truck via Tilburg, back to > Baarle-Nassau. Apparently.

Brilliant.</comment>


Tinder Lets Known Sex Offenders Use the App. It's Not the Only One - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/tinder-lets-known-sex-offenders-use-the-app-its-not-the-only-one <comment><USER2> If Tinder forced people to do background checks, propublica would do a similar write-up about how invasive that is and how it disproportionately affects [affected group]. The only way to win this game is to not play.

</comment><comment><USER3> sounds like an impossible problem for where the only (dystopian) solution would be strong attestation of users identity by the service provider. not only would that too be riddled with potential mistakes. but as it is with all such cases, the service provider can't actually be trusted with such data (or managing such a process).

EDIT: this story sounds like trying to use the sex-offender thing to fabricated outrage. People who use these apps to "hook up" with strangers should be well aware that they might bump into all kind of bad people (some of them might be lunatics or even criminals). Having the service provider suddenly be in charge of attesting for the (lack of) character of its users sounds like a terrible idea.

<comment><USER4> It is not unreasonable to regulate platforms for the safety of its users. Background checks and ID verification flows can be automated, and are inexpensive in bulk.

"Gig economy" platforms already support this in various forms, due to customer pressure and local regulatory environments.

<comment><USER3> they could push to educate users better on how to be safe or at least tailor part of the process (getting to know each other workflow) so it becomes safer.

meeting strangers and attesting for identity is a problem that isn't unique to Tinder/Grindr. It's relevant to any service that spills over into _meat- space_.

Background checks and ID checks unfortunately won't work for many people not in the US. Worse they will give people a wrong sense of security. IMO training and steering users to the right behavior would be more effective.

Some of these tips[1] could be used to implement a workflow (user stories) around it to make it safer:

[1] staying safe on Tinder: [https://www.vyke.com/stay-safe-on- tinder/](https://www.vyke.com/stay-safe-on-tinder/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is there anything stopping a sex offender from taking out a classified ad in the paper or a missed connection on Craigslist? This doesn't seem isolated to web properties so the framing is a little odd to me.

</comment><comment><USER6> The link is broken, but the link from the propublica.org home page is also broken (and is the same link). Maybe it will start working.</comment>


Show HN: Etherglade – Accept Ethereum on your site in minutes - <AUTHOR> https://www.etherglade.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey all! Earlier this year, I launched a parody ICO called PonziCoin ([http://ponzicoin.co](http://ponzicoin.co)), and I found that it was fairly difficult to easily accept Ethereum on a site and support all the major wallets (hardware, web, mobile) so I decided to make Etherglade. It's a drop- in UI that you should be able to add to your site in less than 5 minutes and start accepting Ethereum - it even supports smart contracts! In the future, I also hope to add features to make interacting with Ethereum and smart contracts easier for the average person.

I would love any feedback, comments, or questions :)

Side Note: Don't start a pyramid scheme, even if you explicitly state that it is a pyramid scheme and it's clearly a parody. It turns out a significant amount of people will still put a significant amount of money in

<comment><USER2> There are people who "play" ponzis for a living. They use whatever information they can find to determine if they believe they can get in and out before the ponzi reaches the start of its collapse. Then they hop in, make some money, and hop out.

I think it's contributing to the decline of civilization, but you have to admire how a business investing approach can be applied to virtually anything.

<comment><USER3> It's just a different form of PvP gambling, like poker.

<comment><USER2> Except that I doubt anyone approaches a poker table not knowing they are entering a competition.

Ponzis prey on greedy, foolish people - some of whom actually believe the lies being promoted about it being a real investment. It's even worse in the cryptocurrency world, where fools are convinced that they are buying shares in mining operations or super-secret trading bots.

<comment><USER3> There are plenty of legitimate scams in the cryptocurrency world, but the games we're referring to (PonziCoin, PoWH3D, CryptoCelebrities, CryptoKitties, etc.) are very transparent about the fact that they are zero-sum games where you have the chance to lose a lot of money.

These games should really be considered simulated bubbles instead of Ponzis. A Ponzi scheme collapses when the operator walks away with everyone's money. PoWH3D doesn't have an operator since it's totally decentralized. It will collapse when everyone decides to sell. Likewise, CryptoCelebrities will never crash but inevitably somebody will get stuck with a collectible that nobody else wants to buy. It's akin to buying a beanie baby or a tulip for an exorbitant price, only to find that there's nobody to resell it to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wait a minute, why not just put my eth address on the website?

<comment><USER5> Use [https://eth-button.github.io/eth-button/](https://eth- button.github.io/eth-button/) for donations

<comment><AUTHOR> I should also point out that Etherglade can also be "attached" to a button on your website and then when the button is clicked, the UI will show up in a modal!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a nice implementation. Using credit cards online is actually a little annoying/hacky, despite years of UX work and several billion dollar companies built to solve this problem. If Ethereum or another blockchain tech can solve this at a lower cost than the current payment processors (2-3% fees), then we might actually see widespread adoption online.

<comment><USER7> How do you do chargebacks with Ethereum?

<comment><USER6> There's not precise comparison, but with Ethereum you could have different classes of payments backed by different types of contract which the end user could choose from when purchasing. E.g.

\- For small payments, or to trusted suppliers, no chargebacks

\- For large one-time transactions, funds held in escrow for a given period

\- For long term transactions, funds are committed but only accessed over time etc.

Perhaps there won't be any chargebacks as we know them available in ethereum, but if you want to pay extra 1-2% as part of your payment to offset the risk (which is basically what you're doing now with credit cards, but enforced), that could be an option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This looks nice. One thing though - you should consider using strings instead of numbers for the amounts. The problem is that numbers in JS are actually floats, and you lose precision on high values. Probably not going to make a big difference, but e.g. 100000000000000001 can't be represented as a number in JS.

<comment><USER9> > consider using strings

And because '1' \+ '1' === '11' is not the pinnacle of arithmetic either, consider using bignumber.js or a better language than JavaScript

<comment><USER10> So, what other language do you suggest for building an interactive web app?

<comment><USER9> The number of languages that compile to JS or WASM is increasing, maybe I'd use Elm or Rust.

<comment><USER10> Yes but would it solve the floating point inaccuracies? Compiled to JS is JS after all

<comment><USER9> you could enforce proper types that do not have any inaccuracies

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Any plans for recurring subscription payments support?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a bit hard to do currently - there's no "pull" support for any Ethereum wallets right now, so the user has to approve every request manually and usually has to be on the site for the site to even make the request.

However, one of the concepts I'm working on to make it easier for the average person to use Ethereum is to introduce a hosted wallet option. If Etherglade hosts wallets, we could then introduce easy subscription functionality (which the user can manage). So definitely plausible down the road!

<comment><USER12> Can't you make a smart contract that is effectively a subscription? And then you'd only need to sign it once?

<comment><USER13> Yes you can. You could create an smart contract where you lock X amount of eth, and set up how much the other party can withdraw each month. Then is up to the provider of the service to withdraw the amount each month, which seems to me less an issue since they want to get paid.

<comment><USER14> That's actually how a SEPA direct debit works</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Don't believe the Silicon Valley hype - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/20/dont-believe-the-hype-silicon-valley-is-not-the-be-all-end-all-for-tech-companies/

<comment><USER2> Am I the only person who reads articles like these and gets the suspicion that this is less about how great Austin is (and it is a great city with some top- notch hackers living there), but basically a thinly veiled advertising opportunity for a software company that is trying to link its success to a larger (and largely disconnected) issue?

I'm not even sure who the audience of this is. Investors? I doubt any savvy VB-reading investors are unaware that there are great technology companies in Austin, New York, Portland, Chicago, and many other cities. In fact, the author appears a little out of the loop by talking about "The Valley" when businesses have been heading north to the Peninsula for years now.

<comment><USER3> It isn't all that thinly veiled is it? Its a recruiting pitch, the message is: 'cost of living is lower', 'opportunities are plentiful', 'traffic is better', and 'there is hip culture here too'. It is targeted at folks who are working in the Bay area and hate the commute and high cost of living but feel trapped because it is the 'place to be.' The goal being to get those people to consider working outside the Bay Area.

The bottom line is that there are lots of places to work, they aren't all like the Bay Area but they don't have to be.

<comment><USER4> Austin dweller here -- I assure you the traffic is NOT better here. Ranked 8th worst in the nation.

> If you are not aligned with one of the fashionable templates, your mojo in > the Valley can quickly whither.

I observed this at SXSW last year. It was Elevator Pitch Bingo, with every presentation being some combination of Social, Mobile, Coupon, Local, and "your friends". Very few of the pitches strayed outside that subset.

<comment> wh-uws Austin resident from Atlanta who has lived in San Francisco.

Yes it it is.

In Austin if there is a jam you can go a few blocks over and avoid it.

In SF or Atlanta alot of times you're fucked because this is the only road that goes where you want :/

<comment><USER5> On the other hand, in SF you can commute by bike. I'm told that's not viable in Austin.

<comment> wh-uws If you live and work downtown or near UT's campus it is.

If not then you are quite right its not.

<comment><USER6> i live 2 mi west of ut/downtown, and i disagree. i gave up cycling when i moved here from the Valley. :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > I feel it's actually a competitive advantage > to build startups outside of > Silicon Valley

In some ways this is true. We're in Scottsdale, AZ and have lured two senior people _from_ SV. Granted, they admitted to some irritation with the SV culture, it wasn't really hard. But the incredibly lower cost of having a business here means were capable of offering fair market salaries, not typical low salaries + equity of most SV startups.

While the talent pool is smaller, the competition for that talent is almost nonexistent... so hiring was easier to some degree.

And if you play golf... well...

</comment><comment><USER8> _guess-post=puff-piece-for-his-company_ issue aside, the article is kinda just stating the obvious... which is that you should geographically place your startup where it makes most based on the type of company you are building.

Many folks are already living in SF/Bay Area and start their company without thinking that maybe it would be better to do it elsewhere.

I live in SF yet my own startup, WP Engine, is based in Austin because we're very operations and server orientated. I wouldn't start that kind of company in the Bay Area as there's just no advantage. We now have some Marketing and Strategy presence here, but operations remains firmly in Austin.

Equally, I personally wouldn't put a heavily social-orientated company in Austin as there are many important partners you need to get chummy with to succeed who are based in SF/Bay Area.

It's just about weighing up what labor and partners you need, and putting your company where it needs to be. Not everyone can do that (family ties, visas, etc) but if you're already in the Bay Area it does make sense to consider whether moving out would benefit your startup.

<comment><USER9> "as there's just no advantage".

So, orders of magnitude more top notch engineers is not an advantage?

An order of magnitude more VC firms is not an advantage?

The existence of YC is not an advantage?

Order of magnitude more tech oriented events and meetups is not an advantage?

Maybe you meant "for me, personally, for my very specific business, there's no advantage" but maybe you shouldn't make sweeping statements based on what seems like a strongly held opinion and not a reasoned position.

To be clear: I'm not saying that Bay Area is the only place to start a successful startup. Clearly, it isn't.

But just as clearly Bay Area is an epicenter of startups that generates disproportionately large number of successes, both gigantic (which Austin tech company is on the list of 500 biggest US companies, next to Google, Apple, Oracle, Yahoo?) and small.

So either we have some unexplained phenomena that distorts the probability of success here or there are very real advantages to being here.

<comment><USER8> Well, you chopped off half of what I said and miss-quoted me in the process. I said there was no real advantage to starting an operations/infrastructure- focused company in SF Bay Area. I pointed out that for social, in particular, SF/SV is totally high value.

But, back to operations-orientated (eg infrastructure, etc) startups:

 _So, orders of magnitude more top notch engineers is not an advantage?_

Nope, because such companies have a greater reliance on sysadmins, devops and tech support folks. And there is more talent on that front in Austin (for reasons explained in the OP) than in SF/SV. Also there's no point having an order of magnitude of engineers in SF/SV if you can't afford to hire them. I'm not going to reveal our wage levels but like-for-like they're probably 50-66% that of Bay Area and still highly skilled.

 _An order of magnitude more VC firms is not an advantage?_

Nope, cos Sand Hill Road will still invest in Austin based companies.

 _The existence of YC is not an advantage?_

Nope, YC is nothing to me. I'll never participate as I'm a 31 year old with going on 14 years experience of the industry and been involved in several exits. I'm not a candidate YC entrepreneur.

 _Order of magnitude more tech oriented events and meetups is not an advantage?_

Well, I live in SF so I go all the awesome events and still benefit from being in Austin. What they don't tell you is once your company takes off and you have $MM revenue and a huge team of employees you end up going to less events and start focusing internally.

 _Maybe you meant "for me, personally, for my very specific business, there's no advantage" but maybe you shouldn't make sweeping statements based on what seems like a strongly held opinion and not a reasoned position._

No, I'm saying for most non-social, non-software-pure-plays, it's a big advantage to get out of Bay Area. I'm sure Austinites would argue further than that. It's not just for me.

 _which Austin tech company is on the list of 500 biggest US companies, next to Google, Apple, Oracle, Yahoo?_

Not sure about Yahoo! (and couldn't care less about Yahoo either) but all of them and Facebook have significant presences in Austin. To answer you question, though, Dell is. I'm not saying that's particularly sexy but you asked the question. I'm not also not sure what your point is here or how it related to startups?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The author still thinks that you need to pack it up and go somewhere to succeed. That message sidesteps the real debate: whether you can "stay home" with your startup. Most people that are willing to move end up in Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER11> > * Most people that are willing to move end up in Silicon Valley*

What basis do you have for that claim?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Twitter Accounts to Follow? - <AUTHOR> I notice that many people of the tech industry are heavy Twitter users, from CEOs of big companies to startup founders and hackers. If I want to get a sense of what topics people in tech are talking about this week, which Twitter accounts should I follow? <comment><USER2> @paulg, @Jonathan_Blow, @ID_AA_Carmack, @TimSweeneyEpic @rivatez

Wish Jim Keller was active, listened to his interviews from 2019-2020 and he has some interesting thoughts and insights.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://twitter.com/mims](https://twitter.com/mims) posts some interesting content. And [https://twitter.com/onion2k](https://twitter.com/onion2k) obviously.</comment>


Sony to kill off PS3 Linux option on next firmware update - <AUTHOR> http://www.platformnation.com/2010/03/28/ps3-droppin-linux-support/ <comment><USER2>
      > On Fri, 2009-08-21 at 09:58 -0700, geoffrey.levand at am.sony.com wrote:
      >> Please be assured that SCE is committed to continue
      >> the support for previously sold models that have the
      >> "Install Other OS" feature and that this feature will
      >> not be disabled in future firmware releases.

Source: [http://www.haxnetwork.net/2010/03/otheros-will-not-be- remove...](http://www.haxnetwork.net/2010/03/otheros-will-not-be-removed-from- phat-ps3s/)

I guess this proves that you can't really trust the promises of some companies. We have to keep in mind that a company is driven by profit, and it will always have the highest priority. I have no problems with that in general, but removing features from a product that people have already paid for is not acceptable.

<comment><USER3> I understand Sony is driven by profit, though I don't understand how disabling the option to install another OS makes them any more money.

<comment><USER4> It's a reactionary move precipitated by the hacking done by that geohat guy. A lot of gaming companies think that by making a console pirate proof (which the PS3 has been so far) saves them money in the long run.

Look at the whole Ubisoft Assassin's Creed 2 mess.

In Sony's case I think they partly blame the PSP's problems on piracy and don't want it to happen to the PS3.

<comment><USER5> _A lot of gaming companies think that by making a console pirate proof (which the PS3 has been so far) saves them money in the long run._

Surely it's a big boost to game sales when people have no other option than to buy.

<comment><USER4> Yeah I agree, I'm just saying that sometimes companies make the DRM so restrictive to prevent people from buying that they can anger people. That Assassin's Creed 2 PC mess is a good example of bad DRM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The reason may be that Sony has had enough of scientist buying shiploads of their subsidized hardware and not buying the profitable games.

MS has been reluctant to sell xbox systems to the military for this reason.

</comment><comment><USER7> This _has_ to be in direct response to George Hotz (geohot)'s PS3 exploits.

<http://geohotps3.blogspot.com/>

</comment><comment><USER8> Sounds like Sony just wants to legitimize modchips. With no way to run Linux on the PS3 without one, possession doesn't immediately mean you're a pirate.

(Now to solve the small problem that there aren't any PS3 modchips. AFAIK, anyway.)

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting comment on the rationale for Linux support on PS3: <http://kotaku.com/comment/21054663/>

</comment><comment><USER10> ..does this basically rule out future researchers making a grid out of ps3s, since they'll have to hunt down machines earlier than this specific firmware?

<comment><USER11> Using otheros limits the number of accessible CPUs. So is this really practical anyways?

<comment><USER9> AFAIK booting into OtherOS renders the GPU inaccessible. The cell processor (PowerPC core and the SPEs) is still fully usable.

<comment><USER11> Ah that's right. I meant the GPU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is just terrible news. Good luck to sony and game devs finding new programmers to code SPU's now.

<comment><USER4> Considering games like fl0wer were made with the PhyreEngine, awesome game by the way, I don't think this is really going to be an issue.

I doubt most gaming companies were using the OtherOS feature in order to learn how to program on the PS3, they hopefully have dev kits.

<comment><USER13> DevKits have a notoriously bad development environment.

Granted, some things can only be done on the devkit, like access to the graphics card and the Sony graphics API, but doing compiler work or code that targets the SPUs is simply done better from Unix than with the native devkit options.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not cool. Is this even legal? They can't just patch out features that I paid for, otherwise I may have not bought the device.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, it seems questionable, especially since they're still advertising this as a feature: <http://www.playstation.com/ps3-openplatform/index.html>

They do include a disclaimer that it isn't available on the slim models, but don't given any indication that if you had a model that advertised support, that the support would be removed in the future. In fact, as another comment here points out, they promised pretty recently that they would retain support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Any lawyers out there: if they remove this feature, can I use this as a way to get my money back?

</comment><comment><USER17> Really sad. I've always been intent on getting a PS3 when I get money primarily so I can run Linux on it and play around with it. Now maybe I won't waste the money. :(

<comment><USER18> You should buy the PS3 to play games or watch Blu-Ray.... See that old box sitting in the corner collecting dust? Yea use that to toy around with linux.

EDIT: I had the same intention when I bought mine, but I soon realized anything of interest was locked down anyways.</comment></comment>


Why Americans Spend So Much on Health Care–In 12 Charts - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-americans-spend-so-much-on-health-carein-12-charts-1533047243 <comment><USER2> > Consumers, meanwhile, buoyed by insurance and tax breaks, have little idea > how much they are really spending and little incentive to know underlying > costs.

Almost weekly there's another post showing that consumers literally cannot find out costs usually because the provider cannot supply it. It's time to put a stake in the heart of the recurring blame-the-consumer trope.

<comment><USER3> I don't read it as "blame the consumer" but "the system is opaque".

The consumer doesn't know _and_ can't find out. Articles have been written for, I don't know, a decade or more decrying the opacity of the "Chargemaster", etc, and how if you call a hospital to ask the charge for a procedure, they probably can't give you a quote.

If you have certain kinds of insurance, you're not even incentivized to care - you tolerate the opacity. But I don't think it's really blaming the consumer so much as blaming a system way off the rails.

<comment><USER4> The problem I have with the "blame the consumer" trope is that there's the implicit "and if consumers had full pricing knowledge, The Market(tm) would correct all of the other issues, and healthcare in the US would be fixed." I assert this mostly through anecdotal evidence based on where these conversations tend to go.

I also find it to be some of the most disingenuous handwaving I've seen in recent memory. No one is going to comparison-shop when they have a ruptured appendix. Worse, if they think they can just "tough out" the abdominal pain because they can't afford the doctor visit _or the treatment that might result from it_, they'll just die.

Just to head something off... if your answer to "What if people still can't afford healthcare?" is "If you can't afford healthcare, then you're not contributing enough to society to receive healthcare.", then I thank you for your candor and your ideological consistency, and have you considered that you might be a sociopath?

<comment><USER5> >The problem I have with the "blame the consumer" trope is that there's the implicit "and if consumers had full pricing knowledge, The Market(tm) would correct all of the other issues, and healthcare in the US would be fixed." I assert this mostly through anecdotal evidence based on where these conversations tend to go.

If the consumer had full pricing knowledge beforehand then the market would certainly correct some of the other issues, probably not all but certainly some. Take a look at dental for example.

>I also find it to be some of the most disingenuous handwaving I've seen in recent memory. No one is going to comparison-shop when they have a ruptured appendix. Worse, if they think they can just "tough out" the abdominal pain because they can't afford the doctor visit _or the treatment that might result from it_, they'll just die.

Getting ripped of because you couldn't afford the time to shop around is par for the course in many industries. Yes, some peoples' appendices will rupture without warning but many more people will have conditions that give ample warning and allow comparison shopping. I think this there is a very good comparison to automotive repair in these scenarios (albeit higher dollar amounts and consumers being more willing to have work done up front to avoid more later).

> a system way off the rails.

I agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> y-c-o-m-b Healthcare costs are by far the #1 reason why I want to move out of the U.S. as soon as possible.

I am well off, but due to recent experience I have a major anxiety about going bankrupt from another unexpected health issue. I had emergency spine surgery last year and despite coordinating everything I could to stay in network prior to entering the hospital - surgeon was in network, hospital in network, etc... - the monitoring group that was in the surgery room was NOT in network and neither was the assisting physician. Their fees were so high, that insurance refused to negotiate with them and so I was responsible for the charges despite meeting my out of pocket maximum for out of network charges.

Basically out of network maximums are worthless! If it's set at 10k and the bill comes back 100k, insurance can pay up to the 10k (if even that) and you will be responsible for 90k afterwards. It's a mess. I did some reading on this and it turns out to be a huge problem across the US, especially in states like Texas where finding in-network providers and facilities is less likely.

I remember when I started working in the early 2000s at a gas station. I was getting 100% paid medical benefits through Aetna and coverage was 90% through the insurance. As time went on and I got better jobs (in IT), that turned into a small monthly premium. Then the premiums just kept growing every year until it became a significant chunk of my monthly take-home check. Starting a few years ago, they've introduced reduced coverage all the way down to 70% as premiums continue to climb and with huge deductibles and higher out of pocket maximums. How long can they continue doing this before the whole system collapses?

<comment><USER6> > Healthcare costs are by far the #1 reason why I want to move out of the U.S. > as soon as possible.

Hope you and your family are in perfect health if you plan to immigrate to a country with socialized healthcare. Most such countries will reject families with an autistic child, for example, based on the notion that said child will be heavily dependent on govt/health services.

<comment><USER7> What is your source for this? I know people in Canada and France with autistic kids who have never had any such issues.

<comment><USER8> Did they move there with an already-diagnosed kid?

There was a professor in the news for leaving New Zealand (I think) recently for exactly this reason. Because his kid was autistic (or something) the authorities were highly reluctant to grant him residency & hence lifelong care.

Edit: here's the story, 13-year-old stepson in fact: [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/16/prestigious- ac...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/16/prestigious-academic-to- quit-new-zealand-after-autistic-son-refused-residency)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Do republican politicians, and others in charge of maintaining this healthcare farce we have, have some sort of training in "convince the downtrodden to vote for things that make their lives harder" or is it just something natural?

I say this as a Wisconsin emigrant that watched my home state shoot itself in the face time and time and time again.

<comment><USER10> Do democratic politicians have some sort of training in maintaining the farce that more things should be handled by government, when governments in Illinois, California, New York, etc.--democratic strongholds where Republicans cannot be pointed to as the scapegoats--are on the verge of bankruptcy?

I don't think, deep down, republicans think the current system is better. They just don't trust whatever replaces it won't be much worse. It's easy to say "if we were just like <X European country> we could offer universal healthcare and also save money!" But <X European country> probably has trains that are vastly better than ours despite costing less to operate. They have schools vastly better than ours that they spend less money on. Clearly there is more to the equation.

<comment><USER11> It doesnt matter. These are just the general American talking points.

Fortunately since this is a global forum, people can point out that the situation in AMerica is farce.

The basic stats are just solid - every first world country does better.

You guys have the worst of all worlds, and because of America's prediliction for everything market oriented, and the absurd partisanship - you have no solutions, and are ok with people getting cured in the ER.

<comment><USER12> Not to mention the fact that companies can write off insurance contributions against tax, and individuals can recieve that benefit without paying income or payroll tax on it. In effect that's a subsidy in favour of the middle classes and 1% to the tune of "between $174 billion and $429 billion over a six-year period".

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/health/health- insurance-t...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/health/health-insurance- tax-deduction.html)

(Edited to include the missing point about income/payroll)

<comment><USER13> You say this like it's some special provision in the tax code, but it's not. Companies pay taxes on profits, not revenue. And insurance contributions (like many many other things) are an expense that reduces profits.

<comment><USER12> Yep... thanks, wrote that too quickly, I'll update

<comment><USER13> Ah, I was wondering if you meant to mention that health care benefits are (in most cases) not taxable and I see with your edit that you did. I agree with you on that point. It's a big problem.

Interestingly, McCain proposed fixing this during the 2008 election and was slammed for it by Obama.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > The health-care industry overtook the retail sector as the nation's largest > employer in December, giving local economies and their workers a stake in > the industry's growth. Health jobs surpassed manufacturing jobs in 2008.

This seems to me the biggest source of the problem. As the saying goes it's hard to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it.

These days healthcare jobs - technicians and clerks and so on - are the new factory line work. Ie readily available good paying jobs that you can get (in many cases) without a college degree. These personal care jobs are also hard to replace with automation since the entire point is to deal with other humans.

Thus most people agree "the system" is broken but any specific proposal made to change it meets a big backlash of people who imagine - perhaps rightly so - "that could cost my job!"

</comment><comment><USER15> The charts are not really " _Why_ Americans Spend Much on Health Care", just "Americans Spend Much on Health Care (or More than Others and More than They Used To, Anyway)". Believable causes that I have read being suggested are "demographics", "lack of single payer health care", "unhealthy lifestyle", "inefficient allocation of resources towards terminally ill patients", "Americans pay for drug research that inhabitants of other countries get for free", "expensive safeguards against malpractice lawsuits". Lobbying, taxation and opacity to consumers seems like a poor explanation of why healthcare in the US is so much more expensive than in other countries, and more expensive than in the past.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wish we didn't overpay compared to other first world countries, but although that is very annoying it is probably sustainable. Furthermore, we have several examples of other first world countries paying much less, using systems ranging from full socialized medicine (the UK) to almost fully private systems with some government regulation (Switzerland), so that fixing this is not a matter of figuring out something that works. It is a matter of getting enough people to agree on the same fix.

What worries me more is how the costs keep going up, and that's when measured as a percentage of GDP, so you can't just hand wave it away as part of everything going up over time due to inflation.

That's not sustainable.

Worse, the same thing is happening in other first world countries, with the costs going up at similar rates as they are here, so unlike the overspending problem this is not just a matter of getting the will to adopt one of the known solutions.

There's a great interactive view of the data at the OECD health spending page: [https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health- spending.htm](https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm)

Uncheck the "latest data available" box, and that will enable the year range sliders. Set them to 1970-2017 and the graph will show the growth over time for several countries. Mouse over the lines on the graph and it will give you number.

</comment><comment><USER17> Alternative link. [https://t.co/qiNptlTJ9b?amp=1](https://t.co/qiNptlTJ9b?amp=1)

</comment><comment><USER18> They spend so much, because it's basically Health Business not Care.

<comment><USER19> I'd go with MoneyCaid. Health run care by big bureaucratic business deeply intertwined with big bureaucratic government. So there's lots of money flowing, but not as much care.

<comment><USER20> As someone who got a peak into some of the intimate details of a large Hospice services provider, I have to agree. The fact that there are, no matter what they call themselves, salesmen who wine and dine hospital and senior home officials so that their employer can be made a part of their hospice pipeline is sickening. What's worse is when you discover how many "palliative" patients will routinely temporarily leave care for surgeries, then cycle back on, for years.

Not to mention that many of my relatives, and myself, have been egregiously misbilled or convinced to purchase very expensive, extremely unnecessary devices/treatment. I'm sure a lot of people in healthcare are good, but the people calling the shots - including even some doctors - don't give a shit

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Americans spend too much on nearly all government provided services. Anyone who thinks that more government spending is the solution really doesn't understand the underlying issues at all.

When it costs 5x as much to build a new subway line in NYC compared to Paris [1], spending 20% more on infrastructure isn't going to do anything. Arguably it will make things worse, allowing the existing inefficiencies to continue.

This problem occurs in all the areas where America lags behind other first world countries. Education, healthcare, infrastructure - spending is equal or greater than comparable nations, but the returns on each dollar spent is much smaller.

People try to simplify this issue in a partisan manner to having bigger government (Democrats) vs having more free markets (Republicans), but when you look at each of these areas in greater depth you realize that it's not that simple. There are a multitude of causes unique to America that contributes to costs being so high, as exemplified in this thread's article. In the case of health care, elsewhere in the world there exist both free market and government provided solutions that deliver better outcomes than the American system.

For a more in depth coverage on this topic, I highly recommend: [http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on- cost-...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost- disease/)

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york- subway-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway- construction-costs.html)

</comment><comment><USER22> Is there a printable view of this? Not that it's multiple pages but if you try to print it, you lose all the charts after the first!

</comment><comment><USER23> [http://archive.is/u9WHs](http://archive.is/u9WHs)

</comment><comment><USER24> You can skip the paywall here (if you have a Facebook account, of course):

[http://facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/why...](http://facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/why- americans-spend-so-much-on-health-carein-12-charts-1533047243)

<comment><USER17> You can avoid having a FB account if you just use the twitter link I posted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I spend 0$ on healthcare in US. Government pays for everything. That's easy. Hide your income and get a Medicaid.

</comment><comment><USER26> The common refrain that we will improve healthcare by keeping the government away and relying on the free market ignores the fact that most people are unable to shop for healthcare. Consolidation, price obscurity and immediate need makes that impossible. Even if it were possible, will there be uniform methods for describing the services and total price of services so that people can shop around?

</comment><comment><USER27> Please can someone explain the USA's lack of free healthcare to me? Every time i see it suggested or attempted its immediately sabotaged by just about everyone.

The NHS is one of the greatest things to come out the UK but you guys seem so opposed to the notion.

<comment><USER28> The abridged version is that they were working on it but the head of Kaiser convinced Nixon that private health insurance was a better option. Fast forward a few decades and there is too much at stake for the companies providing the care^insurance for a graceful change. Large companies also don't give a hoot because they're able to offer corporate self-insured plans which constitutes a competitive advantage against smaller employers.

My personal opinion is that the ACA was also complete garbage. Either go single payer (or at least an option to _buy into_ a single payer) or don't go at all. The half assed approach we've ended up with is the worst combination as the individual is forced to purchase insurance in a market with perverse incentives on all sides and no real competition.

<comment><USER8> There are lots of other systems besides single-payer (like the NHS grandparent mentions liking) or the US. It isn't some law of nature that anything "in- between" is doomed to failure.

For example, read a bit about the Swiss system:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Switzerland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Switzerland)</comment></comment></comment>


Conway's Game of Life in HTML5 canvas - <AUTHOR> http://www.julianpulgarin.com/canvaslife/

<comment><USER2> You should add some buttons to populate the grid with some of the more well known of the game's denizens. Perhaps let the user select from a list of patterns, then insert that pattern when the grid is clicked instead of toggling an individual cell.

See the excellent <http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/> for some ideas. That site also has its own RLE syntax for defining the patterns, so maybe you could crawl it and allow the user to use any of the 600-odd patterns they have on there.

That site brings back good memories from uni, I spent a long time converting iterations of GoL grids into MIDI notes and piping them to synths to make generative acid house.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had this feature in mind since I started working on this, and it's definitely what I will implement next. I will also add the ability to resize the grid to fit some of the larger patterns.

This will probably require a rewrite of the current "nextGen()" algorithm, perhaps a quadtree implementation in Javascript or implementing some of the optimizations suggested in Chapters 17 and 18 of Michael Abrash's Graphics Programmer's Black Book.

By the way, you should post some of those MIDIs!

<comment><USER2> There were never any MIDI files, the notes were generated as raw bits and sent straight into ableton live, which is a full blown software music studio. The notes then drove a softsynth which noodled away over various drum loops playing in live.

Because I had no desire to work out how to send clock data back from live into my hacked bit of ruby code, I simply sent MIDI clock signals from my code along with the note data. This meant that the iterations of the GoL were controlling the speed of live's sequencer.

As my code was very naive, it simply did its calculations, sent the notes and then did sleep(0.5) or something, then started the next iteration. This, along with ruby's garbage collection meant that the time taken for each iteration, and the delay between each MIDI clock signal, varied considerably.

All of this added up to a situation where the master clock in live was constantly wandering up and down by about 20bpm either way. Now remember I said that live was playing the drum tracks underneath? Live timestretches audio to the BPM of the master clock, so the whole track was constantly wavering in tempo. The whole thing sounded like an early 90s warehouse party aboard a pitching and rolling ship. Which is incidentally how I usually feel at warehouse parties.

At some point I plan to post the music with the code to my blog, along with all the other wacky shit I did at uni.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I love the fact it's an 'around the world' canvas. Most implementations I've played around with use an expanding or fixed width one instead...it makes some combinations truly amazing.

For example, the acorn pattern(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Game_of_life_acorn.svg>) is a lot more impressive, because the gliders spawned travel across the screen and interact with the solid blocks. Empirically, it seems to make the pattern last a lot longer!

</comment><comment><USER4> Ugh, you know you're too immersed in startup culture when your first reaction to this title is "Ron Conway's Game of Life?!"

Very cool app though!

</comment><comment><USER5> I really like the interactions. I created an HTML5 Game of Life example using Canvas and Web Workers several months ago.

[http://twoguysarguing.wordpress.com/2010/11/04/html-5-game-o...](http://twoguysarguing.wordpress.com/2010/11/04/html-5-game- of-life-web-workers/)

<http://benjaminplee.github.com/HTLM5-GoL/>

I was planning on adding interactions like yours but never got around to it. Nice work!

<comment><USER6> Here's mine: <http://www.mrspeaker.net/dev/canvas/gameOfLife.html> \- (this should be the official "here's mine" thread!) No web workers, but it has some interaction.

The funniest thing about GOL is that the harder you try to make things live, quicker you kill it off. How can 4 simple rules develop such poignant insights?!

<comment><USER7> Continuing with the here's mine: <http://gkatsev.com/gameoflife.js/index.html> I wrote this a few months ago. It's fairly similar to the post's one but I have a few presets as well as the ability to share.

Also, as mentioned above about the MIDI I plan on making it into a step sequencer using the new js audio APIs but have not had a chance to do so yet.

The code is available on bitbucket: <http://bitbucket.org/gkatsev/gameoflife.js>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Absolutely fantastic! I've never seen an interactive game of life before. It's a revelation. To be able insert a single pixel and see what happens is really, really cool.

</comment><comment><USER9> here's mine:

<http://michaelglass.github.com/conway-dark-roast/>

and here's my coworkers much more fleshed out version:

<http://life.michaelgeraci.com>

why? nice excuse to learn canvas, coffeescript, tdd in javascript. certainly can do it with divs (in fact mpg did it that way first).

</comment><comment><USER10> Here's my effort: <http://rob.rho.org.uk/2010/06/life.html> (GitHub project: <https://github.com/robhague/CanvasLife>)

</comment><comment><USER11> Why use canvas for this when plain divs could do the job more easily and more efficiently, with wider browser compatibility? Simply for buzzword compliance?

When we developed swarmation.com we started with canvas and later switched to plain divs. Not only did we manage to throw out most of the code in the switch, things also ran much more smoothly and worked in IE as well.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for cool new tech, and canvas definitely has its uses. But we should be helping people recognize when plain HTML or SVG are more appropriate, rather than being buzzword-driven.

<comment><USER12> Or this is how they chose to learn to work with canvas a bit more and wanted to share their accomplishments?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Game of Life seems to have become the new "Hello World" for trying to learn canvas. I wrote one as my first project for canvas/JavaScript.

</comment><comment><USER14> Heh, the very first JavaScript app I wrote was Conway's Game of Life... in HTML <div> tags.

</comment><comment><USER15> Red and green might not have been the best choice. 10% of males are red-green colourblind.

</comment><comment><USER16> Well, there went my morning...

</comment><comment><USER17> Green on red... wow :)</comment>


How to Get Ahead as a Woman in Tech: Interrupt Men - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/07/23/study_men_interrupt_women_more_in_tech_workplaces_but_high_ranking_women.html

<comment><USER2> The title is pretty crappy: it implies that if you learn to interrupt, you'll somehow get ahead. That's not what the data shows: the data shows that women got ahead, interrupt. It could be that there's a causal link, or that the causal link is in the opposite direction (they interrupt because they are senior as opposed to senior-because-interrupt; that link is also backed over the entire sample set, not just women, by the same data!), or that there is an underlying cause that _both_ makes them more likely to get ahead _and_ more likely to interrupt.

(The article makes no such conclusion, but merely suggests it.)

<comment><USER3> The article is clickbait spam.. youre not supposed to respond.</comment></comment>


Reform of SGML (1993) - <AUTHOR> http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/SGML/TimComments.html

<comment><USER2> Didn't know that while designing YML ;-) But it's very similar: [http://fdik.org/yml](http://fdik.org/yml)</comment>


Air Conditioner Web Remote Control with Arudino - <AUTHOR> http://chriswhong.com/arduino/476/

<comment><USER3> I have to say, that just sounds dangerous to me. A roll-your-own solution connected to a powerful (not to mention expensive) piece of electrical equipment, sitting _on the open internet_? I love hardware hacking and things, but this just looks like a big ole target to me. Not to mention, as much as I love Arduinos, in my experience it doesn't have a very mature codebase - <USER2> wouldn't be surprised if you could leverage that open port into an attack on other devices on the LAN (like the router).

I could see maybe doing it if I were running an OpenVPN server and restricting access to LAN+VPN Clients, but even then it seems like it's not worth bothering, since you pretty much know when you're going to go home anyway, so you can just put it on a timer. If it starts an hour early, does that really cost that much?

</comment><comment><USER4> It would have been neater to reverse-engineer the (apparently quite messy) protocol used by the stateful IR remote controls for ACs, IMO.</comment>


How I Explained REST to My Wife (2004) - <AUTHOR> http://tomayko.com/writings/rest-to-my-wife <comment><USER2> I can't stand the "blog post as conversation" format. It's fine if you're quoting a conversation for one or two paragraphs, but for something this long you should do me (the reader) the courtesy of speaking directly to me.

Also this is giving way too much credit for the creation of the URL. The format of the URL is not some miracle, genius insight. It is a natural result of network computing, and similar descriptors of how to find a file on a remote system had existed previously for ages.

<comment><USER3> This is an example of a Socratic Dialog[1], and relies on metaphor. It's in that way a piece of art useful as a teaching tool, but as such it trades some precision for the end effect.

1\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_dialogue>

<comment><USER2> This is condescending, and relies on the assumption that I don't know anything about anything and just fell off the turnip truck last week.

I think something would have to be done with a bit more art and skill before I would consider it Socratic dialogue. This is just a clumsy blog post that is annoying to read, IMHO.

<comment><USER4> >This is condescending, and relies on the assumption that I don't know anything about anything and just fell off the turnip truck last week.

Well, obviously you didn't get it.

> but for something this long you should do me (the reader) the courtesy of > speaking directly to me.

Your comment is also full of pointless vitriol.

I think it's one of the most succinct and well done explanations of an abstract academese concept loads of people quote but few people seem to understand. I refer to this blog post often.

<comment><USER2> You sound upset. Chill out, buddy.

<comment><USER4> Oh, me? I'm perfectly calm. I didn't want to sound too condescending.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a great blog post, but it has been posted numerous times on HN. I don't want to rant or anything, but I think we should start searching before posting. Please correct me, if I am wrong.

cheers <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=763570> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3396910> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5186774>

<comment><AUTHOR> well, sorry. It was shocking good and never seen b4 for me. But, it's so good that I would like to read it again in a year or so :)

<comment><USER6> ... what?

<comment><AUTHOR> ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So Ryan Tomayko's conversions with his wife are akin in tone and style to a language textbook aimed at tweens?

<comment><USER8> Better than the equivalent conversation in our house.

Me: Hey, do you want to learn about a core principle of how the Web works? ;; Her: Huh? ;; Me: You know, the thing Facebook runs on. ;; Her: Oh right. No then.

It's lucky there are more interesting things than technology for us to talk about, thankfully! :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What do you think about the separation of Web sites and Web services (so- called APIs)? Shouldn't the Web site _be_ the Web service, and offer multiple representations of its endpoints?

As a trivial example, consider that I have a blog located at the URIL <http://www.example.org/posts/>

If I were to offer an API to other developers, I would have two options: 1) serve posts as `application/json` at the URI <http://www.example.org/api/v1/posts> ; 2) serve both `text/html` and a `application/json` representations at the same URI <http://www.example.org/posts> , handling the desired mime-type and API version in the 'Accept' field of the HTTP request.

Which approach is better?

</comment><comment><USER10> Yes, and we also have XML, the Academically Correct and proven-in-the-field way to represent all entities.

I get the "URLs are nouns" metaphor, but I don't think it needs any additional promotion or particularly favors HTTP over whatever else might emerge.

<comment><USER11> Better yet, RDF. It's the final solution for data representation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Correct me if I am wrong here. So, instead of the eloquent method of using GET, POST and PUT on resources, the current practice is about the programmer writing custom parsers to get the information they want and then use them accordingly.

</comment><comment><USER13> Isn't representation of resources what the semantic web is supposed to be about? if I wanted to make someone understand the semantic web I would say something like this,

ontologies are data with corresponding metadata about everything on a domain or site.

These ontologies allow the data to be parsed automatically, i.e sites like amazon could just make their data available as ontologies and third party sites could "read through the sites for us". These third party sites serve as a portal from where we could ask for what we want and they would in turn look through the sites available (eBay, amazon etc) using the ontologies and get the best deal for us.

</comment><comment><USER14> Yes it's a classic. Supplemental to RFC 2616.

</comment><comment><USER15> most of explaining REST to my wife was linking her fielding's thesis. Pretty happy with my life... :]

</comment><comment><USER16> He uses four metaphors to help explain this:

1\. Cleaning 2\. A coffee table 3\. Shopping 4\. A school

So was he explaining this to his wife in the 1970s? Because REST over HTTP didn't even exist until the 90s.

</comment><comment><USER17> > Wife: You mean "http" like the beginning of what I type into the browser?

What browser does she use? It wasn't required to type that anymore for ages already :)

<comment><USER18> For what it's worth, this post is from 2004. Even with that in mind, this is not a verbatim conversation; the style is Socratic inquiry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't wish to read essays but i guess it is just a way to transmitt information on web, get and post methods, mainly.

<comment><USER20> Nope, REST can apply to any channels, not just the web.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What a bunch of hogwash. Everything does not fit into the request/response model of HTTP and the Internet is certainly the web.

<comment><USER22> Email (not webmail, but IMAP and POP etc) uses the internet but is not part of the web. There are other examples but I think that's the easiest to see.

<comment><USER23> "The web" isn't exactly a well-defined concept. There's a school of thought in which anything with a URI is part of the web.

<comment><USER22> Emails don't have URIs. My email boxes don't have URIs. My main problem is that there's no way to link emails together, so they're not really part of any web.

<comment><USER24> Does mailto:firstname.lastname@example.com not count as a URI to your mailbox?

<comment><USER22> I meant /Inbox, /Trash, /Spam etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


It's 25 years since Sega of America made its biggest mistake - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattgardner1/2020/05/11/its-25-years-since-sega-of-america-made-its-biggest-ever-mistake/ <comment><USER3> This narrative has been pushed quite heavily by former Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske, but it leaves a lot out. Kalinske claims the Japanese president of Sega, Hayao Nakayama, forced him to launch the Saturn in NA before Kalinske was ready, and because of that, the Saturn failed and Kalinske resigned shortly after. As always, it's best to approach with caution when CEOs are assigning blame for company failures under their tenure.

The reality is far, far more complicated. Kalinske himself was against the Saturn going back to 1993, due to the predicted high cost of the console. This in turn led to the development of the 32X add-on for the Genesis as a low-cost entry into the 32-bit generation in NA, but the 32X failed spectacularly.

Most relevant, however, is that Sega failed to adequately compete against Sony in terms of garnering third-party support, both in Japan and NA. This is discussed at length in the excellent book Revolutionaries at Sony by Reiji Asakura (English translation available). The Saturn was difficult to develop for and Sega did not have good development tools early on.

Also worth reading is the recent account from former Sega president Hideki Sato, who was the head designer of the Saturn. He discusses many of the shortcomings of the console and Sega's strategy for it:

[https://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?33506-Hideki- Sa...](https://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?33506-Hideki-Sato-on-the- Sega-Saturn-\(incredible-new-interview\))

<comment><USER4> I agree that this is way more complicated.

Nobody knew what 3D hardware would look like in 1994, they were too busy inventing it. For example, the Saturn provides quads as your primitive, which seems weird to anybody looking at the Saturn today. The PlayStation and Nintendo 64 both used triangles.

You might have various reasons to prefer the Nintendo 64 or PlayStation, but from a developer's perspective, the main reason you would prefer the Saturn is probably because of its 2D performance. But a higher price point for better 2D performance is a tough sell.

It's also interesting to look at the different companies through the lens of what their strengths are. Sony has generally had pretty solid hardware design, Microsoft has generally made systems that are easier to develop software for, etc.

<comment><USER5> Better 2D performance and more RAM. The lack of RAM kneecapped the Capcom fighting game ports on PSX.

<comment><USER6> The Saturn's RAM expansion pack helped too: [https://sega.jp/fb/segahard/ss/ram.html](https://sega.jp/fb/segahard/ss/ram.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I feel like the whole 32x mess was an important part of this mistake.

"Hey let's release a weird upgrade pod for our successful last-gen console almost completely simultaneously with our next-gen console, I am sure developers will be happy to split their efforts across two machines! Especially if both of them have really weird architecture that's hard to program on."

<comment><USER8> Not to argue with your point because it is certainly valid, but the N64 had that expansion module for DK 64 and a few other games, yet managed to survive that.

<comment><USER9> The expansion pak was only _required_ for 2 or 3 games, and bundled with one of them.

Most of the games with epak support used it to increase quality and / or framerate, the game worked fine without. It was also relatively cheap ($50).

<comment><USER10> > It was also relatively cheap ($50).

Which is kinda impressive (for the time at least) considering how expensive RDRAM was/is relative to e.g. SDRAM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For me as a kid, there was this sense of confusion and whiplash when it came to post-genesis hardware. The CD came out in 92, with no real notable games at launch: Sonic CD came out a year later, and Snatcher + Lunar at the end of its life in 95. The 32x came out shortly after in 94, and only saw a handful of games before being buried by the more powerful Saturn in 95.

With two major peripherals and a new console in a short period of time, each with its own library of games, it was hard to understand all that as a kid without internet access, much less afford it, so I stayed clear and sold my genesis for a SNES, then got an N64.

The short hardware life probably spurned a lot of 3rd party developers too.

Nintendo was much smarter, with longer cycles between major consoles, and no expensive enhancement add-ons to segment its games. When you bought a Nintendo console, you knew it would have a 5+ year road map and was a good investment (okay, ignoring the virtual boy). _Every_ gameboy has had backwards compatibility with at least the previous generation, so it always felt "safe" to buy the newest model.

<comment><USER12> I recall the same thing.

Everyone understood what Nintendo was up to. Sega friends (that's how I thought of them, defined by the console they owned) would tell me about this or that technology, but not many games for this new tech.... on the Nintendo systems (and later my PC) I had games.

By the time the Saturn was out.... most Sega friends had converted to something else, it was already over.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's something beyond the obvious nostalgia factor that makes these 25 year old video game business stories so captivating. It might be from these massive corporations moving with a gut-driven, ride-or-die mentality or the fact that the only indicator that matters is sales.

In comparison, today's gaming industry is fragmented beyond all recognition. The audience has grown and matured, but every major player is a unique gumbo of F2P, overplayed IP, indie risks, and speculative technology. Also, they're all subservient to some larger corporate strategy.

Once again, my cynicism may just stem from my age, but it seems like there hasn't been much excitement for the past 5 years or so.

<comment><USER14> And there's far less meaningful innovation in gaming today. VR was pretty promising, but has failed to be transformative. The new consoles' graphics frankly don't look much better than current ones IMHO, despite having 10x or 100x the performance. Game streaming is the most interesting and disruptive technology, once the major players figure out the right business model.

Back in the 90s, opening a gaming magazine was so exciting due to the crazy stuff you might glimpse.

<comment><USER15> VR will be a lot more exciting when we hit 'retina' VR, where immersion will be much more effective. The screen dooring effect of the original Vive and Oculus was a huge negative for me.

<comment><USER14> I bought a PSVR, arguably the least impressive of the bunch, but was still blown away. It was really neat. But I didn't touch it after a couple weeks. It was too annoying to put on, take off, clean, store, etc. So I sold it, and don't miss it at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm been doing some Nintendo 64 development lately, and sometimes all ask the CEO at my workplace for advice or insights as he worked on Nintendo 64 games when he was younger.

It's not uncommon for him to finish the conversation with noting that he worked on Sega Saturn before the Nintendo 64, and the former was difficult to work with due to its particular architecture.

<comment><USER17> Out of curiosity, what kind of tools do you use to do N64 development?

<comment><USER16> The last version of the SDK and the GCC-based toolchain were leaked a long time ago, which runs on Windows computers pre-Vista. I'll program in C with Sublime Text, and then run the compiler/toolchain in a VM running Windows XP. The VM can see my source code via a shared folder.

I'm waiting on the mail for a flash cartridge to run ROMs on retail hardware, so for now I use the mupen64plus emulator on Mac OS X, but also a more accurate (but slower) one called CEN64 from time to time. Nintendo 64 emulators are kind of odd; the popular ones don't really "emulate" a game console the way I would have expected.

Sometimes I post pictures of my progress on Twitter if you're interested: [https://twitter.com/danielsavface/status/1258896460604555264](https://twitter.com/danielsavface/status/1258896460604555264)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's hard to say what the biggest mistake was exactly. The Sega CD and 32x were bad ideas, compared to just creating a new console. The Sega Saturn would have been a great 2D console, but they delayed it to add a really strange (quads versus triangles) underperforming 3D capability to their design. I think the Saturn should have been released earlier in 2D only form, so they could move on to making a 3D capable console that trounced the PlayStation and N64 on a delayed timeline, perhaps even backwards compatible with the 2D Saturn.

<comment><USER19> A CD based Sega system was a great idea but not as an add on, the reality is the cost of hardware back then and the nature of the console market being technology illiterate was the issue.

I was one of the few who got the original Sega CD, the early version one that mounted underneath the genesis. It had cool games like Darkwizard. The real issue was the cost of add on peripherals were too high to get any kind of market penetration. Back then parents bought videogames for kids for their christmas or their birthdays. They'd rent their favorite games from blockbuster/convenience store and then get their parents to buy their favorites.

The reality was consoles and games were expensive and most kids rented games back when sega and nintendo were the kings of gaming before PC gaming had taken off in 1990's.

So the financial barrier to console ownership and the high price tag for parents was the real issue. Sega had a lot of good idea's but not conceived in the right way or at the right time. They acted as if the gaming populations parents were rich.

That was the real issue with many console companies that allowed Sony to get a foothold into console gaming.

Playstation was as popular as it was because of piracy and backups thereby increasing its market, it was "microsoft" method of console dominance - <USER2> don't care if you pirate as long as you use our console.

Even if sony didn't intend that, Sony PS1 and PS2 became huge because of ability to pirate games on the platform.

Piracy paradoxically drove sony to success. Everyone forgets places like china, india and third world countries at the time that couldn't really afford games because the the ridiculous prices.

<comment><USER20> Anecdotally, I knew a bunch of people with PS1, maybe one of them knew how to pirate games.

<comment><USER21> Anecdote-wise, everybody in my home town who owned a playstation had pirated games.

You don't need to know how to make illegal copies, you could just buy them for 1/10th of the original price on the street.

<comment><USER20> Ok - update - they didn't have pirated games.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Oh, fantastic! I love reading everything about this period of history.

The Saturn is my person favourite console and I greatly enjoy writing homebrew for it.

If you haven't, and this is of interest to you; check out JO-engine, a fantastic FOSS Saturn homebrew development kit.

[https://jo-engine.org](https://jo-engine.org) :)

</comment><comment><USER22> In case anybody else is denied access because of an adblocker: [https://outline.com/bujnmX](https://outline.com/bujnmX)

</comment><comment><USER23> I remember the disappointment. I had a Genesis at the time, I loved it, and I was primed to be a continued customer for Sega. From my perspective, all they needed to do was to release a decent next-gen console with games support.

</comment><comment><USER24> Not just Sega, but Nintendo as well. The N64 was a moderate success, but if it was a CD-based system and came out a year earlier, Nintendo would have cut the PSOne at the knees and maintained console dominance.

<comment><USER25> Sega fall was far more important than Nintendo in this era. N64 had world wide acclaimed games that Saturn couldn't even hope for. And most of those games couldn't have been created on a CD-based system at that time that imply _very_ slow loading.

N64 fall was mostly due to:

* Lack of texture memory. Having nice looking game was hard and need tricks because you couldn't rely on big textures.

* (Very) bad developer API (actually ABI). Having being in N64 emulation, you truly see they have no idea how 3D rendering was supposed to be exposed.

* Cost heavy support (cartridge).

But even without fixing the last one, the both firsts killed the third party dev investment.

<comment><USER24> I have to disagree with your first two points. Neither of those was a reason for N64 being outsold by PSOne.

>Lack of texture memory. Having nice looking game was hard and need tricks because you couldn't rely on big textures.

So what? The PSOne hardware also had its own set of constraints that made their games pixelated and ugly. In fact, I would argue N64 games were generally better looking than PSOne games.

>(Very) bad developer API (actually ABI).

Again, who cares? If the system sold as well as the PSOne did, developers and publishers would deal with it.

>Cost heavy support (cartridge).

This is the big one. The fact that N64 was not a CD-based system, however, really hurt it with consumers, who wanted a CD-based system, because CDs were new and exciting. Third-parties also hated paying Nintendo for a license AND for cartridges because it cut into their profit margins. The fact that N64 was a cartridge-based system also shut them out from a bunch of AAA titles that used large amount of textures, voice/video and FMV cutscenes because it made straight ports impossible. It may seem silly these days, but FMV in video games was really exciting back then.

I also think it hurt them that the PSOne was released almost two years before the N64 did.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Hindsight is always 20/20, but I wonder why Sega made decisions like using quads instead of triangles, and dual CPU's.

<comment><USER27> How do you even render a quad? What if it isn't planar? Does it curve or crease?

<comment><USER28> In higher-end rendering, a quad that can be non-planar is called a bilinear patch. Yes, it can curve (cross sections tend to give parabolas), and while you won't get infinitely sharp creases you will get saddle-shapes.

See, e.g.: [http://www.sci.utah.edu/~kpotter/publications/ramsey-2004-RB...](http://www.sci.utah.edu/~kpotter/publications/ramsey-2004-RBPI.pdf)

<comment><USER27> Wow seems like that'd be an order of magnitude or more slower to render bilinear surfaces rather than triangles. I wonder why they did that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The Sega Saturn was the first console I purchased with my own money.

The Saturn had some great games.

Three of the Four launch titles were great: Daytona (Rolling Start....), Virtua Fighter, and Panzer Dragon were far better than anything else available.

Street Fighter Alpha 2 was far superior on the Saturn compared to the PS version.

And Guardian Heroes (available now on Xbox Live Arcade) is probably one of the best, most underrated sprite based beat-em-ups.

Ultimately Sony crushed the competition with titles like, Resident Evil 2, Tekken 3, FFVII, Twisted Metal, etc etc. Which is crazy considering how strong the N64 was.

It's sad that Sega laid an egg, but the Saturn had it's time and place.

I'm really looking forward to what the Series X can do with it's project X-cloud. My feeling is that it's going to move towards PC gaming--once your console can no longer play games natively, it will switch to pixel streaming.

</comment><comment><USER30> The article misses the point entirely. It wasn't about launching early, or not having enough games, or wait times.

It comes down to pricing.

In gaming, the same thing has always played out. The console that can deliver the best value wins.

$399 vs $299 is a huge difference. That's the equivalent of $500 vs $750 today.

And don't forget that this was a huge step up already from the $150-199 price point of Super Nintendo.

At the end of the day, when it comes to mass appeal, it isn't the better technology that wins, but the one that combines the best price and performance, and people always underestimate that price is the bigger factor than performance.

<comment><USER31> It's pretty ironic that Sony almost made the same mistake with the PS3 at $599.

I say _almost_, because it might have benefited Sony as a whole anyway.

<comment><USER32> The fact that it was a Blu-Ray player saved it because families could justify the purchase for that feature alone (and typically tacked on the bluetooth remote too)

<comment><USER31> Exactly. It was almost the same strategy with the PS2: it was a ubiquitous DVD player when that was a novel concept.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> As a teenager with a job, the cost wasn't really an issue and the launch window meant there was plenty of time to save up the difference. What killed the Saturn for me and my circle of friends were the games.

I remember we rented a Saturn with all the games from Block Buster for like $50 for the weekend and were thoroughly unimpressed. Not long after, a Playstation popped up at Media Play (remember that store?) with demos you could play. I remember specifically going there multiple times to play Battle Arena Toshinden.</comment>


Lambdas (in Java 8) Screencast - <AUTHOR> http://bitpress.io/learning-modern-java/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, I am the author of this screencast series. BitPress is a company made up of passionate engineers who also love to teach. We noticed a lot of Java developers struggle with or are not exposed to Lambdas introduced in Java 8, so we decided to make a concise, entertaining, and reasonably priced screencast series on Lambdas. There will be a Streams series following up soon, continuing to cover the awesome new Java 8 features. This has become even more topical with the support for (some) Java 8 features in Android N. We also think non-java developers could benefit from seeing how Lambdas are used conceptually as well. Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback!

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