Google CEO's inner circle: Meet the L Team - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/16/us-google-idUSTRE7BF1T420111216 <comment><USER3> It's hard to say exactly how much it means, but it's at least interesting to note that the people that "left the group" are all women and the people added to the group are all men.

<comment><USER4> It's almost like there was a big presentation, and all of these people were up on stage, and there was just one woman. Then it's almost like someone in the crowd asked about the ratio situation, and to "answer", the CEO threw the question at the one woman. And then, it's like the fire of a thousand suns flashed in her eyes.

Oh, wait, it's not just like that. It _is_ that, because it happened.

<comment><USER5> I find this a bit unfair - taking two data points to make a statement about gender discrimination at Google. Here's another datapoint - Google recently hired Margo Georgiadis, a female, to the 2nd highest position in Sales - <USER2> historically male function. ([http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/24/margo- georgiadis-gr...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/24/margo-georgiadis- groupon-coo-google_n_979254.html))

The top position is taken by Nikesh who is the highest paid executive at Google. So Margo is definitely one of the highest paid VPs at Google.

How important is this position? Well, the last person, Dennis Woodside, now handles Motorola. And the guy before him became the CEO of AOL. Also, Margo is responsible for majority of revenue at Google.

This doesn't prove anything but I just wanted to add another data point to the discussion.

<comment><USER4> There are many more data points. I lived it.

These are just the ones which are (finally) getting out to the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting to note that Sergey is not in the L-team. One would expect it after such a long partnership.

<comment><USER7> It kind of makes sense to me, if he's handling "advanced research" and non- day-to-day type operations. I think that kind of stuff is important but probably not the kind of stuff Page is worrying about in those L-team meetings.</comment></comment>


Google: CPU patches cause 'negligible impact on performance with new technique - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/4/16851132/meltdown-spectre-google-cpu-patch-performance-slowdown <comment><USER2> Please cite the original post: [https://support.google.com/faqs/answer/7625886](https://support.google.com/faqs/answer/7625886)

Verge article literally says nothing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I first read it on Verge.</comment></comment>


9 Common Idioms That Come from Technology - <AUTHOR> http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/04/01/9-common-idioms-that.html <comment><USER2> a great list for those who don't speak English as a first language!</comment>


San Diego: join us for SD Hacker News meetup #22 (Fri 10/28) - <AUTHOR> http://anyvite.com/qm3lt6z2xp

<comment><USER2> Make sure to update the page with the pub you plan to over-flow to. I can't make it at 7:30 but after 9, I will be free.

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll be at <http://www.yelp.com/biz/o-briens-pub-san-diego> after 9:30pm or so. Look for the group of people who forgot to remove their nametags... :)

<comment><USER2> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'll try to come. Always fun. Great, friendly group. Don't be scared to come :)

<comment><USER4> I agree. First time when I went there I was just amazed the quality of the group -- very smart and interesting to talk to people.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad to hear it! I actually find it interesting seeing just how well everyone from this "slice" of the internet seems to get along in person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you are an entrepreneur in Southern California, check out <http://thestartupconference.com> on Nov 15th, hopefully it will be worth your while</comment>


Phaser – A fast, fun and free open source HTML5 game framework - <AUTHOR> http://phaser.io/ <comment><USER2> This is a great resource of examples; the author uses Phaser for all the samples: [http://gamemechanicexplorer.com](http://gamemechanicexplorer.com)

</comment><comment><USER3> QICI Engine ([http://www.qiciengine.com/](http://www.qiciengine.com/)) is a open-source JavaScript library based on Phaser with a web-based comprehensive suite of game making tools. It will be released soon, we want to help to make Phaser better. [https://twitter.com/sailing8036/status/629495719414476800](https://twitter.com/sailing8036/status/629495719414476800)

Phaser News: [http://phaser.io/news/2015/08/qici-dota- demo](http://phaser.io/news/2015/08/qici-dota-demo)

Dota demo: [http://engine.qiciengine.com/demo/0.5/dota.html](http://engine.qiciengine.com/demo/0.5/dota.html)

Performance demo: [http://engine.qiciengine.com/demo/0.5/performance.html](http://engine.qiciengine.com/demo/0.5/performance.html)

Tower Defense demo: [http://engine.qiciengine.com/demo/0.5/tower.html](http://engine.qiciengine.com/demo/0.5/tower.html)

Casual game demo: [http://engine.qiciengine.com/demo/0.5/sources.html](http://engine.qiciengine.com/demo/0.5/sources.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Request Evaluation throws a 404.

<comment><USER3> Website is currently under construction, we will release QICI Engine next month. Thanks for your interest!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> After trying out several HTML5/JS game libraries, I'm pretty sure that Phaser is the best one for 2D games. It has frequent updates, great documentation and an awesome community support, too. One can learn a tremendous amount of game development techniques just be reading the source code of Phaser.

<comment><USER5> what would you say is best for 3d? (Html5 engines I mean)

<comment><USER6> I would recommend PlayCanvas [[http://playcanvas.com](http://playcanvas.com)]. :-)

We have an editor tool (like Unity/Unreal), good documentation, a great community of other developers. And the engine is open source if you're not interested using the Editor tools [[http://github.com/playcanvas/engine](http://github.com/playcanvas/engine)]

<comment><USER7> The person I'm replying to is the co-founder of playcanvas, for disclosure's sake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I looked at phaser recently, but couldn't find any examples of successful games made with it. Are there any success stories?

<comment><USER9> You know, this is one of the things that I think is really important in a game engine: Has a fully polished game ever _shipped_ using the engine.

It's _easy_ , by comparison, to get to the 80% point with a game -- especially if you have a sample to start from that's somewhat close to what you want to create. What's hard is making every little bit work correctly; creating a finished product that doesn't have glitches, that works on all devices/in all browsers, and that has a good "feel" throughout. That last bit of polish, that last "20%", probably takes well over 80% of the time; I'd estimate it at about 95% of the time. And if you start with an "80%" engine that hasn't gone through that polish phase at least once, then you're doing all that work yourself.

This isn't precisely what you asked: You asked for _success stories_. A casual browsing of the site doesn't find _any_ published game lists, though. The creators of Phaser.io do have a list of games THEY'VE published with it:

[http://www.photonstorm.com/games](http://www.photonstorm.com/games)

Look at the "HTML5" options; they used to make games in Flash.

I looked at Phaser a while back, and decided against using it. None of those games actually look much more complicated than a proof-of-concept, 80%-at-most demo.

On the other hand, Cocos2d-X has been used in dozens of hit games, and they are up to v3.0 of Cocos2d-js, which looks awesome, has an amazing free toolchain you can use, works in a browser, AND can be embedded in a custom wrapper on mobile (something like PhoneGap/Cordova, only tuned and optimized for game development -- it includes SpiderMonkey directly, for instance, so you don't have to worry about what browser it's running in).

The choice wasn't that hard.

<comment><USER10> I shipped one of the first large games with Haxe on iOS (in ~2011), and I am at a loss for words to describe just how right you are.

My game was complete, but the garbage collector would randomly crash, every hour or so. I spent nearly two weeks reading through incomprehensible C++ code, and completely failed to fix the problem myself.

Hugh, the creator of NekoNME, graciously helped me after I sent in a deterministically crashing test case, and that's the only reason the game was shipped at all. I consider myself a competent developer, but utterly incapable of debugging someone elses GC.

I also had to make a whole bunch of smaller fixes (eg adding in app purchases, fixing leaks etc), but those things I expected.

If you're evaluating an engine for use, there should either be a flawless game more complex than what you're trying to accomplish, or you should be ready, willing and able to traverse the full stack fixing whatever comes up.

(Note: Haxe is battle tested now.)

<comment><USER11> I released an android game using HaxeFlixel and the process was relatively painless, actually I was suroprise at how well it run on my device and how flawlesly things like immersive mode and in-app purchases were implemented.

But again, it as last year, so I assume 3 years make a huge difference in development, plus Haxeflixel is a haxe framework tailored for making games. To whoever might be interested in diving into it, we shipped a nice amount of polished finished games: [http://haxeflixel.com/showcase/games/](http://haxeflixel.com/showcase/games/) (Mine is polaritron)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Coded [http://lalo.li/car/](http://lalo.li/car/) (desktop only) for a js- meetup talk in Vienna.

The good: as advertised, it's fast and free

The bad: as with every framework, I would have done it another way

<comment><USER13> Is this open-source?

<comment><USER12> MIT - [https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/car](https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/car)

But don't look at the code, I'm ashamed of it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've been tinkering with phaser for awhile, so far it's been an enjoyable experience. The best parts I've seen is the out-of-the-box support for animations and integration with tiled map editors.

Work in progress (not too much to show really)

[http://gavinm.com/phased/](http://gavinm.com/phased/)

Source

[https://github.com/gavinmyers/phased](https://github.com/gavinmyers/phased)

</comment><comment><USER15> Good examples and loads of tutorials. I just started playing with it and circular dependencies make me cringe. Game object initiates subsystems that in turn get their dependencies through game object, which is a requirement for initialising aforementioned subsystems. What is this pattern? It's really tough to compose things with it.

<comment><USER16> Working with it professionally, I agree. You pass the game object everywhere, no matter what. The variation if factory methods is also frustrating. It's ridiculous trying to reference how to create things when all the examples use game.add.<whatever> and sometimes you want to construct them separate and use .add.existing. But the standalone constructors will take different sets of arguments (including the game object).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I built a shooter with limited bullets with his. It was fun. I now encourage students to use this library. See my silly game at [http://escape.bphogan.com](http://escape.bphogan.com). It should work with a mouse or keyboard.

</comment><comment><USER18> My kids are currently learning Phaser. I highly recommend this for learning:

[https://www.discoverphaser.com/](https://www.discoverphaser.com/)

(Not affiliated with them in anyway, just a customer who purchased it for my kids to learn).

</comment><comment><USER19> Here is a small game I made to learn the engine awhile ago:

[https://github.com/rickyeh/cubejump](https://github.com/rickyeh/cubejump)

It isn't polished yet as it's a work in progress, and I'm a pretty newbie programmer, so my code isn't perfect :)

It was pretty easy for me to learn, even without a lot of CS experience, and worked pretty well on mobile (at least iOS) without too much hassle. If you have no idea how to make a game and want to make a simple one fast, it seems like an awesome library to do so. The examples and tutorials were plentiful and I was able to find detailed ones on third party sites as well.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is quite a coincidence, I first learned of Phaser earlier today as I was investigating various modern HTML5 gaming engines. I have finished writing the story for a game that's been in my head for years, and I am eager to move on to implementation now that the story is solid. I may opt to roll my own engine since I am well-versed in the necessary minutia, and I enjoy the learning experience. But on the other hand, it would be nice to release the game within the decade. Damn the relentless march of time.

</comment><comment><USER21> most of our games we are publishing are developed in phaser.io

[http://games.famobi.com/action/taptastic- monsters](http://games.famobi.com/action/taptastic-monsters)

[http://games.famobi.com/best-games/fruita- swipe-2](http://games.famobi.com/best-games/fruita-swipe-2)

[http://games.famobi.com/puzzle/flow- free](http://games.famobi.com/puzzle/flow-free)

</comment><comment><USER22> About a year ago, some friends and I made a small game using Phaser at a 12-hour hackathon. It's a nice little framework and, while we didn't really make use of many of its features, it was really easy to pick up.

Check out what we built here: [https://github.com/gavinanderegg/coffeeQuest](https://github.com/gavinanderegg/coffeeQuest)

</comment><comment><USER23> I am going through the official tutorial right now. Are there any:

1) examples of phaser games using multiple .js files?

2) games with multiple levels?

And what are the best games made with phaser?

<comment><USER16> I could possibly get you an example of both if you were interested. Most of the people using Phaser are using Tyepscript and doing multi-module management with that. I use Browserify (and bring in Phaser separately).

If you have a state that loads levels, you change the level targets and restart the state so that the preload runs again and gets the new resources. Or you can load everything up front and approach multiple levels that way.

<comment><USER23> yes please teach me!

<comment><USER16> Here is a multi-module project I wrote back in January: [https://github.com/georgefrick/PhaserJsDemoGame](https://github.com/georgefrick/PhaserJsDemoGame)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Thomas Palef wrote 12 Phaser games in 12 weeks sometime back: [http://www.lessmilk.com/](http://www.lessmilk.com/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Is there any way to eliminate mouse lag? For example, in [http://gamemechanicexplorer.com/#raycasting-2](http://gamemechanicexplorer.com/#raycasting-2) the light source lags visibly behind the pointer. I'd prefer it it was locked to the pointer.

<comment><USER26> I think that example is recalculating the wall positions for every frame. That works for an example of a mechanic, but you wouldn't do that in a real game.

<comment><USER25> I think the problem is worse than that. Here's a small jsfiddle showing that JavaScript's onmousemove is inherently laggy: [http://jsfiddle.net/z8h6y787/](http://jsfiddle.net/z8h6y787/)

Also see this page: [http://atebits.github.io/browser-input- latency/](http://atebits.github.io/browser-input-latency/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The framework is good, however I got faster (fps wise) results using my own rendering functions on Canvas than I was getting using their rendering on both Canvas and WebGL. I think in their efforts to be basically a drop in replacement for Flash/AS3 they have really let themselves down.

<comment><USER28> the rendering is done by another library (pixi.js), and there is currently a rewrite of phaser underway, which will include a custom renderer, that is already much faster than the old one.

<comment><USER27> Awesome!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Make sure to check out Tiled , a level editor. It works great with phaser. Easy to use and learn. Free.

</comment><comment><USER30> I really REALLY like the examples they put up. This is a good resource for an entry level game-designer/programmer to try out some ideas.

<comment><USER31> It's true, the examples are nicely presented. Full game examples would be good though. The community section has some, but I couldn't find anything really impressive.

The car on terrain box2d example looks promising, but the question is, how does it perform in the context of a full game? Hillclimb Racing is the benchmark to aim for... great native app game. If we can get that performance happening in the browser with these engines then we're doing okay, but I can't help doubting these engines are up to Hillclimb Racing standards. That is, fast and smooth with lots of track loaded in memory. Even the native app suffers a slight stutter on occasion as it loads more track ahead, so I wonder how much track can be in memory in the browser. (I'm guessing these side scrolling games have a maximum window of game area available at any one time).

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> does anyone know of an example of a TCG/CCG or other card games built with phaser? I've been looking for a while without success.

<comment><USER33> [https://solitaire.gg](https://solitaire.gg) is my card game, it's WebGL/Phaser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Does it have any built-in tweening support? I remember choosing Easel.js a couple of years back because of this.

<comment><USER16> It does, and they're easy to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Phaser is pretty impressive. i am building my first game on it and i am in love.</comment>


Blake's iOS Device Specification Grid has been updated to current - <AUTHOR> https://blakespot.com/ios_device_specifications_grid.html <comment><USER2> Very nice work!</comment>


Differentiable Programming: A Semantics Perspective - <AUTHOR> http://barghouthi.github.io/2018/05/01/differentiable-programming/ <comment><USER3> A decade ago, symbolic differentiation could also be used to compute normal vectors for mathematically defined surfaces (like iso surfaces). Conal Elliott (the guy who co-invented FRP) wrote a great paper on this with fairly well defined semantics:

[http://conal.net/Vertigo/](http://conal.net/Vertigo/)

And

[http://conal.net/papers/beautiful- differentiation/](http://conal.net/papers/beautiful-differentiation/)

<comment><USER4> Automatic differentiation is a little different than symbolic differentiation. Rather than use a new high level description of the computational graph, tools like autograd [1] can differentiate somewhat arbitrary Python and numpy instructions.

[1] [https://github.com/HIPS/autograd](https://github.com/HIPS/autograd)

<comment><USER5> > can differentiate somewhat arbitrary Python and numpy instructions.

I hear this a lot but it doesn't make sense to me. How do you differentiate an conditional or a loop? It doesn't make sense mathematically, so I'm not sure what sense it makes programmatically.

<comment><USER6> For a loop, you can unroll it and define the derivative that way. But you're correct in general that there are programs that have no sensible derivative but automatic differentiation will still compute something.

Going beyond AD there is a "differential lambda calculus" [1]. I don't really understand this work. It requires more background in programming languages, logic, and analysis than I have time to learn. My understanding is it allows you to compute more derivatives (e.g. for higher-order functions) and place conditions so only sensible derivatives are computed. There is also "differential linear logic" [2] which has some relation to the differential lambda calculus but it's unclear to me what that relationship is.

So in summary I believe:

1\. automatic differentiation will compute the correct derivative when such a thing is available, and some nonsense answer otherwise

2\. to increase the space of programs for which derivatives can be computed and to rule out other programs you need to look at differential lambda calculus / linear logic.

[1]: [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.471...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.471.7213&rep=rep1&type=pdf) [2]: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.01642](https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.01642)

<comment><USER5> > automatic differentiation will compute the correct derivative when such a > thing is available, and some nonsense answer otherwise

The problem is this is false too. Just modify my example a bit:

      y = x if x > 0 else x if x < 0 else 0

Here we clearly have y'(0) = 1, yet autodiff would seem to give y'(0) = 0.

<comment><USER6> Good point / example!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Article is a bit broken for me because while the page is https, the mathjax file is loaded from a plain http. This is apparently forbidden by current Chrome and Firefox, so the figures and LaTeX don't work. edit: ah-hah, HTTPS Everywhere must have fiddled with it.

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't understand in what sense programs can be called "differentiable". Is the space of programs modulo observational equivalence a manifold to begin with? (I don't think it's Hausdorff or even T1, but I could be wrong.)

The examples given in the article are merely derivatives of ordinary mathematical functions defined by ordinary mathematical expressions - <USER2> particular, there are no sequencing, no conditionals and no loops. So why call them "differentiable programs" when you are actually dealing with ordinary differentiable functions from good old 19th century analysis? We need urgent improvements in the intellectual honesty department.</comment>


Dealing with the problem of moon dust - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencecodex.com/nasas_dirty_secret_moon_dust <comment><USER2> "The dust was so abrasive that it actually wore through three layers of Kevlar-like material on Jack's boot,"

they talk about this in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder how well moon dust sandpaper would work.</comment>


How To Write fanfiction: 10 ficwriting rules - <AUTHOR> https://readandwrite.today/essay/10-ficwriting-rules.html <comment><USER2> This article is full of grammatical mistakes. I know usually we should focus on the content and not the presentation but it's difficult to take seriously advice on writing from someone who isn't a good writer.

To address the content, I think the rule to never delete what you have written is terrible advice. Some of the best authors throw away everything and rewrite from scratch multiple times before publishing.</comment>


Spying on Students: School-Issued Devices and Student Privacy - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/wp/school-issued-devices-and-student-privacy <comment><USER2> I used to work in school IT and had products pitched to us constantly that would be basically malware/RATs to spy on students. We could purchase anything that would help us look at Facebook messages, emails, documents/picture, anything really. Our department went against it for a few reasons:

\- If you have this knowledge you need to monitor it. If a student is writing about killing themselves in a document on their machine then they follow through and we had access to that knowledge it becomes our problem.

\- Opens us up to far more knowledge than we had before, knowledge we didn't necessarily want. Kids are kids. We're trying to make adults and should give them a certain amount of free reign to learn and make mistakes without us watching them all the time.

\- Our IT department just didn't feel that it was the best idea and agreed with it on moral/ethic grounds.

EDIT: I should also clarify that all of these tools went beyond what we would need to administer devices from an IT standpoint. Our other tools were more stop a malicious PDF than read little Johnny's email.

<comment><USER3> Reminds me of a Pennsylvania school "WebcamGate" in 2010.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_District)

The school's IT dept had a program to control the student's laptop camera so if it was lost or stolen they could take a picture and see where it was and with who.

It didn't end well.

<comment><USER2> Yep, you're totally right. Different country and different product but if anyone is unsure what features these tools have available they should read that wikipedia page.

We all knew at some point it would be used inappropriately and we'd all be responsible in some way. I think schools and their departments are right to move away from these types of tools. They're teenage kids, not some domestic terrorist with an enormous network.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Created a throwaway just for this as I'd like to remain anonymous. I'm currently in high school, though I picked up programming early. My school decided to purchase a bunch of "educational" tablets for the student populace a while back (wasting a million or so in the process). All in all, they were a disaster. Not only were they not used for their intended purpose, they were a huge distraction in the classroom. Kids would be watching youtube videos, and worse, through the various proxy sites the school could never seem to block, all when they should have been paying attention. I wouldn't be surprised if performance dropped as a result.

That aside, I couldn't agree more with the issues in the report. There was no opt-out: no tablet meant no grades. You'd be a fool to expect any privacy. It was obvious school officials had some form of remote access: they could in theory lock the screen (this was easily circumvented by going offline), but to what degree, we couldn't be sure. For all I knew, they could have live access to the camera and microphone.

From this experience, it seems pretty clear that just throwing technology at students in hopes it helps them "learn" isn't going to work. The money wasted on this program could have been put to much better use, training teachers and actually buying books.

<comment><USER5> Computers have been heralded as the magic answer to teaching kids for 40 years now. There have been no positive results yet. It's not hard to see why - putting computers in the classroom is like putting labor saving devices in the gym.

Learning requires focused effort and work, there's just no way around it.

<comment><USER6> I think it's because people are attempting to somehow "improve" the current educational methods using techno magic assuming that "if we do the stand-in- front-of-a-blackboard thing except with tablets" is going to lead to any sort of an improvement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone here have experience with approaching their districts?

I had a meeting last year with three assistant superintendents to discuss issues related to student privacy. New York has a student privacy law (§2-d of EDC Title 1 Article 1) passed as part of the Common Core Reform Act that establishes a Parents' Bill of Rights for Data Privacy and Security, which must be completed 120 days after its effective date of 12/08/2016\. Among other things, this document must list all third parties to which student PII is provided, for what purpose, and state that they take the proper precautions to protect student data. That date---04/07/2017---has since passed. Unfortunately, my district (and possibly the entire county, Erie) is far behind.

We also discussed school devices---they're moving toward a device-per-child model---and we expressed to one-another our concerns. The EFF's resources were essential in my research and provided resources for the district as well.

The EFF was kind enough to put me in touch with a lawyer practicing in NY with an interest in student privacy to provide pro bono counsel as I figure out the best way to move forward. I'm going to try my hardest to keep on good terms with the district; going the route of issuing FOIA requests and such is a last resort. Finding other concerned parents in my district is likely my next step.

My oldest son is entering first grade this year, so this is a fairly urgent priority for me.

</comment><comment> open-source-ux Why is there so little scrutiny over Chromebooks in schools? Every time this topic is raised, people rush to Google's defence. Yes, I know Google doesn't create advertising profiles from student data. This doesn't make their data collection behaviour defensible. They are still capturing student data in staggering quantities.

Even if the data is "anonymous" (a meaningless term) and aggregated in some form, this is still an unimaginably huge quantity of student data that Google have captured and saved for themselves.

Rather than ask what kind of tracking is acceptable, we should instead ask: why is tracking of students (who have no choice in the matter) even considered acceptable in the first place?

</comment><comment><USER8> OT: Anyone know why a comment in this post went dead in less than 4 minutes? It was pretty substantive and didn't contain anything inflammatory, although the author did say he was using a throwaway.

link to comment (you need enable showdead in settings to read it): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15108272](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15108272)

<comment><USER9> New accounts comments can be autoflagged for various reasons.

Vouch for it, as we can see someone has. The system works.

<comment><USER8> >Vouch for it, as we can see someone has. The system works.

Can you even do that? I thought flag/vouch only works for links.

<comment><USER10> As 'aaron695 said, it works for comments as well. If you want to confirm, turn on showdead and view some comments. You should see a vouch link.

<comment><USER8> yeah, i see it now. you have to click into a comment before it shows up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For some terrible reason, societies tend to believe that the younger you are, the less deserving of rights you are. Even rights such as this, where having privacy would carry less risk than an older person perhaps seeing dangerous things from the younger people. They still do the wrong thing and rob the younger people of their human rights. (Dangerous here means that in most countries, if you eyes or ears detect lewd behavior under a certain age, you go to jail.)

</comment><comment><USER12> Kids should have absolutely no expectation of privacy.

<comment><USER13> Why, and from whom? Their parents? Their school? Corporations?

<comment><USER14> I'd argue, at foremost, from their parents. [and yes, I was very aware of this fact to the extent that my first real-world application of programming was to automate obfuscate my browsing history as a teenager.]</comment></comment></comment>


How I Reduced Employee Turnover by 50% in Less Than 6 Months - <AUTHOR> https://www.aventr.com/blog/how-i-reduced-employee-turnover <comment><USER2> CTRL-F "raise", "money" Zero matches so its automatically MBA mumbo jumbo.

<comment><USER3> If you think everyone's happiness at work is dependent on money and raises that is just not the case. "As people earn more money, their day-to-day happiness rises. Until you hit $75,000. After that, it is just more stuff, with no gain in happiness."

Here is the source from the Wall Street Journal: [https://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2010/09/07/the-perfect- salary-f...](https://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2010/09/07/the-perfect-salary-for- happiness-75000-a-year/)

<comment><USER2> Ok then... what percentage of CEOs (lets say - public corporations only) have a total compensation of $75,000/year?</comment></comment></comment>


How a Facebook "Sentiment Engine" Could Be Huge - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_sentiment_engine.php <comment><USER2> does anyone have an examples of VC funded companies that have taken _massive_ amounts of investment, and been unprofitable for many years, and then become hugely profitable?</comment>


Show HN: Publ.ca - Instant and Beautiful Web Publishing - <AUTHOR>

Hey Everyone,
So this was a weekend project that I did basically as a favor to a friend of mine who is a writer.  This friend wanted a simple way to publish his short stories on the web that gave him a short url for tweeting and had no associated branding with the published work.  Essentially this is what I have done here with publ.ca .  My question is that I want to know where I should take this project in terms of features.
Possible extensions to this project are:
- automatic tweeting when publishing - custom layouts and designs - markdown rendering - user accounts ( FB connect or Google Accounts ?) - analytics - publisher dashboard
I am curious if anyone has any suggestions for features that they would want from a project like this.
Any criticism is good criticism.
Here is an example of a tech crunch article displayed in publ.ca -  publ.ca/ab47 - ( original source: http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/02/android-honeycomb-ipad/)
TL;DR - Publ.ca looking for feature suggestions and feedback <comment><USER2> I'd veto the auto-tweet, but give it tweet & fb buttons.

Also, I second the comment suggestions. However, I do like the simplicity of the whole thing. That actually might be the selling point.

As much as users want more & more & more features, you could just do the opposite, keep it the simple display for writing & see what happens.

<comment><AUTHOR> I want the writer to be in full control. They should be the originator of the tweet. What do you think of only being able to re-tweet a story, IE) if the writer wants to tweet it originally they can but if they don't, others cannot tweet on their behalf.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Here's some quick thoughts: if this is going to be used for short stories (fiction/non-fiction, but not blog posts) you could monetize by letting readers build an anthology and printing nice volumes for them. You could also (if the authors agree) license the content to other sources.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sweet, looks a lot like the readability bookmarklet. They just merged/did something with instapaper, so it looks like some interesting movement in the market.

Maybe try a bookmarklet as well. Link to original source in the top title, and preserve links if possible.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd push for the accounts, and almost prefer no Author/title/etc. - as in, have everything in the text. Maybe make them optional fields?

This way I can copy paste something to share instantly. But I might be thinking of a social pastee/pastebin

<comment><USER6> Another advantage of having accounts: users can "link" stories together to make a book. So if I post story1, story2, story3, I can log in to my account and order them as story1 -> "Chapter 1", "Chapter 2", etc. You can have other cool features too: table of contents, "Save a PDF of your book"

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Clickable:

<http://publ.ca>

<http://publ.ca/ab47>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very nice! I love the simplicity. I wonder if it'd be any good for press releases...

</comment><comment><USER7> I would put some way to comment on stories (Facebook comments?).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats pretty good- find some way to aggregate the tweets and facebook comments about the story. Something like Echo but something that fits the overall feel.</comment></comment>


Singapore condo rental search - <AUTHOR> https://keylocation.sg/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I would like to present our product, we are property search site of a new age. We have totally NO ADS + we have several unique features you can search condos by commuting time, i.e. don't have to keep checking Google Directions over and over. Give our site a try! Because we work very hard and strugling to be noticed.

</comment><comment><USER2> Hi, I have checked it and want to say that it's really awesome even though I never was in Singapore :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> We would appreciate any opinion.</comment>


Anonymous functions in C - C-- https://github.com/graphitemaster/lambdapp

<comment><AUTHOR> This is basically a way of obfuscating your C code. If you want to write obfuscated code, C++ has extensive support for this. I think it's actually a strength of C to not have many features. It ultimately makes code more readable and reliable.

<comment><USER2> I don't think I can agree more with your comment.

C++ in fact is only usable (in a team) if its features are pruned and limited in a team. Really

Throw in some fine preprocessor magic and you'll end up with completely unmaintanable and impossible to understand code.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah. C is a boring language that barely ever changes. But I'm not sure there isn't wisdom in being dull.

<comment><USER3> Compound literals in C are awesome like it's 1999:

Assuming you have this:

       struct point {
          float x, y, z;
       };
       void do_something_with_point(struct point *p);

You can do this:

       do_something_with_point(&(struct point){.x = 1.5, .y = 1.5, .z = 3.5});

<comment><AUTHOR> You can take the address of a literal?

Being able to specify a literal for a struct is useful. You can, for instance, put the literal in a macro and use the macro to initialize or reset a struct. It's better than having to write additional functions to do something trivial.

<comment><USER3> Yes, you can. You can use it to create an approximation of named parameters, because struct members that don't have an initializer will default to zero. It's still not nearly as compact as, say, Ruby, but for C it's pretty awesome and fast.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's interesting. You know you can pass structs by value, too, so I'm not sure how necessary it is to take the address.

<comment><USER3> It can be useful for an API that expects pointers for whatever reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's neat, but without closures I don't really see how you could do much with it outside of toy examples. Going off the examples -- how often do you write something like a foreach or a map or reduce that doesn't reference its enclosing scope?

<comment><USER5> As long as the stack frame is still active, the local variables are still alive and valid. So you could pass a local function as a parameter, but you could not return it. I think jwz called these "downward funargs".

GCC supports it [http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Nested- Functions.html](http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Nested-Functions.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> GCC's nested functions are implemented with trampolines, so there will be a performance penalty. For the amount that you gain, they seem like a bad idea. Tying your code to GCC for the sake of a small amount of convenience is a bad idea.

<comment><USER5> The question to which I responded did not inquire about performance nor about portability

[http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-17.html](http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-17.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> My comment was about GCC's local functions. It wasn't really about your comment, so I regret if you took it personally.

<comment><USER5> Thank you. Much respect, sorry if I was harsh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anonymous (or inner) functions aren't really valuable per se but syntactic sugar for writing the code into a static function somewhere in the same file: closures give anonymous (or inner) functions the power which is what makes them useful.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you use clang, blocks are another approach.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocks_(C_language_extension)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocks_\(C_language_extension\))

[1] [http://clang.llvm.org/docs/BlockLanguageSpec.html](http://clang.llvm.org/docs/BlockLanguageSpec.html)

<comment><USER8> The problem with clang blocks is they're represented as a Objective-C object, this makes them unusable in APIs that expect a function pointer, the only way you can cast them to a function pointer is to define the structure which represents the block and mmap executable code pages to marshal the call. Such a library exists that binds them to libffi here [https://github.com/mikeash/MABlockClosure](https://github.com/mikeash/MABlockClosure) This feat alone makes blocks essentially useless unless your entire API is also block-based, as in T (^foo)(...) vs T(*foo)(...).

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think they could be an ObjectiveC object, because they're described as C, not ObjectiveC.

I think the problems you're describing are ones that are going to be faced in any attempt at C closures. Closures have memory attached, that's the appeal of them and also the source of all the problems.

<comment><USER8> Nope, they're an ObjectiveC object with some specialties at the compiler level. Google how they're implemented.

<comment><USER9> An objective-c object is just a pointer to a struct. You don't need the objective-c runtime to call a block.

Block_copy etc are implemented in libclosure which iirc does not require libobjc either. But of course if you ARE writing objc, they are valid objects and can be treated as such

<comment><USER8> Correct, the problem is to call the function you cannot treat it as a standard function since it's pointing to a struct, the struct does contain the actual function pointer but there is an implicit `this' first argument to that function pointer which has to be that struct itself. This means you cannot use the block in an API that explicitly requires a function pointer, instead the API must specifically be aware of the block and would need to support it.

<comment><USER9> Of course, there's no way around that except to write block variants for those functions. stdlib on osx for example has block variants of most functions that take function pointers (`man qsort_b` for an example)

But if you write your program to use blocks from the start, that's not a big problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wondering how a debugger would react to this code?

<comment><USER8> Lambdapp inserts #line directives into the source code, compilers are required to respect those directives and utilize them when producing debug sections in the binary. For instance in the case of gcc/clang on *nix the compiler will produce .debug_line sections as part of the DWARF debug format. Debuggers like gdb and even valgrind utilize this information to provide correct output. So to answer your question, a debugger would react to this code exactly how it should react, as if the lambda was called via a function and the file / line should be correct.

<comment><USER10> I'm more asking as in debugger integration with versioning system (p4, git, etc.) - Say you've got a crashdump, and was able to track it down to some specific source code release - now you should've also saved the intermediate generated files somewhere - but this means that these might have to go back in p4/git/svn/etc. or find alternative place for them... Generating them again won't be the same.

Similar problem is with say Qt's generated moc_Xxx source, Ui_xxx source, etc. files - unless you make the effort of storing these generated files somewhere you might have problems debugger later.

This is in general my "arrgh" against code generation, and "aargh" is not against it - it's simply when you had forgot to keep the files somewhere and the crashdump snaps fingers at you...</comment></comment></comment>


Important Changes to Mandrill - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mailchimp.com/important-changes-to-mandrill/ <comment><USER2> Seriously cannot trust a new product offering from _anyone_ these days.

Newsletters and transactional emails are _not_ the same service. I signed up a client for transactional emails on Mandrill because the client was already locked into a newsletter vendor who doesn't support transactional emails. Now I need to explain to them why they need a _second_ monthly newsletter vendor subscription? One that serves no purpose to their marketing team and was totally _free_ until recently.

Plus I get the honor of having to justify why I made this choice in the first place. Or have to deal with scrambling to evaluate and migrate to a new vendor in less than 2 months, probably out of pocket too.

I purposely pointed the client to Mandrill because it was backed by Mailchimp and therefore less likely to fail than a startup.

I trust in a new product from an established company, and a year later come up looking foolish to my client. This isn't the first time Mailchimp has pulled the rug out from under me in front of a client. Not making the same mistake again. You're dead to me Mailchimp. Dead to me.

<comment><USER3> You and thousands of others man. I f*ckin hate Mailchimp.

<comment><USER4> Scum bags

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> MailChimp's pricing is best suited for companies that send a lot of bulk messages to a relatively constant number of users (subscribers). This includes weekly newsletters, catalogues, etc. In order to justify the cost, you need to send at least a couple of bulk emails to your entire userbase every month.

Mandrill was best suited for companies that usually don't send anything to their entire userbase, only random notifications and verifications for individual users. This probably includes most non-annoying web services. The only time they need to notify everyone at once is if they'd had a security breach or if they're shutting down.

I'm not sure whether there's a large enough intersection between these two sets to justify treating the latter as an "add-on" to the former.

Of course it's MailChimp's decision to make, and they might have found that the first set of customers actually make them the most money. But given that people around here seem to be increasingly wary of bulk email of any kind, I wonder if that will continue to be true in the future.

</comment><comment><USER6> This reminds me of when Urban Airship shut down their free transactional push notification service a while back. It turns out theres so much more money in the marketing side than the transactional side (profit center vs cost center), and if you're going to run a marketing company it doesn't make sense to give away a service to people who will never become the type of customer you want.

We've been referring clients to mandrill for a long time on many different project and although a few have had enough success to hit the level where they start paying, for the most part it's been just a giveaway. It doesn't make it any less painful for those clients that we now need to switch (especially the few that are using the inbound features - ugh) but I can see where they're coming from in this change.

</comment><comment><USER7> $20 w/MailChimp Transactional: 25,000 mails

$20 w/SendGrid: 100,000 mails

So let me know if you're thinking about switching. I'd be happy to intro you to someone on our team.

Disclosure: I'm with SendGrid. :)

<comment><USER8> It's more expensive than that for MailChimp, if I understand things correctly. On top of $20 for 25,000 emails you have to have a paid monthly MailChimp account. Or did I misunderstand something?

<comment><USER7> That's correct - you also need to have a paid MailChimp account. With SendGrid, use of the marketing product is the add-on (not the other way around).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice way to throw us under the bus! Not even a grandfather. Spending hours hunting down api keys and installing new libraries. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER9> This is absurd. In my case, the monthly price just went up 8X.

Time to explore other options.

</comment><comment><USER10> I guess this means I will be looking for a new transactional email service. Those of you that have experience with MailGun and SendGrid, which do you prefer and why?

<comment><USER8> I don't have experience with MailGun but I do with SendGrid. I have been very happy with SendGrid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's a cash grab, nothing more. There's people stuck without a developer and are forced to pay or get a broken site. Mailchimp knows this.

</comment><comment><USER11> Mailgun, Sendgrid, Postmark are all alternatives. Mailgun is what I mostly use.

<comment><USER12> For the people like me who were happily using Mandrill's free plan and would like to continue to do that:

\- Mailgun offers 10,000 emails/month for free

\- SendGrid offers 12,000 emails/month for free

\- Postmark gives you 25,000 free emails when you sign up, but they start costing money when those run out

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow. Death to Mandrill. That sucks so much...

<comment><USER13> Seriously... what were they thinking?! I hope someone from @mandrill can chime in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm using sendgrid for transactional. Sendy + ses for marketing. Costs me cents per month.

<comment><USER4> Beware that sendy comes with many backdoors though. Put it in a vm with a strong firewall.

<comment><USER12> Can you elaborate? I was planning to start using Sendy, but hiding it behind a firewall seems like it would break the signups, click tracking, open tracking, etc.

<comment><USER14> Compared to Sendy, I would suggest to use EasySendy Pro, I myself shifted to this service, having previously used Sendy. Pro gives many independence of connecting multiple SMTP servers other than, Amazon SES. Also, it is hosted web application and have plans to integrate social and push services very shortly. This cross channel will help us connecting our end customers instantly and smoothly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Do any other providers offer CSS inlining? This has been a great Mandrill feature. I have a number of domains all sending only few 100 emails/month, but the formatting is important. The cost jump to MailChimp monthly + Mandrill is tremendous.

<comment><USER4> sendgrid has transactional templates but it'll require more work

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So my move to shift with services like Easysendy Pro which connects to multiple SMTP relay services and manages all my newsletter and templates was worthful. Also they will be connecting my subscribers to push and social notifications soon.

</comment><comment><USER16> The matching thread from Mandrill's blog is being discussed over here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11170713](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11170713)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you name different versions of a file? - <AUTHOR>

i'm having problems organizing the ppt/pdf files i'm working on right now, i'm not using svn/cvs for these. i was wondering how u guys organize yr files? do u prefix or postfix the filename? or u use _ after each word for better readability? or do u postfix a version count like 1_0 at the end of the file?
i.e. i am working a ppt file, i name my ppt file product-demo-v1.0.ppt after i made my revisions, how best can i name it for better readability and traceability?
any advice is appreciated. <comment><USER2> I put these files in revision control aswell. But in case I wouldn't be able to, I'd postfix it with a timestamp:

product-demo-20100922-1050.ppt

If that's too verbose, then product-demo-20100922-N.ppt, where N is an arbitrary, but increasing number as I save different versions.

But a proper revision control system would be much more valuable, even for non-text data.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, it could work! I will give it a shot!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Use dropbox: <https://www.dropbox.com/>

Not only is each version of your documents backed up but they are accessible from anywhere you choose to access them.

</comment><comment><USER4> So why not use a proper version control system? I've had some success persuading finance types to use TortoiseSVN for complex Excel spreadsheets so I can't see there is much excuse.</comment>


A Glimpse into the Bureaucratic Hell of Denying Health Insurance Claims - <AUTHOR> https://splinternews.com/a-glimpse-into-the-bureaucratic-hell-of-denying-health-1823560356 <comment><USER2> If you're a tech entrepreneur, it's the first story in here that should alarm you the most. It's about denying coverage altogether, not about denying individual claims. Outside of the "guaranteed issue" ACA market, there is virtually no due process for coverage denial. You can be denied on a whim, with little recourse.

The list of conditions for which insurance outside the ACA will be denied is long and opaque. The story makes it sound as if they're looking for reliably diagnosed conditions like diabetes. No. They're looking for _indicators_ of a long list of _potential_ conditions. If you or your spouse has a functioning female reproductive system, the chance of your family being denied is high, even without a diagnosed or treated condition. We were denied for something like that, and also because my daughter had an unexplained seizure when she was 4 (she's now 16 and just fine). To get insurance for the first couple years of Matasano, my wife had to take a crappy full-time job with group coverage.

Without insurance, a typical working family is one major medical incident away from zeroing themselves out. My daughter has never met a pickleball net that didn't break her ankle (she has met one pickleball net). Even with insurance, the cost of that injury was high single-digit thousands of dollars. Without it? The cost of a pretty decent car. Find a friend who's had an appendectomy some time and try to find out how much the insurance company was (nominally) billed for it. A down payment on a house.

If you work in this industry, intend ever to start your own business and potentially have a family at the same time, you should be extremely alarmed at the prospect of guaranteed issue regulated health insurance (the ACA) being replaced.

<comment><USER3> ACA is horrendous, unless you're receiving a government subsidy. I'm self- employed and we have one option of insurance provider, and the cheapest plan for my family last year was $18,000 a year with a huge deductible. That's after tax, out of pocket, for a healthy family with no pre-existing. Like all self-employed people I know (who aren't getting government subsidy), I moved my family to Christian Medishare, which is basically catastrophic coverage for about $3,000 year that was grandfathered in when Obamacare was passed. However it isn't truly insurance, it isn't regulated for soundness. I'm seriously considering returning to wage employment for health care benefits.

<comment><USER2> The rate of increase for health insurance prices went _down_ after the ACA was enacted. The motivation for enacting the ACA was, in large part, the untenable increase in insurance prices in the 10 years leading up to it.

People have a bad habit of blaming the ACA for insurance prices. The ACA failed at its goal of making individual health insurance affordable, that is true. But it didn't _cause_ that problem, and it did something extremely important to mitigate it.

<comment><USER4> Health insurance for my healthy young family of 4 spiraled out of control WITH ACA, so much so that I didn't purchase proper health insurance in 2017, while also underfunding my income tax in hopes that ACA cannot legally "send me a bill" for 2.5% of my household income. (I mean shit, in a red blooded patriotic American, but that penalty made me absolutely furious) All this while paying cash for prenatal visits for our next child, still far cheaper than paying for a $15,000/yr policy + 15,000/yr deductible. In my decade of buying family insurance, I watched my family policy increase by nearly $1000/mo combined with a staggering decrease in value provided via super high deductible... oh, and no legal way out.

I know ACA is good for some, but goodness did it remove my interest in remaining insured. I'm sure you can cite data that tells a different story, but my experience, as well as that of my peers, says ACA has been very bad for those actually paying the bill unsubsidized. I fully blame ACA for this.

<comment><USER2> You have a young family of four, and can barely afford insurance premiums. Basically, without insurance, every single year you're hitting on a blackjack 17 against bankruptcy. You see the ACA penalty, and you see the insurance premium cost, but you're not factoring in the 5-digit cost of virtually any significant medical expense.

 _Rising insurance premiums_ aren't good for anyone. The ACA set out to fix the problem of rising insurance premiums and (I think) pretty much failed. But it didn't _create_ that problem; 5-digit annual premiums for a family of four were a reality prior to the ACA --- or, at least, they were in Chicago on the small group market.

The subtext to these discussions though is whether we'd be better off without the ACA. No, we would not be. We would lose guaranteed-issue insurance, so a sizable fraction of families wouldn't be able to get insurance at all, and, from the available evidence, we would _at least_ have the same rate problems we have now, and (according to some studies) have _worse_ rates. Obviously, this subtext is about the GOP's health care rhetoric, and I'm not wild about opening up a political salient in this thread, but let's at least be clear: the idea that you can repeal the ACA, do nothing else, and get lower health insurance premiums for real coverage is sleight of hand.

<comment><USER5> If enough people didn't have access to insurance, then there would be pressure on hospitals to find ways to reduce prices (so that their volume could go up). As it stands the medical industry is allowed to hold the poor for ransom ("accept our increased costs or they won't get treated") against the US's deep but finite pockets.

Before, we had the (very poor) demand elasticity of people paying everything they had and then maxing out every credit source, and predictably prices rose to around that point. Now, we have no demand elasticity at all, and prices can be expected to rise well above the average person's net worth + credit access.

If you look at any microeconomic equilibrium chart, you'll see that the price is held in a balance between people buying and people holding off due to price. When the good is healthcare, the human cost of "holding off" is very high, and usually involves inability to pay. Unfortunately our economic system tends to fly off the rails if this balance is disrupted, no matter how noble or urgent the cause.

<comment><USER6> >pressure on hospitals to reduce prices

Elsewhere it has been said: choosing between bankruptcy for your family or cancer care for your child isn't an actual choice, it's two loaded guns pointed at your skull. One held by the hospital, the other by the insurance company.

The reason first world countries choose universal healthcare is that healthcare is a human right. Full stop. It is not an economic issue. If you want to get economic about it though you'll lose because as it turns out a healthy educated populace is more productive than one that loses productive families here and there to lances of bankruptcy from the unpredictable nest of human disease.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure its fair to argue that universal healthcare is a human right despite the fact it makes economic sense.

Humanity survived just fine without real healthcare and healthcare is not essential to a fair balance of power b/t the government and its citizenry.

Universal healthcare needs to be argued on the economics of the issue because that is the only practical way to make it sustainable. The "feel good" stuff about it being a human right will fail when stress is applied to America and stress is coming. The US, frankly, has peaked and it is all downhill from here.

<comment><USER5> You also have to watch out that asserting positive rights that are sometimes impossible to provide (like healthcare) will confuse people when governments attempt to claim that other, deeper rights are "impossible to give." (For example, they might try to argue that they can't afford to not torture, comparing it to how their impoverished country can't give everyone free internet.)

<comment><USER8> As anyone who lived through the more recent Bush Administration witnessed nearly daily, people claim "not torturing" is an impossible right to give while denying all positive rights—and acted on that argument—so I fail to see the relationship.

<comment><USER5> Denying every right is the _last_ step of the manuver I'm describing, the first step is to re-define right to mean comfort. Bush-era politics just went straight to step 2 and it didn't work on us.

I suspect that the current UN rights council may be an example of this in action. See: the track record of the members on negative rights, the number of positive rights on their list of rights.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a good article, but it only shows a few parts of a much more complex whole, and extrapolating from these anecdotes to a broader system is not really accurate

Many hospitals lose money on every Medicare and Medicaid patient. The only reason they survive is because they can charge private insurance companies more. So hospitals and health systems have been consolidating to strengthen their negotiating position against insurers

This article paints Medicare as the good guy, private insurance as evil, and hospitals as mixed. The reality is more complicated, and more regional, but overall healthcare is a zero sum game today between payers and providers fighting for dollars, and power comes largely from scale. In geographies where payers are bigger and stronger, they push hospitals and force many to consolidate or die. In areas where hospitals are stronger, they basically dictate price and rates can skyrocket

There's a lot of bad stuff happening on all sides, and it isn't clear that private insurance is always evil. If we become a single payer society, small providers that are struggling to survive will probably be the first to die, and providers will probably consolidate much more aggressively into massive national chains, like the Walmart of healthcare

The cause of a lot of healthcare issues is not one particular party (insurance, Medicare, hospitals) but a system that encourages monopoly seeking behavior without any good mechanism for regulating this

<comment><USER10> I think it'd be a good sport to make hospitals eat denied claims. If two giant institutions want to argue about whether something is covered, the patient should not be the loser.

We should also better fund Medicare and Medicaid. Taxes should be apparent.

<comment><USER11> It's more complex. Medicare is outcome-based. Providers who do a shitty job don't get paid, which is why hospitals complain about reimbursement.

Medicaid is like an ATM machine for providers in many states. There is usually little or no correlation between outcome and payment, and poor fraud controls. That's why you always hear about providers in NYC and Miami who "visit" 900 patients a day. Additionally, you have the institutional racism aspect of Medicaid where services are unavailable in some red states.

IMO, the biggest issues in healthcare are for profit institutions and insurers and the trade guild practices associated with Doctors.

Single payer or regional systems supported by taxes are the way to go. Medicaid should be an institution that is replaced by something better.

<comment><USER12> The market would work better if everyone was paying the same prices without "denial-based" inflation.

I think the solution would be to give citizens disease/disorder "endowments." i.e. a yearly health stipend account - it's money they can spend at doctors, but they can't spend on unrelated goods/services (i.e. food). On top of that, additional "stipends" for major life ailments. The trick would be in finding budgets for those stipends. Once individuals have money, though, they have the ability to do the relative value assessment for various treatments.

<comment><USER13> You may want to read up on Singapore's Central Provident Fund system, as a real-life implementation of something similar: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Provident_Fund](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Provident_Fund)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This story is couched in terms of how bad things were _before_ Obamacare, but I'd like to point out that things aren't great now either. To prevent Obamacare from bankrupting them, insurance companies are resorting to legally dubious mass-denials, one of which affected me personally.

A few months ago, I woke up the next morning after eating some fast food and began vomiting. I couldn't stop throwing up, and I couldn't eat anything, for 2 straight days. I had a 101 degree fever at the worst point. At the beginning of day 3, when I vomited so hard that I passed out for a few seconds and fell on the floor, I went to the ER. They gave me IV fluids and anti-nausea medication, which worked.

About 2 months later, I received a letter from my insurance company (Anthem). They had determined that my situation didn't qualify as an "emergency," and therefore they were denying the entire bill for this ER visit. I have appealed, and so far it has not been overturned. I am now on the hook for thousands of dollars, even though I had already covered my entire deductible for the year.

I thought that this had to simply be a mistake, but then I learned this is actually a new policy that insurance companies are implementing in the era of Obamacare [1]. Patients are expected to self-diagnose whether or not their situation meets their insurance company's definition of an "emergency," and are rolling the dice as to whether or not an ER visit will be covered.

[1] [https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2018/1/29/16906558/a...](https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2018/1/29/16906558/anthem-emergency-room-coverage-denials- inappropriate)

<comment><USER15> > _To prevent Obamacare from bankrupting them, insurance companies are > resorting to legally dubious mass-denials, one of which affected me > personally._

What does the policy has to do with Obamacare? Completely unfair denials obviously happened before the ACA (see: this article), and the idea that Anthem is doing this to stave off bankruptcy is laughable (just see their financials since the ACA was enacted).

<comment><USER14> It seems to be happening more and more post-Obamacare. Further, this is an actual policy now, and this policy was created post-Obamacare (my incident occurred in Nevada, where they have not received permission to deny these claims like they have in other states, so apparently they feel the need to roll it out nationwide without telling anyone). There was no need for the policy before, but now apparently there is in an Obamacare world. But they can't expect people to diagnose themselves and determine whether or not a situation is an "emergency" under insurance company rules, since the symptoms of many non-life threatening conditions feel like they may be life threatening.

Unfortunately, in capitalist economies, when you use the law to put the hurt on companies, they will pass that hurt onto unsuspecting consumers. The money will come from somewhere, and it's not coming out of executives' pockets. Perhaps this is why Nancy Pelosi urged lawmakers and the public not to read Affordable Care Act before it was passed it into law [1]. Had everyone read it, they would have known that problems like this would eventually arise.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV-05TLiiLU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV-05TLiiLU)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's hard to believe that the country is putting up with a system that can bankrupt you any time you get sick and there is pretty much nothing you can do other than being lucky or having a lot of money already. The actual medical care is fine but the billing practices are just ridiculous. I would call them fraudulent in a lot of cases.

<comment><USER17> Is it really hard to believe though? The ones who are lucky and have the money are fine with the situation. The unlucky ones with no money are too busy fighting diseases, insurance companies, and bill collectors, they don't have time to change the system. Dealing with insurance when you have a serious illness is a full time job. The people who need change most are literally fighting for their lives. Meanwhile, healthy people in America think "Gee, why should I have to use my money to pay for someone else's healthcare? What do I get out of it? I'm rich and lucky after all".

The richest don't even understand what health insurance is as a concept. I mean, just look at what our own President Billionaire has to say: "Because you are basically saying from the moment the insurance, you're 21 years old, you start working and you're paying $12 a year for insurance, and by the time you're 70, you get a nice plan." [1] What does that even mean? Or our Speaker of the House: "The whole idea of Obamacare is...the people who are healthy pay for the...sick. It's not working, & that's why it's in a death spiral" [2]. That's literally the entire point of health insurance. This is what we're dealing with here.

[1] [https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/20/trump-thinks-young-people- pa...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/20/trump-thinks-young-people-pay-12-for- health-insurance.html) [2] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/03/09/e...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/03/09/either- paul-ryan-doesnt-understand-insurance-or-you-dont-understand-paul-ryan/)

<comment><USER16> "The whole idea of Obamacare is...the people who are healthy pay for the...sick"

This is the whole point of health insurance! What a stupid idiot (I am overly nice to Paul Ryan. His budget plan was the most ridiculous thing I have ever read).

<comment><USER18> That is the whole point of _socialized medicine_. The point of _insurance_ is that you pay slightly more than the expected value of your claims. So if you know you need $5000 worth of medical treatment for asthma, your insurance premium should be definitely more than $5000.

This bizarre obsession with using the phrase "insurance" and insisting on a product that is not at all insurance is probably why the US health-care system is so fucked.

<comment><USER17> > That is the whole point of socialized medicine. The point of insurance is > that you pay slightly more than the expected value of your claims. So if you > know you need $5000 worth of medical treatment for asthma, your insurance > premium should be definitely more than $5000.

How does that make sense? If I knew I needed $5000 worth of medical treatment for asthma, and I pay an appropriate premium based on that, but then I get cancer..... well then someone else is going to have to pay for that, because my premiums certainly won't cover the cost of cancer treatment.

<comment><USER19> You'd pay the 99% chance of asthma * $5,000 + 1% chance of cancer * $50,000 (or whatever the probability you get cancer * the estimate of cancer treatment costs).

If you do get cancer, the other 99% of folks who didn't get it are covering your costs.

<comment><USER17> > If you do get cancer, the other 99% of folks who didn't get it are covering > your costs.

This is exactly my point, but it's this mechanism Paul Ryan said wasn't working. @powera claimed this is not the point of insurance. These things seem like exactly the same thing to me, so help me understand the nuance.

<comment><USER19> It's the asthma for which you are near-guaranteed to need $5,000 worth of treatment for that's the issue, not the small chance you get cancer.

You're not looking to insure against the chance you get asthma: You have asthma, and you're looking for someone healthy to help pay for it. If too few healthy people sign up for Obamacare relative to the sick (and remember, all else equal, they have to be charged the same regardless of their health) those healthy folks will get an increasingly bad deal as their premiums are covering the costs of more and more sick enrollees and more and more healthy folk drop out of the exchanges. That's the "death spiral".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Every health care system rations care since no current system has enough resources to care for everyone without some form of waiting. The U.S. health care system rations care in the most immoral way of the advanced nations. A person should not profit by denying care to someone else.

As a nation we should try optimizing for a more moral, just system. As I see it that would be something like Medicare for all but I'm open to suggestions/solutions.

<comment><USER21> There is no silver bullet in health care. The field is too large for any one single solution to cover everyone (3 Trillion USD per year is spent on health care). There needs to be a lot of innovation in a lot of different areas in order to solve the problem.

I started a company with my brother that is attempting to drastically lower costs for primary care. ([https://scalpel.com](https://scalpel.com)) We build software that allows physicians to set up their own direct primary care clinics. Our beta clinic in South Carolina charges $49 / month for unlimited visits and charges people at cost for things like labs and procedures. So instead of dealing with a labyrinthine medical system people are just working directly with a doctor. We really only care about making money off our memberships which we charge what we believe is a reasonable amount.

<comment><USER22> I think there's plenty of room for innovation but we should start from the principal that everyone gets full access to medical treatment regardless of their ability to pay.

<comment><USER21> We technically have this in the United States (for emergencies). It is illegal for someone to be denied emergency services regardless of ability to pay.[0] No government system guarantees "full access" to medical treatment there is some form of rationing everywhere.

[https://www.cms.gov/Regulations-and- Guidance/Legislation/EMT...](https://www.cms.gov/Regulations-and- Guidance/Legislation/EMTALA/index.html?redirect=/EMTALA/)

<comment><USER20> Emergency rooms are required to stabilize a patient, not treat them or cure them. This is not universal care and it not giving everyone access to the medical system. One does not got the ER for things like cancer screenings.

From the link you provided:

 _Hospitals are then required to provide stabilizing treatment for patients with EMCs._

<comment><USER21> Access is a function of cost. If medical care is affordable for people near the poverty line then we will be able to solve the access problem entirely. (this is my goal) Governments, charities, and businesses will pick up the slack as they already do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm old and deal with the health "care" system more than anyone else here. What I've learned: 1) You are responsible for your own health. Eat less, eat better, and exercise more. Get enough sleep. Don't over worry. Don't drink too much. Don't touch recreational drugs. Your own health must be your number one priority. Teach your children this, too. 2) ACA, for whatever problems it caused, will save many of us from bankruptcy. "Us" being everyone who is or wants to be a founder. 3) The biggest problem with health cost is lack of transparency. If I could shop around, even a little, I could save tens of thousands of dollars a year. But it's hard to negotiate for price when nobody knows what anything really costs, or what you actually get for that cost; even the people selling it. 5) Every day you are in good health is a good day. Thank God, nature, or other deity(s) of your choice for your lack of health problems.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've begun to suspect is that "universal healthcare" means "you weren't denied, you're just on a waiting list, and every physician is an interchangeable cog".

I often wonder why health insurance companies don't use a similar tactic.

Edit: Try finding a pediatrician in Berlin. (Seriously, I would love to hear recommendations)

<comment><USER25> Because doctors will happily tell you that whatever they plan to do will be covered by your insurance. So the work gets done, the money spent, before they get a chance to screw with you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> That's a very interesting insight into the world of American healthcare and privatized healthcare in general. Previously I thought that all these statements about the US healthcare system were seriously exaggerated, but I guess I was wrong. It's kind of terrifying that being sick excludes you from access to healthcare. In my experince, public healthcare has many problems, but you get what you need.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is why I prefer Europe over US: we have realised healthcare is a human right, not a business.

</comment><comment><USER28> Healthcare is a basic infrastructure problem, not that it is considered this. As a basic infrastructure problem, there are many who see a profit to be made in supplying services. Each country views healthcare from a specific point of view and that dictates how they will, as a country, provide the general healthcare service.

A country like the USA see this in the light of healthcare as a business, make as big a profit as you can, irrespective of the actual services that you provide. In other countries where the relevant governments provide universal service they allow private businesses to dictate the price that the government pays for the supplies required.

So, we have general commodities when supplied into the healthcare system being charged at 10x or greater for on item which, if not used in a healthcare environment, is charged a much lower price. This applied to things like computers, phones, chairs, tissues, matches, paper, toilet paper, gloves, etc,

The suppliers get away with this because of the perception that these goods are of a higher quality. These goods often come off the same production lines as those sold in a normal commercial market.

I have seen up to date medical equipment that cost a large fortune that looked pretty, but if you actually looked at the basic equipment was technology that was anything up to 10 years old and was superseded by stuff your could get commercially.

The amount of money charged for drugs is based on the amount of money spent of research, which if you actually looked at the figures thrown about were spent by the public purse not the private.

It is a captive market and those supplying into it want it that way to maximises their profits. Morality questions are not considered to be important unless it has regulatory considerations that will significant reduce your profit margins if you fail to live up to them.

The problems within the healthcare system (insurance included) will not be solved any time soon. Even if there was a revolution that changed the entire basis of how and when healthcare was supplied, it will soon return to what we see today as greed is the basic motivator for society as a whole.

To bring about real change requires people really changing and this will not happen because we are basically looking out for ourselves and our own. This occurs on the local level, on the regional level, on the state level and on the national world levels.

The healthcare system is an area that needs a complete overhaul worldwide. It is not going to happen since most people do not have the ability to see past their local situation.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is a sickening and inhumane system

</comment><comment><USER29> This is sickening</comment>


Description and implementation of Longest Common Subsequence in python and c++ - <AUTHOR> http://wordaligned.org/articles/longest-common-subsequence <comment><USER2> This is actually a pretty good introduction to dynamic programming. It covers some neat Python tricks along the way, too.</comment>


Ask HN:  Can someone explain Amazon's Cloud Computing (EC2) to me?  - <AUTHOR>

I'm a non-technical solo-entreprenuer who has been running my own sites for years.  I'm hosting my sites on dedicated servers and have had no problems even with high traffic sites.
Why should I use Amazon's cloud services? Could I just launch a site and host it on their servers?  Is it easy to use?
 I'm kind of confused as to how it works.
Sorry for sounding so ignorant, I'm just trying to figure out how I can use it. <comment><USER2> Having a dedicated server is like buying a vacation house. You have a predictable cost, but also a fixed capacity. If the house sleeps 10, but your family is only 4, you're wasting money. If you have 10 unexpected guests one year, some people may have to sleep outside. Also, for 50 weeks a year when you are not on vacation, it sits empty, but you still pay for it.

Amazon EC2 is like getting a room at a hotel. It may cost more per night, but you can also only book it when you need it. Additionally, when you have more people than expected, you can book more rooms. Renting 10 rooms for a week is cheaper than buying a house.

If you know in advance what your needs are, and they are consistent from month to month, get a dedicated server. If you have have unpredictable needs, EC2 is the way to go.

<comment><USER3> That's a great analogy but I'd like to add another variable to the mix. With a dedicated server you know where your data is stored (e.g. a data center in Denver, CO, or Dayton, OH) but that isn't the case with EC2. Their servers are distributed all over the world.

If you business has any sort of sensitivity to data-origin type legal consideration you're better off with a dedicated server. The country of origin for your data isn't easily controlled with a cloud type service.

<comment><USER2> _With a dedicated server you know where your data is stored (e.g. a data center in Denver, CO, or Dayton, OH) but that isn't the case with EC2_

With EC2, you can select a region, and you can be assured that the server you get will be in one of a handful of datacenters in that city. There are 4 availability zones in the US-East region, for example, which means that you can be assured that your data is in northern Virginia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> EC2 is primarily geared toward providing variable computational capacity.

One can use the API to programmaticly trigger the allocation or deallocation of resources in a cost effective manner. In other words when computational needs are low, fewer resources can be allocated and costs can be lowered with additional capacity brought online only as needed - elastic resources to meet elastic demand.</comment>


Was Oumuamua an Alien Solar Sail? - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2018-11-oumuamua-extraterrestrial-solar.html <comment><USER2> > As for what an extra-terrestrial light sail would be doing in our solar > system, Bialy and Loeb offer some possible explanations for that. First, > they suggest that the probe may actually be a defunct sail floating under > the influence of gravity and stellar radiation, similar to debris from ship > wrecks floating in the ocean. This would help explain why Breakthrough > Listen found no evidence of radio transmissions.

Wouldn't it be advantageous for Oumuamua's creators to simply collect data, leave the observed systems alone and start transmitting when those clueless Earthlings aren't listening anymore? This thing was noticed only at 0.25 AU _post_ flyby. It is sort of terrifying that someone might have sent this...

Anyways, I am highly skeptical. For all we know, this was a slightly out-of- the-ordinary rock that swung by Sol. Our current inability to explain its behaviour due to lack of data immediately has people screaming "Aliens!". Well, one notable issue here is that the "Aliens!"-conclusion is not due to evidence for the fact (detected transmissions, clear artificial behaviour or surface structures) but lack of evidence against it. One natural cause for the acceleration when moving away from the Sun as well as the fast spin would be outgassing, but:

> In addition, they cite other research that showed that if outgassing were > responsible for the acceleration, it would have also caused a rapid > evolution in 'Oumuamua's spin (which was not observed).

Are we sure we didn't just fail to detect it? As nature would have it, improbable configurations might have been at work here and multiple streams of outgassing may have stabilised spin?

<comment><AUTHOR> >Are we sure we didn't just fail to detect it?

I would be interested in knowing more about the possibility of that from people who study comets.

The alternative theory is the object is an extremely thin sheet (0.3mm thick), which is what these scientists suggest as the best fit for the data. That would be a really thin slice of space rock.

<comment><USER3> How about from the people who study chance ?

The issue with rare events is that you can never estimate the probability curves. This has the strange result that each one looks unique, complex and very much non-random ... despite potentially being very common, simple and random.

We have one example from an unknown distribution. You can always read a lot into it's exact properties ... but there's nothing to be read, because we don't have the variation on those properties. So this could have been a very common run-of-the-mill interstellar asteroid ... and it could have been an alien explorer. We don't know, and we probably won't know. Well, I guess in the second case we'll eventually realize.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good ideas. But what I meant was about the possibilities of outgas-propellent existing without them being observable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As I understand it, Oumuamua spectra is very similar to that of a D-type asteroid. It appears to be covered by a dull red organic gunk (tholins), which would make a very inefficient solar sail.

</comment><comment><USER5> Is it easier to colonize asteroid belt since water and minerals are easily available?

Gravity still is a problem, but all the resources needed to build colony and sustain life are easily available on lot these asteroids. Also water is great for shielding solar radiation which means on some of these asteroids underground colonizes can pose a lower hazard compared to solar radiation on planets like Mars or our moon.

<comment><USER6> Is gravity actually a problem if the colony is underground and the asteroid is spinning?

<comment><USER7> Spinning would only result in a ring inside the asteroid having the desired gravity. Still might be pretty good though. Not sure what the cost would be to create the desired spin for a reasonably sized candidate asteroid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wonder why this post got deranked so fast? Was it user flags or mod decision?

</comment><comment><USER8> Previous HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18338927](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18338927)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Would it make sense for an advanced civilization to hollow out asteroids to create interstellar ships?

<comment><USER7> Probably not, since The quality of the material likely isn't very high and you'd end up with pretty sick walls which result in lots of mass to accelerate. Maybe that's not true for all asteroids and it might differ between solar systems.

<comment> loa-in-backup parent probably meant *thick walls, but I bet modern lingo like "sick walls" would also apply, as it's a very "rad" idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Part of me wishes it was true. But part of me also knows that betteridge's law of headlines is as reliable as newton's laws of motion for everyday life.

<comment><USER11> > Part of me wishes it was true.

Me too, on one level, but we should be careful what we wish for. If it was an alien solar sail, there's not much in earthly history of two cultures at different levels of advancement meeting that lends much hope for a long-term happy outcome of an intergalactic encounter.

<comment><USER12> True.

Then at least we had in both cases humans for whom there is God that they will ultimately share similar cultures ("do not kill when not needed", "may share similar feelings",...)

With aliens this is a whole different perspective. I am personally not excited to find out how our worlds may or may not be compatible.</comment></comment></comment>


The Pretend Gardener: Student Discovers Hidden Life of Renaissance Spy - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/dec/26/cambridge-student-discovers-hidden-life-renaissance-spy <comment><USER2> This piece is remarkably light on facts and almost entirely speculation.

The whole argument seems to be - we haven't found much evidence of his work, ergo he must be a spy.

<comment><USER3> I was hoping for some sort of code in his drawings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I could not help but think that if The Economist wrote an article about the same topic that the title would have included the pun "The Secret Gardner."

</comment><comment><USER5> Nobody suspects the gardner, or the cleaning staff...

<comment><USER6> I disagree. There is a reason it is called an "evil maid" attack.</comment></comment>


The Virtual Typewriter Museum: Hansen writing ball - <AUTHOR> http://www.typewritermuseum.org/collection/brands/index.php3?machine=hansen&cat=kd <comment><USER2> If it was done in 1870, the design is past copyright expiration. Would be a fun project to recreate this machine- specially with 3D printers making it more accessible to make. Anyone know where we might find the actual design?

</comment><comment><USER3> More on Nietzsche's use of it:

[http://www.malling-hansen.org/friedrich-nietzsche-and-his- ty...](http://www.malling-hansen.org/friedrich-nietzsche-and-his-typewriter-a- malling-hansen-writing-ball.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> It has a very... steampunk aesthetic to it.</comment>


Low-quality calls and high memory consumption. Users look for Skype alternatives - <AUTHOR> http://startupstashs.com/skype-alternative <comment><USER2> skype was good before microsoft took over :/ I wish they'd rollback the interface. It's really annoying how I can't tweak anything anymore, I used to sabotage it for the memory it uses. Now my PC is too slow to do much if I have it running in the background.

<comment><AUTHOR> Skype in the business since 2003

Telegram, Slack, Google Hangout are much younger and still, they win Skype in every aspect.

Microsoft needs to wake up or Skype will join ICQ</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can foreigners loop wget at Canadian sites, increasing bandwidth use? - <AUTHOR>

Also, will the Canadian government be subjected to usage-based billing? <comment><USER2> It's Bell's home and small business customers that will be receiving usage- based bills, not Canadian data centers. I'm pretty sure the government of Canada doesn't subscribe to Bell.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah. So, this would be bad, then:

        while true; do wget http://bit.ly/fHHbHh; rm fHHbHh; sleep 1; done

Managing Matters is a small business using Bell (according to Google). The PDF is a large file on their website.

<comment><USER2> That would be bad for anyone with a shared hosting/VPS plan, since most web hosts cap those types of plans.</comment></comment></comment>