What we lose with data-driven medicine - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/16/magazine/health-issue-what-we-lose-with-data-driven-medicine.html <comment><USER2> The business of medicine in United States is about extracting reimbursements from payers while keeping regulators happy. Well-being and satisfaction of the patient is important only incidentally. Since most doctors would prefer to be in the business of helping patients, finding themselves in the business of billing insurance causes burnout.

Blaming the automation software for this fundamental misalignment is silly. Software is just a tool that optimizes for the needs of the business and the customer. And in American healthcare the patient is not the customer. Insurance companies and the government are the customer.

</comment><comment><USER3> So I'm a medical student, as you can probably tell from my comment history. I once helped write a proposal for the American Medical Association related to medical scribes - individuals that record all the data from physicians into the EHR. The idea for these scribes were to allow physicians to focus on the patient care aspect rather than the documentation and billing.

Our proposal was approved almost unanimously by the student section of the meeting, but was argued extensively by the physician section, not on the proposals actual merit, but on the usefulness or lack thereof of scribes. Some delegates thought that they led to errors in documentation (our proposal was to study this), others thought they would be leapfrogged by newer technologies and thus unnecessary.

Long story short, I have two comments. The first, that having more scribes would be beneficial in letting doctors being doctors, perhaps being a simple solution to the problems demonstrated in the article.

The second is that doctors from all kinds of specialties probably agree on many issues affecting patient care and physicians at large. However, all I see are disagreements.

<comment><USER4> The fact that you feel that additional personnel are necessary to document what another person does speaks volumes as to the unnecessary documentation requirements. We should pare back documentation requirements so that one person can do it without another person's help.

<comment><USER3> How is it any different than being a client of an accountant or lawyer? Or being an assistant to an executive?

Regardless, looking at the present, in my opinion having scribes available would provide a simple solution to a problem often bemoaned in medicine.

<comment><USER4> You're confusing mid-level practitioners with scribes. Lawyers have paralegals. Physicians have PAs or NPs.

The existence of someone whose sole job is just following a clinician and documenting for them is absurd. Medicine in the past was fine with paper charts. Sure there was some inefficiency with collecting information. Medicine these days is actually less complex than in the past because answers are more readily available with diagnostic testing. Why is more documentation required today compared to the past?

We should all strive to simplify medicine, not facilitate ever increasing unnecessary complexity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These EHR systems sound difficult and time-consuming to use. If they can't/won't be _directly_ improved any time soon, why don't nurses and doctors have data entry specialist partners to do the clicking and typing? Why not take some people with a 2-year medical data entry certification and train them to use $INSTITUTION's customized EHR system? It seems crazy to make people who are qualified to actually _diagnose and treat patients_ spend half their time on clerical work using cumbersome software.

Maybe people are worried that EHR quality would suffer if people with fewer credentials entered the data. According to the article EHR systems are already full of garbage data entered by physicians. Does it actually get worse if data entry specialists do the entry instead? This appears to be readily testable. You can have them do it in parallel with the physicians who enter their own EHR data now, and compare after a year.

<comment><USER6> They do, they're called scribes.

<comment><USER5> That makes sense. Do you know why they aren't more common, to the extent that many doctors apparently spend much of their day on EHR data entry?

Maybe I'm just relying too much on this article plus a few similar complaints I've read in the past. Maybe most doctors _don 't_ spend much time on data entry but I only see the grievances of the few that are forced to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Lamenting documentation requirements is as old as Medicaid itself. With more and more oversight by governing bodies and the burdens of "quality-metrics", the personal connection with carers will be increasingly distant.

I love electronic records because I don't have to handwrite anymore, and all the data I need is just a few clicks away. The problem isn't the electronic nature of the records, but rather the reporting and documentation requirements that come with it. Why are there increased amounts of documentation required? Because it is a form of rationing: make patient care so time consuming that fewer patients can be seen, and less can be billed long term. It really is a pernicious way to decrease healthcare expenses, but it comes at the cost of depersonalizing patients, physicians, and nurses.

That, and also legal protections because lawyers exploit any "bad outcome" as negligence, even though no negligence occurred.

<comment><USER7> it does seem shameful that payers so frequently rely on denying care / making billing hard to cut costs when there are so many other things they could do that are harder but higher impact

Also, I'm only recently learning how pernicious the fear of malpractice suits is, and how this fear makes doctors reluctant to collaborate informally -- if you can't see a patient yourself or get their full chart, the perceived liability risk is high enough to prevent informal collaboration

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yes, doctors should focus on the patient and the family, not the computer. Technology should be scrutinized to be more supportive.

Yet a significant problem with this article is that it provides no comparison to other professions.

"A clinician will make roughly 4,000 keyboard clicks during a busy 10-hour emergency-room shift" \-- I doubt that 4,000 "keyboard clicks" is unusual for any profession at present, even one where attention is moving across interactions with patients, colleagues, machines, and the computer. A page of text is about 3,000 characters.

(Aside: I'm actually not quite sure what is meant by a "keyboard click" is -- maybe the author is talking about mouse clicks or toggling checkboxes; elsewhere in the article the phrase is "4,000-key-clicks-a-day" \-- if it's just 4,000 taps to keyboard keys, that's a pretty low number. I don't think that 4,000 checkbox or mouse clicks is even really such a big number. Answers here ([https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-avarage-number-of-mouse- cl...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-avarage-number-of-mouse-clicks-a- person-does-daily)) suggest between 5000 and 7000 mouse clicks/day. Another resources says a doc does about 2500 clicks/day -- [http://www.healthcareitnews.com/infographic/infographic- one-...](http://www.healthcareitnews.com/infographic/infographic-one-docs- clicks-day) \-- and that's for a 16 hour shift.)

In any case, is there something distinct about clinician work with regard to the use of computers, compared to what we're all doing? A claim that there is would strike me as special pleading. If there is an argument to be made, it must be made comparatively.

The author also claims that "Even if the E.H.R. is not the sole cause of what ails us, believe me, it has become the symbol of burnout" \-- do doctors _really_ suffer from more burnout than other professions? _Doctor-authored_ studies may say so, but we need to have unbiased studies of burnout across the professions, and understand generally how being lassoed to a computer affects morale.

</comment><comment><USER9> I realized the other day we find ourselves increasingly influenced by algorithms. Intentionally or not people are forming their lives around arbitrary algorithms. The YouTube guy who reacted outrageously in a Japanese suicide forest was forming his life decisions according to YouTube's algorithms to generate views. Now doctors are making medical choices based on algos, what's next?

At what point does the hivemind merge with algorithmic ML to form a sort of distributed AI?

</comment><comment><USER10> This is one of the really sad thing about medicine today. For those of us who remember how going to the doctor used to be, the experience these days is so disheartening. All that slavish tending to to the computers and data entry instead of spending time with the patients. Nurses and even nursing assistance have also been greatly impacted by this.

<comment><USER11> This is not an EHR problem. This is a poor bedside manner problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder what the actual split of those two hours of EHR per one hour of patient care is actually targeted for _medical_ information vs cost accounting and risk management?

My experience (and resulting skepticism) in data collection for business suggests that "the business" side is the driver behind many or most of the inefficiencies.

</comment><comment><USER13> There are so many ideas here for how computer systems could be improved. It reads like an argument against the computer in a medical setting (or at least a move away from current, perceived, over-reliance) and yet systems could so easily fix 99% of these problems.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but - this is a highly regulated environment and barriers to entry are quite high. Very hard for new ideas to get a hearing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If anyone in this thread is a physician, and is looking for more autonomy in the way that they practice medicine my email is in my profile. We're working on fixing these problems at our clinic and what we've built could be of interest to you.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's not like the doctors themselves are going to drive down the cost of healthcare. Machine driven medicine is the only way we can replace overpaid doctors who aren't doing anything much more intellectually challenging than car mechanics and yet are exploiting the American health care system for all it's got. At first the machines are going to be used for those without good health insurance, as those machines get smarter eventually even rich people will use them, and we can finally start to lower health care costs for everyone.

<comment><USER11> Exactly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Some thoughts on why the system is broken. 1) The ONC certification process. ([https://www.healthit.gov/topic/certification-ehrs/about- onc-...](https://www.healthit.gov/topic/certification-ehrs/about-onc-health- it-certification-program)). It is way too complex to explain here, but it started with the incentive program CMS established in 2011 to push doctors to electronic health care records. Like a lot of CMS programs, the intention was there, but so was the opportunity for fraud and abuse. I can't remember the exact numbers, but the amount of certified EHR vendors dropped dramatically between the 2011 and 2014 certifications. The next round (currently 2017 stage 3) will further reduce that number. The 2014 round of certification definitely weeded out a lot of crappy EHR systems that were thrown together and sold to clinics. The problem now is twofold. First, it's becoming so burdensome and expensive to keep an EHR system certified, that only the well-financed (EPIC, Cerner, etc.) can afford to stay in the game. Second, it's extremely expensive for a clinic/hospital to switch EHR systems. Even if you have developed the most amazing EHR system known to man, getting a big hospital or clinic group to switch systems again will be next to impossible. 2) CQM and PQRS/Meaningful Use reporting. It's complicated, time consuming, and expensive. Prior to 2017, doctors were required to report to two different systems PQRS and CQM, both administered by CMS. PQRS has since been replaced by MIPS. Measures that appear to be identical between the two systems (i.e. CMS 69 and PQRS 128) sometimes have slightly different parameters. The measures themselves have versions and can change year to year. The entire system puts a huge financial burden on doctors. I get the intent. It's the implementation that sucks. 3) Imagine if, on your job, you had to use a system of 70,000 different codes to identify each and every thing you did at work, and you had to justify each and every thing you did with up to 6 different reasons (out of a possible 70,000 reasons), and you had to submit this report each and every day, and if you made any mistakes, or if your reasons weren't sufficient to justify your work, you didn't get paid, and you then had to file an appeal to fight it, and it might be several months before you finally got paid. That's the health care claim system. With the adoption of ICD-10 in 2015, the number of available diagnosis codes went from ~14k to ~70k. The number of Procedure codes went from ~4k to over 70k. If you're into data analytics you probably had an orgasm. If you are a doctor, trying to get a heath care claim paid, your life got a lot worse. Does it really matter whether a patient got hurt because of a collision with a roller skater (ICD-10 V00.01). Guess what? Your doctor doesn't get paid if he uses ICD-10 code V00.01. That's because he has to indicate whether the collision was an initial (V00.01XA), subsequent (V00.01XD), or sequela (V00.01XS). The more complex the system, the more ways insurers can deny claims. It's easy to get frustrated because your doctor/nurse spends all their time staring at their tablet/laptop clicking away instead of talking to you. Don't get mad at them. It wasn't their idea. To the people who are quick to paint the doctors as greedy, overpaid clerks who can and should be replaced by computer and AI, read this [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/opinion/artificial- intell...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/opinion/artificial-intelligence- challenges.html) . Keep on dreaming about your Elysium/Expanse fantasy where patients are hooked up to a machine and diagnosed/cured. It's not happening now, it's not going to happen any time soon. In the meantime, the most effective way for a doctor to treat a patient is to look at the patient, talk to the patient. It's not reading tea leaves. There are subtle, non-verbal cues that are impossible to pick up if a doctor has his back to you because he/she is forced into a clerical role (see points 1,2,3 above). We are decades away from a computer and AI being able to do this. I hope I am wrong. I watch the Expanse too but it is just science fiction, the key word being fiction.

To the commenters claiming "scribes" can do this. It's just not that easy. I was involved in developing a scribe system. It worked for a couple doctors. We thought we had the next big thing. The doctors were able to go in and actually talk to and look at the patient while a scribe sat in another room and listened to the conversation and watched a mirror of the doctor's tablet (all with patients consent). By the time the doctor left the exam room, the progress notes were completed and prescriptions, follow-ups etc. were ready for order. The doctor just had to review and complete. System was great. Doctors were able to go home at a decent hour instead of spending 2 hours in the evening going over each patients encounter. When we tried to expand it failed. In hindsight it was easy to understand why. The scribes we initially used were CAs who had been working with these doctors for years and they could pick up on subtle verbal cues generating complete encounter notes just based on a few comments. In our experiment, it just didn't work once we brought in scribes who had never worked with or around the doctors. I'm sure there's a way to make this work and hopefully someone will one day. It would be nice to have a conversation with my doctor again. Anyway, just some thoughts. I see a lot of posts in here discounting the article and claiming the world is ready for computers to replace doctors, and it's just the greed/ignorance of doctors holding us back. If you're ready to put your life in the hands of AI and computers, I wish you the best of luck. I just want a system where doctors can actually be doctors again. The greedy people in our health care system don't wear white coats. They run around with titles like "Hospital Administrator", "Pharmaceutical Rep", "Health Care Lobbyist", "Senator/Congressperson" and "Insurer".

</comment><comment><USER11> Nothing we lose nothing. It's so frustrating...people LOVE to drum up fear about technology. But technology is an enhancer! It doesn't prevent anyone from doing anything they did before. If you want to use a horse and cart go for it. If you want to use a old fashioned rolodex instead of Facebook go for it. Use the tech or don't. The problem is people resist change even if it's for the objective scientifically proven better.

<comment><AUTHOR> sorry, but this exhibits a complete disregard for (or lack of understanding of) the practice of medicine. Many of us love technology - some of us even read hn. But physicians have very little choice regarding use of this kind of technology, other than to leave medicine or go into private practice where we only take care of wealthy people. And re EHR in particular: is this technology an enhancer as you claim? Because it sure isn't reflected in any objective measures of clinical outcomes.

<comment><USER15> You poor thing, it must be really hard having so much job security and such inflated salaries, due to artificial constraints on the supply of doctors by the medical mafia. You're not going to get a ton of sympathy here on HN, where your job or startup will get replaced in the bat of an eye whenever someone / something comes along that's better / cheaper.

<comment><USER17> > your job or startup will get replaced in the bat of an eye whenever someone > / something comes along that's better / cheaper.

Anyone that works to eat is in the same boat.

<comment><USER11> Exactly and it will remove the artificial physician monopoly and put them in the same boat with the rest of the world

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It sounds like the problem is in the people or procress then if they cut corners and aren't thorough.

I didn't see the computer or data failing in my hastey read through of the piece. It always contained what data the people entered.

<comment><USER19> People make mistakes in communication all the time. Other humans can notice and interpret around those mistakes, but computers can't. Humans can infer things that are missing or implicit in the data. Computers can't. So if we build a computer system on top of data that we _know_ will be poor, incomplete, and sloppy, and if we force reliance on that system, then that's a major problem.

It's silly to assert "the computer didn't do anything wrong". The computer has no agency or will. It doesn't matter if we run perfect software against a bad dataset, or if we run perfect data through bad software. The only thing that matters are the results. The computer and the people are all parts of the same system.</comment></comment>


Coinbase booked $1B in revenue last year, has told hovering VCs to back off - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2018/1/22/16911692/cryptocurrency-bitcoin-trading-coinbase-revenue-secondary <comment><USER2> If these reports are true, that's really impressive growth in just a few years!

Congrats on hitting that milestone, Brian, keep it up!

<comment><USER3> Wonder why Fred Erhsam quit if CB is crushing it. He doesn't strike me as a "follow the heart" kinda guy...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When are they going to let me sell my coins from Australia... can buy but not sell and no date advertised, just 'soon'. I feel like I got scammed.

<comment><USER5> They only recently put in a disclaimer clearly stating the ability to buy and not sell, here in Canada. Was deceptive as hell before that.

Set up a GDAX account, send your coins there (save fees), then transfer them to a better off/on ramp for your location.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does this "$1B in revenue" include the $ that customers have deposited in order to buy cryptocurrency?

<comment><USER7> It wouldn't, according to accounting principles. It would be accounted for as deposits received, with a balancing liability for when the customer makes a purchase or withdrawal.

They would only record revenue when they charge a transaction fee, or any other charge/income that can't be used by/returned to the customer at their discretion. Revenue is only revenue if it doesn't incur a matching liability.

<comment><USER6> I agree that that's how it _should_ work, but I wouldn't be surprised if Coinbase wasn't completely orthodox in their accounting. Replies below indicate that they may indeed be counting customer deposits as "revenue".

<comment><USER8> They have like 20m users, that would mean $50 deposited per users so.. no

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks like they can afford at least one FT customer service person now, awesome!

</comment><comment><USER10> So is YC sitting on a 5% holding in a $3B+ company?

<comment><USER11> More like 7%, and yes, YC will typically "sit" and not do anything. In fact, given that Coinbase has raised recently, YC's share is probably higher than 7% through the YC Continuity fund.

Who knows what will happen once an IPO happens, but no YC company has reached that point yet. We'll find out soon with Dropbox.

<comment><USER10> What do you mean 'who knows what will happen'? YC will have a big payday.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't bet on it. Coinbase valuation will drop drastically when Tether bubble pops and bear market sets in.

<comment><USER12> One can be short-term bearish, long-term bullish, on cryptocurrency. I am. Tether is a disaster looming on the horizon for every cryptocurrency investor and business, but it, too, will pass. Mt. Gox was very bad for crypto for a while...and, then it didn't matter anymore.

If I were a betting man, I'd wager we'll see Tether play out similarly: Big spike in price (which we've already seen), massive drop to something reasonable based on actual demand and participation by real people with real money (currently ongoing, though surprisingly drawn out...the Tether trick seems to be working better than I would have believed, if it were pitched as a film plot), and then long slow climb back to a new all-time high (two years, perhaps).

Then again, at some point, something that works better is going to replace Bitcoin. Maybe the terrifying Tether crash will be the straw that breaks BTCs back. But, Coinbase/GDAX will be well-placed to profit from whatever that next thing is, as long as they're vigilant for new opportunities and careful as hell about security. Coinbase can only lose by making mistakes at this point. They profit whether BTC is going up or down, as they take (very high) fees regardless.

<comment><USER13> What's the most worrying news you've heard of, regarding Tether? It seems sketchy as hell, but I haven't seen anything which would cause me to call it a looming systemic disaster, yet.

<comment><USER14> 2+ billion dollar in imaginary money, with more coming every week, with no real audit? I don't know, with wash trading and bots, it could be accounting for > 80-90% of current marketcap.

<comment><USER15> The market cap of tokens can be deceiving. But is it inherently broken to suggest that there is fiat to backup each USDT?

<comment><USER14> It is inherently broken to claim that there is usd for eqch usdt when there isnt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> They should have enough money to scale up their servers to be able to handle peek usage... not sure why they don't do it... maybe they like it that way (they can claim that their servers are down when they want to stop trading?)

</comment><comment><USER17> Why don't they build a competitor? It's not like it will fail.

<comment><USER18> Regulatory requirements are the hard part. The governments (of many different countries) are by no means required to license you to do what they do - it's not just a storefront, it's tons of financial regulation, they're even fdic insured for cash deposits. It's a legal challenge

<comment><USER17> but not much beyond that. almost guaranteed profit

<comment><USER18> Not sure that's true. Absolutely massive target for blackhats. Security has to be off the rails good

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If we don't start seeing real world DAP adoption and growth in legit crypto- payments soon - this all comes crashing down. My gut tells me the market will wait 4-8 months at best.

<comment><USER20> I think the biggest thing that needs to happen is Lightning Network. If it works like it should it'll be the end of slow transactions / high fees.

<comment><USER3> Loading and unloading Lightning channels creates separate transactions. Depending on how often an open channel is used, Lightning can increase the transaction load.

<comment><USER21> needlessly opening/closing channels also costs transaction fees, so as long as most users are rational, this wouldn't happen (too often).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Screenshot'd this headline for a year from now, ya know _long_ after the crypto thing has just absolutely imploded. Figure it'd give me a good laugh.

<comment><USER23> Why don't you short bitcoin then?

<comment><USER24> Out of curiosity, is there a feasible way to do this currently?

<comment><USER25> [https://www.investopedia.com/news/short- bitcoin/](https://www.investopedia.com/news/short-bitcoin/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What we need is the ability for people to do 1:1 forward or options trades on their existing private shares. So if you have 10,000 RSUs or options in Coinbase, you can instead write an options contract and sell that to investors that will only exercise on IPO. The trick is making these contracts tradeable on a secondary market but I don't see how Coinbase or whoever else could regulate that, as long as there is a solid legal contract underlying it.

<comment><USER27> This sort of activity is routinely prohibited by the share purchase agreement, and exactly for that reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wonder if they're going to put that money toward generating 1099's for their clients.

</comment><comment><USER29> I like how Coinbase, trading a largely unregulated 'security', has the moral indignity of telling its own investors that they better not be trading the assets they purchased.

The fact that people cant buy or sell shares of private companies is ridiculous in general, but particularly in this case.

<comment><USER30> If you don't like the terms of the shareholders agreement, then you don't have to buy the (private equity) shares. But if you buy the shares and sign the agreement, I don't see why the directors should honour illegitimate share transfers you attempt to make in the future.

<comment><USER29> So if you signed a terms of service of Apple that said all your assets are actually Apple's, you would happily comply?

<comment><USER31> All contracts have consideration. If the consideration for the agreement that all my assets are Apple's is $1 billion USD, then sure I would happily comply, rather than risk voiding my contract.

More seriously: people should comply with the agreements that they sign. Don't sign an agreement that says all of your assets are actually Apple's if you're not happy with it. Read all of the fine print and don't be surprised later.

Don't buy stock in a privacy company if you're not happy with the constraints on it. One of the common key differences between private and public companies is that you can't sell or transfer stock in private companies without their approval. You know that when buying it initially, or when agreeing to receive it as compensation.

There are legitimate reasons why private companies don't want their stock to be transferred willy-nilly. For one, it makes the cap table larger and more complex, which complicates further funding or purchase agreements. Two, if the cap table grows too large, then the company may become subject to onerous SEC regulations that are more appropriate for public companies (but without receiving the corresponding benefits). Three, since shareholders are entitled to certain information about the company, private companies limit ownership so that they're not obligated to share this information with people they do not trust. There are probably more reasons.

<comment><USER29> > More seriously: people should comply with the agreements that they sign. > Don't sign an agreement that says all of your assets are actually Apple's if > you're not happy with it. Read all of the fine print and don't be surprised > later.

You have read every single word of all the TOS you ever signed? I find that very hard to believe.

> Don't buy stock in a privacy company if you're not happy with the > constraints on it. One of the common key differences between private and > public companies is that you can't sell or transfer stock in private > companies without their approval. You know that when buying it initially, or > when agreeing to receive it as compensation.

If we talk about the letter of the law, then you don't need to sell the stock, you can sell futures of it at your own compliance. The company can't prevent you from doing that by letter of the law. But the SEC can. The contract is only enforcible in practical terms because as an employee or investor you are disallowed from making any legal claim about the stocks you are entitled to.

Also, the argument that it is 'legal' is entirely a different thing. I never mentioned legality, I said ridiculous. Its not a moral, economic or practical argument to say that something is 'legal'. Saying something is legal is one of the lowest forms of defense for an action. Its saying that the only purpose of it is that they cant put you to jail for doing it.

> There are legitimate reasons why private companies don't want their stock to > be transferred willy-nilly. For one, it makes the cap table larger and more > complex, which complicates further funding or purchase agreements. Two, if > the cap table grows too large, then the company may become subject to > onerous SEC regulations that are more appropriate for public companies (but > without receiving the corresponding benefits). Three, since shareholders are > entitled to certain information about the company, private companies limit > ownership so that they're not obligated to share this information with > people they do not trust. There are probably more reasons.

Very nice, but there is a much more important reason why companies want to not be able to sell off shares: they benefit economically directly because of it. Because the owners get the shares back when people dont buy them, and they have information asymmetry with the employees. AS an employee you have a lot less information.

If employees could sell their stocks willy nilly, every employee that leaves a startup and doesnt want to buy stock to keep would sell them in the open market, which would dilute the value of companies big time while making employees richer.

Hm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Tip for people buying on Coinbase: you can avoid their fee entirely by using GDAX. Deposit the money into your USD wallet first (no cost), then transfer the money to GDAX (no cost), and place a limit order (no cost). You may need to babysit your limit order for a couple minutes but this trick saves you $15 for every $1000 you buy.

I think there is little reason not to do this unless 1) you value your time very highly or 2) you can't be bothered. I honestly think most of Coinbase's revenue comes from people in the latter group.

<comment><USER33> In order for your limit order to actually get filled if you do this, someone has to place a taker order that matches against yours and pay the GDAX fee on that. Coinbase still take their cut no matter what, all you're doing is making sure it comes out of the other side of the trade. If there aren't any less patient people willing to pay the trading fee, your order will just hang around until either someone does or you lose patience and pay it yourself.

Also, there's a risk that the price will move away from where you placed your order and it'll never fill, in which case you'd have to cancel it and re- submit the order at a worse price.

<comment><USER21> but if you look at coinbase and gdax's fee schedule, coinbase is as expensive, if not more than gdax. (0.25%-1% spread vs 0%-0.25% fee depending on whether you're taker/maker). unless you're in a period of insane volatility, the spreads are small enough that placing a limit order for highest bid + 0.01 or lowest ask - 0.01 would get you a trade within seconds.

[https://www.gdax.com/fees/BTC-USD](https://www.gdax.com/fees/BTC-USD)

[https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/210...](https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/2109597-coinbase- pricing-fees-disclosures)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> i can't wait for the moment coinbase crashes.

they're the worst of the crypto world.

<comment><USER35> Do you have anything i can read that would lead me to think along your same lines? I dont currently think coinbase is any worse and is potentially slightly better than many of the other online exchanges. Wanna make sure I get out of my own bubble though and would be interested in the reasoning behind your dislike.

<comment><USER34> Huge fees if you don't use gdax.

Takes 1 month for my money to get into my account.

Lack of support from their team while I had 50k hanging in the middle of nowhere for 3 weeks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Since they make around 1% per transaction, $1billion transacted (I assume this means revenue) is 10 million net... what am I missing here because that's not impressive at all.

<comment><USER37> I don't think $1B is the transaction amount. In the last 24 hours, trade volume on GDAX(Coinbase's exchange) for Bitcoin alone was $247 million.[1] Their trade fees are around 0.25%[2] so in the last 24hr they made over $60M in Bitcoin trading alone.

[1] [https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/gdax/](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/gdax/) [2] [https://support.gdax.com/customer/en/portal/articles/2425097...](https://support.gdax.com/customer/en/portal/articles/2425097-what- are-the-fees-on-gdax-)

<comment><USER38> 247 * 365 * 0.0025 = 225,387,500 / year. How is that 1B?

<comment><USER39> $1B in revenue sounds reasonable, seeing as there are higher volume days than just yesterday, and those trading revenues don't include revenue from fees on (non-GDAX) Coinbase buy transactions.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hacker Paradise: A traveling community for developers and designers - <AUTHOR> http://www.hackerparadise.org/

<comment><USER2> I never knew I wanted this.</comment>


How to pronounce hexadecimal - <AUTHOR> http://www.bzarg.com/p/how-to-pronounce-hexadecimal/ <comment><USER2> While amusing, the premise is flawed. 0xF5 is pronounced "two hundred forty- five". Of course, just as with decimal-expressed numbers (e.g. phone numbers), it may sometimes be useful to list the digits; our existing digit names should be sufficient but could certainly be improved for distinctiveness.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's humor, first and foremost.

But we can think of the words "two hundred forty-five" as meaning `2 * radix^2 + 4 * radix + 5`. We implicitly assume `radix` is ten in spoken English, but the implication in the clip (and the premise of the article) is that radix=16, and the implications of that are followed. There's no reason why the meaning couldn't be inferred from context.

If we were being pedantic, we'd need to come up with new words for _every_ place value, which is way more impractical, and way less funny.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I prefer the abbreviated radio spelling alphabet.

A -> alph -> alphty, B -> brav -> bravty, C -> charl -> charlty, D -> delt -> delty, E -> echo -> echty, F -> fox -> foxty

0x1DE,ADB,EEF is "one hundred delty-echo million, alph hundred delty-beta thousand, echo hundred and echty-fox".

<comment><USER4> Thanks -- I like this, and I've never heard the -ty ending before.

But just a nit on my part: "and" is usually meant to signify a decimal point, so I think the ending should read "echo hundred echty-fox".

<comment><USER3> > the ending should read "echo hundred echty-fox".

You can write it either way - it's like potato and potato, harbour and harbor. I was schooled to never omit the 'and'.</comment></comment></comment>


The elephant in the room: covid deaths are undercounted - <AUTHOR> https://pandemic.substack.com/p/the-elephant-in-the-room-undercounting <comment><USER2> This is strongly reminiscent of [https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nidhiprakash/coronaviru...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nidhiprakash/coronavirus- update-dead-covid19-doctors-hospitals) that anecdotally reported that COVID deaths are being severely underreported in the USA because doctors were told to only test if it would change the care given because tests were in short supply. But that means that if the person goes on to die, they are not actually counted as a case.

<comment><USER3> The article doesn't explicitly make the point, I think a lot of the relevance of this potential undercounting is how it relates to assessing preventative measures. Many people have argued (correctly) that "confirmed cases" should be ignored, as the numbers produced are so dependent on non-random sampling. But they often followup by arguing that we should focus on COVID deaths, because those are (usually) too hard to hide. Potential undercounts of this sort call that conclusion into question.

Perhaps paradoxically, going up another level and looking at "all deaths regardless of cause" doesn't necessarily improve the quality of the decision making. If anti-COVID measures also serve to decrease flu deaths and traffic accidents, it's possible that the total numbers might show a drop even if those same measures are inadequate for reducing COVID deaths. It's hard to get anything right!

<comment><USER2> _But they often followup by arguing that we should focus on COVID deaths, because those are (usually) too hard to hide. Potential undercounts of this sort call that conclusion into question._

Which was the point of both the OP and the buzzfeed article that I pointed.

We only count someone as a case when they get tested and are positive. However we don't test someone simply because they are really sick and it looks like COVID-19. Which means that nobody has to hide the body - it simply isn't counted in the COVID-19 numbers.

This systemic source of error seems to be common across many regions and countries. And it throws all quoted statistics into question. And not by a handful, but by a significant factor.

Of course at the moment preventing bodies is more important than counting them. But knowing that we can't trust the counts either, matters.

 _Perhaps paradoxically, going up another level and looking at "all deaths regardless of cause" doesn't necessarily improve the quality of the decision making. If anti-COVID measures also serve to decrease flu deaths and traffic accidents, it's possible that the total numbers might show a drop even if those same measures are inadequate for reducing COVID deaths. It's hard to get anything right!_

True. But if the systemic undercounting of COVID-19 deaths is a reasonably large factor and the death rate is a significant fraction of the total death rate, it can become a more accurate estimate than the official numbers.

And yes. Accurate decision making with unreliable numbers is impossible. The best we can do is heuristics.

<comment><USER3> > Which was the point of both the OP and the buzzfeed article that I pointed.

Sorry if my comment was clumsy. I realize that you are aware of everything I said. I didn't intend it to be novel. Trying again:

On a superficial level, there's been a lot of media coverage of the number of confirmed infections (the denominator). On a slightly more advanced level, there have been calls to pay more attention to the actual number of deaths (the numerator). These discussions properly point out that deaths (which can theoretically be counted) are likely to be more accurate than infection numbers (which can only be estimated).

This article (and the one you linked) are pointing out that that the number of deaths due to COVID-19 also has significant uncertainty. My comment was trying to make clear why this matters: not for you, but for others who have been paying attention mostly to the media coverage. Perhaps this 538 article makes the point better: [https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-its-so-freaking- har...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-its-so-freaking-hard-to-make- a-good-covid-19-model/) ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22746780](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22746780)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> But still vastly over reacted.

A pneumonia death as just far more spectacular than a normal flu death. Look at the Italy numbers eg. with about 18.000 COVID-19 deaths this season, which is much lower than a typical flu season of about 25.000. Or look at a bad flu year like 2014 with 54.000 flu deaths. With an IFR of 1%.

That's far higher than with this Corona virus. The COVID-19 IFR is below 1%. So what do we wreck our economy for? Flatten the curve, OK. But not much more than for 5 weeks.

[https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(19)30328-5/ful...](https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712\(19\)30328-5/fulltext)

</comment><comment><USER5> Fascinating that China's accounting was vilified every day for weeks and how western media will probably do little better than rote state stenography and rationalizations.

Such freedom, we will have years of COVID trutherism to look forward to.</comment>


There Is Now a Bitcoin ATM in Manhattan - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/21/there-is-now-a-bitcoin-atm-in-manhattan/

<comment><USER2> I saw one in Helsinki main train station.</comment>


Why You Should Be a Little Scared of Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> http://pointersgonewild.com/2015/09/12/why-you-should-be-a-little-scared-of-machine-learning/ <comment><USER2> I can see the potential for descrimination based on a machine learned perceived identity based on web searches and online activity. Imagine not being able to go into a store or be allowed in neighborhoods because of research on certain kinds of diseases or comments made in forums in the past or views supposedly or actually held.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I consider this a pretty phenomenal article. At a time where most articles suggesting we should fear AI imagine unrealistic Skynets and hyperintelligent robotic species, this highlights problems that are almost certain to occur in the future.</comment>


Tesla with Autopilot hits cop car–driver admits he was watching a movie - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/08/movie-watching-tesla-driver-charged-after-autopilot-hits-cop-car/ <comment> Pick-A-Hill2019 Not sure if he had the cabin camera activated or not but if he had then there was no point denying it or trying to come up with a 'I swerved to avoid a dog/cat/space alien' defence.

'If you enable the Cabin Camera, a short video clip will be captured and shared with Tesla following a safety event such as a collision or an advanced emergency braking (AEB) event.'

[1] [https://www.tesla.com/support/car-safety-security- features#c...](https://www.tesla.com/support/car-safety-security- features#cabin-camera)

<comment><USER2> I have that disabled in my car, but not for reasons such as "hey, I'm gonna be an idiot". I just don't like cameras focused on me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Would this be a news story if autopilot were not engaged and he was simply texting? People drive while distracted all of the time.

<comment><USER4> No it wouldn't, but that's not what happened here.

So-called "Autopilot" is not supposed to get distracted, so this is a news story because it's pretty terrible to crash into a cop car with its warning lights on.

Only the worst driver would plow into a cop car with its warning lights on, so what does that say about Autopilot?

<comment><USER3> People hit stationary cars all the time. In the UK there are about 9,000 such accidents per year. It's extremely common.

Someone in the US crashed into a stationary car during the time it took for me to write this up. It happens all the time. It's not news. Not unless it was a Tesla.

<comment><USER4> Stationary cars maybe. Stationary cop cars with their warning lights on, not so much.

Personally, I'd hope a Tesla with "autopilot" would be able to avoid such an obvious obstacle.

<comment><USER3> It happens way more often than you would think. There is an even a named phenomenon about how people naturally drift toward stationary objects. It's called "target fixation."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> De-fender the Police?</comment>


Busted: Photographer takes down website when his theft is discovered - <AUTHOR> https://petapixel.com/2020/04/02/irelands-most-loved-wedding-photographer-is-stealing-my-work/ <comment><USER2> I'm confused did he actually rip off the websites or did he think he was buying stock photos and they were stolen. I get photographers should actually take photos they claim too.

but it seems like a much bigger issue if people other than the true owner of the photos are posting photos on stock sites and they are selling them.

"I finished my day by reverse-searching as many images as I could find and traced many of Muldoon's photos back to Adobe Stock, Alamy, Shutterstock, and Unsplash"

<comment><AUTHOR> Not stock - taken from websites

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> And the website in question: Now "Under Construction"

[https://darraghmuldoon.ie](https://darraghmuldoon.ie)</comment>


Would You Fly in a Pilotless Airliner? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160912-would-you-fly-in-a-pilotless-airliner <comment><USER2> Probably better than flying with a drunk pilot.

</comment><comment><USER3> wouldn't be the first.</comment>


What's Another $14 Billion Anyway? - <AUTHOR> http://mattmaroon.com/?p=626 <comment><USER2> I think the amount of oversight, controversy, and political grandstanding over giving $14 billion to companies that actually make things is just insane giving the $700+ billion given, without any strings attached, to companies that move numbers around on spreadsheets.

<comment><USER3> I don't think that's logical. I mean, I agree that there should maybe have been far more strings attached to the $700 billion, but that doesn't mean there should have been less oversight of this one. (There's actually pitifully little.)

<comment><USER4> But who oversees the overseers? The American people have proven they can't pick a smart loan, much less manage $700B.

I'm opposed to both of the bailouts, with or without oversight.

<comment><USER3> The Fed should oversee the loans, and Congress them, just as with anything else. I don't consider myself informed enough to have a strong opinion about the $700 billion one. I don't have any moral objections.

<comment><USER5> _I don't have any moral objections [to the $700b bailout]._

So you're fine with the government taking your money (i.e. your property) and giving it to someone outside of the government for no reason other than "they're a big company"?

I'm totally open-minded on this issue, so I'd love to hear a well-reasoned argument as to why it made sense for the government to have done that. As it stands, I feel that it is quite immortal to redistribute property unjustly.

 _I don't consider myself informed enough to have a strong opinion about the $700 billion one._

They're playing poker with your chips. Isn't it worthwhile to understand their tactics (or lack of tactics)?

<comment><USER3> Well, the idea of the $700b worth of loans (which is not the same as $700b of giveaway, much of it will be recouped) is to prevent a depression, which would cost far more than the loans. We're in a situation where either way, the taxpayers lose. If those $700b of loans prevent us from losing $7 trillion, then it's worth it. They're not giving out the loans just because the companies asking for them are large. They're doing it to jumpstart the lending the entire economy depends on.

Is that a good idea? I really can't say for sure. The theory sounds good, but for all I know its misguided.

It's not worthwhile for me to try to determine that for myself. I don't have years to devote to the study of economics, which would be necessary for me to have an informed opinion on whether or not the loans will prevent far more than they cost. We can't all be economists, and anyone who isn't can't have an informed opinion. And even if I did have that kind of time, by the time I got that far it would be too late. And even then, the most informed opinions are still far from infallible. They're significantly more likely to be correct than the one I have now for sure, and they're the best we can do, but I'm not sure how much my one extra vote would matter.

That's the thing with government and capitalism, it's all about division of labor. I can't be informed about everything. I just try to vote for people who will get advice from people who are, which is why I base my votes more on a candidate's intelligence and epistemology than their stances and specialized issues such as economics..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> <http://buffalobeast.com/133/bigthree.jpg>

</comment><comment><USER7> _They're losing because every car costs $2,000 more to build due to higher wages and health care. That's it. End of story._

I'd never buy an American car, and it has _nothing_ to do with the price. They're ugly, and crap. End of story.

<comment><USER3> That has everything to do with the price. They're ugly and crap because of the extra cost.

<comment><USER8> I don't understand. You're saying that GM could build cars of similar quality to Toyota or Honda if they were only able to charge $2,000 more?

I defy any one of the big three to release a minivan comparable to the Toyota Sienna for anywhere near the same price (+$2k is fine).

And why does inexpensive have to mean low quality? From what little I know, the Japanese manufacturing mindset (read: The Toyota Way) is that high quality equals lower cost over the long haul.

<comment><USER3> I'm saying that if Toyota had to pay $2k extra to manufacture every one of their cars, they would either cost $2k more (thus significantly reducing their market share and volume, and therefore reducing profits, increasing relative proportion of fixed expenses, etc.) or would be significantly inferior to what they are now due to having cheaper suspensions, doorknobs, etc.

You're talking 10-20% of the manufacturing cost of the car in an industry that has spent 100 years reducing costs in every conceivable way. There isn't that sort of slack laying around. The only way to recoup that cost is to use significantly inferior parts.

My next blog post will address that a bit. It's already written, just hasn't published yet.

<comment><USER9> Agreed- they should cancel the union contracts and fire all the managers that signed them now. GM has 96000 workers paying the inflated health care costs of over 1M people. That just doesn't provide any competitive possibilities.

Still, it's far deeper than wages and costs.

What about the costs to the company for the warranty repairs? The big 3 were offering some very long term warranties for a while. If the sort of quality you are talking about is durability, that could end up increasing costs.

The big 3 approach to reducing costs has been inferior to the Toyota approach. The restrictive UAW work rules limit the flexibility of the work force and devalue overall productivity. They should compare the throughput and excess inventory of the manufacturers. You will see that GM makes too much too slowly, and thus can't respond to demand in a pull based manner as well as Toyota.

The money should go to startup car companies. BYD is valued at 2.5B and they have a huge cell phone battery business. For 15B we could easily start 10 car companies. Invest in the real future.

<comment><USER3> Oh I would never suggest that the wages are the only Union-induced problems. There's a whole laundry list of them. It's just the easiest one to tackle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "They're losing because every car costs $2,000 more to build due to higher wages and health care. That's it. End of story."

If this is really the case than the US government should have agreed to some sort of specific bailout for the health care and benefits wages which are really dragging these companies down. If Toyota can work with US labor (well kind of, see source below) than there is no reason that the big three should not be able to.

Interesting side story. Toyota is worried because "Labor costs as a percentage of sales are growing faster than Toyota's profit margin" and there is now talk of unionizing to sustain labor wages. One of their own senior employees is quoted as saying, "I'm more than willing to work with that company to keep my job. But when they just take it because they want more, I don't agree with it at all." (<http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008112120001>)

If Toyota gets caught up in this UAW mess too, I'm not sure how any company will produce in the US. Is there any foreseeable way jobs can stay here if the unions won't let the companies operate profitably?

</comment><comment><USER11> whatever the auto makers do it's nothing compared to the f-ups of the bankers. even their loan is miniscule compared to the 2 trillion dollar loan we've already given the banking industry; not to mention the 5 trillion in free money and the complete lack of oversight and transparency for the bankers.

More attention should be re-diverted back to the banks...

</comment><comment><USER12> Okay.

What does Matt Maroon do for a living?

<comment><USER13> Writing articles that seem to be well thought through. Although I, sometimes, find myself opposing his views, I have to say that they are always interesting. "If two people think the same , one of them is not needed". So we do need writers who bring a different point of view. I think that is what he does with his writings.

<comment><USER3> Sometimes I think I should do that for a living. But then I worry that that may take the fun out of it.

<comment><USER14> At least the other things you do for a living are pretty fun.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, they've been a lot of fun lately. And even when they weren't, it was my fault for doing them wrong, so I can't complain there.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Price changes alerts for any store - <AUTHOR> http://app.thepriceminer.com/ <comment><USER2> Provide a link or two as examples so people can quickly try it out. Make it clickable rather than something they have to copy and paste. Maybe have a grid of popular products for this. This allows people to try your service and also gives them ideas of the types of products they might track.

I could see something like this being a really quick way to get alerts when a competitor changes their price. Not sure if there would be legal issues in promoting this though.

In the text here ("Enter your email in the field above for future price notifications"), the field is below, not above. At least, it is in my browser.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea! We will change as soon as possible.

<comment><AUTHOR> Done

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Alternative: [https://pricep.in/](https://pricep.in/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Why the currency isn't specified? I'm looking for an item on Amazon France and the price should be dispayed in euros, not in USD.

<comment><AUTHOR> We get the correct price but we strip currency (for numerical comparison)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another one I wrote for my friends and I a while back:

[https://salesniper.com](https://salesniper.com)

<comment><USER6> That's a great domain name. Did you register it or have to buy it from someone?

<comment><AUTHOR> we have registered it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a really great way to mine data. Seriously as an eCommerce store i'd pay for access to this data.

Let me send you a product feed, and let me know any time a customer requests something from it (on my site or someone elses) I'll send them a deal email.

<comment><AUTHOR> Please use this form to contact us: [https://thewebminer.com/contact](https://thewebminer.com/contact)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's an alternative for heuristic extraction which appears to handle more complex data: [https://www.diffbot.com/](https://www.diffbot.com/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Is this market specific? I tried this product [0] and it tells me the product has a price of 32 rather tahn 13,999/-.

[0] [http://www.amazon.in/dp/B01DDP7GZK/ref=br_imp?pf_rd_m=A1VBAL...](http://www.amazon.in/dp/B01DDP7GZK/ref=br_imp?pf_rd_m=A1VBAL9TL5WCBF&pf_rd_s=desktop- hero- kindle-B&pf_rd_r=18WNMTESDDCTV158D3M6&pf_rd_t=Gateway&pf_rd_p=3e319d1c-cef1-40e0-9012-d5f18f0542be&pf_rd_i=desktop)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's heuristic

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> These can be shutdown very easily by the sites if they want to.

<comment><USER11> Why yes they can. But, is it in their best interest to devote much resources to the endeavor?

<comment><USER12> Could be. If they don't want to compete solely based on price. Or don't believe that price is their strong point.

There are many reasons to compete on price but just as many reasons to _not_ compete on price including service, support, delivery charges, home delivery options, shopping local. Or simply not wanting to support a race-to-the-bottom Walmart world.

Yes, forcing retailers to be part of your system is great for your business model but that doesn't equate to necessarily be good for theirs. And since they may never know that you even exist (if a customer doesn't visit because of your site how will they know?) they may be losing traffic without even knowing why.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error and was unable to complete your request. Either the server is overloaded or there is an error in the application.

<comment><AUTHOR> the server is overloaded. We will fix soon

<comment><AUTHOR> now works :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Couldn't this work as a browser extension instead?

</comment><comment><USER15> Alternative for the UK [http://pricehare.com](http://pricehare.com)

</comment><comment><USER16> You might want to update your version of Nginx and add some caching I am getting a 504

nginx/1.4.6 (Ubuntu)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for feedback, we will fix this

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Gives a server error when clicking go and no link is entered

</comment><comment><USER17> Gives internal server error when clicked go without a link

<comment><AUTHOR> Try now ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> So, it's like camelcamelcamel, but for more sites?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> We have to many visitors from HN

<comment><USER19> Just curious, what kind of traffic levels are you seeing from HN. Just in case any of us want to do a load test to validate our own sites can handle it.

<comment><USER20> Top 5 on HN for ~3 hrs peaked around 1,500 views per hour

<comment><USER21> That doesn't sound like a lot, that's a hit every couple of seconds.

<comment><USER19> It depends on how complicated your website is, in some cases what technology you're using in combination with the size of your server you're renting, and if it's 1,500 in the first second or 25 a second. Either way, load tests for your site would be good for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is based on an unique technology which detect price on product pages on various stores

<comment><USER22> How it is different than pricep.in ?

<comment><USER23> Well, the first page[1] I tested it on worked fine, whereas pricep.in seemed to fail. Also, I didn't need to create an account or install an extension.

[1] [https://www.lowes.ca/routers/dewalt-dwp611pk-125-hp- variable...](https://www.lowes.ca/routers/dewalt-dwp611pk-125-hp-variable- speed-corded-compact-router-combo-kit_g1334100.html)

<comment><USER24> It seems your product page no longer works, so of course it fails ;)

Our tools (apps and browser extensions) have a 'report' button, so whenever someone encounters an issue, we get notified and we will add it to our 'to fix' list :)

<comment><USER23> I added them both at the same time, and the page is still working now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Please give us feedback

<comment><USER25> I worked on a product like this for a long while, so I can appreciate how hard the problem is you are trying to solve. Some things I realized along the way:

* Price capture needs to happen in a headless browser (e.g. PhantomJS), rather than just capturing the HTML with a GET. Too many sites use JavaScript to make raw HTML analysis feasible.

* You can get > 50% of the pricing information with fairly simple matching on the class/id value in the HTML tag. But you need a headless browser to make sure the tag is visible. And since most product pages contain multiple prices, you need some heuristic to determine the relevant price. Oh, and watch of out for "reduced from" prices too (e.g. "Old Price: $50, New Price: $35".

* It doesn't hurt to be able to override the general heuristic on a domain-by-domain basis, saved me a lot of headaches.

* You need to be honest with yourself about how reliable the price capture algorithm is, and built up a regression database of known good pages, so when you change the algorithm, nothing else breaks. Also, you need to keep ahead of site redesigns!

* Product URLs tend to look messy, but tend not to change very often, if at all. I was worried about retailers e.g. changing product identifiers, but changing URLs hurts their SEO, so they don't do it. You will find "zombie" products, though - things which appear to be still on sale, but aren't linked anywhere on the site. Deciding when a product is sold out is tricky.

* The best user experience presents the items the user is watching as a "shopping basket". (I took design cues from Pinterest.) For a really slick experience, you should pick out the product name and image (Facebook meta-data helps here) and include them in you "pinned" products.

* Cutting-and-pasting URLs is a hassle. Consider writing a browser extension or a bookmarklet - users don't like to have the browsing flow interrupted by having to click across tabs. Having the price capture done inline on the page really impresses people.

Best of luck with this! I'm yet to see someone solve this problem well, and I eventually moved on other things after losing a lot of my hair. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Really interesting feedback. Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


How to Improve on Naming Contexts in Domain-Driven Design - <AUTHOR> https://userinterfacing.com/how-to-improve-on-naming-contexts-in-domain-driven-design/ <comment><AUTHOR> When I shifted to Elixir/Phoenix 1.3 I found the whole naming contexts thing to be super difficult and confusing. This is the method I use now, but I'm sure it could use refinement. I still need to read Eric Evan's book [1] but I'd be open to other suggestions for further reading.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321125215?ie=UTF8&tag=mar...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321125215?ie=UTF8&tag=martinfowlerc-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0321125215)</comment>


4chan Users Try to DDoS Tumblr, Tumblrs Raid 4chan in Revenge - <AUTHOR> http://www.urlesque.com/2010/11/12/4chan-ddos-tumblr-raid/ <comment><USER2> This reminds me of "wars" kids in my neighborhood would have when I was about ten years old. Each group of kids would think up highly elaborate plans of subterfuge, sophisticated camouflage, and spying, that, when executed, basically consisted of throwing some moldy walnuts over a fence at the other groups of kids.

What they both have in common are groups of children with too much time on their hands.

<comment><USER3> Walter said it best: "8 year olds, dude".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So how exactly does one raid a crapflood, anyhow?

> Raiding 4chan? Like one /b/ user says, "Isn't that like pissing into an > ocean of piss? What's the point?"

<comment><USER5> They may have taken a cue from xkcd:

<http://xkcd.com/591/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This will end well.

</comment><comment><USER7> Tumblr hardly needs any help in being slow in my experience.

</comment><comment><USER8> What's the reason behind this? Usually there's some kind of a backstory...

<comment><USER9> 4chan is that dumbass kid who releases bees into the classroom just to laugh at everyone who doesn't want to get stung.

If there's a backstory, it's probably something that everyone else would shrug off and move on with their lives, but for whatever reason, the sociopaths at 4chan cannot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is this high school? I don't understand these things. Why would you destroy your time, resources, and sense of humanity for this childish crap?

<comment><USER11> _Is this high school?_

Yes. Though Tumblr and 4chan both have older users, the ones that participate in this kind of thing "seriously" are generally of that cliquish high school mindset and narrow worldview characteristic of but not limited to teenagers. Ironically, it's that same earnestness that provokes raids like this.

 _Why would you destroy your time, resources, and sense of humanity for this childish crap?_

Lulz. Srsly.

<comment><USER12> One of the guys in my D&D group is of this mentality.

I hope he matures soon.

<comment><USER13> >D&D >mature

much lulz were had

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow, way to fall for the trollbait. I wonder which side will prove Godwin's law first?

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm actually expecting this whole thing to turn out to be a fantastic case of guerilla marketing by tumblr. It just seems too hilariously perfect.

</comment><comment><USER16> Anyone know the origins of "What is Air?". It seems to be yet another meme that's passed me by, but Googling doesn't yield much in the way of an explanation — just lots of people on Tumblr saying it and finding it seemingly funny... <http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/WHAT+IS+AIR%3F>

<comment><USER17> It's normally used when reblogging a photo that makes you laugh so hard that you can't breathe. I'm not sure of its origin, but it's pretty widely used on Tumblr.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can anyone suggest how to defend against these type of attacks?

Is it simply a case of rate limiting by IP? If so, anyone suggest an easy way of doing this (I assume limiting at the web server level is not good enough?)

</comment><comment><USER19> Going to be fun for the neutrals. I neither use Tumblr or 4chan. Let them cancel out each other. :-)

4chan can just block registration of new users on 15th to avoid this.

<comment><USER17> Uh, what? The whole point of 4chan is that you're anonymous, no registration needed.

<comment><USER20> You're not anonymous to admins, only to users. Every post is still associated with a big fat naked IP address and it's a single click to ban a user of a specific post.

<comment><USER17> Banning an IP address != Banning submissions from every client that hasn't posted before 11/15/10

<comment><USER20> I wasn't addressing the problem of banning Tumblr users, but correcting the often mistaken and repeated claim that 4chan is an anonymous forum.

But seriously, if the mood stays "for real" it's not going to be hard to shutdown and ban tumblr users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The planned trolling tactic of the Tumblr group, "SPAM /B/ WITH KITTENS", seems... flawed. Are they not aware of the origins of lolcats?

<comment><USER22> 4chan will fire back with cat gore.

<comment><USER23> Won't someone please think of the kittens?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Has this something to do with Children's Day?

</comment><comment><USER25> Why do we even have this on Hacker news?

<comment><USER26> Because it's sunday and the regulars are not procrastinating at work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> kids will be kids

</comment><comment><USER28> Tumblr is funny.

4chan is more DDOS idiocy.</comment>


The Rise and Fall of Programming Languages in 2011 - <AUTHOR> http://www.drdobbs.com/mobile/232400093

<comment><USER4>
      > LOCs of Ruby changed or added in 2011 were [...] a fifth of what they were in 2008

I guess he means this peak in 2008 (though it's not 1/5 by averges) [http://www.ohloh.net/languages/compare?commit=Update&l0=...](http://www.ohloh.net/languages/compare?commit=Update&l0=ruby&l1=-1&l2=-1&l3=-1&l4=-1&measure=loc_changed&percent=true)

ruby-rant: I've been playing with ruby recently, and was amazed to find my working toy code broken by each upgrade of ruby (even point upgrade 1.9.2 to 1.9.3). It's a different world/philosophy from java's back-compatibility. I was so surprised I wasn't even angry, just shook my head, wow.

I wanted to try heroku, and the number of layers needing to be installed was also amazing (e.g. heroku's apt-get record doesn't state it needs ruby... ubuntu's repository now doesn't include ruby1.9.1... so I installed rvm (and another round of dependencies and documentation), and found an old gem (undocumented on heroku.com) that would install it). I hit roadblocks several times in this; so it took several days, and several hours on each. So... you've got upgrades/dependency management in apt-get, gems, rvm and heroku - and breaking changes in ruby itself. I recall reading that getting started in ruby had become complex and difficult for beginners, serving its present professional user needs, and very different from the experience that got them started.

Finally... it's a thrilling feeling to reduce 10 lines of Java into 1 line of ruby; but I have a doubt about whether that one short line really is clearer. I'm not saying that it isn't clearer, just that I'll only really know when I come back to it in a few months time and try to understand it. They have identical conceptual complexity; it's just syntax. Don't get me wrong - <USER2> really _enjoyed_ making it shorter, I'm just not (yet) sure it's actually better.

<comment><USER5> I do think the ruby (coupled with rails) toolchain can be a tad overwhelming at first to install and get used to.

I haven't used Ruby a lot, but I do like most of the language. I have a few issues with how some things are named, but whatever. I also miss the great code completion you can get with a language like C#/Java.

Out of curiosity, what broke between 1.9.2 and 1.9.3 for you?

Edit: Just noticed the article is three 5 months old. Guess it doesn't really make a difference when talking about 2011 though.

<comment><USER4> The current directory was removed from the LOAD_PATH, so you have to change "require 'mycode'" to "require './mycode'", or use require-relative, or add "." to LOAD_PATH yourself. It was changed for security issues apparently. [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2900370/why-does- ruby-1-9...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2900370/why-does- ruby-1-9-2-remove-from-load-path-and-whats-the-alternative)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To me this seems very tea-leaf-reading-ish. Specifically, some people tried to boil down the popularity of each programming language with a number (the tea leaf). Then the OP simply looks at those numbers, points at some related events and say "Aha, that is how those numbers came to be!" (the reading). Neither the "leaves" nor the "reading" provide much value, IMO.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Many indicators suggest that Ruby peaked in 'buzz' (which is what TIOBE measures) around four or five years ago. Python became ultra-trendy during 2010 but has likely undergone a correction since then, although it's still very fashionable and has even seen a limited transition to the mainstream (where 'mainstream' means corporate and/or educational use). And there's no doubt that Objective-C and C# have seen large recent increases in use, for obvious reasons. So I'd conclude that, broadly speaking, the TIOBE index isn't that far wide of the mark.

<comment><USER7> Many indicators such as? Pain in your joints and dice rolling?

<comment><AUTHOR> The usual popularity measures: sites like TIOBE that attempt to measure popularity directly; sites like Ohloh (referenced in the article) which track code commits; and publisher's sales figures e.g. O'Reilly all suggest that Ruby has declined in popularity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I often try the trendy languages and tools, just to see what the fuss is about. It's astonishing how fast these things seem to flame out and cycle. Like "people" magazine for technology or something.

Programming fads do occasionally provide something new for my toolkit - <USER3> functional programming craze led me to "High Order Perl", and git wound up making more sense to me than cvs or svn ever did.

</comment><comment><USER9> Dr. Dobbs should really hire a talented designer to take their website out of the 1990s

</comment><comment><USER9> "The well-known Tiobe Index " [...]

Dang. I stopped reading at this point.

<comment><USER10> I've heard of that index before, and I'm skeptical of it. Ruby and Python waning? Not among any of the shops or programmers I know.

Maybe if they qualified it: "Ruby and Python are declining in use for corporate enterprise applications on the Internet." Something like that; I'd believe it. IBM's website is probably not in Django; it's probably Java with Struts or something.

The the DevOps movement alone, almost entirely based in Ruby and Python, is really expanding, and the call for programmers is increasing. Waning? Hah.

<comment><USER11> These days I trust more the index of popular languages in GitHub: <https://github.com/languages>

I like to see it like an index of "in which languages are we innovating" or "which projects are worth forking"

<comment><AUTHOR> I like to see GitGub as an index of "which languages have a culture of uploading code to GitHub?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I better drop Python & Ruby and go pick up (sure, will do right now) Objective-C & C#. Well, I suppose at least they [Python & Ruby] still "...are the most interesting" (?!) so guess I'll stick w/ 'em for a bit longer. ...she'sus.</comment>


Show HN: Excssive, drag and drop CSS compressor - <AUTHOR> http://excssive.com

<comment><USER2> Pretty, impressive, and all that. But realistically isn't all this effort for nothing?

If you're doing a project that needs to have scripts and css minified, the last thing you'd want to do is to introduce a manual drag/drop/arrange/copy/paste step into your build and deploy process. You'll have a command line tool that you incorporate into your automated build and that will be the last you think of it.

I suspect this will get used in the critical path of actual projects about as often as jsbeautifier.org does for javascript. As in, pretty much never.

<comment><AUTHOR> Completely agree that a commandline tool is optimal — the site is actually built off of the clean-css commandline minifier.

The real world use case is currently one of my developer friends is using the Foundation framework by Zurb (which comes with a bunch of separate CSS files, so you can pick and choose), and instead of having 5-6 <link> elements (extraneous HTTP requests are bad), those can all be packaged up in one minifed CSS file.

Using that as a vanilla reset, he can link to another CSS file with his modifications and changes — and never has to interact with the commandline clean-css or YUI Compressor utility. It's just drag and drop with the same results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Has to be a command-line tool in order to integrate into the asset pipeline of a project; you want to do this automatically at deploy/release time.

Take a look at tools like Jammit and Juicer to figure out how to integrate your code into their workflow.

<comment><AUTHOR> I definitely agree that commandline is the right way to go (the site is actually built using the Node.js clean-css script). I built the site with a friend in mind (and those who never really interact with their terminal).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> OT: What's the song in the video?

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, it's "Midnight City" by M83: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDyonn3mQj8></comment></comment>


Tuning PostgreSQL with pgbench - <AUTHOR> https://blog.codeship.com/tuning-postgresql-with-pgbench/ <comment><USER2> There should be better data sets floating around for use these days too.

The old OSDB project was useful for generating arbitrary sided ones, though I'm not sure if it still runs:

[http://osdb.sourceforge.net](http://osdb.sourceforge.net)

There is a rewrite of the OSDB code in C++ on GitHub:

[https://github.com/osdb/osdb](https://github.com/osdb/osdb)

From memory, that rewrite is MySQL only (so far) though. ;)</comment>


Show HN: Browser extension that puts relevant HN/Reddit/FB comments on any site - <AUTHOR> https://mytwocentscomments.website/?v=0.1.3 <comment><AUTHOR> Hey, so I "pivoted" my original idea of adding a comment section on any website ( [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15931518](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15931518) ) to a comment aggregator that puts the relevant Reddit, HackerNews, and Facebook comments on the current website with the push of a button.

I made this switch due to the "marketplace/chicken-and-egg" problem my original idea had. It just wasn't very useful without a big amount of comments already on there. With the new direction, I picked up HN users dudzik's and brownbat's suggestions as in the linked thread above. :)

<comment><USER2> I like how you implemented our suggestions :)

You made it simple to switch between sources, and I like how clean the UI is.

Initially, I thought about each comment source being a separate extension. But I can see the value in integrating the sources into one. It makes it easier to get another perspective on a topic, without setting up too many things.

On the subject of getting different perspectives: Can you select the subreddits that provide you with the comments?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback (again :)).

At the moment it pools the comments from all Reddit and HN submissions and thus all subreddits. It sorts them by relevance/upvotes. I'm using this "plugin": [https://github.com/tgallant/embedd](https://github.com/tgallant/embedd)

I was thinking about having configureable options where the user can choose which services to show comments from. Was thinking about adding others as well - e.g. Twitter, Disqus. I can imagine not all techies want FB comments. :) But for now, I just wanted to release another version first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> How does it find discussions at Facebook about a certain page?

What if many different people at Facebook have started different separate topics about the page? Which of the discussions does 2-cent then choose?

What if I am not friends with the people who discuss the page at Facebook, then will I still be able to see the discussion?</comment>


XMPP over websockets [HTML5] - <AUTHOR> http://blog.superfeedr.com/xmpp-over-websockets/ <comment><USER2> > it's by far the greatest protocol to "push" content from a server to client

Except it's messy and ugly. Well, it's somehow feels on par with HTML, where browsers have to support all sorts of weirdness, though. Further reading: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2069810>

</comment><comment><USER3> As a big fan of and small contributor to ejabberd (I run im.wordpress.com), one who has used Jack's excellent strophe.js, and one who is anxious to see websockets in more use cases, I was pleased to read this news.

However, I still consider XMPP as the protocol of last resort when designing apps for the browser that don't map perfectly onto XMPP. I would sooner write a new protocol than set up a new ejabberd cluster. (This opinion is based on the quality of documentation available a year ago and may be out of date.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't confuse the protocol and the server! It may be tricky to setup and ejabberd cluster, but you can't blame XMPP for that!

Also, I wish people were more adventurous with XMPP in general and stop thinking that it's just a chat protocol.

<comment><USER4> We're actually thinking of using XMPP as a server-to-server asynchronous messaging / pubsub protocol to help us with distributed processing and long running transactions. But I am already stretching my knowledge in this area and would love to chat with others who are thinking of using XMPP as a server- to-server protocol. Julien - can I pick your brain?

<comment><USER5> Ick. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.

For server-to-server passing, prefer (in order):

       1. redis pubsub
       2. zeromq (if you know what you're doing)
       3. amqp (if you think you need it)
       4. populate events to a DB transactionally then consume later

Only use XMPP if your problem domain is "someone is paying me $LOTS to set up an XMPP service."

<comment><USER4> I'd like to understand more about this and your thoughts. Have you had experience using XMPP this way? Is there a specific reason why this wouldn't / shouldn't work? I know you prefer the other approaches, but other than simply preferring them, what is the issue with using XMPP this way?

Specifically, what if the scenario is enabling communication between servers that you have limited control over and do not have shell / root access to install or manage a server? In this case, there wouldn't be an opportunity to install redis, 0mq, or amqp. The database approach might work, but the servers are distributed and might not allow remote connections. Why wouldn't XMPP work in this scenario using a public XMPP server?

I'd like to learn more!

<comment><USER5> First, XMPP obviously works. Google Chat is XMPP. Facebook Chat is XMPP (ejabberd). But SOAP works too. Doesn't mean I want to use it.

My problem with XMPP is best illustrated by XEP-0060, the pubsub extension proposal: <http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0060.html> \-- I don't have time to figure out that monstrosity.

AMQP is at the limit of complexity as far as pubsub things go. It's complex enough to need explaining, but simple enough were you can understand it in an hour.

If you want an in-depth discussion war about pros and cons, ask your question both on the redis mailing list and on the rabbitmq mailing list. I'd be interested in seeing how both communities respond to your requirement of running on limited access servers.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the response! Ok, so to summarize, XMPP works, but in your opinion, it's simply too complex to "figure out"? Basically, in my scenario, it could very well work as optimally as we want it to if we give ourselves time to understand it?

I wish I could use zeromq or redis or amqp, but it just is not an option in this environment.

I was wondering if there was some solid technical reason to not use XMPP, but it looks like there isn't one... it's just a matter of personal preference and wanting to avoid spending time on something. I'll charge ahead with the XMPP implementation in our scenario unless there's a good reason someone can see why not to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very cool! Unfortunately, most browsers are disabling websockets due to security issues in the websocket protocol itself.

<https://developer.mozilla.org/en/WebSockets>

Can't wait until they fix this!

<comment><AUTHOR> We're quite hopeful that this will indeed be fixed very soon!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is really great news. Having identity, presence and all the XMPP goodness delivered to the browser will be great!

</comment><comment><USER8> By any means I'll stand on a point that using pure XMPP from a JS point of view is a total over utilization. XMPP is perfect when you're able to make it fit your needs and (more important) you are able to hide it's extreme complexity from your user.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if it would at all be possible to do the reverse - do html over xmpp?

With the advantages xmpp may or may not have over http/html, this could be interesting.

<comment><USER10> XMPP can carry anything, but it can more easily carry XML-based formats like XHTML. But given that, yes. Formatted IM messages are already specified as a subset of XHTML and you can trivially create your own messages that do whatever custom thing you want with XHTML on your page, or float your custom addition on top of existing messages as a namespaced addition.

The most interesting obvious usecase to me would be using XMPP and ejabberd as a message backplane for your website, hanging various components off of ejabberd that can integrate with your web connection.

<comment><USER11> > using XMPP and ejabberd as a message backplane for your website

Why not 0mq and json ? Something like Mongrel2 perhaps?

<comment><USER12> Because then you'd have to implement your own presence, discovery, and routing mechanisms. You get all of that (and more) for free with an XMPP backplane like ejabberd. Even if you decide it's better to roll your own, you'll then have to come up with a consistency and clustering model in order to scale it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Very cool! I might switch from OpenFire to ejabbered just to use this if it continues to mature.

<comment><USER12> I'd argue that ejabberd is faaar more mature than OpenFire. Their web gui is a little less polished but last I checked OpenFire's clustering mechanism is "buy very expensive oracle database". Still for small (under 100 users) installations without uptime guarantees OpenFire is easier to set up.</comment></comment>


What is the best JavaScript Frameworks to learn? - <AUTHOR> Although there are a variety of options for modern developers to choose from a range of JavaScript framework out there, five of them stand out: Meteor.js, Angular.js, React.js, Ember.js, Backbone.js<p>So please tell me one of 5 frameworks I list above. Which is the best JavaScript framework? Thank you! <comment><USER2> React.js is a library, so you don't get any magic and support from this tool... you have to be very advance in programming to develop a nice app with React.

Angular and Ember are real frameworks, they support all aspect of a Frontend Application, so you can learn more concept if you start using them.

One of the best tutorial for Ember.js is [https://yoember.com](https://yoember.com) where you can learn it from scratch.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not a "framework," per se, but I would suggest #usetheplatform with Polymer.

Outside of that, Vue.js

</comment><comment><USER4> You actually forgot the best one: Vue.js.</comment>