Ask HN: Review My Startup - Thankuz.com - <AUTHOR>

http://thankuz.com
The Problem:
It's too darn difficult, time consuming and expensive to send genuine thanks regularly. Traditional thank you notes required way too much planning in today's fast paced environment (ie. stamps, stationary, envelops, contact info, etc.). Not to mention the environmental impact using all that paper has.
E-Greeting card sites are just as tedious as traditional thank you notes. The typical process requires a user to first sign up, then they have to take several steps to create a card before actually getting to do what matters most, send it. Not to mention that during creation many users are bombarded with 100's of fonts, themes, graphics, etc. (too many choices). These sites don't solve the problem very well in our opinion.
Many people have resorted to sending thanks via social status messages, which isn't nearly as personal, meaningful or effective. We created Thankuz as an alternative to these options and think it fills the large gap between traditional handwritten thank you notes, and less formal social status updates.
The Proposed Solution:
First and foremost, we built Thankuz for ourselves.
The Thankuz Web App was created to make it easier for anyone to say, "Thank You" to People, Places or Things for Gifts, Acts and Expressions via instant thank you notes.
We've recently released our MVP and would greatly appreciate some feedback from the HN community.
Here's an example note: http://thankuz.com/notes/io0w0rf
Thank You, Matt Franklin <comment><USER2> There's something special about receiving a hand written thank you card that gets lost when converted to a font (even a nice looking "hand written" font).

Here's an idea I had to keep the hand written allure and still eliminate the major hassles (stamps, stationary, envelopes, etc.).

What if a customer signed up and was given a template to print out on any old printer. This template has a To/From section at the top similar to a fax cover sheet and below that, a large rectangular outline.

The user would fill out the top contact info, hand write the thank you note inside the box, snap a picture with their smart phone and then email the picture to you. Your servers would identify the user based on the email address, place the hand written contents of the rectangle into a gorgeous thank you note template, OCR the contact field at the top of the page and then email a sample copy to the user for approval. If everything checks out, user clicks 'approved' and copy gets sent to intended recipient.

Obviously that is an over simplified explanation and a good amount of work would need to go into something like that, but I can absolutely imagine having a stack of these pre-printed forms sitting on my desk and scratching out a quick thank you note to people.

4 for $1, 50 for $10, unlimited for $100/year? Or do freemium where you charge for premium or custom templates, remove thankuz branding from the email, etc.

You'd probably also want to do some image processing so the hand written section looks like it belongs in the template and wasn't just pasted in.

Hopefully that brainstorm is useful to someone, good luck with your business!

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent feedback! We agree wholeheartedly that handwritten is the way to go and have been working hard to address that very issue. We came up w/ something pretty similar during a few Thank Tank sessions based on some other products and technologies we've seen used elsewhere.

Our concept was that the user would download and print a special font card w/ the various characters and symbols listed, along with corresponding boxes for them to fill in each letter / symbol in their own handwriting. Once complete, the user could snap a picture w/ their smart phone, or scan and fax, what have you, the card back to have a custom font made by us using their own writing. There are some challenges, but the technology exists to make it all happen.

The user could then begin using their own handwriting, or choose an attractive one (as they currently can) for any notes they create.

We're also planning physical delivery as an option, and are working on a privacy layer for private notes. The biz model you suggested looks very similar to a couple of the ideas we've brainstormed.

Loved you ideas about removing branding, and your thoughts on the freemium model.

Your thoughts are right on and re-affirm what we've thought, and what we've heard from users thus far! Thanks so much for chiming in, and for the warm wishes.

Feel free to email me any time (address in profile), should you think of anything else. You obviously grasp the art of thanks very well and we'd love to hear more!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting idea. I see that your main competitor is email and other media. People send thank you notes by email or Facebook these days. For me your solutions is less personal and it is crating an overhead: you are still using email/facebook to send the message. Just my $0.02. Unless you plan do add something on top of this to make it more personal or rewarding to use it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Your points are well received.

The idea was to go where the users are already thanking each other (since, as you mentioned it's the norm these days). We didn't feel that it made sense to try and replace these traditional forms of media, but rather to embrace and attempt to extend their use for our purposes. The overhead right now is next to nothing, so it made sense.

Another challenge has been extending interaction beyond the first, "Thank you" and "Your Welcome" (hence the comments). We are already working on adding "Winks" and "P.S.'s" in order to accomplish this.

Myself, and 100's of people we've talked to have said, "that thanking via social status' ISN'T as personal as a handwritten note and that they only do it to save time, expense and so they don't feel guilty about NOT sending anything."

As I mentioned in the previous comments response, we plan on adding Physical delivery as an option in a later iteration. We think having that option will make it much more personal than just a Web link to a Note page (which, in the opinion of users we've polled, is more personal than just a status message).

Thank you for the input, we'll keep asking our users how they feel and go from there!

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the reply. I meant that the overhead is going to your page, instead of just shooing an email from an email client; it is minimal but still it's a big step to remember your site.

I commented this because I had similar idea before. I planned to have it more public with points, so most thank you notes would be public and it would say "Jack Jones thankend Jill Jones" with a note. Each of them would get points each time they thank and get thanked (Two counters). In a way this would be like recommendations on linkedin. People would have their profile pages with all thanks and they could use it to show if off.

An idea: video thank you notes, that could go for a premium. You can easily capture and record video from a browser. That's more personal than physical note.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok. Yeah, makes sense now that you put it that way. I don't think an extra click is all that much more, especially considering if there's an attachment (picture or video) in the email that you have to download and open. If they don't remember the site, they can always pull up that email, or check their FB or Twit page to find it (assuming they save it).

I completely agree that a site like this would benefit greatly from some Game mechanics, like points. You'll notice in my previous comment I alluded to that, only called it kudos or karma. I also think the social aspects can play a much bigger role in the future. I'd love to see something like a "circle of thanks" and having the explore option allows users to browse other peoples notes for wording ideas, and to learn more about how others send thanks.

Love the idea of video thanks. We had the same idea, only a different implementation. Basically, we were thinking a user could upload a photo or record a short video from the browser or Web cam to attach (for a more personal touch).

Would love to continue this discussion, if you'd be up for it. It really sounds like you understand what we're trying to do, and are obviously passionate about it. Maybe there's an opportunity here to collaborate on this.

Are you a hacker? Or?

Feel free to email me using the address in my profile!

Matt Franklin

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's the business model?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great question.

We're thinking of a couple different model opportunities:

First, a Freemium model where users could upgrade their account in order to unlock additional features (physical sending of notes, additional themes, textures, fonts, using their own handwriting, etc.).

We're also looking into a Virtual Currency (kudos, karma, etc.) model where users would start with a set number of notes, and could "earn" more by reaching certain milestones, using the site, interacting with other users, sharing w/ friends and of course, using real currency to reload their notes. If we went this route I'd personally like to see some Gaming mechanics built in (something like stamps instead of badges).

We're also building a mobile version of the Web App so thanks could be sent wherever the user is, at any time.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do experienced programmers learn new languages? - <AUTHOR>

I imagine this is different once you have a few languages under your belt - so I ask you, how do you go about this? <comment><USER2> Many languages have a few "killer" features/libs/uses. I often start with a project that uses one of them. Eg:

ruby => rails

python => nltk,django,opencv,scipy

c++ => opengl,opencv

java => opencv

js => node,angular,ember

clojure => overtone

That way you learn the language and some specific good use cases of it.

</comment><comment><USER3> This was taught to me in college a decade.

"Programming language is just a syntax, the core logic of getting things done is already available in your brain."

Here is what i'd do

A) Remember what you already learnt from your favorite language

      1] Syntax

      2] Libraries

      3] Reference Documentation

      4] Organizing your code

      5] Building / Running Programs

      6] Deploying code to farms of servers (if you are interested in sysops, explore this as well)

B) Once you get a hang of basic syntax, start with Examples and keep making progress.

C) Pick a simple task, from what you have already solved before. Program it in the new language by expanding your skills towards 2-5 points and you are done !

<comment><USER4> _" Programming language is just a syntax, the core logic of getting things done is already available in your brain."_

Is this actually true, though, when jumping between programming paradigms?

<comment><USER5> My only experience learning a new language that use a completly different paradigm is Prolog. The syntax and builtins make it hard to write something else that what it is meant for.

Do you mean learning or mastering a language. It is kind of different. Looking for "ideomatic python" will help getting pythonic Python code done.

Not going against the spirit of the language helps.

<comment><USER4> Well, even just _using_ a language (without mastering it) can be a lot more difficult than simply learning the syntax.

For example, many years ago, before I really _got_ functional programming, I tried to learn ML and while I figured the syntax out very quickly, solving problems in a functional style was a lot more difficult and I found it hard to use the language. Learning to use Python or Ruby or Java or C#, albeit not idiomatically, is a hell of a lot easier.

Of course, _knowing_ a language is a lot more than just learning enough to use it, though you certainly don't have to master a language to know it (and many people will never completely master their languages, despite knowing them quite well and using them effectively - for example, I'd wager few people have truly mastered C++).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think it depends on how different the new language is. If you have a basis in C-style languages, it is often not to hard to move between them syntactically. Nuances might take a bit more time -- for instance, going from C/Java to C#, lambdas, LINQ, and other commonly used components took a bit of time.

When I first took a gander at Erlang, I poked at it, got a bit bored because reading the language wasn't a bit harder. I took some time off, revisited a couple of books and looked at some code and it made more sense.

But, overwhelmingly the way to learn is to find a small project that you are interested in implementing and star there.

There really are two parts to learning a language -- the syntax and the ecosystem/standard libraries. Often, becoming accustomed to the syntax is the easy part, understanding the ecosystem can take more time.

<comment><USER7> I agree 100%. One of my favorite ways to learn a new language is by doing problems from [https://projecteuler.net](https://projecteuler.net) . The mathematical basis of Project Euler seems to map into core language concepts better than many other "getting started" exercises.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't know about other people, but the only way I really learn a new language is by dedicating myself to build a project using it, no matter the size, but it has to be something that you have a clear vision of what you want to build (so you struggle at the hard parts, instead of just changing the course of the project). This will make you search for ways to "say" what you need in that language. It's analogous to going to another country to learn a foreign language.

</comment><comment><USER9> I fiddle with some tutorials, get frustrated with readability / pacing / coverage of core concepts, then knock out a project or three with the help of Google, StackOverflow, and the docs for the language and any libraries that seemed relevant at the time.

Across, I don't know, 20-25 languages at this point? Although I only actively use 3-5, depending on how you want to define actively.

</comment><comment><USER10> Read through the documentation. Write some simple code to learn toolbox idioms and patterns. Read through the docs again. Look at some simple code. Build something non-trivial. Then read through the docs again and you're ready to go.

Learning something new in your field of study is not different, it is just easier because you have some context.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you have a background with a Computer Science degree, it makes it easier. One of the later courses in the program I had was assembly programming. Everyone said this was the class that weeded out people. I found it easy because there were only so many ways to do things and you really begin to understand how computers work at the lowest software level possible.

Once you have a basis of data structures, object-oriented programming, and an understanding of libraries in one area (say web programming with Java Servlets) then learning another language is just a matter of building something and reading the API docs as you go.

Try re-writing something not trivial but not overly huge to learn the differences between old and new. After a while they all look the same, regardless of how trendy or hip something might be.

</comment><comment><USER12> There probably is something you have done lots of times, mildy complex, but you know how to write it in the languages you have done before. With the new language you take that example and try to see how it would apply to the new language. You know what you want to do and what to expect for output so most of your brain is occupied by implementing in in the new language.

I've read folks who have some game such as tetris or some other as an example.

Also since I know various language commands and methods, I'll read through the language reference from ! to z and see how it compares to what I know and probably take notes along the way.

</comment><comment><USER13> Do one or two tutorials, then jump straight into a moderately-sized project. Google profusely but also don't be afraid of hitting the language's manual.

Perhaps most important is to not settle for code that you know is not ideal. If you recognize that a piece of code you've written isn't good, then improve it. If it's still not idea, improve it again. Keep iterating on it. This will necessarily involve focused learning. In fact I think this is the key to picking up a language quickly. But it does require that you not be mentally lazy.

</comment><comment><USER14> Think of something you want to write in that language; this is the only thing that really works for me.

Tutorials and canned examples are ok, but if it's not something I actually want then I'm not really learning much.

And if you can't do anything useful in the language you want to learn, then ask yourself why you want to learn it?

Or take something relatively simple, and code it in whatever language. I did this a while back, and wrote a port scanner in c, java, perl, and python.

</comment><comment><USER15> I keep a list of side project i want to build. When i begin a new project and the new language/technology i think might be a fit, i'll build something in it. THis forces me to think outside the usual hello world tutorial and building another to do list. And the problems I face to build my custom project forces me to think and get into what i'm learning

</comment><comment><USER16> Do a tutorial or two, then just start messing around and building. I find that if I try to build something useful, I end up learning the code step by step as I understand how it works and the features that are available

</comment><comment><USER5> this a starting point: [http://learnxinyminutes.com/](http://learnxinyminutes.com/)

might help: [http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code](http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code)

reading about the language or read code. Writing code...

</comment><comment><USER17> I was once told that the best way to cement your knowledge of a new language is to build a chess game in it.</comment>


Déjà vu so extreme that I can't tell what's real - <AUTHOR> https://mosaicscience.com/story/my-deja-vu-so-extreme-i-cant-tell-whats-real-any-more <comment><USER2> I once had this feeling while being stoned. It was maybe my fourth or fifth time smoking marijuana. For a good two or three hours, every moment I experienced, every conversation I had, I had the feeling that I've lived through it before. A constant Deja Vu.

I knew I was stoned, but it still freaked me out. After talking to my friends about this (while still being high), I was able to enjoy and explore it. I asked my friends some questions to which I didn't knew the answer. Still, when they answered me, I _knew_ with great certainty that "I've heard this before". My friends came up with all sorts of fun experiments to further explore my state.

I later read that this feeling (i.e. a normal Deja Vu) presumably is caused by the brain storing information immediately into long term memory, instead of keeping it in short term memory first. When the information is in long term memory while you are still experiencing it, you get the feeling that you've experienced it before.

Scratching the surface of how my own brain works (and can be rewired), was extremely profound and quite unsettling. I stopped smoking since.

<comment><USER3> I have this same experience with dreams at least a few times a month. For example I'll have a dream where I'm recounting a real-life story to a friend or family member. Later on, during my waking life, I'll tell the story again to someone and I won't be able to tell if I've told the story to them before or not, regardless if they are the person from the dream. Sometimes, I won't even remember the dream and I have the same feeling. I usually catch myself while telling them whatever I am sharing, and ask "Have I told you this before? No? Ok...". It's supremely weird, and I've just learned to either ignore it or catch myself.

Also, with the same frequency, can't distinguish if something (realistic) actually has happened to me or if it was in a dream. Something as simple, for example, as going to the beach and playing volleyball with my friends. I will catch myself going through a memory of something, only to realize it actually was from a dream. The memory is as real as any others I have - vivid detail, feelings attached to it, etc. I have to think back on what I've done that week to see if it actually happened or not.

Observing the inner workings of memory and the brain as symptoms is one of the oddest things in life, in my opinion. I've learned not to be scared of it and instead enjoy it as part of the human experience!

<comment><USER4> There's a hypothesis that this is why we (normally) forget our dreams; it prevents us from getting confused about what's real.

<comment><USER5> My hypothesis is that dreams don't actually happen as we sleep, just that the conscious state "arrives" in the brain before the cleaning/storing processes have completed. The brain then creates a memory to explain what's hanging around from the clean-up. So the dream happens during waking, the brain inventing new parts as we try and recall the dream so that the dream state can be established from a logical timeline.

Analogy: a magical secretary is tidying your desk and files. They pull out some files to re-order, put some files you were working on away, lift it pages/images to see where those files should go, etc.. You interrupt them and they scuttle away. You don't believe in magical secretaries so you quickly (and inconsistently) imagine that you were working on the files that were out making a story that explains how those files came to be there, in that arrangement.

Presumably if scanning techniques can show images of what we see in dreams that provides some evidence against this hypothesis, however it doesn't defeat it unless it shows we _experience_ those images through the period when we suppose we're dreaming.

Evidence that refutes this idea gladly considered.

<comment><USER6> If you've ever experienced lucid dreaming, I believe your hypothesis can be considered refuted _while_ you are in a lucid dream (for the same reason that the phrase "I think therefore I am" carries any weight). After the fact though, it doesn't seem possible to distinguish between a real memory of a lucid dream and your idea of a created memory of a lucid dream.

Another possible argument against is if a partner next to you observes you tossing and turning and possibly speaking in your sleep over time, and then you wake up and describe a dream you were experiencing consistent with what they saw. How would you explain the tossing and turning and talking in one's sleep in your hypothesis?

<comment><USER7> People have been able to communicate to the outside when lucid dreaming (via eye movement mostly), during controlled experiments.

So at the very least lucid dreams happen in 'real time'.

<comment><USER5> I've not heard of this phenomenon, communicating with a person in a dream state: could you cite it?

People saying things could be like the images appearing in the visual cortex that I tried to address in brief. They can appear, be processed, provide external output and such without necessarily being part of a dream experience happening at that time.

Back to my analogy, the magic secretary plays back some sound files, which maybe someone in a different office hears and attributes to you being present, but which you aren't "there" to experience. When you start to wake to consciousness you see the files and infer you were working on them, your partner mentions utterances consistent with one file and your brain meshes that in to part of the "story" it is writing of the dream experience ( _a la_ deja-vu).

<comment><USER7> [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24171230](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24171230)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I experience intense moments of deja vu probably 2-3 times a year. I'm 90% sure it's connected to dreams for me, because even on one occasion, waking up, I made the mental note "remember this intensely specific dream, and see if you get deja vu", and I actually did, in the middle of a presentation. I'm guessing it's because when dreaming my mind goes through a vast volume of possible scenarios, so statistically I'm bound to encounter something that it's internally 'rehearsed.' Maybe I sleep too much though, perils of freelancing.

<comment><USER9> Unless you write it down, it could simply be your brain fooling itself, pretending you took a mental note. I had the exact same hypothesis, and so I started writing down the details of my hyper-real dreams. So far none of it came back in the déjà vu form.

In fact, if it turned to be real, it would have far reaching consequences on the nature of reality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Check out this past thread about theories on the potential connections between Déjà vu and short and long term memory.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14075757](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14075757)

</comment><comment><USER11> I've had recursive deja-vu. In them, I remember having a deja-vu (about a deja-vu about a deja-vu ...) in the exact same circumstances. During those, I typically try to do something different than last time, only then "remembering" that I've already tried it in the N-1st layer...

<comment><USER12> I get it too. We have to break the loop somehow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> My wife gets a kind of de ja vu.

She's had a peculiar persistent condition ever since taking a very large dose of lsd with me.

On a near-nightly basis for the last two years her dreams have been entirely different in quality to before her trip.

Prior to the trip she always dreampt in third person, as if watching a story unfold. Now she often has first person dreams.

These first person dreams are so much more real to her than her prior dreams. Indistinguishable from reality.

She often will learn things in the dreams that she doesnt know in real life.

When she woke up from the time she was dreaming as an autistic Vietnemese man during the Vietnam War and started talking Vietnemese to me, that was weird. Pulling out Google translate and having it accurately translate.

Or when she mentioned acute details of a person that neither of us had met before, but soon would be introduced to by a mutual acquaintance of ours. She knew this person because she had a dream where she was that person. The girl was described as chubby with dark hair and had a missing ring finger since birth, as well as being a mutual acquaintance of the friend who would introduce us.

It would take me days of writing to capture the adventures we've been on since this strange phenomenon began. Too many of her "alternate lives" for lack of a better word. And to be honest neither of us talk about it much. Even our closest friends just know the vague superficiality of it. Who would believe us? Most would be incredulous or write us off as nuts. The last place I'd expect this comment to meet welcoming eyes is a place like HN, and for good reason. There's no evidence of this nonsense outside of anecdotes. My wife certainly can't control her dreams to do a repeatable experiment. However now that I mention that, I wonder what lucid dreaming could be like for her.

Neither of us believed in psychic phenomenon before this, but now we just sort of accept that there are greater mysteries than the narrow lens of materialism is now focused on.

We can't explain these occurrences.

<comment><USER14> I've had the sensation of deja vu on and off (particularly when tired) over the past 10 years. This began after experimenting with lsd in my early twenties and has sort of tapered off since. On one of the first occasions trying the drug I had a momentary (and vivid) recall of what felt like the hundreds of times in my lifetime I had the sensation of deja vu. Sort of like some circuit for deja vu related memories was activated. For many of the memories, I had remembered them previously as being about the sensation of deja vu (so in one sense I could at least validate some of them were correct when recalled agian). There were many others I couldn't be sure were actual fragments of my past that were being recalled for the first time. Fleeting.

The persistence of the sensation has broken over the years. Only when jetlagged or exhausted will the deja vu filter reappear.

Another thing I've noticed is that if I'm super tired - that type of tired when you can fall asleep in 10 seconds - is that one half of me will fall asleep faster than the other. If I'm woken in those few seconds I awaken with what feels like two sets of memories for those few seconds that goes with a strong sense of deja vu.

* I've been to doctor and discussed this. Had MRI & EEG (nothing unusual), and removed a lot of stress my life combined with a good diet and exercise. I've had little in the way of such strange experiences in a long while except a little deja vu every now and again.

</comment></comment><comment> nv-vn One of the weirdest things about Deja Vu is that (in its most intense form) it can often seemingly create future memories. My first experience with Deja Vu that I can remember involved what I could only describe as predicting the future. While the events I "predicted" didn't end up happening, it felt as though I knew exactly what "path" I was on and what would happen next. It's a very scary feeling that makes it seem as if you've been sent back in time or you are presently dreaming.

<comment><USER15> My deja vu situations are usually not pleasant and I feel exactly the same way as you do!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> _" It was a pleasant and extremely vivid recollection. The problem was that it never actually happened. What I was experiencing was an extreme form of a very common mental illusion: déjà vu."_

It's possible that he dreamed this, forgot his dream, and then remembered it, causing the feeling of having been there before. He had been there before, in his dreams.

</comment><comment><USER17> Sounds like derealization: "a feeling that one's surroundings are not real, especially as a symptom of mental disturbance."

</comment><comment><USER18> I've been having an experience very similar to deja vu, but not quite the same. I've developed some kind of accidental mental hack where reading nursery rhymes to my kids makes me fall asleep. I could be wide awake but I'll literally open page one of a book and yawn immediately. My wife thinks this is hilarious.

As I'm just reaching the edge of losing consciousness, my brain starts to manufacture false memories about whatever nursery rhyme I'm reading. For example if I'm reading "sing a song of sixpence" my brain will say "ah yes, I remember this one, the king and the maid are having an affair, and the queen learns about it and has her killed". Then I'll shake off sleep and realise that it was a false memory

It's an odd feeling.

Similarly, sometimes when drifting off I'll find myself at the end of a train of thought which _I did not have_. I don't know how else to describe it. It's like my subconscious was having a train of thought and i jumped in and claimed it.

<comment><USER19> I've had many similar experiences right before falling asleep as well, though I wouldn't have known to describe it as well as you have, but yes, I'd be mid- thought in something and forget the thoughts leading up to that one.</comment></comment>


Priceline now worth $100B - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:PCLN <comment><USER2> If you were to tell a non-HNer that Kayak, Booking, Priceline, CheapFlights, OpenTable, and other large websites are worth 100B _combined_ , I don't think they would even blink an eye.

Come here and the top discussion thread is about how little Priceline does, how they're "just middlemen", and that they don't add any value.

It's clear that HN (and techies as a whole, I assume) highly discounts the value of users, marketing, brand, and distribution.

Really is fascinating how different perspectives can be.

<comment><USER3> In my experience in tech (only a few years, I came from finance, and before that construction, weirdly) people are super cynical and often believe that they know more about _any_ business because they can write some code or something similar. I have never been around more people who consistently think they know better than everyone else. This was a surprising thing for me because I assumed engineers would be more curious and thusly more humble. It's actually a really unappealing part of my experience in the industry that often makes me wonder how long I'll last in it.

<comment><USER4> No - it is just about age. HN readers are younger thus they think they know more. Old people will just say: "I don't know about that" [1]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvT_gqs5ETk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvT_gqs5ETk)

<comment><USER5> HN _commenters_ , the more visible ones, are not that young (by young I presume you mean anywhere in the 20s).

[https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders](https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders)

I think the median age in the top 10, for example, is around 40.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is stupid. Really. Here we are in a world where the companies that own the assets (you know, the things that cost a lot of money) are worth less than the things that don't own anything. This doesn't seem "right" or "fair" in the sense that Priceline should be a middleman, unable to exercise any or all pricing power because it does not control the assets producing the revenue. I wonder how long this can last?

<comment><USER7> The Internet has facilitated the age of the middleman. Owning stuff is expensive. It's much easier to leverage network effects to tie consumers to producers. Why make or build anything when you can control the market by controlling the app at the end of the distribution chain?

<comment><USER8> Wasn't the Internet supposed to _eliminate_ the middleman?

<comment><USER9> It did when it comes to distribution channel.

A hotel can have a website where people can directly book a room.

But people want to compare prices, shops around, hence a new form of ... middleman :D

<comment><USER10> Yeah, and they these middlemen also give hotels a way to sell lesser service and blame the middleman. Going through the third-party often loses membership perks and amenities and generally also makes cancellation much harder, in exchange for a lesser rate.

If the hotel offered the lesser rate themselves, they would effectively be pricing their "free" amenities, and they don't want to do that.

<comment><USER11> It's not that they "don't" want to do that - in fact they'd very much like to. It's that they _can 't_ do it. Their agreements with listing services prohibit this. And if they don't get listed then they simply won't get the same rate of bookings.

Generally they are paying around 20% of the booking fee to the listing service. So in theory the hotel would be able to charge 15% less on their own site and make a larger profit. But if they did they would no longer get listed on the popular sites where people go to easily price compare and then book.

<comment><USER12> The loophole in those agreements is that the best price that listing services show is the best "public" price. Larger hotel chains are working around that by offering lower prices to their loyalty club members.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> William Shatner asked for stock instead of cash when he started advertising for Priceline.com twenty years ago. His shares are now worth $4 billion.

<comment><USER14> I don't know if they are still his shares =) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priceline.com#William_Shatner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priceline.com#William_Shatner)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I used to code for a hotel chain, and I remember that Priceline had some sort of weird legacy deal that made them essentially the only OTA (online travel agent) that was able to undercut the hotel's lowest price.

<comment><USER16> It's not exclusive to Priceline, and it's called Opaque pricing:

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

Basically, in exchange for a lower price, the hotel guest gives up their right to choose which hotel they want to stay at. And for the hotel, they get to sell lower priced rooms without advertising lower prices, enabling them to engage in price discrimination so they don't lose out on the people willing to pay them more.

However, I find that the type of hotel guest Opaque pricing attracts is not a desirable hotel guest anyway, so most decent hotels don't participate. Or if they do, only when demand is very low and they're sitting empty.

<comment><USER17> What "kind of guest" does this attract?

I sometimes do this, especially in ski towns. I also sometimes negotiate at rural hotels to get a fade rate. Do hotels hate me?

<comment><USER18> Not the commentor but I imagine those that are willing to find out the name of the hotel after they pay (to save some money) are not the type of customer that orders room service, get's spa treatments etc etc. Basically the opaque booking customer doesn't result in upsells during their stay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Nice, who would've thought that kayak, opentable and booking were worth north of $100Bn a couple of years ago. Kudos to the folks that made this a reality.

</comment><comment><USER20> As a European I find it amazing I hadn't even heard of this $100bn company till now.

<comment><USER21> Aside from Booking.com, they also own KAYAK, Cheapflights, Rentalcars.com and Open Table (the restaurant booking app).

<comment><USER22> TIL.

I usually use Kayak and Booking.com (because you've the option to pay when you checkout).

This comment made me realize that their only other major competitor is Expedia (fun fact: Expedia originated from Microsoft).

<comment><USER23> I don't know how skyscanner continues to manage to fly under the radar. I've never found cheaper prices on any other aggregator.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Great timing, Acquired just did a podcast about their acquisition of Booking.com, which has been called the "second or third best acquisition of all-time."

[http://www.acquired.fm/episodes/2017/7/25/episode-41-booking...](http://www.acquired.fm/episodes/2017/7/25/episode-41-bookingcom- with-jetsetter-room-77-ceo-drew-patterson)

</comment><comment><USER25> For the past 2 or 3 years i saw commercials of kayak on tv. Everytime I'd be price shopping, I'd start with their website. It never worked. I couldn't understand why they would advertise on tv and then have a broken website.

You know that page where it says it is doing the price comparison in the background? That's where it always stopped for me. Frozen, never updating.

Last month, I was travelling again and went to kayak just to check. I get to that page and it's frozen again. But this time i notice the little red X on the top right corner of the browser.

> Popup blocked

I went to the next website of course, but it makes me wonder. How much money have they lost because they decided to use pop-ups for no good reasons?

<comment><USER26> There's a principle that I try to apply in situations like this: giving other developers some credit.

By which, I mean that if every Kayak search was frozen, for every user, I believe that the developers over there would have caught that and fixed it. If a meaningful number of people were experiencing freeze errors, I _also_ expect they would have caught it.

Is it possible the problem is your browser setup, and this is not an experience other people have?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Interesting, it seems like a company that had a very inflated valuation due to the dot-com bubble, was hit very hard when the bubble burst and it took almost 15 years for the stock price to get back to pre-bubble level...

<comment><USER28> > to get back to pre-bubble level

Do you mean "rebubble," or is there some reason Priceline should be worth $100bn?

They do about $400-500m in profit(?) a quarter, for $1.5-2bn/year. Is it the 22% margin that's so attractive? ([https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3APCLN&fstype=ii&ei=...](https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3APCLN&fstype=ii&ei=4td4WbHRM8eI2AaNxYKACA))

Such a large margin might suggest they aren't making significant hardware purchases or that their rates could be undercut by a competitor, both of which would make me nervous as an investor for the long haul.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> When Priceline started the Execs at Travelocity laughed at them. Today Travelocity is a brand of Expedia and just serves up Expedia content.

</comment><comment><USER30> In addition to booking.com, Priceline group owns Agoda, the OTA juggernaut in Southeast Asia.

</comment><comment><USER31> Wow, the stock price grew 10x in 7 years.

OpenTable & Kayak are great companies, so I'm happy to see Priceline supporting their endeavors.

</comment><comment><USER32> I am amazed. In fact, I still remember when someone told me in 2011'ish that they are worth ~30b$; I had the same reaction.

Does anyone know how they justify their valuation? Is it mostly by acquiring other smaller companies (Kayak etc.) and who are the other big competitors to Priceline?

<comment><USER33> The main reason for Priceline's valuation is Booking.com. A lot of people tend to think of Priceline as "that name your price airfare site", but it is really Booking.com that is responsible for the lion's share of their valuation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> So many of the travel sites are owned by Priceline. Here is wikis list:

Booking.com Priceline.com Agoda.com Kayak.com Cheapflights Rentalcars.com momondo OpenTable

I am surprised they haven't bought Expedia or the other major sites.

<comment><USER33> Newsflash: Almost all of the travel sites you've heard of are owned by Expedia or Priceline. Priceline couldn't buy Expedia because it would get killed by antitrust concerns. Expedia also owns Travelocity, Orbitz, Hotwire, Hotels.com, VRBO, HomeAway, has a majority stake in Trivago, etc.

Basically the only big travel sites not owned by Expedia or Priceline are TripAdvisor (previously spun off from Expedia) and AirBnB.

<comment><USER23> And Skyscanner! Lone little skyscanner. Still my favorite.

<comment><USER35> That's Skyscanner, acquired last year by "leading Chinese online travel agent Ctrip"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I think the reason why some people (including me) can't fathom how Priceline can be successful is the same reason why they won't be able to start or scale another Priceline to success

</comment><comment><USER37> Wow this chart and the comparison to its competitors made me see that travel industry is humongous.

</comment><comment><USER38> The stock has been on a tear this month but without any news, makes you wonder if insiders know something.

<comment><USER39> If you look at their 5 year, basically has been a tear forever.

<comment><USER38> I wouldn't say that. From 2014 until June 2016 it was basically flat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> wondering how something worth 100B looks like the first link i click on the web page returns 404

</comment><comment><USER41> I have no experience in the travel industry, but I see the value in priceline (name your price). They provide hotels a way to keep the rooms filled without disclosing to the public the low rates. It also provides a way to reach a different market. Source: I use priceline (name your price) at least once a year. Pretty happy with them.

</comment><comment><USER42> The headline should read "Priceline Group Inc. now worth $100B"

priceline.com is pretty tiny compared to the totality of the group... Mostly booking.com really.

<comment><USER43> I think it's ok for Priceline Group Inc. to be referred to as Priceline for short.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Why did you get downvoted? Priceline PR team?

<comment><USER43> Please don't insinuate astroturfing or shillage in HN comments unless you have evidence. The use of this as a standard (and toxic!) trope in internet arguments is something we definitely need to stay away from. Much more at [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20astroturfing&sort=by...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20astroturfing&sort=byDate&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment) if anyone wants to read about HN's take on this.

We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14858440](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14858440) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> 100 BIG ONES!!

I drive by their hq everyday and i can tell.

Supercars, superthots, hell i think i even seen SUPERMAN!

</comment><comment><USER46> IMO a company's "real" value is determined by how useful it would be if the Earth had a high likelihood of complete destruction in a century. Needless to say, Priceline would probably be worth nothing in such a scenario.

Interestingly, Google and Facebook would still be pretty useful, albeit maybe not as much.

</comment><comment><USER47> They should have split the stock way back like apple and google. Splitting have its own benefits. It would have added more value to their stock price.

<comment><USER48> Why? My understanding was that the only reason Apple and Google did stock splits was that they wanted to get onto the Dow Jones Industrial Average which is (stupidly) price weighted and not market cap weighted so without the split, they would have been a much larger portion of the Dow.

<comment><USER47> To make it affordable and easier for more people to buy their stock. This is always the biggest reason for split. Will an average person invest in a stock which is trading at $2k per share? Nope.

<comment><USER11> The average person is probably invested in their stock through a variety of ETF's.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Recommendations for Standing Desk? - <AUTHOR> I am an existing desk and am looking to add something like this on top:
https://www.amazon.com/Adjustable-Standing-Converter-Workstation-Keyborard/dp/B072Q5M6H5/
I am wondering if anyone is using something they are happy with? <comment><USER2> I'd take a look at Monoprice. Their prices are modest and they offer a bunch of form factors.

I picked up their workstream ultra-slim model about 6 months ago and have had no issues with it. The build quality's better than I expected too.

[https://www.monoprice.com/category/mounts-&-stands/workstati...](https://www.monoprice.com/category/mounts-&-stands/workstation- desks-&-mounts/sit-stand-desks)</comment>


How twitter helped a technology consultant escape from an evil hospital - <AUTHOR> http://inmantechnologyit.blogspot.com/2009/09/social-media-and-my-escape-from-spinal.html

<comment><USER2> My dad's a doctor in a rural environment, and I had a bad back injury including ruptured discs and cracked vertebrae when I was in high school. I can offer some insight on the psychology of the doctors and even a little bit of information on this particular injury.

A rural surgeon is going to be professionally offended if their patient calls up an egghead at Harvard from their pre-op hospital bed and then tells him she doesn't trust his judgement and instead wants to be medivac airlifted back to Boston. It's like when you watch a detective show when the FBI takes over and the local cops are all bent out of shape. The hospital staff may have been thinking about health insurance and losing their accreditation but I doubt it was a sinister plot to meet their spinal surgery quotas. It was probably more along these lines: "a crazy lady from Boston just broke her back jumping off a bridge with some 13 year olds. Now she's telling us to schedule a chopper to Boston because she's Facebook buddies with some prick neurology prof at Harvard. Quick, give her some morphine and get her under the knife before her spinal column collapses and she's paralyzed and we get slapped with a half billion dollar malpractice suit... "

Note that I'm not defending that sort of attitude. That's just what I think they would be thinking, rather than some nefarious conspiracy to maximize insurance profits, which is what the article and most commenters on this post seem to be suggesting.

The other thing is that I don't think the doctors were necessarily wrong in their diagnosis. The higher you go up in the spine, there's a lot more danger of paralysis or other severe spinal cord problem. If you're over 30 and shatter your T12, there's a 50% chance you're going to end up with a serious neurological problem. The odds for recovery are far better the sooner you have surgery, if the surgery is necessary.

 _Timing of surgery is also an important issue in the treatment of thoracic spine fractures. ... Some studies suggest that patients with thoracic spine fractures treated within 72 hours, irrespective of concomitant injuries, do much better physiologically postoperatively than those in whom stabilization is delayed._

<http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1267029-treatment>

Lastly, I don't think a patient requested 370 mile helicopter flight for a treatment which could be performed locally could possibly be covered under any insurance plan, no matter how good the coverage is.

<comment><USER3> I want to agree with you, but what I am interested in knowing is why the boston doctor was insisting on a mobility test prior to surgery and why the small town folks were insisting on surgery first.

The same thing happens in small town India as well where doctors are more interested in keeping you admitted above and beyond the needed duration and doctors in large cities are just better because they have a greater patient load to be well versed with complex surgeries if needed.

<comment><USER2> Watching her in the hospital and knowing that she swam to shore and stood up would have made a mobility test irrelevant. Being 40+ with a shattered T12, she made the riskier decision by opting out of the surgery. If you remove the hyperbolic language from her story, it reads like the hospital was being relatively conservative and trying to take the approach with the least risk of paralysis or other spinal cord injury. That said, It's awesome that she's able to recover without surgery. Even "successful" back surgeries usually have many complications. Surgery or not, back injuries suck and require tons of PT, exercise and lifestyle changes to get back to normal.

<comment><USER4> She made the riskier decision? What qualifications do you have to claim that?

According to the Harvard neurosurgeon she made the less risky decision. Given the choice between believing a random poster to hacker news and someone with those qualifications, I'm going with the known expert every time. It is just icing on the cake that the expert's opinion fits with what I've been told about the risks of back surgery by multiple doctors, physical therapists, and even a panel appointed by the US government. (Admittedly the last is somewhat out of date.)

<comment><USER2> I read it in the article I linked to in my previous post. But you're obviously more up to date on the facts, so you win.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _It never occurred to me that carrying high-level heath insurance would mark me as a candidate for unnecessary surgery._

Perhaps this is exactly _why_ health care costs have gone up so dramatically. We have insurance, so the doctors take advantage of it -- needlessly. We very well could be spending a lot less money for the same amount of health care.

I think the solution to the health care problem is for someone to start saying NO, like in that other article on the front page now. No to more test, no to unnecessary treatments and surgeries and non-generic drugs.

Say no!

<comment><USER6> Another good article which I don't think is getting as much press as the New Yorker article:

<http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care>

<comment><USER7> Fantastic article, but it _was_ on the front page about a month ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=760477>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> According to the author, the story is being used as fodder by both sides of the healthcare debate. All I can see is the perverse economic incentives on display.

<comment><USER8> AFAIK Canada gets around this problem by capping the number of billable patients a doctor can see per day (adjusted by specialty of course). Any patients in excess of the cap is only paid by the government at a steeply discounted rate.

This discourages doctors from overworking themselves and offering shoddy care (instead choosing to move patients through like a cattle farm), and also discourages the sort of unnecessary treatment this article talks about.

<comment><USER9> I suspect that the doctors at this hospital would be well under the quota you speak of. Remember, the author suggested the hospital might lose it's accredition for this type of surgery since they didn't do enough of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if the treatment was really all about the "really great health insurance" and not just the doctors at the hospital deciding that they knew better than another doctor many hours away that had not seen the patient or the pictures of her spine.

Upon reading the description of how the accident took place, my first thought was, "Really, is her insurance going to pay for that!?" And according to the last comment on her blog post, apparently the answer is, "No."

I would imagine either hospital would have to have enough familiarity with that type of accident to question whether her insurance would cover it as well.

<comment><USER11> Ah,is that really a question? My comment on my blog that my health insurance decided it was best to leave me on the ledge to die of exposure was-need I say-tongue in cheek.You must be under the impression the insurance companies are in possession of that awesome perfect blame calculator - parsing an infinite number of scenarios to detemine blame for accidents and disease, then confirm or deny coverage based on their magic box. That is your insurance company, not mine. Please reply quickly, unless you are tied up arguing with them about whether they should cover your AIDS since everyone knows sharing needles is unsafe.

<comment><USER12> I got too say, I would be surprised if an insurance would not cover something like this. This is equivalent to a sports injury. Frankly no one can tell me that jumping off a cliff mountain biking is less dangerous than a bridge jump. I've bridge jumped before (not fifty feet I believe but high) and I wasn't the only one around, I didn't think it was that dangerous at the time but I understand how a bad landing could cause such an injury. Hell Olympic divers have really bad landings doing 33 feet dive and don't die.

<comment><USER10> The reason I questioned whether they would cover this is because in the past I've seen exclusion clauses that stated an insurance company would not cover extreme sports related injuries with a standard health insurance policy. The examples I remember for extreme sports were things like base jumping and bungee jumping and parachuting.

I don't pretend to know much about this stuff. I did state that it was just a question I had. If insurance companies routinely cover people who have accidents while doing things significantly more dangerous than your typical day to day activities then that is great... I guess.

The first part of my comment still stands regardless. I wonder how much of the battle was over getting insurance money and how much of it might have been over the doctor's ego.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> And the ultimate lesson of all of this: If your friend jumps off a bridge, are you going to jump off of a bridge too?

<comment><USER14> Although your comment looks like a vacuous redditesque one-liner, I'll respond: I've jumped from similar heights under similar circumstances, i.e. a spot favored by locals, surrounded by people happily jumping and swimming. It's only in hindsight that what she did was an obviously bad move, and even then it sounds like a slightly different angle would have made it harmless.

This aspect is hardly "the ultimate lesson of all this": if the post were merely about someone who jumped into a pond when they shouldn't have, no one would be discussing it.

<comment><USER15> Three other people were injured that day from jumping, and the ambulance that was called wasn't even called for the heroine of our story. I don't know what the denominator is, but it doesn't sound good.

I do agree though, that jumping or not wasn't the main issue here.

<comment><USER16> Seems like it was a 'hot spot' because people used it often. Sure she says that other people were injured, but how badly? It's possible that her injury was the worse injury anyone has ever sustained from jumping there. If that's the case, and parents still encourage/let their children jump from that bridge, I would say it's a problem. (Not that I would ever let my kids jump from a 50' bridge, at least not until they're old enough to make decisions on their own -- I'm not advocating 'babying' your children after they've left the nest.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "According to Ithaca Fire Department statistics, Lowe was the fifteenth person to die in Ithaca's gorges since 2000—and the fourth to drown in that particular pool since 1986. When most people think of gorge deaths, they think of the jumpers who have given Cornell an unwanted (and unwarranted) reputation as a suicide hot spot. But Ithaca Police Officer Doug Hoyt estimates that about half of those fifteen deaths were accidents caused by turbulent water, slippery rocks, fallen trees, and a host of other natural features. The local community has mourned each death. But Lowe's passing—coming in the wake of the drowning the previous year of Jeevan Mykoo, a thirty-year-old tourist from Ottawa, and the 2006 death of Navin Parthasarathy, a visiting graduate student from the University of California, Santa Barbara—has spurred a widespread debate about how to deal with the dangers and appeals of one of Cornell's great natural attractions."

[http://cornellalumnimagazine.com/index.php?option=com_conten...](http://cornellalumnimagazine.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=264)

</comment><comment><USER14> That is a harrowing story. If it's half true, the hospital really is evil.

<comment><USER18> Doubt the doctors are the evil ones. If they're using an outdated procedure it means they haven't been kept up to date on the latest treatment protocols. The hospital beaurocrats trying to keep their accredation and earn big bucks, those are the evail ones.

<comment><USER5> They are evil because they were thinking of themselves before the patient and using lies to intimidate her into agreeing with them -- when they were wrong.

That's evil. Unfortunately, it's a story repeated across the nation every day.

<comment><USER19> No accreditation means no funding, means no hospital, means no job. So by your definition, the only way doctors can _remain_ doctors at said hospital is by being evil. Hence, I would blame the short-sighedness of whoever created and approved for the rules of accreditation for hospitals, not the people at the whims of those rules.

<comment><USER14> If you're right, all it means is that no ethical doctor would remain at said hospital. Ethics only count when they go against one's own interests, otherwise they'd be pointless.

I can't believe you're making excuses for doctors who (if the story is true) tried to bully a woman against her will into having major spinal surgery that she clearly didn't need.

<comment><USER19> Not quite making excuses, just pointing out that the system that necessitates 'evil' behavior is also to blame...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Oi, that sure was lengthy. Summary: Some hospital in Pennsylvania tries to make money by doing unnecessary procedures on patients with good health insurance and went to great lengths to keep this lady from seeking a second opinion regarding her injury.

IMO, this is the incentive of nearly all doctors in America - the dentists I've had span the entire spectrum of opinions about my wisdom teeth. From "if we don't take them out, you can die from a gum infection" to "do they hurt? no? do you eat meat? then you should keep them, they'll makes it easier to chew".

<comment><USER20> About 15 years ago, the dentist I went to said dire things about the immense pain my wisdom teeth were going to cause in my immediate future. I told him I'd make an appointment right away when that happened, even though his advice was to intervene as soon as possible to 'avoid any future problems'. I still have all of them and aside from the occasional twinge, they are just fine.

<comment><USER16> It's not necessarily about money though. To my knowledge, most people have problems with their wisdom teeth coming in wrong and screwing up their other teeth. If this is the majority case, then going on the offensive and taking care of them early can make sense rather than waiting to have issues.

Sometimes these cases end up sounding to me like the people who try to decry the state laws requiring you to wear a seatbelt by pointing out the relatively few cases where _not_ wearing a seatbelt did save (or could have saved) someone's life. They completely ignore the overwhelming number of cases where seatbelts _do_ save people's lives. It's just a case of people trying to make the facts fit a conclusion that they've already come to and don't want to change.

<comment><USER21> That comparison is like saying that when someone gets diagnosed with diabetes, they should preemptively amputate their feet so as to avoid trouble with them later.

<comment><USER16> So you are saying that removal of wisdom teeth gives you a disability similar to removal of feet?

<comment><USER21> Point taken. How about giving everyone an appendicectomy, just in case?

<comment><USER16> So far as I know appendix removal is move invasive of a surgery with more risk than removal of wisdom teeth is.

Other than that, I would want to see the numbers on '% of people that need appendix removal' vs '% of people that need wisdom teeth removal.' My suspicion is that the latter is much higher than the former, but I could be wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This seems like a situation where knowing a certain phrase might help. I don't know what that phrase might, but a lawyer or someone else familiar with the medical industry might.

Something like "I will not authorize you to perform this procedure and have notified my physician and lawyer of this, if you perform anything that I have not authorized will result in an expensive lawsuit" or something.

Anyone know what the right terms to use are? It seems in other situations there are magic words that can be used to produce immediate results.

<comment><USER23> You can always -- provided you are sane, sober, and alert -- decline treatment or even just check yourself out of the hospital "against medical advice." Generally this involves signing some forms releasing the hospital from all responsibility for you. And then you can just walk out.

Hospital personnel will try to strongly discourage you from doing this -- not because they're evil, but because in most situations it's a _really, really bad idea._ But if you just keep saying "no, I don't want treatment, I want to leave, give me the forms to sign out AMA," and you're not clearly nuts or high on morphine or otherwise impaired, you can pretty much just leave.

However, unless you have a very specific reason for believing that the treatment protocol at work isn't correct or best for you, it's generally a bad idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> _Since that time, people on both sides of the health care debate have listened to my story and pointed out it supports their views, both pro and con._

Unsurprising. I think this is more about patients' rights than healthcare funding, though.

<comment><USER16> Yea. I can see people on both sides saying crap about this.

Pro: _This wouldn't happen with government healthcare because there would be standards in place (i.e. the 'mobility test' would be standard everywhere not just in 'cutting edge' facilities)_

Con: _In government-run healthcare, she would have been forced to stay in that hospital so as to minimize the costs of treating her (i.e. no expensive transport from PA to Boston). The government would be taking away her individual rights to take ownership of her situation._

The healthcare debate is a lot more nuanced than the 'Arg! Socialism!' or 'Arg! Health insurance is evil!' crowds make it out to be.

<comment><USER25> Well, it's more like the pro is that there is no profit motive to keep her there. The staff would be delighted to get rid of her to a bigger facility elsewhere. I live a kilometre north of a large hospital in Sydney, Australia and we get helicopters coming in all hours of the day and night, presumably doing just that.

The "con" would probably be that there would be no facility for spinal surgery in a rural area in the first place. She would not be able to choose to be treated there and she's getting on one of those helicopters.

<comment><USER16> Well, it all depends on the 'type' of government healthcare that happens.

If hospitals are still privately owned, but the government basically starts it's own 'insurance company' that covers everyone that isn't part of the private insurance company plan (similar to Germany) then it's possible that a rural area could still have spinal surgery experts. Even if the hospitals are all government-owned and run (similar to the UK method of healthcare), it's still possible to have spinal surgery experts in a rural area. It just would depend on what was cheaper. Is it cheaper to have a spinal surgery-trained staff at the rural hospital or to fly everyone 300 miles to another hospital? (Or the 3rd option of having staff at a different hospital, but making sure that it is less than 300 miles away -- i.e. spread out facilities that can handle such injuries so that there aren't hugely expensive transit costs for treatment)

<comment><USER9> With a government healthcare system, it won't simply be a cost/benefit analysis. There is also the all important question to be answered: "does this create jobs in my congressional district?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The story really doesn't involve Twitter much at all.

<comment><USER14> But that's not true. It describes her as using Twitter throughout the ordeal. Most importantly, it was through Twitter that she met the ethical neurosurgeon who saved her.

Incidentally, her title references "social media" rather than Twitter, which I think is right; it's not hard to imagine, say, Facebook playing the same role. What's relevant is that she got word of her plight out to a network of people in a way that would be harder to do otherwise, and that feedback from this network led to a fundamentally different outcome than that experienced (I imagine) by most people with broken spines who are having unnecessary surgery and narcotics forced on them against their will.

<comment><USER15> Are people that responsive on Facebook?

<comment><USER27> Absolutely. I see people basically chatting in comments on status updates. I think the problem would be more about spreading the story quickly. Twitter doesn't have the "friend" requirement, ultimately making it the better tool(?) here.

<comment><USER15> I do to from time too, but I asked because personally, I rarely see people get questions answered on Facebook the way they regularly do on Twitter. But then again, the people that Twitter and get questions answered quickly are probably your blogger, big personality types too.

And then yet back on the other hand, as you say, there is no friend requirement so those big personality types could really only amplify their voice in that way over Twitter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This really just amounts to part of the Twitter Hype machine.

</comment><comment><USER29> That is an amazing story!

</comment><comment><USER29> Its also why we need to fix healthcare.

</comment><comment><USER30> Raze that place to the ground, and throw those "medical" staff in jail for life.</comment>


Simplevisor: Intel x64 Windows-specific hypervisor - <AUTHOR> http://ionescu007.github.io/SimpleVisor/ <comment><USER2> Can someone explain to me what this is for? The article explicitly mentions that it is not intended to emulate a machine like bochs/vmware or running windows on linux...

So what is this for? Everyone I talked about this subject or use it to run windows apps on *nix ( osx included ) or to create multiple servers in a single machine. What else a hypervisor can do?

EDIT: for the people pointing me the motivation section... well, that is the section I am quoting in first place.

I did read it, but the guy is awfully vague.

And I never used a hypervisor before anyway, thus you can't assume I will understand random jargon.

<comment><USER3> From the motivation section:

Too many hypervisor projects out there are either extremely complicated (Xen, KVM, VirtualBox) and/or closed-source (VMware, Hyper-V), as well as heavily focused toward Linux-based development or system. Additionally, most (other than Hyper-V) of them are expressly built for the purpose of enabling the execution of virtual machines, and not the virtualization of a live, running system, in order to perform introspection or other security-related tasks on it.

<comment><USER4> What exactly falls under the "other security-related tasks" section? The only thing I can think of would be for a privileged application to try and hide things from the OS.

<comment><USER5> Apart from being able to hide from the OS a hypervisor is also safe from manipulation by the OS and can observe and manipulate anything the OS does.

This opens a few doors: debugging or reverse engineering the OS or kernel modules, sandboxing a system you don't trust, detecting rootkits, protecting your antivirus solution from malware, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sounds a lot like the underappreciated and only lightly documented OSX "hypervisor.framework"

[https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Driver...](https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/DriversKernelHardware/Reference/Hypervisor/)

<comment><USER7> Why do you call it "underappreciated"?

<comment><USER8> Probably because OS X is full of cool tech that seems to be weakly documented, underexposed (in terms of API, like the built-in dictionary) or underutilized (because most developers or users aren't always aware of it.)

I really appreciate that Apple doesn't just keep dropping less used features after just 1 OS release like Microsoft does, but I really wish they overhauled their documentation and improved the discoverability of the cool stuff.

<comment><USER9> > after just 1 OS release like Microsoft

Can you give an example? I always found Windows' backwards compatibility to be stellar, though I haven't developed any desktop apps since the Windows 8 introduction.

<comment><USER8> I don't remember their exact names, but Vista had some apps that were gone in Windows 7, like the Sidebar (a UX paradigm that Apple continues to make arguably better use of in OS X) and some collaboration thing plus others.

I admit that "after just one release" was a bitter exaggeration, but Silverlight, CardSpace, WPF, PhotoDraw and other tech has been unceremoniously dropped or forgotten by MS after a relatively short time.

Apple is guilty of discontinuing apps too, but at least their OS features and platforms are more resilient. For example the Dashboard is still available even though the Notification Center is supposed to supersede it.

<comment><USER9> > Sidebar, CardSpace, PhotoDraw

Those are applications. Applications get dropped all the time and usually for good reason IMO

WPF and Silverlight are totally still around. Silverlight is languishing for sure, but for good reason (and largely the same reasons as flash).

What I meant by backwards compatibility was that Microsoft rarely breaks or removes API's, so from a developers perspective they aren't any worse than Apple.

<comment><USER8> > What I meant by backwards compatibility was that Microsoft rarely breaks or > removes API's, so from a developers perspective they aren't any worse than > Apple.

It's been ages but I remember being annoyed when they sort of nerfed DirectInput into XInput [1]. The earlier API had way more features for advanced force-feedback and some other features. Why cripple things like that at all?

I think the Vista Sidebar vs. OS X Dashboard is a good example; Apple has kept it around for people who might still prefer it, and the widgets made for it still work, whereas any work that developers had put into making Sidebar (and Sideshow [2]) widgets has been negated by Microsoft. I actually liked the Sidebar.

In each of those cases, Microsoft seems to have crippled or took out features and APIs mostly to force something else on us; XBOX and the Windows 8 Start Screen, respectively.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectInput#DirectInput_vs_XIn...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectInput#DirectInput_vs_XInput)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_SideShow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_SideShow)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow. Labour of love? Can't say I've ever had the motivation to delve into writing a hyper visor but for anyone else who is interested what a superb reference!

</comment><comment><USER11> Any recommended project of the same complexity that works on linux?

<comment><USER12> Lguest: [http://lguest.ozlabs.org](http://lguest.ozlabs.org). It's in the linux kernel.

<comment><USER11> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Question: I see "x86 versions of Windows are expressly not supported", but does it allow for executing x86 VMs within the hypervisor?

</comment><comment><USER14> "to support dynamic hyperjacking and unhyperjacking (that is, virtualizing the host state from within the host)."

What? Hyperjacking is a malicious attack against a hypervisor, right? Why is this a design goal? Am I missing something?

<comment><USER15> Based on my minimal understanding of what it's doing and it's code; It's turning on virtualization, setting up a minimal environment, and then taking the current OS and "moving" it to the virtualized environment. The purpose of doing this in this case is to show how to do it in a minimal fashion, and give it as a jumping off point to create other projects with. Some things that come to mind is a debugger that can't be detected, an easier way to debug a device driver since you could set the hypervisor to log communications with the device somewhere. Or to reverse engineer software that detects normal debuggers being attached and determine what it's actually doing (this is common in malware research I believe).</comment></comment>


Sequoia's Michael Moritz on how he picks companies - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_12531654

<comment><USER2> Summary: The recession is acting as a great filter that keeps out non- passionate founders. Also, Sequoia does some of its best investments in recessions.

The interesting thing is that this recession is acting as a filter not just for founders but also for VCs. See WSJ's "VCs head for the door" [1]

My favorite part though was this line from Mr. Moritz:

"Oddly enough in recessionary times, customers are prepared to take more risk with a young company if they believe that that company offers them a tremendous advantage that will help them become more efficient or lower their costs."

I have one data point in support of this at my start up but would love to hear if y'all are seeing more.

[1] <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124416376153487535.html>

<comment><USER3> "Oddly enough in recessionary times, customers are prepared to take more risk with a young company if they believe that that company offers them a tremendous advantage that will help them become more efficient or lower their costs."

I don't think I understand the significance of this statement. You always buy a product that 'offers a tremendous advantage that will help [you] become more efficient or lower [your] costs.'

Is the significance that in a recession a prospective customer is _less likely_ to buy 'the standard'?

<comment><USER2> Yes, Moritz is suggesting that companies (at least some of them) are _more_ willing to take the risk of buying from a stratup, if it offers them a tremendous advantage.., during a recession.

I am wondering if there are entrepreneurs who can corroborate this theory based on their experience.

<comment><USER3> You just used nearly the exact terminology from the original quote. Sorry, I do not think the concept is clear.

Since the advantage over 'the standard' changes depending on what product and what startup we're talking about, this seems to be more of a comment on the likelihood of the buyer to stick with 'the standard'. (additionally, the wording (and paraphrasing) are not making this clearer...some companies...more likely...tremendous advantage...etc)

I'm attempting to make "his theory" concrete in wording so that it's comprehensible. I think you can boil "his theory" down to:

 _Buyers' preference for 'the standard' is inversely proportional to the current economic state._

What do you think?

<comment><USER2> I think his theory is more like:

Buyers' appetite for 'the non standard' is inversely proportional to the current economic state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The interview is disappointingly light. Not that I was expecting to read a bunch of Sequoia's secrets, but given their previously good judgment in tough times, more specifics would have been nice.

<comment><USER5> Another read (though, it discusses the "Talent Scouts" -- not just Moritz): [http://www.sequoiacap.com/news/the-secrets-of-the-talent- sco...](http://www.sequoiacap.com/news/the-secrets-of-the-talent-scouts-/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would have thought there'd be _more_ startups looking for funding: "I can't get a job elsewhere so I'll start my own company."

</comment><comment><USER7> What companies has Sequoia funded that haven't succeeded?

<comment><USER8> Excellent question - is this survivors bias? We need the negative information to get a sense whether their technique works better than random luck applied to good times.</comment></comment>


Reverse Abstraction - Real Art, Real Geeky - <AUTHOR> http://www.ashleyzelinskie.com/#!portrait|c1han

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone! Just posting some of my tech related art here for you to discuss. I am looking for some feedback. If anyone has any comments or questions feel free. Cookie points to someone who finds the flaw in my concept. Hint: there is one.</comment>


Multithreaded data structures for parallel computing - <AUTHOR> http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-multithreaded_structures1/index.html?ca=drs-&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

<comment><USER2> The code in listings 3 and 5 is not thread safe. The list could easily become empty between the call to empty() and acquiring the mutex, leading to a race condition. I see two other subtle race conditions as well. I haven't looked at the rest but this density of bugs is enough to convince me that this author doesn't understand multithreaded programming well enough to give advice on the topic.

Other bugs:

1\. Assumes that std::list<T>::empty() is an atomic operation.

2\. Assumes it's safe to use separate locks for reading and writing, which std::list says nothing about. It probably screws up even in practice for at least the case where you have only one element in the list and two threads execute push() and pop() at the same time.

<comment><USER3> I agree. It looks like their read implementation means that every thread pops the same item off as well, since they clone to a temp variable.

<comment><USER2> Threads have separate stacks and the call to front() and pop_front() is protected by the mutex, so that part is fine as far as I can see.

<comment><USER3> I'm not familiar with the STL implementation, but it seems the pop would need to be coherent with the push in an empty stack. Like if a thread was trying to pop the only entry while another was trying to push, 'intuitively' there'd be a race condition there if STL isn't thread safe (which is the whole point of the article I think).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> And for priority queues, there's a wonderfully clever scheme which involves using a skiplist:

<http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~itayl/ipdps.pdf>

The probabilistic nature of the data structure lets them get those nice O(lg n) and O(1) expected times without the wide-ranging memory conflicts that slow down concurrent min-heaps. Some more basic info on skiplists for people who aren't familiar with them:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skip_list>

<comment><USER5> Yes I'm working on an implementation of those myself.

There are even designs for lock-free skiplist priorty queues, but they tend to be a little slower than the locking versions.

<comment><USER4> Lock-free skiplist priority queues, incidentally, become very elegant if your processor supports even the most basic hardware transactional memory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are much better ways to implement a concurrent queue than the ones shown. Using locks for every single queue/dequeue is a very good way to completely kill performance. A much better alternative is to use hand-over- hand locking, or use CAS for a lock-free implementation.

TAOMP ( [http://www.amazon.com/The-Multiprocessor-Programming- Maurice...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Multiprocessor-Programming-Maurice- Herlihy/dp/0123705916) ) goes over this in great detail and is overall an _excellent_ book.

<comment><USER7> Following is a great resource for Concurrent programming without locks and software transaction memory : <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/lock-free/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There are rather basic (producer/consume queues) and as some have pointed out, are buggy. I'd highly suggest looking at Boost's threading library (for an example of an object oriented approach to threading, taking advantage of RAII -- much of it is now standard in C++11), Intel's Thread Building Blocks, Java's built in Concurrency Utilities (java.util.concurrent package), Doug Lea's Fork Join Framework. The a great book on the subject is Maurice Herlihy's The Art of Multiprocessor Programming:

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Multiprocessor-Programming- Maurice...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Multiprocessor-Programming-Maurice- Herlihy/dp/0123705916/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335394746&sr=8-1)

The book is in Java, but C++11 has the required primitives (cross platform compare and set for integral types, a defined memory model) so you could follow allong in C++11.

</comment><comment><USER9> Intel's Threaded Building Blocks (<http://threadingbuildingblocks.org>) has a very nice collection of threaded data structures and algorithms.

I've found the performance to be quite good and the interfaces are compatible with STL in most cases which can be useful.

</comment><comment><USER10> As Jey has so eruditely pointed out, this advice borders on useless. I've always implemented LL queues as a segment of a list, where each element is protected by it's own mutex wherein each thread may add or remove a node by taking a lock on the first node, then moving to the second node, letting go of the first lock and so on. Although you'll end up holding more than one lock while traversing and three while deleting, this is at the core of powerful ideas like hand-over-hand locking.

</comment><comment><USER11> Another approach: use a persistent data structure ala clojure's:

[http://blog.higher-order.net/2009/02/01/understanding- clojur...](http://blog.higher-order.net/2009/02/01/understanding-clojures- persistentvector-implementation)

</comment><comment><USER12> If you're using C++ (like the article) you should be using boost::thread instead of low level pthreads, or std::thread if you're using C++11</comment>