Swift 3.1 Released - <AUTHOR> https://swift.org/blog/swift-3-1-released/ <comment><USER2> A week or two ago I updated a fairly large project to 3.1. Not as painful as the 3.0 upgrade by any means, but there were still a fair few warnings about features that will be deprecated in future releases. Dropping support for the initialize() function was probably one of the most prominent.

To me that seems like a nice way of doing it - warning developers about approaching changes with a fairly strong warning message, and allowing time for those changes to take place.

<comment><USER3> Most of the new warnings in 3.1 were with things that never should have worked in the first place (some stuff with public declarations referencing private typealiases in their type signatures and things like that).

There were also some new warnings added for mixed type arithmetic which is a common source of surprising behavior.

The initialize thing is as far as I understand due to a limitation in the Objective C runtime and overriding initialize in Swift never fully worked in the first place.

If you feel the 3.0 to 3.1 migration was still too painful from a compatibility perspective, it is not too late to file bugs; Swift 4 will still remain compatible with Swift 3 source so we can make further adjustments to the type checker if needed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just installed, compiling a fairly large project gives me "Command failed due to signal: Illegal instruction: 4" without any further information. Smooth...

<comment><AUTHOR> Congratulations, you managed to crash the compiler. Can you please file a bug?

[https://swift.org/contributing/#reporting- bugs](https://swift.org/contributing/#reporting-bugs)

<comment><USER4> Of course, just did. Very surprised that this happens for a 'source compatible' point release of Swift. Especially as this can be triggered with only five fairly simple lines of code. Not good.

<comment><USER5> Imho, Swift Compiler crashes are the single most worrying things for the swift language future, because it casts shadows over the unit tests, and thus make people doubt the reliability of the whole project.

<comment><USER3> Unit testing a compiler for a language like Swift is hard because there are so many features that interact in complex ways. There are unit tests but it's easy to miss things that look "obvious" in hindsight.

Until recently the focus was on finishing the design of the language itself and not fixing bugs or improving compile time. Now that the language is source stable the focus is shifting to the latter two tasks.

Also source stability means we can build up a larger body of code for testing (imagine having to constantly migrate unit tests that exercise corner cases and quirks... not fun).

<comment><USER5> I understand. I guess the problem comes from the fact that the language is still extremely young and moving fast, and yet advertized by Apple itself as something that should be used right now to develop apps for the billion dollars iOS market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very anecdotal evidence: I work on a fairly large mixed Swift & Objc project and I was expecting a greater decrease in compile times.

At first it seemed 'snappier' but starting to notice not much of an improvement.

It definitely still feels like making small changes like changing a function name triggers a lot of extra work.

I should fire up some benchmarking of Swift 3.1 vs 3.0

<comment><USER3> Also have you tried enabling precompiled bridging headers? This was added in 3.1 with the goal of speeding up mixed Swift/ObjC builds (by none other than Graydon Hoare), but other than that I don't know much about it.

<comment><USER6> It looks like it was actually disabled before release

[https://github.com/apple/swift/commit/5b9166ba8098a23e0601aa...](https://github.com/apple/swift/commit/5b9166ba8098a23e0601aac96ede363dea2484ae)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting to hear that IBM helped improve the release on Linux, thanks. I may consider it for a project in the future.

<comment><USER8> Yes, IBM is putting some money into supporting Swift, just like they did with Java in the early days.

[https://developer.ibm.com/swift/](https://developer.ibm.com/swift/)

[https://developer.ibm.com/swift/kitura/](https://developer.ibm.com/swift/kitura/)

[https://www.ibm.com/cloud- computing/bluemix/de/swift](https://www.ibm.com/cloud- computing/bluemix/de/swift)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Used objc a bit; never used swift. Question about this signature:

        func drop(while predicate: (Self.Iterator.Element) throws -> Bool) rethrows -> Self.SubSequence

I take it the "throws" on the type of predicate means it can 'throw/return' an error. Why would you do this? Why not just require your predicate function to be able to process any element?

Or I am confused?

It seems like the equivalent in Go, for example, would be something like this

       func drop(seq []T, while func(T) (bool, error)) ([]T, error)

which, again, seems like madness.

Or am I confused?

<comment><USER3> With 'drop' passing a throwing predicate feels a bit esoteric, but consider something like 'map'. Suppose you are mapping over an array of file names and loading each one, which can throw. You would expect the 'map' itself to throw if processing one of the elements throws.

You can write higher order functions that only take total functions as arguments and handle errors with an 'Either' type, which is more general but creates boilerplate.

Also 'rethrows' is a special keyword that means if you pass in a function that does not throw, the overall operation won't throw either. So mapping over an array of integers to increment each one won't require error handling, since the operation itself cannot fail.

<comment><USER10> _" So mapping over an array of integers to increment each one won't require error handling, since the operation itself cannot fail."_

Nitpick: in Swift, _" since the operation itself cannot fail"_ isn't correct. The operation will fail on overflow, but it will terminate your application rather than throw.

<comment><USER11> Those are called "universal errors" and it's not very useful to reason about them. You could prove your program correct, use a total-function programming language, but it still could fail to complete - the power could go out halfway through execution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I like Swift but I hate the Xcode and the Apple tools. Is so painful to code with it. Apple needs to change its entire development flow. Even working with the react-native I need to use Xcode. =l

<comment><USER13> Why do you feel it's painful? I've only written a tiny desktop menu bar app with it, but I liked the clean look of it and it didn't feel so cramped like Visual Studio.

Maybe I just don't have written with it enough.

<comment><USER14> I can honestly say that Xcode is the worst piece of software I have ever used.

It's incredibly slow, it has always been riddled with bugs, it has crashed on me more often than any other software, and it is lacking so much functionality that it doesn't deserve to be called an IDE at all.

For instance, it can't even rename a Swift function years after Swift's introduction.

<comment><USER15> You should give Android Studio a try, you will no longer complain about XCode being slow.

<comment><USER16> What is this, the paralympics of software IDEs?

<comment><USER17> First place: Xcode

Second place: Driveway chalk with a water hose

Third place: Android Studio

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hopefully it has support for warnings when formatting strings with optional values:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/42045139/i-want-a- compile...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/42045139/i-want-a-compiler- warning-or-error-when-i-use-a-wrapped-string-in-formatting)

<comment><USER2> Good news - it does. For me, it fixed a lot of bugs that I had no idea existed.

Seems like a pretty easy mistake to make, since third party libraries I use were littered with exactly the same mistake.

<comment><USER18> Yep it was a really nasty one. Because it used to work differently in Swift 2.x where it would not put Optional() around it in certain circumstances.

<comment><USER19> Interesting, I don't remember noticing it behaving that way. What were the circumstances, if you recall?

<comment><USER18>
        var someInt: Int! // class parameter

        // later, in a method
        let url = "/api/bla/\(someInt)"

In Swift 2.x it would simply show the value of someInt. Now it will print Optional. The problem is described in the linked Stack Overflow question as well.

I never program like that but there's a ton of people out there that convince the compiler they're going to set that value in time even when it's not set when init is called. Just like some people (including Apple!) use this pattern for setting outlets:

        IBOutlet var someLabel: UILabel!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does anyone know where the new Linux binaries are? The release announcement links to [https://swift.org/download](https://swift.org/download), but I can't actually find the 3.1 binaries anywhere.

<comment><USER21> There are neither source releases, nor tags in git repository yet (except the 'swift' repository).

<comment><USER3> You can download a 3.1 development snapshot. I'm not involved in preparing the official releases but I'm assuming the Linux 3.1 release will be very close to what is in swift-3.1-branch now.

And all the action these days is on the master branch so if you're on Linux and want to help us squash regressions you should periodically test your codebase with master snapshots.

<comment><USER21> At this stage, I'm more interested in properly packaging it (for a non-Ubuntu distribution), than compiler development itself. Not having at least tags for the release is very unusual, especially given the title of this article ;). As it is composed from multiple packages, there are too many moving parts than may or may not fit together.

It would be great, if there was a tag+source tarball for each release. I'm sure internally there must be something, your colleagues certainly must know, to which commit 'Apple Swift version 3.1 (swiftlang-802.0.48 clang-802.0.38)' maps to.

<comment><USER22> There is a tag for the release, called swift-3.1-RELEASE:

[https://github.com/apple/swift/tree/swift-3.1-RELEASE](https://github.com/apple/swift/tree/swift-3.1-RELEASE)

It's not showing up on GitHub's UI nor search for me at present, which may be why it seems like it's missing.

You can download a .tgz from GitHub but bear in mind that you have to do the same for each of the nested repositories as well. If you're building it for yourself, it's easier to download the swift-3.1-RELEASE content, and then run 'utils/update-checkout --clone --skip-history --tag swift-3.1-RELEASE' to procure the rest of the repositories.

There are a number of bugs to work on Swift packages for RHEL/CentOS:

[https://bugs.swift.org/browse/SR-100](https://bugs.swift.org/browse/SR-100)

[https://bugs.swift.org/browse/SR-108](https://bugs.swift.org/browse/SR-108)

[https://bugs.swift.org/browse/SR-116](https://bugs.swift.org/browse/SR-116)

The issues are primarily around those operating systems having too old a version of Clang in their default repositories to be able to bootstrap the newer builds, and the fact that they don't have the blocks runtime available, both of which are used by the Swift runtime.

<comment><USER21> Thanks, there are tarballs for swift-3.1-RELEASE and swift-lldb-3.1-RELEASE now. For the rest (swift-llvm, swift-clang, swift-cmark, swift-corelibs- foundation, swift-corelibs-libdispatch, swift-corelibs-xctest, swift-llbuild, swift-package-manager, swift-xcode-playground-support, swift-compiler-rt) I will check for those invisible tags.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does anyone have a good linux-based swift workflow? I'm starting to experiment with integrating the language in cross-platform projects and I'd love to be less reliant on Xcode.

<comment><USER24> I have a question. Why would you use Swift for linux development? Is there a binding to any major UI framework (QT...)?

<comment><USER23> For now it's mostly just experimentation/personal projects, but I'd like to be able to write web-servers in swift and to use it for image processing. Swift is interoperable with C, so any library with a C interface is freely available to a Swift application.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I am waiting for a swift->js compiler and a new explosion of hipster wave of how it is the greatest thing ever, even better than the last weeks hot tech.

<comment><USER26> there is already one. [http://www.shiftjs.com/#/home](http://www.shiftjs.com/#/home)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Would really be nice if it could offer generic linux binaries... this ubuntu only development approach is quite aggravating. I don't mind a big download, why not just bundle your LLVM changes and package it all in a single download?</comment>


The Most Important Part of Your Hackathon? Your Sponsors. - <AUTHOR> http://tessrinearson.com/blog/?p=661

<comment><USER2> "Your Sponsors who give away the coolest prizes". Primary motivation for most hackers to spend this weekend at a hackathon I know is to win the prize money/gadgets.

<comment><USER3> I agree with martinoma, I was just at a hackathon this past weekend, and everyone signed up to have fun rather than compete for prize money/gadgets. We didn't know about the prizes until the winners were announced, nonetheless about 40-50 people showed up, and the prizes ended up being pretty cool gadgets, of which included 3 rasberry pi's. The theme of the hackathon was "Interacting with the real world." So we had to fiddle around more with hardware and less with the software. It was my first hackathon and I really enjoyed it, looking forward to attending many more in the future, primarily to have fun and meet people with similar interests.

<comment><USER4> That's awesome! Make sure to keep an eye on [PennApps](<http://2013f.pennapps.com>) that's happening September 6th.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Let me know if you'd like TokBox at your next hackathon. song at tokbox

<http://tokbox.com>

<comment><USER6> Tokbox has the coolest swag. Save me one of those glowing bracelets Song ;) Yuri

<comment><USER7> Tokbox is a great sponsor. Always add value to a hackathon!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why is this suddenly sliding off the front page?</comment>


Rip Creator of Cut/Copy/Paste - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/20/tech/larry-tesler-obituary-copy-paste-trnd/index.html <comment><USER2> The frontpage discussion after the news first broke [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361282](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361282)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ty!</comment></comment>


Decide.com- on Black Friday price forecasting - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/business/fridays-deals-may-not-be-the-best.html

<comment><USER2> I've noticed that decide.com is pretty bad at being able to tell the difference between model variations, bundles and special editions. For example, if you were in the market for an Xbox 360 this weekend you'd see just about every retailer offering limited quantities of the 360 + kinect for $199 which is $100 less than the normal price. Decide can't tell the difference between the 360 + kinect and a Modern Warfare Special Edition Model. It rates the Modern Warfare Special Edition as the better buy as it's "a newer model." Sure it's newer, but they are not comparable items. There are lots of examples of this if you spend any time on the site.</comment>


Weev - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev <comment><USER2> It's a shame hate is such a strong form of motivation. The things people like this could do to make the internet a better place...</comment>


Microsoft Sold Over 240 Million Windows 7 Licenses in First Year - <AUTHOR> http://www.redmondpie.com/microsoft-sold-over-240-million-windows-7-licenses-in-first-year/ Windows 7 was released on 22nd October last year. Meant to be the real successor to the extremely successful XP, Windows 7 added features like Superbar (overhauled taskbar), multi-touch support and better networking. <comment><USER2> I've been using Windows 7 since its RC release, well over a year now. I use OSX, too. Windows 7 has been amazing, MS really got it right this time, after the Vista disaster. Windows 7 rocks!</comment>


Fast division by multiplication - <AUTHOR> http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/archives/2010/02/15/labor-of-division-episode-1/

<comment><USER2> Stuff like this is what I think of when I hear "compiler writers are smarter than you, don't micro-optimize".

It's amazingly much better to have the compiler hide this, than for application-level programmers to figure out the trick by themselves, and obfuscate their code accordingly. Sweet.

</comment><comment><USER3> An oldie but goodie. In practice, compilers are pretty good at working this out for you, _provided the denominator is a constant expression._ In other words, if you're burning cycles because of a division with variable but rarely-changing denominator in an inner loop, it can make sense to precompute the equivalent multiplication factor and perform the multiplication explicitly.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wish I could understand that. The math and all. If I could, I would be such an awesome programmer.

And incredibly smart.

Hat's off for this guy at least.

<comment><USER3> It's not exactly rocket science, here's a simplified explanation (minus some subtleties):

You're trying to calculate n/d (and the result should be rounded off to the nearest integer[1]). Division is expensive, but you observe that you can divide by a power of 2 cheaply using a shift instruction, so you decide to transform the calculation into something of the form (n * d')/(2^N), which is a multiply and a shift-right instruction. For the two forms to be equivalent, d' = 2^N / d, which you precompute.

Certain values of N can be more convenient from a computational point of view - for example, multiplying 2 32-bit integers yields a 64-bit result; on most architectures, the high and low halves either land in separate 32-bit registers, or you have to calculate each half with a separate instruction. So if you choose N=32, you don't even need a shift instruction: you simply drop the low bits.

You also need to make sure you choose your d' such that your rounding will be correct for all values of n.

Depending on the exact value of d', it may also be possible to decompose the _multiplication_ further, leaving only shifts and additions/subtractions.

[1] Of course, for floating-point numbers, you can just calculate 1/d, save it and multiply by it any time you need to divide by d.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article is not available at the moment so I am flying a bit blind here.

H. Warren, Hackers Delight has a nice discussion of this problem. One of my favorite books, but I like to do code generators.

[http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Delight-Henry-S- Warren/dp/0201...](http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Delight-Henry-S- Warren/dp/0201914654/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1266426413&sr=8-1)

</comment><comment><USER6> As an aside, Ridiculous Fish, apart from the excellent name, is one of the best blogs I know - interesting topics, good scientific method proving his conclusions, and a great writing style. I wish he posted more.

<comment><USER7> You may not wish he posted more. I'll bet his infrequent posting is a prime cause of all the great things you say about the blog.</comment></comment>


Aaron Paul's Voice in New Xbox Ad Is Switching On Users' Consoles - <AUTHOR> http://www.couriermail.com.au/entertainment/celebrity/users-complain-breaking-bads-aaron-paul-ad-is-switching-on-xbox-one/story-fnihm6nt-1226954049166

<comment><AUTHOR> What implications could this have for other "always listening" devices (current and future), and their ability to respond to voice commands originating from media sources?</comment>


Microsoft and Yahoo agree a price - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/01/14FE-april-fool-microsoft-yahoo_1.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone know if this is true or an April Fool?

<comment><USER2> The last line: "[ April Fools! Click here for more InfoWorld April Foolery. ]"

<comment><USER3> It would be nice if we could avoid the April Fools jokes here at HN. It's just getting tired.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Could you recommend language agnostic NLP tools? - <AUTHOR> I just build a spell-checker for Wolof, my native language, using some basic rules and a dictionary I managed to put together. I need your help finding open source tools for NLP that are language agnostic or do not require lot of heavy lifting to adapt to a new locale.
Thanks for your help.
If you would like to test my spell-checker : https://digibox.info/apps/experiments/wolofix/ <comment><USER2> Polyglot [0] is a python multilingual NLP toolkit. The quality is not great, but it supports a lot of languages.

[0] [https://github.com/aboSamoor/polyglot](https://github.com/aboSamoor/polyglot)

</comment><comment><USER3> Far from an expert but I was just discussing this with a former colleague about a specific problem he is considering and I found this: [https://www.r-bloggers.com/natural-language-processing- for-n...](https://www.r-bloggers.com/natural-language-processing-for-non- english-languages-with-udpipe/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I see Wolof is under "Upcoming UD Languages", I know nothing about R but I see what I can contribute and/or get from there. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Lucene API has a lot of language specific tokenizers and analyzers that will help normalize what a term is in the index regardless of language. You can then apply various statistical NLP methods which tend to be more language agnostic.

</comment><comment><USER5> I work in NLP at a company that actually develops language agnostic solutions, but I'm not aware of any open-source tool that can do this.

Nonetheless, if you can be more specific about what kind of tools you are looking for maybe I can give you some pointers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your reply. If you don't mind sharing a link to your company's website or products, I would appreciate.

These are some areas of interest to me : 1- Translation : ie French->Wolof 2- Speech understanding & question answering systems 3- Text to speech .. among others. (I will work day and night to build training samples if I have the tools)

<comment><USER5> Sure, the company is Babelscape ([http://babelscape.com](http://babelscape.com)). For the translation tasks you can find massive parallel dataset with several language pairs at [http://opus.nlpl.eu/](http://opus.nlpl.eu/), the other two things that you mentioned are not really in my area of expertise so nothing comes to my mind at the moment.</comment></comment></comment>


Interactive Hand Pose Estimation Using a Stretch-Sensing Soft Glove - <AUTHOR> https://igl.ethz.ch/projects/stretch-glove/ <comment><USER2> This is an interesting comment from the YT video: "great, now write an OpenVR driver for it so it works exactly like a knuckles controller without developer support for games and apps, and you'll instantly have funding. That's the one failing of these other products, not how good they are. None of these gloves get off the ground because they don't have native, plug and play openvr driver support for steam's hand pose system."

<comment><USER3> I think the main reason the gloves don't get off the ground is that most people won't be willing to put up with a set of gloves, or at least the industry is waiting for a purely hand-based solution.

It shouldn't actually be too difficult to get the hand pose with gloves. I've been out of this space for four years though.

<comment><USER4> Enterprise training projects would buy gloves in a heartbeat, if they were easy to integrate. And yes, getting the hand pose is not difficult at all. I hacked together a glove in a weekend with flex sensors, an Adafruit Feather, and a Vive tracker. I also put pager motors in the fingertips for haptic feedback. Demonstrating the basic hardware really isn't the hard part. The hard part is making it robust and building in platform support, which every other glove product has failed to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Something iOS/Android developers might play with, is Google's recent TensorFlow/MediaPipe optical hand pose example: [https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/08/on-device-real-time- hand-t...](https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/08/on-device-real-time-hand- tracking-with.html) [https://github.com/google/mediapipe/blob/master/mediapipe/do...](https://github.com/google/mediapipe/blob/master/mediapipe/docs/hand_tracking_mobile_gpu.md) But real-world performance can be poor: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwgjgT9hu6A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwgjgT9hu6A) The hand pose example doesn't support Linux at present.

</comment><comment><USER5> Related work: [https://github.com/xinghaochen/awesome-hand-pose- estimation](https://github.com/xinghaochen/awesome-hand-pose-estimation)

</comment><comment><USER6> The optical approach works extremely well. [https://youtu.be/eSQoG2gDMuk](https://youtu.be/eSQoG2gDMuk)

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't say "extremely" well. The Leap Motion is pretty finicky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This could be really useful in VR.

</comment><comment><USER8> Can't wait until we can type with these things

<comment><USER9> Don't you think it'd be rather hard to go without the tactile feedback provided by our keyboards? I can imagine people getting really lazy with their keystrokes when performing them with a glove in midair or on a table, making it hard to interpret the input.

<comment><USER10> I am able to touch type on my iPad with reasonable accuracy. It's slower/less accurate than a tactile keyboard, of course; however, I don't carry a keyboard in my pocket, so perhaps this is a good middle ground.</comment></comment></comment>


Why The American Civil War Is Important - <AUTHOR> http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/05/why-the-america.php <comment><USER2> "Instead of thinking how different people were in the 1800s, it's much more useful to view mankind as basically the same species that came from the savannah eons ago."

Oddly, that's the biggest thing I've noticed when studying the Civil War. Even though our DNA hasn't changed much since then, _we_ certainly have.

Life was so different then, it's hard to imagine. Most of the soldiers had never been more than 20 miles from home before serving. And without much technology, they only know a few dozen people before the war. This was supposed to be a great adventure for many of them. But...

Their sacrifice and suffering are unimaginable today. They marched through mud for days on end, eating only salt pork, hardtack, and coffee. They fought brutally with obsolete technology. The numbers are staggering (by American standards): 1/2 million casualties, Gettysburg 50,000 in 3 days, Antietam, 30,000 in one day.

Every American should visit at least one Civil War battlefield. As I walked down Bloody Lane in Antietam, I imagined the thousands who had died in the same spot, a very sobering experience.

Somehow I can't imagine something like that happening today. I don't think we Americans would put up with that much pain and suffering, for any cause.

We have it pretty good now in our air-conditioned homes with a table full of food and a broadband connection. It's easy to forget that we got that because of the sacrifice of so many others.

Great post, even for hackers, on Memorial Day. Thank you.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for your big number statistics. Many other countries around the world abolished slavery without going to war. That makes our heroes seem like they were a bit foolish, doesn't it?

Let's not get sentimental about it, war is ugly, and the civil war was about "good vs evil" about as much as the Iraq war is.

<comment><USER4> > Many other countries around the world abolished slavery without going to > war. That makes our heroes seem like they were a bit foolish, doesn't it?

In other words, they waited until they could abolish slavery without going to war. While waiting was good for not-slaves, it wasn't much good for the folks who were slaves during that time.

<comment><USER5> The British Empire beat the US to abolishing slavery by nearly half a century (1807). The British forced many other countries to give up slavery soon after. If the US had lost the revolutionary war or the war of 1812 slavery probably would have been abolished much sooner.

<comment><USER4> Maybe/probably after the war of 1812 but Britain didn't abolish slavery when it had the US.

When it abolished slavery, Britain (proper) didn't have slavery and had lost the only colony with significant slavery, so abolishing slavery throughout the empire didn't cost much.

Like I said, the US was willing to go to internal war to abolish slavery. Not many countries were.

It's one thing to do good when it doesn't cost much, it's quite another to do said good when it costs a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "When it was over, it was over"

This is important and astonishing to people from other countries. I was an interpreter for some official visitors from China some years ago, and we took a day trip out from Washington, DC to a very near place in Virginia (Alexandria, if I remember correctly) where United States Highway 1 has a monument right in the middle of the highway to Robert E. Lee. And the monument, significantly, has Lee with his back turned to DC and facing the state of Virginia. My Chinese companions were AMAZED that such a monument would be allowed so near to the national capital. The United States allows a lot of expressions of dissent, so even actual civil wars can calm down over time so that people can get along. The contrasting situation in many other countries, where wars from hundreds of years ago are still the basis for grudges today, is a large part of what makes those countries less stable and less prosperous.

<comment><USER7> "When it was over, it was over"

...is also far from correct. The US political system subsequently basically mirrored the conflict, and it continued until both major political parties underwent profound changes in the 1970s.

In much the same way (but more pronounced) Ireland had a civil war in 1922-23 and the two largest political parties today are the two opposing sides of that war. They really don't differ on any substantive matters of policy but each party _loathes_ the other.

Ring any bells?

<comment><USER8> The difference between war and politics is trivial from certain theoretical points of view but very important to real people who have to live through one or the other.

Besides, even the hatred between Democrats and Republicans is tame by most standards. Democrats and Republicans normally engage in fair, peaceful commerce with each other, and a Democrat plaintiff arguing in front of a Republican judge isn't doomed to lose -- in fact, the judge will not consider it essential to figure out the plaintiff's politics if the case has no personal political implications for himself. James Carville and Mary Matalin is just a cute story, not a shocking breach of loyalty. Hell, go on Match.com and see how many people describe themselves as "very conservative" or "very liberal" but are willing to meet someone from the other end of the spectrum. Street brawls? Violence? The most-publicized violence from the last election was imaginary -- the loony McCain worker who carved a "B" in her face and claimed an Obama supporter did it.

Hutus and Tutsis it ain't, nor Northern Ireland or the Balkans. The biggest problems people have with partisanship in the United States is that it's embarrassingly stupid and it probably results in a lot of bad policy. Maybe it's inferior to multi-party coalition politics, or maybe it isn't, but the difference between two styles of peaceful democratic government is bupkus compared to the difference between peace and violence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Here's a question for everyone to help exercise the critical thinking muscles:

What makes you think that the civil war was any more about slavery than the Iraq war was about freedom?

... pause ...

I'd argue that any political group waging war is well served by ideological window dressing that they can adopt so that the war can be sold as something other than humanity acting at its worst or the crude law of the jungle being realized.

Meanwhile, the soldiers are systematically trained to stop thinking of the enemy as human beings. Occasionally there are incidents of extreme atrocity (massive rapes, massacres), which are not isolated incidents, they are simply a consequence of the standard training that arise under certain types of emotional duress. The idea of these broken people being heroes is absurd. They are at best pawns and at worst monsters.

So if you are AT ALL skeptical of Bush's propaganda about the Iraq war, why are you not the least bit skeptical of the standard American propaganda about the civil war?

Why do you think the Iraq war was about oil but the civil war was a grand ideological struggle of good vs evildoers?

<comment><USER9> "...why are you not the least bit skeptical of the standard American propaganda about the civil war?"

Because it is not propaganda it is true. They tried to fight the Civil War for political and financial reasons, it didn't work. No one wanted to fight. The feeling, particularly in the West of the then US, was "Oh . . . the south wants to leave? . . . Well good riddance to bad garbage!" This was the nineteenth century equivalent of "Don't let the doorknob hit ya' where the Good Lord split ya'". So they had to switch, mid stream, to fighting over slavery. Believe me, the people doing the fighting after the switch DEFINITELY believed the war was about slavery. If you believe for a second that those Lutheran fanatic farm boys from Minnesota and Wisconsin gave a hat about political expediency . . . actually if you even believe they could spell political expediency, you are probably mistaken.

The reason Princes and Presidents go to war don't mean anything, what matters is why peasants go to war. In Iraq, afghanistan and in the Civil War the peasants went to war for RELIGIOUS not political reasons.

What won the Civil War was Lincoln freeing the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation. Why? Because even though it meant very little to anyone else, all of the Lutheran fanatics in Minnesota, Wisconsin, northern Iowa and elsewhere in the upper midwest joined the fight in earnest. Just like when the Ba'ath party all of a sudden found religion and convinced the unwashed muslim masses to send their sons to Iraq.

In both cases, these poorly educated, but deeply religious young men believed that GOD told them to go fight. In one case to free the slaves, in the other to fight the Crusaders who had come to eradicate Islam. Getting your peasants to fight and believe is how you win wars. Its just that most of the peasants in the American North weren't satisfied with Lincoln's word that he would free the slaves. They waited until he actually did it, and then they joined the cause.

As a bonus they were rough and tumble farm stock, who did their own work. They didn't have slaves doing it for them. They planted, harvested, bailed hay, picked stones, and all manner of other back breaking manual labor. They did all of this in deep snow and often sub-zero weather before the advent of central heating, electricity, tractors,or other modern conveniences. Now tens of thousands of them, at a time, could be sent south to take up the slavery issue with plantation gentlemen who caught cold if the temperature dropped below 40 degrees. Do you see where this is going? Add to this the fact that they all believed that God had sent them on a divine errand, and you begin to get an idea of why Lincoln was so sure he could save the Union by freeing the slaves.

The south lost the war with the Emancipation Proclamation.

Now here is the thing, the reason for any war, is NOT the reason the leaders claim. In the end, it is whatever reason the peasants are fighting for. So for Bush to continue talking about freedom and Democracy, when the enemy is recruiting millions by talking about the annihilation of Islam was foolish. The same was true of the leadership of the Civil War south. They kept talking about State's rights. Have you ever tried to explain the primacy of State's rights to ten thousand poorly educated religious fanatics with firearms? I suggest you refrain from doing so.

What the south was faced with were old school jihadis. The Christian kind, which are far more dangerous. Think about it, they would give their lives WITHOUT the promise of 72 virgins in heaven. All of a sudden, the northern armies went from being armies that marched well, and looked pretty, to being armies that fought well, and looked terrible. Just for shits and giggles Google yourselves a picture of General McClellan . . . Then Google yourselves an image of William T. Sherman's ugly mug. Lee himself commented on this change. What do you do against an army that, suddenly is willing to countenance enormous losses just to kill you? You run, which is what most of the southern armies spent a good part of the last half of the war doing. And it was smart of them to do so, maybe with time that fighting spirit will wear itself out in the North. It's just that time ran out for them.

<comment><USER3> I enjoyed reading your thoughts.

My take is: Of course religion is a motivating factor -- it's been the favorite method of getting the masses to do one's bidding for thousands of years.

So _of course_ any serious war effort will have a significant "good vs evil" component to it -- the people have been listening to clergy preach about good and evil since they were children, and so all it takes is a simple hijacking of this meme and you have a grand effort for the cause of good.

Framed another way, religion weakens the citizens' defenses against war propaganda.

I think we're actually saying the same thing... When George W. Bush would get on TV and read a speech about evildoers, he would make the hearts of the faithful flutter with devout feeling. He said those words because he knew what effect they would have -- people, trained to idealize an abstract fight between good and evil, would support his policies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "If you want to see American democracy under great stress, the Civil War is the prime example."

Yet the author misses the best example-- that in the middle of the war, in 1864, the U.S. held an election for President, even though it looked (in the beginning of the race) that Lincoln might lose!

<comment><USER11> "This was the first time any nation held a national election in the midst of a civil war." -from Wikipedia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why is it important to non-americans?

<comment><USER13> I wonder...do any of our compatriots in the UK or any other part of the world for that matter hold old wars and battles in reverence? Are there reenactors of prior battles and such in your parts of the world? I am partial to believing this is more of an American cultural phenomena.

<comment><USER14> Oh no. You've heard of the Protestant marches in Ireland commemorating some battle, that used to stir up trouble. Also, I was in Lexington MA on some round-number anniversary of the Revolutionary War, and re-enactors of the British side came over from Britain. All that way, to be on the losing side! Thanks guys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Well, more like: Why the American Civil War is Important ... to Americans.

<comment><USER16> Default setting is <America>, no qualifier needed. Also, <America> == <U.S.>, please learn to live in Ascii ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Quoting Richard Feynman:

 _"From a very long view of the history of mankind - seen from, say, ten thousand years from now - there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell's discovery of the laws of electrodynamics. The American Civil War will fade into provincial insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the same decade."_

<comment><USER2> Providing mankind is still around ten thousand years from now. Not a given thanks to another significant event of the 19th century: the discovery of how to harvest, refine, distribute, and use oil as an economic product.

<comment><USER17> Why would mankind be at risk because of oil? Mankind may be at risk because of nuclear weapons, sure, but oil? When oil is over we may have to start riding horses again, but I don't see that as such a huge catastrophe.

<comment><USER18> I suspect that he is referring to the dreaded AGW (I have no idea whether burning oil contributes more to carbon levels than deforestation or burning coal. In the long run, I think coal reserves contain similar carbon mass to oil reserves, but it always seems like the data is changing.)

<comment><USER17> But isn't oil carbon neutral? ;-)

It's widely accepted that oil has a biological origin (some people dispute that). The carbon absorbed by plants millions of years ago had to come from somewhere, and that is the CO2 in the atmosphere. If oil is derived from those plants, then burning oil simply releases the CO2 that was sequestered underground for millions of years. If there was life before, I think there will be life despite AGW. The number of humans may drop dramatically, of course.

<comment><USER19> The world's coal and oil supplies represent millions of years of carbon absorption. If we burn through it in a thousand years, we've likely put more carbon into the atmosphere than has ever been there before (at one time).

<comment><USER18> Doing the calculations is a major pain, but I really don't think that's true.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology#Earliest_atmos...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology#Earliest_atmosphere)

Wikipedia says that the earth's earliest atmosphere was a stunning 10% C02.

Total coal reserves are 930 billion (non-metric?) tons: <http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/coal.html>

But the earth's atmosphere is 5 quadrillion metric tons: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth#Density_and...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth#Density_and_mass)

So getting to 10% is impossible. Adding in oil, bitumen, and natural gas probably won't get you past 1% (which is still pretty bad: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide#Toxicity> .)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A bipartisan plan to end surprise ER bills - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/9/21/17887692/voxcare-surprise-er-bills-senate <comment><USER2> How about a law stating that a medical provider has to charge everyone the same price for the same service?

This would eliminate the many-to-many negotiation problem that contributes to absurdities like Duke University Hospital having 1,300 billing clerks for 900 beds ([https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/why-does-health-care- co...](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/why-does-health-care-cost-so-m)). It would also make it much easier to estimate costs before going to a provider, because instead of having 1000 different prices, that service will have one price (albeit with some variability depending on what's actually done).

If you paired it with a law that mandated that hospitals publish their prices for services in a simple JSON format, such that companies could use it freely to create price comparison tools, suddenly you'd make it much easier for market forces to push prices down to sane levels. It's insane how difficult it is currently to figure out how much even routine and planned operations like delivering a child will cost, and as a result people don't bother to even try, so there's no incentive for hospitals to keep their list prices anywhere near the realm of sanity.

<comment><USER3> > It's insane how difficult it is currently to figure out how much even > routine and planned operations like delivering a child will cost, and as a > result people don't bother to even try

In my real-life experience, that is false. When my wife was pregnant we asked the doctor if we could pay upfront. She said yes, gave us a price, and explained what that would cover. We paid her; the delivery was at the hospital, and everything went well.

<comment><USER2> Was the doctor's quoted price the same as the all-in price? In our case, the OB's bill was something like 10% of the final total, which was close to 6 figures, despite being bog standard.

<comment><USER3> Your total seems to be one to two orders of magnitude greater than what we paid. We fully prepaid, and there were no complications. However, I wasn't talking about cost but replying to the assertion that one could not forecast costs.

I replied to, "It's insane how difficult it is currently to figure out how much even routine and planned operations like delivering a child will cost, and as a result people don't bother to even try". Your post seemed to refute that as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How about everyone gets to bill through the _hospital_ instead of every person who tangentially heard of you one way or another sending you their own bill. If the hospital is in-network, they bill based on in-network rates, and all those "providers" can take up their bill with the hospital (who at least knows they're there, unlike the patient).

<comment><USER5> How about the state gets a bill for everyone and the risk is distributed over the population minimizing the cost and improving efficiency? This happens by maximizing the risk pool size and eliminating waste from marketing and executive compensation (and the claims denial department). This happens to also incentivize the state to ensure everyone gets the preventative care they need, and line up incentives re: legislation (for instance around cigarettes and alcohol). Then we can call it "what every other civilized country does."

<comment><USER6> How do you then provide higher-quality but more expensive healthcare to those who can afford it?

<comment><USER5> You provide the same high-quality healthcare to everyone because nobody is better than anyone else on account of wealth. Wealthy people don't suddenly need different healthcare when they make money.

<comment><USER6> Why not also provide the same high-quality cars, housing, jobs etc to everyone?

Hint: communism doesn't work.

Also, the reality is you have to prioritize. A public health-care system has a limited amount of money (by definition) and needs to spend it in a carefully balanced way. E.g. you'd rather operate/save a kid than a 90 year old person. Another example is, governments "advise" citizens to do preventative exams based on cost-efficiency, not on "best quality healthcare" \- it's simply unrealistic to perform a mammography on 50% of the _older than 25_ population every year. But if someone _wants_ to do that, and _can pay for the costs themselves_ , why would I, you or the government limit their freedom?

<comment><USER7> The system described above, as applied specifically for healthcare, works wonderfully for _most_ in countries that use it - significantly better than in US, anyway. That alone is already a reasonable answer to your "why?".

But also, there's no reason why you can't have private insurers providing better options _on top_ of a public system. In fact, most countries do exactly that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Care in the US is quite good, but the billing is the most opaque thing imaginable. I went in for a skin biopsy and got a bill from 3 different people. Why? I don't take my car to the shop and get a bill from 3 other shops in town. Ridiculous. I really think the onus should be on the provider to issue a single bill and provide up front pricing.

<comment><USER9> I received a bill 9 months after a procedure. After I had already received a dozen other bills for various other services pretty much immediately and paid immediately. My nuanced argument was "you waited 9 months, fuck off". I never heard anything more about that one.

<comment><USER10> That sounds more like a scam. Is there any way to verify the bill is legitimate?

<comment><USER9> It definitely was legitimate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's a decent start, but it doesn't really do a whole lot for "transparency", it simply caps the charges against some completely unknown and somewhat arbitrary number.

<comment><USER12> Hopefully the insurance companies would demand some transparency.

At least when it comes to ERs transparency isn't exactly useful. Most people don't have time to go shopping around between them, all transparency does this let you know you're being billed $1700 for a Band-Aid instead of billing code B736.21.

This clearly isn't a fix to the problems of the healthcare industry, but it certainly sounds like a nice step up.

While I understand the logistics behind it, the idea that you can go to a place, pay your bill, then have eight different people bill you for the same service just feels like an absolute scam.

Yes, one was the doctor, one was the lab, one was the hospital etc. and they may work for different companies and even in different buildings it's just that they all HAPPENED to be in that one building that one day if that one time.

But you don't go to a restaurant and get separate bills from the establishment and the waiter and the cook and the group which buys ingredients.

"We couldn't have told you how much that Caesar salad would have cost, it depends on complex negotiations with your dietitian. Had it been at least 30 days since your last consumption of Californian arugula?"

<comment><USER13> Insurance companies do have negotiated prices with all their network providers for all applicable billing codes. And insurers do often provide those numbers to their plan members, at least partially. The trouble is that you can't always know in advance which billing code a provider will actually submit on the claim, and some providers are out of network without negotiated prices.

<comment><USER14> >The trouble is that you can't always know in advance which billing code a provider will actually submit on the claim,

That seems like the billing system itself is conceptually faulty. Like a supermarket where the same gallon of milk costs different prices depending on which shelf you took it off of.

<comment><USER13> For a given customer, the "gallon of milk" costs the same regardless of which shelf it comes from. But if you come in to buy milk and end up buying champagne instead the price will be different.

Billing amounts are calculated based on specific unique procedure and modifier codes. The coding is typically done by trained coders using the doctor's notes as a reference, and the coders select the most expensive codes that they can legally justify. Many doctors aren't even aware of their billing rates for various procedures. In some cases the doctor won't know which specific procedures will be needed until she gets into it and sees what's going on, at which point it's too late for price estimates.

Payers (insurers) are trying to fix the billing system by moving away from the fee-for-service model and toward value-based care (payment for meeting care quality goals) or various forms of capitation (flat payment per patient per year regardless of which procedures are needed).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Radiologist and anesthesiologists are the vultures of the healthcare industry - they are often out of network and they hide behind the scenes at hospitals and outpatient surgery centers.

<comment><USER16> The anesthesiologist for a family member's out patient tonsillectomy was the sole out of network component in the procedure. When they remonstrated that we should have known, I responded that maybe we should have checked if the orderly, the valet, et cetera was in-network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I have not read through the entire article, so don't know if what I'll state is covered, however, I have experienced something similar with Kaiser, though not with ER, but with regular Doctor's visits. They just send me a surprise from time to time, and the latest one is $175.00 for a visit. This is, literally, something that just keeps happening. Somebody on their end messes up, or somebody does some sort of funny business, and patients get unforeseen bills. I wish somebody would investigate them and force them to get their act together. I mean it's convenient that they have all facilities in one place, but they are really expensive and their billing practices are inconsistent.

</comment><comment><USER18> In Australia ED is free, paid for by state governments. We spend ~10% of GDP on healthcare, the US spends 18%. We have a private system, but it has to compete with free, and that's stiff competition.

</comment><comment><USER19> Excellent! This is action.

Not the best action (more below) but _anything_ else is wildly better than the situation we have in the current U.S. Healthcare system

Change needs to happen to the U.S. Healthcare system so that surprise billings just stop. This change is not going to happen on its own without people driving change.

The issue at hand is that Healthcare costs in the U.S. are all over the place.

Same place, same doctor, same procedure on the same person on the same day can yield massively different invoices depending on whether the person is insured, where they work, what kind of insurance they carry!

Hospitals wield a lot more power than you and I would guess.

An example: [https://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/06/15/17474/profit- hosp...](https://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/06/15/17474/profit-hospitals- mark-prices-more-1000-percent-because-theres-nothing-stop-them)

As a person who's extremely passionate about driving change in the U.S. Healthcare system, I communicate a lot with people who have fallen on hard times due to an enormous medical bill.

Here are two scenarios for you:

[https://www.quora.com/Recently-my-husband-visited-the-ER- in-...](https://www.quora.com/Recently-my-husband-visited-the-ER-in-the-US- due-to-almost-bleeding-out-were-citizens-and-have-insurance-The-bill- is-24-000-USD-We-do-not-have-that-kind-of-money-What-can-we-do)

[https://www.quora.com/Why-did-the-doctor-charge- me-3600-hr-t...](https://www.quora.com/Why-did-the-doctor-charge-me-3600-hr- to-drain-my-swollen-elbow)

When people ask me what I think is "wrong" with the health care in the USA, my answer surprises them:

Nothing is wrong with the health care in the USA. It is one of the very best in the world for those who can afford it.

The issue is that one should not have to look unexpectedly to a life completely ruined because they suddenly fell sick or got into an accident - they should be able to pick up their lives when they need to do it the most and go on from there.

My hypothesis is that a system where everyone pays the same rate regardless of whether they are insured or not would head us off to a much better direction.

I invite your feedback on:

[https://www.quora.com/Would-a-completely-free-market- healthc...](https://www.quora.com/Would-a-completely-free-market-healthcare- system-with-zero-government-involvement-and-no-subsidies-for-anyone-work- better-in-the-long-run)

[https://www.quora.com/In-the-US-the-majority-of-people- under...](https://www.quora.com/In-the-US-the-majority-of-people- under-65-years-old-have-health-insurance-through-their-employers-What-is-the- logic-behind-tying-health-insurance-to-an-employer/answer/Subhobroto-Sinha-1)

<comment><USER20> Feedback I have is health insurance should work like other insurance where if there is a dispute the claimant has defacto sue the insurance company. They can't just turn around and bill insured if the insurance denies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > So far, things have turned out fine — I've only been billed a $150 copayment > for my ER trip...

Copayment should be eliminated too. Paying for an insurance I want to be sure that if something happens to me I don't have to worry about anything, even about having spare $150.

<comment><USER22> Copayments are essential to keep bored and lonely people from going to the doctor every day for nothing in particular.

AFAIK, only the UK has a zero copayment system among the government run health care systems.

<comment><USER21> In the Czech Republic copay is optional (depends on the insurance company and the plan, not really widespread, the majority of people don't have copay) and nobody seems to be misusing this. You can also just buy insurance that is going to cover almost everything (and with no copay) for reasonable money without even having a job (if you actually have a job the insurance costs you and the employer a fixed percent of your salary). Some times the laws change (just to get changed back some years after) and compulsory copay gets introduced but it always is just ~$1 (which would be enough to repel bored grannies and homeless alcoholics that just want to hang out if there actually were any, but in fact there don't seem to be any actually misusing hospitals). Hospitals don't look and feel as fancy and cozy as they do in the USA and a stationary patients' diet is a disaster from the dietary value point of view but in every other aspect everything works amazing.

<comment><USER22> So it sounds like the Czech Republic has some kind of private health insurance system?

<comment><USER21> All (AFAIK) the health insurance companies in the Czech Republic are private (public actually, but not state-owned) corporations that are regulated heavily but in a very reasonable client-oriented and a little bit socialistic way. Every person is legally obliged to have a paid health insurance but the coverage is the same while the cost is a fixed percent of their income to be paid on monthly basis so poor people pay less and get the same service. People that don't have legal regular local income (e.g. foreign students) must buy insurance approximately the same way tourists do when traveling abroad (everybody else can also go and do this and it's as easy as buying a cellphone subscription, that's almost a free market).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Thanks god. I hate this so much

</comment><comment><USER24> As a German who had to take US-americans to the ER twice, once in Germany, once on Curacao, my observation can be summarized as "WTF?".

In both cases the patient initially refused treatment out of fear to receive a high bill. Both bills ended up being about 50 USD (a few stitches in the first case, lab analysis to confirm it were kidney stones in the second case).

In the first case, the patient's spouse told me not to worry, it ain't too bad. But she would stay with him to make sure he does not fall unconscious ("uhm.. ok...."; I got a taxi to pick them up for a trip to the ER); in the second case I ate my dinner while watching the guy scream in pain - being a doctor's child helps with that .. he finally agreed to let me take him to the ER.

Dear US-americans doctors, you lost me. Where again was the exit ethics took during your education?

<comment><USER25> The doctors don't create the bills, or even really influence billing. The billing issues are caused by hospital administrators who are mostly MBAs or Policy masters, and they're negotiating with MBAs in insurance companies.

<comment><USER26> Do you think that the doctors or hotel administrators have more power?

<comment><USER27> Doctors typically don't work for hospitals. Their services are billed separately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Stop applying duct tape to a ridiculous system. Its time to offer a public option like every other country in the OECD. That's how you solve this. This is sheer stupidity all the way down. How are so few of you mad as hell getting the worst deal in the OECD? I'm mad _for_ you.

It's like watching someone hit themselves in the face with bare knuckles, stop and say you know what this needs? Boxing gloves, then it won't hurt as much. Like, you're right, it won't hurt as much, but why are you doing this to yourself?

Either this is a free market and we allow the market to sort this out, allowing people to die and go broke in the process, or we say this is a public good that deserves a public solution. A whack-a-mole based patchwork of legal impositions on the market is not a solution to anything. It just encourages the captains of the insurance industry to find the next loophole to exploit (or go out and create them by lobbying) to ensure profits keep going up quarter over quarter, until they're whacked back down again. Then in 6-18 months were right back where we started.

<comment><USER20> We used to have a free market and it sucked. So they took the worst part of it and slapped a national insurance program over it and that's Medicare. And now 50 years later the rest of the market sucks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > The policy proposal, which you can read here, essentially bars out-of- > network doctors from billing patients directly for their care. Instead, they > would have to seek payment from the insurance plan. This would mean that in > the cases above, the out-of-network doctors couldn't send those big bills to > the patients, who'd be all set after paying their emergency room copays.

I do love "sensible policy changes" that work by extracting money from physicians to cover patient bills rather than actually fixing the systemic dysfunction.

If you're the surgeon to hand, you don't get to refuse to do emergency surgery. You _have_ to take care of that patient, ethically and legally. Oh, turns out they're out of network, and their insurer isn't obligated to give you a dime? Awesome, free surgery!

Here's a sensible solution: when it comes to emergency-based care, insurers must accept all comers as in-network. There's no such thing as "out of network" emergency-related care.

But hey, insurers have powerful leverage and a near-monopoly. What're the odds we'd take a slice off _their_ profit margin?

<comment><USER29> People should demand an end to private insurers. Makes zero send to have middle men who profit off denying care.

<comment><USER30> idk about you but i have a zero premium plan with $2300 max out of pocket for in-network services. all i want is a foolproof way to ensure all my providers are in-network.

<comment><USER31> How can such a plan exist? Or am I missing something?

<comment><USER32> You are missing the fact that its basically his employer self insuring, as a form of unpaid compensation. The only thing the insurer is doing is acting as a billing agent.

<comment><USER33> It's not self-insurance, necessarily. When OP says "zero premium" they mean (even if they don't know it) that their employer is paying 100% of their premium.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Fuck the "bipartisan plan". M4A now.

</comment><comment><USER35> Non-Americans may not realize: In America, going to the ER, it's possible and often happens that someone can be billed any random, unlimited amount for 10 seconds of interaction: $3,150 for "consultation." Yes. Heck, you don't even need to be seen to be billed. As soon as they collect personal information, despite not being seen, they can and do still try to bill you randomly regardless. One ER in the Bay Area has a security guard whose job it is to collect Social Security or tax identifiers from people before they can speak to anyone in the hospital.</comment>


What every programmer should know about memory, Part 1 - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/250967/ <comment><USER2> The entire article is also available at: <http://people.redhat.com/drepper/cpumemory.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER3> Really fantastic article, and for anyone interested in low level coding it's a must read, but overall it is quite horribly misnamed :-)

<comment><USER4> Reminds me of the old adage "The Lisp programmer understands the value of everything, and the cost of nothing." For a great many applications, most programmers don't need to think too much about the underlying hardware (which is awesome). Until somebody asks, "Why is this so slow?", "Why does it freeze up when I do this?" -- then we're all low-level coders.

Granted, you'll probably never need to understand memory to the depth that those articles get into it, but it's often better know more than you need to. On other hand, maybe you write database integrations for a living :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> [2007]</comment>


"I Work Online" Hilarious Digital Nomad Parody Music Video - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ymMI4N9YFQ

<comment><USER2> haha, i would laugh if i wouldn't cry in pain from laughing ! :)</comment>


Create Serendipity: How a coffee meetup lead to drinks with the Dropbox Founder - <AUTHOR> http://polaske.tumblr.com/post/90479252515/creating-serendipity?two=two

<comment><USER2> How is the same post being allowed thrice in 24 hours?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7977960](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7977960) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7972914](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7972914)

<comment><USER3> The URLs are adding ?one=one, ?two=two at the end to avoid being flagged as duplicates. There seem to be plenty of more natural numbers to continue the sequence!

<comment><USER2> Yep! Is it wrong of me to have thought that HN's filters were better than that?</comment></comment></comment>


GoPro Evolution: From 35mm Film To America's Fastest-Growing Camera Company - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2013/03/04/gopro-evolution-from-35mm-film-to-americas-fastest-growing-camera-company/

<comment><USER2> The key to GoPro is content. As the saying goes, "Content is King". Camera Phones just do not create contact, "on Par" with a goPro generally speaking. Think of your average Camera Phone user, and average Gopro user... The average content generated from the goPro, although - probably not impressive like the footage you see in the adverts, is still going to be superior to average content from a phone camera. Naturally the goPro user has acquired the camera because his average state when using the camera is "something Exciting", and, the average state of the average phone camera user (when grabbing footage) is perhaps "I will share this with my friends" or "this looks cool" (whatever you want to label it).

<comment><USER3> Absolutely, I built a passion project a couple of years ago because I found so many amazing videos I wanted to share. They just all happened to be GoPro ones! [http://goproheroes.com/gopro-hero3-black-edition-smaller- lig...](http://goproheroes.com/gopro-hero3-black-edition-smaller-lighter- and-2x-more-powerful)

It's also worth mentioning they are the only company I know that gives away everything they sell to one lucky winner every single day!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Meh, consumer news.

As far as I know the GoPro is based on Ambarella's platforms. Here are some specifications, a teardown and a look at their newest platform:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1nsYd3lG60> [http://www.ambarella.com/products/consumer-hybrid- cameras.ht...](http://www.ambarella.com/products/consumer-hybrid-cameras.html) [http://www.anandtech.com/show/6652/ambarella- announces-a9-ca...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/6652/ambarella- announces-a9-camera-soc-successor-to-the-a7-in-gopro-hero-3-black)

</comment><comment><USER5> Not to down play the immense success, but having a prominent Silicon Valley VC father and a 100k initial investment on his part must have been crucial in getting the injection mouldings done and ready for volume production.

That was pre-kickstarter days. Kickstarter has levelled the playing ground for other hardware entrepreneurs in getting early support to pay for the tooling and moulding process.

</comment><comment><USER6> The competition for the GoPro isn't cellphones. It's Google Glass.

<comment><USER7> It's neither probably. Their competition is other "action" cameras within more convenient packages. Luckily for GoPro they still excel in video quality (in their category).

<comment><USER8> Yes. I was thinking particularly of the #2 action camera vendor, Contour ( <http://contour.com/> ) as the GoPro's main competition right now.

Though Google glass and whoever competes with it will get there too, eventually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It'll be interesting to see if they can compete with cameraphones. GoPro does have a few differentation strategies. First is that they'll offer higher quality video than phones. However, the video quality on phones will get better all the time, and the difference in quality will become smaller every year.

Another strategy is that they can compete with price. Consumers can always buy a case and a strap to house their smartphone in, but if you're filming sports there's a quite high risk to destroy the phone. The price of GoPro-style video cameras will go down over time (if they won't constantly add new features in), but the cost of phones will probably stay high in the future.

Consumers will likely choose the $79 camera instead of risking their $500 phone to film sports.

<comment><USER10> There is always going to be a significant low light advantage to having a larger lense and sensor. Add a mourning bracket / wrist strap, improved noise reduction and there is only so close a camera phone can get.

<comment><USER9> Yes, that's true, but when camera phones will be as good as e.g. Canon 5D Mark iii (and they will, relatively soon even) then that quality will be good enough for practically everyone. At that point only professionals need better quality.

<comment><USER11> How does this prediction jibe with the statement that a larger sensor will always be beneficial, especially in low light?

Will smartphones be able to include much larger sensors in the future?

Is there some new physics that obviates the need for a large sensor?

The 5D Mark III has > 24x the sensor area of an iPhone 5, and most smartphones are even worse off [0] [1]

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_large_sensor_interchang...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_large_sensor_interchangeable- lens_video_cameras) [1] [http://www.chipworks.com/blog/recentteardowns/2012/09/21/app...](http://www.chipworks.com/blog/recentteardowns/2012/09/21/apple- iphone-5-image-sensors-and-battery/)

<comment><USER9> >How does this prediction jibe with the statement that a larger sensor will always be beneficial, especially in low light?

Even though larger sensors will be beneficial, at some point the small sensor will be good enoug for 99% of consumers, though professionals will still prefer the larger sensor.

>Will smartphones be able to include much larger sensors in the future?

Perhaps, like Nokia pureview did - however that phone is slightly larger than the average smartphone.

>Is there some new physics that obviates the need for a large sensor?

No, but technology will advance so that small sensors will be sufficiently good to 99% of consumers. There's progress in sensor technology ever year. There's also progress on the processor side, which has been/is apparently a bottleneck, as new processors in DSLR cameras enable better image quality (take for example DIGIC processors).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm really impressed by the timeline on the article. Appears to be implemented with <https://github.com/athletics/infostory> ; anybody know if this was this custom made just for Forbes, or even just for this article? Seems like a ton of effort for a small detail, but it really enhanced the article for me.

Edit: Better googling yields this article which talks a little bit about the timeline, so definitely not just for the article: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/lewisdvorkin/2012/09/13/inside-f...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/lewisdvorkin/2012/09/13/inside- forbes-our-journey-from-website-to-platform-a-2-year-interactive-timeline/)

<comment><USER13> Hi, I'm one of the partners at Athletics. We originally developed the timeline custom for Forbes and have wanted to push this a bit further at some point, hence the repo. Really glad you liked it.

Where credit's due: The Forbes team developed the GoPro feature using our toolkit as a starting point. (We did the timeline in Lewis D'Vorkin's post that you referenced.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Awesome post - really interesting to see the evolution and how it was all started without the help of sites like Kickstarter (seems like that's where they would have started if the GoPro was about to come out today).

</comment><comment><USER15> GoPro's success is based on one thing, It does it's job very well.</comment>


Why Apple Will Hit $1,650 by the End of 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/03/21/why-apple-will-hit-1650-by-the-end-of-2015/

<comment><USER2> The highlights from the end of the article.

> iTV's adoption should be even faster than iPad.

This seems really dubious. If I understand it right we are talking about a full TV that has all the features of an iPad, not just a set top box. I already have a great TV that I'm not going to pay a premium to replace just for Angry Birds. And a preliminary Best Buy customer survey had the 42-inch at almost $1500(1). You can buy a much bigger and better TV for that much.

> Feature phone decline will open the door to massive iPhone growth.

Maybe. There will be growth once TMobile gets an iPhone, but the reality is there is more competition than ever. I think moderate sustained growth is likely, definitely not 'massive'.

> The iPad market could be close to the size of the PC market today in a few > short years.

Well, PCs seem to be a declining sector, especially considering I can surf the internet on my phone or tablet on my couch instead of heading to a sit-down PC.

> Macs will keep taking share in the PC market as people look to complete > their iOS set.

PCs are declining, and Macs are picking up a share of a declining market. The synergy with iTunes helps sales but the entire market is not going to get them to 2.5 times their current stock price.

> iAd and iPay are both wildcards here. They could be much bigger than what > even I optimistically envision.

Or both much smaller.

Ads are a tough market. Not a lot of people are having explosive success like Google. There's money, but I don't see Apple being the company to tap into that market. Unless they lock out other ad networks in their iOS apps forcing devs to use their system, but that's not a good approach.

As far as mobile payments, I'm not sure what the author thinks Apple is going to do. Unless they open their own financial institution and start their own credit card they will still have to pay fees to Visa and MasterCard. I don't see Apple as that company.

Other highlights:

> Education could massively adopt iPads to replace text books.

Lol. Maybe at a private school, but not in a public school. Kids suck at taking care of things that aren't theirs (and sometimes even their stuff) so it would be prohibitively expensive.

(1) [http://www.extremetech.com/computing/117305-apple-itv- detail...](http://www.extremetech.com/computing/117305-apple-itv-detailed-its- like-a-42-inch-ipad)

<comment><USER3> The iTV may very well be a set top box. Apple has been posturing themselves to take on the cable companies with a disruptive technology, just like they did with the mobile phone carriers and the iPhone.

And PC sales are not in decline, as you suggest. The article states that market grew 10% last year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Bubble, bubble, trouble, trouble!

I love Apple, but is a company that makes cell phones and fancy laptops going to really have a market cap of 10% of the (current value) of the DOW? I don't think so.

At this point, investing in a hot stock like AAPL is just gambling. It's a very real possibility that in the next 3 years, the influx of tablets and smart phones completely stalls iOS's growth. Plus with the newest wave of Ultrabooks, Apple is not as far ahead of the competition as they were two years ago. I mean, I don't think that Apple is going to go anywhere soon, and they will continue to grow, but I think that a lot of their near term future success is already built into the price of the stock.

</comment><comment><USER3> _It took Apple 6 years to sell 100 million iPhones. They'll sell 100 million iPads in 4 years. If I'm right, they'll sell 100 million iTVs in 3 years. People's desires for the latest and greatest device to complement their iOS set is increasing over time._

Minor nitpick, but the iPhone came out in 2007 - 5 years ago. These numbers seem suspect...

</comment><comment><USER5> The same reason no one reads Forbes anymore :D</comment>


GAMERS CAN HEAR EACH OTHER Now WITH AGORA - <AUTHOR> https://www.agora.io/en/blog/gamers-can-hear-now-agora/ <comment><USER2> IF THEY CAN HEAR EACH OTHER, THEN THERE'S NO NEED TO SHOUT.</comment>


Show HN: Straightred.xyz – Red or Yellow card? you decide - <AUTHOR> http://straightred.xyz/

<comment><USER2> Many videos are clearly not even a foul.

</comment><comment><USER2> Is there a ranking or something?</comment>