Show HN: ExpressPython A small Python 3 editor - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/JaDogg/expressPython <comment> git-pull Amazing work

\- C++

\- Has a python API, this opens up a lot of possibilities. Language server protocol, linting and formatting tools, perhaps mypy

\- Highlighting

\- Jedi integration

\- Being able to glue python and c++ to get it to work together in itself is a feat (where I've tried and failed before: [https://www.git- pull.com/#scrapyard](https://www.git-pull.com/#scrapyard) :P)

How did you like working with QT?

GPL is okay, except it precludes those when open source ambitions incompatible with that license. BSD/MIT/ISC/Apache projects can't pull it in. Too much paperwork to pass onto a layperson, a potential contributor.

Also nice CI loop with appveyor! re: [https://github.com/JaDogg/expressPython/blob/master/appveyor...](https://github.com/JaDogg/expressPython/blob/master/appveyor.yml)

Please keep working on this

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks,

If you want to go with C++ & Python I suggest use Boost. Don't take the hackish approach I've taken. -- My bad looks like you didn't get the boost working. Take a look at my code, but I don't think it's very good C++. Boost is the idiomatic way.

How did you like working with QT? I loved it. It feel native in C++ and have a very extensive documentation, not to mention really nice API. Qt source code was probably the best C++ code I've read.

GPL license is the only license allowed for Open source Qt projects If I understood Qt license correctly, I'd have preferred to go MIT. I'm not entirely sure. So I just went with GPL to be safe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> What's different from IDLE?

<comment><AUTHOR> A window to type stuff that can be read as stdin. Honestly I didn't built it to compete with IDLE or other similar editors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Good Job on actually finishing this...

Though i have to admit that I don't see myself using it with free IDEs like vscode and atom around.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. It's not meant to be used as a standalone IDEs/Editor. I myself use PyCharm (with vim plugin when I need to edit fast). This is to test stuff out quickly. I also used an older version of expressPython to train some graduate hires. I also use it to do various coding challenges to keep myself sharp.

<comment><USER3> i own and am an active subscriber for IntelliJ and PyCharm as well, though i'm using it very rarely (basically only if i'm developing a django app) nowadays.

I personally used Hydrogen[1] for your mentioned UseCase. It even lets you keep objects around, so you don't have to repeat _every_ action just to execute a function with some data. (especially handy if you're consuming web services and want test your parsing rules)

As Hydrogen is backed by the Jupyter Kernel, you can get a similar workflow with vscode and PyCharm... though i have to say that hydrogen unique in its integration. haven't really come across anything even remotely as effective for just trying out code

I hope I'm not discourage you. Your software is a quite neat and kudos for going the Native route instead of Electron!

[1] [https://atom.io/packages/hydrogen](https://atom.io/packages/hydrogen)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, When I first started this project in 2014 for my personal use, atom wasn't stable on Windows it crashed often and barely worked. I don't remember VSCode was there in 2014. Now it's 2019 and we have lot of good choices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why was this submission marked [Dead]?

</comment><comment><USER5> Also worth mentioning the mu editor: [https://codewith.mu/](https://codewith.mu/) \- it's an editor designed to learn with.</comment>


The day I reached the 1600 columns limit in PostgreSQL - <AUTHOR> https://rosenfeld.herokuapp.com/en/articles/programming/2017-09-26-the-day-i-reached-the-1600-columns-limit-in-postgresql <comment><USER2> Why Is there a limit on the number of columns I can have, and if something bad happens from having too many, why isn't the limit much lower than 1600, which hopefully most of us can agree is already way beyond absurd?

<comment><USER3> It has to do with how the tuple header that stores the metadata is designed. See comments here: [https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=blob;f...](https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=blob;f=src/include/access/htup_details.h;h=dcfcffc5cb858ed6493e37bc2ac76338b896c7ae;hb=254bb39b720426f7a4616cb6b40f810c44b24b20)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe Im missing the point, but After reading that I still don't understand why you couldn't just add a permanent column and continually overwrite it.

<comment><USER5> You don't understand it because he doesn't understand the problem well enough to explain it, which is why he ever had this problem in the first place.

<comment><USER6> Any chance we can get a quick post mortem?

<comment><USER7> As pstuart mentioned, one of the post mortem was to fix the script, which I did by using a temporary table.

The other part was to enable new columns to be added to that table in case we need in the future. For that part, I locked a few tables for writing, recreated them with a separate name and replaced the old with the new one in order to avoid any downtime or dealing with master-slave set-ups to be able to dump and restore without downtimes. Full vacuum freeze wouldn't reclaim that space back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I had this problem for real and there was no solution: parsing Edgar sec quarterly reports and trying to stick every field into its column. there was no solution so we just through out some of the fields.</comment>


Lua VM running in a WASM environment - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vvanders/wasm_lua <comment><USER2> So, here's a fun example: a self-hosted Lisp.

Copy this: [https://gist.github.com/anonymous/af755d7cf0f71a574f39f547d3...](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/af755d7cf0f71a574f39f547d3357a39)

And paste it into the VM: [https://cdn.rawgit.com/vvanders/wasm_lua/d68f46a8/main.html](https://cdn.rawgit.com/vvanders/wasm_lua/d68f46a8/main.html)

It's a modified version of Lumen ([https://github.com/sctb/lumen](https://github.com/sctb/lumen)) made to run on this VM. It defines a runtime, a reader, a compiler, then compiles the runtime from Lisp to Lua and prints out its own source code.

Lumen is also capable of compiling to JS, and I wanted to show it printing out its own source code as JavaScript instead of Lua. But unfortunately I was getting some strange WASM-related memory errors when compiling as JS, so I decided to settle for a neat demo that everybody can run.

(The demo could be a little less cryptic, and I could do a better job of explaining it, but it's late.)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's really cool(and kinda meta!).

I love how multi-paradigm Lua is, we used to do component based composition with metatables but I've seen OO inheritance and a slew of other approaches as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Other interesting projects:

\- [https://github.com/giann/fengari](https://github.com/giann/fengari) \- new project, most exciting IMO

\- [https://github.com/daurnimator/lua.vm.js](https://github.com/daurnimator/lua.vm.js) \- emscripten based, has best interactions with DOM (but is a dead end)

\- [http://www.moonshinejs.org/](http://www.moonshinejs.org/) \- no longer maintained, interesting model though

\- [https://github.com/paulcuth/starlight](https://github.com/paulcuth/starlight) \- transpiler: you loose ability to use proper coroutines which are IMO most interesting feature for lua in browser

\- [https://github.com/creationix/brozula/](https://github.com/creationix/brozula/) \- unmaintained

\- [https://github.com/logiceditor- com/lua5.1.js](https://github.com/logiceditor-com/lua5.1.js)

\- [https://github.com/mherkender/lua.js](https://github.com/mherkender/lua.js)

<comment><USER4> To add some anecdotes to the above (plural of anecdote is of course data):

\- fengari: Dunno, nice logo & name though :) Not done yet?

\- lua.vm.js: Pretty good, but as you say in your README: "Next step is to iterate on the Lua <=> JS interoperability. Clever solutions to the lack of finalisers in Javascript are being searched for." (-> leak mem if passing stuff to JS in certain situations)

\- Moonshinejs: paulcuth/gamesys' previous effort. It's a Lua VM written in JS, that accepts just Lua 5.1 bytecode. Works in IE6+. Very small. Nice 'DOMAPI' plugin; nice in the sense it mostly just works, and when it doesn't, the plugin is so small & simple you can hack it yourself.

One thing to note is when getting strings back from the DOM using DOMAPI, I've run into situations where the strings when accessed Lua-side are in fact 0-indexed not 1-indexed. (the_string .. "") is a working normalization technique.

Coroutines work very well here.

Also, do not overlook the in-browser debugger addon. It's a seriously nice piece of work, that more than makes up for the lack of source map support.

It deals with the lack of finaliers in Javascript by providing explicit .retain() and .release() mechanisms.

\- Paulcuth/Starlight: As you say, transpiler, no coroutine support though.

How to get coroutines: ... I was looking into this, and you need something like using kripken's Relooper algorithm or a more general version of Facebook's Regenerator. Scary stuff.

Note about both moonshinejs & starlight, with respect to the string library: It implements Lua patterns by turning them into JS RegExp. The implementation isn't good enough as it stands; it's easy to get the wrong results, as the escaping logic is wrong. Damned if I know where though. I tried to fix it and just broke a different class of patterns...

\- Brozula: Dunno

\- Lua5.1.js: Dunno. Would be nice to have a better API for interaction than the Lua C API. No commits since 2013, like Brozula.

\- Lua.js (lua2js): Dunno. Several open issues about e.g. '<' operator not working. No commits since 2013. And:

      _lua_coroutine["resume"] = _lua_coroutine["running"] = _lua_coroutine["status"] = _lua_coroutine["wrap"] = _lua_coroutine["yield"] = _lua_coroutine["create"] = function () { not_supported(); };

<comment><USER5> I had a project that was doing some WebGL stuff using Lua, I found the Emscripten compiled VM to be at least 2x faster than the Moonshine. Compatibility was great, I seem to recall a lack of direct access to the underlying TypedArray. It needed something akin to a table that was directly mapped to raw memory.

<comment><USER4> That's very good to know! My current project is pretty insensitive to performance, but that's definitely useful info for the future.

<comment><USER5> It is a little extra upfront work, but I found it valuable to support a diversity of Lua VMs in Javascript because little impedance mismatches can really derail a project. Being able to switch from one to the other can isolate bugs, compare perf, memory footprint, or different interop schemes. There is literally no way to know at the beginning of a project whether any one runtime will be sufficient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This was just a little demo that I threw together. I didn't expect so much interest but I'm glad people like it.

Lua is a unique language and it's ease of embedding made it a perfect fit for WASM.

</comment><comment><USER6> This could be be very useful for me.

Long term, I would love to see a Lua to WASM compiler/transpiler with additional Lua runtime functionality efficiently implemented in WASM as well. Since WASM already has its own stack-based VM, why not skipthe additional Lua VM bytecode execution layer?

I would love to work on this myself, but right now the time investment isn't practical for me.

<comment><USER7> I've got a Befunge JIT compiling directly to WASM: [https://github.com/serprex/Befunge/tree/master/js](https://github.com/serprex/Befunge/tree/master/js) (hosted: [http://etg.dek.im/funge/funge.html](http://etg.dek.im/funge/funge.html) )

Maybe I should move on to something a little more practical

Note that there seems a lot of misinterpretation of WASM as a good VM bytecode target. You're stuck with i32/i64/f32/f64. Strings have to be manually managed through byte indexing. There's no GC. Targeting WASM directly is really close to targeting an actual ISA directly. So efficient implementation to WASM is going to come off closer to something like LuaJIT. It also doesn't facillitate self modifying code so lazily compiling will imply either using a trampoline to jump between multiple WASM modules or recompiling everything

There's no jump instruction in WASM, so arbitrary goto has to be converted into loop-and-switch. The Befunge VM I linked breaks that down to only relooping between basic blocks. Browsers optimize that pattern. There's room to play around & see if they can optimize something like a CPS VM. Instead of dispatching based on the value of a memory cell, encode an instruction as a 'store-next-instruction to local, break to instruction implementation (if not short bytecode), have that instruction end by looping back, where we switch to next instruction which repeats the store-next-instruction to local'. Where next-instruction encodes this dance repeatedly. Hot areas of the VM may then be inlined by the browser's JIT

To summarize the above paragraph: instead of compiling to bytecode, compile to threaded gotos

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The WASM file seems to be 88K compressed, 241K uncompressed. Not bad!

</comment><comment><USER9> At last.

(Lua is everything JS should have been.)

<comment><USER10> Probably true 5 years ago. I believe now it isn't, mainly because JS is moving much faster (not always good, but many goodies in JS simply do not exist in Lua).

<comment><AUTHOR> There's some things intrinsic to Lua's design that makes it better for performance & embedding. Take a look at how LuaJIT destroys JS in most benchmarks.

Lua also has coroutines and a few other things that don't exist in JS. JS certainly has the market share and libraries but there's quite a few areas where Lua does much better.

<comment><USER10> I'm pretty sure that the original designers of Lua didn't envison that, but LuaJIT is quite nice. I like Lua coroutines but I think JS has practically caught up with generators and other external supports.

<comment><AUTHOR> Huh, didn't know about generators, learn something new every day(although like everything with JS support looks a bit spotty).

<comment><USER11> Generators are also less general. You can't `yield` from a non-generator function. In Lua, coroutines are implemented as a library, not as a core language/syntax thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty sure coroutines are a core part of the language since there's specific C APIs around them but I could be wrong.

<comment><USER11> The library requires low level access to the VM, but you can yield from anywhere, and pass `coroutine.yield` as a value to higher order functions.

However, there are (were?) restrictions when C functions are present on the call stack between `coroutine.resume` and coroutine.yield`.

Edit: not that low level, actually, here's the coroutine implementation, built on top of the public Lua C API:

[http://www.lua.org/source/5.3/lcorolib.c.html](http://www.lua.org/source/5.3/lcorolib.c.html)

(167 lines including white space and comments).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Lua in the browser? Truly, we live in the future.

<comment><USER13> if you can do lua, you can prolly do any language.

<comment><USER14> Can't wait for GHC.

<comment><USER15> Can't wait for BEAM -- the Erlang VM in the browser!

<comment><USER5> [http://www.erlang- factory.com/upload/presentations/643/brows...](http://www.erlang- factory.com/upload/presentations/643/browserlatEUC2012.pdf)

[https://github.com/svahne/browserl](https://github.com/svahne/browserl)

[https://github.com/baryluk/erljs](https://github.com/baryluk/erljs)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Its faster for sure... I benchmarked a dummy pi calculation code and got this results:

> JS: 0.11499999999068677ms

> Lua: 0.0019999999999527ms

BUT, they don't print the same results.

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm running into an integer overflow error. Try this as input: [https://gist.github.com/anonymous/f00581ecf4dba42501c9c56991...](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/f00581ecf4dba42501c9c569914a909a)

Is there a way to debug it?

It should print the following string: "print(1 + 2)"

This is very cool.

<comment><USER17> A Lisp running on top of Lua on top of WASM? :)

<comment><USER2> Yup! I couldn't resist. [https://github.com/sctb/lumen](https://github.com/sctb/lumen)

I think there's some bug in indexing into Lua tables. print(str({1, 2})) should print "(1 2)", for example, but it triggers an integer overflow error.

It's actually capable of compiling to both Lua and JS, so I was going to show off a Lisp running on top of Lua on top of WASM which generates JavaScript, completing the circle of life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I really look forward to being able to compile WASM to native machine code. With a default link to an SDL canvas library, it would become something like a universal runtime for most media applications. You run that in a sandbox and you pretty much have a native version of the modern browser minus the DOM.

<comment><USER19> WASM apps will still have access to the browser; you'll need more than SDL to replace that.

More likely, native apps will port to WASM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Didn't work for me. Here's my Chrome OS X console output: [http://i.imgur.com/RnA5mUb.png](http://i.imgur.com/RnA5mUb.png)

Let me know if you need more info.

EDIT: Ah, it's firefox-only.

Is there some way I can help get it running on Chrome?

<comment><USER20> Worked without any configuration changes for me (Chromium 59 on Stretch).

<comment><USER21> Worked without any configuration changes.

Chrome Version 57.0.2987.110 (64-bit)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Sweet, I've thought about doing this with emscripten in the past for a an LED panel i've been building/working on. It runs LUA on a microcontroller to drive the display and I wanted a way to simulate the whole thing on the fly.

</comment><comment><USER23> Anyone else getting " Assertion failed: Cannot call unknown function run_lua (perhaps LLVM optimizations or closure removed it?)" ?

<comment><USER24> Yup, on Chrome 56.

<comment><USER25> WebAssembly is only on by default in Chrome 57+.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If I can get cqueues running, then I can run lapis on that and get a webserver happening.. in my browser!

</comment><comment><USER26> Works on Chrome 58 out of the box. Very cool!</comment>


Michael Jackson Estate Turns the 'Fair Use' Tables on Disney - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/michael-jackson-estate-turns-the-fair-use-table-on-disney-180531/ <comment><USER2> Disney only cares about the law when it profits them. Remember that they rose to fame by using stories that were in the public domain and exempt from copyright, then lobbied to extend their own copyright indefinitely.

<comment><USER3> Nothing you've said implies Disney violated any laws, however much I disagree with their actions.

Small companies innovate.

Large companies litigate.

Mega companies legislate.

<comment><USER4> > Nothing you've said implies Disney violated any laws, however much I > disagree with their actions.

This is a problem with the US' letter of the law legal system. We make excuses and justify actions because they aren't explicitly listed as illegal, even though we all know they're in bad faith.

<comment><USER3> If you mean that judges or law enforcement should be able to punish actions that are not against the law, then I disagree wholeheartedly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "[I]f Disney's position on fair use of the Estate's copyrights were accepted one could create a two-hour documentary about the Star Wars franchise, by summarizing each film and using extensive clips from each film while playing the iconic Star Wars music in the background of interviews and narration, and all without permission from Disney."

Great quote

<comment><USER6> Isn't that what the (in)famous RedLetterMedia reviews of the Star Wars prequels did?

<comment><USER7> Yes.

But... are they legal? I wouldn't consider that a sure thing. As much as I've enjoyed some of them, I've often thought the "extensive video review" industry is very likely on the wrong side of copyright. It is true they check off a lot of the fair use criteria, certainly. But one of the core determinations is "can you consume this work in lieu of the original?" and some of those things come perilously close to that line, if they don't outright cross it. Obviously, it is not the _same_ experience, but you certainly come away from such a review knowing all the characters, all the major plot points and often a significant portion of the minor ones, probably the best special effects scenes, a decent slice of the music, and the ability to fairly thoroughly BS your way through a conversation about the movie with people who went to it the normal way without them necessarily realizing you never actually saw it.

<comment><USER8> > _" can you consume this work in lieu of the original?"_

Grab some 8yo, throw them in front of the RLM reviews, and tell them it's Star Wars... are they gonna watch it and be equally satisfied?

Extensive reviews are just like in-extensive reviews... Knowing all the characters is a staple of movie reviews in all forms, as are plot synopses. Story import of character and scene does not factor in to whether it is review-able in any medium. These issues are are applicable to most written movie reviews, book reviews, and song reviews too. They are exempt from Copyright for the same reasons. Why would we want a culture where superficial critique is acceptable, but in-depth critique is rejected?

You hit the nail on the head: "it is not the same experience". If it starts providing some of the same experience, via excessive clips or music, then they infringe. Too much of a song, clips with no purpose, etc. RLM is among the better cases for meaningful reviews.

<comment><USER7> "Grab some 8yo, throw them in front of the RLM reviews, and tell them it's Star Wars... are they gonna watch it and be equally satisfied?"

That is not the question the law asks. The question the law asks is the one I gave. It is naked and unashamedly commercial in nature. A more way of phrasing it might be, grab an 8yo who has not seen the movie in question, show them the review, maybe take a moment to wonder if that's necessarily a good idea for this specific review, and then ask them if they are still interested in seeing the movie. Or perhaps better, if we're talking 8, sit them in front of the movie and see if perhaps they wander away halfway through because they already know the ending.

At the margin, the answer is likely to be that the review substantially reduces the need to consume the original content. That is, for a single case it's trivial to imagine anything you want happening. But if you imagine repeating that experiment thousands of times, is the desire to view going to go down? It's easy to hypothesize your kid saying "yes I still want to see it all the way through in fact I want it more than ever" but that's just an assertion moreso than an argument. It's a _possible_ outcome, but I find it much easier to believe that at the margin, desire is reduced. In that case it would be very likely to fall afoul of current fair use law; even given that again I fully stipulate their superficial conformance to a number of the 4-part test for fair use in US judicial decisions they could still lose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I hope Disney wins. The 1998 Copyright Extension is over this year and WELL POSSIBLY we could get things back into public domain again!!!

Can we please figure out how we can have renewable copyright law which cost over $1,000 a year per copyright item. That way Disney can keep Mickey Mouse and 99% of the rest gets released as public domain. If not they are looking to increase the Copyright to 125 years after death.

I pray the reign of terror of Mickey Mouse might be over soon. [https://boingboing.net/2018/01/08/sonny-bono-is- dead.html](https://boingboing.net/2018/01/08/sonny-bono-is-dead.html)

<comment><USER10> >Can we please figure out how we can have renewable copyright law which cost over $1,000 a year per copyright item.

No fuck Disney and their reshaping of America's copyright law. For one stupid animated mouse they changed how the entire Public Domain worked. It's not really possible to boycott Disney at this point, but if I could I would because of this issue alone.

<comment><USER11> >It's not really possible to boycott Disney at this point

How not? I consume nearly no Disney media. My biggest consumption right now would likely be hulu, and that's a shared account that I don't pay for

<comment><USER12> How about ABC or ESPN? If not them I'm sure there are a dozen other examples of things Disney owns that may or may not be common knowledge.

I'm not saying it's impossible but it is sure hard at this point. Personally I'd really feel like I was missing out by boycotting Star Wars or Marvel. I know not everyone likes the direction Disney is taking these franchises but I continue to enjoy them, especially when sharing with my kids. I'd miss out if I tried to boycott Disney.

Doesn't mean I like them as a company though!

<comment><USER11> Never cared much for the original Star Wars, and certainly don't care for the new ones. Don't care for the vast majority of movies, or even traditional media. I don't consume sports, so the only ESPN I view is Five-Thirty-Eight on election cycles. Meanwhile I haven't watched TV, or ABC in 8 years. Apparently I'm (accidentally) boycotting a lot of media.

I actually didn't realize it was so hard to avoid most of those things. They're full of the same old same old, and produce nearly no satisfaction for me. It's like eating fast food, very tasty, but of no quality. Though I say that, and yet regularly consume fast food. Goes to show my opinion of most "mainstream" media I guess

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've read the complaint, and I doubt Disney's legal department is concerned by this lawsuit. I'm going to predict that Disney has a blanket license for most of the music recordings through ASCAP or whatever other organization would normally handle those licenses.

The bulk of the complaint lists terrible things Disney's legal department has done, but it's not clear how those actions are legally relevant. "Hypocrisy" is not one of the factors in whether something is fair use.

The statement that other documentaries get licenses from the estate doesn't say whether those documentaries are actually legally required to get those licenses. And it certainly doesn't say whether Disney needs a license for its project.

I'm going to predict that the music recording claims will be dropped when Disney shows it has a blanket license, and the other claims do look like fair use to me. But maybe Disney will settle before trial.

<comment><USER14> There's no such thing as a "blanket license" that term is nonsensical. Rights to footage, or sync rights to audio, are always case by case.

Presumably you've gotten yourself confused with what are called mechanical licenses, which only cover songs, and only the music and lyrics (not original recordings) and have basically nothing to do with this at all.

<comment><USER13> You're right: [https://www.ascap.com/help/career-development/a-checklist- fo...](https://www.ascap.com/help/career-development/a-checklist-for-using- music-in-film) suggests that the kind of license I would expect a producer to need wouldn't come from ASCAP.

So all four claims are relevant, but Disney's alleged hypocrisy doesn't seem to me to serve any purpose in the complaint (other than to get the thing noticed by the media).

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h I suppose one reason for hypocrisy to matter is that it proves they knew what they were doing. If I do $FOO, I could think that $FOO was okay. If I do $FOO while actively suing other people for doing $FOO, then it's obvious that I'm knowingly doing something wrong (or perjuring myself, I suppose).

<comment><USER15> Yeah in law this is called estoppel and it could be very relevant to this case.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Did they mention Napster enough times in the article? Each time the article lost more credibility with me and felt more like buzz feed.

<comment><USER17> The line about Napster references, and later directly quotes, a section from the complaint PDF (page 6, section 16).

<comment><USER18> Also you are reading a blog on the "Torrent Freak" website... so they may be zooming in on the part of this story that resonates with this author and typical readership.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wow, it's not every day that I agree with Disney, but here I am.

As an avid Pirate, I don't care if Disney made digital copies of Michael Jackson's music for use in a commercially successful documentary about Michael Jackson's life.

<comment><USER20> But perhaps as an avid pirate, you might care about the naked hypocrisy exhibited by Disney re: copyright, which is the crux of the Jackson estate's clever argument here (clever to the layperson, at least -- who knows if it will hold much weight if the case goes to trial).

<comment><USER21> it comes to a point where Piracy isn't just about caring, but from old habits. What are they going to do if I don't pay their piracy fines? Find me and put me in jail for something they cannot prove even happened?

<comment><USER22> > something they cannot prove even happened

You just implicated yourself, and in a public forum no less. Alone this wouldn't be enough for legal action, but it could prove very useful, especially for showing intent for criminal prosecution. In any event, you never know how information can be used, and used against you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> One thing I miss from slashdot was the "from the ... department" or similar. In this case:

        From the 'You reap what you sow department.'

</comment><comment><USER24> So if Disney win then they lose all their other piracy cases, but if they lose then they win their other cases?

I'm not sure which one they would prefer to have, though this will most certainly be settled out of court with some significant (for us) money changing hands.</comment>


Oral history of 1980s digital icon Max Headroom - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/2/8285139/max-headroom-oral-history-80s-cyberpunk-interview

<comment><USER2> Related: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_broadcast_signal_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Headroom_broadcast_signal_intrusion)

</comment><comment><USER3> See also the first episode of Make or Break TV from 2008, which told basically the same story, but with more visuals.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nostalgia :D

Max was awesome. Brilliant irreverence.

They had some quite intellectual jokes for a pop piece.

I remember the cool :)</comment>


Show HN: GetGit, a simple Gitea hosting service - <AUTHOR> https://getgit.co <comment><USER2> "Create as many users, organizations, and repos as you want."

Sounds like unlimited to me. What happens when someone actually creates 100k repos and stuffs them with 5GB each?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question! My plan is essentially to ask them politely to not. :)

There is a soft limit of 5 GB per subdomain. Once a user hits that limit I'll send them a notification about the limit and eventually take some action like asking them to remove data or moving them to a monthly or metered plan.

It's still a bit of an experiment right now, and I may find that I need to adjust that limit. Thanks for asking! I appreciate the feedback.</comment></comment>


U.S. Life Expectancy Drops for Third Year in a Row (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/us-life-expectancy-drops-third-year-row-reflecting-rising-drug-overdose-suicide-rates-180970942/ <comment><USER2> The article says the drop is due to people in their 20s and 30s are dying but why? The article states there is a big increase in overdose deaths but in percentage terms. Is this significant? Are deaths from fentanyl up from 1,000 to 2,000 or 100,000 to 200,000?

I also didn't find the word "obesity" anywhere in this article and I have to wonder how much this is a factor too.

As much as people might take this as "see how much life is better in [country X]", you still see people desperate to come here. Even in the EU, legal and illegal immigrants are much more likely to be headed to the UK and Germany.

I'm Australian but I've now lived in the US coming up on 9 years. The reason? As a software engineer, you can squeeze what would be a lifetime of savings in Australia into 10 years or less and that's hard to ignore.

The US is a pretty terrible place to live if you're poor however. And that goes far beyond life expectancy (but it of course plays into it).

<comment><USER3> > The US is a pretty terrible place to live if you're poor however.

That's simply not true. The poor in the US have one of the world's most expensive welfare states. It's the next ~20%-25% or so above the bottom 25%, that have it worst. Those people don't get free access to healthcare because they earn too much.

The US has a very advanced welfare state and safety net for the poor. The US spends more of its economy on its welfare state than either Canada or Australia, and is in the upper half of the OECD in that regard. The US welfare state is also rapidly growing, whereas most other developed nations are seeing their welfare states shrinking.

The US poverty and homelessness rates are both superior to Canada and France. The US provides free healthcare for the bottom 25%, along with countless other massive programs involving food and shelter for the poor.

<comment><USER4> You talk about absolute costs as if that means much.

Surely a conclusion can be reached where you're spending more than any other country, yet so inefficient at distributing the wealth that you're spending, or funnelling it into broken feedback loops that keep people in the welfare system.

surely if that were the case then it doesn't matter how much you're spending in absolute terms, you'd still not be enriching the lives of the poor or helping social mobility.

<comment><USER5> US social spending as a percentage of GDP (not absolute amounts) is about 18%, about the same as Canada and Australia, a bit higher than the Netherlands or Switzerland, and a smidge below the OECD average of 20%.

[https://data.oecd.org/socialexp/social- spending.htm](https://data.oecd.org/socialexp/social-spending.htm)

<comment><USER4> I'm saying total spending doesn't equate to effectiveness of spending. I too can "spend" a lot of money on a boat by throwing suitcases of money into the ocean, but it does nothing to improve the boat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Folks, the equation is quite simple: the US is a high-risk, high (financial) reward society. Unlike the EU, it's optimized for the upside: you have many opportunities to create wealth for yourself (and sometimes for others). The EU, conversely, is optimized for the downside: you may not have too many opportunities to climb high, but even if you are the bottom, life can still be relatively comfortable. So, for the averaghe person, the European system is likely (almost definitely) better. For risk-craving entrepreneurs, the US is better (although some other places may have even more and bigger high-risk opportunities nowadays). For you? You decide!

<comment><USER7> That's not actually true at all. The US has lower social mobility than most wealthy European countries. Thus, there are actually fewer opportunities for most people to create wealth for themselves compared to countries with more equality. It's hard to start a business, if, like the vast majority of people, you don't have a bunch of excess money sitting around.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/aparnamathur/2018/07/16/the- u-s...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/aparnamathur/2018/07/16/the-u-s-does- poorly-on-yet-another-metric-of-economic-mobility/#1dab24b66a7b)

[https://www.economist.com/graphic- detail/2018/02/14/american...](https://www.economist.com/graphic- detail/2018/02/14/americans-overestimate-social-mobility-in-their-country)

<comment><USER8> Quintile graphs obscure absolute magnitudes. Most of the people that have a realistic chance of making it into the upper income/wealth quintiles come from relatively high social strata already (either within the U.S or, if they're an immigrant, within their home countries), but they want that high percentile to mean more in absolute terms.

In other words, if you come from the upper end of the distribution, income inequality is a feature not a bug.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think this has to do with the Great Recession. Prolonged economic insecurity is associated with a poor mental health. And that is in turn associated with self medication with things like alcohol and opioids.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4741013/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4741013/)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4151244/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4151244/)

<comment><USER10> That would be a quite a laggy effect at this point. The US has been having it's longest continuous period of economic growth ever.

<comment><USER11> Growth on Wall Street isn't growth on main street, and huge corporate and big investor profits (and associated cash hordes) haven't meant economic recovery in the places and communities hardest hit by the opioid epidemic.

<comment><USER12> _Growth on Wall Street isn 't growth on main street_

Of course it is. Where do you think main streets pensions and 401k are invested? Where do you think main street people work?

<comment><USER13> most equity is held by the richest americans, while others primarily depend on wages which haven't risen in decades, basically.

also most people aren't employed by large business.

[https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most- us...](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers- real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/)

[https://www.huffpost.com/entry/five-big-myths-about- amer_b_8...](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/five-big-myths-about- amer_b_866118)

<comment><USER12> Wages are only one part of compensation. Total compensation has increased faster than inflation over the past decades.

<comment><USER14> Health insurance costs have increased faster than inflation for decades and is responsible for the total increase in compensation[1].

Workers are not getting more or better benefits. They're getting the same or worse benefits, it's just that health insurance costs for the same plans increase each year at a rate that vastly outpaces inflation.

[1] [https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BF- AU065A_INSUR_9...](https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BF- AU065A_INSUR_9U_20170919122105.jpg)

<comment><USER12> That's true, but it also contradicts the claim that compensation isn't going up. Sure it's going towards ever more expensive healthcare, but it is going up.

<comment><USER13> you seem to have both shifted the frame from wages to compensation then defeated a non-existent claim about it, so that seems like a mighty straw man.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I see some people talking about Germany and France offering far better and cheaper healthcare.

But can you afford to look only at Germany and France? They operate in a broader framework of EU.

If you are going to compare services/living standards then must also directly compare Romania or Bulgaria to the US because Germany and France are able to provide cheap healthcare because their healthcare staff are willing to accept lower prices and how does it work? By importing labor from cheaper European countries. Presently, many doctors and nurses from Romania work in Germany without them good luck being able to maintain "cheap" healthcare.

If you cut off Germany and France from rest of the EU, the healthcare cost will likely shoot up far more than what it costs in US now.

There is downward pressure on wages in whole EU and this is why Europeans come to states for better employment opportunities, and better pay which can and does buy you better living standards if you are willing to spend the money you make but it seems not many want to do that, they want free healthcare in addition to taking large proportion of their wages home.

<comment><USER16> I am from Portugal, a country that has many people working in richer EU countries, but I don't think this is true.

Romanian or Portuguese nurses and doctors working in France or Germany or any other country will have the same wages as a french nurse or doctor. Or most of the time at least.

My wife is a nurse and we did some research on this a few years ago.

<comment><USER17> There is still the possibility of increased worker availability reducing wages, you have less bargaining power if theres readily someone else to take your place.

<comment><USER18> Medical workers coming in from other countries can suppress wages, but enough to cause a significant price difference in cost of health care? We also don't know the dynamic effects of a labor shortage. Maybe Germans would switch jobs into the medical field and the wages won't rise that much?

<comment><USER15> German companies are bitching forever now that there are no workers available for them. I read that in news every other week.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Lack of a stable career, terrible health insurance, high premiums, lack of community involvement, isolation from people, increased screen time and media consumption, hopelessness from always on sensational news, hopelessness in the face of global catastrophe to be coming near you due to ever worsening climate problem, student debt, not being able to afford a home, lack of healthy food options, diet and exercise misinformation, overprescribed medication, always on notifications never allowing you to relax, binge watching Netflix no time for brain to relax, shortened sleep cycles disrupting circadian rhythm.

I wonder what could possibly make people feel like shit and wanting to end it all...

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm open the idea of various forms of drug legalization, but someone pointed out that the opioid epidemic (which is behind the decline in life expectancy) is arguably an experiment with legalizing heroin. The analogy isn't perfect, but that gave me pause.

<comment><USER11> Decriminalization (which is subtly different than legalization) of drugs isn't in conflict with preventing addiction and abuse by treating these as health problems, which is what they actually are.

The opioid epidemic was in significant part pushed forward by the unscrupulous marketing of prescription opioid manufacturers, and further catalyzed by the declining socioeconomic conditions in the areas most affected by the epidemic.

<comment><USER21> > Decriminalization (which is subtly different than legalization) of drugs > isn't in conflict with preventing addiction and abuse by treating these as > health problems, which is what they actually are.

It is when you hold the belief that addiction is a moral failing. Most parts of the US seem to be digging out from under that misconception, though. Finishing it off for good could be the one good thing to come out of the opioid epidemic.

<comment><USER22> Yes, if there's any benefit to the current opioid crisis, it's that American perceptions of addiction are changing as they see that anyone, not just poor/minorities can be affected by addiction and that it's absolutely not a moral failing

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Two weeks, I had open heart surgery in my mid-20s in the US.

My main takeaway is this: those of us who work in tech or companies with decent health insurance are extremely fortunate.

In total (knock on wood that this doesn't go up), I spent around $10k out of pocket.

This included more than surgery itself:

\- multiple ER visits because of my deteriorating valve

\- a LOT of dentist work (cleanings, fillings, wisdom teeth removal); these things increase your risk of stroke/heart attack after heart surgery.

\- multiple visits with cardiologist and surgeon consultations

\- pre-operation

\- six days in the hospital recovering

To be honest, that's a lot less than I expected to pay. However, I can't help but think of people in less fortunate positions that would 1) get fucked by the bills if they had no insurance or 2) still go into debt despite having insurance. When you really think about it, all options are ridiculous for an operation that is literally do-or-die.

I'd also like to add a note on specialized vs 'routine' care here in the US. Or my experience with it, anyway.

All specialized treatment I received (dentist, heart surgery, cardiologist) was outstanding.

Routine cafe was awful, and ER visits were nothing short of ridiculous. I went in with chest pain/shortness of breath (that I now know was very serious). I waited for 6 hours. They gave me some blood work and an ekg and sent me on my way. I went again the next week, because my symptoms were getting progressively worse. Once again, I waited about 6 hours in the waiting room before getting an ekg and some blood work. Both visits were a complete waste of time. Luckily, I saw a cardiologist shortly after who gave me an echocardiogram and identified the valve issue.

This (the shortness of breath, dentist visits, surgery) was all done within the last two months. Were I in a less fortunate financial position, I probably would have hesitated to even go to the cardiologist. Especially after having thrown money at the ER for nothing.

It's unfortunate how our healthcare system mirrors some sort of class-based hierarchy: If you can afford it, great! Else, get fucked.

<comment><USER24> > _It's unfortunate how our healthcare system mirrors some sort of class-based > hierarchy: If you can afford it, great! Else, get fucked._

It's not widely known in the upper/upper middle classes but healthcare is more or less free if you're poor in the US (even for major things like cancer treatment). It's really the middle class that has it the worst as they don't qualify for free health care.

Edit:

Some additional information to back up my assertion:

72.5 million people are covered by Medicaid: [https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/eligibility/index.html](https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/eligibility/index.html)

The vast majority of medical services are available for free to Medicaid members: [https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/benefits/index.html](https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/benefits/index.html)

<comment><USER23> I was on Medicaid just a few years ago. It was definitely a lifesend, but the network is very tiny and, as a result, scheduling visits with specialists (in my experience, so anecdotally) took about three months.

I am very grateful I was not on Medicaid during the past few months. But I am happy it's an option.

<comment><USER25> _scheduling visits with specialists (in my experience, so anecdotally) took about three months._

From my own experience, that's approximately what it takes to schedule a specialist visit in the UK.

Unless (surprise!) you have a private insurance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I was expecting the cause to be obesity - just imagine how much healthcare costs would go down if the 40% of Americans who are obese, weren't.

I'd imagine life expectancy would go up a bit too.

<comment><USER27> Free or reduced cost stuff is all the rage these days. Yet we refuse to look in the mirror, where at least a partial explanation for the costs may be found. Quite unfortunate.

<comment><USER22> There are some other interesting tweaks that can be done as well, sin taxes on things like sugar, tobacco, and booze are all likely to have major impacts on increasing the overall life expectancy

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> We continue paying more for demonstrably worse care and outcomes than our global peers.

Single payer needs to happen, now. Medicare for All.

<comment><USER12> You do realize that Medicare Part D is entirely run by private companies and thus is no "single payer".

<comment><USER21> That's true, but it only covers prescription drugs. The rest of the system is single-payer.

Not that we _need_ single-payer, just more controls on costs and benefits. Germany and Switzerland do fine without single-payer.

<comment><USER12> Medicare Advantage includes Parts A,B,D and are run by private insurers as well.

It just irks me when people call for "Medicare for all", but clearly don't understand what Medicare actually is.

<comment><USER29> Not accurate. Part A and B are paid directly to medicare.

<comment><USER12> Part C plans offer Part A and B through private insurers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Has there been comparison of urban to rural areas with this? Are young people in rural areas dying faster than urban areas?

I found this from 2017: [https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p1019-rural- overdose...](https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p1019-rural-overdose- deaths.html)

My sense is that rural areas are harder to change, and probably far more prone to monopolies from service providers. The combination of higher costs of monopoly with higher rates of drug use might lead to more deaths.

Or, in another way, in the US, is being poor in a rural area better/worse/similar to being homeless in an urban one?

<comment><USER31> Unless I'm missing a parent reference you're referring to, the article explicitly mentioned this:

>In terms of deaths from suicide, Bernstein writes that there is a huge disparity between urban and rural Americans. The suicide rate amongst urban residents is 11.1 per 100,000 people, as opposed to rural residents' 20 per 100,000.

<comment><USER30> I'm just wondering if there's ways to link the timelines of the main article (last 3 years) and the rural vs urban comparison (which was from 2017, but cites data much earlier)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Glad to live in Canada. As of 2016, life expectancy was nearly four years ahead of the US, and trending in the right direction.

<comment><USER12> Huh?

 _" Life expectancy in Canada has stopped increasing for the first time in more than four decades, due largely to soaring overdose deaths in the Western provinces."_[1]

[1][https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british- columbia/arti...](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british- columbia/article-overdose-crises-lowering-life-expectancy-statistics-canada/)

<comment><USER32> My bad, there's a drop two years after the source I looked at. Seems like the problem is international. So I guess the question is: what can we do about it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> [Nit] Show me 4 embedded ads but not a single chart when talking about trends. Also 2018.

<comment><USER34> This is a good starting point. This is all open access, and funded through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This is done at the University of Washington Medical School, which is basically "as good as it gets" for a public medical school in the US. UW also has solid allied health departments. Their statistics department (even outside of the realm of health) is solid too: [http://www.healthdata.org/us- health/publications](http://www.healthdata.org/us-health/publications)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Interesting quotes from the article:

> Speaking with NPR, disease prevention expert William Dietz of George > Washington University stressed the links between overdoses and suicides. > Both may occur amongst people "less connected to each other in communities" > and are tied to a "sense of hopelessness, which in turn could lead to an > increase in rates of suicide and certainly addictive behaviors."

> McHugh echoes Dietz, concluding, "There's a tremendous amount of overlap > between the two that isn't talked about nearly enough."

</comment><comment><USER36> Meanwhile, I was informed yesterday that my health insurance premium is going up by 12%.

</comment><comment><USER37> Anecdotal Comments < Hard Evidence. US is indeed in relative decline.

</comment><comment><USER38> The writing is on the wall: the US has to fix is healthcare system.

</comment><comment><USER39> Quick googling shows suicide deaths increasing 24% over 15 years, to 45,000 in 2014.

I heard an interview on Sam Harris' podcast where the contention was teenage suicide rates are dramatically increasing.

Overdose deaths are at around 70,000 for 2017.

Overdose deaths and suicide are very connected, insofar as they can be traced to a feeling of hopelessness or meaninglessness.

Alcoholics are at a very high risk for suicide, for example.

There may be many other related causes of death: homicides, car crashes, and other destructive behaviors can still be viewed through a lens of lack of self worth or hope.

I think it is a huge mistake to treat it as a priori that economic factors drive this situation.

You can argue that even though we are all materially much more well off than 100 years ago, the awareness of relative status still has a profound psychological impact.

But I think looking at possible non-economic factors relating to psychological, philosophical, and spiritual health might provide alternate hypothesis that could help. I think policy makers and pundits avoid that because it seems much harder to address those issues via policy.

To me, though, the data implies a widespread crisis in sense of meaning.

<comment><USER40> US population is up 15% over those same 15 years. The increase in suicides is a lot less dramatic when normalized per-capita.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Even in a country where people were well educated, the average life expectancy rising beyond some point wouldn't be a good thing. No idea where that optimum average life expectancy is, but it's entirely possible that we exceeded it and the drop noted here is actually a positive thing.

<comment><USER42> What is your rationale for capping average life expectancy? I hope not some reasoning based on costs due to old age since that is not a logical consequence. Advances leading to increased life expectancy could also lead to healthier / more productive old age.

<comment><USER41> Not capping life expectancy artificially and not artificially working to extend it for everyone. The world got along fine from 1800-1900 with the world average life expectancy existing at less than 50, but there's no guarantee of the same being true at a global average of 100. IRL everyone alive now exists in a tenuous situation where one of the key constraints is Earth's finite resources. Everyone can't have everything everywhere at the same time while living to 100 unless the population stays artificially low.

*[https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy](https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> If you live in the US and plan on staying alive in the long run, then you better spend a lot of time consulting HealthData.org--and analyzing the data there--to fit your particular situation.

The third leading cause of death--or at least what is believed to be the third leading cause of death--is preventable medical errors: [https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2016/05/03/4766361...](https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2016/05/03/476636183/death-certificates-undercount-toll-of-medical- errors)

Let's not even get in to how much health care actually costs in the US. But, if you want a completely solid read on that matter, get the book CASINO HEALTHCARE via Amazon. You will not be disappointed.

That being said, both me and my fraternal twin brother turned 30 a month ago. Unlike for most people, turning 30, together with my brother, was a very special milestone that I never expected to reach in life.

I have 2 rare autoimmune neurological diseases, that affect my peripheral nervous system (with one of them being very rare, with only case reports and cohorts published in the medical literature...and it was discovered relatively recently in the medical world...in the past 20 years via NIH research grants to physician-scientists) plus type 1 diabetes. It is all connected, but that is another story for another time.

The US health care system is unequipped to properly deal with people who have rare diseases. 6-7% of the general population has a rare disease, so having one, diagnosed or not, is actually common, and is even more common than the prevalence of ADHD in adults! This too is another story for another time, but I ended up self diagnosing the very rare one correctly, even though in my case the whole situation is beyond confounding, even compared to others with the same very rare condition that I have.

The issue is that for people with rare disease, the situation can be desperate, dismal, and even hopeless. In the case of rare disease, the social support structures in place within a society are literally just as important as the medical aspects of care.

We really do need highly specific plans and approaches for, rare diseases in general, for dealing with our unique situations. Compared the the United States, the European Union excels at this, and is the only world superpower that has a practical, pragmatic, and winning approach on the matter. For access to orphan drugs, Germany is the clear winner worldwide. For societal supports, Norway (which is not part of the EU but it is kind of part of the EU for the purposes here) is phenomenal and no other country compares, worldwide. Their government has extremely well developed programs, offices, and "medical homes" (go to contacts that are teams that coordinate all care) for rare disease patients, and for them only.

Remember, our situations are unique and different compared to other more common chronic illnesses, whether you want to believe this or not.

In fact, probably the biggest threat to my well being as somebody with rare disease: a government that does not reform, regulation wise, with the rapidly changing pace of technology. (And yes, all technology in general needs to be regulated, to varying degrees, whether you want to agree or not.)

Sorry to go off on a tangent. If I told the whole story, which would take quite awhile, you would be shocked, amazed, stunned, and impressed, all at the same time. I have cheated death many times, and I really shouldn't be alive. Both my doctors and I very much are aware of that. I certainly do not know why I am here, however I have purpose and I have meaning in my life.

I would love to go into more specifics, but I cannot without effectively writing a novel here.

The point is, on my 30th birthday, I came to the realization that I basically have to go to the EU (I am a dual US|EU citizen) to not only stay alive in the long term, but to potentially avoid having to suffer profoundly for the rest of my life. I cannot go in to the specifics here, though. But, trust me, the US health care system is not equipped to deal with rare disease properly, at all.

So, instead of celebrating the remarkable accomplishment of my 30th birthday with my best friend (I really shouldn't be alive), I was realizing that I had to leave the US for good, to stay alive. I cannot go in to specifics here, but this is not an exaggeration at all. It was profoundly sad for me, because I have to leave my family, who mostly live int he US, and basically start a new life.

</comment><comment><USER43> I moved from the EU to the US...

Toddler had a seizure (first and last ever). Called 911. $1300 for a 1.5 mile (per Google Maps) ambulance ride to the hospital plus a $300 bill just towards "medical care" for the ride (none actually given).

Then $800 for the ER, and a seperate $400 bill for the doctor (who sent us home after telling us to come back if more occurred but otherwise give child's tylenol and go see the child's pediatrician on Monday).

Did I mention that both the ambulance company and the hospital have a local monopoly? There's no price competition, no choice to be made, nor could there be in a medical emergency.

The problem with all of these is: If it happened again, I'm genuinely going to think "is this an emergency enough to justify a $2K medical bill?" That shouldn't be how medical treatment is decided.

The whole "capitalism will solve it" thing just isn't working. I cannot shop around for medical care, I cannot see prices, and insurance is $1300/month for essentially no benefit (except to turn prices from bonkers to incredibly high).

<comment><USER44> I agree that is outrageous. The problem is that people think it is capitalism. When there is no price transparency, there is no capitalism, period.

Hopefully the US is on the way to government healthcare, but for now it would be great to just achieve price transparency so people can shop around.

Without price there is no competition. Without competition there is no capitalism.

<comment><USER45> Kenneth Arrow did a great analysis on efficient markets and the US healthcare industry. Basically it doesn't work the way it works in most free markets because of information asymmetry (he got the Nobel for it). Even if you had price transparency, you aren't in a position to decide what treatment to buy because you're not the doctor and don't have the necessary knowledge to make that decision. The whole process is misaligned because the recipient is not knowledgable enough to make the decision, the decision maker (doctor) is not the payor, and the actual payor (insurance) is often neither of those. Efficient markets require certain preconditions to be met to work. It's true in many situations but there are some well known edge cases.

<comment><USER46> I think you are right but I still think two steps would make the system much saner:

\- Price transparency

\- One price for the same service. The practice of charging $500 to the insurance but $10000 to the uninsured needs to stop. Maybe it's fine to vary by a few percent but there is no other market where the same product costs 20x more depending on who pays. If the excuse is that this is to compensate for non payers then let's pay for this from a separate pot.

<comment><USER47> None of this addresses the point- even if you have price transparency and one price for the same service, you are not educated enough to select services you need. Doubly so if an emergency happens.

<comment><USER46> There are plenty of situations where you know what you need and you could shop for prices if it was possible to get any reliable prices. At a minimum transparency would make it obvious to the public how crazy the pricing practices are.

I agree about emergency situations.

<comment><USER47> If I go for routine bloodwork do I know exactly what bloodwork to order for, or the codes to request? Do I know when to discern between MRI, Xray, or ultrasound diagnostic? I find this hard to believe.

<comment><USER46> Often your doctor tells you what tests they want and then you go to some center where they perform the tests. It's pretty predictable in many cases.

<comment><USER47> _" Often your doctor tells you what tests they want"_

This is the exact point- you do not have the education to shop because you don't even know what you need to be shopping for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Might be off-topic, but in general, US is very harsh on poor people.

Apart from healthcare, Two more things that are harsh on people that don't have money (like students) are:

1\. You need a car, which costs thousands of dollars (depending on how much reliability you need). Then, if your car breaks down and you're poor, you're really fucked.

2\. Eating out is a big expense (e.g. tip makes it worse). It's ridiculous that eating out every day in a month could cost as much as a round-trip flight to Thailand. You could also buy a macbook with that money.

Back, in Thailand, when I was a college student, my allowance was $15 USD a week, and I ate out pretty much every meal. Most of semi-poor/average-income people in Thailand eat out. Granted, the food safety standard is way worse. But I'd still prefer that than spending time doing the cooking myself.

<comment><USER49> If you live in a city, a car is much less needed, anywhere else, you're correct, it's a big expense. When I was poor my car always caused me money troubles. Insurance, tags, gas, breakdowns. If any of that goes out you pay more in fines.

Eating out is a luxury. It's much much cheaper to buy groceries. Groceries are cheaper in the US than any country I've been to, including Thailand. I didn't try to eat natively though (bought cheese/beef/milk imported from Australia)

When we eat out it's usually fast food or pick-up, we don't like eating in public. It's between $15-30 for both of us. Thailand it was cut in half, but we used Grab to deliver it to us. Japan we spend upwards of $50 for half the portions.

You're comparing being poor in US vs Thailand. I'm sure you know the standard of poor is very different. Being poor in the US would be middleclass living at least in Thailand.

tl;dr I disagree, being poor in America is a much more pleasant experience than being poor in many other countries.

<comment><USER48> > Eating out is a luxury.

This would be one difference. In Thailand, we eat out to fill our stomach. We usually don't consider it a luxury. We also don't care much about services.

If anything, I am a bit annoyed about the high-touch service here.

> It's between $15-30 for both of us. Thailand it was cut in half

Half is still too expensive for Thais. A dish in an average air-conditioned mall (e.g. Tesco Lotus) would cost $1-$2 USD per dish. These dishes taste great as well.

> tl;dr I disagree, being poor in America is a much more pleasant experience > than being poor in many other countries.

I agree with this statement.

However, this pushes toward the all-or-nothing situation. You either have good experience or are screwed. There's nothing in between.

Restaurants having high safety standard is great. But then there's no cheaper restaurant. Then, poor folks have to spend time cooking, which is gonna waste time and taste worse.

One of my tidbits that illustrates the different quality of life between US and Thailand is that: I live in US for 6 years now, and I've never seen a cockroach here. In Thailand, I'd see one on the first day I arrive. This happens even if I stay in a high-end condo.

<comment><USER49> > This would be one difference. In Thailand, we eat out to fill our stomach. > We usually don't consider it a luxury. We also don't care much about > services.

Wages are higher in America, so the getting service is going to be more expensive. However, food is very very very cheap compared to most countries. So yeah, it may not be a luxury in Thailand, but eating out is a luxury in the US because you're not paying for the food, you're paying for the service. Fast food is an option though if you really don't want to cook, but some people don't like that.

I actually prefer home cooked meals, I think they taste better, but I'm lucky that my wife loves to cook. When I was single I was content heating up food. Food was the last thing I was worried about at the lowest point in my life. I ate corn dogs nearly every day because it took a minute to cook and a minute to eat and I could buy a 50 pack for next to nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Leaving your 20s and 30s with a career you enjoy, basic benefits such as health insurance, retirement funding, and paid time off, and the ability to afford a reasonably sized home without falling into tremendous amounts of debt seems less and less likely each year. I have a lot of family who have moved from the EU to the US and back to the EU, I have also lived there myself, and I'm intimately familiar with their day-to-day. If the average American knew what the benefits and lifestyle are like for a middle-class German family, all those totally disconnected accolades about job and GDP growth that our oligarchs like to shower upon us would do nothing to prevent work strikes and riots in the streets.

<comment><USER51> I'll probably get downvoted for this, but a strong argument can be made that the European welfare state has only been made possible due to massive US defense subsidies and economic stimulus during the post WWII/Cold War. This doesn't mean that the US has a good excuse for relatively poor domestic social services vis a vi many European states, but let's also be real about what allows Germany, France, etc to provide "free" healthcare and other social subsidies.

In the particular case of Germany, defense spending is only 1.2% (this stat is easily found via google). I'd rather have Pax Americana (which arguably is in decline) over the past 70 years providing stability in Europe, helping to lift hundreds of millions of East Asians out of agrarian subsistence, etc than slightly cheaper healthcare. Although, tell that fact to someone who receives huge, opaque medical bills for simple procedures in the US and they probably wouldn't take too kindly to that line of reasoning...

<comment><USER43> What's the strong argument?

Germany spends 11.14% of GDP on healthcare or 442B. The US by contrast spends 17.07% of GDP on healthcare or 3498B. Therefore the US spends more and still lacks a comparable system.

Additionally the amount Germany saves by under-spending on defensive wouldn't offset the cost of the wealthfare state for example if Germany spent 3% (the US spends 3.5% on defense) of its GDP on defense instead of the current 1.2% they go from spending 47B to 119B. That extra 72B is less than 17% of their total healthcare costs, which again, are much lower than the US'.

This whole argument is a US Conservative talking point that has little to no basis in fact. When you look at the underlying data, it simply doesn't hold up, the cost of medical care and defense are orders of magnitude different and the US's system is so inefficient, even with the savings after decreasing defense spending from 3.5% of GDP to 1.2% (extra 472B/year) it wouldn't function well.

<comment><USER51> I'm not arguing that the US healthcare system is more efficient (it definitely isn't). I'm arguing the political and economic conditions present in post-91, EU-integrated, unified Germany were only made possible in part by constant military and political deterrence provided in part by US defense spending. US military power also increased the politician and diplomatic leverage of the West during the Cold War (the most obvious example being NATO).

<comment><USER52> That's quite BS knowing France has a much better healthcare system compared to the US and also can nuke any country to death. Defense spending and healthcare are clearly unrelated.

<comment><USER15> I read somewhere France still has colonies somewhere in Africa.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> HN title is not good. Original title is "U.S. Life Expectancy Drops for Third Year in a Row, Reflecting Rising Drug Overdoses, Suicides."

The comparison is between the last three years and 1915-1918, but the Spanish flu was just getting going in 1918.

EDIT: folks just arriving, the HN title has changed since I commented. It previously said "worst trend since Spanish flu," or something.

<comment><USER54> > Spanish flu of 1918

It was not Spanish. It's origins come from the battlefields of WWI.

<comment><USER53> Next you're probably going to tell me about French fries, right?

<comment><USER55> Freedom Fries

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> "Higher suicide rates in rural areas are due to nearly 60 percent of rural homes having a gun versus less than half of homes in urban areas," psychiatrist and behavioral scientist Keith Humphreys of Stanford University says. "Having easily available lethal means is a big risk factor for suicide."

Pretty bold claim there. Seems like you could run a pretty big study just based off that one hypothesis.

<comment><USER57> Your comment comes off as if people hadn't thought to do this before.

The center for disease control is legally prohibited from doing so thanks due to lobbying from the National Rifle Association - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment)

<comment><USER58> Not quite true, and as the link you posted highlights, they are prohibited in using tax funds to advocate for or against gun control. They're empowered to do studies, but they must not use tax dollars earmarked for specific initiatives.

<comment><USER59> If I'm not mistaken, the federal government in all of its forms has chosen to call even studying gun violence as a step in the process of advocating for or against gun control. I feel like NPR did a story about that last year, but I can't find anything about it. Am I imagining this happened.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Password Exhaustion: Predicting the End of Password Usefulness (PDF) - <AUTHOR> http://nsrc.cse.psu.edu/tech_report/NAS-TR-0030-2006.pdf

<comment><USER2> I think it is even worse than they suggest. Suppose you compromise a username and password combination anywhere on the Internet, or offline compromise the dump you got from some random forum. This gives you a list of username => password entries.

You then farm that out to your favorite botnet and begin hitting low security consumer sites, like Facebook, Twitter, what have you. You should be able to recover email addresses in a _totally automated_ fashion doing this. You can then probably remote compromise those email accounts instantly, using the exact same password.

Then, again in a totally automated fashion, you search their mail archives for the signatures of mails from your list of 50 high-value target sites: banks, brokerages, domain name registrars, WoW (don't laugh -- best dollar to security tradeoff of any of the above, since an account compromise can be worth $2k+, it is trivially cashable remotely, and it poses no risk of criminal prosecution), etc. You then use their recover password functionality, probably totally automated.

Then you just check your botnet for the new credentials for high-value sites, and start cashing.

<comment><USER3> What exactly does your bingo startup do again? ;)

I finally broke down recently and made a compendium of all my username/passwords combinations in an encrypted file. It was eye opening when I finally saw how many passwords I actually use and (mostly) remember. The repetition frequency was higher than I would like, but I'm careful to never use the same password for a site account and the associated email address(es). Unfortunately, I can't say the same for my relatives and friends...</comment></comment>


How and When to Create a Website with a Black Background Design - <AUTHOR> https://kolosek.com/a-website-with-a-black-background-design/ <comment><USER2> Is there any good app or strategy for the _user_ to invert colors for reading at night that leaves images unaffected?

Right now, I use "inverse colors" on my Android tablet to lessen impact on sleep, and that's an improvement, but images get inverted also.

</comment><comment><USER3> In ye olde dayes, printing with solid black was a problem if you couldn't count on your printer being able to put down an even coat—any imperfections were immediately obvious. Also, black ink by itself was dull, so it was common to punch it up with a hit of cyan or magenta.</comment>


Coding Horror: Douchebaggery - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001065.html

<comment><USER2> I can't figure this post out. It reads kind of like a drunken fratboy's impression of Stephen Colbert's impression of DHH. I mean,

"...when you're using Rails and OS X, you're using the platform of choice for douchebags."

Is that _meant_ to hurt my feelings? Or is it an attempted parody that has gone horribly wrong and started killing innocent bystanders?

FWIW, I can't tell the difference between DHH's opinion of Windows and the average Unix expert's opinion of Windows. And I hope for the sake of Atwood's blood pressure that he never encounters PG's hilarious line about Windows NT from "Great Hackers".

<comment><USER3> Atwood is a dyed in the wool Windows / .Net evangelist. Nobody should be terribly shocked when he makes the assertion that anything other than Windows & .Net are substandard platforms.

<comment><USER4> "I take issue with David's claim that, when it comes to computers and operating systems, there's any "best" anything. In my considered opinion, they all suck. Sure, there are tradeoffs, pros and cons, strengths and weaknesses. But an objective best? It's all relative."

"Don't waste time arguing about the character select screen. Results speak loudest. Show the world what you can do in your programming environment of choice."

Hardly sounds like he's bashing non-Windows. More like bashing elitism and OS- ism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The argument about OSes has long since left the realm of useful debate about relative merits and become some sort of brand-identification circlejerk. Apple is always going to win that war because Windows, for as long as it is dominant, will always be bourgeois. It's the same with Sam Adams vs. Budweiser.

That's the price you pay for achieving ubiquity. You forfeit the hipster dufus demographic.

<comment><USER6> It's funny, because I remember that before Apple switched to Intel, the only reason I could see to buy one was that the machine/OS _looked cool_. Now their hardware is considered superior (at least for laptops), so all the nerds love them, but I still have the stigma in my head that anyone using a mac is just a trendy hippy (or hipster dufus, as you put it) trying to show off how stylish he is.

I'm slowly giving up on that idea now that their hardware actually wins... but it's still hard not to chuckle at some kid in the coffee shop with political stickers on his macbook pro who is most likely using his $2500 laptop to watch youtube videos.

<comment><USER5> I don't think it's accurate to say Macs win on hardware. There are clearly some Windows OEMs who make hardware that's generally better (Lenovo for instance) though I'll give Apple credit and say that they're pretty good.

<comment><USER7> I've yet to see (in a store near me) a laptop that even comes close in features with what a MacBook Pro offers and that doesn't look like it was designed by monkeys.

If you know of such a laptop, would you mind posting a link to it? I would definitely take it into consideration if I finally decide to get rid of my MBP.

<comment><USER5> I'm a pretty big fan of Lenovo Thinkpads (don't think they sell their good line in stores). Most Mac users I know who've owned both agree that Lenovo kicks ass in terms of hardware. You probably won't like the design aesthetic as much though, but in terms of PCs, they're the top dogs right now.

The T series is probably the closest competitor to the MBP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Douchebaggery, indeed.

In my experience, the people who get tweaked when someone like DHH expresses a strong opinion, are usually the same ones to suck the creativity and excitement out of any room they enter.

Unless you're planning to work with DHH, what do you care what he thinks about your laptop? Learn to deal.

<comment><USER9> _when someone like DHH expresses a strong opinion_

It's not a strong opinion. He's saying something stupid and stupidly arrogant:

 _I would have a hard time imagining hiring a programmer who was still on Windows for 37signals. If you don't care enough about your tools to get the best, your burden of proof just got a lot heavier._

Whatever. I could find you some old fogeys who wouldn't hire you because you didn't love OpenVMS, and Richard Stallman himself doomed us all to using Unix instead of VMS, which he prefered, because of political constraints. Is DHH using OpenVMS? No? Then he's not using the best tools, and he should seriously consider firing his stupid ass.

That he thinks that ability really corresponds to making the polically correct choice in OSes really says more about his hangups than his discernment. As for OSX, it frankly strikes me as the Disney Corp. of the OS world. But that's just my stupid opinion, and I wouldn't hit someone over the head with it.

I code on Windows, and deploy to Linux and have never noticed any differences besides file path names and a mysteriously superior performance of MySQL on linux. Hey--I know linux in and out----why am I not using it for a desktop machine? Because Windows is better at that.

<comment><USER7> I'm fairly convinced that anybody who thinks Windows is a better desktop machine has never used Ubuntu.

Just think of how long it would take you to install XP from scratch on a machine and get all the drivers, service packs, updates and tools you need installed. Then imagine being able to get all of that done in under 45 minutes.

Imagine having better eye candy and performance than OSX or Vista on hardware that is less than half the price.

Throw in the benefits of developing on the same platform you deploy on. Welcome to Ubuntu!

<comment><USER10> Ubuntu's a fine OS, but it's not really to be compared to Windows or OS X for general purpose computing, mostly because it's not popular enough to merit serious 3rd party investment.

Wake me up when I can apt-get install photoshop-cs3

PS: I code all day on Ubuntu.

<comment><USER7> try apt-get install gimp :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11>
      OS X == (UI niceness > windows) + (coding tools like unix)

I don't see how you can argue with that much. I prefer to code on linux. I prefer to have a window manager and desktop apps that work @ home. Add the fact that the macs are the nicest laptops of all in terms of features and form factor, and there doesn't seem to be any other comparison.

</comment><comment><USER12> I have had nothing but trouble when it comes to programming web environments in Windows. In _any_ language be it PHP, Ruby, etc. and so forth, there's too much "Oh, it acts differently in Windows."

Most of it is related to POSIX environments vs. Windows, but I digress...

<comment><USER13> PHP? Ruby? You were thinking Unix and using Windows; no wonder it didn't work. Windows probably works much better if you've never seen Unix and you stick to 100% MS tools. (In other words, blub.)

<comment><USER6> On the contrary, if you have only ever used Unix and some unixy language like PHP, you are still a blub programmer. Blub isn't the exclusive domain of Windows, even if it makes sticking with blub really easy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I used FreeBSD as my development platform until I got a Mac. The reason why is because the majority of websites are hosted on `nix platforms and as a programmer it's important for me to understand and experience the platform that my code is going to be running on.

If I was a Windows programmer I wouldn't know about cron, symlinks, du, etc... And I might waste an exceptional amount of time trying to code an already available feature in `nix.

<comment><USER15> I work with a bunch of rxvt terminals, a browser, and a few gvim windows. It's the same damn setup on either Windows or Linux once I have Cygwin and Virtual Dimension (virtual desktops for Windows) installed.

If you're deploying to a Unix server, i.e. not writing desktop apps or systems code, I fail to see how it matters what OS you're using. The dev tools are all ported.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> _Y Combinator is (we hope) visited mostly by hackers. The proportions of OSes are: Windows 66.4%, Macintosh 18.8%, Linux 11.4%, and FreeBSD 1.5%. The Mac number is a big change from what it would have been five years ago._

(<http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html>)

The percentage of Mac-using Y Combinator founders appears to be even higher. Actually the majority, I think.

<comment><USER17> I'm guessing lots of people access HN from work, skewing results towards Windows?... (I don't doubt Windows would still be quite dominant though).

<comment><USER7> You're probably right. Personally I refuse to work anywhere that would require me to use a Windows desktop for development.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't see how what DHH said translates to "OSX/Rails is the best platform ever!".

It seems to me that he's just saying you should care about your tools, and pick the one you think is the best (and be prepared to justify it, if you apply to 37Signals). Don't just default to Windows/Java/Blub.

</comment><comment><USER19> In general, I couldn't give a rat's ass about any of this. But I must say that 3 months ago I switched back to a Mac after 10 years away, and while I like it much, much better than Windows, it's absolute bullshit to talk about Apple or Mac OS X like the quality is infinitely better. On that front, I find both my hardware and software to be just as flaky and crappy as the Dell/Windows hell to which I had become accustomed. Laptop wakes from sleep? Usually. Machine locks up? Rarely, but sometimes. Crummy wireless mouse works? Usually. <sigh>...

</comment><comment><USER20> "David (heinemeier Hansson) gets off on putting other people down."

And there's a pretty serious backlash appearing on the horizon because of it. If Jeff Atwood, who is normally a really nice and straight guy, starts writing personal attacks then I think that DHH has a potential problem.

Note: I don't personally have anything against DHH, I've met him once and hes one of the smartest guys I've talked to. He even bought the beer...

<comment><USER2> I think you're right that there's going to be (is?) a Rails "backlash", but I disagree that it has anything to do with DHH or his personality. (What, you think Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, and Steve Ballmer are humble and self- effacing?) It's just the backside of the hype cycle.

Rails is no longer as young and hot as it used to be, and the fanboys and the media will move on to something else. Because Rails was the subject of such breathless hype from the Silver Bullet crowd, the "backlash" meme will probably get considerable media play as well. Nobody is more bitter than a frustrated seeker of Silver Bullets.

Meanwhile, Rails and Merb and jRuby and other Ruby-based tools will continue to slowly improve, as such tools generally do.

You can argue over whether or not such hype cycles are useful in the long term. They certainly didn't hurt Java.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> From the article: I'd expect hard core OSS folks to want Freedom Zero in their operating system as well as the software they build.

I expect freedom zero for my hardware. OpenCores ( <http://www.opencores.org/> ) and Arduino ( <http://www.arduino.cc/> ) is a good start.

</comment><comment><USER22> I use OSX at home, and windows at work. No big surprise there. So when I first learned about Ruby on Rails, I did the intro tutorial on both platforms.

I had to install Ruby on windows. My Mac had ruby pre-installed, but it shipped with a broken ruby, so I had to reinstall.

I had to install a few patches to get the very first tutorials to work on my Mac. It was seamless on Windows.

Since then, it has been more of a pleasure to code on the mac than the windows. I'm also a lot better able to deal with remote hosting, because I'm going from unix to unix, rather than windows to unix.

That said, I was surprised that it took a bit more struggling on a Mac, considering that the 27Signals team is very mac-centril.

</comment><comment><USER23> I guess the main issue is, people who are too much into free software may sometimes loose their grasp of reality

You frequent slashdot, this site, the serverside and number of other FOSS wikis and blogs, and you start to think that most ppl would agree, that x is better than y and that MS is evil

But in real life, most ppl havent heard of slahdot, or arc and think python is a myth

And this is why DHH for them will definitely sound like a douchebag, and to be fair, if you compare RoR to a product like Sharepoint (yes you can use RoR to create stuff you can create with Sharepoint) if Sharepoint can do it, Sharepoint will be light years ahead of RoR.

</comment><comment><USER24> For most purposes the leading three (including minor variations thereof) are all good enough to get the job done. OSs have essentially become commodities, just like web browsers and relational databases. Who cares. Let's move on to something that really matters for application development.

</comment><comment><USER25> Ever hear of a guy named John Carmack, DHH? He develops on Windows. I'm sure he'll be crushed to find out that he won't be able to get a job at 37 Signals.

</comment><comment><USER26> Sounds like judging a race car driver for the pavement he races on.</comment>


Microsoft's scapegoating explanation doesn't hold water - <AUTHOR> http://semiaccurate.com/2012/07/02/microsofts-scapegoating-explanation-doesnt-hold-water/

<comment><USER3> He's got a point. I think the full win8 x86 tablet is quite a compelling product, but what's W8RT selling point? It's going to have no backwards compatibility, will be less polished than the iPad, and won't be cheaper than Android tablets with the same hardware.

The W8RT tablet will have Office on it, I suppose, but this is more strangeness: anyone who wants Office is going to want the x86 tablet - <USER2> doesn't come with Office!

The x86 Surface looks like a nice product, but the business strategy looks very muddled to me.

<comment><USER4> It's their foot in the iPad-style tablet scene. They desperately want to compete with Apple but also are uncomfortable competing with their Windows brand strength.

Thus WindowsRT - they should have just called it MetroOS, but hell, maybe their maintenance contracts with huge companies forbid them from doing so.

<comment><USER5> +1 for the MetroOS moniker. MS will eventually learn to stop calling everything Windows. Glad my Xbox is not a Windows Game System (WiGS) or whatever stupid name they would've come up with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Error establishing a database connection", so Google cache: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:semiac...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:semiaccurate.com/2012/07/02/microsofts- scapegoating-explanation-doesnt-hold-water/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Microsoft is getting greedy. Seeing the success of Apple and of Google's Nexus products, it seeks to do the same by releasing Surface. Microsoft's greed made it completely forget the role that its OEMs had in its own success, so much so that it neglected to tell many OEM partners about Surface until the Friday before the announcement, and to many others didn't tell them at all. If Surface does not sell like hotcakes, it will be big trouble for Microsoft, and they won't be able to get out of it by firing anyone.</comment>


Set up a public registry of competing interests - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/set-up-a-public-registry-of-competing-interests-1.19851 <comment><USER2> This would be a really good idea. The key idea from the OP:

"A comprehensive, accessible record of competing interests could be used to produce more-precise estimates of their impact on research findings. Using these results as a basis, tools could be developed to help readers to interpret individual studies and to flag up uncertainty caused by competing interests to systematic reviewers when they pool the results from multiple studies."

More detail here: [http://researchintegrityjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/1...](http://researchintegrityjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41073-016-0006-7)</comment>


Reading Between the Lines: SEC, Telegram, and Rule 144 - <AUTHOR> https://a16z.com/2020/02/22/reading-between-the-lines-sec-telegram-and-rule-144/ <comment><USER2> Note that a16z is an RIA now - not a VC anymore. Recent news stories tell of them planning on investing up to $1B in crypto. As an RIA, they can make riskier investments.

Here is the governments claim (3):

"Grams are securities because the Initial Purchasers and subsequent investors expect to profit from Telegram's work: the development of a TON "ecosystem," integration with Messenger, and implementation of the new TON Blockchain."

TON failed the Howey test by their offering in the US markets and - this is the critical part not mentioned - they refused to acknowledge or respond to the SEC. Full-stop, end of story. The courts can start to wrap it up on April 30.

<comment><USER3> > _As an RIA, they can make riskier investments_

Less liquid. Not necessarily riskier. RIAs also have more reporting requirements and liabilities to their investors than private funds like VCs.

> _they refused to acknowledge or respond to the SEC_

Can't imagine this thrilled their investors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Because if the SEC's interpretation stands, any purchaser of a security > issued by a non-public company could be deemed to be an underwriter.

As very non-knowledgeable person in this are I believe this is where the argument falls apart.

The interpretations is specific to Gram tokens, not "a [arbitrary] security issued by a non-public company".

I.e. it's about the "innate" nature of this specific security (Gram token), which is different to e.g. the security normally involved in VC.

_At least if it's not VC business mean to "scam" later investors, in which case it very well could apply._ (And probably should?)

<comment><USER5> I'm also not knowledgeable in this area, but I agree with you. Would love to see an unbiased legal expert's opinion. Definitely feels like a stretch to me though, as you've pointed out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It must be extremely frustrating for the VC firms to be cut out of the "next Whatsapp" entirely. In the unlikely event that Telegram prevails, it's not entirely clear why venture investment would even be needed in a lot of cases. The "network" would still be valuable, but I think it can be purchased for a lot less.

I'd much prefer a 100% transparent, cryptographically verifiable ownership contract to an impenetrable maze of the usual one sided legalese you will find in equity contracts.

I'm not a VC, though. I'm sure VCs would much prefer the opposite: for things to remain just as they are now. Regulatory capture is a powerful thing.

<comment><USER7> Weren't most of the buyers of the TON/Gram pre-ICO VCs? They're not cut out at all.

More generally, there's no reason why entrepreneurs would refuse investment from good VCs. I can imagine scammers would want to lock out VCs to avoid scrutiny, but real businesses shouldn't.

<comment><USER6> VCs don't just buy small chunks of companies. They normally also buy influence and (often) preferential treatment, which they don't get if they just buy into an ICO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ur-whale Not entirely sure why the SEC even has jurisdiction here ... isn't Telegram based outside of the US?

And even if they decide they do have jurisdiction, how are they going to enforce anything?

<comment><USER4> It would affect US buyers or more concrete re-sellers of Gram tokens. Given that you normally buy this kind of tokens to either trade them or keep them as a security you sell when you need money it matters a lot.

<comment><USER8> Wouldn't it only prevent formal legal entities (ie US companies) from making purchases? End users could trivially purchase via non-US payment services, and I don't see how the US could actually prevent "import" or use of crypto tokens in practice.

To me, it seems similar to the way the GDPR claims to apply to entities which don't operate in the EU - good luck enforcing that in practice!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How are you handling functional testing in the browser? - <AUTHOR>

What tools and practices are you using to test your in-browser user interface and application flow for dynamically rendered content?<p>I've been rewriting a Rails web app using test-first methodology and am thrilled with the unit, functional, and integration testing features of rails. I've been working out from the models to the controllers and then to the views. This works great as long as the content is static, but once I hit the browser, I'm at a loss. Because I'm using jQuery, I'd be happy to find a solution that just automated use-case tests for Firefox (for example), and mop up issues in an ad-hoc manner for other browsers (no-cache issues on IE and the like.) <comment><USER2> I use <http://seleniumhq.org/>.

The docs are a bit rough, but I'm reasonably happy with the framework. The core functionality is implemented in JavaScript, and I use it on my continuous integration server to test web UIs on Firefox, Safari, Opera, Google Chrome, and MSIE 6.

I keep hoping to be able to involve non-technical persons in UI test specification, so the Selenese HTML syntax appealed to me. Unfortunately, the Selenium community seems to regard that syntax as a gimmick; the tool support is much better for the various selenium APIs [[http://seleniumhq.org/about/platforms.html#programming- langu...](http://seleniumhq.org/about/platforms.html#programming-languages)]. Also, you get reasonable means of abstraction and combination in a language such as python or ruby.</comment>