Why I quit medicine - <AUTHOR> http://gautams.posterous.com/why-i-quit-medicine <comment><USER3> With a title of "Why I quit medicine" you would think somebody quit medicine because there is something wrong with medicine or the job of being a doctor.

What we have instead is a very well intentioned individual that is getting out of medicine because they want to run a startup. And that's fine. Maybe getting jealous because they see it as a path to riches and have been reading about to many outliers. Or maybe wanting to change the world.

But the job that he does is known as a "hospitalist" in this country. (Essentially Internal Medicine but not office practice).

<http://www.hospitalmedicine.org/>

My wife is one, and practices in a very modern hospital system. I've asked her many times about "the handoff (signout)" from the first time we were dating. Because it seemed outdated to me that when we were at dinner (and she was on call) she had to scribble down notes about sometimes 20 patients over the phone). But apparently the verbal interaction is important as well between two doctors and can't easily be summarized in writing. And I've overheard plenty of handoffs and can attest to the interactions between doctors and the nuance that can't be expressed in writing. (I even said why can't the other doctor just record something that you can listen to and a million other ideas and she shot all of them down very easily as not being practical. And she had every reason to support an idea like that if she thought it would make me money..)

Getting things done is difficult, and yes, they are very closed minded and it's hard to get change.

But drawing a comparison with "Considering I can talk to my smartphone and tell it to send a message to my dad or remind me to water the plants when I get home" doesn't take into account that whatever system is setup and accessed needs to be rock solid, dependable and can't fail in many degrees above your typical startup offering.

So this is a great ambitious idea that he has undertaken and I wish him well. But my guess is that he will have to partner with a health system in order to get adoption of this idea and work out the kinks and prove the concept.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much for your support.

You're right about how important face-to-face interaction is. That is not going to be replaced any time soon - nor should it be. But for the purpose of handover, you still need a written summary of all the patients on a ward that people can refer to. As I mentioned in the post, it would be useful to see who wrote what about each patient - so that you know who to talk to for further information. Having a handover application won't replace the morning handover meeting or a person-person handover - but it will definitely make that process less painful, more accountable and much more efficient.

(P.S. if I was jealous of the so called riches of being an entrepreneur - <USER2> would have focussed my energies on my medical career and right now I'd be driving my A5 from work rather than sleeping on a friend's couch thousands of miles from home :) I don't think anybody who takes this path should be under any illusion. Most start-ups fail and it's not an easy path. That said, I do love a lot of what building a company involves...)

<comment><USER4> Yeah... hackers are usually incredibly naive about compensation outside of their own world. For reference: [http://www.medscape.com/features/slideshow/compensation/2011...](http://www.medscape.com/features/slideshow/compensation/2011/)

Bottom line: here in the US of A, your average doc (most certainly NOT an outlier) is making between $150k and $350k. Put that in your VC-backed pipe and smoke it.

(Debt? Between $150k-$200k for 4 years of med school. Post med school training, in the form of residency and fellowship, runs anywhere from 3-12 years and pays around the $50k mark. Basically, nobody went broke by becoming a doctor.)

Which means, of course, that the outliers can do _very_ well. I have a friend who's Dad is an oral surgeon in the Eastern Shore of MD (what might be considered the "boonies" by some). He clears about $750k/year for a 35 hour work week. llimllib's wife above is probably around the $250k mark in the ER/ICU. If that ain't coin...

Anybody who thinks that somebody _left_ medicine for the money knows very little about medicine.

<comment><USER5> take an evening and go have drinks with some current med students / residents - here's what you'll hear (not from all, but from many): "Obamacare is killing my profession!"..."i should've gone to b-school instead"..."i could be working at GS but now i'm busting my ass for $50k"..."i'm getting screwed! this is sooooo unfair! how am i going to survive this debt?!"...so, the problem isn't that they don't make a great living - because they do. the problem is that they feel they're entitled to make as much as other 'smart people' (aka, their former undergrad classmates at princeton) in other professional careers like corporate law or banking - which they don't. they still make way more than 99% of the population, but those people don't matter as a basis of comparison. if you counter with, "...but, you're a doctor. you're not in it for the money - you want to help people, right?" you'll get an _extremely_ exaggerated eye- roll and the conversation will end...so, in short - it doesn't surprise me at all that a doc is leaving medicine to chase $ in tech now that it's no longer cool to tell your cronies you work in finance... (there are many exceptions and God bless them but, I've personally run into too many self-righteous, woe- is-me med students to know what to do with...) - why do you think dermatology is such a competitive field? $$$$$$

<comment><USER6> Sounds like unworthy people who are just clamoring for status (which income is a proxy for) instead of figuring out who they are as individuals and what their life purpose is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sounds a lot like the medical data startup I joined ten years ago. We were so, so painfully naive about the realities of medical software. Medical records are a trivial technical problem, but an almost insurmountable political and regulatory challenge. I knew our company was doomed when we were talking to another medical software company and saw the literal wall of binders that represented a single FDA approval process submission. It is _so_ not a market that's friendly to startups.

<comment><USER8> Yes, and hospitals have arcane policies / IT departments, my dad is a doctor and the hospital he works at still has Internet Explorer 6 installed on all computers there and they refuse to upgrade it for fear it might break compatibility with some ancient software program they use they access through it. He wants me to create some little software program to see if he can get them to use it when the main system goes down but it has to work in IE6 so its kind of a nightmare and I've been dragging my feet on it because of this... its things like this that make dealing with healthcare such a pain in the ass.

Thinking about this more, its actually a bit scary if I do create something and he is able to get them to use it as I could be opening myself up to a lot of liability. I figure, as a doctor, he should be aware of all this but not 100% sure how up on this he actually is, maybe I should get him to sign something having him take full ownership and responsibility of the software

<comment><USER9> >they refuse to upgrade it for fear it might break compatibility with some ancient software

It will break, in horrible and unknown ways, and even if it didn't if the company supporting it got wind that you used a different version of IE, or heaven forbid Firefox, that's probably enough to deny support. It's probably not even ancient software, they might have purchased it in the last couple of years. Medical software has to be the absolute worst made software on the planet.

<comment><USER8> I think it may even go beyond that, where they have even stipulated what other software could be run on the machine. I do know, for example, that they HAVE to run XP, nothing newer, or it would void their support, etc.. its really insane how companies can get away with that, I don't even understand how for a web app (it uses a Java applet, so I guess it goes beyond a regular "web app", but still..) they can demand this sort of control over the end user's system.

<comment><USER10> It seems like there aught to be some sort of liability for mandating insecure practices for your customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Paper isn't secure, but probably more 'secure' than data on a phone, cause there's far less risk of the paper getting duplicated silently than data being pulled from a smartphone (silent sending of address/contacts, etc).

Seriously? A shared Word document? With no audit trail of who wrote what? And _that_ is an improvement over the state of the art? It sounds like Wordpress has far more robust data management (and probably security) than what he just described.

As a doctor who can code, I'm sure the OP will be in a great position to make real change. He knows the regulatory stuff to get past, what rules can be bent, who the movers/shakers are to get stuff moved. Likely just bringing some very basic CMS/ERP functionality to medical records management in a hospital would be _huge_.

<comment><USER12> _Paper isn't secure, but probably more 'secure' than data on a phone..._

Good point. I'd also add that it's difficult to automate the process of scanning millions of hospitals for crumpled pieces of paper, whereas scanning blocks of millions of IP addresses for vulnerable smartphones is something any reasonably competent script-kiddie can do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I quit medicine too, but not because of the lack of adequate computer interface :)

The whole taking notes, jotting down patient information. It seems antiquated, but it's really a hard problem to "fix" - if it really needs fixing. These are not medical records he's talking about, but personal notes on each patient and todos you carry around with you during your shift.

Paper/pen in taking these notes is faster than computer/tablet input. I've tried it. In several different forms. There's a lot of shorthand doctors develop that help out. Arrows, diagrams, etc...

Still seems a small part of the bigger picture, which is electronic medical record keeping.

Regardless, good luck with your venture!

<comment><USER14> >I quit medicine too, but not because of the lack of adequate computer interface :)

If you don't mind my asking, why did you quit?

<comment><USER13> short answer: had kids, and a financially successful website. (longer answer: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=236308> )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You're getting it wrong I think. I work in healthcare IT and many EMRs are getting on the mobile bandwagon and building out mobile clients that let you do this.

Additionally, hospitals require doctors to put in diagnosis / treatment notes into EMRs which is usually done by transcribing service that the doctors can call or by sitting at a computer and typing it out. Although this process is worse than doing it over a mobile client, healthcare IT is not in the dark ages as people would have you believe.

<comment><AUTHOR> Respectfully, I disagree. I think there are some institutions which do it better than others - but on the whole, from a techie standpoint, healthcare IT is in the dark ages.

<comment><USER16> You came from Britain, didn't you? The situation there is way worse because of the NHS's failed project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Medical notes need to have some obvious design features common to many other computer software.

\- locking: only one person able to change the record \- auditing: keeping records of who read what, when, and where they did it \- signing: any additions are cryptographically signed and timestamped \- sharing: many clinicians need to be able to access the data across a wide range of hospital networks.

The UK NHS spent £11bn on a system which was late or didn't appear.

(<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15014288>)

About 10,000 people in England die each year because a clinician makes a mistake with the meds. While that risk is very low (because there are a huge number of patients taking a huge number of meds) it'd be nice if something simple could be done to reduce that number.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, true. The NHS IT project was a perfect example of how not to do it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Good on you, man.

I'm in medical school currently and the emphasis on locking down patient data is one of the most frustrating things to see. I'm convinced that it's a policy that everyone knows has little benefit and yet pushes for ethical brownie points. What's to be gained from freeing up the data far, far exceeds what could potentially be lost.

Even freeing up anonymized patient data seems to be met with opposition. Imagine the data analysis that can be done on millions and millions of patient cases and the clinical/treatment models that can emerge as a result.

Medicine right now is an old, stiff wooden board bending under the weight of technological innovation. Something's going to snap and I'm looking forward to see it happen.

I really support what you're doing, and if you want design help, my email is in my profile. Best of luck!

<comment><USER19> "Even freeing up anonymized patient data seems to be met with opposition."

Unfortunately, statistically, "anonymous patient data" is an oxymoron. Any useful amount of patient data contain enough information to deanonymize it to a great extent, and in conjunction with other data often fully deanonymize.

[http://33bits.org/2010/06/21/myths-and-fallacies-of- personal...](http://33bits.org/2010/06/21/myths-and-fallacies-of-personally- identifiable-information/)

<comment><USER20> Quite true, but that does take effort. Whatever we do we're going to have to make a tradeoff between saving lives and preserving privacy at some point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The topic of regulation that others have mentioned here makes me think of the airline industry also as, from what I can tell, medical regulations are almost as strict as those, I worked with a guy who used to do programming for devices on airliners and he said it was basically insane how much regulation there was, they were still not approved to use multi-core processors, etc so it was like programming for computers running technology of 10 years ago. I think people tend to think that healthcare would / should be much easier to use new technology for as its not quite the same as the aviation industry. However, it seems this isn't the case in legal terms and the industry may need a regulatory reform before innovation can really take place. In the case of an airliner, it really is life or death, however with healthcare, I think they can put in place enough backup systems (writing on paper, etc), even make the system do print-outs at set intervals, so if it goes down, there is a paper record right there, or something like that, so these issues can be overcome

</comment><comment><USER21> Thanks for writing this article and good luck with your venture. I'm not a doctor but my company works in healthcare and deals with the same physician related problems. So believe me when I say, I understand your pain.

Passing along patient information is a tricky subject due to HIPAA-compliancy. Most patient information is transmitted via fax machines and doctors are alerted of incidents through pagers, often carrying multiple. This technology is archaic and considering 75% of US physicians own some sort of Apple product there has to be change. In particular, physicians need better forms of communication that saves them time.

I'm hoping this changes as it will impact us all. It isn't going to happen overnight but with more and more physicians pushing for change in this area, one can only hope it happens sooner. If you're interested in what my company does, check out our website at <https://www.doximity.com> and our blog <http://blog.doximity.com/> talks about similar problems.

</comment><comment><USER22> I work for a company in Kentucky that is currently working on developing a system (with cooperation from the Department of Health) that addresses this exact problem. Basically a multi-user application that records all aspects of each Provider's "encounter" with a given patient. A Provider could be a doctor, nurse, lab tech, etc... So at anytime the current provider for a patient has access to all previous "notes" and any other data recorded about the patient as well as who recorded that information. Though I must admit, when I first started on this project I was quite surprised that there really wasn't much out there for public healthcare providers that didn't already do this. Besides Kentucky, there are several other states showing interest as well ... I just thought I'd mention that so nobody thinks, "Oh backwards Kentucky, their doctors run around the hospital barefoot!" Apparently this is a widespread problem in the public healthcare system across the United States as well.

</comment><comment><USER23> Hi, fellow UK hospital doc so fully understand the frustrations with NHS IT. I suspect problems stem from the fact that purchasing decisions are generally made by individuals (management and senior hospital docs) other than those that use the systems (in the main junior hospital docs). The other issue is that systems are implemented to reflect the way that diseases and patients _should_ behave but there are always edge cases that do not fit into these nice boxes. Striking a balance between free-form data input, which does not add much compared to conventional paper notes, and forcing patient data into categories and drop-down boxes is a a real challenge. The other thing that is often forgotten is the amount of clinician effort required for a system. If it takes too long or is too complicated accurate data will simply not be entered in the absence of draconian sanctions from above. Anyway there is clearly plenty of room for improvement so I wish you the best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER24> This article touches on why it somewhat bothers me to see some of my smartest friends applying to med school right now. I'm sure being a doctor is a rewarding profession and the work they do is so incredibly important to their patients--but it's not particularly unique work. Medicine is the application of the already known. (Most med students are not going to be the next DeBakey.) Rather than contributing original work, most doctors seem to be well-paid (and deservingly so) blue collar workers. If someone turns down a med school acceptance, that school can instantly pull 100 names of their waitlist who will be more-or-less just as qualified.

Sivakumar is right in that there aren't many doctors who can also code. While he may not get to feel the joy of directly improving patients lives, this goal of his seems far more important to the well-being of everyone.

<comment><USER8> You can make this argument about most software developers too, while they may create unique applications, they are mainly using the "already known" (existing languages, API's, etc)... You can then go on to apply this argument to nearly any other "white collar" job, accounting is "the application of the already known", etc..

White collar does not mean that you are in a research field and pushing the limits of knowledge, from what I understand it has long had an entirely different meaning. Personally, I feel that white collar / blue collar are very outdated terms. I often feel that a software developer is somewhat of a modern blue collar worker as its a creative trade and very different from a "white collar" job such as a sales or marketing job.

<comment><USER24> "Blue collar" was a poor voice of words. You're right that the white/blue collar divide is not a creative difference.

But I still feel that software development is a creative field whereas most of medicine is reactive. All fields are based upon past knowledge so the use of APIs seems irrelevant since they are just tools used to create.

The criterion to differentiate between creative and non-creative fields seems to be whether multiple "correct" answers exist. Obviously in programming the solutions to problems vary in terms of algorithms,implementations, etc. On the other hand, medical diagnosis is either correct or incorrect. Even prescribing treatments seems to be more of "do X with A factors, do Y in the presence of B factors" rather than an individualized, creative approach.

<comment><USER25> There is a certain element of truth to what you are saying. When I was early in my training I was dissappointed in my choice of medicine as a career because I also thought it lacked an outlet for creativity. As a now experienced physician, there are still times when you get to a point in the care of some patients at which the next step is programmatic and rote (if A then B).

However, sometimes--probably most of the time--the patient's presentation is so unclear (e.g. "I just feel weird. . . ."), there are so many variables to juggle in your head at once (twenty different lab values, the way the liver feels, the imaging findings, the color of the patient's sclera, the smell of their breath, their mood) that things become far too complex for any flowchart. These are the times when you need creativity, "book smarts" and perhaps above all, "emotional intelligence" to be a good doctor. There are plenty of doctors lacking one or more of these elements, and they just aren't very good at the job.

<comment><USER24> That makes a lot of sense. The above criterion I mentioned does seem to fall apart since I do consider problem solving to be inherently creative even though oftentimes there is only one answer.

Good to hear from an actual physician though. Do you think that your initial disappointment is a unique response or do most med students go through it? I ask because everyone I know who is getting accepted to med school has wanted to be a doctor since high school. I assume that makes med students get tunnel- vision when deciding their career choices and have an idealized, incorrect view of the field. (I figure most future doctors just get over this pretty quickly by finding different, but equally important reasons to be in the field.)

<comment><USER25> I can't speak for everyone else, but for myself, "tunnel vision" explains it pretty well. At some point in high school, I just decided being a doctor was a totally awesome thing to do. I can't remember the real reasons why I chose medicine, but I know it was somewhat vague. I knew doctors were smart and I thought I was pretty smart. I am embarrassed to admit I also may have fantasized about driving a BMW from my big house with a pool straight to the OR, busting in with an "S" on my chest to save somebody's life.

In college, I was drawn to the humanities and to computer science more than to biology, but I stuck with it. I was a willing victim of the rather unhealthy obsession with "getting in" that most pre-meds develop. Medical school, at least at first, was a rude awakening. It was not intellectually challenging (other than by virtue of the sheer volume of material), it was rote, the hours sucked, the and the culture was unpleasant.

It was not until a couple of years into my residency that I started to really appreciate more of the nuances, and to enjoy practicing medicine. As it stands today, I love what I do. I help people in a tangible way, I make a good living, I am respected and valued by my community, and at as I described above, my creative and intellectual muscles get a daily workout. However, I don't do any busting into ORs and, sadly, I don't drive a BMW.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> A strategy that may have a chance, given the current situation:

1\. Befriend and work with a mentor who happens to be high up in the IT department in a health system.

2\. Create some kick-ass app

3\. Open-source it(use the open-source version as a way for IT people in other health systems to use your work)

4\. Have your mentor implement that software in their health system as a pilot project.

5\. Befriend other IT directors and try to sell to them.

6\. Befriend other medical software providers and try to license to them.

7\. Make hay while the sun shines.

</comment><comment><USER27> I don't know, most hospitals around here use something like SAP IS-H/IS-H MED for patient and resource management. There are yearly "eHealth summits" and similar conferences. Their IT guys are organized in user groups and societies where they share their knowledge. Is it an "enterprisey" environment? You bet it is, mainly because of the regulations. However, the hospitals definitely do not live in the stone age.

</comment><comment><USER28> Isn't this addressed by a product like <https://drchrono.com/> (YC!) or am I missing somethings?

<comment><USER29> Drchrono is an emr. I could be wrong, but I think the author was thinking of a more focused solution for a specific problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> so what's the plan doc? EHR in the style of practicefusion, drchrono, Epic, GE Healthcare?

</comment><comment><USER31> Putting aside income, I think tech/startup jobs are superior to medicine and law because the majority of doctors are simply analyzing symptoms and diagnosing using systems and books written by other people; the majority of lawyers are just interpreting laws written by other people. Whereas tech startups are creating and inventing solutions to problems that can improve the world. Don't get me wrong - I'm glad there are doctors out there (may not say the same for lawyers), but I'd rather be a creator/innovator than someone who is just interpreting things. Too many smart people get stuck in doctor/lawyer jobs for income/status reasons that could be having a bigger impact on the world if they were inventing new ideas and helping create a better world.

</comment><comment><USER32> I am a contractor at a client that does exactly that:

<http://patientsafesolutions.com>

Using a iPod Touch and a proprietary jacket, patients can be monitored and transferred to the next shift of nurses through an intuitive App. Its really quite amazing.

</comment><comment><USER29> Things will start to change soon, there are some signs of this already. Healthcare remains heavily regulated, and because of this even for profit institutions are sometimes run as government institutions. This is most apparent in nursing facilities. Medicare is the predominant payor, and there's no reason for any facility to go beyond what medicare requires. Why invest in electronic records, etc? if medicare doesn't require it (although that's changing now). It's just an added expense.

But it's become apparent to policy makers that Medicare is getting more and more expensive, and some type of change is going to have be initiated. With private health insurance, it's the same picture. Costs are going up and more of these costs are being shifted to the insured (patients). Deductibles have gone up tremendously, and the days of the $5-$10 co-pay are almost gone.

The solution, in both cases although perhaps implemented in different ways, is going to have require the patient/insured to be responsible for paying for themselves directly. On the surface, it seems like a bad thing, but in the longer run it's a good thing. It brings into play what healthcare has been lacking - market forces. Almost all other industries have market forces in play, but not so much in healthcare. Go to a great surgeon, or go to an average one, they get paid the same. Why? It shouldn't be that way.

But once people have to pay more out of their own pocket, they are going to be far more careful about who they see. The level of service provided is going to matter. Ease of access is going to matter. Outcomes are going to matter. How about a refund if certain things don't turn out as promised?

And that's where there is going to be tremendous opportunities for startups. To provide technology for patients, and for doctors, hospitals, etc to provide a better level of service. All parties involved will be actively looking for these tools at some point.

Granted there are some regulatory hurdles, and HIPAA was really a poorly thought out piece of legislation, but as the startup community grows, there will be tools made available to navigate these hurdles as well.

</comment><comment><USER33> Perhaps its a compensation or cultural issue with medicine in the UK.

But, as a doctor, changing careers and creating a startup, especially one on the other side of the planet, seems an extreme reaction with extreme risk. Why not go private or even change geographies but remain a doctor while working on this problem on the side?

I say this because, given how well compensated doctors can be, as well as clear and progressive career paths and the strong vocational aspect, the opportunity cost of this change is enormous!

TL;DR. Are there other more significant issues involved?

</comment><comment><USER34> Why quitting? I see that having access to the problem gives access to numerous use-cases and ideas.

</comment><comment><USER35> Is it just me or does anyone else think all the doctors need is a bug tracking tool ? Preferably something that can be used from a smart phone / tablet via an app ?

</comment><comment><USER36> in scotland I worked in a hospital and would have to print out blood results on a daily basis for, on average, 20 patients. Some weeks it could easily be 60 patients.

To do this would take about 6 clicks and due to the slow system about 40 seconds I figured out. There would commonly be a queue in the morning to use this computer.

I made a simple script on a pen drive that allowed me to print my bloods for patients I had on a list of 'my patients'

i got a slap on the wrist :(

</comment><comment><USER6> So you're a doctor AND you know how to code. Very interesting, please do share your story about how that came to be :)

</comment><comment><USER37> I see why it's important to have secure patient records. It would be devastating to have your personal medical information up on pastebin.

But you know what's worse? Dying because the doctor misses a vital piece of information which can't be found in disorganized paper notes, or a bureaucratically designed medical information system (which set the hospital back roughly the cost of a new life-saving machine).

<comment><USER11> But... the dying will only happen once, then never affect you again. Leaked medical records may impact you for the rest of your life.

<comment><USER38> Dying impacts you for the rest of your life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> A good example of the immense unanticipated costs of regulations, in this case patient privacy regulation.

</comment><comment><USER40> I Don't know what hospitals you guys have been in, but my primary health care for the last 12 years has been Sutter in California. The hand-offs have been electronic (custom software, not word docs) for that entire time. The Doctors now carry around a tablet as well to update info about a patient. Before the tablets, every room had a PC for updating info. Maybe Sutter is just a special case, I was surprised at the article and some of the comments here.

</comment><comment><USER41> Is that really _why_ you quit, or an engaging PR backstory?

As an entrepeneur, you'll have to deal with clogged sinks, office rentals, legal filings, and lots of other hassles similar to carrying around a piece of paper.

<comment><USER42> Perhaps you should reread the OP. He's not saying that he personally is above petty hassles, he thinks it's a problem worth solving.

I bet he also believes he can make some money too, but I don't fault him for omitting that. Surely that goes without saying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> These guys need to buy this revolutionary product called a notebook. And no, I don't mean a laptop computer, but a "traditional" notebook. And probably a bunch of pens. A notebook is harder to lose than a scrap of paper and you can hand it over to the next doctor so he can read your note and add his own. Sounds interesting, doesn't it?

<comment><USER44> That doesn't really solve the problem beyond perhaps the most rudimentary way. You have X number of patients and Y number of doctors with any number of overlapping doctors interacting with any of those patients. Keeping doctors notes in a single notebook won't scale beyond a single doctor.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What would you do about identity theft? - <AUTHOR>

My friend had his ssn/name pair stolen and used on several occasions. Mostly, other people are using the pair to buy subscriptions to television services or other mundane things; nothing worth hiring a private investigator or lawyer over but it worries him. What would you do if your identity was stolen?
I told him to change his name- simply one letter in his last name. If his new name is different, creditors attempting to seek false debts from his old name would reach a dead end. Unfortunately for him, I am not an expert.
Any ideas? <comment><USER2> SSN / Name does not yet constitute an 'identity' and I certainly wouldn't be changing my name over something that silly.

The better way to go about this is to ask the SSA for a new number because of fraud, they do that directly, do not deal with any 'middle men' offering this service.

<http://www.ssa.gov/>

</comment><comment><USER3> First thing is to put credit freezes on his credit accounts. Call up the major credit reporting agencies and explain what happened - they will tell him how to put the freezes on and those freezes will require manual confirmation by telephone for any loans (asking sensitive questions like, "What year was your last car loan? What was the amount? Who was it through?").</comment>


My Bitcoin Mining Experiment - <AUTHOR> http://notonlyluck.com/2013/11/24/my-bitcoin-mining-experiment/

<comment><USER2> $.01 per day - wow, is there any doubt this was a naked front running racket? albeit, rather sophisticated but a good ol' front-loaded pump and dump.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure what mining profitability of vastly outclassed hardware has to do with Bitcoin being a "naked front running racket" or "pump and dump".</comment></comment>


Quora's $50 million - <AUTHOR> http://dcurt.is/quoras-50-million <comment><USER2> It seems pretty obvious why they raised so much -- I don't get the confusion. They're settling in for the long haul. Remember: these dudes are already rich from their Facebook days. They wouldn't even be doing this if they didn't _truly_ want to.

They raised $50 million so they can keep going on this project until it's solved, which may take 5+ years. The financial resources issue has been solved. It's what most anyone who's truly dedicated would _like_ to be able to do. They just happen to be in the position to do it.

<comment><USER3> I don't think anyone is confused why a team raised money. I think every startup out there is going to take as much as they can for as long as they can.

The confusion is what the VC's saw in Quora which would warrant giving them so much (at such a high valuation).

<comment><USER4> Quora is creating a giant collection of well-indexed, compelling bits of content in a format that Google finds delicious. They're already in the top 1000 sites and have been rising steadily. And they're doing it in a way that users are doing most of the work.

The obvious comparison is Wikipedia. Whether or not they'll get to that level I can't say, but it's not crazy to suggest that they will, and if they do they'll be worth a lot more than $500m. And even if they don't, they'll have a lot of users, a lot of pageviews, a smart staff, and a solid technology platform. Odds are good they'll find _something_ to do.

<comment><USER5> out of curiosity, what is the data backing the "in the top 1000 sites" assumption?

I can see alexa reports that for example, but I am still trying to understand what smart people use for traffic estimations.

<comment><USER6> If I'm manipulating the statistics in my head properly, even with a skewed sample, Alexa stats should converge on the truth as you go higher in the ranking, because the distribution of web site accesses is very skewed towards the top websites, which should have the effect of limiting the error as you get closer to #1. If Alexa says a site is well within the top 1000 (as opposed to just on the border, and Alexa shows them at 771), I'd accept that as strong evidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "With only around 20-30k daily active users, it certainly wasn't money raised based on user adoption".

I wish people would stop throwing AppData figures out as if they're fact, they're not. Dustin Curtis has no clue as to how many daily active users Quora has (no one does), but rather how many daily active users who so happen to have connected their Facebook account.

It's not a good indicator of success, and Facebook (and in turn AppData) has proven to be incredibly inaccurate as of late in regards to user numbers.

<comment><USER8> The bigger thing is not what fraction of Quora users use facebook logins, but how much of Quora's traffic is from search results by non-logged-in users (who may be new to the site).

I think Quora would be fine with 20-30k active users with accounts, creating questions/answers/comments. They've rolled out features (Credits, and requiring Credits to promote questions) which imply having a large number of people asking poor questions and giving poor answers is something they're actively trying to avoid.

Yet, if someone like Keith Rabois or Harj Taggar answers something within his field of expertise on Quora, it gets great search placement, AND often ends up syndicated to Forbes, etc.

"Quora as a replacement for blogging, by high value individuals" is the thing to look out for, not huge daily active user counts. With great content, search traffic will follow, and then there will be some way to monetize.

Not every social network has to be peer to peer. If I got to watch a community of great physics experts (Quora actually has some very strong engineering expertise in mech/nuclear, surprisingly) interact, and then pay to ask specific questions, I'd be quite happy. Either pay cash, or pay with answering IT, banking, war zone, etc. questions asked by those physics experts.

<comment><USER9> "With great content, search traffic will follow, and then there will be some way to monetize."

I went through the first dot.com bubble - and I heard a lot of sentences like that. Not saying that Quora isn't valuable, or that it isn't possible to monetize, but the whole build-traffic-and-we'll-figure-it-out-later gives me 'Nam flashbacks.

I used to do a lot at Quora - but the more I thought about it, the more I figured that not getting paid for giving up my knowledge was a bad idea. I find it most useful for discussions/information on start-ups.

All being said, they have a lot of talented people working there and a lot of great data - someone will buy them if they can't figure out how to make it work financially.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Quora is the _epitome_ of Silicon Valley group think. You think the site's big if you live in the valley. Leave and no one's heard of it.

This is bubblicious.

Anyway if anyone from Quora is reading this: your site has become a terrible experience for those with a small screen because the top quarter is dominated by your floating top bar.

<comment><USER11> That's precisely the point. Silicon Valley is saturated by a bazillion products, so the audience here is extremely discerning. Most people will try most things, but to gain critical mass like that _within_ Silicon Valley is very, very difficult.

Empirically, there's a very good chance that a product with critical mass here will tend to spread like wild fire to the rest of the world (and I suspect Peter Thiel has _much_ better data on that than you do). Since the purpose of investment is to buy low and sell high (and the purpose of early stage investment is to buy very low and sell very high), putting money into Quora is as good an early bet as one could hope for.

<comment><USER10> I disagree tho that doesn't mean Quora won't be successful. It's just not realistic to think SV is representative of most populations. It's a very tech- heavy population which is not necessarily what the masses are looking for. Quora could be a dominant Q&A site for tech issues... and perhaps that's worth the big money (I just doubt it).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> quora has about 650k questions in total, most of which are unanswered and in general ignored. my estimate of answered questions puts it at 80-90k.

as for user-base, the churn rate is huge with the majority of users following 2-3 topics before leaving the site forever. there is subset of users who generate all the content and value of the site.

lets look at some numbers:

Yishan Wong: Answers 1457, Question 760 Jeff Hammerbacher: Questions 1092, Answers 1041 Jan Mixon: Questions 802, Answers 4101 Michael Wolfe: Questions 9, Answers 1088 Mark-Hughes-1: Answers 1294, Questions 48

power-laws ahoy.

it's good source of info on startups and the tech scene, which makes it more like a popular discussion forum than a social network. I don't see this growing to millions of active users unless it tries to take on Yahoo! Answers.

i believe the quora team acknowledges this, and with the introduction of boards they're trying to redefine the site to be some kind of textual pinterest.

this sounded quite pessimistic, it's actually the site i visit the most and i hope they continue to grow without comprising on the quality.

<comment><USER13> Always remember that most of the content on sites involving "user participation" are heavily influenced by a small minority of people (Digg, Reddit, etc) I assume the same holds for Quora.

<comment><USER12> re user engagement the "threshold" for submitting a funny picture or pun anonymously is much lower than writing a well-written answer in your full name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I found it interesting that Peter Thiel invested his own personal money into it.

Does that mean the Founders Fund wasn't interested?

Is it common for a VC (especially a prominent one) to invest their personal money into startups, as oppose to their fund's money?

<comment><USER15> Take FB out and Thiel has a horrible investment record. In case people missed, he has a horrible investment record. A coin toss would be better than his choices, let alone low cost index funds. [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-12/clarium-hedge- fund-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-12/clarium-hedge-fund- shrinks-90-as-thiel-has-third-losing-year.html)

<comment><USER16> Yes, but you shouldn't take facebook out.

The whole point of investing like this is that a home-run can offset a large number of failures / also rans.

The Wright brothers have a horrible record of making things fly if you removed the flights made at Kitty Hawk.

<comment><USER15> Yes and no. I think he just gave a $500K check from his own funds so others will not see a cut of that, just losses from his other investments. But yeah, he made money for himself gambling /investing /a combo or whatever. However, not even his FB lottery win can get his record out of the hole.

He is connected, famous and rich so he can afford to and can pick the early stage companies to through a bit of money at, hoping a few strike. But, there's a difference between billion dollar sized funds and angel ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Perhaps I'm confusing Quora with another site, but isn't this the one that throws up a sort of registration wall when you follow a link there? Doesn't happen now when I try, but I'm sure it has in the recent past.

Millions of dollars are being sunk into this site? Why?

<comment><USER18> Quora is amazing. I don't know if they'll disrupt Google or Wikipedia but the quality of the content there is light years ahead of any similar site. You post a legal question and get a bunch of lawyers competing to give you the best answer. Post a question about the early days of Facebook and get 12 early employees all competing to give you the best answer. You post a question about the cops and get amazing answers like this from police officers:

[http://www.quora.com/Crime/What-should-you-do-if-someone- put...](http://www.quora.com/Crime/What-should-you-do-if-someone-puts-a-gun- to-your-head)

Join the site and poke around a bit if you still don't understand. It's like HN. Why is HN so awesome? Because the caliber of people posting here is off- the-charts relative to every similar site. Same with Quora.

<comment><USER19> It's _better_ than HN. I like HN, but after using it for a few years I noticed something wrong with the comments here that I couldn't quite articulate. Then I saw Quora, which showed me just how good a discussion community could be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Quora explains using AWS for "everything" here: <http://www.quora.com/What- stack-does-Quora-run-on-EC2>, but they don't say how many of what. Their traffic is a secret too, despite what the article tries to assume of AppData, but I'm curious why it is believed that running application servers and their databases/cache is economical. Does Quora really see a huge flux in activity and inactivity?

</comment><comment><USER21> I would not be so quick to judge the valuation. We have only one side of the story, and that side, the reporters, has proven to only care about their own page views. The founder putting $20M of his own money is a strong indication that the team believes there is real value in Quora. Until we get statistics from the team, we should hold out on most comments regarding the valuation.

</comment><comment><USER22> "20-30k daily active users."

That seems rather...low for a $400 million valuation.

<comment><USER23> This number is based on users logging in through FB connect only. From the Techcrunch story:

"According to AppData, 20K daily active users and 180K monthly active users log into Quora through Facebook Connect — Bear in mind that this is a small fraction of its total number of users, which Cheever and D'Angelo famously never reveal."

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's fair for a blogger to raise questions and not provide answers. But I'd be very interested to hear dcurtis's personal opinion on this. Why _did_ they raise so much money?

</comment><comment><USER25> Is it possible they raised this to ensure they didn't die in the event of a bubble?

<comment><USER26> Funding is cyclic, going through ups (now, unquestionably) and downs (2008/09 for instance). I'm nothing of an expert, but the alternative approach of raising funding to last not-that-many months to develop further and likely not yet 'be there' seems unwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Where is the money to be made?

</comment><comment><USER28> I thought ENCOM was worth more than 50M.</comment>


Ask HN: PayPal's Adaptive Payments API - <AUTHOR>

I stumbled across PayPal's Adaptive Payments API (https://www.x.com/community/ppx/adaptive_payments) and was considering using it to facilitate payments. It has some interesting features like chained and parallel payments. So a buyer can make a single payment and the funds can be split amongst multiple receivers. You also get to choose who pays the associated fees. But the downside is that it requires both the buyer and receiver(s) to have PayPal accounts. Is it a bad idea to force the buyer to have a PayPal account? How unwilling are people to create a PayPal account for a purchase? Or just use PayPal in general? <comment><USER2> It really depends on how close to the need you are. If your buyer does not have any other option then they might just go through the hassle.

For receivers it doesn't really matter. They will accept the hassle of setting up a PayPal account and transferring funds to their bank account or credit card as long as they receive the money.</comment>


Why Is Texting Hard? - <AUTHOR> What do you guys think is the hardest part about texting? Do you not know what to say? Are you scared of being misinterpreted or being too harsh? When and with who? Do you wish there was an app to improve your texts? <comment><USER2> "Typing" on the tiny little qwerty keyboards seems like a big part of the problem to me. The difficulty of that typing makes people abbreviate, tends to make messages small to tiny, and necessitates autocorrect, which leads to gross misunderstandings sometimes.</comment>


Scripting News: The next step in Digg clones (only members submit/vote, public can view results) - <AUTHOR> http://www.scripting.com/stories/2007/11/26/theNextStepInDiggClones.html <comment><USER2> I think this is a rather clever idea.. It reminds me a bit of Slashdot's system, with the firehose- Anyone can submit stories, but only editors can promote them to the front page.

I can't help but thing there's a way to go one step further though, and automatically make groups based on the people you upvote, or who's pages you like.. This seems like the sort of thing Reddit tries to do with it's customized pages, but if it was pulled off more ideally, you'd get news that's interesting to the people who you've found interesting before.

</comment><comment><USER3> Metafilter has had this editorship/readership model for quite some time, right? I guess it's not Digg-like, but that hardly matters for the reader.

I guess the new aspect of this is the personalities involved and that they have blog readerships. That makes sense, although you wonder if they're going to be talking up their own stuff.

And are bloggers going to want to comment on stuff rather than reflexively write a new post on their blog? I think not.

So basically all you get in a "Blogger's Digg" is the links. But wait, you get those from the weblogs themselves.

So I think what this should really be describing is DayPop or Blogdex in their salad days. Anyone remember them? I know PG does, of course, since they helped inspire reddit. They basically were replaced by Tailrank. But TailRank is so broad after the blog explosion that you don't get the "small community" of bloggers and certainly lose sight of the individuals.

If Tailrank was weighted on the FeedBurner or Technorati rankings and formatted more like reddit, it would probably be just about as useful as any Digg for bloggers like this.

</comment><comment><USER4> Dave's playing around with it with his buddies. What you'll end up seeing is a digg clone where groups of people can have own clones just like blogging on blogger or wordpress.

I assume groups will have the option of making their clone open to the public or keep it private.

It'll end up being niche clones on crack in a high school cafeteria.

Now what if it's monetized like metacafe.com where clones with over X number of views get paid. Money could come from subscriptions or advertising.

Time to start plugging away on pligg.

</comment><comment><USER5> I run a site kinda like this.

If you have a "digg clone" and it doesn't gain enough critical traction, sadly, you just end up with a bunch of spammers anyway. What's the point of public submissions then?</comment>


Gender Imbalances Are Mostly Not Due to Offensive Attitudes - <AUTHOR> http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/01/gender-imbalances-are-mostly-not-due-to-offensive-attitudes/ <comment><USER2> "I hope you share my intuition that utilitiarianism is an unusually thing- oriented and systematizing moral system, and that this gestures at the same large but hard-to-explain difference as the other two results."

I do not. Utilitarianism, at its core, is the _exact opposite_ of "thing- oriented" \- it treats rightness of action as a function of the action's good, rather than as a _property_ of actions. In the (act) utilitarian view, something is not good or bad in and of itself - it is only good or bad with respect to its consequences. As such, an act utilitarian should give no mind to "things" themselves, but only to the actions that produce the best outcomes.

Edit:

I enjoy reading SSC, but I think Scott Alexander (and the normal rash of new utilitarians) consistently make the same mistakes that their positivist progenitors made in the 1940s. I wish we (academia, and society as a whole) would stop treating science and human concerns as prickles and goo[1].

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4vHnM8WPvU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4vHnM8WPvU)

</comment><comment><USER3> This piece tries to argue that women are less interested in libertarianism because they are "less rationalizing-systemizing" and therefore don't "get" libertarianism, but many underlying assumptions are very weak.

For example:

       > A less-empathizing/more-systematizing personality would make people more interested in the politics of effective institutions than in the politics of provisioning social welfare.

Could it not be that more women consider "the politics of provisioning social welfare" an _effective institution_ than men? Or more generally, could it be that people who rely on welfare programs [0] have a different view of them? If you think poor people are not only poor because they deserve to be, some form of welfare is going to be part of your idea of "effective institutions".

Producing Children poses a significantly larger economic burden for women than for men (the primary cause for women receiving more welfare is their higher likelihood of being a single parent), so it is very unsurprising that they view welfare programs differently.

Alexander also implies that people who think offensive / sexist people are lowering participation of women by hurting their feelings, not by ignoring or dismissing issues that disproportionally affect women, which I find a bit odd. If libertarianism is about personal freedom there is plenty of space for issues that affect women (like abortion, freedom to wear certain types of clothing without being harassed, ...), yet I see very few libertarian talking about those issues.

I find the idea that women dislike a certain thing because of some pseudo- scientific evo-psych goop rather than economic reasons a bit absurd.

[0] [https://www.libraryindex.com/pages/901/Who-Receives- Benefits...](https://www.libraryindex.com/pages/901/Who-Receives-Benefits-AN- OVERVIEW-WELFARE-PROGRAM-PARTICIPATION.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> > If women in these communities feel harassed more often, it's more likely to > be a result of gender balance than a cause of it.

Rather than speculate, you could also ask those women why they feel harassed. But then you might not get the answer you're looking for!

<comment><AUTHOR> How does asking why someone _feels_ harassed help?

Let's assume for the sake of argument that women and men are equally likely to "harass" someone, and let's say that likelihood is 10%.

When there is a 50:50 gender split, you get equal harassment. You'll have five harassers and five victims, so everyone has a 1:10 chance of being harassed.

Now let's have a 90:10 gender split. With still the same equal 1:10 chance, a woman now has a 90% chance of being harassed, whereas a man's chance is 1%. Due to this being an n^2 problem, a 10:1 gender ratio leads to a 100:1 "harassment ratio".

These are simply numerical calculations. How does how someone "feels" about them impact them?

<comment><USER5> "Let's assume for the sake of argument that women and men are equally likely to "harass" someone, and let's say that likelihood is 10%."

You've done good math (I think?) on a false premise.

People harass other people when the environment is open to it or encourages it. That seems to happen in a lot of male-dominated environments.

People aren't compelled to harass or not in a pre-programmed way and they don't do it evenly no matter what surrounds them. They respond to incentives and their surroundings.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmmm, "let's assume for the sake of argument" is usually used to introduce a premise that the author does not (necessarily) believe to be true, and this is exactly what happened here. Otherwise we wouldn't have to "assume" it "for the sake of argument".

Introducing a premise you believe to be true is done differently, for example: "it happens to be the case..."

So anyway, the point of the little mathematical exercise was to show that even highly skewed outcomes in "harassment" don't allow you to conclude that there is an environment that is open or encouraging, at least not if you have an unequally distributed population, because in such skewed populations, you get highly skewed outcomes even if the propensity is equal (which it most likely isn't).

> People harass other people when the environment is open to it or encourages > it.

> That seems to happen in a lot of male-dominated environments.

Evidence that this is at all causative? Especially given the numbers I provided.

Anyway, another big factor is that in humans, the male is very much required to initiate, and that something like 70% of relationships happen on the job (and yes the drive to reproduce is one of our most powerful motivators, otherwise we'd be extinct as a species). Couple that with socially awkward nerds and the weird expansion of the definition of "harassment", particularly in the US, and I think you've got it covered.

Oh, and add companies like Uber where breaking laws, rules and norms is company policy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anecdotally, by far the raunchiest place I've ever worked was a catering job that had a pretty even male/female split (not sure if it was exactly 50/50) with women overseeing the operation. That place was a lot of fun.

<comment><USER7> See, being raunchy is not harassing someone or being dismissive due to someone's gender. Unwanted _threatening_ sexual advances are different as well.</comment></comment>


GPU glitches in 2016 MacBook Pro models - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/25/2016-macbook-pro-gpu-problems-glitches/ <comment><USER4> Wouldn't be a MacBook Pro if it didn't have some kind of GPU problem.

<comment><USER5> Why is it that the GPU always seems to be the failure point on mac notebooks? I've personally experienced the external gpu on the 2010, 2011, and 2014 models all fail right around the 3 year mark.

<comment><USER6> The integrated MBP models seem to be a bit more reliable and run cooler. Too bad you can't get a 15" without a discrete GPU anymore.

<comment><USER7> You can always force the power settings into keeping the discrete GPU off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nobody can call the new Macbook Pro "best in class" when they don't even ship with the best in class GPUs from Nvidia.

These machines are essentially build beautiful traps. So, please don't give Apple your money. You don't need the most recent Macbook Pro. Just wait 6 months and buy a used one. Please don't support a company that actively works against you in order to secure their infamous 40% profit margin for doing nothing more than severely limiting your choices.

I always buy used or third-party refurbished Apple equipment and I avoid buying apps from either of their app stores. I hope you do the same.

<comment><USER9> Ten years ago, I was a staunch Apple fan. I liked their product line-up - <USER2> was simple, easy to understand, and the products were good. If you needed power, you bought a Pro. If you needed value, you bought the non-pro. Both sides had good parts, were generally well built, repairable, and at the time used standard stuff. The OS was improving at a rate of knots as well.

Some time in the last 5 years, I've gone from being a big fan, to really not liking Apple much at all. Primarily because they've gone back to their older attitudes toward standardised parts; they've removed user-serviceability on batteries, memory, storage, yet haven't offered any real concessions to their _ridiculously_ expensive upgrade prices.

Their non-US pricing is infuriating, too. With current currency conversion rates, the base MacBook Pro is $250 USD more expensive in New Zealand _after all taxes are taken into account_ than it is in the USA, and it only gets worse from there.

Computers do not need to be disposable appliances. The used market for Macs is awful now, flooded with 2GB/64GB MacBook Airs that are near useless, and 128GB storage on the lower end rMBPs with only expensive custom third party upgrades available from OWC or Transcend putting a premium on the more spec'd out models.

In the past, you could just buy whatever used (or new) Mac is approximately right for your needs, and fill it to the brim with RAM and a fast SSD when you needed to. I got 3 usable years out of my 2006 MacBook, 4 usable years out of my 2008 MacBook Pro, and only 1.5 years out of my 2013 15" rMBP. At the time, it was already just over the limit for my work machine budget, and I had to retire it due to needing more RAM. I'm quite positive I would still be using it today had I been able to upgrade it. But instead I bought a second hand MacBook Air for iOS development and put up with Linux and Windows on an Ivy Bridge-E desktop that I could only use properly half the time.

Many things they've been doing recently have been actively hostile to users with basically no legitimate recourse. Pentalobe screws? Bricking iPhones with third party home buttons? Limiting availability of genuine parts, causing Chinese counterfeit market flooding? _Multiple_ proprietary SSD blade card formats that are essentially pin swaps of existing standards? _Glueing_ batteries? Lightning instead of USB?

It might be semi alright if you live in the USA near an Apple Store, and can take advantage of some of their better policies, but the point is that they don't need to do any of this stuff in the first place.

<comment><USER10> Same here. I live in Mexico and the pricing situation is just ridiculous. We are paying 20-25% more than in the US.

Not only for buying the products themselves, but also for the repairs which are way more expensive. When all the 2011 MBP GPU fiasco I was asked for $1500 when in the US Apple asked for about $300 for the exact same repair.

I've been with Apple for over a decade and just bought a Surface Book. Windows is not perfect, but Microsoft is doing all the right choices lately and Apple only produces eye rolls.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For modern Macs, this seems like expected behaviour. My 2012 MacBook Pro and my late 2014 5k iMac regularly glitch out like this.

<comment><USER12> I assume by 2012 MBP you mean the Retina model? I've never experienced anything like this on my mid-2012 non-Retina MBP. (Hard drive issues, yes, but not video glitches.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> At least those glitches look professional

</comment><comment><USER14> I purchase one (MBP 15). I did have some issues when using a external video card adapter (using DisplayLink drivers) that was then plugged into a USB2 hub that was then plugged into a USB-C to USB adapter. But since removing the driver (and the video card adapter), I haven't had any issues.

</comment><comment><USER15> 2011 all over again, I guess.

<comment><USER10> The 2011 was worse since it happened after the warranty expired. At least now people can still get a refund or use Apple Care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What's worse is the battery life. It's ridiculously bad :-/

<comment><USER17> Source?

<comment><USER16> Me using it, collegues using it. It's not good st all for the workload i usually have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hijacking the thread: was the cause of the GPU glitch with mid 2011 iMacs ([https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203787](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT203787)) ever determined?

Mine had this problem. I've been obsessive about keeping all temperature readings below 50C ever since it came back from repair.

</comment><comment><USER19> That's horrible PR for AMD, whether it's their fault or not.

I don't really care about Apple losing some money over this, they are ridiculously rich, they will be fine. AMD, on the other hand, is the only company that forces the CPU and GPU prices down. Though recently they have fallen quite far behind Intel.

<comment><USER20> This is a bit naive.

AMD hasn't been competitive with Intel for almost a decade...there's nothing recent about that.

AMD doesn't keep Intel's prices down, the market does.

<comment><USER21> > AMD doesn't keep Intel's prices down, the market does.

This is a reductionist view. For the market to bring those prices down, there need to be at least 2 manufacturers of the same product who are not colluding. If AMD went under and closed down, the market that you have faith in would not magically create more companies manufacturing x86 components. This is because only Intel and AMD have the patents and the licenses to patents required to manufacture them. It's possible that someone would salvage those patents and licenses from AMD and try competing with Intel... but what sane person would do so after seeing AMD try and fail to do so for a decade.

In short, AMD's continued survival and success is required for a healthy x86 market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> As a side issue to the current crop of first-adopter issues (I'll wait till this model is on its second generation - then I'm sure it will be a great piece of kit). I was thinking about the outrage concerning the denomination of 'Pro' on these models - with people crying that they're no longer suitable for 'Pro' use but I think I've come to the conclusion that the 'Pro' user of 5 years ago is a dying breed - Apple sees a future where they no longer exist.

Think about it - music production, video editing, photo editing, graphic design, coding.. These are all things which used to be considered extremely difficult but have now been made easier with fantastic, accessible software. Huge amounts of specialist hardware are no longer necessary or indeed desirable in these fields and the new MacBook Pro recognises this - <USER3> development (and other areas) are moving increasingly to the cloud and a huge development machine is no longer a necessity..

I'd suspect that Apple sees the future of its products and services in the cloud and the machines it provides will be slightly different gateways to that future.

<comment><USER23> I develop virtual reality games professionally. I cannot do that on a Mac Pro or a Macbook Pro.

<comment><USER24> Can you do it on any currently existing laptop that is not much heavier and much thicker than a Macbook Pro?

<comment><USER25> There are VR capable (gtx 1060) laptops around the size of the 2012 MacBook Pros.

<comment><USER24> Ok, could you link to one?

<comment><USER26> Not the parent, but you could literally get off your high horse and google "laptop gtx 1060"

I did that and had several options within 10 sec

<comment><USER24> They tend to be 15" or 17". The new 15" Macbook Pro also has better 3D graphics (Radeon Pro 450). It's not as fast as the gtx 1060, but it uses 35W of power in comparison to 120W, and needs less active cooling. Apple generally don't compromise on noise and battery life.

I'm sorry for the snarky nature of my previous comment, but in my experience, all of the suggested alternatives require compromises which Apple are justified in not making. I'm not sure why people think that Apple are obliged to make laptops to suit every use case. If you just want a portable desktop, there are plenty of other options.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Massive New Harvard Study Shows Which Diet Burns the Most Calories - <AUTHOR> https://www.inc.com/chris-matyszczyk/a-massive-new-harvard-study-shows-which-diet-burns-most-calories-heres-why-itll-change-everything-you-know-about-losing-weight.html <comment><USER2> I've always found this aspect of the low carb debate to be mostly irrelevant. The benefit I get from eating a low carb diet isn't that I burn more calories (as in, i'm not expressing an opinion either way on that). It's that I have a desire to eat dramatically fewer calories on a low-carb diet, and the weight loss effects come from that, not higher metabolism. I don't understand why so many studies want to focus on metabolic rate, when it seems clear to me that the most material benefit is the blunted calorie-adjusted hunger.

<comment><USER3> > It's that I have a desire to eat dramatically fewer calories on a low-carb > diet

Precisely my experience as well. While it's true that really no one type of nutrient is universally bad or evil and _technically_ weight loss comes down to calories in/out, there is a huge difference in how satisfied you feel after eating X amount of calories in various forms. I can eat an entire loaf of good bread or a big bag of chips without even thinking about it. Fats are tasty too but I don't find myself wanting to gorge on them to the same extent.

<comment><USER4> Unless you're carefully measuring you're probably fooling yourself.

Alternatively you're eating highly not satisfying foods on the other diets. Which most of the low fat foods are, especially ones marketed for dieting, which are laden with sugar - which means those calories come at the expense of carbs that are slower to absorb.

Then there's the effect of added protein uptake which is known to reduce appetite. It is easy to end up with a meaningful difference in this value, what with low carb diets increasing meat intake.

The difference is real though and about what I have noticed in burn rates. The actual question is, as always, whether the about 10% faster weight loss is worth any health consequences.

Additionally, whether the normocaloric variant is safe is still up in the air - with some big metastudy showing increased total mortality without CHD and stroke morbidity. No idea what's up with that, perhaps some sort of reserve missing or nutrient lacking...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Summary:

Diets that replaced carbs with fat burned an average of 250 calories a day more, in a study whose methodology wasn't described or skeptically analyzed whatsoever. Author then goes on to repeat "not all calories are identical" repeatedly.

<comment><USER6> Simple question is, "Where did the energy go?" First guess would be that the bodies of the fat eaters produced more heat, perhaps on account of a less efficient metabolism of fat. Couldn't that be measured directly with a thermometer? Other guess would be that the fat eaters were more active, producing more mechanical energy. That would be a very interesting possibility to explore. A few decades back, my reading led me to think that conventional wisdom was that fat-burning exercise was aerobic, ie requiring oxygen and breathing. Could burning fat require more exertion to acquire the oxygen?

Does the "not all calories are identical" assertion reduce to "the number of calories of heat obtained when a food is burned in a flame outside the body (the number of calories on the label) is not equal to the net number of useful calories obtained when the food is metabolized?"

250 calories per day is only about 1 kg per month of weight loss. This is not trivial compared to typical weight loss results, but it is quite a bit less than what people searching for diet advice would consider a game-changer. And it is not clear if there are other consequences of changing the composition of the diet over the long term of steady weight loss that most dieters need.

<comment><USER7>
      only about 1 kg per month

That's 26 pounds in _one year_. For most people, that's a game-changer.

<comment> Fire-Dragon-DoL I'm on a diet (fine tuned for me by a professional), and I'm decreasing 1.2 kg _per week_. 1 per month is not that much of you want to lose a lot of weight.

I do eat carbs within my diet, but it's selected on purpose:

\- 80 calories worth of cereals (I use cereals for diabetics, so I can eat 30g of those) \- Up to 800g of fruit (some of it is excluded, like grapefruit)

The fruit is the real trick: it makes you feel satisfied, when you eat it with right timing, even if you are on 700 calories/day (which is basically starvation.

First 3 days are terrible, then the body feels resigned and you feel like you can deal with it.

After 6 weeks that's roughly 10kg lost...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Already reported and discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18453665](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18453665)

</comment><comment><USER9> I want to see a massive diet study that's pure math analysis: start with calories going in and calculate all the different ways the energy leaves the body or gets stored in each case.

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately "calories going in" is not easily obtainable, as absorption is affected by cooking, what foods are in the gut together, individual variation, and how the foods are physically composed together (mashed, whole, blended, etc.). Unfortunately protein and carbs = 4kcal/g, fats = 9kcal/g is only useful as a rough guide in practice.

Look up studies on the accuracy of the Atwater method for more detail.

<comment><USER11> Plus caloric content is measured by incineration. Which our bodies aren't doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's carbs.

Please stop clickbait.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is all fluff.

There are a few simple rules I followed for successful weight loss (15 lbs in the last 5 months.

1) Burn more calories than you consume. 2) Losing more than a pound per week means you'll gain it back again. 3) If you like the taste of the food item then it's unhealthy.

<comment><USER14> Sure #1 is what it all comes down to, but how much are you in control of the calories that you burn? You can find scientific studies as far back as the Minnesota Starvation Experiment that shows that your body tries to maintain homeostasis when calories are reduced via regular caloric restriction, or with extreme overfeeding.

Weight, like much of the bodies processes is a strictly hormonally regulated, the the biochemistry/process of fat burning is actually pretty well understood. Oxidation of fatty acids competes w/ glucose (which is generally preferred), known as the glucose-fatty acid, or Randall cycle (doi: 10.1007/s10545-010-9061-2, PMC2950079).

The easiest way to increase FAO is therefore to reduce availability of glucose (don't eat carbs, or simply don't eat). This also lowers insulin levels, which independently inhibits lipolysis. (doi: 10.2337/db08-0281)

What's also interesting is that as you fast, your ghrelin levels (hunger hormone) goes down (as does insulin, cortisol spikes) - doi: 10.1210/jc.2004-0604

I know everyone's an expert here on HN and I'm glad you were able to lose some weight, but #2 has no scientific or statistical basis, and #3 is prima facie laughable and its hard to imagine any animal surviving if that were the case. (Just stick to tasty natural, minimally processed, real food and you'll be fine).

<comment><USER15> I like the Hacker's Guide to weight (and hair) loss through stress and malnutrition.

[https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/](https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/)

An engineer's take, and most entertaining.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Carbohydrates are also the cheapest calories.

<comment><USER17> I was actually just lamenting how difficult it is to get a "real" (no lettuce) salad this evening.

Making them at home isn't /really/ an option for me, not unless I want to eat it literally every day. The greens would go bad in about half a week; the other semi-perishable things would need to go shortly after.

It's so much easier to go out and get something fresh and variety from a common kitchen (restaurant) that services many others all day.

However, because carbs are cheap, and because meat is popular, those are the two things every restaurant has a focus and spin on.

Eating healthy is too expensive.

<comment><USER18> You can get single-serve fruit salad cups without any lettuce.

<comment><USER19> When people say "salad" they don't mean fruit salad, and I think you know that. Salad almost always means something with lettuce and other kinds of raw vegetables, sometimes with sprinklings of other things in there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Article is a massive pain to read without paragraphs.

<comment><USER21> I had massive attack while reading it, ... playing in the background...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> unquittable autoplay video? What a horrible website.</comment>


How to get gmail.com banned - not that I did this - <AUTHOR> http://mailinator.blogspot.com/2011/05/how-to-get-gmailcom-banned-not-that-i.html

<comment><USER2> I solved all my problems that needed disposable email addresses quite simply: I just don't sign up for those sites. If I'm not interested in getting future emails from them, I probably don't care enough to even log in.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder how effective it would be to look up the MX record of each domain (or just the A record, as it looks like all of mailinator's alternate domains have MX records that just point to their own A records) and ban based on the IP address? You'd have to update periodically, I suppose, but all of mailinator's alternate domains resolve to the same IP address. Of course it seems to be a moot point nowadays.</comment>


Hard-Coding Bottom-Up Code Generation Tables to Save Time and Space (1991) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=8E1E2F91F95973FD5873D5ABEB80A536?doi=10.1.1.15.397&rep=rep1&type=pdf <comment><USER2> It's amazing how much cool stuff there is in old papers.

I forget the details, but I once came up with a technique and was quite proud.

A few months later I stumbled across a paper written in 1986, the year of my birth, that described everything I'd thought of and a few things I hadn't.

Someone had my idea before I was born, and thought through the implications better than I did. Doesn't get much more humbling than that...

<comment> ryan-allen You still came up with it independently, and that's something.

What is interesting is how someone in 1986 was thinking about the same problem and came to a similar conclusion.

I used to think my ideas were unique, but then I realised that we're all absorbing similar information, and the likelihood of an idea being 100% unique is rare.

But if you thought it up and someone somewhere else had a similar idea, you still thought it up on your own.

<comment><USER3> _> you still thought it up on your own_

Back in the very early 2000s I had an idea for efficient backups that was essentially rsync, while tinkering with the thought I hit a block and started looking around for implementations of, or papers about, rolling checksums and such, and found rsync.

I wasn't put out that my idea wasn't original - I was glad twofold because not only had someone done it better already (so I could just use it for the task as hand), but it at least confirmed that my thinking was very much on the right track.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Describes an efficient way implementation of "Code generators based on bottom- up rewrite systems (BURS) automatically generated from machine description grammars". There's a short Wikipedia page for BURS [1]:

"BURS (bottom-up rewrite system) theory tackles the problem of taking a complex expression tree or intermediate language term and finding a good translation to machine code for a particular architecture. Implementations of BURS often employ dynamic programming to solve this problem."

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

</comment><comment><USER5> For some reason Chromium 81 is not able to handle this PDF. Works fine on MuPDF, though.

Could somebody in the know please say if this BURS stuff is used in, e.g., GCC or Clang or LLVM? Or maybe something else that might be familiar?

<comment><USER6> I expected the typical kerning/typesetting issues.

I want to note that it straight-up crashes Chromium's PDF reader.

<comment><USER7> Interesting... Chrome on macOS seems fine with it here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Also highly recommended is "Engineering a simple, efficient code-generator generator" (1992) by Fraser, Hansen and Proebsting.

[https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/151640.151642](https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/151640.151642)

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks fascinating. I wish that in the first section, they would have shown which instructions (for a sample architecture) might have been generated for each application of the tree rewrite rules. It looks like the reader was expected to understand that as a prerequisite.

It seems the authors' interest was more on how using their code generation tables could speed up the application of those tree rewrite rules.

<comment><USER4> It just blows my mind that an "Artifact Evaluation" process wasn't proposed until so recently [1].

"A paper consists of a constellation of artifacts that extend beyond the document itself: software, proofs, models, test suites, benchmarks, and so on. In some cases, the quality of these artifacts is as important as that of the document itself, yet our conferences offer no formal means to submit and evaluate anything but the paper."

1: [https://www.artifact-eval.org/about.html](https://www.artifact- eval.org/about.html)</comment></comment>


20 Mishaps That Might Have Started Accidental Nuclear War  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-weapons/issues/accidents/20-mishaps-maybe-caused-nuclear-war.htm

<comment><USER2> _"... 16) January 21, 1968: B-52 Crash near Thule ..."_

BBC reported an update on NOV10 of this crash ~ <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=361172>

<comment><AUTHOR> A discussion of that report with friends yesterday led on to Stanislav Petrov ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov> ) whose name I couldn't remember at the time and thus via that Wikipedia article to this list of near- disasters. So not entirely a coincidence!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I find obscure failure modes fascinating - for the similarly obsessed, try out the RISKS digests: <http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks></comment>


TimescaleDB 1.0 Is Production Ready - <AUTHOR> https://blog.timescale.com/1-0-enterprise-production-ready-time-series-database-open-source-d32395a10cbf <comment><USER2> I'm excited to give this database a try if I can find some free time.

</comment><comment><USER3> TimescaleDB is great for storing time series comparing to vanilla ProstgreSQL!

Unfortunately it sometimes looses in storage cost-effectiveness comparing to competing TSDBs - [https://medium.com/@valyala/when-size-matters- benchmarking-v...](https://medium.com/@valyala/when-size-matters-benchmarking- victoriametrics-vs-timescale-and-influxdb-6035811952d4)

</comment><comment><USER4> How fast is it when it has a TB of data? I realize that this is affected by the machine it is running on, but just curious how long those sample queries in the docs would take to run.

<comment> nevi-me I spent about 8 months writing data to TSDB. I was sending about 200 vehicle locations per 7-10 seconds for most of the day. I guess around 1 million events per day.

I played around with the data in the first week of setting it up, but then I ignored the feed for months.

When I came back on the 8th month, I couldn't get many/most queries to run in decent time. I didn't diagnose the issue, but I stopped the data stream and archived the database. My data was around 100GB, and I was reading it from a server-grade HDD. (I'll update my answer if I can find more accurate details when I get home).

I don't think it was a TSDB issue, might have been on my side. If I can restore my old data into a fresh DB, I'm going to try TSDB again with the data. I'm doing a Stats degree part time, so it'd be interesting to apply some forecasting knowledge to my dataset.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It would be nice if they did a quick comparison to InfluxData and other time series databases.

<comment><USER6> We do have comparisons, but judging by their Medium read times some may not be considered "quick" :)

* Influx: [https://blog.timescale.com/timescaledb-vs-influxdb-for-time-...](https://blog.timescale.com/timescaledb-vs-influxdb-for-time-series-data-timescale-influx-sql-nosql-36489299877)

* Cassandra: [https://blog.timescale.com/time-series-data-cassandra-vs-tim...](https://blog.timescale.com/time-series-data-cassandra-vs-timescaledb-postgresql-7c2cc50a89ce)

* Mongo: [https://blog.timescale.com/how-to-store-time-series-data-mon...](https://blog.timescale.com/how-to-store-time-series-data-mongodb-vs-timescaledb-postgresql-a73939734016)

We also released a tool called Time Series Benchmark Suite (TSBS) here that someone just submitted a PR for Clickhouse: [https://github.com/timescale/tsbs/pull/26](https://github.com/timescale/tsbs/pull/26)

There is also this spreadsheet that compares a bunch of different time series databases, including TimescaleDB: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sMQe9oOKhMhIVw9WmuCE...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sMQe9oOKhMhIVw9WmuCEWdPtAoccJ4a-IuZv4fXDHxM/pubhtml)

Hopefully some of that is useful :)

<comment><USER5> Thanks a lot, this is useful for comparing.

Edit: did a quick search and the discussion for the first link is here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17766566](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17766566)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I evaluated this heavily but had to backoff because scale is limited to a single machine. Really eager for their clustering solution.

<comment><USER6> Sorry to hear, though I'd like to mention that there is a fair amount of scale you can get out of a single TimescaleDB node. We scale with disk space so you can throw more disks at it; we have production users who are in the hundreds of billions of rows and 10s of TB of data on a single node. Also with support for streaming replication you can spread out your read load and get HA support. But yes, we will have more to say in the coming months about clustering though.

<comment><USER8> Hi,

are the upcoming clustering efforts developed with the intent to be mainlined in postgresql ?

Indeed some way to automatically failover/failback (ie automate pg_rewind) without all the keepalived/pacemaker/haproxy/patroni stuff is really needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can this be used side by side on normal Postgres cluster? As in could I have one DB for app data, and one for metrics data? Considering switching from MySQL (ndb cluster) to running a Postgres cluster and this could be a good motivator.

<comment><USER6> Yep, absolutely. Regular PostgreSQL tables coexist alongside TimescaleDB (hyper)tables in the same database. We believe that's actually a pretty big plus since you can keep metadata that you may need to join on your metrics data without doing it in an application layer.

<comment><USER9> Good to hear! how does the current TimescaleDB single node limitation play into it?

<comment><USER6> Not sure I follow exactly what you're asking. You can do read replicas for HA/failover/read sharding which you can do with regular PostgreSQL databases as well. So at least on the axis TimescaleDB presents no limitations.

<comment><USER9> Alright thanks! I thought I read that TimescaleDB doesn't support clustering yet, only single node Postgres installs, But I could've misunderstood it.

<comment><USER6> It does not support sharding writes across multiple nodes, but we do work with streaming replication so you can set up read replicas (and for failover).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bjarne Stroustrup Announces C++ Core Guidelines - <AUTHOR> https://isocpp.org/blog/2015/09/bjarne-stroustrup-announces-cpp-core-guidelines <comment><USER2> Oh cool, C++ might finally have the features that Ada had over 20 years ago!</comment>


Man loses house following Kickstarter success - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/94925/this-man-lost-his-house-because-his-kickstarter-was-too-successful/

<comment><USER2> I was under the impression that Kickstarter was about raising funds with no guaranteed return on expectations or even if the project will come to fruition. I.E. There's a large amount of trust involved.

Lately, it seems, the comments are leaning more and more toward an ambiance of an actual sales page rather than a fundraiser. I'm seeing more of these in common with Amazon product reviews.

Pity.</comment>


The Iraqi who saved Norway from oil - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/99680a04-92a0-11de-b63b-00144feabdc0 <comment><USER2> [http://archive.is/axMiv](http://archive.is/axMiv)</comment>


Are You Ambitious Enough? - <AUTHOR> http://the99percent.com/tips/6822/are-you-ambitious-enough <comment><USER2> Perhaps it's because I'm young and dumb, but I see nothing ignoble about a self-centered ambition, so long as one does no direct harm to others in that ambition's pursuit.</comment>