Medical School at $278,000 Means Even Bernanke Son Has Debt - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-11/medical-school-at-278-000-means-even-bernanke-son-carries-debt.html

<comment><USER2> I'm caught in an interesting trap where a third of my friends are set to become doctors, a third investment bankers/consultants, and another third will be going into tech. I'm also in Canada.

When our medical school friends explain their debt, my IB friends get really excited and start cursing them for their _luck_. Here, apparently, in addition to student loans that don't accrue interest until 6 months after graduation, all medical students are apparently eligible for a $250,000 line of credit at PRIME. Yes, you heard me--PRIME. At this point, my tech friends start to ask why anyone would take debt.

Here in Canada, an emergency doctor would make about $250,000/year in Ontario for working what works out (in shifts) to be about 25 hours per week, after he has finished his residency. Assuming this is a similar situation in the states, I don't see why this is so outrageous at all.

Oh, and Doctor shortage? _Really?_ It's medical schools that cap entrants, not the price. Take a look at all the qualified students who are rejected each year. I know a bunch.

<comment><USER3> The reason medical schools cap the number of entrants is the same reason they raise tuition exponentially - it's expensive to run a medical school. It has nothing to do with the number of applicants.

Also, 25 hours per week? My wife is a physician. Nobody at her hospital works less than 60. Most work 80 or more. Surgeons are close to 100. For many full time primary care physicians, it works out to about $10 / hour when first starting out.

<comment><USER4> But that $10/hr is gone once you are out of residency. And particularly for the Surgeons - who are still working 100 hours - the real money starts. Med Schools is a fine financial decision at this point in history. Lots of debt - but lots of jobs, with good pay as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a physician (with a BS EE/CS degree which is why I frequent HN), I tire of this argument. If one reads the article carefully, they find that the father Dr. Mark Moy attended excellent public medical school (and lower cost) Univ. of Illinois in Chicago while his son is attending the very expensive (and lower quality) Chicago Medical School (not to be confused with Univ of Chicago School of Medicine).

Many graduating doctors get into big debt because they choose to attend private undergraduate and private medical school. Instead of getting into such huge debt, a fiscally responsible medical student should attend a lower cost, quality public undergraduate school and a public medical school.

For example, in New York State, one could attend one of the SUNY schools or the public part of Cornell (the Agriculture school for instance) undergrad and then SUNY Downstate Medical School where they would get outstanding clinical experience for the approx cost of private undergraduate tuition alone.

It seems odd that Berknanke's son would still be in debt if he had attended both _public_ undergraduate and medical schools and does seem so fiscally prudent on the part of the Fed Chairman and his son.

In addition, IIRC, you can have the military pay for full medical school if you serve for four years as a doctor after you graduate if you are not good enough to get into public medical school.

In summary, for most people who complain of medical school debt in this country, it is really a sign of not being fiscally prudent on their part or of those of their parents.

<comment><USER6> "The median four-year cost to attend medical school -- which includes outlays like living expenses and books -- for the class of 2013 is $278,455 at private schools and $207,868 at public ones."

Whether the median is $278K (private) or $207K (public), that's a lot of debt with which to start your residency before starting to practice.

I'd also dispute the "military...if you are not good enough" assertion.

<comment><USER7> And that's not even considering the interest that accues _while_ you are in residency.

Also, I'm fairly certain that the military (Army?) will pay for your medical school costs, but you still have to go (and be admitted) to a normal medical school.

<comment><USER8> There are two military options - you can have the military pay your medical costs at a non-military (public/private) school, after which you owe the military x years of service as a doctor in the military. The other option is to go to the military medical school - you're paid standard officer salary to go to school for the y years it takes, and then owe the military x more years service as a doctor.

If you look at it as "getting paid to go to medical school" + "guaranteed employment for x years following medical school" it looks like a pretty sweet gig.

<comment><USER9> I don't know how much value that "guarateed employment for x years following medical school" is. From what I can tell there aren't a lot of doctors out there hustling for a position.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd say given the salary data, the fact that medicine is a stable and growing field, and the amount of high level training required , these numbers are not really crazy or out of line.

[http://www.profilesdatabase.com/resources/2011-2012-physicia...](http://www.profilesdatabase.com/resources/2011-2012-physician- salary-survey)

After six years of practicing, even a non specialized doctor will be at 200K with the lowest starting salaries around 140K. That is a fantastic amount of money when you consider that it is the lower end of the pay scale for doctors and that it will be a completely secure position in which you can work until death or retirement.

250K is a small price to entry into 8Million+ lifetime earnings.

Being highly successful in most fields is equated with 150K and beyond salary point, which comes with increased competition and no job security as you move up the ladder...I don't see this as being a bad deal at all, even for those totally self/debt funding.

<comment><USER11> Indeed, the salaries in medicine can be so absurdly high that $250k of debt is truly not as much as it sounds.

If a dermatologist _starts_ at $234k, then you could easily pay back $100k/year and still have a very comfortable chunk of change left over. And that's ignoring salary increases. In a few years, you'll be debt free making $350k. And you could see numbers of that magnitude even in cheaper rural areas where you'll live like a king.

And I completely agree with you on job security as well. Once you start practicing, you're pretty much made for life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> And to add to this we are heading into an era of what appears to be declining reimbursements. If not declining, then there certainly have not been increases commensurate with increases in the cost of training. Students are always told there will be a shortage of primary care physicians. I was told the same in the mid 90's as a student. Just because there's a shortage, however, it does not mean that "increased" demand has resulted in increase reimbursements for primary care physicians. Instead, the trend has been the growth of nurse practicioners and physicians assistants assuming greater responsibilities for care, at a much lower cost.

So if you are medical student now, my advice would to practice, of course, whatever specialty makes you happy, but don't fall for the shortage of primary care providers schtick - if that's the reason you choose primary care, you will be disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER13> Bernanke is a career academic. What would make you think he's particularly wealthy?

<comment><USER14> My thought too. _Even Ben Bernanke_. His salary is 180k. Good but not enough to spend 50k a year on med school most likely.

<comment><USER15> That's something like 1.6 years salary (assuming 6 years of med school)? Seems quite cheap, compared to something like an apartment...

<comment><USER13> Med school is 4 years at around $65,000 per year (post tax obviously). $180,000 per year post tax is $105,000. So that's 60% of his after-tax income for four years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> But Bernanke can print money for him and for his friends.

You can't.

</comment><comment><USER17> Of course - you've got to be a True Believer to get that kind of leadership position, and he would have of course taught that to his son. These people actually believe that having any non-monthly expense able to be financed is a good thing, as it is then more "affordable", where affordable means not requiring any sort of planning or saving for the future. Of course this really just causes prices to shoot up, with positive feedback if the good can serve as collateral, which exacerbates the problem causing more people to finance. Essentially they are working to erode the utility of money itself, and revert us back to a social reputation based system where your stature in life depends on your creditworthiness and obedience to your job (stability required to make all those continuing monthly payments).

</comment><comment><USER18> Maybe, but they also have a stable guarantee of income. They certainly don't live in poverty and fear.

<comment><USER7> You'd be surprised how many doctors struggle to get by while paying their debts off. Starting doctors don't get paid very much (considering their debt load).

It's even worse when you factor in their opportunity losses by spending 4 years more in school and 3-5 years more in residency (where you don't get paid much). And if you add in a specialized fellowship? That's 3-4 more years. It's 7-13 years before you actually get to start making real money. And if you're a GP, you're still only making a fraction of what you could be making elsewhere.

<comment><USER19> I disagree, many physician jobs offer loan repayment (of up to $200k) while offering salaries in the upper 300-400s (for many specialties). Surgeons can easily make seven figures depending on what they are doing.

You also have to factor in the job security, the fact that transitions to other roles does not entail a pay cut (as in law or finance) and the potential to be your own boss (run your own practice).

Doctors who make little money (the reason the average is so low) is because they choose to work less hours and spend time with family and friends. It's not as bleak as you think.

<comment><USER11> > Surgeons can easily make seven figures depending on what they are doing.

That seems like quite an exaggeration to me. Surgeons are highly paid, but in the grand scheme of things very few of them make $1m+/year. And the ones who do so generally do not do so easily. Neurosurgeons and orthopedic surgeons are generally the highest paid of all doctors, but both rarely crack seven figures, and they work horrendous hours in many cases. And becoming a neurosurgeon is simply beyond the ability of most medical students anyway.

Perhaps if you set up a plastic surgery shop in Beverly Hills and hired other doctors under you.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Population Pyramids of the World in SVG using Raphaël.js - <AUTHOR> http://populationpyramid.net/

<comment><AUTHOR> This project has been inspired by a Hacks/Hackers meeting in Brussels. After the meeting, I looked after interesting data sets and found out that it was not easy to find population pyramids for every country in the world, while the needed data was available on one UN website.

There a lots of interesting points to see in there :

\- one can easily spot the future public retirement plans problem in Europe (with more and more elderly people ). See here for example : [http://populationpyramid.net/?country=Belgium&year=2050](http://populationpyramid.net/?country=Belgium&year=2050)

\- I am still wondering what is happening in countries like Qatar in 2010 ([http://populationpyramid.net/?country=Qatar&year=2010](http://populationpyramid.net/?country=Qatar&year=2010)) How come there are so many more men than women ?

\- Near 1950 in Europe, you can spot the "dent" made by WW2 in the population, plus the baby boom. Example : [http://populationpyramid.net/?country=France&year=1950](http://populationpyramid.net/?country=France&year=1950)

\- It is already interesting to compare the shape of the pyramid for countries like Afghanistan in 2010 ([http://populationpyramid.net/?country=Afghanistan&year=2...](http://populationpyramid.net/?country=Afghanistan&year=2010)) VS the US in 2010 ([http://populationpyramid.net/?country=United_States_of_Ameri...](http://populationpyramid.net/?country=United_States_of_America&year=2010)). One can easily see the difference in development, to say the least.

And so on...

<comment><USER2> The men in Qatar are most probably migrant workers.

And marked dent you see in the 30 to 34 bracket in western europe in 1950 is not from WW2, but from WW1 (reduced births due to absent men).

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting, thanks !

<comment><USER3> The "Australia/New Zealand" link seems broken - it prompts a refresh back to "World" when I select it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ooops, yeah. Thanks for the bug report. I will fix that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Please label the axes.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_pyramid> It typically consists of two back-to-back bar graphs, with the population plotted on the X-axis and age on the Y-axis, one showing the number of males and one showing females in a particular population in five-year age groups (also called cohorts). Males are conventionally shown on the left and females on the right, and they may be measured by raw number or as a percentage of the total population.

<http://xkcd.com/833/>

kb

<comment><AUTHOR> Will do. Or add a link to this wikipedia definition, which matches perfectly what has been done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hey, would it be possible to get these with absolute scale, not only the relative percentage? It will be interesting to see processes such as "baby- boom" over time.</comment>


Is the Saudi Government Monitoring Women? - <AUTHOR> http://riyadhbureau.com/blog/2012/11/saudi-women-tracking <comment><USER2> Wow. The author never even asks whether requiring adult women to obtain _permission to travel_ is right or wrong, he just points out how less onerous the electronic version of subjugation is (no need to worry about forgetting your papers ladies, your husband can grant you permission from his cell phone and government keeps track!)

<comment><USER3> Did you read the essay all the way through? He covers that. The prime focus is on explaining on _what actually happened_ and how and what the ramifications are, but the author does mention that it's a problem that the government is inflicting this requirement on people who don't need it.

<comment><USER2> Yes, I read the whole article, and the article about how he doesn't like being his mom's guardian. He views it more along the lines of "stupid government" rather than "women are not property."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't understand why women needs permission to travel?</comment>


Golang proposal: Dense mark bits and sweep-free allocation - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/golang/proposal/blob/master/design/12800-sweep-free-alloc.md <comment><USER2> This would be great, and is greatly needed. but I have a question for the performance junkies here:

        If the cost of atomically setting bits in the mark bitmap turns out to be
      high, we could instead dedicate a byte per object for the mark. This idea is
      mentioned in GC literature [Garner, 2007]. Obviously, this involves an 8×
      increase in memory overhead. It's likely that on modern hardware, the
      cost of the atomic bit operation is small, while the cost of increasing
      the cache footprint of the mark structure is probably large.

I have been trained to think of an atomic operation at the CPU level flushing the cache line, and possibly L1 and further impacting all cores sharing the cache. This statement implies the opposite. Can anyone comment on this vis-a- vis a modern intel chip?

<comment><USER3> This sounds wrong to me, too. For the single core case, there's no such thing as an atomic byte store - the underlying mechanism reads a cache line and modifies it. The same goes for a bit operation (possibly needing more instructions).

For the multi-core case, there's always going to be cache line thrashing regardless of size. Cache lines will evict/transfer between cores as each accesses them.

Probably best to go with single bit, unless it can be shown that the overhead of generating a bit mask and the r/m/w is far more expensive.

<comment><USER4> The referenced paper is a bit vague about this:

 _An alternative to side bitmaps is a bytemap, a bytegrained data structure on the side. Bytemaps trade an 8× space overhead to avoid synchronizing on each set operation (if we assume support for atomic byte-grained stores)._

I think the idea is that, since a bytemap is less dense, two cores less frequently access the same cache lines, leading to fewer invalidations. Though, I wonder if it pays off, since it also gives less locality.

<comment><USER5> No, it is referring to the fact that the least unit that can be written to memory isn't a bit but a byte. To write a bit the whole byte must be read, modified and then written back.

<comment><USER4> Sure, but in both cases if a mark needs to be changed 'the whole byte needs to be read modified and written back', bitmaps or bytemaps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you liked this you might also find Rick Hudson's talk on GC improvements in Go 1.5 interesting:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiv1JOfMjm0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiv1JOfMjm0)

[https://talks.golang.org/2015/go-gc.pdf](https://talks.golang.org/2015/go- gc.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER7> So it looks from the diagram the spans point to arbitrary points in the mark bitmaps. Does that mean there's a lookup table to map from span to mark bitmap/offset?</comment>


SEC vs. Kik will end with certainty, but will it bring clarity to crypto? - <AUTHOR> https://decrypt.co/7353/how-sec-v-kik-will-end <comment><USER2> The pertinent facts alleged by the SEC can be found in paragraphs 7-16 of the SEC's complaint against Kin.[1]

[1] [https://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2019/comp- pr2019-8...](https://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2019/comp- pr2019-87.pdf)</comment>


British parliament to consider motion on universal basic income - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/universal-basic-income-british-parliament-to-consider-motion-uk-a6823211.html <comment><USER2> I'd like to know how such a change would be implemented, would taxes go up so the government can pay back to the very same people? Savings must be made for it to have an impact.</comment>


Linus Torvalds's professional profile on LinkedIn - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/in/linustorvalds <comment><USER2> I am quite surprised someone with real skills and tendency to call bullshit what is such as Linus uses LinkedIn, it's the pits of impostors and people taking larger slices of credit than they could ever truely justify, non- sincere feedback (because who really wants to tell Bill he was useless when he asks for a LinkedIn review, especially if you need him to reciprocate), impossible to unsubscribe emails (because X email is actual different from a Y notification), and slimey recruiters/networkers that want to reach out. Selfies for employees</comment>


Ask HN: Libraries Needed for New Languages - <AUTHOR>

There is a plethora of new languages being discussed here on HN everyday and a lot of talk about how to get involved. Many, I'm sure, would like to engage with a new language but often there is a mental barrier on what to build and a simple To-Do List to learn something either doesn't teach enough or doesn't feel useful enough for some to start.
So my question is - what is the "directory" of common missing needs? That is (most) every language needs(? / ends up getting) :
* an email library * a web framework * a queue framework * a descriptive statistics library * an ImageMagick wrapper * a number of database wrappers * an ORM * a deployment framework * etc etc etc
Perhaps not great examples above as most are related to the web and not games and other disciplines but you get the gist.
Just a thought <comment><USER2> this might be of your interest [https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust- dev/2014-June/010139...](https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust- dev/2014-June/010139.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, precisely what I was looking for. Rust seems like it is a very well organized community!

I think most of this stuff is too low level for me, but maybe I'll take a look at the HTTP libs, there is the slightest chance I could be of use there.

<comment><USER3> There is actually a nice HTTP library called Hyper ([https://github.com/hyperium/hyper](https://github.com/hyperium/hyper)). Maybe you could help there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> To be adopted by serious people for serious business cases™ a language needs a reason why it should be used instead of Python that a mature and highly adopted Python library or tool does not counter. For example this means the language needs a library to beat not only Python but Python + Numpy. After that wait 10 years and you will get even more serious enterprise business people™ to switch from Java.</comment>


Facebook forcing devs to use their credit system, takes 30% cut on each dollar - <AUTHOR> http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/01/28/facebook-pay-our-way-or-get-out/

<comment><USER2> That point about credits being potentially "bigger than PayPal" is spot on. The network effects pulling people into Facebook (and thus credits) are so much stronger than any pulling people into PayPal.

<comment><USER3> It's scary isn't it. It's a good fit for all their services, including Market Place. It's a good fit for their core market (who probably already use PayPal, but would happily go with alternatives). It fits nicely with people wanting to experiment with Facebook adverts for their small biz/consulting biz.

Only question for me is, how long will it remain fixed to the dollar :-) I'm sure secondary markets will spring up relatively quickly!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is MongoDB still an open source company? - <AUTHOR> I'm afraid not, not even close. Yes, I know what "open source" means - read on. The public availability of source code is just one part of "open source" tenets.
1. Community Open source is software of the community, by the community and for the community.For mongodb it appears open source is a distribution strategy - there is no community participation. Now that they have achieved widespread distribution they could care less about open source.
Rumour is rife that the company is actively suing partners who are using the term "mongo" in either the product name or the domain name. My sources tell me that the recent rename of MongoLab to Mlab is a direct result of a trademark infringement notice sent by mongodb. I hear the same narrative from multiple other "partners" of mongodb. How is this any way to build an OSS ecosystem? Why would an ISV or OSS developer build tools for mongodb only to be sued by mongodb when they start to make money? Imagine the havoc that would ensue if Linus decides to enforce trademarks or licensing for Linux?
2. Enterprise vs Community The feature differences between Enterprise and community versions of mongodb have started to get larger and larger with every release. Open source software does not mean "inferior" software or "crippled" software.
3. Controlled by a single company One of the original goals of open source is to prevent the control of a single company over the software we use. To me it looks like mongodb is a step backwards in this direction.
Mongodb "the product" has some very good things going for it but dissatisfaction with Mongodb "the company" is fairly widespread.
My prediction is that very soon there will be a high profile open source fork of mongodb driven by an Apache style board and community. For now the only fork I can find is "Percona server for MongoDB" which seems a better fit for the OSS model. I am going to switch to Percona till my long term prediction comes true. <comment><USER2> JSON support in postgresql will slowly kill mongo. I moved to it from mongo and it's sooooooo much better.

</comment><comment><USER3> > My prediction is that very soon there will be a high profile open source > fork of mongodb driven by an Apache style board and community

That won't solve any of the problems. The symptoms you describe also happen in the Apache Groovy "community", if you can call it that. Although they joined Apache's incubator in April last year (2015) and were promoted to a full project in November, the project manager "chair" privately owns the groovy- lang.org DNS name and if you click on most links for Groovy at Apache, they redirect to groovy-lang.org without any warning. He also keeps a private mailing list of groovy users which he collected by running a weekly newsletter for a year which he no longer maintains, and hasn't merged them with the Apache Groovy users mailing list. They run a separate build system for Groovy treating the Apache process as an add-on process, all against Apache guidelines. He refuses to refer to Groovy as "Apache Groovy" on first use which is what the ASF requires of project managers.

Joining Apache is just another distribution strategy for them, despite the talk in Groovy circles a year ago about getting a proper governance structure. It didn't solve Groovy's problems, and it won't solve MongoDB's.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why not just switch to an entirely different database?

</comment><comment><USER5> I think mongodb was always like that.</comment>


Build a Profile That Matters - <AUTHOR> https://app.devly.co <comment><USER2> Not very clear what the appeal or the advantage for me to create a profile is.

<comment><AUTHOR> @allanmacgregor Thanks for the comment. We want to solve a common problem, for both developers and organizations who are looking to hire the right candidates. For developers, we want to solve the problem of creating or maintaining a traditional approach of filling up resumes which we believe does not reflect completely on the candidate skills and their capabilities. Hence, we believe in helping developers create a minimal portfolio that largely speaks the candidate's capabilities. On the other hand, in the recruiting space, that is traditional hiring process, which is very slow, overarching (universal process that is lengthy in process), creates friction in the entire process that would lead to unnecessary spending, consuming enormous amount of time where organizations, entrepreneurs, recruiters would be spending more time sifting through resumes than focusing on building the business.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/devly](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/devly)</comment>


The most meaningful 404 *ever* - <AUTHOR> http://un-america.com/ The most meaningful 404 <i>ever</i> <comment><USER2> Least meaningful 404, since the actual response header returns "200 OK" :-/</comment>


First Python 2.7 interpreter to use multiple cores - <AUTHOR> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/pypy-dev/2012-May/009901.html

<comment><USER2> To be a bit pedantic: the multiprocess module works fine for multiple cores in regular cpython, I actually used it for a little graphics program I wrote. Nice to see the GIL gone for multithreading though :)

<comment><USER3> It isn't pedantic just irrelevant. Using multiprocess is an entirely different beast than using threads. All shared values have to explicitly allocated that way in shared memory. Since there is a separate interpreter for each process there is no problem with internal state getting messed up. Threads are just a harder problem for python and one which has _never_ seen an effective solution.[1] That is why this kind of work is exciting.

[1] You may argue (correctly) that multiprocessing and using pipes to communicate is a better solution than threads to begin with (for many applications). However, sometimes a threaded solution is the right solution and previously if you needed threads python didn't work for you.

<comment><USER4> Using multiprocess is different from using threads. But that doesn't make it irrelevant, because it is a completely functional, already-existing way of using multiple cores.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I much prefer share-nothing approach and use sockets + subprocess for communication. It scales nicely.

<comment><USER6> Depends on what you're doing. Shoving a numpy array with 10^7 elements over the wire isn't going to scale nicely at all. There are still a lot of computing scenarios having shared memory is the best approach.

<comment><USER7> You do not need threads for shared memory. I know of quite a few high- performance software systems that use process isolation and yet leverage shared memory via mechanisms like mmap() for IPC.

<comment><USER8> Good point, but shared memory via mmap isn't very Pythonic since you have to manage the shared memory manually, you can't allocate Python objects on the shared region, etc.

<comment><USER9> You don't need to use mmap explicitly. multiprocessing.Array and numpy arrays can share the same memory that can be used from different processes e.g., <http://stackoverflow.com/a/9849971>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It seems to use Software Transactional Memory scheme. I hope that it will work better with hardware-aided transactional memory in Intel's next generation architecture Haswell.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is incredibly interesting, and the people working on it are incredibly smart.

But I think it's a slight oversell to call this a python 2.7 interpreter. For instance, most scientific computing code that runs in cpython 2.7 won't run on pypy.

It's impressive from a computer science point of view. But, pypy has a ways to go before I'd call it a python interpreter without adding qualifications.

<comment><USER12> PyPy is officially sanctioned as python 2.7 interpreter. Cannot run scientific code does not rule it out. This is more a problem on the scientific code being too implementation specific (for good reasons though). This _is_ known to be a problem to a lot of people (including me), however it does not rule pypy as a python 2.7 interpreter (without qualifications).

<comment><USER11> My apologies. I mistakenly lumped C extensions in as an inherent part of python. I was wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm not following this. Does it mean the GIL is finally gone?

<comment><USER4> I will get excited when it actually works out to be faster than interpreters with the GIL.

I'm a bit disappointed that Python seems to have no interest in standardizing a lightweight-thread (greenlet, coroutine) interface that isn't an awful mess. yield is powerful but coroutine implementations with it are baroque and opaque. Java-style threading has a million gotchas and the interface is just a dog. I want to be able to teach people with a week of experience to write concurrent programs. (What about writing turtle programs with multiple turtles running at the same time?)

If Python doesn't do it, then I want someone else to eat their lunch.

<comment><USER14> Which of the existing coroutine implementations have you tried, and what did you dislike about it?

<comment><USER15> In my humble opinion, the greatest problem with all of them is that there are so many. Most of them are rather fine I think, but it can just be a serious pain in the ass getting your head around all of them.

<comment><USER14> I've only needed one (Twisted, which is actually slightly outside the space occupied by gevent et al). You can't stop people from building more, but feel free to bet on a popular project if you don't want to deal with choice.

<comment><USER15> In a world where I only work with my own code, that works. Unfortunately that is not my reality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My understanding of the GIL is that its inclusion was justified by the fact that removing it would speed up multithreaded programs at the cost of slowing down single-threaded programs (the latter being more common than the former).

Given that, and given that the patches for removing the GIL were submitted for an earlier version a while back (2.4 or before, I believe), is it unfeasible/impossible to design an interpreter that detects whether a program requires support for multiple threads and then act accordingly? Since this currently requires the inclusion of a module, it seems like it would be unambiguous.

<comment><USER17> Detection will be non-trivial. On the other hand, it could be a simple command line option, like specifying the number of cores you want your program to run on.

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure about that. If you hook thread creation into invalidating the code that was was JITted without STM, you might be able to handle it reasonably well.

Of course, the slow path would just use STM all the time.

<comment><USER17> > ... invalidating the code that was JITted ...

I mean, that is non-trivial.

<comment><USER18> Maybe. If you determine that you only need to do it on spawning the first thread, and never go back, then you can probably spare the expense of throwing out ALL of the jit cache and starting from nothing.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How many tech books do you read per year? - <AUTHOR>

As software developers we are looking for a way to make the self-publishing for technical books, easy and effective. Answering the following questions you will help to put us in the right path.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ZKDSB9Y
Thanks <comment><USER2> For me the electronic versus paper thing comes down to what I bought the book for.

For a book that I just need to reference occasionally, epub is usually fine. For a book where I'm starting from scratch, learning new things and coming back to the same bits over and over again, I prefer a paper version that I can write in.

Sounds like a cool project though - good luck!

</comment><comment><USER3> depends on the size of the book and time frame to finish the book. but I read at least 3-4 books per year based on various CS topics.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> link to survey: <http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ZKDSB9Y></comment>


House Passes Health Care Reform - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-na-healthcare-passage22-2010mar22,0,2788293.story <comment><USER2> One thing that bothers me about taxes is that they are around 20-30% of profits. If you take on a business partner and give him/her 20%, you expect something in return.

What do we get for our taxes? Wars and social programs that will be bankrupt long before we can benefit from them. (roads, etc., are < 1%).

I would be OK with paying the taxes for social programs if I thought those programs would be sustainable into my old age, but they aren't and nobody seems to care, even though this is widely known.

So when you write the IRS a big check, you are paying for old people, and when you are old you will not receive the same treatment.

By the way, most of the cost of healthcare is in areas where the money has very little yield, such as end of life care for the elderly, bypass operations, stents, and statins. If people actually had the opportunity to consider the value of healthcare, reform would be nothing like what it is now.

Next time you see an old person eating bacon and eggs in a restaurant, picture that person's bypass operation, years of statins, and excessive end of life care that you are paying for... and think to yourself how perverse "reform" is.

Meanwhile, there are millions of so-called "illegal immigrants" who can't even call the police if they are assaulted or abused (for fear of deportation) being left out of the reform.

Most of your income taxes go to wars and medicare, and most of the healthcare reform goes to the practitioners who practice useless surgeries and interventions on a vulnerable population of elderly.

The "reform" bills don't change anything, they just transfer even more of the wealth of young people to the elderly and their exploiters.

<comment><USER3> I like driving too, but don't focus too narrowly on roads. I think you're getting benefit from more than < 1% of taxation. Public education helps everyone. Research helps everyone. Having a criminal justice system helps everyone (well, the non-violent drug offenders would disagree). Having a strong civil legal system helps everyone. Meat inspectors help everyone. Financial regulators help everyone.

You could even say that knowing that we don't have senior citizens starving and dying in the streets as helping everyone. I _like_ knowing that I live in a society that takes care of many of the less fortunate.

I'm not saying that government is good at solving every problem, but focusing on just roads, wars, and old people is very narrow.

<comment><USER4> I always have and always will take umbrage with how people downplay the government's role in ameliorating the lives of people.

Case in point, can anyone really deny that the overwhelming majority of the cures and vaccines for deadly afflictions that have plagued the US (and the planet, for that matter) have been developed in a university or non-profit lab under the funding, technology transfer, and/or support of governments (in the US case, the NIH)? Polio (Salk), TB vaccine (Calmette), the list goes on. Hell, even Norman Borlaug helped eradicate famine in several parts of the 3rd world under the encouragement (and part-funding) of the Roosevelt administration.

You're right that it's not just about socialized interstates and bunker bombs. It's truly about doing those things that just _cannot_ fit on any sane balance sheet trading on Wall Street (or if they tried, investors would truly revolt).

<comment><USER2> Ok so you've successfully argued for 1% of the Federal budget and 5% of state budgets. I hope you're not going to stop your thought process there.

<comment><USER4> Manned space missions that go more than "just passed the exosphere", making sure people with the pre-existing condition called "old" and "dirt poor" and the extra-duper fun combination "old and dirt poor" are actually not left to die on the streets with a simple infection, networks of massive national laboratories whose prime mission is to secure technologies and advance science for one of the most technologically advanced and by far most innovative countries on earth (perhaps not in the adoption of personal electronics, but we surely laid the foundation for all innovation, not the least of which was von Neumann and his work with Eckert and Mauchly's ENIAC, the first programmed computer). Those labs take several billion a year each to operate, and have arguably single-handedly placed and kept the US at the forefront of technology for decades.

I'm not going to pussy-foot around it, we spend 50% of our tax dollar on defense, and most of that into personnel and pure weapons r&d and manufacturing. It's a shame, but it's the truth. Just imagine if we could refocus those dollars elsewhere (in an ideal world, anyway), where would we be now?

More importantly, why hasn't private industry come and done it for us?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For all of the talk about the impact of higher cap gains taxes on startups, the far more important impact is likely to be that potential founders will have a (slightly) easier time leaving their jobs and purchasing insurance on a less-broken individual market.

<comment><USER6> The day pre-existing conditions don't matter is the day the us _explodes_ with small businesses.

<comment><USER7> As a counterpoint, countries that already have this are far behind the US in small business creation. Despite this supposed handicap, the United States has the most dynamic large economy in the world. It turns out that the government soaking up a large portion of the GDP to pay for expensive public benefits diverts capital away from financing private ventures, and this has a detrimental effect on entrepreneurship.

If universal health care were really that important to entrepreneurship, why isn't Silicon Valley in Europe?

<comment><USER8> >>As a counterpoint, countries that already have this are far behind the US in small business creation.

Do you have any data to back up your assertion ?

According to [http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/small- business-20...](http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/small- business-2009-08.pdf) "By every measure of small-business employment, the United States has among the world's smallest small-business sectors (as a proportion of total national employment)."

<comment><USER7> That's certainly an interesting link. I knew that over 99% of US businesses are considered "small" employing half the population, but I didn't know that Europe had such a vibrant entrepreneurial society. I'll admit, I'm in middle of a Programming Languages final so I didn't do a lot of statistical digging and relied on anecdote instead.

Still the authors of that study do appear to have an ideological axe to grind. I would be interested in researching the matter further from a less ideological source. I'm curious why we think of the United States having such a large share of the world's startups and invention if it isn't true.

<comment><USER7> And it does strike me as weird that I have a lot of friends from third world countries that come here because they view America as the land of entrepreneurial opportunity, when this study shows that they would be much better off in Germany.

<comment><USER9> There are factors that are equally or even more important, like taxes, availability of capital, bureaucratic hurdles etc. I once heard from a German restaurant owner that he fought 12 years to get a permission to put tables in the garden...

<comment><USER10> Another factor might be that it's possible to get accepted as an American in a few years. In Germany you may be a naturalized citizen on paper--but the real social acceptance of compatriots runs through bloodlines. (I.e. you have to look the part, too.)

Not that they won't be nice to you. But your children will stay, say, "Turks" in the third generation and onwards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I promise +1 Karma to the first person that puts together an infographic actually explaining where, exactly, $100 billion a year of tax payer money is going to go, and what we are going to get in exchange.

I am all for affordable healthcare for everybody, just desperately afraid of how the gov't typically overspends.

<comment><USER12> I think the idea that government naturally has to overspend is wrong. It is a meme that people tend to trot out whenever there is a political discussion (along with _the other side is bums_ and _politicians are unethical crooks_ ).

In this particular case, the idea is that we pay $100 billion a year of tax payer money. (For comparison sake, the F-22 program alone cost 65 billion including development. You could only buy 500 F-22s for $100 billion)

With that 100 billion dollars, we attempt to bring into line the 2.3 trillion dollars that we spend a year on healthcare. (16% of GDP).

16% of GDP is way more than other western countries spend on healthcare. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_compared#Cross- coun...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_compared#Cross- country_comparisons)

Other western countries spend about 8-10% GDP on healthcare.

So lets do the math. Lets say we spend tax money on healthcare and we only manage to get it down 1% from 16% to 15%. That would be a 1/16th reduction on 2.3 trillion dollars... approximately 140 billion dollars. So if we even manage to knock 1% off of the amount spent on healthcare by doing this, we've sent 40 billion dollars back to the taxpayers.

If we get more than 1% off of our %GDP towards healthcare, we start making some serious bucks for Americans. If we got our % spent on HC down to even 10% we would have made a 540 billion dollar win on this issue.

(Yes, it comes in the form of taxes, but it also means that in the long run you aren't paying as much for insurance premiums... health insurance premiums might as well be a tax that doesn't go to the government, as having healthcare isn't optional if you plan on living for a significant amount of time...)

<comment><USER13> You are assuming that we would get the same value for the new amount spent.

<comment><USER12> You are assuming that we are getting anywhere near optimal value from the 2.3 trillion that we already spend. Clearly we do not. Compared to other countries there has got to be absolutely TONS of wastage.

We die sooner, we spend more of our own money and we spend more government money.

lose/lose.

<comment><USER13> I didn't make that assumption at all. I assumed that we will get less value for our money the less competition and more regulation that there is. Current regulation already keeps us far from receiving optimal value for our money.

<comment><USER12> Your assumption is wrong, as clearly indicated by the data. Countries with less competition and more regulation at least _appear_ to receive closer to optimal value from their money (in the realm of healthcare).

Healthcare doesn't make sense when viewed as a market economy.

First off, there is a potentially infinite demand for healthcare. (How much will you pay to live a little longer? As death approaches, the amount you will pay can be seen as an asymptote towards infinity. You have to be a particularly well balanced individual for this not to happen.)

Competing for actual finite resources (hospital beds, doctors, nurses, medications, the drafty-but-fashionable hospital-johnny), with a number of people who are going to die anyway, but are willing (if not able) to pay non- finite sums of money, clearly points us towards a conflict. The only conclusion is for the price of the finite resources to increase indefinitely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So I opposed this bill, but now I have an honest question: Rationally speaking, shouldn't I cancel my health insurance? I'll pay the fine, which is way less than my current premiums, and I'll just wait until something goes wrong to buy insurance, since I can't be turned down.

<comment><USER15> The ban on pre-existing condition screening doesn't kick in until ¿2014?

There's a temporary public option for the people who would otherwise still be fucked until then. I'm not sure if you'll be able to get that on short notice.

<comment><USER16> That's really not very far away. Few young healthy people are going to develop cancer or something nasty and expensive like that in the next three and a half years.

<comment><USER3> Healthy young people get in horrible car accidents all the time.

<comment><USER16> What percentage of healthy young people get in car accidents that require them to pay large medical bills, excluding those that are paid by the other driver's insurance? I doubt it's a very large percentage. The fact that something happens "all the time" in a nation of 300 million does not mean that it's likely to happen to you.

<comment><USER17> Wait until you're older. While most young people don't have catastrophic things happen. But enough do that I have no idea how many apparently healthy young people I personally know who have contracted cancer, been in accidents, or otherwise had sudden very large costs.

Let me give a few. A motorcycle accident broke an arm, and the other person left with no insurance information (my brother's arm is recovered). A propane accident lead to burns over 30% of his body (my brother-in-law Abe survived with significant scarring, but it was touch and go for a while). Hodgkin's lymphoma (killed Mark). A stumble leaving a Halloween part lead to falling with the corner of the step hitting her backbone (Ardith is partially paralyzed + has other health problems). Cancer of the small intestine lead to major surgery and months of chemo (Euna looks like she will survive). A brain cyst lead to balance problems and could have been lethal had it not been for expensive brain surgery (I know 2 women this happened to, both are nicely recovered but one had to never have kids). A jump on a dirt bike went wrong when there proved to be a mine shaft on the other side of the hill he jumped over (Matt is now paraplegic). Oh, and then we have depression leading to suicide attempts (I knew multiple people who succeeded).

Then there is the chronic stuff. I know multiple people with diabetes, several more with Chrohn's disease. Severe allergies are common and can be expensive. Schizophrenia hits 1% of the population.

These are just some of the people I _personally_ know that stuff happened to. Most (luckily) were covered by someone's insurance. But not all.

Yes, you can roll the dice and play roulette. Yes, young people feel immortal. But stuff goes wrong often enough that you're highly advised not to if you have a choice. If you pay attention and live a while, you too will collect a nasty list of sad examples.

<comment><USER16> Most of the things you mentioned, you could see coming quickly enough that you can get on insurance if they can't deny you because of preexisting conditions. You'll be able to get insurance _after_ your get cancer come 2014. The exceptions are the ones involving car wrecks, falls, etc, where you don't have time to fill out paperwork before racking up a huge bill. Even those can do no worse than bankrupt you, and immortal 25 year olds are usually also broke 25 year olds.

Not that it's a good thing to go bankrupt, but you're talking about a low single digit chance of an unfortunate but not disastrous event vs thousands of dollars a year. Contrast to the old system where you were liable to go bankrupt AND not get coverage at all with no insurance (for example, see the immigrants who can't get dialysis who were in the press in the last year).

<comment><USER17> _Most of the things you mentioned, you could see coming quickly enough that you can get on insurance if they can't deny you because of preexisting conditions. You'll be able to get insurance after your get cancer come 2014. The exceptions are the ones involving car wrecks, falls, etc, where you don't have time to fill out paperwork before racking up a huge bill. Even those can do no worse than bankrupt you, and immortal 25 year olds are usually also broke 25 year olds._

Not true. First of all most of the things I mentioned were fast accidents that gave you no warning. So your most is wrong. But it gets worse than that. I listed no less than 4 people with cancer. Let's go through them and see what difference insurance made.

Mark woke up, was not feeling well, then wound up in the ER that night. Without insurance his family would have been financially hosed. (He wound up dead within a year anyways.)

Euna brought up stomach trouble at a routine doctor's visit, the doctor followed up, discovered an aggressive cancer at a fairly early stage. (This was incredibly lucky for her, if the cancer had been located a few inches farther away there would have been no symptoms at all.) Without insurance she would not have had a regular doctor's visit, would be less likely to catch it in time, and she'd have probably died.

The two with the brain cysts went to the doctor after developing severe balance problems. Not having insurance would have meant living through that while going through several weeks of paperwork. What is worse the condition they both had is one where if you stand up and bend over you can drop dead instantly. So without insurance a few nasty weeks with instant death quite likely.

So the likely cost for the cancer cases if you didn't have insurance? Instant bankruptcy, likely death, possible death, and possible death.

Now that may be bad luck, but those are just a list of people who came to mind for me in a few minutes of thinking. YMMV but that is not a risk I particularly desire to go through.

<comment><USER16> Not having insurance is not the same as not getting checkups. It means paying for them out of pocket, but for a healthy young person that shouldn't be too expensive. Before the health care bill passed, there were already places like Hello Health popping up that catered to the uninsured. There will be more of them if people decide insurance isn't worth buying.

It also doesn't mean not getting treatment, because if you have something like a brain cyst, the ER can't turn you away.

I also don't see why your friend's family would be financially hosed, assuming he's over 18.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Another way this bill affects readers of HN: Parents can keep children up to 26 years old on their health insurance. Previously, the age limit was determined by individual insurance companies or individual states.

<comment><USER19> I'd be ashamed to be in my 20's and be on my parents insurance plan.

<comment><AUTHOR> So you'd be ashamed to be in grad school? (Or doing a startup right out of college?)

Often the insurance offered by a parent's plan blows away what can be had through the University. Of course, you can buy individual insurance fairly cheaply... unless you aren't in perfect health, or are a girl.

<comment><USER19> Last year I finished my graduate degree in computer science. I worked a full- time job while doing that (also during undergrad). I'm actually pretty proud of it. I finished up grad school with a lot of work experience, zero debt and had insurance the entire time.

<comment><AUTHOR> And you should be proud of that.

I'm currently a CS grad student, with zero debt, working as a GTA/GRA (depending on the semester). I get my insurance through the University for an awesome $94 a semester, but if I were still young enough, I'd definitely opt for my parents insurance, and I wouldn't be ashamed of it. It would just make financial sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> [I posted this on the other thread, which seems to have been deleted as a dupe. Sorry if it's against protocol to re-post. But I tried to find both sides, good-and-bad wrt startups.]

Some discussion of the impact on startups in the thread at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1208019>

While it didn't discuss all of these, it seems to me that the things that will directly impact startuppers:

Pros

\- Community rating, no recision, etc will make it easier for people with pre- existing conditions to get coverage. For people who have pre-existing conditions (or who have kids who have pre-existing conditions) and don't have a spouse at a bigco and want to do startups, it makes it possible.

\- Might also make it easier for bootstrappers to get coverage.

Cons:

\- The new taxes are concentrated on capital gains, so will tax startups and angel investors most of all. [This bill proposes a 3.8% increase on cap gains. The administration is also planning to change the regular cap gains from 15 to 20%, so if everything passes the rate will go from 15% to 23.8%, or a 58.6% increase.]

\- Shifts costs from the older to the younger, so most startups here will pay more.

\- In realistic scenarios, will probably increase the deficit, affecting interest rates. But that's long-termand not clear.

Pro or con, depending on what you think:

\- Mandatory coverage will require that you have coverage during a bootstrapping phase.

A mix of good and bad for startups, depending on where you are in the process.

<comment><USER21> I've heard this a number of times but not heard it detailed: in what way are the CBO estimates unrealistic? What more realistic assumptions would you make, and what is their effect on the deficit?

Also how is it shifting costs from the older to the younger? It seems more that it is shifting costs from the near-bankrupt uninsured to those who make significant portions of their income from capital gains, i.e. the wealthy.

<comment><USER22> "in what way are the CBO estimates unrealistic? What more realistic assumptions would you make, and what is their effect on the deficit?"

The CBO is bound to look at the next ten years of effects. In order to make it look even remotely palatable, the bill collects four years of revenues before a significant amount of the benefits kick in. It is difficult to imagine a reason for this that doesn't involve gaming the CBO's estimates. (It's not as if our government is all like, "Oh, gosh, we really need to save up some money before we hand this entitlement out." It wouldn't matter anyhow because that wouldn't significantly affect the long term viability of this plan; what matters is steady-state income vs. spending.) Multiplying the estimated cost by 10/6 is a decent start to get a true view of the costs.

The CBO itself has also called attention to the fact that the scoring of this bill assumes that the so-called "doc fix", in which the payouts given to Medicare doctors will be cut in accordance with the law back to a certain rate unless a bill is passed to prevent this cut. This bill is passed every year, and there is no reason to believe this Congress will not pass that bill either (and quite substantial reason to believe it will). You can look around for how big that is, but it's pretty big.

This bill shifts yet more burden directly onto the States as unfunded mandates, which are not scored as Federal burden (for instance, "Find" the second instance of "mandate" in [http://www.wdef.com/news/reaction_to_healthcare_reform_passa...](http://www.wdef.com/news/reaction_to_healthcare_reform_passage_pours_in/03/2010) ). Nevertheless, not only will we have to pay them, we will have to pay them in a context where we can't even borrow our way out of it as States ability to borrow is constrained compared to the Feds. I live in Michigan.... WTF is Michigan going to do with another few billion in mandates?

The CBO has its scope very tightly defined by law, and it's been getting increasingly gamed over the years. This completes the gaming. They might as well disband the office, IMHO, Congress has figured out how to bypass them.

Costs are shifted onto younger people by the mandate for people to purchase insurance or pay a penalty. Many of today's uninsured are young, healthy, and uninsured by choice. You may disagree with that choice, but that's beside the point. The point is that they are not paying into the system. Not all younger people are affected by this due to some other provisions (nothing says government at work like taxing with one hand and crediting with the other), but quite a few are. Coryrc linked this, I'm "borrowing" it: <http://www.newsweek.com/id/224020>

Incidentally, I give this provision a very high chance of being struck down on Constitutional grounds, but that of course leaves the entire rest of the bill in place. The CBO estimate can't assume that will happen, but if it does the already-screwy revenue numbers just get screwier.

Please carefully read the statements I am making here and note their factual content. I will not deny I think this bill is an enormous, enormous mistake, but it is not my opinion that taxes are collected for four years before benefits are paid out, it is not my opinion that the bill contains unfunded mandates on States, it is not my opinion that younger people will have to buy insurance or pay penalties (the reason why is arguably my opinion but extremely-well founded). It is my opinion the CBO might as well disband. It isn't my opinion that the insurance mandate is facing a constitutional challenge, though of course who will win that is currently a matter of opinion. To the best of my knowledge, these aren't "talking points", these are simply part of the bill as it stands.

<comment><USER23> I mostly agree with you, and I do think there's a great deal of gaming going on in the numbers.

But I also think one reason for having 4 years for the benefits to kick in is to give the private companies implementing those benefits times to adjust.

Given that concern, it's probably not nearly enough time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> A startup/small-business related point on the bill is _"A tax credit becomes available for some small businesses to help provide coverage for workers."_

Just trying to make the top story in HN at least a tiny bit relevant to HN...

<comment><USER25> From my casual read, that's for businesses where the average wage is pretty close to the minimum wage.

<comment><USER26> Average wages need to be $50,000 or less:

From WSJ: [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB2000142405274870453490457513...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748704534904575132110999558770.html)

Tax credits for businesses: Businesses with fewer than 25 employees and average wages of less than $50,000 could qualify for a tax credit of up to 35 percent of the cost of their premiums.

<comment><USER27> How does equity figure into the equation? I'm guessing even equity doesn't matter much for startups, since they'll have very low valuation to begin with anyways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Why should the average 20-30+ year old even carry insurance? The penalty is only $250 a year, rising to $750 in a few years. They can't deny you insurance based on pre-exiting issues. So why not just pay the penalty, which can be substantially less than the policy, until you have an issue?

<comment><USER29> $750/year is about the cost of so-called "catastrophic" insurance: high deductible, low monthly. Worthless for the kind of chronic ailments that old people suffer, invaluable for things like car accidents or leukemia. Only an idiot would rather pay the fine than buy this kind of insurance.

<comment><USER28> Catastrophic insurance, with a high deductible, is what I carry. They are going to be grandfathered, but no new policies of this kind will be allowed under this law. An all encompassing health insurance, with the kind of deductible they have legislated, is not cheap.

<comment><USER29> Ah, I wasn't aware. (Shows what I know about this bill.)

While catastrophic insurance is a good deal for young unmarried people, part of me thinks it's not how health insurance is supposed to work. If you're not spreading the cost of caring for old/sick people among young/healthy people then what's the point?

The other part of me thinks it's just a handout to the insurance industry and people such as yourself shouldn't have to pay a dime for someone else's overpriced cholesterol drugs or 3D ultrasound.

<comment><USER30> Catastrophic insurance is exactly how insurance is meant to work. If you want to save for medical procedures in your old age, you can get a savers account.

The whole point of insurance is that a big financial hit (caused by your house burning down, cancer, whatever) causes a non-linear amount of suffering. A few dollars (paid by 99 lucky healthy people) isn't noticeable, but the one guy who can now afford his emergency operation is a thousand times happier. Total cost = 100 _$750. Total happiness = 99_ (-meh) + 1 * (OMG I'll see my grandchildren!!!).

I don't like the whole "forced savings" thing. If you get to 80, and can't afford an operation that you probably don't need, and didn't save for it, and your family won't bail you out ... everyone is mortal.

I guess you could say that people don't have the discipline to save. Fine. Tax the young, and give cash to old people. But don't treat health insurance as a pension - why should young people subsidize old people who want expensive (but most likely useless) operations, but not subsidize old people who can live with the fact that they are mortal and would rather have few bucks to spend at the Bingo club?

<comment><USER31> What do you do if you get a serious condition in your 20s? Not particularly common, but I certainly wouldn't feel good if I wasn't covered for it.

Also, most people literally cannot afford to save up hundreds of thousands of dollars over their lifetime. Nonetheless, this is what they might end up having to pay in medical expenses.

I can't see any hint of a practical or sensible option in what you're saying.

<comment><USER30> If you get a serious condition in your 20s, that's what you should be covered by with cat- insurance.

If everyone needs "hundreds of thousands of dollars over their lifetime" they are getting too much healthcare. That's my other point - we sink all the money into more-or-less useless operations on old people who are about to kick the bucket.

Healthcare is best directed towards younger people, where it can make a difference. Old people often get stuff that's likely to be net negative (side effects, complications, etc) because the hospitals want to make money off the procedures.

<comment><USER31> I guess I'm not understanding what this "catastrophic insurance" is supposed to be. If it covers any medical condition that you might get in your 20s -- _without_ charging enormous co-pays -- then it seems an awful lot like regular insurance. I can't see any reason why someone in their 20s would need less coverage than someone in their 70s. You may be less likely to get sick, but if you do get sick, you'll want that coverage even more than someone in their 70s (since you have more to lose).

>If everyone needs "hundreds of thousands of dollars over their lifetime" they are getting too much healthcare.

Eh? I never suggested that everyone needed to spend that amount. But some individuals will, and not just for "useless operations." There are plenty of cancer survivors who are in that degree of debt.

>Healthcare is best directed towards younger people, where it can make a difference.

I hate how the terms of the debate in America are so selfish. In no other country is there any perception that the old and the young are somehow conflicting interest groups in healthcare. The discussion of this issue is a symptom of the bitterness, cynicism, and (frankly) utter insanity brought about by decades of buying and selling healthcare as a commodity. I just can't engage on this point; I'm baffled by it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> An interesting aside - house dems tacked onto this bill an overhaul of student lending which eliminated $60b of private lending in exchange for a wholly gov't controlled program:

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2010/03...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2010/03/21/AR2010032103548.html)

</comment><comment><USER32> You've got some incredibly complex proposals being thrown into an incredibly complicated system (and by that I mean the entirety of the social, political and economic realm - not just health-care).

The law of unintended consequences is going to play out here massively. Not only is it an intractable problem to predict the outcome from our perspective but it will be near-impossible for historians in decades hence to look back and separate which of their present society's ills were caused by this bill or by the million other factors that occurred in the intervening years.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's going to be interesting to see if the Supreme Court finds that the Constitution allows the Federal government to force people to buy health insurance. With a 4 liberal, 4 conservative, and 1 swing vote split, they could go either way.

One thing's for sure, this bill will be challenged.

<comment><USER17> The court is not all about politics.

The whole thing is about regulating a commercial transaction (buying health insurance) and taxes (aka fees). Both are areas that there is a _lot_ of precedent saying that Congress is within its rights.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> We should all be wary of the mandate. The uninsured used to be victims, and soon they will be criminals.

</comment><comment><USER33> Missing in this thread so far is a discussion of whether or not this bill is even remotely constitutional.

Not only does it seemingly institute a poll tax, it stretches the "commerce clause" of the constitution beyond all reasonable limits, it violates the 10th amendment, and article 2 section 8.

But I suppose all of that will become irrelevant in our glorious new future where the life of every citizen of the US is dependent on the efficiency, fiscal discipline, and humane kindness of federal and state bureaucracies. Indeed, this is a future I think we all look forward to, as all of these glorious institutions have provided a hearteningly robust history exemplifying all of those qualities to the fullest. Haven't they?

<comment><USER34> _the life of every citizen of the US is dependent on the efficiency, fiscal discipline, and humane kindness of federal and state bureaucracies_

How? Get some cash, find a doctor, and give him cash to fix you. Nothing is stopping you from doing that under the new system.

 _it violates the 10th amendment, and article 2 section 8_

No, it doesn't. You can argue that the 10th amendment didn't go far enough, but that is orthogonal.

The new healthcare regulations are not unprecedented; consider agencies like the FAA and the FCC (shouldn't each state regulate their airspace and radio spectrum), FHA (shouldn't each state build their own expressway system?), etc. Basically, your argument makes about as much sense as "income tax is illegal", and regardless of how you feel, the constitutional law is not on your side.

Were you really making so much money on capital gains that this is going to affect you negatively in any way?

<comment><USER33> _How? Get some cash, find a doctor, and give him cash to fix you. Nothing is stopping you from doing that under the new system._

I find it intriguing that your purported solution to the limitations of this legislation is the very antithesis of the program itself. This seems like a weakness in the reasoning behind the plan. Not to mention that the problem is more that the quality of care, at any price, will degrade and that we will all become less wealthy as our government takes more of our money and spends it ever less efficiently.

Also, each state does own, build, and operate their own expressway systems. How exactly do you imagine the FHWA operates? There is not some federal agency that builds interstates across the nation, ignoring state boundaries. Rather, the FHWA provides a set of standards, design advice, and substantial federal funding to local agencies which then make their own decisions on building their own roads. The US government doesn't own and didn't authorize or oversee the construction of, say, I-5 or I-95 they merely coordinated with local governments to do so. This is how a healthy cooperation across local and federal government works.

Anyone who doesn't recognize that this bill represents an unprecedented leap in the involvement of the federal government in every individual's business and livelihood is living in a fantasy world.

 _Were you really making so much money on capital gains that this is going to affect you negatively in any way?_

This is a specious argument. They came for X, and I did nothing... Principles matter. Extorting taxes out of others to pay for your own healthcare may seem just fine and dandy an idea if no one you or I know would pay those taxes, but it's a bad idea on principle.

To adapt a common phrase, those who sacrifice liberty for universal healthcare deserve neither.

<comment><USER34> What liberty is being sacrificed?

(Example: I went to the pharmacy to refill a prescription, but it was a few days early and my insurance company would not pay. The cost of the drug to the insurance company is $18 -- I pay $10, they pay $8. Without my insurance, though, the cost of the drug is $85. That's the free market at work -- liberty indeed.)

<comment><USER33> The liberty of doctors and drug makers to set their own prices, the liberty of individuals to decide their own degree of health insurance coverage. Today we have precious little of this liberty already (I suspect that you imagine that square 1, the present situation, is some sort of laissez faire free for all market economy, but that couldn't be further from the truth), tomorrow we will have even less.

Given that the US has been the engine of medical advancements in the world for the past several decades (though you'd expect the EU, with a similar population and wealth to at least match America's contributions), it seems that perhaps there is some correlation between the ability to earn a profit on the sale of new drugs and new treatments and the development of those treatments.

Now, indeed, this correlation seems to hold in every other industry as well, and everyone accepts that. We understand that Apple would not spend its efforts developing the iPad were it not assured of a hefty profit. We understand that Tesla motors would not have poured the significant amount of R&D into developing their roadster if they did not expect to make significantly more in sales.

And yet somehow our reason flies out the window when it comes to medical care, because we can't imagine the "unfairness" of a system which doesn't cover everyone exactly 100% equally. Sad to say but the universe is unfair. I believe that it's important that we ensure that life-saving care is always available to people regardless of whether they are able to pay or not, but I do not believe that medical care can or should be "free" or entirely government subsidized for everyone.

That path is the way not only to the stagnation of medical advances but also to the ultimate bureaucratization of the medical industry. We can look forward to more and more people deciding to become software developers, lawyers, or oil and gas engineers instead of doctors, nurses, or pharmaceutical researchers. And we can look forward to a system ever more encumbered by red tape and the inefficiency of bureaucracy at every step. In what fantasy world could anyone imagine that the results will be any different?

We should rejoice that it's even remotely possible to trade dollars for health. We should thank all of the people who spent so much effort going through medical school, nursing school, or acquiring chemistry degrees, and who spend so much effort keeping up with the state of the industry. If instead we vilify these folks as extortionists and financial nuisances, if we portray them as providing services that we DESERVE to receive as a birth right for a pittance, then we will drive them away. We will end up with fewer and more mediocre doctors and researchers.

And we will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

<comment><USER35> "because we can't imagine the "unfairness" of a system which doesn't cover everyone exactly 100% equally."

The system in the UK doesn't even pretend to have "100% equality" - if you want to you can go to private health providers and insurers. Very few people do though because the socialized care from the NHS is often good enough.

As for complaints about bureaucracy - I'm always amazed at how little bureaucracy is involved. Only time I can remember signing a form in a hospital was after my wife had a climbing accident and the hospital wanted to keep her in longer but she wanted to go home - so we had to sign some disclaimer.

Maybe I am a socialist or something, but I actually really like the idea of everyone in this country getting pretty decent healthcare that is free at the point of delivery. Of course, I know that I am taxed for it in various ways - but for this I am happy to pay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Pre-Market U.S. Stock Futures: <http://money.cnn.com/data/premarket/>

<comment><USER22> It will be interesting to see how the markets react to this.

My personal theory, which I haven't seen anyone else state, is that the reason we heard from the bond raters last week about how the US might lose its AAA status is an oblique threat to so downgrade our rating if this bill passes. Even if we merely apply the conservative "three times more than the government says it will cost" we're stacking on another staggering amount of debt and entitlement on an economy that can't take it. (Given our current entitlement loadout _even if_ our economy were to start rebounding tomorrow at record pace we're _still_ in deep trouble in the not-so-distant future... and that's before we handed out yet more entitlements.) I'm not ready to "predict" it, but I wouldn't be surprised we lose it in the near future, as in, single-digit weeks.

They'll be right, too. An entity deep in debt whose only priority is to pile it on even deeper is an entity that is not going to be cleaning up its finances anytime soon. We'll have earned it.

<comment><USER37> I wish they (President and Congress) closed Iraq's financial black hole first and only then entered new spending spree. That's what Obama promised during his presidential campaign. Sigh.

<comment><USER38> He found out that it's not a "financial black hole" in any sense of the word. The opposite, it's an OPEC-killer:

[http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/03/17/how_iraqi_o...](http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/03/17/how_iraqi_oil_is_changing_the_world)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> In order to bring down the cost of health care, the government would have to operate the system more efficiently than the market does. I can't think of _anything_ the government operates more efficiently than the market does.

<comment><USER40> I'm generally pro-private sector, but the stats on our health care insurance system are astounding. The OECD averages (which are primarily statist health care systems) about 8.9% of GDP spent on health care. The US averages 16%. US has fewer doctors per capita, lower physician visit frequency, lower life spans, and more uninsured.

I'll grant you that the private sector is more efficient than the government sector in the vast majority of cases. The health care insurance system is not one of them.

<comment><USER39> I would argue that government involvement in the private sector is why our system is broken. I don't mean for this to sound snarky, but what nation runs a better health care system than the US? The quality (for the cost) of medical care in the US is far better than any other nation.

Both Canada and Britain have gov't health programs. 25% of the people in Canada wait 6 months or more for surgery, in Britain that number is higher. In the US, only 5% wait that long. The waiting time for an MRI in Canada is 10 weeks.

<comment><USER41> The waiting time for a large chunk of Americans for all of those procedures is infinite, because they can't afford them at all. That makes the Canadian and British system look quite a lot better than ours. America has the best emergency care system for rich people in the world, but for the average Joe our healthcare system sucks compared to just about any of those socialized systems. The idea that America has the best healthcare system in the world is a joke.

<comment><USER42> And that's too bad. They only people that I've ever met that don't have insurance have enough money to pay for it, but choose not to. The poor are already covered by social programs.

<comment><USER41> > They only people that I've ever met that don't have insurance have enough > money to pay for it

Then you haven't met enough people.

> The poor are already covered by social programs.

That's a joke I hope, but it isn't at all true. Social programs tend to only cover emergency care. If you get cancer and you're poor, you're fucked and doomed to a slow death because emergency rooms don't do chemotherapy. Anything that requires treatment but isn't immediately emergency life or death and you're screwed. Do you actually know many poor people?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> What's interesting to me is that the thing passed with absolutely no Republican support whatsoever.

This insane partisanship cannot last.

<comment><USER44> As an outsider (Irish) I find it interesting that this occurred. Usually at least one backbencher in Ireland would support the opposing view based on their own such morales. Was this down to pressure from their own party, their constituency or just pure spite to derail something that was not their own idea in the first place?

I'm not pro/against the issue; I have no stake in US healthcare.

<comment><USER23> There's also the possibility that they believe it's bad legislation. And the the democrats voted for it as a partisan measure.

Just throwing that out there.

I've never understood why it's only the opposition that can be partisan and not the majority.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I sometimes wonder if these stories belong here, due to the incendiary properties and tangential relationship to start-ups. Not that I don't think Hacker News could handle the discussion more or less maturely.

<comment><USER46> If any such story ever belongs on HN, I think you can make a case that this story is it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I have been biting my tongue on other venues regarding this bill, which is a good sign it's probably not a good idea to discuss here.

Having said that, I'll put on my business hat and begin adapting. What's this mean for my startup?

1) Those of you who say the country is waiting for affordable insurance until startups take off are smoking crack. It's a great benefit, sure, but young folks don't need health insurance and startups are lucky to keep the lights on, much less pay fines to have everybody insured. The process of getting new employees may greatly be enhanced, but we need a thousand pre-employee startups for every one looking for employees, so that's where to look for impact, not with insurance. Not sure there is any impact at all for dirt-poor young startups. It should be interesting how the income requirements work -- can you get 15K in investments and keep that for operating? Or does that make you rich enough to start having to pay fines? Having said all of that (which you might hate), it's a great thing to keep your insurance.

2) Those of you saying that it's the end of Western free civilization are completely overstating the case as well. It's going to add 16 thousand new IRS agents, sure, and there will undoubtedly be new regulatory burdens associated with hiring employees and growing. The key metric to watch here is public debt. We're in a debt explosion and, to some, this just pours gasoline on the fire. If that assumption is true, and I believe it is, then watching the national debt rating could be an early indicator that different business configurations might be better than locating and operating in the states. (That doesn't mean you can't start out here, just once in growth mode getting the hell out of Dodge might be worth it) If the country is going broke, sooner or later somebody is going to come looking for any profits you might be making. I'm not saying it is or it isn't. I'm saying that it looks like a legit concern to me -- you can do the math.

3) Medical and insurance discussions will now become political ones. In other words, somebody has to say "no" in order for any kind of health service plan to work without going broke. It used to be those people were the insurance companies. It was a lot of fun hating the insurance companies. Now that we're regulating the insurance companies like utilities, however, that person is going to be some bureaucrat somewhere. Your best access to him, if you have an employee with a complaint or are looking for some kind of change, is probably through your Congressman, giving your local Congressional weasel even more power than he currently has. This means all startups, from dollar one, need to have some face time with their Congressperson if at all possible. Increasingly he/she is the guy who influences more and more details of operating -- bandwidth availability, insurance standards (now), investment criteria, etc.

I hope that sounded reasonably neutral. I certainly didn't feel angry while writing it. While the immediate impacts are very low, over time I think this is a major change in the country's direction. Small business guys need to pay attention.

</comment><comment><USER48> well... 234 years was a good run.

<comment><USER49> 234 was a good run ... of not being a country civilized enough to look after it all it's sick

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I think the Amish will suddenly start gaining a lot of new, adult members.

This bill is an abomination.

<comment><USER49> Your thinking on this matter are an abomination

<comment><USER51> As an explanation of why you're being downvoted, neither of you are contributing anything to this discussion -- keep flame wars out of HN, ok?</comment></comment></comment>


A better alternative to Rust and Go - <AUTHOR> http://nimrod-lang.org/index.html <comment><USER2> This is just the front page if the nimrod site. There's nothing there about Rust, Go, or any language comparison.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why is it better?

</comment><comment><USER4> Google Result: Benchmarks Round Two: Parallel Go, Rust, D, Scala and Nimrod. [http://togototo.wordpress.com/2013/08/23/benchmarks-round- tw...](http://togototo.wordpress.com/2013/08/23/benchmarks-round-two-parallel- go-rust-d-scala-and-nimrod/)

Consider the Nimrod Programming Language [http://geetduggal.wordpress.com/2014/03/03/consider- nimrod/](http://geetduggal.wordpress.com/2014/03/03/consider-nimrod/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Having worked in a Hebrew School I get that Nimrod was a hero, but in most of the world Nimrod is an insult.

While "rust" is typically not a positive thing, it does imply 'aged' which can be a good thing in a programming language.

I understand that Nimrod is typically about as fast as Go and Rust in performance, but Google's adoption of Go does offer Go a significant advantage as a CV/Career builder.

The title of this thread is a bit misleading as the page doesn't really talk about why Nimrod is a good alternative.

<comment><USER6> Git is an insult too.

</comment></comment><comment> K-Wall Curious choice of name. I expected satire from a language called Nimrod. I don't see where this is a better alternative to Rust or Go.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry if the title was misleading. While better is a very subjective term, I meant nimrod to better in the sense that, while Rust ans Go are amazing languages, I believe they do not do anything to make programming and understanding code easier. Nimrod makes an a better attempt at simplifying syntax and making distribution easier than Rust or Go.

</comment><comment><USER7> Can anyone provide more concise points into why Nimrod is a better alternative to Go or Rust? The way the language is described sounds pretty close to Go, I am curious where it shines compared to them?

<comment><USER8> Metaprogramming!

Real generics! (Hygenic) lisp style macros

Also, and I know this is subjective, better syntax.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Probably it's better than Rust and Go via more powerful macro system, although I'm not very sure because reasoning about macros is kind of hard.

</comment><comment><USER10> Was expecting a link to D ;-)

</comment><comment><USER11> Misleading title indeed.</comment>


A Unix-style mail setup (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://dev.gentoo.org/~tomka/mail.html <comment><USER2> I used to have a "homely mutt"[1] kind of setup but eventually got tired of offline imap, msmtp, and all that.

Now I use mutt only directly on the server running exim. Painless support for multiple domains, completely arbitrary from addresses with no configuration necessary, no imap, no magic directories showing up for no reason, no weird certificates, just pure ssh... It's the way to do it.

Otherwise, I stick to generic clients (Google webmail and Android app).

[1] [http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely- mutt/](http://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/the-homely-mutt/)

<comment><USER3> how exactly does your setup works when offline ?

what if you do understand the internet and stay away from centralized third party solutions and rather self-host your email because it is too sensitive to give away to giant corporations ?

<comment><USER2> I don't really understand this comment. You can host exim+mutt anywhere. With a megacorp, in the cloud, even under your bed... The only problem you face is getting the giants to accept your mail so you will probably want another server acting as a smarthost if you host at home.

I also don't remember being involuntarily offline in the last four years so I don't optimize for it any more. Plus, it's email. It will be there when I get to it. You can incur hours of downtime and other servers will just dutifully keep trying to deliver messages. It's a pretty laid back service.

<comment><USER4> _Well-configured_ other servers will just dutifully keep trying to deliver messages. There are plenty of less well configured servers out there.

For instance, I have greylisting configured on my primary SMTP server, but no greylisting on my secondary (because it's run by a friend, not me). Some servers will contact mine, offer a message, get told "try again", and just not bother, even though they could try the secondary and get through straight away. Other servers will give up after failing to deliver for 30 minutes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Also worth mentioning is Karel Zak's mutt fork:

[https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-kz](https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-kz)

It uses notmuch for mail indexing/tagging/searching and allows you to use notmuch searches as virtual folders.

<comment><USER6> seconded- especially now that notmuch-inject exists. When I first started playing with mutt-kz, I had some difficulty getting the flow through procmail into notmuch, but it's pretty painless now. I've been using it daily for 2-3 years and can't imagine working without it now.

<comment><USER7> notmuch-inject? I hadn't heard of this, and google is turning up nothing. Care to elaborate for a line or two?

<comment><USER8> Maybe gp means: [http://notmuchmail.org/manpages/notmuch- insert-1/](http://notmuchmail.org/manpages/notmuch-insert-1/) ?

Sounds like it should work nicely with server side filtering/delivery?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Are there any projects trying to reduce the email-server complexity on linux?

Mailpile seem to be going in the right direction on the client side, but I have yet to find any self-contained MTA/IMAP solution. With self-contained I mean its configured in one location, doesn't use linux users and has easily extendable storage options.

<comment><USER10> Soverign provides a good basis for an email server setup. It describes itself as a "set of Ansible playbooks to build and maintain your own private cloud: email, calendar, contacts, file sync, IRC bouncer, VPN, and more."

[https://github.com/al3x/sovereign](https://github.com/al3x/sovereign)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is anyone here using GNUS as their daily email client? I used to use mutt back in the day, and I was kind of surprised that the author was using emacs with mutt rather than just using emacs.

That said, I got as far as getting emacs / gnus to sync a gmail account before realizing that I'd need to spend some serious time reading manuals and tweaking configuration before I'd be able to use it day to day.

<comment><USER12> I used to run GNUS, I switched to mu4e over a year ago, and haven't looked back.

<comment><USER11> I'm looking at the webpage now. Sounds like it tries to resolve some of the thread locking issues. Not sure I'd use the orgmode -> rich text email feature, but that is pretty awesome. Anything in particular you find superior to GNUS or otherwise useful?

<comment><USER12> Well, the idea behind mu is to use searches to filter your email instead of using imap folders. Indexing does feel a little slow sometimes, but it is far better than writing procmail rules to filter email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I use a setup very similar to this on OS X.

\- After using offlineimap for years, I recently switched to mbsync/isync. It is way faster and has been much more stable.

\- After a stint with sup ([http://supmua.org](http://supmua.org)), I'm now back to mutt. I really love sup's interface, but it was a little too flaky.

\- I use a script called "mail" that starts a tmux session then launches mutt in it:

        #!/bin/sh
        tmux -2 new-session -d -s mail -n 'mutt' "export TERM=screen-256color; mutt"
        tmux select-window -t 1
        tmux attach-session -d -t mail

Then, in mutt I have the double-quote mapped to a macro that executes a shell command to split the tmux window and launch a read-only instance of mutt:

        macro index,pager \" "<enter-command> \
            unset wait_key<enter><shell-escape> \
            tmux split-window -h \"mutt -R\"<enter>" "open new mutt"

This is my way of having an "async compose" pane for writing emails. I had tried replacing the mutt EDITOR variable with a command that splits the window and launches vim, but there are a lot of annoyances with that approach. Launching another mutt is way easier, and it also allows for easily viewing two emails at once.

That said, there are a lot of nice tips in here that I'll incorporate into my setup. Thanks for posting!

</comment><comment><USER14> Very nice. My biggest objection is to Mutt (which I agree sucks _less_ than many options). It is not clear to me that "mail client" is one job - I find myself happiest with nmh.

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell Re address books and mutt. I recently integrated my Owncloud contacts into Mutt by following these instructions:

[http://got-tty.org/archives/mutt-kontakte-aus-owncloud-nutze...](http://got- tty.org/archives/mutt-kontakte-aus-owncloud-nutzen.html)

They're in German, but they're easy enough to follow even if you don't speak it (I don't). It works really well.

<comment><USER15> See also [http://karra-asynk.appspot.com/](http://karra-asynk.appspot.com/) which syncs CardDAV (e.g. OwnCloud) with MS Outlook with Emacs BBDB with Google Contacts with MS Exchange

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've been considering switching to an IMAP/mutt email setting on the desktop.

But what is the best mobile / iOS client to use?

Which mobile client meets the desiderata he lists (fast, works offline, etc.)?

</comment><comment><USER17> [http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/HOWTO-INDEX/](http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/HOWTO- INDEX/)

</comment><comment><USER18> I really like mutt + isync (for painless imap syncing) + mu (for indexing and address completion)</comment>