Ask HN: Why a Static Site Generator? - <AUTHOR> If you use a static site generator, especially to create a blog, why do you use it? Some reasons I've heard before are:<p>* Pages load faster * Hosting costs are low or free * Can write while offline * Can publish with a workflow you like (e.g. text editor > commit > push) * Can keep a history of changes (version control) * Posts start offline and are saved locally by default<p>Anything else? <comment><USER2> That's a good question,

A static site is famous in developer community mostly, There are a couple of reasons like

1\. developers are very handy with Github, so can directly write blogs or HTML pages and commit push in GitHub easily. No login required in traditional CMS (developers are a bit lazy)

2\. No database required, Static data is just a file so It doesn't require any databases. also, it can be managed with history via commit or branched.

3\. hosting, Static site doesn't need any CPU operation (RAM), It just files so simple file-storage is enough to host. Here GitHub pages, AWS-S3, Google Storage, Zeit serverless and other static storage providers having features to host directly via Git commit. So you can host it within a seconds with just a small command.

4\. Faster development, It has less dependency like a database, third-party services, so we can develop it very fast than the traditional approach.

And working in a team is very productive because no extra setup needed. just clone the repo, change and commit. With Zeit you can deploy every branch for every user for staging purpose within a 30sec.

I am building [https://firecamp.app](https://firecamp.app) with Nextjs serverless deployment feature ([https://fc-web.nishchit14.now.sh](https://fc- web.nishchit14.now.sh) This is staging domain, It'll be destroyed in future.)</comment>


A melody written by a crowd - <AUTHOR> https://crowdsound.net <comment><USER2> So it's kinda looping at the end. Likely doesn't change that much any more.

</comment><comment><USER3> An effective strategy for generating a minimal amount of musical surprise.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yay! More 1-5-6-4 chord progressions! Just what everyone needs =)

<comment><USER5> Crowdsourcing a melody is like teaching a dog to walk on its hind legs. Be impressed that it works at all.</comment></comment>


This is what happens when you work yourself almost to death. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.outernet.io/article/329/one-step-too-far

<comment><USER2> Yikes! A cautionary tale, to be sure. Glad to hear you're back on an even keel; a bit of time to recharge your batteries and reconnect with the basics of life sounds ideal. This is also a good time to read that Serious Book you always meant to get around to, so as to keep your mind exercised without falling back into its habitual grooves.

I think that looking after ourselves is a problem for a lot of 'knowledge workers'. William gibson said it best, in _Neuromancer:_

 _For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh._

<comment><AUTHOR> I really like that quote.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I thought it was pretty much settled that the old "stress causes ulcers" theory was a myth and that current medical knowledge is that ulcers are usually caused by the H. Pylori bacteria.

I always felt sorry for the poor guys that would get ulcers and then everyone piles on about how they need to relax. No, it turns out they just needed antibiotic.</comment>


Microsoft beware: Stephen Elop is a flight risk (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://www.siliconbeat.com/2008/01/11/microsoft-beware-stephen-elop-is-a-flight-risk/ <comment><USER2> From the article,

"After he had been working at Adobe for about six months, Elop told the company in June 2006 he'd be leaving, setting his departure date as Dec.5, one year to the day since he had been hired."

"At Juniper, Elop resigned on Wednesday (2008) — also one year to the day from when he started "

And then Microsoft for two years. And now Nokia. What kind of impact did he make on all these companies (given the tiny amounts of time spent in each) that made Nokia think he had the chops to rescue them? Genuine question.

And to think that when underpaid developers move frequently , they are "bad hires" e.g: "Never hire job hoppers. Never. They make terrible employees." - Mark Suster (HN discussion at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1287110>)

<comment><USER3> The differences in standards applied to people perceived as "executives" vs. people perceived to be "employees" are truly astonishing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe making it more valuable to leave than stay was a bad idea, huh? If someone offered me $800,000 to stay, or $1.8million to leave, I'd leave, too! Especially if I could be working somewhere else during that time as well.

<comment><USER5> Considering his job until now at Nokia, I would say that making it more valuable to leave should be the highest priority to anyone foolish enough to hire him.

Whoever does professional placement for him, however, deserves serious credit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well, in light of this, we should all check the news for Elop's name in about a year from now...

<comment><USER7> He never quit Microsoft. ;-)

<comment><USER8> He was always a.... "company man".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Seems to me there should be longer delay periods on bonus payments of that scale. Granted, I'm not living in that stratosphere, but ... yeah, as someone else said, if I could leave after 1 year (to the day) with an additional 1.8 million for no more work, or stay (and commute) for less than half that... why would you? The 1.8 could have been there for 'time on job' of, say, 3 years, or 5. Or pro-rated to the time spent on the job?

This reminds me a bit of the 'bankers' on wall street a couple years ago. "But if we don't offer sweet deals like these, this top talent won't come work for us!". Do you really want to incentivize 'top talent' to leave on day 366 (or, in wall street's case, take massive risks)?

</comment><comment><USER10> Seems like he is hiding an e from his last name :) Stephen Elope is his real name. He runs away to marry a new company every other year.

</comment><comment><USER11> First piece of good news Nokia's gotten all week.</comment>


Filepicker.io adds policy based security - <AUTHOR> https://developers.filepicker.io/docs/security/

<comment><AUTHOR> Founder here. We're excited to be able to begin offering security on Filepicker. Security in Javascript is hard because most of the possibilities (window.location, referrers) are easily bypassed. We've built this system based on a shared secret and signed polices; this method is a good start for us to help you easily enable file uploads while still protecting your storage.

We've tried to be careful and meticulous about how we approached the problem and tried to balance usability, clarity, and security. We've reached out to friends who do this kind of work at MIT, within our batch at YC, and with some beta customers.

Keeping our developers buckets safe and our user's files safe is one of our company's principles so feel free to email me at firstname.lastname@example.com or post here; I'll stick around to answer questions or respond to comments.

<comment><USER2> Hi!

Thanks for this update. This addresses a great security concern so that our buckets cannot be abused (especially filled) from outside of our apps.

I still have a remaining concern which is more about consistency. If you authorize users to upload for your app with a policy, they still can upload anything to their will without your app even knowing about it. Sure, the new policies can ensure that they won't be able to read what they upload if it never reaches your app but they still can upload huge amounts of data in your buckets without that data even being used or known of by the app.

I sure could write a backend scheduled task to clean up unknown files in our buckets.

But, what I would eventually like to see is a way to acknowledge that file handles we're received by the app. If, after a specified timeout no acknowledgement has been received from our app, then these files would be deemed dirty and you would then be able to clean up your servers and our buckets from these files.

Does my concern make any sense?

In any case, thanks again for this update. This remaining concern can be worked around and this update really mitigates the risk of someone wanting to abuse our buckets for malicious reasons.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Jerome.

Thanks for the kind words. In regards to your concern, the way we imagine this playing out is that in your app, the client asks to upload something. You use an ajax request to ask your server, with your cookies, if this is allowed. If the user is allowed, you can create a policy and sign it. You should also set the min and max size on the policy. Then you can pass this along. Thus, you know of and approve of every upload request.

Does that sound reasonable? We has also considered a post upload hook where you approve of it. However, we imagined that people would not only want to know the metadata, but maybe even the contents before approving it which seems silly to pass the entire data around.

I think what will really help is if you set up the policy as outlined above, and then, do the clean up that you mentioned when we do webhooks where you could sign up to receive a notification after every upload.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, we'll manage it exactly as you mention and do some cleanup.

As for the idea of webhooks, in our case, we wouldn't need the content, just the meta data. That's what we already do anyway: we only store references to the S3 files we created. The idea is that it simplifies be able to run multiple Web server instances by having this user generated content offsite.

My concern was really more about us confirming what we receive to you so you could do the cleanup of non acknowledged files instead of us doing it. What you are suggesting is an additional verification that can have value but doesn't address the question of constituency between what ends up in our S3 buckets and what we end up being aware off in our app. In any case, no big worry but I'll email you details.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You guys are pumping out features like crazy! I'm going to use filepicker in my next project whether it needs it or not, great work!</comment>


SF hospital charged $15K 'trauma response fee' for baby that needed no treatment - <AUTHOR> https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/2154017/san-francisco-hospital-treated-korean-tourists-baby <comment><USER3> That's insane. Unfortunately politicians will not touch this issue because most people either have insurance which covers these idiotic baseless fees or indigent people go to the emergency room and avoid these fees as well. But the poor sap who wants to do things the right way gets effed over like these people. What a shame.

I don't care who, Bernie, Trump, some socialist, take this cause (hospital billing) and have them come correct. They need someone to get tough and straighten them out.

I mean, it's legalized robbery. Nothing less.

<comment><USER4> Article mentions the bulk of the bill was a "trauma activation". This is an alert from the EMS units to the hospital that they are bringing a patient with indications of trauma requiring additional medical resources to be diverted. The reaction and resources differ per trauma facility. SFGH is a level 1 center [1]. There are better news sources that describe the trauma system within the context of this story.

My opinion based on limited information within the article is that the field EMS suspected a closed head injury. The trauma "doctors at the hospital quickly determined that baby Jeong Whan was fine". If the baby had an MRI instead of a medical exam by a team of specialists, the headline would lose some weight.

The fee is to staff ED specialists 24/7\. I believe the better question is: "should we charge for resources that were used but stood down after initial assessment by the trauma team?" From the perspective of the EMS field, there are protocols that describe tbe patient condition, mechanism of injury and other indicators which dictate a trauma activation.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trauma_center#Level_I](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trauma_center#Level_I)

<comment><USER5> > If the baby had an MRI instead of a medical exam by a team of specialists, > the headline would lose some weight.

How so? In my country (Italy) for an MRI I would pay from 42 USD to 81 USD, depending on my income.

Not saying that's its real cost since we pay taxes to grant this to everyone, but from here to 18k...

<comment><USER6> Bad comparison. Italy has far inferior health system, barely able to provide 2x better infant mortality rate at 1/3 the cost when compared to US. /sarcasm

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> John Cochrane, a well known financial economist and former president of the American Finance Association, last month wrote a blog post [0] reacting to a similar article in Bloomberg about the pricing of air ambulance services. If you want to see how bizarre the structure of our markets for healthcare services looks to an economist, I encourage you to read it.

I wonder if there's a collection of this sort of article somewhere, all these journalistic accounts of ordinary people's financially nightmarish encounters with the American market for healthcare. It feels like I've read dozens of them, and they're all basically similar, not just in the facts they relate of each debacle, but also in their lack of insight into what's really so fundamentally broken about our healthcare markets.

0\. [https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2018/06/cross- subsidies.h...](https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2018/06/cross- subsidies.html)

<comment><USER8> That's a superb article, and it makes some extremely valuable points.

It wouldn't _be_ that hard to just take a bunch of tax money, and provide a bunch of health care. Or alternatively, provide a bunch of health insurance. But since the US isn't willing to do that, but _does_ want the services, we get this.

There's no free lunch, and the harder you try and find one, the more warped (and, ultimately, expensive) it's going to end up being.

<comment><USER9> > "It wouldn't be that hard to just take a bunch of tax money, and provide a > bunch of health care. Or alternatively, provide a bunch of health > insurance."

Elaborate, please, if it is so easy.

<comment><USER10> You know, like in every european country.

<comment><USER9> Well you got me! Yeah, I guess they do just tax the hell out of people in Europe and then provide basic healthcare, and call it an easy success!

<comment><USER10> I don't even get if you're trying to make a point. I'm french and for all my life a doctor appointment has never been higher than 1 euro. All important operations are covered and i could not even tell you one that's not exept plastic surgery (and maybe lasik "in some cases").

I'm not even sure the txation in france is higher than in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Recently a friend of mine visited the emergency care in a private hospital in downtown SF with heavy stomach pain. It turned out to be a partial bowel obstruction, which thankfully sorted itself out with some conservative treatment.

My friend was discharged in a couple of days... with a bill of 70K USD. Except for an IV and a Ryles tube, there was hardly any other intervention.

Having just finished college, my friend did not have an insurance plan that could cover such a huge bill. Thankfully the state stepped in to help since the yearly income was below the federal poverty line. Otherwise, I can't imagine the plight.

For once, my friend was thankful for being a broke college grad.

<comment><USER12> Students in Germany usually have free healthcare from their parents mandatory insurance, if they are older than 25 most have to pay about €70 and from 30 they usually have to pay about €115. These are the rates for the public insurances, private insurance are usually cheaper for youngpeople but have other problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> American hospitals are just big ripoff machines. The whole nonsense with insurance negotiated, uninsured, in-network, out-of-network fees needa to go. Just post one price for a service for all. My girlfriend had a few surgeries over the last few years. The only conclusion I could draw from the bills was that

a) they make up prices as they go

b) they like to charge for things that never happened or put a several thousand percent markup on things

They said that Obamacare was broken beyond repair. The same should be said for the current system and its billing practices.

<comment><USER14> >>American hospitals are just big ripoff machines.

Same here in India. For all the talk about Medical Tourism to India, it works only because Americans come here to India with Dollars, and $1 = 70 rupees. Your purchasing power suddenly increases by 70 times.

For Indians in India. Its the same near US level rip off. Sometimes its also hard to not sympathize with the doctors. It takes the best years of your 20's and early 30's to get to be a good doctor, and its expensive to get all those degrees and training. So they charge whatever they have to, to not only recover all that money but also make a fortune worth profit along the way.

A lot of time this is done through unethical means. Ordering tests the patient doesn't need(commissions with the labs), prolonging treatments to optimize for per visit costs, writing medication the patient doesn't need(again commissions with the pharmacy) etc etc.

But yeah, I agree with you. Even In India, Most doctors I talk to want(ed) to go the US to settle there. Largely because of the apparently insanely high pay and perks. One person I talked in my extended family almost talked about it like it wasn't something they had to even think about. If you are a doctor you had to settle in the US. The profession is just too profitable in the USA, to not move to there.

<comment><USER15> Apologies in advance for not truly contributing to the discussion.

> Same here in India. For all the talk about Medical Tourism to India, it > works only because Americans come here to India with Dollars, and $1 = 70 > rupees. Your purchasing power suddenly increases by 70 times.

How is this logic?

<comment><USER16> US$1 = JP¥110 = ISK 107, so the same logic says the purchasing power of a dollar in Japan and Iceland is even higher than in India.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Healthcare in US is a best example of how a Healthcare shouldn't be. The citizens of the country shouldn't be scared of going to hospital. Countries like India may have corruption, but their people, even the poorest, have the option to consult doctor free of cost or at the cost they can afford. The Healthcare in US is in the clutches of Insurance companies.

<comment><USER14> >> Countries like India may have corruption, but their people, even the poorest, have the option to consult doctor free of cost or at the cost they can afford.

For something small, like Fever or Stomach Upset may be.

For bigger problems its not easy, and most of the time they just give up(Embrace death). In Bangalore, there is a hospital called Bowring and Lady Curzon Hospital, its sort of like a government hospital. For decades its well known that when burn patients arrive, and if the victim is really poor, they silently recommend euthanasia. And most people opt for it. Its just the cost of treatment is too expensive, and the whole family goes down in the financial burden that follows.

Also please take a look at government hospitals like NIMHANS in Bangalore, its like the most depressing place you will visit in your life. You have to pay bribes for simple things like IV drip. And most people are very ill and sleep on the footpaths and hospital compound. Most of the times let alone having money for treatment they don't even have money to go back home to their small towns and villages.

Personally I had experience with one relative who got Guillane barre syndrome, their family comes from Kolar(A place 70 kms from Bangalore). He was a flower seller. He refused our help out of self esteem, but we had to bribe through ward boys, nurses and doctor secretly without him knowing to speed up things and get him everything from a bed to the right treatment.

<comment><USER18> This is heartbreaking. How can we solve the problem of overpopulation? What happens to poor people in America under the same circumstances of poor in India when seeking healthcare?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My personal story from Germany: My 14 month old son got a deaseae in the spine so he could not walk anymore.

We spent 4 weeks in the hospital. 1 week until it was diagnosed in the MRT, 3 weeks with 3 different antibiotic treatment and another two month antibiotics at home.

All this while my wife continued to study for her PHD so I stayed away from work and lived with my son in the hospital.

This whole experience did cost us around 200€ (incl. gasoline to drive to the hospital) while still getting full income from my employer.

</comment><comment><USER20> My oldest bumped his head as a baby, went to the ER, he had a great time seeing and visiting with the nurses and doctors (he couldn't speak, but he knew how to get a response). I think it cost us $150 (with insurance) rather than 51k...

On the other hand his birth was near $200k because he was born early and had a long hospital stay (he's fine now, long term premature outcomes are amazing). Nothing we could have done to prevent it, know it was coming, it would have financially destroyed us at that time had we not had insurance.

The US healthcare system is borked.

<comment><USER21> It's entirely possible that the hospital charged the insurance $51k and the insurance only allowed $500, of which $150 was your portion. No one knows what the real cost of anything is at hospitals, and even if you do have the time to shop around, you can't. There's no way to price compare as no one will tell you the price of everything in advance, and often surgeons pick their hospital anyway.

<comment><USER22> If you look at your insurance paperwork it will tell you exactly what the hospital is paid and what your portion is.

Not uncommon for the hospital to be paid 25-33% of the bill. Sometimes a lot less than that.

One of the reasons the list price is so high is due to "usual and customary" laws. An insurance company can't pay for than that, so hospitals set it extraordinarily high.

Also, contract negotiations are based on chargemaster rate and discount. They keep cranking up the list price and insurance comes back and increases the discount.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is it insane? Did people read the article? The critical trauma unit was activated. I suppose if people are called in to work, they shouldn't get paid if it turns out they aren't needed?

<comment><USER24> so, you're saying that when somebody called, "my baby's head hit the floor", they can assemble the whole Avengers just because?

<comment><USER25> You just mentioned assembling The Avengers, so your Superhero Activation Team Fee bill of $5.3 million will be arriving in the mail shortly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If there is one area ripe for disruption, it's US health care.

A few months ago my wife was showing me atrocious bills people were posting on FB, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. It hit home because we "accidentally" got a bill when an in-network lab sent a blood test to an out of network testing facility and we got a $14k bill... for a blood test.

Just recently, a 2 hour ER visit for my toddler cost $3.5k for a breathing treatment, some Tylenol and some influenza tests. All part of my high deductible plan.

I used to be on the side against healthcare reform. I'm now counting the seconds until we have ANY regulation to stop this madness.

<comment><USER27> > I used to be on the side against healthcare reform.

Why?

<comment><USER26> Because I had an amazing healthcare plan and was too naive at the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The issue here is that the head hit was activated as a trauma. Trauma activation criteria are different for every hospital. If the criteria is lower, you get situations like these.

Trauma teams legitimately require such expense. There are surgeons, nurses, neurosurgeons, and others on call 24/7 sleeping on the hospital so they can get to victims of trauma within 5minites. Gunshots, stab wounds, car accidents, massive balconies falling with kids on them, etc, all require legitimate trauma activations. So do drinks and homeless people who get hit by cars or stabbed in the middle of the night, and many who don't have insurance are still treated by the hospital. Some hospitals bill all patients 7-10 times the actual costs, get paid 1-2 times actual by insurance. Uninsured either don't pay, or negotiate down, or are plagued by the full bill designed to compensate for the others who don't pay.

If a hospital isn't able to cover the costs of a trauma team, that means they lose their trauma designation and any local patients bleeding out because of trauma have to be trekked by ambulance or helicopter to the next trauma center, which in SF is Stanford or John Muir in the East Bay. They might have needed to pay another 25k if a chopper was called for this.

<comment><USER29> Curiously enough this only happens in the US. It seems that there is a rationale behind every decision that is made here, and yet the overall system doesn't work for most people.

In that case this case can as well be summarized as: hospital seizes opportunity to maximize profits on baby, then every decision in the chain becomes clear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've said here before that I hope I get mauled and eaten by wolves to avoid the entire healthcare industry, but now I'm thinking about offering wolves as a service.

</comment><comment><USER31> First, they're from South Korea. Paying even a cent of this would be a stupidly bad financial idea. Why? There is absolutely no reason. Let the hospital send the bill to some creditors and let them try to collect in South Korea. Honestly, the situation is laughable.

Second, the article thinks that this was fraud. Figures. It may not be too late for them to call the hospital and point this out and ask them to zero out the balance. This hospital, when it had its prior name, did something similar for a friend of mine, albeit his bill was about $1-2k and it was not fraud. Considering they might be on the wrong side of the law, this seems like a solution both sides can get behind.

</comment><comment><USER32> My insurance was billed $8000 for an MRI and paid out $7000. I was only responsible for $500, but it was really upsetting because I'd had one before and only had to pay $50. The high cost came from the facility being on hospital grounds, which I wasn't aware of since I entered the area leading to the radiology center through an entrance that didn't look anything like the inside of a hospital.

<comment><USER20> A number of years ago I called and asked what the cost for a procedure was at a local hospital.... they struggled to even tell me within a weeks time. The system is just insane.

<comment><USER13> When I had an HSA I also tried to get prices upfront. It's pretty much impossible to get any quote from medical providers. They just won't tell you.

<comment><USER33> I'm in the Kaiser Plan in California. The hospital is also the insurance provider. Generally they are pretty good but even they sometimes cannot tell you the costs ahead of time. Their saving grace is that for most things they have a copay system with a fixed amount out of pocket.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> My wife recently gave birth to our first child. Normal delivery - 2 nights in a hospital. Then we had to go back again for jaundice - nothing serious - <USER2> added another 2 nights in a hospital room. All said and done my insurance was billed $64,000 for what is considered a normal uncomplicated birth. That is insane to me. If you go over the bill carefully, instantly 50% of that disappears because I've "saved" by being with my insurance provider.

What if I had no insurance? Would I get billed that insane number and have to spend hours whittling it down?

My dad was commenting on how the drug he takes regularly in his home country (outside the US) is 1/10th the price of what it costs here.

The health insurance system is broken in USA (who knew?). Everything is artificially over-inflated because it all gets "negotiated" down in the end. This creates a lot of room to maximize your net revenue when you set prices arbitrarily high.

</comment><comment><USER35> Break a leg. Well. I broke femur near San Luis Obispo.

I was admitted to hospital, was charged over $19000 (that is nineteen thousands dollars) per night for bed. Just for bed. And it was a "cheap" option with person crying in agony next to me whole time.

Total bill was 74k$ dollars just for hospital service. Emergency services, E.R., surgery, anesthesiology all Extra.

Welcome to US.

P.S. With that prices, hospital easily would make it in top 20 most expensive hotel rooms of the world, except I didn't have a choice but to pay for it.

</comment><comment><USER36> I genuinely wonder where this money goes, if paid. It seems rather unrealistic to believe these costs can be genuinely justified, with an independent audit? Right? The genuine cost to business cannot be this high.

These values are utterly unreasonable. Someone, somewhere; is doing something extremely unethical.

The fact this can even happen somewhat indicates there's a lot of "power" involved.

—

Edit: another poster had mentioned that some costs are included to cover other admissions in which fees are not paid - no matter the reason.

So, whilst this seems quite logical; it bothers me this is not clearly indicated. Its a pretty poor attempt to fix a clear, and genuine, other problem.

<comment><USER37> I can get close to the math by being extremely generous. 15k of tramua fees. ~10 specialists on call for tramua. That implies each specialist got about 1.5k for the call. ~2 hours of work, maybe payment for transport time so super generous call it 4 hours. If normal pay is 1x and overtime is 1.5x, must stay by the phone critical on call is 2x? This computes the specialists as getting paid an average of $200 per hour normally.

This is all pretty crazy - $200/hour for a brain surgeon, sure, but there's no way the nurse is getting that. One of the big missing data points is how many people were called in. 15k is pretty reasonable if a 50 person team was called in - but then, why would a 50 person team be called in?

<comment><USER36> Interesting!

I guess minimum callout fees, etc - in your proposed scenario including a large callout of resources.

Hmmm!

Thanks for your reply!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Curious... for international patients... if they just don't pay, is there anything the hospital can do?

It's not like it's going to affect their credit rating in Korea or anything?

<comment><USER20> Nothing they can do, having said that I belive if the patient is from a place that has a national system, they pay.

On the other hand medical bankruptcy is sadly frequent in the US so international patients isn't really a concern.

<comment><USER39> > _if the patient is from a place that has a national system, they pay_

This obviously varies by country. E.g. for travel within the EU, a country will pay for their travelers healthcare. I live in Japan, and while the universal health insurance will pay for treatment sought outside of the country, they will only pay what it would have cost if it was performed in- country. So that doesn't help travelers to the US.

<comment><USER20> That would be more than the folks in the US who can't pay at all... so I'm sure most hospitals are ok with it to some extent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> OK so I know that emergency care not being free is madness, and _you_ know that emergency care not being free is madness, but what are the arguments from people who don't think this sound like?

Also, I wonder how feasible it would be for foreign governments to pay for the emergency care of their citizens when they have issues in America, and fund it by charging visiting American's American-style medical bills for any medical care they receive while there.

<comment><USER39> > _but what are the arguments from people who don 't think this sound like?_

The two I see are mostly

1\. "I don't want to pay for other people's healthcare. Other people make poor health [dietary, etc] and financial [they're poor] decisions and they should pay for it themselves." A lot of young people do not want to pay it forward for the healthcare they will need when they get old ("I haven't been to a hospital in years! I'm healthy!").

2\. Distrust in the government in running a fair and efficient system ("death panels" etc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm norwegian.

I have two kids, and have used the emergency care unit a couple of times throughout my life. Total cost $0 in care fees. (They are allowed to charge for stuff like bandages and such for non layovers, usually $5-$20 each visit).

We don't have health insurance, but some insurance companies have begun selling "treatment guarantee" which guarantees start of treatment typically within 14 days of injury. (For non life threatening ailments of course. Elbow pains, leg pains, such..) The best thing about those are that they are usually paid for by your employer because they want you back at work as soon as possible :D (The premium is added to our income tax though)

Socialism hell yeah!

</comment><comment><USER42> Of all the news outlets available, why is Jack Ma's Hong Kong newspaper linked?

</comment><comment><USER43> Every now and then I seriously consider moving to the US, but the healthcare system scared the crap out of me. I can't imagine how stressful it must be to have to depend on your employer for health insurance.

</comment><comment><USER44> If you are a foreign traveller in the US, and you need medical attention, if at all possible use a drop-in clinic instead of any hospital. Even the so- called non-profit hospitals charge outrageous fees.

</comment><comment><USER45> A French friend of mine needed some emergency operation while he was in the States. He bought a round trip ticket to Paris, left, got the operation done, came back to the States. Saved $10,000.

<comment><USER46> What kind of emergency surgery is it if you can fly 9 hours before and after going to surgery?

<comment><USER45> Where in my statement did I say that? Though of course there are many kinds of emergency surgery and flying certainly does not restrict all of them.

<comment><USER46> It's literally your entire comment...

<comment><USER45> I said he left, got the operation done, and came back. I didn't say it was within 9 hours of flying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> There really should be laws against that sort of thing. Maybe some price ceilings per service

</comment><comment><USER48> Follow the money, I guess. Who's pocketing the 15 grand worth of trauma activation?

</comment><comment><USER49> Privatise they said, run things like a business they said ...

</comment><comment><USER50> What does this have to do with HackerNews? This site is turning into mini Reddit.

<comment><USER51> What, do tell, is your definition of what should be posted to HN? I suppose you read this[0] and this [1], which address your question about what content is appropriate, and how to comment on content you believe is inappropriate?

0\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Holy $#17. I was in Stanford's cardiac unit for some days, the actual bill must be $35k.

</comment><comment><USER53> "Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH)"

This has to be satire.

...right?

<comment><USER54> Go give $75mm to your local hospital. I'm sure they're willing to do the same.

<comment><USER55> California gave like 200m$ and it's not called the California hospital though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> It might be the hospital did an ICO and offers services for it's tokens now. Understandable then.</comment>


An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in 4chan /b/ (2011) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://projects.csail.mit.edu/chanthropology/4chan.pdf <comment><USER2> For me, the most eye opening connection to humanity:

> Through our investigation of /b/, we hope to contribute to scholarly > conversations about data permanence. For example, Grudin (2002) suggests > that we evolved to live in an ephemeral world, yet our technology takes us > from the "here and now" to the "everywhere and forever." Similarly, Mayer- > Schonberger (2009) emphasizes the value of "societal forgetting," where "the > limits of human memory ensure that people's sins are eventually forgotten."

As a long time 4channer, there's some "naturalness" I feel in the off-the-cuff discussions on the site where I know my stupidity won't be saved forever. The ephemerality taps into FOMO, requiring that you _be there_ for a thread event that is unfolding, and that is addicting to some.

<comment><USER3> As another person who spent a long time on there, I now feel like the opposite effect ends up happening.

Sure, it's anonymous. But the short-term nature means that the prime objective when posting something is to _get replies_. So you get some troll bait or other things sure to get replies.

Everyone else is doing the same, so you develop a vocabulary based primarily around saying and responding to memes.

If the communication were natural, why is 80% of it memes?

Because of the FOMO, you get an effect similar to many MMOs. In order to participate, you must spend a lot of time on the image board, on IRC, making sure that you're doing your thing.

So you end up with a bunch of people who spend their (usually teenage) lives online absorbing as much image board culture as possible to "get good" at it. It's the ultimate clique. Everyone wants to be part of the secret club (sometimes quite literal: the IRC channels like #/v/ would spend their time creating private sub-channels to have "real talk").

I know on some of the lower-traffic boards you'll find some "real talk" happening, but even then it's usually layered underneath snarky "contrarian trueisms".

It's the ultimate secret club for people who think they get the internet, and gets pretty close to a religion. Remember: don't say you came from reddit.

<comment><USER4> > Sure, it's anonymous. But the short-term nature means that the prime > objective when posting something is to get replies. So you get some troll > bait or other things sure to get replies.

This can be traced to updates to 4chan's post linking system that highlight replies to your post with a (You). Like upvotes, (You)s are a feedback signal of attention.

<comment><USER5> I'm certain it goes back much further than that. Replace that feedback with the feedback of bumping up threads - it's the same thing, only slightly less convenient.

<comment><USER3> definitely. I'd always keep track of my post IDs so I can see who replied to my posts

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why always /b/, though? I get that it's the most popular board, but its culture is so different from the rest of 4chan that it might as well be its own website.

I'd like to see an analysis of multiple boards, comparing culture differences between them and why they're so different between being on the same website with a lot of crossover. Someone here (I assume jokingly) suggested analyzing /jp/, but I feel as if there's actually a lot that can be learned from studying the jay.

<comment><USER4> /b/ is still the most infamous board, nearly a decade after one Fox affiliate station called it the "Internet Hate Machine" in response to its antics. Even though the days of "old /b/" have long past, its memes live on.

The election certainly brought more attention to /pol/ in recent months, given time we'll all be grumbling about how all the other boards are ignored.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If anyone has not seen this masterpiece, here's a bachelor thesis about /fit/, its persona and its memes.

[https://smartech.gatech.edu/bitstream/handle/1853/53595/SHED...](https://smartech.gatech.edu/bitstream/handle/1853/53595/SHEDD- THESIS-2015.pdf)

<comment><USER8> It says something about a paper when a _list of abbreviations_ can hold your attention.

<comment><USER9> Since I'm a long time /fit shitposter and lurker when I read that list of acronyms I laughed a bit, but then it dawned on me "that's a pretty good bunch of definitions, but still it doesn't really truly convey the whole meaning of the words". You actually have to experience those things to completely "get" the meaning of some of those words.

This makes me sad because one of my other hobbies is classical literature and I don't think I will ever properly understand Plato either no matter how well I read the definition of an Attic Greek word or see it appear in 10 different contexts. Something is irretrievably missing and unconveyable. I find the same problem when I try and translate words from my second language to English.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Personally I'd be more interested in a report on /pol/.

<comment><USER11> There is one. Sadly nobody has studied the most important and cultural board, /jp/.

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.03452](https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.03452)

<comment><USER12> /jp/ was made expressly so it could be forgotten about, which works out for both sides.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The conclusion section illustrated, indeed, nothing of value was learned. From a dataset of 2 the conclusion is that they are different for each context.

<comment><USER14> That's pretty much grounded theory in a nutshell ;P

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Honestly,/b/ might seems mild when you compare it to /pol/ which is little less anonymous

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder how /b/ would react to this. Has anyone posted it there?

</comment><comment><USER17> When trolls go to grad school.</comment>


On Abstraction [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9pxbnFC4aQ <comment><USER2> In the bridge analogy he implies that software engineering cannot be more like civil engineering due to changing requirements. He stretches the common analogy of building bridges by suggesting it's normal to add a car-wash to the middle of the bridge before you've finished developing it. This is the norm in software development so there's no way we can engineer a software solution with the same rigour as other, proper, engineering disciplines!

I _do_ believe software engineering can be more like civil engineering and that there are organizations around the world which will license _capital-P_ engineers in software. Just because requirements change does not mean we cannot write mathematically precise and robust models and definitions of systems. It also doesn't mean we cannot, a priori, build software that is as robust to operating conditions as a bridge.

What we're doing as an industry when we run software in production without clearly known limits is simply taking risk. We could know what the tolerable limits are of a particular server are or precisely define the probability that a given change will reach quorum within a particular bound of time. However for a good number of projects we're comfortable accepting that our customers will discover those omissions for us and no one will get hurt.

However if you're writing software to control robotics that help people walk or air-flight control software to safely land multi-million dollar jets you're probably going to take more precautions to design and test your software and create detailed, precise specifications.

 _Update_ : To take the bridge analogy in a different direction: it's more common in the software industry to build two bridges: the one most people use but could fall down at any time _or_ the bridge that costs a significant amount more but there will be a small team of developers waiting to help you get up if it does.

 _update update_ : The point is you can write sound models of your abstractions and _prove_ properties about them with sufficient tooling. Much the same way that a blueprint is an abstraction of the bridge that is built, we have ways of writing blueprints of software systems.

<comment><USER3> I think software engineering cannot be more like civil engineering because software is the result of the decision making process. In civil engineering, the blueprint is the result of the decision making process and the bulk of time and cost is building from that blueprint.

You cannot compare the process of building a bridge to building software; you could compare the process of constructing the blueprint with building software. And I think the scale of complexity of most software far exceeds the complexity of most blueprints.

<comment><USER4> No software is creatively fathomed out of nothing. Opinionated frameworks abound, pre-ordaining the little manouevres needed to wire them up properly, and solving familiar problems with established patterns. If these have all been decided beforehand, even if only by convention, then what are they but blueprints?

What difference there is works in software's favour: there's a frothy top layer of most projects where developers can indulge their whims/hone their abilities and approaches. But it's not the whole.

<comment><USER5> They aren't blueprints, they're foundations and components if we're going to stick to this analogy.

Blueprints are specifications and design documents. Most software lacks these.

<comment><USER3> Specifications and design documents are merely estimations. If you've made every single decision possible, you've written the software.

If you have blueprints for a bridge and get two different companies to build it, you'll get the same bridge both times. The differences, if any, would be minor.

If you give specifications and design documents to two software teams you could get radically different products that look nothing alike and it's entirely possible that neither one of them will satisfy the clients needs.

<comment><USER2> Given a formal model or proof of a system and the two teams will either succeed or fail.

Give them a specification in prose and they will have a little too much wiggle room. Such specifications are useful to a degree but I look at them like sketches on a napkin.

If you use a more formal method of mathematics as your specification then you can be more precise about the invariants that matter and model your system more faithfully. And with a good proof assistant or model checker the computer can even help you catch flaws in your design that you would never have been able to think of on your own.

It's true that the source code is a proof of something. It often helps to know whether you've built the right thing. And that it does what you think it does.

<comment><USER3> Given a sufficient model or proof of the system and you don't need the teams at all -- they can be automated away.

Getting your model right is as hard, if not harder, than getting the software right in the first place. The problem hasn't changed you've just added more layers (and more cost) in the hopes that doing it twice, differently, eliminates most of the problems.

<comment><USER2> For some trivial small problems writing a model in TLA+ or Lean is definitely more costly than just writing the software even if you get a few things wrong. It'd be like commissioning a blueprint for your shed in the backyard. For those sorts of tasks it is sufficient to just write a few tests and call it a day.

However for more complex services that are trying to manage several clusters of resources amongst tens of thousands of tenants or more there are invariably going to be errors. The kinds of errors you see might require a particular series of events to change your state in 53 steps to hit it... but if you're servicing > 1M requests in a minute that ends up being frequent enough to be bothersome.

Even more so if you're working on a memory controller in a new hardware platform that is expected to ship in a few million units. It'd be nice to know that you have strong evidence that your system is correct.

And developing models is hard but so is thinking. Nobody said it was easy. But one shouldn't say that we can't engineer robust software systems. It's just patently false.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Zach Tellman's book ([http://elementsofclojure.com/](http://elementsofclojure.com/)) is also mentioned in the talk and worth reading. I'd argue it is even worth reading if you don't use Clojure.

There is a free example chapter on naming.

</comment><comment><USER6> I thought this was a good talk, but it felt like an overview of chapter 2 of SICP. Not a bad thing, but if this interests you give SICP a read as well.

<comment><USER7> In the first ten minutes of the talk, the SICP definition (which is taken from the Hoare paper) is examined and discarded as too limited.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_and_Necessity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_and_Necessity) seems to be an overview of the "fruits of 100 years of analytical philosophy" mentioned as inspirational for the naming chapter.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is pretty fascinating, and, truth be told, I am very much not into Clojure or anything related (quite the opposite, really). I wish there was more thinking and reasoning about the basics of abstraction, naming, etc.

<comment><USER10> There wasn't a single line of Clojure in that hour-long talk, I don't get your point. Do consume the content before you comment on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I thought the part where he talked about over-engineering being a symptom of a lack of understanding of the assumptions was an interesting way to look at the problem.</comment>


The "Unstealable Bike" to Begin Shipping in September - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2015/02/27/the-unstealable-bike-to-begin-shipping-in-september/

<comment><USER2> Looks like the current form means re-adjusting seat height each time. Seems like there's probably a better way of doing this that avoids that--a telescoping down tube with four hinges, perhaps.

Alternatively, there could be an sliding ring on on the seat post that sets the height, so it slides smoothly into the seat tube until hitting the ring.

But anything to deter bike thieves. This is a good idea. If it takes off, I'm sure future iterations will improve upon it.

As a side note, the video shows her locking it to a ~10cm tree. You know what's really easy to cut? small pieces of wood. :-p

</comment><comment><USER3> Unfortunately, they only make the frame harder to steal. Wheels will be stolen and they are more expensive to replace. To protect a bike from theft, one shold lock the wheels and the frame to some fixed anchor.

See for example whet bike guru Sheldon Brown has to say about locking bikes: [http://www.sheldonbrown.com/lock- strategy.html](http://www.sheldonbrown.com/lock-strategy.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder how many poles would be needed if everyone starts to use a bicycle like this!</comment>


Compete Stats vs. Real Stats (round 1) - <AUTHOR>

Compete shows that Hacker News got 75,000 visitors in March...here:
http://grapher.compete.com/ycombinator.com_uv.png
PG stats show approx 110k + visitors:
http://ycombinator.com/images/traffic-24mar08.png
In the past my comparisons show that compete usually only shows 70-80% of the traffic a site gets. Is anyone interested in sharing some stats on their site ( I will do the same ) to get a better picture of how inaccurate compete really is? <comment><USER2> we get 6.5k, they show 1.75k - Probably due to the niche of my site.

\- similar question - anyone want to share google traffic estimator traffic (clicks per day) vs actual clicks in top 5 organic rankings? (basically what traffic goes to ad vs organic)

\-- Google says 120-240 month I get 400-700 @ avg position of 4 (40% to #1 / 25% to #2 / 20% to #3 / 15% to the rest.)

*as per AOL user data

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't name names, but for one of sites we manage (1m+ uniques/month) compete only accounts for 79% of our traffic.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> One site I am maintaining is getting like 65k a month but compete is saying ~37k a month. Totally bogus.</comment>


Was Moore's Law Inevitable? - <AUTHOR> http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2009/07/was_moores_law.php

<comment><USER2> kk site hacked! Too bad, because it's a good question that deserves thought. Assuming KK considers both critical dimensions of this phenomenon -- capacity and cost -- then the argument for inevitability actually hinges on the much broader and more controversial question of whether markets always work, i.e., whether (1) the emergence of competition and related market dynamics is inevitable in all digital technology product markets, and whether (2) those dynamics are certain to assure that such products will continue to be available to the rest of the market at prices that consistently track their ever-diminishing production costs.

Given the fact that pricing for many products and services that are subject to Moore's Law effects varies hugely by geography -- and the fact that many such variations cannot be explained away based on other factors (e.g., availability of other inputs, transportation costs, national regulations, etc.), it seems to me that the argument for inevitability (esp. continued inevitability) requires a level of optimism that borders on the irrational, a.k.a. "wishful thinking."</comment>


Nearly 40% of Icelanders are using a Covid app, but it hasn't helped much - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/05/11/1001541/iceland-rakning-c19-covid-contact-tracing/ <comment><USER2> I think often the goals of contact tracing apps are misunderstood. The goal isn't to replace "name and phone number" human contact tracing, but rather to augment it. Iceland's location based approach seems to emphasise this, albeit at expense of privacy.

Where contact tracing apps help is for contact events where people are in relative proximity for sustained periods of time. It seems that prolonged contact is a major factor in spreading the virus. If you're on a train with someone for half an hour, you'd not be able to identify them through regular contact tracing, and they wouldn't be able to be altered. On an aircraft this can usually be done as the airline cooperates with public health authorities to identify those sitting near a given individual on the plane etc.

The impersonal but sustained contact situations are the ones apps can really help with, by raising the number of people able to be alerted to their risk of exposure. Traditional tracing handles people you know. App-based tracing, if it gets adopted, can help with the people you don't know but are sitting near, or otherwise around for a prolonged period.

</comment><comment><USER3> Iceland is quite unique, only one real large population center, limited public transport, tiny venues, multi-generational homes and overall a tiny population so it doesn't seem to be the prime candidate for contact tracing apps since it's effectively the best case scenario for traditional contact tracing.

<comment><USER4> All the interesting places people have been pointing to are islands. Except South Korea, but it's effectively an island.

<comment><USER5> South Korea is this context similar to an island . While it is peninsula the only land border is with North Korea and highly guarded , effectively you can only enter by flying in just like an island.

<comment><USER6> Not just flying. South Korea is also connected to Russia, China and Japan by ferry.

<comment><USER7> Not sure about the Russia and China routes but the Busan-Shimonoseki ferry is pretty impractical. 13 hrs and about as expensive as a flight. More if you consider train costs from Shimonoseki.

<comment><USER8> Busan-Fukuoka ferries go directly between two huge cities and are priced competitively, particularly if you get a cabin instead of paying for a hotel.

<comment><USER7> Wow the JR Beetle is super fast! Didn't know about that, my knowledge is pretty old, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this, but the effectiveness of the app is equal to the square of the penetration. Both parties need the app.

At 38% penetration only about 15% of contacts with a carrier will be warned. That is indeed not going to do much.

<comment><USER10> You also have to consider the failure rate of the app. I don't know about the Icelandic implementation, but most approaches seem to be based on Bluetooth. There are all kinds of reasons why one might miss a signal sent by device nearby, including interference on the 2.4 GHz band with things like Wifi.

Furthermore, the user has to actually report their infection, which probably not everyone is going to do.

If we multiply all of those terms, the end result will be much lower than 15% even in this scenario. The tracing apps seem more like wishful thinking than something that is going to provide sufficiently broad and reliable coverage to have anything more than a marginal impact.

<comment><USER11> The entire premise of the app is that P[transmission] = F(distance, duration). I think this is a naive assumption and just the two input parameters have nearly zero predictive power, i.e. the variance of the estimated probability would make any further analysis useless. I'd also argue that the only case where it would be useful is tracing a zombie-level virus when there's willingness to lock down with military a 5 sigma radius around the probable infection. Otherwise it's just a tool for marketing and spying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Maybe I am just ignorant but the article doesn't list a single reason as to why the automated tracing app hasn't helped much. There is a quote from a person who was involved in the tracing op but no comment from him/her either as to why it hasn't helped much.

This is supposed to be a "technology review". Did the writer bother to ask "WHY NOT"?

PS: Happy to stand corrected if someone else was able to read between the lines and find some reasons.

<comment><USER13> The main reason is that we were able to control the spread of the virus faster than the need for the app.

At the moment we're going several days at a time with zero new cases.

It makes it a more difficult sell to the general public, when the overall feeling is that we've 'beaten' this.

I get the feeling most of the general public aren't preparing for future outbreaks because, like most places, I think everyone wants to rely on the hope that the worst is over.

<comment><USER12> Assuming that your argument is correct that it's a little too late to see the benefits of tracing in Iceland, the article's negative connotation to use of the tracing app (or lack thereof) is misleading and discouraging for countries that are still struggling to contain the virus. I find the overall quality of online media, even tech blogs like this one that I used to love, seriously falling being caught up in the age of click bait news cycles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Something I've been thinking about during lockdown is that, while we are for the most part staying at home when possible, if you get sick, you only have, maybe, 4 or 5 contacts to trace, on average. If we release lockdown, the number of average contacts to trace goes way way up.

<comment><USER15> I suspect that many of the people getting infected are not observing as strict of social distancing as you imagine.

e: Why am I getting downvoted? Just conditioned on | getting infected by covid, means more likely to have had more contacts.

<comment><USER16> Without any actual data to hand I would also guess that infections would skew towards people who come into frequent contact with others as part of their job. If true, it would make taking precautions at, for example, the grocery store all the more important because those most likely to be infected are also those who you're most likely to come into contact with in turn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This app tracks users'locations using GPS data and according to the article "allows investigators—with permission—to look at whether those with a positive diagnosis are potentially spreading the disease"

Without also being able to know the location of people without a positive diagnosis, the app probably doesn't help that much.

But I don't think this necessarily applies to apps being developed for other countries where Bluetooth is being used to measure person to person contact directly.

This article lacks any real insight into what isn't working or why.

<comment><USER18> Couldn't you DDoS this infrastructure by having beacons masquerade as users and then have people quarantined because they were marked as near an infected individual when in reality they were near a rogue beacon that spams generated identifiers? This certainly can't be constitutional in any Western system of government.

Even if the identifiers were encrypted with a public key that only the tracer service had the private key to, couldn't a bad actor register as a bunch of actual people and then have them show as coming in contact with infected people?

<comment><USER19> Those beacons would be quickly identified for being motionless, or if they are carried by a person then it's basically someone lying on the app about being infected. This could be verified by medical testing before publishing the ids.

<comment><USER18> Stick it on a bus or a drone, now it's not motionless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Only 33% of Americans would consider using a contract tracing app.

[https://www.axios.com/axios-ipsos-coronavirus- week-9-contact...](https://www.axios.com/axios-ipsos-coronavirus- week-9-contact-tracing-bd747eaa-8fa1-4822-89bc-4e214c44a44d.html)

<comment><USER21> Well, I never opted into Amber Alerts so maybe it can still work by forcing people to use the Apple/Google built in contact tracing API.

<comment><USER22> I'm under the impression most Amber Alerts are really custody battles.

<comment><USER21> You also get them for flash foods and other things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> here is the covid19 info website in iceland, if anyone is interested in how many tests have been done and other statistics; [https://www.covid.is/data](https://www.covid.is/data)

<comment><USER24> Wow, it looks like Iceland recovered from it pretty fast. Only 6 active cases

<comment><USER25> The next issue is whether to count positives who are new arrivals placed into quarantine of 2 or more weeks. Countries will be reluctant to blemish their clean virus-free records even though quarantine may be effective and necessary to have limited allowable travel. Seems we should only count people who test positive after passing through quarantine if they were first cleared as negative and released.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I thought ~60%+ must adopt for it to be effective?

[https://045.medsci.ox.ac.uk/](https://045.medsci.ox.ac.uk/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Slightly offtopic, but it bothers me that the tech community has remained silent or supportive for contact tracing technology, when there were massive outcries for the past several years regarding other kinds of surveillance- enabling technology like face recognition. In general I would prefer that contact tracing technology not exist.

<comment><USER8> There are ways to implement contact tracing so that unnecessary information is not shared and so that you are in control of what gets shared and when. This is not the case for (say) face recognition on a CCTV feed.

<comment><USER28> I'm sure there are ways. But can you ensure this specific app, recommended (or mandated) by your government, puts you in control and doesn't try to sneak a quick one past you? What would be the incentive for your government to ensure that instead of making the population much more observable and thus governable under the guise of taking care of your health? It's literally doing work against government interests, and the governments aren't usually very good at that. Same with major companies which just happen to be also major accumulators of stockpiles of tracking and surveillance information about you. Maybe this one they'd lay down their instincts and truly will roll out a perfectly privacy-preserving solution. But could you trust them to do that?

<comment><USER8> As an example, the one used in Singapore is open source and implements a public standard (bluetrace.io), so you don't even need to trust them, you can check it yourself. And before you ask, yes, people have decompiled the app to verify this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The more successful the battle against coronavirus, the less effective such an app would appear.

</comment><comment><USER30> This paper * suggested, under some pessimistic assumptions, that it would require "near-universal app usage and near perfect compliance" This is due to the large fraction of spread from asymptomatic/presymptomatic carriers.

My review of the paper __is that their assumptions are overly optimistic and that contact tracing will be largely ineffective even at universal adoption.

* [https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6491/eabb6936/tab...](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6491/eabb6936/tab-pdf)

__[https://twitter.com/adamvsteele/status/1259661260406349824?s...](https://twitter.com/adamvsteele/status/1259661260406349824?s=20)

</comment><comment><USER31> I wonder how much it would.

There's a chance that a chance encounter would result in an infection. But then how many data points of low probability events are useful?

</comment><comment><USER32> Contact tracing (of the human-powered kind) is obviously hugely important in reducing the scale of outbreaks in the early stages.

However digital contact tracing has a fatal flaw: Bluetooth cannot be used to reliably estimate proximity in dynamic, real-world scenarios as objects (especially human bodies) absorb huge amounts of the signal.

In many scenarios this can make two people sitting next to each other look like they're 10-20 metres away compared to line-of-sight equivalents (just by having a phone in a pocket, handbag, or even next to a head taking a call). You can easily see this using, for instance, Apple's Bluetooth Explorer tool as part of Xcode developer tools [1] (or any of the bluetooth signal strength tools in the Play / App Stores).

You don't have to rely on DIY tests from the internet though. While they're extremely static tests, the Singapore TraceTogether team did some field studies highlighting the significant variability across hardware [2]. Their tests ended in a plea for factory calibration data from hardware manufacturers.

The Singapore team has talked about false positives in depth as a major issue (one was someone in a different apartment, because bluetooth goes through walls), which is why they set a hard, low RSSI value to reduce false positives - this means a lot of true positives will be missed too.

The key Australian dev revealing significant issues in Australia's COVIDSafe app also acknowledged the major limitations of BLE. [3]

The problem of course is you have a situation where you cannot determine if a contact is epidemiologically interesting, because accuracy in real-world situations is really down to the 20-30 metres of Bluetooth range, even over longer time-frames.

This means you either have a huge caseload for human tracers to sort the signal from the noise (and this relies on the memory of all participants) or you have some kind of automated system (such as amber alerts that the NHS talks about) and the challenge there is that no-one knows if they're really interesting epidemiologically, as no-one can tell where each party was in the context.

A recent series of talks by bluetooth experts is extremely informative.

In one, an expert discusses all the significant sources of error which creates the huge variability you can see in DIY tests at home. [4]

There are other great talks in that video, but Jen Watson - who leads a team at MIT engaged in advanced signal processing - delivers a good brief talk of the issues, hoping to use statistical analysis - using detection theory of fluctuating signals to estimate interesting contacts. [5]

The takeaway from all this though is that it's a hard problem, and in Watson's talk she quickly moves on to thinking about additional future capabilities (such as features in upcoming Bluetooth standards) that might help improve the resolution.

This does leave us with a large _current_ problem though. Tracking apps have been thoroughly oversold with little evidence of usefulness, and in the case of the UK and Australia government authorities have refused to publish the algorithms they are using to determine proximity from an RSSI value and a phone model.

There is nothing sensitive about this apart from the fact it may reveal the system is not useful for the stated purposes.

[1] [https://twitter.com/crushthecurve_/status/125911361479693926...](https://twitter.com/crushthecurve_/status/1259113614796939266)

[2] [https://github.com/opentrace-community/opentrace- calibration...](https://github.com/opentrace-community/opentrace- calibration/blob/master/Trial%20Methodologies.md)

[3] [https://twitter.com/jim_mussared/status/1255498092239036417](https://twitter.com/jim_mussared/status/1255498092239036417)

[4] [https://youtu.be/KgKbllhgESc?t=2991](https://youtu.be/KgKbllhgESc?t=2991)

[5] [https://youtu.be/KgKbllhgESc?t=3175](https://youtu.be/KgKbllhgESc?t=3175)

<comment><USER33> If there's a GPS signal then it may be possible to use the differential phase satellite between two phones to get relative position down to a meter or so (kind of like a super crappy rtk taking advantage of the pps stabilițy). Not sure the gps devices on phones expose enough information for this. Differential rssi of cell/wifi networks is another indicator but probably not very accurate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Does anyone know more about the actual implementation of the app? Is it using Google/Apple Contact Tracing APIs already?

</comment><comment><USER35> This reassures the hypothesis that you probably won't catch the virus from a brief contact in a grocery store or similar if you keep your distance.

Infections happen within families, and spread from one family to another by friends/coworkers. The infected people should be easily able to list all exposed out by name.

An exception is of course mass indoors public events that are forbidden now. This is where a contact tracing app would probably prove to be the most useful.

<comment><USER36> Incidental contact is unlikely to matter in most cases. However, multiple people at different tables where infected at a restaurant from a single customer. So, it doesn't take that much.

<comment><USER37> Or on public transport. New York's subway system was probably it's Achilles heel during this outbreak.

<comment><USER4> Except Staten Island had the second most cases per capita. Lots of the obvious NYC theories have holes where you look at places affected.

<comment><USER38> People who live or work on Staten Island used mta services, including subways, heavily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> [https://archive.vn/g7Pp1](https://archive.vn/g7Pp1)</comment>


Lite: An Implementation Overview - <AUTHOR> https://rxi.github.io/lite_an_implementation_overview.html <comment><USER2> > This write-up outlines some of the implementation details of the lite text > editor. At the time of writing this lite is version 1.06.

Can the title be changed to reflect the fact that Lite is a text editor. As it stands I can't tell and have to click through to find out.</comment>


Fighting to Honor a Father's Last Wish: To Die at Home - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/26/nyregion/family-fights-health-care-system-for-simple-request-to-die-at-home.html <comment><USER2> As an EMT/Paramedic, the single best thing I've been able to do for patients is take them home (or really, somewhere, ANYwhere other than a hospital or nursing home) to die, in peace, in comfort, and with dignity.

We spend more to keep people alive, often in misery, in the last two years of their lives than we often do in the two decades preceding it. Quality of life doesn't have an ICD9/10 code, though.

I've pushed back at doctors and nurses, similarly, who have discharged patients to home, having blithely signed the form that "patient requires transport in fully-equipped ALS (advanced life support) ambulance" (and the bill that goes with it), when the patient is able to walk without assistance, has no complaints or pain, and is generally and hemodynamically stable.

It's obnoxious.

<comment><USER3> It's to avoid "bounce back" charges and the risk of litigation. I am not disputing your point that it's obnoxious but it's a risk avoidance behavior that the hospital does not have to pay for.

<comment><USER2> There's reasonable risk mitigation and there's unreasonable.

Cabulance. Even a BLS ambulance for sicker patients.

But an ALS ambulance (and the resulting bill between $2-3000), with ventilators, cardiac drugs, etc., for a patient who is comfortable as described, and has no history of respiratory or cardiac issues goes beyond overkill.

The actual form has lines as follows: "Bed confinement defines the patient as being (1) unable to get out of bed without assistance; AND (2) unable to ambulate; AND (3) unable to sit in a chair or wheelchair", "condition must be of sufficient severity that going by means other than this would be hazardous to the patient's health or wellbeing" (and I'd argue that other than for end- of-life care or similar, if you require an ALS transport to go home, perhaps you're too sick to be going home).

That really crosses the line of reasonability to borderline fraud.

<comment><USER4> Makes me glad I just run 911...

<comment><USER2> Pretty much. We are dual service, 911 and IFT. I don't mind the IFT side of things from the patient management experience, especially with chronic patients, but yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Home care agencies abruptly dropped or refused high-needs cases like her father's as unprofitable"

This story is really, really glossing over what is happening in home health hospice as a whole. For profit hospice organizations are crippling the non profit organizations by taking all the cheap and easy patients offering them slightly better services than the non profits, while dumping all the expensive and unprofitable patients on the non profits who typically try to take every patient regardless of their ability to pay, regardless of Medicaid and Medicare. These non profits are being killed off one by one because of it.

Yet another example of finance style arbitrage damaging the lives of Americans.

<comment><USER6> This is why the bastardized system we have now will never work. We must move to single-payer or fully private health care -- no middle ground.

I personally don't even care all that much which route we take, since I think the improvement in either case would be extreme. Unfortunately, both are equally unlikely, because of two-party "democracy".

But the status quo is unsustainable.

<comment><USER7> Why must it be single payer or fully private? Plenty of countries with well functioning healthcare systems have a mix.

<comment><USER6> Because in the absence of a single-payer system, the private portion of this system risk arbitrates all the higher-risk patients to the state-supported insurance and/or medical care, thus bankrupting the government and/or non- profit systems. We see this happen again and again.

What countries with well-functioning healthcare systems don't have a base- layer single risk pool under a government system? Of course, almost all of these systems allow supplemental and/or optional private care, but they are still single-payer insurance systems.

<comment><USER8> Isn't that the whole point of the state from a market economy standpoint? To take care of the things that are unprofitable with compulsion/taxation? You can't bankrupt the government. It's got the power to print money. It can keep going as long as it can do so. It also has the power of legislation. It can regulate prices if it so chooses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My mother is a hospice nurse and it has given me a viewpoint I don't think I would have ever considered before. Americans (and probably most people) seem to ignore end of life decisions because it is scary, and it can be, but it is important. So incredibly important, to the person leaving this earth to be respected and to the people they leave behind to not have awful experiences like this.

It seems to be changing a little, slowly, but as this article seems to demonstrate there will be a huge amount of push back from a for profit industry. And once you die the checks stop so I don't see an incentive for them to do better.

<comment><USER10> I would add that it's not just end-of-life decisions that we ignore or fear but anything long term or non-acute. Modern medicine is geared towards getting better quickly but there are certain ailments, be it old age, a traumatic brain injury or mental illness, that we're absolutely terrible at dealing with. It's not that people are not willing to put in the years (as is demonstrated by the brave woman in this article) but that the learnings and breakthroughs for long term illnesses takes generations, not years and sadly we're barely at the starting line.

Please thank your mother for everything that she does for her patients and thank you for sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Many of American healthcare problems will dissolve if US government allowed Indian doctors to come to US and start practice on a cap free H1B.

</comment><comment><USER12> My brother worked as a sales rep for over 10 years in home health and hospice. He has told me many war stories. Per the article, a lot of companies avoid patients who are short-term (less than a week to live) because the companies stand to lose money. He refused to do this and would regularly take on patients that represented a $10-15K loss.

By doing so he formed close bonds with doctors and discharge planners who would turn to him when no one else was willing to take a patient. These relationships led to a lot of referrals and he grew his territory to one of the strongest.

The company was later bought and new management enforced much harsher oversight on patient profitability metrics. Needless to say, he quit. Certainly something needs to change.

</comment><comment><USER13> I see that there is a problem here, but the article seems unduly vague about what it actually is. Could someone explain?

What I mean: This man wanted to go home. For some reason, he could not. Was it because he was _physically prevented_ from going home? Was it because, if he went home, insurance and/or govt. assistance would be made unavailable, and so with the policies that were in place, he _could not afford_ to go home? Or was it something else?

<comment><USER6> The problem was, insurance was happy to pay $500/a day for nursing home care, but balked at paying anything near that much for home nursing, which he needed to stay at home (since his daughter was a full-time teacher and also probably couldn't lift him, etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If the money is owned by the same organisation that gets to spend it, the money is spent wisely. If it costs one fifth to arrange for a daily care at home versus at a nursing home, then that's four fifths saved for something else in the total bill. However, if the one who gets to pay and the one who gets to spend are different parties then both try to optimise from their own perspective and generally end up with contradicting goals.</comment>


So what would we need to implement an open alternative to Facebook? - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/c1vmr/so_what_would_we_need_to_implement_an_open/

<comment><USER2> So, here is what I suggest someone does:

\- A "drop it in and it works" wordpress like app that acts as someones homepage/social network interface so people can host their own pages

\- - include oauth/openid in the app so the homepage can act as a central login too

\- - drop pubsubhubub or something similar into the app so that people can share information with their friends and followers directly

\- implement a central website to act as a "search" clearing house (search for names and email addresses which resolve to url's). All it will store is name and a hash of your email (with options to store more if the user allows).

\- produce a "web bar" like the blogger one to go at the top of the web app - so people logged into their "network" get easy tools when on other peoples pages

All of this exists in parts already (oauth, pubsubhubub etc) so it's just a case of drawing it together.

<comment><USER3> BuddyPress? <http://buddypress.org/>

<comment><USER4> That's actually... really promising.

I could definitely see using this among my close friends if Posterous ever gets too cumbersome.

The real question, though, is how BuddyPress installations might eventually communicate with each other. A federated mesh of BuddyPress instances, with a good UI for managing relationships between them, is the kind of thing that would be needed to take on Facebook.

<comment><USER2> The _only_ concern I would have with BuddyPress is that it is based on Wordpress.

As a codebase WP tends to have quite a high rate of exploits (or it is a popular exploit target). Right now that's not a huge problem - but for a social network where we want to encourage non-techy types to be involved it could be explosively bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What "we" really need is a whole bunch of people to use it. An open Facebook alternative isn't a technical problem.

<comment><USER6> It might work well for corporate hosting of pages -- a work-life social network makes a lot of sense as a separate entity from our private lives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think stopping thinking about and in terms of Facebook would be a good first step.

<comment><USER8> Well, except that when most people say "Facebook" they mean "a place online where I can look up and interact with my friends and family". That's a perfectly reasonable thing to want, and many people do.

<comment><USER7> Right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not sure why exactly we "need" an alternative to Facebook.

But why not leverage what's already out there. I recently killed my Facebook account out of frustration from seeing their social widget all over the place. But the main reason I was using it was: a) People who felt the easiest way to do event invitations was through facebook by way of a point and click here's all my friends in one place interface. b) People sharing Photographs with groups of friends w/ discreet privacy interfaces.

The C) of this list is all my friends who aslo have twitter accounts who add #fb to the end of every.damn.tweet because that's some kind of special operator to "update their profile message".

The question I put forth is why not create a thin layer to pull together the services which provide these already? Twitter already does short one line status updates. Flickr has discreet friend-level privacy settings. There are 8 billion easy to use invitation services. There are other photo services which I'm not familiar with like Picassa which likely do the same.

Rather than reinvent the wheel - we should be pushing for some kind of OAuth or OpenID services to tie these things together CLEARLY. Maybe a simple one- stop page to manage relationships with people, and your services. Your "profile" page can simply be "rit stores his photos at Flickr." and a link to those (or show them inline). But nothing stops me from having a friend who does things on Picassa.

The last few iterations of Facebook seemed to me designed to be more and more like Twitter. Why reinvent the wheel when you can just integrate?

</comment><comment><USER10> Is this a completely arbitrary use of the term "open" or am I missing something? What does it even mean in this context? How does using "open" systems address any of the concerns they mention. The moment you upload any data to a server that is not your own I don't see how any solution is any different to Facebook because the person with the datastore can do as they please, good or bad.

And a question: is it coincidence that popular products are always heavily controlled by a handful of peoples (at most) vision of their product and not "open" design by committee products?

<comment><USER11> The central server would just contain a reference to your data. Your data would remain on your own hosting or a 3rd party of your choosing and updates you post will only be pushed to your friends. That's how I'm getting the general idea.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, that's totally suitable to the 400 million odd users on Facebook who don't even have a clue what a "host" is (other than someone who invites their friends to dinner).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> All of the stuff that would be needed already exists, it's just not being used yet.

      - A standardized personal information representation = Social Graph API
      - A centralized database with pointers to user profiles = Social Graph API
      - A security mechanism = oAuth
      - An information delivery mechanism = PubSubHubbub + Activity Streams
      - Easy deployment = buddypress, onesocialweb and others

<comment><USER13> Your right. But this will never take down Facebook. FB is more of a marketing achievement than a technical one. Who is going to put in the work to market open FB if there is no upside?

I don't think we need an open FB, I think we need a few companies specialize in smaller portions of FB. One company runs the graph, but does not do messaging, or IM, or photos... Then other companies use that companies graphs to build on. These companies should all be for profit, otherwise I don't think they will be able to out-market FB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> In such a decentralized (pushes of feed updates, for example) architecture, how do you revoke a given permission? The data is no longer yours once you pushed it to some other dude's server. DRMing little chunks of data would also be expensive and time consuming if you check every feed item you can see all the time from publisher's servers.

Facebook, also, is not just profiles and the feed. How about events, in a decentralized way, for example? Will a single accept will be amplified to the rest of 500 people invited?

For the profile part, my basic identity is my email address. Implement something on the mail server that I can manage and let that be my profile. Emailing a specific command to email@example.com results my profile as the attachment, for example.

<comment><USER15> So it would just not come with a delete function. Once you've given someone a piece of information, it's hard to revoke it anyway. If you published a phone number to a bunch of friends that you didn't want to have the number, the protocol could allow your client to contact theirs, and ask to delete that information if it exists. Sure their client could refuse to abide by that request, but it's equally likely that they could have exported that phone number info Outlook/AddressBook or written it down on a piece of paper. How do you revoke it then?

As to blog/microblog posts, the same thing applies. The communication protocol between clients could specific a mechanism to request a deletion, but there's no guarantee that their client would obey. But there's also no guarantee that the other person hasn't already read your post.

Once you send information out into the world, it's very hard to pull it back in. Even on Facebook, if you broadcast information to people, there's no guarantee that they haven't written it down, exported it, screenshotted it before you deleted it or revoked privilege to it.

<comment><USER16> If we have to assume no privacy around the data on the site, it's _much, much_ easier to just export that assumption to Facebook and keep using that since it has the benefit of existing.

The social-service your friends are using will have the same access to the data your friend has access to, and if compromised, you are also compromised. So now you have to trust the integrity of potentially hundreds (actually infinite, since the ability for your friends to carry your authentication for them to access you to a new service would be central) of services - which you can't/don't - and then it's easier to just not trust Facebook.

<comment><USER15> > _If we have to assume no privacy around the data on the site_

Where did you draw that conclusion? If you accidentally send the wrong data to the wrong person you've violated your _own_ privacy due to your _own_ mistake.

That's a lot different than you specifying that someone shouldn't get a certain piece of information, but that person gets it anyway because the software erroneously allows them to see it.

It's also a _lot_ different than allowing third parties access to your private data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This touches on the Diaspora project, which was mentioned on HN not long ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1321651>

</comment><comment><USER18> The big problem, I think, is that this decentralized system requires "a centralized database with pointers to user profiles". Who pays for and curates this database?

</comment><comment><USER19> An open alternative is necessarily decentralised, standardized and extensible.

Jabber/XMPP is a decentralized contact list with communication and authorization protocols. It is easily extendable with XEP's.

With a sleek web interface that anyone can host himself - this is an open alternative to facebook I imagine.

<comment><USER20> Women can host these too!

<comment><USER21> See, this is why I use Spivak pronouns...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> What about status.net for the base (what identi.ca runs on), It could easily provide the base for the activity/status feed since that is basically what it's designed to do anyway (And it's open source!).

Then you would just add on the other parts you want to system (for example: pages, apps etc)

</comment><comment><USER23> First, get Oracle to buy Facebook and for Oracle to shut it down.

</comment><comment><USER20> I can't help but think of OpenOffice here. By the time it's built, the world has most likely changed and it's irrelevant.

Innovation anyone?

</comment><comment><USER24> Psst, here's how I think Facebook is going to unravel itself: just like Microsoft not seeing the forrest for the trees, getting blind sided by the Internet and Google, Facebook sows the seeds of its own decline by pushing the social graph everywhere. Facebook has carved out a nice hub for itself, being the most visited site other than Google, but what all these startup visionaries may be failing at is _vastly underestimating_ the usefulness of an open social graph. If Facebook suddenly finds its social graph baby is appropriated by an ad hoc open network that dwarfs its users, then Facebook loses control of the graph.

How might this happen? Browsers sure have changed a lot in just the past 2 years. Local storage is here today already, but almost no sites are doing anything with it. Google Gears had so much potential, but was too ahead of its time to become a trend. What if your browser stored your entire social graph locally, and you could configure your own privacy settings to only share what you want with sites you visit? That eliminates Facebook from being the master hub of the social graph—they are just another federated end point. As Facebook becomes "spammy" more users will want to block Facebook, so they might be convinced to use a local social graph in the same way hundreds of thousands are using AdBlock and FlashBlock. We already know Facebook will kill links to GreaseMonkey scripts that do this.

Alot of mashups and wild Javascript ideas will have to be seen over the next 8 months or so, but I definitely think the Facebook "diaspora" movement will take off once it's dead easy for end-users to run their own social graph programs locally from their own browser. Just like a desktop app. Perhaps even that might be asking too much of end users, the average of whom cannot recognize the difference between their browser and the Internet. Hopefully Apple will start baking new identity features into the iPad, since you know they will nail it as far as being simple enough for everyone to use.

The Techrunch rumor mill does keep whispering about Apple putting Facebook Connect into iTunes, but it seems more likely that Apple would take them on. Facebook will wish they had their own browser to push back with.

It's probably going to be a great tragedy that Apple is so unstoppable now that they can just roll over any other tech company at-will.</comment>