Yahoo acquires Ptch - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ptch.com/post/68919650988/ptch-joins-yahoo

<comment><USER2> I am so tired of the upbeat acquihire 'hey, users, this is good for you!' spin.

        Our passion and our mission was to give you
        the best way to make and share beautiful movies
        made from the photos and videos on your phone.
        Well, someone noticed!

        ...Ptch will shut down on January 2, 2014

<comment><USER3> If it _is_ an acqui-hire, then think of the scenario. A team that's probably burned out. The passion probably died a while back and along with it went the mission.

What type of announcement do you expect?

      We appreciate that you signed up for and used our product.
      Things haven't gone as well as we had hoped and we're
      exhausted.   The truth is we'd be shutting down the site
      in due time anyway but this is a better option for us and
      doesn't make any real difference for you, our user.

It says they launched a year ago so this particular company was still very new. It may not apply to them but I imagine this applies to most acqui-hires.

<comment><USER2> Ideally an honest one.

Edit: here's a thought.

Thanks again for your support of Product since our launch. It means the world to us, and it's been a terrific ride for us. Unfortunately, we haven't seen the broad usage of our service necessary to sustain it and we'll be shutting it down in X months. Luckily, BigCo is acquiring our team, which means that we'll have jobs making their quasi-similar product even better.

Here's how you get your data: (blah)

Here are some similar services you may want to consider moving to: (blah)

<comment><USER4> You want honesty?

How about:

 _" Thanks again for your support of Product since our launch. It means we're now in a position to get acquired by Yahoo. In other words, your support means we get money. We could gush about how much you mean to us, but really, we're running a business here, with the explicit goal of making money. We've done that now, so, thanks!"_

<comment><USER2>
        After the liquidation preference the founders
        (probably 1-3 people) are likely to get 90%
        of the remaining proceeds and the staff –
        those engineers that the acquiring company
        so desperately wants – would ordinarily
        receive a very small proportion.

[http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2013/05/13/the- corrosive-...](http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2013/05/13/the-corrosive- downside-of-acquihires/)

Hopefully Ptch employees were making market wages, because an acquihire certainly won't net them much of anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ptch was incubated at Dreamworks and was a pretty high-profile project internally there. As another commenter noted, it was something along the lines of an instagram video type of app, with very notable enhancements (think the equivalent of instagram filters, powered by dreamworks technology and content).

It was publicly available in the iOS App Store but didn't get much traction. I'm not sure what's left of the team, as I believe all of the original mobile engineers were already poached.

</comment><comment><USER6> Next: Yahoo! acquires an extra vowel for it's businesses

<comment><USER7> I'd like to but a vowel for $100MM, please...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Rule 1 when announcing your imminent acqui-hiredness: tell us what your company did when making your announcement, otherwise it is just gloating.

Can anyone tell me what ptch actually did?

<comment><USER9> The first paragraph says:

"Our passion and our mission was to give you the best way to make and share beautiful movies made from the photos and videos on your phone."

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How do you pronounce the name of this company? Patch? Pitch?

<comment><USER11> Their homepage says

"Make a ptch (pronounced "pitch") by combining the photos and videos on your phone, or using media from your social networks, like Facebook or Instagram.

Personalize it by easily adding captions, music, and effects."

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ask the users to download the data? Since they are about photos and videos, why not simply say "if you can provide us your Yahoo account, we will move all your data to Flickr in a private photo set"?

<comment><USER13> You're assuming everyone has a Yahoo Account, and they like using Flickr

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone have any idea how this fits into Yahoo's overall strategy?

<comment><USER15> [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the- switch/wp/2013/11/26...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the- switch/wp/2013/11/26/katie-couric-david-pogue-and-why-yahoo-wants-more-video- content/), Marissa Mayer has made several statements about not having enough clip inventory for all of the ad inventory they have. User generated content is cheap... I have no idea if it's that, technology, acqui-hired, or what, though.

<comment><USER16> Interesting. Thanks for sharing</comment></comment></comment>


Why do programmers talk less about design patterns now? - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/Why-do-programmers-talk-less-about-design-patterns-now?share=1

<comment><USER2> From the article... "I can add that the emphasis on design patterns reflects limited imagination and creativity."

Quite strange that this is mentioned. From my understanding, many jobs out there require a developer to know XYZ in order to hire them. Many jobs place emphasis on a college education. Many jobs incorporate best practices and standards for developing and testing software (or at least strive to). So, why the bad blood for design patterns?

As a developer I see two different worlds -

1) Rudamentary Development - to the book design, implementation, testing

2) Hacker Life - experimentation and unconventional design, implementation, testing

Both has its place in any project. You may need a quick hacker fix for one project while the other may need a well documented/tested approach.

On my end, I haven't really learned much about Design Patterns. That's not to say that its wrong, just never sat down and learn them. I wish I had. I think it will actually improve my skillset and imagination quite a bit. The reason why is that there are things that these patterns may take care off automatically so that the developer can free up their thoughts and energy towards creating new solutions.

Like the old adage from those Kung Fu movies: "Learn everything I teach, then forget them". Meaning, discarding the standards once learned (thoroughly) may lead to mastery and evolution of the subject.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Design patterns are bug reports against your programming language." — Peter Norvig

Maybe we're on the cusp of enlightenment.

</comment><comment><USER4> agile. Who has time?</comment>


How WebSockets work vs polling/long polling/streaming - <AUTHOR> http://www.websocket.org/quantum.html

<comment><USER2> I find it amusing that TCP was designed as and still is a full-duplex protocol for long-lived connections (streams). Then someone decides to use it in HTTP (1.0) for short-lived, half-duplex, message-oriented communication. Not surprisingly, it is not a good fit. Fast-forward a couple of years and everybody is busy de-crippling TCP in HTTP with various hacks trying to delay the HTTP request-response cycle, thus uncovering the streams in the underused underlying protocol. First now, many years later, the mistake is properly corrected and TCP on the www is vindicated through websockets. Funny world.

<comment><USER3> Wait a little longer and, if we are very lucky, multicast will be "re- discovered" as well. That way, instead of having servers shove data down many sockets to many clients, they will write their payload down 1 multicast socket to all interested clients, with said payload crossing the network as little and as far as necessary but not more.

So goes the wheel of progress...

<comment><USER4> Multicast is a nightmare over the general internet, from what I hear. It'd need some significant tooling to work properly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> He seems to play up the problems with comet-style communication quite a bit. Most of his objections, and it seems the entirety of his 'showdown' is based on using the slowest comet implementations, which do repeated HTTP requests, rather than the obvious and, as far as I know, most commonly used streaming approach. Honestly, I see little difference between streaming comet communication and web sockets in terms of performance/overhead.

And why does the "Complexity of comet applications" diagram show "RIA client app" (does this not have to be built when using web sockets?), "Silverlight or Flash plugin" (as if these are necessary for comet), and some convoluted server-side architecture that has nothing to do with the client-server protocol? Again it seems like trying to play up the deficiencies of comet-type apps in a kind of disingenious way.

Web sockets seem to be a great step forward in almost every way (cross- platform support currently missing) so why hype them with imagined performance wins from unrealistic comparisons with other solutions.

<comment><USER6> Yes, and then you get down to the Kaazing sales pitch, where a diagram shows your packets just going out to the Internet, and there's no longer any management to do on the client.

A well written article otherwise though. I appreciated the reminder to audit the headers you're sending out as an easy way to improve performance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks like an advertorial. No mention of socket.io and praise for a commercial solution that I didn't know after almost two years working with websockets.

<comment><USER8> Yup. It is an advertorial. Kaazing like promoting their own "WebSocket Gateway", and they're in a great position to, owning websocket.org

By the way, at the moment I'm using Python's Twisted with a simple wrapper called txWS: <https://github.com/MostAwesomeDude/txWS>

I'm not a big fan of socket.IO, seems too complex for my needs. I was quite happy to discover txWS, it's literally one more function call and you can just write ordinary Twisted code with no changes, which is a relief.

Edit: I'm tempted to purchase websockets.co...

<comment><USER8> Update: I went and bought websocket.us and websockets.us, and put up my own small website about WebSockets. I just want to provide an alternative to Kaazing's site, that has no commercial focus.

<comment><USER9> As a link, <http://websocket.us/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Their claim that "HTML5 Web Sockets can provide a 500:1 or—depending on the size of the HTTP headers—even a 1000:1 reduction" is also wrong as they dont account for TCP / IP Frame overhead. Sure it still is around 50:1, and sockets are awesome. But if you present numbers, please dont present misleading numbers.

</comment><comment><USER11> I get the basic idea, but when I try to flush it out into a full cluster and app design long-poll/web-sockets seems like a bit of a complexity nightmare on the back end. I mean you're taking a highly cachable stateless protocol and turning it into an uncachable one. Then you're taking a shared-nothing application layer and forcing it to do shared-state cache coherence via message passing. And all the way up and down the stack you're turning what was overwhelmingly treated as a request/response model and turning it into a different one. Every cache, proxy, application firewall, traffic shaper, loadbalancer and IDS on both sides is going to 'get confused' and net out to a toooon of user complaints and corner cases.

<comment><USER2> Exactly. Ajax in general breaks REST, including bookmarking, caching, navigation and more. All major selling points of HTTP goes out the window. HTTP was created on top of TCP, but with severe restrictions to get the great features which HTTP is well-known for. Now someone re-lauches unrestricted TCP as a feature, when it is in fact much more simplistic and formed the base all along. Usage was purpously off limits due to the headaches that unrestricted client-server communication causes.

<comment><USER12> > Ajax in general breaks REST

Huh? You are supposed to correctly choose the HTTP verbs and URI path precisely so that HTTP semantics apply.

If you are talking about page state then there are numerous ways of dealing with that - one example is <http://diveintohtml5.info/history.html>

If your assertion is that developers _can_ write bad code, abuse HTTP semantics, defeat caches, break navigation etc then so what? With the ability to do things right comes the ability to mess them up.

<comment><USER2> I am saying that by using Ajax to partially update a page, that updated page no longer has a URL which identifies it. This breaks HATEOAS badly. The idea of REST is that every state on a site has a representation. REepresentational State Transfer you know... So while there are many other ways of shooting yourself in the foot when designing a REST website, using Ajax makes it almost inevitable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just to let you all know that this is an old article (agree that a publish date would have helped there). Frank and I published this article originally in late 2009 or early 2010. That was around the time that WebSocket first landed in Chrome and there have been a lot of updates to the protocol since then. For example, WS was text only, and I don't think socket.io existed yet ;-)

</comment><comment><USER14> "..., it cannot deliver raw binary data to JavaScript, because JavaScript does not support a byte type" Incorrect. JS most definitely supports binary data using byte arrays with Uint8Array, etc or using canvas data binary

</comment><comment><USER15> spdy is better designed and supports compression out of the box. I also don't think that a network protocol should be part of HTML5 standard.

<comment><USER8> The WebSocket protocol isn't part of the HTML5 standard. The API is, but WebSocket's protocol is not defined in HTML5.

<comment><USER15> The fact that it's mentioned in HTML5 API bothers me.

<comment><USER8> Why? They are _Web_ Sockets, and we have AJAX already.

<comment><USER15> Ajax is merely a client JS interface to HTTP. A protocol that already exist. It's not a protocol being imposed on web servers.

When you want to impose a new protocol on web servers and browsers, it better not be to solve push notifications only. And that's what SPDY did.

<comment><USER8> WebSocket isn't just to solve push notifications. It's also for realtime communication, for example chat or multiplayer games. We do have server-sent updates if you just want push notifications.

<comment><USER15> yes, without compression. Everything you said is covered in SPDY. But SPDY takes a step further and improves the current state of HTTP as well to better transfer documents.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


If Europe is more expensive, why do Americans pay more for healthcare? - <AUTHOR> http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3336/if-everything-else-is-more-expensive-in-europe-why-do-we-pay-more-for-healthcare <comment><USER2> Just this weekend my wife told me about a co-worker who was bragging about taking the ambulance to the ER the last time her son had a slight cough. Normally she goes through all the trouble of driving him there herself, but she didn't want to waste any gas. Apparently, any and all health matters end with a trip to the ER in her family. She said several other co-workers claimed to do this as well. Part of the reason is that they can ask for prescriptions for Pediasure and other baby-related goods while they are there, so that it'll be covered and they don't have to pay for it. I'd never heard of this.

For most of these families, the fathers of their children stay home all day and don't work. I admire how these women pull long shifts and work everyday of the week. But when it comes to healthcare, I've heard some ponderous stories that shed some light on how some systems come to get over-worked and require so much money to operate. Maybe our community is the only one in America that this common, but it's a reality where I live.

Yeah I get a little ticked off when my premiums continue to rise when I hardly ever seek any healthcare and my family is rarely sick, and insurance companies count on my never going to help shoulder the burden of the people who do go. I don't mind contributing some to help people who need it, but honestly it's reaching a breaking point with me. The company I work for can't afford to offer a plan better than Obamacare, so even the PPO plan is terrible.

<comment><USER3> My wife was a teacher for middle school youth who were in state custody (or had other behavioral issues), and _all_ of her students were raised with the exact same approach to healthcare as your co-worker. "Why pay for anything when you don't have to?"

When my wife was about to deliver our first child, she mentioned to her students how the hospital bills can be expensive. Her students were absolutely dumbfounded that anyone would actually pay out-of-pocket (with or without insurance) for a baby delivery. They almost couldn't comprehend the idea that anyone other than the government actually _pays_ for this stuff. Many of those same students came from large families where a single mother literally chose to have many children (with random fathers) in order to qualify for more state-funded entitlements, and unfortunately, that whole mindset evidently perpetuates itself through the generations as kids grow up and expect to repeat the process.

And of course, their votes count the same as my vote.

<comment><USER4> I'm a bit confused by the context. There's nothing wrong with the mindset of expecting free healthcare, but I think it's how you get there that is problematic.

In western countries, those things are "free" because we collectively pay for them. I can't imagine having to pay for child birth. It's just something we are collectively responsible for, because we try to provide basic human rights to everyone.

Same for daycare. As a parent, finding a daycare centre that met basic health standards was one of the most stressful parts of becoming a parent. When the government started subsidizing non-profit daycare, it solved so many problems and made me much more productive at work.

<comment><USER3> > In western countries, those things are "free" because we collectively pay > for them.

Are you implying that somewhere else, these things are free _without_ someone paying for them?

> I can't imagine having to pay for child birth.

Really? Should raising a child be free then too? Should everything be "free"? How does that work?

Except for rare circumstances, when someone gets pregnant, they _choose_ to get pregnant. It may not be the desired outcome, but if you choose to play with fire, you're just ignorant if you think you can't get burned. It's a proactive choice. So if you don't have the means to deliver the baby (and subsequently raise the child in a positive environment), why did you choose to get pregnant and have the child? Why should everyone else be on the hook for your mistake? Regardless of who pays, children _are expensive_. Should we really reward people (and yes, that's what the system currently does) who want to make irresponsible decisions and have children they can't afford (in both time and money)?

Perhaps you're really pushing for full socialism? Sounds great! How's that working out in Venezuela?

> If I have to fight all the time for basic things, then yes, I'll start > cheating the system

Are you "fighting" to pay your taxes? Are you "fighting" to pay your insurance premiums? We're not talking about a struggle to find the best daycare for your kid; we're talking about paying into a system (whether through the government or an insurance provider) that redistributes wealth from those that can pay to those who "can't", but it only works when people don't abuse the system. And if you have the ability to work, you should be contributing rather than "cheating the system". Otherwise, you're just trying to justify getting something for nothing.

<comment><USER5> > Are you implying that somewhere else, these things are free without someone > paying for them?

Free, no, but the rest of the developed world has universal coverage and healthcare that costs half what it does in the US per capita, with similar outcomes.

Someone has to pay, yes. The US's way of paying is just horrendously complex, expensive, and inefficient.

<comment><USER6> >the rest of the developed world has universal coverage and healthcare

Why should every country have the same solution to healthcare? The US was formed as a democracy when 'the rest of the world' was run by monarchs. Healthcare is still a rivalrous good, and if we don't limit it by who can afford it, we will limit by some other ambiguous term like 'need.' My friend's grandma (80 yrs old) just had to fly to the US from Paris to have a surgery for which the French system deemed her ineligible (she was too old).

<comment><USER5> > Why should every country have the same solution to healthcare?

Single-payer systems have a variety of implementations - Australia has a vibrant private insurance industry alongside their public system, whereas Canada forbids it.

It's quite clear that the US healthcare variant simply isn't working and isn't sustainable. I pay more for my family's health insurance ($2,000/month) than I pay for my mortgage, and it goes up 10-20% every year (both pre-ACA and post- ACA).

We're well past the point of saying "well, that experiment didn't work, what's everyone else doing that works?"

<comment><USER6> We were past that point when Clinton raised the issue in the 90's (or even Bob Dole). I just don't think a federalized system with central control/power is the prudent path to pursue until we get price transparency for healthcare costs.

<comment><USER5> We already have price transparency for our single-payer system. Medicare pays a specific amount for specific procedures - you can get a full list ([https://www.cms.gov/medicare/medicare-fee-for-service- paymen...](https://www.cms.gov/medicare/medicare-fee-for-service- payment/feeschedulegeninfo/)).

Our current path is demonstrably not prudent, with a good dozen or more examples of what appear to be prudent approaches to draw from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The reason healthcare costs so much in the US is insurance. When insurance pays for everything patients don't care how much the medical providers are charging, and patients don't care if medical providers are providing unnecessary services. When somebody else (i.e., insurance) is paying, the individual consumer is encouraged to consume without any restraint. When all consumers behave this way, providers are able to charge high prices, which in turn causes insurance premiums to go up. (Look up "tragedy of the commmons").

The solution is to make the consumer participate in driving costs down. One employer I know of has an excellent solution to the problem: Make employees pay 100% of the bill up to a certain amount, such as $6000. That's a large amount, but the employer then contributes a large amount to your Health Savings Account (HSA), such as $4000. This amount is for you to keep regardless of whether you have any health bills or not. (This money can be used for medical expenses only, either in the current year or in the future). This means the max you will spend out of pocket per year is $2000. How does this encourage the consumer to scrutinize medical spending? Because the first $6000 of medical spending in a year is "your money". This is money you'd be able to keep in your HSA if you didn't have any medical expenses. This gives the consumer a strong incentive to reduce costs, question charges, avoid unnecessary services, and so on.

<comment><USER6> >The solution is to make the consumer participate in driving costs down.

The insurance companies and hospitals do not want this, and they seem to prefer to have large administrative bureaucracies and collude on pricing. I'm glad there are many comments making the point about price transparency and competition.

Edit: Just found this somewhat recent article: "those indecipherable medical bills theyre one reason health care costs so much" [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/magazine/those- indecipher...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/magazine/those- indecipherable-medical-bills-theyre-one-reason-health-care-costs-so-much.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the basic premise of the question is utterly flawed. Europe is NOT more expensive when it comes to just about anything except for certain categories of items (like cars and for good reason!). Take Germany for example. Childcare? Free or 200 EUR per month if you want extended hours. College tuition? Free. Rent? Fairly cheap. Food? Again, fairly reasonable. Almost any kind of -care or -service is cheaper in Germany as compared to the US.

<comment><USER9> I heard Germany also has less working days in a year on average.

<comment><USER10> Well, a legal minimum of 20 vacation days (and 30 being the norm for full-time work), plus 9-10 public holidays that fall on workdays, plus as many days of paid sick leave as the doctor asks for.

So maybe 220 days at work per year? I guess that is 6-10% less than in the US.

<comment><USER11> An average German employee works about 1.3k hours a year, in the US about 1.8k. There are some European countries where people work even longer on average. (Note that these numbers include all workers, so also part-time employees. There are also differences between countries on how they are exactly measured so comparisons should be taken with a grain of salt. But for a rough idea that should be enough).

Source: [https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours- worked.htm](https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Most people are aware that the US pays the most for healthcare per capita.

Most people are not aware that the US pays more per capita on socialized medicine than any country except Norway:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_h...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_health_expenditure_per_capita#/media/File%3AOECD_health_expenditure_per_capita_by_country.svg)

In fact, the US spends more in _socialized_ medicine per capita than many countries spend in _total_ (public and private): France, the U.K. and Japan, for example.

I think unfortunately only a collapse will offer opportunity for reform.

</comment><comment><USER13> There are some things that are expensive about the U.S. healthcare system that are totally unnecessary - for instance the epidemic in prescription painkillers of the opium variety - tens of millions of Americans are hooked on those things. The expense here is not the main problem, it is the millions of lives ruined by big pharma.

There are other curious upsells that go on in U.S. healthcare, e.g. off-label prescriptions. That does not happen in Europe as the incentive is not there, the hospital/doctor is not profit motivated to get their patient on the hard drugs, as per the U.S. situation.

Expense begins at birth if you are male - when medical staff get paid for circumcisions then they happen, in Europe there is not this financial imperative so the only people getting themselves circumcised are doing so for religious or actual medical reasons, not just because it is an upsell from the hospital.

The more I find out about U.S. healthcare the leas I see it as that.

</comment><comment><USER14> Europe was more expensive a couple of years ago. Now is much cheaper, just pick equivalent cities and compare them on Numbeo.

e.g. Hamburg vs Seattle [https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of- living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...](https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of- living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=United+States&country2=Germany&city1=Seattle%2C+WA&city2=Hamburg&tracking=getDispatchComparison)

The past years I used to travel each year to US, in different parts (Dallas, Chicago, Seattle etc...) and I always had the impression that USA is way more expensive - from the perspective of someone who goes to a restaurant and enjoys good food and a good bottle of wine.

Also health insurance is cheaper here, and my coverage is very good.

<comment><USER15> US big cities are expensive, but there are plenty of places in the US that you haven't visited that are quite affordable to live in. You can't judge the whole US by NY, LA, and Chicago.

<comment><USER16> > there are plenty of places in the US that you haven't visited that are quite > affordable to live in.

Sure, but almost none are nearly as affordable as the parent poster's example.

"Hamburg - Apartment, 1 Bedroom, City Centre - $823/month"

I'm in the so-called "affordable" Midwest, and there's not a single apartment even _remotely_ close to that price, in any city anywhere within 400 miles here. In Michigan, for example, that same apartment will cost at least $1,200/month. This is true despite the fact that our average income is roughly identical to what Numbeo lists for Hamburg.

<comment><USER17> >I'm in the so-called "affordable" Midwest, and there's not a single apartment even remotely close to that price [$823], in any city anywhere within 400 miles here.

I am in the definitely unaffordable Bay Area, and you don't have to go 400 miles to rent a 1 bd apt for under $800. Its not going to be in a desirable city and probably not a very nice apt, but they certainly exist. Literally the first listing I found on craigslist was $775 (in Modesto, about an 80 mile drive to San Jose).

<comment><USER16> > Its not going to be in a desirable city and probably not a very nice apt,

That's what the comparison is though, it's using "city center" apartments, apartments inside urban areas. Of which, there aren't any anywhere near that price, in almost _any_ city in the US. (Even somewhere like Detroit).

If you want to look at crappy apartments way outside of town, the comparison still holds up:

> Dresden - Apartment (1 bedroom) Outside of Centre - $392/month USD

That "affordable" Modesto apartment is still about 2X the cost of a comparable unit.

<comment><USER18> And likely has proper public transport (very lacking in the US) so you might be able to reduce your gas bill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I read somewhere, don't remember where that your healthcare system is more costly because of you're legal system.

There are more legal risk and cost for doctor, hospital, etc.. in the US, so their insurance is (way) more costly, so their price is higher.

But I don't have any data, so that's just an hypothesis. But if this is true, good luck to change that.

<comment><USER20> _I read somewhere, don 't remember where that your healthcare system is more costly because of you're legal system._

Cost controls are the reason. Providers can charge anything they want in the US. Not true in the EU.

<comment><USER21> The reason is that somehow business has more political power than patients, doctors etc. That all comes back to the eternal problem of politicians having to have _funds_ to be elected. So everyone in office owes favours to various people and organizations. If campaigning politicians weren't allowed to accept any money from anyone at all (people or organizations) then a lot of the political problems in the US would just vanish I think. It's somehow so natural that americans tend to not even think that it's odd that personal political campaigns are paid for by donors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There are a lot of bad reasons for this, and a lot of bad impacts, but there is at least one benefit for humanity: American healthcare dollars create intense competition to do to do aggressive and innovative biomedical research and product development.

<comment><USER23> with maybe 10% of products reaching market and a focus on blockbuster drugs, not necessarily those which may save or improve lives

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Other relevant reasons: single payer healthcare is less expensive because otherwise hospitals have more market power, which allows them to charge prices way above what it costs. Also, insurance companies here don't use cost effective analysis as much as Europe and will pay for the latest experiemental treatment, whereas Europe might ration its care for expensive relatively ineffective treatments.

<comment><USER25> > Other relevant reasons: single payer healthcare is less expensive because > otherwise hospitals have more market power, which allows them to charge > prices way above what it costs.

I am sorry but that's like the opposite of economic logic. Ceritus paribus, more competition means lower prices.

Regarding the actual topic, I've long maintained that a single payer system in America would be much more expensive than a single payer system in Europe because of different priorities of the American consumers (for instance, old people demographic in America, the pro-life nature where a big part of our insurance expenses goes towards saving premature newborn babies). The only way a single payer in America (or in any country) could be cheaper is by offering a different product to the consumers.

<comment> norea-armozel >I am sorry but that's like the opposite of economic logic. Ceritus paribus, more competition means lower prices.

It doesn't hold under empirical study of firms of any industry. Competition can be offset by jacking up prices or otherwise hiding the price. Prices are never set by the market, so everyone pays a ransom for the good or service in question, especially in healthcare.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Maybe Americans pay more for healthcare because we underwrite most of the medical innovation in the world.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2011/03/23/the- mo...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2011/03/23/the-most- innovative-countries-in-biology-and-medicine/#403f5f5c1a71)

</comment><comment><USER27> I had a recent medical issue with my daughter in the Philippines. We brought her to the emergency room in Manila at the best hospital that had US trained doctors.

All the tests, the stay, the treatment all came out to a total of about $140.

Contrast this with a recent visit I had to the ER in the US. I have insurance, and my copay for the visit was $150. There is definitely something wrong with the pricing of healthcare in the US.

I am not sure how to solve it given all of the parties involved, but I think adding transparency to the pricing would be a good first step. To those that do not know, the medical industry in the US has an anti-trust exemption. What that means is that they are not required to publish prices. That is why one patient can get a totally different price than another patient getting the same exact procedure.

How can you begin to solve something if you cannot even measure it?

</comment><comment><USER28> Based on my experiences as an American living in Europe, the premise of this is entirely wrong. At least in some cases- I'm a freelancer without kids living in Germany. For someone who is employed, older, has kids, or lives in a different country, the calculation may be different. But overall, Europe isn't the healthcare utopia people make it out to be.

The cost of living in Europe is significantly lower than the US, not higher as the article suggests. Housing, food, everything. Overall I can live on much much less money than I did in the US. This may vary from city to city, but I think in many places in Europe this is true.

But health care is much more expensive in Europe. For me, part of this is due to being a freelancer- the public system is unaffordable for me because I would have to pay double, and pay double with my income calculated at a higher rate than I actually make. The private system is similarly expensive. It costs far more than health insurance in the US would for me. But in general, health insurance is not cheap.

Insurance also includes far less here than in the US. It doesn't include even basic preventative care when you are under a certain age. It also doesn't include stuff like birth control or STD tests. And even for things it covers, it's difficult to get any reimbursement at all from private health insurance. I've also found the medical system in Germany to be atrocious when you actually go to see a doctor. If you end up in the emergency room, you can get good care. But doctors seem to just wait until it gets that bad before doing much and often spout nearly-superstitious nonsense to justify not providing medical care. Maybe they just do this to me because I'm an immigrant though- possible Germans get better care.

As a result, I only have cheap, crappy insurance here. It's currently cheaper and more effective for me to have decent insurance in the US, and fly home whenever I need to go to the doctor. The US medical system under the ACA is amazing, better than nearly all Americans realize.

<comment><USER29> Hmm, something here seems off. I've been living in Germany for the last 5 years, I'm self employed with a wife and 2 kids, and I'm on the public plan. It seems great. It scales with your income so it should always be affordable. Why are you having to "pay double"?

The 2nd component here is that your premium is 99% of your total health care costs. And, very little arguing with the insurance company. Much nicer to deal with than back in the US where it's rarely 100% coverage and the insurance company is trying to screw you at any opportunity.

> It doesn't include even basic preventative care

My public insurance includes an every 2 years skin screening from the dermatologist, and dentist checkups / teeth cleanings pretty frequently. Other preventative care, I'm not sure of.

> I've also found the medical system in Germany to be atrocious when you > actually go to see a doctor. If you end up in the emergency room, you can > get good care.

I've been sick a few times. I've gone to a family doctor and an ENT specialist and both I thought were very good. Comparable to treatment I've received in the US. It's unfortunate your experience was so bad but I don't think that is the norm.

I have 2 children so we have quite a bit of experience with the German system and it seems absolutely wonderful from my perspective. One of my kids was premature and I have 0 complaints about how they handled that. She also developed a very serious medical condition a few years later. She was on chemotherapy and required multiple surgeries. I don't know how the health care for this would be in the US but the German health care system handled it great, in my opinion. We've never had to fight with the insurance company on anything except for a $7000 club foot brace which took us a few back and forth letters to get. Not so bad though.

<comment><USER29> amendment to my original reply:

I thought about this more and I think your "problem" is that you are young and healthy and have no kids. You do get kind of screwed in that situation since you are basically subsidizing everyone else. But, it has to be like that otherwise health care would be prohibitively expensive for people who actually need it.

If you have kids over here, you will pay the exact same price for your health insurance as you do now but it will also cover your children. At that point it will be a great deal for you =)

<comment><USER28> Yeah, as I mentioned, the calculation is a bit different when people have kids. And that's great, but for me it's unaffordable and cheaper to fly back to the US whenever I need to go to a doctor or refill prescriptions and keep insurance in the US. And that's absurd. It works pretty well though, but that may become unworkable too with the changes to the US system.

By pay double, I mean that I would have to pay the employers half as well. And on top of that, most public insurance companies seem to have a minimum amount of money that they assume freelancers make, which is often above what I actually make. So health insurance would come out to be 1/3 of my income pre- tax a lot of the time.

There does seem to be some preventative care for older people, but a lot of the stuff my doctors check at yearly visits in the US (basic exams, blood tests, even getting a free yearly checkup at all) doesn't seem to be covered at all if you are under a certain age. There's a lot of nice things about the US system under Obama that I took for granted. Certainly isn't perfect or better in all situations, but there are some areas where it seems significantly better than the system in Germany. So I'm always surprised when I see Americans talking about how great the German system is and treating it like an ideal. It seems like it's good in some situations, but the US system is better in many situations too.

I've heard that care is quite good when people end up in a hospital (and people seem to be kept in the hospital much longer and more easily here than in the US), but from everything I've seen, it can be very hard to get any treatment until it gets that bad. May just be a bad sample set though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> As a tourist in SF I got whitlow. I went to a medic. He looked at my finger and then gave me a box of antibiotics. Then his assistant asked for $300. I balked and they reduced to $200.

This sample of size 1 (one) is enough to tell me that something is off in the US.

<comment><USER31> Increasing this sample size to two:

One heated day I punched an object that ought not be punched. Little finger swelled up and didn't quite work correctly. A few hours later said finger was bandaged, and holding a bill for $3,400. No medication. Just looked at, x-ray'd, and bandaged into recovery position. $3,400. US. It would have been cheaper to fly back to the UK and have it looked at - three times over!

<comment><USER32> This is insane. I can't understand how Americans see this normal.

<comment><USER17> Most Americans dont see that as normal, healthcare is one of the top political issues in this country. However, the true costs of healthcare are extremely opaque. I'd guess the cost of the little anger incident above would be an order of magnitude less with insurance.

To add another anecdote, I got a kidney stone ~5 years ago. The cost for ER admission, a CT scan, some lab work, prescriptions, etc was about "$20,000". However, nobody paid anybody $20,000. I paid something like $1000 and my guess is my insurance via their negotiated rates paid something like another $1000 on top of that. How we got there as a country is a long, complicated story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> "Free" childcare, tuition etc in Europe is a myth. There's no such thing as free.

on a salary of $150,000 you pay more than $75,000 in income tax in many EU countries, then add to that various other taxes like real estate tax etc.

For that you get poor public schools, poor healthcare etc.

Last time I scheduled an appointment at the FREE doctor I had to wait 4 weeks for him to see me.

So I had to go to a private one and pay cash, after already paying huge sums of money for this supposedly cheap and awesome european healthcare.

<comment><USER34> Counter example from Denmark, a European country: two weeks ago my son had a rash (no other symptoms), preventing me from dropping him off at daycare. I called the doctor at 8.30 a.m., had an appointment at the FREE doctor at 11. Problem solved in less than three hours.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, sure, there's going to be positive counterexamples.

Waiting times (specially for say for some types of surgery are an issue in Denmark also).

Look, I have extensive experience from inside the the system, maybe I can write a more detailed post about how this works and some reasons why US healthcare can be so expensive, if anyone is interested in that.

But just a quick example, health care costs on national levels fluctuate through the years, and so do collected taxes and hence how much of that pile is allocated to healthcare.

This can result in a doctor treating your son differently in 2016 than in 2017, an neither the doctor or the hospital will tell you this.

For example he might need a surgery, which will be done with an invasive surgical procedure (opening up a person with a scalpel), even though a non- invasive laser procedure is available and the hospital has all the necessary equipment & and the doctors trained.

\-- In short, examples of generally best health care systems in Europe are Switzerland, Netherlands, and NOT England (NHS) or France.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> In urban areas, housing in Europe is typically cheaper than in the US. Rural and suburban housing is much more, though of course the US has a far larger supply of land.

</comment><comment><USER36> for one thing, we Americans demand instant service even for the more expensive things. For example, I live in a small-ish town, and yet there are 3 clinics with an MRI machine within 15 minutes of where i live. If I needed one, I would be on the slab in the amount of time it took me to drive there and fill out the paperwork. Maybe an hour or two if someone was there ahead of me. I would never have to wait a day or more. I don't have the stats on other countries, but I bet most are not like that.

And that shit is expensive. The way medical competition works in the US is that prices go up when there is more competition because the competing clinics need to keep purchasing the latest technology to keep up. As long as insurance covers the alternatives, we go to the best and most expensive.

In the US we have WAY too much health care.

<comment><USER37> I'm not sure I believe "more competition drives medical costs higher".

<comment><USER38> It's pretty plausible. We don't have price transparency or price competition; generally when a doctor asks a patient to get an expensive test, if insurance covers it and it's not inconvenient, the patient will get it. So, if there are more places to get expensive tests, that's competition, but also is likely to lead to more expensive tests being done.

This raises the question of efficacy of the tests for patients who wouldn't have had the test done when there was less access. If spending more for the tests improves health outcomes, that's valuable, and if it saves money on treatment that's even better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Sad, but true: "the fact that this treatment is more readily available means U.S. patients (insured ones, anyway) who might not need it go under the knife just to be safe"

I only had to make that choice once, namely with the removal of my wisdom teeth. I'm glad I insisted on local anesthetic.

<comment><USER40> I have noticed that in the last year a few coworkers had their wisdom teeth removed despite having no problems with them. It was sold as a prophylactic thing. Is that the latest trend? One coworker got a pretty bad infection and was miserable for weeks afterwards.

<comment><USER41> It's actually a very old trend. Only recently have researchers begun to say that you should only have wisdom teeth out if they are causing problems, not prophylactically.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/health/06consumer.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/health/06consumer.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Don't worry, the Tories will make our healthcare as expensive as yours soon enough.

</comment><comment><USER43> What stops US from adopting the Canada healthcare system? It's not perfect but at least reasonable. Why re-invent the bicycle?

</comment><comment> vladimir-y Because imho insurance companies is a sort of mafia, for me it looks like a conspiracy to rob people out is happening.

</comment><comment><USER44> Because the healthcare costs are pushed onto everything else in Europe.

<comment><USER45> I'm not sure that's the whole story. Do European doctors and hospital administrators make $350,000/yr, plus kickbacks from the pharmaceutical companies? There's a lot of structural inefficiencies in the American system that are not incentivised to go away.

<comment><USER40> The healthcare bureaucracy in the US is insane. Every doctor seeems to have several people whose only job is to deal with insurance. And every insurance must have a ton of people who evaluate and deny claims.

<comment><USER46> Every practice has those people. But billing complexity is one of the factors driving doctors to work for hospitals and large organizations rather than in their own practice.

<comment><USER40> And hospitals are even worse at billing. They pretty much just make up charges and let the patient figure it out.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google's 'Project Zero' Hid a Major Vulnerability in Apple's OS and iOS Cores - <AUTHOR> https://thestack.com/security/2016/10/26/task_t-google-apple-os-vulnerability/ <comment><USER2> "Hid" seems like the wrong verb to describe what this article reports, which seems to be more like "identified", "found", or "discovered".</comment>


Ask HN: HN Mobile Site on AdBlock Browser? - <AUTHOR> I love the new HN Mobile site, but has anyone noticed it doesn't work right on AdBlock Browser (Android 6.0)? Seems to be fine in Chrome for Android, but that seems really strange. Bug report? <comment><AUTHOR> I can't tell, was something in this caught by the filters? I avoided anything I was aware of being unacceptable. Don't see it on the ask page at all. Is discussing HN on HN taboo?

</comment><comment><USER2> Trying the |Contact| link at the bottom of the page to let Daniel know may be a better way of getting a response.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, gave that a try.</comment></comment>


Internet Explorer 9 utterly dominates malware-blocking stats - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/07/internet-explorer-9-utterly-dominates-malware-blocking-stats.ars# <comment><USER2> Good news. I personally use Software Doctor. It blocks things several time a day, most of which seem to be tracking sites. However I haven't been bitten by any malware such as fake anti-malware in more than a year. OTOH I would like to find something that is both good and free.</comment>


New Unlock Works for All iPhones, All Firmwares - <AUTHOR> http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=21503

<comment><USER2> It saddens me to see people pay a lot of money for a device just to fight the manufacturer tooth and nail for every update and extra functionality.

As for the carriers who lock these phones, it's as if your bank wouldn't let you put holes in the walls until you finished paying off the mortgage. All this does is frustrate customers who paid for that device and who are anyway locked into a contract. Pointless anyway, since it was always possible to pay a guy $20 to unlock any available model out there.

I'd like to see device manufacturers and carriers focusing on their core business (better hardware/software/service) instead of how to cripple more features to squeeze a few extra dollars today.

Even more importantly, I'd like to see people grow a spine and just say no to buying devices if what they intend to do with them is prohibited by the manufacturer. Do that for a while and you'll see them start sweating and advertising their new open product.

<comment><USER3> _"it's as if your bank wouldn't let you put holes in the walls until you finished paying off the mortgage."_

Well, don't they? My mortgage has a section about needing permission to do renovations. I do not know how things are in the USA, but given that one, in some states, can walk away from a property without repercussion, I would be surprised if things were different. Would be a nice way to increase the price of one's house: buy a house in a different neighborhood, burn it down, turn in the keys.

Back to the subject: with iPhones, the argument that locking takes away functionality is less strong than for other phones. You will get updates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a neat hack - basically, Apple's SIM activation server doesn't validate that the ICCID sent to it matches the asserted carrier - only that the carrier matches the phone identification and that the phone isn't blacklisted.

The SAM tool lets you fool iOS into sending a valid carrier to the activation server, and the activation server happily sends back the material necessary for the OS to associate the baseband with the SIM.

To make things even better, the material sent back from Apple's servers isn't time-sensitive and hence the attack can be replayed forever - once you have the "baseband ticket" for a given phone and SIM, it can be unlocked forever across all current known versions.

</comment><comment><USER5> Title is somewhat misleading, as this requires "any jailbroken iOS device", which at this point doesn't cover all/models firmware revisions - specifically, iOS 5.1 on A5 and A5X powered units:

<http://jailbrea.kr/>

</comment><comment><USER6> In my opinion hardware unlock (via turbo sim or gevey) is still the best solution, it leaves your iOS intact.

<comment><USER7> Tried a gevey sim and the phone randomly lost unlock once every few days. Totally unusable. Maybe they have improved since last year...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This was a lifesaver - I've been stuck in a foreign country carrying around two phones for the past four months.

<comment><USER9> ^^ this is exactly why the carrier lock is bullshit. Then again, most carriers will give you unlock info if you're headed overseas and have been with them more than a few months.

<comment><USER10> Not AT&T, unfortunately. They're just starting to unlock at end of contract, but as far as I can tell won't unlock for overseas travel. And AT&T has sold most international-cable phones in the US, by far.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is pretty cool, I wonder how they realised this was possible. I can only assume they monitored a lot of activations to realise it.</comment>


Rural Kansas is dying - <AUTHOR> https://newfoodeconomy.org/rural-kansas-depopulation-commodity-agriculture/ <comment><USER2> I'm writing this post from my home in Manhattan, Kansas, a mid-sized town in the Flint Hills. We had a gorgeous sunset tonight and I watched it from my back porch, staring across my lawn in the rolling ranch land behind me. I'm working for a San Francisco YC alum tech company but living in one of the most affordable places in the US. Life is amazing out here. I have gigabit fiber internet, great third-wave coffee shops, a great local library, decent restaurants, and a couple of solid cocktail bars. Kansas State University is here, so that brings us a nice performing arts center that gets nationally touring acts and Big 12 football and basketball teams that you can't help but love. My only "commute" is driving my kids to school and driving myself to the coffee shop. We have a great little airport with free parking and I can leave my home and be stepping onto the jet bridge in twenty minutes and SFO is an easy hop through DFW.

It's beautiful out here and I wish more tech workers would consider the Midwest when they decide to leave the Bay Area.

<comment><USER3> how do you feel about tornados

<comment><USER4> Probably the same way he feels about earthquakes.

<comment><USER5> I don't think that's a fair comparison. I think a better one would would be hurricanes.

<comment><USER6> With hurricanes you get warning days in advance (I live in Florida). With tornadoes, you might get a few minutes warning, and with earthquakes, not so much (as far as I understand it).

<comment><USER5> I was more thinking of seasonality of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The failed promise of telecommuting is a tragedy of the tech world. I'm a Kansan born and raised in the KC area (suburban rather than rural), and I wish a work-from-home career was more feasible in my line of work. I'd like nothing more than to live in a small Midwestern town; the city-hives hold no real attraction to me. The Internet should have freed more of us to live where we want, but in the most connected point in the world's history we're clustering in tech hubs.

<comment><USER8> How do we know that remote telecommuting work isn't working? If you could telecommute to work and could live virtually anywhere, Kansas would not likely be at the top of the list due to a somewhat harsh winter climate. I'd imagine people would locate somewhere remote but with a temperate climate (i.e. Central California coast, Florida, Colorado, Western Washington, or even Costa Rica, etc.).

<comment><USER9> Surely I'm not the only one who would prefer to live and work near where I grew up, regardless of the weather.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The Ogallala aquifer is only mentioned once in passing, but that's the real reason rural Kansas is dying. With the aquifer being completely depleted in some areas, conventional farming of the usual cash crops won't be an option for much longer. See [http://www.kansascity.com/news/state/kansas/article28640722....](http://www.kansascity.com/news/state/kansas/article28640722.html)

<comment><USER11> "It comes down to the luck of where your ancestors settled," Wilson says. "Or where you bought ground."

[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/08/vanishin...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/08/vanishing- midwest-ogallala-aquifer-drought/?beta=true)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> TThe only mention of corn in the entire article:

 _While other northwest Kansas farmers were draining the Ogallala Aquifer to irrigate thirsty cornfields, Raile dry farmed. He likes to bet against the crowd._

Kansas is wheat country, and corn is king. This article doesn't even touch upon this 800lb gorilla, it doesn't mention corn subsidies that keep corn prices high while he author goes on for paragraphs lamenting how boosted production has dropped wheat prices.

<comment><USER13> Well it's not like you have awesome urban living around corn fields either. Huge fields and few people kind of get in the way of vibrant towns.

<comment><USER14> Small town living has its own charms, and having lived in big cities, medium- sized cities, and small towns, my preference is for places that are 50,000 people or smaller, with a city over 500,000 population no nearer than 90 minutes away.

Small towns were common 50 years ago in the rural Midwest. Farm sizes were much smaller on average then, and lots of people raised several children and made a decent living with 160 acres and some livestock. Now average farm size is somewhere north of 1000 acres, the kids move away for jobs more often than not, and the small towns are shrinking and dying. This is a loss for the country as a whole.

<comment><USER13> > This is a loss for the country as a whole.

Is it? It seems like that's the direct result of increased productivity. Even if it's a loss for the people who would enjoy that life, it seems like tons of cheap food made available for everyone else is very much a gain.

tl;dr The losses of farmers in Kansas are large in Kansas terms, but small in United States terms. It seems a win for the country.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Living somewhere rural isn't hell. It means you might get bored some of the time - and that's not the end of the world! It also means you get to do what you want, instead of depending on other people to entertain you every minute until you die. Having some empty time between events happening is fine. Living more independently can even be great sometimes. You don't want to live in Kansas, that's fine, I'm just worried that a lot of people in the comments here are acting like there's no reason anyone could want to live there.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is much less interesting than the rust belt decline or any other number of dying communities. Kansas used to need a lot more people to support farming and thus had enough people around for small towns to have a little life to them. Now they don't. It's a good thing that we can make so much food with fewer people, but it does mean even fewer people will live in rural agricultural communities.

We love to romanticize the small farmer, but I don't know why we'd expect vast areas of farm land to support vibrant small towns.

<comment><USER16> With the internet, small towns should be more viable in places like Kansas.

<comment><USER13> You need more than internet access (which is probably not all that great in much of rural Kansas!) for people to want to live somewhere. I mean you can get that anywhere, why pick perfectly flat wheat fields? The small towns were a byproduct of needing a lot of people to grow wheat, they weren't destinations that people chose.

<comment><USER17> If I were going to pick a boring, flat land wheat farm type of place with ultra low cost of living to telecommute from, I would not pick Kansas. You can buy a pretty decent house in Ritzville, WA for $100k, it is on I-90, and it's not a ridiculous driving distance to Spokane or Seattle. And numerous mountainous hiking/camping/skiing/4x4ing locations within a 2 hour radius.

Also in the wheat farming sort of region, some random small town 45 minutes from the moscow-pullman metro area in SE WA. Pullman is a nice welcoming college town. Can buy houses for $100-120k.

<comment><USER18> And there's a tesla supercharger there, so you are covered for everything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The increasing concentration of farm land ownership in the hands of fewer, larger farmers is the result of declining property taxes on land:

[http://www.masongaffney.org/publications/D1Rising_Inequality...](http://www.masongaffney.org/publications/D1Rising_Inequality_&_Falling_Prop_Tax_Rates.CV.pdf)

Farming is heavily dependent on labor and capital rather than land. Rural land is worth very little relative to urban land.

A broken tax system which assigns low taxes on land relative to taxes on capital and labor has resulted in higher land prices, increased the concentration of farm land ownership in the hands of fewer individuals, while shifting jobs and investment towards coastal cities where land values are highest.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's the Pareto principle. People go where they feel they will have more opportunities, and they take their economic activity with them.

Intra-national economic migrants are able to take their families with them, so they don't have the need to "send money home" the way so many international economic migrants do.

<comment><USER19> The more general principle is that investors put their money where it generates the highest return.

Since the United States taxes land rents much less than it taxes labor and capital, investment leaves agricultural areas where farming is heavily dependent upon labor and capital, and moves to coastal cities where land values are highest. It moves out of rural areas and into urban areas at an accelerating rate because that's where our broken tax system tells it to move.

This market distortion could be permanently corrected by replacing taxes on labor with taxes on land values.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Every time I visit my mother's home town (800 people in KS) and see main street basically boarded up I think about how interesting it would be to move there and try and build some type of ag or rural tourism business to get some partial revitalization. AirBnB for disconnecting techies in KC or maybe a small coffee house and Inn on main street. It's honest to god beautiful place.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think the fact Kansas's population is decreasing is likely a good thing. People generally prefer living other places and automation let's that happen.

PS: The average household net worth in Kansas is apparently $424,976 which is well above the US national average.

<comment><USER13> Average household net worth is meaningless. Charles Koch himself is worth ~$60,000,000,000 which comes out to a cool $55,562 per household in Kansas. And that's just one guy!

<comment><USER23> Such a large outlier! When rural farmers move out of Kansas, they increase the average household net worth in Kansas - when they move away, they stop "dragging down" the average. We shouldn't maximize this metric.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As far as I'm aware, there's no procedure or help for the orderly shutdown of a locality that is no longer necessary for the greater community of any level of government. I'm not even aware of there being such procedures in place in other countries, let alone the US where this has context.

<comment><USER23> Cities can disincorporate when they run out of funds, or be disincorporated by the state when they are abandoned. In 2012, the State of Kansas officially disincorporated the city of Treece.[0]

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treece,_Kansas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treece,_Kansas)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Progress! More food from fewer farmers! You want millions of peasants tilling the land by hand?

<comment><USER23> Once upon a time, it took 90% of the US population to produce enough food to feed 100% of the US population.

Today, it takes 2% of the US population to produce enough food to feed 100% of the US population - freeing the other 88% to pursue other, more lofty goals, such as "Instagram Model" or "Net Influencer".

Picking berries or being a "net influencer"? Where is our time really more well-spent?

<comment><USER26> With those options then Net influencer or Instagram model surely? When the task of picking berries can be automated the manual labor should be shifted to other activities.

Naturally one might argue that it would be better for society where it so that people put in their hours into other fields than those that seek to profit on people's vanity.

However, when the option is what would essentially be meaningless work when compared to a machine performing the same task, then for me at least I would prefer people to be Net influencers or Instagram models.

<comment><USER23> If only we could automate the attribute of "being a human". Alas, as I often say, "as long as humans exist, there will be a demand for other humans to explain things to them". Thus a machine picks the berries while a human explains their feelings about the berries.

Could not the human do both, and take the job back from the robots?

<comment><USER27> Have you picked berries for hours on end? It's terrible work.

<comment><USER23> Have you ever had to put 45 cases of cans on a shelf in an hour? Sorry for the "what about ism". There are some jobs that I wish automation would take, since they are so thankless.

<comment><USER27> I feel like both of our points are valid :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This reminds me of a story about Slovakian Protestant Farmer's and how they died out because it became social acceptable for each family only had one child. If the child died the family died. If the child lived they would marry another farming family's only child and the farms would combine, growing larger.

Suicide by Culture ([http://250bpm.com/blog:113](http://250bpm.com/blog:113))

</comment><comment><USER29> I enjoyed this book about modern-day 'frontier America':

[http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.com/2016/10/miles- from-n...](http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.com/2016/10/miles-from-nowhere- tales-from-americas.html)

It's pretty insightful regarding the rise and fall of those places.

</comment><comment><USER30> I don't understand the logic behind commodity food economics. Why is there so much excess wheat sitting around waiting for prices to jump? Surely that will go bad eventually. How much food will get wasted because of volatile markets?

When I think of wheat, it's not just bread either. Breweries are a fast- growing industry that are springing up everywhere. I've seen so many of them become major boons to cities as they occupy formerly unused warehouse or industrial spaces. Maybe they could work out a cooperative deal with brewers to sell excess to them at lower costs to keep driving up demand for craft beer by making production more affordable. The real upside in all this, if wheat becomes cheaper maybe the places around me will make something other than ridiculously bitter IPAs.

<comment><USER31> The interactions are complicated. Government subsidies on many agricultural commodities guarantee a price floor, but that's little comfort to farmers whose livelihoods depend on being able to sell at prices considerably higher. As with many things among actual people, the comparative differences are significant: if you can sell more for more money and have spent less money, you win much more so than your neighbors who've overspent and ended up with less profit.

Conversely, a massive, diversified corporation can better weather local circumstances than a farmer running a smaller operation. This favors further consolidation, as individuals get ruined and or want to exit the space, or they move towards higher-margin products. Current purchasing tastes favor high-end produce to be close to its consumption, so pivoting to Organic in Kansas may not pay off nearly as much as in New York, Illinois, or California.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This piece seems to me to be about automation more than anything else. Less people are needed to produce increasing amounts of crops, which due to surplus, are less valuable. Similar things are happening in many places and across many industries.

</comment><comment><USER33> In the main banner photo of that article, rural Kansas has better and more street lighting than some parts of Los Angeles, for whatever that's worth.

</comment><comment><USER34> Much of Kansas is comprised of the most uninteresting topography in the United States. But for wheat and corn, nobody would live there.

The author claims she grew up in Kansas. I doubt her job requires her to be in Los Angeles. So, why isn't she in Kansas?

As a Midwest resident, I'm annoyed by patronizing West and East Coasters who claim fly-over country is dying. Many folks in the Midwest stay here precisely because the thought of living amongst smug nitwits like the author is so revolting.

</comment><comment><USER35> > "We feel the prejudice in the cities against supporting small towns"

No... If anything, we're the ones spending our hard earn money on organic food, and daydreaming about the bucolic landscape.

</comment><comment><USER36> .

<comment><USER37> This doesn't seem entirely accurate - Minnesota and Iowa, for example, are crawling with well-respected private liberal arts colleges. The problem historically hasn't been producing an educated population, it has been keeping them there.

<comment><USER38> It isn't accurate at all. The main reason is farming and agriculture, and the economics thereof. Kansas is dying because its biggest industry is failing.

<comment><USER13> > Kansas is dying because its biggest industry is failing.

It's not failing, they're producing more than ever. It's just automating. We've been doing that to agriculture since it was developed.

Coal mining isn't too dissimilar FWIW (except it would be great to not mine it at all!), we're currently producing way more coal than when coal country was in boom times. It just uses a ton less people than it used to.

<comment><USER38> Yes, but producing & automating != success. The article talks about how there's a surplus of wheat everywhere in KS. There are places where you can see giant mounds of three year-old wheat stored under tarps. They can't possibly sell it all (at least not at a price where it would be profitable at the moment).

<comment><USER39> Are they just sitting on it until the price goes up? Why not sell for whatever they can get and then re-invest the money?

<comment><USER40> If it's like corn in Iowa, yes, many just hold it and hope for the price to go up. It seems unreasonable, but commodity prices are just that low; selling at the wrong time can be worse for your bottom line than doing nothing. Especially since many farmers go into debt to pay for the initial costs of planting, fertilizing, ...

You tend to see a lot more corn in storage (occasionally this is just huge piles of corn covered with a tarp!) right after harvest time, precisely because that's when the prices are the lowest. There's a surprisingly big market for huge containers that are designed to store crops for long periods of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The problem is quite direct: people do not wish to live there.

Getting 100 people to decide that town _X_ is going to be their telecommute hub and doing it is simply not that hard to organize nowadays--if people actually _wanted_ to do it.

The fact that nobody wants to do this says more than any amount of development initiatives.

<comment><USER42> Speak for yourself. Plenty of us want to do it, and _are doing it_.

Cities are rotten.</comment></comment>


There are only 10 days to accomplish change - <AUTHOR> https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2019/08/15/twitter-data-shows-we-quickly-stop-talking-about-mass-shootings-like-dayton-el-paso/1984989001/ <comment><USER2> I was really hoping for more out of this article. I expected a thoughtful analysis of many different types of "shock events" and how they rise and fade from public consciousness. Instead it's focused solely on three mass shooting incidents and how long Twitter kept talking about them. Lazy.</comment>


Lobster is a game programming language - <AUTHOR> http://strlen.com/lobster <comment><USER2> Worth reading the philosophy page: [http://strlen.com/files/lang/lobster/philosophy.html](http://strlen.com/files/lang/lobster/philosophy.html)

"The most important over-arching reason behind everything in Lobster was to make it a pleasant language to use for one single person: me, the author."

When these sorts of personal side projects come up on HN, it seems inevitable that people question whether anyone should want to use them... You probably don't most of the time. They're cool to look at, but I think the judgment of being cool comes more from a PL designer viewpoint than an end-user viewpoint...

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh - this was done by the author of the Cube Engines a.k.a Sauerbraten.

Wouter van Oortmerssen is not exactly a Newbie. He is at Google now. This might be more interesting than I initially thought.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Another source code example: [http://i.imgur.com/ZZWFkXn.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/ZZWFkXn.jpg)

Its entire source code fits in the screenshot.

From here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8659273](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8659273)

</comment><comment><USER4> Jonathan Blow is also writing his own language for games: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH9VCN6UkyQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH9VCN6UkyQ)

I think this is great (more languages).

Note that this is not by @strlen (Alex Feinberg)

<comment><USER5> Jonathan Blow has a whole series on YouTube discussing the language, and at one point there is even a demo of the language and the compiler! The whole thing is really exciting and the language looks well thought out. It's nice to see a system programming language where the focus is more on getting things done than on making the type system pretty.

<comment><USER4> Yep. And his demo is a little game... :) There's not enough time for seeing all those videos though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Every language is a game programming language.

<comment><USER7> "Lobster is a general purpose stand-alone programming language that comes with a _built-in library suitable for making games and other graphical things_. It is therefore not very suitable for non-programmers."

<comment><USER8> What's the significance of it being "built-in"? How is that an advantage over a language with a reasonable package/module system, so that any game-making libraries can be used as easily as the standard library (after downloading it etc.).

<comment><USER2> The same benefits that PHP has or strives for (for better or worse) in making many web-programming-related functions always available in the global scope (it looks like Lobster does require includes however), plus first-party support from the language itself rather than relying on multiple libraries and authors (the language author gets to deal with that), plus a consistent API for all those things shoved onto the language author instead of the program writer. More interesting things you could do would be to add special syntax to support some domain-specific task, but looking from a language with macros that sort of thing comes across as cute... For instance the gl_ functions in this language create a control flow visible at the source level:

        gl_translate(playerpos):
            gl_rotate_z(tomouse):
                gl_polygon([ [ -0.5, 0.5 ], vec_x, [ -0.5, -0.5 ] ])

<comment><USER9> > For instance the gl_ functions in this language create a control flow > visible at the source level:

How is this superior to exposing control-structure like object (e.g. closures) and implementing the GL dsls as libraries? The above isn't any more readable, with an increased maintenance cost for the writers of Lobster.

I would say that available libraries is by far the most limiting factor for most languages, including (I'm assuming) Lobster.

<comment><USER2> It can be hard to say whether sugar is superior or not without having a lot of experience / pain with unsugared or partially-sugared ways of doing the same thing. In this case I'd agree with you that closures could do the job just as well with hardly any more syntactic overhead. We're also in agreement with respect to libraries. The home page for Lobster mentions C++ interop, but it's unclear without digging in how straightforward that is (e.g. if one has to rebuild the compiler).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder how fast it is? A lot of game programmers hate C/C++ but feel like they can't use anything else, since they don't have the same control.

Edit: I reread the page and it says about as fast as non-JIT Lua, so probably good for a hobbyist, but not a production quality game.

</comment><comment><USER10> Strikes me as a nice idea, but why not just build for/use an already built library for a pre-existing language?

It does look nice, I'm just not sure the tradeoffs of building in a unique language are worth it, since it doesn't seem to add all _that_ much.

<comment><USER11> The author has a history of creating programming languages, so It's really no surprise he's made another. As for why, it seems likely based on the introduction text he was aiming to make a portable language specifically designed with game developers in mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm a bit late to comment, but I think this language is very promising for "batteries-included hacking," much like PHP or Basic. Just, it's not a woefully primitive or erroneous design like those languages. Wouter advertises the interesting high-level features up front, but the productive appeal of any language of this style is in the easing story, and I bet this can satisfy that perfectly well.

</comment><comment><USER13> This looks like tons of fun. I know what I'll be playing with over Thanksgiving break... it will be interesting to see if this could be a reasonable platform for playing with digital synthesis and spectrogram analysis and the like.

</comment><comment><USER14> Considering the feature list, doesn't Common Lisp also qualify as a game programming language then?</comment>


White-Collar Taylorism: The Real Reason People Find Amazon Story So Upsetting - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/08/real-villain-amazon-data.html

<comment><USER2> > It's a little amazing that Amazon is still printing this stuff out on paper.

It's harder for upset people to forward significant amounts of the report if they would have to type it in from paper.</comment>