Where There Is No Doctor: A Village Health Care Handbook - <AUTHOR> https://store.hesperian.org/prod/Where_There_Is_No_Doctor.html <comment><USER2> The companion books, Where There Is No Dentist and When Women Have No Doctor, are also great. User tomp has linked to them in their comment.

Another great book is the US Army Special Forces Medical Handbook. I have an ancient copy, but the following link looks to be it:

[https://www.amazon.com/Army-Special-Forces-Medical- Handbook/...](https://www.amazon.com/Army-Special-Forces-Medical- Handbook/dp/0464861071)

The Special Forces handbook has a wealth of field medicine for nearly every scenario from combat trauma to gynecology to dental care, as they and Civil Affairs personnel are out providing medical care to indigenous men, women, and children (when they aren't killing them).

You can find free, legal PDF copies online with a little Googling. Preferably, get the most recent revision as I've been told it's been updated substantially since the IQ/AF wars.

Edit: The title appears to have been updated to "Special Operations Forces Medical Handbook".

<comment><USER3> >Preferably, get the most recent revision

About what year (and month) would that be? Trying to find a copy. Sounds like a useful doc to have for situations like travelling, hiking, picnics, etc.

<comment><USER2> The last one I'm aware of is a 2008 edition renamed to "Special Operations Forces Medical Guide". There might also be a 2011 edition or even something more recent.

<comment><USER3> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Also see _Where There Is No Dentist_ [1] and _Where Women Have No Doctor_ [2].

[1] [https://www.surviveuk.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/07/Where-T...](https://www.surviveuk.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/07/Where-There-Is-No-Dentist.pdf)

[2] [http://www.burmalibrary.org/docs12/Where_women_have_no_docto...](http://www.burmalibrary.org/docs12/Where_women_have_no_doctor- op200m-red.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> Most books, and apparently this one, skip the nasty stuff: when and how to remove a hand, arm, or leg or how to treat (and I mean "remove bullets, sew up and heal") gunshot wounds, etc. They almost always say "get to a hospital" or "get to a doctor". It's as if all medical books available to the public are written by lawyers concerned about liability.

I'd like a book that tells it straight - what you need to do when you're out of reach of civilization or not close enough or you can't trust civilization (e.g., you're in a war zone).

I don't believe that I couldn't remove someone's arm if necessary. After all, one man removed his own arm once. But I'd feel more comfortable with some instructions and some warnings on the way. As it is, were something like that necessary I'm thrown back on my own judgement.

Sure, odds are slim, but I like to have info available.

</comment><comment><USER6> I came cross this book some time in 1991 or 1992, growing up in a developing country. Not having access to or being able to afford Playboy or Hustler, it was popular among my early teenage friends because of the explicit pictures of the female anatomy!

</comment><comment><USER7> Oh wow, of all the random things to turn up!

Years ago, I occupied by commute time by learning some Spanish with Pimsleur CD's. I'm nowhere near native, but got far enough along with it to take some continuing education classes at a local community college. I built up a small bookshelf of Spanish-language books, from various random sources.

One of those books is "Donde No Hay Doctor". I thought it purely an obscure Spanish publication, and am ALMOST a bit disappointed to learn that it's a well-known book in numerous languages.

</comment><comment><USER8> We had this book in Laos in the late 70's. (Parents were US Diplomats, nearest real medical care was a plane flight to Bangkok.) The knowledge contained within 100% saved lives while we were there.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is the first time I've ever run into a book with one of its few translations being Urdu! Wonderful to see that someone translated it, but it's unfortunate that the Urdu version is $33.95. At 4,756 PKR that's prohibitively expensive for people without access to a doctor to buy.

<comment><USER10> You're right that the list price is too high for individuals in developing countries to easily purchase. I believe the model is for a community clinic to purchase a copy, or for individuals to pool their money to buy a copy for their community. NGOs give away copies as well, with bulk purchases of the book being discounted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great manual. I helped deliver two babies following this and the book for midwives. Fortunately haven't needed it for anything else!

</comment><comment><USER12> I have this book even though I live in a major city.

It's a great teaching manual and helps build up common sense to learn about what can be treated at home and what is serious.

<comment><USER13> Treated at home vs. serious is woefully undertaught.

I had never been to the ER before a few months ago. I had an accident with a falling glass jar and sliced my finger open. I spent so many cycles doubting if this needed a hospital visit or if I just needed a bandage.

I later asked the ER doctor and he said that I definitely needed to be here, but maybe a quarter of the people out there in the waiting area don't.

<comment><USER14> I was in the 1/4th that didn't need to be there once. I was bit by a snake in an unfamiliar area. Having grown up in an area with deadly snakes, I assumed I needed treatment. The ER doctors laughed at me and told me that they don't have poisonous snakes in the area.

Now I do a quick google search to check what snakes are in the area when traveling.

<comment><USER15> I was bitten by one of our cats a while back and assumed that I didn't need treatment.

A couple of days later the wound didn't look to good and I wasn't feeling too well and I went to our local NHS "Minor Injury Unit" who rapidly redirected me to the full Accident & Emergency department where I was X-rayed and prepped for surgery within about 20 minutes! Was told I would be in hospital for at least a week - fortunately was out after only 3 days although I was getting intravenous antibiotics in both arms at once for a while.

Turns out cat bites can be _very_ nasty - I since spoke to a nurse who told me she knew someone who lost a leg to a domestic cat bite.

<comment><USER3> Wow, good that you thought of getting it checked.

>Turns out cat bites can be very nasty - I since spoke to a nurse who told me she knew someone who lost a leg to a domestic cat bite.

Same is the case with leopard or other big cat bites, I've read. Used to read books by Jim Corbett (the famous hunter of man-eater tigers (and leopards)), and similar, as a kid; that may be where I read about it. I guess the reason is that the food (meat) they eat sticks some in their teeth and decomposes and grows bacteria, which infect people when they are bitten. In fact I read that even if the big cat does not kill the person, there are high chances of dying from infection from the bite.

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

Update: Just saw this from the link above, the story of how Corbett hunted and killed a very large tiger, the Bachelor of Powalgarh:

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

<comment><USER15> "you thought of getting it checked"

I guess its an advantage of systems like the NHS - the only concern I had about money was what the car park bill would be (I had parked in the first car park I saw). Turns out that the hospital in question has free parking so I didn't even have to pay for that.

Bandwidth on the free wifi was pretty good as well!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm sure this book has saved many many lives and alleviated a lot of suffering. As a young man I was in a situation to need it, and used it to do a lot of things I wouldn't (and shouldn't) regularly be doing.

If you are going to be somewhere out of reach of medical care this is a great thing to have with you, or to have at least read through if you can.

<comment><USER17> What were the things you used it to do?

<comment><USER16> Not surgery, not anything immediately life-saving or life-threatening, but enough things that I would feel uncomfortable discussing it with people that wouldn't understand the context.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I had a copy of this as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I can't ever forget the picture of the "cholera bed."

<comment><USER19> For anyone else who was curious: [http://notes-from-the- congo.blogspot.com/2009/09/cholera-bed...](http://notes-from-the- congo.blogspot.com/2009/09/cholera-bed.html)

Variations: [https://www.google.com/search?q=cholera+bed&source=lnms&tbm=...](https://www.google.com/search?q=cholera+bed&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjX48izkY_hAhXX_J4KHevKDU8Q_AUIDigB&biw=1280&bih=622&dpr=2#imgrc=POHdRjfcRNeTrM):

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I read this before going to Nepal for some NGO work a few years back. The premise of the book is that many, many things can be solved with clean water and sleep, and that's helped give me the confidence to explore deeper in parts of the world where there really aren't doctors.

Also notable! Don't load people up with antibiotics that aren't needed since that's contributing to increasingly widespread antibiotic resistant bacteria issues.

Read this if you've got a vacation to Southeast Asia planned because being told "avoid lemons" and "avoid cold drinks" and then being prescribed a pile of pills including antacids can be frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER21> Lived in the middle of nowhere many moons ago and this was our doctor! As a teenager growing up I read this out of boredom and when all the other books we had were already read

</comment><comment><USER22> Wow, a blast from the past! I remember being introduced to this book back in 1985 when I first went out to work in fairly remote regions of South Asia. I wasn't directly involved in any sort of medical/health work, but this was an invaluable resource both for myself and to try and offer help to local people when no formal medical care was available.

Delighted to see it is still being maintained and used.

<comment><USER9> Pakistan? One of the translations is in Urdu, and Pakistan is the only country that speaks it. If so, I'm curious where in Pakistan. I live in Lahore, so I'm personally much better off in terms of healthcare.

<comment><USER22> Pakistan, India, Nepal; visits to a few other nearby countries. Yes, I'm sure there's pretty good healthcare to be found in Lahore (although it may not be readily accessible to everyone?); similarly, when in Karachi we had AKUH (where a couple of my kids were born) available. It's a different story in rural Sindh, though, or in remote districts of Nepal where it's a day's hike to the nearest road, or among tribals in central India.

Re Urdu: yes, Pakistan is the only country where it's the national language, but I also encountered it in Hyderabad (Deccan), where Urdu is widely used. It's even one of the official languages of several Indian states.

<comment><USER9> I actually didn't know Urdu was used as the official language of several Indian states. I wish I was taught that growing up. Thank you for telling me that.

Re: access to healthcare, maybe. The situation has gotten better, or I like to believe it has, in Lahore. I'm, unfortunately, not too well aware because data on this sort of thing isn't readily available or widely discussed. We just got our federal RTI laws ratified.

<comment><USER23> OT: I'm sure there's a lot that Indians and Pakistanis are not taught about the other side because the facts are inconvenient for the powers that be.

<comment><USER9> And we're also taught a fair number of facts that are just plain wrong as well. Or at least I was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> A long time ago now, a friend worked on a partial translation of "Where Women Have No Doctor" into Farsi with a grant from Hesperian -- and one of the dilemmas they had was whether including (they did in the end) the more graphic pictures would help or hinder their efforts in distributing it. I wonder how much of a challenge literacy is in a place where no doctor can be found. She talked about doing an audio cassette version, but again, the pictures are a challenge there as well.

</comment><comment><USER25> Cool free pdf. I bought a copy after I read about it in the Whole Earth Catalog many moons ago.

<comment><USER26> The PDF is not free.

<comment><USER27> The individual chapters are. There's links on the website ([https://hesperian.org/books-and-resources/](https://hesperian.org/books-and- resources/)). They are a non-profit, so please support them too. I downloaded all of the PDF's and will be buying the book as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> There's probably no electric there either so you had better buy a hard copy and not an ebook

</comment><comment><USER29> In the future every familiar group with need at least one medic. We can make a better future that this.</comment>


Do NBA Players Try Harder in the Playoffs? - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2217721/

<comment><USER2> They didn't provide very much info on methodology here, which I suppose is acceptable for a lay article. Still, it makes it impossible to make any real use of this information. Did they compare statistics during the playoffs against aggregate statistics for the same teams over the entire year? Did they only use the middle 50% (or some other arbitrary portion) of the season, to remove early-season unfamiliarity and the effects of late-season "lame duck" teams? Did they only compare stats for games between teams that reached the playoffs (thus ensuring that they are at least vaguely similar caliber)? Did they discount elimination games, where of course the teams will be less worried about being tired and aching tomorrow, because there might not _be_ a game tomorrow?

A better way to do a study like this would be to compare non-elimination games between the same two teams, in the playoffs and out. Unfortunately, you lose a large portion of your sample size when you eliminate variables in this way.

It would also be better to go the other way: do various regressions to figure out which stats tend to change in the playoffs, and then ask actual basketball players and coaches if it's plausible that those stats could be correlated with effort. It's not perfect, by any means, but it's better than picking some stats that we think should be correlated with effort and seeing if they change in the playofs.

</comment><comment><USER3> ugh, as a baller this doesn't make any sense.

not only do folks crash the offensive boards harder when it matters, they box out harder as well on the defensive boards.

i love stats + basketball but you need at least a little knowledge of the game to make it work.

<comment><USER4> The crew at Basketball Prospectus know their stuff. What I saw from this was that nobody knows how to quantify effort yet, so here are a few first guesses that don't really work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Of course they do, not only are they playing for the right to win a championship, but their contracts have incentive clauses for advancing through and winning the title.

It also means they'll have more leverage when they negotiate for higher salaries since they have proven success in the playoffs. Some players are well-known (and well-paid) for just their playoff performances. "Big shot" Robert Horry has hit clutch shots while winning championships for the Rockets, Lakers, and Spurs.

</comment><comment><USER6> This article doesn't make much sense. They hypothesize that effort increases in the playoffs, and to try to prove this, they find the statistic that changes the most between the playoffs and the regular season, and call that "effort."</comment>


Handy, a hot startup for home cleaning, has a big mess of its own - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2015/07/handy_a_hot_startup_for_home_cleaning_has_a_big_mess_of_its_own.html <comment><USER2> Housekeeping will never become Uber, because: a) Uber used by wide range of people of various income levels. b) Not everyone likes housekeeping done for them by someone else.</comment>


How I Sold a Blog for $20,000 in 8 Months - <AUTHOR> http://www.blogtyrant.com/how-i-sold-a-blog-for-20000-in-8-months/

<comment><USER2> What an appalling and offensive use of one's time.

Make not-so-much money by providing generic content on a subject until X level of popularity is reached, at which point you transition the audience into a not-astounding paycheck and the web property into a commodity valued solely in visits.

And the world moves on, nothing bettered, and very little changed, beyond a tiny shifting of money ownership.

<comment><USER3> This is the greatness of Google.

Information Dilution. Instead of a site with dense, focused, relevant content, we can create hundreds of sites with watered-down information.

The more sites we have to sift through, the more money everybody makes.

Google has incentivized the web to dilute content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> $20,000 for 8 months work isn't very much. It's not very clear how much time he spent per week but it sounds quite significant.

<comment><USER5> I always qualify "isn't very much"... for the U.S.

I could definitely use U$ 20.000, it's more than a year and a half of my (post-taxes) salary here in Uruguay.

(And yes, I should look into consulting, etc. HN is a great way to nag me to move forward and it's good advice).

<comment><USER4> Right, I guess my comment might even be insulting to some - if so, I apologize. I am in Denmark but I think wages here are pretty comparable to the US for many industries.

But, if what you say is true then surely you should consider writing a blog as described in the article?

<comment><USER5> It wasn't insulting, don't worry :)

I always observe how living in the first world changes the perspective of people... (latest example: " travel doesn't take a lot of money." <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1601857> ).

And yes, I should :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > "Write a blog you believe in"

This sounds like the "How to Get Rich Quick" book that instructs its readers to write and promote a "How to Get Rich Quick" book.

Where exactly is the common ground between writing something you _believe in_ and writing and developing a blog with the explicit goal of an optimal quick cash exit?

<comment><USER7> I was a bit turned off as well. After all your going to spend EIGHT WHOLE MONTHS on this. EIGHT! Think of it...two entire seasons will pass!

Maybe putting some more time into it will yield rewards that don't appear to be sub-minimum wage?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Or I could keep my blog and make the same amount in ads in the same amount of time. :)

</comment><comment><USER9> A couple things I was curious about after reading this: wouldn't a blog that's just been handed to a new owner end up losing followers once the readership realizes the old author's bailed? Also I'd love to hear any tidbits you'd care to share on monetization strategies for bloggers.

<comment><USER10> depends. a lot of niche blogs don't make their money on regular readers, but on the adsense revenue on organic searches and people looking around for info they want. a lot of the techniques he talks about is similar to the process people use to make that type of adsense/referral.

<comment><USER11> > but on the adsense revenue on organic searches and people looking around for > info they want

"Detailed revenue breakdown of a gadget blog ($61k in dec 2007)"

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216960>

[http://selfmademinds.com/200801/income-breakdown-for- decembe...](http://selfmademinds.com/200801/income-breakdown-for- december-2007/)

<comment><USER10> i get a 404.

<comment><USER12> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1Zw50qP...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:1Zw50qPpoqoJ:selfmademinds.com/200801/income- breakdown-for-december-2007/+http://selfmademinds.com/200801/income-breakdown- for-december-2007/&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Uber Considers Moving APAC HQ from Singapore to Hong Kong - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/27/uber_apac_hq_move/ <comment><USER2> > _" Uber is ready to move its regional headquarters to Hong Kong... but > regulatory certainty is key," Chung said. "It's time for the government to > regulate ride-sharing so we can bring jobs and investment to Hong Kong."

Chung said that the move is contingent on the city's regulatory policies changing and that no decision has yet been made._

So it's literally just a more or less open attempt at regulatory capture? The looks of it aside this honestly seems short-sighted given the deteriorating political situation.</comment>


Ask HN: How does this happen?  Pandora Radio founder owns less than 3% - <AUTHOR>

http://blogs.forbes.com/nicoleperlroth/2011/02/11/pandora-files-for-ipo/<p>"The biggest winners in a public offering would be Pandora's investors: Crosslink Capital (owns 23%), Walden Venture Capital (19%), and Greylock Partners (14%). The offering would be the second big win for Greylock this year–the firm also owns 16% of LinkedIn, which filed two weeks ago. But according to the S-1, founder Tim Westergren owns less than 3% of the company."<p>I imagine this situation being far from ideal for Westergren.  How does this sort of thing happen? <comment><USER2> This happens when you owe more in royalties than you make in revenue.

[http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20110212/pandoras-music- fees...](http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20110212/pandoras-music-fees-are- huge-and-not-that-bad/)

Check out what they paid in 2009 for royalties. Yeah. That might lead to some big funding rounds and some major dilution.

</comment><comment><USER3> That is $3M for each $100M valuation. 100M was last year valuation.

See [http://www.quora.com/What-was-Pandoras-valuation-in-the- last...](http://www.quora.com/What-was-Pandoras-valuation-in-the-last-round)

There is also a rumor Google will buy it and here is the speculation Pandora may reach 500M value;

[http://vator.tv/news/2010-07-07-why-pandora-may-end-up- acqui...](http://vator.tv/news/2010-07-07-why-pandora-may-end-up-acquired-by- google)

That $15M for the founder. Sure, very little I think Google (if they buy) will structure a special deal for the founder. Sequoia is known as ruthless for founders, and Google knows the original founders are important

</comment><comment><USER4> Dilution is apart of the entrepreneurial game, I am not surprised that Westergren only has 3%, his value proposition for the first 2 years to investors was less than stellar. investors that put money into this type of startup require large amounts of equity because they need assurance that they will receive a return on their money that they pay forward

</comment><comment><USER5> The short story, the company struggled for a long time early on, hence the need to dilute to not close the doors

</comment><comment><USER6> They took an awful lot of investment rounds and dilution. (The alternative was closing the doors.) As tends to be the case several rounds down the line, the investors own nearly all of the firm.

<comment><USER7> Yup. Worth noting, though, that Tim and some other execs already got to take a few million off the table last summer by selling some shares to their biggest investors. See "investor offer" in the S-1: [http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1230276/00011931251103296...](http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1230276/000119312511032963/ds1.htm#toc119636_14)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> 3% of a (soon-to-be?) public company is pretty good.</comment>


Tty-share – Share your terminal with no effort and no tools on the remote side - <AUTHOR> https://tty-share.com/ <comment><USER2> You can do this with tmux and ssh</comment>


When a rewrite isn't: rebuilding Slack on the desktop - <AUTHOR> https://slack.engineering/rebuilding-slack-on-the-desktop-308d6fe94ae4 <comment><USER2> "All data access had to assume a lazily loaded and incomplete data model"

While this sounds good, in theory it leads to gross animations and horrific skeleton outlines which slow you down more than an initial load. I which they stated they do this for the workspaces and use cases that needed it rather than what it sounds like (this will be everywhere)

</comment><comment><USER3> Dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20499200](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20499200)

<comment><USER4> This is a different article, going into more of the technical details of the desktop update. The other post is for a more general audience.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here: they're the same article. This one is just under Slack's own domain name instead of medium.com.

<comment><USER4> Yep, I misspoke -- I thought the other one had been pointing to the public announcement at [https://slackhq.com/introducing-a-more-efficient-slack- deskt...](https://slackhq.com/introducing-a-more-efficient-slack-desktop- experience).

This is indeed a dupe.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Film Student Let Thief Steal His Phone, Tracked Him to Create This Short Film - <AUTHOR> http://petapixel.com/2016/12/16/film-student-let-thief-steal-phone-tracked-create-short-film/ <comment><USER2> I'd be interested in mass producing these phones and measuring distributions of times before a phone is stolen in different cities in the world.

</comment><comment><USER3> I just watched this after seeing it on Reddit. It is absolutely mesmerizing and I wish it was a feature-length documentary.

</comment><comment><USER4> The referenced Reddit thread, for anyone interested:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/5iknmp/a_film_stude...](https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/5iknmp/a_film_student_let_a_thief_steal_his_smartphone/)</comment>


Once Suicidal and Shipped Off, Now Fighting Nevada Over Care - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/us/once-suicidal-and-shipped-off-now-battling-nevada-over-care.html

<comment><USER2> Psychiatrist here. The mentally ill and the homeless (often not coincidentally related) are often treated poorly by our Emergency Room system. Before Californians get too mad at Nevada, know that California doesn't have a sterling track record here either (though not as specific to mental illness):

[http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-2823079.html](http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-2823079.html)

Sadly, hospitals get little reimbursement for treating mental illness, therefore many inpatient psychiatric wards are closed. I don't know the details, but places I have worked claim these units lose money. In many states and in many hospitals, patients may wait for days and days in the ER before a bed opens there or somewhere else. Supply and demand are grossly mismatched, and reimbursement has not responded to demand. Therefore, units continue to close.

Now much of the care of the mentally ill happens through the correctional system or related venues. See prior HN discussion here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6182507](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6182507)

It's possible some parts of the Affordable Care Act may help with this:

[http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/21/law- pus...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/21/law-pushes-for- parity-in-mental-health-coverage-/2847889/)

I don't know why so many stories about mistreatment of the mentally ill have been on HN recently, but it makes me happy that smart people are taking an interest.

<comment><USER3> Yep, and living in a central coast region where the weather is great, the benefits are plenty, and most "petty" crimes are a revolving door parade, things are just peachy.

Ignoring the local business owner murdered due to the accidental release by CA state psychiatric recovery facilities @ Atascadero [0]; Murder of two police officers due to the military looking the "other way" while discharging an individual without a record of his sexual assaults [1]

Two "minor" _local_ incidents speak well of our mental health and criminal justice systems in this state.

[0] [http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/localnews/ci_20573683/suspe...](http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/localnews/ci_20573683/suspect- identified-fatal-stabbing-santa-cruz)

[1] [http://www.contracostatimes.com/ci_22776195/former- defense-s...](http://www.contracostatimes.com/ci_22776195/former-defense- secretary-leon-panetta-military-ought-be)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > But what makes it "even more tragic," Mr. Herrera said, "is that on top of > the inhumane treatment, the State of Nevada was trying to have another > jurisdiction shoulder the financial responsibility for caring for these > people."

Sigh... that isn't the tragic part, not by a long shot. The tragic part is the human souls involved. That statement is so telling towards San Francisco's true motives in the lawsuit. I just hope the people that Nevada neglected get justice and change Nevada's course.

The gentleman seems to be very happy with the city of SF though, from his quote at the end of the article.

</comment><comment><USER5> As a resident of SF, this makes me furious. I hope our city attorney just demolishes them in court. WTF Nevada.

<comment><USER6> Sadly, I think whoever cooked up this scheme will never be uncovered, and the tax payers of Nevada will pay the bill.

<comment><USER7> That's the golden rule, isn't it. The tax payers will foot the bill. All that is at stake here is whether it will be Nevadans or Californians that get stuck with the check.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Although it may seem off-topic I'm glad to see this on HN. Many people here have commented on the 'homeless problem' in SF, often being critical of both the homeless themselves and of city policy. Not bigoted, mind - just critical, and often with a solid basis in fact. but it's also a fact that other places have been systematically dumping mental patients on California and SF in particular.

<comment><USER9> Whenever I hear these stories I always wonder, why California. Why not Kansas, Vermont or Arizona? What makes California, especially SF a target? Presumably if Nevada wanted to wipe the traces of their scheme better they would just pick random locations every time.

<comment><USER10> The weather is more stable and less seasonal than in most other states. And California has richer cities and municipalities than most other states, so maybe there's a belief that the homeless will at least have a better shot at getting care here.

The cynical/realist motive: California is a really big state -- so it's an easy dumping ground for people to get tossed into and disappear.

<comment><USER9> Ah makes sense. I can see why some homeless given a choice would prefer SF. But I guess from Nevada's point of view I am not sure if they really do want to help or just want to get rid of them. Maybe if they sent them to Chicago in the middle of the winter, whoever made that decision could in theory be criminally prosecuted somehow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> doesn't it sound like an FBI matter - basically kidnapping (as it was against their will - i.e. they didn't give informed consent) and transfer across state lines? One can only wonder there are all the overzealous federal prosecutors when their services are really needed.

<comment><USER12> He was given a bus ticket somewhere and some food. I don't think that falls under kidnapping.

<comment><USER11> >He was given a bus ticket somewhere and some food. I don't think that falls under kidnapping.

Was he free to leave the bus? No (and physical presence or absence of an officer of the State on the bus isn't necessary and isn't material here - that's is the nature of the Force of the State) Thus we have illegal imprisonment/kidnapping at least until the moment the bus left Nevada.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This isn't incredibly uncommon, and isn't limited to psychiatric patients. Southern states for decades encouraged poor blacks to enjoy the better benefits available in the north, for example. Cops in many places shipped off "frequent fliers" to bigger cities.

Even today, it's a common practice to make sure that troublesome social services clients are aware of better benefits available in other jurisdictions.

</comment><comment><USER14> Can you image the gall of the decision maker who said to someone "well we're not going to deal with this, ship them to another state".

Wow, just wow. I am sure they sleep perfectly fine at night. I hope they lose their pension somehow.</comment>


Ticketing App I Wrote. Feedback would be awesome. - <AUTHOR> http://www.onlinecompanyportal.com/sts/

<comment><USER2> Tell me what makes your idea unique? I didn't get much into it to be completely honest. The reason I didn't go into too much is because it just seems like any other ticketing system, the same thing I'd get with Bugzilla or Jira.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well. bugzilla is slow, ugly and has a very poor user experience.

Jira is expensive.

Thanks for the reply!</comment></comment>


Data Analysis Shows That US Is Significantly Outpacing Italy - <AUTHOR> https://covid.bio/growth <comment><USER2> Please if you're going to create stuff like this provide some context and answer questions like "What does this actually mean?". Without those things, this is just another scary looking title and graph that will make people more panicky than they already are. Given the ramp up in testing seen in my state, the large jump up to the cases in the graph isn't surprising. We know that the US has a far higher population than Italy and that testing rates in the US have been very low. Large spikes in confirmed cases are obviously going to happen as the testing ramps up. _That 's_ when we can start drawing conclusions and make better decisions. When we have a more clear picture of how widespread this is and what that actually means. What's the R0 and what's the mortality rate? On the other hand, if we accept that there are far more infected people right now than we know, the logical conclusion is that the mortality rate is low, otherwise there'd be dead people everywhere.

<comment><USER3> The huge issue with the numbers is that they always lag behind the actual situation right now. There is a delay of around 5 days until symptoms show, and something on top of that until you get tested and until the test is processed. And the deaths lag even further behind, it takes very roughly something like 3-4 week to die as far as I've read.

The deaths of today are the people that were infected 4 weeks ago, 4 week is an eternity on an exponential curve like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the differences in testing policies make it difficult to compare the absolute numbers. I think in a week or two it will be more meaningful to compare deaths rather than cases, because deaths seem to be more uniformly reported than cases.

<comment><USER5> Yes, I gave up on case numbers. Seeming CFR differences between countries are mostly artifacts of testing policies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Should we be comparing this in a per capital manner? USA population is five times Italy's.

<comment><USER3> At the beginning of the epidemic and the exponential growth the size of the population doesn't really matter, the number of available people isn't the limiting factor. The structure of the population probably matters quite a bit, but the total number of people in a somewhat arbitrary region probably doesn't. Unless containment measures prevent it, at the beginning you'll always have exponential growth no matter the size of the country.

I'm certainly not an expert, but I would assume that the individual, isolated outbreaks would be the most interesting numbers. Below a certain level they can be potentially contained by targeted measures, above a certain number of infected people you can't do any contact tracing or similar stuff anymore. And hospital resources are location-bound, there is only a limited amount of resource sharing you can do across the country.

<comment><USER7> I agree with your points. I am still a little surprised that the US outpaces Italy, because the social distance there is traditionally much shorter than in the US, e.g., people kiss each other on the cheeks, and give each other hugs more frequently than what I observed in the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It is very dangerous to draw any conclusions from the number of cases in the US. They follow the number of tests that are done and those are limited by the test kits available.

I spoke with one doctor in upstate New York. She said that the local hospital, Albany Medical Center, was stopping community testing and going back to the old procedure of only testing people who met a narrow range of parameters. (Exposure, travel, etc.) Then she said, "So it looks like we'll start plateauing."

The rate of case growth will vary with the rate of testing.

<comment><USER9> _Then she said, "So it looks like we'll start plateauing."_

Could you qualify how that statement is to be read? Is that an observation about what the results are going to look like as a result of limited testing, or is it a statement about the intention beind behind decreased testing (to make the number _appear_ to be plateauing artificially).

Aside: 'Plateauing' is a funny word to type with all those vowels together.

<comment><USER8> She did not suggest anything about the intention. Only that wide-open testing would yield many more positives than tightly controlled testing. And if they're going to tighten testing that will reduce growth in positive cases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> But since testing in the US has been so extremely limited... should we be worried that the actual conclusion here is that "US is _far_ outpacing Italy"?

Of course I'm not sure how available or limited testing is in Italy either.

<comment><USER11> If you're willing to accept a lot of hidden cases you will have to accept a much lower mortality rate. Just saying.

<comment><USER12> For now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Doesn't this data need to be normalized per-capita? It looks like it is just number of cases, and that doesn't get you a comparable. US population is about 5 times that of Italy.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not trying to show percentage of infected, but the spread over time. And it's spreading a lot faster in the US and/or we are testing significantly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I really wonder what the difference between these countries is:

\- Germany: 15,320 cases / 44 deaths

\- France: 10,947 cases / 243 deaths

\- Spain: 17,963 cases / 830 deaths

<comment><USER15> There are various discussions and theories especially as to the low death rates in Germany. Germany has had distributed testing capabilities very early (end of January) and has performed a large amount of testing compared to other European countries, which means cases are cought early and not when they hit the ICU. Other theories are the large amount of ICU beds, local medical production facilities, still ongoing contact tracing and some other things. The expectation however is that the death rate will go up a fair bit.

<comment><USER16> Also - different reporting strategies. Germany is not always reporting someone as a CV death if the dominating factor was something else, whereas Italy reports them all as CV deaths. Or at least that's a widespread theory I've seen. It's hard to imagine such a huge difference can be down purely to testing.

I think the next days will see people dig into these stats and start a more complex discussion about what exactly it means to die of this virus, what exactly capacity means in a world where doctors can go to enormous lengths to save every life in quiet times but can't in crisis times. Just comparing raw numbers doesn't tell us the whole story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The basis for "significant outpacing" is only one day / data point. Previous days follow Italy closely.

Besides that, we have a much larger total population. We've asserted counter- measures earlier. We are able to change our course based on our observed response of Italy.

This seems irresponsible to reactively share a "trend" based on a single data point of notable deviation.

</comment><comment><USER11> I feel like comparing large countries should require some normalization.

How would the results change if we split the US into two countries - US East and US West? The current number of cases would be cut in half(?) but the "start" date would be pushed forward.

</comment><comment><USER18> The total population of these two countries is pretty different though.

<comment><USER19> r0 doesn't take per capita into account

clusters originally were isolated

Eventually this will matter though for absolute numbers, but our healthcare capacity is the bigger issue its not really a contest

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why is no one comparing the North of Italy with the South?

Why is no one comparing Madrid to the rest of Spain?

Germany and France have a very similar curve to Spain, Italy and even China, with a much smaller population as US.

</comment><comment><USER21> It would be useful to know what "shows" means in this context. The normal meaning doesn't work.

Now, imagine a world where a large percentage of reality is presented to people in this manner, what might be the result? Does it look anything like what we've been living in for quite some time now, where it seems nobody can agree on what is actually _true_?

I may be way off base, but I think this is a much bigger issue than people realize, but it requires some effort _and the will_ to see it.

</comment><comment><USER22> This seems like a really nice chart. I haven't seen the data "normalized" to start date like this before.

<comment><USER23> I made one in logarithmic units. But it's on a teeny digital ocean instance and Streamlit, so please don't trample on it.

[http://covid.superlabs.club:8501](http://covid.superlabs.club:8501)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Wouldn't data like this make more sense in a per capita comparison? I get that we're outpacing Italy, but are we outpacing.

US population is about Italy, Spain, Germany, France, UK, and Netherlands put together.

For that matter does China even register compared to the impact this is having on Italy on a per capita basis?

<comment><USER25> Also I think you have to look at the clusters (in a state) as independent threads growing in parallel. It makes more sense to compare individual state to European countries of similar population.

<comment><USER24> Very true. The most basic modeling of by country is not helpful, it'd be far better to show it by city, metro area, etc. And as you said each area has their own start date.

Shoot in the US most metro areas have their own quarantine date too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If you look at China and South Korea, they both took about 11 days between crossing 100 cases to having a strong effect on their case# curve. (18 if you ignore the roughly 7 day incubation + getting tested period)

With incubation time removed:

Italy: 19 days from crossing 100, and counting

Iran: 15 days and counting

Spain: 11 days and counting

France: 12 days and counting

US: 9 days and counting

</comment><comment><USER27> \- Why would you report absolute numbers?

\- You know that private labs are widely not reporting negative results back to CDC, right? (See Alexis Madrigal)

\- We just activated testing in general availability yet virus has been here for months

This is bad statistics, and should be removed.

</comment><comment><USER28> Absolute numbers seems like a bad comparison on a country with 6 times as many people.

</comment><comment><USER29> Adding death's would be interesting. Especially Italy vs. Germany.

</comment><comment><USER30> How is day zero chosen? Unclear if this is a reasonable comparison.

<comment><USER8> Yes, a very fair point. At the left when the tail is sooo thin, it's easy to move it left and right by quite a few days. When there aren't many cases, it's hard to choose a "day zero."

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Testing in Italy is _also_ limited.

<comment><USER32> Italy has a decent testing coverage. US has almost no coverage.

[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/17/us/coronaviru...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/17/us/coronavirus- testing-data.html)

<comment><USER31> The US is terrible. But Italy is still limited, the only country that I'm aware of that is able to test everybody they need to test is South Korea. Everywhere else there are still pre-qualifications.

<comment><USER33> Italy did test a lot during the first days over 100 cases; after, since the number were so high, it limited testing to people with symptoms. I think most countries are straight out testing a small fraction of people with symptoms.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do accounting firms specializing in Internet companies exist? - <AUTHOR>

I have a 3 member LLC with members residing in 3 different states, earning revenue from all 50 states. We have 0 investors, nor plan on taking investment. My current tax accountant has to do regular research because they don't have experience with Internet businesses. I'm unsure if they're doing an optimal job reducing our tax liability (they are a small local firm) since it took them 3 months to finish our taxes, and after a long meeting, we discovered that their decision to classify us as a corporate entity rather than a flow-through has negative consequences to our tax liability.
At the risk of this thread turning into an advertisement, I ask for recommendations on accounting firms or help on FINDING a firm that
1) has experience with Internet companies 2) can confidently decide how to structure an organization to minimize taxes 3) can execute
Do the big 4 firms handle this well? Do the Techstars' or YCombinators' firms handle this well (or are they streamlined for their boilerplate corporate entities only)?
If there's no answer to this question, then is there an opportunity for an accounting firm to launch specializing in Internet businesses? <comment><USER2> The best bet is to do it yourself :)

I found that most tax firms arent aware of the subtleties of accounting for most internet businesses. Even quickbooks is pretty weak.

You know, if there is enough interest, maybe I would launch such a firm ...

</comment><comment><USER3> I would like to work for one that does the same. I would imagine whoever audits the big ones like google etc (which would probably be the big 4/5) would be the one you are looking for.</comment>


A Look at Game Streaming Tech in the Browser - <AUTHOR> https://blog.parsecgaming.com/game-streaming-tech-in-the-browser-with-parsec-5b70d0f359bc <comment><USER2> > The current implementation only works in Chrome. Before you assume we're > kool aid drinking Google evangelists, or simply just lazy, there is good > reason for this — likely due in part to Google's work on Project Stream, > they have introduced "low delay" mode for MSE that sets up a push model for > video frames rather than the traditional buffered pull model. This is also > good for any kind of low latency video stream, not just game streaming. When > in low delay mode, Chrome begins to break the rules of MSE and no longer > requires buffered playback. It also starts to ignore certain timing > information and keyframe requirements.

> ...

> This is not to say that one couldn't get a decent working implementation in > Firefox, but Chrome's low delay mode works in the ideal way without having > to complicate the implementation or diverge too heavily from the way > Parsec's native applications behave. And while we love Firefox, the harsh > reality is that 82% of Parsec users are using Chrome, with only 5% using > Firefox, which made us more comfortable starting with a Chrome only > implementation. For Firefox users, you can always use the Parsec native > applications, which will probably perform better anyway .

I think this is quite sad to see. It's not really game streaming tech in a web browser, it's game streaming tech in Google Chrome.

What happens if Google decides they don't want to play with other streaming services? They're only a quick auto update of locking Parsec services out.

<comment><USER3> (I work at Google, on Chrome)

I know both people from both the MSE team and the Project Stream team. Project Stream doesn't use MSE (it uses WebRTC) and the code in Chrome to detect live streams and optimizing them has been around long time, (see, for example, this change from almost 4 years ago: [https://codereview.chromium.org/692323002](https://codereview.chromium.org/692323002)) and they've steadily added better support for live streams over the years. It's not "game-streaming tech in a web browser". It's just a few simple heuristics to function better for low-latency streams. You can read the code for yourself if you'd like:

[https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/media/renderers/video_r...](https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/media/renderers/video_renderer_impl.cc?type=cs&sq=package:chromium&g=0&l=240)

<comment><USER4> Nothing stopping the single vendor to stop servicing it though, other than a small collective of individuals. OP has a point.

<comment><USER5> but it's an open source project, a lot of browsers based on the same code base will have the same functionality sooner or later.

<comment><USER4> Open source projects die too

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been playing odyssey in project stream all weekend and it's blown away my expectations. We're about two to three years away from seeing consoles move to the cloud. It runs flawlessly at 1080p and I've only experienced three or four five second lag spikes in my six hours of play. The game feels just as responsive and looks just as good on my 1080 GTX running at home.

<comment><USER7> My project stream was perfect for 2 hours, then was completely unplayable for the 10 minutes until I quit. I'm not sure what happened, but I've gone back once or twice and have horrible input lag. I'm using ethernet and get 350MB/s, but google says the issue is packet loss. I don't know how to remedy it, but I know that game streaming is and seemingly always will be just around the corner from perfect.

Edit - it was absolutely stunning to see my accepted email, login to google and ubisoft, and be playing within 5 minutes. Zero download time, zero load time, just instant gaming.

<comment><USER8> It doesn't have to be perfect- it just has to be profitable. And the increased control a streaming service will have over users guarantees that game streaming with be outrageously profitable.

Think of all the basic ways we already see services make money- from the subscription, to metered access, to congestion pricing, early access fees- and those are only the basics. This is an industry that figured out the loot crate, after all.

On a different note, once the profitability is figured out, publishers can give direction to developers that games need to be designed around the latency, or whatever issue appears. Games can also be designed around the assumption that they'll be streamed, allowing things to be a lot more cross platform.

<comment><USER7> I think the problem is the product is poor due to technical issues so no one will adopt it. If I can only play a few hours before getting game-breaking input lag, I'm not going to come back to the service.

I have a decent computer and hard wired gigabit internet, if game streaming can't work there it won't work for the 99% of americans who have worse internet than me.

<comment><USER9> This is an early release right? I'm expecting it to become more stable as they work on it and build out the infrastructure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> (Edit: to clarify the below is about their cloud offering user since I'm on Mac and don't have my own PC to stream from)

I've been using Parsec to play games like No Man's Sky and it's really impressive technologically speaking, but the pricing model is a bit obtuse. It's made worse by the fact that the big cost for someone who doesn't game all that often is storage.

Basically, you sign up to a VM with an impressive GPU and it runs games really well, and the streaming tech is top notch. But to run it all you need to pay for at least 50 GB of storage and you need to pay for it on a time basis, which means you're left with anxiety of leaving it turned off, as well as sudden deletion of your cloud PC if you're not paying attention.

I wish they would come up with some kind of clever storage solution so that the basic Windows image is a shared (read only) storage component and the additional games are additional pluggable hard drives, also shared between users. This would mean you as the end user loses control of modding/patches for some games, but it could save so much storage. The save games etc would go on a tiny hard drive that you ultimately pay for (but I'd say Parsec should eat that cost to reduce anxiety and instead encourage a monthly subscription for any-time access).

TL;DR: Parsec is awesome. I want to pay a fixed price and not be exposed to their tech stack costs, so I don't get FOMO when I'm not using it every day.

<comment><USER11> This reminds me of a huge problem with Steam, which is the size and frequency of updates. For the very small number of first party games, like Half-Life or Counter-Strike, updates are cumulative smaller files that contain changes. So if there was an update to a game, it might be 1-2 GB. For the vast majority of titles on Steam, however, an update requires a full download of the latest version. So for most games it is a 25 GB or 50 GB download. Developers want to stay on top of bugs, so for an infrequent gamer playing on a weekly or monthly basis, opening Steam means queuing up 100 GB of downloads and a long wait to actually play games.

The fact that this hasn't been solved yet shows that Valve isn't willing to invest in fixing it either through new technology or cooperation with developers, which is really sad.

Optimistically, something you're describing for Parsec would be possible, but maybe it isn't realistic.

<comment><USER12> I don't think this is correct. I use Steam and have a lot of games installed. When it does updates, they are not the size of the original downloads. Usually, much, much smaller.

<comment><USER13> Same here. I think what's being seen is that some things are easier to diff and update than others. If a game has a large file for map data that's indexed into, and update to any portions of it are delivered the most easily (where easily includes _reliably_ ) by updating the whole file. If that file is 2GB, then you have a 2GB download. If a game has lots of relatively little files, you could update multiple maps with a few tens of megabytes of downloads.

An actual patch utility that goes in and applies binary diffs would be much more economical in terms of bandwidth, but then that complicates Steam's ability to confirm a game is in a good state with file checksums, and is much more likely to have odd errors as a diff somehow correctly applies to a file with an incorrect starting starting state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am a beta tester for project stream, and it amazes me how well it works if you have a reliable internet connection.

I would absolutely pay for this service, for the convenience of being able to play AAA games from portable devices without strong GPUs.

I suspect that a new generation of game development tools will make future games cheaper to deploy as well.

<comment><USER15> It could work for some games, but in my experience the latency has been pretty noticeable; and Assassin's Creed isn't a very latency-sensitive game.

I think any kind of shooter, platformer, or fighter game would be nearly unplayable, at least on my internet connection. For RPG-type games like Assassin's Creed though it does have potential.

<comment><USER14> For shooters, etc, you just have to ensure the server is running on the same data center as the streamer.

<comment><USER15> There's a big difference between network latency and input lag. Taking 100 ms for the server to register a hit on an opponent is annoying, but acceptable. Taking 100ms for the game to notice me moving my mouse to the left and shift my view is not.

<comment><USER14> Ok, so input lag will be 2*your ping. An input lag <40ms is barely perceivable and 40-80 is playable.

So, you'll need a ~20 ping, which is reasonable for a fast connection.

<comment><USER15> Input lag is actually equal to your ping. Ping measures round-trip time.

I don't know what my input lag was during gameplay, but it was certainly enough to be noticeable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Google has properly opened the path for games streaming to the web browser. Being into the Cloud Gaming industry since 2012 we found this path was getting good enough and decided to start building a cooperative game streaming platform at Dixper. We have now it up and running at [https://dixper.gg](https://dixper.gg) and we are seriously building not only streaming tech but great comunity and optimizing how games use your hardware resources to enable smooth gaming. Great news for all the industry!

</comment><comment><USER17> Parsec mucho love <3

</comment><comment><USER18> It would be amazing to see something like this on the switch. Play any game portably? I'm in.

<comment><USER19> Resident Evil 7 and Assassin's Creed Odyssey are already streamed on the Switch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Great! Youtube style image compression here we come! :)

</comment><comment><USER21> With 9 employees and a seemingly free service, what is the business model !? The tech seem really awesome.

</comment><comment><USER22> Looks great. Can't wait to try it out.</comment>


Will 2-D tin be the next super material? - <AUTHOR> http://m.phys.org/news/2013-11-d-tin-super-material.html

<comment><USER2> The Physical Review Letters abstract[1] (kindly included as a link in the recycled press release[2] kindly submitted here) may lead to more information about this preliminary finding.

Research lab press releases are a known part of the Science News Cycle[3] and are at best just a teaser to get actual working scientists to read the peer- reviewed journal publications to see how much those really say.

There is such a visceral reaction to PhysOrg as a press-release recycling service here on Hacker News that I will, not meaning to put down the kind person who submitted this link, post some previous Hacker News comments about PhysOrg as a source below the references for this comment. It will be interesting to see what comes of this preliminary research report.

[1] [http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v111/i13/e136804](http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v111/i13/e136804)

[2] [http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/04/is- it-...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/04/is-it- journalism-or-just-a-repackaged-press-release-heres-a-tool-to-help-you-find- out/275206/)

[3] [http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174](http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174)

SOMEWHAT LONG FAQ ON PhysOrg AS A SOURCE:

PhysOrg appears to have been banned as a site to submit from by Reddit. I learned from other participants here on HN that there are better sites to submit from.

Comments about PhysOrg:

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3077869](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3077869)

"Yes Physorg definitely has some of the worst articles on the internet."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3149824](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3149824)

"I viscerally distrust anything from physorg.com. Anyone have a better option?"

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3198249](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3198249)

"Straight from the European Space Agency, cutting out the physorg blogspam:

[http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1116/](http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1116/) (press release),

[http://www.spacetelescope.org/videos/heic1116a/](http://www.spacetelescope.org/videos/heic1116a/) (video),

[http://www.spacetelescope.org/static/archives/releases/scien...](http://www.spacetelescope.org/static/archives/releases/science_papers/heic1116.pdf) (paper).

"PhysOrg: just say no."

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3611888](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3611888)

"The physorg article summary is wrong, I think."

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108857](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108857)

"Phys.org is vacuous and often flat wrong."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4890900](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4890900)

"And note that the gravity lamp was announced on physorg.com, famous for how wrong it is about science topics."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106145](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106145)

"I try and debunk/explain [shady] biological science news wherever possible here. In fact, it's typically my only contribution, but one I feel is highly important.

"Your perpetual (and totally correct) crusade against PhysOrg reminds me there are others doing the same, and for that I thank you."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5276327](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5276327)

"Physorg? Ugh.

"Didn't even bother click, came here to read comments instead.

"Can HN please ban Physorg like everyone else?"

</comment><comment><USER3> Could this material be used for "heavy" stuff, like power transmission or lifting trains, and not only electronics?

<comment><USER4> The square-cube law would probably end up being a problem - there's only _so_ much current that can flow through a one- or two-dimensional conductor even with zero resistance.

<comment><USER5> By ohm's law, zero resistance means infinite current. I don't know anything about super conductors, but I thought that was the appeal? If not, what replaces ohms law in a superconductor? Or, put differently, how is the current limit defined?

<comment><USER6> The critical current does. Superconductivity is eventually destroyed by magnetic fields, so all superconductors can only carry so much current before they quench and become regular conductors.

But this isn't a superconductor - it's a ballistic conductor. The idea is that it'll ballistically transport electrons with certain energy levels, which is functionally superconductivity (they don't lose energy to the conductor itself). But, since only electrons with a certain energy can enter in the first place, and since the energy levels are defined as a Boltzmann distribution, they still have a resistance which is proportional to the band of electron energies which cannot enter.

So at RT it's _great_ for a CPU, where the problem is you don't want heat being created on the die itself. But it doesn't allow you to do long-distance transmission like we'd like to with regular superconductors (since it would still have a resistance), and the mono-monolecular nature implies it wouldn't scale anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much for this comment - when reading the article I noticed it carefully circumlocuted "superconductivity", and was curious what the difference was. This perfectly explains it (and goes into further interesting detail), which is exactly what I wanted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That is all nice, but still theoretical. Good luck constructing material made with flourine in a very specific way.

<comment><USER8> We can push single atoms around in the lab, so I don't think there will be too many problems in testing this experimentally.

<comment><USER9> Maybe, but that 'fluorine' part is cause for concern ([http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_won...](http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_wont_work_with_dioxygen_difluoride.php): _" The latest addition to the long list of chemicals that I never hope to encounter takes us back to the wonderful world of fluorine chemistry. I'm always struck by how much work has taken place in that field, how long ago some of it was first done, and how many violently hideous compounds have been carefully studied."_)

There may be a perfectly harmless way to make this at industrial scale, but I would not bet on it.

<comment><USER8> Toothpaste manufacture must be nearly impossible then.

<comment><USER10> That's sodium hexafluorosilicate (Na2SiF6). It's much less reactive than elemental fluorine.

<comment><USER8> Tin fluoride is also commonly used in toothpaste under the name of stannous fluoride.

<comment><USER11> Hehe, I read "stannous" and immediately thought of Stannis Baratheon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Headline is misleading.

The magic phrase in the article is "could be".

</comment><comment><USER13> No. [1] (pardon the snark)

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

</comment><comment><USER14> As freely as cars on a freeway? I want better for my electrons.</comment>


GNU /bin/ed 1.6 released - <AUTHOR> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-ed/2012-01/msg00000.html

<comment><USER2> "If you are packaging ed for a distribution, please, try to use the lzipped source tarball, as this can improve the support for the lzip format in packaging systems. Thanks."

Great. Now we have .xz, .lzip (.lz) and .lzma. Not to mention .7z - all using basically the same compression engine, with just enough differences to make them incompatible with each other.

<comment><USER3> _with just enough differences to make them incompatible with each other._

It stopped being funny when tar ran out of letters.

-Z = compress, -z = gzip, -j = bzip2, -J = XZ

Now for lzip they had to resort to --lzip...

<comment><USER4> well, with gnu tar I prefer to use:

      -a, --auto-compress
          use archive suffix to determine the compression program

So tar cvfa archive.tar.xz files* would create a tar.xz file

<comment><USER5> Doesn't work when piping the file to `tar`, though (e.g. `curl <http://.>. | tar x`). I've thus gotten in the habit of specifying the format I expect.

<comment><USER6> -a only works when creating the tarball anyway.

`file`-like auto-decompress could work, though: these formats have magic numbers, and tar already has the data in its zip_magic struct:

<http://svn.netlabs.org/repos/ports/tar/trunk/src/buffer.c>

together with code to infer compression type. I guess the only reason why tar doesn't support this already is caution.

<comment><USER7> -a does work with decompression, what version are you using? I'm using GNU tar 1.26, and just successfully used "tar xaf firefox-9.0.1.source.tar.bz2".

<comment><USER6> If you explicitly provide a file by path, then tar doesn't use magic number autodetect, but uses file extension dispatch instead. You would need to pass the data as a stream to force magic number autodetect:

          <firefox-9.0.1.source.tar.bz2 tar xaf -

Does that still work? It doesn't for me.

I was using (GNU tar) 1.20 and Debian stable is now at 1.23, but I think that autodetect code went in around 1.18.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> ed: the new hipster editor. Perfect for writing that Haskell to JavaScript compiler for your Node.js app.

<comment><USER9> Hahaha.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I made a `ed` cheat sheet years ago:

[http://www.catonmat.net/download/ed.text.editor.cheat.sheet....](http://www.catonmat.net/download/ed.text.editor.cheat.sheet.pdf)

Remember that vim's ex or command mode (mode when you type ":") accepts `ed` commands. Level up!

</comment><comment><USER11> Meh. Those of us who run _ed-nightly_ have already enjoyed those features since New Year's Eve. <3 Gentoo.

</comment><comment><USER12> <http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg>

<comment><USER13> This can also be found distributed with Emacs.

[http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/etc/JOKES?h=...](http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/etc/JOKES?h=emacs-23)

... Along with a bunch of other jokes, most of them making fun of Emacs. It's been there since ancient times.

<comment><USER14> I'm old enough to remember when this was poignant, and true (and when "eight" was moved to "eighty")...

        Eight
        Megabytes
        And
        Constantly
        Swapping

But man how far we've come in so short a time!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've had to resort to ed a few times to rescue a system with no /usr partition. 'vi' or 'vim' happened to be in /usr/bin, so I needed to do some quick editing. Ed is definitely worth learning!

<comment><USER15> It's always good for systems administrators to be able to do things with one (or both) hands tied behind their backs. Murphy always seems to conspire to create a situation where those skills are necessary....

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> From the ChangeLog:

"All command-line options are now documented in the man page."

This should clear up any difficulty users may have had using the program.

</comment><comment><USER17> I actually found studying ed (while reading _The Unix Programming Environment_ by Kernighan and Pike) to be really helpful in understanding sed and vim in more depth.

</comment><comment><USER18> What does "8-bit clean" mean? I've seen that phrase before in regards to Nvi as well.

<comment><USER19> If you assume you'll never need the 8th bit of any given character (which you wouldn't, if you only ever handle pure 7-bit ASCII) you can safely use it for storing a single bit of per-character metadata to avoid consuming excess memory.

<comment><USER20> actually its wxactly the opposite

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "GNU ed is an 8-bit clean, more or less POSIX-compliant implementation of the standard Unix line editor."

If the main implementation of ed isn't even POSIX compliant these days, I'd say POSIX is officially pointless.

<comment><USER22> GNU has a long history of ignoring POSIX where they disagree with it. There's a much better chance that the BSD implementation will be fully compliant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I use red, not ed. You can't be too careful.

</comment><comment><USER24> This title is misleading. 'ed' was written long before GNU existed. Should probably read "GNU revision 1.6 of the Unix' ed command has been released".

<comment><USER24> Sad to see points of fact downmodded, no doubt by GNU fanboys. Wonder if we should also start calling Emacs' Windows port "Microsoft EMACS"?</comment></comment>


Capital One found it's breach only by a member of the public emailing a tip - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/capital-one-hack-data-breach-email-tip-off-2019-7 <comment><USER2> I would guess most breaches of this nature go entirely undetected forever.

How many companies actually go through the audit logs without a reason to do so?

The vast majority of systems are designed to keep the bad guys out, rather than raise alarms when the bad guys have already stolen the crown jewels. If you want that, check out [1].

[1]: [https://www.serverthiefbait.com/](https://www.serverthiefbait.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Typo in headline: it's > its.</comment>


JavaScript: Warts and workarounds - <AUTHOR> http://matt.might.net/articles/javascript-warts/ <comment><USER2> For the record, CoffeeScript tries to help ameliorate _all_ of these "warts".

* "Hoisting under the hood" -- Function declarations vs. function expressions don't get you into hoisting trouble, because there are no function declarations, and every value is an expression.

* Explicit block scopes can be (more easily) created with:

        do (x, y) ->
          # here, x and y are captured in a new scope.

* "What does 'this' mean?" -- The value of "this" can be fixed lexically, by using the bound function (fat arrow) =>, instead of the normal function arrow: ->. Look ma, no "var that" or "var self":

        $.getJSON url, (resp) =>
          this.setResponse resp

* "Fixing Arguments" -- Function arguments are always available as an array instead of an Arguments object.

        myVariadicFunction = (args...) ->
          # here, "args" is an Array.

* "Avoiding truthiness" -- There is no "==" and "!=" in CoffeeScript, all equality is strict equality. For the one case where double equals _is_ useful in JS, you have the existential operator...

      if a is b
        # here, a === b.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a friend of Matt's, and I enjoy his blog posts, but I'm afraid this post is full of bad advice and misinformation. He claims that `with` followed by an object literal is fully statically analyzable (it's not, because of prototypes), and he recommends using it without considering how badly it deoptimizes in all modern JS engines.

And spicyj is right that NaN is not equal to itself in most languages because that's how IEEE754 specifies it. In particular, this is true in Scheme, one of Matt's favorite languages. ;-P

(Also, depending on what he means by "true equality," his `equal` function fails to distinguish -0 and 0, which are distinct values in the language. However, I suspect those are best treated as the same value. It's extremely rare to want to treat -0 as if it exists at all.)

</comment><comment><USER4> _Yet, there is still a value x such that x != x and x !== x._

 _That value is NaN._

 _If true equality matters, use a helper function:_

      function equal(a, b) {
        if (a === b)
          return true ;
        if (isNaN(a) && isNaN(b))
          return true ;
        return false
      }

People keep repeating this as a strangeness of JavaScript, whereas in fact this is standard floating-point behavior, the same as you'll see in any other language (C, Java, Python, really everything). In JavaScript, you almost always just want a === b, not a function that checks for NaN.

<comment><USER5> Since NaN != NaN you could also do (a === b) || ((a != a) && (b != b))

<comment><USER6> I don't know why you'd use a != a instead of isNaN(a). The former hides what you're doing. Though treating two NaN values as equal doesn't even make sense in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The first code sample in the article is wrong:

> _In most curly-braced languages, blocks delineate lexical scope. For > example, in C or Java:_

        {
            int i = 13 ;
            {
               int i = 42 ;
               print(i) ;
            }
            print(i) ;
        }

In fact this will not compile in Java.

<comment><USER8> I am not very familiar with Java details. Can you explain why this doesn't compile?

<comment><USER7> It's this part:

        int i;
        {
            int i;
        }

Java does not allow you to shadow one local variable with another.

This is ok:

        {
            int i;
        }
        int i;

because the scopes do not overlap.

This is ok too:

        int i;
        {
            class LocalClass {
                public void method() {
                    int i;
                }
            }
        }

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One of the strangest things about == is that although it's commutative, it's not transitive:

      0 == '0'  // true
      0 == ''   // true
      '0' == '' // false

<comment><USER9> Is it really that strange?

Those statements are basically (as per ECMA-262 11.9.3):

0 === Number('0') 0 === Number('') '0' === ''

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Honestly, I don't agree that most of these are warts. In particular function scoping vs block scoping, get THE F over it. Gees.

Sure when I first started JavaScript it bit me exactly once. Since then, I got use to it. It's a different language, every language has its quirks. I'm sure if you started with JavaScript the fact that many other languages DON'T have block scope might upset you. You know what else doesn't have block scope? PYTHON!

        def foo():
          if True:
            x = 123
          print x

prints 123. In C, Java, C++ you'd get an error that x doesn't exist.

        void foo() {
          if (true)
            int x = 123
          printf("%d\n", x);
        }

        error: 'x' was not declared in this scope

4 meanings of this?

The fact is it gives you huge flexibility. By default, lots of libraries add names to the global object (for browsers that's 'window') but because you can control 'this' for all functions you can force any library to install itself to some other object.

Can you do that in C, C++ or Java? As far as I know the only way to fix that in those languages is to edit a bazillion source files and change namespaces of you're lucky enough to have them.

Truthiness?

Again it's just different not broken. Lots of dynamic languages have strange kinds of conversions. Learn them and get over it. The only people this messes up are people expecting it to behave like Java or C/C++. It's not Java or C++. It's not JavaScript's fault you're too stubborn or set in your ways to try it a different way.

</comment><comment><USER11> 1\. Don't use with. It's hard to reason about, and it breaks many compiler optimizations (you're adding a dynamic object into the scope chain).

2\. Just don't ever use == or !=. Forget they exist. Done.

<comment><USER12> I've always found == to be very useful when comparing undefined, because undefined == null. It's very rare that I want to treat undefined and null separately (unless one or the other means there was an error earlier).

<comment><USER13> That's the only reasonable use for ==, IMO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's also impossible to instantiate an object with `new` and varargs.

        new Breakfast('bacon', 'eggs') // great
        new Breakfast.apply(null, ['bacon', 'eggs']) // b0rk

<comment><USER15> This works:

        var a = new (Breakfast.bind.apply(Breakfast, [null, 'bacon', 'eggs']))
        a instanceof Breakfast // true

Or...

        var a = new (Function.bind.apply(Breakfast, [null].concat(['bacon', 'eggs'])))
        a instanceof Breakfast // true

UPDATE (for kicks):

Or... (works with Crockford's Object.create)

        var a = Object.create(Breakfast.prototype);
        Breakfast.apply(a, ['bacon', 'eggs']);
        a instanceof Breakfast // true

<comment><USER14> Awesome. I do notice a gigantic warning on MDN to not rely on this behavior, though: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Function/bind#section_9)

In p.js (github.com/jayferd/pjs), I used this pattern/workaround:

        var Breakfast = function(args) {
          if (!(this instanceof Breakfast)) return new Breakfast(arguments);
          if (args && typeof this.init === 'function') this.init.apply(this, args);
        }

So these would be equivalent:

        Breakfast('bacon', 'eggs')
        new Breakfast(['bacon', 'eggs'])

Whereas `new Breakfast` would return an "uninitialized" object as in Object.create.

<comment><USER15> I used a similar pattern once, except _generically_ as follows:

        function Breakfast(my, args) {
          if (!(this instanceof arguments.callee)) return new arguments.callee(arguments);
          if (Object.prototype.toString.call(arguments[0]) === '[object Arguments]') arguments.callee.apply(this, args);
        }

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> That use of `with` makes me squeamish as hell.

Also, on the topic of the "eta" function, it's odd that the author seems unaware of existing implementations of `bind`.

<comment><USER17> Crockford warns against ever using `with` in a talk he gave last year. Discussion on `with` at 19m58s: [http://ontwik.com/javascript/douglas- crockford-javascript-pr...](http://ontwik.com/javascript/douglas-crockford- javascript-programming-style-and-your-brain/)

Edit: He says it's not that `with` isn't useful, but that there is never a case where it isn't confusing.

<comment><USER16> That is very well put. It is a shame that JS got its scoping so very upside- down, because it means that tiny changes in code can cause incredibly confusing and initially undetectable bugs. `with` is basically an infected bandaid on a broken system. It seems like it's helping until you notice the smell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _The way around this scoping issue is to declare `that`._

It's simpler to bind the function to the current object. [https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Function/bind)

</comment><comment><USER18> Something sort of random I just noticed: you can wrap stuff in {} to make blocks without an actual block statement...just a random block of code. That may be pretty useful once the _let_ keyword becomes widely available, and could be used now to maybe organize lots of code?

<comment><USER19> Not really, wrapping the code in {} makes no difference whatsoever, but a anonymous function executed after creation does (function(){ /* code */ })()

In another note, the article says that '' == false yields false but in Chrome and Firefox it returns true.

<comment><USER20> Actually, wrapping the code in {} _does_ make a difference with 'let'. A 'let' in braces does not escape the braces.

<comment><USER19> Well, the "let" keyword still doesn't work on any major browser so is like it doesn't even exist yet.

<comment><USER21> "let" has worked in Firefox for years; support for it first shipped in Firefox 2 back in 2006. You do have to opt in to it by putting type="application/javascript;version=1.7" on your script tag, since the feature is not backwards-compatible and hence couldn't be added to existing scripts without possibly breaking them.

JS 1.7 in general added a bunch of neat features (array comprehensions, destructuring assignment, etc) that are only now slowly making their way to specifications after some foot-dragging by certain parties. See [https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/New_in_JavaScrip...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/New_in_JavaScript/1.7)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> My rule of thumb is, as soon as it gets to the point where I need to use "this", I find a library that abstracts that whole business away.

I've been there and it sucks. I say leave it to someone with the expertise to use "this" in Javascript without shooting themselves in both feet, at least for browser-side work.

<comment><USER23> Learn the language. You can't just outsource understanding the language you write code in. Even if you just mash together some jQuery you have to understand the semantics for `this` or you're going to trip over them later.

It's not even that complicated. Honestly, just put in 10 minutes one day to learn how it behaves. Even if you end up just always assigning a new variable (e.g. var self = this) it's better than putting your fingers in your ears and closing your eyes when you see `this`.

<comment><USER24> Most of the JS development that I've seen happen is done by people holding their nose and refusing to properly learn the language's idioms, or by people that wish they could be writing in another language that abuses JS as a glorified bytecode interpreter.

I agree that it's a pretty awful language. I wish it weren't the only choice in web dev (and resent the HTML5 zealots that chafe at any attempt to go beyond it with new languages - LOL, as if HTML5 was a real standard to begin with!) But it's there, that's reality, and the good programmers need to deal with it.

Coffeescript makes it a modicum less terrible, but it's Yet Another Language to learn, and people that are already burdened with maintaining more than just the FE stack, like myself, are getting pretty tired of context-switching between all these languages and mini-frameworks-with-adorable-nonsensical- names.

<comment><USER25> BAM, the best comment from a regular, passionate, and smart developer.

JS developers, understand this: the language is not elegant.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Pixar Theory of Labor - <AUTHOR> http://www.theawl.com/2015/07/the-pixar-theory-of-labor <comment><USER2> I think he says that Pixar movies are capitalist propaganda.</comment>


Fervor – A full stack react/graphql framework - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/fervorous/fervor/wiki <comment><AUTHOR> I'm the author AMA! The reason we built this was that we wanted to produce react/graphql projects quickly. We were tired of endless setup to get all the features we wanted. In addition we wanted an easy way to upgrade the different projects we had, and be able to own the data rather than using a SaaS platform for the data side of things. We use postgraphql so graphql apis are auto generated from knex migrations. We use apollo under the hood and redux as well. Also, we built out some really handy Form helpers and other components. A big goal was to make as many aspects as possible declarative, and to make setup of projects relatively config free (or at least config light).

Oh I should also say, come contribute :)!</comment>


Ask HN: How do you deal with depression? - <AUTHOR> The question is pretty straight-forward. I'm currently dealing with lots of pain and guilt from breaking up with a long-term girlfriend and leaving her with massive student loan debts. I'm having trouble focusing, losing weight, etc.<p>Aside from medication (I'm on some), how do you deal with pain/guilt/depression? This industry can be high-stress and we can all be hard on ourselves from time to time. Just interested in different coping strategies. Thanks. <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14800579](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14800579)

Thread on Coping with Loneliness that I asked awhile ago, has some very valuable and applicable answers. I'm sorry I cant be of more help.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do not apologize, this is an excellent resource. Thanks so much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> _> long-term girlfriend and leaving her with massive student loan debts._

Are those her debts? If so, that's not your fault or problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, they are her debts. It is still hard.</comment></comment>


Match your last fifty tweets with ten interesting podcasts from all over the web - <AUTHOR> https://hyvi.co/hearyourhandle <comment><USER2> Wow! This is really awesome! Mind giving a high-level description of the matching process?

<comment><AUTHOR> OP is not the author. but I did see this was posted to PH too. Link to discussion [http://www.producthunt.com/tech/hear-your- handle](http://www.producthunt.com/tech/hear-your-handle)</comment></comment>


Modular, composable, typed optimizations in the tagless-final style - <AUTHOR> http://okmij.org/ftp/tagless-final/course/optimizations.html

<comment><USER2> I only understood the first part, but representing an AST as an interpreter is interesting. Does this require a functional-style language or could a similar thing be done in, say, Java?

<comment><USER3> You probably could, but there would be lots of extra boiler plate that distract from the central idea.

The OCaml language features that are used that would need to be emulated somehow in Java:

* Sum types (type a = A of int | B of float). Think tagged unions [1].

* Module functors (module NAME(PARAM : MODULE_TYPE) = struct ... end). Think package level functions (you get some of this with dependency injection frameworks, but it's probably no-where near as safe/sane and flexible.

* GADTs (type a = A : int -> int | int term). I'm not sure how you would represent these in java, I'm not fully up to speed on how they work yet.

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagged_union](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagged_union)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: A human nature thought experiment. - <AUTHOR>

So, I've been following the Avatar/Genocide discussion going on here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1050522 It's an interesting discussion that has provided a lot of emotional responses. This got me thinking about human nature when it's boiled down so I thought I'd conduct a little thought experiment.
Somewhere in an ocean there's an island. On it are 4 shipwreaked people. One can make sails, one can build a boat, one can sail and one can navigate. The problem is that the island is small and the water and food resources are limited, it cannot support 4 people. With all 4 their probability getting off the island and safely home is good. With only 3 not so much, with two it's poor and with 1 it's essentially impossible. However, the island could support 3 people with some hunger, 2 with realative comfort and 1 in luxury.
This is not a high school math problem ("if we just kill one person we can hang out on the island and still have a good chance of getting away"), or a Microsoft interview question, it's a human nature problem.
Imagine that they are all from the same culture/race. What do they do?
Now image that they are all from different cultures/races (if there are language differences it doesn't affect their ability to build a boat and sail away). What do they do?
I know what I think but what about you? <comment><USER2> Really, it depends on the people.

I am reminded of the two miners who were trapped underground in China a few years ago. Finally one gave in to his hunger pangs, killed and ate the other. He was then rescued, less than 24 hours after they had become trapped.

Granted, the news reports I heard did not mention the ethnicity of either of the miners. But I don't think many people would have predicted that outcome in a thought experiment.

</comment><comment><USER3> If they are all hackers they will simulate the situation using a genetic algorithm based on ant colonies and sail away:)

If they are lawyers they will debate the issue until one dies and they will never sail.

If they have a background in marketing they will probably try and convince the fatter not to eat anything until they come up with a strategy...

<comment><USER4> If they are startup founders, they would optimize the resources and exit!</comment></comment>


Tax Cuts Increase Income Inequality (WSJ) - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/tax-cuts-for-the-wealthy-make-inequality-worse-11572561280?mod=rsswn <comment><AUTHOR> While I am not personally a fan of ultra-progressive tax rates on the ultra- rich, I do think it's time that conservatives start considering higher taxes.

With the top 400 income earners having paid an average of 23%, vs the nationwide average of 25%, it seems that taxes _must_ be revised, if only to satisfy public opinion and prevent civil unrest.

What does HN think?</comment>