For Medical Tourists, Simple Math - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/health/for-medical-tourists-simple-math.html <comment><USER2> " _In addition, device makers typically require doctors' groups and hospitals to sign nondisclosure agreements about prices, which means institutions do not know what their competitors are paying. This secrecy erodes bargaining power and has allowed a small industry of profit-taking middlemen to flourish: joint implant purchasing consultants, implant billing companies, joint brokers. There are as many as 13 layers of vendors between the physician and the patient for a hip replacement, according to Kate Willhite, a former executive director of the Manitowoc Surgery Center in Wisconsin._ "

A simple legal remedy here would be to invalidate this sort of NDA agreement. The government is already involved as a customer in the health care market, and having the courts simply no longer recognize contracts that prohibit disclosure of prices would bring some immediate transparency to many involved.

The law could also go a step further and actually set up/order public listings of prices (this is already done in a lot of industries where vendors try to avoid competing on price).

</comment><comment><USER3> I was a medical tourist in the opposite direction earlier this year. I'm from Canada, land of free health care, and my doctor told me that I would have to wait 6 months to see a specialist.

My ailment[1] prevented me from sleeping most nights, caused severe, productivity-ending headaches all day, and caused me to pop ibuprofens like candy. My PCP attempted to use water to eliminate what he believed was an earwax impaction 14 times on separate days. It had been almost 2 months of me completely disabled before he was willing to put in a referral to the ENT. When he did, they told me it would be six months. You can imagine my frustration.

So, I had a friend drive me to a clinic in Washington state. A bit of discussion, $900 and two visits later, I had seen an otolaryngologist, he had used a small curette to clean out the ear canal, and I was better. $900 to not cry myself to sleep all day for six months seemed like a pretty good deal to me.

Six months later I got a phone call from an office of an ENT here in Canada. I was unbelievably angry.

[1] I had a condition where the skin had grown over the eardrum in your ear. It required surgery by an otolaryngologist to remove the problem and restore my hearing.

<comment><USER4> I read a while back that the US hospitals charge foreign medical tourists competitive rates. But getting that rate as an American is another matter since the hospitals make so much with their standard rates.

<comment><USER5> Nope, I been to the doctor while in the US and the bill was insane given it was a routine check.

Good thing I had travel insurance.

<comment><USER4> I mean the price charged to people from other countries who shop different hospitals for particular medical procedures - "medical tourists".

Ordinary tourists who come for other reasons and happen to seek medical care are a completely different story - they'll be charged the "highest possible fee, 'cause we can" rate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Who's interesting in doing a healthcare tourism startup? Especially if you know the medical system well. Serious. Hit me up.

My wife has gone to Russia twice for dental work (her home country). Was a fraction of the quotes here, including airfare.

<comment><USER7> It's a good idea... and also already a big thing. Look at all the AdWords for [dental vacation] and similar searches. Amish groups taking train rides to Mexico for dental work paid in cash is also apparently a thing.

It could be much bigger, across more procedures... but often people needing care are, by virtue of both age and their current medical worries (and past experiences with bad providers), less adventurous.

A big breakthrough would be if Congress, as a cost-saving measure, allowed Medicare payments for out-of-country treatment.

<comment><USER8> "A big breakthrough would be if Congress, as a cost-saving measure, allowed Medicare payments for out-of-country treatment."

If Congress cared about saving money when it comes to Medicare they wouldn't have passed Medicare Part D, which by design doesn't allow for the negotiation of lower drug prices with pharmaceutical companies like the Department of Vererans Affairs is allowed to do. The fact of the matter is that a lot of palms are getting greased in Washington when it comes to healthcare. Thus why Obamacare doesn't have a public option.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_Part_D](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_Part_D)

<comment><USER9> Precisely. I worked a little bit for a large pharma company (in a finance capacity) and I saw first hand how incredibly profitable it is for the US government to not have negotiating power on drug prices.

Pharma companies make a wildly disproportionate share of their global profits in the US simply because they don't have to negotiate with a large 'super- buyer" (e.g. medicare).

Now if pharma R&D were productive I wouldn't have a problem with this, but it's notoriously unproductive (and not just because of the admittedly overly burdensome FDA regulations).

I would support a grand compromise: 1) for pharma companies: reduce FDA hurdles for drug approval, but add more aggressive post-approval tracking (to reduce the risks associated with a lower regulatory hurdle) 2) for the rest of us: allow medicare to negotiate aggressively on price, this will have a ripple effect and lead to lower drug prices for all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It would be interesting to see a breakdown of what really accounts for the majority of the price differences. This article mentions some things in passing but ultimately doesn't conclude with the main quantitative insights.

<comment><USER11> Most of the difference here is that our hospitals have to fob off the money they lose from treating patients without health care onto those that do. They charge a lot more because every 5th or 6th person coming into the emergency room has no health care, must be given treatment, and will never be able to pay for it. Thus, we all take on that burden through a backdoor, round the corner, through the mailslot, rather than just by dealing with it and giving everyone health care....

<comment><USER10> That doesn't really explain how the healthcare can cost 5x or more. What you've said is that every 5th or 6th person is a free rider (presumably due to laws such as the COBRA [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_Omnibus_Budget_Rec...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_Omnibus_Budget_Reconciliation_Act_of_1985)) ... if that was the source of the added costs, it would suggest they would only be 1.2 or 1.5x higher, not 5x or more.

<comment><USER12> The #1 reason healthcare costs more is because of over-treatment. When providers are paid by the procedure, suddenly everyone needs a procedure (or ten). Combine that with third-party responsibility (insurance pays doctor, employer pays for insurance), opaque pricing structure (doctors are the only ones that can tell you if a procedure is necessary or not), and you have a "market" that is "broken".

Put simply, everyone wants "the best care" when they never have to actually pay for it. And as long as providers are incentivized to provide "the best care", they will do it, as lost as "best" equals "expensive".

<comment><USER13> Over-treatment doesn't explain why the _same_ treatments cost more, though. The base charge for simply occupying a hospital bed for one day is absurdly high in the U.S. compared to just about any other country (Canada comes close, if you're a non-Canadian and therefore actually liable for it).

<comment><USER12> Actually, it does explain it. Lots of people are admitted that don't need to be and nobody ever questions it.

And since we have such a high proportion of non-insured here, those admissions raise the cost for everyone else who DOES have insurance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Some cities in Mexico have a very good medical system for the local rich elite that is very affordable for Americans. This is from my hometown... [http://www.chihuahuamedicalcity.com/English/hospitales.html](http://www.chihuahuamedicalcity.com/English/hospitales.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> The magic of the market.

<comment><USER16> FTA: > Dr. Cram, the Iowa health cost expert, points out that joint manufacturers are businesses, operating within the constraints of varying laws and markets.

> "Imagine you're the C.E.O. of Zimmer," he said. "Why charge $1,000 for the > implant in the U.S. when you can charge $14,000? How would you answer to > your shareholders?" Expecting device makers "to do otherwise is like asking, > 'Couldn't Apple just charge $50 for an iPhone?' because that's what it costs > to make them."

> But do Americans want medical devices priced like smartphones? "That," Dr. > Cram said, "is a different question."

Indeed.

Maybe mixing something that is designed to work better when no ethics is involved (free market and capitalist ideology) with a highly relative to ethics sector (healthCARE) isn't such a good idea. Well, not for shareholders of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> So I get that by cutting out the insurer you are saving some funds, but where does the rest of the difference come from? Are the hospital rooms and surgeons so much cheaper because everyone in those countries pay them rather than just the few people who actually use their services?

<comment><USER18> Some possible reasons:

* The hospital system in Belgium is 99% either state or non-profit owned. Less sticky fingers. Less luxury.

* Infrastructure (buildings, tools, ...). The infrastructure is extremely heavily state subsidised.

* Medical professional wage negotiations. Medical professionals earn quite a bit less in Belgium than in the US. Quite many (most?) medical pros actually seem to have their priorities right: helping people solve medical problems.

* Choice. In Belgium, people, not insurers choose the hospital they go to, based on reputation and perceived quality.

* Volume. Healthcare in Belgium is fairly accessible, probably one of the most accessible in the world. This means few people putting off operations for financial reasons, so higher volume.

* State subsidies spilling over to foreign patients in unintended ways. I could very well imagine some of the marginal cost of an operation on a non-resident American citizen also being carried by the state in other ways.

Two anecdotes, logical consequences of this system.

1) My (poor by US standards) 90 years old neighbour had a hip replacement at the age of 86, 100% paid by the state.

2) An aunt working as a nurse told me about a phenomenon that was quite common until a few years ago: "winter rabbits", old people "dumped" into hospital for several weeks even if they were not ill. Relatives dumped them at the hospital as a (to them) low cost way of getting rid of them for a few weeks while on holiday for example.

<comment><USER19> I've lived in Scandinavia, with largely similar systems (they vary a bit, I've seen Sweden and a bit of Finland). The health care systems are centrally planned and administered, and hence have the typical problems doing the work in an efficient manner.

For instance, it is acknowledged in international comparisons as really hard to get diagnosed because doctors just don't have the time, largely because of administration. Me and others I know have had years and decades of lowered life quality from easily cured problems like bacteria infections, simple knee problems, allergies and iron/vitamin deficiencies.

I've heard good things about the German health care system.

Notes: I have also lived a few years outside of the Nordic countries, so I have some perspective. And I agree that the US system seems the craziest one on the Western world.

Edit: The government has recently decided that all illegal immigrants in Sweden will get free health care, without any paperwork. If you need an expensive and can fake an Ukrainian accent in English, or something similar, there is a cheap solution for millions of Americans with a ticket to Sweden...

<comment><USER20> "The government has recently decided that all illegal immigrants in Sweden will get free health care, without any paperwork."

If the vast majority of people treated are not subject to itemised accounting, the bureaucratic expense of having itemised accounting for one small group can actually be higher than just treating them for free as well.

<comment><USER19> Not for expensive operations costing 10K++ €. The administration of those payments is already set up for e.g. tourists that get sick.

Since it seems I need to explain in more details:

The problem is that potentially anyone which can get to Sweden can get expensive treatment free. This is potentially ruinous for a small country. Just the millions of poor gypsies in Romania/Bulgaria which lack good health care for poor people ("I'm from the republic of Moldova outside the EU. I am here illegally because criminals are after me") is enough to break the Swedish health care system if they use this loophole in an organized way. Or normal citizens in those countries, for that matter. We will see...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Jesus Christ, the price is 5 times lower for a non-EU citizen in Belgium (which is still pretty expensive by worldwide or even European standards)? That's just unbelievable...

</comment><comment><USER22> Cross-European medical tourism could explode next year, after 2011/24/EU: Directive on patients' rights in cross-border healthcare enters into application.

The directive created a legal framework for patient's right to seek healthcare in another member state and for reimbursement.

[http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2...](http://eur- lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2011:088:0045:0065:EN:PDF)

</comment><comment><USER23> Eventually I'll need a lung transplant, and possibly more (I have Cystic Fibrosis). It's one thing to talk teeth and knee joints, but lungs and livers are a completely different story. That said, paying $150K+ isn't something I'm looking forward to (or even know that I'll be able to do), so medical tourism is something I follow closely to see how it develops.

</comment><comment><USER24> The state should also do some math. What is the cost of having a disabled person, even if slightly ?

</comment><comment><USER25> So what are the negatives? This NYT article reads like a PR piece for medical tourism... What about malpractice insurance in Belgium/Poland and what happens if there are problems down the road with TFA's hip implant?

<comment><USER26> What happens if there are problems down the road with an implant (or any other procedure) you got in the US? You pay for more procedures, that's what.

The ability to sue for millions of dollars is the one "advantage" of buying your medical care (or airplane tickets) in the US. We each need to decide how important that is to us.

<comment><USER27> > The ability to sue for millions of dollars is the one "advantage"

That isn't necessarily true, as some states have caps on tort damages, and more corperations are lobying for similar caps/limits on civil restitution via state law: [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/25/us/even-with-counsel- texas...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/25/us/even-with-counsel-texas- amputee-is-hindered-by-state-tort-laws.html)</comment></comment></comment>


Grid tricks your mind into seeing colour - <AUTHOR> https://www.patreon.com/posts/28661801 <comment><AUTHOR> Originally from [https://pippin.gimp.org](https://pippin.gimp.org).</comment>


Look at your toes if you want to know whether you're an innate sprinter - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14843831&fsrc=rss

<comment><USER2> Long toes + short achilles tendons.</comment>


Facebook Rebrands Oculus Research as "Facebook Reality Labs" - <AUTHOR> https://tech.fb.com/introducing-the-new-facebook-reality-labs-plus-save-the-date-for-facebook-connect-on-september-16/ <comment><USER2> At least there are alternatives to Facebook products: [https://uploadvr.com/index-takes-over-rift/](https://uploadvr.com/index- takes-over-rift/)</comment>


USPTO Director Michelle Lee Resigns - <AUTHOR> http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2017/06/06/uspto-director-michelle-lee-resigns <comment><USER2> What exactly can USPTO director influence, between legislative and judicial branches actually deciding what to do with the patent law?

<comment><USER3> A lot! Think of the legal system like a CPU. The legislature is a big, slow HDD. The courts are like DRAM, much faster than the legislature but still slower than ... The USPTO. The USPTO run by the Director is like L3 cache in this analogy - very quick and close to the processing. Maybe that makes the examiners L1/L2 cache. The point is, when the L1/L2 cache has a cache miss, it goes to the L3, right? That happen all the time and is pretty quick, it's a tight feedback loop. Reaching out to DRAM is much slower and less frequent, and same goes even more for mass storage. In this analogy, the instructions are the laws and the processing is everything the USPTO does.

The analogy breaks down a little bit from there, because the laws are not perfectly communicated between each layer, it's like someone inserted a fuzzer in the bus at each stage so that getting from the HDD to the CPU is both slow and unreliable. There's only one step of fuzzing between the L3 cache (the director) and the CPU - much clearer, more direct, quicker, etc.

Beyond the somewhat silly analogy, our legal system is set up to grant quite a bit of deference to administrative agencies like the USPTO, referred to as Chevron deference if you want to look it up. The judicial and legislative branches do provide feedback through lawmaking and court rulings, but each stage of the feedback loop is indirect and slow. The courts don't really tell the USPTO what to do (in general), they just decide specific cases presented to them. Then, the USPTO has to figure out how to act in accordance with those rulings, which isn't always clear. So then the Director has to figure out what the courts really meant and then implement some new internal procedures and rules to adhere to those rulings, which is a bit like herding cats. And they have to fill in a lot of gaps too, because again it's not like the courts sit down and figure it all out, they just rule on the narrow issues presented to them.

Let's end with an example. What is eligible to be patented? The legislature last weighed in on this question in 1952 with 35 U.S. Code § 101. The Supreme Court hears a case on this topic like ever 5 years or so on average (roughly). The last big one was Alice in 2014. Then, the lower courts (Fed. Cir.) started to get a trickle of cases about what that Supreme Court ruling really meant over the years, and the Fed. Cir. hears these somewhat frequently, like every couple of months or so. But, the whole time, the USPTO has been trying to follow the ruling of Alice from 2014, and it's been a moving target to some extent based on Fed. Cir. rulings. Go look at the USPTO's 101 training page [1]. This is what the Director and those under her have been doing for the last few years. Scrambling to figure out what the courts are saying and devising training and rules to implement it. There is a lot of leeway and gap- filling in this process! And ultimately, if you want to get a patent issued, what the Director says is what matters. What happens after that is all in the judicial branch, but patents are presumed to be valid and the Director is the one who issues patents. Her job is incredibly important to the functioning of the US patent system, and doing it well is important to all of us. For the most part, Director Lee was respected and admired by the patent bar and she will be missed!

[1] [https://www.uspto.gov/patent/laws-and- regulations/examinatio...](https://www.uspto.gov/patent/laws-and- regulations/examination-policy/subject-matter-eligibility)

EDIT: just for anyone who reads my conclusion and then goes to the IP Watchdog link and thinks I'm off base, just be aware that that site and it's author are somewhat extremist in their views and don't necessarily represent the majority opinion of all patent practitioners. My opinion is that the PTAB and its implementation has been an overall win for patents and the country at large. As is the crack down on 101. The end result of both is that prosecutors are putting much more effort into writing 'good' patents to navigate these treacherous waters and that can only be a good thing. And I've also seen lots of bad patents killed by the PTAB, which again is only a good thing.

</comment></comment><comment> gat-bitty I was an examiner about 10 years ago, that job is miserable. It is not surprising that anyone would leave.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm vaguely wondering if this is happening now because the tech industry publicly opposed Trump on the Paris Agreement. It's pretty well known that he makes decisions based on loyalty and payback.

They probably won't even nominate a replacement for six months at the rate we're going, so expect the status quo for a long while.

<comment><USER5> I highly doubt that. The patent office has it's own problems as reported to HN.[1] I think the real 'fork in the road' is politics behind the scenes. I haven't read anything about the "MAGA" philosphy on American Innovation but I have heard of cuts to government funded programs like the EPA. So it's either going to get better because someone realized that innovation is they key to success(hopefully..please god...just something) or worse because it's viewed as another bureaucracy and thus cut to save money.

[1]([https://hn.algolia.com/?query=patent%20problems&sort=byPopul...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=patent%20problems&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story))</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How old is too old to be a newcomer in web development? - <AUTHOR> I keep reading stories of ageism from people who are much more experienced than me and it scares me of how hard, if not impossible, it will be for me to get my first job (38).<p>I cannot imagine how being 35 going back for a degree would feel like given that they'll graduate at best when they're near 40. <comment><USER2> you can be any age for example '82-year-old Masako Wakamiya first began working she still used an abacus for maths - today she is one of the world's oldest iPhone app developers, a trailblazer in making smartphones accessible for the elderly.'

if you want to become a developer majority of the community would be supportive :)</comment>


Drug giants threaten UK health service with legal action over cheaper drug - cirrus-clouds https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/nov/01/drug-giants-threaten-nhs-with-legal-action-over-cheaper-drug-that-could-save-84m-a-year <comment><AUTHOR> What amazes me is how craven our politicians are to these companies. For god's sake, just threaten them with complete withdrawal of their access to the UK market unless they comply! The public would back the government 100%. Other countries seem to use this exact same treatment of bad behaviour by big pharma and apparently it works for them.</comment>


Opera detects its fifth tau neutrino - <AUTHOR> http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2015/06/opera-detects-its-fifth-tau-neutrino

<comment><USER2> Anyone know if this is this similar to the oscillation that many people think accounts for the surprising mass of the 125 Higg's reported at the LHC? I was surprised to read this as though it was something unique to neutrinos when I had heard that theory proposed before. (edit: mind you, I've only heard it as a possible explanation for Higgs bosons, whereas this is significant proof for neutrinos).

For anyone interested, I recently finished Don Lincoln's "The Quantum Frontier: The Large Hadron Collider" and "The Large Hadron Collider" (they're kind of a series, although they have a lot of overlap). It's an excellent coverage of the theory and practice of particle physics, and although he doesn't cover the OPERA experiment at all,

<comment><USER3> Regarding the Higgs mass, there are two basic camps in particle physics. Some believe the Higgs mass is just a constant of nature (just like the electron mass, or the speed of light), and there's nothing "surprising" about it, it's just what it is. Others believe that this mass is surprising because of "naturalness" issues -- the idea that this mass should have been more closely related to other fundamental constants, namely the Planck mass. However it is possible to view this suspicion as an aesthetic issue of the underlying mathematical framework (QFT). One of the main motivating features of Supersymmetry is to reconcile this difference by providing a mechanism by which the Higgs mass "naturally" becomes much less than the Planck mass. However many SUSY theories have been tightly constrained by recent experiments, requiring ever more contrived ways to cause this "natural" cancellation for a Higgs at 125 GeV.

The oscillation of neutrinos is completely different. In the standard model of particle physics, neutrinos are treated as identically massless. However, experiments have shown that one flavor of neutrino can spontaneously transmute into another flavor. This phenomenon is (as far as we know) only possible if the neutrino has some (albeit tiny) mass. This has been observed extensively by other experiments that showed electron/muon neutrino oscillation, but OPERA is providing a direct measurement of muon->tau neutrino mixing.

<comment><USER4> Excellent! Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How can they tell it's from the beam and not from say, the Sun? Or other random galactic neutrinos?

<comment><USER6> I'm guessing the sun is easily ruled out based on the direction the neutrino was travelling (as measured by the momentum of the particle produced when the neutrino interacts with something).

"Random galactic neutrinos" are probably a statistical exclusion: Although there _could_ be a tau neutrino coming from the same direction as the experimental neutrino source, there aren't enough of them to create any significant chance of the observation being anything other than an experimental neutrino.</comment></comment>


The Inevitability of Physical Laws: Why the Higgs Has to Exist (2012) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOEoffh6WTs <comment><USER2> ~2:35 > "In 2002, he moved to Harvard to become full professor there, and will remain there until he joins our faculty of the institute in 2008"

I don't understand; when was this recorded? The Higgs Boson was discovered in 2012, and he refers to that event. Why is he referring to 2008 in the future tense?

EDIT: It sounds like it is from the later part of 2012.

<comment><USER3> I'm a native English speaker - I feel it's totally valid to talk about a past event in the future tense as used here. I can't explain why, but I've heard it been used before and doesn't seem ambiguous or incorrect.

Edit: tho the past tense is preferable.

<comment><USER4> Inconsistently used here, but it's the historical present:

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

For some reason, I hear a old-style narration over a documentary film when I hear this tense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Doe anyone know where I could find a more in-depth explanation of why there can only be 0, 1/2, 1, 3/2, 2 spin fundamental particles??

<comment><USER6> If you're asking about why there's an upper limit to the spin, this Quora thread had some good info (Simmons-Duffin is a top notch expert on field theory): [https://www.quora.com/Why-are-there-no-spin-3-2-or-higher- fu...](https://www.quora.com/Why-are-there-no-spin-3-2-or-higher-fundamental- particles-in-the-standard-model-of-particle-physics) Short answer is that for too high a spin the theories become non-renormalizable and break down [i.e. require additional physics to enter] going to ever shorter length scales.

If you're asking why it goes in steps of 1/2 it's a group representation theory thing (guessing you probably already know about that).

<comment><USER5> I was mostly referring to the point in the talk where he claims that just relativity and quantum mechanics is enough to imply that there are no spins higher than 2, he kind of skips over that part.

In that view I'm not convinced renormalizability is a strong enough property, since the graviton is famously non-renormalizeable (or so it seems, anyway). But I'll have a closer look at the quora thread; maybe someone has a more 'fundamental' argument.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good video, thank you!</comment>


Angela Merkel: Europe must take 'our fate' into own hands - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.eu/article/angela-merkel-europe-cdu-must-take-its-fate-into-its-own-hands-elections-2017/ <comment><USER2> For context:

Please take note that general elections (for the "Bundestag") will be held in the end of September 2017. Everything that will be published now and in the next months by the German media may very well be part of a campaign scheme.

</comment><comment><USER3> Self-reliance? Fight for our own future and destiny? Europe First? Sounds vaguely familiar.

<comment><USER4> Sounds to me like she's just saying Europe can no longer rely on the US (e.g. NATO), and because of the unpredictable nature of US domestic politics at this point, they need to plan as if Europe may not have reliable US backing.

Trump may very well get his wish to see some of the less rich NATO members spend more money on defense, but it may come at the cost of US leadership.

<comment><USER5> Well if Europe have been keeping at least the minimum required commitments it agreed to as far as NATO goes this wouldn't be an issue.

Trump's remarks are not new these are the same remarks that have been thrown around since Busb senior was in office.

Heck Under Obama Sec Def Gates used much harsher words than Trump.

<comment><USER4> I don't think that's what is bothering NATO, it's Trump's failure to verbally affirm Article 5 of the NATO Treaty.

On the issue of defense spending, different members of NATO have different economic hardships. Do we really expect Greece to crank up defense spending while in a debt crisis and under heavy austerity already? These NATO guidelines have to be somewhat contextual based on reality of economics.

<comment><USER5> Gates said the same thing, in fact he said that the US basically cannot not afford another war unless it's attacked on its own soil and if NATO will not pick up the slack the US will be forced to reconsider its part in the partnership.

This was said in Brussels in front of all of NATO.

The EU have been skimping on its NATO commmitments since the end of the Cold War this isn't a recent development.

Greece is actually meeting it's goals (likely because of its sick waving contest with Turkey) while Germany, France, Italy and even the U.K. do not.

As for Article 5 there has been already blood in the water since Iraq. France basically said that if the US uses Article 5 for Iraq it will ignore it, Germany and Italy were also signaling the same sentiments.

<comment><USER4> Well, in the case of Iraq though, it seems a slam dunk, since Iraq had not attacked any NATO member.

If the US wants other NATO members to step up, then they should reduce payments. Either NATO members will make the determination that the new budget constraints represents an unacceptable level of reduction in capability below which they think is required, or they'll think NATO doesn't need as large a budget.

Realistically, NATO's deterrence effect against Russia comes down to nuclear- MAD. The conventional forces don't matter as much, if NATO is attacked by Russia conventionally, and NATO goes to war, you have a direct hot war between two nuclear equipped entities which is a bit too much risk, so there's little chance of a Russian invasion of a NATO member regardless of NATO conventional defense capabilities.

I think it's likely any conflicts with non-NATO states on the Eurasian continents will likely be proxy conflicts, with NATO and Russia backing different factions, like with the Korean War, Vietnam, and Afghanistan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why is this article flagged?

<comment><USER7> I'm under the impression that people are that fed up with politics these days that every politics article gets flagged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The real question is: why should it be otherwise, and why is this newsworthy at all ?

European countries all claim to be sovereign countries, but surprisingly, not when it's time to pull the credit card out.

<comment><USER9> Assume European countries were all spending 2% of GDP for military capabilities within NATO. What exactly would that buy them?

More military interventions with more refugees arriving at European borders?

There is basically no real threat to European countries atm. Russia is heckling a bit in Ukraine. Supplying Kalashnikovs to separatists and such. But in general, Russia is retreating. With Montenegro joining NATO and things going bad in Syria, Russia is losing access to the Mediterranean sea. And they run out of money quickly!

If things go wrong, special forces (a few hundred men) and French atomic missiles pose enough of a threat for rogue dictators. The large countries can't afford a war, because economic ties are too strong.

Military spending in Europe is exactly where it needs to be. Low. Humanitarian help throughout the world and keeping the inner stability of society (social security, health-care, retirement, ...) gives a lot more bang for the buck. (pun intended)

<comment><USER8> Perfect, then they don't need US' $$ (or NATO) either, so... everybody's happy ?

<comment><USER9> Nah, NATO is required for that to work. It's like a group ticket. The more you are, the cheaper it gets for each individual. NATO only needs to collectively have more capability than the biggest external threat. More than that is overspending.

And the US are not paying $$ for anybodys army. And they know very well how to use their own capabilities outside of NATO and for their own interests.

<comment><USER8> Do you mean overspending as the US currently do, to compensate for European countries are not paying their fair share, while getting most of the outcome ?

Because this is the bottom of it. European countries want the protection, while not paying their share, and making fun on Uncle Sam spending so much on their military, and not enough on their social program.

<comment><USER9> The US spends more on military than the next 8 countries combined. A quarter of that would be enough for NATO, which is for defense only, now that the Cold War is over.

Europeans don't want the US playing global super power. They don't need it. And they ain't paying for it.

<comment><USER8> So, we do agree that NATO is a thing of the past and that the US, _as well_ , can lower their payment to the organisation ?

[the answer to this question is of course "no", European countries still want the US to be paying for their "protection".]</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


CERN starts first lead collisions in upgraded Large Hadron Collider - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/11/cern-starts-first-lead-collisions-in-upgraded-large-hadron-collider/ <comment><USER2> What would be the advantages of only colliding electrons rather than bigger nucleus?

Seems that since the collisions are more energetic the chance of new discoveries would be increased, no?

Edit: one of the comments on the article mention " A much more useful measure of the energy is the center of momentum energy per nucleon (either a proton or neutron). This is the energy that would be available between a single scattering of two nucleons. We only accelerate charged particles, so when we collide Pb 208 which contains 82 protons at the equivalent of proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV, have 13 TeV * 82 / 208 = 5.125 TeV/nucleon" so it seems the energy per particle is smaller

<comment><USER3> An electron is a truly elementary particle. This means that in an e-e collision, you know precisely the center-of-mass energy of the resulting interaction. A proton, on the other hand, is _not_ a fundamental particle: it's composed of quarks and gluons, so even if we know that the proton's energy is 7 TeV, we don't know which fraction is carried by each of the proton's constiuents. And since interactions happen between the constituents, the center-of-mass energy is not fixed, and generally not known with high precision.

It's therefore much better to probe for unknown phenomena using a hadron collider (e.g., a proton-proton or ion-ion) since with a single beam energy you can potentially produce interactions at a wide range of center-of-mass energy. However, if you know the center-of-mass energy of the processe(s) you need to study, a lepton (e.g. electron-electron) collider is more suitable since you can precisely tune the center-of-mass energy of the interactions.

It's also possible to collide electrons with protons. This was done for example at the HERA collider at DESY in Hamburg in the 90's/00's to study the inner structure of the proton.

<comment><USER4> Not native speaker, so apologies for the bad english.

Just wanted to to add to untitled's comment: electron-on-proton collisions are still being done at Jefferson Lab in Newport News, VA. It just doesn't get as much press as CERN with its impressive PR machine (which I have nothing against). The motivation is the same as at HERA: understand the structure of protons, with the added possibility of polarizing the electron beam or the proton target, which allows to access components of the nucleon structure that are otherwise not accessible. As a bonus, they also have photon beams that collide with proton target exciting different interaction channels.

To come back to gp's question, one can in principle collide anything with anything, but the ideal tool really depends on what one wants to study. Attaining ever higher energy is not necessarily the ultimate goal. Even though it is useful to explore new boundaries, there are also a lot of unanswered questions that can be addressed with much lower energy collisions. For example the Jefferson Lab beam maxes out at 12 GeV, orders of magnitude lower than that available at the LHC, but it's still an extremely useful machine.

Also the comment quoted by gp from the article is wrong. Even though only the protons respond to the electromagnetic fields of the accelerator, the whole nucleus is accelerated. Therefore if the pairs of protons attain a center-of- mass energy of 13TeV, the same holds true for the neutrons, because (1) neutrons have very similar mass as protons (2) neutrons are dragged along for the ride, as they are bound to the protons by a force that is much much stronger than that of the electromagnetic forces involved in acceleration. (It is not true that only protons are accelerated). So the available energy per pair of colliding nucleon (whether it is proton or neutron) is still 13TeV, and the total energy potentially available in the center-of-mass system is 13 TeV * 208 = 2.704 PeV. However, not all of it necessarily released, since the number of nucleon-nucleon collisions that can take place is dependent on the area overlap between the two.</comment></comment></comment>


Skype confirms open source client plans - <AUTHOR> http://share.skype.com/sites/linux/2009/11/skype_open_source.html

<comment><USER2> Not open source ___client_ __, just __ _UI_ __. I won't let that near my PC any more than before.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed, sorry, I realised my mistake when it was too late to edit. I think the best that could come out of this is a unified interface (eg, pidgin) for those that do want to run it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Given the current legal quagmire that is the joltid/skype/ebay saga, I doubt they could open source the whole thing even if they wanted to.

</comment><comment><USER4> to me it _sounds_ as if they have had enough of pulseaudio and all the HDA and chipset mess... just provide an encrypted blob binary for skype's functions, and croudsource the rest, building on their proprietary platform...

</comment><comment><USER5> Skype becomes AIM in 3..2..</comment>


Understanding and Measuring Vitamix Horsepower - <AUTHOR> http://joyofblending.com/vitamix-horsepower/ <comment><AUTHOR> To me, the most interesting statistic in the article is that the overall efficiency of heating water with a Vitamix blender is 68-69%. That is, more than 2/3 of the input wattage coming from the wall goes to heating the mixture being blended. The overall efficiency of heating a cup of water in a microwave oven, by contrast, is usually less than 50%.[1]

I find that to be a remarkably high efficiency. It's obviously less efficient than an immersion resistance heater (100% efficiency since all the "waste" heat is absorbed), but I wouldn't have guessed that the high speed motor would be that efficient in converting electricity into rotational motion.

[1] Tom Murphy measures 43% for a microwave oven here (as well as figures for other approaches): [http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/05/burning- desire-f...](http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/05/burning-desire-for- efficiency/)

</comment><comment><USER2> OK, now I want to try boiling water with my Vitamix.

As an added bonus, after 11.5 minutes of listening to a Vitamix on high, you won't need that cup of coffee to wake up.

<comment><USER3> I know! Holy shit, I did not know that you could boil water purely by means of subjecting it to the motion induced by a blender.

 _Update:_ from the sound of things, it's the action of the blades and the friction induced by their interaction with the water[1], rather than the swirling motion of the water itself, which sounded kind of ridiculous.

[1] [http://frozendrink.com/vitamix/household.html](http://frozendrink.com/vitamix/household.html)

<comment><USER4> There's blade-water friction as well as water-water friction. The link you provided does not quantify their relative contributions. [edit: Actually, I'm not even sure how much blade-water friction there is, due to the boundary layer effect.]

There is also heating from cavitation bubbles collapsing in the water. If you look up cavitation heaters you will find a wacky rabbit hole with unsubstantiated claims about achieving heating efficiencies over unity. However, apparently there are some industrial processes that benefit from cavitation heating by getting even liquid heating and avoiding heating elements that can develop scaling. More info: [http://hydrodynamics.com/cavitation-technology/scale-free- he...](http://hydrodynamics.com/cavitation-technology/scale-free-heating/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Indeed, in the early days, horsepower was used to describe how many draft horses a steam engine could replace._

Is this an example of engineering marketing? Probably: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsepower#History_of_the_unit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsepower#History_of_the_unit)</comment>


3Blue1Brown and the Beauty of Mathematics [video] - <AUTHOR> https://lexfridman.com/grant-sanderson/ <comment><USER2> Worth looking at Grant's graphics library made for and used in his videos: [https://github.com/3b1b/manim/](https://github.com/3b1b/manim/)

</comment><comment><USER3> If Grant is not on NPR or PBS within five years I would be very surprised. He has a very distinctive voice. I find it kind of annoying but it's one of those voices that as soon as you hear it you know who it is.

<comment><USER4> > If Grant is not on NPR or PBS within five years I would be very surprised.

Do you mean as an appearance or with his own programme?

<comment><USER3> He's the next Robert Krulwich!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Playback on other websites has been disabled by the video owner.

Seems like a misconfiguration for Lex to embed his videos in his site then disable embedding.

</comment><comment><USER6> \- Why is the nature of reality so compressible into clean beautiful equations that are for the most part simple?

\- The only things that physicists are interested in are the ones that are simple enough they could describe it mathematically but as soon as it's sufficiently complex system that's outside the realm of physics, that's biology or whatever have you...

So true!

</comment><comment><USER7> While Lex gets interesting people on his podcast, he seems to focus so much on "beauty" in his interviews that nothing substantive ever gets said. He's constantly asking "what do you find to be the most beautiful about X?" and asking other highly speculative and un-substantive questions. I wish he would ask questions aimed and allowing the interviewer to spend the most time delivering high yield information. This is meant as constructive feedback not as mere complaining.

<comment><USER8> If a man is concerned with abstract ideas then perhaps that's all he contributes to the world. Some people want to see things a certain way and will sacrifice their lives for seeing it that way, that's the beauty of life, people are free to choose the good, the beautiful, and the true or any combination of each which is their own beauty, truth, or good in whatever order they choose it. No one can step in are correct them if they think they are wrong, it's not their right. It's the right of people to choose to live a certain way and to experience the world in whichever way it's handed to them with whatever premises that they have in their minds.

Take for instance a starving artist. In art it's in fact the case this this is common:

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

Some artists due to their state may for instance cut off their ears like Pablo Picasso. This is a common co-occurrence with art. Society has done nothing to alleviate this problem in that other than a few recognized artists, the large morass go completely unsupported and fall into obscurity. In fact when society tries to rehabilitate such artists they attempt to do some by giving them remedial jobs that do not do justice to their perspective or talent, but such is the fate of the artist in that either they get market recognition or they fall into their own obscurity and may not even be known in their lifetimes.

<comment><USER9> (van Gogh)

<comment><USER10> This is a funny mistake, since Picasso is a contradictory example: he was immensely successful during his lifetime.

<comment><USER11> Another relevant thing I learned about recently is that Dali was apparently considered massive sellout by his peers and seems to have gotten so famous thanks to a strategic move to America.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've got to shake my head at these segments where the interviewer asks a philosophical question without seeming to have the conceptual maturity and framing to reliably go beyond delineating semantics. Luckily, Sanderson goes above and beyond.

10:31 – Is math discovered or invented?

The way it was posed sounds like it was asking for a dogmatic judgment on the nature of doing math, but I like Sanderson's take on how it looks to him, that certain mathematical problems seem discovered, and the mathematical tools developed to solve them and the frameworks they become seem invented.

14:30 – Difference between physics and math

Rather than tackling the philosophical question directly, Sanderson talks about the motivations mathematicians and physicists have when they do math / do physics, and that different people will give different answers.

17:24 – Why is reality compressible into simple equations?

Again, Sanderson provides a saner view: this feeling comes from that once you analyze out all your irrelevant details that you don't care about, or that you give up about (chaotic systems), what's left is what you can focus on by describing in simple equations.

<comment><USER13> "Is math discovered or invented?" is a question that underlies a lot of math philosophy writings I've read (of the popular science variety) and so I could immediately understand where Lex was going with it. It is a simple question which can elicit as much depth one is willing to dive into.

Similarly I thought all of Lex's questions came from deep understanding of what he was asking, and he would've known clearly what Sanderson would've replied (minus his personal insights) and what other competing answers are out there.

I love Lex Friedman's interviews - he simply asks a small but fertile question and then lets the guest talk.

<comment><USER14> Me too, I really enjoy the perspective he takes, quite unique, but not to everyone's liking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> According to the provided by the UN, genocide requires acting with intent to destroy.

> ... committed with intent to destroy ...

[https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml](https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml)</comment>


Apple lays out MobileMe transition, iCloud web apps coming this fall - <AUTHOR> http://thisismynext.com/2011/06/24/apple-icloud-web-apps-mobileme/ <comment><USER2> I hope they get it right this time!

I'm excited about it...</comment>


How to Make Custom AI-Generated Text with GPT-2 - <AUTHOR> https://minimaxir.com/2019/09/howto-gpt2/ <comment><USER2> If you want examples of AI-generated Hacker News titles (made pretty much the same way as the Reddit example in this post), check out this repo: [https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news- gpt-2](https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-gpt-2)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wolfram has a GPT-2 interface that can be beckoned with two lines of code: [https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/user-900a994f-78ab-4931-b18...](https://www.wolframcloud.com/obj/user-900a994f-78ab-4931-b18e-353eff4d0b33/1143236222823602259835271068650786074616893186089.png)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm curious what Google might be doing to combat content/link farms created for SEO purposes using this.

<comment><USER5> There's a tool for that: [http://gltr.io/dist/index.html](http://gltr.io/dist/index.html)

"Each text is analyzed by how likely each word would be the predicted word given the context to the left. If the actual used word would be in the Top 10 predicted words the background is colored green, for Top 100 in yellow, Top 1000 red, otherwise violet."

<comment><USER6> What if I find out what is the supposedly "non-fake" distribution of green/yellow/red/violet words, and generate my text accordingly?

Generally, whenever your detection strategy is "a spam generator would never do X", I simply update my spam generator to do X. (Note that "X" must be something that is relatively easy to calculate, not things like "this actually makes sense", because it must be something your detector can recognize.)

Also, if Google suddenly started penalizing all text that doesn't "seem natural", there would be tons of false positives: languages other than English, jargon-heavy websites, dyslectic people, etc.

<comment><USER7> Non-native speakers writing text also comes to mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> With the risk of being downvoted, what's the point of ai generating text knowing that it will never understand it like we do and having in mind that poor non AI generated text is already being used for mostly nefarious reasons? As a problem I understand the fascination with it, human languages are extremely complex things and mimmicking it has been proven complicated, but beyond that, what is a practical purpose for this?

<comment><USER2> Because it's fun. Which is practical enough!

I do have ideas for more practical content generation but those do not currently have plans to be made public.

<comment><USER8> Enjoy if it is fun. I simply hope you won't use it or enable others to use it for any nefarious means. I once entertained the thought that one day we may be able to ai generate novels. And the more i thought about it the more pointless it seemed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> minimaxir's gpt-2-simple is a very nice work to get anyone start with Text Generation from the models released by OpenAI. I often wonder how can one keep up so much with the fast-paced NLP and produce things that abstracts the pain and exposes simple functions for developers to on it.

Hugging Face is another such company making massive impact among non-NLP developers to use such resources.

Kudos to these guys!

<comment><USER2> tl;dr I just keep an eye on GPT-2-related news on Twitter.

I have no advance knowledge of any GPT-2 related happenings, which has become inconvenient as OpenAI likes to release things when I am on vacation. :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Thanks for sharing. I have been hearing a lot of buzzword regarding this archtecture, so I checked out the blog.

I quickly glanced through it but will do a deeper dive later on.

The outputted paragraphs don't seem to realistic. However you point out that the text needs to be longer for a more a natural output.

I am genuinely curious how relalistic it can get.

<comment><USER7> Check out [https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2Meta/top/](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2Meta/top/)

In my personal experience I get fooled by the bots far too often, it's actually really scary, I can imagine it being used nefariously to push a specific political agenda, spam places, do SEO fraud etc. etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very nice. I'm going to have some fun taking a crack using this with some of the funnier stuff I've seen on twitter.</comment>


MoD's secret cyberwarfare: 'Less about hacking grids, more about hacking minds' - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/mar/16/mod-secret-cyberwarfare-programme

<comment><USER2> > The Ministry of Defence is developing a secret, multimillion-pound research > programme into the future of cyberwarfare, including how emerging > technologies such as social media and psychological techniques can be > harnessed by the military to influence people's beliefs.

They should rename it to Ministry of Truth, then.

<comment><USER3> I think Ministry of Funny Walks has more going for it. After all they want to control the direction we go thru input and how they walk us there, be it newspaper media or other tricks would only work for the targeted group and then there are always exceptions to the rules.

But if they fail to get budgeting for research over the years is when you know they are failing at this approach.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A Brutalist-Design Chat Web App - <AUTHOR> https://brutal.chat <comment><USER2> /rooms doesn't show any rooms. Is there anyone to chat with? :)

</comment><comment><USER3> I tried it on android and when you press space it makes you wait to type again

</comment><comment><USER4> Doesn't seem to work on android

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah... :/ I couldn't test it with android.

Apparently you can type, just not with the spacebar.</comment></comment>


Cewebrity Interview: Pek Pongpaet of Pinstagram - <AUTHOR> http://cewebrity.co/uncategorized/episode-pek-pongpaet-of-pinstagram/

<comment><USER2> "Cewebrity"? That made me think "Be vewy vewy quiet, I'm hunting wabbits" ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> LOL. I was actually going for the blending of the terms "Celebrity" and "Web", hence "CeWEBrity". But I see the Elmer Fudd interpretation being valid too :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I hate the headline, but Pek is the real deal. I'm also a big fan of Pinstagram, so I might be more than a little biased.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Note: If fellow hackers would like to be considered for an interview on a future episode, please refer to this HN post: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4127237></comment>


Facebook launches job search app - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2012/11/14/technology/social/facebook-social-jobs-app/

<comment><USER2> Is it time to create a new Facebook account? I am so totally not liking this.</comment>


Another German regional government is switching from Linux to Windows - <AUTHOR> https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3036673/another-german-regional-government-is-switching-from-linux-to-microsoft-windows <comment><USER2> It always hits the nerve to hear that a public organization is moving back to MS from FOSS, but I wish this kind of demand(from governments) would lead to a open company that is strictly focused on developing an alternative to Windows desktop. Linux is heavily pulled in the server direction, and we need a company other than RedHAt who can pull Linux ecosystem a bit together to build an opinionated but coherent desktop.

Trying to support all of the email clients, calendar tools and obscure media decoders will never lead us to an usable Linux based Desktop.

<comment><USER3> If you consider that every municipality in EU (or world) has similiar problems and the costs for running Microsoft and other commercial software is quite high everywhere I really don't know why the EU doesn't start some public company or organisation and polish the existing open-source tools.

It's probably considered anti-competitive but let's image they scrap 1 billion of their budgets and invest in opensource:

\- polish Samba to be a viable Windows Server replacement. Replication, missing Kerberos functionality, Implement ADWS, ADFS - maybe Exchange APIs. Save millions on server costs.

\- unfuck LibreOffice, develop a strong foundation to implement typical processes

\- polish KDE / Plasma to macOS/Windows usability/stability \- rewrite kmail/korganizer with modern usability/ui

Not sure if that's possible but it feels like a lot of things are 60-80% done - maybe taking a leap and fixing the other 60-80% might make a difference.

\- have an EU wide service agency that supports municipalities in implementing OSS

\- demand opensource software for public money.

\- create strong open standards and enforce them by law for public institutions.

maybe it will take 5 to 10 years but everyone should profit.

<comment><USER4> It's an unsubstantiated claim but my impression is that governments are not good at managing companies.

Who gets to decide if it's better to use LibreOffice or OpenOffice? What are the features that are the most important for the office replacement? How is it going to be supported? Is there a line where people can call to complain about the product? Taking all that OSS and packaging it sounds a lot like running a company, especially when multiple "consumers" are involved.

<comment><USER3> Good questions. Maybe something like a cooperative¹ that is independed of the states? Such a project could probably even be refinanced by users who pay for consulting.

How to organize this in such a way that it will be successfull and efficient? Let's start researching it now.

It's such a shame how European universities and every other part of the state is switching to Microsoft because the on-premise alternatives mostly suck.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I feel like there are two models for desktop computing—one that is very hard to accommodate for a traditional enterprise, and another where Linux is very well suited.

If one is looking for a managed solution with heavyweight apps including an office suite, email / calendar, etc., then anything other than Windows is going to be unsatisfactory to people who expect Windows. I even include macOS with Linux in that assessment. Let's call this model of centralized control of fat clients the culmination of the 1990s enterprise desktop.

On the other hand, if a company has gone down the road of Google / web apps for everything, then Linux starts to be a very effective bootloader for a web browser.

Personally, I like the fat-client model of the 1990s, and feel that Linux best satisfies my desires. But it's hard to deny the comprehensiveness of Windows & Active Directory for those enterprises that also want to stick to this model.

The web-only model feels a little too lean to me. In any enterprise, there are bound to be instances where web apps aren't going to cut it.

This is where I have hopes for Chrome OS once it begins to support native Linux apps. At that point, it's not a thin client, and it's not a fat client. I wonder then if we may see some of these enterprises walk back from Windows.

<comment><USER6> I think we are a long way from anyone walking back from Windows. It will be an uphill battle for Google due to the lack of privacy awareness (I'm not saying Microsoft is better or worse, just that Google is not looked upon kindly in the privacy regard)

<comment><USER5> Perhaps. But I also think that, of the people who are sticking to the heavyweight fat-client model of computing, some are doing so for technical reasons and others are doing so for principled reasons. If Google's softening on the "everything must be a web app" removes the technical barriers, I could imagine an expansion of Chrome OS.

As a paying FastMail customer, I'm right there with you on Google's privacy posture. But given the number of corporate G-Suite customers, I don't think principled rejection of Google over privacy concerns is the major impediment to Chrome OS adoption.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> yoz-y I was under the impression that most of the administrative work was now done in a browser anyways. I wonder what exactly they get by switching to windows, better fleet management tools maybe?

<comment><USER7> I think the assumption is incorrect. The Microsoft Office suite is used a lot, IIUC

<comment><USER8> Concur. The office suite and surrounding ecosystem (Exchange, Sharepoint) are king in enterprise environments. The latest versions run poorly or not at all on anything other than Windows.

<comment><USER9> But the linux alternative for those tools are exceptionally decent and free.

<comment><USER10> What's a better Linux alternative than Outlook? I've tried Thunderbird and I'm not impressed.

I've noticed that a lot of Linux users equate "free" (as in price) with "better", and this isn't necessarily so.

<comment><USER11> Kontact was KDE's attempt at integrating its productivity stuff into one app, I liked it for a while when I lived in email+calendar world, but I don't think it speaks Exchange if that's what you mean.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Linux Foundation needs to run a hardware support testing program for desktop linux to be successful. In a situation where hardware manufacturers don't support linux and there's no regression testing for community developed drivers, it will never be successful.

</comment><comment><USER13> In my opinion, Munich's Linux project could have been saved if they invested a little in the UI part. It was horrible out of date, a pain to use and looked like something out of a 90's geocities web page.

The work flows were slow and had too many unnecessary clicks.

</comment><comment><USER14> If Linux (or somebody) would focus on the UI and stability in a the non- perfect world of the dumb tweaks I do to change the gem color on my flux capacitors, I think it would be viable, but right now, Linux feels like owning a fish tank, and I can't do business on a fish tank, even though I really want to.

</comment><comment><USER15> They will heavily regret this decision.

If MS was offering them "cheap N years contract," than it is already decided that they will jack up prices the second their contract expires.

<comment><USER16> > They will heavily regret this decision.

Unlikely. Yes, this is a political decision as most actual users of the systems were ok with the linux client. However, the article is a bit misleading. They are bringing the systems used by a subdepartment of the states department of finance in line with the stack used within the remainder of the department (about 1/3 were linux clients, the state already owns over 50.000 other windows clients (lower estimate, most likely more if you include organization which manage their own infrastructure (like universities)), they know what to expect from microsoft). While the systems worked it always required special attention when interoperating with other states (for example: certain informationrequests by other states are standardized between all states (based on a shared windows solution). Lower saxonian employees could not interact with it directly and had to rely on their inhouse solution instead of reusing the existing and proven solution used by all other states). There are notable costs associated to beeing a special flower while maintining conformance to financial regulations.

Yes, I believe that biting the bullet and migrating more departments to open systems would be the better longterm solution (which would also force vendors to port their solutions). But there will be several elections before that pays off and would require a significant investment before the benefits show (and possible coordination between the states) and in the midterm moving to Windows might be the better option. Moving to linux doesn't win an election, but failing to move to linux might loose you one.

However, even after the move about 1/4 to 1/3 of the computers/servers owned by the state will run linux/bsd (iirc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > This time it's all about the roving staff, who aren't using OpenSUSE and > didn't use Solaris before it. They've always been Windows users and it seems > that officials feel it might be time for a bit of consistency.

So my takeaway is that someone at the top was pissed off that he had to use an e-mail client other than Outlook and made a multi-million dollar infrastructure decision based on that.

<comment><USER18> I've worked on a number of large rollout projects where multiple vendors have been considered.

When you tell a CEO/CFO/CIO that you can bundle OS, updates, productivity tools, communication/colab tools all in to one monthly bill they almost always take the MS route. The predictability of the financing is the key thing helping MS kill it in enterprise.

It also helps that 90% of their staff have never known anything else and will need very little training.

<comment><USER19> > very little training

That's the worst assuption ever. Not because everyone uses tool X, everyone understands how to make it work properly. Did you _ever_ try to move a picture from a document you got from M. Johnson? You'll get a headache because moving that one picture will fuck up your title formatting in page 13 and the table in page 2.

Everyone using MS Office I met could use a good week-long training session about do's and don't's, how to write proper documents, presentations that don't suck, etc.

<comment><USER20> Well, the users usually _think_ they don't need training, and isn't that all that counts?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are comprehensive resources to learn digital product design? - <AUTHOR> I'm a software developer (mainly web) with an interest in design. I believe I have a good intuition from my experience working with designers, but I would like to turn this into more solid knowledge.
I'm struggling to find a comprehensive resource that teaches me graphic design and digital product design foundations such as color theory, spacing, rhythm, and most likely other concepts I haven't heard about yet.
I need something that guides me through the world of design, and not an aggregation of articles (of which I already read a lot).
Any ideas? <comment><USER2> I usually point folks to a few top-notch online courses:

[https://www.coursera.org/calarts](https://www.coursera.org/calarts)

[https://dschool.stanford.edu/resources](https://dschool.stanford.edu/resources)

[https://designlab.ucsd.edu/education/online- education/](https://designlab.ucsd.edu/education/online-education/)

[https://www.gv.com/sprint/](https://www.gv.com/sprint/)

But what I find particularly helpful is looking at how elite firms do "process". Before developing the product, it may be necessary to cement the pipeline, the workflow

[https://www.pentagram.com/work/mit-media- lab](https://www.pentagram.com/work/mit-media-lab)

[http://www.appliedaesthetics.org/ART132-01/19/NEXT.pdf](http://www.appliedaesthetics.org/ART132-01/19/NEXT.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> The PDF book "Refactoring UI" has been a helpful reference as it focuses on UI design for apps and websites. Some free articles from the book are available on the site:

\- Building your color palette: [https://refactoringui.com/previews/building- your-color-palet...](https://refactoringui.com/previews/building-your-color- palette/)

\- Labels are a last resort: [https://refactoringui.com/previews/labels-are-a- last-resort/](https://refactoringui.com/previews/labels-are-a-last-resort/)

This article from learnui.design provides a quick and dirty overview about some basic design principles that non-designers tend to not think about:

\- [https://learnui.design/blog/why-beginning-designers-dont- nee...](https://learnui.design/blog/why-beginning-designers-dont-need-grids- type-scales-color-theory.html)</comment>


First Round Capital Holiday Video 2011 - Rebecca Black Parody - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HP4HiZt3DFE <comment><USER2> Think of all the poor, unfed, startup founders and their children that could have been funded instead of having this video produced... when... when will someone think of the children.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am dumber for having watched this....still it was funny/corny.

</comment><comment><USER4> Take the second most downvoted video on YouTube, parody it, ???, PROFIT</comment>


Safari's default media controls blocked when applying a Content-Security-Policy - <AUTHOR> https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/safari-csp-media-controls <comment><USER2> _> This can be a security risk as a data URI is considered to be equivalent to the unsafe-inline source._

wow. This is absolutely as insecure as `unsafe-inline` IMHO. I wonder why the spec doesn't mandate the `unsafe-` prefix for `data` too.

CSP really feels a bit half-baked between the various browsers. With the issue brought up here, all major browsers with CSP support have some annoying or even show-stopping bugs:

\- Chrome treats responses with `content-type: application/pdf` as responses rendered with a plugin even though Chrome renders PDFs without the need for a plugin to be installed (the fact it's a plugin doing the rendering is an implementation detail). So if you want to even just link to PDFs, you have to enable `object-src`

\- Firefox treats scripts running from bookmarklets as being scripts that are directly on the page. This means that unless you list `script-src: unsafe- inline`, your CSP policy can disable the user's ability to use bookmarklets. This is the single instance where a site owner has control over the user agent without the user having ultimate veto powers.

<comment><USER3> Bookmarklets are Dead… …we just don't know it yet. [https://medium.com/making- instapaper/bookmarklets-are-dead-d...](https://medium.com/making- instapaper/bookmarklets-are-dead-d470d4bbb626)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is consistent with expected behavior from my point of view. A bug in safari's controls would not infect the website. The site clearly sends a policy and safari clearly follows it. Perfectly sensible behavior.

Of course CSP does not allow a way to say -> browser controls are okay. Hence, a debate is quite welcome on whether such a specification is needed.</comment>


Show HN: Share cancelled conference posters virtually - <AUTHOR> https://virtualpostersession.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey all - I created this, after receiving a 3rd "cancelled conference" email in as many days, I realized while driving home that this is going to be (at least) a few really slow months for research dissemination.

Happy to answer any questions!

FYI for the technical folks, I was able to whip this up in a day using some really amazing resources: [https://tailwindui.com](https://tailwindui.com) basically has some great copy-pasteable HTML templates, and [https://undraw.co](https://undraw.co) has lots of royalty-free svg graphics. Minimal data collection app in Go for the backend.

<comment><USER2> I was very confused by your usage of the word "poster" and "poster session". I had to go look up the meaning of "Poster Session". I've literally never heard the term used in relation to tech conferences in decades of geekery. Maybe I'm a weird edge case, but I doubt it. If you're interested in this being used for Non-academic / scientific presentations I'd suggest different wording.

for the other geeks who don't know what's going on with this "poster" stuff.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Along the same vein: If you'd like to give that slides-based talk and share online: [https://presentio.us/](https://presentio.us/)

<comment><USER4> Website loaded so slowly on my 4g I noped out of there

<comment><USER5> Agreed it could use some optimization.

Almost 15mb to load the homepage, with 1mb images like the following [https://presentio.us/img/ss/201904.recordings.png](https://presentio.us/img/ss/201904.recordings.png)

A whopping 53mb for the content page. [https://storage.googleapis.com/spork- user-media/g7ps4qb42n4....](https://storage.googleapis.com/spork-user- media/g7ps4qb42n4.pngquant.png) seems excessive when I have it in a 500x400 iframe. Perhaps it should load the slides as you progress through the content? Preloading just a few ahead would preserve the experience, which is decent once it shows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> love the usability, freedom to choose any video conference tool and "upload poster from url/upload now/upload later" \- excellent!! good idea and well done

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Trying to reduce friction as much as possible (and save some $$ on hosting costs in the off-chance this actually takes off)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you check a url is valid? - <AUTHOR> So it is trivial to check a url is valid using regex, but if you wanted to take this one step further and make sure it is a valid domain name that is registered and actually in use...how would you do this? I have a few ideas for how to achieve this with a Microservice but I feel like others may have solved this problem before and there may be better solutions out there. <comment><USER2> First, you need to be precise in what you mean by "valid".

"Valid" can encompass at least these four possibilities:

1) the url follows the correct syntax for url's;

2) the url is valid as per #1 and further the "host" portion of the url (when it contains a name) can be resolved to an IP address;

3) the url is valid as per #2 and further there is a server located at the host (and optional port) value encoded in the URL that responds to requests;

4) The url is valid as per #3 and further the path and/or query and fragment parts defines a valid path on the server running at the host:port encoded in the url.

#1 you can do yourself, as it is just a check that the syntax is correct.

All of numbers 2-4 require some form of 'lookup' occur from some other system in order to verify 'validity'.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> So I think in this instance I would deem valid to be: 1) the url is the correct format 2) the url resolves to an ip address 3) the url is registered and is in use. By this I mean it's not one of the "this domain name is for sale" pages.

Number 3 is the novel and challenging piece of this.

</comment><comment><USER3> Check Whois, DNS and make an HTTP request?

This feels like an XY Problem, though. What are you trying to achieve by checking if the URL is valid?

<comment><AUTHOR> That the url is valid

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> curllib will tell you whether there's something there, presuming the network is available.

In fact, a simple HEAD request will suffice for that.

That would also prove that the domain is registered, presuming DNS is working.

<comment><USER3> That's not enough; some registrars keep a domain parked and responding after the registration has expired.

<comment><AUTHOR> And this is exactly the problem I want to solve and the key challenge</comment></comment></comment>


Man died after overdosing on caffeine mints  - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/man-died-after-overdosing-on-caffeine-mints-8874964.html

<comment><USER2> From the article:

"I am sure this is the first time in my experience we have come across what was literally a caffeine overdose. "

The energy mints have been around a long time, as have other high caffeine sources. And yet apparently this sort of tragedy is so completely rare.

Hopefully then, we wont have any alarmists calling for banning something that has been so safe apparently.

<comment><USER3> The article seems to contradict itself:

>Dr Dragana Cvijan, a pathologist, told the court that 79 milligrammes of caffeine has been known to cause death and that a post mortem revealed Mr Jackson had 155 milligrammes in his system when he died.

I think this is to be interpreted to mean that caffeine overdose is not the only way in which caffeine could cause or contribute towards death.</comment></comment>


Thread: House of Cards - <AUTHOR> http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/february/houseOfCards <comment><USER2> Recaps like the ones that the Onion AV Club does seem to be a good place for this kind of discussion. Twitter, not so much.

No spoilers plz, I'm only on the second episode!</comment>


Show HN: I built an open-source kernel for Texas Instruments calculators - <AUTHOR> You know that old TI calculator you used in high school, then put in a box and forgot about? Have you ever wished you had an operating system for your calculator with preemptive multitasking, dynamic memory management, a tree filesystem conforming to the FHS, and all the comforts of Unix?
Well, good news: that's totally a thing that exists.
I've been working on my kernel for about three and a half years now and I'm looking for new contributors to help out. It's written entirely in z80 assembly, and it's both challenging and fun to work on.
There's an IRC channel for contributors or people who are just generally interested. You should stop by! It's #knightos on irc.freenode.net.
https://github.com/KnightOS/kernel <comment><USER2> I wonder what the viability of a similar OS would be on the nSpire platform, which is fully ARM-based IIRC. nSpires have some very nice options for mathematical programming (the CAS being a standout feature) but as far as I know lack anything like this. (Most of the advanced nSpire dev is done on a french-language site that I can't fully understand through Google Translate).

That said my nSpire CAS CX is pretty kitted out even in the TI Kernel with overclocking, file readers, etc. It even runs Doom!

I'm actually amazed that the SAT allows nSpire CAS calculators on their tests (The ACT does not). Apparently the SAT's defining factor for approval is a non-QWERTY keyboard to prevent note input, despite the fact that the nSpire platform allows notes to be transferred to the calculator even before you sideload third-party utilities onto it.

The CAS system also allows pretty much any problem to be solved without complex problem manipulation. Most SAT tutors urge students not to solve algebra on calculators because they invariably make mistakes when transforming functions for solver(), but the nSpire's algebra functions will do all kinds of transformations and solve multi-equation functions without much work. You could even solve a lot of geometry problems with the (built in!) geometry program if you forget theorems, and a little competence with things like modulus will take care of the rest of the test without any human computation (though this is slower than solving on your most of the time)

<comment><USER3> I'm French, so if you want I can help you to understand the website you're interested in.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the offer... thankfully some of my friends are french-fluent as well as the bulk of my family, so I can get help if I need something specific translated. I just haven't gotten around to it yet. If you're personally interested the site is available at

[http://tiplanet.org/](http://tiplanet.org/)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the link. It brings to me lots of nostalgia reminding me the fun I have with my calculators in high school... You're free to ping me by email (in my profile) if you have any specific question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is really a remarkable bit of work. I spent some quality time in the distant past working with CP/M-80 on the Z-80, and it's pretty remarkable what you've done with a very limited platform (relative to now...back then it was the i7 of day). Cudos.</comment>