Ask HN: Could developers use the licensing model professional photographers use? - <AUTHOR> I was recently surprised to learn how professional photographers charge for their work. They charge for their time and expenses such as equipment rental, food, etc but the client never actually owns the IP. The photographer then charges a usage fee separate to their day rate and expenses. For example if its going to be in a magazine thats having 100,000 copies printed they would negotiate a fee for this and any additional use by the client would have to be paid for.
I see software companies as having a similar model where its pay per install etc.
What if independent developers were to adopt a similar charging model? Say I build a website for a company - charge for my time in building the site but then also issue them a monthly bill based on the number of people that have accessed the site. In reality I can't see anyone agreeing to it - but somehow professional photographers are able to charge this way.
In this article: https://fstoppers.com/originals/guide-pricing-commercial-photography-part-4-license-fees-8713
The author gives the example of the woman who designed Nike's logo and only earning $35 because she didn't have a license in place and at the time didn't expect Nike to become the company it has. It seems kinda incredulous to me that this person feels entitled to more money simply because they did a job for someone and was paid for it (presumably a fair amount at the time) and then because their business has done great they should be entitled to be paid more when they haven't really done anything extra to make the company the success it has become. <comment><USER3> When I got married I annoyed many photographers by balking at their rates and then negotiating for copyright ownership. If I'm paying someone $3500 per day, I expect that to be a work-for-hire. If they want to show up for $100 then fine I'll pay per picture.

Anyhow the SaaS model, per-cpu, or per-seat models are pretty much equivalent to how photographers work. The clients own no IP and it's all usage based. Independent contractors can just set up a SaaS that has a one-time fee for customizations, in addition to the normal monthly price (this is usually the last option in the menu, "Call us for pricing").

<comment><USER4> How often were you successful in negotiating to work for hire?

<comment><USER3> Eventually I found a photographer willing to do it. Such photographers are definitely not common though and in talking to about 10 of them, only 2 would assign copyright.

I carved out an exception to allow the photographer use for offline portfolio examples, and for selling prints to invited wedding guests (but as the owner I could print them or share them digitally for free).

<comment><USER5> How did the other 8 attempt to justify retaining copyright to your wedding photos? I've never hired a photographer before, but your expectations sound the same as mine.

<comment><USER6> What it comes down to is nobody who produces art (photography, painting, etc.) wants to be in a situation where their work is being curated or published and they have remove good work because they don't have the rights to their own photos. It could be for anything from a gallery show (many photographers' bread and butter) to one of their online sample books. What makes the issue more complex here is that a photograph captures a moment in time (meaning it can not necessarily be _recaptured_ ) and the perceived implications of that will vary widely from person to person. But again, if you're a photographer who gets _one great photo_ , some perfect moment from a job, you want to be able to do more with it since you can't just tell the client "hey, this photo is _so good_ you need to pay me 10x as much for it!"

(Hopefully that's coherent enough to make sense of, writing multiple things at once now...)

<comment><USER3> From my perspective, not being able to re-sell that one great photo is exactly the deal you're making when hired to do a job. I wrote some pretty cool software for some past employers, and they could sell one of my patents for a few hundred grand, but they also paid me a fair wage so I signed away my rights.

If photographers' bread and butter is gallery shows, then they should come to my wedding for free, or maybe I should charge them admission to cover the costs of the extraordinarily expensive set and costume.

<comment><USER6> > From my perspective, not being able to re-sell that one great photo is > exactly the deal you're making when hired to do a job.

Only as far as the contract says that is so, as at least in the US the implicit agreement is the opposite.[1]

Don't conflate having a client with being employed (I don't think you are, but the second sentence could be read that way). A more realistic understanding of the freelance photographer's life is that their bread and butter is almost never just one thing... even successful photographers who demand high fees are constantly looking for new and steadier revenue streams. As time goes on and technology improves, the number of photographers (at least: _people able to take pleasing photos_ ) will only increase. Naively this means that the price for services should be driven down, but what it really means is that pros will have to charge more and amateurs will have to do more for less. Photographers in the middle, the ones who do most of the business, will have some tough decisions about how to proceed and many will stick with whatever disadvantages them the least. Giving up your rights in a field where that's uncommon is a pretty major disadvantage, especially when today's client comes from _anywhere_. Giving up the rights to display visual work online will make any creator gulp, because that's the new portfolio. And, unlike code or patents, people can and do give a quick flick through _everything_ you show in order to make a judgement about whether to hire you.

There are plenty of photographers who will do your job for free (a wedding is a bad example here though) and try to make money some other way but they will either be: students, friends with prosumer gear, or people who have another guaranteed income (gallery/publishing contracts perhaps). That last group will be _tiny_ and probably pick what events they do themselves.

I'm sorry for rambling a little bit on the subject because I do agree that there are probably better compromises to be made in the future. I think there's a great potential market for photographers especially to market themselves in the way you want them to actually operate, i.e. not as producers of intellectual property but as technicians providing a service. Unfortunately, until it becomes normal it will really be just another way to charge more. What would help is if these sorts of contracts could be developed by interested parties and released free to potentially gain mindshare. Everyone is in a much better position to negotiate a price ("fair wage", which is obviously dependent on many externals) if the implications of a contract have already been worked out.

Summary: You have a good argument, but it's just one good argument in a sea of tradition and status quo. There are good arguments on the other side as well I think. When photography becomes more of a "need" and less of a luxury (or maybe when it doesn't necessarily need to be done by people) then those compromises may work themselves out anyway. Some ideas for what could be done before then.

All in all, it sounds like you found someone good to work with on fair terms and probably both learned something about how photography is valued by the other side. By you as a private memory, by them as rendered services.

[1] I actually work mostly in a visual field producing work which I retain full rights to. The client is given a perpetual license to use in any way they see fit which usually means public display and publishing (in monographs or online). Though I am not contractually obliged to, I refrain from publishing any work myself at least until the client has done so themselves. It's a courtesy that no doubt would work become part of the contract if I were to stop doing it, but it's agreeable even if it requires checking in every so often to ask if _the thing_ is public yet. Clients understand that I (and others who do the same thing) would be at a severe disadvantage if I was prevented from displaying my work for the sake of _getting more work_ even if I can find a way to make marginal profit from it. Sometimes it actually helps both myself and the client to put a tagline of "Commissioned by [Client Name]" (free advertising for them). In short, I'm sympathetic to the less cutthroat ways of dealing with intellectual property while at the same time being very protective of my legal right to do what I need to do based on my own moral compass I guess.

[I'm just going to apologize again in case you actually read all this. Heh.]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's important that independent developers know that (by default) they retain the copyright to their code and to anything produced from their code.

Unless agreed otherwise, a company contracting you does not have the right to build off your code without your permission - they have an implicit license to use your code for the reasons they expressed to you, and no more.

This is an important part of contract negotiation.

If a company wants the right to use what I built for them, they pay one price. I find it helpful to make it explicitly clear exactly what we are agreeing.

If they want the right to my code, there are several disadvantages for me: I could lose potential future work from them, and I lose some competitive advantage gained from my past work and skill that's gone into that, and I might lose the right to reuse my own code.

They will normally pay a much higher price to cover that disadvantage, depending on how thoughtfully this is negotiated and the nature of the work.

This is different from employed developers, who give up their copyright to the employer (again, by default).

In my experience, freelancers in creative fields tend to be very aware of this situation and apply it skilfully.

If Nike started using the swoosh in a way which they hadn't agreed upfront, the designer has a definite copyright claim there, and both parties ought to have known this when she first agreed to do the work. Indeed, the article reads like they later paid her off with shares.

This is my understanding from the UK; I am not a lawyer.

<comment><USER8> Your understanding is wrong. If you don't put an explicit licence in place then the implied licence is a matter for the courts to decide based on what a reasonable person would expect, not just what was discussed (as that's explicit licencing). If you're contracting without an explicit licence then not only are you doing it very wrong, but any implied licence would certainly include the right to derivative works. If you sold a piece of off-the-shelf software as a whole I think you could argue it wasn't intended for derivative works to be allowed but you certainly don't have the right to restrict it if you are relying on an implicit licence.

If you're not handing over IP rights because you're wanting to lock your clients in to using you in future rather than trying to retain clients with quality work then you're doing them a disservice.

<comment><USER7> > any implied licence would certainly include the right to derivative works

I'm fairly confident that you are wrong, on this particular point, but I'm happy to be corrected.

Copyright remains with the author/coder unless it is explicitly transferred (or is work-for-hire, as in an employer-employee relationship). Copyright cannot normally be implicitly transferred.

Derivative works remain the property of the copyright holder.

As I said, I do make this explicit and discuss it with potential clients in advance, and I recommend that to everyone.

The quality of my work is excellent and I'm not concerned about that.

I don't hand over IP rights for the same reasons that Disney don't hand me over IP rights when I buy a Mickey Mouse sweater. If you create, you have rights to that creation and those rights should be respected. This is a fair business practice in that it applies to everyone equally - it applies when I commission creative work from other people too.

 _Edited to add:_ [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_license](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_license) "Unauthorised use of the work would therefore infringe the creator's copyright. Nevertheless, the commissioner may have an implied license to use the commissioned work, although only for the particular purpose under which the commission was originally agreed."

<comment><USER9> > Copyright remains with the author/coder unless it is explicitly transferred > (or is work-for-hire, as in an employer-employee relationship).

But isn't company-contractor also a work-for-hire relationship?

<comment><USER7> Work-for-hire is a legal term (and maybe a US-specific term?) in this context so I'm not sure.

Here is the official advice: [https://www.gov.uk/ownership-of-copyright- works](https://www.gov.uk/ownership-of-copyright-works)

"in settling disputes the courts have typically had to decide whether the employee was working under a 'contract of service' (eg as an employee) or a 'contract for services' (eg as a freelancer or independent contractor)."

So, it seems to depend if the contractor is seen as an employee in legal terms - in that case, the contractor should expect employment rights and benefits as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You can offer a client any terms you desire to and they can accept any terms that are profitable for their business, but offering terms which clients are used to with little fill-in-the-blanks for the consequential line items makes it much easier to get your proposal accepted.

What gets better about your life under this proposal? Presumably it isn't "tell my photographer friends that I now have their billing model" since you're substantially wealthier than them, or at least you should be. (If not, charge more. Actually, just charge more, no matter what your rates are relative to photographers.)

Is it that you get recurring revenue from one-off consulting engagements? Great news: you can get this. Start putting the following two terms into your proposals: an acceptance period (after which, by default, you don't owe the client ongoing work) and a retainer for maintenance/improvements. The retainer is simply use-it-or-lose-it committed availability at a modest (10~20%) discount to your normal rates.

Example: If you do a 3 week project at $8k per week, you bill $24k for the upfront work. You also, simultaneously with the original proposal, pitch the client on a maintenance-and-improvements retainer: two days a month of guaranteed availability, $3k a month. You will find that most clients don't ask you to do any work in most months. They'll still often be quite happy to pay, since it's an insurance policy against external events (e.g. Heartbleed / a vulnerability in Rails / "our sysadmin broke things and can't get it working again") or, more commonly, changes to the system being required to support new business requirements.

One does not typically have mechanisms which make the retainer more expensive over time, because these are hard to negotiate, but one can certainly have the retainer sunset after a while (6 months or 12 months, say) and renegotiate it then. "This project ended up being really key to the business!" is a good thing to have when negotiating the new rate. No client anywhere will enjoy a hefty increase but, well, client relations are client relations.

P.S. Stop building websites and start fixing business problems. You're a _very_ short walk from "build a website" to "build a system which provides leads to the business" and some businesses will _absolutely_ pay for leads on a per-lead basis if you really, really want to try your hand at variable compensation.

<comment><USER11> > two days a month of guaranteed availability, $3k a month

How do you manage this wih multiply clients? Heartbleed comes out, and all of your clients want two days of exclusive work fixing their issues. Is it first contact, first served?

<comment><USER12> Typically, the terms of a retainer include committed response times and notice requirements from customers. The shorter, truer, but less useful answer is that by the time you have so many retainers that collisions occur, you've also begun hiring other consultants to work for your practice on a W2 basis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 1\. Someone will do it without requiring IP. Unless you have special expertise to offer, your negotiating position isn't strong enough.

2\. per-seat licensing is common in Enterprise software. Though usually that's for product sales, not for work you did for them. It's not unusual to negotiate to retain IP; then you can sell it to the next client, with only minor modifications. You could negotiate for royalties and charge less upfront, but it's unusual, and they'd insist you fix the rates so the client isn't priced out of the software they commissioned.

Royalties (including tiers like "up to 10,000") are a pain to track and audit. Photography is easier to track than embedded software because it is intrinsically visible. (of course, webapps make royalty tracking trivial - <USER2> the whole app, not for embedded components.... unless "rented microservices" become popular.)

Photography is more artistic; code is more engineering, giving photographers a stronger negotiating position.

Maybe photographers have something closer to a union?

</comment><comment><USER14> In a sense, companies that offer developers a salary plus equity or stock options are doing something similar. You get a certain amount up front, which is not contingent on the company's success (i.e., you get to keep your paycheck even if the business eventually goes belly-up), plus the possibility of more if the company does very well.

Other industries do this, too. When I was offered a book deal, I was given an advance, which was not contingent on sales. But, if I my book sells past a certain threshold, I'll start earning more royalties. (So please, buy a couple dozen copies.)

In fact, any business that offers a base salary plus some sort of additional compensation if certain targets are met (e.g. bonuses) are following this sort of model.

Edit: Now that I think about it, all the photogs are doing by charging based on circulation is a version of per-user licensing. Only unlike in software, the "users" are the people who see the advertisement.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes you're right its like MS CALs. Pay x amount for the server then also the CALs for each user/device.

It really makes it apparent that work that produces IP is a special category of work.

I keep imagining if other non-IP producing professionals tried to do charge in a similar manner how it would appear ridiculous (In some cases)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you want to raise your rates, the best way to go about it is to just do it. Companies have an insatiable need for talented development work. The bottleneck is literally how big a number can you say with a straight face.

</comment><comment><USER8> Many photographers also insist that you buy prints from them directly at a huge markup, which would be like insisting you are the only one able to resell hosting to your web clients. We don't need to copy their unethical behaviour.

<comment><USER16> Your example is basically SaaS: the client doesn't get to decide where the application is hosted, you just sell them the right to use it on your server.

I'm not sure what's unethical about that... Unless you believe the only morally valid software license is AGPL, which is designed to prevent exactly this kind of server-side "lock-in".

<comment><USER16> I don't understand the downvotes, can someone explain? To my mind there is no difference between SaaS and "being the only one who can sell hosting for web clients".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Say I build a website for a company - charge for my time in building the > site but then also issue them a monthly bill based on the number of people > that have accessed the site.

This how it works with SaaS, apart from the "charge for my time in building the site" part

* [https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing](https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing)

* [https://www.fogcreek.com/kiln/pricing/](https://www.fogcreek.com/kiln/pricing/)

* [https://slack.com/pricing](https://slack.com/pricing)

You can definitely charge for a support plan for a website though.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is a bit different. If SaaS was charging an upfront build cost is one. The other is with SaaS there are on going costs, e.g. data centre costs, usually further development, etc. With the photographer they have had zero costs to produce it originally and zero ongoing costs to license it further.

<comment><USER18> Zero production costs? So your time is free?

You're paying for shooting time (per hour), processing time (per hour), insurance, equipment amortisation, data storage and backup which could run into tens of GB per client. Don't underestimate backup costs, if you lose someone's wedding photos you can't just shoot it again. Often for weddings the photographer is expected to be there all day, everywhere. Processing several thousand photos can take a day or more.

I agree that you have mostly zero ongoing costs once the photo is 'gold mastered', if you will, but to suggest that the photo was produced for free is disingenuous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> You can try and I'm sure you'll find someone that accepts it but I won't be your customer. As a customer I want ownership of the code, to be able to fix bugs and add functionality without having to go back to you. In a few years you might have changed field of business or be too busy or too expensive to work for me again. It's a risk I cannot accept.

That said, for small trow away projects I could accept that you keep the IP but I'll want a discount (to remark that I don't think this is the normal way to do this business: photos != software).

<comment><USER9> He/she didn't say that you _can 't_ have the source, just that you'll have to pay extra for it, separate from the payment for the time/effort/knowledge the initial development took.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Photographers are able to do so because the photography industry as a whole largely subscribes to such billing models and IP provisions. I've had a lot of experience with the professional photography world with my family, and for the most part, expectations about contract terms are largely the same. From studios shooting elementary school kids for their first yearbook photos all the way to large assignment shoots for multinationals, it's understood that the photographer retains IP rights as the norm. Clients will sometimes purchase IP rights outright, but they're going to pay to do so though it's pretty rare (most photos for marketing projects, for instance, will only be used for the duration of particular campaigns).

I can't really see the same model ever being used for development work. Off the top of my head, I can't recall a single model contract for design or development I've read online that doesn't include terms for the transfer of IP rights. When you're designing an identity for a company, that identity will eventually become that company's public face. No company on earth is going to play games there by letting a third-party have any form of control over it (and that's exactly what licensing terms would be). Their legal department would kill any project before it began, solely out of concern for what you might do in the future.

Let's say you decide to raise your licensing terms in the future based on the company's growth as a brand. Or better yet, let's say you're dead and now your estate controls things. How will that pan out? The same goes for code. If you wrote a major component for FedEx's logistics management, the sort of thing where other major components subsequently rely on it, what would happen if you decided to play games? You'd have effective control over their entire logistics systems, and that's something that would terrify any corporate lawyer.

While I can appreciate the desire to look at alternative contract terms, licensing ala what professional photographers and artists use is something I think is DOA.

</comment><comment><USER21> Its an interesting concept however I'd like to mention that people are the real asset. Sure the code is fundamental but the reason why companies like google and Facebook make acq~hires is not get the code or even the individual. Its teams that are the real gold.

</comment><comment><USER22> The biggest difference is that the photographer sells a finished product, that nobody else can work on.

How would this work when teams of independant free lancer work on a piece of software? What about when they get someone else to modify the code you wrote?

<comment><USER22> The is another thing linked to the notion of "done": environment rot.

Professionnal photographers know to print on archival paper, and give you advice on how to store your pictures to potentially keep them for ever.

What happens in two years when they upgrade their OS and your software no longer works? What if you went out of business? What if you are still in business but now charge ridiculous price?

Do you have a duty to update your licensed software for ever for free? Or at the maximum at the price you agreed to work for originally?

<comment><USER23> A photographer usually doesn't have the duty to do this either. You can certainly ask them to do it but the pricing will be higher. The photographers I know delete their source files after a certain amount of time and only keep the end products in the state they are in.

This is quite equivalent to the software that you build, you get it in the state it is in but if certain things change you need to pay more or agree for something else. A good developer/company will talk to you about it, how to manage the lifetime of the application, for how long their support goes and what it implies afterwards.

<comment><USER22> On the other hand, some photographers will sell you the raw files of your images, I even know some who will give them to you a year after the event as part of the original pricing.

Similarly, a lot of companies will insist on keeping a copy and the rights to the source of software they pay people by the hour to write.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> How does a law firm manage rights to use and modify master service agreements (which may be drawn from to negotiate specific contracts by in-house counsel)?

<comment><USER25> When you're an Orrick customer, most of their documents come from their standard internal library. If you need something custom or have to negotiate terms, that gets more expensive because legal drafting and review needs to happen with a human in the loop.

It is likely there is a master agreement with them that outlines use rights beyond customary client-attorney rights and responsibilities so custom and standard deliverables such that customers don't warez them to BitTorrent or sell them to friends. (The lawyer or law firm always retains copyright unless otherwise ageed.)

[http://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...](http://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1680&context=ohlj) [pdf] see "Copyright Owner's Consent" Also, the section on "Joint Productions" is especially worrisome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Wouldn't that entail that the developers also took on responsibilities for future consquences of the use of their software?

<comment><USER27> That's an interesting question but different issue. Aren't developers responsible already for what they code? Are photographers? Are gun factories?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The photographer can see when the work is being used without permission, the programmer, usually, cannot.</comment>


Surgeons in England to adopt checklists - expect to halve death rate - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-wellbeing/health-news/right-patient-right-limb-two-questions-that-have-almost-halved-death-rate-at-one-hospital-1366705.html

<comment><USER2> Finally.

The idea for a checklist in clinical settings was originally conceived by Peter Pronovost at Johns Hopkins. Last year, Gawande wrote an awesome essay for the New Yorker about the ICU checklists that were attempted in the US (saving hundreds of lives) but eventually cancelled by regulatory authorities-- "If you're changing the way things are done, you need to perform controlled FDA-approved studies."

[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_gawande)

Also, you should read his book _Better_ , which is just page after page of interesting stuff; Atul Gawande is the Malcom Gladwell of medicine, but I think his stuff is far more engaging.

<comment><USER3> This combined with How Doctors Think made me realize that our doctors in the US are really no better than witch doctors. In fact in some ways going to a shaman is probably better. They are less likely to cure you, but they are also vastly less likely to kill you by accident. A pretty good tradeoff, considering that medical accidents are the leading cause of death in the US.

<http://www.ourcivilisation.com/medicine/usamed/deaths.htm>

<http://www.ourcivilisation.com/medicine/usamed.htm>

And this isn't even counting the fact that none of our antibiotics are working anymore because our medical system sees fit to use over 70% of our total antibiotics produced each year in animal feed.

<comment><USER4> I'm going to be as nice and polite as I can be here.

Medical science has had a long history, at least a few hundred years and performs studies/experiments/etc. to make sure that things work.

Witch doctors try random shit and see what sticks to the wall even if it means the patient dies.

Do you see the difference?

If doctors were killing a lot of people, I'm sure journalists would have jumped all over it by now and a lot of doctors would have malpractice suits filed against them.

Antibiotics do work. There have been studies to prove that. This isn't the small-time, this isn't the minor leagues, these pharma-companies are paying a big chunk of change to make sure _something useful_ happens when you take those pills.

If you want lies and deceit, I suggest you go to a "natural" "organic" pharmacy that sells homeopathic garbage.

<comment><USER5> _these pharma-companies are paying a big chunk of change to make sure something useful happens when you take those pills._

Unfortunately, it's not always clear that those drugs do work. The problem isn't in the scientific process, but how it's often carried out and reported by the companies, who know exactly what it takes to get FDA approval (this is BIG business). I'm interested in how this process can be improved.

The "alternative/complementary" medicine thing is a red herring, to be polite.

Here's an interesting article that discusses some of the _less than ideal_ ways that pharmacy companies report the science behind the drugs they develop, among other things.

<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22237>

I think it's an important and interesting issue that needs to be addressed better (probably by the government).

<comment><USER4> You are correct of course. I remember reading about some pill right after WW2 that caused many birth defects but was approved for the public. It is a big business which is precisely why there needs to be an overseeing body.

Alternative medicines isn't a red herring, it relates directly to witch doctors. None of these alternative medicines are tested properly in an objective matter to prove that they do in fact work. These people still haven't gotten to step 1 on the stairs of science, while pharma companies are at step 123901823091283 though still need to climb a few more.

<comment><USER3> "None of these alternative medicines are tested properly in an objective matter to prove that they do in fact work."

Many have been tested and proven to work. The only reason they are "alternative" is that doctors only prescribe medicines that the pharma companies promote. So they will prescribe people statins to lower their cholesterol, but they would never advise someone to take red rice even though it does the exact same thing with less risk of complications.

<comment><USER6> "Many have been tested and proven to work."

Are they in the journals though? (i'm asking honestly, i'd be very interested to know)

<comment><USER3> Yes, but I'm not an ND or MD so I don't know which journals are reputable and which are not. I get the feeling that research on botanical medicine mostly gets published in the same journals that publish normal pharmaceutical research, it's just that doctors only prescribe things that come in pill form.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm a med student and a programmer. I think there are a lot of similarities between these two disciplines.

The body is an incredibly complex system that you or a pathological process can perturb in a variety of ways, just like any other system. The results of those perturbations may be evident immediately or may take a long time to present themselves. The results are output in the form of physical signs and symptoms. The way this particular system works is that there are more potential pathologies than there are physical signs and symptoms, so sometimes you end up with collisions in the pathology to sign/symptom mapping. In these cases you can use instruments like labs, radiological tests, and sometimes invasive methods like surgery to further investigate. These tests are imperfect and are themselves perturbations to the system.

If you can come to a final diagnosis of the underlying pathology using the tools at your disposal (history, physical exam, labs, tests, and procedures) you can then engage in a therapy. The more precise your diagnosis, the more precise your therapy can be. Again, therapies are also perturbations to the system. Ideally these perturbations move the system back into its normal functioning state though they may also cause undesired results that must then be diagnosed and treated.

This entire process takes place within the context of a social interaction that can itself help or hinder. Both doctors and patients have their own social idiosyncrasies that may or may not match up well with each other.

I believe that most physicians operate by generating a gigantic hash table. Essentially they know several patterns of physical signs/symptoms that act as the key. The value is whatever knowledge they have of that disease process. As medical knowledge progresses some physicians update their hash table keys/values with new information, most don't. Almost all physicians update their hash table (i.e. learn) using information gathered in the process of seeing their own patients and recognizing the difference between the predicted outcome and the actual outcome. This is often a subjective process. I think it is because of this approach that most physicians find it hard to believe that medical diagnosis and treatment can be highly systematized and is at least partially such an obvious idea even needs a study to support its use.

</comment><comment><USER8> Here's the checklist: [http://www.who.int/patientsafety/safesurgery/tools_resources...](http://www.who.int/patientsafety/safesurgery/tools_resources/SSSL_Checklist_finalJun08.pdf) [PDF]

<comment><USER9> _Before the patient leaves operating room, make sure that instrument, sponge and needle counts are correct._

And I always thought that was a joke... guess not.

<comment><USER10> That's what OR nurses generally do, count sponges, needles and instruments. They also have to be willing to nose to nose with a crabby surgeon and tell him to re-open the patient and try to find the missing sponge when the count is off

</comment></comment></comment><comment> a-priori As a member of the general public, I do find it hard to believe this sort of thing isn't done already.

As a victim of a minor surgical mishap myself (general anaesthesia applied when it shouldn't have been), I can definitely believe "incidents" happen all the time.

<comment><USER11> "I do find it hard to believe this sort of thing isn't done already."

I showed a similar article to my wife (has worked in healthcare for 20+ years) and she said "Oh yes, we do that all the time. Everything has a check-list." So if it makes a difference, I guess it is either mandated for higher-level staff (surgeons and consultants who are often a law unto themselves) or rigidly enforced at all levels.

Also, the study might show bias because people will do the lists if they know it's being assessed for an experiment, but might ignore it on a day-to-day basis.

<comment><USER2> Any doctor who reads the study and sees the 50% reduction in death rate in surgeries and 90% reduction in accidental deaths in the ICU would be negligent to ignore checklists.

If this surgery checklist and the ICU checklist were to be implemented in every hospital, they would save more lives than all new medications introduced in the last five years, _combined_. Ignoring results like that is just asinine.

<comment><USER3> "Any doctor who reads the study and sees the 50% reduction in death rate in surgeries and 90% reduction in accidental deaths in the ICU would be negligent to ignore checklists."

Unless the government has made it illegal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Although it might not mean much to those outside the UK, this applies to "England and Wales", not just "England".

<comment><USER13> Of course, we love the Welsh!

Also, it was a world-wide study that's been implemented in many places. Canada too:

[http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2009/01/14/surgery-check- list...](http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2009/01/14/surgery-check-list.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There are three columns on the checklist. Here is the first column:

       SIGN IN

      □ PATIENT HAS CONFIRMED
        • IDENTITY
        • SITE
        • PROCEDURE
        • CONSENT

      □ SITE MARKED/NOT APPLICABLE

      □ ANAESTHESIA SAFETY CHECK COMPLETED

      □ PULSE OXIMETER ON PATIENT AND FUNCTIONING

         DOES PATIENT HAVE A:

         KNOWN ALLERGY?
      □ NO
      □ YES

         DIFFICULT AIRWAY/ASPIRATION RISK?
      □ NO
      □ YES, AND EQUIPMENT/ASSISTANCE AVAILABLE

         RISK OF >500ML BLOOD LOSS
         (7ML/KG IN CHILDREN)?
      □ NO
      □ YES, AND ADEQUATE INTRAVENOUS ACCESS
         AND FLUIDS PLANNED

<comment><USER8> Here is the second column:

       TIME OUT

      □ CONFIRM ALL TEAM MEMBERS HAVE
        INTRODUCED THEMSELVES BY NAME AND
        ROLE

      □ SURGEON, ANAESTHESIA PROFESSIONAL
        AND NURSE VERBALLY CONFIRM
        • PATIENT
        • SITE
        • PROCEDURE

         ANTICIPATED CRITICAL EVENTS

      □ SURGEON REVIEWS: WHAT ARE THE
        CRITICAL OR UNEXPECTED STEPS,
        OPERATIVE DURATION, ANTICIPATED
        BLOOD LOSS?

      □ ANAESTHESIA TEAM REVIEWS: ARE THERE
        ANY PATIENT-SPECIFIC CONCERNS?

      □ NURSING TEAM REVIEWS: HAS STERILITY
        (INCLUDING INDICATOR RESULTS) BEEN
        CONFIRMED? ARE THERE EQUIPMENT
        ISSUES OR ANY CONCERNS?

        HAS ANTIBIOTIC PROPHYLAXIS BEEN GIVEN
        WITHIN THE LAST 60 MINUTES?
      □ YES
      □ NOT APPLICABLE

        IS ESSENTIAL IMAGING DISPLAYED?
      □ YES
      □ NOT APPLICABLE

<comment><USER14> Sounds a bit like Scrum (the agile methodology).

The Surgeon/Anaesthesia/Nursing teams reviewing what has been/needs to be done out loud to each other is similar to a daily stand up and the initial sprint planning meeting in a scrum team.

Saying things out loud to each other makes a social bargain that they will/have been done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I had v. minor "surgery" before Christmas and I got asked that many questions I started to think they were taking the piss. Based on that, it surprises me that they don't already have this checklist thing in place!

</comment><comment><USER16> Charlie Munger talks about this in his book, Poor Charlie's Almanac.

</comment><comment><USER17> Seems like such a no-brainer for hospitals everywhere.

</comment><comment><USER18> Ever since I started taking flying lessons, I have been tempted to use checklists for everything else in life.

</comment><comment><USER19> Does anyone here use checklists in a similar manner for application development?

<comment><USER20> I don't, but people won't die if my software doesn't work.

<comment><USER21> I don't, but people may die if my software doesn't work.

Our managers do...

</comment></comment></comment><comment> daniel-cussen In other news: schools to start using Dvorak in 2045.

</comment><comment><USER22> Given that the death rate used to be 100%, I find it really exciting that the death rate will now be halved.

Downside: all the zombies.</comment>


Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition – With Ubuntu 14.04 LTS - <AUTHOR> http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-linux/fs

<comment><USER2> If I were in the market for a laptop, I'd be pretty interested in this unit. Seems like it might be a bit of a hacker sweet spot, assuming they haven't resorted to lots of non-free shenanigans--a laptop that is fully supported by a non-bleeding edge Linux is much better than a laptop that is stuck with a particular Linux distribution.

Seems like I know a lot of folks "coming home" from OS X to other platforms. My homecoming was to an OpenBSD workstation because I decided I didn't want or need my work to be portable. But if I had, I'd be taking a long hard look at this machine with the larger high-res screen, decent CPU, and MacBook Air-ish design.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Announcement here: [http://bartongeorge.net/2015/04/09/4th-gen-dell- xps-13-devel...](http://bartongeorge.net/2015/04/09/4th-gen-dell- xps-13-developer-edition-available/)

</comment><comment><USER3> How much memory is sufficient these days. I mean with all the development work, I can max out my 8 gigs of ram.

I understand that it would be difficult to fit 16 gigs or 12 gigs of ram in an 13in laptop.

<comment><USER4> You want more if you want to run a lot of virtualization from what I've read.

So far I'm doing well with 16GB and SSD.

A situation that comes up for multiple VMs was clustering Cassandra. I had several contract projects and I had several vagrant box up and running for each project.

[https://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-51/topic/com.vmware.vsphere....](https://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-51/topic/com.vmware.vsphere.resmgmt.doc/GUID-C25A8823-F595-4322-BD0D-4FD5B081F877.html)

Hopefully it's that link. Starbuck internet is bad at the moment.

edit:

That sucks, their last laptop spunik was also 8GB. I thought for sure they're going to push for more since a few developers were asking for it =/.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Last I heard Linux and ultra high res screen were a kind of hit and miss. Has dell done anything to uptimize Ubuntu or has it matured enough on its own?</comment>


Ask HN: How do I split profits from online sales with a collaborator? - <AUTHOR>

If I collaborate with someone on a project, like music, art, or software, is there something we can use to sell our product that splits profits from sales in a way we agree upon (50/50 or 25/75 etc..)? <comment><USER2> Most companies should have access to an accountant to handle the taxes and payment portion. The contract or agreement portion should be done by a lawyer.

I can't think of one accounting program that CAN'T do this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was thinking more like all these lightweight apps i see that let you sell something online really simply, like money goes stright into your paypal. Do any of those have a way to split profits?</comment></comment>


Microsoft can filter out the sound of you eating chips on a conference call - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-can-filter-out-the-sound-of-you-eating-potato-chips-on-a-conference-call/ <comment><USER2> Can they filter out my clicky mechanical keyboard?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Now, this is technology we can use!</comment>


Public folders becoming private on March 15 for Dropbox Basic users - <AUTHOR> I got the announcement via email and couldn't find it online. Note: you already can't render HTML from your public folder. And you may not even have a public folder if you weren't grandfathered in.
From the email:
We're always looking to improve the Dropbox sharing experience. The Public folder was the first sharing method we introduced, and since then, we've built even better ways for you to share securely and work together with your team.
As a result, we'll soon be ending support for the Public folder. Dropbox Basic users will be able to use the Public folder until March 15, 2017. After that date the files in your Public folder will become private, and links to these files will be deactivated. Your files will remain safe in Dropbox.
If you'd like to keep sharing files in your Public folder, you can create new shared links. Just make sure to send the new URLs to your collaborators.
In addition to shared links, we have a number of sharing options designed to make collaboration easier and give you more control. To learn more, visit our Help Center.
The Dropbox team <comment><USER2> Bummer! That'll throw a wrench in many the way many people I know use to share folders of files.

Always a letdown when a company decides it has to make money. ;)

<comment><USER3> Indeed - this is going to break a bunch of images in posts I've made to some forums I'm on that don't locally host images.

Dropbox don't seem to be proposing any way to make existing public urls remain public.

Not exactly unexpected I guess - when you put trust in a company continuing to do something for ever, you'll usually be disappointed.

But being disappointed is the time you revisit your decision about whether to keep paying for Pro plans for a service that no longer does one of the things that's important to you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "thanks" to the "feature" my simple screenshot sharing tool will stop working

[https://github.com/glensc/dropbox-watch](https://github.com/glensc/dropbox- watch)

i.e now to achive the same goal need to mess with apis, etc</comment>


Living and working in Sweden as engineers - <AUTHOR> http://hongchao.me/living-and-working-in-sweden-as-engineers/ <comment><USER2> 10 years ago I would strongly recommend my highly educated friends from around the world to give Sweden a chance, but now I advise more caution, as in "wait and see". There is definitely inertia in the process, but in my view, born and lived in Sweden 33 years, Sweden is unfortunately going downhill. I do not look forward to see what the future brings in 5, 10, or 15 years from now on. Me and my girlfriend have discussed moving elsewhere because we feel we do not get what we pay for anymore.

There are many fundamental issues that can only be solved by very unpopular political decisions, meaning nothing is done because it would be political suicide in the short/mid-term (the next 4-8 years).

1) While the Swedish state has strong finances, the Swedish communes (responsible for most of the practical welfare, like healthcare, education, and so on) are struggling significantly. Taxes likely need to be raised 5 percentage points over the next 10 years just to maintain the current level of welfare. And that is not factoring in the missing professionals, like teachers and nurses. These professions are very poorly compensated so a lot of them quit. On top of the issues with the communes, the Swedish households are among the most indebted in the world, due to cheap mortgages on houses and a housing bubble that is just slowly beginning to deflate. The next recession will be very tough.

2) Sweden has failed with immigrating all low-skilled refugees and economic migrants from third world countries. I think Sweden should be applauded for trying to do the humanitarian thing by helping people in need, but what has happened is that there have been too many low skilled people, too quickly for them to be absorbed into Sweden. This cohort of immigrants simply do not have the skills or education to not be an economic burden on the Swedish society. The costs are enormous. In Sweden the talk is about we've created an "ethnic lower class" that can only survive on welfare. The problem is a welfare state only works if a vast majority pitch in to the welfare state. This is a big contributing factor to many issues in Sweden right now. At the same time, the big unions and the Social Democratic party is hostile to skilled workers coming to Sweden because they may compete with the union members, leading to a lot of skilled engineers and similar being deported because of technicalities. So Sweden is basically doing the opposite of Canada: we are hostile to people who can contribute to Swedish society, but have been very welcoming to people who will never realistically contribute a dime to the Swedish welfare state.

3) There's shortage on housing in the big cities due to regulation and rent- control. There is absolutely no incentives to build new apartments because the return of investment is non-existing, and all the zoning regulations and similar makes it a multi-year project just to get permission to even start building. What happens is the only new apartment buildings being built are apartments that are so expensive only people the people who do not have a problem getting an apartment in the first place (due to being well off) can buy them. For the Swedish 99%, you either need to get lucky, take significant loans (which people have done due to almost 0% interest, which will be a catastrophe when the interests rates increase, which must happen within the next 5 years) or stand in the state apartment queue for 20-30 years. The only way to solve this realistically would be for the state to invest heavily in apartments, basically build away the shortage, and then remove the rent control. Finland did this. But it was highly unpopular.

If you are in the top tier of your profession and you can basically get a job in whatever country you please, I'd hang on moving to Sweden right now.

<comment><USER3> Are the costs of immigration really that enormous? We pay 15-20 billion SEK/year in bribes to the craftsmen sector in the form of ROT-avdrag, for example. How many non-working immigrants do you think that would pay for per year? There are plenty of immigrants who are capable of performing any number of jobs that can't get them because they wait forever to get into Swedish language classes and then they wait forever before receiving permanent residency here (why would a company hire you if you could be deported tomorrow?).

Do you know how many truck drivers we're going to need in 5-10 years for example? We're talking mid-five digit numbers. That's not unskilled labor as such but it's not a massive insurmountable obstacle either to educate these people to become truck drivers for example.

<comment><USER4> > Do you know how many truck drivers we're going to need in 5-10 years for > example?

As im working in automotive industry i can say to you: "less each year".. Companies thinking ahead will try to decrease employment of newer drivers and probably sack off some percent of current ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Did not expect such a positive post on Sweden given the negativity floating around these days. I made the decision to move back from a higher paying position abroad a few years ago, and most of it due to the points you bring up. Plus I'm Swedish so I can deal with the weather. In the end, a lower stress existence is more important to me than maximizing my earnings.

A lot of the complaining you hear from Swedish people is because they haven't really experienced anything different. They have no idea how comfortable life is here (still). As a parent, I can barely fathom raising a child in the US for instance. Even the best companies will give you 4 months paid time off, if you're one of the lucky few working for FAANG. What the hell do you even do with a 4 month old after that time's up? They can't fucking even crawl yet. Not to mention the healthcare situation. The relief to just be able to walk into _any_ hospital and just give your person number, and everything is just taken care of. No $20k bill because the hospital is out of your coverage or whatever.

The main thing worrying me today is like you say, the immigration and crime situation. The current crime wave is not because of recent immigration but because of earlier waves. I don't want to find out what happens when 200k refugees and (mostly) their disillusioned sons turn to crime in about 18 years. Hopefully we can figure this out before then.

<comment><USER3> If you read crime statistics reports from places like BRÅ, violent crime is actually down especially in proportion to the increasing population levels.

 _Edit_ :

Also, to add, during the Syrian refugee wave of 2015/2016, the second largest group to come here after Syrians were repatriating Swedes. We didn't get 200K war refugees during the wave on top of our regular immigration. It was 200K including repatriating Swedes and the normal immigration we see year over year.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps overall, but murders are up quite a bit: [https://www.bra.se/statistik/statistik-utifran- brottstyper/m...](https://www.bra.se/statistik/statistik-utifran- brottstyper/mord-och-drap.html) Robberies: [https://www.bra.se/statistik/statistik-utifran- brottstyper/r...](https://www.bra.se/statistik/statistik-utifran- brottstyper/ran.html)

I certainly hope you're right though. But anecdotally, I know of enough people getting robbed with guns and knives that I don't feels as safe as I did 10 years ago.

I pulled the 200k out of thin air. I'm talking more about the sum over the past few years rather than a specific peak.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > One manifestation of equality in Sweden is that most companies are less > layered and implement what's called flat hierarchy. Employees are trusted to > be involved directly in the decision making process rather than being > instructed by layers of supervisors. Of course as companies grow larger, > they can not be kept completely flat forever, but in regular big companies, > hierachies are in many scenarios too excessive and counter-productive. As > someone from a very hierachical society like China, I really enjoy working > in Swedish companies, partly because I am not that interested in climbing up > the management ladder but more interested in having a better technical > career. In China, managers enjoy much higher social status than engineers > because of the power that hierachical organization enables. Many good > engineers are "forced" to take on a management position even if it turns out > to be a bad fit and waste of talent. In my opinion, one of the reasons that > Sweden became an innovation center in the world is because engineers can > just focus on their technical career without getting too much social > pressure to become something else.

Interesting observation. If people are promoted to their "level of incompetence", perhaps not promoting people is indeed a solution...

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess promoting people to a higher technical position (with equivalent compensation as managers) is another solution :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> As some of the comments show, it is hard to have a meaningful discussion on taxes without comparing what you get for them (or what you have to pay extra for in other countries). I guess software developers in most countries belong to the topmost income stratas and will manage a good life in any taxation system. For people who don't make as much it is much more complicated I guess.

</comment><comment><USER8> > Top tier Chinese internet companies now offer higher salary compared to > their Swedish counterparts

This surprises me since the Glassdoor salaries for a software engineer for Tencent in Shanghai is about 200k yuan which is about $30k. AFAIK in Stockholm you could easily net at least twice that.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know the details of the data in glassdoor, but most of my friends in China in the IT industry (at my age , usually senior devs) make more than my Swedish colleagues. And I worked in some of the best known companies in Sweden.

<comment><USER9> Indeed, recently there was an article making rounds here about senior engineers at the likes of Tencent earning 150-200k$ easily, though subject often to the infamous 669.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For anyone not from Scandinavian countries or not used to the low sunlight and mostly cold weather, the downsides from the long-term side-effects of living in Sweden such as depression, low vitamin-D state significantly outweighs any short-term happiness.

<comment><USER7> Most people, even those close to the arctic circle have sufficient vitamin D levels in Sweden [1].

Regarding depression, it would be great If you could state a source for the claim that long term residency in Sweden creates depression.

[1]: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4432023/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4432023/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I know sweden is known for it's great work life balance, but I know of a co- worker who had a very different experience. he joined a start up and had to work extremely long hours 60-80 hours, people working weekends, much like it's done in the US. In theorey it's illegal, but what are you going to do? Things got so bad at that company, he needed to leave. You can't assume all companies are the same in Sweden.

<comment><USER12> If he left, why not report?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sweden is really expensive. And don't get me started on the price of a beer in a bar. Make sure they pay you a lot.

It's definitely a clean and well organized country with lots of nature. And it seems pretty great for tech.

But would never move there.

<comment><USER14> > And don't get me started on the price of a beer in a bar. Make sure they pay > you a lot.

Also, check out taxes. I was offered a contract position in Sweden recently, and the total tax burden was around 55%. Thanks, but no thanks.

<comment><USER15> But the Swedes are fine with it, as is the author of the post, because they feel they get their money's worth. The author went into quite a bit of detail about he doesn't have to save much for his childrens' education and some other major expenses since most will be covered by tax-payers.

Assuming of course that the government is fiscally prudent for the many years until your kids start higher education and you are elderly and need a lot of medical care. Given how popular it is around the world to run huge deficits that end up requiring major cuts to services I wouldn't bet my future on it.

<comment><USER16> We are not fine with it.

It's a bit off topic, but all I can see online about Sweden always sounds so perfect. But in reality it's not. There's a lot of us Swedes that are long from fine paying these taxes and then see our friends/relatives waiting for half a year waiting for treatment for cancer.

And if you'd like private healthcare, Sweden taxes you extra for that.

New car? Triple tax first 3 years.

<comment><USER15> I was wondering if there are dissenting opinions. What percentage of Swedes do you estimate feel the way you do?

<comment><USER17> First of all, being a reader of hn in Sweden probably means your monthly salary is in the top 10%, which of course colors your view of society.

It also means that you're taxed higher. While most people pay 31% in commune tax, the top earners pay an extra 25% adding to the resentment.

I think most people agree that the quality of health care is an issue, but pretty divided on how to go about things. About 50-50 split.

Fun fact, since the election in September the Riksdag still hasn't been able to elect a prime minister due to being to divided on such issues. The only thing they do agree is to not to collaborate with SD, giving both sides roughly 40% support for their favorite candidate.

Wikipedia had a nice map of the situation. We hn 10%ers tend to live in the more densely populated blue areas, again giving a pretty distorted view of things.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Swedish_general_electio...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Swedish_general_election)

<comment><USER15> "I think most people agree that the quality of health care is an issue..."

Really? I thought that good healthcare was one of the major positives of the high taxes paid in Sweden. That was alluded to in the article and I have seen positive comments in the past about it. I guess that is due to the 10%ers being the ones commenting(?). But then I don't understand how there is uneven distribution of quality healthcare.

<comment><USER17> Not uneven in that regard.

One of the issues being debated is the uneven quality between geographic regions. Not a new issue though, a more contemporary issue the lack of care givers and long waits that seems to be a problem in general.

If I were to guess a combination of the large age group just retiring and an attempt to allow more private health care options from a few years back started a vicious circle of relatively low wages and increasingly stressful working conditions driving competent people to seek out private employers instead.

Apparently it's not uncommon for nurses to leave an employment, only to come back as contractors for the same job with twice the salary.

If that is the case I'm sure it's mostly a temporary mess that needs to stabilize into some new configuration.

But the private options seems to be doing a good job, in general the people around me seems to be happy with their service at least. But to access those services you need the typical insurance through your employer, defeating the entire point of a public health care system to begin with.

So any resentment among the 10% probably stems from fear of not having a private option for things like cancer treatments if the current mess in the public system continues.

That said, the public system does an excellent job of all standard physical care I've needed so far. Have had some unlucky encounters with incompetent people, but can't blame the system for that.

The psychiatric care looks like a complete failure though. If you have any anxiety or depression to deal with you're on your own. The treatment plan is basically for a GP to administer prescription medicine and sick leave. If you do manage to be remitted to a specialist their main function is to evaluate to which degree you're faking it. (In Sweden your either working or a lazy freeloader, "arbetslinjen" is very strong) [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbetslinjen](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbetslinjen)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Denmark is very similar as well, but I despise the tax on cars...

</comment><comment><USER19> I guess someone has to state the obvious here. China has a totalitarian, one party government that puts a lot of efforts into total surveillance of their citizens. They are censoring the local intranet and even have "citizen scores" to create the worst dystopia possible. That alone seems like a good reason to work somewhere else.

</comment><comment><USER20> Probably not. It depends from where you are moving but salaries in sweden are not that high and progressive taxation kills your chance of living a comfortable life. On top of that stupidly expensive housing.

<comment><USER21> > kills your chance of living a comfortable life

You have not been in Sweden.

<comment><USER22> Clearly not.

I'm a swede and I used to live in the US, specifically the bay area, SF. I moved back to sweden 5 years ago and while I make less than half of what I did (~150k/year) while working and living in the US, my living standard here in sweden is so much better in every possible way.

I make roughly the equivalent of $70k/year before taxes here in Sweden (it's above average) but I pay less half of what I used to pay for a 2 room apartment in the bay area but instead I get a 300 m2 architectural designed lake house less than 20 minutes from my office. Buying a house of this size and good location in the bay area would cost millions of dollars. I paid less than $400k.

I work remote 3 days a week, I get 8 weeks of paid vacation a year (currently on vacation and I haven't been at work since 14th of december), universal healthcare plus free private healthcare (well "free" because I do pay $15 in fees once every visit) as one of my employee benefits, free lunches plus so called Rikskortet (can be used to buy meals at restaurants or groceries that for me covers the whole month), wellness benefits (basically means I get a free gym membership at whatever gym or physical activity I want), a company car ('17 Audi A7) where I only have to pay for gas which I rarely need to do because I live close to work and I work remote more than half the time.

So basically I pay roughly the equivalent of $1500 a month in total (mortage, utility bills, insurance, food etc) for my current stress free life these days compared to when I used to live and work in the US where I paid $4000 a month just in rent alone for a small apartment.

I'd say that I have a quite comfortable life at this point.

<comment><USER23> Very nice. Read the rest of the reply comments -- I'm particularly impressed with how you used a mutually beneficial arrangement to both you and the company to boost your effective salary: lower your expenditures and lower their loss to taxation by offering you perks you otherwise need to use. Forgive me if this is obvious (not from Sweden so not familiar with the regulations there), but is there any reason why you can't negotiate even further down to have them pay for your apartment? Or is it something that you'd prefer to have independent from your job, or perhaps something else?

<comment><USER24> He is most likely taxed for some of these benifits otherwise it would be a major loop hole.

His gym membership is probably not taxed as the government want to promote good health, but he has to pay tax for the car, free lunches etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


24 hrs w/out internet&cellphone. What would you do?  - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> 1) Tell myself that it's ok, and that the cell and net will be back in less than 24 hours

2) Catch up on sleep

3) Read all the books that are stacked up and not being read

4) Buy homing pigeons for lost distance communications</comment>


UK admits unlawfully monitoring legally privileged communications - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/feb/18/uk-admits-unlawfully-monitoring-legally-privileged-communications

<comment><USER2> So what comes next? Does the UK have to throw out every conviction made in the past 7 years?

It seems unacceptable to just accept the number of people who were sentenced to prison because their defense was being spied on.

This is an egregious violation of people's right to a fair trial.</comment>


Elastic Load Balancing Connection Timeout Management - <AUTHOR> http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/elb-idle-timeout-control/?sc_ichannel=em&sc_icountry=global&sc_icampaigntype=launch&sc_icampaign=em_121652270&sc_idetail=em_153875820&ref_=pe_411040_121652270_7

<comment><AUTHOR> This is great news. The max was previously 15 min, and you could set it by contacting AWS Support.</comment>


Google's Nest Buys Dropcam for $555 Million - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2014/06/20/googles-nest-buys-dropcam-for-555-million/

<comment><USER2> Hopefully they will now allow to stream on the local network and the company will not disappear and render all these cameras useless...

</comment><comment><USER3> That's unfortunate. This has been a popular device for our small store owner clients, and we've been getting a lot of unprompted pushback recently from customers when recommending anything related to Google.

And I can't really fault them for it. I half expect these to be requiring a Google Plus account within a couple of years.</comment>


Ask HN: What's best &lt$100 purchase that made your unexpected WFH-life better? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I donated to my local NPR station because they play really nice Jazz during they that I very much enjoy and helps me concentrate.

</comment><comment><USER3> A bamboo phone stand

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07GGSPV7J](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07GGSPV7J)

</comment><comment><USER4> I bought a standing floor mat ($40) to use with my standing desk. Very comfortable and I can routinely stand for 6+ hours without feeling tired.

</comment><comment><USER5> A proper (well not if you a pro, but for us normies) large condenser microphone so I don't sound like robot when talking to people.

</comment><comment><USER6> Cosmic Brownies

<comment><USER7> What are those?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A jump rope

</comment><comment><USER9> Noise cancelling headphones with Bluetooth and low latency

<comment><USER10> Can you please tell which? Thanks I too am planning to buy new pair.

<comment><USER9> I'm using the N25 over-ear headphones from a brand named Srhythm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A Purple seat cushion ($80). Its awesome.

</comment><comment><USER12> A USB fan

</comment><comment><USER13> A vertical mouse

<comment><USER14> Yeah 20$ and awesome purchase

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> spotify premium, I can play relaxing trance music while i work and it helps me focus tbh</comment>


Twitter only resizes user icon. View this account's icon. Wasted bandwidth - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/POpublictransit

<comment><USER2> Yes, it's initially surprising, and then it gets terribly annoying.

If you look around further, you'll notice that it gets a LOT worse than that particular example. While developing Twitter support on an iPhone app, we discovered that some account icons far exceed 1MB in size, which ended up causing us some memory usage issues. So it goes..

<comment><AUTHOR> I just don't understand how a system riddled with performance issues could make an oversight like this.

Unless I'm starring one of the causes of the performance issue in the face.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think you might want to try <http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/> or <http://help.twitter.com/>.

<comment><AUTHOR> For infrastructure upgrades? Seems more like an internal issue than a user issue.</comment></comment>


Police: Boston bombing suspects lost hostage while buying snacks - <AUTHOR> http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-75562062/ <comment><USER2> That hostage has one hell of a story to tell.</comment>


Ask HN: What did you learn from Gilab data loss? - <AUTHOR> > I don't get to work on databases this size and today has been an incredible lesson and a journey. I've been reading all the comments and blogs, watching the stream and Googling what I didn't know or understand.<p>I wonder what other HN readers have learned from the recent Gilab incident <comment><USER2> Not learned from this incident but in general:

      - you don't have a backup until you test restore
      - use checklists and scripts
      - use another person as soundboard, esp. to confirm destructive changes or "ad hoc" commands. Show intend. Acknowledge.
      - every line entered in prod must have been tested in dev, with known result (ideally everythign in prod should be scripted)
      - use cp or mv with date instead of rm (what changes are "irreversible")
      - use different prompt/color background in prod terminals
      - don't work tired

</comment><comment><USER3> How to spell gitlab

<comment><USER4> Ftfy:

How to spell Gitlab

<comment><USER5> FTFY:

How to spell GitLab.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> what is gilab?</comment>


Line rate 10Gbit/s packet processing on FreeBSD with netmap - <AUTHOR> http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/netmap/ <comment><USER2> This is really very interesting.

I work with Juniper routers and switches all day and every day, the thing I love about them is they're built on top of FreeBSD (now called JunOS, but it still harks back to FreeBSD when you drop to the shell)

Something small and light and fast, running on FreeBSD with this added would be perfect for customer CPE equipment or for non-essential routing tasks.

Very impressive, I look forward to seeing where this goes.

<comment><USER3> The data path on a Juniper isn't passing mbufs around the FreeBSD IP stack, is it? It's FreeBSD command-and-control, but my understanding is that the packet processing itself might as well be its own rtos.

<comment><USER4> I don't know about juniper specifically but most multiport routers are built on packet processing asics with content addressable storage in local ram and built-in macs for each port. When a packet is encountered that requires more complex interaction than the asic can handle it's kicked up to a CPU for processing.

<comment><USER5> This.

Juniper has always used a (heavily hacked) FreeBSD core running on an embedded PC platform (Intel-based Routing Engine) for JUNOS that did all (or most) of the protocol related stuff and left the actual forwarding of packets to a specialized core of ASICs (The Packet Forwarding Engine).

This has changed in recent years with some lower-level protocols being handled on the line-cards themselves on newer platforms. The vast majority of the protocols still run on the Routing Engine though.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, sorry, I was talking about the control plane stuff. Does Juniper use any of the original FreeBSD IP stack for its control plane or exception path stuff?

<comment><USER5> I'm not really sure.

TBH, it's not really the limiting factor. The interconnect between the RE and PFE is something like 100mbps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As many have said on -CURRENT: Thanks for the great work. Do you plan on getting this merged into the FreeBSD tree, and maintaining it?

<comment><AUTHOR> yes to both questions. merging should start very soon.

<comment><USER7> Thanks again for the great work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is impressive. How is the performance on different packet sizes? Most real world loads would require far fewer than 14.88Mpps since most packets would be equal to MTU. So I'm wondering if performance would increase or decrease with packet size.

<comment><AUTHOR> please look at the paper linked to the url, which defines the problem and the metrics in more detail.

<comment><USER8> Thanks. This is what I was looking for.

From the linked paper: _The most challenging situation is usually with the shortest packet sizes, where per-packet costs are almost unavoidably dominant over the memory copy costs. This justifies why we will run most of our tests with 64 byte packets (60 + 4 for the Ethernet CRC). In netmap, in particular, the per-byte system CPU cost is exactly zero because all data transfers are performed by the NIC, and it is up to applications to access memory, if it really needs to._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great! Maybe you could compare this with <http://www.ntop.org/PF_RING.html> for Linux?

<comment><AUTHOR> The "old" pf_ring is only meant for packet capture and involves packet copies, so it is several times slower than netmap. There is a newer "Direct Network Access" (DNA) version of pf_ring which avoids copies and has the same performance of netmap, but is much more fragile because in DNA the userspace program writes directly into the NIC registers and rings (so it can crash the entire OS), whereas in netmap the NIC programming is filtered by system calls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very clever solution on stack bridging. +1</comment>


How Bolivian Farmers Made the World Crave Quinoa - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-13/how-bolivian-farmers-made-the-world-crave-quinoa.html <comment><USER2> Interesting story, but glosses over lots of the details of how they got acceptance in US and Europe. Did they teach the gringos how to cook it? Is it ultimately a technology triumph? As without the debittering (dehusking?) technology the crops would have been unsellable.

<comment><USER3> You can probably blame the gluten-free madness for some of it. Most of the people I know who are big fans became fans at around the same time they suddenly "developed" gluten problems coincidentally at around the same time a couple years ago when the fad started taking off.

It's listed frequently in gluten-free literature as an alternative to gluten rich wheat products.

All that being said, it tastes fine and isn't overly burdensome to cook. It's a nice change of pace from other staples as part of a well varied diet.

<comment><USER4> I understand that there's an unseemly faddish element to the gluten free thing, but I think it's unfair to say that your acquaintances suddenly "developed" gluten problems. More likely, they just hadn't been announcing their chronic bowel problems to you all along and suddenly found that their symptoms improved when they tried out this new diet they'd heard of.

<comment><USER3> I don't just think it's faddish, I think it's outright disrespectful of people who have actual gluten problems.

<comment><USER5> My son has medically diagnosed gluten sensitivity or whatever Celiac is officially called, and he loves the recent fad because there's tons of junk food he can buy at the store, at least as long as the fad lasts. He was diagnosed many years ago and back then, there were not many artificial GF products out there to buy...

It would be interesting to compare results over time, my son was diagnosed quite awhile ago and it was cheap and easy to go cold turkey WRT grains, whereas I think paradoxically it might be harder today for people recently (self?) diagnosed because there so many "here's a GF sorta-cookie-like object for a mere $6.95" products in stores. Or the GF pancake mix that tastes good even to me, but is about $10/box. Its a lot cheaper, and arguably easier, to eat naturally GF products than artificially GF products, what I'm getting at is its a lot cheaper and easier to make a GF omelet for breakfast than to go thru what you need to do to make (or buy) GF french toast. Its easier and cheaper to make your own taco meat seasoning than to try and buy a packaged envelope that doesn't use wheat flour as a thickener, for example.

<comment><USER3> One of the enduring problems with various specialized diets is the desire to make substitutes for the food that was left behind. Nobody really wants to give up a food if they don't have to and we end up with all kinds of terrible substitutes when folks should probably just make the entire paradigm shift into whatever their new food style is.

I think if you have to change foods because of a debilitating issue like Celiac, getting rid of whatever is making you feel like you're about to die isn't all that hard and thus you don't really want to terrible substitute. It's the folks who are induced into the fad who don't _really_ feel all that different one way or the other outside of some kind of placebo effect who still desire the foods that "were making them sick".

I think it's a particular kind of disgusting to convince people who are otherwise healthy that eating certain foods is making them sick when it isn't, it's infantilizing them and I think it takes away from the seriousness of the real disease and the people who really suffer from what's a very painful and often socially crippling issue.

<comment><USER6> People like foods with emotional memory or that taste good. Many delicious foods make you sick. (Trick or treat!)

<comment><USER5> "Many delicious foods make you sick."

One example is alcohol is a food!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think I first discovered quinoa in a cooking program 10 or so years ago. Some of the comments here seem to assume people consume it just because it's trendy in some way. For what it's worth, I like it simply because I like the taste, its slight crunch, and just as something different occasionally.

</comment><comment><USER8> They've been trying to grow the stuff in Colorado since the 80's. Apparently it's not so easy.

[http://www.quinoa.net/127/136.html](http://www.quinoa.net/127/136.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> I won't ever understand some trendy foods. This stuff costs 10 times a much as rice and is a bit more annoying to prepare. Then you have to adapt your recipes and such.

After a while I told my girlfriend I'm just going to make rice because quinoa is just silly, so she decided to make it herself. She's not a very experienced cook, but she tries, and as she tried rinsing it half of the stuff went down the sync, she yelled out in frustration... But she continues to cook and eat it to this day for it's 'amazing health benefits'.

<comment><USER10> Annoying to prepare? It uses roughly the same proportion water as rice and it cooks in half the time (compared to brown rice which takes the longest to prepare). What's the problem otherwise?

<comment><USER11> I don't get the complaint either.

It is comparable to white rice in preparation time and comparable to brown rice in flavor and nutrition. As someone raised on lots of rice at the dinner table, I think it puts rice to shame.

No, it is not truly a simple substitute to a sophisticated foody, there are positives and negatives, of course.

And it is pricier. Let's not kid ourselves. Most of us to actually cook at home are saving so much money relative to typical American eaters, that the price point is completely irrelevant. If you not eating 20 home cooked meals a week, do not talk me about price. (Yes, I do eat 20 home cooked meals some weeks.)

Some people seem very impressed with themselves for dismissing quinoa as trendy. But I know food well enough to decide for myself, and quinoa is a very attractive addition to my pantry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm disappointed that this fails to mention the impact on locals who relied on the food as a staple and can no longer afford to eat it.

[http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/quinoa-boom-offers-hard- less...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/quinoa-boom-offers-hard-lesson-in- food-economics-1.1358699)

<comment><USER13> From the article:

 _Of course, the challenges continue. Today, rising demand for quinoa has led its price to skyrocket in poorer Bolivian communities, which still depend on the crop as a protein source, making it unaffordable for some families._

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How is this article the "how"? It should be more of a historical piece, not a "how to".

</comment><comment><USER9> How much does it differ from millet? It has similarity in appearance, and I jokingly call quinoa 'expensive birdseed'.

</comment><comment><USER15> Until Asia starts eating it (India, China etc.) the headline is completely off. The world does not crave Quinoa.

</comment><comment><USER16> startup ideas: a de-bittering device for people's personalities like mine? or a de-bittering browser add-on for comments?

</comment><comment><USER17> It is a laughably bad grain food source. Due to overzealousness in my youth, I have a giant jar of quinoa as a last-ditch food source in case of thermonuclear war, worldwide famine or biological catastrophe. Once I've eaten all fresh and canned goods and MREs, I'll still have a gallon of quinoa held in reserve.

Probably a more serious problem (than eating quinoa) would be the difficulty of finding fresh water to clean and boil the quinoa under such circumstances.

Quinoa as a sole food source embodies a strong argument for cannibalism (perhaps the Incas agreed).</comment>


The Enzo Project - <AUTHOR> http://enzo-project.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> What is Enzo? Enzo is a community-developed adaptive mesh refinement simulation code, designed for rich, multi-physics hydrodynamic astrophysical calculations.

Enzo is freely available, developed in the open, with a strong support structure for assistance. Simulations conducted with Enzo have been featured in numerous refereed journal articles, and it is capable of running on computers from laptop to Top500.</comment>


A History of Capacity Challenges in Computer Science [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/CSCapacity.pdf <comment><USER2> I hope this faculty shortage is still in effect when I finish my Ph.D. :)

Anecdotally, many of my peers are going to industry instead of academia, because 1) better pay, 2) no begging for funding, 3) they don't want to teach. Academia is seen as signing up for a difficult life. Many industry research labs are allowing their staff to publish papers, so you can even participate in the academic research community. Look at how many NIPS papers come from Google-owned companies.

Personally, I'm interested in academia mainly because I'd rather not be part of an institution whose main goal is making money - but that attitude is not common in CS.

<comment><USER3> How sure are you that a university's main goal isn't to make money these days?

<comment><USER4> Based on the evidence it seems that is very much the point of universities these days, and research only exists to secure funding and prestige, not to push the boundaries of knowledge.

This is not a happy situation, but it seems to be where we are. And it probably won't change for a long time.

It's not impossible to disintermediate teaching and accreditation. But I can't think of any workable way to disintermediate high quality research, especially when significant resources are required.

The best approach might be to herd postdocs into research-only facilities - like Bell Labs and Parc, but independent - and throw money at them to see what happens.

That's not very imaginative, but research-only labs seem to work well when they're managed correctly, and a lot of smart people would like the chance to do pure research without having to teach, mark, and justify their existence with constant grant chasing and committee meetings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We haven't really had anything as collapsing as the "dot-com" crash occur in the past decade (knock on wood). As the article points out we are at all time highs, Congressional Research Service [1] reports that computer science jobs are projected to continue for the next decade.

I also like to mention [2] because it seems like this is where female enrollment's number dropped and never recovered. For a short while, I was researching about how these numbers came to be. Unfortunately, the majority of articles only talk about how computers were marketed to males and "Revenge of the Nerds" stereotypes pushed females away.

Instead, Dr. Roberts' article looks at a simple realism - everyone got sick and tired of CS. Sure, it was lack of resources in the 80s, but it shows a different perspective than marketing did it. I cannot find any research on CS perceptions stating it, but there was/is a severe "elitist" attitude among CS students. I think this is where a lot of the unattractiveness of the subject comes as well. In the 80s, you had to be the best of the best to get into these limited programs. I think it inflated a lot of student egos, which is where that personality quirk was created.

Maybe all STEM people have it, I don't know, but I do see it in CS. It's getting better as other programs are starting to teach things like coding, but if we continue to have limited resources, something needs to help relieve the strain. Better MOOC/Cyberlearning retention, grade automation, novel teaching approaches, etc. Otherwise, we'll just be repeating the 80s drop soon.

[1] - [https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43061.pdf](https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43061.pdf)

[2] - [https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when- women-stopped-coding)</comment>


My health update after spending two years in ketosis - <AUTHOR> http://danielodio.com/two-years-in-ketosis-my-health-update <comment><USER2> I guess watch and make sure your subcutaneous fat doesn't disappear.</comment>


Google Invests in Wall Street Messaging Tool Symphony - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/05/report-google-invests-in-wall-street-messaging-tool-symphony/ <comment><USER2> This is an example of building a simple product that fulfills a market need.

Financial regulations are complex and harsh, but the technology is simple. Normal messengers would not be valued at such an amount or compete with apps like whatsapp.</comment>


Beware Scam Market 'Research' (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://ipvm.com/reports/scam-research <comment><USER2> Thanks for submitting that. I authored that report.

To give some color, a number of those companies have angrily emailed us so evidently, it has been circulating around.

Happy to answer any questions.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you find people with certain expertise within your company? - <AUTHOR> When you need to find who's responsible for something in a different department, or you need to find who has worked on a particular project, what do you do?<p>In other words, do you have a tool to find who knows what in your organization? Or do you just have to ask around a lot till you find someone who knows how to find someone? <comment><USER2> Funny you should ask that's my entire business:

[https://insideropinion.com/](https://insideropinion.com/)

It's actually a problem in pretty much all medium to large companies! There wasn't a good solution outside of internal conferences or some centralized sharing solution... so I built a solution!

Feel free to email me if you're interested.</comment>


DOM nodes do not clear after remove(). Is there a memory leak? - <AUTHOR> We have noticed huge DOM Nodes count and memory increase on our Angular app and in our effort to debug it we stripped down everything. In the end, we were left with the following pure html and javascript code which demonstrates the problem.
Please follow through the following simple code snippet.
<!DOCTYPE HTML> <html>
    <head>
    </head><body></body></html> Load this snippet on Chrome and open up the Chrome Performance monitor, click on the Collect garbage icon and see the DOM Nodes counter. It should be 6.
Let's just add an <input> like this:
<!DOCTYPE HTML> <html>
    <head>
    </head><body><input></body></html> Reload the snippet on a new tab and count the DOM Nodes, it should be 9.
Then, run this in the console to remove the <input>
document.getElementsByTagName('input')[0].remove() The count should be 6, which is as expected.
Finally, reload the snipped on a new tab again. Make sure the DOM Nodes show 9 and then type some text in the <input> field. You will notice that DOM Nodes increase by one, reaching 10, this is the entered #text that is added into the DOM tree. So far so good.
Now let's remove the <input> as before with:
document.getElementsByTagName('input')[0].remove() See the DOM Nodes, they are still 10 as if nothing was removed.
Any thoughts? <comment><USER2> Nodes aren't cleared until the next GC cycle.

<comment><USER3> Not the OP, but the next question is: Can you force the GC to run?

Perhaps this can be useful: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13950394/forcing- garbage...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13950394/forcing-garbage- collection-in-google-chrome)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Lol, wrong site. You might get an answer but try stack overflow or something similar. Hope that helps..</comment>


Show HN: Cronyo – A simple CLI to manage your cron jobs on AWS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cronyo/cronyo <comment><USER2> We replaced Kinesis Analytics with Kinesis Firehose + AWS Batch with Spot pricing to process analytics offline from blobs stored in S3, and it was a significant cost saving for us.

Spot pricing gives you EC2 instances at 70% to 90% discounts, and the complexity of bidding for those is handled by AWS Batch out-of-the-box.

Batch supports Lambda as a compute node, too, fwiw, and is free to use (that is, you only pay for the resources Batch runs your jobs on). If you're into ECS/K8s, AWS Fargate supports spot pricing, and scheduled or CW Events triggered invocations.

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks awesome! I've built almost exactly these lambdas at work but without even thinking about a nice CLI, really like it. I'm a bit confused about how many lambdas end up deployed - do you deploy a new one per unique or multiplex crons onto eg your `http_post` one?

One thing I've been wanting to do for ours is to support KMS enrypted headers which it would decrypt before sending, so we don't have plaintext API keys etc. stored in the repo. Have you thought about anything like that yet?

<comment><USER4> Have you thought about storing your secrets in SSM or Secrets Manager, giving you lambda role(s) permissions to decrypt and using the appropriate APIs to call them? I use SecretString in SSM for a lot of things and it works quite well. There's a QPS limit but you can pay for a higher level of service now and move the bar up.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the pointer, I'll look into those services as well. :)

<comment><USER5> Watch out for the charges. Accessing secrets through API costs money

<comment><USER6> Also watch out for throttling of GET requests/get-parameters API calls. I've found Parameter Store with SecureString sufficient enough but the throttling can kill the Lambda if it gets invoked frequently.

<comment><USER7> For things like this you can abuse organization accounts. They take a few seconds to bootstrap and now you have a completely independent resource limit for that specific service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is fantastic!

In production, I use a cron SaaS but for personal projects, this is perfect because the one I use for free requires me to login every month and re-up my free plan (which is 100% fine and I'm happy to do it).

Thanks so much for creating this and helping guys like me with their pet projects!

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks great! Starred for later.

Clean readme as well.

</comment><comment><USER10> i like the extensive readme and blog post. Thank you!</comment>


Show HN: Japanese Sentence Builder - <AUTHOR> https://learn-japanese.org/2020/05/14/wag-japanese-sentence-builder/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is a tool based on a FSM (Finite State Machine) that restricts the next input in the sequence in order to obey Japanese grammar. The state machine at the top of the screen changes highlighting to show which state one is currently in, with blue states the default and green states accepting. Even beginners can use such a tool to generate authentic Japanese because the FSM will block out a lot of bad input by how it works.</comment>