Houston homeowners unaware that reservoir neighbourhoods are designed to flood - <AUTHOR> https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/harvey-reservoirs <comment><USER2> In Ontario, you simply are not allowed to build in a flood plain. This is in response to Hurricane Hazel in the 1950s, who's floods killed people.

Even further, if your home is destroyed in a major flood, you aren't allowed to rebuild it- clearly, wherever you are it's not safe from flooding.

It's a very effective system. The only problems is has these days are A: people who fight it because they bought property they want to develop, but can't, and B: the fact that where flooding occurs is changing due to climate change and geology/geography changes in the last 50 years.

Texas may want to consider such a system.

<comment><USER3> That will never happen in Texas. The minute that someone tries to make a law, people will start yelling about "big government" and "freedom".

From the article:

"This is not dumb, bad planning,this is very well-thought-out, bad planning.""

<comment><USER4> As has been pointed out many times in recent weeks, they then want the "big government" to fund their rescue and recovery when that mistake bites them.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. I have no problem with idiots that want to build in flood plains, but I get upset with federally-subsidized flood insurance program and FEMA who come in to rescue people who make shit decisions.

<comment><USER6> Is this partisan? Do you feel the same way about people who live in areas prone to destruction by hurricanes, like New Orleans and Puerto Rico?

<comment><USER5> Absolutely not partisan. I would prefer if my (federal) tax dollars didn't help anyone affected by hurricanes. I understand my point of view is way outside of the mainstream, where all of the politicians compete to see who can appear more concerned.

<comment><USER7> I'm curious to understand this perspective. If this were true what do you think the consequences would be?

<comment><USER5> Primarily, I think it would bring incentives closer to the people making decisions. I think it would have pretty dramatic effects on where people choose to live, how they construct their houses, and their level of disaster preparedness. And these are all very good things. Secondarily, it would ever so slightly reduce the federal budget. I don't have any illusion that it would be a meaningful impact on the budget, but I have very similar attitudes towards a wide swath of other federal programs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I grew up in this area. I can confirm it's not common knowledge how these dams work. I learned a lot seeing Harvey.

Everyone does know the dams are there. But in an otherwise flat city they are just big mounds of dirt running for miles. They don't hold water most of the time. Even with heavy rain any minor flooding goes away in a couple days. I never really understood why a 20-50 foot tall dam was needed. I remember once joking with a friend that if the water ever filled up over the dam that means the entire state of Texas behind the dams is under water. It actually did not make sense to me why they built the dams so big until Harvey.

In any case, someone knew and should have been a required disclosure when buying a home. However, I don't think it would have helped. People would have bought there anyway because this kind of flooding was unthinkable. Although they would have known they needed flood insurance. But then, insurance companies probably wouldn't offer it.

<comment><USER9> It's incredible that the city, or for that matter the Army Corps of Engineers, allowed anyone to build homes there. "Totally irresponsible and reckless" would be my most favorable assessment.

<comment><USER10> The Army Corps couldn't help:

>Long added that the Army Corps doesn't have the power to control development on land the agency doesn't own.

>"That would require the act of politicians, and they've chosen not to do it," Long said.

<comment><USER11> The Army Corps should buy up as much of the land possible around the resouivor while the prices are depressed to prevent future development on it.

EDIT: My comment assumes that they would acquire additional funding to do this, as they are the best agency to acquire and hold the land to prevent future development (vs a traditional land trust for conservancy).

<comment><USER12> TFA says they bought 24,000 acres for about $170 / acre (today's dollars) in the 40s. The surrounding 8,000 acres in fact is perfectly buildable with the right codes in place.

<comment><USER11> > The surrounding 8,000 acres in fact is perfectly buildable with the right > codes in place.

What is the delta in cost for building with updated/"right" building codes versus how buildings on that flood plain are already being built?

Everything has a cost, right? Its whether we pay for it blindly through national flood insurance or uprated building codes.

<comment><USER12> "Stilting" houses is not a big deal, if flooding is to be expected. It's done all the time on the coast, and apparently should have been done here. The storm was once-in-a-lifetime, but there's no telling when the next one will hit.

"Communities that participate in the NFIP are required to adopt and enforce local regulations for development in mapped Special Flood Hazard Areas (SFHAs) to reduce the risk of flooding (see 44 CFR Parts 59 and 60)." If the zoning doesn't meet the minimum requirements, then NFIP is not available, which is a deal-breaker.

If the minimum requirements are not sufficient, they can be updated. If the area wasn't properly designated a SFHA, that should be fixed and all new construction and substantial renovation must conform.

This shit probably is not complicated, we just aren't versed in the field. I guessing that TFA fails in researching and educating the reader on the extensive regulations currently present.

[1] - [https://www.fema.gov/media-library- data/643d07bceee8ade17eef...](https://www.fema.gov/media-library- data/643d07bceee8ade17eef8e11cf7a2abb/P-936_sec2_508.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Texas is a non-recourse state [1].

In a non-recourse state if you default on your mortgage the lender cannot come after you personally for the remaining balance. All they can do is foreclose and then sell the house. If what they get from the sale is less than what you owed, the lender eats the difference.

I would have expected the mortgage companies to have been on top of this, either not lending for homes in that area or requiring the borrowers to have flood insurance.

[1] along with Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Idaho, Minnesota, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, Utah, and Washington.

<comment><USER14> >In a non-recourse state if you default on your mortgage the lender cannot come after you personally for the remaining balance.

Sort of. There are lots of caveats (taking out a second mortgage removes some of this protection, for example).

Also, in Washington, at least, this is only true if the lender opts to handle it this way. They get a simplified process if it's non-recourse but if they know you have lots of other assets, then absolutely CAN take you to court for the difference, it's just far more costly and they can't use the simplified procedure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> There used to be big green feilds where people would fly their kites along the river in the Karlín neighborhood of Prague. The feilds were privately owned, but it was illegal to build on them, because they were seasonal flood grounds. Now, new and very fancy offices and appartments are being built there, despite the fact that we often have over a meter of floodwater there. I have no idea what changed. In the same neighborhood is an old rotting building called the Invalidovna [1], which was partly destroyed by flooding. It is about 200 meters from the shore of the river. Everything closer will be flooded even worse. This is an issue that is of great interest to me in the analysis of property rights. When the old building code was in effect, privately owned land was turned into a defacto public park. No one wanted the city to lose that park, but the private property was owned. Doesn't the owner have the right to do with their land as they please? But really, it is in the interest of no one except the owner that the owner should build there. Even the people who buy the appartments are getting screwed in a way.

And what is the fairness of declaring the land a flood plane in the first place. People owned that land before it was declared a flood plane. The government, with the stroke of a pen makes land worthless or worth millions. It is just one of those great examples of how capitalism is chaotic, unjust, and senseless and why we should never assume that someone deserves to be rich and others deserve to be poor.

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

<comment><USER16> "No one wanted the city to lose that park, but the private property was owned. Doesn't the owner have the right to do with their land as they please? But really, it is in the interest of no one except the owner that the owner should build there. Even the people who buy the appartments are getting screwed in a way."

I think this is easily solved by requiring the owner to post a bond that approximates the future risk exposure that public entities (like FEMA, the National Guard, state police, etc.) face due to the new buildings now in place.

That and, of course, full disclosure in sales literature/contracts.

In this way the private property owner exercises their right to dispose of their property as they see fit but the general public is not shouldering a public cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> There is great pressure to build on designated flood plains all over the western world as population density increases. Rules are changed to enable building after there are a couple of decades of people 'forgetting' the geographic realities.

You could make a case that the terrible northern california wildfires in Sonoma county are a variation on this theme. Virtually identical huge fires happened in 1964, when there was far less building and population. [http://www.sfchronicle.com/thetake/article/Wine-Country- fire...](http://www.sfchronicle.com/thetake/article/Wine-Country-fire- of-1964-Eerie-similarities-to-12267643.php)

People forget, subdivisions are built, and people assume someone somewhere did their due dilligence and that it is 'safe' land...

<comment><USER17> [http://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/7534368-181/santa-rosas- de...](http://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/7534368-181/santa-rosas-devastated- coffey-park?gallery=7515439&artslide=8)

"Surprising as it was to residents, the destruction of Coffey Park wasn't a mystery to fire scientists. They view it as a rare, but predictable, event that has exposed flaws in the way fire risk is measured and mitigated in California. Because it was outside the officially mapped "very severe" hazard zone, more than five miles to the east, Coffey Park was exempt from regulations designed to make buildings fire resistant in high-risk areas.

California fire officials developed hazard maps in the 2000s that for the first time, tied building codes to geographies based on risk. Max Moritz, a fire specialist with the University of California's Cooperative Extension, said the maps were an important step forward in assessing fire danger.

But the Coffey Park catastrophe has shown that the methodology, and the law underlying it, were too narrow."

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "I don't want to stay in this community," he said. "I have to go far away from these reservoirs."

The value of the property will drop and people will move right back in. Reading the article it sounds like the city and county still aren't willing to take any real action to move housing out of the flood reservoir.

I wonder what will make City officials take a wider view. As long as short term gain is the largest deciding factor, we can expect more such tragedies.

<comment><USER19> So long as the federal government is effectively underwriting a chunk of the risk, the situation is likely to continue.

<comment><USER3> The same people who fight the hardest against "government subsidized health insurance for the poor", beg for "government subsidized flood insurance for homes that cost $500,000+".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If you want to look at flood information for most places in the US, go here:

[https://msc.fema.gov/portal/search](https://msc.fema.gov/portal/search)

<comment><USER21> Last two homes I've purchased have had this info as part of the escrow/mortgage docs. I bet most people don't bother to actually read that hide stack of paper they're signing.

<comment><USER22> Most of the stack (when I closed) was a mortgage contract which was marked up as a uniform contract, plus what must have been one page per year of the finances for each payment. I double checked some key terms, but mostly relied on it being a uniform contract.

Everything else was short and readable, but there were a lot of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is a really stark example of the chasm between politics and engineering, and why the latter often finds the former incomprehensible and distasteful. The engineers did their jobs. The politicians and the public didn't understand it, or didn't care, and disaster ensued.

</comment><comment><USER24> > Some local government officials, like Harris County Commissioner Steve > Radack, say they've warned residents for years about the risks of living in > or around the reservoirs during town halls and other public events.

Wait. Isn't the job of government officials to _not issue building permits in the first place_?

> Several local officials — including Houston's "flood czar" and a neighboring > county executive — said they had no idea the neighborhoods had been built > inside the flood pools. Several real estate agents said they didn't realize > they were selling homes inside the pools.

Yeah, right.

</comment><comment><USER25> Isn't Houston famous for having basically no zoning laws, at least compared to most developed parts of the US?

<comment><USER26> It lacks what most people consider zoning, although the various jurisdictions making up Houston all have various land use regulations and most neighborhoods have deed restrictions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> There is a great Planet Money episode[0] on the problems behind government insurance/subsidy of flood neighborhoods in Houston. Worth listening to.

[0] [http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/09/29/554603161/episo...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/09/29/554603161/episode-797-flood- money)

</comment><comment><USER28> Is there a service to show the map of insurance premiums for different disaster types?

<comment><USER29> Historical loss data is definitely collected by insurance companies for analysis by their underwriters.

Sometimes they share that information with each other. For example, some limited loss data is shared among companies for auto claim information associated with auto policy holders. (Not all companies participate. GEICO is the biggest holdout, last I knew.) I have not heard that companies share property damage loss information with each other, but they may do so the same way they share auto claim information.

On the other hand, not sharing may give them a competitive advantage. For example, Allstate systematically reduced their coverage of coastal homes in the New Jersey / New York markets about 10 years ago, because their threat models indicated that the area was due for a major hurricane. This obviously reduced their losses when Hurricane Sandy hit.

Katrina got all of the big insurers to take a closer look at their exposures from hurricanes, and I would not be surprised to learn that premiums for coastal properties all along the East Coast and Gulf Coast have skyrocketed in the last decade. The risk is very high. They enjoyed over 10 years of low losses, but then this year they got hammered in Texas and Florida.

So, would companies share detailed information with each other? Probably not, but they probably have a good idea of what their competitors have paid out for major events, and they definitely know where the risks are geographically.

Are they going to share that detailed information with the public? Hell no. They bought it, they paid for it, it's theirs, and they're going to keep it.

The easiest way to determine if there's a high risk is to ask for a quote on a property _before_ you buy it. That will tell you a lot. For example, if you're thinking of buying some property in southern California and wonder if the fire risk is high, just ask for a quote. If wildfire risk is high, Allstate (for example) will simply tell you they can't write a policy for that property. Other companies may write a policy, but the premium will be higher than surrounding areas with lower risk.

Flood insurance is a special case. No homeowners policy offers coverage for flooding, because it is the textbook example for adverse selection in property and casualty insurance. (That is, only people who live in a flood plain will buy flood insurance, so the risk is not spread across a large enough population. Fire, on the other hand, can happen anywhere, so everyone buys coverage.)

For this reason, the government offers flood insurance for those who live in flood plains. Interestingly enough, even then not many people buy the coverage.

Edit: Earthquakes are another example of adverse selection. If you live in California and have investigated premiums for earthquake coverage, you already know this. No, it is not covered by your homeowners policy. No, I don't want to pay for it when it happens, because I live in an area with extremely low risk for earthquakes (and flooding). And yet, when it happens, I will surely be paying more taxes to cover someone else's losses.

<comment><USER28> Surely this data can be crowdsourced from end-users? Just like wages are not public, but we still have a glassdoor.

<comment><USER11> If you could data mine from public record sources, possibly. But there's no way to crowdsource this data due to lack of incentives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > He said he still considers it a "unique event" and doesn't think it's likely > those homes will flood again any time soon.

Of all the things that came across in this article as disastrous this really caught me. This event wasn't "unique," something similar happened nearly 30 years ago.

The question that needs to be asked is: when will this happen again?

</comment><comment><USER31> Would any type of records search available to a homeowner prepurchase have turned up these floodplain maps?

<comment><USER32> I agree they _should_ be available, but it may not have made a difference. Most people don't read any records when purchasing a home or base such a decision on things like this.

I've had flood plain maps included in my mortgage paperwork, but I've also had the other parties sit their being verbally impatient while I actually look through everything instead of just signing where they show me.

<comment><USER33> You should have reviewed the map during due diligence, not at closing. Closing is for checking that the terms of the deal are properly documented not for research.

<comment><USER32> Well I can tell you the map was not available prior to closing. I requested it and all documents. Town and County governments only referred me to the Metropolitan District, whose board cancelled meetings and ignored all attempts. Closing was the first time I saw anything. That's why I didn't feel bad making them wait.

<comment><USER33> It's not the seller's fault the county is a pain in the ass. Again closing is not for due diligence. Even if you had found an issue, you would have lost your escrow. I would be pissed too if a buyer tried to find a reason to back out of a deal at closing. That's not what that's for and you could have cost them a ton of money if you had found an issue.

[Edit] fyi the proper way to make the seller care about such things is to extend due diligence and let them know you'll need a flood map before you'll move forward on the deal.

<comment><USER34> Parent is well within his rights.

I would be pissed if I bought property that knowingly floods, but the seller's agent insists it is the responsibility of the buyer's agent to discover this.

What if the buyer relied on the seller's agent?

You believe the buyer is at fault?

<comment><USER33> I don't "think" it's the buyer's responsibility. It literally is their responsibility (excluding special circumstances). The large majority of contracts are written with the assumption that the buyer performs due diligence during a specific period. Once that period is up, there are penalties for backing out. The buyer is in violation of the contract if they back out of the offer. Rights have little to do with contract law in this case by the way.

Note we're talking about public records such as flood plains here, not the seller lying on a disclosure form or some other form of fraud.

<comment><USER34> If the penalties are part of the contract, then the buyer has a right, as does the seller, to execute the contract in that manner, as well.

You act as though the buyer is committing a crime, where it is questionable that the seller or their agent may have.

<comment><USER33> My point is that any experienced seller (and the lawyers and agents and banks...) is going to be confused and likely pissed if you show up to closing expecting to do all your research then. That's not what closing is for. Due diligence exists for a reason.

<comment><USER32> >> is going to be confused and likely pissed if you show up to closing expecting to do all your research then.

To be clear, the seller in this case also happened to be the developer in charge of the quasi-government entity responsible for these documents. The county referred me to them because State law gives them responsibility for those documents. They had violated time frames in the contract multiple times before this, I only proceeded because I wanted the house at that location and wasn't willing to walk away despite their violations.

I gave the title insurance company and the seller written notice of several weeks that I was still waiting on documents, and that if I didn't have them until we closed, I was going to make them sit there while I looked it all over. So I really don't care if they were confused or pissed, and I really don't care if you think so, either. I asked for them early in the process, didn't get them, so I was going to look them over and make a final decision when I got them - which was at closing, because they chose it to be at closing. I had money already on the table, and it was a calculated risk that I would eventually be okay with the documents, but I wasn't prepared to proceed with the rest of the mortgage without them.

My point is that it was obvious to me that in most of the mortgages they handled and in most of the contracts this developer / builder (one of the biggest in my area) handles, most people were not looking at these things EVER.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> An aside: I'm getting tired of hearing people talk about "unique events". We've had a lot of them recently. Maybe in future the weather is going to follow a different path from that which prevailed in the last century.

</comment><comment><USER36> Lenders would know about the flood zone and act accordingly.

Something is wrong with this story..

</comment><comment><USER37> I love that the responsible state and county officials blame congress,and that the article lets them get away with it. They should blame Californians and jihadis while they are at it.

How's that elimination of "job-killing regulation" working for ya? Things like this are the point of local government.

<comment><USER38> The Houston situation is as much the fault of regulation as its the fault of not having some.

Houston itself was only built up to the degree it was on the backs of federally subsidized flood insurance and huge amounts of public money spent to build the dams around it. If developers had to eat the real cost of building in a flood zone, many fewer would have done so.</comment></comment>


Discovering the hypocrisy gap in reliability the hard way - <AUTHOR> https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/05/23/gap/ <comment><USER3> This resonates so much. One way to gauge the gap is to look for redefined reliability terms:

\- Do they call it continuous deployment when it's really continuous integration? CD is when the build pipeline goes all the way to production without any human interaction (except possibly a review step).

\- Do they call it continuous integration when it's really nightly builds, manual builds, local builds, or per-feature rather than per-change?

\- When HTTP doesn't redirect to HTTPS, when common credentials aren't rotated whenever anyone who knows them leave, when full-disk encryption is optional, when someone can walk in from the street and look at or change _anything,_ when not using common password storage protections or anything like that, even an amateur knows it's not "excellent" security.

</comment><comment><USER4> The note about opening the door resonates with me. On two different occasions I've come across IT people scratching their heads about how to get into the server closet. On the first occasion the guy with the key was at a BBQ and in no shape to drive. I opened it with a library card. On the second, the Kisi server controlling the door had crashed (guess where the server was). I opened it with a butter knife. On both occasions I opened the door quicker than my wife can find her keys in her purse. Lesson 1) Secure your server room against physical attacks Lesson 2) As you secure your server room make sure you make an emergency plan for how to get in to your newly secured server room.

</comment><comment><USER5> I enjoy a lot of the writing on Rachel's site, but the bitterness is too much for me sometimes.

<comment><USER6> I find this "bitterness" an eye-opener, especially when I see how true it is.

<comment><USER7> When taken with a right skepticism, then yeah, it is. But especially junior folks should be careful taking stories like that at face value.

Being senior engineer is about much, much, more than just technical chops. I've worked with many people like that - they were extremely good technically, but their attitude alienated them and made it harder (and over time - <USER2> impossible) for them to do their jobs. If you think that you need total immunity and authority by reporting to the CEO, then you most likely doesn't understand how your organization operates. Being able to navigate an org and get stuff done, like it or not, is critical skill to being a successful senior engineer at any bigger modern tech company.

<comment><USER8> > Being able to navigate an org > is critical skill to being a successful > senior engineer at any bigger modern tech company.

Yeah, this is why after almost half a decade of working remote, I refuse to entertain the song and dance for working for the giants. Plenty of other places pay enough, with less stress, less koolaid drinking and less rear orifice licking for those that prefer it.

<comment><USER7> Yeah working at smaller shops has an advantage of less overhead and you can focus more on the pure technical stuff. It can be very rewarding.

But aligning and navigating how to work through the org doesn't have to be rear licking (although, it often is). Any big org requires you to figure out how to navigate it, even if it's meritocracy.

Understanding what your business needs and figuring out right solutions for it, that are realistic and can be delivered, is a very valid engineering work.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The One-second War (What Time Will You Die?)   - <AUTHOR> http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1967009

<comment><USER2> I think unixtime should run with no discontinuities, and leap seconds should be handled just like timzezones are: Have a table with leap seconds, and consult it as necessary. Don't change the internal clock - only change the display.

i.e. instead of storing UTC in the clock, store TAI, and calculate UTC (or local time) from it.

That would also work well with his proposal of scheduling leap seconds 20 years in the future, and without messing with the length of a day in calculations, or having discontinuities.

<comment><USER3> The part about scheduling 20 years in advance is the one bit that didn't seem well thought out. We don't know this stuff in advance. We can't even predict earthquakes. Anything that changes the earth's effective radius changes the rotation.

Keeping and updating a table might be workable anyway. It can't be much worse than pushing all the new daylight savings rules.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Java fail.

Here is a link to the PDF version: [http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=1967009&type=pdf...](http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=1967009&type=pdf&CFID=16929106&CFTOKEN=62823757)

</comment><comment><USER5> The "programmers should fix their past mistakes for free" argument is amusing when you consider that the leap second concept is nothing more than an hack.

<comment><USER6> Personally, I favour manually adjusting the Earth's orbital and rotational characteristics to match atomic time.

<comment><USER7> Or using a system of time not correlated to the rotation of the planet. (It is convenient though :( )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's bad enough that the ACM charges $25 for papers that can be legally found by Googling the name of the paper, but they also can't keep their website alive during a Hacker Newsing at 3AM.

Is there a cached copy somewhere else? Google doesn't have one.

<comment><USER9> I agree, but it's not 3am across the entire world, it's 9:47am here in the UK, for example.

<comment><USER8> ...yeah. :)

Speaking of the UK, I'm really liking the Hitchhiker's Guide references sprinkled in the article. (reading via the PDF link above)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very informative article. I've only ever run up against this issue when dealing with age, funny enough. It does seem like a hard problem, but I think I fall with him on the "start doing it right" side. Time stuff has to change by 2038 anyways...

<comment> Tuna-Fish It already did.

sizeof(time_t) == 8 on my machine.

I doubt there will be that many 32bit machines in operation in 2038.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Date and time representation has always provoked an incredibly uncomfortable itch in me. But I've accepted the fact that represented time will never be exact.

However, by just using relative system times and language specific time/date procedures, there is a good chance of future proofing, no matter the outcome of this.

</comment><comment><USER12> What is this "interval time" he refers to, and how does it differ from wallclock time?

<comment><USER13> Interval time is what you use for measuring time intervals. It flows at a rate of 1 second per 9,192,631,770 periods of a particular kind of microwave radiation. It is unaffected by politics, astronomy, etc.

Wall-clock time is what you use when you want to know whether it's 12.34am or 12.35am. It usually increments at the same rate as interval time, but sometimes there are leap seconds, daylight saving time, timezone changes, etc.

Using wall-clock time when what you really want is interval time may result (e.g.) in what was meant to be a 1ms wait turning into a 1hour+1ms wait. That would be bad.

<comment><USER6> The interesting thing there is that these problems of wall-clock time have largely been solved at every level other than seconds.

Years vary in length - 365 or 366 days. It's 29th February. Add one year. Is it 28th February or 1st March? What if it's 28th February or 1st March now, but next year is a leap year?

Months vary in length - 28, 29, 30 or 31 days. It's 31st March. Add one month. What is the date? 30th April or 1st May? What if it's 30th March? Is your "add one month" function strictly increasing?

We KNOW that days vary in length - 23, 24 or 25 hours. It's 00:59 and the clocks go forward today. Add two minutes. What time is it? 01:01 or 02:01? It's 01:59 and the clocks go back today. Add two minutes. Is it 01:01 or 02:01?

Now we simply have a situation where a minute can also vary in length - 59, 60 or 61 seconds. It's 23:59:58. Add 2 seconds. Is it 00:00:02, 00:00:00 or 23:59:60?

These problems are not difficult. The same approaches can be applied to each one. The only difficulty is awareness. Leap seconds are rarer and less predictable than Daylight Saving, month boundaries or even leap years. But Daylight Saving isn't predictable either - the rules change all the time. Just solve it with tables.

<comment><USER14> The solutions you describes are designed to keep calendar in sync with Earth rotation around the Sun and around its own axis. However, there is no real need to keep computer timers synchronized with Earth rotation.

The simplest way to keep track of time for computers is to count seconds from a certain agreed-upon point, without leaps, stretches, or arbitrary transition tables - without needless complexity. If I don't care about calendar (Earth rotation) I shouldn't care about any of that stuff either.

In short, no leap seconds would mean simpler, more reliable software.

<comment><USER6> TAI, then? TAI is UTC but without any leap seconds: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google App Engine refuses to stop charging me. wat? - <AUTHOR> http://googleappenginenuts.tumblr.com/ tl;dr:  had app engine acct, not using it anymore, goog won't let me cancel. <comment><USER2> "Downgrading your quotas to those of a free app" is not the same as converting it to a free app. Presumably they do that so people with unpaid bills can't keep on burning mondo CPU and disk space (which it doesn't sound like you were doing, but that's almost certainly the reason for the policy).

When they tried to bill your (expired) credit card you already owed them money. They want you to pay it before they'll let you access that account.

I guess I don't see the problem here?</comment>


This Land Is Your Land: Behind America's Best-Known Protest Song and Lost Verses - <AUTHOR> https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/585577/this-land-your-land-americas-best-known-protest-song <comment><USER2> Not having received much of an answer last time, I'll re-ask here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23592193](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23592193)

(that version of _This Land_ contains both non-school-approved verses, even if one has had part of its vocabulary decomposed into the supporting image)</comment>


TraceTool: Open source C++ execution trace framework - <AUTHOR> http://blog.froglogic.com/2016/09/open-source-c-execution-trace-framework/ <comment><USER2> Looks cool. However, looking at the github, it looks like the code needs to be instrumented manually.

I've been looking for a tool that would automatically instrument functions at compile-time to inject code (for logging or otherwise) when entering and leaving functions. This would help debugging various infinite loops or figure out what call is blocking, etc... easier.

Anyone knows of a tool that would allow this ?

<comment><USER3> Yes, [http://www.frida.re/](http://www.frida.re/) can do this at runtime – no need to recompile to add new probes.</comment></comment>


Royal Wedding, Shloyal Fledding - <AUTHOR> http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/08/17/royal-wedding-shloyal-fledding/ <comment><USER2> Diets only work long term if you have some sort of "cheat day" built in where you can eat outside of the parameters of your diet.

Likewise, a wedding (or big vacation, or fancy car) is like a "cheat day" for your savings plan. What's the point of saving money if you can't enjoy it during all phases of your life?

Plus, he has overstates some social "norms". Parents more often than not help out with paying for weddings. I can't tell you one of my friends who've spent 2 months salary on a ring (that's not a norm, it's a marketing gimmick), and honeymoon costs can range wildly, but people are going to take vacations anyway, whether they are married or not.

I'm not saying he's wrong to have a "low key" wedding (the author in fact had two receptions). I'm saying that people understand what they are getting themselves into, and there is much lower hanging fruit for couples to grab if they want to be fiscally responsible.</comment>


I Know Where Your Cat Lives - <AUTHOR> http://iknowwhereyourcatlives.com/

<comment><USER2> Painful mobile experience. Have very little idea what the site does. Seems to maybe scrape meta data of random pictures and transpose them on maps using geolocation data. This is a screenshot of your landing page viewed on ios [http://imgur.com/eBfi0KJ](http://imgur.com/eBfi0KJ). The social icons and kickstarter pledge cover the nav bar, and the text has no contrast. If you want to have an immersive experience that throws the user in, you need to clear the nav bar so they can atleast go to the about page after the initial novelty has worn off. Also, I think it would be nice if you had some fading text on page load like "the data of 1 million cats visualized" something to clue you in to what you are looking at. Haven't had the chance to view on pc yet, but if I was a potential user, I never would.

<comment><USER3> It seemed quite broken on WP8 too, looked pretty much the same and it didn't seem to want to load another image after the initial load (though this may have been a connectivity problem)</comment></comment>


Easy 6502 - <AUTHOR> http://skilldrick.github.io/easy6502/

<comment><USER3> Ah, this is great. I first learned assembly programming to modify one of my favorite video games, Earthbound. To my surprise, the game was a cult classic, and extensive efforts had been made to develop tools to modify every aspect of the game.

As part of that effort, I learned 65816 assembly, a 16-bit descendant of the 6502. The day I modified the code to add a run button, thereby eliminating one of the most annoying aspects of the original game, I was ecstatic.

I checked back on the community, PK Hack, a few months ago. The level of development was amazing. Virtually the entire game was mapped, byte for byte. There's a sophisticated visual map editor, and a cross-platform data editor.

The coolest part was to see a tool I envisioned, for which I developed a lackluster proof of concept, come to full fledged fruition.

Earthbound, as it turns out is a rather uniquely developed game. The second game in the Mother series, which is enormously popular in Japan, ran into severe difficulties. Co-developed by HAL and Ape, the coding was rather schizophrenic from the outset. Eventually large parts were rewritten by Shigesato Itoi himself, as the legend goes. The end result is a spaghetti soup of code generated by some type of macro system, compiled from some variant of C, and written in assembly itself.

To manage this complexity, many of the events in the game used a text scripting language that abstracted away the underlying routines. This scripting was a series of in-line hex sequences, each its own set of instructions for how sprites, character entities, etc. were supposed to act when the code appeared, which we termed "control codes."

12-year-old me, supremely confident in his abilities and utterly lacking in all technical knowledge, suggested we build a scripting language on top of the control codes so that manual text editing would be eased. The result was a slapdash Visual Basic job that used a BASIC like syntax for simple substitutes for control codes. Of course at the time, I had no knowledge of parsers, DSLs, language design, or really basic computational knowledge. The result was a wreck.

But that wreck stuck in someone's mind. Years later, after obtaining his computer science degree, one of the hackers with whom I had worked implemented a full-fledged language on top of the control codes.

In retrospect, I don't remember the vast amounts of time I ostensibly wasted learning an obsolete game's design and building tools with which to modify it. I remember the heady moment when you suddenly _knew_ how a data field worked, or after a whole night of hunting with a hex editor the data you wanted appeared, and the sheer giddy thrill of discovering new knowledge and seeing it implemented _right there_ , like a physical mark on the world.

I recognize this has been a long and tangential exposition, so if you've read any of it thank you for indulging me. Another glimpse of that low level assembly, like the smell of home after a very long time away, brings back so many vivid memories.

<comment><USER4> I remember a similar sense of joy when i was tinkering with the battlefield 1942 Wake Island Demo, before there were any kind of indication of mod support.

The sheer joy to be able to change simple but undocumented variables to have a plane moving like a jet or having bombs which behaved rocketlike inspired me to learn programming to a deeper degree. Oh the pure joy of exploration and creation.

Later we had flying aircraft carriers which had its fighterplanes "docked" on the sides and would "fall" down towards the battlefield, the fighters had shields which had a blue glow once shot upon... All scripted ontop of 1942...

Once in a while it would be worth a fortune to be young enough again, not used to thinking in terms of projects, roi, timelines and goals...

<comment><USER3> _Once in a while it would be worth a fortune to be young enough again, not used to thinking in terms of projects, roi, timelines and goals..._

I keep promising myself that when this project is finished, or when we hit this sales target, or when this sprint is over, then I'll get back to that off-the-wall idea... I truly believe that anyone of any age can get back to this place. But it takes leisure time, carefree brainstorming, full creative freedom, all of which seem in short supply lately.

But the sprints aren't ever really over anymore. I don't mind. My work fascinates and delights me, and I consider myself lucky to be able to earn a comfortable living (sometimes from my couch!) while having the financial backing to pursue a brand new business venture as well. By all external metrics, it's a good life.

But I can't help but feel that pure creativity, the type of coding that's more akin to art than science, is falling away from my life. So, it's time to change that.

I suppose I need a blog for side projects, unrelated to work in any way, shape, or form.

I need to get back to why I started coding: so it wouldn't take Ness so goddamn long to walk from Threed to Fourside, so I could animate my middle school teacher as a giant pile of puke and attack with my psi powers, and most importantly, engage deeply with a team not just to reiterate, or even to create, but to _discover._

I wish there was something akin to a creative fellowship for hackers. Research grants, in academia or private R&D are too tied up in the work-a-day return schedule to provide the creative space for truly new ideas.

It reminds me of a line from FDR: _Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A few years back some really smart guys figured out how to make optical diodes. That means optical computers, that means really really fast computers. They said the problem was the the size of the diode was on the order 400nm as opposed to todays transistors being around 40nm or so. What did I think? Screw that! I'll take a 1 THz 6502 over all these bloated multi-core pipeliney chips any day of the week!

<comment><USER6> You'd need an MMU with more transistors than the CPU to make it useful though...

<comment><USER7> I hadn't heard about super fast optical transistors, but a few months ago I was reading about ultra fast transistors that operate at 600GHz.

The idea came to me, to write a x86 emulator in 6502 assembly. Run it on a 6502 CPU built using ultra fast transistors, and boom, you've got a faster x86, just it's an emulated x86, MMU and all!

Typical 6502 instructions take 2-8 cycles if I remember rightly, so as long as it takes under 200 6502 cycles to emulate one x86 instruction, you're beating a 4GHz x86 processor.

I'm sure there are practical problems that make it difficult or impossible in reality. But still fun to think about. :)

<comment><USER8> most obvious practical problems:

\- 3 8bit registers vs. ~8 32bit or ~20 64bit registers. (so you're essentially working on memory at all times, and have to emulate all "longer" commands, such as addition, to do 4-8 carries manually)

\- 64k of memory (which includes the emulator), so you need to add some banking mechanism.

\- no support for integer multiplication/division or even float/SIMD in your instruction set.

But you probably can provide a fast implementation of the decimal addition instruction :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It emerged recently on r/ReverseEngineering that the 6502 has fewer transistors than the number of pages in Intel's x86 documentation. Link to the discussion: [http://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/comments/1lp61a/i...](http://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/comments/1lp61a/intel_x86_documentation_has_more_pages_than_the/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Love it! The 6502 was the first assembly I ever learned. I still remember a handful of opcodes from all the hand-assembling I did:

       a9 44
       20 ed fd
       a9 41
       20 ed fd
       a9 56
       20 ed fd
       a9 49
       20 ed fd
       a9 44
       20 ed fd
       60

About a year ago, in a fit of nostalgia, I wrote an Apple ][ emulator in javascript [1]. My 6502 emulator isn't quite perfect yet, but it runs most things.

[1] [http://porkrind.org/a2](http://porkrind.org/a2)

<comment><USER11> Good ol' hand-assembling, the only way to learn.

I had a Radio Shack Color Computer, which in itself was more than my parents could really afford at the time, so I never got the pricey-for-us EDATSM+ editor/assembler. But I could afford a 6809 book that included op-codes. Then it was a matter of a lot of notebook paper and Basic programs that did a lot of POKEs. Heh. I did a little basic music synth program that way.

I had a lot of spare time as a kid.

<comment><USER12> There is a lot in that last sentence - I am worrying how we will find the time to fill in football, swimming, parties and gym for my eldest - yet for me the memories of my youth were acres of time to do what I wanted (even if I felt bored !)

We should encourage just using up the time on anything - drawing, coding, playing an instrument. Anything that builds capital for later life.

<comment><USER13> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_parenting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_parenting)

"Slow parenting (also called simplicity parenting and free range parenting) is a parenting style in which few activities are organised for children. Instead, they are allowed to explore the world at their own pace. It is a response to concerted cultivation and the widespread trend for parents to schedule activities and classes after school; to solve problems on behalf of the children, and to buy services from commercial suppliers rather than letting nature take its course."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Absolutely adore 6502. Started to learn it just a few weeks after being exposed to AppleSoft BASIC and realizing assembly was playing in the machine itself.

There was a holistic understanding of computing that came from the whole Apple II package: taking off the lid, looking at the chips, mapping that to the technical manual showing you the chips, their addresses, their wiring, their code, and being able to stick your hands in all of it. Even a kid could _reason_ the whole machine's current state.

For a while in the late '90s and early '00s, I wondered if we'd lose that kind of education. Tablets worry me for this reason--all screen, no insides.

Thankfully "kids these days" (grownups too) have things like the Arduino so all hope of understanding computing from the inside out is not lost.

<comment><USER15> For those who do not know that: "the technical manual showing you the chips, their addresses, their wiring..." wasn't reverse engineered or smuggled out of Apple. It shipped with every Apple II. See [http://archive.org/details/applerefjan78](http://archive.org/details/applerefjan78). Starts with fairly dull stuff (Basic commands, 6502 instruction set), so you may want to start reading from the end.

<comment><USER16> Wish my Apple //c+ would have had it, would have made programming games a lot easier!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I never 'got' the 6502 and religiously went Z80 all over until someone described it in the following way:

Think of it as a RISC CPU with 256 registers (zero page).

It just clicked then. Wonderful processor.

</comment><comment><USER17> >Well, I don't think learning x86 is useful.

Unless you are a security researcher and your day job is reverse engineering executables.

</comment><comment><USER18> Already posted: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5180937](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5180937)

<comment><USER14> And before that: [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4213806](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4213806)

But it's been a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> `I don't think you'll ever have to write assembly language in your day job`

Doing C++ work I have had to do this a few times, maybe once a year to optimize a critical routine that the compiler wasn't able to pick up on. When it helped, it really helped.

</comment><comment><USER20> The first time I was paid for a programming job was writing relocatable 6502 assembly to put into a string and call from Atari Basic.

What did it do? Computed the X-modem checksum of a block.

Why? Because when 1200 baud modems first came out, the BBS I was a member of couldn't compute the checksums fast enough (directly in Basic), so 1200 baud transfers weren't much faster than 300 baud. And if you just paid several hundred bucks for the new 1200bps modem, you wanted to get some benefit. :)

How much did I get paid? $20, which was about $0.50/byte. (Man, how I wish I got paid $0.50/byte for code I write now!!)

</comment><comment><USER21> My first "serious" programming attempts were trying to use interrupts on a commodore 64 to play music in the background. It didn't work as I wanted - <USER2> was 10 - but I really learned a lot.

</comment><comment><USER22> Can't you load custom assembly into the 6502 screensaver on XScreensaver? Going to try that.

</comment><comment><USER23> I disagree with the claim that learning x86 assembly is not useful. I occasionally use inline assembly in my day job. It's very rare, but it does happen. If you're doing C or C++, it helps to know a little bit of x86 assembly when debugging. There are also certain optimizations that you often need inline assembly for, such as using the built-in Intel instruction for CRC32 calculations.

I learned Z80 assembly when writing software for the TI-85. But if I were giving advice to someone interested in learning assembly now, I would suggest learning x86... it's more useful, and just as fun.

<comment><USER24> I started with z80 on the Spectrum, and was pleased that x86 was largely similar. I guess it helps that people from Intel founded Zilog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> 6502 reminded me of one of my favorite books Hackers. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer_Revolution). I wonder what happened to John Harris [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harris_(software_developer...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harris_\(software_developer\)) I heard he stubbornly refused to move to C from assembly.</comment>


Ask HN: How many developers should you have before you switch to micro services? - <AUTHOR> I've been under the assumption (and feel free to correct me) that microservices are primarily for team scaling. Yet whenever I look around the internet I fail to find good data showing me the size of a team when they switched to microservices vs how successful/how much they liked it or w/e.
So, feel free to provide any commentary but, if you've worked on a team that switched to microservices I would appreciate it greatly if you could tell me:
- how many people worked on the back-end simultaneously when you made the switch - your feelings about it at the time - amount of time passed since then - how many people work on the back-end simultaneously now - how you feel about it now
I want to see if there are any trends. I'm expecting that anyone who tried it with a team of 5 had a hard time and anyone that tried with 50 had a good time but I'm curious to see if there's a clear cut off which dictates that "if you try micro-services while your team only has x team members you can't hope to have a positive experience with it" and what x approximates to.
Greatly appreciate any input, corrections, insights, or comments! <comment><USER2> If there are 50 commits in every release, and a 2% chance of a given commit breaking something, then in expectation every monolith deploy gets rolled back. As release engineering gets harder, time between deploys grows, so number of commits per deploy grows, so release engineering gets harder still.

Microservices are one way out of that cycle. But then you need teams to run a distributed scheduler, service discovery and load balancing, RPC standards and libraries, IDL registry, central build system, time series metrics collection and reporting, distributed tracing, a standard framework per language, etc, etc. My employer has at least one person working full time on each of those list items. Some have more than 50. And I wouldn't dream of doing microservices without them.

At _least_ whatever's in Martin Fowler's article [0], and more.

A word of caution: any microservices you do before you've actually productionized and standardized all that stuff become very painful tech debt.

[https://martinfowler.com/bliki/MicroservicePrerequisites.htm...](https://martinfowler.com/bliki/MicroservicePrerequisites.html)

<comment><USER3> > If there are 50 commits in every release, and a 2% chance of a given commit > breaking something, then in expectation every monolith deploy gets rolled > back.

> Microservices are one way out of that cycle.

Is the implication that microservices lead to fewer bugs, or that microservices allow you to roll back one service instead of the monolith app as a whole?

I would argue the former implication is a dubious claim, and the later doesn't make sense if other services depend on a given service running the latest version, which is often the case when implementing new features.

If you are releasing bugs with every rollout that require a rollback, then perhaps a simpler solution is to do smaller releases with an improved testing/QA cycle.

<comment><USER4> > the later doesn't make sense if other services depend on a given service > running the latest version, which is often the case when implementing new > features.

Properly designed microservices should take this into consideration and support versioning, fallbacks, circuit breakers, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _microservices are primarily for team scaling_

I've never heard this before or thought about it this way. If you _need_ to restructure your code because of your team size, you have a bigger problem with your code than whether it's separated into microservices or not.

"Let's do everything as microservices" seems like a trend from a few years ago that has now somewhat died down. My suspicion is that it was PaaS companies like Heroku pushing people to do this because it made more sense for their products, but I don't have any evidence for that.

Since then, it seems that people have remembered not to solve a problem you don't have. If your code works and it's easy enough to work on it, you don't need to radically change its structure.

Keep in mind that several companies have tens of thousands of employees working on a mono-repo.

> _I 'm curious to see if there's a clear cut off which dictates that..._

There's no clear cut off for anything in managing a software team. It's not a science, and individual situations vary too much to create hard and fast rules.

<comment><USER6> > If [...] easy enough to work on it, you don't need to radically change its > structure.

This is precisely the point. When you have a large number of developers all working on the same _deployment unit_ , it isn't easy to work on. A mono-repo is orthogonal to microservices.

<comment><USER7> And being difficult to work on means dependencies with other teams, making changes slow. This slows down innovation speed and enables competitors to launch competing services faster. So there's the business need of microservices :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sorry for just posting a link, but I find this to be very relevant (and I think has been discussed on HN).

> [https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/microservices-are- > something-y...](https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/microservices-are-something- > you-grow-into-not-begin-with)

<comment><AUTHOR> I liked it! This article is very much along my line of thinking on the subject.

Thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Rather tell you how many developers i think you need before you should switch to microservices i will instead tell you about my team and why we use microservices.

I am currently leading a team of 7 (including myself) and we currently operate a Monolith Rails application with several small to medium microservices.

Our philosophy is essentially, is what we need part of the core functionality of our application, and does it rely on other core functionality. If so then it goes in the monolith. But if it is independent of the other core features then we build it as a standalone service.

We started moving to microservices ~2 years ago when our team was only 2 (me and 1 other). It was much more difficult to maintain at the time, but the flexibility in being able to rewrite certain things when necessary was greatly beneficial. Things like automating our build and great documentation for how things interconnect has alleviated alot of the trouble we had running our microservices.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing! I like your approach. I've often seen the 'do everything as a microservice' idea get tossed around. I get the feeling that your approach is pragmatic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't think it has to do with team size alone, although it is much easier to work with in large teams, first time I used microservices I was in a team of 6 developers, main pain point for us was deployments, it would take sometimes 2 days to do a full deployment of the 10+ old years that was not always well- maintained monolith we were working on, we decided that any part of the functionality that makes sense to be independent from the rest and can be updated/deployed alone to extract it into a microservice instead of refactoring it when we touched it, at the beginning the process was even slower and we had to learn a lot, but with time and after we built a good knowledge base on the different aws services and had a better set of Jenkins job it became much smoother.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that it's not team size alone. Team size is just the variable I'm most interested in.

Thanks for sharing your perspective!

You reference AWS services and Jenkins jobs making things smoother. Is there anything, in particular, you would say should be considered a pre-requisite before adopting microservices, based on what you've learned?

<comment><USER10> most of us had experience with traditional development only, so we had to adopt devops mentality to be really effective, the company had ~4 system engineers who were working on the monolith full-time, so we had to take care of the microservices we built ourselves.

by AWS services I meant things like cloudformation, packer, ansible, consul, the nitty-gritty of ELB, EC2, S3, docker, hardest part for me was IAM and vpc/subnets, dealing with multiple caches instead of a big one, also distributed sessions(in the end we got rid of sessions and used identifiers and a key-value store).

Jenkins jobs to deploy and test every single service on its own, and for deploying everything to a test environment and run integration tests.

UAT for testing all services on test environment.

There is much more than that but these are the things I remember from the top of my head.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds pretty complex! What are you making if you don't mind me asking?

<comment><USER10> I'm no longer at that company, I would rather not share more personal information, but the product was a sort of a marketplace implementation.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's cool, I'm not interested in personal info. I am curious how many developers were working on your back-end at any given time and how many services you had at any given time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 1\. Start coding in something which is Dotnet Orleans and Scalaz ZIO at same time. Tell me where you have found that techno.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds like the actor model. Erlang? Elixir? Not really sure where you're going with this :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> You don't need team of X for microservices.

It's an approach with trade offs.

Made it work with 2 devs

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing! How did you find it compared to a monolith?</comment></comment>


I Left My Job: What Do I Do Now For Healthcare Insurance Coverage? - <AUTHOR> http://stanleyfeldmdmace.typepad.com/repairing_the_healthcare_/2012/02/i-left-my-job-what-do-i-do-now-for-healthcare-insurance-coverage.html

<comment><USER2> I'm in the US and I recently went through the same process. I'm sure other countries have different problems.

Just prior to quitting my job to start my own company, my wife was diagnosed with a health issue. My wife and I were both on the company plan. When we went looking for insurance, she was denied because of her 'pre-existing' issue.

So, we've had to keep her on expensive COBRA until it expires and then there is something after COBRA that we can hopefully switch her to. I hear that there is legislation to prevent insurance companies from denying people coverage if they already have it, but who knows when that'll happen, if ever. I've been able to switch to my own plan, but it still seems really expensive since I very rarely need medical help.

That said, the industry is a mess. The plans are very confusing and definitely directed towards getting the most out of you. No plan is a 'good deal'. The fact that there is three different insurance plans that you need (medical, dental and vision) shows how broken things are. I ended up using a broker who helped explain things a lot. The fact that I needed a broker to explain it is also broken.

Sites like ehealthinsurance.com are massive spammers (try putting your real information in, you'll get phone calls, emails, etc.) and are really no less confusing. It is like they purposely make it hard to figure stuff out by using terminology that nobody else understands and burring it in their website behind forms which ask for your information first. You better figure out what hmo, ppo, copay, coinsurance and deductible mean and how they affect office visits and prescriptions. Then, chart it all out and if you are lucky pick something that seems like what you might need. Once you've got that done, fill out 20 pages of forms with all of your medical history.

Grrr... just thinking about it all makes me so angry. It is such a huge waste.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was one of those people who, by virtue of working for companies that provided health insurance as a benefit, never had to worry about it... I always simply assumed that it was simply a matter of paying.

Then I got laid off. That in itself was no problem - I simply went on COBRA, and nothing changed about my coverage or anything else, for a few months. Unfortunately my employer was struggling with business issues, and wanted to switch to a different insurer, which did not provide service to my region. They asked if I would seek out private health insurance coverage, and I agreed to.

That's when I learned what health insurance is like for the 20%... Employer- provided (and thus group negotiated) health insurance - what I thought of as "normal" health insurance - is a far cry from what you can get if you're out there on your own. Not only do individual health plans cost more and give you less, they are also hard to get. The underwriters are suspicious of absolutely anything you saw a doctor for, even if it turned out to be nothing, or was subsequently fixed, and they want 10 years of your history to pick over too. I had to go to my most recent doctors and persuade them to send letters to the insurance company explaining that I was cured, or didn't have a case that required surgery, etc.

I'm covered now, but it was kind of a nightmare. And I'm not just healthy, but somewhat well off financially. What must it be like for the rest?

</comment><comment> Tim-Boss Each and every time I read about the American health care system and the troubles it gives you guys I cant help but cringe! How in the name of all that's right haven't you guys got a national healthcare system yet? You spend so much money (out of your premiums) just lining the pockets of insurance companies and all the bloat that they come with.... you realise in a NHS system 100% of that would go to paying for your treatment, so it actually works out cheaper overall! And that's not even taking into account conditions like cancer or something requiring regular expensive treatments and medicines that are all covered by the NHS over here

(For the uneducated: In the UK ALL hospital/doctors treatments are covered by the NHS, in Wales all medicines and prescriptions are covered by the NHS and in England you pay a maximum of £6.50 (~$10) for any/all medicinal prescriptions regardless of actual cost/value)

Seriously: "America" the only country left in the western world without a national healthcare system....

</comment><comment><USER4> I have a hunch that the letter writer means "I got fired/forced out", not "I left of my own volition". I wish the blogger had taken some editorial liberty with that line, because my initial reaction was to blame the letter writer for not considering the impact on his family from losing his health insurance. Surely an in-demand executive such as him would 1) have considered this impact and 2) have the means to cover the (admittedly exorbitant) monthly premium?

But I digress. I imagine the HN readership has some experience with individual health plans, since so many of us contract & consult. High-deductible plans are coming into vogue, and I think they're a great idea. The hurdle with them is coming up with that high-deductible (often $10k or more) in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER5> He can get on a plan that doesn't cover as much. I'm in my 30s and I have a plan through blue cross that's about $100/month and covers emergencies and checkups are $10/$20. The deductible is $3000.

This could cover him until he gets another job.</comment>


A New Gene Pool of Animals in the Arctic - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/101/in-our-nature/a-strange-new-gene-pool-of-animals-is-brewing-in-the-arctic-rp

<comment><USER2> Interesting examples, but not a lot of insight. Of course evolution is a trial and error method. Lots of disasters are expected before we end up with a superior species. Nature doesn't seem to be in any hurry.

I wonder how close we are to speeding it up though. Not saying it would be a great idea, but it seems it is bound to happen anyway.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hybridization can be very good for a species since it introduces new beneficial genes and more diversity. The scientists' warnings are concerning though.</comment>


Display Myths Shattered: How Monitor & HDTV Companies Cook Their Specs - <AUTHOR> http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/display_myths_shattered

<comment><USER2> Worth the price of admission just for the list of gimmicky names following this:

 _"[...] Even worse, most of these options actually decrease image and picture quality.

In many cases, it's not even clear what these sham controls really do. The documentation seldom explains them, and I even know engineers from high-level manufacturers who don't know what the controls do, either."_

The following pages go on a sharp technical attack on the nonsense pumped out as "technical specs" by display manufacturers. Very informative reading.

(Link to print version of five page article: <http://www.maximumpc.com/print/12425>)</comment>


How do I know if I should become a manager? - <AUTHOR> I am a software engineer in Amazon (L5). I have 10 years of experience in total and 2 in amzn. My question is how do I know whether I'll be a good manager and whether I should go for it.
I see this question as a serious career choice and if I don't do well as a manager I eighter waste time that I could spend on working towards my promotion or just get frustrated.
On the other hand what if I do great? I'm confused.
I'm in darkness without a flashlight. I'm a lost soul.... Ok you got it :) <comment><USER2> I'm an ex-manager who went back to being a developer. Here are some things I think you'll need to be comfortable with if you want to be a manager:

\- Spending time in meetings. Everything from one-on-one meetings with your staff to meetings with higher management. The higher you get promoted, the more meetings you'll be expected to attend.

\- Dealing with other company bureaucracy. One of your jobs as a manager is to shield your staff from bureaucracy so that they can get their work done.

\- Not being an individual contributor anymore. Once you get promoted beyond being a lead developer, you'll be spending much less time on designing and writing code. You'll be judged based on the contribution of your entire team, not your own contribution. You'll need to start spending time mentoring your staff to make them more effective.

\- Dealing with HR issues. You will be your staff's first point of contact when they want to ask for a raise or promotion, report problematic interactions with other staff, or ask for accommodations due to personal or health problems. You may need to fire some of your employees because their performance doesn't meet expectations. Even worse, you may need to lay off high-performing employees because the company wants to cut costs or cancel a project that they're working on. You may need to choose which of your staff get laid off. You'll need to be aware that certain actions you take could expose the company to legal liability.

\- Because of the above, it will not be a good idea to be personal friends or drinking buddies with the people you now manage. For example, if the employee who socializes with you happens to be promoted while the one who doesn't gets laid off (even if the decisions were made completely fairly), it will be demoralizing to the rest of your staff and may result in your being accused of discrimination.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > I see this question as a serious career choice and if I don't do well as a > manager I eighter waste time that I could spend on working towards my > promotion or just get frustrated.

I've stayed on the IC track since I really don't want to deal with HR issues, but a lot of the other things greenyoda's listed are part of my job as well.

Promotions as you get higher in the IC track depend more and more on leadership. From what I see eng manager is like five roles, depending on the makeup of the team may be shared between tech lead and product/project managers(i'm infra focused so i dont get product managers). My manager and I are basically peers, and we split a lot of those roles up, but by doing both you can better understand why a manager is doing the thing theyre doing. If you really hate it, the skills you learn managing will still be extremely valuable as you move up higher up and not be a waste of time, whether it be empathy for a coworker's position, being able to sub in where needed on your team, or learning the bureaucracy outside your team to be able to push org/company wide tech initiatives forward better.

I'd suggest trying it if youre considering it, especially at a large company - I imagine there are a lot of experienced managers there who can provide mentorship, as opposed to a small company where many manager have little experience.

</comment><comment> xkcd-sucks Do you feel more limited by your own capability to Get Shit Done,or do you feel more limited by your colleagues'/bureaucratic organization's capability? If the latter, try management?

</comment><comment><USER4> Let's starts with the basics -

What interests you about being a manager?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question. 1\. Being more on a business side rather then a tech one. Many times I find myself not giving a shit about how something is implemented. If it works it works (I know, I know, it does matter. Maintenance, scalability bla bla bla) 2\. Trying myself in a leadership role. This could be a technical leadership as well but it's harder to get there and I don't have a strong bias towards that. I'm also not confident about being a good tech leader but maybe its just my fears.</comment></comment>


Mining the First 3.5 Million California Unclaimed Property Records - <AUTHOR> http://angrystatistician.blogspot.com/2013/02/mining-first-35-million-california.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a followup to my earlier article - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5243029>

<comment><USER2> Nice work. I'm owed money :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why not charge a finder's fee? Particularly for the amounts over $1 million. Even at 1% fee that's tens of thousands of dollars that could be in your pocket.

<comment><USER4> The claim for in CT has a field to award a finders fee... assume it would be similar in other states, but it's up to the person to complete when then fill out the claim

<comment><USER5> In my state you have to file to have what is the equivalent of a 'finders license' to charge a fee, as well you're required to have a private investigators license. EVERY state is different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Love the very last entry. Netzero!

</comment><comment><USER7> Someone, give this guy a medal.</comment>


Phf bin - <AUTHOR>

How exactly is /cgi-bin/phf a vulnerability? <comment><USER2> No idea.

What is /cgi-bin/phf?

Why do you say it is a vulnerability?

You will probably get better quality answers if you ask on a Q+A site such as Server Fault, and include relevant background information (e.g. answers to my questions above).

<http://serverfault.com/questions/ask>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link.I read that it is used to hack into web servers and the phf bin along with other cgi-bins are becoming more vulnerable.</comment></comment>


Gold Mania in the Yukon - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/magazine/mag-15Gold-t.html?_r=1&seid=auto&smid=tw-nytimesmagazine&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER2> I thoroughly enjoyed this article. There's nothing more raw in terms of entrepreneurship than gold prospecting.</comment>


Noctilucent Clouds seen at record low latitudes - <AUTHOR> For the past several nights, Noctilucent Clouds, extremely high altitude weather phenomenon typically only seen above latitudes of 50 deg, have been seen as far south as San Francisco (38 deg).  spaceweathergallery.com has many images uploaded by professionals and amateur alike of this amazing phenomenon.  I got my first chance to see them last night, they were so bright the farm was bathed in blue light and I could easily capture them freestanding at ISO 6400 using 1/15s exposure:
http://spaceweathergallery.com/indiv_upload.php?upload_id=15...
If you're above ~40 deg latitude, step outside tonight around 30 minutes after sunset and look northward and look for the telltale high blue electric streams. <comment><USER2> Looks like a clear night tonight in the PNW, I will definitely take a look after sunset! I have never seen or heard of these kinds of clouds before, sounds beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER3> and now for the bad news...

"Recent studies suggests that increased atmospheric methane emissions produce additional water vapor once the methane molecules reach the mesosphere - creating, or reinforcing existing noctilucent clouds.[1]"</comment>


How URLs Work - <AUTHOR> http://comp-phil.blogspot.com/2009/06/how-urls-work.html

<comment><USER2> Nothing about real implications about how you build URLs in an app. Just a pre-(web dev 101)-level or 1st-paragraph-of-wikipedia intro to "<http://www.example.com></comment>


A top obstetrician on why men should NEVER be at the birth of their child - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=559913&in_page_id=1879

<comment><USER2> I wish he would have mentioned his thoughts on men at C-sections. I've been at two of those and it was way different than how a natural delivery is described.</comment>


Robin. The smarter smartphone. – Nextbit - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextbit.com/ <comment><USER2> I've been waiting for something like this, the question is how well does it work? Apple's saving of my old photos to iCloud is actually somewhat annoying – I've become used to being able to quickly browse through my old collections at will. What's worse, the times I have enough downtime to go back through old photos and videos are when I'm on a plane etc. without internet access. Local storage is cheap, I still think I want almost everything local until bandwidth and availability of internet are 10x better than they are today worldwide.

<comment><USER3> So tell photos to keep all photos on your device?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks like a phone with specs close to today's flagship phones. "Ready to hack" is a great selling point, and something that I would like. It's probably more of a competitor to the Nexus line than all of the other phones. This is more like an example of what Google's Project Ara was trying to foster, without the funky hardware. I always thought Project Ara was much more suited for other kinds of devices than phones, and some of my friends were using them for other projects.</comment>


Why does the apple watch exist? Who knows - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/03/apple-watch-exist-dont-know/

<comment><USER2> Of the people I know with Android watches, most like it for the ability to prioritize notifications. Every single one has said that. They can see if they need to answer some reminder, meeting, etc with a more gentle glance.

With that, I'm smart enough to remember that I "didn't need a smartphone" when they first came out and resisted them before they eventually became part of my daily life.

More to that point, I think it is pretty easy to imagine really neat things in generations II and III. Say, when you can use your watch to pay with a biometric confirmation that it gets from being on me. Or 2-factor auth the same way, or fixing the bugs the article mentions when calculating the harder health metrics like stress. Imagine the generation V that measures insulin and logs it. Etc.</comment>


City Living and Your Mental State - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/1771097/measuring-the-mental-toll-of-the-metropolis-study-finds-cities-alters-way-we-process-stress

<comment><USER2> I guess things aren't going to improve, even though I want them to. Living in/close to a city is the only option left for humans. Our minds are suffused with materialism. We are a generation brought up to prefer things that are inherently fast. We would not be able to settle into the countryside for our frame of reference has been speeding at a wild pace since we were born and we have reached a speed at which we cant stop.

<comment><USER3> I'm a bit more optimistic. I moved out to the country a year ago, for cheaper rents and the necessary solitude to get some work done. I've got broadband delivered wirelessly so I can still stay online all day if I choose. But it's nice to get outside for a run or have a laugh at the cows. I think people can adjust easily enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Although the OP does not speculate about it, my guess is that the _noise_ of city living is the only important mechanism by which city living interferes with my mental state.</comment>