skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I took your number of 1/2 as truth, went through the numbers, and... our worker in Des Moines makes about 5k a year more than the one in Berlin. It'd still take 12 years to pay off the person above's unexpected medical expenses.

That's probably quite accurate. But most people don't have a $60,000 unexpected health expenditure before they're eligible for Medicare at 65. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5865642/

> We calculated this estimate as follows: the graph shows that, on average, a hospitalization increases the annual probability of going bankrupt in the following 4 years by 0.004. Multiplying this figure by the annual hospitalization rate of 7.8% for our population (which we calculated using the 1999–2010 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey) reveals that 0.031% (0.004 × 7.8%) of the population goes bankrupt each year as the result of a hospitalization.

If you extrapolate this out over the 40-year period covered in the study (it covers people ages 25-65) there is just a 1.2% chance that you'll go bankrupt as a result of medical debt in your working lifetime. In a country of 205 million working-age adults, that amounts to 2-3 million people. That's why you see so many news stories about it. But the odds of it actually happening to you are fairly low. Meanwhile, the higher taxes from universal healthcare are something that affect 100% of people.

If you ask people "would you rather make $5,000 more per year, or have a 1.2% chance that sometime in your working life, you'll have to declare bankruptcy due to exorbitant medical bills?" You can't say it's an irrational choice if people choose to have more money in their pocket now.

> The definition of "health insurance" in the US is weird - it doesn't actually seem to mean you're going to be able to be able to access either expected or unexpected healthcare needs at a price you can afford.

And what are you basing this on? I've got a wife and two kids. We've need to rely on our health insurance for everything from a car accident that almost resulted in a pre-term birth, to child births. The system is chaotic and confusing, but as long as you're on top of the paperwork the coverage is usually very good. According to Gallup polling, people have negative views of the healthcare system as a whole, but most rate their own coverage as good or excellent (69%) and their own healthcare service quality as good or excellent (80%): https://news.gallup.com/poll/245195/americans-rate-healthcar....
> more tedious to claim is politically risky

I would call that ‘more efficient’.

Besides, they apparently have ‘hundreds of millions of dollars’ to spend on it.
The question is not whether they are hard, but whether they are harder and whether that harder is worth it. Has Slack lost a single paying customer of this? I doubt it.
I agree with your point re: the depth of information in a field making it difficult to maintain competence in multiple fields.

On the other hand, I think society increasingly projects an expectation of this, that someone cannot possess skills in multiple areas, where areas are increasingly narrowly defined. I think in part this plays a role in stress over higher education, in that a degree is seen as a skill certificate (that is, a statement about what someone can do) rather than an opportunity to learn (that is, a statement about what someone has done).
Great, thank you for the feedback!
The biggest reason is probably that you don't need the user to explicitly download and install your app. Also, a web app works on all the major OSes with a single GUI environment. And then of course the fact that webapps run in a more secure sandbox. A standard cross API and sandbox could potentially solve the second two. But I'm not sure how to solve the first outside of a browser.
As soon as you want to do something the engine doesn't provide you have to start learning. This happens way more frequently than you'd think.

I still think a JASS-like code editor would have been better than blueprints for giving news a mental framework for transitioning into C++.
Whining about blogs and RSS is the "baby rabbits adopt old dog as their mother" of Hacker News. It just never fails to work y'all nerds into a frenzy
It did transfer to the Space Force. The mission number is USSF-7, not USAF-7.

https://www.ulalaunch.com/about/news/2020/05/17/united-launc...
I don't disagree, but I think there may be better alternatives to Electron in the not so distant future. I don't think the concept of Electron is bad (i.e. one API regardless of the target platform), but the execution of that concept is.

I strongly believe we will see some major improvements in the performance of Web apps/Electron, since (a) there is a lot of incentive (b) there are many easy wins to be had in terms of performance.
I figured out what it means in this article by reading as far as the second paragraph:

Over the past decade, “neofeudalism” has emerged to name tendencies associated with extreme inequality, generalized precarity, monopoly power, and changes at the level of the state.

This seems sound. I paused at "precarity" but it's obviously a reference to economic insecurity. The only thing I can really fault this sentence for is that "changes at the level of the state" is vague. I'd hope that the article delivers on that with some details later, or else this bit shouldn't be there. (Edit: though...the other three things sound more like 19th century capitalism than feudalism.)

You guys need to do a better job of critique. Denunciatory dismissals are what we don't want on HN; they're cheap, nasty, and uninteresting. Note the site guideline: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In case anyone's worried: I'm not siding for or against the article ideologically. I don't know if I agree or disagree with it; I don't even know what it says. I just know that (1) it clears the bar for an interesting discussion; and (2) commenters also need to clear that bar, or not comment. It's not that high a bar!

If you don't like that I'm saying this about a left-wing article (which I guess this is?), there have been just as many right-wing ones we've treated the same way. Every time it happens in either direction, someone assumes bias, since on the internet, any data point is dispositive.
Many desktop apps these days seems to be built on Electron, a JS framework for building desktop-class apps.

https://www.electronjs.org/
For me, just adderall. I won’t die if I don’t get it but I have fairly bad symptoms if I miss a dose.
Didn't the current population of Iceland come from some 360 or 400 people?
But why bother even setting up different build environments for the different platforms?

Even that part makes it already more work than Electron and I can't think of any meaningful business benefit to not using Electron.
I have to say that I quite like the visual design of this “open” textbook.
The point is that the parent poster mentioned tablets and phones which you don't address in your point. Of course your examples aren't written 6 times, but they support fewer platforms too (only desktop).

Off-topic, but regarding Bitwig: of course it makes perfect sense to use it on smaller devices. Not phones, but tablets. It's even officially supported with a specific display profile in your user interface settings (obvious target amongst others: windows surface). This is particularly useful for musicians on stage.
I believe that Microsoft has tried to build a better Electron for at least the past ten years.

The latest attempt is WindowsUI hosting React Native.

I think. This past week, I have tried to walk through a "Hello World" for this pre-release platform, but I have failed to get a build system actually working. Its the "keep installing software until it works or until your system breaks, whichever comes first" problem.

For now, I have chosen to preserve my ignorance of Visual Studio's build targets and project structure. I can only learn five new tools at a time.
Bingo, thanks!
But with the app stores you get more users

I basically had no users for one of my desktop apps for seven years, till I ported it to mobile and put it in the normal app store
I respect this opinion, but I suspect you have an easier time getting started than I do. Whatever works.
I don't know exactly what time period you're referring to, but back when Java was attempting to take over the desktop UI world with Swing, it was painfully obvious when an app wasn't native on Windows. Eclipse was the first Java app I used that actually felt native, thanks to its use of native widgets (through a library called SWT) instead of Swing.
Ask HN: Are the Harvard Business School online programs worth it?
I'm an early stage entrepreneur with no formal educational background beyond high school. I've come across the CORe[0] and Entrepreneurship Essentials[1] courses provide by Harvard Business School Online, and am interested in knowing whether such courses are worth the time for those interested in an overview of core business essentials.

For those that have taken these courses, how would you review them?

[0]: https://online.hbs.edu/courses/core
[1]: https://online.hbs.edu/courses/entrepreneurship-essentials
Normal AP tests are half multiple choice and half "free response." What "free response" means depends heavily on the test, but they are always human-graded. This year, the tests are free-response only.
"Singapore's measures were born of SARS too, and it didn't save them."

Singapore has 21 deaths as of May 14. Adjusting this number to the US population gives 1,117 deaths. The US has 89,908 deaths and rising. I would gladly trade with Singapore.
Contact tracing is a world wide privacy issue, and especially in the US. I'm talking more generally here, especially that the overwhelming sentiment here on HN towards contact tracing is indifference or praise. We should not be praising further encroachments on our privacy, especially when contract tracing is hardly an effective way to mitigate the disease
Does your cost analysis factor in inflation?
While I agree with this take on UBI. There are middle grounds to explore.

The streaming and game services seems to point at monthly subscription fee from an aggregator as a working model. Not sure how they distribute royalties though, I suspect there are many models I won’t agree with based on what they incentivize.

Then there are the Kickstarter/patreon. Where money is given more in support than for a specific product. This is more like the UBI approach.

I think there is room for a hybrid approach here, merging the two.
It is transferred to the space force - the launch name is USSF-7 (https://www.ulalaunch.com/missions/atlas-v-ussf-7). The Space Force operates out of the Department of the Air Force (like how the Marine Corp operates out of the Department of the Navy), so it's it's civilian head is still the Secretary of the Air Force - it's military head is the Chief of Space Operations.
Don't you feel like you would have improved at this regardless of whether your schooling put a concerted effort into it? I've forgotten a lot of things from school -- doing math in my head isn't one of them because I use it all the time. Is that evidence that it's a good investment of time for 1st graders, or is it evidence that you would have learned it anyway due to the utility of it?
Why You’re Going to See More Animation (Thanks, Pandemic)
Sorry, vented about MacOS. Ignore me.
This is the focus of my main keynote presentation topic, On Being a Deep Generalist.

Specialisation came to the fore during the Industrial Revolution and achieved a form of preeminence in the 20th Century that hadn’t existed elsewhere in human history when knowing, at depth, a wide variety of skills and disciplines was either essential for survival or in order to be considered a well-rounded individual.

The internet, not without ongoing battles against vested interests, has solved the discoverability challenge faced with approaching the wealth of knowledge created in the past few centuries. For many of us aspiring polymaths (and I agree with the other comments here that a polymath isn’t someone who knows “everything about everything“, but rather knows “a lot about a lot” or “enough about enough”) the challenge is mental and societal.

We convince ourselves that we must specialize to succeed; most schools and many workplaces promote the same. Yet creativity and insight so often depends on interdisciplinary knowledge and the ability to use our brains to connect novel ideas.

It’s not the right choice for everyone. If you want to be the best in the world (or the top 1%) at something, then specialize. But most of us are more varied than that, which has benefits for us as business owners, or employees, and as humans.
What (large) companies have open-sourced their core product? I don't think anyone is accusing Shopify, Facebook, Google, etc of being anti-open source.
The big advantage of web applications is that they don't have an installer, and they don't need to deal with pushing updates.

Many comments here explain the advantages of full desktop applications. (And there are many.)

The thing to always keep in mind is, does your application justify an installer? There's so many tiny utilities that run in a browser that I can find with Google. These are utilities that I probably use once a year and don't care to install.

But if I use the application heavily, I want a desktop application even if it's just an application specific browser.
I understand it's Go. Just never thought that Go can also be written that way.

I personally like that kind of syntax for UI development.
I'm sorry this is just not true. They weren't in a tough spot at all. People who have to go and work in a warehouse for minimum wage with no PPE are in a tough spot.

>But they also have to instill trust in the system.

Yes, and I have to rob a bank to demonstrate I'm rich.

What you're saying is that they're in a tough spot because they can profit from lying and chose to do so.
In the US, AP tests aren't really used for admissions—that primarily falls on the SAT/ACT, GPA and the more subjective things (essay, rec letters, etc). AP tests mainly are just for the college credit.
There are at least three big obvious reasons.

1) You need a secure sandbox for running JavaScript (e.g. You run a SaaS and you want your users to be able to customize something). NodeJS has to be sandboxed at VM level like Python, even although JavaScript was designed for this very purpose.

2) You want a TypeScript first nodejs.

3) You want isomorphic JavaScript between the browser and the server, because node does its own thing (for historical reasons) and deno strives for compatibility where possible.

What it lacks is npm compatibility. That is the JavaScript community for better or worse and without being able to use those libraries it doesn't seem compelling to me.
Nice! I recently ditched my older 15" MacBook Pro for a MacBook Air and configured the VS Code Remote Container plugin to run against a $20/mo Digital Ocean server and it's been mostly good so far!

I was so tired of my MacBook Pro's fans being constantly on and always needing to be plugged in with dev servers and VS Code extensions running. Github Workspaces look promising too, looks like the same work.
Wouldn't it be amazing?!

You could even have the browser allocate a volume or two for the container to use (with the user's permission, of course) to store data locally. And users could be allowed to adjust how much space the volume may use (from some default minimum to unlimited).

And with containers, the client should be reasonably safe even if executing malicious software.
Slightly offtopic: Will there be a way to transfer data (history, settings, cookies ...) from the old mobile Firefox to the new one without syncing it all to "the cloud"?
> Digital platforms are the new watermills, their billionaire owners the new lords, and their thousands of workers and billions of users the new peasants

Do you have anything to say about this when it comes to, say, AirBnB, Google (play store), Apple (App Store), Amazon (the web marketplace, not AWS) and Uber?
>Did anyone ever figure out what "neofeudalism" means and why it's here now?

I'm gonna write out a notion before I actually read the article and get disappointed.

Feudalism was a mode of production in which value was chiefly produced from arable land via agriculture and mainly extracted in the form of rent or tax by force, with the ruling class being the most effective military force. Merchants, traders, artisans, engineers, and bureaucrats weren't really major players under feudalism, and their rise from tolerated skilled servants to a class for themselves, the asset-owning class of capitalism, was a major historical transition.

If, hypothetically, we were transitioning into a form of "neo-feudalism", it would be a mode of production in which efficiently producing valuable goods for market trade is no longer more valuable than the ability to just force other people to pay you not to plunder them by force. It would indicate that society's productive potential was either actively degrading, or being held hostage by a ruling class of rent-seekers on the limiting factors of production.

For instance, a society run largely by real-estate or oil tycoons who twist the law to bully their competitors and extract rents/ransoms from anyone needing land or oil could (again, hypothetically) qualify.

The nasty question in this whole thing would be: what so strangled capitalism that feudalism was able to make a comeback? The feudal-to-capitalist transition happened in the first place because the ruling class of capitalism was able to so steadily erode the economic, social, and even military relevance of the landed nobility that by the time of the French Revolution they could be executed en masse without anyone else complaining much, and the nobles of many other countries like England and Germany had to marry into industrial enterprises to keep their wealth! Are we somehow so de-industrialized that we're switching back to subsistence agriculture?
Isn’t that more of an Electron issue?

I mean, is anyone clamouring for VS Code, for example, to be rewritten in native toolkits?
I think the issue with your original comment is with "there's no point," which is in effect invalidating the opinion of others.
I doubt Apple code quality dropped significantly.

I'm not sure that's a safe bet. iOS updates have become notorious for things breaking, sometimes in very obvious ways. I have an iPhone and a recent update caused some very obvious degradation of battery lifetime between charges, for example. Given that I have an unmodified phone running almost nothing but the standard Apple software, and the tiny number of apps I do have installed haven't been used since before that update, there isn't much excuse for this.

Meanwhile, I currently have email disabled on my phone pending a fix for a known security vulnerability that is reportedly going to be included in a firmware update delivered several weeks after the vulnerability was out in the wild and doing the rounds on tech sites.

Neither of these is reassuring when it comes to the current state of iOS robustness and security, and five minutes with Google will show that my experience is not unusual among iPhone users in recent times.
Project Gutenberg top 100: https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top
Although it doesn't directly answer your question, you might be interested in "The Architecture of Open Source Applications":

https://www.aosabook.org

The chapters are written by the developers of the respective software projects, so you may want to bear in mind that there could be both insider developer insights and also potentially some authorship bias.
> Electron apps aren't made because the end result is superior but because of budgets and schedules.

I'd add one thing, it's also used because it leverages existing web development skills.

I've made a couple of Electron applications because it simply lets me make a "desktop" app that is basically a web app that can use some local resources such as the file system, notifications, etc. Is it the best way to make a desktop app? Nope. Do I like the fact that Electron, when not optimized, is a pig? Nope.

But me choosing between Electron and a more native platform it is literally the difference between me shipping something or nothing at all.
I thought it might work but I guess I can't argue with "we tried and it didn't," so fair enough.
So? Now this problem persists in perpetuity?

I just don’t see how this is an argument against fixing it once and for all.

Where state govenments are currently making allowances for these people, the federal government can make the same ones instead.
So they are planning to extinguish git? Acquiring a dominant company and becoming the go-to solution isn't full EEE.
Is this an ad or are you serious?
> The main purpose of government is providing infrastructure like roads and bridges

> Roads and bridges being a government function is a somewhat recent notion that we've grown accustomed to.

> Historically in the United States, roads and bridges were privately owned, and users paid a toll to a private person or company to use them. This was one of the many disagreements between the states that led to the Civil War.

> There are plenty of private roads and bridges still in existence in the Untied States, mostly in the older states.

> One example: http://www.dcdbc.com

I've always wondered about the bridge at Dingman's Ferry. Reading through the website, I wonder how they could possibly enforce the penalty for overages in terms of tonnage. Since they are a private entity would law enforcement issue a citation or would the bridge corporation be forced to litigate?
Show HN: Kweb empowers back end devs to make pretty websites with minimal fuss
This is amazing. It works perfectly on mobile. The fact that it explains the concepts, and then has quizes right inline to test and reinforce knowledge is awesome. And, it is free.

Wow.
Monopoly was based on, or one might say perverted from, a game created to inculcate Georgist ideas in children: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game .
No sources, no benchmarks, no production use-cases. Thanks but no.
> Journalists need to stop using adjectives like "mysterious" when writing about the X-37B.

Considering there isn't even a journalist attributed on the article, I'm not sure we should be presuming any were even involved in its publication.
If you are really stuck, move it to your backlog and make some notes about why you are stuck. Then go do something else - a hobby, a project, etc. Sometimes the answer will come to you while doing something else. Otherwise, revisit it in a couple weeks or months.
It's unfortunate that everything has gone high-level (Unity/Unreal) or ultra low-level (Vulkan/Metal/DX12).

In the 2000s hobbyists were doing stuff in the middle level, because you had to stitch together your window management, GL/DX code, physics libraries, sound libraries, net code, input code, yourself.

I don't know that you always want to do that, but everybody ought to do it at least once.
Actually doesn't make sense. I know a lot of 40 year old unskilled (in this type of activity) people that don't have a lot of resources available to them. If they did it, it would still be impressive, no matter what age they are.

Teenagers have advantages over 40 year olds, the major ones are free time and energy.
Theres a problem with online forums. People glom their opinions together about solving a common problem (like making a game) into a big rolling ball. People who have a different goal but a similar problem become difficult to answer without tearing yourself out of your own commonly shared train of thought.

The perfect answerer would have expert knowledge and the free time and an omni-directional goal to serve all questioners. Those people aren't out there.
I think he did not mean "written 6 times", but more like Compiled 6 times, with 6 different sets of parameters, and having to be tested on 6 different devices.
Wasn’t that Java’s original selling point, it runs anywhere (there’s a JVM)?