Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry? - yotamoron
======
pards
Spreadsheets are widely used in financial institutions, and not just for
little things but also for critical tasks too. I've seen spreadsheets
sophisticated enough to make database calls to book-of-record systems.

These spreadsheets are often put together by an intern or associate who "knows
a little VBA" and automates or tracks a task that the business was doing
manually. Nobody on the desk really knows how the spreadsheet works.

Changes to the spreadsheets are not controlled in any manner, are not tracked
in source control, but are often (thankfully) backed up by virtue of being
saved on a network drive.

The business prefers spreadsheets over "real software" because they have
complete control of it whereas their internal IT department are slow and
expensive, and the resulting custom-coded products are often substandard (see
zubairq's comment about paying market rate).

~~~
brongondwana
A spreadsheet can mostly be maintained by the next person to come along. More
complex systems often die when the person who knew them leaves. Plus all that
stuff about crappy IT departments who don't act as if they exist to serve the
actual purpose of the business.

~~~
cm2187
I have seen enough legacy applications, applications so old no one understand
how they work or dares to touch them, or for which we need to pull developers
from retirement, software running only on old mainframes, to take the key man
risk with business-developed software too seriously.

Same thing with reliability. So many of these IT supported applications that
are supposed to survive a nuclear strike are down a day a week, while the
basic access database pretty much hasn't seen a downtime during business hours
since inception.

~~~
ellius
I think to this point, the organizations that will really succeed in the
future are the ones who aggressively hire people with a strong cross of
building simple, usable and understandable technical tools who also understand
business logic and can communicate. I think soon people will be able get
further with some basic R/Python and the ability to write a good email than
many of the more technically skilled workers without those abilities.

~~~
ethbro
To tease out a little more from yours and parent's comments, I think a few
things are drastically undervalued by traditional programmers.

Tactical initiative: not just for Marines. The closer software is being built
to a person who actually posseses the domain knowledge, the less risk of
misunderstood requirements / behavior there is.

Readability: a language that requires six months to learn to read but
expresses programs in half the length is often times _not_ the right choice.
If a good enough language can be read by someone with a week of training, and
90% of the domain knowledge is possessed by people who don't know the better
knowledge, then use the good-enough language.

Reasons like these are why Excel / VBA is used. And moreover, why it
(paradoxically to us) _works_.

------
zubairq
In tech most managers and recruiters think there is a skills shortage. This is
untrue. The truth is that companies do not want to pay market rates for people
with the right skills

~~~
mortehu
What are those people (with the right skills) currently doing instead of
working in tech?

~~~
michaelt
I assume he thinks the prices should rise until demand drops off, and at that
equilibrium price we shouldn't say there's a shortage. Lots of people would
like a rolex and don't have one, but nobody would say there's a rolex
shortage.

~~~
mortehu
If rolexes could only be bought from other consumers who actually want to keep
them unless they can sell well above their purchase price, people might say
there's a shortage.

------
contingencies
1\. SWIFT was founded as a 'Belgian Cooperative' in the 1970s by an ex
American Express executive and grew at a rate unprecedented for its era, its
first 'international center of operations' was located in Virginia, co-opened
by the then-governor, and nearly co-located with CIA HQ. EU authorities have
confirmed that, despite political backlash and a 'SWIFT 2' nominally designed
to resolve the problem, every single SWIFT transaction since _at least_ 2001
(read: forever) has been provided in full to the US.

2\. The Israeli business AMDOCS with alleged Mossad links is an outsourced and
hosted billing provider for telecommunication carriers, whose client list
includes large portions of the developed world.

Just sayin'.

------
beyondcompute
● The two most successful and widely used to solve everyday problems
paradigms/environments: spreadsheets and shell scripting (with pipes, etc.)
are the ones that have the least attention from “industrial” and academic
programmers. Lessons and strong points from those systems are being ignored.

● There are “clusters of bugs”, i.e., finding a bug in a certain module
increases a chance to find a subsequent bug in the same module. This is
understood intuitively by most people yet very few act on it, discarding
modules that have too many bugs (and rewriting them from scratch) instead of
continuing to sink resources into maintenance.

● While professionals in other industries use professional tools, programmers
use commodity hardware and software (the kind a homemaker would use to google
a guacamole recipe). :(

● Managers and programmers think that personality traits and team members'
individualities do not matter and there's no role “human factor” plays in
development. Ditto for self-organization vs constantly “organizing”/policing
employees.

● There were pretty cool systems back in the day (with orthogonal persistence,
ability to inspect and modify any object on-the-fly, etc.). The modern ones
are not “bad” either but some lessons could still be learned.

● Sometimes there are notions that bad software is created due to sales
people/economic pressure but analysis of, say, build tools shows that it is
not the case. ;)

~~~
nueded
>While professionals in other industries use professional tools, programmers
use commodity hardware and software (the kind a homemaker would use to google
a guacamole recipe). :(

i have to disagree with you here. most of the tools we use as programmers are
so precise, adaptable and refined for the job that would make your average
industry professional cry.

having those tools run on a guacamole-recipe machine is only a testimony to
their power.

it's not just the software either; through services like AWS we have access to
some of the most sophisticated and optimized computation and storage hardware
on the planet.

~~~
beyondcompute
So how many programmers you know use a professional keyboard, say? I don't
want to provide free advertisement here so I won't mention any brands. But the
ones that have hands separated and keys placed in recessions for comfortable
wrist position and modifier keys under thumbs? And those that are fully
programmable, the ones that cost from 300 euro and up? I don't know about you
but I have (on my mechanical 100+ euro keyboard) 'Ctrl(Caps
Lock)-Command(Alt)-Enter' remapped to 'Alt-Backspace' (in parentheses — the
original key) using a Lua-scripted software. If it's your idea of “refined”
and “precise” then that's fine :) Moreover most of programmers I know
(hundreds and hundreds) use a “minimalist slick” keyboard from a Californian
company. It's a good keyboard for googling a guacamole recipe and a nice
example of a “good-looking“ industrial design. But it's not a professional
tool by any means.

I don't really want to get started about those slow laptops (that have “Pro”
labels on them). I don't know about you but for me their performance is
disappointing. (By the way, I use a 2010 Macbook Air as my home machine so no
need to call me “picky”). Yet those “Pro” machines seem to be “default” ones
in so many organizations I know. They are a good trade-off indeed between
looks, portability, versatility and price. But they are nowhere near “pay
whatever it takes to scrape every last drop of performance and reliability
from your tools” approach that to me seems to designate the choice of tools by
professionals.

About software. There's the brilliant, inspirational and slightly sad article:
[https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-
stuff](https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff) . Where, I
remember, was a comment with a person asking, “do you want to pay hundreds of
dollars for a text processor written with the level of quality described?” And
my reaction was, “Hell, yes! If it's a professional tool and I earn tens of
thousands using it, I should be able to pay accordingly for my main
equipment”. In web development industry there's an apparent trend now to
switch to “hipster” (I mostly like things hipster) text editors. Won't specify
the names here but they are usually written in Javascript and HTML and are
“highly customizable” but I rarely see them made to perform functions my IDE
does out of the box. In the meantime, IDEs for web development are a few (are
there any besides the Prague-made ones?) and are not very customizable by my
needs (compared even to aforementioned lightweight editors).

Anyway, thank you for your answer and I am glad, that you do focus on the
positive side of things!

~~~
nueded
>In the meantime, IDEs for web development are a few and are not very
customizable by my needs

i'm a full stack web dev myself, whatever that means nowadays. i consider
languages, the os, dbms, version control, virtualization, browsers,
webservers, automation servers etc etc, to be my tools. not merely the the IDE
or text editor. personally i hardly need anything beside emacs and zsh
terminal on my 7y/o thinkpad t410. that said i do understand that different
people need different tools. hope you find what you need.

------
owenversteeg
I work with (among other things) batteries. As I've gotten a bunch of emails
about it, I suppose I am "the battery guy" here.

Li-ion battery energy density grows in spurts. Realistically, there have been
a few major improvements, with very small incremental improvements in between.
For example, in 2001 we were at 180 Wh/kg. In just a handful of months we
jumped to 260 Wh/kg, then to 280 Wh/kg as manufacturing processes improved. In
the last 11 years, however, improvements have been maybe a few Wh/kg per year,
and there have been literally zero improvements whatsoever in the past four
years, by anyone.

Eleven years is a very long time, especially for something that everybody just
assumes is constantly silently improving. And it's not like the battery
industry stopped investing in growth: there are absolutely insane amounts of
money invested in battery R&D, since whoever figures out how to make a cheap,
energy-dense battery will become absolutely infathomably rich and make Madoff-
level growth look like US savings bonds.

Bonus fact: nobody really understands lithium-ion batteries. One production
run might have substantially higher or lower capacity. Some batteries might
explode. Some batteries are high discharge and some are low discharge. The
"explanation" for all of these things is 'heat'.

Imagine that happening to any other industry (for example the auto industry.)

\- "Why did my car just explode!?" "Heat"

\- "Why does this car last a tenth the lifetime of this car?" "Heat"

\- "Why does this car go a thousand times faster than any others?" "Heat"

\- "Why is this entire production run of cars not working?" "Heat"

People say "heat" for two reasons: 1) because nobody understands li-ion
batteries and 2) because yes, the real answer does have something to do with
heat.

Batteries are one of the most important industries and critical to every
company on HN. But the state of the art of batteries is putting together
random metals with a bunch of random chemicals and watching which ones don't
explode.

Imagine talking to the CEO of Boeing: "We just did our millionth test, engines
made of cheese and wings made of coconut shells. It crashed during takeoff, of
course. We haven't had any improvements in over a decade, but we're sure we'll
get there eventually - we've spent billions on research so far."

~~~
dsacco
Could you speak to the reasons why successful startups are not really being
founded to develop more advanced batteries? Is the issue primarily 1)
widespread lack of knowledge across the entire battery "stack", even within
the industry, 2) widespread mismanagement and inefficiency of processes within
manufacturing or R&D or 3) the fundamental R&D for battery improvements is
just outrageously hard?

I get that it's probably all 3, but I feel as if the main problem being 1) or
2) would lend itself well to startups with extremely knowledgable battery
industry veterans.

~~~
owenversteeg
A lot of it is because the battery world isn't very startup-y. You can hack
together a prototype for an app or a website with a handful of developers,
sleepless nights and some caffeine, and push that out to the real world, and
show that to VCs and raise money. The battery world doesn't work like that.
The scientists and engineers you hire will want to work stable 9-5 jobs with
decent salaries, you won't have anything to show for years, and success is
binary. 99.99% of hypothetical battery startups would have nothing to show for
their research except a handful of useless patents for design processes that
will never be practical. One would have the breakthrough that brings them to
unlimited riches.

Another problem is that there are two categories of success: you find a simple
way to make amazing batteries, or you find a massively complicated way. If you
find a simple way, that's great, but it can be copied by anyone who wants
money, and you'll end up like the Hoverboard - a very successful _idea_ but
the company only captured a fraction of the market. If you find a complex way,
it's very likely to require an expensive material or process. For example, say
you need a rare metal or something that's not currently produced in large
quantities. The capital you'd need to raise in order to extract or create this
material could be absolutely massive. For example, let's say you got a 10,000
Wh/kg battery but it needed a substantial quantity of rhenium. Well, worldwide
production of rhenium is about 40 tons/year. You'd have create a worldwide
industry for extracting rhenium, perhaps rivaling the oil industry in size.
Imagine that conversation with VCs. "You want to raise $1.5 trillion? With a
T?" "Yep, and we want to do it to create a battery that could either enable
our world to look like Star Trek. Oh yeah, and it might become obsolete in
months if someone has a better idea."

Another thing is that there's not much to "disrupt". If someone gave me $XXX
million for a battery startup, it'd basically be set up in a very similar way
to the research arm of Panasonic or Samsung SDI. If some genius comes up with
a way to improve the efficiency of the core research - sure, that's obviously
worth funding. But the problem is that everybody is trying to get to the
breakthrough directly, not invent tools to get to the breakthrough faster.

Imagine if you were in a room with 1000 people, and an authoritative source
announced that there's a pot of gold buried in the hill behind the room, and
it'll probably be found in a few hours. Do you spend two hours driving home,
getting your shovel, and driving back? Or do you run out there and rabidly
start digging? Sure, you might answer "get a shovel" now, but in the real
world 999 of those 1000 people will be digging with their hands.

The last problem is that the risk, and the return, is absolutely ridiculous.
With startups, say 1 in 1000 makes you a billion dollars, 600 return your
money and 399 go bankrupt. Great, that's acceptable. Even worst-case scenario,
you take a big loss but you don't lose _everything_.

With moonshot battery research startups, every single one will lose all your
money except for one - and that one will make you fabulously wealthy beyond
your wildest dreams. If the breakthrough is big enough, it would revolutionize
literally every field from space exploration to aerospace to power generation
to electronics to vehicles. There are so many variables you can't even start
to calculate the odds.

------
mstaoru
I live in China and run startups in e-commerce and food.

China subsidizes up to 70% of postage fee, so Aliexpress sellers can sell
cheap stuff for $2 with "free shipping" worldwide.

There is no such thing as "free shipping" in e-commerce, it's just included in
the price. An astonishing amount of people actually thinks it's free for the
seller.

When you apply for a website license in China, you have to give root access to
the Ministry of Information. Most of the time it's handled by your hoster
"transparently" in the form of "license application tokens". (Yes, you can
trick them if you colocate your own bare metal.)

25% is an average ingredient cost for restaurant meals.

~~~
contingencies
Shipping: It's generally pricey as hell to send anything out of the US. It's
cheap to send things from developing countries. This is merely economic
reality (shipping costs include cost of packaging, labor
salary/health/pension, rent at all trans-shipment points, distance-to-port,
economies of scale, tax on private company earnings, legal and insurance
overheads, etc.) Since half the world's products come from China, its
government-run mail system has no taxes and it has huge ports and rail
networks, it's very cheap. I doubt there is a gov.cn conspiracy to undermine
foreign e-tailers (ready to be proven wrong!), it's just a highly efficient
and centralized socialist bureaucratic mail system. (Note that it's currently
being supplanted both domestically and internationally for many purposes by
more trackable courier companies, of which there are many dozens already, the
best of which is [http://sf-express.com/](http://sf-express.com/) )

Root: If you do business in mainland China the government reserves the right
to strongly suggest you comply with everything they want, which is usually "if
anti-government stuff appears on your site, you are done, and otherwise if we
give you a phone call, jump high now". This is in some ways no different to
other countries in model, but perhaps stronger in presumed responsibility and
penalty than some. As for root-by-VPS, yeah maybe, but citation-needed, and
there's arguably not a huge difference versus seizure as performed by other
countries.

(Source: ~16 years ... not claiming total accuracy, the above is just my
experience/impression)

------
EliRivers
The majority of commercial software writers are banging out poorly designed,
fragile, inadequately tested and often borderline-unmaintainable code.

I feel that people have a kind of double-think about this; they suspect this
is the case, but they still expect software to work properly.

~~~
slachance
Amen.

I work at one of the most well-reputed software product companies in the
world. We pride ourselves in hiring the very best, and try to do so through an
interviewing program that simulates real life coding instead of an academic
whiteboard situation.

Even amongst smart people, the bar for software quality is shockingly low. You
will find ostensibly senior people again and again who given half a chance
with espouse all day long the importance of high quality code, well-designed
abstraction, separation of concerns, and good testing.

You can then let these people operate for a few hours by themselves and
examine the result. In all but a few situations, it'll be a pile of mud that's
designed counter to every one of the values they talk about. Often they're not
aware of this, but it's also very common that they know it's sloppy, and don't
really care. People don't do what's right, they do what's easy.

In a corporate environment, there is never a structure to identify the
developers who are most likely to write good and maintainable code (it's too
subjective) so that they can be put into a review capacity, and even if there
were, there just isn't the bandwidth to review new additions to the depth
that's required. In an ideal situation, many patches would be returned to
author essentially asking for a complete rewrite, but that's difficult to
justify given that building strong relationships inside the team needs to be
considered.

The result is that all software developed in industry trends towards bad over
time, and it appears to be as absolute of a universal constant as entropy. You
can find localized exceptions, but they're often only temporarily good as
eventually more people contribute more features.

------
alok-g
Publicly known but not commonly known: (I get asked about these frequently.)

Electronic Displays Industry: LED TVs are also LCD TVs. When I explain this to
people, some even retaliate! The picture is formed in both by LCD only, just
that the backlight is built out of LEDs in what is called an LED TV.

Specifications given for power output in music systems, contrast ratio in TVs,
frequency response for earbuds, etc. are mostly fake.

~~~
Avernar
That's a result of having the marketing department as the ones who interact
with the public. Pretty much every industry has this problem.

To get at the truth you have to find some enthusiast website and find someone
there who has done enough digging to find the real technical information and
specs.

Speaking of LED TVs, the next one is QDLED TVs where again it is still an LCD
TV but the backlight is now improved with Quantum Dots. Confused the heck out
of the public who are looking/waiting for a true Quantum Dot display.

------
ex3xu
I do marketing and AdWords for a company that specializes in local
contractors. Modern online marketing is a race to the bottom that only Google
wins. Fundamentally, regardles of industry, marketing is a simple logistics
problem -- connect clients to service providers. But the distribution of
attention is incredibly imbalanced -- the top 3 search results get nearly 50%
of clicks with the top ten results getting 90%. So what I am seeing happen for
many local industries and problems is that even though there are probably
dozens or hundreds of local service providers that can provide adequate
service for a problem, the ones that show up on the first page get a
disproportionate, overwhelming amount of business, and the rest of the
providers end up fighting over scraps. Unless they too want to start shelling
out 10 grand a month or more to show up at the very top for every search and
get more business than they can handle. There's got to be a better way.

~~~
calvano915
Isn't this the problem that Angies List/Amazon Home Services/etc is attempting
to solve and monetize? For a goof I submitted a plumbing work order to Amazon
and received at least three competitive bids, all from businesses I had never
heard of before that are vouched for to some degree by Amazon. It seems to be
either the above or Yelp/word of mouth are the only ways that contractors can
be seen by prospective clients, at least until they grow large enough to have
more marketing funds and return business.

------
hnhg
Not my industry any more, but a PhD isn't about pushing the frontiers of
knowledge so much as being a training program for working in academia.

~~~
tomrod
I agree to a degree, but this is dependent on field. Some fields it's about
networking, some its about getting a foot into a door into a lab.

------
johan_larson
Every piece of commercial software ships with large numbers of known problems,
limitations, and deficiencies. For old, broadly distributed software, the bug
databases can easily have millions of issues, some of which have never even
been investigated.

------
blargles
The mining industry relies on a single guess as to what an orebodies looks
like when they plan their multi million/billion dollar mines. These guess
orebodies are usually made by inferring local information based on their
neighbours within a specified range, weighted proportionally to their
distances. The method is still widely used even though it was made to deal
with the fact that back in the day these calculations were done by hand. We
have more correct methods but they're require computers and people don't like
computers.

------
VLM
The telecom side of media is really boring, but on the production side almost
all mass market media comes from about five corporations plus or minus a
couple.

------
ethbro
Commercially available desktop automation systems are pretty terrible in terms
of modern software design. Specifically lifecycle management, code versioning,
third party tooling integration, and readability.

Unfortunately, they're aided by a compatibility moat built up of custom
control support. Basically everything that doesn't support Microsoft UI
Automation requires memory hijinks. And you'd be surprised by how much legacy
software used weird third party libraries.

If you want more impressions or to chat, feel free to flip a mail at ethbro.co
a g mail. Happy to talk, as god knows automation software could be improved.

------
rodolphoarruda
In online learning for higher education: if you don't make mobile learning
your first priority you will struggle to stay relevant in the market.

~~~
akulbe
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "mobile learning"?

Do you mean development for mobile as a platform?

Do you mean the ability to learn on the move?

Something else entirely?

~~~
rodolphoarruda
It's M-Learning. You can check it in Wikipedia for starters. It is the
combination of processes and technologies to allow people to engage into
formal learning programs using mobile devices. It is different from
traditional desktop based e-Learning.

------
ubernostrum
In the US, how hard it is even for your insurance company to figure out if a
doctor/hospital/etc. is in or out of their contracted network.

You'd think "how hard can it be, you either signed a contract with them and
have it on file, or not". Well...

When the insurer signs a contract with, say, a doctor, what is happening is
_not_ "anything this doctor does for someone on one of our plans is covered by
this contract". Instead, whether something falls under the contract or not
depends on a whole bunch of factors, including but not limited to:

* The doctor's NPI (provider identification number, issued by US Medicare/Medicaid).

* The particular medical specialties and credentials of the doctor.

* The location(s) where the doctor renders services and the type(s) of services rendered.

* The federal tax identification number and billing entity the doctor bills as.

* The address the doctor submits on the bill.

So suppose Dr. Jane Doe signs on to your insurer's network. She's contracted
as a primary-care physician, rendering services in her office at 123 Main
Street Suite B, under NPI 1111111111, and will bill as Jane Doe Medical, tax
ID 222-22-2222, payment to be sent to her billing office at 234 Second Street.

And you go to Dr. Jane Doe and have no trouble, until one day you get a notice
back from your insurance company that suddenly she's no longer in network. She
swears up and down that she's still in network with them, so it must be the
insurance company's fault, right?

Well, the thing is that she merged operations with Dr. John Roe in the next
office suite over, and now is billing as Doe & Roe Medical, tax ID
333-33-3333, payment to be sent to 345 Elm Avenue. And there's no contract for
that!

Or she outsourced all her medical billing to MedBillCo, which again changes
information the contract is keyed to. Or she also holds credentials for other
types of medical practice and was rendering service of that type, maybe at a
local hospital. Or she kept her tax ID and billing the same but moved her
office from 123 Main Street Suite B to 123 Main Street Suite C. Or the post
office realigned the boundaries of her zip code, and she "moved" from zip
11111 to zip code 11112 as a result.

This sort of thing happens _all the time_.

I'm told that LexisNexis once came to an (I think optimistic) estimate that
the half-life of medical provider data is 18 months. So gather up all the
information on your network of doctors and hospitals, carefully vet and
double-check it, make sure everything is full and correct and up-to-date...
and 18 months later half of it will be wrong, just due to the background rate
of changes to office locations, credentials, billing entities, etc.

So after working for a little over a year at a company that has to deal with
this, I am not surprised at all when I hear someone complain that "it's the
same doctor I went to last time, nothing changed, they're still in network, so
why can't the insurance figure that out?" Nothing _visible to the person
complaining_ has changed, sure. But that tells you nothing. I am more often
surprised that anyone is ever able to correctly determine in- or out-of-
network status; being able to do it even a fraction of the time is frankly a
minor miracle, and requires a whole lot of people toiling away behind the
scenes.

For the record: I work for a company in the Medicare space, and we're required
to revalidate all our provider information at least once every 90 days,
precisely for this reason. Also, you don't want to know what the industry
average is for correctness of printed provider-directory booklets. Even if
it's sent off to the printers the day the up-to-date data has been validated,
some not-insignificant proportion of it will already be wrong by the time it
arrives in someone's mailbox, just because of how often and how quickly the
information changes.

------
SFJulie
Education is an expensive burden on the society that have not proven to worth
its value in terms of Return Over Investment.

Funnily, the only persons asserting the value of diploma ... are PhD in ivy
league business schools... selling expensive diplomas...

Education is probably a large scale scam in its actual form: too long, too
expensive, counter-productive and overrated.

Cf Henri Mintzberg essay on why MBA for instance are a poor choice for being
innovative.

"M.B.A. programs train the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong
consequences," said Henry Mintzberg, a management professor at McGill
University in Montreal. "You can't create a manager in a classroom. If you
give people who aren't managers the impression that you turned them into one,
you've created hubris."

~~~
Lordarminius
> Education is an expensive burden on the society that have not proven to
> worth its value in terms of Return Over Investment.

As a person from a region of the world with a high level of illiteracy an
having witnessed firsthand the ROI of an uneducated citizenry, I would
question this assertion

~~~
randomdata
I believe he is referring to postsecondary education specifically. In North
America, K-12 exists to make one a functioning member of society. For what
flaws it may have, it has overall shown to be beneficial.

With that measured success, we got the idea that once you were a functioning
member of society, you could become a functioning member of the workforce
simply by continuing in even more years of schooling. But it's not clear if it
has really worked out. In 1970, approximately 10% of the US population had a
bachelors degree or higher. In 2017, that number is closer to 30%, yet incomes
have remained stagnant throughout that entire period and job quality has
declined. Not what you'd expect from the promised higher incomes and better
jobs that people were willing to spend large amounts of money for.

~~~
SFJulie
I was indeed referring to post secondary education.

If I was no troll, I would admit a soft tooth for Finland focus on early
education and the amazing results they have doing so.

[https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/sep/20/grammar-
sc...](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/sep/20/grammar-schools-play-
europe-top-education-system-finland-daycare)

------
BerislavLopac
This one: [https://medium.com/message/everything-is-
broken-81e5f33a24e1](https://medium.com/message/everything-is-
broken-81e5f33a24e1)

------
reasonattlm
That we are actually quite close to the development of a panoply of working
rejuvenation therapies capable of significantly extending human life spans,
were the right lines of research and development just more aggressively funded
than is the case at present.

~~~
prodmerc
Head transplants are actually considered feasible today.
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/37420905/the-
surgeon-w...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/37420905/the-surgeon-who-
wants-to-perform-a-head-transplant-by-2017)

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kapauldo
ACH transactions (bank to bank) cost 1/10000th of a dollar. PayPal charges 3%
plus 29 cents for branded ACH.

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randomnumber314
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but aren't ACH transactions just an
SFTP upload?

