Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47718398

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

> If everyone had an oil well on their property that was affordable to operate the price of oil would be more akin to the price of water.

This is not necessarily even true https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

I recently went down this rabbit hole a bit thinking this was the obvious solution and was surprised to learn that the Reagan administration legalized all illegal immigrants in the USA in 1986: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Control....

State control over employment and borders in the US is just too weak to prevent people coming over and so 30 years later this leads right back to the initial state.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46572701

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

> if anything goes even a tiny bit sideways you just throw your hands up and expect to lose both the mother and child

Of course not. This wrong in two important ways. Midwives are medical professionals. They can administer medicine. Most notably they can administer Pitocin to stop hemorrhage after the placenta is delivered. This is the most common cause of maternal death during labor.

The other way this is wrong is it ignores the option of transferring to a hospital in an emergency. Midwives assess medical risk and can make the call to transfer. Delivering mothers who are overwhelmed can also make the call.

> And you actually pay for this?

The midwife model of care has many advantages over common OBGYN practices. As one example midwives are often delivering 2-3 babies a month instead of many every day. As another example the person delivering your baby is someone you have actually met before and have built a rapport with. Some hospitals try to make this happen with doctors but it is commonly not the case.

Overall the tradeoff is worth it to many people -- it's about 1% of births in the US.

Midwives are medical professionals who have the equipment and expertise to intervene in the most common scenarios that require it.

It will still cost you 5 - 10k for a good midwife and you'll still want to be insured in case you need to transfer. So it only knocks off 5-10k from the total.

To me this is quite surprising. Distributed systems were not designed to solve measure theory problems.

Using DIY tools and not being a trained biostatistician or whoever usually looks at these things you are very likely to face errors you don't know how to account for. I would guess the odds are high you'll encounter scary false positives for example.

It sounds really fun though, something I've always wanted to do with more time.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45304544

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

It has taken a small but noticeable toll on my personal life. Amongst my family we find ourselves talking about the state of the occupation and how hopeless it makes us feel about humanity probably once a week. I can see my liberal Jewish friends having a lot of trouble being criticized and rejected from both sides of discourse in USA. I recently saw two jewish people shouting obscenities at each other while waiting to get off a plane and talking about Israel. Antisemitism on the street seems to be increasing -- I met someone a few days ago who started saying baseless hateful things minutes into our first conversation.

Probably like other people here I've spent a lot more of my free time in the last year learning about the history culture and politics of Israel, Palestine and Iran.

The non-interactive piece is pretty straightforward you just simulate challenge response conversation with unbiasible public randomness and show the transcript (Fiat Shamir transform).

Another area worth exploring is how some of these proof systems can have such incredibly small proofs (192 bytes for any computation in groth16 zk snarks). That relies on the much more difficult to intuit theory of elliptic curve pairing functions.