Hacker News: softdevca

New comment by softdevca in "Why American ambulance rides are so expensive"

softdevca — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 01:08:36 +0000

Fee-for-service doesn't prevent ambulances from being considered a communal expense, it just makes sticky. There is nothing preventing a government from making ambulances equivalent to fire or police except the will.

From the article: "The most efficient way to fund ambulance services would simply be to pay for the option the way that options are normally paid for: with a premium, collected from everyone the service stands ready to rescue". In other words, taxation just like anything else we expect to be available to anybody.

New comment by softdevca in "Why American ambulance rides are so expensive"

softdevca — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 23:17:37 +0000

I don't understand why taxes can be used to save property but not a person.

New comment by softdevca in "Two physicists who correctly predicted the mass of Higgs boson [video]"

softdevca — Sun, 07 Jan 2024 05:49:20 +0000

Those that are worth listening to often are.

New comment by softdevca in "A programming language coding in a grid"

softdevca — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 16:40:37 +0000

Early in in my career I was part of a small company that developed a grid-based language for geospatial applications. The grid approach worked well for a lot of aspects, like implicit caching and concurrency. The cells could contain data that defined a view, such as a map or chart.

The downside of the grid was the same as it is with spreadsheets. The identifiers are not as visible as they are in a flat-file based programming language. What cell the interest rate in again?

It was amazing how well it worked even on state of the art Sun SPARCstation 5s at the time.

New comment by softdevca in "R49081 Is Prime"

softdevca — Mon, 21 Nov 2022 05:41:19 +0000

I may have misconstrued that ELI5 was snark for "elide", in the same vein as I18N or A11Y.

Present me wishes I could explain Explain ELI5 Like I'm 5 to my past self.