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0 pointsspraak8y ago0 comments

If I had wrote that, it would have been about how it led to the development of the Cesarean section operation. In the US, and many other places, the prevalence is much higher than the medical need. When there is no medical need for a C-section, there really isn't any benefit over the risks to the mother and child. Also--and this will probably sound quite hand-wavy or too woo-woo for most of HN's demographic (I assume)--there is great emotional benefit from a baby passing through the vagina.

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falcolas8y ago

And once a mother has a c-section, most (all?) future births are via c-sections as well.

There is a cost to the mother - major surgery - to the benefit of children. Modern society considers this a worthwhile trade, but it would have meant the death of the mother not even a century ago.

I have no real way to tie this back to programming; other than perhaps to note that we're likely still in the dark ages of programming; the programming equivalent of a cesarean section is likely still years away.

pas8y ago

Well, not really.

Look at HTTP, WebSockets, NodeJS, JS! Docker!

Churning out "apps" and delivering deliverables is the focus, not engineering. Ticking off boxes for enterprise is more important than product feel and user satisfaction. And so on.

And once you got hooked on docker and nodejs (with typescript and VS Code) why would you go back to hacking perl scripts that invoke long forgotten binaries written in the darkest C dialects, darker than void* itself, even if that damn docker image is 600MB, the runtime memory cost is not much less, and it's managed by kubernetes which needs gigabytes of RAM just to run an apiserver and scheduler and a kubelet (node/server manager).

dctoedt8y ago

> I have no real way to tie this back to programming ...

One facet of the tie-in is the age-old question of what to optimize for: Programmer time? Execution speed? Code compactness? Code maintainability? Cf. The Story of Mel [0].

[0] http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html

dctoedt8y ago

Keep in mind that a C-section is done only when normal labor isn't enough; it's an alternative to the use of forceps (which is very difficult to teach and can be catastrophic) and not to normal vaginal delivery.

spraakOP8y ago

Actually it's not. There are now elected c-section surgeries, where the mother is scheduled to go in to the hospital and has the surgery. And this isn't because of medical risk. It's pushed by doctors and hospitals as a more convenient alternative.

Besides elected c-sections, the prevalence has been increasing, where a labor shows the slightest risk and suddenly it requires a c-section.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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falcolas8y ago

And once a mother has a c-section, most (all?) future births are via c-sections as well.

There is a cost to the mother - major surgery - to the benefit of children. Modern society considers this a worthwhile trade, but it would have meant the death of the mother not even a century ago.

pas8y ago

Well, not really.

Look at HTTP, WebSockets, NodeJS, JS! Docker!

Churning out "apps" and delivering deliverables is the focus, not engineering. Ticking off boxes for enterprise is more important than product feel and user satisfaction. And so on.

dctoedt8y ago

> I have no real way to tie this back to programming ...

One facet of the tie-in is the age-old question of what to optimize for: Programmer time? Execution speed? Code compactness? Code maintainability? Cf. The Story of Mel [0].

[0] http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html

dctoedt8y ago

spraakOP8y ago

Besides elected c-sections, the prevalence has been increasing, where a labor shows the slightest risk and suddenly it requires a c-section.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse