Huge loss to the community. She was, by all accounts, an amazing programmer. I remember when she uploaded the source code of her Doom 3DO port she indicated that she had to write her own string lib because the base one sucked:
> I had to write my own string.h ANSI C library because the one 3DO supplied with their compiler had bugs! string.h??? How can you screw that up!?!?! They did! I spent a day writing all of the functions I needed in ARM 6 assembly.
I can't even imagine the level of skill required to just say, "Fine, I'll write MY OWN string lib!" while chasing a deadline.
As an aside...I wonder what will happen to her personal artifacts. There was a media blitz awhile back when Tim Cain said he doesn't have the original source code to Fallout because he was "ordered to destroy it" by Interplay when he left. But Becky then chimed in to say that she did have a surviving copy, because she was a founder. [0] I hope someone else on her behalf would be able to continue that effort, but I worry that with her death, Bethesda would assert that no one else has "legal standing" to do so.
Rebecca was well known in emulation circles for her high quality work on various games of the era, often pushing the hardware in unusual ways. This article is one of my favorites, detailing the wacky tricks she used to get Another World's 3D rendering system running acceptably on a Super Nintendo
She also somehow pulled off the port of Doom to the hopelessly underpowered hardware of the 3DO in just a few weeks, after others had tried and failed for much longer than that. The final release had a reduced viewport and a bad framerate, but the background music was great (recorded with a band and stored as audio tracks on the game CD).
Also, 62 years is much too young! And one month from diagnosis (because of being short of breath) to dying is really rough - although there's a lot of progress on cancer treatment, some forms have symptoms at such a late stage that they're unfortunately still a death sentence...
I will never get over the company CEO sending here PNGs of new weapon models and saying, essentially, "Yeah so you can just copy & paste these into the game, right?"
Having a bard in your party let you choose a soundtrack and their songs brought magical effects. For example, the Rhyme of Duotime let your party attack more frequently in combat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oR4j7w4FIY
The first trilogy (including BT3) was also remastered about 7 years ago and released on Steam, it's like $15 and has many quality of life improvements.
In middle school, a friend and I 'cracked' that decoder ring by copying all the info by hand on to paper so we could both play the game from one store bought copy because we were poor. I don't think we ever finished the game, but it's still one of my happiest early gaming memories.
They remastered all three of the first Bard's Tale games a few years ago and released them on Steam with many quality of life improvements-- I bought the set without a second thought even though I know I will probably never take the time to play it all the way through. I've spent a few dozen hours on it so far, though.
Admittedly I didn't dive much into this to get the full context, but it's saddening to me that a legendary game designer had a GoFundMe. I was hoping achieving that level of status in a traditionally well-paid industry would leave one well off, financially.
The United States is the wealthiest nation on the planet according to Forbes, richer than the subsequent three nations combined.
It’s a tragedy that our own citizens are not the direct be beneficiaries of that wealth.
I think a lot about the scene in Star Trek IV when McCoy is in a hospital and says “what is this the dark ages?”
Gofundme is like a kafkaesque tragic absurdity that - hopefully - will be looked at as an indictment of the inequitable K shaped economy we’ve built, and hopefully fixed in the future.
> The United States is the wealthiest nation on the planet according to Forbes, richer than the subsequent three nations combined.
This framing by Forbes (any many others really) is insidious because it doesn't take into account the population number and how unevenly wealth is spread.
For instance, Switzerland is not a huge economy - around the 20th in the world, but its citizens enjoy an extremely high quality of life because both income inequality and incomes overall are significantly better that in the US.
Population size is usually included in those calculations. It’s typically GDP per capita.
But I couldn’t agree more that the inequality and social safety net (or lack thereof) make the numbers deeply disconnected from QoL. Which I believe is the whole point.
> As for whether this represents a "kafkaesque tragic absurdity" we would need intimate knowledge of a lifetime of financial decisions. Maybe she was really bad with money, and frittered it away in casinos. Maybe she was amazing with money, and donated to others more than will ever be donated to her.
As someone in a nation with socialised healthcare, no you don't. It's a Kafkaesque tragic absurdity, and this sentiment of "maybe she was bad with money" sounds a bit like "maybe she was holding the live hand grenade wrong".
The US is maybe the only developed nation where this happens, insurance exists because massively unlikely, massively expensive events are very hard to budget for. It's not the person's fault if they didn't manage that.
> this sentiment of "maybe she was bad with money" sounds a bit like "maybe she was holding the live hand grenade wrong".
Yes, it does sound like that when taken as an isolated sentence fragment. I'm not sure what your point is though, since no reasonable system of economics could possibly solve for people holding the metaphorical live hand grenade wrong.
The UK has socialized healthcare, and that's not going so well. Societies excel at stuff they prioritize. Pretty much all societies don't prioritize other people's tragedies.
It's definitely going better than the US, where you basically need to beg people for treatment money. I'm not sure what "not going so well" means, in that regard, since virtually every other developed country is doing better than the US on this.
I’ve lived in both Canada and the US. My grandma in Canada had to wait 9 months for a hip replacement. Even though the government provided help with paid aids, it was not a great situation.
My mom here in the states needs a hip replacement and she can’t afford it because she’s maxed Medicare.
You mentioned ambulance. My wife called an ambulance for our kid who tripped on something at a park and a rather hysterical person told her she needed to call an ambulance right away. Pressured, she did so; our kid was fine. But we then owed $3,500 for the ambulance. Though we were paying on a payment plan and never missed a payment, the bill got turned over to collections for some unknown reason. We got it sorted it out but it took about 15 hours of work to resolve and fix our credit.
I’ve found that my Canadian relatives complain often about the system but very few seem to truly understand what is good about that system.
Pick your poison. Like many things here in the US, healthcare in the US is great if you have money, bad if you don’t.
You're such an inconsiderate un-empathic asshole to be posting that kind of bullshit to this discussion of Rebecca Heineman's death, under a cowardly anonymous throw away account. You should have thrown yourself away before daring to post your worthless offensively incorrect opinions to this discussion, you ghoulish jerk.
Yeah, exactly, I don't know much about the NHS but I wouldn't be surprised if the recent issues are because it's getting defunded so it can be sold off to private owners.
I think the sentiment is not that generosity to those in need is bad, but that something bad must be causing so many to be in such desperate need.
It may be relevant that the US has higher health-care costs than every other country in the world except for Switzerland, but not because it's providing better care. Many countries have better outcomes.
The fact that you need intimate knowledge is evidence of the Kafkaesque nature. It describes a world where virtue doesn't exist except for the case of financial planning (which often equates quite well to luck).
Based on my understanding of Kafka, to fit the definition, funerals would be essential goods whose costs should be socially guaranteed. In reality, a funeral is a discretionary event about the deceased and for the living. Crowdfunding for the benefit of the crowd is not an inversion of responsibility, it's simply voluntary collective spending.
You could say it's an inversion of societal norms, but that's not Kafkaesque.
I mean, how is "healthcare" from 500 years ago the bar here?
And isn't single-payer state-funded healthcare the scaled version of a small town passing the plate around anyway?
As I think about it, gofundme is even more kafkaesque in that it gatekeeps fundraising to those who have online social networks strong enough to fundraise. We don't hear about those who aren't able to because in the Jia Tolentino definition of "silence," they are not able to express that need online.
> Maybe she was really bad with money
I guess I fundamentally disagree that a kind of Dave Ramsey level of financial saving is a prequisite for healthcare. Indeed, I'd argue that casinos are a symptom, not a problem, of a system in which the only "viable" way out is gambling - again another tentpole in a complicated kafkaesque system.
The Churchill line is about democracy, but the adapted version is a common variation. It works as a standalone maxim without need of attribution to some famous person.
The only way to not participate in a debate is to not participate.
What you call a grand claim was only intended to be a common witticism, shorthand for a generally understood point, not me asserting absolute certainty about all things for all time.
I don't know if you've noticed, but internet discussions collectively can't seem to avoid "no true Scotsman"-ing what counts as capitalism, likewise its alternatives.
I've seen some people on HN criticise the "socialist" healthcare of the nordic countries on the basis of what Stalin was like, and others saying that China as is today is each of communist and capitalist depending on the point the poster wants to make.
I also clicked through ten pages of Google search results for "capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others", each of which showed the literal quotes in the preview excerpts, at which point I became too bored to continue.
Considering the James Van Der Beek of Dawson's Creek fame is having to hold a fundraising auction of his memorabilia to fund his cancer treatment, cancer is expensive in the US.
It's a lot more expensive in the US. Three years of ribociclib is US$100k here in Argentina, which dwarfs the usual costs of things like chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgical resection. (All of which is normally paid for either by a health plan or by the public hospital system.) In the US, if you have to go through all of that, I think the cost is going to be at least an order of magnitude higher.
actually a difference is also how many players along the supply chain siphon money out of the process. the more greed is allowed and acted on for the treatment, the more expensive it gets. introduce layers of insurances, hedgefonds, pension funds, lobbyism, ... it adds up to riddiculous amounts far beyond the original R&D/infrastructure/treatment costs.
And also downsides, e.g. many treatments just aren't available, and many others would never have had their discovery funded without the market-based system existing.
Governments can (and do) directly fund medical research including drug discovery. This is in part because governments of even just middling competence have an incentive to keep their workforce (which also includes their military) healthy.
This… is a think that people believe, but it’s not as simple as that. Most basic research is universities, all over the place. Many drugs are developed in Europe. A lot of medical machinery is developed and made in Europe (Siemens, Philips and Roche are huge in this space). Like most things, med tech is fairly globalised.
And let's not forget that a substantial amount of medical research performed in the USA is not market-based but rather publicly funded through the NIH.
> This… is a think that people believe, but it’s not as simple as that.
This is a thing people believe because pharmaceutical companies keep repeating it. And to be fair, they're not entirely wrong in that getting a drug/treatment from the lab to the pharmacy is incredibly expensive because most drugs don't work and clinical trials are super expensive.
It does seem to me that a better system would be to split out the research/development and manufacturing of pharmaceuticals into the lab development (scientists), the clinical trials (should be government funded) and the manufacturing (this could easily be done via contract).
Which the US had a situation exactly like that until very recently: development labs, often at Universities, with scientists paid for by grants (some private, but the majority being public, government grants), with clinical trials overseen by government agencies like the National Institute for Health (NIH), and winning research eventually being tech transferred for cheap to Pharmaceutical companies to manufacture, distribute, and market.
The companies have the biggest PR arms, so took the most credit for a system that had been balanced on a lot of government funding in the earlier, riskier stages. Eventually the marketing got so unbalanced people didn't realize how much the system was more complex than the marketing and voted for people that decided it was a "free market" idea to smash the government funding for the hard parts of science.
> It does seem to me that a better system would be to split out the research/development and manufacturing of pharmaceuticals into the lab development (scientists), the clinical trials (should be government funded) and the manufacturing (this could easily be done via contract).
The market is there to risk money in the world of imperfect information trying to predict what would be good to pursue. That is one of the hardest parts of the process, but it's not even made your list.
This doesn't make any sense. If you make a thing, the price you set for selling that thing in a country has little to do with where you happen to be living when you made that thing.
It's such an erractic industry in terms of compensation. You can found a studio, make some acclaimed darlings, and still end up shuttering and being no better off than your average joe. Then there's being a "software engineer in games" where you're a cog in a wheel fixing bugs in the yearly Sportball game that gets compensated 200k and you live very well despite never truly "impacting" the industry the same way. 200k isn't mindblowing for a software engineer, but it's well beyond "average joe" range at that point.
I'm that cog. Or at least, was. Situations like this make me thing a lot about the state of the industry and where I lie in life.
I'm wondering if she actually got the fundraiser money, considering how quickly this moved - the last update implied it would have to go to her funeral, and I hope it pays for the bills or helps her family.
Please no. It would be impossible to decide the cutoff for who deserves it. Loud communities would bring drama when their favourite person doesn't get pinned. A black strip might be fine, though.
The first "Boom & Bust" episode of Netflix's series "High Score" series told the story of her winning the first Space Invaders U.S. national championship as a kid.
Rest in peace, Burger Becky! I really enjoyed her interview with CoRecursive a few years ago about porting DOOM to the 3DO[1] and highly recommend a listen.
What a true legend. The amount of people she has touched with her work is enormous.
Feeling a bit of regret. I feel like I made a poor first impression on Rebecca when I first met her a few years back at VCF East. I saw her again recently but was suffering from severe undiagnosed sleep apnea so much so that I was practically asleep at the event. I didn't know about the cancer. Thought I would have another chance. This is happening more and more in my life. :/
Let us cherish all the great moments that she helped bring to us.
I was lucky to catch some of Becky's livestreams on YouTube over the years.
More than a brilliant programmer she was truly a kind soul. She never approached topics with any kind of ego. Just a joy and love for the things she'd worked on and the people she'd worked with
I didn't know her but reading the eulogies it was obvious she was a kind person who touched so many people. I hope some day my eulogies will be similar (if lower in scope).
Very sad news. This one hit pretty hard for me as not only was she so awesome and contributed so much to so many great games, but the short timeline between "oh dang I have cancer and we're fighting it" to, well, today... was just way too short :(
You are not alone being hit hard by the pace of the cancer's progression. Dr Makis talks about his shocks lately as an oncologist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gIYQCjB_NU
You are not alone. I can only think that her post about being very vulnerable after chemo from immune system supression made me realize how lucky you have to be to beat cancer with chemo.
As a retro-enthusiast, I was captivated by the stories she shared in her interviews,
particularly about working on the cancelled Half Life port to Classic Mac OS (supposedly it even ran on 68k Macintoshes, How amazing is that !?).
She said that she still had a CD of the gold master on her shelf.
I really fear that work may never see the light of day now...
Offtopic: several of the embedded Bluesky posts at the end of the article show "The author of the quoted post has requested their posts not be displayed on external sites." Seems not to phase the PC Gamer "journalists".
[0] is a good article about this; not least that this has been happening since at least 1889 (to the point where I'd say we could now probably consider it a valid alternate spelling.)
These are quote-posts; the quote-post isn't protected but the quoted-post is. Bad choice by whoever wrote the article (in fairness the default Bluesky interface doesn't make this particularly clear), but nothing is being displayed that shouldn't be displayed.
Im inclined to blame the US healthcare system. It looks like a gofundme was setup to pay for her cancer treatment. A sensible system a) wouldn’t need patients to pay for treatment and b) might have caught it earlier through regular screening
Do you have any evidence that the cancer is a type that would have been caught by a screening regime currently in place in other countries which is not in place in the US?
Without such evidence your post reads more like propagandizing a death for political purposes than an honest argument.
Even if inappropriate, this reads like a normal expression of grief to me.
It's normal to be upset about the circumstances under which someone died, and to be angry if you believe it was avoidable. Under the five stages model, this would be bargaining and anger.
> Do you have any evidence that the cancer is a type that would have been caught by a screening regime currently in place in other countries which is not in place in the US?
Do you have any evidence that it wasn't?
I honestly don't know if earlier detection was possible, or would have helped her out or not. What I can tell you is that given the state of health care in this country, you can bet that my default assumption would be "yes" until proven otherwise.
Starting with the assumption of "no" gives our system more slack than it deserves.
Aww I’m very sad to hear this. She was close friends to a partner of mine and I met her about ten years ago through that connection. She seemed to be a lovely person.
Wow. What an impactful person. I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that I did know about her till her death though I've played many of the games mentioned in the WP article about her. RIP.
Never heard of her and given what she is known for it sounds like she contributed to destroying the gaming community by inserting your viewpoints into an area where they weren't wanted. Part of the group that destroyed my childhood.
What a horribly cold-hearted and tactless thing to say. From what I've read, she got diagnosed a month ago. Is our treatment here in Canada so damn good that we'd have been able to save her? I doubt it.
“Routine visit”? “Semi—annual checkup”? Where I live in Canada (Victoria) the health care system is so overburdened that this reads like a sick joke. The cost of living is too high and the government doesn’t pay enough to get family
doctors out here, so we mostly just have the ER. This is with an NDP government for nearly the past decade, mind you.
If you're young, schedule an appointment and go in, get your blood work done. Does not require a family doctor. Last time there was barely any wait time for me.
The annual scheduled vists are for older people / seniors.
You can’t “schedule an appointment” in Victoria. There are walk-in clinics, but the only way to access them is to call the very instant they open (as in within the first few seconds) - they immediately book up for the day, and they won’t book appointments for later dates.
Once again, how do you know that? Or are you just making assumptions based on your pre-conceived ideas of how all 350m people in America live their lives?
Huge loss to the community. She was, by all accounts, an amazing programmer. I remember when she uploaded the source code of her Doom 3DO port she indicated that she had to write her own string lib because the base one sucked:
> I had to write my own string.h ANSI C library because the one 3DO supplied with their compiler had bugs! string.h??? How can you screw that up!?!?! They did! I spent a day writing all of the functions I needed in ARM 6 assembly.
https://github.com/Olde-Skuul/doom3do
I can't even imagine the level of skill required to just say, "Fine, I'll write MY OWN string lib!" while chasing a deadline.
As an aside...I wonder what will happen to her personal artifacts. There was a media blitz awhile back when Tim Cain said he doesn't have the original source code to Fallout because he was "ordered to destroy it" by Interplay when he left. But Becky then chimed in to say that she did have a surviving copy, because she was a founder. [0] I hope someone else on her behalf would be able to continue that effort, but I worry that with her death, Bethesda would assert that no one else has "legal standing" to do so.
[0] https://thisweekinvideogames.com/news/fallout-1-2-source-cod...
Rebecca was well known in emulation circles for her high quality work on various games of the era, often pushing the hardware in unusual ways. This article is one of my favorites, detailing the wacky tricks she used to get Another World's 3D rendering system running acceptably on a Super Nintendo
https://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_SNES/
Rest in piece, you absolute legend.
She also somehow pulled off the port of Doom to the hopelessly underpowered hardware of the 3DO in just a few weeks, after others had tried and failed for much longer than that. The final release had a reduced viewport and a bad framerate, but the background music was great (recorded with a band and stored as audio tracks on the game CD).
https://github.com/Olde-Skuul/doom3do
Also, 62 years is much too young! And one month from diagnosis (because of being short of breath) to dying is really rough - although there's a lot of progress on cancer treatment, some forms have symptoms at such a late stage that they're unfortunately still a death sentence...
Gonna link SSFF's enjoyable telling of the 3DO port story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxF1_wg2d_Q
I will never get over the company CEO sending here PNGs of new weapon models and saying, essentially, "Yeah so you can just copy & paste these into the game, right?"
Today I learned...
"Super Fami-Com ("FAMIly COMputer")"
Doh!
It was a sequel to the Famicom.
Many years ago I played one of her works, Bard's Tale 3: Thief of Fate and enjoyed it very much.
It was a masterful blend of RPG, dungeon crawl, and puzzles and had a memorable soundtrack.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru5kg35dNso
Having a bard in your party let you choose a soundtrack and their songs brought magical effects. For example, the Rhyme of Duotime let your party attack more frequently in combat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oR4j7w4FIY
BT3 is available on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/msdos_The_Bards_Tale_3_-_Thief_O...
The first trilogy (including BT3) was also remastered about 7 years ago and released on Steam, it's like $15 and has many quality of life improvements.
The original Bard's Tale was my first RPG and I've been hooked ever since.
She was originally chosen to do a remaster of the series. This was eventually reassigned to another publisher.
If you purchase Bards Tale 4 you get the remastered 1,2, and 3 for free.
I have played BT 1 every year or so since the late 80s.
BT3 was wonderful, lots of nostalgia for me. Sad to hear of her passing.
ahh i have fond memories of this game... and the silly anti piracy attempts (decoder ring) they shipped it with.
In middle school, a friend and I 'cracked' that decoder ring by copying all the info by hand on to paper so we could both play the game from one store bought copy because we were poor. I don't think we ever finished the game, but it's still one of my happiest early gaming memories.
They remastered all three of the first Bard's Tale games a few years ago and released them on Steam with many quality of life improvements-- I bought the set without a second thought even though I know I will probably never take the time to play it all the way through. I've spent a few dozen hours on it so far, though.
It seems Bard's Tale 3 can be played on the DosBox emulator:
https://www.dosbox.com/comp_list.php?showID=188&letter=B
... which is available for many platforms, including Windows and Linux:
https://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1
although the latest version of DosBox seems to be from 2019, so maybe others can suggest a more actively-maintained emulator.
DOSBox-X is a port that is actively developed and has many features missing in vanilla DOSBox.
There are a few other ones as well. DOSBox Staging is one. Magic DOSBox seems to be the most popular on Android. There is some iOS port as well.
Admittedly I didn't dive much into this to get the full context, but it's saddening to me that a legendary game designer had a GoFundMe. I was hoping achieving that level of status in a traditionally well-paid industry would leave one well off, financially.
The United States is the wealthiest nation on the planet according to Forbes, richer than the subsequent three nations combined.
It’s a tragedy that our own citizens are not the direct be beneficiaries of that wealth.
I think a lot about the scene in Star Trek IV when McCoy is in a hospital and says “what is this the dark ages?”
Gofundme is like a kafkaesque tragic absurdity that - hopefully - will be looked at as an indictment of the inequitable K shaped economy we’ve built, and hopefully fixed in the future.
> The United States is the wealthiest nation on the planet according to Forbes, richer than the subsequent three nations combined.
This framing by Forbes (any many others really) is insidious because it doesn't take into account the population number and how unevenly wealth is spread.
For instance, Switzerland is not a huge economy - around the 20th in the world, but its citizens enjoy an extremely high quality of life because both income inequality and incomes overall are significantly better that in the US.
Population size is usually included in those calculations. It’s typically GDP per capita.
But I couldn’t agree more that the inequality and social safety net (or lack thereof) make the numbers deeply disconnected from QoL. Which I believe is the whole point.
As a lucky European, I have US labeled as “richest third world country”.
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> As for whether this represents a "kafkaesque tragic absurdity" we would need intimate knowledge of a lifetime of financial decisions. Maybe she was really bad with money, and frittered it away in casinos. Maybe she was amazing with money, and donated to others more than will ever be donated to her.
As someone in a nation with socialised healthcare, no you don't. It's a Kafkaesque tragic absurdity, and this sentiment of "maybe she was bad with money" sounds a bit like "maybe she was holding the live hand grenade wrong".
The US is maybe the only developed nation where this happens, insurance exists because massively unlikely, massively expensive events are very hard to budget for. It's not the person's fault if they didn't manage that.
> this sentiment of "maybe she was bad with money" sounds a bit like "maybe she was holding the live hand grenade wrong".
Yes, it does sound like that when taken as an isolated sentence fragment. I'm not sure what your point is though, since no reasonable system of economics could possibly solve for people holding the metaphorical live hand grenade wrong.
The UK has socialized healthcare, and that's not going so well. Societies excel at stuff they prioritize. Pretty much all societies don't prioritize other people's tragedies.
It's definitely going better than the US, where you basically need to beg people for treatment money. I'm not sure what "not going so well" means, in that regard, since virtually every other developed country is doing better than the US on this.
90 minutes for an ambulance seems like a systemic failure.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-64254249
I’ve lived in both Canada and the US. My grandma in Canada had to wait 9 months for a hip replacement. Even though the government provided help with paid aids, it was not a great situation.
My mom here in the states needs a hip replacement and she can’t afford it because she’s maxed Medicare.
You mentioned ambulance. My wife called an ambulance for our kid who tripped on something at a park and a rather hysterical person told her she needed to call an ambulance right away. Pressured, she did so; our kid was fine. But we then owed $3,500 for the ambulance. Though we were paying on a payment plan and never missed a payment, the bill got turned over to collections for some unknown reason. We got it sorted it out but it took about 15 hours of work to resolve and fix our credit.
I’ve found that my Canadian relatives complain often about the system but very few seem to truly understand what is good about that system.
Pick your poison. Like many things here in the US, healthcare in the US is great if you have money, bad if you don’t.
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Geeze, everyone be rich, why didn't we think of that before.
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You're such an inconsiderate un-empathic asshole to be posting that kind of bullshit to this discussion of Rebecca Heineman's death, under a cowardly anonymous throw away account. You should have thrown yourself away before daring to post your worthless offensively incorrect opinions to this discussion, you ghoulish jerk.
Yes that example highlights a failure, so we should look into the science to see what is happening:
> New study links hospital privatisation to worse patient care
> 29 Feb 2024
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2024-02-29-new-study-links-hospita...
Yeah, exactly, I don't know much about the NHS but I wouldn't be surprised if the recent issues are because it's getting defunded so it can be sold off to private owners.
The NHS is suffering because of cuts from conservative vultures. They're following the playbook of American conservatives like Grover Norquist:
"I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."
Same as their playbook here in Canada. It's disgusting.
I think the sentiment is not that generosity to those in need is bad, but that something bad must be causing so many to be in such desperate need.
It may be relevant that the US has higher health-care costs than every other country in the world except for Switzerland, but not because it's providing better care. Many countries have better outcomes.
The fact that you need intimate knowledge is evidence of the Kafkaesque nature. It describes a world where virtue doesn't exist except for the case of financial planning (which often equates quite well to luck).
> evidence of the Kafkaesque nature
Based on my understanding of Kafka, to fit the definition, funerals would be essential goods whose costs should be socially guaranteed. In reality, a funeral is a discretionary event about the deceased and for the living. Crowdfunding for the benefit of the crowd is not an inversion of responsibility, it's simply voluntary collective spending.
You could say it's an inversion of societal norms, but that's not Kafkaesque.
> It's been done in churches for centuries
I mean, how is "healthcare" from 500 years ago the bar here?
And isn't single-payer state-funded healthcare the scaled version of a small town passing the plate around anyway?
As I think about it, gofundme is even more kafkaesque in that it gatekeeps fundraising to those who have online social networks strong enough to fundraise. We don't hear about those who aren't able to because in the Jia Tolentino definition of "silence," they are not able to express that need online.
> Maybe she was really bad with money
I guess I fundamentally disagree that a kind of Dave Ramsey level of financial saving is a prequisite for healthcare. Indeed, I'd argue that casinos are a symptom, not a problem, of a system in which the only "viable" way out is gambling - again another tentpole in a complicated kafkaesque system.
> As is often said, capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others.
I've only heard it said that "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time", not capitalism and economics: https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form...
The Churchill line is about democracy, but the adapted version is a common variation. It works as a standalone maxim without need of attribution to some famous person.
It works insofar as quotes that sound wise but have no kind of evidence backing it up often do.
Such quotes are the worst form of quotes, except for all the other kinds.
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No, because I'm not going to get into a debate about whether capitalism is good or not on a memorial post.
Even if I were so inclined, I'm not the one making grand claims about every economic system in the world. You're the one who has to prove your claim.
The only way to not participate in a debate is to not participate.
What you call a grand claim was only intended to be a common witticism, shorthand for a generally understood point, not me asserting absolute certainty about all things for all time.
You're being a flaming asshole and your behavior is totally inappropriate for a memorial post. Go away and stay that way.
I don't know if you've noticed, but internet discussions collectively can't seem to avoid "no true Scotsman"-ing what counts as capitalism, likewise its alternatives.
I've seen some people on HN criticise the "socialist" healthcare of the nordic countries on the basis of what Stalin was like, and others saying that China as is today is each of communist and capitalist depending on the point the poster wants to make.
> the adapted version is a common variation
Got any evidence for that?
NYT (opinion), 2017: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/opinion/dont-quote-them-o...
Forbes, 2019: https://www.forbes.com/sites/yuwahedrickwong/2019/04/19/econ...
NPR, 2009: https://www.npr.org/2009/10/26/114163098/a-spoonful-of-socia...
LSE Economics Society essay question, 2018: https://www.tutor2u.net/economics/blog/lse-economics-society...
I also clicked through ten pages of Google search results for "capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others", each of which showed the literal quotes in the preview excerpts, at which point I became too bored to continue.
Considering the James Van Der Beek of Dawson's Creek fame is having to hold a fundraising auction of his memorabilia to fund his cancer treatment, cancer is expensive in the US.
Cancer is expensive everywhere, the difference is who pays for it.
It's a lot more expensive in the US. Three years of ribociclib is US$100k here in Argentina, which dwarfs the usual costs of things like chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgical resection. (All of which is normally paid for either by a health plan or by the public hospital system.) In the US, if you have to go through all of that, I think the cost is going to be at least an order of magnitude higher.
actually a difference is also how many players along the supply chain siphon money out of the process. the more greed is allowed and acted on for the treatment, the more expensive it gets. introduce layers of insurances, hedgefonds, pension funds, lobbyism, ... it adds up to riddiculous amounts far beyond the original R&D/infrastructure/treatment costs.
And those are just the downsides of a market-based system. There are also upsides of single-payer systems, like monopsony buying power.
And also downsides, e.g. many treatments just aren't available, and many others would never have had their discovery funded without the market-based system existing.
Governments can (and do) directly fund medical research including drug discovery. This is in part because governments of even just middling competence have an incentive to keep their workforce (which also includes their military) healthy.
Nobody is advocating for eliminating a market-based system. My country (Australia) has both single-payer and a market-based private healthcare system.
You can imagine how that system, like most, is actually getting its medical advancements from the US.
This… is a think that people believe, but it’s not as simple as that. Most basic research is universities, all over the place. Many drugs are developed in Europe. A lot of medical machinery is developed and made in Europe (Siemens, Philips and Roche are huge in this space). Like most things, med tech is fairly globalised.
And let's not forget that a substantial amount of medical research performed in the USA is not market-based but rather publicly funded through the NIH.
And performed by researchers that received free education in their home country before moving to the US because they hope for a better career there...
Most of that is funded by the NIH and not by the local systems. Spending money is easy.
> This… is a think that people believe, but it’s not as simple as that.
This is a thing people believe because pharmaceutical companies keep repeating it. And to be fair, they're not entirely wrong in that getting a drug/treatment from the lab to the pharmacy is incredibly expensive because most drugs don't work and clinical trials are super expensive.
It does seem to me that a better system would be to split out the research/development and manufacturing of pharmaceuticals into the lab development (scientists), the clinical trials (should be government funded) and the manufacturing (this could easily be done via contract).
Which the US had a situation exactly like that until very recently: development labs, often at Universities, with scientists paid for by grants (some private, but the majority being public, government grants), with clinical trials overseen by government agencies like the National Institute for Health (NIH), and winning research eventually being tech transferred for cheap to Pharmaceutical companies to manufacture, distribute, and market.
The companies have the biggest PR arms, so took the most credit for a system that had been balanced on a lot of government funding in the earlier, riskier stages. Eventually the marketing got so unbalanced people didn't realize how much the system was more complex than the marketing and voted for people that decided it was a "free market" idea to smash the government funding for the hard parts of science.
> It does seem to me that a better system would be to split out the research/development and manufacturing of pharmaceuticals into the lab development (scientists), the clinical trials (should be government funded) and the manufacturing (this could easily be done via contract).
The market is there to risk money in the world of imperfect information trying to predict what would be good to pursue. That is one of the hardest parts of the process, but it's not even made your list.
This is a comforting lie Americans tell themselves to justify being ripped off.
You pay double the OECD average, and more per person for healthcare than the Swiss - and that's only counting the publicly funded parts!
This implies the US is subsidizing the world's healthcare system and sacrificing it's own citizens for the benefit of every non-American.
You're ok with that?
This doesn't make any sense. If you make a thing, the price you set for selling that thing in a country has little to do with where you happen to be living when you made that thing.
This is either intentional bad faith trolling or you are not aware of the per capita spending on healthcare in the US.
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...
How'd the theme song to that show go again?
I was hoping one wouldn't need to be well off to get treatment for an illness, but that's the US for you.
The games industry is not traditionally well paid, unfortunately.
It's such an erractic industry in terms of compensation. You can found a studio, make some acclaimed darlings, and still end up shuttering and being no better off than your average joe. Then there's being a "software engineer in games" where you're a cog in a wheel fixing bugs in the yearly Sportball game that gets compensated 200k and you live very well despite never truly "impacting" the industry the same way. 200k isn't mindblowing for a software engineer, but it's well beyond "average joe" range at that point.
I'm that cog. Or at least, was. Situations like this make me thing a lot about the state of the industry and where I lie in life.
This. It's consistently lower-paying than the rest of the software industry.
Video games are an art form, the downside is they pay like one too.
Cancer and US Medical Care has a tendency to drain any savings you have. Also, it was sudden so it’s not like she was ready to retire at all.
Not just legendary game designer, but co-founder of a game studio and publisher (Interplay).
I'm wondering if she actually got the fundraiser money, considering how quickly this moved - the last update implied it would have to go to her funeral, and I hope it pays for the bills or helps her family.
Meta: I think such black strip moments should be pinned at top of the hacker news while it lasts.
Please no. It would be impossible to decide the cutoff for who deserves it. Loud communities would bring drama when their favourite person doesn't get pinned. A black strip might be fine, though.
This breaks my heart, I will miss Burger Becky, she was the sweetest kindest person and a legendary programmer.
https://www.burgerbecky.com/becky.htm
The first "Boom & Bust" episode of Netflix's series "High Score" series told the story of her winning the first Space Invaders U.S. national championship as a kid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Score_(TV_series)
I knew I'd seen her somewhere before, that was it!
"Legend" barely begins to describe. She is up there with the Carmacks et al.
She was probably the first programmer I knew by name as a kid, following the games industry as a kid.
Rest in peace, Burger Becky! I really enjoyed her interview with CoRecursive a few years ago about porting DOOM to the 3DO[1] and highly recommend a listen.
[1]: https://corecursive.com/doomed-to-fail-with-burger-becky/
Weird. I just googled it and it said her partner also died of the same thing?
>Heineman's cancer fundraiser is now collecting for her funeral.
Am I crazy or does that sentence have, I don't know how to explain it, the 'rhythm' of a joke? Feels like accidental rhyming, a mark of bad writing?
It unfortunately reads a bit like an unintentional punchline, yes.
Sounds like it’s trying to be ironic
What a true legend. The amount of people she has touched with her work is enormous.
Feeling a bit of regret. I feel like I made a poor first impression on Rebecca when I first met her a few years back at VCF East. I saw her again recently but was suffering from severe undiagnosed sleep apnea so much so that I was practically asleep at the event. I didn't know about the cancer. Thought I would have another chance. This is happening more and more in my life. :/
Let us cherish all the great moments that she helped bring to us.
> I saw her again recently but was suffering from severe undiagnosed sleep apnea so much so that I was practically asleep at the event.
Go visit a pulmonologist and get a diagnosis. Getting one and starting on a CPAP was life-changing for me.
Im reading this wearing a CPAP.
I was lucky to catch some of Becky's livestreams on YouTube over the years.
More than a brilliant programmer she was truly a kind soul. She never approached topics with any kind of ego. Just a joy and love for the things she'd worked on and the people she'd worked with
I didn't know her but reading the eulogies it was obvious she was a kind person who touched so many people. I hope some day my eulogies will be similar (if lower in scope).
Yeah, that's the impression I got from everyone who's saddened by her loss.
We lost a legend.
She was responsible for a large part of my early gaming years, without me even knowing it. Another legendary account retired.
Very sad news. This one hit pretty hard for me as not only was she so awesome and contributed so much to so many great games, but the short timeline between "oh dang I have cancer and we're fighting it" to, well, today... was just way too short :(
You are not alone being hit hard by the pace of the cancer's progression. Dr Makis talks about his shocks lately as an oncologist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gIYQCjB_NU
You are not alone. I can only think that her post about being very vulnerable after chemo from immune system supression made me realize how lucky you have to be to beat cancer with chemo.
My understanding is the cancer had already metastasized by the time it was discovered. Chemo was always a hail Mary sadly :(
As a retro-enthusiast, I was captivated by the stories she shared in her interviews, particularly about working on the cancelled Half Life port to Classic Mac OS (supposedly it even ran on 68k Macintoshes, How amazing is that !?). She said that she still had a CD of the gold master on her shelf. I really fear that work may never see the light of day now...
Offtopic: several of the embedded Bluesky posts at the end of the article show "The author of the quoted post has requested their posts not be displayed on external sites." Seems not to phase the PC Gamer "journalists".
It's faze, not phase. It's a common mistake.
[0] is a good article about this; not least that this has been happening since at least 1889 (to the point where I'd say we could now probably consider it a valid alternate spelling.)
[0] https://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001166.... (no, I've no idea why they're behind the wrong subdomain certificate)
Because they don't really live on that server any more. The correct URL for the languagelog archives is https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/..., but none of the links will keep you on that domain.
These are quote-posts; the quote-post isn't protected but the quoted-post is. Bad choice by whoever wrote the article (in fairness the default Bluesky interface doesn't make this particularly clear), but nothing is being displayed that shouldn't be displayed.
Looks to me like it's the quoted post that's not to be displayed, not the post itself.
Im inclined to blame the US healthcare system. It looks like a gofundme was setup to pay for her cancer treatment. A sensible system a) wouldn’t need patients to pay for treatment and b) might have caught it earlier through regular screening
Do you have any evidence that the cancer is a type that would have been caught by a screening regime currently in place in other countries which is not in place in the US?
Without such evidence your post reads more like propagandizing a death for political purposes than an honest argument.
Even if inappropriate, this reads like a normal expression of grief to me.
It's normal to be upset about the circumstances under which someone died, and to be angry if you believe it was avoidable. Under the five stages model, this would be bargaining and anger.
> Do you have any evidence that the cancer is a type that would have been caught by a screening regime currently in place in other countries which is not in place in the US?
Do you have any evidence that it wasn't?
I honestly don't know if earlier detection was possible, or would have helped her out or not. What I can tell you is that given the state of health care in this country, you can bet that my default assumption would be "yes" until proven otherwise.
Starting with the assumption of "no" gives our system more slack than it deserves.
> you can bet that my default assumption would be "yes" and "yes" until proven otherwise.
That's a recipe for healthcare inflation. There are endless unproven tests and treatments.
Another one of these? Jeez.
Whether you're right or not, it doesn't matter - this is not the time or place to bring this up.
So nobody dies or cancer in places with universal healthcare?
Something doesn't have to be perfect to be better
That's not the argument that was being made.
I'd heard the 3DO doom port story linked here before and it is absolutely wild stuff. Legend.
Aww I’m very sad to hear this. She was close friends to a partner of mine and I met her about ten years ago through that connection. She seemed to be a lovely person.
Running x86 server architecture in software development. PC Gamer's obituary claims she was debugged.
RIP, https://www.mobygames.com/person/343/rebecca-ann-heineman/
Wow. What an impactful person. I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that I did know about her till her death though I've played many of the games mentioned in the WP article about her. RIP.
RIP, Burger.
I played BT1, BT2, and BT3 for hours and hours.
Pop-up when pressing back on mobile that stopped returning to HN.
Sheesh, the mobile web is really predatory. Good that I don’t use it much.
Rebecca was well known in emulation circles for her high quality work on various games of the era
How odd:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45960849
Good catch!
The first time I became aware of her was in the "Another World 101" series, about her SNES port:
https://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_SNES/index...
Never heard of her and given what she is known for it sounds like she contributed to destroying the gaming community by inserting your viewpoints into an area where they weren't wanted. Part of the group that destroyed my childhood.
Damn I knew she had cancer but never thought it is so quick.
“We have gone on so many adventures together! But, into the great unknown! I go first!!!“
Such a legend. RIP.
rip burger o7
What an amazing career. RIP.
@dang could we have a black banner please?
For posterity, we have gotten a black banner. Farewell to a true hacker. She will be missed.
RIP Burger. Thanks for all the epic games and stories.
Also, would it be possible to make the black banner a hyperlink that points directly at the HN submission?
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What a horribly cold-hearted and tactless thing to say. From what I've read, she got diagnosed a month ago. Is our treatment here in Canada so damn good that we'd have been able to save her? I doubt it.
Yes there's a good chance it would have been detected in advance during a routine visit in Canada.
The USA is perfectly capable of having good healthcare for everybody, like Canada, but elections have consequences.
Again, Health Insurance Companies in the USA have blood soaked hands.
How do you know that? You're making assumptions based on nothing.
You know people die of cancer in Canada too, right? You know people die of preventable illnesses in Canada too, right? Stop pretending we're perfect.
Anyway it simply does not matter if you are right - this is not the time or place for it.
My mother had it detected well in advance, and is currently being treated, the cancer is in remission now.
I doubt Rebecca ever got that chance. Sure, surprise late stage cancer happens, but it's often caught when you get semi-annual checkups.
“Routine visit”? “Semi—annual checkup”? Where I live in Canada (Victoria) the health care system is so overburdened that this reads like a sick joke. The cost of living is too high and the government doesn’t pay enough to get family doctors out here, so we mostly just have the ER. This is with an NDP government for nearly the past decade, mind you.
If you're young, schedule an appointment and go in, get your blood work done. Does not require a family doctor. Last time there was barely any wait time for me.
The annual scheduled vists are for older people / seniors.
You can’t “schedule an appointment” in Victoria. There are walk-in clinics, but the only way to access them is to call the very instant they open (as in within the first few seconds) - they immediately book up for the day, and they won’t book appointments for later dates.
Once again, how do you know that? Or are you just making assumptions based on your pre-conceived ideas of how all 350m people in America live their lives?
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I doubt anyone can answer that so why even ask it?
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