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bickfordb

721 karma · joined May 24, 2009

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bickfordb··on The Chan-Zuckerbergs stopped funding social causes
That or reform charitable giving so that it truly is an arm's length transaction. No preferential tax treatment for payments to charities one controls.
bickfordb··on The Hollow Men of Hims
Is there evidence that compounded Semaglutide from Hims pharmacies has harmed anyone?
bickfordb··on PDF to Text, a challenging problem
Maybe it's time for new document formats and browsers that neatly separate content, presentation and UI layers? PDF and HTML are 20+ years old and it's often difficult to extract information from either let alone author a browser.
bickfordb··on Doctors Warn Accountants of Private-Equity Drain on Quality: You Could Be Next
In my experience in my city [Portland, OR, US], PE owns most of the large clinics (NW VCA, BluePearl, Banfield). There are still a lot of smaller vets, but it's harder to get an appointment with them and most don't do urgent care/24hr emergency or have an app where you can do scheduling.

- In an emergency/urgent care situation, you can't really do a price comparison/shop - The pricing is opaque until they you receive the service. Even in routine/non-emergency situations, you get a quote for the services often 20-30 minutes into your appointment, even for annual exams, so it's pretty obnoxious to switch services at that point. - FWIU, Banfield and BluePearl both have a strategy where have lower cost exams to get patients in the door, but then make that up in super high testing/drug fees, e.g. a $300 UTI test that labs charge $30-100 and 10x upcharges on antibiotics readily available from Chewy/neighborhood pharmacies.

bickfordb··on Rebuilding Prime Video UI with Rust and WebAssembly
It's a similar effort. Flutter is a cross platform Dart UI framework that compiles to WASM for the web and also has Android/iOS build targets. The web version can be laggy on trivial examples. I would guess this younger Rust framework is less featureful than Flutter but is more efficient/faster (one of the stated goals in the article).
bickfordb··on How Airbnb measures listing lifetime value
I have a smalltime Airbnb and I feel the same. Their only value is in their marketing distribution and they take 30%+. Their hosting tools could be worse but are not particularly great. Usually things work fine, but they have zero / hostile customer service on the host side on the random exceptional occurence. Hopefully more marketplaces show up
bickfordb··on Ask HN: What kind of whiteboard does not use dry erase markers?
If you use glass, whiteboard material / laminate (formica eg) you can use any kind of marker and then dissolve it with alcohol or acetone.
bickfordb··on Doge Privacy Act Requests
Nope
bickfordb··on Right to Repair laws have now been introduced in all 50 us states
It is a big win, but in the Oregon version at least it excludes large sectors like vehicles which is obviously a big expense to most US consumers. Hopefully it will continue to be extended.
bickfordb··on Are electric cars that much cheaper to operate?
There are a lot of semi-consumable ICE components that these comparisons often omit: mass airflow sensors, oxygen sensors, gaskets/seals, emissions components, starter batteries. These often cost in the $100-500 range/ea and the labor to replace them is at minimum $100/hr in my locality.
bickfordb··on An update on Dart macros and data serialization
They seem to work well in Rust.
bickfordb··on New York starts enforcing $15 broadband law that ISPs tried to kill
The market is already distorted by the telephone and cable companies being granted local monopolies.
bickfordb··on JPMorgan Workers Ponder Union in Wake of Return-to-Office Mandate
FWIW medical workers often belong to unions
bickfordb··on Salesforce will hire no more software engineers in 2025, says Marc Benioff
If they're no longer a technology company, won't that crush their multiple?
bickfordb··on In 2025, People Will Try Living in This Underwater Habitat
It's still there?
bickfordb··on University of Alabama Engineer Pioneers New Process for Recycling Plastics
This article is from the school's PR dept
bickfordb··on Next stop: Miami
Seems smart. They'll continue to have all the leverage since they own the tech and will offload all the operational risk
bickfordb··on Famous AI Artist Says He's Losing Millions from People Stealing His Work
Does this mean that if Hollywood shifts to AI for production that none of it will be copyrightable?
bickfordb··on Plain Text Accounting (PTA)
I use beancount and I use ofxget for some accounts and then keep a CSV archive for the rest and wrote some scripts to sync them into beancount when a new file shows up. It's annoying to download everything and keep it organized, but it gives me better piece of mind than all the other SaSS accounting systems
bickfordb··on FDA says marijuana has a legitimate medicinal purpose
We also didn't require you to enter recovery programs.
bickfordb··on Exclusive hardwood may be illegally harvested
The engineered flooring is generally superior technology:

1. It requires less hardwood (rare) for the veneer, and uses softwood (plentiful) for the plywood base. 2. It can be milled exactly to one thickness. Generally with solid hardwood floors you need to sand after installing to get everything into one plane due to moisture movement in the hardwood warping and twisting it. 3. It can be applied in wider planks. Wide solid hardwood floors tend to cup and contract and leave gaps after installation. The plywood base in engineered planks is cross laminated so that it is more stable and resist moisture changes

bickfordb··on Electoral graffiti found inside Pompeii house
The site is huge. It's two miles square
bickfordb··on Can plastic recycling ever work?
Many plastic items are single use items with a low lifetime. Recycling all these short lived single use items is absurd. An Amazon box lasts 1 day and then needs to be turned into pulp again and made into a new box if everything is recycled correctly?
bickfordb··on Ubicloud – open, free and portable cloud
Ruby web applications have a history of absurdly high resource usage and failure stories compared with something like Go. If the selling point of this is for individuals and small businesses to run this instead of AWS/GCP, it may not be any cheaper once you start running this control plane.
bickfordb··on The OpenTF Manifesto
This is the interesting part of all of this. The meat of Terraform is in its provider ecosystem. Anyone can make a new frontend (or even fork the existing one?), get rid of all the warts, add the missing encryption features gated under enterprise and have a much better tool.
bickfordb··on Terraform best practices for reliability at any scale
Aside from reducing the blast radius of any Terraform state (split by envs, then by teams as you grow), I highly recommend using cdktf with Python for Terraform projects. Huge timesaver
bickfordb··on Judge rules Wyoming corner crossers did not trespass
I'm surprised there isn't a reasonable setback for fences abutting public lands like this
bickfordb··on Google “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI”
A good example of this is Youtube
bickfordb··on FCC orders phone companies to block scam text messages
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bickfordb··on LastPass says DevOps engineer’s hacked computer led to security breach in 2022
What could possibly go wrong with a centralized password database
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