Hacker News Reader

fuzz4lyfeon Employer health plans are getting pricier and skimpier

>Medical schools/the AMA are artificially limiting the number of students and residents for their own ends (keeping wages and scarcity high) so they need to charge a lot... why? - I honestly don't know.

The AARP advocates for social security... why? - I honestly don't know.

Imagine if you put the teamsters in charge of infrastructure spending, every road in the country would be under construction perpetually. It would be illegal to shovel your own driveway without paying someone in the union to sit in front of your house and supervise.

fuzz4lyfeon Echo Frames – Eyeglasses with Alexa

Free markets and globalism are good for everyone except lawyers and doctors. The two professions most overrepresented in congress. Funny how that is huh?

fuzz4lyfeon Drilling open a smart door lock in 4 seconds

>Isn't the point of a lock just to keep honest people honest? I mean you can buy the world's sturdiest, more secure lock and attach it to the world's strongest door, someone with a hammer can easily break a window.

In my home, the locks and windows (laminated glass[0]) are hard enough to break that when you attempt to do so I have time to ready my firearm. Something like this would potentially allow someone to sneak up more quickly and perhaps undetected. When my family isn't home I don't really care if you break into my house, insurance will cover the loss.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2HxWn6eP74

fuzz4lyfeon Hinkley Point C nuclear plant to run £2.9bn over budget

Does the cost of wind and solar include the disposal of the panels? What about the cost of the rare mineral mining needed for the batteries that make solar and wind viable?

fuzz4lyfeon Ask HN: Why did you resign from your last job?

I make hyperbolic statements like this all the time. I'd personally take that to mean he jumped a few levels on the income ladder from say working poor to middle class. The point is it feels like 10x.

fuzz4lyfeon A recent study of Harvard’s admissions practices

I call them platonic thinkers. People who reject that concept of integration[0] and in effect reject reality. Rousseau is perhaps the greatest example, in his own words:

"It is reason which breeds pride and reflection which fortifies it; reason which turns man inward into himself; reason which separates him from everything which troubles or affects him. It is philosophy which isolates a man, and prompts him to say in secret at the sight of another suffering: 'Perish if you will; I am safe.'"

[0]http://www.importanceofphilosophy.com/Epistemology_Integrati...

fuzz4lyfeon WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

They only have to get a few bets right and ride that train for decades. Not everyone has venture capitalist investors.

fuzz4lyfeon OSSU: A path to a free self-taught education in computer science

High school drop out turned software engineer here. I never had any success with these sort of programs. My advice is pick a hard problem (to you) and stick with it until you've solved it. Rinse and repeat. Eventually you will be pretty good at solving problems.

fuzz4lyfeon WeWork’s Adam Neumann Steps Down as CEO

In fact small firms may be more efficient. If they make a bad bet on some real estate they fold while WeWork has to spread that cost to all of its users and keep on moving.

fuzz4lyfeon Show HN: Instant, Self-Destructing Websites

https://sdnotes.com/index

damn beat me to it

fuzz4lyfeon Google Employees Explain How They Were Retaliated Against for Reporting Abuse

If this former friend is still walking the streets please file a police report in regards to the child pornography. I know its difficult to put yourself out there but it needs to be done.

fuzz4lyfeon Neil Young’s failed anti-streaming business helped the music industry

bandcamp offers flac downloads. I just buy from them and add it to my Plex server. Best of both worlds.

fuzz4lyfeon What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)

That is sensible and is generally the approach I take in user facing code. When I have my way I have validators on all input fields in the UI to warn users of invalid input. I like them to be very specific, checking to see if a phone number is formatted in such a way that it is usable by Twillo for example.

On the other hand services that aren't actively utilizing data I write to be fairly agnostic about that data. "be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others." is sort of how I aim.

fuzz4lyfeon Climate capitalists have serious money in climate-friendly investments

In my view for humanity to exist long term we need to become a interplanetary species. An impact like the one that killed the dinosaurs can certainly happen again and the sun has a expiration date.

Ultimately what is purposed isn't even a solution to the problem. Small reductions here and there that in total only manage to delay the inevitable. The only solution is mass scale terraforming projects and genetic modification of existing species to increase resiliency. If the coral reefs are dying we need to build reefs that are more resilient. If polar bears are overheating we need to breed ones who are more temperature tolerant. If the fish of the sea do not breed quickly enough for us to consume them at the rate that we currently do, we need to increase yields.

fuzz4lyfeon What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)

Type annotations were recently introduced as a standard library feature as well though they aren't enforced and require a third party tool like you are describing. I've found that 90% of the time you don't actually care what type something actually is and instead you care what it needs to be.

fuzz4lyfeon What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)

I validate at the point of use/when it matters.

For example if I'm going to use a value in a query, because I'm using parameterized queries the type conversion to string happens implicitly so type doesn't actually matter. If I get 2 or '2' it all ends up as '2' and the database infers type by the column type.

If I need something to be a integer and I don't trust the upstream system then you have to:

  int(*number*)

At the end of the day if my JSON is going back to JavaScript I can't trust types either so I have to take the same precautions.

fuzz4lyfeon What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)

Python doesn't have type safety to begin so those sort of checks have less utility to me and since json.loads returns a dictionary and python objects are effectively dictionaries you are pretty much done.

fuzz4lyfeon What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)

> incoming JSON requests

  import json
  data_from_json_request = json.loads(*request body*)

> easily serialize queries back to JSON

  import pymysql
  import json

  conn = pymysql.connect(*connection details*, 
                          cursorclass = pymysql.cursors.DictCursor)

  cur = conn.cursor()
  cur.execute(*query*)
  json_query_result = json.dumps(cur.fetchall())

I don't feel that a ORM is better than this personally. I know exactly what this is doing at all times. No magic, no guess work about the philosophy of the software. This is probably faster as well.

fuzz4lyfeon A ‘Grass-Roots’ Campaign to Take Down Amazon Is Funded By Its Biggest Rivals

>The way the system is set up, most politicians don't think they have an alternative

Who's in charge of setting up the system again?

fuzz4lyfeon A Chinese social credit song

Aristotle once said:

"Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms."

My expectation for such a system is that a majority group who have a specific lifestyle would penalize anyone who does not strictly adhere to that specific lifestyle. The group would change over time (likely liberal, then conservative, then back again) and each group would become more and more dogmatic about those views. Eventually the group will resemble something like the Nazis or the Soviets and violent revolution or war would end the experiment.

Source: the past two thousand years of human civilization

fuzz4lyfeon Anxious tech workers are going to therapy

Is working worth the gym membership, video games and travel? Perhaps the solution is to work, do and own less more generally. Trying to find a trick to fool your mind into liking an activity you don't only seems healthy for the corporate balance sheet, not you as a individual.

fuzz4lyfeon A ‘Grass-Roots’ Campaign to Take Down Amazon Is Funded By Its Biggest Rivals

Those poor politicians, we can't expect them to read laws before voting on them. They must of gotten confused because they have so many checks to cash and speaking gigs to preform.

fuzz4lyfeon Birds Are Vanishing from North America

You are society. Society is a large number of individuals just like you all pointing at each other and proclaiming everyone else is the problem. Do not ask others to do things you yourself are not doing. You care about climate change? Show me, don't tell me.

fuzz4lyfeon Birds Are Vanishing from North America

>Enough humans who feel and fear their impending mortality are selfish and vindictive enough to obstruct change because they want to conserve whatever material comforts they have now and do not care about what happens to other people after they're dead.

Sent from my iPhone

fuzz4lyfeon Rent control will make housing shortages worse?

I like to test my world view as policies are enacted. Decide a concrete measure for a particular outcome, write it down and check the results once a year (I do it on new years day). These rent control measures are a great target for this regime.

fuzz4lyfeon US takes 'richest nation on earth' crown from Switzerland

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

fuzz4lyfeon US takes 'richest nation on earth' crown from Switzerland

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes

fuzz4lyfeon 200k people applied for jobs at Amazon in a single week

The narrative that the labor market is full and therefore wages must remain low must be preserved at all costs.

200k people applied for 30k jobs that's less than 10/1 anyone who has done hiring in IT knows that roughly 1/10 applicants are even qualified for a particular position.