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jennyyang

1,823 karma · joined January 14, 2020

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jennyyang··on NIH will invest $1B to investigate 'long Covid'
I don't know where you live, if you even live in the US, but that is a travesty that you weren't able to access quick testing. In the Bay Area, I get free testing through Project Baseline. My family has alternated getting tested once every 2 weeks, since our assumption is that if one of us gets COVID, then all of us gets COVID. Collectively we have been tested around 15 times,including children, and it's a breeze to get here.

But overall lack of testing capability is one of the stupidest things that happened over this past year. The US should have free testing available to everyone at least once a week. The capacity to test 100 million people in 2 days should have been built up, because testing is so vitally important to understanding what is going on. The fact we don't have that should be a crime because it has lead to so many deaths.

One thing to keep in mind is that a very bad flu went around in February/March. I know at least 10 people that thought they had COVID but didn't, because this flu was occurring at the same time. The other thing that many people have gotten mixed up with COVID is severe allergies. Try taking daily antihistamine to see if that clears up her coughing. Antihistamines need to be taken for weeks at a time in order to get good effectiveness, doing it one-off isn't nearly as effective. Her illness last March, be it COVID or not, may have made her more susceptible to alleriges or anything that irritates her lungs.

jennyyang··on Electricity over $900/MWh in most of Western US now
PG&E charges much more than 20c. Depending on the tier, it could be over $0.30/kWh. If you have time of day charges, it's even higher during the day, something ridiculously high.
jennyyang··on Why “Trusting the Science” Is Complicated
Sometimes, the "science" is wrong. Everything from low-fat diets, to high sodium diets, to DDT, to MSG. Many of the things that we have literally been indoctrinated with have been fully wrong.

Most recently, when the government, most especially the Surgeon General and even Fauci, told people that masks don't work. That infuriated me and they instantly lost credibility with me. And it caused a split in Americans where too many believed that masks didn't work, even after they changed their tune. It was absolutely unnecessary to lie and it killed people.

So read the science. Listen to the science. But read up further, and make educated decisions. Don't just listen to "experts" blindly.

jennyyang··on Teaching Students How to Cheat During the Pandemic
Absolutely ingenius. I love it!
jennyyang··on Interview Frustrations
If these ridiculous interviews don't produce top notch performance reviews after a year on the job, then the interviews are worthless.

If I were to ever try a startup (I won't), my philosophy would be to hire easily and fire easily. Do my level best to interview fairly, and give people a chance. But if they don't work out, fire them quickly and give them a 2-3 month severance bonus.

Then I would remove most titles and pay in the top tier. I think at the beginning of hiring, it would probably have a high turnover, but as the company matures, if it survives it will be filled with a lot of happy engineers that won't want to leave.

jennyyang··on Pattern matching accepted for Python
Yap. It doesn't make sense to destroy the language just to get in a particular feature. You don't need a language to do everything. It needs to be good at everything it's meant to be good at.
jennyyang··on Pattern matching accepted for Python
Anything that breaks and changes semantics should not be allowed into the language. Let Python be Python, not a Frankenstein's monster of ideas like C++. If it were an idea that were Pythonic, you would not see the confusing examples I've seen in the comments. C++ is the poster child of trying to do too much with the language and it losing itself due to death-by-committee. It's very sad that Python has started down this road.
jennyyang··on Amazon competitor got our belt listing taken down by saying it contains drugs
Just another example of how a virtual monopoly can get away with terrible, shameful and nonexistent customer support because they can. It's monopolistic behavior, but an passive form of it. Instead of actively engaging in monopolistic activity, they remove essential customer support because they have no competition. This really needs to be regulated quickly. Amazon, Google, Facebook all coomit the same behavior by hiding behind bots and algorithms with no customer support and there's nothing we can do because they are so dominant.
jennyyang··on Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked
We need regulations to enforce adequate customer service and SLAs in these huge companies.

Google is getting away with this behavior because of their monopolistic behavior. If they had competition, they would be spending billions on customer support, but because they have a monopoly, they can get away with having virtually none. This is their way of saving money and taking advantage of their monopoly. It's a shadow version of monopolistic behavior where the absence of services can be done because we have no choice. We need to politicize this issue.

Facebook is exactly the same way.

When a company reaches such dominance, and when people completely rely on a company like we all rely on Google, Facebook, et al., then we need regulations to prevent what is happening right now, which is using their monopoly to make life easier for them by not spending any money on customer support.

jennyyang··on Pennsylvania town coal mine has been on fire since 1962
If that's the only route in, then no. Because most of that is expelled gasses due to heat, there's no way that oxygen could go in if the gasses and smoke were being driven out by the fire.
jennyyang··on Pennsylvania town coal mine has been on fire since 1962
What exactly is burning at this point? I would suspect there is little oxygen left down there. Is it some other form of chemical reaction? They can't just dump boatloads of water to douse the flames? There appears to be enough water for things like fracking, we can't do the same here?
jennyyang··on Notes on My Chemotherapy
I pray that you succeed against this battle. I know several people who have successfully battled cancer, one who is doing it at UCSF right now and UCSF is a great hospital for that. You're young and look healthy, I am looking forward to continued decades of your posts!
jennyyang··on Zero arrests in 6 months of health care professionals replacing police officers
I fully support using the proper resources to tackle these non-violent problems instead of sending cops which could very easily turn into someone dead.

What I do not support is completely decriminalization or disincarceration like the current DA of San Francisco is doing. He has turned SF into a dangerous place where criminals are no longer worried about stealing into cars, burglarizing homes, etc. This will only escalate and I really hope the recall effort to get rid of him hastens.

jennyyang··on Robinhood denies claims that it sold GameStop shares out from under its traders
"There is no war in Ba Sing Se."

It's pretty easy for RH to just dismiss this without doing any research but it's also pretty easy to figure out. Have RH sit down with people who say they were affected, and go through the transaction log. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if there were a bug that caused unintentional selling like this, because it sounds like RH was acting on the boundaries of their abilities. This was an edge case that their systems weren't designed to handle, and they didn't have a good way to work around it besides shutting off trading.

jennyyang··on High Short Interest Stocks
Ligand Pharmaceuticals appears to be ripe for a GME-style short squeeze.
jennyyang··on Robinhood is said to draw on bank credit lines amid tumult
So it really is liquidity issues then. Anyone who keeps their trading at RH is seriously jeopardizing their money.
jennyyang··on Keeping Customers Informed Through Market Volatility
If you read this drivel, and don't close your Robin Hood account today, then you're part of the problem. I closed mine and I hope everyone else does too.

I read a comment on reddit recently that is pertinent. The prey in Africa, ie. wildebeests and buffalo, are extremely powerful. But a handful of lions make them scatter out of fear. But if the prey were more organized, they could trample every single one of those predators to the point where they could kill them off. It's the power of organization that helps the prey defeat the predators. This is the exact same thing here. As long as a handful of billionaires tell the retail investor what to do, the billionaires will keep making money off of them.

jennyyang··on The Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company
It's not just Ranitidine.

It's all blood pressure medications like Valsartan, losartan and irbesartan, and metformin the diabetes drug.

These are just the ones that have been tracked. Sometimes the drugs come in with higher doses than they should, or less than they should. Or sometimes the pills are mislabeled.

jennyyang··on More than 100M Americans have diabetes or prediabetes (2017)
Can you buy one without a prescription?
jennyyang··on The Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company
Do you check for impurities in the drugs? One of the biggest issues these days is impurities of carcinogenic chemicals in many of the generic drugs.
jennyyang··on OO in Python is mostly pointless
Pointing to someone's bad code example and saying "This is why all OO is pointless", is truly a lazy effort.

Good OOP is good. Bad OOP is bad. That's like every other piece of coding. Some excellent examples of great OO code that I've worked with have to do with having an abstract class to define a data api, and then being able to switch providers seamlessly because the internal interface is the same, and all you need to do is write a vendor-specific inherited class.

jennyyang··on Gitlab removes its 'starter' tier Users must either pay 5x more or lose features
Having never used Gitlab, is there any advantage over Github?
jennyyang··on FDA approves first monthly injectable to treat HIV infection
As someone who grew up in the 80s with the fullblown AIDS crisis, this really is a testament to human ingenuity. When we were kids, this sounded like the end of the world: a virus that attacks the immune system itself. It was so terrifying to hear about such a horrible disease that had no cure, and was so insidious that we couldn't even create a vaccine to stop it.

In a few decades we as a species have found a way not only to completely eradicate it to undetectable levels (it still hides in cells to protect itself) but now we are at a monthly injection.

The way we have created a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 is also absolutely incredible. It's great to be alive these days, now if only we can get a firm solution over cancer and other diseases like dementia, etc!

jennyyang··on Suspended from Google Play for listing supported subtitle formats
Once companies become monopolies like Google, Facebook etc, I believe the government should impose regulations like mandatory SLAs for customer support.

Right now, companies like Google can completely ignore customer service because they are a monopoly. And they do this, because it saves them billions of dollars. If they had actual competition, they would spend more on customer support because it would be a point of contention, but since they have no competition, they just let bots handle everything and they completely ignore their customers who have no choice but to continue to use their products. This is a form or monopolistic behavior that needs to be addressed by regulations.

Monopolies should be forced to spend money on real humans or some form of effective customer support, with a regulated SLA. It's the only way to keep these companies in check once they have completely starved any form of competition away from them.

jennyyang··on Pip has dropped support for Python 2
At some point it will be selectively rewritten if it's important enough.
jennyyang··on No one knows how much the government can borrow
The only time people care is when they care. And you can't predict when that will happen. It's like a flock of birds flying in the air, you can't figure out which individual bird caused the first change in direction, but it quickly spreads across the entire flock.

The other fallacy is that inflation is here, it's just not being measured by the Federal Reserve properly. There is crazy inflation in things like house prices and assets like stocks. Look at the vast income inequality that has occurred in the last 15 years. Whoever is invested in stocks and housing market has made money. Everyone else is basically forgotten or left by the wayside.

jennyyang··on Paradox-free time travel is theoretically possible
Time travel violates the law of conservation of energy. By travelling back in time, you yourself are injecting more mass/energy into a system. So it's great as a science fiction trope, but if you're going to talk physics, that needs to be addressed.
jennyyang··on Parler’s de-platforming shows the exceptional power of cloud providers
That's their right to spew whatever they want. Just because it's worthless doesn't mean we should stop it. I personally think every single conversation in Twitter is absolutely worthless, maybe even has negative value. Does that give me the right to shut down Twitter? No. I value free speech so if people want to waste their time spewing nonsense, that is their right.
jennyyang··on Facebook will pay more than $300 each to 1.6M Illinois users in settlement
Maybe no one system is best, but the US system is definitely the worst.

So many things about our lives are dictated by precedents set by ridiculous law suits, we don't see it anymore. I went on a bicycle tour in Italy, and the owner was an American. We paid our money and took the bikes. I asked the owner if we had to fill out any release forms, and he said "You only have to do that stupid shit in the US. Here in Italy, we treat adults like adults." The realization of how intertwined our lives had become with the results of all these lawsuits shocked me. It is truly a slippery slope created by lawyers and we are now at the bottom of this slippery slope.

jennyyang··on Facebook will pay more than $300 each to 1.6M Illinois users in settlement
How do they do it in other countries? Is the US the only country in the world that protects their citizens rights? I'm pretty sure that's not true.

However, I do think the US is the only country that enforces laws by "trial by ambulance chasers". Too many ambulance chasers make good money bullying small companies, either through patent laws, minor violations of laws, etc.

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