sfteus

I don't have a crazy tax situation, just some freelancing, so I usually used freefillableforms.com because I didn't want to pay for TurboTax. For some reason it errored out when submitting this year and would not let me re-submit it, so I had to use an alternative.

Ended up using FreeTaxUSA and was pleasantly surprised. Was way easier to enter all my info in than TurboTax, and pulled up the same refund amount. I don't see why I would want to use TurboTax when the free alternative is free and easier to use.

Parking lot hospital: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/mississippi-hospital-puts-b...

I haven't seen anything considered "essential" being delayed, but anything that was not "immediately, medically" necessary in Texas was delayed on order of the Governor: https://www.texastribune.org/2020/07/09/texas-coronavirus-ho... My mother is a cancer patient and frequently had to delay (what I would consider essential) treatments by request of her provider.

Anecdotally, as someone married to an RN, supplies were absolutely running low throughout the pandemic. For the first year they were limited to 1 N95 mask per week, they frequently ran out of specific types/gauges of needles and had to make do with what was available, certain medications were hard to come by, etc. She doesn't work a COVID floor but still more often than not had a double patient load compared to pre-pandemic levels, both due to more patients and less staff. It was also incredibly common seeing people in neighborhood groups trying to find available beds for their family members during our surges, as most people were told there was a wait list expected to last at least 24 hours before something would be available.

Been a while since I've done anything related to audio engineering so my terminology might not be correct, but I've always heard this described as presence. Stems from old guitar amps that had presence knobs that would dump highs to ground to give a darker, slightly muffled sound.

Like you said, it's the difference between it sounding like you're in a small room with a band or in a large venue where some of the clarity is lost.

I've been working remote for ~7 years. The way I would handle this is simply saying something like "You available? Wanted to get a few minutes to discuss X/Y/Z"

When you're attempting to set up synchronous communication, it's essential to let the other person know what the communication is about, and what level of focus you need from them, so they have time to prepare and ensure they have enough time for a proper dialogue. Can't count the number of times someone has said "you there?" while I'm in a meeting, which in my mind is "I'm available to answer simple questions" but not available to jump on a voice call, which is what they wanted originally.

We borrowed a 2020 4Runner to haul a camper on a 300 mile drive, and the radar-enabled cruise control was really nice on that trip both ways. Seemed like it did a good job of breaking early enough to keep it only providing mild input, but it wasn't super distracting or anything. Also possible that any input from the automatic trailer break controller overshadowed the what the cruise control was doing.

It either didn't have lane-centering or it was disabled, but I think in general that's a way more noticeable input than braking. If you have a weird input in steering (ie, a strong gust of wind) your instinct is to steer the opposite way, but in general I think most people that have weird input with acceleration/braking tend to respond with just braking universally.

Only somewhat related: I was provided a Latitude 5520 from my work, as they wanted everything to be done on company-owned hardware. I've had it nearly two years now, and it _still_ has two major issues.

The first is it cannot hibernate; if it goes to hibernation, the CPU will run full throttle until the battery is dead. Sleep is fine at least, so I get by with just disabling hibernation. Not a huge deal as 95% of the time it is on my desk and plugged in.

The second: you cannot unplug a USB keyboard while it is running or else the machine will hard-freeze and requiring a hard-reboot to recover. I originally set up a KVM switch for my mouse/keyboard to switch between my personal machine and work machine without having to plug/unplug a bunch of stuff, but it will automatically switch over if it detects one machine is active while the other is not, and that would usually end up freezing the Dell every night.

Absolutely inexcusable all around for these kind of issues to go on this long. I have to imagine it's either solely warranty/service contracts, or simply sheer naivete on alternatives from large businesses, keeping Dell in business.

I believe that 'excess burden' is essentially how many more people than expected would show these outcomes. IE, if normally you'd expect to see 5/1000 people in a control group experience a stroke, but observe stokes in 15/1000 people in your non-control group, the excess burden would be 10/1000.

HR appears to be 'hazard ratio' which is simply a ratio between the two groups. The above example would have a hazard ratio of 3, as three times as many people presented with the outcome than expected.

I haven't seen anything comparing the two yet, but I would be interested in seeing that.

I'll note that in general, I have seen studies indicating that the risk of both MIS-C (linked in GP) and long-covid[1][2] are decreased when comparing vaccinated/unvaccinated post active infection. I've also seen reports that those unvaccinated who experience long-covid sometimes see reduced / cleared symptoms after subsequent vaccination.[3] We also know that antibody titer levels seem to be correlated with a reduction in infection, which is why when those begin to fall off we see more breakthrough infections. And finally we know that building long term T and B cells tends to see a quicker, more effective immune response, both of which should be created post-vaccination.

Given that, I would speculate that vaccination is likely to reduce overall proliferation of cell infection (including directly infecting cardiac tissue via the ACE2 receptors) via having more free-floating antibodies in your system, and is likely to reduce the overall immune-mediated inflammatory response to the virus as it can respond more quickly before the virus has had a chance to proliferate as much. Both of these (reduced inflammation, reduced cell infection) should reduce the risk of myocarditis as a result of infection. And I would speculate that that tracks with other observed reduction of symptoms of infection (MIS-C, long-covid).

Again, speculation on my part; I would definitely want to see studies to confirm or refute that.

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[1]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

[2]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.05.22268800v...

[3]: https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/vaccines-long-covid

I'm saying this as someone who lost a family member to a combination of myocarditis and endocarditis resulting from a flu infection: I'm not attempting to downplay it. Myocarditis has the potential to be extremely serious, especially for those with pre-existing heart problems.

However, _in my opinion_ with how infectious omicron is, it is likely inevitable that everyone will eventually be exposed. The literature (linked in my GP) currently seems to indicate that vaccines have a lower risk of myocarditis than an active SARS-CoV-2 infection. Most literature that I've seen (so far) indicates that occurrences of post-vaccination myocarditis tends to be rare, and not life-threatening, and the patients tend to recover quickly.[1]

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[1]: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.121.0...

Important to note that Children's Health Defense is a highly suspect organization. Rated "conspiracy-pseudoscience"[1], described as "one of the main sources of misinformation on vaccines"[2], with numerous articles describing their fake health posts on social media[3][4] and shady leadership[5][6].

Not saying everything from that site should be discarded, but should definitely be taken with a grain of salt.

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[1]: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/childrens-health-defense/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Health_Defense

[3]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/social-media-hosted-lot...

[4]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2019/11/15/majority-an...

[5]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-robert-f-kenn...

[6]: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/covid-19-health-pseudoscie...

I can't find much besides models for < 16 unfortunately.

However, for 16-40, Patone, et al[1] estimates that myocarditis incidence is around 2/mil for AstraZeneca, 1/mil for Pfizer per does, and 6/mil for Moderna first dose, 10/mil for the second, compared to 40/mil for an active infection.

Singer, el al[2] (pre-print) states that males < 20 are roughly 6x less likely to develop myocarditis from vaccination compared to an infection.

The AMA[3] also has some info on both myocarditis and MIS-C. 95% of those who developed MIS-C were unvaccinated, and up to 40% required some sort of respiratory or cardiovascular life support (compare to 0% of those vaccinated). Also states ages 12-15 appear less likely to develop myocarditis than the 16 - ~40 range.

Everything I've read so far is that myocarditis from vaccination usually resolves fairly quickly.

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[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01630-0.pdf

[2]: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.23.21260998v...

[3]: https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/population-care/unv...

That's great that your power has been mostly reliable, but it is not the case for a lot of the people here.

In my family alone, my brother and his wife lost power at the apartment they had then for 3 days during the ~2014 winter storm, during which our apartment lost power for around a day. My parents lost their power for all 4 days of the storm last year, and had to travel 15 miles or so to my brothers house after their inside temperature dropped below freezing on day 3. They just let us know their power is out again this afternoon. My wife and I are lucky enough to have since purchased a house close to some critical infrastructure so we've rarely lost power comparatively, but we still lose power several times throughout each summer during heat waves.

I also want to reiterate: this happened in 2011, again in 2014, again in 2021, and again in 2022. The storm in 2021 was objectively the worst of the bunch, but 2011 was similar. It is _not_ a 100 year freeze. It is happening more regularly, and our government has ignored recommendations to better prepare for it going on over a decade now.

EDIT: Just to round this out, a federal report was provided in the wake of the last "100 year" storm that occurred in 2011[1]. In it, there are several dozen recommendations, many of which were at least in part the cause of the 2021 outages as well.

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[1]: https://www.ferc.gov/sites/default/files/2020-04/08-16-11-re...

This is the case at least in some parts of the US as well.

I believe in all of Texas (North Texas here), your costs are broken down by energy costs and delivery costs, the latter of which is paid to your TDU to maintain the infrastructure. For our plan the delivery charge is roughly 45% of the kWh price.

I keep seeing the same general sentiment through these types of threads, something in the nature of "if the scientists are so sure they're right, they shouldn't be afraid of mis-information because only their data will stand up to scrutiny."

The fact that Rogan has these types of people on his show is not the issue, and just as you say it's fine to interview them. The issue is that he tends to take a backseat and let the interviewee make whatever claims without any push-back[1]. Simply having an episode with a pro-vaccine person and another episode with an anti-vaccine person is implying that both viewpoints are equal, which in my opinion they are not. HN is sort of unique in that likely a large portion of the user base is interested in researching claims more in depth after hearing them; I would wager that your average person does not do this and will likely take what they hear at face value. If they did that due diligence for any claim, it's unlikely we would have such a large list of "common knowledge" that is actually false.[2]

W/R/T Rogan specifically, his show reminds me of a decade-old Youtube comedy video, "Both Sides" by SMBC Theater[3]. In it, the show host organizes a debate between a Caltech Biologist, and a "Scientator" from the "Christ Rode a Dinosaur and I Have Pictures Institute," another debate between an MD and a man who believes all ailments can be cured by sticking steak knives in your eyes, and a final debate between an actual journalist and the host's intern, who is described as "anti-rape, bedwetting, and dreaming about their own mother naked," implying the journalist is of the opposite viewpoint. This is obviously farcical, but is meant to prompt the question: at what point does someone with a large viewer base have a responsibility to curate themselves and their guests?

Circling back, again, I don't think hosting people with fringe-views is an issue. I do believe a host has a responsibility to critique all viewpoints on their show, or to bring in someone who can do so if they are not able to. In my opinion, re-establishing the Fairness Doctrine[4] is a necessity and would satisfy both sides of the free-speech / censorship debate. Non-mainstream views would be able to be explored as long as there is an opposing viewpoint there to critique it at the source (as opposed to the "mis-information" warnings now that show up after the majority of exposure has already passed). I also believe that it should be expanded to apply to web-based media, though I don't have any good ideas on what exactly the criteria should be for it to apply (ie, a Youtuber with 100 subscribers probably shouldn't be, but Joe Rogan and other large podcasters probably should be). Advertising in large web services (ie, Google, Facebook, Youtube, etc) should probably also be subjected to this rule.

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[1]: From what I've heard from discussions of Rogan (I'm not a fan of podcasts in general), he tends to go even further by pushing back against science based interviewees while letting anti-science interviewees basically have an open platform. However, I'm trying to make this comment assuming I'm mis-informed about that and he simply lets all guests say their peace.

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGArqoF0TpQ (NSFW)

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

This is an insightful comment that holds true a good portion of the time. However, there is one takeaway that is overlooked in my experience: resolving tech debt that exists due to lack of experience tends to build said experience, _provided_ the less-experienced developers are involved in understanding the underlying issue and planning a solution.

Polio only resulted in paralysis in ~0.5% of cases. The CFR for paralytic polio for children was around 2-5%, or 5-10% for all age groups. That would put the CFR for all polio cases at around 0.0175% for children, and 0.0375% overall.

Best I can find right now, there have been roughly 750 deaths of children in the US from COVID resulting from roughly 9.335 million cases, for a CFR of roughly 0.008%, slightly under half that of polio for the same age group. However, CFR overall is roughly 1.189% in the US for all age groups currently (879,971 deaths/74,037,216 cases), over 100x the rate of polio for all age groups.

That's not including long term effects from COVID with people having scarred lungs / damaged organs, new research indicating increased diabetes rates in children who have had COVID, new research finding long term micro blood clots even in asymptomatic cases, etc.

A short term, high dose prednisone treatment restored enough kidney function for my sister that she is no longer looking at a transplant or dialysis.

Bi-weekly, 5mg doses of prednisone to treat chronic pancreatitis have extended the life of one of my cats going on 5 years now, and greatly increased her quality of life in her senior age. The same dose occasionally treats another cats intermittent IBD that otherwise, before treatment, would eventually progress to triaditis and hospitalization.

Yes, it has side effects, and patients should be made aware of that. But acting like it's something that should never be given is ignorant at best. It is cheap, widely available, and is a first-line treatment for a number of conditions.

I somehow missed that, thanks

Functional considerations aside, there's definitely some personal issues with ligatures. Spacing in code is incredibly important for a lot of people. I'm dyslexic, so distinguishing between something like someValue=someOtherValue() and someValue->someOtherValue() adds additional unnecessary complexity compared to simply writing assignments with spacing (ie, someValue = someOtherValue()). This makes it significantly easier for me to interpret it at a glance.

That leads into my personal issue with ligatures: they change what should be a binary operation into a more complex one. Instead of "I see equals signs, one space or two?" it becomes "I need to stop, change to a vertical reading direction, and see if that's 2 or 3 lines" or "I need to estimate if that is 2 or 3 characters worth of width, or get off track comparing it to characters on the line above." Comparison operators should simply be "greater space equals" but become "wait, was there a second line there? I have to go back and double check that."

I'm sure someone will come along and say "how is reading the number of spaces different than reading the number of lines?" It might be that the spacing is normalized without ligatures, it might just be the vertical spacing in ligatures is too small, I don't really know. It's incredibly difficult to convey this to someone who doesn't experience it, all I can say is it is a night and day difference to me.

I've given Fira Code a shot 2 or 3 times but have found the ligatures to hinder my productivity every time. I also tried them just in the "reader mode" with Jetbrains Mono when that feature was first released, but had to turn it off after a few days.

That all being said, I won't fault anyone for using them if it helps them in the same way that not using them helps me. I'm just glad they can be disabled in Jetbrains Mono as it is otherwise an incredible font.

I feel this would be more interesting if you could hide the font names until you were done.

I'm honestly not sure whether to read this as "arrested ... with the assistance of Github management" or "evading arrest ... with the assistance of Github management."

Somewhat related, Teams on Ubuntu recently has stopped letting me use the left/right arrows to navigate around a message I've written. However, shift + arrow or control + arrow still work fine. Haven't had a chance to dig into why, but it's been mildly amusing.

IMO, the selling point isn't that you can carry around the ports you might potentially use and swap them out whenever you need them, it's that you can buy a machine that's tailored to your setup and peripherals.

I bought a laptop at the beginning of 2020 after the GPU on my old one fried. What I wanted was something with a Cat6 and DisplayPort built in for when I'm in my office, and multiple USB-A ports for the peripherals I use (mouse/keyboard/mic/speakers). I had to settle for one with a single extra USB-C port, an additional USB-C hub to get enough USB-A ports and a Cat6, and an adaptor for the built-in HDMI port to hook up to the DisplayPort on my monitor, which set me back a total of like $100 on top of the cost of the laptop itself. The laptop also has a headset jack and large card reader that I have yet to use, so that's just wasted space that could have potentially been something I would have actually used.

While the animated breakdown itself is phenomenal and certainly makes the video, one of the other key aspects is the progressive explanation of _why_ this mechanism is designed the way it is. You can watch the video without sound, and probably without the text as well, and see exactly how the "spikey ball" was designed, how the driver gears were created, how to get two types of movement from the drivers from linear inputs, and how those movements translate to moving the ball joint.

It reminds me of the old Chevy videos, such as the one on differentials[1]. It was created in 1937, and through some live demonstrations and clever use of stop motion the film shows how to separate wheel movement, fix gear slippage, attach a drive shaft, then optimize for space. Different visual technology, but same type of presentation. There's similar videos for transmissions, suspensions, etc, all incredibly enlightening.

[1]: https://youtu.be/yYAw79386WI?t=202

HPV is a 3-dose vaccination in most cases. I believe Hep A and Hep B vaccines also have 3-dose versions, but I'm not sure if the 2 or 3 dose schedule is standard.

My only issue with a paper-only drop box is there's no redundancy. I would think with having poll watchers from multiple affiliations and multiple shifts per day to ensure you have many eyes on the box it wouldn't be a concern. But, if someone or some group managed to figure out a way to "stuff the box," you'd have no proof it happened.

I really like the system we have in DFW now. We have a global voter roll so you can vote in any location in your county. You submit your vote on a machine, which keeps a local machine-level tally and prints out a paper ballot. You verify the contents of the paper ballot, then drop it into a vote counting box, which scans, tallies, and displays your vote for you to confirm. If at any time anything looks wrong, you notify a poll worker to resolve it. At the end of each day, they verify the counts on the machines and ballot box match, then the ballot counter/box is locked along with the memory cards of each individual machine, so you have day-by-day results.

When the election ends, the ballot boxes are delivered to a central county counting system where they are put into another large-scale counting machine to verify that the counts there match the local counter/box. If at any point there's too many discrepancies, they'll do hand counts of the paper ballots. They can also unlock the voting machine memory cards if necessary. All of this process is done under the supervision of poll watchers.

In theory, you get near instantaneous results as each voting location can simply total the ballot box results and report them. You also have 4 separate systems (voting machine, local counter/ballot box, central counter, paper backups) that would need to be compromised to successfully tamper with the results.

I'm sure it wouldn't make a conspiracy theorist satisfied, but to me, it's a system that balances speed and convenience with the simplicity and security(?) of a paper ballot, without unnecessarily obfuscating the process behind electronic-only voting.

W/R/T your second point, one of the things I touched on was whether or not those with natural immunity are more likely to experience repeated exposure after acquiring immunity. For instance, is a healthcare worker more likely to experience "micro-doses" of virus exposure that helps consistently refresh antibody levels? This is a potential reason as some sources have stated that the third booster shot is generating 5-10x the antibody levels as observed than after the second shot, and a higher number of free antibodies should be associated with a smaller chance of re-infection.

The other potential that jumps out to me is that only targeting the spike protein is causing the drop in protection, as in theory that should be the only type of antibody a only-vaccinated person would have. The potential conclusion to draw there is that antibodies developed for other antigens on the virus may not be as effective as the spike protein, but when combined help retain that higher level of effectiveness when the spike protein mutates. If that's the case, I wonder if having a inactivated/attenuated vaccine as the "third-dose" may end up being more effective, or if the immune system would ignore the additional antigens in favor of the one it already has.

[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-third-shot-booster-116...

Couple things of note, outside of the vaccinated vs natural infection debate:

First, even group with the largest infection rate was still under 1.5% in all applicable models. Whether immunity is achieved via vaccine or natural immunity, it appears that it will overwhelmingly prevent you from being re-infected. There's obviously a ton of variables here (are vaccinated individuals being overly cautious or reckless after vaccination, are natural infections more likely to receive repeat exposures to build immunity, etc).

Second, by my count there were a total of ~106k-152k subjects observed in that study across all groups and models (not sure if there is overlap between models). Across all subjects, only 34 hospitalizations were reported, and there were no recorded deaths. A hospitalization rate of <= 0.032% is pretty damn impressive. Zero deaths is phenomenal.

Finally, across all models the only factors outside of immunity type affecting reinfection were socio-economic status and age > 60. Comorbidities don't appear to affect the chance of reinfection, though I'm sure a breakthrough infection/re-infection would still likely be more severe in cases with co-morbidities.

To be fair, even modern arch style bridges have the same concerns. For example, overhead arch bridges get around it by using ties between the ends running underneath the actual bridge itself to prevent the ends from separating. The Hernando de Soto bridge used this type of design and was recently closed for a few months because one of the ties had started to fail.

I've found two major benefits with yarn. First is package install time, like others have said it's an order of magnitude faster for projects I've worked on.

Second is a little more niche in running a Linux image on Windows host via Vagrant/Virtualbox. Out of the box symlinks won't work so bin files often fail. I would also run into file locks when running npm install on larger projects often, to the point where I was having to run it 5-10x before everything would finish installing. You can instruct Vagrant to offer some support (setextradata VBoxInternal2/SharedFoldersEnableSymlinksCreate/v-root 1), or set an environment variable to key on and update any scripts to use --no-bin-links, but it's flaky in my experience. I never found a solution to the file locks with npm.

I installed yarn on a whim on that setup and have yet to have any of those issues with it.