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sfteus

347 karma · joined October 16, 2014

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sfteus··on Hacker reveals smart meters are spilling secrets about the Texas snowstorm
Smart meters still retain the total overall usage. Even if the power company doesn't read it for 3 months, they'll see the increased usage the next time they come by and apply it to your next bill.
sfteus··on Tell HN: SMS-based two-factor authentication is not secure
I've posted before on here about my experience getting SIM swapped and how quickly someone was able to gain access to a bunch of my accounts. If I hadn't been at home and looking at my phone while it was happening, it could have been much worse, but thankfully I was able to get in and terminate most of their login sessions before too much damage was done.

The one thing I distinctly remember was two of my GMail accounts starting the recovery process. Thankfully, that process apparently gives either 14 or 30 days to stop the recovery and secure my own account. Had I not been connected, that may have been my only saving grace, as I was able to secure those accounts and subsequently use them to recover other compromised accounts.

The larger lesson for me was to always use TOTP tokens where possible over SMS, and to completely disable SMS recovery for accounts that didn't have a delay on SMS-only recovery.

sfteus··on Killing TurboTax
This always made the most sense to me. You get your return and review it; sign off if it's good, modify and return it if you have more claims, something is wrong / missing.

I'd wager the majority of people wouldn't have a reason to submit a revised return. And if the federal government generated your return, hopefully that would give them reason to automatically exclude you from audit, (ideally) reducing the burden of auditors.

sfteus··on The Two Hours That Nearly Destroyed Texas’s Electric Grid
> People also like to stomp on what the free market would actually have to do to prevent this. For a rare event, the cost of surviving it (i.e. winterizing everything) would have to be paid from revenues collected entirely during the event in order to give providers the incentive to do it.

I highly doubt this. We had the same thing happen in 2011; in theory the increased rates should have paid for winterization then, especially given how another similar storm would have put those who had winterized properly at an advantage in providing a limited resource with increased demand. That's especially true given that various figures put the cost of winterizing gas wells or wind turbines at 10% or less of the cost of the system without it [1]. But that didn't happen. It seems to me that gambling that your plant can produce during increased demand with no additional investment has worked out well for many companies [2]. To me that signals an incentive for power produces to actively work _against_ winterization regulation, as you could potentially make record profits on the backs of others' misfortunes, and if no one else winterizes you have less sure competitors to potentially drive the price down during increased demand.

> So enough to cause some people to turn off their electric heat and drain their pipes and take a vacation to Cancun because it's cheaper than staying and paying that electric bill.

This is predicated on the assumption that people were able to leave their houses, don't have pets / elderly family members that can't be moved, that they could all get flight tickets, that airlines were still actively running, that airline tickets wouldn't see surge pricing due to demand, and so many other factors.

I killed everything in my house save for my laptop to work as best as I could, my fridge, and my gas heat turned down to 62. At the highest rate they posted I would have been paying $180/day just for those. I can afford that, being a two person household who both work full time at significantly above average rates for the area. I would wager most people around here would not be able to pay ~$700 over 4 days just for a minimal amount of power on top of other storm damage costs, nor would it be less expensive or even possible to pack up and leave. Then they would be faced with "do we try to go without water for 4+ days" or risk freezing pipes, or paying hundreds of dollars just for the luxury of not freezing.

Maybe I'm cynical, but I believe if the options are "pay an extra-ordinate rate" or "potentially freeze to death" then the system itself is broken.

[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/20/texas-power-grid-win.... [2] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/article/jerry-jone...

sfteus··on Myths of Vaccine Manufacturing
This is like using only GDP to compare economies; it's a useful data point, but it doesn't tell the whole story.

From what we've seen, yes, the mortality rate of COVID19 is similar to the flu. However, the mortality rate of the flu is without other interventions aside from the flu vaccine. In a regular flu season the public doesn't social distance; they tend to group even closer indoors because of the cold weather. The US has never normalized mask wearing; people in the beginning stages of the flu will go about their lives, and work places actively encourage people to continue to work in-person unless they are too unwell to do so. I would wager most people in the US don't improve their hygiene during a regular flu season either. We've done all that (to an extent) with COVID19 and we've barely managed to make an impact.

Look at some other important data points. Average US flu deaths / year: 36k [1]. COVID19 deaths in the US in only 11 months: 445k. [2] If we assume the first COVID19 death in the US was in early February as some report, that's over 12x the deaths/year than the flu. If current trends hold (~3k deaths/day for the next 27 days) until March 2 (the first officially confirmed COVID19 death in the US), we'd be at 526k deaths, or more than 14x as many deaths/year as the flu. If this ran at this rate for the entirety of the next 365 days, we'd hit nearly 1.1 million deaths, or over 30x as many deaths/year as the flu. That's assuming we don't have any massive improvements with vaccine rollout.

The contagiousness of the two is also orders of magnitude different. Flu is estimated to have an R0 value of ~1.5 [3]. Some estimates put COVID19 at an R0 value of 5.7 [4]. (Remember, R0 is without interventions). The way to estimate "herd immunity" rates is the Critical Vaccination Threshold formula: (1 - (1/R0)) / E, where E is the effectiveness of a vaccine. With an R0 of 1.5 and an efficacy of 67% (from your second link. Remember, this is the effectiveness of the vaccine, not the effectiveness in a real-world population, which factors in vaccine rates), we would need roughly 50% of the population to vaccinated to start preventing illnesses in those that are unvaccinated. With an R0 of 5.7 and an efficacy of 94% (Pfizer vaccine), COVID 19 would require nearly 88% of the population vaccinated to achieve the same rate. Even using the lower-quoted R0 value of 2.5 (R-value _with_ other interventions, such as social distancing, mask wearing, improved hygiene), we'd need nearly 64% of the population vaccinated.

You're also ignoring the fact that, despite our interventions, there are currently 3 other strains of COVID19 spreading, all of which are speculated to be both more contagious _and_ more deadly. [5] While the current vaccines are _effective enough_ against the strains, there's nothing saying a new variant couldn't emerge that is resistant to the current vaccines, starting a new pandemic. And you're also ignoring the long-term cases of COVID19 [6] as well as the long term effects post-infection outside of death [7], including chronic cardiovascular damage, kidney damage, neurological effects, among many others.

So yes, the mortality rates are similar, but literally nothing else is. We don't know enough about this virus to let it run rampant, and the world should have done more from the get-go to keep it contained.

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html

[2]: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home

[3]: https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/coronavirus/2020/12/07/covid-19...

[4]: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article

[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variants_of_SARS-CoV-2

[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_COVID

[7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019#Longe...

sfteus··on Working from Bed
I've been WFH for nearly 6 years now. The one constant I've found that hampers my productivity is working from a "shared" space. Working out of a space like the living room or bed room, where you would normally relax, tends to make me slack off, get distracted easily, etc.

I have noticed though that your work space doesn't need to be fully dedicated though, it just needs to not be a leisure room. We adopted a Belgian Mal mix in February that needed supervision throughout the day, so I transitioned from my office to my dining room. We don't use that outside of the occasional game night or other gathering, and the table makes a nice makeshift desk with a laptop. I found working from there comparable to working from my office.

sfteus··on I Miss Working from the Office
Surely you can still be involved in outdoor groups without issue? I participate in an advanced dog training/sport group, and we still meet and just take the necessary precautions (work outdoors, social distance, wear masks).
sfteus··on I Miss Working from the Office
My last job was like this, but they didn't care if people brought in their own equipment. I brought in an inexpensive mechanical keyboard, a nice mouse, some decent speakers and a headset, then requisitioned a second monitor from the surplus room. Granted, I had my own office so the noise bothering other people wasn't an issue. I would wager many places wouldn't allow bringing in your own equipment, but unless it's explicitly prohibited, I would happily spend a few hundred for a day to day quality of life improvement.

Software is another big thing overlooked by a lot of companies, in my experience. I've bought a Jetbrains account to use for my development because the effective $12.50/month I spend on it is nothing in comparison to the productivity benefit I get from it.

sfteus··on I Miss Working from the Office
From my experience, w/r/t meetings, I've worked from home going on 6 years now. A few years back we were acquired by a large company that had several divisions that worked entirely in office. When everyone started working from home, those divisions would initiate meetings significantly more often. I'm not sure if it's like a subconscious desire for more human interaction for those people that would usually get a bunch throughout the day, or a need to micromanage from some people, or just them thinking that they needed extra communication to make up for the remote working, but it was significantly jarring on our team for the first few months until everyone else sort of found their groove.

That's counter to our team, where we basically have the "policy" of less disruptions is better. Any discussion item is pushed into an e-mail or chat unless absolutely necessary. If there are items that are deemed to need a voice meeting that are remotely similar then we'll move them up or push them back to combine them to reduce the need to be on a call. 99% of our communication is done via e-mail or a group chat room, and the expectation is that an e-mail can go without a response for 24 hours, and a chat room message can go without a response for at least 1 hour. Anything urgent goes through a direct message, and the expectation is that you check the receivers status to make sure they're aren't in a "do-not-disturb" status before hand. Only time that is ignored is if something mission critical is occurring, like a systems outage. When you can limit 99% of your distractions to something you can check real quick once every hour or so, your productivity goes way up.

I can also say from experience that having your own space, and good equipment, is severely overlooked by people. I used to work entirely in my office, but we rescued a Belgian Malinois a few months before the lockdowns started so I had been working from a chair in my living room since the office is where our cats hang out for most of the day, and I wanted to give them time to adjust to the puppy as well. Even outside of the new puppy distraction, it's really easy to just sink into your "comfort" area and get distracted or stop working. Once she was housebroken, I started working out of our dining room instead so I could keep an eye on her but still not invade the office until she was better trained, and I noticed a significant productivity boost. GCP Grey has a great video on this ("Lockdown Productivity: Spaceship You"), and the idea is that even though the dining room isn't a dedicated office, it's still a place that you don't subconsciously associate with relaxing, so you still treat it like an office.

I don't have kids or a work from home spouse, so I don't have any advice there.

sfteus··on TailwindCSS v2.0
I have never heard about Tailwind before, but the interactive elements and animated mini examples on the landing page are stellar at conveying what problems the framework solves. I've been putting off the UI for small project of mine and this looks like a great chance to try it out.
sfteus··on My experience as a poll worker in Pennsylvania
I know that in Texas, some smaller counties don't use voting machines at all and only do paper ballots. However some of the larger ones like Dallas use a DRE machine combined with a tabulator instead. As long as the Secretary of State approves the method, counties are free to handle it as they see fit.
sfteus··on My experience as a poll worker in Pennsylvania
IMO, the benefits of having electronic voting with an auditable paper trail and backup outweighs the downsides, if implemented properly.

The process described in the article seems a little different than the ones we used in Texas (Dallas County). We have our registration verified and check in, and then are given a paper ballot. You put that into the voting machine, cast your ballot which is recorded electronically on the machine, then printed on the paper ballot and returned to you. You're told to inspect it for accuracy, then deposit it in a _separate_ tabulating machine, which scans it and displays what it recorded when reading your vote, tabulates your vote electronically, and stores the paper backup in a locked deposit box inside the machine. From my understanding, if anything goes wonky during this process and you notice it, you can have the ballot invalidated and receive another to cast. At the end of the day, the counts are printed and stored along with the memory cards on every machine, and those and the secure ballot boxes are all stored with tamper evident seals.

So you have the electronic count on the voting machine from the memory card, the printed count from the voting machine generated at the end of the day, the electronic count on the tabulating machine from its memory card, the printed count from the tabulating machine generated each day, as well as the paper ballots as a backup, which from my understanding are re-tabulated en-masse on larger and faster machines after the election to get a second count as part of the certification process. All data points have to match. None of the machines are connected to the internet, so you'd have to gain physical access to them or the memory cards, and anything done would have to match the counts on all the other associated machines and receipts, plus the paper ballot backups. The Secretary of State also generates a list of voters who cast ballots each day by county and voting location based on when you first check in to vote, so that's another publicly auditable list that would have to match that is not related to the voting machines themselves.

Paper ballots are definitely more simple and probably just as secure, if not more, if handled properly. However, having multiple points of redundancy is invaluable to help quickly identify issues and ensure everything matches over multiple steps of the process.

sfteus··on Programmable Filament Gives Even Simple 3D Printers Multi-Material Capabilities
There's a device called Palette, I think, that can do this on the fly. You hook it up between your filament(s) and your printer, and send it your print as well. It basically looks at your print and determines how much filament is needed for each segment, and then splices together a few different inputs into one continuous thread. I don't know how well it works or how difficult it is to get setup, but the concept does exist.
sfteus··on PHP 8: Before and After
I maintain half a dozen PHP apps written for PHP 4-5, all of which now run on at least PHP 5.6, and a few of which I've gotten to PHP 7. Advice given by everyone else is excellent. PHPStorm is a must for me, one of the only pieces of software I pay for instead of using some OSS alternative.

One thing on automated tools: getting a good result is decently tied in to the structure of your project in my experience. A common scenario I've seen is projects relying on requiring other files as part of their business logic (IE, parent file A includes file B that processes and renders content vs file B including file A that defines helpers and what not). This is especially common when projects use something like index.php?file=whatever for URLs. Most automated tools and IDEs will struggle with this and false-flag undefined variables, etc, because there is no hard include path. There are a lot of ways to resolve this but it depends on your project.

Also, PHP 7 is much more aggressive about warnings on types and various other things. Unless you adjust your error reporting settings, you'll likely see a ton of these when you finally switch. I personally enable them on dev so I can clean them up, and keep them reporting to Rollbar on production.

sfteus··on Relativty – An open-source VR headset
They mention in the build guide that the display is sometimes available for $150, that's probably how it gets to around $200. MPU-6050 appears to be about $30, main PCB is claimed to be $5 or so, another $5 for the lens and foam respectively, and $10 for the strap. That'd bring it in at $205 provided you already had the capability to 3D print and solder and didn't factor in the material cost for those. It's unlikely, but you could probably make it happen.

I assume you could downscale the display to like a 1080p version to save costs as well.

sfteus··on Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk
For the public good? Absolutely. Even more so if the government subsidized part of it to help ensure those goods were available to their citizens.
sfteus··on Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk
1) Chile, Kuwait, and Singapore have similar rates of testing to the US [1]

2) Current studies show roughly somewhere between 10-20% of hospitalized patients ending up with heart damage, increasing their future risks of heart attacks and strokes.[2][3] Up to 36% of hospitalized patients are displaying neurological symptoms, with possible damage.[4] Up to 60% are ending up with ARDS which may be permanent.[5]

Extracting that with current numbers, assuming we had a 50% infection rate, 15% hospitalization rate [6][7], and a 1% death rate, we'd have ~1.5 million dead, ~22.5 million hospitalized, ~3.375 million with heart damage, ~8 million with neurological issues, ~13.5 million with ARDS.

Obviously many of these would overlap, but it sounds pretty devastating to me.

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing#the-scale-of-...

[2]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...

[3]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

[4]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2...

[5]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...

[6]: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidvi...

[7]: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...

sfteus··on Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk
> if you compare per capital rates ours were actually on par with most other first world nations

Not true, we're squarely between several 2nd and 3rd world countries: https://www.statista.com/chart/21176/covid-19-infection-dens...

> until the recent protests (both left and right) began

Not true, current research does not link any outbreaks to protests (BLM protests at least), mostly due to the fact that protesters were wearing masks and were outside: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/07/01/research-d...

> Let's also not forget that a number of other countries like Sweden didn't lock down at all and are doing fine.

Not true, Sweden is sitting about 150 deaths / million higher than the US right now: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data?country=USA~SWE#...

> What percent of nurses and doctors in COVID wards have gotten sick? And what is their CFR?

Largely irrelevant, because nurses and doctors should be wearing PPE, are trained to work in infectious environments, work in buildings designed to prevent disease vectors, and places that are sanitized regularly. You should see significantly less cases in healthcare than you would elsewhere.

And just in general, the economic impact of letting the virus run rampant would be astronomical. Even outside of deaths, those with severe cases are ending up with likely permanent damage to their hearts, lungs, or kidneys, which will require increased medical costs and likely people who can no longer work.

sfteus··on Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk
Grocery store workers don't spend 8 hours a day in a crowded room with kids who won't keep their PPE on, won't adequately wash their hands, want to give their teachers hugs / high fives, etc. Cashiers get to stand several feet away from those checking out, can put up plexiglass barriers, can slow down the checkout process a bit to sanitize between customers.

Hospitals are designed to prevent infectious disease spread. They plan for mass sanitation, employees wearing PPE, minimizing disease vectors. My wife's hospital has changed their policy to no outside visitors even on non-COVID floors. You can't do that in a school.

Don't get me wrong here, I'm not trying to downplay the sacrifice essential employees are making right now; they absolutely deserve hazard pay among so much else for putting themselves at risk for the benefit of everyone else. I asked my wife at the beginning of this if she wanted to quit, and we'd find a way to make it work, and she said "I'm a nurse, I signed up for this." That's just her mindset; she's been trained to work in a contagious environment and her hospital has many ways to help keep her safe. Asking teachers to take on that responsibility in addition to what we already ask of them, while being inside a petri dish of disease spreading is 100% irresponsible to everyone involved.

sfteus··on Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk
My mom works as an administrator in a public school. She is one year away from being eligible for medicaid, which is when she planned on retiring. She said as of right now, she plans to go back, because getting private insurance with her pre-existing conditions for the next year isn't feasible. I'm seriously considering seeing if my siblings and I can fund it for her for a year so she can just retire now and not have to worry about her as much.

A few other school districts around us have cancelled their in-person plans, at least for a few months, so hopefully her district does the same.

sfteus··on Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk
Price gouging is based on a reasonable price and is subjective. If the present situation results in inflated prices due to lack of materials or needing to run at a higher capacity, that's still reasonable. California, for example, has this written into their penal code, limiting it to a 10% increase in price of the total cost of manufacturing, which includes the increased cost of production, transportation or storage.

If those companies decided that they were going to stop selling their current stock of masks completely until they sold for a higher price, that would be price gouging.

sfteus··on Teachers are ready to quit rather than put their lives at risk
If you're trying to tell me that you think we wouldn't be better off with a leader that said this was a present and real threat and put out a mandatory mask order back in Feb/March, shut down travel and enforced travel quarantines, used the Defense Production Act to create and deliver PPE where needed, didn't confiscate PPE from states and re-sell it to the highest bidder, didn't publicly contradict the pandemic response team and CDC, implemented an effective national testing and contact tracing strategy, etc, then I'd say you're not here for an honest dialogue.
sfteus··on Data structures and algorithms I actually used while working at tech companies
I had several similar experiences through and after college. One in particular was while I was still in school, they had asked a question relative to performance when using views in an SQL database, and my answer wasn't satisfactory to them. Despite the interview going well up until that point, you could feel the tone shift immediately after, like they were just asking the rest of their questions as a formality and wanted me out of there as quick as possible. Didn't get called for a follow up, of course. Found out later that place was actually preying on foreign-based students (who received funding from the university to cover their out-of-state tuition difference if they worked up to 20 hours / week max for a company associated with campus) by making them work 60-80 hour weeks along side school and threatening to fire them if they told anyone, which would cause them to lose their funding and likely have to drop out / move back to their home country.

I received offers from several others, some never called back. Ended up turning all those down though, as I had an interview with someone who helped step through the few mistakes I made as a learning process during the interview. One particular question I remember was basically building front-end components with Javascript, and my example had a loop with a write call in it. He mentioned he would compile the markup in the loop, then write it after it was finished, and asked why that would be better or worse. Had to think on it for a minute, but came up with a trade-off between more memory usage but less DOM writes, resulting in faster rendering. Worked that into the next coding example too, since it was similar but more complex. After the interview, when they called to schedule a follow up interview before I even made it home, I realized he was more concerned about whether I would ask for help, learn, and not make the same mistakes again. Worked there, learned a ton, became a senior dev just few years out of college, now I manage a suite of products for my current company. I don't think I would have gotten that kind of opportunity had I not had that first manager and job, so I strive to emulate that in my interviews.

One of my favorite questions is something like "describe a crisis that occurred and the steps you took to resolve it," and give an example of one of my many stories of pushing bad code to production, having a server crash, etc, etc. I love the question because it involves no coding, no memorization, no regurgitating of info. Instead, it resolves around the person being a hero, which in my experience usually gets them relaxed, comfortable, and talking. You also learn a lot about their thought process: How did they first notice the issue? What was their process for triaging it? How did they debug it? If something involved in it was out of their wheelhouse did they go to someone else more experienced for help, or did they search for similar problems online to try and narrow it down? Did they delegate tasks if the workload was too high for them? Once it was fixed what was the procedure it went through for testing / verification? Did you monitor the issue afterwards to make sure it didn't come back? Once it was deployed, did you search for similar issues affecting your other systems? Did it ever come up again in new code and you were able to identify it before it was deployed?

Obviously not all of these will apply to everyone, but the open-endedness of the question means you can probe a bit here and there throughout their story and gain a ton of relevant insight. And most importantly, it answers the question of "when things get tough, can you keep a cool head and think critically?" I can teach code, data structures, algorithms, whatever, to anyone. But the difference between someone who is always trying to learn and grow, takes initiative, asks for help, etc, and someone who just wants to do the bare minimum is night and day.

Side benefit is this usually takes up several minutes of an interview so they can't be used on BS questions like the one you mentioned.

sfteus··on Chicago Police Department shuts down its arrest API
People are downvoting you because you are clearly not arguing in good faith, using phrases like "think of the children," which is a phrase used nowhere near as often as certain groups claim it is, while they parody it to shut down opposing viewpoints in discussion.

That being said, I'd also like to point out that "abolish the police" isn't saying "remove police entirely." It is saying that police, in their current state, should not exist. It's saying that police not be the ones who handle someone having a psychotic episode, and that part of the money going towards police should fund trained healthcare professionals instead. That police shouldn't be handling the homelessness problem, and we could redirect some of their funding to create public housing instead of throwing them in jail over and over. We shouldn't have police handle truant students, and arresting them certainly shouldn't be the only option available if they continue to do so.

It comes down to the fact that police forces and unions have too much power. And of course that leads into the larger discussion of the fact that police can say "we thought this person was committing a crime" and steal everything in your car with almost no recourse to get it back. That police have incentives to make any given arrest at the end of their shift to accrue overtime, and that most police organizations have no limits on the amount they can accrue. That police forces are getting increasingly militarized even as violent crime is going down worldwide. Or that they can shoot and kill almost anyone and say "well I felt that my life was in danger" and that's the end of the discussion. And that if in the unlikely event they are fired, they still keep their pension and can be hired a precinct over with no repercussion. That there are no means for reasonable oversight of these organization to make sure they are acting in the public's best interest. That police unions actively fight to keep all of these policies in place instead of working to build trust in their organizations so that we don't have these problems in the first place.

It's not a discussion of "I only want the parts of the government that I like to have funding," it's an objective look at an arm of the government that has far more power than it should by pushing every existing law and statute to the limit while everyone looks the other way, and an objective view at what society-benefiting services we could fund (that would reduce the need for police in the first place) if we chose to fund them instead of massive police forces. If we had an education system where you had one teacher the entirety of your career, who had no oversight on the curriculum they taught, could assign grades at random based on how they liked each student, that was unable to be terminated, and if they did lost absolutely nothing, you can bet that we'd be here protesting that as well.

sfteus··on 25 Years of PHP
The amount of fighting I've had to do with setting up NPM for legacy applications, or with any sort of virtualization is insane. I no longer set up Node/NPM on anything automated without NVM, since they seem to drop support for old packages at random. You have to jump through a ton of hoops to make NVM play well when it's effectively installed by root but ran by another user within the container. Running NPM in a unix VM on Windows means you have to update everything with --no-bin-links since symlinks aren't well supported, and there is no fallback. It's baffling that they haven't had some sort of manual copy management when a symlink can't be created.

Meanwhile, I setup composer in a docker file in 4 lines (download, run, move to bin, cleanup), and it works everywhere for any user, respects permissions, etc. I don't think I've run into a single error on composer that wasn't something like a mis-typed command, package, or a host being down.

sfteus··on 25 Years of PHP
It absolutely shouldn't, but it _can_: https://www.php.net/manual/en/reflectionclass.getdoccomment..... Zend has/had support for parsing this value as well.

I distinctly remember writing a project in PHP that allowed users to create custom reports and flows based on values returned from the data models, and for whatever reason we decided to use PHPDoc tags to determine what routines would be exposed to the public for use in these tools. We of course eventually updated this to use DB definitions instead because it was an asinine idea to need to parse a bundle of models and other files every time you needed to pull in definitions.

sfteus··on What Happened to Lee
Anecdotal, but having the same in early 30s. Was diagnosed with ADHD, low-dose long-form Adderall has basically reversed my symptoms, which from my understanding involves dopamine or dopamine receptors. Sleeping better and exercise are both also good boosts.
sfteus··on First hydroxychloroquine randomized controlled trial: results disappointing
30 patients would be statistically significant. Problem is that they were non randomized, open-label, and they seemingly discarded some of the bad results. They also measured viral load, not cure, and the measurement was not done correctly in all cases.

It's basically a "there could potentially be a causal link here; needs way more research" type of study.

sfteus··on First hydroxychloroquine randomized controlled trial: results disappointing
No, that trial has some glaring flaws. Several threads go into them way better than I could.

https://twitter.com/GaetanBurgio/status/1241201751916568576

https://twitter.com/MicrobiomDigest/status/12414295448478638...

sfteus··on Man sues AT&T over 'SIM Swap' hack allegedly involving employees
Interesting, I figured since they claimed that wasn't possible that they didn't keep records. I'll have to go bug them again to see if they can investigate it further. I'm not sure if this was an instance of targeted social engineering or an employee, though I would assume the former is more likely.
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