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164 karma · joined November 28, 2018

Teaching literature to high school students in Vermont.
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stdplaceholder··on What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills
That’s not really the problem we face, though. Our problem is you ask how much it costs to give birth at a hospital and then everything goes according to plan and later you get endless bills for much more than they said, often from providers who weren’t even in attendance, for materials that weren’t even used, and so forth.
stdplaceholder··on O-bahn Busway
We are building a pretty long BRT in Oakland and San Leandro, California. Yeah it’s costing a billion dollars. It does not have a true dedicated right of way since cars can theoretically block the box in front of the bus. But it does have all-door boarding, proof-of-payment with off-vehicle fare terminals, and signal priority.
stdplaceholder··on What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills
Even if you ask for the price and even if you get it in writing up front you will still get a different bill later.
stdplaceholder··on What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills
They have literally no limitations. The reason that an advil at the hospital costs $200 is because they were afraid if they made it cost $20000 people would burn down the hospital.
stdplaceholder··on Jack Ma: US wasted trillions on warfare instead of investing in infrastructure
To give _you_ some context on this, attacks by protesters on returning troops from Vietnam is a myth. The reason people venerate "the troops" today is 50 years of concerted right-wing militaristic propaganda which serves to deflect legitimate debate by classifying any kind of criticism as being "against the troops".

https://www.amazon.com/Spitting-Image-Memory-Legacy-Vietnam/...

stdplaceholder··on An Epidemic Is Killing Thousands of Coal Miners
There is no thermodynamically possible way to generate power from burning coal while also removing the primary product of the reaction from the effluent. Clean coal is, necessarily, 100% bullshit.
stdplaceholder··on BloomRPC: GUI Client for GRPC Services
GRPC offers server reflection so your tools can interrogate the protocol at runtime, so your tool doesn’t need to compile in all the protocol descriptions.
stdplaceholder··on A look at home routers, and a surprising bug in Linux/MIPS
I just checked my OnHub. It is the original, now over 3 years old. It got five updates this year, none of which I noticed. It's too bad that it's nearly guaranteed that they will kill this product line at some point in the future.
stdplaceholder··on The LLVM Compiler Infrastructure
It wasn't ever an acronym. It was an initialism.
stdplaceholder··on After losing half its value, Nvidia faces reckoning
For employees this is a real roller coaster ride. If you had a industry-standard $500k RSU component over four years, four years ago, you were recently walking around with 7 million dollars, depending on your sell or hold preferences. Whereas now you merely have 4 million. On the other hand if you started a month ago with the same deal, now you have much less than the industry standard deal.
stdplaceholder··on The Largest Vocabulary in Hip Hop (2014)
Their last album was the #1 best-selling album on the Billboard R&B/Hip Hop chart and they sold out every venue on their tour. I think they're reasonably well-known.
stdplaceholder··on Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel
I don't think anyone has an incentive to release findings because that will just sour their future work with AMD and counteract any pricing concessions they are getting for waving the AMD platform around under Intel's noses. Same for POWER, for what that's worth.
stdplaceholder··on Adventures in Video Conferencing Part 1: The Wild World of WebRTC
Anybody with the number can join your Zoom meeting and since there's very little indication of their presence you might not even notice. You can also command other people's rooms to join your meeting, if you can figure out how to contact them, and you can force their microphones to turn on, which in my opinion is pretty disturbing.
stdplaceholder··on Amazon’s Chips Threaten Intel
I have not met anyone who deployed the new AMD stuff at scale and is happy with the outcome. The new architecture shines on small codes like SPEC and then falls apart in large, branchy, pointer-chasing codes that everyone runs in production. I would not say AMD is “in a great place” with their current product. They are putting slight pressure on Intel on the very low end and filling some very specialized niches but that’s about it.
stdplaceholder··on The Largest Vocabulary in Hip Hop (2014)
I knew it would be Aesop Rock before I even clicked through. Definitely not the kind of thing you listen to at work to block out the noise. It’s interesting but I guess not surprising that people in the same circle, like El-P, have similarly huge vocabularies. But now El-P is practically the biggest name in hip hop. Maybe wordiness is catching on.
stdplaceholder··on House Oversight Committee Report on Equifax Breach [pdf]
Equifax cannot detect exfiltration of your data because distributing your data is their line of business. Your personal details pouring out of their servers at high speeds is what always happens there, 24 hours a day.
stdplaceholder··on Hook on PG&E Tower Eyed as Cause of Deadly Camp Fire
Why would an executive at PG&E give two shits about that? They get paid via the shell company that owns the utility and their profits are guaranteed by the public regulator while their liabilities are limited by their corporate structure.
stdplaceholder··on Yangtze River Port and Logistics: On-The-Ground Research Shows Assets Fabricated
The incredibly tight range over which this stock has traded, on low volumes, over the last 4 months is pretty suspicious.
stdplaceholder··on Search is on for Google workers leaking secrets
By 2013 TGIF was a virtually information-free internal propaganda session compared to what it had been.
stdplaceholder··on O2 outage due to expired Ericsson certificate
You'd certainly think so. If you have frontend probers that exercise your accessible endpoints (HTTP or whatever) then those probes should fail when the certificate expires in less than 30 days. I couldn't comment on whether an organization like Ericsson or O2 would be expected to have such probers.
stdplaceholder··on O2 outage due to expired Ericsson certificate
I know it's happened to every company where I've worked. It happens so rarely, though, that people don't have enough opportunity to learn from it. Even at Google they were on their Nth such outage for a large value of N before it became apparent that no certificate should ever expire at 23:59:59 on December 31, or otherwise outside of normal operating hours. Seriously 20 years of organizational knowledge required to get the company to understand that certs should expire at noon on a Wednesday to minimize time-to-repair in the inevitable event that one is allowed to lapse.
stdplaceholder··on Goodbye, EdgeHTML
I’m a Mozilla contributor and user; my name is chiseled in stone on their monument. I’m also a a Xoogler and a Chrome user. I think this screed is pretty ridiculous. Microsoft polluting the web with an inferior browser engine is not helping anyone. For the users it is better that they join another, superior browser effort. But what’s reall absurd here is the tone. Is this really an official Mozilla press release? It seems like they’re just trying too hard to make everyone forget that they get 99% of their money from Google.
stdplaceholder··on Five-Year Trends Available for Median Income, Poverty and Internet Use
This summary of facts seems quite useless, presented as it is by county. If poverty declined in two counties and increased in two counties, it makes a difference which counties were which. If Mono County and Alpine County are declining and San Mateo and Santa Clara are increasing, that is a very different phenomenon than the reverse.
stdplaceholder··on The Friendship That Made Google Huge
For example the high bit in blocks of ASCII text will always be zero. In a binary dump it would appear as a column of zeros.
stdplaceholder··on The Friendship That Made Google Huge
Urs doesn't need a level on the individual contributor scale; he's a Senior Vice President.
stdplaceholder··on The Friendship That Made Google Huge
Sanjay's "experimental" directory in Google's repo -- a place where users can commit unreviewed code that are just ideas, or park some code that isn't ripe yet -- is full of gems.
stdplaceholder··on Wall Street Rule for the #MeToo Era: Avoid Women at All Cost
I haven't worked on Wall Street for about 10 years, but when I did it was unbelievably misogynistic. None of our dozens of partners were women. The younger partners referred to their wives as "my first wife" while they were still married to them. The older ones of course were all on their third or fourth marriage. And the president of the firm, who was old enough to personally remember the Hindenburg disaster, just went around grabbing the secretaries' asses.
stdplaceholder··on AlphaFold: Using AI for scientific discovery
I wonder if team “zhang” is angry. They’re way ahead of the rest of the entrants and would have had an impressive result, if they hadn’t been blown out of the water by A7D.
stdplaceholder··on Violence Escalates as France Scrambles to Respond to ‘Yellow Vest’ Protesters
At least now we have some idea of the fuel price needed to start a riot. $7/gal. That means there's plenty of headroom to raise the fuel tax in the USA!
stdplaceholder··on Google Container for Firefox – Prevent Google from tracking you around the web
In order to use this supposed privacy-enhancing feature, you must allow the authors of this extension total control over everything you do on the web. Add-ons are automatically updated in Firefox by default, so you can review this code now and it will change later. This seems like a poor trade.
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