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wefarrell

2,293 karma · joined July 19, 2014

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wefarrell··on Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
What if it didn't "destroy" the evidence, but instead encrypted it in a way that couldn't be decrypted at that moment?

Or if it copied a snapshot some remote and inaccessible server while bricking the phone?

The digital nature of the evidence does make this different than physical files.

wefarrell··on Pentagon raised threat of Israeli spying on U.S. to highest level, sources say
From the article:

>While it is commonplace for allies and adversaries across the globe to spy on each other, the current and former U.S. officials said Israel’s recent efforts have gone well beyond what is typical and expected espionage.

wefarrell··on The Miele Dialog: cook a fish in ice without melting the ice
"The truth is, it’s actually difficult for any microwave oven to melt ice. That’s because solids tend to transmit, rather than absorb microwaves, and because the hydrogen bonds in ice are stronger than (and harder to induce vibration/heating in) those of liquid water"

Interesting

wefarrell··on Beeper Mini is now open-source
If it's the only way to achieve interoperability with a communication protocol, then yes.

Core infrastructure like this should be treated and regulated more like a utility.

wefarrell··on Your small imprecise ask is a big waste of their time
Because there’s always additional context that the junior and higher ups need that they aren’t aware of, the most obvious being time/capacity.

I used to manage an engineer who was responsible for a critical part of our system and he would frequently get hounded by higher ups who went around me and it ate up all of his time to the point where my manager thought this engineer was just unproductive. I wasn’t able to stop those requests entirely but I was able to establish a paper trail and show my boss that this engineer was actually being overworked.

wefarrell··on NYPD barred from telling people they can't film in precinct stations
Qualified immunity doesn't apply when the officer clearly violates a constitutional right. Unfortunately the article says:

Judge Jessica Clarke, who ordered the injunction last week, ruled that while the First Amendment claim might be a little more complicated, it seems pretty clear that the NYPD violated the state and municipal Right to Record Acts with its policy.

wefarrell··on U.S. federal price tag for the post-9/11 wars is over $8T
No, the US system is far far far worse. Look at the changes in life expectancy the last few years in the two countries.

Consider the number of nursing strikes recently and it's clear that the system is getting much worse.

wefarrell··on U.S. federal price tag for the post-9/11 wars is over $8T
And that's the irony. Covid's death toll in the US was a hundred times worse than 9/11 yet we still don't have federally mandated sick days.

State provided insurance coverage was expanded but that expansion is ending over the next year, however 20 years after 9/11 the military and intelligence apparatus put in place is still intact.

wefarrell··on CFPB kicks off rulemaking to remove medical bills from credit reports
I have a company that sells to hospitals, they absolutely care about keeping the wrong people out of the emergency room.

“ Hospital networks require you to either pay outstanding balances or meet with someone to arrange a payment plan before you can be seen.”

Putting them on a payment plan is not the same thing as forcing them to pay. I believe they would force payment for elective care, not preventative.

wefarrell··on CFPB kicks off rulemaking to remove medical bills from credit reports
Yes and I have a company that sells to health systems.
wefarrell··on CFPB kicks off rulemaking to remove medical bills from credit reports
It’s terrible for a hospital’s business to have their ER clogged by people who don’t have emergencies and can’t pay. It means they see a much lower volume of people who can pay.

So they aren’t going to deny people primary care because doing so will just cause them to wind up in the ER.

wefarrell··on CFPB kicks off rulemaking to remove medical bills from credit reports
The obvious consequence would be that people go to the emergency room for any kind of healthcare. That’s a much worse outcome for hospitals so I doubt they would deny people primary care.
wefarrell··on NASA clears the air: No evidence that UFOs are aliens
It’s impossible to falsify patient reports of pain, yet the medical field takes them quite seriously.
wefarrell··on My favourite API is a zipfile on the European Central Bank's website
Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see how it's possible for a COPY statement alone to remove existing data.
wefarrell··on My favourite API is a zipfile on the European Central Bank's website
One nice thing about CSV files being zipped and served via the web is they can be streamed directly into the database incredibly fast without having to persist them anywhere (aside from the db).

You can load the zip file as a stream, read the CSV line by line, transform it, and then load it to the db using COPY FROM stdin (assuming Postgres).

wefarrell··on MetaGPT: Meta Programming for Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework
> I mean that intuitively I couldn't imagine replacing 1 experienced professional with 1, 2, 10, 100 or even 1000 intelligent high school graduates

This analogy doesn't make sense, because the professional is presumably also a high school graduate. This case is more like leveraging a team of specialists with expertise in different domains.

wefarrell··on Launch HN: Refine (YC S23) – Open-source platform for enterprise web apps
I'm guessing you have to pay for it and that you can't freely redistribute it, in which case it's not open source.
wefarrell··on The Resilience of Costco (2018)
Costco doesn’t prevent the things you mention, you should come to my area in NYC. Within 3 blocks I have 3 supermarkets and maybe 12 smaller markets and corner stores. Within a mile I probably have 20-30 supermarkets and one of them is Costco.

A lot of the owners of the smaller markets actually shop at Costco. And you don’t need a car to shop there, you can bike and there are people with vans outside who will take your bike and groceries back home. Costco also offers local delivery.

I wouldn’t say it diminishes from the urban design you mention, in many ways it facilitates it.

wefarrell··on Ask HN: Anyone else locked out of LinkedIn?
Really?

I've been using it to recruit and if I didn't have access that would be detrimental to my career.

wefarrell··on “Our paying customers need X, when will you fix it?”
Saying they “need some kind of target date” is not polite, it sounds a lot like a demand.
wefarrell··on Striking SAG actors in disbelief over studios’ dystopian AI proposal
Commercialization of someone else’s likeness sounds like the type of thing that should be heavily regulated, and skewed in favor of the person whose likeness is being exploited.
wefarrell··on FBI taps cell phone mic as eavesdropping tool (2006)
That reminds me of how the CIA was able to track Pablo Escobar. He had a mobile phone that he only turned on to make calls, however the CIA was able to remotely activate and track it using surveillance aircraft.
wefarrell··on Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983
Average medical school costs are ~230K.

Residency is not college, residents are practicing physicians that are providing considerable value to society and in many cases they are paid appallingly little for the amount that they work.

wefarrell··on Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
It's not even that complicated, you just need to prompt it properly and it won't respond with those disclaimers.
wefarrell··on Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
GPT-4 is capable of fairly complex reasoning and it's possible to mitigate the obvious giveaways by prompting it to write in the style of a particular author.

Students who pay the $20 a month for it and are aware of its limitations will absolutely use it and it won't be obvious.

wefarrell··on Clamor of gravitational waves from merging black holes 'heard' for first time
For the LIGO waves they didn’t need to since the frequencies corresponded to audio frequencies that are audible by human ears.
wefarrell··on Clamor of gravitational waves from merging black holes 'heard' for first time
They can do that with waves that come from LIGO because they happen to have frequencies that are audible when converted to sound. In this case the wave periods are measured in years rather than milliseconds.
wefarrell··on Clamor of gravitational waves from merging black holes 'heard' for first time
Crazy to think that we’re been observing the cosmos for thousands of years through a single sense and we only recently opened up a second one. What a time to be alive!
wefarrell··on Monster gravitational waves spotted for first time
This discovery didn't actually involve LIGO, nor any other feats of impressive physical engineering. It was made by observing neutron stars and finding patterns in their unexpected perturbations.

Neutron star rotation is so consistent that they are used to calibrate atomic clocks[0]. However some of them were glitching and not rotating as expected, but the glitches were consistent between each other. It turns out they aren't actually glitching, but spacetime is being distorted by massive gravitational waves.

[0] https://gizmodo.com/scientists-use-spinning-neutron-stars-to...

wefarrell··on FTC reportedly plans major antitrust lawsuit against Amazon
Amazon has been able to get away with a lot because for a long time their customer experience was fantastic. You could buy pretty much anything knowing it was the lowest price, get it in a day or two, and return it for pretty much any reason.

Over time the experience degraded because they encouraged cheaply copying popular products, and then they even did it themselves and competed with their sellers. And of course their anticompetitive practices have made things much worse for those sellers.

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