adrinavarro

Among other reasons (good citizen, not getting permabanned…), chargebacks aren't really a thing in Europe — they often require a police report, etc. Amex being the exception, but this wasn't.

Kind of unrelated but: my father tried gifting my brother a subscription but entered the wrong email. Money and subscription are both gone — UI just doesn't have the option of amending, cancelling or resending it.

For the last couple weeks, dad's gone into a rabbit hole of trying to reach support——any kind of (useful) support. No dice. Thankfully it's just a few dollars gone into the void.

If only they had the tools to build a better experience... :-)

got-your-back uses Gmail's API instead of IMAP with an insecure app password, which is a discouraged way of accessing Gmail and will eventually be phased out in favor of OAuth access tokens over IMAP (in fact, I thought it already had been).

As for other services beyond Gmail, there's not a great ecosystem for exporting.

For one-off exports, Google Takeout is decent enough, although there's a lacking ecosystem to import the big .mbox files back to an email provider.

I have a colleague based in the UK who got infected with COVID in the early days of the pandemic, before any measures were taken. He still has important health issues - and he's young (under 30).

Similarly, I have a friend who got infected over the 2020 summer (even though he was taking precautions), and again, he's still seeing doctors, taking medical trials, etc. because of his long COVID symptoms.

I know it's n=2, but I would not dare being so fast to say "it's about 6 months on the longer term, and very rare". I didn't take this very seriously as I'm young, but these two cases shifted my perception on the issue and made me adjust my routines just to err on the side of caution.

"Then later on it was discovered that a lot of positive tests are asymptomatic and asymptomatic people don't transmit the disease, so this just hurt healthcare capacity for no reason"

I think it makes sense to isolate anyone who tests PCR positive for coronavirus, right?

Also, is it 100% sure that asymptomatic people will not transmit the disease? What if they are just pre-symptomatic? Where do you establish the cut-off?

Maybe it was based on seeing what happened in other countries, ie. Spain and Italy? I can say for sure that the impact in the health care system here in Spain was very significant.

"it is nonsensical to compare covid to other major pandemics […] Covid will never even come close to those numbers. And yet many countries have shut down their entire economies"

"That makes covid a mere blip in terms of its effect on mortality."

This sounds wrong to me for several reasons. First of all, it's silly assuming that other countries are shutting down their economies without a very good reason for doing so. As I understood it, the "good reason" for doing so was that the infection & death rate was growing so fast, that it was putting hospitals & morgues way beyond their capacity. At the same time, the situation was keeping non-COVID, hospital-worthy visits out of the healthcare system, thus creating a massive public health problem.

(Let's not forget the improvised hospitals, improvised morgues, etc. These were very real.)

It'd be interesting knowing why somehow the COVID cases 'vanished' from this doctor's hospital. But instead of looking into why this happened, this doctor is just saying "turns out that the problem went away, so in the end it was good that we didn't bother too much about it".

And the thing is - we're not through it yet. Thankfully the death rate seems not being as bad as we thought it could be, but this could very well be down to current measures such as isolating elder people, testing at-risk populations, higher awareness levels, and the fact that the average infection age is now much lower than it was in March. So, now, healthcare systems are not collapsing.

There's a myriad of variables that likely affect the virus spread and outcome. For example, the age and characteristics of the populations where the virus is spreading, how population is distributed around the territory (and its density), how frequently this population "comes together" (social behavior - ever seen a swede profusely hugging and kissing?, public transportation, remote working…), and so on.

And when it comes to the healthcare system capacity debate: Sweden frequently put elder, infected people straight in palliative care (http://archive.is/VC5vb), bypassing hospitals. Other countries did admit elder people into hospitals, thus putting more strain into the healthcare system, which later on prompted a lockdown to prevent said system from collapsing.

I started out with PHP at a very very young age and eventually moved on to other platforms (mainly Python). Not looking to question your experience - but actually recalling my own. Making a chat app was one of the first things I did. It was a super basic CRUD app mixing HTML and some code, refreshing the page every few secs, thanks to some meta tags.

Of course, it used frames, so that the "send message" part didn't clear every time it refreshed… those were the days! Eventually, my fancy chat app delivered a much better user experience, thanks to an amazing (back then!) JS library — jQuery. I built my first "API" that way! (It didn't use XML or JSON - it just returned chunks of HTML that were appended to a div).

Pure PHP gets annoying when you're dealing with complex data models, or when you're building a combination of frontend plus backend batch processing. Frameworks such as Laravel make this much much nicer to deal with IMHO. Of course, PHP is far from perfect, and its quirks can cause OCD and frustration to some people… :-)

But thanks to PHP (and also thanks to how lenient and chaotic it was), I was able to create very early on without needing to worry about software patterns (I had no clue what MVC was back then!), strict code formatting, learning how to deploy an app (just upload the code and off you go), and so on. PHP got me into programming — and it's also propelled some big-name sites and apps, so I guess it deserves some credit there as well.

The post clearly states that users can install extensions through the developer's website. The main difference here is that extensions cannot be silently installed — users have to explicitly install them.

Sounds good to me. No more annoying adware extensions.

National politics (Catalonia, etc). But there's also an endemic issue with spending on unnecessary infrastructure while underfunding heavily used infrastructure (such as public transportation in large cities); our budgets never seem to be able to reduce debt, and our pension system is doomed to explode, because eventually there will be more retired than working people.

Agree on this. It was… weird to see someone making a correlation between "not enjoying porn on display during a security conference" and the gender of the person. It's good that they're filtering it, it's bad that they need to, it's sad that they consider it a gender issue.

$200k and up, for a Senior Software Engineer, is something that's only "frequent" in the U.S. (and varying a lot based on specific locations). With rentals costing many thousands of $ a month, significant healthcare costs, a need to have a car for each person, and no safety net.

If your friend is earning around €100k in France and not even living in Paris, then they're in a VERY privileged position. I'd say that €110k in Paris, factoring in exchange rates, CoL & taxes, can be the equivalent to a $200k salary in SV. So it's hardly a downgrade.

110k in France is a lot. And I reckon you can buy a house (well, depending on your standards) with that salary and some discipline…

I meant Mandrill—Mandrill was a significant mistake. SendGrid is working great for us. So sorry.

Oops, sorry. Brain fart. I meant Mandrill, Mandrill was a significant mistake. SendGrid is working great for us. So sorry.

We choose SendGrid long time ago to unify all our mail infrastructure under one provider and it was a significant mistake. Now, we're heavily relying on SendGrid but some systems still depend on Mandrill and we're slowly migrating those as we make changes to them.

Unless you're thinking about the next Silk Road, then, you're not solving the real problem here.

And mechanics.

I wonder why Spain, France, Portugal, Ireland, Sweden… are excluded, but not Germany or the United Kingdom or many other EU countries.

You don't want ABS? How about no airbag either? And doing away with safety belts as well?

The bulk of the cost of producing an electric car comes from battery packs, and cost is also increased because the reduced production numbers cannot achieve higher costs saving from mass production. But all of that is changing every day towards cheaper electric cars.

Pretty much all you mention is actually cheap to include, because it's shared with traditional vehicles, so it's not a major driver in car cost. Actually: if you're going to make a car expensive, then throw in some stuff that people with money (who will actually buy the vehicle) will appreciate.

But you can also get a Smart Fortwo EV, a Bolloré Bluecar, a Mitsubishi i-MIEV… Which are rather basic vehicles and they're electric. The Chevy Bolt is a pretty good middle ground too, if you're in the U.S.

Have you actually looked into the EV market beyond Tesla, with an actual intention of acquiring a vehicle, or are you just thinking out loud?

In this very minute my team is unable to deploy (and therefore accumulating blockings) because of issues with Gitlab. We have a plan on-hold to migrate off Gitlab (even though we just migrated to it!) and while I'd love to stay on Gitlab it's becoming very hard to justify.

GitLab's recent performance has been abysmal. We recently moved from a self-hosted git solution to GitLab, and while the CI, 'namespacing' and issue tracking are truly great and well thought of, we've had entire days where the team was unable to deploy because the CI workers did not run (even though we host the workers), and therefore the artifacts for deployment were never generated. And nearly every day, pushes take minutes to complete, as opposed to a few seconds with GitHub.

If anything, I hope that Microsoft's acquisiton of GitHub means that GitHub is going to keep growing in features for varied enterprise uses, and that we're going to see even more competition in this area.

VAT only applies to consumption by citizens of a country. Not enterprises, not foreigners. If anyone were to sell services to foreign companies or individuals, they wouldn't generate taxes. If they were made mandatory, then their services would be at a serious competitive disadvantage because foreign companies couldn't get a tax refund in their local country.

In short, this plan is very very bad. Taxes are somewhat complicated, but they're designed this way for a reason, and there's a reason why nearly all countries have somewhat similar systems.

In our case, data migration. Resumable, sometimes dies because of various reasons (or just infra rescaling happening), but takes very long to run.

Good point. I'd rather have something explicit going on. In other places where we do use RabbitMQ (for short-lived, non-critical tasks), the listening processes log reconnects every once in a while, even with heartbeat.

Not exactly. Tasks can last for weeks. It can run fine for several days and then die, and it needs to be requeued, until it is explicitly finished. In fact, we do use RabbitMQ to emit "status updates".

With RabbitMQ, I'd need to ack rightaway, otherwise it would re-send the message again after a while.

This looks promising.

I'm currently dealing with a queuing-related issue.

I have a series of tasks running across servers that consume from a queue and run a task.

Often, these tasks die mid-execution (but can be resumed by any other server). So, the queue is a database, and the running tasks "touch" a timestamp in the database if they are still executing. When a database document hasn't been updated for a while, the "consumption query" makes it so that it is 'redelivered' to an available server listening to the "queue".

Of course, this is subpar, but we haven't yet come across an elegant (and not too over-engineered) way to replace this.

I agree with the pricy bit. I've made a calculation, and it would cost me 1200$ a month to run what Cloudflare does for free.

Now, I get that free is not an option. 50/100$ a month is probably OK. But that's beyond reasonable. And prices change depending on where people visit you from (!?)

In Catalonia, secessionists feel free to talk about their political stance, and secessionists do not. This is probably caused by the sheer amount of demonstrations (rather aggressive in tone as well) by a demographic that cannot exceed 50% in any election.

You could argue that "half of Catalonia" is bullying the other "half" of it. One with massive demonstrations and government-sponsored strikes, the other one, with law and courts?

He meant Navarra.