gotthemwmds

s/difference of a few yards/difference of 1 yard/

signed, this totally not still upset Seahawks fan.

(re: 2015 Superbowl)

How can anyone make an empirical statement about AA -- an organization that does not collect any sort of statistics about itself what so ever?

Actually, after reading the whole article, he was picking an unidentified mushroom that later proved to contain psilocybin. This point seems relevant.

30% feels like a decent bargain if you finally get to take the other 70% out of the duffel bags/safety deposit boxes. Especially if that enables you to spend it on things that mitigate risky behavior, such as lawyers.

Consider most people legitimately needing to launder money likely already have a lot of it and aren't necessarily looking for a bargain.

Check out something the historians call "presentism". It's really enlightening in regards to helping think about why past breakthroughs were not fully realized.

Etsy anecdote from someone generally outside of their main market:

I have ordered something off of Etsy 3 times. 2 of those times, there was a minor "customer service" level issue. Once, I accidentally put in the wrong zip code and, after the package was returned to the seller, I was refused any refund (it was "my fault" -- too bad). Another time, I was shipped the wrong item and the back-and-forth between the seller to replace the item ended up taking more time than I was willing to spend on said $15 item and I gave up.

In the first case, I did reach out to Etsy, and was told to resolve the issue with the seller. After much back-and-forth, with the seller insisting it was my fault for typoing the zip code and there was nothing they could do short of re-ordering (and re-paying) entirely, I ended up convincing them to let me directly Paypal them shipping costs for the second attempt at shipping, which went fine.

This process took entirely too much time (especially when one thinks of experiences with Amazon -- where they resend stuff in orders-gone-awry right away, without any question, or significant delay).

My main impression of Etsy is: there are some cool items in its unique/niche marketplace and I would like to buy stuff off of Etsy more often in general, but the site is largely irrelevant to me as a "place to shop" because of the lack of an empowered Etsy customer service level between the buyer and seller -- protecting and advocating for both parties. Of course, not all sellers are at fault here, and I'm sure many Etsy sellers (probably the majority?) facilitate minor order issues brilliantly. This is just my personal experience.

I would feel a lot better about Etsy if I knew I had someone with the power (at Etsy) to help when something unexpectedly went wrong with an order, regardless of where the fault lies. I kind of felt like it was a cop-out by Etsy to place all customer service expectations on the buyer and seller directly.

Anyway, I like the concept of Etsy a lot (I helped my 67 year old mother open an account to sell her embroidery!), but I can't spend 10+ emails worth of time over 2 weeks trying to fix minor order issues, which, in my personal anecdotal experience, has been the case exactly 66.6% of the time.

If Etsy promoted a strong customer-positive service vibe -- as the empowered middle-person between the seller/maker and buyer -- I'd feel a lot better about trying again to buy stuff via it.

And this isn't an entirely buyer-sided argument. I would hope that Etsy sees customer service as a boon to both seller and buyer, and would make life easy on the seller as well as the buyer when these small "consumer snafus" show up. For example, not wasting the sellers time, or charging them fees, or being stingy about refunding fees, when minor things like this happen. It seems self-evident that a protected seller -- one who doesn't have to worry about Etsy putting them through the ringer over a minor order mistake -- would make a happier seller. Which seems like it would naturally trickle down to happier buyers as well.

For some commutes, particularly to Capitol Hill and the University District, or into South Seattle or the airport, Link Light Rail is much better than the buses, largely due to it being entirely separated from street traffic for its entire line.

http://ghdx.healthdata.org/ihme_data too

https://vizhub.healthdata.org/gbd-compare/ enjoy

I think the bigger problem with naming is simply being consistent. Ask 5 developers what the variable name for an important filehandle should be and you'll probably get at least 3 answers. As long as everyone is consistent, even if the names get a little sketchy here and there, that consistency goes a long way for code with a long lifetime.

I'm sorry but I am not reading an article that says, "You're lucky I wrote it," in the first paragraph.

And from the comments, it sounds like I'm not missing much.

Author, don't treat your readers like idiots. I can guarantee some of them are much smarter and more experienced than you.

Well I'm not trying to troll you or anything but my friends haven't named their 2 day old baby yet. That's a person, right?

Obviously you've never read a Steinbeck book.

Evergreen is a cool school.

English degree with focus on "modernism/postmodernism" literature, literary criticism, and philosophy. University of Washington, Seattle, 2006.

I never expected to go back to school after high school because it was so boring. It wasn't traumatic, I had lots of friends and many good times and learned one or two things, but it was mostly just a poor use of time. And they made me wake up so damn early.

I got my first full time job in IT at 17 and had almost 5 years of experience (tech support -> jr. sysadmin/datacenter stuff) before taking my first sociology class on a whim with a friend, expecting to hate it. Much to my surprise, they treated me like an adult, and I had a great time. Seattle Central Community College was a very good school for me.

I got an AA in a 7 quarters (1 calendar year = 4 quarters, by the seasons, more or less...) and had a high enough GPA that I was automatically accepted into a BA program at UW in the math department. Shortly after, I switched to modular logic. Shortly after, I switched to philosophy. Shortly after, I switched to and settled on English, and spent almost 3 years completing it (while working part time) and took it pretty seriously. I did all of my homework and went to the vast majority of my classes and even took notes and went to office hours and study groups.

5 years of full time work in a 100% OSS datacenter/ISP (with root) left me with (significantly?) more skills than your average BA CS/CE grad (and having interviewed a lot of them, I am pretty confident in this). One big exception being algorithms and not as much programming experience. But I had a lot of practical "real-world day to day stuff" knowledge.

For that reason, I purposefully only took the one required "computer" credit I needed as part of my humanities degree. I was able to talk a nice CS teacher into letting me into a 3rd-year level Java class to improve my OO skills. I met none of the prereqs (like, not even remotely close), but within 10 minutes of talking to him in his office, he waived them all and let me take it. I think I got a 3.2.

The English dept. was great and I had a great advisor and so many great teachers and fellow classmates. I ended up taking mostly night classes because they had more adults and were a significantly more interesting group to me. I drifted toward English because "I like books" and, for some reason, really enjoyed reading all of those painful literary tomes and busting out all of the essays. So many essays. I did well and was dean's list almost every quarter. I stayed 2 quarters longer than I needed to, on purpose.

After graduating I immediately went back to IT and have been doing ops (OSS system/network engineering) ever since -- about 10 years of it. Still working on our own hardware in datacenters across the world, complimented by cloud services here and there. Stuff I was doing as a 12 year old (ie: minicom to talk to stuff via serial) is still stuff I do at least once or twice a year.

I mean, I guess I briefly looked into the job market that an English degree usually veers towards. Teaching? Writing? Journalism? Technical writing? Manage a bookstore? IDK. But realistically, since I was planning on staying in (expensive) Seattle, the choice to go back to IT-land was pretty obvious.

The last thing I'll say is, you'd be surprised how useful an English degree is in the IT world. I mean, English is basically taking this big pile of words, trying to make sense of it all, and then trying to use them to state interesting things about people or objects or whatever. Software, on the other hand, is often about sifting through a lot of documentation, working with a lot of different APIs and config syntaxes and databases and init systems and revision control and centralized configurations and dynamic scaled platforms. Then putting it all together into something useful for some developer for some company (ie: their platform!). Or something terrible -- like an ad server.

No regrets what so ever. If/when I retire, I may go back for an MFA, and maybe even a PhD in English lit!

Anecdotally speaking, in the last 2 years, I've seen 3 ex-Twitter (as their most recent position) people apply, and none of them made it passed the second phone interview, which was the first real technical one.

I didn't do the interviews myself, but I watched them, and I was very unimpressed with the applicants.

I can say this about most (70%) Amazon people too... (and am in Seattle, so we see a lot of them).

Might be a Chrome issue? There is something that locks scrolling about 500ms after the page loads. No overlay or anything, just a totally unresponsive picture of some sad kids.

Overall though, this is pretty pathetic on their part.

This page is so poorly designed that I -- an engineer with 15 years experience and a mid 6 figure salary -- can not figure out how to read the actual article.

Why are newspapers trying this hard to implement shitty webUX gimmicks? Give me the words.

What a great example of why Twitter is a terrible communication platform!

This was definitely the first thing that came up, as you found.

To be honest, I just don't remember. There was something about something that made something scary to the PM who was in charge of it all? That is about the best I can come up with.

I want to say the needed to index more than 191 chars, but that seems like a stupid thing to say. Who needs to index that many chars?

If I remember, I'll edit :)

edit: I guess I should say I was consulted to do some unrelated things, then helped them with some MySQL stuff that came up towards the end of the contract, then the utf8mb4 stuff came up, and I spent some time going through it with them. It was not the main focus of the contract, which is part of why I don't remember it very well. Just something that came up in the day to day...

I ran into this at a consulting job recently...

MySQL claims to support utf8, but in reality, it doesn't. You need utf8mb4 to support certain common Kanji characters.

This company had spent untold thousands (possibly millions) trying to convert gigantic databases (and I don't use the term gigantic loosely...) from utf8 to utf8mb4 because some of their Japan-based clients were using Kanji.

Sounds easy right? Wrong. utf8mb4 comes with some technical "gotchas" (google it) that had delayed the attempt to change to it by almost a year.

Anyway, I found this pretty amusing, and got a huge paycheck to explain to them just how screwed they were.

I hope I am wrong, though!

Doctors are already fighting the good fight every day -- carrying the fire (the vast majority, at least). I have always mostly lived in a liberal bubble and over my life I'd say 90% of the people I have interacted with often over a long period were liberal, and this extends to 90% of my extended family too. Bubbled in all the way. All of these physicians in my bubbles throughout life have mostly fit the liberal label (except maybe fiscally) and would be more than happy with treating drug addiction like a health problem. And lots already do! Depends on the city, of course.

Things like "ending the war on drugs" are simply not on your average doctors' mind in the day to day (in my experience). They have other stuff to do, like maybe save a life or two, finish that big paper on immortality or w/e, and they simply go right ahead being doctors, knowing in the back of their mind they are largely "above" the drug war anyway, since they can and do dole out narcotics constantly.

To my dad, an 80mg oxycontin (the old ones, the holy grail of opiate pill abuse) lost its status as a "ooooh, awwww, look at this neat pill" thing probably within 60 seconds of becoming a doctor (that's a guess). My mom was/is a psychologist (retired) and doled out narcotic tranquilizers left and right as well (though at the VA, so she got left alone). It happens to pharmacists too, even a pharmacy tech friend of mine would go "meh" at a 1500 count bottle of perc 30s.

The drugs just become part of the day to day like, for lots of HN readers and myself at least, working on tens of millions of dollars with of computing infrastructure is business as usual.

I think the access to narcotics and constant distribution and "above it" feeling is relevant to why I think doctors won't be leading the anti-war on drugs movement. I don't know for sure about many other than my parents and a few others, but I'm guessing they would all end the war on drugs tomorrow and treat it as a health issue if they knew how to do it without making things infinitely worse. And I'd venture to say most doctors I've known over my (liberal-bubbled) life would agree without much thought put into it -- if they aren't already in some small (or big) way.

My dad recently retired after 30 years of practicing oncology and hematology in a private practice ran with a female colleague, located in an office building adjacent to a very large regional hospital. He also worked a supervising shift in the ER every Thursday night, simply because he found it easier to be in the ER since so many of his patients visited it while he was oncall, sometimes forcing him to go in anyway.

I guess you could say I enjoy recreational drugs and have done them all and my dad generally knows this and we've talked quite a bit about drugs, specifically the insane amount of opiates and benzos he used to prescribe to his cancer patients.

I've sort of gotten the impression the DEA was a hassle in his life and he would not want any attention gained by publicly saying anything but "drugs are bad" (aka the failed war on drugs). There would be no incentive for him to do this on a day to day basis; in fact, there would only be disincentives, at least in the short term.

One day in the early 00s, the DEA showed up at his practice unannounced and wanted to start auditing him on the spot. They told him he was in the top 10 opiate prescribers in his area and they were concerned. They had absolutely no paperwork, so my dad kicked them out of his office, and later the building via security. He told them to come back with a warrant. They never did.

What struck me about this story is how visibly upset he got at the idea of the DEA depriving people of comfort when they are in pain. When he told me this he said, very emotionally, "These people are dying and in pain and they want to look at paperwork?" I can only imagine how pissed off he was when it happened.

This anecdote is all to say I think that doctors probably take one look at any effort to delegitimize the war on drugs and say Nope. What's the point? To help society? Like they do every day as doctors? I just have never felt much of a "let's rock the boat" attitude from any doctors I've known personally regarding drug laws (keep in mind they live in a bubble where all of the drugs are available to them via an Rx pad -- this is very relevant to the enthusiasm drought IMO).

Based on a lifetime of being around doctors as personal and family friends (my mom is a medical doctor too), I don't think doctors are going to pick up this cause enthusiastically, even if it makes sense on paper.

This. I was going to say culture instead of history, but right on.

If everything you know about black people is from the internet, TV, rap music, and pop culture in general, you are missing a lot of what being black in America is really about, and at how much interesting culture and history there is in black communities.

On a related note, if you're ever in Seattle and enjoy these types of things, the Northwest African American Museum (naamnw.org) is worth checking out, and it's right next to the just-renovated Jimi Hendrix Park, since he grew up in the general area it's located in.

Judkins Park across the street (23rd Ave), or walking east towards the pedestrian/bike path along the I-90 floating bridge (Sam Smith Park), are also worth checking out! Especially biking across the bridge over Lake WA.

Similar to MRE, I guess. I honestly haven't eaten one. I got them via the advice of a sorta crazy friend of mine who has a bunker full of similar things (and guns) on his farmland.

Really? I haven't seen one and I've had six figures in brokerage/checking/savings for a decade. I know someone who worked at their datacenter a while ago and, well, heh.

Also, do they support e-statements for savings accounts yet? I swear it is the only piece of mail I get now a days.

Overall though they are a great bank with a magic fee-less debit card and human beings who answer the phone 24/7. And they don't seem too evil, but I haven't turned over many rocks.

Having lived on big fault lines my entire life (Salt Lake City and Seattle), I have been trained from kindergarten on about what to do in an earthquake.

In the closet of my 7th floor apartment I have 1 small-ish backpack full of a handful of useful things like a crank weather radio and some flashlights (all bought on clearance over the years). I also have an orange home depot bucket full of non-perishable, high-calorie food I got off Amazon. And a few cases of water. It takes up about 15% of my closet. I bet I could make the food/water last for a month if I had to.

So the answer is yes! But not everyone did earthquake drills four times a year during 12 years of public school... I am 33.

What I'd really like to argue for is twofold: 1) meeting people where they're at and making no demands of them, 2) lessening the day to day misery of anyone by any amount using practical means that can be implemented immediately.

I strongly feel that large amounts of no-strings cash to people who need social-service type help is one of the best things you can do for them.

No strings housing is a good start too, and I am proud to have voted for the woman currently running the 1811 Eastlake building (Nicole Marci -- Google her or that address, if interested) in a local election this year.

I have been volunteering with various harm reduction type organizations off and on for almost 20 years.

I find it curious though how some can think raising pay by fiat will help the poor.

Er, I don't know how much time you spend around "the poor", but I can guarantee giving them piles of cash money will help, regardless of how much ivory tower logic the average HN reader can spin on it from their $3000/month condo with a Tesla in the garage.

I will admit I stopped reading your comment after that sentence.