Alex3917

This is the key issue. There is zero doubt whatsoever that flossing is essential, and the fact that the empirical evidence is equivocal shows the limitations of science to prove even the most obvious things.

> What’s stopping a similar crisis that 23andMe customers faced where their genetic data along with their identifying information getting sold to the highest bidder if you ever become insolvent?

Nucleus employee here. Nucleus is a medical provider that is providing a medical service and is regulated by medical laws, which extend even through bankruptcy or acquisition. Whereas 23andMe was essentially an entertainment company and was regulated as such, which is what enabled that unfortunate situation to occur.

> But then at the end it added a "Fun fact" that unicode actually does have a seahorse emoji, and proceeded to melt down in the usual way.

To be fair, most developers I’ve worked with will have a meltdown if I try to start a conversation about Unicode.

E.g. if during a job interview the interviewer asks you to check if a string is a palindrome, try explaining why that isn’t technically possible in Python (at least during an interview) without using a third-party library.

There is at least one service that scrapes and archives the DKIM keys of popular websites.

More common than needing stitches? That’s hard to believe.

> It’s still the best measure we have, though you should obviously know that LDL measured while on statins is lower than it would be normally.

I'm not a doctor, but doesn't LDL basically just prevent the body from healing damage to the epithelium, which comes from things like high blood pressure and inflammation? Unless my understanding is wildly off base, it doesn't really make sense that a thing that merely slows down the healing process would be more predictive than the things causing the damage in the first place, given that if you aren't accumulating significant damage then your levels of cholesterol are somewhat moot.

Seems like a reasonable policy. Given that the most talented tech workers, the ones the H1-B visas are designed to make it easier bring to the U.S., are getting $100M+ signing bonuses right now, a $100k/yr fee seems pretty trivial in comparison.

Given that AI has made repeatedly pulling the lever on the world's biggest digital slot machine feel like building a valuable software business, is it really any wonder that a lot of the younger founders who are raising seed rounds are really just glorified tweakers? I was recently on the market for a new job, and within two months I talked with three different founders who, pre-AI, may well have been "employed" stripping bicycles for parts to sell for meth. But now, thanks to Claude and ChatGPT, these folks are now able to vibe up enough traction to raise a couple million bucks in a seed round.

The fact that most of these folks are going to fail doesn't especially bother me. After all, that was true for previous generations as well. What's different now is that a lot of these folks not only won't be coming away from these experiences having developed marketable skills, but many of them will have significant health problems that prevent them from doing so in the future.

I'm actually very bullish on the use of AI in software development overall. But when placed in the hands of folks who haven't yet had the time to develop hard skills, it both enables and incentivizes cutting corners to an alarming extent.

> Next.js is easily the worst technology I've ever used.

To be fair, this is partly on the kind of people who use it. E.g. if you're trying to build something that's intended to last for 10+ years but you don't think it's worth it to spend the 20 hours watching the Udemy course on Angular, then your technology is going to be a complete dumpster fire no matter which stack you choose.

Really just one major breaking refactor in 13 years, and that is partly because not only have we learned a ton, but browsers themselves have changed dramatically. I'm not going to say it was perfectly handled, but they also didn't have nearly as much support from Google back then.

> I find it a tough sell to add another 20 years to life expectancy

20 years would be difficult, but 10 or so years would be very attainable.

em dashes are for denoting emphasis, whereas en dashes are for connecting compound words or phrases.

> I'm more talking about the particular contrastive structure.

But that's one of the main uses of emdashes, for signaling that the second half of the sentence is more important than the first half. If you Ctrl-F for emdashes on my blog, you can see I do it everywhere, even though all of my posts were written before LLMs existed:

https://alexkrupp.typepad.com/

> I can't stop seeing the LLM verbiage everywhere I look.

emdashes have been pretty popular among net native folks for the last 20+ years, e.g. if you were to look back at the most popular Kuro5hin stories from ~2001 - 2005, you'd see them everywhere. People just aren't used to the average person being able to write well, so it looks weird to them.

I mean with LLMs you just copy-paste in the input format of your new CMS and then upload your export file. Even if it only took 15 minutes before, it now takes 0 minutes.

At least with LLMs, we can just write a query to migrate the export to whatever target format we want. The main issue is just breaking 20 years worth of inbound links.

I have no doubt that it wasn't vc profitable, but my assumption (without any inside info) is that the real issue is that they were using some hacked up version of Movable Type that they couldn't upgrade.

It's frustrating though because imho it's arguably still the best blog platform to this day.

This. Claims of a universal antiviral are as old as western medicine itself. Literally the only reason anyone knows what the Hippocratic oath is is because Hippocrates was already famous at the time for promoting elderberry as the universal antiviral.

> From that perspective a one person unicorn is very feasible if we think about it as building a network effect monopoly.

To build a one person unicorn, the main thing you need is an arbitrage opportunity for getting users that is unattractive to multi-person companies. Once established, this business may well turn into a network effect monopoly, but I don't think that is the crux of what is needed to get going.

When using it to write code, what I'm seeing so far is that it's spending less effort trying to reason about how to solve problems from first principles, and more effort just blatantly stealing everything it can from open source projects.

> A decent case of Python 4.0?

I definitely agree with this eventually, but for now why not just let developers set `dynamic=False` on objects and make it opt in? This is how Google handles breaking Angular upgrades, and in practice it works great because people have multiple years to prepare for any breaking changes.

> This is exactly the reason why Computer Vision approaches for parsing PDFs works so well in the real world.

One of the biggest benefits of PDFs though is that they can contain invisible data. E.g. the spec allows me to embed cryptographic proof that I've worked at the companies I claim to have worked at within my resume. But a vision-based approach obviously isn't going to be able to capture that.

> Everyone is still guessing.

This isn't actually true, as the article points out; there is actually tons of empirical research.

If you think about all the software you use or interact with on a daily basis, the median one is probably around 30 years old. The issue isn't that skills are becoming less valuable, it's that folks have attention spans that are too short to learn how existing systems work and/or finish what they start.

Yeah unfortunately they are tricky to get rid of once you have them. In theory I can forward the email from one account to another, but in practice it's hard to think through all the weird security issues that might arise from doing so.

I don't remember the exact details, but it basically involved something along the lines of:

1) Loop through a list of permissions in a for list

2) After the loop block, check if the user had a certain permission. The line of code performing the check was improperly indented and should have failed, but instead succeeded because the last permission from the previous loop was still in scope.

Fortunately there was no real impact because it only affected users within the same company, but it was still pretty bad.

> `for i in range(5): ...` will leave `i` bound to 4 after the loop. reply

This "feature" was responsible for one of the worst security issues I've seen in my career. I love Python, but the scope leakage is a mess. (And yes, I know it's common in other languages, but that shouldn't excuse it.)

Out of curiosity, is there a reason why you are using ELO proper, rather than one of the ELO variants that doesn't make assumptions about the distribution of results? E.g.:

https://github.com/pfmonville/whole_history_rating

The ambient soundscapes of Burial's self-titled album have some similarities to the sonic soundscapes of pet sounds.

> And from an employee perspective, it’s almost always the right decision to place very little value ($0) on the stock option component of your offer. The vast majority of cases stock options end up worthless.

This isn't actually true from a historical perspective. The primary reason why the gap between the wealthy and and everyone is increasing is that employees started preferring cash compensation over equity. Joseph Blasi documented this in his book The Citizen's Share, and that book is why Elizabeth Warren recently passed legislation making it easier for employers to give equity to their employees.