DougWebb

Same job, about six years into it, a major project came up that I had staked my reputation on. For almost six months, I was working 80-100 hrs/wk. It destroyed me. My metabolism shut down, my thyroid was damaged. My body temperature dropped from 98.6F to 97F, and overnight while I slept it dropped to 96F and I had trouble waking up in the mornings. I found out later that if it had dropped any lower than that, my body would not have been able to warm itself back up. It took about a decade for my temperature to return to normal, but I still need thyroid medication. And my ability to work long hours has never returned; it's a good thing productivity continues to increase with experience. I work a lot smarter now.

EDIT: the project was a success, at least. My boss was awarded employee of the year, but I was awarded second employee of the year, which was the only time they did that. I also got a little engraved glass plaque, the kind that comes from a corporate gifts catalog. Maybe a $50 gift card too. So worth destroying my metabolism for over a decade.

58 percent [of physicians surveyed] agreed strongly that DTC ads make the drugs seem better than they really are.

Physicians thought the ads did not convey information about risks and benefits equally well. Seventy-eight percent of physicians believe their patients understand the possible benefits of the drug very well or somewhat, compared to 40 percent who believe their patients understand the possible risks, and 65 percent believe DTC ads confuse patients about the relative risks and benefits of prescription drugs. In addition, about 75 percent of physicians surveyed believed that DTC ads cause patients to think that the drug works better than it does, and many physicians felt some pressure to prescribe something when patients mentioned DTC ads.

Eight percent of physicians said they felt very pressured to prescribe the specific brand-name drug when asked.

Doctors believe that patients understand that they need to consult a health care professional about appropriate treatment. Eighty-two percent responded either "very well" or "somewhat" when asked whether they believe that their patients understand that only a doctor can decide whether a drug is right for them.

Note the last point means that 18% of the doctors believed that their patients thought they knew better than the doctor about whether or not a drug is right for them.

The few positive aspects, about patients being better informed about drug therapies that might help them, could be solved by making the monthly journal info I described available online. People go to Google and type in their symptoms and/or the name of their disease if they know it, and end up on sites like drugs.com and webmd.com. If Google were indexing the journal I described, and those other sites pulled from it too (publishing license should allow that, as it would be publicly funded), then patients would see all of the good information about the drugs, without the advertising bias.

Regarding You're just running a wealth transfer or insurance program in addition at that point. Yes, that would be a major purpose of nationalizing drug R&D and manufacturing. You could say the same about every public service.

Having healthy people isolated is not about protecting the healthy people. It's about stopping the healthy people from spreading the disease to the high-risk people.

That kind of sounds like a structure of living cells. They're more complex than a structure of lego blocks, but they can do a lot more too.

Don't take that as an argument in favor of OOP though. Building with legos is a lot easier to get right than building with cells would be.

The website is built using a CMS that's part of our product line, which auto-generates a sitemap.xml file. It also automatically produces a Sitemap page: https://surroundtech.com/sitemap. The two tabs of interest are "Cards", which shows how each page would look when shared via social media links, and "Sitemap Tree" which shows the (non-graphical) page tree.

To be fair to the visual tool, our auto-generated xml is just a flat list of urls, and our auto-generated url routing is a flat list of uniquely named pages rather than a /-separated hierarchy. To create our own sitemap page we use the hierarchy that's built into our CMS, which also creates the top-level menu on the site.

As for performance, it really helps if you write idiomatic Perl code. There may be more than one way to do it, but some ways are better. For example, an explicit for loop over a list has to be compiled to byte code that steps through the looping, but if you use map or grep the byte code calls a pre-written optimized function that loops as fast as code written in C would be. The more idiomatic your code is, the more optimized calls like that you get, and the faster your code will run.

I really don't get people who are against tipping people in low-paid service jobs. (Even if they're making at least minimum wage.) If you're paid more than they are, and their service is providing you with value, show them some appreciation!

As the writer of Markdown content, you're often both the user of the content and the publisher of the content, so you do care about how it looks. Even if you're just the user, your intention when writing is to communicate something, and the eventual appearance of your content impacts how it is interpreted by the reader. So you still care about how your writing will look, which forces you to care about how the publishing process interprets the markdown syntax.

That's a gross mis-characterization of keto diets, at least when done properly[1].

Up to 20g of net-carbs (ie: non-fiber) per day. The intention is to moderate your insulin response, which impacts other hormones and, for weight loss, switches your fat cells to be able to release fat for energy instead of storing fat. That level of carbs are more than adequate to maintain necessary blood sugar levels for your body's needs.

There's no "weird starvation mode". Lowering your carb intake and moderating your insulin response causes your body to stop the "easy" burning of carbs for energy, and to switch to burning fat (from your food first, fat cells second) for energy. A big misconception about keto is that you have to eat a lot of fat; if you're trying to lose weight that's not true. You need to consume enough fat to keep your calorie intake from being too low (otherwise you do get into a starvation mode which lowers your metabolism), but low enough so that your body needs to get fat from your fat cells to make up its energy needs.

All that said, I have no idea if keto helps with cancer at all. It almost certainly has no direct affect. If there's any benefit, I would guess that it's related to the hormonal and metabolic impacts of fat-burning rather than carb-burning, or the reduction of systemic inflammation that most people on extended keto diets experience.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/keto/wiki/faq

https://stripe.com/docs/api/idempotent_requests

My client is under no obligation to make access to this data easier. It's not really their data either; the information is property addesses, owner names and addresses, and tax assessments and payments. My client wouldn't want to make it easier for scammers to get that data. So they're not going to do anything unless they know the scraper is legit. If that's the case, the api would require authentication, and any fees would be for the server load, not the data.

For years now we've been in an arms race with someone using a botnet to scrape all of the account information for a particular county. My client doesn't care so much about the data; it's the server load that's a problem. Normal activity for this site is a few dozen account searches per minute, but when the botnet gets through our blockade it sends hundreds of search requests per second, overwhelmimg the site. The operator of the botnet has NEVER tried to contact my client to ask for an efficient api to access the data, which they'd probably provide for a minimal fee.

Data hosting isn't free, even if the data is.

Luckily, over time todos tend to become todon'ts, so losing track of the old ones isn't generally a problem.

I made some enhancements in 2019 to my Hacker News reader (https://webbindustries.com/hackernews), but who hasn't made one of those.

[0] https://sidequestvr.com/#/app/303

When the consumer wants to get rid of the product, they can just throw it out and send it to a landfill. If they do, the fee is kept by the government.

Or, the consumer can get the product to a recycling company, somehow. The recycling company can then request the fee amount from the government. This would require tracking the product's UPC and proof of the # of items recycled, or individual serial numbers. (The tracking info, from sale to disposal, could be sold to marketers for additional revenue. For extra value, attach the info to the consumer for targeted advertising.)

Finally, the recycling company, after getting the sales tax money from the consumer and selling the consumer's data for targeted marketing, can now sell the recycled components back to the manufacturing companies. None of the proceeds make their way back to the consumer, of course.

I don't see any economic benefit for consumers here; in fact the cost burden is mostly on them. That suggests Congress would probably love the idea.

I've also seen an article not long ago showing 'visualizations' of dark matter around a spiral galaxy, and it was mostly in teardrop-shaped lobes above and below the galaxy's center and aligned on the axis, rather than distributed through the disk. I didn't think of it at the time but now that I do, it seems like that distribution also indicates that light from the stars is pushing the dark matter away.