jackschultz

When I started web work ~9 years ago, it was with Rails and ActiveRecord, which turns out to be incredibly good for basic queries and pretty basic apps. So good to the point where I never bothered to go too far into SQL until years later, which was a mistake.

When doing work in python, I don't feel it has a comparable ORM, to where I kind of write my own files that have things like finders and updaters and creators. In most cases, I've found it's much better than SQLAlchemy. Dealing with joins, and things like math, meaning averages, sums, distributions, division, is so much better to be done in the query rather than more basic queries and looping through the results.

There are of course cases like injections to look at, but lots of things I have are calculations of data and showing it, so we're able to handle it with raw queries. Also, ActiveRecord has ways to enforce no injections.

In lots of cases, we've found that using an ORM to start, finding slowness, and moving towards raw queries is a great way to go.

What an odd part of history we're in. Imagine 50 years ago, how few options there were for people with tumor problems. Surgery, drugs to help with things like associated seizures. And then imagine 50 years in the future where there could be more of these solutions coming.

Article says ~15 month life average after being diagnosed with GBM, but imagine. Then think how in 3 years this new drug could extend the life of a person by 6 months. 6 months is a huge amount of time for a person and their family. Changes happen so quick in medicine, even going past clickbait "new drug" articles.

There's constant arguments about this, whether a driver for Lyft / Uber, or a delivery driver of Grubhub, Doordash, UberEats, is either an employee or contractor. And yet, I haven't seen talk of the creation of a new type of worker, one for the gig economy.

I get that there's a big difficulty in creating these laws, with politicians who don't know exactly what the solution is, but someone needs to start by saying look, these gig economy workers are neither "employees" or "contractors" with the current law definitions, so we're going to create a new definition of worker geared towards these cases which makes sure employees aren't being taken advantage of, but also makes it possible for these companies to continue.

What in the world is going on with HN today? There's this post trying to make fun of those who like to take pictures in an "I'm better than you because I enjoy the moment" sort of way, then there's another post about "Was Email a Mistake?" from the New Yorker nonetheless, and then another one titled "Tardigrades may now be living on Moon" which is an article which should be retitled "Tardigrades aren't living on the moon, but click here anyway!"

There are comments in all threads talking about how they're not good things to be posted and talked about, but these don't fit with what I feel HN should be about.

If we're speaking about punctuation, there really needs to be another mark in between a period and exclamation point, something that means what you said is sincere.

Responding to a text by saying "Thanks." or "Thanks!" is so different. If I was talking to someone and they gave a compliment, I'd want to say a sincere "thanks", but there isn't a way to do that in a text that doesn't come off as weird.

Woah. It's hard to talk politics here but this is hard to read. Unsure if this is allowed, but tough to read how apparently it's a single person, William Barr, who's asking for people to be killed. Secondly, the people they choose to kill first "is a member of a white supremacist group", with the straight up goal of not allowing people to play the race card in debating this. Oof.

Typing that up it really makes me feel like this link shouldn't be posted here on HN. Even though the people leaving comments are are much more relatable and better than other online boards, it seems more fitting to be talked about in another place.

I've always felt this fit into Gladwell's article from the New Yorker about gun violence:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/thresholds-of-...

The overview is that for gun violence, one act makes the next one slightly more likely. When people see someone perform an act, ones like shootings or suicides, others see it as somewhat more acceptable.

Here's a relevant quote:

> In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.

Take out riots, and add suicides, and there's a match.

I know people can have different opinions on Gladwell, but I feel this is a very well thought out writing about it, and in a way that isn't talked about.

Here's a podcast episode where he talks about it too:

https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/political-scene/malcolm-gl...

> It’s not hard, it just requires you have politicians capable of dodging the huge piles of cash MasterCard and Visa throw at them whenever talk of breaking the duopoly hits the table.

Ignoring the difficulty of avoiding lobbying money, yes, it'd be difficult. This is a large scale financial change and there are always, always loopholes that will come, not just from politicians who make those because of lobbying money. With how giant the economies are, and how often these cards are used, it isn't a simple move at all.

Look at credit card chip readers in the US. The amount of backend equipment change it took to get something "that simple" in action was a lot. I'm not defending them for it not being quicker, but a move like a duel card is absolutely difficult.

Before I clicked on that link I was worried it was another one about how we should be the ones in action to cool down the planet, but I'm glad to see that it talks down on doing that, and also stays neutral.

"Polluting", meaning adding non-existing gas to the air, to combat pollution seems completely off to me. In so many cases, people talk about how a simple action can solve problems and yet so many times, people underestimate the complexity of the situation.

Tax laws have to be a great example of this, where changes leave loopholes and people are smart enough to get around them. I'm sure people won't like that comparison, but it almost seems like the atmosphere is more complex than tax laws, and simple solutions wouldn't work there either.

I don't know where these stories come from, or how much the media is taking studies and framing them in their own way, but I can't see how spraying sulfur dioxide to artificially cool the planet is in any way a good idea.

The thing that always bugs me with these arguments is that people don't seem to bring up the idea of creating a new legal class for these types of workers. Arguing whether those workers fit contractors or employees isn't great to read about because frankly, they fit in neither.

From Uber/Lyft drivers, to Door Dash delivery workers, to any other sort of up and coming on demand work which I'm sure keep coming and evolving, I believe creating a new legal class would be well worth the effort rather than arguing about where they fit in the current system.

This type of solution isn't easy. With all the arguments about if the drivers are contractors or employees, creating a new class of workers will easily be just as difficult; instead of legal fees for the law interpretation, it'd be legal fees for law creation.

Are you sure? Because the article doesn't mention 'degree' or 'graduate' at all. This article is only about the culture of violence in football and its repercussions later in life. There are tons of other articles and talks about this, but here, there's nothing.

I hate the NCAA. People who think players don't deserve to get paid for what they bring to the table in football or basketball because they're getting free education are incredibly wrong. The culture of the majority of the programs and also the desire of the players themselves don't put education first. But this article isn't about that issue, it's about injuries in football alone.

Redacted. According to the ABC news segment on it right now.

I'll first say that I haven't read the full article, which frankly, is the same as most everyone who writes a comment.

The title and intro reminded me of this piece from the New Yorker a few months ago that written by a doctor and his experiences and others with the computers in the doctor field.

HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18381969

The summary is that health care, in the US and other countries too, is a giant system where even little changes take time to go through and become accepted. People who say there's an easy solution for electronic records are in no way correct.

It's a great read both in the information it gives, and also how good of a write the doctor is. I love his writing style.

It was a deja vu feeling every time, but also involved other things after, like the tingly arm and the word confusion. Also, I could tell there was a difference between the seizure deja vu and the "normal" deja vu. I don't want to be the one to say don't see a doctor because of it, but I had much more going on and had had those before.

Great point on being conscious and aware of it. For me the entire time, I knew something funky was going on, but I was wondering why. Like I said in the top comment, words and letters go in shambles, but I'm able to think and know that it was an odd event.

Exactly with mine. The first times I had these I don't remember them, but the people around me did. Where I'd just tell them to hold on before I could understand them again. Took until I was getting them daily where the hit of the seizure was enough to be noticeable.

Temporal lobe seizures are interesting too because for me, it was just the word issues. I had one while riding a bike when I still didn't know what was going on, and I kept going being actively confused, like I knew something odd was going on with the word / thinking part of my brain, but nothing at all physical.

For me, when I looked up online and saw my symptoms were pretty much exactly temporal lobe seizures, I went to see a doctor at the Mayo Clinic (I'd tried a local one but I had to see a normal doctor first before a referral to a more specific one and that process was not the best) and the Mayo doctor did an EEG, MRI, and pointed at the tumor that was causing the seizures.

The medication is a huge problem, considering how many side effects there are and trying to find the right one is so difficult. I've very jealous that you were able to get off the meds.

These types of medical problems seem so random and crazy things can happen. I always wonder what it'd be like if we had these problems 50 years in the future when the knowledge of seizures and medicine has made much more progress.

Super interesting.

I also just want to note to people that seizures aren't always the kind that they're portrayed, with the person falling to the ground and shaking.

Couple years ago I had these events start which turned out to be partial temporal lobe seizures. I would get a big flash of deja vu, my right arm would tingle starting at the shoulder and creep down to my fingers for about a second, and then I'd get hit with a tiny thump in my head where for the next few minutes I couldn't comprehend. I could still think, and I was able to tell people I was talking to to hold on, and give me a little time before we could start talking again. I had one while reading for example and the words got completely meshed together, where the characters were combined in different orders and didn't look understandable at all. I was wondering why the hell I couldn't read, and eventually the words started coming back together.

The reason I'm saying this is that it took more a while to realize these are considered seizures. I didn't know what was going on and didn't think it was anything much until they started coming one a day and that thump getting a little bigger each time.

This kind of seizure was listed in the paper as one of the test subjects. Someone I know was the one to tell me that those events might be a seizure, and I don't know how much longer it'd have been for me to come to that realization on my own. So maybe me saying this can help someone else. That, or get a dog that can smell seizures like in the paper!

Last year my sister had a week off and took the Empire Builder across the country out west. Lots of talk about how the sleeper car is worth it and I remembered she didn't, so I asked her her take and this is the response:

"I traveled alone on the Empire Builder from Milwaukee to Portland, Oregon (two nights/almost 48 hours) in June 2018. I wanted to get a sleeper car but waited too long to book so my only option was a regular seat. I knew I’d be unhappy if I went straight through two nights with no bed and no shower, so I made a stop in Whitefish, Montana for 24 hours. In the end it couldn’t have worked out better. I loved Whitefish and was happy to spend some time exploring the beautiful scenery I’d seen whizzing by. The sights around Glacier National Park were literally breathtaking.

As far as the train itself, I spent most of time in the observation car, and as a solo traveler I was happy to find everyone was very friendly. I’m only 5’2” and luckily didn’t have a seatmate so I could pretty much lay all the way down at night. A lot of people brought pillows and blankets, but I was ok without. Ear plugs and an eye mask were the key to getting any sleep. There were delays here and there which didn’t bother me because I had a very loose schedule anyway.

I don’t have enough good things to say about my trip! I’m looking for an excuse to take another long-haul train."

People have their own stories, so hopefully this gives another perspective.

I know these comments are kind of frowned upon on threads talking about an issue like this, but very interesting use of imgur. Effectively a blog post focused on images, which is a very good way of thinking about posts I feel. People love images rather than only words. Has imgur been looking at this? Trying to push it as another big use for its platform?

Gotta ask, when's the time to buy Boeing stock? It's like all these things happen, stock gets dumped quickly, but it's not like this hurts the overall value of the company.

Anyone have other examples of events like this taking down a big company's stock price for a limited time, but not affecting it overall?

Anyone else see these and think about how maybe there should be some other type of worker other than employee or contractor? Those are hard definitions, and creating laws to reflect this type of worker is incredibly difficult considering people and companies figure out loopholes, but really feels like there should be another category to go with this type of work that's going to become more and more common.

People say these things all the time, but I always wonder how you'd actually feel if you did the 3-5 year work and saved that 3-5 million you earned. My guess is with most people, you get that 3-5 million and you're going to want more. I'm not saying you specifically, but people in general.

And a clarification, I'm not thinking it'd be because you're around wealthier people which would make you want to spend more to compare to them, but rather having more security, if your passion requires more money.

A lot of talk comes up about the facebook and twitter like buttons where most people agree that they're terrible. I for one can't imagine bothering with twitter unless there was a like button, or at least some way for people to show they agree with what the person twitted. Are they supposed to reply to with a thumbs up emoji? Or "I agree"? They really need some easy way for people to show their agreement. The older original forums are one place where people in a more closed area can talk without distinct likes, but for a more open network, there needs to be something easy for people to show support so the people creating the content know what people like.

Here's the New York Times article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/magazine/ancient-dna-pale...

Boy that seems so story based. That's what's to be expected to get people to read, but also makes it so easy to come up with examples of misinformation when the story is trying to make a subject more easily understandable.

Wow that was very well written. In an intense situation where after the fact people want to write dramatically, this was the opposite in a great way. We all still feel attached and with a great sense of what happened, the pace it was written, and the events that stood out to him and were told. It's so nice to have something like that rather than an over the top description. Granted, I'm not sure if he wrote that himself or was helped / ghostwritten as is the extremely annoying case in tons of articles, but either way, well done.

Almost a day late, but I'll throw this in here if people come by later looking for more suggestions.

From this year, I read all but two of the Haruki Murakami books and all short stories. I love his writing style (great translations), and the fact that the stories are about not all the time realness. Kafka on the Shore is a great starting book. Also Norwegian Wood is another example, though this strayed away from the magical aspect I like of his.

Another from this year was The Dubliners, collection of short stories from James Joyce. I was stuck in Dublin during a snow storm this past spring, so I'm sure this lead me to like the stories more, but I swear they're amazing and I haven't found anything else like them. They're all tiny points in people's lives, and the things that happen make differences for the people or are also easy to remember and not forget. Get one with reference notes in the back too.

Besides those, Love in the Time of Cholera was another one way up on my list. Similar to One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I think I prefer slightly more, but reading both is interesting to read since Cholera was written 20 years after Solitude and we can see how the author changed over time.

Overall though, my absolute top tier books are East of Eden, Catch-22, and My Struggle (Knausgaard). 1000% read those. I like including these so if somebody reads this and likes these books as well, they can somewhat trust my other suggestions.

I was in Tokyo a couple years ago and was incredibly impressed with how everyone acted on their subway and the escalators there. Incredible amount of people being in sync. No way that's comparable to London which is what half the article talks about.

I really dislike these types of articles that try to use stats for reasoning. They claim that between 2013 and 2014, so over 365 days, there were 1475 total accidents, 880 from being "improper"? What qualifies as an accident? And what's improper? If there are that many issues? Why not only make stairs? (They have those too). Another "study" is listed saying that in London, "reduced congestion by 30 percent" whatever that means. And another reasoning I disagree wit (one that can't be proven let's be honest) is that this will stop people from being jerks on the escalators. I'm pretty sure that this would annoy more people if they're unable to get by.

The only possibly reasoning is that for super long escalators, very few people walk, so half the capacity is being used.

I'll give JR East credit. If they think double side standing should be the way to go, trying it out for a month and seeing how it goes is a great way of handling it, instead of forcing it from now on and having too much confidence in success as is mostly the case in these social change campaigns.

One more thing, why is the url's slug pretty much completely different? What was the article about before? And by the way, in Tokyo, walkers go up the right side, standers are on the left. You can even see that in the picture at the top of the page. Pretty sure if you're writing about escalators in Tokyo you should mention that.

I always find cases like this really interesting, how predicting outcomes can lead to tons of success in markets. Political events like this are big money winners if you can predict the answer. Same with elections themselves for the affects of the person's plans.

Besides polling data, prediction markets always seem like the could be a legitimate way to guess results. I used to work at a place that ran those, but biggest problem is to make sure the members are committed to answering the questions and learning more about the situation. There's been proof that these cases can be successful.

Another event that comes up is company's quarterly reports that lead to giant price changes in their stock instantly. There are "specialist" predictions out there, but having better guesses leads to straight money. Knowledge of those numbers would be huge for traders, and us non-traders alike. Finding some legal and respectable way to predict these big outcomes would be incredibly valuable. Then again, if there was a correct way to make predictions, we wouldn't be having these discussions.

One of the cases listed above is how they didn't give a refund after going up in the supervisor chain, where the higher person still said the shoes were legit. Only when the story was high up on reddit did they give in. Definitely trying to improve for sure however.