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ralmeida

337 karma · joined October 10, 2011

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/ralmeidab; my proof: https://keybase.io/ralmeidab/sigs/k6XInXgk2cHfKvZpbMDSOgc1rY0zNQP4HV90ABBt7is ]
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ralmeida··on Ask HN: List of titles and specifications for tech jobs?
Not a definitive list, but do look around on which titles other companies are using. One way to do that is through career ladders - the Dropbox one was already mentioned in this thread, but take a look at https://progression.fyi/ and https://www.levels.fyi/ for a compilation of other examples.

Another way is to take a look around LinkedIn and see what titles other companies are doing (especially ones in the same talent market as you). Look both in the titles of current/past employees and in the job postings themselves.

ralmeida··on Ask HN: How to disable right-click blocking in the browser
Probably some combination of security theater and well-intentioned but shallow, nearsighted and misguided attempt to increase security by reducing a perceived attackable surface area (i.e. likely somebody got scared with "View source" or something like that).
ralmeida··on Updated Okta Statement on Lapsus$
If someone has access to your laptop with a logged-in Gmail account, they could change your password and log you out of your other devices, effectively gaining total control of your account and locking you out.
ralmeida··on A concept that took hold in the ’70s haunted everything from seat belts to masks
> if health care professionals were missing PPE as a result

True, but "don't buy masks NOW because the health workers need them" is totally different than "don't buy masks because they are not effective for the general public and can actually be worse" - being either a terribly wrong idea (like the article defends) or outright lying to the public (if the message was told not because it was believed to be true, but as a roundabout way of being extra emphatic to avoid the public hoarding masks and causing PPE shortages for health workers).

ralmeida··on Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
> Maybe wikipedia also changed it (did you check?)

Here's a link to the Wikipedia entry from 2017, same text: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vaccine&oldid=798...

Here's a link to the CDC definition from 2017: https://web.archive.org/web/20171203162427/https://www.cdc.g... ("Vaccine: A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease.")

> It's all marketing at this point.

Definitions made prior to the pandemic would already fit the mRNA vaccines, therefore the claim that the definition was stretched for marketing/persuasion reasons don't really hold water.

> Not FDA approved in the US. "approval pending"

This FDA link claims Cominarty was approved in August 23 2021. The word "pending" is not found in this page.

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-appr...

> These kind of drugs take years to develop. This stuff was done in a few months.

"The first human clinical trials using an mRNA vaccine against an infectious agent (rabies) began in 2013." (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRNA_vaccine)

Of course the actual individual version for COVID-19 is newer, but then again, so is any flu vaccine that is updated basically yearly. What matters is the age of the "vaccine platform".

> They skipped some steps in the process.

Citation needed?

ralmeida··on Culturally transmitted skills and values
Fair enough, but in many cases some attendees attend only by inertia and would be better off declining instead anyway. Which is probably good overall if the meeting is indeed "stupid".
ralmeida··on Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
Time can also yield better vaccines, a policy of recurring vaccine doses (like the yearly flu shots), and milder variants that can emerge and become dominant, like some believe is what happened with the Spanish Flu.
ralmeida··on Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
And yet your own linked study says, right in the first paragraph, that vaccinated contacts got it 38% less often.

Is it possible that this is not enough, and “virtually everyone will eventually be exposed”? Yes. Is it possible that COVID will become endemic and many (but not all or even most) people will be exposed? Yes. Have I seen any source that makes a strong case for this? Not yet.

ralmeida··on Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
> Side effects don't have to happen in the next 6 months.

If you're willing to go that route, the same could be said for COVID itself.

ralmeida··on Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
Wikipedia defines "vaccine" as "a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious disease", which in my view would fit the Pfizer/Moderna shots. Which definition of "vaccine" do you subscribe to that these "treatments" don't fit into?

Also, mRNA is not the only type of vaccine for COVID.

Finally, two more questions: would you clarify which definition of "experimental" you subscribe to? And do you have a source for "testing standards were reduced"?

ralmeida··on Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
From a "reducing my risk of dying" perspective, you'd have to balance the risk of dying from taking the vaccine vs the risk of dying from COVID with zero treatments, one treatment, or both treatments.

The numbers could lean either way and would be very sensitive to variations in the probabilities involved - I'm sure it would be very hard to reach any form of consensus on "probability of dying from taking the vaccine". It's also worth addressing wasn't even making the point of which (so-called) experimental treatment has a better likely outcome but rather addressing criticism at (so-called) experimental treatments in general.

From an "unknown risk" perspective, you'd also have to consider that COVID itself could have yet-unknown long-term risks.

ralmeida··on Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
It wouldn't be necessarily illogical but would still qualify as "taking part in an experiment trial", as put by the parent post.

To determine if this is a rational strategy or not, we'd have to get real numbers (is it really likely that 1 in 100k people die from taking the vaccine?), and compare that against the reduction in probability of dying from COVID by even combining both treatments.

ralmeida··on Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
> it does little to prevent spread

How much, exactly?

> Over the long run we'll all be exposed no matter what we do

Plausible, but your sources don't appear to support that, other than the claim from Mr. Pollard. Is there anything I'm missing?

ralmeida··on Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
Citation needed - and note I didn't say it prevents "100% of spreading"
ralmeida··on Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
Do you have a source for R0 being _absolutely equal_ in vaccinated vs unvaccinated?
ralmeida··on Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
Which is a fair viewpoint from the societal level, but not as much for the individual level, which was implied in the parent message - i.e. how can "I'll take experimental treatment B instead of experimental treatment A" be an argument for not taking experimental treatments in general?
ralmeida··on Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
Some might, but not all, which is still a reduction
ralmeida··on Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
Why is this drug less experimental than the vaccines?
ralmeida··on Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%
Comparable individual outcome, worse societal outcome - you still spread it, so no reduction in overall cases, unlike a vaccine.
ralmeida··on Work Hard (2007)
I use Timing for macOS, pretty good: https://timingapp.com/ (available also from Setapp)
ralmeida··on A monorepo misconception – atomic cross-project commits
Most people don't, to be fair. The case where zero-downtime strategies are adopted for (at least) a questionable ROI is far more common.
ralmeida··on Eric Carle has died
In Portuguese, it's _Uma lagarta muito comilona_ according to Amazon - something like "A very guzzling cartepillar"
ralmeida··on A top audio engineer explains NPR’s signature sound (2015)
Maybe actual clock differences? Not sure if that's the case, but in audio engineering, a separate clock may be used to keep all devices involved in-sync (many pro-level audio devices have a "clock" input for this very reason).
ralmeida··on Architecture.md
Sounds right to me too. One quicker way to improve the 'first process' is to change only step one - do not spend a long time, but instead write a few paragraphs with what's most important and/or top-of-mind. Often, this opens the door to more contributions and questions.

Of course, update accordingly whenever you find yourself in a discussion about something with a contributor (no matter if the architecture doc is even part of the discussion or not).

ralmeida··on Ask HN: What's are your personal automations?
Speaking as someone with no clue about chicken farms, do the chicken naturally go back in the coop at night? Does your automation risk locking chickens outside the coop?
ralmeida··on AWS Lambda pricing now per ms
There's Provisioned Concurrency for Lambda which keeps an amount of Lambdas warm at a price, so you don't have to keep pinging your function yourself to pre-heat.
ralmeida··on Insights from Adopting TypeScript at Scale
Maybe not in the general case, but practically speaking, static analysis can infer the types of probably most completion you would need in day-to-day development.
ralmeida··on Managing my personnal servers in 2020 with K3s
Fair enough, my point was more about using k8s to deploy applications rather than “house server” stuff, where it’s indeed unneeded more often than not.
ralmeida··on Managing my personnal servers in 2020 with K3s
Exactly! Other non-scalability concerns they address (specifically talking about Kubernetes here) is a primitive amount of monitoring/observability; no-downtime updates (rolling updates); liveness/readiness probes; primitive service discovery and load balancing; resiliency to any one single host failing (even if the total compute power could easily fit into a single bigger server).
ralmeida··on How to properly manage SSH keys for server access
Agree, a job title of “DevOps Engineer” is an organizational smell for me.

Most people with such a title are actually something like “Automation Engineers”, “Infrastructure Engineers”, “Operations Engineers”, “Site Reliability Engineers”, etc, that are involved in a DevOps “process”, “initiative”, “culture”, etc.

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