Hacker News: epmatsw

New comment by epmatsw in "Package managers keep using Git as a database, it never works out"

epmatsw — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 19:27:53 +0000

Every SSRed app these days…

New comment by epmatsw in "Electric vehicle sales are booming in South America – without Tesla"

epmatsw — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 19:56:22 +0000

Trivially substitutable goods, at a much lower price, with a now-reduced ethical difference. Not hard to see why.

New comment by epmatsw in "NPM debug and chalk packages compromised"

epmatsw — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 16:29:07 +0000

Annoyingly, npm audit relies on github's advisory DB, which is currently incorrectly flagging all versions of these packages, not just the compromised ones.

https://github.com/github/advisory-database/issues/6098

New comment by epmatsw in "Uber to introduce fixed-route shuttles in major US cities"

epmatsw — Wed, 14 May 2025 18:55:25 +0000

Reminds me of Chariot from back in the day. That was nice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariot_(company)

New comment by epmatsw in "Git Commands That Cover 90% of a Developer's Daily Workflow"

epmatsw — Fri, 02 May 2025 15:54:44 +0000

restore and maybe switch are the two missing ones I think. Rebase for me, but that’s preference. Cherry-pick too.

New comment by epmatsw in "Visiting Us"

epmatsw — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 14:54:53 +0000

There’s also a strong culture of ownership of quality for individual developers. Design documents are expected for even minor changes, and each change goes through at least 2 rounds of well-documented testing by 2 other developers on your team. Compared to other companies where automated testing is the norm, it’s startling how few bugs they manage to ship.

Another thing I thought was interesting given modern dev practices is that you don’t even touch production code until after about 6 months of training, including exams and testing on the actual functionality of the product, even bits you’ll never interact with personally. They’re serious about making sure you know what you’re doing before you get within a mile of something that could affect patients.

They also have a pretty strong accountability culture. I shipped two fairly embarrassing bugs my first year and had a very serious conversation with my manager about whether I should continue to be employed since I’d used up about 50% of our team’s allowed bugs for the year. But on the other side, once I got my feet under me, they were very good about recognizing improvement.

New comment by epmatsw in "Visiting Us"

epmatsw — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 14:49:54 +0000

Ha, we were pushing complexity metrics back in 2012. The Security team added it as a PQA step in 2013 when I was there, no idea if that stuck around.

New comment by epmatsw in "Visiting Us"

epmatsw — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 21:53:49 +0000

The state of MUMPS has progressed a lot since this article was written, to the point where most MUMPS developers would probably only vaguely recognize this. Even the "MUMPS" they were using back in 2014 or so was really a higher-level dialect + higher-level framework (Chronicles) that was transpiled down to actual MUMPS. It was more like writing ES2015 + JSX or whatever and then actually executing ES3 + DOM operations.

Source: was on a team that was performance sensitive enough that I spent a lot of time in the actual transpiled MUMPS code that did look more like this article.

New comment by epmatsw in "On JavaScript's Weirdness"

epmatsw — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 14:37:45 +0000

And yet, per the spec, new syntax features are allowed to break ASI:

> As new syntactic features are added to ECMAScript, additional grammar productions could be added that cause lines relying on automatic semicolon insertion preceding them to change grammar productions when parsed.

So really, the rules are “there are currently 2 exceptions and an infinite number allowed to be added at any time”. To me, that’s worth letting prettier auto-insert semicolons when I hit save.

New comment by epmatsw in "TSMC begins producing 4-nanometer chips in Arizona"

epmatsw — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 16:23:13 +0000

It's sunny for a lot of the year. Ex. you can get an extra harvest of alfalfa per year compared to other climates.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owieQnPYfT8

New comment by epmatsw in "How can NBA address 3-point boom? Ranking 12 potential solutions"

epmatsw — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 23:18:13 +0000

Shortening the regular season is the answer. Too many games, too many teams in the playoffs, means that no game has any impact vs an NFL game.

New comment by epmatsw in "What is metformin's secret sauce?"

epmatsw — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 21:30:39 +0000

Re: longevity, ITP didn't find any significant impact from metformin. Afaik they're the most rigorous testers of this sort of thing, so that's pretty significant to me.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27312235/

New comment by epmatsw in "A $12k Surgery to Change Eye Color Is Surging in Popularity"

epmatsw — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 15:22:48 +0000

What qualifies as an extreme sport? Does skiing count? Football? Soccer?

Does moderate alcohol factor in? Being obese? What’s your line where a personal choice that has some risk disqualifies you?

New comment by epmatsw in "Blood test for colon cancer screening approved by US regulators"

epmatsw — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 00:39:25 +0000

I’m really excited for the possibilities liquid biopsies like this introduce. I look forward to when I can get these in an annual physical without having to pay out of pocket and/or jump through a bunch of hoops

New comment by epmatsw in "A specification for adding human/machine readable meaning to commit messages"

epmatsw — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 23:19:15 +0000

Tbh I really don't like this.

Git already has an established format for machine-readable metadata, trailers. There's even a built-in command for working with them, git interpret-trailers. This pulls data-for-computers into an area that should be data-for-humans.

New comment by epmatsw in "The one-year anniversary of my total glossectomy"

epmatsw — Tue, 28 May 2024 17:21:44 +0000

They're running discounts lately, my dr's office had $200 off for anyone that wanted it and they have regular sales every couple of months it seems.

New comment by epmatsw in "Controlling the Taylor Swift Eras Tour wristbands with Flipper Zero"

epmatsw — Mon, 27 May 2024 20:20:01 +0000

I spent an honestly embarrassing amount of time at the first show I went to trying to figure out how they'd managed it.

New comment by epmatsw in "The one-year anniversary of my total glossectomy"

epmatsw — Mon, 27 May 2024 02:01:31 +0000

It is! I got one for $750-ish about a month ago.

New comment by epmatsw in "US drug control agency will move to reclassify marijuana"

epmatsw — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 19:02:01 +0000

Please. It's insane that people are dying from fentanyl overdoses taking molly, absolutely not the right societal trade off to be making any more.

New comment by epmatsw in "23andMe's Fall"

epmatsw — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 16:29:04 +0000

They've been doing that for months. Scummy behavior tbh. It happened right after the hack, but there's also a new crop of competitors that let you upload your raw 23andMe data, so there's speculation that it's trying to stop the outflow.

If you email them about it, you just basically get a copy-pasta reply restating the message on the site, and if you keep emailing them 3+ times asking for a refund (ask me how I know), they'll tell you you can manually upload identity verification and they'll get back to you in 6-8 weeks with the data.