I ended up paying $12K to Mayo for a week of appointments. Private insurance, if I could have gotten it, would have been at least $1000/mo for premiums (in 2020) plus $10K deductible, so I actually saved money just paying Mayo instead of getting private insurance.

IMO the only reason insurance companies allowed the ACA to pass was the stipulation that everyone in the US was required to get insurance coverage or face a penalty. When the Supreme Court ruled that provision illegal, I'm sure the insurance companies were furious that they were duped.

It has been a very educational journey and remains interesting to me 18 years later - longer than any other project I've worked on. I've had thoughts about commercializing it over the years, but as has been mentioned, navigating online payment services, making a fancy portal, testing it with several browsers, etc. is not that interesting to me: the programming details are the interesting part.

HashBackup has always had a quarterly expiration date built in to the backup portion in case I did decide to commercialize it or a company wanted to acquire it, but recently I decided to ditch that idea and removed the expiration date. I've recently had some health issues that are going to cost society a not-insignificant amount, so letting HashBackup remain free is a way for me to feel like, in a small way, I'm paying it back a little.

My parents married right out of high school, which was pretty much the norm I think. I lived on a dead-end street where nearly every house had kids my age. Dads worked, moms didn't. Moms might babysit, iron, do laundry for others, etc., but moms took care of the house and the kids. The houses were 850 sq ft, most with 3 (small!) bedrooms, a kitchen a living room, and 1 bath. We lived in that house until I was 8 and my sisters were 6 and 2, so 5 of us in 850 sq ft.

My dad worked as a bag boy at Kroger during high school and could: - get married - buy a house after a year married - start a family at 20 - had 1 car for the family - had a boat - had a motorcycle right out of high school. There's no way an unskilled high-school kid could do that today. They'd be lucky to have a car and be able to fill it with gas and have car insurance.

I don't think most people today would consider that lifestyle feasible, but at the time, it was fine. I don't think it's doable today because both parents have to work since inflation over the decades has had a dramatic effect on prices.

I announced it on the Prime Usenet group and a guy wrote to say he was interested in using it for production, but had been burned before and wanted to make sure it worked. So I set him up a VM in my basement, he uploaded a bunch of his executables, and they all worked. I charged $1000/mo for the emulator. Since he was in the EU, I knew I wouldn't have a leg to stand on to get paid if they decided to stiff me, so I did some investigating into a Matrix dongle. It was pretty slick, and I coded up a copy protection scheme that allowed the emulator to run only when the dongle was inserted, and it contacted a license server in my basement to verify that it was allowed to run. To make sure my basement server wasn't a critical resource, I had the dongle setup like a battery that got periodically "charged": if the license server was down, the emulator kept running for up to N days on its local charge, giving me time to solve issues with the license server.

This went on for a few years, but they were never happy they had to actually keep paying for the technology. I heard every excuse in the book about why they needed a backup dongle. I knew the real reason they wanted one was to hire someone to hack it, but unfortunately, that would mean removing it, and that would halt the emulator within 5 minutes. So they came up with excuses like:

"Our state regulator requires us to have a backup computer system, so we need 2 dongles". No, you start computer 2, move the dongle, and you're fine.

One time I heard from a guy who said he heard about the emulator from a Prime parts guy in Chicago I knew, and wanted to try it out for a large EU bank. I asked where to send it, and surprise - it was the same city as my other customer! So I call R in Chicago and asked him how the conversation went with this "banking" customer, and R says "It was kinda weird. He said he had a Prime with a failing disk drive, but when I asked what model drive he had, he didn't know. He kept asking if there was any other solution for him besides hardware until R says "Well, there's a guy that has an emulator", which the banking guy jumped on immediately. So I go to Google and lookup this address the banker gives me to send the dongle to, and it's a massage parlor!

All in all, it was a good deal for me and a good deal for him, even if he wasn't happy about it. He was getting paid to support his own Prime software that he didn't have to port. But I learned my lesson as a youngin' about companies saying they will pay for something. I sold some printer/spooler minicomputer software in my early 20's and had a large investment bank (huge actually, as in everyone at the time would recognize their name) try it out for a month. They called and said they were processing the one-time license fee of $1500 but could I give them the access code early so they wouldn't have a disruption for a few days. I did it, and never got a dime from them. Hard lesson learned about being nice.

I meant to say fooxscale, but had a typo. Turned out to be interesting after all.

According to their AI:

"The optimum Python regular expression to match the words foo, fooxcale, and fooyscale as whole words is \bfoo(?:x|y)?cale\b|\bfoo\b"

That actually matches foocale (wrong), foo, fooxcale and fooycale (wrong), and doesn't match fooyscale as requested.

I have to give them credit though: their AI did give me good advice the other day about an SQLite GLOB query that was not using an index in my program but did use it when I typed the query in by hand. I worked on it for about 30 minutes, then asked. Turns out that if you use a ? parameter for GLOB, SQLite can't tell whether it starts with a wildcard or not, so never uses the index. To make it use the index, you have to string splice the parameter value (after SQL quoting of course) rather that use the ? for parameter substitution. I was pretty amazed it answered that exactly right and gave me the hint about doing the splice, and warning about injection attacks.

I also think it'd be a good idea if SQLite did this test inside the VM program it generates rather than at compile time, generating code to both use the index and not use it and choosing based on the runtime test of the first character. It confused me severely.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46561875

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Insurance companies used to only pay for the vaccine at 60. They've reduced it to 50 now because people (like me) were getting it in their 50's. I got it in my left eye and because my immune system is kinda shit, I still have it, though it doesn't give me too much grief now. But it did trash my cornea in that eye, so it's messed my vision up pretty good. And since there's still an active infection (after 8 years), I can't get a cornea transplant.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/two-dose-shin...

https://www.healthinsurance.org/glossary/no-surprises-act/

If you feel very unhappy or unhappy, ie, not content, more than 30-60% of the time, you'd probably benefit from talking to a therapist and learning about how you can like yourself more. You will always have yourself throughout your life, whereas people will come and go. Learn to be your own best friend first.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46346737

Points: 5

# Comments: 2

Once they started producing their own stuff, recommendations no longer worked: they just promoted whatever crap they produced themselves. And with that, trying to find a show I wanted to watch became so much effort that I canceled altogether. Same goes for all the other streaming services.

The only way to keep Internet/TV costs low is to threaten to cancel or switch every year, and actually be willing to do it. For some that isn't an option because there is only 1 provider, and others I've talked to hate that idea because you have to learn a new channel lineup. It's amazing how much people will pay to not be slightly inconvenienced.

1) if you have payment auto deducted from a bank account, getting that stopped is not always straightforward. My bank told me they couldn't actually block ACH transactions, and to reverse one, I had to file a complaint with the company initiating the ACH, wait 30 days until the next bank statement to verify that the company didn't reverse the ACH, then ask the bank again to reverse the ACH.

2) in this case, the guy had other ISPs, but it looks like they were all satellite or DSL, which have really high latency. High latency and packet loss are way bigger issues than throughput, although with the severity of outage described in the article, high latency with no hard outage might be a better trade-off.

3) if you stop paying and get your service cut off, and it's critical for you (remote work, etc), now you have to scramble

For drives that implement an internal encryption key, it's faster (instantaneous) to reset the encryption key. It won't give you a zeroed drive, but one filled with garbage.

I believe that that using non-ECC RAM is a potential cause of silent disk errors. If you read a sector without error, then a cosmic ray flips a bit in RAM containing that sector, you now have a bad copy of the sector with no error indication. Even if the backup software does a hash of the bad data and records it with the data, it's too late: the hash is of bad data. If you are lucky and the hash is created before the RAM bit flip, at least the hash won't match the bad data, so if you try to restore the file, you'll get an error at restore time. It's impossible to recover the correct data, but at least you'll know that.

The good news is that if you backup the bad data again, it will be read correctly, and be different from the previous backup. The bad news is, most backup software skips files based on metadata such as ctime and mtime, so until the file changes, it won't be re-saved.

We are so dependent on computers these days, it's a real shame that all computers don't come standard with ECC RAM. The real reason for that is that server menufacturers want to charge higher prices to data centers for "real" servers with ECC.

https://datarecovery.com/rd/why-does-it-take-multiple-passes...

If a drive contained state secrets, I might use /dev/urandom instead of /dev/zero, but those kinds of drives are probably just shredded.