So you can do things like “from typing import Optional” to bring Optional into scope, and then annotate a function with -> Optional[int] to indicate it returns None or an int.

Unlike a system using special comments for type hints, the interpreter will complain if you make a typo in the word Optional or don’t bring it into scope.

But the interpreter doesn’t do anything else; if you actually return a string from that annotated function it won’t complain.

You need an external third party tool like MyPy or Pyre to consume the hint information and produce warnings.

In practice it’s quite usable, so long as you have CI enforcing the type system. You can gradually add types to an existing code base, and IDEs can use the hint information to support code navigation and error highlighting.

Personally, sumatriptan doesn't work reliably, rizatriptan makes me feel super woozy, but eletriptan works well and without noticeable side effects.

Immigrant visa issuance is discretionary and unreviewable, as this judgment has just confirmed.

Adjustment of status, which is the process to obtain permanent residency within the US, is also discretionary for family-based applicants. The USCIS policy manual[1] lays out what "discretionary" means; roughly, it's a balancing test where the positive factors need to outweigh the negatives, and in the absence of any factors in either direction, the fact that someone meets the minimum requirements for a benefit counts as a positive.

The person in this case thinks they're suspected of being a member of the MS–13 gang, and was denied the visa on the grounds the consular officer believed he sought to "enter the United States to engage [...] in certain specified offenses or any other unlawful activity"[3] (internal quotes removed).

Those facts wouldn't go away if this individual applied for adjustment within the country. USCIS would almost certainly decide this case warrants an unfavorable exercise of discretion and deny the I-485 application for adjustment.

As for the new policy[2]: there's a procedural bar to adjustment of status for people who entered without inspection. The new policy offers a route for some people to apply for parole-in-place--which has been available to undocumented spouses of military members for well over a decade--which removes the procedural bar to adjustment. The discretionary test above would still apply.

The new parole-in-place policy also has a discretionary test, and applicants must not "constitute a threat to national security or public safety".

So this person is ineligible for an immigrant visa on security grounds; would also be ineligible on procedural grounds if they crossed the Rio Grande; would still be ineligible on security grounds anyway; and doesn't qualify for the new relief to begin with!

The only benefit they would gain by crossing the Rio Grande would be the ability to spend a lot of money on further court appeals that would ultimately be denied; consular non-reviewability only applies abroad. But the new policy doesn't affect that one way or the other: anyone on US soil is protected by the Constitution and has recourse to the courts.

[1] https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-7-part-a-chapter-...

[2] https://www.uscis.gov/keepingfamiliestogether

[3] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-334_e18f.pdf

A babysitter one of the examples specifically called out as a household employee in the IRS guidance[1], so if you’re doing it right you should be running payroll. That’s pretty tricky to DIY properly.

[1] https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc756

Even if your bank sends the cheque for collection and waits for the payor bank to confirm there’s funds there.

The cheque could have been stolen and forged, or a legitimate cheque could have been altered. There’s even an example up-thread of a bank recycling account numbers. The owner of the bank account it’s drawn against can take weeks or months to notice that the fraud has happened, and when they do the transaction can be unwound leaving your bank liable to return the value of the cheque.

When I used to deposit US cheques regularly in the UK, I’d be offered the choice between “negotiation” (we assume the cheque is good and will pay it this week) and “collection” (we’ll send the cheque back to the US and only pay you when we collect the money weeks later), but in both cases there was language on the form making it clear that they could pull the money back up to years later if something went wrong.

There’s literally no way of implementing cheques—-or most other payment rails—-without someone, somewhere choosing to extend credit and deciding to take on that risk.

Parking enforcement isn’t automatic at parking lots without barriers either, but that doesn’t mean paying a parking fee to the operator is a “voluntary payment” just because you might not get a ticket if you do skip payment.

As for how they could enforce it, it’s pretty easy to walk around outside the airport and spot the cars with Uber/Lyft decals, or multiple phones, or use ANPR to identify frequent visitors, or just ask passengers as they get into cars. Multiple options for enforcement.

The enforcement might end up targeting the drivers rather than Uber itself, but it would have the same effect.

PreCheck (or rather Global Entry at $20/year, which includes PreCheck plus immigration/customs priority) is worth the cost for me. I'm an immigrant, so the US has already done several checks into my background and has many, many copies of my biometrics already, so there's no additional privacy loss.

I could afford CLEAR, but the value just isn't there for me.

The reduced scrutiny is the justification for the fingerprinting appointment background check. I haven't seen anything similar in Europe, but busy airports are far more likely to have an efficient security setup that can already cope with leaving liquids in bags and the like. Many US airports still have security checkpoints that look like temporary installations, with portable equipment--even when they're brand new redevelopments!

Usually, the queues are shorter for the PreCheck lanes, but this isn't guaranteed.

CLEAR replaces having an an agent compare your face to your ID with having a kiosk compare your biometrics. The real advantage comes from having a CLEAR employee then walk you past the queue to get by the normal ID checking podium.

You need both to get the guaranteed short queue and the less intense screening.

(And then there are the programs to expedite the immigration/customs process too, but at least those include PreCheck, so you don't need all three...)

The disc versions of the consoles are popular for people who like to buy games second hand and/or trade in after they've finished playing; it's frequently much, much cheaper than digital purchases, even when the digital versions are on sale. There are disc rental services like GameFly, too.

Of course, the manufacturers would prefer to kill this secondary market, so sooner or later I expect the disc drives to go away completely. That was Xbox's plan around a year ago, per some recent leaks, and if one does it the other certainly will as well.

Leaving the US as a non-immigrant always carries a small amount of risk: CBP can always decide to refuse your next admission, even with a visa. After the recent spate of tech layoffs some H1-B holders have been asked to show recent payslips at the border to prove their continued employment, for example.

If you’re super unlucky (with your citizenship, or even just sharing a name with someone on a list) visa renewals can be delayed by months to years for security checks (“administrative processing”).

There are also some green card routes which require a period where you simply can’t leave the US without abandoning your application, after which you’ll be refused entry as a non-immigrant and will need to do the entire multi-year immigrant visa process from your home company. H1-B holders avoid this, fortunately, but TN holders and tourists who get married and decide to stay can get caught out here.

tl;dr: the US immigration system is actively user-hostile.

The implication being that they're likely to jump ship as soon as anyone else makes them a better offer (and that they'll be at least semi-actively looking for that better offer while working for you), and that the quality of their work output suffers because they're not sufficiently passionate about the problem to be solved.

They're the opposite of "missionaries", in this particular vernacular.

Instead of paying monthly insurance premiums, the company directly funds the claim payments as they come in. They outsource the work of adjudicating claims, negotiating with providers/facilities, cutting checks, setting approval criteria and first level appeals to another company, called a Third Party Administrator.

Now, who happens to have all the skills and expertise to do the job of a TPA? The big health insurers. These are giant companies with many lines of business. One of those lines is selling insurance to individuals and small businesses, another is selling administrative services to larger ones.

Note that even with a self-insured plan, there’s often insurance involved too: the company will buy a separate “stop-loss” policy that kicks in and starts paying after the employer has paid out a certain amount in total over a year. This protects them from the risk of covering a plan member with a particularly expensive condition.

It’s intentionally kept separate from the FAA, which has the enforcement role, to encourage reporters to come forward. The second ‘A’ in NASA is ‘Aeronautics’, after all, so it’s a reasonable place to put this function. Reporting to ASRS comes with a certain degree of immunity to enforcement actions, and keeping it separate from the FAA reinforces that.

They have a monthly publication, Callback, which includes anonymised snippets of reports, with each issue presenting lessons learned and usually centred around a specific theme. It’s worth a look if you have an interest in how the US aviation system tries to prioritise safety.

[1] https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/

I did a bunch of writing, news posting, collecting information for the monthly patch summaries, and then they figured out I could code and I ended up building tools and maintaining various bits of the site. I think I ended up owning the item database code for a while? I remember hearing that one got used at Turbine, because it was superior to what you had internally!

I’m now married to Kelly Heckman (Ophelea), who was site manager on CoD for a while, and my first real job was at a social gaming startup, getting in the door with the help of her network. That set my career on the path it is now, so you can draw a direct line from picking up that game box to where I am now. So yeah, thank you and the rest of the team :).

I think growing up during those years of transition, right before the Internet became mainstream and ubiquitous, was a huge boon. Sure, the early MMOs were far from the first international social forum enabled by the Internet, but they were right at the technological frontier at the time. There was something special about inhabiting this massive, 3D virtual space alongside people from across the world, and having that experience be just as novel to everyone else as it was to me.

You couldn't replicate that today, and growing up with the world at your fingertips on a pane of glass as a taken-for-granted fact of life must be a very different experience.

Depending on how recent “recently” is, and how long you were between jobs for, this might be worth looking in to.

It shipped via the Microsoft Store, so you have to specifically install it, but it works fine on a fully updated non-Insiders Windows 10.