Hacker News: wefarrell

New comment by wefarrell in "The Miele Dialog: cook a fish in ice without melting the ice"

wefarrell — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 20:19:17 +0000

"The truth is, it’s actually difficult for any microwave oven to melt ice. That’s because solids tend to transmit, rather than absorb microwaves, and because the hydrogen bonds in ice are stronger than (and harder to induce vibration/heating in) those of liquid water"

Interesting

New comment by wefarrell in "Beeper Mini is now open-source"

wefarrell — Sat, 23 Dec 2023 20:24:58 +0000

If it's the only way to achieve interoperability with a communication protocol, then yes.

Core infrastructure like this should be treated and regulated more like a utility.

New comment by wefarrell in "Your small imprecise ask is a big waste of their time"

wefarrell — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 14:27:53 +0000

Because there’s always additional context that the junior and higher ups need that they aren’t aware of, the most obvious being time/capacity.

I used to manage an engineer who was responsible for a critical part of our system and he would frequently get hounded by higher ups who went around me and it ate up all of his time to the point where my manager thought this engineer was just unproductive. I wasn’t able to stop those requests entirely but I was able to establish a paper trail and show my boss that this engineer was actually being overworked.

New comment by wefarrell in "NYPD barred from telling people they can't film in precinct stations"

wefarrell — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 20:23:49 +0000

Qualified immunity doesn't apply when the officer clearly violates a constitutional right. Unfortunately the article says:

Judge Jessica Clarke, who ordered the injunction last week, ruled that while the First Amendment claim might be a little more complicated, it seems pretty clear that the NYPD violated the state and municipal Right to Record Acts with its policy.

New comment by wefarrell in "U.S. federal price tag for the post-9/11 wars is over $8T"

wefarrell — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 19:03:02 +0000

No, the US system is far far far worse. Look at the changes in life expectancy the last few years in the two countries.

Consider the number of nursing strikes recently and it's clear that the system is getting much worse.

New comment by wefarrell in "U.S. federal price tag for the post-9/11 wars is over $8T"

wefarrell — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 19:01:08 +0000

And that's the irony. Covid's death toll in the US was a hundred times worse than 9/11 yet we still don't have federally mandated sick days.

State provided insurance coverage was expanded but that expansion is ending over the next year, however 20 years after 9/11 the military and intelligence apparatus put in place is still intact.

New comment by wefarrell in "CFPB kicks off rulemaking to remove medical bills from credit reports"

wefarrell — Sat, 23 Sep 2023 13:48:47 +0000

I have a company that sells to hospitals, they absolutely care about keeping the wrong people out of the emergency room.

“ Hospital networks require you to either pay outstanding balances or meet with someone to arrange a payment plan before you can be seen.”

Putting them on a payment plan is not the same thing as forcing them to pay. I believe they would force payment for elective care, not preventative.

New comment by wefarrell in "CFPB kicks off rulemaking to remove medical bills from credit reports"

wefarrell — Sat, 23 Sep 2023 13:42:56 +0000

Yes and I have a company that sells to health systems.

New comment by wefarrell in "CFPB kicks off rulemaking to remove medical bills from credit reports"

wefarrell — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 21:24:24 +0000

It’s terrible for a hospital’s business to have their ER clogged by people who don’t have emergencies and can’t pay. It means they see a much lower volume of people who can pay.

So they aren’t going to deny people primary care because doing so will just cause them to wind up in the ER.

New comment by wefarrell in "CFPB kicks off rulemaking to remove medical bills from credit reports"

wefarrell — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 20:22:27 +0000

The obvious consequence would be that people go to the emergency room for any kind of healthcare. That’s a much worse outcome for hospitals so I doubt they would deny people primary care.

New comment by wefarrell in "NASA clears the air: No evidence that UFOs are aliens"

wefarrell — Sat, 16 Sep 2023 15:46:57 +0000

It’s impossible to falsify patient reports of pain, yet the medical field takes them quite seriously.

New comment by wefarrell in "My favourite API is a zipfile on the European Central Bank's website"

wefarrell — Sat, 16 Sep 2023 00:53:08 +0000

Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see how it's possible for a COPY statement alone to remove existing data.

New comment by wefarrell in "My favourite API is a zipfile on the European Central Bank's website"

wefarrell — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 20:20:15 +0000

One nice thing about CSV files being zipped and served via the web is they can be streamed directly into the database incredibly fast without having to persist them anywhere (aside from the db).

You can load the zip file as a stream, read the CSV line by line, transform it, and then load it to the db using COPY FROM stdin (assuming Postgres).

New comment by wefarrell in "MetaGPT: Meta Programming for Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework"

wefarrell — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 16:39:35 +0000

> I mean that intuitively I couldn't imagine replacing 1 experienced professional with 1, 2, 10, 100 or even 1000 intelligent high school graduates

This analogy doesn't make sense, because the professional is presumably also a high school graduate. This case is more like leveraging a team of specialists with expertise in different domains.

New comment by wefarrell in "Launch HN: Refine (YC S23) – Open-source platform for enterprise web apps"

wefarrell — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 13:31:13 +0000

I'm guessing you have to pay for it and that you can't freely redistribute it, in which case it's not open source.

New comment by wefarrell in "The Resilience of Costco (2018)"

wefarrell — Sat, 29 Jul 2023 14:51:55 +0000

Costco doesn’t prevent the things you mention, you should come to my area in NYC. Within 3 blocks I have 3 supermarkets and maybe 12 smaller markets and corner stores. Within a mile I probably have 20-30 supermarkets and one of them is Costco.

A lot of the owners of the smaller markets actually shop at Costco. And you don’t need a car to shop there, you can bike and there are people with vans outside who will take your bike and groceries back home. Costco also offers local delivery.

I wouldn’t say it diminishes from the urban design you mention, in many ways it facilitates it.

New comment by wefarrell in "Ask HN: Anyone else locked out of LinkedIn?"

wefarrell — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 02:24:15 +0000

Really?

I've been using it to recruit and if I didn't have access that would be detrimental to my career.

Ask HN: Anyone else locked out of LinkedIn?

wefarrell — Mon, 17 Jul 2023 21:22:38 +0000

My account was locked on Friday for security reasons and I haven't been able to get in since. I started an appeal and sent them pictures of my government ID but haven't heard anything from them.

Is anyone else having issues?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36764299

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

New comment by wefarrell in "“Our paying customers need X, when will you fix it?”"

wefarrell — Sat, 15 Jul 2023 16:12:37 +0000

Saying they “need some kind of target date” is not polite, it sounds a lot like a demand.

New comment by wefarrell in "Striking SAG actors in disbelief over studios’ dystopian AI proposal"

wefarrell — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 02:56:32 +0000

Commercialization of someone else’s likeness sounds like the type of thing that should be heavily regulated, and skewed in favor of the person whose likeness is being exploited.