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"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


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.


Suggesting that iMessage, and not SMS/data connectivity, is “core infrastructure” is bizarre, especially given that no one else in the world uses it or cares about it - essentially proving that it’s not.


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.


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.


Civil rights aren't just Constitutional rights, else the US wouldn't have a variety of federal and state level "civil rights" acts. State police are subordinate to the State, not just the Federal government.


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.


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.


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.


Emergency rooms are already the treatment of last resort for the uninsured. Visit any ER on a Tuesday afternoon in a major city and you'll be stuck in a two hour queue behind what are 95% primary care issues.

The $400 Tylenol people love to complain about in the hospital is a direct result of the government mandate to treat thousands of patients a day effectively for free because we can't get our shit together and provide universal healthcare.


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.


> 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 is already a big enough problem they don't seem to care. Hospitals in less affluent areas are getting interest free loans from the state to keep emergency care from bankrupting them: https://calmatters.org/health/2023/08/california-hospitals-b...

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

You seem to be confused that I am speaking to some hypothetical future situation. Hospital networks require you to either pay outstanding balances or meet with someone to arrange a payment plan before you can be seen. Taking away the ability to report to credit is only going to make them more aggressive in this practice.


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.


Have you been to an "emergency" room lately?


Nope, and almost everyone reading this hasn’t either. This is not a helpful or productive comment. Instead consider saying “at my last visit to the ER, I encountered many people seeking treatment for XYZ which I do not think should be considered an emergency” or something similar so others can learn from your experience that they don’t have.


It's interesting that we just assume it makes sense for the patient to self assess what level of care they need.

I wonder if there are sensible reasons to not have a single point of contact for unscheduled care, or if it is just dumb inertia?

I know there are some hospitals that have provided urgent care type services at urgent care type prices in their emergency rooms, I haven't looked to see if it worked well or if they are still doing it.


Spelling out what I implied - my experience has been the exact opposite of how OP is insisting that it should be. I'm not interested in typing up a report of my various experiences with the medical industry and scrubbing it of the right amount of identifying information merely to refute some prognostication that's so abstract it's not even wrong.


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


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


That's not true. For example, if someone suddenly stops acting like they are in pain when they think they are not being observed that's a pretty good indication that they are faking it.


The medical field will often ignore out of hand any reports of pain as drug seeking and do nothing about it.

I have first hand experience with this.


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).


Definitely, it is much easier to stream CSV than say JSON or XML (even if JSONL/Sax parsers exist etc).


That doesn't sound like an amazingly safe idea


It isn't. But that's easily mitigated with temp tables, ephemeral database and COPY etc.

Upstream can easily f-up and (accidentally) delete production data if you do this on a live db. Which is why PostgreSQL and nearly all other DBS have a miriad of tools to solve this by not doing it directly on a production database


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


If in the regular scenario you load 10000 rows of new data and delete the old then it’s fine.

What if someone screws up the zip and instead of 10000 today, it’s only 10?


I had this last week, but instead it was a 3rd party api and their service started returning null instead of true for the has_more property beyond the second page of results.

In either the solution is probably to check rough counts and error if not reasonable.


I think generally don't replace the prod db until the new one passes tests.


What specific risks do you foresee with this approach?


Seem totally fine to me. As long as you can rollback if the download is truncated or the crc checksum doesn’t match.


> or the crc checksum doesn’t match.

which wouldn't exist if the api is simply just a single CSV file?

at least with a zip, the CRC exists (an incomplete zip file is detectable, an incomplete, but syntactically correct CSV file is not)


DROP DATABASE blah;


That’s not how COPY FROM works in postgres. You give it a csv and a table matching the structure and it hammers the data into the table faster than anything else can.


I you feel risky, try a Foreign Data Wrapper ;)


> 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.


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