fancyfish's comments

iirc you can manage the notifications more granularly on the Uber website

Yes, many (if not most?) providers stopped taking insurance for various reasons. The rates provided by insurers are a fraction of the rates they can get charging out of pocket. And insurers try to shorten therapy sessions, or ask why a patient still needs therapy, etc.

I don’t know why mental health specifically has these issues out of all the medical professions though.

A twist on the old “what happens when you type google.com into your address bar and press enter” question. If I were answering I’d talk about a couple areas I can adapt from the repo below, and save some time to also talk about API services and DBs to differentiate it from the usual answer. It is indeed a fun question!

https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when

Can you trigger the reset password flow on disqus, etc? That’s what I’ve done on a few sites to disconnect from 3rd party oauth and use email instead.

I have used Waze regularly since 2014, and my perception is that it plans more aggressive routes (trickier turns, using side streets, etc) to shave off a few more minutes than Maps, whereas Maps will stick to the major, less complicated routes. But I haven't used Maps for routing lately, so I wouldn't be surprised if Waze/Maps are more similar than I realize.

It's well-accepted in psychology/sociology that moral development extends beyond simply following the law, i.e. using the law as a stand-in for moral principles. E.g. in Kohlberg's stages of moral development[1], there is a post-conventional stage where an individual develops a moral code independent of laws, and views laws as a social contract that can be disobeyed if it violates his/her morals. Laws are a good guideline, but are not an absolute moral framework.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg%27s_stages_o...

This has been my experience also. I finished the Nix Pills, and got some personal Python/Haskell projects built using nixpkgs by following the nixpkgs language-specific documentation, but anything off the beaten path is going to involve lots of blog posts and clicking through source code. For example in the Haskell world there are so many blog posts that go in different directions from the nixpkgs docs, using flakes, haskell.nix, etc.

We adopted it in an organization of ~100 engineers, and the only way it’s been possible is having a full-time Nix team writing custom Nix functions specific for our environment and projects. That team also does “Nix help desk” work for one-off questions.

Once it works, it does a great job of hermetic builds, easy Docker images, easy to add cross-repo dependencies mixing C++/Python etc. But there are too many rough edges I can’t recommend it in the general case over Dockerfiles, Bazel or language-specific tooling, Cmake, etc. Pick something simpler, ideally whatever is popular for your language.

Agreed, I see this often where people confuse their marginal income (e.g. $0) with their total income. Most are paid a salary and don’t just choose to work an extra hour on a moment’s notice. Let alone the possibility of working 24x7 and having billable hours like a switch they can flip at any time.

The framing of something “costing me my time” has never made sense to me especially when someone tries to actually quantify it.

Tailscale has been a godsend for my team, saving us quite a bit of effort with VPN/firewall administration. There are very few rough edges, and it tends to just work (at least at our scale of a few thousand nodes). We moved over about 8 months ago and have had no issues since. I’ve also moved my home network (RPis, NAS, etc) to their free tier so I can access it remotely.

Some features that are basically effortless and made me choose it over WireGuard and other VPN solutions: easy provisioning, key exchange, IP assignment, ACLs

Employers are setting GPA cutoffs and checking transcripts for some of the competitive jobs for fresh grads and interns. Not unusual to see a hard GPA cutoff of 3.7, and the employer wants a copy of your transcript sent directly from the university.

As always, when an arbitrary metric becomes a goal, it will be gamed. Especially with the path dependency nowadays where your first job sets the course of your early career. Just as your academics/leadership in high school can make or break whether you get into the prestigious universities, which will quite literally pay dividends ten or twenty years down the line.

Sometimes, the most driven students are the ones cheating because the stakes are too high. If an employer has two viable candidates, one from MIT and one from a state school, they’ll go with the MIT grad as a heuristic. Or similarly if FAANG is inundated with resumes for entry-level jobs, they’ll use school/GPA as an easy first-pass filter.

I don’t see cheating changing until the incentives are minimized. Lower GPA cutoffs + casting a wider net for the entry-level roles and setting a fair skills-based bar.

No, and I am actively interviewing to leave. I treat interviewing like a chance to “re-level” myself with a sorta-objective third party, and I am getting offers for 10-20%+ higher comp.

The fundamental issue is that optimizing things, paying down tech debt, maintenance, etc just don’t get nearly the same fanfare as new features or product launches. I don’t blame people, because the latter is flashier, and more understood by nontechnical folks in the business.

For people like me who work behind the scenes, you need a trusted manager who understands the importance of your work and will go to bat for you, and/or you need to regularly publicize your accomplishments in a measurable, easily understood way. For me, that means posting a tidbit in Slack whenever I make a noteworthy change.

I wish my sort of work was respected inline with its business impact, but alas, it’s harder to measure or communicate things like “developer time saved” vs “feature X bumped sales by y%.”

I’ve found it depends on the position mainly. The more you thrust vertically (cowgirl, etc), the less satisfying due to less bounce. On the other hand, foam is better for digging in for horizontal thrusting (doggy, missionary).

This is why about 65% say foam is worse for sex than springs, while ~35% say it’s the same or even better.

That said, I just prefer foam for sleeping. Much more comfortable and I wake up feeling more refreshed with no back pain. We keep a separate guest spring mattress bed for sex (and obviously guests). We bought it a year ago and our sex life has never been better but ymmv!

In most companies in the USA, 2 consecutive weeks off is longer than normal. Not unusual to have a total of 2-4 weeks vacation to use each year.

The elephant in the room is that this sort of enlightened centrism, while it sounds noble, rests on several ill-formed assumptions.

The first is that, by reading from both sides, they’ll balance and you’ll arrive at an enlightened center. This assumes the Overton Window is balanced, stationary, and not tilted to one side or the other. You’re beholden to the good judgement of each side to not move themselves further left or right.

Another is that the opposing content can actually be merged. In many cases the content will cover different pieces of the same broad issue. Or the interviewees will present their opinions in a completely different fashion. Up to you to carry all this context in your head, or make simplistic summaries of viewpoints that don’t add much value beyond what is already commonly known.

The third assumption is that being at the center or having this detachment from either side is a political position in and of itself. I think it’s too simplistic to say you’ll be the net sum of whatever each side puts out, but you’re taking a position all the same.

You’re not obligated to give equal credence to the opposing side on a number of issues. At best it will make you more detached from politics over time, splitting hairs over policy stances at the voting booth instead of more impactful grassroots political action.

berth

Even though this isn’t official guidance at my FAANG, I’ve started weeding out anyone who (as best as I can infer) cares about political activism. They are damaging to an organization. Even if they don’t start political interest groups at work, they will bring up political topics in casual conversation which will exclude certain people’s viewpoints.

My stance is, we pay you to be an engineer, so I hire people devoted solely to engineering.

I love this concept! Especially that you are crowdsourcing completions, so some of the more niche ones can still get built.

Thank you for putting so many examples on your landing page. This seems obvious but so many landing pages don’t show me actual examples.

Fields where tech is not at least seen as a key differentiator can be very frustrating. Expect to work in a culture where basic best practices aren’t used or even known. Expect decision makers not to understand how good software can speed up or empower research, and allocate resources accordingly. Expect salary and career growth to reflect that you are viewed as a commodity.

Your enjoyment of it hinges on whether you can be happy collecting a paycheck doing the bare minimum and satisfying your tech itch outside of work (FOSS, side hustles). For some, that is perfectly acceptable or even ideal, especially if you can get away with working fully remote.

Yeah, RSE is probably the term you’ll see in job ads

Yeah, seriously. It’s Basecamp. There’s a very deep bench of engineers and product people that would love to backfill the roles.

It will still be damaging short term because they lost a lot of depth in cultural and product knowledge, with the marketing and product leads gone. Not easy to replace someone who’s been living and breathing the products for over a decade.