wmccullough's comments

I would love to see pharmacy advertising banned from television and streaming services during certain times of the day. I would also love to see the same advertising banned on billboards. If [1]this is true, we are exposed, on average, to 5000 advertisements a day.

Pharma advertising culture has lead us (in America) to become a culture of self-diagnosers and a culture where we don’t want to be exposed to any emotion or pain. This is not to say that drugs are bad, because they have amazing uses in the world. I know many people that benefit from antidepressants, antipsychotics, and so-called illegal substances to be functioning members of society, but along with that, I know plenty of people who have been taught by the big shiny box that they don’t need to feel the pain of a loved ones death, or a bad breakup.

I find this woman’s account of going through a hysterectomy in Germany to be enlightening when compared to our own culture.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/27/opinion/sunday/surgery-ge...

[1] https://stopad.io/blog/ads-seen-daily

As someone who is XXY, I can’t help but wonder what, if any issues would be caused by a pregnant mother taking a lot of this.

I hear ya.

I'm definitely not saying that ideology is right, I'm just saying that I don't think that any side really has a good understanding of the impacts of either decision. I've been careful to not express my own opinion, but I'll share it now, probably to my own detriment.

I think that immigration doesn't have to be a polarized thing. The two major sides have done their best to turn this into a polarized issue and a false dichotomy. While I would certainly love to see people coming into the country through legal means, I also feel that our legal process is shit. The thing that I can't get through the heads of anyone that oppose "those brown people" is that yeah, statistically, we may get some criminals, but per capita, we have wayyyy more people trying to come here than are likely criminals. If this many people are trying to escape from their country, be it Syria or Mexico, we have to look at that and think about what it takes to drive someone to leave the place that they grew up.

The other thing that I've shared in the past that will likely get me shredded if the wrong person comes across this, is that I'm happy to not be in the majority race. I would rather be in a place where everyone has a seat at the table. As far as losing our national identity, I don't buy that either. The number one threat to our national identity right now is... wait for it... Americans. For years we were told that Muslims would come here and implement Sharia law. We are now seeing court enabled protections for those who feel their religious beliefs are violated by LGBT people such as myself. We are actively taking the steps to implement the Christian version of Sharia law.

Even at the end of these opinions, I still don't think I fully understand the right solution. I think this is a dangerous time for this country. History is on the side of us having another civil war or revolution. I hesitate to compare us to the French Revolution as so many do, so I'll draw out a larger comparison. What has happened in history when laws begin to favor wealth and the center of power? I don't mean everyday legislation, but the level of shit we are beginning to see here with extreme tax breaks and protections. It doesn't look good.

I think you have a wonderful observation. I don't think so lot of people know what is right. I think most people's definition of right is totally driven by political ideology consumed via mass media and social network echo chambers. I think most of us aren't educated about this topic to know the real long-term effects of open borders or isolationism. I think all sides have to put the emotion and rhetoric down and view it through multiple lenses. What does open borders look like for our economy and form of government in 10. 25, or 50 years? Does it likely lead to a place America loses the good parts of its national identity because the amount of people coming in can't be assimilated into our philosophies in our constitution? Does isolationism lead us to a place where we aren't longer a world leader and some horrible state fills the vacuum on the world's stage? I certainly don't know. How do we define right and wrong in an era where ever issue of morality is polarized? Or where it's okay for one politician to do something but not for another politician? I think in the case of Google, they are selling their souls by providing services to a government that persecutes Muslims (and their own people), but we can't forget that they also have cooperated with the U.S. government which has committed just as many atrocities here and around the world. It's not in this moment that Google crossed the line. I think unfortunately, the great experiment of democracy is just about over. I fear it will be looked upon by historians as this emergent phenomenon that occurred between massive tyrannical empires.

Maybe I misunderstood, but I could swear they reworked a ton of their algorithms as part of this effort.

I'm actually tempted to do a PR against dotnet to see if they'd accept this improvement. My guess is that just like with Roslyn, customers have come to count on the implementation, bugs and all, and it may not be accepted.

I cannot divulge my sources, so take it for what it is, but in talking with people at the top of several very large private insurers (as far back as 2016) they were sick of how providers weren't healing people and bleeding them out.

I've seen evidence (firsthand) that value based care can work, but it's hard to get provider networks on board when they are the ones who aren't getting paid when readmission rates are too high.

> "It out performs Microsoft’s generic SortedDictionary<TKey, TValue> (which is actually a red-black tree) by a factor of 2 for inserts and a factor of 4 for searches."

I may have missed it, but I'd love to know the versions of .net framework this was performed against. I saw a really interesting post in MSDN about how they've been working on performance improvements for underlying data structures. I would love to see this up against dotnet core 2.1 or >. For reference, this was the post:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2018/04/18/performan...

I’ve always heard the saying “stones are the bones of dead mountains” Turns out it could be true.

I’m inclined to agree. For ten years we’ve seen companies have unfathomable growth, yet wages haven’t really grown. The public is being taken advantage in almost every industry—from pharma to tech. Anytime regulation is brought up, I see so many opponents. I think the United States is missing a healthy amount of regulation.

Thank you for the explanation!

If someone such as myself wanted to understand the philosophy of functional languages, do you have any book you'd recommend? Learning the languages is easy enough, but if I ever tried them I'd want to do it using the ideals of functional programming vs. trying to contort the language to be something it isnt't.

I'm noticing a trend more and more where developers move to FP over OOP after a decade or so in their career. I feel if I don't give it a look, I could be missing an obvious lesson.

Serious question about this line:

"Reusing code via inheritance is fragile. Inheritance also couples interfaces to implementations, which makes reuse more difficult. This is its own topic, but even OO programmers will tell you to prefer “composition over inheritance”."

Isn't the goal to have implementations of interfaces so that you can inject implementations around in order to reduce tight coupling? Implementing an interface is not the same thing as inheritance. It's adhering an implementation to a contract. Are interfaces in ObjC different than what I'm used to from Java, C#, and others?

I mean this with sincerity, what am I missing? Is this a short-coming of my knowledge because I come from a strict OOP background? I've always used implementations of multiple interfaces to achieve composition.

I think you may have missed the goal of the exercise friend. I think this is a larger metaphor about walking through the waking life without really observing what’s going on.

Disclaimer: I meant this constructively in case it comes of wrong.

I consider it professional development too. Something I like about HN is that the comments are typically fact based or coming from a constructive place. Very little have I received the Reddit or Twitter discussion responses of expletives followed by insults (though I’ve probably called one or two people some bad things).

This place has gotten me interested in so much more than the tech ecosystem I live in.

I appreciate how dedicated GitLab is to continuously improving the product. Thinking about moving my projects from Bitbucket to GitLab for that reason.

I agree completely.

I think that regardless of whether microservices works for anyone or not, they came about to address a real issue that we still have, but that I’m not sure anyone has fully solved.

I think that microservices are an expression of us trying to get to a solution that enables loose coupling, hard isolation of compute based on categorical functions. We wanted a way to keep Bob from the other team from messing with our components.

I think most organizations really need a mixture of monolithic and microservices. If anyone jumps off the cliff with the attitude that one methodology is right or wrong, they deserve the outcome that they get. A lot of the blogs at the time espoused the benefits without bothering to explain that Microservices were perhaps a crescent wrench and really most of the time we needed a pair of pliers.

I’m not fully willing to accept the plumbing analogy myself. While I do agree that most of our work is CRUD over REST, I think there’s another element of skill that isn’t uncovered in the article. If we are humble plumbers, why does it take me six months to find engineers that understand basic concepts like cohesion and loose coupling beyond a text book level (and I live in a metropolitan area with several software schools!)?

Perhaps a more apt analogy is that we are more like home renovation specialists. If things go well, we can update your plumbing to get away from lead pipes, but if we have to route the new plumbing through a joist, we are going to have to educate you on why we should do something a certain way. If we find a water leak and rot that will put your home (business) as risk, count on us to tell you about the risk and let you decide if you want to address it.

I’d argue that we are simply doing plumbing when things are going really well, perhaps even when the house is small and was well built to start with. If plumbing was all we did, I’d argue that our field would be way more saturated than it is.

A lot of people who take L-Theanine with Caffeine are taking it at a higher dosage than what you can from even a few cups of tea.

I’ve read about this combination quite a bit and from my personal experience, you have to get the mixture just right. Even at high doses of caffeine, the right amount of L-Theanine can stop the jitters and give a calm focus. That all said, these dosages are so individualistic that it’s chasing a dragon.

>“but it’s all irrelevant unless the software meets the needs of those using it”

I’m not trying to be a jerk here, but TDD does just that. I tried to read the rest of this, but the logical fallacies are strong with this one.

I think this is great for them. I think that depending on national culture, a person may want to die with what they came into this world with. I know that some world religions are against the practice. I say this with full realization that some folks will read that and think “how selfish!!” Regardless of any of our beliefs, organ donation is a very personal choice.

Personally, I wouldn’t go about the issue by shaming nations that don’t belief in the practice. I would instead go about it by having a campaign of information on the life saving benefits of helping others. Undoubtedly someone will tell me that these campaigns exists, but I’d say they don’t do a good enough job yet.