erroneousfunk

Joined 13 years ago

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Comment · 8 years ago
Your solution depends on third parties checking the script or going based on some knowledge of "trusted sources." That has nothing to do with this hack, which exploits those who are "verifying" the script themselves before executing it.

The simple solution here is not to use curl/execute with a pipe. Just wget to save the file and check it locally (rather than through a browser) before executing.

Comment · 8 years ago
Fun fact, the the triangular piece in a clothing pattern used to add shape/dimensionality is also called a gore.
Comment · 8 years ago
> They can get jobs within walking distance in the city.

In which fantasy world do people in poverty just regularly find jobs in the city within walking distance of their magical free house in the city?

Comment · 8 years ago
Tangential, but this is the same reason mandatory health insurance makes sense. We go around living in our bodies, and they break down sometimes. It's the law in this country that emergency rooms can't turn people away without evaluating and stabilizing them, so you're always one accident away from creating huge costs for someone else if you don't plan for these costs with health insurance.

In the case of car insurance, the injured party is the driver you run into, or the property you damage. In the case of health insurance, the injured party is the hospital/doctors.

I always thought it was strange that so many states were totally on board with mandatory car insurance, but not mandatory health insurance.

Comment · 8 years ago
I had a manager that loved Java. He wanted to add a new helper service onto an existing service that was written in Python, but the new service would be Java (because Java is the best, obviously).

This new helper was responsible for transforming, combining, and synthesizing large API responses with somewhat variable and highly nested data structures into other large API responses with somewhat variable and highly nested data structures. It certainly was not Java I was proud of, but it would have been trivial (and FAR more readable) in Python. Ugh.

Comment · 8 years ago
> they've picked the right abstraction for the problem

I hate to agree with you, but "picking the right abstraction for the problem" elegantly expresses what I've been trying to tell people for the last few years now, but far less succinctly (I usually ramble on about "underlying data models" and "what this actually is in the real world, not just how we view it in our application")

The reason I hate to agree with you is that I just became very disappointed that this is a difficult skill to master. "Just use the right model and the code is easy, duh. Why aren't you doing this?" Well. Now I just feel like a jerk. I thought they just gave me the "senior" title because I was old.

It's unfortunate that one of the most important skills in the industry is so intangible and difficult to quantify. Even more difficult to teach.

Comment · 8 years ago
"If unforeseen complications arose during or after the procedure, the Surgery Center would cover those costs. Villa wouldn't see another bill."

So there is a sort of built-in insurance to this system. Those who don't have any complications are paying more to cover patients who do. They're simply passing the first line of medical costs (known, anticipated, where a price estimate can be created) on to consumers while letting insurance handle un-estimatable medical emergency type situations.

Comment · 8 years ago
Amen. I rented in Boston, Somerville, and Medford after college, and it's amazing the number of landlords who are just random people who happen to have an extra property, or bought a house with an extra unit, and decide to rent it out. They print a template lease, we sign, and they hand over the keys.

Two landlords in particular didn't know about things like escrow account and interest laws for security deposits, contact information posting for vacant landlords, who's responsible for things like snow removal and smoke detector maintenance. I left those units in good condition (thankfully for them!) but nearly sued twice and, in one case, received triple damages on my security deposit.

One landlord said "To keep costs low, tenants generally organize snow shoveling" I said "Oh, sorry, I didn't realize we were breaking the law here."

There are some states with very few tenant rights where landlords can get away with a lot. California and Massachusetts are not those states. It's a very serious part time job that requires a lot more than just owning a property.

Comment · 8 years ago
I think it's incredible that her health insurance didn't cover electronic prosthetics.

The hook prosthetic is just a simple open/close grabber tool. Imagine trying to navigate through life with two grabbers. The modern myoelectric prosthetics offer way more functionality and freedom. You can use a computer, dress yourself, drive a car, and feed yourself (of course the author can't do all these yet, it does take time to learn). You can't do this at all with hooks.

I fractured/dislocated multiple wrist bones two years ago and it wasn't life threatening but I would have had diminished functionality without surgery -- insurance covered it no problem. My hand is great.

How the hell does it make sense to fix a wrist in order to allow someone to do the activities of daily living but it doesn't make sense to give them a common commercial prosthetic in order to do the same thing?

Comment · 8 years ago
"Sleeping with a guy is a built in option women have to better their lives, that men don't have."

This is a complicated issue, and there's a lot to unpack here.

That technique may be used for women (and, heck, men too -- I'm the female 'breadwinner' of my household, although I didn't meet my husband at a sex party...) to better their lives, but those gains may be sporadic, and they depend on the continued cooperation of the man they're sleeping with.

I was in a "trophy girlfriend" relationship when I was young and my entire life revolved around "keeping" this guy. After a while, he broke up with me, I had to ask my parents for rent money (I had taken a first class trip to Europe the month before, but what was I going to do, ask him to put the money into my emergency savings account instead?), my entire life sort of fell apart. I went to parties with his friends, lived in his apartment, had a credit card on his account. Making sure he was happy was a job, but the skills weren't entirely transferable and there was no security. Not a situation I wanted to be in again, and I didn't.

Having a job, skills are easily transferable between employers, resources in my own name, and a relationship built on mutual respect and kindness, gives me far more freedom and security than sleeping with guys for the lifestyle perks. Even with alimony and child support in the picture (in which case you need to "get him" to marry you and/or have children) there is no facet of your life or lifestyle that is insulated from the whims of a single person. No, you may not starve after a divorce, but, especially if there's a pre-nup involved, the "betterment" in your life will always be temporary gain during the length of the relationship while his will be a permanent one.

Now, I'm not saying women shouldn't go to these parties or sleep with these men if they want to, or that considering a man's private jet ownership when debating about whether or not you want to sleep with him is an immoral choice. But saying "This is a built-in option for women that men don't have... the rest of us poor schmuck dudes actually have to go to work everyday" is an incredible simplification that makes the two choices sound like equivalent things, when they're absolutely not.

On a side note: The presence of these particular sex parties, and the fact that they're so closely intertwined with business in Silicon Valley, I think is an problem. As the article paints it, there's sort of a "damned if you do and damned if you don't" issue that they're introducing for women working in certain companies or who are seeking VC funding.

Comment · 8 years ago
I think it depends on the amount of business that you want. I do freelance as a side job and only have a few clients a year that give me an extra ~10-20k of income. I mostly do web scraping, data science, data management, and teaching (workshops, taught a couple university classes, adult education)

Networking events and word of mouth from other clients have been about half of my work, and the rest just sort of email me out of the blue based on either my LinkedIn profile or a book I wrote.

I don't blog, I don't have much of a professional website. The book I wrote is fairly popular, but I find that the people who email generally haven't read the book (although they might have bought it... to see that it's real, I guess) but they find me through that.

Will agree that cold outreach doesn't work at all unless you're doing it on a massive scale (and then you're just a professional salesperson...). I've done it, but it's literally never worked for me.

Comment · 8 years ago
In a computer security class I had at Harvard, the professor made the comment: "Your mother's maiden name is considered a 'secret.' Which is funny, given the building we're in."

We were in the Maxwell Dworkin building, named after the surnames of Bill Gates' and Paul Allens' mothers. Their mothers' maiden names were literally carved in a huge stone sign outside the building.

Comment · 9 years ago
Known genes associated with hip bone size in women (but not men) are found on chromosome 2 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2522269/). But the expression of those genes is likely controlled by estrogen (http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/woman-s-pelvis-narrow...)

Individuals who have androgen insensitivity syndrome (XY chromosomes, but that don't respond to testosterone and are, for most intents and purposes, sterile females) will have large hips/pelvic bones.

So, yes, hip size takes a few modified base pairs (although probably all within one gene, or pretty close together on the same chromosome), but evolution only needs to "decide" (heavy emphasis on the quotes there) that this physiological change is hormonally triggered. Many skeletal changes are hormonally triggered, so this may have even been the easiest/most likely path.

Comment · 9 years ago
I made a post about this, above, but I would argue that urine isn't always possible to completely clean in some situations. We lived in a place with a carpet and a thick pad under the carpet. Combined with a cat that spontaneously decided to habitually urinate in that one spot (no history of it). We tried EVERYTHING -- it was a massive project for over a year to get her to stop and spent hundreds of dollars on cleaning. Every enzyme product and shampoo, hours of elbow grease, soaking, drying, re-soaking, re-drying. We caught it as soon as it happened, gave LOTS of care and attention, but no dice.

Even the most responsible owners with the best pets can have problems that can't be fixed without just replacing the entire carpet. It happens.

Comment · 9 years ago
My husband and I replaced a carpet in our last apartment ourselves before move out (hired a professional, got it matched exactly with the rest of the carpets, replaced carpet pad as well, cleaned concrete subfloor) because our cat decided that one corner of the living room was an appropriate place to urinate.

She's usually a well-behaved cat, never did anything like this before, and we tried everything we could think of to get her to stop. We spent over a year and hundreds of dollars trying to repeatedly clean the spot, shampooing, steaming, enzymes, but nothing worked.

Our deposit was only $500, but we spent about $1600 replacing the carpet (it was the right thing to do and, like you said, they can sue us). There was NOTHING you could do to get that out besides just replacing it. And that was just one room. Multiply by 5 or 6 for replacing carpets all over the house, and that's more than a landlord can even reasonably hold as a security deposit. And what if we had had a wood subfloor instead of concrete? That would quickly get into the 5 figures.

It seemed like an ideal pet situation -- good cat, no history of urinating outside the litter box, responsible pet owners, regular vet checkups, doing everything we could to try and clean and get her to stop, cared very much about the cleanliness of our living space, but we STILL had to replace the carpet.

Honestly, especially after that experience, I don't blame landlords at all. I own a house now and don't think I'd ever want to, say, rent a room to a stranger with a cat. And I have a cat!

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