jwilbs

Conveniently, you ignored everything I wrote after the comma:

“just because of the comparatively open press in Hong Kong + ubiquity of cell phones”

Of course I remember Tienanmen. And I’m also aware of the Uyghur camps. It’s no surprise that a country as authoritarian as China will be violent. What’s surprising is that it’s being violent in an autonomous territory with many Western connections.

A few weeks ago, I never would have expected China to profess/commit violence openly, just because of the comparatively open press in Hong Kong + ubiquity of cell phones.

After the triad attacks, and now this, I’m worried how far China will go to suppress any unrest.

FWIW, any Americans looking to (try to) help may write their Congress representatives to support the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act.

I was on Medicaid just a few years ago. It was definitely a lifesend, but the network is very tiny and, as a result, scheduling visits with specialists (in my experience, so anecdotally) took about three months.

I am very grateful I was not on Medicaid during the past few months. But I am happy it’s an option.

Two weeks, I had open heart surgery in my mid-20s in the US.

My main takeaway is this: those of us who work in tech or companies with decent health insurance are extremely fortunate.

In total (knock on wood that this doesn’t go up), I spent around $10k out of pocket.

This included more than surgery itself:

- multiple ER visits because of my deteriorating valve

- a LOT of dentist work (cleanings, fillings, wisdom teeth removal); these things increase your risk of stroke/heart attack after heart surgery.

- multiple visits with cardiologist and surgeon consultations

- pre-operation

- six days in the hospital recovering

To be honest, that’s a lot less than I expected to pay. However, I can’t help but think of people in less fortunate positions that would 1) get fucked by the bills if they had no insurance or 2) still go into debt despite having insurance. When you really think about it, all options are ridiculous for an operation that is literally do-or-die.

I’d also like to add a note on specialized vs ‘routine’ care here in the US. Or my experience with it, anyway.

All specialized treatment I received (dentist, heart surgery, cardiologist) was outstanding.

Routine cafe was awful, and ER visits were nothing short of ridiculous. I went in with chest pain/shortness of breath (that I now know was very serious). I waited for 6 hours. They gave me some blood work and an ekg and sent me on my way. I went again the next week, because my symptoms were getting progressively worse. Once again, I waited about 6 hours in the waiting room before getting an ekg and some blood work. Both visits were a complete waste of time. Luckily, I saw a cardiologist shortly after who gave me an echocardiogram and identified the valve issue.

This (the shortness of breath, dentist visits, surgery) was all done within the last two months. Were I in a less fortunate financial position, I probably would have hesitated to even go to the cardiologist. Especially after having thrown money at the ER for nothing.

It’s unfortunate how our healthcare system mirrors some sort of class-based hierarchy: If you can afford it, great! Else, get fucked.

Google says the acceptance rate is 17%. Would love to see your source on 25% of non-Stanford alumni SV people being from USC. Anecdotally, I’ve met one.

This. I’ve contributed code to popular libraries in both languages, and while I (overall) have a preference for python (mostly due to it being general purpose), I find R code unparalleled when it comes to raw data manipulation/analysis.

The overall api of tidyverse packages is such a joy, and recent improvements in purrr/tidyr allow me to construct nested data analysis workflows I couldn’t even dream of in python.

Thanks for the kind comment, I’m glad it was helpful. I recommend you check out explorabl.es - they have a ton of informative interactives, covering a wide range of disciplines. And thanks for the typo notification!

At work: we finally updated our prod environment to accommodate a more recent version of Spark, so have been playing with rewriting some jobs in spark (now that I’m not limited to only using the RDD api). At home: trying to integrate D3 with React in as pain-free a manner as possible; just ordered an online book thing from Swizec Teller that looks promising in that area :).

I find it very hard to believe any recruiter/interviewer would be turned off that my top 6 repos featured a mix of popular and unpopular, personal and forked repos.

Limiting exposure of my open-source contributions to organizations adds not only another layer of search, but the opportunity for me to get passed up because my contributions to ___ weren’t immediately apparent.

I’d love to hear the story behind that, haha.

Were you paid to drive that? Were you just a huge Yahoo fan? An early employee?

Is there any reason you decided to take loans instead of using the GI Bill? Genuinely curious.