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gnarmis

In a recent case of someone living in TX learning that their fetus had trisomy 18, there was a whole legal case that had to be fought, and when Judge Gamble ruled that terminating the pregnancy could proceed in this case, TX AG Ken Paxton filed an emergency petition to ask the state supreme court to overturn the ruling, and that blocked Judge Gamble's ruling. Meantime, the woman's condition was deteriorating enough that she left the state to get her healthcare needs met.

So, what can we expect when TX is making it this perilous to provide basic healthcare for such a large percentage of its population? More of the same, I'd argue.

If you care about your sisters/daughters/spouses' access to healthcare, consider other states.

Re:California bans private prisons on Thursday September 12, 2019 @05:24PM (#20956635)
On the second point, I think folks are rightly dubious about the effectiveness of incentives broadly[1]. There's also some hilarious historical examples of incentives backfiring or having unwanted side-effects (like the Cobra Effect [2].)

More broadly, I don't think it's that easy to think that private prisons can even work well as a solution, regardless of whether they should be allowed to exist as a matter of public policy and ethics. Consider one summative look at this issue provided in this evaluation[3] -- it's dubious whether they're even cost effective, one of the strongest pro-private-prison arguments there has been in public debate, and how there's much better alternatives than the kind of perverse incentives bundled with private prisons, like re-evaluating whether parolees should be allowed in public housing, and providing more transition housing so when sentences are complete, inmates aren't forced to spend even more time in prison because they don't have an address to go to.

[1] https://hbr.org/2009/03/when-economic-incentives-backfire [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect [3] https://publicpolicy.wharton.upenn.edu/live/news/2304-privat...

Re:Python: Avoid master/slave terms on Thursday September 13, 2018 @12:48AM (#17976123)
I'm quite taken aback by the vitriol in those comments.

Programs are meant to be read by humans, and language/terminology has a huge impact. If there are cost-less replacements to words that are easy to adopt, why not adopt them? These changes are beneficial to the community, don't hurt the language, and are cheap to adopt in many cases anyway.

Re:Chernoff face on Friday March 23, 2018 @09:01PM (#16664053)
Chernoff faces are pretty fun to play with too! A while back, I played with it[1], and they do seem useful. I wonder if more realistic faces lead to better utility as a at-a-glance data visualization tool?

[1]: https://gnarmis.github.io/chernoff-faces/ -- a simple toy

Re:Modern terminal-based text editor on Thursday September 28, 2017 @08:00PM (#15361769)
I like this tool. Been waiting for something I could recommend to occasional terminal-users I meet and help.

I'm very glad it was posted here.

Re:Azure Container Instances on Thursday July 27, 2017 @12:50AM (#14862792)
Yeah that makes sense. If there's enough of an enticement to adopt the infra service and you standardize the API at the bottom, any developments/contributions on top of it could co-exist and be more share-able. I'm reminded of the addon marketplace in Heroku. The underlying infra was consistent and general, which made third party plugins/addons/contributions easier (even to make money). Heroku ended up getting a lot of specialized support for platform customers that they probably couldn't have built out themselves.

I could totally see even seeding a possible 'marketplace' with your own services. Like perhaps Func as a service, powered by Hyper. And others also benefiting from the underlying infra being so simple. Why wouldn't a platform-provider use an infra service that's flexibly scalable on perf+price? They probably have the skillset on hand for that too and don't need any more finesse than already exists, beyond stability.

Anyway, that's just my own ramblings. Hope you're having fun with Hyper! It sure looks like a lot of love/tears went into it.

Re:Offline GraphQL Queries with Redux Offline and Apollo on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @10:46PM (#14862297)
This looks really awesome. I liked that rehydration was factored out with a higher order component like that. That seems like a much cleaner solution.

Overall, I'm really intrigued by Apollo Client and GraphQL in general. My guess is that using them cuts down on a lot of custom Redux related code you'd end up writing, mostly fetches and mutations. And replaces those concerns with much more declarative code. And also handles conventions about the shape of how to handle errors and load states.

But what are the gotchas of a stack that might heavily favor Apollyon Client and GraphQL?

Re:Azure Container Instances on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @03:41PM (#14859494)
Check out Hyper.sh too. It abstracts away the whole datacenter -- you can use `hyper` instead of `docker`, basically. You don't need to think about VMs ever as a concept, containers run directly on the hypervisor. And they have Hyper Func, an AWS Lambda-like alternative that uses images. And per second billing.

On the downsides, they're small and they have one data center, and they're not Microsoft. But their tech is open source.

Re:Azure Container Instances on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @03:17PM (#14859250)
For small teams like the one I work in, and for solo work I have dabbled a bit in, I can imagine the following thought process if I have a git repo and sit down to think about how to best deploy it.

- I start researching how to deploy this, but I don't care about optimizing for a lot of scale. I DO care a lot about iteration speed, integration with image registry + code repository + CI/testing services (ideally out of the box), and not making it hard to maintain/deploy/expand for the rest of the team (if an associate engineer can be brought up to speed on the infra and become fairly independent, that'd be wonderful).

- I probably care about burstable, pay-for-usage infra. But it'd be great if that was somewhat abstracted away. Perhaps even based on requests-per-minute, and I set up limits about how far it should scale. (This would immediately put this far and above Heroku -- good, cost-efficient auto scaling)

- I really care about not having to maintain my own DB cluster myself. And similarly for key/value storage and block-file-storage (like s3). And I'd absolutely love to not have to myself tweak and implement something common like cron or logging.

- And I'd probably care about integration with error-detection services and performance monitoring services.

- It would be absolutely amazing if there were default stacks/recipes with load balancers, so the common cases were easy (a common case like a standard RDBMS-backed JSON REST Api using cron and background jobs, or a static website (which basically covers all SPA-like frontends, if you add in a flexible reverse-proxy URL-rewriting solution))

Then, I could pick it up and be fine depending on it, since costs would scale down to my level (plus some premium I guess, but hey I'm even okay with Heroku for some things). But I could probably continue to stick with it for a long time. Inertia in ops means that if you get green field projects early and sustain them, my guess is that they stick around longer than they really even should -- but that's just an unverified guess on my part, idk.

ps -- the thing that really strongly drew me to hyper.sh was that I could abstract away the whole cluster behind `hyper`, like `docker` on my own computer. That was an amazing selling point, coming at after the popcorn machine of container management solutions with their very own intricate towers of complexity. It's what I like about sandstorm.io in part -- abstracting away a lot of complexity about hosting apps. But there's other complexity that could perhaps be eased or simplified, since running a software project is not simply the same as running an app on a computer, networking, load balancing, data security, backups and so on add up to a lot. So it's not enough that `hyper` abstracts away the data center, because there's scope for some more simplification for a certain slice of market: smaller teams who can't afford a full ops team, or teams with a small ops team who want to tackle a monstrous tech project.

Re:Azure Container Instances on Wednesday July 26, 2017 @12:06PM (#14857447)
But Hyper.sh is still competitive, I think, even though it's super young. They already have a high level AWS Lambda alternative (Hyper Func) that uses containers and is fully language agnostic, and they have reasonable pricing-per-minute figured out.

They also have open sourced their tech [1], so for certain companies they probably are compelling.

Perhaps they should provide the kind of ease-of-use on top of the stuff they already provide that will cut open a steady market for them, like a Heroku but with this underlying tech and thus more dynamic on scaling and flexible on tech stack.

[1] https://github.com/hyperhq/runv is one example

Re:$4k Renault compared to Tesla Model 3 on Thursday July 20, 2017 @01:11AM (#14810146)
I was considering the first column, which does list Thailand as second highest in terms of road fatalities per 100k inhabitants. By second column, I didn't mean to say skip the column with country names -- that may be the mixup. Here's the source data too: http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/road_safety_st.... I think considering the number of road fatalities and accounting for population seems like a good enough comparative measure.
Re:$4k Renault compared to Tesla Model 3 on Wednesday July 19, 2017 @07:14PM (#14808808)
You may find this interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

Sorting by the second column gives a good picture about which country has more dangerous drivers. And Thailand is #2... so your claim tracks well against this reality.

There is also such a thing as a representative summary of what the article is going to be about. It's about how DIYGirls worked with a group of high schoolers, part of an all girls club, to make a solar powered tent.

And it's an NPR article, at that.

Not everything requires the cached thought: "mo' views mo' $s"

Nope, seems totally fine.

The group involved in helping this high school team was DIYGirls. The students who did this were part of an all-girls club.

This just seems like an overreaction -- if you actually read the article, the title fits perfectly.

Re:Why We Chose Typescript on Friday June 30, 2017 @07:25PM (#14674191)
Ah, useful things to know about!

flow-typed does exist, so that's something. https://github.com/flowtype/flow-typed.

Re:Awesome D3 on Tuesday June 30, 2015 @12:45PM (#9806567)
D3 is excellent. I poked around with Chernoff faces using D3 and React and had a great time[1].

I love these awesome lists, great for compressing the accumulated knowledge of open source tools.

1: https://github.com/gnarmis/chernoff-faces

There are multiple companies and governments targeting space technology, like sending manned missions and providing infra for cheap launch into LEO.

And there are already many efforts to improve existential risk right here on Earth.

What's a better population comparison? It'd be instructive to estimate this.

But regardless, if you're one in a million, there's like 7 thousand of you. And there's many actors on the stage. But it does spark a useful debate, good point.

I would bet according to my uncertainty. If I was donating expertise or money, I'd supply fractional amounts relative to my own consideration of how valuable each endeavor is. It's not all-in.

Mars colony survives a mass dying in this hypothetical by not being the target planet of the mass dying.

Of course, you have threats that can impact both. Improvement by degrees is still beneficial though. Even though a backup is not useful for this type of risk, in the original hypothetical it is useful.

Also, of course you can switch the hypothetical around and consider Mars getting hit by the mass dying event. But we're talking about the value of having a backup and considering low likelihood situations where having that backup shows its existential benefit.

Of course it does in that example. 10,000 people living self sufficiently.

Enjoy the fiery death while the others go on living, then.

Seriously, you'd pick a planet undergoing a mass dying rather than one with all the support you need to live independently? Make a cot in a firestorm?

And sure if you wanna assume the same tech as that used by us in Antarctica right now and somehow make an equivalence between that and a hypothetical self sufficient colony and all of the attendant tech.

I see lots of obvious upsides, as stated before. It's quite clear that there's massive upsides to sending people to Mars and working towards a self sufficient colony there. Namely, redundancy of civilization and the obvious economic and tech impact. Of course you should pursue this colony.

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