5
points
prirun
Joined 2,573 karma
Jim Wilcoxson, developer of HashBackup backup program.
Say Hi! jim@hashbackup.com
- This is called "balance billing" and the No Surprises Act usually prevents it, especially in emergency cases.
- I recently read that on average, people are happy about 42% of the time, maybe up to 50%. And this applies whether you are single, married, with kids, no kids, etc. So the first thing I'd do is realize that half of the time, you're not going to be "happy"; but what you can worked toward is being content, realizing that the times you aren't particularly happy are normal, and everyone has them.
If you feel very unhappy or unhappy, ie, not content, more than 30-60% of the time, you'd probably benefit from talking to a therapist and learning about how you can like yourself more. You will always have yourself throughout your life, whereas people will come and go. Learn to be your own best friend first.
- The bad thing is, I'm still getting this today and have not done another Firefox restart. Guess I need a new search engine now. Jeez. Sort of unbelievable.
- My Mom had a washer that did this. I told her to unplug it to soak overnight. That worked, but she hated that thing, sold it, and took my sister's older washer that didn't have any "we know better than you do" features.
- I loved Netflix when they had the DVD service and the recommendation competition because it actually suggested shows I would enjoy.
Once they started producing their own stuff, recommendations no longer worked: they just promoted whatever crap they produced themselves. And with that, trying to find a show I wanted to watch became so much effort that I canceled altogether. Same goes for all the other streaming services.
- Internet/TV bills can be negotiated, but it is usually something you have to do annually and most people, rightly so, hate it. The companies make it hard to do, so most people would rather pay an extra $5-10 rather than spending an hour or two on the phone. After 5-10 years, those fee bumps really add up.
The only way to keep Internet/TV costs low is to threaten to cancel or switch every year, and actually be willing to do it. For some that isn't an option because there is only 1 provider, and others I've talked to hate that idea because you have to learn a new channel lineup. It's amazing how much people will pay to not be slightly inconvenienced.
- Stopping payment sounds good, but may not work for a couple of reasons:
1) if you have payment auto deducted from a bank account, getting that stopped is not always straightforward. My bank told me they couldn't actually block ACH transactions, and to reverse one, I had to file a complaint with the company initiating the ACH, wait 30 days until the next bank statement to verify that the company didn't reverse the ACH, then ask the bank again to reverse the ACH.
2) in this case, the guy had other ISPs, but it looks like they were all satellite or DSL, which have really high latency. High latency and packet loss are way bigger issues than throughput, although with the severity of outage described in the article, high latency with no hard outage might be a better trade-off.
3) if you stop paying and get your service cut off, and it's critical for you (remote work, etc), now you have to scramble
- Backblaze erasure-codes customer data across 17 (I think) servers, so customer data is probably not accessible. Yes, it would be better if they zeroed the drive, but Google says that will take 14-30 hours for a 10TB drive.
For drives that implement an internal encryption key, it's faster (instantaneous) to reset the encryption key. It won't give you a zeroed drive, but one filled with garbage.
- I'm the author of HashBackup. IMO, silent bitrot is not really a thing. I say this because every disk sector written has an extensive ECC recorded with it, so the idea that a bit can flip in a sector and you get bad data without an I/O error seems extremely unlikely. Yes, you could have buggy OS disk drivers, drive controllers, or user-level programs that ignore disk errors. And yes, you could have a bit flip on magnetic media causing an I/O error because the data doesn't match the ECC.
I believe that that using non-ECC RAM is a potential cause of silent disk errors. If you read a sector without error, then a cosmic ray flips a bit in RAM containing that sector, you now have a bad copy of the sector with no error indication. Even if the backup software does a hash of the bad data and records it with the data, it's too late: the hash is of bad data. If you are lucky and the hash is created before the RAM bit flip, at least the hash won't match the bad data, so if you try to restore the file, you'll get an error at restore time. It's impossible to recover the correct data, but at least you'll know that.
The good news is that if you backup the bad data again, it will be read correctly, and be different from the previous backup. The bad news is, most backup software skips files based on metadata such as ctime and mtime, so until the file changes, it won't be re-saved.
We are so dependent on computers these days, it's a real shame that all computers don't come standard with ECC RAM. The real reason for that is that server menufacturers want to charge higher prices to data centers for "real" servers with ECC.
- I boot Finnix and use dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx to wipe out drives. Most drives can be wiped out overnight. That fable about needing multiple passes is not true:
https://datarecovery.com/rd/why-does-it-take-multiple-passes...
If a drive contained state secrets, I might use /dev/urandom instead of /dev/zero, but those kinds of drives are probably just shredded.
- Just as one data point, I have a diabetic friend on insulin and under a doctor's care who was put on a CGM and told by the doctor "if the meter reads 150 or higher, don't eat". Sometimes this meant not eating for a day. He lost 70 lbs in about a year and hugely reduce his insulin use.
- "We find that for smaller n≲ 262144, JesseSort is slower than Python’s default sort."
- I switched from Android to iOS because Google forced updates to my phone somehow, even though I had internet access disabled. I only used it as a phone: no email, web browsing, etc. My phone (Blu R2) was a few years old, and after the update, all kinds of stuff was broken. For example, zooming a picture would cause the messaging app to crash. So once that update was installed, I had to enable updates continuously to try to get back to a working phone. But instead, things just kept getting worse. I gave up and bought an iPhone XR on eBay for half retail price.
Most HN folks think diversity is a good thing, and I'm not saying it isn't, but it does have its disadvantages. In my case, I could probably buy new Android phones at least 3x more often than iPhones based on cost, but a lot of people (me) don't want to be fiddling with new phones every year or 2. It was apparent to me that Android updates are not tested thoroughly on older phones. I understand that would be hard because there is a huge variety of hardware, but it's a significant downside of Android IMO.
- This poem was set to music by Randall Thompson as part of Frostiana, a collection of Frost poems:
- I tend to use "catch and re-raise with context" in Python so that unexpected errors can be wrapped with a context message for debugging and for users, then passed to higher levels to generate a stack trace with context.
For situations where an unexpected error is retried, eg, accessing some network service, unexpected errors have a compressed stack trace string included with the context error message. The compressed stack trace has the program commit id, Python source file names (not pathnames) and line numbers strung together, and a context error message, like:
[#3271 a 25 b 75 c 14] Error accessing server xyz; http status 525
Then the user gets an idea of what went wrong, doesn't get overwhelmed with a lot of irrelevant (to them) debugging info, and if the error is reported, it's easy to tell what version of the program is running and exactly where and usually why the error occurred.
One of the big reasons I haven't switched from Python to Go for HashBackup (I'm the author) is that while I'd love to have a code speed-up, I can't stomach the work involved to add 'if err return err("blah")' after most lines of existing code. It would hugely (IMO) bloat the existing codebase.
- > I worry that the cost of exterminating people algorithmically could become so low that they could decide to start taking out small fries in batches.
My guess is that the cost of taking out a small fry today is already extremely low, and a desperate low-life could be hired for less than $1000 to kill a random person that doesn't have a security detail.
- The ACA lets people get healthcare insurance who are not otherwise eligible for it, for example: part-time workers, independent contractors, employees of companies with fewer than 50 employees, temporarily unemployeed (fired, laid off, switching careers or jobs), people who have lost coverage because their spouse lost coverage. That's a pretty broad swath of people!
Some people qualify for a tax subsidy that can be anywhere from $0 to the entire cost of a plan, depending on their income. A unique feature is that the subsidy is based on your expected income for the upcoming year, but if you make less than that (are laid off for example) or more (independent contract gets an unexpected contract), the subsidy is adjusted when you file your taxes.
Currently the ACA does not accept anyone who has a policy through work. IMO, every should have the option of getting ACA healthcare coverage. If their work coverage is better or cheaper, they can stick with that, but if their work coverage is worse or more expensive, employees should be allowed to get ACA coverage, with the employer paying part or all of the subsidy (what they would have paid to a private insurance company for the employee) instead of just the government.
- There is a list of 6 disadvantages of WAL mode on the SQLite site:
Insurance companies used to only pay for the vaccine at 60. They've reduced it to 50 now because people (like me) were getting it in their 50's. I got it in my left eye and because my immune system is kinda shit, I still have it, though it doesn't give me too much grief now. But it did trash my cornea in that eye, so it's messed my vision up pretty good. And since there's still an active infection (after 8 years), I can't get a cornea transplant.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/two-dose-shin...