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brb writing a dystopian fiction where members of the criminal underworld pee in bottles and do... other things... to evade the state. and then there's a sherlock-type investigator who's chasing a character through the sewers, etc.


It's already a thing to some extent, at least for heads of states. Kim Jong Un is known to have a personal toilet that's taken with him on foreign trips: https://www.businessinsider.com/kim-jong-un-brought-his-own-...

I've seen similar claims made on the Internet about the U.S. president and the French president, although these ones aren't proven. Macron did refuse a COVID test on his trip to Russia in early 2022 presumably due to concerns about DNA collection.


Without spoilers: that was a major plot point in Gattaca (1997).


Putin already does this.[0]. He doesn't want adversaries to know what drugs he's taking (presumably for cancer).

[0]https://www.parismatch.com/Actu/International/Poutine-malade...


There may have learned a lesson from Stalin.

"According to Russian newspaper reports, in the 1940s Stalin's secret police had set up a special department to get its hands on people's faeces.

The ambitious aim: to analyse samples of foreign leaders' stools.

In other words, espionage via excrement."

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35427926


I remember saying that the Secret Service has a sophisticated portable toilet for the president to use when he's travelling, but the only source I could find was some conspiracy website. (I found it during the Bush II administration, so it's either gone from the Internet, or Google has probably lost it)


You'd enjoy "Urinetown: The Musical"


Tailscale


I saw a post about tailscale here on HN and recommended them to a friend where he is CTO. The couldn't be happier and became paying customers.


I like debuggers, but I don't always use debuggers. Typically because I can find the problem quicker w/ a puts/print/etc. than the time it takes me to run the debugger.

I also do a lot of web stuff, and if you're running some server process and you're not running the server process through a debugger directly, then you need to find and attach to the server PID, etc., then maybe deal with threads, and it's just a lot of upfront effort when I could just find the issue by throwing a puts/print somewhere or writing a test.

I'm not anti-debugger, I'm just busy and it's easier to put something in my code (which is how I frequently jump into debuggers too, e.g. binding.irb, binding.pry, debugger, byebug, etc.)

the CLI debuggers (gdb, lldb, etc.) are great when I really need them, but they're a pain in the ass to setup with things that are not C or C++, editor integrations sometimes need setup, and using them without setting breakpoints visually is tedious.


Think about what you want out of working on some side projects. If you think it's important for your career or because there's an itch you want to scratch, etc. you'll make time for it. If you think you're doing it just because you feel you _should_ be (because of something-something-#hustle-#grind), then I would think twice about spending your precious free time on writing code in your free time for the sake of writing code in your free time (or trying to monetize your free time!). You own your free time and you should fill it with the things you want to do as part of a balanced, enjoyable life.

I write a lot of code outside of work. I have some sort of compulsion to do so, and have numerous passion & open source projects I work on. They pretty much all scratch some sort of itch for me personally (either creative or mentally). This keeps me motivated because they're all stuff _I_ want to do and mostly not things I feel like someone else wants me to do or I'm making myself do. I don't worry about going months between touching some of them. Some weeks, I don't feel like touching any of them and will spend most or all of my free time on other stuff.


Totally agree, as one have to enjoy the time spent in code. Also no pressure to make that perfect (although one may). Important thing that mentioned is project can be worked in "on-off" mode, because giving free time always not viable, specially if one has family.


This makes me feel warm and fuzzy again for the old web. This is wonderful!


as other's pointed out, RSS is still here if you want to use it. It's just not ubiquitous as it once was.

IMO the big thing that killed RSS ubiquity was Google Chrome not having support for it natively. Before that, Firefox, Opera, Safari all had RSS as well-supported, central thing and I remember finding it super annoying that Chrome didn't have it when it launched. But I kept using Chrome for the same reasons everyone else started switching to Chrome. And the RSS extensions all sucked. And eventually I stopped using them. And here I am, no longer reading RSS.

But as Chrome ate up browser share, I'm sure fewer people went to RSS because it wasn't natively there and so the incentives to implement RSS decreased as fewer people expected it to be there, especially as many more people were coming online only having used Chrome.

Oddly enough, I switched back to Firefox years ago and _could_ get back into RSS at any point (or with any number of RSS reader apps, etc.), but the habit has stuck, and I now stay up-to-date on everything via email newsletters, Twitter and this orange website instead. it's worse and I hate it, but oh well


My solution to this was getting a miniflux.app subscription and pinning the tab/setting it as my home page. I got directly to this page via an RSS feed.


This is _exactly_ why I created Feeder, an RSS extension for Chrome. In 2010 I wanted to switch from Firefox but was hooked on live bookmarks.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-feed-reader/pn...


I remember using this! I liked it and used it for a while! But not having it in the bookmarks bar, I kept forgetting about my feeds :/ and then I stopped installing it. I'm sorry :( Glad to hear it's still going strong though. Maybe I'll give it another shot!


Vivaldi has support for RSS feeds now. Vivaldi has been getting better and better. I urge anyone who hasn't tried it in the last year or two to check it out. It's the new Opera.


IMO, RSS as a browser feature was dead pretty much as soon as smartphones happened (and desktop<>mobile RSS sync didn't).


nice try Oracle!


In short, healthcare is very complex and there is no incentive structure that prevents the software from managing that complexity poorly, primarily because the users of the software are often not the ones making the purchasing decisions. Many are optimized for billing, and others are optimized for health systems who want lots of data points and jam the software with data collection forms.

There's lots of _better_ healthcare software out there. It's still complex, while remaining fairly user-friendly, but it tends to live inside healthcare startups and healthcare tech, and not deployed as broadly as the big EMRs like Epic, Cerner, eClinicalWorks, etc. These established players tend to be the only ones with the feature sets that big hospitals and health systems want/need.

Aside:

A lot of people in this thread are complaining about "regulations" making things difficult, but HIPAA, HITRUST, Meaningful Use/Promoting Interoperability, SCRIPT, etc. are not _why_ EMRs suck. They make it harder to start from scratch, but they do not prevent you from building easy-to-use software. The software sucks because there's generally no incentive to make it not suck and a whole lot of legacy suckage with a lot of momentum, money, and influence.


I've used Linux for a long time. Though primarily on servers these days, I've occasionally used it as my main desktop OS, and always end up going back to macOS because of three things:

1. battery life on laptops. Linux tends not to Power Management well on most laptops. Whether this is a hardware/ACPI thing, a device driver thing, or an overall ecosystem thing, I'm not sure. But it's noticeably worse than when running Windows or macOS.

2. as others have no doubt mentioned, trackpad. Apple's trackpad hardware and macOS's trackpad gesture support is so good, it's really hard to not have it. I can emulate some of it on my XPS 13 running Ubuntu w/ some additional agent thing that runs in the background, but it's only 85% there and not as smooth an experience.

3. desktop environment stability & consistency. this is _much_ less a problem than it was say 10 or 15 years ago as GNOME has gotten quite good and Flatpak/Snap/etc. are decent at containing various GUIs and their disparate dependencies, but there's still a lack of good integration with DEs across ecosystem tools generally. But also Electron has also sort of leveled the playing field a bit, so many desktop apps behave the same across platforms (for better or worse)

I would've said slow package/kernel updates, but there are enough solutions to this now, that it's not as much of a problem (Ubuntu HWE, Nix, Linuxbrew, or using ArchLinux)


I guess I don't quite understand the target audience? I put in my average checking amount and it quoted me at how I'm potentially missing out on $262 dollars/year, at which point, I think, yeah okay, but I have FDIC-insured deposits, so I don't feel too compelled to forgo that for the promise of maybe adding another $262 to my wealth. I'm just simply not keeping 10s of thousands of dollars in my checking account. To me, that's what a savings account and/or investment accounts are for.

So who are these people keeping so much money in their savings account that they want to invest it, but are not already being served by other offerings from traditional investment firms of high-yield savings accounts?


Great question. The motivation will differ from person to person, but I can give you the reason why I'm using it.

I live in a high cost of living area, so I used to keep ~20K in my checking account at all times to pay for rent etc. All the rest of my money I invested in a total market stock index fund. The checking account balance is just a small fraction of my overall balance, so the FDIC insurance really didn't help me.

Financial Choice has two benefits for me. 1) I now get to invest those ~20K which gives me a ~1-2K expected annual return without any hassle, and 2) I can just keep all my money in my Financial Choice account, so I don't need to bother moving money between a checking and brokerage account anymore.


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