At the tax authority we could query that directly from a database.
But yes, the public sector suffers from countless different systems that have accumulated over the years. It happens because everything has to go out to a public bid and throughout the times it has been considered anti competitive to built things in-house.
More than that, the vendor winning the bid will happily use the opportunity to latch itself to the flow of taxpayer money. That's a big reason you end up with XML hell - the systems are designed to make future interop impossible without going through the vendor.
In fact, wasn't Denmark a case study of that? I remember there was someone on HN a while ago, IIRC working in public service of some country in Europe, who posted stories about their constant fighting with a vendor who intentionally makes it very hard to have any kind of integration and data exchange between various administrative branches.
I have a very obscure allergy to some specific compounds in some medication. It gives me a rash, nothing serious. I'm always very diligent in mentioning what little I still remember about that allergy.
I've spent thirty years telling doctors I'm allergic to amoxicillin; I'm not sure if I am, but that's how my parents started every doctor visit when I was small so I carry on the tradition. I think I might have thrown up after taking it as a small child, but I have no recollection myself.
I have something similar with epinephrine. Every visit I'm asked "allergy to epinephrine?" and I have to, again, clarify "no, but I'm sensitive to it, and it makes me really jittery, so I prefer to not have it unless there's no choice". It makes me feel like I've had way too much caffeine and is just generally unpleasant.
Those conversations don't seem tomatter much, because when getting common small procedures done (such as mole removal) the doctor will use whatever they prefer. Epinephrine is a vascoconstrictor, so it helps with bleeding and keeps the anesthesia (eg: lidocaine) from wearing off as quickly. So, doctor's prefer it. So each time I have to ask the doctor if that's the variant they are using, and if they could do without. Sometimes they do, sometimes they explain why it's best not to and we go ahead with.
I know I could outright say allergy and they wouldn't use it, but I really don't want to cut off a useful tool for them, for no good reason other than I don't like a minor, short-lasting side effect.
I’m pretty sure it’s not actually possible to be allergic to epinephrine. After all, it is commonly known as adrenaline. You’d probably die if you were allergic to it.
Yeah, that's what's weird about it. It's very much NOT an allergy, but I don't like how it makes me feel. So, optionally, if it can be avoided I prefer to. But it seems to be listed as an allergy and is stuck in my medical records forever. :\
it's common to have childhood allergies to penicillin-class drugs which go away in adulthood; i had to have major surgery (as an adult) but had a similar childhood reaction. I was advised to do an allergy 'challenge test'. It turned out the allergy was either never really there or had gone away, which gives doctors more options when antibiotics are needed. It might be worth looking into.
But only “look into it” in a carefully supervised medical center. Don’t go rolling the dice on a severe allergic reaction to an antibiotic at home or outside of that supervision.
Obscure allergic reaction and obscure disease often look the same. You treat them opposite. The former, you want to suppress the immune system, and the latter, you don't. In obscure circumstances (e.g. a doctor is debugging a serious rash after a surgery while you're unconscious and on an IV), those sorts of tidbits can be important.
Next time just ask for an allergy test. These days they just draw a bit of blood and send you the results in a few days. Then its on your records for good.
I'm not sure how to interpret this. Were the antihistamines in case you had a drug allergy? Or were they for the other kind of allergy (pollen, pet danger, dust, etc.)?
Antihistamines are for any kind of allergy. They don't care if it's from breathing in something, touching something, or eating something. Allergy is an allergy.
Were they thinking, "The patient might find these handy if they have pollen allergies but never really thought to do anything about it"?
Or, were they thinking, "The patient doesn't seem to know if they're allergic to this prescription I'm giving them, so I'll give them an antihistamine to go along with it just in case."
Obviously there are many things going on here, and I am not saying this is the end all explanation to the whole thing, but an interesting part of the puzzle I came across during a project I did on the brewery industry during my bachelor, is that there exists a whole market segment of consumers who just wants to "try something new".
When you ask yourself in the super market "Who in their right mind wants a snickers and mint flavored orea?" this is that segment.
So, in my case, the beer industry was (is? This was a decade ago) losing sales to ready-mades (Barcadi Breezer, cans of rum and coke, etc.) and a way to hold on to consumers was simply to add new, limited run recipes.
All classes of drinks are trying to hold on to consumers who are being stolen by other classes of drinks, by offering up new colors and strange flavor combinations.
But at the same time I think you are right about companies training consumers to drink larger and larger portions sugared drinks. Like, 1.5 liter coca-cola isn't even the largest size drink in the cinema sometimes!
Right, yes this makes sense! I suspect that these short-lived new flavours actually increse sales of the original flavours, since the consumer desires to taste the original again.
A few years ago I decided I wanted to buy one of his limited prints with some extra money I was to earn. Then I pushed it off for a bit due to a few poor excuses, and eventually forgot about it.
And now his prints are of course ... out of print.
I'm not saying I need a numbered and signed limited print like The Tigers New Clothes [1] but it would be nice with maybe just a regularly, unsigned, unnumbered poster on my wall.
His sketchbooks are awesome, and often have a large poster/print in them. I think for sure they will have prints in the future, just not signed of-course any more as much as KJG would love to from up there.
I thought I was pretty good at regex, but I could never have written this one and had to consult both `man grep` and regex101.com.
Explanations for the beginner and intermediate regex and grep user:
`-o`: Only return the match, instead of the entire line
`-P`: use Perl compatible regex
`-m` max-count, Stop reading a file after NUM matching lines.
And now for the regex:
`name:`: find the exact match
`\s*"`: Zero or more spaces leading up to and including an double quote
`\K`: This was the kicker for me. "resets the starting point of the reported match. Any previously consumed characters are no longer included in the final match" - basically tells the regex engine that the characters _before_ `\K` needs to be there in order to form a match, but it should only return the characters _after_ `\K` as the match. This is super handy! Is there a "reverse \K"?
`[^"]+`: One or more characters that are not a double quote. This basically means "Find the line that has a key called "name" and return all the characters after the first double quote and until the last double quote"
"How do I make it print only the captured group with the number, not the whole line?" is a pretty common Stack Overflow question. The "\K" thing gets rid of the "start: " part, but what about " end"? That's were "reverse \K" would come in handy.
Does anyone on HN have any of these "surprising" email addresses that most people and developers do not expect?
How does it work with common e-mail clients? How do people react when you show/tell them your email?
I have a domain that uses non-ascii characters, and while I can receive emails on that domain, hosted by Fastmail, Fastmail clients refuses to _send_ emails to that domain (I can, if I type the domain as Punycode).
I have my own domain and a catch-all setup, so when I sign up for a service, it's [email protected], if I give someone my email address, it's [email protected]
It makes it easy for me to keep track of who is sending me what + who is sharing my email with third parties, but definitely confuses some people.
Samsung is particularly annoying about this. You can't sign up for an account with "Samsung" in the user portion. They'll straight up block [email protected], so I've resorted to misspelling their name in the email address and they seem perfectly fine with that.
I can't type one of my email address on HN as it has emojis in the hostname. It works great with Fastmail. It gets problematic when I use emojis in the mailbox name as well. At lot of hosts won't allow that.
You can see the email address on the front page if I paste the punycode web address on here:
Messing with emoji taught me how absolutely atrocious unicode support among email servers is. Gmail supports it, but even modern versions of postfix require special compilation flags to enable SMTPUTF8.
While emoji aren't a use case you'll get many managers to care about, there are plenty of unicode characters that can. Email addresses using foreign script, for one, or even just characters like åäáà, not uncommon in European names, might convince people to consider enabling such features.
Sadly, the process of enabling support for such characters is much harder than it should and I've got to admit they my mail infrastructure also can't handle these types of email addresses. Modern MS Exchange servers seem to have finally implemented support, though, so perhaps we may see more support for it in the future!
I think postfix's DB drivers were also still latin-1 only, if I'm not misremembering I had to mojibake what I wanted it to pick up.
Though UTF-8 is not the only thing atrocious with e-mail stacks, there's so much maintained-but-not-really non-standard software that a lot of people rely on.
To end on a positive note, e-mail hosts are starting to demand SPF to accept mail.
I do and like many other HN users, when websites refuse to accept my email, I simply don't use their service. I haven't noticed any decrease in my quality of life - in fact, being able to use my email freely is invigorating and gives me a sense of worth in this corporate controlled internet.
Since we are sharing our getting out of doom scrolling stories, I’ll share how I got off Reddit.
I realized that most of what I was reading on Reddit was fabricated outrage (since then they’ve added subs like “makes your blood boil” and “idiots in cars” - check them out if you feel like you are not outraged regularly enough)
I was the type of person who would sit on Reddit, be bored and type Reddit in the url bar.
So I decided to quit Reddit and used habitica for the task. It’s a gamification for to-do lists and forming habits. I added “visiting Reddit” as a minus 1, and every time I realized I was on Reddit I opened habitica and gave myself a minus 1.
Fictive internet points are quite powerful. I also started flossing this way (flossing at night, +1)
But yes, the public sector suffers from countless different systems that have accumulated over the years. It happens because everything has to go out to a public bid and throughout the times it has been considered anti competitive to built things in-house.