540
points
linkregister
Joined 4,795 karma
Former vulnerability researcher now dev in SF for a YC-alum company.
- The case in question does not hinge upon the crying emoji. This was a tangential discussion.
- > Apple gave their version a weirdly mixed expression that people sometimes interpret as “crying while laughing because something is so funny” (even though there’s already a separate emoji for that.) And iOS users kept using this emoji to mean that, while everyone else was confused.
This sounds like a small social media niche being interpreted as representative overall. The first 10 search engine results were people primarily interpreting it as a crying/sadness emotion; some used it as an expression of general intense emotion. This seems consistent with actual crying, which can be a reaction to many different intense emotions, not just sadness.
- Farmers in Sumeria over-irrigated the land until it was rendered unusable due to oversalination. This was a gradual process occurring over hundreds of years. That occurred before the limited liability corporation was invented.
- Sure, "rich" means different things in different contexts. In this case it's a shorthand for the much smaller group of people who control large companies and can move major levers impacting employment and trade. Admittedly it's ambiguous, as so many English terms in common use are.
- Laughable that this is interpreted as a slur against r*ch people. It is a banal observation that power corrupts. Societies with constructs to check power experience better overall and individual prosperity in general.
- This is a perfect example of the opportunity for federalism. Any state could —and many did— close the loophole. You mentioned emergency regulation from the Texas governor. New recreational substances are discovered and introduced to market continuously. States can use their legislative authority to address them. Delta-9, Spice, and other delta-8 THC analogues have been successfully addressed by states.
The side effects of this provision make hemp plants in the ground illegal, according to Senator Paul. It is reasonable for the public to be outraged about a hastily-written amendment whose authors failed to understand the unintended consequences.
- Various peer-reviewed studies exist and have been covered by pop science articles over the past 15 years or so.
Here is an example one; there are likely dozens available.
Study with 65 citations: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7607527/
Pop science article with more context: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/05/nearsight... (https://archive.is/OeuC3)
- What is your recommendation for the young author beyond questioning culture?
- Amazon Mechanical Turk is available to anyone with internet access, though jobs have dried up in recent years. Some jobs are region locked while others are available to all locales. I'll discuss mturk for the time period of its heyday.
> My hope is that they have to work a similar number of hours to afford what someone in a first-world country would doing the same work.
Average pay appeared to be far below minimum wage for mturk workers in the United States. My expectation is workers in developing countries have far higher purchasing power for doing the same work. I would also expect an inverse relationship between high local pay and number of workers on mturk, with considerations for languages and other region-specific .
> Would it be okay if Amazon showed up to a refugee camp with supplies, but before you could get your donation, you had to put in hours on mturk?
Because mturk is made available internationally and signup is trivial, I do not agree with your analogy of coercive refugee camp labor. Though Amazon is well known for harsh and unsafe working conditions in its US warehouses, I cannot consider safety considerations for a web-based anonymized gig economy service to be comparable. Using mturk to make money is voluntary.
I personally hope for refugees and residents of developing countries to have the necessities of life and opportunities to achieve success comparable to OECD nations' residents. I think that targeted foreign aid is an important part of helping people in developing countries. Access to credit and global markets has brought the largest amount of people out of poverty in history. Our governments and importers should work to ensure people in emerging markets have safe working conditions while also giving them access to our developed countries' markets.
- If mturk workers had better opportunities, they'd take them. mturk is competing with local economies in low opportunity locales. It is rational to work in a cybercafe doing rote web tasks for 8 hours if you'd receive the same amount of money performing manual labor.
- Fire danger is not a linear function. It fluctuates from year to year with rainfall. Efforts to reduce ignition events are meaningful.
Furthermore, risk to people and property is not uniformly distributed. Fire mitigation efforts are performed disproportionately near population centers. When man-made, preventable ignition causes are concentrated near towns like Paradise, responsible entities have a duty to reduce those risks.
It is not necessary to allow fires to burn houses down to fulfill a concept of accumulated fire risk. Marin County has published a series of videos showing homeowners how to landscape their properties to reduce the spread of fire.
- > The issue is that there are also other ignition sources and dead trees will eventually burn.
Please read citation number three from the parent post. This is not a certainty. Calfire and local agencies do a substantial amount of brush clearing, tree cutting, and when conditions are right, controlled burns. Anything that reduces the frequency of ignition events buys more time for fire control agencies to do this work.
- Then she is part of the conspiracy to lower rates in 2026. How deep does the rabbit hole go?
- This is a mischaracterization of the liability of PG&E for those fires. All of the PG&E-caused wildfires were due to inadequately maintained equipment operating well beyond its service life. The reduction of maintenance budgets to improve free cash flow and return capital to investors was a conscious decision by the company officers [1].
As you stated, PG&E was held liable for billions of dollars of compensation for the impacted people. This led to negative earnings zeroing out the profits of the previous decade [2]. Furthermore, the stock's price is far lower than it was during the hayday of deferred maintenance.
Since the involvement of California state government in PG&E operations, maintenance has improved dramatically. Furthermore, PG&E again has positive earnings, demonstrating that the long-term viability of the company is improved with adequate maintenance budgeting.
Now to address the counterfactual, "the fires would have happened anyway": no. The leading cause of wildfires in California in general, and impacting people and infrastructure in particular, is electrical equipment. This is empirical; after PG&E began cutting power during high-fire danger days, the number and severity of wildfires dropped dramatically [3].
1. How PG&E missed its chance to prevent the Camp Fire: Damning report on utility’s negligence, https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article24357122...
2. Pacific Gas & Electric EPS - Earnings per Share 2011-2025 | PCG, https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PCG/pacific-gas-el...
3. Human-caused ignitions spark California’s worst wildfires but get little state focus: In 2019, utilities turned off electricity during high-wind events, and California had its mildest fire season in eight years. Was that a coincidence?, https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2020/01/05/human-caused...
- Why is that horrific? Is it because some farmers are smaller operations and have less bargaining power? What about a large farming conglomerate, e.g. Cargill? What in particular is bad about this contract, and makes it different from other contracts?
Is it horrific to be sued for modifying and selling software with a removed GPLv3 notice?
- In the modern age of mass credential stuffing attacks exploiting password reuse, MFA is one of the most effective tools for reducing unauthorized logins. Companies that don't adopt it are risking unacceptably high levels of credit card chargebacks.
I wish the standard were for companies to check new passwords against leaked password lists, e.g. what https://haveibeenpwned.com uses.
I use a similar workflow and have found that websites that allow passkey-based login can avoid the friction of waiting for TOTP codes or magic links.
- That looks great for presumably a couple of hours of work, and it showcases pxehost pretty well.
- Millions of Americans take amphetamines daily, yet very few publish papers. I wager that Erdös simply had talent locked behind a common dopamine disorder.
(just kidding)
I agree that school assignment is highly variable. I'm glad your wife managed to get her appeal approved. It's unfortunate she even had to go through that process to begin with.