Hacker News: emaginniss

New comment by emaginniss in "Flame retardant found in US breast milk"

emaginniss — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 15:34:10 +0000

Or babies

New comment by emaginniss in "Stanford president resigns over manipulated research, will retract 3 papers"

emaginniss — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 15:19:19 +0000

The longer I spend on social media the more I have learned that the only differences between men and women is that men are terrible and women are awesome. Right?

New comment by emaginniss in "Running Postgres as a Unikernel"

emaginniss — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 14:37:10 +0000

As I recall, Oracle on Solaris was able to go direct to the disks and experienced a lot of perf improvements over similar HPUX or Linux machines

New comment by emaginniss in "Company to pay fine after hiring fake priest to extract confessions of workers"

emaginniss — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 17:44:33 +0000

Fair enough, although his sentence seemed to be based on being a habitual offender with armed robbery and domestic violence convictions. It's similar to how people in this thread think that repeat violators of wage theft should face higher penalties.

New comment by emaginniss in "Company to pay fine after hiring fake priest to extract confessions of workers"

emaginniss — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 16:10:53 +0000

There is a reason that there is a difference. The bank vault situation is a case of illegal taking. The person in that case is likely someplace that they aren't legally allowed to be or are using force (or threat thereof) to extract the money. There is no chance that this was an accident. The employment case is a failure to pay money that is owed. That is sometimes just a contractual failure and can be the result of malice or incompetence. Many states have recognized that the failure to pay lawful wages is greater than a simple contractual failure and have added double or treble damages to the awards to penalize employers in this situation. Still, it is generally recognized that we don't want to be throwing people in jail for just failing to live up to a civil contract. Imagine if we started throwing people in jail for failing to pay rent.

New comment by emaginniss in "Company to pay fine after hiring fake priest to extract confessions of workers"

emaginniss — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 16:06:46 +0000

Wait! Someone is in jail for a decade for just spitting on a cop? We need to protest this case. Who is it?

New comment by emaginniss in "Sub.Rehab – See where Reddit communities have relocated"

emaginniss — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 15:22:29 +0000

> and made money doing it

How do you see that happening? Part of the reason for the pricing on the APIs was to ensure that more people saw the ads. I know I never see them when I use BaconReader.

Monetizing something like Reddit is always going to be a struggle, especially since the Reddit crowd is more tech-savvy than the Twitter and Facebook users, thus more likely to use ad-blockers.

I honestly don't know of a way that a social networking system can ever have a near-universal scale and still make money. Sure, a niche community that relies on contributions from its members to offset development and hosting could work, but not Reddit or Twitter with they way they're going. FB is still going pretty strong, but last I checked, 70% of the main feed content I saw were ads.

New comment by emaginniss in "Westfield Walks Away from Downtown San Francisco Mall Property"

emaginniss — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 20:01:13 +0000

Looking at it from a nationwide perspective, there were two watershed moments in mental health treatment in the late 20th century.

The first was in the 60's when JFK (whose sister had been savaged by the mental health institutions) signed legislation changing the requirements for commitment to be "posing a danger to oneself or others." This was a change from the metric of "mentally unfit to live independently in society."

The second was in the 80's when Reagan and the Democratic-majority congress defunded and shuttered many of the state-owned mental health facilities. This was a bi-partisan effort by the Republicans, who hated spending money, and the Democrats, who hated how poorly run the facilities were. Nobody has had a really good solution for mental health care in the US since those happened and, as the parent post points out, it is unfair to paint this as "Reagan defunded mental health care."

New comment by emaginniss in "FF4J – Feature Flags for Java"

emaginniss — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 15:01:51 +0000

I know! I was so confused that I tried downloading it and playing and it wouldn't work. I've been in a spiral all day.

New comment by emaginniss in "Google no longer automatically indexes websites?"

emaginniss — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 15:34:27 +0000

ChatGPT requires an account to work at all

New comment by emaginniss in "US banks lost $472B in deposits in the Q1 2023"

emaginniss — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 15:20:51 +0000

The money the government spends or forgives still goes on the balance sheet and will either come due at some point, or will result in the default of the US Treasury. That would be like me saying that spending crazy amounts of money on a new sports car doesn't matter because I have a huge line of credit. Eventually, that money for the car needs to be repaid.

You can absolutely see examples of this in city and state governments in the US that have failed to make pension payments. Kicking the can down the road will eventually catch up with someone.

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/20...

New comment by emaginniss in "Looking Back On Helm"

emaginniss — Wed, 24 May 2023 19:25:14 +0000

Or my axe

New comment by emaginniss in "Container shipping has cratered, as ship owners try to avoid unprofitable trips"

emaginniss — Wed, 24 May 2023 15:58:36 +0000

Robert Kennedy Jr is a crazy anti-vax nutjob, therefore, all of his work on environmentalism is invalid and the entire cause of environmentalism is suspect. Is that how this works?

New comment by emaginniss in "Roblox: Ten-year-old spent £2.5k of mum's money without her knowing"

emaginniss — Mon, 22 May 2023 15:33:41 +0000

Should everyone be able to get their money back from Apple/Google/Steam/GOG for any digital purchases? After all, the retailer wouldn't lose anything by giving a refund. Only bits changed hands.

New comment by emaginniss in "Why are so many young Americans adopting fake British accents?"

emaginniss — Mon, 15 May 2023 14:53:16 +0000

I thought his Foghorn Leghorn impersonation was fantastic

New comment by emaginniss in "Microsoft Bets That Fusion Power Is Closer Than Many Think"

emaginniss — Wed, 10 May 2023 15:10:29 +0000

I'm not sure why you're so negative on a business model that has worked for tech startups for decades now. Many businesses have started by promising to fix a problem experienced by a larger entity. Along with product guidance, the startup often gets capital in the form of investment. The larger company gets a low-risk attempt to solve their problem with the possibility of upside in the case of a larger than expected success.

New comment by emaginniss in "Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?"

emaginniss — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 15:36:01 +0000

You should start selling ad time

New comment by emaginniss in "Steven Spielberg: ‘No film should be revised’ based on modern sensitivity"

emaginniss — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 15:29:00 +0000

Chang was being a Drow or Dark Elf. I think it would be offensive to High or Wood Elves for them to be grouped in with Drow. Check your human privilege.

New comment by emaginniss in "Schools are ditching homework, deadlines in favor of ‘equitable grading’"

emaginniss — Wed, 26 Apr 2023 21:04:09 +0000

In that case, we should let them slip their deadlines and graduate at 20 or 25

New comment by emaginniss in "Ways to shoot yourself in the foot with Postgres"

emaginniss — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 15:53:40 +0000

I am strongly biased against ORMs, but I still recognize their use in CRUD operations. In any case where you are doing bulk operations, true upserts, or more complex queries, then I 100% agree.