Hacker News: snowflakeandrey

New comment by snowflakeandrey in "Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says"

snowflakeandrey — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 19:09:45 +0000

I thought the top end is supposed to be served via O1 -> EB-1A -> Citizenship pipeline?

New comment by snowflakeandrey in "The Death of Daydreaming"

snowflakeandrey — Mon, 12 May 2025 01:42:09 +0000

at least according to "irresistible" by adam alter, it's also close to the definition of behavioral addiction, more broadly when we routinely maladapt to engage with a certain behavior to avoid emotionally uncomfortable that gets worse due to the avoidance.

New comment by snowflakeandrey in "DOGE worker’s code supports NLRB whistleblower"

snowflakeandrey — Sat, 03 May 2025 17:24:53 +0000

Thanks for chiming in with your experience. Would you attribute the doubt to a DevOps person without Security experience, or someone with ulterior motives? Has CISA determined the lost credentials to be password stuffing or endpoint compromise? Seems plausible that DOGE staff had infostealers on their endpoints and the automated validation of those credentials did not include a review of where they got them or whether it will be noticed.

The (under oath) claims of extraction of data seem strange for the reasons you mentioned but so do the threats as well as the NLRB PR rep stating that DOGE was never there, I think there's more to be discovered that could clarify what happened.

New comment by snowflakeandrey in "US Ends Support For Ukrainian F-16s"

snowflakeandrey — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 22:21:09 +0000

I think the idea of free trade is that more wealth is made through comparative advantages and trade, meaning everyone contributes less "blood and backs" and gets more wealth in return [1]. Not sure how this applies to military assistance, but it seems likely Japan and EU would not have the peace dividend they've had since WW2 if US wasn't subsidizing their defense.

1. https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/ap-macr...

New comment by snowflakeandrey in "The Canary"

snowflakeandrey — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 14:26:32 +0000

I wonder if that's because as regulation is considered and debated, industry incentives start to align as they attempt to show they're "regulating themselves just fine".

New comment by snowflakeandrey in "Ousted propaganda scholar accuses Harvard of bowing to Meta"

snowflakeandrey — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 05:51:50 +0000

Forgive me if I'm being dense, but why wouldn't the researchers just go off and sell this to the customers of the large agriculture business?

New comment by snowflakeandrey in "Is tipping getting out of control? Many consumers say yes"

snowflakeandrey — Wed, 25 Jan 2023 16:22:40 +0000

Compared to US tipped-staff service, non-tipped staff in Japan seem a lot more genuine in their desire to help. It seems a matter of culture and professional pride to be provide excellent service, which leads to a significantly more thorough experience -- being that nice in the context of a tip would seem pushy and awkward.

New comment by snowflakeandrey in "Infinite AI Array"

snowflakeandrey — Fri, 06 Jan 2023 12:00:32 +0000

Editing the kind of magic shop it is, add "very high end" to that sentence and see the difference. Specifically —

  {
    "id": 2,
    "name": "Magic Wand",
    "description": "A magical wand that can cast powerful spells.",
    "sku": "MAGIC-WAND-001",
    "price": 49.99
  },

Is instead:

  {
    "id": 4,
    "name": "Magic Wand",
    "description": "A powerful wand made from a magical tree.",
    "sku": "MAGIC-WAND-001",
    "price": 1500.00
  }

Or with "fancy", it is —

  {
    "id": 3,
    "name": "Mystic Wand",
    "description": "A powerful wand that grants the wielder the ability to cast powerful spells.",
    "sku": "WAND-001",
    "price": "199.99"
  },

And if the magic shop is "run down", it might have —

  {
    "id": 3,
    "name": "Mystical Wand",
    "description": "A powerful wand that grants the wielder the ability to cast spells.",
    "sku": "WAND-001",
    "price": 29.99
  }

What a joy :)

New comment by snowflakeandrey in "Gitlab: don't discuss politics at work"

snowflakeandrey — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 21:29:42 +0000

Every moral system I can think of would prescribe that, everything else being equal, you should attempt to change the behavior of the company you find unethical while you have at least some power over it, rather than removing yourself from a position of power to affect more ethical behavior. It strikes me as very strange to advocate that folks remove themselves from positions of power to effect moral progress.

New comment by snowflakeandrey in "Open-source apps removed from Google Play Store due to donation links"

snowflakeandrey — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 19:50:18 +0000

Google will never care about the quality of an app store (for devs and for users) as much as a company with majority of revenue coming from folks using their app store. It's the fundamental problem with a monopoly business and breaking off the Google store from being the exclusive way to get apps on the Android platform will solve it because companies optimize profit.

New comment by snowflakeandrey in "Open-source apps removed from Google Play Store due to donation links"

snowflakeandrey — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 16:58:55 +0000

Yes — if there were real competition between multiple app stores, some of which provided better systems of vetting than others (both for users and for developers), then the kinds of stores that had these policies would die off.

New comment by snowflakeandrey in "Open-source apps removed from Google Play Store due to donation links"

snowflakeandrey — Wed, 16 Oct 2019 16:56:35 +0000

A 501(c)(3) application costs at least $275 and takes 2-12 months to process. That seems all right if you're a SV SWE registering something on the side of your regular 6 figure income, but for a lot of folks around the world, that seems a largely no-go way to support their project.

If this is really an attempt at preventing garbage apps from spamming or tricking users, this is both overly broad (many false positives) and badly targeted (many false negatives). Why is it that iOS doesn't have this policy, and has significantly fewer garbage apps?

Maybe if Google were to allow third party app stores, folks could choose the one that fits their ability to evaluate the sophistication of apps themselves. For example, some folks might want to pay for extra security checks on the apps they use, while others want to install anything and everything under the sun.

New comment by snowflakeandrey in "Julian Assange arrested in London"

snowflakeandrey — Sat, 13 Apr 2019 15:00:35 +0000

Link the leak? In this case, extraditing to Sweden on a wholly unrelated charge than to extradite to the US seems like a thing Sweden would not want because it would have hurt their credibility in future extraditions. All speculative now, ofc.

New comment by snowflakeandrey in "Google Ends Forced Arbitration for Employees"

snowflakeandrey — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 00:01:51 +0000

That makes a lot of sense, and a legitimately personal decision. Some people don't want to share root access on the personal phone with their employer. Other people don't want to carry a separate phone for work.