I've always assumed that severance pay is not an artifact that is negotiated upon severance, but rather that it comes into effect once the necessary conditions vest, so to speak. Severance pay, and an employee's right to it, is implicitly contained in the employment agreement, and once the conditions for payment laid out in the employment and labour law regime under which you were hired are met, then your right to get paid automatically comes into effect. The idea that an employer can refuse to pay you on the basis that you have refused to sign a severance agreement seems out of whack with the spirit of the law to me, assuming that this is not explicitly stated either in law or in your employment terms (that your being paid for severance is subject to you signing a severance agreement).
I've always thought that "good design" has nothing to do with software. As in you'll have to nail the art elsewhere, then bring those lessons to your software.
Are you specifically interested in bombing as a method of killing innocent people, or are you more generally interested in the killing of innocent people, the method notwithstanding? Coz, surely, you're not implying that white, apartheid South Africans didn't kill innocent people, are you?
The car safety belt was invented by Volvo, but either they didn't patent it, or patented it but allowed other car makers to use it at little or no cost. I don't have a source, but I've read something along those lines online.
Do they mean to say that it's never completed a single orbit around the sun since the solar system was formed? Is it possible for an orbit around the sun to be that huge? I mean, just because we only observed it for the first time in 2012 doesn't mean it's never been to this part of th solar system before, or does it? I wouldn't know, but I'm struggling with the notion that there is a body that is in orbit around the sun that is yet to complete an orbit since the solar system was formed all those billions of years ago.
I'm probably wrong about this, and I know very little psychology, but I am under the impression that suicidal people don't admit to having a problem. Also, they don't hope to find help, either coz they think or know it's out of reach, or don't know help is available. If this was not so, I would imagine they'd seek this help rather than take their lives, which is a sign of someone giving up hope.
Now, installing an app for suicide prevention looks to me like an act by someone who HASN'T given up hope. And if you haven't given up hope, you are already walking away from the brink. And if you're already walking away from the brink, maybe you're not suicidal?
My feeling here is that an app for reaching out or talking someone out of taking their life may not be the best approach to reaching such a person to make them pull back. Of course the journey to suicide is long and complex, and there must be many points at which an intervention is useful and where your app will play a part, but I just feel like there might be a disconnect between the people who should use your app and those who would use your app.
Be that as it may, like I said, I'm not a psychologist, and most likely my assumptions are wrong. I imagine the literature on suicide being mentioned talks about this in detail and from a professional point of view. All the same, I wish you all the best in your project and hope it succeeds.
How does the ability to pay indicate ability to make worthwhile contributions? Or, how does inability/unwillingness to pay or prove yourself in some other way relate to an inability to make worthwhile contributions? (quality of posts, comments, etc)
A service that enables domain experts to give video advice to paying users is not an idea you're going to be the only one who's ever thought about. So it's a bit iffy to claim that someone copied your start-up. Unless you're talking about specific methods of defining or solving problems in your execution of the concept, which doesn't seem to me to have been the case here. I could be wrong, naturally.
Unless my high school biology teachers lied to me, feeling hot or cold is not a mere perception; it's homeostasis, a complex mix of body temperature control, early warning system and pre-emptive shutdown all rolled into one. I don't see how useful tricking this system is, and I also fear it is dangerous to do it, if at all it's possible to successfully do it.
In keeping with the theme of paranoia, many of the comments attacking the veracity of the article are posted by NSA agents masquerading as benign HN users to discredit someone breaking out one of their best kept secrets.
I don't like thinking about space too much; I mildly worry that if I get too much into it, something might snap in my head, and that can't be a good thing.
In my dreams, I may "express" fantasies, like flying, or jumping ridiculous heights, or falling from such heights without hurting myself like a super cat/ninja hybrid, or giving enthralling musical performances. I never express repressed desires though. Like, if a girl has rejected me in real life, she usually does the same in the dreams. If in real life I wouldn't dare touch, say, her butt, I'm just as restrained in my dreams.
Maybe what really needs to happen is for someone to make a "software keys" keyboard, where the characters are not imprinted on the keyboard, but are displayed on the keys instead. That way when you change stuff around, as is variously suggested here, WYS remains WYG, as it were.
Rad or dud?
While I understand where the Republican comments are coming from, it should be useful to realize that this law was passed in a bi-partisan legislative assembly, and since it appears there was no objection from Democrats (or the public) at the time the law was passed, it's safe to assume Democrats were cool with it too.
Would I, with my naked senses (eyes, touch) be able to tell the difference between a 55ms response time and 117ms response time? Alternatively, does such a difference add up or combine with other factors that ultimately make it noticeable to me? How? And while we're still at it, is this winning performance by Apple touchscreens a function of the quality of the screen itself (or components), other hardware (ICs and what nots) that work with the screen and are a factor in how it responds, superior code at OS level? I'd love to hear such details, as opposed to merely telling me 55ms vs 120ms.
When I fall ill and go to the doctor, as opposed to going to medical school, is it rational? Off course it's rational. But that act of leaving my health at the hands of this dude whom the world tells me will get me back to good is essentially faith.
I'm not a very philosophical/bright type, so I may come up shot if someone wanted to take this up philosophically, but at basic level I do think faith is rational. A lot of the inputs for what we consider rational may very well be acts of faith.
So this is what it's called. I didn't even know it's a "thing". I'd say it feels uncomfortable, not terrifying. I usually just confirm that I can breathe, and once that fear is settled, I "haul" myself out of it.
I read this comment when this story was on the front page, and it's occurred to me ask, what would you consider the antithesis of Wired? You know, something you'd recommend someone read...
I'm feeling rather good about myself because although I'm a complete novice at linux, I knew the cal command. Yay me! I read about it here:
http://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php
Oh yeah, plus I keep hearing about how the quality of HN has dropped. I imagine you could selectively pull stuff from back in the day, apply the same popularity criteria to today, and compare the quality of what comes up. It's small curiosities like this I want to learn how to pull off.
Whoever did this, I'm a newbie to coding, and I'd want to see the code used to pull this. I'm assuming it wasn't done manually. I've been thinking I'd want to do something similar once I get the hang of it, and to play around with it. "Hall of fame" comments or articles aren't the only ones someone new to HN would be interested in, right? How about, for example, the speed at which an article rises to the top? Or how long it remains at the top? And so on and so forth. You could probably try to draw an analogy to music charts. I don't know. But I'm working on knowing. So if you don't mind sharing, I'd appreciate.
But how bad is it really? I don't know the answer, whether empirical or subjective, but I have a (subjective) suspicion that there's a fair bit of confirmation bias going on. What percentage of diners share pictures of their food on instagram? How many people take selfies? I don't suppose anyone has actually collected that data, we can't quite say how much is too much, and since some of these behaviors may well be annoying, people quickly enter confirmation bias mode. Besides, the problem is not phones, it's people. Phones just give us an avenue to run away from ourselves. I'm not on my phone at the birthday party because I have a smartphone, I'm on the smartphone because it helps avoid the awkward silence and contrived conversations that would otherwise prevail. If you were sharing a bed with someone you find hot, say some star or someone you've been crazy about but couldn't get around to telling them how you feel, I doubt you'd be staring at your phone with that person in bed next to you. So the problem is not the phones, it's the quality of our relationships and interaction, and those won't change or improve just because we've put the phone away. Were the relationships and interactions robust enough, a smartphone wouldn't stand a chance of getting in the way.
What's the difference between YC deciding who to invest in, and an individual deciding who to marry? I'm thinking YC is free to use whatever criteria they deem fit in deciding who to invest in in much the same way that individuals are free to use whatever criteria they deem fit in deciding who to marry.
Is there not a way an emergency responder, or anyone else for that matter, could fully discharge a battery like the one on a Tesla? As ask coz back in the day before digital cameras became mainstream, we used to repair point and shoot cameras at the photo processing lab where I worked. A point and shoot camera has a capacitor for the flash that can give you a short but not insignificant shock, and to avoid it, we'd take a normal light bulb and use it to discharge the capacitor. I realize a cap batteries stores a lot more power, but couldn't some mechanism be built that does the same thing?