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Silenion Paternity leave at startups: designing a policy for new parents

The "Medical leave" portion of the time off is covered under completely different laws, so I'm not sure which portion of what I've said you're replying to.

No one is being sent back to work without medical leave from their attending physician, who is charged with determining when the mother is healthy enough to go home and can go back to work. I absolutely do not, under any circumstances, believe in any being or institution ever getting between a mother and her doctor's right to determine what is medically best for her and her child. That is essentially what society was built to protect.

Silenion Paternity leave at startups: designing a policy for new parents

That suggests that "more people" is an unmitigated good, which I don't believe. There has never been a time when you were more able to avoid unplanned childbirth. The number of children in foster care has been increasing since 2013.[0]Whatever good could be done by having a child could be done better by acknowledging some of the people already in this world and giving them a real shot. We're all responsible for any situation that becomes a "tragedy of the commons", and we need to start behaving like it.

[0]: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/30/567615510...

Silenion New Evidence That Lead Exposure Increases Crime (2017)

Yes; meant to type Iraq, must have been autocorrected by my phone. I can't edit the comment now unfortunately. Otherwise I'd also clarify that I meant "Banned for automobile use". The remaining use of TEL only accounts for a fraction of what was being pumped into the environment when it was being used by cars.

Silenion Paternity leave at startups: designing a policy for new parents

Re: 1) But parents decide to have children, and they have the responsibility for caring for those "vulnerable people". I'm not saying they don't need more time, but to say they've been put into some untenable situation that must be dealt with by everyone else is absurd. There's never been more access to birth control or knowledge about the reproductive process. There's never been a point in the world where there was less space for another child. Looking from at this from the perspective of what's best for children, having a child is selfish. Adoption doesn't add people to the world and would decrease overall suffering assuming you're a better parent than the foster system.

2) This is recently becoming a national issue, as it well should be. There needs to be a mechanism in place to protect the employees surrounding parental leave if it's going to be enshrined in national law. I don't think you can make the argument that businesses don't have a history of pushing the costs of regulation onto their employees when possible.

3) By that argument bringing up parental leave at all is a completely moot point. We have nearly 438,000 children in the foster system.[0] 45% of all child deaths are from malnutrition.[1] If I made a list of injustices in the world, a parent being unable to spend every waking moment with their child for a couple months isn't even in the first 1,000.

[0]: http://www.childrensrights.org/newsroom/fact-sheets/foster-c... [1]: https://www.worldhunger.org/world-hunger-and-poverty-facts-a...

Silenion Reboot Your Dreamliner Every 248 Days to Avoid Integer Overflow (2015)

The trend towards monolithic hub systems is baffling. Didn't we learn those lessons while we were struggling with mainframes and timesharing? You don't lock critical systems, ever. You don't even directly interact with them, you send them messages and if they don't receive them they should continue to function as the operator would expect. The collision avoidance system failing to function correctly is no where near as dangerous as arbitrarily applying the brakes.

Silenion Apple self-driving car in accident: California DMV filing

It's such a large commercial space that ending up with even a few useful patents when the first full system comes out is worthwhile. Either sell the patents or use them as leverage.

With Apple's cash reserves, they can afford the risk. The chance of shooting the moon is worth it.

Silenion New Evidence That Lead Exposure Increases Crime (2017)

I just grabbed an article that had a few sources to dig further if someone so chose. I learned about it through working in the industry.

Silenion New Evidence That Lead Exposure Increases Crime (2017)

One of the most dangerous forms of lead is Tetraethyllead, because of how fat soluble it is. It's been banned in nearly every country in the world because it moves through the environment at an alarming rate. One company in the world still manufactures it, and they're based in the UK[0].

They're entirely aware that they're killing people and have openly said in management meetings that they won't stop manufacturing the product until government regulation forces them to.

Mind you, lead levels don't only increase in the country the chemical is used; it moves through entire ecosystems and across oceans. Lead levels don't fall to below dangerous levels for decades. This isn't just poisoning the people nearby; it's poisoning the entire world in small, insidious ways. And chemical companies are profiting from that. The margin they're selling TEL for would make government contractors cry.

And to top it off, they have virtually no quality program surrounding their products because they don't need one; all of their deals are done with backroom handshakes and agreeing to take the blame if an issue arises. Their company is built around the idea that it actually costs less to just say "Yeah, we're terrible people, fine us" than to actually try and comply with government regulation. They've repeatedly been caught in corruption and environmental probes, and have changed their names in the states and in the UK multiple times. They were literally caught trying to bribe their way into selling TEL in Iran. [1]

[0]: https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/leaded-petrol-alge...

[1]: https://www.sfo.gov.uk/2014/08/04/four-sentenced-role-innosp...

[1]: https://www.sfo.gov.uk/cases/innospec-ltd/

Silenion Ask HN: How do you keep track of small pieces of useful code?

I feel like it would just add overhead; I remember what project I wrote that function for, now I also have to remember where it is in my everything library? Why?

Silenion Go 1.11 released

Modules release is definitely a "we told you so" moment. Depending on outside packages has always bothered me, and kept me from doing more with the language.

Silenion For some, experiencing trauma may act as a form of cognitive training

Counterpoint; trauma is so difficult to forget that the relatively small footprint of forgetting random, unessential facts just doesn't compare to the benefit of being able to forget something you would otherwise get into PTSD-style thought-loops over. Don't think about the time a close relative passed away; think about the types of torture John McCain went through. Do you think he could have come back and been the man he was if he couldn't lock some of his memories away?

And there is no "initial phase of emotional reactivity". It's a continuous spectrum of reactions and reactions to those reactions. Real trauma is like being hit by a train, or getting cancer. Yeah, you'll recover, but you'll never quite be as healthy as you were before the event even if your recovery is miraculous.

Silenion The History of Gopher

Try to identify the opportunities to catch a similar wave today. AI is in a similar place

Silenion The Awk Programming Language (1988) [pdf]

Not to move the post, but that's part of what makes python so great to me. It reads like pseudocode if written with that goal in mind. Its more like having a conversation with the computer. When I need performance, I now have the algorithm written out in an easy to parse way. Then small parts in golang/C are far faster to write, because I can feel out the whole program.

Im not directly in the software industry though, just writing programs for data analysis in quality and safety programs. I'm sure once you can think directly in something like Go, it'd be faster to write that program first. But it decreases the cognitive load for me.

Silenion Filmstro: Royalty-Free Music

Makes sense that Nintendo would nail a similar effect. If there's one thing they're masters of, it's distilling an experience down to it's essential elements.

Silenion Subscription Hell

An alternative is intentionally packaging releases into tiers (performance, stability, feature, etc) and sell them as such. Something closer to Windows XP service packs than individual updates. I'd expect small, necessary updates to continue to exist as they do.

A user can buy the base version, then a few months later when you create a release that allows processing widgets through the program twice as fast, they can update for a small fee. This would force the developer to create updates that would be easy to communicate the benefits of to the consumer.

It'd be a bit more difficult to figure out pricing for new users over time and which version they receive, but it would allow they old pricing model without forgoing the benefits of incremental development over time.

Silenion Facebook Q1 2018 Earnings Slides [pdf]

I'd argue that ballooned beyond "internet outrage" though; a lot of parents started seeing the loot boxes as slot machines. That gave the issue its "Is it legal?" and "PROTECT THE CHILDREN" angles.

Honestly, people probably don't give enough credit to the MW2 "boycott"; it showed kids that they could organize if the company's practices got out of hand. I think the MW2 and BF2 issues were really part of a longer trend towards dark patterns in video games, and it took time for people in positions of authority to realize how serious the situation could become if they continued down the path they were on.

Silenion The high modernism of social media companies

And I'm saying we're fallible. We need mechanisms to avoid fatalism when looking at a downward slope, because history says we don't actually know how things will turn out, no matter how obvious they seem.

Silenion Why undertakers are worried

Huh, what do they do if you just say "Alright, guess he's your problem now"? Pretty sure my parents would be cheering me on from the after life. We're not the most sentimental bunch.

Silenion Ask HN: How do you keep up the energy to work on side-projects after work?

If I can hold my willpower together for the first 30 minutes after I get home, I usually do alright.

If I open absolutely any distraction within the first 15 minutes after I get home, my night is shot.

It's funny how much of my time is dictated by momentum alone. In a sad, "Do I actually have free will?" kind of way.

Silenion The high modernism of social media companies

No, but it's the same argument for something like SpaceX. A quick analysis says being optimistic makes the most sense because it has the best outcomes in all situations.

If we're optimistic and correct, we're building the things that will be useful in the future. We know we have to get off the planet to survive as a species, so we have to hope that we can do so.

If we're optimistic and wrong, we're distracting ourselves until we die. Pessimistic and correct, we wait for death and die.

Pessimistic and incorrect, we watch the future run away from us while we argue over what remains on the planet to be used by the technology we stagnated in. I don't want to know what 2050 looks like if we're still dependent on oil.

The worst case only exists if we're pessimistic as a species. The best case only exists if we're optimistic.

Silenion Show HN: InKino – An open-source movie app made with Flutter

Beautiful work. I was actually looking for a mobile platform to build my newest project on, looks like I'm learning a bit of Dart. Hope you don't mind if I dig through your project every time I get stuck, it looks like you're using a lot of similar functionality :)

Silenion A new JPEG format

A new blockchain-based distributed image format for virtual reality, drones, and self-driving cars, delivering maximum company synergy with minimal downtime, vis-a-vis cloud dependency concerns

Someone invest in me.

Silenion Giving up reading news will make us happier

Set aside a specific time each week to scan the headlines and pick out the most interesting. For HN or most content aggregation sites, if something is particularly important, it'll stay on the first 5-6 pages for more than a week.

Scan the first few pages, pick out 5-10 articles, read for an hour or two. You'll be at least 80% as informed as if you had checked in every day. This also lets you deep dive into any of the ideas if they're particularly interesting, because it's such a small list of mental options.

One of my worst problems is ending up with a notebook page of 40 items that I found interesting. I never go back and learn more about them because I can't really decide what's the most interesting. Cull options ruthlessly until you have a manageable set of options.

Silenion Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (April 2018)

Location: Denver, CO

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Python, Django, Microsoft Dynamics AX, Excel/VBA, Golang, AWS, HTML/CSS, Javascript, Linux, and Git.

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerome-kuebler-417aa654

GitHub: https://github.com/jerkuebler

Email: jerkuebler at gmail.com

Years of Experience: 1-2

Primary experience as a chemist who learned to program to automate away a lot of pain points in research and quality control. I'd really like to find a junior-level position developing, or a role that could leverage my background in quality control or research while giving me space to learn more advanced programming techniques. Currently fascinated by concurrency in user-bound programs. Really open to anything at the moment.

Silenion The Unnerving Existence of Teen Boss

On a macro scale, I agree. We should strive to improve our culture and reduce the harm our actions have on anything outside ourselves. The world would be a better place if we all worked together, undoubtedly.

On a micro scale, if I had children, I'd teach them to take every advantage they can get. I'd teach them to be ruthless, because that's what the world rewards. If someone has to suffer, I'm doing everything in my power to prevent it from being them.

You can't attack these problems from the bottom. A parent would be putting their child at a disadvantage in the interests of the state, which is absolutely absurd to expect. It has to be an institutional movement.

It would be great if we could remove the system that rewards that behavior, but in absence of that, the correct move for any individual agent is to exploit the imbalances.

Silenion We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads (2017) [video]

Eh. We've got a close enough approximation. Sci-fi-esque example below.

The more things humans collected, the safer their genes were, and the higher the dopamine hit. Many humans took this to the logical end, collecting things at the expense of all else, including the safety of other humans. This led to severe poverty of all humans not wired to collect more things, which decreased their reproductive fitness.

Over time, the human race in aggregate continued to become more effective at collecting things, until they had wiped out all other life and all viable material was turned to drugs. The end.

Silenion Announcing the Second Edition of “Refactoring”

Python is amazing for these types of books. Written with the intention in mind, the actual code reads like pseudo-code, and a good percentage of people have interacted with the language at least briefly. Though the latter point is certainly more relevant for JS.

I'm sure the author had his reasons, and there are certainly worse choices in the top dozen languages. (Refactoring... in PHP!)

Silenion The Trouble with Leaving Facebook Is That We Like Facebook

Yes. It's been associated with many negative mental health effects. Quick examples, but you can find a lot of studies on it. [0][1]

[0] http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180104-is-social-media-bad...

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2017/06/30/a-run-d...

Silenion 'The Gig Economy' Is the New Term for Serfdom

Adjust down to 10k-15k; the wage doesn't have to be livable in a single apt with no partners, but it should be enough that you can split out living expenses in a cheap midwestern city with 2-3 roommates. Welcome side effect, we spread people and wealth more evenly across the country in a small way. People are encouraged to find the cheapest possible living arrangements, which will include developing currently unwanted land.

Recognize that most people are going to be put off from the bare minimum arrangement, and that you don't have to pay people making above some arbitrary line, something like 6-7x the UBI.

Many of the social programs currently running could be shut down with UBI.

And all of these are based on the assumption that automation will continue to increase efficiency. Right now, it would be nearly impossible, especially with the legislation that exists. It's dependent on taxing the owners of businesses with high automation, recognizing that we're not far out from some truly massive automated systems, the most immediate being logistics and transport.

Silenion Thinking Differently about Thinking: The Mind-Expanding Ideas of Andy Clark

On a macro scale, those kinds of questions have given rise to a lot of the social progress we've experienced in the last century.

In the future, you'd expect a mature theory of mind to give direction to psychologists or neuroscientists. A rough analogy would be the way theoretical physicists interact with experimental physicists and chemists. It's difficult to create the experiment or speculate about a reaction without a point to jump from. In the same way, a psychologist looks to philosophy to ask "what are the most important questions to people, and how might that reflect in how they behave?"