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eseehausenon Cloudflare expands its government warrant canaries

Part of the job of lawyers is to know the judges they interact with and what sorts of claims they'll take seriously and which ones they'll overrule. That has very little to do with the kind of immutable logic outsiders tend to try to read into the law.

eseehausenon Why can’t a bot tick the 'I'm not a robot' box?

Because humans still get the picture selection prompts, so you'd have to write code good enough to read the prompt and then select the appropriate images.

eseehausenon Deliveroo users are getting defrauded

People using their accrued wealth to sit around while other people make money for them (who will suffer if they can't do that) is generally considered moral- or at least ethical- under the current order.

eseehausenon Structure of recent philosophy (2017)

I think for a field like philosophy, which is composed of a bunch of relative silos (some within broader silos like the divide between analytic and continental philosophy as well as others like pragmatism and many sets of non-Euro/Anglo regional philosophy traditions), snowball-sampling isn't really appropriate to gather the "structure of recent philosophy". However, it is a cool look at _parts_ of the current analytic philosophy landscape, and I'm with the other commenters that the aesthetics are on point.

eseehausenon Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

If the only thing stopping the structural changes necessary to prevent ecological collapse was a fear of aliens, then I think we'd be doing better.

Also, the kind of technological delay you're talking about there would be a couple of decades at most, when it looks like you're talking about thinking in terms of centuries. If anything, we're slowing down necessary technological advances to maintain the status quo long past the point where it's tenable.

eseehausenon Twitter warns that private tweets were public for years

That and most users aren't auditing each new version of the apps to make sure they're still doing what they say they're doing to protect data.

eseehausenon Beauty Is Making Scientists Rethink Evolution

I didn't dismiss evo psych outright in that comment- I said it's often being used in the way psychoanalysis and theology were being used to naturalize the current social order. Though you do engage in the kinds of problems that I was trying to outline in this comment. That is to say, you're looking at social phenomena and then working backwards to make unfalsifiable claims that it may be beneficial using a lot of cultural intuition rather than hard data. While I don't find the implications of your feelings about humor particularly problematic, it's the same process that leads to more harmful ones.

As others have noted in the thread, it's just as possible that a predilection for humorous mates isn't such a deleterious adaptation that it kills the people who have it before they die. It may well serve no practical function, and it doesn't need to.

I'm definitely not saying it's not interesting to look at the ways that a penchant for humor manifests itself across species and cultures and whether there are any genetic markers that determine whether somebody is more or less interested in a humorous mate. At that point, it'd be interesting to see how those markers were propagated over time, when they developed, etc. Otherwise, though, this just does the same thing as psychoanalysis and theology- it takes the current order and asks how it fits the narrative you've already assumed.

eseehausenon How I Finally Hit 2000 on Lichess and Improved My Rating

There are lots of cool books- I have a strong preference for ones like Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess which present problems or walk through games with somewhat conversational commentary.

There are a lot of good suggestions (based on my admittedly limited experience) in this thread: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-books-for-a-beginner...

eseehausenon Beauty Is Making Scientists Rethink Evolution

This is a really important point. Evolutionary psychology and associated disciplines have come to replace psychoanalysis and God in the popular imagination as a teleological force that's making rational decisions about what to do in a given moment. This makes it into a bludgeon for reinforcing the status quo (just as the other two were before that).

While I'm not necessarily 100% in agreement with this formulation, I do think a useful and simple corrective is this: "natural selection" isn't a positive choice for the "fittest"- it's the elimination of unfit adaptations before they can be passed on. This article references "sexual selection", which may well be a positive choice, but it has very little to do with utility or health, as I'm sure many of us recognize from our own lives and the studies of animal mating choices.

eseehausenon Talent Is Everywhere, Opportunity Is Not

> Landlords don’t care about any color other than on-time-green.

This is obviously not a universal truth (and there have been many well-known cases of individual and systemic housing discrimination in the USA). Here's a Wikipedia bit that has more links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_discrimination_(United...

eseehausenon A new generation of environmentalists is learning to love atomic power

Because we already know how to store it for thousands of years with minimal leakage without creating a contraption that could lead to nuclear waste raining down on our heads.

eseehausenon Amazon is selling stolen art, fake products and is infringing copyrights

Looks like the person violating the copyright just reuploaded under a new ID after the original takedown, which is why the artist is still seeing his work up there.

eseehausenon On Disbelieving Atrocities (1944)

Because people (or even projects) you love may outlive you? It can provide immediate visceral satisfaction to try to help boost them even if you won't see the benefits. Children are a good example of this, but there are many others (legacies, societies, proteges, lovers).

eseehausenon Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews

Based on my experience, people who can acknowledge their issues and accurately compensate for them are more valuable than most of the people who think they're the top 1-3%. Obviously you have people who think they are, and it's actually accurate, but I assume they're doing just fine with their half-mill+ salaries at FANG. The rest of the world needs programmers, too, and a little bit of humility and willingness to keep improving goes a long way.

Maybe just keep that and learn to be a little more obnoxious in the self-assessments you give to others?

eseehausenon Tim Berners-Lee says tech giants may have to be split up

Same with governments and the attempts at state capitalism you're referring to. Everything always is good unless it's bad, the question is how easily can it be constrained when it goes bad (and monitored for the signs of it going bad).

eseehausenon Texans say voting machines changing straight-ticket choices

Making things hard to vote is a feature, not a bug.

eseehausenon Idleness as Flourishing

Most animals- at least megafauna- don't spend all day in search of food, shelter, etc. They almost all have daily periods of idleness.

eseehausenon Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun (1943)

Which can still happen in a simulated way that minimizes harm but maximizes perceived harm by the inflictor. The gory death of an opponent in an FPS who respawns without incident elsewhere, for instance.

eseehausenon What Do Happy Teens Do?

Obviously it's beyond the purview of the study, but I have to imagine the correlations aren't too far off for adults either.

eseehausenon Why U.S. Corporate Boards Don’t Include Workers

Except the groups they represent are different. Executives represent the shareholders and labor organizers represent labor. Even if you say a large part of the benefits are lost due to corruption in both cases, it shapes where the remainder ends up.

eseehausenon Nobody Trusts Facebook, Twitter Is a Hot Mess, What Is Snapchat Doing?

Also given the (hundreds of) billions of advertising dollars spent on shaping consumer tastes/desires when it comes to food.

eseehausenon A Method I’ve Used to Eliminate Bad Tech Hires

It's under the limit ($600): https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...

But even if it wasn't, a company of any significant size (enough to pay even 1 person's salary, say) should have a low effort and cheap way of tracking contractor payments and issuing 1099s.

eseehausenon Ask HN: What is your favorite internet rabbit hole?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_philosophy

For the reasons for the opposition, it's difficult to point to any article that doesn't almost willfully misunderstand the other side. I haven't listened to this episode, but In Our Time is usually good about bringing in experts from both sides to discuss issues: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/bridging-the...

You can probably substitute "The Less Wrong crowd" for "analytical philosophers", as they're sort of the hobbyist or non-institutionalized version of the latter. You could also just try reading the Derrida article I linked to see why people with a rationalist bent have historically recoiled from his writings.

eseehausenon Ask HN: What is your favorite internet rabbit hole?

It's interesting how much this reads like footnotes to Derrida , especially in the beginning (other cliffnotes here: http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida/#SH7c or http://www.columbia.edu/itc/ce/s6403/jacques_derrida.pdf if you feel like reading the original). It's nice to see ideas move from so theoretical that LW and associated communities would likely dismiss to digestible forms like this. It gives me hope for communication amongst outgroups that are pretty virulently opposed to each other (Continental theorists and let's say the vanguard of popular "rationalism"), mostly due to their proximity.

eseehausenon When a crow dies, the other crows investigate the cause of death (2015)

The issue is that leaving food for the animals alters their behavior and can cause issues. You're probably not the worst offender wherever you are, as there are many people who just give food to animals, but the argument would be that it contributes to the problem.

eseehausenon How to fend off a jerk

That depends on your initial assumptions, which you can shape over time (though you may not want to or find it advantageous to do so).

eseehausenon How to fend off a jerk

With email, rather than happiness, amping up the professionalism and courtesy might be an analogue.

eseehausenon How to fend off a jerk

Honestly, when somebody who isn't a subordinate, friend, or direct charge acts like a jerk, I don't think it's worth taking this kind of pedagogical role with regard to etiquette (probably not a good idea in the friends case a lot of time as well). If somebody wants to be a jerk, there are enough providers of goods and services that they'll find one that responds favorably to that. Not to mention that they'll probably rationalize turning them away as the provider being a jerk rather than learning something from it. As DarkTree points out, the provider's response to that behavior is more about managing the provider's quality of life than about shaping customers for the greater good.

eseehausenon Angular 2 versus React

I don't have a horse in this race, but do you think that learning JSX is going to be any easier for non-coders?

eseehausenon You're a better engineer than you think

While that may be true for some, a number of highly effective people in various fields seem to have a sense of dissatisfaction that pushes them to do more. That sense can often apply to their own self-assessment.