Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | bsk26's commentslogin

great team!


Except it'll probably still decay into co2 in the landfill while the coal underground is stable


Block off the oxygen supply (like how coal became coal) and they won't decay into CO2.


Affected by this, and unless I'm reading the docs wrong 5 months is a bit of a PR exaggeration. Health insurance is longer but pay and vesting end mid-March.


Interesting. Somewhere else in (this or another thread on HN) someone mentioned that their wife was affected and would have pay & benefits into March, and then 5 months severance after.

My hope for folks affected (and, as a former SFDC employee, I know several affected) is that it's pay & vesting for the WARN period, with the severance period following that.


You're correct, I 100% misread my docs. My package appears to be the same and really is quite generous (and makes me feel a bit better about sfdc, which is nice)

Overall will probably be a good change - as much as I liked our product, the sfdc transition was rough. For better or worse the layoffs don't seem to have been totally random: most of the affected folks I know had larger than normal equity packages


Nice, glad to hear it's a good package. I had only a 60 day warn period to find a new job, which was a bit stressful. Good luck!


A used iPhone - a iPhone 7 is an excellent webcam and is probably about $80, or less with a busted screen


Doubt any prius does 500-600 range. Mine says about 450 and I drive like a grandma. Great car but I wish I'd just bought a full EV


Fuelly users report an avg of 45mpg for 3rd gen (2010-2015) Prius at 11.9 gallons fuel. That's 535 miles. 4th gen (2016-present) is 51mpg at 11.3 gallons, 576 miles.


Looking back at the the first article in the series, they use hunter gatherer groups as examples of people who aren’t obese without acknowledging this is almost certainly due to extreme calorie restriction. Overeating might not explain everything but starving will definitely make you skinny


I thought Dark Waters was good but the nytimes article it is based on is even better https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

If you're concerned about goretex and dwrs, everything made by Nikwax uses different technology and is PFA free. Goretex might be safe for end user (or might not) but the manufacturing process is probably environmentally risky ... I wouldn't buy goretex for non-critical uses. So use it for mountaineering but not in the ski resort or on the way to work



Mods: Would be bee’s knees if HN code rewrote AMP links to direct URL on commit, comments and submissions.


As a counterpoint, I prefer the AMP links


Considering the permanence and longevity of comments and submissions, I propose that direct canonical URLs are preferable to something Google will eventually sunset. Apologies if this slightly degrades the near term browsing experience.


When I ask candidates if their whiteboard code compiles, it's a gentle hint that there are major structural issues, or an opportunity for them to point out the parts that are psuedocode-y. In general I don't include whether the code compiles (mostly JS, so "runs") in feedback unless it is amazingly perfect or really far off. This seems standard.



We had a bunch of apple trees when I was a kid, including a red delicious tree that was probably planted in the 1920s. Its apples were my favorite, especially when they became crisp and sweet after a light frost. Perhaps store bought red delicious suck but I think this hate is just misplaced elitism from people who've never had one off the tree.


How is it elitism to say that the 99% of the variety that people actually eat suck?

I would think the elitism is insisting that the only way to truly judge them is straight off the tree (after a spell of opportunistic weather).


I guess that's exactly why I thought it was a bit snobby ... internet folks trashing the preferences of 99 percent of the population.

Having a tree is pretty hard where I live now but pretty normal back in the Midwest.


That makes it even more important to point it out. Most people would otherwise have no clue there's anything to miss out on. As some people above said, making their own apple sauce made "store bought inedible". The flip side of that is, to make cheaply and badly mass produced things sell, people can't know good things. Once stuff is gone and purged from the archives, it's gone. The feelings of anyone who happens to be around currently, including ourselves, are not even a matter compared to the dangers of that.

We can't remain at the point where our problems with coping with emotions restrict our intellectual movements. This isn't asking anyone to run 50000 miles, or go a week without sleep or a year without food, it's just saying "this thing you think is good is actually kind of shit, and if you knew this actually good thing that would be immediately obvious to you, please don't die now". And while most people (including me) can't have a tree, everybody but the very poorest could save up some money to buy just one "real" apple to at least confirm this. Or maybe buy two, and give one to a poor person, just so they know how bad the apples they sometimes eat are. And then the question is "what does this mean, how can this be improved", etc., and not "how do I live with this blow to my ego". Please, don't take this as me being upset at your comment at all, it triggered me, you could say. I read Fahrenheit 451 recently and since then every HN discussion has aspects that remind me of it.

If people didn't personally identify so much with what they know and do etc., there wouldn't even be any hurt feelings to overcome, but I'm not even going there. Let's assume it's real offensive to be corrected or put down a peg: yes, and, so, what? That should motivate us to head off others at the pass, and to smoothly inspect their lessons and take them on board without blinking should they have merit, to become good at it, instead of attempting to ban it.

> internet folks trashing the preferences of 99 percent of the population

vs. article:

> His words contain the paradox of the Red Delicious: alluring yet undesirable, the most produced and arguably the least popular apple in the United States. It lurks in desolation. Bumped around the bottom of lunch bags as schoolchildren rummage for chips or shrink-wrapped Rice Krispies treats.

Maybe it's a bit rich coming from me after going on such tangents, but still, it takes some mental gymnastics to turn complaints about "ramming [these apples] down the throats of American consumers" into "being a snob for thinking lowly of people for liking these apples so much". No, everybody would be able to tell the huge difference, but as you said, most people don't get the chance. That's the problem, not the solution.


They might be a mouthful of orgasms when eaten right off the tree. The ones in the supermarket are still made of open-cell foam and disappointment.


> Perhaps store bought red delicious suck but I think this hate is just misplaced elitism from people who've never had one off the tree.

I've had Red Delicious both directly off the tree and reasonably fresh from the farm, and they are, in either of those cases, generally far better than from the supermarket, true.

Even so, they aren't now as good as I remember them—even from the supermarket—from 30-35 years ago (they seem to be on average a lot more mealy now), and, even back then they were a middling variety for eating without preparation, and not particularly outstanding for any preparation I can think of.


It's not elitism - the problem is virtually nobody has access to the quality of apples you did. Generally speaking, we are limited to what is at the store, and they taste like shit.


Having a tree to have fresh apples is a bit more elite than most of us that have to buy them from the store...


Shouldn't think so, at least not of necessity. I lived next to a small apple orchard for a while as a kid, and in a tumbledown hovel with chipboard walls at that; the trees belonged to the same farmer who rented us the place, who certainly wasn't any more a member of any elite anywhere than we ourselves were.


Privilege comes in many different forms. 90% of the population doesn't have that kind of access.


Yeah, it was a real privilege for a kid and his single mom to be living well below the poverty line in a three-room shack that any half-awake inspector would've immediately condemned - not least for the black mold that ate up one whole wall of the third room so we had to seal it off with plastic - because it happened to sit on a hill next to a tiny patch of half-gone-to-seed apple trees that produced maybe as much as a half bushel in a season, the whole being owned by a former truck farmer whose income consisted in no inconsiderable part of the pitiful rent he got for the place, and who barely afforded the property taxes that left unpaid would've had the lot of us indigent.

I understand that the rhetoric of privilege isn't intended as personal attack, or at least that that's not its ostensible intent. I wish more people who favored it understood that, however intended, personal attack is the way it comes across, and that makes it unhelpful - indeed, actively harmful, if the purpose is to promote sympathy, among those not so predisposed, for those philosophies in whose service the rhetoric is invariably deployed.


The fact that your life sucked in many other ways is irrelevant. Having fresh fruit growing on plants near your house which you can eat is a privilege that most people do not have.

I'm not saying, "your life was privileged, and you suck." I'm saying, "your situation of having fresh-off-the-tree apples was an unusual privilege." Am I wrong, or do you just object to the one word, and want me to know a bunch of other things about how you lived too?


To reiterate from my prior comment, I understand exactly what you're saying. The problem I have is that you're not listening to what I'm saying - which, again, is that it doesn't matter what you're saying, because when you use this rhetoric to express it, you piss people off even if in spite of yourself, and the rhetoric is therefore actively inimical to the purpose in whose service you employ it.

It's not that complicated or controversial a point, or at least I wouldn't have thought so - that, when attempting to communicate, the intent with which you speak is irrelevant to the effect your words produce in your interlocutor. Unless your intent is actually to piss people off - and I see no reason to suspect that it is - then using a rhetorical structure which consistently produces that effect is counterproductive. If your intent is to inspire sympathy for the contention that there's something "elite" about having access to fresh apples, regardless of any surrounding circumstance, then using a rhetorical structure which consistently antagonizes people, and thus is much more likely to depress the tendency to sympathy among the already unconvinced than to inspire it, is counterproductive as well. And arguing that those whom you so anger and antagonize, are in the wrong to feel so, only compounds the error.

It's not that I fail to understand the concept - I expect I should do, considering I deployed it often enough myself back in my doctrinaire-progressive youth. And it's not that I fail to grasp that your intent is not to give insult - even if my own experience could not inform me on the other side of the question, mere charity would require I not so presume.

The problem I have is, quite simply, that the rhetoric you are using, in any case save when talking to someone who already agrees with you in every meaningful particular, does not work. Outside that very specific internecine context, the only thing it achieves is to make people angry, and that helps nothing and nobody as far as I can see.


The flowery baroque language you use to obfuscate your words is in contradiction with your point.


I concede that concision isn't my firet skill. That said, if it's obfuscatory, it's not deliberately so, and it sounds as though you took my point regardless.


I understand your point. I don't agree with it. I don't think the meaning of the word "privilege" has become so narrowly defined that it automatically provokes outrage like this.

If, in fact, "privilege" does in fact trigger this massive anger you say it does, then I totally agree that its use is counterproductive. I just don't see it.


I spent a while casting around for something close enough to my point that I could recommend it - rather than, for example, a Marxist critique of privilege theory which decried it for being not antinomian enough. Just as I was beginning to despair of the time I'd have to spend writing a long piece of my own on the subject, I ran across this:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2017/03/23...

I can't really claim with confidence that the book makes a point I'd be entirely happy with, because I'm only just about to start reading it myself. But this review, and what I'm seeing on its Amazon page, suggest that it's quite close at least to the point I'm trying to make, and so I recommend it sight unseen.

If you don't feel like making the purchase directly, email me at the address in my profile, and I'll gift you a copy in whichever format you prefer. In any case, I'll be interested to hear what you think of it.


The problem isn't that "privilege" has become too narrow, but that it's become too broad.

The word implies an actor. Privilege is, by definition, caused. A benefit of privilege by definition originates in a system of structural inequality, one more or less deliberately designed to benefit some, but not others, based on some criterion such as sex, skin color, sexual preference, or the like - and that's not a possibly tendentious definition of my own invention, but rather the one applied by the proponents of the concept, all the way back to McIntosh's formalization in the late 80s that began the modern popularization of "privilege" in the first place.

A further implication, also original but more clearly elucidated by Maltz Bovy, is that to do other than abandon or at least forswear the benefit of privilege, and work to dismantle the structural inequality that furnishes it, is iniquitous. To say that someone is or has been privileged therefore cannot but at minimum verge upon an accusation that that person lacks virtue. That, I think, is at base what provokes anger in response - and not unreasonably so, because it does constitute an attack on the quality of one's character. Even when leveled at someone who is progressive and does accept the theory of privilege without question, such an attack tends to elicit a defensive response. How much more so, then, from someone who is not, and does not?

And "privilege" remains so freighted, regardless of intent. It's especially pernicious, therefore, to conflate privilege with simple good fortune, which is fundamentally distinct in that good fortune isn't caused. It's just a thing that happens, and happens to work out well for someone. That's what we're talking about here. No system of structural inequality put those trees next to that hovel. You cannot reasonably posit a deliberately unequal allocation of benefit to have brought about that result. The very idea is risible at best, outright nonsense at worst. And, in stating nonetheless that that must be the case, you level the sort of opprobrious allegation I describe above.

It is not reasonable, nor is it acceptable in any conversational context where civility and charity are meant to hold sway, to offer one's interlocutor insult, then become incensed when said interlocutor responds as though insulted. Cet animal est très méchant: Quand on l'attaque, il se défend. Voltaire's sarcasm remains a sarcasm, whether you mean it so or otherwise.


Crying "privilege!" anytime someone has something you don't doesn't add a whole lot to the discussion.


Substitute "tenement apartment" for "shack" and "slumlord" for "former truck farmer", then subtract "living near formerly productive fruit trees". You now have a story that describes many times more people than your original.

The politics of privilege basically says that unless you have had the worst life that it is possible to have, you have to yield to anyone that had anything worse off than you. Since the word "elitism" is what brought all that into the conversation, perhaps it was a poor choice.

While at previous times in history, it might have been a mark of elite privilege to not have to pick your own fresh produce, that is no longer the case. Now, having fruit trees and a garden in your backyard means you are lucky enough to have direct control over a portion of your food supply, and can therefore choose to grow food with flavor and nutrition, rather than superior shelf life, visual appeal, and transportability--which are the characteristics that the grocery store will choose for you.

The apples that grew in my (rented) backyard as a kid were sour, with a woody texture, and were usually covered in wasps or ants. But they certainly did taste better than store-bought Red Delicious. The ants added a lemony flavor. I never thought to try the wasps.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: