scdoshi

Signal announcement:

https://www.signal.org/blog/announcing-signal-president/

This follows a 5.7B investment by Facebook

Interesting set of videos by Jansen explaining systems used to create strandbeest: https://www.strandbeest.com/explains

Thanks for that link.

Also found this which goes into some more detailed comparison with rectangular grids:

https://github.com/uber/h3/blob/master/docs/doxyfiles/usecas...

S2, linked from the README[1], does the same hierarchical subdivisions in squares, with each square having a string ID.

Squares divide into sub-squares exactly, but hexagon's don't sub-divide into hexagon's neatly.[2]

Can someone explain the advantages of hexagons over squares in this use case?

[1]https://code.google.com/archive/p/s2-geometry-library/ [2]https://www.illustrativemathematics.org/content-standards/ta...

Monitoring aquifer health seems like a good approach to start with. Great to see you have thought about the issues.

Water is an ethically challenging area to start a business in, but the status quo in India is pretty bad, so I hope you do well!

Looks like a really good idea.

How do you plan on scaling without becoming part of the water mafia (or at least enabling them)?

After all, there are only so many independent suppliers with their own water source.

Would love to hear you thoughts on this.

Many (if not most) companies do stock refreshes annually, don't they?

This might be just me, but the most important thing to me when I get advice is:

- who am I getting it from

- what do I know about their life/experience

- under what circumstances

Because that let's me adjust how much importance to put on it. Getting advice is generally not the hard part, figuring out which advice to follow and which to discard is.

I might be missing something, but seems to me like the products are still recycled, but as raw materials, not as full devices.

This makes sense, given data is almost certainly bound to be present on phones etc.

Maybe there's a more nuanced way to do this, but this doesn't seem all that bad.

OTOH, having these phones go through a refurb program and selling them probably involves a fair amount or resource use as well.

This has been a fun blast from the past. viaCycle was in YC (S12). And yes, we shut down in 2013 around 3 years in.

The article describes a hypothetical scenario.

It's clear if you read carefully and pay attention to the dates, but this is the kind of thing that seeds fake news and forwards. Disappointed that shock value and clickbaity titles are being used by a rights advocate group.

Okay, but he's basing this argument on his paper, where he sets out to show that immigrants are in fact, not exceptional.

However, if you believe my reasoning, then he isn't really measuring anything. So, we don't know if immigrants are exceptional or ordinary or worse. Or at least not based on his paper.

Okay, so obviously, an employment based visa program does create conflicts of interest and in general, is not good for the immigrant employee, compared to a non employment based visa.

However, the claim that immigrant employees are somehow not as good as their American counterparts is based on shoddy logic.

The criteria he uses in his paper to measure this:

- high salary - high rate of patent production - Ph.D. dissertation awards - doctorate earned at a top-ranked university - employment in R&D

Because of issues with the employment based visa, he himself argues earlier in the article that immigrant employees end up with a lower salary.

Top ranked universities don't always admit people based on merit. Being in the country when applying to school and speaking the language have huge advantages. A lot of graduate admissions are on a case by case basis, and getting an in person meeting with the professor can make all the difference. Also, top graduate schools tend to be a lot more expensive.

Employment is R&D is also hampered by the fact that immigrants don't have comparatively fewer choices when looking for a job, again because of issues with employment based visas. This is especially true is you want to do research in aerospace or materials because of security clearances.

Overall, this doesn't give me a lot of confidence in his other analyses.

Disclaimer: I'm an immigrant, so I'm not without my biases here.