Hasknewbie

You are correct about HK (in fact I think the higher crime rate was much older that just the 80s and dated back to the 50s and mass emigration caused by the successive troubles in the mainland). I do think it's a great story, as it demonstrates an administration can completely turn around a police force from utter corrupt to highly professional in around a decade. In Western countries where the worldview is often 'static' it's also a good reminder that societies can change quickly.

And yes in Singapore the laws (and their enforcement) are much more strict.

It's not violent like countries caught in the drug wars, but a single number fails to give the whole picture: in India a lot of the violence is targeting lower castes and religious minorities (Muslims, Christians, Sikhs)[1], sometimes with the (more or less overt) approval of the current ruling party (BJP -- Hindu nationalists). A recent shocking example is the gang rape and murder of an 8 year old Muslim girl: although most of the country was horrified by this, some of the demonstrations were in favour of the accused, and for the charges to be dropped[2].

So yes, when the ruling party basically deliberately targets minorities, I would qualify that country as "quite violent".

[1] https://qz.com/959802/india-is-the-fourth-worst-country-in-t...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/an-8-year-... -- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/24/world/asia/india-child-ra...

There's no correlation: Singapore and HK have some of the highest population density in the world, and have a low crime rate. Checking the list of countries by density[1] and then by violent crimes[2] will confirm that. India is quite violent, but for different reasons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populatio...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

I agree with the article but I can only note, once more, that it is from The Guardian, who did run multiple articles in support of no-platforming in universities.

But look who comes crying about freedom of inquiry now, once said "erosion of integrity" is done by right-wing bureaucrats. But the no-platforming happens mostly in the US, while government interferences is happening in the UK, so they will probably get away with their double standard one more time.

Come on, The Guardian is not some Medium blog hoster. You can't say this being in their opinion section means it doesn't count. If you discounted everything tagged as opinion, their front page would have a whole lot of empty spaces.

This is a flawed view based on the premise that elected officials would somehow be incapable of grasping the concept of "having special advisers". You might be interested to know that Hong Kong has a system similar to what you're describing. It's not working out to well (hint: one's expertise is useful only in narrow cases, while corporatist self-interest applies all the time).

Dupe of:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16642594

I can see that Bloomberg is still bloomberging:

First paragraph:

>> "Poland: reasonable strategy roiled by leftist impulses."

The current government is a far right Catholic party that has just enacted a law partly denying the Holocaust (somewhat related to this, one of their senator sparked a scandal by posting actual Nazi propaganda online), and the country may have its EU voting right suspended due to the administration's attacks against the judiciary. But yeah the most important thing is that one of their economical policy happens to be left-leaning.

On the economist Thomas Piketty:

>> "Last month, the anti-capitalist economist wrote about ..."

Piketty is left-leaning, not "anti-capitalist".

Caption of a Piketty photograph:

>> "Only academic. Until now."

Piketty has been a (prominent) advisor for politicians on the French left for at least a decade.

You go Bloomberg "News". You keep doing you.

I would argue it's not about the extra characters, it's about enforcing explicit mutability.

In Scala, where var/val both exist, each time you declare a variable you are forced to think about its mutability. But if you only have "var", with the _option_ of tacking "final" to it, then a programmer can simply forget to make that decision, because the language allowed them to.

Since this article is only a rehash of the original one, wouldn't it be better if this thread pointed to it directly?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/12/tim-be...

The problem is that said GNU support (which AFAIK is the one everyone interested in the language uses) is contributed by ... Adacore. They can decide to stop doing that should they wish to do so. I might be out of date, but their Ada compiler is the only one that's up-to-date, targets multiple platforms, and can be used for free. So they have a sort of de facto vendor lock-in.

Also, if you have to recreate a collection of lib from scratch, I have the feeling people would rather contribute to a newer language in the same (or same-ish) space doing just that, such as Rust -- which I think is what is happening, even if Ada still has some distinctive features.

You are correct, but I was speaking in terms of general-purpose programming, with an OSS/free implementation available, and to my knowledge all the other vendors only target the embedded and high-integrity spaces. And they cost money.

Moreover Adacore is the only one to have a general-purpose OSS (albeit kind of captive) ecosystem.

Your ANSI/ISO remark is off-topic. You don't need a seat there to use the extensive C++ ecosystem. With Adacore it's either GPLv3 all the way or you pay up. Also, to underline their gatekeeper status even more: they could one day decide to stop releasing their compiler to GNAT, without giving any reason, and there's nothing anyone could do about it.

Ada is in practice almost completely maintained by one single (consulting) company, Adacore, who, except for the GNAT compiler, release all of their OSS contributions under GPLv3 "to limit your freedom [of use/reuse]" (it's mentioned explicitly on their Website).

They do NOT want an autonomous Ada community to pop up, they just want to attract programmers they can contract. Since they're basically the only noteworthy contributors for Ada, they're impossible to bypass, hence using Ada means submitting to Adacore's whims.

Ada is indeed a very well designed language, and with some recent language revisions, so have you ever wondered why it did not get any traction at all? Well, that's why.

Every 6 months or so on HN or Reddit, someone rediscovers Ada, gets psyched and tells everyone ... and then discovers the licensing / controlled ecosystem issues, and walks away. And we don't hear about it. For about 6 months.

Correct, but the points in my second comment below also apply if you are Chinese. If you do business in China, even if you're a local, you're on a leash.

You are missing the point. Yes there is protectionism in the EU, but the claim was: China is very capitalistic compared to the EU. That is just false.

In the EU you can start your business wherever you are a legal resident, the regulations are a known quantity and essentially you just have to mind your own business. This is not so in mainland China, your applications can be arbitrarily denied, and if your business does too well, you will get a knock on the door asking if you are a "good comrade". All big businesses there are tied to the CCP one way or another.

> China is a very capitalist country compared with, say, EU.

That is patently false. In China it is impossible for foreign companies to compete on a level playing field. There is a huge amount of protectionism and anti-competitive practices, the currency is manipulated to favor exports, and it's basically impossible to make it big without ties to the CCP.

Namibia has a "if you sell land, the government has the option of being the first buyer [to redistribute it afterward]". Not ideal, but way better than Zimbabwe. They probably looked at Mugabe's results and thought "thanks but no thanks".

Not sure this would work for ZA though. Namibia is only 2M people, it's not the same scale.

David Berreby's book "Us and Them: The Science of Identity"[1] pretty much agrees with you, and makes the case that the less rich/diverse someone's identity is (in essence: the more "single-issue" they are), the more likely they are to have a narrow view of it and to cling to it regardless of its validity.

His conclusion is that an individual should cultivate multiple identities, so that each one is enriched by the others and becomes more nuanced in the process.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Us-Them-Identity-David-Berreby/dp/022...

It started in 1998. Related leaks continued until 2004 it seems.

Beside these, MS have been dragged to court multiple times for unethical business practices, on both side of the Atlantic, and were found guilty, again on both sides (so it's not merely "an EU witch hunt"). The last time that I know of was in 2016 for the "malware-like forced installation of Windows 10" case. Windows 10, supposedly their latest and best, being itself technically a spyware. They're an immoral company. "Definitely better", I think not.

> "The real problem isn’t fake news; it’s that people have given up on that search for truth"

I disagree. Most people have neither the time, inclination, or often the tools to "seek the truth" by themselves, and therefore they rely on the media to (in)form their views.

Moreover there is such a thing as influencers and trend-setters. The media do not simply report on what people are expressing, they can also (and often very much do) set an agenda. Knowing this, it's journalists' duty to report the news accurately and not mix reporting with opinions, not manufacture or distort facts, and avoid feeding into the Outrage Economy and its endless echo chamber.

By chance, I stumbled on a "meta-journalism" website just today, that analyses how mainstream print media (both left- and right-leaning) cover the news, it's pretty interesting. It's also often pretty damning. I hope they become better known:

https://www.theknifemedia.com/

> "Thankfully, running a System Restore worked and the next update didn't have these problems, but since then I stopped allowing automatic updates"

It is now possible to disable automatic updates in Windows 10? (Asking because forced updates is what made me switch to Linux in the first place.)

It's pretty good that this kind of open secret gets coverage in the mainstream media, but it's disappointing that this article contents itself with a bit of celebrity shaming and only hammering on Twitter, probably because they're a bit more transparent (technically speaking) and easier to take down.

Other networks (i.e. Facebook/Instagram) are probably just as bad, and if so they are generating untold amount of ad revenue based on fake traffic and accounts.

The irony of seeing this pop up in The Guardian.

I was lucky enough to get my hands on the first edition of City Of Darkness before it became pricey, I heartily recommend that book.

The "no laws and/or regulations in KWC" is a bit of a myth though, HK police began patrolling the place in the early 70s, plus despite its legal status it benefited from HK's infrastructure, such as postal services or the electric grid. It was lawless mostly in its number of unlicensed dentists.

WASM uses the current JS/VM environments to leverage its existing infrastructure (i.e. low-level abstraction and security). In practice it is a pre-optimized bytecode that only relies on JS primitives, so it does not need dynamic typing features or GC, i.e. the slowest and least safe parts of JS. Which means that anything compiled to WASM is "near-native" in terms of performance, making the use of a separate VM unnecessary.

If you land on Pinterest by chance, it is even more obnoxious than Facebook, which is saying something.

I avoid it like the plague when looking up stuff, but it is so annoying I wouldn't be surprised if there's a Chrome/Firefox plugin to directly prune it from Google search results.

A developer, if they so wish, can allow third-parties the use of their property in some use-cases that are beyond "critique or satire".

In this case FWD allows this explicitly for youtubers in general, but have withdrawn this permission to PDP in particular because they do not wish to see their product associated with a racist.

How is this a "misuse of the law"? Please explain.

I facepalmed when I read that "not going to delete FB because" sentence. How about that thing called e-mail? If keeping someone's e-mail address and firing a message every now and then is too much hassle, then that person was not worth keeping in touch with in the first place.

FB has turned people into needy Rolodex hoarders.

I can't help but notice that this author, seemingly concerned with correctness, also wrote a post about static typing's benefits being unclear, with his argument there again based on an arbitrary and completely unscientific graph pulled from another Medium blogger.

He seems to base his views on the hearsay from his Javascript monoculture, while ignoring the more relevant literature like Code Complete or (when it comes to TDD) Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It, both books basing their claims on empirical research. Making Software's conclusion is that TDD can help, but does push complexity upward (i.e. programs end up with simpler components so as to make TDD easier, but with a higher numbers of them and therefore more dependencies between them) so resulting bugs will be harder to track.

But it's hardly surprising this article is poorly researched: it's just rehashing TDD pablum for self-promotion, there is not a single original thought in there.

I think it's one of those things where people have difficulties realizing the scale of things. For example hurricane Irma is the size of Texas or France. If it hits Florida, people won't need to evacuate Miami, they'll need to evacuate Florida. Think of the logistics it takes to evacuate a whole state basically overnight, and the size of a threat causing such event: if we barely have the know-how to run away in time, do you think we would have any know-how to block something of that magnitude?