arglebarnacle

This is a fascinating and illuminating piece of history, but I have a hard time believing that these cartographic mistakes are the reason for China's posture in the South China Sea.

The first part of the article mentions the strategic and economic resources in the region. Do we think that China would be minding its own business if these mistakes had not been made? It seems more likely that we would simply be left with the "ancient and historical claim[s] to the reefs and rocks in the South China Sea" without the attendant maps from the early 20th century.

The age discrepancy in phone addiction probably has a lot to do with younger folks getting more value of social media on average, though I don't want to discount the idea that older people have more self mastery. Brain development is pretty much done by age 26, but I know way more 30-35 year olds with smartphone addictions than 50-55 year olds.

I'd second this. It really is a phenomenal book. For me, the most interesting thing about it is it would probably be a terrible meditation guide for a lot of people I know. But if you have the approach/learning style that's typical of folks on hacker news, it's the best book there is--because of its emphasis on clearly elucidated concepts, consistent use of language and terms, ample neuroscience-oriented background, and an "actionable" progressive approach.

This is completely untrue. Vipassana, which means "insight meditation," is a core Buddhist practice which is far broader than this one teacher and his course. If you read the wikipedia article [0] on the branches of Buddhism that emphasize Vipassana, you'll see that S.N. Goenka gets a mention ("...as well as nonsectarian derivatives from those traditions such as the movement led by the late S. N. Goenka"), but it is in no way limited to Goenka's school or his course.

As a Buddhist who is very passionate about Vipassana from the completely different angle of Mahasi Sayadaw and American teachers like Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield, and Culadasa, this thread is more than a bit frustrating!

For Boston area folks, the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center is one example of a great place to learn this type of meditation practice, as well as about Buddhism more generally if you are interested.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vipassana_movement

With respect to education, that limit is definitely intentional for Marx, and the same goes for other forms of so-called "human capital" like job experience and connections.

They definitely help you make money, but they don't have the special attributes that make capital so desireable--you can't sell it to turn it into another form of capital, and crucially you can't employ others to use it to make money on your behalf while capturing the surplus value of their labor.

Well sure, but nobody benefits financially or reputationally from an undergraduate student's homework. There's clearly some proportion of having an academic's PhD students do this type of work for them which would stop being educational and start being an abuse. The question is, is too much of this type of work being pawned off on grad students?

I was the victim of a relatively sophisticated attack that took advantage of the weakness of SMS-based 2FA.

The attacker cracked the relatively weak password on my Verizon web login and enabled a "feature" that synced all my SMS to desktop, which they then used to break into a 2FA protected Yahoo email account. I saw the tokens come across and ultimately no financial damage was done, but suffice to say I moved as much of my 2FA over to authenticator apps as I could.

According to the wikipedia page about this rule/game, over 97% of pages have this property. Interestingly, "Mathematics" seems to be a rare exception. You get stuck in a loop:

Mathematics -> Quantity -> Multitude -> Counting -> Elements -> Mathematics

I guess you could argue it's ironic or hypocritical in some way to squander electricity in the era of climate change, but it's completely wrong to identify cryptocurrency as a serious contributor to climate change.

We can even set aside the fact that renewable sources of electricity can be and are used to mine cryptocurrency (e.g. the vast bitcoin mines co-located with Chinese hydro dams). The real problem with this argument is it represents the same fallacy you see with "violent video games are driving kids to be more violent"

Even if it were true, it tackles the social problem in question backwards. Instead of asking "do video games make kids more violent" we should be asking "what are the main drivers of violence in our society?"

Climate change is caused by fossil-fuel power generation, trucking, personal automobiles, greenhouse gas emitting industry, and agriculture. It's not caused by bitcoin, even if bitcoin mining contributes to it in some minuscule way by comparison to the real drivers.

Foundations are supposed to be self sustaining without actually selling anything, so they require large endowments to endure. That $50M could sustainably spit off as much as $2.5M/year, funding ongoing development indefinitely.

Yes that's right, but you've got the terms reversed. Defined contribution is the one where you bear the risk, and defined benefit is where the government bears the risk.

That's certainly true about total war where the nation's survival is threatened by defeat, but it's not true about the kind of limited wars was have seen since world war 2. In fact, because these wars are limited wars for the world powers that start them, but total wars for the postcolonial states in the receiving end, I think it's very correct that the public e.g. in the US continue to aggressively question the rationale for war even after it's begun in e.g. Vietnam, Iraq, and so on.

Henry Kissinger would certainly have been happier to see a US public united behind the Vietnam war effort because it would have made it easier to win in a geopolitical sense, but what about in a moral sense? The US wasn't threatened existentially by failure in Vietnam, and it's right that we didn't adopt the attitude expressed in your comment.

It's not hypocrisy, just evidence that the bitcoin community isn't homogeneous. There's always been a set of people who viewed it as a radical political project to unseat central banks and democratize money, but I'm not sure those people were ever predominant, and they certainly aren't predominant now.

It's not the the libertarian segment of the community has done a 180 to cheer Wall St's cooption of bitcoin. Instead, you're witnessing a lot of people who hold bitcoin who are excited that more and more people appear to regard it as a serious store of value. These people are probably not libertarian types--they're interested in bitcoin as an investment, and don't really care if the additional money entering the ecosystem comes from Wall St.

We're great at mining but bad at putting things in space. The main virtue of mining things in space is that the materials are already in space, sparing the vast expense of launching them up there.

I guess I partially agree that having other things we want to do in space is prerequisite, but imagine the kinds of things we could do and build if we had unlimited raw materials already in orbit, or on the moon. Remember, mining water is a big part of this, not just what we tend to imagine with earth mining.

The courses are being offered online--it's a shame grad classes are too expensive to just take for fun! Looks like $6,800 or so to take one of the two they're offering next semester, or about $12,700 for both. The Masters degree would end up costing you about $58.7k plus $1,000/semester in fees. It's a hard sell for something that still looks relatively far in the future, but I suppose if space mining is truly is your dream career, it's great that this program exists.

I'm inclined to agree that bitcoin markets are far less robust than gold markets on the whole because of the long history and entrenched social position of gold. I do think you underestimate the effect on gold markets if they were flooded with someone trying to offload $70b of gold.

That's about 7 times more gold than the entire contents of the U.S. gold reserve of 8,134 metric tons of gold. I really don't understand why you think it would be easy to sell that much gold at the prevailing price.

Some random googling turned up about $100b/day of all gold changing hands worldwide, so you would have to sell it over a long period of time to avoid moving the price. If you were to try to keep your trades under say 0.5% of daily volume, or $500M, this would be the equivalent of trying to sell 1/14,000 of the total market cap each day, which would work out to about $12.5M/day if applied to bitcoin's market cap. Selling 0.5% of the daily volume of bitcoin would be more like $36.7M/day.

The reason for the difference in those numbers is that bitcoin turns over more of its market cap daily than gold, proportionally. So dollar for dollar, of course $1B affects bitcoin more than gold, but in terms of turning over 1% of the market cap the data suggests this might actually be easier in bitcoin.

Seems like it's having the opposite effect though--the throwaway is causing people to think they've been scammed and makes them no longer on the lookout for the real package.

This comment seems to conflate resistance to mass surveillance with resistance to targeted surveillance. It's almost as if the fact that I'll never be able to resist a targeted attack means that I shouldn't attempt to have any privacy at all, but surely that's not right.

Encrypted messaging apps and services like ProtonMail have never been primarily to help people with Snowden's threat model. They're for people like you and me to reclaim a semblance of privacy, and they work even with "Uncle Sam" as the threat model in a limited, dragnet surveillance sense.

I think it's time to stop fighting this fight--nobody I know, even among the security/tech literate, uses the word cracker. We may just have to live with the fact that "hacker" means two easily conflatable things, at least until another term actually catches on for one or the other.

No doubt many people here are already aware of Richard Stallman and his views about open source software, but needless to say his perspective is the beginning, not the end, of a discussion.

It's just wrong to say that that "there is no FOSS" as if you were correcting someone's spelling mistake. The debate about the direction of open source/Libre software is too important to be treated in the way you chose for your post.

For what it's worth, I think games which portray men as unemotional automatons who are only capable of the grunt work, or portray men as mostly machismo-fueled bro types who constantly degrade women, also reflect sexist attitudes. Sexism stifles and limits men and encourages men to be toxic--as a result it harms men, and these portrayals are a part of that.

I don't think any serious person is arguing that sexist games are making people sexist who wouldn't be otherwise. Certainly nobody is arguing that sexism is mostly caused by video games.

Sexist games are a problem because they are a space in our culture where women are inferior, or are only sex objects, etc.

In a similar way, there was a time in America when a white person could safely make derogatory jokes about black people to his white friends with little risk of social blowback. Thankfully, anti-racism eventually took that cultural space away. It's not that those conversations were directly doing black people harm, but rather they were part and parcel of a culture in which it was okay to do black people harm in general, a culture that is hopefully being further eroded.

Similarly, I would expect to see the amount of sexist games reduced over time because I hope we are eroding the culture in which it is acceptable to see and treat women the way they are portrayed in these games. That's why speaking out against sexism in games is important--because it is part of the project to make sexist attitudes in general unacceptable in our society, something I hope we all agree is desirable and necessary.

Nobody put a gun to Benchmark's head and forced them to take a deal that left so much control in Kalanick's hands. It was a reflection of the relative strengths of their negotiating position at the time. Kalanick is owed control because Benchmark agreed he had control.

The legal question is whether the various scandals that followed show in some way that Kalanick made that deal under fraudulent conditions. It has nothing to do with a supposed generic truism that VCs always deserve to control the companies they fund. Uber is actually a great counterexample to your rule. They appeared to be such a good investment, and so many VCs wanted in, that they were able to dictate very favorable terms.

The obvious solution would be for foreigners to co-invest with local VCs/Angels. I think if investors have an eye toward making these kinds of investments in a sustainable and ethical way, it is definitely possible.

To be fair, if bitcoin had improving institutional support, adoption, technology, etc., you would observe the same trend in HN discussion about it. That would seem to make it a problematic indicator of a bubble, at least on its own.

Of course, if one rules out the possibility that cryptocurrency is going to be a thing, then it's in a bubble by definition any time it's worth more than zero. This appears to be the underlying view of at least some commenters here.

It only counts if it's something that's riskier than it seems. Everyone knows cryptocurrency is extremely risky, the problem in 2008 was that these packaged mortgage products were far riskier than they appeared, far riskier than they were rated by Moody's, S&P, etc.

Maybe you only meant your comment as snark, but if not it's important to understand the difference between simple risky investments and potential structural flaws in the finance system, like the ones we saw in the financial crisis.

Yes! Think about it this way--the smallest height someone could be is zero. So imagine that 90% of the people are zero height, and 10% are exactly 60ft tall. What's the average height?

Yeah, but "people of color" doesn't only refer to black people--the other 20% are also people of color. So 60-40, and it's true that US prisons are predominantly populated with people of color.

Next time summon the courage to express your moral nihilism on your real account.

It almost feels like a mistake to dignify this with the obvious response: might is might, but might is not right. Moral criticism like that of the GP is subject to debate, but not to the blanket claim that injustice as a thing doesn't exist and power is the only reality.

If you publish an unedited photograph, you could reasonably say that your photograph contains only the truth, and you can't be criticized for it. But if all of your photographs are of immigrants committing crimes, the fact that you've used your discretion to focus on this issue is nonetheless a political statement that's subject to criticism.

Similarly, if you go on social media to make posts about how being trans is not as dangerous as people seem to be implying, even if it contains a grain of statistical truth, you are making a certain point. Again, I think it's important to "photograph" the oppression faced by marginalized groups than to highlight ways this oppression is supposedly exaggerated.

Your point about my poisoning the well suggests you think I was trying to "call you out" or attack you, but that's not the case. I think we have a reasonable meta-disagreement about whether there is a political knock-on effect of highlighting different statistics or narratives. It's a disagreement two people of good faith can have.