Hacker News Reader

beginningguavaon China drafts law protecting foreign IP and prohibiting forced tech transfer

there was no world trade organization or global free trade agreements back then.

Not to mention the most common thing the US is accused of was a former worker bringing his knowledge to the US and recreating a factory from memory. He didn't get paid by the US government to steal blueprints like China does today

beginningguavaon The Der Spiegel journalist who messed with the wrong small town

https://www.berkeleyside.com/2018/08/08/eric-clanton-takes-3...

progressive university professor and black lives matter activist cracked a trump supporters skull with a bike lock

Of course since our court system is a joke filled with activist judges he gets 3 year probation for what should be attempted murder

If you flip the situation it's a hate crime covered daily by the mainstream media

beginningguavaon Google Takes Down Artstation Android App for Explicit Content

>progression of society

how is reducing ourselves to animals running around naked with no impulse control "progress"? Is pleasure your only goal in life? The hard work and years of effort to make scientific breakthroughs sure as hell isn't fun, but the results are beneficial

>If we want to transition from a society of repression and suffering to one of liberation and bliss

"repression" is what makes society possible. If every one is free to do what they want and seek their own pleasure with no societal control, your only rule is might makes right.

Pretty much every religious rule you're criticizing was for the benefit of the weak. The strongest can just crack your skull and do as they please without any rules holding them back

beginningguavaon The Der Spiegel journalist who messed with the wrong small town

It's not difficult to push your agenda with it technically being "true". Just interview 100 people, focus on 1 or two, maybe take their quotes out of context, and congratulations you can portray an entire town or demographic in a negative light that fits with your readers preconceived notions

beginningguavaon The Der Spiegel journalist who messed with the wrong small town

you can't be bigoted against white conservatives

believe me, the liberals and progressives I work with in the tech industry are just as bigoted if not worse than anyone I met growing up in the midwest. They outright dehumanize the "other" ie conservatives with complete blindness to the hypocrisy.

beginningguavaon Deformities Alarm Scientists Racing to Rewrite Animal DNA

why would evolution stop at the neck?

If intelligence isn't heritable and has nothing to do with genetics, please teach a paramecium how to do quantum physics and I'll give you a million dollars

beginningguavaon PewDiePie’s Battle for the Soul of the Internet

The MSM are going to lose an entire generation because of stupidity like this. The people who actually follow pewdiepie know it's BS and then start to wonder what else the media has lied to them about where they didn't know better.

Pretty much the definition of shortsightedness. They are killing their reputation long term to get ad clicks today.

beginningguavaon Number of babies born in Japan is the lowest since records began

One of the better takes I've seen on the situation:

https://imgur.com/a/Zg32EAl

cheaper housing, higher wages, less crime, less pollution

The only people hurt by stable population are giant corporations who want cheap labor and more consumers. Japan will be fine, they'll just increase productivity with technology rather than throwing bodies at problems

US should solve the problem by giving bigger tax deductions to incentivize middle class to have more kids and free child care. But instead of the logical decision, our politicians tell us we need to bring in millions of immigrants

beginningguavaon Number of babies born in Japan is the lowest since records began

Cato is funded by the Koch brothers who love illegal immigration because of cheap labor

beginningguavaon People Fall Off Cruise Ships with Alarming Regularity

seems like the problem could be solved fairly cheaply with machine learning. Just have cameras covering common areas for falls and have a model that identifies human like objects and then shoot off a signal to a human to verify, then if it's actually a person who fell over board send someone in a jetski or something to retrieve them

Also remind's me of patrice O'neal's rock coat joke 13 minutes in(NSFW)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-4k2SOD1P8

beginningguavaon Facebook open-sources a speech-recognition system and a machine learning library

In a world with less perverse incentives these people whose education was largely funded by tax payers would be working on actual valuable projects rather than optimizing how to get people to click more ads for a private corporation.

beginningguavaon China hacked HPE, IBM and then attacked clients

They get around it by making precursors and then sending it to Mexico for the cartels to finish and then traffic into the US. It's a loophole China allows to stay open

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/public-safety/sd-m...

beginningguavaon China hacked HPE, IBM and then attacked clients

the vast majority of the fentanyl that's killing 70,000+ people a year in the US is manufactured in China. The Chinese government has done next to nothing to prevent this

beginningguavaon Top Patreon creators launching an alternate crowdfunding platform

for a normal social media site that's an issue, for something like this where you only join the site to mainly support people you already know about it doesn't really matter.

Although I'd rather see some sort of open source project or crypto based platform instead of another centralized service that can be taken down by their payment processor. Brave browser and BAT could be the answer

>normal customers also like the add that "normal" can change pretty quickly, ask women in post-revolution Iran. Within living memory alt-right would be considered normal by a large chunk of the population and people would be chasing people of color and LGBT off these platforms. The tools used to censor opponents today could be used against you tomorrow

beginningguavaon Central Londoners to be subjected to facial recognition test this week

They'll simply pass a law making disguises/obfuscation illegal in public.

Because why would anybody who's not a criminal or up to no good have any issue with the tracking, right?

beginningguavaon Central Londoners to be subjected to facial recognition test this week

make no mistake, the rest of the world's leaders don't see China as a dystopian hellhole, they see it as a proof of concept. The only way to stop this is now, to strike hard and reject it entirely. Because once it's fully implemented any future rebellions will be able to be snuffed out in their infancy.

IE: Government sees a group of people visiting suspicious websites, they use phone location tracking to see that a small group is meeting up in person, government then uses facial recognition to track them 24/7 and eventually finds an excuse to arrest them before the movement can grow

Although I doubt people will do anything, we're too comfortable and they'll simply boil us like frogs, pushing privacy rights back inch by inch until people finally realize they are against the edge of a cliff

beginningguavaon United States should prepare to build a prototype fusion power plant, panel says

>Which would you rather have? A 1.5m tunnel, or an energy source that would change the future of human civilization?

oh come on we have more important stuff to spend money on like the 1 trillion annual spent making sure Boomers are comfortable on social security, or 90 billion on food stamps.

It's depressing how we live hand to mouth rather than investing in the future. We could solve the majority of the problems facing humanity permanently by investing a fraction of our budget into these areas.

Health care is a supply and demand problem that can be solved with AI- Berkley already has AI surgical bots that can suture intestines better than a human. Imagine being able to do most routine surgeries with bots that share, learn, and improve from every surgery done on the planet?

Global warming and energy production in general could be solved by fusion

beginningguavaon EU Copyright: Block Everything, Never Make Mistakes, but Don't Use Upload Filter

Germany just requested that France give up their UN security council seat so that the EU could have it

Remember when the EU was just supposed to be a trade union rather than an organization that can pass laws that effect every person in Europe?

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/11/28/world/germany-u...

beginningguavaon Google Employees Demand the End of Forced Arbitration Across the Tech Industry

I'd say it's a good thing overall for employees to have more power, it means that supply and demand is favoring workers.

Look for big tech to push for more H1B Visas to shift things in their favor by saying there's a "talent shortage". The H1Bs don't have the luxury of protesting stuff like this because they can be deported if they get out of line plus it drives down wages

beginningguavaon The Most Effective Weapon on the Modern Battlefield Is Concrete (2016)

>These tactics generally extend the fighting, but don’t accomplish that much

Maybe not in the conventional sense, but financially it's costing the US hundreds of billions that could have been invested elsewhere.

I'm pretty sure the cost of the war in the middle east is what helped sink the Soviets

beginningguavaon The Most Effective Weapon on the Modern Battlefield Is Concrete (2016)

>At over $600 a barrier, the cost of concrete during the eight years of the Iraq War was billions of dollars

Does anyone have any insight as to why resistance forces are seemingly so much more effective today compared to the past? Rebels were able to bleed the US of billions with the threat of a cheap car bomb

In the past there didn't seem to be situations like Vietnam and the middle east with guerrilla warfare being able to drag things out for years and making things so costly.

Is it because the US isn't willing to go total war and massacre civilians until they give up Mongolian style or what?

beginningguavaon Top U.S. general urges Google to work with military

Google is effectively building AI for the Chinese military by opening their AI center in China

https://www.blog.google/around-the-globe/google-asia/google-...

You can be sure every bit of that research will end up in the hands of the Chinese government and military. So their arguments for not working with the Pentagon are thus void.

Also hypocritical considering DARPA funded Larry and Sergey's research into what would become Google

beginningguavaon How Facebook Is Fueling the French Populist Rage

>unless you actually want censorship on the largest scale ever in history

that's what they want. The media and many government officials have been implying that the citizens are simply too stupid to be trusted with filtering their information so the glorious government must restrict what they're allowed to see. At what point will they decide the common man is simply too dumb to vote and get rid of democracy as well?

All this talk is demeaning and shows what our cultured elites really think about us, that we're a bunch of dumb cattle that need to be controlled

beginningguavaon Source: Google Allo will be officially shut down soon

>Now explain it to me Google - what's your vision

It's a bunch of very talented, bored engineers who realize that launching a product, even if it fails, is better for their career and resume than doing grunge work that might be better for google's bottom line

Basically resume driven development and Google hasn't done anything to prevent it. They probably don't care, they'd rather have them wasting money at Google than leaving due to boredom and potentially creating a startup or going to a competitor that might disrupt Google somehow.

beginningguavaon Economic Analysis of Medicare for All

US education is top notch based on international PISA scores if you break it down by race and compare them to europe, latin america, africa, etc

https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2015/pisa2015highlights...

Singapore almost always takes 1st in international test scores and their long time leader didn't pull punches

https://imgur.com/a/a8nCQUO

and it's not an income thing, the poorest whites and asians score as high as black students from families making 200k+ a year

https://i.imgur.com/PD9hz9b.jpg

So in a way you're right, US government does run their education system very well, it just seems to be a racial thing which can never be spoken about politically so it's just ignored as the elephant in the room

beginningguavaon The U.S. Yield Curve Has Inverted

yeah, capitalism doesn't work if the government picks winners and losers. A recession is often a good thing, kind of like how natural forest fires clear things out. This time the government intervened and simply kicked the can down the road.

beginningguavaon The U.S. Yield Curve Has Inverted

Might be just discretionary spending which doesn't include stuff like social security. Tax cuts ballooned the deficit and Fed increasing interest rates also doesn't help.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/25/business/economy/us-gover...

beginningguavaon The U.S. Yield Curve Has Inverted

As far as insight for how this looks for the US economy, one of the few people I respect when it comes to predictions is Ray Dalio, he says the US debt will start becoming an issue soon. Within 10 years the majority of the US federal budget will go to paying INTEREST on our debt, requiring us to borrow more to pay for the rest which will result in exponentially rising debt and inflation as the government prints money.

Dalio also talks about Thucydides Trap and Paul Kennedy's book on the decline of great powers. He doesn't say it but he seems fairly confident in China surpassing the US as the dominant global power in the near future. The only issue I have is that he seems to think China's high debt is fine compared to the US based on vague reasoning.

The US and the West in general need to wake the fuck up or we're going to be under China's thumb. We've become complacent and assume our status on top of the global hierarchy is guaranteed. China is playing to win and doesn't care about breaking the rules to win

beginningguavaon I Quit Google Over Its Censored Chinese Search Engine

>How, exactly, does Dragonfly make the world a worse place

It sets the precedent of Google censoring search results for a government. Once they do it for China you don't think other countries will say "censor these results like you did for China or GTFO"?

We've recently seen leaked internal discussions by Google engineers saying they want to ban media publications they don't like. You can say they're a private company but at this point if google bans you, you effectively don't exist online

beginningguavaon Why only 2% of Chinese pay any income tax

we should go back to that, the federal government is essentially cancer and money is the glucose that feeds it's constant growth.

The initial idea of small federal government with states rights was brilliant because people could vote with their feet. If you're a progressive who supports the right to abortion, legal weed, and government health care you could move to a state that supports those things and gladly pay that states higher income taxes to fund it.

In my mind that system is far superior to having the federal government shove laws down the states throats and prevents the divide between our citizens becoming so massive as we've seen over health care and taxes at the federal level.