Hacker News Reader

discardoramaon China issues demolition order on world’s largest religious town in Tibet

Acknowledged. Sometimes I get stuck in "reddit" mode after switch from reading reddit to HN. :-/

discardoramaon China issues demolition order on world’s largest religious town in Tibet

Chinese are bullies. And bullies pee in their pants when faced with real resistance. That's the best way to describe it.

discardoramaon China issues demolition order on world’s largest religious town in Tibet

> ... and still discriminates and kills Muslims on a massive scale, even after partition.

As an Indian, I'm shocked to hear this. Did you ever live in India? "Massive scale", my ass. At least India didn't wipe out its population in a "Cultural Revolution"... Do you want to talk about Falun Gong? The harvesting of organs from FG prisoners?

discardoramaon Guccifer 2.0: DNC's servers hacked by a lone hacker

> Deal with Iran that cements the Islamic revolution,

Knowing what I know about the MiddleEast, I can assure you that Iran is a much better option than the Saudis. The Saudis basically owned the USG over the last couple of decades. Case in point: after 9/11, when all flights were grounded, a couple of special flights were allowed to fly zig-zag across the country, picking up Saudis so they could get out of the US before the FBI came knocking. And Saudis are the biggest exporters and funders of extremist Wahhabi version of Islam.

Iran, on the other hand, has a much more moderate version of Islam. There are still Jews in Iran who practice freely, for instance. I challenge you to find one Jew in Saudi Arabia who practices freely.

discardoramaon Why do they love electric cars in Norway?

Oh, come on. Yeah, we do make plastics and all, but the main use is for burning.

discardoramaon Tesla offered $325M for Salton Sea startup

Serbia and Siberia are 2 different places. Quite different, in fact.

discardoramaon Deep Mind Playing Montezuma's Revenge with Intrinsic Motivation [video]

So lets say I take the trained network, and flip the color of the pixels, and make some other cosmetic changes (keeping the game intact). Will the network then solve it in the first try?

discardoramaon Matt Damon's Commencement Address at MIT

Yep, like the Kardashian clan.

discardoramaon A Guaranteed Income for Every American

> is adding 100,000 new jobs every four years at this point. In 20 years, that one industry will employ a million people

I think your math doesn't add up.

But going along with your line of thought: will UBI be phased in over 20 years? No. It'll happen over a year or two. Several million people will suddenly be off the rolls. That's not a gradual decline; that's a bloody step function. You will most definitely not have jobs for them. Creating jobs is hard, really hard.

discardoramaon A Guaranteed Income for Every American

> A UBI will do the good things I claim only if it replaces all other transfer payments and the bureaucracies that oversee them.

Unfortunately, I have 2 problems with this:

1. Of the people that I see in SF who could use UBI, almost none of them seem the type who would clean up their acts with UBI. They have serious mental issues, and money means only 1 thing to them: a means to chemical substances. So what do you do when a guy blows his $2000 monthly stipend on hookers and blow and now is back on the streets? Arrest him? Send him to jail? Put him in a mental hospital? And who pays for that? And who provides him the services, if the bureaucrats who used to do it are gone?

2. What do you do about the millions who are employed in the service-providing sector (bureaucrats, non-profits, etc.) ? Right now they make decent money; you're now going to lay them off. Where will the jobs come from for them?

discardoramaon Yahoo Announces Public Disclosure of National Security Letters

Direct link to the NSLs: https://s.yimg.com/ge/tyc/Redacted_NSLs.pdf

discardoramaon Uber Turns to Saudi Arabia for $3.5B Cash Infusion

> So where's all this cash going? Is the driver side being subsidized to a ridiculous degree still (this is, actually, my guess)?

I was in India recently. The driver said that when Uber started out, they'd give each driver Rs. 60K/mo (about $1000/mo) just to sign in for 10 hours/day, even if they did not give a single ride. Now, Uber pays by the number of rides and not a portion of the actual fares. So, for example, he said that Uber pays them Rs. 3500 for 17 rides. Most of my rides were about Rs 100 each; so Uber was taking a loss on each ride. But their system of paying by the ride is a genius idea: it removes the incentive for the driver to dick around and do a TSP around the city to drive up the fare. Now its in their interest to get the ride over with as quickly as possible, so they take the most direct route.

Edit: Sorry, "Rs" is the Indian currency, Rupee. There's about 65 Rupees to the USD.

discardoramaon Housing in the Bay Area

> What concerns me the most is that the newcomers might lack the environmental commitment, and tip the scales from valuing conservation to valuing rampant development.

Actually, if you care about the environment, dense development is the best option.

discardoramaon India set to start massive project to divert Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers

> by helping the maoist separatists of the north-eastern part, but bangladesh never does that.

A lot of the ULFA leaders were living in Bangladesh and got tacit support from the government of Khaleda Zia.

discardoramaon IBM is not doing "cognitive computing" with Watson

> given that we now have programs that look at a photograph and say "Women wearing a hat, sitting on a bar stool and drinking wine"

That may be; but then there's also this: http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.1897

discardoramaon India set to start massive project to divert Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers

I understand your concerns, and they are valid. However, none of us can predict the future; we can only use the past to fit patterns. For example: even during the worst periods of conflict between India and Pakistan, water continued to flow into Pakistan from India. Remember: Pakistan is mostly a desert without Indian water; and India did nothing. Relations between India and Bangladesh are quite friendly, so I have faith in a just resolution. Of course, Bangladesh must be vigilant.

discardoramaon India set to start massive project to divert Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers

You know Bangladesh would not exist were it not for India's intervention, right? And when the Indian Army had occupied all of Bangladesh, it could have just stayed there, "temporarily". But it withdrew fairly quickly, and Bangladesh was born.

My point is: if India wanted to screw Bangladesh over, it had ample opportunity; but it chose not to.

In any case: large chunks of Bangladesh is projected to be underwater in the near future, so maybe extra water is not a good thing? ;-)

discardoramaon One Month on the World’s Longest Train Ride for $1,000

I .... don't know what to say. It's not as if the text he plagiarized was top-class writing! It's just observations and feelings; it would have been far easier to just write down what he was thinking! What is wrong with these people.

discardoramaon Two Bytes to $951M

"nroff_b.exe" ?!? Did these guys really have to drag nroff into this?? Better look for an old-school Unix hacker.

discardoramaon Reverse Engineering a Mysterious UDP Stream in My Hotel

In our university, some guy figured out the phone numbers of the phones in the elevators. Sometimes we'd dial that number and have a random conversation with a random person. Other times we'd dial and just listen in. Caught a few juicy tidbits of conversations between faculty, but nothing major.

discardoramaon Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

I didn't say you could get any job; just that you could get a job, so it is no longer a question of survival.

discardoramaon Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

It's because once you are highly educated, you realize that you are no longer in competition with your fellow humans for resources: you'll get a job pretty easily, and it's no longer a matter of survival.

discardoramaon Tesla Model S autonomously crashes into a parked trailer while in ‘summon’ mode

Um, if it detects an obstacle, how did it hit the trailer?

discardoramaon Trump-Sanders Signal an Oligarchy on the Brink of Collapse

How about this headline:

Hillary's Nomination Signal an Oligarchy Doing Fine

(Hillary is all but nominated, I know)

discardoramaon How I Got the $84k Hepatitis C Drug for $1500 by Buying It from India

We are talking 20% ROI, year after year, for the duration of the patent (17 years). That's a 22x ROI. Most SV investors would drool themselves into a pool at the thought.

discardoramaon Second Oracle v. Google trial could lead to headaches for developers

Google petitioned the Supreme Court to hear its case, joined by allies including Yahoo, HP, Red Hat, and open source advocates, but was rebuffed. Microsoft, EMC, and NetApp urged the high court to let the Federal Circuit ruling stand, and that's what happened.

WHY?? And here I thought Microsoft was coming around. Fuck these assholes (and EMC and NetApp too). What do these people have to gain by letting the ruling stand? It just makes interop harder. And here they are tapping into the Linux API shamelessly[1]. Shame on you fuckers.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/04/why-mi...

discardoramaon How I Got the $84k Hepatitis C Drug for $1500 by Buying It from India

I'd say that a 20% ROI on the price of the development of the drug sounds reasonable. But the 11B was NOT the price of development; that would have been much lower. Assuming it was 1B (typical number thrown about), then a profit of 200M per year seems reasonable. Cost of manufacture of most drugs is negligible. Assuming they sell 100M pills/year, charging $10/pill (of $840/dose) seems quite fair.

discardoramaon How I Got the $84k Hepatitis C Drug for $1500 by Buying It from India

> then the government should be involved.

The government is involved. Most of these drugs would not exist were it not for the NIH.

discardoramaon How the Jeans Capital of the World Moved from Texas to China

FTA: there are 200,000 people employed in Xintang, making 300M jeans/year. That's an average of 1500 jeans/employee. Assuming an average wage of 30K/employee, that's $20/jean extra. Surely not a bank-breaking sum? Jeans vary in prices from about $30 - $300, so an additional $20/jean isn't outside the realm of possibility.

discardoramaon NVIDIA Announces the GeForce GTX 1000 Series

> AMD still doesn't have a good answer to CUDA.

I don't understand why AMD doesn't just jump on the CUDA bandwagon and support the API?