hingisundhorsa

> still marvel at the OLPC XO-1, also derided as a toy but one of the most amazing computers ever built

Sorry, I was with you until the moment you described a pretty standard AMD Geode GX2 SoC with a pretty poor transflective LCD as "most amazing computer ever built". Let me guess, you worked with Nicholas? the self-promoting self-described father of web tablets who claimed to have saved millions of children when really he just chewed up millions of UNDP funds that could have gone towards genuinely life-changing projects?

> at least from a moral point of view I don't see that we did something wrong.

You did. You lied on your Thai tourist visa application form. It explicitly said: "I hereby declare that the purpose of my visit to thailand is for pleasure or transit only and that in no case shall I engage myself in any profession or occupation while in the country"

> No locals were out of a job

Could you explain how you formed that conclusion?

> They lived there as tourists so paid a lot more into the local economy than locals

How did you determine that? I've lived as a hippie in India, similar to what Steve Jobs did. I spent 0 money and lived off the temple welfare system. I was exploiting the generosity of people who had a thousandth the resources and welfare that I had. I wasn't alone. There were hundreds, if not thousands of other Westerners doing similar things.

"For a thousand years, China has been ruled by a cognitive meritocracy selected through the highly competitive imperial exams. The brightest young men became the scholar-officials who ruled the masses, amassed wealth, attracted multiple wives, and had more children."

Author manages to squeeze a topping of first semester Introduction to China with a thick crust of massive unsubstantiated overreach.

"hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications."

Nice autopraise, mildly disguised.

"After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness."

Seriously? There was an otherwise intelligent guy working for us who started spouting this kind of drivel. We noticed it all started after he got assigned a female manager and then subsequently a non-white manager. Some people have mild racial hangups, which they then externalize in odd ways like China peril.

I don't know much about the actual conditions in North India. But this article contains some markers that are at best suggestive of exaggeration, at worst maybe falsification. Eg, high levels of descriptive details that don't seem to be relevant and also don't mesh together: 1. Sunita’s family in the north Indian village of Mukimpur

2. When nature calls, the 26-year-old single mother and her four children head toward the jungle next to their farm of red and pink roses, to a field of tall grass, flecked with petals, where the 7,000 people of her village go to defecate and exchange gossip.

7000 people is a lot of people. Especially for a village. A quick check shows Mukimpur in the 2011 census only has a population of either 42 or 151. http://ourhero.in/population/villages/mukimpur-111460 http://www.populationofindia.co.in/uttar-pradesh/muzaffarnag...

Taking a look in Maps: https://maps.google.com.my/maps?q=Mukimpur,+Uttar+Pradesh,+I...

Seems like there's maybe 100 structures there max, even if all were houses, how do you get 7000 people?

There definitely maybe a toilet problem, but I doubt this article is shedding light on the cause.

I believe that's Singapore. Albeit, the rules are being changed due to rapid influx of rich foreigners into Singapore causing social issues. https://sg.news.yahoo.com/ferrari-crash-fuels-singapore-anti...

I tried to find where in the article it says anything that might back up "already been convicted of being part of a terrorist cell". The closest I found is where it says: "already in jail for being part of a cell that considered attacking a Territorial Army base in the town.". This sounds a bit like a thought crime to a laymen like me and the verbiage flags my weasel alarm. Also, could you clarify where you're getting the term "nation's infrastructure" because all I saw was: "discussing attacking the town's TA headquarters". If we accuse everyone who's pissed off at the town council / home association and starts talking about blowing them up of terrorism, then we'll need a much bigger prison system.

We're all so easily swayed by propaganda to label someone "murderous thug". Odd how we never had a trial, never had concrete verifiable data and easily label them as such. We sweep those collateral casualties under the rug the same way the "barbaric" people we purport to be attempting to "civilize" do. I worry about us and our future.

Marketing was the example in the article. It is also one that catches my attention because I was aware of a case where my personal physician was pushing a particular drug and I was aware that pharma salesmen (marketeers) are permitted to encourage physicians to favor their products through controversial freebies like free trips to company seminars in the Bahamas, etc. I have no hate for marketing. If I had found a article contrasting how much is spent on legal versus R&D, I would have used that. And, by chance, yes, I do refuse to waste an extra dime on clothing just for a logo.

Sigh. I don't know whether you're being sarcastic. You're focusing on a country when we should be thinking about individuals. What I see is a population set that is currently excluded from survival due to the pricing of certain chemicals. This population set exists both in India and in our own backyard. There are 2 ways we can get access to a solution for that population set. One, allow generics to compete after a certain period. This tends to be natural, since reverse engineering a drug takes some time. During that time, big pharma can price the drug to maximize profit, after that, they have to compete better if they want to hold on to that profit.

I don't feel conflicted. Patent protection was established as a mechanism to encourage and facilitate innovation and to encourage inventers. The question I ask myself is whether the current system is sufficiently balanced. In my opinion, it is not. It is way too much in the favour of large pharma. A good way to check that it is, would be to examine the books of a pharma company and check what percentage of profit (not earnings) goes to R&D versus other areas like say marketing. This journal article suggests that marketing spending is 20 times higher than that on R&D. [1] http://www.bmj.com/content/345/bmj.e4348 That causes me to be skeptical of pharmaceutical company claims that the generics industry is killing innovation. I've even heard a pharma marketeer use the term "Indian generics terrorism" which is exceedingly callous given that we're basically choosing to deny life to those individuals who can't afford big pharma marketed drugs. The patent system was not intended to be used to justify such behavior.

It gets worse, France actively committed "terrorist' activities against organizations opposed to the French using French occupied Polynesia as a location to test their nukes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior

I guess we were just as bad with our activities there, but at least we're ashamed of it now.

As a “<insert ethnicity here> <insert gender here> <insert sexual orientation here> programmer”, I've always been uncomfortable with race based or gender based or orientation based policies. Google would have been better off taking the time evaluating each participant and then making a judgement on whether that person would benefit from additional help. That would be better for everyone rather than blindly assuming every female needs assistance or every "insert ethnicity here" needs assistance.

I looked up the point you are making. The data backs you up, 3 wheelers suffer from inherent instability on turns. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQh56geU0X8 "When the single wheel is in the front , the vehicle is inherently unstable in a braking turn, as the combined tipping forces at the center of gravity from turning and braking can rapidly extend beyond the triangle formed by the contact patches of the wheels. This type, if not tipped, also has a greater tendency to spin out ("swap ends") when handled roughly." What a pity. I was quite excited about the prospects.

Uhm, perhaps my English is slipping but that just seems like a description of what they saw.

Yes, a person with drive might achieve that. That said, it'd probably be massively less likely. Out of the 100 million kids in India born into poverty, probably 1 in a 100 would make it to a blue collar job, 1 in 10k to a white collar job, 1 in 100k to a professional, 1 in 1M to be a millionaire, and 1 in 100M to be a billionaire. I'm fudging the data but would I be massively wrong?

Could someone help me out, I've read Pinker's criticisms, Chablis' and others, but I don't feel convinced because they all seem to be generic attacks on accuracy. From their articles, I was not able to identify a specific point that Gladwell has made that is false. Lets take for example, his most recent book, David & Goliath. I was impressed by his unusual look at the David coming down the valley story in a new light including Goliath being a sufferer of pitiutary defect (hence the weak vision). Is that analysis somehow wrong? It doesn't seem to be any more wrong than other analysis I've seen, eg: Pinker's claim that violence has been decreasing over the ages.

Really? Comments like this seem to be intent on setting up a strawman (ie: not anything close to what Gladwell attempts to communicate) and then knocking down that strawman.

"there's money in writing books to take down Gladwell.". It is interesting that much of the negativity seems to be about the person, Malcolm Gladwell (masked by talking about "Gladwellism" or his style), rather than attacking the points he has made. I wonder if the criticism was genuine, wouldn't it be more focused on the writings and not the writer?

That's one of the poorest E-Paper panels I've seen. That first picture of Anool looks dithered. A regular E-Ink display is capable of 32 levels of gray, this seems to be much lower depth and lower res.

Sometimes I feel confused. Are "we" the real terrorists?

Strong statements need to be backed up with strong data. You said "all of the equipment and techniques". Did you not read the Gawande section? Seems like the techniques are new and weren't invented by us.

Is this the magical trickle-down healthcare plan? :-)

How long do we think this Indian protection of this island will last? The current Indian government, who Indian colleagues tell me is led by a mafia related Italian family, is one of the most corrupt in the world. It is only a matter of time before whichever intelligent anthropologist in the bureaucracy/judicary is currently protecting them falls by the wayside.

Are we really surprised by this? Think about your own experience in highschool and the type of people from that experience who are now in law enforcement? Any correlation between bullies and law enforcers?

It's not just Indian and Chinese degrees. We hired a guy who had a BA in Computer Science (or something like Engineering Science) from Dartmouth (ivy league!) who turned out to be incapable of doing real work. He had trouble implementing linked lists and hash tables.

Really? What kind of hacker are you if you don't think about basic statistics and false positives? Jeez... The readership here has dropped to the level of slime mold. I guess I'm starting to fall into this category myself.

This whole thread puts HN to shame. It is a shame on all of us. Horrific. Just horrific. Shame on the people who threw some innocent Brown (yes, the school, not the skin color) kid under the bus, or MIT or whatever other school. The kid is missing and his family gets death threats for something he didn't do. They even had to take down their searching for him page. Shame on all of us for participating in this.

Sigh. That justifies spamming HN?

Anyone else get the feeling we are we making HN become like every news/forum site now? Reporting every and any shot fired anywhere in the world?