59 karma · joined June 27, 2018
If you look at the war photos. You'll see infants. Such a horrific war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre
It's also strange that we say this is the worst event in vietnam war, when we dropped napalm on people ( chemically burning them to death ) and more than 4 million people were killed in that terrible war. God knows how many vietnamese women and children were raped. My Lai was one of thousands of my lai incidents in vietnam.
This is very old tech. "Invisible" image linked to a url. Pretty much every ad email has pixel trackers for data ( impressions, etc ). It's used heavily in marketing.
Not sure why google would use such primitive tech. There are better ways to verify that an message has been opened and read.
So puberty kills girls' confidence. Then they have college rape campuses to look forward to.
Thanks to the media, we've conditioned females into fearing society, schools, cities, everything. Why stop there? Why not condition them to fear their natural process of growing up. Something they can't escape or avoid. All for those clickbait pennies.
All media should come with warning from the FDA just like cigarettes. Cigarettes - toxic to your lungs. News/media - toxic to your mind.
You mean the largest and wealthiest demographic bought the most cars during one of the worst economic recessions where a significant portion of the younger generation had to move back with their parents just to survive?
> There's an Autoweek article[1] that tries to spin this positively, but it basically says that Millennials and Gen-Z are responsible for just 30% of vehicle sales in 2017.
They aren't "spinning" anything. They are just offering data and expectations. As the economy improves and as the younger generation get on better financial footing and as they get older, they'll buy more cars. What's so shocking about that? Even you acknowledge that they went from a 20% market share in 2011 ( a major recession era ) to 30% today. And as millenials get wealthier and as gen-z gets older, common sense and data says that trend will increase.
> Essentially, people ages 18-35 are purchasing less than a third of the vehicles, despite being at a position in their lives where a demand should be at its highest.
How is 18-35 at the age where demand is the highest? You think kids in college need cars?
> Complicating matters, it looks like the market research pointing to millennials essentially purchasing them merely out of pragmatic necessity, to drive to work or cart families around because there are no other options:
As opposed to buying them to hang on your wall as decoration?
> As boomers die off, their economic and political power will wane and we're going to see some pretty dramatic changes to urban and suburban landscapes.
In some matters sure. But certainly not when it comes to cars and most definitely not in the suburban landscape. Even in urban landscapes, like NYC metro area with great public transportation, people still love cars. Come check out the yearly auto show at javits center.
This is a tricky question. Easily the biggest factor is china. China being the most populous nation was the largest source of poverty a few decades ago and now is the largest source of reduction of poverty. They lifted 680 million people out of poverty by 2010. Today, that number is probably approaching 800 or 900 million due to their economic growth.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2013/06/01/towards-the-end...
So do we credit the "communism" of the chinese communist party? Do we credit capitalism? Do we credit chinese communism management of capitalism? Do we credit foreign investment? Chinese entrepreneurship? It all depends on your political bias. Success has a thousand fathers, failure is an orphan.
Also, poverty is a very political/strange concept. A poor city dweller struggling to make ends but who has a smartphone and nice sneakers will not be in poverty. But a farmer who owns his land, is independent and grows enough food to live comfortably but has no smartphones or sneakers would be seen as being in exreme poverty. Ultimately, reduction of poverty is simply a result of moving farmers and stuffing them into large cities and how dependent they are on the "state". The less poverty you are in, the more you are dependent on society for life's essentials.
Also, poverty decreasing is great, but in the same time period, wealth inequality has increased drastically. Imagine poverty of weapons. Both of us are in extreme weapons poverty ( we have no weapons ). You get a nerf gun and I get a shotgun. Weapons poverty is wiped out. We should celebrate right? It's "great" that poverty decreased, but the differential in power between me and you skyrocketed.
Look at china. Their poverty has decreased dramatically. But the power differential between the powerful and everyone else has increased dramatically as wealth inequality skyrocketed. Is this really a good thing? The wealth inequality funding "digital dictatorship" and tyranny?
This is the same diversion tactic some people use about wealth not being a zero sum game. In purely terms of wealth, it is not a zero sum game. But wealth translates into power. And power certainly is a zero sum game. So if you got $10 and I got $10,000,000, in terms of wealth, both of us are doing better. But in terms of power, my power increased drastically while yours barely budged.
> I really feel like it's a shame that word is almost toxic in intellectual circles.
It is because it's opinions based on political biases. But economists and political "scientists" do a great job lying to us that their field is a "science" with the same credibility of physics. It is not. There is no objective truth because it's not in the realm of the empirical but societal/political. You'd have less toxicity in a debate between a christian, jew and muslim on who is the one true god.
The same thing with small economical cars with great mileage. Remember a few years ago when gas prices rose above $4 and every pundit was saying that gas guzzling trucks and SUVs were a thing of the past. Want to guess what the the best selling vehicles are today? They aren't small sedans. They are large trucks.
https://focus2move.com/usa-best-selling-cars/
> Americans chose to pay later for mass transit. Now it’ll cost us a fortune.
No. We chose cars. And we will continue to choose cars over mass transit. It will take something drastic to change american culture and our lifestyle.
Absolutely. Unless the win-loss ratio includes all games while the AI "learns" to play the game. It might have lost most of its early games, but now wins 100% of the time.
I suspect it wouldn't take DeepMind long to master starcraft II and beat starcraft's AI 100% of the time.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17892966
I have a sneaking suspicion that journalists spend most of their time on social media sites like HN and just repackage stories they read here.
Also, the title should read "South African mountains older than current continents".
The article mentions it is older than the african continent and that is correct. But that doesn't make it older than continents in general. The Makhonjwa Mountains and Vaalbara ( the first supercontinent ) were created in the same time period.
Who is disagreeing with facts. It's the interpretation that people disagree with.
"Tiannamen square massacre" vs "Bringing order to tiannamen square"?
I believe all interpretations should be allowed. You believe biased google employees should get to choose.
So you are for biased chinese employees altering google search results then?
What's even more absurd is that people have the gall to defend this behavior on HN.
Really? You don't see what's controversial about a pro-life employee seeing pro-choice results and deciding to alter the search results? Or what if a republican employee decided to scrub prejudiced anti-republican results and pro-democrat results? What about a chinese employee seeing prejudice "tiannamen square" results and deciding it needed to be removed? You don't like prejudiced results but you are okay with prejudiced google employees creating prejudiced results for you?
> It isn't objective and it never has been.
Actually it was. Google of the 2000s was nothing like what it is today. Google used to be fairly agnostic and served the results honestly when they were desperate to gain market share. Now they are intentionally altering results for a political agenda. That is very dangerous.
But you are right. The headline is incorrect. It should be "Prejudiced Google Workers Discussed Tweaking Search Function..."
Google used to be an honest representation of the internet. Now it's just a prejudiced representation of their prejudiced employees.
> Absolutely. But using a headline like that just plays into conspiracy theory.
Stop it. It isn't a conspiracy theory just because you don't like the truth. We have actual video footage of google leaders and their employees openly talking about manipulating the public. We know they tried to manipulate the 2016 election. They are pretty open about their agenda.
It's one of the reasons why I use duckduckgo. Better search results and less spying and less data collecting.
Also, news companies aren't immune to "fake news". The news industry have spread their fair share of "fake news". And their fake news causes wars and the suffering of millions of innocent people.
If you really cared about fake news, then you should be more worried about the news companies than social media. It's odd you are not. But I guess you trust a couple of highly biased editors tied to the establishment more than an open platform like HN. I frankly trust HN far more than the nytimes. HN isn't perfect, but you are far more likely to get the truth here than in the nytimes. Certainly the mods here do a better job of keeping things even-keeled and less biased.
Are there people I like more than they know. Sure. Are there people I hate more than they know. Absolutely. But really 99.99% of the people don't matter. I don't think about them or them me.
Ultimately, you care about your family and friends. Do people waste their time wondering if "people" like you or not?
If the database is just a detail then you most likely are working on a small toy project. Or a class project. If it is a significant project where performance, scale and security matter, then database is the central concern. You have to start and end with the database. But dealing with data can be boring and cumbersome so we tend to jump to coding and proscrastinate on database and data design.
https://www.thewrap.com/media-enablers-harvey-weinstein-new-...
The NYTimes should be the last company anyone should be telling secrets to. We have social media. People should post it anonymously to social media than an establishment organization like the NYTimes.
Hell post it on HN. I trust HN and the mods here more than I trust the editors at the NYTimes.
Even if they aren't actively tracking your movements, they are collecting data on you and passively tracking your movements since they can use the data to retroactively see where you were.
China is using their "peace" prize as soft power to further their own interests. They are being rather blatant about it as you showed with mugabe winning it in 2015. And europe is using their "peace" prize to further their own interests. Though they do pay lip service to "peace", "human rights" and "democracy". The chinese haven't bother with that much, but if history serves as an example, it won't be long before the chinese pretend to be the champions of the "peace", "human rights" and "democracy" like europeans do.
Also, the chinese peace prize winners are suspect for sure. But so are the european peace prize list. People like woodrow wilson and henry kissinger are nobel peace laureates.
That's why it's generally called machines rather than computers. But the media plays loose with words to make the story more interesting.
Also, the british bombes were way too slow to be effective.
It was actually the US Navy that produced effective code breaking bombes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombe#US_Navy_Bombe
You can see one at the National Cryptologic Museum in Maryland.
That's never going to happen. Nobel Peace Prize is a political tool and has always been so. It has nothing to do with peace but advancing post-colonial european interests. Go read the history of the nobel prize and who has won. The prize was created by alfred nobel, noted for inventing dynamite and being a major war munitions manufacturer.
Why was Suu Kyi given the nobel prize? Because she loved democracy and human rights? Of course not. Lots of people love democracy and human rights and they haven't won the award. She was given the award because the british thought that they could use her to take over mynammar again and they felt that they could control her. Turns out that they couldn't since she's a nationalist, like her father. Think about it. She was given the nobel peace prize in 1991 while there was no democracy or human rights in myanmar ( it was a military dictatorship ). So her award was "forward looking". What were the british looking forward to? Gaining influence in their former colony.
Why was obama awarded the nobel peace prize before he even took office? Because europeans wanted to influence obama going forward. Funnily enough, the nobel peace prize probably influenced obama into helping france and britain by militarily attacking libya. After all, he owed the europeans.
Awards are more about influencing the future rather than celebrating the past. This is especially the case with the nobel peace prize. It's part of what we call soft power.
Guess what? The chinese are playing the same game now. That's right. They have their own "peace" prize.
> I see this pattern every time there's a critical article about China.
Because we get the same story about china multiple times in a day.
Just from "abc.net.au" within the past 19 hours. The same story has been pushed onto the frontpage.
"China’s all-seeing surveillance network"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18030655
"China is building a digital dictatorship to exert control over its 1.4B citizens"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18026060
I'd called this propaganda rather than news.
> let's focus on the ridiculous and crazy to be put it mildly things going on in China.
Why? If china wanted to export their dictatorship to the US, I can see why we should be concerned. But they aren't. It's primarily europe and segments of puritanical leftists and rightist in the US along with parts of the tech leadership.
It's fine to have a story about china once in a while, but multiple times daily just reeks of propaganda.
"China is building a digital dictatorship to exert control over its 1.4B citizens"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18026060
They aren't even waiting 24 hours.
Okay.
> I definitely don't ever see myself "retiring"-- and I mean that: I will never not be interested in what I'm interested in now.
Okay.
We were all 23 once too. We all took philosophy or literature class and thought we figured it out too. Just a word of advice, people change, life change, society changes and even you change. Ah to be young again...
And it isn't every thread. It's usually the most egregious examples that people point out.
Whether it is good for society to immense wealth controlled by family trusts/chariities or whether the wealth should be taxed and used for public purposes is something people can debate for an eternity.