Hacker News Reader

slurryon Robin Williams, Oscar-Winning Comedian, Dies at 63

Nanu nanu.

open defecation, which is more widespread in India than Africa,

For real? It's astonishing that India - a second world country, alleged rising star - could get beaten out in sanitation by Africa.

slurryon Burger robot poised to disrupt fast food industry

Automation tends to hit at the middle, not the bottom.

For example, blacksmiths got replaced by automation. Highly skilled labor, replaced by machines + lower/unskilled labor.

Burger automation is the fantasy of automating all the way to the bottom of the skill pile. But I would put my money on new waves of automation that disrupt skilled labor. There may come a day when we reach the bottom of the pile and utopia/dystopia is realized, but I don't think that day is today.

slurryon The agricultural revolution that wasn't

I take a person's website with a big grain of salt out of hand if they link to a lot of HBD blogs like hbdchick and Steve Sailer. "Take with a grain of salt" is not the same thing as "reject...out of hand".

I later reject his argument after examining it cursorily and directing some half-ass arguments of my own at it. Not out of hand though

slurryon The agricultural revolution that wasn't

I think it's a legit point. If I had to do it again I would have used italics.

slurryon The agricultural revolution that wasn't

And...three posts down on the author's homepage we get to race and IQ, then a little further down a cross-post deal with Unz Review. HBD-curious at best. I take his musings on Austronesians with a consequent grain of salt.

I think the key is here:

"The Austronesian advantage seems to have been threefold: (1) a more flexible and innovative approach; (2) a less present-oriented time orientation that extended further into the past and the future; and (3) a less individualistic approach to life that made collective goods and goals more possible."

First of all, these three traits are even less in evidence from the archaeological record than the alleged farming practices he is criticizing. Flexible and innovative is basically meaningless. The second one ("present-oriented") in particular is a staple of Austrian-economics-type diatribes against the poor (especially black poor), so it is likely to be a back-projection of present day arguments rather than a genuine window on the past.

But anyway, none of the three points are given any significant support - just a short handwaving paragraph each.

"Couldn't have been agriculture" - I can go along with that - "must have been racial superiority of this particular type" EDIT: those are my paraphrases, not direct quotes - that is a step too far. It's too far not so much because arguing racial superiority is wrong (although it is) but because the evidence adduced is flimsy and does not support it.

slurryon Yann LeCun on the IBM neural net chip

Published on Facebook? Really?

slurryon Jay Rockefeller: Internet should have never existed (2009)

Headline fail. The very next thing out of his mouth is:

"...and that's a stupid thing to say."

slurryon An Intro to Videogame Design History

It didn't mention color graphics either. The presentation is about game mechanics, not delivery.

slurryon Historical figures have moved to cities in the same way for centuries

Paris has height restrictions, which doesn't seem to have deterred artists.

On the contrary, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/a096d1d0-d2ec-11e2-aac2-00144...

slurryon A Contrarian View of MITx: What Are We Doing?

I dropped out of academia and my advisor was a self-absorbed prick, but: for concentrated learning there really is no comparison.

slurryon The Social Laboratory: Singapore's Surveillance State

I guess I'm showing my age and/or wrestling fandom here, but you guys don't think of caning when you think of Singapore?

I've always thought "Oh, Singapore," next thought: "where they cane people."

slurryon Historical figures have moved to cities in the same way for centuries

Thus, NIMBYs and city haters are standing in the way of history.

Lobbying for height restrictions? Lobbying against the next Michelangelo.

slurryon Facebook's Gateway Drug

Is access to small consumer loans really that significant among the problems facing Rwandans, Paraguayans and (I forget the other places[s])?

It seems to me that, if it were, there would already be a better solution than Facebook in place. Or if it is just about to be, that Facebook is unlikely - even with this project in place - to be in the best position to provide it. Unless they get really close with local regulators, but I doubt they have it in them to shimmy up with the local fuzz to be the most favoured credit bureau in Paraguay.

slurryon Facebook's Gateway Drug

Other people are already treating HIV with anti-retroviral drugs. Why can't we tackle it with shamanic healing ceremonies?

This is not evidence-based development strategy. This is a shot in the dark.

slurryon Ask HN: Things that suck?

e-Readers - Kindle DX too awkward, old-tech; other readers can't handle PDFs worth a damn.

slurryon Facebook's Gateway Drug

What's frustrating is how un-data-driven these efforts are. Surely we have some empirical research by now on the most cost-effective ways to improve quality of life through aid projects. And my guess is the top ten are all sanitation-related.

But they do this. What a [presumably tax-subsidized] waste.

slurryon [dead]

Really more of a sunken city than a sunken civilization. Still pretty cool though.

slurryon The New York Times Calls for Marijuana Legalization

I thought NR was for legalization from way back? Quietly anyway. Definitely Bill Buckley personally was pro-legalization from at least the 70s onward.

Edit: and the piece is by a sitting Republican congressman, who is a somewhat legendary figure in movement conservative circles.

slurryon The Benefits of Failing at French

Actually the French suffer from this as well, thinking that every language has the rhythm of French, and only stressing the last syllables.

Having taught Latin to French speakers, I can confirm.

slurryon What's the scariest thing in the world? Ask your teenage daughter

I think zombies are a proxy for other teenagers. They travel in packs.

slurryon Scientists have developed a material so dark that it can't be seen

http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cs.aspx

slurryon The Mao Mango Cult of 1968 and the Rise of China's Working Class

To me, the article plays this as slightly humorous and kitschy, whereas your comment makes it seem much darker, especially with the Dr. Tiller comparison. One thing you get wrong is, this began among workers at Tsinghua University, not rural dirt farmers. So if this be idiocy (and that seems uncharitable at best to me) it is urban and not rural in character.

slurryon GNOME 3.13.3

What will happen to GNOME if it does not successfully compete with the big dogs? Nothing. It does not compete with the big dogs now, has never done so, and - whatever convergent multiplatforming it may do in the future - is unlikely ever to do so. And yet it is still a viable project.

This isn't the beverage or toilet paper industry. Niche products - especially ones like GNOME that don't have to "sell" or turn a profit - have a demonstrated way of living on.

There may be good arguments for what GNOME has been doing, but the need to compete (with largely imaginary competitors imho) is not one of them.

slurryon What If U.S. Cities Just Stopped Participating in the War on Drugs?

Drug prohibition is old. But the militarized quasi-Schmittian state organs devoted to enforcement them, and their attendant juridical pretexts, are of a more recent vintage.

slurryon What If U.S. Cities Just Stopped Participating in the War on Drugs?

Other features of the last 40 years, besides the drug war, include the virtual disappearance of urban rioting and the erasure of youth/minority political militancy.

I believe this is not a coincidence.

Arbitrary search and seizure, checkpoints, mass detention are common features of military counterinsurgency. They are also features of the drug war.

I'm not saying the drug war is consciously aimed at youth and minority citizens the way similar tactics were aimed at Communist guerrillas in the Malaya emergency, or Sunni insurgents in Iraq. But I am saying that the effect is about the same.

That's why it's probably a mistake to lean on rational utilitarian arguments against the drug war. The unspoken selling point is its unacknowledged side effects. Sure there are costs, but no more Watts, no more Black Panthers. The calculus of harm reduction is weak against dots that are never connected out loud.

slurryon Hadoop's Uncomfortable Fit in HPC

"Big Data is any thing which is crash Excel." - @DEVOPS_BORAT

slurryon What Killed Google+ And What Can Save It

He does provide some evidence, although I'm not sure how much like statistics it is. Here:

"Last week, the company parted ways with Vic Gundotra, a talented executive who led Google+ through a thick fog of expectations. The company is also reported to be reassigning team members and sub-products (possibly Hangouts) to other business units. "

He acknowledges that for some things like tech discussion G+ is doing fine. The argument is that, organizationally, Google itself is pivoting away from G+.

slurryon It's Different for Girls

>Attractive woman are going to have such problems as a matter of course. Men are attracted to woman primarily based on their looks

People are attracted to all kinds of things. Go out to a big box store in an unfashionable suburb some weekend and look at the couples walking around. It's not as if The Real America is living in a PUA utopia where only attractive people find a mate. All kinds of facial and body types are walking around with each other.

If people can pair with unconventional types, they find them attractive enough. Some people will harass what they find attractive. Therefore some people will harass non-conventionally attractive people.

Which is a long way of saying, by no means will conventionally attractive women be the only ones to find themselves receiving such harassment.

This pretty much defeats the purpose of the rest of your comment.

>and confident men are going to act on their desires.

What do we mean by "act on their desires?"[0] There is enough ambiguity to drive a rather alarming truck through.

[0] http://www.hackcanada.com/canadian/zines/spacemoose/take_bac...

slurryon It's Different for Girls

>Why does privilege mean that white, male, straight, or non-disabled people are not allowed to say "lighten up" or even express an alternative opinion on these topics? Why are their opinions now less because of their skin color or sexuality?

Here is why:

"Why did the chicken cross the road? BECAUSE NEGROES CAN'T READ. HAR HAR HAR HAR!!!!!!! Pretty funny, huh? Oh, come on, lighten up."

^Typical context in which "lighten up" is used . You don't want to sound like that guy, do you? So don't say "lighten up', no matter what race or orientation you are.

If someone finds your joke uncomfortable (like I'm hoping we all found the joke above uncomfortable) trying to cajole them into comfort with it is wasted effort at best, continuation of harassment at worst, and a simple dick move most likely.