Hacker News Reader

theseadroidon Google launches an AI contest for social good

Off the main topic, but I'm a scientific method believer at heart and I hope we can improve or invent a better system than capitalism one day. If we treat social science more like a science then there's no need to use words such as "crap" or "only". Instead we should keep our heart open for its improvements, maybe even borrowing ideas from existing theories such as socialism.

theseadroidon The US spends more on healthcare for no gain says new report from Johns Hopkins

>I'm not saying this model is right. I'm just saying that doing away with it will have fundamental consequences to healthcare R&D.

Might not be a bad thing to try it out and see what the consequences can be.

theseadroidon The Social Credit System in China [video]

True, 1984 is not included in any Chinese textbook. Chinese education system is not the best. We have literature related classes from primary school to high school but they don't include many western works (well translation is one factor I can see). And the way teachers teach them is very very test orientated. We have a big test after highschool called Gaokao which is almost the only factor to decide which college you can go to. Many ppl spend their entire highschool prep for that one test. (There are schools specialized for students retaking this test after they failed the first time, and it takes 1 year to retake.)

During college there's no mandatory literature courses anymore but I was exposed to many western work during that time in my spare time. One reason was I was trying hard to learn English. But I can see many people dont have the incentives to read those even if those works are famous even in China. Many STEM college students in China start to prep for studying overseas once they step into college and all they care is GPA + a good Toefl/GRE score (and there are faster ways of getting good scores for those other than reading literature).

I dare to say many of those STEM students become the friends and coworkers you guys have in US today and they probably haven't "wasted" much time on pondering issues outside of STEM fields or getting their own lives to a better place.

Edit: not appearing in literature textbooks doesn't mean it's not famous or popular in mainland China. Haruki Murakami is also a very popular author whose work is not included in textbooks. He has a book called 1Q84 which was very popular and many Chinese got interested in 1984 because of it.

theseadroidon The Social Credit System in China [video]

Hey yes. Most Chinese schools and universities are government run and funded majorly by the government. There are a small number of private funded schools (especially English only international schools which are really really expensive) and not many people attend those.

theseadroidon The Social Credit System in China [video]

Chinese here. I dont wanna argue about other misinformation this thread have presented so far but just one thing: Access to the book 1984. jd.com is like amazon equivalent in mainland China (amazon.cn has less traffic there)

Searching 1984 returns: http://search.jd.com/Search?keyword=1984&enc=utf-8&wq=1984&p...

the first item has 93k reviews. On taobao (by alibaba) the search results are: https://www.taobao.com/list/product/1984%E5%A5%A5%E5%A8%81%E...

I dont know where you get the idea that average mainland Chinese person who attended their public school system (we dont really have a private school system yet, for better or worse) are not aware of those things.

theseadroidon China Cracks Down on Churches

Why is this even on Hacker News? Does the majority of readers here have the expertise to comment on the matter?

theseadroidon Plastic Water Bottles, Which Enabled a Drinks Boom, Now Threaten Industry

It's already done. Now we just need to improve the efficiency of such processes.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/16/scientis...

theseadroidon When you talk about a country you never visited, consider Paris syndrome

The reason I posted this is to remind us what we have read from media could be far from the truth.

https://www.sbs.com.au/news/paris-syndrome-culture-shock-sic...

theseadroidon U.S. Life Expectancy Falls Further

Something else to consider: In many oriental countries such as Japan and China, people used to live with minimal influences from religions. There are buddhism presence here and there, but buddhism itself is very non intrusive than abrahamic religions.

I lived in northern Europe for a couple of years and it seems to me northern/western Europe is also much less religious than US, without a opioid epidemic.

theseadroidon Ozone: The Earth's protective shield is repairing

Thanks for the video. It's very educational.

theseadroidon US election system reveals frightening vulnerabilities at almost every level

Isn't election systems the best candidate for open sourcing? So that anyone with technical knowledge can independently verify the security and correctness.

I wish every piece of civilian software funded by gov is open sourced. And why shouldn't they be?

theseadroidon Model 3 achieves the lowest probability of injury of any car tested by NHTS

Hm just a few days ago there's news about Subaru admits to falsifying data directly related to car safety:

http://www.thedrive.com/news/23955/subaru-admits-to-falsifyi...

theseadroidon Disagree with Me

I would imagine those are two audiences because the titles are two different call to actions. ppl who would like to have their view changed or challenged would go to /r/changemyview. And not many people are open to change or even thinking their view needs change.

Btw it would be nice to have social login for disagreewithme so I dont have to create yet another account and worry about data leak.

theseadroidon China is making electric buses cheap, just like it did for solar panels

>a lot more electric buses on the road in the USA

The sources you provided didn't say anything about that. In the meantime:

https://qz.com/1169690/shenzhen-in-china-has-16359-electric-...

theseadroidon I Have No Enemies: My Final Statement (2009)

Here's one suggestion from a Chinese perspective: Can you guys fix your democracy first? If you can't set a good example on how good democracy can be, then there's no incentives for any other countries to follow.

You realize that US influence can never achieve anything without the citizens of China agree with it right? Like now majority of Chinese think your political system is a joke. And you know what? The majority of Chinese like those policies that's violating certain human rights. If US can only be ever weaker as time goes by then the values you hold dear can only be more insignificant in other part of the world.

theseadroidon Trump 'poised to quit Paris climate deal'

Protip, look at per capita. Or accumulative. How is it fair that u blame others after u done tons of pollution in the past?

theseadroidon Recovering from Burnout and Depression

You think your job is making the world a little better place isn't it? Do you think all or most people can think the same way? That everyday the 8 hours of their lives are making the world better/not wasted? The comment you replied to used the imaginary job of 'dog kicker' to say that's not always the case. In real life, there are jobs who are censoring internet, who are profiling teenage to find better advertisement opportunities, who are monitoring regular citizens' communications. The list goes on. And there are programmers that develop those tools to enable those jobs. Do you think people working those jobs can be confident saying they are making the world at least a little bit better?

theseadroidon Thousands of underground gas bubbles poised to 'explode' in Arctic

Source of the image https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=6034

theseadroidon Massive permafrost thaw documented in Canada, portending huge carbon release

https://climate.nasa.gov/effects/

>The intensity, frequency and duration of North Atlantic hurricanes, as well as the frequency of the strongest (Category 4 and 5) hurricanes, have all increased since the early 1980s. The relative contributions of human and natural causes to these increases are still uncertain. Hurricane-associated storm intensity and rainfall rates are projected to increase as the climate continues to warm.

theseadroidon Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups?

This lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

Basically it says that the metabolic mechanism of fructose is different from other forms of nutrition. Our bodies have no good ways to break it down without harming ourselves. The long term effects of eating fructose are comparable to long term alcohol drinking. I assume nobody would say that calories from alcohol are the same as other food sources?

theseadroidon The large crack in the Antarctic ice shelf has grown 6 miles

This is a large topic and I've been thinking for a while. In essence, there are 2 major things we need to educate more.

1. Science. To the point that average joe understands that the prediction of climate change is concluded from the same scientific methods that helped us finding cures for diseases, inventing computers, and sending people to the moon. Science is not always perfect the same as we dont always have perfect cure for some diseases at the moment. But that is the best we can do for now, and it's the work of many experts over many years. So it is logical to either believe it or contribute to it scientifically, financially, auditing-wise, or something else. After all we believe in scientists not because that they have the title, but because we believe in scientific methods, in scientific approach.

2. Social science. Pure science is about causality. Social science can teach us value, what is good, what is bad, and happiness. Then we can discuss whether not acting upon climate change will make you more happy or less happy.

theseadroidon The large crack in the Antarctic ice shelf has grown 6 miles

What about educating the whole population to the point that the average joe can think logically, critically, and independently so that the society as a whole can adapt change better?

And it's not like we haven't seen that the average person can make better decisions because of education, than medieval age lets say. Maybe we just need faster ways to improve the population.

theseadroidon Zhou Youguang, creator of the Pinyin writing system, has died

As someone from mainland China and learned pinyin in grade 1 of primary school, which happened in early 90s, in Beijing, I use pinyin daily, for inputting Chinese into electronic devices.

>All my Chinese teachers explained that young schoolchildren were taught basic pronunciation with bopomofo (which uses special characters, not latin letters), not pinyin.

No, we use latin letters in mainland China, Taiwan uses special characters.

The article is very accurate. Older generations like my parents have to learn latin lettered pinyin by themselves to use PCs and smartphones.

And the pinyin form of my name and home address are on my passport.

theseadroidon LEDs may cause retinal toxicity at occupational domestic illuminance

A related study on human retinal pigment epithelial cells

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eva_Chamorro/publicatio...

theseadroidon No Evidence of Aloe Vera Found in the Aloe Vera at Wal-Mart, CVS

No, this is an example of why government regulation and free market economic are important. In places where there's fierce competition, a scandal like this will cost the player to lost the battle against other competitors, so deregulate those markets to boost competition. In places where competition is not possible by reasons other than regulations, government should regulate the shit of the industry. However, US is heading to a place where most markets are gonna be dominated by monopolies yet the regulations not be there.

theseadroidon Vancouver plans to tax empty properties 1% of their assessed value

The sooner some of you guys get the idea that you own nothing, the sooner NA will become a better society. Living inside a society means your rights are not granted by the god or by nature, it is granted by other people around you, by the society. The right and law of ownership is the same. It is merely a consensus how the society distributes its wealth.

The issue you described doesn't really exist in Vancouver, where it has one of the lowest vancancy rate in the world (0.6 percent), it's a seller market and rent is high enough comparing to local income/maintenance cost.

BTW, Switzerland has the lowest house ownership in Europe according to [1]

1. http://qz.com/167887/germany-has-one-of-the-worlds-lowest-ho...

theseadroidon How three-day weekends can help save the world

Every time someone makes the comment "oh if China was just like Western countries and had X etc", I feel obliged to point out that there's a large majority of people in this country who A) Do not like being told we should be more like Western countries and B) Don't mind Y and have just as much joy and happiness as anyone. Not to mention the abysmal state many Western countries and economies have found themselves in. While they were taking their Z, China was busy being the second largest economy in the world and soon to be the largest.(Source: Chinese) /s

theseadroidon The world’s most liveable cities

I've been lucky to have a nice landlord for a while until he sold the rental unit, then the new landlord started charging more for laundry/parking/anything the law allows. He also tried his best to increase rent. You must have heard that the ultra low vacancy situation leads to rent bidding wars and whatnot[1]. The renting market is current a seller market.

Being a home owner you have to be in the market once. One good rational decision and you are set. Being a renter means being the buyer all the time. At least for me I dont want to spend the extra time to learn the skills to be an expert renter and try to outsmart the landlord year after year.

[1] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-ren...

theseadroidon The world’s most liveable cities

For sure. If they've been living here for some years. The housing crisis wasn't this bad until maybe last 5 years. But it has prevented not only young talents coming to the city, but also small-middle businesses flourishing. As the list is published yearly, shouldn't it reflect up-to-date situations? And Vancouver's renting market is going frenzy at the moment[1], is there a single option left for young people to live here with peace of mind?

[1] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-ren...

theseadroidon The world’s most liveable cities

Can't say for other cities, but Vancouver is quite liveable if you gathered your wealth elsewhere. The median household salary is 22nd Canada wide in 2010[1]. The housing price is world renowned.

I wonder if there's a list for world's most liveable cities for young people. Where technologies are rapidly being adopted by both the community and policy makers, knowledgeable government, less presence of established powers/influencers who prevent progress.

And how hard to create such a city from scratch?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Median_household_incom...