Hacker News Reader

tossaccount123on New U.S. Experiments Aim to Create Gene-Edited Human Embryos

you could make a case that millions of people currently suffer genetic diseases they are born with that have the potential to be cured using this technology if it's developed

tossaccount123on The Sorry State of the World Economy

according to MIT innovation has slowed dramatically since the 50's and as a result general productivity growth that has been boosted by technology since the industrial revolution has stagnated

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601199/tech-slowdown-thre...

tossaccount123on $190M missing after crypto exchange Quadriga CEO dies

people have done crazier things for less money

Fake your death, get some plastic surgery done, enjoy life with those $200 million dollars

tossaccount123on AWS Drives More Than Half of Amazon's Operating Income

>How is anything a “status symbol” with over 30%-50% market share in industrialized nations?

That's my point, when it came out the marketing around the iPhone was how using apple made you a trendsetter and you were ahead of the curve, now everybody has one. So raise the price and bring back the sense of exclusivity

as for performance, it really doesn't matter for luxury items. People pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for old cars and it's not because they perform better than a modern economy class vehicle

tossaccount123on AWS Drives More Than Half of Amazon's Operating Income

>I wish Apple operated that way, as lowering Apple device price will very likely increase the absolute amount of dollars coming into their back acct.

I've always thought they should make a $10,000+ model. iPhones are essentially a status symbol unless you buy it for privacy purposes. There is a decent market who would pay a lot of money to have a iPhone that the plebes can't afford. Hell, even a lot of broke people would save up to buy one

It's like cars, if you just want a tool to get from point A to B you can buy one cheap. On the other hand you can also spend hundreds of thousands on luxury cars.

Make some limited edition iPhones every year and I'm sure there would be demand and an eventual collector market

tossaccount123on Saudi Arabia runs online database of women to track them, stop them running away

US actually produces the most oil of any country now. I'd like to see someone do the math and see if it would be cheaper to leave the middle east and save money on wars and just subsidize our own oil production to make up the difference for any price increase consumers might see. Of course that won't happen because war is a industry now

What's also amazing to me is seeing this culture defended by the left, when if most muslims were given power in Europe they would strip away most rights for women and homosexuals that the left also fought for

tossaccount123on New study: Google manipulates users into constant tracking

I was more pointing out how either side can hypocritically rationalize things that run counter to their supposed beliefs because they make money off being hypocrites.

Nobody thinks they're evil, people can rationalize all sorts of crazy behavior.

tossaccount123on New study: Google manipulates users into constant tracking

basically every claim is sourced as far as I can tell. Schmidt is pretty entrenched with Clinton considering he started a company dedicated to using tech to get her elected, Groundworks

https://qz.com/520652/groundwork-eric-schmidt-startup-workin...

tossaccount123on New study: Google manipulates users into constant tracking

It's fascinating how obviously smart people can rationalize their actions.

Schmidt and Google claim to be "progressive" but that kind of rationale of "nothing to hide" would mean that every progressive movement would have been shut down in its early stages had this kind of tech and surveillance been available at the time because it went against what was currently judged as right by the people in power

tossaccount123on New study: Google manipulates users into constant tracking

https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/

A good read on Google and Eric Schmidt's relationship with the State Department and federal government in general

"There was nothing politically hapless about Eric Schmidt. I had been too eager to see a politically unambitious Silicon Valley engineer, a relic of the good old days of computer science graduate culture on the West Coast"

tossaccount123on Want to Stop Fake News? Pay for the Real Thing

There's also the fact that the MSM has made complete asses of themselves over the last few years.

Has "Fake News" ever knocked trillions of dollars off the stock market because they ran an unverified story that implied the president would be impeached?

https://nypost.com/2017/12/02/abc-news-corrects-flynn-bombsh...

At some point there needs to more accountability for these organizations than "Oh, sorry about that"

I'm not sure why the media and journalists still get held up to some nostalgic ideal of brave upholders of truth. The majority of news organizations are owned by billionaires pushing their own agenda or giant corporations that only care about profit. Truth is secondary at this point.

tossaccount123on How to teach programming to your loved ones [video]

The best you can really do is point them in the right direction and help them when they get stuck, but learning to code really requires motivation that only they can provide

tossaccount123on Skirting U.S. sanctions, Europeans launch trade mechanism for Iran

Germany is currently going through with NordStream 2, a plan that gives billions to Russia. Simultaneously, the US is expected to spend billions protecting Germany and the EU from Russia via NATO. If Russia is really a threat why is Germany helping to subsidize their military and government?

Who is unreliable here? Why isn't Germany getting their natural gas from the US?

Of course the EU doesn't like Trump. If somebody has been giving you free money for decades and all of a sudden somebody wants to put a stop to it or at least get something in return, of course they aren't going to like the new guy

tossaccount123on Germs and ancient migrations help explain our world of 'haves' and 'have nots'

>Just say that differences are in 99% shaped by environment and you are fine

You can find flaws and inconsistencies in their logic easily though. People have no issue with saying that height is genetic for example. Even racially, it's ok to say Asians are on average shorter than Africans

But imply intelligence is genetic, and now there are issues. For some reason we are told that evolution and genetics stop at a human's neck

My question is that if intelligence isn't genetic, why doesn't somebody teach a dog, or cat, or bacteria how to do quantum mechanics? Surely it's just environment right?

tossaccount123on Germs and ancient migrations help explain our world of 'haves' and 'have nots'

Guns, Germs, and Steel is essentially pop science by a guy with next to no expertise in many of the areas he bases his theories on like geography.

Germs - Ignores the fact that Europeans were devastated by things like Malaria that many Africans have moderate immunity to thanks to the sickle cell trait

Domesticated animals - Ignores that Europeans have actually used Zebras as work animals and had to domesticate cows from Aurrochs and dogs from wolves

The whole thing is basically Diamond starting off with a conclusion and finding a theory to fit in

tossaccount123on A New Theory Proposes That Humans Tamed Themselves

Common sense would tell you there's some truth to it. For centuries we killed murderers and rapists and thus removed them from the gene pool. Data shows testosterone levels, which are correlated with violence, have dropped massively over the last few decades, whether that is genetic or environmental and to what extent for each is up for debate

WWI and WII basically selected to kill off Europe's bravest and most nationalistic men, those who immediately signed up to fight and were thrown in the meat grinder.

I'm partly convinced that's why America is so different from Europe, we managed to avoid most of the carnage of those wars

tossaccount123on The Scripto App Became a Fixture of Late-Night Comedy News (2018)

>Negative coverage doesn't make them biased, undeserved negative bias does. Whether it's deserved or not is a debate for elsewhere.

That's the point, you can report a bad story about somebody neutrally and just lay out the facts, but the media has consistently reported things negatively

tossaccount123on The Scripto App Became a Fixture of Late-Night Comedy News (2018)

Statistically Fox is the least biased MSM outlet, they are 52% negative towards Trump, compared to over 90% for the others

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2017/09/...

A Harvard study compared Obama to Trump media coverage their first 100 days in office and found Obama got 59% positive coverage compared to 20% for Trump

https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-donald-trumps-fi...

tossaccount123on Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach

>Where does the growth come next though

I'm amazed they haven't taken a crack at Google with a search engine in their app. Imagine how valuable combining Facebook's data with the user intent of search? A lot of users would never leave the facebook app on their phone if they could get a search engine that's halfway decent. It seems like they are leaving a ton of money on the table as it stands

If its too much to develop their own maybe they could team up with Bing or something?

tossaccount123on U.S. Changes Visa Process for High-Skilled Workers

The US didn't have an income tax at all until the 20th century, at least at the federal level

tossaccount123on U.S. Changes Visa Process for High-Skilled Workers

It was hyperbole to show the effect of supply and demand

More and more I notice how similar software engineers are beginning to sound like the "Made in America" factory workers who said China could never do their job. Never take the present comfy situation for granted

tossaccount123on U.S. Changes Visa Process for High-Skilled Workers

>To prime your intuition a bit, consider how woman and minorities more than doubled the work force from the 1960s to 1990s with no loss in jobs or lowering of wages.

You do realize there hasn't been a raise in real wages since the 70s when you account for inflation right? Coincidentally during that same time period the income gap exploded because the wealthy had plentiful cheap labor and were able to pocket the productivity gains as pure profit because workers had no leverage to demand higher wages because there were 0 labor shortages. American's used to be able to support large families of 4+ kids with only 1 working parent. Now you have households with both working and they can't afford to have kids.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-...

I support high skilled immigration because it benefits the country but let's be real, if we dropped 10 million software engineers in Silicon Valley from around the world, guess what? Wages would drop massively because it would be a buyer's market for tech companies, they could pick and choose the most talented for pennies

tossaccount123on An Anti-Facebook Manifesto, by an Early Facebook Investor

>However, do you really believe in this concept of a conspiratorial all powerful MSM, that spans the political spectrum and co-ordinates efforts to refute viewpoints

Pretty much all the media we see is controlled by a handful of corporations with varying degrees of connection

https://assets.rbl.ms/18622935/980x.jpg

It's worse now than the image above because AT&T is purchasing Time Warner

With relation to Facebook it's pretty obvious that everybody in the traditional media industry would like to see them lose influence because it costs them money. Instead of watching the news or buying newspaper subscriptions people get the info from Facebook. There really doesn't need to be coordination because it's in their self-interest to pile on Facebook.

Go back 20 years before social media and if the news and the newspapers didn't cover it, it basically didn't happen. The MSM has lost a massive amount of influence due to social media because they can't completely control what information is spread around.

tossaccount123on An Anti-Facebook Manifesto, by an Early Facebook Investor

>Were we ready for it?

No, our brains evolved for millions of years to operate in groups of less than 100. Social media is basically high fructose corn syrup for our dopamine system. Within a span of roughly 20 years the way we live our lives and communicate with other humans changed massively

All the MSM hate for Facebook though is simply because they are butthurt that they've lost their spot in society in terms of controlling influence and information

tossaccount123on What If Google Doesn't Reward White Hat SEO?

There's a reason so many people buy up expired domains, it's common to either start a new site with an aged domain or 301 redirect them to your site for the extra boost

tossaccount123on Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong

Except all stats on infant mortality, life expectancy, etc show that's not true.

US and Europe have dumped over a trillion dollars in foreign aid to africa alone, 9x more than the Marshall plan post WWII.

tossaccount123on Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong

100 years ago the richest man in the world could die from a simple infection because there were no such thing as antibiotics.

People take for granted so many things we have in the modern world, they want some form of utopia right now. Perfect is the enemy of good

tossaccount123on U.S. Accuses Huawei of Stealing Trade Secrets, Defrauding Banks

>And it works, too. Look at the quality of life in China, compared to India... Or Vietnam.

You're basically saying crime pays if you can get away with it. Everybody knows this, the thing is that eventually you can't get away with it anymore, which is what China is learning now as their economy gets crushed by tariffs and the world unites against them

tossaccount123on U.S. Accuses Huawei of Stealing Trade Secrets, Defrauding Banks

lol, our justice system has been a joke for a long time. James Clapper and John Brennan are walking free after violating every American's constitutional rights and then lying to congress about it. Meanwhile Edward Snowden is a wanted criminal around the world for exposing their rape of the US constitution and roger stone has his house raided by 29 FBI agents with CNN filming in the driveway for lying to congress.

There's a Navy veteran rotting in Jail right now for taking a picture of his sub on his last day because it was technically classified info. Hillary Clinton is enjoying life despite having hundreds of pieces of classified info on her server

There are two tiers of justice in our country, get used to it. At least in this case it would benefit the average american

tossaccount123on U.S. Accuses Huawei of Stealing Trade Secrets, Defrauding Banks

>But if this is just a bargaining chip to be exchanged for a few worthless face-saving trade deal "wins" for this administration, it will be disgrace

If letting one person off the hook can benefit all americans through better trade, how is that a disgrace?

China has apparently offered to balance the trade deficit with the US within 6 years

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-18/china-is-...

their economy is also tanking rapidly based on what their government can't cover up, the quarterly reports of US companies

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-28/nvidia-cu...

So by basically any measure the US is winning the trade war