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wordbankon Why We Hurt Each Other: Tolstoy’s Letters to Gandhi

> Peaceful coexistence is hard precisely because it is NOT our most natural, basic state.

It depends on what you mean by saying "our".

It's "not natural" for an aggressive chemical reaction called "life" that consumes all the resources it can find.

But it's a basic state of the Universe. Ever heard people saying "God is Love", "we are all one" or "nirvana"? That's it.

wordbankon Russia’s Cold War Mapmakers

> E.g. тайна in Russian is more like 'enigma', definitely not 'classified/secret'.

How about "государственная тайна" then?

wordbankon Russia’s Cold War Mapmakers

"Секрет" is more a social thing. Confidential information of bigger entities like government or business will be called "тайна".

wordbankon StackOverflow modding itself out of existence

ServerFault is super aggressive against any additions and "admin panels".

My detailed question was closed because I mentioned Webmin installed.

wordbankon Is Windows Phone Dead?

No, I'm using Lumia 830 and had 520 before. There are all basic apps and many Unity games.

And Lumia 5 series are selling like hotcakes in poor countries. Windows Phone OS is smooth and fast on low-end even compared to iOS.

(I'm not a MS fan, OS X is my desktop.)

wordbankon Ask HN: Are you working on a Reddit replacement? What is it?

I believe decentralized Reddit can work quite well in this setup:

* Reddit-like engine that supports only one subreddit

* data importing tool that can fetch all the previous posts from Reddit sub and feed them to the engine

* mods of subreddits setup the engine on their own servers and migrate their subs' data there

* another useful addition - profile importing tool that can verify user, so you can preserve your username (via PM from bot on Reddit)

This way we're getting hundreds of small Reddit-like sites. If one fails for some reason - you can always fork it and try to attract audience to your version.

wordbankon Apple removes Civil War game from App Store until it removes Confederate flag

As a developer, I'm more happy with Apple's closed ecosystem than with Google's 95% piracy rates.

I'm not an Apple fanboy though.

wordbankon Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Others Team Up to Launch WebAssembly

Native apps give you many complex native libraries including UIs.

wordbankon Kongregate: the science behind the massive profits of F2P games

> Eventually, the pendulum will swing the other way. People will get sick of freemium games, and go back to games where you pay $1-$10 once.

> Some people made a lot of money with freemium, so everyone is copying them.

Freemium was a response to the market. Most of players are not willing to pay anything:

http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/05/monument-valley-developer-...

wordbankon The Dalai Lama’s Daily Routine and Information Diet

Science is not an absolute knowledge. It has many unproved theories and makes mistakes on a regular basis.

(Please note that my world view is purely scientific but I'm using buddhist ideas for looking into my consciousness because science doesn't say much about it.)

wordbankon Why the Internet in Sub-Saharan Africa Sucks

> There were modest spikes in south africa and brazil. Not many anywhere else.

Huh? South America has good overall Internet penetration[1] and Chile is going to 70% right now.

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

wordbankon The Dalai Lama’s Daily Routine and Information Diet

There's no reincarnation in Buddhism, only rebirth.

And rebirth happens to you right now when your consciousness arises again and again from previous states of your mind.

Yes, there's also a "fantastic" theory that this process goes beyond physical death but this theory is supported by simple logic of buddhist philosophy.

wordbankon The Dalai Lama’s Daily Routine and Information Diet

> I changed my mind and accepted the fact that all religions are at best ridiculous or at worst repulsive.

You are confusing the ideas with their interpretations by human minds.

wordbankon American Trailer Parks: The owners are getting rich

Wrong. I'd like to get a cut of the huge tech capitals cake to convert it into charity.

wordbankon How the Strugatsky brothers’ science fiction went from utopian to dystopian

> the way of the East - to focus on inner rather than social development

I think it's not the way of the East but more like an image created by westerners.

You will break this illusion by simply visiting Thailand, India, Korea or Japan. And it's hard to imagine more materialistic culture than Chinese.

I'm not saying the ideas of Hinduism or Buddhism are bad but look how people actually interpret them:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Muslims_in_Burma

wordbankon Elon Musk email to Tesla employee about missing an event to witness the birth

It would not be a tragedy for me. Well-being of these people is more important than an imaginable entity named "company".

wordbankon Elon Musk email to Tesla employee about missing an event to witness the birth

No, I didn't say this. I'm saying that he's making the same mistake as thousands of leaders before him: placing achievements first and people second.

wordbankon Elon Musk email to Tesla employee about missing an event to witness the birth

History repeats itself and people who are trying to "change the world" don't care about any casualties on their way.

Ironically, world could change so much by everyone being kind and grateful to others. No invention or conquest can bring this kind of change.

wordbankon Did I ever mention that I fucking hate the fucking web

Gmail became so painful about two years ago. So I moved to Fastmail (wow, web UI can be THAT fast!). New Google Maps were broken for a couple of months. Google's own developer plugins like Game Services and AdMob are buggy and unintuitive.

Google products' UX is always unpolished (including Android). The last Google service that I'm using is Docs, but I hope Dropbox will make something better soon.

wordbankon Chile is introducing free higher education

http://wenr.wes.org/2013/12/introduction-to-the-higher-educa...

"Chilean universities are among the most expensive in the world when measured against per capita income, which is no doubt a factor in the nation’s high dropout rate. It is estimated that Chilean families pay more than 75 percent of the costs associated with higher education, compared to 40 percent in the United States and just 5 percent on average in Scandinavian countries."

wordbankon Chile is introducing free higher education

Excuse me, but you're too fast on making conclusions. Also you're totally ignoring the lack of vertical social mobility in the Chilean society because poor people have no chance for education and better jobs for their kids.

> It results in chileans who are markedly better at critical thinking than americans.

This statement is too generalized. But even if it's correct then you can't pinpoint it to education. There's a whole culture behind

> Consequently the government runs a surplus does a great job of providing services

That's simply not true. Chilean government is criticized a lot and the president has very low ratings.

> Chile is the south american economic miracle as a result.

Chile is resource-cursed country with quite small population and low corruption. It's not the government's achievement.

wordbankon Chile is introducing free higher education

It's the most expensive compared to the average salary in the country.

In response to your other points: Chilean government fails a lot and the president has 25% rating. So at least they're trying to reset the government.

Also you're looking at "virtual" education from NA/EU perspective but Chile is digitized very poorly compared to "on the edge" countries. Online services are like 2001-2003 US ones.

wordbankon Chile is introducing free higher education

In Spanish? Because here in Chile most people don't have enough education to study in English. Vicious cycle.

wordbankon Ask HN: Why did multicopters suddenly take off?

But why there's no trend of multicopters replacing helicopters? Big ones, with humans inside.

wordbankon The Psychology of Pricing: A Gigantic List of Strategies

Why do kibbutzim belong to communism? Communism is based on works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. You can't just attach a "communist" tag on every commune that has shared property.

wordbankon Fitbit Files IPO

I have smartphone but I don't carry it everywhere, it lives on my table most of the time. Battery life is not irrelevant because why care about keeping stuff constantly charged when I can charge it once a week?

wordbankon The Psychology of Pricing: A Gigantic List of Strategies

Communism is a philosophy in the first place. It leads to a certain type of governing and managing economy. On practice it also lead into a totalitarian state every single time.

wordbankon Fitbit Files IPO

I wear FitBit for 2 years 24/7, including sleep tracking. It works for a week on a single charge. Can you do this with iPhone or Pebble?

wordbankon The Psychology of Pricing: A Gigantic List of Strategies

The strongest argument against communism is "How could a man plan economy if he can't plan his todo list app without producing bugs?"

People tend to fail in simple predictions but communists and hardcore socialists still believe they can manually control systems of enormous complexity.

Number of failed communist regimes confirms they can't. (But these regimes are quite good at producing death and starvation.)

wordbankon Cognitive Distortion

The Pali Canon is the first source of quotes like this though.