skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Life expectancy:

USA: 78.74 years
Cuba: 79.07 years

They must have done something right.
Yes, for individually owned cars, range anxiety is a real thing. I'm talking about electric taxis which shuttle multiple people around on short trips throughout the day.
initramfs is also about keeping userland tools, like LVM out of the kernel. But to run the LVM tools you need access to a filesystem, which might be on a LVM. And there are quite a few other scenarios too. But if you can do without, be my quest, less things that can fail.
It's a pity that journalists (and a few self-interested politicians) distorted Halderman's points so dramatically. This stuff's never going to go away, now -- it'll be the foundation of wild conspiracy theories for decades.
> Because of the incredible harm to humanity done at the hands of communists over just the past 100 years alone

You're talking about dictatorships that called themselves communist. Some were economically communist, but the governance was never as Marx intended.

Marx envisioned a system of 'councils' that would exist in many aspects of society (e.g. for each factory), each would send a representative to a higher level council. This is what 'soviet' refers to. This system was never really implemented.

Economic system and governance are not the same thing. It's conceivable to implement communism using a proper 'soviet' (council) system, or maybe even using a parliamentary democracy. I don't quite believe this would work that well, but calling the belief itself 'unforgivable' is ...simplistic.

Especially considering that many people who believe in communism do so out of a sense of idealism that is much less selfish than capialists; in some sense communist beliefs stem from a sense of empathy that is much more compatible with evangelical values rather than capitalism.
No, the US is definitely not putting nukes in Estonia.
> + Only the US 'embargos' Cuba, they are free to trade with 167 other nations in the world - and even buy American products from wherever they want - just not America.

Except, any company making a deal with Cuba is automatically banned from dealing with the US.

To this date, the US even interfers in Europe regarding that: There is a famous case where a German bought Cuban Cigars from a Dane, and the FBI interfered, and seized the funds from their bank accounts.

If any company ever touches the USD, the US claims to have jurisdiction over them.

> + Cuban's live in relative poverty

The median wealth and income in Cuba is higher than most middle american countries.

Cuba is not a great country to live in, but please don’t distort the facts. That doesn’t make you any better than the North Korean propaganda that claims the US president eats babies.
It's been a vacation spot for Canadians for a long time :)
What about the passenger seat though? My EE/physics is rusty, but inside vs outside of a giant metal cage might be easier than slightly to the right but still inside.
> Never sprayed Vietnamese with Agent Orange or napalms for one, never dropped nuclear bombs on civilians

Yes, on the North Vietnamese invaders who had a track record of murdering civilians well before the US was ever involved. And the Japanese who perpetrated the Rape of Nanking, etc.

But even so - the US has voted out these previous politicians whereas Cubans were and are not able to do that.
Why Cuba when the richest economy in the world is around the corner? Cuba doesn't have a functional economy for their own citizens let alone for potential immigrants. However, their standard of living is not as bad as people in the west think, that's why I refer to the human development index.
Microsoft Bets on FPGAs for Cloud, ML and AI
Communism proposes to collectivize the means of production; there's still _some_ individual ownership.
"reactive knee-jerking response to the aggressive stance of US."

It was a response to the Cuban revolution, which was Communist, and 'Soviet inspired' from day one - a global movement which was threatening the entire world.
I dunno. I've done straight-up factory work, i.e. manual labor as well as IT.

Maybe I just have a good company, but I'd much rather do this than ever go back to factory work, even if the pay were better in the factory job.
A former boss of mine used to talk about how he found economics interesting, because unlike telling someone not do something and watching them ignore you, with economics you can change the rules of the game so they don't want to play any more.

"Fake news" is just another manifestation of the same old "Thirteen cat facts you won't believe" and even "One simple tricks" we've been seeing for years. It's economically profitable to make large amounts of people look at your site. Until that stops being the case, all of the parasitic crap we see on the web will continue to grow. It will grow bigger and faster, too, as more people get connected to the web, and don't know what's "true" and what's not.

I have no concluding remark to this observation, other than get used to it, unless you're a decision maker at Adwords, in which case pull your finger out and realise you hold the position of power to stop this.
SkillShare gives 3 month access for $0.99
Hate to rain on this (TBH I don't):

Shopify has raised (per Crunchbase) about $122M in funding.

At the current rate, they will see $374M in GMV on their best day of the year.

Shopify has between 1K and 5K employees (again Crunchbase). Let's make the most conservative analysis and assume 1K. If they are paid $20 per hour (low estimate I think), that is $41M in employment costs per year. With taxes, office rent, healthcare, etc, lets just lowball again and call it $50M/yr for all the people costs. Again I think this is a huge underestimate if the crunchbase number is accurate.

Lets assume no marketing, hosting or other costs of any kind.

The internet claims 100k stores use shopify. Lets assume they all pay for the standard tier plan, and pay month to month. That is $79 * 100k = 7.9M per month in revenue. Again, huge over estimate, since I would guess 95% of the customers use the cheapest tier, and the largest companies most likely negotiate better than advertised fees.

Finally lets assume their BEST day is only about twice as good as their average day. This is probably overestimating their revenue by about 10x, at least.

That would mean they are bringing in well under $47.4M in gross revenue, on over $50M in fixed costs.

So in other words, even if black friday were half the days in the year, they still would lose substantial money. This is after 12 years of business.

It's unlikely they will ever turn a profit. If they were going to experience some kind of exponential growth to defeat this analysis, 12 years of the fastest growth in the internet have already gone by, so it seems unlikely going forward.
The Founders Fallacy
How do you feel about the incredible harm done at the hands of capitalists and liberal democracies over just the past 100 years alone?
Ending of the article is kind of funny, use gmail, chrome, etc... so facebook is no good but google is great... Yeah right.. I am with you :)
While I don't doubt that fake news is widely shared on Facebook, blaming the outcome of the election on it seems like a convenient way to dismiss the preferences of tens of millions of voters. It seems like there's a real effort right now to show or at least insinuate that fake news is the reason Trump won.

There are so many disturbing things about that narrative I don't know where to begin. It would require a profoundly dumber US population than I believe exists. It would imply very cynical things about the US education system which don't mirror my experience growing up there (I have seen truly bad education systems overseas, and while the US could use some work, it's a paragon compared to some others). It would require the conservatives to be much dumber than the liberals, which just sounds like bigotry and arrogance to me. It essentially dismisses the concerns held by Trump's supporters--who are fellow Americans after all--which only widens the growing divide in the electorate. And finally if you believe this idea that fake news is a serious problem which needs to be curtailed, it almost inevitably leads to censorship mechanisms which will be abused down the road. How do you fact check the entire Internet? Anyone in journalism knows how much work it can be to fact check one article and often the facts are open to interpretation, particularly in politics.

Elites in government and business are now pushing for the creation of censorship mechanisms in order to curtail fake news, and they're hoping to get away with it because of popular disillusionment over the results of the US election. We really, really need to come together on this point and stop them.
It's a rate of 0.007% for China by virtue of their 1.5b population.
You'll note that those results all start appearing in July - after the DNC shoved Sanders out of the race. When the corruption was relevant, the "reputable" media was silent.
Many cars have seat sensors - so disable the phone if there is only the driver's seat occupied
That's exactly one of my main criticisms about Castro - his self-belief that only him could govern Cuba. Was he immortal, he wouldn't have stepped down from power, I believe.
YouTube Redesign
> Way less crimes than those who accuse him. Never sprayed Vietnamese with Agent Orange or napalms for one, never dropped nuclear bombs on civilians, never supported Pinochet et co, doesn't have 25% of the world's incarcerated in just 4% of the global population, and lots of other things besides.

Yes, because comparing the capabilities of a small, poor island nation is the same as comparing the capabilities of the most powerful country in the world.

Castro had no capability to do what the US has done, had he had the chance how would've done much worse.
Nice. Just subscribed for this thing. We'll see...
> A toilet cleaning robot would have a spinning brush like a drill and would circle the bowl of the toilet a couple of times.

But that robot can't refill its consumables, it can't mop up the floor, and it can't deal with the mess after your semi-demented grandpa missed half the bowl. This solution is useful for a large rest stop with a dozen toilettes and thousands of customers per day (and employees that do the above tasks), and utterly useless for your own home.

> IMO there's no purpose to making a robot have the same physical constraints as a human. Our bodies are pretty shitty when you think about it. Robots can be much more elegant.

Our bodies have a huge advantage: they are incredibly flexible, and surprisingly strong for their dexterity. No robot we have ever built even comes close. You can have lots of robots in your home (Roomba, toilet bowl cleaner, dish washer, sandwich maker, a kitchen machine, uuh, is there anything else you can automate?) and you'll still need a human doing a lot of work. Or you can have a single human working half-time in your home, and you don't need a single robot. Give me a robot that can do 90% of all household chores, and I'm sold.
Welfare is meant to help provide a minimum living standard. Society generally agrees that living below these levels is not acceptable to allow (though perhaps survivable). It is therefore seen as more of a human right in western worlds.

Remove the ban? Watch a whole range of job wages plummet, and a whole range of people fall into poverty. People will have to work horrendous hours, or in horrendous conditions just to get enough to survive. This will only increase the income inequality, making it harder for the poor to make a living. The employment numbers may have increased - but at what cost? More civil unrest, more crime, more people in hopeless situations. Whilst you realise its not a good idea, you seem to trivialise it.

I'm sure the author did consider this point. They realised that - we didn't get here simply because we introduced welfare and minimum wage - and that getting rid of them isn't a valid approach to get to full employment. Its something so obvious its not worth discussing.
So I open a bottle of champagne as another surpressor is gone. He did not care about the lives of his opponents, so I have nothing against his own departure. Would have been great if he had used his power to build up something.
> The truth is, if as a continent we are to point at individual world leaders who did the most for African nations, Fidel Castro is very high up that list, if not at the top.

Many don't know this, but George W. Bush had quite an impact:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President's_Emergency_Plan_for...
Fidel never had as much subjects as Stalin to kill.
You're absolutely right, at worst it was a mild inconvenience for me, nothing even close to the authors wife has to face.
> not have democracy, not have access to the internet,

So foreign countries’ propaganda can overthrow your democracy and put up a complete crazy, due to fake news?

The US has seen how much Russia Today and fake news have influenced this presidential election. Would you want that to become an issue in your country?

This is a serious problem one has to ask themselves.
This is a great movie! Tempted to watch it right now.
It would be more accurate to say: deepest minerals with hydroxyl groups found 1000 km down.

Never at any stage will there be a fluid that can be described as free water at these depths. Breakdown of minerals with OH- such as hydrous ringwoodite at the top of the lower mantle results in dehydration melting. The melts/fluids produced will have many 10s of weight percent solutes, but in a mol. percent sense these melts/fluids are dominantly H2O, given how low the molar mass of H2O is relative to the other components. If some of this melt gets trapped inside a growing diamond, it freezes during ascent and forms minerals with structural OH-, e.g Mg(OH)2.

There is ambiguity regarding what to call melts/fluids at these pressure and temperature conditions as many bulk compositions will be above the second critical end point where there is complete miscibility between H2O and 'molten rock'.

Last paragraph of the paper:

Our data support the idea that dehydration melting generates volatile-rich fluids/melts at the top of the lower mantle, yet being a key process for diamond genesis and for transportation of water across the 660 km discontinuity.
I wouldn't dismiss it as uninformed. chirau was speaking directly to consequences that affected them, impressions personal to them.
There are various RAM based distros in which the only file system is initramfs.

Makes no sense to propose getting rid of this.
Original comment was:

> And the US isn’t putting nukes into Estonia?

Honest question: Where is this coming from? I'd hate to call this war-mongering and spreading misinformation, but this is a great way to polarize a conversation in one fell scoop.
Talk to a lawyer in your local jurisdiction. :) But offhand:

> Is there anything in the law about good faith in contracts?

Not in the sense you mean, no. Generally speaking, if they sign it in bad faith (that is, with no intent to comply), and they do not comply, that would be fraud (ie, a crime). If they sign it in good faith (that is, with an intent to comply) but later do not comply, that's breach of contract (ie, a tort) but not fraud. In both cases the contract is broken, but only because they broke it. The intent to break it isn't really relevant to that.

Generally speaking the solution for your question is "make sure the contract contains a clause that automatically terminate the contract on initiation of a criminal investigation for child abuse by the authorities" if you're worried about that.

Edit: It's not directly relevant to your question, but I feel like I should link this article which is hilarious and disturbing, and goes into some details on the fraud/breach of contract distinction. https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-23/countrywi...
How Is Technology Changing the Real Estate Sector for the Better
Shopify is a public company. You don't need to speculate on their revenue or expenses, you can just look it up. They earned $99.6 million in Q3. They expect revenues in the range of $379 million to $381 million for 2016. And they are still losing money, although getting close to break even. Their market cap is 3.86B, so 10 times revenue, so the market is expecting them to continue to grow rapidly.

https://investors.shopify.com/events/Events-Presentations/de...
What bothers me the most about this is that passion and wish to work 9-5 are considered mutually exclusive. This feels like passion for software engineering just means passion for cranking out code for the company 24/7.

Of course this is just a personal anecdote but during heavier work weeks I have very little energy or interest in any spare time hacking. In contrast on normal 9-5 weeks I tend to do a lot more of reading, coding and other things that develop my professional skills and enable me to perform better in my day job.
Of course it can. Cuba is an island nation and relies on trade to acquire the vast majority of the goods those of us in the West take for granted. Block that trade and you basically stifle all economic growth.

From wikipedia:

>>Cuba produces sugarcane, tobacco, citrus, coffee, rice, potatoes, beans and livestock.[2] As of 2015 Cuba imported about 70-80% of its food.[51] and 80-84% of the food it rations to the public.[52] Raúl Castro ridiculed the bureaucracy that shackled the agriculture sector.[52] Before 1959, Cuba boasted as many cattle as people. Today meat is so scarce that it is a crime to kill a cow without government permission.[53] Cuban people suffered from starvation during the Special Period.[29]
People complaining about low metrics in Cuba (quality of life, income, etc.). When being offered other metrics as counterpoints (like life expectancy) they conveniently dismiss it as being made up by the state. Really Cuba can't win.
Half of those you listed are just normal characteristics of communist state, to argue on those would be to argue on whether communism is "evil" in comparison to capitalism or not. This is very much not self-evident as you seem to assume from your post (I'm not interested in said discussion, just pointing out how biased looking your comment reads to me).

Just to put a concrete point, Per capita GDP of Cuba is 4 times the largest democracy country (India).
How many did Fidel kill?
Yes.

My impression was then when America tried to force other countries to participate in the embargo they told them to shove it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helms%E2%80%93Burton_Act

Also yes Cuba has trade with the rest of the world

http://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/cub/

> Cuba is the 140th largest export economy in the world. In 2014, Cuba exported $1.74B and imported $5.91B, resulting in a negative trade balance of $4.17B.

> The top exports of Cuba are Raw Sugar ($392M), Refined Petroleum ($314M), Rolled Tobacco ($236M), Hard Liquor ($116M) and Raw Nickel ($108M), using the 1992 revision of the HS (Harmonized System) classification. Its top imports are Wheat ($234M), Refined Petroleum ($228M), Concentrated Milk ($207M), Corn ($204M) and Poultry Meat ($196M).

> The top export destinations of Cuba are China ($311M), the Netherlands ($157M), Spain ($141M), Senegal ($92M) and the United Kingdom ($67.3M). The top import origins are China ($1.05B), Spain ($920M), Brazil ($507M), Canada ($389M) and Mexico ($360M).

Of course geography still matters, the US is nearby, large, and rich. Exporting to the US would be a huge plus for the Cuban economy but it wouldn't change everything.
Same here. I'm gonna lose a few days of sleep thanks to the author.
I think christianity should be judged on having overcome those terrible crimes of the past. Islam should be judged on whether it can overcome islamism. And communism should be judged on having failed to deliver a society worth living in.
That's boingboing for you in a lot of ways. Interesting stuff sometimes, but also ... they get a bit excited.
it probably has the open source success as the only thing going for it, probably the ugliest non-intuitive language I've ever come across
This is why I'm not a fan of protecting your playlists as a performer. I understand when some performers have stems or remixes which aren't available anywhere public, but renaming tracks / hiding playlists / refusing to tell anyone "what song that was" always just comes off as a dick move to me.
By non-verbal do you mean like ambient sound? Dogs barking, child yelling, garbage truck garbage trucking? I don't know. If they can do voice, then it might be possible to do ambient sounds of there is a separate nets trained with a library of ambient sounds where it's tuned not to be the same every time the sound plays like how when you have tiled graphics, there are algorithms that remove the unnatural sameness from one tile to the next.

This could have interesting implications for Foley-artists of the 21st century.

How likely would such a tech help lower budget companies who want to implement voice communication within their software, say for video games or similar?

Hmm, now this has me wondering what implications this has for voice acting as well.

EDIT: We can call the ambient sound symbols sent over the wire "Soundmojis" or "amojis" or "audiomojis"
> That's a logical fallacy. You can't say that Castro's crimes against humanity are okay because the US has committed worse ones.

Correct, but it can help a lot of people come down off of their high horse.
This thread is going to get hot enough on politics alone. Perhaps we can try to leave religion out of it?
In all seriousness, I was expecting the article to be like "on nov 5th, I went to Shenzhen to attend the annual Shenzhen I/O hardware hacker conference.. and boy was I blown away.. lots of cool stuff people are working on..".. then I'm like, um, a game? what?
Your "solution" would solve virtually all the worlds problems... addictions, crime, depression etc. That we still have such problems is evidence that "taking more personal responsibility" this is a deficienct prescription.

It's fine that you want to place the blame on someone, but self-control as advice is an ineffective policy prescription, it's more akin to the strategy that religion promoted. Shaming people to get them to alter their behavior often times has the reverse effect, it worsens their addiction.
damn this is the internet!! if people start believing everything they come across, it's not the source that's the problem, not the medium, but people themselves
HTC Reveals Tether-Less Vive Upgrade for $220
The problem is just that you have to see it a lot more nuanced.

It was the cold war, and the US had already put nukes into Italy and Turkey, well within range of Moscow.

In such a game-theoretical standoff, the USSR had had to react – to keep the balance of power.

It’s a completely crazy situation, and I’d consider both sides of the conflict as Evil, but I’m not sure why so many people try to claim the US was Good, while the USSR was Evil. Both stood for some good, and some very bad principles.

I edited the comment to reduce the conflict potential, but keep the general idea of it.
Syrian War could not stop the kids to play Pokemon Go
So since the poor were supporting somebody and the rich were opposing him, he must have been the right guy?
No it's just saying some people aren't happy with it and could do something else. Let's not focus on that bit, hey? Let's talk about the main point?
Those runs between 10 and 1000 times faster (1000% - 100000%) than Python.

They're faster than pure python in the general case, but once you throw numpy, numba, numexpr and cython into the mix and focus on numeric workloads, most of that difference disappears.
Cuba scores well on a number of health indicators. Another latin american country, Mexico, also has high life expectancy (77yrs).
Not taking a side on the whole Linux vs. GNU/Linux thing, but the kernel is decidedly not called GNU/Linux; it's just Linux.
Fails of the week funny
You are taking about person who put country to isolation and moved world very close to nuclear war.
Burn in hell, Fidel.