skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What about the research indicating improved cognitive capabilities in adults who became multilingual as children? Isn't it just as likely that children who grow up exposed to multiple cultures end up better able to maneuver through a complicated, multi-cultural world?

Hearing nothing but "crisply perfect English" as children robs them of this gift, and normalizes exclusion to them — at the level of awareness that all of the lessons we learn at that tender age: too deeply even to notice, let alone change, without considerable effort, or some specific motivating factor or event (which, having internalized exclusion, is structurally less likely to happen, in the first place).

To me, that's improper child care.
As I said, I won't continue the discussion here. But thanks for your response.
I think they are trying to say we’re all basically the same across all countries, and all of these lines, boundaries and definitions are arbitrarily drawn by others in order to profit off our evolutionary tendency to work together as groups.
Road Rent – On the Opportunity Cost of Land Used for Roads
>The Western world, and many others, mobilized to stop Nazi Germany.

That was more of an effort to avoid Germany getting more powerful (and affecting them) than a humanitarian mission. Besides, half of the "western world" took side with the Nazis, including a full blown pro-Nazi government in occupied France (with tons of sympathizers pre- and during the occupation), Italy (of course), Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, Norway, Ukraine, and so on.

>Lynching was an illegal act.

And yet few ever got into prison for it when it was practiced.
How Jupiter May Have Gifted Early Earth with Water
As this sort of thinking becomes more and more popular, I wonder how close to some kind of singularity we truly are. If the people of the world are really so eager to transform the planet into a single global monoculture, then some sort of technology-driven unification of all human consciousness can't be too far off. Me, I personally like a world of true diversity, where people of different physical regions are allowed to have unique local cultures.

Complete and total globalization of everything on the planet (and perhaps beyond) might be inevitable, but I don't trust the people who are trying to make it happen right now to have any common peoples' best interests in mind, because I'm not naive to human nature (plus I've read up on them).
> When I look at modern web development I shudder; the ecosystem is so confusing for someone who has been out of touch as long as I have. Node, webpack, yarn, npm, frameworks, UMD, AMD, arghhh!

I agree overwhelmingly with this sentiment. I've been working with JavaScript on an almost daily basis for about 20 years. I very much dislike the new JavaScript environment, it's an atrocious monster of unnecessary complexity (and getting ever worse). Just because things could be done, thanks to dramatically faster JS engines, they were.

The product I'm building now: vanilla JS. No npm, no packages, no package managers, no node, no jquery, no react, no vue, no angular, no webpack, no yarn, no frameworks, no polyfills, etc. It's not even using ES6/7. It's gloriously fast, simple, extremely small in size, universal and nothing more than absolutely necessary. Sub 50kb page sizes, 5x faster load times than Quora or Wikipedia, 20% as many requests (the typical Wiki page makes three dozen or more requests), while still accomplishing everything required for the project (it's a knowledge service).

Push these simple pages through a performance checker:

https://www.quora.com/What-made-George-Washington-a-great-Pr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Dorsey

You'll see 38 requests for Wiki, and 49 for Quora. The simple Quora page has 500kb of scripting junk bloating it and 180kb of css, leading to 1000ms load times. And these are largely considered good outcomes today, that's with billion dollar organizations spending huge sums of money to speed everything up. Oh, the page only has 1mb of unnecessary bloat? A tremendous outcome.

Fuck the new bloated JavaScript and Web dev ecosystem, it needs to crawl back into the hole it came out of and die. There's a better way to build, and it's not by adding vastly more complexity to accomplish the same thing we used to with 5-10kb of JS.
> considering that 140-145 is at the 0.1% statistically you are unlikely to meet anyone smarter by a distribution point even at places that skew towards a higher IQ due to selection bias.

Two points:

- +3 sd puts you at the 99.7th percentile, not the 99.9th. 140 would be much less rare than that.

- The places that select for high IQ contain many, many people with IQs over 145. Princeton admits 6% of those who apply, not 6% of those aged 15-20. With 350,000,000 people in the US, applying a 0.1% filter will leave you with 350,000 people. With 20,000,000 people aged 15-19, that filter will leave 20,000. Princeton admitted ~1,300 last year.

If you never meet anyone with an IQ above 145, you're not in an environment that selects for high IQ people.
> It requires asking Microsoft for permission to compete with them

On that note, Apple now distributes iTunes for Windows through the Microsoft Store.
If you're doing anything right now other than eating, you don't really believe it's necessary for survival.
> One reason for wanting to shift databases is testing. The unit tests might be running on the developers own sqlite instances because running them on the company-wide SQL Server installation is prohibitive.

That doesn't strike me as a shift, though. Presumably, if sqlite (or, say, its heavier weight, also free, cousin PostgreSQL) can mimic enough functionality of the proprietary company-wide db, why isn't bare SQL enough to access those functions?

Why is SQL not a good enough abstraction? Too difficult to ensure one is writing a portable subset of the language?

> A well-written ORM

This runs into the danger of being a "true Scotsman" type argument if it doesn't apply to at least most popular ORMs (or at least one for each popular language).

> aren't more complex than the equivalent sql statements.

They are, by definition, if one already knows the equivalent SQL statement: one has to learn the additional, separate syntax.
It could certainly be that the German automakers are more concerned about present profitability. That could easily turn into falling victim to the classic innovator's dilemma. It seems that by year end, both the Model S and Model 3 will have taken significant market share from their European competitors: http://europe.autonews.com/article/20180220/ANE/180219831/te.... The cannibalization is real, and that's why luxury automakers like BMW have announced plans for 12 fully-electric models by 2025 (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/news/industry-ne...).

Your points about electrical infrastructure are definitely thought-provoking ones. I'd agree that the infrastructure as of today doesn't exist for widespread adoption. At the same time, the market that Tesla and the luxury European automakers compete for today doesn't hit that 5% threshold (http://www.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3022-autosales.html#aut...). Add up the market share of car (not truck) sales from BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Porsche, and you're looking at a ~3% market share.

I think this section of the video from Sandy Munro is worth a watch: https://youtu.be/CpCrkO1x-Qo?t=1730. Munro has been a huge critic of the build quality of the Model 3, but that everything "below the skateboard [the floor]" is seriously impressive. The cells in Tesla's battery pack have a maximum of a 0.2 milliamp difference between cells.

Say that I accept your premise that the German automakers today are biding their time, and could spend their R&D money on electric cars if they so chose. Who will they source their battery packs from? Will they try to build their own supply chain for the raw materials? What competence have they demonstrated in creating electric powertrains that deliver the acceleration and speed that we expect from luxury cars?

Lastly, I think your "market size estimation" here is dramatically off. BMW last year delivered 2.4 million total cars. They sold 103k "electric" vehicles last year, with 31k of the i3, and the rest probably being comprised of hybrid versions of their existing 3 and 5 series sedans. (https://www.press.bmwgroup.com/latin-america-caribbean/artic...) This was 65.6% year over year growth. For 2018, they expect "high two-digit growth" to continue. The demand is there, even from their own existing customers.
I experienced the reverse: using a CPAP finally gave me enough energy to start exercising, which helped me lose weight. I imagine if I stopped using the CPAP I would slowly start losing energy again and probably stop exercising and gain the weight back. The few nights I've gone without CPAP have left me feeling awful, even without as much weight.
That's the one I had in mind (it's brilliant), though it's become a bit of a genre itself:

https://youtube.com/results?search_query=adam+curtis+parody

Corbett Report offers a good, longish (45m) take, non-parody:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=njJz6zrmy_s
Or the aptitude of teachers simply aren’t that relevant and the problem exists elsewhere, as in the curriculum or home environment of the kids, etc.
The Israel kibuttz model would worK for many.
> It may or may not be, but you can't just assume it.

It's not random, but it's not primarily attributable to teachers.
That's inconsistent with the data, considering economic immigrants nearly always end up better off. Did you mean that the native plebs wouldn't be getting richer? That's at least arguable, but carries some interesting connotations.
Aren’t you proving the GPs point? Around people with the same education your experience is fine, so get everyone in the same schools and we’re good.
Thank you for the summary
How are they different? (I don't mean this sarcastically)

In one world, we believe that a crime committed causes harm against a social construction. In the other...

To me, it seems like the crucial difference is whether the person responsible for the act is the one punished. It is not clear that is the objective of the modern (American) justice system. It is even less certain that was an issue with pre-Enlightenment justice systems.

Human nature seems to be more "someone has to pay!!" more than "the person responsible has to pay!"
http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2001-01869-016

> Adolescents identified before the age of 13 (N = 320) as having exceptional mathematical or verbal reasoning abilities (top 1 in 10,000) were tracked over 10 years. They pursued doctoral degrees at rates over 50 times base-rate expectations, with several participants having created noteworthy literary, scientific, or technical products by their early 20s. Early observed distinctions in intellectual strength (viz., quantitative reasoning ability over verbal reasoning ability, and vice versa) predicted sharp differences in their developmental trajectories and occupational pursuits.
> Wallyworld did more to bring up the standard of living

The quality of food Walmart sells is abysmal. The pressure Walmart put on food manufactures to drop prices played a significant role in the malnutrition and obesity in the us. TVs and smart phones are a very small part of Quality of Life. Having fulfilling work, good health, and a clean environment are more important aspects that Walmart worsen.
Streak (YC S11) Is Hiring Experienced Back-End Engineers in SF
> Proper child care means a high level of interaction with well-educated people who speak crisply perfect English.

So 95% of children aren't cared for properly? Elitist bull.
Thank you for post... Wondering if you can recommend any further reading? (Besides your forthcoming book :-) ) I am very interested in this topic, especially how one might make a easy-for-novices programming language. (I am sure there are many existing examples as well.)
I don't think so. I think it's current justification is typically framed in the form of 'punishment', and its historical justification was purely religious. And, coincidentally, was at least partially about giving the punished person a fair shot at redemption by punishing them while they were still on earth - which is literal god-appeasement.

Regardless, I think equating capital punishment with ritual sacrifice is a fair judgement. No matter how rational our rituals and systems for killing people seem, there's no reason to suggest that the Aztecs did not feel similarly about their rituals and systems. Law is not supposed to be a science, so it's also not free from cultural relativism, even if you're not a cultural relativist generally.
> Me, I personally like a world of true diversity, where people of different physical regions are allowed to have unique local cultures.

I think free movement is likely to amplify culture, not mute it. Right now I have to go through tons of hoops to live in Taiwan. The culture is precisely my aesthetic. I've spent untold hours studying the language. There are lots of Taiwanese-culturally-minded Americans and Dutch and South Africans who don't feel at home in their birth culture. Making it a big hassle for them to live in a culture that reflects their values just smears out culturally-Taiwanese across those countries.
>Because the article proposes a scenario where welfare and public assistance would readily apply to newcomers too.

FTA: “If the worry is that future migrants might not pay their way, why not charge them more for visas, or make them pay extra taxes, or restrict their access to welfare benefits? Such levies could also be used to regulate the flow of migrants, thus avoiding big, sudden surges.”
>It's not clear if the study referenced controlled for student variance this way; if so, it would readily explain the lack of results.

This headline is pretty click baity. A “better” teacher is one the produces better outcomes for their students. Firing the “bad” teachers, and rewarding the “good” teachers will obviously lead to better outcomes for students. This experiment was only testing whether the metrics they were using truly measured the quality of the teachers, and whether their insentive structure was productive. Turns out they weren’t.
The same two authors also have a duology of satyrical novels about a conman in the 30s Soviet Russia: The Twelve Chairs [1] and The Little Golden Calf [2]. The novels are incredibly witty and their quotes/references are still part of the common Russian vernacular.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Golden_Calf
> Personally I have come to the conclusion that the best solution is virtual machines with a linux base system. Put every game that is sticky to windows into its own little container and just have hardware passed through.

Is there a Windows license available to consumers that allows simultaneous installation on multiple VMs under a non-Windows-based hypervisor?
For a modern city there is awfully lot of (extremely wide) roads…
This seems to indicate that the borders themselves are an intensional form of profiteering. I see this more as the incremental and accidental process that takes advantage of the peculiarities of geography.
Could a genetic algorithm have come up with this design?

(Electronics seems an interesting application area for automated design, since the search space is relatively small)
The backend can also be too fractured. Isn't that one of the reasons why people pitch Node.js for backend applications? "Write in one language, reduce fracturing"?

I would not argue one solution fits all. I think having the ability to write frontend+backend in JS _and_ Go is a good thing.
I've been thinking a bit about this lately, and I think you could achieve this slowly in the US with an expansion of the visa lottery process.
Some clients use SRV lookups, a few (to their embarrassment) do not (2009)
Do you have anything to support any of these claims? And how does the number of children I choose to have impact my likelihood of being a "helicopter parent" or my ability to contribute to "more science"?
The problem wasm addresses has nothing to do with the fractured state of javascript frameworks. It's about turning the browser into a virtual machine for performance reasons and started with asm.js.

The fact that it allows using variety of different language, rather than Javascript, a language which wasn't exactly designed for what it's being used for today by Brendan Eich, is a nice side effect.
> t's the lossy jbig2 compression in Xerox copiers: http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_....

My understanding of this fault was that it was a bug in their implementation of JBIG2, not the actual compression? Linked article seems to support this.
For back-end programming, once you pick up a language, you use its standard set of tooling like you would for every other type of program and by making a choice of language, you can select the style of programming you prefer, (functional, OO), or tap into your existing knowledge.

With JavaScript, it is the only choice available, so if you want a different style of programming you have to involve all kinds of additional tooling in addition to the language's native tooling, on top of having to involve JavaScript's tooling, frontend package manager, backend package manager, transpillers, babel, gulp etc. etc. it's just a mess, not really comparable with having to invoke Bundler or Cargo for the backend side of things.

> Frontend is massive, why would one suppose that a single solution would work for everyone?

The problem is that JavaScript is the single solution that essentially has to work for everyone right now, hence the push for WebAssembly.
The one in the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro is a 35k pixel ToF, but artificially constrained in power and thus reach to live on a phone battery.
If they have the disposable income to purchase "techno-toys" then obviously they have the means to support their basic needs.

I'm actually curious what quality of life metric you're judging by that's declined in the last 50 years?
Perhaps divine retribution is a better explanation than ritual sacrifice in theocratic regimes, in the case that a god or a group of gods require the death of the mortal body so the soul can face metaphysical justice for Earthly sin.

However, regardless of the metaphysical beliefs of a state, any entity of sufficient size & organization will often be recognized by an individual as possibly having godlike power over the individual's body. Whether or not that truth actually ritualizes state-sanctioned violence, or the diffused psychological impact of that violence can be called a sacrifice, is a matter of opinion; however, being that it is state-sanctioned it is obviously distinct from murder, and because these punishments often have no deterrent effect on the populace, their true nature is in camera obscura.
It would be tricky to completely throw JS away until WASM is able to call into the "browser APIs" (DOM, XHR, etc.)
>Ask yourself why the company moves its operations to a "low-capital" country.

Because migration restrictions prohibit them from hiring those same low-wage workers domestically.

>And while you're at it, ask how companies justify that as a boon for the country they're moving to, then reconcile with the original statement.

Because those companies bring capital with them, increasing capital intensity in the destination country and thus increasing productivity and wealth.
In the sense of Total Quality Control, a process is "under control" or "under full control" when the output of the process conforms to a statistical measure, such as every data point falling within three standard deviations of the mean. To a first approximation, anything outside of that range implies a "special cause of variation," as opposed to a "common cause" of variation. In this case, think of a special cause as something like a layoff at the major industry in town, causing something like stress at home or missed meals. Those would affect the performance of students, outside of the "common causes" of the usual variations in ability, interest, temperament, and so on.

So, no, the answer is not to throw away the experience and insight embodied in the faculty. The answer is to try to understand and remove (or compensate for) the special causes of variation in the population of students, as well as the special causes of variation within the faculty. One of the other things Deming said that I find very insightful is that the interesting thing about geography is not where the borders are, but why the borders are where they are. Applied here, the interesting thing about the variation in grades or test scores is not the variation itself, but why the variation is there, and why is it shaped the way it is. These 'why' questions only have answers that are close to the data and contingent upon the systems, in contrast to blanket incentives that try to sweep an understanding of the system under the rug of punishment and reward.
How does Spacious even make money?
What is the business model of Spacious? How do they even make money when their membership is so low? Are they even profitable? And what the restaurants are getting out of it? I am trying to understand their business model in detail. Any ideas?
I dispute "The hash doesn't match because the filename doesn't match." He did backpedal and say he really meant they don't match because the files are different. (Well, duh.)

I also dispute "It's a tautological false-positive, by the very definition of the term, _everything_ is potentially unwanted."

That's not the definition. Here is a definition in line with what just about everyone means by the term:

"A potentially unwanted program (PUP) is a piece of software that is also downloaded when a user downloads a specific program or application. PUP is similar to malware in that it will cause problems when it is downloaded and installed."[0]

Or my own shorter definition: "Software that nobody would want on their computer if they knew what it is and does."

It sounds like that's exactly what was detected.

I don't dispute, but I'm curious about his claim that AV vendors maliciously flag their competitors' legitimate software. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if that's true, but it's the first time I've heard of it.

[0] https://www.techopedia.com/definition/4061/potentially-unwan...
But if we arrive to the point of violence, wouldn't digital devices be pretty irrelevant anyway? Like if things are starting to get out of control why is the victim even staying in proximity to the abuser and not getting help from the police or at the very least staying away at a friend's place or something?