skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We already know the answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Opium_War .

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the demand for Chinese goods (particularly silk, porcelain, and tea) in Europe created a trade imbalance between Qing Imperial China and Great Britain. European silver flowed into China through the Canton System, which confined incoming foreign trade to the southern port city of Canton. To counter this imbalance, the British East India Company began to grow opium in India and smuggle them into China illegally. The influx of narcotics reversed the Chinese trade surplus, drained the economy of silver, and increased the numbers of opium addicts inside the country, outcomes that worried Chinese officials.

In 1839, the Daoguang Emperor, rejecting proposals to legalize and tax opium, appointed viceroy Lin Zexu to go to Canton to halt the opium trade completely[8]. Lin wrote to Queen Victoria an open letter in an appeal to her moral responsibility to stop the opium trade.[9] When he failed to get a response, he initially attempted to get foreign companies to forfeit their opium stores in exchange for tea, but this ultimately failed too. Then Lin resorted to using force in the western merchants' enclave. He confiscated all supplies and ordered a blockade of foreign ships to get them to surrender their opium supply. Lin confiscated 20,283 chests of opium (approximately 1210 tons or 2.66 million pounds)[10].

The British government responded by dispatching a military force to China and in the ensuing conflict, the Royal Navy used its naval and gunnery power to inflict a series of decisive defeats on the Chinese Empire,[7] a tactic later referred to as gunboat diplomacy.
What made Jeff Bezos install bulletproof glass panels?
Glad it helped you

It definitely could help someone's depression. But not everyone benefits from SSRI for depression, so the anti-depressant effect might be limited.
There is sync.Pool [0] but I wouldn't reach for it until you've profiled your application[1] and found that the specific allocation in question is a hot spot.

As of now[2], they get cleared when a GC occurs so they can be a bit quirky to use in practice. This behavior is changing though

[0] https://golang.org/pkg/sync/#Pool

[1] https://blog.golang.org/profiling-go-programs

[2] https://github.com/golang/go/issues/22950
I have a Google Pixel XL, and it has a built-in call screening feature from Google. It seems like exactly what you're looking for.
Those marketing purposes are exactly what dtech is referring to.
"Even though Traf-O-Data wasn't a roaring success, it was seminal in preparing us to make Microsoft's first product a couple of years later. We taught ourselves to simulate how microprocessors work using DEC computers, so we could develop software even before our machine was built."

-- Paul Alan
This is a shit answer. Hand wavey, clutching at straws and fraught grab-ass excuse making.

Emotional disturbances from bad trips are real and serious. You shouldn't trip without a trip sitter. Tripping balls not only means lots more humiliation and blackmail material, but reputation smears, and predatory induced bad trips among people who aren't REALLY being friendly because in truth they're not really friends.

So, public nudity freak outs, but also expensive psych ward visits, life altering rude awakenings of extremely negative self worth, and the lengthy bouts of depression that come with such understanding. With depression and reputation costs, we certainly find self harm and worse.

Meanwhile, plenty of testimonials of really unpleasant, nightmare bad trips that last up to a day, plus the recovery and recuperation as you take a breather to get a grip. Especially when the dose is old, stale, tainted, spoiled or not the advertised morsel.

All of this opens up a can of worms for psychologically fragile people, and you'll see an uptick in persistent hallucination disorders.

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

These aren't hard drugs. They are heavy drugs. They come with burdens of responsibility. It's not just a hop-on-hop-off rollercoaster ride. It's not an OTC drug.

Decriminalization isn't the same as 100% legal. There should still be some solid laws for handling, commerce and responsible use.
At HN if a single user flags an article there's no discussion to be had?
The thread in question featured an article about women bearing the emotional baggage of toxic masculinity. The author wrote the piece such that it read as a generalization to all men, which is obviously not the case and the author acknowledges this shortly into the piece. Anyway a single person took offense to the contents, presumably without reading the article, flagging the thread and it is locked and condemned to obscurity. Regardless of the validity of this person's reasoning, is his action grounds to deem there's nothing to further to be said about the contents of the article. Seems like a recipe for an echo-chamber, and in an industry notable for a particular hue of pill is this a bug or a feature?
> why there is not an on-phone IVR which can solicit a brief intro

I believe Google Voice has this option. You enable it and it records them saying who they are, which is played to you to accept or reject.
I said "can be", not "spontaneously cease to exist due to their non-appreciation". Homes don't explode the moment they stop appreciating in value.

> An asset isn't necessarily an investment. E.g. cars, merchandise, foodstuff etc.

um sure but the topic at hand is the rate of return on real estate assets, not "how to invest your money". Cars are a depreciating asset, and so what? That is not the topic being discussed.

> People need somewhere to live ...

Sure but again I don't know what about this statement is revelatory. Yes everyone needs shelter, we take that as axiomatic.

> so they'll keep building houses

ok but here's the thing: you actually can't take that for granted. Most people don't build their house, they buy one that already exists. The vast majority of people engage in real estate trade, not real estate construction. Real estate development is performed by a comparatively small number of actors, and they do it expressly for the purposes of profit. Yes, a majority of housing is owned for the purposes of residence, but that does not imply that a majority of real estate development is pursued for the purposes of occupancy by the person funding its development. People will only build houses for themselves if it's cheaper than buying on that already exists (or if they have some sort of requirements that can't be fulfilled by housing on the market, but again, the number of people hiring architects to design houses for them to live in is comparatively small).
Huh, nice observation! I usually shrug at that sort of theory because the terms are too fuzzy to put to a test, but this is a very nice example of the idea.
>You have heard of C?

I'm an experienced C developer.

>which keeps a lot of virtues of C

No, C doesn't have many virtues. It's major virtue was getting close to being a macro assembler, and Go removes that completely. Go tries to be a higher-level-than-C language with good execution speed, but that goal was already achieved perfectly by Object Pascal, D, Ada, and Common Lisp.
Bill and Melinda Gates being notable exceptions of course.
Hamas has been firing missiles at Israel for some time now. Let's not pretend this is an entirely unprovoked attack, even without the cyber incident they have been firing missiles at Israel. Why do you jump to defend a terrorist state?
> There is no universal law of the universe that requires the 10% of robot builders to own everything on earth

In your universe the universal law is that the robot builders have (collectively) nigh absolute leverage over the rest of society. Without the angel assumption they would slowly (or quickly) use that leverage to amass power.

People wouldn't live in rags or whatever but all secondary economies point to providing value to the robot builders.
Ask HN: What back end can provide noticeable performance improvement over Rails?
Hi, pretty much the subj.

What backend framework / technology, if any would provide a noticeable performance in loading / response times over latest Rails?

Provided that:

1) Rails project is fairly optimized (Pagespeed 90+ etc.).

2) No particular requirements, such as an extreme concurrency (not trying to replicate Discord etc.) or extra-large downloads or video streaming / video chat / deep learning, just a very fast website with a database and a backend that serves it.
This is awesome! You guys are using far superior materials :)
Important note here is that it's primarily red and processed meat. I think fish and poultry are still considered healthy in moderate amounts.
Why the switch?
> It could find no evidence to suggest that such a scheme could be sustained

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But even if the evidence is absent that can simply be explained by the lack of large scale well designed trials.
Or borrow from a library.
I've found that change in general is the problem. My grandma was able to use her old tube radio no problem but when it broke she never used the newer stereo, even though she only had to push one button.

30 years later same issue with my mom, she can navigate very complex tasks no problem but has trouble with anything new, even if it's much "easier" to use.

The trick would be to have new tech perfectly emulate whatever the old generation grew up with.
Yes, receiving calls (and text messages) is free. (unless you are roaming and then you pay the international sector of the call)

As far as I know this is true not just in Europe but everywhere outside of North America. It's certainly been true in the Asian countries I've been to (I get prepaid SIM cards everywhere I visit). It comes down to the numbering plans - in the NANP (north american numbering plan), landline and mobile phone numbers are mixed together and you can't distinguish them without a database. In other countries, mobile phones have their own "mobile phones" area code which is non-geographic and applies to all mobile phones. This means that callers beforehand know if they're calling a mobile phone or a landline.
The Great Gatsby.
My apologies. Since that was your final paragraph I took it as your overall conclusion. I didn't realize that the quoted paragraph was exclusively referring to your point about surveillance.

So to be clear you unambiguously condemn the Chinese government for their role in operating ethnic internment camps, and while you disagree with the specifics, you agree that they are operating ethnic internment camps?

Also you don't think it's wrong to judge the Chinese government for doing this?
It enhances the feelings you are experiencing already. If those are negative to begin with, I'd worry about people having a bad trip and hurting themselves (even inadvertently like stumbling into traffic).
For me, this is where it matters whether or not it's for sale. If you're growing your own opium poppies, cooking your own meth, or whatever, I'm fine with that. Give some to your friends, even.

If you start selling it, or make it a business, then it becomes everyone's problem, and government should step in. If/when weed is legalized nationally, the big tobacco companies (plus a few others) will smell money, take over the market, and advertise like crazy; then we'll have to set some limits.

Drugs have to be regulated on a case-by-case basis. Caffeine is available to anyone and untaxed. Alcohol is only available to those over 21, and taxed. Tobacco, 18 and heavily taxed. Opium? I'm not comfortable with selling opium becoming a legal business model. Like most things in life, drug legalization is a compromise.
Ask HN: Can you approximate the ratio of content that was posted by paid users?
On reddit, for example.
It may not work in the current form then we will have to find alternative.

After working with minimum wage workers for 2 years and with technology advancement, I don't think the 10-15% of the population will be able to live a good life without Ubi.

As tech gets better more bottom employees will be displaced from work. We need to start increasing minimum wages and figure out how to provide better life to bottom 10% of the population
WTF happened to this thread?
"This is apparently being implemented as we speak ( SHAKEN/STIR, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHAKEN/STIR )."

I see twilio at least mentioning shaken/stir:

https://www.twilio.com/blog/your-phone-your-call-eliminating...

... but I am curious if anyone knows: can this be interacted with, currently, with either twiml or twilio functions ?
People have been saying Japan has been at the tail end of it for 20+ years.

What makes you so sure the US is at the tail end of it?
> If 80% of the planet goes green, but 20% is still emitting pollutions, we are still in the same boat (just not sinking as fast).

I'm not sure this is actually representative of the facts. We don't need 100% of the planet to go green to stabilize our temperature below a threshold and there are negative feedbacks on carbon emissions.
" leaking acid."

"...or whatever the colloquial term is for the shit that they put in batteries these days. 'Acid' is what we used to call it."
Researchers identify brain region activated by Pokémon characters
A drop of .5% per month is so huge that it’s not believable. Normal kids entering daycare could be exiting borderline mentally retarded. This doesn’t pass the sniff test. It seems likely that this sort of massive decline would be noticed already.

Unfortunately I can’t access the paper so I have no idea what it actually says beyond this claim.
Strong Clues Influencer Marketing Should Be Part of Your Strategy
Are there any services that actually charge you additional fees for incoming long distance calls though? That seems to be the primary concern here.
Unfortunately you are correct. If you ever read the comments section of news piece regarding gas taxes or steps to reduce carbon emissions, the average American voter freaks out at the mere suggestion of increasing energy prices just a little bit.
Me too; weird!
The "How to Optimize" section is worth reading even if you don't write any Go.
I appreciate the suggestion, but I've disabled all the google things on my phone and don't plan on re-enabling them any time soon.
Google sites and I am a huge fan.

-Simple

-Integrated SSO

-RBAC for changes

-Easy and quick to make changes

-Responsive out of the box

-Free and 0 time to manage

https://sites.google.com/new
Good plan.

The AppleScript support was there maybe even before Illustrator was available for Windows.

Not going to look at either API. And, I don't have a current Illustrator.

...but I can guess with certainty that the javascript API gets more attention within Adobe. And that it has a more solid future.

AppleScript may never disappear from Illustrator or macOS. But it _does not_ have a bright, vibrant future.
Not to be a pedant but the study states "increasing amounts of red meat and particularly of processed meat" and even says the negative association "has been absent with white meat". I imagine the [citation needed] comment was more calling all out the blanket-ness of "meat is unhealthy - period". I think it'd be more accurate to say "large amounts of meat, especially red meat, are unhealthy - period".
The height influence on NBA Players – data driven approach
Personally I prefer (cond ((< a b) -1) ((> a b) 1) (t 0))

Or, if that's too many parens for you:

(mcond (< a b) -1 (> a b) 1 0)

The definition of MCOND is four lines of code and can be found here:

https://github.com/rongarret/ergolib/blob/master/core/ergoba...
You seem to be the one being dense on purpose, your quote is precisely what I am talking about. He said that where he is is a hell-hole, that place being Kenya not the entire continent of Africa as the top comment says.
>In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson said, “Safety is important to Amazon and we want customers to shop with confidence on our stores. Third-party sellers are required to comply with all relevant laws and regulations when listing items for sale in our stores. When sellers don’t comply with our terms, we work quickly to take action on behalf of customers.”

>Amazon often doesn’t own or even touch the products bought and sold on its site—so in Amazon’s view, it’s not liable for defective products. In its response to David Jarrett’s legal complaint, the company said in a court filing that his alleged injuries “were caused by acts or omissions of third-persons or entities over which Amazon has no control.”

Is it just me or are those completely contradictory? Both of those statements can't be true. You can't both reassure customers of the quality and safety of items sold on your platform AND say you have "no control" of your platform.
I have a Seattle area code and for the last year or so I've been getting daily calls from various 206 numbers that also match the first 3 digits of my number. I answered the first one and there is no one on the line. After that I block each new number but they keep calling. I guess it'll eventually end as there are only 9998 possible numbers.
I survived 59-hour Marvel marathon, all 22 movies in storied franchise
You're assuming an awful lot.

Flags on HN are not binary, but a score-like thing, and for killing a thread that already had collected some points it almost certainly took multiple.

(I haven't read the article in question, so I don't have an opinion if the flags are justified or not)
One pattern I noticed but haven’t tried to circumvent yet is that I noticed robocalls identify on the caller ID as having the same area code as my normal phone number and my Google Voice number.

If we were to acquire a phone number from say, some small town somewhere you have no business with, then could we block all caller ID with that area code and avoid all such robocalls?
Only thing you can do about that, IMO, is to not be reactionary and not make arguments that seem in the slightest threatening to people. Taking the marriage example, if someone brings up "the sanctity of marriage", instead of just being against that idea, I point out that I agree marriage is sacred and as such I don't want it being subject to definitions in a vote, or having sacred religious ceremonies attached to tax incentives. I think I've changed more than a few peoples minds with that one. People are irrationally reactionary, I agree, but the best response is to not give them so much to react to.
Thank you for the further response. I'm not sure whether this is your area at work or you're just trying to help here, but as further feedback in return, that reads like an opt-out scheme to me. I'm also immediately struck that this relies on a setting (which Microsoft products have a history of changing when installing later updates) and that we still haven't resolved whether VS Code has its own separate privacy policy (which is mentioned as a possibility in the generic Microsoft privacy statement we were discussing before, without any specific indication of how to determine the answer definitively or where it would be found if it exists).

So again, while I appreciate that individuals involved may have honest intentions and be trying to help here, this is still a very long way from the kind of clear, unambiguous official statement that would make me trust any Microsoft product enough to use it in the current data-harvesting, forced-updates climate. I have specific legal obligations to clients when dealing with their source code and the proprietary knowledge implicit within it, and there's no way I can take this sort of documentation to my lawyer and say "Can I use this?".
Ask HN: Join a Co-Op?
Imagine a collective of people just like the ones in this community, focused on solving the same problem?

We could build it 10x faster

We could sell it 10x faster

Interested in exploring this concept with me?

I'm putting together a slack channel to discuss if you're interested.

https://join.slack.com/t/noco-co-op/shared_invite/enQtNjI5MjEwOTE5ODE1LTdjMDE1ZmY3MzU2ZmQ2Zjg0MGMyM2E1ZjdkNjhmNjg4YjNhYzgyNzI5YzlmZDcyNDQ5MjkxOTQ2ODBkYTUzMGY

also slightly more info in a nice wrapper at https://noco.io

Hugs,

AP
How did people became so incapable in social interactions that they need a public service to share code they make together?
Where is caffeine not taxed?
Ask HN: Touchscreen Monitors with High Resolution?
I've got an idea to buy a touchscreen monitor (around 27") so that I can get it framed, mount it on the wall with a Raspberry Pi to use as a photography display in my house.

Has anyone got any experience with anything like this, or even just with touchscreen monitors?
Annotations and dense use of sourcing/footnotes, too. Every time I land on Gwern's site, I'm struck by how much potential the hover-for-context format has, and how little it gets used.
Because the third party auditor (the FAA) has had it's operating budget slashed so viciously, it can't compete in attracting the talent required for independent certification.

Remember, to regulate something, you need to be 10% smarter than what you are regulating. Which means you have to be able to make sure you can attract the best talent possible.

As a regulator, you have to be on your game all the time. The regulated just need to get lucky once to get away with what they shouldn't.
You can't migrate every person on the planet to another one. And we still haven't found any planets remotely as habitable as our own, nor solved the problems related to long-term space travel or terraforming. And above all else, why the hell would you be content with throwing away Earth, the most livable planet we know of? The idea of saving the human race by just going somewhere else is laughable.
A lot of the speed will be dependent on your ability to cache and your implementation of caching. After that, your speed will likely have more to do with your HTML/CSS/JS than your back end.

But, generally speaking, a compiled, static language like C# with .NET Core will be faster than Rails.

I don't have personal experience with them, but Rust, most JVM languages (e.g. Java, Scala, or Kotlin), and F# should also be faster.

Again, a lot depends on your specific code.
But there are other benefits. You need to make a compromise and there is no win-win situation. It is true that the 10 lines version is totally obvious for everyone, but I do not agree it will make easier to understand a complex piece of code. If I fill my screen with a function that makes a simple comparison, I will need an IDE and at least a couple of monitors for a function that actually makes something, I will not be able to understand the code because I will be too busy navigating it.
This article is unrelated to programming and technology in general. I enjoy seeing these articles make it to the front page but I also wonder why they do.

What is the relation between this seemingly unrelated topic and technology in general? Did this article make it to the front page because engineers are unhappy or did it make it to the front page because people in general are unhappy?
The Go authors have steadfastly refused to offer users any means of writing a CPU-local freelist, even though the utility of such things is obvious and evidenced by the fact that they use such things all over the runtime package. They just think that _you_ are too stupid to be allowed to do such a thing. Honestly with the attitude that the Go authors treat their users I don't know why anyone tries to write high performing code in that language. C++ is there, after all.
The Ultimate Fate of the Universe
They lace stuff with fentanyl because it is cheap and powerful opioid. Done correctly it adds to the potency of poorer quality drugs. Fentanyl is basically the MSG of hard drugs, except fentanyl can actually kill you.