skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nothing was doomed. The US had enough resources to succeed. If only they has actually a definite goal and were willing to apply enough power to get it done.

But nobody knew what they wanted Afghanistan to be and allowed themselves to be engaged in a war of attrition.
The problem was that they had so little room for error. But I guess landing a rocket vertically on a heaving ship is also tricky, so maybe the problem is surmountable.
It’s kind of a joke that this administration keeps blaming the Trump negotiations, as if the Taliban has kept their side of the agreement. They haven’t - the US has no obligation to either.
Not the one you respond to, but I read it as something akin to Nudging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory

> Nudging contrasts with other ways to achieve compliance, such as education, legislation or enforcement.
It'd have to be very America-friendly for that motivation to make sense, to make up for being situated such that keeping it supplied relies on the cooperation of one or more potential adversaries.
Yes there is one physical truth about where atoms are at a given point. However the type of statement discussed in this thread, and by most humans most of the time, are not about "how many of this, and at what velocity". They are statements of judgement, value-systems, morality, etc.

This is most of the discussion we produce as a species, on the topics we care the most about. People like to talk about whether things are moral or righteous. These discussions are by nature not about truths but perspectives and preferences.

Someone is going to call trump "unpatriotic" and trump is going to reply "fake news". At no point here was the physical world/truth involved.

What I'm defending is that encyclopedias shouldn't pick a side on these events but reflect the controversies and let each reader make their own mind, from their own preferences/biases.

Very little of human discourse is about physical facts
> I know how bad the Taliban is. I know what they do to women and little boys.

Someone who was on the ground there should know better than to confuse the Taliban with irreligious tribal warlords. The Taliban completely banned the old Afghan practice of "bucha bazi" or pedophilia. They hang pedophiles, they do not "do things to little boys". Of course, things may have happened in the fog of war, but the official Taliban policy - and they do have a policy - they are organized and disciplined, as the author admitted - is to punish pedophilia.

> We called them Hajjis and worse and they were better than we were, braver and stronger and smarter.

That is why they won. They are a strong and proud and incredibly resilient people that represent the Afghan majority and deserve to have sovereignty over their own country.
Or better yet, billions of dollars.
Clear-cutting is much maligned, and unfairly so.

People often have a romantic notion that you can selectively cut a forest and just cherry-pick out the high-value trees, and that if you were to do this, it results in a healthier forest. That is a fantasy for the scale of logging that we rely on for industrial production of wood products.

Typically, the way that forest is managed is that you clear-cut it in strips or blocks, in a manner almost reminiscent of medieval crop rotation. This keeps sections of differently-aged forest adjacent to one another, which has a whole host of benefits for wildlife habitat, tree species diversity, soil quality, fire prevention, etc.

The paper companies and large landowners have been doing this for fifty, seventy-five years now, and they've pretty much worked out the techniques to be able to maintain their forests in sustainable ways.
It being a breeding ground for extremism was the reason. In order to stop the Soviets, we (the USA) pushed Afghan society towards religious extremism because it was the only way it was "acceptable" for Afghans to kill other Afghans that supported the Soviets. After it was all over, we just packed our bags and left instead of helping them build a society that wasn't based on religious extremism. When I was in the military, they told us that we shouldn't have to go to Afghanistan, but we're stuck cleaning up the mess made decades prior.
Any developer through sheer will can mold himself into a one man startup that builds a powerful product that normally requires the efforts of a massive team.

Where things typically fall apart is when it comes time for maintenance and support.
I didn't say "irreducible" at all - just that software naturally gravitates towards nonessential complexity. Avoiding that takes skill, hard work, constant vigilance, and the humility, willingness and ability to go back and redo things. Because it's easy to get it wrong and overengineer something in the name of managing complexity, or because you didn't know or misunderstood something about the problem domain. There's your "historical accidents".

And "short term economic incentives" is just a dismissive way to say that having working software now is a hell of a lot more useful than perfect software at an unknowable time in the future.
> you yourself have

That's the myth. The reality is "a problem you see some people have" (where problem is defined as "anything real or imagined or incepted need that someone can be persuaded to pay for").
It definitely varies, but I’d say that Apple Maps is on a constant upward trajectory of marginal improvements, while Google Maps and Waze rots.

At best, it decays in place like Waze. At worst, they “improve” it, like Maps.
> User-generated content on Google Maps is pretty solid after all these years.

In Germany, there are lots of scammers registering domains for businesses that have no Google Page, and owners of restaurants are literally extorted with those practices.

For example, lieferando/takeaway claims business pages with custom domains in an automated process to force restaurants into using their platform, they literally own thousands of domains like "restaurant-name-in-city.de". Additionally the phone number is routed through their VoIP gateway, and it's published everywhere like this. So if people try to call the restaurant, they call through their hotline, which gives them even more power to put pressure on restaurant owners to pay premium.

I'm sorry, but this yelp style mafia shit that this solution allowed is not what I can support in good faith.
For anyone else wondering whether the "keyhole" term was made up for this or not, no: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_keyhole
> U.S. could have not cynically installed the most pliant pro-American corrupt thugs to be in charge and told the people to obey

Which of course has been the post-WW2 standard operating procedure for the U.S. in more countries than I care to count. And it always comes back to haunt us, god knows what the long-term ramifications of this latest fiasco will be.
https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/dart linked from the Wikipedia article
Funnily enough, my experience is the exact opposite. I've been using Apple Maps exclusively during my vacation in the last two weeks and regardless of where I went, the experience was much worse than with Google maps. Restaurant info was not up to date, addresses were wrong and especially the routing was awful. Thanks to apples routing I easily spent a collective 4 hours more on the Autobahn than should have been necessary.

Overall, I will definitely continue to use Google Maps as my main map app. My best guess is that since the iOS market share here in Germany is dramatically different than for example in the US, the quality of the user generated map content is dramatically different as well
We somehow don't have the money or resources to provide basic necessities like food and shelter for people, but there's always money for destructive and pointless wars. We could easily choose to improve the lives of others, but instead we choose to bomb and slaughter people around the globe.
The same could be said about many articles posted here.

Personally I only read the first few paragraphs before closing the page.

Anyway, I upvoted it because it offers something interesting which I was not aware of, and made me curious as to its change.

(I didn't downvote you, but I assume it's because the comment doesn't really add anything. The complaint isn't that constructive, and is not aimed at the right people. I think most of the people here can figure out how to read which includes determining it they should continue reading something, and not fall into the sunk-cost fallacy of "I atarted reading this, so I have to finish.")
Just get a regular one and install Linux?

You pros
Finance pays at least as well as FAANGs (anecdote: in 2017 I had an offer from a FAANG and a finance company, the finance offer was slightly higher, and the FAANG flat-out refused to negotiate a finance offer), and also my sense is that salaries outside the US aren't keeping up at all with the US.

The salary numbers on https://levels.fyi seem to be plausible enough for US FAANG salaries, if you want an idea of what they look like.
You've been downvoted, but I do wonder what process leads to someone building an archive that flatly does not work. When not even the mandatory files have been created to make autogen.sh happy, you have to wonder if anyone has even actually tried to build it.
You completely ignored the "doing unpaid labour for a megacorporation" portion, which is the "sarcastic" point the author is making. Unpaid individuals should not be doing content moderation for Google.
The URL returns "Not Found" for me.

This works: https://www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/article/San-Francisco-laby...

Separately, I am not sure this counts as vandalism: Surely, if people have the freedom to arrange random rocks on a public beach in a pattern, then other people have the freedom to do whatever they want with said rocks on a public beach.

If we are going to ascribe property rights to arrangements of rocks on public beaches, that choice to live in a very fundamentally different society needs to be made consciously.

Or, are some people's rock arrangements on public property more equal than others'?

On a separate note, cairns have meaning in Iceland[1] and I wish people would stop trying to build imitations everywhere they go.

[1]: https://campeasy.com/blog/places/what-are-cairns-and-why-sho...
I agree. But sometimes the obvious and simple solution is not the simplest one. Taking your example about the database: if your table is over 70 million rows and you are using Mysql < 5.6, trust me: it’s simpler to add an additional table than to run a migration on such a big table that will lock it on production.
OTOH, in some sense it truly is pretty important to discover this if you're working in astronomy. At least, I think that if you don't notice it I doubt any of your colleagues will be able to take you seriously. Like a sort of Fizz-Buzz test
The world is ending--so what? My life is complete: I learned the word, 'moonlet.' GORGEOUS!!!!! :P;) xx
Even outside of wartime the US military burns an entire Bezos net worth of cash every 90 days or so.

Uber's entire market cap would run the US military for just over a month.

The amount of money that is being wasted here is so far beyond the scale of anything we're familiar with in even the highest echelons of private wealth.
That's a sentence that sounds strange - how can an AI cheat? It can't ignore the rules it's programmed with.

Well, because there are additional, unspoken, unconsidered rules that it wasn't programmed with.
See the movie "Charlie Wilson's War". Apparently it started out as an opportunity to annoy Russia. It probably persisted to feed the war machine.
How is this a scam?

It sounds more like a case of using outdated business listings.
One can only hope. But first we need to fix ourselves from that PTSD that 9/11 left us with, though I am not sure we can stomach that.

I wonder if the Germans ever came to terms with their WWII shame? Hard to tell. From my encounters with them, it always seems like a burden carried in perpetuity, generation to generation. Who knows.
Stop watching CNN
Sounds like textbook trademark infringement.
The Rise of DOS: How Microsoft Got the IBM PC OS Contract
Wikipedia disagrees, but for me, the defining feature of a transpiler is that its goal isn’t running the program but getting human-readable source code that can be maintained.

So you get your COBOL source code, transpile to Java, throw away the COBOL code (1), and let humans do maintenance on the Java code from there on.

Converting to (often) messy C with the sole goal of reusing its compiler for me it’s t transpiling.

(1) of course, caution dictates that keeping that code around is a good idea.
> but not in an embedded tweet.

Given it's an embedded tweet, I don't think there is an easy way to blur it.
It was an attempt at humor, just like the tweets in the submission. I was trying to gently poke fun at the fact that some portion of hn will call anything a bit unexpected "clickbait".
No offense, but 9/11 is nothing compared to 50 thousands Afghan innocent civilians killed by US in response.

(Edit: please observe all the downvotes, implicitly claiming that lives of Americans are somehow more valuable.)
I alway wanted to build a flesh-eating robot for my garden, since I saw it back in 2001:

https://web.archive.org/web/20040129031356/http://www.ias.uw...

https://web.archive.org/web/20040129031356/http://www.ias.uw...

Nowadays I have a lot more problems with bindweed.

...

I see in Japan, they are further ahead to Make Room! Make Room!

https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-03/six-robots...

Slugpeople.

Uzumaki anyone?
You mean "democracy"? Let's be honest, US (and to a lesser extent EU) can tolerate just about any atrocity performed by a "friendly" regime if there is enough to gain from it. There are countless examples past and present across the globe.
A probably apocryphal story which i had heard but has stayed with me;

Thomas Edison is supposed to have made hundreds of failed attempts to get the filament of his light bulb working reliably before his first success.

A smart aleck reporter asks him; "Mr. Edison, don't you think you are more of a failure than a success given the ratio of your failed attempts to successful outcomes?.

Edison replied; "No, because i am the only person in the world who knows hundreds of ways of how NOT to make a light bulb filament"!.
This smells like a sponsored post...
Have you noticed how quickly Americans discovered that they in fact care so deeply about Muslim lives and Filippino fishermen that they're willing to risk nuclear war and total destruction of its west coast? Ridiculous.
Then gcc is a transpiler, too. It translates C/C++ to assembly language.
I personally think it's refreshingly honest to focus on moving a number up and to the right, rather than pretending to "make the world a better place" while the bottom-line is to move a number up and to the right.
I love this interview with a Vietnam veteran regarding his experiences deploying to Vietnam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tixOyiR8B-8
Even if the business is legitimate, you can usually just pin it wherever you want on Google maps so it shows in your local search.
This is way deep in conspiracy. Asteroid tracking is open sourced. There are no secrets to be kept.
At the time there was a lot of talk of the usual "making Afghanistan safe for American business" thing, that's been the actual motivation in some historical US invasions of countries with very weak militaries.

For example, a Slate article debunking one of the more popular specific claims of that sort, published Dec. 2001:

https://slate.com/culture/2001/12/is-the-afghan-war-about-an...

I'm not sure I find its debunking as complete or convincing as the author seems to think it is.
But it will attract massive objects (like stars) at some speed then?
I read the article as a critique of “root cause of failure”, making the point that failures are always failures of systems, not individual elements.

I agree with this basic premise… if a single fat-fingered SQL command can bring down a service, for a random example, it’s not the operator that is really at fault but the system that has the operator typing SQL directly at the database to do maintenance.

However, unless you identify the specific causal pathway that led to the failure you can’t improve the systems! Root cause attribution strategies like “5 whys” do a pretty good job of teasing out the layers of a system failure to identify both the specific causal pathway and the systematic failures, if you keep it going long enough.
> The real horror of 9/11 was not the few thousand deaths in the western hemisphere, but the few hundred thousand unnecessary ones executed in retaliation in the eastern hemisphere (none of which reduces the likelihood of a recurrence).

Not to mention the tens of thousands of illegally detained, usually on fake or wrong pretenses, and the many of them tortured. Every one of them, and everyone that knows them, has every reason to hate the guts of everything remotely American.
IE was not better than navigator. Everybody i know would use netscape instead of IE. IE won because it was shipped with the OS and some people will not bother to download something else.
Hey, thanks for bringing this up! It's fixed now.
36m views. How much would I have paid for that many impressions through Google Ads?
I applaud your devotion!

At what point do you start to answer “to your customers” though?

This sometimes holds me back from rebelling. Exchanging 1 boss for a 100 customers that all have expectations.
Scammers will set up fake businesses everywhere with the phone numbers all routing back to the same boiler room from where they’ll dispatch some low-quality contractor who’ll do a bad job and overcharge you for it.

Wikipedia has an article for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locksmith_scam

A comment below suggests this isn't limited to locksmiths and other trades are affected too.
In my experience, the Germans believe they have done a terrible thing, but were the ones to learn the most from it. They have since studied their doings and reflected on them heavily. So much so that they are moral leaders of the world and others should learn from them of how to have a pure heart.
Powerade and Gatorade both have sugar free alternatives
The Afghanistan war was very popular. OBL had coordinated the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Almost every American citizen was out for blood. The Taliban was hosting him and weren't going to give him up easily. So we went through them to get him (even though we didn't).

The aftermath is where the popularity dwindled. Wars are easy, occupations are hard. And after dismantling the Afghanistan Taliban regime we thought we could be rebuild a better Afghanistan built on western standards. This was never going to happen.

Iraq was also popular. 80% of Republicans supported the incursion wholeheartedly. Slightly over 50% of Democrats supported the incursion, if WMDs could be found. Once Americans realized WMDs weren't going to be found support for the war in Iraq dropped stupendously. But support for the occupation was relatively high (for a while) because most Americans realized you break something you have to fix it.

For most Americans, war is hugely popular. But just the 1-2 months of actually fighting. The decades long nation building is what generals try and talk politicians out of.
Pursue excellence, not perfection. Try to be the best that you can be, but accept that you will make some mistakes.
This reminds me of individuals who include nude photos of themselves reflected in items they post on ebay.

When people spot them, they assume that it is accidental, but they are uploaded intentionally by exhibitionists, like in this Google Maps case.
I wouldn’t extrapolate too much. Afghanistan isn’t really of any strategic importance to the US other than not providing a safe harbour for international terrorism, which is not even clear the talibans still intend to do.
Not a lot of birds in the oceans would be my guess.
Running a marathon (or any endurance evening) is an extreme activity that is in the category of "make it happen". It burns double or more the calories of any pro sport.
I'd like to pedantically miss the point.

I love things that work well, and I think that despite the world of computing being criminally suboptimal, we seem to be making progress! Slowly. And I'm grateful for it.

The world is a surprising beast of incredible complexity, and I'm in love with it.

I agree that success is silent, but I don't think that means people don't appreciate things that work well. It's just that expressing that appreciation almost always sounds shallow. Of course it works well, that's obvious. Why bring attention to things we've solved, things we take for granted.

It's easy to notice things that don't work and use that observation as a tool to improve. It's much harder to separate the things that worked well by accident from the truly good designs.

Praise is a much more fraught art than criticism. You will see more of the latter.
Μηδὲν ἄγαν

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_mean_(philosophy)
It makes no sense to me to create technology that incentivizes the creation of fresh, unindexed CSAM.

Makes me wonder if the management at apple feels the current stock of CSAM content is getting stale? /s

At a technological level, this highlights the difference between perceptual hashing and image classification, which (ostensibly) can extrapolate from the training data. Regardless of how you feel about running this thing on your phone, the approach they chose has some significant perverse incentives.
Yeah the touch screen is pointless. I would think having a low featureset , a smaller phone without a giant screen would be the goal.

I like the punkt approach better. Your phone is a phone / access point when you need Internet. It comes with signal for texting but not much else. I think ideally I’d like a camera as well, since that’s not really a distraction. https://www.punkt.ch/en/products/mp02-4g-mobile-phone/
What would such a company be doing right now? I'm sure that we'll eventually want such equipment in orbit, but I don't think working on it now helps us get there - right now a lathe or milling machine in space doesn't make any sense as launching the raw materials would be more expensive than launching the finished part. Maybe for a Mars colony where you want the ability to make replacement parts in situ, or maybe if we were already at the point of having a captured asteroid to work with.
>we just packed our bags and left instead of helping them build a society that wasn't based on religious extremism

Yeah, let's completely destroy the relatively stable secular state built with the help of those evil Russians (DRA was able to fight for 3 years after the Soviet army has left) using religious extremists amply supplied with western weapons and funds, and only after that we will help Afghans to built a prosperous society. Maybe. I think there are certain parallels to be found with Iran.
Just don't do it if you don't want? I'm very surprised someone would call marking harmful material on a website "doing content moderation for XXX company". I flag posts on HN in regular basis too, I guess that counts as "doing unpaid labor" as well.

I benefit a lot from GMaps as a community, so I don't mind to contribute some bit.
No, Google don't pay me or anyone in the community, but they provided the platform which isn't nothing. "Cost" is never even in my mind. I just.. use it as a tool.

At this point I guess our values are just different, so I'm not going to argue with that.

Practically speaking, it's unlikely Google don't have a moderation team for GMaps at all, but it's literally impossible for any company to go through all the content at GMaps' scale, even if they tried. User report is alway needed.
I think are using the term "Plantation" as a loaded word here to unconsciously invoke the negative ideas of slavery and oppression to get their point across. I've never heard of a tree farm called a plantation before.