argumentum

Interesting, if one of humanity's failures (climate change) mitigates another (lack of pandemic preparedness)

Some great quotes:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3624652/The-30-best-...

To make America the greatest is my goal, so I beat the Russian and I beat the Pole. And for the USA won the medal of gold. The Greeks said you're better than the Cassius of old.' - He said this quote after he won the Olympic light-heavyweight gold medal at the 1960 Games in Rome

Pretty amazing for an 18 year old .. if a bit Trump-like.

Rumble young man, rumble. Rumble in peace now ..

I suppose at some level how good of a Googler you are affects how well of whatever you want to be good at .. So you might say being a good Googler is part of being a good developer.

One of the greatest (and nicest) guys around. Best of luck Garry!

"The idea is credited to a Greek citizen, Marcel Mitzakis, who devised the system for the de Thoren Syndicate in the 1930s; they were advised by J F C Fuller."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes#Heat_ray

Putting his heritage to good use it seems :)

Whether you view a new fangled technology as "magic" depends on if you understand how it works. Scientists in the 1800s knew much about electricity, combustion, etc well before a "19th century rube":

Our 19th Century rube would fail to recognize cars/trucks, airplanes, helicopters, and rockets; radio, and television (the telephone was 1875, so just missed this one); toasters, blenders, and electric ranges. Also unknown to the world of 1885 are inventions like radar, nuclear fission, and atomic bombs. The list could go on. Daily life would have undergone so many changes that the old timer would be pretty bewildered, I imagine. It would appear as if the world had blossomed with magic: voices from afar; miniature people dancing in a little picture box; zooming along wide, hard, flat roads at unimaginable speeds—much faster than when uncle Billy’s horse got into the cayenne pepper. The list of “magic” devices would seem to be innumerable.

Similarly the perspective of the average 21st century "rube" (though likely to be better educated than his 19th century counterpart) has little understanding of computing or networking, or genome sequencing etc.

Growing up in the 90s reading Bruce Coville's "my teacher is an alien" series, I remember being awed by the description of a "universal translator" device gifted by aliens to the main character. Yet within 20 years, everyone I know has a much more capable version of that device in their pocket.

The author obviously has a right to his opinions, but it's clear that this article is just that: an opinion piece. Since he's a physicist, his perspective might be somewhat muddled by the place of science in technological progress:

Science > Engineering > Market Adoption

Today's scientists are discovering things that tomorrow's engineers will turn into technologies that day after tomorrow's entrepreneurs will consumerize. It's worked this way throughout history, and yes, it's faster now than ever before.

If it's any consolation, they were "normal people" before they became insanely wealthy. If anything, that's the point of YC .. to give "normal people" with intellect, determination and good ideas the chance to become "insanely wealthy" while improving the world.

You say "over-react", but in many ways the reaction is quite rational. When an airplane crashes, hundreds of people die. We are reacting not just to our fear of dying in a crash, but out of sorry of the lives lost and empathy for their families.

Humans also tend to react much more strongly to the malicious actions of others than to the arbitrariness of nature (including human error, as humans are part of nature). Even compared to your ordinary murder, terrorism takes it to the next level, since it indicates that there are others who share the ideology or membership in the terrorist group who intend to cause harm to your society, and they're still out there.

In short, it's not all about "risk". It's about justice. There's little irrational about the desire to live in a just world, and the willingness to pay for it.

I generally agree w/you .. I was referring to the professor who was interviewed, not HN users. I would say that the drug war component of mass-incarceration seems separable, and easier to solve than the violent crime component. It seems better strategy to me to go after the low hanging fruit, look at the results and then plan the next move.

I would worry that trying to solve the whole issue at once, like the professor seems to suggest, would be a non-starter politically.

The problem with the article is that the professor doesn't just argue the points you made, but suggests we shouldn't advocate for ending the drug war or reducing sentencing:

But according to John Pfaff, a professor at Fordham Law School, neither of those efforts will make a significant dent in the problem, because they are based on a false understanding of why the prison boom happened in the first place.

"The reason it’s important to get it right is that if we’re trying to reduce the prison population, we want to make sure we do it correctly—and if you focus on the wrong thing, you won’t solve the problem. So if you think it’s the war on drugs, you might think, ‘OK, if we just decriminalize drugs, that will solve the problem.’ And, you know, it’s true that if we shift away from punishment to treatment that could be a huge improvement. But just letting people out of prison—decarcerating drug offenders—will not reduce the prison population by as much as people think. If you released every person in prison on a drug charge today, our state prison population would drop from about 1.5 million to 1.2 million. So we’d still be the world’s largest incarcerating country; we’d still have an enormous prison population.

And if we focused on cutting back sentence lengths, maybe that would weaken DAs’ bargaining power at plea bargaining, but since people aren’t serving the massively long sentences anyway, it probably won’t have that big an effect on prison population either."

This is a weird argument, because reducing the prison population by 17% is a significant dent ..

I disagree w/your latter assertion: the interviewee basically claimed that ending the war on drugs would, at most, reduce the prison population by 17%.

When you have a truly complex problem, the way to solve it is to pick it apart into simpler parts. If we start with ending the war on drugs, and the prison pop only goes down 17%, we can move on to the next reform.

There seem to be many flaws, but rather than go through them now, I'll assume that only 20% of incarceration is drug-war based.

Great, that means if we end the drug war, we'd get 20% reduction in our world-record incarcerated population. A half-million more people (roughly) will be freed to get treatment and attempt to contribute to the economy and society.

That sounds like a great start to me.

Well you could add in alumni then. All I'm saying is that measuring performance is not that hard a thing to do.

Trump's position paper on immigration is by and large an appeal to the worst nativist sentiments lurking across the political spectrum [1]. Read on balance it is a call to end the very idea of America as a land of opportunity for aspiring people around the world, yearning to be free.

His H1B spiel has to be understood in that context .. it's fine to discuss if the program is abused. It's fine to criticize mass immigration, to maintain security, to advocate reasonable limits on the rate of immigration so as to not overburden social services etc. But what he is doing is pitting aggrieved minorities against each other, peddling the lie that "foreigners are stealing your jobs" to the worse off, and "foreigners are stealing your taxes" to the better off.

Quite honestly, Trump was winning me over in many ways before this. We do have too much political correctness, it's great that someone is speaking against special interests, we should make better international deals, we were stupid to arm rebel armies in the middle east etc. In most of his speeches he had come out in support of legal immigration, but looks like he has gone full nativist now. Too bad, he just lost my vote.

If his policies are implemented, we will destroy what PG eloquently describes below [2].

There is such a thing as Americanness. There's nothing like living abroad to teach you that. And if you want to know whether something will nurture or squash this quality, it would be hard to find a better focus group than hackers, because they come closest of any group I know to embodying it. Closer, probably, than the men running our government, who for all their talk of patriotism remind me more of Richelieu or Mazarin than Thomas Jefferson or George Washington.

When you read what the founding fathers had to say for themselves, they sound more like hackers. "The spirit of resistance to government," Jefferson wrote, "is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive."

Imagine an American president saying that today. Like the remarks of an outspoken old grandmother, the sayings of the founding fathers have embarrassed generations of their less confident successors. They remind us where we come from. They remind us that it is the people who break rules that are the source of America's wealth and power.

[1] https://www.donaldjtrump.com/images/uploads/Immigration-Refo...

[2] http://paulgraham.com/gba.html

They all count, as do test scores.

You can factor in the opinions of parents, students, fellow teachers, admin, as well as test score improvements, college admissions etc.

I think you underestimate the ability of students & parents to judge teaching ability separately from likability. The users of a product are best suited to know what works & what doesn't.

At my high school we had a mix of good & bad, as you'd expect. Everyone knew which teachers knew their subject, could communicate well, was more dedicated etc. Some of the most engaging teachers were the least liked because they graded harder, but if you had a rubric that included "grades fairly", "not boring" etc, students would be able to correctly assess them.

Of course some would be dishonest, but noise will cancel itself out, by and large.

I don't think the money issue is a tough sell, if you can demonstrate high returns on the investment. As it is, the US spends more per student than everyone else, but gets mediocre results, so people are not confident that even more spending is going to be worth it.

I think the easiest first step is to spend more on teachers within the current budgets.

"From everything I can tell, we would do well to give teachers massive salary increases, then make it hard to become a teacher and easy to fire bad ones. Then give the teachers huge freedom to do what they want. And yes, this will cost money (which the taxpayers don't want to hear), but on balance it seems to work for most people, most of the time."

It may not be that expensive, if class sizes are not that important you can have fewer teachers. The problem (in the US) is that the teacher's unions are generally against performance based pay, teacher evaluations and firing bad teachers.

Imagine if Hitler's worldview focused cultural rather than racial superiority .. we might all be speaking German.

Is it still at Coupa? I would love to try it.

Chill out .. there is nothing made by man that has a "zero-carbon footprint". Even if you don't burn fossil fuels, merely by breathing you release co2.

This is a techcrunch PR launch, and you know what they meant.

"It is widely considered a war crime"

Evidence? Whether allied strategic bombing of Germany/Japan was a "war crime" is partly a legal / technical question:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crime#Definition

In regard to the strategic bombing during World War II, it should be noticed that at the time, there was no international treaty or instrument protecting a civilian population specifically from attack by aircraft,[34] therefore the aerial attacks on civilians were not officially war crimes. Because of this, the Allies at the trials in Nuremberg and Tokyo never prosecuted the Germans, including Luftwaffe commander-in-chief Hermann Göring, for the bombing raids on Warsaw, Rotterdam, and British cities during the Blitz as well as the indiscriminate attacks on Allied cities with V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets nor the Japanese for the aerial attacks on crowded Chinese cities.[35]

What do you consider "real" physics? Dark matter is not some voodoo word, it's part of the standard model of cosmology. While we know it exists, we don't know how it works, and theorizing & experimenting about it is crucial to understanding Nature.

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

Which two are you referring to? The first separatist movement of course was the demand for Pakistan prior to independence. Then there was the demand for Bangladesh in East Pakistan. Both of these were successful.

Within today's India, there was first Tamil separatism, then Sikh, Kashmir and then a few small eastern tribal groups. They have each waxed and waned over the years for different reasons. Ultimately it is the duty of the Indian state to preserve & strengthen the Union while ensuring that its value for each constituent outweighs any ethnic or religious separatist sentiments.

The US is unique in being formed basically from scratch, and growing from there, rather than as a merger of historical nation/states.

This article converted me to classical liberalism when I first read it a decade ago.

There's no "natural" reason why the subcontinent should be united or divided, rather the governing states that exist at any point in time are a function of history. Like Europe, India has at times been divided and other times united as a single polity (first under asoka ~300bc, then akbar ~1500ad and finally the Raj ~1850ad until independence).

If by "further" you refer to 1947 division of the subcontinent then it has in fact broken up again, in 1971 when East Pakistan became Bangladesh.

There is great value in being united of course, which is also the original intention behind the EU. When constituent states disagree or want to split up, like Telangana and Andhra Pradesh did recently, they can do it through a constitutional process rather than a war. Being a larger state also provides greater opportunities for its citizens.

As time has passed, the part called "India" today has faced a few separatist movements, but has held together primarily by creating a more successful shared narrative so it means something to be "Indian" in addition to being a Punjabi or Gujurati or Muslim, Hindu or Jain. This is likely to continue.

A a fellow atheist, I agree that evil is a real thing, but I still don't see the need to call it "supernatural".

Evil is the opposite of good, so if we agree that actions to promote life, liberty and happiness are good, then actions that promote death, slavery and misery are evil. Simple as that.

So there's plenty of evil in nature.

Singapore's GDP per capita in 1960 was much lower than Bangladesh is today, and with similar if not worse land distribution.

"Did your servants get comfortable room+board and some time off, besides their wages .. cultural or legal norms around lifelong employment of staff"

Sounds uncomfortably close to slavery.