jyscao

Exactly, calling it “illicit” is funny. Your ToS isn’t law.

I tried to clone a HTTP (not HTTPS) site, and it's giving me `navigation failed: net::ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED`. Even when I explicitly included the protocol with `http://<FQDN>`.

If positive correlations exist between people who do bad things, and their ethnic backgrounds, then it's a pattern worth looking into.

PSA: Railway just had this recent f*ck up - https://x.com/lifeof_jer/status/2048103471019434248

Now you're just talking out of your ideological a**.

Which is your right. Just know that that's what you're doing.

Useful middlemen do serve a role and add value. A parasitic middleman just extracts value without adding any value anything in return.

And do tell how you distinguish "useful middlemen" from "parasitic middlemen". These are meaningless terms based on your own value judgements. In other words, they're completely useless in practice.

A universally recognized transaction-coordinating mechanism works much better. And guess what? We already have that: price.

Without this middleman acquiring an expired domain would have been whatever the nominal registrar cost (somewhere between $10 to $100 or so per year for a domain)

Except you have no idea if $10-100 charged by registrars should be the actual price of those domains. The only two factors that should determine the price of something is the lowest price the seller is willing to sell it at, and the highest price any single customer is willing to pay. That's it.

If some government policy existed that enforced domain names must be priced below $x, then that functions as an artificial price ceiling, which necessarily results in a misallocation of the resource in question. In this case, that would mean, domains going to people who are less incentivized to put them to the best possible use.

Take the very example of friendster.com: when Mike Carson bought the domain from his park.io customer, friendster.com went from a website that only generated ad revenue to now a new social networking app idea he's developing, which I'm sure even you'd agree is an improvement to its previous use. And that was only possible, because Carson believed the 30k he was being asked to pay in order to acquire ownership of friendster.com was worth it (to him).

If all domain prices were artificially capped to $100 (or whatever other arbitrary threshold) and below, then in all likelihood, you'd see the problem of malicious actors who bulk buy then squat domains become worse, not better. You might counter, why would they do that? Since on the surface, it'd appear that they cannot profit from those domains by re-selling them at a higher price later on. Sure, perhaps not directly (but even this is debatable, because what'll likely happen is you'll just create a black market for it); but maybe they'll just tell the people who want to take the domain off of him that whatever app idea they're building, he wants a x% stake in?

In economics, your intentions don't matter, it's all about the incentives your proposed policies create. And to that end, price caps never work, because they just shift the collateral damage elsewhere, while making the economy worse in net.

I don't view middle man parasitic behavior as valuable, and see no market value performed here other than extraction.

Seeing middlemen businesses as "parasitic behavior" is a common misunderstanding of their role in the economy. They make possible commercial transactions between initial producers and ultimate end-consumers, where and/or when such transactions could never have taken place affordably without their presence.

Despite being full of arrogant intellectual superiority, evidently the majority of the HN crowd has little understanding of basic economics.

While I personally wouldn't go as far as "Society profits immensely from their contribution", these types business people do serve an important function in the economy.

Much like traditional middle-men sellers, commodity speculators, insurance providers, and the like, domain name re-sellers take on the risk that no one else are willing to bear at some particular time (that the domain they're "squatting" could be worth nothing in X years). If and when the domains they're "squatting" later on become more valuable, either through their own direct efforts, or by re-selling them to other parties that can make better use of them, then the profits they make from such transactions are justified for the aforementioned risks they bore.

IYKYK

Mao's cult as you call it, shares little similarities to the modern day Chinese government, which is arguably the most pragmatic government that exists in the world today, certainly amongst developed countries. So once again, wrong.

That your point about support for Chinese democracy, could also be applied to Chinese communism

Incorrect - my point about Chinese democracy does not apply to the current governing body of China (whether you choose to view and harp on them as communist or not is irrelevant).

The Cultural Revolution, which the previous commenter presented as a gotcha, is widely regarded as a dark period and unequivocally a mistake by the majority of Chinese today. But Chinese communism today is both much more and much different than Chinese communism under Mao.

OTOH Tiananmen is much more emblematic of "Chinese democracy" than the Cultural Revolution was of Chinese communism. And as already stated, the way Tiananmen was handled is deemed to be correct by the majority of the Chinese populace today.

And so once again, this goes back to my original point: peoples of different nations choose their own government, including the form of that government, and not just in the narrow sense of who their next public-facing leader should be during the next several years. The Chinese already does exactly that.

Ironic then that most of the students throughout China who supported and even participated in the Tiananmen protests would later admit that Deng acted correctly in squashing it, and that China is better off today for that. This is a sentiment most Chinese living in China today share.

Could things eventually go south with the CCP in charge? Of course, and given long enough time, that's almost a certainty. But even when that day comes, it still does not directly imply a liberal democracy was the better governing system for the Chinese people, as your original comment strongly implied.

Yes, so what's your point?

What a gotcha

An ideologically driven subset of urban educated youths that was proportionally a tiny subset of the entire Chinese population marched for it in 1989. FTFY.

They are ruling themselves in the sense that their governing systems are emergent consequences of their own cultures. All peoples ultimately deserve the governments they have.

Ok yes, you're right. Guess I meant to say: no humans today are descended from someone between a male sapenis-female Neanderthals hybrid.

Any browser with reader mode should also work. Worked for me on Brave, both mobile and desktop.

And in retaliation we genocided them

This is far from being the only or even main explanation to their extinction.

The Neanderthal populations were extremely inbred, so I'd guess that was a bigger factor to their decline.

Because these hybrids would contain mtDNA from their human female line. Neanderthal mtDNA could only be passed down by Neanderthal females.

And because none of those are found in any modern human populations, we can conclude no humans today are descended from female Neanderthals. Though whether hybridized descendants from male-sapiens female-Neanderthal pairings never existed, or they did exist for some time then eventually went extinct, we cannot currently say with certainty.

Presumably this hypothesis is meant to explain why there is this observed asymmetry in the type of Neanderthal DNA we find in modern human populations that contain them, which is entirely autosomal. With none in the mitochondrial form, which is exclusively passed down along the female line, and also none in the Y-chromosome form, which is exclusively passed down along the male line.

Without weighing on the validity of their hypothesis that one or both sides found the other“especially attractive”, an alternative mechanism that could explain why we only see Neanderthal autosomal DNA in modern humans could be that only the female offspring of male-Neanderthal and female-sapiens pairings were reproductively fertile. This is more commonly the case in interspecies hybrids, see Haldane’s rule.

Israel is a global power and its air force is probably the second most effective in the world

If by that you're implying the US has the most effective air force in the world, then you're probably wrong.

So does this mean Discord is scrapping its new face verification requirement for users, or imply they’re no longer using this 3rd party service (Persona) to do it? The article wasn’t too clear on that.

Big if true :P

This is the path I want to take too. Do you find it difficult to focus on the marketing and sales side of the business rather than the building part?

Imagine what would happen if someone would try to liberate oppressed people in China.

My original point is very much meant to counter absurd hypotheticals like these. No other sovereign nation on Earth at the current point in time would ever dare to "liberate" China, because this is no longer the 19th century, and so China is no longer weak.

Soft power may buy you hearts and minds; Japan and South Korea are good examples of that in Asia. But hard power is what truly matters at the end of the day when it comes to asserting your geopolitical interests, and that's clearly the philosophy China has decided to operate under.

The U.S. is clearly not oblivious to this reality either. Even if we grant your moral arguments that Maduro was a horrible dictator deserving his fate, the fact that Trump and his administration chose to act when it was geopolitically and domestically convenient strongly suggests that "taking out the big bad Latino dictator for the sake of humanity" was not the primary motivation.

One thing that never ceases to amuse is how people like yourself always inject moralistic prescriptions into what were meant to be purely descriptive commentaries.

My comment on U.S. actions against Venezuela was not a condemnation, but rather just a factual example. Russia's military actions against Ukraine is no different. Nor China's actions towards Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Tibet.

Because “international law” is a farce, recent U.S. actions against Venezuela is but the latest example of that fact.

The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

They likely will lead in compute power in the medium term future, since they’re definitely the country with the highest energy generation capacity at this point. Now they just need to catch up on the hardware front, which I believe they’ve also made significant progress on over the last few years.

Genetic diversity within continental races, including that of Sub-Saharan Africans, are mostly a consequence of genetic drift.

While genetic diversity between races are from selection. Thus the inter-racial genetic differences are more likely to manifest in trait differences that humans find more meaningful (which I use purely in a descriptive manner, not prescriptive), such as physiological (medical, metabolic), psychological & behavioral (personality), cognitive (intelligence), and of course physical (appearance, athletic).

The intra-racial differences that arise from genetic drift result in things that are still tangible genetic differences, e.g. ABO blood group frequencies, but don't map well onto characteristics that human societies place emphasis on as much.

And to address your point that:

The genetic diversity of "black" alone exceeds the rest of the world combined.

This is because the level of genetic diversity as influenced by genetic drift is primarily a function of population size, and Africa being the origin of the Homo sapien species, and probably the Homo genus as a whole, has always had the highest level of effective population size. Thus genetic drift in Africans is least likely to be able to cause allele fixation on particular genes, and so such diversity is better preserved. But as already mentioned, these forms of genetic diversity is less likely to impact the observed traits that most humans, both academics/social scientists and your average joe, find "meaningful".