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matt4077

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Politics & data.

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www.smithsonianmag.com 6y ago

The Untold Story of the Secret Mission to Seize Nazi Map Data

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www.nytimes.com 6y ago

The Jungle Prince of Delhi

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www.politico.com 6y ago

The new science fossil fuel companies fear

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www.politico.com 7y ago

The Feds May Come to Regret Charging Assange with Espionage

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www.theatlantic.com 7y ago

Medieval Overfishing Transformed Europe's Fisheries

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www.newyorker.com 7y ago

The Man Who Built the Bauhaus

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www.theatlantic.com 7y ago

What Is the Most Overrated Invention?

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www.theatlantic.com 7y ago

I tried to make Facebook's news feed random and fun

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www.newyorker.com 7y ago

Is Noise Pollution the Next Big Public-Health Crisis?

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www.theatlantic.com 7y ago

AI Evolved Creepy Images to Please a Monkey Brain

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www.newyorker.com 7y ago

The Man Who Built the Bauhaus

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www.theatlantic.com 7y ago

Jeopardy's James Holzhauer Explains His Strategy

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www.theatlantic.com 7y ago

When Did the Anthropocene Begin?

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www.ted.com 7y ago

Ted: Facebook's role in Brexit, and the threat to democracy [video]

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www.lawfareblog.com 7y ago

WikiLeaks and the Lost Promise of the Internet

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www.newyorker.com 7y ago

Guantánamo’s Darkest Secret

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www.theguardian.com 7y ago

Fukushima: Removal of nuclear fuel rods from damaged reactor building begins

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www.nbcnews.com 7y ago

For Katie Bouman, One Day of Science Fame Turned into a Nightmare of Trolling

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www.theatlantic.com 7y ago

Salmon on Psychotropics

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www.engadget.com 7y ago

China wants to ban BC mining for wasting ressources, producing 10m tons CO2/yr

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www.nytimes.com 7y ago

Sydney Brenner, a Decipherer of the Genetic Code, Is Dead at 92

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about.bnef.com 7y ago

Battery Power's Latest Plunge in Costs Threatens Coal, Gas

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www.icij.org 7y ago

Panama Papers helps recover more than $1.2B around the world

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grist.org 7y ago

Batteries are key to clean energy – and they just got much cheaper

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www.newyorker.com 7y ago

Dropped Hyphens and Other Joys from the American Copy Editors Conference

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www.nytimes.com 7y ago

A.I. Experts Question Amazon’s Facial-Recognition Technology

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pedestrianobservations.com 7y ago

Shut Down the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway

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www.nytimes.com 7y ago

A Key to the Arctic’s Oil Riches Lies Hidden in Ohio

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fivethirtyeight.com 7y ago

Conspiracy Theories Can’t Be Stopped

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www.theatlantic.com 7y ago

Who Still Buys Wite-Out, and Why?

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There are exactly one-and-a-half points of his bio in the text (one being cut off halfway). The rest is a list of relatives. If that doesn't imply a judgement based on his relatives, it's just completely pointless.

By that logic everyone and everything is corrupt, monitored, etc. Including the hardware you might install your own VPN node on, all messenger apps, all phone lines, the mail, and so on. Your best friends are all spies. Your bedroom is bugged.

That would mean there is absolutely no way to improve your privacy and you might as well do nothing.

As others pointed out, this is break-ins, not cars being stolen. Typical cost of a break-in is one window. I have no idea how much that costs, but let's say $1000, which is probably 10x too much. That comes out to $1000 x 0.0364 = $36/yr.

Are you seriously judging someone by their great-great-uncle's book?

And why are you including a relative being a Appeals Court judge, and an independent journalist? Is "independent journalist" a code for something?

I believe they may be referring to the idea that not everything is consumed in the year it’s produced. Infrastructure, for example, is useful years or even decades after it is built (and, presumably, counted in GDP).

I’ve seen that error in just about any discussion of charitable giving, including on HN. I doubt it’s due to a lack of knowledge/skills, because these people would tend to give away all their earnings in the belief to somehow make a profit.

Building roads, writing traffic rules or enforcing them just isn't amendable to optimisation using your preferred mechanism of free-market economics. Or, more accurately: competition only works for rather large competitive difference needed to overcome the natural friction introduced by the difficulties of moving.

It's painful to see that people seem to not even be aware anymore that our societies have yet another organising principle beyond capitalism, namely democracy.

Sure, you never agreed to be somewhat dependent on "society". But there just isn't enough land to live in the anarcho-libertarian fantasy where you don't have to find compromises. And the standard hyperbole of the "threat of violence" makes even less sense if you unquestioningly champion capitalism while rejecting democracy, because capitalism also relies on the ultimate threat of violence, as anyone not paying their rent will notice sooner or later.

Private prisons seem to be a good counterexample here. Not only does the profit motive lead to inhumane conditions and perverse corruption, such as the Chicago(?) judge getting a kickback for every juvenile sent into the system. The outsourcing of that "monopoly on power" OP decried exaggerates any problems inherent in the government<->citizen relation: civil servants at least have a certain professional ethos, swear an oath, are usually invested in a long-term career, have pensions to look forward to (and not risk), are subject to far more rules (FOIA etc), can mostly not escape liability through bankruptcy, and so on.

Privatised security is an almost prototypical dystopian nightmare. Look no further than TSA. Millgram might have fudged his data, but the idea that giving someone a uniform and power over others tends to awry is still somewhat plausible.

Other examples: those rent-a-goons shooting civilians in Iraq for sport. (With, by the way, double the salary and many military toys not relevant to the job at hand). The US health system also comes to mind, only that you would have even less choice to chose your local police short of moving.

Battle Chess 7 years ago

I learnt far too much chess theory trying to take the king with a pawn, which was the last animation I had not seen.

IIRC they grab the crown with their pike and it somehow ends up on their head.

It's commendable that the author counteracts the tendency towards cynicism with the occasional rebuttal, although to fully embrace the spirit of kindness, I would maybe skip the Dilbert reference.

Remember: If everyone really were as stupid and/or evil as some of these maxims postulate, it'd be highly unlikely that you just happen to be the exception. Also: management, design, law, marketing, journalism, social sciences, and politics are all disciplines just as challenging as programming or engineering.

And if you can't think of any reason why one of those fields should be difficult, you're just as likely to better at it as that field's practitioners being better at your job.

"Vapours" actually were a major thing in medical research once, cured by bloodletting and mercury IIRC.

There are all sort of models still widely believed today. Some are unassailable (evolution, germ theory), some seem right more often than not ("don't eat bacon"), and some seem so right but nothing based on them works ("cholesterol is bad").

So this sort of naive belief in our ability to model the processes in a body or a cell has out of fashion at least since WW2. It's still used to come up with ideas to try. But even there, purely random exploration of the search space is not consistently worse.

Same sentiment for Saudi investors? Same for Israeli?

"Yes" & "Possibly, but being open to investor' individual behaviour to supersede their country's"

See: it's not that difficult. One man's slippery slope is another's perfect hill for early morning skiing.

I interpreted OP to be referring to a different elephant, in another, oddly-shaped, room.

..but your feat of childish defensiveness applies either way.

Tesla Cybertruck 7 years ago

That sounds like exactly the sort of statistical analysis people tend to get spectacularly wrong. I'd be surprised if more than a single-digit number of people get shot while driving even in the US. For Europe, you probably need to express it in years/incident if you want to use integers.

Meanwhile, more than a million people die in crashes each year, and some 40 million or so are injured. Putting any, even small, additional obstacle in the way of help is bound to be a losing proposition.

This would essentially be a re-hash of the seatbelt debate, where many people were somehow convinced they could escape any accident by quickly jumping out before impact. That attitude lead to seatbelt laws, which were the single most important factor in reducing fatalities per mile traveled by a factor of 10 or so since the peak.

While I'm tempted to invoke some Darwinian principle, the damage wouldn't be limited to those making that decisions, but also their passenger, the next owners, etc, and possibly pedestrian victims of collisions.

In any case, I doubt it's actually forbidden right now. There are, after all, bulletproof cars. They just tend to be expensive enough to mostly discourage people motivated by Hollywood macho fantasies.

Suggestions are based on what people search on phrases that appear in text. People don't search and/or write down what everyone knows already.

Those suggestions aren't there because Google believes men can get pregnant, it's because that's something confused teenagers search.

I also don't get why you consider "Men can get pregnant" to be insulting or biased? It's mostly just nonsense, but if you want to find meaning in it, the potential to become pregnant has historically been regarded an almost holy facet of humanity.

Another fun one I just found, and which you might appreciate: "[idiots can]'t get cold".

In my attempt right now, I do get many articles about Ukraine, but every single one of them includes the word "Germany" in some form.

I belief this is an effect of Google News emphasising recency in its ranking algorithm.

Interestingly, your complaint is almost the opposite of the one often made on HN, namely that people would prefer a somewhat dumber but very literal search interface. It also shows why that wish's fulfilment might end up disappointing people: In the snippets I get, "Germany" gets included in these articles in all sorts of irrelevant ways, including navigational links that really aren't part of the story ec.