MsMowz

To make it more alarming, this news comes only a few months after reports of forced sterilization in migrant concentration camps[1].

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/18/914465793/ice-a-whistleblower...

Since it's true at least in orientation, they're probably not trolling

That's not a popular opinion because it's functionally the same as saying only the people who can afford to buy a home or enter a long-term lease should have access to affordable, stable housing. Since politics is about who gets what, and since most people don't have much in terms of savings or leverage, it's in the interest of most people to oppose your viewpoint because it's against their interests.

It's only emotional pandering if you don't think politics should be a useful instrument to people without money.

Minor in what sense? It’s still one of the largest in terms of industry revenue and viewership.

Historically, it’s been the task of intellectuals to try to take complex issues and make them understandable by non-experts. That’s how theory gets connected to practice in democractic societies.

Why would the Kushners be stifling right-wing voices?

>All this Germany bashing and his constant condescending remarks remove a tad of his credibility

I think it’s the exact opposite. He’s speaking from the experience of being in the Eurogroup and negotiating directly with Germany. Anything he has to say on the matter is far more credible than any of the pro-Euro claims made by people who have no skin in the game.

>Is there anyone here on HN who has further reading advice on these claims (E.g that the € is malice by design)?

It’s a bit dated now, but pretty much anything Keynes wrote about trade balances under the Bretton Woods system corroborate what Varoufakis says. He really presents a pretty standard Keynesian perspective on monetary unions, so you won’t have to look far.

Let's just consider this for a second from a political standpoint. What does Cuba have to gain from sabotaging the improving relations with the United States? The embargo is still a huge, huge burden for them, and they have no major allies (a la the USSR). Why would the Cuban government do this?

Political pieces aren't appropriate for Hacker News.

You're not including payroll, sales, or property taxes, though.

That source doesn't say anything that adds credibility to your point. It's just waffling about the US's involvement in the civil war. By contrast, the WikiLeaks dump of the 1973 diplomatic cables undermine what you're saying.

It's no longer a question of whether or not the US supported the Khmer Rouge. The question now is how much did the US support them. Some members of the state department at the time suggested that the US orchestrated the whole thing. While that seems unlikely to me, it's worth wondering about.

Which war? The US backed them in the civil war.

Wow, what a story. It's great that he told it, too. I've seen in thrown around that 1 in 7 American adults are functionally illiterate, and I can't imagine what kind of life that must be.

The US-backed Khmer Rouge was propped up to defeat the communist movement in Cambodia. They certainly weren't communists by any post-1848 definition.

It really, really doesn't matter. That's one great thing about a distributed SCM.

Another option is aggressively tutoring students who fall behind. Finland does this to great success. I'm not sure what the ratio is now, but at one point there was a tutor for every 7 students on average in Finnish schools. You're absolutely right that it would be costly and politically difficult.

If these students go through a process like Project Bright Idea, as I mentioned, they would get the resources and mentorship they need. If they can't demonstrate it after that, they probably don't have it.

Despite going through gifted education programs myself, I'm deeply skeptical of the concept of them in general, and I've only become more skeptical as new research emerged. Here's a good example for why I'm skeptical:

>There is evidence that aspects of gifted education should influence education more broadly. Project Bright Idea, developed at Duke University, saw 10,000 typical nursery and primary-school pupils taught using methods often reserved for brainier kids—fostering high expectations, complex problem-solving and cultivating meta-cognition (or “thinking about thinking”). Nearly every one of them went on to do much better on tests than similar peers.

Another way to phrase this is that this study demonstrated that people may become "high-achieving" because of gifted education programs, and not the other way around. Or perhaps typical pupils can become high-achieving by exposure to high-achieving pupils.

The article's refutation of these ideas is the King's College study that determined that "50% of the variance in intelligence is heritable." Plomin's more recent (2015) research suggests this estimate was far too high, and should really be about 30% phenotypically, which makes me think there's no point in trying to find young Einsteins. If students are of average or slightly above average intelligence, Bright Idea style programs will be best for them, and if they are truly a "young Einstein," they'll demonstrate it on their own, just like old Einstein did.

If the major releases were slowed down to once annually to keep up with TC-39, that seems frequent enough.

I really don't enjoy using MySQL. Compared to almost anything else, it's like stepping back in time. But I'll be damned if it doesn't work. We use a single MySQL instance to do a couple hundred million writes each day, and we've only rarely had any issues at all with our setup. Of course, we're not using the default setup, but the point is that it works and it works well.

Those are not the only two options.

You're reading way too much into fizzbuzz. Whenever I get a problem like this on a white board I know that it's just a screening question, so I solve it. Solving this toy problem is nothing like solving actual problems in the real world. If you use fizzbuzz for its intended purpose, great. If you're doing it like this, you're going to reward the people who are incompetent enough to need to draw out every implication of a 3 line function.

Their concept of productive labor vs. unproductive labor was ultimately not that useful, but I really think it's interesting how critiques of classical political economy revisited the idea. Regardless of all economic activity being "necessary" in a sense, there is clearly a difference in producing new things and maintaining the system in which people function. For example (not to pick on anything, because there are a lot of fields like this), finance is clearly qualitatively different from manufacturing. That's not to say that it's wholly unnecessary, but its fundamentally unproductive nature should probably be spoken of more than it is.

The most interesting part of the cryptocurrency phenomenon has been the rise of pseudo-academic writing to support individual coins or the concept itself. Every time a new coin emerges, there's a detailed advertisement that's styled like an economics journal article. At the same time, there's low-level sophistry like this article to assert that cryptocurrency is going to solve social problem X.

People who believe cryptocurrency is going to prevent autocracy have lost all grasp on reality.

That will never happen on hacker news, certainly.

This is a great win for German labor. Individual men have their privacy protected, and all workers can still benefit from seeing the median earnings for their fellow men and women. If a country is serious about resolving their pay gap, this is a good first step.

What's most fun about anti-pomo hit pieces like this one is how decidedly postmodern their polemics are. More frustratingly, there is no unitary postmodernism, because it was a broad confederated movement, so undoubtedly there are postmodern thinkers who the author would sympathize with and others who she would hate.

The author's motivations are revealed in the conclusion:

>Our current crisis is not one of Left versus Right but of consistency, reason, humility and universal liberalism versus inconsistency, irrationalism, zealous certainty and tribal authoritarianism. The future of freedom, equality and justice looks equally bleak whether the postmodern Left or the post-truth Right wins this current war. Those of us who value liberal democracy and the fruits of the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution and modernity itself must provide a better option.

She's upset that classical liberalism has been abandoned on the right and modernist socialism has been abandoned on the left, and wants to carve out a return to reason for classical liberals in the center. There are two issues with this.

The problem with the idea of the right or liberal "left" returning to classical liberal thought is that the classical liberal thought of the 19th century was unable to answer questions that came up as capitalism and liberal society developed. Different answers led to different traditions: modern liberalism, conservatism, and right-wing libertarianism. You can't just undo 250 years of development and pretend that the world is how it was when Smith and Locke were writing.

The problem with her idea that the left should return to modernist traditions (e.g. the social democratic tradition, communism, anarchism, etc.) is that the left already has. The fastest growing political movement in the United States (and in most European countries, most notably the UK) is socialism. The group spearheading this movement in the US is the DSA, whose largest caucus is the Refoundation Caucus, a Marxist and Leninist (but _not_ Marxist-Leninist) group. Postmodernism has been essentially been absent from the left since the 1990s, with the only exception being the academic "left."

Regardless, despite its many flaws, we are all better off for postmodernism happening. The "inconsistency, irrationalism, zealous certainty and tribal authoritarianism" that the author rails against is exactly what Foucault, Derrida, et al. were writing against. They revealed grand errors in mainstream intellectual thought, and that shouldn't be diminished by the fact that their analyses weren't otherwise very useful.

I know hiring is hard, and the truly qualified candidates for any posting are sparse, but startups throw out way too many potentially-decent candidates before giving them a real look. Bigger companies can afford to use more blunt heuristics than startups can. When that "elite 1%" only makes up .1% of your applicants, you have to be willing to use a finer comb.

I can't speak to the general case, only my personal experience as an applicant and early employee at 3 startups, but I can't count how many times I've been told that I wasn't a good fit (pre-interview) because I didn't have experience with parts of their tech stack, even though any developer worth hiring for those early positions should be able to pick up a new stack and run with it. Very little development experience is actually "irrelevant" to any given opening.

Peterson is probably the most talented sophist around these days. This particular lecture series, like most of his other lectures, is full of ad hoc historical revisionism that just happens to line up exactly with his enlightened Christian centrist worldview.

It took several years before I really felt generally competent. I don't think there's a mastery stage, in the same way that artists never master a medium.