Oxitendwe

How well did these cultures fare against the imperialist Europeans, exactly? How well do they fare against their more technologically advanced neighbors?

Incidentally, you may also wish to read "Industrial Society and Its Future" by former Berkeley mathematics professor Theodore Kaczynski.

No. I am also skeptical of more modern cars with complex computers. The thought of being in one scares me.

>Therefore, in order to attract a mate, logically women should try to attract a mate when they're younger, and try to improve the way they look. They should not be trying to get more educated or accomplish more in their careers.

Now that's ridiculous, why should women care about getting a mate, it's not like we have a sub-replacement birthrate or anything, or that having children later increases the chance of birth defects.

Having a lot of single childless people is not good for society.

You're supposed to raise your own children. This is inconsistent with having virtually every job an "educated" person can have.

>Does anyone have suggestions on how to fix this? One option would be to have the cultures integrate so there are not sub communities for PoC.

I find it a bit insane that people think that this is even something that needs to be fixed - why can't different ethnic groups live among themselves, instead of being required to lose their ethnic identity and become part of the larger group? Do you seriously think that's what they actually want? What you're advocating for is the destruction of their ethnic identity. I think that's wrong.

>Why can't we treat people from outside our community as the same as people inside? If we better understand and critique what a community is and how it forms I think it's possible.

Your point is basically that we should destroy the very concept of community and ethnic identity. Groups and their corresponding identities are defined entirely by who is not in them.

Or, to put it a different way, "You don't actually need to be racist in order to be racist."

I don't think products like this encourage the "deep surveillance state" - if anything, they weaken it by loosening their monopoly on high-tech covert surveillance. These things can be used for good as well as evil - you could spy on a corrupt official or catch someone cheating just as easily as anything else.

If you already know it's there, you probably don't need to go through the trouble of destroying it, unless you just want to fry random USB devices.

I think it would be pretty easy actually, to keep up with the data - you could just get a Bluetooth headset and set your phone to automatically accept calls from your spying device, then listen in while you go about your day.

SQLite is one of my favorite pieces of software for this exact reason, that it is actually a more or less "finished" program instead of a mire of shifting design requirements and constant security updates, a comfortably static and unchanging object against the chaotic backdrop of modern software development.

>Yes, and I have completely lost faith in the US's ability, on a federal level, to staunch that failure, as long as the Republican party continues to exist.

The democrats have had control over the house or the senate for 62 out of the past 84 years, and both of them for 52 years (in total, not contiguously). There has also been a Democratic president for 48 of those years. If you're mad at the way things are, I don't think it makes sense to be mad at the Republican party, unless it's for constantly losing.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Combined...

>The point of constitutional liberty is that culture can change as much as you want but you'll always be free to retreat to your enclave where it never will.

This is absolutely incorrect, Americans do not have freedom of association, so people of other cultures can always live with you, work with you, buy from you, etc - by law. Whether you think that's a good thing or not, that is a fact: you can't have an enclave in any meaningful sense.

Do you not realize the downside of having some shady syndicate controlled by rich and powerful people dictate which symbols people are allowed to use to communicate with each other electronically? Or do you realize it and you think it's great, because you expect them to act in your interests, and against those of people you hate?

>For some people, race, fighting for for recognition, let alone equality, is a daily battle. You may live and work far from this conflict, but it exists, and in some part the diversity modifiers for emoji provide folks with empowerment.

Have you ever considered how condescending it is to these people to say that white people need to be the ones to give these people the ability to "reflect their world" via technology by encoding things relevant to other groups of people in the specifications they write? Why don't these people "fighting for recognition" write their specifications, and their own software? Making white people do it for them cannot be empowerment - it's charity, and with that charity comes dependence, which is the exact opposite of "empowerment". The only real empowerment comes from the self, not by other people deigning to give you things for free so their peers will think more highly of them.

Are white people any more represented by the color yellow than black people?

>moral facts

Could you perhaps list a few of these "moral facts"?

>And it's political, which goes against the HN guidelines.

People violate this "guideline" so much that I literally did not even know it was a rule (and yes, I checked beforehand) until I was shadowbanned for it without warning. Apparently the rule is that you can talk about politics if you don't talk about too much, or exclusively, although I strongly suspect it had more to do with having the wrong views than posting about them too frequently (data on this would be welcome).

>We have university professors condemning math, reason, and objectivity as inherently racist/sexist.

I agree with you completely on this, but do you have some sources for it? I'd be really interested to see how widespread the problem is, exactly.

>We assume that tech is susceptible to horrible gender/racial biases for lacking even distribution of races/genders, but somehow newsrooms and sociology departments are immune to this while being somewhere north of 90:10 liberal:conservative (especially when we know that political bias is much stronger than racial or gender bias).

This is a feature, not a bug. If you're a leftist, at least - this is the true purpose of the "diversity" push to remove white men from positions of power and replace them with left-leaning white women[0] and non-white minorities[1]. It is happening in tech specifically (and not any other male-dominated profession like truck driving, or female-oriented profession like nursing and kindergarten teaching) because tech companies have a vast amount of power and influence, and leftists want to stuff positions of power within those companies with people who will support them.

>These biases are certainly responsible for creating or fostering distrust for these institutions. Why should anyone believe anything about social justice when it is distorted once by a 90:10 sociology department and then again by a 90:10 newsroom?

"Social justice" is a fancy word for radical leftism. Again, it mostly seems to revolve around removing white men from positions of power, and replacing them with people of a more left-leaning demographic.

[0] http://news.gallup.com/poll/120839/Women-Likely-Democrats-Re...

[1] http://brilliantmaps.com/if-only-x-voted/

Science only tells you what is, it can never tell you what should be. The value systems possessed by most people revolve mostly around what should be, and aren't affected so much by what is (except insofar as it can tell you what can't be, even if you really want it to).

Basically, you can't derive an "ought" from an "is", and science can only give you an "is".

Is forcing children to eat their vegetables, take regular baths, and go to bed on time an example of "one size fits all" parenting? I find it very difficult to believe that learning to read later in life won't adversely affect your maximum reading proficiency later in life, a very concerning "future difficulty" as it is the most basic possible skill required to function in society after learning to speak. I don't think either that it makes sense to give children a choice in the specific matter of whether or not they should be instructed in this skill that is so critical to their development and usefulness to society - they are by definition the least experienced and informed about the consequences of their decisions. That's not to say I don't think kids should have a choice in anything, just that part of raising children involves not letting them make choices that significantly and adversely affect their future.

I absolutely agree that this would be a great idea, but it would be much better to solve this at a higher level - the website should provide a light and dark stylesheet, and then the browser should pick based on whether the user has a dark theme or not. Giving a website information about your physical surroundings (GPS coordinates, ambient light, audio input, etc) should be an extremely conscious choice, made only when there is not a better option (Google Maps cannot recalculate your route upon making a wrong turn if it doesn't know where you are, for example).

It's pretty ridiculous. I see a lot of articles like this, that all go along the lines of science supposedly disproving the existence of something you can easily observe on a day to day basis. If it was about skin color, why aren't albino Africans white?

Yeah, I think it represents an advancement in the state of the art of tag-based media organizational systems - with regular boorus (or any other tag-based online image gallery) for example, which all have a specific focus, you're not tagging the pictures that you have on your computer, you're tagging their pictures, so the database exists on their servers, doesn't work with any other gallery websites, and isn't related to whatever you have on your hard drive. Hydrus distributes tagging, so each owner of an image can tag it how they like, and then share those tags with other people who have an image of the same hash - the mapping (from hashes to tags) exists on your computer, can be easily shared and manipulated, and is directly related to files on your hard disk, not to mention that there are no gatekeepers and curators to decide if your files are worth hosting on their site.

It's a pretty incredible achievement - some things I would love to see added to it are some way of grouping mappings, or making particular sets of them special - like Gelbooru's mapping, and Danbooru's, and etc. This would open up the door to having transformations between sets of mappings (functors, you could perhaps call them?). For example, if you wanted to use Gelbooru's mappings (they are less strict than Danbooru) with Danbooru's tagging conventions, you could write some mapping of tags to tags (or, more like a mapping from mappings from hashes to tags, as the transformation of a single tag might depend on the presence of other tags), which could transform some of Gelbooru's tags into a set that follows the conventions followed on Danbooru.

Another important open problem seems to be that cryptographic hashing as the only equality metric for files is clearly too strict - thumbnails, minor image transformations (like PNG -> JPG), watermarking, etc, all appear as "different files" to the tagging system. I would love for there to be some way of equating files modulo some other function, like for images there is color histograms, keypoint matching, phash, etc.

First of all, that has nothing to do with the UNIX philosophy, second of all, it has nothing to do with type theory. Anyone is perfectly capable of implementing a Maybe/Option/whatever type in C, allocating it on the heap (because you wouldn't be able to return it if it were stack-allocated), and then returning a pointer to it, whereupon C's actual type system would happily complain about mismatched types if you tries to use this type without deliberately accessing its internal members, at which point you're doing exactly as much intentional effort as if you used a convenient accessor macro that checks to make sure it's not the nil case. While I agree that C (and its type system) could be much better, fixing the problem is not quite as simple as "just design a better type system".

Porting your program to a different platform makes it a different program. It doesn't change the completeness of the original. Modifying your program to account for API changes also qualifies as "a different program" - you can have different programs that all do the same thing, for different platforms, for different API versions of the same platform, and have them all be "complete" even if you may need to write a new one at some point because you want to run it on your wristwatch or something.

Tiny problems that are solved provide a common part that many people can be reasonably sure is free of bugs - if thousands of people use left-pad, you can be reasonably assured that it has no bugs (or else people wouldn't use it, or a bug report would be filed - "many eyes make all bugs shallow"), if a thousand people write left-pad, you will get many versions with bugs that are never found, because there is much higher entropy/surface area.

What do null pointers have to do with the UNIX philosophy?

>Unfortunately, what still causes a significant amount of friction in our cities and prevents inclusive growth is the dominance of cash.

What on earth does cash have to do with societal friction? I find it very eerie and unsettling, how for some years now I've seen numerous articles and thinkpieces written that advocate for removing cash altogether and replace it with some kind of centralized banking system. The dynamics of power for these systems are always about exactly as terrible as you'd expect - completely centralized, where the bank takes care of your money and you may only spend it in places they will let you spend it. Just one example of why this is a terrible idea - in 2010, MasterCard (the very company mentioned in the article) suspended donations to WikiLeaks. All value judgements about WikiLeaks aside, it's a pretty disturbing precedent, that you may only give your own money to people who payment processors allow you to. I can only imagine we'd see much more of that in a "cashless" society where all of your money is owned by other people.