room271

I have a feeling people are being a bit short-termist here. We can judge whether all roads lead to democracy/liberalism in 30-50 years but not yet.

In the meantime, my personal opinion is that China is heading for disaster somewhere along the road if they don't liberalise increasingly over time.

Which 'average' people in the UK are you talking about?

The vast majority of the people I know don't think of China in those terms. And they may call China communist but what they really mean is non-democratic rather than a comment on the market. (The term 'communist' is somewhat overloaded in everyday talk.)

And I don't meet many people at all in the UK who want their nation to remain 'great'. That's a very foreign sentiment to us - patriotism doesn't sit that comfortably. They probably do want a good life for themselves and others though.

Lastly, I think you're a bit too cynical on people actually wanting democracy for China. I think a lot of people do genuinely want this for altruistic, but also selfish reasons.

Youtube?

'The rest of it was spent creating one of the most impactful companies that the world has ever seen.'

I don't think Uber is this, even if 'impact' is purely taken as a morally neutral statement. It's just clearly not the case. Train companies, underground, shipping, airlines, have all had a much bigger impact and that's just looking at transport.

This is a very strange and unconvincing article. Greenland is massive; and, while it's very hard to give 'worth' to part of a country (and potentially misguided to attempt to do so in most cases), $2bn is pocket change for a wealthy country, and the potential upsides of owning such a vast tract of land are much bigger over time.

If I was offered $2b or such a large swathe of land, I know which I would take.

(The argument becomes crass anyway when you consider that real people live there.)

Is Mr Steele being paid himself during this period?

The first sentence reads: 'We didn’t think hard enough about how our actions would affect the community, and we’re sorry for letting you down.' So yes, they have apologised.

I switched to containers almost two weeks ago and they are great, the kind of thing that makes you think how did I browse without this before?

I've separate containers for: work, home, facebook, shopping. It's particularly useful for google accounts, as I have gmail for work, home, etc.

And the ergonomics - e.g. being able to sort tabs by container, or hide work tabs in the evening - is great.

One of the things that interests me about client-side approaches like this is performance as perceived by the user.

Even though I suspect the times taken between real hacker news and the clone to load comments are similar, real HN feels a lot faster because the page only loads once the content is ready, rather than loading the page skeleton and then blinking the actual content when loaded.

(And the web itself.)

There are a few different areas of philosophy and it's useful to separate them out:

1) Logic (this is useful and also can be called maths) 2) Political Philosophy / Political Theory (crosses over with politics/history, again useful) 3) Ethics (useful and important but not necessarily worth academic study) 4) History of Philosophy (this is really the history of thought and useful and interesting. A lot of philosophy is really this) but unfortunately it blurs into attempting new thought 5) epistemology (useless, science is the better path)

Source: I studied philosophy.

It's important to remember that early philosophers tended to also be mathematicians and scientists.

Consumption taxes are typically seen as a bad solution because they are regressive.

If coupled with increased progressive taxation elsewhere this might be okay, but otherwise it's a big problem.

The truth is there isn't a 'simple' solution to this, which is part of the reason that status quo is unchanged (another part of the reason is obviously the lobbying power of large/multi-national corporates.

Helping to moderate comments on theguardian.com!

https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/9105-detecting-antisoci...

(We're still beginners as will be apparent from the video but it's proving useful so far. I should note, we do have 'proper' data scientists too, but they are mostly working on audience analysis/personalisation).

I just googled it and found this:

http://eji.org/anthony-ray-hinton-exonerated-from-alabama-de...

which has a lot more detail on the specifics of the case (and indeed it is very troubling but great he has been released). Sounds pretty much as theguardian said though.

Disclaimer: I work at the Guardian (not as a journalist though).

Edit: also on WashPo and NYT:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/04/0...

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/04/us/anthony-ray-hinton-alab...

There are European countries which don't require ID (for example the UK). The thing you're perhaps missing is that if you don't have a compulsory national identity card of some kind, then many people will not have an easily available 'official' ID. The problem is worse in the states because so many people don't own a passport.

In any case, there is very little evidence for substantial voter fraud in the US as far as I'm aware.

The general point about the US being perhaps overly smug about its democracy is valid however. Just not because of a lack of voter ID requirement (in fact, the introduction of requirements is more likely a source of undermining democracy there).

This. Before I switched to 4 days a week (to do non-work stuff) I had 31 days holiday not including public holidays. I really value this extra time. The lack of holidays was one reason (albeit not the only one) I decided not to work in San Francisco when I had the chance in the past.

Can the mods explain why this was removed from the frontpage?

It is clearly of interest to the community.

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted.

My experience of San Francisco is that a lot of the homeless people I saw had addiction or other forms of mental illness. In this context, it clearly is not a 'choice' in the meaningful sense of the word. Having experience with an alcoholic who was incapable of escaping her situation alone, I think you make a very valid point.

I think this is true, but it can't explain most of the difference by itself as most of the major wealthy cities I have been to do not have anywhere near the scale of homelessness and mental health issues as San Francisco. (I say this as someone who has lived in the UK, France, and San Francisco (albeit briefly).

I really think the local people (I don't mean you here) have a kind of blindness to the problem in San Fran, perhaps because after a while you start forgetting how abnormal it is. There is so much wealth in the city but clearly not enough people commited to acting.

Of course it is. The question is: do you accept the results even if they show against your hypothesis?

Check out Proxima by Stephen Baxter:

https://www.amazon.com/Proxima-Stephen-Baxter/dp/045146771X

It's a Sci-fi book about life on Proxima Centauri and includes the idea you mentioned.

(Also a really good read!)

I agree that technology in terms of energy supply will be important, but is terraforming really a sensible option? Given how little we understand the climate, trying to manipulate it in this way feels like a very risky manoevre.

And there are big problems here in terms of externalities: my 'improved' climate might be disaster for you.

There is an unfortunate naming conflict here:

https://github.com/juxt/yada

although I guess that happens alot nowadays.

Most commenters don't seem to realise that this is satirical, and that the author actually thinks Docker is 'the future':

https://circleci.com/blog/it-really-is-the-future/

But there is, as the author notes, truth in the satire.

Even with expertise, you need labeling of some kind for supervised learning.

Indeed, I've seen at least one paper where they used Mecanical Turk and aggregated results (by showing the same examples to multiple people) to check for quality. It sounds like they did almost exactly the same thing here.

Paper: 'Antisocial Behaviour In Online Discussion Communities' (Cheng et al., 2015)

Link: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1504.00680v1.pdf

(Search for 'Mechanical Turk' / section Data Preparation -> Measuring text quality.)

He's not suggesting communism!

Yes, and when you are using pg_restore use the -j flag! (restore in parallel).

It would be interesting to hear the motivation of why they did this. My own experience is moving the opposite direction (from master-slave self-managed to RDS master-replica).

I wrote up my experiences and the reasons for the switch here: https://www.theguardian.com/info/developer-blog/2016/feb/04/... .

Have you also looked at Transit?

https://github.com/cognitect/transit-format