Synchronized flushing won't change the fact that Zimbabwe is a fucking shithole. This kind of "let's cross our fingers and hope for the best" measure was never necessary when the place was called Rhodesia, because when Whites were in control, they knew how to engineer around droughts. If Mugabe's government would simply stop killing Whites, there might be enough left to help out with such situations, even if they are in the minority.
This is a beautiful statement in regards to how ignorant and racist it is. Zimbabwe, despite It's history of turmoil and colonial exploitation, is on the verge to economic security and prosperity. I recently met some government ministers from Zimbabwe at a network security conference in Malaysia where they had been instructed by their government to not come back until they understood how to develope respectable and effective network infrastructure that would support the local people.
Sure Zimbabwe and many other African countries have issues, but so does every country around the world. The constant perpetual negative cloud that people associate Africa with really denegrates the vast growth and improvements the continent has recently gone through.
What's on my website doesn't change the facts on the ground in the former Rhodesia. Unlike most people with specific belief systems, I feel that I can be objective about anything.
I'm a race realist, and the racial reality in sub-Saharan Africa is that blacks have very low IQs. No amount of foreign aid and wishful thinking will change this fact. You say that it is "on the verge of economic security and prosperity" with the government wanting to "develop respectable and effective network infrastructure that would support the local people", yet you conveniently leave out the fact that Zimbabwe, as Rhodesia, already had all of these things. Whites created economic security, prosperity, and an overall infrastructure which supported everyone, including blacks. It wasn't perfect, just like in South Africa, but it worked, and it did so due to Whites applying their knowledge and creativity to solve hard problems. The current majority, over the last few decades, has been slowly dismantling the civilization which Whites created, while simultaneously drastically increasing the amount of foreign aid the country now needs.
"the racial reality in sub-Saharan Africa is that blacks have very low IQs."
I've had the pleasure of meeting enough sub-Saharan Africans that I can not only personally call bullshit on this, the statement is so nonsensical it reads to me like a claim that the moon is made of Swiss cheese.
I'm not a coward. If I was, I would have resisted making my original post, because a coward would care about losing HN points. I make the distinction between "racism" and "racial realism" merely because I care about using terms properly. The latter is more precise, whereas the former is tainted with negativity. Also: Why should I refer to myself using a term which I know others see as negative? I would gladly call myself a "racist" if its meaning were taken to be "someone who sees the differences between races and acts appropriately on that knowledge", or something to that effect.
Let me be very clear: I am saying you are a racist independent of whether or not you recognize differences between races, real or imagined.
Of course it has negative connotations. Most people don't like racists. You can't seem to deal with that, and your weasel words make you a coward. Whose respect are you trying to earn (or keep) anyway? I'll tell you something, owning up to it won't lose you any more respect. But at least you'd be less insufferable.
Okay then, I'm a racist, and I'm only saying that because I don't want to seem as insufferable as you make me out to be. See? I can be accommodating. However, your first sentence is not at all clear, because you contradict yourself. You are saying that I am a racist independent of whether I recognize differences between people based on the concept of "race". Well, no, calling me a "racist" is absolutely dependent on whether I see race as a real thing, not a concept, and on whether I use it to gauge people based on their differences, which are most obviously indicated by skin color.
"Racism is generally defined as actions, practices, or beliefs that reflect the racial worldview: the ideology that humans are divided into separate and exclusive biological entities called "races". This ideology entails the belief that members of a race share a set of characteristic traits, abilities, or qualities, that traits of personality, intellect, morality, and other cultural behavioral characteristics are inherited, and that this inheritance means that races can be ranked as innately superior or inferior to others."
The symbology on your website is typically seen as negative as well. Perhaps you should consider an alternative there if you are concerned with what others see as negative.
That's a good point, but what you see there is my personal symbol, which is the banner of the Third Reich with the swastika's tips chiseled. The symbolism is therefore unique to me, because, as far as I know, no one else uses it. Also, I give a detailed explanation of whether I am a Nazi. It just takes a few clicks to get to it. I've let that website wither, and really should get it into shape some day.
What's on my website doesn't change the facts on the ground in the former Rhodesia. Unlike most people with specific belief systems, I feel that I can be objective about anything.
I'm a hacker and a scientist, like most HNers. There is no cause to delete my account, especially as you can see that the vast majority of my comments have nothing to do with race, but rather with hacking and science. Also, deleting my account would be like admitting that your points system doesn't work as intended. If certain of my comments go below a certain amount of points, they won't be seen to most HNers, which is how it's supposed to work. Deleting my account would be superfluous and overkill. Lastly, I'm pretty sure that wishing a beating upon me is not a statement which PG would condone, especially given that you work for him.
I didn't take offense, but I haven't wished a beating on anyone here, not even on the people whose skin color is not the same as mine, and not even to prove a point, as you tried to do. A few downvotes does not a majority make. I agree that my IQ is very likely lower than the HN average, but that is not the same as being a low-IQ human, which is generally at the level of actual retardation. Race is not only about skin color.
> The example you give was a harsh yet necessary action due to the fact that low-IQ humans require brutality to understand when they've done wrong, because nice words and the rule of law just don't cut it with them.
You thought that HN was somehow racist-free? It's not going to be, mostly it's just hard to spot them since it's relatively rare for non-white people to even be mentioned on here in the first place.
That's probably because you've never lived, side by side, day to day, with low-IQ humans. They are not the same as us, and therefore require different treatment. To believe otherwise would imply that the Whites of Rhodesia and South Africa were either heartless monsters, or people who couldn't learn from their environment. Neither of those is possible.
I'm by no means eager to dismiss an argument made seriously, but if you're going for apologetics for something as appalling as torture, you're going to have to work your way up to it gradually. That's been way beyond western civilization's Overton window for a couple of generations now. It may just be Something You Can't Say.
And capitalizing white as if that accident of birth should be an honorific like an accomplishment? That sounds kind of unhinged.
If you actually believe that there is "Something You Can't Say" then you most certainly are a person who can "dismiss an argument made seriously".
"At any given moment, the [Overton] "window" includes a range of policies considered politically acceptable in the current climate of public opinion, which a politician can recommend without being considered too extreme to gain or keep public office."
The US government has generally admitted to torture, in its "fight against terrorism". Given that the US government wasn't replaced, even partially, or its policies changed in any significant way, through the massive outrage of its citizenry, I am guessing that most people agree with "something as appalling as torture", today, in Western Civilization, as long as it's done for "all the right reasons".
EDIT: I didn't notice this the first time around.
"And capitalizing white as if that accident of birth should be an honorific like an accomplishment? That sounds kind of unhinged."
Why don't you use that line on jews, who insist on "J" simply and entirely due to the mother's religion? They get very upset when you don't capitalize the "j", no matter where the word appears. Even the spellchecker in my Google Chrome browser underlines "jews" in red when I write it in all lowercase. If the power which jews possess is significant enough that it reaches deep down into the bowels of my web browser, then I think that I can get away with referring to the originators and guardians of Western Civilization as White.
You might find it even more unhinged that I usually refer to non-Whites as "unWhite", and I try not to use it at the beginning of a sentence, so as to avoid having to write it with a "U'. Likewise, I avoid using "jews" at the beginning of a sentence. Also, I refer to neo-nazis as "nazis", who are most of the ones you see today, mere pretenders, and I save "Nazis" for those, such as myself, who I think deserve the capitalization. Therefore, "White" doesn't mean every person with pale skin, so, really, it's not about honoring someone because of an accident of birth.
That was a reference to http://paulgraham.com/say.html which explored his fear of arbitrary fashion being mistaken for morality. As for torture, I regard that as something we're guilty of through having effectively lost democratic control of the country, and I've seen very little disagreement and none I find convincing.
As a sub-saharan African(Zambia ).I think your views are terribly short sighted, whether or not the Zimbabwe economy was better during white rule gives you no right to refer to a whole race or group of people across multiple countries as less than.
My country just got a bond at the same interest rate as Spain, according to you, the Spaniards are just as "dumb" as the Africans for being in debt and having a bad economy at the moment .Should we throw in the Greeks?,speaking of economies,maybe most of the E.U
Let us continue with the illogical statements:Zimbabwe's economy is bad so all sub-saharans are "dull"....Hitler and the NAZI regime caused millions of deaths sooooo all Germans are murders? is that your line of thought?
Thinking of any human as being less than yourself and only fit to be treated as such has been the root of most evil.
It is people who think like you that have committed some of the worst atrocities.
Why are you deleting accounts of people who cosplay? It's mostly kids having fun playing dress up and taking photos and making plans to appear at conventions, all while calling themselves by anime-inspired names. When these kids lose their accounts, they also lose their connections with each other, connections which they spent a great deal of time and energy cultivating, and what's even worse is that it's difficult for them to reconnect, after creating new accounts with their real names, because they know each other only by their cosplay names. It's a nonsensical policy, which does little-to-nothing to keep these kids safe, and which rather effectively kills existing social circles.
Yes, and when APIs fail: P2P screenscraping. Regardless of its legality, as some other commenters here have brought up, Twitter can't stop distributed reading and storing without blocking lots of IP addresses.
Well then, it's time for a 3rd-party Twitter search engine, using a P2P-based scraper, with no regard for API rules or ToS. In the long term, what's more important: Twitter's bottom line, or content not being thrown down the memory hole?
Yes, but isn't it worth capturing that content, and in doing so, their users? The search engine I am suggesting could easily transition to being the next Twitter. We grab the content, their users perform searches, and then the users migrate when they see that they can not only search every tweet ever made (since we began indexing) but also add to the database directly (kind of like Google having both a search box and an "add your own URL" box on the main page).
I'd guess that the vast majority of twitter users don't know anything about this API shenanigans, blocking 3rd party clients and all this bullshit. They don't know and they don't care.
As long as Justin Bieber and other celebrities continue to post, users will be there.
Also, the typical tweet doesn't make sense a couple of hours/days after being posted. I'm not sure if there's such interest in searching for old stuff.
What about Zapier? Doesn't it provide the same Twitter connectivity as IFTTT did? I don't use either, but, from casual inspection a while back, my impression was that they are similar enough in that regard.
"So what happens if you decide to make a Kickstarter Movie about a couple of anthropomorphized robots who end up on a dessert planet only to discover one of the inhabitants is destined to overthrow a totalitarian dictator?"
That depends. Does the plot involve one of the robots taking a bite out of the dessert planet?
lol, gotta love spelling correctors. Ya know I did see one where the princess had a couple of sticky buns on the side of her head. So its entirely possible :-)
Figure out a way to route all of your writing through your search engine, and have it flag phrases which do not occur in its database, or which occur much less frequently than similar ones. So, in this case, it would ask: "Did you mean 'desert planet'?"
Alternately, you could just have your secretary check everything before it goes out. You know, like they did in the old days. But then again, I still program in PL/I, and tie handwritten notes to the legs of pigeons.
> Figure out a way to route all of your writing through your search engine, and have it flag phrases which do not occur in its database, or which occur much less frequently than similar ones. So, in this case, it would ask: "Did you mean 'desert planet'?"
Or, one could build a table of trigrams and bi-grams for English words and use that in the spell checker. It would be helpful to have some sort of approximate indexing, so you can catch things like 'dessert planet' which is just 1 edit step away from 'desert planet.'
My suggestion was for Blekko, where he works. It just occurred to me that there are interesting possibilities in connecting a search engine with a word processor. Anyway, even though your table/index thingy would work, it's availability and/or accuracy might suffer from whatever manual intervention which would be necessary for maintenance, but mostly, it would not have the advantage of constant updates from crawling new and updated sources. There is more to English than the OED. A while back, I saw an estimate of there being something like more than one million words in English, which included many terms that have come into normal usage, but which might take years to be included in any mainstream dictionary.
I caught the reference, and have been idly thinking about ways to plug the generic AJAX style text edit box into an API that allows for spelling analysis. (this is more analysis than correction, as you point out). Not surprisingly if you get aggressive about the corrections folks complain.
I wouldn't, as long as all of the extras can be toggled on/off. I'd actually pay a monthly fee for a search engine which has many features and is very customizable.
> There is more to English than the OED. A while back, I saw an estimate of there being something like more than one million words in English...
I can see the advantage of a cloud-hosted solution here. It's getting pretty compute/memory intensive. Still, "spell/grammar" check is something that we'll probably never get completely right. We'll just peck away and approach asymptotically. Desert/dessert and their ilk are a worthy target. (Words that "look" right.)
Bussard was a genius who couldn't get funding. Less than a year before he died of cancer, he asked Google for a paltry sum to continue his research, shortly after the government cut him off. I have wondered why Google didn't jump on this. Do you know? And now, ironically, the Navy, the very entity which tossed him out, has not only picked up his research, but has apparently gone all quiet about the results.
Here's the video of his excellent (and, in retrospect, sad) presentation at Google. I say "sad" because it shows an intellectual giant, nearly on his deathbed, practically begging an Internet giant, for what was really the tiny amount he needed to continue with what had become his life's work. Anyway, it's an intense, fast-paced, insightful, and (likely) final public look into his mind, his work, and his character.
I watched the video of his Google presentation. It seemed to be more of the "overwhelm them with slides" sort of talk. It did not instill in me a sense of that what he was talking about was practical, but rather that he was in his own world and that if he just showed how neat the physics was that he would get funding.
It was more of a "slides, with a whole lot of words coming out of his mouth, the mouth of one of the world's foremost experts on the subject matter" sort of talk. I got the sense that it was practical to proceed to the next level, which is all he was asking of Google.
I also got the impression that he was in his own world. That tends to be how geniuses talk. There was no introduction, no covering of the basics, no time to settle in. It was like jumping into the ocean of his mind, and you either sank or swam with his thoughts.
He was 78, and possibly already sick with cancer at that time, yet he came off as a young visionary with unwavering optimism. That, combined with his accomplishments, made him amazing, and one of my heroes.
He was asking for funding. For funding, you need to convince people that it's worthwhile. There are many ways to do that. One is to say "trust me", another is to persuade through education, a third is to use money which was promised for another purpose, and so on.
He used the first approach. Only, he did it in a way that's similar to what a lot of kooks do - throw graphs up on a screen, without the time to review them, and on a topic which few in the audience will understand. That is not a way to convince people to fund your project.
You say "That tends to be how geniuses talk." That is incorrect. Look at Fermi, Feynman, Gould, Sagan - all considered geniuses, and all renowned for their ability to explain things. Darwin's "The Origin of Species" was meant for a wide audience, and was not a technical monograph. Freeman Dyson has written some marvelous essays, including his "A New Newton" book review of Gleick's Newton biography. Just take a look at the Nobel Prize lectures and you'll see good evidence that Nobel Prize winners are also able to explain their work using something other than a blizzard of viewgraphs. Those people are ones I admire.
Instead, I think this sort of presentation tends to be the way that people who are convinced of their genius-ness talk. And again, it's the sort of way kooks talk.
I want to be clear here. I'm not saying that he's a kook. The polywell reactor may be the power source of the future. But that presentation detracted from his goal, I presume, of getting funding for the project. Really, if you didn't know it was Bussard, would you be convinced? If I had given the same talk, in the same style, would you be willing to contribute $10 million in funding?
"Looking at this solely as a geek and not taking into account the legal issues, any information that has been publicly available on the net at any point should be considered permanently public."
I believe this to be true, although without regard for the details of this case, because I look at it from the point of view of censorship. When taken to the extreme, in a world where there is no censorship of any kind, a person cannot even censor themselves, given that nothing ever made public could be permanently deleted.
"Please, guys, before you conclude that probabilistic computers are the future, think about what it would be like debugging a program running on one."
Most of today's software is already probabilistic. Most bugs occur because the software is run on the wrong hardware. Therefore, once we have probabilistic hardware, most existing software can easily be ported, and most bugs will instantly disappear.
Most bugs occur because the software has bugs, as in broken logic or edge-cases that aren't handled. To quote from "No Silver Bullet" [1] ...
I believe the hard part of building software to be the
specification, design, and testing of this conceptual
construct, not the labor of representing it and testing
the fidelity of the representation
From your link: "The third is the shoemaker (or some other tradesman), whose labour suffers proportionably by the same cause. It is this third person who is always kept in the shade, and who, personating that which is not seen, is a necessary element of the problem. It is he who shows us how absurd it is to think we see a profit in an act of destruction. It is he who will soon teach us that it is not less absurd to see a profit in a restriction, which is, after all, nothing else than a partial destruction."
I note that the absurdity of profiting through restriction sounds a lot like today's implementation of copyright and patent laws, which can be seen as a partial destruction in its not-seen effect on the economy. Also, the section on Algeria seems applicable to most of the enormous spending done by the US abroad. I like reading works from more than a hundred years ago, especially when the authors seem to be speaking now.
