Hacker News: newsmania

New comment by newsmania in "How to Legally Own Another Person (2015) [pdf]"

newsmania — Thu, 05 Oct 2017 05:07:23 +0000

The purpose of requiring a college degree, I have come to realize, is not to demonstrate knowledge, but rather to demonstrate submissiveness. It shows that you are decently capable of doing what you are told, and that's all most employers want to know.

New comment by newsmania in "When you split the brain, do you split the person?"

newsmania — Wed, 04 Oct 2017 06:40:41 +0000

That’s exactly why I think empirical models of consciousness fall short.

New comment by newsmania in "When you split the brain, do you split the person?"

newsmania — Wed, 04 Oct 2017 06:35:58 +0000

I would point out that metaphysically speaking, we have no way of knowing if we are in a simulator. For all we know, the universe could be just the matrix. However it is self evident that our conscious thoughts and experiences exist. This indicates that there is a clear conceptual distinction between our consciousness and the material world in which it resides.

Consciousness is an incredible thing. Reducing it to a mere property is akin to pretending it doesn’t exist at all.

New comment by newsmania in "Props: Small Planes for Small Wars"

newsmania — Tue, 03 Oct 2017 14:54:30 +0000

People these days don’t really seem to care much if a serviceman dies. Now if the terrorists wife dies in a raid, people act like something far worse has happened. This plane will help target terrorists better because it’s slower.

New comment by newsmania in "A therapist’s guide to staying productive when depressed or heartbroken"

newsmania — Sun, 01 Oct 2017 06:58:08 +0000

Run as far as you can from the atttractive ones. Good looks are a crutch. They let people slide by without ever developing character.

Get an ok or ugly one. They aren’t in as high demand so less likely they will leave you. More importantly the benefit of a hot wife is far less than that detriment of her destroying you.

New comment by newsmania in "Basic income is just the beginning as Finland looks to citizen-driven governance"

newsmania — Sun, 01 Oct 2017 01:18:42 +0000

One problem I’ve thought of with UBI is that it may very well make everything more expensive. Since people will have more money they will not need to work as much. When people don’t work as much, of course the amount of goods and services decrease. And when supply decreases, prices go up.

New comment by newsmania in "How a ’50s-Era New York Knife Law Has Landed Thousands in Jail"

newsmania — Sat, 30 Sep 2017 13:58:32 +0000

Cops get a bad rap, but the DAs haven’t come under fire. They knowingly ruin many many more innocent lives than cops. And unlike cops who may shoot in a poor split second decision, DAs knowingly and willingly destroy the lives of the innocent for their own personal gain. It’s time we put blame where it is due.

New comment by newsmania in "China orders N.K. firms to close down within 120 days"

newsmania — Fri, 29 Sep 2017 00:49:00 +0000

No they’re not. The only reason they are still there is because China wants them there. And they are being very dumb by making China angry.

Secondly treating your people like dirt is also a very bad idea. Singapore remains a monarchy while not being anything like NK. The man drives his country into the dirt for bombs when they are completely unnecessary. He could either a) treat his people better then wouldn’t need bombs, or b) keep China happy and still wouldn’t need bombs.

New comment by newsmania in "Ask HN: Where can I host a 1TB DB relatively cheaply?"

newsmania — Fri, 29 Sep 2017 00:36:10 +0000

Hosthatch has a 1 TB hdd vps plan for $20. I’ve used them before and they were ok. They had a network outage but fixed it.

New comment by newsmania in "Drowning in grain: historically high supplies and low prices"

newsmania — Thu, 28 Sep 2017 15:32:27 +0000

I have an idea. Corn farmers aren't making money, so let's subsidize corn farming to help them make money. Of course, that will lead to a worse oversupply, but hey, it's been working so far, right?

New comment by newsmania in "Ask HN: Learning modern web design and CSS"

newsmania — Wed, 27 Sep 2017 08:44:21 +0000

Google “flexbox”. That is the single biggest new thing replacing floats in css. You’ll also want to make sure you understand css transitions (they are very simple).

New comment by newsmania in "Why SQL is beating NoSQL, and what this means for the future of data"

newsmania — Tue, 26 Sep 2017 13:07:37 +0000

everybody hates on Mongodb, but at least it's sql-injection proof.

New comment by newsmania in "Why Do Some People Speak So Confidently When They Have No Clue?"

newsmania — Sun, 24 Sep 2017 22:53:26 +0000

Because we have the right to vote at age 18! And since politicians decide who goes to jail, who fights in wars and where bombs dropped, deciding on the right person to vote for is hugely important. Normally we would take years to formulate opinions on what the right policies are. But the fact is we can vote at 18 when we are still in college with no life experience. So we spend four years voting on things we likely don’t understand. We are expected to know who to vote for, yet don’t really have the life understanding to make good choices. So we get used to making decisions and defending them even if we don’t really understand the subject matter. At least that’s what I think.

New comment by newsmania in "A 400-year story of progress – How America became the world’s biggest economy"

newsmania — Sun, 24 Sep 2017 22:44:12 +0000

Slavery actually held the USA back. It kept the south rural, whereas the north was far wealthier without slaves because it industrialized. Furthermore, the civil war was incredibly destructive and without slavery would not have occurred. Lastly the USA was not the biggest economy in 1850.

As for a “usurped continent”, the land was very sparsely populated by the natives compared to the people who came in, and disease cleared out more of them making a vast underpopulation. It’s just not right to say that so few people should get to control the entire continent just because they were there first. Also I would guess you are a liberal from your comments, and therefore likely support legalizing undocumented immigrants. According to your logic, undocumented immigrants are “usurping” America, which is quite unpopular among liberals today.

America committed plenty of evils, but that’s not what made America great. In addition to many bad things, the USA did a lot of things right. I believe the USA had a lot of benefits from geography, but the real thing that made the country great was recognizing the rights of the individual. It has been demonstrated over and over again that egalitarianism yields big dividends in groups. Because the USA had such an emphasis on equality (declaration of independence), innovation occurred on an incredible level. It took a long time for that equality to spread to blacks, but the very idea of even equality of whites was unheard of at the time of the USA founding.

Combine that with the fact that Europe was devastated by two world wars, it was inevitable that the USA should pull ahead.

New comment by newsmania in "Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js"

newsmania — Sat, 23 Sep 2017 21:48:41 +0000

No way! Vue is way better than react. Ok, it depends on personal opinion, but I think it’s s much nicer framework to work with.

New comment by newsmania in "Portugal treats addiction as a disease, not a crime"

newsmania — Sat, 23 Sep 2017 16:39:03 +0000

Why would they pay more? First, convenience - it's right in the store, you can just buy it without having to do a shady deal where you might get killed. Second, big drug companies at scale will be able to manufacture for much less. Third, there is a premium you have to pay for anything illegal to compensate the seller for the risk. So they are paying higher than it's worth anyways.

New comment by newsmania in "Portugal treats addiction as a disease, not a crime"

newsmania — Sat, 23 Sep 2017 01:08:36 +0000

Make drugs legal. Impose a 15% tax on each sale with all money devoted to rehabbing addicts. Problem solved.

New comment by newsmania in "EU paid for report that concluded piracy isn’t harmful, tried to hide findings"

newsmania — Fri, 22 Sep 2017 06:17:46 +0000

Gee if you want music and don’t want to pay for it, learn how to play the guitar. But if you think someone else is better than you and you want to listen to their music, what do you have against them being compensated?

Copyright is different than patents because it’s not ever going to prevent you from making something you would have come up with by yourself like patents do.

New comment by newsmania in "Should We Kill Animals to Save Them?"

newsmania — Thu, 21 Sep 2017 19:25:23 +0000

After watching enough shows about lions on Netflix, I can't see how anyone wants to preserve these creatures in the wild. They are mind glowingly brutal animals, whose very existence is predicated in mauling other animals. If you care about animal suffering, don't let lions out to terrorize livestock.

New comment by newsmania in "Democrats fight FCC's plans to redefine “broadband” from 25+ to 10+ Mbps"

newsmania — Thu, 21 Sep 2017 19:21:46 +0000

This is just such a nonissue. 10mbps is fast enough for anything regular users need.