prmths's comments

> It only takes 3 votes for a new story to get on the front page.

That's not true because I've seen posts with far more than 3 languish in the "new" section.

> It drops off pretty quickly if it gets no more votes or if it gets flagged.

I've seen posts with 0 votes stay on front for a long time.

> If you see a story that doesn't belong on the front page, flag it or email the mods - [email protected].

It's not my job.

> Don't publicly trash the site by speculating it's broken when the site maintainers work damn hard to make sure it works smoothly,

Did I trash the site? I just offered my opinion.

> and when there's no evidence that it's working in any way other than is intended and desired by the community.

By the community? Is this your first time on HN? The community doesn't run HN. The moderators do.

What's the point of getting so defensive?

> but never with any support for the claim.

Because it's well known and established.

http://www.newsweek.com/2014/05/16/israel-wont-stop-spying-u...

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-intellige...

https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/03/politics/germany-media-spying...

That every major nation spies on each other is obvious.

Why do you think every major nation has a spy agency?

> The marginal value of these comments was low, lacking any support, and is greatly diminishing with use.

It's not everyone's fault you don't know the basics. What are you whining about? That you are ignorant of what government and spy agencies do?

If people said all governments pass laws are you whine about how people don't provide evidence of it?

> The Russians and Chinese manipulate the American public every day all day

So does our media, government agencies, NGOs, Canada, Britain, Israel and many european nations. But lets scapegoat the russians and the chinese.

> How do you think we ended up with president chump?

Certainly not because of the chinese or europeans. The chinese and europeans wanted hillary to win.

Let me ask, did the chinese and russians get obama elected? I love how easily people are brainwashed by the media. They say something and the mindless just repeat it.

What makes you think they don't do that? Of course they do that. They even send chinese women to seduce lonely pathetic FBI/CIA/etc officials to get information. There was a huge story about it a few years ago.

But everyone does it. The brits, french, russians, koreans, japanese, germans, saudis, etc all do it. Hell the nation with the largest spy network in the US is our ally Israel.

The chinese are amateurs when it comes to spying on the internet or in the real world. Once they get to israel's level, then you the media won't even report on their spying and if they do, they'll make excuses for it.

> I've always admired Canadian culture/values

What is canadian culture? What are canadian values? I've never heard anyone mention canadian culture or values before.

> would love to live in Canada one day.

You are one of the rare individuals. Most canadians I've met want to live in the US. Especially those with money or skills to make money. Better food, weather, culture, history, life, etc.

> - Aggressively encourage/fund/facilitate startups. Unlike salaried employees, startups aren't turned off by the low-engineering-wages. Once Canada can grow 5-10 startups into major established companies with Canadian HQs, that will really boost the local engineering ecosystem and job market.

But they can't compete because of scale. Canada isn't large enough and it certainly has too little internal talent to compete with the US. California by itself can out compete canada by itself. Thrown in the other 49 states.

Even if canada retained all its "brains", it wouldn't matter. We outnumber canada 10 to 1 and outrank canada in every economic facet from resources, ports, infrastructure and foreign talent.

Foreigners with skills, from china to india to the middle east to eastern europe, all want to come to the US to study and work.

It's almost impossible for canada to compete with the US. They have nothing going for them vis a vis the US and their internal market isn't large enough to compete with the US.

Exactly. Exceptions prove the rule. But this applies to everything, not just databases. Never write your own OS, unless you are faced with an exception where you have to.

If you have a special case where RDBMs can't fill your need, then you obviously have to build your own. But these cases are so rare that it proves the rule.

SCMP was founded as a pro-british propaganda newspaper in the early 20th century and has pretty much remained so while switching owners ( rupert murdoch then robert kuok ). SCMP's claim to fame is coining and popularing the propaganda term "Rape of Nanking" during ww2 when the japanese invaded british/western interests in nanking.

It was bought out by Jack Ma in 2016. Jack Ma is the founder of Alibaba and it is rumored that he maintains close ties to the chinese government/party.

It is assumed that SCMP will be the english language pro-beijing propaganda arm going forward.

Just like sql and regular expressions. You work hard to get it to work and then forget about it.

One of the top stories on HN right now.

"Health dangers of sleep deprivation"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16954079

And then we have this. Do journalists get together to troll their readers with clickbait?

> All of their products, while undoubtedly groundbreaking

But that's not true. None of their products are groundbreaking. It's all decades old battery tech. What was revolutionary was musk's ability to brand old tech as new/hip and get the government to bail out and subsidize Tesla.

What tesla is great at is marketing and attaining government funding. Just like solar city.

> How will Tesla handle the pool of buyers for a $75,000 sedan and $900/mo lessees shrinking dramatically?

It'll go bankrupt or get a bailout.

https://techcrunch.com/2009/06/23/the-government-comes-throu...

People forget that we've already seen this movie before with TSLA. It was saved from bankruptcy by Obama. I doubt Trump will come to Musk's rescue.

Also, TSLA's biggest problem isn't a recession. Just like solar city's biggest problem wasn't a recession. It's low energy prices and removal of favorable government policies along with our love of large vehicles.

http://6abc.com/automotive/ford-getting-rid-of-all-its-cars-...

TSLA might be doing well in norway, but it's just a blip in the rest of europe, north america and china. It's a testament to musk that he is able to keep such a marginal and ineffective company in the spotlight day after day. The guy is truly one of the great marketers of our time.

> Not to worry just yet as AI still hasn't been realized.

AI has been realized. We have tons of AI in every facet of industry from the car to the food to gaming industry. AI is everywhere.

> Real AI will allow machines to spawn original decisions to solve new problems spontaneously.

AI already does it to some degree. Deepmind's AI has made original decisions and solved new problems in chess and go. Deepmind's AI isn't domain specific.

What you are talking about is generalized "conscious" AI. That is like fusion energy. A truly revolutionary step that we don't know if we'll ever achieve.

The current dangers of AI isn't the generalized AI since generalized AI would ostensibly be "godlike" to us. What is worrisome is the pace of advancement of regular "non-conscious" AI.

> I really hope Gates gets nominated for a Nobel Prize. He deserves it.

For creating a monopoly and setting back computer science and computing by decades? For sheltering his billions from taxes in a family controlled charity?

It's amazing what tens of millions in PR spending/campaign can do for a billionaire's reputation. There are people who actually believe bill gates is a good guy.

In 30 years, zuckerburg will retire, shelter his money in a family controlled "charity" and hire a top notch PR firm and the naive people will demand he be proclaimed a saint.