I continue to be astounded that the ability of the US president to pardon someone of a criminal conviction exists. It seems like such a blatant contradiction of the separation of powers.
It's not unique to the US. Many countries have it. I must say, sans abuse, it is useful. It is intended for the very few people who fall through the cracks of legal rules.
There was a guy in Poland who was extorted by gangsters. Initially he took an informal loan, but they made him repay it indefinitely, threatening violence. Police failed to help, for unclear reasons. He ended up murdering the extorted. It was a premeditated murder, not in direct defence of his life, etc, and so he got life imprisonment.
He did serve a chunk of his sentence, but in the end was pardoned, on the grounds that he was kind of in a hard place. Without help from the police, he was at the mercy of a gangster, with a constant threat of violence and no perspective of any relief. Link in Polish: https://pl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artur_Bryli%C5%84ski
It's not without controversy in Poland either. It was used in an attempt to quash an ongoing process about blatant abuse of power by two politicians. But I would disagree that the prerogative is totally without merit.
Hard disagree. Finding anything of quality on 4chan is like searching for gold nuggets by hand in a mountain of radioactive poop. The only times I've ever seen anything useful in there is when someone else has already done the hard work of curating a post.
The core reason why HN is superior (IMO) is the curation and the moderation.
As an outside observer, the difference between the current US administration and the CCP is becoming smaller every day. What's the point of having actual domain expertise when the primary selection criteria is partisan support of the current party in power? It's policital appointees throughout the apparatus of government, top to bottom. The USA is surrendering any pretense of higher moral superiority at a frightening rate.
Counterpoint: it's super clear and easy to read on Firefox mobile. No popups or interstitial ads. Yes it's quite lengthy and there are many pictures, but you know what you're getting into with any long article like this one. This is exactly what I want for reading on mobile.
Pain is weird. The more I learn about it, the less I'm sure of anything to do with it. It's a different subjective experience for everyone. The severity often doesn't correlate to any observable physical insult. It's worse when you're tired or stressed. The biopsychosocial model of pain seems like our current best explanation for why it varies so much between people.
The scientist Lorimer Moseley has some excellent videos on Youtube about pain, recommended for anyone interested.
I very much relate to the sentiment of starting out with simple tools and then backfilling knowledge gaps as I went. For me it was Excel -> Access shared DB forms -> Django web application framework -> etc. From spreadsheets, to database design, to web application development, to scaling HTTP services, and on and on it goes.
This. This is what I come to Hacker News for. Absurdly well-documented writeups of things about which I am intellectually curious but that no normal person in their right mind would experiment with.
What's the name for that principle/rule where someone blithely removes rules or regulations without any context for them being there in the first place? It's on the tip of my tounge. I feel like we're seeing that a lot in the US Federal govt at the moment.
But it illustrates one of my deeply held beliefs pretty well: there are things that are virtuous at small scale that are disastrous at large scale, and vise versa.
In society "othering" out-groups leads to many wrongs. But it's hard to argue there's much evil in cultivating a sense of family pride. The vice turns to virtue at very small scale.
I believe in giving more help to those who need it. But does that mean I should skip Christmas presents for my kids because there are people starving in [insert poor country or war zone]? The virtue becomes vice at small scale.
A unified theory of moral behavior is actually hard to come by.
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