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gscott 17 minutes ago [-]

Joined with a rise in suicides https://www.nbcnews.com/health/mental-health/suicides-homici...

and mass killings https://news.wttw.com/2019/08/13/northwestern-research-shows...

and violent crime https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/us/violent-crime-murder-c...

and homelessness https://www.cbsnews.com/news/homelessness-on-the-rise-in-som...

What do Christian churches do? (quick Google search random).

https://www.uchristianchurch.org/mission-and-outreach/ https://www.diamondcanyon.org/missions https://www.newhopechristianchurch.com/missions http://northridge.online/about/missions

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claudeganon 8 minutes ago [-]

Yeah, it’s almost as if a Christian-backed conservative political coalition dismantled the welfare state and stopped new services from being put in place or something...

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dang 11 minutes ago [-]

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, regardless of how provocative another comment is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Arguably the second blow does more damage to the container.

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Paul Singer: Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the 33rd Wriston Lecture. This lecture has become an important night in America's intellectual life through the force and consequence of the ideas offered at this podium over the years. The formula for that success is simple. We invite extraordinarily bright speakers who offer bold perspectives, perspectives which rarely get a hearing in Manhattan ballrooms or progressive covens. Delivering the Wriston Lecture in 1995—that was a huge laugh line [laughter]. I mean, are we napping? Delivering the Wriston Lecture in 1995, James Q. Wilson asked why Americans were so unhappy with a country that was more prosperous and powerful than ever. Wilson drew attention to several insufficiently addressed signs of disorder: crime, failing schools, a coarsening culture, and deteriorating civic life. Wilson argued that these problems had begun with the dissolution of the family, then, as now, a controversial view.

Today, disorder is rising again. And I'm not just referring to Mayor de Blasio's much-lamented return from Iowa [laughter]. You're getting there. This disorder is the consequence of a nationwide effort to roll back many of the successful policies that MI scholars have spent their careers advancing. De Blasio's presidential campaign may have ground to a halt, surprisingly [laughter], but the preposterous policies he supports are moving full-steam ahead, carried on the platforms of less incompetent but equally radical candidates. Here in New York, but not just in New York, we face an opioid and single parenthood crisis overlooked for too long by the experts. America's labor market and civic well-being suffer from an education system that continues to prioritize bureaucrats and administrators as well as entrenched power over students. Not to mention the curricula, now ubiquitous throughout higher education that indoctrinates our students to be ashamed of Western civilization and to despise private enterprise and economic freedom.

As for today's campus culture, let's just say that it welcomes a broad diversity of ideological viewpoints from Noam Chomsky all the way to Robespierre [laughter]. Wilson's remarks in 1995, and their echo and resonance today, are typical of the work and approach of the Manhattan Institute. MI scholars have never been afraid to challenge lazy, conventional thinking and offer bold diagnoses and solutions. We're persistent, and when we have a view about something, we do not back down under pressure from elites and cloistered cabals of holier-than-thou academics. MI adapts with the times, and also more so with the Journal [laughter]. But we've also stood for certain principles: rule of law, public safety, free markets, and the belief that culture is a key determinant of the welfare of societies. In investing, where I spend much of my time, this combination, the ability to adapt without losing sight of core convictions, is a necessity. You must be able to think independently and form strong contrarian views, while at the same time maintaining a good deal of humility about how much you don't know. When I first started investing, my dad thought that if his son was brilliant enough to get into Harvard Law School, then he must be smart enough to make money in the stock market. Wrong [laughter]. I learned the hard way that listening to the so-called authorities and blindly following the trend was no substitute for starting from a few core principals and applying them in innovative ways to the unique investing challenge that each new era brings.

It's the same in policy and politics. And the Manhattan Institute embodiment of this ethos is, I believe, what gives us our competitive advantage. It's embodied in the outlook of our new president, Reihan Salam. [applause] Back in 2008, Reihan and his then coauthor, Ross Douthat, was challenging the GOP to adapt its guiding principles to the new political realities. He's already bringing the same spirit to his leadership of MI, and we're looking forward to the leadership that he has in store. Our lecturer tonight is another example of this spirit of independence, persistence and innovative thinking. He's also one of the most effective critics of groupthink, whether in business, politics or philanthropy. Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and in the words of economist Tyler Cowen, "one of the most important public intellectuals of our time." Peter has spent his professional life in Silicon Valley. He helped found PayPal, was the first major outside investor in Facebook, and more recently, cofounded data security giant, Palantir, as well and the venture capital firm, Founders Fund.

While Peter has been one of the most successful architects of the Information Age, he's also been one of the most incisive critics. Peter argues that our technological imagination has been too modest, too content to fiddle on the margins when what we need are transformational breakthroughs. The country that brought the world the automobile, the skyscraper, the airplane, and the personal computer has become enamored with kitschy applications that facilitate things like take-out delivery, late-night car rides, and being able to tell your friends that you liked what they had for lunch [laughter]. These are no substitute for the pathbreaking, world-changing innovation that America needs. Peter has distilled his argument into a Tweet-sized maxim worthy of our age. "We wanted flying cars and settled for 140 characters." At first, I didn't understand that reference, perhaps because I'm banned from Twitter [laughter], not by Twitter but by my internal communications team [laughter]. True.

Peter understands, as we do at the Manhattan Institute, that robust innovation relies on a system of free enterprise. Like so many philanthropists and scholars in the room, Peter has committed himself to preserving the policy framework necessary for experimentation, growth, and most critically, America's reputation for unimpeded inquiry, which has historically driven our culture of innovation and must do so again if we're to meet the unique challenges of this century. A society that censors challenging ideas may well be headed on the path to suicide. For those of us with the means and courage to not just speak out against the intellectual mob but to actually build something superior in its place, there is great and urgent work to be done. Tonight, that means providing a forum for the challenging ideas of our 33rd Wriston lecturer. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Peter Thiel. [applause]

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It's called the brainwash effect, you are used to seeing blatantly unsmooth text so you can't deal with seeing smooth text. I guess high dpi displays don't look nice to you either. A proper monitor would follow exactly the sRGB curve, and the GDI rendering engine would take the inverse formula to anti-alias in linear RGB and give the best results.

I am NOT upgrading, it is not worth it. Why would I eyestrain?

Here is another example. https://i.imgur.com/dqhD1q4.png Note that below the enlarged samples, there's a sample of what that size would look like at a higher resolution. I used hacks to have the exact same outline in higher resolution. Take a look from a distance. The GDI sample is as close as it gets to the reference, while the DirectWrite sample is too thick and distorted.

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If you are used to seeing distorted text, you are going to have problems seeing smooth text. That's how it works. DirectWrite is a curse. DirectWrite is awful and will forever haunt me for life. It's one of the most overrated things on Earth.

[...]

I have viewed the sample image on several screens in pixel perfect size. Now this is where it gets controversial and subjective. I prefer classic GDI rendering, it is much smoother than DirectWrite. On every display. It actually looks like text, it actually resembles the font behind the render. DirectWrite is way too dark, it doesn't truly look like the actual font. But already we are seeing the problem. Now this is where it gets controversial and subjective.. controversial and subjective.. subjective.. The people who prefer text that's actually text are absolutely devastated by DirectWrite.

Mr.Radar posted:

Switzerland posted:

dang is Good People™, yo

JawnV6 posted:

coutt 1 day ago [-]

This is a common way of thinking about it, but nobody really knows. It's purely a conjecture. There is no data to back it up, and it just appeals to common sense.
Should everybody drop C/C++/whatever and rush into the Rust train because Rust people has conjecture?
I ask the opposite question. What would happen if the only programming language left is C? Wouldn't we become better programmers and raise the bar so high that the bug count drops to 0?
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rjmccall posted:

i've definitely heard this from sex workers before. every "you can advertise and people can pay you" site ends up building their user base in large part based on sex work and then eventually kicking it off so that they can go mainstream

Antigravitas posted:

They aren't wrong…

Juul-Whip posted:

did slashdot have upvotes and downvotes? i can't remember if they did but that seems to accelerate the death spiral everywhere it's used

DaTroof posted:

This sounds right from what I remember, except I think anonymous started at either 0 or -1 and logged-in started at +1. Their scoring system is goofy in a lot of ways, but to be fair, any attempt at crowdsourcing moderation will probably be at least as goofy

lobsterminator posted:

Micro$haft Winblows, amirite!