NMDA receptor encephalitis is usually associated with a particular ovarian tumor, so the first thing I did on seeing this article was to check if the author is male or female (he's male). It is the habit of certain cancers to present with bizarre symptoms (so-called paraneoplastic syndromes) including psychosis as in this case, and often it can be months before someone thinks to look for cancer. I'm glad the author's okay.
> Can you elaborate? What's unique about the nations for which democracy isn't the best form of government? What's unique about their people?
Not the person you responded to, but functional democracies require either an already-established functioning government, which can be efficiently perpetuated and controlled by elected leaders (think the United Kingdom); or a non-functioning government which can be effectively reformed and then perpetuated by elected leaders (think Taiwan). In both cases, functional democracies also require an electorate who can be brought to work towards a nation's major development goals.
There are countries for which none of these criteria can be reasonably met in the context of a democracy. One reason is if the electoral processes are so corrupt that no one competent is actually elected or, if they are accidentally competent, are too busy working towards their own and their cronies' ends to be effective leaders. The second is if there is underlying social strife which prevents people from working collaboratively towards nation building.
India fails in both counts: the corruption at all levels of government is nothing short of legendary, and the country as a whole is comprised of very diverse peoples who, historically, have had little reason to work together. Many African countries, rather tragically, are in the same boat: during the colonial era, "countries" were almost randomly assembled out of groups of people who historically had almost nothing in common. When the colonial powers left, they typically left nothing behind -- no knowledgeable and experienced administrators, no established universal education, and little or no social infrastructure. The people were then left to reinvent government from scratch, and the "country" more often than not was actually five separate nations of people who hated each other.
In sum, democracy is sort of an advanced form of government which, when introduced, really does need a somewhat coherent nation to already exist (in more cases) for it to work well. An autocratic or authoritarian government is usually the on-ramp, so long as it's reasonably functional and stable for long enough. Wherever democracy has persistently failed to take off, it's invariably a place in which the underlying foundation didn't exist to begin with.
Thanks, I very much agree with your points. I do however think it sounds very different to say "democracy has some prerequisites" and "democracy is not necessarily the best form of government for a nation. One can still think it's the best form (that we know of?) for all nations, albeit the path there isn't a one-step path.
I came here to post something similar. PG is perhaps still important as an archive of proofread OCRed public-domain material, but for ordinary people, the shadow libraries have vastly more stuff. After all, readers don’t want their reading to be limited to what was published before a copyright cutoff date many decades ago.
Well, mainly in the fact that Anna's has several orders of magnitude more books, and includes research publications and more, ah, contemporary materials to boot.
Methinks someone's experimenting with a botnet -- "can we bypass HN's checks and balances to get an entirely-irrelevant topic to the front page, and keep it there for x hours?"
Somewhat ironically, he'd spent the last years of his life working on prolonging life [1], and was selling a $25,000 "proactive healthcare service" consultation to anyone who could afford it [2].
1: The company's website, humanlongevity dot com, seems to have been compromised, and as "captcha" will try to have you install a Trojan. So here's the Wikipedia page instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Longevity
You've had enough arguments with people in both this thread and the previous that I'm pretty sure you understand what the issue is with your use of the word "free".
What you are offering is NOT a free tool -- it is a demo, for a tool for which you are charging $12/month. No reasonable person would interpret a grand total of 3 exports as enough to justify calling this a "free" tool.
This is to say nothing of your violation of AGPL on the use of MuPDF, which has been pointed out here and elsewhere.
But of course, you're free to Show HN a paid product; just kindly don't insult our collective intelligences in the process.
agreed. i have never seen anyone (let alone an assortment) of hacker news users saying "i switched my 2fa to this after seeing how great it was!" Not really sure how one 'switches their 2fa' to an LLM...
This thread is about the 2FA app, not the LLM app. I don't care about the LLM app. What's this witch hunt? This app literally solved a (self-inflicted) problem I was having for some years now where I was keeping an old phone around just for MFA. I even thought about creating an iOS app that's compatible with Aegis files (actually I even _started_ working on that, but didn't get far) just to solve my problem. Now I don't have to, thanks to a comment here, and that's why I posted. Geez. I guess I'll stay with negative comments for the future, they seem to be more trustworthy.
I mean I get it, astroturfing is a real problem and an annoying one for communities. But I also have no idea how to prove to you that I am neither a bot nor shilling here.
I really wish those offering speech-to-text models provided transcription benchmarks specific to particular fields of endeavor. I imagine performance would vary wildly when using jargon peculiar to software development, medicine, physics, and law, as compared to everyday speech. Considering that "enterprise" use is often specialized or sub-specialized, it seems like they're leaving money on Dragon's table by not catering to any of those needs.
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