jbapple

Eric Holder said that it met the constitutional bar of "due process" for a Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen living abroad, to be assassinated by the executive branch as long as they talked about it a bit beforehand. I am doubtful that his investigation will result in meaningful change at Uber.

> Making the military more smoothly administered does not necessarily correlate with an increase in horrors of war.

Certainly making enlistment harder will decrease the number of troops (absent a draft) which has a non-zero probability of decreasing military adventurism, yes?

Discouraging a single enlistment seems to me like it has the same order-of-magnitude impact as casting a single vote.

> If the military attracts good people, then that means there is the chance of having good people in the chain of command.

How does making enlistment easier increase the percentage of volunteers that are good people?

> I think it's too simplistic to think of a better military as being a net negative

Do you think more recruits means a "better" military?

> For a lot of people, the military is one of the best job options

How do you weigh that against the risk of injury, death, or PTSD, as well as the civlian casualties of US wars?

To be specific - do you believe Iraq Body Count or the Lancet surveys, and how many civilians would have to have been killed in the second Iraq war for you to think it would be a net ethical negative to make it easier to enlist?

> Without getting into weeds too much, there's lots of good work happening to make it easy to join the federal government or enlist in the military.

Why is it good to make it easy to enlist in the military?

Question number two asked "is there any evidence". Your response number two explains, "we believe".

Is there any evidence which backs up your belief?

> If you don't accept this, and continue to insist any human can marry (or should be able to marry) any other human, you're making things up that are not reflected in real legal or philosophical systems.

What is a "real philosophical system", and what distinguishes it from an unreal or fake philosophical system?

In particular, if a person who is not a professional philosopher has a set of beliefs about what is knowable or what is moral or what the nature of consciousness is, and if that set of beliefs is unusual, is their set of beliefs a "real philosophical system"? Conversely, if that person is a professional, full-time, employed philosopher and their set of beliefs is very popular and influential, is that set a "real philosophical system"?

If Dan is correct that companies often do not keep their best developers happy, what might account for Joel believing the opposite?

This arrest happened in late August, it seems. Has SCOTUS set limits on how long prisoners can be held secretly?

What constitutes a "secret arrest", as mentioned in this article? Jose Padilla was arrested and initially held without notice to his family or attorney. Is that what this arrest is like? What proportion of the arrests in the US are "secret"? When the families of the prisoners are told, are they sometimes bound by court orders not to disclose the arrests?

Have you benchmarked MPSC-per-core and SPSC-per-pair-of-cores against any of the three concurrent queues in the article?

> Guccifer2 is a cover for APT-28/APT-29 (GRU).

How do you know? The NYT keeps using the passive voice ("believed to be tied to the Russian intelligence") or saying that some unnamed "American intelligence officials" told them so. Even when they name the officials, they don't say how they determined it.

A big contributor to the GFC was pension funds ("dumb money") buying CDOs with rates that were way too low for the risks. Do I need to be worried about the same thing for cat bonds?

I don't understand the difference between this data structure [0] and buffered B-trees, as described in "Lower Bounds for External Memory Dictionaries", by Gerth Stølting Brodal and Rolf Fagerberg [1], or in "On External Memory Graph Traversal" by Adam L. Buchsbaum, Michael Goldwasser, Suresh Venkatasubramanian, and Jeffery R. Westbrook [2]. Granted, this adds in path-copying, but I'm not sure what new innovation this has that merits the description "Hitchhiker trees are a newly invented (by @dgrnbrg) datastructure".

0: https://github.com/datacrypt-project/hitchhiker-tree/blob/ma...

1: http://www.cs.au.dk/~gerth/papers/alcomft-tr-03-75.pdf

2: http://euler.slu.edu/~goldwasser/publications/SODA2000.pdf

> Come to think of it, when you're issued a state ID/driver's licence, that should also be considered your registration to vote, provided you've reached voting age.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Voter_Registration_Ac...

"Section 5 requires state motor vehicle offices to provide voter registration opportunities to anyone applying for a new or renewed driver's license or state identification card."

You can read the oral arguments in the Supreme Court case that struck down the preclearance part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965: https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcr...

Under that rule, the federal government had the power to prevent changes to voting rules.

To me, the most interesting part of the oral arguments was this exchange:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: General, is it -- is it the government's submission that the citizens in the South are more racist than citizens in the North?

GENERAL VERRILLI: It is not

I do not think the author doesn't know that section 1201 was designed to help companies create access control. The author of the blog post is talking about not just the purpose of the law, but also the effect, which he or she believes infringes on the First Amendment.

I'm not a lawyer, but I think that laws with a constitutionally valid purpose are sometimes ruled unconstitutional by the courts when they have unconstitutional effects.

I can't comment on whether I think that will be the case here.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE#1985_bombing

> A16Z should really have thought twice about what such a blatantly anti-employee piece would do to their reputation.

Does A16Z care about their reputation among the laboring class, or only among the ownership class?

Note that the comparative experiments in the original Bloom filter paper are very sensitive to the implementation details of the other Bloom filters they are comparing to. For instance, in the implementation of blocked Bloom filters, they get a false positive rate of 0.43% when using 13 bits per element. I get 0.27%, perhaps because in each small Bloom filter I am using a split Bloom filter.

I emailed one of the authors of the original paper, and, while their Cuckoo filter implementation is available, they have lost their experimental setup and comparison code.

Oh, and the original op-ed by John Yoo? It came out a 18 months ago, less than a week after the torture report came out. It wasn't about federal records preservation.

This comment by vaadu is copy-and-paste from an op-ed in the LA Times by John Yoo, one of the authors of the torture memos:

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-yoo-torture-feins...

Furthermore, whether the torture report was done properly seems irrelevant to whether it is "a federal record and must be preserved."

> Could you please explain why the foreign investment is a problem?

I'm not sure, but I get the impression that the concern is partly about non-resident populations. Non-residents buying homes as investments or as a hedge against corruption driving them out of their home countries uncaps demand. More demand might end up causing wealth transfer from the renter class to the owner class.

> the point we make in the book is that few employees expect or want lifetime employment at a single company

This might be a function of broken promotion processes. Perhaps, in a world in which employees believed that they could advance their careers by either staying at one company or moving around, we would see a significant fraction of workers who would want to have long tenures.

The article says, "The recent attacks have pushed many Europeans to favor greater powers for law enforcement over privacy," but the only direct evidence for this claim is quotes from high-level government employees.

I don't know how it is in Europe, but in the US, there are a number of issues about which surveying congress would give you very different results from surveying the actual residents.

Furthermore, no evidence is presented that the recent terror attacks changed the minds of the politicians quoted in this article; before the recent terror attacks, there were already high-level government employees who thought there should be encryption backdoors, I presume. Are those politicians just getting more press now?

> I assume it means the agreement you sign forces you to use binding arbitration in place of suing MBNA

I've heard that called a "arbitration clause", but never a "non-arbitration clause", as the person I was responding to put it.

> They use these non-arbitration clauses, and they are always right.

What do the clauses look like? What does it mean that they are "always right"? What is the consequence of this rightness?

What is the actual space overhead of this structure, and how did you measure it?

> "Although hashtable is very fast with O(1) time complexity, but there is always about ~25% table entries are unused, because the hash-table load factor is .75. And this htree is suitable for memory-bounded cases."

Do you know htree achieves this space efficiency? I ask because it looks to me like every node has an array of children, like a standard tree. Doesn't the cost of storing one additional pointer for each key add up to at least 25% space wasted?

> I'm not sure that the quotes you've put here portray a bias one way or another so much as a legal opinion (erroneous or otherwise)

John Yoo's legal opinions were used by the Bush administration to justify a system of torture up to and including permanent injury, sexual assault, and death. If he had issued these opinions in a vacuum, I would agree with you. Instead, he sought opportunities to provide legal cover for systemic human rights abuses.

The consequences of his actions seem predictable, and in my view that makes him partially morally responsible for them and it is fair to call him an advocate of them, in deed and word.

You can read about it in the CIA torture report and the DOD torture report:

https://www.amnestyusa.org/pdfs/sscistudy1.pdf

http://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Detainee-...

There are a multitude of US laws against torture, but Yoo and his intellectual cohort seem to think that the "Unitary Executive" is not bound by most laws, as long as that executive proclaims the actions are part of a war (which does not need to be declared by Congress, under Unitary Executive theory that rejects the War Powers Act).

Finally, I posted this snippet to point out that John Yoo has a history of dismissing limits to executive power to an extreme degree. Even if his theories are viewed outside of the moral consequences of his actions, I think it's important to know that his view on surveillance goes WAY, WAY beyond just warrantlessly listening to the phone calls of innocent people, all the way to, according to him, crushing the testicles of innocent people. I think this helps frame the discussion of the history of the Bush administration's abuse of civil liberties, though you are welcome to disagree.