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lalc

202 karma · joined December 4, 2010

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lalc··on DemocracyOS
>Democracy does exactly that - it gives everyone the same vote, regardless what minority they come from. Therefore, it protects any minority for maximum possible extent.

From my reading, doesn't this say nothing? "democracy protects minorities as much as democracies could ever protect minorities."

>the majority is emergent

How does "emergence" affect the possibility of tyranny?

>it violates the basic democratic rule, "every person should get the same power in politics"

So maybe the takeaway here is that pure democracy is insufficient? The original point was that "Political systems should protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority."

>Democracy is defined by the end result (same access to power), not the procedure (voting).

Isn't this just semantics?

>It's true that even without stripping other voter's rights, minorities can still be persecuted. But it is a cultural issue, which won't be resolved by formal constitutional framework.

Isn't "stripping other voter's rights" a loaded way to put it? Freedom to vote doesn't necessarily have to mean freedom to persecute--freedoms generally end at the boundary where they begin trampling other freedoms. Also, in which situations "It is a cultural issue"? What does that imply? Does DemocracyOS fix cultural issues?

>In fact, historically, it very often were elites (that you may think are the solution) who participated or even organized these persecutions.

Did the parent suggest a return to oligarchy? Do current elites participate in persecutions?

>For example, in the U.S., there is a large minority of people in prison who are not protected by democracy, because they don't have voting rights.

How will people in prison obtain fair representation under DemocracyOS?

>This can possibly protect a minority, but it can also delay progress in helping minority. The minority that needs to be overruled in super-majority voting can keep the status quo longer than desired by most, and that's unfair too.

So the solution is to never protect minorities in the first place?

>We don't know what the future morality will be; it may be different in positive, not negative, fashion compared to today's morality. We could perhaps say, though, that the future society will be more happy with their own morality than ours (because they can compare the two, we cannot); therefore, it should be possible for them not be too conservative and implement it.

Yes, political systems should enable the implementation of policies. This says nothing about the merits of different political systems.

lalc··on My Philosophy on Alerting: Observations of a Site Reliability Engineer at Google
I just want to say: HN is bursting with great articles today.
lalc··on Amazon Must Be Stopped
Right, book publishers are largely middlemen. Let the old ways die and a hundred new business models flourish.
lalc··on First programming job – a 4 month reflection
Yep, lots of workplaces are like this. As you do care, get away from PHP ASAP.

Beware of structuring and refactoring too much, or writing low-ROI tests. You must find balance.

lalc··on Late Meditations on XKCD 936
At least now we have Mozilla Persona.

Oh, and a shining example of good mobile fingerprint reader UX. Soon...

lalc··on Lestac, a non-linear 2D exploration game
I bet it has lots to explore and "lovingly crafted" I can buy, but "gorgeous"? Not everything can be gorgeous. Maybe try "quirky" or "with character"?

Anyway, buying to support, and wishing you success.

lalc··on $200,000 to the first person to break Telegram
When you become sure what the future price of BTC will be, please, do tell.
lalc··on Meta unveils next version of augmented reality glasses for $3k
I believe proprioception is resilient to minor offsets or miscalibration, as I've seen such illusions at science exhibits--false hands that you're tricked into thinking is your own. And the STEM system (absolute body position tracking) apparently is high-precision.

It's more likely that immersion will be broken by perceptible latency.

lalc··on Meta unveils next version of augmented reality glasses for $3k
Yeah, virtual phone and virtual laptop seem ridiculous when you have an AR headset. There's even a virtual laptop keyboard... how could the glasses possibly detect your typing?

That Oculus demo looks great! See, there's an honest video you can actually believe. Promising for sure.

lalc··on Meta unveils next version of augmented reality glasses for $3k
I'm writing a middlebrow (lowbrow, really) dismissal because this actually deserves it. This is... shamelessly phony. "Your laptop is now a hologram"?[1] Do I have to 3D scan my laptop in? Are they going to mind-upload my Intel CPU to the cloud while they're at it?

Your use-case for AR is a ghostly 5FPS replica of my laptop or phone that I can vaguely gesture at? Tracing in the air to lathe a rocket hull will bring me closer to the world? Meta has access to non-rendered pages of app icons inside the iOS sandbox? "ROCKET COMPLETED"? "500+ Meta Applications in development"?

They say this is real footage, and have a big red "BUY NOW" button. What target audience is this supposed to convince?

[1] http://i.imgur.com/unxD96I.jpg

lalc··on Where my mouth is
I have to admit I'm ignorant as to what Java libraries I'm missing out on by not using a JVM language. I hear about this advantage a lot though! What are some examples of good Java libraries that aren't as good in other common languages?
lalc··on Warning: Google Authenticator upgrade loses all accounts
To get back into your account you're provided backup codes that you're supposed to store somewhere safe. Otherwise, if your phone were stolen you'd be out of luck, yes.
lalc··on Facebook is bad for you: Get a life
Re: photos of you being posted: You can enable manual approval of you-being-tagged appearing in your Timeline in privacy settings.
lalc··on The Great App.net Mistake
I get that App.net is supposed about owning your own data, and sure there's a brief mention of PRISM at the top. But why I would want to write an app for it in the era of PRISM? How can I trust this notion of a "private cloud?"

What I'm looking for now is more decentralization and encryption than a walled garden.

lalc··on Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements
Really cute mechanism in http://507movements.com/mm_123.html

The little pins hit the V in the center gear and cause it to shift to the other gear. Neat!

lalc··on Every important person in BitCoin just got subpoenaed by NY financial regulators
>Any legitimate business accepting payment in bitcoins can only receive bitcoins from other registered addresses, else they are black flagged and no longer a registered address.

This particular implementation wouldn't actually work. Anyone can send BTC to any address, so it would be easy to poison the well.

(But I suspect some similar scheme could be feasible. You might be able to enforce the rule on BTC->$ withdrawls? I wonder about mixers, though.)

lalc··on Why mobile web apps are slow
Do you know what GC does?
lalc··on Thorium nuclear reactor trial begins in Norway
That is a really silly article. The author extrapolates hundreds and then thousands of years into the future.
lalc··on OpenGL – OS X Mountain Lion vs. Mavericks
That's CloudFlare responding to the influx of HN visitors. Site admin probably has their security setting too high.
lalc··on Linode hacked, CCs and passwords leaked
Yeah, I just migrated from Linode to Ramnode (just in time!) and I'm quite happy with the performance. Great network connectivity.
lalc··on Linode NextGen: RAM Upgrade
And here I just finally finished migrating to RamNode for this very reason a week ago. Frick.
lalc··on Why so many jobs are crappy
>Work, being a core part of life, is meant to be interesting, engaging, and meaningful. Otherwise, why are we wasting our time on this planet?

A little early for April Fools'. Let's try this again.

>Work, being a core part of life, is meant to get things done. If your work is useful to other people, you will be able to enjoy life on this planet for a long time.

lalc··on WebGL Terrain Flyover Demo
This looks great and that is a huge amount of effort. I have to ask about what I think is the elephant in the room: Surely you must have noticed that all your mountains are chopped off at the exact same altitude? Wouldn't the scene look way better if you just increased the maximum, with basically no effort?

It's as though you spent a month painstakingly mixing 64 channels of crystal clear audio, but, right at the end, threw your hands up and clipped the final mix into oblivion.

lalc··on An Unremarkable Event in the Tenderloin
Food isn't as fungible as change, but there's still opportunity cost. Each dollar they don't have to spend on food is a dollar that can be spent on drugs instead.
lalc··on Why HN was down
Here I was thinking you were referring to the Japanese meme "No ___, No Life!"
lalc··on Facebook computers compromised by zero-day Java exploit
I'd like to see a custom version of Chromium for this purpose. Google's sandboxing is great. Just reduce the attack surface by stripping out non-essentials like plugins, SVG, WebGL, NaCl, etc. etc. and you have a pretty darn secure browser. See the ridiculous complexity of those two exploits by Pinkie Pie for what attackers are up against.

Seems like a good convenience/security tradeoff to me.

lalc··on Instacode
Here's an obscure crypto algorithm I hand-rolled: http://instacode.linology.info/15261

You've probably never heard of it.

lalc··on I want to start a space company. Now what?
Step 1: Write the next PayPal.
lalc··on The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race – Agriculture
I'm assuming this is being posted (from 1987!) because of how hilariously wrong it was.
lalc··on The Simple Truth (2008)
Quite a bit of it pokes fun at General AI researchers from the '80s, actually.
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