marris

Unfortunately, the most likely outcome is a society-damaging overreaction.

Angry people will still look for other like-minded people with whom they can share their grievances. The Internet makes it possible for larger groups to meet, talk, complain, and bond. When these folks get kicked off Facebook, substitute ecosystems will pop up on WhatsApp, some other social media app. Are "we" going to start restricting encryption next, just so "we" can keep the next unlikable candidate out of office? Not worth it IMHO.

Thank you for posting this.

Overall, I think that the good done by Uber around the world (primarily for consumer surplus, maybe not so much for drivers) totally dwarfs the various complaints I've heard about breaking local regulations. In practice, it takes an enormous amount of time and energy to roll back regulations in one jurisdiction (just look at the state of occupational licensing in various US states). In that environment, it takes someone with fairly thick skin to "just build the thing" and show consumers what they were missing. Personal failings aside, I think we owe Travis and the rest of Uber an enormous debt for showing us what's possible.

> None of these great minds existed in an apolitical, unbiased vacuum, where they could devote themselves to nothing but free thought.

If that is the claim, then I agree that it is wrong. The most common criticism of Marx that I have heard is not that he is political, but that he is wrong (and perhaps incoherent). Similarly, I think that any curriculum that wants to replace the highly influential writings of Plato with another philosopher should make a case for why we should do this... an argument beyond the "inclusion" of additional points of view. I can sit at my desk and come up with a dozen different points of view. I don't think that each of those should be included in a philosophy class, in place of Plato.

What are the politics of Kant and Plato?

Of the examples that you list above, I agree that communication (what would have previously happened with letters) has mainly moved to the net. To the extent that receipts have moved, the government has access (either directly or through a subpoena) to many forms of electronic records.

My original point was that in criminal cases, there is a treasure trove of physical evidence available to the government, and the value of this evidence has been under-weighted in discussions about encryption.

- If the suspect has dangerous equipment or substances at that location, then the government can gain access to and analyze those physical materials.

- If the suspect received deliveries to his address, then the government can get records from FexEx, UPS, USPS.

- If the suspect used a phone, the government can get access to carrier calls (I agree that this may not be possible for app-based calls).

- If the government finds credit cards used by the suspect (either by finding the physical card or by using the purchase history of any cars, residences, or other tools used by the suspect), then they can search the history of those cards.

You are correct that the original statement was not accurate. Please see the more precise restatement above.

You are correct. I should have been more accurate and stated that the new power that the government is demanding is demanding in the Apple court case is the power to decrypt our records and communications with a warrant.

There are also government agents who are pushing for the right to decrypt everyone's communications and records without a warrant.

Interestingly, the government never "demanded" the right to search everyone's unencrypted communications. They just went out and did it.

It needs to be pointed out more often that law enforcement still has all of the physical access methods that they've had for the past 200 years. If the government wants to break into your home or office, they can and will do so. No "technological advance" from Silicon Valley has made this type of investigation more difficult. This means that all of the investigative methods that were available 200 years ago are available now.

The government is demanding new powers: the power to search our communications. Perhaps the ability to conduct such searches will make their jobs easier, but keeping them from having this power does not make their jobs more difficult than the 200 year baseline. We are only asking them to do the same legwork that they've always done: look for suspicious behavior, track the purchase of dangerous materials, react to disasters and attacks when they happen, etc.

The author is not including the machine size.

From wikipedia:

"We could, alternatively, choose an encoding for Turing machines, where an encoding is a function which associates to each Turing Machine M a bitstring <M>. If M is a Turing Machine which, on input w, outputs string x, then the concatenated string <M> w is a description of x. For theoretical analysis, this approach is more suited for constructing detailed formal proofs and is generally preferred in the research literature. In this article, an informal approach is discussed."

If you consider the length of the Turing machine and the input string, then your don't get K = 0. The author's approach only includes the size of w, which is always 0.

How big are the machines used by the author's silly approach? If we wanted to describe the machine that prints "abababababbaba", we could write the program/specification as:

(1) Use the machine L_silly_abababababbaba (2) Use the string ''

How can we encode this into a shorter program/specification? Maybe by concatenating the machine name and ''?

L_silly_abababababbaba ''

Or we can be clever and realize that the string is always '' so we just need to machine name

L_silly_abababababbaba

Or we can say we don't need the L_silly_

abababababbaba

Can we go shorter? What if we specify a gzipped version of the string? We can take the string, unzip it, and use that Turing machine. But most strings are not compressible via gzip. So there will be many strings for which the shortest program via this approach is:

abababababbaba

... and some of the other words in this posted comment...

I don't think your opponent believes that the US system is a "representative democracy" or a "democracy" or whatever it is that lets N-1 people take arbitrary stuff from 1 person. Your "rally support" solution would not fix the situation.

Not what Musk does, but thanks for playing.

There a typo in the HN title.

Two issues:

- Many people don't spend every penny they have. They spend every penny they can get out of their health plan. That's not a "market failure" by any means agreed?

- If they must pay out of pocket, and they have no kids, then why not? If they do have kids, then that seems a bit selfish to me. Maybe the right thing to do is save the money and buy cheap painkillers.

Not every sad story is Oliver Twist. And the argument that single-payer health-care will be cheaper is a crap-shoot at best. The countries that do it well do many things well. I don't see dramatic savings from US single-payer education. Or from single-payer defense spending.

Why did you use such a dangerous product?

Unless the kit includes a self-mastectomy tool, I don't think the FDA should get hysterical.

not obvious

MusicBee is awesome!

"Disease is socialist" but most cures come out of commercial drug companies cure them. Weird. I think the reader has a healthy aversion to Rand, but there is certainly a difference between great acts and mediocre ones.

OK, I see where you're coming from. I don't think he's saying 1). But then again, I've been reading him for a while, so I had a bit of context. If this had been a random one-time post on some guy's blog, then sure, I'd probably think 1).

Huh? Yes, "thermostat" is used as an analogy (by both Friedman and Rowe).

But the article is not claiming that there is a "general thermostat theory." He's talking about one idea (there may be no measured correlation under targeting) and asking why this is not more widely known, especially since the abstract idea seems more widely applicable (to fields other than monetary theory and applied econometrics).

The inverse of Rowe's claim is that this idea is well known (maybe under a different name). Are you arguing that? If so, then by what name?

Let's get the obvious out of the way: The thermostat concept is an analogy. In Friedman's original article, it's being used to describe money supply targeting [not real thermostats].

Nick Rowe is abstracting away some of the specifics of Friedman's article, but he's talking about the same concept : how active targeting of one measure can achieve desirable changes in another one while still showing no/little correlation between the two.

Rowe is also applying that abstraction to another concrete example: the pedals in a car driving in a hilly area.

No, that's not the point. The point is that when velocity is constant, there's no indicator that your pedal manipulation is good as opposed to bad. For that to happen, you would need a period of time where you messed up with the pedal, and saw that you messed up. Then you could make an argument like: Hey, when we let hillAngle-pedalAngle [or whatever] drift away from zero, things go bad [velocity will fall].

Now it is true that you can measure collinearity between the hillAngle and the pedalAngle and show that they are correlated... but we sorta knew this already, didn't we? After all, we're setting the pedalAngle based on the hillAngle. We created that functional relationship. There's no need to empirically discover it.

Put it another way. Suppose v = w1 * hillAngle + w2 * pedalAngle + v0, and you want to find w1 and w2.

If your dataset shows pedalAngle = -hillAngle, then you have

v = w1 * (-pedalAngle) + w2 * pedalAngle + v0 = (w2 - w1) * 0 + v0

So you're dataset tells you nothing about w1 and w2.

Sorry, what do you mean "OP is misinterpreting Friedman's paper"? I don't think there's much "interpretation" here. He's basically saying: here is a paper about X. It is titled "X".

And I'm also confused by what you mean by "the OP has made up this 'Friedman's Thermostat'"... seriously, what does that mean? Friedman wrote a paper on Friedman's Thermostat. So how could OP [whoever that is, I assume you mean Nick Rowe] have "made it up"?

Does anyone know what the speculative execution notes in processor.h are talking about? The code seems to be trying to set up spec execution "barriers."

What does that mean? I thought speculative execution was a micro-architecture optimization (and the speculatively executed instructions won't be retired until the processor knows that it wants the side-effects).

In contrast, I've only seen barriers come up for x86 at the ISA-level (and even then, only for multiprocessors setups).

Game... maybe HFT... maybe High performance server... sure OS... most are not (C++ != C, C++ != assembly) Implementing a language... maybe Database... sure Numerical library... most are not Crypto library... most are not VM... maybe Browser... maybe the rendering engine

Again, you need to wrap your mind around:

(1) Some things will be written in C++

(2) C++ is not a synonym for "low-level." Many of your examples are really referring to C and assembly. Why would you prefer a C++ implementation of a crypto library to a C one?

(3) The vast majority of computer code written today is not for any of these systems. Lots of code uses these systems, but most people are happy with language bindings for a crypto API. Or to a numerical processing library. Or running on a VM running on an OS.

Does anyone have empirical data that the C++ fraction of software written today is increasing? If so, then you have a case. I'm going to guess that that fraction has been falling for quite some time, and will continue to fall.

I think not.

The language is too big [it's always odd to see some people say things like "the language is still too big", as if some recent effort has succeeded in making the language somewhat smaller, but not small enough... every recent effort has actually made the language bigger]

There are too many ways to write bad code and too few ways to navigate bad code. It's hard enough to pick up a big C# program and figure out what it does ... C++ is not easier.

I'm not sure why there's all this excitement over bit twiddling... every language lets you twiddle bits. I can only assume the cool feature here is mislabeled, and the authors are really excited about memory twiddling. Fair enough. It's fun to write code that touches data structures at a byte level. But it's not fun to read/fix someone's buggy byte manipulation code. If you're not writing a device driver, or your own compression library, then you should not do this.

Now, I am a big fan of people learning low-level system details, provided they do it with some small C program, or by doing a project for their OS or compilers class, or by maybe working on some open source project.

But anyone who chooses C++ when he doesn't need it reminds me of the kid who, rather than painting on paper, decides to paint on the carpet. You could do it. It's also probably a lot of fun. There's even the remote possibility that you'll improve the carpet. But you probably won't. You'll probably just make a mess. And it won't be fun to clean it up.

Why are we accepting this guy's premise that "equality of wealth" should be a target at all? We could get equality tomorrow if we took most of the stuff that the rich owned and just destroyed it. Does any sane person think that would be a good thing to do?

The fact is that things have gotten better for the some of the POOREST people in the world over the past 50 years. They have benefited from improved meds, better food, cheap telecom, etc. And unless there is some major screwup, things will probably get _better_ for them, not worse. Just compare the unemployed in the US today with the unemployed in the Great Depression. Do we have large herds of unemployed moving out to California to become migrant farm workers? No. Do we have them all turning into servants for the rich? No.

People will not be replaced by robots as long as human+robot is more productive than robots alone. This is true for many jobs today and it will continue to be true for many jobs in the future.

If you think of things on a super-long timescale, then we're eventually going to hit intelligence enhancements. And then things are going to get really exciting.