This article brazenly glosses over HTTPS, which is designed to tackle the very issues that are raised (privacy and authenticity). APIs do not need to sign every response, they just need to properly use HTTPS.
2,488 karma · joined October 18, 2010
That future is already here. Starting salaries for attorneys at top-tier firms are higher than starting salaries for engineers at top tier tech companies, but not by much, around 10%. Once you factor in the 3 extra years it takes to get a law degree and tuition costs, it's fair to say that attorneys are paid less than engineers.
While attorney compensation at top firms grows pretty quickly every year (5 years out of school, you can hit 300k with bonus), very few attorneys last this long (average attrition is 3 years), and again, this is only the very top tier. Also, generally attorneys work far longer hours than engineers and have a much more stressful work environment.
Nearly every threat is not immediately visible. In a horrible recession, most people still keep their jobs. When one foreign country invades another, it generally has no direct effect on anything in the U.S. If an astroid is about to hit earth, it won't have any effect until impact.
Society relies on more than direct experience to evaluate threats.
Some people who watch those videos will be convinced the earth is flat. But even the people that don't, that "use the experience to learn to not trust everything", is also harmful. It's far more productive for YouTube, or any institution, to build actually trustworthy institutions, rather than teaching people to not trust anything.
Yes, it's not for the average developer. Yet it should be incumbent on the tools builders. I'm actually surprised that most compilers/interpreters don't have a "step backwards" flag that you can turn on during compile/run-time. It would be a helpful feature to expert and novice developers alike, but hasn't really caught on outside of niche areas.
As a very rough comparison for SaaS companies, sales and marketing can consume a solid 50% of your revenue, overhead like accounting, insurance, support, and office space should be 20%, and actual product development is just 30%. This obviously varies greatly by industry and product, but if you're solely thinking about the final product and not how you get it to your customer, you're not thinking broadly enough.
Everyone learns everything through some sort of channel, whether that's your parents, your school, the news, some academic papers, or social media. No one has the time or ability to study everything from first principles. For example, measuring something as basic as the force of gravity is a pretty time-consuming experiment.
People learn by ingesting a source, performing a credibility determination of that source, and then using critical reasoning to evaluate those conclusions. When YouTube (or anyone) promotes every crazy wacko with their own crazy idea as equally trustworthy, it eliminates an important component to learning.
Correcting a mistake is by definition accountability. If there was no accountability, there would never be any correction, and anyone would be free to lie or be sloppy. One can definitely take issue with the way certain publications make corrections, but new media does not even attempt to do anything.
Challenging but it's definitely been done before. The system below [1] (disclosure: I worked on it years ago), stores every memory write in a separate buffer on the assembly level. You need to modify the compiler for this, and it cuts performance roughly in half, but it allows you to step backwards in code and perform sophisticated performance analysis.
Freedom of speech should absolutely be protected. But censorship is not really the problem. Today, more people have more outlets to speak and express themselves than at any time in history.
The problem today is that institutions of trust are being eroded. Every individual cannot be expected to become an expert on every single issue, they need to delegate that research to institutions they trust, and then trust that institutions recommendations.
The problem today, is that trust is lacking these institutions (whether that's government, academic, religious, etc.). Without proper authorities of trust, there is a power vacuum that charlatans are eager to take.
Maximizing "view count" is a bit simplistic way to think about the internet. Traditional media (e.g., TV, newspapers, magazines) are also incentivized to maximize view count. The difference between traditional media and new social media is that newer media is not held responsible for the content they publish. If a newspaper publishes an obviously false story, they need to retract it otherwise they lose credibility. If Facebook does the same, they blame it on the individual and say they can't be expected to police their networks.
The problem is not about maximizing views, it's about accountability.
This isn't a free speech issue, no one is suggesting that this content be removed from the internet.
The issue is that sites like YouTube don't just provide content, they also promote it by showing people recommendations. No one is suggesting that climate change deniers should be prohibited from expressing their views, just that YouTube should not promote it.
Take a more extreme issue: flat-earthers. Someone who believes the earth is flat should definitely be able to say so, but it's not a good idea for YouTube to actively promote that viewpoint. It's also just as bad for YouTube to present the issue purely as flat-earthers versus non-flat-earthers, as it suggests there is some sort of balance between the viewpoints.
To the extent that YouTube is promoting content, they should do within some bounds of reasonable consensus. If they refuse to police their recommendations, they aren't improving free speech, they are just destroying the existing mechanisms of consensus.
Today I develop mostly in Python on a web backend system. Now, the most common performance issues I see are making multiple network calls when one would suffice (e.g., not caching repeated database queries). I have no doubt that there are many hidden O(N^2) issues lurking in the python code, but because network calls are so expensive, they seem to dominate optimization efforts.
I suspect that I'm not alone here, as today, there are many I/O performance tools than there were in the past.
Not exactly, if the government prints money, then the value of the dollar will decrease, but it the value of other assets will increase to adjust for the lower dollar value. So while printing money can be thought of as a tax on cash savings, it's not a tax on all assets (e.g., stocks, property, etc.).
This quote is substantiated.
- myself
It happens all the time, it's called property taxes.
The long term potential is to make justice less expensive by being able to evaluate cases more cost effectively. It can also potentially identify judges that are outside of the norm.
I don't see a problem with this as long as the system is just identifying what is successful and normal. However, if judges themselves start using it and adjust their decisions, there is potential for it to create feedback loops that can move the norm into towards something that is not necessarily just. So this system can be used for good as long as there remains an independent check on it (i.e., independent judges).
This concern is not hypothetical. Today, judges are already using tools that calculate average prison times for offenders based on previous rulings. That should not be allowed as it creates feedback loops and bakes in earlier biases. However, the public should be able to use those tools to evaluate their legal position.
Is the rent cheaper there?
You're introducing periodicity, which I did not have in my simple model. Maybe a more complete model would be:
Wealth_N = Sum {i=1 to N} ((Income_i - Consumption_i)*CapitalGrowth^(N-i))
Liberal California may be losing population to conservative states like Texas, but conservative states like Texas are becoming far more liberal.
I think it is happening at the scale people imagined. The amount of foreign trade and offshoring that the U.S. is doing with developing countries is multiple orders of magnitude higher than it was in the early 1990s.
This is actually one of the standard strategies for taxation: we should setup a tax system that optimizes for the maximum total tax receipts. When you tax too much, incentives go down and you actually lower your total tax receipts. In principle, there is an optimal taxation amount.
The problem with this approach is that we don't have good enough data. No one really knows how many fewer billionaires there would be if we increased their taxes, and biased interests each have plenty of conjured data to make their argument.
There are other tax strategies as well: trickle down economics (a favorite of the right, also based on suspect data); and guaranteeing living wage (a favorite of the left). One advantage of the latter is that the argument is not based on numbers or data, but on morality.
wealth = income - consumption
In the U.S., we tax all three: general income tax, consumption tax (e.g., sales tax), and wealth tax (e.g., property tax). Taxing any one has an effect on the other, and a discussion about one is relevant to all others.
Well humans don't live in traditional Darwinian nature, our brains have evolved beyond that. A key distinction between humans and animals is our ability to think and imagine. Freedom, at it's root, is based on the idea that people have an inherent right to "think" and believe.
If "thought" is an intrinsic right, then it follows that freedom to think should be protected. It further follows that to protect thought, we need to protect speech, religion, certain aspects of privacy (i.e., you can't freely think if you're constantly being watched). A whole moral code can be built from the basic concept of the right to think.
This observation may actually indicate the opposite, it is conservative policies that are failing. To see this, consider two potential reasons why people move away from urbanized progressive areas into more conservative areas:
1. Progressive policy failures (as you suggest)
2. The conservative areas are under-developed, and therefore have a greater potential for growth, which creates incentives to move there.
Under the first hypothesis, liberal policies ruin things. But under the second hypothesis, conservative policies ruin things. There is a pretty simple way to test out which is true: if the first is true, and progressive policies are at fault, then a conservative area would become more conservative as it becomes more popular and more people move there. If the second is true, then conservative areas would become more liberal as it becomes more developed.
Pretty much every originally conservative area that becomes developed later becomes more liberal (hello Texas). It's pretty clear that your hypothesis is false.
> This is semantically vacuous verbiage. Rights have no meaning unless you have a system of human organization (e.g. a government) that allows those rights to be enforced and respected.
The OP is clearly being sloppy with their word usage (and their all-caps usage), but I think what they may be trying to say is that the constitution generally prohibits the government from doing something, rather than granting an individual the right to do it.
For example, the first amendment doesn't say you have an affirmative right to free speech, just that "Congress shall make no law .. abridging the freedom of speech". Most constitutional "rights" are actually rules prohibiting the government from doing something (e.g., prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures).
On a practical level, the distinction may seem semantic, but there are important moral implications: all people inherently born free, and government/society restricts that freedom. Some of those restrictions are more acceptable than others, and that's what the constitution tries to delineate. If it was the reverse (i.e., the government granted you rights), then it would imply you were not free to do them in the first place.
Although the two approaches are similar on a practical level, the former approach emphasizes freedom to a greater degree.
I moved from NYC to SoCal for 3 years. There's nothing worse than going out drinking until 4AM, waking up with a horrible hangover, and then looking outside to see a beautiful cloudless 70 degree day. I moved back to NYC and now my hangovers are greeted with freezing rain, sloppy sleet, and sub-zero temperatures. Down the Tylenol, order some Chinese food, and sit in bed: the world is at peace.
Programming in the 2010s and 2020s is kind of like union labor work back in the 1950 and 1960s: not instantaneous riches, but meaningful work that leads to a decent middle to upper class life.
Unfortunately, this won't last forever. Other countries are catching up to the U.S. quickly. Eventually, development will move to cheaper labor countries like so many other industries. What is frustrating though is that if the U.S. actually focused on developing its talent, we could maintain the lead for another decade or two longer than if we just sit on our hands. With that extra lead time, we could come up with the next major industry (AI-training? quantum computer programming?), but as it stands now, many other countries will be equally poised to jump on the next opportunity and we'll squander our lead forever.
Of course they do, that is a symptom of the problem. Take an absolute extreme of society: one person has all the wealth, and everyone else has nothing. Obviously, that one person will pay 100% of the taxes, and everyone else will pay 0%.
Today, we see a similar but less extreme situation. It's not intuitive at first glance, but think about it for a few seconds and it makes sense: if you want a more balanced distribution of tax burden across society, you need a more balanced distribution of wealth across society.
Accordingly, if you want the bottom 50% to pay more, you actually have to tax the rich more to reach a more equal distribution of wealth.