throwawayjava

> Why the discrepancy? The 28th amendment hasn't been ratified yet.

I predict Holmes gets at least as much time as Balwani, if not more. Why? Many of the most compelling causal explanations for the (very real and concerning) gender sentencing gap aren't applicable to this case.

(On a related note, I had an exchange about gender gaps in sentencing with another HN user 3 months ago who was complaining how unfair it was that Holmes "is spending exactly zero days in prison" and got off with "a slap in the wrist" compared to Shkreli [1].)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16588351

The money goes to the Treasury. Congress holds the purse strings.

FTC fines are not designed to make victims whole; fines are inherently punitive. In our current system, restitution and civil damages fill that role; i.e., victims who want to be made whole should sue Mr. Brar individually, sue him as a class, and/or find a prosecutor who will go after criminal charges with restitution and make sure they're included as victims.

The good news for victims is that the FTC settlement generally makes civil suits easier for victims to win. The settlement significantly increases the probability of success and significantly decreasing the cost of each individual victim's lawsuit. In particularly egregious cases, FTC settlements will require an explicit admission of guilt. Those admissions make victims' cases even easier to win (the victim only has to prove that they were defrauded; the question of whether the interaction was fraudulent is already settled).

IMO the most appropriate structure for an FTC fine would be ${some multiple of the money you made scamming people, AFTER paying back all victims who decide to file a civil suit}. I think the ordering is exactly the opposite, though, unless the civil suits include punitive damanges. We'd have to find a bankrupcy lawyer to be sure.

NYC/LA/Chicago combined is only 15M people. That's clearly not enough people to win a majority of a 300M+ population. Perhaps you mean a wider class of cities. But 80% of Americans live in cities! If you can't get elected by "pandering" to a whopping 80% of your electorate then something is terribly wrong. We have to choose a very "just right" definition of "city" for your assertion to be true.

But there's an even more important misunderstanding here.

When discussing this topic, many people get distracted by the fact that removing the electoral college would increase the voting power of Massachusetts residents and decrease the voting power of Montana residents in presidential elections.

This is a distraction because neither Massachusetts nor Montana is the winner in the current system! It's states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that have a truly distortionary amount of power in the current system. Those states are not particularly rural or particularly urban.

Here's the key observation that could make changes to the electoral college politically feasible: if you don't live in a presidential swing state, getting rid of the electoral college increases the power of your region in selecting the president regardless of the size of your state/city.

So, this is not a case of favoring one small set of states over another small set. Removing the electoral college would substantially weaken the power of 5-6 states over the Executive branch and increase the power of the other 45 states (some more than others, sure, but nearly everyone wins compared to the status quo).

> Because, in the end, minority interests will always be cast aside once the election is over anyway.

This is exactly why I favor keeping Congress as it is but reforming the electoral process for the Executive branch. Montana has a very loud voice in the Senate and House relative to its population. I do not suggest changing that.

> It would be far better to...

1. An omniscient and beneficent dictator would be even better; the point of my post was to suggest plausible alternatives :-)

2. There are many merits to federalism, but this is quite a bag of worms and we're already straying OT.

If the AGA is new (within the last decade or two), those people spent tens of thousands of dollars on a freaking oven. That's more than most people would spend on an entire kitchen remodel.

If the AGA is not new (from before 1990 or so), it's horrendously energy inefficient. A modern sub-$1,000 oven would pay for itself in energy savings in no time.

Because strong presidents drive policy-making, this difference ("a few key states" vs. "the country as a whole") definitely shows up in Congressional behavior.

A much simpler (and more plausible) solution to chapium's problem is simply getting rid of the electoral college.

Many Americans choose not to go into academia (at every level) because the other options are much more lucrative. It is true that many of America's best minds do not pursue a PhD in large part because of the paltry stipend.

It is also absolutely true that the one top CS PhD program I know of does not compromise in admissions and does not suffer from a lack of highly qualified applicants.

> Americans don't have a monopoly on intelligence.

I think it's possible to agree with this point while still believing that American CS Ph.D. programs -- especially those outside the top N -- are not as attractive to domestic applicants as they probably should be.

In the 90's and early 00's I used to see the session token in the URL of every request.

For example, instead of:

        <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=throwawayjava">Comments</a>

        <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/<token>/threads?id=throwawayjava">Comments</a>

        <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=throwawayjava&token=<token>">Comments</a>

        post_with_session_cookie("/auth/api/<et cetera>", ...)

        $.post("/auth/<token>/api/<et cetera>", ...)

You can mitigate some of these problems by changing the token on every request, but now your security problem is only a (massive) usability problem.

None of this is the default for any major web framework, which is probably why this style of authentication completely disappeared in the mid 2000's when people stopped rolling their own backends from stratch.

Aren't there libraries/frameworks/products for exactly this? E.g., when I google "website tracking framework" amplitude.com is top ad result, and it seems to cover the business uses. And http://google.github.io/tracing-framework/ is the first non-ad result, which seems to cover the legitimate technical uses.

> I believe most of the site-owners need these information to operate/develop their sites

Can you give an example of a piece of user-relevant functionality that cannot be implemented without Google Analytics?

IME especially Google Analytics is mostly useful for business reasons, not technical reasons.

It's certainly fair to say that it's difficult to operate a profitable web business without Google Analytics. But that's a very different claim. And the difference is important because...

> So, if anyone could simply explain why this is SO bad or send me to correct discussion

Legitimate customer-business relationships should always involve informed consent. Cookie blockers and Firefox containers provide the technical tools that enable me to make an informed decision about whether to use your site. Without those technical mechanisms, it's very difficult for me to constantly monitor whether you are tracking me.

You/Google are free to deny me access to your products/content if I choose not to be tracked. But I should be allowed to make an informed decision about whether to use your site. The tools you're complaining about enable that informed decision.

If you believe my claims about are inaccurate, I implore you to read through those 5 citations in my original post.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17296329

I've become convinced that clothing and shoe shopping is also "mainly about the experience" for many people.

I don't get it, and I'm happy to see enough others who don't get it so that there's a critical mass of consumers for the business that provide the things I enjoy to thrive. But I do believe it's a matter of preference (and perhaps also of environmental/economic impact).

None-the-less, those exceptions do exist!

> Comparatively, the right is sacred in the US

I argue this is much more a result of political/governmental culture than the letter of the constitutional law.

I.e., we could swap the text of the First Amendment with the text of Article 10 and speech in the US would still be freer on average.

I believe this because it turns out all of the categories of speech not protected by Article 10 are also not protected by the First Amendment (there are differences, but those differences are matters of boundary rather than category; concretely, Article 10 could be interpreted in a way that's congruent with the current interpretation of the First Amendment).

> Which is part of why most transgressions involve the judicial branch heavily, the exceptions get their own page on Wikipedia.

The thesis that pithier speech protections and less explicit exceptions result in judges more jealously guarding speech is an interesting legal theory. IMO it's much more likely that these differences are attributable to political culture and national ethos.

The 1st amendment has a similar set of exceptions (morals: [1, 2]; health: [3, 4]).

> preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence

Several of the exceptions discussed in [5] apply here.

Some speech about non-gov't secrets is also not protected by the 1st. Two examples include anything the court decides is not of public interest (e.g., DeCSS), and publication of recordings or transcriptions without prior consent (in some states).

And then there's the most obvious historical exception to the First Amendment: being too dark in any century except this one.

The differences between the EU and the US are much more attributable to political culture. The massive and obvious failures of the First Amendment's protections in previous centuries demonstrate that the constitutional text itself plays only a small role; the political culture that ultimately interprets the text is also important.

Mistaking the First Amendment for a permanent, carte blanc, or unambiguous license to free speech willfully ignores the fact that the force of the document is inseparable from the political and governmental culture entrusted with its care, and that ALL current and previous political cultures have interpreted the First Amendment in a way that DOES restrict speech for "the protection of health or morals". and for "preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence".

It is the degree to which these tradeoffs are made, not the mere existence of the tradeoffs, that differentiates the First Amendment from Article 10. And to see how those tradeoffs are made, you have to go beyond the text and delve into case law.

--

[1] https://courses2.cit.cornell.edu/sociallaw/student_projects/...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...

Article 10 of the ECHR as interpreted by the ECtHR is very different from the First Amendment to the United States Constitution as presently interpreted by SCOTUS.

It's also worth noting that the First Amendment as presently interpreted by SCOTUS protects some speech that was not always unambiguously protected; see e.g., a good fraction of humans pre-1970-or-so, the evolution of the court's treatment of obscenity, speech in the schoolhouse, and so on. In some sense, even previous Americans didn't have freedom of speech as a modern American would understand it.

Aside from libraries and (some but certainly not all) museums, aren't all of these examples of things that fit well within materialist consumerism?

I also prefer yoga studios, expensive coffee, fancy restaurants to specialty knives, clothes shopping, shoe shopping, and food courts.

But those sorts of personal preferences are just matters of choosing what to consume, which doesn't seem like a fundamental or important difference.

I think "secondary concern" is a stretch. The entire religion is centered around the notion of sin; without sin, justification (and therefore Christ) is unnecessary.

Regardless, the important point is that:

> how a Christian should behave and how people get to heaven are two separate questions

I.e., regardless of whether goodness is a secondary concern in Christian theology, it is not a secondary concern in Christian culture.

Which is significant because you are explicitly asking for:

>> appreciation and celebration of a culture and people.

and in response to a thread rooted with claims about the goodness of Christians.

> I have consistently found intensely, cerebrally religious people to be some of my favorite people to talk to. And I see so much good come from people who seat religion at the head of their table

But have equally seen other things at the heads of those good tables. And some truly bad fruit in each case!

My own understanding today is that there are many good people in the world, all feeling different parts of the elephant, and we all need each other to figure out the whole:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant#The_...

There are many ways to slice that, but in any case, it's NOT symmetric. To the extent that religious people "donate" more, it's only because one of their primary outlets for self-expression happens to be considered a charity!

My previous church expected full members to tithe (not required, but strong social pressure). And that counted as "charity" even though the vast majority of that money only benefited us (worship space and a pastor eats up a huge percentage of funds). I'm sober-minded about the fact that this space was really for ourselves, no matter how charitable the intent.

However, membership dues in my local hackerspace (where we also do some charity, but where again the vast majority of funds go towards infrastructure for ourselves) aren't considered donations. Those are dues, not tithes (aka donations).

In any case, as someone who tithed for years, IMO maybe 10% of tithing goes to truly charitable causes. Maybe.

So when I hear "Christians donate more to charity!" and then read "but effect disappears with tithing is excluded", what I really hear is "we spend lots of money maintaining our clubhouses". Not because I'm judgemental or anything, but because I've seen both church and other non-profit entities finances. It's just the reality of most community-organized non-profits that don't have explicit charitable goals as their primary intent.

So, to be clear, there's nothing wrong with funding a space and your pastor's salary (or, for that matter, paying to lodge for out-of-town hackers/lecturers). But the asymmetry in how those are accounted comes with hopefully clear entailments about any purported higher moral ground for one over the other.

There are many straight and narrow paths which exclude the supernatural as motivation.

Spirituality and deep-seated moral compasses are not the exclusive domain of theists. Some of the most spiritual people I know are atheists. All of the least spiritual people I know are rabid Christians. Both facts are certainly a result of my particular circumstances and aren't meant to generalize to either group.

> On the contrary, it's really pointless to try hard to be a good person if getting to heaven is the concern.

Many seminary lectures have been filled by the intellectual quagmires that grow out of "let grace abound".

> I don't know who teaches this stuff people have in their heads

IME growing up in the church, mostly American Protestants. And I don't only mean that in a coy way. Many American Protestant churches do not require their clergy attend seminary. The result is predictable -- some excellent diamonds in the rough giving competent sermons, surrounded by a whole bunch of crazy rants vaguely grounded in some words that do indeed come from the bible.

> The usually chummy and Hawaiian-shirt wearing Lasseter admitted late last year to giving “unwanted hugs” and behavior that others “felt crossed the line.” Interviews revealed uninvited kisses and touching and amorous displays at studio parties where alcohol was served.

Understanding natural language is much more than just a design problem. It's a grand challenge and core subfield of Computer Science. It's the original Turing Test.

        sudo apt-get install gargoyle-free;
        wget http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/tads/Rematch.gam;
        gargoyle Rematch.gam

What are your thoughts on how smartphones might impact this left vs. right debate? The button on the right is accessible without using just one hand (tapping with thumb while holding in palm), but I need two hands to tap the button on the left.

But I'm left-handed. Do right-handed people hold their smartphone in their left hand? It just occurred to me that my minority handedness might be why I've always found large smartphones hard to use.

I think those numbers are useful. Microsoft spends $14B on CS R&D. We can go back and forth about the R and the D, but that's still a freaking huge number.

> The OP specifically said Microsoft was the largest funder of academic CS research.

Needless to say, I'm not OP, and I never made any of the claims OP made.

The only purpose of my original post was to try and share what numbers we do have on this question.

And I stand by reply calling BS on the distinction between research based upon whether money is flowing into professors' research groups. Some of the world's greatest patent lawyers are retained by universities, after all.

It's annoying that MSR's numbers aren't broken out from the R&D total. All we can do is speculate what portion of that goes to MSR et al, really.

But it's not surprising. There are all sorts of incentives for not breaking out those numbers. Still, the numbers are helpful. $14B is a lot of money. Even a small slice of that makes MSR one of the most prominent funders of CS research.

> Personally, I think if Microsoft spent anywhere close to a billion dollars on pure academic research... Microsoft grants would be pursued just as hard as NSF grants, because they would be such a major funding source.

I disagree with your perspective throughout this paragraph.

Funding grants for university faculty is NOT the only valid model for funding pure research. Therefore, we could very easily expect MSR to contribute a significant fraction of total US CS research funding without decreasing the competitiveness of the grant landscape for professors at universities.

To me, the distinction between "basic research" and "everything else" seems more important than the particular funding model used. So the criticism that Google has a bad track record with long-running research agendas is highly relevant, whereas 'how much money goes to academics in universities' is far less relevant.

> Additionally, if Microsoft were plunking such a large amount of money into academic research, I assume they would at the very least publish that figure in a PR piece to cash in on some public good will.

But of course, they already do that: "$14 Billion!"

Microsoft reported spending $14 billion on R&D in 2017. That year, NSF's CISE budget was somewhere around $950 million.

The comparison is apples and oranges, because NSF is funding public research and a lot of basic research, whereas one must assume the vast majority of that $14B at Microsoft is spent on the D portion of R&D.

Still, though, MSR is one of the more prolific research institutions in CS. If they were a university, they'd probably be top-ranked.

Productivity as typically reported is a statistic called "Total Factor Productivity" (TFP).

Here's how it's calculated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_factor_productivity#Calc...

> What units do we use?

TFP is unitless.

That's not true; the first decade of the 2000s rivaled the post-war era in terms of TFP growth:

https://www.bls.gov/lpc/nfbbar.gif

Even Brynjolfsson's ultimate thesis was not that "computers don't induce growth in TFP", but rather that "computers and business practices need to converge in order for computers to have an effect on TFP".

Consider, e.g., real estate prices in a relatively stable area after that area is plunged into a long-running war. Prices will sharply correct, but talking about a "peace bubble" is a bit disingenuous.

I know many, many just-below-olympic level divers. Of those, one suffered "minor" injuries (deep bruising basically everywhere on their body and a burst ear drum) and one suffered major life-threatening internal injuries (collapsed lung) after landing on their belly/back from 10m.

The person with the less severe injuries flopped with the aerator on, which is probably the only reason the injuries weren't more serious.

Diving from 10m is absolutely dangerous, even for professionals, especially without an aerator.

> but I don't know how open the facilities in the US are to the public/minors.

In the USA, at the places I know of, untrained children are allowed to dive off of 10m platforms during "free swimming" times. But only straight dives, and only after they demonstrate straight dives off of 5m and 7m.

Which seems like a sensible compromise, given the risks.

(Exceptions are always possible. If you are training for platform diving, you can simply tell the life guard and they will let you do fancier dives from 10m.)

> giving 3.3 million inhabitants per tower, compared to 5.3 for the whole US

"conurbation vs. entire population" not a fair comparison -- a huge portion of the US population lives in rural areas that couldn't support a diving tower even if they wanted to.

All of the USA cities whose diving infrastructure I know about have between 1 million to 2 million inhabitants per tower. According to that metric, the USA is less risk averse about diving (but actually, it's really just a matter of wealth and interest, because diving is an expensive sport and platforms are actually specialized sports equipment).

Edit: Also, the wiki list of 10m platforms in the usa is out of date or just wrong. None of the 10m platforms I've used on a regular basis are on that list...