Thriptic

Can anyone provide a synopsis of what data is actually submitted and what exact states trigger the submission?

I have this problem as well. I have gotten around it in a few ways:

First, practice what you are going to say RIGOROUSLY. You should be able to recite your full speech / pitch / presentation / whatever with no use of visual aids. Basically, you should memorize it. I always assume that I will be ~20% worse while performing than while practicing, so if I can do the whole presentation without visual aids while practicing then the visual aids will be sufficient to save me if I get in trouble while presenting. Most people rely on their visual aids as a huge crutch during practice, and as a result they forget what they want to say and end up staring at their PowerPoint or notecards during the entire presentation as opposed to engaging with the audience. They come off as nervous and unprepared. Further, using your visual aids as a crutch incentivizes creating verbose slides as an insurance mechanism which is why most PowerPoints you see are shit.

Second, realize that public speaking is fundamentally about telling a story. A good story and a good presentation should share the same elements: they should be amusing and engaging (always work in some humor and audience interactions to engage the audience, many of whom probably don't want to be there and will fall asleep otherwise); they should be concise (don't go on tangents); key take aways should be clearly stated and there shouldn't be a data dump; there should be a natural flow and verbal transitions should be employed as if you were speaking to a friend; etc. Finally, know your audience. What do they care about / want to see? What do they already know? How can they be persuaded or amused?

Third, as other posters have mentioned, the only way to get better at this is to practice. Go find opportunities to practice. It only takes a few good presentations to shake the fear of being a bad presenter / acquire the rep of being a good presenter.

Finally, realize that the stakes are pretty low normally. Most of the presentations I sit through are awful (even those from C suite people who basically present for a living) and most people can't speak or convey information well. As such, I rarely remember when people bomb as bad performance is the norm.

It depends on what you mean by gun control (full ban vs restrictions), but the opportunity cost of banning firearms is not negligible.

* There is an economic impact (lost revenue for firearm producers, sellers, resellers, ammunition producers, gun ranges, sport associations, hunting groups, accessory producers, etc).

* There is a personal utility cost (enthusiasts, hunters, and sport shooters can't enjoy their hobbies anymore).

* There is a communal cost (those people now have fewer reasons to come together and form groups).

* There is a personal defense cost (citizens and especially at risk groups are less able to defend themselves).

* There is a national defense cost (armed citizens impede invasion).

* There may be a military readiness and recruitment cost.

* There is an increased probability of tyrannical government (armed citizens impede this, I don't know to what degree).

* There are time and legal costs (this will be fought aggressively and take up large amounts of legislator and judicial time which could be spent on other matters). In the US this would require a full constitutional amendment which is by design a non-trivial undertaking.

* There are regulatory costs (someone needs to define and interpret what bans mean).

* There are enforcement costs (all existing firearms would be grandfathered in. To my knowledge there is no legal basis for eminent domain of firearms or seizure of assets that were legally purchased pre-ban. For example, any alcohol purchased before prohibition took effect was still legal to possess and use. Any automatic weapon purchased before the ban on automatic weapons is still legal).

You can argue that it's still a net benefit to ban firearms (and you may be right) but I disagree that there are negligible costs.

These aren't even remotely equivalent and you know it. Western governments don't place minders inside Western companies; they don't take stakes in all companies to exert control; they don't have social scores that are contingent upon your speech about the government; they don't ban encrypted communications; they don't have great firewalls; they can't easily detain you arbitrarily; they don't strip control of IP and transfer it to local competitors; there is a much higher degree of rule of law...

Just because the US et al aren't perfect (and they certainly aren't) doesn't mean the behavior in China is equivalent to what is going on in the west.

Well what I mean is human augmentation with machines. I'm actually not sure what the proper word is.

You could if you wanted to die an unpleasant death.

Naively I would say cybernetics. To my knowledge I don't think there are many regulations governing the types of things that people can implant in themselves. If you try to market a device as a cybernetic or make health claims about it then the FDA will come after you, but self implantation of hardware is likely not regulated much.

Well, you can't run a human trial without IRB approval, you can't run an animal study without IACUC approval, and you can't introduce a therapeutic without FDA approval so I'd say that's pretty tightly regulated.

As I have said in a number of these types of threads, saying we will pay people off / implement UBI as a solution to reduced participation in the labor force dramatically underestimates the complexity of the problems of automation / globalization / de-industrialization. Most people want to work; they derive self-esteem from their labor and for being a provider; and status is awarded by society depending on the type of job you work and your position in an entity (eg CEO, foreman, etc). Being unemployed / on benefits in America is strongly looked down on and stigmatized. People don't want "hand outs" or "charity", they want to do something to generate value. While I agree that we will ultimately have to pursue some sort of UBI or payoff solution, implementing it requires a complete cultural shift in the way we think about work which will likely be a difficult uphill battle. People go all in on retraining (even though it obviously can't work for everyone) because retraining fits well into American culture without controversy.

I am not making the claim that private firearms ownership is required for maintaining human rights. My claim is that it is an additional control against tyranny, which it is. It is more difficult for a tyrannical government to enforce it's will on an armed populace than an unarmed populace.

Very fair point. I had never considered this before.

The Arab Spring and resulting aftermath is illustrative of what happens in such a situation.

I categorically disagree with this. Look at the enormous damage small groups of armed people have imparted on the government even recently. Two delusional guys in Boston shut down the entire city for multiple days and necessitated a state-wide response by blowing up a few pipe bombs, killing a police officer, and going on a car chase. This response cost millions and millions of dollars and resulted in millions of dollars more in lost productivity. The Waco Texas debacle necessitated a huge federal response which we are still feeling the effects of to this day. The Oklahoma City bombing was perpetrated by two guys who didn't even use firearms.

I'm certainly not endorsing any of these actions and I believe the government responses were warranted, but there is a clear history of rebellious armed civilian groups being huge problems for governments.

It's definitely the case that an armed populace acts as a check against tyranny. You can argue that this is not enough of a benefit to warrant private gun ownership given the societal costs and low probability of a tyrannical government in the US, but this benefit definitely exists.

The amount of benefits is miniscule relative to the value they are generating and their true market value. Further, the biggest benefit, free college, effectively doesn't count because no one in a competitive program has the time to major in anything that would plausibly provide a good job right after graduation. It is a big story whenever a football player graduates with a STEM degree given how hard it is from a time management perspective (or at least this used to be very rare iirc). Also if we are being real, a lot of these players don't belong in college academically. They would not be accepted on grades alone and would not survive without the hilariously enormous support system in place solely designed to keep them in compliance with the rules.

Most college students in STEM won't even work unpaid internships and yet these guys are expected to generate orders of magnitude more value while being unpaid or hilariously under compensated.

You're being down voted but you're making an extremely important point. It's very, very difficult to convince people to reduce their quality of life because something bad is going to happen in the future to people who may or may not be them. You see this all over the place in other domains such as diet (people know they should eat less but don't), exercise (people don't do it), personal finance (people don't save), alcohol and drug use (people don't stop), medication compliance (people can't be bothered to take their meds), security (people can't be bothered to do best practice), etc; and those are problems that directly affect them with shorter time horizons. You're fighting human nature, and you're going to lose. Further, you have a collective action problem where no one is going to act because they don't want to be the person who has to reduce QOL while other people don't. I firmly believe that people will not get onboard with reduction of consumption en masse and that the only way to solve the problem of climate change is to innovate our way out of the problems while maintaining analogous QOL.

I applaud the general HN community for taking a stand against the problem and making sacrifices, but the reality is that most other people won't, and I think we should have that discussion.

I agree. I wasn't making a value judgement, simply stating a fact.

To your point, that same stigma about LGBT guys being weak, feminine, and emotional is one of the many factors that stops a lot of people from coming out too.

Is their password change function working? I can't seem to change my pw. It gets to SMS 2FA then appears to fail when I try to verify the token I'm sent and boots me back to the PW change page.

Exactly this. Further, I'd expand on what they are saying to say that the difference between a bad customer experience, good customer experience, and great customer experience typically lies in the little details and goes beyond the core offering. Great customer service orgs take the time to check up on you and make sure you are happy (and have it not be an automated effort), they bend the rules to fit an edge case, they always own mistakes and try to make it right, and they are fundamentally customer focused. Bad orgs treat customers like numbers and hide behind policy and contracts at every opportunity so that they don't actually have to deal with people.

For example, I took my girlfriend to a nice hotel for our anniversary last year. When the hotel heard I was having an anniversary, they sent up a very nice hand written congratulatory card, a bottle of prosecco, and a selection of deserts on the house. That couldn't have taken them more than 15 minutes and cost them like 20 dollars, but it is something I will always remember; I will definitely return there in the future; and I recommend that hotel to any friends seeking a nice place to stay. That is great customer service.

At a more basic level, I was at a mid tier hotel a few weeks ago and somehow I didn't get the room upgrade I paid for. The management immediately refunded me the difference without complaint and gave me a few drink tickets to use at their bar as an apology. That is good customer service.

Contrast those to my experience at my former favorite steak house this year where for the last ten years I had been telling everyone to go. I went there for Valentine's day (had a reservation) and was told I had to wait 30 minutes for a table to open. While I was waiting, I saw multiple couples of the same size come in behind me and get seated. After the 30 minute wait, they tried to seat us at the loud and noisy bar. When I complained, they basically told me tough shit you get what you get. A reservation just guarantees you a table not a good one. I concluded that they were discriminating against us because we are younger than the average clientele there. Not only did I walk out and cost them my business, but I gave them a scathing Yelp review, and now shit talk them at every opportunity. I will never go back even though they were great every other time I was there, and instead always point friends to one of their main competitors when asked my opinion about local steak houses. I do this even though I know the competitor's food isn't as good. They could have given me the table I deserved; they could have comped some drinks or something; but no, they were right and I was wrong and so they lost a loyal customer instead.

I'm not talking about rainbow tables or hash tables, I'm talking about straight up bruting with GPUs and hashcat. You seem to be implying that using a salt adds entropy, but the salt is known (plaintext) and it's added in a set way so it doesn't. Sure your choice of algorithm and complexity factor will definitely affect your guess rate and ease of bruting, and yes using a salt prevents the use of precomputed hash tables, but it's not like it's impossible to crack a salted 6-8 character password hashed with bcrypt if you throw enough GPUs at the problem. The only question is if it's cost effective.

What's odd to me about this post and all of the responses in this thread so far is that everyone is only thinking about password length as a way to defend against online bruting attempts when in reality long passwords mostly serve to protect against offline bruting attempts. The reason you don't want 6 or 8 character passwords is that when your password hashes get dumped it's a lot easier to crack them.

You made a valid point about the difficulty of judging how sensitive information should be released and the dangers of letting small groups of people make those judgements. I apologise for my somewhat tangential post. I've consumed a good quantity of whiskey and made a reflexive post.

If you're concerned about the best interest of the public and US citizens then maybe you should spend less time worrying about Snowden and more time worrying about the NSA's inadequate monitoring, life cycle, and DLP practices. Billions of dollars were lost and countless orgs were negatively affected by the release of Eternal Blue alone.

Well, the problem in this case isn't really in the scientific or peer review process itself, it's in using citation count as a metric for paper quality or researcher expertise.

I've had people play this game on several of my papers under review. Reviews will say something like "high quality submission but the authors should consider including work X for completeness" etc where it's obvious that work X was written by the reviewer. As an author, I just found some place to plausibly cite the work and moved on. The quality or validity of my manuscript was not impacted in any way. In my admittedly limited experience, reviewers will rarely green light obviously inferior work just to get an additional citation as it impacts their reputation and it's an inefficient way to stat pad (self-citation or trading citations with your collaborators is by far the most efficient way to pump citation count, especially in the context of review papers). Additionally, obviously inferior works don't even make it to the peer review process; they are rejected by the journal editors in a first pass screen.

There are more insidious games people play that DO impact publication quality, such as requesting friendly reviewers (this mechanism is normally legitimately used to help editors route manuscripts for review to domain experts), submitting work to journals where the PI is an editor / has relationships with editors, attaching well known PIs to manuscripts to add the appearance of legitimacy even though they did no work and were not involved at all, etc. These are problems that won't go away because there are far too many researchers and not enough money / positions to go around, so people are heavily incentivized to play games.

The most hilarious rules I've encountered were for a large, well known US hospital:

* Password must be EXACTLY 8 characters long

* Password must start with a letter

* You must use exactly 3/4 of the following: upper case, lower case, numbers, one of three special characters

* Password cannot "resemble" username or past password

Pass a law that says every lost user account is an X dollar fine based on data "richness" that can't be discharged in bankruptcy. For simplicity, let's say $10 in this case. 160 million lost accounts is now a 1.6 billion dollar fine. That is enough to cripple a lot of companies. It would make people think long and hard about what data they wanted to keep and how they wanted to secure it.

Alternatively, create a situation where companies are responsible in perpetuity for damages related to identity theft if a victim's credentials are lost. If company X loses my SSN and then someone opens up a fake account in my name, they are automatically responsible for any costs I incur and I don't have to prove attribution.

The purpose should be to heavily, heavily disincentivize any storage of basic data or PII unless absolutely necessary.

I agree. I recently visited Italy and was planning on visiting several of the major cities. I went to Florence for a day and it was such a shit show that I gave up on the larger cities entirely (think thousands and thousands of people crammed around notable sights all trying to get that perfect shot for IG).

Instead, I spent most of my time in the countryside. It was absolutely beautiful and I rarely saw another foreigner.

I would argue that it is not really covert as brown bagging for public consumption is a well known social convention. Most Americans (especially those enforcing the law) know or assume that when you are obscuring a bottle with a bag and consuming from that bottle in public, you are consuming alcohol. It is not much more covert than not placing the drink in a brown paper bag.

Is it true that some users of bars are alcoholics? Definitely. Is it true that some users of bars want to participate in date rape? Definitely. Is it likely that these users represent even a small percentage of overall bar patrons? No. We don't need to shut down an entire industry to protect a tiny subset of users.