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My guess is the grandparent is (mis-)remembering the kerfuffle[0] around mongo shipping a copy of PG as a "BI Connector". But yeah, the timeline is off, that was in 2015.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10697692

That was then. Try and find a post-Cold-War instance of the US deciding to usurp free and fair elections for our own economic or security purposes. We weren't doing it for the fun of it, and in a unipolar world order, we don't do it at all.

>Scientists have long claimed that our ability with numbers is indeed biologically evolved – that we can count because counting was a useful thing for our brains to be able to do.

I would like some citations for this. This is the first I've heard of this, and I previously have assumed that it was universally accepted that this was not the case.

This article makes similar claims at multiple points, without corroboration. "researchers have concluded", "researchers often assume", "researchers have argued", for arguments that I have never heard made.

Strictly staying within US law is not the only thing that the US intelligence apparatus tries to do. There are also agreements not to monitor the citizens of "Five-Eyes" citizens in those countries without due process; even if not illegal, it would violate the intelligence-sharing agreements we have with those nations and would be highly improper due to the damage to national security that risking those intelligence-sharing agreements would entail.

That being said, this story is incredibly thin.

>It aimed to explain why Dotcom and others charged in the FBI's Megaupload investigation were spied on for two months longer than previously admitted.

There's no reason this would even be improper, if the FBI had gone through due process in the US, which it appears they had. This story appears to be entirely Kim Dotcom's lawyer trying to politicize his case in order to fight a lawful extradition.

I don't even think that's particularly controversial. The concentration of tech startups in SF has been devastating for the city, and has distorted every aspect of early-stage tech startups for years. And frankly, YC bears a rather large proportion of the blame for this.

Can you clarify what you mean? How are we not left with determinism at a fundamental level?

(And if it starts with a Q, then at most one can say is that it's possible that it's not deterministic. It's perfectly compatible with determinism, just not (AIUI) (and IANATP) currently known whether or not it is the case.)

Assange is not a US citizen.

Here's the actual source document.

https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/icotr/51117/2016_Cert_FI...

It appears to be proper judicial oversight of national security operations.

Unsurprisingly, having the rule of law applied even in the pursuit of those who seek to end it is smeared by those who would prefer to weaken the United States' national security and the institutions of liberal democracies the world over.

That's just not true. The first credible reporting on the existence of the investigation came from CNN, 10 days prior to Comey's testimony in March.

On one hand, yes, our political divisions no doubt make that kind of information warfare campaign tempting.

On the other hand, it's already pissed us off something fierce, and I think the narrative in the mid-term future will ultimately be one where would-be adversaries decide they don't want to be the next poor soul to be made an example of.

I find myself self-censoring on topics like this, not because of what I (don't) fear is being done by authorities, but because I can't help but to note that we're not, in fact, living in some Orwellian dystopia, and that seemingly the surveillance that is being done is promulgating a safe and stable society, but not toeing the sky-is-falling line doesn't do much for those numbers by my username.

Meanwhile, there are places that are living in a dystopia, and the single most important goal of the powers that be in those places is undermining the rule of law. So I can't help but be skeptical of stories like this.

We have a society where we can air discussions about topics like this, and where criminals can be kept out of the public sphere, and these are good things. There. And hey, tonight at least, for once, I won't go to a throwaway to say so.

My siblings in this thread need to learn about the reforms that were done post-Watergate. The rule of law governs everyone, especially law enforcement, in the USA. If you don't believe that, why do you think lawmakers bother with getting laws passed to allow surveillance in the first place?

You can't have it both ways. Either LEO follow the letter of the law and we're not in some 1984 scenario (because there are, in fact, substantial protections for privacy under the law), or they do not, and we're left with this mystery of why things like the USA PATRIOT Act exist, which now needs to be explained.

If this was illegal surveillance, then obviously it wasn't within the scope of what's allowed by said anti-terror laws.

This doesn't add up for me yet, because I don't understand what the supposed motive is. Do the police have much interest in journalists accounts? I mean really, what's the thinking here? Are London police ignoring murders of journalists? The UK is hardly an autocracy.

Frankly we should wait to see what the IPCC says. This could easily be entirely fabricated, the only corroboration was information that would be accessible to cybercriminals, not anything that implicates law enforcement specifically.

Why?

Per the article in the Guardian, the Independent Police Complaints Commission is investigating the claims.

I'll note that the corroboration was passwords of politically active people, which frankly doesn't do anything to implicate law enforcement. This may well simply be yet another "whistleblower" attempting to sow distrust of any authorities who are not beholden to their own influence.

>blindly trusting "the data"

This phrase is not coherent.

Doing something blindly would literally be to do something without data.

Towards any end at all. IRL, there are no points for effort, and certainly no points for purity of intent. The proof is in the pudding.

And so, no, I don't see good/effective politicians as having some quality that would otherwise have them be considered sociopaths. I expect a competent elected leader to behave along the lines of what I'd expect from a competent co-worker.

Pragmatism is a principle.

> Normally I'm impressed by Bill Gates' thinking, but this seems half-baked.

I would submit that that has more to do with the summarizing/simplifying/editing done by Quartz to represent Gates' views on the topic in 1:43.

> How does it compare to the usual default settings of PostgreSQL for example? - I think you get SERIALIZABLE, so the behaviour should be very reasonable.

Not clear if you're referring to PostgreSQL or CockroachDB, but for the record, the PostgreSQL default transaction isolation level is READ COMMITTED, not SERIALIZABLE.

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/sql-set-trans...

Why wouldn't it be fair use? What exactly is your understanding of what the criteria are?

Thanks for the writeup. I've never used Linode, but I recognized lots of echoes of my own experience with AWS, with the big point being something that isn't always given the importance that I think it deserves - when you get to larger deployments, you are much better off being a comparatively small fish. We started on colocated hardware, set up some new services in AWS, and scaled them up; we pushed the components hard in various weird ways and actually tickled some bugs in the c4 instance class when they first came out, but before I was able to figure out repro steps my phone was ringing and there was an engineer on the other side, and that's just because they wanted to figure the problem out - we did not, and still don't, have a paid support plan. But by virtue of being likely to affect other users, if we'd managed to trigger it, it was worth solving for them. I've certainly never had anything like an experience where I was trying to get them to fix a problem; any issues simply have to be fixed, as they will invariably end up affecting (many) others.

More recently, as we outgrew our original colo hardware, we got set up on OVH dedicated servers, which was back-of-envelope cheaper. Between delays in getting hardware online and managing to trigger the DDOS mitigation in a couple different scenarios, with the debugging and frustration you can imagine that entailed, I don't know if that's turned out to be the case. But when you're dealing with AWS (and I imagine the same should be true of GCE & Azure), it's really simple - if you have to ask, you're nothing special. You're not going to exhaust the available hardware. You will never wait N weeks to get another rack operational.

Just put them all on the same list and use negative points for the rewards. A spreadsheet would work perfectly.

Links?

Sources please.

The clear consensus is that AGW is real. That is a far cry from saying that there is a clear consensus that it must be dealt with ever, let alone that it must be dealt with in the near-term.

I'm sure he means infscroll using keyset pagination.

The UX, as noted, is ugly - have to somehow support scrolling in both directions with some sort of lazy-loading - but pagination in this context doesn't === offset-based pagination.

Uh, this makes no sesne to me. He's speaking specifically about the numbers reported for the Georgia Dock, which, from the reporting in this article, could very easily be completely legitimate. You seem to be interpreting his statement as applying to everything under his job description as director of regulatory compliance.

I did not read his statement as a blanket statement; it hadn't occurred to me that anyone would until I saw your comment. As a matter of fact, the 2nd sentence seems to explicitly preclude that interpretation.

Sorry - should have quoted the specific thing I was calling out-of-date, which was from a few comments up-thread:

> Brains (read: humans) can learn from very few examples and in very little time. [...] Those are all things that ANNs have proven quite incapable of doing, as has any other technology you might want to think of.

This is just an outdated view of the state-of-the-art. It's understandable, given that it's outdated by maybe six months, iff you're willing to go with preprints.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.06065

A hobbyist looking for something plug-and-play will still generally want lots of data; the cutting edge is not exactly "curl|bash"-able. But the papers coming out this year have been dispatching what I thought would be entire areas of study in a dozen pages, one after another after another.

Not only do I think it's a "when" and not an "if", I think the timelines people throw around date to "ancient" times - meaning, a few years ago. Given where were are right now, what we should be asking is whether "decades" should be plural.

What would you have them do instead?

I don't love it, but I don't have a problem with it, mostly because I have no idea what other route they could take.

Ad-supported is something Buzzfeed can make viable, but it means tailoring both the substance and the form of their content to optimize for that. Doesn't work for WaPo.

Of course I do, which is why I asked the 2nd question:

> What gives you reason to think they (not the DNC!) be that colossally stupid?

The political motivation is what would make lying here colossally stupid.