calhoun137

I dont think the law can be modeled as a logically consistent set of rules, because there are so many laws that its always possible to apply correct deductive arguments to arrive at different "correct" conclusions which contradict each other.

A much better model is to view the legal system as a tool used by the rich and powerful to exert their domination over the oppressed classes. This has historically always been what the law was for, going back all the way to ancient Rome. This is also what makes the concept of a "rule of law, not of man" such a revolutionary concept.

I thought the implication was he didnt want to use sms for 2fa because of sim hijacking attacks

Well said. I do, fwiw. Im not the kind of person who makes arguments by reference to authority often, I found his political views repulsive and confusing when I first learned about them. Its been a long journey but I believe there is a strong possibility he simply was wrong about many of the beliefs he held about politics and the course of the future of human history.

Von Nueman is on the record as saying he believed computers were a sub field of self replicating machines. I believe they will be very important in the future and will have many applications.

Not really, unfortunately. I think it would be fun to build a 3d printer that can replicate itself, but have not tried building any prototypes because besides being too expensive I also havent taken my research into that far enough. I am a very ambitious person and have big plans for the future! What I have done on this subject besides reading about it is very theoretical and abstract, its more of an aspiration right now than an active research project to be completely honest.

he also got the US military to pay for the R&D and to make the results of all the research in the public domain. he got into a big fight with Einstein over whether or not they would do experiments at IAS (Einstein only wanted to do math and theory there)

"Differences over individual contributions and patents divided the group at the Moore School. In keeping with the spirit of academic enquiry, von Neumann was determined that advances be kept in the public domain. ECP progress reports were widely disseminated. As a consequence, the project had widespread influence. Copies of the IAS machine appeared nationally"

from: https://www.ias.edu/electronic-computer-project

Von Neumann was very smart, but I think he had poor judgement when it comes to politics. Perhaps not. I don't know tbh! When I learned about his political views many years ago it actually deeply changed strongly held opinions that I had about America. He was so smart, and I want so badly to follow in his footsteps, that I said to myself "If Von Neumann believed that only America can save the world from fascism, it is enough for me, I will go on as he begun, he must have had his reasons and knew what he was doing. But I will not abandon my principles! Only change the way I go about trying to achieve them."

I am so happy to see this article about Von Neumann on HN!!! I have been posting about him on here for years, and have read all his books, but not as many of his papers as I would like, they are really hard! I have been working for many years now on continuing his theories of weather control technology and self-replicating machines. He is my absolute personal hero and the scientist who, far above all others, I consider to be the one in whose footsteps I want to follow.

Turings Cathedral by George Dyson is fantastic https://books.google.com/books/about/Turing_s_Cathedral.html...

I agree it was a pretty big simplification which ignored the role of the state. I consider "the existing political structure" to consist of both "wall st" and "silicon valley" and that these elites are in conflict with each other.

One of the key dynamics of the modern era is the result of a conflict between the old beauracracy on wall street and the rising aristocracy of silicon valley tech executives. While wall street controls the flow of money, silicon valley controls the flow of information. The secret algorithms of social media companies like youtube are their primary source of power, and to control the algorithm means to have a massive ability to manipulate public opinion and control the public mind. I believe its only a matter of time until silicon valley emerges as the victor of the current conflict.

This is an extremelly well written and well thought out post. Thank you.

Here is my suggestion: how about for the next LHC scale physics project we get all the governments in the world to put in manhatten project levels of funding to research machines which can control the climate and the weather to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change.

This would be a lot more practical and better for science and the future of the human species than confirming what everyone has known with 99%+ confidence for over 30 years. Just my 2 cents.

I am not very familiar with Scott Aaronson and am just making a general observation about the subject of QC, I have no idea what his motivations or intentions are. If Scott believes QC will day be practical and I don't, only time can tell who is right and who is wrong. I have seen this kind of goal post moving in string theory, and its been going on for 20 years with QC in a strikingly similar way imo.

There is no way to argue against this kind of goal post moving style of debate because even if another 20 years go by and QC still don't exist on a practical level, the goal posts will just keep getting moved.

I am extremely confident that this will continue until the public gets bored of hearing about it.

I think we need to comes to grips with a hard truth about the reality of academic life. Once you invest decades of your life into a research subject, if it turns out the entire thing is never going to work, there are major social and financial pressures to deceive the public about the true nature of the subject.

I saw this happen with string theory first hand, and my experience with string theory was a major factor that led to changing paths to pure mathematics and computer science.

As someone who has spent a lot of time researching QC, I do not believe it will ever be possible to build a practical quantum computer. We have been over this so many times on this site. Here is a good link from a serious professional who takes the same position [1]

In fact, my personal opinion is that quantum computers are functionally, a hoax, the main purpose of which is to generate hype, secure research grants, ensure career stability for academics, and give science reporters something to write about to get clicks while deceiving the public.

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/gil-kalais-argument-against-q...

This is the better link. Omg I love this guys humble style. If I ever think I have made a big discovery in math or physics I am totally going to present it like this: "You know how I am always coming up with bad ideas that turn out to be wrong, well I just had another one. No big deal, silly me I can't help myself [big sigh] This is so embarrassing, but I think gravity and quantum physics could be related by ...

This is a surprisingly hard question to answer! An orthodox point of view says "diameter" is just a word for a physical quantity which can be measured by experiment and plugged into a formula to predict the result of other experiments. In my personal opinion, theoretical physics is not currently capable of providing a satisfactory answer, but if we knew more about the relationship between quantum field theory and general relativity it would probably be possible to say more.

There are plenty of ways to wave your hands about it, and I have been doing this for a long time and could give 100 different explanations. At the end of the day what do I see in my head when I think about the "diameter" of the proton? Basically a probabilistic soup which is confined to a small area.

The "wave function" of a quantum particle can tell you where it is but is not the same as the particle itself. Standard QM assumes particles are infinitesimal points, in QFT this leads to infinities which can be resolved if you assume particles have a "smeared out" radius. This "smeared out" radius is what the proton diameter should be related to when the more complete quantum and gravity theory is discovered.

Whew this is a long article, does anyone have the tl;dr?

One reason to do this would be to discover what other apps the user has on their device which may not be detectable by other methods. That is valuable business intelligence that could be used in various ways for maintaining a competitive advantage. I got this idea from this reply:

https://twitter.com/nial_26/status/1167464788667928576

This is causing a big problem for my business right now, but I am not mad at Stripe because you earned that level of credibility and respect in my opinion. I understand these things happen and am glad to know a team as excellent as Stripe's is on the job.

I'm just here to let you know your website designs are aMaZiNg!!!!

> I’m not sure the debt situation can be fixed until we deprogram people to stop seeing college as this one, singular, necessary thing, though.

This is an interesting point of view, and I would like to push back on this.

In my view, it is not a practical suggestion to "deprogram people" like you describe, anymore than it is practical to "deprogram" the general population to no longer fall victim to ponzi scheme's or other scams like fake ICO's etc... This is because con-artists prey on fundamental aspects of human nature and employ sophisticated social engineering techniques to manipulate the behavior of their victims. In order for the social engineering of "our side" (i.e. deprogramming people) to overcome the social engineering of con-artists, we would need to be better at it than they are! We are not going to beat them at their own game, and attempting to do so is a losing strategy.

The student loan industry is a predatory and hostile industry which is backed by the biggest banks and has enormous political influence in congress. The main goal of their lobbying is to prevent being regulated.

This is a smart strategy for them because in my opinion, history has clearly demonstrated that the best solution to this type of problem is government regulation which prevents the worst abuses of a free market system.

There used to be laws where you could clear your debt by filing for bankruptcy, but this is no longer possible for student loans. If my generation had more political power in DC, we would pass laws to allow this as well as cancel a very large percentage of outstanding student debt.

So I strongly disagree with proposal that people need to be "deprogrammed" because I don't think this is a practical approach to address this major problem.

I agree with a lot of what you are saying here. But the education system functions as a means of enforcing class divisions and preventing economic mobility.

The major issue is student debt, regardless of any other legitimate criticisms of college culture/education, this is literally the largest source of debt in America today. There is more student debt than there is real estate debt. In many ways, college has become a scam designed to entrap young people in a life time of debt servitude. We dont have to fix all the other problems with college at the same time. I am lucky to have no student loans, but most people I know are saddled with massive debt. I want to do something to help them.

> The current proposals as I understand them will subsidize tuition at the current, severely inflated rate, letting the colleges get away with their price gouging

This is great point in my opinion. Solving this issue in the real world is not simple, it comes down more to the political power of various competing factions than it does to coming up with a "big idea". Once you have a "big idea" (like free public college), unless your faction has sufficient political power, then how are you going to implement it?

The problem is not that we are lacking big ideas that will work, there are many of them. The problem is we don't have the political power to implement a single one of them.

Consider this statement from the OP:

"Look no further than this chart (https://i.imgur.com/B3sVMjg.png), around 2010 was when the gov started fully backing and giving the loans directly, and conveniently it's when students needs for loans skyrocketed. It's so obvious that colleges took advantage of it."

Right now the gov't intervene's in public education by "fully backing and giving the loans directly". My position is that not all forms of government intervention are inherently bad, for example, the way the government intervenes in public high school is something we both agree is good.

I believe that the current way the gov't intervenes in college education is deeply problematic, and that instead of completely removing the role of gov't, we should copy the model from high school which has proven to work very well.

> This is why I'm so skeptical of the "free college" rhetoric

I assume by "this" you are refering to the OP's statement that "This is what happens when there's 0 pressure on universities to price their programs competitively."

One of the idea's behind free public college is to apply market pressure to private college's, so that they have to price their programs competitively. In a risk free debt financed system, prices will rise, the same dynamic happens for both medical care and real estate.

I am not sure on what basis you think this kind of system would make the problems worse.

Also I am curious, are you in favor of abolishing public high school? What part of your argument against free college does not apply to free high schools? One of the many talking points behind the free college proposal is that in today's job market, a college degree has the some utility that a high school degree used to have.

> People act like the utility of this stuff is apriori obvious, but to me it's really not. Unless you are trying to build a knowledge graph, what do you do with these triples?

I have been very interested in this subject for years, the motivation to me seems clear, so perhaps I can shed some light on this for you. Being able to extract information from raw text would have a huge number of business applications, and could completely change the way human beings interact with machines. Besides that, there are a number of questions which are unanswered which bear on fundamental research topics in deep learning, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing.

The idea behind the triples is they provide additional data points which can be used to improve the efficiency & accuracy of information extraction.

This is a super hard subject at the forefront of modern research and its just a hobby of mine to keep up to date on the state of affairs at this point, having long ago given up the side project I had been working on. I must not have been keeping up very well because I had not seen the link before despite being from 2016.

Better title: "When everyone shows up on my website"

I honestly feel like you comment is a perfect illustration of this point made in the OP, which was as much about citizens as it was about what politicians would like them to think:

"just fathom the authoritarian mindset that would lead a citizen -- and especially a "journalist" -- to react with anger that these things have been revealed; to insist that these facts should have been kept concealed and it'd be better if we didn't know"

By the way, the indictment for the extradition request has nothing to do with the 2016 election, but rather the Iraq war logs from back in 2010. I understand you may not like Assange very much and think he is a bad person, but I would encourage you to consider the bigger picture and that many people are raising the alarm that this is an extremely dangerous attack on the first amendment and the freedom of the press.

It's unsurprising that political leaders would want to convince people that the true criminals are those who expose acts of high-level political corruption and criminality, rather than those who perpetrate them. Every political leader would love for that self-serving piety to take hold. But what's startling is how many citizens and, especially, "journalists" now vehemently believe that as well. In light of what WikiLeaks has revealed to the world about numerous governments, just fathom the authoritarian mindset that would lead a citizen -- and especially a "journalist" -- to react with anger that these things have been revealed; to insist that these facts should have been kept concealed and it'd be better if we didn't know; and, most of all, to demand that those who made us aware of it all be punished (the True Criminals) while those who did these things (The Good Authorities) be shielded

https://www.salon.com/2010/12/24/wikileaks_23/

The indictment is not only about hacking, but about aiding the source in avoiding detection, and encouraging them for more documents.

There is zero allegation of hacking. Rather they are saying Manning sent a hashed password and Julian said in the chat he sent it to his team and then it never went anywhere. Calling this hacking is a big stretch.

This article from 2011 shows the Obama justice department knew all about this[1], check out the last two paragraphs which I will post here:

"In the exchange prosecutors showed in the courtroom, Manning appeared to have sent Assange a “hash,” or encrypted, password. Assange said he’d passed it on to members of his team, but the exchange prosecutors showed did not indicate whether WikiLeaks ever actually helped Manning with the password.

That chat could be a critical one for the parallel criminal investigation the Justice Department is pursuing into Assange and WikiLeaks. If Assange gave Manning advice or assistance in breaking into computer systems, that could transform Assange’s role from a mere recipient of secret data to a conspirator in efforts to steal it."

I am curious why you think the Trump administration is pursuing this now whereas the Obama DOJ declined to prosecute sighting the "new york times problem" as described in the previous link.

[1] https://www.politico.com/story/2011/12/defense-manning-was-o...

The attempt of the US government to prosecute Assange is the gravest possible threat to press freedom imaginable.

People are talking about a hashed password like its something new, but this is not new information at all. The Obama justice department had all the same chat logs - no new evidence has been discovered since then - and knew all about this but decided they couldn't prosecute without endangering press freedom.[1]

So if you don't think this is a major assault on press freedom, you should at least realize you are disagreeing not only with me but literally the Obama justice department which looked at this for years. Why is it that they came to this conclusion and never moved forward with the case, but now the TRUMP administration is pursuing it anyway?

It's not just american journalists that are at risk, but this is meant to send a chilling message to anyone anywhere on earth that you better not report on the US government negatively or else we will have you extradited, prosecuted as a spy, and thrown in solitary.

Anyone cheering on the US government as they try to set a precedent for prosecuting journalists as spies needs to think more carefully about this issue.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/julia...

I am putting my money on "configuration change" as the root cause of iCloud being down.