pacala

This may well apply to countries as well. Due to the scales involved, it takes longer to notice the deleterious effects, and is much harder to reverse course.

In practice, vote secrecy does not appear to be a priority concern of the authorities. More so when you have to educate more than 3000 local authorities [number of counties in US] to pay attention to the issue. I did a quick duckduckgo for images of US mail-in ballots, and found many instances of mail that have the sender information on, as is customary for US postage. Found even a couple pictures of ballot envelopes from Portland, Oregon, where they explicitly ask the voter to provide a return address, that is to tie their identity to the ballot:

https://imgur.com/ZRHuLWd

http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/northwestnews/files/s...

Fair enough. If I understand correctly, the server only uses the user's identity to generate a random serial number, then only remembers the serial number and the fact that user X has generated a serial number.

With that, we are left with the following attack vectors: the server and its software, either via hacking or via subtle rule tweaks, targeted ballot invalidation, voter pressure. As a technopesimist, I'm especially uncomfortable that a key piece of the process is an opaque blob of silicon that can't meaningfully be inspected by a human observer. Echoes of Diebold voting machines, plus billions of dollars poured into elections. But I can see why HN audience is prone to be persuaded this is a good idea.

The lack of follow up is indeed rather frustrating. On the plus side, the article reports that they kept the people in quarantine 8-12 days after the testing round. From other sources on the Web, "on average symptoms appear after 5 days and most people with symptoms had them by day 12". While the study has probably accounted for most of the symptomatic cases, a 30 day follow up would be of great value, including to validate the incubation period estimations.

https://www.webmd.com/lung/coronavirus-incubation-period

* Voting is the cornerstone of democracy. It is the one place where it's not worth cutting costs for convenience.

* Trust but verify. I'm not aware of a cost-effective way to monitor mail-in voting. Suppose I want to observe the process. Do I need to sleep in the voting collection room for 18 days in a row to monitor that no one is messing with the ballots? What about the post office? What about the post truck?

The argument 'is the proven voter fraud higher when using voting process X vs process Y' cuts both ways. I haven't seen evidence to conclusively prove that proprietary voter machines with no paper trail tamper vote counts. And yet most people agree that paper trail voting is a much more trustworthy approach.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_monitoring

I believe we are mostly on the same page. Voting should be in person, on paper, on a weekend day. It can be done, even in covid times.

One more thought: Simple >>> Complex.

Small variations in a technically correct process may break some of its properties. The more complex the process, the easier is to inject variations, some of them adversarial. If gerrymandering is to be taken as an example, this can be taken to quite some extremes by two sides driven to win the zero-sum game at all costs. But even in absence of that, bugs happen.

To nitpick one detail, I'm not persuaded by the secrecy violation prevention argument. You either prevent secrecy violation by anonymization, or you prevent vote fraud by keeping a link between the voter and the ballot. You can't have both at the same time. In person voting minimizes the bounding box of anonymization: in space, at the ballot box, and in time, the election day. Hopefully both parties afford to have observers during this space-time interval. As you spread out the voting process, both spatially and temporally, it becomes increasingly impractical / too expensive to maintain observers of the entire process.

Exactly. We should not trade off the weakening of the voting process for convenience. The voting process deserves to be as strong as we can possibly make it. In person, on paper, on a weekend day.

A political machine that can make use of the 'who did Joe voted for' information is likely to have access to the ballot id database and link 'ballot id 43abfd32' to Joe.

On voting machines, good point. We should not use voting machines either.

What keeps an attacker from:

    Open the ballot envelope and the secrecy envelope
    Note who you voted for
    Pack the secrecy envelope and the ballot envelope 
    Use the vote information in whatever way they see fit

?

Variation:

    Hey grandpa Joe, I'm here to help you vote
    Note who you voted for
    Help you pack the secrecy envelope and the ballot envelope
    Use the vote information in whatever way they see fit

There several problems with mail-in voting systems, including your proposal. On top of my head:

* The tampering envelope is extended to weeks instead of hours.

* There is a non-zero risk of vote secrecy violation.

* There is a non-zero risk of voter pressuring.

Coming from a country that earned the right to vote through violent revolt, it is strange how established democracies, especially the US, are cavalier with weakening the voting process: vote on a Tuesday [???], no paper trail voting machines [???], mail-in voting [???].

The ability to check one's ballot status implies that the ballot is tied to one's identity. How does the system guarantee vote secrecy?

Edit. From Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Oregon#Balloting

Ballots packs are mailed to every registered voter 14 to 18 days before the election. When the ballot pack comes in the mail, it includes:

    An official ballot
    A secrecy envelope
    A ballot return envelope

After filling out the ballot the voter then places the ballot in the secrecy envelope, then inside the return envelope and must then sign it in a space provided on the outside return envelope. This is then either mailed back through the US mail with first class postage, or dropped off at any County Elections Office or a designated dropsite. Ballots must be received in a County Elections Office or a designated dropsite by 8pm on Election Day (postmarks do not count). If the ballot arrives at the County Elections Office after 8pm on Election Day, it is not counted.

Once received, an Elections Official at the elections office where the ballot is received will compare the signature on the ballot return envelope to the signature on the voter registration card to verify that the voter is registered to vote. Once verified, the secrecy envelope containing the actual ballot is removed and polled with the other ballots. Once the "polls" close at 8pm on Election Day, the ballots are removed from their secrecy envelopes and counted.

I come to grips with:

* The 'engagement' metric leads to toxic outcomes no mater what.

* The upper management / board is single mindedly obsessed with 'engagement', as a proxy for making money.

* I cannot function in an environment where my personal ethics is in direct conflict with the company focus.

Therefore I quit. YMMV.

Predicting political preferences is a huge can of worms. Don't do it. Have the data scientist delete their model.

As actors in the World, we are machines that turns sensor data into a linear stream of actions. To the extent the decision process in not completely random, there exists a metric that ends up maximized by the decision process, sometimes referred to as 'god' or even 'God'. The vast majority of economic decision processes in the modern economy are driven by one metric: money, sometimes referred to as 'Mammon'. A corporation is an aggregation of human / computerized actors that work to maximize the corporation metric: money earned by said corporation.

The discussions are very simple: Course of action A makes us X$, course of action B makes us XXX$. Therefore course of action B is taken. There is no consideration of other effects besides, perhaps, a quantization of risks. Risk of losing the 'good guys' facade, counterbalanced by PR expenses, or risk of being sued, counterbalanced by legal expenses.

Nit pick. There is another imprecision lurking in the quoted statement. Epidemics are subject to power laws, making it misleading to take averages over large populations. US mortality rate may be 29.87/100k, but that is an average weighted by population between 50 states with different geographies, demographies and policies, for example NY's 120/100k vs. CA's 10/100k.

?

There is only the simple observation that there is a spectrum: free speech -> deplatforming [ban from youtube & co] -> deinfrastructuring [ban from paypal / aws & co] -> depersoning [physical exile to periphery] -> lethal force.

I seem to remember a time of nuanced conversations. But perhaps online discourse was always an adversarial contest between two strident extremes. Enjoy.

PDF of the decision: https://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/regmeet/may20/b4....

In the good old times of Soviet power, there were other oppression mechanisms besides lethal force. In fact lethal force was only rarely used, especially after Stalin. A couple of examples:

* Send dissenters to perform menial jobs in some remote small city with little impact on the national scale. Technically, the Gulag itself was an application of this strategy, with a particularly harsh destination and a particularly dangerous occupation.

* House arrest. Keep dissenters in their homes, and carefully control whom they get into contact.

The end effect is the same: drastically limit the platform available to dissenters, without outright murdering them.

Meta: This is a very low quality post. It is accusing Karol Sikora of being 'either 'an insane person or an amoral profiteering liar' without a shred of evidence of such behavior. Assassinate the character of the messenger with no proof, then add insult to injury and wholly fail to address the message. What was so objectionable about content of the interview in question?

The type of the constructor is not the type of the object. The type of Rectangle constructor is (number, number) => Rectangle, vs the type of Rectangle which is just Rectangle. Think RectangleFactory vs. Rectangle.

Please don't cite euromomo as a source:

* They stopped graphing the per country raw numbers, which makes it impossible to put things in perspective: what is the comparative excess mortality per million people?

* They use deceptive graphs that do not start yaxis at zero

* They refuse to publish the raw dataset for independent processing.

Full title: Florida scientist was fired for 'refusing to manipulate' COVID-19 data, she said

The major challenge is that we either hide for an indefinite amount of time, which destroys the wealth pipes, aka the economy, or we get hit by a second pandemic wave. There are NO good options.

Cherry on top: everything is hyperpartisan, which leads to the destruction of public trust. In some alternate reality, Mr. Trump and Ms. Pelosi would hold a joint press conference and tell us the cold facts: There are NO good options. Many people are going to die, and there is nothing anyone can do to indefinitely prevent that. Let's at least hold our heads up with dignity.

> the undesirables aren't even aware they're banned

Chilling. Given the scope of BigTech, 10x chilling. An 'undesirable' can end up on a secret black list for whatever petty reason, and then have a huge streak of targeted algorithmic 'bad luck' to destroy their life. Can't find a good job, a good mate, a good house, everything costs you 15% more? It must be something wrong with you.

FWIW, open source is not an absolute good. It is undercutting the ability of your peers to make a living. It is making software a commodity, such that capital rich hardware owners can make a killing. See AWS.

Commoditize your complement. https://www.gwern.net/Complement

Humans are unique in evolving recursive language. Consciousness is a recursive agent: observe me observing the world, several layers deep. Likely the exact same mutation / brain structure backs both mechanisms.

Neither electrons, nor the Universe, are recursive agents. Maybe some of the Devil's apprentices playing with reinforcement learning AI will inadvertently create a non-human consciousness, but other than that, humans are special.

Not super familiar with Kafka, but behind the scenes some RDBMS are log replay engines. Are there technical reasons to not slap a RDBMS frontend on top of a Kafka log and avoid dealing with raw streams in the application code?

Edit: From the sibling comments, the answer is https://ksqldb.io.

Agreed. Careful/Restrained OOP / 95% FP [the ML branch] / DOP, all names for the same sweet spot. The push back is against hard OOP culture, rooted in confused thinking.

* Everything is emphatically NOT an object. There is immutable data, there are functions and there are modules. These are not the interchangeable, learn to use them in the proper context.

* Everything is emphatically NOT a message. There are plain functions, there are polymorphic functions, there are RPCs and there are async messages. These are not interchangeable, learn to use them in the proper context.

The technical difference is lack of language-level module support, requiring manual management of vtables. It can be done, see Linux kernel for an example, but often times degenerates in a ball of globals.

To further clarify, one can use DOP style in many languages, including languages that are ostensibly OO. DOP is a style, using data hiding and polymorphism as sparingly as possible, as opposed to OOP style, which strongly encourages using data hiding and polymorphism at every corner.

Exponential growth doesn't work forever. As recently as 100 years ago there were less than 2 billion people in the whole world. At 7.8 billion and growing 80M [1 Germany] each year, we're running out of room to breathe.