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polymatter

1,380 karma · joined August 12, 2011

software developer and accountant

interested in functional programming, learning chinese

email: glisher (underscore) rock (at) hotmail (dot) com

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polymatter··on Psychologists Shielded U.S. Torture Program, Report Finds
Social condemnation of torture would be a great start. But unfortunately the average Joe strongly believes that its easy to tell if someone is holding out and that torture is an effective way of extracting information if they were. Programmes like 24 reinforce this image (but are not really to blame - they would hardly be popular if they were realistic).

Extending such social ostracism to descendants is ridiculous though. It wouldn't deter the torturers (many of whom probably believe they are doing what is necessary) and would just lead to witch hunts. You'd have better luck with "I'm not going to the prom with you, cause you support torture, so I have no idea what other perverse ideas you think are ok".

polymatter··on Impulsive Rich Kid, Impulsive Poor Kid
I'd be interested to hear any other potential solutions. Seems to me the choice is either:

a) basic income, or

b) all the unemployed who can not get a job in the new economy are given a government job. The work in the job doesn't matter, as long as it provides a fig leaf to allow the government to give them the money they desperately need to live.

If its not entirely clear, I think that these non-jobs are are an unfair and incredibly expensive way of giving out benefits. The richer would be better off with a basic income (free money! smaller more efficient government meaning taxing the rich less!). The poor would be better off with a basic income (no social workers or benefit admins judging you! future is predictable so able to start investing for the future!). Its only annoying for those of us in the middle, those who will not benefit much from a basic income (because it won't be a huge amount of money, our taxes are unlikely to decrease) but will also not see much benefit from it (I probably already had a safety net in terms of friends and family, and the basic income will be too small to support the lifestyle I am used to anyway).

polymatter··on Data on 7% of Americans Were Just Hacked, Now What?
I'm not sure if it was edited, but reference to China has now gone.
polymatter··on Buffer's transparency dashboard: Public salaries, equity and more
> This is essentially the problem which you are seeing from a different angle and that's okay.

Having thought about this, I think you're right. I can see how keeping salaries secret doesn't cause the issues I suggested it does. Sorry, reading my post now I come across as needlessly combative.

Personally, being transparent about salaries makes me trust the management more. I think more transparency is generally a good thing and I don't think there are any big negatives to keeping salaries secret. But it doesn't cause the issues I suggested it does.

polymatter··on Buffer's transparency dashboard: Public salaries, equity and more
You are right I shouldn't refer to a woman in her early 20's as a girl. Its a habit when I thought "girl" meant, woman younger than me. Sorry.

Horses are expensive to maintain, even if they are gifted to you for free. But people use all sorts of basis for gossip.

polymatter··on Buffer's transparency dashboard: Public salaries, equity and more
But keeping salaries secret leads to rumour and speculation. How is that better? Especially when you make it so taboo to talk about, it just makes it more exciting. Especially so since you can't hide the externalities.

I'll give you an example. When we learnt a girl from finance owned her own horse, the gossip around the office was not how did she skrimp and save, but what she needed to do to whom to receive such an obviously large salary. I have no doubt she did just save her money well but thanks to keeping everyone's salary secret, we have vicious rumours instead of fact.

If you are really hiring people who honestly believe that everyone apart from them contribute little to the company, then you are hiring incredibly arrogant people. If you are really hiring people who honestly would be surprised that some people earn more than others, then you are hiring incredibly naive people.

fwiw, I earn £27,000 as a C#/Java developer in central London and I know I am extremely poor at salary negotiation so I expect I am grossly underpaid. This causes me resentment. Salary negotiations involve me having to justify myself or backhandedly belittling the contributions of my colleagues. ie. exactly the sorts of problems you believe that keeping salaries secret solves.

There is only one reason for keeping salaries secret, and that is to keep wages down. That benefits employers, and it benefits those who are great at negotiating.

polymatter··on Argentinean programmer's house raided after he found a security breach
I think his ultimate point was that embik is being naive. That it is just a simple coverup with a thin, obviously untrue excuse.
polymatter··on Tesla Beats Delivery Forecast with 52% Quarterly Surge
> so financially ignorant

I agree, and specifically I think of the confusion between gross profit margin and net operating cashflow. Tesla makes money on every car sold (as they actually have a gross profit) but have been spending cash really fast (as they have a negative cashflow). All this really tells you is that Tesla is investing a lot of money, which is to be expected for a company that is trying to spearhead a paradigm shift within the entire automotive industry.

Also, since one big weakness in Tesla is whether it relies on government subsidies and loans for its continued survival. Thats something I don't understand and if I had a horse in this race, I'd be weary of a company that relies on the whims of political support in order to survive.

polymatter··on How American Fans Pirated Japanese Cartoons into Careers
what made you change your opinion? I love it when there are translation notes on screen. It feel inclusive to explain to me what's going on.

I can't speak Japanese, am not embedded within current popular Japanese culture and did not go to a Japanese high school and therefore there are references which I will not understand. These include jokes that rely on wordplay such as puns and malapropisms, and historical notes about Japanese history, geography and society which I am mostly ignorant of.

Without those translation notes, you exclude me from understanding anything but the surface of what's going on.

polymatter··on Samsung disabling Windows Update?
its probably a short term fix while they work through the process of working out how to identify the defective machines and isolate them properly within Windows Updates.

still incredibly dodgy though.

polymatter··on Columbia becomes the first US university to divest from private prison companies
be interesting if we allowed prisoners the choice of prison, haha.
polymatter··on Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business
optimise by a score. score is calculated as a function of price and some quality metric. unfortunately this can get complex.
polymatter··on “Mostly functional” programming does not work (2014)
do you have any recommendations on such tutorials/introductions that teach category theory?
polymatter··on American recycling is stalling, and the big blue bin is one reason why
I agree that more can be done to increase incentives for manufacturers to produce better packaging. I would caution against outright bans, as that often exacerbates unforeseen circumstances. You might end up encouraging massive deforestation as manufacturers switch en mass to bamboo packaging or suddenly roads are clogged up as truck drivers are told to maintain a maximum 30kph to avoid damaging products. Human systems are ridiculously complex, that was the chief failure of state-directed Communism.

> I don't get to choose how the stuff I buy is packaged

I think an economist would say you do get to choose. You could have chosen a different product that was packaged better. Since the onus is on you to sort out the packaging, you should have incentive to prefer products with packaging that you don't have to manage.

polymatter··on Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software
Re: 1, the following is a quote from the aforementioned licence pag (http://www.hwaci.com/cgi-bin/license-step1)

---

Even though SQLite is in the public domain and does not require a license, some users want to obtain a license anyway. Possible reasons for obtaining a license include:

* You are using SQLite in a jurisdiction that does not recognize the public domain.

* You are using SQLite in a jurisdiction that does not recognize the right of an author to dedicate their work to the public domain.

* You want to hold a tangible legal document as evidence that you have the legal right to use and distribute SQLite.

* Your legal department tells you that you have to purchase a license.

polymatter··on The Machines Are Coming
I highly recommend CGP Greys video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU) for a good overview of the issue.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9341055 for similar discussion.

polymatter··on FBI overstated forensic hair matches in nearly all trials before 2000
Not being double-blind makes it cheaper. Hence takes less budget, lower taxes, everybody cheers.

Anybody proposing to make it double-blind is going to need to find the money, either from other departments or by raising taxes. Without a chorus of public support behind them, this is a very hard sell. And easily reversed after the next election.

polymatter··on Rise of the Machines: The Future Has Lots of Robots, Few Jobs for Humans
Work does not imply job.

Jobs are where people are financially rewarded for work. Work that is not financially rewarded still exists. See topic: Hobbies, Charities, Volunteering.

polymatter··on Massive, Illicit Bust of Edward Snowden Stuck to a War Monument in Brooklyn
I highly recommend the following CGP Grey video for further detail about the problems of First Past the Post voting (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo).

> But instead we have FPTP, and why?

Its the simplest and most naive electoral system so Joe Bloggs understands it. Its just "the person who gets the most votes wins". The problems this system causes are ephemeral statistical problems that require more than a 10 second soundbite to explain or even to detect happening. So from Joe Bloggs point of view, you want to change his fundamental right to vote based on the fact that your intellectual busywork has concluded that the wrong person can win the election. That's how the UK failed to get Alternative Vote passed in 2011.

polymatter··on Estonia's e-residency program expands abroad
> you simply offer a bottle of vodka for a cell-phone photo of the ballot marked the way you want

you have to keep tens of thousands of people quiet for that to work without any suspicion at all. with e-voting you can commit major fraud without anyone noticing and with much much less evidence trail.

polymatter··on Estonia's e-residency program expands abroad
But it also means that a virus that intercepts your PIN and your ID card can log in an hour later and vote for someone different. You then would have no way of knowing.
polymatter··on Estonia's e-residency program expands abroad
That was a very interesting video but I think you misrepresent it slightly. Its clear the Estonian E-voting system was designed very very well in comparison to the ridiculously bad Diabold machines of yesteryear. The problem was that the current state-of-the-art hasn't advanced enough to make major fraud at least as hard as the paper ballot. And that means that e-voting makes it plausible for state actors to dictate election results, which in a democracy is a very bad thing. In other words, there was no way Estonia could make it perfect and anything less than perfect is broken.

The important point for me was that getting e-voting right is so incredibly important to a democracy that it should be treated as a national security issue. The Estonian E-voting system was clearly treated as a government IT project as procedures like "don't plug in a personal USB stick into the master counting server" are violated if its more convenient than replacing the broken DVD drive. Worse, politics gets mixed in which means that security concerns are dismissed with complacent and technically questionable statements like "nice people who care about computer hygiene have no viruses".

polymatter··on Estonia's e-residency program expands abroad
I couldn't find any obligations. Its probably a good idea to keep your PIN secure to reduce the probability of ID fraud. As far as I can tell its a state backed digital signature and authentication system so wouldn't confer any obligations.

However, there is some discussion about whether its a completely new legal status which would do things like make you liable for double taxation. Personally I find that highly unlikely, but IANAL, YMMV etc.

polymatter··on A Tiny Compiler for a Typed Higher-Order Language
Interesting stuff.

btw I think the type of your the function h is a -> c. I know its a minor typo, but it confused me while I was trying to follow.

polymatter··on Charlie Hebdo: first cover since terror attack depicts prophet Muhammad
Confucianism is a religion. No blurring out of technical theological details is required. Confucianism has a holy city, temples where people pray to him, miracles attributed to him, unquestionable holy books and an organization to promote itself. It doesn't lack anything that other religions have so it makes sense to call it a religion.
polymatter··on The Irregular Verbs (2000)
Seems to be similar to a list at http://www.usingenglish.com/reference/irregular-verbs/
polymatter··on Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor
!java means limit search to Java documentation

!scala means limit search to Scala documentation

!golang means limit search to Go documentation

!cpp means limit search to C++ documentation

etc.

see (https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html) for more.

polymatter··on “Time Collapse” and My Broken Brain
I believe he is using the term "bullshit jobs" to mean jobs that are pointless, produce no producivity and are mainly created for the sake of appearances. In other words, the administration and civil servant jobs that you refer to. Jobs such as farm laborer jobs may be boring and tedious, but since they are very clearly productive, are not "bullshit jobs".

This term comes from the anthoropologist David Graeber in his essay 'On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs' (http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/).

polymatter··on What's the scariest thing in the world? Ask your teenage daughter
1 and 2 also applies to many adults and their peers. I think the main difference is as you stated that teenagers haven't internalized those lessons yet.
polymatter··on Update to Microsoft Takedown – Domains Fully Restored
"We would like to be on the record to state that at No-IP, we have a very strict abuse policy. Our abuse team is constantly working to keep the No-IP system domains free of spam and malicious activity...We provide a valuable service for free, but because of this, it is common for users to abuse our service. Our abuse team is amazing and they are usually pretty quick to shut them down, but sometimes a few can slip through the cracks".

No-ip was aware of the potential and had an abuse team to deal with such cases. They were also aware of other experts finding their abuse team wanting. But that doesn't seem to be enough evidence to suggest they were partly culpable in any particular case. Perhaps there were examples of particularly galling incompetence in their abuse team, or the abuse team tipping off fraudsters but otherwise informing them seems to be the most reasonable and responsible action.

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