timtas

> But would it be so crazy for these regulators to hire someone...to help provide a little bit of actionable technical advice?

Didn't you know? They do. Large corporations are always happy to help regulators write laws in such a way as to benefit them to fend of those pesky innovators. [1] Raising compliance costs as high as possible is highly desired by large companies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

> If wasting electricity becomes such a big problem for the society as misuse of personal data already is, sure, let's introduce regulations on that, too.

Sure, what could go wrong there? Regulator, "We're going to need to look closer at that for-loop to see if it complies. And you do realize that n+1 queries are a violation of EU law?"

Clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson has a lot of interesting things to say about this:

Why it's so Hard to Sit Down and Study/Work

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFmQ5waavJY

How to Always Achieve Your Goals - No Matter What

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rvc9zguunhc

Sort Yourself Out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0Qm8I2cCAE

Clean Your Room

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gcMm_aL3Cc

Last week I heard an interesting interview [1] of Antony Sammeroff, author of a free e-book titled Procrastination Annihilation. [2]

I hesitate to recommend to you yet another anti-procrastination technique. Most of them are probably gimmicks that wear off quickly, as you have testified. But this book sounds like good stuff to me. I know this guy a little, and I think he's really smart.

[1] https://tomwoods.com/1090

[2] https://beyourselfandloveit.com/en/doit

“One hour of flight time available per tank of gasoline”

So like what, $70 round trip commute? Hmm.

> safeguards against the services going “rogue”

Safeguards...LOL. We’re not even permitted to ask what they deem to be secret. Congress has fully abdicated any oversight, notwithstanding the occasional theatrical performance. Frankly, they’re probably scared. Lindsay Graham recently warned a sitting president he had better not cross the FBI.

I have more ISP choices than grocery store choices.

WaPo and NYT can be counted on to amplify every rush to war and every expansion of the suveylance state. This is where the assumption of accuracy turn insidious.

Ah for the days of 100 million Americans passively accepting Cronkite’s “the way it is” — night after night trusting him to distill the “grand consensus” of the ruling class into a common mythology, a great uniting groupthink. What a comfort it was!

Having recently endured a few horrific interview processes, I considered writing an article titled, “No, I Won’t Run Your Fake Work Gauntlet.”

Take home assignments, coding as performance art, timed puzzle solving, obscure technical questions, full day interview gauntlets—these are what I had been through. These processes are designed primarily to avoid false positives. False negatives are okay. This is unfair to the candidate, but the company gets to pick the tune. Rather the candidate _lets_ the company pick the tune.

About a month ago I landed a job. The interview process consisted of two steps: an hour phone screen with the CTO followed by an on-site show-and-tell of a side project of my choice. (Coincidentally, the company is in downtown Austin, but is definitely not the company mentioned in the article.)

The process was a joy to me. I have side projects to show. In fact, I showed two. The audience was approximately 10 developers. My impression is that the CTO was looking for a lot of thumb to go up.

Here’s what I liked about it. First, it was not a time suck. Second, it made me the driver, allowing me to draw attention to the best parts, not just of my code, but of how I think about problems. It was downright relaxing.

To be sure, this is just a different way to prevent false positives at the cost of false negatives. If you don’t have side projects but consider yourself a great developer I can understand why you would consider this process unfair. It sucks to be a false negative. But for me, it’s way better than the alternative.

Not every company needs to draw from every talent pool. I’ve happily taken myself out of the pool of companies which use those other methods. I’m glad there are some which use a method that suits me.

For a decent chunk of time maybe 1/4 of all internet users thought AOL was the internet.

Throughout history, the moment anti-trust enters the picture is the exact moment the supposed monopolist begins its natural collapse.

Boy was that ever vague, considering drone bombing all over Pakistan and Yemen clipping a few hundred civilians cleared the "not stupid shit" bar.

At a Facebook office in Austin I saw a poster, "Move Fast and Make Things." I assumed it to be a transitional state to "Move Fast and Don't Screw Up or You're So Fired"

To those who desperately want free markets proven inherently unjust, Piketty is a prophet. But he's a false prophet. He's pretty much a hack of a social scientist.

"We find evidence of pervasive errors of historical fact, opaque methodological choices, and the cherry-picking of sources to construct favorable patterns from ambiguous data." [1]

[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2543012

It's like a doctor who opens up your gut to remove your appendix, but it turns out he doesn't know what an appendix looks like and has never performed surgery before. The distinction between stupidity and malice has kind of disappeared.

Not quite no one. Certainly applicants themselves are privy to the details of cases they themselves bring. I guess applicants are always agencies of the executive branch.

Is that where it stops? I wonder, do FBI agents discuss details of it's FISC cases with, for instance, NSA agents? And can the FBI, for instance, obtain details of a FISC case brought by, for instance, the NSA?

Interesting background. Thanks. Here's my question. Exactly who outside of the court itself knows what it does? That is, what entities are privy to it's docket, rulings and the details of it's proceedings?

> The new amici...will not represent specific clients.

Let's be clear. These are friends of the court, not any kind of advocates. They work for the court. They are not adversaries to the executive.

What, for example, will happen if the court systematically ignores them? Can they go to the media? What can they do but resign? That will make the nightly news and be forgotten by morning.

This creature is called a "court," but, lacking adversarial advocates it's wholly an instrument of the executive branch. Adding some friends with impressive resumes does not change that.

Possibilities 2 through 4, while theoretically possible, are highly unlikely based on fairly basic observation of human nature and how secret power operates. And because it's all secret, we're entitled to make the most ungenerous guess.

By "rich" I assume you mean the teachers unions. [1]

So long as the state appropriates and controls a vast share of resources all the people will vie for a share of it. They will find innumerable innovations. Those who have the means (money and influence) on their own always find a way in. So many of those of lesser means find ways to band to together to push themselves up to the trough. This leaky boat cannot be made seaworthy. [2]

"Public election funding" is another way to say, "Let's give the current incumbents monopoly control of the financing of elections." You can bet that whatever initial formulas they devise for distributing this cash (which confers the power to decide elections) while everyone is watching will be creatively "improved" soon after the public has shifted is gaze. Even when the initial formulas are evenhanded, we see unintended consequences. [3]

[1] http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/list.php

[2] https://mises.org/library/politics-cannot-be-fixed

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/01/...

The author notices the divergence, but he doesn't seem to notice that a new pattern has emerged. Forty years of smooth increase has morphed into to something like a roller coaster. He looks past these chronic spasms to see a secular shift -- "continued exponential growth of household net worth." It turns our that wealth _can_ durably outstrip savings! He doesn't wonder whether another steep (perhaps steeper) plunge of asset values might be in store.[1]

There's nothing mysterious here. For a century it has been well understood how artificial credit expansion inflates asset bubbles causing the boom/bust cycle.[2] Only the intellectual progeny of Keynes continue to find it mysterious and feel compelled to invent exotic new explanations for such "paradoxes."

Why ever would we be surprised at inflating asset prices when it's been Fed policy for a long time. In the words of Bernanke, "...higher stock prices will boost consumer wealth and help increase confidence, which can also spur spending."[3] In other words, new paper wealth makes consumers feel richer so they'll stop that harmful saving.[4]

[1] He notes, "The valuation jumps up and down as asset markets re-evaluate what all those real assets are worth." but without wondering why they only started "jumping up and down" in 1999.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_business_cycle_theory

[3] http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bernanke-defends-qe-talks-w...

[4] https://mises.org/library/hayek-paradox-saving

This is not a new argument. It certainly goes back even before conservative Russell Kirk's 1957 classic, The Inhumane Businessman [1].

It seems to me quite obvious a that the waning of liberal [2] education is a bad thing. But these fashionable leftist laments miss the point and fail to recognize some obvious causes of their own making.

In Kirk's time as now, the motivation to gain immediately marketable skills is a strong one. The difference is that elites like Robinson see such motivations as base and immoral, whereas Kirk saw them as deceptively un-utilitarian.

To the degree that ROI is a driver, the decline in general ed is certainly accelerated by massive price inflation of that last few decades. But there's another reason. The fact is liberal education in most American universities has become a shoddy product. In many, it's become quite illiberal.

This is not abstract for me. I recently helped my son decide on a college. It came down to two: School A, a school that's focussed on more practical topics such as business and engineering. Scarcely one-fifth of the coursework is general social sciences and humanities. And School B, an old and venerated bastion of liberal ed. Both are top 40 national universities.

Now, we had already weeded out all the schools that have entirely thrown over the western cannon for ideologically driven grievance-based curriculum. In other words, our list was pretty small. The last step in our decision process was to visit School B. I was hopeful because I want my son to go deep into great ideas, for the very reasons that Kirk gives.

Then came the orientation. Announcement: we have a new core curriculum.

Wha...?

Students, it turns out, will no longer choose from among courses in history, philosophy, literature, phycology, economics, etc. Now they will all be funneled through a few newly developed "integrated" courses. Courses where Greek classics are compared with Harry Potter. Classes that focus on the dying American Dream. Courses where science and history are now a branches of climate change activism.

No thanks. School A please.

This is what the market looks like when it's working.

[1] http://www.kirkcenter.org/index.php/detail/the-inhumane-busi...

[2] It's worth pointing out that "liberal" here means classical liberal, which is nearly the opposite of "liberal" in the context of American politics.

The author is on the right track, but he fails to form a serviceable thesis. You should never exchange cash for services if you follow his thesis strictly. My ten year relationship with my own awesome dentist falsifies this thesis.

To find a better thesis, we might ask, what's the difference between my dentist and WeCodeLikeNoOneElse, Inc?

I think the main difference is reputation, the role it plays the given marketplace. I'm not sure why, but the market for offshore development has never counted on reputation. I can't name a single firm. I can't even remember the name of the firm I recently interacted with as a contractor coming in to to clean up their mess. If I were to suss out any one of the unsolicited Linked In offers for cheap development I get each week, where would I even start?

My dentist has built up a loyal clientele by word of mouth in the community over a lifetime. The community is small enough that a shady dentist would be run out town in no time.

Conversely, I do know the names of some local dev shops, and I know their reputations. The ones with good reputations do not treat their clients purely as cash cows. Although they face the same, or worse pressures on utilization, they do quality work, at a premium. They have built brands and will grow or sink mostly on reputation. They still constantly face incentives to pump out shit, but there's a counter balance that's missing in the offshore outsourcing market.

I think it's official, we moderns owe an apology to medieval barbers and conjurers.

Yet another reason why I've stopped using plural pronouns to refer to the state at any level.

Desiring to wear the halo of the physical sciences, the social sciences have chosen poorly suited methods. Unfortunately, great contributions to the epistemology of social sciences have been ignored from Menger's "Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences" [1] in 1883 through Mises and Rothbard. Human action is highly resistant to empiricism.

[1] https://mises.org/library/investigations-method-social-scien...

Anarcho-Capitalist, Right Wing? Not really. All them I know are hard core peacenicks who want to end the drug war and Wall Street bailouts. They're more Nader than Cheney.

Um no. Read my post again s l o w e r. Love me some Bastiat!

> Are you replying to me?

Sorry, yes HN apparently has a limit to nesting of replies, so I cannot reply directly. I'm sure that replying a level up is bad etiquette, so this is the last time I will do it.

I will leave it at this. My position is that there is no sound philosophical basis for positive rights (the claim that one person is entitled to receive something that must be produced by another person). On other words, my rights are only to be left alone to satisfy my desired ends by my chosen means without force or coercion by another party.

This speaks nothing of what "society" or one's fellow man "ought" to do. Rights to no involve "ought."