worstspotgain

Quite amazing how little traction this story is getting. Back in the 1950s-2000s, when Russia's influence on the West was rather subdued, this would have been the only news in town.

Instead it's more like "nothing to see here, kindly vote in our puppet candidate X, thanks!" for various local values of X.

Sure, but 1000 is just 1 in 3000 voters. In practice it's going to be way more than that, probably 2 or 3 in 10. Thats hundreds of thousands of voters, many of whom are going to be punctilious people. Of all the suggested fuckery methods, this would be caught the fastest IMO.

The ballot printout is not discarded, is it? If not, then the ballot-barcode consistency in the sample can be verified as part of the audit.

Believe me, we've been aware that this is a non-bug feature for a long time.

The Tuesday law was passed in 1845. Instead of changing it, many legislators are pushing in the opposite direction: trying to selectively suppress their opponents' votes further. If it hurts them more than us, it's a worthy goal!

Indeed, and the math is the same. If out of 3 million voters, just 1000 double-check the printout, they will detect a 1/100 flip with probability 99.996%.

Not with a randomized audit, such as this one for the 2022 primary [1]. If it flipped just one vote out of 100, and you drew an audit sample of just 1000 votes, the probability of detecting it would be 99.996%.

[1] https://www.cpr.org/2022/07/13/colorado-counties-begin-audit...

If you exclude its pre-Athlon Nvidia-like era, Intel's market cap earlier this year was only ~20% below its 2020ish peak.

It has engineers. It might yet surprise. Nvidia hasn't proven it can turn a ridiculous amount of capital into a matrix-multiplication moat.

> nothing burger event for an index that has lost relevance

This argument has been around since time immemorial. The right way to think of it is more like a country club or a who's who, rather than a survey or a directory.

As for the news at hand, it's really more about Intel than Nvidia. Sic transit gloria mundi.

I wish some of the sleeping/eating studies covered the options "sleep when I'm tired" and "eat when I'm hungry."

When remote work is an option, it'd be nice to know the health opportunity cost of RTO. Sadly the cohort is too hard to study outside of nursing home residents.

> it decreases demand for existing homes as well. It also negatively impacts employment and many other areas, basically if your run on debt the higher rates hurt

The question is not what's affected. It's how much monetary policy it takes to achieve the desired output and employment effect, and where is the employment effect. We want to stop increasing rates once the effect is achieved.

We raise rates because the economy is overheating. Too much money is chasing too few goods, raising prices. In response to the favorable prices, too many jobs are chasing too few workers, raising wages.

Rising prices and wages (without rising productivity) means inflation. We're at one edge of the Phillips curve [1] and need to move back to the middle.

> That may be a goal, but it isn't the goal.

The goal is actually to raise unemployment. That's what the "cooling the overheating economy" euphemism means. However, we don't have the tools to raise it evenly in all sectors. The only tool we have is the short term interest rate.

Luckily, it affects the long term rate, which affects demand for homes, new and existing. For (say) every 20 fewer homes sold, one realtor and one banker might go unemployed. But for every 20 fewer new homes built (say), 50 laborers might go unemployed. That's why the transmission is primarily through construction [2] [3]. The consumer durables sector (appliances) used to have a large multiplier too, but most of those manufacturing jobs have been automated or moved overseas.

> they wouldn't be lagging if the effects must have already happened

You can model the lag effects as geometric decays of the original impulse. You need a negative original effect (one impulse of high unemployment) that will then regress back to baseline (continued but fading unemployment.) We didn't have any impulse, hence no decay.

The only thing that could really go wrong is a resurgence of inflation if the cuts were too fast, but chances are we would have seen that already too.

> relative to where we would have been without intervention

The problem here is we were at too much output/employment. We had to get through that moment and fix the problem without overshooting in the opposite direction.

We couldn't do better, that's the whole point. It's not like there was potentially more output to be had. The actual problem is that output was too high. That's why there was inflation.

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

[2] https://www.usnews.com/news/economy/articles/2022-12-20/new-...

[3] https://www.infracapfunds.com/post/why-the-us-is-unlikely-to...

The goal in increasing rates is to cool the economy by reducing construction, i.e. housing starts. Exchanging existing units doesn't affect employment and output as much. Since starts dropped by a third, it follows that prices would have been even higher without the raise in rates.

> we really won't know for sure for at least a decade or so

We absolutely already know. The contractionary effect of a raise in rates is largest in the short term. You can't have a lagging effect after rates are cut if there was no contraction to begin with.

Prices are not the relevant statistic though, it's housing starts [1]. They dropped from ~1.8M in April 2022 to ~1.3M today. Prices are affected by supply and demand equally, while starts are much more affected by supply.

As for how the Treasury and Fed managed the crisis, it was easily the most incredible macro success story since I've been alive. Had you told me in 2022 that they'd manage sub-3% inflation without a recession at all, I'd have said you believed in fairy tales.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST

That's not really surprising, considering that's exactly how interest rate increases are supposed to work. They crowd out a bit of business investment and a lot of housing investment [1]. This in turn cools the economy by curtailing construction.

Unfortunately, housing in most areas was screwed to begin with. This was not nearly the case with prior inflation bouts that required rate increases. The Fed was left with two bad choices. It did what it had to do.

If the economy was Windows XP, housing would be its networking stack - its most exploitable sector. This is largely because of local governance and regulatory capture [2]. Housing has been artificially undersupplied for 5 decades under a variety of pretexts, such as architectural integrity. It has effectively turned the sector into a pyramid scheme that captures the wages of renters.

[1] https://archive.is/8wAry (from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/19/opinion/inflation-interes...)

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

Is there a blog post about what specifically she found to be inscrutable? The C++ doesn't look all that terse at a syntactic level, and has plenty of comments. Are the problems at the domain level?

Here's an algebraic example to keep things theoretical. If the easy to delete version proposed by the article is:

   f(x) = 6x^2 - 5x + 1

The prospective extensible version is:

   g(x,a,b) = ax + b
   f(x,q()) = q(x,3,-1) q(x,2,-1)
   f(x,g)

It's the generalization for factorable polynomials. It's clearly harder to read than the easy to delete version. It's more complex to write, and so on.

However, it's algebraically orthogonal. It has advantages in some cases, for instance if you later add code for a 6th-order polynomial and need to use its zeroes for something else.

We know that it could be better in some cases. Is it a good bet to predict that it will be better overall? The problem domain can fracture across a thousand orthogonal "creases" like this one. The relevant skill is in making the right bets.

Here's an example that's not orthogonal. Let's say we think the 6 coefficient might be more likely to change in the future:

   g(x,a) = ax^2 - 5x - 1
   f(x,q()) = q(x,6)
   f(x,g)

This version is most likely just adding complexity. A single function is almost always a better bet.

At the risk of turning a unison into a chord, here's my two cents.

If:

1. You know where the 'creases' of orthogonality are. You've carved the turkey 1000 times and you never get it wrong anymore.

2. As a result, there is hardly any difference in complexity between code that is and isn't easy to extend.

Then write code that is easy to extend, not delete.

The question is whether your impression of the above is true. It won't be for most junior developers, and for many senior ones. If orthogonality isn't something you preoccupy yourself with, it probably won't be.

In my experience, the most telling heuristic is rewriting propensity. I'm talking about rewriting while writing, not about refactoring later. Unless something is obvious, you won't get the right design on the first write. You certainly won't get the correct extensible design. If you're instructed to write it just once, then by all means make it easy to delete.

Global Russian paranoia would actually be alright. We used to have that in the 80s. Certainly better than global Russian domination by way of stooges like Maduro, Orban, Wagner in Africa, and you-know-who in the US.

The most salient feature of Russian meddling is playing all sides, both ideologically and in levels of sophistication.

The less-sophisticated efforts are basically misdirection and camouflage. They are intentionally disarming, akin to how their 'strongman' puppets make an effort to bumble and 'accidentally' feed the trolls. Covfefe bigly, if you will.

> camelcase naming for everything, getters and setters for every class variable, interfaces everywhere

This is not far off from the guidelines in many cases, e.g. Windows code (well, not every variable of course.) A lot of Java design was copied from C++.

Moderation is speech too. It's not possible to have an apolitical discussion of matters related to a plutocrat that offers a $100M vote bounty. To selectively silence dissenters is to be even more political than to just debate with them.

Besides, Tesla is a car company. There are dozens of weekly articles about it, compared to maybe one for all the other automakers put together. This has effectively turned HN into an advertising platform for Musk. If moderation was sincere and not pretextual, the entire topic would be banned.

I'm 100% sure I'm not making matters worse by posting. At a minimum it creates a data trail for the bots' actions. It also prevents giving the impression that the audience has been 'tamed' into full Musk complacency by the bots.

BTW, it's funny that my replies to the flagged message are getting flagged too. If someone can read the original message they can read the replies as well. Digging into the hidden reply chain just to flag more stuff gives away the automated nature of the flagging.

> Then why is he doing it in the Bay Area, then?

Probably so he can blame in on politics when it fails spectacularly.

Apparently (quelle surprise) Linus is getting swarmed by Russian trolls like a US swing-state voter. From https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linus-Torvalds-Russian-Devs

Ok, lots of Russian trolls out and about. It's entirely clear why the change was done, it's not getting reverted, and using multiple random anonymous accounts to try to "grass root" it by Russian troll factories isn't going to change anything. And FYI for the actual innocent bystanders who aren't troll farm accounts - the "various compliance requirements" are not just a US thing.

If you haven't heard of Russian sanctions yet, you should try to read the news some day. And by "news," I don't mean Russian state-sponsored spam. As to sending me a revert patch - please use whatever mush you call brains. I'm Finnish. Did you think I'd be _supporting_ Russian aggression? Apparently it's not just lack of real news, it's lack of history knowledge too.

Cue John Cleese

How convoluted, insidious, and camouflaged can a hidden backdoor or exploitable intentional defect be?

If hacking or subversion is possible, it has been tried and will be again. If anyone is going to try it, chances are Putin's people will.

It's by far the sneakiest, most advanced cheating and infiltration apparatus humanity has ever known. It inherited a large "meddling war chest" from the Soviet Union, then invested heavily into it for 25 years. The Internet increased its opportunities a million-fold. Its semitransparent tentacles are now embedded into nearly every consequential organization on the planet.

Consider the xz episode as a baseline. It was fairly sneaky, but it was introduced by a newcomer to the project and affected mostly existing code. A more elaborate exploit might be submitted with a new feature by an established maintainer.

I wonder if it's the same people who buy all three. The people who dress up for Halloween 364 days a year.

I used to think no production vehicle could ever be uglier than a PT Cruiser.

Glancing at the authors' names, it's possible that none of them are native English speakers. Any chance that the sections you're referring to were just AI-polished rather than AI-generated?

Whenever there's any positive news on masking, there's always online pushback under some theory or another. I'm not saying GP here is necessarily guilty of anything, of course.

The namesake 2015 movie was almost as much of a pain to watch as being in the experiment itself would have been.