Mickydtron

If Minnesota or California can protect the rights of their citizens, then good for them, but it does not protect LGBT individuals in Texas or the Midwest.

Yes, but Hacker News is not exactly a random slice of American voters. I would expect to find some, but not many, Trump supporters who are going to find and use a site like this.

In order for it to be a legitimate alternative, as opposed to only being of interest to ideologues and academics, shouldn't it actually be competitive with existing technologies in areas like fees, user experience, or speed? If it was better at some and worse at others, it would provide a legitimate alternative with a different set of trade-offs, but for it to lose in every category doesn't really make it seem like it can be an alternative to the centralized banking system in a real and useful way.

A well designed fiat currency system would not rely on the moral code of humans, but rather on having created an incentive structure such that the actors in power are pushed towards doing the correct thing. We have not fully accomplished this, but it is a state that we can strive towards. It is important to note that fiat currency is not based on the idea that we can reliably find and promote saints to run it (at least in theory).

Regarding the trustworthiness of social institutions, there are mechanisms for creating more trustworthy systems on top of less trustworthy parts. A simple example is TCP. It is a leaky abstraction at times, yes, but it is more trustworthy in the face of adversity than UDP is.

This is not to say that our current batch of social institutions are even as trustworthy as TCP, just that it is possible to build institutions that are, and that we have a lot more experience as a civilization with debugging social institutions than we do debugging software. Thus, I do not think it is paradoxical to lean on social institutions to reign in raw human nature.

He provides links to the repo where the test code is, anyone is free to run it themselves and see if it matches up.

The documentation for Effect Managers is basically "If you don't already know how to make one, you shouldn't be making one." I get that it's an "expert feature", but I want to learn and try anyways! I've been learning the basics by looking at the WebSocket library, and reading the compiler errors when I broke it in different ways. The compilers errors were surprisingly helpful, but some documentation would be nice.

A related anecdote: One of the major reasons I decided to give elm a try was when Richard Feldman was giving a talk about writing Dream Writer in elm, and he got to a point where the performance was noticeably slowing down. He started trying to make it better by 'sprinkling a few `lazy`s through the view code', and then stopped because that had magically made everything super fast again.

I have a hobby project that uses Elm on the front end with Elixir and Phoenix on the back end, and that has been working really well. Elm's event machine like architecture goes well with Phoenix's native support for channels, although the elm library for Phoenix Channels is definitely not production ready.

It has been a very bizarre experience having dynamic typing on the back end and static on the front end, though. Everything feels slightly topsy turvy.

As someone who has started to explore (and enjoy) elm, I have to say that speed is not one of the major selling points for me. Rather, seeing that it has at least competitive speed is just dodging a potential deal breaker. It could smother me in kittens and do my taxes, but if a framework only renders three frames per second, I definitely won't use it. Elm being in the same ballpark (slightly better? slightly worse? doesn't matter) means that I can see if the other features of the language entice me to try it out. They did, I did, and I really like it (even though apps that use random a lot end up being structured in a way that is strange to my brain).

It would be hard to detect the best time to deliver the message. Naive approaches could get it almost exactly wrong, as one of the times when I really don't want to be interrupted is when I'm just sitting and reading something, and not really interacting much. I'm sure there are better ways of determining if the user isn't focusing on anything, and maybe some of them would work well as a trigger for delivering messages. That would be pretty nifty.

It seems like the "Watch" feature would actually take care of this. If both people are watching the same chat, they would both get real time notifications, and could chat in real time. The app limits how many threads you can be watching, though, trying to force you to actively opt-in to things that you want to pay attention to because they are directly relevant to what you are doing right now.

I actually am struggling to see the real relevance of the military examples there at the end. It seems to be there to show that stubbornness and/or courage results in winning (to rather grossly simplify). But it should be obvious that neither stubbornness or courage are enough for military victory, and it's not too hard to find examples where the opposite was what brought victory. In fact, we don't even need to leave the Punic wars. Hannibal's winning move at Cannae was in fact to have the center of his battle formation not be stubborn, and fall back, drawing the Romans into an encircling trap. Fabian's strategy was seen as cowardly, but as squozzer notes, Hannibal didn't destroy Rome, while Rome did eventually destroy Carthage.

The core insight here, while interesting, ended up being much more generic than I was expecting it to be after the initial examples. It seems to boil down to "There exist mechanisms by which a small group can either grow to dominate a larger group, or have their behavioral norms spread to outside of their group, or otherwise punch above their weight. These mechanisms involve a rule or circumstance that is asymmetric."

It is an interesting principle, and useful to keep in mind, but I do not think it really supports all of the points he makes with it, or justify some of the language used. For example, I do not think that all drinks being Kosher, or a high prevalence of halal butcher shops, merit being described as "dictatorships". In the examples that would merit such strong language, such as the possibility of an anti-democratic religion dominating a democratic society and culture, I do not think that the Power of Asymmetry Principle leads where he tries to go. Specifically, he says that we need to be "more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities". However, if we examine the situation while keeping the power of asymmetry in mind, all we need to do is look for the asymmetry that would give this group its power, and take that away. In this case, the ability to use violence to enforce religious rules, specifically the death penalty for apostasy. Without the threat of violence, fundamentalist Islam would look much more like fundamentalist Christianity, trying (with various levels of success) to enforce its norms through political and interpersonal channels, but far from an unstoppable juggernaut.

He says that he rolled down his window, and the cop approached from the passenger side and demanded he roll down the rear passenger side window.

You might be able to approximate the triangle in line by using slash and backslash. 2/3\ = 8. 2/\8 = 3. /3\8 = 2. Not nearly as pretty, but if you're familiar with the triangle in a hand written context, it might get the point across.

Being too successful is of course a good problem for github to have, but for the individual maintainers, it's still a source of frustration that can lead to maintainer burnout. If too many people get frustrated and leave, then it can quickly turn from a problem of too many people to having too few.

I agree that that's probably how it started, but it seems that once the cultural expectation has been set, it's hard for a single project maintainer to set a different custom just for their own project. People are going to use the conventions and communication methods that they learn elsewhere, even if you say not to in the contributing guidelines document. You might be able to get individuals to stop doing it in your project by asking them directly, but then each person has done it at least once, and you've had to ask each person to change their normal habits. Besides, as they note in the letter, there is a valid and valuable purpose to these communications, it would just be better if they were in a different place than clogging up the comment thread.

Are there statistics on how often non-violent protesters escalate to violence in the face of failure?

I think our watchlists are already past "small, focused, and accurate".

edit: Zikes beat me to it, and said it better.

I actually had a hard time, early in the article, telling which side he was on. Specifically, "liberties also cherished by free people...the right of a nation’s citizens to be free of punishment by their nation except in accordance with positive law applied with due process" seemed in complete opposition to Cameron's statement that "For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone."

If we want to have the right to be free of punishment as long as we obey the law, then we absolutely should resist this level of government surveillance.

Some of the examples given seem either unrelated or rather disturbing if they are related. Specifically, the reference to Tim Hunt and Justine Sacco seem to be there to promote a "Free expression and liberty are under attack!" narrative, which is a seemingly true enough point, but hopefully not relevant to the topic of counter-terrorism legislation. Should Britain have located and arrested everyone who contributed to those stories blowing up? If not, then why are these incidents being brought up in this governmental context?

Mob justice is antithetical to free expression, but is messy and complicated, and governmental action is too blunt a tool to fight it with.

Right, exactly. I didn't put enough conditions on my "should". I meant that in a crazy utopia, we would never be put at risk because of others, the real world is very very far from this utopia, and we put high levels of implicit trust in other people all the time. There's nothing wrong with this, given the world as it is.

Going back to Uber vs. Homejoy, the level of risk differential is much higher with Homejoy, because when using an Uber, you are probably not assuming much extra risk compared to what else you would do to get where you are going. For a cleaning service, then the risk differential is noticeable ('someone has access to my house' vs 'Only I and my family have access to my house') when jumping up from "doing the cleaning yourself". If you're comparing Homejoy to other cleaning services on a risk basis, you'd have to actually look at the numbers. I'm really not trying to bash Homejoy or cleaning services here.

While this is statistically true, people don't act as if this were the case. While trusting someone with your physical safety should be a high-trust decision, we treat it cavalierly enough in our day to day lives that most people clearly don't worry about it.

Maybe it makes sense, though, because the other person in the interaction has more incentive to defect when given access to all of your possessions than when given control over you yourself. That is, you have little reason to think that the Uber driver is working at cross purposes to you, and mainly just have to take their competence on faith. With something like Homejoy, it is their character and motivation you are gambling on moreso than their competence.

I haven't heard of people abusing Homejoy to rob houses or anything, but it seems not entirely stupid that someone would worry about bad actors more than incompetent ones.

One could argue that mandatory vaccination laws, which are being passed in some states, are a form of force. I think that these laws are good and useful, but they do point out that even Westerners need coercion at times. They also point out a potential way to apply 'force' to the remaining pockets, which is to introduce vaccination requirements into international treaties, either as requirements for trade deals or something else. The UN would probably be the proper vessel for this, rather than any individual Western country, although certainly those countries could spearhead the effort to make this happen.

It seems like the funding coming from outside investors wouldn't really increase the incentive for lawyers to drag things out. If they're paid by the hour, then they already have that incentive, and resist it or not at their own discretion. If they're paid contingently, then their motivation is to get a win as quickly as possible, or drag things out if that will make the payment much larger. Again, they have that motivation regardless of who's paying them. What this would change is make it possibly less likely that the 'client' would run out of money before you can finish the job.

This seems like a broken patch to a broken system. To use the main example from the article, Cat would crush Miller if Miller didn't have access to this method of financing their lawsuit, and Miller's lawsuit looks at least plausible, so them being crushed out of hand is a bad outcome. So, it does somewhat fix the problem of smaller litigants being able to go up against larger defendants without just being automatically crushed out of hand.

However, it does seem that there are some obvious failure states for this new system. If venture litigation becomes the norm, then only litigants who are either extremely large themselves or can attract financing will even have a chance of victory. So, the financiers become the de facto arbiters of the judicial system.

To me, the real problem is that the civil justice system is so expensive as to be out of reach for many/most people, or at least putting a limit on how big a size difference the two parties can have. All told, this isn't that different than someone taking out a mortgage to fund a lawsuit, and that is fairly obviously allowed. The fact that someone might need to take a mortgage or seek outside funding in order to seek justice is the problem, not the mortgage or financing itself.

I was also overall impressed with the tone of the article. However, there were a few phrases which somewhat worried me. Specifically, "there is a broad recognition on both sides of the Atlantic that we live in dangerous times" and "if governments are going to prevent and investigate threats to public safety in the real world, they need timely and appropriate access to data that is stored online".

The first is somewhat debatable (there obviously is danger, but more or less than there used to be?), and even if completely true, "dangerous times" have been used to justify a lot of very bad things, so nebulous references worry me.

The second is also a sentence that by itself is fairly straightforward and uncontroversial, but is highly dependent on "timely" and "appropriate". After all, if "timely" means "as soon as we need/want it", and "appropriate" means "we swear we won't look at it unless we need to, honest", then many NSA programs could be loosely described as a way to get "timely and appropriate access to data that is stored online".

It is possible that neither of these sentences is meant to weasel in these sorts of meanings, and that I'm simply reacting to anti-privacy advocates having used otherwise innocuous phrases to justify bad behavior.

I think it would be very interesting if the civil courts of the US and EU each forced the other entity into passing stronger privacy protections than they have currently. Specifically, I'm thinking of a scenario where the collapse of Safe Harbor helps force Congress into passing meaningful privacy legislation and drastically curtailing the NSAs overbroad powers and mandates, and the US then turns around to the EU and says "ok, now it's your turn. If we can't spy on everybody, then neither can you."

"That's terrible, and no one should do that." I find that I really enjoy talks that go through some of the antipatterns before showing the way they are showing off. It both helps build a pattern match of when I should be thinking about their solution, as well as being entertaining.