sedev

How has that worked out? What are you looking at when you compare that to what you were doing before last year?

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/kyc-and-aml-beyond-th...

You might look at the standard KYC questionnaire for a new retail account and think “Really? You ask questions which have obviously correct answers. You give people less than a tweet worth of space to answer them. How could this possibly catch any criminals not stupid enough to write Occupation: Drug Dealer?” […] this is not the only mechanism by which KYC questionnaires have a stochastic effect; they’re also useful in an entirely different part of the crime lifecycle. Many, many crimes involve lies, but most lies told are not crimes and most lies told are not recorded for forever. We did, however, make a special rule for lies told to banks: they’re potentially very serious crimes and they will be recorded with exacting precision, for years, by one of the institutions in society most capable of keeping accurate records and most findable by agents of the state.

This means that if your crime touches money, and much crime is financially motivated, and you get beyond the threshold of crime which can be done purely offline and in cash, you will at some point attempt to interface with the banking system. And you will lie to the banks, because you need bank accounts, and you could not get accounts if you told the whole truth.

The government wants you to do this. Their first choice would be you not committing crimes, but contingent on you choosing to break the law, they prefer you also lie to a bank. […]

Particularly in white collar crime, establishing complicated chains of evidence about e.g. a corporate fraud, and mens rea of the responsible parties, is not straightforward. But then at some point in the caper comes a very simple question: “Were you completely honest with your bank?” And the answer will frequently be “Well, no, I necessarily had to lie in writing.”

And congratulations, you have just eaten a wire charge fraud for every transaction you’ve ever done.

https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

Request for clarification: 13% of what?

In addition to the more concrete reasons, abstractly they're getting a bit of extra usage out of the namespace by segmenting it. A 9ZZZ999-type license plate is not just any license plate — it's specifically an ordinary private vehicle (as opposed to a state-owned vehicle or a trailer) that was registered in California between 1980 and 2026, and both of those facts are durably encoded in the number. Notably, both of these are also very human-readable facts, which for most of the existence of the car bureaucracy was extremely germane. The CA DMV got its digital-records act together in the 1990s (this is from memory, it might have been in the Bush years but it certainly wasn't in the '80s and it was a done deal by the Obama era) but there was a long time before that when "just plug it into the DB" was not an option because the DB was a filing cabinet and the query engine was a human digging through it.

Personally i feel like its kind of like democracy: the worst system except for all the other systems.

It's exactly this, in large part because Wikipedia happens to also be a large-scale exercise in direct democracy.

Maybe there is something I'm not taking into account but I have a hard time seeing the meaningful cost of some obscure wiki page merely existing.

The thing you're not taking into account is that every article that exists takes up some amount of editor time, which is why it's good when more people participate in Wikipedia. You are correct that the server/bandwidth cost of almost all articles rounds off to zero. That leaves just the cost in "an actual human looked at this and okayed it," which has different scaling characteristics.

The general notability guideline is another thing that's effectively downstream of "there's not enough editor time to keep everything up to basic standards." If Wikipedia had 10x the editor-hours it does now, notability requirements would de facto loosen, because there would be enough editor-hours to keep the extra articles useful. Seriously, editor time is the major bottleneck of Wikipedia.

You can create a page as an anonymous user. The content and subject is much, more more important than the fact of being created as an anonymous user. If that's the process you want to avoid, there's also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_creatio... but that one is more geared towards people who are already engaged with Wikipedia. An outsider saying "well, someone, but not me, should do something about this problem," is just as welcome on Wikipedia as it is anywhere else.

For most things the talk pages will explain why it is restricted, but if someone forgot to put a notice there, there's also a giant list of "the following topic areas reliably attract disruptive editing and get people angry, so admins move much more quickly to restrict editing than they would otherwise." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_sanctions#Ac...

I am going to say a thing I say a lot: please edit Wikipedia. It is easier to do than you probably think! Wikipedia's biggest constraint is no longer money or server space, it's editor time (especially since LLM-based garbage is a force multiplier on disruptive editing that does not have a corresponding improvement to good-faith editing). Any topic area you know about and/or care about can benefit from your attention. Fixing typos is valuable. Adding photos is valuable. Flagging vandalism is valuable. Please edit Wikipedia.

"But this means his pro and con opinions don't match typical opinions and this makes him polarizing. And hence some people will flag his articles reflexively or post reflexive dismissals. And Hacker News is heavily weighted to downrank polarizing articles."

The downranking is particularly weird since HN's professed norms go extremely hard on something along the lines of "you should take atypical opinions seriously since they're more likely to contain new information than opinions that are conventional-wisdom-with-a-few-little-sprinkles-on-top." Sometimes the HN audience is very diligent about this norm. Reactions to Gruber's writing from the HN crown often show marked deficiencies in adherence to this norm. I'm not sure what, if anything, should be done about that by Gruber or HN's moderators, but I do believe that the problem is not located in Gruber's writing.

An important part of the historical context here is that the black community in America has a lot of scar tissue around sketchy investment opportunities, and those scars go back, oh, call it 160 years (i.e. the Reconstruction era). When you have a community that is suffering from widespread generational poverty, as the black community in America broadly is, that community naturally tends to be very eager for opportunities for generating wealth — especially opportunities that present themselves as "This is it! This is your chance to buy into the American Dream, legitimately and officially, no messing around with crime, sports, or the music industry, you're going to have Investment Opportunities, you will be stockholders, this is what prudent people do to accumulate wealth and provide for their children & grandchildren."

The black community in America has been presented with many such opportunities. How many of them were legitimate? Nobody has a really solid number, for hopefully obvious reasons, but whatever the real rate of legitimate opportunities that sound like the above is, it's low enough that 160-ish years of it have left the black community in America still suffering from widespread generational poverty. Particularly there is a pattern in economic-bubble periods where members of the black community buy in near the top (because the growth of a bubble is driven by existing capital flowing into it and the black community has less capital, while whatever activity is inflating the bubble seeks out large clumps of capital first, as any growing sector does), end up as bagholders (because they bought in near the top of a bubble), and suffer disproportionately (because they had less capital, and so a given absolute loss is a bigger percentage of their capital than for wealthier communities). There have also, of course, been periods of undisguised racial violence, which have always involved theft as one form the violence takes. All of this leaves the black community in America with noteworthy long-term scars around the topic of investment opportunities particularly marketed to them — and yet, what are they supposed to do, give up on pursuing the American Dream, especially when someone promises up and down that this is it, they can leave behind the sordid stuff, this truly is the pathway to affluence, safety, and respectability?

I have never been to Chicago and I know nothing about Bally's. All I know is that while history rarely outright repeats itself, it quite often rhymes.

Unfortunately that well-worn example usually only proves that "false positive" as a technical term fails to match people's intuitions. The underlying problem about the base rate is important to teach, but it's easy for well-meaning people to try and teach the base rate lesson but fail by instead teaching a bullshit gotcha about the definition of "false positive."

I'm glad your proposed solution was "Spend a few hours monkeying around in Jekyll to make dates radically less prominent [and] somehow alter the URL structure to take them out of URLs" — my conscience is repulsed by the thought of removing the date information entirely. It should be there for people who are actively seeking it out.

That one (as I am seeing it now) cites the Jacobin article as a source, but the Jacobin article itself is fuzzy on sourcing.

They can construct various internally-consistent models of what's going on, debate the merits of those models, and check them against the available evidence while doing their best to procure and evaluate new evidence. It's not fundamentally dissimilar from what, say, particle physicists do. The raw materials are different and so the research toolkit necessarily reflects those differences, but serious fields of intellectual inquiry all resemble each other in these fundamental ways.

Since you mentioned Q particularly, I remember the college course in which I learned about it was using Stevan Davies' New Testament Fundamentals, which my college-aged self was able to come to grips with pretty readily. For me that answers the question of "how do they prove that to anyone who's not a specialist" — they can publish a (relatively slim!) undergraduate textbook that incorporates the theory.

A lot of textual analysis is fairly mundane — it's the equivalent of a document allegedly from 1962 saying "when Reagan became President" or being typeset with LaTeX or referring to "selfies". Specialists, of course, can pull off much more sophisticated versions of this kind of thing ("that is a phrase that never appears elsewhere in the Pauline corpus and also it doesn't fit with Paul's soteriology and also it's from the wrong dialect of Greek, therefore it's probably not authentic").

The byline is kinda small, but it's helpful contextual information that this article is by Mike Duncan, who is likely to be familiar to HN readers as the guy who did the Revolutions and The History Of Rome podcasts.

"appeasing brutes like russia has a long history of not working" is a true statement that, in this context, does not do any of the work one would like a true statement to do, but it does do much of the work that one would like a statement to do if one were behaving with malice and dishonesty. It collapses the critique it's replying to into an inaccurate summary ("all of the things you said amount to 'appeasing Russia'") and uses a weighted, emotionally loaded verb to do so ("appeasing"). What this response actually says is "all of the problems that sedev pointed out are irrelevant because Russia is bad," and I am not surprised that you didn't say that out loud because when it's said directly, it's obviously wrong.

Do better.

Please go into detail about how this would be implemented, with particular attention to what could go wrong at each stage of the process and what the consequences would be, especially consequences originating from stakeholders who possess nuclear weapons and whose territory you are proposing to exert military force against, and compare the difficulty and expense of implementation in terms of expected value to the magnitude of what might be gained by a successful operation of this kind.

Yes, I mean "you clearly did not think about this and your idea is very, very, very bad."

Clickbait avoidance: it's rapamycin.

You know what, fair, that was too harsh of me; I was probably speaking more out of irritation about the editorial issues. Thanks for the pushback.

From the Conclusions section:

The main question we tried to answer is whether a significant shift away from the US dollar as the dominant “hegemonic” currency is likely to occur in the foreseeable future, and in which direction the monetary system might develop. The key conclusion was that the fate of the US dollar as the currency hegemon depends on a number of factors, with the degree to which US policy makers would be able to maintain macroeconomic stability relative to other countries of supreme importance. Only if stability is maintained will the US dollar retain its position as the safe-haven currency of choice.

In heavily hedged terms, they conclude that the situation is currently stable and likely to remain so. My opinion is that there's good information in this document but the editing (mostly in the sense of structure and clarity) is quite poor, prone to using the very real complexity of the issues at hand as an excuse for weasel words, wishy-washiness, and desperation to please one's boss. In reading this document, I recommend that you keep in mind that the document is from late 2022 and Credit Suisse imploded in early 2023, so, as the document's authors might say, one suspects that it does not represent a level of intellectual rigor that one would prefer to see from a globally important bank.

This was brought to mind by the discussion of Dan Luu's "Why it's impossible to agree on what's allowed" piece. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39313942 Particularly germane is the requirement of telos — clear purpose makes it possible to reach agreement. Possible.

There is no right to advertise, is how I see it, any more than there is a right to use asbestos, lead, and mercury any way you please. There is societal permission to use those substances in strictly controlled ways, requiring that serious work be invested in preventing and limiting the toxic effects upon the public of using those substances, because those toxic effects are real and taking the benefits of using those substances while shuffling off the toxic effects onto someone else, is evil. We should regulate advertising in the same way: it is evil to shuffle off its toxic effects onto the public at large while the advertiser and ad-inventory-seller keep all of the benefits. Ad-blocking is as virtuous as carrying around kits and sensors to check how much lead and mercury is in my immediate environment — certainly I will benefit from doing it, but I shouldn't have to, because pumping out ad-toxins into the social environment constantly and pervasively, is evil.

My experience is that the content of those arguments often doesn't matter. This sticks out to me particularly in music discussions because those discussions have always had room for endless sanctimonious opinions. One of the most valuable things I read when I was younger on the Internet was a SomethingAwful columnist explaining how to be a fake music snob and pointing out that "people involved in music discussions don’t actually care what other people think, they’re merely concerned about the politics of domination and submission." It's not just music discussions: human discussions in general are prone to this, and when the discussion is really about the politics of domination and submission (a topic that people, usually correctly, care a whole lot about), the "real" subject matter of the discussion will become the building blocks of the social dominance exercise and its connection to the underlying thing will quickly be severed. There is no political tendency or fandom or faith that is immune to this, it's an emergent feature of humans' monkey brain hardware.

Since they've done it before — https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/24/306592297... — I would consider it highly realistic.

You are factually wrong and also your news sources are factually wrong. If you find that insulting, that's a you problem.

The news is wrong. Especially about the CHAZ. Source: live here.