letitleak

His moves certainly show that he doesn't care about anyone but himself and his power. When he arrested parts of the military during their coup practices he created this situation of violence. If he stepped down as more rational PMs did when given hints, he would be living in luxury but in house arrest or exile. The other path is a smaller less official coup, and that ends in his death and longer term instability from the poor and unpredictable transfers of power without the legitimacy of the generals..

> I don't get why people are still advocating Octave as a Matlab alternative.

Because it is the closest thing to a drop in replacement, which is what you need when taking a class or following a tutorial based on MATLAB. Trying to use a different language and follow along is a much more advanced challenge and can be borderline impossible for a MOOC with an autograder or a class with a dusty professor.

I wasn't very happy with octave and I wouldn't use it for an independent project.. but I can't say how much of that is the pesky little octave specific bugs and how much is that I wouldn't like MATLAB's syntax when it is perfectly implemented. I suppose I could make the same criticisms of R as much of its frustratingly odd behavior comes from its history in emulating an old proprietary language's syntax..

intentionally bad programmers don't need the certification, just to pay the standard $25 play store fee. I think this program will help the quality of play store iff they can get a lot of people through without sacraficing content, such that their certificates actually matter in the market.

Warning the user that it may be illegal to take photos is reasonable, but making a device that acts on the theoretical authority of someone else against its own/possessor is not. Taking your example of polls, it may be illegal for me to take a photo, but it may be my responsibility to do it anyways. For example, I may see visual evidence of large scale voting fraud within a polling station. It is similar for sensitive data and whistle-blowers.

I'm not contesting any of those views, I am saying that the costs to the North were significant and the drain of resources caused by the poorer South continues to be significant.

Using the civil war to justify another military action against a portion of the country that simply votes out would be an example of learning nothing from the past.

The biggest trick in US history was the South convincing the North that the reward for winning was keeping them. The North is stillpaying today.

I think his theory is inconsistent with the pro-brexit group being older, and the anti being younger.. But I think both the brexit group and Trump express the right wing disillusionment, which seem to be older people that thought they were in the political/economic in group and ended up marginalized with nothing relevant to the globally connected youth. I'm not sure older Scotts would have believed they were in the in-group in terms of UK power or economy.

The British as non-EU can't get a better deal than the Swiss as a non EU Schengen area member.. I think the British will either lose more control of immigration from this vote or be pretty crippled by poor EU trade agreements leading to the US learning to deal direct with the mainland.

Foreign Banks will refuse you service if they discover you are a US person with no intention/ability to comply. If they don't they face tax penalties on any US holding and possibly local penalties due to treaties with the US.

*Over time the US will enlist more and more help with these kinds of methods (for example many foreign employers would have obligations from paperwork they signed to accept US customer payments) so at some point you will probably have to come into compliance if you aren't somewhere totally at odds with the US.

Charging for renunciation is the most ridiculous part. You are paying for a process that:

is expensive only since they want to investigate you as a presumed criminal or tax dodger (the movie Brazil comes to mind)

is a result of their non-compliance with international norms

is the result of the US declaring you have a status that was never requested

As an expat I consider all US citizens to be indentured servants due to this requirement to buy independence from the US and whatever it chooses to enact next. Effectively, these changes are not noticed by the US' domestics, but those who think they "can flee to Canada" when they have ethical problems with the US are now deluding themselves. "If you don't like it, then leave" may have been sarcastic BS, but at least it was a real choice that many people made in the Vietnam era, etc. If you don't like us leave us money (which we will use in the ways you probably object to)" is something else.

I will find it both funny and sad that when the people who supported the two party system are pissed by someone like Trump implementing fascist policies they will finally realize that their own willingness to destroy our basic civil rights makes it impossible for them to avoid helping a system they find morally repugnent and criminal.

If saying an employee acted without authorization and/or tampering with the papertrail will save a few million in fines then you better hope no one like that is on your board. But your stock options will be safe.. though you probably wont be entitled to them.

I see very little of this in tech and remain pissed at my peers over storage, printers, cpu mmus, mobile phone upgrades, software with no model to reason/guess about how it will implement an unfamiliar feature... I am often happier with a 5 year old hardware product or a 15 year old software one since its not as well tuned for obsolescence as a current one.

For example, 5 year old celerons support 16Gb of ram which makes them useful for another five years, modern celerons support 8Gb making them perfectly engineered for 5 years ago.

[Edit - 5 years ago was 16Gb, 2013 was 32Gb, today's celeron is 8Gb.. progress.]

I find this criticism and Eliot's of very little value without Orwell's choice of rebuttals. The format of 1984 is very different from A clock Work Orange, which is the closest thing I can think of to Asimov's request. 1984 works on a different level because it doesn't distance the reader from the characters by giving them new vices or unessential tech that we must map to the present. The pigs in animal farm also work very well from Orwell's perspective. I don't think he viewed his class controlling India as an accident, and for all intents he was a civic minded pig that at best understood that his peers were going too far in making an empire with all the unfortunate traits of past empires.

There are research projects/papers on the topic with claims that are all based on Brier scores. I'd say Brier scores are inherently biased by choices in framing/asking questions, but at least measure everyone uniformly/fairly who is given the same questions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Judgment_Project

For full datasets, I'm not sure if they provide it since not all researchers are good about open data. You could look at open prediction markets which are directly observable but they wont give you any insight into how professional analysts compare with the crowd.

One of the reasons I like crowd prediction is that it seems to be slowly leading to well distributed groups of people who are able to make educated guesses even with one or two conditionals.

While governments have professional analysts, they don't do all that much better than chance even on direct predictions and then what they do share with the public is filtered by their biased interests.

Not only do we not know, for example, if the chaos after an accelerated arab spring was a better outcome from the perspective of maintaining western financial/political interests at a cost of preventing a more gradual transition into stable democracies. But more importantly, we also don't know if government analysts had that hypothesis and they still chose to interfere.

Personally, I don't think western democracies will continue to function with that type of secrecy of knowledge combined with increasing computational modeling/prediction capabilities.

>take or acquire in an unfair or clandestine way

Hmm.. The non-poaching agreements were about refusing to offer jobs to reduce wages in an unfair or clandestine way.

I hope companies use the term poaching more, it makes easier to start a class action lawsuits against them.

Offer anyone a job who you want to hire based on their skills and/or experience.

I generally agree, but there is an important caveat that relates to human social thinking. It is legal to mail spam since the resource burden is on you, it is not legal to fax it since the burden is on the recipient.

The US began with a theory that email was like mail since the recipients resource use was minimal and now treats it more like fax since the senders burden proved even more minimal.

On the web in general, the delivery costs are exceptionally low for the producer leading to the general sense that most content should be long lived and ad free. Especially on mobile, where people with ridiculous data plans have large costs.

Clearly, traditional news publishers have other production costs and a decaying product. But how do you fairly make the distinction between real ones and pseudo publishers in a way that doesn't over-reward being near the blurry lines that separate them?

Normally, search should have a mechanism to specify these kinds of qualities, hence a separate mobile mode in google's search. But Google working out penalties for use of display ad networks (which deliver different content to different users) is a conflict of interest.

I'd not heard from no permissions, but as with a website, I still prefer things with my signature correspond to things from me and are nice even if the rest is a cesspool. Given these problems, I would seriously hope that the ~8 app makers I trust feel the same way.

Sorry to go OT[1], but is there a link to their general (encryption/integrity) policies?

I was shocked they are sometimes delivering the android studio via http and providing only sha1 sums. If your IDE is compromised, then who knows what code you might be signing..

[1](Well I considered it a related matter, as I have trouble telling what googles actually policies are and whether my attempts at feedback will be filtered by a group in some kind of crunch as described or by someone who will be neutrally considering actual policies..)

The wording and implication of these questions have very different meaning to me today than they did in the 1980-1990s, I can only imagine the 1960s..

Now it is entirely clear to me that if a high profile speaker comes, it is not that they are merely being reimbursed for travel expenses with a few extravagances, nice dinners.. maybe a meaningless honorary certificate.

Being politically controversial and then cashing in on the speech circuit is now an openly discussed career plan. Paying for the high profile but educationally useless speeches is one way that even average colleges are moving from public/educational spaces into transaction centers for prestige and accolades.

If you rephrase the question to be clear that no one is being payed for their presence, then I could care less who shows up to speak of their own volition.

But all of those choices are now in a bundled product where you must pay the 4 year sticker price, so what you don't like will need to be handled by their ever growing PR-agency, oops I really meant to say administration..

I think this will be a very interesting question even if she ultimately wins as she's certainly had a tough time given her resources.

Personally, I don't believe people are building direct immunity. I think they are updating their self image to avoid cognitive dissonance which leads to identity confusions, like the shocking number of people I meet who seem to think they are in all sorts of long tails when they seem quite average.

As such, I do think quantitative based analytics will eventually win out. But not in terms of direct targeting ads to the correct voter. I think broadcast (or pseudo broadcast) ads are essential and the sophistication will be in analyzing the social affects and trying to do this in smaller tests without "using them up". I.e. eliciting bad defenses from an opponents supporters on twitter is far more powerful than randomly bringing up points privately to the independents you are after. In the first case, we are all forced to cement an argument if only to clarify why we think someone is an idiot.

I wasn't familiar with Charles Rangel until I read this article..

For anyone who suspects the US is engaged in a "Buy American" (or else) campaign to sell domestic evasion/financial services, the man who apparently wants to be identified as behind FATCA seems to be the poster child of evasion the patriotic way:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Rangel#Unreported_asse...

The World’s Favorite New Tax Haven Is the United States (bloomberg.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10978847

"The US Treasury worked tirelessly to address many of these problems, and most have been resolved. If there are still problems with the law, then I believe Congress should hold hearings to see how it can be improved."

I bet they are wondering how to stay motivated on this one. Well a minor update to the legal system should fix the problem:

Welcome to Congress, we have now designated you a "US Congress Person" for filing purposes.

Being or having been a Members of Congress will require you to file all forms that could be requested of any "US Person".

In cases like FATCA you will also be required to disclose all accounts in your country of residence to meet our test of equivalence for "US Persons" abroad. Banks in the US will now be required to follow all procedures for FATCA for the special case of "US Congress Persons" or face 30% penalties. If Banks are unable to establish whether account holders are "US Congress Persons" they shall pay 30% penalties on all US sourced income.

The penalties for failure to file any form as a "US Congress Person" shall be no less than the highest established for other "US Persons".

Being convicted of some crimes and failures to file may limit your time in office but does not change your status and obligations as a "US Congress Person". If (Ex-)Congresspeople would like to renounce their citizenship they will automatically face the maximum 10 years of continued filing with the IRS as provided by the current regulations. "US Congress Person" like "US Person" can not be renounced separately.

Children of US Congress Persons shall inherit all filing birthrights of being a "US Congress Person".

(edit- fix mis-attribution of renunciation/IRS filing issue to FATCA)

People in the US should be complaining to the FTC. In the very least, for phone's under warranty, Magnuson-Moss should apply if Apple isn't fixing these problems for free.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty...

I don't really get your point. If someone is going to be apprehended on your soil that basically has to be by your nationals. Agents of another nation are not capable of placing or moving someone in custody they are just criminals engaged in a kidnapping unless the situation matches some extraordinary one covered in a specific treaty.

It would be fascinating if Denmark and the US have such a treaty, and if that is recent then I would wonder if that doesn't subject Denmark to penalties by other members of the EU and/or other nations in the Schengen treaty. It certainly should.

Given that those are the enablers, it would take pretty blue hats for me..