Can you? There are a few problems: firstly, the primaries are controlled by the parties, so you have a very limited menu to choose from when it comes to the actual elections. Secondly, the media is no longer independent. If you are not aligned with the status quo, you will get no exposure, or only very negative exposure. Finally, politicians consistently do the opposite of what they promise on such matters. Take Obama: a lot of people believed that he was the way to fight, that he was the "correct person". He promised to encourage whistle-blowing, and then he did the opposite. This is not a partisan observation, I pick this example because it is the most recent disappointment on such matters.
> But more importantly, I won't be spirited away to a black site by speaking ill about the president.
It is happening right now in Oregon.
> Nor can the government decide it doesn't want me as CEO of my company anymore.
Are you sure?
> Or prevent me from funding the opposition party.
Try funding a radical party and see what happens.
> There's an enormous difference between the West and totalitarian dystopia China.
I agree that there is, but it is scary to see that the difference is becoming smaller and most people seem ok with that. I worry that the future will not be a place worth living in.
The EU is not some weird hive-mind, it has separation of powers just like the US. It is the European Court of Justice's job to overturn executive decisions that trample on the constitutional rights of its citizens, same as the Supreme Court in the US.
I am not sure how your comment related to mine, maybe I was not clar, EU and US had a contract, US is not respecting it and this judges looked at teh facts and said, yeah the contract is invalid so you can't store private data in US using this contract as a base, find something else.
And now US citizens from HN spin this as protectionism or over regulation and just ignore that there was a such a contract and it was not respected, it would make sense then that US guys won't complain if someone else would do the same, but you notice if an app related to China is only suspected of doing something like that the mob demands it getting banned if an US entity has the power to just search and read anyone's private stuff that is not from US then is fine.
I mean US could pretend they won't spy , and then work a bit harder to get the data they need instead of having 100% full access to everything.
I'm sorry for going a bit offtopic, but I have noticed this weird linguistic contortion "get let go" often. Why the euphemisms? You get fired. It doesn't hurt to speak plainly. This "let go" expression seems weirdly childish, like how people say that someone "passed on" to avoid confronting the hard reality of death.
And I'm not picking on you, I know that almost everyone talks like this now.
Well at Netflix in particular, there is no real difference between being fired and being laid off, since both come with the same severance and benefits.
So it makes sense to use a generic term.
In most cases you use the generic term to avoid liability. Saying someone was fired could be libelous/slanderous.
Interesting point, but in most cases people say it when talking about themselves (I was let go) or in the hypothetical, as was the case here with OP: "When you get let go". So no risk of liability, there must be some other explanation.
There is still a liability when talking about oneself. Sometimes when someone is fired they have to sign a non-disparagement agreement to get their severance.
Saying you were fired could be considered disparaging.
The "let go" is total corporate newspeak. You can't "let" go someone who didn't ask to go nor doesn't want to. You can only force him to go (by firing him).
Here we go. The obligatory "you don't understand Gödel" post.
> Ever since Gödel proved his theorem, people have used it as a metaphor for all kinds of things, from new age mysticism to psychology, biology, quantum physics, AI etc.
Including Gödel himself, who was a mystic. It is true that people make all sorts of silly claims vaguely based Gödel and other famous results, but it is also true that there are indeed deep philosophical insight to gain from Gödel's theorems, which are also dismissed without a proper argument.
> I start to appreciate the rigid form of scientific articles more and more.
I always appreciated it, but notice that what Gödel did is not science. He obtained a deep insight about reality that was not based on the scientific method or on empiricism.
Democracy is more of a principle (is just means that legitimacy of government comes from some aggregate choice of the governed), than a political system. Radically different political systems can be classified as democracies, all the way from direct vote (self-organized communes, also Switzerland) to complex federations with layers of indirect representation, such as the USA or the EU -- with a lot of other interesting alternatives such as sortition.
> By eating food that is more unhealthy for you in order to save the planet, it means that you have valued the planet's health above your own. I find this to be irrational.
I find it more irrational to believe that one can be healthy in an unhealthy environment.
> I am all for finding the cleanest, most environmentally friendly way of feeding humans. But if the result is less good for human consumption, then I am simply substituting one evil for another, and nobody can take any moral high ground over it.
The article is about flimsy speculation on one extreme situation (vegan junk food vs. regular junk food). Nutrition science offers us precious little certainties, one of the few being that processed food is less healthy than food cooked by humans with a few simple ingredients. An healthy and balanced vegan diet would be fantastically more healthy than the choices of at least 90% of americans.
Can you create some optimally-healthy diet for a small group of priviliged people at the expense of fucking the environment and resources for everyone else? Probably. Should you? I guess it depends on how you see your relation with the rest of humanity.
In any case, this is all theoretical. I bet most people gasping about this are going to down some pizza & beer within the next 24 hours.
The author seems to make a circular argument: foundational languages look like C++/Java, Python doesn't look like C++/Java, ergo Python is not a foundational language.
There are no foundational languages, what is foundational is CS theory itself. C++ and Java are just part of the ALGOL tradition, which syntactically relies on a bunch of arbitrary choices (curly braces vs indentation is an arbitrary symbolic choice and any preference is personal and subjective), and furthermore were highly influenced by 70s computer architecture that doesn't really exist anymore. In other words: just a bunch of legacy choices.
Python is the best general-purpose language there is at the moment, because of its popularity, ubiquity, actual use in a wide diversity of domains and availability of libraries for almost anything you can think of. Furthermore, the syntax is simple enough for one to be able to keep it all in one's head and not having to constantly refer to documentation. If you learn Python today, it will likely be useful to you for the rest of your life in a variety of situations.
Getting used to curly braces in ALGOL-like languages is a minor intellectual challenge compared to what awaits someone taking a Computer Science or Engineering degree.
> Disengaging based on an N=1 is not the type of individual action that improves our society.
Statistical significance is not the only epistemological tool around. I would even argue that, outside of some scientific fields, it is really not that important (and might even lead to a lot of wrong conclusions in the context that is used nowadays, but that is a different discussion altogether).
We are not some dumb statistical machine. We have an entire model of the world in our heads, and one single observation can have profound implications on it. The journalist reports to an editor, who maintains a system of job promotions, and all of this is connected to an institution that holds very real power. The OP observed this journalist manipulating the story, not in a random direction, but in their view in a direction that would appeal to the status quo. It is normal to update one's map of reality when confronted with first-person experience of an event that goes against what you've been told, and when the simplest explanation for how the world works changes in light of this direct observation.
And this is also how your mind works, and this is also how you formed your views on reality, including repeating the "N=1" cliché. None of it has anything to do with p-values.
> How is this conclusion different than saying that, say, reading anything in any magazine is a waste of time because the magazine sells advertising space?
It is different because the business model of the magazine is to create some content that people enjoy, so that they will tolerate the ads that come with it.
Here, the content itself is an ad in disguise. That is the business model of SEO, "content marketing" etc, and this is why it keeps flooding the web with mediocrity.
> A wide variety of types of malware exist, including computer viruses, worms, Trojan horses, ransomware, spyware, adware, rogue software, and scareware.
It specifically mentions spyware, so let's take a look at that definition:
"Spyware is a type of malware that aims to gather information about a person or organization, without their knowledge, and send such information to hack another entity without the consumer's consent."
Can you? There are a few problems: firstly, the primaries are controlled by the parties, so you have a very limited menu to choose from when it comes to the actual elections. Secondly, the media is no longer independent. If you are not aligned with the status quo, you will get no exposure, or only very negative exposure. Finally, politicians consistently do the opposite of what they promise on such matters. Take Obama: a lot of people believed that he was the way to fight, that he was the "correct person". He promised to encourage whistle-blowing, and then he did the opposite. This is not a partisan observation, I pick this example because it is the most recent disappointment on such matters.
> But more importantly, I won't be spirited away to a black site by speaking ill about the president.
It is happening right now in Oregon.
> Nor can the government decide it doesn't want me as CEO of my company anymore.
Are you sure?
> Or prevent me from funding the opposition party.
Try funding a radical party and see what happens.
> There's an enormous difference between the West and totalitarian dystopia China.
I agree that there is, but it is scary to see that the difference is becoming smaller and most people seem ok with that. I worry that the future will not be a place worth living in.