Beldin

As someone who studied privacy in voting, it's horrific that we have a word for this. Cat was out of the bag when the then-minister (of the interior) started pushing this. Somehow, despite the "how are you, fellow kids" vibe, the word became unstoppable.

Too bad no one explained the minister that we'd like to not enable vote buying (nor other forms of boter coercion).

(The official guidelines make a distinction between allowed - no info visible - and illegal stemfies, but no one's doing any enforcement.)

> The idea that critical communication infrastructure must be (directly or indirectly) supported by advertising interests is certainly not obvious

I think the problem is more that the trend over the last 5-7 decades has been to privatise things. The EU (for instance) has rules forcing (e.g.,) privatisation of train companies and postal services. This has caused previously government-owned services to be privatised.

In this day and age, I'd be surprised to hear of any successful case where a non-public good was made public in a Western country. (I'll restrict my surprise to there because of insufficient familiarity with other countries to make such sweeping statements.) Whether it'd be web browsers, water treatment facilities, energy-related, healthcare-related, infrastructure-related, etc.: if it's currently privatised, it will emphatically not revert to public; if it's currently public, it might be forced to be privatised.

You might think about "privatised-but-with-strings-attached" variants, like in California with "carrier-of-last-resort", or in EU with public transport concessions requiring also services that operate at a loss to service small population centers / unpopular hours. Typically, these impose restrictions on the market parties on what they must deliver in order to be granted the concession. That seems like a way to guarantee the kind of service a government would deliver, but by market parties. And it is! But once you encode rules, you can start eroding them. Every new concession tender going out, you can try to dilute such conditions. A bit is enough - every step gained can be relied upon in future negotiations ("you're asking for more than last term"). And, of course, every small step can be argued by increasing costs - because cost will always increase anyway.

The TL;DRR (didn't read the rant): the public commons has a tendency to erode in favour of privatisation. There is pressure to do so, and no real counterpressure to reverse, only to not go too fast.

Another hypothesis: being extravert means getting energised by interactions with others; being introvert means that costs energy. (Most people will have experienced both, at different times.)

This is why I don't think that being introvert is caused by fear, nor that courage cause extraverted behaviour. For most people, whether a social situation is providing or draining energy very often depends on more than just you.

Yes, there are exceptions. But don't underestimate yourself -- in either direction. The vast majority of people need both to thrive.

I think the main issue is that regular post has addrrss info of the recipient. So the whole logistics chain is geared towards that. If you remove the need for address info for a (small) subset, you'd have to have two logistics chains somewhat intertwined with each other...

> What global players does Russia have any significant influence over?

China, N. Korea, probably Vietnam, India'll listen to them, possibly more in s.e. Asia, and they're expanding their influence in Africa (by supplying mercenary armies).

They play the game differently than the US (at the very least: with other countries), but that does not make them a 2nd rate power.

I mostly agree worth you, except to nuance that it is not about "information that is classified in the US", but about classified US-documents.

Assange is alleged to have released unredacted info that exposed informants in warzones. This while running a service - not an infrastructure, a service - for exposing information.

Arguing that he hasn't personally killed anyone is not a strong rebuke against such allegations.

And you don't think that what happened to some folks that said/did stuff that displeased the US and UK rulers might have a similar effect on their population? Like, for example, what happened to Julian Assange?

Isn't that the definition of a jury trial? That the opinion of the jury decides whether or not the defendant is convicted?

The allegations I've seen floating around is that he deliberately withheld certain types of leaks. Thereby making Wikileaks no longer neutral, but politically-motivated.

> Is it not enough that one state committed a crime and he reported it?

It depends on what "it" would be enough for... but if he indeed actively surpressed damaging info leaked to him on par with the stuff he has released, yeah, that makes matters complex.

Another criticism I've seen is that the leaks did not do any redaction whatsoever - even when it clearly pertained to informants in war zones. For that, if the allegations are true, my view is simple: you shouldn't do that. And if you set up an infrastructure for leaking, it is reasonable to assume that you're capable of handling such an important and obviously necessary step.

So "isn't it enough?" - no, it is more complicated than that.

> Box plots [...] assume that your data follows a bell/gaussian shape.

Not sure how to square that with this statement on Wikipedia's page on box plots:

Box plots are non-parametric: they display variation in samples of a statistical population without making any assumptions of the underlying statistical distribution[3]

> every talk is a job talk

Absolutely. A subset of the people in the audience are tenured or tenure-track academics. These folks get grants for postdocs. Moreover, they may be on a hiring committee. Even better: if you leave a favorable impression and a colleague of theirs has a job opening, they might recommend you.

Treat (academic) presentations as job talks. Good impressions open doors, not just in the immediate future but also further out than that.

To the best of our knowledge, for any of asteroid belt, Kuiper belt and Van Oort cloud, the trick is hitting, not missing.

Space is vast; matter is (relatively) sparse. Moreover, matter tends to clump together, concentrating what little there is.

> HN tends to be highly skeptical of “if you don’t have anything to hide, you wouldn’t mind the lack of privacy” arguments.

Well, those arguments flip the narrative. No one has to justify their privacy; invasion of privacy needs to be justified - and, when warranted, scope needs to be enforced.

In case anyone needs an analogue: when paying, you don't give the seller access to all of your money. They justify a particular amount and if you agree, they get the right to only that.

With money, we tend to call folks who take more than warranted "robbers" or "thieves". I think society would be in a better state of we viewed invasion of privacy as negatively.

> As long as the coverage and convenience are so lopsided,

Two ways to fix that (in general): improve one side, or worsen the other. Some measures do both simultaneously, eg. bus lanes take away asphalt for cars and improve bus infrastructure.

It's fairly easy to make a bus network more convenient than a car in a city. You can easily take measures such as dedicated bus lanes, one way streets, pedestrian areas, narrower streets + wider pavements and cycle lanes, less and more expensive parking.

The current attractiveness of public transport is roughly how attractive cars should have been. But most US cities have focused for decades on making car use more attractive. Congratulations, it worked.