Religious people understand the world less, study suggests - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/religious-people-understand-world-less-study-shows-a7378896.html <comment><AUTHOR> Summary: "Although supernatural beliefs often paint a peculiar picture about the physical world, the possibility that the beliefs might be based on inadequate understanding of the non-social world has not received research attention. In this study (N = 258), we therefore examined how physical-world skills and knowledge predict religious and paranormal beliefs. The results showed that supernatural beliefs correlated with all variables that were included, namely, with low systemizing, poor intuitive physics skills, poor mechanical ability, poor mental rotation, low school grades in mathematics and physics, poor common knowledge about physical and biological phenomena, intuitive and analytical thinking styles, and in particular, with assigning mentality to non-mental phenomena. Regression analyses indicated that the strongest predictors of the beliefs were overall physical capability (a factor representing most physical skills, interests, and knowledge) and intuitive thinking style." [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acp.3248/full](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/acp.3248/full)

Paywalled

<comment><USER2> I think you could have suspected that to say the least :) It's very hard to be as realistic as possible. People have all kind of delusions (not only religion). We have a world we create in our head and live according to laws of that world and not of reality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The thing that annoys me most about science communication and science in general is when people abuse it to make lazy claims.

Here is the methodology:

"Two hundred fifty eight Finnish participants (63.6% women) took part in the online study. Their mean age was 31.81 years (SD = 9.89, range 18–65). Of the participants, 38.1% were working, 44.4% were students, and 17.5% were employed in activities other than those mentioned earlier; 1.2% had grammar school education, 44.2% had vocational or upper secondary school education, and 54.5% had polytechnic or university education. Religious affiliations were none (61%), Christian (37%), or other (2%)."

Tell me if you think you can make the claim that "religious people understand the world less" from that. The title should be 'Christian Finns understand the world less compared to non-christian Finns" and even that is being lazy.

If I did a behavioural study with male and female rats and mice of various ages I would be laughed out of the room. So why so much leeway with these studies when there are so many confounding variables?

<comment><USER4> It's worse than that. As the next paragraph says:

"The online data were collected in two stages. In the first stage, the participants were recruited via several open internet discussion forums and several student mailing lists. In this stage, data about religious and paranormal beliefs, systemizing, mechanical abilities, and core ontological confusions were collected. The rest of the data were collected 1.5 years later. The recruitment message was sent by email to all individuals who had participated in the first stage and who had given their email address for participating in further studies (N= 1537). Of them, 237 could not be contacted because of outdated email address, and 887 did not take part in the present study."

So this is a self-selecting study: the initial group of 1537 (which was self- selected) was whittled down (largely through self-selection) to the final 258 on whom the results are based. Further to that, the authors gave no information on which of the "several open internet discussion forums and several student mailing lists" they recruited or how they did that recruitment. And they made no comparison between the demographic makeup of their sample and the general Finnish population. (Probably because it would've counted against the validity of the study since, y'know, Finland isn't 63% female or 44% students.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A little off topic, but even non-religious people have problems understanding basic science concepts. One of my favorite examples is:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrXaQu_qGeo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrXaQu_qGeo)

Basically, even Harvard graduates have problems and misunderstandings with basic concepts like the seasons.

While there's a lot of possible reasons for this, the one that I think is relevant here is that if you don't ask the questions, and already believe you know the answers, you are likely to not learn the appropriate facts, but rather continue to believe your mistaken views.

This could be taken to an extreme in religion, because really the answer to everything is God. So what need would there be for actual answers or understanding?</comment>


Qualcomm To Get $4.5B from Apple Settlement According to Earnings Release - <AUTHOR> https://www.macrumors.com/2019/05/01/qualcomm-apple-settlement-4-billion/ <comment><AUTHOR> _"... our financial guidance for the third quarter of fiscal 2019 includes estimated revenues of $4.5 billion to $4.7 billion resulting from the settlement (which will be excluded from our Non-GAAP results), consisting of a payment from Apple and the release of our obligations to pay or refund Apple and the contract manufacturers certain customer-related liabilities."_

[https://investor.qualcomm.com/static- files/e8c6eb06-9de6-421...](https://investor.qualcomm.com/static- files/e8c6eb06-9de6-4214-a019-6267e8752b9b)</comment>


An Estonian shares his country's strategy for navigating the digital world - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/01/lessons-from-the-worlds-most-tech-savvy-government/283341/ <comment><USER2> There's two things that jump out at me as worth mentioning:

1) Estonians can imagine losing a war over their territory. It's happened within recent memory. They have contingency plans. Contrast with the United States, where such a thing is the stuff of fantasy, mostly to do with China's military, and our contingency plans seem to involve cutting our leaders off from the world and waiting it out.

2) Americans wouldn't stand for a unified identification system. The moment you propose it, you'd have the Moral Majority breathing down your neck about giving in to the UN and taking a step towards a One World Government. This kind of religiosity permeates our entire civic culture. The very idea of modifying the Constitution horrifies even intelligent commentators, because it was written 200 years ago so it must obviously work well. This is the exact same logic you see from Bible-thumpers.

I really appreciate both the notion of the "boring European state" and the "start-up mindset" that Tamkivi brings up, though they're somewhat at odds. A boring government is a good objective; you don't want the government to be interesting: you want it to work. It makes little sense to me to think of growth as an end rather than a means, but I admit I'm not good at economics; I can see its need when you need a buffer zone for experimentation, but I don't see why it's any kind of measure of success.

<comment><USER3> China's military?!? China doesn't exactly have a distinguished history of conquest. What do they have to show for literally centuries of trying to take Vietnam?

It would surely make more sense to fantasize about a more militaristic culture waging the war, no?

<comment><USER4> Everyone neighbouring country has fought wars in indochina over the years. No country has been to successfully control them for long periods of time. In a land war the chinese have a lot going for them, just look at the korean war to see the strengths of chinese military. The fact the china was once many small countries that were all conquered by the qin kingdom should show that china has a long history of conquest. Just in the 20th century they conquered tibet and xinjiang and held back the US invasion of north korea. On the sea they have next to nothing and their navy is a job. China has never been a big sea power but it looks like they are trying to change that only time will tell how that turns out

<comment><USER5> _China has never been a big sea power_

Not actually true; in the 1500s China was a huge sea power. They had ships big enough to grow crops on deck and Admiral Cheng Ho got as far as Middle East and Africa. Then the bureaucrats, losing power to the merchants and the Navy manipulated the Emperor into declaring owning a ship with more than one mast a capital offence (!) and that was the end of that.

Fast forward a few years and the Portuguese show up on the other side of Africa, Vasco Da Gama at the helm. He should have encountered a Navy that embarrassed anything the Europeans had at the time. Instead, nothing, and then European colonial history happened.

<comment><USER3> Fun fact: jingoistic Chinese claim (without documentation of any kind, as far as I know) that Zheng He (= the guy you mention) actually visited the Americas.

Also, wikipedia indicates his expeditions occurred 1405 to 1433, not 1500s.

<comment><USER5> You are right, I got 1500 and 15th century mixed up :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As an Estonian this makes my heart warm but we (Estonians) have to keep in mind that a lot of what we've accomplished isn't because we're so truly special (although that makes for great marketing) but because our country size and the need (and timing) for a rebuild enabled us to do so.

Lets continue to pursue other great things being small and nimble enables.

On another note, the national PKI infrastructure truly is great and enables location independence on a new level. One can (and I have) start companies, handle legal issues or anything else which requires either lawful signatures or end to end crypto (PKI between citizens) while abroad.

<comment><USER7> Its ok to be humble, but I am not sure the argument about size holds merit. Surely, the costs are at most linear per person: the bigger state might have a higher cost, but the cost per person is unlikely to be higher. I would rather expect the opposite: some of the cost would be amortized effectively, and even more so by the fact that a preexisting system means less reinvention is needed.

The problems are thus not scale, but things specific to the nation itself. The USA, for example, is unlikely to follow a similar path any time soon due to a distrust of public works and preference for private enterprise, a (currently very well motivated) suspicion on grounds of privacy, endless political impasse, problems with procurement, bureaucratic momentum, and so on.

<comment><USER8> But inefficiencies scale up super-linearly. The USA, for instance, has less cultural cohesion and sense of national identity than Estonia (the Russian minority in Estonia being the exception that perhaps proves the rule). Additionally, larger countries necessarily have more layers of bureaucracy, which make national programs more difficult to implement (the USA still does not have a national identification card, though I think RealID is still going forward, largely because of resistance on the part of states).

<comment><USER9> In theory federalism can make up for some of the inefficiencies of larger organisations. In practice, there's a strong centralizing tendency. (As seen in eg the US and German political systems.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This sounds awesome, but it also sounds scary. If I understand it well, the government issued the certificates for all its citizens it can both know what everyone does and impersonate them. I wouldn't mind _that_ much if they were mundane operations, but things such as voting is of extreme importance.

Oh, and the fact that the id is built in a manner that makes sure the person has to be born in Estonia is kinda odd. No strangers allowed ?

Anyway, has anyone details about technical implementation ? That would be terrific if it could be more widespread.

<comment><USER11> Not exactly. The government does not have your private keys which are only on your PIN-protected smartcards, so they can't impersonate you. And giving public-private certificate pairs does not mean the government knows anything about using them. I sign a bank transaction, the bank knows it. I sign an electronic agreement with my card with me friend, only us know about it. Government just handles revocation lists and expiry. More about it at [http://id.ee/?lang=en&id=](http://id.ee/?lang=en&id=)

The id card being issued to citizens is quite common in Europe. The thing is that the id card allows you for visa-free travel across Europe and that has pan-European regulations attached. But foreigners can get a similar electronic authentication and signature id card in Estonia still as well.

Some technical stuff also at [http://www.id.ee/?lang=en&id=35755](http://www.id.ee/?lang=en&id=35755)

The e-voting code for elections is made public at [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/estonia- publishes...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/estonia-publishes- its-e-voting-source-code-on-github/)

<comment><USER12> The problem is there is no way to know for sure the government isn't keeping all the data needed to generate keys. To make the process secure, you'd need a protocol where people get to generate their own keys (open source implementations) based on some entropy under their own control.

<comment><USER11> Well the government does not generate the keys, or access the signed data. The smartcard does, inside the chip. The spec is here: [http://www.id.ee/public/TB-SPEC-EstEID-Chip- App-v3.4.pdf](http://www.id.ee/public/TB-SPEC-EstEID-Chip-App-v3.4.pdf)

Forgotten who the chip manufacturer is, but basically what you'd describe would be an attach against the chip manufacturer and their key generation algorithms and randomness.

Estonian ID cards are made by Trüb AG, which does id cards also for Switzerland, Germany, Dubai and countless other countries. And the Estonian card personalization if I remember correctly is also outsourced to a private party.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If all this works for Estonian people, congratulations to Estonia for achieving this. As a Greek I suffered bureaucracy and still do. I would like for my country to unite all this data.

I have second thoughts about a couple of things though:

* The digitally signed mobile SIM-Card: How does this work exactly? Does the mobile company have access to my data?

* e-Elections are considerably easy to tamper for one and have well documented problems[1] to which I saw no solution in the article. For example, if there's a tampering accusation, how can we recount the votes or verify that X person voted for Y representative?

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting#Documented_pr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting#Documented_problems)

<comment><USER14> I'm an Estonian and have been enjoying all these benefits for many years already. Can't really imagine a life without them :) Here are my replies to your questions:

* The mobile company does not have access to your data. They just issue a special SIM card that stores your private keys. Unlike the article states, there is actually also a small piece of software installed on your phone that is later used for authentication and signing. The way it works is that you go to a site where you want to log in (I'll use Estonian government portal [https://www.eesti.ee/eng/](https://www.eesti.ee/eng/) as an example here), you press Enter (or "Log in" or whatever the button is called on the site) and choose "Login with mobile-ID". In Estonian government portal both your phone number and personal code are asked as "usernames" but some sites might ask either one of them (depends on the site's owner). Then after a few seconds your phone will display a screen showing that a connection is being made. At the same time you will be shown a "control code" on the browser screen that you will have to confirm on your phone. This is done in order to prevent some forms of man-in-the-middle attacks. Then you're prompted to enter a mobile ID PIN1 code (used for authentication) into the phone. If PIN1 is correct, the screen on the phone disappears and the website is automatically reloaded with a logged in screen. You can cancel the authentication procedure at any moment. PIN2 is used for signing and works the same.

* Obviously it would take a lot of time to answer all the problems posed in the Wikipedia. I would disagree, however, that Estonian e-elections are easy to tamper. As Estonia is on the forefront of e-voting in the world, all these problems are addressed and analysed in great detail by our Electronic Voting Committee ([http://vvk.ee/general-info/electronic-voting-committee/](http://vvk.ee/general-info/electronic-voting-committee/)) that is involving leading e-voting experts in their work. There have been many debates about e-voting and rulings by our Supreme Court. The process of e-voting is very transparent (you can start reading about it here: [http://vvk.ee/voting-methods-in-estonia/engindex/](http://vvk.ee/voting-methods-in-estonia/engindex/)), it's heavily audited before, during and after the voting, the software is open-sourced ([https://github.com/vvk-ehk/evalimine](https://github.com/vvk-ehk/evalimine)) and very well documented. But to give a very high-level answer to your question about recounting the votes - there are many different applications and servers used in the e-voting process that keep traceable logs. If recounting is needed then these log files are used in order to determine if votes were tampered in some constituency.

<comment><USER13> Cool, thanks for taking the time to write such an extensive response :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder how anyone here would feel about signing contracts with a key pre_generated on their government issued card...

<comment><USER6> The keys are generated inside the card and cannot be read (barring broken card implementations). For more check out [http://www.id.ee/public/TB-SPEC-EstEID- Chip-App-v3.4.pdf](http://www.id.ee/public/TB-SPEC-EstEID-Chip-App-v3.4.pdf) chapter 11. Card user's secret keys .

That said it's never gonna be unbreakable, it is though in the general case far safer than the alternatives (scanned bitmaps are actually being used as "digital signatures") not to mention the ease of use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> More fundamentally, they've completely rethought how to teach maths: [http://www.computerbasedmath.org/computer-based-math- educati...](http://www.computerbasedmath.org/computer-based-math-education- estonia.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> Identity management is a very big and very problematic piece of any large government-to-citizens programme; solving this once, up front, is an excellent idea that does not seem to have occurred to many other nations.

</comment><comment><USER18> Any Estonian devs here? Is there vibrant ecosystem around x-road? Can a startup actually get access to it? SOAP?

<comment><USER19> You have to sign an agreement to get access but that's about it.

There are active discussions about making access easier and encouraging devs to use X-Road and other public datasets.

If you need more info hit me up on twitter @jnsaff.

EDIT: [https://www.ria.ee/x-road/](https://www.ria.ee/x-road/) has loads of info about X-Road.</comment></comment>


Banksy launches homewares shop in dispute over trademark - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/oct/01/banksy-launches-homewares-shop-in-dispute-over-trademark <comment><USER2> I find the Banksy identity situation pretty interesting. His identity has been basically known since 2008, but despite that revelation, few articles on Banksy actually acknowledge this fact and state it in clear terms.

In 2008 DailyMail did a report that provided highly convincing evidence that Banksy is Robin Gunningham [1]. Since then several other pieces of evidence have come out pointing to Robin Gunningham [2][3]. But for some reason in the press they like to latch onto much weaker evidence for other candidates, like Robert Del Naja, to try to "teach the controversy" as it were. Journalists apparently have difficulty comparing multiple layers of evidence coming from different angles with unsubstantiated statements, which I think is kind of sad. I'm pretty sure that it's really that journalists like to just keep the dream alive, even though they know it's kind of silly. I guess it turns out if people are sympathetic to you keeping your identity secret, all you have to do is deny it no matter what and they will just always report your identity as being in dispute.

On the other hand, Wikipedia's treatment of the subject is good, which is something [4].

1: [https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1034538/Graffiti-...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1034538/Graffiti- artist-Banksy-unmasked---public-schoolboy-middle-class-suburbia.html)

2: [https://news.artnet.com/art-world/early-banksy- auction-13291...](https://news.artnet.com/art-world/early-banksy- auction-1329194)

3: [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/banksy- geographic-...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/banksy-geographic- profiling-proves-artist-really-is-robin-gunningham-according-to- scientists-a6909896.html)

4: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banksy#Personal_life_and_dispu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banksy#Personal_life_and_disputed_identity)

</comment><comment> em-bee can someone please explain the trademark law that forces banksy to do this?

i know that not defending/protecting a trademark can cause you to loose it.

i also understand that trademarks are limited to categories, which is why we can have "LINUX" washing powder. but that washing powder is not pretending to sell Linux Software.

whereas this banksy merchandise is in my understanding rather clearly pretending to be banksy artwork.

how is that not obviously infringing on his trademark?

why would banksy be forced to sell his own merchandise to protect his trademark?

i thought the point of a trademark was that it must not be confusing.

LINUX washing powder is not confusing. banksy merchandise is. or am i missing something?

<comment><USER3> I am not a lawyer first of all but this is my understanding: If you buy a greeting card with Banksy art on it do you think you are getting an official licensed print? The greeting card company here says no, you aren't confused, because Banksy doesn't sell official merch. By selling official stuff he is fighting back saying he certainly is selling official stuff (now) and the card company selling cards with his art can be confused for something he endorses.

<comment> em-bee so if disney didn't sell merchandise using their characters, i could do so myself without impunity? i find that hard to believe.

if i buy a banksy greeting card then i most definitely assume that it is licensed because i would not consider that they'd be allowed to do so without licensing.

if that is the issue though, wouldn't it be enough for banksy to put a price on the license?

you want to sell banksy greeting cards, you need to get a license from banksy. he just needs to put the price high enough to make it worth his while, and/or to make it unprofitable for the would-be licensee.

<comment><USER4> At least in the US, trademark law is _use it or lose it_. If you are not selling products bearing your trademark, you are not actually engaging in "trade" with your "mark."

Copyright law is automatic, but it does complicate things if the original author of a copyrighted work is unknown or difficult to contact. For licensing, you need a name and address of an entity to license _from_. The whole idea behind Banksy's art is that he's anonymous, so precludes the idea of licensing his work.

> you want to sell banksy greeting cards, you need to get a license from > banksy

That is exactly the sort of thing opening a store with tangible goods will allow.

<comment> em-bee the store allows me to sell my own products. i should not need a store to sell you a license to use my trademark.

banksy is using his mark, and so is disney. i am making the difference between disney movies and disney merchandise. how would disney merchandise not infringe on disney movies if they are created by independent companies without permission?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The World Bank's Broken Promise to the Poor (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.icij.org/project/world-bank <comment><USER2> John Cabot, an ambassador in the 1950s, had a good quote:

"The UN is meant to prevent you from going to hell, not take you to heaven."

The IMF and the World Bank were part of the world superstructure set up alongside the UN, so this quote applies to them.

Can't speak about the World Bank, it might indeed really suck. The IMF is a good organization that tries. They've made some bad mistakes, but have learned from them. A good example of this was during the Southeast Financial Crisis that in 97-98 that toppled the Indonesian government and still to this day has left abandoned skyscrapers in Bangkok. At the beginning of the crisis the IMF had a policy against restricting investor access to banks, believing it was better to "let the market work". By the end of the crisis, after South Korea had fallen (fallen meaning they were out of foreign currency reserves), and Japan / Russia looked like it might be next, the IMF had changed positions and was fully committed to using international law to stop irrational investor panic.

People forget HOW HUGE THIS WAS. There was a Time magazine cover at the time that literally read "The Committee to Save The World" with Greenspan, Summers, and Rubin on it.

Interestingly, though this problem would later help usher in the Dot Com bubble. The regulatory agencies had to lower investor rates to calm investor nerves, even though other people were asking them to not too because of the increasingly worrying NASDAQ IPOs.

[https://img.timeinc.net/time/magazine/archive/covers/1999/11...](https://img.timeinc.net/time/magazine/archive/covers/1999/1101990215_400.jpg)

<comment><USER3> As a Brazilian that grew up on the 90's watching this situation unwind, I'd thank a lot the IMF for helping us. They really did do good at that time.

But they seem to have changed their direction recently, and are really insisting on pushing money into unsustainable places. I don't get their new goals, they don't seem to have any stabilizing effects.

<comment><USER4> I lived in a country that recently required IMF support, Ireland, and have a positive view of the IMF as a result.

Of course, there were conditions attached to the loans but given that nobody else was willing to lend money to the state under any terms at all, it seemed fair enough. And the interest rate was nothing like "payday" rates.

The alternative (a "cold turkey" end to government payments - e.g. no salaries for police, doctors, teachers, etc.) would have caused huge long term damage to society, the economy and would have undermined the legitimacy of the state.

On a personal level, if I were lending money to a desperate down-and-out friend who had exhaused all the normal sources of credit including their family, I would probably also ask for lifestyle changes before giving them money.

<comment><USER5> > On a personal level, if I were lending money to a desperate down-and-out > friend who had exhaused all the normal sources of credit including their > family, I would probably also ask for lifestyle changes before giving them > money.

While it might seem reasonable from a personal perspective, I don't think it really applies when you're considering an entire country (or any sovereign entity, for that matter). This mistake has been made before, and in many fields, so I don't blame you particularly (e.g. we think of personal indebtedness as "immoral" but deficit spending has largely been shown to be bountiful and a net positive when managed correctly).

I'm personally not well versed in economics or genius enough to suggest alternatives, but I just wanted to point out that kind of fallacy when thinking about these things.

<comment><USER6> Actually in this case the analogy is completely correct. The notion that government borrowing is wildly different from household or corporate borrowing is only true in a limited sense, and only if we are talking about borrowing in a currency that the government itself issues.

The IMF demands payment in Dollars/Euros, not the local currency. A country borrowing money has a hard requirement to pay back the loan in real (as opposed to nominal) terms. So it really is similar to any other lending.

Let me also address deficit spending. It isn't such a magic bullet that a government can come up with more money to repay a loan by increasing its expenditures. It's about the same idea as the Laffer Curve. Sure, if things get extreme enough, the argument is correct. But most of the time things aren't that extreme. Most of the time, when a government needs to repay loans, fiscal discipline is useful and necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I remember doing a long research paper on the World Bank and IMF around 2000. They're the equivalent of "pay day loans" for 3rd world countries. It's predatory lending at its finest. For those unfamiliar, they generally only give money if countries cut spending on the people (education, health, etc) and open up natural resources for exploitation by foreign corporations.

<comment><USER8> Do you know how much it costs to get your water and electricity turned back on? Not to mention that you have to toss any food you have saved and you have to find some way to live without access to toilets, etc for the duration.

Compared to that, a payday loan is cheap. Yeah being in that situation is shitty in the extreme, and no none of your options are good, so you are trading very bad for worse.

<comment><USER7> The payday loan analogy is admittedly weak. I just meant to indicate that it's a crap deal. It is actually worse than payday loans. See, with payday loans, you just pay ridiculous interest. With WB/IMF loans, it's more like "we'll loan you money to keep the lights on, but you're going to have to stop taking your blood pressure meds, and one of our friends is going to stop by and eat some of your dinner every night".

<comment><USER8> Okay, that makes more sense.

I just get tired of people constantly harping on payday loans without considering the alternatives available. Also I was kinda shocked how much an effect it had when a collegue got his power turned of (he forgot the pay his bills).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The World Bank is an organization to steal public and natural resources for private banks and corporations, and alongside the IMF one of the biggest generator of poverty. But I guess we can keep pretending they try to help to Third World countries.

<comment><USER10> The article definitely points out the wrongs done by IMF/World bank. Are there any resources you can point me to, such as data / financial reports which highlight how the resources are misused / mishandled?

<comment><USER9> "On private water: The case for the World Bank to divest" [https://www.stopcorporateabuse.org/sites/default/files/resou...](https://www.stopcorporateabuse.org/sites/default/files/resources/shutting_the_spigot_on_private_water_corporateaccountabilityinternational.pdf)

"Impoverishing a Continent: The World Bank and the IMF in Africa" [http://www.halifaxinitiative.org/updir/ImpoverishingAContine...](http://www.halifaxinitiative.org/updir/ImpoverishingAContinent.pdf)

"Dismantling The World Bank's Myths on Agriculture and Development" [https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/sites/oaklandinstitute.org/...](https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/sites/oaklandinstitute.org/files/OurBiz_Brief_UnfoldingTruth.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Based on selectorate theory [1, lending to broken governments promotes cronies over the general population. Unfortunately, the alternative (waiting and watching) involves risking complete state collapse. Weighing the evils of the latter, _i.e._ the lessons from World War II, against the evils of the former, _i.e._ our present condition of sclerotic autocrats propped up by outsiders fearing outright anarchy, is tricky.

This analysis does not appear to do that. Instead, it just measures the cost of being conservative with anarchy risk. The counterfactual (letting those governments collapse through hyperinflation, foreign and/or domestic default and/or austerity and the resulting civil strife) could be better or could be worse, and estimating it will involve lots of speculation. But it deserves to be explored.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectorate_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectorate_theory)

</comment><comment><USER12> Just to play devil's advocate, I've been told that in a negotiation, it's always important to know what your best alternative is (e.g., [https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of- management/15-66...](https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of- management/15-665-power-and-negotiation-spring-2014/lecture- notes/MIT15_665S14_Class_2_Lect.pdf) ; "I've been told" because I'm terrible at negotiating).

When a country starts to negotiate with the World Bank, generally speaking, their best alternative is to print money; cause hyperinflation; and then pay off their existing debts with the new, worthless, money. It seems to me that the World Bank's terms are better for the poor than that.

<comment><USER13> It's hard to tell because the World Bank is so young in the history of nations. Certainly in the short term things are less painful, but having your country's natural wealth siphoned off by other countries (or in many cases absurdly wealthy individuals/companies) has the potential to create real and systematic harms.

We could imagine, for example, a United States that became and remained very poor after having all its natural wealth siphoned off by European firms under predatory terms during the Great Depression. It's hard to tell if the world would've been a better or worse place (maybe the profits would've been reinvested into stabilizing Germany's internal politics), but certainly US citizens would be much worse off today.

On the other hand, could a World Bank have saved Germany from Nazism and ended the world wars after episode I? Probably. Who really knows.

<comment><USER5> This is a good point. In general, predatory lending has been a favorite tool of imperialism, and it continues to sort of be that way even though you don't see explicit imperialism anymore.

The crux of the problem is that non-developed nations still have something that developed countries want: either natural resources, or human resources. The IMF is basically a modern version of the Paris Club, and is a tool used to make it cheap and easy to extract these resources/make them available to the global economy, without the explicit threat of military invasion.

I don't really see a good solution for "Poor" countries. You can't have people dependent forever on foreign aid. But perhaps the developed part of the world becomes so productive that at least the necessities for productive lives, such as basic education and healthcare, can be provided to "poor" nations. This is what I view the Gates foundational work as doing.

It is in the interests of the global community to have stable and safe economies all around the globe. I really hope we can reach that goal sometime in my lifetime....

<comment><USER14> "Predatory" lending is only possible in the presence of coercion.

If Party A is such a bad credit risk that the only loan they can get is from Party B at a high interest rate, and that requires them to dramatically change the behavior that created the cash crisis in the first place, Party B is not a predator.

If Party B is charging too much for the loan, surely another "greedy" party will undercut them and offer better terms to Party A.

If Party A accepts the debt on the same conditions, but then fails to dramatically change their behavior such that they insist the terms of the original deal be modified or else they'll default, Party A is acting like the predator.

<comment><USER15> > If Party B is charging too much for the loan, surely another "greedy" party > will undercut them and offer better terms to Party A.

You are assuming perfect competition in the area of loans to nation-states: this is certainly not the case. There are only a handful of lenders playing at this level, and they are mostly driven by politics, not profit.

<comment><USER14> "Only a handful of lenders playing at this level"

There are many lenders playing at "this level," presuming that by "this level" you're referring to the market for sovereign debt.

The area where there are only a handful of "players" is lending to countries that are very high credit risks. And for good reason. What rational investor would lend money to a party clearly unable to pay it back? None. That's a death wish.

Except of course when governments guarantee that party's credit for political reasons. Usually the arguments for such "support" include precepts that the free market leaves some nations behind, and so intervention is justified.

But the intervention, as we have seen quite often with the IMF itself, can do more harm than good.

And by the way, many "undeveloped" countries have respectable credit ratings ([http://www.oecd.org/trade/xcred/cre-crc-current- english.pdf](http://www.oecd.org/trade/xcred/cre-crc-current-english.pdf)).

<comment><USER15> The tone of your comment suggests disagreement, but the meat of it is in full agreement with my earlier comment, so much so that yours can be thought of as a more fleshed-out version of mine.

>> There are only a handful of lenders playing at this level...

> The area where there are only a handful of "players" is lending to countries > that are very high credit risks. And for good reason. What rational investor > would lend money to a party clearly unable to pay it back? None. That's a > death wish...

>> ...and they are mostly driven by politics, not profit.

> Except of course when governments guarantee that party's credit for > political reasons

<comment><USER14> Your reference to lenders began with: "You are assuming perfect competition in the area of loans to nation-states," and you said "there are only a handful of lenders playing at this level." I disagreed because this is untrue, and suggested your comment may only be accurate in reference to countries representing very high credit risks.

Regarding politics and profit, we disagree here as well. Yes, I referenced political reasons as motives for lending to these very high credit risk countries, but it's not mutually exclusive. I believe if you dig into that political motive you will find a strong profit motive. Maybe the "State" isn't motivated by profit, but often the people who exert power over the State are. What else would they be motivated by? Doing good for humanity? Please...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Over the last decade, projects funded by the World Bank have physically or > economically displaced an estimated 3.4 million people, forcing them from > their homes, taking their land or damaging their livelihoods.

And we're finding out about this only now?

<comment><USER17> The World Bank specifically and the neo-colonialist world-view it embodies have both been severely criticised in pretty much this vein since not too long after the bank was founded.

<comment><USER14> So what's the moral of the story, practically speaking?

If you drill a hole in the bottom of your boat; Be selective about whom you let save you?

<comment><USER5> You seem to have a prevailing view of undeveloped counties as being there fundamentally because of their "own fault". This is very much akin to blaming the poor to being lazy or incompetent or stupid.

While its certainly true that a lot of countries don't have their shit together now, its also true that most undeveloped countries were either under foreign domination (e.g. Indian Subcontinent, most of Africa) or domination by proxy (e.g. China).

The moral of the story is: don't accept the propaganda of "International Financial Institutions" as existing strictly for the assistance of developing countries (their stated goal) but rather as a continuation of exertion of power over developing counties through financial means.

<comment><USER14> Not at all.

Greece is not an "undeveloped" country. Their people simply supported social policies that resulted in more expenses than revenues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This data isn't in context, it's not fair to take data like the negative impact of resettlement on its own without also looking at the benefit provided by the projects to the poor.

</comment><comment><USER19> If there is a full-text article on the page, I am not seeing it. Page appears I be for a project and link to a number of other pages.

Anyone able to find a better link?

<comment><USER20> The link is to a project by the ICIJ title "Evicted and Abandoned" which consists of a series of articles

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Anyone have a link to the paper by I think, the IMF or World Bank describing how a cryptocurrency (like Bitcoin) could be created? From the ~70s.

</comment><comment><USER22> This page links to a portal looking landing page; is there supposed to be an accompanying article?

<comment><USER23> It's a collection of articles, but this one appears to be the most relevant to the title: [http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/worldbank-evicted- abandon...](http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/worldbank-evicted-abandoned)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> If you want to understand libertarians read: The Creature of Jekyll Island. This goes into the function of the World Bank.

</comment><comment><USER25> Central banks create poverty and maintain power structures; this isn't news.

<comment><USER26> The World Bank and IMF aren't central banks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Capitalism: "lol sux 2 be them"

<comment><USER25> The world bank (and central banks in general) are extremely antithetical to the central ideas of capitalism.

<comment><USER13> The World Bank pushes privatization of infrastructure, natural resource extraction, agricultural resources, etc.

the IBRD's Articles of Agreement explicitly identify "promoting private investment by private investors" as a goal. If that's not part and parcel with capitalism, I'm not really sure what is.

Perhaps you protest the other investments WB makes, which fall under its goal of producing "suitable conditions" for private investment (in practice, that means sucking governments dry until/unless they agree to privatization and occasionally ousting non-capitalist leaders from power.) But saying that capitalism stops being capitalism as soon as private investment starts controlling governmental decisions is just defining your way out of a very real and substantive critique of capitalism. Reality and real problems don't go away just because you're being pedantic about the definition of capitalism.

The World Bank may not embody "your" capitalism. But by any reasonable definition that avoids this sort of No-True-Scotsman distinction, the World Bank is aggressively capitalist. And certainly the bankers describe themselves (earnestly!) as capitalists.

So instead of saying "that's not capitalism", we should discuss whether _any_ system which deifies private investment will eventually end up with organizations like the World Bank. And how to curb those excesses.

(Also, the world bank is not really a central bank. If the World Bank is a central bank then we might as well call any very large bank a central bank as well. In both cases, there are analogies but also important distinctions.)

<comment><USER25> Would you not agree that distinguishing between free-market capitalism and crony-capitalism brings important value to the discussion?

The inclusion of government force or government collusion is hardly a secondary consideration. The ability to wield what is essentially a monopoly on force, is THE most important factor when discussing capitalism vs cronyism. The world bank is the physical embodiment of cronyism, and I maintain, not capitalism.

I think it's kind of BS that you can point to THE distinguishing factor between something I argue for and something I argue againsts and say "pedantics"...

<comment><USER13> _> Would you not agree that distinguishing between free-market capitalism and crony-capitalism brings important value to the discussion?_

As I said,

 _> > saying that capitalism stops being capitalism as soon as private investment starts controlling governmental decisions is just defining your way out of a very real and substantive critique of capitalism_

Money can buy political power, and in a system that incentivizes profiteering, that political power _will_ eventually be used to generate profit.

You call that cronyism. I claim it's the logical conclusion of human nature unfolding within an unabashed free market.

You're more than free to re-define terms, but it doesn't change the reality that free market systems invariably cycle through periods of cronyism.

Playing around with the definition of capitalism is terminally non-responsive to the claim that free markets, given enough time, invariably breed this style of cronyism.

It's like claiming that sugary/fatty foods can't cause coronary artery disease because heart disease is caused by plaque. Technically true, but literally everyone's response is going to be an eye-roll.

 _> The ability to wield what is essentially a monopoly on force_

Ugh. There's no such thing as a "monopoly on force". It's literally the great equalizer among not just humans but all organisms.

You're more than free to go out and build an unbeatable military and take down the evil crony-(not?)-capitalist world order. Who's gonna stop you? If you can't or won't build up the resources and mind share to do so, well, welcome to reality.

<comment><USER25> Completely illogical...

> You call that cronyism. I claim it's the logical conclusion of human nature > unfolding within an unabashed free market.

A free-market is _reliant_ on government power to protect/enforce property rights. You claiming a system which strictly enforces property rights always leads to a system which disregards property rights is absurd.

Are you arguing that in order to keep people from wielding governmental power against others, we need to strengthen government? Really? Why not make it so government power being wielded is a non-issue?

> It's like claiming that sugary/fatty foods can't cause coronary artery > disease because heart disease is caused by plaque. Technically true, but > literally everyone's response is going to be an eye-roll.

A terrible analogy... What you're arguing is that a diet that avoids sugary/fatty foods will cause heart disease because people end up ignoring diets. That's not a good argument against dieting...

<comment><USER13> _> Completely illogical..._

Agreed.

Your argument is logical but vacuous[1]. Mine is logical, and what's more, proceeds from assumptions that aren't oblivious to empirical observation.

 _> You claiming a system which strictly enforces property rights always leads to a system which disregards property rights is absurd._

My claim is that political power is dynamically allocated, not statically allocated. In free markets, money buys power. Power is then abused to rig the rules of the game.

So even if you start in an ideal free market state, you'll quickly converge to cronyism. in this sense, opposition to "crony-capitalism" and advocacy for "free market capitalism" is an inconsistent position. Again, not as a matter of your definitions and logical derivations. But as a matter of _observed reality_!!! If you definitions and derivations contradict reality, the problem is not with reality but with your model of reality.

 _> Are you arguing that in order to keep people from wielding governmental power against others, we need to strengthen government? Really?_

No. Where do you find me advocating for "strengthen[ing] government" in this thread? In fact, I think my critique of the World Bank is most commonly read as a critique of how strong (certain) governments have become. But actually I don't have any strong ideological advocacy, and even the World Bank/IMF have benefits and drawbacks that aren't so easy to categorically praise or condemn in broad strokes (see: various other threads).

I'm not the one claiming a theory of utopia. I'm just pointing out the absurdity of make such a claim by carving out increasingly arbitrary and anti- empirical definitional distinctions.

 _> What you're arguing is..._

What I'm arguing is that definitions and logical derivations exist in service to describing reality. You have these two things -- reality and the tools we use to model reality -- the wrong way around.

Again, stop arguing about definitions and logical derivations stemming from those definitions. Answer the claim that free markets beget cronyism _as a matter of empirically observable fact_. Anything else is vacuous.

[1] in the sense of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuous_truth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuous_truth)

<comment><USER25> hmmm...

> No. Where do you find me advocating for "strengthen[ing] government" in this > thread?

Everytime you say "free markets beget cronyism" you're implying a less free- market would beget less cronyism. That claim strongly suggests a less free- market is preferable; the only way to regulate interpersonal cooperation is through growing government.

> Power is then abused to rig the rules of the game.

Then why is it vacuous to argue for limiting said power? You are correct, people will always work in their own self interest. If there is some super powerful tool for them to increase their fortune/profit/power of course they will use it. That's entirely the point.

Saying free-markets become less free overtime and eventually foster cronyism isn't an argument against free-markets; it's an illustration of their importance. Healthy eating and its advocates aren't _less_ important because unhealthy people exist.

<comment><USER13> _> Everytime you say "free markets beget cronyism" you're implying a less free-market would beget less cronyism_

No, I'm not. I'm claiming that free markets sans cronyism aren't a steady state (or even exist), so distinguishing between "free market capitalism" and "crony capitalism" is anti-empirical.

 _> the only way to regulate interpersonal cooperation is through growing government_

Ideology, marketing, religion, and non-state violence, for example, are all also powerful mechanisms.

Also, limiting government might actually _INCREASE_ the power of government... and what's worse, _someone else 's_ government! This is particularly relevant in the case of the World Bank.

 _> Then why is it vacuous to argue for limiting said power?_

See above. The choice might be between US gov't/corporate power and local governance. Limiting the power of local governments in the face of extremely powerful foreign governments and corporations doesn't actually reduce the power of government writ large.

 _> Saying free-markets become less free overtime and eventually foster cronyism_

No, and if you re-read the thread, you'll notice that I'm not even making an argument against free markets. I'm making an argument against your distinction between "free market capitalism" and "crony capitalism". Again, the central claim from my original reply was:

 _> >>>> The World Bank may not embody "your" capitalism. But by any reasonable definition that avoids this sort of No-True-Scotsman distinction, the World Bank is aggressively capitalist._

I think you're now violently agreeing -- or at least you've stopped making any sort of coherent argument that crony capitalism is "not capitalism" in anything but a sort of vacuous sense.

As for the rest of your post, I don't get it. You're still just playing with definitions! Free markets aren't a cure-all for corruption, and your approach to corruption seems to be using definitions to bury your head in the sand. Seems dangerous.

If you're opposed to the World Bank, then you're opposed to an artifact of free market capitalism. It's that simple.

<comment><USER25> No, I'm not agreeing. The distinction between cronyism and free-market capitalism is important. You're claiming it isn't - I'm claiming it is. Simply:

Property rights = Free-market =/= Cronyism

It's like if I commented on an article about sodium and water exploding saying "water is generally pretty great, don't mix it with sodium though" then you respond with "don't be pedantic, water explodes."

Semantics are extremely important, especially in this arena. Never would have thought I'd get into an argument today with someone arguing against distinguishing between free-markets and cronyism... wow.

Acknowledging the presence of a force is not "playing with definitions"... unbelievable...

<comment><USER13> _> Property rights = Free-market =/= Cronyism _

Free-markets without Cronyism doesn't actually exist in the real world... no matter how cute your definitions and logical derivations are, they're also vacuous.

If we're going to advocate for impossibilities, why not skip the free market middle man and simply advocate for universal happiness? Empirically dubious and we have no idea how to actually _implement_ it in reality, but apparently that doesn't matter.

(Also, I've heard water does in fact exist without sodium. So, not analogous.)

<comment><USER25> Crony-capitalism is literally the opposite of a free-market! So, you think property rights are a made up impossibility? Advocating for them is a waste of time? Nothing lives on a spectrum? Don't care how you answer. This is a waste of my time.

<comment><USER28> > Crony-capitalism is literally the opposite of a free-market!

But it's what the capitalist system of property rights consistently produces in the real world.

> So, you think property rights are a made up impossibility?

No, they are made up but quite possible. The idealized free market the capitalist model of property rights is supposed to deliver is, OTOH, an impossibility (or, at any rate, an unstable condition unlikely to ever be achieved which would decay immediately if it was.)

<comment><USER25> > But it's what the capitalist system of property rights consistently produces > in the real world.

No... ignoring property rights consistently produces crony-capitalism.

> they are made up

as are ethics and morality. Doesn't mean they aren't endlessly important.

> be achieved which would decay immediately if it was

As in, property rights are pointless because people ignore them. Got it. What do you propose?

<comment><USER28> > No... ignoring property rights consistently produces crony-capitalism.

No, the original capitalist system (that is, the dominant system of the mid-19th century system developed West for which critics coined the name "capitalism") fully embraced the capitalist model of property rights—again, the capitalist model of such rights was defined by what was observed in that system as distinct from a other historical systems—and was deeply and pervasively characterizes by cronyism.

Now, if you have some other model of property rights in mind _other than_ that embodied in the real historical system for which "capitalism" was coined as a label, you might argue have an argument that deviation from that model, such as the deviation seen _in_ capitalism, produces cronyism. But you shouldn't confuse that model with capitalism.

<comment><USER25> I would be careful of suggesting the idea of property you're referring to is somehow "the original capitalist system". Many economic and political theorists in the mid 19th century and earlier talked about property rights in the terms I'm referring to - these were also capitalists.

"Propriété et loi." Originally published in the 15 May 1848 issue of "Le Journal des économistes", Frederic Bastiat (hardly some obscure, sideline thinker) wrote:

> Economists consider that property, like the person, is a providential fact. > The law does not give existence to one any more than to the other. Property > is a necessary consequence of the constitution of man.

He continues:

> It is so true that property predates the law that it is acknowledged even by > primitive people who have no laws or at least no written laws. When a savage > has devoted his work to building himself a hut, no one disputes his > possession or ownership of it. Doubtless another savage who is stronger than > he can drive him out but not without angering and alarming the entire tribe. > It is actually this abuse of strength that gives rise to association, > agreement, and the law, which places public force in the service of > property. Therefore the law arises out of property, a far cry from property > arising from law.

Point being, the property rights I'm referring to - the property rights that the vast majority of free-market advocates speak about - have been considered and thought about for ages. I'm not coining a new label.

[http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/bastiat-the-collected- work...](http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/bastiat-the-collected-works-of- frederic-bastiat-vol-2-the-law-the-state-and-other-political- writings-1843-1850#lf1573-02_label_134)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Datahike: Durable Datalog database powered by an efficient Datalog query engine - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/replikativ/datahike <comment><USER2> Nice to see an open-source Datomic clone, but it's not mature enough IMO. I hope Datomic gets opensourced now that the company behind, Cognitect, was acquired by Nubank.

<comment><USER3> Hey, one of the core architects of Datahike here. As a Clojure company we are also super happy that Nubank made Clojure and Datomic much more credible with this move. While Datomic is obviously much more mature, it is important to understand that we have a different scope in our goals than Datomic. Datomic is mostly built as a more convenient backend database for corporate environments and is highly tailored towards AWS and a business environment where the costs of operating and depending on these cloud services is acceptable, which is only the most profitable, but small, slice of the whole market. Even when Datomic gets open-sourced it will not be automatically built with other than these design goals in mind.

Our goals on the other hand go even beyond thinking about this backend market; we want to use Datalog really as a distributed systems environment and extend Datahike to all endpoints including the browser and IOT development:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2CZwOHOb6U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2CZwOHOb6U)

Our main intention was never to just build an open-source Datomic. But it made too much sense not to do it as a first step. In fact we also really hope that Datomic will be open-sourced such that we can merge our efforts. But given the current governance model of Clojure and Datomic we do not yet foresee that open-sourcing Datomic alone would address a large section of our plans. We are ahead of Datomic already in a few areas:

We have funded development for ClojureScript support going for instance and in comparison to Datomic all our efforts where from the beginning aimed at this, we in fact provide more a set of libraries and abstractions that can stand on their own and that you can compose in different ways than having a top-down design that we then unbundle into libraries. This made it much easier for us to evolve and reuse our stack despite the pivot we did from replikativ to Datahike.

Regarding maturity we have worked hard during quarantine to address some of our pain points:

1\. We significantly improved our write throughput and Datomic performance is in reach (close to release), [https://github.com/replikativ/datahike/pull/201](https://github.com/replikativ/datahike/pull/201) 2\. We have a first version of our server API available and will extend this in the next months to provide Datomic-style local querying [https://github.com/replikativ/datahike- server/](https://github.com/replikativ/datahike-server/) 3\. We recently provided Java bindings [https://lambdaforge.io/2020/05/25/java- api.html](https://lambdaforge.io/2020/05/25/java-api.html)

Over the last year we also built a cooperative that has more than 5 people working on this full-time and we aim to grow even faster next year and really bring Datalog to the community and the masses. If Datomic gets properly open- sourced, we will get there even faster.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for clarifying. I agree that Datomic is expensive to run and that open sourcing it would not improve this overnight, a lightweight and cost-effective alternative would be great.

How will you handle security when accessing a Datahike backend from the browser? I've used Datomic from the browser indirectly in the past for internal tools, using a custom rest api to run the queries, but for external access it was not clear how to limit the queries to the parts of the database the user had permission to view.

What are your plans for IOT development? I found that Datomic is not a good fit for timeseries data, does Datahike offer any advantages?

<comment><USER3> Interesting, honestly speaking we have not thought about time series data a lot yet, but I think we should be able to provide custom indices and extend Datalog with more efficient query primitives, if this is necessary. Can you elaborate a bit? I have used HDF5 binary blobs for tensors of experimental recordings (parameter evolution in spiking neural networks) in Datomic a few years ago and it is definitely possible to integrate external index data structures, but eventually the query engine will need to be aware of how to join them efficiently.

W.r.t. security, our current approach is to shard access rights and encryption on a database level and just provide many databases, one for each user. This is obviously not the most space efficient, but the most general approach. If users can share access keys and data we can also do structural sharing between these instances and factorize further. We envision doing joins potentially over dozens of distributed Datahike instances in a global address space during single queries. Since the indices are amortized data structures it does not make too much sense to encrypt chunks of them for different users as this defeats the optimality guarantees of B+-trees, i.e. you could have very bad scan behaviour over huge ranges of encrypted Datoms. How have you tried to partition the data? This is an interesting problem.

We can also expose the datahike-server query endpoint directly and you can write static checks for access right restrictions. We only do this so far to limit the usage of builtin functions to safe ones, but you could also go ahead and do the same for more complex access controls. Some work in this direction for Datahike has also been done here: [https://github.com/theronic/eacl](https://github.com/theronic/eacl) Doing this openly on the internet will also require a resource model to fend of denial of service attacks, fortunately Datalog engines can have powerful query planners and we can restrict our runtime to limited budgets as well.

<comment><USER2> For timeseries data I encoded a [entityId,timestamp,attribute] tuple to a big integer, using a order preserving mapping to ensure that the datoms are sorted by the timestamp. This provided the right functionality, for example using seek-datoms we could retreive the datoms with timestamps between some range, but performance was poor. I think a custom index could help a lot here. We also had problems with the database growing to large, and needed to manually shard the database over time.

A datalog equivalent to TimescaleDB (which extends Postgres with timeseries optimiziations and time based table partitioning) would be great.

For client access I tried to define access rules based on attributes (similar to how many graphql frameworks handle this), I tried to express this using datalog rules. For example, users hava permission to access :user/items, and :items/blabla, so a user X can access [X :user/items Y] and [Y :items/blabla Z] Some experiments were promising, but it was slow and I did not find a good way to integrate this.

<comment><USER3> I see, so your problem was that you wanted to scan over all Datoms for one entity over a time period and you would have needed to have an EVAT index? In Datahike it would be fairly simple to add new indices like this.

Yes, access management must not incur a large overhead, that is why many systems have a separate restricted way to express and track rules. My hunch is that it still would be better to keep it in Datalog and specialize the query engine that it is fast on these (potentially restricted) rules and relations.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Passive-Aggressive Programmer: or Why Nothing Gets Done - <AUTHOR> http://homepage.mac.com/s_lott/iblog/architecture/C551260341/E20071129060000/index.html

<comment><USER2> This probably doesn't explain every case that the guy is talking about, but I used to adopt this attitude in various jobs -- usually a few months before I ended up leaving the job for something else.

I've found that I have a specific lifecycle in regular jobs. It goes like this:

1\. Enthusiasm. No matter how many times I've gotten burned in other jobs, this one is going to be different! Management seems to be really open to improving things, or doing things as best as practically possible. Hurrah!

2\. Passive-Aggressive apathy. Well, I was wrong. Again. Hells, this place moves slowly. No, management's plan or idea won't work, and I'll say so, but I don't feel like explaining it anymore because clearly they aren't interested in my opinion. I will slouch in my chair and grudgingly do what I'm told.

3\. Complete apathy. I won't even bother to say that I disagree with their bad ideas anymore. Discussion is pointless; they simply want to do it their way, and that's that. I'll browse through the classified ads on my lunch break.

(Get new job, go back to 1.)

I don't think that particular lifecycle is unique to me. So, the author may be dealing with some folks that are completely disenchanted by their work environment, but for whatever reason they can't or won't find another job.

<comment><USER3> I have to admit, I've often been in that cycle myself. But there _are_ companies where that doesn't happen, so you have to ask yourself: why am I always ending up in these lousy companies?

<comment><USER4> It could be that stages 1-3 mirror the company lifecycle. Companies start out not sucking (as startups) and slowly either become lousy and big, or get bought into a lousy and big company.

<comment><USER3> there is definitely some of that. i can think of two former employers where i was one of the first ten employees, and i really enjoyed the work in the beginning. then they got bigger and things started to suck.

at the other end of the spectrum, there are the rockstar programmers who pretty much never have this kind of problem. they are always sought after, they can pretty much name their own game. they don't have to deal with lousy employers for one second, because there's always somebody offering them something better.

i'm not one of those guys. but i'm aiming to get good enough at the game that i don't always dislike my job, at least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> PAP has no stake in the outcome, he does not own the place, his stock options are worthless and the only way to climb up the ladder is to show accomplishment to his own name. Other PAPs have the same motivation.

In other words, PAP is not interested in having consultant succeed. Entirely rational behavior. That's how you get to having to call in consultants in the first place, so this goes with the territory.

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting examples of the "PAP". A good follow-up might examine _why_ a programmer is passive-aggressive.

thaumaturgy hits on one common reason: the programmer is a product of his environment.

Another very common reason is that the programmer is in over his head and uses "fog" to protect himself. Why? It's easier. And it works. Problem is that the programmer has done nothing to get out from being in over his head. And probably never will. They're everywhere.

My first mentor once told me why he thought there were so many mediocre programmers: all they have to do is stay one step ahead of the user. In a commercial environment, not so hard to do.

</comment><comment><USER7> it sounds like this guy is a consultant, who management brings in, and everyone there automatically hates him.

<comment><USER8> Yes, and could well be proposing the exact things that the staff engineers already proposed, but were rejected by management!</comment></comment>


FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.03832

<comment><AUTHOR> To summarize, with this pre-print, Google's "FaceNet" holds the current record on performance on the LFW unconstrained face verification task with an accuracy of 0.9963 +- 0.09. Looking at the other top results on LFW, it's clear that the LFW data set is saturated.

[http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/results.html](http://vis- www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/results.html)</comment>


Ello - Simple, beautiful & ad-free. - <AUTHOR> https://ello.co/request-an-invitation

<comment><USER2> What is this?

"You are not a product. Sign up for our new thing that is nebulously different from things that treat you like a product."

</comment><comment><USER3> You might want to think about your initial landing page. You are missing a noun.

'simple, beautiful and ad-free [insert email]'</comment>


Owl Lisp – A purely functional Scheme that compiles to C - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/aoh/owl-lisp <comment><USER2> Owl's pretty nice, but I wish it was documented better: I can't actually get into it, because I have no idea what is valid Owl.

Also, I like how it doesn't call itself Scheme, because it's not Scheme.

This is a problem that annoys me: people seem to think that if you're a lisp-1, and you follow a few naming conventions, you can call yourself scheme. That's like calling yourself Common Lisp because you're a lisp-2 with setf.

Scheme is a family of languages, true, but it _does_ have a formal spec, and if you do not follow it (or at least approximate it), than _you are not scheme._ Scheme inspired, or scheme derived, maybe, (Racket got this one right, and changed its name once it started going too far afield, thus saving us from having to explain to 1000 confused newbies that PLT Scheme isn't Scheme, and now must only deal with people who _tell_ newbies that Racket is Scheme) but if you don't meet IEEE or RnRS, or at least Scheme as described in AIM-349 (the original Scheme: a radically different language from Scheme today), than you're not Scheme, and if you call yourself that, than you'll confuse people.

/rant

<comment><USER3> The title is "a purely functional Scheme..."

<comment><USER2> No, no, I think Owl did _well_ , because it didn't say that it's scheme, at least up front. It's honestly more akin to DSSSL than anything else. Saying that it's "functional scheme" is far less likely to cause confusion than some of the other things people have done.

EDIT: No, it's not like DSSSL, and it's less cool than I thought it was. It's still cool, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really like the growing interest in making lisps that compile to C, and one that is purely function is even better. I'd be curious how the GC in this compares to the fascinating work in Chicken for novel GC in C environments.

<comment><USER5> I agree that Chicken is based on a brilliant idea that turned out to work really well in practice. It's a very practical language / implementation.

<comment><USER6> It is not practical enough for me to have a language which does not support native threads.

<comment><USER7> And as I read it sometime ago while searching for Scheme implementations with native threads, Cheney on the MTA is inherently single threaded.

<comment><USER8> Not necessarily, it can be extended to support multithreading:

[https://github.com/justinethier/cyclone](https://github.com/justinethier/cyclone)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very cool! By purely functional I'm guessing they mean immutable by default? Aside from Clojure, what other Scheme/Lisp implementations are immutable by default? I know Lisp-flavoured Erlang is due to being on the BEAM but I'm curious what else is out there.

<comment><USER10> If I understand what you mean by "immutable by default", then it's all Scheme implementations, and probably all Lisp as well.

<comment><USER11> What about set-car! set-cdr! vector-set! string-set!

<comment><USER10> If you can't easily avoid those, you're not going to be capable of doing much else anyway.

<comment><USER11> I was responding to "If I understand what you mean by "immutable by default", then it's all Scheme implementations"; not whether one should or should not use mutating operations!

<comment><USER10> So what does "immutable by default" mean??? Is there even an agreed upon definition? Because you certainly didn't explain / explain clearly if that's what you were attempting to do... Clojure has mutable vars and set!, so it seems Scheme is no worse and fits that guy's definition of IbD.

<comment><USER11> Consider:

      (define x (vector 1 2 3 4))
      (define y x)
      (vector-set! x 0 100)

Should y[0] be 100 or 1?

<comment><USER10> That's not really relevant. According to the guy's own definition, Scheme is as immutable as Clojure, which is what he was specifically asking. They both have something like set!. If you want to wank off about Scheme not being 100% immutable, go right ahead, but it's clearly not what was being discussed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> C++ has many pure functional features that C lacks. For example immutable methods with const and Lambdas. Wouldn't these features make it easier target to C++ rather than C? Do these functional features only make it easier for a human to write functional code or is there some other reason these Lisps all use C?

<comment><USER13> If you're writing a compiler, you're going to want to explicitly manage closures and function pointers anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's not purely functional if it supports side effects all willy-nilly. Scheme sans mutation (which is not the same as Racket, since Racket's stdlib still supports mutation) is no more purely functional than modern C++ sans mutation.

With that said, purely functional programming is arguably just a hassle; I tend to think that "functional-first," as I call it, programming, a la Clojure, is a good balance between practical and pure. In this way, side effects are adhoc, but all definitions are immutable by default.

</comment><comment><USER15> aoh also wrote the very awesome Radamsa fuzzing engine in it - [https://github.com/aoh/radamsa](https://github.com/aoh/radamsa)

<comment><USER16> Yeah, unfortunately my only exposure to owl lisp is wishing that Radamsa _wasnt_ written in it so I could understand/modify radamsa better.

Radamsa is seriously awesome.

<comment><USER15> ...and that's 100% my experience with it too :-/

Awesome fuzzing engine but modifying it is not for the faint of heart.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you perform online learning for Production ML systems? - <AUTHOR> My workflow for batch/offline training takes a day. I have a use case where I want to aggregate feedback from last hour and perform online learning.<p>How would you do it in Production ML system serving live traffic? <comment><USER2> To answer this well, there are a few additional details needed: 1\. How often does the model need to be retrained? 2\. What's the output of your model? 3\. You say training takes a day - if you had the parameters, how long does it take to process?</comment>


In the battle of free speech now it's France v Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/09/battle-free-speech-france-google-right-to-be-forgotten <comment><USER2> What is free speech if the state acts to prevent anyone from finding what you published?

Imagine a despotic regime that allowed it's citizens to publish or say whatever they wanted, with the only restriction being it had to be in an empty auditorium.

Is Baidu or Yandex going to comply with RTBF? As soon as people know you can't find something in Google globally, they'll just work around it. Metacrawlers will return which just query every search engine.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wouldn't call it 'free speech'. That's what Google is marketing it as, but it's really 'privacy law'. Nothing about RTBF is about preventing people from speaking, people are still free to put whatever they want on the Internet, wherever they want to. However, stories which violate an individual's privacy which do not have relevance to the public interest are being restricted from being a permanent stain on their reputation.

(And the only potential First Amendment issue in the US, is because somehow the Citizens United decision gives our companies Constitutional rights, which is silly.)

Arguably, France's problem with Google's refusal to implement this globally is that Google doesn't prevent French users from visiting other countries' Google websites, like say, google.ca. So Google isn't really providing a good faith effort to uphold the French law, even in France.

<comment><USER4> > I wouldn't call it 'free speech'. That's what Google is marketing it as, but > it's really 'privacy law'.

The two are overlapping. Privacy laws _in general_ are restrictions on free speech, and privacy laws restricting the manner in which true, _already publicly disseminated_ , information -- including on some matters of public concern (and criminal acts are _by definition_ matters of public concern) -- can be disseminated are pretty much the _pinnacle_ of free speech concerns.

> (And the only potential First Amendment issue in the US, is because somehow > the Citizens United decision gives our companies Constitutional rights, > which is silly.)

It would be equally a First Amendment concern in the US if companies did not have Constitutional rights but were merely vehicles through which individuals (who have Constitutional rights of their own) act.

<comment><USER3> RTBF is primarily meant to redact "untrue" information, so, I find your first response to be... somewhat questionable. In many cases, what RTBF is blocking is libel. I suppose the notion of "information not relevant to the public interest" may fall under the debate, but most of the claims of "censorship!!!!" clearly focus on concerns that are NOT affected by RTBF laws.

Google's search algorithm has no right to free speech, actually, unless we'd like to define it as an artificial person and grant it Constitutional rights too.

<comment><USER4> > Google's search algorithm has no right to free speech

Google's search algorithm is a tool which the people for whom "Google" is simply a legal construct used as a vehicle use in the course of exercising their right to free speech. Restricting the information that can be presented through this tool is restricting those people's right to free speech.

<comment><USER3> I don't know if I feel like that would hold up in court. Google's algorithm isn't helping individuals at Google construct speech, it's arguably collecting it's own data and presenting it's own results, merely according to guidelines it was taught or programmed with.

<comment><USER4> > Google's algorithm isn't helping individuals at Google construct speech, > it's arguably collecting it's own data and presenting it's own results

Google's algorithm isn't a independent agency, its a tool created by humans for a human purpose.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>