Consider the problem of predicting an agent's binary choice. If an agent follows a strategy of always choosing the opposite of what the algorithm predicts, then the algorithm's prediction will always be incorrect. A "true future predicting algorithm" cannot correctly predict the actions of certain kinds of agents, as long as those agents can observe the prediction.
There will always be probability involved, the algorithm’s job will be also be to “wrap the prediction” in a way receiver thinks will it will benefit from ( negotiate ) . Hence leading to following the prediction.
People are not their governments. Viewing competing governments as competition between their countries - I think that is propaganda. The US government violates the privacy of US people through mass surveillance. Now it is competing for control over social media. Yet the goal of mass surveillance of US people, which harms US people, is justified in terms of US interests.
During the cold war all sorts of things were justified because they made sense from the perspective of US (governmental) interests. The Vietnam war, the Mujahideen, the toppling of free and democratic governments. In a "realist" framework, the ends justify the means. The "ends" and "means" here are considered from the point of view of the statesman.
When the world is viewed as a chessboard between competing nations, human beings outside the decision making centers suffer - we are reduced to being expendable resources, collateral damage, in the pursuit of "national" interests.
Especially in dictatorships like China and Russia, indeed.
> Viewing competing governments as competition between their countries
I don't understand this comment. So if a foreign government is opposed to you, it's OK because it does not represent its people and therefore you should not do anything about it? As far as I know the government controls the use of violence force so in the end of the day governments matter over people when it comes to foreign relations.
> During the cold war all sorts of things were justified because they made sense from the perspective of US (governmental) interests. The Vietnam war, the Mujahideen, the toppling of free and democratic governments.
This hardly happened in a vacuum. In case you missed an episode the whole of Europe and several parts of Asia were threatened to be taken over by communist rule, in a violent fashion - the US acted as a counter power to that.
The money is there, it just mostly resides in the hands of the few. The mean net worth of an American household is almost $700,000 - that's total net worth of all households, divided by number of households.
Please don't post like this. If you see a [dead] comment that shouldn't be dead, you should vouch for it (https://hackernews.hn/newsfaq.html) or email hn@ycombinator.com so we can fix the problem
I occasionally see comments from users like this one, with all but occasional comments dead. If I look back far enough, sometimes I can find a comment that was transgressive. But often enough, nothing.
So should I be emailing hn@ycombinator.com about those?
"[dead]" means that an account has been administratively banned. "flagged" only shows up per-comment, showing that users have flagged that comment.
Tracking back through history to find the banning offence can take a while. But you can vouch for either individual posts or a user as a whole, by email, as described above. I do this myself on occasion.
Flagged / banned account activity isn't visible unless you've set "showdead" to on, in your HN profile settings.
It's so sad to see banned accounts consistently making interesting and constructive comments, which are mostly all dead, except for the occasional vouched one. And sometimes for years. That's quite the cruel punishment.
Being paranoid by nature, I routinely check my account from other IPs whenever my comments aren't getting replies. And I wonder if others do that. I mean, could someone go for a year without realizing that their account had been banned?
And good thing too but not all of it is - in fact, it's a sign of how well developers are treated that they can afford to volunteer their time and expertise for everyone: developers don't need to spend every second of every day on the grind for basic living.
I think it's because of the common assumption that the system that controls your data must also house the application that interacts with this data. When decentralized applications finally arrive (the inklings are already here) users won't be forced into this false choice. In that sense, companies like Google and Facebook are behind the curve, and don't really represent technological "advancement", but rather a social shift that has legitimized itself by falsely presenting itself as inevitable.
You just touched upon one of my idealistic geek wet dreams: Truly decentralized applications. Let's use ondemand music streaming as an example. I dream of a network where I pay whatever vendor I want, to deliver streams of music. I also pay whatever vendor I want to save my data (think playlists and play data). And I pay whatever vendor I want (could be free software as well) to play those streams. Each component does one thing, and the communication between is documented and open sourced. If I decide to switch player, that is fine, perhaps I use a different player on my phone and on my rpi terminal. If decide to switch stream provider my data is not locked with the previous vendor.
That's some idyllic thinking, but I agree such interoperability would be awesome. However, I don't see how it could be realized with current closed ecosystems. Seems like this would almost require open software...
I kind of think of imminent battle between decentralized/centralized as analogous to the Linux/Windows wars of yesterday. Over the short term you're probably right that centralized services will win. But because decentralized services yield control of your data, they have the potential to be so much better for the consumer than centralized services.
