Many areas of law enforcement are whack-a-mole. There's no online gambling regulation so strict that it will stop unlicensed sites from existing entirely; that doesn't mean the rules are pointless or resources dedicated to enforcing them are wasted.
Sure. However, the effort spent vs. what is gained has to be considered. Not all games of whack-a-mole are created equal.
VPNs are incredibly easy to spin up, gambling groups are not. Within a week I could probably spin up a dozen or more semi-legitimate VPN companies. Multiply that by however many hundreds of people are willing to do the same. Add a few thousand more people willing to spin up completely shady 'free' VPNs.
The scale quickly exceeds what you can possibly block, unless you firewall the nation.
Sure. But majority of the people (as seen with China, or Russia) do not care about VPN and won’t care. So, it seems to me that this way it will be easier for law enforcement to achieve what they want just because the target pool is already smaller.
>But majority of the people (as seen with China, or Russia) do not care about VPN and won’t care
The article that our comments are under are about an 18x increase in sign-ups from the UK for one provider, a 2.5x increase for another provider, a 10x increase for yet another provider, etc. in just days.
I'm curious about your stats for China/Russia, though. Where/how do you find out how many internet users in those countries have a subscription to and/or use a VPN? Would those stats continue to hold true if there was not a great firewall in China, and just rudimentary IP-blocking of VPN providers?
> The article that our comments are under are about an 18x increase in sign-ups from the UK for one provider, a 2.5x increase for another provider, a 10x increase for yet another provider, etc. in just days.
Those numbers mean nothing without the baseline. What if before it was 1 person and now it’s 18x more, totaling 19 people?
W.r.t. data about China and Russia, I don’t want to pay for market reports, but occasional discussions about China, for example, show that about 35% of internet users use VPN (https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/i3afnz/how_many_peop..., the thread has some links for more info). However, it is unclear how many of those users are private citizens use VPN to specifically bypass censorship. From my anecdotal experience from work and my PhD, most Chinese I met just don’t care about censorship and lack of access to FB, YouTube, or whatever. Chinese are like western users for the most part, on average they need social media, financial apps, maybe search, etc. they are not actively looking for censored info.
>Those numbers mean nothing without the baseline. What if before it was 1 person and now it’s 18x more, totaling 19 people?
They obviously don't mean nothing. Knowing absolute numbers would be much better, but knowing that the direction of the trend (people previously not caring now care) is informative by itself. It's safe to assume that more than 1 person had a VPN subscription previously.
I appreciate the link and additional insight. The way you phrased it before, I was expecting you to quote sub 10% or less. 35% is not inconsequential, especially considering the environment.
In the end, I'm not convinced you can extrapolate Chinese internet usage patterns to the UK, given the large cultural differences (specifically in regards to internet, history of censorship, etc.). Someone who has grown up their entire lives under the great firewall will react differently to censorship than someone who has grown up their entire lives under a mostly free internet that is now being censored.
> but knowing that the direction of the trend (people previously not caring now care) is informative by itself.
Sure. However, without baseline numbers how do you know who are the people signing up for VPNs? This is the whole point: is it the general public en masse, or some of tech people who had no VPN before?
> In the end, I'm not convinced you can extrapolate Chinese internet usage patterns to the UK, given the large cultural differences (specifically in regards to internet, history of censorship, etc.). Someone who has grown up their entire lives under the great firewall will react differently to censorship than someone who has grown up their entire lives under a mostly free internet that is now being censored.
Of course culture makes a huge difference, but you cannot strongly prove the opposite just based on the assumption about cultural differences. I think the the average consumer simply does not care enough. Remember, the expectation on average is that the access to the information is free.
The idea that you should verify your legal identity to load a website is reprehensible and not something that should be treated seriously. It should be ridiculed like the authoritarian nonsense it is.
Yes, in a perfect world the downsides are limited. But in the world we live in I predict a lot more leaks similar to the Tea app hack (which contained a lot of passports, linked to some quite private data from chats like medical documents)
The biggest hope I see is that the EU also wants to implement age restrictions, but with a lot more effort to get it right and make it compatible with a strong desire for privacy. Maybe that will make "proper" implementations easy and common enough that many of the downsides will be mitigated
It seems to me that your argument is: if the system can make mistakes, it should not exist.
However, no systems are fault free. Whether we are talking about computing systems, mechanical systems, or societal ones.
Sometimes police can arrest an innocent person before they realize the mistake and release them.
Should we stop policing completely? Or maybe the right question to ask is “how do we minimize the chance for police to make mistakes?”. Note, these are two separate issues:
1. Do we need the police at all?
2. How do we make police to not arrest innocent people all the time?
You are ascribing thoughts to me (and root comment) that I have not expressed. I recommend that you reread the thread and separate what is being explicitly said, and what you believe is implicitly said.
Then reread it with only the explicit meanings in my and root comment: we are talking about the consequences of the law without making any comment on the morals, probably because we are network admins that see this news as input and we are not lawmakers that see it as output.
I hope that by rereading the comments in this light, communication might be improved.
Sure. But publishing this result with your experimental methodology may help others to refine the experiment and get a better answer.
It is absolutely shameful that negative results are almost never published. I sure that a lot of money and effort wasted by repeating the same dead-end experiments by many research groups just because there is no paper that said: “we tried it this way, it didn’t work”.
1. Papers are written to invite replication — the most important part of the scientific process. It is already difficult to compel replication even when you only put the most promising research in people's faces. Now you want them to have to also sift through thousands of entrants that have almost no reason for replication attempts?
2. It's easy to call it shameful when it isn't you who has to do the work. If you are like most other normally functioning people, you no doubt perform little experiments every day that end up going nowhere. How many have you written papers for? I can confidently say zero. I've got better things to do.
> It's easy to call it shameful when it isn't you who has to do the work.
What work? The work of writing the paper?
It seems to me that it’s better that research group A will spend 10 days to write the paper about their dead-end experiment, than 20 other research groups will do the same series of experiments, wasting a lot of time, money, and energy just because there was no paper that said “it doesn’t work”. Perhaps it would be better if those 20 research groups would instead try 20 different ways to fix the faulty method in hopes to get somewhere, than dosing the same thing.
I do not understand how it’s even a question for debate.
The lack of null result publication is a real issue for research and scientific knowledge in general, including for accurate positive results (what if once you see a positive result by statistical chance but the experiment was actually conducted before you by 10 other people but that wasn't published because the results were null?)
> Papers are written to invite replication
They are written to share knowledge, new discoveries. We hope that they are replicated.
> It's easy to call it shameful when it isn't you who has to do the work.
We are not judging anyone, we are qualifying the situation. And we are speaking of publishing results for experiments that have already conducted, not voluntarily making up null cases and doing the related experiments. It wouldn't make sense and would be harmful. But if you did an experiment that produced a null result, not publishing is a loss of knowledge. Again, we are not judging anybody, it's a failure of the publishing system. But this cannot change if nobody points it out.
I'd have troubles understanding a researcher not acknowledging today that the lack of null result publication is an issue. It would show a lack of perspective IMHO. And for someone acknowledging that there's an issue, pushing back is not the right stance.
> They are written to share knowledge, new discoveries. We hope that they are replicated.
If they aren't replicated, no new knowledge is gained. Not really.
> it's a failure of the publishing system.
What failure? Again, the "publishing system" is to submit the "best of the best" research to the world in order to invite replication. While nothing is perfect, we don't want people to have to sift through papers that have effectively no reason to be replicated in a quest to find something that is. That would make things infinitely worse.
The internet was created for the minor-leagues. If you are willing to put in the effect to document your "less than the best" research, put it up on a website for all to see already. There is nothing stopping you. But who wants to put in the effort?
> We are not judging anyone
How do you define "shameful" if it isn't related to judgement of someone?
You assume that null results are not worth it and are not the best of science. You seem to be ignoring the issue where researchers collectively waste time redoing "failing" studies again and again because the null results are not published, and other issues not publishing them causes.
We fundamentally disagree here and I'm not willing to put in the effort needed to try to convince you otherwise, many other comments are here are better than what I could write.
I do hope you take the time to take a step back (and you seem to be in defensive mode, if so, you need to go out of this) and reconsider.
> How do you define "shameful" if it isn't related to judgement of someone?
Do you know the expression "it's a shame"?
> used when you wish a situation was different, and you feel sad or disappointed
> You assume that null results are not worth it and are not the best of science.
No. I make no such assumption. That may often be true, but there is nothing to stop a useful null result from being published. We also get things wrong from time to time. It is very possible that the best baseball player in the world has been overlooked by Major League Baseball. We're pretty good at scoping out the best, but nothing in life is perfect.
If the best baseball player in the world ends up in the minor leagues instead, oh well? Does it really matter? You can still watch them there. Same goes for research. If something great doesn't make it into the formal publication system, you can still read it on the studier's website (if they put in the effort to publish it).
> You seem to be ignoring the issue where researchers collectively waste time redoing "failing" studies again and again because the null results are not published
I may be ignoring it, but if that's the case that's because it is irrelevant. There is no reason to not publish your "failing" studies. That's literally why the public internet was created (the original private internet was created for military, but next in line was university adoption — to be used for exactly that purpose!).
> We fundamentally disagree here and I'm not willing to put in the effort needed to try to convince you otherwise
Makes sense. There is nothing to convince me of. I was never not convinced. But it remains: Who wants to put in the effort? Unless you are going to start putting guns to people's backs, what are you expecting?
> There is no reason to not publish your "failing" studies. That's literally why the public internet was created
You are suggesting researchers should blog about their null results? It seems to me the null results deserve the same route as any other paper, with peer reviews, etc.
It matters, because this route is what other researchers trust. They wouldn't base their work on some non reviewed blog article that can barely be cited. You don't even base good science on some random article on Arxiv that was not published in some recognized avenue. If you are using some existing work to skip an experiment because it tells you "we've already tried this, it didn't show any effect", you want to be able to trust it like any other work. Hell, as a random citizen in a random discussion, especially one with a PhD, I don't want to be citing a blog article as established scientific knowledge.
And yes, getting published in a proper, peer reviewed avenue is work, but we all need to deeply internalize that it's not lesser work if the result is null.
> Unless you are going to start putting guns to people's backs, what are you expecting?
If researchers collectively decide it's worth pursuing, it's all about creating the incentives at the right place. Like any other research, you could be rewarded, recognized and all. High impact journals and conferences could encourage researchers to publish / present their null results.
Of course, we are not speaking about such things like "what two unrelated things could I try to measure to find some absence of correlation", we are speaking about "I think those two things are linked, let's make an experiment. Oh, no, they are not correlated in the end!" -> the experiment is done either way, just that the results also deserve to be published either way. And the experiment should only be published if it doesn't exhibit a fatal flaw or something, we are not talking about flawed experiment either.
> You are suggesting researchers should blog about their null results?
If they want to. Especially if it doesn't meet the standard for the publication system, why not?
> It seems to me the null results deserve the same route as any other paper, with peer reviews, etc.
If it ranks with the best of them, it is deserving. There isn't room for everything, though, just as there isn't room for everyone who has ever played baseball to join the MLB. That would defeat the entire purpose of what these venues offer.
But that doesn't mean you can't play. Anyone who wants to play baseball can do so, just as anyone who wants to publish research can do so.
> If researchers collectively decide it's worth pursuing
It only takes an individual. Unlike baseball, you can actually play publishing research all by yourself!
1. Where do we read your failed research? Given your stance, it would look very foolish to find out that you haven't published it.
2. Do you draw a line? Like, if you add a pinch more salt to your dinner and found that it doesn't taste any better, do you publish that research?
I get your point, but this is not specific to null results.
> It only takes an individual
No no no. The desirability of null results need to be recognized and somewhat consensual, and high impact journals and conferences needs to accept them. Otherwise, there's no reason researchers will work to publish them.
1. I don't publish anymore: I'm not a researcher anymore. I didn't encounter the case during the short time I was one (I could have, though. Now I know, years later. I suspect it would have been difficult to convince my advisors to do it). I hope this doesn't matter for my points to stand on their own. Note that I think null results ARE NOT failed research. This is key.
2. Ideally, null or positive result alike, the experiments and the studies need to be solid and convincing enough. Like, there needs to be enough salt and not too much, the dinner needs to be tasty in both cases. If the dinner doesn't taste good, of course you don't publish it. There is something wrong with what you've done (the protocol was not well followed, there's statistical bias, not enough data points, I don't know)
It feels like we are talking past each others, you are thinking I'm talking about failed research, but I'm talking about a hypothesis you believed could be true, you built an experiment to test it, and found no correlation in the end. This result is interesting and should be published, it's not failed research.
As it happens, I attended a PhD defense less than a month ago where the thesis lead to null results… The student was able to publish, these null results felt somewhat surprising and counter intuitive, so it's not like it's impossible, it just needs to be widely seen as not failed research.
> The desirability of null results need to be recognized and somewhat consensual
If it is interesting you should also find it interesting when you read it 30 years in the future. You don't need other people. It's a nice feeling when other people want to look at what you are doing, sure, but don't put the cart before the horse here. Publish first and prove to others that there is something of value there. They are not going to magically see the value beforehand. That is not how the human typically functions.
It's not like you have to invent the printing press to do it. Putting your work up on a website for the entire world to see is easy peasy. Just do it!
> Ideally, null or positive result alike, the experiments and the studies need to be solid and convincing enough.
No need to let perfect become the enemy of good. Publishing your haphazard salting experiment isn't apt to be terribly convincing, but it gets you into the habit of publishing. Eventually you'll come around to something that actually is interesting and convincing. It's telling if someone isn't willing to do this.
> The student was able to publish, these null results felt somewhat surprising and counter intuitive, so it's not like it's impossible
Exactly. Anything worthy of the major leagues will have no trouble getting formally published. But not everything is. And that's okay. You can still publish it yourself. If you want to play baseball, there is no need to wait around for the MLB to call, so to speak... Just do it!
> you are thinking I'm talking about failed research [...] it just needs to be widely seen as not failed research.
Yes, I am talking about what is widely seen as failed research. It may not actually be failed research in a practical sense, but the moniker is still apt, especially given that you even call it that yourself. I guess I don't understand what you are trying to say here.
> I guess I don't understand what you are trying to say here
I guess I failed to get my point across to you and I doubt I will suddenly manage to do it this far in the discussion. Nature failed this too apparently, so I guess that doesn't tell much about me.
> Putting your work up on a website for the entire world to see is easy peasy. Just do it!
I have already said why this is not an option. I'm terribly confused as to why you are even suggesting it. Recognized research doesn't currently happen in blog posts.
> it gets you into the habit of publishing. Eventually you'll come around to something that actually is interesting and convincing.
Irrelevant? Patronizing?
The issue is not at the individual level anyway. It is a systemic issue. We are discussing on a post from Nature called "Researchers value null results, but struggle to publishing them". Here's your systemic issue, raised in one of highest impact journals.
> It's telling if someone isn't willing to do this.
What does it tell you? That research is not the person's current job maybe?
> I am talking about what is widely seen as failed research
And this is my point. It shouldn't be.
> you even call it that yourself
Nope. At best I used quotes around the word "failing".
I don't see this discussion progressing and surfacing interesting points anymore. You are disrespectful. Your points are subtly moving targets. You are sharing irrelevant advice to someone who doesn't need them. You are sharing irrelevant baseball and food comparisons (that I tried to adopt anyway). You are misrepresenting what I wrote. You don't really engage the actual topic. The whole discussion is looping.
I believe you are trolling me. I tried to assume my feeling about this was wrong and gave you too much attention as a result. I should have stopped earlier. That'll teach me.
If Nature can't convince you there's an issue that has absolutely nothing to do with me, I won't neither.
All I can see is that you said people can't find a compelling reason to do it. But that was already said long before you ever showed up and is specifically the point made in the comment you originally responded to... What do you think you are adding by just repeating that original comment over and over?
> Recognized research doesn't currently happen in blog posts.
Stands to reason. Who is doing it? Nobody is going to recognize something that doesn't exist! You have to demonstrate the value first. That is true in everything. Research is not somehow magically different.
> What does it tell you?
That nobody wants to do it. But what do you want to tell us? We already knew that nobody wants to do it.
> I don't see this discussion progressing and surfacing interesting points anymore.
It was never interesting, only humorous. Where did you find interest?
> You are disrespectful.
Ad hominem is a logical fallacy.
> Your points are subtly moving targets.
There is no apparent shift from my original comment as far as I can see. It is possible that you have misunderstood something, I suppose. I'm happy to keep trying to aid in your understanding.
> You are sharing irrelevant advice to someone who doesn't need them.
HN purportedly has 5 million monthly users. What makes you the expert on what they do and don't need? Get real.
> You are misrepresenting what I wrote.
It is possible, even likely, that I misunderstood what you wrote. But usually when you recognize that someone misunderstood you try to work with them in good faith to find an understanding, not run away crying that your precious words weren't written well enough to be understood, so I'm not sure you have really thought this through.
> I believe you are trolling me.
No you don't. The minute you legitimately thought I was a troll, you would have immediately cut off contact. Instead, you wrote a lengthy reply to give me your heartfelt goodbye. You can say this, but actions tell the true tale. Why make shit up?
> If Nature can't convince you
Said article in Nature effectively says the same things I have. What would it need to convince me of? It is on the very same page.
I'm not sure why you keep thinking you aren't (even though you clearly are). Perhaps you've confused HN with Reddit and are trying to "win" some stupid "argument" nobody cares about — most especially me? That would explain why you keep repeating my comments in what appears to be some kind of "combative" way.
> I'm done.
Got it. This pretty much proves that is exactly what you were trying to do. What motivates this?
Scroll down to “ I’ve heard that there are strict limitations on ammunition in Switzerland. Who can buy ammunition and how much can they acquire?”, the answer to which basically boils down to: anyone with a valid permit.
> Which is what the 2A ding-dongs are usually referring to when they pipe up with the usual "Switzerland has lots of guns!" nonsense.
No. It applies to weapons issued by the state.
> Plus restrictions on what kind of ammo, and the seller can request they perform a background check.
Man, it’s as easy to buy ammo in Switzerland as in the US. You can argue on all these minor points about background checks etc (btw majority of high profile shootings in the US are done with legal arms!), but it has nothing to do with reality.
The ammo thing is for the service rifle. Switzerland also has a very high private ownership level at least compared to the rest of Europe, and by they can keep ammunition at home (but secured, like the weapons).
> Rational deliberation and cold calculation may be relevant for property crimes, he argues, but violence results from decisions that are far more impulsive and spontaneous
After watching about 100 hours of various body cam footage on YouTube, I totally agree. In so many cases the interaction with police escalates absolutely spontaneously, without any sort of clear intent to escalate from either side.
What’s positive is that we have state of the art domestic manufacturing with potential to onshore more and more of the required supply chains, building/educating local expertise, etc etc.
The question is: what’s AMDs margin? 20% manufacturing cost maybe well below 1% of the total development cost. So, not a deal breaker at all.
It seems to me that long term having fabs in the IS is net positive for the economy: more jobs, more localized supply chains, more local expertise, etc etc
The manufacturing cost is emphatically not only 1% of the total development cost. Particularly for GPUs, the high bandwidth memory and manufacturing costs are a significant portion of the product price.
> The manufacturing cost is emphatically not only 1% of the total development cost.
I have no idea what is the manufacturing cost of a 800 mm^2 die is, but I am sure it is lower than the development cost.
> Particularly for GPUs, the high bandwidth memory and manufacturing costs are a significant portion of the product price.
HBM is not manufactured by the GPU vendor, it is an off-the-shelf component that AMD buys like any other company can. Thus, the cost of HBM is tallied in the BOM and integration costs (interposer, packaging, etc).
800mm^2 die would roughly cost 300-350 usd axcoeding to [1]. That's the Taiwan price and dor N4. This doesn't include the memory or the package. The silicon cost for N3 is close to 2x.
Well, seems that increase of 20% for US-based manufacturing on a base cost of $350 is $70. MSRP of 5090 is $1,999. So, on shoring will result in 3.5% increase in MSRP, which is nothing.
It did. The shift from the manufacturing sector to the service sector also mattered; manufacturing had a well-understood "union culture" with clear benefits to employees and service-sector work was generally considered "white-collar" and not in need of the same protections.
... but ask nurses whether they feel "white-collar."
If you want to read about this, "industry concentration rate" is a good search term. In general, studies show that US industry concentration (percentage of the market claimed by the largest entrants) is increasing (indicating a decrease in competition).
My (perhaps moronic, but hey, I’m not an expert) metric is this: if a company X constantly buys other companies just for the sake of preventing competition —- it’s bad, and we risk to have a monopoly. Which, we almost do have with Google, Apple, and many others.
I mean, it’s a fine line to thread: companies should be able to do M&As, but at the same time, they should not be allowed to become monopolies.
This is what Russia is (semi-successfully) doing.
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