I spend a lot of time in a journal club discussing human behavior genetics with researchers who include researchers on extreme old age. That's a data-mining study, and would not impress other researchers in the field (or even get published in a better journal) without being replicated in an independent dataset. Spurious gene-correlation studies of this kind are a dime a dozen.
Food for thought is that the heritability of longevity as discovered in twin studies is actually not particularly high.
"I used to live next door to a Russian émigré. One day he asked me to explain something that puzzled him about his new country. "This place seems very rich," he said, "but I never see anyone making anything. How does the country earn its money? The answer, these days, is that we make a living by selling each other houses. Since December 2000 employment in U.S. manufacturing has fallen 17 percent, but membership in the National Association of Realtors has risen 58 percent."
This services-dedicated-to-startup industry is smelling very much like a bubble.
Let us pause for a second an think what could possibly happen with anti-terrorism laws like this in not-so-advanced democracies where there is little protection of the average citizen from the abuse of state power.
Let us also think about how the leading democracies export the "democratic software" (laws) and they get copied/cited in not-so-advanced democracies in making their own laws. It is very easy for a barely-democratic state to cite a western democracy's law as a precedence.
Let us then think about how many people live under democratic laws (and under strong rule of law) and compare that to the number of people without that.
Depressing.
I fear that these badly written anti-terrorism laws are like software flaws that will flow from system to system and harm many more people than we can see right now.
> anti-terrorism laws like this in not-so-advanced democracies where there is little protection of the average citizen from the abuse of state power.
Ummm... This is about Northern Ireland, which had an undeclared low simmering civil war for much of the late 20th century, with abuses by state powers (imprisonment without trail, soliders shooting protesters on the streets), active paramilitary groups killing civilians and state actors, and undemocratic processes (gerrymandering of votes).
I think we know what happens when the UK/NI state wants to abuse one part of the population.
We went for a weekend to Belfast (which is a great place to visit) but I must admit I was rather surprised to find that there are still automatic barriers in place that close the roads between the Falls and Shankhill Roads.
One thing is for sure - UK needs a proper Constitution. It seems the government is treating the population lately as if it has no rights.
While in US at least the government tries to pretend that it only spies on "foreign" (with its own interpretation of foreign) communications, because it knows otherwise it would be unconstitutional, in UK Cameron has just said that "nothing should be hidden from the government". And the sad part is there's nothing stopping the UK government/Parliament from passing such a law, nullifying what should be an absolute basic right to privacy everyone on Earth should have.
When there's no privacy there's no freedom. And governments now try to get rid of that freedom under the false pretense that it will offer more security instead (it won't, or at very least the trade-off between terrorist violence and government violence won't be worth it in the long term).
I'd add that the PG post is a symptom of a disease. A disease that that is brewing in the echo-chambers of SV. Note also the recent post where PG claims that "mean people fail".
The more the VC community gets un-hinged from the reality the quicker the inflation of the bubble and the crazier the assertions.
Part of the problem is that investors might understand the businesses they invest in from 30,000 feet, but they frequently have no idea how their portfolio companies are actually run. If some of them went undercover and applied for jobs at their own portfolio companies, they'd probably have a different perspective about the "talent shortage."
Yes. As a job search candidate myself, I see your point. It was not as it used to be before. Maybe something to do with a lot more competition and focus on competitive programming in interviews may be?
What disease is that, (very) specifically? I'm having a hard time nailing down what you mean, and how you arrived at that conclusion, but think it would be worthwhile to understand more.
The disease is, to a large extent, myopic and self-serving reasoning. It goes like this: we want larger number of "highly skilled" developers to come to the US, preferably, permanently and preferably, working for VC-backed firms.
Let's think about the consequences.
If this is implemented, it will hurt the sender countries (brain-drain) and may even lower the salaries for people who are already here. I'll go back to the brain-drain again. The REST OF THE WORLD NEEDS DEVELOPERS TOO. Maybe even more than the US.
Once here, these people will toil long and hard and face very steep challenges in making serious money. Maybe 1-2% of them will see millions. Most will make sub-par wages as immigrants. Yes, H1-B wages are lower.
Meanwhile, VCs, since their bets are widely hedged will get to play many rounds of the same game increasing the odds of the payout.
Hurt the sender countries? Maybe in some cases. But in many, opportunities were limited there. They come here, not just for money, but for meaningful work that engages their skills at a challenging level. Good for everybody.
This used to be true in the old days. These days both India and China are extremely hot markets for good software engineers. Europe always had a shortage of developers. They are also not markets where people from other countries can go and work.
So, that means all things being equal, when really good developers leave their countries they are depriving the local market of their talent.
If you think of the equation this way -- when engineers immigrate to the US they are bringing with them the investments that their own countries had made. Outside the US many countries subsidize higher education, especially engineering.
It used to be that the money that these engineers sent back would more than offset the local productivity gains. Given the growth in China and India and the salaries there it is hard to argue that the remittance is a good compensation for this "brain drain".
By and large, the main product of the Web industry is the user. Content or code that is sold as a property or a service is used to lure in the product (the user) and sell the most-commercially viable aspect of the product (that is the information about their "categories") to the highest bidders (advertisers).
Is it too much of a stretch to say that this mode of user-segregation-and-information-selling is pretty much a new form of "commoditization" of human beings.
I would say it's more like the commoditization of the potential to extract profit from human beings. It is hard to blame the big Co though; most people happily give up information voluntarily for the services the websites provide. I am routinely chided for shunning social networks.
Meanwhile, do-nothing congress are set upon legislating a new sanction on Iran.
IMHO best comment on hackernews of 2014. Eyeballs is an inaccurate description, it was imported from the tv era. Online privacy is fading because it's the source of user information commodity that is being mined/traded/exploited. A brave new world.
"That is, the more expressive a language or system is, the less we can reason about it, and vice versa. The more capable the system, the less comprehensible it is."
What makes these assertions true? Research/data/polls etc would be helpful. It is hard to accept such wide-ranging claims without some proof.
Also, could someone please post the effective definitions of "expressiveness" and "capability" as used in the post ?
Government can't place a policemen at the every doorstep of a house which owners failed to lock windows. With billions of funds available, Sony should have taken more steps to protect itself, the malware was quite primitive[1]. Especially, when you have so many enemies as Sony..
This is a good effort. I do have some concerns about it.
A true root cause would go deeper and ask why is it that an engineer could solely decide to roll out to all slices ?
The surface-level answer is that Azure platform lacked tooling. Is that the cause or an effect ? I think it is an effect. There are deeper root causes.
Let's ask -- why was it that the design allowed one engineer to effectively bring down Azure ?
We often stop at these RCAs when it gets uncomfortable and it starts to point upwards.
I say this to the engineer who pressed the buttons: Bravo! You did something that exposed a massive hole in Azure which may have very well prevented a much bigger embarrassment.
A true root cause would go deeper and ask why is it that an engineer could solely decide to roll out to all slices?
Because writing code which contains a large number of checks and balances is generally orders of magnitude more expensive than human trust/judgment on the Ops team. Reading the postmortem makes me think that this sort of failure could have happened to anyone, and no-one really did anything wrong. The mistake was the blob store config flag not getting flipped, which is just a natural human error. The engineer who did the roll out could have been any of us. Given what he/she knew, he/she thought they had a good soak test (and a couple of weeks is a pretty good soak test) and made a call, similar calls he/she makes a number of times every day. This one didn't pan out.
I would hazard that most companies have a big red rollout button that is reserved for trusted engineers that will do a rollout without all the checks you're requesting.
No one is saying that it had to be code. It could be as simple as "talk to another peer or your manager before making the next step".
For critical infrastructure companies there is the usual rule of "four eyes" for roll outs.
So, while it may be the case that most companies will have the trusted person with the keys to the rollout car the more critical the mission gets the higher the levels of human checks are put in.
Maybe that's what the RCA should have said -- we F-ed up designing and managing the rollout process. An engineer just fell victim to it.
Just a second level of approval can be very useful, without requiring orders of magnitude costs. In part because it usually requires that the change be explained in writing to the second approver, and that can often reveal issues.
It's not clear he/she didn't notify a secondary person, who would have likely had the same knowledge he/she did. Given the same knowledge, the same push might well have happened.
However, see this
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
Very clear evidence in a wide study about the contribution of genetics.