"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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
"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 ?
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.
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.
I am not worried about natural toxins. Most of what I select to eat is likely free of them. What I am worried about is that there doesn't seem to be any evidence of non-transfer of chemicals even at lower temperatures. I see claims but no clear evidence. Even if the transfer rates are low the chemicals "dose" can accumulate over repeated use.
Is there any scientific evidence for this statement on no harmful chemical transfer below 140F. Also, just because the food came in the very bag you're cooking it in doesn't mean it is safer.
Question for sous-vide aficianados. Are you not worried about the chemicals going from plastic to your feed ?
I grew up knowing that, by and large, the less manufactured stuff you put in your food the better the food is for your body.
So, it seems highly dangerous to me to take natural piece of food, wrap it in a highly complex chemical compound (plastic), heat it, and then consume it.
IBM is playing to two of it's strengths here -- decades of enterprise sales relationships and development manpower, largely based in India. In effect, they're becoming a sales and System Integration channel for Apple. In return they get to give their customers mobile apps that put lipstick on the pigs (Mainframe software, WebSphere/J2EE apps).
What I find amusing is how IBM is spinning this into a "Data and Analytics" play. Granted, it is a bit of marketing BS. But I also suspect that they are trying to please the stock market analysts. It would probably be a highlight in their next earnings call.
This Watson Analytics effort is flawed. It has a very limited market. It takes massive investment to run. Very few people will ever try it. They will also get very questionable benefits.
Bottom line, it is hard to see IBM getting anything close to a positive return from it.
Judging by how IBM has gone on to destroy itself in the last few years, I predict that this will be another nail on their coffin.
We won't be talking about Watson Analytics past Summer of 2015. Of course they will have 1000 people still working on it.
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.