gervase

This is pretty cool, and the first I've heard of the SOS Fund. Was this something that you actively sought out, or did they come to you?

If you want to go direct to the publication:

"Conceptual Design of a Universal Donor Screening Approach for Vaginal Microbiota Transplant",

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcimb.2019.0030...

I had some trouble accessing the site; if anyone needs a mirror:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190917180019/https://cosmoteer...

It seems so: https://github.com/lunaroyster/LaTeX-search

This seems like it would be related to a broader shift (among tech parents, at least [0]) from digital to analog.

From my perspective, it seems like a pendulum. On the whole, baby boomers didn't adapt to the advent of computers very well. However, they generally recognized their value, and provided access to the devices in a mostly unstructured way. Thus, their Gen X/millennial children are overall more technically savvy than they.

Now, those children are becoming parents themselves, and reflecting on the potential negative aspects of unlimited screen access, social media, widespread gamification, etc. on their own children. Providing the same unrestricted access to their own children may seem unlikely to produce the same results that they themselves experienced. Thus, alternatives like reducing or restricting access at home/school become more common/popular.

Perhaps the next generation will resent their parents' restrictions, or feel left behind technically, and swing back the other way?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18309305

Apple users seem far more willing to pay for small useful applications from indie developers so more indie developers put more effort into producing small useful and beautiful apps for Mac.

This rings true to me as well, but why is this the case? If we roughly assume that Mac users are 1 order of magnitude fewer than Windows users, they must be >1 OOM more likely to pay for these kinds of apps to generate this impression.

I struggled with this puzzle for quite a while when I switched from Mac to Windows. Utilities are simply not comparable, either in design, functionality, or simple quantity, for a market which is (on paper) both much larger and much older (if you restrict your view to the OS X era).

As an aside, it totally makes sense to me why Linux utilities are numerous and awesome, but have (usually) poor graphic design, because that Bauhaus-esque function over form describes how I prefer to work, too.

If it fails, you know they aren't. And if it succeeds, well, then you know they are.

This problem is solved in an interesting way by Keybase Chat, in which messages sent to non-existing accounts are "delivered", and can then be read if that account is created later on. It requires re-keying of the message by the sender, so it's not exactly a "fire and forget" solution, but it's pretty neat anyway.

When I was running hiring at a previous startup, we ran into this issue often. When I proposed adding FizzBuzz to our screening process, I got a fair amount of pushback from the team that it was a waste of the candidates' time.

Once we'd actually started using it, though, we found it filtered between 20-30% of our applicant pool, even when we let them use literally any language they desired, presumably their strongest.

However, it usually only filtered fresh grads (CS students from top-10 schools). Those with previous work experience almost never had a problem.

If you replace "punish" with "control" I think that's an easily-extensible template, because isn't that ultimately tied to the personal ethics of the employee?

<Some Company>: hey dude want to work for a company whose job it is to help manipulate and control people by violating their privacy through big data?

Engineer: sure! Just as long as it doesn't violate this very specific aspect of my personal ethics!

That could easily describe Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.

This is a horrible idea that breaks the idea of secret ballot and opens up all sorts of vote buying, coercion and intimidation.

Not at all; the parent said "taken into account in the final tally", not "see that their vote was counted as they intended".

This is very similar to the system for paper ballots, with a tear-off receipt. If you type in the ID number, you can verify that that ballot was counted. There is no association between identity, vote choice, or ballot ID.

From the article, it seems they're dealing with demand fluctuations of 1000-3000 MW within a given hour (2PM was the example), so I think it's really working on a totally different scale. Even 10x as many batteries wouldn't be able to smooth that load fluctuation.

I think this is a natural outcome of the peer review process; you're not targeting research papers at statistical models, you're targeting them at human reviewers. This kind of behavior is equally prevalent in many fields, including computer science.

I recently reviewed a paper from a research team in China, on a scalable and ubiquitous ad hoc sensing platform. The presented "spin" was that it could potentially be useful for monitoring power distribution networks, thereby reducing blackouts, which was certainly true. However, it could also have been used for an inescapable, totalitarian panopticon (this part was implicit and unstated).

As a reviewer with explicit instructions to evaluate the ethical implications of the work, is it my responsibility (A) to interpret the stated "spin", (B) extract and evaluate strictly the technical contributions of the work, or (C) all of the above, and the implicit "anti-spin" interpretation that was provided courtesy of my Western worldview?

And here's a twist - six months previously, a similar situation occurred with my own work, in which a technology that I envisioned (spun) being used for disaster relief caught the eye of an alphabet agency for low-cost, secure data collection in third world theaters. This was deeply shocking to me at the time, because I hadn't considered this potential use case when I was developing the system. I had spun its impact so effectively in my own mind, I didn't even see the negative alternative.

It's my observation that human brains will inject their own spin if it doesn't already exist, using the social and cultural norms to which that brain is accustomed. I don't hold a researcher's desire to sell their work as effectively as possible against them, especially if the person to whom they're selling most effectively is themselves.

Agreed. I don't object to company or founder exposés such as these, but I do find the article's focus on the founders' age to be misplaced and distasteful. I also think that these kinds of breathless adorations of the latest "wunderkind" to contribute to the widespread perception/reality of ageism within the industry.

I understand it makes for a more click-attracting title, but imagine if the title was "Silicon Valley's Latest Unicorn Is Run By an Asian" - it sounds offensive, at least to me. Preferably the articles would focus on something other than a protected class.

Note that age is not technically a protected class, only "advanced age", defined as 40+, but I personally think that making unbounded age a protected class would be beneficial for everyone. Refusing to hire someone because they're "too young" is equally as offensive as refusing because they're "too old".

In case anyone else was curious, it seems the penalties for being so labelled are enforced through the imposition of tariffs [0].

If the IMF / WTO agree with the Fed's characterization (which is doesn't currently look like will be the case, from what I read in the parent article), then it could have broader impacts, i.e. by the imposition of tariffs by companies which are not currently in a trade war with China.

However, since the US is already levying (heavier) tariffs against China, this is currently being viewed as more of a public / foreign relations move, as it seems unlikely that it will trigger even stronger tariffs.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/us/politics/trump-currenc...

FIOS wasn't actually why that market segment died; it was due to the FCC decision to re-classify DSL [0]. This was in response to a lawsuit resolved a few months earlier that did the same for cable internet connections. [1]

By re-classifying both cable and DSL as Title 1, rather than Title 2, that meant that they were no longer common carriers, and could kick all the competing ISPs off their network. This is why it seemed that most of the third-party providers went away nearly overnight.

[0] https://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-changes-dsl-classification/

[1]" https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/technology/cable-wins-int...

i've always wondered how companies get away with decrypting certain sites, i.e. Healthcare.

Often, through some kind of employee code of conduct; think along the lines of "I agree to refrain from using my work computer for personal business." or similar. Then, if something sensitive is decrypted, the employer has some legal cover.

At best you have someone who is basically an idiot savant. At worst, you have someone who has forgotten basic life functions, but handles being a soldier like the best of them.

From both an industrial and military perspective, this seems like a feature, not a bug.

In fact, it really brings to mind a similar fictional concept, stylized Focus, from Vernon Vinge's Deepness in the Sky. Here, Vinge describes how teams of these "idiot savants", specialized in a certain area, are led by neurotypical managers who direct their output toward broader strategic goals.

If this was repeatably and broadly applicable in human learning, I could definitely imagine this achieving widespread usage, especially in developing countries willing to exchange personal well-being for collective (familial or societal) success.

PCs made a lot of fast progress until sometime in the 90s and then things stagnated.

Transistor densities increased 2 orders of magnitude (~100x) between 1995 and 2005. Integer operations were a little less, maybe 1.5 oom, over the same period. When you say that PCs stagnated over that period, in what context did you mean?

In this case, I think that's especially true, but maybe not from the perspective you intended: they were sold on the idea of reduced costs, and they're marketing the changes to their employees (and the public) as retention-improving changes, despite the bald-faced absurdity of such a statement.

Pollution is a commonly-used example of a negative externality [0], or a way to shift business costs onto a third party.

In the parent example, the implication is that rather than investing money in reducing pollution, that money can instead by returned to the investors as dividends, and the global public must bear the impact of the unmitigated soot emissions.

The "wealth transfer" in this case is represented by the costs absorbed by the public (in terms of increased healthcare costs, endangered coastal real estate, disaster relief costs, etc which may result from pollution and/or anthropogenic climate change) being transferred to the investors/owners/operators of the polluting companies in the form of reduced spending on mitigation technology.

That was my interpretation of the parent's meaning, at least. At the time I posted this comment, there were three different interpretations of the same comment, which is very interesting.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Negative

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Yep, that's pretty accurate. It also drives degree inflation in the job market: "Why would I hire a BS student when I can get an MS or even PhD for the same price?"

If you're interested, you can find a more comprehensive cast of cryptographic characters on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Bob#Cast_of_characte...

Carol is also commonly used as the 'C' when a third agent is necessary.

If you dig into the documentation they've released so far, you'll find that it explicitly addresses this (I also am in the "No Facebook-owned Services" camp, so I went digging for the answer.)

There are two subsidiary organizations: first, the Libra Association, which is the governance organization populated by the "validators", i.e. the corporate partners who ponied up the $10MM entry fee.

The second is Calibra, the engineering arm spun off of Facebook itself, which is developing all of the bits and pieces that make up this technology. This includes the endpoints, client software, node servers, and so on.

Neither of these subsidiaries requires a Facebook account to interact with (although it's unlikely any of us will interact with the former, realistically); this is explicitly stated in the FAQ on the Calibra page, where it states that you can interact with the payment ecosystem using the (forthcoming) wallet software directly.

With that being said, they will also be integrating it nicely with Messenger and WhatsApp; this is likely where the majority of users will interact with it, which provides a nice front-end (the screenshots look very similar to Apple Pay).

Thus, if you need a long, unwieldy, or hard-to-surface address to send assets with the Calibra wallet, or if FB users can't easily target a wallet address for payment, then you're still facing a usability barrier, if not a technical one. I'm not sure if there's much a difference between the two, honestly, beyond the semantic one.

Furthermore, there's absolutely no guarantees that this won't change over time - I could absolutely see FB bringing the pressure down on Calibra to play within the garden, so to speak. We'll have to wait and see what implementations actually appear, not just what they've announced on Day 1.

They're not arbitrary, but they're not razor-thin, either. If we take a quick look at profit margins (net income over revenue) for 2017 as a proxy for fees relative to service costs, Visa was something like 36%, which is pretty good (for context, Google's is ~22%, Apple's is also ~22%, Citigroup is ~25%, Mastercard ~31%, Paypal ~13%, Facebook is just under 40%).

It would definitely be a big shift from the "support" they offer now, admittedly, but if they can break the Visa/MC duopoly at scale, I think you could make a business case for it.

If it fails, they lose their investment, which I believe was only on the order of double-digit millions, which is nothing to Visa. If it succeeds with their investment, they have a tiny amount of leverage. If it succeeds without their investment, they have no leverage at all.

A $10MM investment as a hedge against that outcome makes a lot of business sense, from a risk mitigation standpoint. The size of the investment is also indicative of their relative confidence that it will succeed - if they were sure that it would succeed and supplant their core business, they'd probably be investing a lot more.

I think people are missing the big picture here. This isn't a replacement for Apple Pay, Alipay, or PayPal - it's something new, driven by the sheer scale of Facebook's userbase. The cryptocurrency aspect is a smokescreen for the actual impact.

In fact, I predict that national governments are going to have to get on board with electronic currencies if they don't want to unwittingly transfer control over their own economies from their national treasuries to a private company.

Indications are that this won't be pegged to USD, but rather to a basket of international currencies. Since there are so many ways to combine a basket of currencies into a single value, this gives Facebook plenty of leeway as to how to price this currency.

Essentially, this is the equivalent of the virtual Facebook nation-state establishing their own federal reserve. More importantly, they've already got buy-in from the major non-governmental players. This will essentially create, all at once, a settlement layer that not only bypasses any individual national government, but also the established banking channels like SWIFT.

The US dollar is the predominant international reserve currency at the moment, and the US government leverages that as a pretty big club via SWIFT injunctions.

If there is an alternative that is ostensibly neutral from a governance perspective, and publicly auditable to prevent arbitrary adjustments/freezes, I could see that being very attractive to countries with a less-than-friendly relationship with the US. We already see rumblings to this effect in US-unfriendly countries: http://fortune.com/2018/07/26/iran-sanctions-cryptocurrency/

Of course, since Facebook is based in the US, it also provides the US government with a nice, local target for legal leverage. But it would also be very easy for Facebook to spin off this as a subsidiary and place it somewhere out of reach, like Switzerland. Perhaps they could call it something like Libra Networks? Wait, that sounds familiar... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-switzerland-paym...

It would be very difficult to outlaw transactions in a currency when those transactions can be initiated and validated on a blockchain directly by the participants. You'd have to play the whack-a-mole game with access to the chain itself, because with direct validation, you're essentially trying to outlaw barter. Look at the efficacy of the cryptocurrency ban in Venezuela as an example.

Facebook is currently doing an end-run to create the first supranational currency, and it's billion+ users combined with the technological agility (specifically, the lack thereof) of national governments means that they actually have some chance to succeed.

Everything they do should be a public good.

It seems the main disagreement is on how to define public in this context. Should it be for the good of humanity, or the good of the United States? And, if it's the latter, how can that restriction be enforced?

Apparently the initial implementation (iOS 8) randomized it every time the screen sleeps or wakes. I wasn't able to find any recent documentation detailing the current behavior - probably similar?