ordinaryperson

Your revised theory is that Ars is actually a Condé company because of the logo in the footer? Not sure that’s how corporate law works.

Take a minute and do some research. Advance owns Ars and the terms of the acquisition allow it to have total independence.

But again, I recommend you contact the Ars editors directly and share your theory that the Condé logo at the bottom of the page proves that they are in fact Condé stooges and have no editorial independence. See what they say. Their DMs are open.

Very insightful piece of analysis. Why don’t you email the Ars editors your theory that they are corporate Condé stooges and see what they say? As I mentioned in a sibling comment it’s actually Advance that owns Ars, not Condé, and it’s a different leadership group.

No. It’s run as a separate company inside the company.

And technically Condé does not own Ars, Advance does. Different leadership group.

The terms of the Conde's acquisition state they are not allowed to interfere with the operation of the site.

The depth of articles or the decision to pull in Wired content is strictly an editorial decision made by Ars editorial leadership.

Targeted advertising is not similar to selling internal organs.

Databricks' core value proposition is Apache Spark in the cloud, optimized with their special sauce (eg Proton engine).

Running your own Spark, especially on prem, is a lot of work. Most companies would prefer to just provide their data and let someone else handle the query engine.

The parent is right however that Databricks has a feature store (tokenization) but it's not simple to set up and just getting content in and out of it is a major pain point right now.

I'd encourage everyone to read Emily Shaw's research on this topic: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED563202.pdf

"Validity of the SAT for Predicting First-Year College Grade Point Average"

TL;DR: High School GPA + SAT score produce correlation coefficient values between 0.44 and 0.62, depending on the population. How strong are those values?

A general rule of thumb for interpreting correlation coefficients is offered by Cohen (1988): a small correlation has an absolute value of approximately 0.1; a medium correlation has an absolute value of approximately 0.3; and a large correlation has an absolute value of approximately 0.5 or higher.

From Dr. Shaw's paper on page 7, linked above.

In other words it's very strong, the strongest correlation coefficient that has been found for any signal associated with first year GPA at college.

This has been well understood in the academic community for decades, it's only outside of professional education circles that the validity of the SAT and ACT (when combined with high school GPA) as a predictor of future performance at college is even questioned.

Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

Counter-example: Jenkins. It does what you ask of it, its base install is "naked" and only contains the minimum functionality in the core.

Everything then becomes a plugin. Git. GitHub. Branch for multi-branch pipelines. Credentials management. And on and on and on.

Now you have stay on top of maintaining the plugins in addition to the core. Also, many plugins require other plugins so just to do some basic stuff like set up a multi-branch pipeline from a GitHub repo you're suddenly staring down the barrel of dozens and dozens of bespoke plugins with varying levels of quality and support.

A monolithic application like curl is a dream to me by comparison. Everything is tested in every release. Sub-components are kept up to date by the maintainer. No plugins fighting each other's plugins.

From afar it's easy to see the praise simplicity and modularization but honestly monoliths can be undervalued too.

The good news is we can already test this hypothesis by looking at the countries that already enforce compulsory voting [1]:

  Argentina
  Australia
  Belgium
  Bolivia
  Brazil
  Ecuador
  Liechtenstein
  Luxembourg
  Nauru
  North Korea
  Peru
  Pitcairn Islands
  Samoa
  Singapore
  Swiss canton of Schaffhausen
  Uruguay

Australia is probably the best of the bunch but it's demography and geography are not comparable to the US, a lot of things that work there don't translate here and vice versa.

The author theorizes:

When the only question voters face is whose ideas they prefer, politicians will naturally focus on developing and debating real world ideas rather than fantasies, and democracy can live up to its moral and practical potential.

O RLY? Is that the situation in Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador? TL;DR: No.

This article also presumes the bedrock of democracy is elections, but in fact that's just one dimension and not necessarily the most important one -- rule of law, civil institutions, a functioning state are all equally if not more important than the selection of specific leaders.

Good book on this topic: https://www.amazon.com/Wars-Guns-Votes-Democracy-Dangerous/d...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_voting#:~:text=15)%...

So cynical. I hope you're never in debilitating physical pain, only to have other people dismiss the effect of surgical intervention as a figment of your imagination.

It's not just about the sample size, I could get into the anatomy of my injuries but I don't want to divulge more of my medical privacy than I already have.

Suffice to say that when certain things are torn or detached surgical intervention is often the only way to re-attach or restore function to the affected joints. No mount of wishing it way mentally is going to change that.

Without specifics this article is not helpful.

I've had 5 orthopedic surgeries and they were transformative -- and this article is written by an orthopedist!

There's some data [1] against these operations:

- Arthoscopic knee surgery

- Subacromial shoulder decompression

- Acromioplasty for rotator cuffs

- Vertebroplasty for the spine

That's 4 techniques out of...how many exactly?

It's just an n=1 anecdote but my surgeries absolutely changed my life for the better. I don't want to get into the gory details but I feel incredibly grateful to have had such talented surgeons.

You can argue placebo but my years of ineffective physical therapy suggest otherwise.

Instead of saying "Surgery, the Ultimate Placebo" this article should say "A handful of specific surgeries shown to be no better than a placebo" -- generically describing all surgeries as a placebo is clickbait, in my non-medical-professional opinion.

[1] https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2020/11/07/some_surger...

I couldn't believe my eyes – so many people in NYC (Manhattan specifically, the place I always wanted to live in) live like rats, an order magnitude worse than what you can get in Odessa for $300-400.

Odessa is a city of less than a million people while 8 million are crammed into New York. The more apples-to-apples comparison would be Moscow (12 million).

Plenty of people are willing to trade space for location. They want to be in the center of all the action.

And prices are dropping rapidly as the city empties out because of Covid: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/12/big-drop-in-manhattan-rental...

Silver's 2012 book "The Signal and the Noise" discusses our inability to rationally process probability, pointing out that commercial weather forecasts (e.g. Accuweather) never list a probably of rain under 20-25%. A 5% chance of rain is a mathematical possibility but people "feel" like 5% = "will never happen" and get angry if it rains.

Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman's life's work is about this, what he calls "System 1" and "System 2" of our brain, where System 1 is a fast responder that provides insta-feedback but is largely incapable of processing mathematical inputs. His 2011 book "Thinking Fast and Slow" summarizes his work well.

I'm not sure popular media can be trained to frame statistical probabilities in a way that doesn't provide people with the certainty they crave. But who knows?

But the media is not Nate Silver. He said Trump had about as much chance of winning as the Cubs had that year of wining the World Series, and obviously both happened.

Silver did a nice writeup of the whole experience: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-real-story-of-2016/

Honestly Halo started to go off the rails at Halo 2 and that silly cliffhanger ending. And I'm still not sure I understand the plot of Halo 3.

So I don't know if you can pin the blame for what happened to the Halo franchise on MSFT.

Literally none of those links prove what I ask.

The first is Microsoft opposing an effort by the US government to force it to hand over information stored on servers physically outside the US. Which proves my point.

The second is an FAQ by the EFF about National Security Letters. These are times when the government covertly forces American companies to hand over information. Which is stupid. But it has nothing to do with the fact that US companies control certain parts of IT infrastructure in Europe. You don't think Siemens and DeutcheTelekom turn over information to the German government?

The third one is a totally unrelated story about Edward Snowden's e-mail service. Not sure what that has to do with anything. What company would want to host his email? He's a walking target for state adversaries.

So again, if you have links that prove your point, please post them -- but these do not even come close.

Sure.

Problem is, the US government does not own US companies.

After the Snowden leaks, for example, Google did a lot of hardening to its servers i.e. ensure all of its internal traffic is encrypted.

If you have evidence that Microsoft, Amazon and Google are totally willing to forgo the security and privacy interests of their customers in favor of pleasing the US Government, please, present some evidence for it. I'm eager to read it.

The CIA does a lot of spying on behalf of US corporations to drive US corporate interests.

Luckily Europe doesn't do any spying.

https://thecorrespondent.com/6257/how-european-spy-technolog...

Of the 3 you mention "filtering logging outputs, checking HTTP response codes, throwing errors" only the last one seems universal to me.

Take logging. Super important - I spend a lot of time evangelizing logging to younger devs and how to do it well. But filtering? How? In what way? For what values? I don't have context but the expectation I should be able to filter for specific things you have secret preferences for strikes me as a signal that's not clear or universal.

Checking HTTP codes. In what context? There are plenty of times when it's not helpful -- for example there are many page not founds that DON'T return as 404 (even tho they should). So this a priori belief that all devs should automatically have this built-in preference for checking HTTP codes as some universal signal of quality in programming is, I think, a larger assumption than you might realize.

I don't think there is a perfect way to interview, but I do think if you're going to quiz developers it helps to give them some advance warning of what areas you prefer to focus on so it's not such a random, out-of-left field line of questioning.

You may not consider your questions abnormal -- but that's the problem, neither do the people who ask obscure algorithm questions! It's very hard to validate your assumptions.

Are you telling candidates in advance what type of code to expect or surprising them?

Do you know what I do when I see a problem for the first time that I don't immediately know the answer to? I Google it. Because A) it's faster B) many minds greater than mine might have already come up with an optimal solution that I'm unlikely to self-produce in 2 hours.

What if a developer hasn't been deep in debugging production code for a while? Those edge cases might not be top of mind.

Maybe they're doing documentation or planning or writing Jira tickets and remembering all the ways to nullcheck a JavaScript variable isn't their current life goal. Instead they might try running the code locally or write some tests for it or research to see what others have done in similar patterns.

Dreaming up magical solutions while under the stressful glare of people judging your life's work may sound reasonable to you because presumably it matches up to some internal signals you value in each other, but every workplace is different -- different codebases, different problems, edge cases prevalent in one may not be prevalent in another.

You're better off doing a traditional Q&A about their experience and a take home mini-project (or asking them about theirs). If they don't want to spend time on that, then and only them give them some timed test you feel is applicable.

The Leaf came years after Tesla and was a cautious, follow-the-leader side bet by Nissan.

The Tesla Roadster was a radical re-thinking of the automobile -- an industry that had been stagnating for over 50 years -- and an all-in investment in electric vehicle future by an eccentric billionaire. Nowhere near as bold or life-or-death in either financial outlay or feature design.

Do a side-by-side feature comparison of the original Leaf and Roadster to see just how far apart the two were in thinking, design and ambition.

The Leaf was and is essentially the belief that Tesla's vehicles would be too expensive for the average customer so Nissan could ride Tesla's tailwind to sell a more affordable model. And they have, and that's fine.

But it boggles my mind when people imply that Nissan's efforts in electric vehicles are in any way a reasonable comparison to what Tesla has done.

Not really.

It's an office, not an isolation chamber. You have to work together.

That may be a frustrating concept for some -- from your comment it appears you only care about your work, you don't care if others' work is completed or the larger corporate objectives are met -- but that's why teamwork is so important.

Yes, it would be great if everyone could just singlestream on their own tasks but that's not how companies work. I'm sorry you find helping your coworkers to be such a frustration and distraction from your own personal achievements.

a 30 second conversation might take a 1 minute call now but certainly a 30 minute call sounds absurd.

It is absurd, but people do it. People are always late to meetings. Then 5 minutes of kibbutzing since many have recommended personal chit chat as a way to connect during lockdown. Then there are people who just want to hear themselves talk. It happens.

In a normal office you could streamline some of these but in lockdown you can't.

It's great that you don't have this experience. Consider yourself lucky. But I was responding to the generalization that people who don't have kids "love" WFH. I do not have kids, do not love WFH, and anecdotally from my professional circle my experience is not that uncommon.

I do not have kids and do not love WFH during lockdown.

Simple things that would be a 30-second conversation in the office are now 30-minute Zoom meetings.

Slack noise -- already a distractor to begin with -- has gone up 10x.

If I have X hours at home or in the office I know exactly what limited amount of time I have to accomplish a task and can more easily allocate chunks of that time to specific needs.

In lockdown it's like living/working in a casino with no clocks and no sense of time or progress and it's harder to do time management (IMHO).

If I need something from someone in the office I can walk over and ask, virtually people have the ability to ignore you for days on end without consequence.

I have no doubt that some people's personalities prefer this style of interaction but I hate WFH like this (in lockdown) or this much (months on end vs once a week) despite having no kids.

What I don't understand is why the big browser makers -- Google, Apple, Mozilla and Microsoft -- makers don't just offer this service.

80% of the plumbing is already there, why not just extend the UI? Generate unique, high-entropy passwords and store them in a user account.

Or add this in the OSes themselves -- Apple already does a version of this with keychain. What's preventing them from just copying all the other features of 1Password and LastPass?

Seems like it would do a lot for web security.

Lot of great comments here, just wanted to add one piece of historical context:

This had a really bad outcome the last time the UC system tried to do this 20 years ago: https://www.berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/2001/02/21_sat.html

In response to the UC's criticism the College Board added an essay to the SAT. The thinking was this would expose the softer, more human side that standardized tests missed.

What happened?

It significantly increased the cost of the test (gotta pay someone to grade it) and made it even harder for poor kids to go to rich schools because they couldn't afford the more expensive test.

Not to mention the subjectivity of grading an essay.

Standardized testing is like that Winston Churchill quote on democracy being "the absolute worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" -- what system does the UC have that's more fair?

The NYT piece said they're planning on developing their own test -- so now prospective students have to take two tests if they plan on applying to schools outside the UC system?

The practical effect of this is Asian Americans will have to work 2x as hard as other groups to get into good schools, as was revealed by the Harvard case https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme....

Pretty simple Google search: https://theconversation.com/the-petya-ransomware-attack-show...

Many more examples.

I'm "making up" numbers? What would you call this? https://theconversation.com/the-petya-ransomware-attack-show...

It's a simple example but that's the kind of tradeoffs platforms are trying to make. Small bugs in favor of security and compatibility. It could be a thousand image orientation bugs. Same arguments still apply.

And yes, you can't cordon off security updates from everything else. They accidentally break other things. But this is a general problem of software development.

If you're using a third-party's software, aren't you already consenting to their "control"? How much control do you have over someone else's software?

Unattended upgrades is a great example. You must manually install it, it's difficult to configure (you must edit some complex text file) and even then with it on and set to update all types of packages it often still doesn't. Maybe I'm doing something wrong but in my long experience with Ubuntu I've found unattended-upgrades very unreliable.

I get that some people prefer a less secure ecosystem and never want to update their software. But it seems like the greater community is better served by auto updates.