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Ask HN: What can we do against terrorist attacks, like the one in Paris? | There is very little we can do in the short term. We have to understand the reasons why ISIS are targeting the west. They have a multiple pronged approach:<p>- Provoke the west to further attacks on Muslims. Ideally the
deaths of Muslims in Muslim lands should include innocents.
Drone strikes and bombings are good, because it helps them
turn the local people to their side.<p>- Provoke the west to hatred and bigotry of the greyzone
Muslims (moderates) living in the west. Ideally they feel
further marginalised and excluded. They need to be turned to
fight for the caliphate, or be killed with the rest of the
'kuffār' (western non-believers).<p>- Provide young impressionable marginalised Muslim male youths
with 'heroic' role models. Ghettoes in Paris where the 2005
riots took place are an ideal breeding ground for
marginalization. Most are unemployed, have no education and
no opportunities.<p>- Removal of despotic dictators from Muslim lands. Promoting
instability, unemployment and isolation improves the chances
of additional soldiers to join the fight.<p>I highly recommend an article called "THE EXTINCTION OF THE GRAYZONE" [1]:<p><pre><code> The Muslims in the West will quickly find themselves between
one of two choices, they either apostatize and adopt the
kufrī religion propagated by Bush, Obama, Blair, Cameron,
Sarkozy, and Hollande in the name of Islam so as to live
amongst the kuffār without hardship, or they perform hijrah
to the Islamic State and thereby escape persecution from the
crusader governments and citizens.
</code></pre>
This shows how the aim is two end up with two sides. No greyzone. Finally this highlights what we are up against:<p><pre><code> As the world progresses towards al-Malhamah al-Kubrā, the
option to stand on the sidelines as a mere observer is being
lost. As those with hearts diseased by hypocrisy and bid’ah
are driven towards the camp of kufr, those with a mustard
seed of sincerity and Sunnah are driven towards the camp of
īmān.
Muslims in the crusader countries will find themselves
driven to abandon their homes for a place to live in the
Khilāfah, as the crusaders increase persecution against
Muslims living in Western lands so as to force them into a
tolerable sect of apostasy in the name of “Islam” before
forcing them into blatant Christianity and democracy.
Muslims in the lands ruled by the apostate tawāghīt will
find themselves driven to the wilāyāt of the Islamic State,
as the tawāghīt increase their imprisonment of any Muslim
they think might have a mustard seed of jealousy for his
religion, or lead them to apostatize by working as agents,
soldiers, and puppets serving the banner of the tāghūt.
Mujāhidīn in the lands of jihād will find themselves driven
to join the ranks of the Khilāfah, or forced to wage war
against it on the side of those willing to cooperate with
the munāfiqīn and murtaddīn against the Khilāfah. If they do
not execute these treacherous orders, they will be
considered khawārij by their leaders and face the sword of
“independent” courts infiltrated by the Sufis, the Ikhwān,
and the Salūlī sects.
Eventually, the grayzone will become extinct and there will
be no place for grayish calls and movements. There will only
be the camp of īmān versus the camp of kufr.
</code></pre>
ISIS believe in a prophesy. They are trying to make it come true. If you look at the list of things above, we are falling slowly into their hands, one step at a time.<p>The sad thing is that there is no quick fix. We could leave the middle east and stop interfering. It would be a good first step to defusing tensions based on our presence there, but it would simply open the door to ISIS at the moment, leaving a vacuum for them to fill.<p>If we go full out war, with boots on the ground then we end up joining a fight that we cannot win.<p>I've heard calls to "nuke them back to the stone age". That's great, but many of them are living amongst us. Paris has had several terrorist attacks and the vast majority of the attacks were French born. The same went for the attacks in London.<p>Long term we need to add to the grey zone. In fact we need to westernise and have inclusive policies to make sure the marginalized Muslim youth (in fact all disenfranchised youths) are included in society. They need to see that they have a future.<p>The best thing we can do is to train them and employ them, making them valuable members of society and giving them something to feel proud of.<p>At the moment, poisonous Mullahs are doing that job a hell of a lot better than we are.<p>[1] Source: THE EXTINCTION OF THE GRAYZONE: <a href="https://archive.is/VE0jj#selection-459.1-463.388" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/VE0jj#selection-459.1-463.388</a> |
CVE-2015-8126: Multiple buffer overflows in libpng | Right, so the announcement is kind of vague; let's see what's actually going on. Here are the recent commits to libpng:<p><a href="https://github.com/glennrp/libpng/commits/libpng16" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/glennrp/libpng/commits/libpng16</a><p>The first/latest one ("avoid potential pointer overflow") sounds scary, but I believe it's just about the pathological case where the library is handed (valid) buffers that extend to only a few bytes away from the maximum possible value (i.e. 0xfffff...). If your OS does this, it probably shouldn't.<p>Going down the list, there are three relevant-looking commits. Listed in chronological order:<p>[libpng16] Reject attempt to write over-length PLTE chunk <a href="https://github.com/glennrp/libpng/commit/81f44665cce4cb1373f049a76f3904e981b7a766" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/glennrp/libpng/commit/81f44665cce4cb1373f...</a><p>[libpng16] Prevent reading over-length PLTE chunk (Cosmin Truta). <a href="https://github.com/glennrp/libpng/commit/a901eb3ce6087e0afeef988247f1a1aa208cb54d" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/glennrp/libpng/commit/a901eb3ce6087e0afee...</a><p>[libpng16] Silently truncate over-length PLTE chunk while reading.
<a href="https://github.com/glennrp/libpng/commit/1bef8e97995c33123665582e57d3ed40b57d5978" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/glennrp/libpng/commit/1bef8e97995c3312366...</a><p>- The first one only substantively changes png_write_PLTE, so it could only be an issue for applications that actually write out PNGs. It changes a check on the ‘num_pal’ argument from a hardcoded 256, aka PNG_MAX_PALETTE_LENGTH, to be based on the bit depth. The png_write_PLTE function is internal and called only from png_write_info, which passes it ‘info_ptr->palette’ and ‘info_ptr->num_palette’ as ‘palette’ and ‘num_pal’, respectively.<p>- The second one confusingly changes png_write_PLTE again, but just to rename a variable. The substantive change is a similar check on an argument to png_set_PLTE, which is a <i>public</i> function and, incidentally, the only thing that can set ‘info_ptr->num_palette’, unless the application accesses it directly, which is deprecated. (Thus, outside of the deprecated case, it should ensure that the behavior change in the previous patch never actually gets exercised.)<p>- The third one adds yet another check, to png_handle_PLTE, which is called when reading a PLTE chunk in a PNG file - this time, the variable is called ‘num’. After the check, ‘num’ is used to fill an array of size PNG_MAX_PALETTE_LENGTH - but there was already an earlier check for the length being too much for that, in which case it may longjmp out of the function with png_chunk_error or just return. png_handle_PLTE then calls png_set_PLTE with the same argument, so, in lieu of the added check, the previous commit’s check would still trigger and fail the image load. The new check just changes an error into something the library might be able to recover from.<p>So the second commit is the important one, and the third demonstrates how png_set_PLTE can be called while reading a PNG with a size argument greater than appropriate for the bit depth, but still <= PNG_MAX_PALETTE_LENGTH. What happens then? The oss-security post says:<p>> Some applications might read the bit depth from the IHDR
chunk and allocate memory for a 2^N entry palette, while libpng can return
a palette with up to 256 entries even when the bit depth is less than 8.<p>So are only applications that do something odd affected? The png_get_PLTE function gives the client the actual num_palette value as an out argument, so any client that uses that to size buffers wouldn’t be affected; nor would one that hardcoded 256 or PNG_MAX_PALETTE_LENGTH. For example, Skia does the latter in SkImageDecoder_libpng.cpp.<p>Are there any libpng-internal uses that could be affected? I grepped for ‘->(num_)?palette\b’. TLDR: I don’t think so, but if you want the pointless detail, among other less interesting uses were:<p><pre><code> /* Report invalid palette index; added at libng-1.5.10 */
if (png_ptr->color_type == PNG_COLOR_TYPE_PALETTE &&
png_ptr->num_palette_max > png_ptr->num_palette)
</code></pre>
num_palette being too high could only make this fail, so it doesn’t matter.<p>png_image_read_header uses it to set image->colormap_entries, which has its own long list of uses. I think this is then used (by the application, via PNG_IMAGE_COLORMAP_SIZE) to determine the size of the colormap buffer, but there may be an issue somewhere.<p>png_image_read_colormap uses it to generate actual color map data, but this is not obviously dependent on the bit depth, and checked against image->colormap_entries (…in case it changed from earlier?).<p>png_set_quantize uses a user-specified num_palette value and in any case is not important functionality.<p>Some PNG_COMPOSE code uses num_palette to write to palette; not a problem…<p>png_do_expand_palette just looks up entries in palette (png_ptr->palette) by byte-sized indices without checking anything. The palette buffer must be at least 256 entries long, or else it will read out of bounds, which is presumably why ->palette is only set here:<p><pre><code> /* Changed in libpng-1.2.1 to allocate PNG_MAX_PALETTE_LENGTH instead
* of num_palette entries, in case of an invalid PNG file or incorrect
* call to png_set_PLTE() with too-large sample values.
*/
png_ptr->palette = png_voidcast(png_colorp, png_calloc(png_ptr,
PNG_MAX_PALETTE_LENGTH * (sizeof (png_color))));
</code></pre>
(it’s set differently in the dither case, which I don’t think is relevant?) Anyway, it’s not affected by this.<p>png_handle_tRNS and png_handle_hIST have separate arrays whose count is expected to be <= and ==, respectively, num_palette.<p>- For trans, the ‘trans_alpha’ buffer itself is always PNG_MAX_PALETTE_LENGTH sized, so there can be no overflow there; it also sets info_ptr->num_trans. This can affect the application if it uses png_get_tRNS.<p>- The hist buffer is also always maximum size and doesn’t have a separate length field, so it’s covered by me checking uses of num_palette.<p>png_do_check_palette_indexes checks the bit-depth invariant separately.<p>hIST again in pngwrite.c and pngwutil.c, nothing else interesting in those files.<p>I think num_trans is safe in the same way, but I haven’t looked as closely. |
Made this open-source, ad-free OS X menubar world clock. Feedback appreciated. :) | Sounded nice but doesn't work on El Capitan 10.11.1 when I tried adding 'America/Los_Angeles' as one of the clocks. Hope the bug report helps. Added as <a href="https://github.com/Abhishaker17/Clocker/issues/1" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Abhishaker17/Clocker/issues/1</a><p>console logs show this:<p>```
14/11/2015 20:55:38.088 lsd[255]: LaunchServices: Could not store lsd-identifiers file at /private/var/db/lsd/com.apple.lsdschemes.plist
14/11/2015 20:55:40.034 Clocker[47726]: <i></i>* -[NSCalendar component:fromDate:]: date cannot be nil
14/11/2015 20:55:40.040 Clocker[47726]: (
0 CoreFoundation 0x00007fff987afe32 __exceptionPreprocess + 178
1 libobjc.A.dylib 0x00007fff95c1bdd4 objc_exception_throw + 48
2 CoreFoundation 0x00007fff98786b5c -[NSCalendar component:fromDate:] + 316
3 Clocker 0x00000001062b678e Clocker + 26510
4 Clocker 0x00000001062b6924 Clocker + 26916
5 Clocker 0x00000001062b61e3 Clocker + 25059
6 AppKit 0x00007fff9a76cd54 -[NSTableView(NSTableViewViewBased) makeViewForTableColumn:row:] + 76
7 AppKit 0x00007fff9a76c76d -[NSTableRowData _addViewToRowView:atColumn:row:] + 283
8 AppKit 0x00007fff9a76c4c6 -[NSTableRowData _addViewsToRowView:atRow:] + 184
9 AppKit 0x00007fff9a76acdf -[NSTableRowData _initializeRowView:atRow:] + 390
10 AppKit 0x00007fff9a76943f -[NSTableRowData _addRowViewForVisibleRow:withPriorView:] + 416
11 AppKit 0x00007fff9a7691d3 -[NSTableRowData _addRowViewForVisibleRow:withPriorRowIndex:inDictionary:withRowAnimation:] + 299
12 AppKit 0x00007fff9a767f99 -[NSTableRowData _unsafeUpdateVisibleRowEntries] + 1697
13 AppKit 0x00007fff9a76785a -[NSTableRowData updateVisibleRowViews] + 233
14 AppKit 0x00007fff9a7671d3 -[NSTableView layout] + 178
15 AppKit 0x00007fff9a7060df -[NSView _doLayout] + 53
16 AppKit 0x00007fff9a705d97 -[NSView _layoutSubtreeWithOldSize:] + 324
17 AppKit 0x00007fff9a705ff3 -[NSView _layoutSubtreeWithOldSize:] + 928
18 AppKit 0x00007fff9a67819b -[NSView setFrameSize:] + 1727
19 AppKit 0x00007fff9a69f620 -[NSClipView setFrameSize:] + 390
20 AppKit 0x00007fff9a6905b5 -[NSView setFrame:] + 476
21 AppKit 0x00007fff9a63829b -[NSScrollView _setContentViewFrame:] + 633
22 AppKit 0x00007fff9a635fd3 -[NSScrollView tile] + 2563
23 AppKit 0x00007fff9a635547 -[NSScrollView _tileWithoutRecursing] + 51
24 AppKit 0x00007fff9a6a21fb -[NSScrollView _update] + 27
25 AppKit 0x00007fff9a69ef42 NSViewLevelLayout + 165
26 AppKit 0x00007fff9a69ee87 -[NSView layout] + 14
27 AppKit 0x00007fff9a74a660 -[NSScrollView layout] + 56
28 AppKit 0x00007fff9a7060df -[NSView _doLayout] + 53
29 AppKit 0x00007fff9a705d97 -[NSView _layoutSubtreeWithOldSize:] + 324
30 AppKit 0x00007fff9a67819b -[NSView setFrameSize:] + 1727
31 AppKit 0x00007fff9a71f416 -[NSScrollView setFrameSize:] + 1147
32 AppKit 0x00007fff9a6905b5 -[NSView setFrame:] + 476
33 AppKit 0x00007fff9a69cbd5 -[NSView resizeWithOldSuperviewSize:] + 409
34 AppKit 0x00007fff9a69c569 -[NSView resizeSubviewsWithOldSize:] + 318
35 AppKit 0x00007fff9a69ef42 NSViewLevelLayout + 165
36 AppKit 0x00007fff9a69ee87 -[NSView layout] + 14
37 AppKit 0x00007fff9a7060df -[NSView _doLayout] + 53
38 AppKit 0x00007fff9a705d97 -[NSView _layoutSubtreeWithOldSize:] + 324
39 AppKit 0x00007fff9a67819b -[NSView setFrameSize:] + 1727
40 AppKit 0x00007fff9a6905b5 -[NSView setFrame:] + 476
41 AppKit 0x00007fff9a69cbd5 -[NSView resizeWithOldSuperviewSize:] + 409
42 AppKit 0x00007fff9a69c569 -[NSView resizeSubviewsWithOldSize:] + 318
43 AppKit 0x00007fff9a6781b7 -[NSView setFrameSize:] + 1755
44 AppKit 0x00007fff9a80934b -[NSNextStepFrame setFrameSize:] + 201
45 AppKit 0x00007fff9a6905b5 -[NSView setFrame:] + 476
46 AppKit 0x00007fff9a69cedd -[NSView resizeWithOldSuperviewSize:] + 1185
47 AppKit 0x00007fff9a7052a0 -[NSView layoutSubtreeIfNeeded] + 902
48 AppKit 0x00007fff9a724be5 -[NSWindow(NSConstraintBasedLayout) _layoutViewTree] + 82
49 AppKit 0x00007fff9a70b5e2 -[NSWindow _setFrame:updateBorderViewSize:] + 1059
50 AppKit 0x00007fff9a72403d -[NSWindow _oldPlaceWindow:] + 1075
51 AppKit 0x00007fff9a723426 -[NSWindow _setFrameCommon:display:stashSize:] + 2719
52 AppKit 0x00007fff9a722979 -[NSWindow _setFrame:display:allowImplicitAnimation:stashSize:] + 222
53 AppKit 0x00007fff9a722894 -[NSWindow setFrame:display:] + 67
54 Clocker 0x00000001062b5c1f Clocker + 23583
55 Foundation 0x00007fff8a715835 -[NSObject(NSKeyValueObservingPrivate) _changeValueForKey:key:key:usingBlock:] + 1049
56 Foundation 0x00007fff8a780ef7 _NSSetCharValueAndNotify + 268
57 Clocker 0x00000001062b77df Clocker + 30687
58 libsystem_trace.dylib 0x00007fff8b934082 _os_activity_initiate + 75
59 AppKit 0x00007fff9a8bb811 -[NSApplication sendAction:to:from:] + 460
60 Clocker 0x00000001062b4f95 Clocker + 20373
61 AppKit 0x00007fff9ae1842d -[NSWindow _handleMouseDownEvent:isDelayedEvent:] + 6322
62 AppKit 0x00007fff9ae19411 -[NSWindow _reallySendEvent:isDelayedEvent:] + 212
63 AppKit 0x00007fff9a85eb8d -[NSWindow sendEvent:] + 517
64 AppKit 0x00007fff9ad27155 -[NSStatusBarWindow sendEvent:] + 281
65 AppKit 0x00007fff9a7deb27 -[NSApplication sendEvent:] + 2540
66 AppKit 0x00007fff9a645d9a -[NSApplication run] + 796
67 AppKit 0x00007fff9a60efbe NSApplicationMain + 1176
68 libdyld.dylib 0x00007fff8bd805ad start + 1
)
14/11/2015 20:55:40.059 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (com.abhishek.Clocker.149152[47726]) Service exited due to signal: Illegal instruction: 4
14/11/2015 20:55:40.113 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (com.apple.ReportCrash[47730]) Endpoint has been activated through legacy launch(3) APIs. Please switch to XPC or bootstrap_check_in(): com.apple.ReportCrash
14/11/2015 20:55:40.537 ReportCrash[47730]: Saved crash report for Clocker[47726] version 1.0 (9) to /Users/username/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/Clocker_2015-11-14-205540_UserNames-MacBook-Pro.crash
``` |
Ask HN: How to form deep friendships later in life? | There are ways to make deeper relationships faster. The key is to become an irreplaceable existence in each others' lives. People fall in love and become closer than any childhood friends (in several aspects at least) even if they meet late in life, right? You basically need to create that kind of relationship with whoever you choose to cultivate a deep friendship with.<p>You can certainly overcome the time condition with practice on getting closer faster. I spent 2 years as a nomad traveling through and living in ~8 vastly different cultures where I didn't even speak the language and had no local friends before I got there. Before that, I was born in India, grew up in the Middle East, studied on the East Coast, and worked in California. During all these transitions I went through lots of periods of incredible loneliness and missing out on the long-standing relationships others had, which is I guess how I learned most of this. Some general tips based on that experience.<p>- Cut the chitchat. Skip the "where do you work? where did you grow up? what's your favorite color?" bullshit when you meet someone. It isn't enriching, and it's more often than not forgettable for both people. You will learn these things about each other over time if you become closer, so save it for later. Don't initiate these questions, and find ways to segway out of this into the other stuff (see below) if the other person initiates it.<p>- Forge a mentor/padawan relationship. If you know more about something they're interested in, or vice versa, go for this, and do it in a respectful manner whichever side you're on, but also be willing to treat them as a peer. This instantly makes you irreplaceable as a friend they can and want to learn from (or teach to), when it's something they're embarrassed to do with their other friends.<p>- Be a good conversationalist. Listen to what they're saying, ask interesting questions, always prioritizing making them feel comfortable telling you more stuff and think more, rather than just making smalltalk. Try to relate to what they're saying but with as little talking about yourself. Direct the conversation towards interesting aspects of the topic rather than mundane superficial details. E.g.<p>Them: Ugh rough day at work<p>You: Good challenges or stuff you wish you didn't have to deal with? (rather than "tell me about it")<p>Them: I guess good challenges, but I wouldn't want to face this too often. We were having a crisis deciding which one the core feature of our new product is, and I and the director of product had somewhat conflicting opinions.
(rather than what he would have said "oh, argument with my boss")<p>This provokes thought, and they associate talking to you with having more meaningful conversations, rather than just regurgitating the same words they'd used with their mom or the bartender who said they looked down.<p>- Practice under semi-artificial constraints. As someone else suggested, couchsurfing (or living in dorm-style AirBnBs). You will meet other solo travelers or hosts who would like to get to know you. Practice these with them. The time-limit on when you'll depart will encourage everyone to have more fun with you before you go.<p>- Break down your walls. Be open. Talk about deep topics and expose your flaws and vulnerabilities and things you care about. Talk about things like this, your loneliness and jealousy over other people having deeper friendships. You make yourself vulnerable, but it'll appeal to human empathy, and people will want to help [NOTE: Don't get needy or whiny. Just explore your internal workings together with people]. This draws them in faster and they will want to understand you at a deeper level. They don't see you as that guy who's sitting across the table from them, but as a fellow human being who is in need of their company. People love feeling needed.<p>- Live together, travel together. Don't live alone. When traveling, don't get a hotel room, go dorm-style. When renting, get a house with a shared kitchen and living room. Carpool. Do a sport with your housemates, work on home decor together (furniture shopping, etc). Go hang out in their room.<p>- Play games. Sports are not always easy to coordinate, but football/basketball/tennis with colleagues or other friends is a great way to get closer. If those aren't feasible, play video games together. Have a video game party evening now and then for console people, or just play online while voice chatting in a Hangout/Skype call. Make non-game-related conversation when between games. Or if you want to be away from the computer, play board games. With your housemates, a nearby board game meetup, coworkers, etc. Gaming brings out a lot of personality aspects of people, and they don't waste energy on chitchat.<p>- The above can be summarized as don't just talk to people, but have <i>experiences</i> together. Suffer something together (sport/school/gym), build something together (work/cooking/housekeeping), enjoy something together (concert/games).<p>The part I didn't talk about much is how to meet people. I'll leave that to you. I hope this gives you an idea on what aspects of your human interaction to improve upon so that you can make the most of the pool of people you <i>do</i> get to meet, and get deeper and closer friendships overcoming the aspect of duration. |
Ask HN: How did you get to your current job/startup? | My current status: About to drop a very well paying job to move countries (back to Australia) to become a consultant specializing in training, onboarding and POCs in Search Engine industry (primarily Solr and Elasticsearch). I am at the age of being "The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything" (so, it is a good year to try to fulfill that destiny....)<p>Longer story:<p>- School in Soviet Union. Good student. Got some exposure to computers (Yamaha TRS!!!) and learned Basic, Assembler, game decompiling/modification, and bunch of other self-driven IT interests.<p>- Moved countries (to Australia), Computer Science degree in a new language in a new country. Did ok, helped that I was a full-geek back in Soviet Union already.<p>- Have been playing with Solr for many years on and off. Have recently found random unfinished projects going back to Solr 1.4<p>- Worked in a bunch of IT companies, mostly doing backend stuff with focus on Java <a href="https://twitter.com/arafalov/status/664874979775922176" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/arafalov/status/664874979775922176</a><p>- When the bubble burst, nearly accidentally, got hired to be a 3-rd tier technical support for BEA products (Weblogic, etc). Supported huge customers with multiple versions of multiple multi-million line Java products. Lost a lot of my hair, but gained troubleshooting skills normal developers do not have (e.g. Our bank is experiencing double transactions. Please solve in 3 minutes without seeing the live system. Ping me for the answer.....). Also learned to actually understand and guide semi-technical people in asking complicated technical questions. Learned to answer those questions. Learned to emphasize with their problems and translate them into possible technical solution. Turns out this was the BEST ever job for my career, even taking into account lost hair and probably a couple of years of my life expectancy. Presented at JavaONE twice based on the experience to an extremely interested audiences (400-600 people with 4+ overall reviews). Also, published in a couple of magazines (for free). Also, blogged, anonymously, then under my own name. Still do. <a href="http://blog.outerthoughts.com/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.outerthoughts.com/</a><p>- Went off to do something completely different for a well-paid but highly-bureaucratic company (this is my views, not representing my company, etc). Moved countries a couple more times. Used my troubleshooting skills to build small projects for real non-IT audiences (e.g. translators). Discovered that outside of IT-heavy fields, a little bit of IT skills can go a very LONG way and makes people really happy. But it does require the full-stack skills of hearing the customer needs, converting them into IT issues, building the solution, and training the users in understanding them.<p>- At some point, got a project at work with Solr 3.x, started doing that and asking (and answering) questions on the Solr Users mailing list. Must have been pretty visible as I got contacted by Packt and asked to write an introductory book on Solr. Loved the idea (had a similar one myself) and jumped into it with two feet. Produced something nobody else in the market did (actually had to fight with Packt to let me), which proved very successful. The book still sells some copies despite being for Solr 3.x and quite out of date (don't buy it!).<p>- Writing the book and getting ever deeper into Solr community, realized that helping newbies in any systematic way (beyond mailing list) is a niche that is not served well. More than that, it was something I was enjoying doing as it allowed me to build various (open source) projects but around the same core technology/focus area. Created a resources site for Solr (<a href="http://www.solr-start.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.solr-start.com/</a>) which - behind the scenes - uses quite a large number of different projects and technologies, satisfying my itches and still with each project being useful immediately. The site is quite popular as it is the only place that lists and cross-references all available components of several types. Also, started a mailing list to track new Solr projects/articles/etc, my own and from others.<p>- Realized - by constantly thinking about Solr (and by then Elasticsearch) - that there is at least 20 times more absolutely exciting things I could be doing around the search engines and helping real people. And that I would never be able to achieve that in evenings and weekends. And that I could be doing most of that kind of work from anywhere in the world. And that there is demand for this kind of popularization/education/info-product material. Proven by two already ongoing projects for a large publisher, which we are both extremely excited about. And by presenting to Lucene/Solr Revolution twice to full rooms (slides/videos are online: <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/arafalov" rel="nofollow">http://www.slideshare.net/arafalov</a>, one with 30K views )<p>- Decided to return back to Australia (where parents are) and see if I can help people to integrate search into their stacks from there. Early discussions with potential partners, customers and users proved very positive. The biggest challenge is figuring out what will be the best win/win/win combination (users' benefits/my income/cool projects). Looking forward to discovering the answer to that.<p>Oh, and if your team needs Solr training in Q1/Q2 of 2016, I still offer <i>first customer</i> rates and (business-) lifetime benefits. |
The reverse job applicant (2010) | Man, this hurt like a liver punch. I graduated about a year and a half ago.<p>Two years before graduation, I interned at a really big oilfield services company and they, engineers and managers, liked me despite a Van Wilder academic track (I spent 9 years in college for a 5 year degree. I failed to adapt to academia. I was just someone on which it is easy to apply those rules rarely applied on anyone).<p>I was to be hired if I applied after graduation. Right before I graduated, there was a law that was passed preventing people not from the cities where the oilfields are situated to be hired to work there. The local population (mostly without degrees) was protesting about why all the good jobs went to people from North of the country while they, in the South (where oilfields were), didn't have that chance.<p>There were also protests from people without degrees about why it takes a degree in the first place, or the ability to speak English, to be hired by those companies. Uhm, because NMR and Gamma rays are neat things?<p>This created tension at a critical time, and the Government pushed for a law requiring any new hire by the oil companies to be someone from the area (without consideration to qualifications). That's the Government standard operating procedure.<p>So I was jobless because the company who wanted to hire me couldn't hire me because I was born in the wrong area according to a law that was passed to reduce unemployment. I didn't fail to be amused by the irony of joblessness due to joblessness reducing measures.<p>Now, I reached out to some people to circumvent that. I needed a card to be able to work there. They set out to procure me that card. I waited, a lot, mainly because, to worsen the situation, the instance delivering the cards was investigated for "selling" 3,000 jobs.<p>You see, some people complained about not finding work or a lot of companies "giving" jobs for people they know.. So there was this idea to create a Government instance that would do arbitrage: Companies would send them job offers. People looking for work would register with the organization. Then the organization would play match-maker and send the companies applicants who correspond to their profile. This is how it was supposed to work to prevent HR people in those companies to sink in nepotism.<p>How it worked in real life though was that the organization hid the offers and sold them to job applicants willing to pay. Beautiful.<p>Again, my problem was that the company wanted to hire me, but I needed the card from the government organization of <i>that</i> specific place, which was investigated for selling jobs to people instead of simply connecting them.<p>I didn't fail to be amused by the irony of this, too. Jobless because the instance that should connect the unemployed to the employers is under investigation for trying to squeeze a profit from it.<p>And then, to make things worse, again, a law was passed to prevent people from being hired if they're not squared away as to their Military Service. We have compulsory conscription here. I tried to avoid it because I thought that the company I was going to work with had an age limit for the position (28 years old) and I was 27 years old. I thought that going to the Military for one year (it used to be 2.5 years) would make me too old, so I decided to apply for the job first. If you fail to show up after three letters, the Military can snatch you as you are (so if you went to buy stuff and, at a check-point, someone stops you and finds out you failed to show up, you are taken on the spot, in the clothes you have with you, to a Military base). I'm not really dodging the Military Service: if my country was at risk and they really needed more people to bear arms and actually kill terrorists, I would do it without question. But most people spend a year there doing nothing and sometimes are sent back for different reasons.<p>As I waited, I decided to work on a project to enable mobile subscribers to send airtime to other subscribers who are on a different network (say from Verizon to AT&T). I started the project to learn Python (github.com/jhadjar/uniflex). I abandoned it because there are limitations only carriers can lift and they lack the incentive to do so (that's why I didn't go the route of USSD commands or added value provider, because I'd eventually need their consent to enable the transfer). I put the code up as it was (it sucks because it was still a rough draft and that was the first thing (useful, real) I write).<p>Now, I'm still looking for work. The only companies worth working with, here, are in the oil business since the salaries other companies offer are petty (I made more in a part-time job with my buddy as a student). And these companies like to hire Engineers fresh out of college, provide expensive training, and then make a return on investment. The ROE is rapidly made since quotes are high and the Engineer's training is paid for rather quickly.<p>Other companies, though, tend to prefer people with experience. Or post ridiculous job offers for people without experience that only require a `mastery` of C, C++, Java, and a bunch of other things, even for a web design position.<p>Reading those offers, I get the impression that people actually do tech in my country. I lived here long enough to know better. It only means those who write those job offers are clueless as to what is required for a specific job, and clueless enough to accept someone fresh out of college saying he has `mastery` of C/C++ (most think it's the same for they only have C classes here) because he wrote a couple of programs in college. We went to the same classes and the people who put `mastery` are the same who capitalize `INCLUDE`.<p>It's also sad that I worked at a school that didn't require I provide a degree, teaching something I don't have a degree for, for a salary that was like 4 times what most those lame companies offer.<p>I'm also working on a project (in Python) that would appeal to companies who do a lot of banking operations (but again, since not all banks offer electronic forms, I need to make them change their forms and there need to be strong incentives so I started with those who already have electronic forms (XLSX)).<p>When I read job offers for Engineering on here or elsewhere, they feel like a dagger in the heart because I don't know anything deep enough. I started programming at 9 and for Electronics in college, but one here ends up worrying more about if his exam sheet is going to be graded by te teacher who doesn't like him, than technical proficiency (just an example: A teacher of mine gave me a failing grade because I didn't write in x86 assembly language "the way she does". We used the A86 compiler for a class, I read the whole doc. She used MASM's style and directives to write stuff for A86. In the exam, I wrote correct code, with comments explaining why I wrote what I wrote the way I wrote it, even citing page numbers of the doc). She gave me 5/20). The system is also rigged: for example, they don't display grades until the period for any possible plea to regrade your paper is expired. Many don't even bother to grade papers and give you an estimation of what they think you could get (many get the same grade they did the semester before, if one gets a high grade when he had a low grade in first semester, it's considered cheating). Of course, you can't complain to anyone since these teachers have been there for 30 years, are buddy of the dean or the Minister (they're not going to jeopardize their relationship for a student who won't be there in a few years), and you're the kind of students who's frequently absent (6 hours daily in transportation to get to and come back from college where most teachers suck and density of information/unit time is tiny is no fun). Just a few examples as to the ways you can waste time dealing with issues instead of focusing.<p>Sometimes I wonder why I haven't studied abroad where you only have to worry about things like exams and papers, you know, normal stuff.<p>Then again, it could be worse and I'm not dead yet. Sorry for the rant but I needed to laugh a little bit. Writing this helped. |
How ARM got so successful without the public really noticing | As with most things I think the success of ARM has less to do with its chips or architecture and more to do with its business model and the competition.<p>For decades the combined power of Intel's volume and Window's ubiquity kept a huge amount of resources dedicated to that platform. SPARC, M68K, NS32, VAX, PA-RISC, even Itanium were crushed under the unrelenting focus by third parties on building tools, software, and systems around x86 and later AMD64 architecture chips.<p>What is fascinating is that Intel got into that position by being open, there were no fewer than 12 licensees for its 8086 design, and people had supplanted "expensive, proprietary lock-in" type architectures with more open and cheaper chips. It was the emergence of the PC market, and the great Chip Recession of 1984, where Intel decided if it was going to stay a chip maker, it had to be the <i>best</i> source of its dominant computer chips. I was at Intel at the time and it shifted from partnering, to competing, with the same people who had licensed its chips, with the intent of "reclaiming" the market for CPU chips for itself.<p>You have to realize that at the time the bottom had fallen out of the market, and things like EPROMs and DRAM (both of which Intel made) were being sold on the grey market at below market costs as stocks from bankrupt computer companies made it into the wild. Further competitors like Ok Semiconductor were making better versions of the same chips (lower power, faster clock rates). Intel still had a manufacturing advantage but it could not survive if it couldn't make the margins on its chips hold. It dumped all of its unproductive lines, wrapped patents and licenses around all of its core chips, and then embarked on a long term strategy to kill anyone who wouldn't buy their chips from Intel at the prices that Intel demanded.<p>We can see they were remarkably successful at that, and a series of CEOs have presided over a manufacturing powerhouse that was funded by an unassailable capture of not only software developers but system OEMs as well. They fended off a number of anti-trust lawsuits, and delicately wove their way between former partners like Compaq who were now laying on the ground, mortally wounded.<p>ARM was playing in the embedded space, dominated by the 8051 (an Intel chip) where Intel played the licensing card (just like ARM) licensing its architecture to others who would make their own versions of the chips. As a licensing play they insured their partners would never move "up market" into the desktop space and threaten the cash cow that was x86.<p>The relentless pace of putting more transistors into less space drove an interesting problem for ARM. When you get a process shrink you can do one of two things, you can cut your costs (more die per wafer), or you can keep your costs about the same and increase features (more transistors per die). And the truth is you always did a bit of both. But the challenge with chips is their macro scale parts (the pin pads for example) really couldn't shrink. So you became "pad limited". The ratio of the area dedicated to the pads (which you connected external wires too) and the transistors could not drop below the point where most of your wafer was "pad". If it did so then you're costs flipped and your expensive manufacturing process was producing wafers of mostly pads so not utilizing its capabilities. At the Microprocessor Forum in 2001 the keynote suggested that spending anything more than 10% of your silicon budget on pads was too much. 90+% of your die had to be functional logic or the shrink just didn't make sense.<p>The effect of that was that chips ARM designed really had to do more stuff or they were not going to be cost effective on any silicon process with small feature sizes. And the simplest choice is to add more "big processor" features or additional peripherals.<p>So we had an explosion of "system on chip" products with all sorts of peripherals that continues to this day. And the process feature size keeps getting smaller, and the stuff added keeps growing. The ARM core was so small it could accommodate more peripherals on the same die, that made it cost effective and that made it a good choice for phones which needed long battery life but low cost. The age of phones put everything except the radios on chips (radios being like modems, different for every country, were not cost effective to add to the chip until software defined radio (SDR) became a thing. And the success as a phone platform pushed the need for tools, and the need for tools got more of the computer ecosystem focussed on building things for the ARM instruction set.<p>At that point step two became inevitable. Phones got better and better and more computer like, they need more and more of the things that "desktop" type computers need. You have a supplier (ARM) which is not trying to protect an entrenched business basically doing all it can to widen its markets. And a company like Apple, who wasn't trying to protect its desktop/laptop market share pushing the architecture as far as it can. More tools, more focus, more investment from others to support it, and like a fire that starts as a glowing ember near a convenient source of tinder, the blaze grows until the effects of the fire are creating its own wind and allowing it to grow bigger and stronger. Even after Intel woke up to the fact that the forest around their x86 architecture was on fire, I don't think they had enough time to put it out.<p>So here we are with ARM chips which are comparable in software support and feature set of Intel's low end desktop CPUs. But without the Intel "tax" which is the extra margin Intel could demand being the only player, and immune to Intel's ability to attack by patents or license shenanigans. Intel is in full on defense, paying tablet vendors like Lenovo to use their chips in ARM tablets, supporting the cost of building out their own IoT infrastructure with Galileo, and doing all they can to keep ARM out of their castle, the data center. Like DEC and its VAX line, or Sun and its SPARC line, they are doomed.<p>Looking at the performance of the iPad pro it is pretty clear you can build a chromebook or a laptop that would meet the needs of the mass market with an ARM architecture machine. And because ARM licensees can add features <i>anywhere</i> in the architecture including places like the frontside bus[1] which is tightly controlled space in x86 land, you will be able to provide features faster than x86 OEMs can convince Intel they need them. And that will change things in a pretty profound (and I think positive) way. Not the least of which might be having the opportunity to buy a lap top that isn't pre-backdoored by the chip manufacturer with its SMM.<p>[1] Literally if you buy a bus analyzer (a sophisticated logic analyzer) from Agilent or Tektronix and hook it to the Intel frontside bus, it won't display the signals until you enter the NDA # you got from Intel! That is pretty tightly controlled. |
Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule (2009) | As a maker-turn-manager I've become skeptical of this perspective. I think it's indulgent and misdirected. Yes, if <i>I</i> as a manager schedule <i>your</i> time, I'm probably not going to schedule it for your best performance. But I don't think the problem that as a manager I don't leave you giant blocks of uninterrupted time. It's that as a manager I tend to interrupt your time with meetings that serve <i>my</i> role, and a manager's role tends to be focused on prediction, expectations, upward-directed planning, balancing work, status, risk... all things that aren't even intended to improve actual execution. In theory of course a manager is supposed to be focused on team performance and execution, but the heaviest pressure on a manager is about how the team fits into the larger organization, not how the team works.<p>If a maker's days are interrupted by meetings that are genuinely structured to improve their execution, I don't think the interruption is very concerning, and may be beneficial. This theory about a Maker's Schedule, and these theories around attention, make these positive interruptions less likely to happen – the maker's become skittish about all meetings, become reclusive, sometimes causing a downward spiral because the maker <i>actually needs</i> those meetings and becomes more reclusive out of shame because the maker is confused and performing poorly. Defensively the maker reacts against the structure that remains – the structure of meetings created by the manager, meetings which aren't supportive, where the maker is not sufficiently engaged to feel confident in repurposing the meeting... but the dysfunction is that in the face of these meetings a better response would be more meetings, better meetings, meetings where the makers leave the meeting ahead of where they started instead of behind. But don't expect the managers to call those meetings – frankly as a manager I often can't make those meetings happen even when I want to.<p>I'll also copy a post I wrote on the topic (<a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/+IanBicking/posts/jgJCdMkzyBE" rel="nofollow">https://plus.google.com/u/0/+IanBicking/posts/jgJCdMkzyBE</a>):<p>I'm somewhat pro-meeting, which maybe puts me at odds with the cultural norms of developers.<p>I think I realize some of the problem. Meetings tend to be called by managers. Managers have management goals. Process, deadlines, coordination, etc. The developer sits around in case they provide some important input on one of those topics, or to give status, or to commit to a deadline. Nothing in that kind of meeting helps the developer's work. And the developer tries their best to withhold, to protect their own work, but also to protect the project which actually needs that output.<p>In a developer-oriented meeting the topics would be decisions to make, architectural choices to consider, noting places of tension where a creative solution could be helpful. In a developer meeting it is reasonable to take some time to look at code. To do a bit of research – right in the meeting – to answer a question. To brainstorm ideas. If a problem is hard, it is reasonable that everyone go silent for a minute and ponder the problem.<p>In The New Science of Building Great Teams (<a href="https://hbr.org/2012/04/the-new-science-of-building-great-teams" rel="nofollow">https://hbr.org/2012/04/the-new-science-of-building-great-te...</a>) they discuss some evidence-based observations about communication patterns. In it they suggest that high levels of communication lead to more productivity. By developer sensibilities, <i>very</i> high levels. But mostly peer interactions – developers interacting with developers.<p>I'd really extend this to all the people engaged in making the product, design, user experience, user research, development, probably support and other roles. In an ideal model there would be dozens of meetings, as different sets of these people came together to talk about what is relevant to those groups of people. These meetings would not have clear and firm agendas, the product is the agenda, finding the agenda is some of the work of the meeting.<p>It's easy to blame management for the unproductive meetings. We're calling these snooze-fest status meetings. But I'd turn it around: professionals shouldn't depend on management to initiate meetings. Sure management can try; I try to setup meetings I think will be productive for other people. The Standup is the quintessential example. But we know where those so often end up: as yet another management-led status meeting. And it's a form without a clear purpose. Who should be in the standup? What should we talk about? When those things are defined by management we get management-style answers. Even better than trying to fix the standup, keep it from being necessary: make the meetings that help everyone do their work, where the topic is always execution and not prediction or planning or status.<p>With Project Managers and other professions focused on planning there is a danger that we defer to the specialists. But everything needs to be planned. The next line of code I write has to be planned. Developers have to be planners, every one of them. |
A letter to our daughter | It is a lot of promises that are hard to keep.<p>They think they can just throw money at a problem and it will eventually go away given enough time.<p>They think people in communities will give up their bigotry against certain groups without a fight. They think everyone in the future will adopt the same worldview that they have. They think that they can solve poverty by giving everyone an Internet connection on the planet and most people who are poor are illiterate and can't read and write.<p>Like I said a lot of promises.<p>Some problems can't be solved with money, it takes innovation, it takes a new way of thinking, it takes doing things in a way nobody thought of yet.<p>Students who are poor and have family problems have emotional and psychological problems that hinder their learning. No matter how much money you spend on their school, as Gates has learned, their test scores don't go up. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/06/09/how-much-bill-gatess-disappointing-small-schools-effort-really-cost/" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/06/...</a><p>This effort by the Gates Foundation proves that building better schools does not give the students a better education.<p>You see they made the mistake of throwing money at a problem in order to solve it. Five years later and a disappointment in what they had created.<p>Parents of the students get by with low paying jobs, because there is a wealth inequality in our nation. It leads to poverty, family issues, emotional and psychological problems none of which building new schools could address. All of which factor into having a hard time learning and getting better test scores.<p>Why is there a wealth inequality and people have to settle for low paying jobs?<p>Technology has automated most of the good paying jobs so they can be done with computers for free. Microsoft and Facebook for example earn money from technology that does work for others for free and earns money. Websites can operate 24/7 and replace people who take phone calls or work at a desk to fill out forms.<p>Also we used to have factory jobs until we shipped those jobs to China because the labor cost less over there.<p>Getting a good education is only possible if you have a good enough credit rating to get a student loan, if your family is poor and struggles and misses paying bills, you will have a bad credit rating and not be able to get a student loan for college. Not getting good enough grades will lead to a lack of scholarships and other things.<p>People who can't get a college education face a life of hardship working low paying jobs just to get by. Not everyone can become a computer programmer after being a dropout, and then join a startup. Some have to work retail jobs in the service industry and 2 or 3 of those jobs. Not having time to raise their children properly. Not able to help with homework because they work overtime to get enough money to pay the bills.<p>These factors have not been addressed in the future plans for fixing our education system.<p>Sure you can learn a lot on the Internet and even use it to earn money, but most people just use it for entertainment value and communication. So there are distractions to learning on the Internet. But what happens when the freelance market suddenly gets 3 billion more lower wage contractors in it all competing for the limited amount of contracts?<p>I wish I knew how to solve these problems, but I learned from experience that you can't just throw money at them and solve them.<p>You need the government to help out with some sort of basic income program to lift people out of poverty as good paying jobs are scarce because of automation or AI advances. I expect that to get worse in the future.<p>You need better mental health clinics to address the emotional and psychological problems associated with poverty for the students to be able to learn better. You need to find money for tutors to help them with homework when their parents cannot. You need to teach poor students stress management and test anxiety management so that they can o better in tests and learn better study habits and score higher.<p>I've found at least with my son, that the Internet is a distraction for him. Time he could have spent studying for tests, he instead watches Youtube videos and plays video games. I've tried to help him as best as I can, but now he is failing chemistry as a junior in high school but passing his other classes because they are not as hard.<p>We are one of those poor families because I ended up on disability in 2003 and don't earn as much as I used to as a programmer. There is only so much I can help my son, he makes decisions for himself, but I cannot force him to study more or do better on his tests. I feel as if I didn't go on disability we'd be better off and I'd be able to hire a chemistry tutor for him to get his grades up. I forgot as I took chemistry in 1985, and it was so long ago. It is harder to raise a child than you think, esp if you are on a limited income. The school he goes to is a good one with good teachers and modern equipment and they use iPads for ebooks and learning, but it is not enough and still students struggle with their classes.<p>No matter what you do there will still be problems as no system is perfect, and students will still get low mtest grades no matter how good a personalized system you develop. The Dewey System was developed for personalized learning and it failed. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey</a><p>Most of what they are trying to do has already been tried and failed. It is like trying to go against human nature and change the way human beings behave so they can learn better. But human beings cannot be reprogrammed like robots, and almost all of these theories go with the case that human beings can be reprogrammed like robots to create a better community for better learning.<p>It is like trying to solve a social problem using technology thinking, you need to think in terms of society and the way people work, which is not the same way technology works. You need to lead social reforms in communities in a way that makes sense to everybody and not just people on a certain political spectrum that leaves out all others. You will face a resistance to change, as many won't want to change. People will come up with conspiracy theories over the changes, etc.<p>It is a good start to build a different system of education and try to make new communities for education for everyone, but money alone won't solve it, you need the cooperation of everyone in the community to change the way their human nature works and give up on the old ways of doing things. Some won't want to give up on the old ways. |
Should kids learn to code? | Should kids learn to code?<p>That's a great question. I also wonder if adults should learn to code, or my peers who would be young adults.<p>I'm 24. I started programming when I was 10 years old by reading a 'For Dummies' book teaching Basic. I hardly read the book because it came with a CD with the language and the language's help system had tutorials which I jumped into right away.<p>I spent the next four years developing video games in Basic. I learned C and continued to make games and also started working on other types of simulation. I've picked up web programming incidentally, taken courses in high school, worked as a programmer, researcher, and software engineer, majored in computer science in college, and have a steady job as a software engineer.<p>Earning my degree has been amazing for me because it's introduced me to highly technical aspects of the field that would otherwise be inaccessible to me or present large barriers to entry.<p>An interesting trend is for school systems to embrace computer programming / computer science as a skill and teach it as a class or to introduce it into the curriculum in general -<p><pre><code> > Britain became the first ... to introduce compulsory computer science on
the school curriculum for all children aged five to 16.
</code></pre>
Equally, though, this could be off-putting for many kids. Depending on how it is introduced, it might scare away those who would otherwise be interested in programming or less so another design field in computer science. Oddly enough:<p><pre><code> > “One 13-year-old told me she would rather be in garbage disposal than work
in technology,”
</code></pre>
It's really surprising that this sentiment isn't more widely felt. Maybe it is the sort of tech-bubble, get-rich-quick, new technology enthusiasm and excitement that gets people to push through the initial, `this is boring, difficult, and unfulfilling' feeling that I would really anticipate from anyone making a cold dive into code.<p>In fact, I've had the opportunity to mentor some kids around the ages of 10-12 and that's exactly the response I've seen to the programming or code side of development, where they will be increasingly excited to design applications in a much, much higher level way. But directing software design should really be considered a lower field than implementing it, in my very humble opinion.<p>And this point, about some being disaffected by being compelled to learn something, underscores another unfortunate fact - and that is no matter how someone is introduced to computer science or computer programming - something will be outside of their control.<p>Some start by programming in Python or JavaScript, some start with C (many engineers) or Java, others have began with Fortran or Basic or Visual Basic, and others begin to learn computer science with Scheme. There are so many vastly different programming languages and platforms that exist, and even different <i>programming paradigms</i>, and each is easier to use or understand to different minds.<p>But it would take an expert oracle to know what the best introduction is for every individual to give them the best chance of success in computer science. Some scientists can't even agree on what text editor to use.<p><pre><code> > Puzzlingly, though, IT had the highest unemployment rate of any subject
analysed by the Higher Education Statistics Agency.
</code></pre>
Here is another annoying fact. In the midst of a rise of bootcamps, there are still those who can't find jobs. And the fact that so many people can jump into monthly groups to learn to "program" doesn't mean that there is a stable, sustainable system for them to work in.<p>If it is what I believe it is essentially web design or scripting education that's going around, there's really only a few months of work for any group of graduates, and the opportunity to float along the top at any organization that takes them on.<p>To imply that a bootcamper will become a major technical lead in any kind of reasonable time or with anywhere near the same level of effort as a regular graduate seems extremely disingenuous, and the fact that six figure salaries are being touted as results from these camps seems to show a real economic failure.<p><pre><code> > The coding bootcamps springing up in London and Edinburgh are essentially
a pop-up solution.
</code></pre>
That would be an accurate description, although I might be cynical.<p><pre><code> > ... Scratch, a computer language developed specifically for young
children.
</code></pre>
I've seen Scratch and I think it's fantastic. Along with Logo and other platforms for introducing logic and computation, I think it's perfect for children and new-comers. Compare for example the sort of weights and blocks that some children are introduced to when learning algebra initially.<p><pre><code> > Perhaps that is the single most honest argument for teaching
everyone to code: to give everyone an equal shot
</code></pre>
That's definitely a fair point, but there's never going to be a way for this to be true universally and that is just a fact. The ecosystem for programming and development is varied and depending on what you want to do, it's going to require vastly different skill sets.<p>Another reality is that there are so many people doing so many different things and technology is such a competitive field that there is almost a guarantee that someone, somewhere is attempting to achieve the same thing in a complete different approach. Who has the fair advantage?<p>Then it's explained that having experience or skills with computer programming, 'knowing how to code,' or being introduced to the field results in `Aha!' moments like ...<p><pre><code> > "‘It would be so cool if this existed,’ and then implementing it the same
day – it’s like a superpower,"
</code></pre>
In reality, if you have a complicated idea for something that you want to see created.. it's going to take work. If you have a simple idea, then yes, it may be simple to create! And it is empowering to have the skills to create or begin to create something, or to know where to find those resources and how to begin.<p>Then this article ends on this point:<p><pre><code> > "How many young people ... have what it takes to be great developers? ...
"But they won’t be, unless we give them the chance.
</code></pre>
This is probably the core idea to education, school, training, and jobs. In order to find opportunities... they must exist, and in order to achieve skills they must be attainable or at least known to someone.<p>But in the same vein, how many people would make excellent astronauts if there were a much broader space program? It's something where there's always a trade-off in time and skill between anything a person might become employed doing.<p>Shameless plug, part of why I developed the Duck programming language was to make a very accessible programming environment, and I still intend to expand it as best I can to allow easy programming! I'm also working on a new language that is lower-level and it intends to facilitate clean, efficient and safe programming while encouraging higher-level paradigms like functional programming. There aren't a lot of functional, imperative languages out there that still avoid automatic memory management, and I think that's a loss. |
Science-fictional shibboleths | I love this stuff. I'll quibble with a few things.<p>(1) Conspiracies<p>I totally disagree. I find long-lived conspiracies quite believable, but with the caveat that they must be socially realistic and have plausible operating principles.<p>First of all, a long-lived complex conspiracy cannot remain <i>totally</i> secret. That's not plausible. Something's going to leak. But it can act and/or distract (disinformation, etc.) so as to limit the damage and exposure brought about by these leaks. Keep in mind that in today's information overload world the information might be out there but if it's not clamoring for attention it will be ignored. When was the last time you Googled the secret initiatory practices of the Order of the Blahblahblah?<p>But more importantly: people do not engage in long term coordinated complex action without motive, and just "eeeevil!!" or even just profit or power are not sufficient motives to keep people in a coherent "always-cooperate" game theoretic mode with one another for that long. If power and profit are the motive then the group will dissolve through internal strife. Other motives are needed.<p>A long-lived complex conspiracy therefore rapidly converges with religion or cult. It must have a Doctrine(tm), an initiation process, some form of eschatology either real or metaphysical, etc. If it's a really nasty cult-driven-conspiracy it might employ cult mind control techniques. These as we know from the real world can be devastatingly effective. Whole massive groups of people have been convinced to commit suicide (Jonestown), so why couldn't they be convinced to perpetuate a lasting criminal or "parapolitical" conspiracy even at risk to themselves and their own personal fortune or power?<p>A plausible Big Bad X-Files Conspiracy therefore must be a cult and is going to look and operate like a cult. It's going to have internal cult jargon and crazy doctrines that will sound shockingly batshit to outsiders but that internally actually serve as belief-and-language-based social signaling. (Galactic emperor Xenu, etc.) If it's a conspiracy that lasts longer than a life span then it must have a doctrine that transcends the personality of its leadership and some mechanism for transfer of kingship. It's going to have totally brainwashed True Believers following manipulative and obsessed upper management for whom the cult is a proxy for their personal ego. It's going to have some process for both initiating new members and purging itself of dissent. The later is going to look like the shame-driven practices you see in manipulative cults in which the dissenter is first shamed and vilified before being banished or killed.<p>Profit or power are not sufficient motives, but a "carrot and stick" can be a part of cult mind control. Membership may have its benefits if the cult is powerful, rich, or well-connected, and once one has accepted these favors they are a "made man" indebted to the cult. Blackmail can also play a role. Many gangs and mafia groups require members to commit a crime or misdeed in order to join, and revelation of that crime or misdeed can later be dangled as punishment.<p>Fundamentally a long-lived conspiracy with coherent goals is going to be a cult that operates a lot like the mafia. In fact it's not uncommon for mafia like criminal conspiracies to have racial identity doctrines, honor codes, a romantic image of themselves, and other mythologies that serve at the very least as social glue. Many began with political goals -- the true Mafia were if my memory serves me originally a political resistance. Combine that with some crazy-ass religion or political eschatology and you've got your cigarette smoking man and his compatriots nailed.<p>I actually take an opposite tack on conspiracies: while I think the woo-woo variety of conspiracy theory is woo, I also think there's a kind of faux-rationalistic over-reaction in skeptic circles that amounts to "coherent group motive denialism." Conspire just means "to act together," and secrecy through flat silence or through distraction is definitely possible within certain realistic bounds. Hell, if nobody wanted to ever be secret we never would have invented encryption!<p>Finally though -- it is true that nothing remains the same forever. At some point one of two things is going to happen: the conspiracy/cult is going to act in a big way and in so doing both reveal itself and immanentize its eschaton, or it's going to fade away and dissolve into socioeconomic background radiation. If the group is strongly motivated the former is more likely, <i>especially</i> if it feels "the time is nigh" (it has enough power) or conversely if it feels itself losing power and feels forced to act. Sometimes the latter is driven by the leadership's need to maintain internal credibility. If people start doubting then they must escalate. (Some propose that ISIS is now launching international terror for exactly this reason, though they are far from secret. But the same principle applies.)<p>... and remember that end-justifies-the-mean fanatics can be <i>very very bad</i>, so we're well into plausible villain territory. If the end justifies the mean and the ideology provides a moral 'out', people will do insanely evil stuff... like... I dunno... tell people gas chambers are showers? Open fire on cafes? Force children to drink poison? Only the author's personal depravity is the limit to what they might imagine such a group plausibly doing when the chips are down.<p>Who knows, maybe that's a big part of the story? What happens when your dismissed-as-wacko conspiracy nut is proven <i>dramatically</i> "as in breaking news" correct? Or maybe your conspiracy theorists' investigations actually prod the group into paranoia-driven action? Such a group is likely more paranoid than the foil hatters that might chase them.<p>An alternative plot twist I thought up once for the X-Files and that would fit into the emerging 'rational fiction' trope is if Mulder discovered that while (most of) the paranormal stuff wasn't real and the aliens weren't invading... <i>the conspiracy that The Smoking Man belonged to believed alien invasion was nigh</i> and was all the more dangerous as a result. The stuff that did turn out to be real might have a rational (but perhaps still very SF) explanation... and the conspiracy plot revolves around how its existence has inspired insane paranoia among an element of our intelligence apparatus who are utterly convinced it's a sign of impending alien invasion. Think of it as a more elaborate SF-based version of a comet inspiring a dangerous doomsday cult. The big finale could have been Mulder now struggling to find a credible way to reveal the truth about UFOs (which might still have a neat SF edge... von Neumann probes?) to the world not just for truth's sake but to stop the impending global-scale Jonestown meltdown of the conspiracy.<p>(2) World-controlling corporations<p>I sort of agree and disagree. A world-controlling corporation is plausible but will have in becoming such a thing become a government. Therefore you have a similar convergence path here as you do with conspiracy -> long lived conspiracy -> cult. Corporation -> mega-powerful totalistic corporation -> nation state.<p>To become a government requires that the corp evolve new traits like a national mythology, the adoption of governmental function and ritual, and a support base in the general population. The latter is important: for this to happen, someone has to think it's a good idea!<p>It's not impossible that a corporate entity could undergo such a metamorphosis while retaining some of its original mega-corp DNA. But it would most certainly no longer be a corporation in the traditional sense. It would have some sort of national identity.<p>The socioeconomic, political, or technological forces that might push a corporation down this road and lead to it emerging as a government/nation might be quite interesting. It's not at all implausible given that Congress has something like a 15% approval rating.<p>Here's a back story for you: an aggressive Uber-like startup invents an economically plausible win/win way to shrink the exploding wealth disparity in developed nations... maybe something based on an innovation in game theory. But to make it work they need to change a few laws. Fast forward a hundred years and you have a global socialist state presided over by something that is now a government but retains the organizational DNA of an Uber-like growth company. For its brand of game theoretic win/win socialism to keep working it <i>must</i> meet certain numbers, which leads in practice to some kind of nutty/weird Keynesianism. ... and of course dissenters are <i>provably</i> (via game theory) threatening the well being of all.<p>That's quite plausible and no idiot ball is required.<p>(3) Space travel<p>I disagree that routine space travel is implausible, but I do agree that if you do it and have any <i>hard SF</i> aspirations then you must read up on physics and orbital mechanics. You've got to make a genuine attempt to make it physically plausible... unless of course you're going the SF-flavored-fantasy route of Star Wars in which case that's okay too. In that case it's got to at least be in-world consistent and not terribly cliche.<p>I do agree that MacGuffins like He3 are unlikely. Really interesting original motives for space travel and/or settlement are much better. These could include necessity (Seveneves), politics (escaping global dystopia), religion (or desire to freely practice such in a world where that's forbidden), weird but plausible economics (after two generations of global Japan-style stagnation, the World Central Bank decides a big space economy would make a better stimulus package than WWIII and launches a PR effort to sell it, etc.), a massive discovery that demands a major exploration effort, etc.<p>One that I've toyed around with is this: that in an almost post-scarcity and incredibly rich society people might do space travel for the same reason they climb Everest or try to break deep sea diving records... to have fun and show off. Implausible today but not implausible in an economy 10X larger or where technology like reusable spacecraft has geometrically reduced cost. Space travel and attempts at space settlement could be a <i>sport</i>. Think a cross between extreme mountaineering and Nascar. |
New Style of Police Training Aims to Produce Guardians, Not Warriors | Police need to just behave more like firefighters.<p>Not only that, but I think that a lot more cops need to be out on <i>foot</i>. Not bikes, not segways, none of that. They should be out walking around, talking to people. IMHO, I should know who the cops assigned to my neighborhood are.<p>Here's a thing that happened last week that highlights a problem I have with the cops:<p>At about 1:30 in the morning, my dog starts doing her dog thing and informing me that IMMINENT DOOM is upon us in the form of somebody being outside of the house. I get up and walk to the kitchen to find that, yes, indeed somebody is outside of the door trying to get in, which is a <i>scary</i> feeling. I don't have a peephole on that door, it's the middle of the night, and they aren't knocking, they're trying to get the handle to open.<p>Now, luckily I'm a pretty huge guy, so while this was scary, it didn't really seem life threatening, (they weren't trying to bust through the door, just trying to come inside, so probably just a very disoriented person). Eventually, they left, and I went back to bed.<p>A few minutes later, however, we heard a car alarm go off next door, indicating that the person had just moved on to the neighbor's house, which is really sad, because there is an old lady that lives next door, who might not brush off the idea of somebody trying to come into her house as readily as I could.<p>I go outside and find out that the person trying to come in was a ~20 year old girl who couldn't have weighed more than 110lbs soaking wet. Basically the least threatening person imaginable, but she <i>was</i> trying to get into the neighbor's house.<p>One part of my life involves volunteering for a group of people who deal specifically with this sort of thing at a big dessert party that lots of people in SF have probably heard of. My mode switched from being worried about the lady next door, to being worried about the obviously confused kid trying to get into somebody's house.<p>I loudly convinced her to come and talk to me away from the lady-next-door's house (so as to make sure that the lady inside, who I am sure was scared, could hear that everything was alright), and we started trying to figure out where she was supposed to be, and a plan to get her to that place safely. Sidenote: turns out she just has some really shitty friends who more or less ditched her and went home.<p>While I was talking to her, the cops showed up (presumably my neighbor called them), and I got to see how they would have handled the situation.<p>There was a guy just riding his bike by the neighbor's house, and the cops started YELLING at him<p>"What are you doing?"<p>"Just riding home."<p>"Huh, why are you here? Why are you riding here? Huh? Why here? What are you doing? Is this your house? What are you doing? Do you know you can't be here? This is an alleyway you can't ride here [EVERYBODY rides their bike in the alley, which is practically a bike path], why are you here? This is illegal. What are you doing here?"<p>Just started machine-gunning questions at this poor dude who happened to be riding by at the wrong time.<p>Eventually, they figured out that the girl I was talking to was the person that they were looking for. I explained to them who she was, what she was doing, and where she needed to be.<p>The thing that absolutely FLOORED me was that they refused to give her a ride home. They wanted to stick this obviously disoriented, possibly drugged, girl into a cab (a fucking CAB! Yikes!), and make her into the cabby's problem (hey, get into this random car and hopefully this drugged up girl will make it home safe!)<p>Luckily they did NOT do this, because the girl said she didn't have any cash. The ended up calling some sort of non-police-police van who gave her a ride to [hopefully] her house. (It was their Crisis Intervention Team, I think. Like people who show up and talk to people who have just had a traumatic experience, I guess they weren't busy, and had time to give this girl a ride).<p>--<p>Watching the whole thing was just sad to me. Not only was the FIRST response that the cops had to start yelling at some dude, but when presented with a REAL opportunity to improve somebody's safety (this girl), they either didn't want to, or were not allowed to.<p>Keeping some disoriented girl safe in the middle of the night seems like the cliche of what cops are supposed to be doing, and here when presented with the opportunity, they wouldn't do it.<p>Pathetic. |
Common Probability Distributions: The Data Scientist’s Crib Sheet | Nicely done.<p>There is an important point that the article makes although only implicitly: If have some data and want to know what the probability distribution is, then hopefully know enough good things about where the data came from basically to <i>know</i>, even without looking at the data, what the probability distribution <i>must</i> be. The article gave such ways to know.<p>A biggie point: In practice this way of <i>knowing</i> is not only powerful but, really, nearly the only little platform you have to stand on to know how your data is distributed.<p>Here is an example one step beyond the article: You have a Web site, and users arrive. Okay, each user has their own complicated life, maybe use the Internet only in the morning, only in the evening, have nearly a fixed list of sites they go to, only get to your site from links at other sites they do see regularly, etc. That is, each user can have wildly complicated, unique personal behaviors on the internet.<p>Still, the arrivals at your site will be as in a Poisson process, that is, the number of arrivals in the next minute will have the Poisson distribution and the time until the next arrival will have the exponential distribution. Why? A classic result called the <i>renewal theorem</i>. There is a careful proof in the second volume (the one difficult to read) on probability by W. Feller.<p>So, the arrivals at your Web site from user user #1, Joe, is some complicated, unknowable <i>stochastic arrival process</i>. Fine. Joe has a complicated life. User #2, Mary, also has a complicated life but has essentially nothing to do with Joe (Joe is a nerd, and Mary is
pretty!). So, Mary acts <i>independently</i> of Joe. Similarly for users #2, 3, ..., 2 billion. Then the arrivals at your Web site are the sum of those 2 billion complicated, unique, with details unknowable, independent arrival processes. Then, with a few more meager assumptions, presto, bingo, the renewal theorem says that the arrivals at your site form a Poisson arrival process.<p>There's a terrific chapter on the Poisson process in E. Cinlar's introduction to stochastic processes. Terrific. Some of what you can say, knowing that you have a Poisson process, is amazing. All with no or meager attention to the data and, instead, from knowing you have a Poisson process, e.g., from the renewal theorem from a sum of many independent arrival processes.<p>Bigger lesson: The renewal theorem is true in the limit of a sum of many independent arrival processes. So, it is a <i>limit theorem</i>. Then, more generally, many of the crown jewels of probability are limit theorems that say what happens in the <i>big picture</i> when it is a limit of some kind of smaller things about which have nearly no ability to understand. So, astoundingly, such limit theorems show that the effects of some universe of detail, maybe even <i>big data</i>, just wash out. Often very powerful stuff. A big part of a good course in probability is the full collection of classic limit theorems -- astounding, powerful stuff in there. Wait until discover martingales -- totally mind blowing that any such powerful things could be true, but they are!<p>Final lesson: It's possible also to take from the article and from much of introductory lessons in statistics an implicit lesson that is wrong and even dangerous: That lesson is that, given some data, right away, ASAP, do not pass GO, do not collect $100, and ASAP rush to find the probability distribution. Well, if can find the distribution via something like the Poisson process outlined above, <i>terrific</i>. But usually can't do that. Instead just have the data, just the darned data. Maybe even <i>big data</i>. Then, sure, can get a histogram and look at it. Okay, no harm done so far. But, then, maybe, from the implicit but dangerous lesson, feel an urge, a need, a compulsion, a strong drive to find <i>the distribution</i> of that data, go through some huge list of increasingly bizarre well known probability distributions looking for a <i>fit</i>, etc. Mostly, don't do that.<p>Or, yes, there is a probability distribution, but, usually in practice, especially when you are given data without any additional information that will let you conclude something like Poisson above, beyond just that histogram, you don't have much chance of finding or approximating the probability distribution in any way that stands to be useful. Or, mostly just get the histogram and stop there.<p>Next, all the above holds for one dimensional data, that is, single numbers. But if your data comes in pairs of numbers, say, points on a plane, or, for some positive integer <i>n</i>, <i>n</i>-tuples, then your desire to find <i>the distribution</i> is much, much less promising. Indeed, just getting a histogram is much less promising. For <i>n</i> > 2, already histograms are tough to see or work with.<p>But, fear not: The field of applied probability and statistics is just awash in techniques where you don't need anything like precise data on distributions!<p>Succinct version of this lesson: Yes, the probability distribution exists, but commonly you can't really find it and commonly you don't need to find it. |
Japan’s 105-Hour Workweek | This is mainly second-hand information. I haven't worked at a Japanese company, the closest I've gotten was interviews and a sort of off the record job offer. I have lived in the country for 1 year though, so I definitely saw the actual hours friends were at work or busy because of work.<p>1. Japanese business culture sees labor laws as guidelines.<p>2. Being overworked (meaning enduring or working extra hours) is seen as a "good" thing.<p>3. Doing anything to sabotage the team effort (including working fewer hours, not being available, not asking to help others) is seen as the worst thing you could do.<p>4. Being granted a week off by your company is seen as generous (even though you may be allocated 2 or more weeks a year). The corollary to this is not taking your allocated vacation hours is seen as a good thing.<p>5. You don't miss work due to a cold, you put on a mask and show up anyway.<p>6. Punctuality is in some ways more important than doing the actual job. This is why people go through great efforts to jam into a single train in order to not be late by even 5 minutes.<p>7. Apologies are expected, more than reasons or explanations. The message your superior wants to hear isn't that you screwed up, it is that you are inferior and have no excuse and he is superior to you (hence an apology). This is a legacy of Japan's feudal days; Japanese large corporations are essentially the transformation of what used to be feudal powers.<p>8. Confrontation is avoided at great lengths. This is why Japanese have a hard time of saying "no". This implies that if your boss asks for work to be done, you will undoubtedly agree without complaint.<p>9. Women are paid significantly less than men, but the trade off is a woman can quit her job to rear children and not be "penalized" from a social standpoint. Men get paid more than women but Japanese culture expects that the man of the family will pay for his wife and children in full through retirement even if the woman doesn't work a single day.<p>10. Since men are the de facto breadwinner, and women often don't work to take care of the household/children, men are expected (even by their own families) to work longer hours in order to advance the entire family. It is not uncommon for the father of a family to live/work in a city 2-3 hours away from where his family resides.<p>11. "Black" company (in Japanese) is a term that refers to businesses that have mandatory overtime (12+ hour days). I guesstimate roughly half of all companies in Japan are Black companies.<p>12. Companies often have "Nomikai" (drinking parties). They are not mandatory per se, but like everything in Japan, social pressure is often used to force people to attend. This is considered a work function even though no actual work takes place.<p>13. Most employees in Japan are part of "sales". This doesn't imply selling a product, rather it means wining and dining to the customer (Business to Business). This includes things like taking the customer on dinners, karaoke, golf, etc all "on the house". Failure to do this mean strain on the customer relationship. Strain on the relationship implies loss of business.<p>14. There's a "right" way of doing everything. Japan is a society that values process and manners. For example when you, a Japanese national, go on an interview, and must enter an interview room, you first knock exactly 3 times, yell "excuse me", wait for an invitation, open the door, yell again "pardon me", then enter the room, promptly close the door, wait to be invited again to take a seat, then proceed to take the seat. Failure to do this correctly exactly as listed looks bad.<p>15. Japanese (the language) continues to require honorific/humble language <i>in addition</i> to polite language. In school, children must address students senior to themselves using <i>polite</i> language. In the workplace, employees must be able to address superiors and customers using honorific/humble language (a step above polite language, imagine talking to a king in the old days with English). Distant acquaintances and strangers must also be addressed with at a minimum polite language. Casual language is reserved for friends and family only. To be fair, this isn't just unique to Japan but is common in many East-Asian and nearby cultures.<p>16. If you want to avoid this hellish landscape and remain in Japan and still be respected, you do have one and only one option. Do well on your college entrance exams in high school, get into the top tier schools, then apply to the top companies and highly desired positions. This will spare you of regular mandatory overtime during your adult life, allow you to have better than average salary, and still be highly respected in society despite only working may an average 10 hours a weekday. Doing something else (like going abroad) is not seen as the "normal" way. Not being normal is not good. The only exceptions are English teachers, translators, and obviously affluent families (that would have been fine anyway). University students can also get away with study abroad, assuming they don't go more than a year and join the rest of their peers in the same job hunting style at the end of it. But these students may have already accepted that they are unlikely to land a good job so study abroad is seen as a way to delay the inevitable.<p>17. More and more Japanese are slowly just beginning to say "fuck it". This is leading to interesting subcultures. For example the term called "freeters" (shortening of English free-timers) is a culture of young Japanese that refuse to work standard salary jobs and instead work multiple part time jobs often taking breaks in employment to enjoy free time. More 20s and 30s Japanese are taking advantage of working holiday visa arrangements with other countries as an attempt to expatriate. More and more Japanese are negotiating or purposely deciding to only take jobs where they are allowed a fixed number of hours (often the cost is a reduction in pay or a not so great work assignment). But these groups are still very much the minority and there are definite sacrifices these people have made (or they're just mentally crazy) in the eyes of the typical Japanese. |
The slowing in population growth in Africa has been less than anticipated | The comments are better than the article itself.<p>From: NdiliMfumu Dec 14th, 03:10<p>Today's problems with overpopulation are directly related to Mankind's evolution, as are many other modern discontents:<p>Prior to the modern era (especially, prior to the beginning of organized agriculture in the Middle East, 12,000 years ago), Mankind was a predominantly nomadic beast who wandered about, following natural herds and eating whatever fruits, nuts and other small vegetables he could find, whenever he couldn't fell another water buffalo or gazelle.<p>In this condition, food was generally scarce, disease common and rampant, children frequently taken by the passing lion or wave of dysentery, and the population constantly under threat. It made sense for us to evolve to be continuously fecund, always seeking meat, salt and sweets (fruits), and to avoid anything foul, bitter or unduly acidic. People tended to be lean and stringy, eager to sock away a bit of fat or sodium for the next dry and desperate week ahead.<p>We were not used to regular access to food, drink, salt or sugar, nor were we quite used to seeing our numbers grow.<p>Ah, then, we learned settled agriculture and everything began to change. Suddenly, there was a much more certain supply of food and drink. Sweets became more commonplace. Salt was easier to come by. And there was ever so much more opportunity for sex, now that the new girl just moved in next door.<p>Over the centuries after the onset of settled agriculture, human populations grew rather steadily. From merely about 25,000 souls in 50,000 BCE, we grew to around 100,000,000 souls around the year 1 CE. This is an intrinsic rate of population growth of only 0.016 % per year. Hardly much, but enough to be very successful as a species over a long period. Yet, it pales in comparison to the modern rate of intrinsic population growth, which has often been above 2.5% per year.<p>What has happened in the meantime? The Industrial Revolution enabled human populations to intensively urbanize, elevating millions from abject poverty, bringing in its train electricity, among other things, and the development of artificial ammonia production. This was critical.<p>Together with artificial fertilizer and increasing agricultural mechanization, farm productivity bounded and food became increasingly cheap in most parts of the world during the last 200 years. At the same time, SANITARY practices (especially, sewage system development and water purification projects) deprived the River Styx of legions of children who would otherwise have died of dysentery and early childhood respiratory illness. All this came about long before modern medicine could penetrate into most parts of the world, and well before antibiotics were developed and could play their role.<p>Between 1800 and 1950 (when penicillin began to become much more prevalent), death rates plummeted and the intrinsic rate of population growth exploded. At the same time, Mankind began to fall ill from diseases of excess: Excess salt leading to hypertension, excess sugar and fat tending towards morbid obesity and adult-onset diabetes, excess nicotine tending to heart attack, stroke and cancer.<p>What we see, here, are very swift cultural, economic and political changes sweeping over the Human Condition, much faster than can be accommodated by the usual evolutionary processes, alone. The Human Genome simply cannot respond quickly enough to doff the tendency to want more: More food, more sex, more sugar, more fat, more stimulation. All those things which for millennia we longed for, now, we have in great surfeit.<p>The tendency for wealthier, urbanized families to have fewer children and to start later is a direct reflection of the population pressure experienced by large numbers of people living in close quarters. We can help this along by encouraging people to continue leaving the countryside: Raise taxes on idle farmland and pastureland, on rural homes, and on train/bus rides terminating in the hinterland !<p>Similarly, give families income support and training to relocate into cities. Offer them apartments, jobs, healthcare and continuous education. Pay them to forego having more children, and to educate the ones they have better. Offer particularly young women money and apartments to stay single and childless until they're at least 25 years old thereby cutting their fecundity in half. And of course, make reproductive health services, including contraception and abortion services, broadly available, safe and cheap for young women.<p>The current and continuing crisis of world-wide deleterious climate change is, like overpopulation, a direct reflection of our evolutionary challenge and current inadequacy. Were it not for the 7.32 BN of us already alive in such vast numbers, there would be many more fish in the seas, much more oil in the ground and much less carbon in the atmosphere. Time for a thorough-going and purposeful change: Let’s not leave it to evolution, lest we go the way of the dinosaurs !<p>Continuing fecundity in Africa is the direct result of the general lack of urbanization, there, as compared with other continents, as well as cultural values emphasizing fecundity and large families, and the general level of poverty and illiteracy.<p>But this is rapidly changing, as the article points out.<p>As African nations lift themselves from poverty and progressively urbanize, e.g., Nigeria, today, fecundity drops and the intrinsic rate of population growth along with it. Nigerian women, especially those who live in Lagos and other large cities (e.g., Abuja, Port Harcourt, Benin City, Ibadan, Kano, Kaduna) are increasingly interested in getting an education, making money and deferring marriage. Deferring the start of childrearing has a dramatic effect on overall fecundity. Deferring a first pregnancy to the age of 25 cuts an average woman's lifetime fecundity in half.<p>The major impediments to successful population control are largely culturally determined resistance -- especially male chauvinism, heterosexism, paternalism and religiously-driven moral imperatives to "be fruitful and multiply" (this, largely an attempt on the part of these religions to secure and increase their numbers by indoctrinating newborns in the faith).<p>But all these impediments tend to fall by the wayside, when young women and families enter into urban areas: The anomie of the cities assists young people in escaping the control of their parents and their clergy. "Traditional values" tend to fall victim to "modernism". "Contraception" is no longer a dirty word. Liberality and social mobility go hand in hand. Staid and stoic traditionalist parents tend to shut up, when their well-educated daughters are sending home then rent cheque from Lagos !<p>Africa's population will bound towards 2 billion or more by the end of the 21st century, but then it will stabilize. By that time, if we're lucky, the Earth will host more than 12 BN souls, and we shall be straining the world's resources to the limit.<p>If we have some real luck, hydrogen fusion power will replace fossil fuels and nuclear fission, entirely. We will devote the new, cheap and nearly limitless power to cleaning up the environment, sucking the carbon out of the atmosphere and burying it in the deep seas, planting billions of trees, and building tall and narrow cities, leaving vast tracts of open land to the animals, the insects and the other flora and fauna. We shall swing from mile-high elevators much like our distant ancestors swung through tropical forests.<p>And we shall begin to colonize the Moon, Mars and other regions of space, as well.<p>Time for a thorough-going change! |
What does a GB of Internet service really cost? The worst case scenario (2011) | There's more than a few problems with this particular assessment as it relates to "what we pay" and what kind of service we can expect for that price.<p>On the cost side, I suspect the cost of support, service and customer acquisition significantly affects the cost/GB. I used to switch between UVerse and Comcast every 6-12 months (the point at which the promotional prices ended) because it was very easy to do so and they didn't have a requirement that I remain for a contractual period of time.<p>However, even given all of this, "what we pay" <i>is barely related</i> to "what it costs", at least in most of the US. In the majority of markets there is often only <i>one</i> service provider that provides service at speeds in excess of 25Mbps. Sometimes, there is two, but in the state that I live in, the choice is often "Cable Provider" vs "Phone Provider". If you're lucky, your phone provider is AT&T on the newer network (with those giant boxes in each of our subdivisions -- no FIOS here) and they can deliver more than 25Mbps (inbound) and the other is Comcast at up to 100Mbps. Both have caps (unless you are a business subscriber) with AT&Ts at 150GB or 250GB depending on the service and Comcast at 250GB. A small number of areas have an additional cable provider (usually Wide Open West) that offer reasonable speeds and I <i>think</i> WoW doesn't do caps but I'm not sure.<p>The price you pay from each of these providers will be different depending on how many competing providers exist in the area. AT&T U-Verse at much higher speeds costs less in my house than AT&T U-Verse in my family's cottage up north (it tops out at 12Mbps with 150GB caps).<p>Until there is competition offering uncapped service (and customer demand for it), it doesn't really matter what the cost is. The folks at these companies charge what they can get away with given the market they're operating in, which in many markets is either an absolute monopoly (me, up north with AT&T) or them sharing the market with a single competitor who is able to deliver faster or slower service than them with identical data caps. The cost for entering a residential market is high, riddled with regulation and practical concerns, and the companies have lobbied hard for restrictive state laws that prohibit municipalities from providing a competing service.<p>Prior to them setting up this whole "pay for unlimited service" arrangement, I ran afoul of the 250GB cap and immediately switched to Comcast Business. The difference is <i>stark</i>. I had some service done with AT&T that resulted in one of the AT&T guys putting a shovel through the Comcast Business wire at 4:30 in the afternoon. I called them up and they sent someone to my house at 6:30 PM. I also get a special phone number, not open 24-hours, but I rarely talk to more than one person about the problem I'm experiencing and the hold times are minimal. He fixed the service (at no charge -- despite it being a competitor that <i>caused</i> the problem). That was one experience, but I've called support a few times and I've always had my issues addressed <i>quickly</i>. When I was a residential customer, waiting several days for a service call was normal.<p>I pay more than <i>twice</i> as much as the residential service at $130/mo for the same speeds, but I have no data cap and routinely use 2-3 TB/mo according to my router. I'm on the same wires, using the same company, paying a lot more, and getting no caps, and what I'd characterize as exceptional customer service. This almost irritates me <i>more</i>. It's not an issue of being unable to provide this kind of service to everyone, or an issue of network capacity, it's an issue of being unwilling to provide this kind of service to everyone because the market dictates that they don't need to in order to be (very) profitable.<p>Now, I suspect that the small businesses that they target this service at probably don't use the kind of bandwidth or have the performance requirements that I do (I'm in the 2-3TB/mo range). My dad's 9-person company was happy with IDSL at 1Mbps bidirectional until two years ago and would probably still be on it if Comcast hadn't wired up the park and undercut the other providers by half, so they're competing for a different kind of customer in small business. And this may bean that the small business market actually has <i>more</i> competition since many are willing to accept slower service offerings as identical products (or maybe the manufacturing non-tech heavy small businesses in my area are just that way). |
Ask HN: The Struggles of Poverty and Trying to become a programmer from 0 | I am currently struggling with similar tough situation.I see some helpful advice here but honestly, its easier said than done.<p>-I am a latina, working in retail, no support of any kind whatsoever, surviving and on top of that with an expensive autoimmune medical condition. My job is in retail working long stressful hours, no benefits, no vacations. That leaves almost no time to study or hack around because I need to work in order to survive. Many things regarding web development requires owning a Mac computer that many people can't afford or taking some basics classes around which are not free. Nowadays, if you have internet access and a simple computer that should be enough. Guess what? Many people cant even pay for those basics needs. I just bought a Mac with money I don't have...hopefully it will pay in the future. But there are people even in the US with less choices than your average person. For example, many people lack credit access and money to buy computers, have internet access, buy books, go to places...hard to believe but it's true. When I first was diagnosed with my medical condition, I did not have insurance or financial help and all I needed was less than $2000 for my medical tests. No one helped me financially even when asked for help. I lost my hair, couldn't go to work so I did not earn money for those days, had some skin rashes due to my conditions. How can I be able to meet people like that? or study? I spent my few savings on all that. Thankfully, I recovered and my medical situation is now manageable. But It was a painful situation...I am afraid to face the same situation in the future: Health vs rent? Because eating became my third choice...<p>I applied to many free hack/development schools just to be denied from all of them. The last one I applied at the beginning of December 2015 just denied me I believe for not completing a bunch of tests/quizzes in order to get in. Guess why I couldn't finished? I was working long hours during holidays and did not have a computer and they required a mac. So I rushed to get one just to complete my tasks, didn't get sleep in order to advance some tests, and put some internet and the Mac on a credit card(at least now I have access to one but It wasn't always like that). When I put my internet to begin working on those entrance quizzes which are really long tasks, I saw my denial email. That was 2 days ago...I allowed myself to cry that whole day. Today, my plan is to keep my mac computer and try to pay if off little by little and study from free sources.<p>I live in NYC, my bills are not expensive because I have learned to budget after my health vs rent situation 2 years ago...but it's tiring to live with so many constrains.It's tiring to not have vacations AT ALL not even holidays off. I understand that my situation could be worse if I didn't plan my steps everyday. I just pray things don't get worse for me, especially health-wise.<p>This is what I recommend since you live in a big city like me:<p>-Try to eliminate your debt if you have any so you can get easier access to stuff in the future like loans. credit card, set up internet accounts, etc.
-Try to get a credit card by doing #1 and buy yourself a refurbished or cheap Mac computer as many schools/teaching tools are really requiring a Mac
-Get access to public library and have a card
-try to get cheap internet access by shopping around. I don't have cable tv just cheap internet
-Read free sources online and get free ebooks about programming
-Check around for free development schools/IT programs in your city. NYC offers some or with minimal financing...apply if you can.Apply to all of them and don't give up...within your city that is.
-Go to meetup groups and try to network.<p>NYC Fellowships just denied me, I don't qualify for Per Scholas here in NYC since I am currently working and need my job to survive...Treehouse is not longer free with public library access as it used to be. I fell into any possible crack in every situation. I feel forgotten by everyone in every situation and I am afraid. But I don't have much choice but to keep fighting.<p>I don't have friends in the industry, I don't have a mentor or someone to guide me in my journey. I have no financial help. All I know is that I love computers and programming, I have to survive and I need money to cover my unpredictable medical condition and I only have my own help for all that.Also, I am tired of working every day of the year. I want at least JULY 4th, Christmas and New Years off.Or even a week vacation...I want to leave my soul sucking job...these are " basics" things but many people lack them.For me, just having one of them , it's a privilege. I finally got my hair back and my skin rashes are more manageable, so now I am ready to meet new people and be more presentable.Better keep up now because I feel my time is limited due to my health condition. Who knows when I will lose my hair again and all that? I better be positive about my situation and don't stress myself more about my struggles.<p>Just believe in yourself, don't forget what you want and your needs, keep fighting and don't give up. Don't dwell in painful situations and don't allow yourself to cry for more that a day. Don't look back, just look forward but don't forget the reasons you are fighting for this. Don't really wait for a break, just go after what you want...<p>Hopefully, your situation turns around. Keep us updated... |
OpenBSD Jumpstart: Learn to Tame OpenBSD Quickly | Very nice, here's the plain text version instead of slide format.<p>Learn to tame OpenBSD quickly.<p>December 24, 2015<p>History<p>Forked from NetBSD. Theo De Raadt is the founder and leader of the OpenBSD project. The first OpenBSD release (1.1/CVS) appear on October 18, 1995.<p>Why use OpenBSD ?<p><pre><code> UNIX-like
Get the last version of OpenSSH, OpenSMTPD, OpenNTPD, OpenBGPD, OpenOSPFD, LibreSSL
Get the last PF (Packet Filter) features
Security focused Operating System
Thorough documentation
Cryptography
</code></pre>
Forked from NetBSD. Theo De Raadt is the founder and leader of the OpenBSD project. The first OpenBSD release (1.1/CVS) appear on October 18, 1995.<p>OpenBSD Version numbers<p><pre><code> Six month release cycle
New release is incremented by 0.1
</code></pre>
OpenBSD's Flavors<p><pre><code> -release: The version of OpenBSD shipped every six months
-current: Development just after the release
-stable: Release, plus patches (support ~ 1 year)
</code></pre>
Installation<p>Really simple, ready in 5 minutes (KISS).<p>Get more information: <a href="http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html</a><p>Networking (Files)<p><pre><code> File Contain
/etc/myname Default hostname.
/etc/hostname.if Configuration for each network interface, for example: /etc/hostname.bge0
/etc/mygate Default gateway.
/etc/resolv.conf Resolver (DNS).
/etc/hosts Known hosts on the network.
</code></pre>
Networking<p><pre><code> # See available network cards:
/sbin/ifconfig
# Restart networking service:
/bin/sh /etc/netstart
# Set DHCP for 're0' interface, on the fly:
/sbin/dhclient re0
</code></pre>
Networking (Routing)<p><pre><code> # Show the routing table (ipv4):
/usr/bin/netstat -rnf inet
# Show the routing table (ipv6):
/usr/bin/netstat -rnf inet6
# Delete all gateway entries from the routing table:
/sbin/route -n flush
</code></pre>
Networking (set at startup)<p>Example 1: configure static IP address for re0.<p><pre><code> ## file: /etc/hostname.re0
inet 192.168.0.58 255.255.255.0
# For more information, read the manual: hostname.if(5)
</code></pre>
Don't forget to run 'sh /etc/netstart re0' to apply changes to running system.<p>Example 2: configure DHCP for bge0.<p><pre><code> ## file: /etc/hostname.bge0
dhcp
# For more information, read the manual: hostname.if(5)
</code></pre>
Don't forget to run 'sh /etc/netstart bge0' to apply changes to running system.<p>Example 3: configure wireless.<p><pre><code> ## file: /etc/hostname.iwn0
nwid ACCESS_POINT_NAME
wpakey THE_SECRET_KEY
dhcp
# For more information, read the manual: hostname.if(5)
</code></pre>
Don't forget to run 'sh /etc/netstart iwn0' to apply changes to running system.<p>PF (Packet Filter)<p><pre><code> Ruleset: /etc/pf.conf
</code></pre>
Useful commands.<p><pre><code> # Disable PF
/sbin/pfctl -d
# Enable PF and load the rules
/sbin/pfctl -ef /etc/pf.conf
# Just load the rules (apply changes)
/sbin/pfctl -f /etc/pf.conf
# View the loaded rules
/sbin/pfctl -s rules
</code></pre>
For more information, read the manual: pfctl(8)<p>Pf ruleset sample<p><pre><code> ## file: /etc/pf.conf
# Protect a laptop (allow only ping/ssh from anywhere)
set skip on lo
set fingerprints "/dev/null"
block log all
pass in on egress inet proto icmp all icmp-type echoreq
pass in on egress inet proto tcp from any to any port ssh
pass out
# For more information, read the manual: pf.conf(5)
</code></pre>
Debug PF with tcpdump(8)<p><pre><code> /usr/sbin/tcpdump -nettti pflog0
</code></pre>
Manage users<p>Manually<p><pre><code> /usr/sbin/user [add|del|info|mod] user_name
</code></pre>
The interactive way<p><pre><code> # Add users
/usr/sbin/adduser
# Remove users
/usr/sbin/rmuser
</code></pre>
For more information, read the manual: adduser(8)<p>Manage Groups<p><pre><code> File: /etc/group
/usr/sbin/group [add|del|info|mod] group_name
</code></pre>
Members in 'wheel' group can use su(1) to become 'root'.<p>For more information, read the manual: group(8,5)<p>sudo replaced with doas(1)<p><pre><code> ## file: /etc/doas.conf
# Permit the user 'Marc' to reboot the box
permit nopass marc as root cmd reboot
</code></pre>
Marc can now reboot the box:<p><pre><code> $ doas reboot
</code></pre>
For more information, read the manual: doas.conf(5)<p>Install Packages<p><pre><code> export PKG_PATH=http://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/5.8/packages/amd64/
# OR use 'installpath' variable in /etc/pkg.conf:
installpath=http://ftp2.fr.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/%c/packages/%a/
# Add sudo package
/usr/sbin/pkg_add sudo
</code></pre>
Some packages provide configuration and other information in a file located in '/usr/local/share/doc/pkg-readmes'.<p>For more information, read the manual: pkg.conf(5)<p>Packages<p><pre><code> # List packages installed
/usr/sbin/pkg_info
# View install-message for a specific package
/usr/sbin/pkg_info -M package_name
# Remove a Package
/usr/sbin/pkg_delete package_name
# Delete unused dependencies
/usr/sbin/pkg_delete -a
</code></pre>
For more information, read the manual: packages(7)<p>Install non-free firmware packages<p><pre><code> /usr/sbin/fw_update
</code></pre>
Firmware is downloaded from release-specific directories at: <a href="http://firmware.openbsd.org/firmware/" rel="nofollow">http://firmware.openbsd.org/firmware/</a><p>Manage daemons, services<p><pre><code> File: /etc/rc.conf.local
/usr/sbin/rcctl [enable|disable|start|stop|reload|restart] daemon_name
# Examples
/usr/sbin/rcctl enable ipsec
/usr/sbin/rcctl enable isakmpd
/usr/sbin/rcctl set isakmpd flags -K
/usr/sbin/rcctl start isakmpd
</code></pre>
For more information, read the manual: rcctl(8)<p>Run a script at startup<p><pre><code> File: /etc/rc.local
</code></pre>
For more information, read the manual: rc.local(8)<p>Update OpenBSD<p>Any security or reliability fixes can be found at:
<a href="http://www.openbsd.org/errata.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.openbsd.org/errata.html</a><p>You can also use the openup tool from M:tier<p>Upgrade OpenBSD<p>To upgrade 5.6 to 5.8, you need to follow instructions:<p><a href="http://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade57.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade57.html</a>
&
<a href="http://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade58.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.openbsd.org/faq/upgrade58.html</a><p>OpenBSD Filesystem<p><pre><code> The most important:
/ Root directory.
/home User home directories.
/root Default home directory for the superuser.
/mnt A temporary mount point.
/etc System configuration files and scripts.
/etc/examples Example configuration files for base system daemons.
/etc/skel (dot) files for new accounts.
/etc/signify Key files used for signify(1).
/tmp Cleaned after a reboot.
/var/tmp Symbolic link to the system /tmp.
/var/log Log files.
/var/run pid, socket files, utmp, dmesg.boot
/var/db Database files.
/var/www Configuration files for httpd(8).
/usr/local Used for third packages installed.
/usr/src BSD and/or local source files.
</code></pre>
For more information, read the manual: hier(7)<p>OpenBSD Kernels<p><pre><code> /bsd
Pure kernel executable (the operating system loaded into memory at boot-time).
/bsd.mp
Pure kernel executable for multiprocessor machines.
/bsd.rd
Installation kernel. The built-in RAM disk contains utilities which can be run without an external file system, so this kernel is useful for limited system maintenance too.
</code></pre>
Tune the system<p><pre><code> sysctl(8) get or set kernel state
config(8) modify a kernel
</code></pre>
Need more help ?<p><pre><code> FAQ: http://www.openbsd.org/faq/
Manual page: afterboot(8)
Mailing list: misc@
</code></pre>
Presentations & Papers<p><pre><code> http://www.openbsd.org/papers/
</code></pre>
Supporting OpenBSD<p><pre><code> Donations [1]
OpenBSD Foundation [2]
OpenBSD Store [3]
</code></pre>
Thank you.
Feedback: contact@<p>[1] <a href="http://www.openbsd.org/donations.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.openbsd.org/donations.html</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/</a><p>[3] <a href="http://www.openbsdstore.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.openbsdstore.com/</a> |
The Ivy League, Mental Illness, and the Meaning of Life (2014) | > And I think we see that in the last 50 years, the meritocracy has created a world that’s getting better and better for the meritocracy and worse and worse for everyone else.<p>But weren't you saying just the opposite? That being part of the elite, which here you call "meritocracy" because you're playing a card trick, drives people crazy?<p>Here's what I think: You're talking to the elite (if you weren't, you wouldn't be in the Atlantic), and you know said elite are more comfortable thinking of themselves in terms of "meritocracy" (even though one of your theses is that there's no meaningful merit involved), and you also know that pretending to care about unequal distribution of social benefits is currently in fashion among your audience (hence the preference for "meritocracy", because it implies that your audience's unequal share is earned). Keeping all three of these plates spinning at once is difficult; the sentence I quoted is them all hitting the ground at once.<p>>Davis: Some criticize this kind of self-reflection as narcissistic[...]<p>>Deresiewicz: [...]the main point is to know yourself so you know what you want in the world. You can decide, what is the best work for me, what is the best career for me, what are the rewards that I really want. And maybe you’ll end up saying that I do need a certain level of wealth, but you will know it because you will have come to know yourself.<p>Nope. Nothing narcissistic here. You know, in ages past when countries had explicit aristocracies rather than the implicit ones which deposed and replaced them, "the main point" as you put it was to serve others, rather than oneself. Can't imagine what brought that to mind just now, though. Totally unrelated to anything, no doubt.<p>>Gaining self-knowledge isn’t a simple or predictable process. Are there certain things that can only be learned outside the classroom?<p>Could there possibly be any <i>wronger</i> question to ask?<p>>Aside from the classes themselves, the fact that we’ve created a system where kids are constantly busy, and have no time for solitude or reflection, is going to take its toll. We need to create a situation where kids feel like they don’t have to be “on” all the time.<p>Are you sure? What it sounds like you're saying is that "we" have been doing the best "we" can for decades, and the result is barely tolerable. Are you sure it wouldn't help more if you just stopped creating situations? If the problem is that you're raising your kids inside a Skinner box, why would you think the solution is to make the walls less opaque? Are these the only terms in which you can think? You don't need to answer that one.<p>>When I taught humanities classes, I never talked about self-reflection, and I never invited students to talk about their feelings or their backgrounds or their experiences.<p>Well, you got that right, at least, if only by accident. And it has to have been by accident, because you think you got it wrong. The context couches this as a failure on your part, but why would it be? Why would you think that someone <i>else's</i> self-reflection should have anything to do with <i>you</i>? You don't need to answer that one, either.<p>So how does this amazing article finish? With its subject telling us about his own college experience, in the course of which comes this marvel, which I've emphasized so you don't miss it:<p>>I drifted for two or three years after college until I reached <i>a cinematic moment in my life</i>[...]<p>Why <i>cinematic</i>? Because we've all seen this movie. To call it "transformative" would be erroneous, because a plot twist doesn't change the shape of the plot, it's part of the story all along; to call it an "epiphany" would be the same, plus stupid, because we all know God is dead. Indeed, part of the interview describes how academia has tried to fill the former social role of religion and failed at it.<p>But this possibly quite significant point is glossed over entirely because it's not important to Deresiewicz's movie and therefore not important to the article or the audience, who are (presumed to be) in much the same state as the subject: their problem isn't that they've failed to live the movie plot they thought they wanted, it's that they've <i>succeeded</i> at it and found themselves nonetheless unfulfilled. Which is fine as far as it goes, what a shame for them but who cares, right? Except they've managed to inflict the same disaster on the next generation, because they are not only narcissistic but incredibly stupid besides.<p>And, having recognized the existence and nature of this error, what do they feel really matters? Is it that their descendants, their students, their supposed protegees, are going to have to find their way out of this clusterfuck on their own because everyone who might be expected to help them is too self-absorbed to bother and too stupid to succeed at it anyway? Of course not. No, what matters is who gets the blame, specifically that it be anyone but they themselves:<p>>But the take home message is that everyone has to liberate themselves from this system. Education should be an act of liberation. We need to make a better system but ultimately everybody has to claim their freedom for themselves.<p>These are literally the last words in the article. Do you think that's an accident? Because it's not an accident. |
How Calico, Google-Backed Research Lab for Aging Research, Operates | Some more insight from this, an audio interview with Aubrey de Grey (SENS Research Foundation) and Brian Kennedy (Buck Institute):<p><a href="http://mendelspod.com/podcasts/brian-kennedy-and-aubrey-de-grey-their-converging-approaches-aging-research" rel="nofollow">http://mendelspod.com/podcasts/brian-kennedy-and-aubrey-de-g...</a><p>Which, being nice, I've transcribed some of:<p>Moderator: What response have both of you had to the entrance of Calico, the Google company, and Human Longevity, Craig Venter's new company?<p>Aubrey: It's a complicated question. I'll talk about Human Longevity first. In my opinion they are not really working on what we're working on. They are working on personalized medicine, trying to optimize therapies that essentially already exist using analysis of large amounts of genetic data.<p>Moderator: So a similar company to other companies that are out there, with a fancier name?<p>Aubrey: I would say that definitely their hearts are in the right place, but they are a regular, perfectly normal company. They want to make profits fairly soon. Calico have set themselves up as a completely unusual company with the goal of doing something very long-term, however long it takes, they want to actually fix aging. They said so - Larry Page was perfectly clear about that. The question is how are they going about it, and that's getting really interesting. The first thing that they've done, which I feel is an absolutely spectacularly good move, is to bifurcate their work into a relatively short-term track and a long-term track. The short term track involves drug discovery for age-related diseases, doing deals with big companies like Abbvie, and so on. That's all very wonderful and all very lucrative in the relatively short term, and has more or less nothing to do with the mission for which Calico was set up - but it is a fabulous way to insulate the stuff that they do that is to do with why Calico was set up from shareholder pressure. It gets a little more complicated though. So then on the long term side, the stuff being led by David Botstein and Cynthia Kenyon, the question is how are they going about their mission. Of course an awful lot of this unknown because they are a secretive company, but from the perspective of whom they are hiring, and what kinds of work those people have done in the past, one can certainly say that they are not just focusing on one approach. They are interested in diversity. My only real concern is that they may be emphasizing a curiosity-driven long term exploratory approach to an unnecessary degree. I'm all for finding out more and more about aging, but I'm also all for using what we've already found out to the best of our ability to try stuff and see what we can do. I should emphasize that this is only my impression from a very limited amount of information available, but my impression is that it is perhaps turning into an excessively curiosity-driven, excessively basic science, inadequately translational outfit. And that's kind of what I feared when Botstein came along in the first place, because he's on record as saying he doesn't have a translational bone in his body. Now Brian could obviously say a lot more if he wants to, as he's done a deal with Calico.<p>Brian: Let me start by saying that I think its great that these big companies are getting into the game. Almost no matter what happens that is going to help the field get more people, more private sector people involved, maybe get Big Pharma involved, and so I think it is a good thing. I can't say too much about Calico because we have a relationship with them, but I will say that I think it is an interesting challenge when all of a sudden a lot of money is on the table, and very good people are hired to say "go solve this problem," and they haven't been thinking about that problem until a month ago. So I think what we're going to see with Calico is that they're going to continue to evolve as they go forward, and I think it will be very interesting to see the kinds of stuff they choose to do, and it may be very different two years or three years from now.<p>Moderator: You were saying in the panel we were just at that you thought it was a game-changer.<p>Brian: I think it adds great momentum, and I think it will be equally important to really get Big Pharma to get into this game too. It is easy to say you've got a ton of money, but what is a ton of money? If you're going to start doing real clinical trials, phase III clinical trials, it takes more than a ton of money; Big Pharma has to come in. Getting Abbvie involved is a good step, but it would also be good if everyone else starts saying this is the place to be. |
Ask HN: What's the new best practise security model in the enterprise? | This definitely more an infrastructure question -- specific to your organization's workflow, internal policies, existing software, priorities and politics -- than a general 'where do I implement {kerberos, RSA SecurID, off-site audit trails, etc}. You won't get a one-size fits all solution, as it totally depends on 1) the industry you're working in, 2) the internal compliance policies you have to deal with, 3) the country you're operating in, 4) the operating policies you have to follow in order to stay compliant with the clients professional liability insurance policy/policies.<p>>> "lots change as you try to build a complete system"
I mean this is why in the enterprise, changing one line of code can take 2 weeks of conference calls (in-house legal often has to be brought in, the original stakeholder of the project has to be brought in and odds are he's gone so whoever inherited the project has to be brought in, if you're making a fundamental change to the system often third-party auditors from the big 4 are requested to sign-off on the logistics of the change (especially if you're a publically traded company operating within the US).<p>RE: Purchase ordering systems - this has been standardized via multiple standards, but most of the companies I've consulted with have one integrated system (usually SAP, Dynamics, or one of the other handful of big-name brands), and they all speak the EDI standard[1], or if not, you'll certainly have Connector modules. I.e., BizTalk (if you're on a MS Dynamics stack, that's what you'll be using for workflow) has a SAP connector, SAP has a connector for Epicor, etc. With respect to security in terms of server<->server PO negotiation, read this[2] if you're on the MS stack. SAP R/3,4 (and B1, and AIO) all take care of the issuing of the PO, validating incoming POs (i.e., the SAP FSCM module will take care of customer management to see if the credit line is available for the customer, and all that; the FI/CO stuff will take care of balancing the accounting journals); the workflows [defined within BizTalk for MS or using custom ABAP modules that were placed in during your SAP implementation], the security negotiation is usually done via AS2 (see: [2]) or through one of a few 3rd party EDI transaction entities (in the same way that there are like 4 major CC companies, like-so with those EDI value-added transactors). x.509 and ActiveDirectory are almost always the standard re: authentication[3]<p>CRM's are historically purchased as a module that plugs into your ERP.<p><i>Lemur and Let's Encrypt have _nothing_ to do with anything enterprise and belong nowhere near it.</i> (The fact that you even posed this question makes me really concerned) LE is great for the average Joe developer because it democratized SSL cert generation, but even if a VeriSign SSL is 100$ that's, what? half an hour of a consultants time? My clients get that warm feeling every time they see a brand-name as a line-item on their invoice. <i>Managers are all about mitigating risk.</i> This is why you have VMware instances running 30 year old software simulating DEC Alphas, and why consultants who have skillsets in REXX and JCL can bill higher than associates in BigLaw. <i>Any project has risk attached to it, an integration/re-write project has avoidable risk. Delegate the risk factor out by getting the CIO to sign off on a restructuring program that's done by consultants so if it fails you can blame Accenture or IBM Consulting.</i> I would never, ever take on a project like that, even at triple my rate, because it sounds like you're already entrenched in a fractured system and in my experience those projects fail. I never take any work that I'm 100% sure I can complete because one major mess up and my reputation is shot. And this is the type of integration I do for a living. [Read this if you take nothing else away from my advice - [4]].<p>Even if you can write a 30 line Ruby script that integrates all of your systems into one magical, fluid operation, if there's even a slight chance of failure, you will be the one who assumes responsibility. Furthermore, 6 months down the line when middle-management and/or upper management is evaluating your performance, this is what they'll remember.<p>Your company is an enterprise. You have a fractured knowledge base with 'wildly different authentication [schemes]'. Bring in consultants and don't risk your career.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X12_Document_List" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X12_Document_List</a> Enjoy spending the next 2 years reading.
[2] <a href="https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb743507.aspx" rel="nofollow">https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb743507.aspx</a>
[3] Here it is in SAP Netweaver (not to be confused with R/3, the actual SAP) - it's fairly similar though in the methodology though as is any of the other ERP / CRM's. <a href="http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw70/helpdata/EN/d3/1dd4516c518645a59e5cff2628a5c1/content.htm" rel="nofollow">http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw70/helpdata/EN/d3/1dd4516c5186...</a>
[4] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10639309" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10639309</a> Read my post here on why rolling your own solution is bad for your customer, and even worse for you. |
Ask HN: What is your advise to move up the ladder? Any anecdotes? | I'm curious if you discussed your desire to move into a management position with your supervisor. If you did discuss it, what, if any, feedback did you get?<p>Based on your statements in your question, the frustration is obvious, so is a sense of entitlement, like you've earned this right but it's not happening for you.<p>I am sorry that you are feeling like that, it's a terrible place to be and it can drive you to make some really stupid decisions. Hopefully, in simply asking this here has helped you relieve some of the stress, if not, maybe the following will be of some help.<p>This is not a direct answer, but should give you some ideas and thoughts to ponder, plus a couple of next steps.<p>Here are some of the themes I'm seeing in your question:<p>* Too much stuff to learn when it comes to coding<p>* Want to spend more time on personal projects instead of on technology treadmill<p>* Feel like you can complete coding tasks quickly<p>Let's address these themes:<p>I'm going to treat leadership / management interchangeably here, even though there are some serious differences between the two roles. For the purposes of being a line manager, they can be treated interchangeably.<p>Moving into a leadership role, whether you're looking for a tech lead or a management role, does not stop the first bullet point above. If anything, you have to be aware of all of the new trends enough to make a judgement call on it's validity, maturity and use-cases. You need to know this because you'll have your reports coming to you on a regular basis wanting to use some of these techniques / tools / languages / etc. How do you say no without offending your report? On the flip side, you'll have your manager(s) coming to you asking if something is a good idea. How do you explain the tradeoffs if you're a one-trick pony?<p>To the second bullet: you have, significantly, more time as an individual contributor than as a manager. As a manager, you have to make sure everyone is on target with what they need to do, run 1-1s to make sure the people are satisfied / happy and are not planning to resign shortly, report up the progress, report down the needs of the bosses. You are, perpetually, stuck between trying to communicate up, down and across the organization, while sitting in a lot of meetings (assuming a large org) and being on the hook to get more stuff done. This is doubly so if you are new to management. The hard truth is that the role doesn't matter, you have to know where to draw the line(s) and have a life. It's a constant tradeoff, do you pick up a new hobby or go out with your friends or learn the latest framework / language / algorithm / etc.<p>Your ability to code or get engineering tasks done quickly has very little to do with your ability to lead / manage. You need to learn new skills, mostly around communication, relationship building, messaging, ownership, delegation, accountability of others, etc. Just because you are a good developer does not mean you'll be a good manager. I would argue that most developers should never be allowed to lead as the skills and roles are so different, they are not transferrable. This means that you're starting from scratch, again. By the way, as you get promoted, you're constantly starting from scratch, unless you are, already, doing some of the things your manager is doing.<p>None of this directly answers your question, as there is no direct answer or how-to guide, it is very industry- and organization-specific.<p>Being a manager at a startup is very very different from being a manager at a large corporation. Moving into that role is, also, a different process. In some ways, moving into a leadership role at a startup has more to do with raw leadership skills then anything else; you see a problem, you own solving it - rinse and repeat, boom you're a leader now. By the way, replace __boom__ with months, potentially.<p>In a larger company, it's more involved as managers are expensive, both in terms of salary and training / knowledge acquisition. Imagine the disruption to the team, the delivery flow, unofficial communication channels (aka social glue), etc. when a manager leaves.<p>To be perfectly blunt, if you have ask the question, you need to really think about what it means to be a manager / leader. Look at how your role models came to be leaders, what paths did they take? Based on what you stated, your goals are position and money, that will make you a terrible manager, if you don't care about the people. You'll have a hard time retaining people or producing results in any high-performing organization as you won't be able to motivate anyone based on those drivers.<p>Another thought, position is meaningless in a high-quality tech environment. Power does not come, just, from the title, it comes from the group differing to you because of respect. Having worked at places where the position/title alone denoted power, it's a crappy place to be.<p>My suggestion, as to the next steps, is to:<p>* Reflect on the instances when you were put in charge of something and how people reacted to you, how they treated you and how you treated them<p>* Have several coffee dates with managers / leaders in your organization (don't go outside of your org) You are looking for people doing the role you would move into as your next step and their managers. Tell them you're interested in being a manager and what lessons they learned, what their day looks like, what keeps them awake at night, etc. You want to learn as much as you can from them and get your name out there. This is part of building relationships but also information gathering. This will tell you if you actually want the job and are willing to put up with the politics and dealing with people without the context of code to help you.<p>* Sit down with your manager in your next 1-1 and explain what you're seeking and ask for help to move into that role.<p>Also, read Managing Humans by Michael Lopp. It will give you a good idea about what it's like to manage engineers. |
Let’s Move Beyond Open Data Portals | Sorry...I just have to disagree with the OP. Several years ago, Socrata stopped by where I worked (a news organization) and told us of their idea to build a portal of city governments everywhere that would host datasets. They were new at the time and I just thought they were bonkers.<p>Now, I can't believe what you can find on the various data portals. There's a lot of shit data but that's because lots of organizations collect shit data. But for the organizations that <i>do</i> have data, Socrata is such a huge step from what existed before.<p>I'll ignore the many situations in which agencies just didn't put out data at all. Dallas, Texas is one exception. It has been posting its crime data for years. Except it was on a FTP site with a convoluted structure. And it wasn't all in one file. So you had to write a script that spidered the subdirectories, downloaded the files, unzipped them, and concatenated them (and I don't think they were a straight-up concatenation).<p>Now, it's just all on one page from which you can export the data as bulk CSV [1]. Because Socrata's REST API is so straightforward, you can just script your data requests to hit the right end points. But not only is there the incident data, there's the narrative data [2] (which had also been on the FTP site, but required its own spidering), and there's tables I hadn't seen before, such as [3] suspects and real-time active calls [4]<p>On top of it, the police department has even decided to put up the data for their <i>officer-involved-shootings</i>. Mind you, they were <i>already</i> ahead of the game, nationwide, last year when they created a parseable (via scraper) webpage with HTML tables and PDFs. They certainly didn't have to make their data even easier to get, but they did [5]<p>Texas has always been generally good about public records because of their broad sunshine law. But it's not that the law turned them all into free-data-hippies right away...the agencies just have a tradition of doing it -- it helps alot if you're a Texas employee and you've seen how everyone else just agrees to potentially damaging records requests, and yet no one gets stressed out.<p>I have to think that Socrata, just by being <i>there</i> as an option, not just in Dallas, but everywhere, has made bureaucrats more aware of how data sharing can just be...<i>done</i>. Certainly, there are always officials who will push back, because they're power-control-freaks or because they have something to hide. But plenty of bureaucrats don't really care...they've just been told by their IT people that putting up data in an easy way would cost too much and be too much of a security compromise. Now that there's an option of a general data portal, there's fewer reasons to say no.<p>Just to give you an idea of how technically clueless many bureaucrats are (and I don't really blame them, but their agencies for not prioritizing tech training)...it is still not unheard of to be denied access to machine-readable data -- e.g. they <i>print out a spreadsheet</i> and fax it to you, instead of just sending you the XLS -- because they think that if they give you the spreadsheet, you can "alter the data".<p>Yes, it really is that dumb.<p>edit: to the author's credit, he's not saying that open data portals should be closed, just that governments should move beyond them. That's a nice sentiment, but in reality, it's an idea that takes away resources from <i>improving</i> data portals.<p>From TFA:<p>> <i>Now we actually give that directly to Waze, so they can reroute people dynamically. Indeed, this is a good open data story — taking the data to where people are —but there’s something more interesting: it’s a two-way street. Not only does Waze now share pothole and road condition data it collects regularly through its app, they went one step further. They began to proactively collect and share data in the interest public safety.</i><p>But <i>that can already be done</i> with the existing LA data portal and its REST API. Why does the city of Los Angeles have to give Waze anything other than the GET endpoint, from which Waze engineers can download as they like. And not just Waze, but everyone else, in equal measure. So there's nothing <i>wrong</i> with what the author wants, he just doesn't appear to think that with APIs, developers can create far better and far more resources than what the city could do itself.<p>And no, the city (unless it has a magical source of revenue) can't do both building out more "human" data applications while improving their open data pipelines. The latter has much, much further to go before the city can spend IT money on building out new apps.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.dallasopendata.com/Police/Dallas-Police-Public-Data-RMS-Incidents/tbnj-w5hb" rel="nofollow">https://www.dallasopendata.com/Police/Dallas-Police-Public-D...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.dallasopendata.com/Police/Bulk-Police-Narrative/inke-qqax" rel="nofollow">https://www.dallasopendata.com/Police/Bulk-Police-Narrative/...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.dallasopendata.com/Police/Dallas-Police-Public-Data-Unknown-Suspects/jitt-qwwh" rel="nofollow">https://www.dallasopendata.com/Police/Dallas-Police-Public-D...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://www.dallasopendata.com/dataset/Dallas-Police-Active-Calls/9fxf-t2tr" rel="nofollow">https://www.dallasopendata.com/dataset/Dallas-Police-Active-...</a><p>[5] <a href="https://www.dallasopendata.com/Police/Dallas-Police-Public-Data-Officer-Involved-Shootin/4gmt-jyx2" rel="nofollow">https://www.dallasopendata.com/Police/Dallas-Police-Public-D...</a> |
It's time for the US to use the metric system | Getting closer, but we aren't there yet.<p>Truth is, there is a TON of industrial machinery, tooling, fasteners, and more centered on Imperial units. Increasingly, new projects are happening in SI units too. This may start to snowball in the near future. Some of this is driven by global networking effects. Common units are a must, and global engineering efforts are less efficient with Imperial units.<p>Most of the new work in the major vertical industries is now Metric (SI). That's been a long, painful transition. They still carry a lot of ongoing, sustaining engineering and a supply chain supporting it and it's Imperial units however. I'm not sure the author really appreciates the weight of this legacy. It grows a little lighter every year, but it's still very significant and very costly.<p>In the US today, there are ~200 to 250K small to mid sized manufacturers. These remain all over the map, and they typically are the last to adopt new units and technology. It's not that they are lazy, or unable, though unable is a factor. It is all about that investment making sense for them. Often, it just doesn't. If what they have works and they can compete they will do that. Machinery investments are often significant and multi-decade long service life is expected.<p>Older machinery often doesn't work in dual units, and when it doesn't, conversions are error prone and confusing to everyone in manufacturing, which leads to the problems of dual units, duplicate drawings, etc... It's often easier to either continue with Imperial units, or target some switch over date to minimize the problem, and when older machinery remains capable, incentives to phase it out are low. Incentives to rework / upgrade it can be attractive though, depending.<p>It's a lot better than it was in the 80's and 90's, when I began to have some direct familiarity with manufacturing. Back then, I was a prototype mechanic for a while, and maybe 1 out of 100 jobs was metric. Back then, the first thing most often done was a conversion and check. It was rare to work in the Metric units directly. Most test and measure equipment in use, as well as the machines, were Imperial units and often didn't even have the capability to switch.<p>I just toured a nice mid sized shop recently. Almost all the equipment in the building was dual unit capable, with a nice mix of units seen in the drawings and data on the shop floor. Some older machines were running new, reasonably advanced controllers too. (Yes, I looked some of that over out of interest as I will be sending that shop some work in Metric.)<p>The company I manage has just started it's first couple of Metric projects. Reason: comparability with robotics, where Metric dominates.<p>If you ask me, my hunch is that we will see a more significant incentive to switch formally when robotic automation has matured in the small to mid-sized manufacturing market, and the last of the old guard machines has gone past it's useful service life and is phased out.<p>This may be accelerated by new, small, lean, localized manufacturing coming on line about now. It's growing more practical to setup shop and serve niche ecosystems and still make money. This is a ripe target for new business, new machinery, and that's all very highly likely to at least support metric (SI) units.<p>All of the useful software is dual unit now. That has been a non issue for well over a decade. Legacy software can take forever to cycle out of manufacturing, and it's finally happening en-masse. Really old stuff, DOS and older, is almost never seen now, meaning the tools from the 90's is in aggressive phase out and with that, the last of the single unit software solutions goes out the door.<p>Until then, there will be more than enough inertia backing Imperial units.<p>Maybe 10, 20 years at the earliest? We might be able to take a step, like preferred units, depending on how we want to handle our huge Imperial unit based legacy.<p>All that said, if we want a jobs program, just pass a mandate and fund the crap out it. We will pay hard for a decade, but we will have largely switched too. I don't see that happening, though it would be good for us to do, largely because we will carve out lots of stuff for cost reasons, and we will do that, because investment spending is poorly differentiated from other kinds of spending in the US right now, taking meaningful legislation and the funding needed for it off the table hard. A well thought out plan has the potential for real economic stimulus as well as some gains in terms of overall manufacturing capacity and efficiency. From a pure competitive standpoint, this kind of investment could be a great idea.<p>Barring some real change in how we think about spending overall (fat chance!), ongoing and incremental industry improvement driven by global network effects will nudge us there, bit by bit.<p>Good as it gets right now kids. |
Ask HN: I'm a dull person since software doesn't excite me anymore. What to do? | Now I'm humming that Father John Misty song that goes "people are boring, but you're something else completely..."<p>This isn't much of a cheer up but lots of people are dull in this sense. Maybe they've worked at the DMV for 40 years. Or they've been dealing with local politics all their life. Maybe they have a hobby but in all likelihood that's boring, too—tell me more about your ski trip or your pottery...<p>In first person, skiing is awesome, but it's useless for being an "interesting person." Some people are interesting from a varied life experience, and some people bore everyone to death with their fascinating anecdotes. There are other factors and the focus on having "wasted one's life" is, I think, a red herring.<p>Because the real problem doesn't seem to be how to be interesting but how to be <i>interested</i>. If you're moderately burned out then your capacity for interest fades. Enjoyment becomes less enjoyable.<p>I sometimes watch a video with the psychotherapist Adam Phillips who talks about the need to find one's appetite. It's a good notion because it's counter to the quasi-Buddhist ideal of non-desire that's floating around, and it's also not just telling you to "enjoy" yourself in the obvious ways—but to really locate your appetite as if you don't really know where it is or how it works.<p>I would suggest that boredom with software can be a useful attitude. The proliferation of infrastructural complexity doesn't benefit end users, and for any given purpose there is value in minimizing the amount of necessary software to achieve it. Code is technical debt; that's why everyone loves to remove lines of it.<p>So your incentive as an engineer who sees software as a burden is in many ways aligned with good business. This might make you curious about ways to simplify and write less code. That's a huge topic and the focus of some of the smartest people in the field. Maybe it's even the primary topic of computer engineering.<p>Townes van Zandt sang "life's mostly wasting time," but I'd say it's mostly dealing with bullshit and problems. Work is like this: something is messed up and you need to fix it. There may be a grander vision motivating your work, but there will always be days when that's far off and you're just down in the muck with your hands dirty from CORBA stack traces and horrible complicated "logic" (to use the industry euphemism for the growing accumulations of special cases and workarounds). At this point it's good to have a repertoire of attitudes that includes the role of a technician who puts on her gloves and jacket and goes down into the mess holding her breath.<p>Then there are two more things.<p>The first is the real possibility that your current place of employment is not a good fit. Maybe you would be more engaged at an early startup, or more inspired somewhere with a more diverse staff, or you might need different terms like Wednesdays off, half time telecommute, or whatever other arrangement. I don't know and it might take experimentation. If your boss is sympathetic, hopefully you can work something out, or you can find another place.<p>The other thing is mental health broadly speaking. Lots of people in IT have "issues" and you can find dozens of courageous conference talks with personal stories of mental unwellness. Working people in general for obvious reasons can become dissatisfied with life, especially those whose job involve sitting still at the same desk every day—dealing with broken shit.<p>The state of affairs societally is obviously broken, and hopefully the next few years will have more recognition of this—talk of reduced hours and even basic income schemes are becoming normalized and viable. Still, political shifts notwithstanding, you need to take real measures in your life to combat the tendencies toward overwork, overdistraction, and the spiral of boredom.<p>It's a spiral because it involves feedback loops that demand either strong effort or clever judo to escape. There are bootstrapping problems involved when your problem is that you don't want to do stuff. Malignant problems exacerbate themselves: lack of interest leads to fear of dullness leads to nonactivity.<p>For all of this last point my primary advice is to talk to a professional in mental health. This is what they do. In some cases they might recommend a medicinal method of bootstrapping, if you're okay with that and if you need it. But they also work with things like thought patterns and general counselling. Experienced therapists will have talked to hundreds of people with similar problems.<p>Secondarily, while I sympathize and recognize your situation, I'll respectfully disagree that lack of hobbies makes a person dull. For an obvious contraindicator, this thread itself shows that you have questions to ask that people find relevant. Mental content isn't everything. As a human you're endowed with the capacities of consciousness that we all share and that's the basis for curiosity, not some amount of learned facts or skills.<p>I mean, you don't need anyone's permission to start traveling, and all travelers start from this state of ignorance, yet their basic human receptiveness makes them capable of curiosity, and that makes them "interesting" as travelers.<p>If you're not clinically depressed, if you can wake up in a hostel room and after a cup of coffee feel basically alright, you can go out in any foreign city and look around. You don't need to be knowledgable about architecture or politics, but if you're in Bangkok and see the king on billboards everywhere you'll get curious and sooner or later you've learned about the history of Thai monarchism, maybe even read <i>The King Never Smiles</i>, and then when Southeast Asia comes up, you're suddenly the guy with the interesting knowledge, and all you had to do was follow your natural curiosity.<p>I've saved this for last but consider meditation—in the very simple sense of sitting down quietly in the morning or evening, maybe with a cup of tea or something. It's all dressed in flowery metaphysics and people get excited about it but it's such a simple thing, to sit quietly. I don't keep up with the science, but I don't need statistical surveys to know that sitting quietly now and then is good for me. It's obvious. It can feel excruciating when you're mind is racing and you're bored or full of self-loathing or whatever, but beneath all that thinking activity you're strengthening a deeper capacity—and after 15 minutes, you have a new perspective, bad moods can dissipate, anxious thoughts dispersed, like Adam on the first morning (as Whitman wrote).<p>I'm way far into pretentious zone with meditation and Walt Whitman but whatever. Best wishes. |
Show HN: Fisherman – Plugin manager and CLI toolkit for fish shell | So, to answer the most important question, WHY do I want this thing?<p>Long wall of text ahead, but I promise this covers a lot.<p>---<p>If you are only using fish, you are missing out the ability to effectively share plugins, prompts, configs, missing completions, documentation for external utilities, plain old scripts or bundle of scripts.<p>If you are using Oh My Fish (OMF) / Wahoo or Tacklebox, you may be already doing some of the above, just very poorly.<p>---<p><i></i><i>So</i><i></i>, I want to create shell scripts, snippets or let's call them utilities that follow the [UNIX guidelines](<a href="http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap12.html" rel="nofollow">http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_...</a>) for option parsing, fish auto-completion out of the box, with bundled documentation using the traditional `man(1)` pages like a boss, and I want my scripts to come not only in the form of `.fish` files, but I want to ship them bundled with scripts in other languages too sometimes, maybe Awk or Perl, or if you are cool, Python. Then I want to commit that to a GitHub repository, or as a Gist, or to BitBucket, GitLabs or my own server if I want.<p>---<p>Fisherman makes this process very easy and it also gives me access to an external ["index"](<a href="https://github.com/fisherman/fisher-index" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/fisherman/fisher-index</a>) to where I can publish these utilities, let's better call them now <i></i>plugins<i></i> so that others can discover my stuff without having to know the URL in advance.<p>Fisherman is not like, say `brew` where you typically share one or more binaries, that's a true package manager indeed.<p>---<p>Fisherman, however, is about sharing snippets, prompts, configurations, initialization scripts, like I said above, that kind of stuff. In the Fisherman jargon, I am rolling all that into a bun and calling it "plugin".<p>---<p>To Fisherman they are all the same, they <i></i>should<i></i> be, and if that's not the case your "framework", "manager", whatever, is not doing you any service.<p>---<p>There are several different setups that Fisherman understands and can process. Why? Because there are already existing snippets and plugins with their own idiosyncrasies. The same ones I mentioned above. Also people creating stuff in fish and releasing it without a particular "framework" in mind.<p>---<p>Fisherman recognizes packages from all of those dimensions and lets you install them and use them as you wish. Without strange restrictions that these other "frameworks" often pose on you, like strange name conventions or strict URL forms. It _will even__ try to guess the URL and correct your mistakes sometimes.<p>---<p>You can also "install" stuff locally and it will symlink a directory to Fisherman's configuration directory so that you can develop, test and iterate :repeat: fast and without having to do anything but `(1)` creating a directory and `(2)` typing `fisher install .` or `fisher install <my_path>`. You can commit your changes to a Git repo and that will not affect the process. It just works™.<p>---<p>But also you get a builtin (obviously it's builtin) <i></i>cache system<i></i> to let you install stuff while you are offline (assuming you already downloaded the _stuff_ first) and that segues into Fisherman's simplest, but IMO best feature, the <i></i><i>flat tree</i><i></i> :evergreen_tree:.<p>Here is the thing, Fisherman is as fast as <i></i><i>no</i>* Fisherman.<p>The [initialization script](<a href="https://github.com/fisherman/fisherman/blob/master/config.fish" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/fisherman/fisherman/blob/master/config.fi...</a>) basically declares a few variables and evaluates only config files that <i></i>you<i></i> allow Fisherman to evaluate. Period.<p>---<p>On the other hand, legacy OMF and modern OMF, Wahoo and Tacklebox mutate a variable to add / remove paths as you install / uninstall plugins. This is slower than loading all your functions into a single directory and telling fish to load only that.<p>---<p>But wait, you say, a flat tree means every function will be public and there ought to be name collisions and what not. Well, that's how it has always been. If you were under the impression there was such thing as private function scope, I am sorry, there isn't.<p>* <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25088699/make-fish-functions-private" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25088699/make-fish-functi...</a><p>* <a href="https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/1799" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/1799</a><p>---<p>This is a "deficiency" (or feature maybe?) of the language and there is no way around the implications of this. You create a function and then remove it from the scope, but that does not change the fact _that function_ will replace any other function with the same name.<p>---<p>Now, you can always add prefixes to your functions or use underscores at the beginning of the function name like most folks do anyway. So, by using an underscore you express your intention to mark this function as private, but it's just as "public" as any other.<p>Well, if fish has no private function scope, then it makes sense to use a flat tree for speed.<p>---<p>In the case of OMF and admitedly Wahoo too, things are even worse :sweat_smile: because these two boys use fish [_event handlers_](<a href="http://fishshell.com/docs/current/commands.html#emit" rel="nofollow">http://fishshell.com/docs/current/commands.html#emit</a>) during their initialization process, and since fish <i></i><i>does not</i>* automatically load files with events (there is just no convention for this ATM), they need to source <i></i>every single<i></i> `.fish` file inside <i></i>each<i></i> plugin's directory and inmediately `emit EVENT_NAME` adding yet another step in the process.<p>---<p>Events are great for communicating between different components / areas in a complex application, and I originally thought of using them in Fisherman despite the (arguably small) performance overhead, but desisted when I realized whatever happens inside an event handler, does not leak. They are essentially black holes and useless if you want to parse any output generated inside the handler / function.<p>---<p>One of Fisherman features is UNIX stinkiness. I don't think the UNIX philosophy (whatever that was) is a creed unbreakble doctrine, but I like to write my functions and utilities so that they can be plug / plumb into one another easily. That's why everything is a "stream" and all the commands Fisherman ships with read the standard input and do what you would expect if you are already familiar in how UNIX typically works. This is one of the principles I based while writing this, so it's everywhere. It's also [here](<a href="https://github.com/bucaran/getopts" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bucaran/getopts</a>). That is used in Fisherman to make sophisticated CLI apps. It's written in sed/awk and it's <i></i>really<i></i> fast.<p>---<p>This is not even close to all Fisherman has to offer. There other cool things like the [search](<a href="https://github.com/fisherman/fisherman/wiki#search-point_left" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/fisherman/fisherman/wiki#search-point_lef...</a>) command that parses the index file and lets you query plugins like you would expect from any modern tool. In OMF/Wahoo (Tacklebox has nothing) you only get a name.<p>---<p>In Fisherman every plugin gets a well deserved `name`, `url`, `description`, any number of `tags` and an `author`'s name. Makes sense.<p>---<p>And if you install a plugin from an "unknown" URL (one not in [fisher-index](<a href="https://github.com/fisherman/fisher-index/blob/master/INDEX" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/fisherman/fisher-index/blob/master/INDEX</a>), Fisherman will complete the information the best it can querying the Git repository, exhausting all the possibilities, so there's always data. It even looks at the URL itself and tries to guess stuff.<p>---<p>This "index" thing, is just a plain text flat database written in a human readable format. One cool thing is, the index is <i></i>always<i></i> kept up to date, unlike in OMF where you need to update in order to learn about the new goods. So, you don't have to update <i></i>the entire<i></i> application just to see what new packages are available, you are always querying the latest index.<p>---<p>A few other features that to mind is Fishfiles (dependency manifest file) that allows plugins to declare dependencies to other plugins and keep track of what plugins you have installed or not in your system.<p>---<p>BTW, OMF uses a more naive, but still similar, `bundle` file. Fisherman recognizes this and works with it too. No questions asked :+1:<p>---<p>Finally, the bundled <i></i>help<i></i> is phenomenal. Everything ships in glorious `man(1)` pages. You are not alone. Every single feature is thoroughly documented like it should be and now the Wiki is also pretty nice with the screencasts for each command. |
Ask HN: What is your company's on-call rotation like? | Hi,<p>My company does 24/7 devops for some clientele. We are a team of 6 for reference. We have been doing this for many years since before "devops" was the term for it. Some of the platforms we have also built for these clients, and some we simply manage, or we have only built+manage the automation.<p>In terms of answering your question:<p>- expected duties. In terms of what we are selling the client there is a long specific list of what exactly we can provide the client. In practice however the list is exhausting, and intended 1/2 for CYA, and we will fix whatever issues arise. Some of that is seeing things that need work/adjustment/tuning/optimizing before problems arise, and then as you can imagine the whole being-on-call thing means that you must be an expert at resolving issues that no one saw coming. In terms of SLA stuff, we are supposed to be on-scene (digitally) in 15 minutes, but we are never that slow.<p>- how deep. Think of it in phases. When something needs fixing, you must quantify the urgency. If there is an urgent fix needed this is ground zero. You do whatever you can, if that involves waking people up, or checking out code bases that are new to you and patching some developers code in the middle of the night, its all on the table. In ground zero mode, you do whatever it takes. Once the bandaid/fix/solution is in place to "stop the bleeding" as I like to say, then there is follow ups, that may include working with the client to have them implement the elegant permanent fix, or if they are in over their head, sometimes that lands on us too. But it serves no-one to have a bandaid that is going to just get ripped off every night. So we see the problem from A-Z, even if our offramp is on B, or M. If it's not urgent, we will just wait for tomorrow to discuss with the client, it falls out of the scope of on-call.<p>- priority. Well, on-call work is billed and agreed different to ticket work since we are primarily a consulting company. So these are different buckets. But we also have our own products that we own 100%, and the priority is quite easy. If something is broken/down/about-to-break, it trumps everything else. Regular tickets are great, but they are meaningless if the platform for which your developing them against can't stay functional. On-call work rarely has a "queue" or even really a ticket system.<p>- there is no "complete in time" it's either done or you failed. I say this, having failed too, and it sucks, but it is what it is. If something breaks, and you can't fix it, you don't just go home. But.. sometimes you do, but you walk away from the scene with your tail in-between your legs, no one plans for that.<p>- managing other teams risk. Communication. Putting energy in ahead of time, and bringing things up before they break is huge. Also if you say "Hey you should turn left, there is a cliff!", and the client is insistent on turning right, this can do two things. A - they know and hopefully its recorded in an email or in a meeting that you wanted to turn left. B - if your absolutely certain they are going to run over a cliff, but your still on the line / have to support the darn thing anyway, you can quietly put a bunch of pillows at the bottom of the ravine, and prepare for the inevitable. When the car goes over the cliff, and everything almost grinds to a halt, and you manage to have been correct about it, but also managed to bail them out, you score a lot of gratitude from the client, and ongoing future relations.<p>This is all from the point of "consulting" mostly, but I have done this same type of work for many large companies directly on their payroll too, it all applies, and the bigger the company the more it's like consulting in some way also, because bigger companies are more compartmentalized. I have also done this in many small startups where your all just one small team.<p>Holidays and vacations are important, but they will never truly be the same after years of this. We are pretty good at it now, and we really do try to keep everyone up to speed with where "the bodies are buried" with all of our clients infrastructure. That is the hardest part. Everyone can look at a perfectly groomed wiki or set of 100% refined chef/puppet cookbooks/modules, but the world isn't perfect. So the hard part is learning how to take the punches with elegance, and people need a break. It really does take at least 3-4 people to have a not-insane 24/7 schedule.<p>We generally plan about 1-3 weeks ahead depending on the time of year and put it into our scheduling system, which is also the system that does our paging. We rotate weekends, and work it out amongst ourselves. Some people have things like date nights that we know about and try hard to not screw up.<p>Don't build your pager system yourself, you have enough stuff to do. I won't plug them because I don't want this to sound like an advert, but do yourself a favor and pay the money to a company that specializes in bubbling up alerts to notifications that can do phone/sms/email/ios/android/push/etc. These have really helped us manage the insanity & schedule.<p>If there is any advice, simply don't be frightened to say when you don't know something, even if your tasked with fixing it. There is little room for ego when your the one that ultimately has to be responsible. Being on call means you can't pass the buck, and the sooner you know what you don't know, the sooner you're able to learn it!<p>Edit: Typos |
There are no secure smartphones | That's right. Focus on the baseband is kind of the new fad in mainstream ITSEC. These problems are long-known in high-assurance as the cert requires <i>all things that can compute, store, or do I/O</i> to be assessed. The reason is that, historically, these were all where attacks came in. I'm pretty tired but I can do at least a few points here.<p>1. Software. The phones run complex, low-assurance software in unsafe language and inherently-insecure architecture. A stream of attacks and leaks came out of these. The model for high-assurance was either physical separation with trusted chip mediating or separation kernels + user-mode virtualization of Android, etc so security-critical stuff ran outside that. There was strong mediation of inter-partition communications.<p>2. Firmware of any chip in the system, esp boot firmware. These were privileged, often thrown together even more, and might survive reinstall of other components.<p>3. Baseband standards. Security engineer Clive Robinson detailed many times of Schneier's blog the long history between intelligence services (mainly British) and carriers, with the former wielding influence on standards. Some aspects of cellular stacks were straight designed to facilitate their activities. On top of that, the baseband would have to be certified against such requirements and this allowed extra leverage given lost sales if no certification.<p>4. Baseband software. This is the one you hear about most. They hack baseband software, then hack your phone with it.<p>5. Baseband hardware. One can disguise a flaw here as debugging stuff left over or whatever. Additionally, baseband has RF capabilities that we predicted could be used in TEMPEST-style attacks on other chips. Not sure if that has happened yet.<p>6. Main SOC is complex without much security. It might be subverted or attacked. With subversion, it might just be a low-quality counterfeit. Additionally, MMU or IOMMU might fail due to errata. Old MULTICS evaluation showed sometimes one can just keep accessing stuff all day waiting for a logic or timing-related failure to allow access. They got in. More complex stuff might have similar weaknesses. I know Intel does and fights efforts to get specifics.<p>7. Mixed-signal design ends up in a lot of modern stuff, including mobile SOC's. Another hardware guru that taught me ASIC issues said he'd split his security functions (or trade secrets) between digital and analog so the analog effects were critical for operation. Slowed reverse engineering because their digital customers didn't even see the analog circuits with digital tools nor could understand them. He regularly encountered malicious or at least deceptive behavior in 3rd party I.P. that similarly used mixed-signal tricks. I've speculated before on putting a backdoor in the analog circuits modulating the power that enhances power analysis attacks. Lots of potential for mixed-signal attacks that are little explored.<p>8. Peripheral hardware is subverted, counterfeit, or has similar problems as above. Look at a smartphone breakdown sometime to be amazed at how many chips are in it. Analog circuitry and RF schemes as well.<p>9. EMSEC. The phone itself is often an antenna from my understanding. There's passive and active EMSEC attacks that can extract keys, etc. Now, you might say "Might as well record audio if they're that close." Nah, they get the master secret and they have everything in many designs. EMSEC issues here were serious in the past: old STU-III's were considered compromised (master leaked) if certain cellphones got within like 20 ft of them because cell signals forced secrets to leak. Can't know how much of this problem has gotten better or worse with modern designs.<p>10. Remote update. If your stack supports it, then this is an obvious attack vector if carrier is malicious or compelled to be.<p>11. Apps themselves if store review, permission model, and/or architecture is weak. Debatable how so except for architecture: definitely weak. Again, better designs in niche markets used separation kernels with apps split between untrusted stuff (incl GUI) in OS and security part outside OS. Would require extra infrastructure and tooling for mainstream stuff, though, plus adoption by providers. I'm not really seeing either in mainstream providers. ;)<p>That's just off the top of my head from prior work trying to secure mobile or in hardware. My mobile solution, developed quite some time ago, fit in a suitcase due to the physical separation and interface requirements. My last attempt to put it in a phone still needed a trusted keyboard & enough chips that I designed (not implemented) it based on Nokia 9000 Communicator. Something w/ modern functions, form-factor, <i>and</i> deals with above? Good luck...<p>All smartphones are insecure. Even the secure ones. I've seen good ideas and proposals but no secure[ish] design is implemented outside <i>maybe</i> Type 1 stuff like Sectera Edge. Even it cheats that I can tell with physical separation and robust firmware. It's also huge thanks to EMSEC & milspec. A secure phone will look more like that or the Nokia. You see a slim little Blackphone, iPhone, or whatever offered to you? Point at a random stranger and suggest they might be the sucker the sales rep was looking for.<p>Don't trust any of them. Ditch your mobile or make sure battery is removable. Don't have anything mobile-enabled in your PC. Just avoid wireless in general unless its infrared. Even then it needs to be off by default. |
Apple May Be Using Congo Cobalt Mined by Children, Amnesty Says | Sigh.
Why are people even surprised? This won't change and can't change until we stop yelling "think of the children!" and only demanding for the suppliers to do a better job.<p>Yes some suppliers might be able to do a better job but many cases they also simply can't it's just the nature of doing business with under-developed countries.<p>Similar processes like the Kimberly process that was supposed to stop the trade in conflict diamonds have utterly failed and this is an industry that is built around artificial scarcity which just was dying for an excuse to further limit the production of diamonds to jack up the price.<p>There is very little any supplier can do to actually address this problem, this isn't some large scale mining operation that uses children this is for the most part unofficial mining.
Unofficial mining (AKA the official past time of small scale African warlords) is pretty much a bunch of people taking over abandoned mining sites, dump sites for mining waste, sites that were deemed to be uneconomical to develop or just being down stream from the actual mine.<p>While it's true that these sites are often taken over by some gang of former child soldiers and their master (we all liked Beasts of No Nation) more often than not these days unofficial mining is conducted by communities, villages, and individuals who do not hold any one at gun point.<p>These unofficial mining operations do not produce any substantial amount of note (individually, however there could be 1000's of small scale mining operations vs only a handful of large scale official ones which means that anywhere between 10-50% of a given product might be mined unofficially) but they do produce enough to say feed a village (or to buy the wanna be warlord a BMW from the 80's even diamonds are sold for not even cents on the dollar, every 1$ in uncut stones that ends up in the hands of the miner is inflated to 1000 to 10000 by the time it ends up at tiffany's).<p>Those unofficial mining operations are getting mixed with what the big actual mining operation produce and end up in the supply chain, this can happen at so many points that there is no way to enforce any process which will guarantee that the supply is clean of conflict, child labor or any other social decree.<p>Even if you take out the child labor part which while horrid is by far not the worse part that can happen to a child in Africa, the conditions in the official mining operations for registered adult miners are also appalling and so far beyond what most of us could even imagine human beings being able to withstand on a daily basis.<p>So instead of yelling that we should vote with our wallets until those supply chains will be clean we need to realize that they will never be clean as long as you are dealing with a region such as the Congo.
Instead of making another pointless process which will just going to be circumvented at all levels while jacking up the price for the end consumer (which every one in the supply chain, especially as it gets closer to the source will just pocket the difference).
Companies should put the money that consumers would end up paying into programs that might actually work and not into the endless pit of bribes that any certification process would turn out to be when facing the unmovable object which is reality.<p>Apple can switch a supplier and it will, but it won't find a clean one as no such supplier exists even if they'll find the most expensive one with the best intentions. Because the local population which runs these operations will always have the upper hand and as long as the conditions exist that make it more likely for children to end up digging up rare earths for your smartphone or diamonds for your tennis bracelet this won't change.<p>I hope the day would come where a company like Apple could be brave enough to come out and say look we can't buy Cobalt which wasn't mined by kids, but we made a calculation that if we could it would be 17% more expensive so we are jacking our own prices by 17% and transferring the difference to X Y and Z in hopes that in 20 years we could buy Cobalt which was not only not mined by children but also mined by miners with life expectancy which is longer than our yearly product cycle.<p>But as long as people would keep on yelling boycott this and boycott that it will never happen and the only thing Apple can do is to continue to play the pass the hot potato game with it's suppliers (which will continue to restructure and change names to be put back into that list) and maybe have Tim Cook do an apologetic we are the world cover... |
Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity | Am I the only one who has trouble with touch interfaces in general? Ever since my burnout I developed tremors in my fingers (I'm only 35) they got less but I don't expect them to ever completely disappear.<p>When I got my first smartphone, a Galaxy S4, which is nearly all-touchscreen to the edges and only 8mm thick, I found them absolute <i>hell</i> to use. Despite that I love the elegance of <i>idea</i> of touch-interfaces. If it's on, I must hold it by the 8mm sides to not press all sorts of things, which is very hard to keep steady. Meaning I can't do two-thumb-typing, or take sharp pictures, having to steady it against/in my hand I press the power button by accident, it just sucks. Many things take longer and it's not cool to be confronted with every few minutes.<p>Three-finger touch gestures are going to be awful for who who can't reliably bring three fingers down on the touchpad at the same time or can't quite rest their hand ready for that. Either the OS will occasionally register a bunch of one- and two-finger events before all three hit, or the OS will have to wait and analyse what's the intent and incur latency--at which point you're no longer doing <i>anyone</i> a favour, not the young dexterous power users, nor the twitchy and the elderly.<p>A lot of people ITT praise this guy's "design" skills, but I'm not entirely clear what particular field of design? His graphics design skills are pretty okay (not my taste but it looks good), but his user interface/interaction design skills ... I can't even judge because he doesn't display them?<p>All he writes about, even on the "Design Process" page is basically graphics design, mockups and daydreaming. This is what people in the industry call, <i>a cute hobby</i>. Where are the user tests? Where's the stories? Videos? Theory?<p>How do children ages 9-11 work with that (long) menu list that supposedly "is easily scannable"? (answer: they don't)<p>How do the elderly feel about three-finger touch gestures? (probably not very sexy)<p>What about when the menu list is translated to other languages? Doubt that even crossed his mind. But try it out, an exercise: An application with big menus that you are very familiar with (for me GIMP, but otherwise perhaps LibreOffice, or whatever). Switch the interface from English to a second language you speak well, even/especially if that language is your mother tongue. What happened to "easily scannable"?<p>Now switch the interface to a script you can't even read, Persian or Cyrillic. If you can still somewhat blindly perform some tasks and relatively easily find your way to switch back, the interface is doing pretty good. I have a fun Xposed plugin for Cyanogenmod called "HODOR", which hooks into the OS and changes <i>all the words</i> everywhere to read "HODOR". It's hilarious. To switch back you need to start Xposed, browse two levels of menus and reboot your phone. There's only two points where I need to <i>guess</i> (memorize), which I think is not bad for Cyanogenmod's UX design. This is what the final reboot dialog looks like: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/Yjf4Gc0.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/Yjf4Gc0.jpg</a> (asking whether I want regular or soft reboot, recovery or download and to OK/Cancel).<p>On the Design Process page he says "during the creation of Neo, I put a big focus on research", but then all he shows is more daydreaming and mockups. Where <i>is</i> the research?<p>This is a neat portfolio for a graphics designer but as far as user interaction design goes, all I see is someone that doesn't take the field seriously.<p>Something that is slightly worrying in the general case (also for graphics designers), all the descriptions I see him <i>telling</i> how it should be from his point of view, nothing about other users, nothing about users that are not like him. I admit that's just my impression from reading these few pages. But that's exactly what a portfolio should provide.<p>No stories about him sitting down with at least 20 random (not self-selected) people interacting with his mockups (assuming they're interactive), doing tasks, taking notes and/or video, and documenting especially the failures and the changes they provoked. That means either he hasn't done actual research, or he deems it not important enough to write about on his portfolio (very unlikel,y given the troves of information it provides if you actually do it).<p>Even if he didn't test on other people, I'd expect the "Design Process" page to at least talk about, his design process. It's just screenshots of early iterations. "Early on I identified the three most important topics as navigation, file management and input"--cool, how did you do that? Intuition is not a process! In particular it's not a skill that someone at the start of their career can plausibly demonstrate (either you can clearly explain steps how you got there or you have a long history of intuitively being right about such things). |
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