Wow, the author must be a bit depressed or something. I don't even know where to start.
> If I’m going to cease to exist, it doesn’t matter what would be in a world without me.
Oh yeah, egoism at its best lol. If I die, why shouldn't everyone else?
> children make a human a slave of circumstances for at least 15 years. For what? For nothing, just because.
Okay... He is also realizing that children are not his "helper bots". I am assuming he is a he, because a women would never say these things... I don't know in what world you live in to think of children this way. Have you ever played with a child or seen it grow up? This is atrocious. Seriously man, get help or something, this almost borders on psychopath level of apathy.
> (Children, again) It’s like a new branch in a version control system, if you know what I mean.
Okay I am out. You really should get help. Definitely.
> So no, children are not our immortality. They are the best way to kill time (and eventually yourself).
Yep... Totally get it. Obviously children are not our immortality. Are they the best way to kill time? I mean if you are a robot, that's probably true.
> We’ve already superseded the evolution, so we don’t actually need it any more.
We are far away from that. Right now our gene pool is actively deteriorating because we managed to eliminate natural selection. And yet, we still can't live forever and we can't fix the common cold. Good luck to our species.
> The nature isn’t our friend. It’s our enemy.
Okay :D. Just dig yourself a concrete hole and live in there from bottles of Soylent and see what happens. There are tons of studies who show you how important a connection to nature is for the human body and mind, but well...
> The meaning of life is to keep on living.
Yeah, that's maybe the only thing I can agree with in this "text" or whatever it is. But it definitely doesn't follow from the brainfarts that came before.
I am now actually pitying the coworkers of this person and actually anybody he interacts with, if any.
Look, there is only one thing that differentiates humans from robots. It is that humans are nothing like you want to make them in your article. If humans were like you, I would wish this race would get replaced by actual robots asap, because at least then, there is an excuse for behaving the way you do.
> because we managed to eliminate natural selection.
Evolution is alive and well. Drunk driving for example kills young people. Disease similarly kills plenty of people to kick evolution into action. Suicide is tragic enough people don’t think of it as evolutionary pressure, but dead is dead.
Etc. Etc. It’s not as obvious as dealing with actual lions, but the developed world is well below the replacement rate. That’s some serious evolutionary pressure.
First what matters is the sum of all deaths by a specific age not deaths at a specific age.
Anyway, the average age of fathers in the US is 31. Men over the age of 40 make up 9% of all fathers. So, dying at 30 or even 40 is directly meaningful from an evolutionary standpoint. Further, losing parents is a significant issue.
Haha, same thought. I agree with the evolution bit though. But if all humans decide to not have children, machines are not smart enough to keep evolving themselves yet or in the near future.
> Oh yeah, egoism at its best lol. If I die, why shouldn't everyone else?
Why not consider it from an alternative, less demonizing perspective? The author might simply be pointing out the fact that no matter how nice the things that you'd leave behind you would be, you won't be around to experience them. Therefore, it would be in your interest to actually... you know, not die.
> Okay I am out. You really should get help. Definitely.
Perhaps the author doesn't convey his thoughts in the most reasonable manner, but having children is indeed a huge responsibility and one that will take both energy from the parents as well as a lot of resources over many years. Noone should be having children just because they feel like it, especially NOT just because they'd like to leave a legacy of some sort. As the author points out, those children will grow up to be their own people and you'll need to support them to the best of your abilities, regardless of how different their views and values could be from yours.
> Right now our gene pool is actively deteriorating because we managed to eliminate natural selection.
I'm not sure whether natural selection really has been made less significant, however this appears to be at least partially supported by the information that i could find: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr051.pdf
Based on the graphs in page 7, it appears that approx 85% of women reproduce and 76% of men do (at least up to 40 years of age), though there is more detail in the following pages. Would anyone care to comment with other sources that either support or disprove the claim that natural selection isn't a (big) factor nowadays? What about the deterioration of the gene pool?
> Okay :D. Just dig yourself a concrete hole and live in there from bottles of Soylent and see what happens. There are tons of studies who show you how important a connection to nature is for the human body and mind, but well...
I don't believe that the author expressed that this is the optimal way to go about things. Other people who also advocate for longetivity also seem to actually suggest that people should lead more active and healthy lifestyles, have better diets with elements of intermittent fasting/caloric restriction and so on. Even if we as a species cannot have immortality now, it is definitely worth to pursue enjoying our later years and remaining functional for longer, is it not? In that regard, nature is indeed our enemy if we don't look at what can affect us negatively (be it alcohol, smoking, sedentary lifestyle, bad diets, lack of sleep, or anything else)
> But it definitely doesn't follow from the brainfarts that came before.
It seemed to follow the previous statements pretty well - it is pretty important (at least from our subjective point of view) to remain alive and little if anything else can substitute that.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> The author might simply be pointing out the fact that no matter how nice the things that you'd leave behind you would be, you won't be around to experience them. Therefore, it would be in your interest to actually... you know, not die.
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle should probably be put the rest at this point. From the beginning it was more "capturing" our inability to move beyond the physics as we know it. It's like tying your shoe laces. I always found it fascinating how firmly most physicists believe in the equations someone came up with, just because it agree with measurements. I mean that's real nice and all, but just because something agrees with measurements, doesn't make it a fact. There are literally infinite ways to create equations that satisfy measurements. But sure, a few decades of research in the early 20th century and that's it. This is all we can do. Let's just accept that lol.
Our current models are only good until we find a better model that replaces them, one which can explain phenomena we observe , which the old model didn't.
So, yes, it's possible there is some physics "beyond" the one we know, and yes in order to go beyond what we know we have to consider the possibility that some of the stuff that lay at the foundation of the current physics is wrong (or, correct up to an approximation). And many working physicists are well aware of that fact and they do consider all the options on the table.
The problem is, you have to find something to replace it and it has to work.
Thinking about all crazy things is great. "Temporarily" throwing away some assumptions can be a productive thinking tool. The Heisenberg principle (like many other things) can be both something you want to keep and use as a foundation for other explorations, and it can be something you question. The field is made up of many people, not everybody should be working on the same thing on the same assumption; I think "putting ideas at rest at this point" should be relegated to old theories that have been fully superseded, and even then they can be still useful: even Newtonian mechanics can still be quite useful even if we know it falls short.
That's how all of physics is constructed. Even things you may think are obvious, like Newton's 3 laws of motion, are only accepted because they agree with our measurements. How else should we determine their validity?
> There are literally infinite ways to create equations that satisfy measurements.
There really aren't. You seem to be thinking of something like in the movie The Number 23. But we're talking about equations, not numbers. Take Newton's Second Law (f = m • a). What equation can you write that expresses that relationship that can't be simplified to f = m • a?
The uncertainty principles are inequalities, not equations. And that is something you can write with multiple forms.
As for equations, notice that many equations in Physics have a constant which turns a proportion to an equation. This is where you have leeway in constructing more or less arbitrary equations based on the variables you think are important enough to observe.
Coming to your example, Newton's f = ma equation is really f/m proportional to a. The units are chosen carefully to make the constant 1. This works under the assumption that mass is constant and acceleration is measured measured from a non accelerating frame of reference with non relativistic speeds. So, yes there are several other ways to write that equation.
Yeah this model sucks, unless they give you A LOT more of these options than they would give you RSUs. Then it could work out, if you believe in the company.
Cool, so whats the point here? These are not screenshots from developers. These are screenshots from a minimal possible subset that prove some contrived point. Nobody who wants to develop software productively would show you screenshots like this. Just because you can develop software successfully like this, doesn't mean its a good approach. The tooling has developed insanely since 2002, it's not even a competition. The dev tools in 2015 just are mind blowing compared to 2002. People who are not using them may still be able to code but it really doesn't prove anything.
> it can also be emotionally draining to reject candidate after candidate.
How so? I mean I can certainly see why interviewing is not for everyone, but this really never crossed my mind. It's not like you know the candidate. Also you want to keep a good standard in your company, don't you? So why would this ever matter to you.
Doing the right thing doesn't always make it easy. I've rejected candidates that I thought were awesome people, just not at the right level of expertise for the role. I really appreciate the enthusiasm that people just entering the industry have, but at some point you can't overcome the lack of experience with enthusiasm. Likewise when you do Zoom interviews with people who don't have awesome jobs currently, and think about what they could do with their lives if they made the kind of money the job pays.
It's emotionally draining because there might be a dozen reasons you want to hire someone, and you have to mentally debate whether any of those reasons can outweigh their faults enough to let you say yes. But they can't, so you have to smash that person's hopes and say no.
It's also emotionally draining to try to confront unconscious bias. You have to tediously step through each link of your decision to say no and make sure that it's consistent with how you treat other people. It's important to do, but it does take some mental effort.
And at a certain point, when you've rejected 5, 7, 10 candidates for the role, it starts to feel hopeless. Are we ever going to find someone to fill the role? And yet you can't let that hopelessness bleed into the interview, so you have to take 5 minutes before the interview to get into "pep mode" so you don't let the interviewee realize how bleak you feel about their prospects of passing, and then to make sure you don't your hopelessness seep into how you review the candidate.
It really is emotionally draining. Especially if you're doing it once or twice a week, because there isn't enough time to forget about your last experience.
I imagine this differs from person to person, and that some people would find rejecting people (especially person after person) to be draining.
You're trying to hire because you want to find someone to help you and you're hoping this next person will be the one to be that help. The person looking for a job obviously wants to find a job that will work well for them, and especially during this pandemic it's entirely possible that the stakes are higher for them than normal (do they currently have a job? Are they moving out of fear of their job going away? etc).
I think that it's entirely possible that someone would find it stressful to reject a stream of applicants - repeatedly telling a series of people, to their faces, knowing that they're people and not just faceless applicants, that it's not going to work out might very well be stressful to some people.
I think that's just the key reason why interviewing isn't for everyone. It's hard for me to emotionally step back from a candidate without zoning out entirely and delivering a bad interview experience.
Why do you have to diminish your otherwise good comment by advocating for something that is clearly just your own belief? There is nothing special about a whole foods plant based diet, except that it is like infinitely more healthy than the standard American "diet" (or you could also call it "slow and painful way to die").
The problem is that vegan or vegetarian diets will scare away many people for no good reason.
But yeah in general I agree. It's pretty amusing how the HN crowd talks about measuring and temporary fixes like "intermittent fasting" but not at all about actually ending the poisoning by food... Yeah sure, you can do all sorts of stuff to prolong your life while stuffing yourself with poison. However the most effective way is still not to eat the god damn poison in the first place. But hey, then there would also be no engineering problem to solve and no products to sell, right?
> FLoC is an engineering solution to a political problem.
Yes.
> the problem with targeted advertising is the targeting
Is it? The problem with advertisement is the advertisement. I don't like to see ads at all, but one thing I know for sure, I'd take targeted ads at all time over random ads.
> People don't like seeing their web history funnel into their advertising.
No. This is the problem YOU have with it. Most of the non-tech people I know have no idea what you are even talking about.
I don't think the choice is between personally targeted ads and random ads though. There are middle options.
For example, if I search for "how to do a Subaru oil change" it's the perfect opportunity for the search engine to show me ads related to motor oil, Subarus, car maintenance videos, etc... If I opt in to sharing my location with the search engine they could also show me ads from local repair shops and car dealers.
Later on when I'm reading an article about dog training, I don't want to see ads about fixing my car, show me ads related to dogs. Use the context of the page for targeting.
Sure, search does really well for contextual because there is lots of intent. But most other contextual is not like that: people aren't looking to buy something.
Your normal usage isn't dog training or subaru oil changes. It's idle nonsense like whether Kim Kardashian is angry with Courtney Cox or whatever. There's not enough to sell you that's contextual. People have an idealized vision of what they spend time on. It's nothing like this productive stuff you're talking about.
Not to be annoying, but advertising is serious money. If you think you can do good contextual advertising you will become rich very easily. Anyone will. It's hard for me to believe that no one is doing this supposedly easy and effective thing well since all the incentives are there.
Sure, but there are a lot of ethical problems with them.
Imagine starting a service that paired individual shoppers with a passive handler to follow them around a shopping mall to build dossiers including:
* everything they pick up and look at
* what they eat in the food court
* the clothing styles and sizes they try on
* what their transportation to the mall was
* their race, gender, age, and apparent ethnicity
* etc...
It doesn't sound like that at all. It's more like the shopping center hires people to follow you around and write down all this info about you while you shop, whether you want them to or not.
Can we really be sure that current user-targetet advertising is better than contextual advertising? It seems to me that nobody wants to step out of the safe model of targeted advertising, since it does work well enough, and so there haven't been big enough attempts at contextual advertising to really say one approach is better.
As an anecdotal test, I went to cnx-software.com and disabled my adblocker. The site has roughly 13 ads, 3 served by Google, the rest custom. Google tried to sell me toothpaste, while the custom ads are for things I'm actually tangentially interested in, like SoMs, embedded devices and assembly services. This kind of advertising obviously has a large overhead for the site admins right now, but I could definitely imagine an AdSense-like service that would distribute ads based on processing the site's contents.
Yes we can be sure, especially because user-targeting includes contextual signals. Google and Facebook are two of the most valuable companies on the planet because they have the science of ad targeting completely figured out.
That's like arguing heading to Alaska to prospect for gold in 1899 was a great idea because the companies selling picks and shovels in Seattle were making bank.
No. Those companies were making bank selling picks and shovels because picks and shovels are great for digging for gold, regardless of whether you actually find any.
Tired analogies and ridiculous strawman arguments aside, Facebook and Google are valuable because they have a valuable product in their advertising technology. What and how you use it is an entirely different issue.
Sometimes…sometimes not. I'm sure you've seen the blogspam articles that tell you how to fix whatever problem you're having with your computer and the first step is to download their product to do a "scan".
Aren't ads always about giving one competitor an advantage regardless of any objective benefits for the consumer? (With the exception of PSAs and the like.)
My wife buys diapers online, then ads for diapers show up on my computer.
I go shopping for underwear on one device, and then when reading a technical forum with co-workers on a different device, there's ads with people just wearing underwear.
I assume it's already been written but I've said and I'll say again that the 1984 of the future will be set in or around some kind of algorithmic dystopia. I'm specifically thinking a corporate one although China...
But the problem is we are not getting targeted ads. We are getting semi-targeted ads.
If someone is paying 10 usd for conversion and you have chance to convert 1%, another one has 90% chance to convert but paying lets say 0.10 usd, even if you have 90 times better ad, ad network will show you the 1% one.
Privacy advocates need an excuse to advocate for privacy and impose more regulations for the Common Good.
Then we end up with crap like the cookie banner - which completely ruined the internet for me.
There is not a day I don't have to close one of those and browser extensions to block them are nowhere as good as blocking ads. Not to mention, accepting all the cookies is one click, while rejecting them either require 1 minute of thinking or browsing through popups and menus.
The fact that 99% of the people don't care is over their head.
If people cared they would be using duckduckgo.
Funnily enough, I use duckduckgo and I think it's a great Google replacement - but I don't care about being tracked, I just appreciate the features (especially code snippets in search)
>I'd take targeted ads at all time over random ads.
Why?
It's not the content you want and the fundamental idea behind targeted ads is precise manipulation of people's behavior which is an extremely dangerous thing to have at scale.
I second that. It's not only that you make yourself completely intertwined with a Cloud by using more than fundamental services.
The costs of lambda or even DDB are IMMENSE. These only pay off for services that have a high return per request. I.e. if you get a lot of value out of lambda calls, sure, use them. But for anything high-frequency that earns you little to nothing on its own, forget about it.
Generally all your critical infrastructure should be Cloud independent. That narrows your choices largely to EC2, SQS, perhaps Kinesis, Rout53, and the like. And even there you should implement all your features with two clouds, i.e. Azure and AWS, just to be sure.
The good news is also the bad news. There are effectively only two options: Azure or AWS. Google Cloud is a joke. They arbitrary change their prices, terminate existing products, offer zero support. It's just like we have come to love Google. They just don't give a shit about customers. Google only cares about "architecture", i.e. how cool do I feel as engineer having built that service. Customer service is something that Google doesn't seem to understand. So think carefully if you want to buy into their "product". Google, literally, only develops products for their own benefit.
A very long time ago
App engine went out of beta and there was a price hike leaving many scrambling. App engine was in beta so long that many people didn’t think that label meant anything.
Google Cloud has quite good support and professional services.
I’ve worked with them for 3 years and can’t think of any services that have been killed.
They are very customer focused. From my perspective as a partner cloud services are more built for customer use cases than Google internal use cases. GKE and Anthos for example.
The optionality of being cloud agnostic comes with a huge cost, both because of all the pieces you have to build+operate and because of the functionality you have to exclude from your systems.
I am sure there are scales where you either have such a large engineering budget that you can ignore these costs or where decreasing your cloud spend is the only way to scale your business. But for the average company, I can't see how spending so much on infrastructure (and future optionality) pays off, especially when you could spend on product or marketing or anything else that has a more direct impact on your success.
> But for the average company, I can't see how spending so much on infrastructure (and future optionality) pays off, especially when you could spend on product or marketing or anything else that has a more direct impact on your success.
If you change "average company" to "average startup" then your point make sense. But for a normal company not everything needs to make a direct impact on your success. For example guaranteeing long term business continuity is an important factor too.
Unless you’re planning for the possibility of AWS dropping offline permanently with little to no notice, it really feels like you’re just paying a huge insurance premium. Like any insurance, it’s down to whether you need insurance or could cover the loss. Whether you’d rather incur a smaller ongoing cost to avoid the possibility of a large one time loss.
If AWS suddenly raised their prices 10x overnight, it would hurt but not be an existential threat for most companies. At that point they could invest six months or a year into migrating off of AWS.
Rough numbers that would end up costing us like $4m in cloud spend and staff if we retasked the entire org to accomplishing that for a year.
There’s certainly an opportunity cost as well, but I’d argue it’s not dissimilar to the opportunity cost we’d have been paying all along to maintain compatibility with multiple clouds.
Obviously it’s just conjecture, but my gut says the increased velocity of working on a single cloud and using existing Amazon services and tools where appropriate has made us significantly more than the costs of something that may never happen.
Plus I've seen more than a few efforts at multi-cloud that resulted in a strong dependency on all clouds vs the ability to switch between them. So not only do you not get to use cloud-specific services, you don't really get any benefit in terms of decoupling.
There are obviously plenty of companies that are willing to couple themselves to a single cloud vendor (e.g. Netflix with AWS) and plenty of business continuity risks that companies don't find cost effective to pursue. Has anyone been as vocal about decoupling from CRM or ERB systems as they are with cloud?
My own view is that these kinds of infrastructure projects create as many risks as the solve and happen at least as much because engineers like to solve these kinds of problems than for any other reason.
> The optionality of being cloud agnostic comes with a huge cost, both because of all the pieces you have to build+operate
This sounds like cloud vendor kool aid to me. Nearly every cloud vendor product above the infrastructure layer is a version of something that exists already in the world. When you outsource management of that to your cloud vendor you might lose 50% of the need to operationally manage that product but about 50% of it is irreducible. You still need internal competence in understanding that infrastructure and one way or another you're going to develop it over time. But if its your cloud vendor's proprietary stack then you are investing all your internal learning into non-transferrable skills instead of ones that can be generalised.
I can run PostgreSQL myself but there's a ton that goes into running it with redundancy, backup, encryption, etc that takes deep expertise to well. I know from experience that it's easy to get database failover wrong. I could probably cobble something together, but it would be mediocre and wouldn't handle network partitions reliably. On the other hand, RDS is used at a scale well beyond what I could afford to build out and has benefitted from much more usage. Problems that are low probability for me are regular events for RDS and have that experience built in.
Ultimately, you are paying a cloud vendor for service value and operational experience. Some services aren't as good as others in both regards, but for the ones that are good, the overhead of doing it yourself is an exponent, not a fraction.
To be honest, I would probably fit RDS more into the infrastructure layer than the application layer. I think there is value in having things at that level be managed.
Yup, seconded 100%. I started programming on my own when I was 7 years old with a learning computer for children that supported BASIC. Until I reached work-life, everything centered around exploring everything and digging deep into whatever was interesting...
Then work happened. Right now I just can't stand it anymore. My brain is rebelling against even coding. I am still really good at it and enjoy it, but I realize that I just lack the drive I had. Some people might say that's bad. IT IS NOT. I spent almost 25 years of my life filled with coding. I am done. I want to have other people code things for me and focus on building awesome products instead. This is what drives me now. I don't care about low-level anymore. I don't care about bugs or why this stupid dependency won't work in a deployed environment. I want to ship awesome things to customers and I keep realizing that this is at the core what always drove me. I never coded for the sake of coding. It was always to build something cool, except there was no one else around to do it for me.
This is a very familiar story for many engineering managers I know.
Tracking your time spent has nothing to do with productivity. It is simply data you may chose to act on or not.
If this person was out for optimizing income, tye6 would not have studied a PhD in the first place, because that's 6 years wasted, plus tuition on top of it.
You can your tracking to optimize for whatever variable you want to optimize. You could realize that you work too much and aim for working less. You could realize that you do social media too much and aim to do less of it, etc. It's up to you.
As for not making money. The world is, sadly highly biased towards rich people. If you are poor and happy (which is totally possible) you are still highly at risk that this state won't last. Without money, you are f*ed in this world. It's just the way it is. If you are dependent on income you are dependent on A LOT of things. The best you can generally do for your happiness is become income independent as fast as possible, which usually means to earn as much as possible as early as possible and then live from investments while focusing on everything that's not work.
> If I’m going to cease to exist, it doesn’t matter what would be in a world without me.
Oh yeah, egoism at its best lol. If I die, why shouldn't everyone else?
> children make a human a slave of circumstances for at least 15 years. For what? For nothing, just because.
Okay... He is also realizing that children are not his "helper bots". I am assuming he is a he, because a women would never say these things... I don't know in what world you live in to think of children this way. Have you ever played with a child or seen it grow up? This is atrocious. Seriously man, get help or something, this almost borders on psychopath level of apathy.
> (Children, again) It’s like a new branch in a version control system, if you know what I mean.
Okay I am out. You really should get help. Definitely.
> So no, children are not our immortality. They are the best way to kill time (and eventually yourself).
Yep... Totally get it. Obviously children are not our immortality. Are they the best way to kill time? I mean if you are a robot, that's probably true.
> We’ve already superseded the evolution, so we don’t actually need it any more.
We are far away from that. Right now our gene pool is actively deteriorating because we managed to eliminate natural selection. And yet, we still can't live forever and we can't fix the common cold. Good luck to our species.
> The nature isn’t our friend. It’s our enemy.
Okay :D. Just dig yourself a concrete hole and live in there from bottles of Soylent and see what happens. There are tons of studies who show you how important a connection to nature is for the human body and mind, but well...
> The meaning of life is to keep on living.
Yeah, that's maybe the only thing I can agree with in this "text" or whatever it is. But it definitely doesn't follow from the brainfarts that came before.
I am now actually pitying the coworkers of this person and actually anybody he interacts with, if any.
Look, there is only one thing that differentiates humans from robots. It is that humans are nothing like you want to make them in your article. If humans were like you, I would wish this race would get replaced by actual robots asap, because at least then, there is an excuse for behaving the way you do.