Grade inflation stepped up a notch during the Vietnam War, when professions were reluctant to fail students out of college an into the draft. Now it's done to protect a college's graduation rate, which affects rankings.
Elite Ivy League institutions admit bright, motivated high school graduates and produce bright, motivated college graduates. The institution's value add is mainly networking and branding--kind of like YC.
Transparent maintenance with live migration and automatic restart
At Google, we have found that regular maintenance of hardware and software infrastructure is critical to operating with a high level of reliability, security and performance. We’re introducing transparent maintenance that combines software and data center innovations with live migration technology to perform proactive maintenance while your virtual machines keep running. You now get all the benefits of regular updates and proactive maintenance without the downtime and reboots typically required. Furthermore, in the event of a failure, we automatically restart your VMs and get them back online in minutes. We’ve already rolled out this feature to our US zones, with others to follow in the coming months.
Loud jumbo mosquitoes constantly buzzing around my neighborhood, ruining my view and endangering my kids? I want 30 minute delivery, but not that badly. I can plan ahead and exercise patience, or use a bike messenger.
Heaven help us if Bitcoin becomes the world reserve currency without some central authority like the Fed controlling the money supply. Bad things would happen without counter cyclical fiscal policy.
I've seen a trend in HN where the comments from a previous story are cherry picked by a third party and turned into a blog post, which is then submitted to HN. It could be coincidence, but it looks like that's what happened here. The counter-argument is that great minds think alike.
To put it simply: software estimates are hard because nobody has made that particular bit software before. Why? Because software doesn't rust. There is little need to exactly duplicate software which has already been written. Thus, most software is charting unknown territory.
I think the issue is that 23andme has no rigorous data on what the false positive and negative rates are. Unless they can supply that it's snake oil. And I say that as a 23andme customer.
Elon repeatedly tries to misdirect from the issue at hand. Teslas do not catch fire more often than the average U.S. car. But that is not in question. The question is, "after a collision, what happens?" And so far, the answer is, "the Model S has a 25x increased chance of catching fire." That is the focus of the investigation. Fires post-collision are a bad thing, even if the never reach the occupant: they can ignite other cars gas tanks (or other objects), and impede rescue work.
In general, I'm not a big fan of linking directly to PR put out by self-interested parties. It's very hard for the average reader to de-spin the propaganda put out in these missives. They're being manipulated and don't know it. I'd much prefer a link to a well written analysis of events from an unbiased industry expert.
That the rate of "fires from a collision" in a Tesla is 25x that of the average US car. The OTA update reduces the number of undercarriage collisions and thus the number of fires.
These get requests are likely sharded among a large number of machines. Viewed that way, it's much more manageable. Want to service more requests? Just add more machines.
1.5M relational queries on the other hand--that would be impressive.
I think the source of the perennial confusion over this issue is that some software development is actually engineering, but most is greese monkeying. The software mechanics resent the engineering questions but the engineers can't understand how you could not ask them. In truth the work of both camps is fundamentally different.