Wow, check out the pressure wave (I assume) that moves the camera dramatically forward just before the blast is heard. That was one big freakin bang.
1,355 karma · joined December 14, 2010
Rails and Mobile, Java and .NET in a former life.
Let's call it the 'Post-Buffy' school of thought, where character nuance, motivation, back-story, plot and sub-plot are all delivered with a kind of attention to detail formerly only used by novelists. There may be a few examples from the 60's -- The Prisoner comes to mind -- but even that can't really touch the narrative layers we've seen in the last decade: The Wire, Lost, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Battlestar Galactica, Game of Thrones (TV as novel if there ever was one), Six Feet Under, Dexter, Band of Brothers, and so forth. These aren't just books, they're novels.
This I think is partially the result of the ability of viewers to sit down and spend concentrated time with a series when they come out on DVD. The first time my wife and I did this was maybe 10 years ago with Buffy and Angel, and it was the most fun I'd ever had with television. This was a new experience. We'd lose 4 or 5 hours late on a Friday just chaining one after another, like the Battlestar Galactica skit on Portlandia.
What I think Netflix is doing, and probably what it has massive amounts of data to back up (I watched Buffy through Netflix, come to think of it), is that this new type of viewer engagement -- long sessions of series "gorging" -- has completely transformed the way we experience television. I think this is why they released the House of Cards episodes all at once. This is also probably why they're not releasing viewing numbers -- the new experience context of contemporary viewers has very little to do with the old Nielsen ratings arc, and would be a poor measure of the show's success, from Netflix' own point of view.
To follow your analogy further, the Chinese spies who socially engineered access to RSA's security hashes wouldn't be guilty either.
A security hole, like an open door, is not a tacit abdication of rights to a company's data, nor a tacit invitation to do any and all kinds of harm to the company with that data, nor a tacit surrender of all legal means to recoup damages resulting from the stolen data.
I also completely disagree that AT&T 'harmed themselves'. This to me is grey-hat rationalizing/hand-washing. "It's not my fault that your security sucks. I just, you know, exploited it, harvested hundreds of thousands of emails, highlighted the most important executive and government official emails and released them in as public a manner as possible, potentially causing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars worth of economic damage and loss of reputation."
Sorry, to me a max 10 years is light, compared to the kinds of white-collar sentences we've seen for stuff like insider trading. They stole the data. They sat on it. They tried to release it in such a way as to cause harm, and the potential dollar-value risk for AT&T and all their employees was huge. Think of the massive hit RSA took when their data was stolen. It doesn't matter how "easy" the hack was: what matters is intent, action and effect. All three, to me, are clear-cut here. I don't see how weev could expect any different outcome.
This is such a sanitized version. I'm open to being corrected here, but afaik the 'crawling' in question was done by a script written and refined for the expressed purpose of harvesting data, with intent to cause material economic harm to AT&T, which they did. They sat on the vulnerability for days while discussing at length how to perform the 'report' in such a way as to cause the most negative effect.
They knew full well what they were doing was illegal and were afraid of being caught and discussed it.
Let's state it again in a less-sanitized fashion: They found a vulnerability, did not report it, exploited the vulnerability and stole data with the stated intent to cause material harm and/or sell said data, and actually brought about said economic harm.
People defending weev are making it sound like some guy tweaked a value in his browser url bar, ran to AT&T and said 'look what I found', and had his home promptly raided. Hence the ridiculous top comment on slashdot, "America has lost its fucking mind."
Let us not, as the hacker community, lose ours over this. What weev did was malicious and illegal and harmful and if we appear to defend him I'm afraid we undermine the cause of Aaron's case and the possibility of curtailing real prosecutorial aggresion. I really don't think it was the case at all with weev.
In other words, if it's possible that legal reform designed to prevent cases like Aaron's from occuring again, could also let bad actors like Auernheimer off the hook, that could undermine support for the reform.
As far as whether Auernheimer is a felon, I still don't know. It's one thing to find a vulnerability, it's another thing entirely to not only not report it, but exploit it and openly discuss how to use the results to cause significant material harm.
Reported actions of Auernheimer in the AT&T case:
- Did not report the vulnerability but sat on it and refined a script to exploit the data and debated how and who in the press to report the vulnerability to in order to inflict the most economic damage.
- Harvested over 114k emails.
Alleged quotes of Auernheimer:
- "I don't see the point unless we phish for passes even then that's boring"
- "[A]t this point we won. we dropepd [sic] the stock price," Auernheimer wrote. "[L]et's not like do anything else we fking win and i get to like spin us as a legitimate security organization."
Very, very hard to be sympathetic here. He exploited a vulnerability, stole information and discussed at length how to use it to inflict damage. Weigh into that his past malicious behavior, and I wonder if he's not getting off easy.
I'm assuming here that the following two press accounts are not grossly misrepresenting the facts:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/01/18/us-apple-ipad-idUS... http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/01/goatse-security-trolls-...
Here at least you have clearly stated malicious intent, which may or may not have been serious, in jest or otherwise, but clearly the potential harm in Andrew Auernheimer's case is real, so much so that they 'joked' about shorting ATT stock before they released the data.
They were facing potentially only 10 years each max, compared to Aaron's 50.
To me, the disproportionate charges in the two cases is the most galling thing and should serve to highlight how out of control the prosecutors were in the Swartz case. 10 years may even disproportionate in Auernheimer's case as well, but at the moment I'm quite unsympathetic given what I've read.
I say all of that fully ready for the inevitable "HN Turnaround" when more facts and POVs are brought to bear and I change my mind on this. But at the moment I see very little in common between two self-aggrandizing lulzing jokers and Aaron Swartz.
I'm sure Spring would make dealing with beans a lot less painful. I know there's more to J2EE these days than Beans and WebSphere and the whole early-2000s debacle that frankly gave Java a bad name and enabled the rise of php and Rails and the like.
Struts is Struts and never really appealed to me. Wicket looks more lightweight but still seems config-heavy. I think that's the one thing, from a coding standpoint, that makes even contemporary Java still feel 15 years behind: configuration hell. It's just part of the whole Java mindset, that it's never really shaken (even in Android!), that a major part of my coding life should be spent configuring the framework. C# and .NET has moved away from that more and more and to me it's a much better environment for it. This is all subjective tho. YMMV.
So what do you use? What makes you happy in the Java world these days (I'd really like to hear).
Java's JVM/bytecode infrastructure on the other hand has undergone a renaissance as a VM platform for a lot of very cool languages: Scala and Clojure being the two big examples there. But that's Really not the same thing as Java, obviously. And there's Android -- a completely different ecosystem, and somewhat truncated as a Java dialect, but still basically the Java language and able to employ most of the libs you're used to having: Guava, Guice and so on. No dynamic code gen, which stinks, but I know why they did it. So if you have Java under your belt and want to get into mobile stuff, that's a huge plus.
So, as a general-purpose language skill, Java is still really, really important to know and will have legs for a long time to come. ASP MVC is a great framework, and if you can't work in something like Django or Rails or the like, it comes in nice 3rd or 4th place in terms of making for general coder happiness. C# is a far more progressive and interesting language than Java, but that's a philosophical difference between the gatekeepers of the two languages: Java intentionally moves slow for the sake of stability and continuity, C#'s minders have apparently embraced a little of the 'move fast break things' attitude of some parts of the open source world. I prefer the latter, but understand the rationale of the former.
Me, I'm a Rails coder these days but also get to hop back into Java for Android dev and the rare foray into ASP work and they all have strengths and tradeoffs and they'll all be around a long time. The only thing I think I would avoid on principle, for my own sanity, is any enterprisey J2EE framework. That truly does feel like a massive leap backwards.
I have neither the time nor will to refute this with actual numbers, but I can say that 1) by their nature large projects are 'in the minority' and 2) anecdotally I really doubt at this stage Rails is proportionally all that different than other frameworks.
This was probably a true statement a few years ago but there are numerous examples of large teams working on large Rails codebases at present. I'm here to tell you my day-to-day is anything but simple or small. Discovering the numerous examples of other large Rails codebases currently in production I leave as an exercise for the reader.
Absolutely, I'll ping you over email shortly. Although I find in person over libations to be much more dialectical (in the Socratic rather than Hegelian sense.) Maybe we'll cross paths at a conference some day...
> it's pretty much what I do these days.
A minor obsession we share, apparently, although it's been a while since I've been in full philosophical immersion mode.
I must admit I am woefully late to the Deluezian party. I've been reading around him for years (Heidegger, Husserl, a bit of Lacan, Marion, Levinas) but this discussion has pushed me over the edge, it's time I got up to speed -- where would you suggest I start?
As for Bergson, I see him as a kind of rival to the entire Husserlian tradition, Heidegger in particular; addressing the same questions regarding science and the difficulties of post-Kantian, post-Hegelian epistemology in the modern world, but much clearer and therefore less subject to the cult of interpretation that seems to be the domain of French phenomenology. It's all but forgotten that in say, 1920, had you had asked who was the most important philosopher in the world likely the answer would have been 'Bergson.' I think he still has a lot to say to us in 2013.
I'd start with his Introduction to Metaphysics and then to Matter and Memory.
Thanks for the exchange Steve, very fun stuff.
That said: I think the trick here is to be careful that we not confuse process philosophy (Whitehead, Bergson, Hartshorne) for pure nominalism, or the pure separation of identity/name/essence from its object. Process philosophers, as I read them, as a general category try to bridge the tension between idealism (the reification of essence or form into an eternal fact) and nominalism (the view that all names/essences are purely ad hoc and never actually representative of the substances they attempt to indicate).
It's not that process philosophers reject essences out of hand, but that they attempt to find more descriptive language that accounts for the constant motion and change of substances. So Bergson had the notion of "Duration" and Whitehead had "occasions" and "ingressions." Names, essences in the process view expanded further along the ontological spectrum than the ad hoc naming of Occam/nominalism, but never so far as Platonic 'ideals' which are eternal and unchanging. It's really, at the bottom of it, not that far from Aristotle himself, but with language that pulls notions of essence further toward immediacy and the Heraclitean flux (i.e., You can't step in the same river twice -- or maybe even once).
All this to say, I wonder if the notion of a 'role' is truly descriptive here -- the role itself changes, as does Subject. The idea of "_why" as a free-floating identity actually, to my mind, moves it further towards an Idealism rather than the process/duration ideas you seem to be advocating. "_why" in this scheme becomes almost a pure abstraction devoid of the context of having been invented and inhabited by Subject.
Questions of essence always become arcane and you can chase this rabbit down countless holes. For the issue at hand, to me it becomes a question of execution rather than definitions. "_why" as a role is only as abstract as Subject makes it. Compare with, say Bob Dylan, who to my mind has spent most of his career negotiating the same dilemma. There's no question that "Dylan" is a character that Robert Zimmerman has been playing and inhabiting for decades, with varying degrees of theater and overlap between real autobiography and pure myth-making. _why/Subject is playing a similar game here probably for similar reasons, and the connection between the two and how much real biography and myth-making is really up to Subject.
In other words, I don't think the idea of "_why" as a free-floating 'role' is completely adequate here -- the narrative is too entangled in the community's mind with Subject for it to become purely abstract/theatrical/literary and divorced from its creator. We're not going to see _why fan-fiction any time soon, and I suspect if anyone else starting writing in the voice of _why, it would quickly be spotted and met with opprobrium. Whatever distance between Subject and the _why role there is remains in the hands of Subject and in the nuance of how he executes the theater of it.
For me personally I've been fascinated with his creative persona since I read the Poignant Guide many years ago and love his creative integrity and sense of whimsy and fun. Totally unique in the software world, and one of the big reasons I was attracted to Ruby in the first place. It'll be fun to see how/if Subject plays this out.
I disagree, but maybe I'm missing something. This early quote, regarding 'bayesian vs. frequentist' seems to sum up O'Neil's view of Silver fairly well to me:
"What is not reasonable, however, is for Silver to claim to understand how the financial crisis was a result of a few inaccurate models, and how medical research need only switch from being frequentist to being Bayesian to become more accurate."
And later on regarding 'bad data,' a point she reiterates several times:
"In other words, it’s not that there are bad statistical approaches which lead to vastly over-reported statistically significant results and published papers (which could just as easily happen if the researchers were employing Bayesian techniques, by the way). It’s that there’s massive incentive to claim statistically significant findings, and not much push-back when that’s done erroneously, so the field never self-examines and improves their methodology. The bad models are a consequence of misaligned incentives."
I do think in the above quote O'Neil is equivocating between the idea of a 'bad model' and the skewed data or overreaching significance applied to the model.
Her fundamental point, which she could have done a better job communicating I think, is that it wasn't the models themselves that were bad, bayesian or otherwise, but the data in the models and at times the inordinate significance applied to those models that was the real cause of the meltdown.
"Bad Model" in Silver's view is really "bad modelling" -- a problem with the statistical technique (frequentist vs. bayesian) used to model the data.
"Bad Model" in O'Neil's view is really "bad data" -- intentionally skewed numbers as a consequent of conscious or sub-conscious eliding or redactory effects on the data populating the model, for purposes other than accuracy: financial gain, for instance.
O'Neil's point is that even a frequentist model would have been effective had the data not been massaged. On this view O'Neil's view is correct: the cause was not "bad modelling" but "bad data." The "bad data" in the model was an "effect" of corruption, not the root "cause" of the financial meltdown.
Is this even possible? I've only recommended or been recommended for skills I or others have claimed to have in the LinkedIn profile. Nobody's endorsed my Real Estate expertise or deep immersion in String Theory, for instance.
A bit of theological nitpicking: the notion of a pre-millenial 'Rapture' is a late development in Protestant theology that appears first in the 1600s and doesn't achieve mainstream popularity until the late 20th Century. Prior to that, Christian eschatalogical expectations were for the return of Christ to establish a just government once and for all.
Your larger point is still valid, but the application of the notion of a 'Rapture' is mostly anachronistic in any context other than the last hundred years.
This is fine. If you're too lazy and content in your own unexamined assumptions to read a few hundred pages of the men who did the hard work that gave you your entire livelihood, it will not affect your ability to do practical research.
But let's be clear about some of the practical implications of that position:
* Science does not need to be rational in any meaningful sense. (Go ahead and try to reinvent that idea without falling ass-backwards into the same problems "those philosophers" have been working through for centuries. Go ahead, I'll wait.)
* It does not need to be consistent within its own assumptions.
* Science is de facto "true", simply by virtue of being practiced by someone who claims to be doing science.
* Since we've now abdicated the rigorous discipline of establishing secure definitions, the notion of empirical science is now free-floating, ad hoc, and vulnerable to redefinition at any turn. The only thing required is for a group of men who call themselves "scientists" who have a different agenda to take control of a majority of significant journals or the community at large and impose their definition by fiat.
Philosophy may seem to be arcane and needlessly obsessed with definitions. And when its obscure language intrudes into the hard work of real empirical research, it can seem to be a giant non sequitur that can be easily ignored, as science moves forward (whatever "forward" means, now that we can't establish what is truly salutary and what is not).
But such willful ignorance not only skirts the fact that it was such philosophical examination of the limits and range of human knowledge that actually established science to begin with, that sort of ignorance sets enormously dangerous precedents, a sort of intellectual stare decisis for the future of human inquiry. It opens the door to sophistry, demagoguery and ultimately pure irrationalism.
History is long, and intellectual tyranny is opportunistic. Whatever integrity and above-board intentions you think scientists can maintain in the long-term, on good will alone and not deep self-awareness of core philosophical discipline is absurdly naive. Without a community committed to rationality (which is what philosophy does even if it only sets up negative limitations that seem unsatisfactory to scientists who want carte blanche to do whatever they want), then the entire discipline in the long term most likely will be taken over by non-rational concerns: commercial, military, governmental or even religious.
Absent the basic language provided by philosophy that can give at least some basic definitions and intellectual rigor for what is and isn't "science" (again, good luck reinventing all that), welcome back to the pre-socratic age of sophistry, demagoguery and a new Dark Ages. Just give it a century or so -- buy hey, you won't be around, so why worry?
With Popper it's important to put things in context. He's reacting to the developments in Positivism/Verificationism and the rather famous problems it had. Falsification is related to Methodological Naturalism in that both are provisional hedges against unwarranted leaps within science, the problem of induction in particular (see: Hume and induction), as well as the historic difficulties in establishing the relationship between subject and object -- what I think in my mind and what I know about the world external to my mind (see: well, Hume and Kant).
Popper's view is that science is must be understood as merely conventional, not declarations of objective truth about the state of the world. So, falsification is a way of acknowledging this limitation while establishing a language for moving science forward within its appropriate boundaries. We no longer say a scientific theory is "verified," or even that one "believes" it to be true (Popper doesn't "believe in belief") -- this would imply a direct statement of truth about the world. Rather, we say we have a conjecture that has not been falsified. All of science, as "Objective Knowledge," is really the collection of language in books and articles and journals (what Popper calls "World Three") that contain the most useful conjectures that have been accepted by convention into the community, that have not been falsified.
This is why the idea of "falsifiability" is so important. If something has no criteria by which it can be shown to be false, then it cannot qualify as a candidate for citizenship in World 3.
This works as a provisional, conventional set of boundaries around science and useful guideposts that show the best kind of science as rooted in empirical experience and observation.
That's as bizarre a rationale for willful illiteracy as I can think of. You seem content with it, and I wish you well.