firebones

(Edit: never mind. I think there's some mistake in your chronology that renders my numbers invalid. Died at 84 in 2017 == born in 1933. Retired in 1988 at age 55, probably not after 60 years at XOM, more like 30; or retired after 60 years, probably more like 1933+18+60=2011. Guessing maybe he retired at age 60 in 1993? Got sick at 72 in 2005? Died at 84? The numbers change a bit--missed out some big gains in 1988 and 1989, hit the flat 2000s, and probably got creamed by having to cash a lot out during 2008 crash.)

What I was going to post based on your original report of retiring in 1988 with $3M (keeping it for illustrative purposes):

He must have sold the stock when he retired to buy that house and those cars. Had he kept it in XOM, his $3 million would have been worth $22 million today, with a dividend that would have covered his expenses and that kept pace with inflation.

Not that keeping your nest egg in a single stock would have been advisable, but the S&P return for that would have been comparable.

HackerNews: Where the subtlety of a comment's humor is inversely proportional to the size of the cognitive DDOS it initiates.

Thanks for the clarification and explanation.

The responses attacking your point here seem to be operating under the assumption that the manager, and the OP's peers, don't recognize when someone is obfuscating their effort and/or results. People notice.

"Bullshitting" is defined as "be misleading or deceptive" and the cost of this is borne not only by "management" (who presumably is in this constant mode of misleading or deceiving you), but by your peers who are dependent on you, or who are waiting for you to deliver.

As someone who gets burned out from time to time, I totally get it. It's tempting. I don't know the best general solution, especially if you're in an environment of distrust (rather than what superplussed assumes). But maybe explore some other paths? If you're in a job where in order to function, you have to deceive your management AND your peers, maybe you'd be happier in a different situation or company or role. To the OP: are you trapped in your situation? (It may very well be that you are, for instance, due to market conditions or visa situation, which sheds some light on why you're opting for deception.)

>>>For that matter, I wish drop box was versioned. Same reason. It's always blown my mind that nobody has done a file system that was versioned so you could merge stuff. Maybe that's because BitKeeper merges so much better that the others. It's possible to automerge a lot more if you have the history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Files-11

(A little facetious here...no merging, but come on, it was the 1980s.)

How about two-provider authentication? (2PA?) Send codes/links to two confirmed but independent accounts (email + Twitter, or Facebook + SMS) and require those to be entered.

Probably not anymore secure--and a nightmare to manage. But look to consensus algorithms for authentication ideas.

Bravo. Masterclass username for this comment. I'm dying.

(For those who may have missed it in this HN crowd, let me momentarily invoke a veil of joke-explainer and offer this http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hunter2 of the joke.)

The timing of conceding this bet is auspicious.

--Signed, another $BRK meeting attendee

If you look at where the money is moving, this is exactly right and it has already happened. Passive management is crushing the inflow numbers.

Perhaps this creates opportunities, but maybe not opportunities at scale.

From what I've seen, buybacks are often more about preventing dilution due to share-based compensation; they're effectively a tax-advantaged dividend. However, they can also be a sign of a company that has no better idea for spending their capital, which can indicate a decline in the ROI of their R&D. Could HP and IBM have done better with their cash over the last 10-15 years than buying back stock? Share repurchases seem to obfuscate with plausible deniability whether the intent is to return capital in a tax-advantaged way, or whether there's just a basic lack of faith in investing in new innovations.

I'm interested: with Jim Simons, is it some acumen you believe in, some method he employs, or some connections/stature that leads good deals to his door?

For instance, with Buffett, it seemed his stature, historical perspective, and means allowed him to invest $5B in Goldman Sachs at the near height of panic, under terms that very few were able to get.

(Caveat: I don't know anything about Simons, but I'm very curious about the basis for your claim/offer, knowing that in the HN crowd, you have a lot of industry experience.)

Any infrastructure project will require more people while it is being built out, and the rate of job growth will scale with the rate of build out. That isn't a negative or a worry. If the market becomes saturated, the growth will stop and a lot of the jobs will no longer be needed.

> While this is a possibility, the wrench in the works is the Firefox browser. How is Google going to get them to play along and prevent 3rd-party blockers like UBlock Origin from working? I don't see it happening.

As power and money become more centralized in fewer hands, the ability to abuse DRM and standards, and to coerce partners and content providers into falling in line, becomes cheaper. Google declares legal and technical war on ad blockers while offering a "better" solution laden with incentives; Firefox gets bought off or coerced to be compliant. The barrier to disruption becomes not only a high technical bar, but a legal one as well.

I don't think there's a clear path to this that I can see right now, but we're a LONG way from Microsoft's defeat in the browser wars (both in terms of time and political environment) and a lot of shit I didn't think I'd see over the last two decades has happened after all. The broader interpretation of Gilmore's notable quote ("The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it") is less applicable today than it's ever been--in part because to a large degree, "censorship" has been replaced by "loss of profit".

As the one who challenged you in that original thread, what drew me to your initial comment was the great point that you made: that much of the time and difficulty in doing something novel is making many of the tough decisions, and that once those design and technical decisions are made (and revealed), it seems "obvious" to others, and is judged simple in comparison.

Congratulations on following through, and demonstrating your core premise!

What were the top things that you felt weren't captured by that premise--for instance, undocumented decisions that you had to discover on your own, or cases where you made tradeoffs that led to unexpected complexity? Were they maianly around bot-mitigation?

Bravo!

Four of those are bets on autonomous navigation and driving/flying. One (welding) has nothing to do with deep learning (that I'm aware of) and everything to do with the base rate of automation.

In terms of level 5 autonomous driving, the most common retort I've seen recently is "well, we're going to need special roads with sensors built in, and then it is a tractable problem." There are more than 4 million miles of road in the US; at any given time maybe 2% are under construction. The US Interstate Highway System was built during a boom and the cold war (where the system learned from Eisenhower's WWII experiences and learning from the Autobahn's military utility.) [1] If we're lucky, maybe the interstates will get sensors. But the complexity of re-doing an exit or interchange, which involves dozens of on-the-fly lane changes and cutovers, seems impractical merely to support self-driving cars.

I would love autonomous vehicles for the sake of my children, but I suspect that at best, maybe my grandchildren will benefit.

[1] https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/interstate/brainiacs/eisenhowerinte...

I wish I had enough spare cash to take you up on a bet that you could implement this in less than a weekend. Maybe HN can crowdfund paying you for two days at $1000/day to replicate, versus your time and a $3000 rebate if you can't.

What you state is factual. In the context of "as revolutionary as transistor", then I'd say yes as well. But when it comes to jobs, deep learning's impact is overstated.

When I hear claims on how many jobs will be replaced because of deep learning (in contrast to the base rate of the long, steady slope of automation over the last 175 years), it's often about an abstract and simplified notion of the complexities of jobs outside the claimant's area of expertise. In such cases, it's useful to ask the claimant whether their profession is soon to be made obsolete. Will AI replace the pundit anytime soon? The economist? The enterprise programmer? The AI researcher?

Yeah, tell that to all the hedonistic 5-year-olds who develop Type 1 juvenile diabetes. Give me a break.

Two minutes is a helluva long time, (But if it's true that the cyanide crunch is 4 minutes, then, point given.)

Thanks for the awesome writeup. Since you opened up questions:

From the start of your cutover (when you started seeing the 500s) to resolution of the various issues along the way--how much time elapsed? (e.g., deciding to swap client libraries, A/B testing, redis upgrade, shifting load to dedicated instances, implementing proxies/memcached)?

And what was the end user impact (e.g., 50% of users would see timeouts during peak usage for the day, or users using certain functionality would be affected 1% of the time, etc.)

Just trying to get a sense of the level of urgency involved in terms of chasing down all these leads. It seemed pretty methodical, so it's hard to tell if it was a slow-burning persistent nagging issue that you chipped away at over a couple of months, or an all hands on deck sequential process of trying a lot of different things in a relatively short period of time to keep the site afloat.

I'm guessing this is a dig at someone of prominence having notable hair who is in US news who is on one of the drugs mentioned.

Regarding "exploitation", I suspect that it is because employment markets are inefficient and non-fungible (based on location and many, many other factors, including culture and reputation) and that if a company's metric is hiring talent at the 90th percentile, then they may more quickly hit a limit where their ability to fill 90th percentile job salaries strips their ability to access talent in non-majority groups.

Efforts to reduce imbalance (regardless of demographic) is necessary to overcome location bias, and the bigger the pool, the higher the tide for all boats.

If you're "labor", stop thinking that you're at war with other demographics.

When it comes to providing a service that people "want (and thus want to pay for)", all sorts of things could be sold to people that fit that criteria. There's no moral or legal exemption for "meeting demand" that suddenly makes it "far more reasonable" than the base instinct of "making money".

By this criteria, Theranos was merely "meeting demand" for finger pricks over needles, FDA and their "regulations" be damned. Despite the millions spent trying to convince people that regulations are merely tools of regulatory capture, most regulations exist for a reason. Operating from the default point of view that regulations are evil is why we're seeing the EPA and Clean Water Acts gutted. Heck, even NOAA got slapped around today as a result of this attitude, and they merely provide information.

Uber's actions were all about "making money" under the thin veneer of giving the people what they wanted. You can find that same rationalization in many organized crime movies.

Your comment leads to what may be the core advice I have: get better metrics.

Twitter has always suffered from being in the wake of metrics that their competitors excel at. That's led to an inability to manage investor expectations and focus on features and project prioritization that doesn't create long-term value.

That's not the worst idea on here. I have no idea how much Patreon and various crowdfunding sites take in, but scale those up to Twitter's audience (which has some meaningful overlap with those likely to use or benefit from those services) and they get the foundation for a payment/micropayment type model. Twitter tried doing this with some sort of direct commerce experiment, but "give $5 to a cause/artist/politician" tends to be a more social activity than going right after retail, or hoping to crack the micropayments for content nut.

Joining the 10^-8 Parsecs High Club.

Can't they archive the content (but not expose), and then figure out how to filter the exfiltrated data? No history need be lost.

That's what was observed on the Cloudflare end. Without the multiplicand of how many pages Cloudflare served in a given amount of time, you can't determine the impact. Assuming that affected sites were affected en masse, a targeted attack from a connection would be minuscule compared to the pages Cloudflare serves.

Cloudflare is serving up more than 100Mbps; the attacker only has to zero in on what's fruitful, which yields something far higher than the 1 per 3.3M Cloudflare sees serving millions of innocuous requests.

It would also seem to assist with parallel construction, along with the added bonus of security theater to support future agency funding.