ims

> Given the current trends it's overwhelmingly likely that someone will eventually be detained, harassed or put on a no-fly list due to past comments on HN.

This is sarcastic, right?

This paper was apparently written by an Army officer, not a defense contractor (although he may work in acquisitions).

Believe it or not, many people who work in government and the defense industry spend a lot of time thinking about 9/11. Not so outlandish that this would show up in their writing.

Well that's a facile statement, since the EU is only 20 years old. Individual countries in Europe absolutely do have a record of torture, abduction, and secrecy in varying degrees. Are you completely forgetting the 20th century?

I think OP was probably just being humble himself.

Interesting, was just thinking about this the other day when somebody linked to a coding challenge for Max Levchin's new company: https://affirm.com/jobs

FWIW, that's Jeff Daniels not Jeff Bridges ;)

Don't forget that investigators will sometimes let people do things for a while in order to establish a more solid case.

Ethical guidelines for this kind of bystanding typically allow crimes like fraud to proceed temporarily but not murder or assault and so forth.

Evernote and Linux user here. Their web app is quite good, and their Android and iOS apps are fantastic. Having also messed around with their native app on Windows, I didn't feel like I was missing too much since the whole point is really the content of the notes.

For what it's worth, there are a couple clones of the native app for Linux including Everpad and Nevernote. Haven't tried them because the web app does everything that seems necessary for me.

> If I were to do it over again, I would rather be an Alaskan fishing boat operator than a software engineer doing 99% of the stuff that paid programmers have to do.

I usually find your comments thought provoking but as somebody who is familiar with this industry I assure you that this is not the case.

No need to even go into the conditions, which are probably more horrible than you imagine (in terms of the work itself, workers' physical safety, interpersonal interactions that usually range from unfriendly to physically abusive, and overbearing managers which we all know you despise). Those are obvious. But if you think that VC's exercise undue influence on the tech industry, and if you chafe against this kind of control (as it seems you do), you would not enjoy an industry where people doing the actual labor and putting their lives on the line (really) make very little compared to the extremely large companies that bankroll the operations and distribution.

A nitpick, I know, but... software development is still not a bad industry to be in compared to most.

I have used this fairly extensively in helping a large volunteer organization manage a staggering array of Google forms, docs, and so forth.

As another commenter said, it is like VBA except you get to use JS which is nicer. You can do quite a bit with these scripts. More than you might think. But... It has serious drawbacks.

1. The script implementation has been changing often and without warning.

2. It fails unpredictably with no indication of what the problem is (the built in log is limited and it is difficult to tell where the source of trouble is -- Google Docs? the spreadsheet you're working on? a bug in the code?)

3. Undocumented bugs are rampant. Real example: you add a small script in the responses spreadsheet to send e-mail confirmation to people who submit a Google form. It uses the built-in onFormSubmit trigger. By all appearances, this will start to e-mail everyone going forward. Instead it e-mails everybody who has ever submitted since the form went live.

4. Sometimes runs incredibly slowly with no apparent reason.

Like everything else in Google Docs, there are lots of things you just can't do -- some by design, some not.

You're mistaking what I mean by subsidy. I'm talking game theory, not short term shuffling of monies.

You are correct in that there are transfers of money and arms, the individual value and long term wisdom of which are always debatable. What I am talking about is a de facto subsidy, based on the fact that many other countries have in effect outsourced much of their security apparatus to the United States because they know that the US would step in for any existential crisis caused by mutual enemies.

Think of it this way. It costs billions to construct a single aircraft carrier. Many seafaring nations currently build smaller navies than they would if the United States were not filling a large portion of this role for them. When buying aircraft, ships, tanks, missiles, etc, an allied country only has to build those assets marginally necessary to create a comfortable excess over and above the security already seen as inevitably provided by the US. That constitutes an indirect subsidy.

And the rest of the Western world, like it or not, is able to spend less on defense precisely because -- thanks to some unique events in the 20th century -- the US is effectively providing a defense subsidy for all of its allies.

I'm not advocating, just saying. Perhaps European countries would have to spend more if the US did not concern itself with the rest of the world? Food for thought.

Right. While not impossible (it's possible for almost anyone, no?), this type of blackmail is probably extremely uncommon.

In the real world, it's so much more likely to be "he's a cool guy, we went to the same prep school, why not?" Which renders the same result, but in less of a movie-script dramatic way.

This is exactly right. I'm a member of INFORMS (the operations research professional society), and I can report that a staggering amount of ink has been spilled over the last few years about how to capitalize on the recent "Analytics" and "Big Data" trends.

On the one hand, people are starting to realize that quantitative analysis can help their businesses (mind blowing, right?) -- on the other hand, so much of what you see about "analytics" and "big data" is nonsensical jargon. You have two camps within the OR world: people who want to ride this bandwagon all the way to the bank, and people who want to refocus on getting the message out about what OR really is.

The bandwagon-riders have succeeded to some extent. INFORMS created a monthly "Analytics" magazine[1], created an Analytics Certification[2] (their first professional certification), and so on.

The other camp has a legitimate concern that OR already has an "identity crisis" (operations research vs. management science vs. systems engineering vs. industrial engineering vs. applied math vs. applied statistics etc etc). INFORMS has spent millions trying to get business people to just be aware that it exists. The fear is that hitching our wagon to these trends will just be another blow to our profile when these fad words are replaced by the next big thing.

[1] http://analytics-magazine.org/ (you can get a good feel for the type of content in this publication just by reading the article titles...)

[2] https://www.informs.org/Build-Your-Career/Analytics-Certific...

Very true. Wouldn't the typical approach to this involve probabilistic methods like taking large-ish (but not "Big") samples from your multi TB data and doing your EDA with those?

Zach Holman has written about this: http://zachholman.com/posts/slide-design-for-developers/

In fact, this slide deck was extremely reminiscent of his style, down to the font and some other details. I wouldn't be surprised if the person who designed this deck was influenced by some of Holman's previous presentations.

Not saying it's a great analogy, but it seems like SaaS would be the McDonalds (scalable, commoditized) whereas bespoke software is the fancy restaurant meal.

It doesn't really seem to hold up though, or say much either way.

Not to speak for the GP but in addition to the Delaware Division of Corporations[1] in which February Won, Inc -- like many startups -- was registered (and where you have to pay a fee), there are quite a few public sites which attempt to aggregate this information, albeit with varying levels of accuracy. For instance, Bloomberg Businessweek [2].

[1] https://delecorp.delaware.gov/tin/GINameSearch.jsp

[2] http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/pe...

One thing that you can truthfully write (and that I have seen many others write) is "Have completed projects using ..."

It is accurate and conveys a certain flexibility and curiosity to the reader, assuming they are putting any thought into reading it.

No, I don't think so. Or if so, it was ancillary. He wasn't saying "I should have done things differently" -- instead he was trying to show how depraved, spoiled, and inadequate people are inside the ivory tower. Much as in "Less Than Zero" by Bret Easton Ellis, we are supposed to be shocked at how the privileged elite are venal, cruel, phony, unworthy, and get away with it too.

You may or may not find that persuasive. But just as with "Less Than Zero" (a terrible, terrible book) and much of the similarly themed failure memoir genre, you get the sense that it is wildly exaggerated fabulism with a hysterical moral tone that is supposed to ensnare the reader in outrage.

Okay, I was trying to stay sympathetic to this article as I read it, but it bears almost no resemblance to reality as I've known it (not a stranger to these institutions).

This is less an indictment of "the system" than further evidence that systems can be gamed. Is this a shock to anyone?

Our narrator seems to have coasted through a variety of moderately prestigious (an adjective meaning that other people think whatever it is must be very discerning) opportunities. He chose to squander them out of a seemingly nihilistic/angsty/meta-hipstery and extremely adolescent rage against the machine.

What a pity. For him.

I'd be very interested to hear you expand on this.

> "C++ is unsafe by design," he said. "It gets you down to the metal," a term that means that the code runs very fast because it can be read directly by the hardware, "but it is unsafe."

Hmm...

This is a great point too. Excel is hard to lock down and easy for non-computer people to use. Access is easy to lock down and relatively harder to use.

If you know what you're doing, you can use Access (scary program that people don't really know what it's for) to lock down the data and enforce business rules and that kind of thing, then give coworkers Excel spreadsheets with pivot tables from an ODBC connection to the Access db that they can "do their thing" and mess with and email around.

The true worst of both worlds though is when somebody creates an amateur Access db, locks it down so you have to do everything through a 1995-Visual-Basic-looking switchboard, creates horrendous forms with garish colors and giant bitmap images that have no coherent UI... and ... I can't even go on, these are too painful to remember.

I've seen Access used decently as well as abused.

The good: it is actually not a bad tool if you're familiar with database concepts. It even has some nice features, like being able to see a graph of all the pk relationships between tables (and use that graphical tool to create relationships and rules). You can seamlessly switch between list view (rows)/design view (GUI aid)/SQL when you're working on queries, allowing you to test things quickly and get rapid feedback at different levels of detail. It has a not-completely-insane tool for generating custom reports from tables or queries. It is extensible with VBA (trust me, I know -- that's not really a ringing endorsement). And like many MS products it has wizards for common tasks that make them surprisingly painless. And above all, because Access is part of the office suite, a regular user might actually have the program installed and be allowed to use it in a BigCorp or Government setting.

All that being said... Access is abused just like Excel by people who don't really know what it's for. What's worse, you get monstrosities made by people with just enough knowledge of databases to make them dangerous but without the wisdom to consider normalization, maintainability, or anything like that. I have so often been asked to "take a look at" an Access database that was thrown together 10+ years ago by a mildly computer savvy amateur that is still used in production, and without exception the insides are horrifying. (Side note: usually I have had to fight my instinct to take these on as a pet project because nothing good can possibly come of it, and as soon as you change it you own it).

TL;DR -- You already know shit. You might actually be surprised how not-bad Access is. Sadly you are not the person who is using Access in 99.9999% of cases.

If there's erroneous data getting inserted in a database, you go looking for the broken part of the program that is putting it there. You don't mess with the database.

I imagine it's a pun on "Fortran" ("for-" -> "four" -> "five").

On that note: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Autonomous_Oblast

The problem comes from trying to force a dichotomy between "new" and "not new". This is an interesting article about these types of seeming paradoxes: http://lesswrong.com/lw/no/how_an_algorithm_feels_from_insid...

I don't necessarily disagree about those things being sad/scary/pathetic. But these things cost money. Taxpayers are generally averse to spending money on long term prevention. Something that people consider an "expensive boondoggle" and refuse to pay for before an incident tends to become "shame on you for not doing your job" right after.

Do you remember after the BP spill how people were shocked -- shocked! -- that the government did not have deep sea oil rig submersibles and that we had to rely on BP's resources? This type of thinking blew my mind. Who on earth would have supported paying for deep sea utility submersibles for some "black swan" oil spill before this incident happened? And the funny part is, now that it's over and everybody has moved on, they probably still wouldn't.

So back to the FAA... how are we going to pay for top tier engineering talent in the kinds of numbers required to check these components at the level of detail we might wish?

TL;DR: proper oversight costs money.