I for one thank you for your contribution. Hacker News can be a bunch of jackasses at times.
You are absolutely right: distributed version control led to git, which completely changed programming. And though Satoshi didn't cite it by name it was almost certainly also part of the inspiration for Bitcoin and the blockchain, which has led to another $30B in collective market cap.
If you want a suggestion for what to do next, or what to advise, you can probably have a lot of impact (and make money) by getting involved in some of these new distributed ledger/ICO projects. You have the technical ability and it's now possible to monetize at the protocol level. Here are some links if you're interested:
Hacker news hasn't cornered the market on jackasses, my opinion is that this place has one of the least amounts of jackasses. But yeah, I get your point.
I'm pretty retired but I'll check out your links. I kinda feel like a useless dinosaur but if there are places where I can help move things forward I'm 100% up for that. I just don't feel like I have that much value to add at this point.
Edit: one thing I really wish would happen, and if I could help with this I'm in, is /etc and any other config file is under version control. 3-way merge/3-way diff and merge is way way better than 2 way.
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.
>>>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.
VMS style versioning is not at all what I meant. What I meant is the OS implements the inode just like a versioned file in an SCM.
Consider the /etc stuff. You wack apache's config, so does debian, you do an apt-get upgrade and it either automerges or you get presented with the 3 way merge in $EDITOR or our graphical file merge.
In many cases, the system can just automerge it (BitKeeper has a pretty sophisticated way of doing, it's better than other answers in a lot of cases) and when it can't you get access to the full DAG and can use all the SCM tools to merge.
1) Google has Android because they did something very similar to Apple: Eric Schmidt was on Apple's board and used his inside info to drive smartphone development at Google. A massive lawsuit then transpired, but for Google on balance it was worth it to steal the Android IP from Apple.
2) For that matter, David Drummond was on the board of Uber and arguably took info from there to Google as well, using it to start their ride hailing project. Uber did not sue at that time.
3) Google was very slow on self-driving. Levandowski and others tried to get Google to ship a real self-driving car product for years, but only Uber actually had the cojones to do it in Pittsburgh and Arizona. That is what finally lit a fire under Google to spin out Waymo.
> 1) Google has Android because they did something very similar to Apple: Eric Schmidt was on Apple's board and used his inside info to drive smartphone development at Google. A massive lawsuit then transpired, but for Google on balance it was worth it to steal the Android IP from Apple.
I don't disagree but I also don't see your point. Android licensees have paid more to Microsoft than Google[1], Drummond was on the board but was never an engineer[2], and Google's inability to execute on its Driverless car vision is eerily reminiscent of Google attacking Microsoft Office [3] or stealing key employees [4].
My point is that I understand it is a very competitive and "when they do it, it's bad, when I do it, it's strategy" kind of world. And I completely understand why Levandowski might just say (note he didn't, I just can imagine that he might) "Screw them I'm the one making this happen, I deserve all this money and it is my data, I created it or caused it to be created."[5]
Google already paid huuge sums of money to these engineers[6]. And they have been unable to make any money here or nearly as much progress as others. So one wonders if this is actually an 'Overture' maneuver[7]. Where they agree to settle for 10% of Uber's stock which they will sell all of at the IPO. Netting back their investment in self driving, and a nice bonus. Then they dump the whole thing on Fiat Chrysler and move along.
These things are fun to watch, they don't often happen quite so visibly.
The FDA is not elected, or even indirectly elected. They are career bureaucrats with career tenure who cannot be fired. How would you even know that they are doing a good job? Last I looked, Americans have terrible health care relative to other countries; the FDA has no responsibilit for that?
You must be kidding, right? The for the last 20-30 years the head of the FDA has been a very volatile position covered with public scandals and the agency has an insane turn over rate due to the structure, workload, and public pressure [1].
Actually it looks like the developed countries with more, better treated bureaucrats are doing far better.
Access to healthcare is firmly in the bailiwick of Congress. Hell, the rest of the First World has similar authorities that determine what drug gets to market, their criteria are similar, and their healthcare metrics aren't nearly as awful as the United States.
And for the "career bureaucrats", if you want a modicum of stability you need them, you can't have elections or change the rules every other year - what you need is institutional memory and predictability.
The answer is to stop arguing with words and start targeting Gawker's business model. Their advertiser list is in plain view. Go to their about page to see all the megacorps that have done sponsored ads with them. Now take the worst things Gawker has ever written and send it to the people who run the advertising accounts at those companies (you can get their names off LinkedIn or whatever).
For example, send the #GawkingatRapeCulture hashtag to the Coke rep who chose to advertise on Gawker and ask them whther Coke is intentionally supporting rape culture by donating to Gawker. Make sure not do this purely as a solo op; once you have the data on their advertisers, pull together a website that makes it easy for anyone to chip in via one click.
Those who run sites with advertising inventory can also donate ad slots at lower CPMs to the sponsors of Gawker in order to pull revenue away from Gawker.
They profit from clickbait. So we need to hit these people in the wallet.
What Silicon Valley does better than anyone is create
exits. They know how to get people who they have made
money for to turn over a lot of that money to buy the
companies they have invested in. They know how to put on a
show to get a company to an IPO. They know how to go out
and get hundreds of millions of dollars to bridge companies
with 10s of millions in revenues to their IPO and more
importantly to make sure the IPO happens.
This is Mark Cuban. He sold Broadcast.com at the height of the dot com bubble for 6 billion dollars. 520,000 users sold to Yahoo for $11,000 apiece.
startups which provide deluxe on-site benefits could extend
their daycare, meal and on-site walk-in health care to
people who have WIC or EBT cards and can show that they
live in the neighborhood. The bonus here? You can meet
actual people in your neighborhood.
I really, really, really want Anil Dash to try this with his own startup on Market Street in the middle of the Tenderloin. Send us the video. Show us how it's done, Anil! Practice what you preach.
Let's also make sure the person criticizing said "assholes" is not paid to be a professional asshole themselves, like Sam Biddle or Nitasha Tiku at Valleywag.
Hank Greely is not a "genetics prof", he is a bioethicist in Stanford's Law School. He doesn't develop new genetic technologies. This is like calling a film critic a director.
> "Hank Greely is not a "genetics prof", he is a bioethicist in Stanford's Law School. He doesn't develop new genetic technologies. This is like calling a film critic a director.
Assuming that the content currently in that section of Wikipedia is correct and is congruent with how things work at Stanford, he is a "genetics prof".
Or we can just take his Stanford bio at face value.
Also, we should consider what the man has to say. Whether or not he "develop[s] new genetic technologies" is irrelevant if his opinions are valid and his facts are correct. If you take issue with the opinions he has or the facts he states, then address those head on.
The man's thoughts are being called upon because he is a domain expert in bioethics (and, as we've just found out, genetics). I think it would be a good bet that this man has a wealth of relevant domain knowledge with respect to state of the art genetics research, gene sequencing technologies, and genomics startups.
Qualification sniping tends to be a poor way of discounting what someone has to say.
> He is a lawyer, and did not even get a science-related degree when he took his bachelor's (BA = Bachelor of Arts)
You cannot infer that a BA is not a science-related degree. Here is how Bachelor's degrees work in the US.
In the US, there is no inherent difference between BA and BS in math and science. What degree a given set of coursework earns is entirely up to the school. All of the following exist in the wild:
• BS is the only choice. (Caltech, for example. In fact, Caltech only offers BS for everything. Even English majors--and yes, there is an occasional English major at Caltech--end up with a BS).
• BA is the only choice. UC Berkeley is an example in this category for math and physics.
• Both are offered, with identical coursework and requirements. You can have whichever you want. Some will even for a small fee give you two diplomas, so you can use whichever seems appropriate for the situation.
• Both are offered, from the same department, with different in-major coursework and aims. One may be aimed toward students aiming to go into research, and one toward those aiming to go into teaching, for instance.
• Both are offered, from different departments. For example, UC Berkeley's College of Letters and Sciences offers a BA in chemistry, and the College of Chemistry offers a BS in chemistry. Computer science can be taken at Berkeley in the College of Letters and Science for a BA, or in the College of Engineering for a BS.
• Both are offered, with the same in-major coursework, but differ in out-of-major requirements. So, the BA and BS would require the exact same science and math courses, but the BA has specific breadth requirements to produce a well rounded education, whereas the BS lets you take pretty much what you want as long as you satisfy the math and science requirements and any general requirements of your school.
In the particular case of Stanford, most Bachelor's degrees in science are BS, but they have a Human Biology program that issues BA, not BS [1], so unless you checked his specific degree, your inference is unfounded.
I'm honestly baffled by the reaction to this. You're absolutely right that it is extremely clear.
It says he is a director at the Center of Law and the Biomedical Sciences at the School of Law and that he is a Professor (by courtesy) of Genetics at the School of Medicine.
It literally says that in his bio.
Yet at least three people in this thread have felt the need to inform HN that "he's not a genetics prof" and then link to the bio of him that lists him as a Professor (by courtesy) of Genetics at the Stanford School of Medicine.
What does the education portion of your comment have to do with my comment? The comment I was responding to said he was not a Genetics professor, I responded by saying that he is a Genetics professor (according to his Stanford bio).
I wasn't saying that he was not a legal expert as well.
I am sorry, if you feel I am being snarky. But "by courtesy" plainly is used as some form of honorary title - if he had it "by merit" they would not use the term.
Given that the title of the article at least, implies that a person with deep knowledge of the science (not the ethics) of genetics is expressing an opinion, it seems fair to point out that there is no indication of deep math skills, or of chemistry, physics, biochemistry, etc. knowledge.
> " But "by courtesy" plainly is used as some form of honorary title - if he had it "by merit" they would not use the term. "
You know why the Stanford School of Medicine gave him that title? It wasn't for merit? And Stanford is using the "by courtesy" term differently than how it is normally defined?
> "Given that the title of the article at least, implies that a person with deep knowledge of the science (not the ethics) of genetics is expressing an opinion, it seems fair to point out that there is no indication of deep math skills, or of chemistry, physics, biochemistry, etc. knowledge."
Just to be clear, are you saying that you see no indication that Greely has a deep knowledge of the science behind his field of study-- based on the title and content of a ~700 word Venturebeat post?
I'm not going to comment on this thread anymore. If you want, you can look through his publications. But I doubt that would change your mind.
Professor is just a senior teaching title. It does not require a degree at all, even though it usually does. All it will tell you is that the school believes he is qualified to do the work he's doing for them.
The fundamental upstream question here is whether men and women should show the exact same patterns of ability and interest given their measurably different organs, hormones, chromosomes, lifespans, physiology, and so on. Much of the rest of the body differs systematically, visibly, and predictably between genders; it is unlikely a priori that the brain would remain invariant. Here's the late Doreen Kimura of McGill and Simon Fraser on the topic:
Men and women display patterns of behavioral and cognitive
differences that reflect varying hormonal influences on
brain development
By Doreen Kimura (May 13, 2002)
Men and women differ not only in their physical attributes
and reproductive function but also in many other
characteristics, including the way they solve intellectual
problems. For the past few decades, it has been
ideologically fashionable to insist that these behavioral
differences are minimal and are the consequence of
variations in experience during development before and
after adolescence. Evidence accumulated more recently,
however, suggests that the effects of sex hormones on brain
organization occur so early in life that from the start the
environment is acting on differently wired brains in boys
and girls. Such effects make evaluating the role of
experience, independent of physiological predisposition, a
difficult if not dubious task. The biological bases of sex
differences in brain and behavior have become much better
known through increasing numbers of behavioral,
neurological and endocrinological studies.
Sex differences in problem solving have been systematically
studied in adults in laboratory situations. On average, men
perform better than women at certain spatial tasks. In
particular, men seem to have an advantage in tests that
require the subject to imagine rotating an object or
manipulating it in some other way. They also outperform
women in mathematical reasoning tests and in navigating
their way through a route. Further, men exhibit more
accuracy in tests of target-directed motor skills--that is,
in guiding or intercepting projectiles.
Women, on average, excel on tests that measure recall of
words and on tests that challenge the person to find words
that begin with a specific letter or fulfill some other
constraint. They also tend to be better than men at rapidly
identifying matching items and performing certain precision
manual tasks, such as placing pegs in designated holes on a
board.
Review 1: Louann Brizendine, a neuropsychiatrist at the
University of California, San Francisco, explores
groundbreaking issues in brain science...Brizendine
graduated from the Yale University School of Medicine and
draws on research done at the Women's and Teen Girls' Mood
and Hormone Clinic, which she founded at UCSF in 1994.
Review 2 :This comprehensive new look at the hormonal
roller coaster that rules women's lives down to the
cellular level, "a user's guide to new research about the
female brain and the neurobehavioral systems that make us
women," offers a trove of information, as well as some
stunning insights. Though referenced like a work of
research, Brizedine's writing style is fully accessible.
Brizendine provides a fascinating look at the life cycle of
the female brain from birth ("baby girls will connect
emotionally in ways that baby boys don't") to birthing
("Motherhood changes you because it literally alters a
woman's brain-structurally, functionally, and in many ways,
irreversibly") to menopause (when "the female brain is
nowhere near ready to retire") and beyond.
There are tens of thousands of papers in this general area on Pubmed.
I for one thank you for your contribution. Hacker News can be a bunch of jackasses at times.
You are absolutely right: distributed version control led to git, which completely changed programming. And though Satoshi didn't cite it by name it was almost certainly also part of the inspiration for Bitcoin and the blockchain, which has led to another $30B in collective market cap.
If you want a suggestion for what to do next, or what to advise, you can probably have a lot of impact (and make money) by getting involved in some of these new distributed ledger/ICO projects. You have the technical ability and it's now possible to monetize at the protocol level. Here are some links if you're interested:
https://www.smithandcrown.com/icos/
https://startupboy.com/2014/03/09/the-bitcoin-model-for-crow...
http://www.usv.com/blog/fat-protocols