One tradeoff is that one of the tradeoffs graphics programmers do is about security. They typically work with raw pointers, using custom memory allocation strategies, memory safety comes after performance. There is not much in terms of sandboxing, bounds checking, etc... these things are costly in terms of performance, so they don't do it if they don't have to.
That's because performance is critical to games (where the graphics programmers usually are), and if the game crashes, no big deal as long as it doesn't happen so often as to seriously impact normal gameplay experience. Exploits are to be expected and sometimes kept deliberately if it leads to interesting gameplay, it is a staple of speedruns. Infinite money is fun in a game, but not in serious banking software...
I am all for performance, and I think the current situation is a shame, but there are tradeoffs, we need people who care about both performance and security, maybe embedded software developers who work on critical systems, but expect a 10x increase in costs.
An interesting example, because your body is literally something you have to hide. That is, it is illegal not to.
Personally, I hide it because that's what society is telling me, especially if children are around, and I have no real reason to go against that. I mean, who wants to see what I do in the bathroom? But should the government want to, I will gladly let them as it will nicely illustrate what I think of them.
There are many things I want to hide more than my body functions. It is a social taboo, not something that has to do with personal safety and security, which is what privacy advocates usually point to. Arguably, it is the opposite problem: something you have to hide, but for personal freedom, you shouldn't have to.
Information asymmetry has always been a thing, wars have been though over this.
But I think that in our age, information asymmetry is particularly low, at least in western countries. Each one of us has access to a tremendous amount of data, sure the powerful have access to more, but I have a feeling that the relative difference is shrinking.
I will always remember when a police investigator was interviewed, the context was a controversy about police files. The investigator said: "police files? not very useful, when we want to investigate someone, we browse Facebook". It means that the police doesn't have much as much of an information advantage compared to you and me.
Journalism, world events, etc... Most of the times, we have all sorts of first hand reports, photos, videos, news sources from enemy countries, etc... Not all of them reliable, and factchecking enough to see through that mess takes work, but it is possible in a way that wasn't before. A lot is available on open data platforms, plus all the shady stuff like Wikileaks, darknets, etc... that are not that hard to access either.
Should you want to, you can be your own Palantir, because most of what Palantir does is standard data analysis that can be done with open source tools, and most of the data sources are public, private data is just the cherry on top.
Of course it takes work, but it is possible with limited resources, mostly a computer, an internet connection, and time. No need to travel around the world to meet contacts and get access to paper archives.
No one really says that in an absolute sense, it is always in context, what it usually means is "I trust a particular institution with the data they collect", not "I will give my credit card number to everyone who asks".
For example, let's say you approve of installing security cameras monitored by police in your residence, if you say "I have nothing to hide" what you are actually meaning is "there is nothing these cameras can see that I would want to hide from the police". I think it is obvious that it doesn't mean you approve of having the same cameras installed in your bathroom.
The real question is one of trust and risk assessment. Are the risks of revealing a piece of information worth it? how much do you trust the other party? not the literal meaning of "nothing to hide".
The point is that the data you're sharing may look banal to you now, but you have no idea how it might get used in the future, and by whom. You should assume that all data you share is available to everybody. Thus everybody should prefer privacy by default.
Indeed. And there's risk-reward tradeoff. The debated argument says "have all my data if you want for no reason". The stronger case is, "what do I get in return"?
Often in this discussion it's about a society-wide standard. The benefit to "me" might be that e.g. the police can do their job well, hopefully protecting me from criminals, while sticking to reasonable and trusted privacy controls (e.g. intrusive data collection requires a court warrant, and I trust the courts enough to do a good job). That's very different to uploading all social media conversations logs to NSA because "nothing to hide".
Looping back to this article, it is unclear if there was ever ant good reason to record religion in Amsterdam. Nor would I exclusively blame administrative procedures on the Holocaust - though I'm sure it made matters worse.
Like everyone else, I am very skeptical that it is somehow related, for several reasons.
- He is just a small time streamer, I didn't watch his videos but it looks like typical clickbait content playing on people's paranoia. Why would Palantir care about it?
- I didn't watch the videos in question, but I suppose that he says that Palentir is evil because it is used by police forces to attack poor migrants, that kind of thing. Not only he is saying what everyone is saying, but it may be good advertising for Palantir, as it shows that they are good at their (evil) job.
- Streisand effect, I am sure that even the idiots at Palantir know that it may not be a good idea to give attention to a streamer who annoys them.
- Speaking of attention, it is highly likely that the streamer in question was unbanked for a completely unrelated reason but saw the opportunity to make buzz, and it seems to be working!
- There seem to be no further evidence connecting the two.
> I am sure that even the idiots at Palantir know that it may not be a good idea to give attention to a streamer who annoys them.
Thiel has proved that he can hold a grudge. After Gawker outed him, he spent years shopping for anyone who could sue them, and found his guy in Hulk Hogan. He financed the lawsuit that led to Gawker Media's bankruptcy and closure.
>Thiel has proved that he can hold a grudge. After Gawker outed him, [...]
That might be true, but it's a stretch to go from this to "Thiel had a grudge for this specific streamer and was responsible for him getting banned". For one, Gawker has orders of magnitude more visibility than this guy.
Oh he does. But he uses the Streisand effect to his benefit to sell his product. Maybe you could argue it is not the Streisand effect if you want exposure by quenching stuff, though?
This can be very frustrating when it's a false positive, but these 'neobanks' have a tendency to be very "trigger happy" and quickly close accounts whenever they have a reason to think there is fraud involved. And there's a lot of automation involved of course.
When that happens, they won't tell you the reason of course, because that would help fraudsters improve their fraud skills.
There is no reason to believe this bank actually have humans who are aware of this customer's Twitter handle, and who read it, and didn't like what they saw.
There should really be a rule banning these types of comments.
The response to someone’s comment regarding “x” is not “why are you defending x?”. It’s a rebuttal of “x”. Respond to the argument on its merits. Don’t dodge it.
Do you lot ever get tired of saying this type of stuff? There’s nothing new or interesting in this comment. This isn’t a fresh perspective. You’re just saying the same one liner that have been said hundreds of thousands of times before. Let’s move on.
> in just one generation user manuals went from showing you how to tune your carburetor to warning you not to drink the battery acid
The truth is just that we don't have actual user manuals anymore. Either the things that went into the manual are now built into software, or they expect you to look it up on the internet. So the only things that remain are legal disclaimers and very basic instructions, like how to turn on the thing so that the software can tell you what to do next.
So they don't tell you how to tune your carburetor because you don't need to do that anymore, it is all injection and the ECU software does the tuning, but the lawyers insist that it should be mentioned to not drink the battery acid should an idiot decide to try it and sue the company.
A promotion means you are getting a different job, typically leadership, which means working with people more with machines. If you are better with machines than you are with people, do you really want that? does your employer really wants that? If you are twice as fast and twice as good as others doing some job, and if you like that job, what you want is double pay, not a promotion to a position you won't be as good at.
That's Peter's principle, and your managers have heard about it too.
Probably. Most managers would also argue that because you're so great with machines, you'll surely be even greater at managing others who are supposed to be great with machines. Does that make sense? No. Do managers and executives think like this anyways? Yes.
I'm sure most managers and executives on HN though doesn't think like that, surely are the exception. But out in the wild world, people truly get promoted mostly on whims and personal relationships without thinking "are they better with machines than people perhaps?", because that's the easy way. People also feel excluded if they aren't considered for promotions, even if the promotion in question wouldn't make sense.
> Probably. Most managers would also argue that because you're so great with machines, you'll surely be even greater at managing others who are supposed to be great with machines. Does that make sense? No. Do managers and executives think like this anyways? Yes.
I'd say the opposite is true. In modern management theory, the value of domain knowledge for managers is severely undervalued.
I a big company I worked with, they had a special program for future top managers, they have them do grunt work in several departments for several years before they get the position they are hired for.
We had one of these guys working with us at one point, awesome guy: friendly, humble and good at everything he does, including partying! We only knew he was "special" much later, when he left us to continue his journey.
I have many bad things to say about this company, but this is not it: hiring people who are actually good, making them understand the work the company does by practicing, and thinking long term, hats off.
But back to the subject, even though the guy did actual productive work with us, and did it competently, he wasn't destined to be an expert, he was destined to be a manager and he was only here to get enough domain knowledge for that job. This is not the same path as a technical expert who will keep doing the same job, but better.
Story I've told here once. A director I worked under had climbed up from the bottom.
Now one weekend, us 3 ITers were going to replace the building switches and fix and cleanup the network cabling and move all servers. Massive weekend job. We start saturday morning, and deadline is monday morning or 400 people cant work. A second team is doing the phones. He promised to be there to open the door for us.
Junior me comes in, and he is at the door, with breakfast! We begin. He's not technical, so he resigns himself to sitting in the corner, popping ethernet cables out of bags as we request them.
He sees what we do, where we struggle. He sees IT take out the plan and execute it steadily, while the phoners are missing their team lead and every phone forgot its number. I learned PBXing on the fly there and had more fun than a job is supposed to be.
At the end of the weekend, all is well and monday is actually boring (except the emergency phone in the elevator wont stop ringing and connects random elevatees to customers. Oops. My bad. Forgot to reprogram that one.)
The next weekend, the bookkeepers have to do some mysterious all weekend bookkeeping thing. Director is not a bookkeeper at all. He was there, doing the bookkeeper equivalent of unbagging ethernet cables.
Now that smiling, helpfull man turns out to be a wolf in every exec meeting. He knows just enough about every job in the company. You can't fool him for 1 millimeter. You flood him with jargon, he jargons right back at you. In his circle of evil backstabbers, with life changing decisions to make, he's an absolutely scary steamwaltz. I admire him and don't want the job even if he makes a fortune.
> the value of domain knowledge for managers is severely undervalued
Sure, but you can always pick that up as you learn how things work. It's a bit harder to do that in engineering as it requires years of experience with your craft.
Just like a manager just starting out isn't gonna have the right intuition and hunches until some years of experience, you can't just "pick that up", that is the expertise, unlike domain knowledge.
Would you put a professional manager straight out of business school with no military experience in charge of a platoon of marines and send them into a war zone? How do you imagine that would pan out? if not, why would you put such a person in charge of an engineering team? Do you imagine it would go any better?
Like sure eventually the person will learn the job but only after a significant cost in bad decisions.
Eh, I'm not entirely sure if you commented this to the wrong parent comment, if not, how is this connected to what I wrote about?
Just to clarify just in case; We're talking about domain knowledge here, not management knowledge, I'm not entirely clear how that maps to your example, as you're talking about any general experience I suppose? I'm not saying we should put people without experience into management positions, if that's the misreading you did.
Every manager I've ever had sees me as an extremely competent multidisciplinary engineer. So obviously ever one of them thinks I'd be perfect for management. Every time I've tried a management role, it's been a flaming disaster.
At my last job I argued for six months on this point with my manager. I eventually relented and... disaster.
I don't know how to more clearly articulate "I cannot and will not manage others. I am not capable and it will end badly." But apparently that's not clear and understandable enough for management brain.
New job now and I think the boss is intelligent enough to understand "no, that is not possible"
We've all met many brilliant engineers with the social skills of a lettuce. The idea they cannot get a raise in salary unless promoted to management is just daft.
It appears the problem is many managers regard underlings getting paid more than them as unhealthy; despite the fact the job descriptions are vastly different.
> many managers regard underlings getting paid more than them as unhealthy
Yeah, I never understood this. As a manager I've always strived to earn less than those I help do their job (meaning pushing their salary up whenever I could), they're doing all the heavy lifting and I'm just along for the ride trying to unblock them and coordinate stuff. Not sure why there are managers who think they should earn more than the people doing the grunt-work, but then again, the world is filled with people who think they're more important than they are.
Many executives consider managing peoples is harder than managing machines, and that having many people working together have a better value than a single person.
As such, many want a raise, but no-one want to manage peoples and have responsibilities that involve human factor (state otherwise, it is easier to be sure about the result of your own work than the work of your whole team). That’s the reason why it is easier to ask for a raise as a manager than a single coder.
Yea, in the company I work in (entire country it seems tbh) - it's exceedingly rare for contributers to get a raise over a certain point. If I want to increase my income I kinda have to go into management.
I'm sure there are outliers, but this seems to be the norm.
> That's Peter's principle, and your managers have heard about it too.
All this sort of thing was true when I went to management college, last century, and it was well known to my line management, and yet, nevertheless, all the observations were still true because in effect it's an observation about human nature. It would be guidance if people were guided by it, but they aren't.
"I know that's a bad idea, but I'll do it anyway" counts for "We should fire all the people whose performance review didn't rate them above average" just like "I only had a couple glasses of wine, I'm fine to drive".
In tech companies, there’s usually both technical and management tracks, and you can be promoted up the ladder (many times over) without changing jobs. At a certain point you’ll do less design and coding, and more high level strategy, but that’s not until you’re nearing the top of the ladder.
> Yes, I know scouts learn knot-tying in general, but a lot of kids don't even get to do scouting
But do knot scouts learn to tie their shoes correctly? I never did scouting but I have done sailing, and was interested in knot tying as a kid, but shoe tying wasn't given much attention. They certainly told us how to tie a reef/square knot properly, but no one looked at our shoes even though half of us did it wrong. In most books, you had the standard shoe tie if you are lucky, but nothing more.
Ian seems to be the only one who takes shoe tying seriously, even though it may be the most tied knot in the world. I have the Ashley Book of Knots, widely considered the reference on knot tying, if a little dated, and shoe tying only occupies a single page out of 600. Interestingly, a knot analogous to the "Ian's Secure Shoelace Knot" is mentioned (#1219) but despite being, I think, the best in the book, its existence is merely acknowledged.
A PC with an Apple sticker on it is not an Apple-branded system, it is a PC with an Apple sticker on it. If you actually were to consider it an Apple-branded system, then it would be a trademark violation, which feels worse to me.
That's because performance is critical to games (where the graphics programmers usually are), and if the game crashes, no big deal as long as it doesn't happen so often as to seriously impact normal gameplay experience. Exploits are to be expected and sometimes kept deliberately if it leads to interesting gameplay, it is a staple of speedruns. Infinite money is fun in a game, but not in serious banking software...
I am all for performance, and I think the current situation is a shame, but there are tradeoffs, we need people who care about both performance and security, maybe embedded software developers who work on critical systems, but expect a 10x increase in costs.
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