Seriously? Are people this fucking stupid. A solution in search of a problem. Authoritative sources exist. Use them. Not some jackoff rating sites. Jesus people take your head out or your ass.
What are you talking about? We have search engines for a reason, since everyone cannot be expected to know what the authoritative sources are for every topic known to man. And if you think it is easy for a company to use human moderators to curate lists of every authoritative source for every topic known to man, then you should create a startup to replace Google.
The problem of sites like Google and Facebook finding ways to display information to users without misleading them is not a solved problem.
You don't leave a 6 figure job because of "lack of confidence in management." You just don't.
LOL. Your post makes it sound like a 6 figure software developer job is rare. My 6 figure job certainly wouldn't make me stick around if I lost confidence in management. Perhaps if I had some hyper-inflated $300k+ salary position I would stick around on a sinking ship, but $125k-$150k developer jobs grow on trees for anyone skilled enough to deserve that pay level. (even in the Midwest suburbs, not just SV)
Problem is if you start trying to filter fake news, you get people screaming at your for "censorship" and "blocking alternate views". That feeds into their victim mentality.
I guarantee you will see it in the comments on this story. Someone will defend the claim that four presidents were members of the KKK, saying it's a valid theory and that suppressing it is just censorship and who is Google to decide what is true etc.
Instead of blocking fake news, a better solution would be to highlight mainstream well researched information while still allowing users to view fringe information which is clearly tagged as such in the results. I don't think we should ever get to a point where we block access to incorrect information. We should instead try to reach a point where it is easy to identify incorrect information.
Yes, that's all we need is crowd sourcing to help determine the truth. Popular opinion should matter more than actual facts.
Crowd sourcing would not be the only source of data, but it can provide a great deal of help. Once you have rated a relatively small number of information sources as reputable or not, you can view which users are ranking those few sources correctly. You can then mostly ignore the users who are giving false ratings on the few sources you know are not reputable, and give more weight to the users who are ranking your control group more accurately.
If sites like Google and Facebook want to let algorithms decide which information to highlight, they will need to spend more time doing human assisted ranking of various information sources. Crowd sourcing will be very helpful here, but you will still need some human moderators who can perform real research to help determine which information has credibility. I know too many otherwise intelligent people who are becoming so disenfranchised they just don't believe anything they read anymore, which is the ultimate goal of these misinformation campaigns.
That's like spitting in in the ocean for a day of profit in the S&P 500.
Where this news may not be fake, it sure illustrates how absurd this kind of reporting sometimes is. $150 Million may be a lot of money to you or me, but it's about the same as you cleaning out your couch cushions the day you got paid and the income tax refund hit for the S&P 500. This isn't even a ripple in the profit pool. Yet here we are regaled by "woe is us in the S&P 500" reports..
Considering the Fortune 500 companies earned over $1.35 billion per hour in 2012, a loss of $150 million in 5 hours is 2% of their sales over the outage, 0.5% of their sales that day, and less than.02% of their sales that month.
This is similar to if I lost $2 this month because of a single AWS outage.
Why wasn't Amazon's website down when all of the others were? Isn't their cloud good enough to host their own website? Or do they keep their website on someone else's cloud, because that's the cool thing to do these days?
Because Amazon's site was properly set up in multiple regions, like anyone who has mission critical applications online should do. This is just a recent example of why you need to host a site which requires high availability in multiple data centers in multiple regions, because no data center will ever be able to guarantee 100% up time over a long period of time. Cut corners at your own risk.
I'm sure you'll be more than happy to provide some data to that effect, right?
It is so obvious no rational person would need data for this, similar to needing data proving things fall when dropped. But here you go anyway.
It is nearly impossible to find out how many sexual harassment cases are unfounded, but you can get a rough idea of how many by comparing them to forcible rape statistics where there has been more investigation into false claims. According to the FBI about 8% of forcible rape cases are deemed to be unfounded. Other studies put the number closer to 2%. But even though false claims are very rare, only about half of rape cases end up in a conviction. For sexual harrassment, the plaintiff wins about 40% of the time (both this and the above 50% statistic for rape are only for ones which make it to trial).
So considering the conviction rates are similar for both sexual harassment and rape claims, it is unreasonable to assume to rates of false claims are drastically different. Whatever the rate of false sexual discrimination claims are, they are probably somewhere around 5-10%.
Compare that to the near certainty that someone blames the victims in cases of sexual misconduct or rape.
$2.5k on a PC is throwing money in the wind. I could get you 90% of the performance for 50% of the price. Hugely diminishing returns past $1.5k.
It is quite common for the best of the best to "only" be 10% better for twice the price. It is just a combination of price and product segmentation where those with more means help subsidize the price of R&D for everyone else. I was glad there were great $150 video cards when I was younger, and I'm glad there are amazing $700 video cards now that this isn't a large amount of money for my hobbies.
Who in their right mind spends [$700] for a video card? Seriously, I want to know. Unless you are a trust fund PC master race worshiper, why would you sink 2x the cost of a console into a card that will be obsolete in a year or two?
Who in their right mind spends $5 for a single meal? When some people don't make that much in an entire month?
You must live outside of the US. Cable TV is far more expensive than $35 per month, especially for a service which allows you to DVR shows. Most cable packages are 2x-3x more expensive.
$35/mo is not "fairly low-cost"... for something that was 100% [free] twenty years ago.
I'm not sure when a service with an unlimited DVR was ever 100% free. Who cares if I can get broadcast TV for free with an antenna, who watches TV programs other than sports live anymore? And for live sports why would you want to watch without the ability to pause?
Even for those who are willing to put up with those problems in the 21st century, you should at least understand why most people don't want to.
They are specifically saying the issues with S3 are in the US-Standard and US-East-1 regions. If you have specifically put your stuff in a bucket in another region, you are probably fine.
Which is exactly why this isn't some catastrophic situation, since anyone who needed a highly available site would have it hosted in more than one availability zone.
If your boss wanted a highly available site and you only hosted it in a single availability zone, it would still be your fault if it goes down (unless you have records of him denying funds for the second zone). Hosting it in the cloud doesn't mean you can start being stupid.
Because this outage doesn't affect anyone who cared about ensuring their cloud systems had high availability. If they did they would have had servers hosted in multiple availability zones. No cloud provider, or home-brew solution, is going to be highly available if you only have servers in one server farm.
So it appears either us-east-1 or us-east-2 was down. If you wanted 99.9%+ up-time you should have servers in us-west-1 or us-west-2 also. This isn't rocket science.
London has one of the best cab drivers in the world due to requirement about memorizing nearly the entirely of the city map. They call it a "knowledge" and it takes year or more of training before they can become a cab driver.
I get upset when any taxi driver isn't using a navigation tool with access to current traffic patterns. If my company isn't paying for the ride I'll often have Google Maps open on my phone to make sure the driver isn't taking a poor route. No amount of human "knowledge" is better than a real time traffic updated navigation app.
It seems just basic common sense to require people that need to deal with the public, including in a safety context, to actually be able to converse in the national language.
It depends on how strict the requirements are. Most adults read at a 7th to 8th grade level, and around 20% of adults read at under a 5th grade level. Any reading / writing requirements which limits employment to a large percentage of the working class population are likely not in the public interest.
If they are looking for something around a 3rd-5th grade reading level I could understand that. If they are looking for an 8th grade reading level the law is ridiculous and will likely only serve to limit access to non-native speakers and those without higher education (IMHO).
The few Intel builds I've done were for performance die hards, spending $4000+ because they believed that Intel was the end-all, be-all, even though the games they play are hitting GPU bottlenecks, and the CPU is sitting there at 50+% idle. Could have saved $500+ to put into a better GPU... but people don't listen when they go by forum posts of evangelists claiming Intel is the best thing since sliced bread, even though their $1200 CPU only bests AMDs $400 CPU by 10%-15% at best.
I think you may be setting up a bit of a strawman argument by comparing $1000+ Intel processors with $400 AMD processors. I'm not even sure which AMD processors you are talking about since an FX-9590 or FX-8350 are both between $150-$200.
When most enthusiasts are building a computer and choosing between Intel or AMD, I would say they are probably comparing an Intel i7-6800K to an AMD FX-8350. That would be $410 vs $150, 13575 Passmark vs 8938, 33 Passmark per $ vs 60 Passmark per $, 140W vs 125 W, 97 Passmark per Watt vs 72 Passmark per Watt.
No one is doubting that AMD is better in performance per dollar, but in reality you are only talking about a $260 difference not $500+. For that extra money you get a 50%+ faster processor, not 10%-15%. Performance per dollar may be important if you are building a server farm, but you generally only have one personal computer so in that case total performance is far more important. If you really had to choose squeeze out some savings so you can upgrade a GeForce GTX 1070 to a 1080 ($200 difference) then I guess AMD is a reasonable trade-off, but honestly if $200 is that big of a deal don't spend $500+ on a video card in the first place.
I concede that AMD is almost certainly the better option for sub-$1000 computers, but I strongly disagree it is the better choice for high end machines.
If, however, Uber workers were truly independent contractors, they could freely subcontract other drivers to drive multiple passengers at the same time and get paid for all of them (and presumably pay their own drivers a percentage of the rate that Uber offers per ride). Uber disallows this however, thereby exercising too much control over the work that their drivers do, and clearly placing them in the category of employee.
It is perfectly legal to put a clause in a contracting agreement ensuring that the work cannot be subcontracted out. If you are hiring a particular contractor because of their specific expertise, you may not want them to farm the work out to someone cheaper if they have overbooked themselves. When I worked at a consulting firm there were times where they even spelled out the exact employees my firm would use for a project.
Since Uber wants to give accurate information about the drivers to its customers, such a clause is very reasonable in their case.
This may seem a bit obvious, but new movies turn into older movies at exactly the same rate that new movies are released. It's not as if "older movies" were a fixed set. If you make a policy of only watching movies that are at least X years old, you'll end up with the same amount of "new" (to you) content each year as if you watched every new blockbuster on opening night at several times the price.
But a large part of the enjoyment from movies is discussing them with others. Similar to sports and other forms of entertainment, they are shared experiences. It only takes a few weekends for coworkers to assume anyone who cares about a movie has already seen it and spoilers are fair game.
I'll go with a variation of A: I have no interest in the history of film. Even many of my favorite films from childhood are not that enjoyable any more. The camera work, dialogue, and general cinematography from older movies really detract from the experience.
I have respect for the history of computers as well, but I wouldn't enjoy using a Commodore 64 anymore either.
The thing is, unless you have seen everything you would possibly want to see in older movies available for $10, why would you pay $50 for the same home experience?
Yes, I have seen every decent older movie I care to see. Every once in a while I am surprised by an old movie I missed, but it's quite rare. After a couple decades even great movies start to show their age anyway.
But if all you get out of going out to watch a movie is watching a movie, why not watch an older movie for nothing? Does the newness of a movie really mean that much to you?
Yes, considering I've most likely already seen the old one.
Why not make it $500, at least if you're intention is to charge a wishful price that nobody is going to pay anyway.
You must not have young children (who need a costly babysitter), rarely go to a movie with friends or family (thus reducing the price per viewer below movie theater pricing), or perhaps live in a low cost area where tickets aren't pushing $15 per person. Because otherwise you wouldn't think $50 for this service was wishful thinking on the part of the studios.
I would gladly pay $50 for a dozen or so movies per year so I don't need to spend $50+ per night on a babysitter.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously? Are people this fucking stupid. A solution in search of a problem. Authoritative sources exist. Use them. Not some jackoff rating sites. Jesus people take your head out or your ass.
What are you talking about? We have search engines for a reason, since everyone cannot be expected to know what the authoritative sources are for every topic known to man. And if you think it is easy for a company to use human moderators to curate lists of every authoritative source for every topic known to man, then you should create a startup to replace Google.
The problem of sites like Google and Facebook finding ways to display information to users without misleading them is not a solved problem.
You don't leave a 6 figure job because of "lack of confidence in management." You just don't.
LOL. Your post makes it sound like a 6 figure software developer job is rare. My 6 figure job certainly wouldn't make me stick around if I lost confidence in management. Perhaps if I had some hyper-inflated $300k+ salary position I would stick around on a sinking ship, but $125k-$150k developer jobs grow on trees for anyone skilled enough to deserve that pay level. (even in the Midwest suburbs, not just SV)
Problem is if you start trying to filter fake news, you get people screaming at your for "censorship" and "blocking alternate views". That feeds into their victim mentality.
I guarantee you will see it in the comments on this story. Someone will defend the claim that four presidents were members of the KKK, saying it's a valid theory and that suppressing it is just censorship and who is Google to decide what is true etc.
Instead of blocking fake news, a better solution would be to highlight mainstream well researched information while still allowing users to view fringe information which is clearly tagged as such in the results. I don't think we should ever get to a point where we block access to incorrect information. We should instead try to reach a point where it is easy to identify incorrect information.
Yes, that's all we need is crowd sourcing to help determine the truth. Popular opinion should matter more than actual facts.
Crowd sourcing would not be the only source of data, but it can provide a great deal of help. Once you have rated a relatively small number of information sources as reputable or not, you can view which users are ranking those few sources correctly. You can then mostly ignore the users who are giving false ratings on the few sources you know are not reputable, and give more weight to the users who are ranking your control group more accurately.
If sites like Google and Facebook want to let algorithms decide which information to highlight, they will need to spend more time doing human assisted ranking of various information sources. Crowd sourcing will be very helpful here, but you will still need some human moderators who can perform real research to help determine which information has credibility. I know too many otherwise intelligent people who are becoming so disenfranchised they just don't believe anything they read anymore, which is the ultimate goal of these misinformation campaigns.
That's like spitting in in the ocean for a day of profit in the S&P 500.
Where this news may not be fake, it sure illustrates how absurd this kind of reporting sometimes is. $150 Million may be a lot of money to you or me, but it's about the same as you cleaning out your couch cushions the day you got paid and the income tax refund hit for the S&P 500. This isn't even a ripple in the profit pool. Yet here we are regaled by "woe is us in the S&P 500" reports..
Considering the Fortune 500 companies earned over $1.35 billion per hour in 2012, a loss of $150 million in 5 hours is 2% of their sales over the outage, 0.5% of their sales that day, and less than .02% of their sales that month.
This is similar to if I lost $2 this month because of a single AWS outage.
Why wasn't Amazon's website down when all of the others were? Isn't their cloud good enough to host their own website? Or do they keep their website on someone else's cloud, because that's the cool thing to do these days?
Because Amazon's site was properly set up in multiple regions, like anyone who has mission critical applications online should do. This is just a recent example of why you need to host a site which requires high availability in multiple data centers in multiple regions, because no data center will ever be able to guarantee 100% up time over a long period of time. Cut corners at your own risk.
I'm sure you'll be more than happy to provide some data to that effect, right?
It is so obvious no rational person would need data for this, similar to needing data proving things fall when dropped. But here you go anyway.
It is nearly impossible to find out how many sexual harassment cases are unfounded, but you can get a rough idea of how many by comparing them to forcible rape statistics where there has been more investigation into false claims. According to the FBI about 8% of forcible rape cases are deemed to be unfounded. Other studies put the number closer to 2%. But even though false claims are very rare, only about half of rape cases end up in a conviction. For sexual harrassment, the plaintiff wins about 40% of the time (both this and the above 50% statistic for rape are only for ones which make it to trial).
So considering the conviction rates are similar for both sexual harassment and rape claims, it is unreasonable to assume to rates of false claims are drastically different. Whatever the rate of false sexual discrimination claims are, they are probably somewhere around 5-10%.
Compare that to the near certainty that someone blames the victims in cases of sexual misconduct or rape.
$2.5k on a PC is throwing money in the wind. I could get you 90% of the performance for 50% of the price. Hugely diminishing returns past $1.5k.
It is quite common for the best of the best to "only" be 10% better for twice the price. It is just a combination of price and product segmentation where those with more means help subsidize the price of R&D for everyone else. I was glad there were great $150 video cards when I was younger, and I'm glad there are amazing $700 video cards now that this isn't a large amount of money for my hobbies.
Who in their right mind spends [$700] for a video card? Seriously, I want to know. Unless you are a trust fund PC master race worshiper, why would you sink 2x the cost of a console into a card that will be obsolete in a year or two?
Who in their right mind spends $5 for a single meal? When some people don't make that much in an entire month?
See how silly your statement really is?
What are you gonna stream that $35/mo subscription through, genius?
Your neighbor's wi-fi?
He said cheaper than cable tv, not cable internet, genius. Internet is an expense you will have regardless of if you choose cable tv or youtube tv.
Is $35 cheaper than cable TV?
You must live outside of the US. Cable TV is far more expensive than $35 per month, especially for a service which allows you to DVR shows. Most cable packages are 2x-3x more expensive.
$35/mo is not "fairly low-cost"... for something that was 100% [free] twenty years ago.
I'm not sure when a service with an unlimited DVR was ever 100% free. Who cares if I can get broadcast TV for free with an antenna, who watches TV programs other than sports live anymore? And for live sports why would you want to watch without the ability to pause?
Even for those who are willing to put up with those problems in the 21st century, you should at least understand why most people don't want to.
They are specifically saying the issues with S3 are in the US-Standard and US-East-1 regions. If you have specifically put your stuff in a bucket in another region, you are probably fine.
Which is exactly why this isn't some catastrophic situation, since anyone who needed a highly available site would have it hosted in more than one availability zone.
...because today it was nobody's fault.
If your boss wanted a highly available site and you only hosted it in a single availability zone, it would still be your fault if it goes down (unless you have records of him denying funds for the second zone). Hosting it in the cloud doesn't mean you can start being stupid.
So why use these large cloud services?
Because this outage doesn't affect anyone who cared about ensuring their cloud systems had high availability. If they did they would have had servers hosted in multiple availability zones. No cloud provider, or home-brew solution, is going to be highly available if you only have servers in one server farm.
So it appears either us-east-1 or us-east-2 was down. If you wanted 99.9%+ up-time you should have servers in us-west-1 or us-west-2 also. This isn't rocket science.
London has one of the best cab drivers in the world due to requirement about memorizing nearly the entirely of the city map. They call it a "knowledge" and it takes year or more of training before they can become a cab driver.
I get upset when any taxi driver isn't using a navigation tool with access to current traffic patterns. If my company isn't paying for the ride I'll often have Google Maps open on my phone to make sure the driver isn't taking a poor route. No amount of human "knowledge" is better than a real time traffic updated navigation app.
It seems just basic common sense to require people that need to deal with the public, including in a safety context, to actually be able to converse in the national language.
It depends on how strict the requirements are. Most adults read at a 7th to 8th grade level, and around 20% of adults read at under a 5th grade level. Any reading / writing requirements which limits employment to a large percentage of the working class population are likely not in the public interest.
If they are looking for something around a 3rd-5th grade reading level I could understand that. If they are looking for an 8th grade reading level the law is ridiculous and will likely only serve to limit access to non-native speakers and those without higher education (IMHO).
The few Intel builds I've done were for performance die hards, spending $4000+ because they believed that Intel was the end-all, be-all, even though the games they play are hitting GPU bottlenecks, and the CPU is sitting there at 50+% idle. Could have saved $500+ to put into a better GPU... but people don't listen when they go by forum posts of evangelists claiming Intel is the best thing since sliced bread, even though their $1200 CPU only bests AMDs $400 CPU by 10%-15% at best.
I think you may be setting up a bit of a strawman argument by comparing $1000+ Intel processors with $400 AMD processors. I'm not even sure which AMD processors you are talking about since an FX-9590 or FX-8350 are both between $150-$200.
When most enthusiasts are building a computer and choosing between Intel or AMD, I would say they are probably comparing an Intel i7-6800K to an AMD FX-8350. That would be $410 vs $150, 13575 Passmark vs 8938, 33 Passmark per $ vs 60 Passmark per $, 140W vs 125 W, 97 Passmark per Watt vs 72 Passmark per Watt.
No one is doubting that AMD is better in performance per dollar, but in reality you are only talking about a $260 difference not $500+. For that extra money you get a 50%+ faster processor, not 10%-15%. Performance per dollar may be important if you are building a server farm, but you generally only have one personal computer so in that case total performance is far more important. If you really had to choose squeeze out some savings so you can upgrade a GeForce GTX 1070 to a 1080 ($200 difference) then I guess AMD is a reasonable trade-off, but honestly if $200 is that big of a deal don't spend $500+ on a video card in the first place.
I concede that AMD is almost certainly the better option for sub-$1000 computers, but I strongly disagree it is the better choice for high end machines.
If, however, Uber workers were truly independent contractors, they could freely subcontract other drivers to drive multiple passengers at the same time and get paid for all of them (and presumably pay their own drivers a percentage of the rate that Uber offers per ride). Uber disallows this however, thereby exercising too much control over the work that their drivers do, and clearly placing them in the category of employee.
It is perfectly legal to put a clause in a contracting agreement ensuring that the work cannot be subcontracted out. If you are hiring a particular contractor because of their specific expertise, you may not want them to farm the work out to someone cheaper if they have overbooked themselves. When I worked at a consulting firm there were times where they even spelled out the exact employees my firm would use for a project.
Since Uber wants to give accurate information about the drivers to its customers, such a clause is very reasonable in their case.
This may seem a bit obvious, but new movies turn into older movies at exactly the same rate that new movies are released. It's not as if "older movies" were a fixed set. If you make a policy of only watching movies that are at least X years old, you'll end up with the same amount of "new" (to you) content each year as if you watched every new blockbuster on opening night at several times the price.
But a large part of the enjoyment from movies is discussing them with others. Similar to sports and other forms of entertainment, they are shared experiences. It only takes a few weekends for coworkers to assume anyone who cares about a movie has already seen it and spoilers are fair game.
I'll go with a variation of A: I have no interest in the history of film. Even many of my favorite films from childhood are not that enjoyable any more. The camera work, dialogue, and general cinematography from older movies really detract from the experience.
I have respect for the history of computers as well, but I wouldn't enjoy using a Commodore 64 anymore either.
The thing is, unless you have seen everything you would possibly want to see in older movies available for $10, why would you pay $50 for the same home experience?
Yes, I have seen every decent older movie I care to see. Every once in a while I am surprised by an old movie I missed, but it's quite rare. After a couple decades even great movies start to show their age anyway.
But if all you get out of going out to watch a movie is watching a movie, why not watch an older movie for nothing? Does the newness of a movie really mean that much to you?
Yes, considering I've most likely already seen the old one.
Why not make it $500, at least if you're intention is to charge a wishful price that nobody is going to pay anyway.
You must not have young children (who need a costly babysitter), rarely go to a movie with friends or family (thus reducing the price per viewer below movie theater pricing), or perhaps live in a low cost area where tickets aren't pushing $15 per person. Because otherwise you wouldn't think $50 for this service was wishful thinking on the part of the studios.
I would gladly pay $50 for a dozen or so movies per year so I don't need to spend $50+ per night on a babysitter.