I've tried Occulus and agree with the parent (I'm also 40 and have been around this block before). VR will never be a mainstream, mass market application. Now that the tech is mostly working (OR is awesome - it works like we all wanted it to the first time Jaron Lanier was in the news), it needs applications. Sure, core gaming will change as will some industrial applications, but otherwise there aren't a lot of good reasons to put an app in an head mounted display. HMDs are not exactly a great fashion accessory (even at the scale of google glass).
Sacramento and the rest of the Central Valley has been trying this forever. It didn't happen during the first bubble, it likely won't happen this time around. The Delta and Valley regions may as well be flyover country as far as techs are concerned. It's almost as easy to hop on a plane and be in Austin, Boulder, Portland, SLC, or any other regional tech hub than it is to drive around in CA.
I grew up in Merced and have seen this same story too many times in the past... 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s... This conversation is a good predictor for bursting bubbles, though.;)
How about this: sites that have their password databases breached pay a $1B fine, the fine paid in part by the company, the management, and the devs responsible.
The users are not the ones in need of training here.
So, there are two types of people out there: those that wear watches and those that don't. I fall into the latter category. As someone who doesn't wear jewelry, I've never felt the need to accessorise with time (save for that brief period in 7th grade where I had a few Swatches...;) ). The other reason for a watch would be practical. But here's the thing: I always know within a few minutes what time it is. If you don't wear a watch, you get pretty good at knowing the time. And, in most cases, you realise that it doesn't matter that much. Is it early? Have breakfast. Is it late? Have a cocktail. Am I at work? I have clocks surrounding me that are more accurate than any watch I'd wear.
Having played around with the "quantified self" gadgets, I can also say that they didn't give me much more than I could get through just general self awareness and a scale (or a more precise measuring device for whatever it is I'm quantifying). So, a smartwatch for me would just be a connected device for email, Web, and phone calls. My smartphone is great for that and I don't have to wear it on my wrist (see above: I don't wear jewelry). I can also set my phone aside and easily walk away from it when I need to be disconnected, which is key for long term sanity.
I know I'm only a portion of the market, but when it comes to smart watches, the manufacturers are already dealing with a segmented market. The luxury manufacturers are right to focus on what their bread and butter is: high end, mechanical jewelry (which, imho, is way cooler than a smart watch from an engineering perspective). The smartwatch space will need to focus on the intersection of smartphone users who wear watches for practical reasons and want to move away from their phone. They'll likely never capture the smartphone users who don't like to wear watches.
"You need to be very adaptable, so that you have a baseline skill set that allows you to be a call center operator today and tomorrow be able to interpret MRI scans."
I'm not sure if this is just naivete or Silicon Valley hubris, but this statement doesn't really make much sense. MRIs are interpreted by MDs (radiologists) with years of training. Call centers can be staffed by high-school drop outs. I have friends from both ends of the spectrum in exactly those jobs and I can tell you the starting point for each career and baseline skill set are not the same. Note that baseline intelligence may be the same - my call center friends are all phenomenal musicians who put their intellectual effort into music and use call center jobs to pay the bills, but there's no way they're interpreting MRIs in this lifetime.
I'm seeing the same high level of hubris in tech right now that I saw (and was guilty of) in 1999. There seems to be this feeling that good software skills are a proxy for any other discipline. After all, if I can write an MRI app for an iPhone (or, in the 90s, if I could write a Web 1.0 MRI viewer - which I did, fwiw), then I'm clearly qualified to take the next step and start diagnosing patients (or better yet, just write an app for that, too). Once you know the jargon and basic requirements, everything else is just implementation details, right? Of course, the reality is is that those implementation details are years of dedicated training, not a few weeks of hacking. You only get so many years in life - you can't do everything with them.
In Bock's comments, I see either ignorance or sleaziness. Maybe he really believes that anyone can and should be anything and everything. In that case, he's wasting his time in HR and should become a motivational speaker. But, it also seems like he's just using this as a way to get more call center operators to believe that there's a career path at Google that will allow everyone with a CS degree to be true renaissance people. Sure, every now and then one will pull it off, but people also win the lottery. That doesn't mean everyone will.
Literal, out of context interpretations of sacred documents by the masses has been great for science.
There is a middle ground in citizen scholarship, between taking a document at its most literal and complete deference to the the high priests. An educated populace should understand the nuances that led to a document being written in the first place and applying critical thought to determine if those reasons are still valid today or if the document should be evolved.
With all the comments about moving to other free services or using this as an opportunity to start a new business, what is the value for most people? If there are enough people that value it at a certain price such that the costs of running the business are covered, there's a business to be made. Otherwise, it's just charity on the service's part. Sure, everyone likes getting stuff for free, but even free stuff costs money for someone.
Here's a crowd-based experiment I've always wanted to initiate: For one day, everyone follows ads and stays on the ad site for a non-trivial amount of time.
If everyone clicks on ads (or even a small percentage of people), monthly ad budgets will be very quickly drained. The companies will have received no value from their ad spend (if they do at all as it is). Google, et al. will get a one day windfall from the ad revenues. It might take a few coordinated "denial-of-ad-attacks", but eventually vendors will start to question the value of their internet advertising budgets and find better ways to spend their money connecting with customers.
Of course, a side effect of this might be killing the goose that laid the golden egg. If Google and Facebook suddenly lose their primary source of revenue, they will have to look for other ways to monetize their services (maybe just asking users to pay? if Facebook's numbers are real (haha), $5/month/user would be ~$5B/month,which is not bad).
A more devious alternative would be to have ad blockers silently follow the ads and "fake" a user session...
What's most interesting is that the anonymous reports from the US intelligence community the day after the plane disappeared said that the plane was on the bottom of the Indian Ocean. These claims seemed a little odd at the time since there was no supporting evidence at all and rescuers were still looking for debris on the original flight path. But, it's looking like they were spot on.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the only real conspiracy in this whole affair is the US govt's cover up of the initial leak. The plane itself likely just suffered a catastrophic failure and lumbered on until it ran out of fuel. But, the US govt also likely tracked it the entire time. That's why someone was able to make a confident pronouncement so quickly. They knew exactly where the plane was, if not exactly what happened. But, this intelligence capability (tracking all flying objects all the time) is probably highly classified. Rather than give it up for a civilian SAR effort, they decided to keep it under wraps, knowing that eventually the plane would be found and the capability is far more useful if no one knows it exists.
This. Software is expensive to maintain. For every old, supported version that a customer can rollback to, the company must maintain development and support infrastructure. This is likely a full time QA person whose job it is to ensure the rollbacks work, at least a part time developer to fix things that break the rollbacks, the team that supports the packaging and distribution of the rollback versions, and the front line support staff to answer calls when something goes wrong with the rollback. Already, that's at least 3 FTEs and likely 5 or more. Just to support rollback functionality. To put a price on it, it's at least $300k/year in direct costs, and more in opportunity and indirect costs.
For free apps, or apps that only cost a few dollars, there's absolutely no way a company can justify the cost and effort to do this.
Now, if users were willing to pay $50 for an app, then there would likely be resources available to support this. Of course, with those prices, the dev processes could be more robust and the need to rollback would be greatly diminished.
I think you nailed it in calling out that Eric Schmidt realizes this was a very bad move for Facebook and shows that Facebook is not really competition. "Good for them" is simply a way of saying that these guys made out like bandits at someone else's expense.
Facebook can only pull off a few more of these big deals before their cash is gone and their stock is worthless. If they have to do this every time a new startup starts to take users away (which seems to be what really happened with WhatsApp - losing everyone but the US to another messaging platform couldn't have been good for FB), they'll be out of money and equity quicker than you can launch a startup at SXSW.
Eric Schmidt knows this and hance can easily laugh it off. I'm sure Eric also knows what Facebook's actual user base is (hint: there's no way it's anywhere near 1B people, some simple top-down modeling should be enough to convince anyone that there is no way 1/7 of the world's population is actively using FB, kinda like when the Oscars used to claim 1B viewers). WhatsApp was probably just the confirmation he needed to write off Facebook as a competitor.
Ok... hopefully that's all the DST-sleep-deprivation ranting I'll do today...
-Chris
Data Scientists are this bubble's Web Masters
on
'Data Science' Is Dead
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I've been working with big data since before it was a term and currently run a scientific software company that touches on many aspects of "data science". Many of my colleagues also work in the field. I've seen many fads come and go. Data Science as a profession is one of those.
Most people who call themselves data scientists are really just doing "big data" processing using tools such as Hadoop. They are delivering results to managers who have jumped on the big data band wagon and, not knowing any better, have asked for these skills. In 99% of the cases, the processing is simply haphazardly looking for patterns or running basic statistics on data that really isn't that big. However, there is a lot of low hanging fruit in data that hasn't been analyzed before and most practitioners who've suddenly become data analysis experts are rewarded for trivial findings. A tiny bit of statistics, programming, and data presentation skills go a long way.
Compare this to the Web Masters of the late 1990s. The Web was new and managers knew that they needed Web sites. HTML and CGI were techie things but also fairly easy to learn. A group of people quickly figured out that they could be very important to a company by doing very little work and created the position of Web Master. A tiny bit of programming, sys admin, and design skills went a long way.
Web Masters disappeared when IT departments realized that you actually needed real software developers, real designers, and real sys admins to run a corporate Web site. Sure, the bar is still low, but expertise beyond a 'For Dummies' book is still needed. And, few people can be experts in each area, hence the need for teams.
Real data science has actually been around for a long time. Statisticians and data analysts have been performing this role for decades and have built up a lot of rigor around it. It a tough skill set to develop, but a very useful one to have. "Big Data" distracted people a bit and let the current generation of data scientists jump in and pretend everything was new and we could throw out the old methods. As the field evolves, data science will necessarily transition back to the experts (statisticians) and become a team effort that includes people skilled in programming, IT, and the target domain (analysts).
That said, there's good money to be made right now, so if you have Web Master on your resume, you might as well be a data scientist while you can.;)
Just sent this to feedback@slashdot.org... please everyone do the same with your comments. Spam them into compliance with our demands!;)
I have been reading and participating in discussions on Slashdot since 1996.* Over the years, there have been few times when I have gone more than a few days without reading/./. is my connection to the broader geek community and the discussions on the site have been influential in shaping me as a geek. As an older geek,/. gives me a chance to share what I’ve learned and also keep up with how people are thinking about new technologies.
I have yet to find a site that is as comprehensive in its community and coverage as/. Let me restate that: there is no other place on the internet as essential to the geek community as/. Nothing comes close./. works because of its community. The community values/. because it’s given us a place to discuss a broad range of topics in a civilized manner. Without the community,/. will simply be another discussion board on a news site, with loud voices screaming their opinions and very little civilized discourse.
If you haven’t noticed by the comments on many of the stories recently, the community will disperse if the beta is rolled out. I won’t go into the reasons why (there are thousands of great comments explaining the shortcomings of the new site) other than to say that the new format discourages discourse and community and encourages quick comments with little context.
Deep, threaded, moderated discussions that are easy read and inviting to participate in are what makes the current site work. The conventions for discourse that have evolved over the last 17 or so years, many enabled by the design of the site, are what allows the community to function. Change it too much, and the community will disperse and go their separate ways - off to Reddit and 4chan and the comment sections of Ars, Wired, Toms, and other tech sites.
The managers in charge of this redesign are facing probably the biggest decision of their career. By going forward with the beta, they will surely meet their quarterly goals. But, in doing so, they will be directly responsible for the destruction of one of the most important communities on the internet.
Please make the right decision and don’t go forward with the beta as it currently exists. (and note: redesigns are fine, just understand why your site works and don’t destroy its soul in the process)
-Chris aka rockmuelle
*My 6 digit ID is only due to the fact that I valued privacy in the early days of the internet and was reluctant to sign up for accounts anywhere.
Why aren't/. readers collecting the virtual unicorn horns I left for them on my website?? Don't they appreciate the gesture and realize the value they're leaving on the table??
More to the point, as a professional programmer and musician, as much as I'd love to write music software, I use my free time writing music. The commercial tools are really good and the parent is correct in saying that it will take a lot of effort to catch up.
Fwiw, I use Ableton for recording and production and hardware synths for sounds. Of you love hacking and music, check out the latest generation of affordable analog synths (Korg volca/monotribe, Artutia microbrute, etc). Desiging sounds from scratch is highly satisfying.
I've argued that it's more like "web master" from the 90s. A tendy job that will soon be replaced by actual experts.
For data scientist, the experts are the traditional analysts and staticisians that were already doing these jobs before Hadoop experience became the only job requirement.
The rectangle with rounded edges was a design patent (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent) not a utlitity patent, which the Google patent is.
I'm not saying the Google patent isn't bad, especially given the clear prior art with MS Comic Chat, but just that it's important to distinguish the types of patents when pointing out the inanity of the system. Design patents are a little easier to accept since they're closer to copyright on physical objects.
It will be interesting to see if they keep this up when they're spending customer's money rather than investor's. A blank business with a set amount of money to spend is easy to model this way. Once you start to find the real value in your offering and determine how revenue is actually made, things get trickier. One or two stellar salespeople or engineers can be responsible for an outsize portion of the business. They need to be compensated appropriately.
Reproducibility (what we strive for in science) is not the same as repeatability (what the poster is actually trying to achieve). Results that are not robust on different platforms aren't really scientific results.
Luckily for this discussion, the data actually exists. Indiana recently went from not changing time to chaning time. Turns out energy costs are 1-3% more under daylight saving time than with out it.
Here's the citation:
NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES DOES DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME SAVE ENERGY? EVIDENCE FROM A NATURAL EXPERIMENT IN INDIANA Matthew J. Kotchen Laura E. Grant Working Paper 14429 http://www.nber.org/papers/w14429
But the problem with this model is that there's no way for a grad student to publish a negative result if they fail to replicate the results. To compound the problem, if a student starts getting negative results, they will quickly change their course of research to something that may produce results. PhDs are not granted for negative results - there is little incentive to pursue research paths that aren't fruitful.
In the end, the student will know original the result is questionable, but the scientific community will not.
Look, I use open source all the time and have contributed to many projects and ran a few. I love open source just as much as the next slashdotter.
BUT, broad statements like "open source will fix healthcare.gov" don't add anything to the conversation. What if it was built on open source and it failed? Would we be making the same claims about commercial software? "If only they had used WebSphere and DB2!! Everything would have been wonderful!".
No. No. And. No.
As many people have already pointed out, the problems with healthcare.gov are mostly the same ones that plague many large scale IT projects. Insufficient testing, complex interactions between many existing complex systems (which are hard to get right), consultants that get paid for code delivered, working or not, and so on.
Now, TFA actually makes the argument that healthcare.gov as an _open platform_ would be a good idea. It goes on to point out that that's one thing that makes some of the bigger web apps successful: they are platforms for building apps rather than apps themselves. How much of that is true is open for debate (is google really a beautiful platform or is it a bunch of hacks held together by duct tape? only google engineering knows for sure...) , but as a goal, healthcare.gov as a platform isn't a bad idea.
However, platforms don't just materialize from thin air. In fact, building a platform before you have apps is a recipe for failure. It's usually only after the third or fourth app that the patterns emerge that make a platform possible. It takes time for good platforms to evolve.
Given that, designing healthcare.gov from the beginning as a platform would probably have failed, too. The developers would have created a wonderful platform for some vague requirements that likely didn't actually meet the needs of an insurance exchange at all.
From a pure software engineering perspective, what's happening right now isn't that bad. Version 1.0 launched, it had problems. Let's get working on Version 2.0 and maybe try out some new ideas. Then for Version 3.0 and 4.0, we can start thinking of a platform. The other important point here is that you have to plan for multiple versions and long term maintenance/evolution for software. The suggestion that healthcare.gov should have been run as a startup in the government rather than outsourced is probably the best idea for fixing the problem.
According to Microsoft/Apple/etc. software developement costs large amounts of money and equipment, yet Linux and the open source community exist and flourish. How many scientists would risk their own money in their own experiments? If not, what does that say about the experiments?
Whoa there... Linux and most open source tools cost large amounts of money to develop. Look at the list of top contributors to Linux:
Most of those are companies that are paying their employees to work on Linux. The sum of their salaries and the resources they require is a good part of what it costs to develop Linux.
Just for fun, let's estimate what the Linux kernel costs to develop each year. The actual report from the Linux Foundation lists the number of changes each organization made to the kernel. If you sum of the number of changes from commercial entities, you get 55,604 changes committed by paid developers. Assuming each developer contributes one change a day on average and assuming they work hard, that's about 200 changes/year/per developer. Dividing the number of changes by the changes per developer suggests around 278 full time developers are contributing to the Linux kernel. Assuming the average fully burdened cost for a kernel developer to be $250k, the cost for those developers is $69.5M/year.
tl;dr: The Linux kernel costs somewhere in the ballpark for $70M a year to develop. This is just the kernel, not the rest of the Linux ecosystem.
If those companies stop contributing to Linux, Linux goes away.
Slashdot Mirror
I've tried Occulus and agree with the parent (I'm also 40 and have been around this block before). VR will never be a mainstream, mass market application. Now that the tech is mostly working (OR is awesome - it works like we all wanted it to the first time Jaron Lanier was in the news), it needs applications. Sure, core gaming will change as will some industrial applications, but otherwise there aren't a lot of good reasons to put an app in an head mounted display. HMDs are not exactly a great fashion accessory (even at the scale of google glass).
-Chris
Sacramento and the rest of the Central Valley has been trying this forever. It didn't happen during the first bubble, it likely won't happen this time around. The Delta and Valley regions may as well be flyover country as far as techs are concerned. It's almost as easy to hop on a plane and be in Austin, Boulder, Portland, SLC, or any other regional tech hub than it is to drive around in CA.
I grew up in Merced and have seen this same story too many times in the past... 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s... This conversation is a good predictor for bursting bubbles, though. ;)
-Chris
I'm a bike commuter and I own two cars. I pay more taxes relative to car commuters for the use of the roads.
Of course, I could get rid of the fun car and keep just the practical one, but I'd still be paying more than most drivers relative to my impact.
For rule 1 to be a valid argument, all bikers can't own cars. In the US, that's almost universally not the case.
-Chris
How about this: sites that have their password databases breached pay a $1B fine, the fine paid in part by the company, the management, and the devs responsible.
The users are not the ones in need of training here.
-Chris
So, there are two types of people out there: those that wear watches and those that don't. I fall into the latter category. As someone who doesn't wear jewelry, I've never felt the need to accessorise with time (save for that brief period in 7th grade where I had a few Swatches... ;) ). The other reason for a watch would be practical. But here's the thing: I always know within a few minutes what time it is. If you don't wear a watch, you get pretty good at knowing the time. And, in most cases, you realise that it doesn't matter that much. Is it early? Have breakfast. Is it late? Have a cocktail. Am I at work? I have clocks surrounding me that are more accurate than any watch I'd wear.
Having played around with the "quantified self" gadgets, I can also say that they didn't give me much more than I could get through just general self awareness and a scale (or a more precise measuring device for whatever it is I'm quantifying). So, a smartwatch for me would just be a connected device for email, Web, and phone calls. My smartphone is great for that and I don't have to wear it on my wrist (see above: I don't wear jewelry). I can also set my phone aside and easily walk away from it when I need to be disconnected, which is key for long term sanity.
I know I'm only a portion of the market, but when it comes to smart watches, the manufacturers are already dealing with a segmented market. The luxury manufacturers are right to focus on what their bread and butter is: high end, mechanical jewelry (which, imho, is way cooler than a smart watch from an engineering perspective). The smartwatch space will need to focus on the intersection of smartphone users who wear watches for practical reasons and want to move away from their phone. They'll likely never capture the smartphone users who don't like to wear watches.
-Chris
"You need to be very adaptable, so that you have a baseline skill set that allows you to be a call center operator today and tomorrow be able to interpret MRI scans."
I'm not sure if this is just naivete or Silicon Valley hubris, but this statement doesn't really make much sense. MRIs are interpreted by MDs (radiologists) with years of training. Call centers can be staffed by high-school drop outs. I have friends from both ends of the spectrum in exactly those jobs and I can tell you the starting point for each career and baseline skill set are not the same. Note that baseline intelligence may be the same - my call center friends are all phenomenal musicians who put their intellectual effort into music and use call center jobs to pay the bills, but there's no way they're interpreting MRIs in this lifetime.
I'm seeing the same high level of hubris in tech right now that I saw (and was guilty of) in 1999. There seems to be this feeling that good software skills are a proxy for any other discipline. After all, if I can write an MRI app for an iPhone (or, in the 90s, if I could write a Web 1.0 MRI viewer - which I did, fwiw), then I'm clearly qualified to take the next step and start diagnosing patients (or better yet, just write an app for that, too). Once you know the jargon and basic requirements, everything else is just implementation details, right? Of course, the reality is is that those implementation details are years of dedicated training, not a few weeks of hacking. You only get so many years in life - you can't do everything with them.
In Bock's comments, I see either ignorance or sleaziness. Maybe he really believes that anyone can and should be anything and everything. In that case, he's wasting his time in HR and should become a motivational speaker. But, it also seems like he's just using this as a way to get more call center operators to believe that there's a career path at Google that will allow everyone with a CS degree to be true renaissance people. Sure, every now and then one will pull it off, but people also win the lottery. That doesn't mean everyone will.
-Chris
Literal, out of context interpretations of sacred documents by the masses has been great for science.
There is a middle ground in citizen scholarship, between taking a document at its most literal and complete deference to the the high priests. An educated populace should understand the nuances that led to a document being written in the first place and applying critical thought to determine if those reasons are still valid today or if the document should be evolved.
-Chris
With all the comments about moving to other free services or using this as an opportunity to start a new business, what is the value for most people? If there are enough people that value it at a certain price such that the costs of running the business are covered, there's a business to be made. Otherwise, it's just charity on the service's part. Sure, everyone likes getting stuff for free, but even free stuff costs money for someone.
-Chris
(and maybe the internet as we know it)
Here's a crowd-based experiment I've always wanted to initiate: For one day, everyone follows ads and stays on the ad site for a non-trivial amount of time.
If everyone clicks on ads (or even a small percentage of people), monthly ad budgets will be very quickly drained. The companies will have received no value from their ad spend (if they do at all as it is). Google, et al. will get a one day windfall from the ad revenues. It might take a few coordinated "denial-of-ad-attacks", but eventually vendors will start to question the value of their internet advertising budgets and find better ways to spend their money connecting with customers.
Of course, a side effect of this might be killing the goose that laid the golden egg. If Google and Facebook suddenly lose their primary source of revenue, they will have to look for other ways to monetize their services (maybe just asking users to pay? if Facebook's numbers are real (haha), $5/month/user would be ~$5B/month ,which is not bad).
A more devious alternative would be to have ad blockers silently follow the ads and "fake" a user session...
What's most interesting is that the anonymous reports from the US intelligence community the day after the plane disappeared said that the plane was on the bottom of the Indian Ocean. These claims seemed a little odd at the time since there was no supporting evidence at all and rescuers were still looking for debris on the original flight path. But, it's looking like they were spot on.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the only real conspiracy in this whole affair is the US govt's cover up of the initial leak. The plane itself likely just suffered a catastrophic failure and lumbered on until it ran out of fuel. But, the US govt also likely tracked it the entire time. That's why someone was able to make a confident pronouncement so quickly. They knew exactly where the plane was, if not exactly what happened. But, this intelligence capability (tracking all flying objects all the time) is probably highly classified. Rather than give it up for a civilian SAR effort, they decided to keep it under wraps, knowing that eventually the plane would be found and the capability is far more useful if no one knows it exists.
This. Software is expensive to maintain. For every old, supported version that a customer can rollback to, the company must maintain development and support infrastructure. This is likely a full time QA person whose job it is to ensure the rollbacks work, at least a part time developer to fix things that break the rollbacks, the team that supports the packaging and distribution of the rollback versions, and the front line support staff to answer calls when something goes wrong with the rollback. Already, that's at least 3 FTEs and likely 5 or more. Just to support rollback functionality. To put a price on it, it's at least $300k/year in direct costs, and more in opportunity and indirect costs.
For free apps, or apps that only cost a few dollars, there's absolutely no way a company can justify the cost and effort to do this.
Now, if users were willing to pay $50 for an app, then there would likely be resources available to support this. Of course, with those prices, the dev processes could be more robust and the need to rollback would be greatly diminished.
tl;dr: you get what you pay for.
-Chris
I think you nailed it in calling out that Eric Schmidt realizes this was a very bad move for Facebook and shows that Facebook is not really competition. "Good for them" is simply a way of saying that these guys made out like bandits at someone else's expense.
Facebook can only pull off a few more of these big deals before their cash is gone and their stock is worthless. If they have to do this every time a new startup starts to take users away (which seems to be what really happened with WhatsApp - losing everyone but the US to another messaging platform couldn't have been good for FB), they'll be out of money and equity quicker than you can launch a startup at SXSW.
Eric Schmidt knows this and hance can easily laugh it off. I'm sure Eric also knows what Facebook's actual user base is (hint: there's no way it's anywhere near 1B people, some simple top-down modeling should be enough to convince anyone that there is no way 1/7 of the world's population is actively using FB, kinda like when the Oscars used to claim 1B viewers). WhatsApp was probably just the confirmation he needed to write off Facebook as a competitor.
Ok... hopefully that's all the DST-sleep-deprivation ranting I'll do today...
-Chris
I've been working with big data since before it was a term and currently run a scientific software company that touches on many aspects of "data science". Many of my colleagues also work in the field. I've seen many fads come and go. Data Science as a profession is one of those.
Most people who call themselves data scientists are really just doing "big data" processing using tools such as Hadoop. They are delivering results to managers who have jumped on the big data band wagon and, not knowing any better, have asked for these skills. In 99% of the cases, the processing is simply haphazardly looking for patterns or running basic statistics on data that really isn't that big. However, there is a lot of low hanging fruit in data that hasn't been analyzed before and most practitioners who've suddenly become data analysis experts are rewarded for trivial findings. A tiny bit of statistics, programming, and data presentation skills go a long way.
Compare this to the Web Masters of the late 1990s. The Web was new and managers knew that they needed Web sites. HTML and CGI were techie things but also fairly easy to learn. A group of people quickly figured out that they could be very important to a company by doing very little work and created the position of Web Master. A tiny bit of programming, sys admin, and design skills went a long way.
Web Masters disappeared when IT departments realized that you actually needed real software developers, real designers, and real sys admins to run a corporate Web site. Sure, the bar is still low, but expertise beyond a 'For Dummies' book is still needed. And, few people can be experts in each area, hence the need for teams.
Real data science has actually been around for a long time. Statisticians and data analysts have been performing this role for decades and have built up a lot of rigor around it. It a tough skill set to develop, but a very useful one to have. "Big Data" distracted people a bit and let the current generation of data scientists jump in and pretend everything was new and we could throw out the old methods. As the field evolves, data science will necessarily transition back to the experts (statisticians) and become a team effort that includes people skilled in programming, IT, and the target domain (analysts).
That said, there's good money to be made right now, so if you have Web Master on your resume, you might as well be a data scientist while you can. ;)
-Chris
Thanks for the thoughtful answers. As a full time software guy, part time musician, it's great to be privy to the pescalogical wisdom of the pros.
I will say, the MT-32 reference is the one that immediately took me back to a different time and place. Good stuff!
Just sent this to feedback@slashdot.org ... please everyone do the same with your comments. Spam them into compliance with our demands! ;)
I have been reading and participating in discussions on Slashdot since 1996.* Over the years, there have been few times when I have gone more than a few days without reading /. /. is my connection to the broader geek community and the discussions on the site have been influential in shaping me as a geek. As an older geek, /. gives me a chance to share what I’ve learned and also keep up with how people are thinking about new technologies.
I have yet to find a site that is as comprehensive in its community and coverage as /. Let me restate that: there is no other place on the internet as essential to the geek community as /. Nothing comes close. /. works because of its community. The community values /. because it’s given us a place to discuss a broad range of topics in a civilized manner. Without the community, /. will simply be another discussion board on a news site, with loud voices screaming their opinions and very little civilized discourse.
If you haven’t noticed by the comments on many of the stories recently, the community will disperse if the beta is rolled out. I won’t go into the reasons why (there are thousands of great comments explaining the shortcomings of the new site) other than to say that the new format discourages discourse and community and encourages quick comments with little context.
Deep, threaded, moderated discussions that are easy read and inviting to participate in are what makes the current site work. The conventions for discourse that have evolved over the last 17 or so years, many enabled by the design of the site, are what allows the community to function. Change it too much, and the community will disperse and go their separate ways - off to Reddit and 4chan and the comment sections of Ars, Wired, Toms, and other tech sites.
The managers in charge of this redesign are facing probably the biggest decision of their career. By going forward with the beta, they will surely meet their quarterly goals. But, in doing so, they will be directly responsible for the destruction of one of the most important communities on the internet.
Please make the right decision and don’t go forward with the beta as it currently exists. (and note: redesigns are fine, just understand why your site works and don’t destroy its soul in the process)
-Chris aka rockmuelle
*My 6 digit ID is only due to the fact that I valued privacy in the early days of the internet and was reluctant to sign up for accounts anywhere.
Why aren't /. readers collecting the virtual unicorn horns I left for them on my website?? Don't they appreciate the gesture and realize the value they're leaving on the table??
More to the point, as a professional programmer and musician, as much as I'd love to write music software, I use my free time writing music. The commercial tools are really good and the parent is correct in saying that it will take a lot of effort to catch up.
Fwiw, I use Ableton for recording and production and hardware synths for sounds. Of you love hacking and music, check out the latest generation of affordable analog synths (Korg volca/monotribe, Artutia microbrute, etc). Desiging sounds from scratch is highly satisfying.
I've argued that it's more like "web master" from the 90s. A tendy job that will soon be replaced by actual experts.
For data scientist, the experts are the traditional analysts and staticisians that were already doing these jobs before Hadoop experience became the only job requirement.
-Chris
The rectangle with rounded edges was a design patent (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent) not a utlitity patent, which the Google patent is.
I'm not saying the Google patent isn't bad, especially given the clear prior art with MS Comic Chat, but just that it's important to distinguish the types of patents when pointing out the inanity of the system. Design patents are a little easier to accept since they're closer to copyright on physical objects.
-Chris
It will be interesting to see if they keep this up when they're spending customer's money rather than investor's. A blank business with a set amount of money to spend is easy to model this way. Once you start to find the real value in your offering and determine how revenue is actually made, things get trickier. One or two stellar salespeople or engineers can be responsible for an outsize portion of the business. They need to be compensated appropriately.
-Chris
This.
Reproducibility (what we strive for in science) is not the same as repeatability (what the poster is actually trying to achieve). Results that are not robust on different platforms aren't really scientific results.
I wish more scientists understood this.
-Chris
Luckily for this discussion, the data actually exists. Indiana recently went from not changing time to chaning time. Turns out energy costs are 1-3% more under daylight saving time than with out it.
Here's the citation:
NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES
DOES DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME SAVE ENERGY? EVIDENCE FROM A NATURAL EXPERIMENT IN INDIANA
Matthew J. Kotchen Laura E. Grant
Working Paper 14429 http://www.nber.org/papers/w14429
-Chris
But the problem with this model is that there's no way for a grad student to publish a negative result if they fail to replicate the results. To compound the problem, if a student starts getting negative results, they will quickly change their course of research to something that may produce results. PhDs are not granted for negative results - there is little incentive to pursue research paths that aren't fruitful.
In the end, the student will know original the result is questionable, but the scientific community will not.
-Chris
Look, I use open source all the time and have contributed to many projects and ran a few. I love open source just as much as the next slashdotter.
BUT, broad statements like "open source will fix healthcare.gov" don't add anything to the conversation. What if it was built on open source and it failed? Would we be making the same claims about commercial software? "If only they had used WebSphere and DB2!! Everything would have been wonderful!".
No. No. And. No.
As many people have already pointed out, the problems with healthcare.gov are mostly the same ones that plague many large scale IT projects. Insufficient testing, complex interactions between many existing complex systems (which are hard to get right), consultants that get paid for code delivered, working or not, and so on.
Now, TFA actually makes the argument that healthcare.gov as an _open platform_ would be a good idea. It goes on to point out that that's one thing that makes some of the bigger web apps successful: they are platforms for building apps rather than apps themselves. How much of that is true is open for debate (is google really a beautiful platform or is it a bunch of hacks held together by duct tape? only google engineering knows for sure...) , but as a goal, healthcare.gov as a platform isn't a bad idea.
However, platforms don't just materialize from thin air. In fact, building a platform before you have apps is a recipe for failure. It's usually only after the third or fourth app that the patterns emerge that make a platform possible. It takes time for good platforms to evolve.
Given that, designing healthcare.gov from the beginning as a platform would probably have failed, too. The developers would have created a wonderful platform for some vague requirements that likely didn't actually meet the needs of an insurance exchange at all.
From a pure software engineering perspective, what's happening right now isn't that bad. Version 1.0 launched, it had problems. Let's get working on Version 2.0 and maybe try out some new ideas. Then for Version 3.0 and 4.0, we can start thinking of a platform. The other important point here is that you have to plan for multiple versions and long term maintenance/evolution for software. The suggestion that healthcare.gov should have been run as a startup in the government rather than outsourced is probably the best idea for fixing the problem.
-Chris
According to Microsoft/Apple/etc. software developement costs large amounts of money and equipment, yet Linux and the open source community exist and flourish. How many scientists would risk their own money in their own experiments? If not, what does that say about the experiments?
Whoa there... Linux and most open source tools cost large amounts of money to develop. Look at the list of top contributors to Linux:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/09/google-and-samsung-soar-into-list-of-top-10-linux-contributors/
Most of those are companies that are paying their employees to work on Linux. The sum of their salaries and the resources they require is a good part of what it costs to develop Linux.
Just for fun, let's estimate what the Linux kernel costs to develop each year. The actual report from the Linux Foundation lists the number of changes each organization made to the kernel. If you sum of the number of changes from commercial entities, you get 55,604 changes committed by paid developers. Assuming each developer contributes one change a day on average and assuming they work hard, that's about 200 changes/year/per developer. Dividing the number of changes by the changes per developer suggests around 278 full time developers are contributing to the Linux kernel. Assuming the average fully burdened cost for a kernel developer to be $250k, the cost for those developers is $69.5M/year.
tl;dr: The Linux kernel costs somewhere in the ballpark for $70M a year to develop. This is just the kernel, not the rest of the Linux ecosystem.
If those companies stop contributing to Linux, Linux goes away.
-Chris