I'd argue if you sacrifice correctness and security you may win first mover status, but it will quickly turn into "first failure" status. You can cut corners on performance and maintainability for much longer before that debt comes due.
If you plan to pursue an industry job, people only care about what you have proven you can do.
In my experience, this is not true. Especially when you have very little real-world on-the-job experience, i.e. when you're starting out. Basically, a graduate degree from a "good" school creates the impression that you're extra-intelligent. How much people weight that vs. actual experience can vary. But it can potentially earn you the benefit of the doubt. Employers are sometimes willing to let you be the "he doesn't have much experience, but he's smart so he can pick it up" guy.
This is the exact opposite of my experience in a graduate C.S. department at a large state school. Master's students generally didn't qualify for fellowships. They were either part time and working, full-time and supported by the U.S. armed forces (usually the Navy), or they were full-time and supporting themselves through loans. The Ph.D. students, on the other hand, usually had fellowships that waived their tuition and fees, and either paid them a stipend (during the first year) or paid them for 10 hr/week of T.A. work. My stipend in the late 1990s was around $12,500/year I think. I was single, my health insurance was through the university, and I didn't have a car payment. So it was basically just rent, food and gas.
If you want to live and work in Germany, or possibly even the EU in general, then European institutions probably deserve a "bump" in those rankings. If you plan to pursue an industry job in the U.S.? Nobody has heard of LMU Munich. In academia, sure. But if you're going to grad school because you want to work in academia, then odds are you can get your way paid at a U.S. school, which argues against the original poster's rationale for going abroad (i.e. to save money).
No, he's saying it's wrong to describe graduate school as requiring one to go into debt when 99.9% of the graduate students he knows aren't going into debt. Because they have fellowships and are paid to work as T.A.s or research fellows. If you can't get a fellowship then, yeah, it might not be worth going, assuming your goal is to work in industry.
In my experience, folks with graduate degrees are usually smarter than those without, and are more likely to grasp (and care about) things like computational complexity, scalability, concurrent programming, security, etc. than those without. Does that mean everybody with a graduate degree understands or cares about those things, and that everyone who lacks a graduate degree fails to understand and doesn't care about them? Not at all. Just describing trends.
Speed of deployment usually isn't worth sacrificing correctness, performance, maintainability and security, if the choice is one or the other.
Education is no longer about advancing human knowledge or you making a contribution to that unless you started out independently wealthy.
Disagree. If you're brilliant and interested in academic research as a career then you can live reasonably comfortably by getting a Ph.D. and pursuing that goal, even if you aren't starting from a position of wealth. "Reasonably comfortably" does not mean lavishly.
The value proposition of a PhD or a Doctorate in this context is suffering due to the Law of Diminishing returns. The cost of college education has increased dramatically due to the high availability of student loans and the amount of additional income you get from having such a credential is not proportional to the cost.
Many Ph.D. students are on fellowships that take care of their tuition, and they get paid to work as T.A.'s or be part of a research team. For such a person, the only cost is the opportunity cost of not being in industry. If your goal is a job in industry then a graduate degree can help with some jobs, but for most it's only a marginal benefit. Master's is the best use of time in that it only delays your entry into the job market by two years, but it's also typically the most expensive since fellowship money is usually only available to Ph.D. seekers.
Rankings could be bunk, but the highest ranked university in Germany is LMU Munich, which is tied for #30. Eighteen U.S. universities are ranked higher, including five that are public. The highest ranked Central or South American university is the University of São Paulo in Brazil, which is in the 251-300 range. In my experience, if they want you, most schools will pay your way w.r.t. the Ph.D. Master's not so much, since it's viewed as a path to industry and not academia.
I found that a Master's degree helped me get jobs. Especially early on when I didn't have a ton of experience. My tuition was free, since (at the time) was a Ph.D. seeker with a fellowship. Only cost was the opportunity cost of not working an industry job, which was further offset by the fact that I had a (small) stipend.
Most people pursue Ph.D.'s because they want to do academic research as their "day job" or because they're eying one of those fancy NFL money jobs in AI or finance.
Completing a Master's or Ph.D. in a STEM field at a reasonably accredited U.S. university should guarantee a near-automatic offer of citizenship. To analogize to picking teams on the playground, these are the "ringers" you want on your team. They drive growth, and they're almost guaranteed to be net contributors with respect to taxes vs. social benefits.
This reduces it to a simplistic case of lack of consequences for inherently lazy workers.
I honestly think it's that simple. If people understood their continued employment was contingent on writing quality code, whether with respect to security or anything else, they would be much more careful. As it is, nobody cares, so they respond rationally to the incentives that are presented. Show up, have a good attitude, meet your deadlines, and don't commit bugs so egregious they break the product in "obvious" ways. If you commit code that breaks the product in non-obvious ways then, well, nobody's perfect; we're not holding you accountable.
The truth is that hardly anyone gives a crap about software quality.
Yes and no. Most managers, devs and executives care, but only up to a point. That's the key. The happy path needs to work or the company's customers will leave. However, the product can be super buggy outside that happy path, perform poorly, and be porous from a security perspective and nobody cares. At least, not until that porosity is noticed and exposed publicly; then everybody cares all of a sudden.
Management doesn't care enough to fire them when they fuck up. If developers knew their job was on the line they might pay more attention to security. You can train them all you want, but if there are zero consequences when they ignore that training then they'll continue to be lazy.
Reddit's new policy seems like the basis for an endless game of Whac-A-Mole as the Internet's creeps search for new places to exchange disturbing content.
1. The folks interested in these things will definitely find other places to congregate, but here's the key: possibly not at reddit. Which is reddit's goal.
2. In terms of it being Whac-a-Mole, it shouldn't be too hard if they implement a user-based reporting / flagging system. Let your users flag suspect subreddits, then every day a reddit employee looks at the top few "most redported" and determines if they meet the criteria for removal. Users who abuse the flagging system lose the ability to flag.
One thing I wish RT would do is make it easier to see "top movies" by audience score. Maybe have the rotten/fresh icon for critics and a separate "thumbs up / thumbs down" icon for audience score. Then again, it's much easier for the mob to "game" audience scores, so I understand why they're reluctant.
2017 population is roughly 325 million. Population in 1945 was roughly 140 million. Seems strange that there was exactly 1 "top" mass shooting during the 37 years from 1945 to 1982, then 12 in the 35 years from 1982 to 2017. Given the differences in population I'd expect there to be approximately half as many during the 1945-1982 period as in the 1983-2017 period.
Recently looked at a list of top mass shootings in the U.S. by # of casualties. 7 of 13 happened in the last 10 years. 12 of thirteen happened since 1983, the only exception being Charles Whitman in 1966.
I know I make a lot more "easily caught" mistakes when writing ruby code than I did when I used to write Java. Referencing a variable before it enters scope, NPEs, etc. Passing wrong number (or types) of parameters to a method.
Just because you see or overhear something in public does not grant you some magical right to do with it as you please without repercussions.
The law generally grants one the legal right to do with it what one pleases. So no legal repercussions. I agree it's not magical; it just stems from statutes and legal precedent.
May vary by state if you live in the U.S.
1. Someone you know takes your photo and uploads it to Facebook without your permission.
First, you don't need Facebook for that. 30 years ago someone could have taken my picture, printed up a bunch of flyers, and plastered it all over Manhattan. More recently, you still don't need Facebook; all you need is the world wide web and, possibly, search engines. Would you do away with those?
Another question I'd ask is: how is this even an invasion of my privacy? If someone takes a picture of me in public then I have no expectation of privacy. If they take a picture of me in private, potentially one that I'd prefer not be shared, then I'd say the fault lies with the individual who shared it and not the medium used to share.
2. Someone you don't know catches your voice in a video of a crowded event and posts it to youtube.
Public = no expectation of privacy.
3. Someone you know posts where you are to twitter to tell someone else about a gathering.
Same as above. Do my privacy rights include the right to not have an individual publicly reveal my current location? All of your criticisms boil down to the fact that the internet/web are efficient ways to broadcast information.
4. Someone you don't know does a wireless survey and detects your phone hotspot / home wifi nearby, then posts that to a list of wifi aps online.
Fine by me.
5. Windows 10 (before the patch to disable it by default) shared all of the wifi passwords you put into it to Microsoft. (Supposedly for the purposes of informing friends automatically, damn whether you wanted them to be able to connect or not.)
Did they divulge this feature in an EULA? If so, then I'm fine with it. I would choose not to use Windows so long as it had that feature. If it was not divulged then I'd say Windows 10 users have a right to be pissed.
Just because you are apparently fine with that, doesn't mean others are. Those people would very much like to find a way to prohibit / prevent that info from being used, but it's an uphill battle due to the apathy of others.
If you're not okay with images of you being shared online, then don't go out in public where someone could take your picture. In fact, don't interact with anyone in private either because that person could take your photo and show it to (potentially many) others. We have laws intended to protect us from others sharing indecent photos, but not run-of-the-mill photos. That strikes me as entirely appropriate.
to make the world less private, less individual, less creative, less human... Big Tech has imposed its will on the resident population with neither our input nor our permission.
Their program isn't to make the world less private per se; it's to make money. The means by which they make money happens to be making the world less private. He fails to deal with the fact that this forfeit of privacy is voluntary and that those who forfeit some amount of privacy also get something in return. It's a transaction. I give up some privacy, but I get a platform to connect with old friends, dialogue about current events and share pictures. I give up some privacy but I get a pretty decent web-based email client without having to pay any money for it. I get a nice search engine. I get free cloud-based storage. A decent web browser. Etc.
How does any of this make me "less individual" or "less human"? In what way has this been done without my permission? I know these platforms allow Google, Facebook, et. al to collect information about me.
My preference would be for FF devs to focus on increasing speed, stability and standards compliance instead of adding new features, unless the community indicates they really want a particular feature (or, possibly, if a given feature is trivially easy to implement).
I mostly want my browser to not crash, to render pages and perform DOM-manipulation correctly, and to do everything as quickly as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd argue if you sacrifice correctness and security you may win first mover status, but it will quickly turn into "first failure" status. You can cut corners on performance and maintainability for much longer before that debt comes due.
Eh. It was a top 20 program and, at the time, I thought I wanted a Ph.D., so I had the fellowship and stipend anyway.
In my experience, this is not true. Especially when you have very little real-world on-the-job experience, i.e. when you're starting out. Basically, a graduate degree from a "good" school creates the impression that you're extra-intelligent. How much people weight that vs. actual experience can vary. But it can potentially earn you the benefit of the doubt. Employers are sometimes willing to let you be the "he doesn't have much experience, but he's smart so he can pick it up" guy.
This is the exact opposite of my experience in a graduate C.S. department at a large state school. Master's students generally didn't qualify for fellowships. They were either part time and working, full-time and supported by the U.S. armed forces (usually the Navy), or they were full-time and supporting themselves through loans. The Ph.D. students, on the other hand, usually had fellowships that waived their tuition and fees, and either paid them a stipend (during the first year) or paid them for 10 hr/week of T.A. work. My stipend in the late 1990s was around $12,500/year I think. I was single, my health insurance was through the university, and I didn't have a car payment. So it was basically just rent, food and gas.
If you want to live and work in Germany, or possibly even the EU in general, then European institutions probably deserve a "bump" in those rankings. If you plan to pursue an industry job in the U.S.? Nobody has heard of LMU Munich. In academia, sure. But if you're going to grad school because you want to work in academia, then odds are you can get your way paid at a U.S. school, which argues against the original poster's rationale for going abroad (i.e. to save money).
No, he's saying it's wrong to describe graduate school as requiring one to go into debt when 99.9% of the graduate students he knows aren't going into debt. Because they have fellowships and are paid to work as T.A.s or research fellows. If you can't get a fellowship then, yeah, it might not be worth going, assuming your goal is to work in industry.
In my experience, folks with graduate degrees are usually smarter than those without, and are more likely to grasp (and care about) things like computational complexity, scalability, concurrent programming, security, etc. than those without. Does that mean everybody with a graduate degree understands or cares about those things, and that everyone who lacks a graduate degree fails to understand and doesn't care about them? Not at all. Just describing trends.
Speed of deployment usually isn't worth sacrificing correctness, performance, maintainability and security, if the choice is one or the other.
Disagree. If you're brilliant and interested in academic research as a career then you can live reasonably comfortably by getting a Ph.D. and pursuing that goal, even if you aren't starting from a position of wealth. "Reasonably comfortably" does not mean lavishly.
Many Ph.D. students are on fellowships that take care of their tuition, and they get paid to work as T.A.'s or be part of a research team. For such a person, the only cost is the opportunity cost of not being in industry. If your goal is a job in industry then a graduate degree can help with some jobs, but for most it's only a marginal benefit. Master's is the best use of time in that it only delays your entry into the job market by two years, but it's also typically the most expensive since fellowship money is usually only available to Ph.D. seekers.
Rankings could be bunk, but the highest ranked university in Germany is LMU Munich, which is tied for #30. Eighteen U.S. universities are ranked higher, including five that are public. The highest ranked Central or South American university is the University of São Paulo in Brazil, which is in the 251-300 range. In my experience, if they want you, most schools will pay your way w.r.t. the Ph.D. Master's not so much, since it's viewed as a path to industry and not academia.
Eh. I'd prefer not to hire someone whose hobby is programming, all else being equal. Or video games, for that matter.
I found that a Master's degree helped me get jobs. Especially early on when I didn't have a ton of experience. My tuition was free, since (at the time) was a Ph.D. seeker with a fellowship. Only cost was the opportunity cost of not working an industry job, which was further offset by the fact that I had a (small) stipend.
Most people pursue Ph.D.'s because they want to do academic research as their "day job" or because they're eying one of those fancy NFL money jobs in AI or finance.
Completing a Master's or Ph.D. in a STEM field at a reasonably accredited U.S. university should guarantee a near-automatic offer of citizenship. To analogize to picking teams on the playground, these are the "ringers" you want on your team. They drive growth, and they're almost guaranteed to be net contributors with respect to taxes vs. social benefits.
I honestly think it's that simple. If people understood their continued employment was contingent on writing quality code, whether with respect to security or anything else, they would be much more careful. As it is, nobody cares, so they respond rationally to the incentives that are presented. Show up, have a good attitude, meet your deadlines, and don't commit bugs so egregious they break the product in "obvious" ways. If you commit code that breaks the product in non-obvious ways then, well, nobody's perfect; we're not holding you accountable.
Yes and no. Most managers, devs and executives care, but only up to a point. That's the key. The happy path needs to work or the company's customers will leave. However, the product can be super buggy outside that happy path, perform poorly, and be porous from a security perspective and nobody cares. At least, not until that porosity is noticed and exposed publicly; then everybody cares all of a sudden.
Management doesn't care enough to fire them when they fuck up. If developers knew their job was on the line they might pay more attention to security. You can train them all you want, but if there are zero consequences when they ignore that training then they'll continue to be lazy.
1. The folks interested in these things will definitely find other places to congregate, but here's the key: possibly not at reddit. Which is reddit's goal.
2. In terms of it being Whac-a-Mole, it shouldn't be too hard if they implement a user-based reporting / flagging system. Let your users flag suspect subreddits, then every day a reddit employee looks at the top few "most redported" and determines if they meet the criteria for removal. Users who abuse the flagging system lose the ability to flag.
One thing I wish RT would do is make it easier to see "top movies" by audience score. Maybe have the rotten/fresh icon for critics and a separate "thumbs up / thumbs down" icon for audience score. Then again, it's much easier for the mob to "game" audience scores, so I understand why they're reluctant.
2017 population is roughly 325 million. Population in 1945 was roughly 140 million. Seems strange that there was exactly 1 "top" mass shooting during the 37 years from 1945 to 1982, then 12 in the 35 years from 1982 to 2017. Given the differences in population I'd expect there to be approximately half as many during the 1945-1982 period as in the 1983-2017 period.
Recently looked at a list of top mass shootings in the U.S. by # of casualties. 7 of 13 happened in the last 10 years. 12 of thirteen happened since 1983, the only exception being Charles Whitman in 1966.
I know I make a lot more "easily caught" mistakes when writing ruby code than I did when I used to write Java. Referencing a variable before it enters scope, NPEs, etc. Passing wrong number (or types) of parameters to a method.
I don't see that at all. I see my coworkers leaving for greener pastures and getting raises when they do.
The law generally grants one the legal right to do with it what one pleases. So no legal repercussions. I agree it's not magical; it just stems from statutes and legal precedent. May vary by state if you live in the U.S.
First, you don't need Facebook for that. 30 years ago someone could have taken my picture, printed up a bunch of flyers, and plastered it all over Manhattan. More recently, you still don't need Facebook; all you need is the world wide web and, possibly, search engines. Would you do away with those?
Another question I'd ask is: how is this even an invasion of my privacy? If someone takes a picture of me in public then I have no expectation of privacy. If they take a picture of me in private, potentially one that I'd prefer not be shared, then I'd say the fault lies with the individual who shared it and not the medium used to share.
Public = no expectation of privacy.
Same as above. Do my privacy rights include the right to not have an individual publicly reveal my current location? All of your criticisms boil down to the fact that the internet/web are efficient ways to broadcast information.
Fine by me.
Did they divulge this feature in an EULA? If so, then I'm fine with it. I would choose not to use Windows so long as it had that feature. If it was not divulged then I'd say Windows 10 users have a right to be pissed.
If you're not okay with images of you being shared online, then don't go out in public where someone could take your picture. In fact, don't interact with anyone in private either because that person could take your photo and show it to (potentially many) others. We have laws intended to protect us from others sharing indecent photos, but not run-of-the-mill photos. That strikes me as entirely appropriate.
Their program isn't to make the world less private per se; it's to make money. The means by which they make money happens to be making the world less private. He fails to deal with the fact that this forfeit of privacy is voluntary and that those who forfeit some amount of privacy also get something in return. It's a transaction. I give up some privacy, but I get a platform to connect with old friends, dialogue about current events and share pictures. I give up some privacy but I get a pretty decent web-based email client without having to pay any money for it. I get a nice search engine. I get free cloud-based storage. A decent web browser. Etc.
How does any of this make me "less individual" or "less human"? In what way has this been done without my permission? I know these platforms allow Google, Facebook, et. al to collect information about me.
Mostly people generalizing from Peter Thiel and, to a lesser extent, Elon Musk.
My preference would be for FF devs to focus on increasing speed, stability and standards compliance instead of adding new features, unless the community indicates they really want a particular feature (or, possibly, if a given feature is trivially easy to implement).
I mostly want my browser to not crash, to render pages and perform DOM-manipulation correctly, and to do everything as quickly as possible.