October 2012 – rc3.org

Month: October 2012 (page 1 of 2)

Google’s NYC Hurricane Sandy Map

This is what I was talking about the other day when I talked about developing a capability in mapping. If Apple is going to catch up with Google in this area at all, they need more than a mobile app.

What does it mean to be a senior engineer?

October 25, 2012 / Rafe / 0 Comments

You should read John Alspaw’s essay, On Being A Senior Engineer, even if you don’t aspire to be a senior engineer. Maybe you already think of yourself as a senior engineer. Maybe you work in some completely unrelated field. What it’s really about is becoming a mature professional and not only mastering the skills of your field but passing them on to other colleagues in useful ways as well.

I recently read a post about the value provided by managers. I was not surprised to read that managers do add value, but I was a bit surprised at the means by which that value is added. I would have assumed that it was by keeping people happier, removing distractions that sap productivity, or helping to prioritize work. As it turns out, the actual value is in teaching people how to do their jobs better.

So as a manager, the best way to add value is to help people along their path to becoming senior engineers (if the people who report to you are engineers). As an engineer, you should be looking for opportunities to work for a manager who can teach you to be a better engineer. And perhaps most importantly, you don’t have to be a manager to help other people get better at their jobs, so you should helping other people get better as a key aspect of you’re job. This is one of the key points of John’s essay.

Anyway, you should be reading his post and not mine. It’s a road map to making the most of the incredible opportunity we have to work as engineers.

Advanced Vim registers at Arabesque

October 23, 2012 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Advanced Vim registers

Tom Ryder’s Arabesque is one of my favorite developer blogs because it’s almost always about how to get more out of your tools. In this case, he talks about a Vim feature that I’m eager to master — registers (think multiple clipboards for Vim). A colleague who happens to be an Emacs user and I were talking about the massive productivity advantages to be gained by mastering Unix text editors. They’re power tools built by and for people who live in their text editors all day over the past two or three decades. It’s tough for any old graphical editor to compete.

Amazon’s misplaced faith automated anti-fraud algorithms

October 23, 2012 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Amazon has gotten a lot of bad publicity today because they canceled the account of a customer named Linn and deleted all of the content on her Kindle because her account was flagged by a fraud detection algorithm that linked her account to an account associated with fraudulent activity. Let’s look at what went wrong.

First, a lot of the coverage is focused on DRM. This is the risk of purchasing DRM-protected content. Amazon was able to revoke her access to material that she previously purchased because of the DRM. That’s bad. DRM is bad. Don’t buy books protected by DRM.

What interests me as a software engineer, though, is the fraud-detection part of the equation. Using algorithms to identify related accounts is pretty standard stuff. Amazon is closing fraud-related accounts, and then apparently running an algorithm that finds related accounts and closing them as well. The problem with any algorithm like this is that false positives are inevitable. Some number of accounts identified as being related will actually be unrelated.

Given that this is a foreseeable outcome of any algorithm that performs this sort of categorization, Amazon’s business policies should reflect this. For one thing, they shouldn’t be automatically suspending accounts based on the results of this check alone. It’s incredibly hostile to customers. Furthermore, the responses from customer service reflect an absolute faith in an algorithm that is certain to be imperfect. That’s bad business.

If a business is going to use an algorithm-based approach to fraud problems like this, there’s got to be an understanding of the limitations of such a system. When you ignore that fact, you run into public relations disasters like the one Amazon encountered today.

Google shares a peek inside its data centers

October 20, 2012 / Rafe / 1 Comment

Google has published a gallery of photos from inside its data centers, and it’s the best data center porn you’ll ever see. I love the little Google-themed bike in this photo. (Via Co.DESIGN)

Richard Posner on luck

October 19, 2012 / Rafe / 0 Comments

Federal judge Richard Posner discusses the role luck plays in success:

I think that ultimately everything is attributable to luck, good or bad. Not just the obvious things, like IQ, genes that predipose to health or sickliness, the historical era and the country in which one is born, the wealth of one’s parents, whom one happens to meet at critical stages of one’s life and career, one’s height and looks and temperament, to the extent genetic, and one’s innate propensity to risk or caution (that is an exceptionally important factor); but also the characteristics that cause a person to make critical decisions that may turn out well or badly, characteristics that really are derivative from some of the previously noted “luck” characteristics. The decision-determining characteristics include intelligence, imagination, attitude toward risk, and personality characteristics such as aggressiveness, maladjustment, indolence, and having a low or high personal discount rate (how future-regarding one is or is not). Talent is luck but so is the propensity for working hard (often the consequence of a compulsive personality) or not working hard.

First, I agree with this sentiment. In fact, it reminds me of my response to the “one dangerous idea” Edge question from 2006. My idea is that everyone reaches their potential. My bottom line:

I think that the concept of squandered potential is more useful as a motivational tool than as a description of reality.

The rest of the piece is interesting, but I don’t really agree with Posner on the importance of lowering the national debt (or even the deficit) as a near-term goal. I’m fully in the camp that the our number one economic goal should be the pursuit of full employment. (I liked Matthew Yglesias’ follow-up as well.)

Android is not a money maker for Google

October 18, 2012 / Rafe / 2 Comments

Matthew Yglesias writes about the fact that Android is massively successful and yet loses money for Google. This reminds me a lot of Sun and Java. Java is one of the most successful programming languages ever introduced, and indeed practically spawned an industry unto itself. Furthermore, many, many companies have made money using Java in all kinds of ways. The funny thing was that Sun never really made any money with Java. It didn’t enable them to sell hardware, or server software, or development tools. It’ll be interesting to see what Google does with Android in the long term.

Update: From the comments, Horace Dediu breaks down Android as if it were an independent company. As a business unit, it is profitable.

Michael Dobbs on the Cuban Missile Crisis brinksmanship

October 17, 2012 / Rafe / 0 Comments

The ‘Eyeball to Eyeball’ Myth and the Cuban Missile Crisis’s Legacy

In the New York Times, author Michael Dobbs dismisses the myth that the Cuban Missile Crisis ended with a showdown. People overvalue confrontation and brinksmanship, but as the article points out, this approach invites truly disastrous outcomes.

The near future of JavaScript

October 14, 2012 / Rafe / 2 Comments

If you are a Web developer, you should check out Brendan Eich’s Strange Loop presentation on The State of JavaScript. JavaScript was supposed to be my 2011 skill of the year, but I really didn’t make any progress toward that goal and wound up learning other things instead. This year I’ve learned a ton of things, but not much JavaScript. In the meantime, JavaScript has become an even more essential skill for developers. As it turns out, I have managed to learn a fair amount of Scala and Hadoop since I wrote that post, and I’m learning Python right now as well. Maybe in 2013 I’ll get back to JavaScript.

More on aircraft carriers

October 12, 2012 / Rafe / 3 Comments

In last night’s debate, Paul Ryan asserted that under the Obama administration, America will have its smallest navy since before World War I. That brought me back to my post about aircraft carriers. Here’s a breakdown of all of the operational aircraft carriers in the world:

As we know, China’s aircraft carrier is unusable.

Are we really worried about the United States’ naval capabilities?

(via Conor Friedersdorf)

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