Monthly Archives: February 2016

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Functional Programming Is Not Popular Because It Is Weird | Probably Dance

Imperative languages have this huge benefit of having implicit state. Both humans and machines are really good at implicit state attached to time. When reading the cake recipe, you know that after finishing the first instruction the oven is preheated, the pans are greased and we have mixed a batter. This doesn’t have to be explicitly stated. We have the instructions and we know what the resulting state would be of performing the instructions. Nobody is confused by the imperative recipe. If I was able to actually finish writing the functional recipe and if I showed it to my mom, she would be very confused by it. (at least the version that doesn’t use monads would be very confusing. Maybe a version using monads wouldn’t be as confusing)

Source: Functional Programming Is Not Popular Because It Is Weird | Probably Dance

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Your Letters Helped Challenger Shuttle Engineer Shed 30 Years Of Guilt : The Two-Way : NPR

“It’s going to blow up,” a distraught and defeated Ebeling told his wife, Darlene, when he arrived home that night.

And it did, 73 seconds after liftoff. Seven astronauts died. Cold weather and an O-ring failure were blamed, and Ebeling carried three decades of guilt.

“That was one of the mistakes God made,” Ebeling, now 89, told me three weeks ago at his home in Brigham City, Utah. “He shouldn’t have picked me for that job. But next time I talk to him, I’m gonna ask him, ‘Why me? You picked a loser.’ “

Source: Your Letters Helped Challenger Shuttle Engineer Shed 30 Years Of Guilt : The Two-Way : NPR

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Silicon Valley is broken and heading for social unrest, argues media theorist – Quartz

“Over the next ten years, I think we’ll see either a significant movement in that direction, or we’ll be in a bad place,” he says.

And what sort of “bad place” might we expect if Silicon Valley fails to change course?

“Basically everybody working for 16 to 20 hours a day for very little pay, doing repetitive tasks that for one reason or another, computers can’t do,” Rushkoff says. “And these will be the lucky people, because at least they’re employed.”

Source: Silicon Valley is broken and heading for social unrest, argues media theorist – Quartz

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Here’s How Electric Cars Will Cause the Next Oil Crisis

With all good technologies, there comes a time when buying the alternative no longer makes sense. Think smartphones in the past decade, color TVs in the 1970s, or even gasoline cars in the early 20th century. Predicting the timing of these shifts is difficult, but when it happens, the whole world changes.It’s looking like the 2020s will be the decade of the electric car.

Source: Here’s How Electric Cars Will Cause the Next Oil Crisis

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A phony STEM shortage and the scandal of engineering visas — how American jobs get outsourced – LA Times

Evidence is ample that the very claim of a STEM shortage in the U.S. is phony. Salzman noted that “overall, our colleges and universities graduate twice the number of STEM graduates as find a job each year.” The mismatch is especially stark in the biomedical field. There, according to a 2014 paper by experts from UC San Francisco, Harvard and Princeton, “the training pipeline produces more scientists than relevant positions in academia, government, and the private sector are capable of absorbing.”

As a result, “a growing number of PhDs are in jobs that do not take advantage of the taxpayers’ investment in their lengthy education.” As we reported last year, the same high-tech corporations that poormouth their ability to find skilled workers simultaneously lay them off by the thousands.

High-tech firms in the U.S. cut nearly 80,000 employees last year, according to the job placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. That included 47,000 announced layoffs from Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Unisys and Microsoft. (The former CEO of the latter, Steve Ballmer, is also a co-chair of the Partnership for a New American Economy.)

The reality of the H-1B program is that it fails to serve as a conduit for the skilled and virtuous immigrant known for what Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., described as “the entrepreneurial spirit, the determination to make a go of it.”

Source: A phony STEM shortage and the scandal of engineering visas — how American jobs get outsourced – LA Times

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Patient monitors altered, drug dispensary popped in colossal hospital hack • The Register

“The findings show an industry in turmoil: lack of executive support; insufficient talent; improper implementations of technology; outdated understanding of adversaries; lack of leadership, and a misguided reliance upon compliance,” the team said.

“[It] illustrates our greatest fear: patient health remains extremely vulnerable. One overarching finding of our research is that the industry focuses almost exclusively on the protection of patient health records, and rarely addresses threats to or the protection of patient health from a cyber threat perspective.”

Hospital information security is “drastically” underfunded, training flawed at all levels, networks are insecure, and policy and audits largely absent and at best flawed when they do exist.

Source: Patient monitors altered, drug dispensary popped in colossal hospital hack • The Register

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Is zero-effort computer security a dream? – Help Net Security

In the ZEBRA system, every user is required to wear a Bluetooth-enabled bracelet, similar to a Fitbit, and the system knows who is wearing which bracelet. When the user logs into a device the first time, the system establishes a secure connection to the bracelet. While the user interacts with the device, the bracelet will send the measurements generated by the interactions over to the device. The device then uses a machine learning classifier to map those actions into a sequence of predicted interactions.

Source: Is zero-effort computer security a dream? – Help Net Security

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Basic income may be needed to combat robot-induced unemployment, leading AI expert says | News | Lifestyle | The Independent

Dr Moshe Vardi, a computer science professor at Rice University in Texas, believes that a basic income may be needed in the future as advances in automation and AI put human workers out of jobs.

In an interview with The Huffington Post, Dr Vardi said: “Our current economic system requires people to either have wealth or to work to make a living, with the assumption that the economy creates jobs for all those who need them.”

“If this assumption breaks down – and progress in automation is likely to break it down, I believe – then we need to rethink the very basic structure of our economic system.”

Source: Basic income may be needed to combat robot-induced unemployment, leading AI expert says | News | Lifestyle | The Independent

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Sorry, Terminator conspiracists: AI-equipped drones can now think for themselves | VentureBeat | Business | by Andrew Thomson, VentureRadar

Until recently, drone technology relied heavily on human controllers and acted as carriers for cameras and instruments which would then be monitored manually. But, in news that will strike fear into the heart of any Terminator movie conspiracists, experts are now merging drones with artificial intelligence (AI) systems with incredible results.

My firm recently carried out two technology scouting projects that had us assessing many of the players in this field. We found that drones fitted with AI technology are being used to disrupt a number of industries and undertaking a range of tasks with minimal human input.

Source: Sorry, Terminator conspiracists: AI-equipped drones can now think for themselves | VentureBeat | Business | by Andrew Thomson, VentureRadar

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Hey developer! DevOps doesn’t mean what you think it does

DevOps simply shouldn’t be a term abused by developers who want to make the direct push to production. It’s well on its way to no longer holding any real meaning, rather than serving as the force for good that we need for the database. In an effort to salvage DevOps’ significance, I’m willing to challenge every developer wanting production access “because it’s DevOps.” This DevOps hollowness epidemic has to stop, lest we provide a severe disservice to our customers and cost ourselves our jobs.

Oh and hey developer, next time you ask about this, I’m making you read the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and telling the CFO.

TL;DR: Dropping your hundreds of SQL scripts in a directory and having the DBA team run them is not DevOps. It’s you being lazy.

Source: Hey developer! DevOps doesn’t mean what you think it does