achou

Actually, I agree with you that this is kind of how it works. My point is simply this: the headline number for "military spend" includes a great deal of funding for research:

https://www.aaas.org/programs/r-d-budget-and-policy/historic...

No, I don't believe this is a great system. On the other hand, consider that if research spending weren't under this guise, would popular support for research allow for the funding to exist at current levels, much less increased ones? Given understanding of the average American of basic science, that would be a stretch (to put it mildly).

Perhaps having researchers write a few extra paragraphs in grant proposals isn't so bad after all.

I didn't see the part where I said anything about stimulus or investing.

WWII is what enabled the US to adopt this position, and its memory, rapidly fading into history, are why the US chose involvement and leadership of the world instead of isolation. Before WWII the US was (relatively) isolationist. You can claim that it would have been better off staying that way, but given the way things spiraled into WWII, the conclusion of US leaders was a reasonable one: we must lead, or else things will spiral into conflict once again, and we will not be able to contain, control, or ignore it.

How could they come to any other conclusion? They had already tried the "let's try to avoid picking sides and please can't we all just get along" option in WWI and it turned out, shall we say, badly.

None of this excuses the absolute folly of the US' many military misadventures, and likely huge amounts of waste (in terms of people and treasure) in pursuing them. I am merely pointing out that the idea that we could abolish most military spend because somehow the world will just get along by itself, or even that we can just ignore what happens elsewhere, is just not the case and hasn't been for a long time.

Folks, realize that US military spending:

- backstops the US dollar as the world's reserve currency, which allows the US to have a large deficit with low risk to its economic system, which basically means the US can ship paper to other countries and they will send real stuff back to us in return. Let's not kid ourselves, this has a lot to do with the US' large military and financial advantage.

- makes opportunistic authoritarian governments around the world think thrice before invading their neighbors. Consider what it would be like if the charts here were moving up and to the right instead of flat: https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace

- ensures the relative safety and efficiency of international shipping routes and underpins global commerce

- provides funding for basic research has lead to many innovations. DARPA, anyone?

- keeps weapons expertise and manufacturing capacity within US borders, which creates US jobs and reduces the capability of other governments to develop competitive arms independently, which keeps them within the sphere of US influence and protection. Other countries look at our military budget and think "we could never compete, let's just buy their weapons, and make nice with the US". Think of what the alternative would look like.

We can debate the morality of the specific wars that the US has gotten entangled in. We can debate the relative size of the military budget, to some degree. But it would be foolhardly to ignore the upsides to military spending altogether.

I like that FOSSA scans FOSSA. Here's the link from the "license scan" badge on github: https://app.fossa.io/projects/git%2Bgithub.com%2Ffossas%2Ffo...

Demographic decline seems almost inevitable given our economic system, sans immigration.

I'm a parent in SF. The cost of housing and availability of quality care (day care, nanny), and schools are definitely factors among the parent community here in deciding not to have more children. Many of the parents I know are doing well financially (they must be to be raising kids in SF), so I get to see the non-financial reasons for smaller families. One that's pretty important: quality of life. The opportunity cost of having children is about much more than money.

The options for doing things you enjoy are hugely greater today than in the past. Fancy restaurants, sports events, cruises, gaming, live music, Netflix, social media. World travel. Rewarding work. You name it. The world has become much better and better at providing things that people enjoy spending their time and money on.

Having children not only reduces the money you have to enjoy these things, it puts a huge damper on your time, and freedom to do so. Sure, you could go to that cool new restaurant with your young children. But it's a completely different experience than going without them -- so much so that it veers into negative utility.

For some people enjoying family life and kids is more valuable than all of the other stuff combined. But as the world gets better and better at giving people alternatives to spend their time/money/freedom on that they enjoy, having more children will become less and less attractive for more and more people.

Policies will only do so much to reverse this. Many European countries have much more family oriented policies than the US, yet look at the reality of their birthrates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ageing_of_Europe.

Is it not obvious that a search algorithm for maximizing a revenue function, devoid of ethics, eventually becomes a search algorithm for identifying and exploiting human weaknesses?

AI/machine learning is just a way to optimize this function further.

I have one child in preschool and another that just entered second grade. They go to a progressive school that focuses on inquiry based learning, and the most important metric is that they seem engaged and enthusiastic about school every day.

The bigger picture is that not every kid is the same, and that's shaped by the child and also the parents. Our parenting style is a combination of firmness around core behaviors coupled with plenty of freedom beyond that.

It's obvious when interacting with other kids and parents that other people have very different styles. Some of the other things other kids do, like behaving crazily at the dinner table, we would shut down immediately. Other things, like putting their 2nd graders into "Kumon," a kind of cram school with lots of busy-worksheets, we avoid. Check out the messaging and branding here to get some idea: https://www.kumon.com/. Apparently on the first day of Kumon they show kids the logo and tell them that the kid isn't smiling because learning is not fun, it is supposed to be hard work. I found it horrifying that parents felt the need to push their kids into that kind of environment to "keep up".

On the other hand, the progressive school is definitely touchy-feely and there's a sense that there's less structured learning. Fortunately it seems there's a balanced approach as they get into higher grades where progressive units of inquiry are augmented with some book learning. It takes an act of faith to believe that this will ultimately pay off - that they are not "wasting their time" just playing all day. Who wants to gamble with their kid's future?

Outside of school, we try to think "anticipate and encourage" not "force feed".

For example, when we visited friends and our son always gravitated towards playing with the piano, we got him a keyboard and let him play with it at home. Soon enough he was asking "why don't I have a piano teacher?". So we got him one. He generally likes it, and practices largely on his own with just a few reminders.

On the other hand, we took him to play soccer and after two games where he refused to step foot on the green, he insisted "I don't like any games with balls. Except dodgeball." So we didn't force it, but we did have him go to martial arts, which he enjoys. Maybe we'll have him try out socceer or baseball in the future - but only if he shows an interest.

The same goes for reading. We put lots of books in the house and also spend our own time reading physical books, so they can see us. They get curious what we're doing when we're not paying attention to them. While they aren't as advanced as some of the other kids in class, they are enjoying reading every time they pick up a book. And that's all we want.

The book touches lightly upon advertising and how it can affect demand:

http://www.core-econ.org/the-economy/book/text/07.html#711-p...

This strikes me as a very important subject, one that I heard little about in my (limited) economics courses. Anyone know of good references to how economics treats the ability of firms to affect demand?

Nearly every company has a marketing department. Some of the largest companies on the planet make all their money from other firms' desire to influence demand.

Is there any work at the intersection of evolutionary psychology, economics, and advertising?

A very small startup team does benefit from an open plan, such as shared desks or a shared office. This scales to maybe 6 people. I think this is the environment that larger companies are trying to capture.

But at scale, this is a ridiculous setup and one that breeds interruptions. In a small team, what one person knows is often useful to another. In a larger team there are many more independent parts, and entangling communication is a waste of attention. Worse, I think it causes people to deliberately adopt a default-closed mentality to avoid overload.

Companies don't easily outgrow their early cultures; they think what got them there will continue to serve them -- in fact, they want to go back and "capture the magic" that were there in the early days. It's a form of corporate nostalgia that is one symptom of becoming sclerotic.

It's not really about open floor plan vs. cubicles. I recall the first time I visited HP's vast cube farm at their silicon valley headquarters. It was vast, drab, mostly quiet, and absolutely soul-deadening. OTOH the Dropbox headquarters in SF was open floor plan and absolutely cramped, yet buzzing with youthful energy. Lots of people were using headphones. I could see how it would be an exciting place for a young person. On the one hand the buzzing energy is a potential distractor, but it's also an energy booster. It makes your heart beat a little faster. It makes you feel like you're in a place where things are happening.

With age, my powers of concentration have waned a bit and I cannot power through distractions like I did when younger. A cube farm would be very demotivating. An open floor plan would be highly distracting, but likely somewhat better. But the best is to avoid large environments like that entirely, and stick with a smaller group where the interruptions are actually useful, where a shared office and a shared mission produce energy and focus.

Needless to say, spending and income are two different things. This is very easy to see if, for example, one spouse loses their job and the other continues to do exactly the same housework and child rearing -- but now can spend much less.

I probably should have said "all economic systems since the dawn of time" but I took a shortcut that covers most of the modern world's economy instead. I certainly didn't say that communism was somehow different or better in this regard.

Consider what happens if one spouse loses a job and is forced to take one with half the pay. The spouse doing the work at home suddenly has to make do with less, even though their work has not really changed.

My point is not really about slavery, it is about how this example shows how much work there is and how difficult it is, and how we don't seem to account for it even in normal life.

Thanks, will check it out.

"the history of paid work suggests that the unpaid labor of mothers in the family is the critical thing"

Thank you for this much needed shift in perspective. It should be obvious: mothers' work has been on the critical path for humanity, and other work has shifted around to accommodate it. This is such a forehead slapping observation.

My point is that the systems we've built optimize for things we choose to measure. We're very much measuring and optimizing for money and the kinds of goods and services money can be exchanged for. But to a startling degree we're not choosing to measure all the other hard work that has to get done if we expect humanity to exist beyond one generation.

This article just puts it in stark relief for me. All of the work that Lola had to do for so many decades, working herself to exhaustion... all of that work still needs to get done for every other family too.

Truly remarkable story.

One thing that struck me is that Lola did so much of the work of a traditional mother's role: raising the kids, cooking, cleaning, laundry, and even providing emotional support. The mother had to take on a traditional father's role in bringing home an income. And the actual father - well, he did neither role and seemed to just freeload, gamble, abuse, and finally disappear.

All of the work in a traditional mother's role, well it's usually uncompensated too. Sure it's a "labor of love" but it's also just a huge amount of work, for decades. An argument could be made that the entire capitalist system is built upon uncompensated labor. Just ask your mom.

Yes, I do have children. I got the idea from this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/20/opinion/sunday/take-your-...

Bringing babies to work definitely has issues, but also benefits.

I'm a founder looking for ways to make my next startup family-friendly. I'm a parent of two sons in SF so I know what it's like. A grab bag of ideas so far:

- Allow parents to bring babies to work (0-6mo)

- Locate in suburbs where parents live instead of in the city

- Hire remote employees who work from home

- Establish a culture of taking an office break around 4-5pm then resume at 8pm for a couple hours

- Do social events during the day instead of after hours

- Suspend email delivery certain hours, such as 4-8pm, and on weekends until Sunday afternoon

- Same as above for real-time chat for most employees (some exceptions for things like sales)

- As an exception to above, have on-call schedules planned way in advance

- Flexibility on holidays to help synchronize with school schedules

Other thoughts?

The survey polled 430 "mostly everyday programmers". Unfortunately, everyday programmers mostly know very little about security.

Developers tend to think of security as about avoiding coding mistakes, and that's reflected in their idea that security is about pen testing, code review, tools, etc. Any security professional will tell you that these are valuable but only a small part of the big picture. Take a look at Microsoft's SDLC for a wider view of what it takes to weave security into every aspect of software development[1]

Probably the single most valuable thing most development organizations could do to improve security of applications is to do threat modeling[2][3]. It's especially valuable in the early stages of application design, but it can be applied at any time. Threat modeling can increase awareness of how an application's security assumptions interact with its overall architecture. Thinking through your application's threat model systematically is the first step to prioritizing mitigations.

Unfortunately, this is voodoo to most developers even though it really should be an intrinsic part of designing application architecture. I've heard people say there's a mental block because the kind of thinking required for security is almost the opposite of that required to design and construct systems. I don't believe that though. I think it's mostly a matter of training and historical accident that security is even a separate discipline. It shouldn't be.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sdl/

[2] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff648644.aspx

[3] https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Application_Threat_Modeling

"How do I spend this money?"

If you're asking yourself this question, you're not focusing on building your business. How to spend it becomes a distraction.

The converse also happens: for any business problem the easiest solution is to spend money. Leads? Leadgen firm. Hiring? Recruiters. Code? Outsource, or contract out. Testing? you get the picture.

Throwing money at a problem is a short term fix but fails to build competence at doing that thing. The lack of experience weakens your company in the long term. It's organizational muscle that didn't get exercised. It atrophies over time.

This might make sense for certain areas, but having too much money on hand makes it very tempting to solve all problems with this one hammer.

(I'm an investor in Fossa)

Open source is ubiquitous, and few seem to have a great handle on what they are using. Excited to see Fossa take a stab at this in a way that is developer-friendly.

Also check out tldrLegal, software licenses in plain english: https://tldrlegal.com.

Why bother raising from a VC? Bootstrapping can work out very well.

I'm a founder of a company that had "mid-success" (a few times over).

I mostly agree with this article and when I see companies in my former market raising $100M+ rounds I always cringe.

> But as a general rule, the longer you delude your investors here, the worse shape you’ll be in.

This is true, but the real problem is not deluding your investors but deluding yourself. It's often necessary to have unreasonable optimism to overcome every hurdles along the way. Knowing when that optimism crosses the line can be difficult especially in the bubble of fundraising.

> Very often I’ve seen cases where founders know in their hearts they have an airplane but are able to convince good investors it might still be a spaceship. This really causes a lot of heartache, and often precludes your opportunity for a good acquisition later.

The point about over-raising limiting future options really resonates. It's one of the saddest things that can happen: all of the hard work has been done to build a viable business, but in the rush to get there too much money was raised, so the the cap table has gotten to the point where any reasonable exit will yield the founders and employees almost nothing. So frustrating.

> Let’s define a “really good airplane” as a company that has profitability within reach and is on track to be worth $100 million with several more years of hard work.

Here's the thing. Airplanes can get much bigger than $100M, they just take longer to get there. They have to fight their way there and rarely get the spotlight. That's just the way some markets are, no matter how great the product, no matter how smart the team. It's a shame when founders build a real company but destroy the value of its equity by trying to make it something that it's not.

I'm a parent with two children living in SF.

Before I had children, I had no idea how difficult it was going to be, even putting aside finances. Most people without children just don't get how much more difficult ordinary life becomes. There is a deep reason that the "boring" suburbs beckon.

Yes, the schools and the lower housing costs are a part of it. But there's also just the easier lifestyle, where you don't need to compete as much for everything. Parking, sidewalks, aggressive cars, daycare, schools, a seat on the bus, and very much avoiding crazy people who might harm your children.

It is extremely stressful to walk your young child across a busy intersection in SOMA where a driver is aggressively trying to turn, where a crazy person is screaming at the top of his lungs, where a street that smells of urine awaits you on the other side.

Putting SF aside, it's extremely difficult to maintain a good relationship with your spouse when a demanding job takes up a huge amount of time, and when that job seems like a vacation compared with the weekends with the kids. Almost universally every parent I know says that going to work on Monday is a relief, the beginning of their temporary vacation from the intensity of nuclear family life.

The children themselves create the vast majority of the stress. Parents need environments that help reduce that burden, not merely keep inconveniences at bay. At our school the #1 wish of parents, by far, is for faraway grandparents to move nearby and help. If they could afford it. If they could survive in this city hostile to the elderly. If they were willing to give up their comfortable retirement travel adventures to shoulder some of the burden. Very, very few have this arrangement in SF.

Simple example using Pinyin: 你好吗 is "Hello, how are you?". In Pinyin you'd type: "ni hao ma?".

It sounds like this: https://translate.google.com/#auto/en/你好吗？

To understand the impact of Pinyin, all you have to do is take a look at the alternative input sources for Chinese on your computer or phone.

On my Mac it's under Settings -> Keyboard -> Input Sources. Add a new input source for Select Chinese (Simplified) and take a look at the alternatives:

- Stroke, which uses only symbol characters and numbers to "write" words. Good luck with that!

- Trackpad handwriting. You "write" the characters on your trackpad and it recognizes them. Works pretty well if you already know how to write the characters. But it's much, much slower in my opinion. Plus, you need to memorize how to write thousands of characters and how the characters connect to how the words sound, which there is no systematic mapping for.

- Wubi Xing, which I'm unfamiliar with but seems radical based. Just look at the keyboard - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_method

- Pinyin, which uses your regular English keyboard. With a little training, you can sound out Chinese words and immediately type them with autocorrect-like functionality that works amazingly well. I can type Chinese almost as fast as English this way.

In short, Pinyin has made it possible for Chinese people to operate efficiently in the modern world we live in.

When I was taught Pinyin, the instructor explained that the phonetics were influenced by the Russian pronunciation of the roman alphabet. Not sure if this is true, or if it explains the issues you're describing. But it seemed plausible that China thought they were going to be closer to the USSR given the shared ideology in the 50's.

In any case, as a person who has a decent pronunciation in Chinese but lacking the ability to fully read/write, Pinyin has been absolutely great for being able to type Chinese informally. I can communicate almost anything I can say, and that's truly wonderful. Part of that is the smart prediction software. But Pinyin has a big part in it too: it's not difficult at all to sound out a word and figure out how to spell it in Pinyin. That's the essential feature that Chinese characters lack, and Pinyin nails that essential quality as far as I can tell.

Scan finds lots of bugs for open source projects at no cost. Sure it is marketing, but unlike most marketing it also has real value.

Not sure I can comment on the results on your own code, but I will say that volume of results is not always correlated with value in static analysis. There are plenty of noisy rules that basically have negative utility if you factor in the time it takes to review each issue. It's a complex balancing act between finding more issues, having fewer false positives, analysis time, understandability of results, and other factors.

I should be more clear: every customer using Java wanted to know how our custom developed analysis compared with what Findbugs could find.

There weren't all that many such customers though (again, historically). A more typical customer was developing in C/C++.

Um, Coverity contributes a lot to the open source community through Scan[1].

While Coverity does incorporate Findbugs results, it also has its own analyzer that does much more interprocedural analysis and tends to be tuned better for fewer false positives and more accurate error messages. Historically at least, part of the reason for incorporating Findbugs was to make it easier to directly compare what Findbugs found with what Coverity's analyzer found. Because every customer wanted to know that.

I have no idea of current figures but historically Java was not a big business for Coverity. Other vendors had much more Java business (and incidentally also incorporated Findbugs results).

Finally, as you can see from the message the Findbugs leadership does not seem unified and easy to collaborate with.

So forgive me but I find your comment and its tone a bit unfair.

[1] https://scan.coverity.com