texthompson

Why does it matter where the bytes are stored at rest? Isn't everything you need for SHA-256 just the results of the SHA-256 algorithm on every 4096-byte block? I think you could just calculate that as the data is streamed in.

Why would you PUT an object, then download it again to a central server in the first place? If a service is accepting an upload of the bytes, it is already doing a pass over all the bytes anyway. It doesn't seem like a ton of overhead to calculate SHA256 in the 4092-byte chunks as the upload progresses. I suspect that sort of calculation would happen anyways.

That's interesting. Would you want it to be something like a bucket setting, like "any time an object is uploaded, don't let an object write complete unless S3 verifies that a pre-defined hash function (like SHA256) is called to verify that the object's name matches the object's contents?"

> Someone probably told me that every cell in my body has the same DNA. But no one shook me by the shoulders, saying how crazy that was.

This is only mostly right. Every cell in your body has an astonishingly similar amount of DNA, but every cell division (and even steady state DNA repair) offers the opportunity for mutations. So your cells are all astonishingly similar, but there can be detectable differences.

One implication of this is that cells that are closer to each other in developmental history will have more similar DNA. One of my colleagues in graduate school used this to do phylogenetic lineaging, where he looked at markers in DNA from whole organisms to reason about which cells are closely related, and which cells have a more distant developmental ancestor.

Biology is super cool! I hope that everyone finds a little bit of it that they can enjoy. :)

If you didn't know, that 80% number is probably the result of Little's Law. That's the result where if your demand is generated by a Poisson process, and your service has a queue, 80% utilization of the service is where the probability of an infinite queue starts to get really high. People

Here's a nice blog post about the subject:

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2009/01/30/server-utilization...

One of the funniest stories I've ever heard was about how a junior developer asked a more senior developer a creatively terrifying question:

How do I install half of an RPM?

I think of myself as a very absent-minded person. I also can't imagine being in my car without knowing my daughter is in my car. After reading this, I'll probably check the back seat for her even when I'm very confident she's not there.

I don't mean to be critical. I've had a lot of advantages in life, and reading about this breaks my heart. I wish I could understand more about how I could help. None of these parents or kids deserve this situation, even if the parents could have done better.

People in Flint, Michigan still don't have clean water. Lots of other folks in the world also don't have clean water. Doesn't that seem like an easier thing to fix than trying out experimental therapies?

I hope that you feel better soon.

Daycare.

It turns out that the people who need the most help might have a hard time telling doctors the truth about their symptoms for a variety of reasons. I think you're right that this would be better, but I think it would be really sad to avoid helping people just because they had problems with self-awareness and communication.

I might be wrong though. :)

I've never seen anecdata before. Thanks for sharing that word, love it. :)

Why is it not in anyone's interest to write an explicit rebuttal?

Being #3 in a growing market is not a bad place to be.

I think this is consistent with an institutional interest in going through the motions of diagnostic tests, but not caring about accuracy.

It looks like Professor Eisen's blog is down at the moment. Here's a link to the Google cache of that page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Michael Eisen is a professor at Berkeley, founder of the Public Library of Science and pioneered the use of microarrays for studying gene expression. This blog post is in response to the recent controversy about CRISPR, in particular Eric Lander's article called "The Heroes of CRISPR."

I think that evolutionary psychology might be worse, but perhaps that's because serious scientists actually care about nanotechnology and its related fields.

This article would be really interesting with more context and explanation, but I find a bit unreadable in its current state.

That being said, I enjoyed the algorithm for generating the next Paxos algorithm. That's fun, but I'm still not sure that I really understood what the author was saying.

It's too bad that there's not a more robust discussion about the institutional incentives that drive scientists to fool themselves.

Coins can be biased, they just need to be bent so far out of shape that it's obvious. Here's a fun example:

https://izbicki.me/blog/how-to-create-an-unfair-coin-and-pro...

I'm a big fan of two books:

* The Elements of Statistical Learning, by Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman (https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/local.ftp/Springer/OLD/ESLI...). * Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, by ET Jaynes (http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/prob/book.pdf)

Best of luck. I can see from your post that you're thinking about performance tuning, I'm assuming you mean of software. That's a nice area - the nice part is that compared to fields like medical genetics, data on performance of software is relatively cheap to get, so a lot of issues about small sample sizes are surmountable.

I don't think that the title or the content claimed that "presenting mathematics in an understandable way" is a hack. "Statistics for Hackers" sounds to me like hackers are the intended audience.

This method of presentation makes sense to me. Most statistics classes that I've experienced were taught from the point of view of abstract math. That's certainly one way to do it, but I knew a lot of people for whom that wasn't the optimal presentation strategy. Now that computing is cheap and there is a large audience of people with programming knowledge, I think that teaching statistics through examples of simulation, bootstrapping shuffling and cross validation is a great way to learn things.

That's a great idea, because the number of Kafka nodes scales with the size of your data. Your Zookeeper nodes don't need to scale along with your data.

Totally agree. Both correctness and security are important, but they're not the only concerns in developing useful software.

It's probably good to not put too much of a gap between them, independent of order. :)

> With the right tone and body language, people just open up. It's wonderful.

Also, your boss might be genuinely curious. A lot of people who employ this technique precompute trajectory for arriving at their conclusion. They're often right, but the times when they're wrong are really interesting.

Bottom line - I agree with you. Don't be condescending, because you might learn something from the people around you. :)

I didn't see any place where this method was claimed to be a magic bullet, or even a more common silver bullet. In fact, the author specifically mentioned this:

> When the class period ended, I and the classroom teacher > believed that at least 19 of the 22 students had fully and > excitedly participated and absorbed the entire material. The > three other students' eyes were glazed over from the very > beginning, and they did not seem to be involved in the class at > all.

That's a very clear explanation that this method didn't work for every child in the class. In any class there will be children that are difficult to reach. This isn't necessarily an article about that.

My usual rule of thumb is "does AWS sell a single instance big enough to store and process data in real time?" If you can't find an instance big enough, you have big data.

> So the truth is, the world does not need or can afford that many people researching cancer, teach and inspire the next generation.

I'm amazed that you think that. Why do you think that science is overcrowded, and more importantly, why is that the right thing for society? How would we know if we had too few, too many or exactly the right amount of people researching the fields you mention?