By the logic of that tweet, the CIA was hiding behind and deliberately using the civilians working in the WTC complex as human shields to hide from the Saudi 9/11 militants looking to remove US military bases from Saudi Arabia.
I really don't want to go down the endless list of comparisons but I don't think anyone warned the civilians in the world trade center just before it was hit. But in the case of the AP office:
"We received a warning that the building would be hit. "
And I think civilian casualties was was intended goal of the World Trade Center attack....
I could give other examples, but if Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's 1993 WTC bombing was not enough of a warning that that complex was a target, I don't know what would be. Mohammed succeeded on his second try.
John P. O'Neill of the FBI headed that investigation and he left the FBI and was head of WTC security on the day of the attack. He told people he thought he expected another attempt.
If you're Israel you certainly might choose to level an 11 story building if it houses a meaningful share of or otherwise critical Hamas intelligence operations. That's direct targeting; Hamas had operations in the building and they intentionally, directly hit the building.
You don't fly jetliners into giant skyscrapers to hope to side-hit by luck a very miniscule portion of a massive target like the CIA. That would never be a consideration for the operation. The 9/11 hijackers as we know for a fact chose the WTC for the terror purposes of killing and scaring the civilian population. Your logic twists pretends we don't know what their intentions were.
Geez, by that logic some collateral civilian damage is acceptable if it gives a nation grounds to attack someone they’ve always wanted to get rid of???
I must have put on my tinfoil hat this morning. Sorry!! :)
No evidence was provided for that claim, and I don't think it's a coincidence they decided to blow up a building that had the offices of journalists critical of Israeli foreign policy.
Hamas is the locally elected government. Gaza not allowed to have any military to defend themselves? Isreal free to inflict as much collateral damage as they want upon anyone, but anyone else following the same rules is a terrorist?
I'm not going to participate in what is bound to be a flamewar on this topic, so I'll probably just contribute with this single comment.
Hamas won the election in 2006, and no elections have been held since. While sort of democratically elected and likely still the majority party, Hamas has recently launched hundreds of rockets targeting the civilian population of Israel. This is unquestionably an act of government-run terrorism. It's not the first time - this is doctrine.
It's very hard to make sense of news reports on this conflict, as propaganda is bound to be rampant on both sides.
I've read plenty of news reports over the years stating that Hamas doctrine is to use civilian infrastructure for their operations. Meaning hospitals, civilian residences and most recently, press buildings. And also that Hamas intimidates journalists not to report such operations in any degree of detail. Israeli doctrine, on the other hand, is to give advance warning but systematically attack Hamas fighters that operate out of such locations.
It would be unsurprising if a military force uses lies and deception to achieve their objectives. It's impossible to be confident that reports are honest. Was this an attack on Hamas targets using a press building as a human shield, as the IDF states, or was it simply a pretext to destroy the press headquarters in Gaza? No journalists are reported to have been killed in the attack, as far as I can tell. I would wager that this was actually an attack on Hamas fighters or assets, but there's little evidence. I could be wrong.
Regardless, I would welcome a discussion that gives some serious thought to how to defend oneself against an adversary that operates like this. Meaning, deliberately attacking the civilian population and then using civilians and civilian infrastructure as human shields during the response.
While there remains some Arab support for informal, low-level violence directed towards Israel, ever since Black September etc. the Palestinians not being able to have a formal military to defend themselves is what all their neighbours can agree on, not just Israel.
> Gaza not allowed to have any military to defend themselves?
They are absolutely allowed to have a military I think. Edit: At least for all intents and purposes they do have one when they can coordinate large rocket attacks and do have numerous anti tank teams.
They are however not using it to defend thenselves but to poke "pointed sticks" into their neighbor in the hope that te neighbor will do something that the media will make a story of.
And, since it is military the neighbor is also allowed to bomb it when they are fed up with having shot rockets at their civilians.
Edit2:
> Isreal free to inflict as much collateral damage as they want upon anyone, but anyone else following the same rules is a terrorist?
If Israeli military was hiding among civilians and Hamas precision strikes hurt civilians despite Hamas calling them up an hour in advance I wouldn't blame Hamas either.
Now, sure, I know the reply will be that Hamas also violates the Geneva convention routinely. And then everyone will dive in to scream about how the other side did it first.
And nothing will get better, because the sad truth is that Hamas, the IDF and the right wing Israeli coalition are in effect allies in a coordinated struggle against moderates on both sides who'd (amazing, I know) prefer not blowing people up. Politics on the Paletstinian side are harder to analyze, but for sure Likud needs an active Hamas adversary to stay in power. They're barely hanging on every election.
Realistically there is no such thing as a war without the destruction of civilian assets. What do you suggest Israel should do if Hamas is firing rockets at them from within a city?
There are a lot of people who do want to blow each other up and that's just life
> There are a lot of people who do want to blow each other up and that's just life
Right, but the notable intersection with US policy for non-Israeli folks like me is that the responds then becomes: maybe we should stop buying them bombs to do it with.
As I mentioned, right now the people with the bombs on both sides of that border have a very clear built-in incentive to use them. Take the incentive away and let's see what happens.
This is a great way of putting it and something I haven't thought of before. Mostly, I have been guarding my 2yo from pushing-all-the-buttons because I'm scared of her breaking something expensive (air purifier) or hurting herself (elevator). But I want to foster this sense of creative exploration.
She has taken a lot of interest in my Macbook (lots of keys to press, and she sees me using it) but zero interest in the cheapo tablet I bought her.
I can tell you that getting an RGB keyboard is not a great idea. I learned that from experience.
In my own experience (of exactly 1 child), teaching him to understand what's ok and what's not ok to play with is important. We felt, from a distance, a hot stovetop well after the burner was off, touched the edge of a knife to see how sharp it was, etc. We lived in a city, so we got to see, in person, cars running lights and getting into an accident (look both ways, even with a walk signal!).
I also let him participate in the button pushing with guidance. Kids want to do what you're doing, so making that as real as possible is a good thing. In my case, I had an only laptop kicking around. It could do some web games and looked and felt similar to what Daddy was using.
Disclaimer: not a parent, but anecdotally curious as a child.
Give them video games. Problem solving, and creative button mashing as a must if you want to be good at a game. Then slowly extend to things like old laptops (get them to help you switch out the hard drive), etc.
Strong +1 to this. I passed the FAANG interview after solving 100 leetcodes, mostly medium.
Being able to show up and do the work is table stakes –– and yes, I actually write efficient algorithms in my day-to-day because we process massive amounts of data. But the algos I write were invented 50, 60 years ago. My leetcode study process was to look up the solution and then memorize it through rote practice. Why reinvent the wheel? I'm not trying to win a Turing prize here.
But your intellectual mettle and day to day happiness in the company is tested by your ability to deal with people.
Zuckerberg wasn't a mediocre programmer. He was an accomplished programmer who had shipped industry-level code by the time he was in high school. Adam D'Angelo was a USACO gold medalist.
I macro agree with your point about leverage although I'd like a bit more insight here...
"You can give them a hint as to what it is, to vouch for the legitimacy of your finding, but Facebook has one of the better-resourced security teams in the industry, and they're just going to find it themselves and shut it down without paying you anything."
Wouldn't that cost Facebook much more than $7,000?
I don't think so. Those people get paid whether or not you focus their attention on a perimeter-exposed RCE bug. By tipping them off, all you've done is make them more effective for a time.
The bug is there whether a bounty hunter finds it or not. The other "leverage" you have, if you don't like $7K bounties for auth bypass on random backend thingies, is just not do hunt for bounties at all. Facebook knows that; their desire to attract bounty hunters is priced in to the bounties they pay.
It's for this reason that people who want to make serious money and who start in bounty hunting break basically two ways:
* Either they get really good at mopping up lots of 4-figure bounties (hitting the occasional blackjack on something that pays into low-mid 5 figures), often with a fair bit of automation, or
* They graduate into consulting, where the weekly rate for this kind of work is substantially higher, you're given a briefing by the target about where to look, and where you get paid whether or not you find a marquee bug.
(A good person to ask about this stuff is 'daeken).
As a company, why would I want to pay the hourly rate at all? Why not contract with a reputable bounty hunter, give them the level of access I'd give the hourly consultant, and pay the hunter bounties for what they find?
Seems like that captures the "higher bugs per hour" advantage of the consultant while retaining the "you only get paid for directly producing value" advantage of bounties.
It seems like what you're describing here is simply a bug bounty program.
The reason companies pay for app pentests and also run bug bounties is that the two modalities find different kinds of bugs. App pentesters generally get a lot of intel about their targets (source is not unusual). You're also getting a team with bios and a final deliverable that records the diligence work done, which is not an outcome you get with a bounty program.
But you can do things in between. It's not crazy to offer a gig to someone who has delivered a good finding on a bounty project. But you have to do something to incentivize them beyond what the bounty already does, and the most normal way to do that is to not make payment contingent.
Sure. But if they drop it for this, it was less value than this - and you’ve saved them the time of testing less important things before narrowing in on this bug.
On the one hand, you have a renaissance man (RISD-trained painter and Harvard-minted CS PhD) who authored On Lisp and started up and exited successfully with some of the most respected technologists as partners (Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris). On the other hand, you have the author of Founders at Work, someone who not only thoroughly interviewed tons of successful founders (& bootstraped a pattern-matching capacity) but also has a reputation for a world-class EQ that built community and kept bad apples away.
So, yeah, the DNA of the founding team matters a lot. Seems like for scaling companies (like Y Combinator, itself, is a company – and by Sam's definition of creating more value for others than itself, has become a platform) – traits are extremely heritable (not so much the case with children!)
I just read the whole thing, how is it a takedown? Plomin's paper is a meta-study which discusses results that are robustly replicated because there is a crisis of reproducibility in this domain and replication is the arbiter of the scientific method. This article you linked is essentially an opinion piece about Plomin...
edit: Did I get shadowbanned for this?! Post not showing up on different device..
It's a review of Plomin's book, Blueprint, including putting it into context with the history of similar works.
"Like much of that literature, Blueprint plays fast and loose with the concept of heritability. Sometimes Plomin treats it (correctly) as a variable property of a population in a given environment. As population geneticist Richard Lewontin pointed out in a scathing critique of Jensen’s approach in 1970, in times of plenty, height is highly heritable; in a famine, much less so (R. C. Lewontin Bull. Atom. Sci. 26, 2–8; 1970). But elsewhere, Plomin, like Jensen, treats heritability wrongly as a property inherent in a trait."
...
"The most troubling thing about Blueprint is its Panglossian DNA determinism. Plomin foresees private, direct-to-consumer companies selling sets of polygenic scores to academic programmes or workplaces. Yet, as this “incorrigible optimist” assures us, “success and failure — and credit and blame — in overcoming problems should be calibrated relative to genetic strengths and weaknesses”, not environmental ones. All is for the best in this best of brave new worlds.
"Plomin likes to say that various components of nurture “matter, but they don’t make a difference”. But the benefits of good teaching, of school lunches and breakfasts, of having textbooks and air-conditioning and heating and plumbing have been established irrefutably. And they actually are causal: we know why stable blood sugar improves mental concentration. Yet Plomin dismisses such effects as “unsystematic and unstable, so there’s not much we can do about them”."
I wouldn't jump straight to foul play. New throwaways are probably pretty sensitive to downvote/flagging/etc, it's unlikely you were moderated out of existence.
I wish that writer had spent fewer words describing Plomin as undemocratic, insidious, discredited, simplistic, and regressive, and more words actually explaining why he thinks Plomin is wrong.
Someone sent me this screenshot and asked to post to see if this was some kind of spam filter or if HN mods are actively hiding it (trying to invoke the Streisand effect I guess). She said the first post was also hidden until it re-appeared with your response. I am now also very interested because as far as I can tell this doesn't violate rules, just makes some people uncomfortable or something.
Not super relevant, but it's funny that the guy who has famously criticized credentialism [1] also thinks the best way to describe his artistic achievements is "studied painting at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti" [2].
This is called being pragmatic. pg is excellent at this.
If the rest of the world operates on credentialism, you either go with the flow and just play along, or refuse to acknowledge how the rest of the world works, and get caught up in a lot of stupid arguments.
It's important to understand, there's a cost to being unconventional. I think pg understands this better than most. Sometimes that cost is worth it. A lot of times though, it isn't.
Isn't pragmatism about choosing actions with a clear eye toward their practical effects? My perception is that if he can't even stick to his principles on credentialism when talking about a hobby, he either takes extreme care to shape others' opinions of his hobby or doesn't really personally buy anti-credentialism.
(I don't mean to pick on Paul Graham, but it's kind of hard to resist with all the essays.)
Maybe he has a clear eye toward the practical effect of mentioning his "painting credentials". To say he wasn't sticking to his principles, I think you would have to say he was allowing his own decisions to be unduly influenced by credentials, not just mentioning his own.
Mentioning facts about your education in your bio isn't the same as "describing your artistic achievements". You wouldn't buy one of his paintings because of where he studied and neither would he try to sell you one purely on those facts.
I personally have no idea what painting accomplishments exist and how much they mean, but I do have a vague idea of what RISD is, so that's more useful to me.
If you wanted to hire a painter, you would have an idea of what task you wanted to accomplish, and understanding that would allow you to compare painting accomplishments against your intended goal. If you want to hire a painter but don't know what you want them to do... that is not a recipe for commercial success!
No composers were world recognized in the Baroque era. How would they be? There were no recordings and no music publishing industry. Bach was not well-known as a composer until after his death because he worked as a church organist as opposed to traveling and staging concerts. His employer St Thomas Church didn't release his composition until 1850. He was certainly well-regarded in Germany as an organist though.
I did not say "world recognized", I said recognized as world-class.
I believe his church was disappointed that they didn't get Purcell, when he was first hired. I may well have that wrong - it's a vague memory.
My point was that experts don't necessarily do a good job of recognizing which other experts are great quickly. It can take a long, long time for the best to rise to the top.
> disappointed that they didn't get Purcell [...] a vague memory
Right idea, some details wrong. It was Telemann they wanted, and it wasn't his first job but his last, at Leipzig.
Bach was actually their third choice, after Telemann and Christoph Graupner. (Who? I've never heard any of his music either. I hear tell it's actually rather good.)
(Also relevant: they weren't exactly hiring a composer; they needed someone to compose and conduct and teach and organize. Telemann was in fact a very fine composer, but it's entirely possible that that wasn't why they wanted him more than they wanted Bach: they may e.g. have thought he would be easier to get on with, and they may have been right.)
Why would someone in Bach's era needed to have recognized him as a world-class composer? If his music appealed to them personally they would know, and if they were a "record label," the fact that it wasn't popular at the time is all they would need to know.
My point was that Bach accomplished more than just about any composer before or since.
Some people put Mozart and Beethoven up there (I think he was better at his best and I believe more prolific generally, but YMMV).
The point is, though, that almost no one in history has rivaled Bach for his compositional feats, yet it took a hundred years after his death before people really started to realize that.
If that was true for him, I question whether it's realistic to count on human ability to recognize accomplishments as a useful metric.
Agree, YC is a company. Instead of owning 100% of IP and products being developed, it owns 7% of it. More thoughts here (from 2016): [0], also in comparison to Alphabet.
Rather a platform, isn't it? Matches founders with VC for a stake of 7% as fee.
Platforms thrive if you match supply and demand in a highly relevant way, and once they thrive, they generate network effects.
So PG & Jessica were sort of the equivalent of the seller terms and conditions on the Amazon marketplace platform haha. They were able to spot and shape promising founding teams.
https://twitter.com/IDF/status/1393565656621137920?s=20