mbellotti's comments

I'm probably too late to the party for this comment to matter but: what the AI community pushes as "Safety" isn't actually Safety. Read Sidney Dekker. Read Nancy Leveson. Read Jens Rasmussen. Safety is not building perfect technology that never makes a mistake.

When I was working in defense technology I had two questions for engineers when we talked about Safety:

1) Can the operator assess the risk of using this technology? 2) If something goes wrong during operations, can the operator mitigate the risk?

The degree to which either of those statements is true is a measure of how safe that technology is. Technology that is simple to understand and executes deterministically every single time and where it is obvious if it is malfunctioning and the operator has enough time to either correct it or stop it, is generally perceived as safe. Technology that hides what it is really doing, confuses the operator about what the effects of operating it might be, and either executes faster than the operator can respond or specifically prevents the operator from responding, is more likely to trigger negative safety outcomes.

The problem the AI industry faces is that tricking the operator into thinking the technology is doing something it is not is explicitly part of their business model. Read any of the mentioned authors (Dekker is probably the best starting point) and it will become obvious why AI Safety is impossible when AI is dependent on pretending to "think" and "reason". In order to be safe they would have to abandon that. If they abandon that, they will be unable to raise the capital they need to keep the bubble from bursting. The technology will survive, maybe with another AI winter, but many of the businesses will not.

So they will abandon the lip service about Safety instead, but then that was never real Safety to begin with. Real Safety is not about zero risk. It is just as impossible to have zero risk as it is to have 100% uptime. Real Safety is about how the technology is designed to manage risk as part of an overall system.

Finger crossed this is okay as a "Show HN" (there's a free chapter so I think it is ^_^;;;;)

But I'm psyched. This was a two year project collecting stories, researching techniques and historical context, then having Covid push through production schedules into complete disarray.

It's adorable that these answers are all in the past tense. This is still going on. Many of these systems still exist.

Well shit, thanks for noticing that. I've fixed it.

I really like Zulip (https://zulipchat.com/) because it enforces threading of conversations which makes them so much easier to sort, mute, follow up with after the fact.

I can provide a little general insight on this. Here are some things that might lead one to get rejected from USDS Engineering without an interview:

- You're too junior (not your case, I understand.)

- It is not clear that you've actually written software recently as a professional. (While we're looking for senior people and do have management needs, over time we've struggled with hiring managers -vs- growing them because government is such a radically different environment that success managing in the private sector is a poor indicator. So engineering managers are evaluated primarily as engineers first, managers after they pass)

- Your skills seem too specialized in areas we do not have needs. (Much of government technology is super old and much of what is wrong with it is technical debt and decay, not cutting edge technical challenges. For that reason we prefer generalists. Again this doesn't sound like your case)

- Not enough web development work (There is an on-going debate about this, but realistically citizen facing services tend to mean websites and the infrastructure that supports them. In the past we have hired engineers who were unable to adjust to web development and we couldn't find them enough work to play to their strengths. So while we're open to software engineers from other disciplines, there's still a lot of inconsistency in how the engineers judging your resume weigh this issue. Our attempts to correct this are ongoing.)

- You've applied as an engineer and emphasized non-engineering accomplishments (Since we're a civic tech organization sometimes people curate their resumes to play up their social good activities instead of their engineering. This is without a doubt the wrong move. If our engineers don't think you can write code they will not clear you for a technical interview.)

- You've applied for the wrong role or it's not clear what role you would fit into (This seems like it might your case. USDS has three types of roles [well five, but two are not really relevant here]: Engineering, Design (which includes visual, UX research, and content strategy), and Strategy/Operations (which includes both our front office administration and people who are coming in with significant government/policy/legal/product management experience. While we definitely have people who straddle lines [PMs with engineering backgrounds, designers who can program, etc] all those people still applied and were evaluated for one specific community.)

This is the one thing the article got wrong about the talk. The 7074 replaced magnetic drums with core memory. It's an easy mistake to make since the 700 series used vacuum tube logic and the 7070 replaced those with transistors. The 7074 came about two years after that.

Oh yeah, when I talked to the agency that owns the 7074 (more on this in a second) they were like "You can't do this because we will get hacked"

"How are you going to get hacked if I talk about your mainframe? It's not connected to the public internet, is it?"

"No. Well... we don't know... but ... hackers! Hackers are really smart Marianne."

Part of the compromise was that I promised I would only use information that was already available publicly through government reports and news articles. I went back through my talk and documented where each fact was already published somewhere else until they were comfortable with it. So the ambiguity on whether the 7074 was the actual machine or an emulator was deliberate... there were certain things I could not find a public comment on and therefore agreed to avoid making direct statements about.

This all seems super annoying, but it makes sense when you realize how heavily scrutinized public servants are. In the end they are only trying to protect me, my organization and Obama's legacy. Three things that are really important to me. So I can't exactly blame them for it. I was happy to be able to find a middle ground where they felt comfortable, the organizers weren't too badly inconvenienced and I got to give the talk I wanted to.

This article was such a pleasant surprise! I loved talking at Systems We Love and I love talking about legacy architecture in general. Bryan and the Joyent team were very accommodating and understanding. The White House is an amazing place to work (even now), but it's not a system that understands conference talks very well. Wish we could have a video, but it was a heavy lift just getting the bureaucracy okay with the idea that I was going to talk about information that was already public, without naming agencies or projects and without going into detail beyond what was in a user manual and that this was not a security risk.

> A lot of legacy, sure, but I think this article makes it sound even more legacy than it really is.

Indeed. The point of the talk was that 1) legacy is often assumed to be bad not for any real technical reasons but just because it is legacy and 2) a lot of what was being presented as legacy wasn't even legacy. Their OS 2200 version was actually newer than the Oracle DB they were using on the "modern" side of the stack.

Actually not completely true. It depends on the agency that sponsors your clearance and it has more to do with the agency's involvement in the intelligence community. The White House does not require it.

It's true, and that's why I think student hackathons are going to become so important in recruiting. It's not about the grades and a fancy name, great talent comes from passion and intellectual curiosity. At these events the differences between the groups that code for fun and the groups that are in CS because they think it means a guaranteed well paying job post-graduation are REALLY obvious.

I'm going back and forth about how smart it is to reply to this seeing as the point I was trying to make was not "Wah YC rejected us because we're different!!!"

For the record, I've always really respected YC for being honest and up front about biases. I find it very refreshing, because most everyone else is too scared of being accused of discrimination to admit it. Everyone has biases. Every VC and angel is going to try to match what's in front of them to something they know when assessing the potential value. I have no doubt that YC will accept a great company that doesn't fit the "type", we spoke to lot of companies like that before we came out to SF.

What I'm curious about is YC's habit of "fund without idea" or "fund for new idea" ... how likely is it that someone against the traditional startup type would be given that opportunity? I don't know the answer because there's no data on what ideas people came into YC with, vs what they left with ... but it's an interesting question to me because cognitive biases are an interesting topic to me.

The people who think they are smart enough to think their way out of their own biases are usually the ones who fall victim to them the most often. So I've always really seen YC's honesty about this as a GOOD sign, not fodder for criticism.

It is used in the term "life hacking", yes. Originally I had an explanation in the post but I cut it for length (and relevancy) so here's what I was up to: Casinos give out free "slot credits" like candy. I got $30 dollars for taking the bus to AC, $80 for eating at a certain restaurant, etc. The trick is you cannot cash out your credits, only play them, but you can-- of course-- cash out your winnings.

Except the odds of you winning anything over pocket change are astronomically low, so most people gamble away not just all their credits, but all their winnings and some of their own money to boot. That's why the casinos are so eager to give you free credits for everything.

What I was doing was playing the penny slots on the lowest bet level and cashing out anything over ten cents. I was making about 60 to 70 cents on the dollar ... which sucks if it's your dollar, but the whole point was it WASN'T. I was using the slots to convert the casinos free credits to cash.

......Not what I would have done if given free choice of activity, but like I said, my friends wouldn't let me play blackjack :D If I have to sit for hours while the bride-to-be brags about her bullshit "system" for hitting jackpots, I might as well make a little money.

I confess... too quick on the draw. The title made it sound exactly up my alley. Then other upvotes... upvoted before I read lol. Sorry guys, my bad!

I think they have the right idea but for the wrong reasons. Having a person whose sole job is to play devil's advocate on every idea can help minimize the risks of group think. Often truly bad ideas are not a mystery, plenty of people on the ground level of a company think they are bad ideas but also know that speaking out will hurt them politically within the company. There is nothing a company can do to prevent this feeling, it's a natural part of human behavior. Having someone who does nothing but question and criticize might give these voices a safe channel from which to express their perspective, preventing bad ideas from moving forward in good companies.

This makes me love Twilio even more :D I wish more companies would realize the benefit of cultivating talent from within instead of mining other companies for "rockstars"

It is ... slightly creepy, depending on whether they remember that they didn't give you that information.

But more to the point, is it worth scraping fb on the off chance that their email is part of the public profile? I would think most of your target audience would have better privacy settings.

While on one hand more practice questions is a really good thing for building confidence among new programmers ... The point of a good interview question is to figure out how you think, not what the internet consensus on a given subject is.

I'm not sure how much I buy this. With no discussion of the model it's hard to say what assumptions he did or did not make in terms of how all these factors respond to each other.