What are their roots? I really didn't enjoy my experiences with R, but I also was forced to take it and have little interest in learning how to be a statistician.
Statisticians. Sorry who I meant was the whole of academia who before had an excuse to pass there stats work on to a statistician but now are happy programmers.
In all seriousness I've taught postdocs who were willing to learn everything from Python to C++/MPI to assembler. The key is just to be intellectually curious and enjoy solving problems. R is very often the thin end of the wedge -- its learning curve is more like a wall, but once you've survived that, most programming language quirks seem like NBD. And lord knows the real physical world is far quirkier still.
R is ugly as shit (ok not as bad as Perl, and it is lispy enough not to be infuriating) but it gives you an enormous arsenal of tools. It's not like R is unique in this way, any decent programming language enables this, it's just that R and CRAN seem to have a working implementation of most anything an analyst is likely to need; if you need speed you call out to C++ or FORTRAN, it's not beautiful but it gets things done. So more of your time can be spent in the pursuit of understanding, to poke and prod, visualize your results, solve problems and (sometimes) discover things no one else has seen.
If someone DOESN'T like those last two things, what the hell are they doing in academia anyways? Choose another line of work and make a lot more money :-)
You misunderstand my comment. Understandably so, I can see I wasn't as clear as I should have been. Let me clarify: Twitter has already spent a lot of money developing their own infrastructure. They now get to enjoy significantly cheaper ongoing infrastructure costs versus the cloud, as per the sibling comment. Moving to the cloud would be "throwing money down the drain" because they would have to invest significant resources into the migration and only have an increased monthly server bill as a result.
Generally, at any scale over ~500 computers that run continuously, investing in private infrastructure is going to be 1/2 to 1/5 the cost of public cloud, including people costs. The real levers for improving engineering spend are around complexity of your actual serving software, which doesn't depend on / isn't really influenced by who you buy your computers from.
I don't buy that claim at all. No way you're building private infrastructure for 1/5 the cost of Azure or AWS. Or even 1/2.
If you're comparing some servers in a 4th tier colo with a poor SLA to AWS and pretending that devops time is free, then sure. But if you're actually building something with comparable reliability and availability, then no way. You're going to spend a lot more than you'd expect on extra capacity, a team of service engineers, load balancers, multiple locations, etc.
What availability does Twitter actually deliver? I might be getting mixed up with reports about other sites or biased toward older events that happened when Twitter's architecture was less mature, but it seems like it's at least a semi-regular victim of "break the Internet" phenomena.
Twitter hasn't gone down in ages. (At least 2-3 full years.) It's reliable enough that hundreds of sites use Twitter as their "if our site is down, check for updates here" alternative.
> It's reliable enough that hundreds of sites use Twitter as their "if our site is down, check for updates here" alternative.
This has nothing to do with twitter's reliability. It just means companies have said twitter is more reliable than they are so look for our update on twitter opposed to some company specific system status page.
You're severely discounting the very large margin those companies take. It is not hard to build a medium sized infrastructure, with quality, cheaply - if you have access to expertise. This usually means hiring a few infrastructure jockeys from the larger companies.
Your SLA will likely be better than with public cloud.
You should absolutely build a public cloud competitor if you believe your numbers. By your numbers you'd make a minimum 100% margin and as much as 400%.
Unfortunately two things in the way of that are will and the cost of building a long tail of product features. First, that I'm not interested in running a standalone business, and second - my research here (it's been a lot) depends on being able to spend 20% effort on an 80% solution. I don't build a dynamo or a SNS and don't need a sales and marketing budget when I'm embedded in a large company building something purpose-built. The overhead of normalizing for industry wide generic use cases kills the 500% dream.
There's obviously room here though because AWS definitely takes a margin and that means opportunity!
What was the problem with awarding it to Kissinger? Generally curious? I don't recall the details, but as far as I understood he pretty much laid down the foundation to end the Vietnam war.
Carpet bombings of Laos, helping Nixon interfere with negotiations in Paris to end the war, looking the other way while Pakistan massacred people in Bangladesh, supporting Pinochet, etc.
That was past; then came the deal to an armistice to end the Vietnam War (though then after the armistice NVA and VC continued the war and South Vietnam collapsed). The point of that prize was not that there had been war, it was that the parties had signed to end hostilities.
In 2009, the peace prize really was quite strange in my opinion: Obama had achieved rather little except winning an election campaign (becoming the U.S. president the same year) on promises that undoubtedly sounded good to the Committee (but which later on were not kept very well or quickly).
The Obama prize was like giving a gold medal to a runner just because it will run some races and he tells you he wants to win . Nobody could understand it , it's still a mystery the reason behind it.
There are other examples where the Nobel prize has been given to someone who previously intensified the conflict, but then worked for peace. Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat in 1978, for instance.
Posts like this are why I always check the comments. I don't think I would have had this thought shared with me anywhere else. Having said that, I'm still unsure how to interpret the Oscar Wilde quote.
