The Phony Free Market - <AUTHOR> https://m.facebook.com/?_rdr#!/RBReich/photos/a.404595876219681.103599.142474049098533/1075758279103434/?type=3 <comment><AUTHOR> For those who don't care to visit Facebook:

Robert Reich Here's an excerpt from my new book "SAVING CAPITALISM: For the Many, Not the Few," out 9/29.

"The Phony Free Market"

It usually occurs in a small theater or a lecture hall. Someone introduces me and then introduces a person who is there to debate me. My debate opponent and I then spend five or ten minutes sparring over the chosen topic—education, poverty, income inequality, taxes, executive pay, middle-class wages, climate change, drug trafficking, whatever. It doesn't matter. Because, with astounding regularity, the debate soon turns to whether the "free market" is better at doing something than government.

I do not invite this. In fact, as I've already said and will soon explain, I view it as a meaningless debate. Worse, it's a distraction from what we should be debating. Intentional or not, it deflects the public's attention from what's really at issue.

Few ideas have more profoundly poisoned the minds of more people than the notion of a "free market" existing somewhere in the universe, into which government "intrudes." In this view, whatever inequality or insecurity the market generates is assumed to be the natural and inevitable consequence of impersonal "market forces." What you're paid is simply a measure of what you're worth in the market. If you aren't paid enough to live on, so be it. If others rake in billions, they must be worth it. If millions of people are unemployed or their paychecks are shrinking or they have to work two or three jobs and have no idea what they'll be earning next month or even next week, that's unfortunate but it's the outcome of "market forces."

According to this view, whatever we might do to reduce inequality or economic insecurity—to make the economy work for most of us—runs the risk of distorting the market and causing it to be less efficient, or of producing unintended consequences that may end up harming us. Although market imperfections such as pollution or unsafe workplaces, or the need for public goods such as basic research or even aid to the poor, may require the government to intervene on occasion, these instances are exceptions to the general rule that the market knows best.

The prevailing view is so dominant that it is now almost taken for granted. It is taught in almost every course on introductory economics. It has found its way into everyday public discourse. One hears it expressed by politicians on both sides of the aisle.

The question typically left to debate is how much intervention is warranted. Conservatives want a smaller government and less intervention; liberals want a larger and more activist government. This has become the interminable debate, the bone of contention that splits left from right in America and in much of the rest of the capitalist world. One's response to it typically depends on which you trust most (or the least): the government or the "free market."

But the prevailing view, as well as the debate it has spawned, is utterly false. There can be no "free market" without government. The "free market" does not exist in the wilds beyond the reach of civilization. Competition in the wild is a contest for survival in which the largest and strongest typically win. Civilization, by contrast, is defined by rules; rules create markets, and governments generate the rules. As the seventeenth-century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes put it in his book "Leviathan:"

[in nature] there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

A market—any market—requires that government make and enforce the rules of the game. In most modern democracies, such rules emanate from legislatures, administrative agencies, and courts. Government doesn't "intrude" on the "free market." It creates the market.

The rules are neither neutral nor universal, and they are not permanent. Different societies at different times have adopted different versions. The rules partly mirror a society's evolving norms and values but also reflect who in society has the most power to make or influence them. Yet the interminable debate over whether the "free market" is better than "government" makes it impossible for us to examine who exercises this power, how they benefit from doing so, and whether such rules need to be altered so that more people benefit from them.

The size of government is not unimportant, but the rules for how the free market functions have far greater impact on an economy and a society. Surely it is useful to debate how much government should tax and spend, regulate and subsidize. Yet these issues are at the margin of the economy, while the rules are the economy. It is impossible to have a market system without such rules and without the choices that lie behind them. As the economic historian Karl Polanyi recognized, those who argue for "less government" are really arguing for a different government—often one that favors them or their patrons.

"Deregulation" of the financial sector in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, for example, could more appropriately be described as "reregulation." It did not mean less government. It meant a different set of rules, initially allowing Wall Street to speculate on a wide assortment of risky but lucrative bets and permitting banks to push mortgages onto people who couldn't afford them. When the bubble burst in 2008, the government issued rules to protect the assets of the largest banks, subsidize them so they would not go under, and induce them to acquire weaker banks. At the same time, the government enforced other rules that caused millions of people to lose their homes. These were followed by additional rules intended to prevent the banks from engaging in new rounds of risky behavior (although in the view of many experts, these new rules are inadequate).

The critical things to watch out for aren't the rare big events, such as the 2008 bailout of the Street itself, but the ongoing multitude of small rule changes that continuously alter the economic game. Even a big event's most important effects are on how the game is played differently thereafter. The bailout of Wall Street created an implicit guarantee that the government would subsidize the biggest banks if they ever got into trouble. This gave the biggest banks a financial advantage over smaller banks and fueled their subsequent growth and dominance over the entire financial sector, which enhanced their subsequent political power to get rules they wanted and avoid those they did not.

The "free market" is a myth that prevents us from examining these rule changes and asking whom they serve. The myth is therefore highly useful to those who do not wish such an examination to be undertaken. It is no accident that those with disproportionate influence over these rules, who are the largest beneficiaries of how the rules have been designed and adapted, are also among the most vehement supporters of the "free market" and the most ardent advocates of the relative superiority of the market over government. But the debate itself also serves their goal of distracting the public from the underlying realities of how the rules are generated and changed, their own power over this process, and the extent to which they gain from the results. In other words, not only do these "free market" advocates want the public to agree with them about the superiority of the market but also about the central importance of this interminable debate.

They are helped by the fact that the underlying rules are well hidden in an economy where so much of what is owned and traded is becoming intangible and complex. Rules governing intellectual property, for example, are harder to see than the rules of an older economy in which property took the tangible forms of land, factories, and machinery. Likewise, monopolies and market power were clearer in the days of giant railroads and oil trusts than they are now, when a Google, Apple, Facebook, or Comcast can gain dominance over a network, platform, or communications system. At the same time, contracts were simpler to parse when buyers and sellers were on more or less equal footing and could easily know or discover what the other party was promising. That was before the advent of complex mortgages, consumer agreements, franchise systems, and employment contracts, all of whose terms are now largely dictated by one party. Similarly, financial obligations were clearer when banking was simpler and the savings of some were loaned to others who wanted to buy homes or start businesses. In today's world of elaborate financial instruments, by contrast, it is sometimes difficult to tell who owes what to whom, or when, or why.

Before we can understand the consequences of all of this for modern capitalism, it is first necessary to address basic questions about how government has organized and reorganized the market, what interests have had the most influence on this process, and who has gained and who has lost as a result.

 __*

Should you wish to pre-order: Amazon: [http://bit.ly/1F2A9PX;](http://bit.ly/1F2A9PX;) Barnes & Noble: [http://bit.ly/1ihgd0M;](http://bit.ly/1ihgd0M;) IndieBound: [http://bit.ly/1UW92No](http://bit.ly/1UW92No)

(Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House LLC.)</comment>


A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://econweb.umd.edu/~wallis/MyPapers/RHH_2006_w12795.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Abstract:

Neither economics nor political science can explain the process of modern social development. The fact that developed societies always have developed economies and developed polities suggests that the connection between economics and politics must be a fundamental part of the development process. This paper develops an integrated theory of economics and politics. We show how, beginning 10,000 years ago, limited access social orders developed that were able to control violence, provide order, and allow greater production through specialization and exchange. Limited access orders provide order by using the political system to limit economic entry to create rents, and then using the rents to stabilize the political system and limit violence. We call this type of political economy arrangement a natural state. It appears to be the natural way that human societies are organized, even in most of the contemporary world. In contrast, a handful of developed societies have developed open access social orders. In these societies, open access and entry into economic and political organizations sustains economic and political competition. Social order is sustained by competition rather than rent- creation. The key to understanding modern social development is understanding the transition from limited to open access social orders, which only a handful of countries have managed since WWII.</comment>


Why is Japan so… different? - <AUTHOR> http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/03/17/why_is_japan_so_different

<comment><USER2> Foreign Policy FEATURE Why Is Japan So … Different? A brief history of leaving China, becoming the other, and turning Japanese.

BY DAVID PILLING MARCH 17, 2014

On March 16, 1885, an editorial entitled "Leaving Asia" was published in the Japanese newspaper Jiji Shimpo. Now widely believed to have been written by Yukichi Fukuzawa, the intellectual giant of the 19th-century modernization movement that culminated in the Meiji Restoration, it argued that Japan could simply not afford to be held back by "feudalistic" China and Korea, and should therefore "leave the ranks of Asian nations and cast our lot with the civilized nations of the West."

Japan's break with China, a country it subsequently invaded and humiliated, is a story of sharp relevance today. Tensions between the two nations are extremely high. Chinese and Japanese ships and planes circle disputed islands in the East China Sea, with the ever-present danger of an accident or willful escalation. Leaders in both countries have started to compare the present with 1914 and 1939, when the world stood on the brink of war.

The principal cause of animosity is Japan's invasion of China in the 1930s and 1940s, an unsuccessful attempt to colonize the Middle Kingdom in which millions were slaughtered. It can also be clearly traced to 1895, when Japan fought China in a brief war and annexed Chinese territory, including Taiwan, and claimed the Senkaku islands (which the Chinese call the Diaoyu), the focus of today's territorial dispute. More subtly, however, the resentment between the two countries goes back further still, to Japan's intellectual break with China, when it threw itself into a headlong effort to modernize and Europeanize.

China was once considered the fount of all knowledge for Japan, an isolated archipelago of islands sitting like an apostrophic afterthought off the eastern edge of the vast Eurasian landmass. Kyoto, founded in the 8th century and Japan's imperial capital for a thousand years, was a replica of the Tang Dynasty capital Chang'an. Serious Japanese poets wrote in Chinese. Only women used the phonetic kana script -- a lady-in-waiting at the imperial court composed the 11th-century Tale of Genji, considered the world's first novel. For men, to be learned meant to be learned in Chinese.

But in subsequent centuries, the prestige of Chinese civilization began to slowly erode; it fell sharply in 1644 when the Ming Dynasty crumpled and the Han Chinese came under foreign control. This coincided with the early days of Japan's Tokugawa period (1600-1868), when the ruling shoguns sought to protect the state, and themselves, from foreign influence, including Chinese. Intent on preserving its monopoly and wary of competing ideologies, the shogunate banned the Japanese, on pain of death, from leaving the country and returning. Traders from China were mostly restricted to a Chinese quarter in the city of Nagasaki.

For Japan to break with China was a traumatic decision. Most of what it valued culturally had come from the Chinese landmass: wet rice cultivation, the written script, concepts of Confucian hierarchy and filial piety, and techniques in the use of both bronze and iron. The historian George Sansom wrote that Buddhism, which also arrived in Japan from China (even though it originated in India) was "a great magic bird, flying on strong pinions across the ocean, [bringing] to Japan all the elements of a new life -- a new morality, learning of all kinds, literature, the arts and crafts, and subtle metaphysics which had no counterpart in the native tradition."

<comment><USER2> During the Tokugawa era, scholars of kokugaku, or "country learning," endeavored to revive nativist traditions and loosen the hold of Chinese influence. Helping these ideas take hold was the Opium War of 1839-1842, where a mere handful of British gunboats brought low the great civilization of the Middle Kingdom. China was in danger of being "cut up like a melon," as a 19th century expression had it. If Japan were to avoid a similar fate, it would have to embrace Western civilization and leave its Asian origins behind. Kokugaku scholars looked back to a pre-feudal classical Japan, a supposed golden age of literature and philosophy. They stressed the supposed purity of Japanese poetry, which, distinct from the classical Chinese forms, was meant to evoke nature and praise pure emotion.

Even today, such ideas resonate. Shintaro Ishihara, the former governor of Tokyo whose 2012 plan to buy and develop the contested Senkaku/Diaoyu islands in the East China Sea triggered the current Sino-Japanese standoff, once told me proudly that Japanese poetry was unique. The novelist Andre Malraux, he said, had personally told him that the Japanese were "the only people who can grasp eternity in a single moment." Ishihara, blinking in his owlish way, went on, "The haiku is the shortest poetic style in the world. This was not created by the Chinese but by the Japanese."

Much of what we today consider quintessentially Japanese originated from this period of breaking with China. Ian Buruma, a brilliant scholar of China and Japan told me, "As knowledge of the world grew, the Japanese began to realize that China was not the center of world, and to recognize the weakness of China. So they thought, 'We better start repositioning ourselves.'" Similarly, much of Japan's supposed exceptionalism was a modern construct, said Buruma. "The reason the Japanese nativists describe their own culture as completely different from China was a form of defensiveness." From the 1880s, after the overthrow of the shogun and the establishment of a modern state in the name of the emperor, history books were rewritten to begin not with the Stone Age, but with Japan's own creation myth, tracing a supposedly unbroken imperial line from the sun goddess Amatarasu to the present day. Japanese Shintoism, an animist set of folkloric beliefs mixed with ancestor worship, was elevated to a state religion with the divine emperor at its center. Much of Japan's supposed uniqueness, in other words, was propaganda; a political exercise in nation building and establishing Japan's credentials as a standalone culture distinct from China.

Tokyo used that propaganda to create support for Japan's imperial ambitions, based on the supposed superiority of the Japanese, who were closer to the divine emperor than foreigners. Japan's "civilizing" mission was elevated to an idea that was worth dying -- and killing -- for. Things were very different, of course, after the war. Years later, in 1971, Henry Kissinger told then-Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai that Japan's "tribal outlook" made it capable of rapid change. "Japan believes that their society is so different that they can adjust to anything and preserve their national essence," he said. "Therefore the Japanese are capable of sudden explosive changes. They went from feudalism to emperor worship in two to three years. They went from emperor worship to democracy in three months."

Some foreign observers have been as enthusiastic about promoting Japan's alleged uniqueness as the Japanese themselves. Of course, all nations are unique, but in Japan this truism became a fetish. The Japanese developed a form, which dates back to the Tokugawa era but which flourished in the post- World War II period, of quasi-philosophical writing called Nihonjinron, or "essays on the essence of Japaneseness." Written by both Japanese and foreigners, these tracts sought to explain what made the Japanese unique and how they differed from foreigners, who were, all too often, lumped into one homogeneous category. Such lines of inquiry often settled on a description of the Japanese as cooperative, sedentary rice farmers who use instinct and heart rather than cold, Western logic. Unlike Western hunter-gatherers, the Japanese were seen as having a unique sensitivity to nature, an ability to communicate without language through a sort of social telepathy, and a rarefied artistic awareness.

In 1946, U.S. anthropologist Ruth Benedict made it respectable to see the Japanese as a race apart with the publication of her classic study of Japanese culture, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. She described a highly codified society operating with conventions all-but-incomprehensible to outsiders. Her work paved the way for shelf after shelf of Nihonjinron texts by Japanese authors. These multiplied with Japan's post-war economic success, which the Japanese and foreigners alike began to attribute to the country's supposedly unique organizational and social structures. Gavan McCormack, an Australian academic, describes Benedict's book as "one of the greatest propaganda coups of the century." In stoking Japan's own sense of its own uniqueness, he argues, the book helped sever Japan's psychological ties with its Asian neighbors. "What they believed to be ancient tradition," he writes, "was quintessentially modern ideology." Japan's perception of itself as isolated and different persists to this day, often to its disadvantage.

Japan's perception of itself as isolated and different persists to this day, often to its disadvantage. It has, for example, hampered the country's electronics industry: Japanese manufacturers often produce goods perfectly adapted to Japanese customers but of little global reach. It yearns for what it sees as its rightful place in the hierarchy of nations -- it has for years waged a campaign to obtain a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council. But whether defending whaling, or the rights of its leaders to worship at the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, which houses the "souls" of more than 2 million dead Japanese soldiers, including 14 class-A war criminals from World War II, Japan often has a hard time explaining itself to the rest of the world.

Some in Japan, however, especially on the right, seem bent on preserving the mystique of a country that is somehow unintelligible to outsiders. Masahiko Fujiwara, a right-wing author (and mathematician), suggested only half- jokingly in a popular 2005 book that the Japanese should stop trying to learn English altogether as this would help preserve a barrier between their own exceptional culture and the rest of the world. He told me that when non- English-speaking Japanese went abroad, they preserved the mystique of a profound culture beyond the grasp of foreigners to understand. As soon as they spoke in English, he said, the illusion was broken and foreigners realized the Japanese had nothing to say.

Donald Keene, perhaps the greatest post-war U.S. scholar of Japanese literature, told me a similar story from the other direction. His lectures in Tokyo, mostly in Japanese, are invariably standing-room only as Japanese students flock to learn from his encyclopedic knowledge of Japanese language and literature. Yet as soon as he draws on the board a simple kanji --the multi-stroke characters derived from Chinese -- there are often gasps of amazement from members of the audience astonished that a foreigner has penetrated Japanese hieroglyphics. In Bending Adversity, my book on Japan, Toshiaki Miura, a shy and thoughtful commentator on the left-of-center newspaper Asahi Shimbun, summed up Japan's sense of geographical, even psychological, isolation, coupled with its long-frustrated attempt to find a place in the hierarchy of nations. "Our psyche is very insular, but we always see ourselves reflected in the mirror outside," said Miura of the twin impulses to be isolated and yet to be internationally respected. "One of the tragedies of Japan's position in international society is that we have no neighbors of the same size or the same level of industry. If Japan were placed in Europe," he said, airing that 19th-century impulse to leave Asia, "it would have Germany, Italy and England to get along with, and we could learn how to coexist with countries of the same strength."

But Japan is not in Europe. It lies next door to China, the fount of much of its civilization, and a country that Japan invaded when China was weak. It must now watch in alarm as China, which has neither forgotten nor forgiven, grows stronger.</comment></comment>


INDX.guru: Fastest stock market monitor on the planet. Free for the first 5,000 - <AUTHOR> http://indx.guru

<comment><AUTHOR> Calling all early adopters!

INDX.guru takes over six million points of stock market and media monitoring data and presents it to you on one, beautiful dashboard, blisteringly fast. Traditionally, making decisions about companies of interest to you on the stock market requires the inefficiency of multiple sources of data, costing you valuable time. With INDX.guru, you have one, beautiful dashboard, with up- to-the-minute news, blogs, videos, Tweets and other financial indicators, all set up as notifications so you know when something changes as soon as everyone else does. INDX.guru's special 'Heat' and 'Sentiment' features measure the overall 'noise' of the chatter surrounding a company, as well as how positive that chatter is.</comment>


Half of Mumbai's slum residents have had coronavirus – study - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/29/half-of-mumbais-slum-residents-have-had-coronavirus-study <comment><AUTHOR> India is the third-worst hit country in the world, but there are concerns a lack of testing could mean the true figure is far higher

Over half the people living in the slums of Mumbai have had the coronavirus, according to a city-commissioned study that raises fresh doubts about India's official case numbers.

India is already the third-worst hit country after the US and Brazil, with nearly 1.5 million cases, though experts have previously said the lack of testing could mean the true tally is much higher.

Blood tests on 6,936 randomly selected people conducted by Mumbai's city authorities found that 57% of slum-dwellers and 16% of non-slum residents had virus antibodies, the study released on Tuesday said.

Mumbai, where about 40% of the population lives in slums, has reported just over 110,000 infections and more than 6,000 deaths so far.

The city of 20 million people is home to India's largest slum, Dharavi, where an estimated million people live. But deaths in the sprawling slum have not exploded, with local officials saying their aggressive efforts to stem the spread of the virus has been effective.

The survey results suggested asymptomatic infections were "likely to be a high proportion of all infections" and also indicated the virus death rate was likely to be "very low", the study said.

The Mumbai survey came a week after an antibody study commissioned by the government suggested that almost a quarter of people in the capital New Delhi, home to 20 million people, have had the virus.

</comment><comment><USER2> They should be nearing herd immunity then</comment>


Nginx v1.13.1 Released - <AUTHOR> http://nginx.org/en/CHANGES#1.13.1 <comment><AUTHOR>
        *) Feature: now a hostname can be used as the "set_real_ip_from"
           directive parameter.

        *) Feature: vim syntax highlighting scripts improvements.

        *) Feature: the "worker_cpu_affinity" directive now works on DragonFly
           BSD.
           Thanks to Sepherosa Ziehau.

        *) Bugfix: SSL renegotiation on backend connections did not work when
           using OpenSSL before 1.1.0.

        *) Workaround: nginx could not be built with Oracle Developer Studio
           12.5.

        *) Workaround: now cache manager ignores long locked cache entries when
           cleaning cache based on the "max_size" parameter.

        *) Bugfix: client SSL connections were immediately closed if deferred
           accept and the "proxy_protocol" parameter of the "listen" directive
           were used.

        *) Bugfix: in the "proxy_cache_background_update" directive.

        *) Workaround: now the "tcp_nodelay" directive sets the TCP_NODELAY
           option before an SSL handshake.</comment>


8-Character Windows NTLM Passwords Can Be Cracked in Under 2.5 Hours - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/02/14/password_length/ <comment><AUTHOR> HashCat, an open-source password recovery tool, can now crack an eight- character Windows NTLM password hash in less than 2.5 hours. "Current password cracking benchmarks show that the minimum eight character password, no matter how complex, can be cracked in less than 2.5 hours" using a hardware rig that utilizes eight Nvidia GTX 2080Ti GPUs, explained a hacker who goes by the pseudonym Tinker on Twitter in a DM conversation with The Register. "The eight character password is dead." From the report:

It's dead at least in the context of hacking attacks on organizations that rely on Windows and Active Directory. NTLM is an old Microsoft authentication protocol that has since been replaced with Kerberos. According to Tinker, it's still used for storing Windows passwords locally or in the NTDS.dit file in Active Directory Domain Controllers. It's dead at least in the context of hacking attacks on organizations that rely on Windows and Active Directory. NTLM is an old Microsoft authentication protocol that has since been replaced with Kerberos. Tinker estimates that buying the GPU power described would require about $10,000; others have claimed the necessary computer power to crack an eight-character NTLM password hash can be rented in Amazon's cloud for just $25.

NIST's latest guidelines say passwords should be at least eight characters long. Some online service providers don't even demand that much. When security researcher Troy Hunt examined the minimum password lengths at various websites last year, he found that while Google, Microsoft and Yahoo set the bar at eight, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter only required six. Tinker said the eight character password was used as a benchmark because it's what many organizations recommend as the minimum password length and many corporate IT policies reflect that guidance. So how long is long enough to sleep soundly until the next technical advance changes everything? Tinker recommends a random five-word passphrase, something along the lines of the four-word example popularized by online comic XKCD, "correcthorsebatterystaple." That or whatever maximum length random password via a password management app, with two-factor authentication enabled in either case.</comment>


Ask HN: Is QA/Tester profession dead? - <AUTHOR> I explore QA/Tester SEiT open positions from time to time and I noticed that there are less and less of them, especially in potentially interesting places.<p>Do you have QA in your team? Of no, may I ask why? <comment><USER2> I think QA is still a very important role in a serious company, we still have a lot of QAs in the company I work in. We developers do write tests but that is usually not enough and QA always founds meaningful bugs. IMO a good QA team is still really valuable.

<comment><USER3> I agree with this. Additionally, a lot of QAs at my company are transitioning to a test automation role where they are writing/coding their tests in addition to their normal work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Management may not see it that way, but a cunning, experienced tester is invaluable.

The nature of testing may have changed.

For one, the approach to testing is different with more smaller iterations and more powerful automation.

For another, better automation has split testing into more of an automated test developer/pipeline plumber part and an exploratory (manually testing the juicy stuff, the boring routine is handled by automation) part.

</comment><comment><USER5> Not dead at all. At my current company, 15% of the total tech team is comprised of QA/SDETs. Though, Manual QA is now being replaced with automation. For every new feature we work on, we have to make sure that we have automation ready before we go live into production. We work on Selenium, Appium, Karate for automation. We use ADF for testing our apps on real devices. Our CI/CD pipeline takes care of running the tests and when the tests fail, deployment doesn't happen.

Like every other job, you've to keep yourself updated with the latest.

</comment><comment><USER6> For many, the QA/tester was someone not worthy of being a developer because of not having sufficient programming skills. Nowadays the testing frameworks (web front-end!) got so complex and testing stacks so hysterical that QA/tester job is basically full time development job. Thus, developers do the QA/tester job nowadays (which doubles their work).

<comment><USER7> I didnt know this perception existed. I believe QA would be crucial in avoiding disastrous customer interactions (customers get ticked by the slightest bugs ) and in mission critical software. Didnt a QA guy find out about the bugs in Ubers self driving car dep and Uber still ignored it and then killed a pedestrian ?

<comment><USER8> Don't think it was a QA. [https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/10/report-a-manager- at-ubers-...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/10/report-a-manager-at-ubers- self-driving-unit-warned-executives-about-safety-issues-just-days-before- fatal-crash/)

Also, when it comes to things like Self Driving, the line between a QA/dev is really not there. Both of them are just writing software since testing such a thing can't be a manual process.

<comment><USER7> Yeah. True that. But I guess that just means the job has additional requirements. You can teach a QA guy to write code but its kind of hard for devs to think like a QA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The QA/Tester profession isn't dead, but the traditional manual testing role is dying out. Most of the companies I know that use manual QA processes have outsourced the manual QA to teams in Asia (primarily India) and those are only used for legacy products where writing tests are difficult/impossible. My current company (~50 people) doesn't have QA, and we would only consider hiring someone in QA if they were able to write high-quality test code (contractors we've used in the past have written test code but not high- quality). Using GUIs to create automated tests are a no-go. Those people I know with QA backgrounds all have significant difficulty finding new positions, even if they are good (6 months unemployed would not be unusual)

</comment><comment><USER10> QA (both embedded and external) is extremely far from dead in the game dev industry at least.

<comment><USER7> I am very interested in how game dev does e2e testing. Arent there millions of strategies that players can follow and the games must therefore respond consistently in all these scenarios ? How is this type of combinatorial explosion avoided ? Any references ?

<comment><USER10> I haven't done QA in a very long time so unfortunately do not have much detailed insight anymore.

In general, in a AAA studio when I think of "QA" I think of so much more than just game testing for end users.

We have things like:

* Daily smokes for content creators. Embedded QA doing manual (and sometimes partially automated) smokes of core game features as well as our proprietary editor and other tools multiple times a day before new binaries get rolled out to content creators, with the sole purpose of making sure that artists are able to actually work with the build(s).

* _A lot_ of automated runtime testing and automated unit tests (some teams are better with this than others) which QA helps monitor. This can help test various combinations of weapons etc very quickly. Tests for everything from locomotion to weapon-switching, damage output validation, etc.

* Cert testing - before we send a build to MS or Sony our own QA has to go through various certification requirements and approve it. This will include testing not just game features but loading times, build metadata, various security measures, etc.

* Engine integration testing...when game teams integrate new engine drops or features (or when features are even integrated between engine streams and the main release line) things like editor, environment framework, other tools and relevant features, etc are tested on an example data set by QA.

* Full playthrough testing. I don't know for sure which QA department/team handles full playthrough testing and various iterations thereof but I suspect it's our remote QA-specific studio vs in-house QA (although I'm sure they do some of that too).

* And more that I'm not thinking of off the top of my head right now.

And then of course we have the regular team playtests where the entire team plays certain maps in development and files bugs/provides feedback/etc - having a few dozen to a few hundred devs actually playing the thing helps catch various issues with different scenario/equipment combinations, map problems, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We're having trouble finding QA's to hire at my current company so that may have something to do with there being less positions.

To be fair, we're not really in a tech hot zone so that might be why we struggle.

</comment><comment><USER12> QA is still much a thing in our company, although not necessarily working in the traditional "assurance" role but rather in a "assistance" role.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Lately, I have been searching for open engineering test positions in Microsoft, and I have found none of QA, Tester, SDIT, SEIT etc.

The same goes for duckduckgo

</comment><comment><USER13> QA jobs are getting outsourced to cheaper markets outside the U.S.

</comment><comment><USER14> We have, and other companies around here have as well (Thailand).

</comment><comment><USER15> Not in East Europe it is not.</comment>


Team Fortress 2 Modders Make Nearly $50,000 Apiece - <AUTHOR> http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/10/22/team-fortress-2-modders-make-nearly-50000-apiece/ <comment><AUTHOR> I submitted this, and not the original source ([http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2010-10-22-valves- user...](http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2010-10-22-valves-user-created- content-store-earns-modders-USD50k)) because it requires (free) log in to read.

Here's the full text of the original source:

Valve's user-created content store earns modders $50k Royalties from the new in-game user-created content store in Valve's multiplayer shooter Team Fortress 2 have approached $50,000 for some players.

Five modders, who won a competition to have their creations featured, earned five-figure sums from the in-game Mann Co. Store - which opened just a fortnight ago.

Creators keep 25 per cent of all item sales, with the rest going to Valve. The highest-revealed royalty payment to date is $47,000, meaning Valve would have taken approximately $140,000 from the sales of just one modder's content.

"It was completely mind-blowing, the size of the return that we're getting on these things," modder Spencer Kern, one of the top two earners so far, told Gamasutra.

Valve flew Kern and another player, Steven Skidmore, to its office to present them with their money first-hand, as payments had exceed Paypal's permissible limits.

Said Valve boss Gabe Newell, "It benefits us because it grows the community, right? These [content creators] benefit, but we benefit too.

"Once people realise this is about their community, and that the right people are getting the benefits... after a while, they'll say, 'This is really how these kinds of communities need to work.'"

Valve will also sell its own content on the store, but plans to significantly extend the range of amateur contributions. Prices for items currently range from less than a dollar to $17.50.

"What you really want to do is create per-person pricing, or per-person monetisation or per-person ways of creating value," said Newell. "In a sense, asking 'could you support a game entirely with just this as a monetisation model?' - you could."</comment>


Stone: Leonardo da Vinci's Resume - <AUTHOR> http://www.cenedella.com/stone/archives/2010/01/leonardo_da_vincis_resume.html <comment><USER2> If it worked for Leonardo da Vinci, maybe it could work for me. The next time I'm looking for a job, I'll try this:

"Most Illustrious Proprietor, Having now sufficiently considered the specimens of all those who proclaim themselves skilled developers of applications of business, and that the invention and operation of the said programs are nothing different from those in common use: I shall endeavor, without prejudice to any one else, to explain myself to your Company, showing your Management my secret, and then offering them to your best pleasure and approbation to work with effect at opportune moments on all those things which, in part, shall be briefly noted below.

1\. I have a sort of extremely light and strong functions and modules, adapted to be most easily ftp'd, and with them you may pursue, and at any time combine them with others, secure and indestructible by standard mean time to failure of hardware and denial of service, easy and convenient to compile and catalog. Also methods of unzipping and storing the data of the customers.

2\. I know how, when a website is besieged, to shard data onto the cloud, and make endless variety of mirrors, and fault tolerant disks and RAIDs, and other machines pertaining to such concerns.

3\. If, by reason of the volume of the data, or the structure of the btrees and its indexes, it is impossible, when conducting a search, to avail oneself of sub-second response time, I have methods for benchmarking every process or other function, even if it were interpreted, etc.

4\. Again, I have kinds of functions; most convenient and easy to ftp; and with these I can spawn lots of data almost resembling a torrent; and with the download of these cause great terror to the competitor, to his great detriment and confusion.

5\. And if the processing should be on the desktop I have apps of many machines most efficient for data entry and reporting; and utilities which will satisfy the needs of the most demanding customers and users and consumers.

6\. I have means by secret and tortuous scripts and modules, made without leaving tracks, to generate source code, even if it were needed to run on a client or a server.

7\. I will make secure firewalls, safe and unattackable, which, entering among the hackers with their utilities, there is no body of crackers so great but they would break them. And behind these, software could run quite unhurt and without any hindrance.

8\. In case of need I will make big properties, methods, and collections and useful forms, out of the common type.

9\. Where the operation of compiling might fail, I would contrive scripts, functions, routines, and other parameter driven processes of marvellous efficacy and not in common use. And in short, according to the variety of cases, I can contrive various and endless means of data entry, reporting, and storage.

10\. In times of low revenue I believe I can give perfect satisfaction and to the equal of any other in maintenance and the refactoring of code public and private; and in guiding data from one warehouse to another.

11\. I can carry out code in Javascript, PHP, or C, and also I can do in network administration whatever may be done, as well as any other, be he who he may.

Again, the intranet app may be taken in hand, which is to be to the immortal glory and eternal honor of all your customers of happy memory, and of the illustrious house of Google.

And if any of the above-named things seem to anyone to be impossible or not feasible, I am most ready to make the experiment in your data center, or in whatever place may please your Businessperson - to whom I comment myself with the utmost humility, etc."

<comment><USER3> Next time the Duke of Pittsburgh needs to create a CRM solution, you will have a resume at the ready!</comment></comment>


Microsoft pays licence fees for 74 smartphone patents - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/08/microsoft_patents_acacia/ <comment><USER2> Normally, this story wouldn't even be news -- patent deals are cut all the time -- but there's an obvious strategy being developed here. Microsoft has identified patents as the most effective attack against anyone seeking to profit from FOSS. Rather than attack FOSS directly, you dump as much money as you can in to littering the intellectual property space for a given product with patent mines. Step on a patent mine and all of the sudden you're paying Microsoft (or someone else) for sitting on their ass and building a patent portfolio rather than innovating with any real products.

Under the old rules of engagement, patents were the equivalent of nuclear warheads. No one really wanted to use them, but they were good for making sure that your buddies across the street didn't fire off a salvo of patent suits in your direction. The problem for FOSS is that software patents are ideologically reprehensible to most of the people involved, therefore patents are not sought, and the intellectual property battlefield falls in to the hands of the patent trolls and big corporations.

As things stand today, we're looking at a future where patents become a large market in and of themselves. Big corporations will push for international cooperation for patent enforcement, and up-and-coming companies who benefit from FOSS are going to face significant new risks. The biggest losers will be consumers. Virtually all of the new internet giants stand on the shoulders of FOSS. It's only matter of time before the patent trolls find ways to attack everyone using their "IP".</comment>


What does Docker add to just plain LXC? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17989306/what-does-docker-add-to-just-plain-lxc?rq=1

<comment><USER2> Here's what I answered on stack overflow:

Docker is not a replacement for lxc. "lxc" refers to capabilities of the linux kernel (specifically namespaces and control groups) which allow sandboxing processes from one another, and controlling their resource allocations.

On top of this low-level foundation of kernel features, Docker offers a high- level tool with several powerful functionalities:

 _Portable deployment across machines_. Docker defines a format for bundling an application and all its dependencies into a single object which can be transferred to any docker-enabled machine, and executed there with the guarantee that the execution environment exposed to the application will be the same. Lxc implements process sandboxing, which is an important pre- requisite for portable deployment, but that alone is not enough for portable deployment. If you sent me a copy of your application installed in a custom lxc configuration, it would almost certainly not run on my machine the way it does on yours, because it is tied to your machine's specific configuration: networking, storage, logging, distro, etc. Docker defines an abstraction for these machine-specific settings, so that the exact same docker container can run - unchanged - on many different machines, with many different configurations.

 _Application-centric_. Docker is optimized for the deployment of applications, as opposed to machines. This is reflected in its API, user interface, design philosophy and documentation. By contrast, the lxc helper scripts focus on containers as lightweight machines - basically servers that boot faster and need less ram. We think there's more to containers than just that.

 _Automatic build_. Docker includes a tool for developers to automatically assemble a container from their source code, with full control over application dependencies, build tools, packaging etc. They are free to use make, maven, chef, puppet, salt, debian packages, rpms, source tarballs, or any combination of the above, regardless of the configuration of the machines.

 _Versioning_. Docker includes git-like capabilities for tracking successive versions of a container, inspecting the diff between versions, committing new versions, rolling back etc. The history also includes how a container was assembled and by whom, so you get full traceability from the production server all the way back to the upstream developer. Docker also implements incremental uploads and downloads, similar to "git pull", so new versions of a container can be transferred by only sending diffs.

 _Component re-use_. Any container can be used as an "base image" to create more specialized components. This can be done manually or as part of an automated build. For example you can prepare the ideal python environment, and use it as a base for 10 different applications. Your ideal postgresql setup can be re-used for all your future projects. And so on.

 _Sharing_. Docker has access to a public registry ([http://index.docker.io](http://index.docker.io)) where thousands of people have uploaded useful containers: anything from redis, couchdb, postgres to irc bouncers to rails app servers to hadoop to base images for various distros. The registry also includes an official "standard library" of useful containers maintained by the docker team. The registry itself is open-source, so anyone can deploy their own registry to store and transfer private containers, for internal server deployments for example.

 _Tool ecosystem_. Docker defines an API for automating and customizing the creation and deployment of containers. There are a huge number of tools integrating with docker to extend its capabilities. PaaS-like deployment (Dokku, Deis, Flynn), multi-node orchestration (maestro, salt, mesos, openstack nova), management dashboards (docker-ui, openstack horizon, shipyard), configuration management (chef, puppet), continuous integration (jenkins, strider, travis), etc. Docker is rapidly establishing itself as the standard for container-based tooling.

I hope this helps!</comment>


The Complete Guide to Know about Cell Therapy from the Point of Standardization - <AUTHOR> https://www.creative-bioarray.com/oncology.htm <comment><AUTHOR> What is cell therapy? Cell therapy refers to the transplantation or input of normal or bioengineered human cells into a patient's body and newly-imported cells can replace damaged cells or involve a stronger immune killing function, so as to achieve the purpose of treating diseases. Cell therapy has shown higher application value in the treatment of cancer, hematological diseases, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, Alzheimer's disease etc. In general, cell therapy includes tumor cell immunotherapy and stem cell therapy. There are two cell sources for cell therapy, one from the patient itself and the other from the allogeneic tissue.

The Defects of Cell Therapy The cell is the most basic unit that contributes to a living organism, however, it does not mean that everyone shares the same cells. On the contrary, there is a huge difference in each individual which can be compared to human-to-human differences, that is, two identical people never exist. The huge difference between cells and cell preparations is the biggest drawback of cell therapy. In this post, we will discuss several issues that need attention in the current stage of cell therapy.

Difficulties in the Standardization of Cell Therapy Cancer cell immunotherapy cannot be standardized from the stage of raw material acquisition. The cell treatment materiasl for each paitient are their own blood leukocytes. The condition and physical condition of each patient are different, and the collected white blood cell growth quantity and kill activity are not uniform and cannot be standardized. As it is impossible to standardize raw materials, preparation processes, and product specifications, it cannot be standardized, industrialized, and scaled up. Each tumor cell immunotherapy laboratory meets the GMP level with the hardware environment, and it can be more like a cell preparation workshop. Researchers ranged in number from a few to a dozen and could not really meet the standards of division of labor of industrialized pharmaceutical companies. Taking stem cell therapy that using umbilical cord mesenchymal stem cells as an example, which raw material is an umbilical cord, and one umbilical cord-produced cell can be utilized by many paitients. The standardization path is more advanced than the immunotherapy of tumor cells, and the raw materials can be standardized to some extent.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Natural cytokine supernatants with more standardized and standardized properties Cytokines are a class of small molecule proteins with broad biological activity synthesized and secreted by immune cells (such as monocytes, macrophages, T cells, B cells, NK cells, etc.) and certain non- immune cells (endothelial cells, epidermal cells, fibroblasts, etc.) Immune responses are regulated by binding to the respective receptors to regulate cell growth, differentiation and effects. Cytokines (CK) are low-molecular- weight soluble proteins that are produced by various types of cells induced by immunogens, mitogens, or other stimulants. They have the ability to regulate innate immunity [1] and adaptive immunity [2], hematopoiesis, cell growth, and damage tissue repair and other functions.

Cytokines can be divided into interleukins, interferons, tumor necrosis factor superfamily, colony stimulating factors, chemokines, growth factors etc. Cytokines form a very complex cytokine regulatory network in the body and participate in many important physiological functions of the human body. Where stem cells and immune cells cannot reach the body, cytokines can easily reach target tissue sites because of their small size.

In recent years, recombinant gene cytokines have made remarkable achievements in clinical applications as a novel biological response modifier. A large part of the effects of stem cell therapy and immune cell therapy arises from the action of cytokines secreted in the body. The stem cells and immune cells in the body are introduced back into the body to secrete a variety of natural structural cytokines. Although the amount of these cytokines is relatively small, they are synergistic and act directly on the cytokine network in the body because of their high natural structure activity, lack of antigenicity but diversity. Because of the standardization, standardization, industrialization, and scale of natural compound cytokines, it is more cost- effective than cell therapy, allowing more patients in need to enjoy cell-like therapeutic effects.

Although natural complex cytokines can largely replace cell therapy, but there are still conditions that require the presence of cells to exert a therapeutic effect. We hope that cell therapy can break the current situation, become high efficiency and low cost with large scale, more standardization, and then be applied to more disease treatments.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Difficulties in The Scale of Cell Therapy Industry At present, the production mode of the cell therapy industry maily depends on technicians. In the 10,000-grade clean laboratory, the cells are operated in a class 100 clean bench, cultured in a carbon dioxide incubator, centrifuged in a centrifuge, observed through an inverted microscope, and the drug reagents are stored in a medicine refrigerator. All of these devices are operated by independent biological laboratories of the individual and being linked together through the operations of scientists. This type of production model is small in scale and similar to workshop-type production. Although there are some large scales, the essence is a collection of many small workshops. Due to the small scale, the instruments used are laboratory instruments and many of the reagents used are scientific reagents, which will lead to the issue of low efficiency but high cost. Autologous or Allogeneic cells There are two kinds of cell sources for cell therapy, one from the patients and the other from the allogeneic tissue. Autologous cell therapy can not be standardized from the raw material acquisition stage, and its cells are only applied to the patient itself, the essence is essentially medical technology. The prevalence of autologous cell therapy as a medical technology is mainly due to the scale of the predicament. Allogeneic cell therapy, the cells derived from allogeneic. Taking tumor cell immunotherapy as an example, the cell source may be from cord blood, and the larger-scale cell source may be a filter plate for leukocyte filtration at the blood bank. Taking umbilical cord mesenchymal stem cells as an example, the cell source is the umbilical cord, and one umbilical cord-producing cell can be used by more than one person. If scale can be cultivated, although the quality standards cannot be quantified well, the scaled products themselves have a certain degree of standardized properties.

The cell industry, as an industry, is not the path to the advancement of cell- based therapeutics. If the advanced technology cannot be mass-produced on a large scale, it can only stay in the laboratory and become the object of research for scientists, never have achance to become a drug into the majority of patients. For allogeneic cell therapy that using allogeneic cells as raw materials, the standardized properties of the scaled products can be realized if large-scale cultures are prepared, then scale and standardization can promote each other. The current progress in standardization of cells is not easy, but the progress in scale should be relatively easy to achieve.</comment>


John McAfee in surprise rant over Google and privacy - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28721480

<comment><AUTHOR> Notorious computer security pioneer John McAfee has used a surprise appearance at a hacking conference to warn of threats against "freedom" thanks to privacy issues with technology.

Speaking at Def Con in Las Vegas, Mr McAfee called on hackers to "make a stand" against companies that seek highly personal information.

He blamed laziness for the spread of apps and websites that gleam information from users.

"We'd rather be safe, secure and comfortable than actually live," he said.

In 2012 Mr McAfee was accused of murdering his neighbour while living in Belize. He fled the country soon after and denies the charges.</comment>


Fun Sales Fakts – The Witness - <AUTHOR> http://the-witness.net/news/2016/02/fun-sales-fakts/ <comment><USER2> I am glad is going well! I will buy it the moment a finish Dark Souls 2...

</comment><comment><USER3> As the site is down here is this article text:

The Witness has now been on sale for a week, so it seems like a good time to post a financial summary. Often, independent developers find these kinds of numbers useful in making their own plans, and the general public can find them interesting too. There is a wrinkle, which is that I can't be too precise about the sales results on specific platforms, because often when we sign a deal with a particular store, we agree not to reveal their sales numbers. I am actually not sure at this time which stores we are allowed to be specific about and which we aren't, and I would have to dig up and sort through a number of contracts to be sure about it; but that is not a good use of time right now, since I am spending most of my day supporting the users who have technical problems (shipping games on PCs these days is really not fun). The situation can be thorny in subtle ways, too, because if I post information about all stores but one, then I am implicitly revealing the sales figures for that last store, which is not allowed. Finally, I want to make clear that we did not make this game in order to make money. We were trying to build a beautiful / interesting / intricate thing, first and foremost. The money just helps us stay in business in order to build new things. It is very easy on the Internet to read a financial posting like this cynically, so I urge folks out there not to do that. Okay, so here's what I can say: Across all platforms, The Witness has totalled over $5 million USD gross revenue in the first week, and it has sold substantially more than 100,000 units. This is a good chunk more revenue in one week than Braid made in its entire first year, from August 2008-September 2009. (Braid initially launched on XBLA in August 2008, and it came to Steam in April 2009). Braid was considered a hit independent game at the time. We can also compare sales by units instead of revenue; this is a little more of an apples-to-oranges comparison because The Witness has a higher price than Braid did (Braid launched at $14.99 [$16.50 when inflation- adjusted to 2015 dollars], and The Witness launched at $39.99). By number of units, the first week of each individual platform handily beats Braid's first week of sales. (Witness on PC by itself beat Braid's first week by a decent margin, and Witness on PSN by itself beat Braid's first week by a decent margin, counting only by number of units). This is great because as price goes up, naturally the number of units sold goes down. So the fact that we beat Braid by units, more than doubly, is a really nice success. The Witness launched on two platforms, PSN and Windows PC. Neither of these platforms dominates our sales; PC is very strong for us, and PSN is very strong for us. There are some publicly-available guesstimates for specific platforms on sites such as SteamSpy, but the numbers that SteamSpy is reporting for The Witness are a bit too low (though this is kind of to be expected, I guess, from the way that site works). So, the game is doing great. That doesn't mean we have broken even on our development cost yet! Because our development budget was so high, $5 million in revenue is not enough to recover it yet (because we split that revenue with the storefronts, we have to subtract VAT in Europe, etc). However, it is looking like, as time goes on, we should break even and make a comfortable safety margin on top of that, which will allow us to make more nice games in the future — unless some kind of world economic disaster happens. As I mentioned, right now we are dealing mostly with PC graphics driver problems, and we are also working on adding some features to the game about configurable controls and rendering options, for PC and PS4. After this, in the near future, we will start investigating the bringing the game to other platforms. Under serious consideration are: iOS, Android, Xbox One, OS X. We will provide more-concrete information about these as it becomes available!</comment>


Foundations of Data Science [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.cs.cornell.edu/jeh/book.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> This book provides an introduction to the mathematical and algorithmic foundations of data science, including machine learning, high-dimensional geometry, and analysis of large networks. Topics include the counterintuitive nature of data in high dimensions, important linear algebraic techniques such as singular value decomposition, the theory of random walks and Markov chains, the fundamentals of and important algorithms for machine learning, algorithms and analysis for clustering, probabilistic models for large networks, representation learning including topic modelling and non-negative matrix factorization, wavelets and compressed sensing. Important probabilistic techniques are developed including the law of large numbers, tail inequalities, analysis of random projections, generalization guarantees in machine learning, and moment methods for analysis of phase transitions in large random graphs. Additionally, important structural and complexity measures are discussed such as matrix norms and VC-dimension. This book is suitable for both undergraduate and graduate courses in the design and analysis of algorithms for data.

Video lectures at [https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/publication/foundat...](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/publication/foundations-of-data-science-2/)</comment>


Warren Buffett Gifts $3.2B in Berkshire Hathaway Stock to Charities - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/warren-buffett-gifts-3-2-billion-in-berkshire-hathaway-stock-to-charities-1499723277 <comment><AUTHOR> Full text:

Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Chairman Warren Buffett has donated about $3.17 billion of shares in the company to five foundations, the company said Monday, the latest contribution in a more than decade-long pledge to donate a portion of his wealth to charities and philanthropic endeavors.

The Omaha, Neb., billionaire investor donated 18,628,189 Class B shares in Berkshire Hathaway to five foundations: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, Sherwood Foundation, Howard G. Buffett Foundation and NoVo Foundation.

In order to make the contributions, Mr. Buffett converted his A shares in Berkshire Hathaway to Class B shares. Last year, Mr. Buffett made donations totaling $2.86 billion to charities.

Mr. Buffett, 86, is Berkshire's largest shareholder and as of March held 32.7% of the voting power in the conglomerate.

Mr. Buffett pledged in 2006 to donate 85% of his Berkshire Hathaway stock to the Gates Foundation. Including the stock gift this year, Mr. Buffett said he has donated $27.54 billion of stock to foundations.

Mr. Buffett said Monday he intends to have all of his Berkshire shares given to charities through annual gifts that will be completed 10 years after his estate is settled.</comment>


Nginx v1.13.10 Released - <AUTHOR> http://nginx.org/en/CHANGES#1.13.0 <comment><AUTHOR>
        *) Change: SSL renegotiation is now allowed on backend connections.

        *) Feature: the "rcvbuf" and "sndbuf" parameters of the "listen"
           directives of the mail proxy and stream modules.

        *) Feature: the "return" and "error_page" directives can now be used to
           return 308 redirections.
           Thanks to Simon Leblanc.

        *) Feature: the "TLSv1.3" parameter of the "ssl_protocols" directive.

        *) Feature: when logging signals nginx now logs PID of the process which
           sent the signal.

        *) Bugfix: in memory allocation error handling.

        *) Bugfix: if a server in the stream module listened on a wildcard
           address, the source address of a response UDP datagram could differ
           from the original datagram destination address.</comment>


An Update Regarding The FDA's Letter to 23andMe - <AUTHOR> http://blog.23andme.com/news/an-update-regarding-the-fdas-letter-to-23andme/

<comment><AUTHOR> Original text, the blog seems down:

Dear 23andMe Customers,

I wanted to reach out to you about the FDA letter that was sent to 23andMe last Friday.

It is absolutely critical that our consumers get high quality genetic data that they can trust. We have worked extensively with our lab partner to make sure that the results we return are accurate. We stand behind the data that we return to customers - but we recognize that the FDA needs to be convinced of the quality of our data as well.

23andMe has been working with the FDA to navigate the correct regulatory path for direct-to-consumer genetic tests. This is new territory, not just for 23andMe, but for the FDA as well. The FDA is an important partner for 23andMe and we will be working hard to move forward with them.

I apologize for the limited response to the questions many of you have raised regarding the letter and its implications for the service. We don't have the answers to all of those questions yet, but as we learn more we will update you.

I am committed to providing each of you with a trusted consumer product rooted in high quality data that adheres to the best scientific standards. All of us at 23andMe believe that genetic information can lead to healthier lives.

Thank you for your loyalty to 23andMe. Please refer to our 23andMe blog for updates on this process.

Anne Wojcicki Co-founder and CEO, 23andMe

</comment><comment><USER2> The FDA has bent over backwards - pretty much everything that 23andMe needs to do in order to sell legally has been laid out, and ignored.

The Google egotistic approach is well ensconced in 23andme

</comment><comment><USER3> That's not an "update" \- it's corporate bullshit that says nothing.

23andMe is _finally_ learning that there are actual, legitimate reasons why regulations exist around medical testing.

Off topic: when did the smarmy cliche "reach out to you" become the ubiquitous way to say "contact you"?</comment>


Why it's time to forget the pecking order at work - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_heffernan_why_it_s_time_to_forget_the_pecking_order_at_work <comment><AUTHOR> Organizations are often run according to "the superchicken model," where the value is placed on star employees who outperform others. And yet, this isn't what drives the most high-achieving teams. Business leader Margaret Heffernan observes that it is social cohesion — built every coffee break, every time one team member asks another for help — that leads over time to great results. It's a radical rethink of what drives us to do our best work, and what it means to be a leader. Because as Heffernan points out: "Companies don't have ideas. Only people do."</comment>


In the Heart of Silicon Valley, They Don't Want New Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/in-the-heart-of-silicon-valley-they-dont-want-new-jobs-1474064487 <comment><USER2> Paywalled. "web" link doesn't work.

<comment><USER3> The Crescent Park neighborhood of Palo Alto, Calif., Sept. 11. Photo: Brian Molyneaux/The Wall Street Journal By Andy Kessler Sept. 16, 2016 6:21 p.m. ET 197 COMMENTS Palo Alto, Calif. The capital of Silicon Valley is ready to abdicate. A few weeks ago, bizarre as it might seem, Palo Alto Mayor Patrick Burt came out against jobs. "We're looking to increase the rate of housing growth," he told Curbed San Francisco, "but decrease the rate of job growth."

Think about that. Almost every mayor in the U.S. is wracking his brain trying to entice jobs into town. Yet Palo Alto—3.8% unemployment, a magnet for the geek class, the place that nurtured Facebook —is telling everyone else to get lost.

I had to meet this guy. Near City Hall, I pulled my (proudly gas guzzling) car into a spot between a white Tesla and a black Tesla. This was the Coral parking zone, giving me two hours before I had to move to the Lime zone. Nearby stood the Epiphany, a new $800-a-night hotel, just down from the ancient House of Foam, fulfilling all your polyurethane and polystyrene needs. Next to the Verizon Wireless store, the old Stanford Theater was showing a Ruth Chatterton double feature. Palo Alto, 65,000 people sitting on 26 square miles of some of the most valuable land anywhere, is certainly a town of contrasts.

The city doesn't have a mayoral election. Instead, the council members, some of whom identify as slow-growth "residentialists," install one of their own as mayor for a one-year term. Now it's Patrick Burt's turn, and he's making the most of it. "Big tech companies are choking off the downtown," he told the New York Times.

Right before the mayor went rogue, one of the city's planning commissioners, Kate Downing, resigned in an open letter. Her family, she said, couldn't afford to live in Palo Alto any longer. She's got a point.

Michael Dreyfus, a top real-estate agent in the area, says the cheapest home for sale is a three-bedroom, one-bathroom, 959 square footer on about an eighth of an acre that backs up to train tracks. The asking price (are you sitting down?) is $1.35 million. Or he can sell you a place with five beds and four and a half baths on less than half an acre for $17.5 million. OK, that one is in desirable Old Palo Alto, but it isn't even that old—no cobblestone streets or anything.

I wanted to ask Mayor Burt: Is stifling job creation really going to help? Or would that only boost surrounding towns? Palo Alto has already capped the annual growth of office space. It took years to approve a new $5 billion Stanford Hospital extension, which the area desperately needed. Even worse, there is a funny quirk in the zoning laws that limits what's allowed in so- called Pedestrian and Transit Oriented Development areas (downtown). This includes restrictions on research and development, a catchall for limited manufacturing, "storage or use of hazardous materials," and "computer software and hardware firms."

I can tell you outright that the only hazardous materials in an office of software coders are their high-test caffeine concoctions. But the software firms are many. Amazon has its search team in Palo Alto. The big-data firm Palantir has been gobbling up buildings for its engineers. Facebook had several before moving to neighboring Menlo Park. SurveyMonkey has a huge site near the train station.

Even Palo Alto's residential areas are filled with startups, real-life versions of Erlich Bachman's house from HBO's "Silicon Valley." They're easy to spot, having more cars parked during the day than at night. These companies offer high-paying and productive jobs that are great for society.

Someone asked on Quora, the question-and-answer website—whose offices, not coincidentally, used to be right across the street from City Hall before being moved to neighboring Mountain View—"Will Palo Alto Mayor Patrick Burt really be able to ban tech companies?" One outlier's answer included this line: "The way to moderate housing prices in the face of growing demand is to . . . build more housing."

Mayor Burt told Curbed San Francisco that he wants "metered job growth, and metered housing growth." To me, "metered" implies pay as you go. The city government's job should be to build out infrastructure to meet increased demand.

The thing is that Palo Alto has plenty of room. The city reaches from the San Francisco Bay all the way up to the top of the hills holding back the Pacific Ocean. The city says that only 0.5% of "developable land" is vacant. But that doesn't tell the whole story.

In 2011 residents passed a measure with 65% of the vote to take 10 acres of city parkland and turn it into a composting facility. If my math is right, that's enough room for 80 "affordable" homes. Sounds like Palo Alto has room but chooses not to make it available for anyone else. It's not exactly NIMBY—Not In My Back Yard. But maybe IGMYOOL—I Got Mine, You're Out Of Luck. That's the definition, I suppose, of a residentialist.

Even downtown has room: upward. Most buildings are two stories, maybe three. Only one, filled with lawyers and venture capitalists, hits 15 stories. Though there's also City Hall, which is eight floors. I took the elevator to the seventh to see if I could drop in on Mayor Burt. Turns out mayor is a part- time job. Mr. Burt's full-time gig is running a medical-technology company doing research and development in . . . Palo Alto. Hmmm.

Mr. Kessler, a former hedge-fund manager, is the author of "Eat People" (Portfolio, 2011).</comment></comment>


Delay in starting Machine Learning course - <AUTHOR>

Just got this email...
We're sorry to have to tell you that our Machine Learning course will be delayed further. There have naturally been legal and administrative issues to be sorted out in offering Stanford classes freely to the outside world, and it's just been taking time. We have, however, been able to take advantage of the extra time to debug and improve our course content!
We now expect that the course will start either late in February or early in March. We will let you know as soon as we hear a definite date. We apologize for the lack of communication in recent weeks; we kept hoping we would have a concrete launch date to give you, but that date has kept slipping.
Thanks so much for your patience! We are really sorry for repeatedly making you wait, and for any interference this causes in your schedules. We're as excited and anxious as you are to get started, and we both look forward to your joining us soon in Machine Learning!
Andrew Ng and the ML Course Staff <comment><USER2> What's the site url for the course signup? thanks

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://www.ml-class.org/course/auth/welcome></comment></comment>


Nginx v1.11.7 Released - <AUTHOR> https://nginx.org/en/CHANGES#1.11.7 <comment><AUTHOR>
        *) Change: now in case of a client certificate verification error the
           $ssl_client_verify variable contains a string with the failure
           reason, for example, "FAILED:certificate has expired".

        *) Feature: the $ssl_ciphers, $ssl_curves, $ssl_client_v_start,
           $ssl_client_v_end, and $ssl_client_v_remain variables.

        *) Feature: the "volatile" parameter of the "map" directive.

        *) Bugfix: dependencies specified for a module were ignored while
           building dynamic modules.

        *) Bugfix: when using HTTP/2 and the "limit_req" or "auth_request"
           directives client request body might be corrupted; the bug had
           appeared in 1.11.0.

        *) Bugfix: a segmentation fault might occur in a worker process when
           using HTTP/2; the bug had appeared in 1.11.3.

        *) Bugfix: in the ngx_http_mp4_module.
           Thanks to Congcong Hu.

        *) Bugfix: in the ngx_http_perl_module.</comment>


Google Play Developer Program Policy Update - no more push ads, bookmark ads - <AUTHOR> http://play.google.com/about/developer-content-policy.html?ref=ab

<comment><AUTHOR> google email to developers:

Making Google Play a great community for users is an important part of helping build a successful platform for you as a developer to distribute your apps. From time to time, we update our content policies as part of an ongoing effort to provide a secure and consistent experience for users. We strive to maintain clear guidelines for you as developers, to help us grow this platform and engage with those users.

This email is to notify you that we've made some changes to our policies; here are some highlights:

\- Streamlined the ads policy, with guidance on interstitial ad behavior, and a new "System Interference" provision, which prohibits ads in system notifications or home screen icons, and requires user consent when an app changes specified settings on a device

\- A revised hate speech policy that provides more comprehensive coverage, while recognizing Google Play's role as a platform for free expression

-Clarification that the gambling policy extends to all games that offer cash or other prizes; that virtual goods and currency in games are subject to the payment processor policy, that incentives should not be provided to users to rate an app; that artificially inflating an app's install count is prohibited, and that the Google Play Program Policy applies to all developer information or content made available on the Store. Please review the Google Play Developer Program Policy to see all the changes and make sure your app complies with our updated policies.

Any apps or updates published after this notification are immediately subject to the latest version of the Program Policy. If you find any existing apps in your catalog that don't comply, we ask you to fix and republish the application within 30 calendar days of receiving this email. After this period, existing applications discovered to be in violation may be subject to warning or removal from Google Play.

We recognize that some developers will need to change their app and advertising practices to comply with the revised policy, but we believe these changes will help ensure all users and developers can maintain confidence in the standard of apps available on Google Play. Our aim is to foster a high standard of app behavior, so you will be able to take advantage of Google Play as a successful platform to distribute your apps and continue to grow your business.

Regards, Google Play Team

<comment><USER2> This is quite significant as some of the bigger ad networks focus almost exclusively on these kind of ad units and have reasonable market shares (Airpush and Leadbolt are good examples): [http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/ad](http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/ad)</comment></comment>


Enduring Mental Health: Prevalence and Prediction - <AUTHOR> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5304549/ <comment><AUTHOR> Abstract:

> We review epidemiological evidence indicating that most people will develop > a diagnosable mental disorder, suggesting that only a minority experience > enduring mental health. This minority has received little empirical study, > leaving the prevalence and predictors of enduring mental health unknown. We > turn to the population-representative Dunedin cohort, followed from birth to > midlife, to compare people never-diagnosed with mental disorder (N = 171; > 17% prevalence) to those diagnosed at 1–2 study waves, the cohort mode (N = > 409). Surprisingly, compared to this modal group, never-diagnosed Study > members were not born into unusually well-to-do families, nor did their > enduring mental health follow markedly sound physical health, or unusually > high intelligence. Instead, they tended to have an advantageous > temperament/personality style, and negligible family history of mental > disorder. As adults, they report superior educational and occupational > attainment, greater life satisfaction, and higher-quality relationships. Our > findings draw attention to "enduring mental health" as a revealing > psychological phenotype and suggest it deserves further study.</comment>


Laundry Day – iOS app - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/laundry-day-care-symbol-reader/id974530923?mt=8 <comment><AUTHOR> Care symbol reader.

This app will help you with your laundry. You can scan your laundry tags and app will tell you how to wash your clothes. It works like magic, but no, it is a technology!

In case of bad light conditions you can manually choose symbols from the list. Lot of tips regarding washing, bleaching, drying, ironing and professional care are included. There is a really detailed description how to wash your laundry and how to wash some kind of fabrics.

Everyone should have this app! If you are really sure you will not use it, you should buy it to your mom.</comment>


iWork 13 - A Huge Regression - <AUTHOR> http://www.libertypages.com/clarktech/?p=6597

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like the site is getting hammered right now. Here is the text in the meantime:

 _So after waiting all day all the iWork Mavericks updates showed up in the MAS. With great trepidation I waited for them to download. Would all the problems users had been sending to Apple the past 4 years finally be fixed? The announcement today of a total rewrite might mean that Numbers finally had some speed and could take at least some of the workload we'd had to use Excel for. For many people being able to get rid of Excel would be welcome. Yet a rewrite might also mean a few fixes more oriented towards the iOS versions rather than how many pros and small businesses use iWork. I know I have a huge number of scripts — often with complicated hacks to get around the limits in Pages and Number's incomplete Applescript Dictionaries.

Here's the bad news. They won't work now. Effectively Applescript support is gone. Numbers doesn't even have a dictionary. And Pages has had nearly everything removed.

I could go on about how almost none of the problems I've been griping about for four years in Numbers have been fixed. But what's the point. Apple has spoken. It wants the OSX iWork to basically be the same as the iOS version and designed purely for casual use. By making it free they kill the market for any competitors other than Office. So if you run a small office, even if you hate MS-Office, there's really no alternative anymore.

The bigger question is what this means about Applescript. But I think that's clear. Despite a session at WWDC which raised my hopes, clearly Apple's completely abandoned it. There's no scripting for so many of their apps and so little evangelism that it's hardly surprising so few 3rd party apps now support it.

What I suspect Apple doesn't realize is how much small business and small shops workflow depends upon Applescript. Casual use is fine. But a lot of people do more. It wouldn't be so bad were there an alternative. This isn't just like Apple not upgrading the MacPro. This is like Apple not upgrading the MacPro for four years, then announcing that the MacMini is the new MacPro. And discontinuing FCPX, Aperture, and it's other pro apps and telling you to use iPhoto and iMovie.

Can you tell I'm depressed?_

</comment><comment><USER2> Imagine the outrage that would ensue if Microsoft pulled a similar move with Excel and VB</comment>


Andrei Alexandrescu: Generic Programming Galore using D (video) - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/68378925

<comment><AUTHOR> Abstract:

Generic programming holds great promise – ultimate reuse, unprecedented flexibility, and never a need to reimplement an algorithm from scratch due to abstraction penalties.

Unfortunately, the shiny city on the hill is difficult to reach. C++'s generic power has effectively reached a plateau – anything but the simplest generic constructs quickly turn an exponential complexity/benefit elbow. C++11 fails to be a strong sequel in the generic programming arena, and many other languages don't seem to "get" genericity properly at all. The D programming language is a definite exception from this trend.

D makes short work of the most formidable generic programming tasks achievable with C++, and makes virtually impossible tasks readily doable. It also reduces the relevance of "Modern C++ Design" to that of an introductory brochure (much to the dismay of that book's author).

This talk has a simple structure. It will pose a few generic programming tasks that seem difficult or impossible with current language technology, and then will show solutions in D that solve said problems.</comment>


Plaxo to be acquired by Comcast - <AUTHOR>

A Letter from the CEO and Founders
Dear Plaxo member,
We are excited to announce some of the biggest news in the history of Plaxo. Plaxo has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Comcast, the nation's leading provider of entertainment, information and communications products and services. We've got at least a few months to go before the acquisition is completed, but we wanted to send you this note to let you know what's coming up and how it affects you and your account. Plaxo will remain an independent brand, organization and entity. We've been busy at work on our networked address book service and our next-generation social network, Pulse (if it's been a while, please come back and check out all the new features). And, through additional projects with Comcast, we'll be able to take these services to a lot more users and places than we could on our own... including the TV, phone and more. If you'd like to read more about some of the great new things we're planning, please read our official announcement. So, what does this mean for current Plaxo members like you? The services you know and enjoy from Plaxo will not only continue to exist, but will also continue to evolve and improve. We will continue to make our basic services free, and we will continue to serve customers in multiple languages across the world. But, we'll now be able to invest even more in our services, and we will enhance them with more users and more content available across a wider array of devices. We will also continue to protect your privacy and give you control of your information. We will continue to protect your data with one of the strongest privacy policies, which will remain in effect even after the transition. And, we'll continue to be a strong advocate for the open social web. We've put together a quick Q&A about your privacy, account and your data. Last, we'd like to extend an enormous thank you. Whether you've been a Plaxo user for a long time or just recently joined Pulse, we'd like to thank you for making Plaxo a vibrant network. We are excited to open a new chapter today and look forward to helping you keep in touch with the people you care about.
Sincerely,
Ben Golub, Chief Executive Officer Cameron Ring, Founder and Chief Architect Todd Masonis, Founder and Vice President of Products <comment><USER2> Yeah for Plaxo! Lot's of acquisitions going on.</comment>


FBI Investigating High-Speed Trading - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304886904579473874181722310?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702304886904579473874181722310.html

<comment><AUTHOR> FBI Investigating High-Speed Trading

Examination Centers on Possible Trading on Nonpublic Information

By

Scott Patterson and Michael Rothfeld

Updated March 31, 2014 9:59 p.m. ET

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is probing whether high-speed trading firms are engaging in insider trading by taking advantage of fast-moving market information unavailable to other investors.

The investigation, launched about a year ago, involves a range of trading activities and is still in its early stages, according to a senior FBI official and an agency spokesman. Among the activities being probed is whether high-speed firms are trading ahead of other investors based on information that other market participants can't see.

Among the types of trading under scrutiny is the practice of placing a group of trades and then canceling them to create the false appearance of market activity. Such activity could be considered potential market manipulation by encouraging others to trade based on false orders.

Another form of activity under scrutiny involves using high-speed trading to place orders to conceal that the transactions are based on an illegal tip.

"There are many people in government who are very focused on this and who are concerned about it and who think it breaks the law," an FBI spokesman said. "There is a big concern that high-frequency traders are getting material nonpublic information ahead of others and trading on it."

Ultimately, federal prosecutors would have to decide whether the facts of a specific case warrant bringing charges, the FBI official said.

The probe, which has picked up steam in recent months, comes amid heightened scrutiny of computerized trading. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is investigating whether high-speed trading firms have gained advantages that aren't available to regular investors, such as access to superfast data feeds.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission are looking into ties between high-speed traders and major exchanges, examining whether the firms are getting preferential treatment that puts other investors at a disadvantage, said people familiar with the probes.

Since the beginning of the investigation, the FBI, working with the SEC, has developed fact patterns of potentially illegal trading and run them by prosecutors to determine if they could be used in a criminal case.

For the FBI, the investigation marks a new and unusual phase of its focus on insider trading. Because high-speed trades are executed by computer programs, it is often more difficult to detect nefarious activity and to prove that it was executed intentionally.

FBI officials said they are looking for patterns in the market that can reveal whether any trading activities in question violate the law. They would then have to be able to prove that those trades were made with fraudulent intent.

The FBI said it has dedicated a large number of agents to the investigation. FBI officials are looking into whether some brokers trade on information about client orders before executing them, and whether brokers use information about after-hours trading to beat the market when it opens the next morning.

Among those being probed are proprietary-trading outfits, which trade strictly for their own account, as well as fast-moving broker operations that buy and sell orders on behalf of clients, such as mutual funds and pension plans.

The push comes after a long-running focus on more traditional insider trading by federal prosecutors and the FBI in New York.

Speed in the Spotlight

Scrutiny has been growing on fraction-of-a-second differences in access to information. Recent highlights:

The U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan has charged 90 people with insider trading using confidential information about earnings reports, mergers and other market-moving news since October 2009. So far, 79 of those people have pleaded guilty or been convicted at trial and none have been acquitted.

The Justice Department said it is working with other regulators on the probe, including the SEC, CFTC and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which oversees broker-dealers. The investigation, which the FBI calls the High-Speed Trading Initiative, is also focusing on whether the waves of orders that flood the market from high-frequency firms are being used to manipulate prices to their benefit.

Investigators are also seeking leads from traders or others who may have participated in illegal activity. "People will benefit to varying degrees by calling us at an early stage," he said.

Market regulators have been investigating whether high-frequency traders have unfair advantages over other investors for several years. SEC enforcement officials continue to probe whether high-speed firms were using so-called order types—directions traders use to tell an exchange how to handle their orders—to jump ahead of less savvy investors. In a page-one article in September 2012, The Wall Street Journal reported that a former high-frequency trader, Haim Bodek, blew the whistle to the SEC on how certain order types could hurt other investors.

CFTC investigators are probing whether high-frequency firms are routinely distorting futures markets by acting as buyer and seller in the same transactions, illegal trading activity known as wash trades. Such trades are banned by U.S. law because they can feed false information into the market and manipulate prices.</comment>


Curiosity Killed the Cat and the Asymptotically Optimal Agent - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.03357 <comment><AUTHOR> > Reinforcement learners are agents that learn to pick actions that lead to > high reward. Ideally, the value of a reinforcement learner's policy > approaches optimality--where the optimal informed policy is the one which > maximizes reward. Unfortunately, we show that if an agent is guaranteed to > be "asymptotically optimal" in any (stochastically computable) environment, > then subject to an assumption about the true environment, this agent will be > either destroyed or incapacitated with probability 1; both of these are > forms of traps as understood in the Markov Decision Process literature. > Environments with traps pose a well-known problem for agents, but we are > unaware of other work which shows that traps are not only a risk, but a > certainty, for agents of a certain caliber. Much work in reinforcement > learning uses an ergodicity assumption to avoid this problem. Often, doing > theoretical research under simplifying assumptions prepares us to provide > practical solutions even in the absence of those assumptions, but the > ergodicity assumption in reinforcement learning may have led us entirely > astray in preparing safe and effective exploration strategies for agents in > dangerous environments. Rather than assuming away the problem, we present an > agent with the modest guarantee of approaching the performance of a mentor, > doing safe exploration instead of reckless exploration.</comment>


OECD:  Entrepreneurship at a Glance 2016 - <AUTHOR> http://www.oecd.org/std/business-stats/entrepreneurship-at-a-glance-22266941.htm <comment><AUTHOR> "This publication presents an original collection of indicators for measuring the state of entrepreneurship and its determinants, produced by the OECD- Eurostat Entrepreneurship Indicators Programme. The 2016 edition introduces data from a new online small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) survey prepared by Facebook in co-operation with the OECD and the World Bank. It also features a special chapter on SME productivity, and indicators to monitor gender gaps in entrepreneurship."</comment>


Developing extension packages for VS2005-2012 using C# with real-life samples - <AUTHOR>

Creating extension packages (plug-ins) for Microsoft Visual Studio IDE appears as quite an easy task at the first sight. There exist an excellent MSDN documentation, as well as various articles, examples and a lot of other additional sources on this topic. But, at the same time, it could also appear as a difficult task when an unexpected behavior is encountered along the way. Although it can be said that such issues are quite common to any programming task, the subject of IDE plug-in development is still not thoroughly covered at this moment.
We develop PVS-Studio static code analyzer. Although the tool itself is intended for C++ developers, quite a large fragment of it is written in C#. When we just had been starting the development of our plug-in, Visual Studio 2005 had been considered as modern state-of-the-art IDE. Although, at this moment of Visual Studio 2012 release, some could say that Visual Studio 2005 is not relevant anymore, we still provide support for this version in our tool. During our time supporting various Visual Studio versions and exploring capabilities of the environment, we've accumulated a large practical experience on how to correctly (and even more so incorrectly!) develop IDE plug-ins. As holding all of this knowledge inside us was becoming unbearable, we've decided to publish it here. Some of our solutions that seem quite obvious right now were discovered in the course of several years. And the same issues could still haunt other plug-in developers.
By publishing this collection of small articles we wish to contribute to this area of software development. We hope that developers interested in this topic will discover something new for themselves or at least will use the articles as a collection of how-to's and recipes for Visual Studio extension development. <comment><AUTHOR> Part N1. Creating, debugging and deploying extension packages for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005/2008/2010/2012. <http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0166/>

I invite you to my twitter. You will not miss new articles on this topic. <https://twitter.com/Code_Analysis></comment>