Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

oreilly.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 302 posts

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#231

Post by ghaff »

sradman wrote: post #229
ghaff wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They focused on the people because they were either scammers or well-known people with no domain knowledge. The basic idea was very straightforward. I can come up with lots of great ideas if I ignore whether there's any reasonable path to a solution. Hey! Let's have a Star Trek medical tricorder implemented in a watch. Let me know when you're done implementing it. I'll be at the beach. Nothing to do with regulator bo…

> They focused on the people because they were either scammers The scamming came after the failure of the core premise of the startup: microfluidic lab-on-a-chip. My point was not to excuse the scamming, it was to switch focus back to the core ideas and not the people sporting black turtlenecks. I suspect that if the original strategy worked the story would be different. Transparently reporting technical/business fai…

Presumably they compare the results with those from known good tests.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#232

Post by hodgesrm »

nikanj wrote: post #206
purple-again wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really disappointing to hear this. The ML revolution is very real and so is the immense value it’s capable of granting us...HOWEVER it’s really only in a narrow category of problems and people don’t want to admit that so they try to shoehorn it into every corner of everything...not too dissimilar from blockchain. That narrow problem space where ML has become revolutionary is classification problems where the cost of…

And just like blockchain, the reason it gets forced into every field is VCs. "We are going to challenge existing players in $market" gets you nothing, "We are going to disrupt $market with blockchain/ML" gets you a eight-digit seed round.

You don’t have to take the money, or at least take it on those terms. Entrepreneurs have agency. They should exercise it.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#233

Post by whatever1 »

underdeserver wrote: post #210
purple-again wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really disappointing to hear this. The ML revolution is very real and so is the immense value it’s capable of granting us...HOWEVER it’s really only in a narrow category of problems and people don’t want to admit that so they try to shoehorn it into every corner of everything...not too dissimilar from blockchain. That narrow problem space where ML has become revolutionary is classification problems where the cost of…

Seriously? A narrow category of problems? ML has been used and is being used to significantly advance image processing, video processing, image classification, speech-to-text, natural language understanding, medical imaging interpretation, medical notes and differential diagnosis, warehouse management, shipping and delivery, transportation, networking, agriculture, biomedical research, insurance, law practice (docume…

Please. The vast majority of the above are fields where ML failed spectacularly.

If you had any idea about medical diagnosis, biomedical research, supply chain optimization, politics and journalism you would know that machine learning is a laughing stock in these fields.

ML had 2 big wins: (image & data) Classification & NLP. It is stupid to not use ML for these problems, but it equally stupid to try to fit ML in fields that it cannot work.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#234

Post by patja »

chadash wrote: post #198
helge9210 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The difference is that cybercrime is self-solving: when companies start losing enough to really impact their bottom line, they'll finally have incentive to invest more in proper cybersecurity. Let's drop "cyber" for a second. Suppose some (potentially, foreign state sponsored) actor starts to physically attack/kidnap company employees in company's home country that is starts to affect the bottom line. No one would…

I don’t believe this is true. Wealthy companies that do business in dangerous countries tend to pay quite a bit for security of key employees. If you are a white collar worker of MegaCorp Oil traveling to Iraq for business, you will be provided with security. If you are a local Iraqi working in the oil fields, you can probably expect less security, precisely because your loss won’t affect the bottom line. But even so…

This reminds me that there is a fascinating Econtalk podcast episode on the subject of how the kidnapping insurance market works. Companies who have employees working in parts of the world where they are at risk of kidnapping for ransom have access to insurance against this risk.

Two of the things that struck me about this market are (a) the insurance companies require their customers to get serious about mitigating the risk. Employees all have to attend training on how to avoid kidnapping and what to do when it happens, the insurance customer has to take other measures to limit where they go, the customer has to beef up physical security, etc. And there are some situations they refuse to insure, so that's a big red flag. The insurance company becomes a partner in doing everything they can to prevent kidnappings. and (b) customers are sworn to secrecy and may not reveal that they have this insurance. Employees don't know they are insured against kidnapping. They don't want kidnapped employees spilling the beans.

The insurers have local negotiators in their employ who often have longstanding relationships with the kidnappers.

Anyways, a bit tangential, but I learned a lot about this niche industry, and it gave me more of an appreciation for how insurers can raise the professionalism of their customers in their efforts to minimize risks. A similar approach with the benefit of setting standards could definitely apply to cybercrime insurance.

https://www.econtalk.org/anja-shortland-on-kidnap/

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#235

Post by busterarm »

ojbyrne wrote: post #126
busterarm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also it's very much worth nothing that Silicon Valley no longer has the monopoly on talent that it once had. In fact in some of the more important development areas now, it's shifted to places like Boston or elsewhere.

I think you’re not looking far enough back in the history of computer technology to think it’s _recently_ shifted to places like Boston. There’s always been companies outside SV, and especially in Boston. And there’s always been ebb and flow.

I'm well aware, but my point is this time that there are entire fields where the _hub_ is Boston and not SV.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#236

Post by kory »

helen___keller wrote: post #197

There are countless takes on this, but I'll add one more: Silicon Valley's failure is in being unable to diversify effectively from a failure in city-building. For a good stretch, the bay area was the place to be. Lots of people wanted to be there, whether or not they were engineers. The cost of living made these ambitions completely unreasonable, except for the well compensated engineers. Monoculturalism is a failur…

I think a big challenge here is single family housing with a yard is by far the most desirable housing in the US.

I doubt folks would accept a significantly more dense living if they were the engineers of tomorrow. They’d expect the single family home and yard for their work.

Where in the USA is this not a challenge? Single family zoning is everywhere and existing residents in most American cities have little reason to want that to change.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#237

Post by mattkrause »

tchalla wrote: post #209
purple-again wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really disappointing to hear this. The ML revolution is very real and so is the immense value it’s capable of granting us...HOWEVER it’s really only in a narrow category of problems and people don’t want to admit that so they try to shoehorn it into every corner of everything...not too dissimilar from blockchain. That narrow problem space where ML has become revolutionary is classification problems where the cost of…

In you view, why do you think the society has an issue when a “machine “ makes a decision vs a human? Can you think of a legitimate areas where trust in machine outputs wouldn’t be favoured vs a human?

ML systems will struggle when the question itself is ill-posed.

A human can say “I’ve been instructed to group these data into those categories, but this particular example doesn’t fit into any them.” and then devise a way to handle special cases.

By construction, an ML system can’t. At the end of the day, a classifier needs to assign one of the predefined labels to each example. At best, it might give you a confidence value, or a probability distribution over labels. However, interpreting those is usually outside of the system itself.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#238

Post by mlyle »

helge9210 wrote: post #184
lanternfish wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're still supposed to put locks on your doors even though it's the police's 'job' to prevent property crime. Moreover, I don't think many tech companies want to give the state the access required to impliment preventative security measures for them, they'd rather role them themselves to maintain control.

> You're still supposed to put locks on your doors Locks are for honest people. > to impliment preventative security measures for them That's not a job of the state. The job of the state is to punish (cyber)criminals. And it's not the harshness of the punishment that matters, it's the inevitability.

> Locks are for honest people.

That's a great slogan. But-- your (cyber)security stance obviously affects your risk. There are things you can do with business model, stance, and organizational controls that absolutely affect your exposure to both cybercrime and real-world crime. Your home state can absolutely provide help in your strategy against (cyber)crime, but surely we also should probably avoid getting blackout drunk and flashing large sums of cash around dense urban cores, too.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#239

Post by WalterGR »

notsureaboutpg wrote: post #195
WalterGR wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are these multi millionaires? Clearly I know the wrong people in tech in the Bay Area.

If you get an entry level TC of 140k and save 50% of it, you'll be a millionaire in 15 years. That's without any kind of growth, investment, stock options growing in value, raises, etc.

And if you make $65,000 a year and save 100% of it, you’ll be a millionaire in 15 years.

Nobody is arguing that it’s possible.

Re: Other challenges to SV’s preeminence are more fundamental than the tech diaspora

#240

Post by [deleted] »

kortilla wrote: post #154
Apocryphon wrote: post #78

The article reminds me somewhat of an earlier O’Reilly piece, which taught me that the man’s got a bit of social consciousness in his critiques of SV: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23657403 I suspect the Pollyanna tone is why people aren’t actually engaging with the material in it. Applying machine learning to medical science is indeed exciting, but it’s hard to envision what exactly is the product that causes…

> Cities are dominated by a new class of highly paid big-company employees driving up housing costs and forcing out lower wage workers This is just an ignorant hot-take though that once again blames upper middle class tech employees for a housing problem caused solely by bad govern policies. There is no “domination” here considering that tech employees are well. 21 percent [1] are now considered tech jobs and the FAA…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN