The last 4 digits of his SSN. The last 4 are often used as a default password for financial accounts and to verify identity over the phone. Along with the date of birth (dob). It's a bad idea that it's used so much for security, but it is. It's a good thing for scammers to have and asking for it and the dob in this context is a huge red flag.
Bizarrely, I remember a recent HN discussion where a poster was arguing that any software developer who is not working in machine learning is like a plumber.
I guess this means that the entire profession consists of janitors and plumbers.
Considering that plumbers and janitors have likely, in the entire history of human civilization, done more for health and longevity than doctors and scientists...I'm kind of ok with this analogy.
Doctors, maybe, but it was the scientists who told them about the germ theory of disease, for instance.
I've read, but not confirmed for myself, that in the US the biggest gains in health came in the post-Civil War period, when "plumbers and janitors" made the difference. Of course, that's really starting with, after the science, the civil engineers who designed the public works systems that supplied clean water and took away sewage, and let's not forget that politicians and like who found it worthwhile to buy votes that way (now, they take our infrastructure for granted and buy votes more directly...).
Sure, that's true of recent (< 200 yr ago) history, but plumbing's contribution to health and longevity goes all the way back to ancient Rome. (Somewhat ironically, plumbing, from the Latin word for lead, "plumbus", may have also contributed indirectly to Rome's eventual decline.)
Thanks! There was a delay after the Civil War as you'd expect from all the chaos and disruption that caused (e.g. MIT got its charter before the outbreak, but wasn't able to start up until after), but it's pretty clear, and gets really dramatic the further you go forward.
I've been studying the period (mostly the Industrial Revolution and onward, though the accelleration of the late 19th / early 20th century is staggering), and it's pretty phenomenal.
There was a lot going on. Germ theory, of course, was part of it. But public health measures, especially sewerage systems, clean drinking water, and municipal waste removal, were all massive contributors. Note that the decline in mortality occurs well in advance of antibiotics and even most vaccinations.
For all the recent debate on vaccinations, it's interesting to note that the peak period of their impace (roughly 1930 - 1960) saw relatively little reduction in mortality, though there was a large decrease in disease incidence. It turns out that with septic control, antibiotics, food quality, and nutrition, many viral diseases weren't killers, but did present quality-of-life issues. And yes, often quite severe -- polio was no joke, and I know people who've suffered lameness from it myself. Measles and smallpox are similarly scarring and have long-term impacts.
But the major impacts of virtually all medicine are front-loaded to the period before 1950, with much the gains since attributable to either greater access (especially for the disadvantaged) and removal of environmental agonists (lead, tobacco, alcohol, asbestos, miscellaneous poisons, safety hazards).
and as pointed out so much, is entirely why nobody wants to work for them. Respect these very bright people znd you have a starting negotiation position.
I recently had a plumber do some work on a >100-year-old apartment. I was lucky: he's a very good plumber.
The job didn't involve too many "pipelines" but the knowledge and creativity required to make them work was well above what I see from most software developers.
"Plumber" is not the put-down that poster thought it was.
Janitors? They are certainly more than janitors! More like plumbers... getting your data safely from point a to point b without plugging things up while passing through [process] boundary's. How much does a plumber cost? $140 / hr? Sounds about right.
So is the work that doctors, lawyers, and other highly-skilled people do, by and large. Everyone knows that day-to-day aspects of these jobs are hardly glamorous (or even cerebral), the vast majority of the time. Yet somehow we manage to accord these people with their due degree of respect, and wouldn't think of referring to them as "janitors".
I don't see what's so bad about janitors, though. They do very thankless jobs for not much money, whereas doctors and lawyers and other high-skilled individuals are often well renumerated or offered certain social prestige that your post shows is quite lacking when a humble janitor is considered.
A perfectly valid point. But getting back to the original article -- it pretty much takes a SV alpha-nerd (or aspiring CEO seeking to cater to them) to come up with language like that.
There's nothing wrong with janitors, but the work they do can be done by any dumb monkey with almost no training. That's why the pay is so low for the job: anyone can do it, as long as they can lift trash cans and push a vacuum cleaner.
Plumbers are entirely different. They have to get their hands dirty working on some awful systems, but they actually have to know what they're doing, get specialized training, etc. Soldering a proper joint with copper pipes isn't that easy, and if you screw it up, it'll leak later and cause a lot of property damage. Knowing which pipes and fittings to use where is specialized knowledge. It's not something you can just grab someone off the street and train them to do in 30 minutes. Of course, plumbers also cost a lot too, and the ones who are self-employed (rather than their assistants) generally do pretty well financially.
Hey I'm the author of this blog post and the CEO of the company that did the benchmark report. That was a very poor choice of words on my part, and I appreciate you flagging it. I reworked the paragraph to remove the janitor comment and (hopefully) make it clearer.
I agree that it's a bad idea to use "janitor" as a disparaging term, and that was very far away from my intention. If that was what you took away from reading it, then that's more evidence that I didn't do a great job with writing the original draft.
Here's the original paragraph for reference:
Data engineers are the janitors who keep your data clean and flowing. Insights are great, and you need them. But to deliver insights at scale, you need data infrastructure. That’s delivered by data engineering. It’s not as fun to talk about as D3 visualizations and business intelligence dashboards, but it’s every bit as important.
You got downvoted for this, but this is exactly the problem with "science" and "journalism" today. They're quick to report any first publication or comment as a huge breakthrough, but they never even hint that it might be a flawed study and that the rest of the scientific process (verifying the claim independently) is still yet to come.
"Paid $75k to Love a Brand on Instagram – Is It an Ad?"
If you are a public figure paid 1 cent to endorse a product, then it is an ad. If you fail to clearly disclose this ad identity and relationship then it is dishonest, possibly criminal.
Nothing more to discuss. This specific situation is vastly beyond any possible gray area.
So out of 170 study participants found on the internet, of whom those with any disclosed history of depression were removed, 70 were found to be clinically depressed on the basis of a screening questionnaire (http://cesd-r.com/). That's 41% of the sample.
They cite cost as the issue, that only 2600 users represent half of all comments on their entire system.
I don't know how much they are paying for a third party to manage their comment system, but I will bid $500/month to handle those 2600 users comprising half of all comments, or $1000/month for all comments. All inclusive bid. I can get this tiny number of users running on a pretty modest system.
My proposed system will also save money on subpoenas and moderation overhead by not storing ip addresses and not having paid moderation.
Have you factored in that you need to serve the comments to every user, not just ones that comment? I mean, to be fair, you could probably serve staticish chunks of HTML and update-on-new-comment, but it's a consideration.
The interesting part of that report is imported extra virgin olive oil is vastly more likely to be merely virgin due to refined or oxidized olive oil present, compared to California olive oils.
But then this research is also financed by the California Olive Oil Council, and also by the company of the best testing brand. So there's a possible conflict there, or it may be that they know they have better certification and monitoring therefore a better/more consistent product, than the name/top selling brands primarily sourcing from imported olive oil, and they're investing in research to quantify this.
Thank you!! In an earlier comment on another thread I bemoaned not publishing the brands that passed (or shaming the ones that didn't). This is what I was looking for.
sort of off topic: but i remember the days where pretty much anything ending in .edu was what you hit because you knew that it would be up. Especially UC Davis. Those days are over. :/
and on topic: I think it's great that the "Great Value" brand that many people turn their noses up at turned out to be one of the few that passed the UC Davis tests.
I mean, the way WalMart manages their supply chain, there's no guarantee it will continue to pass. If I remember correctly, Great Value Parmesan cheese was rated the worst (highest) level of wood pulp additives when tested vs other major brands.
> If I remember correctly, Great Value Parmesan cheese was rated the worst (highest) level of wood pulp additives when tested vs other major brands.
I buy that brand too and recommend it. The label clearly lists cellulose among the ingredients and it has a legitimate function as a decaking agent. At 7.8%, it did not have the highest cellulose level in that study, though it was close. I've bought grated parmesan with low levels of cellulose, and some of it's more clumpy. However, it seems the 4% brands have the right mix. WalMart's doubling that does seem to be working as a cheap filler. The cheese in it is actually parmesan though. Much more interesting in that study though was that some brands such as Market Pantry, Always Save, and Best Choice all contained absolutely no parmesan cheese at all.
Buying a brick of hard parmesan and grating it oneself is by far the best way to go, but cheap bottled stuff that isn't too bad is more convenient for kids to work with.
Maybe the FBI should spend less time suing Apple and more time finding out where the wife of the Orlando shooter has disappeared to given she was proven to have assisted him with the crime and knew about it in advance.
The FBI might also do well to look into the mother of the San Bernardino shooters who lived with them in a house full of bombs and guns and yet somehow never had any idea what was going on.
These seem better leads than this constant obsession with searching everyone's phones.
Because she told them she did. Noor Mateen told the FBI she was with him when he bought ammunition and a holster and that she once drove him to the Pulse nightclub because he wanted to scope it out. She told federal agents she tried to talk her husband out of carrying out the attack against the nightclub.
