Sure, but all of those are different than an admin at hacker news doing an
UPDATE posts SET text="I hate brown people" WHERE post_id=17560983
to make you look like a racist (or whatever they wanted to alter your comment to look as though you had written it). That type of editing doesn't naturally occur and is more like the type of changed meaning we're talking about here.
It's also important to remember just how far Git was ahead of most competitors in performance. I was using monotone quite a bit around this time, and while its UI was frankly not much better than git's, it at least worked acceptably quickly. Darcs was mostly defined in the public eye by the exponential merge issue. Hg was fine, for some definition of fine, but it was enough slower than git to be annoying -- maybe not deal-breaking, but noticeable on pretty much any task.
I remember installing cogito to act as a front-end for git because very early on it seemed obvious that (a) git was going to win, and (b) it was going to win in spite of its UI, which was saying something.
And which have perfect forward secrecy, which PGP will never have without adding some new per-message communication between the two parties (which would totally violate the layering on top of email).
The idea that you can combine full hypertext and security is absurd. IMNHO this is the most significant problem with email (and many "secure" messaging stacks that allow "rich content"). Sure, it's possible to define a secure subset of html (basically bold/italics/underline, tables and headers).
But everyone adds transclusion (in-line rendering of linked content, which leaks data and opens up the door to bugs), fonts (ie: programs), images (historically not a great idea), and some even Javascript!
And that's not even all the muas that runs in the browser, and try to expose some safe subset of itself to be used for rendering the mail body.
So, html Email is insecure, when contrasted with plain text email.
Using pgp as "code signing" for hypertext applications ("html emails") isn't nearly enough.
Sadly, afaik there's no agreed "safe" rich text format for mail. Absurdly rtf would probably be better than html mail.
Anyway, I don't see how anyone could expect html mail to be safe in the first place.
Tenure track positions are not at all hard to fill. There are 500 people applying for every one of them, and probably 350-400 of those people are completely qualified to do the job. But only ten of them are desirable, and a hundred other universities have those same ten people on the list.
Paying market rate won't help, because they're not leaving positions unfilled because they can't make an attractive offer. They're leaving positions unfilled because they're unwilling to live in a world where not every team gets Lebron James. It's better to do without than to not get your first choice, so that's what they do. If they were willing to pay $800k to fill a seat with whoever they picked as that "market rate" lecturer, they could have just hired the same guy for $120k -- he applied for the job and you rejected him.
As has been pointed out before, statistics like these "for every five open faculty positions, only one is filled" are incredibly misleading. The reason only one in five is filled is not because there's a shortage of qualified teachers. It's because the thousand faculty searches going on at any one time are only interested in competing for the same hundred people.
Universities aren't trying to hire someone who can teach undergraduate CS courses. They're trying to hire someone who can build a lab capable of bringing in a steady stream of seven-figure grants. You need to have a PhD from a top-five (ish) school, with an excellent publication record, and an existing network of collaborators to be competitive for the vast majority of open positions.
I haven't been on a search committee in years, but in the mid 2000s, I think 3-500 was about the norm for a mid-range state school. Not all those people were qualified, but I think you can assume you'll have somewhere on the order of 2-300 qualified applicants for most jobs.
As has been pointed out before, statistics like these "for every five open faculty positions, only one is filled" are incredibly misleading.
Also, still trying to dig up the last article I read about this, but didn't that figure lump pretty much all faculty positions together? I could definitely believe there are lots of contingent faculty positions going unfilled, but the numbers probably look quite different for someone who's not interested in part-time positions, teaching-only positions, soft-money positions, etc.
anecdata from the current hiring season is that CS hiring at less prestigious institutions has become qualitatively different from that in other fields. one faculty described receiving a total of four applications from actual CS PhDs (not just top five) [0].
even at stanford, perhaps. i was astonished to see that a stanford junior is the listed instructor for EE 364A (a PhD level course in convex optimization, aka CS 334).
Which is why it just makes more sense to hire Indian CS students. American univs are never going to match the volumes the Indian system already produces.
$125 an hour isn't crazy. I billed that doing some consulting for a company in Memphis maybe five years ago, and that was a no negotiation involved arrangement. I'd worked there before, so they knew me. I threw a number out there and they pretty much went, "alright, sounds reasonable enough".
I think it's a general Apple failure mode. They're so wrapped up in the idea of making something completely unheard of, that they overly weight novelty. Most of these "clearly bad ideas" aren't all that clear at the time. I don't think I ever thought the touchbar was going to be a positive addition to a laptop, but when it was announced, there sure were a lot of people who seemed convinced it would. You can make an argument for why it's great, and if your company culture is predisposed towards valuing novelty, you'll anchor to those arguments, and there isn't going to be one guy in the room who can say "no".
That same culture has obvious upsides as well; I'm not trying to just knock Apple as incompetent. I just think the flip side of that coin makes things like the TouchBar more likely to survive scrutiny there.
That's an interesting way to look at it, and the novelty factor may well have something to do with it.
I suppose Touch Bar just doesn't seem particularly novel to me though, many consumer level PC laptops used to have little touch bars as FN keys in the early and mid 2000s, and they were just as much of a hassle then which is probably why no manufacturer kept them around.
First, "don't make mistakes" is a policy so idiotic in its conception that I don't think there exists a good-faith argument for advocating for it.
Second, a "cover-up" is when you hide evidence of your past misconduct. Pleading guilty in public is in every possible way the literal opposite of covering something up. If they'd just deleted the article with no commentary at all, that's covering up the mistake. Leaving the original URL up with a notice that they erred in publishing the original story isn't.
Except it eliminates so much context as to make the apology meaningless. Unless you knew about the existence of the pre-delete story, all you know is that the story used to be one thing, now it's "NPR fucked up".
