Interesting read. I don't think this came up in my stats classes:
Gosset solved many problems at the brewery with his new technique. The self-taught statistician published his t-test under the pseudonym “Student” because Guinness didn’t want to tip off competitors to its research. Although Gosset pioneered industrial quality control and contributed loads of other ideas to quantitative research, most textbooks still call his great achievement the “Student’s t-test.”
Another fun bit of biochemical history: Chaim Weizmann (1) was a biochemist and staunch Zionist who gained the attention of First Lord of the British Admiralty, Winston Churchill, for cultivating a bacterium, Clostridium acetobutylicum, that could produce acetone, which was in short supply and required for the production of cordite, the key propellent in naval artillery during World War I. In gratitude for Weizmann's contribution to the war effort, George Lloyd asked him what Britain could do for him, to which he replied "not for me, but for my people", which begat the Balfour Declaration (2) establishing Britain's commitment to provide a Home for the Jewish People (3).
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Weizmann
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration
(3) It is essentially lost to history that the Balfour Declaration also provided that the Palestinian people should not be displaced. It is also mostly lost to history that there was a great deal of politicking between Weizmann arriving in England and his audience with George Lloyd, including a world tour Weizmann orchestrated to promote one Albert Einstein.
I continue to be amazed the things you learn on HN. When I was in Poland last summer I learned that a number of Jewish leaders there between the two world wars advocated for a Jewish homeland. But they were never able to convince the government to publicly declare that support. Despite the fact at the time Jews made up to 25% of Poland's population.
That's wrong. Polish state from 1926 onwards supported Zionists (in the years 1926-1939, Poland was ruled by the authoritarian Sanation movement).
Verified you are correct. Yet the museums I toured in both Warsaw and Gdansk gave me the exact opposite impression.
"It is essentially lost to history"
In practice, this is clearly true. But it is not for lack of trying, at least on some people's parts. I recently read 'A Peace to End All Peace', David Fromkin, which goes in depth into the background here, including Weizmann's role and the making of the Balfour declaration. A passage from the book's conclusion has stuck with me:
"It took Europe a millennium and a half to resolve its post-Roman crisis of social and political identity: nearly a thousand years to settle on the nation-state form of political organization, and nearly five hundred years more to determine which nations were entitled to be states. Whether civilization would survive the raids and conflicts of rival warrior bands; whether church or state, pope or emperor, would rule; whether Catholic or Protestant would prevail in Christendom; whether dynastic empire, national state, or city-state would command fealty; and whether, for example, a townsman of Dijon belonged to the Burgundian or to the French nation, were issues painfully worked out through ages of searching and strife, during which the losers—the Albigensians of southern France, for example—were often annihilated. It was only at the end of the nineteenth century, with the creation of Germany and Italy, that an accepted map of western Europe finally emerged, some 1,500 years after the old Roman map started to become obsolete. The continuing crisis in the Middle East in our time may prove to be nowhere near so profound or so long-lasting. But its issue is the same: how diverse peoples are to regroup to create new political identities for themselves after the collapse of an ages-old imperial order to which they had grown accustomed."
One big difference with the Middle East is that the present day borders were largely drawn up by foreign powers (England, France) rather than evolving organically as they did in post-Roman Europe. This is also a source of much of the ongoing conflicts in the region including Israel/Palestine.
TBF, England and France took hundreds of years drawing up their own borders between each other
I'm not saying that this is a bad comment, or that it should not have been made; but at the same time, I am also a bit wearied to see that the HN comment section has achieved a Time To Palestine of 1 on this post.
I'm not saying that this is a bad comment, or that it should not have been made; but at the same time, I am also a bit wearied to see that the HN comment section has achieved a Time To “Time To Palestine” Palestine of 2 on this post.
These low effort posts are against the HN guidelines and also not terribly clever.
Palestinian people should not be displaced
This was always wishful thinking at best, and more realistically a lie.
Hmmm, those palestinian Arabs that made peace with the Jews in the 1948 civil war are still there; see
Doesn't prove much. The Jews needed the fertile lands that were very much settled, there were not all flocking there for some desert.
Quoting Ben-Gurion:
A people which fights against the usurpation of its land will not tire so easily. ... When we say that the Arabs are the aggressors and we defend ourselves — this is only half the truth. ... [P]olitically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves. The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country.
I've heard that tour was also accidentally the reason Einstein became such a household name and face, tho I'm not so convinced this is true.
"Britain's commitment to provide a Home for the Jewish People ... in a place other than Europe" is the key detail that's missing here.
It wasn't like they all got together and said, you know, it's time we did the Jewish People a solid for once.
It also can't be overstated that Balfour himself was a staunch racist and antisemite. His motivation for passing the Declaration was at least in part the idea that if the UK gives the Jews their own country, the UK will have a powerful ally in the global Jewish conspiracy - and also encourage Jews to leave the UK and not manipulate in its politics, culture and economy.
From Balfour's own writing in 1919 cited in his Wikipedia article:
[Zionism would] mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a Body [the Jews] which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb.
He's the best example how support of Zionism and antisemitism aren't mutually contradictory and can actually go hand in hand. It's likewise often lost on people that there was a Zionist project helping German Jews emigrate to Palestine with support of the German government even after Hitler came to power, although of course (like all migration) it ended with the beginning of World War 2. This isn't to say the Nazis were fond of this project but they didn't actively oppose it. They did however pass laws requiring emigrating Jews to liquidate their assets (i.e. sell off any businesses or property) and significantly limiting the amount of wealth they could transfer out of the country just like they later dispossessed (and subsequently re-privatized) Jewish business owners and confiscated their property during the Holocaust.
Pedantry: David Lloyd George, Prime Minister during the later part of WW I and for a time after.
Well, now I hate him. Thanks.
I did a talk in 2019 where I mention that tidbit. Of course, to properly do it justice I had to bring a Guinness and open it on stage.
Here’s a video from EuRuKo that was filmed on a decommissioned ocean liner converted into a hotel and conf space https://youtu.be/Aczy01drwkg?si=lsVWAFv9f3eLc2fZ&t=1095
damn, unfortunate the rabbit makes this unwatchable.
otherwise, i love beer and great story, i'll just read about it.
I agree. You can read the talk here https://www.schneems.com/2020/09/16/the-lifechanging-magic-o....
I introduced the voiceover artist at the beginning, she’s a Japanese speaker that I found on fiver. I chose her because the talk was being given at a Japanese speaking conference (Ruby Kaigi).
I love the foil of having a second character on screen but having an accented cartoon was not the right effect I was going for.
I’m still experimenting with multiple characters in my talks but my most recent one I did doesn’t use any actors and I read their lines like a narrator. I think the effect works much better https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-8UQMH6p-Mw&list=PL9oQ7yETvN12...
ah, appreciate the reply, and the spirit of creativity.
Kinda feel like I got caught being overly critical and here is the actual creator! Thanks for receiving it well and also for putting your stuff out there.
I’m kinda glad you said something to be honest. I wanted to mention the voiceover being cringe but it’s also hard to pre-apologize for something without raising a lot of alarm bells.
I’m still proud of the overall talk. I’m glad I pushed a limit, found it, and learned from it.
Your comment stated what you saw and how you felt about it. I think you did a great job speaking up without lashing out or talking down. I appreciate that.
i would advise maybe toning down the strength of your criticism when addressing the creator of the content /2c
I appreciate you sticking up for me. I can see this comment being taken poorly by others. I also think we generally need to learn to empathize that the creator might experience our words different than how we mean them (and therefore be kinder when we post).
In this case, I was aware that the rabbit is tough to watch so I have the empathy for my viewer and the comment came across as honest rather than harsh. I don’t think you should be downvoted. If it was a different time or place then I 100% could have taken it the wrong way.
Guinness was way ahead of their time and in many ways the Google of their day (building accomodation, high pay, great perks). My granddad worked there so all my dad's brother and sisters learned to swim in the Guinness swimming pool!
Funnest tidbit is that the widget to get a good head from cans won the best invention of the year, the year the internet wax invented.
For an excellent piece on many more interesting bits about Guinness, check this out: https://www.thefitzwilliam.com/p/no-great-stagnation-in-guin...
Since you called them the google of the day, it’s only fitting to mention that Guinness in “The Guinness book of record” refers to the brewery.
And much like how we use Google to settle discussion in pubs today, the book was published to do that very same thing, back then.
It also apparently pioneered the practice of companies getting tax (or in their case, lease) concessions for "investing in Ireland"...
I don’t think I’ll ever be interested in Internet Wax.
Sometimes I wonder about the actual utility of the T-test compared to just looking at a pair of boxplots, with jittered points (or some other indication of the number of data points).
If it isn't plainly evident from the boxplots (assuming you've got "enough points") do T-tests alone ever make a truly compelling argument?
That would not be exactly scientific. T-test can be calculated independently and verified.
But you still need to choose a significance threshold, which is just an opinion. There's nothing "scientific" about p=0.05; surely God loves p=0.06 almost as much.
This doesn't surprise me; any industry involved with basically any manufacturing seems like a perfect testing ground for statistical methods. There's enough scale in these things where subtle differences can save tons of money, so it can be beneficial pretty quickly.
I always thought the t-test was clever just because of how simple it was compared to more advanced stuff.
We covered this in my Research Methods class as part of my Systems Engineering Masters. Growing and agriculture in the early 1900s benefitted from things like ANOVA, blocking factors, nuisance factors, factors, levels, ranges and experiment design such as full factorial design. It is taken for granted these days. F statistic, F crit, etc
Artificially pumping beer full of nitrogen is kinda weird you gotta admit.
The nitrogen is just a propellant for forcing the beer through tiny holes that make the dissolved CO2 come out of solution in tiny bubbles, which form a more stable foam. Very little nitrogen actually dissolves into the beer.
I feel like OP unfortunately mostly misses the point of Gosset's work and the t-test, in the usual way of people taught the contemporary bastardization of Gosset/Fisher/Pearson/Neyman as NHST. The important thing isn't that it lets you calculate some _p_-value; the important thing is that it is a framework for decision-making, where you can trade off your false-positive and your false-negative rates to make the economically rational decision: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00031305.2018.1...
In this case, because it is a well-understood problem with the rates of bad batches easily established from the brewery's records of testing & drinking, it lets the brewery decide on how many 'off' batches it wants to risk in exchange for saving the cost of a certain number of test-samples. You decide you want to risk 1 bad batch in 100 for a false negative while rejecting 1 good batch in 20, then you need _n_ samples etc. And this directly translates better measurements (by lowering variance, eg. by blocking) into money: the lower the variance, the fewer samples you need to achieve any given tradeoff, thereby saving the brewery money on scrapped material or testing. The smaller the better, hence Student's inability to use asymptotics or approximations: they might be off by orders of magnitude. (He would even try to do _n_ = 2 tests!)
Or they might be trying to tightly optimize alcohol content, to avoid taxation for passing high-alcohol content thresholds, but also avoid going too low to disappoint their customers, so Student would explicitly calculate out scenarios, for example:
Thus, Gosset concluded, “In order to get the accuracy we require [that is, 10 to 1 odds with 0.5 accuracy], we must, therefore, take the mean of [at least] four determinations.” The Guinness Board cheered. The Apprentice Brewer found an economical way to assess the behavior of population parameters, using very small samples.
(If you're thinking this sounds like a very subjective-Bayesian decision-theory thing to write, you are right, although Student would have rejected that, like most statisticians, and emphasized that he was dealing with populations with known base rates, and so nothing Bayesian was necessary; it was just a frequentist decision-theory approach.)
That article you posted is excellent, thank you. Also relevant: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01621459.1982.10...
The students' t distribution has a symmetric PDF (with no skew), and thus you assume that the sample and/or population also have such a PDF (Probability Distribution Function).
t statistic > History: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-statistic#History
Students' t distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student%27s_t-distribution
"What are some alternatives to sample mean and t-test when comparing highly skewed distributions" https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-alternatives-to-sample-m... :
> the Kolmogorov-Smirnov two-sample test, which essentially compares the empirical distribution functions of the two samples without implicitly assuming normality. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov–Smirnov_test
You may also be interested in the Wald-Wolfowitz runs test (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wald–Wolfowitz_runs_test ) and the Mann-Whitney test (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann–Whitney_U ).
Statistical Significance > Limitations, Challenges: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance#Limit...
Statistical hypothesis test > Criticism, Alternatives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_hypothesis_test#Cr...
There are Multivariate Students' t distributions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multivariate_t-distribution
Matrix t distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_t-distribution :
The generalized matrix t-distribution is the compound distribution that results from an infinite mixture of a matrix normal distribution with an inverse multivariate gamma distribution placed over either of its covariance matrices.
But does a matrix t-distribution describe nonlinear variance in complex wave functions?
Quantum statistical mechanics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_statistical_mechanics :
In quantum mechanics a statistical ensemble (probability distribution over possible quantum states) is described by a density operator S, which is a non-negative, self-adjoint, trace-class operator of trace 1 on the Hilbert space H describing the quantum system.
A Q12 question: How frequently are quantum density operators described by a parametric t distribution?
I read this story and several other very interesting ones in this great book detailing the history of evolution of modern statistics -- The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century by David Salsburg.
The author himself personally met with several leading figures that he describes. Highly recommended!
Comparing Guinness to an ‘earthy milkshake’ is one of the worst things I’ve ever read.
This Guiness connection is the core of the jokes when explaining about t-test in Larry Gonick's History of Statistics.
This story appears in "How to Measure Anything" by Douglas Hubbard, which is worth a read if you're not already a stats and decision theory whiz.
I love these sorts of of things. I was fortunate enough to have this fact mentioned in my stats book in undergrad, and later when I was in Dublin and touring the Guinness brewery, they had a small exhibit on Gosset (although Gossett was actually based out of their brewery in England). Another fun fact that I learned in organic chemistry was that Alexander Borodin (the Russian composer who composed "In the Steppes of Central Asia" and "Prince Igor") was only a composer in his spare time and was actually professionally an organic chemist who was the co-discoverer of the aldol reaction
Gosset recognized that this approach only worked with large sample sizes, whereas small samples of hops wouldn’t guarantee that normal distribution. So he meticulously tabulated new distributions for smaller sample sizes.
Does it mean Gosset stop before the distribution converging to normal distribution?
My first year of working at AWS was in the "DUB1" site, which was part of the Digital Hub (a tech and incubator space). As it happened ... Amazon's small office was in William Sealy Gosset's old laboratory, right beside St. Patrick's Tower where the Guinness cooperage was. As a former statistics lecturer, I excitedly told everyone I worked with how lucky we were, to almost no reaction! Can you imagine?
A long time ago I submitted William Sealy Gosset as a suggestion for commemoration with an Irish Postage Stamp; but nothing has ever come of it. I hope some day he gets more recogonition.
Wow, forcing visitors to individually disable 6 types of cookies. :thumbsdown.tif:
Louis Pasteur developed his technique for wine and beer, and milk would benefit years later.
I went to school beside the Guinness brewery. The smell of the hops brewing will remain with me forever.
However the school was dirt poor in many ways and they wouldn't sponsor our school football team to buy some kit. This was back in the 80's Ireland with massive unemployment and huge emigration.
Ironically the school had a computer lab way beyond its time when one ex-pupil donated a couple of Apple Macs and a dozen Apple IIe's. That's were I cut my teeth on some - probably BASIC - programming, learning myself.
On Topic - Guinness were always canny and ahead of their time. Getting a job there was like winning the lotto, you were pretty much made for life.
I always thought that name was strange but I never thought to look it up. Stats books are so dry, they don’t have the inclination to share these kinds of stories.
You probably missed it. This is something stat book authors love to mention. I don’t remember a stat intro book that doesn’t have a footnote for “Student t”.
Just went through mine a few months ago. It definitely doesn't have it.
what book? i'm honestly curious because of how frequently this story is repeated in stats textbooks
The author is Jay Devore.
Doubly unfortunate because the philosophical aspects of statistics are more important to students than most of maths. There are something like 4 different schools of thought [0] and people will have a natural propensity to one of them.
Although they all agree on the formulas and rigorous aspects, it is actually a challenging proposition to comprehend what someone is doing if you strongly see the world from one perspective and don't realise that academics are potentially approaching the interpretation in one of 3 other ways.
It adds a lot of dryness to the textbook because the author can really only talk about the objective parts in an introductory classroom setting. But if you're getting taught by a frequentist and have a subjectivity bent it is easy to spend a year or two confused before someone clues you in that there are unresolved questions of interpretation.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretation_of_probability
Interesting, my university book of the subject was pretty tiny but it did talk of the different interpretations, but it only mentioned frequentist and bayesian. I did not suspect the story was much more complicated.
I see what you did there
It doesn't have to be that way. My pandemic lockdown read was a 10 dollar Stats textbook[1], that comes with tons of classic examples: the Salk polio vaccine, a prosecutor misusing the multiplication rule using purely circumstantial evidence ("what are the odds that police pulled over the wrong couple matching 10 different pieces of description by the victim?"), the classic Gallup poll showing FDR would defeat Landon (versus incumbent _Literary Digest_ showing a Landon win), Gosset's history with Guiness, the early history of probability as gambling strategy, a controversy over Mendel's data on pea plant heredity being _too_ clean, and so on.
Sadly, while this book left me well prepared to apply statistical reasoning in my day job, it's departure from typical pedagogy left me feeling unprepared for further reading based on perusal of Stats Wikipedia -- what's a kernel? what's a moment? etc.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Statistics-Fourth-David-Freedman-eboo...
In a former life I taught some intro stat courses from this book. It’s a good book for an intro course for people who aren’t going on to further stat classes, although I think for a current class I’d want something that acknowledges how statistics and computers have gotten all tied up with each other. (I don’t have any recommendations - it’s not my job to know this any more.)
The history of just about anything is very interesting, but it's generally not relevant in a textbook which has a specific purpose.
I agree with the sentiment, but I always have wondered what t-test a real engineer uses and why they only teach the "Student" version. Given the context, a bit of a clarifier would have been appreciated.
sorry but this is a classic story mentioned in almost every basic stats textbook i’ve read
I liked this one a lot
Abelson, R. P. (1995). Statistics as Principled Argument. Psychology Press. https://www.routledge.com/Statistics-As-Principled-Argument/...
Wait until you hear about the bad blood between Fisher and Pearson.
I wonder if dry reading means written without the influence of drink. I couldn't find an answer online. But, if so, it would be ironic to describe a stat book that ignored a brewer as dry.
This is such a great story, it should be included in every intro stats class (I did, back when I taught intro stats).
Gosset didn’t have the mathematical background to derive the correct distribution theoretically, so he figured out what it was by simulating drawing samples of different sizes thousands of times and fitting curves. Simulating, in those days, meant writing numbers on thousands of cards, then shuffling and drawing a sample. Calculate the mean and standard deviation. Repeat. Thousands of times. He published the result with an apologetic shrug for not being able to prove it properly.
It's interesting how mathematically shallow most stats presentations are. In most other areas I've studied, you start from some basics like axioms and gradually build up machinery by proving theorems etc. But presentations I've seen of the t-test focus on when and how to use it, without going very deep into the derivation at all.
This leaves me skeptical of the movement to replace calculus with stats in high school. It's true that an ordinary citizen will find stats more useful. But for students who will go on to become scientists and engineers, I think they should study calculus. Calculus is a better on-ramp to the sort of rigor you need in upper-level math. And I'm concerned that a bad "cargo cult" stats class may be worse than no stats education at all. Calculus education seems harder to screw up.
Not sure why you are downvoted for this. Your points have merit. I agree that stats classes can have a "cookbook" flavor and do not generally lead to a deep understanding of probability. But I would rather fix the stats classes than abandon the topic.
Does anyone really argue to replace calculus with stats? I thought the idea was to offer both and let students choose based on their interests.
Propbabilities, combinatorics, logics and sets are the most valuable things from high school maths that benefitted me all the way through from teenager to professor.
Calculus is intellectually stimulating, but for my line of work (dealing with uncertaintly, risk, decision making, AI), other parts of mathematics are more useful. However, I would not argue calculus should be replaced. I would argue for more "proper" maths to replace "recipe-like" maths. It's more important to go deeper on a topic than what the topic is.
Combinatorics would make a great high school math course, honestly. Lots of fun puzzles and very approachable.
Calculus is also mathematically shallow in that sense: the subject where you start with axioms and gradually build up the machinery of calculus is (Real) Analysis, which is not part of the standard calculus curriculum and which the vast majority of people taking calculus will never study [1]. A typical Calculus class expects students to memorize and use things like trig function integrals which are presented without proof; not so different from memorizing and using statistical tests presented without proof, in my opinion.
In an intro statistics class I think conceptual depth is more important than mathematical depth. It's more important that students really understand the concept of probabilistic inference, both hypothesis tests and confidence intervals, than that they understand the mathematical derivation of the t distribution [2].
Unfortunately intro stats classes often fail on this count as well. One of the (many) straws that eventually broke my desire to teach was a committee decision--a committee composed entirely of people not teaching intro stats--to disallow students from bringing formula cheatsheets to exams, effectively forcing us to make the students memorize formulas rather than focusing on conceptual understanding.
[1] When I took Real Analysis there was a calculus class that met right before us in the same room, which often ran over so that the calculus students would be packing up as we entered the room. One day as we're sitting down one of them asks us what class we're there for, and then asks what Real Analysis is all about, since he's never heard of it. One of my classmates responded with the absolutely perfect "Well, our homework last night was integrating x^2 from 0 to 1."
[2] I'd say the same goes for Calculus, for what it's worth; actually understanding what an integral means is more important than being able to set up the Reimann sum and take the limit.
Um. Wow. That's quite a story. But, it's not real. "owever, Guinness had a policy of not publishing company data, and allowed Gosset to publish his observations on the strict understanding that he did so anonymously."
I'm 1906, Gosset was the guest of Person at UCL, and since Gosset had a First in Math, and Professor Pearson was the leading mathematician and publisher of the Bell curve..
Gosset spent a year at UCL. University College London. A year with an expert looking over his shoulder? I would think that he would publish with an extreme amount of confidence, forgoing the need for an apolocetic shrug, which I have never ever heard of. Never, and I have a degree in math with a minor in Statistics. They had playing cards. You are arguing for large sample sizes, which is not economical - precisely against the design of the test - which looks surprisingly suspicious.
Except that this part is true. Obviously, he is well-known in academic circles, but Guinness did have a policy against its employees to publish their research using a pseudonym[1].
[1] Specifically, they can publish with three conditions:
1) To not mention Guinness or its competitors,
2) To not mention anything about beer (so topics specifically about beer is forbidden), and
3) To not publish using their surname (which in practical effect is to publish using a pseudonym).
Typo: guest of Person => Karl Pearson
Good for you. As you might have guessed from reading that I used to teach statistics, I have a bit more than a minor in the subject. Your attempt to appeal to authority, not to put too fine a point on it, falls flat.
Just because you haven’t heard of a thing don’t mean it isn’t true. We can, after all, just read the original paper:
As for the apologetic shrug, in the course of the “analytic solution” we have:
and then after a bit more math guessing the correct distribution based on the moments
My story is slightly off; Gosset only used one sample size rather than several different sample sizes. But he did use simulation with thousands of hand written cards as his approach to the problem, he did fail to prove the correct distribution (moments are not sufficient to determine the distribution), and he did publish with an apologetic shrug.
along with compulsory Guinness tasting :)
At least they let him publish, albeit under a pseudonym. It makes me wonder how many potentially useful discoveries were made in industrial settings, and wound up being buried due to management not wanting to risk leaking competitive information. The good news, I suppose, would be if you believe that it's rarely the case that only one person could ever discover something. Then you can conclude that all (most?) such discoveries were eventually (or will eventually be) rediscovered independently.
On a related note... I wonder how much valuable research disappears (more or less) when companies fold, get acquired, etc. Take MCC[1] for example. I've been doing a lot of reading lately that involves old papers from the 1990's on "agents" and "multi-agent systems". And time and time again, in the references, you'll see something like "MCC Technical Report TR86-32791" or some-such. Occasionally said report can be found online, but quite a few of them seem to be either hard - or impossible - to find. Maybe there's an archive of physical papers stored away somewhere, but FSM knows where the heck such a thing would be, or how hard it would be to get access.
A similar situation came up a while back when we started discussing "sharding" here on HN[2]. There was a lot of effort spent trying to identify when the term first arose, and a lot of evidence pointed to a particular paper that was internal to CCA, who were acquired by Xerox. And now that original paper seems to be unobtanium. The paper probably still exists somewhere in the bowels of Xerox, but good luck ever getting your hands on it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microelectronics_and_Computer_...
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36848605
Probably a lot. I’ve come to find out that some dinosaur companies won’t even let their programmers open up issues on open source repos (forget sending patches or releasing their own software).
The logic goes like this: if someone found the log4j zero day before it was reported they could comb through all issues and see the companies that the users worked for then try to target them. In this case any comment would indicate possible involvement.
The least bit of security, through the tiniest extra bit of obscurity. Thankfully many of these companies are starting to come around and realizing that a lack of involvement with open source is more risky than accidental 3rd hand information leaking (like what dependencies doesn’t certain company use).
The easiest counter to this is that, to my knowledge at least, it’s easier to build a vulnerability scanner than to scrape repos for more targeted attacks.
The "No lieutenant, your men are already dead" defense. I like it.
I think that if your threat model includes nation states (and the companies I was referencing above was largely S&P500 financial institutions) then you have to think the attacker also doesn’t want to trip off any alarms with a ham fisted port scan blasting the precious zeroday exploit all over the internet. Your point is still extremely valid though.
Which is why the counter I provided is that the best defense is to get as many engineers’ eyes on the problem and in the codebase as possible to prevent or find it before it becomes an issue. Things like lib XZ are scary, but it’s even scarier if not caught before it’s in the wild.
The dirty secret is that nation states can get your software dependency list pretty easily in a number of ways (e.g. sending agents to meetups to nerd out & make friends would be an expensive way but there’s other social engineering attacks I’ve observed).
The other secret is that monitoring software can’t detect anomalies ahead of time & the vulnerability scan will not show up meaningfully any different than all the other random traffic already happening. Your nation state can hide it’s vulnerability scan amongst all the other vulnerability scanners already running (both legit as a service when you request it against your server & illegitimate actors trying to find a way in). So at best a ham fisted search is unlikely to really tip your hand in a meaningful way unless it requires having penetrated a few layers of your security to begin with.
As for libxz, the scary part is that as an industry we recognize the security challenge of not compensating maintainers and yet we have lackluster responses to fixing it (e.g. Google trying to pay OSS maintainers to harden their security while completely ignoring that a huge problem is that the maintainers can’t devote full time which opens an avenue for malicious actors to overwhelm maintainers & take control socially as happened with libxz).
I always found "student" confusing in the name. Like, is there a "professors t-test" or something?
I personally found a lot of peace after learning that tidbit.
This was in my textbook and my professor covered it as well! Class of 17 here
54 years after I was mystified trying to parse the use of "student" for this, here is the answer. Cool!
Many international conferences are regularly held in Dublin, and attendees often visit the Guinness brewery as part of conferences' social events, where a memorial plaque reminds them of Gosset and his important contributions to statistics.