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JackeJR

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Mysteries of Dropbox: Testing of a Distributed Sync Service (2016) [pdf]

cis.upenn.edu
106 points·by JackeJR·3 bulan yang lalu·26 comments

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JackeJR
·3 bulan yang lalu·discuss
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47676174

Dropbox is a lot more than file storage. The syncing itself has been through serious tests to characterise its behaviour. Sure, some may not like the decisions taken to direct its sync behaviour one way or another but at least all these are known through formal testing.
JackeJR
·3 bulan yang lalu·discuss
There was a discussion of a self-built dropbox on the frontpage (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47673394). This is just to show that dropbox is thoroughly tested for all kinds of wierd interactions and behaviours across OS using a very formal testing framework.
JackeJR
·3 bulan yang lalu·discuss
Actually it can. See https://youtu.be/FUQwijSDzg8?si=LWd5gVNYRd3HH9rJ

Or just search for the James-Stein paradox.
JackeJR
·7 bulan yang lalu·discuss
For (1) you can prepay i think up to 10 years? And every year you just prepay 1 year again and you will have 10 years to remember that you forgot to pay a domain registration bill.
JackeJR
·8 bulan yang lalu·discuss
Well a good surveyor would take into account order effects, i.e. the order in which questions were asked for example using Latin square designs.
JackeJR
·10 bulan yang lalu·discuss
The thing is that with such a sample, we don't really know

1. If the effect is real. i.e. had the patient not been given the injection, would his/her condition improve spontaneously.

2. Assuming the effect is real, what are the circumstances that make the treatment work for this person.

Not to be overly dismissive of the good work but it is too early to be optimistic about this given the above and the fact that the results were not replicated out of Sana suggest that there is a lot that we need to work out before this becomes a viable treatment for the masses.

The harms of hyping this up is that readers will get their hopes up and then be disappointed when things don't pan out as do most scientific endeavours. Overtime, readers will learn to distrust anything that is being reported because 90% of which do not translate to real world impact. It is hard to get the nuance that "science takes many many failures and iterations" to the public and the more likely outcome of such reporting is general distrust of science when things don't go the way that is hoped for.
JackeJR
·10 bulan yang lalu·discuss
N=1 study should not have made it into headlines.

> Although the research marks a milestone in the search for treatments of type 1 diabetes, it’s important to note that the study involved one one participant, who received a low dose of cells for a short period—not enough for the patient to no longer need to control their blood sugar with injected insulin. An editorial by the journal Nature also says that some independent research groups have failed in their efforts to confirm that Sana’s method provides edited cells with the ability to evade the immune system.