ayanray

Can you elaborate on the upward trend? You mean like going to Senior, Principal, etc.? I feel like saying yes to everything ultimately just moves you to the business side / customer side, which eventually leads to budgetary control over a larger group.

I never understood why larger companies do this, I.e. either early stage of your career or as a contractor (with some possibility to FTE) and not as directly to FTE if you're a generalist. Companies do at-will employment, but I guess it is difficult to let go without evidence (I.e. performance reviews) though I'm not really sure.

When some of the contractors went FTE at a previous role, their salaries dropped dramatically (though they were paying for their own health insurance through an agency).

Can someone elaborate on the programmer's perspective? I understood the first and second paragraph (super helpful thanks!) but the exploratory, reloading repl escaped me.

As an aside, does anyone have a list of tools that are in this category of "One more tool for managers and non-tech product owners, to sell them idea \"any cool app can be made just by few clicks of mouse, your dreams will come true\"". What's a good place to find such tools?

Yeah I didn't get it until I read this. I've read a few papers before and some of them have been too abstract / unfamiliar for me to understand. I've had to read them slowly 3-4 times just to get it to 'click'. I think it takes practice to read papers, but once you have the habit, maybe you won't be able to stop.

How can you quickly check DNS? Combination of Who.is / traceroute / ping / nslookup?

I worry this is a case of micro vs macro environments. In a macro environment, it would be of interest to the general public to not determine why 1000 people died in a train crash. It's worth an exhaustive multi-year study and the victims' families can join a class action lawsuit and be tried as a single case. It's also in the best interest for all parties to find out why that crash happened in such a controlled environment to improve the service (private use of railways, well-understood environments).

In car crashes, each case could be different and difficult to figure out what was the exact cause. Cars are becoming more complicated, as with farm equipment vs farmers or the "check engine light". Without transparency into the internals, I wouldn't know what broke or was it my fault or the car and I would probably have to rely on the honesty of the company to tell me or my family that.

What I worry about is how can we define accountability. At least you could sue a person if you got into a car accident and got injured (happened to several people I know). Suing a huge corporation and getting bullied around, settling for less, etc. sounds possible, but can happen too with people vs people. How do you even make a case when you likely don't understand what actually happened or could even prove what happened (crypto, copyright laws)? I'm all for reducing risk, but machines will make mistakes and I don't know what happens next.

The way I understood the proof of work system is that it's there to determine which block is accepted as truth. So during a conflict, the first to solve the proof of work puzzle has their block accepted.

For distributed databases, when there are multiple conflicting transactions that touch the same data, I could see the proof of work as a method to determine which transactions win, especially in a global, multi-master model. When the proof of work puzzle is solved during conflicts, the transaction is accepted as truth and moves to a COMMITTED state. It seems kind of wasteful if you are paying for resources to solve challenges, but maybe there's a better way to decide who wins for trusted vs untrusted environments.

As an aside, Spanner I think acquires locks globally before writing. Maybe there's an interesting global-lock free model that just works using block chain, even if it's just for trusted parties (I.e. Google-internal).

harsh

maybe the ploy should be to get to V3 as quickly as possible as this pyramid / growth rate collapses or cut costs in V2 (cheaper servers, more efficient code - if possible). This is an interesting thought to me nonetheless.