bhangi

Yugabyte is an open source distributed database that has a Postgres compatible query layer as well as a Cassandra compatible one.

https://www.yugabyte.com/

This article talks about a few factors that have created this crisis: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/09/the-fed-has-not-cove...

"What were they thinking?" indeed.

I'm not sure why you're downvoted, but I think that this nails the biggest reason for runaway inflation in housing prices. When money supply is cheap, asset prices will be bid up. The only people who can afford the assets and profit from further increases in their prices are those with the means... in other words, the rich get richer while others are left behind.

I agree. While there are many articles that are questionably sourced and there are many articles with which I profoundly disagree (mostly advocating Austrian style economics and unfettered capitalism), it also provides a forum for viewpoints that are actually quite progressive and liberal (particularly when it comes to civil liberties). I'd rather be the one separating the wheat from the chaff for myself than Facebook or its ilk filtering it for me.

Note that the ZH comments section, however, is a cesspit filled with all sort of -ists.

I had an ultra 10 in my bedroom closet and it was impossible to sleep with that thing on. But I don't think it was much worse than HP 9000s or IIRC DEC alphas. Feeling nostalgic now.

In the 90s, it was frequently referred to as 'Slowlaris'. Yeah, in the early days of Solaris, I definitely used to miss SunOS 4.

Tarkovsky's works are generally demanding works of art. They are definitely slow paced and almost boring, but I've always found myself in a much more thoughtful frame of mind after watching his films.

As for Solaris, it is worth reading the book as well as watching both versions of the film -- they ask and explore different questions. The book is about the nature of intelligence and life whereas the films are more about the human part of the equation -- what does it mean to be a human as opposed to be a "replicant"? Tarkovsky is slower paced, but IMHO encourages deep reflection. Soderbergh's version is definitely more watchable and is actually quite thoughtful by Hollywood standards.

IntelliJ for Java. Emacs for everything else.

My favorite olive oil anecdote. Last year, I was traveling from Venice to Paris on an overnight train and I'd brought along a bottle of wine to share with my cabin-mates. One of them reciprocated by bringing out a can of olive oil that had "just been extracted last week" from his farm in Tuscany. We sampled that oil with a piece of bread torn from his sandwich -- our olive oil purveyor was probably not expecting to conduct a tasting in an overnight train. Would it be politically incorrect to exclaim: mamma mia? :-)

All I can say is that you are right -- it is impossible to taste real olive oil and not know the difference between it and the supermarket stuff.

I think the key is seasonality, though I'm sure that regulations and customer willingness to pay for quality do play a role. For instance, I find that fruits and vegetables taste better in India too and the typical Indian customer is very price sensitive and generally unwilling to pay a premium for quality. But availability is usually seasonal.

Well, if a company is willing to pay top dollar for a year to hire a candidate for a specific skill, I'd say that the specific skill should be in high demand. So it would be easy enough to find another employer in need of that skill.

Actually, I don't see a big problem with SV companies getting the lion's share of H-1B visa allocations if they are for the highest paying jobs. I would argue that this would ensure that everyone is better off -- workers in Seattle area will see their wages increase while SV companies have (properly) high-priced access to the talent that they claim they cannot get locally.

If you have easy H-1B transfers (which we do), then this is not an issue since the H-1B worker would have no motivation to stick on in a lower wage job.

That is $100k or $25K per year assuming a 4 year vesting schedule. Even assuming that you did not take a pay cut relative to working for a bigger or more established company, it seems a little low reward for the risk involved. Particularly considering that $250M exits have low odds to begin with.

Sorry if this is an ignorant question, but can you elaborate on this? It's not clear to me why this would lead to memory leaks.

I suspect that the majority of the cases where H-1B workers are paid less than the prevailing wages are at body shops like Wipro, TCS and yes, IBM. IMHO one potential fix for the situation could be to disallow (or at least make it sufficiently expensive) for a company to hire an H-1B worker for any third party work -- that is, if company A hires a worker, then the worker would have to work on company A's premises only and that any such work cannot be sold to third parties on a time and material basis. Yes, enforcement will be difficult and there will be clever ways of circumventing the regulations, but I honestly see no other solution except to cut out H-1B altogether. Which, IMHO would be cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. Having been in a position of trying to hire engineers in this market, the AeroFS experience is spot on.

And yes, we should completely get rid of L-1. I agree that it is one channel that is exploited by the body shops.

Samza can run on a Hadoop 2 cluster using YARN. As far as I know, there is no other connection to Hadoop or HBase.

This is an unfortunate display of bad judgement by all parties concerned.

The disgruntled employee, even if he had not signed an NDA, did something fairly stupid and verboten -- namely, he bad-mouthed a former employer and ex-colleagues. The (tech) world is small and such public displays of indiscretions always come back to bite you.

Yishan Wong had a lot more to lose IMHO by engaging in this manner with the ex-employee in a public forum. He risks the reputation of his company and his own personal brand. Based on Yishan's writings that I've read, I found him to be a thoughtful manager who seemed ready to make the jump to executive cadre. I'd have expected a more mature reaction and ideally not a public one. No matter, we all have lapses of judgement -- hope that Yishan is getting appropriate counsel from more experienced executives and is able to defuse the situation without more damage -- reputational or otherwise.

The one question no one seems to be asking is how much of PayPal's revenue is due to transactions on eBay. I suspect that it is the majority. If that's the case, then with the spinoff, it would be in eBay's interest to make all other types of payments equally attractive on its site -- not so good for PayPal, I'd think.

Perhaps I am missing something, but color me skeptical... immutable on-disk structures essentially means that you have to perform run-time compactions on every query... unless your in-memory representation is the cache, in which case you have to worry about durability.

I would say that a technical interview consisting of coding questions that test data structures and algorithms is about as standard as you can get. True that some interviewers will turn this into a hazing ritual, but hopefully there's some feedback mechanism by which that behavior can be discouraged -- a few ideas would be to have shadow interviewers or allowing candidates to submit feedback about the interview content and process etc.

IMHO, the ideal technical interview would be one where the interviewer is able to dig in deep into the candidate's experience and able to ask intelligent questions that reveal the candidate's technical depth. But this requires very strong interviewing skills as well as an appropriate technical background on part of the interviewer -- this will not scale.

The "audition project" is a non-starter for the reasons you mentioned and as you correctly point out, we have no evidence that it works in the large.

So back we are to the flawed coding interview. Like some wag said about democracy: it's a shitty system, but there's nothing better.

Did I read correctly that you have to sign up for a Gold Support Package @ $400 / month before you have access to GCE?

Am I the only one who thought that this article was tongue-in-cheek? I mean, who seriously advocates for such a dystopian world? It has to be ironic!

So the objection to JSON comes down to a couple of things: no comments and fragility in face of a trailing comma. I wonder if the right thing though would be to fix JSON (maybe even call it something else) rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Personally, of course, I think we should just use a slightly modified version of s-exprs which would be easier to parse.

(:keyword value)

where value can be an atom, list of atoms or a list of keyword value pairs. Comments could follow the Lisp convention and start with semi-colon and end with newline. Only 5 characters to escape, namely, '(', ')', ':', ' ' and ';'.

Well, obnoxious may be too strong, but it is definitely ironic and self-unaware (or should that be un-self-aware?)

Yes, but it strikes me that most of the arguments for increasing or even eliminating quotas for skilled immigrants can also be viewed as a variant of the feudal attitude. After all the arguments boil down to: "let the skilled immigrants in or the jobs will move overseas." So in the end it is about preserving one's high wages or geographic locality of jobs.

BTW I am completely pro-immigration, so don't take this as a slam against immigration. My ideal world would be where geography is irrelevant as far as jobs go, which should naturally normalize wages across the world -- no more need to migrate for economic reasons. Since that is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future, the question is do we choose jobs or wages.

Regardless of which side of the fence one falls on, three things need to be fixed:

1. Do not tie the H-1B to the employer 2. Allow spouses of H-1B holders to seek employment 3. The H-1B has no country quota, so remove the country quota for employment based green cards

IMHO, Java combines the worst of statically typed and dynamically typed programming languages. To paraphrase Rob Pike, programming in Java is like dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's in a fairly complex contract but at runtime, the contract can be overridden by dynamic classloading. So you do not get the efficiency of a statically typed language (because the compiler cannot make certain assumptions about the types / classes) nor do you get the expressiveness of a dynamically typed language.

In the case of DI, I would observe that no programs in other languages seem to require or even use this pattern. If you need to implement LGPL at the language level, a better abstraction is modules with contracts... or even better a proper metaobject protocol a la Lisp.

I feel compelled to point out that most of the examples in the article are free speech that happens to (gratuitously in most cases) piss off the minorities. Notable for their absence are transgressions against authorities -- e.g. the sort of vicious recriminations against whistleblowers whose free speech rights are for naught when they hurt the powers that be. Assange nailed it -- free speech is tolerated only so long as it does not interfere with the interests of the power structure. The moment it does, it will be swiftly dealt with -- under one guise or the other.

Somewhat disappointed in this piece from Turley, who's otherwise quite nuanced.

Besides relevancy, another problem for Facebook and Twitter ads is that to be successful, the ads should not degrade the user experience. Speaking just for myself, promoted stories or tweets definitely feel like a degradation of user experience even if I understand why they do it.

This just begs the question -- how difficult is it to do a reasonable job of detecting bots before passing through the "click"? If it is really hard to do during the request processing, surely it is not hard to do before billing?