expathacker

> Blue collar jobs are more rewarding and the work environment can be better for all the reasons you described but the money is worth it IMO. If the money were the same I'd hand in my two weeks and get my welding certs.

A few years back a large series of personal tragedies hit me at once which coincided with being screwed over at a job. I decided to leave tech for a while, and spent a few months in Portland becoming a certified bicycle mechanic & frame welder.

This lead to me starting a bicycle company building very solid bikes for obese riders (like myself) who were afraid to ride on the roads. I lost many thousands of dollars and had to go back to software for the financial aspects, but I have never had as much joy and satisfaction in tech as I did building bicycles.

> (B) Brutalism is often associated with left-wing / communist large-scale social engineering, and the left reflexively celebrates anything done by the left. (Aside, the association of brutalism with the left is historically quite false, e.g. people like Le Corbusier didn't meet a dictator he didn't like.) So where brutalism is celebrated by somebody who's explicitly and self-consciously political, it's a Gramscian hegemonic strategy [1]. An example of such a writer is Owen Hatherley [2].

Huh, quite an interesting take. On the contrary, I associate an appreciation of brutalism with those who post staunch free-market capitalist comments.

I have many taken architectural tours in Bucaresti, Plovdiv, Sofia, Skopje, Moldova, Tbilisi, Beograd, Kiev, and Moscow. Unanimously, the tour-guides presented these buildings with disdain for their aesthetics and association with authoritarianism. All of the tour-guides were definitely left/liberal-leaning, some to the point of dreadlocks and Che Guevara hats. (Thanks for the links, by the way, I had never heard of Own Hatherly before!).

What's more interesting to me, is why HN is so attracted to Brutalism? Is it a sense of minimalist aesthetic, an expectation of structural integrity, the economics of minimalism, a detachment from previous architectural genres, or perhaps an affinity for the writings of Ayn Rand (whose characters espouse the virtues of Brutalism, and whose book, "The Fountainhead" was about a brutalist architect).

I spend a lot of time exploring and studying music in former Yugoslav countries, and while I find the Brutalism fascinating in it's relationship to Soviet/Yugoslav poverty & austerity, beauty is not a word I would ever use positively in the same sentence.

Location: Istanbul (UTC+03:00)

Citizenship: US

Remote: Only (Up to 15% travel)

Willing to relocate: Yes, to either Paris, Barcelona, Copenhagen, or Zurich, and not until late 2019.

Technologies: Chef, Puppet, AWS, Ansible, Salt, Grafana, ELK, Logz, Fluentd, Jenkins, GCP, Terraform

CV: https://linkedin.com/in/nomadicengineer | https://www.visualcv.com/2n3kxtvvoro

Email: cruftyold@gmail.com

10+ deployments per day from Velocity 2009. It was really a pivotal talk in the early days of the DevOps movement

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdOe18KhtT4

Fixing Twitter: Improving the Performance and Scalability of the World's Most Popular Micro-blogging Site by John Adams (then from Twitter)at Velocity 2009 (Velocity 2009 was really an incredibly pivotal and influential conference in the DevOps movement).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X_ed6GPofQ&t=26s

Bootstrapping an Infrastructure by Steve Traugott at Lisa 1998. I don't know of any videos of the talk, but the related paper eventually lead to Puppet and the beginning of the modern configuration management software

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Bootstrapping-an-Infra...

There is no talent shortage by Andrew Schaefer, co-founder of Puppet from Velocity NYC 2013.

https://vimeo.com/75670082

(edited for consistant formatting)

Not the most exciting, or revealing of leaks. Less interesting, then, say, their leaks of Turkish dessert recipes[0]. Great attempt at clickbait though!

Compare the locations with https://www.internetexchangemap.com/ and you'll see that most of these are just the natural locations for datacenters. Most of these locations are within a few kilometers, sometimes within a few hundred meters, of other commercial datacenters.

They generally fall within: Close to major population and finance centers with affordable power, abundant fiber, and local/state governments willing to give subsidies... like every other datacenter.

0. https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/757649656650297345

For those of you reading these things thinking, "Oh, I don't know anybody who has had this happen to them. This could never happen to me or anybody I know".

11 years ago, Steven Fountain, a friend of mine, a programmer / systems administrator I met when I was working at Napster who suffered from schizophrenia was shot to death by police in Campbell, California. He had called the police in a moment of confusion and despair.

I had just interviewed him for a job at a company where I was working two weeks earlier, and was trying to convince my boss to hire him even though he was quirky, not quite realizing how bad his emotional state was until talking to his ex-gf at the funeral.

http://www.mydeathspace.com/article/2007/11/09/Steven_Founta...

Edited for clarity and date accuracy

I grew up in Michigan, and hated it until a few years ago when my sister moved to Grand Rapids. GRR has some of the best veggie/vegan food I've had in the world, a strong arts scene and an equally vibrant underground music scene.

Ann Arbor is also quite fantastic. I study middle-eastern percussion, and Ann Arbor is a hub for my musical world. Every time I visit family in Michigan I take a couple of days to play house parties, go to concerts, take lessons, and jam. The Arabic/Turkish music scene there is very vibrant, and the city itself is unexpectedly diverse for the midwest.

The cost of living in Michigan is lower than in some third world countries. I bought my mother a house in Grand Rapids, in cash, for less than 25% of what it would have cost me for a down-payment on a 750 ft^2 condo in a really bad neighborhood in San Francisco.

The weather, however, is the deal-closer for me. Winters are pretty miserable.

(edited for clarity and punctuation)

I love OS X, but nowadays I can't stand Apple's hardware.

Living outside of the US, using Mac products purchased in the US means you have to go to third-party repair shops. Last week I took my 1-year old, $2,500 MBP to an Apple store in Istanbul, only to find out that Applecare doesn't work here, and a replacement screen would cost me $650 (thanks to super high import taxes). Tomorrow I'm taking it to a 3rd-party repair shop where the repair, with what is likely a counterfeit or stolen screen, will cost $400. I'm considering just buying a used Dell instead, but I hate Linux on the desktop.

If you're speaking about the federal gas tax which goes to the Highway Trust Fund[1], it's currently $0.184 per gallon of petrol and $0.244 per gallon of diesel.

There are also state gasoline taxes, vehicle weight fees (for commercial interstate trucks) registration fees, and tolls[2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Trust_Fund 2. https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/07/us-transporta...

Less than 3 seconds on google says otherwise. Ignoring the hundreds of near-misses, here's a handful of actual collisions.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-36067591

https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/investigation-report-i... international-airport-quebec-674056663.html

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-14/drone-ope...

https://petapixel.com/2018/02/16/drone-causes-aircraft-crash...

> From what I understand at the moment the problem is that many police precincts in the US cannot afford them (since they don't get enough funding -- you need to hire people to sort through the footage as well as licensing the hardware and software from Tazer and so on).

This has little to do with taxes and more to do with priorities. Thanks to civil asset forfeiture the money is absolutely there for many police forces, but they would need to prioritize this over the acquisition of armored tanks and other militarization programs.

Check out Victor Wooten's Ted Talk on thinking about music as a language. He compares learning music with learning to talk. The general premise: "Nobody waits until you're an expert in language before being allowed to speak, why are you expected to be a master before you can make music with other musicians?".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zvjW9arAZ0

Why? This was a decade ago, and they were basically children when it happened. The product itself is a fine product and I've used it with about 35 consulting customers since, there aren't too many other options, and none of them are as good as PagerDuty.

Emotionally detaching. I was a workaholic from age 16 until 33 and this was my primary identity. I used to always be proud of the work I did, no matter how lame the company or how many times I was screwed over. Then one day my father died, and I was fired from a company who I truly believed in and for whom I had sacrificed.

This sounds cynical, but it's really peaceful. With the emotional energy and sheer time saved I am able to cultivate strong relationships, passionate devote myself to music, be a better father/husband/son, discover new interests that have nothing to do with the internet.

I frequently espouse the virtues of a "Fuck you, pay me" work attitude, and I recommend everybody examine their relationship with their careers and ask themselves if on their deathbed they will wish they had worked more.

Ugh, I shouldn't post while 1/2 awake on 12 hour flights. PagerDuty fired me before I was vested. I was 1/2 evangelist, and 1/2 "DevOps" but took the 50% pay cut so that I could focus more on evangelism, I don't really like tech work anymore, I don't feel like my contribution is significant enough just being a grunt. During AWS Re:invent I signed us some major customers, but we had a bad outage, so they fired me for the AWS outage. Really. I think it was an excuse, and pg, or some other YC advisor told them to fire me and take back the stock options. After I pointed out how jacked up this was, they offered to bring me back as a contract evangelist, but I hold grudges.

I'm hoping that this extra access to Apple's extensive music collection will make this usable for music other than what you would hear on MTV or the classic rock station. The potential of the application is great, but as somebody with limited interest in pop, I find myself lacking for a way to identify new music discoveries.

Well, to be a little bit pedantic, the USA doesn't have a democracy either, we have a representative republic.

You're speculating as to the state of Russia's democracy. Have you any specific proof of your allegations? I'm guessing your proof lays primarily with that which is published in the media, and the strong statements / research which come out of NATO and other anti-Russian establishments?

I can't believe people would vote for Trump, but let's face it, they did because they believed his economy promises. I can't believe people voted for Putin, but Russia's economy has flourished under his reign, before him, people literally starved to death. I can't believe people vote for Erdogan, but Türkiye's economy is magnitudes stronger and fairer than it was before the AKP reign. Perhaps these democracies are working as intended, and people just cast short-sighted, greed-driven votes?

The mere act of asking this question makes your speculation more valid than mine, since I have never paid a moment's interest to the going-ons of the ML market. Maybe? Maybe not?

> In the unlikely event equity is worth anything, converting it to cold hard cash is not always straight forward.

People rarely seem to understand this. A successful exit doesn't necessarily mean employees will get paid. A friend experienced this when Google bought the start-up he had been at for 2 years. Employees had to wait a year for an earn-out period. They had to re-interview for their positions, and fired if they didn't meet Google's impossibly high standards.

(edited to clean-up a grammatical error)

"Cash Rules Everything Around Me." -- Wu-Tang Clan.

I'm old and jaded, but salary should be your primary metric. Stock options are worthless. I took a 50% cut at PagerDuty (YC10) for 2% of the stock options, they're now worth $1bn+ and screwed me pretty hard, the day after my father died. They didn't even offer any severance pay until I pointed out how much damage I could do to their reputation, then they gave me a week. Start-ups, especially run by new founders, don't know how to treat people humanely. Thanks guys. Since then my attitude is, "Fuck you, pay me". You will not win the start-up lottery. If they don't offer an 83(b) election, you could end up in the red if they do exist. This happened frequently in 2001, it even lead to several infamous suicides.[1]

Are you 200% sure you will last the 3/6 month signing-bonus waiting period? If not you could end up with a liability greater than the value of the bonus. I had this when when a start-up outsourced ops to LoudCloud. They contested our unemployment claim and I spent $3k in legal fees fighting them, in the middle of the start-up recession.

Start-ups will not invest in you as an employee, and will drop you without a second thought. Expect to spend all of your free time learning new skills just so you don't get fired.

[1] https://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=17123680

(edited for spacing, and to add the anecdote about severance pay)

Tangenitally, I'm curious about the unemployment insurance. What does it cover? In the United States, unemployment insurance is compulsory for employers, but it only covers two specific cases: laid-off due to inability to pay salary, laid-off due to your skills no longer being required. Quitting / being fired / getting sick puts you out on the street. Is it the same in Europe?

To one-up themselves, perhaps Delta could also scan faces immediately upon arrival, with a focus on sentiment analysis to get an idea as to how satisfied their customers are at the end of the trip?

Will we have a hipster fad of "Retro-brutalism"?

It's been a long time, but somewhere I voted, maybe California or Michigan, but somewhere I voted gave me a real receipt. It had a bar-code that was tied not to my identity, but to my ballot itself.

The "receipt" was a perforated piece of paper with a barcode. The votes were cast by connecting lines, and the right half of that line crossed the perforation lines, and was mine to keep. This seemed like a reasonable system, and I could then verify that my vote was counted.

As for voter intimidation, if we really believe that our democracy is worth killing and dying for in foreign wars, then it would logically follow that we must accept the risk of demanding accountability domestically.

I do not know, do you? I'm guessing that neither of us have observed their election process in person, or are experts in the fairness of their, or any other democratic process. If you are, please school me, I'm a willing student.

I am a US citizen, my birth nation has "elected" two presidents who failed to win the popular vote. 2% of my fellow citizens are unable to vote due to felony convictions. On top of this, the practice known as gerrymandering is essentially carte blanche for a state's ruling power to ensure continuous victories due to the complicated nature of an inconsistent federalist voting system.

Seeing as Russia has been a democracy for 25 years, isn't this just absolving the Russian populace of any guilt or responsibility over their choice in government, or the actions of said government?

Could it be that the "greatest generation" were just really bad parents? The men came back from WW2, and then again Korea, completely broken with PTSD"?

The boomers didn't deal with nearly as much war as their parents. Violent crime peaked exactly 18 years after Roe vs Wade. An entire generation was allowed to wait until they were ready to be intentional parents rather than accidental.

I used to live 2 blocks from Delancey. I had them move me into my apartment, move me out, hired them for two office moves, and they were the labor for the SF-end of a significant datacenter move. Great guys, hard workers. The professionalism at the cafe is almost military, I had breakfast there almost every morning for 2 years. It's part of the reason I'm so fat.

Sure .. As long as everybody who voted takes their receipt, and is willing to go to the government and demand proof that their vote was counted. Let's see, in the USA you get 54% voter turn-out .. a re-count requiring those receipts should get what, 15, maybe 20% of those voters to participate?

There. No.