programmertote

Just one data point to add -- the small firm (~150 ppl) I'm currently working at recently laid off 25 people. The reasoning was there are dark clouds in the horizon in the housing market (the company is related to real estate btw).

Not from my experience. I've worked with all three of them. If one can stick with the web UI to provision permissions and the permissions required are simple/straightforward, Google Cloud (again, this is my personal opinion, so please take it with a grain of salt) is the most usable among the three.

BUT all three of them (AWS, Azure and GCP) have pros and cons, so you just have to spend a good amount of time learning their quirks.

I've been using Windows since 95, and I dislike the fact that Windows nowadays hide a lot of options in context menu. That means I almost always have to click on 'Show more options' to do what I need. Also, Windows Explorer is laggier and it feels like they just slapped a web-page like UI on top of an existing (legacy) code base. I feel like Microsoft hired a bunch of UX/UI designers who never properly learned the principles of UI and try to do the right (logical) thing for the users.

With people talking about ads and such, I'm reluctant to get a new computer with Windows 11.

I generally agree with your thoughts.

I am also concerned about couple of important things: human skill erosion (a lot of new devs who use AI might not bother to learn the basics that can make a difference in production/performance, security, etc.), and human laziness (and thus, gradually growing the habit to trust/rely on AI's output entirely).

> Fabric feels like a rebrand of existing Azure services, plus a few new beta services that Microsoft is aggressively selling to their customers as fully baked

Couldn't agree more. To me, Synapse and Data Factory (ADF) are somewhat overlapping services too (sure Synapse can do some stuff like running SQL against blob storage files). I wonder what would happen to Synapse and ADF when Fabric becomes fully functional. I hope they don't kill ADF though.

I looked at Fabric a year ago and you're right about it being expensive. That's part of the reason (another being that most of it was just in experimental state at that time) I decided to not use it for production. I'll review it again when MS finalized most of the features, and when (hopefully) they reduce the pricing.

I have no doubt that a lot of garden-variety diagnoses and treatments can be done by an AI system that is fine-tuned and vetted to accomplish the task. I recently had to pay $93 to have a virtual session with a physician to get prescription for a cough syrup, which I already knew what to take before talking to her because I did some research/reading. Some may argue, "Doctors studied years in med school and you shouldn't trust Google more than them", but knowing human's fallibility and knowing that a lot of doctors do look things up on places like https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/solutions/uptodate to refresh/reaffirm their knowledge, I'd argue that if we are willing to take the risk, why shouldn't we be allowed to take that risk on our own? Why do I have to pay $93 (on top of the cough syrup that costed ~$44) just so that the doctor can see me on Zoom for less than 5 mins and submit an order for the med?

With the healthcare prices increasing at the breakneck speed, I am sure AI will take more and more role in diagnosing and treating people's common illnesses, and hopefully (doubt it), the some of that savings will be transferred to the patients.

P.S. In contrast to the US system, in my home city (Rangoon, Burma/Myanmar), I have multiple clinics near my home and a couple of pharmacy within two bus stops distance. I can either go buy most of the medications I need from the pharmacy (without prescription) and take them on my own (why am I not allowed to take that risk?) OR I can go see a doctor at one of these clinics to confirm my diagnosis, pay him/her $10-$20 for the visit, and then head down to the pharmacy to buy the medication. Of course, some of the medications that include opioids will only be sold to me with the doctor's prescription, but a good number of other meds are available as long as I can afford them.

I had an interview with a senior data engineering candidate and we were talking about how expensive Databricks can get. :D I set up specific budget alerts in Azure just for Databricks resources in DEV and PROD environments.

Agree with all you've noted. I'd also add that 'Exit'/'Close' buttons sometimes don't work (I use Firefox btw). Worse, you have to click so many different buttons to buy just one index fund.

In contrast, I can do all that in one pop-up/side panel in Fidelity or Charles Schwab. I have been a long time user of Vanguard (almost two decades) and I wish they revert to their old web UI, which is informative and simple enough to get all the jobs I need to do in an efficient manner.

That's true. I currently work for a boutique real estate consulting firm. A senior guy, who has been working with Census-sourced data for two decades or more AND has good sources within the Census bureau--of the firm told me that Census department is considering of stopping some survey data (some sections of American Community Survey or some sort is what I recall as an example he used; but please don't quote me on that) due to lack of sufficient budget.

One trivia that I learned: some parts of the Census building permits data is collected in the old fashioned way via mail. The Census bureau has to consolidate these disparate sources of building permits from 3100+ counties and deliver monthly, annual revised monthly, annual summary values. It's kind of labor intensive and error prone (and thus, revised data is released once a year) to collect.

I didn't downvote your comment above. But I think you might be interested to watch this one (of course, the video is made by a Canadian YouTuber, but I think he can back up his claims in the video from what I observe): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZvDhayPHxs&t=471s

I unfortunately don't know much other than knowing that SOME community colleges [ like this: https://www.hccfl.edu/academics/subjects/engineering/electro... ] offer intro classes (you need to know some calculus and if you are into robotics, very likely need to use SOME of linear algebra) related to EE/ME.

You may find some YouTube channels that teaches you ways to play with breadboard, but again, like I said, it (playing around with "cool/fun" toys) is different than taking classes required to finish a four-year degree.

Best wishes for your learning journey!

Before you go full in on mechanical (ME)/electrical engineering (EE), I'd suggest you to try taking a course or two on it. For me personally, EE was a challenge and although I aspired myself to be a conventional engineer (either aerospace or electrical engineer), I ended up doing software/programming because EE was simply a subject I cannot master during college courses. If I had enough time in college (I was working 20 hrs part time and taking four other courses--was a greedy mistake of mine), maybe I'd have enjoyed my EE courses a bit more? Who knows?!

Just my two cents as a mid-40 years old (maybe I'm jaded), and don't take it the wrong way. I just don't want you to go fully commit to ME or EE without having tried a tiny bit of the college courses. Sometimes, we have ideals that we want to do, but when we actually go and do them full time, we realize we don't enjoy that activity as much as dreaming about the idealized version of such activity...

Not relevant to what you are discussing related to attention to detail (which I agree with).

This is my imaginary scenario -- if Steve Jobs were to tell me in a meeting, "I see air bubbles coming out of the phone", I (as an engineer) would reply to him, "Dude, that air is carrying excess heat out of the phone via convection. If you don't leave any space in between hot electronic components, your phone will be a toaster or a clothes iron".

When I read "cracks superbug problem", I thought AI solved how to kill superbugs. From reading the article, it seems like AI suggested a few hypotheses and one of which is similar to what the researcher thought of. So in a way, it hasn't cracked the problem although it helped in forming ONE of the hypotheses, which needs to be tested in experiments(?)

Just want to make sure I'm understanding what's written in the article accurately.

That is what people like trump don't understand (not surprising). Instead of gradually rebuilding the manufacturing capabilities of the US while supporting essential industries (like steel production) to create competition, they think slapping tariff will magically make the domestic manufacturing come back. Like you said, the US manufacturers will just ride along the coattails of tariffs instead of trying to be competitive and/or expand their production (they have no incentive to do so).

Again, knowing how short-sighted the US politicians and the society as a whole (e.g., look at how a majority of corps only care about short-term/quarterly profit) have become, it is not surprising but saddening to observe (because I have been living in the US for a bit over two decades and cannot move back to my home country, which is, at the moment, riddle with civil war).

>Crash a wedding. You are not a nuisance; you are the celebrity guest! ... They will usually feel honored. You can offer the newlyweds a small token gift of cash if you want. You will be obliged to dance. Take photos of them; they will take photos of you. It will make your day and theirs. (I’ve crashed a wedding in most of the countries I have visited.)

That will only work if a white tourist wedding crashes in a poor country. That will not work if I (as a brown-colored southeast asian) do it.

Not disagreeing with you. But the OPM site data seems to be only for headcount, and it probably can be found by those who know how to deep dive on government sites?

Having said that, I am very much worried about the direction the US is heading. I came to the US for college and eventually end up being a permanent resident. My home country, Myanmar (Burma), has been ruled by military dictatorship for decades, and I see a lot of parallels in terms of disregard for rule of law; cult of personality; silencing free speech and journalists/reporting agencies that disagree with your point of view; etc. Add musk's chaotic way of meddling with the (albeit inefficient) government machine, not looking good at all.

Besides the US vs. China wage differences, it is easier to source things locally and iterate quickly. At least that is what I read as one of the advantages Chinese car manufacturers have.

Can you share a bit more? I grew up in a city and never knew the details of the farms (and interested). Thank you.

Vanguard's website revamp in the past three years was disappointing because in the past, I can visit just one (landing) page and get almost all of the info I need about my holdings + actions I could take on them and my accounts. Now, I have to click through a myriad of pages to do what I want. Plus, in Firefox browser at least, if you want to 'Exit' the order and some other pages, it simply doesn't work, so I have to type the 'vanguard.com' in the browser's URL field and ping it again.

This is an example of not breaking what was not broken (or at least, keep most of what was useful instead of replacing everything with "new and cool" stuff just because <no reason?>).

Whenever I see posts from famous people touted on Hacker News and Reddit, I always remind myself about this favorite quote of mine from Buddha (I'm a former Buddhist-turned-atheist, but I still agree with a few thinking and concepts from Buddhism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesamutti_Sutta

> Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing (anussava), nor upon tradition (paramparā), nor upon rumor (itikirā), nor upon what is in a scripture (piṭaka-sampadāna) nor upon surmise (takka-hetu), nor upon an axiom (naya-hetu), nor upon specious reasoning (ākāra-parivitakka), nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over (diṭṭhi-nijjhān-akkh-antiyā), nor upon another's seeming ability (bhabba-rūpatāya), nor upon the consideration 'The monk is our teacher (samaṇo no garū)' Kalamas, when you yourselves know 'These things are good; these things are not blameable; these things are praised by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness,' enter on and abide in them.

The 'brain drain' (as you refer to it) stems from intelligent/motivated grads in the US for the last two decades (at least) pursuing more lucrative fields like finance and adtech (re: Google, Facebook). Or some pursue management route (attending big MBA schools and switching to management roles where they climb corporate ladder). In other words, there are not a lot of college/grad students who want to pursue traditional engineering routes in the US.

I myself was an electrical engineering (EE) major until I switched to computer science in my third (junior) year of college because like a friend of mine at the time told me, "<my name>, if you don't major in computer science, you will not be able to find a job easily after graduation". He was right. All of my former college friends in EE ended up pursuing programming jobs (a few of them now works for FAANG; I used to work for one but left a year ago due to RTO). That is why the US has no sufficient personnel to do traditional engineering jobs and we have shipped off a lot of those to foreign countries.

A unique (and IMO, correct) way to put it.

I personally don't want to have a kid of my own blood. But I want to adopt one or two and maybe foster a few IF I become financially capable, which is probably a decade or so away.

I do believe that having a kid of your own in this day and age (esp. when you are working day job and depending on that job for healthcare, housing, etc.) is unfair for the kid who will join you in your life. Sure you'll love him/her, but the reality is the kid will have to grind (again, assuming that you are not a multi-millionaire) when s/he reaches certain age. The best use of our resources, when we accumulate a good amount of wealth to sustain ourselves and have a bit more extra to spare, is to adopt/foster or do something philanthropic entirely (so many homeless, sick, hungry people that you can help).

As a fan of Adventures of the Gummi Bears cartoon series, I was searching for some cartoon drawings on the internet and stumbled upon this website, which brought me back to late 1990s, early 2000s style of web pages. I hope some HN folks might find it nostalgic. :)

> Read the Wall Street analyses from the middle of last year on AMD being a big Nvidia competitor, then read the posts here this week about how AMD engineers don't have boards to fix bugs. "We the customer had to mail the AMD engineer a spare board to fix the bug". The cobbler's children wear no shoes at AMD. Then go read some Wall Street report about the stiff competition Nvidia faces from AMD. The information is here, not in the Wall Street analysis report by people who know less than me about how transformers work.

Are you saying that AMD will not be a serious competitor to NVIDIA?

Amazon also likes to tout their way of doing things as Amazon's peculiar culture. Some practices like reading the design proposal doc before starting the discussion about it looks right in general sense, but it usually turns out that almost all people who are invited to these meetings don't actually read that doc (instead are busy working on their tasks) or don't really have the depth to understand what's written in the doc in 15-30 mins. So what ends up happening is a lot of these meetings end up being dominated by whoever is the top dog (usually the guy with higher level in the room) in that meeting and the rest of the attendees end up listening to his/her opinion without much challenge (because most are intent on just getting out of that meeting).

The whole 2+ years I was there (left because of 3-days RTO), I felt like it was a cult and some people seem to drink the kool-aid (or they are good at pretending to like the culture), but some like me, who are more skeptical, don't.

Just speaking from my experience -- if the company is a big corp, usually the wages follow average market rates (I was paid market average wage in a top advertising corp in the world and I got my green card there in 6-7 years). Bureau of Labor Statistics puts out average market rates for each job category and the H1B sponsor has to match or pay above that to get the H1B application approved. I was also checking out my market rates (i.e., applying for other companies that allows H1B transfer) constantly during my H1B time because I can move to another job if my current company was paying me lower than average wages.

On the other hand, for some shady companies that are set up as contract shops, then I'd not be surprised if the wages are lower than average market rate, but I have never worked at one, so I might be misleading by even mentioning this here.

That's a typical process that companies, who want to sponsor green card to their internal employee, are required to do. They have to find an equally-skilled US citizen by posting jobs publicly for X amount of time. Then after they have collected applications, they "review" and reject them; use that as an evidence in filing the green card for the internal employee.

It is a broken/absurd rule and only puts more work to everyone involved (not just the applicants, the HR; the internal employee and his/her manager, who usually has to get involved in that process). The process itself is also relatively expensive (cost ~$10K+ for attorney fees; documentation and USCIS application fees). I know because I had to go through that asinine process years ago when my ex-employer (big corporation) sponsored my green card.

"Infinite Growth Forever," - that onion-y sign off made me laugh.