ocius

I have anecdotal evidence that at least a part of this is due to Musk's behaviour. My father is in charge of the car fleet for a large German company, and they have decided to exclude Tesla from their fleet because of Musk's recent behaviour. At the same time, they have also decided to go full electric for the entire fleet (no hybrid either).

Installments of this type are not very helpful, as they proliferate the notion that the so called "debt" of a nation in its own currency has to be repaid or is in any way bad. The goal of a nation with a sovereign currency should be to keep prices stable while advancing wellbeing in general. Often, this means spending new money, which is framed as debt and said to increase inflation. In reality, new "debt" can both increase or decrease inflation, depending on how the money is spent. There is no direct correlation between increasing the pool of money and inflation. If money is spent on a product that currently has low demand due to a crisis, prices won't be increased and there won't be inflation. If money is spent on a product with high demand, then prices will increase and inflation will worsen. Example: after COVID, construction was down 30% in Germany. Government could have stepped in and spent new money to use the available labour, but instead it remained unused. This way, the labour went to waste, and construction companies, like many other companies, had to charge more for the same services because there was less demand in total, which causes inflation.

Just as a side note because you mentioned it in relation to DOGE: the US government cannot go bankrupt in its own currency. As long as prices are kept in check, there is no reason not to create more money. The fact that the US has to pay interest on it doesn't change that. If the government decides to spend more money than it takes in, the money is simply created by the central bank (through the detour of bonds). If you are interested, read up on Keynesian economics and Modern Monetary Theory.

We're expecting the amount of data to double every year for the next couple of years. That would require a lot of storage hardware and maintenance cost, don't you think?

We are expecting the amount of data to at least double every year for the next couple of years. That would mean that in 5 years, we'd have to manage more than 500 16 TiB hard drives in our office :D

We don't really have that many constraints, despite that it should be cost efficient and save us from loosing all our data.

Some good points! There are, however, also changes that you do not want to propagate to your teammates or production unless you are 100% sure that they are the final solution to the problem you are trying to solve. Sometimes, the complexity of a problem is so high that you have to experiment with the code.

When those changes include non-reversible database migrations, for example, it is better not to integrate that code into "mainline" before you've settled on a specific implementation.

Good point. You are not dependent on Cloudflare, though, you can use other similar services or open the port on your router if it supports it. And if you pay for it, you can get an SLA so that they can't mess with you by terminating your project.

I would still consider it very nice of them to offer this free service that let's you break free from your dynamic IP, crappy router and at the same time giving you protection that you couldn't set up yourself.

I think many people just want to be able to make their device available from the internet - this type of liberty is not really important for many people.

Depending on your write load, the SD card could become a problem, but you could mount a USB SSD. You can even boot from a USB SSD now (https://www.makeuseof.com/how-to-boot-raspberry-pi-ssd-perma...)

I can recommend the Rasperry Pi for self-hosting, if you pick one of the more recent models with more RAM (3 or 4 with 4GB of RAM at least). You just need to keep in mind that the availability of your website is not quite as good as if you were hosting in a datacenter.

Regarding security: you might want to have a look at cloudflared. This is a (free for small projects) service by Cloudflare where your server (Raspberry Pi) connects to cloudflare, and all HTTP traffic is proxied through Cloudflare. This has multiple advantages:

- you don't need to open a port on your router that forwards to your Pi, which is good for security and simplicity (some routers don't even have this option)

- you get all the cloudflare protection with the click of a button, including HTTPS with automatic Cloudflare certificates, DDoS protection, etc

- you don't need DynDNS to point to your dynamically changing IP

Python is simpler than Java. This might not be a very important factor in software engineering of large products, but it is very important for prototyping.

Also, a lot of research in ML is done in Python, and there are quite a lot of startups doing ML, so Python is a natural choice. Same for data science.

Really impressive! World-spanning infrastructure. Beautiful map, also.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (http://www.hpmor.com), also available as podcast (https://hpmorpodcast.com)

A Harry Potter fan-fiction where Harry is a master of rational thinking and decision making. The plot is incredibly clever and exciting, and at the same time you learn a lot about how to think properly, but also a bit about science in general.

In the first chapters, I find Harry a bit annoying sometimes, but I beg you to ignore that and continue a bit, it gets so good!

"it polluted my search results with geographically relevant search results"

Oh my! Perhaps they also polluted the search with search results relevant to your search term?

If you want to be completely anonymous on the web, use other means of browsing it. You can't visit other websites without them knowing where you come from if you are unprotected.

I would say it's a strength of his that the guests just get to say what they have to say. He always prepares a couple of questions in case the conversation stalls, but other than that, he let's the guest talk about their ideas, instead of sticking to a specific story he wants to cover.

My standpoint is that banning encryption or adding backdoors to it is not a feasible way of attacking this problem. Encryption methods don't stop to exist just because the government declares them illegal. Programs to encrypt messages will stay around and will continue to be used. Even if police set out to find anyone using encryption by spying on their traffic, the traffic could just be hidden as part of legitimate traffic.

But perhaps I'm underestimating the stupidity of criminals - perhaps they'd just stick to unencrypted communication. However, if the usage of Tor for illicit activities is any hint, I'd say that is unlikely.

How would you even ban encrypted communication in practice? It takes only one expert cryptographer who is willing to build a communication platform that encrypts its traffic and hides it as part of legitimate traffic to counter any such law.

Yes, initially you might be able to catch a few bad guys who don't switch to the new service quick enough, but soon enough, all that is left is the ability for police & co. to read private messages of a population that is mostly innocent.

You can't really tell for a Web App whether it'll be faster in JS or Python, but you can definitely expect a Computer Vision application with lots of heavy number crunching to be a lot faster in C++ than in Python. We have actually also made comparisons, and even if you use things like numpy and Python bindings for OpenCV, you won't reach the speed that a C++ application achieves easily without optimization.

We try to limit the amount of languages we use, but we have high performance Computer Vision code that is written in C++, we're interfacing that with Python for simplicity, and a web app in JS. Right tool for the job!

I'm not an expert on auto scaling groups, but we have used the Google Cloud equivalent for a time. The biggest issue for us was that deployment is not as easy. Can you update the software on the ec2 instance without turning it on, for example? With K8s, we can leave the deployment scaled to 0 and just patch the image of the deployment to perform a release while the workers are all shut down. Similarly, we don't have to write code to wait for the workers to finish their current job before we shut them down in order to be replaced by a newer version; this is all managed by K8s, and the configuration for it lives in Git. As others have already pointed out, it is also important for us to remain independent from Google Cloud / AWS.

Our startup has a webapp that acts as a UI for a machine learning application. We have two different types of heavy workloads (ML and something else). The workers for these run on Kubernetes, which makes them easy to scale (which we do a lot, automatically). The app itself doesn't run on Kubernetes yet (simple VM). It would be better if it did, though! We keep building a lot of functionality ourselves (e.g. deployment without downtime) that would be easier with K8s. I think what you really want to avoid is Microservices, not K8s. K8s gives you many advantages, such as the entire config in Git, containerized workloads, deploy management, etc., which sooner or later, you'll find yourself wanting. Depending on how you get started, the learning curve can be steep, and some of the tools are not mature but supposedly used by everyone (ArgoCD for deployment?).

I'm a Software Engineer from Germany, living in Switzerland and Germany.

Working in tech you'll have more than enough to live a very good life in Germany. While the absolute amount may not be as much as in the US, the amount relative to the average person will still be very good, particularly if you choose to live in the countryside, but also if you choose to live in the city.

Quality of life is very similar to Amsterdam / Netherlands, so you don't have to expect huge differences there. Bavaria is a bit more on the traditional side, and you might actually notice that (e.g. shops close very early / not at all on Sundays). While shops in Germany are generally closed on Sundays, they are open late in many of the other states (10pm, or even 12pm in the cities).

Career prospects are good to very good, particularly in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg (neighboring states), which are the most prosperous states in Germany. In the countryside, you may have to resort to Home Office or working in a Mittelstand Unternehmen, though. Most larger cities have a small startup culture if that is your thing.

For comparison: 14 or 15 killings by police in Germany in 2019 (depending on the source). Germany has ~80 million inhabitants, compared to the ~330 million in the US, so you'd expect roughly 60 killings by police in the US if the level of violence was similar.

The English Wikipedia entry lists the circumstances for each killing by German police forces: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...

The German version talks of 15 killings for 2019.