I just read the preface and have to ask... is this heavy on marketing, cheerleading and kool-aid? First the author makes it sound like the Nakamoto paper was sent from the heavens and then this:
> I became obsessed and enthralled, spending 12 or more hours each day glued to a screen, reading, writing, coding, and learning as much as I could. I emerged from this state of fugue, more than 20 pounds lighter from lack of consistent meals, determined to dedicate myself to working on bitcoin.
To me, this seems a little dramatic for what should be a technical topic.
I'm a cryptocurrency enthusiast myself. To be more precise, the talk is ignorant of the history of money as a system of domination, and utopian in that it ignores critical vulnerabilities intrinsic to distributed-consensus currency systems.
That's what prefaces often sound like. It's the author introducing themself and their claim to authority that will make you take their following content seriously. This author is just explaining why they cared so much as to write a book.
there is no marketing etc in this book. it is by far the best book on the topic. it covers only bitcoin, i.e. no etherium/smartcontracts etc, but it does that really well. and in fact all the other blockchains are more or less the same
Why so hateful? What does having autism have to do with this? I don't really like the quoted piece from the preface either, and even if the author has autism, what does it matter? Isn't it more fair to people with autism and more powerful with regards to your dislike to the author to just not like the author based on that you don't like him as a person? That way you don't insult everyone with autism and you insult him more.
Also, your diagnose does not make much sense; you state that the dramatised telling in the preface means that the author has autism? In that case that would mean that people like Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert or in that case most Americans (compared to us reserved Dutch people) would have autism.
On top of this you seem to suggest that you have to have some sort of mental condition to do things 'wrong' (as far as you want to call the preface wrong). What disorder do you have that led you to write cliché as 'clise'? Or did you mean 'sexy young man'?[1]
for the right person, I had the budget to give them a top of the market rate.
We aren't building self driving cars. At the end of the day we are doing basic CRUD.
By "smart developers", I mean can pick up things fast, they don't have to know everything.
I am a big proponent of the Joel "Smart and Get Things Done" filter when it comes to hiring (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid...). My interviews are far more behavioral than "Describe all of the design patterns in the GoF book and write examples on the whiteboard"
Right, a Honda Accord is a nice car to most people and could be interpreted as top of the market.
Now, if your post said for the right person, I had a budget to give them $150k in Austin, TX then we'd be getting somewhere. "top of the market rate" is just too ambiguous in most experiences.
I know my local market fairly well - it's a major metropolitan area that's not on the west coast . I'm still an in the trenches developer, I just have more team lead responsibility.
Yes "top of the market" is $85 an hour as a W2 contractor. Using my rule of thumb - 1800 hour work year when contracting taking into account unpaid holidays, unpaid vacation and sick time, and gap between employment - that's a base pay rate of $153,000. More often than not, there will be more than 40 hours worth of billable work.
I am fairly aggressive about my contract rate when I am contracting, and I would take that in a heartbeat.
So yeah, all of the contractors that report to me make more than I do. For some strange reason, I'm okay with that.
Whoa, where do you live? I live in a cheap-as-hell nowhere mid-sized Midwestern city and $85 for a contractor's... not top of market. Closer to $125, maybe a bit higher. You might get a discount for a long-term gig, but $85'd be a steep discount. You'd pay even more for someone who has actual skills in a rarely-needed (locally) field or specialty (most of those people move to Colorado or get locked up by a handful of large local companies).
[EDIT] Nevermind, saw your post clarifying/emphasizing the W2 angle down below. That's probably about right, then.
You can't compare contractor pay with salaried pay like that due to lack of benefits, etc. You'd have to lop off like $10k for extra taxes and a bunch for healthcare as well (could easily be $10k+). Maybe you know this, but it wasn't immediately clear since you didn't provide your own salary $.
That's why I specified "W2 contractor". As a W2 contractor (as opposed to a 1099 contractor) you work for an agency and they pay the employment side of SS and Medicare.
Of course if you need to pay for family benefits, that's an extra cost, a lot of the contractors I know are either married and get benefits under their spouse or are single and have a relatively cheap high deductible plan. When you work for an agency, you can buy insurance as their employee.
Ah gotcha. As for finding a lot of seemingly qualified programmers who can't pass fizz buzz, yea idk how you get around that. Fortunately for me I work at a big company and can just not do the first round of interviews if I get fed up with it... but as the only person hiring, ugh.
Let me clarify. The hourly rate I was referring to was what the contractor gets. Not what the agency gets. I tell the recruiter and my manager the offer I think we should make the person and let the higher ups negotiate the bill rates the agency will charge the company. I haven't been second guessed yet.
>
techiferous: But remember that there is non-billable work (accounting, etc.) and a 15.3% self-employment tax. [...] Working as a consultant for $175/hour is similar to being employed at $175K/year.
> danssig: Calling that pay rate $175K/yr is beyond conservative.
NOTE: two users here also recommended your equation
> slashcom: $x/hour * 40 hr/wk * 50 wk/yr = 2n1000
The general rule is always "times 2, add 3 zeros"
>
jurjenh: yes, this is generally the rule I use as well, take the hourly rate and double it and add a K (eg $30/hr = $60K) [...] Personally I use an estimate of about 75% efficiency
> rapind: For 75% efficiency I assume you mean 3/4 * 2 * $175 * 1000 = $262,500 / year.
If the idea is that independent small job (less than a year) contracting results in a 50% loss to overhead, then yes, just take hourly rate in thousands. This helps convince people to stop messing about with self-employment and just work for the man.
If you mean how much money is in your bank account after a year of work for one company, contrasting a 1099 to FTE for a regular company, it’s the 2x + 000s formula. Unlike comments above, if you have your own LLC consulting business and run the 1099 payments through that, you can pay less tax as self-employed taking care of your own insurance and benefits.
That might be an age thing. Once you have seniority in either field you gain a lot more free time if you want. Source: Am a software engineer, wife is a physician and we both have plenty of free time.
This is great. I have been looking at Kubernetes for sometime and have struggled with adapting it to our deployment model. A lot of the tools and tutorials want someone to sit and run commands in order to start controllers and worker nodes but that doesn't make sense in our automated environment. What we really want is a way to bake AMIs etc that have everything ready to go and when we do a deployment or scale out it is as simple as starting an instance. This collection of labs lays a lot of that out and I think this is something we can work with.
We have, and as far as we could see it is a command line tool that needs to be run manually. This model doesn't work for us as we scale instances in and out by the dozens throughout the day. I could be missing something but anything that requires command line interaction isn't viable.
For instance, if we see that our worker cluster is has reached some consumed capacity threshold (CPU, memory, etc) then we need to add more worker nodes. The way we do this is via Auto Scaling Groups. Auto Scaling Groups work on launch configs that are essentially an AMI and instance user data. Getting an AMI that just has the Kubernetes stuff that can be started at will and told to join clusters at runtime has not been clear from the documentation I've read.
Thanks, I have looked at this as well. There are a few issues:
- It only scales worker nodes
- It only scales nodes if a pod can't be scheduled. This is too late for us as are requirements are to scale when resource utilization crosses a threshold (ie reserved memory is over 70%).
- It still doesn't solve the baked AMI problem. I may be wrong about this but the AWS docs for CA are lacking. For instance, when does the ASG/launch config get created? Is that something it does or it needs to be done ahead of time? Which AMI does it use? etc.
1) Yes, but I'm not sure why you would want to scale other nodes (I assume you're referring to the masters?)
2) Yes, the cluster-autoscaler will give you more node capacity. If you want to scale Pods on a CPU basis, you can use a Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/run-application/horizontal-...). I believe it now support custom metrics as well, so you can scale on any resource threshold.
3) The ASG/Launch Config is created by Kops when you create the cluster; and is also manageable through the kops tools. It will default to the kops default AMI (which includes the kubelet, and everything you need for k8s to run), but you can also override that with a different AMI if you have a k8s compatible AMI that more fits your needs.
To expand on the sibling comment by nrmitchi, in Kubernetes you don't scale your worker nodes by CPU or memory. Instead you scale your pods by CPU or memory. Running the cluster autoscaler ensures that when you run out of space to schedule a new pod new worker nodes are brought up. It also works the other way; when your nodes are being underutilized for a while, the autoscaler will kill some nodes (and the scheduler will automatically handle placing any pods on those nodes onto other nodes).
Right, I see that in the CA docs. This doesn't work with our business requirements since our workloads are spikey and we don't want to wait around for pods not being able to be scheduled to start more nodes.
A contrived example is imagine if for every gmail user that logs into gmail google spins up a pod for the user. No imagine if there wasn't any capacity to schedule a pod for a user that is logging in. That user would either be denied or have to wait for an instance to come up and then the pod to be scheduled. Not ideal.
Yes, this is my biggest problem with the autoscaler as well. I opened an issue about this almost a year ago, looks like they're finally getting around to addressing it: https://github.com/kubernetes/autoscaler/pull/77
We built a Kubernetes platform installer[1] using Terraform which works fairly well and I think is more white box because it uses Terraform directly. However, we are still dealing with some of the necessary Terraform language repetition in our modules.
My guess is it wasn't much of a debate and in actuality they used something like Simulink to model the control system and then had that generate the C++ code for the target hardware. I doubt any car control system software is written by hand these days.
I've seen this prediction about Africa for the past 20 years. And it's probably even older than that. It's not a particularly bold one, in my opinion, but it is a flawed one.
Africa is not a country, it is a continent. Comparing it to India or China (whose economies haven't really paid off for foreign investors as much as you'd think) is a major flaw. China and India have an incredibly consistent society from corner to corner and well organized governments. Africa on the other hand is a few dozen sovereign countries, without a common culture or language between them. They are constantly at war with each other and within each other.
I think in order to extract the full economic potential of Africa you'll need to see unification at levels that put the EU to shame and at least a decade of trusted, non-corrupt, forward looking governance.
I think it'll happen, but not for a very, very long time. Until then, follow the Chinese govt investments in Africa and try to tag along.
I've been to India several times, and as a foreigner looking from the outside, I can say that it has much more consistent society than it may look to the Indians. The government, however corrupt, is still way better than what most African countries have.
They have like a dozen languages in like 5 different scripts. Their advantage is that English is ending up as the common tongue of India, so there's lots of English there.
Perhaps 'organised' rather than 'well-organised'? But the point is that 'India' has a national government (and a cricket team, and an army, etc), and 'Africa' has nothing of the sort.
I tend to share your pessimism having been exposed to the "we can fix Africa" ideology for a while. That said, the Chinese have a much better track record of going into a place and not "fixing" it so much as adding a merchant class with a working payments exchange system which converts into much more fluid money markets. My grandfather called it mercenary mercantilism but it that was just his name for markets without judgement. You want to sell water wells? great, you want to sell slaves? no problem, etc. By not tying externalized notions of proper governance to the furtherance of economic development, things moved more quickly forward.
Actually the Chinese build near-extra territorial enclaves. In the Western model you pay bribes to many people (though intermediaries), while in the Chinese one you pay a few people at the top.
It's more along the lines that when the US comes to 'help' a country by providing foreign aid it usually has strings attached like "oh by the way, you can't sell women anymore if you want this aid" (that is the 'judgemental' part, where the aid is contingent on a change in a behavior that has been around for generations but it anathema to the sensibilities of the US). People who come in and say, "We're providing this aide to develop this part of your natural resources, infrastructure, what have you, because we're going to be buying goods from you. Not any of the women because we don't buy women but other stuff you make." Would be an example of a 'non-judgmental' aide package.
The latter tends to spur economic activity with much less friction than the strings attached version.
> Africa on the other hand is a few dozen sovereign countries, without a common culture or language between them.They are constantly at war with each other and within each other.
I am on the ground in West Africa right now. I have been to 15 countries from Morocco to Gabon in 12 months, and will visit another ~22 in the next 12-18 months.
Your statement makes it clear you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Maybe what you said was correct in 1980, but things are changing faster than you can imagine.
There are 54 countries (not a few dozen), over 1.2 billion people in "Africa".
Your statement about war is so far from the truth it's laughable and absurd.
If you get your information from CNN and Fox, you need to stop. It is not giving you an accurate picture of how the world functions
> Africa is not a country, it is a continent. Comparing it to India or China (whose economies haven't really paid off for foreign investors as much as you'd think) is a major flaw. China and India have an incredibly consistent society from corner to corner and well organized governments
I know. I’m ethnically Indian. I’ve been to India multiple times. If I were to invest in an Indian startup it would probably be in Bangalore or Chandigarh.
Just as it is highly unlikely that I invest in a startup in Wyoming, it is unlikely that I invest in startups in large parts of Africa.
Calling it “Africa” is just short hand for segments, categories, and locales in that space.
And boy is India far from consistent and organized. I speak Punjabi and don’t speak Hindi. There are 50 other states and 50 other languages that are spoken.
> Africa on the other hand is a few dozen sovereign countries, without a common culture or language between them.
Not too far off as a description of the EU either.
There's definitely a lot to fix regarding the political climate, and I agree with your sentiment that it'll take a lon time. But I do believe growth would be exponential given the common markets (EU with a diverse, culture, India, China) to learn from.
as much as Africa is not a country, it's absolutely crucial to be able to scale across borders to be able to achieve VC returns here. In Africa, if you stay in one country with an idea that's not a basic need you have very little chance of doing over $500k in revenue.
Yup! In the exact same way that not many EU countries would realistically operate within 1 single country if they are VC funded. Just like EU VC funded companies, The african based companies inherently have to think on a global scale on the onset. Unlike in the US/China where it's okay to be US/China only
Why? $500,000 isn't too bad, if you only had to invest your share - which might only be $5,000. The numbers are smaller, but the percentages may be greater. The number of chances to invest may also be greater, as they will have fewer services already in place.
I don't see that they'd need to worry about international markets. At least not initially.
Well, people were also talking about China like that for many years and even Napoleon already called them the "sleeping giant" (although probably in a militaristic context) and then suddenly, at the beginning of the 90s things started to take off.
I was recently invited over a friends house to get together with a few others to discuss bitcoin and bitcoin opportunities. All mid 30s, non tech day jobs and people I would consider intelligent. They had no experience with equities, no experience with forex, and were heavily researching bitcoin mining systems. It seemed as if bitcoin just popped up on their radar and really had no understanding of bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies and I got the sense that they felt like they were getting in on the ground floor. Maybe?
+1 to the shoeshine boy indicator reference in this thread.
We frequently request account limit increases to 1000-2000 instance limits and get the same canned response. Though I bet in the earlier days capacity allowances for GPUs was probably more sensitive.
> I became obsessed and enthralled, spending 12 or more hours each day glued to a screen, reading, writing, coding, and learning as much as I could. I emerged from this state of fugue, more than 20 pounds lighter from lack of consistent meals, determined to dedicate myself to working on bitcoin.
To me, this seems a little dramatic for what should be a technical topic.