
What Brought You Here? - milancurcic
https://milancurcic.com/2019/09/28/what-brought-you-here.html
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DoreenMichele
When I applied to a major university at age 17, I put down two potential
majors. One was Geology.

I didn't attend that university. I went for two years to a local college and
didn't bother to declare a major the first year. The second year, I declared
as a History major because I was taking a lot of history classes and my
counselor was in the history department. It let me keep the same counselor.

I dropped out in part because I knew two people with substantial amounts of
college who were delivering newspapers. One was living with his mother. One
was financially dependent upon his wife.

I figured I could deliver newspapers for a living without a pile of student
loans and my quality of life would be higher without the student loans. I
decided I would return to college if I ever had any idea what I wanted to do
with a degree.

I eventually decided I wanted to be an urban planner, which was a good reason
to go back to school. Most urban planning programs are Masters degrees. You
typically have a Bachelor's in something else.

I decided to pursue a Bachelor's in Environmental Resource Management as
background. I felt I needed to understand the underlying natural environment
in order to do good things with the built environment.

Most Environmental Studies programs began in Geology departments. It's
possible that I might have ended up sort of where I am currently even without
the long, winding detour in between.

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qnsi
Ive been reading some books about innovations and it often seems like this. A
lot of random encounters (is word serendepity correct?) coming together to
create new idea.

Now if only there was more options for this random encounters on the Internet.
For me only HN and reading nonfiction helps in this

~~~
zwkrt
On one hand it is dismissive to say that any innovation occurred due to the
laws of physics and the starting condition of the universe at the Big Bang. On
the other hand it makes your insight that most innovations were chance
happenings less surprising.

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keiferski
Reminds me a bit of a scene in _No Country for Old Men_ , when Chigurh is in
the hotel room.

 _If the rule you followed brought you to this - of what use was the rule?_

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=_fv7XSrrI9M](https://youtube.com/watch?v=_fv7XSrrI9M)

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dbrgn
Backtracking life decisions like that is fun :)

But I find it hard to believe that HPC in the cloud is cheaper than HPC on
bare metal, assuming high load most of the time. For computing weather models,
that should he the case.

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milancurcic
At peak capacity, bare metal pays off soon. Even when they run at near 100% of
CPUs, weather models never run 24/7 but only fraction of the time.

Examples: A national weather service (any country) may run at 20-50% capacity.
In a research setting, 5-10% is more common (personal experience). Consulting
businesses are somewhere in between. The lower the fraction of capacity used,
the longer the time after which bare metal investment pays off.

For businesses that need to do a one-off feasibility study or to work on a few
projects/events, upfront investment of > $100K for bare metal is prohibitive.
And this is before hiring a sysadmin and a weather modeler to run the thing.

I appreciate your comment, it motivates me to take some time soon to write up
the unit economics in more detail.

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dbrgn
Thanks for the reply, that makes sense!

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alephnan
> I think about what gets me to make certain turns and decisions in life. For
> example, co-founding Cloudrun

Huh. Google Cloud Platform has a product with the same name now.

[https://cloud.google.com/run/](https://cloud.google.com/run/)

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milancurcic
Yeah, we joked about it on their launch day, "welp, there goes our SEO!" :)
Probably not a big deal as we're in a quite narrow niche.

