don't the incentives seem wrong? they're limited to 10% margin so what's the incentive for them to keep costs down for consumers? they only make more money when the costs go up.
It's called a perverse incentive, and it's really common when politicians think themselves economists.
The one that bugs me the most is that the margin generated by credit and debit card transaction fees is similarly limited in the US, but insuring transactions against fraud is part of the costs. Because of this, US credit card transactions are like a playbook of what not to do in security.
i don't know what the penetration of it looks like, but on the vsphere/esxi side there are also a number of really expensive addon features that i have not seen reproduced in open source software.
1. vmotion + storage vmotion - you can live migrate a vm from one hypervisor host machine to another. you can also live migrate the underlying storage (good if you want to consolidate storage servers, rebalance disk load, etc). with some caveats, you can do all of this without any downtime in the vm. it's not just a simple suspend on one host, resume on another host. a memory snapshot is migrated while the vm is still running on the first host, and when the amount of dirty pages starts to converge, they flip the vm over to the new host. similar idea for storage vmotion.
2. fault tolerance - for single cpu vms, you can use vmware's record-replay technology to execute a secondary vm in a "shadow" mode which replicates all of the nondeterministic events across the network. if one hypervisor host dies, the other can take over with no downtime. this is great when you need to add HA for a legacy application.
3. vsan - generally you run these systems with some sort of shared storage (nfs or iscsi attached SAN, or something like that). a SAN can be really expensive and a single point of failure. vmware can create a "virtual san" from a cluster of your esxi hypervisor hosts. as you can imagine, it has all sorts of HA features and can rebalance workloads to improve performance.
there are more, but that's just a few interesting features.
Fair bit of that can be done with Proxmox now. What esxi has going for it from what I hear is the ability to deal with 100/1000s of hosts over many many nodes and Proxmox struggles with that
can you speak to how that is vs the gui web interface goodness of proxmox? I'm interested in playign with ganeti but all the youtube walkthroughs that would motivate me more are super outdated and the website doesn't really sell the product very well.
> vsan... a SAN can be really expensive and a single point of failure.
In every scenario that we spec'd out vSAN for production use it came in at least two times as expensive as your average dual controller, HA capable, storage array.
vSAN pricing is all about what the sales guy is willing to do to make the rest of the sale. It has zero marginal cost if they can get you on the platform and using their ecosystem of tools and software.
In edge deployments where rack space is tight it's actually a great solution if you only have a few U to work with and have a HA requirement for a legacy app as well.
good mention of the replay feature! I haven't used that before, but that sounds like something that they could sell for a lot of money and companies would want to buy that feature.
it was pretty noticeable to me. i don't think it's the groundwater specifically but they started treating the water with chlorine as part of the change, which you can definitely taste. i installed a filter under the sink and at least that fixed the problem for me... but it did make me reflect on what's in our water, in general.
also consider that we issued more than 350k student visas this year. if the h1-b cap is 85k then we are giving immigrants some of best college-level education in the world and then refusing to hire >75% of them. this has never made sense to me.
Paul is famous for his essay about Lisp - arguing that his startup beat other startups because Lisp is such a better language than C++ or Java which his competitors were using.
Unclear to me if this is really the meaningful reason that Paul's company succeeded (I'd say obsession with programming languages can be a counter-indicator for productivity), but it clearly resonated with a lot of people since that essay is arguably the onramp into Paul's fame. A lot of programmers read that essay back in 2001. His popularity as an investor who understood engineers arguably catapulted YCombinator
I think that whatever his achievements, those are the result of his business savvy and being able to execute. Praising Lisp just shows that it is his favorite language and he's using his clout to promote it, nothing is wrong about it of course. But as I've already said I believe that he could've used plenty of other languages with exactly the same outcome business wise.
I don't think he was obsessed with languages. He picked the one he knew best.
I also think the whole blub thing becomes less and less relevant with every passing day. Every language has evolved significantly over the last 20 years - when he wrote that article - much less the last 26 years since he started viaweb.
I personally prefer FP languages. I don't think they give me magical superpowers... okay, well, maybe BEAM languages in certain circumstances. But I also know people that work magic with C and do things I could never dream of.
given interest rates are at a historic low, i would be shocked if they are using actual cash to buy these houses. presumably they are buying with mortgages?
Just for the record, San Francisco has the OTHER corpse flower, the dead man's corpse flower or Titan Arum. We talk about a flower that can measure more than 3m.
Some people could wonder why Rafflesia is the biggest flower in the planet if there is a 3m flower around. The explanation is that what is shown in San Francisco is not a single flower. Is a bunch of flowers shaped as a single one. Thus, Titan Arum has the biggest group of flowers in the planet, and Rafflessia is the biggest single flower.
This one is not a parasite and any brash gardener can culture it (and enjoy the experience of be hated by the entire neighborhood). We all have at least one of its cousins at home in fact. Is very easy to culture.
i don't work for a FAANG company but if i did, the reason would be primarily pay. if you're making 500k$/year in california, you can take home around 280k after taxes. no small/medium tech business i'm aware of is paying that much.
it's easy to say money isn't everything. but you don't really need to work very long to retire with that kind of money. if you're single (even in the bay area) it should be relatively easy to live a fairly cushy life on 100k$/year spending. that means you can pocket 180k$/year in savings. if you invest it, and the stock market returns 7%/year on average[1], you will be a millionaire in 5 years. it's one of the lowest risk ways for a young engineer to accumulate wealth. definitely within reach to retire in your early 40s, depending on how much money you want to spend.
[1] no investment is guaranteed but the stock market has been very reliable in the past with a long enough timeline.
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