angerbot

There's a few. My company has been using serverless aurora pretty much since preview and will keep doing so for some parts of infra, but are moving some services back to provisioned.

- Data is replicated cross region, but your compute all lives in the same AZ, so if (when) an AZ goes down you have to wait for a new instance to be created elsewhere. AWS says the time for this is undefined, IIRC we've seen it be around 15-20 minutes before the DB is back online.

- If you have lots of long running transactions or queries, serverless can have trouble finding a scaling point and won't scale up/down. You can set it to force scaling after 5 attempts, but this results in dropped connections and 1-2 minutes of downtime every time.

- Scaling up actually takes 45s-1:30 for new capacity to be available. If your load is spiky enough that that's too slow, you're stuck with overprovisioning anyways.

- Tools like VividCortex don't work for serverless if you rely on those. Teams here that use serverless have shifted to DataDog APM for this purpose.

- Loading data from S3 doesn't work. This wasn't really a usecase we had but it's something to be aware of.

That said, for gradual load or DB downtime tolerant services it's great! Also very nice for dev environments as the scaling down to 0 can result in some very real cost savings.

I thought WireGuard was not yet ready for primetime, why is it being used here? I've been wanting to stand up a VPN at work to make my life easier than SSH tunneling but I was waiting for a 1.0 release of WG.

Super neat! One note that I found odd: km/L is a weird way to talk about fuel efficiency for metric. Everywhere that I've seen typically uses L/100km rather than just doing a MPG equivalent conversion.

Their conference is on as we speak so, the former?

King street restaurants have high turnover anyways - most of them have not been open that long to begin with. The area has a lot of competition so you really can't get away with being mediocre for very long.

Lots of business were crying foul at the start of the pilot, but credit card transaction data the city has hasn't borne that out.

Yes, cost of living in Montreal is nowhere near what it is in Vancouver or Toronto

I'm at $90k with ~3 years experience (located in Toronto). Many of my colleagues are either at 90 or very close (~85) with similar experience. I've lived in Vancouver as well and have seen similar compensation.

Have you read their security white paper[1]? As much as I tend to freak out about cloud storage of password data (one reason I moved off of lastpass), they do seem to take fairly strong steps to host-proof the data (such as having an on-device generated secret key that they never receive).

[1]: https://1password.com/files/1Password%20for%20Teams%20White%...

How are you determining this without sniffing everyone's traffic? How do you know if someone typed youtube.com into their browser window or clicked a link from an email without access to things like referral headers?

Visa provides protection from a lot of risk on both the buyer and seller's side.

As a seller I know that if a Visa payment clears I'll be getting that money, even if the customer doesn't have it. I don't need to arrange financing or risk taking a check that may bounce long after the customer has disappeared.

As a consumer, I get some measure of protection from fraud and have the option of doing a chargeback and letting Visa sort things out with the vendor if something is not as described.

Google and Go-Daddy also have a constitutional right not to associate or do business with the alt-right (or really, anyone else they disagree with). You are protected from the government restricting your speech, no one else has any obligation to put up with you.

First Nations in Western Canada would deliberately set fire to areas. There is a very old tradition of having "fire keepers" who were responsible for burning areas and ensuring that it was done safely. Traditional wisdom was that every part of the forest should be burned at least every hundred years. Here's[0] an interesting article from the CBC on the topic.

[0]: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/fire-fighting...

If you're in Canada report them for violating CASL - it's a cool $10k fine per infraction, I'd imagine they'll add an unsubscribe link right quick.

> And the companies that do well and grow: they just move to the valley, because they generally can, and they have every reason to.

Slack is a perfect example of this. They still have a small office down the street from me here in Vancouver, but they're based out of SF now. I can totally see why given the access to capital and talent in SF vs Van.

I've definitely had Google Now show me things to do when traveling. Usually it gives me lists of museums, places to eat, etc. I can't recall if it's ever done that without a plane ticket or airbnb/hotel reservation email for some context though.

The new BMW M5 is also closer to the size of a 7 series from 30 years ago. Additionally, even with AWD being added it's 200lbs lighter than the last gen was. Cars are certainly heavier on the whole than they used to be, but lightening them is starting to happen again and they're much safer than any car from decades past.

Collate looks amazing! I've been looking for exactly this, and since I use Linux rather than OS X quiver was out. Trying it out now and I'll almost definitely be purchasing.

Edit: Where can I file bug reports? :)

I don't know that it would be difficult to reproduce the test that is mentioned in the paper linked below, but they do mention the following anyways for EC2:

> A single account was never seen to have two instances simultaneously running on the same physical machine, so running n instances in parallel under a single account results in placement on n separate machines

This rant [1] on the PSD format has to be my favourite:

  // At this point, I'd like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format.
  // PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an
  // insult to other bad formats, such as PCX or JPEG. No, PSD is an abysmal format. Having
  // worked on this code for several weeks now, my hate for PSD has grown to a raging fire
  // that burns with the fierce passion of a million suns.
  // If there are two different ways of doing something, PSD will do both, in different
  // places. It will then make up three more ways no sane human would think of, and do those
  // too. PSD makes inconsistency an art form. Why, for instance, did it suddenly decide
  // that *these* particular chunks should be aligned to four bytes, and that this alignement
  // should *not* be included in the size? Other chunks in other places are either unaligned,
  // or aligned with the alignment included in the size. Here, though, it is not included.
  // Either one of these three behaviours would be fine. A sane format would pick one. PSD,
  // of course, uses all three, and more.
  // Trying to get data out of a PSD file is like trying to find something in the attic of
  // your eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark attack on his 58th
  // birthday. That last detail may not be important for the purposes of the simile, but
  // at this point I am spending a lot of time imagining amusing fates for the people
  // responsible for this Rube Goldberg of a file format.
  // Earlier, I tried to get a hold of the latest specs for the PSD file format. To do this,
  // I had to apply to them for permission to apply to them to have them consider sending
  // me this sacred tome. This would have involved faxing them a copy of some document or
  // other, probably signed in blood. I can only imagine that they make this process so
  // difficult because they are intensely ashamed of having created this abomination. I
  // was naturally not gullible enough to go through with this procedure, but if I had done
  // so, I would have printed out every single page of the spec, and set them all on fire.
  // Were it within my power, I would gather every single copy of those specs, and launch
  // them on a spaceship directly into the sun.
  //
  // PSD is not my favourite file format.

1: https://github.com/zepouet/Xee-xCode-4.5/blob/master/XeePhot...

It could perhaps be a) put to other uses or b) no longer grown in such large quantities and replaced by some other less harmful plan (speaking about corn in particular which is heavily subsidized and terrible for the soil it grows in).

I've noted a marked decline in North Face quality compared to even 5 years ago (Steep Series notwithstanding). It's a shame, they used to be one of my go-to brands when I wanted to spend a bit more but get solid gear.

MEC in Canada has the same problem. Sometime around when their logo changed from the mountains to a modern box with "MEC" written in it they stopped stocking as much high quality gear and much of their in house stuff saw a decline in durability/functionality in the name of fashion. Although speaking to people who work there they had solid market research showing that the old audience of hardcore outdoorspeople would no longer be enough to support them as it was shrinking fairly rapidly.

These days I mostly stick to Arc'teryx outers/shells, Patagonia for my mid layers, and icebreaker for baselayers. All of my gear from any of those companies has proven to be reliable and durable if pricey. I've heard good things about Peak Performance and Rab as well, but I've yet to purchase anything from them.

Edit: since this is now the recommend brands that are good but people maybe haven't heard of thread, I'd also like to plug Hestra, Fjallraven, and Osprey Packs

Certainly not. A modern DCT or even a regular torque converter (such as the ubiquitous ZF 8-Speed) will be faster to 60 than a manual with even the best driver by several tenths.

I hadn't considered that (this is really out of my depth). Any ideas on what the actual size of a trained model would be to distribute? Taking 150G on the user's hard drive is out as well, probably.

Very cool. I've been toying with the idea of using something like this or perhaps the cloud vision API to automatically generate image captions for screen readers (e.g. through a browser extension) but the cost to run something like an EC2 GPU unit is prohibitive for a project like that which I wouldn't want to charge for.

Running it locally on the user's machine would take far too long to train, especially as you would have to use the CPU in the majority of cases since many people don't have a separate GPU.