forgotpassagan

They're not just behind on paying, they straight up stopped giving the MAP grant last year which had paid about 30% of my undergrad costs at state school. If I wanted to go to college now I would have had to move out of Illinois until I had residency in another state. Student loans won't even cover state school costs.

Free babysitting help is worth a lot, but depending on your wife's career it still might make financial sense to move. If you're in the Chicago area like most people in Illinois, Indiana is doing great(for the Midwest), and Michigan's economy is still way better than Illinois. Madison is a tech hotspot and a great place to raise a family too.

Two out of three software companies I interviewed at in Illinois shuttered their offices in the state in the last two years. The companies that are staying are all going downtown. Software jobs are pretty damn rare out in the suburbs and it was definitely a bunch of 'take what you can get' shittily run companies because they could be.

I once worked at a hybrid IT/consulting shop. A lot of companies still run Windows Server, but the space is being rapidly cannibalized by cloud services. In the few years I worked there we had already lost maybe 20% of our IT contracts to customers moving to cloud services like Office365 and Google for work. Custom software as a business is still thriving but basically everything new is running on cloud (and not Windows) at the clients request. Which means no Windows Server and related service contract revenue. Quite a large percentage of our IT contracts were conversion contracts to move companies to cloud services, and I assume it's only gotten worse in the years since then.

Windows Server has decent market share because of inertia but I would bet money that it's in an irreversible decline. MS has been taking the unusual step of making their server software like SQL Server and .NET Core run on native Linux, so it seems they've seen the end coming as well.

I agree with you that SQL Server is a good product. Far better than other 'legacy' databases like Oracle and DB2. The problem is that the paid contract model is dying. There's tons of mature and free SQL databases, and for the average project you only need so many features. SQL is such a mature tech that most projects could use any SQL database. The differentiation is gone, so there's no longer a reason to pay.

IKVM is the best I know of, but I heard rumors last year that unfortunately it's main maintainer is moving on to other projects. There's others that cost money but I don't really pay attention to them

Your customers are many years behind the times then, which isn't unusual if you're doing consulting. Windows Server only does well in the consulting bubble and in backwards industries like finance, it's basically dead everywhere else.

Containers are hardly a buzzword, I would say more than half the fortune 500 run their systems exclusively in containers and that's only increasing. The last two companies I worked at were 100% containers for pretty huge fleets of machines. I don't know of a single large tech companies that isn't exclusively containers or at least KVM virtualized machines.

Mainframes are so past dead that they've resorted to haunting us. Mainframes (and SQL server and Oracle Db) are so behind that they make it illegal to benchmark their systems in license agreements. From the leaked benchmarks I've seen, a power mainframe CPU is maybe 10x slower than a single X86 core from Intel or AMD. Oracle Db is also about an order of magnitude slower than Postgres and MySQL which you can get for free.

I'm not trying to be a dick, just convince you that based on your beliefs it is you that is in a bubble :) . In fact the same bubble I used to be in (used to do consulting and shared a lot of the same opinions until I moved to different parts of the industry). That's fine if you still making $, but it's something to be aware of if you're looking around for other opportunities in different areas of the space

I moved from Illinois years ago because of taxes and bad job climate. My parents paid about 20% more in property taxes than their mortgage, and we had just an average sized lot. It's not uncommon at all in Illinois.

Most of my family and friends are also there, but it was a lot better for my financial future and retirement to move away, enough that it was worth leaving friends and family behind.

Illinois has the highest move out rate of any state. And the average income of people moving in is almost 20k lower than the average for people moving out. The government is also in tatters and the college system is languishing from lack of funding. It has one of the highest rates of students going to school out of state and college costs are astronomical because the state doesn't even give their public universities much.

Corruption in the Illinois government is unbelievably bad and the state is basically run by Madigan and a network of powerful unions with historic mob ties.

IMO you're probably much better off in Indiana financially if you're looking at your and potentially children's financial futures. I would really do the COL math before you buy a house there.

My disposable income increased from essentially zero to about 35k a year from a strategic move to a state with higher software engineer demand and much lower tax burden.

Lol this is so true. Everyone I knew had relatives or a small place somewhere warmer

This may be how Kong does it but it's not really 'high performance'. The right way to do rate limiting is to limit by IP using a counting Bloom Filter or Cuckoo filter along with random samples. When you hit a false positive then you have a second normal rate limiter to 'mop up' IPs that are over the first limiter.

This doesn't give you a hard exact limit but gets the job done storing far less state. You also need to bucket by IP sub-ranges in IPV6 to stop people crap flooding you with tons of unique IP's

Same. Except I'm not as optimistic about Atlanta because the state is mostly poor and it's farther from the huge cities on the upper east coast. NC and Texas are both booming state-wide and have 'world cities' in reasonable driving distance.

North Carolina has the 'triangle' area which has seen huge growth for many years. Texas has Austin, which is probably the closest to SV of any place I've ever been. It looks so much like SV you could probably confuse the two in pictures

The Midwest has crappy weather, and rich people as a rule don't like crappy weather. This alone will prevent many investors from moving to the Midwest.

Geographically, Texas and the east coast near North/South Carolina are the most likely places for the next silicon valley. Both are in proximity to large population centres and have relatively good weather, cheap COL, low taxes, and plenty of 'natural beauty' type things that rich people like. Hills, driving distance to ocean, forests, etc...

I lived in the Midwest and IMO it's mostly cold flat and boring endless farmland with little natural beauty and no access to large water bodies outside of Chicago area. It also has high taxes and cost of living. Not really anything attractive about starting business is there.

It's been precedent for a long time. For example, we could have much better satellite photos but it's illegal to sell footage with resolution better than 1 pixel/meter. If they're doing it publicly for commercial satellite imagery I have zero doubts similar secret restrictions for video quality exist for military footage taken with optics

They intentionally degrade the quality of to avoid giving competitors data. I'm sure Congress has seen the original, and it's pretty startling that they still think the object is a legit UFO

A lot of sites are transpired these days, so you have the 'source' but it's generated code

I disagree strongly. I used .NET for years before jumping ship to Java. Guava and Apache commons dwarf anything available for C# at any price. I know because I went looking many times for libraries with similar algorithms and Bloom filters. .NET is pay to play and in most cases something similar in Java was free.

I also greatly miss native database libraries when I'm using .NET. a large number, maybe a majority, of open source databases have an outdated buggy port to C# if anything. I will never forget the hell of integrating Lucene with C# because the port is bugged and close to a decade old. This is par the course for .NET

MS has a huge problem with lack of open source support unless you're stuck on the (IMO archaic) SQL Server+ Windows server platform.

Microsoft has fallen many years behind the times. Having to get a multi thousand dollar license for a server OS and SQL database is a joke. Their VM support outside of Azure is severely lacking and support for containers is junk because they're not based on Linux cgroups like everyone else. Windows as a server OS is as dead as OS/2 was 5 years ago. Linux won, by a landslide, and MS is too proud to just deal with that. Their software is severely crippled in server land as a result.

I hadn't, but the primary problem is the inverse case. Java programmers have no problem switching to C# and vice versa. The languages are really similar. The problem is that many millions of lines of open source software have already been written in Java and developers are not going to spend thousands of man-years converting them. Especially because they know the languages are so similar.

Developers are well aware that it would take minimal effort to make the languages compatible so they make little effort to port from one to the other. And Microsoft's problem is that the vast majority of these projects already target Java. If the languages were vastly different ports would be more interesting and fun to do, but since they're not porting is basically a boring and vastly annoying syntax conversion. Something annoying that nobody wants to do for free.

If Microsoft officially supported interop with native Java libraries I believe C# would take off like a rocket. Unfortunately, so far, Microsoft hasn't really sent out an olive branch to the massive open source Java community

Google heavy promotes articles that use their Google Analytics and have high time-on-page scores. Everything Google does with search ranking is gameable but built to focus on high quality content. The best thing about having a couple high ranking pages is that it becomes much easier to make others. Your trust score is already high so there's a good chance other articles about postgres will also reach first page, even if they're not about specialized topics. This is what the SEOtards fail to understand

Medium in it's purest form is a blatant SEO siphon from your website. Well written articles will generally place highly on Google's search results no matter the domain(unless you've got shady shit going on). God knows what metrics they're using these days (mostly ML?) But Google readily recognizes articles well written from expert sources in my opinion. I've only written around ten blog posts but they're all first page, some first result, for my goal keywords.

And this is on a no-name website not optimized for SEO at all. The SEO arms race has been going on so long that we've reached a point where, if you're a good writer, it's easier to follow Google's guidelines than try to cheat the system.

Medium and other blog sites are basically a guest blog, except you're not getting paid for placement. Google ranking is everything and posting on medium does nothing but hurt you gravely

The JVM has simply has a lot more resources poured into it. C# and the CLR is a more modern clone of Java and it shines in the great usability of C# and to some extent the more sane op-codes of the CLR. Transforming between the two is actually easy enough that several projects offer 100% interop between C# and pure Java libraries.

I expect performance of the JVM to beat C# for a long time, but since the designs are so similar the difference isn't important in most cases.

Having spent time in both ecosystems, I'll admit that C# is easily a superior language to Java, honestly the best designed language I've ever used. Not surprising since it has the same designer as Delphi and Typescript. It's all syntactic sugar, but so much so that programming C# is significantly faster and easier.

What really hurts the .NET ecosystem right now is an insanely large gap in open source support. Something MS is fostering now but spent more than a decade trying to kill. This will not be easy to fix, as it's more a people problem than technical. MS actively tried to hurt the open source community for over a decade and to get support they will need to change the mind of countless people. It remains to be seen if this is viable.

If I was Microsoft I would remedy this by adding first-class support for Java libraries in C# by throwing their support behind existing projects to do so. This might close a gap that could otherwise take decades to fill

Out of compassion (and possibly not wanting to get sued), doctors and pharmacies will provide you will lifesaving medicine in the US, no matter your ability to pay. I have seen this happen in pharmacies and have firsthand experience with this happening in emergency medicine.

Typically you'll be given the insulin and asked to pay later or it will be quietly written off as lost, expired, or just the cost of doing business. The pharmacists I knew we're more than willing to give a free vial if it was crucial and deal with payment later(or in many cases never). Repeat offenders are directed towards programs where they can get insulin at discount or for free. Despite the healthcare system being fucked, letting someone die without insulin is a bad PR move so the giant companies that make it will give it away if necessary (but you have to sign up and pass income checks).

Still, this is mostly just human compassion I've seen. Doctors and pharmacists I've known are generally very helpful and nurturing people. You make a lot of money but there's easier ways to make the same if human compassion isn't your thing. If this wasn't the case I assume many would die, because it doesn't seem that the government provides any protection against this.

The US medical system is corrupt and FUBAR but this is not a good example. I've worked low level jobs around retail pharmacy and emergency medicine and seen this happen firsthand many times. Healthcare providers in the US are of fairly high quality and generally will not let you die. Most of the insane costs and profiteering are focused around drug pricing, countless layers of nonsense surrounding insurance and pricing structures, and the need for hospitals to charge some people a lot to make up for the huge fraction that don't or can't pay.