krab

Only my first job after university was via a regular advertisement and application. The other jobs and contracts happened thanks to:

- one of my bosses

- me talking at an event and meeting another speaker

- getting recommended by a person that knew me

You're missing the value the Bitcoin network provides in facilitating trade that's illegal or shady.

I don't want to make any moral statement here. I'm just saying that Bitcoin can be positive sum or negative sum. I don't know which is true and I don't know whether it's better or worse for humanity to have a global mechanism for unregulated money transfers. But that's what we have.

Not sure. Maybe only if the account is flagged somehow? I just registered - there's a simple form that takes a card in the end. And that was just it. I could order a server.

It depends on your needs for reliability and how many users you have.

If you don't mind being offline when doing maintenance occasionally and being down on the rare occasion when the hardware fails (like once in a few years) until you get the replacement part, then look up "server housing". You can buy a computer, either rack mounted, or tower, maybe used, and you put it into a datacenter that manages bandwidth, power and cooling.

That would be probably the cheapest option but pick something close to where you live.

Not in my experience (I have a EU address and payment card).

The sign up was smooth and easy.

Or in UK, or in the US (latency doesn't matter that much in case of LLMs). That would all be in line with the policy that restricted physical movement of these chips.

The thing is the USA can target the individual companies selling goods outside of the designated countries. It would be hard to monitor and enforce but the mechanism is - if you'd like to do any business with the US, you have to play by their rules.

What if this was an intentional, yet overly clever, way to avoid one special case?

I mean, for all practical purposes, the value of 1 equals to the unconditional execution.

They did it before. See for example the history of Merck, a German pharma company during WW1.

> The free market is great, but only if we hold all the cards.

I think that's the actual reasoning. Be mindful that USA is our ally but they'll always prefer their own interest and that's normal.

I don't think so. This is true for people writing cpython. But if you implement custom `__hash__` method, you should be fine.

Because -1 is not equal to -2. They will fall into the same bucket of the hash map, but the hash collisions are expected and must be accounted for.

We were the issuer. So these were probably the payment processor's extensions. But we were issuing MasterCards.

Oh, this format was fun. You could see history unfold when parsing it. The messages I parsed were ISO-8583 with ~EBCDIC~ no, BCD. But one field contained XML. And the XML had an embedded JSON. The inner format matched the fashion trend of the year when someone had to extend the message with extra data. :-)

In practice, it works the same.

Technically, there are two kinds of copyright - I'll translate loosely from the Czech law, I'm not sure about the exact English equivalent. There are "person" rights and "property" rights. You can never rescind your "person rights". But that only means that no one can claim you're not the original author. That's about it. You can transfer "property rights" via licensing as you wish. The license can be exclusive and you can give a right to further transfer or sublicense the work to the licensee.

Also, each work is copyrighted by default. You're not allowed to use something that you just found on the internet if you're not granted a license.

Just shooting without knowing your real needs - take this with a grain of salt.

Store some parsed representation that makes it easier for you to work with (probably normalized). Keep an archive of raw data somewhere. That may be another column, table or even S3 bucket. Don't worry about schema changes but you need to not lose the original data. There are some pitfalls to schema migrations. But the schema should be the representation that works for you _at the moment_, otherwise it'll slow you down.

Regarding Python+Django vs. Go, I have an opposite experience. Concurrency is handled much better in Go but that's about it. ORM, web framework, any library is generally worse. On top of that, I miss my exceptions.

Yes. That's a risk assessment every company must make. What's the probability of downtime vs the development slowdown and the operating costs of a fully redundant infrastructure?

I worked for a payments company (think credit cards). We designed the system to maintain very high availability in the payment flow. Multi-region, multi-AZ in AWS. But all other flows such as user registration, customer care or even bill settlement had to stop during that one incident when our main datacenter lost power after a testing switch. The outage lasted for three hours and it happened exactly once in five years.

In that specific case, investing into higher availability by architecting in more redundancy would not be worth it. We had more downtime caused by bad code and not well thought out deployments. But that risk equation will be different for everyone.

That's a pretty much orthogonal issue if you compare dedicated servers to, say AWS EC2. There aren't that many tasks you would have to perform on bare metal that you don't have to do in EC2.

PaaS such as Heroku or Vercel, that's another story.

... and we were doing serverless and build less before it was cool! It was called "shared PHP hosting". :-D

The absolute trust killer is when your customer finds out about some issue on their own - even though you were supposed to monitor that. :-)

More important than raw uptime.

Well, S3 is hard to beat for our use case. We make a heavy use of their various tires, we store a somewhat large amount of data but only a minor part ever goes out.

The compute and network heavy stuff we do is still out of AWS.

You're right you need to find a company you can trust.

And for a lot of startups it really makes sense to use AWS. But if you do something resource or bandwidth intensive (and I'm not even talking about Llama now), the costs add up quickly. In our case, switching to AWS would increase our costs by an equivalent of 4 - 8 devs salaries. After AWS discounts. That's a hard sell in a 15-person team even though half of our infra costs already are with AWS (S3).

A bit less terrible way in my opinion:

Find a dedicated server provider and rent the hardware. These companies rent some part of the datacenter (or sometimes build their own). Bonus points if they offer KVM - as in remote console, not the Linux hypervisor. Also ask if they do hardware monitoring and proactively replace the failed parts. All of this is still way cheaper than cloud. Usually with unmetered networking.

Way less hassle. They'll even take your existing stuff and put it into the same rack with the rented hardware.

The difference from cloud, apart from the price, is mainly that they have a sales rep instead of an API. And getting a server may take a from few hours to a few days. But in the end you get the same SSH login details you would get from a cloud provider.

Or, if you really want to just collocate your boxes, the providers offer "remote hands" service, so you can have geo-redundancy or just choose a better deal instead of one that's physically close to your place.

Yeah, that's the PII leak.

Nice find!

There's a problematic but not critical personal information leak, a mild business intelligence leak and that's about it.

> They could keep this script running for months, even years, creating awkward scenes and uncomfortable conversations at every restaurant across the country.

If that's about the worst thing you can actively do, then it's only about the data leak.

Yes, exactly.

They specifically mentioned Huawei. The dependency of telecom networks has been discussed repeatedly in Europe. This inititative isn't only about cloud computing.

+ Chinese

I heard there was a similar problem with the bank account number in the US - that you could use it to withdraw money without an actual password or strong identification. Hence the popularity of cheques, PayPal and similar services that weren't needed that much in Europe.

Since the railroads are heavily regulated, it's not easy to innovate there.