lbrindze

I take issue with a hard 20% cap on low income units. I'm not against low-income units in general but in practice this is the same exact policy that lead to less affordable housing in SF as a whole. Because these caps were set as hard limits (without equivalent caps on commercial developments) people built office buildings instead of housing which made the problem worse overall...

compare this to a city like Boston where these caps are negotiated and set on a per development basis. As a result, while each new residential building may have proportionally less low-income units, boston as a whole has more affordable units available for rent since more housing was built in the first place due to the flexibility of these caps.

I was born and raised in CA, but for the progressive a state we claim to be, some of these policies are down right counterproductive (despite having great intentions) and should be revisited.

* my source here is I used to rent an apartment from the head of affordable housing commission in boston. If there is published materials that contradict this please correct me!

The integration with xarray[0] and the Pangeo[1] community at large are pretty good. Not good enough for sub second response on large datasets but very good for analytic workloads, especially when you are dealing with larger than memory datasets.

If you want fast(ish) performance but you can wait a few minutes or longer its a great tool. Climate scientists love it because it lets them focus on their problem domain instead of focusing on dealing with developing parallel software.

If you are using it to magically speedup your api backend you will probably be disappointed, but you will also be just as disappointed trying to use a jackhammer to hammer in a nail.

[0] https://xarray.pydata.org/en/stable/ [1] https://pangeo.io/

Im very much a bottom up sort of learner so I wanted to post something I haven’t seen yet in any of these comments. Go through and build Linux from scratch https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

You don’t have to do all of it, just enough to feel comfortable with the problem space that containers in part are trying to solve for. In doing so you will learn about the fundamentals of the stacks you are working with. Then go learn about cgroups at the lowest level. Again you don’t need to master these things but setting up a container from scratch will then give you a more intuitive understanding of what container apis like docker are trying to solve for. Install a hypervisor on your local workstation and set up a few vms networked to each other. Use a tool like netcat to talk across them. Once you have these basics, and yes it is a long and round about way, I think the cloud stuff becomes a lot easier and more approachable since you will have a more in depth understanding of what cloud providers are actually giving you in terms of configurations and managed services. I came into software development from doing sysadmin work at a NOC during a graveyard shift. So I had a lot of time on my hands to mess around with this stuff. I don’t think that tools like docker should be a substitution for the fundementals, but rather something you add to your tool belt later to make these sorts of configurations easier to set up.

Yeah this isn’t going to be a 1-2 day crash course but if you are diligent you can get a basic understanding of what these tools do in under a month. Only after you have a complete understanding of single node use case (e.g. multiple containers running on a single host) would i recommend starting to learn k8. Good luck!

* edit to fix small typos

High pressure over the north east pacific combined with the Coriolis effect. Also the land sea border has a big influence here in this case in particular.

All of the big agency (NWS, ECMWF, ICON, etc.) use physical models to create the large gridded forecast products. These models work by solving differential equations so your intuition here is spot on!

GEFS is the noaa ensemble product. The operational GFS is actually just a single deterministic forecast run.

A lot of private providers roll up different agencies models to provide their own proper ie tart weather model because this is a lot cheaper than running the HPC required for most deterministic models.

The most important thing when checking the weather, especially with apps like windy, is to compare multiple models for your self to see how “stable” the forecasts are that day.

They will sell you an irridium go and distribute data through their own email client but you can get all of that through Sailmail and using the saildocs email GRIB service for less money with a lot more flexibility, also I’m not sure how good their support is for using something like PACTOR over HF which if you are a licensed HAM is always free.

This stuff really only applies to offshore or other low bandwidth connection use cases. When I have decent cell/internet it’s hard to beat windy’s UI.

You may be interested in era5 data for historical reanalysis. This is published by the ECMWF and is available for free. I’m pretty sure it has solar irradiance data but I’m not certain. You can also get NCAR reanalysis and other model reanalysis products through the NWS[2].

For visualizing gridded data products you can use panoply[3]. If you just care about GRIBS zyGrib works pretty well too.

[1]https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/datasets/reanalysis-datas... [2]https://www.ready.noaa.gov/archives.php [3]https://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/panoply/

It turns out almost all the organizations follow the same training standards set out by the WRSTC (World Recreational Scuba Training Council). The big exception is CMAS which past level 2 no longer is comparable to the WRSTC program tracks since it allows for decompression diving on air down to 40m (level 2) and 56m (level 3).

This means even with an advanced or master diver certificate from PADI, (NAUI, SDI, SSI, etc...) the tables you learn to use do not go beyond decompression limits (requiring mandated decompression stops on your ascent) since they stop at 30m. It used to be 40m but I believe the standard has become more conservative since I was last teaching. NAUI does have supplemental training that goes beyond WRSTC standards but a lot of that has to do with the science and ecology of the underwater world more generally.

All open water level certs (usually the most basic level cert) expects students to be fully autonomous (with their buddies) by the end of the course. If you sign up for an open water dive in southern. California for example, it is rarely a guided experience and most people form groups of 2-3 on the boat and go and enjoy the water, coming back within an 1-1.5 hours. Almost everywhere else I have worked, it is expected (by the guests...) that all dives in open water are lead by a certified dive master and not self lead in small groups. I personally think this is a result of the way the standards and incentives work for dive operators to encourage that dependency on their outfit and keep the money flowing in.

Generally recreational diving is very safe but even working as an instructor for a few years at a few different outfits, there is always a handful of fatalities. I really like the comparison to Skydiving someone else made, except its a much more subtle danger since you dont actually need to be in top physical shape to do this activity (even though it is required by the certification agencies).

The only other thing I find interesting is all the certification agencies are for the INSTRUCTORS (hence the I in PADI, NAUI, SSI...). These orgs are outfits that enable recreational scuba operators to have a standardized set of empirically derived safety limits to protect the instructor and shop liability (not the student's). More often than not, especially in far flung, remote diving destinations, caution is thrown to the wind and people do not always follow the prescribed standards.

Source: OWSI (Open water scuba instructor) with multiple agencies as well as CMAS level 3 diver

Nitrox is 100% fatal at depths beyond prescribed limit. The whole point of Nitrox is to increases the oxygen content in the gas to minimize nitrogen absorption. A side effect of this is that you will get to hyperoxic poisoning thresholds earlier on a deeper dive profile. This is why Nitrox requires additional certifications, to help understand these limitations and learn how to calculate your max operating depth. (when using nitrox wihtin these thresholds I find I have more energy at the end of my dive).

To go deeper you need to blend in inert gasses and decrease o2 and n2 to keep partial pressures below fatal doses. This means most commonly mixing in Helium to cut down on over o2 and n2 in your gas mix. Human tissue I guess doesn't absorb helium the same way it does n2.

Source: Open Water Scuba Instructor with multiple agencies... I havent taught in about 5 years though so some of this information may have changed, especially in light that global helium shortages (or US stock piles?) may have driven the price of He up to high to be used for mixed gas diving.

When I first started working on software I was fortunate enough to get exposed to working municipal contracts. One example was building out a payment gateway and website for the LA county coroner and medical examiner. This included making a small e-commerce site for their gift shop (I don’t know why they had a gift shop).

A friends father, who was very involved in local government, told me with regards to government work, “failure is unacceptable but indefinite delay is ideal.”

As long as you are in no immediate hurry to get paid, these sorts of local/state gov projects can be quite lucrative and require very little day to day effort to get them done. The hardest part is learning how to navigate the RFP process but it’s really just about reading the rules and proposals posted. The reason government is often overcharged for mediocre software comes down to this deeply flawed procurement process.

I think your second point here often gets missed/understated. That energy and those computers could have been helping forecast severe weather events or working to fold proteins or any other number of useful tasks that don't involve tracking a ledger of other people's wealth.

To me this difference in market cap and revenue you illustrate demonstrateS more that AMD has a lot of market to gain while INTC stands to lose ground.

As an investor it would seem that AMD has more potential upside. Add to that they are currently producing better technology at the moment...

Apeel Sciences: https://apeelsciences.com/ I don't work for this company or have any affiliation but they are up to some really cool stuff in the food space. They develop a plant based coating for fresh produce that keeps it fresh for longer minimizing food waste and making produce easier and safer to distribute.

https://andela.com/ is another company that is really awesome and doing some cool stuff with helping make technology jobs more accessible to people all over Africa.

at ~9km resolution they may be accurate but I doubt you can plan things down to the minute or even have any certainty of what weather conditions to expect near shore where terrain will greatly affect the flow of 10m winds. also Windy only works over a strong network connection so during actual passages it isn't really that helpful (compared wx gribs which can typically be downloaded over ham radio)

All that being said, Windy is an amazing product, and definitely a boon for visualizing model data and making that accessible to anyone with a decent internet connection!

source: thousands of miles of single-handed ocean sailing and I also handle wx model data daily at my job.

"Designing Data Intensive Applications" is an absolute goldmine for things like message queues but also going beyond understanding the full implications in database selection and other common, distributed-oriented engineering decisions modern software engineers may come across.

I would add the most important thing is to start getting paid to learn programming. This doesn’t necessarily mean getting a full time job as a software engineer (yet) but smaller more manageable things. For example, take a boring task you already do in work or daily life and try and figure out how you could make it more automatic.

This will be slow, painful and frustrating at first, but if you spend the time banging your head against the wall now, and are truest motivated, it will take you where you want to go.

I believe serverless works on a bunch of different providers. I have no affiliation with this project but it’s a pretty good tool! https://serverless.com/

Specifically if you want to operate HF phone or in digital modes (CW is allowed in >15m band for techs along with some limited hf phone and digital modes in 10m). Also you can operate marine SSB (which is hf phone) outside of a HAM general license as long as you operate on designated marine SSB channels.

Fwiw I never went to a boot camp (nor have an engineering degree of any kind).

I was lucky enough to have a few opportunities where I was paid to learn. Got my first big boy developer job at a startup in Santa Monica in oct 2014 after working as a scuba instructor. Now I work very part time from a boat sailing around the sea of Cortez. I can only do this because my resume is solid enough that picking up short term freelance work is not impossible.

If you want to learn something (or do something for that matter) I think passion is the first and most important ingredient. If you want it bad enough the opportunities will manifest themselves.

I have worked in a quite office and an open office and I think at the end of the day my feelings are the same. I am more productive and can get more done in less time when I do my own thing in my own space.

One thing I think worth mentioning though is as our systems become more and more distributed there is a clear advantage to having the limitations in communication folks are bringing up. It really forces you into a mindset where you have to nail down your API so others can neatly interface with your work. When I'm in the same location as a teammate, I'm more likely to just go over and ask them how their module/service works, which I might argue leads to more intertwined, less decoupled code. If I am physically removed from other team members, I am forced to make more independent resilient systems because in order for projects to be more successful, I have to more closely stick to the predefined API specs from the outset.

I am fortunate in that I have garnered enough skill/demand that I can work from my boat, sailing around Mexico, so for me, the freedom independent contracting has allowed in my personal life is unmatched. I undrrstand why managers and business owners are loathe to offer this kind of work, and I think partly it's because a few bad eggs has given wfh a bad rep

for me, using docker on my own workstation (OSX) makes it easy for me to test deploy's to multiple machines quickly (even if these are only locally hosted VMs). docker-machine facilitates that by allowing you to quickly spin up and spin down virtual machines locally or in the cloud.

I can see advantages for running docker as a way of streamlining dev environments, and keeping them consistent across team members, but by automagicaly awaying the docker-machine env commands you have effectively lost the most powerful facet of container technology.

Perhaps we would all do better if Docker's toolset docs were written in a way to communicate these design decisions (their purpose, and how they conceptually work behind the scenes)...

Here is a wild idea... If you are going to be a publisher of books, why not qa (ie edit) these books the old fashion way. If quality books is the top priority, no algorithm will match the discernment of the human eye.

I am a developer, (not a writer), but this outrages me nonetheless