tzone

So assuming you are looking at reading "consistent snapshot" in the context of a real time transaction. If the data that you want to read as a "consistent snapshot" is small, locking + reading is good enough in most cases.

If the data to read is too large (i.e. query takes long time to execute, and pulls a lot of data), you are going to have ton of scaling issues if you are depending on something like "repeatable read". Long running transactions, long running queries, etc are bane of all the database scaling and performance.

So you really want to avoid that anyways, you would almost always be much better of changing your application logic to make sure you can have much shorter, time bounded transactions and queries and setup better application level consistency scheme. Otherwise you will at some point hit scaling/performance problems and they will be an absolute nightmare to fix.

I think two isolation levels that make sense are either:

* read committed

* serializable

You either go all the way to have a serializable setup, where there are no surprises. OR, you go in read committed direction where it is obvious that if you want have a consistent view of the data within a transaction, you have to lock the rows before you start reading them.

Read committed is very similar to just regular multi-threaded code and its memory management, so most engineers can get a decent intuitive sense for it.

Serializable is so strict that it is pretty hard to make very unexpected mistakes.

Anything in-between is a no man's land. And anything less consistent than Read Committed is no longer really a database.

There aren’t just 10 or 100x engineers , there are even infinityX engineers when you work on actual hard problems because some of those can only be solved by handful of people.

Also, industry is now transitioning where even small business might need geo distribution , not just for compute but also for data. That is going to make distributed systems even more complex even for the small guys.

Cloud services have made a lot of this stuff easier for average Joe but you can’t really avoid dealing with at least some fundamental concepts of distributed systems

It has now been at least two decades that it has had close to zero credibility, but somehow in general population it is maintaining its brand as a legit publication

Ethereum was dominating TRON until very recently and this does have to do with huge increases in Gas prices on Ethereum

I do consider to know what I am talking about, considering my systems make hefty profits and have no real exposure to volatile crypto assets (or even long term exposure to crypto in general, my profits are in real world dollars). This is why I know that USDT has actual real utility and it is currently best instrument in its category. USDT is indeed somewhat shady but it’s premise and utility are all sensible and it is hugely profitable for its founders. They have zero reasons or incentives to do suspect things that could risk its peg.

If something goes horribly wrong for USDT it is going to be due to incompetence and not because of some long term planned con.

So all arbitrageurs, market makers, etc, transfer USDT between different entities through TRC20 network. USDT on TRC20 started to increase only after Ethereum gas fees got ridiculously high and it became too expensive to use even for pretty high volume market makers.

More USDT got issued because there was opportunity to make 0.1-0.2% on each new USDT since demand for it was that high (i.e. people were paying real USD to buy USDT at a premium, imagine that).

USDT (and USDC) demand spikes during crypto crashes because people actually cash out to these instruments because they are so widely used and trusted by actual market players. People aren't cashing out of crypto ecosystem during most crashes, money actually stays in crypto networks.

" Another concern the report outlines is that the U.S. anti-money laundering regime is focused on residential purchases, when a significant portion of the cases GFI reviewed involve commercial real estate transactions. "

Or another:

“When you talk about residential real estate, the heart of it is identifying who is the beneficial owner, [because] if you find out who the beneficial owner is, it also tells you who the criminal is,” Kumar told ICIJ. “In a commercial real estate investment, you don’t have to own the majority stake to be a criminal. You can own 2% of a $500 million property, and you are [still] laundering millions through it.”

More advanced human rights just simply means more fair human rights, it has nothing to do with chronology or recency. There are plenty of examples of countries that had more advanced human rights in the past and regressed and made things worse over time.

Easy example: Russia had much better human rights for LGBT community not so long ago, however, it has regressed and gotten much worse over last 10-15 years.

It is not super crazy to think that there would be plenty of people who would have rather see him die vs get extradited to US.

If you relocate to Zurich or Vancouver from SF, highly likely most companies that re-adjust salaries will decrease your salary even though cost of living is pretty high in both of those places.

The premise of this whole reverse-exploit is that there are people who are extracting value by getting preferential treatment with their transaction execution by doing deals outside of the blockchain itself (which are hidden and not public by default).

Most people in Western world are either out of shape, or straight up obese. It makes sense that, that will have huge negative effects on fertility.

First thing first, is Tether sketchy? Yeah, pretty sketchy. But not for the reasons provided in the article.

USDT is the most traded asset against other crypto because it is the easiest vehicle to use for all sorts of arbitrage. USDT is available to trade with on every non-US exchange and it is the easiest asset to move around. As overall market size increases, it makes sense that demand for USDT is increasing because it is used in most of the trading/arbitraging/etc...

When looking for highest USDT/USD trading volume, it isn't Kraken that you should be looking at, but Curve. Curve is a DEX that does largest amounts of stable coin trading volume. Curve also has incredible liquidity depth. Right now, you can go there and exchange: 10 million USDT to 9.99 million USDC in a single transaction. USDC can be cashed out for USD very easily and is regulated not just by regular US regulators but also NY financial department too, which is the most aggressive regulator to ever exist probably. If you wanted to, you would be able to cash out billions of USDT to other NY regulated stable coins in a single day.

While USDT is certainly very sketchy, it is the dominant market player specifically because of its sketchiness (and due to it being the first one). USDT's independence from US regulators is a huge plus for most of the major non-US crypto players. Those players would be more worried about holding USD (or USDC) directly, because they are more worried about US government freezing their funds, rather than Tether going insolvent.

It is very easy these days to go between Eth <-> BTC without any KYC/AML.

USDC and PAX are both regulated by US financial regulators, including NY.

There are plenty of ways to be skeptical of Bitcoin or Ethereum or rest of the Crypto, but this article is not it.

Their flows are all pretty smooth, you really don't need slick UI to make 3-4 trades a month at most.

Of course you do need slicker UI when you are essentially offering an online casino to your users. Nice colors, engaging UI, etc is important to keep your audience entertained and to have them roll the dice more often.

Examples:

* Learn about type systems: advantages and disadvantages of various modern (or older) type systems: c++, java, typescript, rust, go, etc... Understanding pros and cons of various type systems would help you improve as a software engineer, and make you better at designing proper abstractions and apis in whatever language you are working in.

* Learn about concurrency primitives, asynchronous event loops, parallel programming, etc. In modern software engineering pretty much every type of work involves concurrency, understanding what type of primitives exist in different platforms and languages, and what are their pros and cons would make you much more effective as a software engineer overall.

* Learn about data structures in scope of data storage and data transfer in practice. Get understanding of network i/o, disk i/o, how things get stored in memory, how things get stored persistently. This stuff is way more complex and way more useful in practice than learning about slightly different ways of doing computation or calling functions in a programming language.

* and many more...

I would say in modern software engineering, part of "how to express basic computation" is really the least complex and least interesting of the bunch. You can skin that cat many ways but compared to many other challenges, it is in my opinion at the way bottom in terms of importance.

And of course RocksDB has had similar graphs to showing perf against other systems.

Every system manages to find a benchmark that fits their narrative :)

Reality is both RocksDB and WiredTiger are high performance storage engines, and they are both optimized for SSDs too. These type of benchmarks rarely tell real story.

While virus is actively spreading, taking "current death count / current total infected", can easily underestimate mortality rate by 5-10x because it takes quite a while from infection -> death.

That is only one example of pretty complex dynamics. There are many other complex issues, including mortgage rates, more nuances about tenant laws and renting out apartments, extra costs associated with selling/buying houses and so on.

It is a pretty complex situation. Another big part of the equation is that there are a lot of wealthy people who benefit from high housing prices that continue to increase, so it is very unlikely that things will change towards other direction any time soon.