This was a great read - particularly the section on the thinking framework / mental model. I think survey papers like this are necessary to keep up with what's going on in the community.
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seahckr commented on India Is What Happens When Rich People Do Nothing theatlantic.com/internati... · Posted by u/pmoriarty
India has a lot of problems, and in comparison to them, COVID is fairly minor.
For example about 200,000 people have died so far in India with COVID, but over 1 million are estimated to die each year from the effects of air pollution:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/absolute-number-of-deaths...
India's fundamental problem is that it is overpopulated - stretching all of the natural resources of the country, and increasing density leading to viruses like COVID transmitting more easily.
The country needs a one child policy, or to put serious money back into Vasalgel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_inhibition_of_sperm...
India's population "problem" if it can be called that is in only 3-4 states out of 28 - Uttar Pradesh (230M), Bihar (120M), Maharashtra (120M). Most states in India have population densities comparable to countries in Europe.
seahckr commented on Apple commits $430B in US investments over five years apple.com/newsroom/2021/0... · Posted by u/sologuardsman2
If this is true, I'm bullish on real estate in Elk Grove, California. Elk Grove is a suburb of Sacramento that is about 1.5 hours from San Francisco. Apple used to have a major manufacturing presence here before they expanded their manufacturing in China. After Apple moved their manufacturing overseas, Elk Grove became a sleepy suburb where engineers from the Bay Area moved their families to get affordable homes and better schools.
Ever since telecommuting for work took off, the house prices have been spiking.
Disclosure: I have been looking at Elk Grove, Folsom, and other Sacramento suburbs as a possible place to relocate my family and team ... my team and I are not happy with the cost of living in SF, and we can get a lot more bang for buck by moving away.
You can get a 4 bedroom, 2500 sqft house in Elk Grove for about 750,000 now (six months ago it was 500,000). The schools are also quite diverse ... over 30% Asian and Indian.
Interesting. How do Apple's investments outside near LA and other parts of US help Sacramento real estate?
seahckr commented on Leslie Lamport: Video course on TLA+ lamport.azurewebsites.net... · Posted by u/kelvich
Great to see this here! I act as a TA for Dr. Lamport's TLA+ courses at Microsoft, and can answer any questions y'all have.
TLA+ in one sentence: it is a language used to write specifications, same as you might write a spec in English/your chosen informal language, except here you write your spec in basic mathematics; benefits of a formal specification language include freedom from ambiguity, model-checking, and even machine-checked proofs of correctness.
This language is a joy to use and I've found it really affects the way I think about system design.
attended a course where @ahewler TA'd. can attest, he is awesome! disclaimer - msft engineer.
seahckr commented on Global availability of Microsoft Teams news.microsoft.com/micros... · Posted by u/happy-go-lucky
All of the file-sharing features are tied into "OneDrive For Business," which isn't OneDrive and is just some Sharepoint garbage. The new sync client helps a lot, but it doesn't work for the sharing part at all, which is what Teams uses. It's a huge liability for Teams until Microsoft can make OneDrive For Business not terrible. And when I evaluated it, it was missing any kind of snippet support, which I consider a dealbreaker (some workflows may not think this way, which is fine).
They will probably fix it over time, and also closely integrate with everything else, like LinkedIn, O365, Word / PPT / Task Tracking etc..
seahckr commented on Ask HN: What is the biggest untapped opportunity for startups? · Posted by u/seahckr
Here are a few, and I frequently have these conversations with VCs, albeit biased toward areas I work in:
- Spatiotemporal analytics usually in the context of IoT. Most people currently repurpose cartographic tools for this purpose but the impedance match is poor and the tools are seriously lacking elementary functionality. There is no magic technology here, just exceptional UX/UI and an understanding of the problem domain and tooling requirements.
- IoT database platforms, no one offers a credible solution for this currently. Everyone defines this in terms of what they can do, not in terms of what is required in practice. There are many VCs currently hunting for this product but the problem is one of fundamental tech; you can't solve it using open source backends.
- Also for IoT, ad hoc clusters of compute at the edge being able to cooperate for analytical applications. The future of large-scale data analytics is planetary scale federation for many applications. Significant tech gaps here.
- Remote sensing analytics. Drones and satellites are generating spectacular volumes of this data and no one can usefully analyze data of this type at scale. Today, companies wait weeks for a single analytic output on less than a terabyte of data.
- Population-scale behavioral analytics. Many startups claim to do this but none of them can actually work with relevant data at a scale that would deliver on it despite increasing availability of the necessary data.
- AI based on algorithmic induction tech i.e. not the usual DNN and ML tech everyone calls AI. This is way more interesting if you have a novel approach.
Very insightful. In your expert opinion, what are some of the core features / functionality that an IoT database platform should have (that existing solutions or combinations of them on AWS / Google Cloud / Azure don't provide)?
Yesterday we announced Polaris specifically so (1) customers don't get locked into a catalog; (2) people know Snowflake works with AWS, Azure, Confluent, etc.
1: https://www.snowflake.com/blog/introducing-polaris-catalog/
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/04/databricks-is-buying-data-op...