whopa

I think this is why AWS promotes DynamoDB so much, because it's one of the few datastores that work sanely with non-VPC lambdas.

I wonder why all the predominant RDBMSes are heavyweight connection based, and why this is presumably so hard to change. There's nothing in SQL that requires this to be the case, at least conceptually.

I had to do similar a month ago, around $20k as well. It was from my account at BofA to an account at a different bank. I did it all online, and it cost $10 and cleared the next day, so within 24 hours. I did this all online without talking to any person, though I did have to 2FA into my account.

I get that some banks might not be as competent yet, but signs look like they'll all get there in the end.

As a sibling comment has mentioned, there are high-skills immigration paths in the US, they just aren't very well known, and have a very high bar to clear. It's not great, but it does exist. I personally know 2 Indians who got their green card in a matter of months.

That said, the Canadian system, while definitely better than the US system, still isn't that great, and not something to model after. Specifically, it gives too much weight to credentialing, which is unfair in its own right, and still very much subject to gaming.

I personally believe in complete free movement of labor (which totally existed before, the current state of things is relatively young), but that seems politically infeasible around the world right now. Brexit is an example of even taking a step back from it. Maybe this will someday happen in my lifetime.

People keep saying that Node is async native, but the GC is global and synchronous, and that property will bite you on availability even at moderate traffic, i.e. sooner than you'd expect.

> I feel that if you make the best choice you can given the information you have, you've nothing to regret.

You did miss something. Trying to be a gymnast wasn't her choice, her mom made that choice for her when she was 3 years old. This is the story of a failure to be elite in the sports world, and coming to terms with a dream that was externally foisted onto her at a formative age that didn't get realized.

I don't think this situation applies to the scenarios most HN readers deal with. Your advice is a lot better for this crowd.

Modern AWS instance types are EBS-only.

This is an informative and well written article, but seems incomplete in this day and age. In public cloud environments, network attached storage is far more prevalent, so the swap story may be different there (I honestly don't know though). Since the author works at Facebook, he probably lacks experience in this regard.

If you're in AWS land you can use Kinesis firehose to S3, which is perfect for Spark. Way more straightforward than any Kafka solution.

At small scale just go with Kinesis. The base semantics are pretty much the same between the two, and Kafka is terribly complex to run. The hosted Kafka solutions are too expensive for small scale.

Kinesis has a real auth story too, plus you can trigger Lambda functions off streams.

My point about Tejon Pass is that it's a steep grade mountain pass with heavy traffic including lots of trucks. There's no equivalent in PA.

Highway trucking will be the first significant deployment of autonomous vehicles. One of the big challenges is Mountain West interstates.

I do agree that the NE US is a proper testbed for bad weather city driving, since no West Coast cities have really that bad winter weather, I'm just objecting to the claim that somehow Pittsburgh captures all the challenging road conditions that autonomous vehicles will encounter.

> they aren't biased by the immaculate freeways and roads in California -- Pittsburgh has a much wider variety of challenging driving situations, weather, and conditions than California so it is a great test bed for developing autonomous vehicles

Careful, don't compare Pittsburgh to an entire state. Pennsylvania doesn't have any real mountains, whereas California does. Google tests their self driving vehicles in the Lake Tahoe area, which in the winter can be much more challenging than anywhere in within 500 miles of Pittsburgh.

Navigating serious grade changes, both uphill and downhill, presents more of a challenge for trucks too, even for humans right now. The only places to really test that in the US are pretty much west of Denver.

The Democrats adopted Romneycare with some tweaks as a compromise effort. They view it as a starting point, not the end goal. Any attempts to move beyond that starting point were obstructed by Republicans.

The AHCA failed due to a small handful of Republicans rejecting it, with one part of that handful complaining that it wasn't pulled rightward enough, and the rest actually realizing that going rightward wasn't politically-tenable as you said. Most of the party was totally fine with the AHCA.

I'm specifically not making a value judgment on the approaches of the two parties. Health care is a complicated topic, and there are many approaches of with pros and cons to each. All I'm saying is that the parties have fairly different approaches to the issue, which are meaningful, due to some fundamental principles on which they differ.

You've been saying how there's a perspective where they do not meaningfully differ, but you have not actually articulated how that perspective is valid. My position is that this perspective is not valid, and recent events with the AHCA have made this very clear.