Linux is great for training, however I would like to deploy my models to run locally on user machines which are running Windows. Theano supports Windows but TensorFlow doesn't.
I've been seriously contemplating it for about a year now: is it the time to abandon Europe and find new life elsewhere? Asking for the honest HN opinion, is the old continent already the sinking ship? On one hand it is comforting to consider that there is ~1000 years of history of civilized Europe behind us, with rich culture, the discovery and development of science and, in general, prosperity. On the other, it took less than a century for the Western Roman Empire to collapse.
In the US, you're more likely to be killed by a cop than by a terrorist in Europe.
Japan is peaceful for now, but has its own problems - rising tensions with China, proximity of North Korea, low economic opportunity. Same goes for most other developed Asian countries.
Africa, Middle East, Russia, most of Asia and South America are less developed (AFAIK), in terms of social cohesion, healthcare, economic opportunity.
The best options seem to be Australia and New Zealand, they are English-speaking, highly developed, peaceful, lawful and, most importantly, far away - a problem for some (e.g. if you have family members in other countries), but in case of major conflict, it will probably be a good idea.
All in all, some perspective is in order. Europe is probably the strongest it's been in the past 100 years. There are 300 million inhabitants, so even 1M migrants is a drop in the bucket. There are no immediate threats from other nation-states, except possibly for a few countries bordering Russia - although even they seem focused more on the Middle East recently. Most European countries still have the strongest social security.
On the other hand, the unexpected is just that, by definition. Chances are low, but it's possible that some crazy person does something crazy (Putin? Erdogan? A right-wing EU leader?). But that's true pretty much anywhere in the world.
Of developed countries, Australia is expected to be one of the most impacted by climate change. Already crop yields are being affected; drought (in the west and interior), floods (in the north and east), and heat waves (everywhere) are posing challenges to Australians.
Most of North and Central Europe is less likely to suffer from such drastic effects.
Latin America is also an option, but you have to go there with the mindset that you're going to be part of the upper class. That's the toughest thing that ex-pats from Europe and America deal with there. It's not very easy to go with a middle class identity and fit in with the existing middle class of those countries.
Locals will expect you to be a retiree, a tourist, slumming it and up to no good, or an entrepreneur who is going to invest and create a business. You can't just go get a normal job domestically and expect to have a better life than you would in a western country. Worst of all, you won't really be accepted as a member of the local culture unless you've married a local and speak the language perfectly. People will see you as an outsider, and they'll take your money, but you will likely never feel at home.
The expats I have met in Latin America who have made a good life for themselves are either:
A. Working for large multinationals and live in a cloistered expat bubble.
B. Working as teachers in elite schools or as missionaries connected with some sort of religion or charity.
C. Digital Nomads who are basically permanent tourists and not really ex-pats.
D. People who were formally middle class in western countries and are now upper class having started boutique resorts, specialty farming operations, or are doing real estate development. This is the best reason to move to a developing country: You have the mindset of a wealthy person, but can't break through the middle class glass ceiling. Usually these people will leverage home equity or savings in western countries to invest in lifestyle business or those with a high rate of return in developing countries that require a lot of hands on management and political skill. Usually, the capital they invest would have been insufficient to star the same kind of business in a western country.
Yeah, but in Australia we have sharks, snakes, spiders and drop bears .. don't forget the drop bears. Plus, our Internet is crappy (unless you're on the National Broadband Network) and we are something of a nanny state. Oh, and our housing is ridiculously expensive. But apart from that, everything is pretty good.
My friends in Australia say it's economy is too reliant on mining and raw exports and that there is not enough value added exports. Is this not a common view in Australia?
That would be correct......to an extent. I moved to Australia around 10 years ago (originally from Poland but traveled the world extensively) and worked in tech since then wishing I did a course in welding or heavy machinery operation instead. Even mining laundry service workers here get 120,000/year salary!
The tide is turning though and world's biggest quarry is in trouble.....since China problems are looming more profoundly on Australian economy (China sneezes and Australia catches a nasty cold) more people are looking towards other industries i.e. services, tech, medical and those who used to make a tidy profit in the mines are being let go due to slumping iron ore pricing and weakened demand. In the space of last 12 months iron ore price was cut in half.
Add world's most expensive housing prices, climate issues, stalling economy, bogan attitudes (less so with the influx of educated migrants) etc. and Australia has its own share of issues to deal with. All things considered though, I would never want to go back to Europe or move to US. Why? To name a few: stable democratic government, great lifestyle, far away from some of the the loony bins e.g. Putin or not sharing borders with other countries (can get pretty lonely here at times though as to get anywhere is a minimum 10 hours flight), good pay and social support system, lots of nationalities in bigger cities so racial tensions are rare (we all just seem to get along), warm weather etc. Why would I want to live anywhere else? Yes, I could make more money in US, be more culturally aware/inspired in Europe, have cheaper lifestyle in Asia (south-east) etc. but when you look at what's really important in life and narrow it down to a dozen or so factors, especially if having a family is a prospect, nothing comes close to living Downunder. Even Kiwis want to live here! And that comes from someone who lived (at least 16 months) on every continent, except Antarctica and Africa.
Another thing I like about Australia is that it has no cultural and historical debt. Coming from Europe where some of the buildings I use to live in were older then Australia itself, there was always a great sense of pride (sometimes false) to think/say/do things the certain way just because it's what my ancestors believed in. Don't get me wrong, I think that European culture, shaped by its history is one of the best things this continent can be proud of but for some reason living Downunder feels liberating. It does not matter where you come from, what religion you profess, whether you're a gay or straight etc. the pressure of being stigmatized based on your personal values or your origin is non-existent. Aussie history is very young, some may say that excluding Aboriginal people, it's just started so in some ways it feels that migrating here you can start your life with carte blanche without having to conform to any norms or dogmas resulting from entrenched culture as it's the case in other countries. It's far from laissez faire as Australia is somewhat a nanny state (in a good sense) but open-mined and democratic enough to let one be and not interfere or make you feel bad in case you have opposing views (think governments in China, Russia, UAE or culture in Middle East, Asia etc.)
I disagree. Abortion laws really paint a different picture from that open minded Australia you depicted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Australia shows depending on where you live in the country you have different basic rights. Not the same carte blanche for everyone.
Except the massive problem of growing inequality, low wages, and a public service that has been shredded. New Zealand has a scary future if it can't start to face these problems.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, my friend. I've been seriously contemplating for about a year now whether America is a sinking ship and it's time to leave and head back across the pond.
The grass is always greener in someone else's yard, and the mold is always greener on someone else's bread. We over-estimate both how good and how bad others have it.
Europe made a decision to move away from that history to something more like the US. Swedes and French don't have children, and they are importing Syrians and Africans who do.
It's a similar scenario to what happened with the old Dutch and English people in 1860 Manhattan. The new masses of Irish and Jews drove many to leave.
It's not necessarily a bad thing, but the future will be very different.
1) Configured via a special DSL (Varnish Configuration language) that gets translated into C, compiled and loaded into the Varnish process via a .so. Perfect combination of expressiveness and speed. You can even inline raw C code in it!
2) Heavy, good use of virtual memory. Varnish allocates quite a lot of gigabytes and leaves it up to the operating system to decide what should be in RAM and what should be on disk.
3) LRU garbage collection of cached objects requires a synchronized priority queue. Varnish people transformed the decades old idea of implementing a heap in an array that every CS graduate knows and came up with a faster, paging-aware solution (http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1814327).
Nice, but they are solving a problem that is not all that hard. For example, I'd rather see a beautiful implementation of a concurrent garbage collector (which probably doesn't exist because it is almost impossible to achieve; a purely functional programming approach doesn't even apply here). Or how about a beautiful implementation of a web browser?
Well, in any case, I've never heard of a government software project being overdue because their proxy cache contained spaghetti code :)
To be clear, I'm not trying to denigrate this project in any way. I'm just saying that the complexity of the problem should be taken into account here.
Maybe this will change your opinion. I recalling helping rescue a government software project that was horribly behind schedule. One of the many issues being an e-learning system for a state department of education. Their CMS (Blackboard) was fronted by a forward HTTP proxy/cache/load-balancer that was misbehaving but near-impossible to debug. Details a bit hazy now but I recall it being a hairball of poorly written java. I ripped that out and replaced it with Squid and some rewrite code.
HTTP intermediate services are easy to write, but operate in a hostile and chaotic environment; they are very very hard to make reliable, performant, interoperable, secure, forgiving, and compliant. To achieve that and still have elegant code is really something so yay Varnish.
I'm a bit of a fan of the Dovecot mail server source for similar reasons (but I'm biased, having made a small contribution and got into the authors file)
I think the complexity of the problem actually speaks in favour of Varnish. The Unix philosophy of writing software is based on the principle of doing one, possibly small thing very well. And that's exactly what Varnish does: it is a reverse-proxy cache that can optionally do a bit of preprocessing on the incoming HTTP requests.
Besides, it's not trivial to write a high performance HTTP cache.
> Besides, it's not trivial to write a high performance HTTP cache.
Certainly true.
I guess that for me "beautiful code" invents some abstractions that transform a problem that initially seems dauntingly difficult into something that is easy to reason about. A proxy cache does not, for me, satisfy the first part of this premise, although I can imagine that the details of such a project take a lot of effort (hence "not trivial", but in a different way).
>I guess that for me "beautiful code" invents some abstractions that transform a problem that initially seems dauntingly difficult into something that is easy to reason about.
Well then, look no further than any RDBMS.
Seriously, for as much as people sometimes rag on the relation model, it is amazing for its power and relative simplicity.
The complexity of the problem is significant enough that there's only two verified HTTP servers I recall and a specifying/verifying a web app was considered good work. The bugs, inconsistent perfirmance, and CVE's in various caches also suggests they're not dead simple.
They're certainly easier to write than a lot of software. Their simplicity is deceptive, though, when real-world isdues come into play. Esp if result is to be beautiful.
Concurrent garbage collectors exist. It's nothing new or special. The problem is you need read barriers which means your garbage collector ends up slowing your entire programm significantly down. For some reason Intel and AMD decided it's not worth it to add hardware acceleration for read and write barriers so end up paying a lot of $ for custom designed processors from Azul if you truly need a concurrent garbage collector.
You can change jobs but it requires going through a bureaucratic obstacle, and if you ever find yourself without a job temporarily, you'd better find a new one _very_ fast or you're deported. Worse, switching jobs can make it a lot harder to get a green card since it resets. H1-B holders seem to find it hard to switch jobs which is why big companies like Cisco are are able to accumulate so many of them. They just park themselves at a big company and try to keep their head down and wait out the green card process.
With more flexibility afforded to H1-B holders to find a real market-rate job, many of the perceived problems of the program would go away in my opinion.
The irony is that for a lot of Indians/Chinese here, they could either wait 6-8 years, or they could leave the country for a year then transfer back in and have a GC in a year or less. It's particularly unpleasant for H1-Bs who start the PREM process as such. So much easier for internal transfers, especially EB1, O, an L1/L2... and easier still if you're not from a slow lane country (currently China & India, but Brazil was in this boat for a number of years, too).
A lot of companies (Microsoft is one example that I know of) are sidestepping H1-B entirely for college hires (and perhaps other channels of hiring?) for L1. Hire in Canada or the UK; apply for L1; transfer to the US in a year or two.
Apparently it's much more straightforward (and less prone to chance) as compared to H1B.
Its actually pretty cool to see Microsoft 'hacking' the visa system. They opened a center in Vancouver and put all their international hires there for 1 year, then brought them into the US on an L1 which allows them to get a greencard in 1 year- which prevents them from being in the 10 year to be free queue.
There is 0 difference in the speed of GC process. It does not matter if you are on H, L, O or don't have any status at all and applying from abroad. People are spreading this myth because L1-A and O-1 requirements are pretty close to EB1 so if you can get such a category of visa then you have a good chance to apply to EB1. But, again, if you fit these requirements already you can just apply to EB1 from any status (or lack of thereof).
Actually at least one cateogory, EB1-C, specifically applies to managers relocated from an overseas branch of the same company. An equivalently qualified manager on H1-B in the US is ineligible for that category.
Equivalently qualified manager on H-1B would have spent a year out of last 3 serving in such a position overseas so he would also be eligible. Alternatively, a L-1A manager who already spent more than 2 years in the US would be ineligible.
Didn't know that, thanks for the information. I was rejected in the H1B random lottery step (sigh) after getting an offer from a grown startup in SF, and did not investigate the green card process deep enough.
I don't think that and don't appreciate the framing you're trying to impose on me. Could you perhaps word comments like this more carefully?
What I think is that people armed with firearms give the police much less reaction time, while people armed with knives can, if they're not on a vector that puts them in contact with other officers or civilians, be pacified more gradually.
Sorry for the choice of words, but my point was that a person armed with just a knife can still be very dangerous. The use of a gun in such a situation cannot be simply called a deadly overreaction, without going into details. Therefore I do not see my comment as unreasonable.
If we're trading youtube clips here's a police force who disarm a man armed with a machete. Armed police are available, (the UK has armed police, especially in London) but those police are not needed because our police force is not fucking incompetent.
With no clips to trade, I'm merely spectating at a tennis match, but I remain unconvinced that the UK response is in any way better.
In all 3 clips (your two, plus the parent's) what I see is that a person holding a knife is an immediate and real danger to anyone within 15 feet of them.
Also, if I'm seeing correctly, both assailants had already been pepper-sprayed, is that right?
I don't know the numbers but it seems to me the relevant question is, in X number of incidents in the UK vs. the US, how many perpetrators die? How many cops die?
If the UK police are able to subdue these people without killing the perpetrator or getting killed themselves, on a per capita basis, I'd say the UK response is better.
Leaving aside the apples/oranges comparison of the greater latitude given to the individual's rights in the US vs. the UK (2nd and 4th amendments in particular), I'd more or less agree with this criteria being a good way to distinguish the overall value of the two approaches to dealing with armed civilian confrontations.
That being said, if the numbers you're looking for exist in an unbiased, non-doctored study, I'd be surprised. If they did, and they supported the thesis, you'd see them quoted in every article advocating gun control.
Yes, in the UK version the person poses a risk of very real harm to officers. People could die. Despite this, police manage to subdue him, and arrest him. They can do this because an officer didn't shoot him within six seconds of arriving at the scene.
In the first clip I wouldn't call that "competence" so much as "overwhelming force", something US police use frequently. It's worth noting that at the beginning of the video, an officer is trying to ram the perp with a trashcan found at the scene...
It's also worth noting that in the US an officer is much more likely to be killed. Hence why regular people are more likely to be killed by police. It's a fearful, kneejerk reaction thing.
It's surely anecdotal, however I have a hard time believing most of Europe, in particular the UK, has more mentally ill and/or drug addicts who are more prone to this kind of behavior than the general populace. You also have a variety of high profile examples of cop-killing in the US that play into this kneejerk reactionary arms race on the part of police.
Nice stigma. People with mental illness are not violent; mental illness does not predict violent behaviour. That's about as offensive and ignorant as saying "has more black people and/or drug addicts".
Once again. Provide examples of high profile cop killings contributing to so-called arms race. It's not an arms race when police always has a gun while the suspect may or may not have one in any given encounter.
You have moved from one statement to another without much to show for it.
Reusing your own comment in a different thread, "what terrible reasoning"
While Kolmogorov's definition of probability looks a bit spooky at first, I definitely recommend going through it at some point. Not only it feels nice, it also makes understanding probabilistic concepts easier (e.g. understanding that a statistical space is simply a "lifted", or rather parametrized, version of a probabilistic space).
Not for the first time, and perhaps not for the last time, these words are so relevant.
A war that need not have been fought was about to be
fought because of mutual misunderstanding, language
difficulties, and mistranslations.
Why did America drop the two bombs? Why did it not drop the first one over the Tokyo bay? Why Japanese leaders hesitated so much to surrender, despite being so much overwhelmed by foreign power? Why nobody managed to stop Hitler from inside Germany? Why all the genocides in the history had to happen?
The world is complicated, it does not always choose the right path. Decisions of even the greatest importance are sometimes made with insufficient information, and are subject to all kinds of cognitive failures. It's easy to judge after you know all the facts.
I don't understand the debate of the meaning of ignore vs reject.
The US made ultimatum without a specific deadline. The hawkish press spoke in behalf of the government, but without authority. The US continued its plan to attack until surrender was communicated. No doubt powerful in US govt wanted to see what the bomb could do. Dropping two a-bombs in a week wasn't an accidental race condition against communication lines. The US leadership had two bombs and wanted to use them.
nobody expected them to surrender at the time, and they needed either to go trough a landings and ugly attrition war or display such force to let the parties surrender while saving face.
that's why the bombs and that's why the target were mid sized cities.
''We of the peace party were assisted by the atomic bomb in our endeavor to end the war,'' Koichi Kido, one of Emperor Hirohito's closest aides, said later.''
The targets were mid-sized cities because by the time the target planning started, Kyoto was the only big one the B-29s hadn't burned to the ground (well, the important parts; I forget when, but we'd given up on Tokyo after destroying 17 square miles or so), and Secretary of War Stimson, who'd visited it and Japan in general, removed it from the list, despite Groves imploring him many times to not. That was wise, if for no other reason that it strengthened the Emperor's hand when he was finally in a position to end the war, for a long time Kyoto was the Emperor's city, Tokyo the military's.
Calling a 5% change in the Shanghai Composite index a "hard hit" is an overstatement, given what has been happening there over the last months (particularly April-September).
I've applied for H1B in the past, knowing everything one should know about it beforehand. Either my choice was idiotic, or being a slave in the US is better than being free in my home country (Poland). </irony>
While I agree that H1B is a stupid system, for everybody, I also think you should be more careful with your choice of words. Saying H1B is slavery is like comparing US police brutality cases to Nazism.
