I may not be using the same definition of "motivation" as the author, but understanding what motivates your people, putting the right mix of people together to work on the right problems, and knowing how and when to apply pressure to get people to do their best work are absolutely something managers can do to motivate their teams.

I still mourn the loss of Weatherspark's old Flash interface, which brilliantly displayed all of this data in a single pane to give context to the recent, current, and forecasted weather. I've never seen as concise a visualization of current and historical weather data.

Do you maybe have sceeenshots of this? Would love to see some more ways of compacting and visualizing this data in a digestible way.

I think this was rhetorical hedging - the author was expressing false doubt to underscore how extraordinary the actions of his hosts were, but he didn't literally mean he wouldn't do the same for others. The tone of the rest of the piece implies he is very grateful for the kindness of strangers.

> I am having trouble seeing myself emptying my bank account to purchase a boat ticket for someone who has more money than I do.

Another strange example. In the entire article he does not give one example where he is the helper or offers reason why he would help or why people should help. It is all about the taking as far as I can read. IDK, just I'm not inspired or excited.

Well we only know what he said.

He doesn't present examples where he helped others.

That's not the point of his piece, and spending time virtue signaling to the reader would undermine the message that this kindness is a form of grace, given freely without expectation of reciprocation.

Since it has no calories, it's not "food" by even a very loose definition.

As someone who lives in a neighborhood where most tapwater is still delivered by lead service lines, I'm sympathetic to the argument that it provides hydration. I'd prefer that my tax dollars went to solving that problem more directly, however.

Are you saying you shouldn't be able to buy water with SNAP money?

I think it could be argued either way. There's plenty of non-food necessities (toilet paper, feminine hygiene products, etc.) that aren't covered by SNAP.

I read this comment as implying a similar kind of exceptionalism for technology, but expressing a different set of values. It reminds me of the frustration I’ve heard for years from software engineers who work at companies where the product isn’t software and they’re not given the time and resources to do their best work because their bosses and nontechnical peers don’t understand the value of their work.

In fact, a properly-configured Kafka cluster on minimal hardware will saturate its network link before it hits CPU or disk bottlenecks.

Isn't that true for everything on the cloud? I thought we are long into the era where your disk comes over the network there.

Depends on how you configure the clients, ask me how I know that using a K8s pod id in a consumer group id is a really bad idea - or how setting batch size to 1 and linger to 0 is a really bad idea - the former blows up disk (all those unique consumer groups cause the backing topic to consume a lot of space, as the topic is by default only compacted) and the latter thrashes request handler CPU time.

But it can do so many processes a second I’ll be able to scale to the moon before I ever launch.

This doesn't even make sense. How do you know what the network links or the other bottlenecks are like? There are a grandiose number of assumptions being made here.

There is a finite and relatively narrow range of ratios of CPU, memory, and network throughput in both modern cloud offerings and bare hardware configurations.

Obviously it's possible to build, for example, a machine with 2 cores, a 10Gbps network link, and a single HDD that would falsify my statement.

But the workload matters. Even the comment in the article doesn't completely make sense for me in that way -- if your workload is 50 operations per byte transferred versus 5000 operations per byte transferred, there is a considerable difference in hardware requirements.

Exactly. "a properly-configured Kafka cluster" implies you have very properly configured your clients too, which is almost never the case because it's practically very hard to do in the messy reality of a large-scale organization.

Even if you somehow get everyone to follow best-practices, you most likely still won't get to saturate the network on "minimal hardware". The number of client connections and requests per second will likely saturate your "minimal CPU".

It's true that minimal hardware on Kafka can saturate the network, but this mostly happens in low-digit client scenarios. In practice, orgs pushing serious data have serious client counts.

A network link can be anything from 1Gbps to 800Gbps.

There's a lot of population centers in the US that could be better connected without crossing the Rockies.

Beijing to Shanghai is roughly the same distance as Chicago to New York City. Travel time via train is 4.5 hours vs 22 hours.

Boston to New York is almost 4 hours on the Acela!

Every software company I've worked at that is more than 5 years old had major features that nobody understood anymore, even features that were core to the product.

Dont forget the critical software that keeps the company going that someone dealt with long ago, and was left to rot when they left, only for someone to discover it and have to go on an archeology dig to find info and improve upon it.

You're right that the orange man has been a big factor, but not because of his effect on the stock market. The stock market isn't the economy, and most Econ PhDs are not working on modeling stock prices.

As the article indicates, a huge portion of the market for hiring PhDs is directly or indirectly dependent on federal funding. Universities are freezing hiring and reducing PhD cohort sizes, institutions like the IMF and World Bank are in crisis, and US government agencies have been reducing staff sizes. There was hope that the tech industry would provide another big source of jobs for PhD economists, but that hasn't panned out.

Source: the article, and my wife works in the UChicago economics department.

In the end, the need for a certain job sector drives demand. Its the same reason a new grad in CS in US could go get a six figure salary, because everyone was racing to monetize the web.

PhDs werent dealing with stock prices either. Nobody was trying to predict the stock market. The goal was to price volatility and sell volatility to the end party that would actually roll the dice.

Buses are the resilient backup for trains, especially if road infrastructure has been designed to prioritize transit (e.g. Chicago highways with shoulders designed to let Pace buses bypass traffic jams).