vigilant's comments

And what if I turn on the camera for a tenth of a second, take a picture, and turn it off. You won't notice the LED being on for a tenth of a second. Software makes it easier to prevent such things.

Is gRPC a full fledged server for API calls?

e.g.: Will it have things like monitoring (we've handled x calls to this API in the last hour, the average API call took y milliseconds). Clustering? (a client connects to a list of grpc servers, if one server goes down, the client will automatically connect to the next on the list)? And load balancing?

If not, are there existing third party tools to implement these, or is the expectation that the community will create these?

Does anyone have experience with EB-5? I did a startup in Canada, so am fortunate enough to have the 500K/$1M.

It looks like it is fair from a panacea - I haven't yet consulted a lawyer, but based on internet research, it seems like it can be hard to find a legitimate (e.g.: non-scammy) EB-5 Visa project, and the wait times for EB-5 can fairly long. But at least you aren't tied to an employer, and can do whatever you want as long as your investment works out and creates the 10 jobs.

Don't a large number of immigrants make it easier to make friends? My experience in a different large city - immigrants new to the city are eager to make friends, as they won't know many other people in the city. People who grew up in the city often still have their friend group from childhood, and thus are less interested in meeting new people.

I do love Canada, but New York City has nearly all of those same positives which you list (other than universal health care), to an even greater extent. And you can get bay-area level salaries there (as opposed to Toronto, where your salary is half what it would be in the bay area)

The reason the debt metaphor is used for technical debt is that debt isn't necessarily a bad thing - it just something to understand and manage.

Most people, when they buy a house, go into debt (e.g.: a mortgage) for the initial purchase - without that debt, they would never be able to save up the money needed to buy that house.

A startup seems similar - the first goal of a startup should be to show traction and market fit before running out of runway - and if building up technical debt lets them achieve that more quickly, then that is the right thing to do. This first phase seems to be where the 10x programming would shine.

My experience is that more often than not, unit tests get thrown away in aggressive refactorings, and system level tests survive. If you have a system that depends on units A, B and C, and refactor it to use a totally different structure divided into units D, E and F, then the unit tests for A B and C get thrown away, as they don't really have an equivalent in D, E and F. But the system level test stays, as the system as a whole does the same thing. So, the system level test is what guarantees the safety of the refactor.

That is not always the case, but that happens in most of the large refactorings i've been involved in.

System level integration tests are also proof that the work we did is correct and we can move on. And it is better proof than unit tests, because we aren't mocking everything. And they are far more likely to survive a large and risky refactor than unit tests.

Don't confusing testing in general with unit testing. Just use the right tool for the job. If your unit tests aren't catching a material number of bugs compared the the effort spent, compared to other testing methods, then don't do them. Unit tests have benefits such as quicker execution time, etc. - but that has to be weighed against cost.

The idea that developers should be hidden from customers, like lepers, is offensive to me as a developer.

There seems to be a lack of emphasis on 'shipping working software' in this list. As a developer, that is what I ultimately want to be judged on. Nothing else. And too many managers judge developers by how closely they adhere to their silver bullet development process which they read in a random website.

It seems like the only ways to do this are

1) Create a startup, ship something awesome, have a great exit 2) Work for wall street, in a position where your success is judged by how much money you make, which directly drives your bonus.

I fear that opening sourcing my personal projects would work against me. The code that i develop in my spare time is done for my own benefit, and just for fun - no documentations, no unit tests, and there are hacks there which i'm proud of.

I fear a future employer would look at that code and think that is how I write code in professional environment.

I've seen this story before - worked for a company with very disciplined management, focusing on steady predictable growth - 25% a year, not 200% a year, but doing so profitably without VC capital. And then the venture backed competitors who didn't care about making a profit popped up...

It is a vicious cycle - once a market attracts the attention of VCs, it becomes really hard not to join in.

It seems incredible racist to assume that all Chinese money is dirty money and/or money laundering. Sure, some of it is, but China is also the world's factory - we pay them to manufacture stuff, that provides them with money legitimately. It might not be evenly distributed among the population, but that isn't the case in the US either.

But this is hackernews - the demographic is highly paid silicon valley workers. If you're making 250k-500k a year, then a few thousand dollars whenever you do a transcontinental flight is a reasonable luxury. It is just a few weeks rent, after all.

I've actually experienced the opposite..

With couchsurfing, i've tried both hosting and surfing. Hosting felt like I was managing a free hotel - the guests seemed to have little interest in hanging out or socializing at all. They just stuck to each other. Maybe my mistake was allowing couples instead of individual travellers. I never got a chance to surf, all requests were denied, I get the sense that you basically have to be female and traveling without a partner to succeed in surfing. Context: 29 yr old asian american male, no deformities or anything like that.

With AirBnB, most of the time, it was just a business relationship, but I did form a few friendships which lasted a while.

Of course, anecdotes are not proof - I think it really shows that it is more the luck of the draw than anything else.

How can technology help prevent such attacks without infringing on the basic right to privacy?

Perhaps some sort of real time image recognition of video streams from major public areas (like airports), which can detect things like guns and unattended packages and alert authorities automatically? Of course, that doesn't help detect the suicide bomber scenario.

Automatic facial recognition of known criminals? That would be hugely open to abuse.

Same with me. Live in central London, about 1 km away from the 'Silicon Roundabout' Fastest internet I can get is ASDL with real-life speeds approaching 8 mbit.