For me the biggest quality of life improvement has been moving to a less populated area with clean air, clean water and access to good organic food, forget what country that is in, that only matters in which the local government either degrades or improves upon those basic things.
This is why I probably won't move to Asia, it's just too polluted. Or why I won't move back to a big city.
I'm not clear on the details, is this a 90 extension on the filing due date, or is the filing due date still 4/15 with a 90 day extension on taxes due?
> “We encourage those Americans who can file their taxes to continue to file their taxes on April 15,” Mnuchin said. “Because for many Americans, you will get tax refunds.”
~~Seems pretty clear to me,~~ ~~the deadline for filing~~ and deadline to pay are both extended by 90 days.
Edit: Sorry, you're right, it's not clear. Others in the thread seem to disagree that the filing deadline has been moved or not. This was how I read it.
If I have updated my understanding correctly now based on reading more of the supporting materials, it looks like you can file late without a penalty if your state agrees, based on a declared state of emergency, but that you are still encouraged to file on-time if you can. Only for payments, are they saying broadly that no penalties or interest will be assessed, if you owe money on your federal return, (which is as much power as the treasury probably has.)
California for example has one of the most detailed set of guidance by state in this document. My state of Indiana is saying they will follow the federal government's lead.
The article could be read in a way that supports automatic extension of the filing deadline, but the announcement was very specific that it applies to the payment deadline:
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Tuesday said that individuals will be able to defer up to $1 million in tax payments to the IRS for 90 days in light of the coronavirus outbreak.
Without interest and penalties, filing late is probably meaningless, but still it would have been nice if they clearly stated that the filing deadline was postponed as well.
Of course, it would have been nice if they'd have planned this out in their contingency planning weeks ago and had a detailed announcement ready to post on irs.gov, but no one in government knew that a pandemic could turn into a bad thing. Aside from the government epidemiologists who have been warning about this all along, but they're just scientists, so what do they know!?
Senior full-stack developer with 10 years of experience building fast, high quality, web applications that return results.
I'm comfortable working up and down the stack; from DevOps infrastructure to CSS animations and everything in between. I love learning the goals of your application and then getting there as efficiently as possible.
Preferred tools (and open to finding the right tools for the job):
_Backend: Ruby on Rails, NodeJS, Elixir, PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, WordPress _Frontend: VueJS, React, Svelte, _Platform: AWS, Heroku, Linux VPS.
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Easier said than done. To implement that I will probably need to hire a DevOps guy, and now we have all this cloud formation (or whatever your infra as code choice is) code to manage now. So in reality it probably costs more (devops and more code to manage) than if I just went with a couple cheaper bare metal servers.
If you are running in the cloud then you still need a devops guy same as you would if you where bare metal. In fact you will probably need _more_ devops people the deeper you get into the AWS ecosystem.
Datapoint: We have 2 "DevOps guys" supporting a significant AWS infrastructure. We autoscale from 200 ec2 instances at night to 700 ec2 instances during the day. We run 60+ microservices, each of which has multiple processes that run, each of which is autoscaled (we use ECS). We use Aurora (with autoscaled readers) and DynamoDB (autoscaled IOPS). We manage all of that with 2 "Devops Guys".
Granted, we're a mature startup and have put a few years of investment (at the cost of 2-3 "Devops Guys") into our infra, but ultimately it doesn't take much to manage a ton of AWS infra once the tooling is in place.
Man, that sounds so luxurious. I'm begging for us to hire a second guy because I'd like to not always be on point for everything and to take vacations. Probably running an order of magnitude more stuff than you described, multi-cloud and with Terraform.
Terraform and the fact that I came in with experience makes this doable. But only just.
They were also acquired at a price which would value each employee at ~350M.
They were capable of scaling in a way that is certainly an anomaly, and not indicative of the costs of an ordinary team.
It speaks volumes about what the right talent and architecture/technology choices can do if leveraged successfully, but is more of an interesting anecdote than a realistic infrastructure budget.
> They were also acquired at a price which would value each employee at ~350M.
That’s a pointless calculation. The acquisition wasn’t for the employees. As with all network-effects products, the acquisition was for the active user base. They could have acquired WhatsApp, fired the engineering team, rewrote it with an architecture that required 100x the servers and still been happy.
One of the benefits of the cloud is that the developers should be able to easily manage their own infrastructure. After all, they should be the people most familiar with the performance profile of their service/micro service/application. They should be the ones making decisions like using Aurora vs Dynamo vs managing your own dB on vms or bare metal vs a Hadoop cluster across VMs. They should own their deployment pipeline with CI/CD. If you have a dedicated DevOps person or team on a pure cloud application you are either a very large organization that is coordinating across multiple development teams that each have their own infra. Or you have built something brittle and not entirely cloud native (eg self managed Cassandra or elastisearch on a cluster of VMs). (Third possibility is a complex micro service architecture where it’s nice to have someone purely in-charge of “the system view” of the infrastructure even with a small number of developers.)
Why? Do You think developers can’t consider cost/performance? Do you think engineering managers and their finance partners don’t care? Maybe I’ve gotten lucky with company choice, but the engineer who finds massive cost savings due to optimization gets recognized over someone implementing the next basic feature.
I disagree. Any of our senior developers can create a CloudFormation template or use one that we already have and make minor changes and include in their repository.
Every place that I have worked it’s the responsibility of the team who wrote the code to create the CI/CD pipelines.
We have grown in complexity since we first started to have a dedicated “ops team”, but honestly it’s because developers just didn’t want to do the grunt work and we needed someone to make sure everything was done consistently.
But still ops serve developers not the other way around. The senior developers who knew AWS well, basically set the standards and kept ourselves accountable to the ops guy we hired, even though any of us can override him because of our influence in the company.
I started taking away some of my own access and privileges just so I would be the first to hit roadblocks to feel other developers pains who weren’t given the keys to kingdom.
But you understand Ops, and you have your developers understand Ops, which is my point.
Hiring "DevOps" teams completely misses the point, in the same way that I don't hire Unit Testing teams to write the unit tests that my Devs don't want to do the grunt work for.
When a Dev understands Ops they write more efficient code, as they realise what storing your entire DB in cache really means for the server.
But at least three of the senior engineers (including me) I feel could hold our own against any “specialists”. My experience are too many of the “specialists” are old school netops people who got one certification and treat AWS like an overpriced colo.
AWS likes to pawn their customers off to Certified Partners for outsourced solutions.
I'm a software engineer who went the specialist route because it does take real skill to do this well. Yes, I am embedded on a team of old school netops people now, but I'm in charge of all of this and I get to drag them kicking and screaming in to the modern world.
Specialists are worth it if you find the right one.
I’m a software developer/architect/team lead/single responsible individual depending on how the wind blows, but after a few years of adding AWS to my toolbelt, I think I can hold my own and I have been recruited to be on the infrastructure side.
Old school netops folks are so afraid of becoming less relevant they do their best to keep control. But at least they are harmless compared to the ones that have tried to transition to the cloud. They are actively harmful costing clients and companies more with little to show for it.
And no I am not young. I’m 45 and started programming in assembly in the 80s.
“lift and shift” should be phase 1. Not the end goal.
>> and now we have all this cloud formation ... code to manage
The cloud formation code is (likely to be) much less than your application code. ... and if your intention and need is to have couple servers, then you don't really need any infrastructure code. If these cases, yes bare metal is much cheaper and (probably) better option.
> Easier said than done. To implement that I will probably need to hire a DevOps guy, and now we have all this cloud formation (or whatever your infra as code choice is) code to manage now. So in reality it probably costs more (devops and more code to manage) than if I just went with a couple cheaper bare metal servers.
This does not make any sense. You don't need cloudformation or anything, you can just use a wizard and provision as many VMs (baremetal or otherwise) as you need. It's literally a form and next -> next -> next.
Now that you have systems you can login to, their complexity is the same – except you won't have to care, or manage any hardware.
You still have to manage those systems yourself. Keep them patched, secure, and the workloads up. It's your choice whether or not to delve deeper into the AWS ecosystem.
Note that even though I said you don't need cloudformation (actually just use Terraform instead), you have a lot of power at your disposal if you do. You can't automate racking and stacking of physical servers, but you can fully automate the lifecycle of a cluster of VMs. At my job I can bring up a 40+ cluster containing many kinds of workloads, with a single butotn press. And destroy it just as easily (for non-prod). That's invaluable.
> Now that you have systems you can login to, their complexity is the same – except you won't have to care, or manage any hardware.
Depends upon the number of servers you have.
Back when I worked on several somewhat popular websites ( a handful with ~1-5mil daily unique users), we had about 40 servers and they mostly took care of themselves. Between me (primarily a developer) and the CTO we averaged maybe a single day thinking about hardware per month, and that was mostly to install new hardware rather than taking care of existing stuff.
If you have this number of servers, once you have something like Ansible setup (we used cfengine back in the day, ugh), both hardware and software mostly manages itself.
What are you comparing? If you’re comparing a large, HA SaaS use case with a static website on a VPS, then of course the latter requires less DevOps work, but if you hold the use cases equivalent, AWS requires much less DevOps work than bare metal. Notably, just because you’re using bare metal doesn’t mean the motivation for infra-as-code goes away; to the contrary, you need more of it because you’re now managing more services that come out-of-the box on AWS.
Your static site would still probably be better on AWS. Whack it into an S3 bucket, put cloudfront in front of it, and you have a globally scalable, CDN-enabled static site with at least five 9's of reliability and it costs you peanuts.
in 2007/2008, I managed a GIS server / website that averaged 100 hits per day, but once every couple years the website would get listed in time/cnn and would get millions of hits.
I set up an EC2 instance behind a load balancer and set it to auto-scale. done. If I had to handle that bare bones, I would have had to upgrades switches, manage dozens of servers, deal with hard drive failures, etc., and most of that would be idle 99% of the time.
As someone who is often categorized as a devops guy, there really shouldn’t be such a role. The whole point of devops is that you have developers that can perform operations tasks.
Devops means different things to different people. I'm a devops guy surrounded by devops guys and we all are operations people that develop, which day to day is completely different from a developer that performs operations.
These two don't play nice together. That is you can't use cloudflare as a CDN and netlify without netlify complaining to you about not being able to provision your ssl.
TBF linguistics as a field doesn't seem to apply empiricism as strictly as the hard sciences. It seems that it was only relatively recently that descriptivism became the norm.
What is the risk of exposing our health data? To me it is not so obvious, other than maybe embarrassment? Is it like how in our culture we don't like to talk about how much money we make? Why are all these things supposed to be secret in the first place?
Also, consider the poor security track record of implantable medical devices [1]. From the source [2]:
> The vulnerabilities could allow an unauthorized individual (i.e. someone other than a health care professional) to access and potentially change the settings of an implantable device, home monitor or clinic programmer.
Ok cool, so there's millions of implantable cardioverter defibrillators whose voltages can be changed by someone who sits nearby at a restaurant. If they up the ampage high enough, the patient has a heart attack.
Now, what if I found out that a sitting president or other elected politician had a small electronic defibrillator implanted in their chest? We could see targeted assassinations look like medical device malfunctions when in reality someone learned about this device, built an exploit for it, and hired someone to sit within bluetooth range to deliver the payload.
It's not impossible to do. Unlikely, sure, but this is a result of the high-tech world we are living in.
To me, your examples are not about "using information against" someone.
> Want a new job? Nope! We don't want someone with your condition on our team.
There are laws in some countries that could forbid such discrimination. Even if the employer lies about the true reasons, lies don't go unpunished forever. The parent is right about it, they are cultural biases.
> Want to buy a house? Nope! An AI bot says may not live long enough to pay the loan.
As said by another reply, your example is purely fictional. Even if it was true, there could be a culture change and new laws to support those people in need.
> Want to get some ice cream? Can't haz. When you swipe your electronic payment method the database says you're at a risk for diabetes.
Again, fictional example.
> There are thousands of other scenarios.
Sure, if you use all the words in the English dictionary, you can create billions of sentences, but very few will be actually close to the truth...
> Want to buy a house? Nope! An AI bot says may not live long enough to pay the loan.
Nobody cares whether you pay or not, as long as the property value isn't under water. They want you to die. If you die without an heir who can take over the payments (perhaps with the help of insurance money), they get everything you paid so far, and the property.
These are independent of any sharing. A medical provider could directly provide these features as a service without sharing any of the underlying data.
It's not the same as the income situation. In that situation it's about whoever pays you not wanting you to know that you're being undervalued compared to your coworkers. With healthcare it's about not wanting your community to know things and have biases against you and treat you differently because of your medical history.
Imagine you used to have cancer and beat it, and independent of that fact are looking for a new job that offers health insurance.
If your condition every resurfaces, you're going to be a real expensive hire for your employer in terms of time off (for treatments and recovery) and your new health insurance provider.
You might be so expensive that they decide not to hire you, or decide not to cover you.
If you want to think of your own cases, think about medical conditions that have been stigmatized over the course of history and how people's actual lives are effected by them.
Isn't embarrassment enough? Why do you close the door when you go to the bathroom?
In addition, many diseases like STD/STIs or mental illness carry a stigma. Information like that, if inadequately protected, can have a social or even financial cost like losing your job.
I don't think it should be up to someone else what I am allowed to be embarrassed about, or what I want to keep private.
I don't think changing society to not be embarrassed about things being made public is a good solution to privacy concerns.
Also, we might have a million, non-embarrassment reasons to want to keep things private. I might not want people to know about my cancer because I want to be able to live my life without having to answer questions about it, or have people treat me as delicate. I might not want people to know I am pregnant because I don't want to have to tell them when I have a miscarriage.
Most importantly, I want to be able to have whatever arbitrary reasons I want to keep things private.
> There are life and death implications in medical privacy in most countries. Stigma is real, as are insurance risk algorithms.
Hell, in some countries people have been killed because of their medical history.
Also, centralizing this data is very dangerous if this data falls into the wrong hands at a later date.
A prime example would be the registration of religion which happened in the Netherlands prior to world war 2. (for taxation reasons). Which resulted in a large number of victims during the holocaust in part because of this record keeping.
So... You are advocating that your hiv status should be hidden from your romantic partner? ;) More seriously, unified health record sharing is inevitable, especially if we are to move to universal healthcare. Would you be against a different entity hosting this data, or just Google?
Because the right to your private medical issues is at stake. And that ignores the predatory insurance industry and other discriminatory practices as an aside.
Imagine even more sophisticated advertising from Big Pharma to the old and vulnerable. That is reason enough.
As a society we are getting better at talking about income. We hide _that_ because of a lack of class consciousness. We should absolutely be transparent with income (except when negotiating for a new salary).
So essentially the answer I'm hearing is that there is a fear of what other people will do with the information. Mostly around discrimination and shame.
What is the risk of talking about this? Why is this article pushed to page 2?
32. How we built Uber Engineering's highest query-per-second service using Go (2016) (162 points, 11 hours ago, 102 comments)
33. Google whistleblower: the medical data of millions of Americans is at risk (160 points, 2 hours ago, 45 comments)
Do you join me in my request to make all flags and votes on HN public?
We are all more connected than we realize. Issues in California are issues for everyone, this protectionist attitude gets us nowhere in today's world where it's easier than ever to live anywhere.
This is why I probably won't move to Asia, it's just too polluted. Or why I won't move back to a big city.