This really isn't true. You should use different parameters (specifically, you can reduce the random_page_cost to a little over 1) on a SSD but there isn't a really compelling reason to use a completely different DBMS for SSDs.
Are there decent US based alternatives to Hetzner? I'd like to have my servers located in the US for a variety of reasons, but most of the alternatives I've seen to Hetzner seem to be pretty fly-by-night shops.
Content gets more engagement as it gets closer to the "policy line" of getting banned, and in a competitive information environment (an engagement maximizing algorithm) you end up with a lot of content close to the border of what's allowed.
I remember software working really badly in the early 2000s, when Microsoft had an unassailable monopoly over everything. Then there were a bunch of changes: Windows started getting better with Windows 7, Firefox and then Chrome started being usable instead of IE, and Google and Apple products were generally a huge breath of fresh air.
Since then, Google and Apple products have become just as bad as Microsoft's. I think this is because the industry has moved towards an oligopoly where no one is really challenging the big players anymore, just like Microsoft in the late 1990s. The big companies compete with each other, but in oblique ways that go after revenue not users.
Can someone link to a real source for this? Like, a paper or something? This seems very interesting and important and I'd prefer to look at something less sketchy than venturebeat.com
> It's unfortunate people expect you to have social media like a girl asks me if I have Instagram and I'm weird to not have one, I get it they can scope you out too for safety but when I tried using that stuff I felt this pressure to post about something
Probably worth Googling something like [men who don't have social media] to think what women think about this, it's more positive than you might think :)
You're right that a hobbyist couldn't build something like search or maps or docs in a weekend, but a lot of what Google ships is boring webapps. And I promise that they are really hard to ship: approvals are annoying and time-consuming, and the infrastructure is designed for scalability and performance, not flexibility or iteration speed.
There's a joke inside Google that Google infra makes easy things hard and impossible things possible.
Approximately what proportion of the US federal budget is spent on scientific research? What proportion is spent on foreign aid? Looking up these values is a useful exercise.
I don't honestly think that technology is meaningfully downstream of money. A startup or hobbyist can build something that costs Google several million dollars in a weekend. Most of these systems are complex, but not as complex as e.g. an operating system.
But upgrading technology requires government administrative capacity. That's generally cheaper than outsourcing technology development to third parties, but does require a commitment to try to understand the thing you're managing.
Politicians don't hire competent administrators because they believe that building a solution yourself and buying a solution from a contractor are basically equivalent, which anyone on this website can tell you is not true. This is an easier problem to solve than most think, but it's not trivial. And it's really hard when you have clowns like Elon Musk purposefully destroying institutional knowledge for no good reason.
Nuclear is really terrible at peak loads; it's a very reliable base load. It's basically impossible to quickly increase or decrease the output of a nuclear plant.
The PISA scores are below average in 2022 but not significantly so. Most countries have had a pretty bad decline in test scores due to covid, but that's (hopefully) a one-time problem and future cohorts will do better.
I'm not saying that's a good thing. We're a very rich country and we should do better.
But the US also has a lot of systematic problems that peer countries don't, like child poverty, that are likely a bigger cause of subpar test scores than bad schools.
I'm not trying to say that the US educational performance is great, just that it's not terrible. I think there's a lot of room for improvement, but there's a narrative that US schools are failing horribly and that just isn't true.
In what world is the US education worse-than-third-world? The US has universal literacy, phenomenal higher education institutions, and primary and secondary schools that are comparable to peer countries on average.
We spend lots of money on schools in the US and generally get pretty good outcomes. Our math scores leave something to be desired, but average reading scores are better than peer countries. There are plenty of exceptions, especially in poor neighborhoods, and chronic absenteeism is a real problem, but it's worth keeping sight of the fact that the vast majority of American schools are quite good.
We use a kind of funky BigQuery setup at my shop to reduce our spend, and I think it's based on a quirk in BigQuery pricing that Google doesn't explicitly recommend.
BigQuery has two completely separate pricing models: on-demand, and slot-based. The two models bill on completely separate things:
* On-demand pricing bills per GB of data processed by your query.
* Slot-based (or editions) pricing allocates your project a number of CPU/memory slots, and you pay per CPU-second.
You can find the costs each query would have by looking at the total_bytes_billed and total_slot_ms columns in the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.JOBS_BY_ORGANIZATION table, and multiplying those values by the slot-ms cost (total_slot_ms * 0.01111) and the bytes-billed cost (total_bytes_billed * 0.0000059). Then you can go through your queries and allocate them to either on-demand or slot-based pricing, depending on which is cheaper.
Usually slot-based is cheaper, but queries that do a lot of internal joins can have really huge CPU costs but cost very little in on-demand if they're not reading a lot of bytes.
Somewhat annoyingly, these billing models are configured at a per-project level; you can't switch between the two of them in a single project. Fortunately, you can query tables from other projects easily.