Does "financial gravity" imply that noble missions are generally less profitable? Is there a way to align that (maybe by governments structuring the market with taxes / regulations)? Is that realistic?
I work as a Data Engineer and in my country Azure is pretty big, and as a consequence their Data Factory service has become a common choice for enterprises. It's a GUI based ETL tool, architects prefer it since it is a managed cloud service and supposedly is easy to use.
In practice you lose all the benefits of abstraction, unit testing, proper CI/CD, etc. I haven't met an engineer that likes the service. Some projects have resorted to writing code generation tools, so that they can take config files and programmatically generate the JSON serialization of the pipelines that you're supposed to develop by clicking and dragging.
I think the comparison was Snowflake vs Databricks SQL. Databricks SQL is a PaaS service just like Snowflake. Also, it uses their Photon engine, which is a proprietary engine written in C++. It is not Spark.
It's definitely a long term thing. Some guys from my university founded a company around foldable containers in 2008 (https://4foldcontainers.com/). It's still not common.
I've had this experience in Germany and it turned out that the waitress gets a cut of the turnover, at least for drinks. So they have an incentive to keep the glasses full. I'm not sure if this is common in Germany.
I started reading "The Master and Margarita" this year after seeing this title pop up on HN so often. I could not finish it, I found it rather boring. I'm curious, am I the only one? What does everyone find so great about this book?
My girlfriend works as a GP. One of her colleagues was on a visit and had to call an ambulance. She was able to do so by reaching out to the police via Facebook.. (not sure how the address was communicated and what the privacy impact is of that)
Outboard motors for boats work like this. If you hit a rock with the propellor, a piece of plastic in the drive train breaks. This prevents the propellor or some other part of the motor from serious damage.
I don't have data but my gut feeling says that the numbers of Bank Tellers has peaked. In my country (Netherlands) a lot of small branches of banks have closed. The general trend is towards self-service / online.
Anecdotically, I went to the bank across the street 2 years ago to ask some question about insurance. I was told to go to the website and look up the information there. The branch is now closed.
This absolutely happens. Fisher boats will turn off AIS routinely. The nonprofit Global Fishing Watch is doing research to analyse AIS signals, and determine if illegal fishing happens in protected areas. See http://globalfishingwatch.org/fishing-vessel-behavior/signal...
If you browse their site, there's also stories about other illegal activities, such as laundering fish (it's being mixed with fish caught in legal areas on sea). Also some boats are staffed with people that are essentially slaves. They typically stay on sea permanently, and are fueled on sea. (http://oceana.org/blog/how-global-fishing-watch-can-combat-s...)
Price is quite low (I think 20-30 euro) for which you get 20 hours of excellent video material. After each section there is a practice where you build something (using your own AWS account billed against your own credit card).
AFAIK it is not multitenant, you get your own machines.
They spin up the VMs with either open source Spark or the Databricks runtime - you get to choose the distribution and version before spinning up the cluster.
The startup time of a HDInsight cluster is quite long; it's not really suited for ad hoc clusters (which are really easy to spin up quickly in Databricks).