Can someone who is a domain expert comment on this statement I see being repeated often about Jio's ability to have a significantly lower cost structure by offering only 4G service with 'commodity hardware' versus the legacy players who are operating 2G/3G networks in conjunction with 4G? Is there a lot of truth to this or is this just something that the analysts have heard someplace and are now repeating it faithfully?
It is true. The ex-CTO of Jio, Tareq Amin, who pioneered this IP only network in Jio now works for Rakuten in Japan and he repeated the same feat here in even lesser time. You can lookup terms like NFV and Open-RAN to dig deeper. If you're familiar with web-infra it's similar to replacing expensive hardware routers from Cisco with a simple dumb server + FRR
1) How big can all the colocated data for a single primary key get before they don't fit within a split? Can I implement a GMail-like product where all the data for a single user resides within one split?
2) Is there a way to turn off external consistency and fall back to serializability? In return you get better write latencies. This is similar to what CockroachDB provides?
It's simply due to the competitive hiring environment for the best software engineers in USA. The difference in pay cannot merely be explained simply by the difference in cost of living. I have personally worked in Singapore as a software engineer before moving to USA (worked for companies in SF & Seattle). A very good senior software engineer in SG might make SGD100-120k/yr with 10 years of experience. Singapore is a world-class city but it's also a very expensive place to live. In USA, the same engineer could be making USD400-500k/yr with 10 years of experience provided they work for top-tier companies like Google/FB/Apple/Amazon. These numbers obviously include stock-based compensation. The key is to be in the 95th percentile - I think the difference in pay (between USA vs world) is less drastic if you are just in the 50th percentile.
I have been through this several times. There's never any advantage to you revealing your current salary. No company is ever going to reject you because you didn't tell them your current salary. So just politely tell the recruiter that you don't want to reveal it. If they insist, just tell them what your salary expectation is (this should give them an idea of what kind of offer you'd be willing to accept which is all they should care about).
What happens when after exercising, you sell the shares for a lot lower than the EV the year after? Can you claim a loss and deduct the loss from the taxable income the year you sold?
This is equivalent to the standard: (Cost Basis - Sale Proceeds) calculation in a standard stock transaction.
Depending on whether this is a short term or long term loss, the following happens (taken from [1])
Short-term losses counterbalance those expensive short-term gains. What's left at the end of Part I of Form 8949 is the net short-term capital gain or loss. If there were no gains, then obviously the net would equal the total loss.
Long-term losses are applied to long-term gains. The result, at the end of Part II of Form 8949, is the net long-term capital gain or loss. Again, if you only have a loss, then the net is a negative number.
Next, you combine the short-term and long-term results on Schedule D. At this point, a loss in one section can offset a gain in the other section. For example, if you have a net short-term loss of $1,000 and a net long-term gain of $1,200, then you'll pay tax on only $200.
If there's still a loss, you can deduct up to $3,000 from other income.
If you had a really bad year and ended up with a net loss of more than $3,000, you can carry forward the leftover portion to next year's taxes. The unused loss can be applied to next year's gains, as well as up to $3,000 of earned income. A big loss can be used as a deduction indefinitely -- another important reason to keep good records.
Ok so you can deduct as much as you want from any 'capital gains' you might have but only are allowed to deduct a max of $3000 per year from regular income, and the leftover capital loss just keeps on rolling over perpetually until you die?
Also the other thing that's screwed up about this is you pay taxes when you exercise the options at the normal income tax rate. But when you want to apply the tax deduction in the event of a loss, you're only allowed to do it on 'capital gains' for an unlimited amount and a max of $3000 on normal income. In fact it might be preferable to deduct it against normal income and keep rolling it over and just pay normal capital gains taxes (which is much lower than your income tax rate typically).
> and the leftover capital loss just keeps on rolling over perpetually until you die?
Pretty much. I have a $10K capital loss from a bad investment over 10 years ago. I simply keep rolling it forward until I have a capital gain to offset it.
Your resume is fine (just make the GPA more obvious - convert to 4.0 scale or something).
I've worked at some of the companies you mentioned and I regularly do technical interviews for internships. Here are some tips:
- Try to get a referral. This is by far the easiest way to stand out if you are not from some of the top colleges the company is actively targeting (top tier firms go on campus recruiting trips to the best schools in US and they get most of their candidates from that pool). Explore your network - do you know anyone that went to your school and now works at one of these companies? Ping them.
- Start applying early. Usually the company decides upfront how many internships they're going to offer that year. So if you apply late, your changes of getting in are lower - they've very few slots left and they can be very selective. Go on LinkedIn and look for recruiters from the company who handle University Recruiting specifically. Ping them and ask them about internships and their recruiting schedule.
- Try applying to companies in Europe like someone else suggested.
Also don't worry too much if you don't get into your dream internship now - it's not the end of the world. I have been in a similar boat - I went to school in Singapore and I got rejected by every single company in your list for internships (my school is one of the top 3 schools in Asia but that still didn't help). Instead I ended up interning at some local startups. 6 years later things have changed - I've worked for some of the companies on your list and every company that has rejected me in the past is now trying to actively recruit me. So don't get disappointed - keep learning, contribute to open source projects, apply to Google Summer of Code, keep participating in competitive programming contests and be the best you can be.
Amazon is way ahead of everyone else in the cloud space. Their closest rivals (Microsoft & Google) are pretty much copying AWS. Most of Azure's services are equally proprietary and I doubt that will ever change.
This just leaves the other smaller players (DigitalOcean, Joyent, Rackspace, etc) who are mostly offering something akin to EC2 and then partnering with other vendors to offer the missing pieces on top (frankly what other choice do they have? They can't get into a race with Amazon/Google on who can build the most no. of services - they will never win that race).
i agree with this comment completely. As an aws user, they have just done a great job in the cloud space. For anyone to really over take them, they'll have to come up with something radically different because the product is that good.
I worked on and around Openstack for 18+ months. I think ignoring it is pretty safe to ignore at this point.
<rant>
There might come along something that is actually good, but Openstack isn't it. The architecture is just bad, it will never be as reliable as something like AWS. (not because of scale, purely because of lack of error handling capabilities)
Reality is these sorts of orchestration systems need to be written by specialists. The vast majority of Openstack was written by people that admit they have no clue about systems level programming. This is what hype does, it forces a whole bunch of bad programming and architecture down everyones throats.
The marketecture and hype machine have done horrible things to Openstack. Not only have vendors riddled the thing with lockin and crap code that needs to be supported, but they have pushed entire projects that should have been shot in the head. cough Ceilometer cough
There is security, performance and plain availability problems everywhere, mostly embedded deep in the architecture.
Dumb decisions like "All systems must be Python" when Python is clearly not suited to a large number of the things they want to do is painful. As is the general "not invented here" syndrome and boys club that leads to certain libraries or patterns being pushed over others, usually to the peril of the project due to the 'blessed' thing being incomplete and unproven.
</rant>
I don't intend on returning to Openstack if I can avoid it, unfortunately my skill-set does tend towards that sort of thing so we will see how I go.
OpenStack's model seems to be "clone what Amazon does, 18 months later then hand over to vendors who don't have the scale to match Amazon's prices"
It's kind of nice in theory for internal clouds.
But I'm increasingly seeing tooling targeting Docker instead of OpenStack at the service level for doing the same kinds of things OpenStack is supposed to offer (ie, the service utilities Docker to offer automatic deployment/availability/loadbalancing instead of doing it using the OpenStack APIs).
At the cloud vendor layer, the differences between vendors can be abstracted using libraries, which removes an alleged attraction of OpenStack.
Given that, I see a few vendors challenging Amazon by building unique selling points (Google has some innovative things as does Microsoft, and Digital Ocean pushes the price/performance thing).
I see Docker taking away a lot of the "cross cloud deployment" attraction that OpenStack had, and doing it better.
So what does OpenStack offer end users? (I understand it's attractions to vendors, and maybe the internal cloud use case).
When you are actually using it as a private cloud for multiple internal clients I can kind of see the point (as I mentioned in my previous comment).
If not, then what utility is OpenStack providing?
Bare metal works well. I see many people using either Docker on bare metal or maybe a VM layer as an additional security layer, but using Docker as the deployment target.
The utility it is providing is deployment/management of the underlying resources. Docker does not do that. Some of the stuff people are building on top of/around Docker will provide it, but it's not there.
But I agree with you that OpenStack is not good enough to be worth it for that with perhaps the exception of very large multi-tenant deployments (in which case, my first goal would be to start rewriting large chunks of it). And parts of it are just so horribly over-engineered it is scary, because it makes me wonder what it is they're missing to think it was necessary to make things that convoluted, and what they're missing because they've made it so convoluted.
> And parts of it are just so horribly over-engineered it is scary, because it makes me wonder what it is they're missing to think it was necessary to make things that convoluted, and what they're missing because they've made it so convoluted.
So the source code for Amazon Web Services is clearly architected, free of cruft and under-/over-engineering? I assume you've worked with AWS's source code in order to be able to make such a comparison. In my experience, the design and architecture of closed-source internal applications delivered to customers only as a front-end is usually a nightmare.
I mildly degree with your assertion that the Docker tools aren't there yet. Some are pretty usable, and additionally if you include the category of DevOps tools then they are pretty good.
I agree entirely with you on the rest of your comment.
I've still to meet someone using it. Everyone uses aws; you hear people complaining about google compute's problems; I even hear people using eucalyptus. I've never met anyone using openstack (and I've been to aws conferences).
