Andrew's comment was very eye opening for me as well.
Is it possible we as humans have a well performing optimized search/compute algorithm in our brains that we have not been able to discover and recreate in machines yet ? In essence are we just bio-robots and procreation is just a method to bootstrap the next iteration of the bio-machine ?
If you look at the Boston Dynamics quad-legged robot, it "almost" feels like a real dog. CPU instead of Brain. Wires instead of Blood. Steel frame vs bones. The major difference being it doesn't have a large data set of experiences to behave like a real dog. Behavior/Emotions can be bootstrapped and eventually collected as experiences to query for future reactions.
I went though the H1-B process myself in the past(2007). If USCIS gets more applications than their yearly quota, then their will be a lottery and your chances will be the same with either (startup or larger) employer filing.
Once the application is selected in the lottery, USCIS will start looking at the background of the company and if it's a legit corporation.
"Only" if you are going through one of the shady Indian consultancy(+) companies in the bay area, their is a chance they will want to probe more and might reject your application. But like you said it's a startup with a product, you should be fine with either choice, and I would not worry too much if I were you.
(+)These are basically companies that will apply for an H1B for a fee (H1B + their own commission) but they don't really have a product or a job for you. If the application is accepted, you can either find a job on your own and transfer your H1B AND/OR they will try to place you in some company and take a commission out of your salary.
If you are already pretty proficient in coding, I would take a break from it and instead learn something different.
- Sport (Snowboarding/Skiing/Swimming, Climbing etc lessons)
- Reading books (History, Biographies, etc)
- Visit a new town (doesn't have to be too far) and hangout with complete strangers and learn their stories.
Or purely on the STEM side you could refresh yourself on probability, statistics, linear algebra and get a deeper grasp on machine learning/data science.
I have noticed that all google cloud services now require credit card information for validation. Can this be be made optional and instead rely on their Gmail accounts ? (Especially for people just wanting to tinker with new services for fun)
I suspect that it's unlikely that google can remove this because bad guys tend to spin up many free trial instances and do bad things (sharded bitcoin mining, DDoS'ing, etc). Privacy is #1 so they aren't allowed to look inside your machines or inspect your traffic...so that leaves billing / such metadata to fight abuse.
That makes perfect sense, and I don't argue with this logic at all. But since you're here, I'd like to say something (that isn't horrible :P) that I've actually wanted to [have the opportunity to] get out there about GCP for a while now.
The "Heroku-style free" tier is likely to be all I can manage for the short to medium term future, due to a variety of factors.
As a result, the two go-to systems I would turn to if I need code hosting are Heroku and OpenShift, and I have accounts with these platforms (although I'm leaning toward the latter lately). I am yet to do anything generally interesting with them myself, but these are the systems I take into account when talking to others, because I have no experience with GCP. (I wonder if this is true for others too, and how big that number is.)
I have zero idea how Heroku are fending off precisely what you refer to. I've heard about situations where individuals' AWS accounts have been hacked by automated systems that spin up "instances with everything", but once it was established with billing that the account was hacked, the charges (which in one case were 5 figures) were fully reversed. Perhaps this fact is relevant here.
I think the problem can be solved before it (theoretically) gets to that point, however.
Serving up webpages, doing the occasional database transaction, etc, produces a significantly different CPU load than bitcoin mining does. I don't consider instance CPU usage monitoring a violation of my privacy, so I think it would be perfectly fair to throttle back continuous high CPU usage, but allow for short bursts of high usage. (In fact, I think this kind of thing is already standard...?) For bonus points, make the system track instance CPU usage and adjust its thresholds to allow for periodic high burst usage :P (since, thinking about it, masquerading as a web server and doing 30 seconds of mining every 5 hours is going to work out to zero gain).
I wouldn't consider it at all unfair to offer a free tier with exceptionally aggressive CPU-time QoS; in fact, it would probably suit me (and a lot of other people) perfectly, giving the funemployed community the option to do things like spin up fascinating new environments like Erlang, Dart, Rust, etc, and play with these environments (which are not yet available on Google's cloud hosting infrastructure) for web serving and similar. (For more bonus points, I'd extend the heuristic CPU-time tracking I mentioned before to classify instances as "friendly" over the long term, and let them have exceptionally low latency! :D)
In short, there's a whole demographic of people out there that you're definitely excluding, including people like myself who are just at the "messing around" stage, to nervous types who don't like deadlines and run from the "free for X period of time" part of GCP.
I realize and recognize that your response here is only your opinion, not Google's, and I'm very happy to respond here or via email (my address is in my profile) if you'd like to discuss any of any of the things I've said. ^^
If you are not hurting for money(which I doubt), I would suggest taking a nice break, travel, pursue some other skills like new language(Spanish, Portuguese), photography, cooking, volunteering, adventure sports. It will recharge you and maybe along the path you will find some interesting problems you could solve, for an instance a software solution for a problem that exists in some foreign country but you dont see the same problem in US.
Is it possible we as humans have a well performing optimized search/compute algorithm in our brains that we have not been able to discover and recreate in machines yet ? In essence are we just bio-robots and procreation is just a method to bootstrap the next iteration of the bio-machine ?
If you look at the Boston Dynamics quad-legged robot, it "almost" feels like a real dog. CPU instead of Brain. Wires instead of Blood. Steel frame vs bones. The major difference being it doesn't have a large data set of experiences to behave like a real dog. Behavior/Emotions can be bootstrapped and eventually collected as experiences to query for future reactions.