skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reposting my comment from Geekwire:

Notably, no one else on this comment thread is
willing to attach their real identity to it.
I've been contacted by Amazon recruiting many
times. I'm a Seattleite with 10+ years of
software engineering experience. And I'll say
the same thing here that I say to every AMZN
recruiter who contacts me: no way, no how.
Amazon is a sweatshop, and anyone who thinks
otherwise—especially Jeff—is deluding themselves.

I wish that Amazon featured *anywhere* on my
list of 'prospective employers that I'd consider
working at someday,' but given the reputation
that they have with my friends, there's
absolutely no way I'd ever consider working
there under any circumstances.

If my feelings are anything like other
prospective senior and principal-level
employees here in the area (and I assume
they are), then it concerns me deeply about
Amazon's future.
At one time I worked for a marketing guy who was not a coder nor an engineer really. What he was really good at was closing the loop by talking to people and asking questions. Because any project you have a bunch of different groups and white marketing is about getting them to reason collectedly to solve problems.

So the 'from scratch guy' is a technical person that cares about closing the loop instead of working on technical puzzles inside his comfort zone.

Me I have two things. I hate working on anything and then have it not ship (What I could have spent the last three months in Costa Rica working on my tan? Seriously?) And I like when I see people using the stuff I worked on. Nothing better than to see that customers are ordering your product and the company is shipping it and making money without having you to be involved.
Knuth wrote TeX in Pascal.

Are you talking about MMIX as "higher level assembly language"? MMIX is the (a?) programming language used in TAOCP. For Knuth it was a purely theoretic thing. Other people have implemented MMIX by now.
Wow this is a much better version of the story. Thanks
Amazon's attrition rate is among the highest in the industry. So, despite how he makes it sounds in the memo, the news should not have been of much surprise to him.

In a nutshell, he fails to acknowledge that there is a problem, and passes the risk of reporting to employees.
An Amazonian's response to the NYT's story about Amazon's 'bruising workplace'
South Korean Man 3D Prints a Breath-Powered Flashlight
Well, you'd use 30% less bandwidth (and therefore start / seek faster).

In addition, decoding VP9 in software is actually faster than H.264 with ffmpeg, the decoding library that VLC uses.
From 2011.
> And they are single purpose devices that don't run arbitrary code nor accept arbitrary input.

But be careful designing firmware upgrades though. Also I really don't see what kind of attack it prevents when you have a trusted keyboard and display but otherwise compromised OS.
> Is there ever really a situation where you need to write a web service but cannot afford garbage collection?

Yes, anything that has a real-time requirement.
> Being riddled with fatal flaws is an aspect PGP shares with the lucrative Certificate Authority system, with S/MIME, with the DNS security system, with IPsec, with cell phone encryption.

which fatal flaws are present in "IPsec"?
Don't we have that? With SELinux, sandboxing is literally a command away (and the command is, aptly, named `sandbox´).

There are certain inconveniences when it comes to sandboxing applications, especially applications that require an X server, which is why sandboxing is not done by default on any popular Linux OS.
I seem to remember hearing rants of working as a developer at Amazon 3 years ago. Here's a link to Steve Yegge's diatribe and Bezos's web services mandate: https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX

Here's an excerpt:

His Big Mandate went something along these lines:

1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.

2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.

4) It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.

5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.

6) Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.

7) Thank you; have a nice day!

Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.
This question was also brought up on reddit a while ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/1zrujz/literate_pr...

My pet theory is that programmers are driven by a constant feeling of obsolescence: Most implementations are incredibly short lived so that it seems futile to optimize the code for understanding (literate programming), when much less (programming experience, comments and help by people who know the code base) is good enough. Especially the last point in parentheses is crucial: Asking someone who knows the code base is likely a more efficient superset to text, because asking can be selective, nuanced and individual while a text just stares back at you.
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He's offering people to report cases as described in the NYT article directly to him, that's a good thing - unless of course he's just saying that for the media.

What would be a better way to respond as a CEO? What would you have done?
Have you tried selecting the "warrior" mode? The same thing happened to me but after I selected "warrior" mode, recommendations popped up.

Edit: It seems that the "wizard" mode is updated daily or so.
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First thing they should recognize they have an issue. When this many people are complaining there is an issue

Second they could have offered an increase in benefits like paternity leave to show they want to improve things.

He did neither of those
> I think you underestimate the ability of students & parents to judge teaching ability separately from likability. The users of a product are best suited to know what works & what doesn't.

You significantly overestimate the goodwill of everybody involved.

I had a butch, lesbian English teacher. Most of the community had "issues". Students hated her because she was a ferocious grader. Without tenure, she would have been gone.

However, her results were amazing. If you took her AP English class and got a B or above, you were getting a 5 on the AP exam.

So, what counts? Community? Administration? Parents? Students? How do you square the fact that everybody wanted her gone, but her results were stellar?
I'm pretty sure that currently being the only species that has any hope of stopping an Earth-killing asteroid makes us the dominant species.

As long as humans are around I think it's unlikely that another species will develop technology unless we engineer it to do so.
http://syedmusaali.svbtle.com/
I'm fairly happy with Leo for "documenting" my Puppet nodes - I create a Leo node for each Puppet node or node regex with a link to the node definition, and a link to the "documentation" node of each class included for that node. Classes have "documentation" nodes which similarly link to their definition, files and templates and to documentation nodes of any classes included by the class. There's no more prose involved than you'd expect in-line. I find the structure extremely useful to re-discovering how a particular node is configured. If there are simplifications available, I find the structure makes them visible.

Perhaps the above would be less useful for more traditional code. Could you describe in more detail how you used it?

I have a long catalog of improvements I'd like to see made to Leo (e.g., its XML file format is version control hostile - try resolving merge conflits on several thousand lines of deeply nested machine-targeted XML; or try sending a pull request slathered with "sentinels"). Building such tools being out of scope for my day job, my re-imagined version won't be available any time soon.
Sam wrote "I often get asked about what people can do for a year or two to make a big impact between projects." If the US government isn't the right fit (especially if you're not an American), consider doing a Fellowship with a non-profit which may also have a big impact. MovingWorlds.org is one place to find those opportunities. We (engageSPARK, a not-for-profit business building the "Twilio for non-techies" for NGOs & Governments) also have a Fellowship program: https://www.engagespark.com/about/#join . :)
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KeepSnap Directory August Monthly Digest – Blog for Photographers – KeepSnap
My one and only experience with them happened in Belize. I had been snorkelling and turning over rocks when all of the sudden, before I even noticed it, there was a cloud of black ink and a little octopus darted away. Now as an adult I would just let the poor terrified creature escape, but at that age I was absolutely hellbent on finding it. The process of turning over random rocks and being inked was repeated a few more times before I finally cornered it and managed to grab it. My cousins and I dug a hole in the sand with water in the bottom, and observed the octopus changing colors. I remember it shifting through shades of translucent blue and red.

My cousin caught a trunk fish with his bare hands that same day too. Another weird creature, though surely not nearly as intelligent as an octopus.
The oligarchs will have their way on this one sooner or later. Just keep beating the negotiators over the head with it until they surrender.
How to start a career in testing?
Different use case. Facebook is a communications application, with user inputs and networking, focused on getting the information to you as fast as possible for the best user experience, and being always working 24/7.

This is a one-off deterministic demo, without inputs or networking.

Still, a 1k demo like this is impressive. And 18000 classes is too much for a messenger. But you can't compare them.
> Ruby powers a bunch of high throughput websites yet it's notoriously 200x slower than any other language

Have you considered the costs of the hardware that compensates for the software's slowness?
Linux Foundation Launches Open Mainframe Project
What you say is absolutely correct, and I really don't understand why this is not the way it's explained by default. I've written some articles, linked from some other comment here, that does exactly what you propose. People generally find them extremely useful.
Why is Smalltalk Dead?
The "notebook" paradigm in Mathematica is another good example; arguably it's as much a part of the experience as the underlying Wolfram kernel.
they are extremely performance demanding (the actual tracker itself, what the clients communicate with), and use http. So much so that major trackers are constantly running into performance limitations.

They often have to issue 1k+ requests per second.
redis blaster (rb): sharding for Redis
It would be nice to agree to disagree, but we really need IPv6 to displace IPv4.

Google is pushing IPv6 so hard because IPv4 just can’t expand enough to fulfill our needs. And not just Internet of Things, your light bulb needs to be online, that sort of silliness. IPv4 can’t expand enough to raise each community and each organization to a current first-world level of Internet usage.

Want to build a Chinese Facebook? Can’t get enough IPv4 address space for all the servers. Want to build Facebook in America, can’t get enough IPv4 address space for all the servers.[1] Vint Cerf doesn’t need to be employed by Google to say that IPv4 just wasn’t intended for the Internet of 2015. He made IPv4. He knows.[2]

Using your MAC address for your IPv6 host address is now obsolete. Privacy Extensions[3] are the current best practice. IPv6 address space is so astonishingly vast, that it’s possible though not common to have a separate IP address for each host you would want to contact during a single session. IPv6 is not inherently less private than IPv4.

[1]http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/blog/2014/06/facebo...
[2]http://www.networkworld.com/article/2227543/software/why-ipv...
[3]https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4941
Sure, it might be the case that some employees are having the time of their life and enjoying their jobs. However, all that talk about the sweatshop work conditions of Amazon employees can't be all hearsay. To the very least, Jeff should act and investigate the issue instead of completely refuting it.

IMO, investigating the issue and acting upon it is a better move for Amazon's employees and PR.
i'm no expert in this manner, but jeff bezos strikes me as a classic sociopath. that goofy smile, that deliberately saccharine and smarmy facade that he constructs whenever he speaks in public... it all just seems so ridiculous and fake. he doesn't seem like a normal person. to me he seems like a prick trying to imitate what he thinks a nice person would act like.

and through my own professional experience, i know for a fact nobody with a cutesy demeanor like that builds a company like amazon. i don't buy it for a second. i don't buy this little emergency damage control email either.

also, just one little detail from the article that jumped out at me - any company that specifically designs and defines a mechanism for anonymous reporting (snitching) on your coworkers to your manager, knows how it will be used - as a manipulative backstabbing tool. these people aren't naive, they're professional assholes designing their own little lord of the flies workplace.

it's like someone took the gervais principle and optimized for it.
Berkeley's got a solid database class up on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=-XXv-cvA_iBVK2QzAV-...

Berkeley webcasts are awesome... there's an OS class up there that I highly recommend as well.

Here's the link to their CS classes:

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/series.html#c,d,Computer_Science
Some politicians and government officials are already saying companies like Apple and Google are aiding terrorists. They don't necessarily have to outlaw it. They can just put such pressure on the providers of the biggest services, in order for them to use weaker encryption.
The very fact that this is being negotiated in secret shows that the people involved know it is wrong. Any law that comes out of this "agreement" should be considered completely invalid.
Agreed, I did 3 months at Amazon and ran screaming for the hills. To this day I am stalked by recruiters trying to get me to come back, even after explaining to them that only people with deep, neurotic lack of self worth would ever do that. Amazon does not hire just the best, they hire the brilliant geeks who don't realize they are brilliant and have personality problems such that they don't understand when they are being screwed over. Well, except for the aws team. They are pretty ok from what I recall.
it doesnt seem like such a bad idea to me. generic communication between services? yes thx ill take that.

and thats why so many use AWS.
He may be referring to this:

https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg12...
Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Distributed Web
> lie like a rug and use the results to your advantage

I have seen and witnessed this proposition in many areas of society. In my opinion, this stance is based on the idea that a given person's lifetime is all that matters. It has completely no concern for the future of humanity or the sustainability of the greater system.

You may not be discovered on your deceptions now, but the effects of them have lasting detriments. And sometimes those lies may come back to bite your children, your nation, your race, your species, or even your planet in the long run. In the social sense, you are a representative of any group in which you affiliate. In the flesh sense, you are a representative of your genes. In the practical sense, you affect the world around you.
Extensive discussion of the original Guardian article 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10062134
In theory they do. In practice, there's occasional issues with foreign musicians having their bows confiscated when they travel to the US (as they contain a small amount of ivory), e.g. http://www.theviolinchannel.com/ivory-bow-new-york-airport-c...

It's a sensitive issue in the musical world. For a while (I haven't checked recently) it became illegal to sell or transport a piano with ivory keys no matter its year of manufacture (the piano industry moved away from natural ivory as late as the 1950s, so there's plenty of pianos on the market which fall under the ban).

Edit: more recent: http://www.thespectrum.com/story/life/2015/08/07/ivory-ban-i...
Sadly, that is how I read this memo too.
This is a reasonable, common quibble when starting property based testing.

A failing test should be straightforward to turn into a simple checked example - most good libraries have extensive simplification steps that try and boil failing examples down to the minimal example that still causes the test to fail.

But this is only necessary if repeated runs of the property based tests don't reproduce a failure*. For me, they have.
Windows 10 will check for piracy
Programmers often say comments are for describing algorithms -- especially hairy ones, but it's a straw man: The code does what it does, and the comment doesn't enter into it. If anything the comment can confuse because programmers don't usually read code, but can find it easy to agree with the comment so they move on.

I think that the decision to bring code into this world is not one to be taken likely, and a literate program is simply the story of why interwoven with the implementation of what: Where did -2 come from? When I ifdef for a FreeBSD bug, how will I know if the bug is fixed (and the code can be removed/changed?) And so on.

Literate programming isn't the only "solution" to this problem. Making programs really big by duplicating efforts, and working around workarounds, using Java seems to "work" (for strange values of work), so perhaps this is a blub thing? If your code is "self documenting" then you don't know what documentation is.

That is to say: Literate programming didn't catch on because it was dismissed by the larger number of programmers who could get "things done" who didn't understand literate programming.
I wonder when the TPP will become so unpopular as to cause its negotiations to be abandoned. But I don't think that will happen, the parties involved have already sunk enough cost into it that they cannot leave.
> Those that choose to work there do so out of greed (rising stock price)

Seattle is full of tech workers who retired young from their appreciating stock options, from Microsoft and Amazon and presumably other companies. At one point I read that Microsoft had minted 10,000 millionaires in the Seattle area. I don't know what the corresponding Amazon figures are, but I suspect they are similar.

Note that AMZN is up about 60% just in the last year.
Assembly 2015 demo party winning entry
It is becoming clearer and clearer that we are in a time where to be a good person you must break laws.
Talking Candidly About Enterprise Debugging Practices
Seems to me that CPAN would still have a ton of things to teach to new repositories but seems few people look at it.
Nmap Cheat Sheet – SecureAll.org
The Definitive Guide to SaaS Marketing 2015
Website is currently under construction, we will release QICI Engine next month. Thanks for your interest!
>Whether or not they'll release a 10.10 patch remains to be shown

10.10.3, which includes that fix, was released 3 days ago. I'll never understand the HN crown, whining about the HN crowd while you didn't bother googling before writing your rant.
It has little to do with rank. At my employer the more senior guys are just as likely to go home on time - if not more so. They're aware enough to realise they'll burn out if they don't aggressively defend their personal time.

I guess its a question of work culture.
Robert Frost Did Not Mean Take the Road Less Traveled
Not necessarily. They might be under the impression that the public does not fully understand the economics and how the world really works.
Well, don't travel with those bows. I too would get my weed confiscated if I traveled with it. You know how I solved this conundrum? I don't travel with it.

> it became illegal to sell or transport a piano with ivory keys no matter its year of manufacture

As it should be.
Yes it is AI. You could quickly go through the Table of Contents in the classic Russell and Norvig "AI: A Modern Approach book" to see what is considered as AI. To be classified as AI, the mode of learning (statistical or not) is not as important as the notion of what an intelligent "agent" is supposed to do. There are quite a few definitions/statements of this notion here. One of them (again from the book) is that AI must "act humanly" - which Kurzweil is described as: "The art of creating machines that perform functions that require intelligence when performed by people". Note that the behavior of the AI is stressed, not how it produces this behavior. Machine Learning falls under this categorization of AI (Section 1.1 in the 3rd edition of the book).
LEARN TO BOOST Your CONFIDENCE
How to Exercise Your Brain – 5 Simple Ways
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Thanks, this is exactly what I was looking for. The reason why I'd rather avoid electronic adjustment is because I've seem some of them burn out (the motor) and then the unit can be tough to replace, esp if the manufacturer goes out of business. I prefer manual adjustment. I'd also expect to save some money that way.
there are marble towers and there are dirty trenches. There are only few things that are efficient and matter in the trenches. Putting beautiful marble on the trenches' walls just isn't one of them.
You've got the wrong transcendentalist.
Do you see anything redeeming about the quote? It seems problematic if something like this can be so political but be impervious to the logical debate an 8yo can engage in, no?
It depends on your programming style. If it's a typical convoluted, constantly refactored OO code - then, yes, literate programming won't help.

If your code consists of a lot of DSLs, clearly separated from each other, each implemented in a small, compact, readable module - then you won't have to change that much in the existing code. In my experience this style is a very good match for a literate programming.
Citruseo: French blog about online marketing
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> But if you know of any stories like those reported, I want you to escalate to HR. You can also email me directly at jeff@amazon.com

Really, and who's going to stick their neck out? I would rather get off than wasting time trying to fix things which I don't have control on.
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What's funny is that people started making specific accusations and then all the rest of us started having flashbacks to our Amazon interview experiences.
Same here. The wizard mode seems broken. As soon as I rated more than a handful of movies it started showing 0 recomendations.
Code itself does not tell the story, does not give you any background or any non-formalised constraints. There is absolutely no way code can replace a proper literate prose.
This is a Javascript demo. So let's not discount the browser, Javascript engine, JIT, 3d acceleration libs, sound libs, and everything used from the OS that is involved here. Still it is a great effort.

Your argument fits better to a machine like the C64, where demos are really going directly to the hardware and the OS is basically inactive.