skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm new to it myself, in my first role with the title "Architect" after a decade of being individual contributor and lead for R&D teams. So take these from someone very early in the position, but I think the important things are:

Know your shit and be able to have high level conversations about nearly anything technical. You don't have to know the inner workings of everything, but you should have a good idea and high level understanding of it. For instance, you don't have to know every message queue system on the market, but you should know a few, their relative strengths and weaknesses, how specific ones are often used and how message queues play a role in overall system design.

Learn a new language every year or two and keep an eye on the horizon for new technologies that can make you and your teams faster and more efficient.

Live and breathe failure. Understand the conditions that the systems you build and work in break down and learn to compensate for that and explain that to others.

Be able to talk to others, on their terms, whether thats your top flight engineer or the guys on the business side.

Its a bit corporate and soft, but I found the IBM article on it fairly insightful http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/mar06/eel...
Exactly, Amazon does not give a shit!
"I want to agree with you but unfortunately the system you're proposing isn't really feasible."

It's the system we actually have.

I suppose that isn't proof of "feasibility", because people's definitions vary.

"The poor actually are hurt by not having access to Uber as it becomes more and more popular and ubiquitous. We all are in fact. It's a stratification of society; there's one transportation scheme for the rich, Uber, and one transportation scheme for the poor, government-funded mass transit."

If you want to define "harm" as "one day, a new thing pops up, and only the rich have access to it because it's very expensive, and now the poor are more harmed than they were yesterday because there's a thing they don't have access to that didn't exist yesterday", that's your decision. It is consistent and perhaps not wrong.

But I don't care much about that sort of "harm". You've defined yourself up a definition of harm that can never be fixed, by definition. There is no way in theory or in fact to move things instantly from brand new and expensive to "affordable to provide to the poor for free or high subsidization". And problems that don't admit of solutions, even in theory, aren't ones you should spend a lot of time worrying about.[1]

Far more interesting is the question of how to harness what has been created to help the poor. And there will be a time delay. It can't be helped, only at most minimized, and economics being what they are, you can blow a lot of money that really ought to be helping people now trying too hard to push that date forward beyond what it naturally "wants" to do.

If that reality bothers you... well, good, you're human. But that doesn't mean you can change it. Things like this can only start at the wealthy end of society and flow down. Deny it to the wealthy in a fit of pique and you only create a situation where the poor don't get it either! If we accept that the poor are harmed by not getting these sorts of services we are ethically constrained to consider that a bad choice.

[1]: "But if people just accept this, it'll be true!" Tell you what, you create a concrete solution where innovations can generally be instantly introduced to the entire world and I'll happily, gleefully, joyfully recant. In the meantime, this is the world. The rare examples of successful rebellion against some small part of reality puts a heavy survivors bias on our view of that sort of struggle; in general, this sort of reality is not fixed by wishing really hard it wasn't true.
If someone is the utmost authority in their field, they won't need a degree for you to recognize their credibility.
Leading the way is, surprisingly, Buzzfeed. They plan on doing A/B testing on their FOIA requests, and releasing their own report calling out offending agencies. This will be welcome information.
How realistic is a compiler-level change that is 100% transparent and reverse compatible with existing codebases? I suspect this is a tough nut to crack without making fundamental changes to the language and perhaps invalidating past codebases. You might as well move to a different language then.

I suspect we'll have a Rust compiler that compiles fast applications with a very minor performance hit before this happens to aging languages like C/C++.
Intuit is in trouble. There are several competing products eating its lunch.

TaxAct is a good example of a competitive alternative to Turbotax. I used to do my taxes with TurboTax, but got tired of the yearly price increases and the movement of useful sections of the 1040 form to higher priced versions.
A couple of years ago, I switched to TaxAct which provides everything for 1/5th the cost of the best TurboTax package.

I dumped Quicken 10 years ago due to the incessant upgrade treadmill. I've been using GNUCASH instead. It doesn't have all of the features that Quicken had (e.g. downloading transactions from your financial institutions) but it is free and stable. You have to get used to double entry bookkeeping, but that is a minor obstacle to overcome.

Intuit makes most of their money using regulatory capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture instead
of delighting customers. For example, they collude with the Internal Revenue Service and the banking industry to prevent open source alternatives to electronic tax filing and the downloading of bank transactions under the guise of security.

Intuit needs to get back to producing products which are superior to open source alternatives at a nominal cost without using regulatory capture as a key aspect business model.
What are companies supposed to do when their employees become mothers?

Women have baby and when this happens she is going to be out for a month probably longer. Her family will encounter medical cost along with whatever expences existed before and she will not be able to work to pay for this.

We point the finger at whatever company happens to be her employeer and act like it is there responsibility to pay the bills.

I feel like society through the government should either pay this bill or be willing to accept what a company does in its financial interest.
Job hopping only became normal as a side effect of massive layoffs, union busting, and other anti-employee tactics.

They started it, employees would be fools to not leave when the wind is blowing in that direction.
Well, they say it 'will run on most ‘modern’ 64-bit Linux distributions, but official support is only provided for 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04 or newer'; that looks reasonable to me.

It's unreasonable to ask them to support all kinds of Linux distributions; it all depends on how well it actually 'will work'. E.g. Blizzard's Hearthstone does not officially support Linux (despite using Unity, btw.); also it doesn't support graphics chipsets as old as Intel GM45 (Intel's integrated graphics circa 2008; gen.4; last Core2). Yet I've been able to run this game on Ubuntu on my ThinkPad X200 reasonably well since beta and it's only getting better with time. Part of it are improvements from Wine and Mesa 3D (I didn't believe I will get performance improvements for the 5+ year-old hardware, but it happened last year: mesa 9.3(?) brought a solid improvement to 3D including Ubuntu desktop experience[sic!]) but also I believe Blizzard is actually fixing Linux-related glitches, even though the game is not officially supported. This could be better than some companies 'supporting' Linux by doing a half-assed port and forgetting about it.
React is a toolbox. Toolboxes are used for most almost EVERYTHING.
The person I replied to said exactly that React should be used for everything.

There are certain categories of web applications and pages which do not benefit at all from React (or other semi-related technologies like Angular), and it's folly to pretend that they do.

If you want to go the "it's a toolbox" route...showing up to a carpentry job with a plumbing toolbox isn't useful.
Maybe not so rarely. The tech bubble of some years back was money in search of a solution.
That's not my argument. My argument is that your point about Sweden isn't valid because it's relatively much easier to avoid Swedish markets.
Yup, but all the cool kids are/were on PIP ;-)
The insurance company saved money, but did Amazon? I thought the portion of premiums that employers pay is fixed? That's why everyone pays premiums- the healthy subsidize the sick. And when there are more healthy than sick, the insurance company profits.

What am I missing, how would Amazon save money by her switching insurance providers?
That's like saying stop using HTML and javascript for everything. There are more appropriate tools out there!
The Death of LOL
Has any foreign chain been able to really take off in Germany?
"glitch in the system", sounds like business requirement to me. HR could not reactivate her health insurance so they called it a glitch in the system.

I am sorry for all the folks working there.
Government subsides are a major factor in dairy prices.
Thank you for explaining this. When you work for a while for places that have no concept of what you just explained it's easy to believe there's just nothing you can do when an employee has to take an some extended time off.
How terrible. Perhaps healthcare for all is tradeoff worth making. Or we can continue on as savages in the US.

EDIT: I can see my karma for this comment is swinging around wildly. Consider the following:

* You are (based on the typical HN audience) probably young now, most likely healthy. You will eventually get older, and will likely have medical issues eventually.

* I argue that healthcare is not something to be earned, but something you are entitled to as a human being. No one should ever die from health reasons due to not having enough money. If its too expensive to do this (which is clearly false, as other countries are able to do so with less money than we spend in the US), we use R&D spending to ruthlessly drive down the cost.

* I came to this point of view over time. I am a healthy young male. I've known people who have died because they couldn't afford healthcare. I've known someone who worked as a prostitute to pay for her SOs cancer treatment. My mother would not have been able to afford a surgery to mediate her degenerative disc disease in her spine without the affordable care act.

I am not arguing for the elimination of the tech startup scene in order to have universal healthcare. I'm arguing for the transition to single payer and the streamlining of healthcare deliver in the US to lower costs AND ensure coverage for everyone.

We're a first world developed country, and its about time like we acted like one.
> The problem with the U.S. and why universal health care potentially wouldn't work is in terms of scale. The U.S. has over 300M people living in it, over 8x as much as the most populous European country. We also have a history of hating and evading taxes at all costs (Boston Tea Party).

So, set some very basic standards at the federal level and make the details and implementation a state responsibility. The largest US state is significantly smaller than the largest European country that provides universal healthcare, so that should solve that problem more than completely.
> there is never an actual intention to follow through, it's always the precursor to firing.

No, it's not. I've had employees on PIPs that are here years later with no problems.
The battle of front-end frameworks is powered by companies trying to lure new and inexperienced developers, as well as experienced employees already working with teams of developers, into a more unified thought pattern.
For that purpose they are great.
On the other hand, the underlying "magic" isn't optimal for all use cases. The author states:

"If you have a highly dynamic application that needs to rerender frequently, and you want to avoid the heavy weight of template diffing, [...] ReactJS’s virtual DOM will be super effective. However, if you’re site doesn’t have those needs, CHOOSE SOMETHING ELSE!"

Well choose a DOM representation implementation in this case. That's not what React is all about. And may I add that, "Virtual DOM" or however you want to call it, will never be as fast as manual DOM manipulation done right. It's just a well documented convenience magic abstraction.

We no longer have vast incompatibilities among browsers, so we no longer use JQuery. At the same time, threads pop up everywhere titled "how do I do [this] in [Angular, React, etc.], just like it has happened with JQuery in the past. And I won't even mention framework specific "plugins" ..

The underlying problem is, the majority of people involved with JavaScript for the web platform, are afraid and/or lazy learning it. And no framework can cure this, but at the same time frameworks help us hide the pile of ignorance we have under the framework carpet.

I'm not bashing anyone, frameworks can inspire and help organize vast amount of work. But at the same time they are hard dependencies, hailed by well known developers. Sooner or later there will be new ones [that got it right this time] and the cycle of hype-wow-sucks will continue. Well they are all built with JS, so how about you take your time to learn the language and philosophize a bit on programming, state management, application structure and the capabilities (as well as the bottlenecks) of the web platform?
Then you may choose any framework you like at any time and you won't be shooting yourself in the foot because you'll be using it as a tool, and not the panacea for all your troubles.
"Offchain" aka marketing speak for a standard relational database.
Ugh. Greedy idiots are ruining mobile gaming. There are virtually no good games anymore as they all are designed to require in app purchases, they are not designed to be great games, just to con stupid people out of money. Gaming on mobile is dead because of this, yet continues to make money due to such scams.
I am not sure this is the solution, but you could call "ldd <file>" on a unity generated binary to see system dependencies. If they statically compile stuff into the game, that's another question.
Is there supposed to be a cause-and-effect here? Because I'm not seeing how that's related?
I roughly 2006 I planned to leave my job and go to a new city, and Amazon was the first company I considered working for because the Pacific northwest interested me.

Some light research online indicated that Amazon would not be a good place to work. It was just anecdotes, but I had a nagging feeling that these negative anecdotes about Amazon were easier to find than for other large companies I was considering. I decided against pursuing Amazon, but wondered if I had put too much weight on this research.

It stuck in my mind and all the other negative things I've heard about Amazon between 2006 and now sort of snowballed for me. How they treat their corporate employees, how they treat their warehouse employees. How they treat their business partners. How they treat their sellers. (Hint: the opposite of how they treat their buyers.) And so on.

So the recent NYT article told me nothing new. I had already realized that Amazon had this definite pattern. Whereas the occasional anecdote you hear about other companies just remains a few anecdotes, it doesn't become a pattern.
I'm at the point where I'm looking to pick the next web technology stack for projects moving forward. I am leaning towards React as the main framework for everything.

The reason for a one-size-fits-all choice is that I really don't want to have to learn the ins and outs of 3-4 different frameworks and libraries. Even if React doesn't exactly fit the model of a certain application, it makes sense to shoe-horn it in to avoid a fragmented technology stack. I only have so much space in my brain.
Fashion chains, plenty of them. H&M, Zara, etc.
If you can only use it for routine and preventative care, and not for emergencies, it's not insurance. It's a backwards payment plan that puts all the risk on the patient, instead of the insurance company. It doesn't "insure" anything. It only insures that you lose coverage when it stops being a payment plan.

Calling it insurance is a farce.
The long-run solution will be when mozilla removes XUL entirely, and switches to browser.html

https://github.com/mozilla/browser.html

In the short run, perhaps try an ESR release?

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/
Imagine the worst possible future with the system I dislike.

Then imagine the best possible future with the system I do like.

My system is clearly superior!
pretty much almost all folds in strict languages can be assumed to be left folds.
My wife does, and it's 100% necessary for her to be functional.
Watchtower: Automatic Updates for Docker Containers
Proof of Work Alternatives: Proof of Activity, Proof of Burn, Proof of Capacity
This is the angry way of saying - think about the needs of your website/web app before you decide what libraries and frameworks to use, and use them sparingly.
I think the shocker was they put her on a "performance improvement plan" -- that's basically probation.
> ultimately the problem is that everyone is expected to simultaneously have opinions on every policy in every sector at once

That's why people elect representatives, to do that for them. The U.S. is not a direct democracy.

Regardless, the problems are there and must be dealt with, however difficult that is. Ignoring problems because they are difficult would be a willful negligence. It would also be irresponsible to let people suffer, and also harm our entire community, because the problems are difficult and mechanisms imperfect.
> If I don't want 4 weeks of vacation, why should I pay for everyone else to get 4 weeks of vacation?

You want to pay for things like that because it makes your society stronger and healthier overall.

You already pay for everyone to use the police, jails, firemen, roads, sidewalks, parks, libraries, courts, etc. etc. even though you probably don't use them, or use them frequently. Why do you pay for other people to use police, courts and jails?

Have you ever wondered why the crime rate in the US is so high compared to developed countries? One of the reasons is because people are very desperate. They have low education, no healthcare, so safety net, so they have nothing to lose. If you had "paid" for them to have those things, those people would be happier, healthier, and you wouldn't be 10 times more likely to be murdered than I am.

After 10 years in the US I went back to Australia for a few weeks and it slapped me in the face - there are very few desperate people in Australia. Even the lowest paid people have healthcare, education, own their own home and have toys like project cars.

That's just one example, but you need to stop thinking about "me, me, me" and think "us, us, us"
The solution is obvious: You hire men and people who don't get sick.
> The insurance company saved money, but did Amazon? I thought the portion of premiums that employers pay is fixed?

Large companies actually underwrite their own plans (this is known as self-insuring[0]). The plan is managed by a known insurance company (e.g. Aetna, Blue Cross), so from the employee's perspective it's the same, but the actual risk is borne by the company. I would be very surprised if Amazon did not do this, given their size (~200K employees) and company age (over 20 years).

As a rule of thumb, the break-even point is about 1000 lives covered. Once a company gets to that point, it starts to be in their best interest to underwrite the insurance plans they provide.

Source: Founded a health-tech company that sold to insurers (which meant selling to companies that self-funded their plans as well, as they were they real risk-bearing entity).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-funded_health_care
Regarding the negative thinking, this is a really important point. Consider these two alternative attitudes when on-boarding a new employee:

1. Let's evaluate to see whether the new developer is good enough, so we can fire fast if our expectations are not met.

2. Let's figure out how to help this developer achieve his/her maximum potential for adding value to the organization. If for some reason the developer is unwilling or unable to develop to a level that makes a positive contribution, then we consider separating.

I find the second approach much healthier for the employee and the organization.
And? Do you think it would be less fun for them if microtransactions were absent? Doubt it.
Fast food chains
I'd like to read that too actually. The new place I'm working is all Angular on the front end. Seems decent enough, but I haven't tried many JS frameworks, and haven't messed with React at all, despite all the buzz about it lately.

I honestly don't know if there's any point to trying to learn it over getting better at Angular when we have so much invested in Angular, and there's a new coolest JS framework every other week anyways.
This is pretty good but two big ones are missing

-- Grace under fire: I always love to ask folks I interview "what was your biggest mistake and how did you recover". The person who can be the cause and the solution (or at least a major player in it) and knows to "ask for help" is someone you want on your team. Folks who cry in a corner or "hide it" aren't the people you want to hire.

-- Tolerance for risk: Your going to have a lot of it, they are going to take some of it too. Make sure you aren't going to get someone on your team who is great till you have to make a big move and they shut down
Ongoing discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10122295
Fiddle for XML
I thought the portion of premiums that employers pay is fixed?

I don't know about the new laws and such, but that sounds kind of silly to me. Why would they have to pay if she's not covered?
could I port a chrome extension to firefox now?
problem with games is that they are only good if multiplayer.

and it's only good multiplayer if you can't cheat.

that means every dumb game system rush to try to run as root. as you can see with steam.

then after they have that excuse they also use that new power to enforce DRM. as you can see with steam.

and cheaters continue to cheat. but now you have malware.

running games in Linux is easy. heck you've done it on windows, you can make it on Linux with better docs and apis. the problem with Linux gaming is catering to users that don't have their heads up their buts. that is the real problem, and nobody sees the monetary incentive.

that said, true Linux gaming holy grail will be achieved when you can run a windows vm with full 3d support. period.
What is the performance of the barcode scanning? The commercial Scandit crossplatform lib is amazing (see videos) www.scandit.com
> The strength of a type system is that there is one.

I do not agree. There is no single type system that would fit all the possible use cases.

> Probably explains why most Lisps consist of one-man-hobbyist projects, though.

No, it does not.
The PIP also encourages the employee to resign instead of waiting to be fired, minimizing employer risk of wrongful termination lawsuits or having to pay severance. In the author's case, she resigned; the PIP was a success for Amazon.
I had a 100% remote job (senior level) making considerably more than that. They are out there.