skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was able to read the article before it got hugged to death by HN.

That said, like many similar interview/hiring stories shared here, it reeks of single-sidedness. Specifically, there is not enough detail regarding your interactions with the interviewers to warrant calling this a horror story. The only points of interest in this piece, in my opinion, were that the interviewers were late and there was a clear communication issue (particularly when it came to scheduling the interviews).

Other than that, all we know is that you tripped up during some of your interviews. In those situations, based on your post, it was never really your fault, which is not the best attitude to have.

Finally, them saying that your engineering skills needed more work shouldn’t be insulting. Amazon hires tons of engineers and they are generally very technically competent. However good you think you are, there are millions who are just as good, and there are thousands who are better. Amazon can only hire so many people and this was likely their way of saying they simply had more candidates with more experience.

I know it is frustrating. I can say this because I have absolutely been in your shoes. (Dream job, all the way to the last stage, then no offer.) At the end of the day, we have to acknowledge the competitiveness of our field and use that to drive us to become better.
Location: Toronto, Canada
Remote: Yes

Technologies: React, React Native, Redux, Node, Ruby on Rails, Graphql, Golang,
Mongo, Postgres, HTML, CSS
Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/beccanwosu
Email: beccanwosu@gmail.com
Experience: Remote Full Stack Developer in companies in the
Health Industry located In the US
That's a big part of the problem.
I think native UI in dedicated applications is massively overrated. It's great if it's apart of the system, if there's a config menu or something you'd expect from the system itself, but I have never had a problem with Spotify or Discord in terms of 'non native'. They can be a lot better absolutely, but native look is far worse.
Groups have moderators, users can subscribe to specific mods' decisions.
I know - given enough time and money, I'd make a CLI app using something like ncurses. Unfortunately though, the reality is that I just don't have the resources.

The backend is its own process, you could definitely find the binary in the application package and run it on its own — it's not bound to Electron in any other way. Electron is just the client, the frontend graph compiler, and the backend are two separate binaries that communicate with each other over gRPC. That means you could run any of these independently, as well. [0] The client is Electron, but nothing except the UI happens in JS, everything happens in the frontend and the backend, and they're both tiny, fast, native-compiled Go apps. My backend, for example, is 4.8mb, frontend I think is 6mb. The rest of the size of the app (70mb) is just Electron, its dependencies, and the whole enchilada that comes with it. I'm not happy about it either.

For better or worse, though, since the JS part of the app is nothing but its 'skin', it's as memory efficient as Electron apps get. No real processing happens in JS, it's all Go.

[0] That said, it's not something I support right now, because if you ran the backend separately and then started the app, you'd effectively be running two backends. There is not yet a way to tell the app package that it should connect to an existing backend running locally instead of starting one.
And before that, those same people used to walk into computer stores and ask if they could buy an "AOL".
My story from 2008: https://medium.com/@simon/2008-how-i-got-hired-by-amazon-com...

Not a horror story, in that case.
Boeing moved from Washington State to Chicago.
I remember watching the great documentary "Good Copy Bad Copy." The most memorable fact from that movie is that Nigeria is the third largest film industry in the world. And, the film added that they are making films much more relevant to people from the African disaspora than Hollywood ever will, as Black Panther proves (it's the exception to the rule and took this long because Hollywood couldn't move any faster). I'm not doubtful that Hollywood isn't aware of this shift and will use the technologies, but the author's point that there is a lot of overhead which will need to be jettisoned to compete in the future is not something to ignore.
Policy-based evidence making. Reasonable economists find an inconvenient result, so pressure them to recant. Then they print something that doesn't contradict the original result, but it's less adversarial to the policy, so call it a reversal in the headline.

> As was demonstrated back in 1994 by economists Alan Krueger and David Card, modest, gradual wage increases have not been shown to reduce employment or hours worked in any significant way.

In other words, small changes have small effects. But also small benefits. What's the point of something that at best only breaks even?
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—
and there was no one left to speak for me."

— Martin Niemöller

Alex Jones is a paranoid lunatic, misinterpreting a very real assault on demographics like the straight white male as full-on white genocide, as well as many unrelated issues like immigration, but that doesn't really make him a white supremacist. Being afraid that your demographic is being targeted doesn't make you a supremacist. There are many minority demographics right now who validly feel that way. Calling for the extermination of other races would make him a white supremacist. Alex Jones being a white supremacist is a false narrative perpetuated by the informal group of gatekeepers trying to silence his platform.

> How would you translate it into any sort of policy short of complete and absolute non-regulation of speech?

That's false absolutism. You cannot dismiss censorship as a "scare-word". It's scary for a damn good reason. Right now they're only coming for the socialists. Soon they will come for someone you care about, and then I wonder if you will still be so readily apologetic for the information gatekeepers of the new era.
This is true issue irrespective of the company's bigness.
Sometimes having a debugger on prod is the right answer.

"The Remote Agent software, running on a custom port of Harlequin Common Lisp, flew aboard Deep Space 1 (DS1), the first mission of NASA's New Millennium program. Remote
Agent controlled DS1 for two days in May of 1999. During that time we were able to debug and fix a race condition that had not shown up during ground testing. (Debugging a
program running on a $100M piece of hardware that is 100 million miles away is an interesting experience. Having a read-eval-print loop running on the spacecraft proved
invaluable in finding and fixing the problem. The story of the Remote Agent bug is an interesting one in and of itself.)

"The Remote Agent was subsequently named "NASA Software of the Year"."

http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html

http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/m/pub-archive/176h/0176 (Havelund).pdf
Somebody ought to make a Dollar Shave Club for men's business attire.
Philip K Dick underrated him.

http://english.lem.pl/faq#P.K.Dick

Unless you consider it flattery that he told the FBI that "Lem is probably a composite committee rather than an individual".

But the lack of respect was not mutual!

Stanislaw Lem:
Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans

https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm
I would say that Java has ~50% more code than Python due to types and braces. But I agree with you that it's worth it, because the compiler can check that a programmer satisfied a constraint, instead of relying on informal conventions or comments.

You can have a statically typed language without verbosity, via type inference (Haskell, newer Java, etc.). I wouldn't say I enjoy Java's verbosity, but I would take this over shooting myself in the foot because Python does little to protect me from my own silly type/name mistakes.

I do lament that Java falls short on being able to declare tuples, lists, and dictionaries easily.
https://github.com/cullum/dank-selfhosted/blob/master/roles/...

No RBLs? I see cullum hasn't spent any time running a mail server.
> strong privacy guarantees

This can change any day. And if you think that's impossible, look at Windows or Google Chrome. Most users just will happily trade privacy for convenience.

> the other requires you to invest time and effort, first to research, then enact

This is classic learning curve = bad. Rust is also harder than JavaScript, and Vim is harder than Notepad. What matters is whether its worth it.

Some people don't see a problem with being at the whim of a megacorp and not having true ownership of their devices. That's normal. After all, Chrome and Windows have huge marketshare too.

Putting all the eggs in Apple's basket is near-sighted at best.
This is the reason VLC have blacklisted recent Huawei phones.

https://twitter.com/videolan/status/1022033608670961665
I would never think of Golem XIV as anything other than an SF story - sure, Golem keeps trying to lecture the humans about philosophy but I'd say the larger elements of the story were

- Some Humans fear the AIs (pretty standard Frankenstein situation) and conspire against them

- The conspirators are eliminated as a threat, the narrator tells us they believe Annie did this because Golem would have done something subtle to avoid alerting humans whereas Annie simply considered the conspirators a nuisance and nothing above that - IIRC we're likened to insects, swatted away and, when they persist, crushed.

- With the AIs gone humans go on as if nothing happened, seemingly learning nothing from it at all

All of Imaginary Magnitude and A Perfect Vacuum are awesome in my opinion (I have read them only in translation)
> most young people I know/work with in California who comes from the South does not want to return for these specific reasons

I lived in the City of St. Louis† for 13 years (and in the County for 6 before that) before moving to NYC. What I find is that young folks here who say they're from, say, Cleveland or St. Louis or similar cities in the South and whose experiences since moving have led them to believe that nothing they've found here exists back home, are often from the exurbs of those places and don't actually know what it's like to live in the center of a Midwestern or Southern city.††

I suspect they wouldn't much like the exurbs of New York, either.

We like to talk about red states vs. blue states, but the reality is that blue cities give way to purple and then red counties pretty quickly, even in liberal strongholds like New York.

Now, look, that's not to say that there are no differences in culture between, say, Atlanta and San Francisco. Obviously there are big ones! But when you dig into what people actually know about living in this or that part of the country, there's often not a lot there. Or, more charitably, individual experiences vary wildly (even within a single metro area).

† Not the South, but I think the point I'm trying to make here still holds.

†† It also seems worth noting that the experience of living in a big, new city in your early 20s (with all the new freedoms that come with that) as compared to wherever you happened to be when you were 14 is -- well, let's just say there are important perception-shifting factors.
The Wall Street Journal also likes to frame $260,000 and $650,000 incomes as typical Americans struggling to get by (originally posted on WSJ regarding Obama-era tax increases): http://i.imgur.com/bdgZa.jpg

It's hard to regard this Rupert Murdoch publication's opinions on money as grounded in any sort of reality.
Wages are not a uniform entity. Increasing the minimum wage has very minimal economic impact becase it makes up a tiny fraction of the US economy. Consider increasing pay 7$ per hour for all 542,000 US workers workers making minimum wage * 40 hours a week * 48 weeks a year = 7.2 Billion per year that’s chump change at under 0.04% US GDP. (That’s right not under 4% but under 0.04%.)

Yes, many people make more than minimum wage, but not 7$ more than minimum wage. However, for them it’s a smaller increase so again it does not add up to much.
You nailed it. I continue to be shocked by the naivete of the West in all things Asia--work practices, education, rule of law, protection of IP, role of women in society. This after having lived and worked in Eastern China for 3 years. Those abroad just don't get it. And with such a behemoth as a world partner, they aren't changing fast nor need to.
Just to add, there is also some kind of bias against Lispy languages because it looks different. People I meet who know about Racket (or other lisp dialects) just hate the "parens" or the prefix notation. Personally, I felt the same until I wrote reasonable amount of code, and that's why I think its a bias that one can get over with eventually.
Disney Channel told us we could be anything we wanted when we grew up.
> people are choosing majors that aren't valuable in the market, and are later somehow surprised they are worse off than when they started

It's not "people," it's children.

Children who are told by every single successful adult they trust that they need to go to college and that it doesn't matter what they get the degree in, just that they have one.
So like, studios and FX shops like Pixar and ILM are very much aware of these techniques, because they are leaders in them (they closely partner with Nvidia on things like the super impressive real-time raytracing of the RTX GPUs, for example), and they develop prototypes and working production applications of these things. The technology to replicate cinema-quality graphics at lower cost has existed for a while, at pretty much consumer-level costs in-fact (if you know what you are doing). But if you have $100m to spend, you're gunna spend it to keep ahead of what is already possible.

But I think my take after reading this is what he sees as a bomb that's waiting to go off is in reality a gradual evolution that literally everyone in animation/film sees coming. I have spoken to a bunch of people in the space, and have been in the space myself, and have run into absolutely no one that is a non-believer (like the people who doubted the iPhone would take off, for example).

Also let's be real here, we are talking about entertainment art here, and from what I've seen, most people suck at telling stories. Cost hasn't really been a barrier for a long time with low-cost, damn good cameras and free distribution platforms like Youtube. Hell, the pilot used to pitch It's Always Sunny in Philidelphia was famously recorded on a home camcorder. People don't go from distributing their own stuff to pitching studios for technology resources they don't have access to, they do it for the marketing machines and higher-revenue distribution channels. The up-level in quality is just a bonus if you have a good story.
Education is one of the most important things a country needs to keep a free society, educated workforce, and booming economy...

Why capitalism is involved I have no idea.

Ignorant people favor simple political messages...which is one reason certain groups of politicians put education immediately on the chopping block.
So an economic free lunch, cool. /s

"Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas"
The internal recruiter usually knows very little about the actual role and exists only to sell you to other teams. They are usually contractors, and could not care less about how candidates actually do as they themselves have no job incentives that align properly. They'll line you up with positions that make no sense, they'll ignore any advice or opinions you might have, and are not technically skilled at all. If the interview goes south at any point, the candidate is to blame for not hitting the bar. Your happiness is not a factor, they have literally hundreds of resumes with your same skill set.

I once had a recruiter try to line me up with a javascript position when I had java experience, not understanding the difference.

You have to really police their behavior and almost babysit them, otherwise you get situations like this.
Ara Güler obituary: a renowned photojournalist
As a Pixel 1 owner, I'm a bit disappointed by this new version. It just does not seem worth it to spend that much money on what looks like a small incremental improvement.
I don't work at Amazon, however my experience has been similar working at a large F10.

Our internal 'recruitment services' dept is all outsourced/contracted. They mask this internally through cheap tricks (don't present the staff in exactly the same manner as contractors in our internal system, etc), but do a little research and you'll figure out what's going on. I'm guessing they have hundreds, possibly thousands of contractors on the payroll running the operation.

They literally don't give a shit how it all goes down. I've escalated situations up the chain multiple hops and get nothing back, just silence. No acknowledgement, nothing. Talk to other Director/VP level friends in HR and they don't even know who to talk to.

I run a small to mid size department (think around 50 FTEs and some contract/consultant staff) and when we get openings posted, we run the recruiting ourselves and just instruct the internal recruitment team when we're ready to write/extend offers. They are usually still working on the initial candidate screen doing who knows what, dicking people around with video interviews and stupid phone screens.

Corporate HR and recruiting is totally broken - avoid at all costs.
ohh another hot air bubble product.. "electric scooters" ... that will pass too.

what we really need is updated modern public transportion network, high speed electric trains/ efficient transportation hubs..... not bicycles and scooters LMAO !! This is a 21st century! Why are we going backwards? They make a good toy though.
The Nvidia RTX Quadro cards recently released can actually handle that size a scene with ray-tracing in real-time, just fyi, and Disney/Pixar is using them now.
> Two years ago, after a rather unpleasant interview process, I asked to be put on a do-not-contact register

Great! Clearly he's closed that chapter in his life and he can move on. It'd be a bummer if they contacted him again, luckily he can just say "No thank you" like a normal person. But wait!

> here I am reading yet another email from an Amazon recruiter asking to talk to me about a possible opportunity. Will this horror never end?

This gets the biggest eyeroll I can possibly muster.

> This is a retelling of the two tedious months that Amazon put me through only to tell me that I can't code, which I now find funny, but at the time it was rather insulting and humiliating

Is this guy serious? He didn't meet the bar, but instead of working on the weak areas of his skillset, he's claiming he's was insulted and degraded.

---

Amazon clearly was not a fantastic company to interview with, but man this guy really milks it to the point where I don't have a lot of sympathy for him.
Racket is too powerful to be used by big corporations. The last thing a company wants...

Ah yes, The Slashdot Cynicism.

Guaranteed to get a +5 Insightful.

What is your experience with Racket? Or failing that, Scheme? Or, failing that, Lisps in general?
I would love to see the reverse. Ive never seen a Java codebase that I thought was pleasant to work with, but maybe I'm just not looking hard enough.
It helps to think of it as my work is just a product being sold.

It's also a more accurate model of what's going on.
So for CPUs yes, for GPUs we have seen massive progress even just this year. The Nvidia RTX cards have actual real-time raytracing, not some demo, an actual working product, that can handle massive scenes. I saw a Pixar Renderman talk where they used an Nvidia RTX Quadro to real-time raytrace the entire city in Coco.

Less about raw power, more about specialization. There is a lot of room still in specialization. In graphics, with things like ray-tracing, and in AI with things like the TPUs.
> After a brief exposure, however, many programmers fail to appreciate its full breadth and never use it again.

Yeah. That was me. A friend of mine tried to clue me in to Prolog about twenty years ago and I didn't "get it".

Recently I revisited it and realized that about 1/3 of my working career was wasted by not using Prolog.

My strong suggestion to any programmers reading this: learn and use Prolog.
Perhaps you're not a very good professor.
The counter argument is that it is much harder to intercept the mail en-masse than it is to interfere with elections in person.

Every year there are stories of polling places having "technical difficulties" or being "moved at the last minute" in certain neighborhoods. Roads get closed down, signs directing people where to go to vote are not put up, and 4+ hour lines out the door become common place in areas where those in power want to suppress votes.

In contrast, with vote by mail people don't have to take a day off of work, they don't have to wait out in the cold for hours, and they don't have to risk not being able to vote at all if their local polling place decided that all the machines are "no longer working".
There is apparently a huge shortage of both men and women!
I can see about 50/50 cached/uncached requests. It's probably the way that the HTML is being generated, will have to look into that, thanks
Neil Blomkamp of District 9/Elysium fame has released some shorts made with the Unity engine and was pretty effusive about the benefits of using a real time engine for animation: https://unity.com/madewith/adam

That said, the results are still quite far from studio CG animation. I wonder whether the market for cheaply produced animation is really as large as the author thinks. I think he's underestimating the primary value add of studios, which is marketing and distribution.
Pay off the mortgage ASAP then worry about it. Debt is the devil’s passion.
I ran a vfx company before. Author clearly is just a hobbyist at best and has no experience in digital production.

Studios aren't clueless, this is their business. They take advantage of every hardware upgrade, have already expanded into the cloud, and the bigger companies have direct R&D access to nvidia's engineers to develop the next generation. Everyone wants faster graphics and lower costs, and they already use real-time rendering everywhere, especially in editing.

Yes, better hardware has made it easier for more people to produce more things, as evidenced by the exploding world of Youtube creators making high-end productions. However there is an immense difference in overall quality between those videos (which can easily climb into 6 figure costs) and the big budget studio productions that fill cinemas.

Also graphics are a tiny part of the overall product. The rest is the creative process, building the actual scenes, and making it all look and feel right. There's no magic button to transfer your imagination into the computer, and that's the majority of the effort, along with actually coming up with a good story in the first place.
You expect a high speed train station outside your front door? Awfully optimistic of you.
This rings very true from my perspective as well from both sides of the fence.
I too find that after a 10-hour day, I can not do anything productive. My best time is morning till early afternoon. I think ego depletion definitely has some anecdotal evidence. Most of us can only do quality focused work when our mind is clear after sleep.

If you look at the data gwern provided, some of the supposedly owls actually sleep till noon, and do work immediately after waking up. That is not an "owl" in my opinion ... I too can do work at night if I spend the day wandering around. An owl is someone who could pump good work after a taxing day.