skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Wouldn't you call two new offices that are smaller than the headquarters "satellite offices"?

Not quite.

Amazon has satellite offices, that employ an order of magnitude fewer employees.

At 25k/branch, the term "regional headquarters" can be considered justified.

They did game the system though. Feels like they negotiated tax benefits with 50k employees in mind, and kept the same benefits while only giving locations 25k each.

This is good for tech in the east coast. Fin-tech firms WILL HAVE TO compete against Amazon for (supposed) west coast wages, and could help build a much stronger tech industry than NYC has atm.

Cornell tech much be so happy with their choice to open office on Roosevelt island.
I can see them being the biggest winners out of this whole set of events. NYU is probably also happy, having acquired NYU poly a few years ago.
The Roman Trivium was Logic, Rhetoric, and grammar. Most of these arguments are logical fallacies - X does not guarantee Y - but are valid Rhetorical devices. Slippery slope is easiest to explain. If A, 90% chance of B, if B, 90% chance of C, if C, 90% chance of D. Therefore, if A, 73% of D - A implies D, if not perfectly. This is completely valid in Rhetoric, where you can't perfectly model anything, just approximate, but not logic, where truth or falsehood is digitized and binary. Most arguments that humans get into are rhetorical, but our focus on logic has left us vulnerable to misunderstanding. We are ignoring clear correlations because there's not a logical certainty.
How Multi-Beam Flash Lidar Works
Drives up rent.

Breaks up existing, stable (if often impoverished) communities.

Increased, concentrated development can have a negative environmental impact.
"Medical Device Hacking" is a large part of how my wife and I slept at night for the last few years

I spend a lot of time in places with little to no cellular coverage. One of the medical devices I use downloads prescription changes from the doctor's office via cellular connection. So I had to hack my device so I can make the prescription changes myself.

You do what you have to do.
I wasn't clear. I suspect that under certain conditions (price, relative quality etc), and at a certain increase of price, people will switch to the cheaper product because the quality difference isn't that much.
the city where i live banned every single billboard/outdoor advertisement[1] and, imho, it was one of the best ideas our local government had.

[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
I sure hope the EU hasn't given in to the DUP.

But since May won't get anything through parliament, it's probably a moot point.
Caring for your industry also produces things like open source contributions, conference talks, and other forms of collaboration which are arguably of greater benefit to your personal career than they are to your current employer.
Oh, thank you. I'm going to try it!
I am VERY critical of SAP.

> In 2011 SAP bought Successfactors, for 3.4bn.

And their stock price has more than doubled. What's your point?
In astronomy one aberrant observation is enough to completely revolutionize the field or destroy a previously esteemed view. It's not based on melting pot models and so a single mistake indicates something is wrong, perhaps fundamentally wrong. Consider that decades before relativity was discovered we knew very well that something was very broken because Mercury's expected orbit was off by 1/100th of a degree per century.

By contrast, how would you propose falsifying a climate model? Each decade or so we gain another chunk of data we can use to try to trial predictions of the past and, to date, they've done quite abysmally except in the most broad sense of a longterm gradual increase in temperatures. For instance from 2001 and 2010 the warming slowed to 0.11C per decade. [1] For the 17 years before then was 0.17C. There was not a single model that predicted this and, in spite of a number of after the fact hypotheses for that apparent decline, there is still no decisive answer. In a science that was more heavily dependent upon testing, this would be a ground-shaking event. But it's effect on climate science has been relatively minimal.

[1] - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/did-global-warmin...
Western liberalism, by tradition, is a lot stricter on governments than on corporations.

At some level this makes perfect sense to me. I can have a website where I let you publish but not Emily.

OTOH, in 2018 a handful of corporations control most of social media. Banned from Twitter and FB is "silenced" to a meaningful extent. Also, these are mostly open platforms where most people get to publish if they want. This makes their "content policies" censor-esque in ways that bother liberals on instinctive freedom-of-speech grounds.

I agree, and I think that this is an issue we need to solve. FB is the most important media platform in history. Civil wars are being started on FB. Elections are won on FB.

I think it's a problem that needs a solution, or freedom of speech loses meaning.

But... it's not surprising that liberals are freaking out about a "government acting like a corporation." The principal is basically "government cannot just act like a corporation."
> assuming 15k jobs in New York is $75MM/yr, which is a lot of money

They'll probably pay it back in payroll taxes. The subsidy effect is an unfair tipping of the scales in favor of large companies. But mass has its benefits. You can't renovate LIC in the hope that businesses will move there. An anchor employer underwrites infrastructure with broader social benefits without requiring the city to co-ordinate lots of smaller employers. (The follow-on question being, how do we make such co-ordination easier.)
Yeah i dont wanna setup up a sever (because that hella insercure) but I want my info to be free! Wordpress?
The way you describe your work sounds a lot like the physical world equivalent of engineering management.
It's kind of interesting that an app developer needs to prove they've got permission from the copyright holders to display a website, but Safari can display them all just like that.
> presumably did not realize that the car was fully electric rather than just a hybrid

I don't buy that anyone working at a car racing event doesn't know Tesla's full electric.
Learn with Facebook
20 years on, and still no native object copy and merge in JS
I’m not who you replied to but I really needed this.

I’m working on getting out of being a headhunter (a decent, honest, technically minded one who actually listens, but still with all the bad actors it’s hard to have prod in my career) into software development. I’ve always been fascinated with computers ever since programming my BBC micro first in basic then assembly.

Family reasons meant i needed a short term job (12 years ago!) so I put off learning and dropped out of university.

I’m able to spend the evenings and weekends learning now -I’m fascinated by iOS development, Swift and learning all the apis.

Motivation hasn’t been too hard to find but seeing light at the end of the tunnel has and this post resonated with me because I understood a lot of it and thought that I have come a little way after all.

Thanks for taking the time to write this.
My previous job. More than a million lines of code for a glorified CRUD app, with more than a $7 million annual budget.

Accruing technical debt was a process feature. More bad code that everyone is afraid to touch means more budget for terrified developers and testers, and insane networked database design means more budget for servers and sysops. The fear leads to meetings, the meetings lead to suffering, and suffering leads to the dark side. It still works according to spec, and is human-fixed quickly whenever it doesn't, but the poor quality of the codebase is likely costing at least $2 million per year.
While working at a company, be loyal to your local team (other people just trying to do good work) and yourself (e.g. build new skills you can use). And really, those are variations of the same thing because co-workers that value you can help you get what you want or even your next job.

Blind loyalty to a company means nothing though. First, managers change: any promise, especially a long-term one, is one manager-change away from becoming vapor. Projects are cancelled or relocated or reprioritized. Layoffs occur at times convenient for the company so don’t be surprised when you’re unable to count on stock vesting. Perks go away. Ultimately, treat most company-level things as “sounds nice” and never count on them. For example, I would never buy a house based on stock I should get or a bonus that was promised.
It is literally the opposite of the effect described in the article.
Ahhhh crap. Here goes housing prices... We were really hoping to buy something next year :(
>Russian propaganda bots are that, propaganda bots.

What is Russian propaganda though?
I imagine this varies based on the child. How are you finding working and being the primary carer of an infant?

Do you have any particular strategies for getting work done, and somehow keeping your child safe, entertained and developing?

I've got a 6-month old daughter, but my wife doesn't head back to work for another 3 months. I'm a bit concerned about my productivity once that happens.

I absolutely love spending time interacting with my daughter, in my free time. However, I presently find it near impossible to work when I'm the only carer around, unless she happens to be asleep. Hopefully that changes in 3 months and she's capable of short periods of independent play - but I'm not quite sure what to expect.

I've worked full-time at home for approximately the last 5 years. So I have very much got that down pat. Unfortunately, I can't work on a laptop anymore, as I developed RSI doing so a few years back (was working long hours, my own fault). I've also got two dogs which I love having around. However, once my daughter can walk (and harass them) they'll have to be mostly separated from my daughter. They're 50kg, so any small mishap would be a large mishap - can't take that risk. We've got a fully fenced acre out back so the dogs can't really complain!

I'm also a night owl, its 4:30 AM here and I'm pushing Docker images to ECR ;) It's quite strange how much more efficient I am working at night. I've tried all sorts of things to work on a "normal" schedule. Running on the treadmill in the morning, going for walks at lunch etc. No matter what, when I really need to get work done, I fall back into a night routine - even though I'm putting in the same total hours.

How do you manage being a night owl and being awake to look after your child during the day?
If the ad isn't political, who gives a darn who said it?
It's relatively well connected to both Southern and Northern Europe?
I agree that splitting up your CSS to only send the critical stuff first is tough to scale and it's tough to find a reliable solution.

> It kind of breaks how CSS is supposed to work.

Can you elaborate on this?

> You easily run the risk of sending redundant bytes if the same styles are still in your external CSS.

I think we're up against 2 less-than-optimal situations. Suppose you have 50KB of CSS.

* Ship it the traditional way. User waits on all 50KB before first paint.

* Ship it the code splitting way. User gets 10KB upfront, and leaves before the rest loads. But if they interact with the site extensively, then they trigger the redundant bytes that you're mentioning, so that the total download size comes out to be 75KB.

Disclaimer: I write the docs for Lighthouse. I'm speaking from my general knowledge of the project but haven't vetted these comments with my team. So consider all comments my own.
If the subsidies are per job, is that a problem? Pay half as much for half as many jobs - seems reasonable to me. Doesn't seem like "false pretenses" in a way that materially affects the deal.
Individual action is unlikely to be effective in this case. For every person that cares enough and is aware enough to boycott these products, there are a thousand other people who either don't know, don't care, or can't afford to take the time and effort to change their behavior over something like this.

If you want to make an impact, look toward political solutions; raise awareness among your friends and family, write to your representatives, send a letter to your local newspaper, etc. etc. The only reason companies are overexploiting these resources is because it's profitable; a small tax or tariff could tip the scales in a much bigger way than your own individual consumer habits ever will.
Not 'a hosted instance' or 'a cloud server', but many. An arbitrary amount. Personal anecdote: Local full builds for me take 28-30 minutes. When I farm it out to our infrastructure in AWS it takes 9 minutes.
[edit] w/e
Oh, and since everybody seems to post their personal blogs for critique, shameless plug in adding a link to my own, which I think gets the minimalism aesthetic sooomewhat right.

It still needs some more slimming down, and small aesthetic changes would be welcome, but here it goes.

[1] https://tpaschalis.github.io/
I live in Seattle and have lived in Seattle. I know exactly the effects this has, and it's not beneficial except to the already wealthy. Great if you're rich, terrible if you're anything other than rich (hint: most people aren't rich).
Fire. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_t...

Interestingly, I think the majority of citizens would disagree with the ruling. (And it was partly overturned a few decades later.)

Furthermore, the ability to state facts and opinions is important. If someone finds a culture oppressive he/she ought to be able to say it so.
One of the corporate advantages of 100% remote is the business can pay your team whatever their local market rate is, this is usually a lot less than SF, Seattle, NY etc. Additionally, you can often avoid paying certain benefits if your team member is outside of the US.

This is a huge competitive win for organizations who are willing to organize around remote work. I personally am not sure how I feel about salaries weighted in such a way, partly feel like people doing equal work should be compensated equally since they contribute equally. On the other hand, potential employees are free to accept of turn down an offer and the market will continue to adjust accordingly.

Full disclosure; I've noted elsewhere on HN that I turned down an offer with Gitlab at the final stage because they adjusted the geo-compensation calculation in the late stages of the interview which made the position fiscally uninteresting. I swear I am not bitter :) - I just think that this aspect of the employment strategy is interesting and worthy of dissection as it is probably something we will see more and more with remote positions.
Considering Amazon helped pay for the South Lake Union streetcar, I imagine that this announcement will expedite the approvals for and the construction of the BQX street car.
You can fairly easily install the latest macOS on such older iMacs [1]. It works well and gives them a new life. If you do it, consider increasing the memory to the max (8 GB?), and replace the HD with SSD. Still plenty of power to use for email, web browsing, DJ station (Spotify and/or Sonos), and even to run Xcode.

[1] http://dosdude1.com/mojave/
I was a one of these “new hires” to a startup that was growing. It was chaotic because a lot of knowledge wasn’t transferred and we had to basically figure out a lot of the business logic because those original people were all gone.

I jumped ship after a few months and eventually the startup failed. I heard from former colleagues the main reason is those original people went to work for several big companies, who were all customers of this startup. They still held a grudge and persuaded those companies to stop working with them.
People are “consistently inconsistent” about controversial science topics
> Are you just an Amazon shill who jumps in to try and suppress any criticism of them?

No, I'm not. Are you the kind of commenter who accuses everyone who disagrees with you of being a shill, so that you can control the conversation? (There's at least as much evidence of that than there is of me being a shill...)
My expectation is that everyone is going to suddenly fall into line and she'll get it through.
I once had the horror of walking through some drug store and seeing bottled DNA, with a description like "an essential component of life!" At best, I suppose it was an overpriced and inefficient amino acid supplement. At worst, it was effectively a sugar pill.

I'm sure that these studies get any traction, we'll see bacterial 'supplements' almost immediately. Never mind that even gut microbiome supplements are usually destroyed in the stomach, we can definitely make yogurt that gets to your brain!
Thousandeyes Breach Spamming Google Search with Fake PDFs
Bad is not a good measure. But taking 'bad' to mean large, convoluted, zero documentation; I was once at a financial services company that had a 25 million+ LOC mainframe cobol application that had been under active development since 1969. This was a batch and CICs system. It was spaghetti on every level; database (db2, vsam, isam), the screens of the app, the batch jobs, the cobol. It was truly astounding. It was also the source of about $500 million in revenue. They were doing software as a service in the 1970's. It's still going today. Customers in that space don't have many options.
I'm guessing by bad, you mean ugly. I'm fairly convinced there is no "good" code, or that it's such a minuscule subset that you'll never likely encounter it in your career. Every year I look back on last years stuff I've written, and I can find ten ways to clean things up.

In my opinion, if it works, and provides the utility it was designed to bring, then it doesn't matter. If it makes money, then who really cares!
I mean, yes there's nothing wrong with engineers struggling and pushing their skills and boundaries, it's how we grow and improve. But persistent struggling with daily tasks is indicative of a deeper problem. There might be missing knowledge, or the mistaken idea that programmers should be hard workers to be productive.

Using our tools of simplification, abstraction, automation and domain knowledge, it's critical to teach your juniors how to be optimistically lazy and do less. That's how we raise great engineers. Otherwise, we're just raising mid-level programmers who only know how to throw lots more code at their problem, and as I hope we all know by now, more code never results in fewer problems.
>I interviewed with them when they were at 40 remote employees (as far as I can recall). Sadly, I lacked the chops they were looking for. But I was thoroughly impressed with how passionately they spoke about their remote culture.

I had a similar experience with Zapier. I loved how everyone seemed to love their remote culture, how they have blog post after blog post about remote work life, how they'd get together a couple times a year for a working 'retreat' but I apparently didn't fit their culture.
Because they’re financially stressed and can’t afford kids.
Silicon Valley Companies Ending Forced Arbitration
In the current App Store version the share button embeds both the original and HN discussion link into a promotional message about the app.

Not providing attribution in the form of the address bar (title + url) might be the main problem here but I personally feel fixing sharing would help as well.
Two things:

1. That wasn't me who gave the advice.

2. There's a big difference between putting up a Wordpress install on PHP 5.6 and greenfielding a modern project on 7.x.
Okay, so on my screen that means 80% of the window is whitespace and it burns my eyes. background-color: black, I guess?

Responsive design is a thing, yes, but ultimately on a desktop computer you're always going to be able to choose a browser size that breaks a site.
Top Reasons You Should Add AIOps to Your Tooling Arsenal
I thought the same. It would probably sound more realistic without the gasping. Most human speakers wouldn't gasp that audibly and at different parts of the text.
A few points:

1) Whether or not such a consensus exists is somewhat orthogonal to the question "Would any evidence convince you to change your mind"

2) There is complete consensus that there are morphological differences between the sexes; this consensus extends to neurology. To what degree these morphological differences are genetic is up for debate (remember that brain morphology is absolutely environmentally affected), but most of the time we have studied traits for nature vs. nurture, the answer has been "both."

3) For some mental traits (e.g. IQ) it is well established that the difference, if any between the means of men and women is quite small. For other mental traits it is well established that the difference is quite significant, and the question is to what degree it is genetic versus environmental.

4) Many people on the left have argued that any investigation into innate differences between men and women should not be allowed, under the theory that any positive result would be co-opted by misogynists. That might be true and even be a good reason to avoid the research in today's cultural climate, but it's definitely fallacious as an argument that there are no inherent differences; this study was specifically about fallacious reasoning, not correct reasoning.
Exactly what seems to be happening at my current startup (more context in my other comment).
To me, it’s dishonest because it presents a small aspect as a primary driver without giving proper context. So it was frustrating to me because I had to spend time researching the potential issue to learn it is a very insignificant aspect that I don’t think was worthy of my time.

It’s like posting “Don’t eat ground beef as it is full of rat feces.” any time someone posts about hamburgers.

It’s true that the FDA allows a small amount of fat feces in ground beef, and all food [0].

But it’s really insignificant and almost always irrelevant to the conversation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Food_Defect_Action_Levels
Amazon's HQ2 Spectacle Isn't Just Shameful--It Should Be Illegal
Isn't Object.assign basically a merge?
The fact that the sources are not easily accessible to you for free does not negate the fact that there are cited sources explicitly disproving your assumption (that this is just economists making things up).

> Thanks, I also read the article.

I'm not sure the extent to which you considered this, but in this context it's hard to read that sentence without making you sound like a jerk.
Those numbers seem rather high. Profits are on the order of £2.5m/year ~(3.25 million $) so / 140 and your talking a 23k/year annual bonus. On top of that selling the company likely means the jobs not only pay less, but are also worse.
Years ago as an intern at Microsoft, I had code go into the Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Outlook, and shared Office code.

Excel is an incomprehensible maze of #defines and macros, PowerPoint is a Golden Temple of overly-object-oriented insanity, and Word is just so old and brittle you'd expect it to turn to dust by committing. There are "don't touch this!"-like messages left near the main loop _since roughly 1990_.

I had a bug in some IME code causing a popup to draw behind a window occasionally, and a Windows guru had to come in to figure it out by remote-debugging the windows draw code with no symbols.

I learned there that people can make enormous and powerful castles from, well, shit.
And for those who like to post code snippets in (currently still) esoteric languages like Elixir - and from a nice CMS?
> Bosses never expect an email to be answered immediately.

Sounds like wherever you were working before was doing it wrong.

I work remote and no one ever expects immediate email or slack. It is because the whole company is remote that this is the case - you can't have this type of expectation when folks are in every time zone across the globe.

Although I love remote, it's not for everyone. There's a lot to be said for perks like gym, dental, etc. It's really nice that you found a good fit!