skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What a thoroughly empty statement. There is almost no content to this, it consists of blandly repeating the mantras of the day.

This reinforces to me just how much the current fashion - constant obeisance to "equity" if not "equality" - is a replacement religion.

Utterly empty, pure signalling.

Edit - for instance:

"Discrimination against ethnic and religious minorities has been deepening..."

Since when? Measured how?

Notice that every claim - which aligns with the religion of the day, genuflection to equity - is made as if it were an ironclad fact instead of a questionable opinion, while being juxtaposed with fake unending humility.

"I don't know anything about how to solve inequity, so I worked with <progressive groups that claim to do so>, because I absolutely know that every one of their arguable political claims are true."

She even claims Jeff's money was made through a "system that needs change" - how so? Almost all his money was made through stock appreciation.

He made the actual dollars she is now giving away from investors in Amazon stock, not "black and brown bodies" or whatever the current victim group is.

Edit: another instance I couldn't miss:

"Over 700 million people globally still live in extreme poverty. To find solutions, we [...] prioritized organizations with [...] leaders of color, and a specific focus on empowering women and girls."
Apparently [0] some people are genetically disposed to require much less sleep than most, but no, you can't train yourself to perform normally when sleep deprived.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27471247
Article does not support headline.
Even if you don't stay at Amazon for many years, that doesn't mean your career is over or worse than having not worked there.

Also, it's about Amazon India, so take care before generalizing globally.
There's a lot of natural variance in this. There's no a priori reason that your 7.5 makes more sense than somebody else's 9. Or a house cat's 12-16. It's like asking whether 5' 8" or 6' 1" is the correct height. You roll the genetic dice and they land where they land.
In years to come we will look down on the 5 day working week in the same way we currently do with 15hr factory shifts during the industrial revolution.

It blows my mind that 99% of jobs are still 5 days / week, Monday to Friday - why is there basically no variation on this model?

It annoys me so much that I recently launched https://4dayweek.io/ (Software Jobs with a better work / life balance)
> Predicting the market has and will never be about "facts" - it will always be about predicting other people's behavior.

It will be a combination of both, as different people will react differently to the same facts about a company and the market/economy. And there's no way to predict ahead of time when these new facts / information will appear (e.g., lawsuit against a company), and so fluctuations will occur 'randomly' over time:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street
One can consider AML measures similar to getting your luggage scanned in an airport. Such measures strip everyone of a bit of privacy, but prevent rare nutcases from inflicting large-scale damage.

The question is how much benefit an average society member gains for that cost. How many planes were not hijacked because the potential perpetrators knew they won't be able to covertly bring a handgun abroad? How many crimes were not done because the potential perpetrators understood that they won't be able to turn the proceeds into large sums of usable money?

It's really hard to measure, and because of that, the extent of such regulations tends to grow, just in case. There's plenty of security theater in airports, along with useful measures. There's plenty of overreach in AML regulations, along with useful measures. Curbing both back to the reasonable levels is a hard task, because it's hard to obtain a strong evidence that a particular level is reasonable at preventing the crime.
Someone has to be there for that kid to say 'shut up and study'. Failing that, disruptive student is a drag on the rest.

I am sympathetic to the thought process behind it but the end results are hard to argue with.
> There's no intrinsic reason for earnings to be directly related to stock price.

You are buying a share in an income stream! You are using your money to buy money! If there is no intrinsic reason for this to have a price that is measured in money, where exactly do you think a price measured in money is appropriate?
Certainly all the business class hotels have the ability to reserve room blocks, cater events, pre-book rooms, etc. But those are essentially additional profit centers. I'm just saying that many/most of us essentially deal with hotels 1:1 even for business travel.

But, yes, there are some brands of e.g. Marriott that are in part oriented to corporate events and the like and other that are mostly for individual travelers whether on vacation or business.
The main difference here is that the teachers are unionized. Their contracts generally make it extremely difficult to remove underperforming teachers or pay for results.

Higher pay under a pay for performance structure and the ability to remove ineffective teachers would be good. This would bring it more in line with industry. It can be tricky to get the right metrics. The bigger issue is that the teachers union opposes any of them.
Dads Just Want to Help
It's bi-directional for me. I am my #1 match's #1 match.

Should be that way in general, right?
Out of interest, how do we decide if something is a torture? Imagine a machine that’s broken, does it feel pain? Say, you drop your iPhone with Siri on the floor. Is it cruel? Isn’t a lobster the same kind of machine, just a biological one?
Amazon is a loose federation of different teams. Some are fine and some are bad.

My counter-anecdote: I worked at Amazon for two years and it was mostly fine. Normal boring job.
And these people could have decided to keep that money or like her former husband spend it on 100 million dollar boats.

She decided to donate it instead. That’s something to celebrate.
Yes, it assumes you can get an estimate. Yes, this assumption can be problematic. Yes, there are limits. But, again, even the most problematic estimate is leagues ahead of "diamond hands, diamond hands, GME to the moon".

No, "yield" in terms of dividends is not necessary. Owning a share in a company that puts cash in a bank account is also worth money.
For very, very popular services, a second of being live will exercise more code paths and edge cases than even the most dedicated testing team could ever dream of.

We hear a hell of a lot about testing but the most fundamental piece of software quality nowadays is the release strategy: running on tee'd live production traffic, canarying, metrics and alerting, quick roll backs, etc.
Update - daily output of modules: Python/190, Ruby/12.
What happened to Jack Ma is one of the few things that scares this class of wealth.
> The thing is, just like a car can travel on any road...

I don't disagree with your comment as a whole, but this stood out to me as a classic example of why car::computer analogies always suck. No, not every car can travel on every road. Send your typical Camry or Accord down a fire road and it will be lucky to make it half a mile. Without some modifications, my 4x4 Bronco II would have issues with some trails.

Now, if you were limiting your scope to paved roads, I can kind of see your point, but there again there are certain roads that would give issues to the average car, particularly in places like Detroit where the road itself can be so deteriorated due to municipal neglect that it will destroy a car's suspension. Or, San Francisco where the hills can be so steep that driving a manual transmission car daily requires skill beyond that of the average driver to avoid rollback accidents, not to mention the extra wear on the clutch.

> ...a computing device can execute any software.

Not quite true. A microcontroller is a computing device; it executes code written in a human-readable language that has been compiled into a machine language, just like a full-blown consumer computer. However, you can't just throw any software on the microcontroller's storage medium and expect it to run. First you must be able to recompile it, which means you need access to the source code. Second, if said source code is not in whatever human-readable language the microcontroller's IDE expects, you'll have to spend the time porting it over to that language before even attempting to compile it. Even then, the microcontroller may not be powerful enough or have the right features to run the software the way you intended.
Tamás Görbe: “Spherical gears are amazing” [video]
I knew a guy who claimed he only ever slept 3 hours a night. :) There was nothing obviously wrong with him at all. Older guy, too. His job was his passion, though, which I imagine helps quite a bit. I doubt he had to drag himself out of bed ever.
The minute you buy something, what you do with it has to do with your rights and not the rights of the company that created that thing.
I don't get it this line of argumentation.

Imagine someone was kidnapped against their will, and once we were to discuss the rights of the person being kidnapped the person kidnapped with stockholm syndrome have argued in favor of the kidnapper, as if it was within his rights to break its own rights.

Because this is what you are advocating here. That a company should have the right even to break your rights because they are a "good willing actor" or that they are doing it thinking in your well being (which you are inclined to think with tons of well crafted and manipulative propaganda towards this goal).

And its even worse because, its not the third party that its at fault according to your point of view, but the government that is trespassing by trying to force with laws, approved in a democratic regime, that your rights have to be respected and there are limits into how they can limit you or forbid what you can do with something that you bought and therefore its your property.
I think down leveling is quite common, especially at higher levels as the expectations grow quite a bit between senior and staff. Depending on the position, actually filling it with +/-1 of the target level is a win. Interviewing is expensive and if a candidate is good for the role, but perhaps just a bit below the bar, then a recommendation to hire at L-1 tries to keep the candidate and give them a career path.

This is from my perspective at Google, I've never worked at Amazon.
I'm always surprised why industry leads (like Amazon) sometimes treat their products as an amateur treats his/her weekend projects. This is definitely not the worst as I know one of the leading options marketmaker has been using a giant shit mountain of MS Access/Excel VBA code to run their system since the 90s. Last time I heard about it (a few years ago) they are planning to replace that shit mountain with something new but I don't know if it's done now.
This sounds alarming:

> There is strong evidence for brain-related pathologies in COVID-19, some of which could be a consequence of viral neurotropism.

This doesn't:

> We further compared COVID-19 patients who had been hospitalised (n=15) with those who had not (n=379), and while results were not significant, we found comparatively similar findings to the COVID-19 vs control group comparison

What are the quantitative findings of "loss of grey matter"?

What mechanism/s are suspected that might be specific to COVID19?
So there are evolutionary reasons baked in such behaviors? Regardless, it's not quite the same as building factory for the sole purpose or killing, and esentially kill for pleasure. The equivalence would be an ongoing massacre which is not seen in nature to my knowledge.
What if the licensing board is corrupt? It is perfectly reasonable to suspect that they might protect their own in some cases, similar to police testimonies.
Interested in learning more. Could you please list one or two orgs from her list and why you doubt them?
The whole article basically is made up from quotes of a single person and just slightly mentions some contract-related stuff without even quoting text from the said contract.

This is absolutely not a quality article.
Current AWS employee. Technical sales side.

I don't disagree with what OP was saying. I have friends who experienced this. But my experience is no way closer to this.
Think of this. The company have million+ people working. It got many companies in it (Acquisitions and independent business units). At least 30% are technical side. Out of it around 50% face this issue who are on development side. Which is still significant. Especially on call. other stuff like URA still applies for everyone. Work life balance is upto manager, team, business unit etc. Can't really generalize. You get to work with great companies and build great experience for your career if you got lucky. If someone doing their job,it's really hard to go things wrong way. Managers are always under hiring pressure and they tend to hire wrong folks most times. The interview process have lot of bias baked in. We miss lot of good folks and hire wrong folks too.

But I agree this toxic culture need to change.
Wish she had got half of Bezos's money. Bezos's might be a great business man, but I don't think he is a great human being.

This was an article 5 years ago about how amazon treats its employees:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...

It hasn't seemed to stop amazon from growing like crazy. He is the modern day Robber Barron, but maybe we have no Upton Sinclair or maybe people just don't care. Bezos seems to be using strategies from the early 20th century.
No it hadn't. "ME", "A" and "SANDWICH" are just 3 different targets
Depends on what charity/non profit does. Many waste money on fund-raising activities, scams, illegal activities and politics. [1][2][3]

[1] https://www.charitywatch.org/charity-donating-articles/chari...

[2]https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/04/11/admissions-sc...

[3]https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2019/donald-j-trump-pays-cou...
In france, the legal norm is the 35 hours work week.

I wish there would be ways to reduce work time to reduce unemployment and "share" labor, but my guess is that it's more difficult for employers to organize under such model.

The problem isn't only overwork, but it's also the labor distribution and competition among job candidates. The more work is done by one person, the less labor is left to create jobs.

Honestly I've left this rat race of job competition a long time ago, it's depressing. I live in a country where welfare benefits allows me to eat and have a home. Money is not a problem. I'm not a merchandise.
Indeed, a truly remarkable disconnect with reality that honestly makes me question the point of having an account on a site called "Hacker News."
My concern here is that Facebook will require their app to be sideloaded so that they can continue abusing their users. Now I don’t use Facebook, but at least I know my family members are somewhat protected from Facebook by Apples rules. If their Facebook app were sideloaded it would be open season for Facebook.
Stock buybacks are, if anything, often considered preferable to dividends, because they allow people who invest outside of tax shelters to control whether or not they want to have taxable income this year (by selling the stock on their own schedule, rather than getting a dividend on the company's schedule).
A worm or a fruit fly has a nervous system. Does it feel pain? How do you quantify it?
Indeed, how do we decide anything that's on a gradient?
Unless you've been seriously underpaying your existing employees, it's gonna be ballpark plus negotiation, isn't it? In any case the new guy is gonna try to make some friends over a beer, isn't he?
"Wellcome" sounds familiar.

Related to the organization that faked "doubleblind" studies to get AZT approved by the FDA in the 1980s?
They have a big product portfolio, so less than 50 engineers is a big stretch even in the best of circumstances.

But they are clearly in a very deep hole of technical debt that they will never be able to dig themselves out of, so all they can do is throw more people at the problem.

I don’t think this warrants being downvoted to the point of being barely readable. The estimate may be way off, but it’s a perfectly good basis for a discussion. Please don’t do this when you can use words instead.
There is no way to end up ahead by giving away money in order to pay tax on that money.

So long as the marginal tax rate is <100%, you will always lose more money by giving it away than by keeping it and paying tax on it.
I come from the perspective of a programmer, not an engineer, but I think many things still apply.

> Do software engineers really have leverage?

I would say yes the sense of real impact, but only somewhat in the sense of actual power within the given economic system.

A more extreme example would be scientists who work on foundational science. They have been discovering things that are of such high impact that they transform the way we live.

Such scientists are typically (not exclusively) well off. But they don't inhabit the most powerful places in our societal hierarchy at all, nor are they compensated in terms of their real world impact. One reason might be that these people are intrinsically motivated, they simply don't seek that power or leverage.

> How could we increase our leverage?

By not selling our labor and instead (partially) owning our products and services or at least by (collective) bargaining.

The smallest but still impactful thing we can do is to not accept employments or clients that don't value our craft.

There are also many engineering focused companies that eventually 'sold out'. Their power structure changes, their engineers lose agency and so on.

> Why don't we choose to use our rare skills for our own profit (as everyone else does), and instead many of us give away immense value (and power/leverage) by open sourcing our work?

Because the positive impact of open source software can be much greater.

Some projects are simply not fit to be sold on a market, but still have possibly immense value.

This doesn't mean they cannot or will not be compensated. Foundations, donations and so on are used for that.

Many things simply cannot work this way, because they are based on being open and free. Wikipedia or Linux wouldn't be what they are otherwise.
"I just had one for breakfast." -- Jim Hacker
Do you honestly think lions “respect” their food, and fungi, and viruses, and mantises?
Escape Tutorial hell by building this UI projects
American capitalism is built on employee heroics, but at least you can get the AWS stamp on your resie, which, let's be honest, will make you the "it" girl of job hunting.
This is a great example of culture clash. In the US, being cut means nothing, you've always got to be ready for another job search. Only a few workplaces (Govt, places with strong unions, full professors) have any protection against retrenchment or arbitrary firing. But in India, jobs are careers for life, and your employer is part of your personal brand. The cachet of AMZN is great, until you realize they are going to fire 20% of you every year. People will say "they must have fired him for a reason" because they don't understand it's just about metrics.

It's also common in India to solve problems by throwing people at it (and indeed the US if it involves minimum wage workers) rather than difficult tasks like fixing the root cause or improving the process. It's also super hierarchical (I recall watching the manager watching the engineer, who watched the junior engineer, who watched the tech type at the console, telling him what to do), encouraging lots of butt kissing. So overstaffed teams, 1/3 of whom do not much, 1/3 (with replacement) who suck up ferociously to their manager, plenty of drudge work, and fear of the stigma of being fired. Great combination.
In this video [0] the channel owner sneaks into the area, quite interesting!

[0] https://youtu.be/DRzpDqqB2fk
Thanks!

I had tried Markor already, and its TODO feature seems like a prototype unfortunately. It lacks crucial UI to use it properly and it's clearly visible that the TODO part is "bolt-on" only on top of a text editor. :|

With regards to Todo.txt[2]: I can't manage to find its source code, is it open source?
Buyers of Amazon Devices Are Guinea Pigs. That’s a Problem.
Open source work gives us leverage. It can either be used to demonstrate skills, create consulting work, get you a spot at a big conference or... provide self-fulfilment.
There is wording about the range being “reasonable” in the law IIRC. This is also to cover, for example, negotiations if the potential hire wants a higher salary and the business is willing to agree. It’s still obviously grey area, but I think making the range obviously meaningless would be shot down.
Don’t conflate corporate size with engineering competency. It’s counter-intuitive, but oh so common to see this. That’s why so many engineers want to work for start ups!
> AWS is pretty reliable for the most part

In telecom or traditional mainframes, for example, the compute unit itself was expected to be reliable. Individual elements of AWS are not pretty reliable in that context. Check out the single host EC2 SLA.

However, today most large or even medium scale software assumes unreliable individual elements and has redundancy at the program level. For that purpose, AWS core services are pretty reliable.
could easily specify to have accuracy at least within 1 standard deviation of the final outcome salary.
There were a number of recent articles. Here's one:

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-polices-based-jeff-be...
previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27557463
* https://www.safe.com/ $

* https://sourceforge.net/projects/geokettle/

* http://talend-spatial.github.io/

ref: https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/5049/seeking-options...
It says I have no comment history
Of course we do. I’m just explaining why such a place might have many, many more programmers and other employees than we would guess are needed judging by our experience out at the periphery of their business.
I have many family members who work in the development world. The Gates Foundation is a punchline of sorts and many people do not like them. Melinda is very christian and refused for years to fund contraception or abortions. Meanwhile melinda travels the world being fawned over as a feminist queen.

The other valid criticism of these development nonprofits is that they are propping up dictators. People won't rise up against their terrible governments if they have free everything from the US/Europe. Looking at you USAID.
I'm not sure I agree with the premise myself, but I find the argument plausible: if it goes into a new charitable organization today, that's $10B off his taxable income this year, whether or not the money goes to actual efforts this year. If he directs donates the money later, then he gets that exact amount as a deduction later.

Given that he's stepping down as CEO this year, the difference between a $10B deduction on his taxes this year and the same amount of money deducted across multiple future years when he has less income can be substantial.

(This argument assumes that he intends to spend $10B on charitable donations at some point in his life anyway; it's not an argument for why spending $10B is better for his taxes than not spending it at all.)
Living with a single hose portable air conditioner in the city
there’s was a debate about whether fish feel pain and the best moment is “actually plants might feel pain” [0]

>> plants add caffeine to their nectar to enhance their pollinators memory and cognition
>> plants synthesize almost all known neurotransmitters

[0]: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Balu%C5%A1ka-Commentar...