skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Amazon engineer here, just a couple of observations after a few years at the company.

As many people said, there's a wide variability in experience at Amazon depending on the team. And I would say even more, depending on where you sit in the graph. The bottlenecks at the center have more clients, higher TPS, more stringent latency requirements. And their support burden is worse and the engineer's life is worse. It's hard to move everyone forward together. Once you add enough constraints the problem gets too hard to solve. But like working at Microsoft, you pay these prices in order to have high impact, a high number of customers, and high influence. A big question for large service federations like Amazon is how to smooth out these bottlenecks. Like Stevey's rant about code size though, first you have to admit you have the problem, service size.

I joined with a team that was not service oriented. It was like a collection of cron jobs that ran single threaded applications directly updating the DB. It was painful and very hard to alter these stateful applications without breaking things.

I moved to a team that ran a collection of services and it was so much better, like night and day better. The path forward for us became obvious when we started thinking about how to migrate between APIs and decompose our services still further (and by the way, our support burden is comparatively low).

What makes service oriented architecture at Amazon great is that it is cheap. The other two Amazon advantages Steve mentioned are not coincidences, they are what you need to make service rollouts low-friction. They are what makes it possible to shoot first and rollback later. With rare exceptions they are used by the entire company.

Remember Sinofsky's "don't ship the org chart"? It is a lie. You cannot avoid it. You always ship the org chart. So the real question is, what is the org going to look like so that we ship something good-looking? That's the real purpose of Steve's rant. No matter how much politicking or boosting you do for this important service-oriented architecture, it doesn't work unless you have a service-oriented org chart. And Google does not, apparently.

The big big question for the internet and decades in the future is, you say you're going to organize the world's information. What is the organization going to look like? I think it'll be more interactive. The API will be there, there will be writes. It will be less centralized, with the appropriate authorities owning data and providing an interface to their small piece of the world's information. I think that's eventually going to mean you own your identity and provide as much interface as you care to. The arc of the internet is long but it bends toward decentralization (assuming we keep it out of the hands of the fascists).

For me Amazon is a microcosm of that future, and it's going to be interesting to lead the way there.
We agree with you completely, we are very much for safety.

We are against people touching their phones while driving (it's illegal in most states) and designed our product specifically so you don't have to touch your phone.

It auto starts up when it detects you've begun driving via your speed from GPS (go to Settings in the app to enable the auto start up). We also designed this GPS detection to not suck battery life (it will take about 1% of your battery every hour).

It works on phones even if the phone is in the passenger seat next to you- you just have to make sure to talk loudly enough.

It will even pick up your voice if your phone is in your pocket (again, just speak loudly enough) and you can hear it talk back to you.

No touching your phone or taking it out of your pocket required.

edit: also, no need to downvote this guy, it was an honest misunderstanding.
Agreed, it's just too ugly. Steve Jobs would never let that happen. Oh wait.
His basic argument is that slow languages (sure, I'll concede that) are only useful when you spend a lot of time blocking on disk seeks. This isn't true at all. Many Rails applications that are at scale (e.g. Twitter) don't have to hit disks to process requests and serve the bulk of the data for their requests out of in-memory systems such as memcached or Redis.

SSDs are fast, but they aren't going to be faster than the in-memory systems which are already in widespread usage among Ruby developers.

tl;dr: his argument is fucking bullshit
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Thanks for the article, it was a good read and interesting. I have one thing to ask you about that really bothers me when companies do it. This gets old REALLY fast:

"Unlimited plan subject to terms and conditions."

Why don't you simply rename the plan if it's not really unlimited?
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What does not liking a company for it's past transgressions have anything to do with being anti-capitalist/anti-innovation/pro-taxes?
I'll support this just as soon as B&M retailers are required to find out where their customers live and collect sales taxes accordingly as well.
Posilac.

Schmeiser.

Basmati.

And lots and lots of others.

Really, Monsanto is evil, it has been proven way beyond any doubt. In cloudants position I'm not sure I would have taken the money but I would have never ever sent out this press release.
> and then using Roundup on the field. There was an element of getting-something-for-nothing

Using RoundUp means more herbicide sales for Monsanto.
It's time to Pivot.

You are young, go to college (take all the student loans you need to stay on campus) and get a solid degree that you can do something with when you graduate, Computers, engineering, etc. Join a fraternity, make some of the best friends you will ever have in your life, drink some beer and enjoy life for a few years.

We all make mistakes, it's how we rebound from them that defines us.

Best of luck. You can do it!

Peter
What's odd is that here in the UK it's C# dominating the enterprise landscape. Or at least that's the impression I've always got from the jobs mentioned to me and the developers I've met. I've met PHP, C#, Python, Rails devs but never a Java developer.

The thing about .Net not being awesome compared to Java, it wasn't but that's not true any more, .Net is awesome compared to Java. There's a hell of a team behind the C# language at the moment and they're about 3-4 years ahead of Java in terms of new language features.

Not that I've any delusions about .Net coming to dominate in the web space, but it's more likely than Java imo which looks old now when I read it, though admittedly I don't keep up on it that well.
Cloudant posted the article which is almost exclusively about the Monsanto partnership.

The ensuing debate logically should be about the partnership rather than the technology.

Flag the article if you don't think it's relevant.
There's a difference between seeing that something can be generalized, optimized, or improved and spending the time to do it.

Knowing that difference and applying judgement is a major differentiator between inexperienced programmers and experienced ones. That, I think, is what heyrhett was getting at.
http://www.fbi.gov/foia/

"Our files are generally indexed in our Central Records System. This computerized index contains most of our records; some of our earliest records are not indexed."
In other news, the Buggy Whip Assembler's Union has some concerns they would like to raise regarding the adoption of the new "Horseless Carriage" technology.
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Apple - a future where you'll pay to be the product
If I recall correctly, the US is the only developed country without mandatory minium paid employment leave (federal employees excepted). Which small-government fans might accept readily, but it also has amongst the lowest actual average vacation times… Apparently free citizens want to work.
(One statistic had the Canadian average lower, though)

Strangely enough, this doesn't seem to have a straight-forward correlation with yearly hours worked. Italians have about the same number as Americans, but 20 mandatory days and quite a lot of Catholic holidays. Koreans and the Greek seam to top that list, although I'm currently not a big believer in Greek statistics…
Besides this new linking feature, I don't understand how the hashtag feature should work in google+. If I try to search for "#android", what I get is a list of posts mentioning "android", without the hash. What I really want though isn't a casual mention of the word, but posts which were deliberately tagged "#android".

Am I missing something?
What in the world is a "local SMS?" It still goes through the cellular network, even when you're texting the person in the cube next door.
Let's be honest though, there's 0% chance of functional languages becoming mainstream in web development.
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I have to constantly hear my father shout what an idiot I am for quitting a high-paying job. My friends make fun of me for making a retarded life decision.

Either your father and your friends are complete assholes, or your depression is causing you to interpret things in the worst possible way. Odds are that your father and friends really love you and want you to succeed. They may not express this well, and you're probably pulling further inward in your depression. When the fog of depression lifts, you'll see the world and your options much more clearly.

What doesn't make it any easier is that I'm 20, I have no college diploma, no high school diploma, no idea what the fuck is going on.

Oh, dude, you're actually in a great position! You're young, and college loans are still quite easy to come by!

Here is your plan:

1) Get some help for your depression. You don't have time for therapy right now, just go for the drugs.

2) See what financing options are available to you. Financial aid? Loans? What schools can you potentially get yourself into? People will tell you that a loan for school is a mistake, but if you go into a technical, reasonably difficult field, this is simply not true.

3) Go to school. Get your degree. You will almost certainly emerge into a better economy, and you'll have a pretty good time doing it.

Remember, in getting through this situation, you are becoming a stronger and more resilient person. In one year, you'll have a greater appreciation for your life, and of what you are capable of enduring.
If Colonel Sanders can do it at 65, you have nothing to worry about. At 20, you're way to you to even entertain ideas of defeat. IMHO anyway...Don't listen to your friends or father...Take life by the balls and kick ass...
voice recognition != voice comprehension
Sorry for commenting same comment again. But check the post posted here 3 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465882

At that time everyone was praising about bezos, amazons culture.What circumstances changed the views about amazon? Honest question.
This is an unusual statement to make, because in practice in the last decade, Java-based solutions are nowhere near 100x as fast as Perl/Python/Ruby based solutions; in fact I've found them generally to be slower.

The difficulty lies in defining what 'fast' means. It's possible that the JVM is more highly optimized than, e.g., the perl bytecode engine, but the highly abstracted Java libraries (FactoryFactories etc.) tend to be far less efficient and have larger memory footprints and significantly more stack-passing than the equivalent ruby/python/perl equivalents.
Google+ is almost where Friendfeed was in 2008, awesome. All we need now is feed and service imports and we've got a done deal.
Ask for an SMS token. But don't ask me how you would turn your phone on. :)
Wait a minute. I just read the Canadian court opinion from which this tiny snippet was extracted. The context you've discarded includes:

* Schmeiser was a former Roundup-ready licensee

* Schmeiser admittedly used Roundup (the herbicide) in numerous circumstances after ceasing to pay licensing fees, which is part of the pattern of circumstances that led Monsanto to sue him

* Schmeiser actually verified, with Roundup, that his "volunteer" Roundup-ready crop was Roundup-ready, and then saved the seeds anyways

* Monsanto had at the time been removing volunteer Roundup-ready canola plants at their own expense from fields where farmers noticed it growing

The context of this specific paragraph also concerns Schmeiser's argument that Monsanto's patent did not apply except in cases where the unauthorized user sprayed crops with Roundup; he wasn't merely trying to exculpate himself, but was also attempting to overturn part of the patent.
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I'm more worried about the follow use case:

Siri, did you enjoy the film?
Yes, Sam, very much
How many stars out of five would you give it?
Four.
Thank you, Siri. Would you like to go to dinner?
No thank you. Would you like to play a game?
1. Genetic manipulation by Monsanto has relied on herbicides/pesticides and monocultures. This comes with averse effects and risks. The use of herbicides/pesticides must be reduced. We need pollinators, we need genetic diversity and biodiversity. We must look ahead more than 25 or so years. When it comes to soil fertility and contamination we should be looking ahead 100 years.

2. Is it possible for a group to select and breed their seeds over years, and eventually having a breed that is similar to a patented Monsanto seed?

3. It very well may not be on the most hated.
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> These are slow as molasses

Not really, with stuff like Python, your bottleneck is most likely going to be I/O and data reading/writing.

> You can replace Ruby here with Python, Django or Groovy and it is still correct.

Nope, with Python, unless you're using Django, most of your stuff is done with Python - there are frameworks like Flask but they provide a minimal set of tools to work with web concepts like routing and sessions.

CPU won't be the bottleneck until storage is as fast as CPUs. SSDs close the gap a tiny bit, but nowhere near enough.
> AFAIK, there's never been a horizontal gene transfer from a prokaryote/eukaryote/any other kingdom to a mammal or animal.

contradicts

> The last time may be when we got mitocondria.

Also, we seem to have quite a bit of bacterial and virus DNA that somehow got incorporated.

Oh, and it's mitochondria.
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I tried entering "Mountain View, CA" into the text field in the upper left, and hit Enter, and nothing happened. I tried this in Safari, Chrome, Firefox.

Seems broken to me. Am I doing it wrong?
The herbicide isn't what's interesting or valuable.
Been burned legally a time or two - it's CYA language in case of blatant abuse. Our plans are for individual artists, it would be against terms, for 100 artists to get together, pay for one plan and load 10,000 works and use our newsletter module to send millions of emails.
These laws certainly will not help e-commerce shops, sales will decrease (or more likely continue to increase across the industry but not at such a rapid rate) because the e-comms will now be on a level playing field with brick and mortars.

All of this being said, the biggest problem will be simplicity. If there is not a service to easily distill all of these rules and plug into the bulk of shopping experiences (magento, atg, ep, shopify, etc) this will very much hurt small, up&coming e-comms.

I'd imagine there is very good opportunity for a company to create an API of all of this tax information and monetize it.
(I'm talking without any real analytics here; hopefully you took them into consideration. Also, I'm not comparing the cli or the GitHub for Mac app. And one more thing: I wasn't there when this app was a blank slate and I'm not trying to beat you up on the UX, but it's time to count clicks and reassess what needs to really be there.)

I think you're talking about the visual design and layout of the page. That's a different ball of wax from the overall UX and doesn't carry equal weight, so white space is not so much a concern of mine as I don't fixate on pixel spacing enough to throw a fit about it. The design and the layout have always evoked an immediate mental map based on the three or four everyday functions that I need in order to complete my tasks on the page, and I'm usually competent enough to complete my actions and end my interaction on the main project page in short order. The basics are there, which is a good thing, and the visual design itself is competent.

What bothers me is the multitude of mostly unrelated navigation systems that are dispersed about the page with what appears to be a need to display all, along with repetitive links strewn about. It suggests an underlying logic that if an entity exists, it must be displayed. And displayed it all is in a very unorganized fashion.

I would suggest trimming the fat and displaying only what the user needs in order to complete their tasks and establishing a clear hierarchical visual representation of global, project and in-page navigation and actions. There are currently five different types of visual displays for navigation in the top third of the main project pages alone: semi tabs, text links, breadcrumbs, full tab buttons, folder tabs. The footers are equally disparate. Not all of the seven nav menus need to be displayed in their entirety nor do they all carry the same weight or deserve their own section of the page. That really needs to be looked at and simplified before it grows even further.

The action buttons are all in a similar recognizable visual format, but they too are also dispersed about the page without any obvious relation to the content or navigation menus around them. For someone who's been using the app for a couple of years, accumulated knowledge would overcome any new layout changes (stop playing with the button placement, please) but to a new user, you're basically throwing the kitchen sink at them and hoping that it all makes sense. It's easy to transition a seasoned developer to Git, but Github is another story.

Again, mine was not a critique of the visual design, but an honest assessment of where the [creeping] overall UX is. Out of simplicity I didn't delve into any of the project subsections or other sections of the website, but my immediate thoughts are to migrate into simplicity and uniformity.
Thank you for your answer - it does sound like you've tried hard to overcome the issues and I'm sorry I've not yet tried your app.

How does this work if I have my phone set to turn off after x mins of activity and/or screen lock?
Thank you. I totally agree.

I rarely comment on HN but actually logged in just for this.
> You're justifying code that doesn't work on the grounds that it was quick to write.

No, the code works fine for an acceptable period of time, it doesn't just not work.
"Conversational?" Conversational like the automaton I get when I phone my bank? It looks to me that the system is a canned response / limited expected response / state machine that every motherfucker on earth can do. If you want to do marketing bullshit, HN is probably not the best place to do it.

We're actually surprised that people are picking up that we're optimized for texting while driving

You are? You are surprised that people are picking up on your core selling point? Why? Did you not feed this to them?

We're actually surprised that people are picking up that we're optimized for texting while driving and that Siri is a personal assistant

Oh, I see. "Gosh, we're surprised that <some really obvious thing> while <some other thing that we wish to be perceived as true but isnt>".

It would be great for you if the press would frame the discussion as "sonalight is for texting while driving while siri is a personal assistant", because it then sounds like siri doesn't totally wipe the floor with you when it comes to texting while driving. If only saying such tripe online would make it true - but maybe HN isn't the place to try it.
> If you invented a new kind of seed which was significantly more productive but cost billions in R&D to develop, what business model would you use instead?

If the new crop is more expensive because of IP regulations, it is NOT an improvement.

There's just no way to reconcile feeding the poor with making massive profits on patents.

It's also misleading to focus on the crop itself; soil management is a far bigger issue. If your crop produces more, it means it depletes the soil more. Topsoil depletion is a huge issue wherever there is intensive modern farming.

The goal with patents is to control the food supply, not increase it.
What you said is increasingly true in the US too, from what I have seen.
Out of interest, what's a B&M retailer?
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This is quite comforting :)
B&M = Brick & Mortar, a reference to their physical stores.
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I didn't even realize I was doing it until you mentioned it.
As a Peer Career Advisor at the career center (and tech intern this summer in NYC), I can absolutely attest to the fact that the career center is all about helping students achieve whatever their goals are. The fact that finance and consulting are so much more prominent means more students come in asking for help with consulting and finance, but I'm sure we'll be working to encourage people to take a closer look at tech. There are so many opportunities for bright non-programmers, especially designers, that everyone needs to be aware of.
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I've been running the developer betas since about Beta 5 and it's been fine, update away.
Uh... Wrong-headed as that notion is, it's also talking way past me. How do you see it as relevant to what I said?
If you do sell-out, do it quietly.

But seriously, this is a fairly well laid out argument. The buck has to stop somewhere and it may as well be here.
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Oh, that's a pretty silly comment then, it's where their store is. Given that people have to supply a card and/or delivery address when buying it's not going to be a massive pain for online retailers.
> The herbicide isn't what's interesting or valuable.

Headpalm.

You DO realize that the point of the gene is to SELL ROUNDUP, right? Not using RoundUp on "RoundUp Ready!" crops kind of defeats the entire purpose.

"Sales for Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides peaked at about $4 billion in 2008 when the product line generated record gross profit of nearly $2 billion.

Roundup-branded glyphosate, commercialized by Monsanto in 1976, is one of the few blockbuster molecules developed by industry since the early 1970s. Methyl-tert butyl ether (MTBE), invented by Arco Chemical in the 1960s and commercialized in 1979, is the only other molecule developed by industry since the 1970s to generate sales of more than $1 billion/year."

http://www.chemweek.com/chem_ideas/Rob-Westervelt/Blog-Monsa...
Yes, please use the interface. Again, you're describing solutions that already exist.

This version of the navigation has the least amount of chrome out of any of them, less buttons, less navigation all around.
If you're interested in putting together stuff on campus and working in NYC this summer, please talk to me! - Ben Doernberg '13 bdoernberg@wes
I mean a upfront cost, and then some monthly hosting fee maybe. Might be a while for hardware to be that cheap.
This is exactly what I want. :)

I was just remarking the other day about how much I am hoping Siri comes with a Joshua voice.