AitchEmArsey

> What is the "cultish LP dance" here that is weeding good people out?

The "culture fit" interview process focuses on leadership principles, so lots of questions like " tell me about a time when you went above and beyond for a customer". Being yourself will get you nowhere, you need to research the questions and the script that is expected of you.

> What service does your team work on?

I'm a partner-focused SA, so not a developer and not aligned to a particular service.

From within AWS, it just feels like we push people too hard. Service teams are too small relative to their goals, sales teams have unrealistic growth targets and also double as support for needy/incompetent customers, and professional services have billable hour requirements which are as high as any major consultancy and with additional pre-sales support expectations.

Strict adherence to the "hiring bar" means we fail to bring in good people who aren't desperate enough to act out the cultish LP dance during their interview. Hiring new grads seems to be the only area where growth is not stalling - but that can obviously only help so much.

My team is hiring for 2-3 people and we are being buried alive without that growth happening sooner - but I can't in good conscience recommend this place to anyone I respect or like.

> proper oracle soliton

I know this was a typo, but the idea of Oracle upselling someone on a quantum field theory based solution to a string matching problem amuses me greatly.

I'd say if those people are not being utilized to improve the product, then yes it is a waste - who is to blame for the waste is a different matter, but management is the obvious place to look.

I cancelled my subscription last week precisely because of the poor UX.

It really pisses me off that they charge what feels like a disproportionate amount (certainly more than I've ever spent on music elsewhere), offer a very simple service only passably well, then waste their revenue on SV dev salaries (with no obvious benefit to the users in features or stability) - and of course their illustrious podcast hosts.

It is a sign of the trying times we live in that I saw the extra "z"s in your post and instead of assuming a typo, I immediately think of Russian hackers infiltrating this platform.

If you haven't read it already, I'd suggest checking out "Superforecasting" by Tetlock and Gardner.

The "Good Judgement" project by Tetlock is likely to be of interest: https://www.gjopen.com/

That concept has fallen out of favour in HPC, but it'll be interesting to see if it makes a comeback.

As recently as 2016, an SGI UV3000 rack-scale SMP machine with 16TB of RAM was the sort of thing you'd see on a trade-show floor - now you can get that much memory in a 4U chassis, and things will only improve further if/when Optane DIMMs take off.

I understand how it works; I'm trying to find a "vote with your feet" solution as an alternative to screwing over poorly paid employees by not tipping. The most obvious way to do that is to favour restaurants where tipping is discouraged.

When I saw "tipping in advance" I thought of Starbucks, though I'm not sure how much that is opportunism and how much it is now an expectation just like a restaurant.

You can't say "you went into an establishment with cheaper prices and knew this was a requirement" when there is no actual choice - it applies everywhere as far as I've seen; it's not like I can pause my business trip to the US and go to another country for lunch.

in that vein, is there a list somewhere of American eateries which pay non-poverty wages and therefore adopt tipping practices which are less morally reprehensible to us foreigners? I'd happily go out of my way when in the US to avoid this particular cultural norm.

What you are describing is "mindfulness" exercises; basically a modern take on meditation.

I have the app "Meditation Studio" which consists of some softly-spoken people talking you through breathing exercises and relaxation - would recommend for anyone wanting to try these techniques.

Nuking someone is a definitive, MAD-triggering event. Causing a radiological disaster "accidentally" would be entirely consistent with the "stop hitting yourself" diplomacy Russia has undertaken since moving against Ukraine in 2014.

I remember meeting a senior AMD engineer a few years ago who deflatedly said people there were happy as long as the stock was above $12. Bet he's a bit cheerier today!

Agreed. I never really got hooked on Docker itself, but Swarm is well-scoped and easy to use without sacrificing too much; I'd argue the vast majority of k8s users would be better off with something simpler, and Swarm fits the bill nicely. Maybe Nomad does too, but IMO Hashicorp do a really bad job of documenting the progression from a localhost test to a production setup; the docs for each of their tools can be summarised as "draw the rest of the fucking owl".

I already use Obsidian (paid version as I want to use it for work too, and to support the project). My interest in trying an alternative is mostly just curiosity.

Looks great - so much so that I assumed it would be for Apple devices only, so congratulations and thanks for the Linux support.

I'll try it in a bake-off with Obsidian, but the main down-side for me is "notes stored on our servers" - I'd happily sacrifice the collaboration features for a self-hosted option with my data kept as regular text files as much as possible.

> BTW, are there out there any on premises multi-user HPC clusters with Docker running on the nodes?

The vendor ClusterVision (EMEA, went bankrupt then returned to life) used to offer a cluster deployment option based on OpenStack+Docker; OpenStack for defining the cluster boundary on top of your hardware then Docker serving as the "image" on each compute node layered on top of the regular OS. Not at all a typical use-case for HPC containers, and with hindsight it is fairly obvious how that Byzantine stack resulted in too much complexity for them to support cost-effectively.

Your two positions are really not far apart from a third party perspective, but throwing in claims like "unnecessarily divisive and seeking for flame war" just seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I subscribe to the Economist too and perceive their reporting as still being reasonably libertarian without venturing into tinfoil-hat territory, but being in the UK I guess I get both a different balance of articles and also have a different perception of libertarianism.

(Saving the article to read later)

My first thought on seeing the title: my experience is that this is a causal loop; the key is not to focus on how good/happy people are at their peak, but how to reverse a downward spiral where decreasing performance and unhappiness are driving each other.

They probably can't, which is why I'm pessimistic about the idea being viable - unless there is some way for the application to be open-source and quasi-federated; for example with people/companies/communities hosting their own nodes - like Mastodon but with some kind of auto-discovery for regular users to make it approachable.

I'd pay $5-ish per month for social media if it came with no ads or data harvesting - just a more privately scoped version of Facebook with some of the useful bits like event scheduling and discussion groups. Of course the problem is getting non-technical people to value their attention and privacy at more than $5/month in order to catalyse the network effects.

Competition between profitable businesses is one thing, loss-making startups paying 6-figure salaries for shitty tools is quite different - particularly when the latter company ends up with a billion-dollar valuation for reasons totally divorced from actual worth.

> "I don't know why we're doing this, it's going to cost a lot of money and make things worse."

I'm a step outside the domain so not totally confident in my own cynicism, but I feel like this phrase could be applied to practically every B2B startup I hear about these days. Selling CRM, project management and time tracking tools to (mostly) other VC-funded companies is just a way to skim more cream out of the economy without adding any true value.

I try not to judge individuals for working in these places; working at AWS I'm hardly in a position to throw stones. Increasingly though I am dismayed by the lack of real, society-enhancing jobs available to highly skilled tech workers in the sea of mediocrity and rent-seeking.

The closed nature of MacOS and Windows means that you have no guarantees (and no audit mechanism) to determine how much the machine is passing your data back to HQ. As the post very clearly states, most people don't need to care - but someone with extreme paranoia has only one obvious choice here.

Your aggressive negativity is far less interesting than this blog, and serves no purpose whatsoever.

Literally never seen instructions directing me to use an .env file; seems like a pretty weak straw-man to enable shilling yet another "startup serving other startups" unicorn wannabe.

No neck issues, but lower back and core muscles are a problem, simply from too much sitting.

Physio sessions gave me some tips for how to relieve the pain when it flares up, and going to the gym for the last couple of months seems to have helped a lot.

Can't say I recommend a standing desk - I have an adjustable motorised one and while I do use it sometimes, it seems to just shift pain from my back to my legs rather than giving any actual relief.

Evidently "free" has other costs, like "we're going to delete your stuff and there's nothing you can do about it".

So on balance I'd say paying for something is a pretty good deal.

This is an article about how to write theoretically better code (from a CS perspective) for a scientific use-case - but that is not the same thing as "better scientific code". For most purposes, the effort a scientist will go to in understanding how classes work (as an example) will outweigh any benefit they might see from using them.

One of the nice things about Python is that the programming style arrived at here is totally unnecessary - a point which was soundly missed by the author.