acwan93

Yep, I mistyped. Amazon MWS doesn't have a staging/sandbox environment that's available for third party developers to test on.

Same here in e-commerce. We end up testing in production environments with an element somewhere that's in a development environment that can be tracked and actively watched. Amazon notoriously does not have a production environment, and eBay's is just unusable.

Since that class I've reached the conclusion that school is not the best way to learn concepts and materials but to learn how to work a bureaucratic organization to reach your own end goal (whether it's a job, ticket to the middle class, or simply knowledge), which in itself is a valuable skill. I think museums, seminars, and some NPR shows ended up being the best ways for me to really master the material I would've otherwise learned in school.

Interesting, I've never met or encountered someone from the Navajo Nation so that's good to know! I always wondered how it was resolved there.

I like A) simply because sometime during college I became a terrible test taker. I realized that I'm very good at projects and actually understanding the concepts, but I couldn't articulate that in the traditional exam or problem sets.

When it came time to anything that involved presentations or demonstration of a project, I was exceptionally better at the topic. Maybe it was a better way of learning since I was more engaged, or the types of professors that heavily believe cheating is going to happen any way and try to mitigate it actually give a damn.

Fun example about lazy teaching: Our undergrad's HKN chapter kept a test bank of past exams in Physics, CS, etc. When I was studying for my Physics final I went back to past midterms and realized the professor recycled questions from previous years with some numbers changed up. I ended up filling my entire cheat sheet with the questions that weren't already on midterms but were in the test bank.

The result? The final contained a majority of questions from that cheat sheet. I still pose this scenario to a couple friends nowadays asking if this would be considered cheating, and the responses are actually a mix of "no, you're just taking what's publicly available" and "yes, you're manipulating the system to get where you are and taking spots from someone with academic integrity".

Hard to say. Those in Arizona not in the Navajo nation wouldn't agree with you since they're still on MST.

I usually say "PT/MT/CT/ET" for those not in the list of stateside exceptions since it just removes ambiguity.

Maybe that's why places like SoulCycle, Barry's Bootcamp, or yoga studios have also sprung up. People do want connection, just not in the way it was before.

I've read that the decline of religion also plays a role here. Aside from the religious aspect, the sense of community and regularity you get meeting the same people on a regular basis is lost.

It's kind of the mix of a loss of "third place" (institutions, coffee shops, etc.) and the increase of social media bubbles that pushes us to be more polarized, I think.

Is this why some orgs have "sales engineers?" People who can pick up the nuances of a client's question whether a company can actually do feature X?

My dad always said it succinctly: software no one uses is a piece of shit. Build things that someone can immediately use.

Until an older relative uses that same group for something completely unrelated.

Serious question, and maybe this is just based on the people I've met: I've been hearing lots of business owners complaining about California's labor laws getting increasingly hostile which leads companies to relocate or move as many resources they can outside of CA, much like Tesla did. Does anyone else share that sentiment?

I personally think that this is well-intentioned but has consequences that need to be thought out before it becomes law.

Does this mean Anchorage's airport is going to get increased traffic again? I'd imagine planes today have the range to not need a stopover compared to the Cold War era.

There’s a CRM of some sort that sends emails I’ve received that even mentions a nearby restaurant or point of interest in its emails. It’s trying so hard to be personal it’s laughable.

Doesn't this work like Harvard/Yale/Princeton/etc admissions, where if they selected a completely different set of applicants everyone there would just as likely be qualified and deserving of attending?

I swear sometimes it might just be easier or even fairer to throw all resumes/applications in the air and see which ones land inside of a predetermined circle.

I've seen this kind of position in a lot of startups/tech companies ("Growth Manager", whatever that means). To me, it sounds like a product marketing position.

I don't think EDI itself is too complex or anything--after working with several REST/SOAP servers, EDI is just another standard you have to account for. Parsing 850s or generating 810s is just the name of the game.

What makes it super complicated and frankly pisses me off are the "exclusive" deals retailers have. Want to work with Target? Too bad, you have to work with CommerceHub. Macy's? Nope, gotta use SPS Commerce. This is why I like Shopify or even Amazon Vendor Central, which uses EDI. Wayfair was fortunately open to the idea of anyone linking to their EDI servers so long as there's a proper onboarding process.

My company, which is an ERP for wholesalers, doesn't have a way to directly work with the retailer. It always has to go through one of these middleware companies.

I think it's a mix of language and company structure. We are a bilingual company where people speak a mix of Mandarin and English, and sometimes it's just too much of a pain to communicate to someone in English in text when you've been primarily speaking to them in Mandarin. That and a lot of technical terms are in English, so that also adds a layer of complexity in remote work when trying to mix English and Chinese.

Our company also is on the older side (in longevity), even though we're a small business the company has a lot of systems in place that's not equipped for remote work. I'm really trying to change this since I firmly believe hybrid seems to be the way to go moving forward.

I'll give you an anecdote for my company (we're a software firm with developers, support staff, and sales reps):

We offered hybrid and remote options to all of our employees once lockdowns ended. All of them (except for one) wanted to come back full-time, with some notable exceptions for hybrid. Some employees have kids so they went hybrid, but once schools reopened they all went back full-time in the office. The lone person was extremely freaked out about COVID and still wants to do full-remote, and he's now working hybrid where when he's in the office he's in an isolated room away from us.

All of them disliked the lack of communication while remote. We implemented Teams, had our daily/weekly standups over video chat, and talked a lot using remote tools. But that significantly slowed things down and it was hard to figure out what people were doing.

Remote does have a place, but I think hybrid is the way to go.

I think up until recently I had a different mentality than what you're describing, where pay was second, but the type of work was more important. I always assumed that so long as I was satisfied with the projects, coworkers, and company/organization was something I could stand behind, pay and compensation would follow.

As I got older and more "adult" responsibilities started coming (mortgage, family planning), economic security became much more of a priority. More conventional things I learned about employee retention and organizational behavior started to make more sense where pay and time off were huge motivational factors. It's okay to be motivated by money.

I demanded a minimum compensation amount to a recruiter once at a FAANG company, something really outrageous even for FAANG. They ended up giving me non-answers saying that I still needed to interview and determine what my SWE level was going to be before they talk about compensation.

I stopped the conversation right there. That was a massive waste of time.

We moved our company's support call system to Microsoft Teams when lockdowns were happening, and even that was affected by the AWS outage (along with our SaaS product hosted on AWS).

It turned out our call center supplier had something running on AWS, and it took out our entire phone system. After this situation settles, I'm tempted to ask my supplier to see what they're doing to get around this in the future, but I doubt even they knew that AWS was used further downstream.

AWS operates a lot like Amazon.com, the marketplace now--you can try to escape it, but it's near impossible. If you want to ban usage of Amazon's services, you're going to find some service (AWS) or even a Shopify site (FBA warehouse) who uses it.

Don't file formats like .FIT or .GPX handle this case? I had this problem when migrating nearly 10 years of running data from Nike Running --> Strava. It wasn't perfect but eventually I got "good enough" data after weeks of wrestling with unknown aggregators who either scraped sites or used an unofficial API. Apple Health is the closest thing I've seen where there's somewhat of an open standard despite the walled garden in Apple's ecosystem.

Without some overarching body, like a government regulator, I'm not optimistic there will be widespread adoption of interoperability.

Wasn't there news about how as a virus mutates over time it becomes less severe, but more transmissible? Something about where the virus just wants its host to live long enough to transmit the virus to someone else so it can continue passing its genetic data over. It seems like Omicron could be following this pattern.

If you have too severe of a virus, then all its hosts are killed and it can't live on. Too weak of a virus and the host's immune systems will kill it before it has a chance to transmit.

By select handsets, I assume any big name handset, e.g. iPhone, Pixel, Galaxy, would be allowed, but a no-name handset wouldn't be allowed?

Isn't this similar to the pre-iPhone days, when if you brought an overseas GSM phone you had to go through some hoops to get it activated with Cingular/T-Mobile? I remember getting handsets from China and Europe and the reseller would have to circumvent something to get it activated on the networks.

It seemed strange that T-Mobile would have a CDMA network, until you remembered that it came from Sprint.

This seems like good news. I'm glad that starting with LTE all the carriers started agreeing on a single platform with SIM cards. Even though there are little nuances between each carrier, the fact that you can buy a single phone and have it work with the four (three now) major carriers is a big deal.

The reason was that the GOP was allegedly looking for an excuse to close the borders and further their anti-immigration agenda, and used the pandemic as an excuse.

"The president’s chief adviser on immigration, Stephen Miller, had long tried to halt migration based on public health, without success. Then came the coronavirus."[1]

"The idea that immigrants carry infections into the country echoes a racist notion with a long history in the United States that associates minorities with disease."[1]

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/03/us/coronavirus-immigratio...

Much like plumbers where clients don't understand the issue and yell at you for "excessive billing" or asking for discounts.

I remember visiting a port in Cartagena (Colombia) well before the pandemic where they gave us a presentation highlighting that due to the inefficiencies of American ports, ports nearby the Panama Canal can do business simply by transporting containers from Panamax ships to smaller ships simply because American ports can't process as many containers. The presenter seemed proud that Cartagena was able to unload and reload more ships as Miami or LA/Long Beach in a given day.

The reason they said was due to automation and "forward looking technologies", and said that American ports were riddled with unions and refusals to automate. It seems like this has been a long time coming.