bitbuilder

The Azure service game is indeed incredible. Every experience I've had with them has been excellent.

A client once requested we file a support ticket with Azure to help deal with a performance issue my team was working through. It wasn't really all that urgent, but the client requested we use the highest urgency level anyway. So I filed our ticket.

In less than a minute I felt like my phone was being blown up by every engineer at Microsoft. And the messages they left made it clear that the fate of humanity hinged on resolving our issue within the next five minutes.

On top of that, the depth and intelligence of the support was downright humbling to this fellow engineer.

(At the end of the day, it turns out we'd screwed up and left debug logging on.)

I'd add to that, team dynamics can't be discounted. Feeling part of a team is good for morale, and in turn productivity.

People tend to produce better work, on a faster timeline, when the respect of their teammates is on the line.

Also, with any given team and codebase, team members will tend to carve out unofficial roles that best fit their abilities. This of course increases the net productivity of the team.

>With isolation becoming a major issue during the pandemic, I'm not surprised people want to hire someone with these skills to just listen to their ideas and stories.

I think you make a great point, but at the same time it feels like you're also describing conventional talk therapy. And if you have good insurance, it's free. If you don't, it still doesn't break the bank.

I frequently joke with my friends that I'm only paying for a therapist to have someone to vent to. I pay them, and they listen my bullshit without judging me. (There's more to it than that of course, but it's a lighthearted way to suggest therapy to someone you feel could benefit.)

I've even found myself rambling about side project ideas with my therapist, which was surprisingly helpful when they pushed back against the inevitable "but it's a stupid idea of course, so I probably wont do anything with it."

I can't find it anywhere anymore, even on their site. They must have realized they weren't reading the room well with the ad and modeling.

But I did screenshot it previously: https://imgur.com/gallery/bxcK7zb

If that's the look of the HN demographic, I'm even more out of touch than I thought I was.

As another anecdote, I've had the same ad targeting for this last week or so. (Which is really unfortunate timing.) At some point I must've clicked on the wrong article while seeing what the "other side" was up to. And now my feed is full of tacticool insurrectionist chic.

The most disconcerting to me was an ad showcasing a "tactical hooded trench coat"[0], with the model holding an AK in the FB ad. I mean, nobody is going hunting, or defending their home, with their tactical hooded trench coat. Seemed pretty squarely targeted at the aspiring insurrectionist crowd.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for letting people buy whatever strange clothes they want. If I have any point here it's that maybe FB doesn't get to claim the moral high ground when they're pushing ads using AKs as props, targeted at the crowd that stormed the capital (also, they need to fix their algorithm if they're pushing them to me).

[0]https://imgur.com/gallery/bxcK7zb

I'm sure a lot of us can relate.

One of my best memories from my career: I was sitting at my desk at 8pm "working" because I had "so much to do". When in reality I was just dreading going home. A coworker that I barely new dropped by my desk and said "Things aren't going well at home, are they? Me either." We proceeded to head across the street to a bar to share stories. It helped immensely at that time.

I make an effort to pay it forward. If you see someone in the office at all hours, especially when wfh is an option, odds are good things aren't going great for them. Even just a simple "How are things going with you?" over the water cooler can go a long ways.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually a combination of a new feature being recently rolled out, along with the sudden spike in load this morning.

The holidays are actually the perfect time for Slack to roll out a risky deployment, as it has to be their lowest usage time. So it would make sense if something was pushed out last week or the week before. And everything probably seemed fine.

And then this morning they suddenly realize this new feature does not perform under load. And to make matters worse, the new feature has been out long enough to make any sort of rollback very tricky, if not impossible. Which means they'd need engineers to desperately hack out, test and deploy a code fix.

If this is the scenario, I do not envy them at all.

I can't believe this is a thing. I recently switched back to Windows after deciding I wanted to play around with VR development (and honestly, get back into gaming) and was horrified to see a notice telling me my computer was going to reboot itself in one minute, with no way to abort.

I was right in the middle of something, and my first instinct was to Google how to stop the damn reboot. Of course, my computer was already rebooting by then.

I now know to turn on the setting to postpone updates for a month. But wow, I can't believe such unbelievably hostile UX is the out of the box experience.

(Also, side note, I'm pleasantly surprised at how robust and hassle free the Windows experience has otherwise become. I may even prefer this laptop to my MacBook, which I never thought I'd find myself thinking in a million years.)

Thanks for sharing. You've described my own stutter and struggles perfectly.

Like you, I can tell I'm going to "block" on a word before I even say it. So it's less of what's thought of as a conventional stutter and more just a complete inability to say the word. It's a strange, almost scary, feeling to those who experience it. However, if I'm particularly excited about something, or don't care about the opinions of company I'm in, I occasionally "push through" the blocked word and it instead turns into a conventional drawn out stutter.

I also use similar coping methods, which as you note sometimes result in awkward situations. To give a hypothetical example, if I want to tell my coworker "I need to go home and let my dog out", I might notice as soon as I start talking that I'm going to block on "dog", so what results is something like "I need to go home and let my... [long pause as I try to think of a replacement word]... pet out." (Which of course leaves me feeling flustered, as I wonder what the my coworker thinks a dramatic pause before announcing I have a pet, and who says "pet" instead of "dog" anyway?)

This article was actually great, and does a good job of driving home that this is a physical disability relating to how our brains are wired, or our neurochemistry. Growing up in the 80s and seeing speech therapists about the issue, all the talk was around just "learning" not to stutter. Yes we can learn workarounds and coping methods, but at the end of the day it's still very much a biological issue, and it's obvious to those of us that experience it.

Reinforcing the idea that it's related to neurochemistry, I've noticed that any strong CNS stimulant (caffeine, etc) erases the stutter. And conversely, being in caffeine withdrawal (or just tired in general) amplifies it.

The good news is that I've found it's rarely interferes with my personal or professional life. It really only surfaces when I have my guard down 100% and I'm just engaging in casual conversation, while also tired or sleep deprived. When I put on my "work persona" for meetings, presentations, just general professional banter, it never surfaces. In those situations it's almost as if I'm talking through a manufactured persona, which would echo sentiments expressed elsewhere in this thread about the stutter disappearing when singing, speaking another language, etc.

On the other hand, I'm pretty confident the stutter is at the root of crippling social anxiety I experience in some situations.

>Lockdown with family in one’s dwelling isn’t prison.

You seem to be forgetting about the sizable percentage of the population that lives alone in their small dwelling. I know a lot of these people and my own anecdata indicates a lot of them are having mental health issues.

>Imprisonments is about much more than a loss of mobility.

Well sure, but I think it would be hard to argue that confinement and the resulting lack of mobility isn't the primary role of a prison.

And even in prison, we let prisoners eat with friends, play sports with friends, work with their friends, visit with family, etc. These are all things most of us felt we couldn't do during the height of lockdown.

And why do we allow prisoners to do all those things? Because we recognize that it's inhumane to deprive people of social interaction for extended periods of time.

To further reinforce this, what do we do when someone's in prison, and we want to punish them more? We decrease their mobility and increase their isolation by putting them in a small room by themselves.

Please note, I'm not arguing that lockdown was the wrong move, or that we shouldn't continue to consider various lockdown measures.

I am saying that we shouldn't be dismissive of concerns about the toll long term isolation is having on people's mental health. And that consideration of various lockdown measures should be taking into account these mental health concerns and weighing them against public health concerns.

True, hence my follow-up sentence on this point being mitigated in a world where we felt more free to work in alternative work spaces.

It's not like I don't get out to run, go to the park, or even occasionally meet a friend for a drink on a spacious patio. So my comment was somewhat hyperbole. But sharing the same space for work and sleep is still driving me a bit batty.

We all have different needs of course. I recognize I don't share the same needs as many. Hence I'd never advocate for a workplace that didn't accommodate those that did prefer to work remote.

>I don't understand this, why?

My sentiments are similar to OP's, and for me a large part of my job satisfaction was getting to hang out with really incredible people all day, getting lunch with those people, getting afterwork drinks with them, etc. Hanging out on video chat just isn't the same.

Of course, an argument can (and maybe should) be made that it's smarter to to keep your work focused on the work, and find your social outlets elsewhere. However, the unfortunate reality is that for those of us far removed from school and our home towns, work is where we tend to make our friends.

On top of that, I just enjoyed the change of scenery in leaving my apartment in the burbs to go into a nice office space in the city. Feeling restricted to the same space for 24 hours a day is driving an unhealthy level of cabin fever and boredom. For the first time in my life, I envy those with the big house and a yard.

Of course that later point would be somewhat mitigated in a world where I could work out of shared space or the local coffee shop, so I'm not sure if that's an indictment of remote work in general for my purposes.

My apologies, you are correct. I took some things for granted in terms of why I made the comparison, and on further reflection it probably isn't a fair comparison.

For example, I took it for granted that when I said there were 1500 retail locations that readers would realize that meant probably close to 10,000 out of the 13,000 were just dedicated to running those retail locations (that's going by back of the envelope math, as well as hazy memories of actual numbers).

Add to that probably another 1000 for the warehouses and associated logistics, and you're looking at a pool of maybe 2000 actual knowledge workers split among all of the functions listed above (sales, marketing, support, legal, real estate, merchandising, development, IT, etc, etc).

I also made perhaps an invalid assumption that the software being written to manage and optimize the: 1) design of a product 2) sending it off to China for manufacture 3) shipping it back to the states 4) storing it in a warehouse 5) letting it be found, ordered and paid for online by anyone in the world 6) and finally shipped to the end consumer.... is all somehow more complicated than the development being done by LinkedIn, and being done by only a couple hundred dev and infrastructure people.

In my mind, that felt like evidence LinkedIn might be bloated. But as others have pointed out, I'm sure there are dev challenges I'm taking for granted. And of course you need a healthy headcount to deal with the legal, support and sales operations of a company with the international footprint of LinkedIn.

>This question comes up on every post about a big tech company.

And in turn, there are always replies that justify these head counts in ways that I still have a hard time buying into.

All I have to go off is on my own experience, but I worked at a large retailer/wholesaler that had:

  - 1500 retail store locations.
  - Probably a half dozen warehouses. 
  - A couple high volume ecommerce sites (not at LinkedIn scale, but scale was a concern).

To support those operations, they employed people for:

  - Staffing the retail stores and warehouses.
  - Call centers for customer support.
  - Sales for the wholesale division.
  - Advertising/marketing for the retail division, all run internally.
  - Logistics/shipping.
  - Real estate.
  - Merchandising.
  - Inventory management.
  - Product design.
  - Sourcing product manufacture.
  - All of the boilerplate corporate crap (HR, recruiting, accounting, etc.)

Almost all of the above had software to support it that was written and maintained in-house, including a custom built ecommerce stack.

All of the above took roughly the same headcount LinkedIn now has. The technology team writing and running all that custom software was maybe 200-300 people.

So even after I hear all the reasons LinkedIn has to be so huge (sales, support, scale, etc), I'm still left scratching my head.

That's a fair point, and definitely something to keep in mind. Thank you for highlighting that.

I know you're not debating NC, but looking again at the state, it was mostly the last few weeks that looked flat. If you compare to the peak in positivity 42 days ago, they've gone from 16% positive to to 7% positive, using rolling 7 day averages. So, if I were in NC I wouldn't be overly concerned.

Because we're talking relatively small numbers. It's easy to create large movements in small numbers.

If one person in my town is murdered this year, and 2 are murdered next year, that's a 100% year over year increase in the homicide rate. But it's obviously a meaningless increase.

2.2 out of a million is a small number. More people in NC are dying every day from cancer or heart disease.

>Is there a dashboard which shows increase in testing capacity over that same period

Here's the best resource Ive found for comparing all the relevant data:

http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/

Playing around with the data there, it looks like yes NC has had an increase in cases recently, but it tracks an increase in testing. Test positivity rates are about flat. It really is completely pointless to discuss increases in cases without also comparing to increases in testing and positivity rates.

Deaths are up, but as another poster pointed out it's hardly statistically significant. The rolling 7 day average is 2.2/1m now, vs 1.7/1m on May 1st.

I spent from around 2008 to to 2019 carrying a decent camera with me almost everywhere I went. I loved taking photos, and I wanted to make sure I was capturing them in the best format I could.

I also only shared on social media photos that were taken with my DSLR or whatever I was carrying at the time. I received a ton of positive feedback on the quality of the photos, with everyone commenting on the fact I must have a nice camera, asking what camera I used, etc.

Last year, after playing around with an iPhone 10, I made a conscious decision to leave my camera at home for most occasions, and do the best I could with just my phone. The quality was such that I didn't feel I was losing out on much by not using a fancy camera.

Since then 99% of what I post on social media has been shot with my iPhone. And yet, I still, constantly, have people telling me "you must have a nice camera, what kind is it?" They sometimes refuse to believe me when I say it was my phone.

There's no real secret to it, I don't think. I spend a lot of time considering framing, perspective, lighting. I also still post-process in Lightroom (on my phone) most photos I post. Just simple things like some straightening/cropping, maybe bumping the contrast and clarity a bit.

I've come to believe there are really only two things you need a nice camera (or more accurately, lenses) for: 1) nice background separation with a shallow DOF. The iPhone portrait mode is still pretty mediocre, and finicky to use. And 2) the changes in perspective different focal lengths can give you. Compression with a telephoto can give some really nice effects, and you can't beat the wide open sweep of a wide angle.

The fact my iPhone now has 14mm, 26mm, and 52mm focal lengths makes that last point even more irrelevant. And it's so awesome I can quickly toggle through them, rather than swapping lenses or carrying a heavy zoom lens.

Of course phone camera sensors haven't caught up yet with "real" cameras. If you're doing serious night shooting a big sensor still can't be beat. But frankly I'm amazed at just how well my phone does do in low light (just don't pixel peep on a large screen).

I'd be really interested in how they plan to implement this. I'd certainly hope it would be more sophisticated than a linear adjustment of salary based on differences in the cost of living.

I live and work out of St. Louis at the moment, and I've spent a bit of time evaluating FAANG salaries in relation to the cost of living in their relevant areas. While in most cases it seemed I could maybe get 1.5x to 2x my St. Louis salary, I was looking at around a 5x increase in housing costs alone. It never made any sort of financial sense to make the move (as much as I would've liked to).

Of course the most sensible approach would be to offer just above market rate in whatever the local market is. That can be awfully hard to determine though. It's much more a function of local supply and demand than anything that correlates to cost of living.

Thank you for articulating this so well. This is indeed how I'm beginning to see the divides shape up, and I tend to include myself in the 3rd group as well.

Source for Nebraska turning into a hotspot?

Looking at all the trackers I have bookmarked I'm not seeing much of an indication of this. Yes, confirmed cases seem to be up in the last week, but that seems to track with increased testing (a good thing). The rate of positives is showing a decline over the same time period.

More indicative of an outbreak would be increased hospitalizations or deaths. Hospital bed usage has been at the same level since mid April, and deaths have been at a steady 1 to 3 per day since the end of April.

Sources:

https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/en/test?state=NE

https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/nebr...

https://infection2020.com/#

Very true.

As I was telling a friend of mine, it feels like a collective case of "misery loves company". Any indication on my social media that someone is stepping out their front door to be proactive about their mental health is met with an unfortunate amount of derision and shaming.

And the political aspect to this can be just as depressing. It seems a nuanced conversation on the benefits of reopening is impossible with my friends on the left side of the political spectrum (which is most of them, and includes myself). I have incredibly smart friends on the left, and I'd love to hear a point of view from them that I didn't feel was being driven from an "us vs them" mindset.

It's really unfortunate that advocating for reopening has been cast as the position of the looney right in the national discourse. When to reopen could be the most important question we face in decades, and a reasoned, dispassionate discussion of the pros and cons sure would be wonderful.

I'm guessing they're confusing profit and margin. It wouldn't surprise me if margins were higher now, but I have a hard time believing overall profits are up, anywhere.

Especially when you consider a lot of restaurants make a good chunk of their profit on alcohol sales. While many are offering alcohol to go, I think most of us are picking it up from the corner store instead.

>3 deaths out of ~750 known cases

Actually it's 6 out of 705. [0][1] May seem like a small difference, but a 0.8% chance of dying is 8x more than the flu.

Never mind the fact that the data out of China, Italy, Japan and Iran is all trending around the 2-3% CFR calculated and published in multiple peer reviewed journals. [2][3]

(However, South Korea might be reason for hope.)

>or been very old

It bothers me immensely when people mention it's "just old people". I'm not sure why I should "chill" about my parents having an 8% chance of dying if they contract this. [3]

[0] https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/02/the-latest-coronavirus...

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

[2] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762130

[3] http://weekly.chinacdc.cn/en/article/id/e53946e2-c6c4-41e9-9...

More annoying, to me, is how much of a struggle it is to determine the names of streets that a navigation route follows.

I'm the type that prefers to look at a map to see where I'm going, and it drives me absolutely insane to have to pan up and down my route just to try to determine the name of a street I need to turn down.

For other use cases, I can somewhat empathize with the complexity of determining what street names to show. And over-cluttering with street names wouldn't be much better. But for a navigation route, the logic should be dead simple: throw a street name within the viewport if that street is part of the route.

(Yes, I fully realize I can switch to step by step directions. Maybe it's because I'm more of a visual person, or maybe I'm just old and used to using maps for directions, but I just can't stand using that view to figure out where I need to go.)

Couldn't agree more, and I feel like I've spent half my career tilting at windmills trying to get other engineers to use less abstraction, instead of more.

I can't count the number of C#/Java projects I've walked into where it felt like I had to drill down through a dozen layers of abstraction just to find code that actually does something. Hundreds (thousands?) of files that contain nothing but autogenerated boilerplate crap.

Layers upon layers of boilerplate, "just in case we need to swap something out later!" No. I promise you, you won't. And if you do, I promise you things aren't as loosely coupled as you think they are. You're going to have to do a bunch of rewriting anyway.

Also, 9 times out of 10, by the time you realize some seemingly interchangeable piece of your architecture needs to be replaced, your team will be chomping at the bit to blow the whole thing up and rewrite from the ground up anyway.

In the meantime, having a simple codebase that people actually enjoy working in will make everyone's job so much easier. And fun.

You sound exactly like how I felt before seeing a doctor about my insomnia.

If you haven't already, I'd suggest just seeing a doctor, and asking for something that will help you sleep. I was given 50mg Trazodone, and I feel like it's saved my life. It's not a controlled substance, so doctors and nurse practitioners hand it out like candy.

Now I get 8 hours of sleep a night, and most of the research I've dug up indicates it doesn't mess with your sleep architecture. There were some nasty side effects my first few weeks, but they seem to have faded over time.

I spent months and months obsessively reading everything I could about how to improve my sleep. Tried it all. Tried every OTC supplement even rumored to improve sleep. Nothing helped. And the more time I spent stressing about it, the worse it got. By the time I saw a doctor I'd probably gone two weeks straight averaging 2-3 hours of sleep a night. I felt like a shell of a human being.

Just asking for a pill might seem like an unhealthy cop out to some, but the improvement in my quality of life since doing so has been immeasurable since doing do.

A therapist of course can't fix a mistake you made in the past.

However, they will most certainly help you change the way you think about that mistake. Which can be extremely helpful in moving past those mistakes and making the best of where you find yourself now in life.

I just recently started seeing a therapist, and this was a huge revelation to me. More specifically, helping me realize I was holding onto a lot of guilt over things where it made no sense to cling to that guilt. Learning to let go of that mental overhead has been extremely helpful.

I have plenty of people in my extended friend group who are in their mid to late 20s, and most of them are still quite active on FB.

Nobody thinks it's cool or fun anymore, of course. But it's still the go-to spot for sharing life events, family news, anything you want to brag about really. Or any vacation pictures that you'd like grandma and grandpa to see.

IG is still image driven, so it's not a platform you can easily use for relaying text based information to your social network.

If you read the announcement, this is already pretty tightly integrated into IG, assuming you link your IG account to your Facebook Dating profile.

Of course, that means you probably need to have a Facebook profile. And in that regard you have a valid point. Nowadays I'm pretty certain that most of the types of people I'd want to connect with have dropped their FB profile but still maintain an IG profile.

But I suspect we underestimate the number of people who are still quite active on FB and have maybe only heard of IG. The older, less tech savvy social media users out there still want to date too.