Hacker News Reader

evanjacobson Warren Buffett dumps $1.7B of Amazon stock

> There is little market share left for them to win

Despite controlling about 40% of US online retail, Amazon only has about an 8% share of total US retail. There’s still plenty of room to grow here.

https://www.emarketer.com/content/amazon-will-surpass-40-of-...

evanjacobson Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2022)

AWS S3 Insights | Software Development Engineers | Seattle | ONSITE or REMOTE (US only)

The mission of S3 Insights is to help customers understand what data they have and how their data is being used in order to recommend actions they can take on their data. As an engineer on the AWS S3 Insights team, you will write software to efficiently and accurately aggregate every event in S3, summarize and digest that data, and generate key insights for customers.

Here are a couple of the positions that I'm hiring for but please feel free to reach out to me (evan @ amazon . com) with any questions:

https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/2071571/software-development...

https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/2155848/senior-software-dev-...

NB: The positions above are for engineers with industry experience. If you're a recent college graduate, please go instead to Student Programs at: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/teams/university-tech-full-time

evanjacobson A few things to know before stealing my 914

My first car was also a 914 that the father of a friend of mine had sitting in his garage. The transmission was shot (no first gear) and the suspension had given out but I bought it anyway for $800 and put about $2000 into fixing it.

It was a really fun car to drive although it also shared many of the same quirks as mentioned in this story.

evanjacobson Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2019)

Amazon - Alexa for Everyone | Software Development Engineer | ONSITE (Seattle, WA) | Full Time

Alexa for Everyone is focused on making Alexa an indispensable part of the lives of people with disabilities, older customers, and family caregivers. We are a small team of engineers and product managers and we have an ambitious road map for the year.

We are looking for engineers who love to invent new experiences on behalf of customers and are willing to dive into any layer of the tech stack in order to deliver those experiences on a large scale.

Please take a look at two of our open positions listed below or reach out to me (I'm the Hiring Manager) directly at evan@amazon.com

Current open positions:

Sr. Software Development Engineer: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/696864/senior-software-devel...

Software Development Engineer: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/839068/software-development-...

evanjacobson Reflections on DOOM's Development

"I don’t recommend writing a press release at the start of your project, especially one like that."

So even though Doom was wildly successful and (according to Romero) was the most ambitious game development effort before or since, he doesn't advocate that others follow that path?

It's likely that the team worked so hard and achieved such success at least in part to the fact that they had a very clear goal for what they wanted to achieve and that they had publicly announced this goal.

Interestingly, writing a Press Release is the very first step of the "Working Backwards" product development process at Amazon and it is mandatory part of introducing any new product.

evanjacobson Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2017)

Alexa Smart Home | Software Development Engineers | Seattle | ONSITE

We're focused on making Alexa the UI for the home and we're looking for engineers who want to help us in this mission. This is a unique opportunity to be an early member of a team whose work will have a big impact on customers. In order to achieve this mission, you'll get to build a wide variety of applications and services using a range of technologies.

Here are just a couple of the positions that I'm hiring for but please feel free to reach out to me (evan @ amazon . com) with any questions:

https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/478440

https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/479984

P.S. If you're a recent college graduate, you can apply for those positions at: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/teams/university-tech-full-time

P.P.S. If you're looking for a summer internship, those positions are available at: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/teams/university-tech-internship

evanjacobson Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2017)

Alexa Smart Home | Software Development Engineer (all levels) | Seattle | ONSITE

Here are just a couple of the positions that I'm hiring for but please feel free to reach out to me (evan @ amazon . com) with any questions:

https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/478440

https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/479984

evanjacobson Twitter: It is too late for it to become the giant people expected

I would have liked to see Twitter become the product that Slack is now for many people: great direct message and group message capabilities, fun interface, great API for enabling bot integration, etc.

evanjacobson How to Write a Spelling Corrector

"why should they know about something so far outisde their specialty"

evanjacobson Tom Hanks on Typewriters

There will continue to be lots of examples of preserving the best of analog technology in the digital world.

One example is an app that I built that lets authors sign ebooks (Authorgraph: http://www.authorgraph.com). This idea was a result of doing more and more reading on my Kindle but missing the experience of meeting authors and having them sign my books.

evanjacobson The Green Book Map

This post reminded me of the upcoming book by Matt Ruff ("Sewer, Gas & Electric", "Set This House in Order", "Fool on the Hill") titled "Lovecraft Country".

From the description on the author's website:

"Chicago, 1954. When his father goes missing, twenty-two-year-old Army veteran Atticus Turner embarks on a road trip to New England to find him, accompanied by his uncle George—publisher of The Safe Negro Travel Guide—and his childhood friend Letitia. On their journey to the manor of Samuel Braithwhite—heir to the estate that owned one of Atticus’s ancestors—they encounter both the mundane terrors of white America and malevolent spirits that seem straight out of the weird tales George devours."

http://www.bymattruff.com/my-novels/lovecraft-country/

evanjacobson Two Girls, a Golden Balloon, and Fate

This reminds me of a story I heard as a kid while listening to a baseball game on the radio.

During a game one night, one of the non-starting pitchers was bored in the dugout and started doodling on the baseballs that would be periodically brought out to the umpire (to replace balls that are hit out of play or that are scuffed on the dirt). He happened to know that it was the home plate umpire's birthday that day and so on one ball he wrote "Happy Birthday Dave" (or whatever the umpire's name was). At one point, that ball was brought out to the umpire by the bat boy along with a few other balls and was put into play by the umpire who didn't notice the inscription.

The batter happened to hit that ball foul into the stands where it was caught by a guy named Dave who was also celebrating his birthday that day.

evanjacobson Amazon, in Threat to UPS, Tries Its Own Deliveries

Amazon did in fact try a drive-through facility in Bellevue, WA (a suburb of Seattle) a few years ago where customers could pick up previously ordered items.

http://downtownbellevue.com/2007/09/27/amazon-fresh-online-g...

evanjacobson E-Go: A sub-$1000 electric longboard

Yep, they mention that it is waterproof in one of the videos on the site. That probably means "splash proof" rather than "submersion proof" however.

evanjacobson Hacking the Olympics

Kathryn Bertine wrote a book and a series of articles for ESPN in which she tried to do something very similar. After trying several sports, she settled on cycling and gained citizenship of St. Kitts and Nevis.

More about her story at: http://espn.go.com/espnw/blogs/training/article/6177784/kath...

evanjacobson The anatomy of the perfect technical interview from a former Amazon VP

In my 10 years at Amazon, I interviewed lots of engineers and I think Amazon's interview process is fatally flawed. Of course Amazon is still able to hire good candidates but I believe it is in spite of this process and not because of it.

Here were the most frustrating aspects of interviewing for me:

1. Bar raisers don't ask questions that they themselves don't know the answer to. I believe this is what Roseman is referring to (as a desirable?!? attribute) when he says "One of the things that really pisses me off is people asking questions that they don’t even have a good handle on themselves". What happens in practice is that you miss hiring people who may not be able to answer a question to which every interviewer already knows the answer but whom might be uniquely qualified in some other area.

2. Interviewers still ask candidates to code answers to theoretical questions on the whiteboard. There is no room in the Amazon interview process to "try out" a candidate for a week or two in a real world setting to see how they perform.

3. Amazon considers all SDEs to be fungible but internal politics determines which group gets to interview a new candidate. Have an advanced degree and strong interest in machine learning? Too bad, US Retail needs someone to work on front-end development and they'll ask you lots of questions about javascript.

4. This isn't really part of the Amazon interview process but Amazon's job descriptions are (for the most part) written so generically and absent of personality that I think they miss out on lots of great candidates for whom startups simply seem more fun & interesting.

evanjacobson Obama to Offer Plan Meant to Ease Concerns on Surveillance

The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue.

NY Times Editorial Board 6/7/2013

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/opinion/president-obamas-d...

evanjacobson T-Shirt Printing API

"Are our shirts any good? No. Our shirts are fking great."

evanjacobson Ask HN: Product Recommendations from the HN Community?

I believe that this is the kind of open-ended question that Yabbly is designed to solve. http://www.yabbly.com

evanjacobson Tailgating YC

Wow! One of the best self-aware posts I've read in a long time. Looking forward to reading more and following the progress of Exversion (which sounds like an awesome idea, btw).

evanjacobson Heroku 2X Dynos in Public Beta

One point that I haven't seen raised yet is that a reduction in the # of dynos required to operate a service would provide the benefit of being able to run certain addons that are priced on a per dyno basis more cheaply (e.g. NewRelic).

evanjacobson Stop participating in hackathons just to win

I'm a big hackathon fan and participant and I can sympathize with the emotional high of "hey, we built something really cool" to the low of "the judges didn't just didn't understand what we've built". Most of the hackathons in which I've participated use a panel of judges from the VC or general "tech community" but whom aren't usually hackers themselves. I'd love to see an event where the judges know what it takes to produce something that works in a compressed timeframe and don't ask the inane questions like "how are you going to make money?" or "who are your competitors?"

I'm also bootstrapping my startup primarily for the same reasons. I don't particularly want or need validation from VCs, many of whom aren't hackers, to distract me from figuring out whether what I've built is of any value to my customers.

evanjacobson Amazon Acquires Social Reading Site Goodreads

This isn't a good analogy. IMDb was and is literally the best source of movie data anywhere. It is more useful to think of them as Wikipedia for movies since the community maintains the info and includes data that isn't available anywhere else.

Goodreads is the largest community of book readers in the world and so they would be able to provide their tools for book groups and conversations about books that Amazon is sorely lacking.

evanjacobson Amazon's homepage was down

During my time as an engineer working on Amazon.com, we occasionally experienced outages of various lengths. One of the surprising details about these outages is that they really didn't result in any revenue loss. That is, it appeared that customers would simply wait until the website was available again to make their purchase. I would be surprised if that effect doesn't still happen today especially with the availability of Amazon on a variety of platforms (i.e. customers are comfortable ordering from their phones when they couldn't get to the website from their desktop computers).

evanjacobson Namecheap Makes $44,000 Donation to the Electronic Frontier Foundation

I wonder how new this policy is. I've had http://www.readwritehack.com registered with Namecheap since 2008.

evanjacobson Every NFL play for the past 10 years in CSV format

A bit OT, but I thought this might be a good opportunity to mention the upcoming SportsHackDay in Seattle from Feb 1-3 which culminates in a group viewing of the SuperBowl. http://sportshackday.com/

evanjacobson How Amazon did everything wrong (but I still got to #1)

For me, this is the most important takeaway: "But how do you let over 24,000+ readers know there is an update available? Amazon does not give publishers access to the customers’ email addresses so you cannot get in touch with them directly."

Amazon may have disintermediated publishers in the author -> publisher -> retailer -> reader chain but there is still opportunity to remove the retailer and have a direct author -> reader relationship.

evanjacobson The myth of doing “that one thing”

I wonder if this is a cultural issue. People have become used to the idea that taking one (usually small) action will have an outsized impact.

Don't like the political environment? Voting for the right presidential candidate will fix it.

Overweight and out of shape? This pill will do the trick.

Don't want to do the years of hard work to achieve excellence in your field? Just be at the right place at the right time and get "discovered" (or "funded").

evanjacobson YakShaving: I totally "invented" airtime 2 years ago

Something something "ideas are cheap" something something "all that matters is execution"

evanjacobson I have 404,772 users. Now what?

The expectation for entrepreneurs is that they always have this very clear vision of how they are going to change the world when in fact many of them simply get hooked on an idea that then goes on to change the world. Uncertainty is viewed by many as a sign of weakness but if you're being honest then you need to expect that there will be times when you don't know what to do next.