kator

The only currency you're born with is time. The rest are acquired by the application of time.

Joe: "Hey is Lisa back from vacation?"

Larry: "I saw a red Lamborghini in the parking lot!"

Most people will assume Lisa is driving a red Lamborghini and back from Vacation, meanwhile, all the bots are searching for Lamborghini vacations and trying to figure out what's going on in the conversation.

FTA "But a 20,000- or 40,000-death epidemic is a far less severe problem than one that kills two million."

Meanwhile, https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ shows Deaths: 19,603

I'm not an epidemiologist but how can we barely at the mid-point of the spread and say things like the above, while the hard facts already show we're at 20k deaths?

While I agree the actual rates are hard to know until we have robust antibody assay in larger populations, it seems a bit hand-wavy to say "oh it's just not that bad, here look at these random samples we looked at it and it'll be ok."

I can confirm that Amazon is aggressively hiring across our business.

I am a hiring manager at Amazon and am hiring Product Managers, SDM's and SDE's. Doing phone screens daily and multiple "loops" virtually. We're also on-boarding people at home by sending them equipment and working with them remotely to get up to speed.

We live in interesting times!

I was just thinking, imagine trying to use a modern-day smartphone for this. So much complexity how could you be sure the missile would even get off the ground. There is a big advantage to systems that engineers can mostly "keep in their heads". Very few systems are that way these days.

What I like about Memcached is it's just that, it works, written in C, oh and my goodness uses Perl tests!

It's not re-written every other year in the latest hot language. It chugs along, without embarrassment, doing one thing amazingly well over 17 years...

Sadly no.. https://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-9/NetBSD-9.0.html

> Updated ZFS. This is the first release with ZFS usable for daily use, but there is no support for booting from ZFS nor using ZFS as root filesystem yet.

I’m running 32bit windows apps using the Crossover by Codeweavers. I just bought the lifetime license, figured it was time they get some reward for all their hard work.

Hmm good point, when looking for a place to retire look for Vim searches!

STO's come from everywhere, this I love the most about Amazon. From the lowest levels to the highest levels of the organization, if you have an idea, can communicate with some passion and data, you can become an STO. We hire them, recruit them, and they're born of the fire in their belly about a topic. This is the key factor for success, as far as I can tell at Amazon we're all humans and every idea is treated with respect, and no matter the source, the idea could become our next massive customer offering. I have never seen that at other large companies. I hope that never dies here because, with that mindset, we will continue to deliver amazing customer experiences into the foreseeable future.

"Full Stack" expertise has little to do with STO. To me an STO is on a broad topic such as "Owns this {thing}" etc. It's great to have varied experience because you can add that to the debate on what the right next action is.

Now all this said my job has quite a bit of technical details related to it and the fact that I've hacked stuff up and down the stack and ran companies while also having been a customer in this industry is super useful to my focus. In that respect, I would always encourage people to learn as much as they can and understand the customer's perspective as if you lived it every day.

The decisions aren't made by the network. Decisions are driven by knowledge and data and a sense for how we are able to provide the best possible customer outcome.

It's not a "who you know.." sort of environment, but networking will make you more productive because somewhere, on planet earth, someone at Amazon, is thinking about that thing, you just thought of, and they're going to be super excited to compare notes and ideate with you!

I've been at Amazon for 1 year, 8 months and 21 days (thank you Phonetool).

I'm a product manager, my career history is long and varied including 25 years of running my own companies. I was at first very concerned about the Two Pizza team concept, who's in charge, how do we optimize the application of people to effort? Being a programmer I had always looked to manage the separation of concerns in my designs. I just hadn't thought about it in the real world as a pattern that could work. To me, Amazon is a massive open-source project with many teams focused deeply on a handful of topics. We share data very openly, we share learnings, we share what we're planning to do and ask for input.

My opinion is that somewhere in the history of Amazon the executive team must have realized they could not make all the decisions, that they would become the bottleneck for growth. So instead of focusing on command and control as many companies have done, they focused on how to hire leaders and teach them to think critically, take risks, learn and improve. Amazon values seeking truth and if it's not fully known then where it makes sense take risks to learn and improve the known truth. If you read about our leadership principles[1] you'll see that they're in tension with each other, they're designed to make you think, the answer isn't given to you, the way you come to answers is taught instead. An example, Dive Deep vs Bias for Action, when do you stop digging into the problem and just take action? This tension helps you think about decisions you make that impact the outcome for our customers.

Another thing that often gets overlooked is the concept of "Single Threaded Owner". I'm an STO on a topic, that means I write and communicate the known truth and our strategy and plans, I participate in discussions around that topic, I talk to customers about it, I read industry news and leverage my own experience in that topic. Others know me as that STO and reach out to me with related topics if something makes sense to me in my topic area then I try to address it, if not I connect the person with another STO I think would be interested in their idea or problem. Success at Amazon is deeply driven by networking, we have an internal tool called Phonetool which allows you to quickly navigate the company and find people who are close to the topic you have in mind. I keep thinking it's like the six degrees of separation concept, if somebody doesn't know the topic they know someone who is closer to the topic, within a couple of emails you are in a conversation with someone on the other side of the company who is passionate, fired up and knows more about the topic than you thought could be known. They're excited to talk to you about their topic and teach you or learn from your new idea related to their area of focus.

When I first started someone told me "Don't worry if other people seem to be doing the same thing, over time the best effort will return results and the other ideas will fade and those people will find new ideas to chase". I've heard it said we would rather have two people working on a thing than none. This is a path to discovery. Amazon is very data-driven when you make a statement without data you had best be ready to debate it and explain why that is your position. I myself have a long career and sometimes I just have to say "because I've done it, been there done that". Which is fine but its also awesome when you can show data. I identified a pattern that was unhealthy based on my own experience, my team came up with some metrics we could collect to quantify the issue. Now we're sharing those metrics and people all around my team are rallying around the problem.

In my career, I've run my own companies, been in start-ups that raised money, sold companies to other companies and just about everything else you can imagine. This is the closest to feeling like a startup but with the resources to create great outcomes for customers at scale. It has its challenges as do all companies of more than one person, but many of the challenges are different than I've seen in the past. When in doubt you can always raise a leadership principle and everyone will jump in and talk about how that would apply to the situation we're dealing with. That's unique for me thus far in my career most companies I've worked for have their "values" painted on the walls and that's about as far as they go. I was at a startup where we tried to be very deliberate about our values but this is deeper, cuts across the entire org and everyone is passionate about discussing what they mean for them and how they apply them to their work.

To me what is most important in my career is learning and doing it with great people, so far I've got lots of both of those things applied to problems at a scale I wouldn't have in other companies.

[1] https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles

  46,225 mm2 chip
  56x larger than the biggest GPU ever made
  400,000 cores
  78x more cores
  18 GB on-chip SRAM
  3000x more on-chip memory
  100 Pb/s interconnect
  33,000x more bandwidth

This thing is like 8" x 8" and consumes 15 kilowatts of power. Seems like a supercomputer in 8" x 8" form factor?

What are the odds the steel wool could catch fire on these?

I have Dyslexia and have always found light on dark background easier to read. I used green screens (amber even) and like everyone I went to the “light” side as GUI’s became a thing. But I always kept my xterm with black backgrounds.

At one point I read an article about dark backgrounds helping dyslexics read better. I tried it on Kindle and in one year read 6x as many books as the year before, it was like someone had transformed me with a magic wand, I could read and enjoy more of what I was reading.

I haven’t figured out a good way to get dark mode on iOS nor css hacks for dark mode HN. I did find a way to hack dark mode into Slack and Jenkins and those were amazing changes for me (and quite a few of my team).

I worry that people think Dark Mode is a fad, to me it’s a gift and I hope the trend continues.

I consulted for many years of my career and my general rule of thumb is bill at a rate of what you want your annual comp to be divided by 1,000 ($165k/yr / 1000 = $165/hr). This is based on the basic concept of 50% billable or a bit higher with overhead. If you're doing independent you will need to bake in insurance (health and liability), taxes and other costs of running your business. If you beat the 50% billable you're in the money, if you don't then it might be time to find a job.

In your situation if your company bills you out at $165/hr I would push for total comp of $165k (base + bonus + insurance + other benefits). Remember to also factor in risk/reward, if you don’t mind all the risk you can go independent and reap more of what you bill, but if you’re worried about not landing customers then you should consider a job with a company that has a pipeline and can get you billed out quickly. That said don’t overestimate the “safety” of working for a company, if you don’t bill well or they have issues they’ll fire you in an instant.

As a side note when talking to people about setting up their own consulting gig I always remind them that customers pay for what the perceived value is of a resource. If you ask for $75/hr billing you may not get the gig but ask for $250/hr and shockingly they might sign you tomorrow morning. There is an interesting balance between perceived value, asking price and what people will pay vs what they expect to pay. Your asking price actually communicates your confidence you can deliver, and customers have a built in bias on this front and will make pre-conceived judgements based on this simple part of the overall negotiation.

"Since Calendar offers in-app notifications, you can still get notified, regardless of your device or connection."

One challenge I see in AI is that humans tend to attribute human traits to non-human entities (Anthropomorphism). This tendency leads people to expect something from AI that they can do quickly and to be shocked when we find AI to be brittle and lacking fundamental features of human understanding.

Having raised children and now playing with my grandchildren, it often amazes me at just how much we take for granted in that comes "out of the box" with a human brain. Humans can build associations with very few samples, and we come pre-wired with all sorts of tools from primary systems like hearing, visual, sensory systems to complex capabilities like speech and communication abilities.

I've worked with computers for 37 years, and the progression has been amazing, but we're still a long ways away from the primary capabilities of even a house cat.

All this said I often wonder if the reason for the failure of current AI systems to wow us is the gap between power density of a human brain vs. compute systems. I've heard it said that DeepMind burned an order of magnitude more than the 20W/hr a typical human brain uses. When we have compute systems with that power density, we may see more emergent behaviors from our silicon-based friends.

Either way, I think AI has useful applications today and I hope we will find many useful applications of these technologies to make our lives better and make more time for us to learn, love and care for one another.

I'm very comfortable typing /mute in noisy channels and coming back later. I'm also happy to close slack when I need to be in the zone.

IMHO Don't blame the tools, it's about discipline, you need to own your time, calendar time for yourself and get stuff done. If management doesn't understand this then time to find a new team.

I hardly go a day without using iTerm2.

Don't worry George your responsiveness more than makes up for an honest mistake.

To everyone else: I would highly recommend if you make money on a daily basis using iTerm2 that you support his efforts:

https://www.patreon.com/gnachman/posts

Before you ask, yes I'm a patreon for George, his work inspires me.

LOL I'm older and have 35 years of experience in the technology.

Doesn't mean for one hot second I think I can just puff my chest up about a topic and blow people off when they ask a perfectly good question.

For me the jury is still out on systemd. My biggest concern is it seems to be slowly taking over everything and thus violating the core unix philosophy of "do one thing really well". It feels like systemd was started to "improve startup times" for desktop users so they'd be happy. Meanwhile servers were sort of forgotten about and many of the complexities added by systemd make getting things done harder for day-to-day system admins. I've made some unit's myself and I like the many options I have but honestly it's not a daily job. Writing three lines of bash in /etc/init.d was way quicker and easier to rationalize about in the heat of "getting shit done".

All this said I have been using systemd on my machines for a while now, at first I would back it out the second I created a new install image but now I'm trying hard to learn it and understand.

Again... the Jury is still out in my mind.

When Y2K got hot I told all my team members that 2038 would be worse. At least Y2K was easy for humans to understand, they all could see 1999 => 2000 and how that seemed important. I had bank CIO's and large movie studio CIO's calling me with "unlimited budget to fix this". Because it was easy for their CEO and CFO to understand.

The challenge here will be that this seems awkward from a non-computer science standpoint. Have you tried to explain this to your Mom yet? It's obvious to bit heads but not regular humans. Even my own very technical team thought I was a bit off my rocker talking about this in 1999.

The other very real challenge is the generation gap, many devs working on stuff today have no experience with Y2K issues, they just haven't been working on systems long enough to be bitten by that stuff. They look at old code where some "if (yy < 69)" hack was put in place to support old YYMMDD formats and wonder what the crazy dev was thinking when they pushed that code.

On top of all these issues we have IOT being deployed by brilliant young minds who have no experience dealing with things that have to work for 50 years plus. If anything, the IOT ecosystem is moving to a "technology consumer" mentality where things are built to barely survive 18 months and everyone is moving so quickly they don't worry about 2038 because "it's eons from now". Most of these companies won’t be in business in 2038 but their products will litter the world and still be plugged in bashing away at whatever the internet is by then.

The velocity of this decade is amazing, I stand in awe as I watch all the new technologies that get cranked out in rapid succession. However much of that has been due to the "fail fast, iterate rapidly" approach. Which is great in many ways, but formal verification has taken a back seat while most teams have no engineering review team. These things slowed us down in the past and we have rightfully tossed them over our shoulders in the ever rapidly accelerating pursuit of innovation. However, we have lost of a lot of what it really means to be an “engineer” along the way.

Hacking is great, until it gets someone killed. Thus far software has eaten most of the world that doesn’t kill people. Now we tread into the world that will, the physical world, self-driving trucks, trains, planes, automobiles. Coffee makers that boil over and burn a four-year-old kid who just thought it was fun to push the red thing on dad’s tablet. This is the world we are headed into, and the 2038 problem is really just the tip of the iceberg.

I can tell you the Y2K problem was real, it was painful but easier for humans to understand. If we want companies to prioritize resources to fix 2038 problems now over the next shiny button they want in their UI we will need a massive marketing campaign to get people to understand. Because in the end devs don’t make all the decisions on resource allocation and the people who do have no clue how things really work. It’s an age-old tension between the technologists and the business leaders. How we overcome that here is unclear to me, but I think the basic issue is getting people to understand the potential impact so it comes up in conversations in the Board Room and the CEO is asking the CIO/CTO “So what are we doing about 2038?”. Otherwise nothing will happen on the corporate side.

The article makes sense, that said I have two grandchildren that are five and three. They interact with ipads and phones like they're "normal" life. They talk to their Alexa's and Siri like they're people. They ask the TV to change channels and ask Mom why when they swipe the TV screen nothing happens.

My oldest grandson had the funniest argument with Siri, she kept saying I don't understand you and he would say "why you're talking to me just like I'm talking to you."

I agree we are still humans and no shocking net-new amazing multi-tasking or concentration skills will come out of the "digital generation". That said these kids are growing up on the shoulders of giants and will expect things to just work. If anything, that could make things harder because they may not want to learn how to make new things work.

All this said my grandmother lived through horse and buggy, radio, TV, Color TV, Computers and men on the moon. She used to say the more things change the more they stay the same. Because people are basically the same no matter when they were born.

I often use google "flip a coin"[1] for stupid things and the other day I was wondering why almost every single time it came up heads. I started to wonder if there was a browser rng problem or the code was crazy etc.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=google+flip+a+coin

Looks like people are paying the ransom:

https://blockchain.info/charts/balance?address=1Mz7153HMuxXT...

Subways in NYC are not fun in the summer either. I always assumed it was because when they were designed they didn't consider a future state where air conditioners on the trains dump their heat into the tunnel.

I tried searching for a similar study for NYC but all I found was old articles from years back.

It doesn't look like the MTA shares any measurements of temperature in their data feeds: http://web.mta.info/developers/download.html

Does anyone have ideas on how we could get this sort of data for NYC subways?

See https://github.com/slockit/DAO/blob/v1.0/DAO.sol#L666

> Another decision he made when he had no idea of the bug shows how quirky and unforgiving code can be. “If the capital ‘T’ in line 666 had been a small ‘t,’ that would also have prevented the hack,” he says.

Can someone familiar with this explain how something financially based can have a capitalization flaw? I would expect a smart contract language to have very strict type and variable linking. Humans make many mistakes in coding but most of the time it doesn't cost $55m. A transaction language should be very strict so either the smart contract language is flawed or the author of this article is overstating something for dramatic effect.

EDIT: Found this: https://github.com/slockit/DAO/blob/v1.0/DAO.sol#L666

on a deeper dive: http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/06/18/analysis-of-the-dao...

It would be interesting to do this same comparison with MariaDB.

I wonder if that project has managed to continue progressing while MySql seems to have regressed.

It's super easy for all of us on HN to say "Oh look Oracle ruined another thing". But it would much more interesting to have quantified results to compare from.