msg

Only half joking, I have 134 tabs open.

People like to be building something. Delicious is less edited than the wikipedia but it's still a massive datastore, semantically tagged, and filtered by its users. And if Delicious would get off their cans (and it looks like they will) it could be the single best way to share a link.

"Honest Achmed's Used Cars and Certificates"

I think the joke about "honest" comes from the used car salesman bit and the "Achmed" comes from the Iran hack.

It is perhaps unfortunate that they came together in a way that sounds like a stereotype about dishonest Arabs (I hadn't heard of this stereotype before reading the thread).

With luck the same sets of staff will not have access to both, et cetera.

It's been said a few times on the thread but I'm not willing to read the entire thing just to find the nuggets among the blather. Here is the problem:

It's been said a few times on the thread but I'm not an expert on everything and I'm not willing to halt my day and gain the background to fairly judge the veracity of every comment on the threads I'm interested in. In fact, I'm fairly likely to miss a counterintuitive point or chance to think deeper.

Was this comment too verbose? I don't know because I only skimmed it while I was reading this enormous thread.

  menu Preferences -> Advanced -> Update

  seek to "When updates to Firefox are found"

  check "Ask me what I want to do"

If you have to choose between a creative workforce that knows how to get things done and a standard workforce that fits inside of boxes and stereotypes, then damn the boxes and take the minds. Even if it costs some glorified HR person some trouble down the road.

Instead you might see:

  logger.fatal( String.format("Program crashed on index %d: %s", i, message) );

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2227753

Key points:

It might be more accurate to call it "freed" software. The goal of the GPL is to uncage domesticated software and let it roam wild forever, never collared again. The people who distribute software in this fashion won't let you put it back in the zoo.

And again, FSF is not saying that users are free to do what they want. You are not free, according to them. They say that software is free, in the sense of the software freedoms. That sentence essentially would only parse to $0 before Stallman came along.

The title is implying only that no iPad 2 review could be as complete as this one, so other reviews are redundant and not worth reading.

I will go a step further, reading paywalled content for free at the public or university library is exactly the same, especially for content providers, as checking out materials for free.

If you don't love libraries with all your heart I don't think there is much more for me to say.

One thing I had picked up in between was a strong desire to learn the computer. I didn't grow up programming, so Perl was something of a revelation to me. I picked up C after that and read Code Complete, another revelation. About then I figured out that I wanted to work on software professionally.

I continued to work on programming skills and CS outside of the four walls of my program (and I still do).

There was no secret sauce in getting into Amazon. They were (and we still are) desperate for people, with hundreds of engineering openings today, who know CS fundamentals, are not one-trick ponies (ie, work at many levels of the stack, from UI through service to DB), and can code their way out of a paper bag. There is a ton of customer-impacting work to do and never enough engineers to do it all.

It is not an exaggeration to say that if you can solve algorithm, coding, and design questions in phone screens and on the white board, and communicate your thought process along the way, you will be head and shoulders above the vast majority of the candidate pool. Having a work record of delivering software products helps too. That said, you are not likely to pass the interview loop if you try to fake your way through.

After I finished the MS CS, I worked at a defense contractor and shipped some software in C++/Qt/MySQL. I learned a lot and loved my coworkers, but the defense industry environment was not for me. I read Steve Yegge's posts about Amazon and services and the rest, and that was for me. The ones about interviewing are all still relevant for the Amazon interview. The specific questions have changed, but the areas to bone up on are basically timeless.

Then I submitted my resume online for a position in Amazon's Recommendations team. I didn't know anyone in the company (although it turned out that I ran into acquaintances after I joined). I didn't get picked up by them but somebody else needed people badly and started the hiring process with me.

There are a broad range of teams and experiences at Amazon. Some teams are high pressure, high reward (Kindle comes to mind). Some are redefining industries, like AWS. Front-end vs. back-end. Huge resources, many dependencies, and a two-year roadmap vs. two guys launching a brand new business.

At 30 I am a husband and father with a master's in CS making software for Amazon. Except for mortgage and school, we are debt free.

But the big question is how you define success, which is only a couple of whys away from what the meaning of life is.

If you don't have a reliable, justifiable success metric, you can't be successful. But you can keep chasing rainbows.

Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.

I guess Quora suffers fools gladly.

Like many other things in computing, the price to play has gotten steadily cheaper over time. When it gets more expensive we should ask why.

It makes sense for Apple's future of curated computing, but it's definitely another dick move.

They are trying to drive developers to use the App Store? Sounds ridiculous coming out of my mouth.

They are trying to kill off OSX hobbyist experimentation in favor of iOS? I think I'm getting warmer.

https://mozillalabs.com/ubiquity/2010/03/10/community-mainta...

I still use and love this tool every day.

Rather than picking one style per person receiving the message, you need to pick one per situation. Mentoring and long term conversion experiences can use the nudge. Deadlines and trouble may require the mandate.

I had a manager that swung between the nudge and the mandate. He never had time to debate with me so I wasn't able to trust him or feel heard. Needless to say, I jumped at the chance to leave his team.

Talk about burying the lede!

"But leaving aside the revenue split, there are technical limitations as well. The existing in-app purchasing system in iOS has a technical limit of 3,500 catalog items. I.e. any single app can offer no more than 3,500 items for in-app purchase. Amazon has hundreds of thousands of Kindle titles.

"Something’s got to give here. I don’t know what, but there must be more news on this front coming soon. I don’t believe Apple wants to chase competing e-book platforms off the App Store."

In other words, all the rest of the article, defending the Apple terms, is so much codswallop. Because Gruber believes that these terms are unacceptable, as in Dead On Arrival, to major users of in-app purchases and will have to change shortly to accommodate them.

And once you have figured that out, why not apply this to the other users of the platform, the rest of these arguments? "Eating margins will chase applications off iOS" and "Catalog limits are too low for many credible use cases" apply to many more developers than just Amazon Kindle.

But for some reason these arguments are dissociated from the ones Gruber wants to make. Instead of putting together the whole picture, he comes to these major stumbling blocks and writes the equivalent of "Does Not Compute."

I don't know the GP but their post is believable. Some parts of Amazon are mired in cross-team dependencies. Worse, to get anything done in those situations, hacks have been piled on top of hacks for tragic years. The right solution may be waiting in the wings but all the dominoes have to fall first.

There is a lot of variety at Amazon. There are high-pressure, high-reward teams like Kindle. There is cutting edge stuff at AWS and elsewhere.

My team is a leaf far out on the dependency tree. Approximately, we have only end users. It's a great situation, even with a pager (shared between five people, so one week or less a month). Our pager, on the average, does not go off. We get to ship software every week and we're profitable.

You exist. You can make choices. You can act. In that sense, you are free, until you're dead. You can do whatever you want with software.

In a more practical sense, if you want to redistribute GPL-licensed software, you aren't free from the restriction of the software's license in a legal sense, because the license is your only legal means to redistribute the software.

When are you ever free to do what you wish with software? Answer, when it's your original work... and you don't violate software patents, even the ones you never heard of... and it's not export controlled or you're not exporting it... and its main purpose is not to induce copyright infringement (we are losing that one in the courts today, sad but true)... and you are not using the software to commit other crimes... AND SO ON.

Get real, there are all kinds of legal restrictions on your ability to "do what you wish" with software, even public domain software. Some of them even make sense.

It might be more accurate to call it "freed" software. The goal of the GPL is to uncage domesticated software and let it roam wild forever, never collared again. The people who distribute software in this fashion won't let you put it back in the zoo.

And again, FSF is not saying that users are free to do what they want. You are not free, according to them. They say that software is free, in the sense of the software freedoms. That sentence essentially would only parse to $0 before Stallman came along.