nanoscopic

This reminds me of my "war" to get an article for my parser XML::Bare.

There was a time when there was a comparison page for XML parsers, and many parsers had articles.

Still existing parsers on Wikipedia that should be removed; if they are to stay true to their war on having useful software info in Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:XML_parsers

The original argument was that if you can find a citation in print you can have whatever it is on Wikipedia, but that ceased to be true years ago and it has become a popularity contest and power struggle with obnoxious Wikipedia editors.

#!

exit 42

bytes: 10 :D

Co-mingling of books is a huge problem. I can't/won't buy books from Amazon any more because the last time I bought some tech books I got counterfeits. The text was blurry and gave me a headache; the counterfeits were that bad quality. Amazon, as expected, denied any responsibility and even claimed the books were legit.

Additional story: https://amazonandmykid.com

( my own )

Suffice it to say Amazon does not care about employees, neither at the warehouses nor at their corporate headquarters.

When I was there a guy jumped off a building because they wouldn't let him switch off a toxic team. They also similarly tried to prevent me from switching teams when I was there.

A week ago I was at one of the Amazon retail stores and an employee there agreed that Amazon cares nothing for their employees. Obviously one should take this with a grain of salt as this is just a random statement from a random retail employee, but this is generally what I hear from Amazon workers both current and ex.

The general word on the street in Seattle is "Amazon sucks" to the extent I've heard Amazon employees referred to as Amholes.

This article is spot on in many ways. It is also very pessimistic. It does a good job of pointing out how we seem to be making very little meaningful technological progress compared to the past, and that the main reason seems to be that society is increasingly structured to be stable instead of everything happening on the bleeding edge.

I essentially agree that is happening, but I think there are many of us who care little about the established red tape and regimes and are willing to do whatever is necessary to push society and technology forward.

I do admit I am concerned about my own unwillingness to take large risk despite saying I will. I think that is the most damning part of this article to current first world culture: We have become comfortable with the level of technology we currently have despite its flaws. Without major societal instability only few people step out to make drastic changes.

While this is crappy, it is the default behavior of most large companies when it comes to copyright. As people have described I mistakenly said that copyright must be enforced or it is lost. Agreed I was confusing it with trademark. Despite that, I see many companies treating copyright the same and harassing all copyright infringers with abandon even if it is harmless.

I will also share another story. Some years ago I owned n64.org. I ran a fan website of Nintendo 64 games there. It was quite popular. I was underage ( < 18 ) at the time I bought the domain, and I bought the domain before NOA registered "n64" as a trademark.

NOA threatened to sue me for the domain. I refused as their claim that people would think my fan site was the official Nintendo site was entirely nonsense. In the end they wrote a check to me for like $50 or something equally ridiculous.

Nintendo is not your friend. They don't do a good job taking care of their fans. They will happily sue or threaten you for doing anything they don't happen to like.

Amazon has a team called "Amazon Profitability Group". I used to work for said team, albeit only briefly.

The purpose of the team is to calculate the proper price to sell items for, the "discount" to vendors, and the items to put in the "buy box" in order to make the most profit for Amazon. I think the what is described here in the article is only the tip of the iceberg. Amazon isn't doing something as simplistic as cutting out the competition with low prices... they are feeding all the numbers into neural networks and analyzing and predicting competition and profits, and then doing what the systems tell them is the most profitable.

That is, anything that Amazon can predict will make them more money or gain more market share... they are doing. I have full confidence that they are doing all of the terrible things outlined and more. The bigger question is whether government and law allow them to continue doing this. I think that it will continue to be allowed, despite being super shady and destroying both small and medium size businesses.

It cannot easily be proven that there is anyone orchestrating the monopolistic processes, because Amazon has essentially turned the process of dominating the market into an equation and they just do what the equation tells them to.

Amazon will claim "we are just being smarter; we mean no harm", and without providing open minutes of their internal discussions it will be impossible to prove wrongdoing.

What is needed is open accountability for internal plans, but that is against the "American way" so I doubt it will happen anytime soon.

I admin a number of different websites. The majority of them are static. I have forced https redirect on some of them. On others I do not.

The only benefit of https I perceive in the case of static public content is that ISPs cannot easily monitor which specific pages on my domains are being visited. With plain http they could.

I don't particularly care if people get MITM'ed when visiting my static sites. If they did so it generally is because they chose to use unsafe public access points ( wifi ). This extends to some degree to all forms of wifi since so many security forms in use on them can be easily broken.

My current understanding is that enterprise encryption using certs with wifi is still secure and cannot currently be broken.

The only other party would could do MITM against normal customers on their own home internet, while using wired connections, is, I believe, the ISP themselves. Random third parties cannot generally do so. If there is some plausible way they can do so I would like to hear it.

If your ISP is MITMing you, I think you have bigger problems then whether they change the content of my static site when you visit it. If they were, they could potentially target your initial download of your browser and downgrade to http to infect your browser so that you never realize after that that https is faked out...

I think there are caching benefits to using plain http. The primary one is so that your ISP can cache your static content and save internet bandwidth globally.

I actually wrote a solution for this exact problem for SUSE Hack Week 2018. I made a small job tracking / state tracking system using Perl and nanomsg. See https://github.com/nanoscopic/galear/blob/master/client/srv/...

Essentially it is just a small server that listens on a nanomsg queue for new tasks. Workers can then be created that periodically ping the server to grab a task off the queue. Optimally a nanomsg queue would also be used to queue the tasks out to the workers; I just build it this way since I could implement the entire thing within hours and continue on with my hack week project.

The benefit of using nanomsg over several of the other message queues suggested here is that nanomsg is a brokerless message queue, meaning that there need not be any central queue tracking everything.

It is somewhat ironic in that sense that I essentially built a message broker using it, but it demonstrates the simplicity of using nanomsg.

While the code there is written in Perl, it could easily be ported to any of the other many languages nanomsg has libraries for.

In summary, to handle long running background jobs: 1. Create as many "worker" processes as you need to be able to simultaneously process multiple long running background jobs. 2. Have a way to feed tasks into those workers ( in my case a central task tracker ) 3. Have a way to feed back status of the workers to something central so you can tell what is going on

I have thought about the whole thing a lot since it happened and considered it from many perspectives. I saw with my own eyes the process of my wife bleeding out. I have to live with that. Obviously I have thought about this.

Yes, I considered that someone in the group did feel very threatened and either didn't want to speak to me about it, or that one of the people I did speak to was scared to admit it. It's possible, but the people I spoke with seemed very genuine. If people took issue I believe it was a logical issue not a "I feel threatened" problem.

If management is going to have a cow about this, they really should step in a lot sooner and not have allowed it to get to this point. The whole problem is that management doesn't care enough to setup an environment where stuff like this can't happen.

I said this to HR and security, and I will repeat it: If I wanted to hurt someone as everyone is implying, I wouldn't have said anything about it and would have just done so. It's not logical. I was well aware people would flip out when I said it, and I wanted something to be done to resolve the situation. My statement was more a cry for help than anything.

If anyone actually legitimately thought there was any actual concern I would hurt the person, they shouldn't have allowed me back into the building at all for a long period. I was allowed back in a week later and easily had the access to hurt the person had I intended in any way to do so. I had and still have no such intent. I consider the person to be my friend.

Time does not remove the pain I feel. I will continue to feel it. My wish is for large companies to behave better and not force situations on employees that cause things like this to happen. Especially not to software engineers just trying to do our job.

I agree that the company and everyone involved is just trying to resolve the situation and follow policy. That is not enough. People need to have humanity and compassion. At no point did anyone apologize for the pain I went through. At no point did I receive a personal letter from Jeff Bezos that he was sad it happened. I don't think Jeff cares at all. I don't think the company cares.

Perhaps it is all my fault. I don't think so. I'm no dummy. A lot of things indicate the situation could have been avoided had many people involved acted differently. There is blame on all sides. I can own up to not being perfect. I made mistakes. I was terribly upset. I've grown from it. It still hurts though.

I don't think my problem is an inability to see other perspectives. I can readily see them and explain them. The problem is that with tons of people around no one ever actually tried to actually resolve any of the tension. I know it is yucky to get involved in tense situations, but just letting them grow beyond control is bad and hurts people.

The entire argument happened in front of the larger team. The manager did not pull me aside to have the heated conversation. Many people witnessed it.

I talked to several of them about it afterwards. I asked if they felt that I was being threatening at all. All of them said they understood what I was going through, that it was clear I was extremely stressed and was flipping out. Each of the people I asked said they did not believe I had any intent to kill my coworker, or even that I said it as any sort of threat. In context it was heard as me simply losing control after saying I couldn't handle it and had to leave immediately.

Note that this is the only time in my career I ever actually asked to leave because I couldn't handle a situation. I only even asked because I was very worried I would be fired if I walked out on my own. I have walked out when necessary at others jobs and there was no issue, but that is not the way Amazon is. At least it was not that way on my team.

Typically if an argument at work appears, I would just continue hashing it out till its done and go back to work. This situation was unusual.

I was given authority and encouraged to push back against people who are wasting company time. I made careful judgements and fought requests only when it made sense. Nearly all requested changes, even if they were ridiculous, if they had any value, I did. I know it could be construed from what little I've said that I am being arrogant and refusing to listen, that is not the case.

I requested style guidelines to be put in place and would be happy to follow them. Amazon does not have style guidelines for the code in place. It was and is legacy code with no documented styling. The style I used was a modern proper one. The style complaints were arbitrary and came from a junior engineer. They were not based on mature reasoning or proper practice.

I readily agree that I could have just said "I don't care" and lowered my stress level significantly. The stress was partially my own fault. I don't disagree with this. This is a big reason why I started my own company rather than immediately returning to another "corporate job". I needed to recover such that I can do my job without anything remotely like this happening.

Based on my past experiences, if you are forced to stay home at all, you are very likely getting fired. The reason I wasn't is less to do with them telling the truth, and more to do with the fact that the projects I was working on had high dollar value for them and they wanted me to keep working.

I started my company with around $35k on hand. I did not have any more money than that. My co-founder also contributed some of his money as well to cover expenses during the year. We lived frugally. There is no hidden saved up money here that I had to make it work. I am still broke to this moment because of this.

I have a lot of experience in the industry; it is not significantly hard to find a place that will hire me. Finding a job that is a good fit is more difficult.

Whatever guidelines I am presented with I follow.

It might serve you to consider that you don't have sufficient information to cast the sort of judgements you are on me.

I cried multiple times at work at Amazon. This is not surprising for me to hear either.

I agree that an employer can fire anyone they choose, but if they do list a reason that reason has to be in a legal subset of possible reasons.

That is why most states are "at-will", meaning that they don't need to list any reason. I am not saying that they could not fire me; they certainly could have. They simply cannot list the reason officially as "because you told people about this event that happened and gave your opinion on it".

If they said "we believe the employee is violent and threatening" that would be a valid reason. I am not. I may get upset and stressed but I have never laid a hand on anyone in my life. There is no evidence to support the claim that I am violent, because it isn't true.

There are also more complex things going on here than just whether or not I can be fired and they can "get away with it". The real issue is that they don't want anyone to know what happened because it makes them look bad.

For that, it actually doesn't matter if I am a raving lunatic or not. The simple fact is they want to cover up the whole situation and make it go away. That is the worst part of all of it.

As a full time employee I am not paid for hours worked, I am paid for the work performed; for results. As such, it is common and typical for employees like me to be allowed to engage in any number of "non work" activities to help maintain stress and keep productivity up.

That is something that has been true at nearly every company I have worked at. Amazon is not different in that regard, at least not on the teams I was involved with there.

There are a lot of social events at Amazon. I did not spend my work time approaching random people at their desks to mouth off to them. That would be weird and stupid. I simply shared it with people during social conversations at social events where we are encouraged to interact with others.

During social events, I am quite sure that free speech covers what I say.

I did not actually threaten anyone. I said that I feel like I want to kill the person. It is not the same... I did not communicate it to the person being talked about. I also in no way stated that I intended to, was planning on doing so etc. It was, agreeably, a stupid admission of how I felt, which can easily be misinterpreted.

It is similar to saying "hey I'd like to have sex with that hot actor". Saying that does not mean you will go rape the actor. It is just a feeling. Feelings don't equate to action.

I agree action had to be taken; I have no problem with them reacting. My problem is that I had to go to that level to be paid attention to. My stress was absurdly high before this happened, and I communicated it was repeatedly and received no help. When I finally said "I can't take it" I was ignored.

I agree it could have potentially happened without the stress. Despite that the stress definitely triggered whatever the cause was immediately. That was very clear. The doctors did though claim there were zero problems 2 days previous. Usually miscarriage does not occur past the first trimester when all other signs are good.

As stated, I did continue to work and do what I was asked despite the extreme stress. I did not walk out the door when refused to be allowed to leave for the day. I do agree that as an employee my job is to do what I am directed whether I like it or not.

I agree that they cannot let such a statement slide, and that is why I said it, because nothing else I said in the week before this was acted on. I was ignored in every other plea for some sort of intervention. My manager could, though, have simply asked me if I meant that and I would have explained that, no, I was just upset. We could have walked over to the person I was even referring to and worked it out immediately on the spot. I told him about when I came back to work and he was sad and had no hard feelings towards me.

I agree no company would allow it. They would look for a legal way to get rid of anyone saying such things. I told them as much. That said, listing that as the reason for termination is not legal. I did do my job in a professional sense. Freely sharing what I believe to people who listen is free speech. You cannot legally be fired for your opinions that do not affect your work; at least not as the listed reason.

I could have simply been terminated with no cause listed. That they did not due that is great; but it was not out of any caring for me. That is simply the way the company works; which I agree is a good thing.

The worst part is that my story is not unique. The level of stress and resulting poor mental health is, in my opinion, very high there. I don't think they are doing what is necessary to improve that. ( despite trying )

I didn't personally like the manager in question, but I do believe he was trying to do his job accurately. He attempted to follow the process of things as best he could. He simply did not understand me or attempt to be close to me in any way.

As a result of that, he was unable, I believe, to see the extreme stress I was under despite me telling him I was in the week leading up to what happened.

His huge mistake was to ignore my plea to take the day off to feel better and be able to handle the situation. Had he done so I believe everything that happened could have been avoided.

I do believe the manager is at fault and caused the situation by this, but I don't think it makes him a terrible person or anything. I respect him as trying to do his job.

Boring is not so much what was stressing me; the stress was due to silly things holding up the approval of code that saves the company tens of thousands of dollars per week. I had production ready code that was being delayed by styling complaints. ( white space on blank lines )

Code review that improves code I am all for. Code review that holds up valuable fixes for weeks for silly reasons is not good and makes me feel upset.

I did continue to do the work, and voice my complaints, it just eventually got to the point I couldn't handle the stress, so I talked to my manager to ask how to move forward. He did nothing to really relieve my stress and just ordered me to do it anyway ( which I did; even under all the stress )

I think it is worth knowing and adds perspective to the article. The pivot process had just started when all this happened, and I was not offered pivot.

At Amazon it is encouraged to strive for the highest quality despite the tension created. I actually object to their suggested methods in that regard. I think it is better to have social cohesion both within and between teams, but that is not how you are trained at Amazon to deal with things.

I was encouraged to push back on things that I did not feel productive. It wasn't done out of a desire to rebel, but to do as was desired of me. My personal preference is to just do the best I can to keep stress down and accept things for the sake of happiness of everyone rather than make a big deal of anything.

I never refused to do anything of me; I carefully following the Amazon principles. I also worked closely with another senior mentor at Amazon. I talked with him weekly for months before and after the events mentioned to make sure I was doing what was asked of me as best as I could.

I agree that I cannot directly prove the causation. Both my wife and myself feel this is the cause and I think it is reasonable.

There are clear reasons for why people do as they do, and blaming oneself is not the proper solution. My general belief is that care must be taken to understand how to interact with people in a way that they understand, since accurate communication is not an easy task.

I worked at Amazon developing various portions of the core software that drives their website. Code I wrote runs billions of times per day...

While there, I was told to do many things that I think are not a valuable use of my time. I pushed back on many, and attempted to keep productive. It was very frustrating and stressful.

Eventually the stress came to a head and I vehemently told my boss that I thought the task I was being told to do was idiotic. I requested to go home for the day sick for mental health reasons, as I was unable to cope with the stress that moment.

My boss refused to let me leave for the day and continued arguing with me. The discussion then obviously went too far and I said "I would like to kill [someone who is my friend at Amazon]." I meant it only as an expression of the intensity of how much I was upset. The friend I mention knows this also and would confirm this if asked. I was just freaked out and stressed beyond my capacity to deal.

My boss forced me to go back to work after this exchange. After 4 hours he then came and got me and took me to a meeting with HR and security. They accused me of threatening to kill my coworker ( which is a horrible misunderstanding ) I explained clearly that I meant no such thing, and pointed out that I asked to and needed to leave for mental health, and they didn't care.

They said I have to go home at that point and would be forbidden from returning to work for 2 weeks. This upset me further. I assumed I would never be returning and was being fired. I pleaded with them to just give me the day off as requested and they refused. They forced me to stay home for a week.

I went home and told my wife what happened. She had just passed the first trimester of her pregnancy. She saw the doctor about the pregnancy 2 days previous and the baby was perfectly healthy and there were no problems.

After learning what happened to me at work, she was so stressed over it that she started bleeding later that day. If I was fired at that moment I would lose my house and be homeless in Seattle; I didn't have the funds to endure that.

She had a miscarriage 2 days later as a result of the stress and worrying. She nearly bled to death. My child died because of Amazon's reckless disregard for mental health.

Amazon did allow me to return to work after a week. I went back to my job and had to continue working for the same manager responsible for my child dying for another 4 months.

During that time I told anyone who would listen at Amazon what happened.

Eventually HR approached me and told me I could not keep telling people and they would fire me if I do.

They gave me the following four choices: 1. Quit of my own accord and tell whomever I want ( no severance ) 2. Continue talking about it at work and get fired 3. Stop talking about it and retain my job ( my performance was high and I had recent great reviews; they had no other issue with me ) 4. Accept a severance of $30,000 and leave the company peaceably ( layoff )

I chose option 4 and started my own startup ( carbonstate.com ) I only had enough funds to run my startup for a year, and have not made any money on my product. I have since had to rejoin the industry to pay bills.

Not explained in the repo is how to root the Retron 5. That information is available at http://www.chromableedstudios.com/techninjutsu/rootron5howto...

Spent the last 9 months on a startup I co-founded, https://carbonstate.com

We are producing an ECM system aimed at the SMB market.

The short feature list is:

- Configuration driven; no coding required to create management systems

- Complex schema support ( nested and linked types )

- Automatic data entry/modification form creation

- Workflow support

- Compiled templating with fragments and support for reverse proxy cache invalidation on data change

- Horizontal scaling ( nanomsg based node interactions )

- Vertical scaling ( new event based http server translating http messages to nanomsg )

- Script driven installer system with UI ( smaller and more flexible than NSIS - <100k installers containing XML parsing and a general purpose scripting language )

Kickstarter to fund finishing the project is in the works.

Before the startup, at the beginning of the year, I rewrote a new version of Apache Avro in C, C++, Perl, and Java to replace all of the event logging within Amazon. The code runs billions of times per day across 4 major web platforms and 20+ component systems.

This explanation clarifies a lot about what the problem is with the particular engineer. Thank you for explaining in more detail.

I do agree that it is important engineers work with others and see beyond their own small sphere. It is not a skill many engineers are good at, but it is still something they should be trying to do and do better over time.

Flexibility is important for those writing code. If they just pump out components that require extra rework to make other things compatible with them then there is a problem.

Work is only done and done well when it can be used as it should be. Completed work should not create more work.

Also agreed that having a professional attitude is important. You don't have to love stuff you actually hate; you just have to be able to talk about it and interact on a professional level. If you actually hate it you can carefully state that you don't like it; but it shouldn't affect your ability to interact.

I've found that many of the best engineers are quite terrible at interacting with other human beings. What matters to me is only if they deliver. If the bottom line is met and the work is getting done and done well, then it doesn't matter to me if the engineers are complete assholes.

Feel free to drop me a pm of the engineer you are canning; I'd be happy to connect with him on LinkedIn.

Your note of "If you don't like working somewhere you should leave" doesn't really work. You have to stay at companies for a specific amount of time or you will end up with too many different positions on your resume and be unemployable. It is better to stay suffering even at a place you hate to build your resume. Leaving when things aren't going well, or allowing them to get to the point where you need to leave is bad advice.

I am living proof of this. I have worked at 8 different positions in the past 17 years. By all reasonable notions I should be employed at a Principal Engineer level. That said, I am unemployable. I am on unemployment and apply to the most reasonably suited positions I can ever week, for 5 months now. I have only been contacted back maybe 10 times in that entire period and made it to 1 in person interview.

If you want to have a job, don't leave, even if it sucks, even if all you coworkers tell you "you can easily get another job". When you have an offer in hand; then feel free to quit. Otherwise stay put and try not to cause trouble.

Let me tell you a short story.

I worked at a company for almost 2 years. One day my manager calls me into his office. He asks me: "Do you like working here?" I pause for a moment, then respond "No. Not really." He then says "Alright then. You are fired."

In my particular situation, I pretty much knew what was actually going on and why. I could have handed him a letter of my two week resignation instead of going through the ridiculous charade of "do you like working here?" There is good reason why people hand in resignations before asking for the details. The chance that you will get suddenly terminated for no apparent reason is very real.

Was I fired for a valid reason from the company? Nope. My performance reviews etc were very high. The manager just didn't like me and the feeling was mutual.

As another example, if one is not enough:

Another place I worked at, also for almost 2 years. I work there through a consulting group. One day my consulting group handler comes to the office and says we need to talk and asks me to come to lunch. No notice before he showed up. After leaving the secure facility, he asks me for my access card and informs me I have been fired.

I ask why. He says that no reason was given. I keep pestering the guy, who I know fairly well, to try to get some sort of explanation. Eventually he says that the only explanation he was given is that the company said I am too smart. He said it doesn't make any sense and he doesn't get it either. To this day I don't know why I was let go from that position.

If I'm at a job and things look like they are going sour; it is time for hardball. I assume that I could be fired at any moment at all times, and I make sure I am prepared for it.

You think "Two weeks is bullshit"? Two weeks is generous.

Are you suggesting that Troy Hunt is involved in illegal pentesting ( pwning their db )? I really doubt that. He is an industry professional.

The problem is not pissing off Troy Hunt; but more that they are advertising that their website is vulnerable and that they don't care.

The layman clicks on links that say "you have a virus; download this tool to remove it". They then click 'Yes I authorize' to verify that the downloaded program should be allowed to corrupt their machine.

I fail to see how the bank changing their website to HTTPS is going to save the average Joe.

There are so many websites and things that operate over HTTP that make our machines vulnerable, that I think it is foolishness to use a link that could be MITM to begin with.

That is, it seems to me, that if you simply avoid ever using wireless there is no danger of MITM. I could see that XSS could be done on some sites with ads, and that would be worsened by lack of HTTP.

Is it as simple as "Don't use wifi. Use adblock. HTTP/HTTPS then no longer matters." ?

I stated specifically that I agree it is bad in situations where you could be MITM. I also agree many people do that. My question here is only how it could effect me or people who follow the practice I follow.

This article seems to be reaching. Reading it through, the basic claim is "Porn is really popular. Serving out streaming porn causes power consumption. Without any really numbers or information, we think that must be bad for the environment compared to old style porn on tapes, magazines, and DVDs."