paxunix

Slack is dismantling what I've spent decades honing my email filters for and there's no analogue.

It's that the guy who won this time is a horrible human being and is the head of a party that seems barely interested in governing, but more in enriching themselves even if it means sacrificing rights and privileges of those they govern. The guy that won last time is not as horrible a human being and was interested in governing for all Americans.

So when the oligarch heads of companies decide to donate to the new guy's big party, it's tantamount to simply ignoring all the truly shitty things the new guy and his party have done and have said they're going to do, because it's more important to the oligarchs that the real power in the land[1] look favourably upon them and their designs. It has been made abundantly clear that currying that favour costs money.

[1] Make no mistake, the US government is more powerful than all of the tech companies in the country and its new leader intends to wield that power as capriciously as he sees fit.

I highly recommend using Fluid Film instead of WD-40. It will coat better and last a lot longer (you'll still have to put it on once a year).

Couple is two. Few is four. Several is at least five. There is nothing for three, except for very large values of two or very small values of four (these are so uncommon in practice that we just use three).

> Then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out.

Jassy's answer to that question contained this tidbit about "how to build a strong team? ... go into the office ..." At that point I was certain the RTO message was coming and it was just a matter of time. Turns out that time was today.

If you're in a building at Amazon, sure, Amazonians. If you're out on the street in Seattle with regular people, it's often Amholes.

It's not that they necessarily need true reasoning. It would just be extremely beneficial, because that's what every human driver already has built-in (although exercised to varying degrees of success).

What about an axe that falls off the landscaping truck in front of you? Or a mattress? Or a harmless styrofoam cooler? The self-driving car does not know what those things are, but suddenly there is <something> in the air that will likely collide with you. The computer is going to be unable to predict how the mattress or the axe or the styrofoam will fly through the air, it can only decide to take abrupt, evasive action. It is also unaware that the person behind the car has been periodically looking down at their phone instead of watching the road, so an abrupt swerve or stop may still cause an accident. A sensible human driver would realize they are taking on additional risk by following such a truck and/or remaining in front of the distracted driver, and maybe decide to change lanes safely. The car's pretend AI has no idea of any of these things until something falls off and it has to react. We'll praise it when it gets it right--ooooh how ingenious! And the apologists will claim "there's no way it could have made a perfect decision--look how many other times it gets it right!" when it fails. And the realists will conclude "ha, stupid computer, told ya so".

Some time ago I had asked one of my Indian friends (who manages a software team in India and the US and has travelled the world, so he has a varied perspective) what he thinks is the biggest barrier to India's advancement? He said "Corruption. The bureaucracy and the government have so much corruption at so many levels". This sounds like a different way to state your mention of "management failures". Hopefully the additional worldwide scrutiny is a motivator for change.

lol You're on a website catering to people who dislike having others prove them wrong and will stretch "technically correct" as far as possible, in the face of all else. If computers didn't exist, they'd be lawyers. If lawyers didn't exist, they'd be clergy.

> Sorry, I forgot you did not specify. [...] I'm sorry for assuming.

No it is not sorry, and no it did not forget.

Why should I believe the computer forgot that I did (or didn't) tell it how to refer to me? It's a machine--why should it ever forget anything? What good to me is a machine I have to remind what I told it? And if I did not ever specify how to refer to me, yet it's claiming it forgot, then it's lying. What good to me is a machine that lies to me?

It doesn't understand what being "sorry" even means--it just said that because the model/context indicated it should say that. It cannot be sorry in any useful sense of the word because it cannot feel remorse or regret or guilt or shame or anything. The machine telling me it is "sorry" means nothing and doesn't indicate it has any great insight (indeed, it has no insight at all) into human feelings.

When adult humans do that, we call them assholes, or sociopaths.

I wanted this to be true, but "whalesalad" was the thread's top-post user.

I set up an AWS API Gateway that proxies to Reddit RSS URLs and then I just give the APIG endpoint URL to Feedly. Unless you have a lot of reddit feeds or high traffic ones, you probably won't even break out of the APIG free tier.

Engineers have an often-times pedantic fascination with debugging deeply detailed problems.

Consider a legal trial to be a giant machine executing a huge set of detailed and arcane and sometimes arbitrary instructions. Either the machine does the right thing (one side arguing there was no crime) or the wrong thing (the other side arguing there was a crime). What engineer doesn't love figuring out why the machine's behaviour is correct or incorrect?

Plenty of selfish/oblivious drivers, but don't overlook the selfish pedestrians causing intersection traffic backup too. There are plenty that are crossing right up until the light is red (even if they don't have a "walk" signal), making it impossible for more than one car to make the left turn. Everyone needs to work together.

That's how you win elections. You tell (convince) people what to be afraid of, and who's to blame for it.

> Good use of manager time is to figure out what those people do differently and then have them teach their ways to the others.

What if the greats do that, and the others just don't care enough to learn, like this is a blue collar job with white collar pay to them?

They could be greater than they are; they think they're great already, but they're nowhere near the true greats on the team.

You can't make them care and you can't make them want to be great.

Yes it does, but not for everything, and there's certainly less new work being done with it. It's impressive that much of that code just works and no one has touched it in a long time. A lot of breakage in that space is due to new people with no perl familiarity coming in and making changes--the pool of people that understand how that stuff works is shrinking.

(Source: This morning I worked on some perl/mason at Amazon and my team owns many thousands of lines of it).

> More often, however, migraines are likely to be covered by FMLA (in the us) and the person gets time off for a certain amount of days.

Almost always, you will be expected (rightly or wrongly) to use your PTO/sick days first (if you have any). Then FMLA may kick in (up to 12 weeks within a 12 month period), subject to several potential restrictions (e.g. employer company minimum size, employee tenure minimum, etc.) Also, the law states that your employer no longer has to pay you, they just have to keep your position available for you upon your return.

So, maybe that's no so great or useful and it's better for your employer to just deal with the fact that you get periodic migraines.

(Not disagreeing with your points, but wanted to clarify that FMLA is great for some situations but not all). People just need to be more understanding and compassionate.

Yes (at least, on desktop there is). Right click on the map where you want to fix something and select "Report a data problem". The UI will walk you through the rest.

It's not useless at all. That the answer is simple does not imply the journey to fulfilling the answer is also simple.

If a person lacks discipline, it is generally within their control to look at themselves and their choices and figure out how to become more disciplined. If they cannot figure out some way, it is generally within their control to figure out how to ask someone for help about how to build discipline. I recognize that there are people with a mental makeup for whom asking for help is extremely difficult.

I do not know what to tell those people, but to continue to make progress in their lives means they have to overcome those blockers somehow.

You can almost always get a free consultation from a lawyer. In that, they will make a guess as to how likely the case is to be won by you (the plaintiff) and decide whether to take it on or not.

It's possible to also have added to the judgement in your favour, coverage for any fees you've had to pay to retain counsel to take care of this legal matter for you.

I'm not sure if by "talked to some attorneys" means a casual chat with a lawyer friend over lunch, or if it means "requested a consultation to determine whether retaining an attorney is the best path forward based on A, B, C".

Call your state's bar association. They can't recommend a particular attorney, but they can generally point you to organizations that can help find the right attorney for you, particularly if cost is a factor.

Will it cost money? Definitely, up front. Will you get it back? Quite possibly.

It is POSIX shell parsing behaviour that redirections can appear anywhere in the command (obviously, not in the same word as another parameter, nor inside a quoted string). They have to be stripped out by the shell before execution: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3...

The only options you usually need for comm are -1, -2, and -3. It takes two arguments, call them 1 and 2. Its job is to include lines from each and both files in output (by default, you get 3 columns of output), so we want to filter by telling it to exclude what we don't want. My mnemonic is "-" means "not", so -1 means "not only in file 1", -2 means "not only in file 2", and -3 means "not in both". So now, when I want comm output that shows the lines unique to my 2nd file, it's:

comm "not only in 1" and "not in both"

so:

comm -1 -3 file1 file2

So when does the cottage industry of companies spring up that take data deletion requests in bulk from classes of EU citizens and batch them up for submission en masse to BigCo? And then also sell you a monitoring service to make sure that BigCo actually did go and delete all the data they were using (at least, that which is publicly visible)? And then when they find that one piece of data that wasn't deleted, sue BigCo?

It's probably far-fetched to think there's DDOS potential here for a company's data officer(s), but when do the bot farm service vendors craft significant numbers of realistic user accounts and then use the above companies to drown BigCo in deletion requests for those fake users?

One sometimes-unfortunate thing about the Internet and global accessibility to other peoples' opinions is that it's easy to find other people "just like you". This leads to a signal amplification that doesn't necessarily mean the problem is as bad or as far-reaching as the group would have you think. It certainly can be, but concluding that from a limited news sources with unspoken agendas isn't accurate. We can all get in a huddle and complain about things, but there is a non-small number of people who just ignore it--even though they would have a positive counter-argument to offer--and instead go on about their business because they don't want to get involved.

Remember that when you're reading the news (here or elsewhere, since rarely is news generated on HN) you and your outrage are being used for marketing (and possibly furthering some other agenda).

I agree with your closing sentence about being data driven and thinking about it--getting out of the news bubble and using your own brain to analyze something is good.

To counter those objecting to your statement of "Of course, a lot is asked of engineers during crunch time, but that's the same way everywhere in the industry":

Everyone likes to pick those nits. I also work in the retail org at Amazon and have only had a crunch time twice in the almost 11 years I've been here (and it lasted two to three weeks both times). Software is hard and planning its implementation and development is hard. Get over yourselves and accept occasional imperfections in the process. (If they are _not_ occasional in your work environment, consider that a suggestion that you get out--Amazon or otherwise).

Anyone saying Amazon is uniformly this or uniformly that is as full of shit as anyone saying it about any other company.

People who read these threads and decide "well, now that I've seen this, there's no way I'd work for Amazon" are doing themselves a disservice, just as much as if they substituted any other company for "Amazon". Collect your data; talk to people that work there--you will get a variety of opinions. Bash-posts on HN and Reddit suffer from severe confirmation bias.

People that like working at Amazon and have had an overwhelmingly positive experience (like me), often don't wade into these threads because separating their signal from noise is really tedious and we have other more fun things to be doing.

Working for Amazon in India is almost like working for an entirely different company and is not a great comparison to working for Amazon in the US.

Cultural norms in the US apply in the US; cultural norms in India apply in India. I've generally found Indian managers and developers to approach the work entirely differently than their US counterparts. Not a negative--just an observation.

There does seem to be a pervasive undercurrent of "if I do good work on my team here in India, I can get out of here and go to the US as soon as my promo goes through". This sentiment naturally comes out in behaviour on teams and around coworkers.

It is often said that people don't leave jobs, they leave managers. I've seen it be true much more often than not.

Are you a white, casually-dressed male with an American-sounding name? If so, it is very unlikely your devices will be scrutinized at all. Outside of that, the probability increases (sometimes by a lot). Hacker News likes to see the long arm of the law reaching into their personal lives where it almost never does. This isn't to say we should like--nor even tolerate--when it does, but you can probably just pack all your usual travel items as you normally would for a domestic flight, and simply be on your way, unmolested.

Are you trying to bring 3 phones, 2 laptops, a tablet, 4 chargers, and assorted other electronics with you? Be prepared for the long arm to reach into your life because you're attracting suspicion. You would be attracting suspicion even without the current political climate, because that much equipment is outside the bounds of normal for your average traveller.

Be an average traveller and no one will give you a second glance.

You generally can't polyfill an operator or things that require changes to language parsing, but you can run it through a transpiler like Babel so it converts everything to an earlier version like ES5 with more widespread and stable feature support.