tracer4201

Do you have a girlfriend or boyfriend? If not, get on that. Go have sex. This is not a suggestion, it’s a prescription.

Have sex, get an emotional attachment, fall in love. Obviously there are risks associated with all this.

I was insanely career obsessed. Found someone I adore. Helped me recalibrate my brain. They didn’t love me back the same, so I had other problems. But I grew a lot as a person.

What is the downside? I was thinking it could compromise software security, although my layman understanding is we’re better off if the open source community finds and makes problems visible?

Or there are other software secrets that we wouldn’t want state adversaries to see, like things that block your access under export control laws?

I think capitalism is a wonderful thing, having been born and lived half my life in communist rule. But in my older age I’m jaded maybe. If you have the means to control media and outright buy out influence and outcomes, of course you don’t need to use brute force to suppress the population. I think that’s the natural evolution of capitalism. It enriches many along the way but ultimately power goes to a smaller and smaller minority.

It’s not exactly the question you’re asking, but what I’m trying to say is, this is the natural outcome of our economic system. Tech organizations involvement in politics is a side effect.

Get a gym membership. Learn to squat, bench press, do some pulling motions.

Drink plenty of water.

Walk. You don’t have to do cardio exercise but try to walk every single day. At least 20-30 minutes. If you take a bus, get off earlier or later so you can walk.

Floss your teeth. If you get gum disease it’s permanent. It’s not that hard to get. Once your gums are diseased, they will recede slowly (or fast), and it will be painful to eat certain foods.

Seriously, please take care of your physical/fitness health and dental health.

No matter how much you love your work, the more you put in, the more others will take advantage of you if it suits them. Draw healthy boundaries. Don’t work every night or weekend. Use that time to read, go into nature, learn about the world, travel, and so on. Anyone who tells you money isn’t everything or “we don’t want people just in it for money” can fuck off. They’re there for MONEY. You don’t need to obsess with money, but your career is a means to financial freedom. Don’t kill yourself especially if your hard work is getting others promotions and making them rich while you merely just stay employed or get meager raises.

Also prioritize family and having a kid earlier than later. You won’t understand until you have a kid, but your children are your most valuable treasure. Once you have child, you’ll do anything for him or her. Bring that joy sooner than later.

I’m in leadership ic role at a big tec company. We pride ourselves in engineering.

hiring bar was dropped. expecting a mid level engineer to work with a byte buffer is considered “too complex” and non differentiated work.

the literal goal is to pump out features written up by mba/product team. none of these mbas use the product mind you. theyre chasing stupid features they think vice presidents want, because the thinking is it will drive promotions.

this is a cynical post and i will stop here. my org has problem of incentives. nothing else. you incentivize wrong things then this happens

At my work, I have colleagues who speak English as a second language. Many of them are using LLMs to up their document and other writing.

It’s actually quite awful. It’s obvious the text is LLM generated because of the verbose, generic writing style. It communicates clearly but without substance. Not gonna lie, I secretly judge these people.

Japanese notebooks and ball point pens. Dedicated notebook for individual projects. Daily planner.

If I really want to focus and stay organized, nothing beats pen and paper. I’ve tried out note taking apps, writing on my iPad, using my husband’s remarkable tablet, and Obsidian. It’s fun and interesting at first but doesn’t scale. I will however type some notes up, when needed, in Obsidian just for the search functionality. I’m still pen and paper first.

Amazon is less of a storefront and more of a logistics business. If Temu or anyone else seriously offered competition to take Amazon’s sales, I imagine they’d just pivot to offering Temu delivery.

Amazons core model is to try a million different things and see what sticks. That’s why they’re horrible at some things, and “ok” at others. They never really double down and deliver a truly amazing experience. The UI is so so. There are ads everywhere. Their electronic devices are pretty third rate toys to give to your 8 year old instead of a more expensive iPad. Even Prime Video mostly looks like shit compared to Netflix, though they do end up copying their interface.

I don’t share your optimism. The US was historically the land of opportunity, though often at the expense of imperialism, violent coupes, and endless wars. With the rise of non traditional/mainstream medias, younger generations see themselves economically imprisoned and can see through the cracks of an elite class that prioritizes its own financial interests above all else.

I hope I am wrong, but the establishment politicians see this danger. Tik Tok is a clear example - the anti Israel narrative, which was never tolerated in the mainstream press, is gaining more and more momentum. Congressional leaders, their financial backers, and Presidential candidates are all advocating some kind of ban or suppression of Tik Tok. And this is merely one example among so many divisive politics in the US.

I don’t think the younger generations will just roll over if you offer them cheap TVs, iPhones, or cheaper Big Macs. Something drastic has to happen.

What problem are we trying to solve?

When I think of holding in memory state, to me it’s less about class or OOP vs something else and more about race conditions, thread safety, possibly idempotency, and proper abstraction design.

Abstraction design meaning, I’m not exposing the keys to the castle or leaking internal details where it might allow another good intentioned programmer to do bad things or introduce some subtle, difficult to reproduce bug.

  > Has anyone ever been promoted to an engineering manager and decided it wasn't for them?

Engineering manger and IC are different jobs. An EM title is never a promotion. It is a career or job role change. The skill sets and value proposition are entirely different.

So much personal stress and in some cases negative team or business impact could be prevented if we stop thinking of management as a promotion and more as a career shift.

If you’re unhappy, think about root causing what specifically it is you’re unhappy about. If you DO want to be a manager but not for this team, that’s a different challenge than if you do not want to manage people at all.

If it’s something you don’t want to do, have a heart to heart with your direct manager and tell him or her how you feel. This is less about quitting - if your manager is worth working for, they’ll give you the right encouragement to stay in the role and help remove obstacles and unnecessary challenges off your plate. Or they should help you transition and return to an IC role.

> It’s about the same as saying “kids just want to drink Tide pods nowadays.” There’s definitely something wrong with kids who do it

Supporting Palestinians is like drinking Tide pod? WOW, what an incredibly inhumane and racist take.

> Hope that we reign in spending in a drastic, unprecedented way (without impacting revenue as well...)?

American politicians, deliberately or out of incompetence, use the crisis of the moment and conveniently forego this topic.

I’m convinced the next US administration HAS to do something about this. I don’t see a way that doesn’t involve both spending cuts and raising taxes.

I don’t like discussing politics on HN, but I think this should be deeply concerning for anyone interested in start ups, technology, or innovation. All of our innovation is enabled by having a somewhat functioning democracy, courts, cops, civic culture, where people have the opportunity to critically think about hard problems and innovate, because they’re not worried so much about near term survival.

You used the word accident and called out an example of the US citizen killed.

In fact, we had military and private contractors commit war crimes, and even the ethical folks did things that contributed to millions getting displaced.

We redefined how we classify male civilians. If you’re a male and end up being in the wrong place, you’re just another casualty and classified as a militant.

Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush clan did some truly horrific things. Kidnapping people with any kind of trial. Dropping bombs in Western Pakistan on weddings because there’s some suspected leader of an organization we don’t like, even if they simply aren’t terrorists but don’t want America in the region.

> It doesn’t work so we keep doing it because we can’t try anything different because what we are doing doesn’t work.

Saying it “doesn’t work” is a stretch, no?

The large tech companies all give similar technical interviews for software engineers. Today, most people hired through this process are probably “good enough”.

And by what metric do I mean good enough? These companies are mostly demonstrating some acceptable level of growth. At the end of the day, that’s all their shareholders care about.

We won’t have meaningful change unless there’s an incentive. You think something is broken, but the key decision makers don’t agree.

Source: 10+ years in big tech

I worked at a big tech company in a staff/principal engineering position. I always had coworkers who didn’t start coding until college, who were better engineers, communicators, and overall leaders than I was. I turned to them for mentorship.

For what it’s worth, I learned to code in grade school.

I wasn’t terrible at my job, and left in that principal role.

Not sure how conclusive my anecdote is, but I 100% do not believe there’s a strong relationship with starting to code earlier in life and being a better coder, engineer, or general employee than someone who started in college or even much later in life.

> But elitism only becomes useful at a particular stage of development. Earning the white belt is almost purely knowledge and a bit of practice. Getting to the black belt requires not just skills, but a mindset: determination, resolution, and yes, snobbiness. You must believe that having a black belt is worth the effort and that having a black belt is better than not having one.

I think it’s even simpler than this white/black belt metaphor.

Driving your career forward requires delegation, scaling yourself through others. Doing this effectively requires having strong opinions. The author is referring to these opinions as elitism, which is jarring to me. It could be elitism or simple pragmatism.

Quite a few posts here are referring to code quality. People often forget that programmers aren’t paid to write the prettiest code or have the most beautiful abstractions. VALUE is what we want to produce.

I once found myself insulting a monolithic code base only to later realize that mess of a code base has shipped in over 10 million devices and a product rated over 4.5 stars on Bestbuy, Amazon, and many more retailers. It’s entire ecosystem had directly and indirectly generated billions of dollars in sales.

Meanwhile, my own teams’ clean code with well thought abstractions hadn’t generated any revenue at all. In fact, this other “piece of shit” that came before paid for all our compensation.

I’ve worked on everything from back end enterprise apps used by day traders to building information retrieval systems for kiosks at airports to embedded software running on a particular eink device.

Everything was directly meaningful to me, insofar as it provided someone value, gave me money for sustenance, and/or was something I was personally extremely interested in.

Meaningful is a relative concept, and I sincerely hope people in this thread don’t fall in a trap of comparing what they’re doing so what others are or are not doing.

I’m mostly interested because Israel is funded by tax dollars I pay, and heavily supported by racist religious people who believe we must support Israel because “they are Gods chosen people”. We don’t share such view for any other country on Earth, and the topic of Israel has been essentially censured in the US. Even now, criticizing Israel is quickly equated with anti Semitism. You can burn flags, insult Presidents, insult any country or statesman on Earth, and it’s all within some acceptable boundary, but the minute you even dare question Israel, the discussion comes to an end.

American politicians will drag their heels at times to address issues impacting Americans, but criticizing Israel shows them immediately speak up.

I think that’s dangerous, and we have to overturn that. And the idea of any particular race being “Gods chosen people” is unacceptably racist. An Israeli person is no better than a person of any other nationality. They are not above criticism. And if your religion says it is, we need to work to completely remove any influence your religion has on our government. Racism is racism, period.

> it started going downhill for us developers on the macOS and ios platform;

You didn’t answer the question. Was there a time you could develop and distribute on iOS without paying the license fee?

> If you are fine with a corporate abusing their control over their platform to exploit money from you, both as a developer and a consumer, then we don't really have anything else to discuss because of our differing economic / political belief on this subject.

This is a logical fallacy — begging the question — when you state a position as an absolute truth.

No one is “fine” with a corporation “abusing their control”. But your argument is based on the premise that charging for an SDK or charging a license fee to build and distribute on iOS or Mac is itself an abusive practice.

The counter argument is that it isn’t. Because anyone could develop and distribute software for Windows or Unix doesn’t mean that that is the only model and anything else is abuse, which you’re claiming as an absolute truth.

I don’t think you answered the ops question. Was there ever a time that you could develop software for Mac or particularly iOS and distribute it without paying the developer license fee?

To be fair - the Unix market is different than iOS apps. And on Windows, anyone could run whatever program… which caused a lot of problems and financial loss. And just because Windows or Unix used those models, why are they the one and only acceptable model?

Picking up Rust is not the same as picking up Python or even Java, in my opinion.

I started learning Rust and C++ at the same time, coming from a world of Java, Python, and Ruby.

If I need to solve a problem in C++, I would much rather write Rust because the compiler actively screams at you when you do bad things.

And in my opinion, the challenging part is learning what those bad things are. In other languages, the compiler doesn’t care. You immediately see your program crash or things fail in subtle, hard to reproduce ways later in production. Rust changes that model.

I disagree with you on the documentation. I think the Rust documentation is superb. I have yet to see any language give nearly as meaningful information when your code fails to compile. Secondly, Rust front loads and throws issues immediately in your face, as opposed to having you discover problems in your code at runtime. I don’t think that makes Rust difficult - it’s forcing you to think about your choices. And particularly it’s making you think about concepts that perhaps you completely overlooked in other languages - thinking about stack vs heap allocation, moving semantics, shared ownership, etc.

If you want to quickly prototype something, Rust isn’t the best language IMO. But if I have a choice between C++ and Rust, I’d go with Rust anyday. If I was starting a new project from scratch and it was more of a web service, I might go with another language over Rust only because I’m more of an expert in Java, Python, etc. and it’s easier to hire developers for those languages than Rust.

But I’m biased. Rust has a special place in my heart. It’s the first language I’ve learned in many years where I felt some sense of accomplishment and did not at all feel like “Oh great, another tool that fundamentally doesn’t add value.”

For my use cases involving Java and iOS interoperability in a multi threaded environment, nothing else came even close.

>However, with Amazon’s own gaming streaming service, called Luna, in testing, it could help transform FireOS into a much more appealing gaming device to enable even more access to games that only require a controller and an internet connection.

I’ve only considered Amazon Fire tablets as a cheap tablet you might give to a child, relative to spending several hundred dollars on an iPad or higher end Android tablet. I never quite understood who is the target audience for these devices though. I was recently in an Amazon Books store and tried the higher end model. It felt very unresponsive and clunky. But I’ll assume Amazon continues to produce these because they help get people into the Prime ecosystem with the tight Amazon Video and Kindle integration?

The worst part on the device I tested was how it has the Kindle app built in. And the main screen was just ads labeled as “recommendations”.

Google is often the default search engine across many operating systems and phones. There’s no apples to apples comparison with Amazon, and before you force this false analogy, let me clarify that you’re arguing a strawman.

The irony is NYT ran an article chastising Amazon for the very thing they also engage in.

I recently had to call NYT to cancel my membership. The person on the other side ran me through a script, and each time I told them I didn’t want their counter offers. It was annoying.

To be honest here, I canceled my NYT subscription because of the very subtle yet obvious propaganda laced in their articles on a recent news event. They present themselves as honest reporters, when in reality there’s language that in a subtle manner takes a clear side and provides a distorted view of a complex situation.

The honest truth in my opinion is the NYT isn’t honest or more objective than other papers. Yet time and time again, their reporting is viewed as gospel.

Not selling on Amazon doesn’t mean you exit the industry. If this was the case, every retailer would have an Amazon presence, which isn’t true either. You’re merely repeating what was stated earlier.

>The person who wins the lowest price box is not the lowest price. It is the lowest price who agreed not to sell on other sites for a lower price than one Amazon. You as the customer are being tricked.

There's no dark pattern involved here. When the buy box doesn't show you the lowest price, you usually see something like "Available for a lower price from these sellers" or some wording like that. In my 15+ years as a Prime customer, I've seen this quite a bit where I can find a competing offer for a lower price, often though with a longer delivery time.

>Where is the chat button? Where can I ask a question? Where can I let Amazon know something was wrong with the refund they sent?

I'm going to assume you're not writing this in bad faith and that this isn't a rhetorical question. From Amazon.com, I see "Customer service" is the second link from the left just below the search box. From that page, I see a big box in the center titled "Returns and Refunds".

>You're also making the assumption that the buy box always offers the lowest price, which isn't true if Amazon are factoring non-price variables like is the manufacture undercutting Amazon on their own site. So as a seller you could be offering the lowest price with the fastest shipping, but still lose the buy box because you had the audacity to offer a better price on your own site or at Walmart.

I'm on Amazon page right now. It tells me that I can get a product the fastest with the buy box offer, or I can get a cheaper price from other "offers". And when I click that link, it shows me higher and lower prices, but the lower prices have a delivery date (actually a range, between X and Y) more than a week out.

Let me start just by saying that the offer is still shown. It's not immediately in the buy box, but as a shopper, I have access to the lower prices and can buy from a different seller. This information is not obfuscated from me or hidden through some dark pattern.

>This in turn creates a very strong incentive to sell your products everywhere for the same price, regardless of your actual costs. So your prices at Walmart and your own site go up.

>If pricing at other stores wasn't a factor in the buy box algorithm, then consumers could find lower prices else where if they wanted to. Thus allowing competitors to slowly loosen Amazon strangle hold on online retail, and reduce prices for consumers.

The incentive goes away if you don't sell on Amazon, right? Any Amazon "strangle" (your word, not mine) only exists because people choose to sell on Amazon, right?

>How can this ever happen if selling cheaper elsewhere loses you the buy box on the biggest online store?

See my previous point. Don't sell on Amazon.

>Again you're completely ignoring the size of Amazon market share here. Who is voluntarily going to give up 50%-60% of all online sales? It's a bit like US ISPs, if Comcast screws with fees stupid prices on your cable contract you can just go to a competitor right, we'll just ignore the fact the competitor is selling 2mb DSL.

I don't agree with this. Companies like Comcast are deemed monopolies because their customers don't have a choice. Just as you stated, Comcast gives me high speed broadband. But my choice is limited to Comcast, and the only competitor (if there even is one in my neighborhood) will offer 2MB DSL.

This is NOT the case with online shopping.

I can purchase an iPad from Apple, Amazon, Best Buy, and a bunch of other websites.

I can purchase my razor blades online from Target, Amazon, Gillette, etc. including several of the grocery stores in my city (who will ship them.

Yes people shop at Amazon, but it's because they choose to. I have the option of not shopping with Amazon. As a matter of fact, I bought 10 "5 Star" brand notebooks on Amazon. I saw later that Wal-Mart had them for $3 instead of $7/notebook. I sent them back to Amazon and got them from Wal-Mart instead.

With internet service, many people don't have a choice but to go with Comcast, Cox, or whichever single provider offers the service in their neighborhood.

The crux of the article was that you lose winning the buy offer if you sell elsewhere cheaper. Okay - so who wins the buy box? Someone who is actually offering a cheaper price, one that’s more enticing for me as the shopper?

How is that hurtful for the consumer? You’re calling that “punishment”, but in fact as a shopper I just want to see the lowest price with the fastest shipping.

The seller fee bit part isn’t relevant. Wal Mart and Target or any other site could well offer lower seller fees - in fact, they’d HAVE to undercut Amazon in order to catch up with Amazon. But that doesn’t mean Amazon has to bring their prices down. I don’t buy that.

One other thing - as a shopper, no other shopping website comes close to Amazon’s customer service.

There is quite a bit to this article that’s disingenuous, for example -

> How do sellers handle these large fees from Amazon, and the inability to charge for shipping? Simple. They raise their prices on consumers. The resulting higher prices to consumers, paid to Amazon in fees by third party merchants, is why Amazon is able to offer ‘free shipping’ to Prime members. Prime, in other words, is basically a money laundering scheme. Amazon forces brands/sellers to bake the cost of Prime into their consumer price so it appears like Amazon offers free shipping when in reality the cost is incorporated into the consumer price.

If pricing on Amazon is too high, consumers won’t buy those products at Amazon and get rid of their Prime memberships too. But this isn’t quite true. Using hyperbole like “money laundering” also doesn’t help the case.

> Amazon also uses its bazooka of cash from Prime members paying high consumer prices, laundered through third party sellers, to distort industries across the economy.

Again, hyperbole. The author merely brushes off the fact that these sellers don’t HAVE to sell on Amazon in the first place. Presumably, Amazon is growing because more and more sellers flock to their website. If it’s a bad deal for sellers, they can sell on other websites. The article makes a one line claim - representing it as a ground truth - that a new business HAS to sell on Amazon. So this is clearly stating that no business can survive if they only have their own store presence or sell on Amazons competitors. I don’t believe this is true (based on a very successful family business). Yes my data point is anecdotal, but if we’re saying no business can survive without the ability to sell on Amazon, then the entire article is moot - the simple reason for breaking up Amazon is that no small business can survive without Amazon.

Again, I don’t think that’s true, and the author knows that - hence, the long wordy article to come at the issue from other angles while sprinkling in hyperbole.

I work in a Principal role at a company whose products or services many people use every day. All of my work is done on on a Mac, which you’d have to pry from my dead cold hands before I’d be willing to go back to a PC (especially Windows).

I didn’t read the rest of the review after finding that sentence. Shockingly, the author is listed as an Executive Editor.

I’m going on a tangent here, but these companies like Wired produce trashy content, lose readership, and then go on to blame anyone and everyone but themselves.