Some excerpts from recent Alan Kay emails - <AUTHOR> http://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/ <comment><USER2> There's an interesting book on the topic discussed in these emails, entitled "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned":

[http://amzn.to/2CtIrRR](http://amzn.to/2CtIrRR)

There's a YouTube talk by the author on the subject here:

[https://youtu.be/dXQPL9GooyI](https://youtu.be/dXQPL9GooyI)

The rough idea is this:

\- creativity often arises by stumbling around in a problem space, or in operating "randomly" under an artificially-imposed constraint

\- modern life is obsessed with metrics and goal-setting, and this has extended into creative pursuits including science, research, and business

\- sometimes, short-term focus on the goal defeats the goal-given aims (see e.g. shareholder value focus)

\- the authors point out that when they were researching artificial intelligence, they discovered that systems that focused too much on an explicitly-coded "objective" would end up producing lackluster results, but systems that did more "playful" exploration within a problem space produced more creative results

\- using this backdrop, the authors suggest perhaps innovation is not driven by narrowly focused heroic effort and is instead driven by serendipitous discovery and playful creativity

I found the ideas compelling, as I do find Kay's description of the "art" behind research.

<comment><USER3> That book was written by computer scientists, and they demonstrate how the optimal search algorithm is often to pick the most unusual thing to try that you haven't tried yet. I'd like to see more discussion about this as an approach to personal development. Many people advise students and new graduates to sample the search space broadly, without detailed goals, just to see what's out there. It almost becomes the "do something every day that scares you" maxim. There is an old saying about "Everything you want in life is waiting just outside your comfort zone."

<comment><USER4> I've not watched the video nor read the book but I take it slightly differently.

Reinertsen, in "Managing the Design Factory", describes the need for companies to generate high value information as efficiently as possible. Using Shannon's theory of information, he argues that low-information events are those events where the likelihood of either success or failure is high. Out of this comes the fact that you maximize the information output when the probability of failure is 50%.

How many of us take risks - professionally or personally - where the probability of failure is 50%?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For anyone who hasn't run across this, Alan has shown up on HN periodically, and the resulting post history is just astonishingly rich: [https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=alankay1](https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=alankay1). Threaded conversations at [https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alankay1](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alankay1).

If you read the threads you'll see that he has frequently continued conversations long after the submission dropped off the HN front page, and many topics have gotten developed further than one usually sees. HN's archives are full of gold and for me this one of the more obvious veins of it.

If anyone wants to spend some time aggregating and collating these writings, as the OP has done from emails, I would see about getting YC to fund the effort, subject to Alan's permission of course. Email firstname.lastname@example.com if you're interested.

<comment><USER6> Irony of ironies!

<comment><USER6> [This bit of pointless & unexplained snark would have been deleted or edited had I revisited in time]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >Socrates didn't charge for "education" because when you are in business, the "customer starts to become right". Whereas in education, the customer is generally "not right".

Very important takeaway!

<comment><USER8> The whole paragraph is gold:

> Socrates didn't charge for "education" because when you are in business, the > "customer starts to become right". Whereas in education, the customer is > generally "not right". Marketeers are catering to what people _want_ , > educators are trying to deal with what they think people _need_ (and this is > often not at all what they _want_ ). Part of Montessori's genius was to > realize early that children _want_ to get fluent in their surrounding > environs and culture, and this can be really powerful if one embeds what > they _need_ in the environs and culture.

This is so true on so many levels. Schools and university came to mind immediately. For me, the most striking fit is to educational articles and blog posts on the web.

When the www was young it was full of stuff that catered my intellectual curiosity. Nowadays _content creation_ is driven by _keyword research_ , _search volume_ and _CPC_. After three paragraphs I usually know this will end in a _call to action_. Not that there wouldn't be any interesting stuff out there, but it is drowned in a sea of ever repeating trivialities.

<comment><USER9> Remember when Google was useful to find good stuff faster instead of driving what should be there ?

<comment><USER10> I remember that when I started googling, I would often go to page 2,3,4,5 to find what I wanted. These days I never go past the first page. I actually had to check now that there was still a page switcher...

What changed the most? How good I am at formulating a query? What kind of information I'm looking for? How good Google is at curating the first page? How much information is available? Sure hope its not that my queries are more trivial, or that my preferences for answers favors simpler,easier ones...

Thankfully I still get lost on Wikipedia (and Youtube), in a kind of what-is- all-this-I-need-to-know-more learning spree.

<comment><USER9> A bunch of factor:

\- we became impatient if not lazy \- google does a huge job at parsing complex queries \- the content is more organized in itself (html semantic markup, meaningful css classes, etc etc)

The other day I tried a tails/tor and .. i cant recall.. ipfs probably. This network is bare, so bare I felt excited just like the 56K days. It quickly went bad because there's a huge % of bad / crazy content, but still I felt entering a more interesting territory as a visitor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The thing is that Licklider's vision of computers as "interactive intellectual amplifiers for all humans, pervasively networked world-wide" has already come to pass, and created huge economies of scale and exponential pressures for compatibility and conformity that didn't exist before.

In the 1970's a few dozen brilliant people could create a completely new and self-contained computer system because the entire computing world was tiny and fragmented. there wasn't the imperative to be compatible to all-pervasive standards (even IBM's dominance in business was being challenged by the minis).

These day if you want to create a new computer system that people will use you need at the minimum to provide a networking stack and a functional web browser, some emulation or compatibility system to support legacy software that people rely on, device drivers for a huge range of hardware, etc. All this not only takes a huge amount of work, it also punctures the design integrity of your system, making it into a huge mountain of compatibility hacks before you even start on your own new concepts. But the deadliest enemy of innovation is the mental inertia of masses of users with a long history of interacting with computers. They are no longer the blank slates who have never seen a computer you had in the 70's.

Even in the realm of art people realized that the romantic or modernistic model of artistic revolution that Kay invokes is untenable and retreated into postmodernism.

<comment><USER12> _> All this not only takes a huge amount of work, it also punctures the design integrity of your system, making it into a huge mountain of compatibility hacks before you even start on your own new concepts._

One possible approach that doesn't require writing a full compatibility layer is virtualization. Run your new system alongside a mature system like Linux, then rig it up so windows can appear inside whatever new environment you come up with. You do still need to write the code to send events and get pixel buffers, but it seems like much less work overall.

<comment><USER13> Then you're constrained by the existing window and input systems, which probably makes many interesting new concepts impossible to implement.

I don't know an alternative except to do everything new within one window, which would be at least as bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone know what happened to HARC ? It was announced in May 2016, with Alan Kay's involvement and Bret Victor's:

[http://blog.ycombinator.com/harc/](http://blog.ycombinator.com/harc/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11679680](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11679680)

In September "eleVR" said it was leaving YC research:

[http://elevr.com/elevr-leaving-ycr/](http://elevr.com/elevr-leaving-ycr/)

I presume these e-mail excerpts are inspired by the end of HARC too? What happened?

In the thread about first year reports a couple months ago, someone suspects that funding has ended too. Also, Bret Victor's work and name are conspicuously missing from the first year reports.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15564072](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15564072)

[https://harc.ycr.org/reports/](https://harc.ycr.org/reports/)

<comment><USER15> Thanks for the link by @j_s, I found following insightful comment by you (@chubot):

> The misleading thing about Linux is that it IS IN FACT a big idea -- it's > just not a technological idea. We already knew how to write monolithic > kernels. But the real innovation is the software development process. The > fact that thousands of programmers can ship a working kernel with little > coordination is amazing. That Linus wrote git is not an accident; he's an > expert in software collaboration and evolution.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15164092](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15164092)

From your comment, I think the funding and development process of these post Bell Lab/PARC research projects might need a paradigm change from technology idea oriented to social development oriented due to the reality of our highly networked social environment (the dream of Licklider).

If we read the CRAZY eleVR thread as a tree/forest, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15162957](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15162957)

We can see that how much misunderstanding of each other exists in our tech community. There are much deeper social development problems to be solved than simple VC or philanthropy funding.

@vihart was right saying

> HN. You're a weird place.

It is a more fundamental problem that vihart and gang can't solve. And that would be an opportunity at another meta level.

Think what Lick would do.

<comment><USER14> Thanks, glad you got something out of the comment.

You have a point that, ironically, the success of Licklider's vision may have changed the nature of collaboration for the worse in some ways. It's been a huge net positive, in that humanity as a whole is more productive, but there are things that have been lost.

(Or maybe another way to look at it is that Licklider/Engelbart's vision has been watered down, and you could solve these communication problems with better software design.)

Another example I recall is that Rob Pike said that Bell Labs was a wonderful environment because everyone had to physically sit in the same room, huddled around big shared computers. There is a natural exchange of ideas in that environment, which leads to big research breakthroughs. When Ethernet and personal workstations came around, suddenly you could sit at your desk and close the door and put your headphones on.

I personally noticed that irony at my own job. Often people would be talking more to people in a remote office than the person sitting next to them. And sometimes people would chat electronically with someone in their own office -- e.g. if they didn't want to take off your headphones or disturb other officemates!

I also wonder what a new model for funding basic research looks like. It seems like YCombinator would be a logical entity to fund such research, but as far as I can tell, it was a failed experiment.

And I think there is some danger in longing for the "golden age". I was reminded in reading the "Dream Machine" that a lot of it was driven by fear of the Soviets (Sputnik, etc.). And I also wonder if what made it work back then is no longer present, for better or worse.

<comment><USER15> The fact that we are having this conversation across time and space shows the power of Lick's "Intergalactic Computer Network". We have reasons to be optimistic.

On the other hand, on top of the computer hardware/software communication layers where this conversation takes place, there is a profound layer that we seem to take for granted and not consciously aware of (like fish in the water), i.e., written language composed and consumed by real human being (English in this case). To communicate effectively with this distributed (non- local in space) and asynchronous (non-local in time) layer, we need more contexts other than the words themselves. In Rob Pike's Bell Labs and Alan Kay's bean-bag-chaired PARC, local synchronous face-to-face communication would be much more effective because the audience were from the same background and shared the same context.

Let's take a look at the contexts of Bret Victor's blog post "Some excerpts from recent Alan Kay emails". These are excerpts of private written communication (emails) between Alan Kay and Bret Victor. We could imagine what Alan had in mind when he wrote those emails, or what Bret had in mind when he read them, further more, why Bret made those excerpts and posted them on his blog. However, since we were neither Bret nor Alan, we can only read them within the constraint of our own contexts. We can only guess what message Bret wanted to send with his blog and we are not even sure we (HN community) are his intended audience.

I am sure there are some YC funders reading this and the fact that we don't see any of them making a statement here shows that they are also under the constraint of their contexts. So I guess the challenges and solutions to funding of research lie upon these contexts as well.

It is all about pink and blue planes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > An example of the vision was Licklider's "The destiny of computers is to > become interactive intellectual amplifiers for all humans, pervasively > networked world-wide". This vision does not state what the amplification is > like or how you might be able to network everyone in the world.

i am going through licklider's 'the dream machine' book. it is quite long, and dense but ties together lots of individual threads (for me at least) that were kind of floating loose otherwise. i had known about luminaries in the field (and their work) specifically, licklider, shannon, norbert-weiner, cerf and kahn, metcalfe, von neumann, vannaver bush (to name a few) but this book brings them together.

interestingly though, licklider's background was in psychology, as opposed to ee/maths. did we lose some of the diversity of perspective ?

another book, that i found to be pretty good is 'the idea factory', it complements the 'dream machine' book quite well.

edit-001 : fmt changes, and added reference to another book.

<comment><USER17> > interestingly though, licklider's background was in psychology, as opposed > to ee/maths. did we lose some of the diversity of perspective ?

The answer to this question is almost right in the emails: the focus of funding research switched from visionary work of defining problem space to exploration of solution space. Engineers are people who are educated, perhaps sometimes predisposed, to solve problems, not find problems worth solving.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The name Licklider is mentioned a couple of times. Recently I read a fascinating account of his work. Great read for those who want to know more about the history of computing and the internet: [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FIPHEXM/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FIPHEXM/)

</comment><comment><USER19> > The destiny of computers is to become interactive intellectual amplifiers > for all humans, pervasively networked world-wide". This vision does not > state what the amplification is like or how you might be able to network > everyone in the world.

That's a vision that recognizes the value in creating _tools_ , not constrained solutions for the _current_ problem. Freedom can be frightening[1], but letting people explore what is possible with your new tool sometimes leads to unexpected uses and the occasional paradigm-shifting discovery.

[1] (with apologies to DHH[2]) If we give people unconstrained tools, they might change the String class to shoot out fireworks at inappropriate time!

[2] [https://vimeo.com/17420638#t=27m27s](https://vimeo.com/17420638#t=27m27s)

</comment><comment><USER20> Another way of thinking about this is that large companies have basically decided that executing optimally is more important than necessarily creating huge leaps themselves. They can just focus on making money, create a sizable amount of cash, and acquire new technology.

I'm sure there's a cultural effect here as well. Seems like there are fewer large companies that are willing to just let technologists "muck around for a bit" swinging for the fences without some kind of goal.

But, I just wonder, if VC-funded startups are where new tech grows, we end up just focusing on incremental improvements, instead of potential large leaps.

<comment><USER21> > Seems like there are fewer large companies that are willing to just let > technologists "muck around for a bit"

I wonder if this is true. Many of the major computer industry companies have labs: Google, Microsoft, IBM ... (Apple? Facebook? Amazon?)

I wonder if it's more or less than before.

<comment><USER22> Compared to Bell Labs or PARC, these are purely applied labs.

<comment><USER21> Thanks. Do you know of any source that talks about this issue (applied vs basic in the major corporate labs) and on a somewhat sophisticated level?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What this makes me wonder is, if the problem is not enough funding for visionary work, or more accurately that modern funders misunderstand how and why to find visionary work, then what will change their minds?

Because I feel like I've read a few of these posts, watched similar talks, and I nod along and agree every time. Only problem is, I'm not a wealthy benefactor, director of a research institute, or a business exec with control of discretionary R&D funding.

Where do those people hang out, what would convince them like this post convinces me, and is anyone working on that?

<comment><USER24> I think it is hard to get people to understand what they do not understand yet, actually what they have opposing experiences to. It seems to me making money is easy if you a) work hard b) are extremely goal driven (and obviously you need to be sufficiently smart). Now this seems to be working in research too, where the extremely goal driven part means you focus on publishing research papers in prestigious places.

I think it is working in research (given for example that some of the papers in conferences like POPL are just great). Of course you won't hear from those instances where it is not working (until it does).

The problem is you somehow have to decide who to give money to, and you cannot possibly know who carries a vision inside of them that they are actually able to realise given enough funding and time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > set up deadlines and quotas for the eggs. Make the geese into managers. Make > the geese go to meetings to justify their diet and day to day processes. > Demand golden coins from the geese rather than eggs. Demand platinum rather > than gold. Require that the geese make plans and explain just how they will > make the eggs that will be laid. Etc.

\-- I have seen these types of situations so many times while project implementation.

</comment><comment><USER26> Is the underlying assumption behind this text is that less innovation is happening right now? Are the billions poured in AI not counting?

<comment><USER27> The comparison is with an environment where the mouse, windowing and Ethernet were created.

Billions poured into AI have produced some interesting tricks but little that changed the entire world of computing in the way those things have.

<comment><USER26> That's funny you should mention "the mouse, windowing and Ethernet", because in the last 5 years the majority of people have stop using all 3 of those (thanks to mobile). So that takes care of the "little that changed the entire world of computing" argument.

Yes, billions have been poured into AI and we still have no strong AI. That just shows that it's a problem that is way more complicated that inventing the concept of a pointing device, making computers talk to each other, or having applications show something on a screen that isn't text. The people in the 80s weren't smarter (or dumber) than the people of today, there were just a lot of low hanging fruits back then.

<comment><USER28> > because in the last 5 years the majority of people have stop using all 3 of > those (thanks to mobile).

Even if this were true, which I disagree with, it has changed the world. Just because we don't still use the iPod anymore doesn't make it any less brilliant.

> The people in the 80s weren't smarter (or dumber) than the people of today, > there were just a lot of low hanging fruits back then.

They didn't just take the low hanging fruit. In the 60s it was assumed that computers would just get bigger and bigger. They had to take the highest hanging fruit that everyone thought was ridiculous. They had to envision an entirely different world. So perhaps they weren't more intelligent but they had a more powerful vision of the future.

You're probably laughing at similar people today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Makes me wonder, what could we do, or what could current organizations do to recreate that environment of research and creativity in today's (and tomorrow's) world? Also, what do you do in your own life (if any) to create that sort context that is conductive to this kind of creativity?

<comment><USER30> Committees impose compromises and conditions on funding, so govt or public company money won't work, as Kay points out. It must be pvt money, like the Medicis funding the renaissance. Something like the Gates Foundation. It could be a prestige project for Bezos or Zuck.

<comment><USER31> DARPA was government though

<comment><USER32> And DARPA is nowhere near as good as ARPA was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > Parc was "effectively non-profit" because of our agreement with Xerox, which > also included the ability to publish our results in public writings (this > was a constant battle with Xerox).

Parc was "effectively non-profit" because there was no way to collect or monetize reams of user data like there is today. If there had been, either Kay wouldn't have gotten that agreement or Parc would have been much more selective about what constituted "results."

For example: how many companies have solved the talk-to-our-computers-and-our- computers-talk-back problem now?

<comment><USER34> > there was no way to collect or monetize reams of user data like there is > today

Xerox was at the time the world leader in handling literal reams.

A huge portion of data processing was related to managing customer data, mailing lists, etc.

<comment><USER33> I'm talking about a different type of user data-- what would be input into things like visual programming languages and devices that Alan Kay talks about-- Grail, light pen inputs, etc. I assume what Kay is talking about is the ability to publish insights, data, and specifications for the languages and UIs that were being developed at the time. So when you see Kay doing user studies working with kids, the stuff he made public was the actual research on what was learned about human-computer interaction during that time, languages used, developed, etc. It wasn't the position of the kids' eye, fingerprint of their typing patterns, mouse movement patterns, etc.

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I've never seen anything Kay wrote from the 70s or 80s that discussed the implications of mining user data on such an enormous and regular basis as is currently done. And I doubt Xerox itself thought of that category of user data as being valuable outside of research, or in any way significant the way "customer data, mailing lists, etc." were. But today, that user data is assumed to be valuable and can cheaply be collected and monetized. So even if some Parc-like team exists today, the results will be practically locked-down to keep a competitive advantage over others. Or it will make much smaller strides with specific goals in mind-- like Mozilla with Rust. Or it will clone and improve upon existing proprietary technology and make it available to the public-- like GNU.

It's a bit like reading someone wax nostalgic about Bitcoin's initial bootstrapping mechanism and complaining that today's altcoins don't put enough emphasis on distributing the tokens to people who aren't speculators. That's fine as a description of a problem, but its a fairly toothless observation in terms of solving the problem. Distributing tokens when nearly nobody is watching is a completely different problem from distributing them when everyone is not only watching but also speculating. Similarly, having a research team do work that is a pubic good when nobody thinks the data generated is something that can be directly monetized is a completely different problem from trying to do the same when the greater part of the economy depends on _everybody_ watching, collecting, and monetizing the data that your software/hardware generates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This bit

"An important part of any art is for the artists to escape the "part of the present that is the past", and for most artists, this is delicate because the present is so everywhere and loud and interruptive. For individual contributors, a good ploy is to disappear for a while"

reminded me of John Carmack explaining in his .plans how he would go off and seclude himself for a couple of weeks to start a new iteration of the id technology.

</comment><comment><USER36> I have intimately enjoyed the work of Engelbart, Kay, Nelson, Victor, etc over these years. They make computer history meaningful and believable.

</comment><comment><USER37> It is a very difficult narrative. Mainly because while reading it, I had to think constantly about survivorship bias and appeal to authority. Would I really read this if it was written by a 20 year old without a track record? Or how many Alan Key's are out there that completely failed and would prescribe a totally different approach and attribute the cause and effect on other factors?

I also totally get the point of funding problem finding versus funding business plans that are full of bullshit and pretend to have a risk free solution with a play book that just needs some money to execute it linearly step-by-step. So, for that part it is written very well and the point is clear.

Another topic is: would all kind of innovations really emerge if the funding mechanism was radically different in the last 20 years? Would we see all kinds of big leaps or was ARPA-Parc just a serendipity moment that couldn't be repeated no matter what the funding structure was?

<comment><USER38> I think Parc was a unique "a serendipity moment". These Cambrian Explosion type moments happen frequently in history: high creativity in which a new form is developed, followed by an increasing focus on small incremental improvements, and finally stagnation. The amount of potential a new form has determines how long this process takes.

I believe that for workstation/desktop computing we have already hit stagnation. I also suspect that programming languages have not advanced in any significant way since around 1990. By this perhaps surprising claim, I mean that the languages available today are no more capable than those available in the 1980s.

<comment><USER39> I don't know how you're defining "capable"; I'd take the view that Haskell/Scala/... are immensely more effective than anything that was comparably mainstream in 1990 (and that Haskell/Scala/... development in practice today is a lot more effective than Haskell in the '90s, even if a language that's notionally the same was available), and that the interesting research languages of today have made similar progress beyond the interesting research languages of 1990. It takes a frustratingly long time for things to percolate into the mainstream, so it's easy to think that, say, ML existed in 1970, and forget that ML is still a long long way ahead of what were commonly used industrial languages even as late as 1990.

<comment><USER38> I would define "capable" in terms of developer productivity--the time it takes to deliver quality software. For example, if you decided to write a DNS server from scratch would choosing Haskell or Scala (both fine languages) really enable a massive (order of magnitude) improvement over choosing Smalltalk, C, Ada, or Common Lisp? I doubt it. What we do benefit from is the availability of libraries, IDE's, and various frameworks. These, I would argue, rather than innate abilities of the modern languages are what enable us to be more productive (assuming that we are).

<comment><USER39> > For example, if you decided to write a DNS server from scratch would > choosing Haskell or Scala (both fine languages) really enable a massive > (order of magnitude) improvement over choosing Smalltalk, C, Ada, or Common > Lisp?

Well, for a sufficiently low defect rate, I suspect it would take an order of magnitude longer (for normal developers) to achieve it in C, Smalltalk, or most Lisps. Ada perhaps not, but then maybe it would've taken the order of magnitude longer to implement, particularly if you factor in making enough money to buy the development tools first. Then as now, the future is not evenly distributed.

I mean, you're undeniably right on one level: for a small, standalone executable whose main task is bit-banging, where a high defect rate is acceptable, it was possible to bash that out 20 years ago at a similar speed to what you can do in today's languages. But I think that's actually a much smaller niche than it first appears, and not where the focus of our efforts has been because that's not actually what businesses most need.

> What we do benefit from is the availability of libraries, IDE's, and various > frameworks. These, I would argue, rather than innate abilities of the modern > languages are what enable us to be more productive (assuming that we are).

I think the ability to write long-term-maintainable, general-purpose libraries or frameworks is actually very tightly tied to the languages we use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Are the full emails availabe somewhere?

</comment><comment><USER41> _> Most don't think of the resources in our centuries as actually part of a human-made garden via inventions and cooperation, and that the garden has to be maintained and renewed._

Just right.

</comment><comment><USER42> What if a stepping stone to UBI was a basic income to everyone that's demonstrated some technical aptitude? If scientists and engineers didn't have to work for, say Zuckerberg, to survive and instead because they genuinely wanted to collaborate, maybe the tech giants wouldn't be so disproportionately powerful. And creativity in the tech world would skyrocket.

<comment><USER43> No need to comstrain our self to engineers. There are probably lots, and lots, of people that would produce more value on their own agenda.

<comment><USER44> And there would be plenty more that would produce far less.

<comment><USER45> Is that a fact or a fear?

<comment><USER44> "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."

UBI has a lot wrong with it, but I'll just start and end with a first principle: Taxation is theft and therefore, government and UBI are immoral.

I advocate for freedom and consent, especially as it pertains to economics. The income I earn through producing goods and services that I exchange voluntarily with other individuals should be mine to keep; all of it. Anything less is not freedom and certainly not consent.

<comment><USER21> What about all the goods you consume that you do not pay for, but were developed over the decades, centuries, and millennia and by your contemporaries too: Language, liberty, civil rights, the system of laws, security, roads, economics, finance, wheels, computers, mathematics, much of health care and education. Are you paying the Einstein estate for relativity? King James' translation team for their Bible? Alan Kay for all he did that you use? All the FOSS developers? The Suffragettes for your vote?

If not for taxation, who will pay for the police that keep you safe, the education programs that likely educated you (assuming you had some publicly funded education) and most of your customers, employees, and business partners? Public health that prevents epidemics? The list goes on forever.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Taking Down The Bitcoin Network - <AUTHOR> http://nerdr.com/shutting-down-bitcoin-really-taking-down-the-bitcoin-network/

<comment><USER2> This is mentioned only tangentially, but how essential are exchanges to the liquidity of Bitcoin today? If most trading is done through exchanges, as opposed to P2P, then couldn't the market be seriously disrupted by DDoSing the primary exchanges (Mt.Gox and the like) for a few days, thus freezing out most casual users and causing a panic?

edit: I'm only a casual user myself, so there may be reasons why this isn't a practical concern, but I am curious.</comment>


The Lemonade Enema - <AUTHOR> http://www.thomas-morris.uk/the-lemonade-enema/ <comment><USER2> > Before the Suicide Act of 1961 it was illegal to kill oneself.

That's certainly interesting. I wonder if it carried the death penalty..

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the first comment in the article explains it.

Its basically an IV, getting in fluids when they can't be administered orally.

</comment><comment><USER4> Avoid rectal ginger ale. Horse trader secrets should not be applied to patients.

</comment><comment><USER5> Sounds like it allowed to avoid dehydration. Probably not the worst way of doing it [IANAD]

</comment><comment><USER6> "Making you grateful for modern medicine."

</comment><comment><USER7> Not just a lemonade enema, but even more perverse: An enema made with lemonade thrown up by a nurse.

<comment><USER8> I don't believe that is what "throw up a clyster" means. If you google it, that particular phrasing is not uncommon to this story. To me, from context (I have no special knowledge), "throw up a clyster" means to mix a clyster, not regurgitate it.

<comment><USER3> I'm guess its like knocking up (a clyster)... Which doesn't mean getting it pregnant.</comment></comment></comment>


Coronavirus Brings American Decline Out in the Open - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-29/coronavirus-brings-american-decline-out-in-the-open <comment><USER2> Hopefully it's not a decline but a great awakening</comment>


Why we chose pnpm over Yarn for our monorepo - <AUTHOR> https://www.takeshape.io/articles/why-we-switched-from-yarn-to-pnpm/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm helping the TakeShape team to document more of our behind-the-scenes decision making. This ended up being a fascinating look at the decisions behind picking the right package manager for a monorepo.

If your project is similarly structured, we hope this helps you out! Would love to hear about any similar experiences you've had, too.</comment>


The deadly secret of China's invisible armada - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/specials/china-illegal-fishing-fleet/index.html <comment><USER2> The Chinese are literally going to empty the oceans at this rate</comment>


Everyone is quitting - <AUTHOR> https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/home/everyone-is-quitting <comment><USER3> Last time there negative press about Amazon's culture, Bezos wrote an email encouraging people to contact him directly if they suffered abuse.

Apparently if you actually try it, you get fired:

[https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/home/fired- for...](https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/home/fired-for- contacting-jeff)

<comment><USER4> > Bezos wrote an email encouraging people to contact him directly if they > suffered abuse.

> Apparently if you actually try it, you get fired

Apparently, firing ensures that there is no further "abuse".

<comment><USER5> The white-collar version of "beatings will continue until morale improves"?

<comment><USER6> More like "Beheadings will continue until morale improves."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Everytime I hear these stories, there are 2 things that go through my mind.

1) I'm never going to work at Amazon

2) If you're judging a company based on the experiences of those who are dissatisfied, isn't that always going to be heavily biased?

At any large company, there will be many people who are unhappy and dissatisfied. If you go out looking for stories from such people, and compile them into a single digest, it's going to make any company look dysfunctional.

Using a glassdoor-esque rating system seems like the best way to judge a company. And Amazon's rating there is 3.4 ([https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Amazon-com- Reviews-E6036.h...](https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Amazon-com- Reviews-E6036.htm)). Which is nowhere near Google (4.4) or Facebook (4.5), but it isn't horrible either. It's even slightly above average (3.3) across all companies in Glassdoor.

Which does kind of make sense... no tech company can churn out great technology products over many years, if the work-culture is dysfunctional. Purely for that reason alone, I'm sure Bezos would put a lid on how bad the work culture at Amazon can possibly get.

All of which is to say... I get the feeling that Amazon is probably an _okay_ place to work. It's not great. It's probably a little below-average for the tech industry. But it's probably not as dysfunctional as these reviews and horror stories seem to suggest.

<comment><USER8> Amazon is large company. A really large company. Like all large companies, there are good/great departments and bad ones.

Sometimes, the people part of the bad ones wake up and start bitching, then you get this.

Google has great reviews, but it has its share of bad departments. It also has a lot of koolaid drinkers, so the people who work in those just bitch about it a lot to their friends and it never goes any further than that... Eventually someone will post a NYT article about it and make Google sounds totally horrible because of those localized issues, just like Amazon. Or maybe they'll just keep drinking the koolaid. Who knows!

<comment><USER9> > Amazon is large company. A really large company. Like all large companies, > there are good/great departments and bad ones.

I don't buy this as an excuse. There are too many stories about Amazon culture to write them all off as a loud minority. Either Amazon has _more_ bad departments than other companies or the bad ones are just _worse_. Either way I don't care, I don't want to work in a toxic environment and am not going to coin-flip that I get put into one of the good ones.

<comment><USER8> from the people I know who work there, yeah, there's a bit more bad ones than at other places for sure.

Though I blame it more on their slightly looser hiring practices. A lot of people get hired there that have no business working as engineers on hard problems anywhere. Then Amazon does what most tech companies seem to have trouble doing: can them (they should not have hired them in the first place, but still). Then they write stories about it complaining about how great they were and were canned.

<comment><USER10> > A lot of people get hired there that have no business working as engineers > on hard problems anywhere. Then Amazon does what most tech companies seem to > have trouble doing: can them (they should not have hired them in the first > place, but still).

You're suggesting Amazon struggles not because of bad management (as almost every story suggests) but because their developers aren't skilled enough? That's a really strange claim on the face of it.

<comment><USER8> More people say Trump would make a great president than people say Amazon is a bad place to work. Tons of people saying something doesn't make it true.

That said, they totally have bad management. Like the majority of tech companies minus a couple of shiny ones. What I'm saying is that, aside from the fact they are a pretty visible target among tech companies with shitty management, one of their main issues is that they have very lax entry requirements, so not only people bitch about the real issues, they ALSO bitch about non-issues because a large segment of their devs suck. Yes.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, when I quit %80 of my team had already quit because our manager was terrible. They were not bad engineers. He literally was trained to be a prison guard, and was managing programmers as if they were prisoners.

Silly of you to claim amazon has lax hiring standards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I thought this was pretty funny (from The Onion a year ago):

"Jeff Bezos Assures Amazon Employees That HR Working 100 Hours A Week To Address Their Complaints"

[http://www.theonion.com/article/jeff-bezos-assures-amazon- em...](http://www.theonion.com/article/jeff-bezos-assures-amazon-employees-hr- working-100-51121)

<comment><USER13> > Nothing matters more to me than the well-being of our employees, and our HR > staff will continue to work their fingers to the bone— not seeing their > families or friends or anything at all outside their offices [...]

Is their HR outsourced? Because they should also be their employees, right? :D

EDIT: Judging from the down votes, I guess that someone didn't get the sarcasm. :)

<comment><USER14> That was the joke :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Just more fodder for my mental reasoning for why Amazon is on my lengthy blacklist of companies I will never work for. It's kind of amazing to me how many companies in the tech sector have given up even the vestige of being about technology and how it benefits people in favor of being some of the most ruthless and sharky people in the business world.

There was a point in my life where I'd say I'd never again work in government, finance, or healthcare related companies, and now I actually find I'd rather do that because management politics is /less cutthroat/ and more reasonable in those industries than it is in tech. I hope maybe we'll see a real revival in the tech industry one of these days, but so many of the companies that have made it big have done it by stomping on the people who actually matter. Tech these days is all about big egos fueled by big dollars, but the numbers don't actually matter so things are irrational from the top all the way down.

At least in finance, the numbers are all that matter at the end of the day. At least in healthcare there's a semblance of care given to the patients. At least in government there's an understanding if not a fulfillment of the social contract. In tech all we have are douchebags with big wallets and bigger egos (Bezos, Ellison, et al) destroying the lives of their employees (and sometimes their customers) to enrich themselves at the expense of all others. It's completely pathological.

<comment><USER16> >in favor of being some of the most ruthless and sharky people in the business world.

A lot of techies, especially young guys, are hyper-competitive from very early on. I think a lot of shops have a problem where the cut-throats are a good part of the staff, then these guys start graying a bit, have kids, etc and realize they can't keep up but they've already created a cut-throat culture. So they burn out and move onto a company with better benefits and values.

Its easy to blame CEOs, and obviously they should share the blame here, but a lot of this culture is grassroots. The most miserable environments I've been in are CS classes and early career tech work. Holy shit, are the egos huge and the attitudes bad. Social skills in IT are below average in general in my experience, so we're talking a lot of serious and dedicated misanthropes with stereotypical male social aggression, bullying, and intimidation. (gee, women don't feel comfortable in CS classes, I wonder why?)

The real question is why aren't we teaching the values of work-life balance, win-win, etc from early on. Is it schooling with its emphasis with grades and "doing better than the other guy?" By the time it gets to the CEO level, its already been ingrained in society. My pet theory is that CEO behavior just reflects the rest of us. If it didn't they'd be kicked out of by the board or an employee uprising. A lot of people love Bezos and his heavy-handed ways, in fact, they think this is why Amazon products provide such a good value.

As we move towards automation and post-scarcity these questions are going to become important. It may be the case that today's batch of CEO bad guys are the last generation as GMI and other concepts become political realities to handle later stage capitalism, economic drive-downs, loss of jobs via automation, and lower costs of living.

<comment><USER17> > schooling with its evidence on "doing better than the other guy"...

Is this culture common at many tech-focused universities? It certainly wasn't at MIT 5 years ago.

<comment><USER18> Yes, I can't speak for MIT but where I went to school your grades basically dictated where you ended up placed in internships.

Grading on a curve also fosters competition by its very nature. Doing well on a test doesn't mean mastering the material, it means beating 90% of the class to ride the curve to an A.

<comment><USER17> Yea grades as a zero sum game really decreases collaboration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> PSA: In case you need more context, just go to the parent url:

[https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/home](https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/home)

Which from my understanding is a collection of anonymous rants from Amazon employees, and the posted link is just an example.

As someone already posted, it would be interesting to hear if someone in HN can provide some counterexample, or if the rants are spot on.

<comment><USER20> Let's assume the rants are true for the most part. How is it possible that so many people work for Amazon despite the antics, especially in Seattle where it should be possible to get a similar job elsewhere. Are there benefits people work towards while coping with the toxic workplace?

<comment><USER21> The median tenure is 1 year at Amazon. Lots of people cycle through there. Though plenty of people stay for a while. They pay alright and it's not too difficult to get hired.

Also, when I was working there I had a difficult time reconciling myself to how bad it was to work there. On paper it doesn't seem so bad. You get to work on pretty interesting stuff sometimes, you make good money, typically you only have to work 40 hour work weeks, etc. I convinced myself to walk away from a good chunk of money just in bonuses to get out of there, some people might be able to stick it out longer or find the money harder to leave behind.

The problem is that having such a huge portion of the economy being involved in knowledge work is a relatively new thing, and we don't understand the differences between knowledge work and physical work. And especially we don't have thoroughly established standards on what constitute good and bad conditions for knowledge work. We tend to think that sitting in a chair for 8 hours a day is "easy", but it very much is not. A stressful working environment for a knowledge worker is just as bad if not worse than a physical stressful job working extended hours. I only spent a year at Amazon, and most of the time I probably didn't even put in full 40 hour weeks, but I hated it there. In comparison I view the time I spent years ago doing data entry at sometimes up to 70 or 80 hours a week during peak times as comparatively inconsequential. Depending on the team you're on and so forth, working at Amazon can be a painful and stressful experience.

Take being on call for example. In theory this isn't so bad, it's good to give devs exposure to how the ops side of things works, and it's in theory good to give them ownership of their own mistakes so that they have incentive to write good code. The problem is, you're not in charge. You're never going to get permission to dump the resources into making everything run well, ever. Most teams have other priorities and they don't have enough resources to spare to allow you to properly fix the code you're responsible for. Worse, it's not even your code, it's code that was written by someone else years ago who also left years ago. And the next person is just going to get whatever mess you leave behind when you leave. So in the average case you can't actually work to improve things, so being on call is going to always be an extra pain, and a significant intrusion into your theoretically off-work life. Worse, it'll push you behind on all the other stuff you need to deliver.

Meanwhile, you have all the typical office BS of politics, ranking, bad corporate culture, reorgs, etc. that you have to deal with day to day. Some people manage to find good teams in that mess, and others manage to just turn off whatever makes people care about work and just suffer through it for the paycheck. But for a lot of people, more so the more you care, it'll be a stressful nightmare. And the easiest way to avoid dealing with all those problems is to just leave, which lots of people do.

<comment><USER22> "it's not too difficult to get hired" \- is this right? I've had friends go through 3-4 (I think five, for one) rounds of interviews.

<comment><USER23> I interviewed there several years ago and although the interview process was long (several phone interviews and then a full day on-sight) it never really felt like a hard interview process. Of course after I interviewed there I heard nothing from them for 2 months, assumed they weren't interested, then they gave me a written offer out of the blue for a completely different job that had nothing to do with what I'd interviewed for and wasn't really aligned with my skills or interests, so I have no idea what kind of bizzaro twilight zone interview process I might have fallen into.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Almost everything I've heard about employment at Amazon has been negative.

Now obviously, I can't say whether that's fair to the company, however it must be costing them a lot of money. I bet there are a lot of people that have heard the din of politics and would never consider working there.

Are there any HN readers that are currently working at Amazon and that are happy?

<comment><USER25> I worked there as an SDE for ~3 years, until recently (in Seattle, in a core business area) and liked it a lot.. As far as I could tell, most of the people in my organization were very content with their jobs. We've of course talked about the negative reputation about the work environment. It seems like those conditions must exist _somewhere_ , to hear this much about it, but they must be in other parts of the company since they're totally unlike what I've seen.

That or it existed until several years ago and the rumors have a time delay in coming out.

<comment><USER26> Other face posts mention a structure of hiring bonus (getting less after 2 years) and some 4 year reason to stay. Can you elaborate?

<comment><USER27> An example of salary from one wholly-owned Amazon subsidiary: Base salary 78k. First Year signing bonus: 30k, 10 RSUs vest after first year Second Year signing bonus 25k, 30 RSUs vest after second year Third year & Fourth year, 40 RSUs vest after every 6 months of employment

This was directly from an entry level offer and it is general practice to get a salary increase at annual reviews and more RSUs for after your fourth.

Like many RSUs, if you leave before your RSUs vest, you forfeit them. This is pretty much your 4 year incentive to stay.

EDIT: Clarifying RSU forfeiture

<comment><USER28> So when the first and second year RSU's mature and you quit, you can still sell the 20 RSU's though right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I got a glimpse of the craziness just interviewing there. I enjoy telling that story (sorry mentioned it many times here in the past).

* They missed first phone call.

* Then on interview day my future manager was not there. Heck, I suspect they didn't even know I was supposed to come in (yes, I did check my email 3 times that morning to make sure I wasn't crazy).

* People I talked to expected to be told about the stupid leadership principles. I talked more about those than actual cool stuff I did with distributed systems. One would think Amazon would care about distributed systems, but I guess not...

* Forgot about me during lunch. I was just left in a room by myself for an hour. After some point I started to walk around aimlessly hoping someone would ask if I am supposed to be there (I even had a funny comeback line ready)

* After promising to get back to me in 2 days, got back in 3 weeks.

* Didn't get the offer. Feels like dodged a bullet.

Take it as an anecdote, a fluke, but I see it as pointing to a systemic issue. I can see some problems, but it was just too many in row. From various people, at various points in time.

<comment><USER30> So what would the funny comeback line have been?

<comment><USER29> "I am here to steal your CA private key" ;-)

Then probably ask them how they like their job or such.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Worked at amazon for 4 years in late 90s and early 2000s. I think there are two distinct employment experiences: If the company (that is, your team and hierarchy) found you promising, the rewards were usually good, at that time that meant incentive stock options. More importantly, you were given significant managerial responsibility and opportunity to drive strategic initiatives. If you fell into this group, you could be reasonably well off in in 4-5 years, and wealthy in 10. Your job, while demanding, was generally fulfilling. For those that didn't fall into this group (by my guess about 80% didn't make the cut,) life was more brutish. Significant stress, poor rewards, and no possibility of advancement. The company didn't really care if you stayed or not, and actively managed you for maximum output. My guess was it usually took about a year for management to make decision as to which group you fell in. So my advice, join Amazon if you feel you can really be good (both technically, as well as in your ability to manage the politics of a large organization) The politics itself was not anymore than you would find in any org that size. One just had to make a point to understand and work the system.

<comment><USER32> So, basically like every other medium- and large-sized company. Get into the small, privileged "in" crowd and you're smooth sailing, up the hierarchy and up the pay scale. Otherwise, get on the treadmill--you're going to have as much value as possible burnt out of you until you quit or get replaced with another "resource".

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The reason I refuse to work for Amazon is because they claim ownership of every side project you make on your own time, with your own equipment, just because you are employed there.

<comment><USER34> Is that enforceable though?

<comment><USER35> Doesn't matter what the courts say if the mere threat of a lawsuit can scare off investors in a future startup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I constantly read how badly the pickers in the (European) dispatch centers get treated. They can get away with it because those are low wage jobs and the workers easy to replace. It becomes more evident that this is a fundamental issue in the company's culture.

</comment><comment><USER37> I wish more of these stories had some indication of what department the author was from. I have a bit of a suspicion that the closer you get to the retail operation the worse it gets (and of course doing fulfillment in a warehouse is the belly of the beast). Part of it is certainly Amazon culture but part of it is surely that retail businesses are a grind. Margins are slim and there is constant pressure to gain every possible efficiency even at the cost of human pain.

</comment><comment><USER38> What are the attributes of a crappy manager? A lot of people say what they hate, but there is a theme I have seen in tech.

When you think of these managers, you need to ask, who are they? Where are they from? How did they get the job? What did they do before (large/small org)? What is their social background? What is their style?

At the root, I suspect it's shitty leadership at the top. The Valley execs I have met, let's just say they are not the sort of guys you would willingly go into battle for. Tech lacks a real officer class that commands respect.

I have also yet to see a non-white person quit over company culture issues. Thar be some elephants in thar rooms.

<comment><USER21> The fundamental difference between good and bad managers is usually how they deal with "shit". Bad managers are shit funnels, good managers are shit umbrellas.

<comment><USER39> I think there is more to it then that. All my managers have been shit umbrellas, but still some of them were not worth the investment of my time.

Once my management was split over several people and that was an issue as well as one could set incentives and then the other would obstruct because they didn't share the incentives and didn't care about the outcome. Not having shared incentives and outcomes has been the most common problem across my entire career.

Managers can set up goals and incentives and then change them at the last minute without telling you and claim you failed. Not maliciously in my case, but the effect is the same.

I'm sure the ways in which a manager can be bad is quite diverse.

<comment><USER21> Certainly there's more, the shit umbrella/funnel factor is just the first order approximation of goodness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This makes me wonder what would happen if you took a job there and just refused to do the sucking up? What if you just competently did what they asked and didn't worry about getting fired for bullshit reasons?

With that kind of turnover, it occurs me to that you very well could survive without doing all the soul-sucking bullshit because the managers simply couldn't afford to lose _more_ workers.

I'm not the one to try it, though, as I've no interest in working in those high-stress situations in the first place. I'm fine with making a little less and having a personal life outside of work.

<comment><USER41> You can cruise and do nothing. I worked at Intel for 3.5 years and watched "old white guys" collect $200k+ in pay/bonus/stock and do about 1 month of real work.

But it is soul sucking...if you piss the wrong people off they will do their best to get rid of you and promote their lackeys. It really is welfare for the middle class.

<comment><USER42> > old white guys

Why did you inject race into the conversation for no reason? I've seen layabouts of every description

<comment><USER41> Because thats what i was exposed to. Im a 34 year old white guy and have no problem saying it felt like welfare for "middle" class. the bonus and stock handouts were absurd. Yes Intel has different races/gender (the diversity push is a joke), but on the software side it was dominated by one demographic.

<comment><USER42> Please stop. Invoking race was completely unnecessary for making your point. If you really meant class, you should have said so. I know middle class people of all backgrounds.

<comment><USER43> You asked and he answered. You don't get to complain about his answer when you explicitly asked for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Don't work for Amazon, don't buy from Amazon if you can.

I've started to order my books through my local bookstore recently, it's surprisingly easy. I do my research online (often times via AMZN tbh) and pick up the books on my way from/to the office.

<comment><USER45> Almost every big company [1] does something or the other that is so bad ethically (and sometimes legally too) that if we decided to boycott, we'd end up boycotting them all - and this is assuming people are even willing to, which most people aren't (convenience and product price trumps everything else to most). I just wish there is a way to protest and protest strongly enough for them to change their behavior. There have been some good attempts [2]. What else can a normal person do to protest?

[1] Some examples here - [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/4wpl0i/whats_a_b...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/4wpl0i/whats_a_big_industry_secret_that_isnt_supposed_to/)

[2] [https://www.buycott.com/campaign/browse](https://www.buycott.com/campaign/browse)

<comment><USER46> You can find positive and negative anecdotes about any company, but with Amazon it's a qualitatively different situation. It's a long-term ongoing pattern of unethical behavior, a cacophony of negative feedback that outweighs the positive. The way they treat their blue-collar employees, white-collar, business partners, sellers, etc. (All parties except the buyers.)

I've stopped buying from them but I'm realistic, very few people will care enough to do so, not enough to affect their bottom line. I do it because it supporting them would feel wrong to me. Not because I expect I can make them change.

<comment><USER45> I don't shop at a few places (Walmart etc), can add Amazon to that list. Will it make any difference though? You and I are probably in the _rounding error_ minority, unlikely to move the needle. We can feel good about our choices though, I don't see any other positive result.

<comment><USER46> Whether it makes a difference or not, I'd rather feel good about my choices than feel bad.

With its current practices, it's only a matter of time before Amazon has a recruitment problem that it can't fix.

<comment><USER45> _it 's only a matter of time before Amazon has a recruitment problem that it can't fix._

That is to be seen. There are lots of horrible employers who are still around (EA for example). Supply of workers is much greater than demand (even software industry is not immune to it as more and more youngsters enter the profession)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> >Amazon is a great company for its customers. It's about time that it becomes a great company for its really hard working employees as well.

Hat off.

</comment><comment><USER48> What do their turnover numbers actually looks like? Chances are they get a lot of management attention.

IIRC, 15% per year is pretty standard in the software industry. I think Google's figure was something like 5% when I was there.

</comment><comment><USER49> Personal favorite:

[https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/home/osha- and-...](https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/home/osha-and- bathrooms)

Don't often hear about health and safety in this business.

<comment><USER50> It sounds like there is some serious passive aggression (or even just aggression) going on over there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Everything I've ever read about working at Amazon has been terrible.

Despite this, from the outside at least they still seem to execute flawlessly and are still adored by geeks who don't work there.

</comment><comment><USER52> I wonder how they are managing and keeping up with excellent products without right management behind the scene?

<comment><USER53> IMO, it's a part of the API driven culture.

If the API is the glue that ties business units together, you don't need as many knowledgable employees who understand the guts of the company -- the company itself is self-documenting.

<comment><USER54> Interesting thought.

If you're guessing correctly, this will probably be the future of the development business.

<comment><USER42> It's terrifying that Amazon is doing so well despite treating their employees terribly. Behold, the future of software development!

Are we sure we want to keep inflating supply with all this "everyone should code" nonsense?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> No wonder they are on constant recruitment overdrive. Calls from consultants recruiting for them have become worse than from banks offering credit cards.

<comment><USER56> It's visible from the outside too. We've worked with Amazon for years, around AWS, MWS, login and pay, etc., and it's a shambles. Nobody seems to stay more than ten weeks or so, points of contacts are always changing and one gets the feeling they're all bluffing because it's their first day - I don't know how they actually get anything done. They must have a core of people _somewhere_ who aren't rotating rapidly, I suppose?

<comment><USER57> So even if only 25% of your frontline staff leave in a year... that is still a lot of time the higher guys that stick around need to spend teaching the new staff. If you couple with 25% of frontline staff left + need 25% new staff due to growth, you are in for a rough ride.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I've learned that there are only two things managers are responsible for - getting the performance and achieving the goals the company has set for them, and keeping their people. If you achieve goals but don't keep your people, you've lost.

</comment><comment><USER59> Am I the only one who thinks that at least some of those reports may be complete bullshit? I've red couple and to be honest they don't go into details on what actually happened, like this one [https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/home/assaulted...](https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/home/assaulted- at-amazon)

Why was he assaulted? Just randomly, without a reason 40yo guy came to him one day and assaulted him?

How was he assaulted? Did the guy came with kitchen knife and said he's going to cut his fingers or something? Or he thrown a paper ball in his direction?

<comment><USER60> > Lesson learned... if you're ever assaulted or harassed at Amazon (and most > _females_ will be, eventually, in one form or another)

Different kind of assault.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Another one on the site: [https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/home/osha- and-...](https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/home/osha-and- bathrooms)

This is not the only tech company I've heard this about, and it's been a problem everywhere I've been. I'm not especially opposed to open offices, but if companies are _routinely_ cramming more people on a floor than the designers of the building ever imagined, it might be time to reconsider a few things.

<comment><USER62> At a certain point I wonder if OSHA complaints or calls to the local fire department would help at all.

<comment><USER61> They do fix it when there's a complaint, because they have to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Amazon was terribly run a decade ago, in 2006. At the time my manager had training to be a prison guard- that was his intended career. He didn't know how to run a spreadsheet well, and he was managing programmers. His boss was an ex-DMV employee, literally, and had carried the same sort of passive hostility over.

Amazon is a retailer that thinks it is a tech company and so its management is the kind of management you want at Walmart to keep the "associates" from pilfering the goods.

At least in 2006 it was that way.

I think the really interesting thing is, how can a company that is so notoriously terrible still be able to hire as many employees as they want? How is it that so many young (eg: 19-24 year old) engineers think that getting Amazon on their resume (or Facebook, Google, etc.) is somehow a big feather? Are further employees really that impressed by the name of the companies on the resume?

When I was that age I certainly did think that a big name meant something but after I got to the other side- where I'm interviewing people- I realized that it's a huge mistake to try and judge whether you should hire someone with these kinds of correlations (including college and GPA).

Amazon was the most terrible work experience of my career. I strongly urge everyone I meet who is considering them to avoid them.

<comment><USER63> > getting Amazon on their resume (or Facebook, Google, etc.) is somehow a big > feather?

Because it is. Everybody knows these companies get to skim the cream and they vet their candidates thoroughly. As a start-up with no HR and poor hiring processes it, more often than should, gets the interview/job.

<comment><USER11> I don't know why so many people believe it, and I know for a fact that "Everybody knows" is false. Amazon does not skim the cream and they do not vet their candidates thoroughly. I don't know where these ideas come from, though I would guess marketing done by the companies themselves. Amazon engineers are lower than average. I'd say "the cream" is the top %10 of engineers I've worked with. (I'd put myself at %80). The average Amazon engineer is %40. Engineering managers are %20. I think the average Google engineer is maybe %60. Apple %80-%90. Facebook I have less visibility into but the impression from their attempts to recruit me is that they are probably getting pretty average engineers.

Note that I would work for Apple and I will not work for google, because google is not high enough quality to meet my standards. (And I personally saw Mark Zuckerberg say "never hire anyone over 30 years old.. they just don't get it" at a YC Startup School in 2007 or 2008, so I'm of the impression they probably are close to as bad as google at being able to tell who is good and who is not.

Being able to hire good engineers is not an easy task, because you have to be an excellent engineer to be able to tell who is good and who isn't.

I have the distinct impression that people in their 20s do not realize that these companies names on their resumes are only feathers when presented to lower quality hiring departments.

If you want to work with the best of the best, you're not going to rely on the fallacy of correlation.

<comment><USER64> Firstly, you cite no actual data about who is "the cream" vs not.

Secondly, you have no data to back up this claim:

> (I'd put myself at %80). The average Amazon engineer is %40.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> I think we should limit the size of companies (in terms of number of people).

Because capitalism is great for competition, until a company has grown so big that there is no choice left. Both for the consumer and the employee.

Also, big companies usually have an internalized economy, which limits its usefulness for the outside world.

Basically, keeping companies small would increase the modularity of the economy.

<comment><USER66> The number of employees in a company doesn't necessarily limit its monopoly power or ability to collude, though.

If you tried this, you'd just get companies avoiding the law by working with subsidiaries or contractors, a bit like they do already for different reasons.

<comment><USER65> Certainly true, but this can be considered a (secondary) side-effect. Law could prohibit this behavior, but can of course never eradicate it.

As for your point about monopoly: I don't think it will be very easy to maintain a monopoly if the number of people you employ is limited (because other companies could easily equal that number of employees).

<comment><USER67> Their advantage is not the number of people they employ, but the customers they have and the patents/applications/property/reputation they own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Interesting to see Amazon people writing these complaints on Google's services.

Also, what effect will this have on people using Amazon? Should we try to use Google cloud offering instead of AWS?

I guess with any service that offered super cheap costs, there was a place where something had to give...

<comment><USER69> >Interesting to see Amazon people writing these complaints on Google's services.

If they used Amazon's own services, IP and other logs would be available to Amazon's internal investigators without so much as a subpoena.

The old Mini-Microsoft blog was on a Google service as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Does Amazon offer relocation and tn visa sponsorship? There isn't a lot of great opportunities from where I'm from (western canada).

Wouldn't they look good as my first job in my resume for a person who recently graduated that never had a software job?

<comment><USER25> Yes, they do. (Well - I'm not sure about TN Visas specifically, but I was aware of their sponsoring plenty of visas).

It was my first software job and as far as I can tell it's an amazing thing to have on my resume.

<comment><USER70> How was your experience there?

<comment><USER25> Generally very positive. I posted about it elsewhere in this thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> everyone's quitting... but Amazon's hiring does not seem to be picking up slack (unless they just increase the workload on current employees).

I mean, if a lot of people were quitting, recruiters would be trying their best to replace them. While I have seen a lot of open positions on amazon.jobs, they have been open for months (some even for a year) and are still accepting resumes (they seem to be taking their time replacing people if at all).

and in all honesty, I'd still want to work there if I can get a chance (so if Amazon employees / recruiters are hiring in Canada, please email me).

<comment><USER72> I've been getting a strange number of recruiters contacting me from Amazon recently, when I am not looking for a job.

I mean, there are always recruiters, but the Amazon ones are always like "You've got 1month+ experience, you get a job!"

I was always put off by how entry level they sound.

<comment><USER71> I have had a couple of amazon recruiters contact me (I applied via their website), and both appeared to be confused (I wanted a position in Toronto/Vancouver) which they assured me was what I was selected for (to go through the interview process). However after the first online test, they changed it to a Seattle-based position and made me do the test again.

As for the entry level jobs, it's weird because I applied to both SDEI (0 - <USER2> yrs of exp) and SDEII (1 - 3 yrs of exp) - and they rejected me for SDEI (which I'm more qualified for) while I was "under consideration" for SDEII.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> If Amazon try this in NSW, Australia then they want to watch out. If they get a complaint about bullying and it's not dealt with, directors can go to prison.

<comment><USER57> Non-IT staff will be robots eventually. I think this post is about IT.. if not this entire thread is out of context ;)

<comment><USER73> It applies to IT and non-IT staff alike.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> A Google site criticizing Amazon...

Am I the only one seeing the irony?

</comment><comment><USER75> Amazon's treatment of non IT staff is well known to be bad. It's CEO said they have no intentions on improving to reduce employee turnover.

</comment><comment><USER76> I was recently recruited by Amazon's video division but I had to decline due to personal issues. Looks like I dodged a bullet.

</comment><comment><USER77> Sometimes you get a bad manager or you get into a bad situation. Sometimes you don't. Without the details on why this person actually was fired, we're just speculating and adding more to rumors.

<comment><USER78> "You can fool some people some times, but you can't fool all the people all the time..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> The bad grammar makes it hard to take this post seriously (my something-is-off spam-detector goes off I guess, trained from years of sifting through fradulent emails).

<comment><USER80> What bad grammar?</comment></comment>


A guy tried to sweep leaves with a drone - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/10/27/what-happened-when-a-guy-tried-to-sweep-leaves-with-a-drone/ <comment><USER2> Dear Roomba, please make this a real product. xoxo

<comment><USER3> With cameras and basic spectrum analysis to identify leaves, sonar/lidar/3D cameras to analyze the topology and a little participle physics, it could probably be automated. Tell it where you want the piles and where the borders are and let it fly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Has enough money for a really nice drone.. doesn't have the money to buy a 15 dollar push broom(the proper tool for this job).

<comment><USER5> Probably more a matter of convenience. His current broom broke and he had the drone handy. A replacement broom would mean a trip to a store, plus the money for it, plus the time to still do the sweeping. Had he started with the drone, yea that's just questionable.</comment></comment>


Chuck Moore's 144-computers chip is now available - <AUTHOR> http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/products/index.html <comment><USER3> Moore added this wonderful passage to his blog today. I think it captures something of the specialness of the man:

 _GreenArrays is starting production of its 144-computer chip with an accompanying evaluation board. Details at greenarrays.com. This is the result of funding, testing and refinement.

On the lighter side, regarding my Five Fingers shoes: continued delight; more miles of hiking. My gait is changing: shorter strides, less heel strike, less toe-out. And I've not experienced any lower back pain. Somehow my soles are less sensitive and I can walk barefoot more easily. _

<http://colorforth.com/blog.htm>

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a very interesting product from the great Chuck Moore that needs a "killer app" to take off. I wish I had time to invest in it...

What's interesting is how different this company is from the idea of a startup that most of us here have in our heads. Just look at the team and try to figure out what the average age of the company is:

<http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/about/bios.html>

I wonder if this has something to do with the fact that chip design requires a lot of experience or the fact that these people just happen to be in great Chuck Moore's professional network. Or likely both.

<comment><USER5> I think both. Plus consumer web applications and consumer smart phone apps and social media apps are some kind of fashion among young people. (I am 35 years old and even I feel the generational differences from younger folks a bit.) Older folks are not so sensitive to fashions.

Edit: or maybe every generation have a love affair with the topic which is the 'next big thing' of their youth? Maybe in 2040 a social media startup will be founded by old folks, while the young guys will be enhusiastic about something completely different? My father is a mechanical engineer, I am a programmer, maybe my son will have the profession regarding the 'next big thing'.

<comment><USER6> Or, we have the domain experience of social and mobile. Many don't have the domain experience of... say health care.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reminds me of the wonderful connection machines of lore... <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation>

</comment><comment><USER8> What, this thing costs $20! As a hardware novice (read dabbled with Arduino a little), how hard would it be for me to create something useful using this chip?

<comment><USER9> It would be a significant effort to put a board together to do anything with this, certainly more than the cost of the eval board if you place a value on your time (and aren't looking at this just as a hobby).

Most people who might use this in a commercial setting would buy the eval board first to try it out. That is probably what I would do even if this were a hobby project.

<comment><USER10> Of course a student could try to find a QFN 88pin to DIP adapter for like $20 (or make their own), and plug it into a breadboard. I could only find a QFN-72 to DIP adapter with 5 minutes of searching.

[http://www.proto- advantage.com/store/product_info.php?produc...](http://www.proto- advantage.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=3100034)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is interesting - each node is tiny and can barely do much (mainly RAM constraints). But because they are tiny, you can pack tons of them on a chip/board and coordinate several nodes to do larger work items. Since all actions are asynchronous (as opposed to clocked) you use very little power when you aren't actively doing work, and the minimum amount of time required to actually do the work.

I wonder why they settled on 18 bit words though?

<comment><USER12> From [http://www.yosefk.com/blog/my-history-with-forth-stack- machi...](http://www.yosefk.com/blog/my-history-with-forth-stack- machines.html) :

Look at the chips he's making. 144-core, but the cores (nodes) are tiny - <USER2> would you want them big, if you feel that you can do anything with almost no resources? And they use 18-bit words. Presumably under the assumption that 18 bits is a good quantity, not too small, not too large. Then they write an application note about imlpementing the MD5 hash function:

"MD5 presents a few problems for programming a Green Arrays device. For one thing it depends on modulo 32 bit addition and rotation. Green Arrays chips deal in 18 bit quantities. For another, MD5 is complicated enough that neither the code nor the set of constants required to implement the algorithm will fit into one or even two or three nodes of a Green Arrays computer."

Then they solve these problems by manually implementing 32b addition and splitting the code across nodes. But if MD5 weren't a standard, you could implement your own hash function without going to all this trouble.

In his chip design tools, Chuck Moore naturally did not use the standard equations:

"Chuck showed me the equations he was using for transistor models in OKAD and compared them to the SPICE equations that required solving several differential equations. He also showed how he scaled the values to simplify the calculation. It is pretty obvious that he has sped up the inner loop a hundred times by simplifying the calculation. He adds that his calculation is not only faster but more accurate than the standard SPICE equation. He said, 'I originally chose mV for internal units. But using 6400 mV = 4096 units replaces a divide with a shift and requires only 2 multiplies per transistor. ... Even the multiplies are optimized to only step through as many bits of precision as needed.'"

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> _Export is controlled per US EAR ECCN 3A991A.3._

Could somebody clarify what this means? The only reference to "3A991A" I could find is www.uptodateregs.com/_eccn/ECCN.asp?ECCN=3A991, however there is nothing on that page about a .3 subsection.

<comment><USER14> a. "Microprocessor microcircuits ", "microcomputer microcircuits", and microcontroller microcircuits having any of the following:

[...]

a.3 More than one data or instruction bus or serial communication port that provides a direct external interconnection between parallel "microprocessor microcircuits" with a transfer rate of 2.5 Mbyte/s.

 _www.access.gpo.gov/bis/ear/pdf/ccl3.pdf_

<comment><USER15> Exactly 2.5Mb/s?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good God, that's cheap. _I_ can buy that evaluation board (and I very well may some time). Best of luck to them with the sales, that's at a scale and price that could open up a lot of options.

Compare and contrast to the E-ink evaluation board: [http://store.nexternal.com/shared/StoreFront/products.asp?CS...](http://store.nexternal.com/shared/StoreFront/products.asp?CS=eink&CategoryID=3&Refresh=True) 6" = $3,000, and not too long ago they were over $8,000. Out of the reach of many seeking to innovate without a company pushing them to do so.

</comment><comment><USER17> How does this array do I/O? How does one bring in data (from disk/network) into the chip? I couldn't find anything demonstrating high throughput I/O on the eval board...

</comment><comment><USER18> Can you do something useful on this chip? It seems to me that while the total number of instructions looks good, what can actually be accomplished per instruction is very bad. Not only do the instructions operate on very small words, you need a ton of communication between the cores to do anything. E.g. how fast would this thing realistically be for (integer -- it doesn't even have floating point) matrix multiplication?

</comment><comment><USER19> So if I'm following correctly...

1 ALU / 1.5 ns ≈ 67 MFLOPS * 144 units = 96 GFLOPS

Obviously, a significant percentage of work in the real world would probably go to distributing instructions amongst the units.

Anyway for comparison, according to the thread here: <http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=51677>

...an Intel Core 2 Quad QX6850 runs @ 48 GFLOPS.

<comment><USER20> Isn't a FLOP a "Floating Point Operation"? If the chip has no FP unit, it does 0 FLOPS.

<comment><USER19> I see... I suppose the efficiency of the presumed software-based floating point library can be factored along with the parallelization then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "144 computers"=="144 core parallel cpu" ? I'm guessing this is not x86 and targeted at academic researchers looking to build custom, massively parallel, computational clusters on the cheap [ computational neuroscience? ]. If anyone could volunteer additional context or applications for this please do so, I'm not as familiar with hardware as I'd like to be.

<comment><USER22> It has 64 words of RAM and 64 words of ROM. It has 18-bit word for ALU operations and commands.

I think it has more than one MISC command in a word, I think count is about 3 (six-bit commands).

I cannot wrap my head around how to program that... not a beast, more like a field of tiny windmills. One of the designers of preceding chips once wrote about using it as a systolic engine, but the area of systolic algorithms is quite narrow, AFAIK.

I cannot find any C/Fortran compiler or compiler for any other high-level language.

My overall impression is that this looks like all bad ideas from Cell BE were ported to Forth language.

MISC: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_instruction_set_compute...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_instruction_set_computer) John Sokol on early GreenArray alike designs: [http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=274687&cid=...](http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=274687&cid=20297751)

<comment><USER21> My initial thought was: high density, asynchronous cores -> brain modeling. You treat each asynchronous core as a neuron.

Reading up on Charles Moore this may indeed be the intended case: <http://www.pcai.com/web/ai_info/pcai_forth.html>

> _Charles Moore created Forth in the 1960s and 1970s to give computers real- > time control over astronomical equipment. A number of Forth's features (such > as its interactive style) make it a useful language for AI programming, and > devoted adherents have developed Forth-based expert systems and neural > networks._

Still, 100 billion neurons in brain / 144 cores * $20 per chip = ~$13 billion . Also I would guess most modern researchers in this area don't know Forth and are doing high-level programming and virtualizing neurons rather than taking a low-level hardware approach.

<comment><USER22> Forth was used in AI in a pretty non-linear way.

I have a book where authors developed Lisp on Forth and then proceed developing Prolog on newly created Lisp. Then they demonstrated how to use that Prolog in the development of rule-based expert system.

There was a saying that Forth amplify programmers' ability to develop programs and to make mistakes. If you a need an AI tool, but do not need your mistakes to be amplified, stay away from Forth. I think that apply to other areas of domain-specific development as well.

While I adore Forth, I cannot recommend it to anyone. Especially to simulate brain - what if you introduce an error, Forth amplifies it and we'll get a hidden psychopath? ;)

<comment><USER23> What book is it? You can't just mention a book that has Forth, Lisp, AND Prolog and not give the title. :)

PAIP and a couple others have Lisp and Prolog, LOL has Lisp and Forth, HOPL 2 has all three (but separately), but it doesn't sound like any of those.

<comment><USER4> I think he probably spoke about "Designing and Programming Personal Expert Systems" by Carl Townsend that dates back to 1986.

From <http://www.faqs.org/faqs/computer-lang/forth-faq/part5/>

      Contains LISP and Prolog emulations in Forth,
      including a unification   algorithm.  It also has some
      minimum distance classifier code.
      The application is fault diagnosis in locomotives.

<comment><USER23> Salute!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Great to hear stuff like this, and I just asked this several days ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1797124> but it went nowhere.

</comment><comment><USER25> At first I thought it said Chuck Norris and I was like BAHAA!</comment>