JulianRaphael

https://web.archive.org/web/20230304214707/https://www.teleg...

Second the book recommendation below and can highlight one thing about having spent time on plantations myself: do NOT cut the trees. There will be folks who will tell you that by cutting the trees you will get more sunlight and hence more coffee production. I've seen first hand how hundreds of farmers (mainly in India) cut all the trees on their coffee plantation and a few years later lost most of their land due to water issues and landslides. Depending on where in the world you are, you also want to understand what companion plants (could be macadamia nut trees, banana plants, etc.) are best suited for your coffee plants.

I would not try to compete with low-quality bean production. Not sure how much land you have but you most likely don't have the resources to compete at scale. There is, however, a massive specialty coffee market and people are willing to pay good money for good coffee. So besides my recommendations above, try to find some specialty coffee producers in your region and learn from them.

Anyone wants to kick around ideas? Particularly interested in use cases for technology to improve regenerative agriculture / permaculture operations and water management in the global South (esp. India). You can find my E-mail address in my profile.

AWS Builder ID is a new personal profile for everyone who builds on AWS. Whether you are a software developer writing code, a student working on assignments, a data analyst modeling information, or a marketer constructing campaigns, AWS Builder ID is for you.

Your AWS Builder ID provides access to tools and builder services on AWS including Amazon CodeCatalyst and Amazon CodeWhisperer. You can keep your AWS Builder ID as you move between jobs, schools, or other organizations. Over time, you will be able to provide additional information such as specific interests or skill level to help tailor your AWS experience.

Have any folks on HN successfully integrated cloud platform marketplaces like AWS Marketplace into your go-to-market strategies?

These two papers give a much better answer than this blog: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138904172... (why do humans increase their chili consumption) and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8042654/ (antibacterial + disease-alleviating properties of capsaicin).

Besides the fact that capsaicin has antibacterial effects and exerts indirect disease-alleviating effects during bacterial infections (something our ancestors had to deal with a lot), eating chili triggers an endorphin high, but regularly eating chili makes you less sensitive and hence you have to eat more chili to get your little high. Taken together, these two properties of chili most likely have been the main drivers of it being adopted as a staple food in many cultures.

You would be surprised how many users don't want that. Take e.g. a startup run by two people in Singapore that gets featured on HN unbeknownst to the founders as they are asleep. They experiences a ton of traffic, which makes them exceed the free tier limits. If you were one of these founders, what reality would you want to wake up to? That your web app was hugged to death and you lost out on a significant growth momentum or that your web app stayed up and now you have to pay a bill to AWS (but hopefully have made some revenue, too)?

I'd also say that in the year of our lord 2022 literally everyone has heard about unexpected cloud bills (yes, happens with GCP and Azure all the time as well) and hence should know that they have to set their account up properly - there is a ton of tutorials by AWS and others on how to set up your budgets and billing alerts.

AWS Free Tier (e.g. 12 months of Amazon EC2 750 h/month, 5GB S3, Amazon RDS 750h/month, 1 million Lambda requests / month, 25GB Dynamo DB,...). This can get you pretty far in the first year of building, testing, and iterating.

https://aws.amazon.com/free/?all-free-tier.sort-by=item.addi...

Agreed! Unfortunately, quite a bit of the money that she donates to some of these organizations goes into the pockets of extremely well-paid executives. That what's always bothered me about giving to charity orgs more widely. Luckily, there are websites that allow you to check how much charity organizations are actually spending on their programs vs. their expenses...

I do think that giving directly to individuals who will make sure that all of the money is spent wisely is an interesting alternative approach.

First, HN includes more than hacking and startups. Quting from the HN guidelines, "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" can be submitted. Instead of posting a dismissive comment, you could also ask yourself - or the community - what others find interesting about this topic?

Here is my take: Mudras are an elaborate form of encoded symbolism with a long history in culture that influences a large part of the world. People trained in classical Indian dance will be able to decode a story based on these gestures, whereas someone who doesn't know much about it won't get the meaning. If you think about it like that, it's quite similar to code. At the end of the day, computer code is also just symbolism - so we as practitioners of this particular kind of symbolism can always learn about other forms of symbolism to improve our craft.

That's great news and thanks for the swift reply. Have you considered asking the HN community for help with this issue? I'm sure there would be lots of volunteers.

dang - are there any features for making HN more accessible? A vision-impaired colleague of mine wanted to check out HN today and made me aware that the contrasts on HN make it really hard for people with impaired vision to read on HN (webaim.org confirms this: https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/?fcolor=919191&...). Using his screen reader (NVDA) didn't help much as the front page doesn't seem to take into account screen reading software. Has someone built a more accessible version of HN? Also, does the HN team plan to make HN more accessible in the future?

A vision-impaired colleague of mine wanted to check out Hacker News today and made me aware that the contrasts on HN make it really hard for people with impaired vision to read on this website. Using his screen reader (NVDA) didn't help much as the front page doesn't seem to take screen reading software into account. Has someone built a more accessible version of HN? Also, does the HN team plan to make HN more accessible in the future?

Could you provide a bit of context? What's the point you're trying to make with this video? I'd argue that comparing work at Amazon to slave labour is doing a disservice to the victims of slavery and their descendants.

This might be the most impactful letter Jeff has written so far. I admire Jeff for being a truly original leader and personally find a lot of his thinking inspiring. I know that HN fervently hates Jeff and Amazon - and Amazon definitely has to improve a thing or two - , but I'd challenge the haters to find another corporate leader who is not only willing to commit to such radical visions like becoming Earth's Best Employer and Earth's Safest Place to Work, but actually drive his leadership to deliver on these promises. The $15 minimum wage, the Climate Pledge (Amazon being the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy in the world), and Jeff's personal investments of $10 billion to fight climate change are - in my opinion - proof that Jeff is not entirely the evil capitalist that folks on HN think he is. I'm sure that there will be people who will comment that the $15 minimum wage was only implemented because it will harm competitors, the Climate Pledge was created to appeal to ESG-driven investors, and his personal investments are just tax savings. But you have to acknowledge that he is trying to use his power and influence to have a positive impact on the world.

I'd be really curious to hear from the folks on HN who are so deeply critical of Amazon and Jeff: do you see that he's at least trying and putting in money and effort? Or do you really believe that he is the devil manifest on Earth? If so, please cite one example of a living corporate leader running a company of Amazon's size who you consider to be a "good" leader. I'm genuinely curious.

I'd argue that this not only applies to software but to all of human creation. Very few creators are craftsmen and very few consumers value craftsmanship. Creating software jewels requires mastery of many skills, many of which are not purely technical but involve an understanding of human behaviour. These skills can only be acquired by studying a field with a certain kind of devotion that very few people have. Real craftsmanship happens when work becomes intuitive, which happens once the basic skills have been perfected and there is enough understanding of other areas that might seem tangential, but further enhance the craftsman's creativity on a level that can't be really learned from manuals or documentation. There are very few employers that allow you to work like that.

Then you need people who are willing to pay for the product that the craftsman creates. Corporations generally don't value craftsmanship. Consumers are not willing to pay the price. In the past, you had royals and aristocrats who would pay for works of craftsmanship for prestige. Who are the modern patrons of craftsmanship? I would love to see some Silicon Valley billionaires fund software craftsmen, but very few of them put their money to work in such impactful ways.

Astute observations, you seem to know this space well. Judging from this and your other comments, you also write really well (high information throughput!) - have you considered sharing your knowledge with a wider audience?

Great comment! You hit the nail on the head with regards to India's geopolitical standing, which is often forgotten when discussing these incentives. In order to come up with really enticing incentives, you need to have deep understanding of what guides technology companies in their decision making AND deep understanding of the geopolitics of IC. There are relatively few people in Indian politics who have this kind of knowledge.

What do you think the Indian government would have to offer the international IC community to actually attract chip-makers?

You should check out AngelList (https://angel.co/) and find a few syndicates of successful investors that you'd like to join.

Looks like a wonderful place! How I wish that people from outside of Sikkim could acquire property there - it's one of our favourite states in India.

Think of it from a perspective of game theory and geopolitics. You have an epidemic raging in your country that has led to lockdowns, casualties and severe economic damage. Now you have two options:

1. Warn the world, lock your borders down, suffer economic damage whilst the rest of the world will prevent your citizens from entering their countries and can prepare for a proper response. Experience a setback on the stage of geopolitics and a loss of soft power.

2. Don't warn the world, suppress free flow of information, impose internal travel bans to stop the virus from spreading within your country, let your citizens carry the virus to the rest of the world, be the party with asymmetrical information advantage, exploit the situation to further strengthen your position on the global chessboard of geopolitics and expand your soft power.

What people in the West tend to forget is that Chinese strategic thinking is older than most Western civilisations. Chinese rulers study Chinese philosophy deeply, whereas Western rulers have little philosophical education. Chinese rulers think fundamentally different from Western rulers and have asymmetrical information advantage in politics as well: hardly anyone in the West really understands Chinese philosophy as it requires you to learn the language to grasp it fully; but it is easy to understand what motivates Western politics.

This situation reminds me of one of the Thirty-Six Stratagems.

Disturb the water and catch a fish (渾水摸魚／混水摸魚)

Create confusion and exploit it to further one's own goals.

Just out of curiosity: whereabouts in the Himalayas are you located? We've been looking for nice places off the beaten path and are always looking for inspiration.

This is not to refute your comment, but would you have been able to foresee what problems the internet will solve when ARPANET had 15 sites in 1971? I mean if someone would have told you back then that you'd be able to stream a movie in 4K from more or less anywhere in the world, you'd probably have laughed that person out of the room. So look at ARPANET back then and look at the internet today and how much innovation has happened on top of it. And I'm sure there will be a lot more innovation on the good ol' internet for many more years to come.

In a similar way, BTC will evolve. It arguable already has. All the money flowing into cryptocurrencies and the crypto tech stack drives more and more competition (and yes - also corruption and bad behaviour) and some of it will be meaningful. Just like some tech startups were/are scams, some are kind of useless but harmless and a few changed the world. I personally don't know what problem(s) crypto will solve, but I can see that the technology summons a lot of creative energy. Creative energy that gets empowered through capital and channeled through competition will eventually produce breakthroughs somewhere. Let mankind's creativity run wild and let yourself surprise by the unexpected outcomes!

I agree with you. People in the West want to feel and look good and have an obsession with "healing themselves", hence meditation and psychedelics are sold as ways to achieve that. However, if you study the origins of meditation and psychedelics, they have nothing to do with feeling good! These practices were closely guarded by a few select practitioners or shamans and normal people would not engage in them at all. However, in the case of meditation some teachers shared some of their learnings to householders, albeit in a very different way. They certainly did not advise laymen to go on intense meditation retreats to get in touch with their childhood trauma and heal themselves!

For those who are willing to really commit their lives to it, meditation - or to be more precise the spiritual path that leads to it and merges with it - can absolutely cure many neurotic issues. This happens when people stop pretending to feel great and honestly accept that they feel bad, anxious or whatever. By learning to befriend your "bad" emotions slowly and whilst nourishing "good" emotions (through e.g. loving kindness or compassion meditation), you start to slowly unravel some of your milder neurotic issues. But it should be communicated very clearly that you can't sprinkle a bit of mindfulness over your messed up life and expect to be enlightened...

You are correct (see the Wikipedia article). Meditation was - and is - not a practice that beginners on the spiritual path would engage with in traditional Yoga or Buddhist practices. The problem is that these practices were taken out of their context (stationary secluded environments like ashrams or secretive groups of wandering mendicants) and commercialized by the West in general and by snake-oil vending gurus in the East.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashtanga_(eight_limbs_of_yoga)

Exactly! Good consultants are subject matter experts in process/project management. I guess this is what MBAs and PhD consultants are really good at: they have a big toolkit of industry best practices because their employers advise so many (often market-leading) companies in any given industry and they are good at doing in-depth research to apply these best practices to the specific requirements of their client. Not being a subject matter expert can sometimes be quite helpful when assessing a project/process as you have more room for free associative thought than a SME.

Oh, McKinsey and others are also experts in downsizing operations (i.e. letting people go) under the umbrella of efficiency improvements. When a new CEO comes in, they know that their compensation is tied to the share price of the company. Often one of the first things they do is to call in McKinsey to assess the efficiency of the company and then cut/outsource a few thousand jobs together with implementing some process improvements. Cutting expenses is easier and faster than delivering real value through innovation! Also, McKinsey - the experts - recommended this! At the next financial earnings call, the CEO can talk about how they increased their profit margins, investors like that the CEO is already delivering results so quickly, the stock price goes up, the CEO receives his bonus.

It's similar to what Bain Capital and other Private Equity investors do: they are not subject matter experts in a specific industry, but they are subject matter experts in capital extraction. I think this form of abstractive capitalism has done a lot of damage to many great companies, but as long as the system rewards this behaviour, there will be a lot of demand for consulting companies and private equity investors...maybe we should go back to the philosophy of old Greece, where the pursuit of knowledge was valued and the pursuit of wealth was openly derided (but use robots instead of slaves for day-to-day labor).

In the words of Plato (in his lat work, Laws): "My dear Clinias, small is the class of men—rare by nature and trained, too, with a superlative training — who, when they fall into diverse needs and lusts, are able to stand out firmly for moderation, and who, when they have the power of taking much wealth, are sober, and choose what is of due measure rather than what is large. The disposition of the mass of mankind is exactly the opposite of this; when they desire, they desire without limit, and when they can make moderate gains, they prefer to gain insatiably; and it is because of this that all the classes concerned with retail trade, commerce, and inn-keeping are disparaged and subjected to violent abuse."

Whilst some of this is true, don't forget that there are so many large companies out there that are run in an extremely inefficient way by incompetent management, with business divisions generating hundreds of millions/billions that are in turn run by and staffed with mediocre people. For businesses operating at such scale, bringing in McKinsey, BCG or the likes can often lead to the implementation of a series of smaller process improvements that together add up to tens/hundreds of millions in cost savings. You don't necessary need to be an industry expert to identify process improvements and many industry experts are really useless outside of their domain. I did some consulting in university through a student consulting organisation (didn't make the move into consulting after uni, though) and felt completely embarrassed to present the findings of our research to the senior management of a successful medium sized business that was a market leader in their industry. After all, I hadn't even started working full-time and these people had decades of experience! However, they had no experts in-house for the specific issue they were looking into and implemented our recommendations successfully after properly scrutinising it.

Additionally, companies often hire a consulting company that has previously advised their competitors to indirectly benefit from a knowledge transfer. There will obviously not be a transfer of actual IP, but a lot of abstract knowledge about operations can be gained from these engagements.

Lastly, I don't have an MBA myself but I've worked with some extremely smart MBAs who absolutely blew most mediocre engineers out of the water in terms of intelligence, problem solving, people skills, etc.. Not every engineer is a super smart code wizard and not every MBA is an empty suit. Don't judge a book by its cover!

Most of these stories are about Amazon and again, at the scale that Amazon operates I think that this would be expected? With 1,000,000 employees, if you assume a yearly turnover of just 1% that's 10,000 people leaving the company and I'm sure there are quite a few people in that group who had a bad experience - particularly as this includes the retail operation, which definitely had a bad reputation (most stories on the website that you linked are about retail teams). Post the NYT story in 2015 a LOT of things changed in retail, but I'm sure there are still issues.

Not trying to be pedantic here, but this thread was about AWS and not Amazon, so I will just reiterate that I can't personally comment on Amazon as a whole, I can only comment on AWS and I think most people would agree that AWS can be put into the same category as FB, MSFT, GOOG, etc. I have highlighted this distinction several times, but you seem to not want to engage in a conversation about AWS and rather discuss Amazon as a whole. That's fine, but as AWS and Amazon are really two different companies, you are then comparing apples to oranges and in that case you should compare Amazon to e.g. WalMart?

Out of curiosity, I just did a few searches along the lines of "is MSFT/FB/GOOG bad place to work" and for each of them there were several results/websites about how each of these companies is the worst place to work. If you look at the largest publicly available data set, Glassdoor, AWS does quite well - better than Microsoft and as well as Google. I have not worked for Amazon outside of AWS, so I can't really comment on that. However, as Amazon has more than 1,000,000 employees (400,000 of which were hired in 2020), I'd argue that you get more negative stories simply because of the larger population? Comparing Amazon to MSFT (163,000), FB (50,000) or GOOG (135,000) without taking its ginormous scale into account seems to be comparing apples to oranges. In terms of scale and typology, it would probably be better to compare AWS to these companies and I believe that the publicly available data paints a different picture than what you describe.

I'm not trying to argue with you here, I've just had a quite few discussions in recent times with people who had very strong negative opinions about MSFT being a place for the lazy, Google being a place for the special snowflakes, Facebook being a place for the cultish, AWS being a place for those looking for a stepping stone in their career, etc....and I think that all of these companies actually are great places to work but there will always be a few percent who absolutely hated their time there.

Sure!

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