HN user

davidrupp

665 karma
Posts15
Comments157
View on HN

I used to tell people there that my favorite development technique was to sit down and think about the system I wanted to build, then wait for it to be announced at that year's re:Invent. I called it "re:Invent and Simplify". "I" built my best stuff that way.

I'm intrigued, as this article did not trigger my (clearly as yet underdeveloped) GenAI spidey sense. Will you share some specifics of what triggered yours?

Separately, do you have any thoughts on the subject matter? Whoever or whatever put these words in a row, they resonate deeply with my lived experience of the last several years.

I agree that it wouldn't cause the doors to open any sooner for deplaning, but once they did, people could just ... leave. The people standing in the aisle with their luggage out of the compartment are the ones who started in the aisle seats. People in the other seats need to get out, reach up, pull down, get organized. Sometimes they have to salmon their way back from their actual seat to the compartment several rows behind them because that's where they had to stow their carry-on because the people seated in row 30 put their bag over row 16 when they boarded[1].

Similarly, for takeoff I agree that it wouldn't necessarily save time, net. But it would help with the frustration of standing in line, backed up on the jetway while everyone is struggling with setting up the initial conditions for the deplaning scenario I described above. At least people could get seated sooner and be comfortable for longer while they're waiting for takeoff.

[1] Based on a true story.

SDE, just passed ten years at Amazon; opinions my own, obvs. The three best managers I've worked with in my career have all been at Amazon (you know who you are). Also the three worst (ditto). And the respective bars were pretty [high | low] coming in. Just like everywhere else I've been, it comes down to the individual. Amazon, as far as I can tell, have never tried to homogenize management. Your team delivers? You're in.

Starting Hospice 2 years ago

He did? I'm surprised to find a quote I'm not familiar with. On what page of which edition did he say this?

I recently was asked to take over the role of Deputy Governor Danforth in The Crucible a week before opening. I accomplished it -- barely -- largely through rote memorization. Yes, I also had to imbue the words with appropriate intent and emotion, which I did not achieve by rote, but in a way it was comforting to have those specific words to start with, rather than make up some of my own that might or might not actually convey the proper intent, and almost surely not nearly as well as a luminary like Arthur Miller. As I see it, it's those words that establish my character, not the other way around.

I like how Patrick Stewart puts it [1], as "dead letter perfect", which is apparently the default expectation in British theatre more so than, say, film acting.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2007/jul/29/theatre2

And how do "you" evaluate Alice, with an MS in Computer Science, active Github, ten years of experience, all FAANG? Exactly the same way.

Even if I agreed with your premise that the prevailing paradigm is necessary for Bob (spoiler: I don't agree), I would rather it not be for Alice.

Fig is sunsetting 2 years ago

Perhaps because it was a better deal than any of the alternatives. I left a startup a few months before it was (as far as I know) acquihired, partly because I could see the end of the runway approaching. All of the extant team were offered roles at the acquiring company, which I'm sure they and their families appreciated. Is "all they get out of it is to work at Amazon" preferable to a Big $$$ Exit? Maybe not. But the latter may not have been an option IRL. As a side note, I've been working at Amazon for nearly ten years now, and I have not been displeased with the improvement in my financial situation thereby.

Remove TypeScript 3 years ago

"Most programmers find themselves drawn strongly to typing or not quite early in their career, and then spend the rest of it rationalizing The Correct Choice to themselves and others."

Hashtag irony.

I learned a lot about programming by taking a book like this that was written specifically for the TRS-80 (which I did not own), and translating the programs to what I owned instead, which was a Sinclair ZX80. This primarily involved translating between different flavors of BASIC, but also deciding what I could arrange to leave out and still have an interesting game, due to the relatively constrained resources of my machine. Excellent experience.

"Bragging" seems unnecessarily pejorative. Reading the information about his patents didn't sway me one way or the other the first time I visited his site, but I can see it being relevant data for some of his audience. The (superior) content of his books did sway me, as did Mark's willingness to make many of them available for free. I've since had occasion to interact personally with Mark, and I've unfailingly found him to be gracious and personable; "braggart" does not apply, in my experience.