HN user
I never worked for google (interviewed but was rejected) but I have suspected this is true -- that there was a sweet spot where google was a magical place, but that time has long passed.
One of the better decisions I ever made was not ignoring emails from folks recruiting for Amazon in 2003. It was a different place back then, and truly like "the world's largest startup." The other thing that was different back then was that the people I worked with were all so blindingly smart. I'm pretty smart, but in 2003 I often felt like the dumbest person in the room[1]. In 2025 that feeling was rare, and not simply because I had 20 years more wisdom.
I left Amazon for the third and last time a couple months ago and have no regrets.
If you're still there and reading this, Amazon still has a lot going for it as a place to work. But it's not the electric place I recall from 20 years ago. I'm not sure if there is any company that can match both the startup-like freedom of action with massive scale of early 2000s Amazon.
[1] In case it isn't obvious: this is a desirable condition because it means you get to learn something.
I wrote a talk entitled How Humans See Data that puts several of these ideas, among others, into a coherent framework based on research by Bill Cleveland.
Fair enough. I maybe should have put language in scare quotes. :)
In 1999, front end templates were written in an internally developed macro language named catsubst and served by a C (maybe C++?) application named Obidos. Later (starting in 2003-ish), front end code was written in Perl (Mason) and served by another application named Gurupa. The transition to Gurupa was very long and arduous. I've no idea how the site works now.
Your control is greatly reduced in aerobars, but more importantly, your ability to defend your space is hugely reduced, which makes riding in a pack extremely dangerous. This video explains why having the ability to protect your bars prevents crashes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRIsWzrMmBs
Cycling has some dumb rules (e.g. sock length), but banning aerobars in mass start races is not among them.
I participated in the drafting of these tenets along with several others. Many years later, I'm pleased by how much I still like them.
I'm like this, but when I have too much caffeine I notice that it's harder to turn the monologue off. It becomes a little shouty in fact. Brains are weird.
You've got it more or less. The way I say it is that bad ideas can't hide in writing. You can fool yourself and others with a powerpoint or a spoken argument. But clear writing demands clear thinking. Poorly constructed arguments are (usually) obvious as such when put into writing.
CLR
Starry Messenger - Galileo
Very fun and readable. He's so excited to tell the world about what he's learned.
In practice I find prophet far superior. Prophet can deal deftly with the kind of problems that show up in real-world data like missing values and radical changes in trend from shocks to the system you're modeling.
For textbook problems like forecasting electricity demand, sARIMA works just fine, but you'll struggle forecasting anything more complex. This is not to say that it's impossible, but it will require far more expertise.
Perhaps related to Sturgeon's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
The specific anecdote may have been fabricated, but the principle is sound. An example is the marshmallow problem[1], where a group is given some materials and is asked to build, under time pressure, the tallest tower they can with a marshmallow on top. Adults generally fare poorly because they don't experiment enough, building a tall tower and placing a marshmallow on the top as time is running out, only to have the tower collapse under the newly introduced weight. Children often do much better because they start with small, simple structures and iterate quickly.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_build_a_tower?language=e...
As a data scientist: What do you want to know about the thing you're building and how it works?
Keogh has produced a bunch of interesting work. Toward Parameter Free Data Mining is a gem: https://www.cs.ucr.edu/~eamonn/SIGKDD_2004_long.pdf Of course SAX is also super interesting: https://www.cs.ucr.edu/~eamonn/SAX.pdf
Did you even read the headline? “Supplements won’t prevent dementia...”
The first half of the article is all about various dietary supplements and how there is no good evidence for them. But there is decent evidence for exercise, controlling blood pressure, and congnitive training.
Jeff talks a lot about this in his recent letter to shareholders.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312518...
He suggests that a great memo takes a week or more. In my experience that's roughly right, though you'll often have been mulling over the problem for weeks before you actually start writing.
Jeff's letters to shareholders are pretty good. Here's a recent one: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312518...
Because of its audience and goals it's necessarily less technical and more essay-like than a typical s-team memo. For obvious reasons, I can't link to any of those.
An example that's close and is in the public domain is Jacobsen's TCP slow start paper: https://ee.lbl.gov/papers/congavoid.pdf. He's advocating a specific change in the TCP protocol and marshalls evidence beautifully to make his argument.
I agree completely. It's also important that the audience can actually tell the difference between good writing and poor writing and give useful feedback. You can't just ask people to write and hope for the best.
I've seen a couple companies try to adopt the Amazon-style narrative, and they both failed. I think the only way it can happen is if leadership demands it and is absolutely unrelenting. People will resist at first, but in time (years) they will come around. Some people may have to exit the organization and be replaced for this change to work. Amazon's organization circa 2004 was large and resilient enough to support this kind of change. A random startup might not be able to.
There are important norms in Amazon's culture that support this method. Time is always set aside at the beginning of the meeting for people to read the paper. They know that no one will read it before-hand, so they make time in the schedule. Also, the main document is at most six pages, but you can supply an endless number of appendices. This gives people a place to put supporting information that feels too important to cut entirely.
To the contrary, clear writing make it much easier for the audience to assemble complex ideas.
Poor writing definitely makes it harder, and it turns out that the vast majority of people are poor writers, mainly because they don't practice. You might not have experienced high-quality business writing because it's so rare.
Powerpoint does have its uses; I've written and delivered lots of talks using powerpoint. But informing an audience about to make a high-stakes decision is not among them.
I've written documents for Jeff, and IMO, the six-page narrative memo is a key part of Amazon's success. It's so easy to fool both yourself and your audience with an oral presentation or powerpoint slides. With narrative text that has to stand on its own, there is no place for poor reasoning to hide. Amazon's leadership makes better decisions than their competitors in part because they are routinely supplied with better arguments than their competitors.
"Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is." -Dick Guindon, via Leslie Lamport
Constraining people via arbitrary norms is harmful. Putting people into tidy little boxes is harmful to those that don't neatly fit in their assigned box.
The smartest HR person I ever worked with once told me "Your standardized people processes work well for about 80% of your staff. The other 20% is where enlightened, thoughtful management comes into play."
For scientific/technical talks specifically, a truly useful technique I learned from The Craft of Scientific Presentations[1] is the assertion-evidence slide.
This type of slide has a complete sentence at the top that makes a substantive assertion. Then the rest of the slide contains evidence for that assertion usually in the form of a diagram, chart or table. This type of slide is the backbone of a scientific presentation.
Generally, Alley's book is extremely useful.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Craft-Scientific-Presentations-Critic...
I'm reminded of a time when my sister in law was upset with her daughter. The girl was supposed to have cleaned her bathroom but hadn't swept the floor. To make peace, I offered to help her finish the task. What I learned is that she actually didn't know how to sweep a floor (she was maybe 5 or 6 years old). I helped her and both of us felt like we'd learned something.
She learned to sweep a floor, and I learned that often, when kids aren't meeting your expectations it because they honestly don't understand how to do it. I didn't have a child for a long time after this, but I think of this vignette often.
Even at work with junior colleagues, often they have no earthly idea what the expectations are or how to fulfill them. They need to be taught and just expressing your disapproval isn't going to help.
FYI, if you like 3b1b's videos, you can support him on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/3blue1brown/posts
What if Facebook is exploiting the same weaknesses that cigarette companies or drug dealers or casinos do? Have you ever walked into a casino and seen truly sad people whiling away their time and money? Have you ever walked past a homeless heroin addict on the street? You might argue that those people have revealed their preferences, but to me it appears that they are trapped in addictive cycle reinforced by unscrupulous predators. That billions of people might be trapped in such an addictive cycle that feeds them intellectual poison is at least cause for alarm if not a full-on crisis.
If you're interested in more about LambdaMOO, Julian Dibbell's My Tiny Life is a good read: https://www.amazon.com/My-Tiny-Life-Passion-Virtual/dp/08050...
Could I have made a lot of money in software had the free software movement never started? Sure. Could I have had my particular career? Nope. Could the current world of a zillion startups enabled by cloud computing exist without the GNU project or something like it? Seems unlikely to me, but perhaps my imagination is limited.