tinkerteller

This is mind numbing article and probably not worth anyone's time. The so called "best" advice is: Stay the hell out of other people's code*.

My employer is famous for hiring folks at executive levels from GE and I can tell you without doubt that most of them had been some of the the worse execs I have came across. I can easily see GE as frothing with some of the worst senior level clueless "talent" out there.

I think GE used to be great under Jack Welch because he ruthlessly demanded results. When you operate in that mode virtually anything works because everything other than success gets brutally weeded out. You can start any number of new businesses and the evolution system implemented by ruthless pruning eventually will yield successful species. After Welch left, GE decided to use most of his principles as blueprint except one: demand top notch results and ruthlessly weed out everything else. One company that operates like GE under Welsh these days is Amazon. It would be very hard for any exec to spend 5 years at Amazon without showing amazing results. On the other hand I know plenty of execs at big 5 tech who have sailed through for as much as decade by simply "managing up".

It's not technology problem but execution problem. The 5 lbs/20 mi drones are quite feasible in wide urban areas to pre-selected customers. FAA is no longer a problem. It's all about deploy to small group, iterate and expand. But team there seems to be taking extra-ordinarily cautious approach until everything gets perfect - which it probably never will. Typically you don't see media to follow up on 5 year old promises of a CEO so this could very well might be hit piece generated by some insider. Anyway, I suppose Paul Viola's days there are numbered now. It's surprised they survived this long under Bezos without delivering anything at all.

While I don’t agree with @comesee, I don’t see his comments are offensive/vulgar language. Even the parent comment states very short and simple fact:

dang called me a troll after I simply asked him exactly what it was about my comment that warranted it being removed.

Why do you think this tiny little comment worthy of immediate massive downvotes so that no one even can upvote it any more?

Is it your expectation that people commenting here must submit themselves to popular opinion? Is diverging from group think or disagreeing with mods punishable by immediate shadow banning?

You are entitled to your opinions but your assertions are blantantly wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18514873

While I know how hard these people work, I really cannot support your enthusiasm. The users are often banned at slightest opportunities and they are not even informed what they did wrong or the fact that they just got banned. They would just get dreaded “your are posting too fast” error and all their future posts and comments are automatically de-ranked forever with no recourse or appeal to these higher powers. I felt this was very similar to being placed on no-fly list which we as hacker community deride so much as infallible authoritarianism.

As HN community is more and more becoming group think (watch how this post will be downvoted) and laying these extra layers of super powers punishing anyone ad hock doesn’t help. In few posts when I wrote non-popular opinion very respectfully these folks expressed their displeasure. Mods should NEVER do that.

The sign of such required moderators is indicator of how broken the algorithms driving HN. Instead of fixing these fundamental tech issues, the powers behind HN have doubled down on exercising heavy handed dictatorships. The least they could have done but never have bothered is to at least tell people they punish what they did wrong, how do they fix it and get back in community. The best they could have done would b ego open source HN and have honest discussions about various issues we have as community so more brain power is available to solve these issues. That’s the hacker way.

Update: Great! Group thinkers are already getting busy at casting downvotes.

AAPL will survive, not because they are doing great but the fact that Android just can't pick up the slack. I was completely mind boggled when top Android phones decided to get rid of headphone jack in order to copy iPhone's mistake. When Apple introduced notch, most Android phones followed up to also have that ugly thing. Funny thing is that none had FaceID to justify it! As long as Android is determined to chase tail lights, Apple is safe and will keep leading the segment. Wall street will come around back in few days.

With current state of things YouTube will be toast virtually with any copyright regulation. Huge amount of popular content on YouTube is stolen and retrofitted for your viewing pleasure. This is a raving cottage industry on YouTube and unthinkable just couple of decades ago when studios were going crazy over copyright infringement. You can find several old TV series, movies etc posted by others and comfortably ripping of ad revenue.

That is a wrong analogy. FB does recommendations prominently luring in you to things that you didn't knew existed. It also filters and sorts to decide for you what information you get to see.

The correct analogy is having a secretory that reads all your emails and only selectively lets you know what you got as well as inserting recommendations based on her belief system. So if this secretory tells you that your brother only sends you bad emails and here's the great model of gun you should buy if you are going to meet him - then your secretory is not merely a tool to manage your emails.

BUG: Level 66 salary for Microsoft is more than level 67!

It seems equivalent levels at Microsoft are severely underpaid by the factor of 2 and sometimes even 3. How the levels considered equivalent across different companies on this website?

Google had to punish Andy Rubin once because they found bondage porn on his work computer. Now, does that give you enough context?

Are you smoking something? There are no right answers, seriously? This dudes were the boss of victims who used their power to control their paycheck, promotions and career for sex. This is very different then relationships between peers. On the top of this, victims lives and careers were destroyed anyway while the bosses obtained fat paychecks to buy private islands and never having to work for all their future generations. In what world there are no right answers?

This is really on Google. Companies shouldn't be providing cover to sexual predators. They just made sure Andy keep abusing in his even more powerful position as CEO of startup. Shame on them. They have really divorced themselves from ethics.

Dude, she was asked to do interview at Burning Man. It wasn't her choice. It is unfathomable that this guy is allowed to manage anyone at all anywhere.

I think it could be said that Andy Rubin's penis is responsible for delay in robot revolution at least by decade.

BTW, surprising that article entirely forgot about Vic Gundotra who was also fired because of sexual misconduct with big payout and forcing victims to keep mum. Google is sure more and more looking like Uber these days with execs going on sexual abuse spree like no tomorrow. I'm not sure firing one person every other week for sexual abuse is something to be proud about. Anyone who thinks #MeToo is overrated needs to read this article.

What's up with calling these division leads as "CEO"? Do they only answer to the board elected by shareholders?

Even bigger issue on FB is fake ads. About 2 out of 3 ads I see are usually of some very bad product but with very attractive video and headline. I've seen people in my family buying often and getting regrets. Now I have developed muscle memory to absolutely not trust any product/sign ups on FB.

People took his code and re-distributed en-mass. BASIC paid the Microsoft bills for almost 4 years. Are you saying people stole and/or paid for unusable code?

Given average Android phone lifespan of 21 months, this leads to $2 per month charge for each Android user in EU. Not big deal for most users. However, interestingly all the fines and taxes on corporations are always passed on to customers. When will EU understand in their quest to tax and fine the shit out of tech companies?

This list is not about talent finders/leaders/managers. It's about people who wrote ton of code to accomplish something by themselves that would have been very very hard for a good manager to accomplish by simply lining up big team of median engineers.

Original interpreter Gates wrote was pretty hard. Imagine flipping switches to enter a program to do entire BASIC interpreter. You are literally entering machine code, not even Assembly. In those days doing any compiler or interpreter was a monumental amount of work and there was a reason Gates was able to sale his work to establish fairly profitable company standing on just one product: BASIC interpreter. He is not in this list for his later successes as businessman or leader but the fact he was able to code this almost single handedly.

This is so boneheaded. They are not tieng revenues but user logins! Expect more nagging emails from LinkedIn to do logins!!

According to the filing, the “number of times logged-in members visit LinkedIn, separated by 30 minutes of inactivity,” on desktop and mobile devices will be evaluated over a three-year period to help determine the number of performance stock awards (PSAs) that get doled out to Nadella

If I remember correctly there were lot many more people involved pouring various ideas that became final product although Buchheit had a lion’s share and founded the project.

(only including people who wrote massive amounts of important and complex code themselves and quite possibly dozen median engineers wouldn’t have cut it)

John Carmack

Dennis Ritchie

Ken Thompson

Bill Gates

Donald Knuth

Jeff Dean

Brian Kernighan

Not in a exciting place although probably better than rest of the big 5. The main issue is focus moving off from engineering to quarterly results and lot more non-technical people telling engineers what they need to do. Projects gets cut or severely underfunded until they die. No new ambition moonshots (they are all supposed to happen in other Alphabet company). People have learned to game the interviews so real quality is downhill. Also CEO-of-CEO is basically all but checked out and other “CEOs” are not as visionaries, bold, risk takers and obviously not as empowered.

C/C++ is one of the domain were 60+ year old can shine - if you had been writing code in it regularly. These are the languages that are hard and requires years of experience and bit of history of evolution.

If all of these companies were incorporated as part of YC batch that would be very impressive. I've increasing feeling that many companies just want to get listed as "YC company" to leverage investor network and take advantage of branding.

Hope that's obvious. If you are going in for something related to smoking always talk to your doctor. I'm talking about simple stuff where they give you large forms on what you have. They form end up at insurance companies and your rates would reflect that.

Tip: If you are very casual smoker and see a form asking you "Have you ever smoked?" or "Do you smoke any tobacco?" then say no. If you say yes then you will see it getting reported to your health insurance and even life insurance and your premiums will go up as if you were chain smoker.