Hacker News Reader

jasonallenon Oracle Swings the Layoff Axe

If you or anyone affected is interested: I'm hiring in AWS both in Seattle and Vancouver, BC. Email me at alljay at amazon.com.

jasonallenon 3D engine made of MS Excel formulae

A dev on my team wrote the following Excel 2000 credits (it was a flying carpet-like game). Afaik that was around the time BillG put his foot down and mandated no new credits. Enterprise customers felt these credits were both a sign of wasted engineering time ("you could have fixed x bugs instead!" and wasted disk space. It's logical, but only partly true. Shipping software on CD means a very long stabilization phase. You couldn't really "fix more bugs" because every bug fix had a risk of introducing another one. That means some Office teams would literally complete their work a year before shipping. They'd sit around half-heartedly helping other teams. That's when someone would take time to write credits. These credits were often tightly-optimized C and assembly, taking very little space. The facts couldn't overcome the optics, so that was the end of fun Microsoft credits.

jasonallenon 3D engine made of MS Excel formulae

As an excel developer in the 90's, this brings up great memories. I wrote the Doom Excel credits in Office 95. I wish I'd had thought of doing this instead. Kudos.

jasonallenon At Scale, Rare Events Aren’t Rare

It reminds me of an old story about Microsoft Windows. Back in the early 2000's, compiling and building Windows from source code took many hours on very specialized build hardware. Meanwhile there were thousands of developers who contributed to the full Windows stack. If any developer checked in a build failure, it would cause the build to be delayed. Well, at that scale (of thousands of developers), you can't compile Windows even if devs only commit 1 build break per year. Bad times...

jasonallenon Show HN: Creating a Pop Ballad Generator

Pretty interesting. Too bad the synths are generic and no beat. I'm pretty sure with more work this could substitute most electronica I listen to when I code.

jasonallenon Ask HN: What manual processes would you automate in your company?

I'm confused by what you mean. I'd argue that onboarding new customers should be your core competency, the focus of your main product. What am I missing?

jasonallenon Should I turn down a Amazon AWS job offer over this?

I've worked at Microsoft, Amazon, and several other places. These clauses are pretty standard. I'd say it would be unusual to find a place that doesn't make you sign these (or similar) clauses. My experience has been that it mostly depends on your relationship with your boss. If you're a strong performer and your side interests don't interfere or compete with the company, you're "usually" fine. That's not a guarantee: it's just the odds. Your location of employment also matters. I assume you're planning to work in Seattle, and unfortunately Washington is company-friendly when it comes to worker rights. California is usually more worker-friendly. If you're planning on working on AWS, you're probably going to have little free time. Don't fret this legalese if you plan on dabbling in open source or write games on your free time. However if you're probably going to run into problems than other than just legal ones if you're planning on creating a business on the side: amazon usually demands too much to leave you with much free time.

jasonallenon Start building Actions on Google

I think that, over time, both paradigms are required. For the quick lookup/command, "ask" is best. For longer interactions, like driving directions, or cooking instructions, etc... a "conversation" makes more sense. Given that we're at the early stages of conversational UIs, I think the 'ask' case is more helpful, but I'm more excited to see what will evolve through conversations.

jasonallenon Start building Actions on Google

Amazon lost the phone and tablet wars, so they shifted their focus to the voice assistant market, and are now ahead of competitors with their Alexa skills SDK. It's great to see Google now step up too. I expect Microsoft and Apple follow suit.

It's pretty easy to imagine how one could port simple 'voice command' apps between platforms ('hey, order a pizza/uber/etc...). Over time, however, these platforms should emerge into substantial AI. To be useful they will need to remember and understand more subtle contexts. "Hey, what's the score of the game" will have to remember that I like the Seahawks and Sounders, but only the Sounders are playing live right now, etc...

I like Google's choice to include a "conversational" model to the application design. "Let me talk to <x>" is pretty natural and allows <x> to then have full control of the interaction. Alexa's "ask <x> to <command>" model makes it easier to fire off simple commands, but awkward for deeper ones.

jasonallenon Announcing TypeScript 2.1

Feels like Typescript is building (or has built up?) more momentum than Flow.

jasonallenon 1.4B records from “Have I been pwned” for analysis

yeah, that's what I mean. Provide a service that reports back leaked working credentials so that the service provider can lock down the account.

jasonallenon 1.4B records from “Have I been pwned” for analysis

I'm always amazed at how efficient AWS is at detecting private keys on the internet (checked into github, etc..), and then proactively locking down accounts. I wonder how long it will be until we see a similar service from consumer accounts, like github or twitter. Seems like "have I been pwned" might offer a commercial API for such benefit...

jasonallenon All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware

When this becomes real, the next question becomes "why own the car"? What's the benefit of having it sit in a parking lot for 8 hours until I'm ready to go home. Seems like the future will become more Uber-like, where I call up rides whenever I want, and don't worry about parking, maintenance, etc....

jasonallenon We Have Always Been at War with UI

Good writing has similarities to good UI in that you have to relate to your audience. I'm a fan of this topic and appreciate your thoughts on it. However I found your article too long for my taste and attention span. Your complaints get lost in the enormity of it all.

jasonallenon Biz Stone Explains Why Twitter’s Co-Founders Are Betting On Vegan Meat Startup

I want to like this, but it conflicts with Michael Pollan's rules for eating ("don't eat anything your great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food").

Their chicken strips contain titanium dioxide. I'm no expert, but wikipedia says we probably shouldn't be eating that. What am I missing?

jasonallenon Coding Skill and the Decline of Stagnation

Interesting post. A couple of observations:

1. I think programming is a multi-disciplinary task. Notch is obviously among the best at "writing a lot of working code". He's pointing out that he could improve in software design. I've work with many folks who are obviously strong in one area but weaker in others.

2. I think his coding sloppiness comes through in minecraft: it's an incredible game, but I've stopped playing at times due to frustration with crashes and corruption.

...oh, and 3. My guess is that the "large US based game developer" was Valve.

jasonallenon Richard Stallman Was Right All Along

Agreed - Stallman was right all along. What's working against Stallman though is that his doomsday predictions are being delivered in piecemeal fashion. Each slight erosion doesn't seem too bad by itself. Only in retrospect does the magnitude of the problem reveal itself. Governments and corporations have evolved processes to change laws in such effective manners as to evade most human observation.

tldr; No one tells you the plane's not coming - they just tell you it's 20m late, perpetually...

jasonallenon Monsanto chooses Cloudant to power its genome analytics

Paul, branding us as "dumb" for reasoning this way seems beneath you. Where, in this line of reasoning, do we diverge?

1. Monsanto is a despicable company.

2. By "working closely", Cloudant implicitly condones Monsanto's ethics.

3. By announcing it publicly, Cloudant goes beyond condoning Monsanto's ethics and appear to actively support Monsanto's actions.

That's roughly my line of reasoning. Are losing each other at #1, #2 or #3?

jasonallenon GitHub: Issues Dashboard for Organizations

Any idea when this will trickle down to github:fi?

jasonallenon Monsanto chooses Cloudant to power its genome analytics

Yuck. Does anyone know if they were forced to put out that press release or did they actually write that on their own volition?

jasonallenon TechCrunch As We Know It May Be Over

Am I the only one who sees the victimization going on here? MG says "AOL promised not to interfere" and yet now "they may break their promise to us". Meanwhile Michael went and created an investment fund that clearly conflicts with TechCrunch interests.

I think AOL tried to have it both ways. With mainstream media revealing the distasteful arrangement, however, AOL has to protect their bigger interest: publishing.

jasonallenon Mozilla to remove Firefox version numbers

Great news! Mozilla is finally accepting Chrome's good innovations. Now for a unified search bar...

jasonallenon Team Fortress 2 now free forever

I suspect it's because of paid DLC. The ol' razor and blades model - give the game away for free and reap the profit on bought game content (e.g. 'hats'). The margins on those make gillette envious.

jasonallenon How Much Does a Software Developer in Portland Earn?

You assume the person living in the expensive city doesn't benefit from doing so. Folks living in San Francisco choose to do so because they find the trade-off worthwhile. I choose to live in a relatively high cost-of-living area because I love the benefits it has.

jasonallenon Ask HN: Jobs & Startups in Seattle (urgentish)

I'm an engineering director at Zynga's new Seattle office. Your skill set matches our open job reqs. Email me if you're interested.

jasonallenon What was it like to fly the Concorde

I flew the concorde NYC->London in 2000. The actual flight experience was underwhelming. The seats are narrow and you can't really 'feel' how fast you're going. I never heard or felt anything when we crossed the sonic barrier.

As for the good stuff: I loved crossing the atlantic in 3 and a half hours. I remember enjoying the caviar and a little too much bubbly. I also enjoyed the custom boarding process - everything was so damn convenient.

Nowadays I can still relive the experience by walking through the concorde stationed at the Seattle flight museum. My boys never get tired of me explaining how fast the plane goes or how the fuselage expands by a few inches during flight.

jasonallenon [dead]

Twilio runs on Amazon EC2. Tropo runs in the Voxeo network, which has been around for 10 years and has many customers including much of the Fortune 500. Tropo can handle a much greater call and SMS volume, so if you need volume or expect peaks of usage, Tropo will be better.

Skimmed the article and came across this. This isn't very informative and seems biased.