puszczyk

Thanks for the detailed posts. This can be useful for ppl considering applying there.

I work for Elastic for the last 6y or so and I feel I’ve been lucky to have managers who cared (for customers, also for the team), provided actionable feedback, and put me in projects that lined up with my strengths and interests. I feel a lot of that is encouraged by the company culture, but esp two individuals I have in mind—I think they’d behave like that in any other company (or burn out quickly).

Would you mind sharing if this was SV or some other region? Do you know if this would a “general” culture for Google/AWS, or limited to certain teams or offices?

> In my own country, thankfully, we get paid time off if we're sick. If we're sick long-term (I don't know what the cutoff is), the employer has to pay us 70% of wages for a year, after which the government takes over

1y sounds like a long time, esp for smaller companies (like if you have say 5 ppl on a payroll). I wonder if they can insure against such a risk (say if an insurer can cover the salary if absence longer than a month).

In Poland this is 70% (if in hospital), 80% (if general sick leave), and 100% (pregnancy related). Your employer covers this for 34 days, then the social insurance takes over. IIRC if the absence is over 6 months, then the social insurance stops paying % of your salary and pays some low fixed disability benefit.

> Lithuania … got basically paid by the US to provoke the PRC

Any links on that?

I think historically HN was mostly immune to FUD. Hope this is still the case.

> The American response … You believe that you “deserve” compensation, but at the same time you guys are all crazy on independence and don’t-tell-me-how-to-behave and whatever else. But as soon as a thing goes wrong you want money for it.

Do you believe that all Americans share these exact traits?

I’ve noticed this on Polish vs Czech roads (I’ve driven mostly in the mountains border regions of Czechia so this maybe local). Polish roads have gazillion of signs and usually you’ll see a lower speed limit sign just before the curve or a bend if it’s not supposed to be driven at the speed limit of the main road. In my opinion there are way too many signs and I feel—as another poster commented here—like a robot. On the other hand in Czechia on a small mountain road there’s a general limit say 90kmh or 70kmh and there’s no way you make the bends with that speed— it’s your responsibility to slow down.

I’ve seen a similar differences in another border regions, e.g. Switzerland-France or France-Germany. It almost seems like there are two schools of thoughts that different countries subscribe to.

On the other hand, code is often not the only output. Tickets, design docs, bug repros, emails, wikis, user docs, etc. Touch typing can remove one source of friction there.

Tell it to yahoo.

Money is obviously a great help, and saving money aside is a great hedge against future risks (so you can call it a plan).

I think that the OP had no “career” plan in mind. You can burn through all the money in the world if you are not careful.

But again, having money helps immensely whether you have a plan or not. If possible do put some aside for future emergencies or crises.

Black tea applies to Europe as a whole as far as I can tell.

Which parts of the world prefer green? Chinese and some Asian restaurants here (Poland) feature green tea quite prominently, but that’s the limit of my experience.

What? Can you give us some examples?

> It's not "waste", it's the people who are willing to spend the most money, which are presumably the people who want/need the thing most, so it's better than allocating the thing at random.

It’s not a waste, but it’s not best allocation either. It seems like the chips will go to established players with large and cheap credit lines and ossify the market even more.

The scalpers are not like market makers who are regulated, provide both bid and ask, and whose spread is usually quite small in comparison to scalpers.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketmakerspread.asp

Regardless of what you think about Palantir I find it amusing how entitled the politicians are, even in a free-market liberal democracy:

> […] Denver City Councilwoman Candi CdeBaca. […] She Googled “Palantir,” and what she found made her furious. “A company like this, and the governor and the mayor don’t say a thing about it?” the councilwoman says. “I had no heads-up from anyone that this was coming”

As far I understand (I’m not an American, please feel free to correct me), you’re free to do business in the US. There’s no requirement to get an approval from a local politician.

I hope this is just gamesmanship, and she doesn’t secretly hope Colorado to become a mafia state, where an approval of local don is needed before you register your company.

What do you recommend to use instead?

Yeah, sure. I like desserts. I’ll eat a tasty looking one if presented with the opportunity. But it doesn’t mean I want my kitchen or living room filled with desert ads.

WhatsApp call are end-to-end encrypted. Do you think they aren’t? (All, only yours?)

Not the OP, but I think lot of us get distracted often. The tasks are rarely 8 hours exact, and I bet its not easy to notice that a task took say a 10% hit.

Also this post from Joel Spolsky [0]

> When I had a summer internship at Microsoft, a fellow intern told me he was actually only going into work from 12 to 5 every day. Five hours, minus lunch, and his team loved him because he still managed to get a lot more done than average. I’ve found the same thing to be true.

For me personally, the biggest issue from distractions are not these extra hours that may accumulate over time, but rather a loss of momentum.

When I feel productive I can churn tasks quickly one after the other, even the ones I "dread" -- documentations, docs, posts. OTOH when I start getting distracted its hard to be back to productive even on something I usually enjoy (coding, investigating some tricky problem).

[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

Any chance to release another batch of invites? I think I've just missed mine :) the page says "invalid invite code" after I've filled in the email and password...

At least in Poland, the private health insure won’t cover serious procedures, eg they will cover cardiologists, but not a hospital stay, operations, etc. this means they are much cheaper because they don’t have this tail end, high value risk. You still rely on the national insurance and health care system for that.

Arguably, the comment is off-topic, but TIL about bmw m1 :)

I don’t know why the answer is unpopular. I not an American and don’t follow the NY politics. I don’t know too much about the scandal. But the ^^^ description sounds like a playbook followed by many politicians in many places , and the one that seems to work quite often.

In Polish it’s actually “cuda”, without diacritics (same meaning). Regardless, one often ignores diacritics in writing in English/Western context. My last name has “ń”, though all the airlines insist to put “n” there; same with Western European banks. While for some words they maybe ambiguities if you skip the diacritics they are usually resolved by the context. Polish ppl are def used to read a text without diacritics and not surprised by this. (Of course a larger body text is a bit harder/slower to read, but it happens often when text messaging or in a Western context). I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that Serbian is similar.

>> Syria? South Sudan? Venezuela? Honduras? Belarus?

> these countries do not conduct terrorist activities or war crimes in a foreign soil

Are you sure you comment on a good faith here?

The idea to avoid the news and that news are biased is not new nor revolutionary. But I like this “information arbitrage” idea — most people get their news from X, Y, Z so if you can research an event more objectively you maybe able to profit from it.

Can you expand on what do you have in mind as “nice to see a government clampdown on the m [the 5 offices in India]”?

> The first time a black coworker gave a black thumbs-up reaction on slack, I noticed I didn't want to +1 it. I didn't identify with it, it didn't feel like it was coming from me.

Why wouldn’t you identify with a +1 from a black (or other race/ethnicity) colleague?

The question is a bit aggressive, but if possible don’t consider it like that — I live in an (unfortunately rather conservative) part of the EU and TBH I’m often surprised with the race/diversity activism. I usually support them, if nothing else then because I’m clearly ignorant and not affected by the challenges some of my coworkers have to put on with.

This is a great news. I've been toying with the idea of generating parts of my blog from notion. There are currently some projects which reverse-engineered the API and provide an "unofficial" clients [1][2]. The problem though is that I'd like to blog to be minimum maintenance after a spike of work and I'm afraid the unofficial clients will inevitably break and will require updates.

The problem with the current beta is the limits of the API. E.g. code block are not supported[3], so you can't really use it to generate a technical blog.

Looking forward to the GA :)

[1]: https://github.com/jamalex/notion-py [2]: https://github.com/kjk/notionapi [3]: https://developers.notion.com/reference/get-block-children

You can actually do that in mobile/desktop safari https://www.groovypost.com/howto/use-safari-reader-view-auto...

Thanks for responding to my cynic take. Maybe indeed they deserve some credit for the decision and the benefit of the doubt for now.

"One department of the megacorp confirms a decision made by the other department" big news

You can by insure for you as a driver and for your car (and in many jurisdictions have to) — this limits your responsibility. You can spend $10000 on AWS and still make a mistake and pay another $10k+.

I don’t get the point that AWS docs are free. I mean, they are free, but the services are not. Do you pay for a visit in a car dealership?