Readit Newsims commented on Goodreads was the future of book reviews, then Amazon bought it washingtonpost.com/techno... · Posted by u/pseudolus
hi i worked at goodreads and this comment is giving me gell mann amnesia.
ask any engineer there, this is basically true in the sense that amazon drastically professionalized what had been a deeply fly by night company. the way software was written and product cycles were done pre acquisition was hilariously bad.
the reason goodreads still looks so ancient today is that even a decade of amazon engineers trying to salvage it haven't been able to climb out from under the mountain of tech debt the company accrued pre acquisition.
amazon should have just scrapped and rebuilt the entire thing after the acquisition. or just not bought it and finished building their competitor to it that was in progress. either would have been more successful what they did.
Seems like the existing user base, reviews, and lists were the main source of value. I don't want to be "that guy" but I'm curious what made it so hard to rewrite some or all of the CRUD aspects?
If I work my ass off and my model recommends a few extra units, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation?
This guy is a straight-shooter with upper-management written all over him.
ims commented on Robert's Rules of Order (1876) gutenberg.org/files/9097/... · Posted by u/thunderbong
Technical people love parliamentary procedure because it notionally resolves messy human deliberation into a linear call stack with system interrupts.
The important thing to understand is that the rules are mainly for exception handling and are borderline irrelevant on the golden path. Most of the time, committees don't even think about the rules because everyone understands motions, seconding, and voting. Groups often operate in de facto ‘suspension of the rules’ and just talk through issues semi-formally until it’s time to take a vote. That’s actually the optimal outcome in most settings.
The true test of the rules is when disagreements arise about the form of debate rather than subject matter. Sometimes there is a legitimate procedural question but often this comes up when the apparent minority decides to start maneuvering because they believe they are going to lose. In the real world, this tends to play out in one of two ways depending on context:
1. This is a highly professional body with a parliamentarian at the meeting (or at least somebody plausible like a general counsel) who can call the balls and strikes, or the chair is—at least in principle—considered competent to rule by enough people present. A ruling is made and the body moves on.
2. This is an amateur body (which includes most government bodies below the state/province level and the vast majority of private committees/panels/boards), in which case people will resolve the issue as humans usually do. Namely, either the meeting will fall apart and be unable to conduct business or the most influential or aggressive parties will win regardless of what the rules say.
"But the body can just resolve everything properly by reading the rules!" -- well, theoretically.
But think back to the last time you played one of those byzantine German board games for the first time. Now imagine that nobody at the table really cares about board games and are not used to reading game rules. Further imagine that some parties are willing to defect from the spirit of the rules in order to raise esoteric legal and procedural objections, waste time, and filibuster outcomes they don’t want.
Real meetings have time limits, and while the U.S. Senate might stay up past midnight occasionally, regular people who have to wake up for work in the morning and who are giving up family time for a thankless volunteer position generally will not tolerate taking 5 hours to unwind the call stack in a hostile proceeding. So again, the loudest and most assertive parties tend to wear everyone else down. In that case the rules are at best useful for establishing in the record that procedure was not followed, which is only really useful if the issue can be escalated to the courts, appealed to a higher body, or revisited in a subsequent session.
Others in the thread have suggested simplified rulesets, and I’ll recommend Rosenberg’s Rules of Order which was designed by an experienced judge specifically for smaller meetings. But the truth is that almost any set of rules will work for amateur bodies if parties operate in good faith, and almost no set of rules will work if not.
ims commented on A religious sect landed Google in a lawsuit nytimes.com/2022/06/16/te... · Posted by u/semiquaver
As a former Oregon House resident, astonished to see it on the front page of HN.
It's interesting to see the same strategy implemented at Google, apparently, that they reportedly used to get members employed by Yuba county. There was a minor scandal, an investigation leading to a bunch of firings, years ago. Allegedly members were using their ties to get the county to look the other way at countless unpermitted structures. I understand that blew over in time, after which there was apparently a rehiring of some of those that were fired. (Some of this is just things I heard when I worked at the grocery store/gas station/video rental, which was and I believe still is the center of commerce in the area.) At that time it seemed like the fellowship made up about half the town population.
Anyways, for years they were trying to build a large colosseum and that must have been much harder to hide than the countless little shacks without addresses that they put members in, up driveways that wended and climbed past the main, addressed house. I think the colosseum led to the county's investigation. I'm not sure if they're still building it...
Fascinating. Have you written about your experience there?
Side question: what’s something as simple as SQLite, but more of an unstructured key-value store?
I’ve been using (locally) a Redis container for a very early prototype because it seems to be simple enough to use.
I know you can query json strings in salute but that’s not quite the same thing. For one redis offers some geo features.
Have you looked at RocksDB? http://rocksdb.org/
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Sounds like you're looking more for optimization theory, but if you want a gentle introduction to applications with approachable math and lots of examples, I highly recommend "Operations Research: Applications and Algorithms (4E)" by Wayne Winston. It's a solid undergrad level text covering basic linear optimization, mixed integer linear programs, and non-linear optimization.
I'm wondering, if such a movement doesn't doesn't exist already, do I need to start it myself?