Hacker News: jrauser

New comment by jrauser in "Tesla to wind down Cybertruck production"

jrauser — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 16:07:10 +0000

I'm convinced that Elon made it just because he thought it would be funny. "Let's make a truck that looks like it came out of a 90s low-polygon video game! That'll be hilarious!" He never cared for one moment if it was actually a good product.

The poor people that bought them were the butt of his joke.

New comment by jrauser in "Amazon says it didn't cut people because of money. But because of 'culture'"

jrauser — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 17:24:55 +0000

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.

New comment by jrauser in "Amazon says it didn't cut people because of money. But because of 'culture'"

jrauser — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 17:11:38 +0000

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.

New comment by jrauser in "Friends don't let friends make bad graphs"

jrauser — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 02:10:24 +0000

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSgEeI2Xpdc

New comment by jrauser in "Amazon.com Homepage (1999)"

jrauser — Tue, 25 Jan 2022 03:39:31 +0000

Fair enough. I maybe should have put language in scare quotes. :)

New comment by jrauser in "Amazon.com Homepage (1999)"

jrauser — Mon, 24 Jan 2022 23:50:35 +0000

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.

New comment by jrauser in "Which cyclist hill descent position is superior? (2017)"

jrauser — Sun, 14 Jun 2020 15:24:06 +0000

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.

New comment by jrauser in "The Tenets of Amazon's Principal Engineers"

jrauser — Wed, 26 Feb 2020 17:28:14 +0000

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.

The Tenets of Amazon's Principal Engineers

jrauser — Wed, 26 Feb 2020 17:25:49 +0000

Article URL: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/landing_pages/principal-engineer-hiring

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22425091

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

New comment by jrauser in "Not everyone has an internal monologue"

jrauser — Thu, 30 Jan 2020 18:28:50 +0000

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.

New comment by jrauser in "The Amazon Builders' Library"

jrauser — Fri, 06 Dec 2019 01:02:31 +0000

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.

New comment by jrauser in "Ask HN: What are the most fundamental books on computer science?"

jrauser — Mon, 21 Oct 2019 12:46:35 +0000

CLR

New comment by jrauser in "Ask HN: What are your favorite books or essays written at least 100 years ago?"

jrauser — Mon, 09 Sep 2019 05:56:01 +0000

Starry Messenger - Galileo

Very fun and readable. He's so excited to tell the world about what he's learned.

New comment by jrauser in "Arima Model – Guide to Time Series Forecasting in Python"

jrauser — Sun, 23 Jun 2019 22:11:48 +0000

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.

New comment by jrauser in "How to do hard things"

jrauser — Mon, 20 May 2019 18:30:52 +0000

Perhaps related to Sturgeon's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

New comment by jrauser in "How to do hard things"

jrauser — Mon, 20 May 2019 04:45:47 +0000

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...

New comment by jrauser in "Ask HN: Best questions for an engineer to ask a CEO during a job interview?"

jrauser — Wed, 27 Mar 2019 15:09:46 +0000

As a data scientist: What do you want to know about the thing you're building and how it works?

New comment by jrauser in "Don’t make this mistake when clustering time series data"

jrauser — Sun, 10 Mar 2019 00:14:36 +0000

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

New comment by jrauser in "Some strategies may help against Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias"

jrauser — Mon, 04 Mar 2019 15:33:56 +0000

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.

New comment by jrauser in "Jeff Bezos Turned Narrative into Amazon's Competitive Advantage"

jrauser — Fri, 08 Feb 2019 21:30:47 +0000

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.