You get a scale at AWS that is hard to find elsewhere. There are still a huge number of very smart people there. You can learn a lot. I loved my time at AWS.
That said there are a ton of cons. There's an entrenched management class that is disconnected from reality. There are a number of ~L8-L10 folks who don't believe or understand how they're falling behind the cloudflares and other providers. There is a bizarre arrogance in Seattle that masquerades as "willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time". People aren't afraid enough.
What AWS will struggle with over the next few years is verifying the results of the narratives they tell themselves. At some point along their evolution a disconnect between narrative and reality happened and someone needs to bring everything back to a baseline of reality. Leaders tell a story of their success (that I'm sure they themselves believe) and no one follows through to actually verify the results.
This issue of lack of narrative/reality baseline, to me, is a cancer at the heart of AWS and if it can be addressed then I think they can recover and shine. Otherwise they'll fall into the same trap as MSFT back in the 90s/2000s where they think everything is going just fine while the floor falls out from under them.
Happened to MSFT, happened to Google, happened to Sears, happened to GE, happneed to Boeing, happened to IBM.
There's definitely been some rot in AWS, which has been holding off the collapse in most other areas. Honestly it seems the more top down leadership, no matter who, gets their hands involved in thr sausage making process, thats when things start to go awry.
Engineering companies success because of their engineering culture. Amazon has some of the besr in class. Keep the accountability that many other top tier companies lack, but otherwise imo get out of the way and let the ICs do their job.
What happened to Microsoft and Alphabet does not seem comparable to Sears, GE, Boeing, and IBM. The latter group have objectively declined in terms of profit and potential.
MS/GOOG are still earning near record amounts of net income with fat profit margins, and have a higher than ever market cap.
AMZN also, so far, has pretty rosy numbers to back it up. They’re profit margins are relatively tiny though, so the executives are focusing on increasing those to match its trillion dollar market cap.
It is the reason Amazon shareholders enjoy a $2T market cap rather than Walmart shareholders that only have a $650B market cap.
It depends on what you mean by "what happened". If what you're talking about happening to those companies is how much money they make, you're totally right.
That said, your reply is a bit of a non sequitur. The thread is largely about answering the question of "why do you work at Amazon?", and I haven't seen anyone saying the answer is because of how much money Amazon makes. I also haven't seen anyone say they quit because Amazon appears to be on the same financial trajectory as GE or Boeing.
I bet you a tonne of people would agree that there's a culture shift away from valuing the experience of the boots-on-the-ground operational folk at all of those companies, which is why they don't want to work there.
Really, none? IDK, I've always thought DynamoDB and S3 were amazing, and Lambda, albeit not perfect on launch, was highly innovative and useful for many, many, many circumstances you'd either needs a k8s cluster or fleet of little used servers at the time.
SQS and Cloud watch were legit to, although cloud watch metrics are a bit aged and logs were really difficult to use until insihhts came into place
Also Glue, while it has some tenancy issues and rough edges, takes a bunch of work out of managing a datalake
Oh and Aurora + Aurora serverless weren't as flashy but from an ops perspective game changing at the time
Cloudformation is definitely showing it's age and I hate writing it compared to CDK, but it was also pretty game changing at the time. I don't know if it was the first infrastructure as code language, but it definitely kick-started the revolution.
The shopping site is the worst mainstream shopping site. Find stuff is hell. It’s missing criteria, finding the shipping time / cost when comparing products is painful.
Shipping is fast and prices are good, but you’re never quite sure you ordered the right size / color / edition.
>Engineering companies success because of their engineering culture.
What current companies do you consider to be both successful and have this culture now?
It's brought up a lot on HN. Heck, the evolution from 'fun, small, engineer company makes through product then everything changes when it becomes larger, more corporate' is almost a Hollywood cliche now (films like Blackberry, tv like Halt and Catch Fire).
Like the amazing story where a L7 insisted rewriting a python-based CLI tool in Rust, all in the name of performance even though the majority of the time was spent on HTTP calls?
What's more amazing is that the manager of the team thought that was an L7 scope and a great achievement.
> even though the majority of the time was spent on HTTP calls?
I'm not sure why this detail is relevant. The CPU it consumes is still CPU. Hypothetically, if a rewrite saves $100 million annually in compute, why does it matter that the majority of its time isn't spent in compute? It's still $100 million.
I took that to mean the tool was IO-bound, so it wasn't using much CPU to start. So if there was even that tiny sliver of slack CPU (and that's almost definitely the case on a desktop or other dev machine), then saving that tiny bit of CPU actually saved no money, since it was already riding on the spare capacity of other investments. That just leaves the cost in engineer-hours to rewrite the program.
IO-bound doesn't mean it doesn't use much CPU. A tool can use a lot of IO and also a lot of CPU.
> then saving that tiny bit of CPU actually saved no money
this doesn't follow
> since it was already riding on the spare capacity of other investments
nor does this
Take for example a CLI that downloads and verifies the Bitcoin blockchain. It may spend most of its time downloading blocks, but it spends a ton of time calling SHA256 to verify those blocks. Similarly with a tool that downloads and checksums large files like Docker images.
If you have a fleet of 650K developer machines all running this util, then at some point it becomes cost effective to optimize the CPU usage.
Whether that point was reached in this example is not something I know. It seems like the L7 and their manager believed it was. But OP believes it wasn't. Either way, we don't know from OP's description of the situation.
Sure, something like that is technically consistent with the description, but unlikely to be relevant. If you're thinking of a program that downloads a bunch of data and then does a bunch of cryptographic operations on it, what are the odds that the first description in your mind is "spends most of its time on HTTP requests"? Slim, I'd say, even if it's technically the majority of the time.
The question isn't the "hey what's the first description that comes to mind?" The question is why people on HN are mocking the idea that saving HUGE_NUMBER*B is a bad investment just because there is some other A satisfying A > B.
I was on that team. The rewrite was NOT valuable. Heck there is even a pinned Github issue at the top of the repo that tries to explain why this rewrite even happened and it doesn't have a good answer.
And high ranking managers never make silly judgments based on hype or cool-factor, is that right? Come on, the overlying context was specifically the claim that upper level management had lost touch with reality, and that this was just one example.
I get that people want to make fun of management. But the complaints were that Amazon was stagnating and frugal. The idea that they're spending extravagantly on programming language fads is amusing, but isn't really consistent with what others were saying or with what we know about Amazon generally.
Rewrites to save compute resources are done pretty frequently at huge companies. It's a relatively easy source of projects for high level engineers because they can see the fleet-wide metrics and have figured out how to choose projects that have clear dollar value in their performance write-ups.
Could an L7 have wasted a bunch of time on a fruitless project? Of course. Could an L7 have wasted a bunch of time on a fruitless project at a notoriously cutthroat and frugal company AND be super proud of it? That seems much less likely since they have to show some numeric impact at that level, but I obvious still possible. Would their manager then also be proud of it? That seems even less likely.
So when the only description of the project also accurately describes a large class of valuable projects (i.e. decrease fleet-wide cost of a ubiquitous tool) I was genuinely curious if there was more to the story.
Have you used many cli tools that consume a meaningful amount of cpu (in terms of cost)? They are generally used by a human, so the scale can’t be all that big.
Yeah, go to a place with poor bandwidth and run any tool that downloads and hashes large files. It will spend a large time waiting on the download and also a large time hashing the files.
I don't get this take... what is the scam part? It's a real device that people can buy, and it does what it was purported to do... maybe it's not as amazing as people hoped, but does that make it a scam?
It does not do what it was purported to do though.
It was supposed to have a built-in AI, including an AI to navigate websites that is just a bunch of manually written playwright scripts, and plenty of capabilities that are present in the marketing videos and promised by the CEO that simply do not exist.
By that logic, Theranos wasn't a scam either. The hardware existed and it delivered a result. It didn't do what was claimed however and the results were routinely faked.
It was claimed that the R1 would navigate an app like a person would. That it wouldn't matter if the UI changed because the AI would figure it out the same way a person would. It follows a script and breaks when the UI changes.
It was claimed that it would be faster than ChatGPT. The majority of it is a ChatGPT wrapper.
A product exists, sure, but I'd be surprised if anyone feels it met expectations.
Can't find the interview now, but I remember watching it and yes they specifically said that because it is an AI, rather than just an automation script, it is intelligent and will not be thrown off by site redesigns or CAPTCHAs (they have later said that they won't handle CAPTCHAs also).
Turns out that it is just an automation script and it cannot deal with site redesigns or CAPTCHAs.
Edit, just found they have made this claim also which simply doesn't exist at all:
> The R1 also has a dedicated training mode, which you can use to teach the device how to do something, and it will supposedly be able to repeat the action on its own going forward. Lyu gives an example: “You’ll be like, ‘Hey, first of all, go to a software called Photoshop. Open it. Grab your photos here. Make a lasso on the watermark and click click click click. This is how you remove watermark.’” It takes 30 seconds for Rabbit OS to process, Lyu says, and then it can automatically remove all your watermarks going forward.
Regarding its “learning” - it is still a model that needs data. The best you can expect is it will take actual UI sessions (as in users interacting with the website) for specific tasks to build its scripts, and as with any current “large” model it’s not going to update in realtime based on user input alone.
Sure but that’s all in the future. All of the selling points of this device are in future tense. The “model” does not seem to exist, but it’s being “worked on”. Their client app was taken apart and there is nothing interesting there. Their servers were hacked into, and made to run Doom which is funny, and there is no trace of any AI model there.
One of their former engineers gave a statement that LAM is just a marketing term and nothing like that exists.
If all the selling points are in future tense at what point can we call it a scam?
Edit: also the founder’s previous gig was a crypto scam that also promised AI on the blockchain
There is evidently a LAM of sorts given the nature of the queries it can answer. It is able to use agents - something like langchain or ChatGPT tools - in order to perform tasks that may be dependent on other tasks.
The problem is their LAM sucks, and is likely no more than just a task builder prompt on GPT (instead of a model specifically tuned for generating these tasks) using lang chain for resolution. They also have limited tooling, and some of it is already broken.
As for it being a scam. I definitely don’t see how you can offer lifetime ChatGPT with no subscription. So unless they are going to bring in additional revenue somehow it is effectively a ponzi scheme.
Scam generally implies some form of deception, and I think selling a product that claims to have proprietary AI and not just wrap ChatGPT when it does not have proprietary AI and in fact wraps ChatGPT certainly qualifies as deceptive.
Some of the advertised features like Uber seem to be super buggy or permanently "temporarily" unavailable. I wouldn't call it a scam per se but it's more of a beta or early access product.
It’s like people who say ‘Apple products are a scam’. If you don’t like them and think they’re overpriced, it’s simple: don’t buy them. Provided there’s no deceit, there’s no scam.
It's supposed to be a model that navigates apps and websites using ML, but instead it's just plain old, manually written scripts, that will break when a website or app changes.
I’m with you. People saying it uses scripts - so does every other ai - what exactly are they expecting? Why is this device being singled out over literally any assistant.
They announced their LAM AI as being able to navigate websites and apps by itself, and not needing any adjustments when the sites change or new sites are needed due to ML.
Instead of that, they shipped a bunch of manually written playwright scripts for a small number of websites and apps... With no AI involved.
I see from your other comments you are saying this was supposed to be some AI that can navigate websites and perform tasks with no user input.
Maybe you had some unrealistic expectations about what they were offering, as it has been quite clear they only offer limited integrations. It was even widely discussed that it was just some langchain (or similar) driven agents - apparent to anyone who has read even basic information about the product.
> Don't try to guess whether gene editing or LLMs or rockets will turn out to be the most valuable technology to know about. No one can predict that. Just work on whatever interests you the most.
This optimizes for Paul's outcomes not for the individual outcomes.
> This optimizes for Paul's outcomes not for the individual outcomes.
Actually, PG advice is solid. Trying to guess the next big thing is not a winning strategy. More so for teenagers who lack a lot of skills including good judgement. Even if their guess was guaranteed spot-on, and the universe was rooting for you, once the cat is out of the bag, what advantage would a 15 years old have? They don't have any war chest or connections to survive.
If the goal is to optimize the individual's outcome, outside working towards a stable 9-5 career, their best bet is indeed building projects they're passionate about and utilizing the skills they gain in their next endeavour.
One way to waste your life is being constantly distracted by which industry is more profitable or has more potential, doubting yourself and switching context.
Depends on how you measure individual outcomes. Arguably, a life lived passionately is the best individual outcome, even if it doesn't result in you becoming rich. Maybe that's a privileged thing to say, and certainly if someone following their passions is staring down the barrel of poverty then they might want to rebalance in favor of their financial health, but in the absence of dire financial circumstances, passion is a good compass to follow. Certainly many people volunteer their time for causes they are passionate about, with no expectation of financial reward, and are happier for doing so.
What PG is noting is that sometimes (even if rarely), what an individual is passionate about can also be good for investors. But the passion comes first.
I think he’s saying that at the time when you’re making the prediction you can’t know. If you're gonna learn som core technology that you can use 7 years later (where he suggests programming) then this makes sense.
I think there’s a strong element of luck here: even if you have general purpose skills in eg programming or CS, once a novel opportunity presents itself, you likely won’t have a head start, especially today. But what can you do about it? Telling kids who are 14-15 that they should bet on some more niched tech like LLMs or even transformers would likely be terrible advice.
I upvoted because I thought it was a clever observation (meaning one that did not obviously present itself to me), although I did need https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39763016 to explain what you meant.
Becoming among the best in the world at one or an intersection of things is an excellent individual outcome, and one way to do that is to work hard on what interests you.
You can certainly become the best in the world at some combination of things that don’t interest you, but that seems less fun.
No, they're saying 1000 bets on random foundational technology means PG is more likely to have a startup to invest in that's a winner, then necessarily giving good advice to the individual founder who doesn't have 1000 turns at the wheel.
This does make sense. I think it's also possible that most of the successes PG sees are people doing something interesting to them. So the argument would be more like: among success stories, true interest is more common than trend chasing.
Of course YC funds tons of ChatGPT wrappers so dunno.
The founder who tries to do something boring and profitable ends up doing things like making another CRM or some kind of SaaS pipeline from one thing to another. These tend to be things that get built anyway by the people with more funding. There's so many CRMs built on top of vtiger open source, and these may be better than vtiger for a while, but in the long run they fall behind.
Paradoxically, avoiding risks makes people more likely to take the riskier options.
And yet, what makes most people on average the most amount of money is working on boring problems, not sexy, new technology problems. That is what is mainly implied by the top level parent. For every Elon making rockets, many more are more likely to make a significant amount of money just building another CRM.
I don't have any particular advice. I've been very lucky to join a few companies that were on the run up at the time but I never really knew at the time that they were going to be successful.
I just think blindly pursuing passion to the exclusion of profit will leave most people happy (or not) but impoverished and some people happy, lucky, and wealthy.
It was really just a tongue in cheek comment. I think Paul's advice is inspirational but it should be checked with a healthy dose of reality.
Incidentally, Paul's advice is the best advice I heard for maximising your luck surface area. You know that saying: luck is where preparation meets opportunity.
I don't know anybody impoverished from trying to build something. Even if they failed, the lessons they learned and people they met in the process offered plenty of future opportunities.
On the other hand, I know plenty of people unhappy with their lot in life but who didn't try anything to improve it when they could. They like to complain a lot and impose their bitterness and skepticism on the young dreamers.
And our society needs many, many more dreamers. Because when they succeed, as seldom as it happens, we all end up better thanks to them.
You make a good point and I don't get why you are being downvoted.
> Reuters reported earlier this month the deal would be blocked by European Commission antitrust regulators and that its main concerns were that Amazon could thwart iRobot rivals on its online marketplace, especially in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. Amazon could have delisted rival robot vacuum cleaners, reduce visibility of rivals or raised costs of iRobot's rivals to advertise and sell their robot vacuum cleaners on Amazon's marketplace, Vestager added. - https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/amazon-irobot-abandon-...
The same can be said about this deal too. And ofcourse, since Vizio is a data harvester and broker, there's the additional privacy angle involved.
> Every single one of these could be engineered away.
You clearly didn't read half of the article. 50% of these are purposeful chimes.
Also, why? What is the value of making a compressor or fan more quiet on the 3? It would be much better to lower the cost. Worry about the sound on the higher end vehicles but let the 3 be low cost.
Especially considering the alternative people are coming from is a loud very noisy machine with lots of moving parts, the fact it makes any sounds is probably not a big deal in the sum of things. Maybe eventually as everyone is in EVs this will be something people notice/care about in a competitive product way and you could or try to eliminate or shape the sounds to be more pleasing beyond. It’d probably make iteration more expensive if it became a requirement.
Most of the time they operate with lots of ambient noise of the tires on the road and outside the car which probably makes a lot of these barely audible or noticeable.
That said there are a ton of cons. There's an entrenched management class that is disconnected from reality. There are a number of ~L8-L10 folks who don't believe or understand how they're falling behind the cloudflares and other providers. There is a bizarre arrogance in Seattle that masquerades as "willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time". People aren't afraid enough.
What AWS will struggle with over the next few years is verifying the results of the narratives they tell themselves. At some point along their evolution a disconnect between narrative and reality happened and someone needs to bring everything back to a baseline of reality. Leaders tell a story of their success (that I'm sure they themselves believe) and no one follows through to actually verify the results.
This issue of lack of narrative/reality baseline, to me, is a cancer at the heart of AWS and if it can be addressed then I think they can recover and shine. Otherwise they'll fall into the same trap as MSFT back in the 90s/2000s where they think everything is going just fine while the floor falls out from under them.