useful

Extremely less useful than it used to be: just this one simple thing. I could go on.

Absolutely nothing useful to add to the discussion, just snark. Yet for some reason its the highest voted comment.

That's useful. But even better is to be relentlessly cynical.

- testing "back of the envelope" estimation however can be useful. I mean things like "how much storage is required to store satellite images for Google Maps?"

All this just to get past the spam filters and prevention that make email a useful form of communication to begin with. And let's forget the people who couldn't set up their own mail server for just a second.

I think that not having points has some nice qualities, but it also feels like I'm being denied information that I find useful in reading/skimming a thread. I've noticed I find reading HN a lot harder while this has been in effect.

ETA: Actually I really think the idea of "work-life boundaries" is a useful framing to have alongside "work-life balance"

Karma from article submissions, on the other hand, tells you nothing useful about the submitter. Any chance we can disassociate upvotes on articles from user karma?

There was lots of existing documentation and lore about SOAs, but at Amazon's vast scale it was about as useful as telling Indiana Jones to look both ways before crossing the street. Amazon's dev staff made a lot of discoveries along the way.

It's useful that CAD engineers know the basics so they can automate AutoCAD. Its useful that financial accountants know basic programming so they can become more efficient with analysing data. If the mayor of NYC wants to learn to program in his spare time, why the hell not?

At this point, I've > worked through these challenges for longer than 4/5 of the people at > the company and thought I would share some of my insights in hopes > that other engineers who are joining might find it useful. This marks the beginning of my 17th week of unemployment* after being fired from Facebook after about a half a year working there. My experience being fired has been incredibly transformative. I worked through challenges for longer than 1/10 of the people at the company and thought I'd write this alternative viewpoint in hopes that other engineers who might want to join Facebook find it useful.

Below, Babuskov raised the point that the endorsement system will obstruct useful back-and-forth discussions between sub-kilokarma users in buried threads that often takes the place of a private messaging system on HN. This would fix that more effectively than merely reducing the endorsement requirement. You should not entertain any illusions that you can flip the switch and watch this system work perfectly, and that you will therefore be able to avoid confusing people with many changes over a lengthy period of time.