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akincisor

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Bots, so many bots 2 years ago

See the history of Reddit. It was manually curated sock puppets before bots were viable, and now that bots are viable, I strongly believe the bulk of comments and posts in the popular subreddits are bots (and many are run by reddit themselves).

I've recently used a ruby script with a bunch of methods that I can configure with a few yaml files to generate a shell script which I can then run.

Each run generates a timestamped folder with not only the bash script, but also a copy of the configs used to generate it, and all the data that the commands in the bash script needs (json files). I find this style of generator a common pattern for commonly used but frequently tweaked scripts.

The contract of the web is:

- I ask for a resource - you give it to me - any linked resources (stylesheets, scripts, images etc) are up to me to request

Therefore there is no "ethical" conundrum in blocking ads. The ad industry brought this on themselves by trying to push malware, spam and actively trying to make the web worse.

CSS is declarative and not imperative. A lot of people have issues with a different kind of programming.

Also the "cascading" nature of CSS makes it hard to reason about.

I love my Ricoh GR and bought it nearly 6 years ago. The camera is an amazing combination of an APS-C sized sensor in a pocketable form factor combined with a fixed focal length lens (which is superb) that is perfect for an everyday carry.

They only just came out with the GR III (the II was almost no change and didn't do well).

Their design choices are baffling. You could set up the GR to have tactile physical controls for all the things you may want to change on the fly, but the GR III has a touchscreen instead. It also has a 30% lower battery life (which wasn't exceptional to begin with).

Though I suppose the USB-C port is an improvement.

So any post that has "... a liberal amount..." or "... take the conservative approach ..." or "... replaced the right wing nut..." would be filtered.

Political candidates also share names with other people. Name based filtering can silence unrelated people. See how well our no fly lists are at targeting people who just happen to have the wrong name.

For every problem, there is a simple solution that is wrong. Getting things right is often not simple.

If you've ever used a firecracker rocket it has solid fuel in exactly the same way. It just burns from the inside out (I think) to ensure that the rocket's center of gravity doesn't change as the burn progresses.

The first time I was a new (post) grad and I didn't much like it and left for a startup within a year.

I figured I'd give it another go with more experience, so the second time I was hired at L5 (expected to be leading teams). Liked it even less the second time, but stuck around for about 2 years for logistical reasons.

In my experience at Google and other large companies, the team you join ends up dictating your experience. I would be open to a third stint at Google, but would be very careful about vetting the team (especially the leadership).

Having said that, I don't think I like the culture at Google. Especially the second time, it felt very mercenary and there was cutthroat competition. It didn't feel like I was working on a cohesive vision, but just moving protobufs around. I think I preferred Google when Eric was CEO, maybe because it was smaller, but it felt like Larry was running Google with too much emphasis on the bottom line and not enough on product or vision.

Go Turns 10 7 years ago

Too little (PHP, JavaScript) is suboptimal, and too much (Scala, Haskell, Rust) is also suboptimal.

I find myself thinking the exact opposite. When you want to do something quick and dirty JavaScript or Ruby are my go to. When you want to do something right, do it in Haskell or Rust.

The middle of the road options I find are worse for anything.

Unless you want to hire big teams. Java, C#, Go are great for that.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

Amazon Echo Buds 7 years ago

Only on one of them:

- Your "friends" are known and tracked

- The content you view is determined by your browsing history, ad tracking and that of your "friends"

- The composition of the audience that's voting is poorly informed and susceptible to non-critical thinking (YMMV)

On both of them:

- Stories are posted to maximize your outrage/other emotional response

- Content of stories rarely matches the titles

Social interaction and even a like button is not the problem. What the like button does is the problem.

Slack S-1 7 years ago

Funnily enough, when I do design interviews, I often ask them to design a chat client - not the whole design, but bits and pieces, like the db schema or the API of the service.

What the interviews invariably show is that a chat client is not simple. It's extremely complicated, especially when you want it to work at scale. If you think it's a "simple" app, go ahead, try to make one - even on a whiteboard.

I can completely understand why instant messaging can get you $700 million in revenue. As for the losses -- they are invested in the future of the company and I think are justified.

"How hard can it be?" is something we ask about "simple" stuff everyday, and the answer if you dig deeper is almost always "Much harder than you think."