patmcguire

Readability is hit and miss. Very nice to have everything written to the same standard, it makes it much easier to navigate through any project. Downside is it's pretty rough for more peripheral teams or teams working in a language that's a small component of their product. I remember for one of DeepMind's big launches the interface was all in files ending in .notjs, presumably since they didn't have anyone on the team with Javascript readability. This was 5+ years ago, though, so some of the downsides may have been mitigated.

Yeah, it's good for these kinds of discussions when it's a universal requirement, or when the white paper concerns will actually be addressed before confirming a design. I do get suspicious when it comes up for the first time when it's something someone doesn't want to hear, or when the discussion continues on like it's obviously untrue in the meantime.

There's a site for this http://www.nohello.com/

It's think it's pretty common when billing for time when the base rate is high. Lots of big law firms bill in six minute increments.

I'm trying to find the original source for this, but there's a quote I've seen about how finding a cycle in a linked list used to regarded as a FizzBuzz like test. It came of age when most people worked in C - if you worked in C for a year you'd know that cold.

I wonder how much the technical question approach isn't so much wrong as it is testing for things that matter much less now. There don't seem to be many questions about concurrency and distributed systems in this kind of interview, or at least not good ones. Everything now is "it depends" and the hard solutions are about ten lines of code for ten pages of problem explanation.

Ah yeah that's definitely going to be different HTML on Lynx, then, since I bet they don't support that and Google's not missing out on tracking.

Yup - curling with Lynx user agent gets a targets of href="/url?q=<whatever>" rather than href="<whatever>" ping="tracking"

Did they also remove link wrapping with this? The HREF goes straight to the destination for me now on Chrome, where previously it went to some Google domain redirect. It's there on the first HTML load too, it's not a JS thing after the fact. Is there a different response for Lynx or are they formatting it in such a way that Lynx doesn't pick it up?

There's something related called the bullwhip effect. I think that throwing away requests under load rather than putting them in some overflow queue prevents it. The effects aren't magnified down the chain of services as each scales up because it's only incoming traffic.

Are there any alternatives? It often gets very weird at the high end of drug prices, but usually in a way that inverts normal economic logic - this story from a few years ago blew my mind https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13995249#13996448

This is a very thorough explanation of why it matters https://danluu.com/deconstruct-files/

Odd coincidence, seems like it might have been some upstream banks having a bad SCA rollout

That really might have been the tech, codebases can get pretty weird after a while.

This is one of those situations where it's not what you know, it's who you know. The only thing that matters is if you know someone who can bypass their support and flip a boolean.

Or you have a system with incredible amounts of fraud that still manages to function, like CPC ads

Yeah, I think it's most likely that. Seems very plausible Nest wanted to have some voice features but they got cut before launch. The mic's still there because changing hardware is hard, it's not announced because it doesn't do anything.

The hard part is how to make it work politically. I don't know if any place has really done it in an environment that was mostly built out already. Manhattan used to have 700k more residents than it does now, and that was when a lot of the island was still farmland - people spread out with the trains. Once you're out of space it's very difficult to develop transit, because that would probably mean a homeowner doesn't get what they want.

It's mostly about 1979 and the humiliation of the hostage crisis.

Doesn't matter how low is if the payout is high enough. Also, it's not like they've got any better ad to show you, CTR is something like one in a thousand for display.

I see this sentiment a lot, but I think it probably does make financial sense to show you ads for a thing you already bought. There are often a few whales out there who are buying one of a thing to sample and then might later buy hundreds or thousands.

Probably the most honest explanation of how companies actually hire I've seen.

https://medium.com/teachable/how-we-code-at-teachable-ff4285...

Elastic, Mongodb, and Docker all have this business model. I guess the difference is in their case they developed it first and then open sourced - they've got a much more credible claim to superior support.

Yeah, at least the R code only goes up and down, line by line. Most non-trivial excel code will have different bits of code going right and left (formulas sit in a row,column pair). One you get into extra tabs/sheets that's yet another dimension.

They keep quite a bit more than what you see on the surface, or what would be needed for the simplest definition of play history https://twitter.com/steipete/status/1025024813889478656

Or you file a chargeback, or someone playing on your account uses an aimbot, or anything else that attracts their unilateral ire.

The unmentioned context here is that Debian is stricter in how they handle binary firmware than most distributions. I believe they refuse to distribute any not under a free software license, most others will ship binary blob firmware.

In April all of the top ten companies tracked at least 50% of pages, whereas in July only five companies do so.

Looks like the people who predicted this would lead to consolidation among the biggest players were correct.

1) It's hard to overstate how much people love Fortnite. They can also lose ~25% of sales and still make the money without the cut. 2) It's not necessarily about the money, there's lots of other rules besides the 30% cut that might be the actual sticking point.

And it wasn't until 2005 that student loans were made permanently non-dischargeable, rather than the previous first five years. Of course bankruptcies went down, what's the point?

Yeah. If Netflix sends me every byte I've ever viewed, that's pretty useless.