Hacker News: patmcguire

New comment by patmcguire in "Software Engineering at Google (2020)"

patmcguire — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 20:50:29 +0000

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.

New comment by patmcguire in "Things to say when you're losing a technical argument (2001)"

patmcguire — Fri, 05 Nov 2021 19:58:32 +0000

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.

Windows Explorer Through the Years

patmcguire — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 21:43:31 +0000

Article URL: https://gekk.info/articles/explorer.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23482496

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

New comment by patmcguire in "Creating a Slack Writing Etiquette Guide for Your Workplace"

patmcguire — Thu, 05 Mar 2020 21:00:44 +0000

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

New comment by patmcguire in "Facebook forcing moderators to log every second of day"

patmcguire — Thu, 09 Jan 2020 19:39:59 +0000

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.

New comment by patmcguire in "Hexing the technical interview (2017)"

patmcguire — Fri, 06 Dec 2019 05:16:07 +0000

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.

New comment by patmcguire in "I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx"

patmcguire — Tue, 26 Nov 2019 18:14:36 +0000

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=" rather than href="" ping="tracking"

New comment by patmcguire in "I am no longer able to use Google with Lynx"

patmcguire — Mon, 25 Nov 2019 20:46:25 +0000

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?

New comment by patmcguire in "Taking too much slack out of the rubber band"

patmcguire — Mon, 11 Nov 2019 16:13:05 +0000

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.

New comment by patmcguire in "Mental-health information 'sold to advertisers'"

patmcguire — Wed, 04 Sep 2019 22:00:16 +0000

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

New comment by patmcguire in "Dropbox Brings Back Support for ZFS, XFS, Btrfs and eCryptFS on Linux"

patmcguire — Mon, 22 Jul 2019 21:34:26 +0000

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

New comment by patmcguire in "Twitter was down"

patmcguire — Thu, 11 Jul 2019 19:47:39 +0000

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

New comment by patmcguire in "A Profile of Zoom CEO Eric Yuan"

patmcguire — Mon, 22 Apr 2019 05:57:48 +0000

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

New comment by patmcguire in "Google terminated our startup's developer account – what do we do?"

patmcguire — Tue, 19 Mar 2019 19:59:29 +0000

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.

New comment by patmcguire in "You Do Not Need Blockchain: Popular Use Cases and Why They Do Not Work"

patmcguire — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 19:00:56 +0000

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

New comment by patmcguire in "Google says Nest’s built-in mic not listed in specs was not meant to be secret"

patmcguire — Wed, 20 Feb 2019 17:32:18 +0000

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.

New comment by patmcguire in "Chariot is shutting down"

patmcguire — Thu, 10 Jan 2019 23:13:54 +0000

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.

New comment by patmcguire in "Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada"

patmcguire — Thu, 20 Dec 2018 16:09:22 +0000

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

New comment by patmcguire in "An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth"

patmcguire — Thu, 13 Dec 2018 00:28:36 +0000

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.

New comment by patmcguire in "An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth"

patmcguire — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 18:23:04 +0000

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.