chitchcock

Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.

I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they've made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don't real

jackrusher

Hofstadter on Lisp

In the mid-80s, while reading through my roommate's collection of Scientific American back issues, I encountered this introduction to Lisp written by Douglas Hofstadter. I found it very charming at the time, and provide it here (somewhat illegally) for the edification of a new generation of Lispers.

In a testament to the timelessness of Lisp, you can still run all the examples below in emacs if you install these aliases:

(defalias 'plus #'+)
(defalias 'quotient #'/)
(defalias 'times #'*)
(defalias 'difference #'-)

willurd

Each of these commands will run an ad hoc http static server in your current (or specified) directory, available at http://localhost:8000. Use this power wisely.

Discussion on reddit.

Python 2.x

$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000

chanks

Turning PostgreSQL into a queue serving 10,000 jobs per second

RDBMS-based job queues have been criticized recently for being unable to handle heavy loads. And they deserve it, to some extent, because the queries used to safely lock a job have been pretty hairy. SELECT FOR UPDATE followed by an UPDATE works fine at first, but then you add more workers, and each is trying to SELECT FOR UPDATE the same row (and maybe throwing NOWAIT in there, then catching the errors and retrying), and things slow down.

On top of that, they have to actually update the row to mark it as locked, so the rest of your workers are sitting there waiting while one of them propagates its lock to disk (and the disks of however many servers you're replicating to). QueueClassic got some mileage out of the novel idea of randomly picking a row near the front of the queue to lock, but I can't still seem to get more than an an extra few hundred jobs per second out of it under heavy load.

So, many developers have started going straight t

debasishg

General Background and Overview

1. Probabilistic Data Structures for Web Analytics and Data Mining : A great overview of the space of probabilistic data structures and how they are used in approximation algorithm implementation.
2. Models and Issues in Data Stream Systems
3. Philippe Flajolet’s contribution to streaming algorithms : A presentation by Jérémie Lumbroso that visits some of the hostorical perspectives and how it all began with Flajolet
4. Approximate Frequency Counts over Data Streams by Gurmeet Singh Manku & Rajeev Motwani : One of the early papers on the subject.
5. [Methods for Finding Frequent Items in Data Streams](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.187.9800&rep=rep1&t

staltz

The introduction to Reactive Programming you've been missing

(by @andrestaltz)

---

This tutorial as a series of videos

If you prefer to watch video tutorials with live-coding, then check out this series I recorded with the same contents as in this article: Egghead.io - Introduction to Reactive Programming.

---

magicznyleszek

CSS Selectors Cheatsheet

Hi! If you see an error or something is missing (like :focus-within for few years :P) please let me know ❤️

Element selectors

Element -- selects all h2 elements on the page

h2 {

tuxfight3r

Bash Shortcuts

Moving

command	description
ctrl + a	Goto BEGINNING of command line

prakhar1989

Rich Hickey on becoming a better developer

Rich Hickey • 3 years ago

Sorry, I have to disagree with the entire premise here.

A wide variety of experiences might lead to well-roundedness, but not to greatness, nor even goodness. By constantly switching from one thing to another you are always reaching above your comfort zone, yes, but doing so by resetting your skill and knowledge level to zero.

Mastery comes from a combination of at least several of the following:

squarism

In the below keyboard shortcuts, I use the capital letters for reading clarity but this does not imply shift, if shift is needed, I will say shift. So ⌘ + D does not mean hold shift. ⌘ + Shift + D does of course.

Tabs and Windows

Function	Shortcut
New Tab	⌘ + T
Close Tab or Window	⌘ + W (same as many mac apps)
Go to Tab	⌘ + Number Key (ie: ⌘2 is 2nd tab)
Go to Split Pane by Direction	⌘ + Option + Arrow Key