Francesco Agosti fragosti

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

Step 0:

Get Homebrew installed on your mac if you don't already have it

Step 1:

Install highlight. "brew install highlight". (This brings down Lua and Boost as well)

Step 2:

Share Counts

I have always struggled with getting all the various share buttons from Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest, etc to align correctly and to not look like a tacky explosion of buttons. Seeing a number of sites rolling their own share buttons with counts, for example The Next Web I decided to look into the various APIs on how to simply return the share count.

If you want to roll up all of these into a single jQuery plugin check out Sharrre

Many of these API calls and methods are undocumented, so anticipate that they will change in the future. Also, if you are planning on rolling these out across a site I would recommend creating a simple endpoint that periodically caches results from all of the APIs so that you are not overloading the services will requests.

Twitter

OS X Screencast to animated GIF

This gist shows how to create a GIF screencast using only free OS X tools: QuickTime, ffmpeg, and gifsicle.

Instructions

To capture the video (filesize: 19MB), using the free "QuickTime Player" application:

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

How to: Allow Node to bind to port 80 without sudo

TL;DR

Only do this if you understand the consequences: all node programs will be able to bind on ports < 1024

sudo setcap 'cap_net_bind_service=+ep' /usr/local/bin/node

Important: your node location may vary. Use which node to find it, or use it directly in the command:

	Latency Comparison Numbers (~2012)
	----------------------------------
	L1 cache reference 0.5 ns
	Branch mispredict 5 ns
	L2 cache reference 7 ns 14x L1 cache
	Mutex lock/unlock 25 ns
	Main memory reference 100 ns 20x L2 cache, 200x L1 cache
	Compress 1K bytes with Zippy 3,000 ns 3 us
	Send 1K bytes over 1 Gbps network 10,000 ns 10 us
	Read 4K randomly from SSD* 150,000 ns 150 us ~1GB/sec SSD

	i386 : iPhone Simulator
	x86_64 : iPhone Simulator
	arm64 : iPhone Simulator
	iPhone1,1 : iPhone
	iPhone1,2 : iPhone 3G
	iPhone2,1 : iPhone 3GS
	iPhone3,1 : iPhone 4
	iPhone3,2 : iPhone 4 GSM Rev A
	iPhone3,3 : iPhone 4 CDMA
	iPhone4,1 : iPhone 4S

	-- show running queries (pre 9.2)
	SELECT procpid, age(clock_timestamp(), query_start), usename, current_query
	FROM pg_stat_activity
	WHERE current_query != '<IDLE>' AND current_query NOT ILIKE '%pg_stat_activity%'
	ORDER BY query_start desc;

	-- show running queries (9.2)
	SELECT pid, age(clock_timestamp(), query_start), usename, query
	FROM pg_stat_activity
	WHERE query != '<IDLE>' AND query NOT ILIKE '%pg_stat_activity%'

	// http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15829172/stop-chrome-back-forward-two-finger-swipe
	$(document).on('mousewheel', function(e) {
	var $target = $(e.target).closest('.scrollable-h');
	if ($target.scrollLeft () <= 4) {
	$target.scrollLeft(5);
	return false;
	}
	});