incan1275

This feels more the fault of local government that just lets large tech companies have their way.

If you read this: https://blogs.microsoft.com/?p=52550473

you'll see that their post does not mention the housing situation at all. I wonder where they will find all the non-engineers and execs - the janitors, the guards, the cooks, the receptionists - who are being pushed out by every acre that gets taken over by Apple/Google/MSFT.

It was for us. Things we use it for:

- Using it as a timer for cooking in the kitchen. - For music at home. - Listening to weather reports and news in the morning before we head out for work.

Before Alexa, we used our phone for all the above, but we found it to be much easier using a voice assistant. I wouldn't say it's a massive gain in productivity, but we are pretty happy we got it.

Happen to know that is the work of the eBay team in New York. Really great engineers in that lab.

He has some great points about SIGMOD/VLDB reviewing - they emphasize far too much on "algorithmic novelty", instead of impactful simple systems. However, in terms of graph processing, I too think in many instances, single machine processing is too limiting.

In general, I think people would be more convinced if there were real cases in industry where engineers switched from distributing graph algos to single-machine algos because they found performance benefits were better. In all my years, I haven't heard of a case like this (it's always been the other way around).

Seriously, using Google search trends isn't the best way to analyze usage or popularity. GitHub stats (assuming they are publicly available), would be much better.

Currently halfway through: Emperor of all Maladies, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Amazing portrait and biography of cancer. It outlines the history of cancer, chemotherapy, surgeries and the drugs use to treat so many patients who gave their lives for cancer science.

The author is a good writer, but occasionally delves into minute historical details that I sometimes don't care for. Still, it's very enlightening.

Such bad journalism. Creating one's own language is not even trivial, and it seems Facebook did it in a flash.

For more perspective on what the engineers intended: https://code.facebook.com/posts/1686672014972296/deal-or-no-...

I would say don't be too hard on yourself. It's difficult to find something you're passionate about and have it practically used by many people.

The best thing you could do is actually work on side projects related to your paid work. Come up with an idea, prototype it, demo it and convince your boss/peers that it's something beneficial for you or the company. Many obvious examples where a lot of successful applications first came up as someone's side project at work.

I share the author's frustration with wikipedia sometimes - people usually go to wikipedia for a distilled, comprehensible description of the subject matter. What he quoted was certainly not comprehensible, even to someone well-educated in CS foundations.

Yonatan Zunger posted a really awesome piece about the origins of insurance, that complements this nicely.

https://healthcareinamerica.us/how-to-ask-good-questions-abo...

To be fair, they are upfront in the beginning about not being able to adhere to an exactly-once model.

"In the past three months we’ve built an entirely new de-duplication system to get as close as possible to exactly-once delivery"

What's annoying is that they do not get precise and formal about what they want out of their new model. Also, their numbers only speak to performance, not correctness.

On the plus side, I think it's awesome to see bloom filters successfully used in production. That sort of thing is easy to implement, but not easy to get right for every use case.