jerzyt

Of course, Wikipedia is the easiest website to scrape. The HTML is so clean an organized. I'd like to find some code to scrape Airbnb.

Yeah, I'd expand on the "API over DBs" based on my experience. I could make it nest much deeper: DBs over Excel spreadsheets, and Excel spreadsheets over PDFs or scraped HTMLs, yada, yada, yada. But before I waste any time creating an API, my client wants to know if the project is even viable.

Google's Search is dying because of Thousands of self-inflicted cuts. A couple of years ago there were about 3 or clearly marked ads on the first page, followed by generally useful results. Right now, I don't have the patience to scroll past the ads which are almost indistinguishable from useful links.

I don't have the stats, but seems to me that majority of purchases at convenience stores is alcohol. In CA, you cannot buy alcohol at self-service POS. That spells doom for Amazon Go.

At one of my previous jobs, I did a project on employee retention. Our goal was to identify valuable employees who were most likely to leave. The results were surprising at first. The top two factors leading to an employee moving to a new job were: high performance review and high increase in compensation (raise and bonus). On reflection, we realized that we just reaffirmed their market value, so they could negotiate their next salary starting from the new base with us.

Bottom line, whether you're happy or not with your job, you should probably move.

Google is not paying people to provide a service. They are paying a company. I sympathize with the people who are underpaid, but their beef should be with their employers not with Google, even though as another commenter stated: Google is outsourcing non-compliance. On a related note, if people working below the minimum wage are flying to protest at Google headquarters, someone is paying their airfare. Doesn't look like a spontaneous act to me.

This is really a great way to sabotage your competitor. Have a bunch of friend and family buy a product and flood Galaxus with bogus returns and warranty claims. We'll see how it works.

100% in agreement on Excel. Even when coding in Python I frequently save an intermediate file as xlsx to explore/debug, or even load into Tableau for viz.

VMS OS from DEC had exactly the "unique password" stupidity in the late 80s. In a way, it was much worse than Twitter's, because where I worked there were only about a 100 accounts, so you could find the other by hand in less than an hour.

It could also be argued that "medianism" is the perfect method to hide income inequality, because median is resilient to outliers, so the billionaires will not affect the median at all. Every metric can be "gamed" and so can the median.

I can confirm it. I have a commercial vacuum packing machine, and a bag of rice sealed in it becomes a brick. You can't displace a grain of rice without damaging the vacuum. I doubt that a laptop inside this bag would survive it.

I'm with you - I noticed that little pac-man, but it's not an optimal way to see the difference. Seems like scaling both images and doing an image diff would be much more effective. That's a standard tool in semiconductor manufacturing.

And what will stop them from monitoring the alcohol sales?

Really depends on the phase of the project. At the start, getting everyone in the room is really beneficial. Once we decide what we're doing, I'd rather be left alone and work from home. At the end, testing, debugging and fixing, I'd rather be in the office.

Kudos to Spotify, whether it's a money decision, or a decision to stand up to a has-been entertainer. They stood up to a bully.