patmcguire

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.

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.

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.

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.

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=<whatever>" rather than href="<whatever>" ping="tracking"

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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