tlug

It's unbelievable. I used too work for Google back in 2005 and they had a custom to welcome all Nooglers (new Googlers) on Friday general meeting, where Larry/Sergey were present an people could ask them any questions.

So one guy stood up and asked why our main page is not compliant with W3C guidelines (doesn't pass HTML validator test). L&S answered that they need to shave off any unnecessary byte, so that it loads faster. That's why they didn't care about closing tags etc.

How the world and perception has changed since that time... It's just sad that one needs a huge JS framework just to build a simple website these days.

Oh and the size of the homepage was in the order of 20 KB then, IIRC.

Great stuff. I always admire efforts like archive.org, textfiles.com and yours just fits well into that theme. The nature of today's Internet is that things disappear all too easy due to a simple redesign decision, people no longer care about "Cool URIs Don't Change" rule by Tim Berners-Lee. It's refreshing to see work like this and hope it will survive forever.

Just in case someone stumbles upon this via Google and wondering what was the outcome. After almost a month of complaining via online chat and over the phone, asking for escalation, Booking.com finally issued a refund. The offered to book another place with a promise to cover the rate difference (about 1/3 of the initial cost). I don't know what actually helped, my stream of complaints, or maybe the fact that I warned them about possible legal actions like ACM ConsuWijzer in the Netherlands which I learned about from this thread or maybe simply this process just takes so long. Due to the lack of transparency BB, it's hard to tell.

I have not yet had to try Airbnb's support for host scam, but unfortunately I am now in a situation with a scam host on Booking.com. Some time after booking and paying for the apartment in NYC, the host disappeared, they removed the listing, don't answer emails/phones/etc. I've been complaining to Booking.com over their chat and phone - no real action for almost a month. The only thing the first line can do is to file a ticket to appropriate department (fraud, I assume) and their hands are tied. They apologise for delay, etc. but nothing is really being done, I'm afraid.

If anyone has tried digging a deeper hole in the ground, they'll understand that this hand-operated screw-like coffin can't work at all, due to the forces involved. You need to displace a huge amount of dirt, I don't see that happening without digging a hole first.

Call me old-fashioned, but when I look at the source code of a web page designed using the "modern" frameworks, it looks like a horrible mess of JS/CSS with very little actual content. E.g. take a look at this guy's code snippet's HTML source in the middle of the page - it's just a wall of <div>s and <span>s, for every single visible character.

The search engines these days cannot even function without a JS interpreter, something that surely increases the complexity and cost of building one.

Long gone are the days when one cared about semantic elegance of HTML code, per-site optimized CSS stored in an external file for easy caching, only occassional use of JS for easier navigation...

Nowadays you don't build websites, you have to build "apps". It's one of many signs of the "appification" of Internet.

OK, if you define the availability of writes in this way, that they must complete immediately, then indeed the availability part of CAP is not met.

However his definition reads: "every request received by a non-failing node in the system must result in a response"

It doesn't say anything about the timing of response. The network partition will be resolved eventually and thus the write operation will complete. Or it can time out and return an error, which is also fine based on the definition of availability (must result in a response).

Is it just me, or the proof appears to be incorrect? In the last example, the write operation should simply block before returning "done" to the client, before it's able to replicate the state to the other server. In fact, in a fault-tolerant system there cannot be just two servers, because it would be impossible to achieve a majority vote.

I find it awkward how Apple is now bravely fighting problems that it has (co-)created in the first place. They invent all the clever ways how to limit the number of notifications and disturbances on the phone. But that's just attacking the problem from the wrong side. If you don't want notifications, just don't enable them! It's that simple.

I may be old (42) but the only notifications that exist on my phone are from SMS and WhatsApp (which I occassionally use). I intentionally don't enable notifications about emails, as this communication medium is by definition not realtime. Of course I'm not on Facebook either, but even if I were, I don't see the point of having to check all the time what fresh pics of cats are other people sharing.

That is a very old article, I wonder if there are any new approaches to this issue.