My understanding was that the helical shape described the orbital of the electron at the molecular level and not its track down an actual wire. I think the hope is to exploit this helical shape using external electromagnetic sources of energy to manipulate (move/rotate) individual molecules due to this.
Disclaimer: I am a layman in this realm. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
I'm guessing that on average the company saves money this way, since people aren't robots and tend to develop a sense of community with their coworkers. Companies possibly exploit this for savings.
My experience has been that interviewers like you are rare. I may have reflected on my observations incorrectly, but it seems to me that depending on a newcomer to quickly learn a language and adapt is seen as a high-risk investment. I consider myself an adaptable person, and while I was able to make this impression upon prospective employers in my early days, they would always weigh this against the cost of training me for "longer" than the average employee.
In a sense, they were right. I have noticed myself increasingly comfortable with new codebases whenever I change jobs, so experience definitely counts for something.
Yeah, too often I've had interviewers who were far too eager to go and go all the way down to the minor corner cases of a problem (even if I try to beg off of them) and in the end I have no time to ask interesting questions. Questions that might reveal more about my skills than the last two corner cases.
You can use Serpy for that, although it will require some hacking for deserialization (a previous client of mine had a custom-built solution that used Serpy for responses but plain Form classes for parsing requests, but that seemed fine and they were handling 3k/requests per second at peak time).
That's essentially what we ended up doing, selectively using Serpy for certain slow responses. It still felt hackish though, as though we were taking the brakes off certain responses because we knew they needed little validation (IIRC). DRF serializers still need work; marshmallow provides a similar feature set to DRF but serializes almost twice as fast:
As a Django enthusiast and python programmer, I often want less magic from Django, not more. This makes pyramid or flask seem tempting to me. If I wanted Rails that badly, I would simply port my code to Ruby.
Django is supposed to be the “Rails” of Python, allowing programmers who want a Rails-like experience to continue using Python instead of switching languages completely.
If you don’t want “magic” then your solution is right - just use Flask.
The thing with the "magic" of django is that you don't need to use it! It's up to you whether you want to use the magic or not! The magic is powerful. The thing that turns users away is learning the magic.
Django's supposedly independent components were built with the context of the rest of Django in mind and have all kinds of default behaviors based on that. Surely they may work without the rest, but it isn't nearly as smooth as working with independent libraries that were designed with a much more limited scope.
> Django is supposed to be the “Rails” of Python, allowing programmers who want a Rails-like experience to continue using Python instead of switching languages completely.
A small nitpick: While Django may indeed fill that role, it's actually older than Rails, so wasn't "supposed" to do that. Both projects have been created independently of each other.
As I said above, I'm pretty taken with FastMail. It's got an incredibly zippy web client, which I value a lot. Besides the privacy aspect, they just have a better product.
These sorts of solutions are always tantalizing, especially when developing on a Mac but deploying on Linux, but the killer feature for such an application would be IDE/ST3/Atom/VSC[/etc...] support. If this sync process could be orchestrated from such a development environment directly, it would avoid many design pitfalls, such as degenerating into rapid fs polling.
hey! thanks for your comment! I wrote this yesterday because I wanted the read speed of a local copy, hot-reload of the remote side app, and the ability to edit at both ends. I came across fswatch, I've been quite impressed; it does a pretty good job resource-wise. On linux it uses ionotify; I have not seen it degenerate into rapid fs polling (yet). Cheers!
It's not a critique of your design. You solve the problem as you see it pretty spot on.
It's more so that I wish IDEs supported software like this. There's a plethora of such offerings such as CyberDuck, Expandrive, etc that would benefit from reduced read/seek activity if the IDE could just orchestrate when to emit changes to what it thinks is the "disk". As you noted on GitHub, such software gets really laggy when working in directories that aren't trivially small.
I'm not sure why Amazon thinks mobile video ads are a good idea at a time their marketplace has taken a serious hit in reputation.
Most people are already wary of counterfeit goods on the marketplace. For many household goods, cheap offerings from fly-by-night operations clutter the search results. Review sections are chock-full of 5-star reviews reading "Great product!" or similarly generic messages. Many sellers have begun essentially paying their reviewers with free goods via the Vine program; and of course those 99.9% of those reviews are favorable.
What used to feel like a premium experience now feels closer to a dollar store experience full of questionable products. Video ads on top of that will probably decrease my engagement; time will tell whether I'll continue to use Amazon for goods not available in my locale.
I agree, and anecdotally, I buy all kinds of things frequently on Amazon - food, electronics, cosmetics, pricey PC parts, stationery, phone cases, etc. - with a purchase every week or two and have yet to encounter a counterfeit. And in the rare cases I do have problems (damaged product, shipment missing, etc), Amazon customer support has consistently been good. So personally speaking, their reputation in my eyes hasn't really changed. I suspect that many customers share my feelings, but like with every other service industry, the most outspoken customers are the unhappy ones.
I have gotten a few duds, but as you say: Their customer support is second to none and i know if it happens i'll be able to return the item at no cost for a full refund.
However I also am pretty careful about keeping an eye out for scams and counterfeit items as well, there are definitely some obvious ones out there and it does make me wary and purchase less then i would otherwise.
HN and Reddit often seem to have very different views and concerns from the general population. Not sure if it's because of the echo chamber effect (reinforcing each other confidence by agreeing), or self-selection (people who share those views are more likely to be engaged on these forums), or something else.
You hear the out-of-touch people the most, because [usually] only the people with negative opinion (tiny minority; otherwise the business would go bankrupt) that are vocal about things. Neutral people don't care, people with positive opinion are happy about the experience and keep it to themselves.
I don't think that comment is completely irrelevant. There are already issues of Amazon's own branded being pushed to top, then sponsored listings being pushed to to the top, on top of counterfeit stuff. Now there will be another thing to ignore. I rarely use Amazon because I don't have Prime but if I did, this will certainly annoy me because I am already paying Amazon for the subscription as well as when I buy things, let me get straight to the thing I want to and let it be what I want (read - not fake).
> This is the top comment of literally every Amazon thread. This has nothing to do with ads.
I disagree. The comment questions why Amazon would do this now, since they're already facing consumer trust issues, and chasing advertising dollars will likely erode consumer trust further.
Every open marketplace is always going to list counterfeit goods as a business risk, because it is. That's not the same thing as implying that their reputation is damaged. On the contrary, Amazon's horrible reputation for counterfeit goods seems to exist here and on reddit and that's pretty much it.
> Every open marketplace is always going to list counterfeit goods as a business risk, because it is.
On the contrary, Amazon did not list counterfeit goods as a business risk in its 10-K filings prior to 2019.[1] It has been an open marketplace since before 2019.
That does seem to imply they only started taking it seriously as a business risk somewhat recently, which could be interpreted as hedging against reputation damage.
Otherwise I'm in agreement that there's outsized discussion of the problem on reddit and HN.
To provide a correlary, I am sure Boeing didn't mention software and MACS as a risk until a month ago. Why would Amazon even acknowledge counterfeits to be an issue until it actually effects business?
What's the burden of proof for 'their reputation is damaged' here? A fully sponsored brand survey?
A number of companies from Lush Soaps to Birkenstock are suing Amazon for infringement, the AAFA is requesting the US Trade Representative office to add Amazon markets to their list of known counterfeiters, and Amazon is finally acknowledging to investors they have a problem - but if you're just going to dismiss this as "business as usual" then it's not worth the discussion.
The Lush lawsuit was from 2014 and had absolutely nothing to do with counterfeit items, it was about allowing advertisers to use the Lush keyword in search listings for ads.
Birkenstock is a good example of a case they will almost certainly lose. Courts have routinely ruled that marketplaces can't be held responsible for counterfeits that they don't control.
> the AAFA is requesting the US Trade Representative office to add Amazon markets to their list of known counterfeiters
That's a joke and should be treated as such. It's never going anywhere and is purely a PR campaign to get Amazon to more proactively work against counterfeit products. That's a fair goal, but hardly impacting Amazon's reputation among consumers.
> and Amazon is finally acknowledging to investors they have a problem
They've done so in their 10k in the past as well.
> but if you're just going to dismiss this as "business as usual" then it's not worth the discussion.
If the entirety of your evidence is silly requests and a mixture of lawsuits that either won't work (because they never have) or are entirely unrelated to the conversation, then yeah I'd say there's near-zero reputation damage.
That said, Project Zero indicates that Amazon is paying attention so they absolutely see some risk. But nothing you've presented suggests that Amazon's reputation as far as consumers are concerned has been impacted as of yet. Their annual sales growth seems to confirm that.
IIRC, Birkenstock has evidence Amazon used the counterfeiters to force them to bring all (even new/brick & mortar only) Birkenstocks to Amazon. "Yes, we can solve your counterfeit problem, if you stop having special editions outside of Amazon".
Which puts the "they can't control" part in doubt :)
First of all there's no "evidence" of anything, it's a claim Birkenstock is making. And the actual claim (by the CEO of Birkenstock) had nothing to do with counterfeiters, it was that Amazon was attempting to attract legitimate retailers that sell Birkenstocks to sell them on Amazon.
Then the Birkenstock CEO threatened to sue Amazon for doing so, saying that Amazon was knowingly violating their policy, despite the fact that you can't win lawsuit for a company that you have no legal agreement with, so that threat is empty BS.
Yup. This is my point. Granted, I'm mainly speaking from anecdotes myself here, but the only place I ever hear about how terrible Amazon is because of counterfeits is here or reddit (rarely reddit.)
I live in Seattle so I hear a lot of criticism of Amazon, but this isn't one that surfaces often.
It's a common phenomena that happens in any online forum once they reach a certain size, or the topic becomes sufficiently controversial.
As far as I can tell, it's basically "whataboutism", but even more indirect or abstract.
"Amazon might have an ads service, but what about this particular criticism of their online marketplace (of which I only see on this news aggregator)?"
"Oculus came out with this new hardware, but what about their ownership by Facebook?"
"HotelsTonight is being bought by Airbnb, but what about Airbnb's behavior with local governments and their housing policy?"
I see what you're getting at, but I don't think "whataboutism" is the right term for that. Whataboutism would be like Facebook being criticized and someone responding, "Yes but Apple does it too!"
What you're describing seems like it's an example of how everything eventually reverts to the mean. In this case, the "mean" point of discussion for any topic is the subtopic most people are familiar with and have a strong opinion about.
Controversial topics are much more engaging, which means threads about them attract more comments. In turn that surfaces more attention to them, from which it follows that on any given topic you're likely to see people slowly shift the discussion to the most familiar subtopic, which will generally be the most engaging (and thereby likely controversial) one.
It's a feedback cycle which sustains a meme (in the linguistic sense of the word). A majority zeitgeist is formed around an idea which is thoroughly self-propagating, because every time a topic with any degree of relevancy pops up, the discussion shifts to the meme.
Because they are one of the biggest companies in the world and ads help them and their partners sell more via official channels. It's a very simple formula.
Because Amazon spends a measurably significant amount of revenue on advertising. Recouping a fraction of that money is substantially more valuable than any hit to their reputation.
>"Many sellers have begun essentially paying their reviewers with free goods via the Vine program; and of course those 99.9% of those reviews are favorable."
I long suspected this. Can you say what is the Vine program and how does it work? I am familiar with this.
Speaks to the fragility of the human mind. The human collective organism, as it were, instead of rising against the challenge from the machines, decides to shift focus elsewhere. Chess is nowhere close to being a solved game, yet we're already treating it as such.
When it's possible to predict the winner from an arbitrary board position, given optimal play by both players. Checkers, for example, is solved. Chess and Go are not (even though computers can outperform human players).
If ops/devops were purely a game, yes. Yet ops is privy to a mountain of confidential information and has the power to arbitrarily shut down revenue sources. I would say this introduces a lot of risk into the equation.
Disclaimer: I am a layman in this realm. Please correct me if I'm wrong.