dangoldin

It very well may be isolated to a few people - my wife uses it without any issues and yet it's noticeably slow for me. I agree with you that the comparison isn't 100% valid but it was more of a proxy for how much crap Gmail loads - it will also continue to make additional requests through the session.

I think the code to integrate the other Google services is the problem for me - I don't need it and it clutters my experience.

Yea - I was a bit hesitant but ended up making the switch anyways. It looks as if the other comment mentions that they do have it so I'll check it out.

Yea you're right - it's definitely a biased sample but still shows others are experiencing it to some degree.

I do the same check for "why is fastmail" and get "why is fastmail down" - I suppose slow is better than down.

Thanks for the data point - I've spoken with others and it's been a mixed bag - some say it's slow and others don't. I wonder how much of it is perception of speed vs actual speed. Can you try reloading it and seeing how long it takes to load?

Are you based in the US? I use proxies every once in a while to do some testing and notice that the captcha difficulty does vary depending where I am "from".

I remember our upgrade to 16 colors. That was life changing.

So it seems you can still buy it online. Does that mean you can go into a dealership and just buy it on your phone?

There was a scandal in NJ where Chris Christie's underlings were caught closing a bridge when they didn't get political support from a mayor.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/01/chris-christie-b...

Yep pretty much. I think the problem is that many sites now rely on 3rd party resources which slow everything down.

I didn't get a chance to pull this info but should be pretty easy to do. I also expect different types of content to load at different speeds (images need to be rendered, JS needs to be evaluated, ..)

I published the code on GitHub and you can take a stab at it =)

I agree. I've been using Ghostery recently to see the external libraries that are loaded on various sites and it's ridiculous. Some sites are loading more than 50 extern scripts.

If you need a DB that's read only and updated infrequently you can just store the content in JSON files and parse them client side. Of course if you need to do writes it gets more complicated.

Yea - it can work just as easily on your own server but the idea is that you don't have to worry about hosting at all and rely on S3 which is the most reliable AWS service.

Something that I've been playing around with is hosting sites on S3. Then you can have a simple cron job that will just update an HTML or JSON data file at whatever frequency you want.

Nice way to keep the site static but add a bit of variability.

Made a minor update but definitely let me know if something's still unclear.

Yea it's a bit tough to figure out the precise language for my point so that's why I wanted to show an example but that wasn't that much better.

I guess it does translate into something more along the lines of having something that you can explain and back up vs something that feels right. Having some basic heuristics to adjust the algorithm would be the latter but modeling out the actual environment would be the former. There's a time and a place for both but the idea is that for longer term projects you want to take the more rigorous, more difficult approach.

I think the biggest value is framing the problem properly and understanding the space. Once that's done the approaches can be modified and switched around pretty easily.

I guess I should have been clearer. I think having the right formulation of the problem helps both approaches. The algorithmic approach is one that tends to rely more on quantitative/statistical properties and less on a rule of thumb.

Thanks for the note - I'll update the post.

Timely post for me. I removed the "ShareThis" plugin from my blog last week due to the sleaziness and have been thinking of putting together a replacement. I guess in this case I just won't bother.

A way to bypass is to search Google for that title and click on the WSJ link from the results. It seems the WSJ looks at the referrer and allows search engine sources.

Seriously. Bigger problem is password reuse. If someone gets access to a user's password they then most likely have access to their email account, etc.

Yea - then we just walk through their answer to make sure they get the reason it works and ways to improve it. It's usually quicker and leaves time for another question that they hopefully haven't heard.

I know this is old but stumbled onto it and though the discussion was interesting.

I used something else - don't want to give too much away but the general idea is to try it on a smaller problem (4 flips, $5, etc) and seeing if any patterns develop.

It was for quantitative engineer roles at Yodle (adtech startup). The goal wasn't really to get to a solution since it's not possible without sitting down to code but more to get them thinking about it and how they'd structure the problem. I don't remember offhand how many people got it but the ones with a statistics/data background ended up having the right approach and the ones that didn't got it with a few hints.

I wasn't able to do it with pen and paper and suspect it's not possible. The 1000 flips and the 1 billion is arbitrary so it seems you'd always have to work with real numbers. I may be completely wrong though.

Glad to help! If you run into any trouble let me know (email in profile) and I'll provide some hints.

When I was conducting quantitative interviews I ended up doing the same thing. One of my favorite problems to give was 267 (http://projecteuler.net/problem=267). It has a few "aha" moments but also requires coding to get it done.

Something I've been thinking about is an Excel frontend with an R backend. Each worksheet becomes a data frame so you can edit it in Excel and quickly apply some formula but you can also jump into an R console to do something more complicated.

Nice post. I've recently been trying to get back into R with the goal of being able to replace Excel. For the basic stuff R is great but as you start doing more complicated things it takes quite a while to figure out to do them in R. This is a part of the learning curve.

Looks very similar to the NPR blog articles now. I like this trend - long, clean single page articles.