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error54

1,233 karma · joined December 13, 2011

Engineering Manager in big tech

I smile at dogs.

all views are my own

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error54··on Forewarn gives realtors access to buyers' histories with a phone number
Arbitrary discrimination. From the article:

> “The real estate agent can essentially screen out people they don't want by saying, ‘Oh, this person drives a Ford truck and I only want to sell to high end people so I'm just gonna get rid of this customer'”

error54··on Forewarn gives realtors access to buyers' histories with a phone number
> saying it would be unethical to only use Forewarn’s data to determine whom to work with. As part of her job, Hicks is responsible for ensuring the realtors she manages are as financially successful as possible.

So discrimination is ok because you know, we have to make as much money as possible

error54··on Google sued for negligence after man died following map directions
From the article:

> State troopers who found Paxton’s body in his overturned and partially submerged truck had said there were no barriers or warning signs along the washed-out roadway. He had driven off an unguarded edge and crashed about 20 feet below

error54··on Google Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men as It Addresses Wage Equity
(2019)
error54··on FCC to remove companies from robocall database for non-compliance [pdf]
https://www.optoutprescreen.com/
error54··on Visa, Mastercard suspend payments for ad purchases on PornHub, MindGeek
source?
error54··on FDA to order Juul e-cigarettes off U.S. market
> Juul (which is now majority owned by Altria) is the most reputable one

> Altria are a very legit operational business

Worth noting that Altria used be known as Philip Morris - a company that has decades of history of marketing cigarettes to children and covering up the dangers of tobacco.

They are in no way, shape, or form a "good" company.

error54··on Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
The US has been off the gold standard for a long time.
error54··on How do you tag a jellyfish? (2017)
TIL that a "smack" is a group of jellyfish
error54··on The Key Points of Working Effectively with Legacy Code
Never trust an engineer who says they don't need to write tests. It's somewhat of a dream for many engineers to be heads down working alone on deep technical problems but while coding may be solo endeavor, _code maintenance_ is a team sport. It's never good to let someone go it alone for too long.

Side note: It's much simpler to say "they/them" when referring to someone rather than "he/she", "s:he", and "his/her".

error54··on 600k Images Removed from ImageNet After Art Project Exposes Racist Bias
You're rewording what they said. If any group of people is more policed than another group of people, said group is more likely to have a criminal record. Doesn't mean they're more "criminal" than any other group but more of a reflection on the current state of the criminal justice system.

To paraphrase Warren Buffet: "If a cop follows you for 500 miles, they're going to find a reason to give you a ticket."

error54··on [dead]
Why did the three women not get arrested for filing false police reports? Especially for falsely claiming that the man had a gun. There have been many, many reports of what happens when the police arrive on scene thinking there's an armed person for these women to not know what could happen. Also, accusing someone of being a pedophile and participating in drive by shootings?
error54··on Open source takes continued investment, and that must be subsidized somehow
If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend Henry Zhu's (Babel core team) talk from React Rally[1]. He talks candidly about the struggles of maintaining an extremely popular library and the demands and stress it puts on his life; especially now that he quit his job to work on Babel full time.

If your company uses Babel (which it probably does), please donate to Henry[2] or at the least, send him a thank you for his work.

1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0sfFX7WH1c

2 - https://www.patreon.com/henryzhu

error54··on Polly.js – Record, replay, and stub HTTP interactions
Not to shamelessly plug but if you're in the Bay Area on June 28, we're giving a talk that's a bit about performance, a bit about Netflix engineering culture: https://jstalks2018.splashthat.com/.
error54··on Netflix and Alphabet will need to become ISPs, fast
TV's would be one (of many) limiting factors here. Most consumer televisions have, relative to most other computing devices, low processing power and disk space. Plus you have to factor the additional bandwidth load of downloading a 4K television show that you may not watch and then multiply that cost by 30 or 40.
error54··on Stock-trading app Robinhood was rejected by 75 investors
I did not know about Plaid until today.

https://plaid.com/solutions/transaction-data/

> Our high-functioning platform pulls up to 24 months of data directly from users’ bank accounts.

Whoa. I never agreed to anything like that. How is this legal/why would banks let a startup have this much information?

error54··on Netflix: Removing client-side React.js improved performance by 50%
That's pretty close. For our use case (and many others), the biggest culprit for increased TTI is the sheer size of the JavaScript payload and the time the browser takes to parse the whole bundle[1]. We still use React and other libraries on the server to generate the HTML but rather than sending all that JS down, Tony worked out exactly which client interactions still needed JS and wrote those in plain JS which resulted in a big TTI win as the browser simply had less data to parse.

1- https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1297&v=M1qm-AWWu...

error54··on Netflix: Removing client-side React.js improved performance by 50%
Hey spicyj!

I'd love to sit and talk React with you and your team. We're always particularly interested in performance optimizations so maybe we can swap some knowledge.

Not aware of any team that is actively avoiding React but we're a fairly prolific bunch when it comes to public speaking and knowledge sharing so perhaps I missed some announcement from another UI team. A few of my colleagues will be speaking at the SFHTML5 meetup[1] in a few weeks if you'd like to come hang out and talk shop or feel free to drop me a line at jem@netflix.com :).

1 - https://www.meetup.com/sfhtml5/events/244074642/

error54··on Cybersecurity Incident Involving Consumer Information
> Equifax discovered the unauthorized access on July 29

Well over a month later and they're just now getting around to telling people about a security breach that could affect almost half of all Americans...

How is this ok/legal?

error54··on In Bay Area, six-figure salaries are “low income”
NYC != Manhattan. Yes, 100K is middle class in lower Manhattan but in the outer boroughs, you could live quite well on 100K.
error54··on America’s opioid epidemic is worsening
It's a "national health crisis" because of the ethnicity and locations of the people it's affecting. Today, politicians are proposing more treatments and going after the pharmaceutical companies[1]. Back in the 80's and 90's, the response to the crack epidemic was harsher prison sentences for users and sellers because it was largely minorities who were affected[2].

Not arguing that treatments shouldn't be made available but it's important to keep all this in mind if someone ever suggests that all are equal in the eyes of the law when it comes to drug offenses.

1 - https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/31/us/heroin-war-on-drugs-pa...

2 -http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2016/02/heroin_vs_cr...

error54··on The Cost of Native Mobile App Development Is Too Damn High
No worries! Tracker1 is correct that all browser based UI is built using React. Other platforms may be doing their own explorations into React but I can't speak to that since those are outside of my domain of expertise. I can say that my team loves React so we're definitely looking into React Native.
error54··on The Cost of Native Mobile App Development Is Too Damn High
Absolutely!

https://jobs.netflix.com/

I can verify that it's an amazing place to work :)

error54··on The Cost of Native Mobile App Development Is Too Damn High
Not true. Our Android and iOS apps are native. We are however looking into React Native.

Source - I'm an engineer at Netflix.

error54··on Browser auto-fill phishing
For many people living paycheck to paycheck, someone cleaning out their bank account would be quite harmful. Yes, the banks will reimburse them but that could take up to a week if not more. In the meantime when your rent and utility checks bounce, you could be in an extremely uncomfortable position.
error54··on Browser auto-fill phishing
In case anyone is worried, most (all?) browsers do not autofill credit card information without the user explicitly clicking into the credit card field so there's no chance of a hidden field stealing your CC information.
error54··on Decoding the MetroCard, Part 2: Research and Past Attempts
After living in NYC and now living in San Francisco, I wonder why the MTA hasn't switched to contactless cards yet similar to what Boston or SF has. As someone who has missed many a train trying to swipe my metro card, it seems like this would be an easy win for them and less wasteful than a disposable paper card.
error54··on Enrollment Is Surging in Machine Learning Classes
You're very welcome!
error54··on Enrollment Is Surging in Machine Learning Classes
Protip: https://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=balls187&comments=t
error54··on How We Build Code at Netflix
Since all Frontend code is written in JavaScript, it makes sense to have the server code written in JavaScript as well as we do quite a bit of work on the server. Also, we do serve isomorphic views so Node is a big help in that regards.
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