This interview starts off with the interviewer saying it's going to be in JavaScript, and then introducing a piece of code that's clearly not JavaScript:
Eh, the implementation is all Javascript and can be approached in any language. They're just providing function signatures with types so the candidate knows what they're working with.
Also the signatures are Typescript, which really isn't that far off in the context of an interview. Even in a pure JS codebase it's not uncommon for IDEs to pull the TS definitions of packages to provide basic type checking. But even pure JS libraries will normally provide typed signatures in their documentation.
If anything I'd say this shows that the interviewer is prepared, by ensuring the candidate has what they need to complete the question.
My prediction is that Netflix will buy Valve when Gabe Newell decides he truly doesn’t care anymore.
From the article:
“… the chart indicates Steam had an operating margin of about 60 per cent and made $2bn of commission revenues, for about $1.3bn in profit just from Steam commissions in 2021.”
That’s a very impressive profit and limits who can afford to buy it. Netflix could pay something like $50 billion in stock to own the gaming market.
They can still keep the 2001 aesthetic while giving themselves more work: we have higher resolution screens now so a 1024x1024 icon is probably in order; we have pervasive OS-level dark mode support now so they can create dark and light versions of the icon; as UI fashions change they can add or reduce the amount of shadow and glass effect.
Microsoft itself was a leading Unix vendor in the 1980s with Xenix.
Every Microsoft developer had a Xenix workstation for things like email, access to network disks, running a decent C compiler, and debugging.
DOS was practically a single-program environment with no memory protection and no networking. Unix offered much better productivity for software developers.
Engineering in general was a field that used Unix workstations heavily. Microsoft didn’t become competitive until Windows NT in 1993.
Memory protection was not possible on the 8086 and quite half-baked on the 80286 (you could switch to protected mode but then you lost access to hardware BIOS facilities that relied on real mode, and switching back to real mode required hard-faulting the processor because there was no architectural support for it). The Intel 80386 was the first fully-featured x86 CPU wrt. running memory protected OS's.
The reason being that they thought no one would care about those legacy MS-DOS applications, everyone would be running to adopt OS/2 on 286, hence no need to go back into real mode.
In hindsight, Microsoft seems to have lost two opportunities to already be on the forefront from UNIX, first with giving up on Xenix, then by not really embracing the POSIX subsystem on Windows NT.
Linux would never taken off in such alternative realities.
Not that it matters that much now with WSL, and Azure Linux.
Is there a more bizarre legislative process anywhere in the world?
The US Congress is practically able to pass only a single giant bill every year. To work around its own deficit rules, these bills are packed with taxation time bombs where rules have expiration dates or delayed starts several years in the future.
Then, if Congress doesn’t get around to defusing its own time bombs, you get situations like this R&D expensing fiasco where American businesses and employees pay the price. Unless the bomb is hopefully retroactively cancelled, like happened now.
On top of this madness, there’s an executive branch operating like a runaway autocracy, producing a flood of executive orders that intentionally flaunt laws and even target specific private entities (e.g. Trump’s attacks on law firms that worked for his opponents, and universities he doesn’t like).
How long can a nation function like this? If the bond market loses faith in this process, there could be mayhem. Will be interesting to see if the passage of BBB impacts US debt when markets open again on Monday.
> taxation time bombs where rules have expiration dates or delayed starts several years in the future.
> ...
> Unless the bomb is hopefully retroactively cancelled, like happened now.
this is by design: the opposition usually get into power in midterms and next presidency can swap parties, so if there is a bad provision its moved out to "explode" when they aren't in power and hurt the oppositions continuing chances
as an example, the cuts to medicade don't start until right after the next midterms (which most are expecting to strongly favor democrats) [0]
Get rid of the First Past the Post voting system. Almost all the brokenness of US politics is downstream from FPTP. It incentivates divisiveness instead of collaboration and consensus, which a better voting system would.
Divisiveness as well as strategically voting for the "lesser of two evils" compared to voting for your ideal choice.
It should honestly be banned for any election and primary across the country and be replaced with approval voting or Condorcet methods or something else that are strict improvements.
Congress has transformed from a body of civil servants working toward a common goal to a bunch of solipsist narcissists happy to burn everything down for more face time in the beltway media echo chamber.
It's a year of very rapid change. I just realized the other week (naively) that we (non-US) should really be bracing even more than we are. For shocks to come, economical, cultural as a reaction to the slide towards an authoritarian presidential system.
It's not a time to be watching though, but to act.
As mentioned in the story, everybody with a 68k or RISC computer in the 1980s tried their hand at making a Unix workstation because the market was so lucrative.
In addition to Commodore there were Apple, Acorn, and Atari also making these upscale plays with Unix. Sun and NeXT were native to this market. And non-Unix workstation vendors like Apollo were adding compatibility.
It was a crowded market and Commodore didn't bring anything unique to it. The Amiga's multimedia strengths were practically wasted running X Windows.
Nitpick: This was the 90s already. 68k based Sun gear was in the 80s but 90s was the RISC era already for Unix boxes. (except for NeXT I, they continued launching new 68k models into the 90s and got left behind)
GCC was largely ignored until Sun became the first UNIX vendor to have different SKUs for developers and plain users, quickly followed by other vendors.
Only then folks started reaching out to GNU, as means to avoid paying for UNIX developer licenses from their respective vendors.
Sun even had multiple levels, one of the reasons Ada didn't took off, was that UNIX vendors like Sun had it as an additional SKU, the developer license would only get the classical UNIX stuff, alongside C and C++ compilers.
In hindsight, JSONL would have been much easier to deal with as a developer.
But I still don't regret picking CSV -- DB interface is pluggable (so one can use JSONL if needed), and I deliberately wanted to have different formats for data storage (models) and data transfer objects (DTOs) in the API layer, just like with real databases.
I agree, CSV is very limited and fragile, but it made data conversion/validation part more explicit.
reply