Viewing profile — jd20

I didn't see it mentioned, but why not just use robots.txt? Does Bytespider ignore it?

I'd really love to see more data on whether ergonomic keyboards actually work. From what I've read, it sounds like the results are mixed: I kind of want to try a split keyboard lik…

One does (it's a southpaw, numeric keypad on the left). A few are TKL (full size keyboard without the numpad). Actually, as a programmer, I pretty much never use the numeric keypad…

A clarification: these are interviews with people who assemble custom keyboards, I was expecting chats with the people who actually design and produce custom keyboards (like yuktsi…

It's possible that wasn't the default setting on Macs back then. I don't know that cgo would be a good choice either, if you're resolving a ton of domains at once. Early versions o…

Trash cans :)

Nope, you don't really need a database. What you need for fast, scalable web crawling is more like key-value storage: a really fast layer (something like RocksDB on SSD) for metada…

Some Apple services were written in C/C++. One downside is it's very hard to source engineers across the company who can then work on that code, or for those engineers to go work o…

Everything was on 10gigE. The average page size was around 17KB gzipped. Everything's a careful balance between CPU, memory, storage, and message throughput between machines. Apple…

You should check out Manning's "Introduction to Information Retrieval", it has far more detail about web crawler architecture than I can write in a post, and served as a blueprint …

I think WebObjects was supporting Java even before it came to Apple from Next. In the early days, many of Apple's services built with WebObjects even ran on Sun server hardware, an…

No idea, it's been years since I last worked on it. It was also not the only Go service written at Apple (90% of cloud services at Apple were written in Java), though it may have b…

Some fun facts: - Applebot was originally written in Go (and uncovered a user agent bug on redirects, revealing it's Go origins to the world, which Russ Cox fixed the next day). - …

If Apple Maps has taught us anything, probably not. But Apple would first need to pour an equally large amount of resources into web search, they way it did for Maps.

Applebot was built for crawling web pages, to be used for search results in Spotlight and Siri. That user agent might also be used for attachment previews, but the original intent …

Apple built their own search engine over 5 years ago, under the Siri / Spotlight umbrella. When people talk about Apple building their own search engine, they generally seem to exp…

Thanks for clarifying, I figured I was generalizing it a bit.

> The phone boots into an operating system known as “Switchboard,” which has a no-nonsense black background and is intended for testing different functionalities on the phone. I th…

I've found the same to be true for Uber Eats. If my order is wrong, they give a full refund no questions asked (and a meal is typically $20-25). And orders get messed up a lot (may…

Made me wonder how likely it was that "Funded by YC" was one of the criteria used by the analyst to come up with the list.

Would also love to hear more about how this is done... I'm in the process of setting up Stripe subscriptions on a website, but have been scratching my head over the best way to acc…

One unfortunate side effect of being at a FAANG company is that most of your best work is probably proprietary and you will never have the chance to show it to anyone outside the c…

Not sure why it's not possible, though I could've had a defective unit. Specifically, I had a Fiio D3 ($20) which had bad background noise, even when not playing. I always assumed …

There's a sharp curve of diminishing returns, for DAC's especially. The super cheap units you find for like $10-20 will usually have serious shielding / noise issues, which is imme…

It's not a new idea, really. I remember seeing Nagra come out with a battery-powered preamp for home stereos, many years ago (and I think they still make them). I also remember hea…