Kesty's comments

The conclusion of the blog are not great either.

Sure you should have tests, sure you shouldn't copy paste code you don't understand and you shouldn't push directly to production.

But, regardless of all that, the main issue of all this incident is not the rookie mistake itself, is how they didn't have logs or alerts and it took them 5 days of customer complaining to find out they had "duplication errors" in the db.

That's the thing that should have been fixed first and extensivly mentioned in the post-mortem

The idea of moving fast is to have extensive logs and alerts so you fix all error fasts while they appear without "wasting time" with long expensive tests in a phase where things change every day.

5 days to find out you have "duplicate key" errors in the db is the opposite of fast

CEO thoughts: "Oh post-morten are always well received, I should write one for that very really basic bug we had and how we took 5 days to find it, and forget to mention how we fix it or how we have changed our structure so that it never happen again"

Also the CEO: "remember to be defensive on reddit comments saying how we are a small 1 million dollar backed startup and how it's normal do to this king of rookies mistake to be fast."

They don't have logs and commit directly to production 10/20 times a day.

I don't think 128 bits vs 36 byte performance it's a main concern right now

Everything can be understandable if this is a small first personal project of someone.

Here we are talking 1.65 MILLION CAD $ backed YC company

Sure not having tests, is bad. Doing thing with AI without triple checking is dangerous.

But not having error logging/alerts on your db ? That's the crazy part.

This is a new product, is not legacy code from 20 years ago when they thought it was a neat idea to just throw stuff at the db raw, and check for db errors to do data validation, so alerts are hard because there's so many expected errrors.

ChatGPT-4o might spot it when asking about the code directly, but this was a conversion from js to python, errors where chatgpt/copilot or any other AI will allucinate or make mistakes to be as close as the original code are very common in my experience.

The other common issue is if the original code has thinsg chatgpt doesn't like (misspell, slightly wrong formatting) it will fix it automatically, or if he really think you should have added a particular field you didn't add.

Their point is that Apple app could do that and it was unfair to block other apps to be able to do the same.

They already used to do that

https://www.theverge.com/2015/7/8/8913105/spotify-apple-app-...

You can already do it on youtube, it's integrated on google activity.

https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity

It's not wrong that AMP is a terrible thing in a pretty package.

While the idea of having standards for mobile and slow connection might be a noble one, forcing everyone into it by using mobile search results as ransom is an evil practice.

Especially since it's a google run, if it was set up as a non profit foundation with people on the board from different major players as a collaborative project then, yes It might be different.

And unfortunately nothing will change because what you want to do is better in every single way, but their way of doing thing is better in the only one that actually counts: It's faster and cheaper.

Welcome to code development in the real world 101.

You either go insane, give up and take up beekeeping, start your own company or finally decide to not give a shit anymore and start hacking the same way as everybody else because in the end your are not sending astronauts to Mars, and it works "most of the time" is good enough for the clients and the price and time they are willing to pay.

The article doesn't simply say it's deterministic but the seed doesn't change.

Google has checks in place to see if someone is serving things to GoogleBot differently that the rest of the users. So it almost definitely has bots that double checks pages without the user-agent.

If the "disguised" googlebot is the same as the actual one, chances are it is since it would want to be as close as possible to not flag false positives, and use the same seed for consistency then you might be able to use that to avoid detection on the fact that you are serving google something different than normal users.

Newspaper used/do that to be able to have their full article content indexed while serving a paywall to everyone else.

Next outrage is when we will find out how much this technological masterpiece actually costed.

Biggest issue is that the system probably doesn't have a flag Test /Not Test.

The Test Records probably do the same thing just to a smaller list than the real one.

So there is no real way to separate them.

I think there is a dissonance between smart personalized suggestion and being against tracking.

Which is the main downfall of DuckDuckGo they use as the smart bar search engine.

If you want good suggestions and smart personalization you need to track your user.

If you don't want to track your user for privacy concern, it's all good but then don't give user a product like suggestions that will always be subpar compared to someone else that is for user tracking.

Electron main selling point is being cross platform.

Having it only Ubuntu/macOS seems counter-intuitive.

This is just a simple example for this kind of situation.

Of course, you could make it faster by removing everything under 128 from the array before starting the loop, but it's not really the point here.