m6.12xl are 48 vCPU systems. 25 million cores is a hilariously huge amount of compute to use to run a site of twitter size, which I guess does point to how much tech debt they have ignored over time.
There is nothing simple in data moving. Problem is that it can be abstracted away so you do not have to worry about it. Out of sight out of mind. Example - majority of the CPU area is devoted to data moving problem (cache, branch prediction, out of order execution, register renaming). The same is happening on other levels of the stack (OS, network and so on).
But they do serve videos, which possibly they have to transcode or otherwise process on import (?)
They probably also have some filters for pictures to remove porn and stuff like that.
This can amount to serious CPU if you have millions of users uploading that stuff daily.
Pretty sure Google hasn't used 'bitshift puzzle' interview questions for ~10y now. It really is just a meme thing from long ago. My interview there ~6y ago was basically the same as ones I've done at a handful of other companies
The problem here is really just general flaws in capitalism. The main thing I hate about ads is the broken corporate incentive -- companies want to earn as much as possible and the feedback loop of worse customer experience is weak.
So annoyingly while it is true that ads are a currently necessary part of funding the internet, it is also true that a perverse incentive exists to just keep hammering the $ button once you find a model that works. It is a good argument for why we probably should want to pay directly for content. Or y'know, just topple capitalism on account of it generating toxic localized optimizations literally everywhere.
Each ad serve is not worth that much to start with, facebooks CPMs are about $7-8, so they are getting $0.007 per serve with extensive targeting. The falloff is something around 10x+ for completely non targeted ads which for most sites push them below the level of economic feasibility.
This is also why if you stumble into some parts of the web, they vomit out a billion ads per page to try and compensate.
Really the problem is that there is a tremendous gap between the costs to serve content and users willingness to pay (either directly or via any indirect method). It is a tremendously deep hole we've built with freemium models that will probably require some level of societal agreement to dig back out of.
If you remove pay models, a vast majority of the internet will just disappear. (I think you) in a previous comment mention that it is 'cheap' to run a site, which is generally true on a per user basis for primarily text sites. But cheap != free.
I see it often, but it is honestly the most laughably selfish opinion to believe that one should be entitled to the internet as it exists today, but also not pay directly or indirectly to be able to use those services.
That's not what they were saying though. It's one way to read it, sure, but another way is "most content on the web is so low value that if it ceased existing users would not care".
Which is true. If its not on the web, then I don't read it, and don't miss it - by and large.
A huge number of people seem to believe that 95% of the internet is of any value - yet the existence of HN itself shows that's not true. This whole site exists to turn "the internet" into a selection of high quality links, and even then the front page is maybe 20% interesting to me on a day by day basis.
So how much of the internet matters to me? 6 links out of 30, selected by a community which completely avoids all the "major" sites.
Google actually pays Zurich engineers more than Bay Area, something like +15% IIRC. I was close to moving out there at one point and know a few people who did.
No, not when it comes to TC. L5 TC when I left Google was just under $500k once stock and target bonus were counted (for new stock grants not counting appreciation). Zurich TC was like $250-300k USD for L5s in my same group.
Agreed. Premium is fine. On another note, I dislike the coins and award system because it reminds me of gacha. They provide you free award to make you open the app every week or two and encourage you to buy and award more through various shady methods. Counters, notifications that don't exist, subs you are not subscribed to getting thrown in your feed, etc.
Yep, reddit ads CPC is 2-5x cheaper than FB / Google. So assuming half of it is real fraud, the likely outcome of removing the fraud is just that CPC would double. Still better as misleading metrics are bad, but likely no real net change in cost per real return.
that's a terrible way to run a business...they should just own it or fix the problem and charge whatever is fair. Tricking the users will bite them in the ass
