ericlippert

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1.
by ericlippert 4y ago
You have accurately re-stated the situation, yes. I know for a fact that there are teams like that! And what are they going to do now that the scientists who could have helped them make those decisions in a principled way are scattered to d
2.
by ericlippert 4y ago
Thank you, that's kind of you to say!
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by ericlippert 4y ago
I appreciate the sentiment behind your post, but in the future could we all please not conflate "neurodivergent people's difficulties in expressing empathy" with "being a jerk on the internet"? I've had many ge
4.
by ericlippert 4y ago
I was regretted attrition. And very, very far from the most vital person on my team.
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by ericlippert 4y ago
People are leaving. In droves. There has been a huge exodus of senior talent in the last year. Zuck mentioned that in an earnings call and rather than assigning himself any responsibility said that those people were unregretted attrition an
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by ericlippert 4y ago
We were a team of mathematicians focused on cost savings and improving decisions. We know how to subtract costs from benefits. I was not the lead. A team focused on helping the company make better decisions is all the more necessary when at
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by ericlippert 4y ago
I do have data to back this up for employees. You'd win that bet. Shareholders, I have no data on that.
8.
by ericlippert 4y ago
Nor did anything compel you to read it, or post whiny comments here! I did choose to work for Facebook. The pitch I was given seven years ago was that (1) the mission of the company is to lower costs of building community and connecting peo
9.
by ericlippert 4y ago
I am very thankful for that opportunity. I learned so much from my colleagues! And they were genuinely great people to work with. I was well compensated, it's true. It's also true that for every $1000 I was paid, I lowered FB&#x2
10.
by ericlippert 4y ago
Not the first time I've made that joke, but it's none the worse for having been used before.
11.
by ericlippert 4y ago
I'm 100% sincere in that praise of my colleagues. Many people, myself included, had a lot of concerns about the products the company was building and their effects on the world. When you work on a team whose mission is to help other te
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by ericlippert 4y ago
"Signal loss" is the overarching term for all the factors that lead to the company being less able to make good inferences about users. Not just the obvious consideration of "how do we serve an ad that is relevant to the user
13.
by ericlippert 4y ago
That's all very kind of you to say, thank you. I have several times been offered the chance to teach a masters level course on compiler design but never had the time to develop it. After a bit of a break, maybe I'll give that more
14.
by ericlippert 4y ago
And thanks to all the repliers below for their kind words. My goal was always to share knowledge and enthusiasm and it is genuinely touching to know that I succeeded.
15.
by ericlippert 4y ago
I see your point and don't mean to be argumentative, but a couple small corrections. First, the pivot to "meta" was just over a year ago, so it hasn't been quite years. Second, I haven't been shy about sharing my op
16.
by ericlippert 4y ago
The team was all mathematicians. We did the math. I helped one of our data scientists put a model into production that saved $15M a year from that model alone, and we had a dozen people like that. We were working on signal loss models that
17.
by ericlippert 4y ago
Thank you, that's kind of you to say.
18.
by ericlippert 6y ago
The question -- if sincerely asked -- is not rude. My goal for this blog, which I have written for 17 years, is to write about algorithms, programming techniques, language design, and other stuff I find interesting. If you find it interesti
19.
by ericlippert 6y ago
And that you would read it that way says more about you than it does about Tim, believe me.
20.
by ericlippert 6y ago
It's not clear to me why you think that this anecdote had any particular intention. My intention was not to promote any position at all, but rather to tell an amusing personal story that I was reminiscing about because of an email I go
21.
by ericlippert 6y ago
Yeah, all the links are wrong now. I'll fix them!
22.
by ericlippert 6y ago
As I noted in the text, the actual problem that we had to solve was complicated by a great many factors not the least of which was the fact that the library had to handle strings from different string encodings.
23.
by ericlippert 6y ago
Noted.
24.
by ericlippert 6y ago
In this case I think not. However I strongly agree with your position and have tried hard to ensure that my code is commented such that it explains why the code works as it does. See https://ericlippert.com/2014/09&#x
25.
by ericlippert 6y ago
It does a full lex and parse. Then if there is an edit, it determines based on the edit which tokens need to be re-lexed; maybe we went from "[10,20]" to "[10.20]" and so now the [ and ] tokens are fine but everything in
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by ericlippert 6y ago
Well then, feel free to write your own blog post on a topic you enjoy more!
27.
by ericlippert 6y ago
One of the most important things you can do in perf analysis is to know when to stop looking for incremental improvement. If this subject in particular interests you, we did a lot of work in the C# lexer/parser so that once the file is
28.
by ericlippert 6y ago
Well thanks for inspiring the post! It triggered a pleasant trip back to a simpler time for me.
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by ericlippert 6y ago
A Visual Basic program is not allowed to have undefined behaviours like a C program; InStr has a specification and that specification has to be implemented; that spec includes defining the behaviour for all inputs. There's also no null
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by ericlippert 6y ago
That's a great example; the most important part of your anecdote is the end which says what was the user impact? There is no prior reason to believe that a 50x speedup is actually a win; taking an algorithm from 100K nanoseconds to 2

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