Even then, it’s a weak question that simply asked the candidate to imagine some reasons why this company is the one, while in reality it’s just whoever willing to hire you, stack ranked by some criteria like money and suffering. So from an engineering stand point, if everyone knows it’s a pointless game, why do it.
This would’ve been a beautiful question if everyone only applied to one job, and this was a chance to tell the future you’d like to see and how you, the candidate, would build this future. But is that ever the case in practice?
I generally answered honestly. If a place seemed less interesting but paid more I would say it was a good offer. (They usually knew.) If a place had good people I would say that. If there wasn't a reason, I wouldn't want to work there anyway.
I'm aware that I've been privileged to have options, but given that I do, I see no reason not to be honest.
While DHH clearly has an agenda, I think this is a great reminder that so does everyone else. People most often give feedback in light of their own needs, wants, and experiences. Just as it is vital to be curious and to test assumptions in programming, the same applies to many other things in business and life. This is just a simple reminder based on a programming-friendly concept.
They prefer term "domain investors." Honestly, there are a few that figured out how to make money doing this, and there is a whole bunch more that bought into the idea, but have never made anything out of it.
Hi, I am the guy who did the research. I haven't done enough analysis to see if DGA domains are skewing the sample, or more like which way they were doing it. It could be that all those domains are dormant and don't have DNS, but it could also be they are hosting a bunch of advertisement. It's a whole separate project that requires building out a more sophisticated scraper.
As per the conclusion, well, forgive me for trying to entice the reader to try the product :) Always Be Selling, right?
We did the research without trying to sell anything; it was just interesting. I'd do more, but it takes a while, and I am tired of this space, for the time being at least.
ps. It also takes forever to get the data. I had a local Clojure script running of my macbook pro, doing 10 parallel queues at a time, for what seems like days on end. At some point, my ISP (or something in the chain) suspended my access to a bunch of websites. ooops!
Hi, this is UPS. Your packages was the wherehouse due to an error in the shipping address. Please contact our customer service immediately at http://scams4you.xyz
Thanks, you are right, domain investors mostly take risks in arbitraging something they are able to acquire faster than others and don't exactly produce value in the same way that you would, while say creating a game. Of course, don't mention that to the domain investors, as it would not go well.
I would say many of them think of themselves as real estate investors, where they buy up cheap pastures today, in hopes of building the next Manhattan on it tomorrow.
Indeed, domain utilization would be a lot better if they were a lot more expensive. That's partially why some new TLDs sell you a domain for 99 cents the first year, and then raise prices to $50 for the next. Assuming you took a year and built something valuable, the price to keep it goes up.
That said, even those TLDs have tens of thousands of domains (more on that later), which are registered and unused. Investors are willing to take their bets, even if it costs a lot more to maintain the bag.
I am a familiar with a few theories on raising the prices and introducing "taxes," for holding domains, and a friend and I have had numerous discussions on the subject, but so far, in my opinion, those are theories that have too many unrealistic expectations of the real world. There's a solution somewhere out there, but we are not there yet.
It's interesting that you mention Real Estate, because Vitalik's solution is inspired by the "Land Value Tax" idea in Real Estate, which is a policy widely supported by economists as the "least bad tax" and which directly attacks rentierism and land speculation, which are the direct cause of inflated land prices and a significant contributor to the ongoing housing crisis (as well as inflation overall, as rent inflation is a major contributor).
Fun fact: the problem with domain names has happened over and over again in a related field -- online games. In fact, wherever you see a "land like asset" arise (defined as an asset that is scarce in supply, necessary for production, and which obtains value from its location), you will see something analogous to land speculation. Digital "land value taxes" have been attempted before, and the best evidence available suggests that they are very effective:
Right now in domains some services have a very, very crude approximation of a "land value tax" where they charge a fixed higher fee for "premium" domains (common words). This has a slight effect on dampening speculation, but the root problem is that the fee is not directly proportional to the desirability of the domain (ie, the location). The solution is not a blanket high fee across everything -- it's perfectly fine for the holding cost fopr things that aren't currently in high demand to be eeffectively zero -- it's to have a holding fee that rises and falls in proportion to demand for the non-produced, necessary asset.
yup. precisely the topic of an hour long discussion I had with a friend yesterday.
here are top 2 problems I see with this tax in domaining:
1- All of the TLDs are owned by a handful of companies, and it's not in their interest to create a more competitive model. They don't really care who owns a domain, as long as someone's paying for it. In fact, they like squatters and encourage it. You should see how many domains are auto-registered by bots. I'll write about that more in the future, but for every TLD that claims "millions" of registered domains, a large portion of those are just unused junk. The registrar though is getting paid.
2- Land tax is not in the business interest of a business. As a domain becomes one of the key pillars of a business, I wouldn't want anyone to have the ability to take it from me, which is how it works (from my understanding) under the value tax. However expensive, it is cheaper to pay large sum up-front, and know you have the domain forever.
Land tax is one of those things that are good in theory, but in practice will be very hard to implement.
That's a pretty neat use of AI for a subset of use cases. I like it. I just asked it "Why does JavaScript keep crashing", with no particular details, and it was smart enough to show me how console.log() works in order to try and debug this unknown error. It feels good, like asking a friend for help.
I am curious, how do you decide on what kind of content goes in the links bar? It doesn't seem be just news, or just links. I am having hard time figuring out when to resort to the links, vs just using the AI response.
Someone else here made a suggestion to update colors, and did some tweaking. Can you see if it got better? Also, do you have examples of websites that did a good job with colorblindness? I am not sure how to test it , given that I can see colors alright.
This would’ve been a beautiful question if everyone only applied to one job, and this was a chance to tell the future you’d like to see and how you, the candidate, would build this future. But is that ever the case in practice?
It’s all a game.