There is (was?) an absolutely fabulous answer on quora.com which detailed how this site came to be --- from memory:

- initial ecommerce site was a mess (basically a page-by-page recreation of the catalog?) which saw minimal usage

- the redesign, which focused on usability --- notably reduced cognitive load --- resulted in an immediate uptick in orders which grew markedly for a long while until it represented the vast majority of their business EDIT: and also optimized for repeat orders on a schedule

If someone could find that, or a better writeup, I'd be grateful (it's _not_ the Medium.com article) and this page: https://iacollaborative.com/work/mcmaster-carr/ is just a mentioning by the company which did the underpinnings, not the overall architect. This link is decent: https://www.bedelstein.com/post/mcmaster-carr

There was of course previous discussion of this here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34000502

Video on why the site loads so fast:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ln-8QM8KhQ

(which is from the Medium.com article)

A whistle-stop tour of some game-engine collision/pathfinding background, how modern engines work, how old engines work, and how I'm applying a mixed-approach in my game.

Or, if you prefer, local Florida news that links to the journal article: https://www.wfla.com/news/hillsborough-county/tgh-patients-h...

I think its instructive to look at the early history of Google and Facebook. In the early years they did not really turn on the ad revenue levers and just focused on increasing users (i.e. Don't Be Evil) - until a decade after offering their respective services.

Similarly Netflix is just now starting the ad revenue model after years of only subscription based services.

Eventually the temptation for multiple sources of revenue (i.e. subscription AND advertising) will likely be too great due to:

- IPO and Wall Street demands net income growth (i.e. FB/Google)

- Private Equity buys the company and needs to pay back leveraged debt

- The number of customers willing to offer up a credit card for Search stagnates and a lower cost ad tier appears and the ad infrastructure that is built is applied to the paid tiers

Anywhere near 500ms should be embarrassing

API fuzzer built, currently supporting generating data from jsonschema but now expanding into also fuzzing grpc apis based on protobuf files.

It's fun and I don't think LLM with all the uncertainty would fit as well since you want to cover the whole input space.

Hope to charge 99$ or something per year for it but I don't know if anyone would pay for it :)

This is interesting. I never anticipated so many people would think of it as a circle. I mentally picture a calendar we had in my kindergarten classroom. It was a regular (USian, with the start of the week on Sunday) wall calendar, but all the pages had been cut out and hung in a line with January at the ceiling and December just above the floor.

Relatedly, I've recently put a line in my .bashrc to display the ISO week number (date +%V) in addition to the traditional date. Knowing that we're in week 42 of the year somehow helps me get a better sense time passing than knowing it is the third Wednesday in October. In general I think the world lives in weeks rather than months and it's a little unfortunate that our date system obscures this.

Another day, another HTTP client. Why do we need so many of them? I and my team are thinking about just ditch all of these, and use python + requests/httpx as the client. If need a quick call, just curl/wget.