One of my best friends has been doing recs for a long time, it works.

I'm convinced the ad-retargeting is just people being dumb/lazy. In the ad platforms I've bought on (Google, Bing, display ad startups, etc.) it's been trivial to remove people from campaigns based on triggers. Adding a querystring param to a page after the purchase of an item is trivial. I just genuinely think it's enough of a hassle to get a url policy going that people don't follow through.

Also the worst is when you have a partner company portal you have to go to. I AM LOGGED INTO A SYSTEM YOU CONTROL, you know everything about me and the entire portal is behind a login on a custom domain your prospects/clientele doesn't use, ffs just write a blanket rule that if you see a vendor url you don't get ads bought on you. It's really quite simple.

I keep getting ads for Russian mail order brides and penis enlargement pills.

No idea why.

Is this still valid?

This definitely isn't true. Lots of companies still do recommender systems - but a lot of them fall back to things like global popularity if you don't have enough information about the user to make their personalization meaningful.

Basic recommendation systems are pretty easy to implement and don't require a ton of tuning.

I'm on site for week #1 for my new remote job, and so last night I was sitting here in my hotel room browsing the node_modules directory for this project for no particular reason, and I discovered the best package ever. It's called is-path-inside.js and these are its glorious contents:

wow such framework... much mature

(sorry, couldn't resist)

As Bleh? Yeah. I never planned to stop posting as suzzer. I had to wait out the temp ban I gave myself.

I now find myself not bothering to fix spacing typos while writing emails because prettier will just fix them for me...

Also constantly try to select words with control d.

I didn't know about prettier, going to bring this up with my team on monday and demand we start using it. I've used go a little bit and I love gofmt so I'm completely sold on the idea of a standard formatter.

so I am gonna get a new laptop. really dont know anything about this type of thing. just want to do standard internet things like surfing and streaming. no gaming. also want to be able dev around so I guess run Visual Studio and VS Code.

seems that the low end laptops would be sufficient. 8GB of ram and 2.5-2.8hz processors seems to be standard.

any reason to go higher? anything to watch out for? should I spring for SSD?

That processor speed seems pretty slow by today's standards, SSD is pretty standard to have now.

ssd makes everything better, I'd def spring for that.

I guess 2.5 is fine for laptops after doing a bit of research.

This looks good imo, tradeoffs can be made to go a bit lower:https://m.newegg.com/products/N82E16834268091

For the most part, unless you're frequently compiling large code bases, processor speed doesn't matter too much and clock speed isn't a good measure of processor speed anyhow - google benchmarks for the CPU in question relative to other machines you've used. For an extreme example:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php...tium+4+3.40GHz
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?id=3035

I think I'd optimize more for SSD, RAM, screen quality, build quality, etc.

Although I agree with candybar below, 2.5-2.8hz sounds about a billion times slower than what you should be looking for

Def this, +1

SSD is must have.

I'd personally go 16GB on RAM nowadays, but my current laptop is 8 and it's fine, so...

I have an i5 2.5 Ghz w/ 6g Ram. I paid $500 for it.... six years ago and I need an upgrade. This means your specs are a bit dated, though to be fair, the newer Intels possibly faster than mine.

If you can, I'd say go as high-end as you can afford. This is a long-term investment and you may as well find something that will run whatever Win10 will end up auto-updating to. You don't always know what the future will hold, so it doesn't hurt to pay $1,000 and get something that will work when you decide you want to be the next Deadmau5.

Going SSD is a requirement, IMO. You can swap out and get a 500G SSD for $150 if you find that an SSD is adding a lot more than that.

nice. I was gonna get this one, but your link is cheaper.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/samsung...?skuId=5712021

I mean, 2.5 is okay-ish. For programming on a Linux with lightweight tools across the board, it isn't that bad. This computer was buggy and a fair-bit slow before I swapped out the hard drive and removed Windows. That's the catch with Windows: it runs smooth at first, but after the 25th update, everything starts stalling out unless you know the 50-odd registry files to delete.

What are you talking about daveT. I've never had Windows not run fantastically assuming Windows 7 or 10. And 2.5 GHZ is fantastic and/or meaningless for processor speed.

Really? Have you ever called customer service at 9am just to chat for 10 minutes because their computer is booting up because they opened up a browser and Outlook froze up? I do remote work on Windows 10 via Teamviewer at times, and trust me, it's very prone to crashing.

I probably do some different things than most people, but Windows definitely crashes hard under what I would consider normal workloads. Besides, those numbers are pretty old, and really, I don't see why anyone would want to buy something outdated if they can go higher. That's all I'm saying.

To make my point more clear. My computer is 6 years old, has the same and better specs than what is posted, and I paid less than the prices posted.

I'm a windows hater for the most part but I've experienced maybe like 1 windows crash per yer since windows 7. I use it daily, for work and games.

You don't just processors by clock speed any more. Clock speed has been stagnant for years. Relevant metrics are number of cores, amount of cache, and some other advanced processor features.

I'm on an HP lappy running Windows 8 and while I'm not a Windows fan it's been less painful than I expected. Has run Visual Studio 13 and SQL Server Manager simultaneously along with half a dozen spreadsheets fairly painlessly.

I don't think this could be true given that DDR4 and 802.11ac weren't available 6 years ago, SSD was super-expensive and processors that were as power-efficient and performant as i5-7200U simply didn't exist - you had to choose between slow and power-hungry. This also meant laptops from that era were prone to being noisy and becoming hot if the fan got dusty.

With that said, if we were to ignore some of those things above, my over 7-year old laptop is not that much worse and I only paid about $900. Some things do get more expensive over time (anything labor-intensive) and that price range ($500-$700) doesn't seem to be a sweet spot for new laptop.

ya, I should have thought about this a bit more. recently my laptop at work got swapped out. obv we work with pretty hudge codebases and projects/solutions. everyone was running 8g but after a dev team completed a new project and handed it off to the maintenance team, it turned out the new team couldnt efficiently debug or build on 8.

also, I just checked and noticed that I was upgrade to SSD too and I do remember it taking a while to move files around and stuff like that.

so ya, after looking back, SSD is a must. but I dont think I will building or maintaing codebases like a work. but I think DaveT makes great points in that there is really no reason to start out at less than optimal when the price is reasonable.

so I think 15.6in, 16g, 250SSD are my specs. Im not gonna worry about processor bc I figure with those specs, they wont be tacking on a weakass outdated processor.

ofc so now, looking at the prices for those reqs, I really want to gamb00l it up on a refurb.