Month: September 2017

I’ve arrived.

// My good old Brussels. It’s so nice, the Wi-Fi spots recognize me around the city as I walk)

Please recommend something to read on the plane that is engaging enough to not put down and would last for the duration of the flight (about 10 hours). Naturally, I’d like something that you’ve found particularly memorable recently. In English or Russian

I particularly enjoy popular science, like Singh’s Fermat’s Last Theorem or Nikitin’s The Origin of Life

But it needs to be in digital format definitely. Otherwise, I can’t find it in the US

What a dumpster fire this internet of yours is 🙂

Poured myself some coffee. Decided to click on an ad link to some pop article, just to read and better understand the world.

To see how they fight for the attention of the internet audience nowadays. And how the media promotes itself.

Headline: “What happened to Maslyakov?!”. I click through, as always, via two redirects to Rambler (Hello, Matvey!). Finally found the article, Rambler “reprints” it from Dni.ru. Well, that’s another dump, but still, let’s take a closer look.

Autoplay video no longer surprises (it’s ads, of course). My speakers are at maximum. The AD DOESN’T TURN OFF. IT SHOUTS. Okay, I waited it out – turned it off.

Article gist: Rumors that Maslyakov is ill. Let’s check! Ask a psychic. She believes not! That’s it!

Below are 164000 likes in two days.

There’s also an accompanying video. Maslyakov on Urgant’s show. A year old. A minute clip. Of course, with an ad at the beginning, which cannot be skipped. Totally off-topic, just because it’s Maslyakov.

Dni.ru at least put this in the “Horoscopes” section, where normal people don’t go. On Rambler, it’s in the “show-business”. Normal people don’t go there either, but still, there’s a difference from horoscopes.

Well okay, Dni.ru can be understood. They created a Horoscopes category and sell links to psychics there. There’s a link, it leads to her site. But when this article gets to Rambler, they remove the link to the psychic (no domain in the text in both editions either), but they put a link to Ferrari, leading to the same page (banners! Banners! Video ads again!).

If you compare the texts, the original has corrected errors and typography. Rambler got, apparently, the first version. Apparently, Rambler grabs it as soon as it’s posted, and doesn’t edit further. But it does add links to Ferrari.

Sixty-six comments on Rambler.

Here’s what I think. Rambler was a decent place at one time. Then it turned into this kind of pornography. Why does none of the ordinary people working there ask themselves “what am I spending my life on” 🙂 And also, does this contribute to the dumbing down of the population? Could this be a genre of modern art? which, if banned, would bring millions of Rambler viewers and readers of such articles onto the streets?

I give the link, but don’t visit it too often

news.rambler.ru/starlife/37836915-maslyakov-gotovitsya-k-peremenam/?smi2=1

Has anyone seen implementations of faceted search with dynamically calculated ranges? For instance, there’s a product price and a million products. After the search, only products in the range from 10 to 100 rubles are displayed. Can the system intelligently divide this range into several sub-ranges and display them in facets? Has anyone seen such a thing online? Usually, in search engines, you need to set ranges fixedly, and for example with prices, this doesn’t work. Is this more convenient than a slider in facets, which overall could play the same role?

UPDATE: moved from comments:

A very raw idea I have is this: make two additional queries: with sorting by price one way, the other way, and in both cases, take the first element. We’ll get a price range from minimum to maximum. Next, divide this range into N parts, and for each part, make a separate query to get the number of results (to display in parentheses). In the simplest case, this N is the maximum number of price groups. If in some cases of N we get zeros in the groups in the middle (the edges will definitely not have zeros), then we combine this group with the neighboring one, until the zero disappears. If performance allows, we can take a larger N, and already on the client side, combine results into a small number of groups, but in such a way that each group has approximately the same number of elements. Thus, the ranges we get will be uneven in boundaries, but uniform in content.

A small update. If you simply generate equal ranges by dividing the overall spread by N, then users get ugly ranges, with fractional numbers and such. Therefore, if Solr’s performance allows, you can also send requests for rounded ranges and compare results with the first. If the maximum spread between groups has increased by more than X%, then we make the rounding for this pair of groups weaker. Otherwise, we try rounding at a higher level.

For example, we get 10 numbers in the range from 1 to 3, and another five in the range from 56 to 57. The full range is from 1 to 57. Let’s take N=20. We make 20 requests to Solr with ranges 1..3.85, 3.85…7.7… and so on. We get 3 numbers in the first range and five numbers in the last, and in the others – zeros. We round 3.85 to 4. We make two requests (from zero to 4 and from 4 to 7.7). We get again 3 and 0 respectively. The spread from the previous ones is zero, so we keep the rounded value (4). We do the same crap with 53.15..57 – it rounds to 53..57. It results in three ranges (0,4), (4,53), (53, 57). The first and last have positive values, so we display them. The middle one has zeros, no need to display. Thus, we display facets 0..4 and 53..57. The downside here is that we can’t make 53 into 56 without increasing N. Question is, do we need to.

I have an idea to use a slider, and represent the ranges in the form of a histogram. Then what’s described above fits perfectly with the concept of histograms. N determines the number of columns in the histogram. Uneven numbers in ranges are no longer a problem.

Apparently, this is the prototype I will make. The histogram looks like an excellent solution.

I’ve been thinking about what it would be like if Facebook principles operated in real life:

1) Water cooler. A new employee pours boiling water. Suddenly you have a question – “where’s the nearest restaurant to go have lunch?” You get an answer. After that, various people start flooding into your office to tell you they responded to that new guy. They only stop when you hang a “do not disturb about the restaurant” sign on your door. There’s already a whole door covered with signs on various topics.

2) Train station. Crowds of people scurrying back and forth, staring at the ground. Suddenly, one of them stops, looks up, and loudly shouts, “I watched the last episode of ‘Game of Thrones’ today!” And then he moves on. The others applaud, someone might kick him, some catch up to ask related and unrelated questions. The guy keeps walking, surrounded by a small but gradually thinning crowd.

3) Faces to the ground, but on top of their heads – the best photo from a corporate party or a trip from five years ago. That’s how everyone recognizes each other.

4) If you throw something else into the thinning crowd, like “I lost my passport!”, it doesn’t disperse as quickly because everyone is curious about how it happened and eager to give advice. Even if they are slightly strangers. They’re definitely interested.

5) Periodically, some people run up and show videos from Thailand and photos from a corporate party. Overall, no one gets offended if you ignore them, as there are always more eyes following behind. Give a thumb up or a compliment, and people start jumping and rejoicing. If you criticize, they start a discussion or a squabble.

There is a great series “Black Mirror,” and one of the episodes is exactly about likes in real life. Highly recommend it.

*Sep 16-31 I’ll visit Moscow*. As far as I know, I’m being followed by the hybris community from Russia and/or their friends here on Facebook. If you are interested in anything on this topic, if you have any issues with #hybris, contact me via Facebook / LinkedIn / r.aliev@gmail.com, and I will be happy to help.

Most likely, I’ll be in Kolomna (Moscow region) where my home is. Trying to find a place in Moscow, though. Also relevant.

Third car video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZEj9Wa-r1w

My hybris blog update:

On August 30, SAP announced a new version of hybris Commerce, Release 6.5.

The detailed information about the new features and changes of the release is published on hybris wiki.

However, official releases are often primarily filled with marketing highlights, so I decided to quickly analyze the data from the documentation portal to uncover important changes possibly not mentioned in the official release notes.

Every major feature deserves their dedicated page on the SAP Hybris Help Portal. The updated pages are also important, but there are too many of them. The importance of the new pages generally exceeds that of the updated ones.

I gathered all 200+ new pages into a single list.

https://hybrismart.com/2017/09/01/sap-hybris-help-6-5-what-is-new/

Watched a good movie yesterday. It’s a family film, ideal for watching without English subtitles: it’s very straightforward (half of the movie is a dog talking, rated 6+).

In the film, dogs periodically die, to whom you tend to get attached, but everything ends well, and overall, the movie is very positive.

It was based on this book: https://www.ozon.ru/context/detail/id/31218906/

https://www.amazon.com/Dogs-Purpose-Novel-Humans/dp/0765330342

http://www.kinopoisk.ru/film/sobachya-zhizn-2017-571896/

The ceremonial chess room where tonight I am destined to lose twice and win once. Two losses mean 70 push-ups for the evening, 36 and 34. After this, we decided not to play anymore today #chess