XML Made Me Buy 61,729,433 lbs Of Coal | Prime Reacts

Recorded live on twitch, GET IN
/ theprimeagen
Become a backend engineer. Its my favorite site
boot.dev/?prom...
This is also the best way to support me is to support yourself becoming a better backend engineer.
Reviewed article: thedailywtf.co...
By: Alex Papadimoulis
MY MAIN YT CHANNEL: Has well edited engineering videos
/ theprimeagen
Discord
/ discord
Have something for me to read or react to?: / theprimeagenreact
Kinesis Advantage 360: bit.ly/Prime-K...
Hey I am sponsored by Turso, an edge database. I think they are pretty neet. Give them a try for free and if you want you can get a decent amount off (the free tier is the best (better than planetscale or any other))
turso.tech/dee...

[@Jake9066]

Tom would've never accidentally bought 28,000 tons of coal. He's a genius.

[@FLMKane]

Yeah he wrote MySpace instead.

[@Kane0123]

The exchange’s backend was probably written in JDSL

[@thomasb9758]

I respect Tom a lot

[@DaviAreias]

if they let Tom cook, everybody on earth would be wealthy enough to be able to afford 28,000 tons of coal and get it delivered by Amazon on the same day

[@VivekYadav-ds8oz]

nah Tom would've bought real coal and made his own power plant, thus generating extra electricity for him and for the world, making him the first trillionaire.

[@ampleoq]

Plot Twist. This all happened as we were closing in on christmas. It was all part of Brad's plan, Brad is never wrong. Brad actually sold the coal to Santa at an exorbitant price due to the demand. Brad can do no wrong.

[@MaxUgly]

Thank you! I immediately had that "there is an xmas joke in there!" thought just reading the title. Thirty seconds in, I was not even listening to this hilarious situation or enjoying Primes's hilarious commentary. I have been working on myself a lot and can proudly say I shut down that voice and forced myself to just enjoy the damn video! My version would have used waaay more words to make a much less funny joke. Well done!

[@ChaseCarlson]

SOAP APIs are definitely one of the web technologies of all time

[@InforSpirit]

Lesson: Don't be so big of A hole that people assumes you can store 28,000 tons of goods in that pit.

[@humansaremortal3803]

He can power a small city for a couple of years. I burn 3~5 tons of coal living on a countryside. depending on the amount of wood.

[@BboyKeny]

Would you buy from some guy called Brad though?

[@vetox2915]

@@BboyKeny I think Brad is one of the names I would trust. More so than like an Aiden

[@BboyKeny]

@@vetox2915 Ohnoo, I'll make sure to let my little sister know. She's pregnant and is expecting my first nephew in March. They going to call him Aiden 😱

[@Fooney1]

That's so 2000 and late @@BboyKeny

[@BboyKeny]

@@Fooney1 I think that's when normal names were still normal. Now people are called after the weather, like Rain and Snow.

[@psyience3213]

I was using xml for loading all the assets for a little game I was making and learned quickly that xml booleans suck.

[@NerdyWasTaken]

Why

[@toongloong]

Poor documentation and bad encoding enforcements lead to messy parsing. Prime mentions that with 1s, 0s, empty strings and capitalization

[@LagMasterSam]

All data formats that store non-strings as strings suck.

[@SaHaRaSquad]

I prefer KDL. It's like XML but with 99% less syntax overhead, so it's easy to read, write and parse.

[@robonator2945]

eeeh, personally I prefer 0/1, it ignores the "Does it want capital or lowercase" issue with True/false. A bit annoying and unclear at first, but if you know what you're working with it does the job. It's a lot harder to forget 0/1 than exact case sensitivity.

[@Xograch]

You were the one that added that mute and subtitle on trailers future?! That is awesome, I'm so happy that it exists. The only downside is that it has English subtitles for shows that don't have those subtitles when watching the series in my country

[@antonpieper]

If only they wrote that in JDSL instead of XML... Tom would have watched that!

[@kasuto-no-machi]

4:55 Futures shifts the risk to traders because the farmer can lock in the price. They promise to deliver the 20 tons of pork bellies in April and get $34k.

[@nychold]

This is why I wrote a parsing method to handle "True", "False", "Yes", "No", "T", "F", "Y", "N", "1", and "0" as possible boolean values. I think you could even put in the N-word and it would come out as false. Because it starts with "N". Better safe than sorry. lol

[@Blackweirdo]

Hey look at this German XML I got you

[@streettrialsandstuff]

You should throw an exception if the input is malformed (i.e. it doesn't match an enum of two values ("true", "false"). That's the only true way of not fucking up.

[@nychold]

@@streettrialsandstuff Unfortunately, that's not an option for our program on all inputs because some are optional, and throwing an exception there would cause valid user data to be rejected for optional data. Lots of customer calls to get the code to that state, and a rewrite was rejected due to cost. So here we are.

[@caerphoto]

@@nychold so the enum of valid values is just ("true", "false", null) or whatever value represents absence of data.

[@shapelessed]

I mean... 28k tons doesn't exactly translate to 28m pounds but you do you...

[@juxuanu]

American mind moment

[@chonkusdonkus]

Americans and their imperial measurements

[@0xCAFEF00D]

It's in the same catastrophy level.

[@colemichae]

It's just a comma

[@chigozie123]

Towards the end, the article stated the right conversion: 56M pounds

[@Septumsempra8818]

It removes risk. The example I learned is from currency: Suppose you run Harley Davidson's Russia branch. You have to pay your employees in dollars and you have to produce a budget before the year. However, you don't know the price of rubles for the year. What do you do? Traders/banks will charge you a fee to give you a fixed rate for the year. This mechanism of trading that uncertainty for a fee is the Non-degenerate side of futures markets. This is the true economic value of such a market, something Bitcoin has struggled with finding.

[@TheFrankvHoof]

When buying 'futures' turns to 'next-day delivery' 😂

[@blenderpanzi]

"Don't send emails when you're upset." So I should never send emails?

[@chunkyMunky329]

I guarantee you Netflix did NOT test whether users wanted to have the ability to turn autoplay on or off!

[@someman7]

Haha, I love how the author keeps reassuring us with safeguard after safeguard, even though we know none of them managed to prevent the shipment

[@deltafactory]

I watch trailers so infrequently. In fact, they only play at my house if I fall asleep in front of the TV or .. can't find the remote. I hope that whatever metrics are justifying the "people like the sound!" take in to account inaction or those who can't figure out how to turn it off.

[@kenuahs]

I worked with some commodities traders and boy Brad reminds me of that group a lot.

[@thingsiplay]

That's why type checking with DTD exists.

[@LupusMichaelis]

And wrong XSD and WSDL (can you feel my pain?)

[@christophersilver1902]

I'm not sure which is worse, the API programmers setting the default value of physically deliver to true when the whole point of exchanges is to mostly not deliver commodities OR the client side programmers casually generating a bool from a text comparison of the single positive case as if no edge cases might exist.

[@EwanMarshall]

That may not have been the default, and string that is not "0" may have been true.

[@wlockuz4467]

If anything, this is a great example of why having a decent interpersonal relationship at work is important lol

[@aahnecroth]

happens when have big kahuna burgers as a nutritional breakfast, also, brad, to this day, says "what?"

[@icybrain8943]

Brad is a genius

[@justgame5508]

How can an API that is used to trade millions of dollars not have strictly typed requests or at least some validation to return 400 if it receives an unexpected value

[@SaHaRaSquad]

People have no other choice than to use the API so why improve it? Same reason almost everything produced by Microsoft is a pile of hot garbage.

[@PanosPitsi]

@@SaHaRaSquadvscode is pretty good tho

[@yannick5099]

Could be worse, imagine he would have traded in livestock or something perishable.

[@SaHaRaSquad]

Imagine he would have traded manure. Yes, that's traded too, as fertilizer.

[@EwanMarshall]

Didn't know it was XML issue with truthiness, but I remember when this happened and it hit the news. He got the coal he really wanted to trade in.

[@Rohinthas]

Ho boy great video! The article was great and I genuinely enjoyed the little rant about loud trailers! I hate it so much partially because I know it works

[@electrostatic1]

Farmers and miners are afraid the price will go down in 6 months. Power plants and food processors are afraid the price will go up in 6 months. Because they are both afraid of what could happen they agree to what there 6 months price will be now using a contract. Traders just kind of interjected themselves in the process.

[@Houshalter]

Grain elevators also have to decide how long to store the stuff. If there is going to be a shortage in 3.5 months, it's best to stock up and wait until then to sell. But they don't want to take the risk. They just charge a fee for storage, and let the stupid traders buy it now and take the liability.

[@steamer2k319]

The volume thing: if enough people have voiced complaints, make strategy #8 (silent trailer with subtitles) an option in user settings. A/B testing is all well and good but you probably don't need to be as aggressive in marketing to repeat customers. The testing helped in selecting the best performing *default* but it should be easy enough to let returning customers customize their experience. Especially so if the engagement rates were anywhere near comparable.

[@anonymousanon4822]

Also I really doubt it is actually better. Maybe they evaluated their tests too naively. Because I have absolutely had moments of panic pressing some button to turn it off. Turns out the first thing that comes to mind is to start the movie/series and then immediatly pause it. Because whatever you do in the menu, something will always be playing. So if their testing is stupid they would see that people tend to select movies with unmuted trailers quicker. If their testing was smart I conjecture that it would detect that those people actually pause that shit immediatly and don't even play it.

[@peterszarvas94]

you can turn off auto play in Netflix settings

[@SaHaRaSquad]

@@anonymousanon4822 Probably they do the same as KZbin and others: measure how much time the user spends on the platform. Distracting trailer with sound probably helps pull in people that want some dumb entertainment, and that's it.

[@Tawnos_]

Regarding the volume: it was often quicker to quickly triple tap to start & pause the video than try to figure out how to mute netflix during the time of that antifeature.

[@Kestrel-lp8ho]

an entire chat of programmers baffled by the imperial system of measurements. mmmm, ahhhh

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

i am terrible with my own countries units... metric just works

[@johnbell1810]

I read there's a great technique for turning coal into diamonds

[@ScientifikX1]

People use futures as price insurance. Say you were a corn farmer. You can wait until corn prices are high, short corn futures get the money up front and then harvest the needed corn to fulfill the contracts so then no matter what happens to the price of corn in the meantime you already got paid the price you shorted the contracts for.

[@anlumo1]

Wow, that story is so old, some people in that stream weren't even born yet when it happened.

[@quantum_dongle]

The picture of the barges at the beginning of the article is the Ohio River going through downtown Pittsburgh.

[@theondono]

Fun fact: the US doesn’t allow onions futures because a guy cornered the market once

[@kon-jakub]

I love how easy it is to trigger Prime with autoplay mention.

[@Linuxdirk]

61,729,433 lbs of karma delivered right to Brad's office! 🤣

[@AEONIC_MUSIC]

Where did you get that number from? it said 50 something mil pounds

[@Linuxdirk]

@@AEONIC_MUSICVideo title.

[@AEONIC_MUSIC]

@Linuxdirk oh well in the video it said 57mil so idk where they hot the title number from

[@lovyNOM]

Brad got coal for Christmas LMAO

[@iNuchalHead]

15:03 Next season on "I Think You Should Leave"....

[@gwaptiva]

That's why you have XSDs; putting a 1 in a field expecting an xs:boolean would cause pages of obtuse errorr messages (but error messages, that's the point). (or indeed "true" in an int field with bounds 0 and 1)

[@FrostsorrowGaming]

i love story time with Primeagen!!

[@hmtnl]

The article focuses on Brad, but the idiot who defaults the value to "1" is the real culprit here. If the value is not 1 or 0, just throw an effing error man.

[@calebpena3729]

He must have pissed off Santa

[@kylekinnear8878]

Never, ever compare strings unless you have to. Parse them to a type and compare the types if possible.

[@saniel2748]

Chat really goes like "Grandpa tell us that one about trailer with volume"

[@lostsauce0]

Jesus, the fact that it didn't error on invalid input

[@dand4485]

Interesting, why no XSD for the XML instances... Then again some reason when i use to text xml/xsd early 2000-2003, thought i remember booleans could be [true|false|0|1], all four values. Double checking the W3C RFCs today, boolean today may only be "true" or "false" that's all, well except if it nullable...

[@lamegunner]

POV: You're here because you just ordered a thousand litres of milk

[@tirushone6446]

As a rustation this story made me tell my type saftey I love them. also brad is a genious?

[@cowardly_wizard]

it frelling fails CLOSED? that is def a whoops

[@markuseberlein3394]

28 thousand tons. Might that be a case why XSD exist?

[@ErazerPT]

It will be a coal day in h..l before Brad can live that one out...

[@matiasbpg]

I have the volume off when I watch Netflix lol don't remember watching a trailer with volume on by default in a long time

[@NaoyaYami]

Brad is such a coal guy.

[@TriglycerideBeware]

Story begins at 6:20, according to creator himself

[@DavidvanDeijk]

Here in metric land 1 tonne is around a cubic meter, assuming a weight per volume in the order of water. Makes it easy to visualize how much coal it is.

[@JorgetePanete]

ah yes pounds the world-compatible easy maths mass unit

[@hrmny_]

love prime basically defending himself shipping dark patterns in netflix

[@SaHaRaSquad]

Muted video playback with subtitles instead of sound is not a dark pattern. Or at least not nearly as bad.

[@hrmny_]

@@SaHaRaSquad yeah but that wasn't shipped and he blames people clicking on the video with sound on

[@SaHaRaSquad]

@@hrmny_ And he's right, because people have no standards. The developer has the least power in that decision compared to users and management. What's he gonna do, quit?

[@vmachacek]

this is classical new spin on universe old story, read this in one way or another million times

[@danielderwertvolle6354]

I assume the tests for muted or unmuted trailers was testing for clicks by users. I think something like that working to get people to click on a show and people actually preferring that feature are different things. For example clickbait also works but people still don't like it at all.

[@seasong7655]

I guess their office will stay cozy warm for the next century or so

[@SydneyApplebaum]

Prime posts that much coal on twitter daily

[@CoryDAnimates]

With a Pirate Software raid midway through the article read.

[@wlockuz4467]

Wait why is that test case checking against "true", shouldn't it be "false"?

[@V4ker]

It's literally the worst possible way to check it, but I guess they checked if it was "true", and if it was /then/ they responded to API that something wasn't right and rejected the trade ack

[@mmmhorsesteaks]

In python, it's very easy to get a working for-loop actually.

[@jelliott3604]

Interestingly (to me anyway) I did some work on an industry xml schema for commodity energy trading - gas, coal, electricity - but OTC Forwards / over the counter rather than exchange traded Futures. Anyway.. why are they adding non-schema, non-DDL defined xml? Am item of type xsd:boolean can (only) have (case-sensitive) values true, false, 0 or 1 Anything else will fail validation. Even if this is time-critical (it's not) and you decide that you can't afford to lose that couple of milliseconds validating in production the first time you test the damn thing you will catch it.

[@nexovec]

Brad got his trade delivered :D

[@iflux8821]

That door was off-by-one error 💵

[@ejaz787]

Does AExecor actually exist? This story has been around since 2009 but I cant find anything about the company.

[@nikkiofthevalley]

I wouldn't be surprised if the company name was changed.

[@ejaz787]

@@nikkiofthevalley well surely there would be some trace of them online before the name change.

[@arsenskavin130]

Cyberpunk we deserved.

[@zacharythomasrobertson8471]

Now you're literally making story time vids 😂

[@brandyballoon]

This is gold! oops I mean coal

[@earthling_parth]

Prime not emphasizing the _italics_ bugs me sooo much...

[@jeffsobral2213]

I just noticed you got the Rick's voice. (Rick and Morty)

[@emaayan]

xml schema - SimpleType, enum restriction 0,1 , ya done..

[@Celastrous]

The muteagen

[@Zenobeus]

Fantastic Story, I've run into "Brads" in my life-time, luckily few and far between, this story is great schadenfreude.

[@DrewMyersUk]

"False" == true

[@tapu_]

Brad can never be Tom

[@danielburger2550]

Why use XML if you don't validate it. The attribute needs a type and you need to validate it with an XSD. Else you could just use JSON.

[@johanngambolputty5351]

It feels like if traders were really taking on risk, then they'd sometimes have to buy something they couldn't actually shift, if all the trades are always backed by a real sale, then they're just skimming off the top right? Whose buying from the trader instead of straight from the supplier? Is it a buying in bulk thing?

[@alexandrustefanmiron7723]

Tom is a genius!

[@codeguy11]

Bro what?

[@gammalgris2497]

I wonder if there is a XML schema which enforces certain plausibilities like types (e.g. string, Boolean, number, etc) and value ranges? Dunno how good the API is documented. Seems like an unnecessary error.

[@kwicklaunch]

I don't get it, the sequence going 3, 2, 1, infinity. Surely the expected result of normal front end JavaScript is 3, 2, 1, NaN?

[@TheNewton]

7:52 "True" such as in python is so antiquated , how many programming languages waste human lifetimes worth of time by acting like aliases or disambiguation are concepts too hard to deal with in favor of pedantry that it must be "True" and not true or 1.

[@lpanebr]

To use XML without a DTD is like using English words without knowing the language.

[@maxcharacterlimitreache-]

3...2...1...[object, Object]

[@MrAlanCristhian]

I want Tom and Brad on my team.

[@TheNewton]

"Truthiness" can be an annoying af concept and unintuitive abstraction but so is pedantic data formats with no validation tooling or clear feedback.

[@Wreighn]

Hahahahaha. This is gold!

[@TosterCx]

No, this is coal

[@RenderingUser]

Brad

[@Aiviymatoc]

i hope you never get to see how SAP apis work. their boolean format is "X" = true and xml node does not exist or ist empty = false

[@theondono]

2009 ooofff

[@thedevminer]

what is a lbs?

[@mattgarelli1371]

I go to your content because it's good. Not because click bait title.

[@JulianSloman]

See what you missed is if I want it, then I want the volume on but if I don't want it I _really_ don't want it... it's not binary.... door 8 should have won! but I don't get a vote since I've been off netflix since 3 years.

[@michaelgerullis4300]

for someone who built an endless loop into prod you sure are cocky

[@arsenskavin130]

Where's l and b in pounds