☕ Big Tech vs. Australia
Google and Facebook have been heavily involved with proposed legislation in Australia. Facebook has now banned all news from their platform in Australia. We break it down here.
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Industry News
Big Tech vs. Australia
The Australian Government has been taking a harsh stance against Google and Facebook and their impact on news outlets. The government has been proposing a new series of regulations that would require Google and Facebook to pay Australian media companies under a so called “link tax”, where tech companies pay news outlets for displaying and linking to their content.
Facebook and Google both originally took hard stances against this proposed legislation, with Google threatening to pull their services from the country. Facebook threatened to block users in Australia from sharing news content.
Here’s how the whole thing played out…
Google specifically objected to a "pay on a per-link basis” proposal. The payment would have been required regardless of where the links applied (including Google Search).
In the end, Google ended up striking a deal with News Corp where the company would enter into a revenue sharing agreement with the media empire. YouTube will also invest in video journalism and the two companies will work together to build a subscription platform.
Google now has deals with more than 50 Australian titles and more than 500 publishers.
Facebook took a more ballsy approach, and actually followed through with their threat. They implemented a measure that stopped all Australian users from sharing news articles on the platform.
This was a bit of a mess, since Facebook also ended up blocking access to government pandemic, public health and emergency services. Quite a few pissed off Australians.
The company has now reversed their decision (after a couple of days of implementing it) and have now struck a deal with the Australian government. They will be restoring news on their platform in Australia.
Roblox IPO
I assume most of our readers are over the age of 16. Therefore, you probably haven’t heard of Roblox.
It’s an incredibly popular gaming platform with more than 36 million players. Think of it as a Runescape meets Minecraft.
It’s an online game platform that also allows users to program their own games (in a scripting language called Lua) and host them on the platform.
The vision of the company is to build the Metaverse, a virtual world where we can all interact and be connected (watch Ready Player One if you haven’t already).
Roblox is now going public through a direct listing. Revenue has grown by 80% over the past year to $923 million dollars. In the past year, users spent a total of 30.6 billion hours engaged on the platform, or an average of 2.6 hours per daily active user each day.
Game developers on the platform have also been quite successful. The number of active developers is over 8 million, 1.25 million of who earned money on the platform.
About 300 developers earned more than $100,000.
Tech Snippets
A fantastic tutorial on reverse engineering a GameBoy Advance game (Klona). This is great if you’re interested in reverse engineering and front end development (uses JS and React).
Here’s an awesome tutorial on Huffman Coding. The Huffman Coding Algorithm forms the base for many compression algorithms and forms the core of the gzip file format.
Interview Question
Given two strings s and t, return the number of distinct subsequences of s which equal t.
A subsequence is a new string formed from the original string by deleting some (or none) of the characters without changing the remaining character’s relative positions.
Example
Input - s = “babgbag”, t = “bag”
Output - 5
Previous Solution
As a refresher, here’s the last question
You are given a 9 x 9 array that represents a Sudoku board.
Write a function that determines if the Sudoku board is valid.
A valid board follows these rules
Each row must contain the digits 1 - 9 without repetition
Each column must contain the digits 1 - 9 without repetition
Each of the nine 3 x 3 sub-boxes of the grid must contain the digits 1 - 9 without repetition
The sudoku board may not be entirely filled. If there are empty boxes, then validate the board based off the filled boxes.
Solution
The optimal way of solving this question is the brute force way. We iterate through every item in our Sudoku board and make sure that we're satisfying all the rules.
The main optimization we can get is by using an array of sets to keep track of each row, column and square.
We have 2 arrays with 9 set objects. One keeps track of our rows and the other keeps track of our columns.
Then, we have a multidimensional array (3 x 3) that keeps track of our 9 squares.
As we iterate through each position in our board, we can use the indices of that square to figure out which row, column and square that position belongs to. We make sure that the number in that position isn't already the row, column and square.
Can you analyze the time/space complexity of our solution?
Reply back with your estimate!
We’ll tell you if you’re correct (or we’ll tell you the answer if you’re wrong).