Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Selling a MacBook exposed a scam
The MacBook scam
Fiona Fung, who started the Marketplace team, listed the laptop once in a while after leaving the team, just to use the product herself. A seller or buyer tried to scam her right away, and it was a new kind of scam the system had missed.
Floor height in VR
The habit paid off the same way on Meta's VR and AR teams. The way she set up her VR gear kept turning up odd floor height issues, which meant she happened to have a good repro environment, so she took on finding them.
On the VR team she had not checked any code into the code base, out of worry about messing up the operating system. The team was doing a lot of polish fixes, so she spent her product-use time vetting how the experience looked, which helped hold the quality bar.
Where does the term dogfooding come from?
The phrase "eating your own dog food" is widely traced to Microsoft, where manager Paul Maritz sent an email in 1988 titled "Eating our own Dogfood." It meant that employees should use the company's own software in daily work. Using a product this way surfaces bugs and rough edges that test plans miss. The practice later spread across the software industry.
Why do scammers keep finding new angles?
Platforms block known scam patterns, and each block pushes scammers to try a variation the filters have not seen. Their messages are cheap to change, while detection systems must be trained or updated on examples. Fraud teams therefore treat the problem as a continuing contest instead of a one-time fix. The Federal Trade Commission has reported consumer losses to fraud in the billions of dollars each year.
Why do VR floors need precise height?
A headset estimates where the floor is from its sensors and from the user's setup, and the app places virtual objects relative to that height. If the estimate is off by even a few centimeters, a virtual floor appears to float or sink, which feels wrong to the body. Different rooms, lighting, and play spaces change how well the estimate works. That makes a real home setup a useful test environment.
More from Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career
