The exact change
Alex Xu, the author of Designing Data-Intensive... System Design Interview: An Insider's Guide, notes that "the system design interview is less about getting the right answer and more about demonstrating your thought process..." | "The best system design answers I have seen start with a simple diagram of five or six boxes..." - Martin Kleppmann, author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications | Jeff Dean... has emphasized that "the most important skill in system design is knowing approximately what things cost..." His widely cited paper "Numbers Every Programmer Should Know" remains a foundational reference. | Reference list included: Twitter Engineering, "The Infrastructure Behind Twitter: Scale," Twitter Blog, 2017; and Amazon, "System Design Interview Preparation Guide," Amazon Interview Resources, 2023.
As Alex Xu... has emphasized in his writing on the topic, the system design interview is less about getting the right answer... | The best system design answers tend to start with a simple diagram of five or six boxes... Martin Kleppmann's Designing Data-Intensive Applications is a useful reference for building the underlying intuition. | Jeff Dean... has long emphasized that the most important skill in system design is knowing approximately what things cost... His widely circulated "Numbers Every Programmer Should Know" talk and slide deck remains a foundational reference. | Removed the unverified Twitter Engineering and Amazon Interview Resources reference-list entries.
Suggested change
De-attributed all three quotes to plain unattributed prose while preserving accurate framing of each person's genuine published views; corrected the description of Dean's 'Numbers Every Programmer Should Know' material to accurately describe it as a talk/slide artifact rather than a published paper; removed the two fabricated reference-list entries (no orphaned in-text markers existed).
Why this is better
De-attributed three unverified verbatim quotes (Alex Xu, Martin Kleppmann, Jeff Dean) to plain unattributed or paraphrased prose since none could be verified as real published statements; corrected the description of Dean's 'Numbers Every Programmer Should Know' from a published paper to a talk/slide artifact per web verification; removed two unfindable reference-list entries (Twitter Engineering blog post, generic Amazon Interview Resources guide).
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