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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

It's really funny to watch tech journalists try to write about Google infrastructure from the outside, based only on one paper...

Hell, it's usually really funny just to watch tech journalists try to write.

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High Scalability is a serious and informative blog, and I wouldn't dismiss it. This isn't TechCrunch. Its focus is less on rigorous scientific analysis of a narrow field, but a good, moderately deep, overview of anything to do with data scaling. And it's doing a darn good job.

In case you aren't aware, nostrademons is a Googler. He is pretty well-qualified to dismiss it in this particular case.

Is he similarly well-qualified to dismiss an entire profession?

The second sentence is admittedly a cheap-shot and a bit overgeneral. I thought about editing it out, but people had already responded to it and I hate when people ninja-edit the part of a post that I'm responding to.

Well, thanks.

It's still not fair to toss HighScalability in with the pageview whoring tech rags.

He might be... But just because you're one of the thousands of engineers at google, that doesn't make you automatically qualified.

In that case, a respectful and, more importantly, substantial comment would have been in order.

His employer doesn't matter. It doesn't add anything productive to the discussion. If one of Bing's developers had laughed off articles about Microsoft's architecture as "look at the adorable little journalists running around throwing big words around", I would not expect it to rise to top comment.

It's funny because it's technically a violation of an NDA.

The part that amuses me is their surprise that Google sees some advantage to transactions.

Journalists (of any kind) want to see things in terms of personality or philosophical conflict, e.g. SQL vs NoSQL. Because it's what their readers understand, and usually, it's all that they understand. They don't seem to consider that people might be making rational choices and difficult tradeoffs.

If that site contains one journalist, I'll eat my diamond tiara. Let's call them blogophiles instead. Or reposting aggragists. Adveraggrapostsummarizers. "One who reposts content from other sites while attaching ads and providing a veneer of quote-unquote insight."

This is exactly why I think the "News" market is ripe for some disruptive product.

The only problem is that sources can send cease and desist letters to any company that effectively steals the sources' viewerbase.

I can't really apologize for my brethren in the market, but yes, tech journalism tends to be terrible. The journalism market was already disrupted by Twitter, Facebook and blogs. Blogs in particular are great, because instead of reading what some idiot from journalism school has to say about, oh, I dunno.... uhm.... exceptions versus errors in programming languages (as touched off by that Python vs. Go post), instead of reading some wonk's interpretation, you can instead read a developer's opinion.

In the meantime I just wanted to point out that everyone and their mother is making "announcements" about Spanner, and usually trying to make the world think they're better. Mostly this is from NoSQL companies.

I don't think it's fair to lump all technology journalists into one category. There are two basic types of technology journalists - technologists who write about technology and journalists who write about technology. The former tends to be more accurate, but the latter tend to be more savvy, and thus successful, journalists, since most readers are not technologists.

Web programmers take note: High Scalability == Tech Journalism.

The sad part is web programmers think these blogs are some sort of programming advice. "What is your stack?" == "I am an idiot."

How does it feel to "kickstart a revolution" (those are Mr. High Scalability's the exact words) every time you publish a paper?

...you know, I did a text search for "kickstart" and its one instance had nothing to do with Spanner.

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