Comment by MichaelCrawford | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MichaelCrawford | Hacker News Reader

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MichaelCrawford

In one of Google's lobby there is a 3-D animation of a spinning globe, with spikes that appear wherever and whenever searches are performed, with the height of the spikes being proportional to the rate of query submissions.

The recruiter who showed me this was very proud of google's accomplishment and indeed it was impressive to see the spikes erupting from the east and west coast of the US, Europe, Japan and India.

But I watched quietly, sadly and solemnly South America and Africa. There were modest spikes in south africa and brazil. Not many anywhere else.

Both continents are quite populous.

Among the reasons for the choices I've made in my life and my career the last few years is that I have come to regard the vast majority of the code I've written in my long career as a developer as being of no real lasting value to anyone.

Instead I wander around downtown and oldtown portland seeking out crazy people then finding some way to lift their spirits somehow. It can be a little frightening as I specialize on the particularly violent sort. Those are also the most cruelly isolated:

"LEAVE ME ALONE! LEAVE ME ALONE! WHY DON'T YOU LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE?"

The gent he was accusing had no clue.

"Hi! My name is Mike. What's yours?"

"Jerry! Pleased to meet you."

Does it have to be so hard?

My point is that those google search spikes would be erupting all over South America and Africa were someone to take responsibility to enable them.

I intend to contribute somehow, someday, in part by setting up some nameservers in cybercafes. There are actually lots of them, cybercafes are quite popular in the developing world.

I'm in Africa and... I'm sorry, but we have nameservers already. That's not really a problem. Are you really talking about DNS servers here? I wasn't sure.

The issues which prevent those spikes you'd like to see on the maps at Google are education (primarily literacy, especially English literacy), access to devices, and culture. Access to devices is being solved by cheap smartphones becoming obtainable to some degree and constant improvements to data networks in African countries, but the other two have no easy solution.

EDIT: To maybe make it a bit easier - consider someone in a village (with a cellphone and access to a data network) who wants to find out why something happened to the carrot he was growing at home. All of us would pop open Google and search about some information about carrots. A guy in a village would head up the road to talk to his friend who's been farming for 50 years and knows about carrots. If you tried to tell him "hey, you could ask Google that question" the only reply you'd get would be "I don't really know about that".

I've had someone come to me to ask me to look up bus fares on the internet for them. They'd hand me a piece of paper with the URL for the bus companies tariff page. Not too interesting until that same person later pulled out his Windows Phone smartphone to make a phone call, and he had full internet access and a good mobile browser on that phone.

I'm not sure how related this is, but my parents are from a Pacific island, Palau (I've mentioned it before in other comment threads).

One of the things that hurts progress in my country isn't really a lack of education as much as it is ignorance in the strict sense. It's funny, because a couple of years ago, a trans-Pacific cable was laid close to the island, but the decision was made to not invest in tapping into it due to the cost--even nowadays, people are interested in improving connections, but it isn't a priority. They really haven't experienced the internet, at least not in it's full capacity, so they don't know what they are missing. They know about it from what they see on T.V. ("viral" review shows targeted at baby-boomers who still watch T.V., I suppose) and social networking, so simply, they don't know what they're missing. I recall when I finish high school and moved back here to the US for college--I basically missed the dotcom-boom days of the late 90's and early to mid 2000's, the internet was not just a convenience, it completely changed my living habits.

But the so-called "other three billion" really can't know this because they haven't experienced this, so not only do you face real obstacles, but you face lethargy as well. At least for Palau, I feel like that is one of the main reasons internet access is pretty subpar there today.

[*] I do admit that this might not be relevant in parts of Africa. For one, Palau is a pretty small place (no more than twenty-thousand people), so attitudes are probably much more homogeneous (with that attitude towards the urgency of improving internet infrastructure) compared to hosts of nations with millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa.

> consider someone in a village (with a cellphone and access to a data network) who wants to find out why something happened to the carrot he was growing at home. All of us would pop open Google and search about some information about carrots. A guy in a village would head up the road to talk to his friend who's been farming for 50 years and knows about carrots

Speaking as a US native, the reason we'd look for carrot information on the internet is that none of us know anybody with carrot experience. If I knew someone who knew about carrots, they'd see all of my carrot questions before I ever asked the internet.

Yes, but this is the central advantage of distributed information: while your carrot-farmer buddy is a higher-bandwidth and possibly deeper source of carrot information than google is, that guy doesn't know so much about goat husbandry. Or fishing. Or roof construction, or car repair, etc.

So if carrot info is all you ever need, great -- but otherwise, you are going to need nearby buddies who are experts in many, many other things. In fact, you're going to need far more buddies than you can ever actually have, due to the limits of the number of social connections any of us can have (not to mention the limits that time itself imposes on the conversations we'd have to have in order to maintain those relationships even if we could keep them all straight in our heads).

Google's primary utility isn't in making you a perfect expert on anything in particular -- it's that it allows you to become sufficiently expert at anything at all in a really short period of time. Even an army of friends, with the most varied experience you can imagine, cannot come close to matching the breadth of expertise available via the net.

I plan to live out my whole life knowing nothing about carrot farming, goat husbandry, fishing, roof construction, or car repair.

What's going on here is that Africa isn't really reaping the benefits of specialization of labor in the way the civilized world is. The guy in the example isn't even growing multiple carrots! When I get a problem with my roof, I'm not going to try to fix it myself after a crash course in Google-based roof repair. I'm going to pay someone else to do it for me. I do the same when I want to eat fish or goat, or fix my car. The whole point of a developed economy is that you don't know how to produce the stuff you need. Instead, you produce what you're good at producing, and everyone reaps the gains from trade.

The title of this piece strikes me as a little over-specific. What in sub-Saharan Africa doesn't suck?

Yes, the issues are substantially bigger. South Africa can't even provide reliable electricity in the cities, never mind elsewhere. People living there tell me it's not a problem. If they're not bothered by that, I doubt they give a damn about google searches. If memory serves me correctly that's been going on for about 10 years now.

South African here.

There's the electricity issue (we call the rolling blackouts "load-shedding") which affects the cellular base-stations and telco exchanges as much as anything, but also another more obvious issue for content delivery: the local loop.

For the past 15+ years (as long as I've had Internet access), the incumbent telco (TelkomSA) has not been forthcoming with upgrading or maintaining the ADSL infrastructure. Finally, there seems to be traction with FTTx providers, but this seems limited to affluent pockets of a few thousand people in the country. All the new fibre offerings serve the same locations.

While it's hopeful this will improve the situation in the medium-term, the backhaul from ISP to eyeball is oversubscribed at least 30:1 for ADSL, with equipment being replaced by (IMO) inferior network equipment. Additionally, there are reports of automated line-conditioning software which should improve local loop connectivity, but I've seen DSL sync issues only since the software has been implemented.

The (ex-public, privatised under Telkom) Exchanges have been neglected and have recently been divided into three groups: Earners, Maintainers and "Lost Causes". The latter two will not receive upgrades from ADSL1 and the Earners will likely migrate to newer technologies. This is largely due to copper-theft and vandalism of exchanges/cellular base-stations (which are oversubscribed enough that wireless technologies routinely sustain 3000-20000ms latencies). The oligopoly running cellular networks have no incentive to improve this, since the Regulatory Authorities don't really seem to push competition as well as we'd like.

TL;DR: There are issues, but rose-tinted glasses make me hopeful in the medium term. Claims are that wireless will fix everything seem bleak, since base stations become oversubscribed faster than they can be built/upgraded (and the backhaul from them is measured in megabits/s, rather than gigabits/s charged at ~US$0.15/MB).

I also live in South Africa.

Our mobile networks are in pretty good shape:

* Anyone can buy a prepaid SIM from any supermarket and access the Internet within 10 or 20 minutes. Last time I visited France, it took me 4 days to achieve a similar result.

* Mobile data is cheap when buying in bulk. I pay USD2 per gigabyte.

* LTE coverage is growing fast and RTT is good. For example my ping time to google.com is 30ms.

Conclusion: Private ownership and free markets lead to good service and low cost. ESKOM proves that state ownership of companies and monopolies lead to bad service at high cost.

> South Africa can't even provide reliable electricity in the cities

Even India cannot provide reliable electricity to its cities. Rural India has scheduled blackouts for 6-7 hours a day.

My father was an electrical power engineer. It's quite a lot harder than one would think to distribute power with a nationwide grid.

It's never really made sense to me that we even have a nationwide grid. Why not local grids with local power plants? That's what islands use. While there is economy of scale in a big power plant then you need a bigger grid to consume its power.

There are many ways to generate electrical power. I expect many aren't used because power companies can't earn money from them.

I expect you'd have fewer scheduled blackouts if the rural areas had their own local generators.

> It's quite a lot harder than one would think to distribute power with a nationwide grid.

I am not an expert on this topic but I am Indian so I know that corruption and apathy play a big role too.

I've just gotten into the PDX Renters Unite! Facebook group. Rental prices in Portland are skyrocketing largely due to venture-backed companies hiring from out of state.

The solutions are largely straightforward, for example "inclusionary zoning" would require that new housing developments include a certain proportion of affordable housing. But inclusionary zoning is forbidden by Oregon State Law.

In what way does that law serves the needs of the people? Well that was not considered by the legislators, no the developers lobbied them, no doubt set them up with hookers and blow so as to maximize shareholder value while throwing lots of young people out on the street.

And instead of basic infrastructure the West (which milked colonial Africa for centuries, and continues to do so post-colonially, placing friendly lackeys in power to ensure underdevelopment and advantageous for them business climate), comes with feel-good schemes like "One Laptop Per Child" etc...

South Africa's electricity supply crisis has nothing whatsoever to do with the West or colonialism, it's entirely about bad governance and a lack of long-term planning.

The country has around 40GW of installed capacity, dating from over-investment before 1994, but the state opted to both not build new stations and not carry out any maintenance on the existing stations for years so about 10GW is now offline and unusable. Hence the frequent power outages.

Google isn't the leading search engine in all countries of the world, so they should not spike everywhere.

I'm surprised you didn't notice Russia and China not spiking as much either.

Google is the leading search engine in both Africa and South America though.

China here. Google isn't working, supposedly they have connection issues (but we all know the GFW is blocking it). Not surprising to not get traffic from a country not letting it in.

I once read that the GFW permits google from time to time so as to fool those who search with google into thinking that it is a technical fault on google's part, rather than censorship.

If you ask China Telecom why Google and Facebook aren't working, they'll tell you it "must be due to technical problems on their side" -- they do not officially block any websites (some WTO concern) and are incredibly opaque about what they do block.

It seems to me Google and Facebook would have standing to force the US government to tariff or even block chinese imports.

Google is second to Yandex in Russia, but still very, very popular.

> There were modest spikes in south africa and brazil. Not many anywhere else.

Huh? South America has good overall Internet penetration[1] and Chile is going to 70% right now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...

South America is the most sparsely populated continent except Australia and Antarctica. The Amazon and Patagonia regions host very little human population (thank goodness).

So South America would always show up as a few big coastal cities with vast emptiness inside, even with huge search penetration on Google's cool visualization. It really doesn't tell you much either way without raw data.

What is your requirement for something to be 'lasting'? I don't expect my code to last forever, but if the code I write manage to be part of something that is state of the art for a while in one particular niche, then that is more than enough for me. The only truly lasting pieces of code are the really basic building blocks, stuff like ntpd. Everything else is ephemeral but evolves over time. Eventually new basic building blocks will appear from that, but the process of getting those are mostly accidental.

As for Africa, it is probably a case of not having gained a critical momentum for the kind of infrastructure the article talks about. This doesn't mean it won't happen - while we don't build CDNs at the place I work, we do build basic infrastructure for access control in wireless and mobile networks, and we are definitely seeing more activity and business from African regions compared to how it was earlier.

I want to leave something behind for others when I'm gone.

Most of the code I've ever written, if it will build, won't run on today's computers. While it could be made to by porting a few years after that again it won't work.

Consider Homer's Iliad and Odyssey; you can find them in any library and most good bookstores despite having been composed almost 3,000 years ago.

Sounds like the spikes should be the higher depending on how slow they are, that would make people want to fix it.

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