Periodic

The cloud is all about scale and only having to rent resources when you need them. If you have your home server you have to buy and maintain and pay for those resources at all times. When you make a quick cloud request you only "pay" for the resources you consume.

When I was working on Google Search what really astounded me is how we could leverage hundreds of machines in a single request and still have virtually no cost per search. The reason was that each search used a tiny amount of the total resources of those machines and for a very short time. A total search might have (made up numbers) one minute of computation time, but spread across 200 machines it only takes 300ms from start to finish.

That's the benefit the cloud will provide. You don't want to have a 1000-machine data center available at all times to store billions of possible documents and process your requests with low latency. If we went to a private-network model I fear that the turn-around time would be a lot closer to a human assistant. You'd ask it to do things and then it would get back to you sometime later (seconds? minutes? hours?) when it had finished it's research and come up with an answer.

Thank you for pointing this out! I glossed over it in the title, but it is bears special attention to avoid falling into any traps of rhetoric.

There definitely seems to be a trend in diet right now to search for the "natural" cure to all our ills. The Paleolitic Diet is probably the best example of this because it is explicitly named as being based on the past. There is an unfounded belief that primitive people were healthier, stronger and better in many ways. However, I don't know of any evidence to support those claims and most of the arguments don't hold together if you don't assume the correlation of natural and good.

I'm really curious what causes such as fixation in our modern culture on the "natural" as being healthy and good.

There's also an odd opposite assumption that anything that is "unnatural" is probably "bad". GMOs are a good example of this. Anything derived through selective breeding is good, but as soon as you directly modify the genes it's bad, despite more rigorous testing.

Part of the problem is that they want to change the backends too. Hangouts had a lot of problems. Allo is their way of trying to create a clean slate and break away from the legacy of Hangouts. They can still keep Hangouts for some things, but they want to focus on a product that will get picked up by your average mobile user. People these days like using phone numbers for identification and a lot of users don't ever use a desktop. They're building for that user first. We'll see if it ever becomes a chat product the rest of us want to use.

For example of Hangouts issues, the SMS integration had all sorts of weird cases going on and wasn't reliable. I ended up having to turn it off to get texts for short-message texts from Google itself. I did some digging and since those came through a different channel somehow they were getting dropped by one of the systems and weren't getting flagged as needing to be delivered to me.

My wife also had three account entities for the same name in the Google system and sometimes her reply would get sent to a new chat. So about once a week my history with her would start fresh.

However, I agree that hangouts has been my preferred chat application for a long time and I'm disappointed how hard it is to get into the siloed worlds that a lot of chat apps have these days.

I remember my grandparents trying to make sure they got all their evening chores done so they could sit down age watch Wheel of Fortune when it came on. They didn't have a lot of free time on weeknights, but it was because of how they chose to spend it.

Can you say more? What makes the difference between correct and incorrect instrumentation? What are the powerful features that it has that the others don't?

In short, how do we make a Jira install into something powerful and useful?

What I find most illuminating about the deep software theory is it helps me understand why things are best practices. There are a lot of things that are good to do, but understanding deeply how the compiler things and how the languages are designed gives me insight into why we choose to do the things we do.

The best example is taking a few options someone has for their function interfaces and reframing it in terms of type algebras which helps expose where it's overly complicated. The two best examples I have are making IO and mutations of input explicit and localized in single a location so the user doesn't have to guess which functions are changing things and which ones aren't. Once you have a good framework for describing these abstract boundaries a lot of other principles of design fall out from keeping it simple and readable.

Just a year ago I was on a project that involved building a tree of data and we wanted the ability to try adding a few things and backtrack to multiple different points if it didn't work out, so there was a lot of shared data in the tree. Performance was critical and we had various operations that had to be performed regularly, so I did a lot of implementations and tested them directly.

My CS degree (which I got late in my career) was invaluable. I got it precisely because I had no idea what I was missing and if I hadn't I wouldn't have investigated half the options I did and would not have had a good framework for thinking about them. I would have gotten the job done without it, but it wouldn't have been as good a job and I wouldn't have known what I was missing.

If the problem is that you can't get a job if you're not in the club, why not join the club?

I used to work at Google and I did a lot of interviews. I loved when we finally got an experienced engineer in to interview. I could stop asking the toy algorithms questions and actually talk about design.

But maybe they only want to hire fresh college grads? The company is sorely lacking in experience. I wouldn't be surprised if the reason they can't find experienced engineers to interview is that everyone with experience who is qualified to work at Google either works there already or doesn't want to.

Maybe you're in that camp of not wanting to work at Google. That's fine. I enjoyed it for a while but it wasn't for me. Just having it on my resume has opened a lot of doors.

Exactly, that confused me too. It would be like saying all the schools cost the same because the interest rate for student loans is the same regardless of amount. There is a huge difference between paying 5% on $1,000 and 5% on $100,000.

Its also interesting that they did the cost net of financial aid, so probably looking at the average cost of the degree, creating a much larger variance than the data set indicates.

I had associated it with survivors/metaphysical guilt. It's similar to the guilt that survivors feel when an accident happens and injures/kills others but not them. It's not that we did anything wrong to be ashamed of, but instead almost a guilt about being lucky or being who we are.

It's an interesting phenomenon and I've begun studying it more after moving out of Silicon Valley and suddenly realizing how very privileged I really am. A specific point is that generally you can't discharge the guilt just by doing good things. Donations and volunteer work don't seem to help because there's nothing to atone for.

Perhaps you work in a different part of Google than I do, but I've been here for four years and I see many good engineers getting pushed into management roles to advance their careers. Their job title is still that of an engineer, but they end up with reports, schedules full of meetings and use Google Docs as their primary editor.

It seems that the ability to have an impact while writing code is quite limited in the industry, and the way to expand it is to take on leadership and management roles, even if you aren't technically moving onto the management ladder.

I'm in the process of moving to Sacramento from San Jose. My wife and I sat down and looked at what made us happy and we decided that living in Silicon Valley was not high on our list.

I'm tired of the costs and crowding. The cost of living is about 30% lower and housing is significantly lower.

I'm managing my career by working for a San Francisco company and working remotely. I'll commute in once a week, which is still less commuting than I was doing in the bay area. I'll have a house instead of a condo. I'll have a nicer/larger place. I'll have plenty of things to do (though things still close early). I'll be closer to my family. I'll be able to support my wife when she goes back to school.

I'm looking forward to it.

They still push Microsoft products pretty heavily in universities. I was very happy when I went off to university to be able to easily get keys for products like Windows, Office and Visual Studio. Our CS department had something set up and the impression I got was that Microsoft was footing a good bit of the bill to make sure that they were the easiest choice for most students to get professional software.

As someone who has worked at Google for a few years, I can't agree with the author's characterization of tech behemoths. While they have embraced the start-up mode of doing things for some new projects and are very free with their investing, their core business is everything you'd expect from a big business.

I'm not sure it's possible to grow as large as Google, Apple or Facebook and remain agile. The product and organization gains too much inertia on its own. Even if you have a brilliant idea for improving the product there are hundreds of people you need to convince, months worth of meetings and reams of design docs required.

The big companies may be innovating on the edges, but their established products are all ripe for disruption.

Of course, if you look too disruptive they'll probably just buy you with their mountain of cash.

It could have had better supporting arguments and evidence, but I couldn't find enough of it and just skimmed to the end to make sure I wasn't missing it.

Those countries are getting wealthier and the economics of the world are slowly shifting. We have maybe 1-2B people online with capable devices and abundant bandwidth. That leaves 5B yet to connect and another 3B who will want to connect over the next 50 years as population continues to grow.

You can see Facebook and Google scrabbling over themselves to get a share of the emerging markets. Google is trying to pair down Search so they can get it onto those 2G connections. Facebook is trying to give away bandwidth. They both know there is going to be a lot of money in those markets soon, but no one knows exactly how that economy is going to evolve.

Another scary thought: What if the person thinks this is clever and admirable code?

I think many of us spend a lot of time in our ecosystems and we might lose sight of what's outside. If someone spent all their days writing complicated Aspect-Oriented code then maybe to them this is just second nature and the right way to do it. What if you wanted to add more features, after all?

I wouldn't go so far as to imagine perverse incentives from management. It could just be a cultural bubble that the person works in or they could work in a place where most problems are far more complex and these sorts of solutions make sense.

It can be difficult to remember who your audience is, what they know and what they need to be told.

Isn't that basically what we did with doctypes? HTML has a lot of similar issues and it has slowly managed to move forward. The real benefit was not having to mix old and new code and getting rid of all the quirks by requiring you specify that you want them if you want that old doc to work.

JavaScript could get to the same place just be letting you specify a different language in the script tag.

The big question is how we support legacy browsers for a time because many won't support the new keywords.

For me it's all about stress. Typically I can't get myself to fall asleep before 1am. Whenever I go to bed it just takes 1-2 hours to fall asleep. I just can't get my mind to shut off. I struggle to get up at 9:30am and need coffee to be functional in the mornings.

If I go out on a long camping trip I'll often not even bring a book. This means that once the sun goes down there is basically nothing to do. After a day or two I find myself easily falling asleep and sleeping through the night. When I come back home, if I still haven't begun to go back to work, it persists. I can easily just go to bed at 11:00 and get up at 8:00. It generally lasts until I go to work.

It's the anxiety of needing to get things done and maintain my appearance to others and to myself that really seems to keep me up. As I lie in bed there's a part of me that says I should have accomplished more during the day and that I should be doing something "productive". I'm working hard on meditation, mindfulness and self-awareness to reduce the anxiety, but what works best is to really remove myself from the stressors and go to a place where I really just can't do anything so my mind gives up.

I went camping near the end of December and had another week off for the new year. It was great. I was well slept and relaxed. Now in my first week back to work I've already fallen back into less than 7 hours of sleep per night.

I guess I need to go camping again.

What really stood out to me was the idea that the current climate of shooting for an acquisition as a primary exit strategy is due to the threat of the entrenched goliaths of the industry and the concentration of power they have in terms of markets and patents. I had never linked that trend to anti-competitiveness in the market because the market looks so competitive based on how many companies are starting and getting funded.

I just realized that when I want to use drive I open a new tab and type "drive" and let auto-complete do the rest.

Since Google has hidden the other properties behind the grid icon I've completely forgotten they were there.

The biggest difference between Android and Chrome OS for me as a user is how it handles user multi-tasking.

I've tried using an Android tablet for work. It's nigh impossible, even with a keyboard because it doesn't support multi-tasking well. Sure, it supports OS multi-tasking, but it doesn't support user multi-tasking.

Android is based around the single-task model. You have a foreground app that takes up the entire screen and other apps are backgrounded. You can switch between apps fairly quickly, but you can only have one open at a time. There are some attempts to fix this, such as Samsung's split-screen, but none are officially supported. We've even moved to having Chrome tabs use this model.

I love my Chromebook for work though. It does everything I need to do, including having multiple document windows open for multi-tasking.

Chrome OS is built on a multi-task model. You can have many windows open at once and quickly switch between them without losing state or visibility.

Windows tried to merge the two with Windows 8 and it was a terrible user experience. The last thing I want for my dual 24" monitors is to be able to only use one window at a time. Having a messaging app take up the entire monitor is ridiculous. Hopefully they'll find a middle ground. Until user multi-tasking exists in Android I won't be using it for anything but my phone.

Losing your PIN generator would actually be a lot easier with the government than with companies like Google. Most government already have a branch in every major town (post office or DMV). We already have a pretty simple system for distributing ID cards, including biometric data in the form of photos.

I don't think the graph says which request types are more or less common. The ordering could be arbitrary.

It would be interesting to know why some are slower. Perhaps they require very little processing and so the time becomes dominated by FFI transformations? It would be nice to know!

It really shows what an investment they are willing to make in the language. They aren't just training up internal engineers, they're bringing in some of the best in the community.

I'm hugely excited that Facebook is making this investment and giving some of the developments back to the community. There are many smaller companies that would be interested in Haskell but don't have the resources or expertise to tackle some of these complicated problems.

Facebook is blazing the trail for production Haskell and the rest of us can follow.

I made the mistake of moving 18 miles (San Jose) from where I work (Mountain View). Two years ago traffic wasn't bad but I swear it's getting worse. If I leave the house at 9:00 it takes 45-60 minutes to get to work. If there's a major accident or problem it can take up to 90 (happened once). Now I just don't leave the house before 10:00. My commute is less than 30 minutes and I regain 30-60 minutes every day.

I feel very fortunate to work at a company and with a team that supports my preferred schedule.

As an engineer at Google a key difference from some other companies is how few meetings I have. I have less then 10 hours of meetings per week, and they are all scheduled between 11am and 4pm. There's also plenty of less-formal meetings when I strike up a conversation with my coworkers, usually closer to 6:00 as we start to focus less and wonder more.

I dislike this strongly. It is attempting to demean a group of people without really giving them a fair chance. It exaggerates and vilifies the "enterprise programmer" while lionizing the young-but-inexperienced smart programmer. It's a very common theme here on HN. It's playing into the narrative of the young entrepreneur that can drop out of college and build the next successful start-up. The fact is that most people in that situation will fail the first few times as they gain experience. People who can operate like Alan, though obviously Alan does not deliver results, are very valuable in a company. Systems have a tendency to get more complex and you will need people who have experience dealing with that complexity, managing it, and reducing it.

Let me address the parable a bit more directly.

The parable is very hard for me to relate to because to me it seems like the two characters are cherry picked such that they're vastly different in terms of skills. It looks to me like Charles is either much better than Alan at design or got lucky. I think the only wisdom that can be gleaned from the story is to not over-complicate your design. Charles and Alan both spend time upfront designing their code, but it seems that Charles came up with the better design and saw the simple kernel of the problem. That's the only real difference between the two. Alan saw a problem that needed a lot of work and specs to get right, but Charles saw it was actually a very simple problem.

I would say the lesson is to make sure you understand the problem well enough, but Alan is an experienced guy who still couldn't figure it out, so it must have been a hard problem to know how to work with in the first place. Maybe Alan was working defensively to make sure he had all his bases covered in case the design turned out to be different than he initially anticipated. I can't say.

I did my undergraduate in Physics and Mathematics about ten years ago now. When I started the program I wanted to be a researcher and delve into the secrets of the universe. I quickly discovered that it wasn't for me and moved into Computer Science.

One piece of advice that stuck with me the most was from the director of career development, who had previously been a research manager at IBM. He told us that if we wanted to go into industry just skip graduate school and focus on getting lab experience. He told us if we really wanted to do graduate work to just get a MS and then go into industry. He told us to only do a PhD if you wanted to go into academia because not only was it a waste of time compared to what you could learn and earn in industry, it would pigeon hole you into a very specific field.

He was very adamant that a key skill in business was being flexible and PhD programs most certainly aren't.

What I think is the future for workstations and laptops is a web-integrated OS. Take Chrome OS as an example. These devices become more and more powerful as more and more of our data moves into the cloud.

I don't think anyone actually reviews, comments on or edits large documents on a tablet. That would be a nightmare. The most I've found bearable when reviewing papers on a tablet is highlighting. On a laptop you have the power of a full keyboard, which I can use to comfortably compose this comment, yet my laptop has almost no internal storage and all my documents are stored on the cloud.

This move is important for maintaining relevant, but I do think the insistence on tablets and phones is missing the whole of point of us making the data mobile.