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chetanahujaon Why we are not leaving the cloud

> equally astonished in 2017

> Prime Video, Hulu, HBO GO, YouTube Red,

So Netflix has a six year lead and attendant network effects in it's favor. If you don't believe me, I created a facebook clone in PHP last weekend which works just as well (or better) than the original Facebook. Do you want to join it?

chetanahujaon Why we are not leaving the cloud

This answer is in the same category as "Actually, Google is an ads company". That is to say, it makes a plausible case but ultimately wrong.

The original success of Netflix depended on being the first company with a fixed-price-no-ads streaming business model in addition to really good user experience across a wide variety of platforms. I remember being astonished at watching a Netflix movie on my iPhone (when I was still an iPhone user) while riding a train in 2011'ish. It was miles ahead of any other competitor in providing solid, usable clients on multiple platforms combined with reliable streaming in most cases and networks. This was as much a triumph of technology and product design as it was of the content available. If it was only about the content, it would be Hulu (at least in US) instead of Netflix who would be in pole position today.

chetanahujaon Uber Executive, Linked to an Old Harassment Claim, Resigns

"bullying and harassment has shown a strong positive correlation with the frequency of such claims as those you describe"

"which have no such attachment to one specific end of the political spectrum, the worst I've seen is thoughtlessness."

My comment was not to start a partisan political thread but your anecdotal claims hold no merit here since CEO of Uber is known to spout Ayn Rand bullshit in public and is known as a Trump supporter.

I was not calling Uber's culture progressive and meritocratic. It's clearly not. I was challenging the rest of the community to treat Uber in a way that was appropriate for a meritocratic and progressive community.

chetanahujaon Uber Executive, Linked to an Old Harassment Claim, Resigns

If Amit didn't reveal that he had forced out (whether he officially resigned or was fired is a distinction without a difference) of Google after an investigation of serious charges against him, then that's a good enough reason to fire a top executive.

chetanahujaon Uber Executive, Linked to an Old Harassment Claim, Resigns

It's fairly easy to agree that this action is not enough to get Uber off the hook and can indeed be thought as a PR stunt. But why do you think Amit Singhal's race is a factor here?

chetanahujaon Uber Executive, Linked to an Old Harassment Claim, Resigns

> I see that HR doesn't want to fire people he's fond of

If the the descriptions we've read so far about Uber HR's response to sexual harassment and discrimination claims as well as Travis's role in them are corroborated, the board needs to do a major housecleaning at Uber starting from the CEO, many people in HR and many of these managers who were directly carrying out these actions. Anything short of that sends the signal that women are indeed considered second class citizens in the tech ecosystem.

Anything short of this would leave Uber as a silicon valley pariah. Top engineers and managers would be reluctant to join the company. Those who stay in Uber long term will have their brands tarnished. If we, as a group (silicon valley startup ecosystem) fail to respond in this manner, the entire industry's brand will be tarnished forever.

We claim to be a meritocratic and progressive bunch. It pains me to say this as a guy in this industry, I had never imagined how serious and ugly the sexism in some parts of the industry is. Yes I had known at a surface level that women have more obstacles to overcome to make it in this industry. But still Susan Fowler's blog was shocking to me. This new blogpost has doubled the shock. I hope my actions from this point on will be guided by this knowledge.

chetanahujaon I am an Uber survivor

At this point, after all the allegations of abuse and bad behavior at Uber, if the CEO is not fired, the community here must hold the Uber board complicit in these shenanigans. The situation here seems similar (or maybe worse) in magnitude as that at Zenefits. The board there took swift action once the accusations came out in public and perhaps saved the company (at least in the short term). What can the HN community, made up of founders/investors/technologists do here? Push for a consumer boycott of Uber? Refuse to work for Uber? Refuse to do business with Uber?

chetanahujaon French historian Henry Rousso held for 10 hours and threatened with deportation

"From various incidents that have come out it seems as if it's the Wild West where whatever the idiot harassing you decides, with little recourse if you disagree"

you're right to a large extent.

https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone

chetanahujaon French historian Henry Rousso held for 10 hours and threatened with deportation

"Borders are under control of the legal system and policing them is a right that's granted to the Federal government by the constitution"

Barely. Apparently the US constitution gets suspended at the border (and a 100 mile radius around the border)

https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone

chetanahujaon French historian Henry Rousso held for 10 hours and threatened with deportation

"Edit: this is for non US citizens. US citizens don't need to answer any questions at entry, but be prepared to be taken aside for screening"

Also be prepared to answer questions about your religion... regardless of if you're a citizen or not. we finally have a religious test to enter the country..

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/26/muhamm...

http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/13/us/citizen-nasa-engineer-detai...

chetanahujaon The threat from within

History has taught "tolerant liberals" to be vigilant of the fascists when they try to take advantage of machinery of a liberal democracy to further their intolerant agendas. We've decided not to fall for it one more time, no matter how much the would-be fascist supporters try to harangue us with that "tolerant liberal" line.

chetanahujaon The threat from within

I'm of course not literally calling it "my" platform. I'm pointing out that the student body and faculty of the university (or the TV show host, or the convention organizer or what have you), they are the owners of the respective platforms. And they get to choose who to allow and who not to allow to attach themselves with their brand name.

In case there are any illusions, the hate-mongering trolls are not there to engage in intellectually vigorous debate. They are there to buy themselves a patina of respectability by attaching themselves to these respectable brand names. These institutions would be fools to allow themselves to be used that way.

chetanahujaon The threat from within

Exactly. They're not on campus (or a CPAC meeting, or a TV show or whatever) for "reasoned debate". They're there to raise their profile and signal to others like them that these ideas are now acceptable to air in respectable forums. It's foolish for any of these organizations to be used in this manner.

chetanahujaon The threat from within

"Seeing someone like Milo get pummeled in a debate does incredible damage to his brand and his ideas."

Internet trolls are not visiting universities to engage in vigorous intellectual debate in good faith. They're on campus to raise their profile and gain a patina of respectability. They are entitled to their free speech. They are not entitled to get access to large platforms to spread their message of hate.

chetanahujaon The threat from within

"What is fundamentally incompatible in a tolerant society, is toleration of intolerance."

This. My love of free speech and a free exchange of ideas is entirely compatible with my refusal to allow my platform to amplify messages of hatred that I find repugnant.

chetanahujaon The threat from within

"Bad ideas fall to reasoned debate"

Clearly not. Haven't we learnt anything from the recent victory of bad, horrible hateful ideas on the platform of media manipulation and louder-than-thou debating techniques?

chetanahujaon The threat from within

"By giving such speakers a forum, they're endorsing that such views are worthy of being heard or debated"

Exactly. Free and open debate of controversial ideas, however heinous, say in a classroom setting is very different from actively providing hate-mongers a prominent forum from which to spread their hate. Former is academic freedom, the latter is a political decision.

chetanahujaon The threat from within

"You automatically lose an argument if you refuse to engage with your detractor."

You just described the battle cry of the eternal troll. Your freedom of speech does not equal me being forced to listen to you.

chetanahujaon The threat from within

"liberal values and ideals are seen as more intellectually correct"

The irony here is of course is that those complaining about not being heard on campuses today are actually the most privileged members of western society who support restrictions on media and suppression of freedoms for marginalized groups. Tolerance as a value can't survive if the tolerant are required to provide a platform to the intolerant.

chetanahujaon The threat from within

I agree with most of the article about academic environments being open to vigorous debate among opposing ideas. But I find this phrase: "diversity of thought" problematic.

Not because I don't actually value diversity in philosophies or modes of thinking, but because the phrase itself has been used recently as a weasel phrase by reactionary forces acting to scale back decades of work to improve actual diversity of backgrounds including race, national origin, genders, sexualities etc. in the workplace and positions of power. I'm not accusing him of using it deliberately in that sense but I think it's important to keep that connotation of this phrase in mind while discussing his talk.

chetanahujaon Meshbird – Distributed private networking

@rickette posted this:

"Just took a quick look at the crypto implementation. It uses AES-256 in CBC mode but..... without an authentication tag (HMAC)."

Any response?

chetanahujaon Posix Has Become Outdated (2016) [pdf]

> The original goal of the POSIX standard was application source code portability. However, modern applications are no longer being written to standardized POSIX interfaces.

This is a weird claim to make. The three OS's that they're talking about (desktop Linux, iOS and Android) all have plenty of popular applications written directly at the Posix API level.

Heck, when we were architecting our mobile-network-enabler stack that had client side and server side components (all in user-space), it was a no-brainer for us to just pick the posix API as our base and we designed and wrote a lot of native level code that "just worked" on all three platforms.

Even if there's any sort of framework layer between the application and the system, the Posix semantics are so deeply embedded in the culture of programming today that frameworks can say things like "this API opens a new file for write" without having to explain what all that means. The very language we use to architect a solution has deep, unspoken assumptions built-in, and it's more or less based on what Posix semantics allow.

chetanahujaon Trump Is Right: Silicon Valley Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants

"user: throw2bit" "created: 2 hours ago"

"You are welcome - An Indian tax payer."

I would have thought about dignifying this childish tantrum with a response if you at least had the decency and guts to write this under a real name.

chetanahujaon Trump Is Right: Silicon Valley Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants

"The Masters in US is gamed too. Many of those students are the ones who could not clear the campus interviews of Infosys, Cognizant or Accenture when they were in the college for Bachelors. So they come to "study" MS in the US so that they can get into the H1B system easily."

I don't mind a bit of cynicism but this is absurd. Why the hell is "study" in scare quotes? It's a pretty standard thing for fresh graduates to better their chances for employment by getting higher degrees.

"As far as I know, the MS hires do not posses any special skills."

Maybe you should keep your speculations to things you do know.

I think you're being making the classic mistake of using your narrow experience range into making far larger proclamations based on speculations and innuendo. As an employer in silicon valley myself, I would definitely look upon a resume from a person with a Master's degree from US more closely than someone coming off of the infosys/wipro train. That is not to say that there's a clear yes or no either way but having an MS from a US university is at least one positive signal among other signals I'd look for in a resumé.

chetanahujaon Not Everyone in Tech Cheers the H-1B Visa Program

Irony of only focusing on tech jobs when talking about H1-B is two-fold:

1) Tech jobs (especially in software fields) are some of the easiest to do remotely. Creating higher barriers to H1-B visas will only create higher incentives to let those same workers work from their home countries instead of bringing them all the way to the US. The unintended side-effect of course is that this is actually cheaper for the employers, siphons spending outside the US economy and to the extent this is believed to be zero-sum market (it's not), you have to believe that this will depress the job market here.

2) Software is not the only field H1-B jobs are used in. There are whole categories of jobs where $130K salary is absurdly high even for top candidates (without any visa restrictions). Case in point, academic researchers and scientists.

chetanahujaon Not Everyone in Tech Cheers the H-1B Visa Program

> Of course, doing this would almost entirely eliminate the economic incentive for companies to bring in foreign workers since they would be free to negotiate better deals once here

This is ignorant ranting at it's worst. Changing companies for H-1B visa holders is one of the easiest operations in otherwise byzantine world of US immigration. The only restrictions are that the new job should be in same or similar area of expertise which is usually not a problem at all (except in case the person is drastically changing career fields) and should pay at least prevalent wages etc. H-1B holders can and do use these opportunities to find better jobs (usually with higher pay) all the time.

chetanahujaon Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastructure

First of all, extent of Snap's dependence on Google Cloud and this extreme volume of spend was never public.

Also, there's a difference between something being public (like press releases) and actively generating buzz where lots of (relevant) people are actively talking about this.

I think if you were in a GCE sales meeting yesterday you'd have noticed a lot of people jumping up and down in joy. They've been playing second fiddle to AWS and in desperate catchup mode. Their next cold call got so much easier. Their next close got so much easier. Screw all that, their inbounds suddenly went through the roof. Lots of smaller startups etc. who would have never thought of Google cloud as an option are now seriously considering it. A lot of people who are already on AWS just signed up for GCE out of curiosity "just to see what the big deal is about". I don't think there's any way to overstate the impact of this news on Google Cloud's future.

chetanahujaon Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastructure

> Of course, maybe they got some killer promotional deal with Google

For sure. How much is this free marketing that Google cloud service is getting worth? I'm pretty sure whatever discounted deal Google gave Snap is more than made up by this free marketing blitz they're getting.

chetanahujaon Snap commits $2B over 5 years for Google Cloud infrastructure

We run our infrastructure on public cloud but almost our entire stack is cloud agnostic (except for a particular big database service we use). So our serving nodes are distributed across many public cloud providers and we can make decisions based on location/cost etc. in different regions of the world.

The rule of thumb I've heard is that you should start looking beyond public cloud once your cloud spend hits ~200K/month. Since at this level, engineering and ops investments you need to make to maintain your own infrastructure start making more sense. I think it's safe to say Snap is beyond that threshold right now.

chetanahujaon Why I don't believe in Uber's Success

> almost immediate payment from their customers Isn't there a gap between customer making the credit card payment and the bank transferring the actual money into Amazon's account?