throwaway6497

Price of this book is steep :( $90+ for new and $70+ for used.

Also, a quick knee-jerk question. How did Cassandra, HBase fail to meet your requirements? I am sure you must have evaluated existing data-stores before you went ahead building your own.

side-question to OP who is probably the blog author: Which software was used to generate the diagrams?

Haven't read the blog post or the paper but SIGMOD is a prestigious conference. Congrats on the great work.

It is really fascinating to see the self-driving car space. I have been assuming that Google is way ahead of everyone else, and that other tech companies literally didn't stand a chance including Apple.

If traditional car companies are not too far behind Google, and are able to confidently compete in this space, then Apple definitely has a chance to compete in this space.

Thanks for pointing me to this. I didn't know they started offering 6 weeks leave regardless of Gender. 6 weeks feels half-hearted though but better than nothing.

You know what I find unbelieveable! In spite of several people calling out that Amazon doesn't officially offer paternity leaves and that it sucks, Amazon leadership is simply doing nothing about it. Google/FB/Linkedin/Netflix/Microsoft have officially announced 3-unlimited month paternity leaves. It appears Amazon simply doesn't care about employees or the optics in this case. How do they officially justify their stand. We don't offer paternity leaves because - ???. WTF. Really

Update: They started offering 6 week paternity leave since Jan 2016. 20+ weeks is what other companies mentioned seem to offer.

For a second, a thought crossed my mind that Amazon is actively trying to change its external perception after the NY times article and is trying to cozy up to developers. I found this on Glassdoor. Apparently, it will take a long time for them to make their culture less toxic.

===From Glassdoor===

Cons

====

The management process is abusive, and I'm currently a manager. I've seen too much "behind the wall" and hate how our individual performers can be treated. You are forced to ride people and stack rank employees...I've been forced to give good employees bad overall ratings because of politics and stack ranking. Advice to Management Don't pretend that the recent NY Times article was all about "isolated incidents". The culture IS abusive and it WILL backfire once stock value starts to drop. I'm an 8 year veteran and I no longer recommend former peers to interview with Amazon.

== [Edit: Formatted to make it clear what was pulled from Glassdoor]

Amazon is turning a new leaf. They stopped publishing to any major conferences after their last significant paper, DynamoDB.

My perception of Amazon is that they take everything from open-source but don't actively give back. Amazon and open-source never went hand-in-hand. Making their deep learning frameworks open-source is cool. Kudos to the team which managed to do this. I am sure internally, it must have been a huge struggle to get the approval from execs.

[Edit: Grammar]

Facebook Live will decimate Periscope. They should have sold when they had a chance. Too little too late.

More like 8-12 years, if you switch a job without getting a I-140 approved and 12+, if you switch jobs and GC process gets reset for each job change.

This comment at best should be neutral. Why the down voting. Just curious.

Greg, I don't know you. It is pretty incredible reading the blog post and what you have signed up to do. Kudos to Sama for the vision, and all the amazing people you were able to get together for the shared mission. Making the org non-profit is the right model for this. It is all the more surprising given that the whole VC model is to make profit. I am curious to see what you guys come up with. All the best.

For 2015/16, new college grads at good companies total comp is in the range $120-180K, and they definitely have access to good social networks within the company and outside. Is there a large group of next generation people I am missing?

I admit this comment might be insensitive and will probably ruffle the feathers of many but I was purely thinking from the point of view of economic impact and who drive(s) the innovation engine here. VCs, People who made it in tech, hungry (for success) people who want to make it in tech, and senior product and engineering people who can build solid products (not charlatans or imposters) have no reason to leave SV. They are all doing well money wise except probably hungry ones who are motivated to make a lot of impact or money or both.

I am interested to hear what other people have to say about this.

Among the people who voted, this is the number for Taxable household income for 2016

More than $150,000 16% Prefer not to respond 11% Rest of the % are all under $150,000.

Good senior engineer/product people make way more than that. I don't think any of those people are leaving. They are the critical-mass who will make/break good technical companies and power the innovation cycle. SV is in no trouble. There is no real scare of brain-drain.

I was wondering who are you and why are you doing this? Are you doing this profit? Doesn't seem like it. You seem to be a great guy! Keep up the good work. World needs more people like you.

Can you add more to this?

I am not a tax expert but I have heard that as long you put the appreciation money back into a house purchase, you can keep all the appreciation upto 500K tax free.

Any machine learning experts here? How is the problem of finding empty slots in your calendar formulated as an ML problem? This is an honest question to learn.

What? Yes, it is underlined in Safari but not in Chrome. I am checking what is different in Chrome. I don't have any fancy plugins/extensions in Chrome which blocks images other than adblock.

Couple of things about the Medium article itself.

It is not obvious that "Reed Albergotti’s recent article." is a link. No anchor tag styling css to know otherwise. On clicking the hidden link I see the following

" This link came from a private email sent to Greg Duffy and has already been used to view the full text of the article.

If you are a subscriber please log in. To create your own account, subscribe or email corporate@theinformation.com.

Subscribe to The Information ... "

It will nice, if we can fix both problems, so your medium article reaches more target audience.

This is awesome! Thank you. This is especially helpful for programmers who are good at other languages and want to get a feel of go quickly over a weekend. Much easier to map the existing mental models built over-time to the new go programming semantics. Humans learn best by example and comparing the new stuff with what we already know.

Glad I am not the only one who feel this way. Some benchmarks between load ptr/store ptr and the read-write lock would be helpful. Also simplified code-blocks for each of the approaches and more details into pro/cons of each approach could have helped for better understanding.

I used to wrongly think you need a PhD to be able to win a Turing. Diffe proved me wrong. He serves as an inspiration to anyone who mentally feels inferior to PhDs when it comes to making significant contributions to the field of Computer Science

This is great! I hope this becomes the new norm for all new startups. If a start-up doesn't want to follow this then it really shows the values founders believe in and the kind of company they want to build.

Is this kind of plan unpopular with VCs; shark and Gordon Gekko ilk?

It doesn't make sense to allow commercial real-estate companies to take advantage of prop-13. I thought, the whole point of Prop-13 was to ensure that old folks don't get thrown out their homes.

I want to learn more about dynamic sharding. Will be great, if people can help me out here. I get the feeling "my googling" skills will fail me.

Also, most people are supporting a mortgage + one/two kids + spouse. It is easy for a person with FU money to just quit the job on a whim, and search for a new job. A majority of software engineers are still scared of being unemployed. Imagine being without a job in Silicon valley for a few months (high mortgage/rent + kids + spouse). Your savings will deplete fast; It is kind of scary and it is the biggest reason why people put up with abuse till they find a way out.

Feel terrible reading this. Is rest of the Alphabet upper management completely oblivious to what is happening inside Nest? Don't they care? Isn't leadership about doing the right thing. If people are getting abused, Alphabet/Google better do something about it. I thought Alphabet took pride in the kind of leadership traits they support and want their leaders to embody. I am pretty sure a ton of current/ex-Googlers will be shell-shocked to hear stories like these. I think Nest employees should simply join core Google teams(search/ads/apps/chrome/new efforts) and put an end to their personal abuse.

Larry and the rest of the leadership should really look into how Nest is run internally and fix things. This cannot be the norm and status-quo. This is anti-thesis to being Googley, and I personally know a ton of current and Ex Googlers who will be ashamed and hurt to hear this kind of abuse at Alphabet/Google. I am sorry you had to endure this. I am happy you are in a much better place. I am happy for your family now.

[1 word edit for grammar]

Are you referring to the DataFlow paper at http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol8/p1792-Akidau.pdf