Google, You Creepy Sonofabitch - <AUTHOR> http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/google-you-creepy-sonofabitch/ <comment><USER2> I'm going to be completely honest here: If these things were behind a configuration option and defaulted to off, I'd have gone into my phone and turned that option on. I _want_ to leave reviews for restaurants as I'm walking out of them - it serves the common good and doing it immediately is better for memory. I _want_ to remember to download offline maps when I'm about to go somewhere where I won't have coverage. My memory is terrible enough that I can't do those things myself. Google obviously can't provide this service out of the goodness of its heart, of _course_ it's going to have self-serving tweaks added on, but I consider those to be easily worth the value I get out of Google Prosthetic Associative Memory.

<comment><USER3> Also, if they were behind a configuration option and defaulted to on, most people would be fine turning it off and forgetting about it.

This seems to be about lack of control. It's good for developers to think carefully before they ship products that do things with no way of being told not to.

EDIT: Welp. Apparently these settings exist.

I don't understand the point of the blog post then. Why is it so upsetting, if you have the ability to turn it off?

<comment><USER4> Maps app -> Settings -> Notifications -> Your Contributions (and uncheck boxes as desired).

The controls exist.

<comment><USER5> But does that mean Google stops collecting the data? Sure, no notifications, but will they still know what restaurant I just walked past?

<comment><USER6> As mentioned several times, disable Location History under Settings -> Google -> Location (on stock Google Androids you find that setting under Settings -> Location as well).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This issue reminds me of a key permission iOS gives control over while Android (even post-Nougat) doesn't:

The distinction between allowing an app to use location _while the app is open_ versus _anytime_.

Android makes no distinction between these two states, which opens up the ability for many apps (not just Google's) to enable automatic stalking mode. Take Yelp, for example. I _do_ want it to be able to access my location so I can easily lookup restaurants nearby. However, on Android, once you give Yelp the location permission, it'll start popping up notifications about things near your current location, which is just creepy. On iOS, you can restrict it to only be able to see your location when using the app, which is what I want for most apps.

<comment><USER8> Yes! And the newest version of iOS grants you the ability to say "while using the app" for any app rather than just the apps where the developer gave the user that option.

<comment><USER9> And if an iOS app does request access to the user's location while in the background, it's required to have a _specific_ explanation of why it needs that:

[https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Ge...](https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/General/Reference/InfoPlistKeyReference/Articles/CocoaKeys.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40009251-SW18)

<comment><USER10> I really wish I didn't dislike apple and hate their UI and design

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Serious question for the HN community - why do you leave your GPS on/activated by default? I have mine disabled unless I specifically need it for something, which is rare. Usually the only time I ever need GPS is for driving instructions. Otherwise, it's off. GPS is also the biggest battery hog on the device. Why would you leave this on? Do you all use it far more frequently or was it something you never thought to shut off? I can't think of one app I use that requires my location other than weather, in which case I just set the location(s) I want and can refresh at any time. But I generally get weather from a saved DuckDuckGo search - "[zipcode] weather" \- stored as a bookmark and problem solved.

On a related note, Google has created a tool that allows you to see all the data they have on you (and delete it if you want). Because of the way I set up everything and my habits, they had virtually nothing on me. The only stuff I think were some chats from years and years ago and a few searches I did while not in incognito mode on my phone. I also don't use any of their apps from their main product suite - no search, email, chat, drive, etc. And I never leave myself logged in to my account on anything. I don't think this reduces my productivity or quality of life at all. In fact, quality of life is almost certainly improved.

<comment><USER12> Good comment. Might be worth mentioning that turning GPS off reduces the accuracy of your location, but does not prevent it from being known: [https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/21/16684818/google- location...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/21/16684818/google-location- tracking-cell-tower-data-android-os-firebase-privacy)

 _GPS is also the biggest battery hog on the device._

I'd be surprised that this is true. I used several battery monitor apps on several phones, and never found this to the case. It's a simple receiver, and doesn't require much power to do so. If you find a correspondence, it may be more likely that the power is actually being used by the apps that are using GPS, rather than the GPS itself: [http://alienmantech.com/blog/android- disable-gps-save-batter...](http://alienmantech.com/blog/android-disable-gps- save-battery-power/)

<comment><USER13> >> _GPS is also the biggest battery hog on the device._

 _Something_ is, but I find it _very_ hard to believe it's the GPS itself. It's, after all, a completely _passive_ system. What eats battery is transmissions and computation; with GPS, the first doesn't happen, and there isn't much of the second either.

I guess what happens is (on some phones; I've kept GPS always active on my Galaxy S4 and S7, and never noticed a difference) having GPS active makes various services run in your system, which may or may not be poorly written / poorly integrated with phone's power management.

<comment><USER14> On modern phones, you are unlikely to observe any power savings by turning off GPS or "location services".

The GPS is only going to use significant battery power when it is acquiring or actively calculating fixes. No device or OS vendor would ship software that burns the GPS at all times--your device's battery wouldn't last more than a few hours.

The grandparent is totally incorrect about the GPS being the biggest battery hog on the device. Not even close, unless you are, 24 hours a day, navigating or running some other application that requires continuous (1 second duty cycle) GPS fixes. Even then, your backlight is likely consuming an order of magnitude more power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The idea that you'd have any location privacy while carrying around a cell phone is absurd. Both iPhone and Android devices record location history, and your network provider always has a rough guess of where you are. It may be annoying that Google is very persistent about trying to build its maps dataset, but the suggestion that it's not happening on other devices is crazy.

<comment><USER16> There's a huge and meaningful distinction about the technical ability to violate your privacy, and actually doing so, and trust (slash non-creepiness) is largely about not doing so when you could. For instance, the fact that my roommate can open my bedroom door at any time does not mean that I have no privacy when making phone calls in my room; it means that I have privacy because I trust my roommate not to do so, except perhaps in an emergency. A roommate who randomly opens my door and comments on my conversations would be a creepy roommate.

iPhone gives you lots of controls around location history, and certainly there is nothing in the iPhone ecosystem where they want you to contribute reviews or human analysis to help them with gathering data. I trust that these controls work. My cell phone provider knows where I am to route calls, but I trust that they aren't also keeping the data for fun / marketing / etc.

The suggestion that it _couldn 't_ happen on other devices is certainly at odds with technical capabilities; the suggestion that it _isn 't_ happening is a different one entirely, and is not crazy.

<comment><USER17> Your cell phone cannot function without actually knowing where you are (to some approximation) at all times. This information is known to the phone company, at the very least. The phone company almost always records and retains that information. Similarly, you cannot communicate to anyone on the internet without using an IP address, which your counterparty must know and nearly always retains.

<comment><USER18> _Your cell phone cannot function without actually knowing where you are (to some approximation) at all times._

That's like saying a transistor radio needs to know where broadcast antennas are, which is obviously absurd.

<comment><USER19> It's a cellular telephone -- they need to know all the cell towers near you and direct your phone between them. It's a rough area but my phone provider definitely knows I'm at work right now.

<comment><USER18> GP said, "cannot function." How did cellphones work before they came with GPS?

<comment><USER16> They registered with the nearest cell towers, and ask them to watch signal strength so they can make handover work. This is coarse location information (since the company that runs the cell towers knows where their own cell towers, and uses your current tower registration to figure out which cell tower to send a call to), and can be made a little more fine-grained if you use signal strength from the various towers and triangulate. This does not involve the Global Positioning System or other satellite-based positioning systems at all.

If it does not do this, it is not a _cellular_ phone. There are other types of portable phones that don't work this way, like cordless landline phones (the base doesn't know where it is, just that it's plugged into a phone jack) or satellite phones. But the "cellular" part refers specifically to dividing up the terrain into cells, finding which cell the phone is in, and assigning it to a tower based on that determination.

(This is all pretty irrelevant to the point I was making above that cellular network operators can easily choose not to use the location information or signal strength information for anything other than routing calls, and that deciding that they can just use the information however they want would be creepy.)

<comment><USER18> And that's fine, but none of this addresses the assertion that cellphones _can 't work_ without GPS tracking.

<comment><USER20> GPS tracking is a complete red herring; you're focusing on the wrong thing. No one ever claimed that GPS was necessary. Here's the statement that was made: "Your cell phone cannot function without actually knowing where you are (to some approximation)".

That "approximation" is: "Which cell towers can hear your phone transmit, and how strong is the signal?" Your cell phone would work just as well as a phone if you disabled the GPS chip, but your location can be estimated by triangulating from signal strength. It's not nearly as precise, or as accurate, as a GPS-provided location would be, of course.

<comment><USER18> _No one ever claimed that GPS was necessary_

The context of this thread is Android and Apple's tracking of location history and I'm just trying to stay on topic. Not without downvotes, natch.

This isn't Reddit, I'm not an idiot, and I know how cellphones work. Try to be more charitable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Two things that happened to me:

A) I walk into a store, get a notification from google photos asking me "I see you're at store X, wouldn't you like to take some pictures?". Possibly to use as part of google maps. Thinking back I think this is when I started de- googlifying my life.

B) I get a notification from google maps asking me "you're travelling to place X soon, wouldn't you like to download an offline map, just in case you don't have connection there?" Google must have learned that because I had the plane ticket on gmail.

<comment><USER22> #1 is so obnoxious. No Google, I won't do free work for you. At least offer me some store credit.

<comment><USER23> Do you pay for their service? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

<comment><USER24> They make money by showing me ads, so yes, I do. Just not in a direct monetary exchange.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Disregarding the privacy issues, I find this to also be insanely annoying. I want notifications to be important. Not a bunch of spam that ultimately equates to advertising.

<comment><USER26> You can turn off these notifications in the Maps app. It's annoying they're on by default though.

<comment><USER27> You shouldn't have to opt out of spam.

<comment><USER28> For most people it's not spam.

<comment><USER27> They're using it as a way of increasing their ad revenue by getting free data from their users. How is that not spam? If I send you unsolicited emails asking you to give me photos of products you use which I'll then sell ads for and keep all the revenue, would that not be spam?

I did not sign up for any product promotion notifications, so if I receive any it's spam.

<comment><USER29> They pay the user for it with increased Google Drive space, a free subscription to the NYT, etc.

<comment><USER30> Only if you sign up for Local Guides.

I did out of curiosity after I answered a few questions, and sincerely regretted it. The notifications and junk e-mail were never-ending until I blocked them all. And my time is not worth that little.

<comment><USER29> You don't have to subscribe to the emails to get the benefits. The notifications are the same as when you're not a local guide. I also signed up to get the benefits.

<comment><USER30> I'm pretty sure you do have to subscribe to the e-mails.

You may not have to _stay_ subscribed, but that's true in a sense for most junk mail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Growing pains on the way to a true digital personal assistant.

The industry has to figure out how to deal with privacy concerns, because a digital assistant which is continuously aware of your location and what you're doing will be tremendously useful. It's a little friend in your pocket that we won't be able to imagine living without.

Traffic jam ahead? Got you covered.

Can't remember someones name? I've got it here.

Need to remember the name of that great you discovered last time you were in this area? Got it here.

Looks like you need an ambulance.. it's on the way.

Privacy issues abound, but possibilities are endless and people _want_ these features. At present many of the benefits from a smart phone that we have become accustomed to are only possible because of data harvesting. Perhaps as hardware continues to evolve, and these features commoditized we can convince organizations that we will actually pay for the services if we can have greater control over our data.

Thanks for sharing your views on what is "creepy". Not everyone agrees (as can be seen from the comments) and I have a feeling that what feels creepy today will seem normal tomorrow, but your concerns are valid.

<comment><USER32> >It's a little friend in your pocket

No, it's not. Google is entirely incentivised to extract the maximum amount of value from those reliant on their services, and the level of dependence is proportional to how much much they can potentially make off you. This is how a company works, and this is fine, but it is very dangerous to imagine that Google has anyone's best-interest at heart except their own.

<comment><USER33> But it is symbiotic in some ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The real question is: is this creepy or ingenious?

The reality is that their products are the best because they are able to crowdsource the masses for practically free.

Google Maps- How do you think they are so good with traffic and or know when a place is busy? [Google admits it tracked user location data even when the setting was turned off]([https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/21/16684818/google- location...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/21/16684818/google-location- tracking-cell-tower-data-android-os-firebase-privacy))

Tensorflow- All those captchas you had to type and click? Yeah they were used to digitize books and build an amazing clean image dataset. [Google Inc. Acquires Carnegie Mellon Spin-off ReCAPTCHA Inc.]([https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/google-inc-acquires-carnegie- mel...](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/google-inc-acquires-carnegie-mellon-spin- recaptcha-inc)) ([https://techcrunch.com/2007/09/16/recaptcha-using- captchas-t...](https://techcrunch.com/2007/09/16/recaptcha-using-captchas-to- digitize-books/))

Some of it may be unethical, because they do not do a great job of explicitly stating what they do with your data, but some of it may be for the greater good.(intentions are not bad.) An example is traffic. I think in this case, I would like them to know so that they can warn/tell others, to save others time.

It is the wild wild west when it comes to data privacy laws in the U.S compared to the E.U, because there are none and (currently) it is easier to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission.

<comment><USER35> reCAPTCHA is a freaking nightmare, it's gotten worse and worse, it often has me go through two or three pages worth of image recognition puzzles before letting me log in. And since it's used on non-Google sites, it's nearly unavoidable.

<comment><USER36> I got one the other day asking me to click on the "crosswalks".

Seriously, Google, amongst the vast trove of information you hold on me/my IP address will be "in Britain", so maybe try writing in British English rather than using a word that 90% of us won't understand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Yet the author attempts to shove google js down our throats.

[https://i.imgur.com/6AJLhnR.png](https://i.imgur.com/6AJLhnR.png)

<comment><USER38> ... while complaining about Google being creepy, nonetheless.

So "Creepy, but not SO creepy that I won't trust them to vend code that I'll direct my readers' user agents to download", then. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I think this is called "shadow work"...Google has turned you into a mechanical turk without pay :)

<comment><USER40> > I think this is called "shadow work"...Google has turned you into a > mechanical turk without pay :)

That's an excellent term!

Also, I can't favorite this comment for some reason. The link is missing.

edit: I guess replying fixed it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> It's always surprising how much comments and postings in these parts are vehemently in opposition to data being usefully incorporated into these apps and services, I remember a recent post about how Google's passive on device music identification worked on the Pixel 2 which turned hostel.

I understand that certain types of people are attracted to certain topics but it's still somewhat jarring when in a technology discussion board there is this amount of anti tech sentiment.

This feature is useful, it puts that data gathered to a good use, and it's upfront about it, if you don't like it just swipe the notification away.

Don't be fooled, the iPhone is gathering the same type of data it just only snitches on non system apps doing so in the background. Not to mention that it looks like they don't put that data to good use which as far as I'm concerned is the greater sin.

<comment><USER32> I think the article primarily addresses the tone-deaf way in which Google addresses the user, not so much the practice of gathering data and providing useful suggestions to the user "like magic", which does indeed have it's benefits.

There's an implied deal that the user will provide their data to Google so they may profit from it, and in return they will provide you with a service free-of-charge. The article, and some anecdotes here in the comments, indicate that Google can be a little needy and tone-deaf in prompting the user to provide them with even MORE data, at times. Instead of passively collecting data, they appear to actively prompt the user to feed their machine, which is very annoying and creepy in the author's opinion.

<comment><USER41> I was responding more to the comments in this thread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I've always found it kind of alarming in Waze that when you stop at an intersection where there's a gas station they prompt you to enter an updated gas price...even when the app presumes you are the driver.

I get that they're trying to get everyone to chip in for the common good but not while I'm literally driving, please.

<comment><USER43> I was using Google Maps the other day through Safari and got a pop up to download the app during the middle of the route and I could barely see the map. I nearly got in an accident trying to dismiss the pop up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Yeah, Google could still be the cool company they were around 2000, if they just were not so greedy about collecting data for their Advertising business...

Another thing is that every time you start using an Android phone, all Google sync services are activated. So you have no chance to disable them until its too late and Google uploaded all your contacts into their cloud. That should be illegal.

<comment><USER38> I'm not sure why people think the data is being collected for advertising, as opposed to, say, improving the ground-truth on the Google Maps dataset.

I've contributed some images to the photo request. They end up appearing in Maps as the picture of the establishment.

<comment><USER44> Yeah, sure the pictures are for maps, but in the end Maps turned into a place where businesses have to be present as it is the de facto location based search engine. At the moment, I am not sure how they are making money with maps, but I find it a little odd that they keep asking to contribute pictures when it clearly shows that they are tracking every movement of you.

So something is wrong there (at the very least that they are tracking us all).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Wow, the author is surprised that when she/he shared her/his location with Google, Google actually got her/his location.

If only Google made it ridiculously easy to disable this. Oh, wait, it does:

[https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3118687?hl=en](https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3118687?hl=en)

<comment><USER46> If you have to stop and think about every bad consequence of any of your actions on your phone, then at some point the phone loses its usefulness, and becomes a nuisance.

The device should think _for_ you, not _against_ you.

<comment><USER45> This isn't even your phone, this is your Google Account. Isn't even limited to Android.

But yes, you should think of the consequences of signing up for a service that clearly states that it records your location history.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> What are these "Google" notifications? Is that a "Google" app generating them? If so, can't it be disabled or uninstalled? I don't have this on my Android phone but I've uninstalled or disabled everything Google related. And if you don't want to be tracked, you can also switch off Location History.

<comment><USER48> If you try to disable many Google-provided apps on Android, you're presented with a scary-looking screen warning you about system instability, and it's legit. If I attempt to disable Chrome on my phone, for instance, it causes every single app on my phone to crash upon any interaction whatsoever, including third-party apps like Signal. Funny how Chrome is more inseparable from Android than Internet Explorer was from Windows.

<comment><USER49> I have Google Chrome turned off, and it works fine. I have Fennec, loaded via F-Droid as my browser. You have to have some browser, but it doesn't have to be Google Chrome.

One thing that seems to help is that, when I get a new phone, I turn all this stuff off before connecting to anything or even putting in a SIM card. So Google never gets a chance to control the phone's connections to the outside world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Hm. I find google map reviews fairly useful, and so don't mind contributing. I don't know why my phone figuring out if I'm near a restaurant I would like is creepy?

It's nowhere near as creepy as find my device, which everyone seems OK with.

<comment><USER50> You're probably not thinking adversarially. Most of us aren't. Most of us love all the features of technology.

However, there are bad apples in society, seeking shortcuts through taking from others and harming them. And there are guardians in society, constantly looking for vectors that a baddie can cause harm to protect them.

One emerging vector is the combination of market data to target individuals for threat and harm. E.g. you piss someone or a group off, whether by insulting them, simply the act of driving or eating meat, supporting a political party they don't, etc. Then, that person or group purchases batches of insufficiently anonymized marketing data, combines them to narrow down to your profile and uses it to hunt you down.

E.g. restaurants. Someone could buy location, restaurant and driving data, filter by several clues they discover about you, then stake out locations where you'll be.

Now that I've explored the personal-revenge factor, consider a different type of threat: economic survival. An adversarial corporation could use details about your psychology gleaned from timing information, nutrition profile, age, DNA/race, internet comments to influence you and larger groups in unethical ways, such as encouraging you to live unhealthy lifestyles, presenting carefully selected news items - not to harm you necessarily, but to perpetuate their own gain at your cost.

And this doesn't even have to happen to you personally. It can happen to targeted groups estimated to have vulnerabilities in any domain: middle-class, new home-owners, teen-agers. And the baddies' efforts all increase in efficacy the more information we leak.

So stop giving away all your information!

<comment><USER38> If one doesn't trust Google as a data steward, I can totally see one being deeply concerned about these data-request notifications and about the system knowing their geolocation.

... but I can't follow why one would then continue to use Google Maps.

... or a phone running an OS that Google writes and maintains.

... or, in the case of this particular blog-post, [https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/webfont/1.6.26/webfont...](https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/webfont/1.6.26/webfont.js)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Hasn't Google been telling everyone for years that they want users to have information at their fingertips? They've built their platform around this. Google wants to do things like set a calendar reminder when it sees that you got emailed a receipt for plane tickets. When they see you just ate a restaurant they want to suggests things to do after (movie, play, concert, etc). They've been telling everyone this is what they want to do.

So, if someone is using Google products, why are they freaked out about this?

</comment><comment><USER52> The way I see it is Google is offering a free and optional yet pre-installed service, namely Google maps, and is sometimes asking its users to contribute to its POI dataset. It'll be both good for Google and its users if the information about a restaurant is accurate or the gas prices for a gas station is up to date. The notifications could be sent way too often and I get that would be annoying but the whole concept isn't that bad.

<comment><USER53> This is a notification problem, not a privacy one. These people are just annoyed that the app is sending them too many notification, and are outraged at an entirely different thing. Google Maps' whole job is to know your location; it having the location data is as much of a privacy violating as a hospital having your heart rate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> It's time again to advertise microG - free software reimplementation of Google Play Services which allows one to somehow control their privacy without abstaining from most of the Android software out there that require Play Services. There are even constantly updated images of a preconfigured LineageOS fork - [https://lineage.microg.org/](https://lineage.microg.org/)

</comment><comment><USER55> Google's creepy, but it seems the author should be savvy enough to know that Facebook does a lot more than what is implied here. Facebook goes after you all over the internet whether you have a Facebook account or not and won't let you delete the dossier they have on you. I don't see much of an ethical difference between the two companies; they are full of people chasing an ideal of success that is opposed to mine.

</comment><comment><USER56> This creep factor was _the main reason_ why I got another IPhone. As a developer I'd much prefer an Android (hating the Apple Store but thats another story), however as a _user_ Android was a total no-go.

<comment><USER56> I was even daring enough to install the superb Google keyboard on the iPhone but only because they explicitly repeatedly say that they do not send my data home. if they ever do Google is dead!

Speaking of: Why does Siri (mother of all bitches) thinks she needs my GPS in order to tell me the weather??

<comment><USER57> Otherwise how the hell does Siri find out your accurate location to tell you weather. your IP address?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> People in this thread are clutching their pearls about invasion of privacy and are going on about how they won't do any free work for Google yet hardly any of them has voluntarily given a dime to Google in return of the tons of services they get from it.

Where do you think all the reviews come from? Who puts information about traffic cops on Waze? From a million monkeys smashing keyboards?

<comment><USER59> A paying Google customer here. The fact that I'm giving them quite more than a dime doesn't make me exempt from stalking. What's your point?

<comment><USER58> Are you paying for the reviews?

<comment><USER59> No, and I never pay attention to those reviews. They typically don't match the actual experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Ah, finally, their G+ efforts finally bore fruit and shows their hand.

G+ has been the impetus behind all of this and has led Google away from their core search and related tech and more into weaving itself into our daily lives, mercilessly.

I love most of Goog, but G+ has diverted them into this social mess. It's something I wish they'd left well enough alone.

</comment><comment><USER16> The primary reason I have an iPhone is that I want to reach friends who use Google Hangouts without having literally my entire device be logged in as my Google account.

I used to solve this by having an Android with a dedicated account, and logging the Hangouts app into my normal Google account, but that stopped working a couple of Android versions ago.

<comment><USER6> And now you have a full device logged into an iCloud account. Which Apple is pushing even more obnoxiously (and keeps pestering me about it on both iPad and Mac after each update). What did you gain?

<comment><USER16> I have all my iCloud sync options off except for Find My iPhone, which isn't something I can do with Google - it'll automatically sign me into everything. And the sync options stay off, even though yes, they do pester me to turn more things on. (Meanwhile, I found this morning that my Chromebook, which I have specifically for high-security things like my domain name registrar and privileged SSH keys, has gone ahead and turned on sync for everything again, despite having turned it off multiple times in the past.)

Also, admittedly, part of the benefit here is simply that I don't use Apple services (e.g., I don't use Facetime), I use Google services. I'd get the same benefit if I were using any non-Google phone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> It's not so much the privacy that bugs be about this -- its the _cognitive intrusion_ ; my phone vibrating for my attention only to look at it and see this bullshit. Ick.

<comment><USER62> Agree, this is the biggest issue. I get slightly annoyed by this but what's worse is for old and non tech people. Has anyone at google studied for even 2 minutes how non tech people use a phone? My grandma panics every time there is a notification that is not a SMS or a phone call. I opened her phone and there was som many unread crap-notifications that you couldn't even find the ones that were from her real friends. I get questions like how can i see if i have any unread text messages, which is an instant proof that the UI is wrong.

Also the phrasing of these notifications make you think they were designed by someone from Ryanair. "Add your photo to google maps" the instant you take a photo could easily be confused with "Save this photo" for someone who doesn't understand tech.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I guess I don't see these things on my phone because I'm cheap and rarely ever have data on.

But if I did, I wouldn't be shocked that a device with gps and internet access knows where I am and a company that makes money by people using it because it is useful would want to make their product more useful.

</comment><comment><USER36> > We need some human help

So pay me.

<comment><USER38> That'd be "Google Opinion Rewards" ([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.paidtasks)), and it does periodically throw surveys out about your travel history.

<comment><USER34> Do they actually pay users a fair wage for their time?

<comment><USER64> I get about 50c of credit for each survey which takes about 15s, so that comes out to $2/min or $120/hr which seems pretty fair. Of course, you can't actually do hours of these things.

<comment><USER10> It's more like 0-12 cents per survey, and they vary from absolutely odd ("Have you participated in a dance contest in the last month") to awful (most surveys ask you to confirm where you went yesterday)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> The obvious countermeasure seems to be to feed them bullshit data (wrong reviews, pictures from elsewhere and what-not), but for some curious reason this feels antisocial against other Google users in a way that outweighs the benefits of sabotaging their data collection. Attacking Google almost has something of being an /r/atheism style gadfly.

(Well, there's also the problem that there is no telling how they would react to an account getting flagged for nonsense submissions. Losing access to my gmail would be a personal catastrophe well in excess of losing a full wallet or two.)

</comment><comment><USER66> Well.. maybe an Android installation _without_ google (and samsung bloatware) is something for you :)

[https://eelo.io/](https://eelo.io/)

</comment><comment><USER67> You could turn off location tracking on your phone. Yes, it makes life a bit more inconvenient, but it lowers the creep factor significantly.

</comment><comment><USER68> How is this functionality different than an app asking you to review it after using it? The app "knows" your using it and prompts you to contribute to crowd sourced app reviews in the App Store. Apple likely knows what apps you have run unless you disable all diagnostics and lots of apps phone home.

In this case, geo fencing is prompting you to review a location instead of an app.

I think people rely on a lot more crowdsourced information, much of it from nagging or campaigning, than they realize and would be sad if it didn't exist. Waze has saved my bacon many times. Google Maps's knowledge of near real time bussiness congestion or closures has stopped me from wasting an hour driving somewhere only to find out it's closed or all full.

On the health front we could probably save millions of lives from disease if more anonymized health records were available to researchers for application of machine learning to medical histories or prediction of complications. So much good could be done in the world.

<comment><USER69> I've made it a policy that if an app pops up unsolicited modals to badger me about rating it, it automatically gets a 0-start review. That pattern needs to die in a fire.

<comment><USER70> It was already replaced by other pattern - it first asks for meaningless rating in app and only if user selects 5 stars he is redirected to AppStore .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> It's interesting how we use individual-inspired predicates when refering to the complex identity "Google" in this thread — "Google wants ..." "Google should ..." —- would Google get mad at you and stop talking to you when you do something bad? I guess it would.

Who is Google? The alignment of the agency, benefit, desires, ... seems to lie among various "actual" humans, it's a distributed system across human identities much like its actual software is distributed across servers.

I keep wondering whether interacting with it while assuming it to be motivated in similar ways that individuals would be is a sensible approach in general, and how we have constructed it to be so given our incentive and preference systems (buying products, paying for services, etc.) It's very much a mirror of the human self: self centered, attached to its ego.

</comment><comment><USER72> I am here pleading, begging Google to give me (and everyone else) an option to set up a free of cost, always on VPN something like {this} but which you can enable on any network all the time.

I don't mind Google having access to all my data as long as they are dominant. The problem in my opinion is the push back they are getting from advertising agencies (wsj is only a hired gun afaict)... I'm guessing one London based plastic company in particular is waging a war on Google. If I were Google, I would not share I formation about my property. It just doesn't make sense to share this information with your customers.

{This} [https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/6327199?visit_id=1-6...](https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/6327199?visit_id=1-636518928482913910-3054715947&p=wifi_assistant&rd=1)

<comment><USER73> Tend to agree. Is the data saving option with Chrome somewhat doing this?

I am in the US and our cable providers are now allowed to sell our Internet data on sites we visit. We use Google DNS instead of ISP because of this and hate how ISP injects into DNS with an ad and Google does not do this. Which they could and make a ton of money.

But our ISP still has routing data in where we visit. I would like my data to just be one place if possible and trust Google to be that place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Not involved in the project but certainly support the premise:

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/290746744/eelo-a- mobile...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/290746744/eelo-a-mobile-os- and-web-services-in-the-public-in)

</comment><comment><USER75> Given the message in the article, I find it interesting they use Google Analytics on their site still.

</comment><comment><USER76> Clicked expecting some bug, just found a person who doesn't know how to turn location off. Meh.

</comment><comment><USER77> Google are a deeply, deeply unethical company and all of their employees are complicit.

On a more practical note, I live in apartment above a restaurant. My phone now asks me to review this restaurant every time I come home and wants me to post photos I take in my apartment to the restaurant's map page.

Now that OSM data is as good as Google and Maps.Me is a good enough client, my next phone will be completely de-Googled.

<comment><USER78> Why did you purchase a phone with an OS provided by what you believe to be a deeply unethical company?

<comment><USER46> Lack of affordable options?

My banking app supports only two platforms, one of which is too expensive, and the other is made by Google.

<comment><USER40> Also Android is a more open platform. I can't reasonably side-load personal apps in iOS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Just turn off location services on the phone unless you really need them.

<comment><USER80> Turn it off in your Google account, not your phone (unless that's what you meant).

I turned it off years ago and when I read an article that says "click on this link to see how google tracks you!" I see nothing.

<comment><USER79> Turning off location history in your account settings is also important, but turning off location services on your phone will prevent the messages from appearing (since Google will, in theory, not have your location readily available).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> When you realize you are a battery in the Matrix... and then you realize it is a symbiotic relationship.

</comment><comment><USER82> His complaint seems to be directed more to the interface than the infrastructure. IIRC you have to do a fair bit of signing up for things to get these creepy messages. My question would be, if the invasive interruptions sounded less creepy would he still have a problem with them?

</comment><comment><USER83> There are things you can do to help fight this. Donate some time or money to the Ubuntu Phone project. It isn't maintained by canonical anymore, but it is far from dead. More choices and options are what we need now. It is insane that there are basically two OS you can do.

<comment><USER35> Purism's Librem 5 would be a better effort at this point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> See also - Quayside - Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs redevelopment effort: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16181331](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16181331)

</comment><comment><USER85> Concur completely. The practical alternative - an iPhone, is worse in other ways. In the history of general purpose computing, never ever has a company sold hardware to the customer transferring ownership rights to the customer, and then locked the device up to apps approved by the hardware manufacturer, going as far as taking a 30% cut. How this is flying past regulators is anyone's guess, and as more time progresses, people will begin to think that running apps on hardware they own is a privilege, not a right. Ludicrous!!

So, the choice between an ever spying phone and one that you cannot run/publish apps of your choosing is a hard one. However, with the right configuration, Android can be made a lot less intrusive, retaining the ability to run the apps of your choosing

<comment><USER86> Not a hard decision at all. There are very few apps you cannot already purchase for the iPhone or cannot write yourself with a free developer profile.

<comment><USER85> "cannot write yourself with a free developer profile" \--> THIS is complete disconnect with the potential end user, unless the app is for iPhone developers.

The world is comprised of 99.9999999999999999999% non iOS developers

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> It's your choice. If you don't like the "surveillance capitalism" of Google, don't get their devices, fix your DNS etc. to not be able to contact them, etc.

</comment><comment><USER88> i don't mind google's data collection. the ergonomics of user-interaction can be a bit annoying.

that said, assuming we're safe and private because we turn stuff off, or opt out of things, just seems silly. the nsa (or whichever agency) just invokes 'something something national security' and they can track you just the same, and google (or your carrier, or various other intermediaries) can't even tell you about it.

</comment><comment><USER89> Use good Android forks like CopperheadOS sans Gapps.

</comment><comment> GCU-Empiricist I generally prefer android to iOS because it's easier to work with as a dev, but this has been making me think about converting back.

<comment><USER90> I haven't owned an iPhone in over 5 years, and I feel the same way. No company should be romanticized, and I'm sure Apple's (very public) decision to take user privacy seriously can be viewed cynically - but at the end of the day that's the kind of stuff I care about as a consumer, and will choose my next phone accordingly.

<comment><USER91> As an N.B. - developing and using for iPhone/iPad, hell even Apple TV has become so much nicer in the past 5 years. I can't remember the last time I've used DFU mode. Signing Certs are still annoying in XCode, but day-to-day it's a lot better than what it once was.

<comment> GCU-Empiricist Do you still need an up to date mac to do it (even a hackentosh) or can you develop from outside their environment?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash Unable to connect to the server (and got a 500 error minutes ago) as of 12:17PM EST. Anybody else seeing this?

Edit: Now it's working. 12:20

<comment><USER38> It's probably getting bandwidth-hammered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> Off topic, but scroll to the very bottom of the linked page and mouseover all of the little circles.

I like that. That's slick.

</comment><comment><USER93> I just hate these non-descriptive titles, regardless of the content. But maybe that's just me.

</comment><comment><USER94> at least for now these notifications can be disabled

</comment><comment><USER95> Noodlehead is pretty good though, right?

</comment><comment><USER96> I owned Google Pixel last year. I found the constant pestering from Google Maps to upload more photos very annoying. I returned after a while.

I sent the following issues to Google customer service and returned the device. I am putting that here with a sense of respect to both Google and hn community. Some of it is dated.

I am very unhappy with the Pixel purchase. It is not worth the price. I am an iPhone user who switched to Pixel after seeing the Pixel event. I am also a Google fan but I found the experience with Pixel jarring. Below is my experience so far. I am going to return the Pixel and go back to my old iPhone 5s.

1\. My experience with music on Android I did not like Google Play Music app because the free version meant having to put up with ads. Also I did not like to use data to play the songs I already owned. So I downloaded the songs on Google Play Music. But I did not like the Google Play Music app interface. So I read reviews of the best music player and bought Neutron and Poweramp. But both music apps were not able to use the music which Google Play Music downloaded. So I spent an hour to find ways to move music from my pc to Pixel and did it with windows media player. Now I started using Neutron and I chose the automatic option to find music and it started played Podcast files which is not what I expected (I had bought Pocket cast and downloaded some podcasts earlier). Then I used Poweramp. But what I noticed was a bug in Android OS. When I connected the 3.5 mm audio jack and disconnected a call I was on, both Neutron and Poweramp started playing! Shouldn't Android OS allow only one player to play music. Isn't that the most basic test case! So playing music on Android was a bad experience. When I close the app the music was still playing. The app was sitting in the notification area and still running. I wanted to stop playing music when I closed the app. Why doesn't Google make a decent default music player for Android? And why does the music start playing when I connect the 3.5 mm cable. I may not want to hear music but may want to listen to a podcast. The music experience has been horrible on the Pixel.

2\. Using Google Assistant to make a conference call I pressed and held the middle button and said "call Jack". It brought up a list of numbers and chose one and the call failed. This is a conference call number. The contacts has a comma in between two numbers. Comma is used for a pause. Google Assistant dropped the comma and dialed the number and the call failed. Because of this bug in Google Assistant I can't use it to make a call to a conference all.

3\. Podcasts I bought Pocket Cast but on the locked screen I don't see the 10 second rewind and forward buttons. I only see the back and next buttons. Whey can't I see the 10 second rewind and forward buttons? Why do I have to unlock the phone to access those two buttons? It is irritating to hear 30 minutes of the podcast only to press the back button and be put in the beginning of the podcast.

4\. iTablaPro Android does not have a decent alternative to iOS' iTablePro app. The swar systems app is not that good. For certain user compaints on the Google Play store, the developer asks the customer to go to a certain folder and delete files. Why expose a customer to such intricate technical issues. Also there are certain issues that happen on other models that is related to timing. Generally I notice that the quality of apps is not good compared to iOS.

5\. The back button Using the back button is confusing. Sometimes instead of taking me to the previous screen, the app takes me to the home screen. Why?

6\. No headphones I paid $750. So why doesn't Pixel come with a headset?

7\. Video editing I found it hard to trim and cut videos. I did not find a default android app to edit and trim videos.

8\. Music snycing If I delete a song how do it sync it so that it deletes on my pc as well? Why isn't Google making a good music sync program.

9\. Local search results on the phone does not include the music files on the phone. Why?

10\. When I turn on my Bluetooth headset the music plays on it instead of the 3.5 mm jack. I don't see any easy way to choose 3.5 mm jack for songs and take calls using my bluetooth headset.

In all I am not happy with the price I paid for Pixel and the Android os and apps seem to work poorly. Android is poorly designed without paying care to the needs of the customer. I am deeply dissatisfied. It hurts me to say it because I am a big fan of Google as a company and like many of its services.

</comment><comment><USER97> OP is freaked that the data that was shared with Google is used to help Google get a bigger dataset...

Get a grip.

Edit: Downvotes now rolling in. I'd love to know why. Is this a bug? Is Google doing something wrong? Or did OP hand over the data and not bother to go through the settings to turn off things they didn't like .

<comment><USER98> > Or did OP hand over the data and not bother to go through the settings to > turn off things they didn't like

OP is making the case that they shouldn't have to. That a personal device they purchased outright should be secure by default.

<comment><USER97> It's secure. The data is only going to Google. OP agreed to that when he logged into the device with their Google account not when they bought the device.

Also: security != privacy

<comment><USER22> Yeah I think the word they meant to use was "private".

Having a user check a box to agree to this along with a million other things is definitely legal (which I guess is your point?), but it's less than ideal for users.

Consumers buy a phone with the anticipation of being able to watch Netflix and Hulu and send text messages (insert other use cases here), then pay $600 for it, then they are stopped with a "oh by the way if you want all of these apps you need to tell us where you are all the time". It's legally fine but that doesn't make it non-evil.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> I can only assume this guy wears The Breeches Of Trust

</comment><comment><USER100> Oh man this is what I hate the most about my Pixel. How can I turn it off?

<comment><USER101> Press and hold on the notification itself. Alternatively, press and hold on the notification and start to slide left/right (still holding) to reveal a gears icon. It should be a shortcut that takes you to the notification settings for that app with the option to toggle them on/off.

<comment><USER100> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER102> Site is down, as ironic as it might sound, here is the Google Cache of it:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bradfro...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bradfrost.com/blog/post/google- you-creepy-sonofabitch/)

</comment><comment><USER103> It feels like Google has a team dedicated to finding new and idiotic ways to make Android more annoying.

The most recent annoyance I experienced was the "Welcome to [State]" announcement every time you're using Google Maps navigation and you cross a state line. Really, Google? You had to interrupt my music for that?

<comment><USER104> I can't imagine you're crossing multiple state lines in a short enough time that this is any more annoying than google maps navigation instructions.

Things like that aren't universally liked or dis-liked, but I can see that for you it was way more annoying than it is for me.

Have you checked if you can turn it off?

<comment><USER103> > I can't imagine

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tri- state_area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tri-state_area)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_State_Area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_State_Area)

I searched and found no way to disable it at the time. I don't re-do that search on a regular basis so I can't say if that's changed since then.

And no single annoyance is a huge issue, but when you view this in the larger context of Android's cacophony of distracting annoyances it starts to become mildly infuriating. Everything you do, Android seems to have some way of pestering you about it. Your phone starts to feel like a telemarketer in your pocket.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to present compensation as priority in interviews? - <AUTHOR> I would like to avoid discussion of passions and motivations. I am seeking top of market compensation for top of market engineering talent, but don't want to be overly blunt in presenting this. I do want to filter out interviewers who are looking to use desirability of position as leverage for lower compensation. My ideal position is a company that is having trouble finding talent for clear business needs and will pay accordingly, but I'm unsure of how to word this on initial phone screens. <comment><USER2> One thing I look for is how long the position has been open. My gut tells me if the position has been open for many months that means that they aren't willing to pay market.

As Joel Spolsky said: _" Now, let's review some microeconomics. In a free market, it is almost axiomatic that the market always clears. That's a technical term that means that when somebody tries to sell something, if they are willing to accept the market price, they will be able to sell it, and when somebody wants to buy something, if they are willing to pay the market price, they will be able to buy it. It's just a matter of both sides accepting the market price."_

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/06/15/whaddaya-mean- you-...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/06/15/whaddaya-mean-you-cant- find-programmers/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Χαίρετε! Try this word-track...

'Thrilled we could make this call happen. I've read the position summary, did some research on your company. I'm very interested. However, I want to respect your time. Before we dive too deep, would you be able to share the compensation band for this role?'

A seasoned interviewer isn't solely looking for low-priced candidates. Several criteria go into determining a good match...(skills, experience, & cultural fit). High price point candidates often win by demonstrating value-- essentially, CAN YOU do the job? WILL you do the job? and Can they LIVE with you?

</comment><comment><USER4> There's a great podcast episode about salary negotiation for engineers from HN's own. Basically tie your value to the value of the business problems you solve.

[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2016/06/03/kalzumeus-podcast- episod...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2016/06/03/kalzumeus-podcast- episode-12-salary-negotiation-with-josh-doody/)

</comment><comment><USER5> You might want to aim at industries that are seen as less desirable or trendy but have real technical problems that you'd be good at solving. It's even better if you are directly tied to a revenue generation process. Hedge funds come immediately to mind.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's called contracting.</comment>


Extensive vs. Intensive Learning - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nickwinter.net/extensive-vs-intensive-learning <comment><USER2> It's not clear to me that the generalization beyond languages is valid. In extensive reading the unknown words are connected to more known words; that seems to me likely the largest factor in why it works better. But the other domains like math problems don't have this context effect, because the problems are independent. Why would it still work?</comment>


SimCity Update 2 - <AUTHOR> http://www.simcity.com/en_US/blog/article/simcity-update-2 Was that the real cause, I wonder what the upgrade untails (hw or sw) <comment><USER2> The talk of changing hardware configurations of the servers leads me to believe that the beta was either poorly designed or someone didn't like the result and for some reason decided to push forward with the launch without addressing the problems first.

<comment><USER3> If I had to guess, the network communication design failed when presented with larger then expected number of connections, which showed poor testing being that EA has worked with online games before. There could also be higher then anticipated data errors (corruption from the network stack, cpu errors, memory errors) from the clients not in the beta that are holding memory on the server longer then expected in comparison to the beta.

Beta's don't always give the best information since the participants are self selecting (selection bias).

And making what is historically a single player game dependent on network connectivity for no apparent gain to the user is a design failure.</comment></comment>


GitHub Stats by Programming Language - <AUTHOR> http://www.r-chart.com/2010/08/github-stats-on-programming-languages.html

<comment><USER2> GitHub classifies LOTS of projects as JavaScript when they are actually more correctly categorized as C#, Ruby, or another language. My guess is that this occurs because smaller web projects that include a number of JavaScript libraries end up having more JS than their other language. (even though the librares are just being used and not the focus of the project)

<comment><USER3> Probably because most projects are JavaScript and people don't want to admit it :)

We have an extensive list of library-type files and paths that we ignore.

<comment><USER2> Very cool, I am glad to hear you are filtering. It was still pretty easy to find a rails app categorized as javascript though: <http://github.com/flyerhzm/rails-bestpractices.com>

What would trigger that to be JS? CKEditor maybe not on the list of excluded library files?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The "striking" drop-off for Perl can be explained by the gitpan: <http://github.com/gitpan>

There are also similar statistics skewing users, like the emacsmirror: <http://github.com/emacsmirror>

It'd be nice if GitHub had a way to exclude such users from their statistics.

<comment><USER5> I was told that Gitpan is not included in the stats.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've long kept an eye on github as a potential source for <http://langpop.com> stats, but it still seems way too tilted towards languages that, by all other measures, are not that popular.

(And that's no knock on Ruby - lanpgop.com is built with Ruby!)

<comment><USER7> Yeah the Rails crowd are nuts about github, whereas pythonistas for example also have bitbucket.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> At least you make the top 10.

Somehow Common and Emacs Lisp as well as VB make the list without any users or repositories...

<comment><USER8> Which is strange since I've got at least 3 Common Lisp repositories on GitHub.

But it's late and I'm sleepy so maybe I didn't understand the table.

<comment><USER9> No, it's gotta be a bug; there are hundreds of elisp repos, and it shows zero.

<comment><USER5> Indeed. My emacs projects have more watchers (and forks) than any of my other projects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There are some differences:

<http://github.com/languages>

<comment><USER3> Can't stress this enough.

The languages we use here is for the _code_ in GitHub. So it's a lot more robust than simply counting the dominating language of a repository. For example if there were only two repositories on GitHub, both were classified "Ruby" but they were 51% ruby / 49% js — we'd report ruby as 51%, while his method would report 100%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm somewhat surprised to see more Perl repos than Python repos represented. Dead language, indeed.

<comment><USER12> That's because <http://github.com/gitpan> hosts 21,000 mirrored repositories.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Although I understand it will be harder to get, it'd be interesting to see these stats "per commit" instead of "per repository."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone know what a "user" associated with a programming language represents? Is it an owner of a project, a contributor, a follower, etc?

<comment><USER14> Clarifying that will help make mores sense out of the stats. The proportion of users to projects could be an indicator of productivity. Or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Representing C# developers who use Github. We're a super-minority.

<comment><USER16> most just use codeplex I'm guessing?

<comment><USER17> You're correct - there are a few popular OSS .NET libraries on GitHub (RestSharp immediately comes to mind) but the vast majority of .NET projects live on CodePlex.</comment></comment></comment>


Five Programming Languages That Are Probably Doomed - <AUTHOR> https://insights.dice.com/2019/07/29/5-programming-languages-probably-doomed/ <comment><USER2> It's a generational thing as well. New programmers adopt whatever is fashionable when they start out and move on from there. Ten years ago that would be Ruby and quite a few Ruby developers ended up in e.g. the Elixir and Rust communities. Five years ago that would have been Javascript. Today that would be Typescript and lots of Javascript developers would have progressed to that naturally (as well as Go, Rust, and a few other languages).

This is significant because the number of programmers world wide doubles every five years ([https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle- bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html](https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle- bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html)). So whomever was doing perl 20-25 years ago is outnumbered 16-32 x by everyone else in the business before you even consider the vast numbers of former perl developers that threw in the towel a long time ago. This means most new projects will bias to whatever skills are available cheaply (i.e. whatever is popular) and many of the relatively few older developers end up adapting to that.

I actually know a couple of companies with some active perl code bases. Wouldn't touch it myself since I was an early Java adopter (now using Kotlin) but they seem to manage. Though I imagine finding more developers is going to be tough. Languages never die but they do tend to become shadows of their former glory. I don't think anyone would suggest using Cobol for a new project at this point in time. It's been considered a legacy language for as long as I've been programming (since the late eighties). It's dead as door nail; never coming back. But you can still make good money maintaining code written nearly half a century ago.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would bet all five languages are still in common use in ten years. The language most likely to fade away though might be Objective C since Apple really is pushing Swift and new frameworks built with Swift.

<comment><USER4> Many cross platform native apps are built in C++. Until Swift does C++ interop well, it is unlikely they will be re-written in Swift. Facebook uses Objective C++ - you can mix Objective C and C++ in the same source and use C++ containers/STL on objective-C objects, etc. This is a _massive_ convenience.

<comment><USER5> Yet only Apple old timer devs have the Objective-C++ documentation lying around, since Apple has removed all ways to access it since they purged old docs.

However one thing is true actually, C++ has a growing role in Apple platforms, given IO Kit, DriverKit and Metal Shaders.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> R is going away??!?!? The tidyverse, Rstudio, and modern ecosystems like bioconductor have led to a huge boom in the use of R in life sciences, to the point that I teach more Python than R. I reckon R is now the language of choice if you are starting out in the life sciences/biology. RLadies chapters are sprouting up like nobody's business all over the world!

And they don't even know about the big projects that connect R and Python, like Rstudio's reticulate.

</comment><comment><USER7> Their take on Haskell reminds me of "Lisp doesn't look any deader than usual to me." I'm a little surprised PureScript didn't come up at all; that has intriguing potential to interop with Javascript and now also Go.</comment>


Software is even harder than you think - <AUTHOR> http://ekabanov.tumblr.com/post/26086384093/software-is-even-harder-than-you-think

<comment><USER2> I pretty much agree with the article; that's why I'm so depressed when I see a piecework software site advertise a job to replicate something like Facebook (only better) for $1500.

</comment><comment><USER3> tldr: Shit's hard, need intuitive tools.</comment>


RIP Andre Hedrick: The engineer who kept the PC open - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/26/andre_hedrick/

<comment><USER2> I interacted with Andre on and off for years when running my first company. The company built hardware for web caching, which is a disk-limited task, so we were constantly on the edge of low-cost disk technology (we also built big SCSI boxes, but the low-end ATA boxes were much more popular), so we tickled lots of bugs in the ATA drivers, and shipped out lots of boxes running on his pre-release ATA drivers. It was always, always, always, a pleasure to work with him. Not because he was nice (though he was always more than civil to me, perhaps because my issue reports were concise and complete and reproduce- able), though he was nicer than some of the other folks we were working with (Han Reiser was perhaps the most cantankerous, aside from Linus). But, the important thing was that he was impressively competent. I'd send him a kernel oops and he'd fix it by the next day, sometimes after a couple of back-and- forth communications or having him login to a box where he could replicate it, usually along with an amusing explanation of why the hardware implementation was broken. I think it would be difficult to overstate how important he was during those important growth years for Linux; without reliable and fast hard disk drivers, a system is crippled, and he single-handedly built a significant portion of the ATA drivers during that period.

I never met him in person or knew him on a real personal level, but I considered him a great ally of the things I care most about (software freedom and reliable software, in particular). I hate to see him go, and I'm sorry his family has to go through this. I know that he inspired many developers to stand up for software freedom as well as technically sound implementations, not because he preached about it but because he lived it, every day.

</comment><comment><USER3> All I can think about is his four young children. The man took his own life, and that's that. But his kid didn't do anything to have deserved a childhood knowing their father committed suicide. Some of the kids may even blame themselves for a big chunk of their lives for what happened.

I wish he could have found a way and the courage to live on -- for the sake of his children.

A man having committed suicide is sad. But four children growing up without their father is a real tragedy.

<comment><USER4> I know this sounds harsh, but from my own experience with friends and family (2 family members, 6 friends gone) committing suicide this was MANY years in the making; far before he had kids. That makes it a real shame; like many (most!) people, he shouldn't have had kids in the first place. I feel very sorry for them and his wife, this shouldn't have happened. And most likely could've been prevented. Especially with the kids in mind, this is a tough one.

Edit: changed wording out of respect

<comment><USER5> When someone dies in circumstances like this the people near to them are going to be very traumatised. Out of respect for them, you should keep your opinions to yourself. Using words like "unforgivable", "coward", and "duty" in the context of someone you appear not to have known is inappropriate and offensive.

<comment><USER4> That's your opinion. I don't think other people who are contemplating the same thing are helped by me (or anyone else) keeping things to myself.

Edit: changed my wording. I'm Dutch, we don't beat around the bush, but you have a point, I can say it differently. I will use those words for the people I did know. I do think that people should talk more; it is just strange how this happens if you actually HAVE people who care about you around you.

<comment><USER6> I don't think other people in similar situations are helped by you period.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> He always seemed a contentious and argumentative sort on LKML. So it was good to see that the author had a much different experience with him. Sad that Andre wasn't able to find a way to carry on. Thoughts and condolences to his family.

</comment><comment><USER8> I knew him personally for last few years as his colleague. It was very saddening to know about his demise and shocking to know he took his life. He was always very jovial and cracking jokes all around. My heart goes out to his four children, who were aged between 5 to 14. While I knew he had some personal issues, but never thought these could lead him to suicide. I wish I knew more and did more. RIP Andre!

</comment><comment><USER9> Wow. Thank you Mr. Hedrick for fighting the good fight and "keeping the PC open." We're still in the nascence of the computing era and I think many years from now, this man's efforts and the efforts of others like him will be viewed as being even more important than they are now.

RIP.

</comment><comment><USER10> Sometimes theres room for compromise.

But then, sometimes there isn't.

R.I.P

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I hope he did not kill himself because of the the big layoffs at Cisco...

<comment><USER11> I think a guy like that would not have any trouble finding another job. It's more likely he was suffering from severe depression, a complex and sometimes tragically undiagnosed illness. Sad to see him go. I see he died on the same day as my mom two weeks ago :-(

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> You will be missed Andre :(

</comment><comment><USER13> I think I need to alert one thing - particularly on a page like this. If in your settings you have 'showDead' set to on, then you will see a incoherent comment at the bottom of this page from losethos.

Some of you folks might remember a discussion involving Losethos sometime back on HN. I can't find the discussion but here is the article which was discussed: <http://qaa.ath.cx/LoseThos.html> . In that article, one kind person had taken some effort to understand the reasons behind such incoherent comments.

I am not sure that people who marked the comment as dead, are aware of that discussion. Perhaps we need a policy at HN to handle such situations better.

PS: I got the above link by doing this search 'site:news.ycombinator.com losethos' on google. You can also see some more comments on the same here <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4189669>. But can't find that original discussion</comment>


N.S.A. Leaks Make Plan for Cyberdefense Unlikely - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/13/us/nsa-leaks-make-plan-for-cyberdefense-unlikely.html

<comment><USER2> I can see the attractiveness of doing malware & spam scanning "on the wire" \-- but I fail to see what the NSA can bring to the party that cannot already be provided by commercial antivirus/antimalware companies?

</comment><comment><USER2> This seems consistent with the NSA's unrelenting "gotta collect it all" power grab.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cyber "defense"? What a joke. NSA's cyber/hacking programs and the US Cyber Command of which it's in charge of, have _always_ been about _offense_ , and they will continue to be for the most part. NSA is all about finding exploits and _exploiting_ them, not patching them up.

The idea that NSA could "protect" the Internet by having complete access to it is a very flawed one, but I'm sure it could be something NSA could believe strongly: "Just give us more billions of dollars - we're the only ones who can fix the Internet".</comment>


Improving Bug Triage with User Pain (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/05/improving-bug-triage-with-user-pain.html <comment><USER2> A former employer implemented this in the 2009/2010 time frame. We were at that point an old software company with mature products, lots of process, custom internal tools, and very separate product management, support, development, and QA. The various category ratings had some data input, but were done by hand, so a person was always directly involved. We used user pain for maybe a year before the company adopted scrum and began migrating to entirely new tools/process; user pain was not retained.

My recollections are that we found lots of room for disagreement over whether something was a particular number on one of the scales, and depending on the bug and personalities involved these arguments could last a while. It was straightforward to game the scale to make particular issues show up with a high or low pain, regardless of how many customers actually reported it (if any - unfortunately user pain does not include a 4th 'imagination' rating).

One development manager told me he really liked User Pain because it was straightforward to make defects reflect a low pain number such that they could just be ignored.

It was a short experience, but I don't think I would want to implement user pain again unless the category ratings were entirely data-driven and automated. I don't think this method is useful if you leave the ratings up to people.

<comment><USER3> I had a different experience while working at a startup from 2010 — 2012. It helped us to get to a uniform way of thinking about bugs, and gave us a ratchet for continuous improvement with the product. It wasn't a silver bullet, but it helped.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> To quote Jerry Weinberg: "Quality is value to some person"[1]. Any reasonably complex system is going to have different users with differing quality requirements: administrators, tactical operators, strategic operators, sophisticated operators, naïve operators... Whose pain are we accounting for?

[1] [https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gerald_Weinberg](https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gerald_Weinberg)

<comment><USER5> The ones who bother to report.</comment></comment>


Post Office photographs every letter you send - <AUTHOR> http://www.nbcnews.com/video/nightly-news/52475524?lite&lite=obinsite#52475442

<comment><USER2> The title is wrong.

No they don't photograph every letter, they photograph every envelope/package you send.

Which makes sense, considering you want mail to be sorted automatically. It's the storage of this information, as well as meta data about it, that is arguably problematic.</comment>


RIP Robin "Roblimo" Miller - <AUTHOR> https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/rip-robin-roblimo-miller <comment><USER2> I guess Hacker News is the "new Slashdot", but Slashdot really was much better in its peak years. It's not unreasonable to mark the downhill decline to beginning shortly after Roblimo's departure. I never met him, but I feel as if I've lost a compatriot. He will definitely be missed.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure I ever observed Slashdot at any particular peak, but I've been reading it weekly (if not daily) for something like the past 15 years, and it still serves a role that HN, due to its bubble-like nature, can never fill.

Slashdot is more general interest, and it sports a much healthier cross- section of the tech industry than HN at least presently does. Slashdot comments though, definitely not worth reading any more, if they ever were

<comment><USER4> How would you say the Slashdot and HN cross-sections differ?

<comment><USER3> HN tends more towards software and startups, everyone is an armchair CTO, Slashdot tends more towards tech, space and science. They both cover each other's topics, but there is a definite tendency on both sides.

You're unlikely to read about some venture capital gossip on the Slashdot side, while you're unlikely to read e.g. "Giant Predatory Worms Are Invading France" on the HN side.

The great thing about HN comments is that everyone is a smart ass, the bad thing about HN comments is that everyone is a smart ass. Slashdot comments are generally just toxic noise, dumb jokes and horrifically amateur analysis.

<comment><USER5> I'll add that Slashdot's user comment toxicity is a product of its founders' commitment to non-censorship and free speech.

Back in the day (what some here have referred to as Slashdot's "peak"), Slashdot commentary and trolling could be side-achingly hilarious, irreverent, profane, thought-provoking, insightful, silly, and humbling.

Slashdot's editorially permissive policy coupled with algorithmically assigned moderator points allowed "representative" Slashdot users to choose which trolls and provocateurs would be buried and which boosted.

As a result, Slashdot was renowned and reviled for its sometimes predictable and frequently appropriate inside jokes (e.g. "Had Netcraft confirmed it?", "Only old people ______", "IN SOVIET RUSSIA $NOUN $VERBs YOU", etc.) as well as for its sometimes intractable and iconoclastic user base.

The user base was in fact so intractable that a site-wide redesign was deployed and then retracted due to extraordinary complaints from the user base. Dice ended up throwing a lot of invested time and resources away to appease a user base determined to voice its displeasure with a Web 2.0 redesign.

Roblimo, CmdrTaco, and CowboyNeal were the ones who forged Slashdot's editorial policy and, by so doing, indelibly shaped the character of Slashdot at its peak.

Today, thoughtless shitposting and unoriginal trolling of anonymous (and some pseudonymous) Slashdot users has driven away all but the most hardy (or desperate) of Slashdot readers. Slashdot today seems to be an endlessly burning tire fire. I'm grateful the current /. thread for Roblimo is so far civil. [0]

But there was a time when its moderation policies and commitment to anonymity generated insight and humor. Even now, Slashdot has a hackerish mean streak that can yield endlessly entertaining threads full of puns, jokes, and in- jokes and if there is anything I wish HN had more of it is an understanding that iconoclastic juvenile humor can play an important discursive role in conversations of technology, society, and culture.

I only rarely visit Slashdot these days due to the toxicity of its users' comments (I can't bring myself to hide comments moderated to -1 for the same reasons that I "showdead" here on HN).

I am forever indebted to the original Slashdot team, the Slashdot community and, on this occasion, especially Robin Miller for providing a platform where I could learn from others, express my opinions, and keep abreast of geek culture.

Roblimo, you will be missed.

[0] [https://linux.slashdot.org/story/18/05/24/1750210/robin- robl...](https://linux.slashdot.org/story/18/05/24/1750210/robin-roblimo- miller-a-long-time-voice-of-the-linux-community-has-passed-away#comments)

EDIT: typos and small changes here and there

<comment><USER6> "e.g. "Had Netcraft confirmed it?", "Only old people ______", "IN SOVIET RUSSIA $NOUN $VERBs YOU", etc."

Sorry to point out that you forgot grits and Natalie Portman, of whom some /. users seemed to have a not quite healthy obsession.

Else than that your comment is spot on.

<comment><USER7> I, for one, welcome our new inside-joke-forgetting overlords

<comment><USER8> I'd like to see a Beowolf cluster of those.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For the younger of you here, think Slashdot.

 _Miller was perhaps best known by the community for his roll as Editor in Chief of Open Source Technology Group, the company that owned Slashdot, SourceForge.net, freshmeat, Linux.com, NewsForge, and ThinkGeek from 2000 to 2008._

Suddenly, the Web feels older.

\--

P.S. [https://linux.slashdot.org/story/18/05/24/1750210/robin- robl...](https://linux.slashdot.org/story/18/05/24/1750210/robin-roblimo- miller-a-long-time-voice-of-the-linux-community-has-passed-away)

</comment><comment><USER10> It's easy to forget both how small the Linux/open source world was back then and also how big a source of news, commentary and community Slashdot, NewsForge etc were.

Thanks roblimo.

</comment><comment><USER11> Fun, crass, friendly. Met him at a Knight Foundation event in Miami. Kevin Marks, if you are reading this, you needed a ride to BarCamp and this is who we hitched a ride with.

</comment><comment><USER12> Slashdot thread:

[https://linux.slashdot.org/story/18/05/24/1750210/robin- robl...](https://linux.slashdot.org/story/18/05/24/1750210/robin-roblimo- miller-a-long-time-voice-of-the-linux-community-has-passed-away)

</comment><comment><USER13> This is sad news. However, on the flip side, finding out that Linux Journal is back from the dead is heartwarming. I hadn't caught that bit of news previously.

</comment><comment><USER14> Sad news. I remember refreshing /. multiple times on 9/11, and also getting my first goatse link.

RIP Rob.

</comment><comment><USER15> Roblimo, thank you for being a huge part of my introduction to geek culture. RIP

</comment><comment><USER16> His byline accompanied many of my early adventures in Linux and Open Source.

</comment><comment><USER17> Feel a bit like this deserves a Hacker News black bar. Reading Slashdot back in the day, Roblimo, CmdrTaco - those were good times. I was at the early bit of my career then, and being part of communities like Slashdot, Sourceforge, etc. were instrumental in helping me grow and more importantly learn about the constant changes in our field - so to me, these folks are also heroes of the Internet as much as some of the founders - for example, people like Vint Cerf, or Tim Berners Lee. Maybe in a slightly different way, but heroes of our communities none-the-less. RIP.

<comment><USER18> I find it unproductive to think about what HN should/should not do, but I just wanted to echo your sentiment. Roblimo, hemos, CmdrTac (who posts here sometimes... condolences if you're reading) had big and positive impacts on my personal professional development with software and open source. I am very grateful to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> As crass as Rob was, he'd never get to post here on HN.

Keep that in mind while you get rich off the back of his work, YC.

<comment><USER16> ???

<comment><USER20> I think he's pointing out that many (most? all?) unicorns are built atop open source software that only exists because of a significant counter-cultural struggle that happened in the 80s and 90s.

I still remember when the idea of running a free software stack was considered deeply weird.</comment></comment></comment>