Google May Have to Get Used to Third Place in the Cloud - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-13/google-may-have-to-get-used-to-third-place-in-the-cloud <comment><USER2> Microsoft will reap the rewards of supporting XP and Office for decades, that wins enterprise trust & goodwill, and clients will expect that from Azure. On the other hand, every month we have a new product/service of Google being deprecated (officially or by raising prices). Even if it's technically better, the most sane business decision from enterprise would be to bet on Microsoft for support reasons. Microsoft talks the enterprise talk and walks the enterprise walk. Google probably has a fun and hackster image in the eyes of enterprise.

<comment><USER3> I can't even tell you how many connectivity and graphics technologies MS launched, I developed on, and then they abandoned.

I struggle to understand why people think MS deserves enterprise trust & goodwill.

<comment><USER4> > I can't even tell you how many connectivity and graphics technologies MS > launched, I developed on, and then they abandoned.

How many of these technologies still function on Windows 10? As far as I know many of their abandoned platforms are still fully functional. Even in Windows 10 you can _still_ install 16-bit apps. They've always been dedicated to compatibility... try running a few year old app on a modern smartphone and you'll see the difference.

<comment><USER5> Not to mention that windows still sticks with carriage return + line feed to maintain compatibility with the 1960s.

<comment><USER6> Notepad & its underlying text box component support Unix style line endings now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I see a lot of Google Cloud bashing on this thread, so thought I'd share my viewpoint as a customer.

We've been a Google Cloud customer for close to a year now and just recently signed a deal to move all of our infrastructure over to them from AWS. I've previously managed infrastructure spends of $>10M a year on AWS before, so have a decent amount of experience with them. I've never used Azure.

We had been running our CI/CD pipelines on Google mostly because we received startup credits from them. Over time, our use cases expanded as we adopted BigQuery for data warehousing. We choose to commit to Google long term because we've been a heavy Kubernetes shop in got tired of managing it ourselves on Amazon. We participated in the Amazon EKS alpha and felt that they were years behind Google in their Kubernetes implementation. We have probably been able to save 1-2 DevOps hires this year by adopting some of Google's managed services.

If there is a downside on the technical side, it is that some of their products don't have the same number of features as Amazon such a prefix signing and reporting on GCS. There also isn't the same level of community awareness on how to use their stack so documentation gaps are more painful. Other things like a lack of presence in China could be challenging in the future as well.

On the business side, Google has been amazing to work with. Whenever we have a technical question, the sales team has generally been able to quickly get us an answer or we've got to talk to the product PM. When working with Amazon, you are usually referred to a solutions integrator who can't answer tough technical questions. Google is very open with early access releases as long as you're willing to provide them feedback - which they truly value. Their sales processes aren't as mature as that of an established enterprise company - which can be a good or a bad thing - but they've certainly earned our trust as an enterprise customer.

In some ways, any of the big 3 are going to have marks against them in some way as they just do too many things for them not to piss you off in some way. I wasn't a fan of Microsoft a decade ago because they regularly killed open source products I liked by releasing their own version of it under the Microsoft name.

When looking for partner I'm looking for someone who can accelerate my business and earn my trust. So far, that's what I've gotten from this relationship.

<comment><USER8> > Other things like a lack of presence in China could be challenging in the > future as well.

Well, to be fair, NONE of the big clouds have any presence in China. They are "in China" in name only.

For instance, 'AWS' China is not AWS, you will be dealing with Sinnet for Beijing or whoever else operates the Ningxia region. The underlying software is a baby version which doesn't have anywhere near the same amount of features. Frankly, the only benefits vs a local cloud provider are that the name is still retained (so you have your bases covered if anyone complains) and the API is AWS compatible.

It is a similar story on the other clouds. So I wouldn't weight this that heavily against Google.

Also, all of this only applies if you have boots on the ground. It's not like one can just create an account in China and run with it. It's an expensive and lengthy process.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure what you are angling at here.

The China regions might not have all the AWS services present, and they have some extra restrictions, but they aren't some kind of clones of AWS software.

Unless I'm missing something, they are the same versions of what runs in the other regions.

<comment><USER10> You can't go into the AWS console and select a region in China and then provision resources.

AWS-China is literally a different organization with a different service on a different URI and with whom you'll need to establish a different contractual relationship.

<comment><USER11> It's a different 'partition' the same way that govcloud is a different partition. Separate for legal reasons, but the same technology underneath.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> From product perspective, Google cloud is far ahead from AWS and Azure.

As one who runs a company that operates on all 3, serving over 3b+ HTTPS requests daily, across 250K of web apps, in all continents, I can say clear and simple:

        GCP Compute, Networking stack and storage are a superior product when compared to AWS and Azure.

For every dollar you pay:

      - You get more compute power per core, while paying less.

      - You get faster network, internal and external, with an amazing layer of load-balancing and Anycast IP.

      - You get the best "data processing at scale".

Google has a business problem rather than product. A smart man once told me,

        In B2C, the one with the better product is most likely to win.
        In B2B, the one with the larger sales team will.

Perhaps, Google is still learning that vast majority of business, especially the larger ones are not about easy self sign up, rather face-to-face meetings, price quotes, negotiations, etc. It is a different culture that almost as oppose to how they used to run things thus far.

Figures don't lie however, and revenue streams are the oxygen of a business.

All it takes for GCP to get the crown would be a series of right and bold decisions by its executives, which I hope they will make those eventually, since the product deserves a wider recognition.

<comment><USER13> ... and you get what you pay for. Whenever I've had a problem on AWS, I've spoken to a human being, and had a detailed information on what was happening and how they were fixing it.

I don't have a support plan through Amazon, but I do a bit of business there (now).

When I had a problem with Google, the response was a stone wall. Online FAQs and no one to talk to. Even security issues, they blow people off on.

I wouldn't base a business on the Google Cloud. Too big a risk.

<comment><USER14> I have no idea how you are getting someone to talk to from AWS without paying. I have had 10k/mo spend with both and without a support plan you get absolutely nothing, and with they fall over themselves to help, calling you immediately after filing tickets.

<comment><USER13> Some of the projects I work on are pretty high-profile. I assumed they did that for everybody, but perhaps that lead to special treatment?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> AWS: a web gui with 200 options, some of which have 200 menu items to select from. Experts work well. neophytes are stuck behind canned recipies which are limited. Want IPv6? deploy a /56 _explicitly_ to locations, because they didn't pre-can a model to manage it for you. What?

command line tools in JSON are pretty good however. Can drive from shell.

Azure: too young. Tried k8s, the fit was awful. I'm told by people who don't know, but speak to gossips there is a metric french tonne of 'reboot it again' going on behind the scenes.

I never got to a point I could _test_ if I could drive from the shell. it just wasn't baked.

GCP: its 2018. Google still can't do native IPv6. That aside, this is the interface I wanted all along. I drive this from the shell every day. We live in k8s.

</comment><comment><USER16> Touching on big G trying to catch up - I've recently had some issues with GCP and while the addition of more accessible support (you can now reach some support person relatively easy) it helps little unless it's a request that they can handle with a single button press. While it now FEELS less frustrating as you have somebody to talk to, it doesn't help that I have an issue that is being ping-ponged around different reps for >10 days by now.

Regarding MS taking 2nd place - recently came in contact with their cloud. It's not up to par to the rest from a tech perspective, however, they are killing it on their sales channels and in sectors such as banks and retail due to their ubiquity in those.

Edit: Wording, horrible is not the best description of the MS cloud, just not as good for me.

<comment><USER17> Explain, how it is horrible from a tech perspective? (hint: it's not)

Edit: I'm getting downvoted, but no one as of yet has shown how Azure is built on horrible tech compared to its peers. It's just a flat lie, none of the big 3 are built on horrible tech. It's just being dishonest and is basically fanboyism/hatred of one party. You can argue about UI you like or don't (I prefer Azure) you can argue about APIs, their IaaS and SaaS, you can argue that Azure isn't as good on the "edge" compared to GCS, you can say kubernetes is a bumpier ride on Azure etc, but saying the tech is "horrible" is not correct. Sorry. This isn't early 2000s Slashdot.

<comment><USER18> The UI is, um, lets say, very unconventional for non-windows folks. It is extremely sluggish compared to AWS or GCP. As in, each page takes several seconds+ to fully load vs AWS/GCP. Maybe this is just for me, or an IE vs Chrome issue or something, I'm not sure. The horizontal panning in the UI is pretty strange for the uninitiated too. Everyone else, the _entire internet pretty much_ scrolls up/down on a web page but in Azure it's up/down + side- to-side + expanding panels with scroll. I'm not even sure where to look for things (scroll down or to the side). As far as the tech is concerned, I'm not sure but the first impression of the UI coming from another cloud provider just seems off. Typically, I use the UI to get the lay of the land before hitting the API or something. But, I suspect I'm not the target market since I've spent my entire career on the linux side of things.

<comment><USER19> Enterprises tend to automate cloud deployments once they've gotten past the initial phases. Comparing UI is valid but also compare the Restful APIs, SDKs and template driven automation tooling across clouds.

<comment><USER20> You give way too much credit to most enterprise infrastructure guys.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'd like to comment a few things made me appreciate and enjoy Google/Cloud services and I am aware they are very subjective to my personal experience as a student and beginner to web dev, but there are many folks like me so I could be speaking for them too.

Resources, Resources and Resources! As a self-taught web developer, I struggled a lot when it comes to learning anything about web developments, and whenever I found some good resources, be articles/guides/tutorials/videos, they always came back to the Google team. Their sites/content such as the Google Developers, Web Fundamentals, Firebase/Google Chrome Developers Youtube channels and so much more, are very beginner friendly and it is all focused on web developments too. Google Web Fundamentals and MDN are essentially my go-to recommendations for any web dev beginners.

Meanwhile, AWS and Azure seemed very enterprise-y and aimed at industry veterans. AWS dashboard and documentation interface daunts me, and while I'm aware other resource sites such as Udemy, Pluralsight or Front End Masters have excellent courses on AWS, but I do not find them to be extensive and easy to learn as Google ones, and they aren't free either. Azure? I think in terms of good documentation and learning resources, it is definitely in the third place when compared to Google/AWS.

<comment><USER22> Azure's documentation is standard Microsoft technical doc fare, i.e. atrocious. It's horrible trying to get a straight answer out of anything they've written.

<comment><USER23> My impression from a decade in Windows Server and .NET development is exactly the opposite. You may have to do a lot of reading, but the available technical docs have 100x the raw utility of those from Apple and others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This seems related to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18383553](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18383553) (Microsoft Beats Amazon in 12-Month Cloud Revenue), where this point was discussed almost endlessly:

> These numbers are very misleading considering they wrap up things like > Office into "cloud revenue."

<comment><USER25> And as discussed to death in the linked thread, what Microsoft should've done instead? Excluded Office from the cloud revenue, simply because Amazon didn't make as much money from their own office productivity suite (but still included it in their cloud revenue numbers)?

MSFT used cloud revenue metrics consistent with those of the competitors (Amazon and Google), which is the proper way to do it, imo.

<comment><USER26> I guess it would be more comparable if they split out IaaS/PaaS/SaaS although probably no company wants to do that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I dug into the details earlier this year, and it turned out at the time that Microsoft counts some undisclosed but significant percentage of revenue from sales of Office 365 in their "Commercial Cloud" category, even if you buy it in a box at a store... because in theory that box entitles you to Office In the Cloud. This (Azure plus some percentage of Office) is the "Azure" revenue number that gets compared to AWS and GCP to determine the market share number that you see in all the graphs.

Can anyone confirm/deny? I'm reasonably certain this is right from my reading of financial reports, but I'm no accountant.

<comment><USER28> This is very true. There are lots of gamification the providers play to "juice" the numbers.

Here's one example (apologies for picking on IBM). So IBM will sell you a million dollars of software for $1, and then force you to buy $600,000 of cloud even if you never use it. You don't complain because you got a 40% discount, and IBM can "book" 600k in cloud revenue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Google having an edge in ML and kubernetes will help them but they really need superior documentation to counter crowd wisdom on AWS.

Solutions/answers to most basic roadblocks you might encounter when working with AWS offerings are a quick google search away but that's the case for gcp offerings. They also need to ramp up their evangelism (for the lack of better word) to get some mind share.

</comment><comment><USER30> Google has great primitives. But they are very slow in releasing new features, and what they do provide is only offered in "the google way".

AWS and Azure might not have everything packaged as clean, functional, scalable components, but instead they look at what companies are using today and just offer a managed version of it as quickly as possible, with a constant stream of updates. They apply the iterative process of startups to the cloud, and this means that actual startups can get going 10x faster.

We run primarily on GCP because almost all of our needs are GKE/VMs, but 100% of our managed services come from AWS and Azure.

<comment><USER31> Anecdotally I've met an absolutely crazy amount of recent Google Cloud hires in the past few months so I'm curious if the pace of updates will improve in like a year as they throw money at it.

<comment><USER32> They told me in Grad interviews that a majority of their grad hires are into Google Cloud right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Snap and Spotify account for 13.7% of Google Cloud: [https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/20/spotify-will-spend- nearly-45...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/20/spotify-will-spend- nearly-450-million-on-google-cloud-over-3-years.html)

<comment><USER34> Snap doesn't spend it all on what you are all discussing here, though. Even though it's wrapped up in Google Cloud marketing, Snap's main use seems to be of App Engine, a product that is clearly in the lead among comparable products, as opposed to things like GCS and GCE which are clearly behind S3 and AWS, respectively.

Snap also has a huge contract with AWS, for what it's worth. Other large customers like Apple also split their ticket between Amazon and Google.

<comment><USER35> In what specific way is GCE behind EC2?

I would argue on many points GCE is clearly significantly superior to EC2.

The Google billing model is far better, they bill on straight CPU and Memory, which you can combine in any desired ratio. Amazon has well over 100 different instance types.

Google gives you an automatic sustained usage discount. Amazon requires you to commit to reserved instances up front for 1 year minimum, and those have to be _specific_ instance types, so as your workloads change you can't reallocate capacity.

GCE has workload live-migration. If the underlying hardware that your VM is hosted on begins to fail, they will migrate you to new hardware in REAL TIME without any downtime other than a sub-second pause in processing.

Amazon will notify you that your hardware is failing and give you a deadline usually a week or so out to reboot your VM, if you don't they just terminate it.

I could continue for several more points if interested.

<comment><USER34> Market share.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Given how customer unfriendly google seems it is not surprising. If you are running a service and google shuts it down or just closes your account with no explanation it might be hard for you.

</comment><comment><USER37> How much do you think Active Directory is driving Azure's success? I picture Azure's big sales pitch as being able to call up GE or Exxon or whatever and say "hey throw all your ancient lotus notes and other various hosted stuff onto our servers and we can sync all your AD to AAD and you're done". I can see that as being a huge thing. And once an enterprise is in, they're start using it for new things as well.

I've never done any kind of enterprisey user access management before so I don't know if it's actually that easy or even if it's any different from migrating to AWS/GCP. Or if AD sucks and enterprises hate it. Would love to hear from people who have more experience there.

</comment><comment><USER38> One thing that Azure has really done a good job at is compliance. According to their latest report there are 13 services that aren't HIPAA-compliant, where most of their services are. Compared to Google or AWS that's a major jump in what's usable for companies with compliance needs. That plus their aggression in converting on-prem customers to the cloud (last I heard they were buying up datacenters) has helped them become #2 in the cloud space

<comment><USER39> I'm having a hard time finding something in Google cloud that is NOT covered by their BAA: [https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance/hipaa/#covered-...](https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance/hipaa/#covered- products)

<comment><USER38> That lists 38 hipaa-compliant services. Azure's is close to 80ish hipaa- compliant services. AWS' list is fairly large too. I haven't used GCE in a long time, so maybe GCE just has that many fewer products/services.

<comment><USER40> One big selling point of GCP vs other cloud providers in regards to HIPAA is that pretty much all of GCP is covered, and probably will in the future:

"GCP's security practices allow us to have a HIPAA BAA covering GCP's entire infrastructure, not a set aside portion of our cloud. As a result, you are not restricted to a specific region which has scalability, operational and architectural benefits. You can also benefit from multi-regional service redundancy as well as the ability to use Preemptible VMs to reduce costs.

The security and compliance measures that allow us to support HIPAA compliance are deeply ingrained in our infrastructure, security design, and products. As such, we can offer HIPAA regulated customers the same products at the same pricing that is available to all customers, including sustained use discounts. Other public clouds charge more money for their HIPAA cloud, we do not."

[https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance/hipaa/#covered-...](https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance/hipaa/#covered- products)

Its been about a year since I last checked out everything you need to be HIPAA compliant to run AWS services, but IIRC it required running dedicated instances for nearly everything. That can make running on AWS way more expensive.

EDIT: Apparently the limitation of dedicated instances was removed in May 2017. [https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa- compliance/](https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-compliance/)

<comment><USER38> That's great to know about GCE. It makes moving there actually a possibility

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The last company I worked for used Azure. I had never used Azure before and the thought of using a Microsoft product was a bit off-putting during my interview, to be honest (yeah, I admit to being one of those old-school, Microsoft-sucks dinosaurs from the 1990s). After using it for a few days, I had a change of heart. The documentation is pretty good and their tech support guys were extremely helpful. They would even call me back several days after the fact to make sure their suggestions were working and that I was having a good experience on the platform. In my experience, their UI made sense, their documentation was decent, and their tech support was great. I think Microsoft has earned their spot in the market with Azure.

<comment><USER42> > yeah, I admit to being one of those old-school, Microsoft-sucks dinosaurs > from the 1990s

I don't think this is all that old school. It's not like Microsoft spent the 2000s repairing their reputation. I started my career in the beginning of the current decade, and the question of whether Microsoft sucked wasn't even an interesting one, because everyone knew the answer was yes.

It's the last few years that they're really started to turn around their reputation, as I understand it (though I haven't had exposure to any of their products in this period).

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Would like to cover few points discussed here.

I don't think its fair to judge cloud platforms competency with just the market share since there are players like Microsoft/Oracle who have lot of enterprise foothold. I have used all other major cloud providers and as a power user, have found GCP to be rock solid.

Paid support is the only option with all major cloud platforms if you want faster response. I think all of them need to get better at it.

Cloud providers can literally break your business with a price hike so be very careful when you build your stack. Don't tangle yourself by consuming vendor locked features. Make sure your stack can be migrated over to another provider at very short notice or have at least a footprint with other providers in parallel.

<comment><USER20> _Make sure your stack can be migrated over to another provider at very short notice or have at least a footprint with other providers in parallel._

Changing infrastructure over a small increase in price (which rarely happens) is a one of those dreams that techies have but hardly ever happens because the risk of regressions is too high.

The minute you don't use managed services and you host everything yourself on EC2 instances you have the worse of all worlds - you're paying more than baremetal, you're paying the same amount for supporting your infrastructure, and you're not developing any faster than you could on prem.

<comment><USER43> Depends on your team and product needs.

I don't think price is the main motivation to use cloud. Ease of use, vast resources to provision without any significant delay and pay for what you use are the main factors.

If your infra is not mission critical and if you have deep pockets you can afford to be tied to a vendor. Otherwise - having skilled expertise and designing your architecture in vendor agnostic way is pretty much essential.

<comment><USER44> Does using cloud that more expensive, as a share of revenue, in most businesses ?

<comment><USER20> Probably not, but I've seen two companies that were in AWS.

The first company where I was the Dev lead and at the time didn't know the first thing about AWS and neither did the infrastructure guys and we brought in consultants. Yes it was much more expensive. We didn't reduce the number of people, didn't increase automation from the netops side and we developed just like we did on prem. So yeah they should have stuck with the colo and from what I've heard, they kept my system on AWS but stopped there.

On the other hand, I've worked for a company that started off on AWS from day one. They outsourced most of the netops to a Managed Service Provider, they have one person in house that manages some of the EC2 instances and does some other projects, and they used as many of the managed service offerings on AWS as they could. They were more concerned about focusing on their core business than worrying about the "undifferentiated heavy lifting".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Azure's UX is terrible. They have this weird sliding, Metro UI that takes a lot of learning to figure out. Every startup that I have talked to has hated using Azure. Even the pricing is so hard to figure out. There is some weird intermediate conversion when looking up the price for managed databases.

Microsoft is known to throw brilliant discounts into bundling cloud along with its other Office stuff. Not sure if they are using this as leverage.

In India, I know for a fact that the banks that are moving to the cloud are doing it on Azure, because Microsoft is not afraid of heavy compliances. It's hard to speak to a human in Google Cloud.

<comment><USER46> I agree on the UI part, it is quite horrendous. But any major enterprise organisation should be / probably is using some sort of automation tool such as Terraform or something similar. You just don't go and click around in the UI to set up your stuff manually, that's not how big projects in enterprise work (all cloud stuff is automated without depending on UI) so bad UI is a con but it's less important that other more technical features.

<comment><USER45> ha ha - fair enough. Pretty much justifies Hashicorp's valuation ;)

But here's some stuff that's really missing. In Google's dashboard (and their API), you can add ssh keys _after_ creation of an instance. Its a fairly basic functionality made possible by the "accounts daemon" (which is opensource [https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/compute-image- package...](https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/compute-image- packages/tree/master/google_compute_engine/accounts))

Azure doesnt have this, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> There's a large number of companies that have a "Microsoft Strategy", meaning that if Microsoft have a solution that sort of fits the problem, that's what they pick.

Google simply can't sell to these customers, because... They aren't Microsoft.

The weird part is that a large number of these companies will outsource their operations, their own staff will never use Azure services directly. It would make zero difference if their applications run on Amazons, Googles or Microsofts cloud offering, but they have a "Microsoft Strategy", so it has to run on Azure.

</comment><comment><USER48> It's astonishing to me that you silicon valley types still don't get, how much of a lead MS have on the compliance front (among others) that makes their cloud platform the only logical choice. In Europe, GCP is almost immediately disregarded, as they have, on multiple occasions, proved they cannot be trusted with your data, and legally required audits will destroy your company if you chose google as your provider(see the DeepMind issue for the latest example) while Amazon doesn't have quite the same problem, contrast that to MS who has the largest compliance list, as well as outstanding contracts with most large companies, and the choice is bloody obvious. Essentially, if you are not a SF startup or American centric company, there really is no other option, and the vast majority of the human population, surprise surprise, do not live/work in America.

<comment><USER49> I'm also in Europe, using GCP, know many others who do, and have actually never heard criticism of GCP with regard to data security.

Yes, there are lots of people criticising Google. But for a business using GCP, my impression is that they have been pretty good crossing their t's and dotting their ö's during, for example, the recent introduction of GDPR. They have contracts and model clauses for different scenarios and products. And while I can't judge how good these are, I would assume they will be tested in court pretty quickly.

Long before that, they have reacted well to criticism. For about a decade or so, Analytics has had the option to only collect anonymized IP data, a requirement from a couple of court decisions categorizing IP addresses as PII.

I don't disagree that Google's size alone is reason for scepticism, and to keep an eye on them. But please don't go around claiming to speak for some imaginary European consensus when no such thing exists.

<comment><USER50> Well things like the DeepMind NHS data transfer don't really help[1].

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/14/google- be...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/14/google-betrays- patient-trust-deepmind-healthcare-move)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Microsoft is much better positioned than Google to build a large cloud business off their enterprise customers. IT execs need a "cloud strategy." MS can move their existing apps right into Azure. Presto, you have a good story for the board. Their success in this sphere doesn't surprise me. Google's cloud business growth is nothing to sneeze at, and I don't know whether it matters that they are in third place or not.

</comment><comment><USER52> Honestly , they deserve that place.

While I'm a huge G cloud fan , there is too many things that frustrate me with GCloud.

Whether it's Firebase that doesn't have a way to limit user bandwidth or Google Staff taking you for a dummy because the guy is a « Google Engineer » or the performance of European Datacenter... there is a just countless stuff that makes GCloud overall an « okay » experience but nowhere similar to what AWS or'Azure offers

</comment><comment><USER53> I work in this space. If you count VMWare on-prem deployments, Azure and GCP are 3rd and 4th, respectively.

Amazon's dominance is massive, Azure exists because Microsoft gives it away for free with big Windows and Office purchases, and GCP putters along last due to perceived bad customer service (which is kind of true)

</comment><comment><USER54> I find Google's products harder to use than competitors.

A year ago I did a shootout between visual recognition APIs by the like of IBM, Amazon, Azure, Google, Clarifai, etc.

Every API other than Google took less than 20 minutes to get logged in and running API calls.

To log into Google cloud services I had to install complex proprietary code just to be able to log in. Then when I installed the Python GCS API it destroyed my anaconda installation even though I wasn't working in the base environment.

I was able to get it to work but it took 10x longer than competing APIs.

It seems to be the same way for other GCS services. I think people at Google think they are so smart that developer ergonomics doesn't matter.

</comment><comment><USER55> Google struggles with the top down Enterprise sales required to make something like this happen at a non-Tech Fortune 500 firm. It's not about low cost hardware and fancy AI, it's about helping move a process along.

</comment><comment><USER56> Microsoft were able to leverage their Office 365 cloud products that most companies are already using to gain momentum. Google have shifted their focus toward AI in their recent years and I believe once it is ready, Google will come out with a breakthrough AI application on its cloud platform that will make a lot of businesses flock to them. Right now they just really don't have a way to differentiate themselves among other providers yet. It's still early in the game but that time will come.

</comment><comment><USER57> GCP is mainly sold to engineers it being the best one on a price per feature, AWS is sold on market force they where the first big one. Azure is sold on being a vmware setup replacement.

</comment><comment><USER58> for sure all of them have pros/cons.

i have been using AWS for many years across multiple companies now. Over the years i got the feeling that the quality has degraded. New services are half- baked (ES, EKS), some newer API's are overly complicated (VPC peering is overloaded for cross-account AND internal instead of 2 abstractions on top of it - why do i need to get confused about all these extra API args which are not needed for internal VPC peering and have to spend hours to finally understand it). Overall AWS feels that they got more sales focused.

i just started to get nightmares with Azure recently, luckily i was able to get rid of almost everything of it (only keyvault remains, since azure does for now have the best offering for HSM). The UI is absolute terrible from front-end caching bugs to strange permissions. MS seems to have to invent their own vocabulary for everything instead of using terminology that most of the rest of the internet uses (which makes finding things very hard), same goes for their API's, its almost impossible to use their API's without these super huge and often buggy libs (try to use REST API auth without a lib...). I am personally also having a hard time to read their documentation.

I did not had the chance to try GC yet but i want to. I know that google services sometimes can be a bit complex to start with, but there is good documentation and reference docs - its usually very easy to just use REST api if you dont wanna use some heavy libs. We recently moved to k8s (i am loving it - continues deploying apps with autoscaling and 0 downtime was never that easy), so as we move more into k8s i hopefully get the chance to try out GC

</comment><comment><USER59> Why are people comparing GUIS when talking about cloud usage ?

If you are using the cloud and the GUI to spin up resources you are doing it wrong. Period.

</comment><comment><USER60> On a commercial scale sure, but personally gcloud will stay a firm favorite of mine for one simple reason - an aspect of their free tier:

AWS/Azure seems cool too, but that promise of "you'll always have a custom VPS you can SSH into forever" is wildly underrated imo.

It's not a money issue, it's more about someone handing you a swiss army knife and saying keep it.

</comment><comment><USER61> Interesting. Assuming "enterprise" really is that big of a deal in this arena, they had a chance to integrate with Red Hat's customer base and lost it to IBM. I suspect IBM will handily pull into third unless they manage the acquisition like most of their other acquisitions.

<comment><USER62> > Assuming "enterprise" really is that big of a deal in this arena.

Enterprise is not a big deal. It's literally everything when it comes to cloud infrastructure. You can thrive with SMBs but you will never be able to match the revenue potential of closing enterprise deals.

The hardcore SaaS sales motto is that if you win the enterprise, you win the market... That's a very very real statement. You're unlikely to capitalize on any expanded and growing market if you're just a niche player catering companies under 10MM ARR. That doesn't mean you can't build a great company that caters for SMBs, but you just won't be a significant player in the market (Think Digital Ocean).

You can try to capture all that theoretical mass of small and medium businesses which in theory looks larger and more profitable when seen as a block, but you will burn yourself harder and get less return over those deals. It's simple math. It's better to go after an account that will spend 20MM on your services (for instance Netflix), than trying to close 200 accounts that will spend 100K on your services.

The logic here is that by earning the trust and loyalty of the enterprise clients you can slowly capture the other segments of the market. Not the other way around.

If Google's plan for their cloud is to focus on SMBs, they will get crushed even harder and potentially disrupted by niche companies which ironically will build their own offerings on top of more feature-rich public clouds like AWS or Azure.

<comment><USER63> You're incorrectly conflating "enterprise" with "large" here. For example, Snap and Apple are very large companies in terms of Cloud spend, but they're very much _not_ an "enterprise"/Fortune 500 company that moves at the speed of an arthritic sloth and needs to be sold on the benefits of moving to the cloud.

<comment><USER62> I'm basing this on the actual technical terminology for classifying business segments. Snap and Apple are definitely considered Enterprises if we go by the Garter definitions that represent business segments as cohorts of different IT needs.

SMB (Small and Medium-Sized Businesses) 0-100 Employees with ARR of $5-$10 million

SME (Small and Medium Enterprises) 100-1000 Employees with ARR of $10 million to $1 billion.

Large Enterprise Over 1000 employees with ARR of over a $1 billion.

Of course, there are always going to be outliers or companies that can't be classified exactly in one category because they may have unusual large IT spendings and Infrastructure needs. That's probably the case for Snap and Apple, but that doesn't mean they are not enterprises by definition.

As an IaaS, the bulk of your revenue is not coming from Snap anyways. It's coming from companies with those arthritic speeds you mention and that are just starting to realize why it makes sense to move their huge workloads to the cloud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> The fact that GCP doesn't have IPv6 yet (except for load balancers) is insane.

<comment><USER65> How does that limit you?

<comment><USER64> For our application it would make it a lot easier to directly communicate with phones and other devices on mobile networks among other things. It's a UDP- based native protocol. Google has UDP load balancers, but they obscure source IP and other info.

It's also just lame. It's 2018.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> AWS may be the better service, but the console is a huge mess.

</comment><comment><USER67> Bloomberg article lacks comparable data. Seems like an Azure puff piece. Would have loved to see comparable data across the top 5 players.

</comment><comment><USER68> Imo. GCP-> Geeks, hackers, beginners . AWS -> Small Businesses, Startups . Azure-> Large Enterprise Businesses.

</comment><comment><USER69> I wonder how much of the increasing success of Azure is creditable to its deep integration with Visual Studio Code.

<comment><USER70> There is no deep integration. Some plugins yes. It is driven by that motivation. I use VS Code daily and never read the word Azure there.

My opinion on your question: Not much. The interesting question is: How much the good will (VS Code, .NET Core, Linux support,...) of the last year's pay out

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> If Godaddy can provide decent support, why can't Google?! The only think I use on Google Cloud is Firebase, love Firebase. But even then, I never know who/where to ask if I have questions.

<comment><USER66> I've had my ups and downs with Firebase. The dev experience is generally good, but reliability hasn't been so great.

Last year we had a 12 hours database downtime. Our call center was hell all day long. After a number of emails back and forth their support engineers acknowledged there was a downtime and gave us $25 of credit and an apology which doesn't even begin to cover our bad image to our customers.

I've had problems with storage dozens of times where files couldn't be uploaded.

2 weeks ago some cloud functions simply stopped triggering until I redeployed. Thankfully this was on a dev project and production was not impacted.

We are slowly but steadily moving some projects out of Firebase and will not start new web projects with it. Maybe it's better with the Swift and Android SDKs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Third place is still a big chunk of the pie.

</comment><comment><USER73> 4th place. IBM is beating them.

</comment><comment><USER74> I predict they will settle for fourth - after Apple.

Give it 2 years, 4 tops.

<comment><USER75> Why do you think that Apple will enter the cloud? Apple hasn't been a real contender in servers for a decade, and it seems like their strength lies more in the design than in raw technical capabilities.

<comment><USER74> iCloud, iWork(web based), email, Time Machine(backup), Messages, Apple Pay.

Those are some of the things that Apple _already does_ in the cloud. I anticipate it will expand significantly as they grow their services business.

Whether they build a "server" is irrelevant - the "service" however, is key.</comment></comment></comment>


Incentivizing Quality and Impact in Computing Research - <AUTHOR> http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/5/186027-incentivizing-quality-and-impact-in-computing-research/fulltext#.VTpAPFLlXNc.twitter

<comment><USER2> I think it's interesting that this proposal for academia to move away from shorter, more frequent publications is completely in contrast to how the software industry has moved towards agile methodologies as a way of working. I honestly don't see what the problem is. Is it really such a bad thing if someone publishes their work in smaller chunks? I'm sure everyone is aware of the benefits of short feedback loops with agile methodologies, why shouldn't researchers employ the same strategies? So long as the research is truly novel, does it really matter if it is published incrementally?

<comment><USER3> > So long as the research is truly novel, does it really matter if it is > published incrementally?

Presumably not. The question is whether the opportunity to do truly novel work is being lost in all the hubbub of writing and submitting papers and serving on program committees. Truly novel work requires deep thought, and deep thought takes time.

I can do no better here than to quote the mathematician G. Spencer-Brown, from _Laws of Form_ :

"To arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires _years_ of _contemplation_. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behavior of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply _bearing in mind_ what it is one needs to know. And yet those with the courage to tread this path to real discovery are not only offered practically no guidance on how to do so, they are actively discouraged and have to set about it in secret, pretending meanwhile to be diligently engaged in the frantic diversions and to conform with the deadening personal opinions which are continually being thrust upon them." [Emphasis in original]

Even allowing that Spencer-Brown may have overstated the case somewhat -- there are times for reading and talking, for reasoning and calculating -- and even if we recognize that this quote evinces a certain bitterness in which we may not wish to share, I think it still makes a good point. Even in software development, if we're doing anything difficult, there are times when we have to set aside the usual progress tracking and focus on solving a hard problem, an activity that cannot be scheduled and managed.</comment></comment>


Pooper: Your dog's poop in someone else's hands - <AUTHOR> http://pooperapp.com/ <comment><USER2> Is there a discount if someone steps on the poop before the scooper gets there?

</comment><comment><USER3> Please tell me this is satire.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is there a way to find out of there are any "scoopers" in your area before subscribing?</comment>


Shooting the Stars from the Most Light-Polluted Country in the World - <AUTHOR> https://petapixel.com/2019/11/13/astrophotography-from-the-most-light-polluted-country-in-the-world/ <comment><USER2> Eagle nebula and War and Peace nebula are really beautiful. What is it about space that makes your mind go blank? or is it just me?</comment>


about 1% - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/node/21543178 What bugs me is how is it possible that while 1% in net worth starts with $6.9M, it is just $350K in income only a quarter of which, comes from financial assets. This implies 1.3% interest - unbelievably little. Any explanation? <comment><USER2> I think this article neatly sums up the problem. It is all about the 'financialisation' of the economy and yet it never mentions gold once ! Just like the film Margin Call. No gold at the base of the pyramid (i.e. capitalism without real always liquid capital) means that you can build a debt/derivatives pyramid to the moon. This monetary inflation only benefits the rich while creating the illusion of wealth below. However a return to gold would destroy big government too and this is why it can never be talked about. The reason interest on savings is so low is that the fed has had to rig rates at multi century lows to try and keep the debt party going. It has thus created the biggest bond bubble in all of financial history. The fed IS the bond market and can not exit without creating a crash.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> What bugs is me is how is it possible that the 6.9M in assets results in only 25% of the 350K income coming as interest - which is a 1.3% interest rate - seems to low for any reasonable investment (lower than inflation, for example)?</comment>


The decline of the Online Message Board - The Old Internet Neighborhoods - <AUTHOR> http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/remembrance-of-message-boards-past/

<comment><USER2> Seems to me that people prefer talking over listening and answering. Topic- specific boards focus the discussion away from the individual toward a topic. FB and Twitter do the opposite but if people really preferred groups then they wouldn't be in decline.

The article and comments also raise a couple additional points: there's now a large body of archived knowledge on the web and some decent Q&A sites so asking questions on message boards isn't the preferred mode anymore.

Having said that, I still miss Usenet.</comment>


Ask HN: What are some great books for children? - <AUTHOR> HN,
what books do you think are excellent for children?
I'm particularly interested in STEM books for a 7 year old, but please don't feel limited by that. I'm interested in any books for children that you particularly like. <comment><USER2> _Three Little Pigs_ provides a solid foundation in engineering cost benefit analysis and the risk assessment of black swan events. It provides the basis for an in depth discussion with your tiny tike of whether or not Pokey's prioritization of low initial cost and straw design was economically sound in light of Lazy's more costly wood construction suffering the similar catastrophic failure when encountering huffs and puffs. The child might be encouraged to write a formal analysis of the counter-factual in which the wolf crept up upon Will while his brick structure was incomplete rather than visiting the other structures first.

The more sophisticated child should probably be introduced to actuarial consideration of how pig lives relate to absolute construction costs and the potential negative effects of increased hut construction regulations on the overall economy. Extending the exercise to draft lobbying positions may or may not be appropriate, i.e. should the construction of wolf-proof structures be left entirely to the private sector seeing as public funding for wolf shelters would provide good projects for engineers?

STEM and 7 in the same sentence make me sad.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> > STEM and 7 in the same sentence make me sad

Why? there are some excellent non-fiction for 7 year olds. In UK 7 year olds are learning science and math in school.

eg _The Way Things Work_ [https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0241227933/](https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0241227933/)

 _If..._ [https://www.amazon.co.uk/If-Mind-Bending-Looking-Ideas- Numbe...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/If-Mind-Bending-Looking-Ideas- Numbers/dp/0750293845/)

 _The Awesome Body Book_ [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Awesome-Body-Book-Adam- Frost/dp/140...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Awesome-Body-Book-Adam- Frost/dp/1408862352/)

 _Just a Second_ [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Just-Second-Steve- Jenkins/dp/132874...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Just-Second-Steve- Jenkins/dp/1328740862/)

Some children are naturally curious and can't get enough of this stuff.

<comment><USER2> Children are not curious abut STEM. They are just curious.

STEM is a non-word used to discount art and literature and dance and history and everything expressive. It reflects the idea that human existence is about getting ahead versus falling behind relative to the conveyor belt created by the Sputnik Crisis. Absent are notions of blossoming and flowering and joy. STEM is white papers by think tanks and research grants and educational politics. STEM is an agenda.

A book about trucks, ships, and planes is a book about trucks, ships and planes.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. As a child, I read up on technology/computers _as well_ as history (still a big hobby of mine), archeology, and random subjects found in the encyclopedias my parents bought me. I went through a bunch of phases (dinosaurs, Egyptian history, computer stuff, art, taking care of fish, etc.). My parents supported all of these with books and museums trips.

I understand the appeal of introducing your child to your passion, particularly if it's an employable skill, but IMO at 7 years old... just buy them whatever books or encyclopedias for children they find interesting. It's not going to hurt them! Though definitely share technology with them.

<comment><AUTHOR> > just buy them whatever books or encyclopedias for children they find > interesting

I'm curious why you think I'm not doing this? Why have you assumed I'm imposing what I want my child to read, rather than listening to what he wants?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Tiger Who Came to Tea - targeted at the younger reader, but I mention it as there's a great lesson to be learned there though, for young and old alike...

Of course Wind in The Willows is still one of my favourite books that I read as a kid and I can quote you large sections of it. Still read sections of it now and then...

I loved the Willard Price "Adventure" series of books. I read "Volcano Adventure" when I was 7. After that I became obsessed with volcanoes and Willard Price books. I drove the librarians nuts about those books and they had to bring them in from libraries near and far until I'd read them all. Grin.

The Willard Price books had a big impact on me though. I grew up and have lived those books - I've dived wrecks and reefs, explored jungles, gone on safari, I worked for four years in Africa, travelled all over. I even climbed up a live volcano. Funny how these things stay with you. Of course highly frowned upon these days as politically incorrect. Ditto the Biggles books.

</comment><comment><USER5> My son is 6 now, and he has loved these two books since he was about 3:

The Boy Who Loved Math: The Improbable Life of Paul Erdos \- [https://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Loved-Math- Improbable/dp/1596...](https://www.amazon.com/Boy-Who-Loved-Math- Improbable/dp/1596433078/)

Bedtime Math: A Fun Excuse to Stay Up Late \- [https://www.amazon.com/Bedtime- Math-Excuse-Stay-Late/dp/1250...](https://www.amazon.com/Bedtime-Math-Excuse- Stay-Late/dp/1250035856/)

We also started this book recently, and he has really enjoyed it so far:

Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World \- [https://www.amazon.com/Women-Science-Fearless-Pioneers- Chang...](https://www.amazon.com/Women-Science-Fearless-Pioneers- Changed/dp/1607749769/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Hoagies Gifted Page used to keep lists of good books for bright kids. I assume they still do. I don't spend a lot of time there anymore for various reasons, including its tendency to frame giftedness as "Whoa is me. I am so smart, and it is ruining my life." But if you are only looking for book recommendations, that aspect probably does not matter.

When my oldest was being homeschooled and no amount of science was ever enough, I subscribed to some kind of science magazine for him. We also had a lot of "cartoon guides... " They occasionally have off color humor, so some people think they aren't appropriate for age 7. But I had no problem with it.

There are also nifty math books out there, like The Number Devil, Alice in Flatland and ...memory fails me. But I imagine all of these are listed on Hoagies.

</comment><comment><USER7> For _younger_ children (that is, children who can't read yet), you're going to have to read that book anywhere from once to several _hundred_ times, out loud. Look for books that have interest for an adult, even though they are children's books.

One of my favorites is "The Bravest Ever Bear". I think a 7-year-old would get a lot of enjoyment out of it. It's not STEM at all (though an interesting engineering problem does show up).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here are a few of my suggestions.

Picture books for young children- We really enjoyed _I Want My Hat Back_ , _This Is Not My Hat_ , and "Sam and Dave Dig a Hole" written by Jon Klassen and illustrated by Mac Bennet.

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/White-Read-Aloud-Award-Picture- Book...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/White-Read-Aloud-Award-Picture- Books/dp/0763655988)

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Not-Hat-Jon- Klassen/dp/1406353...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Not-Hat-Jon- Klassen/dp/1406353434)

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sam-Dave-Dig-Hole- Barnett/dp/140636...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sam-Dave-Dig-Hole- Barnett/dp/1406360988)

Books (with some illustration) for older readers- We're enjoying _The Saga of Erik the Viking_ by Terry Jones and illustrated by Michael Foreman.

[https://www.amazon.co.uk/Saga-Erik-Viking-Puffin- Books/dp/01...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Saga-Erik-Viking-Puffin- Books/dp/0140322612)

</comment><comment><USER8> Laura Ingalls Wilder's books include very detailed descriptions of how things were built or constructed back in the day. One gets the impression the author would've loved to be a carpenter but wasn't able to because she was a woman.

You will need to provide historical context, and point out and countervail all the racist, nativist, etc. parts.

</comment><comment><USER9> You cant beat Roald Dahl - the dark humour and themes are brilliant. Im reading them to my son and its great to still enjoy stories as an adult, and see a different side to the story I would have missed as a child

</comment><comment><USER10> My neighbor, a chemist, gave me some childrens books on why leaves turn color and the different states of matter. I am not sure if they are still in print, but I think something like this would be fantastic for age 7

</comment><comment><USER11> Good night stories for rebel girls - [https://www.booktopia.com.au/good-night- stories-for-rebel-gi...](https://www.booktopia.com.au/good-night-stories-for- rebel-girls-elena-favilli/prod9780141986005.html)

It contains stories of 100 famous women throughout history to inspire young girls to be whatever they want to be.

<comment><USER12> No offense, but I found the writing for these stories to be pretty horrible. The idea and concept is great, but horrible execution. There is also some very poor grammar in there as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> that's a shame. (especially since I just bought it.)

Maybe I should have got this instead? [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Women-Science- Fearless-Pioneers-Cha...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Women-Science-Fearless- Pioneers-Changed/dp/1526360519/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I know you wanted STEM books, but I _loved_ the Cam Jansen series of mysteries from about 6-10ish. It was to the point that the school librarian wouldn't put the new one out generally until I read it.

Link: [http://www.camjansen.com](http://www.camjansen.com)

</comment><comment><USER14> Randall Munroe (of XKCD fame) wrote "Thing Explainer", a book that attempts to explain things using only the most popular 1,000 words in the English language: [https://blog.xkcd.com/2015/05/13/new-book-thing- explainer/](https://blog.xkcd.com/2015/05/13/new-book-thing-explainer/)

I also remember having a book similar to this around that age (maybe a couple of years older): [https://www.dk.com/us/9781465414175-knowledge- encyclopedia/](https://www.dk.com/us/9781465414175-knowledge-encyclopedia/)

The nice thing about the latter one is that the pictures will be enthralling now, and as your child grows they'll be able to understand more and more of the book :)

</comment><comment><USER15> Panchtantra</comment>


Could a Russia-US rail tunnel be built? (video) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-15387714 <comment><USER2> What a useless video.</comment>


Ask HN: Best city for a career in tech in Texas? Austin, Dallas, or other? - <AUTHOR> EDIT: I'm specifically asking as someone starting out in Product looking for career advancement and exciting products, not solely startups however. <comment><USER2> You will most likely find more finance-oriented tech jobs in Dallas. Other than that, Austin will have a much wider range of options.

That said, your career will likely be extremely limited by your inability to communicate clearly (based on your extremely vague initial question and your only-slightly-better edit[1]). I suggest you hack this issue ASAP and take it seriously -- it's not that difficult, and it will make a huge difference.

[1] I realize that this is the interwebs and all, and there are many opportunities to clarify vague initial comments (e.g., your edit), but people really value and appreciate people who ask good questions from the start.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a fair point. Since you've given me the opportunity to clarify via your own response, I'll provide some more details: I'm interested in product management as a long term goal. I find Austin to be a more enjoyable city to live in than Dallas, but Dallas seems to have more career opportunity. Will I be limiting myself by living in Austin?

<comment><USER2> I will defer to other people's judgments on your clarified question -- I am extremely biased towards Austin (I have lived there before and have very fond memories of the city).

I will, however, reframe the question and provide a related answer. Visit each place, and figure out which one you enjoy spending time in. Specifically, which place has people you really like to spend time with. As I suggested above, I'm an Austin fan, and it's not even close. YMMV.

Once you've narrowed down a place, then you can focus on a job. "Project management" is a very broad category, so finding something that fits it shouldn't be that difficult.

That said, if you're implying something (e.g., you want to be a PM for BigCorp or BigBank with job attributes X, Y, and Z), then maybe the place will matter. Personally, I think that's at best premature optimization or at worst the wrong focus.

Best of luck... please keep us updated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Question is very vague. Are you looking for a career in "Product" as in Product Management? If so, you are asking the wrong question.

Best way to get into Product Management is to move into it after doing something else (e.g. engineering, support, operations, etc). Find a company working on products you love, get a job there, and convince the product leadership you know how to make something better.

The best way to go about that is to be location independent. Go where the products you love are.

</comment><comment><USER4> I always see a lot of job postings for Austin. Plus, the city is supposed to be really nice.

<comment><USER5> It's horrible. People are literally dying here. Stay away

<comment><USER6> I know you're being sarcastic but if you own your home wouldn't you want as many people as possible to move in? It'll drive up your property price.

<comment><USER7> And property taxes. Unless you are selling your home anytime soon, higher home prices don't really benefit you in any meaningful ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Two questions:

What role... EE, IT, sys admin, web dev (front/back end)

What kind of company (start up, established etc)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm specifically asking as someone starting out in Product looking for career advancement and exciting products, not solely startups however.</comment></comment>


Zuckerberg to Be Taxed at Lower Rate Than Most Facebook Employees - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2012/02/07/zuckerberg-tax-rate/

<comment><USER2> Can someone explain why are different stock types in the states taxed at different rates? What is the logic behind classification of some stocks as income and some as capital assets?

I am quite knowledgeable in finance, but am Canadian and in Canada all stocks are taxed as capital gains and all capital gains are taxed at 25%.

We do have a complication when it comes to distribuited dividends, but I imagine so do the States.

<comment><USER3> I think the issue here is that stocks belong to the employee as soon as they vest, whereas RSUs don't come into existence until the IPO, at which point they're immediately sold. Since the employee never owns them prior to selling, they count as a short-term capital gain.

<comment><USER2> Thanks. That's very interesting. I guess it's the same as something that we call 'stock options'. You are granted a right to buy stock for the price it would be when one starts working, but you can't really sell them or cash them until the IPO. For example, if I started working for a company that would have stock price of $2.00 if IPO happened today, they would grant me the right to buy the stock at that price at IPO no matter what the stock price would be at the time. It's called 'exercising' your option. So, if stocks were worth $10.00 at IPO, I would have gained $8.00 on day 1.

However, even if you 'exercise' your stock options at IPO (buy stocks for the price of the valuation when they were granted to you), you don't have to cash in your stocks, which means that the gains would not be realized (and thus not taxable) until you do.

The tax, however, would be the same as any other capital gains, which is 25%. We do not care how long the gain took to realize, just the fact that the net gain was positive. (You can carry capital losses from the previous years and offset your positive capital gains when you have them.)</comment></comment></comment>


1100-line Perl emulator for BBN-Lisp runs original Eliza program - <AUTHOR> http://my.umbc.edu/news/48895

<comment><USER2> I'd really like to see PARRY ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARRY](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARRY)) run on a modern system: [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai- repository/ai/areas/...](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai- repository/ai/areas/classics/parry/)

<comment><USER3> If you're interested in chatterbot, check out a short piece I wrote the state of the art - [https://medium.com/@rob_ellis/creating-a-chat- bot-42861e6a2a...](https://medium.com/@rob_ellis/creating-a-chat- bot-42861e6a2acd) and a new framework superscriptjs.com

You could easily port PARRY to work on SuperScript.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The title had me confused for a bit. It's a Lisp emulator written in Perl, not a Perl emulator in Lisp. I was actually hoping it would be the latter, simply because that would be impressive.

</comment><comment><USER5> GitHub repo: [https://github.com/jeffshrager/elizagen](https://github.com/jeffshrager/elizagen)

</comment><comment><USER6> On the one hand, this is really cool. On the other, I'm always sad to see projects like this which seem to follow Perl 4 Best Practices type design. By this, I mean ...

* No strict or warnings

* Calling subs with "&foo" syntax

* Globals, globals everywhere

It's cool that Perl just lets you whip things up with so little ceremony, but it's always nice when people write nice code, in any language.

<comment><USER7> I always love it when someone does something awesome in Perl, but always a little scared to see the code :-(

A sad thing here is that the code looks like it mostly would run under strict and warnings, and it'd be pretty easy to simplify the sub definitions at the start

<comment><USER8> Strict is not that big of a deal and can be easily enabled later. Seriously, those issues with the code are really tiny and very unimportant, especially for this project. But I would definitely choose this kind of code over anything with Moo* for example.

It's sad that people don't know or forget what makes a code easier to understand and how important it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why is someone interested in old Lisp, if their best attempt to emulate it inspires them to code in Perl.

It's like uncovering the manuscript of some old Beethoven score, and you and your friends choose to squeak it out with your armpits, instead of pulling together a string quartet.</comment>


Standoff over guns. John Lewis is an absolute hero - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/22/politics/john-lewis-sit-in-gun-violence/index.html <comment><USER2> Once you go to filibuster, you've already lost.</comment>


8K 360 degree video - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNdHaeBhT9Q

<comment><USER2> For Safari users: 360 video doesn't seem to work correctly in Safari. It does work on Chrome on the Mac though.

There's also a 360 music video from Avicii: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edcJ_JNeyhg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edcJ_JNeyhg)</comment>


nytimes.com DNS down and/or hijacked - a-no-n https://uptime.com/nytimes.com <comment> a-no-n This is one of their website's reverse proxy/LB IP's: [http://22.214.171.124](http://220.127.116.11) (empty content currently)

        nytimes.com.		500	IN	A	188.8.131.52
        nytimes.com.		500	IN	A	220.127.116.11

        www.nytimes.com.	        500	IN	CNAME	www.gtm.nytimes.com.

        www.gtm.nytimes.com.		IN	A (((nothing)))

        ;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
        nytimes.com.		300	IN	NS	ns2.p24.dynect.net.
        nytimes.com.		300	IN	NS	ns3.p24.dynect.net.
        nytimes.com.		300	IN	NS	dns.sea1.nytimes.com.
        nytimes.com.		300	IN	NS	dns.ewr1.nytimes.com.
        nytimes.com.		300	IN	NS	ns1.p24.dynect.net.
        nytimes.com.		300	IN	NS	ns4.p24.dynect.net.

UPDATE 0: Back online as of 5:16 am EDT, must've been a migration/small attack.

UPDATE 1: uptime.com says currently down when it's actually up, maybe related to DNS propagation / GeoIP / long-distance monitoring.

</comment><comment> a-no-n [http://www.cnbc.com/id/100988768](http://www.cnbc.com/id/100988768)</comment>


Cleaning up X server warnings - <AUTHOR> http://keithp.com/blogs/xserver-warnings/ <comment><USER2> Interesting.

Interesting how the -Wcast-qual warnings are _unfixable_ , so it shouldn't exist. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. A lot of warnings seem to fall on this.

Or warnings that would make sense on stricter languages but doesn't make sense on C _exactly because of what you can do with C_ , like, for example, reading serialized data, then casting it to (MyStructure *)

And a little bit offtopic, but GTk have some unfixable warnings as well, something like "blah is not implemented in this platform" so, if I have to use this, but BLAH is not implemented, thanks for warning me, but shut up if I can't fix it

<comment><USER3> Reading serialized data and then casting it into a structure type is ill- defined, very bad practice, and there's nothing in C that tells you it's a good or safe thing to be doing. So, please don't do that.

The exact layout of a structure in memory is up to the compiler, and can easily change with compiler options, even if the compiler itself and the target architecture and platform remain the same.

An externally-visible serialization format should of course be stable, and not depend on the compiler used to build the code, or the hardware platform which might have ideas of how various fields should be aligned (or even how to order the bytes in integers larger than 8 bits).

Serializing data is something you do, just blindly copying the run-time representation that you have to an external medium is _not_ serialization. You should do it field by field, with a well-defined format chosen for each field.

<comment><USER4> That's the theory, sure. But in practice, if you know all your targets support the right "#pragma pack" and "__attribute__((packed))" and other markers that you use - what's wrong with making use of them?

<comment><USER5> The fact that you can't know all of your _future_ targets will support that is a problem.

Endian issues are also a big problem here. The need to byte-swap everything eliminates a lot of the convenience.

It's also way too easy to make breaking changes to the struct, since there's no standard way to mark a struct as being something that you serialize/deserialize, and normally you can change struct fields at will in C code.

Just take the extra five minutes to write code to translate between your struct and a stream of bytes. It'll be easier to understand, less risky, and more compatible.

<comment><USER2> "The fact that you can't know all of your future targets will support that is a problem."

I don't see this as much of a problem as endianness, but yeah, maybe, x86 made us accustomed. And you can use portable types, defined on headers (linux does that, like u8, u16, etc)

But sometimes you know your target won't change (for a long time)

"It's also way too easy to make breaking changes to the struct, since there's no standard way to mark a struct as being something that you serialize/deserialize, and normally you can change struct fields at will in C code."

In the same way you can break your software doing any change. You can mark it with a naming convention but the easiest way is seeing the "pack" directives on it. And unit tests

"Just take the extra five minutes to write code to translate between your struct and a stream of bytes. It'll be easier to understand, less risky, and more compatible. "

Well, it's not five minutes. And it makes your program slower (for the most convoluted data types). A simple example:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMP_file_format](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMP_file_format)

And yes, GIMP reads field by field [https://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/tree/plug-ins/file- bmp/bmp...](https://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/tree/plug-ins/file-bmp/bmp- read.c?h=gimp-2-6)

<comment><USER5> Does it really make your program slower? That padding you have to eliminate for this technique is added for speed, after all. The initial read may be faster, but every access to the data is going to be slower.

I'm not quite sure what the BMP file format is supposed to be an example of, especially since file formats are separate from techniques used to read or write them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I always wondered why so many FOSS projects always generate warnings. I always assumed that the large mature projects like the X server did this because they were performing some crazy optimization that the compiler was too naive to know about. I never had to do this myself, so I thought that the pro's used their arcane knowledge to eek out an extra 0.1% performance out of something for the benefit of everyone. Turns out that the truth is so much less interesting.

<comment><USER7> Often, it will be because the projects are older than the warnings. And when the amount of warnings cross a threshold, they will not be fixed.

<comment><USER8> Yes, definitely this. If there are hundreds of warnings, there's no motivation to fix any of them. If there are none, hopefully no-one wants to add the code that creates one.

Perhaps they now need to compile the project with warnings-as-errors to enforce clean code?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It always surprised me that GCC has no source-level way of controlling compiler warnings.

Many programmers (and gcc apparently) live with the assumption that compiler warnings _must_ _always_ be fixed. This is largely false. Compiler warnings are there to help with additional information, not to be something to fix. There are many cases where the compiler issues a warning which must be ignored.

Many compilers support pragmas to silence a _specific_ warning class in a specific point in the code. IMHO it's a much better approach to silence just a single warning instance where you know the compiler is getting the wrong assumption than silencing a whole warning class like the article suggests.

But it seems that in GCC you have no choice. Instead, code written with/for gcc often silences the warning by inserting some dummy code. For instance, the "unitialized warning" is usually fixed by assigning the variable to itself. It's shitty to look at, and someone that doesn't know this trick might wonder why this is being done.

I've reported a feature request many years ago, and it was quickly closed...

<comment><USER10> I thought thats exactly what these are for: [http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Diagnostic- Pragmas.html](http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Diagnostic-Pragmas.html)

Also work for clang like so (replace clang with GCC for its version):

        #pragma clang diagnostic push
        #pragma clang diagnostic ignored "-Wsomeignoredwarning"
        triggered by this code
        #pragma clang diagnostic pop</comment></comment>


Plover.io – Browser file transfer for any device - <AUTHOR> https://plover.io/ <comment><USER2> It's a pretty intuitive thing and I'd imagine there would be a lot of use cases.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is what we were going for. Glad you enjoyed it!</comment></comment>


Hacker News RSS Feed - <AUTHOR> https://news.ycombinator.com/rss <comment><AUTHOR> I didn't realise HN had an RSS feed so here it is for anyone who didn't know either. Doesn't seem to be documented anywhere.

<comment><USER2> If you go to the HN home page in Firefox, you'll see the RSS icon light up at the top of the window. (I couldn't find a similar feature in Chrome.)

Also, one HN user created some RSS feeds for HN stories that reach various point thresholds:

[https://github.com/gianlucaborello/rssify](https://github.com/gianlucaborello/rssify)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that looks pretty good.

RSS icon doesn't show for me. Even though this is in the home page source.

      <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="rss">

<comment><USER2> You might need to customize the toolbar and drag in the RSS icon - I don't remember whether Firefox displays it by default.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


iWork for iCloud beta - <AUTHOR> https://www.apple.com/iwork-for-icloud/

<comment><USER2> I used to complain about iWork all the time, but now that I'm a complete cog in Apple's diabolical machine (MBA, iPad, iPhone), I've realized two things:

1\. Office for Mac is terrible relative to Office for Windows, to the extent that I get actively frustrated when I try and use it (which I sorta suspect was a design goal.)

2\. Google Docs hasn't particularly improved since I started using it.

Seeing as I've more or less given up trying to do heavy Excel work, I need to basically do pretty markup, pretty data, and pretty presentations for non- technical clients. Being able to display it easily on the iPad would be wonderful.

<comment><USER3> What problems do you see with Office for Mac? Honestly curious.

<comment><USER4> I for one find the interface positively infuriating. I don't have it installed any more, but when I was using Office 2011 for Mac I found that its integration into the OS, from copy/paste to basic UI principles, was horrible. It felt, frankly, as bad as using OpenOffice -- software which is designed to run mostly as-in on Linux, OS X, and Windows.

<comment><USER5> It sounds like Office for Mac is just like iTunes for Windows, then.

<comment><USER4> Precisely :)

Or, depending on who you ask[0], precisely the opposite.

[0] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=iwx...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=iwxnWuG_Ruw#t=65s)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So here's something I don't get:

They've done Pages in the browser. Ok, great. So that would use HTML5, right? And take advantage of modern web browsers' layout compatibilities, complete with CSS styling, and all the cool new stuff like CSS regions & shapes. Right?

Apparently not.

If you go into Pages and open up web inspector, what you'll see is not a nice clean HTML structure with the text written in HTML and formatting in CSS. Instead, you'll see a large collection of dynamically-generated SVG <text> elements, with pixel-exact positions explicitly specified, even to the level of the horizontal locations of individual glyphs. This effectively completely bypasses the browser's own layout capabilities. They appear to have written their own layout engine _in javascript_ , or perhaps ported over the existing native Pages one.

Any ideas why they would have taken this route? Apple and Adobe have both been doing some fantastic work on improving WebKit with better layout facilities, and Microsoft have been doing the same with IE. Things are pretty good in 2013. Why not leverage that work?

<comment><USER7> My guess is that it's because browser support is inconsistent, and Apple needs to have a 100% flawless experience on _ahem_ less-well-engineered browsers. Positioning the SVG elements precisely ensures that nothing is cut off, and there aren't any visual oddities. Writing your own layout engine is a great way to ensure a consistent experience across multiple rendering engines.

<comment><USER8> Most of Apple's other online services (particularly all of their dev tools) instead just require Safari.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> SaaS is outside of Apple's expertise so it'll be interesting to see how this goes. I've tested the beta and it's very impressive, but where Apple has trouble is scaling its internet services.

<comment><USER5> This service doesn't really seem like it needs anything in particular to scale; it's just a static asset-load of Javascript. All the "magic" is done by talking to the same iCloud backend that the installable version of iWork does, which was already scaled to the point where this would just be a blip.

<comment><USER9> I'm referring to file storage and syncing across devices. It's not particularly easy given that Dropbox is an entire company devoted to this cause.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Awhile ago Bret Victor tweeted:

"Human race shoots self in foot, builds prosthetic replacement, completes 100-meter dash. Introducing iWork For iCloud."

Can anyone explain what he meant?

<comment><USER4> My understanding of that tweet would be that he is echoing the general sentiment that many technologists share that the web has made people excited about technologies that were better written half a decade ago.

For example, all the hullabaloo about creating basic sprite-based games or simple WebGL models. Such stuff has been possible on the _desktop_ for many years, but suddenly because it's in a browser everyone seems to lose their mind over the technical amazement of such developments.

To relate this back to the tweet, I believe Bret was saying that Apple is touting iWork for iCloud as a revolutionary product, when in fact it is a pared-down and buggier version of software which has existed on our desktops for years. It's sort of like breaking the wheel to reinvent it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've played with the beta, and it's pretty neat being able to have what almost feels like a desktop quality experience in a browser. It does have a bit of an iOS 6 feel to it with gradients and drop shadows, which is surprising.

</comment><comment><USER12> I would use "XCode for iCloud".

<comment> k-mcgrady What advantages would that give you over using Xcode on a MacBook?

<comment><USER12> I could develop anywhere. On a windows machine, on a friend's laptop, even on my iPad I guess (hopefully)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I suppose we shouldn't expect Firefox compatibility anytime soon? The iCloud calendar icon's been broken on Firefox for a while now:

[https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5182304](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5182304)

<comment><USER14> It's probably because Firefox does not support many presentation attributes as well as proper font antialiasing for the text and tspan SVG tags. It looks like they did create their own text layout engine with support for flowing around arbitrary shapes.

I'm curious how well this works, since emulating native text capabilities (just think RTL vs LTR) requires an insane amount of Javascript and the performance is pretty terrible for texts longer than a few hundred words. If they got this right, it must be a masterpiece of Javascript code. Google recently introduced their own text layout capabilities in Google Docs (also SVG based) and it's pretty buggy beyond simple text. Just to highlight the complexity of the issue, they used to render text into SVG on the server until recently.

It's one of the reasons we had to use foreignObject with pure HTML inside for Moqups instead, although it prevents us from supporting IE at all, including IE 11. We can at least target Webkit/Blink & Gecko this way.

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/SVG_in_Firefox](https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/SVG_in_Firefox) [2] [http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-css- shapes-1-20130620/](http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-css-shapes-1-20130620/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> No screenshot of iWork on Chrome. Only IE and Safari : )

<comment><USER16> Google's the main enemy for Apple these days, far more than the folks up in Redmond I'd say.

<comment><USER17> What is everyone talking about? The Chrome logo is there and so is this:

"iWork for iCloud works with Safari 6.0.3 or later, Chrome 27.0.1 or later, and Internet Explorer 9.0.8 or later. "

<comment><USER15> I know it's there. It's just that they dont take screenshots of iWork on Chrome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> No Firefox compatibility?

</comment><comment><USER19> iM an iDiot

</comment><comment><USER20> Beautiful - Keynote for iCloud crashed my Safari on 10.8.4...

</comment><comment><USER20> I saw these appear a month ago and then they disappeared from iCloud.com for me. Am I the only one?

<comment><USER21> I tried them a month ago, they're still in my account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> iCloud.com sucks. They're trying to replicate iOS UI and functionality in the browser and it's an abysmal failure. Steve Jobs always liked to tout Apple and their employees as artists. Well artists have to know their medium and that's something Apple really needs to work on.

Edit: What's with all the down votes? This is valid criticism.

<comment><USER23> Might be because the discussion is about iWork specifically, and you haven't really explained why iCloud is an abysmal failure.

<comment><USER22> iWork for iCloud which is a part of iCloud.com. I'm strictly speaking of the website for iCloud. It's awful. It takes a long time to load and is stuck with a clunky user-interface that mimics iOS/OS X. It doesn't look right and it doesn't feel right. Apple needs to hire people who know how to design a web application.

<comment><USER23> Maybe there is a topic on a forum somewhere about the iCloud website specifically where your comment might be better received?

<comment><USER22> Perhaps, but this is just something I said in passing by the thread, so I shouldn't have to seek out another forum. If people want to down vote me because they can't accept that Apple isn't perfect then I reckon that's their prerogative. I own and use Apple products exclusively and I think it's important to point out their flaws. Google has much better web applications.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Despite dangers, synthetic marijuana use goes sky-high - <AUTHOR> http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/10/22/v-fullstory/1885944/despite-dangers-synthetic-marijuana.html

<comment><USER2> Well of course its use goes sky-high. After years of looking at those fake- buds for mail order in high-times since you were 13, when some fake weed actually works, of course its use blows up.

I wonder how dangerous the stuff really is, and how much of the danger is actually from the chemical (JWH-018) rather than the incense it's put on.

I have smoked some variation of the stuff, and it definitely gets you high. It's distinguishable from THC, but barely. Mostly the effects go away quicker, and it has a very sativa-like feel, at least the stuff I smoked did.

Going rates that I've seen are actually higher than what the article states, around the same price/g good ganja. Thus, the market is really people who can't get connections to ganja, and moreso people who undergo drug testing.</comment>


Facebook is helping to set up a new pro-tech advocacy group - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/12/facebook-lobbying-american-edge/ <comment><USER2> > The American Edge Project is dedicated to the bipartisan proposition that > American innovators are an essential part of U.S. economic health, national > security and individual freedoms

This will be interesting. On one hand, I definitely agree with that quote in the article. On the other hand, you often see highly tech-invested commenters on this website argue that it no longer makes sense to work for a startup because the FAANGs have amassed so much wealth and power that they can always be a better deal, _even when the startup succeeds_. So at the very least in seems the tech giants are stifling innovation in some way. It's also important to note that all of the tech giants amassed their power through acquisitions, not just organic growth (e.g. Facebook and Instagram/WhatsApp, Google and Android/YouTube).

<comment><USER3> What about Amazon? Wholefoods is the main notable purchase and they were were essentially a peripheral expansion/afterthought. NetFlix I can't even think of a single merger.

<comment><USER4> Amazon: Audible, IMDB, Goodreads, Comixology, the Book Depository, Woot, Ring, Eero.

They've been gobbling up other online media stores for decades. It's to the point you just assume a new store is an Amazon subsidiary or will be soon.

<comment><USER5> Don't forget Twitch as well. That was a massive acquisition. And Alexa, Box Office Mojo, Zappos, LoveFilm (an early Netflix competitor), and Curse. If I recall correctly, they also own a stake in Wikia/Fandom too. And that doesn't even go into the dozens of book stores and book data companies they've acquired over the last 20+ years.

Amazon has gobbled up tons of smaller companies in order to make themselves stronger and more diverse. I'm not sure why Nasrudith singled them out as someone who hasn't really.

<comment><USER6> Zappos was a huge infusion of business DNA into Amazon, and from what I understand had a big influence on Amazon's customer service practices (Zappos was/is known for being maniacally customer focused.)

Another acquisition from around the same time was 'diapers.com'. That site is now defunct, and was never huge, but I believe they pioneered the concept of 'subscribing' to consumables like baby formula and, of course, diapers. After that acquisition, Amazon started doing the same with baby products, then their own brands, and now you can subscribe to just about any recurring purchase on the site.

In these cases, I think the acquisitions provided much more than the economic value of the business. They infused Amazon with new strategies and ideas to make them, as you said, stronger _and more diverse._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I feel like the group has a point. We should regulate Facebook to some degree, and I'm glad to know about their involvement here, but some people think the company should be destroyed and I don't see what they're hoping to accomplish. The realistic present alternative to a world dominated by Facebook proper and Instagram is a world dominated by WeChat and Weibo.

<comment><USER3> Regulate how exactly? While better than the indistinguishable from bots "destroy/break up Facebook" ad nausuem repetition I have seen plenty of calls for regulation with zero thought as to what regulations they would add. The few examples I have seen proposed are either blatantly unconstitutional, ineffectual, and/or obviously doomed to backfire. Politician's syllogism (we need to do something and this is something) gets us nowhere.

<comment><USER8> One possible regulation that should resonate with the HN crowd would be a real form of due process or arbitration for users who have been censored. If platforms like Facebook are going to be the universal arbiters of acceptable public speech, then we ought to have formal recourse when they silence us. As it stands, we are completely at the mercy of the algorithm or outsourced contractors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Facebook is helping to set up a new pro-tech advocacy group to battle > Washington

My guess is that Facebook is going to look for its own specific interest not so much "pro-tech". That makes sense and it is the normal PR naming to make it more palatable.

I can see that Facebook lobbing sometimes is going to align with "tech" needs and other it would play opposite to it.

I cannot read the article, so, anyone knows if organizations like EFF would be included in this advocacy group, it includes just Facebook or which companies it includes?

<comment><USER10> Yup, that's pretty much what I'm getting. It'll be an exercise in doublespeak; on the one hand they will push for internet access for all, but on the other to do away with net neutrality so that they can offer free internet access to Facebook and co but paid for non-facebook, like they tried (and failed) in iirc India. They want to push the Libra cryptocurrency so they can literally print digital e-monies and get a chunk of that dank payment processing revenue. They want to not be held accountable for swaying public interest, because they already are - consciously or not. They are pushing to get more and more power, less and less government oversight. Pesky consumer protection laws, pfft, not for us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This looks like the start of a new misinformation campaign. Unregulation is anti-tech, not pro-tech: tech of today is in a strangle hold of corporate anti-competition tricks. Calling Facebook's lobbying efforts pro-tech is a cruel joke, but most people aren't well informed enough to tell.

<comment><USER12> freedom in America usually means freedom of the elite to do whatever they want, and freedom of the workers from being protected

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's about damn time. One of the clearest things on display during Zuckerberg's Senate grilling is that tech as an industry has proportionally smaller influence when compared to other industries (automotive, airline, finance) despite having a larger share of the economic pie. Tech is also a newer player than other companies in those industries, so it's natural that the balance of power has not yet swayed in favor of tech terms of Washington politics. Infiltrating politics through lobbying, advocacy or people in seat doesn't outright necessarily jive with our ideal notions of a democracy but it's the way that the game is played.

<comment><USER14> I'm not really sure what the purpose is of openly celebrating regulatory capture and the decline of our public institutions as they are being undermined in their independence by yet another interest group

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Luckily the top Google search result for "American Edge Project" is this handy website about knives: [https://www.americanedgesharpening.com/](https://www.americanedgesharpening.com/)

</comment><comment><USER16> You will have to forgive me if I don't trust Facebook to do anything but that which is good for Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER17> >> political advocacy group

Nice way to position your lobbyist.

<comment><USER18> To be fair, lobbyists and advocates are both just mouthpieces for special interests. "political advocacy group" just takes some of the stink off of the connotations of "lobbyist".

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've always wondered why big tech and its seemingly unlimited cash hasn't been able to out-lobby NIMBY groups in the bay area, and spur more housing construction.

Hopefully this is one of the things they'd be able to accomplish with an advocacy/lobbying group.

</comment><comment><USER20> [https://archive.md/CytY7](https://archive.md/CytY7)

</comment><comment><USER21> Disgusting. Everything about this is simply disgusting.

<comment> hakka-nyu-su Particularly the fact that Zuckerberg and other companies are using China as a bogeyman to extract favorable tax and other policy concessions while exploiting Chinese immigrant labor.

<comment><USER17> It's not the labour that is their end game, unless you're talking about their users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Surprised it's taken this long. Tech has for too long pretended Washington and politics don't matter.

<comment><USER23> Not true. Google is one of the largest spenders of lobbying money in Washington.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm sure Facebook will prioritize the interests of the common man in their advocacy.

</comment><comment><USER25> Every company in that article needs to be broken up, and also investigated for their roles in enabling and encouraging extremism. The ad-driven frenzy for clicks at all costs needs to be reigned in.

<comment><USER3> Investigated for things that aren't even remotely a crime isn't a very good idea and is also a form of extremism ironically.

The central asseration of driving it while a convenient scapegoat also assumes facts not in evidence and outright contradicted. Alex Jones has been driving extremism in concrete and proven ways by hawking his own crap for funding.

<comment><USER26> There are congressional investigations as well which are meant to inform legislation, not indict criminals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Sometimes I feel like "The People" need the equivalent of the NRA. An advocacy group that will advocate for their tech civil rights.

The real power of the NRA is not the money donated to it, but the huge group of single issue voters they can whirl up at a moments notice.

<comment><USER28> That's sort of the problem: The People (at least, a subset of them) are the ones who created and support the NRA. The People (at least, a subset of them) are also the ones who run and support Brady.

"The People" includes a large amount of people who disagree with you - regardless of what your belief system is. Arguing that your enemies are some privately sponsored or corporate backed shill is a tactic going back to ancient Rome.

<comment><USER3> Yeah "the People" in the Populist sense is a rhetorical trap. Implicitly it is "People who agree with me" which is myopia if ignorant or astoturfing if not. Even the Ironmanned best "the majority unrestricted from coercing others". That is why rights especially for the unpopular are important along with anonymous voting. With those precautions it would be truly Steelmanned but also not aa susceptible to the trap.

Without safeguarding rights populism is a ladder to powers which may become "people who agree with Great Leader".</comment></comment></comment>