The inside story of how Amazon created Echo - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/the-inside-story-of-how-amazon-created-echo-2016-4?op=1 <comment><USER3> summary: Bezos may or may not have established a requirement for the 1 second response time, Amazon did a bunch of testing to craft responses to common questions, Bezos wanted to make sure it wasn't seen as just another music device and it may eventually make Amazon $1 billion.

I had hoped for a bit more detail.

<comment><USER4> (1) Yes - after reviewing much internal and comparative data (2) Yes - <USER2> and lots (3) Yes - he's not a huge music fan (4) Easy speculation, but probably yes given ASP and likely units sold

source: physically present in many meetings in which first 3 were discussed, debated, and decided.

<comment><USER5> Does he like audiobooks? Audible integration is one of my main loves about the Echo -- I own 3 of them now. There are some minor tweaks which the app could use ("end-of-chapter sleep" being the main one, and maybe a go-back-5m on top of go-back-30s, and an auditory representation/readout of how far into a chapter/book/etc. you are.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How is this any more useful than my smartphone? I'm also extremely skeptical of voice controlled anything ever catching on. It's just too awkward, no matter how good the technology gets.

<comment><USER7> Its much better than a smartphone mic. And always on, unlike a phone you need to take out of your pocket.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > seemed like more confirmation that the ecommerce giant lacked the chops to > create a game-changing hardware device.

Only if you haven't heard of the kindle.

> lengthy internal debates about its market appeal

something something fire phone.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm fascinated by Echo because it seems like a silly idea on paper, yet I can't stop hearing good things about it.

Genuine question: are people not concerned about the NSA potentially listening to all their conversations?

I am tempted to buy one, based solely on the rave reviews, but I'm 80% confident the NSA could hack into it and bug my home if they wanted.

<comment><USER10> I guess an obvious question is: what makes you think they haven't already? You have a smartphone, yeah?

More realistically, I would say that for most people, the NSA thing is a non- issue. Most of America isn't as privacy-minded as HN tends to be. I personally am not concerned about that. If the NSA is hacking into my Echo, there are bigger issues than the Echo -- namely, the NSA is overreaching. I'm not sure that ruling out an otherwise beneficial symptom of the problem really fixes the problem itself.

In other words, if you don't have an Echo, does that magically make the NSA powerless? No, of course not.

<comment><USER9> Great points. While I don't consider myself that privacy-minded, I have been trying to be more conscious of it lately. I suppose I trust my phone more for two reasons:

1\. The public battle between the FBI and Apple gives me some confidence that my phone isn't bugged. 2\. Even if it is bugged, my phone spends most of its time in my pocket or in a corner of my bedroom charging. Its microphones aren't good enough to pick up any real conversation in either situation.

The Echo is unique in that it is specifically designed to hear all conversation in a room and placed in a central location at all times.

Having said that, I agree that the Echo will not make or break the NSA. It is, however, one more potential security hole I am willingly bringing into my life. I will have to weigh the benefits to that risk. Just like I continue to use my smartphone, Gmail, Facebook, etc because the benefits have outweighed the risk, I am coming around to the benefit side of Echo's equation.

<comment><USER11> If the NSA had any reason to listen in on your conversations, nothing will stop them. It's just as easy to point a laser microphone at any window in your home, or simply planting a bug in your home.

<comment><USER12> Easier yet, just remotely activate the microphone on one of your smartphones or other devices. Most people have already accepted internet connected listening devices into their homes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why can't I buy one outside of the US?

<comment><USER14> I suppose they are busy meeting the demand from U.S. customers, but I hope they will go international later on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Jeff Bezos' marketing arm at it again. Notice that the Tesla Model 3 was the hottest news of the weekend and only got a tiny Business Insider article?

<comment><USER16> Without trying very hard I found 4 Business Insider articles about the model 3 published in the space of 2 days, including 3 different articles about the model 3 published in one day...

[http://www.businessinsider.com/here-is-the-tesla- model-3-201...](http://www.businessinsider.com/here-is-the-tesla- model-3-2016-3)

[http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-everything-we-know- abou...](http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-everything-we-know-about-the- just-revealed-tesla-model-3-2016-4)

[http://www.businessinsider.com/the-model-3-is-teslas- biggest...](http://www.businessinsider.com/the-model-3-is-teslas-biggest- gamble-here-are-the-risks-2016-3)

[http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-stock- model-3-2016-4](http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-stock-model-3-2016-4)

Amusingly one of the comments under one of those articles even accuses BI of having a "lovefest" for Elon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is echo a profitable business unit for Amazon?

I don't know a single person in my extended network, ranging from elderly family members to colleagues and tech professionals, to my teenage sister's cohort, who considers it anything but an obnoxious idea. I've actually made a point to try and ask people I know about it without sharing my opinions with them first, because I earnestly want to understand if people want these kinds of devices in their homes.

Though the sample of my connections is small (N ~ 75 people), it is fairly diverse and randomized across age, income level, education, tech proficiency, and world-wide geographic location, and it has seriously been a completely uniform, 100% rate of negative opinion regarding the idea of Echo.

I'd like to see more official numbers though, to better understand where the demand does come from for it.

<comment><USER18> [http://www.amazon.com/Amazon-SK705DI- Echo/dp/B00X4WHP5E/ref=...](http://www.amazon.com/Amazon-SK705DI- Echo/dp/B00X4WHP5E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1459726284&sr=8-1&keywords=echo%5C#customerReviews)

35k people have reviewed it. 4.5 star average. 35k > 75

<comment><USER6> Yes, everyone knows you should trust a site's own reviews for a product online.

<comment><USER19> Just like everyone should trust that someone on the internet is sincere in their claim to have surveyed 75 people in his social network(which magically contains a random distribution of the population) about their opinions on the Amazon Echo, with unanimously negative results.

<comment><USER17> I'm not asking anyone to trust my network survey. I am saying, "Hey, I surveyed my network and it really disagrees, to a frankly unbelievable degree, from what the popular presentation is -- can someone point me to some sales, etc., data to understand this disparity?"

Linking to Amazon reviews does imply a certain belief that it's a credible source of information, but I have never found that to be true. Many products I've purchased with 4-5 star average reviews and many thousands of reviews overall have nonetheless been defective, broken easily after opening, or fallen short of the descriptions in other ways.

Additionally, there's also the problem of sources of review bias, like people who frequently review new tech and thus overlook certain rough edges or pitfalls because, to them, those aren't a big deal with bleeding edge tech and can be forgiven (but to regular consumers, it's often not true), or like people who have devoted many hours to climbing high in the rankings of Amazon reviewers, and are implicitly affected by thinking of how their review might affect the way they are perceived in the Amazon reviewer rankings.

Of course, my sample of 75 from my network _could also_ be biased, but I'm not asking anyone else to believe the result of that sample, or even to believe that I actually conducted that sample. You could even treat my comment as though it started out with "Imagine if the following was true:" and go from there if you wanted, and just treat it as a thought experiment in terms of how to actually prove the hype over Echo derives from actual sales success and consumer traction.

It's very telling to me that my comment is downvoted and attacked on weak grounds rather than addressed.

If it's any comfort, I really, actually have asked around 75 of the people in my network, which includes extended family of a variety of age ranges and tech propensity across the midwestern US. But I have also asked friends across Europe and southeast Asia over gchat and Skype too, as well as former colleagues in most of the large urban areas along both coasts of the US, and one in Mexico City.

It's actually really, really, really easy for a person to get a pretty diversified sample of people just asking questions to their social network. There surely are dimensions along which it is not well diversified, such as people living below international poverty standards -- because the very nature of considering purchasing an Echo or having an internet connection and Skype account to talk to me overseas is correlated with not being below some international poverty line. And it's perfectly fine for people to suggest this invalidates the usefulness of my ad hoc social connection survey.

It's disappointing to me that people are focusing on criticizing some ad hoc survey with a small N. No one, certainly not me, is claiming that survey to be statistically rigorous. But, if you assume the survey I describe did actually occur with the results I explained, then it's at least an anomalous outcome that might prompt someone to say, "Hey, what are the numbers that make people think Echo is actually successful?"

If you don't want to assume anything about the survey, because it's an internet comment and you don't care, then fine. Don't. But in what possible way could it be valuable to divert attention away from the question at hand ("Why is Echo hyped?") and waste time arguing about an experience I claim to have had (asking for and receiving opinions on Echo) that you cannot verify.

Amazon doesn't release sales numbers, and all the growth stats for Echo that appear in puff pieces are just described as sales growth, but relative to some baseline that we don't know. An article that says "sales up 300%" is junk unless you can actually see the sales data to understand what that 300% means.

And don't get me wrong. This is not Amazon hate. I'm not Amazon's biggest fan for reasons of how they treat workers, but I am still an Amazon customer and I even wrote a whole thing on another post the other day talking about the usefulness and value I get from Amazon Prime Music.

It just seems kind of nuts that someone can't say, "Hey, my experience when I've gone out of my way to ask about Echo to lots of people is that literally no one is interested in it -- what data is there to help me understand why Echo is still so hyped?" without being downvoted out of some HN group-think / Amazon tribalism.

It really, really was an _earnest_ question. I'm just asking for what data sources there are to suggest Echo's hype is justified. Linking to Amazon's own reviews for it is clearly not a reasonable answer. So, what else?

<comment><USER19> Frankly, it is unbelievable that 100% of the people you asked had even heard of the Amazon Echo(it's hardly a household name), let alone that every single one of them had the same opinion on the product. Accusing people of engaging in group-think or tribalism over being downvoted for making a very dubious claim speaks volumes about the brand of pseudo-rationality you are engaging in, regardless of how truthful you are or aren't being with your claim.

It's one to thing to earnestly ask "what data is there help me understand why Echo is still so hyped". I don't think anyone downvoting you takes issue with you asking for information.

But when you're asking this question immediately after claiming to have surveyed a large group of people in your personal network - supposedly taking into account age, tech literacy, physical location, etc. - and received not only negative responses across the board, but a specific, unanimous emotional response that the device in question is "obnoxious", you should expect that people will receive such an absurd claim with extreme skepticism.

If you didn't want to divert from getting genuine responses to your earnest question, then you should have asked yourself if including information about this survey you supposedly conducted really added anything to the discussion, rather than blame the community for letting it serve as a distraction.

<comment><USER17> Many people have used Amazon within the past year, and therefore it would be unlikely for them to have not heard of Echo. It's very much a household name, yet doesn't seem to justify being so. That is puzzling.

Including the information about the overwhelming response I've encountered (an actual _aversion_ to the idea of the device) is relevant. It is not a distraction. It's more likely that it is downvoted because it is viewed as a negative comment about Amazon and about overhyped tech -- such comments are frequently downvoted here.

It's very easy to have a network that randomizes over age, tech literacy, and physical location. I'm frankly baffled you would think that's hard to obtain. I grew up in a poor part of the rural Midwest, met lots of international people while in college, and worked in southeast Asia and western Europe for brief periods. Even without those working experiences, I would have a very globally diverse set of connections, and while it may not be true for everyone, it's not as outrageously rare as you seem to portray.

I maintain that including my experience of hearing no reaction other than aversion is useful as a starting point to further ask why it is so hyped. I don't mind if others don't like it, but I don't agree with your characterization as a "brand of pseudo-rationality you are engaging in" \-- that part is ridiculous.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Redditor's solid explanation of memes and anti-meme behavior - mkr-hn http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1arq1y/til_that_when_the_store_hot_topic_attempted_to/c90cj68

<comment><USER2> I believe this is a large component of it. However, I think there is also a certain amount of response in the form of:

"We made this and shared this, why are you getting paid for it?" Which is different than the tribal notions. Basically if someone is going to profit from my free work, from my community, why shouldn't they at least offer me a cut? It is not a case of legal requirement, it is a case of decency. Something is built on sharing, then someone else decides to make a profit - <AUTHOR> sharing that - goes against the grain of the idea to begin with.</comment>


The Shrinking Singapore Stock Market - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-11/the-incredible-shrinking-singapore-stock-market <comment><USER2> This is also happening in the US to some degree, fewer companies are going public and prefer to stay private longer, many times by letting investors/shareholders get some liquidity via private equity injection of capital. The way I try to protect myself against this is:

1) Heavily diversify in international (50% of my equity portfolio is in ex-us index funds), where the declining trend is not as sharp.

2) Tilt my equity allocation towards small cap value (20% tilt). Small cap value has been shown by academics to be a good proxy for private companies that a normal investor in the public market cannot typically own.

I hope it'll be enough!

<comment><USER3> Hmm, I don't think its the same thing though. The US has multiple stock exchanges and many different cities hyper-specializing in different things (e.g. SF- Tech, Chicago-Commodities, NYC-Finance, Houston-Energy). The country itself is a powerful economic engine with all that land and close to 300 million people.

In comparison: the only reason Singapore did so well because economic activity in APAC needed to be directed from an English speaking country in the region which was stable and had a well established corporate laws/governance.

Now that other countries are catching up, Singapore is rapidly losing that advantage.

<comment><USER4> Somehow Australia failed that criteria</comment></comment></comment>


German plan for product liability for software released with known security bugs - <AUTHOR> https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.deutschlandfunk.de%2Fsoftware-fehler-da-gibt-es-seit-jahren-ein-gewisses-laissez.694.de.html%3Fdram%253Aarticle_id%3D381800&edit-text= <comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the google translate only link, could not find an English article on the topic.

I beleive the intent is good, but this could have a huge negative impact on the German software market, if implemented incorrectly, but will most likely have no effect even if it is passed.</comment>


Ask PG: How hard would it be to implement a blacklist of domains for HN? - <AUTHOR>

So I can just skip certain sensationalist postings... <comment><USER2> I'm guessing you mean a per user list. It would be easy technically, but I don't want to do it because it would take the pressure off making the site good.

<comment><USER3> Using an aggregation of the per-user lists to guide the evolution of the site- wide list would probably resolve that concern. It's also conceptually very similar to how submission flagging currently works here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/32404> Hacker News filter for Greasemonkey seems to be what you want.

</comment><comment><USER5> already exists. Can someone reply with the exact location/listings?

<comment><USER6> Sure.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=499044></comment></comment>


Home in Nix – dotfile management - <AUTHOR> https://hugoreeves.com/posts/2019/nix-home/ <comment><USER2> I tried out Nix recently, with the intention of using it to get declarative management of my user account.

I discovered too late that Nix basically has no support for this.

While NixOS has some very nice features for declarative setup, user environment management boils down to terminal commands for "install package X, remove package Y".

The mentioned home-manager seems more of an awkward hack than a good solution in my view. It builds up a parallel package repository that you have to use besides the actual packages, and requires a lot of additional work if you want to customize something.

In my understanding (possibly incorrent?) it is also not actually immutable, but just dumps down files into $HOME, losing the most interesting aspect of Nix.

In the end I ditched it and stuck to my Ansible setup.

Nix is a great approach, and definitely worth a look, if you can stomach the other downsides (see below). But right now I would only recommend it for deterministic server builds or isolated dev environments, not for managing you main setup.

* Problems:

\- There is plenty of documentation, but it is often incoherent, messy, missing important explanations, and it is generally very awkward to get a good insight and understanding of how all the parts fit together.

\- The language... it is full of confusing oddities; clearly something that has grown peace by piece. Switching to something more coherent like Gluon (also functional, [https://github.com/gluon- lang/gluon](https://github.com/gluon-lang/gluon)) would seem like a better approach to me.

\- Packages: The quality can be very hit and miss. I discovered several that are written poorly. Plenty are also outdated/unmaintained. But: considering the niche nature of Nix, the amount of packages is actually quite impressive.

<comment><USER3> _The mentioned home-manager is more of an awkward hack than a good solution in my view. Tt 's not actually immutable, but just dumps down files into $HOME, _

That's actually not true. Each home-manager generation is immutable and in the Nix store. E.g., the last two generations on my MacBook:

        home-manager generations | head -n2
        2019-12-23 12:05 : id 12 -> /nix/store/6rig5ip0swmnnfcvgm221n5lig3xsh18-home-manager-generation
        2019-12-12 12:40 : id 11 -> /nix/store/8as4k5x7i5bhf3wjvlcczhx8w2680k46-home-manager-generation

But it symlinks certain files from the store in the home directory, because some programs (e.g. shells) have hardcoded paths to configuration files.

 _losing the most interesting aspect of Nix_

Similarly to the declarative NixOS configuration, you can switch between home- manager generations, etc. It's a purely declarative configuration.

 _It also basically builds up a parallel package repository that you have to use besides the actual packages,_

What do you mean by this? home-manager also uses the Nix store. E.g., my home- manager configuration contains ripgrep in the declarative package configuration:

        $ realpath $(which rg)
        /nix/store/hww0h39bs56hp17ynxcjrk0imgqill07-ripgrep-11.0.2/bin/rg

_There is plenty of documentation, but it is often incoherent, messy, missing important explanations,_

I fully agree! Often one has to read derivations in nixpkgs to understand how things are done.

 _The language... It is full of oddities and basically a mess_

I disagree. I didn't like it when I started using Nix and seriously looked at Guix because it used scheme. Now, 1.5 year later, I like Nix as a language. It's just a small, functional language.

\---

I think the biggest barrier of the Nix ecosystem is that you can't really use NixOS or Nix in a meaningful way without also learning the Nix language and some of the intricacies of writing derivations. So, you are pretty much all-in or it will be a frustrating experience. So, I understand your point about only using NixOS on reproducible servers. I also use NixOS on my desktop (and love it), but admittedly, it's only doable when you invest enough time to learn things.

If someone wants an immutable system with transactional installs and updates, Fedora Silverblue is probably a much easier entry-point, because you do not really have to understand OSTree et al. to use it.

<comment><USER4> > Now, 1.5 year later, I like Nix as a language. It's just a small, functional > language.

If nixos used a different language (e.g. gluon), do you think you would have become more comfortable quicker?

<comment><USER3> I don't know Gluon (from a quick glance, it looks similar to Haskell and ML). But I do not think it will help much. Nix is a small, lazy, functional language. Being a lazy functional language, it will be more difficult for people without a FP background. But laziness and purity provides a lot of benefits.

I think the problem is more about documentation and expectations:

\- Nix only has a small number of builtins. A lot of useful functions are in nixpkgs. As a consequence, you often have to look in two places to find if there is an existing function that does what you want to do. Added to that, some functions are undocumented and can only be discovered through the REPL or by reading the relevant nixpkgs sources. Then some functions do have documentation, but the documentation is very terse, does not contain good examples, etc. I think things would be clearer if Nix had a documented standard library and nixpkgs would only be focused on providing package derivations and NixOS modules.

\- Expectation-wise: I think a lot of people do not expect to have to learn a new language when starting to use a package manager and/or distribution. This leads to treating derivations akin to RPM spec files (which is what I did in the beginning), which becomes frustrating very quickly.

Disclaimer: I am by no means a Nix expert. These are my observations from learning Nix myself since last year.

<comment><USER5> > Nix is a small, lazy, functional language. Being a lazy functional language, > it will be more difficult for people without a FP background. But laziness > and purity provides a lot of benefits.

Many functional languages have lazy evaluation, and they do provide benefits. However, unfortunately, this concept has leaked into other areas of programming. In particular, many database ORMs use lazy evaluation to pull data. In one step, you create a database query, then pass that off to another function or class. Then, when it's off in another package and evaluated the query is made.

The main problem with lazy evaluation of database queries is that it treats a database evaluation like normal code, even though under the hood there may be network access, caching, and if you're not careful duplicative database pulls.

Generally, there should be a rule in programming languages that when you make a network call, the programmer has clear visibility into when that is happening. Hiding it with fancy syntax is more of a negative than a positive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My $HOME _is_ a git repo for my dotfiles, with a .gitignore containing just "*". Simple, zero abstractions, no need for additional management.

<comment><USER7> Further, you can create a bare git repo and make $HOME it's working tree.

More details here [1].

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11071754](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11071754)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Would prefer GNU stow for simplicity.

[https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/](https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I've looked at and read about other's experiences with stow in the past. I'm uncertain about this so please correct me where I am wrong, but the issues I see with stow are: 1\. It's somewhat dated/may have a tail of legacy features 2\. I'm unsure of it's value beyond of what can be provided via the Git Bare Repo solution linked in the intro of my post. 3\. More importantly, it's not a programmable solution where you can override default files based on the current system. The main value proposition I see in my system is that I can define a single default configuration for, say, my terminal Alacritty, and override the configuration where necessary based on either my user, machine or role. Nix is a programming language, so I essentially have my system configuration managed via a programming language and can control things with a great level of detail.

<comment><USER9> I use Stow, it is simple and only does a few things, but for a lot of users like me it is more than enough:

1\. Probably it will not receive more features any time soon.

2\. You can have several configurations and mix them, also it makes very easy to adopt changes from the current system and/or rollback changes.

3\. No, it is not programmable, but you can have several folder for different systems and configurations. I for example have a folder called unix for all *nix systems, other called x11 for x11 programs, darwin for macOS, etc. You could do the same with roles.

If you want really fine grained control over machine/user/role, it is not enough, and it does not take into account package managing at all.

I use a mix of Stow/Ansible for Desktops and HashiCorp/Ansible for the `cattle`. Nix is more powerful than my setting, but I still need to evaluate if it is flexible enough for the orgs I work with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have very similar setup [https://github.com/dejanr/dotfiles](https://github.com/dejanr/dotfiles) it was inspired by [https://github.com/peel/dotfiles](https://github.com/peel/dotfiles) and few other repositories.

Also i still symlink some stuff like stow is doing, but with few shell scripts. The main difference is that my dotfiles are not start with '.'.

Idea is to move everything to nix, so that when you rollback, you rollback your dotfiles as well.

What i wish maybe, is that i used home manager but that some future focus.

</comment><comment><USER11> stay simple, simple dot files, don't create overkill work for yourself so you don't need to manage your dot files.

</comment><comment><USER12> Nice post, thanks for sharing. I currently use vcsh and myrepos and they work great for me. Now that I switched to Nixos maybe I could give home-manager a try.

I wrote about my approach here in case you are interested ( [https://germano.dev/dotfiles/](https://germano.dev/dotfiles/) )

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. Home manager will enable you to manage your dotfiles. The more interesting proposition comes from Nix. I've absolutely loved using it in general and run NixOS by choice as my desktop OS. The great thing about using Nix and Home Manager to manage dotfiles is that your configuration is defined in a _programming langauge_. You have broad scope to control things based on whatever environment you are deploying the files to. It's a really powerful solution, it just takes a bit more time than some other dotfile systems. Give Home Manager a go if you have time to tinker, and if you have questions feel free to contact me through my email on my homepage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I just clone my dotfile repo from github into ~/darkrc and include the config files I want on each system, so my ~/.bashrc will have a "source $HOME/darkrc/bashrc" at the end, ~/.config/ranger/rc.conf will have "source ~/darkrc/ranger.conf", etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's certainly one option. The unique thing about dotfiles is that everyone has a different 'best solution'. The setup outlined in my post has the advantage of being highly configurable and programmable. However, for some people it might make more sense to use a plain git repo with symlinks as installing Nix on all their devices could be a nonstarter. I'm curious, what do you use to manage tools that don't have a `source $SOME_PATH` option. Do you symlink?

<comment><USER14> I used to symlink and have a simple dotfiles repo, but this forces you to have exactly identical rc files. Different computers simply need different setups, so I started with ansible and a few playbooks running locally.

<comment><USER15> This was posted recently [https://drewdevault.com/2019/12/30/dotfiles.html](https://drewdevault.com/2019/12/30/dotfiles.html), but I actually liked the idea of using uname, hostname etc in constructing $PATH and even though I was already using git to track my dotfiles I adapted some parts of my setup like Drew describes and made $HOME a git repo itself ignoring everything by default. Works quite well across different OSs, machines and shells.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> streb-lo I for one am waiting for systemd homed.

<comment><USER16> As always with anything about systemd, it's impossible to know if it's satire without looking at the source code. Sometimes, not even then.</comment></comment>


Increasing battery life in linux - <AUTHOR> http://pranavk.github.com/linux/power-saving-and-increasing-battery-backup-in-linux/

<comment><USER3> Within Ubuntu and other Debian derivatives you should do

        sudo aptitude install laptop-mode-tools

This basically does a lot of minor tweaks, like disabling finger print readers etc.

<comment><USER4> Slight correction for the lazy who just copy/paste commands.

        sudo apt-get install laptop-mode-tools

Thanks for the tip.

<comment><USER5> The original command, as written, works fine. Aptitude does have an interactive mode, but when run with arguments like that, will behave approximately the same as apt-get would. Aptitude acts as a frontend to several of the slightly-lower-level apt tools.

<comment><USER6> Aptitude is no longer pre-installed in current versions of Ubuntu (and Debian). Also, aptitude used to be recommended over apt-get because its handling of dependencies was superior and because it made it easier to find "orphan" packages. As I understand it, apt-get has since caught up with aptitude and is nowadays the preferred command-line tool.

<comment><USER7> More importantly, aptitude is known to be broken. Aptitude's resolver never caught up with Ubuntu's multiarch transition, and will erroneously conclude that many things are uninstallable (or attempt to "fix" things by uninstalling half the system)

<comment><USER8> It looks like this has since been fixed:

[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/aptitude/+bug/8317...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/aptitude/+bug/831768)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> the title should be "Increasing battery life in linux with a nvidia GPU"

I got a Ivy Bridge Zenbook and i can get up to 7 hours battery life thie is even better like windows.

i use powertop to reach this.

<comment><USER10> This. Another misleading "generic title" for a case that just happens to be his laptop/setup.

i've a similar experience with my ivy bridge laptop. I also check with powertop whenever something looks odd, but by default, all the things were rather fine (i run Arch)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wouldn't using bumblebee do exactly what this article describes, but automatically and with the advantage of using the nvidia GPU for specific applications?

At least that's what I've been using for over a year now.

<comment><AUTHOR> I used that but it failed for me for some reason or other. So i tried it, its also nice piece of code that worked nicely for me. Doubled the battery by more than 100%

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Intel's PowerTOP helps track down power usage more generally: <https://01.org/powertop/>

<comment><USER13> Btw., does anyone knows if there is some similar tool for iOS? (Doesn't matter if I need root access...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Isn't this only for laptops with dual GPU (optimus setup). In which case, I guess the only "other OS" is windows that is (was) the only one able to switch on the fly which graphics chip is to be used.

<comment><AUTHOR> yup, right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm running on a Fedora install with very customized front end here (basically ditched everything and built from scratch) which is very easy on the resources (about 330Mb of RAM usage after boot) and I'm getting between 2 and 3 hours of battery life. I've done nothing power management related though.

Windows on the other hand sucks the whole battery up in 2 hours tops. Still, I'd be very much interested in increasing my battery life. This is the only thing holding me back from doing serious coding outside.

<comment><USER16> This is the one thing which depends very much on the hardware you're running, but as the post notes, turning of the GPU can very helpful, and you won't notice the difference in most usage (which may even be everything you do).

I was able to do this in the BIOS, which is actually the easiest way to do it (if your computer supports it).

The other thing is scaling the fan down[1] - as long as you don't go overboard with it, it's perfectly safe, and a _huge_ impact on battery life.

Finally, turn off your wireless card and/or Bluetooth if you're not using them. Many computers enable Bluetooth by default, but since most people don't use them, it's a needless battery suck.

[1] The other thing is scaling the fan down - <USER2>

<comment><USER16> Copy and pasted wrong - this is the link: <https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fan_Speed_Control>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Self-promotion time: [http://www.nux.ro/archive/2012/10/EL6_power_usage_optimisati...](http://www.nux.ro/archive/2012/10/EL6_power_usage_optimisation_on_Intel_Sandy___Ivy_Bridge.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> There was a more general stackexchange question dealing with this. Actually, there are probably a few - but this is recent enough to warrant reading.

[http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/17858/how-can-i- impr...](http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/17858/how-can-i-improve- battery-life-in-fedora-15/)

</comment><comment><USER19> for low-level lovers <http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/swsusp/8hours.pdf>

from the suggestions of [http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_reduce_power_consumptio...](http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_reduce_power_consumption)

</comment><comment><USER20> There is no _/proc/acpi/battery/_ in my system. I do have acpi installed.

<comment><USER16> Do you have an NVIDIA GPU?

<comment><USER20> Yes, I have an Intel HD 3000 and Nvidia NVS 4200. I use bumblebee and bbswitch to handle dedicated GPU.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I guess that explains why the fan is permanently on in Linux on my XPS L502x.

</comment><comment><USER22> Doesn't this absolutely freak out X11?</comment>


Researchers Find Critical Backdoor in Swiss Online Voting System - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/zmakk3/researchers-find-critical-backdoor-in-swiss-online-voting-system <comment><USER2> Who wants to bet their democracy that this was the only issue, not just the only one _found_?</comment>


Linus Should Use Windows 7 - <AUTHOR> http://ewams.net/?view=Linus_Should_Use_Windows_7

<comment><USER2> The Windows 7 suggestion come naturally because ReactOS isn't ready yet. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> That's a pretty ridiculous suggestion for someone like Linus surely...

</comment><comment><USER4> Not sure if trolling or a joke.

<comment><AUTHOR> Neither. Linus has a problem, I demonstrate that Microsoft has already solved it.

<comment><USER5> He had a gripe with a specific distro, not that all distros exhibit this problem. And Windows would not solve his overall usage needs and wants.</comment></comment></comment>


Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything by Steve Blank - <AUTHOR> http://hbr.org/2013/05/why-the-lean-start-up-changes-everything/

<comment><USER2> Steve Blank has a high rate of Self-serving bias <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias>

I don't know if he is doing it consciously for self promotion or he really believes it. Entrepreneurship is always about grabbing opportunities and that is why it is difficult for entrepreneurs to plan ahead. Scientific management was a reaction to limit the chaos and improving success. To label that as "traditional method" and everything else as "lean startup" is very awkward and malicious.

Pretending to be the innovator of a process and taking credit for something without mentioning Krafcik, Womack or Deming is strange.

I still find Steve Blank rather questionable.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess he is advocating applying leanness to "start-ups" rather than production, quality or manufacturing.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> _One of the critical differences is that while existing companies execute a business model, start-ups look for one. This distinction is at the heart of the lean start-up approach. It shapes the lean definition of a start-up: a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model._

Isn't this equally applicable to individuals as well, with certain modifications?

You can act like a start-up organization, searching for repeatable and scalable business models. You can switch from one start-up idea to another, all the while trying to find a profitable business to create and run.</comment>


We built a video conferencing app using JavaScript in hours - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@aydankirk92/how-we-built-a-video-conferencing-app-in-hours-9a35ed930ed0 <comment><USER2> I'm still curious what is the underlying server tech that takes care of the video stream, and if it's tcp only or does some udp too.

I guess the server doesn't modify the video stream. Since browsers are able to read the webcam, do they use hardware acceleration to compress the video stream? Is there a collection of formats?

I still wish we could go back to p2p video streaming like Skype was doing.

<comment> i-am-curious P2P scales quadratically, central server scales linearly. You might argue the cost is not borne by the operator but imagine what happens if Zoom was P2P. It would probably bring down the internet.

Moreover P2P would require more upload bandwidth per user from users. P2P just doesn't make sense for standard video conferencing.

<comment><USER3> > central server scales linearly

Assuming that the server combines all the incoming streams into a single output stream, otherwise it still has to broadcast N-1 streams to each of the N users.

<comment> i-am-curious But why would you not combine them? In fact, I can easily see people being lazy and combining just on N sized stream to reduce server overhead especially if there is compression on top.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm currently using Twilio's programmable video for a mobile product I'm building.

I did a lot of the same review and reached similar conclusions. The popular open-source self-hosted solutions seem incredibly bloated and buggy.

Twilio's offering also manages scaling and infrastructure. I suspect it's cheaper to go with their solution in the beginning and having a self-hosted solution will only become cheaper beyond a certain amount of concurrency/usage. They also offer recording, composition and a couple of other useful features.

If anyone has implemented a self hosted solution that's cheaper to host yourself I'd be interested in reading about it.</comment>


UK Security Agencies Unlawfully Collected Data for Decade - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/17/uk-security-agencies-unlawfully-collected-data-for-decade <comment><USER2> The UK is not going to stop, they are just going to make it legal thanks to the UK's Investigatory Powers Bill. There is no opposition to it in the commons, minus SNP, LibDems I think our last chance to stop it is once again with the lords which I have little hope for, "wont they think of the children"

[https://www.opendemocracy.net/digitaliberties/julian- huppert...](https://www.opendemocracy.net/digitaliberties/julian-huppert/uk- investigatory-powers-bill-becomes-law-terrify- us?utm_source=Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=3e5b752210-DAILY_NEWSLETTER_MAILCHIMP&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_717bc5d86d-3e5b752210-407396011)

Direct quote "It is difficult to assess the extent to which the public is aware of agencies' holding and exploiting in-house personal bulk datasets, including data on individuals of no intelligence interest …" They admitted in 2013 that the data collected is of "no intelligence interest". Anyone before snowden was called a nut job saying the government was doing this, it was all true

Encrypt everything. This is going to force me to VPN to a VPS outside of the UK and route my house's http/https traffic via that, not hard but annoying. Sadly that will then put me on another list where all my traffic is recorded for later decryption.

<comment><USER3> A limitation of "encrypt everything" is that many of the bulk datasets you referred to aren't taken from communications surveillance, but rather from other kinds of transactional, subscriber, or governmental records, which are maintained by other organizations (like a bank).

We can defend against a lot of communications surveillance by encrypting our communications, but these other data sources are still there and are mostly unaffected. (Note that this is also true outside of the UK.)

I don't know exactly how to address that. It seems like the main options are avoiding interacting with the institutions that create the records, persuading them to retain much less information about people, trying to get dramatically greater legal protection for other kinds of third-party records, or some kind of major cultural shift where institutions fear turning data over or governments fear requesting it.

Also, some datasets might exist partly because companies are legally required to retain certain records, so even if they didn't want to know that much about you, they may be mandated by law to have some of this information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone think that the law will be applied here? i.e. does breaking the law result in legal punishment?

I no longer believe that "ignorance of the law is no excuse."

If the judges, policemen, government agents, etc. aren't held accountable for breaking the law (or not knowing it), then I should not be held accountable, either.

The alternative is one where the enforcers of the legal system break it with impunity, while the peasants (that's us!) suffer under the full weight of the law, and of the government enforcement thereof.

</comment><comment><USER5> Two ways they can avoid breaking the law in the future:

1) Stop unlawfully collecting data.

2) Pass into law a bill that would make it legal.

Which do you think they'll do?</comment>


Don't Do Nothing - <AUTHOR> http://blog.datalifebalance.com/dont-do-nothing/ <comment><USER2> Personally, I would question the workplace environment and organizational structure that causes people to feel like they can't/shouldn't do something when they find a problem. But it is admittedly much easier to have the CEO come up with a snappy catchphrase to put the blame and responsibility of this situation back upon workers.

We don't have problems because there are issues management is failing to address. We have problems because _you aren 't doing enough_.</comment>


Cloud Filestore, high-performance file storage for GCP users - <AUTHOR> https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/06/New-Cloud-Filestore-service-brings-GCP-users-high-performance-file-storage.html <comment><USER2> A few questions come to mind after reading the docs (minus the currently 404ing ones): (1) is this a zonal or regional product? ie does it replicate data across zones in a region? (2) roughly what latencies should I expect to see? eg for the following: a 1KG, 1MB, 1GB read and write. Any info here would be helpful. (3) does it have close-to-open consistency? or something weaker / stronger? (4) any plans to add gcp pub/sub integration somehow? would be great to be able to subscribe to changes like with other gcp storage products. (5) any plans to move from NFSv3 to NFSv4? (6) backups available or planned as a feature? eg to GCS (7) can you share anything about how it is implemented?

Thanks

<comment><USER3> Yeah, considering NFSv4 was published almost 20 years ago (December 2000), not supporting it is kinda disappointing.

<comment><USER4> I'm unfamiliar, what does NFSv4 add that Cloud Filestore users will be missing out on?

<comment><USER3> A good place to start is to read the introduction chapter of the NFSv4.0 RFC: [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7530](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7530)

Further minor versions add other things that could be useful for cloud usage, e.g. in NFSv4.1 ([https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5661](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5661) ) parallel data access, sessions, improved delegations, and in NFSv4.2 ([https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7862](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7862) ) server-side clone/copy, sparse file support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> They've undercut Amazon EFS by 33% for the budget option ($.20/gb vs. $.30/gb). Hope this kicks off a little pricing war - shared filesystem is a hugely useful solution for migrating old apps, would be nice if it were cheap. Both options are still grossly overpriced (IMHO)

<comment><USER6> Amazon EFS bills for usage while Google bills for provisioned capacity.

So unless you run GCP at a very high % of provisioned capacity, it's more expensive.

I'm pretty confident EFS can't match GCP's 700 MB/s and 30,000 IOPS though.

<comment><USER7> I did a fair number of tests last year and couldn't get anything like that. If anyone is interested, the poorly formatted output of that is here:

[https://github.com/halbritt/benchmarks](https://github.com/halbritt/benchmarks)

<comment><USER8> Can you please elaborate a little? EFS scales with size, i.e. did you have at least a few hundred GB on there or was it mostly empty? Roughly how many IOPS did you get?

<comment><USER7> IIRC, I populated the thing with 10TB or thereabouts.

For small block sizes, I got hundreds of IOPS.

Latency was pretty terrible in almost all cases.

I wrote a great deal on this topic for internal consumption. Those benchmarks weren't really meant for the general public. My biggest conclusion is that EFS isn't useful for any workload where performance is a concern. Unfortunately, it's priced so high, that I'd never consider using it otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very happy that GCP is opening in LA, however pushing the VFX angle is interesting considering the bulk of that work has moved overseas due to tax credits. Sent the link to a friend at Dreamworks that still has a sizable amount of work in Glendale.

Will also be interesting to find out how they are solving/pricing the immense bandwidth/storage requirements needed to make such work practical.

<comment><USER10> They had a big event about this for the media/vfx industry today: [https://cloudplatformonline.com/LA-Cloud-Region-Launch- Media...](https://cloudplatformonline.com/LA-Cloud-Region-Launch-Media- Home.html)

The data all lives in the cloud, only the models and specs are sent back and forth. Zync is their rendering tech: [https://www.zyncrender.com/](https://www.zyncrender.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is great for persistent storage on Kubernetes clusters. Storage has been complicated so far and while there are external solutions for pooling and replicating locally attached disks, this is much nicer and simpler for most uses.

</comment><comment><USER11> As convenient as this seems, there are good reason that many shops prohibit the use of NFS in production.

There's nothing to prevent any application from doing full error checks on every disk i/o call, dealing with timeouts, etc. Except that nobody wrote that stuff into software designed for local disk.

<comment><USER12> > _As convenient as this seems, there are good reason that many shops prohibit > the use of NFS in production._

Such as?

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Reliability issues, IME.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> At $enterprise-dayjob we've ended up using EFS in AWS after migrating an application that was using NFS. One of the main obstacles to adopting this was perceived lack of security as EFS didn't support encryption of NFS connections between EC2 instances and EFS mount targets. AWS EFS released support for encrypting the NFS connections earlier this year, using Stunnel.

What's the corresponding story re security for cloud filestore?

<comment><USER14> How did you get around the terrible performance of EFS. Are you not read/writing lots of small files?

<comment><USER15> NFS in general seems to struggle with that scenario. Do you get better performance with your own NFS server with that type of workload?

<comment> X-Istence A NetApp filer on 40 Gbit/sec will do NFS plenty fast for running VMs directly to/from the system using ESXi for example.

EFS is not even in the same ballpark in terms of speed :/

<comment><USER15> Right, I've had that setup in the past and I wouldn't disagree with that but I've also seen a netapp choke on lots of tiny files over NFS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The price is more attractive (read cheaper) than AWS, but it is still on the pricey side considering the storage sizes people work with these days.

Using persistent storage with Google sets me back a little over $175 per TB of SSD, per month, without networking factored in.

At $0.20, time a thousand for a TB, Cloud Filestore comes to $200. Let's see how the performance goes.

<comment><USER17> Spin up a huge render job, use the perf of the storage, and then nuke the storage as you have a final product? That's probably what they're getting at.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This seems like a really unfortunate name choice to me. When I first read the title I misread it as Cloud Firestore, which just has one letter different to Cloud Filestore.

<comment><USER19> Aren't these the same? Cloudstore and Firestore are the same product with different branding.

<comment><USER10> ...no, first of all there is no such thing as Cloudstore.

Cloud FIREstore is a document-store database for Firebase, which is the GCP suite of services primarily for mobile apps.

Cloud FILEstore is a NFS file system mountable across multiple compute engine VMs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Product page: [https://cloud.google.com/filestore/](https://cloud.google.com/filestore/)

(disclosure: I work in GCP, but not on this product. Just happy to see it go public for more users.)

<comment><USER20> Is it intentional that on the page, there's a list of Partner Solutions that are essentially a competitor of Filestore?

<comment><USER21> I think these are the solutions that GCP Partners have created USING Filestore.

<comment><USER10> No, they are alternatives that have existed as solutions before Filestore was created. They still have unique features, better performance and other advantages if you need them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The performance of EFS is horrible. I hope this is better. On paper, it seems more performant.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm curious whether this is backed by Google File System ([https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...](https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/gfs- sosp2003.pdf)), or something else.

<comment><USER24> Nothing at Google has been backed by GFS in many years. [https://www.wired.com/2012/07/google- colossus/](https://www.wired.com/2012/07/google-colossus/)

<comment><USER25> Well, the poster probably meant whatever GFS incarnation is around these days (Colossus is v2 or v3, depending on how you look at things). In the end, almost everything at Google is backed by "GFS": Bigtable, Blobstore, GCS, Spanner, Megastore, etc. There's little else that is not backed by GFS, but talks to D directly. At least that has been mentioned in public, of course. Still, none of it is user facing/serving, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Hows it compare (pricing / performance) to using Cloud Storage, for non web accessible files.

Example use case, screenshots of websites where instances both request and write / overwrite them.

<comment><USER10> This is a product that gives you a file system, like attaching a disk, but over NFS so it's available for multiple servers to mount over the network.

If you don't actually need a disk-based file system and just want to read/write individual files as objects, then object storage like Cloud Storage is your best option.

<comment><USER27> Specifically, it depends on whether you need random writes to files and/or (some) file locking semantics/consistency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Even google's blog is prone to spam-comments!

</comment><comment><USER29> wow the premium filestore is as good as a single ssd (replicated). that's really cool to use for mysql/postgres databases on gke, way cheaper than using GCP SQL if you already have a GKE cluster.

<comment><USER30> Whats the advantage of using NFS instead of just attaching a Persistent Disk to a StatefulSet? Wouldn't that be a lot cheaper?

<comment><USER10> NFS is much faster to attach than PD to a GCE node, which can take minutes at times and lead to crash loops waiting for the storage to be ready. This is especially problematic if the disk needs to be moved from one node to another for some reason.

<comment><USER31> Isn't running databases on NFS, really bad?

<comment><USER10> Depends. There's nothing wrong with NFS itself, although v4 is better obviously. There's a performance trade-off with going over the network and sharing the storage with multiple servers, along with the necessary metadata for each file, but if you don't have much contention then it's just like a drive with higher latency.

If that latency is low and your workload can handle disk concurrency well then it works fine. It helps if you use (or configure) a database with more sequential access and buffering for large updates rather than lots of random small writes, as well as spreading the data over several disks.

AWS EFS has latency problems which make it problematic but this product seems to have better performance profile which could work well.

<comment><USER31> I get the performance issue but I'm more concerned about data integrity.

I did a quick lookup in the MySQL docs ([https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/disk- issues.html](https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/disk-issues.html)) and was surprised that this isn't really an issue.

Learned something new, thanks!

<comment><USER10> Databases all use some kind of write-ahead logging so you'll be safe as long as that file is safe, and they're even capable of recovering the file all the way up to any corrupt records that may have been appended at the end.

You shouldn't use multiple servers writing to the same volume for database drives, but other than that it's no different than any other disk that might lose connection. Most VMs "local" disks are still attached over the network anyway, emulating a PCIe bus interface instead of NFS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is also what EDA/ASIC design tools need to move to the cloud.

<comment><USER33> What is EDA/ASIC design tools? AutoCAD?

<comment><USER27> No, but exotic software people use to design integrated circuits, like a WiFi modem, or a Bitcoin miner. Autodesk, the creator of AutoCAD, sells Eagle, an EDA software. It does not go lower than you can go with a soldering iron, except for allowing solder joints that are better created with hot air / infrared heating, and fancy multi-layer circuit boards with components on the inside.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> So now they have two cloud storage products, called Cloud Firestore and Cloud Filestore? Their branding team is on top of their game, as always.

<comment><USER35> Disclosure: I work on GCP

Thanks for the feedback. As the person that named both products, I can say we spent a ton of time debating this but we felt that the fact one is an enterprise file share and the other a document database service focused on mobile and web would mean very little conflict for customers. We will keep an eye on any customer confusion it might cause.

<comment><USER36> This will be extremely confusing for Japanese and Korean speakers.

<comment><USER37> Actually, not that much for Korean speakers, because "file" becomes "pa-il" and "fire" becomes "pa-i-eo". (Damn English triphthongs...)

Hopefully they won't launch Cloud Pyrestore any time soon...

<comment><USER38> Similarly for Japanese, "file" is pronounced/written as "fairu" and "fire" as "faiyaa". If the service docs are translated, then they would look like (and sound as) difference names.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> premium tier iops is a fixed perf vs the per GB iops scaling of AWS, nice.

</comment><comment><USER24> "Typical" availability number is both low and wishy-washy.

</comment><comment><USER39> Given Google's history, is there any good reason to believe this service would still be supported by Google in a few years and not be replaced by yet another new-and-of-course-much-better-than-the-old-one iteration?

<comment><USER40> It's currently in Beta, which means it will hopefully eventually go GA. As with any product from any company ever, just because it's in beta doesn't mean it necessary ever goes GA.

In the case of Google Cloud Platform products, many of them [1] are subject to the deprecation policy [2]. Basically it states that they'll give you one year advance notice of any intent to deprecate those products. This is functionally the exact same policy as that offered by AWS [3].

[1] [https://cloud.google.com/terms/deprecation](https://cloud.google.com/terms/deprecation)

[2] [https://cloud.google.com/terms/](https://cloud.google.com/terms/) (see Section 7)

[3] [https://aws.amazon.com/agreement/#2._Changes](https://aws.amazon.com/agreement/#2._Changes).</comment></comment>


Clumsy Equations (2010) - <AUTHOR> https://susam.in/blog/clumsy-equations/ <comment><USER2> > There is no simple way to solve this equation. I had to resort to using the > Lambert W function to solve this.

How do you know when to use Lambert W function?</comment>


Google Walkout Organizers Say They're Facing Retaliation - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/google-walkout-organizers-say-theyre-facing-retaliation/ <comment><USER3> > Meredith Whittaker, who leads Google's Open Research, said that after Google > disbanded its external AI ethics council on April 4, she was told that her > role would be "changed dramatically." Whittaker said she was told that, in > order to stay at the company, she would have to "abandon" her work on AI > ethics and her role at AI Now Institute, a research center she cofounded at > New York University.

I don't understand why a person who organized the pressure group that led to Google disbanding their AI ethics group would expect her role not to change, since she's involved in AI ethics, the very thing she helped sink. She helped make it politically toxic and a PR disaster for her own employer.

I'm no fan of Google, but they tried to organize something to satisfy a politically diverse group of stakeholders to at least have a discussion on this topic, only to have their efforts very publicly sabotaged by one of their own. Are they really obligated to continue to fund the work she's done to harm the company?

<comment><USER4> They didn't try to do that, though. They tried to organize a group of people who largely (although not exclusively) knew nothing about AI, or ethics, to rubber-stamp their actions and assuage the concerns of regulators & watchdogs. Ethics laundering, basically.

<comment><USER3> That's a really huge assumption, considering they never met (afaict), let alone deliberated anything or issued recommendations. Google sought input from outside their bubble and those inside the bubble immediately protested based on identity politics.

There are a lot more people outside the bubble than inside, and this action makes it seem like Google doesn't give a shit what they think. It's the sort of thing that makes heavy regulation appealing even for those who normally would oppose regulation on principle.

How does that benefit Google?

<comment><USER4> There was widespread protest from outside the bubble, too. You'll be unsurprised to learn the entire AI ethics space is being enthusiastically colonized by Thought Leaders all too happy to hold "discussions" in service of whatever their corporate funders desire. Oh sure there'll be some token pearl- clutching, but you can't stop progress (toward ubiquitous facial recognition) right?

Anyway, if you're interested in seeing all the ridiculous shenanigans these people try to pull I recommend following @farbandish on twitter.

<comment><USER5> I thought it was only 1 or 2 people out of 8 who were problematic; How is that "colonizing"? It also stills feels disingenuous to judge all 8 people's intent and position without them meeting a single time or making any deliberation.

<comment><USER6> _> I thought it was only 1 or 2 people out of 8 who were problematic_

I think ahelwer meant the AI ethics space in general, not just this panel.

As a researcher who has been working in ML and also software engineering ethics since long before "AI ethics" became a thing, I've definitely noticed a massive infusion of self-promoting "thought leaders" who have zero expertise in either of those things.

Most of those people are MBAs with little or no actual business experience and zero software knowledge (let alone ML or AI research experience). Their ethics background usually amounts to a few undergraduate philosophy courses that, ironically, failed to teach them the one thing that a philosophy course should teach: a modicum intellectual humility.

And yes, those folks tend to care mostly about their paychecks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you do not know that this sort of thing is coming when you chose to stand up for what you think is right, you should.

Protest and civil disobedience come at an obligate personal cost. The only reasonable expectation you should have before doing it is that you're about to burn your world to the ground -- anything left standing you should count as a blessing and a relief.

In this case, for example, walkout organizers should've just assumed that they're going to be retaliated against, and that their protest didn't end the day of the walkout but will continue through the whole process of having a labor lawyer, fighting this in court, documenting their work lives for the next 5+ years, etc. It's part of the same action and part of the same protest.

In the long term and at a broader societal level, moral protests are usually worth it, but that does not mean that your shorter- and medium- term economic and personal social costs are going to be zero -- in fact, quite the opposite!

edit: i assume that the walkout organizers knew all this, but the above can totally be read as "oh those silly babes-in-the-woods googlers", which was not what i meant. If anything, I understand the linked post as just the next phase of the game, in which illegal retribution is disclosed as part of an ongoing legal fight.

<comment><USER8> It's pretty absurd to think the authors didn't expect any kind of reprisal. No kind of organizing against an entity this size, especially with the visibility the walkout had, comes without a cost. And not reporting on the consequences would be handing over the victory to Google.

<comment><USER9> This retaliation in response to anti-harassment protests is actually illegal. It's pretty obvious these actions were done before legal got involved: When Claire Stapleton had a lawyer contact Google they walked back the demotion.

<comment><USER10> It feels like Google eventually started disciplining disobedient employees. I mean, can you imagine Goldman Sachs bankers organising a protest to express their dissatisfaction with certain decisions their upper management makes? They would be fired on spot. Now, Google has been facing employee revolt for the last couple of years (military projects, James Damore, China search engine), and Google kept allowing that to happen without any consequences. Now that changed, and it makes sense, because employees don't own the company, employees work for the company in exchange for compensation and don't really have to grounds to constantly blackmail the management just because they don't like the direction the company is going. You have to be delusional to think acting like that won't jeopardise your career... Besides if you need to involve a lawyer you are most certainly unwelcome there and should probably just quit (however, finding a new role might prove difficult given the circumstances. Which company would employ someone that organised a revolt against their leadership in their previous workplace and eventually ran crying to the media about retaliation instead of handling the situation quietly).

<comment><USER11> Good lord. What kind of terrible person thinks Goldman Sachs is some kind of role model?

<comment><USER12> For better or worse, a lot of people admire and respect success. Goldman Sachs is very successful, so unless it does something really bad, it will be respected by many.

I don't think you should refer to people as terrible just because they don't admire the same qualities that you do.

<comment><USER13> You do realize you're talking about the same people who nearly took down the entire US banking system 10 years ago, right? The only thing they've been "successful" at recently is getting the government to bail them out of the mess they created.

<comment><USER12> I didn't say they made the world a better place. They weren't trying to.

They had one clear goal: make a lot of money for themselves. And they have, for many years, achieved this goal splendidly, through hard work, financial and business skills, reputation, innovation, connections, lies, market manipulation, government bailouts, etc.

This is considered success, and earns respect, in both Western and Eastern cultures. There are people who hate the way Goldman makes money, but they are not the majority even in the general population. For example, take a look at this: [https://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-reputation- sco...](https://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-reputation-score-has- improved-since-the-financial-crisis-2018-9) or [http://www.vault.com/company- rankings/banking/vault-banking-...](http://www.vault.com/company- rankings/banking/vault-banking-50/)

<comment><USER13> Where I come from, that's considered sociopathic (and, yes, I know it applies to all corporations, not just GS or investment banks).

<comment><USER12> Do you mind if I ask you which country you're referring to?

Does it mean people in your country would hate for their kids to get a job at Goldman Sachs, organizations would hesitate to take Goldman Sachs donations, etc?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _After escalating the issue to human resources, she said she faced further retaliation. "My manager started ignoring me, my work was given to other people, and I was told to go on medical leave, even though I'm not sick," Stapleton wrote. After she hired a lawyer; the company conducted an investigation and seemed to reverse her demotion._

For the sake of argument, let's postulate that this is exactly what it sounds like: straight up retaliation. If so, here's the question in my mind:

What flipping moron thought that:

a. this was a good idea

b. they could get away with this

TBH, I'd say that IF Google management were that upset at this individual's actions, it would have made more sense to just straight up fire her, as opposed to this kind of childishness. NOT that I'm saying any of this justifies firing. Just saying that outright firing somebody you disagree with makes more sense than keeping them around and trying to fuck with them as, whatever, punishment I guess? That's braindead stupid as far as I can see.

And actually, (a) is the more serious question in many ways. Seriously, what did they think they would _gain_ from this retaliation? Who wins in this scenario? Nobody, as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER15> Firing would have been even more provably retaliation; presumably they were hoping to reduce legal liability. Why they thought this would _work_ is beyond me, since this kind of activity is also recognized by labor law as Totally Illegal.

One possibility - the people with power to fire her actually talked to their lawyers, while the people with the power to initiate this kind of harassment did not.

<comment><USER14> _Firing would have been even more provably retaliation; presumably they were hoping to reduce legal liability._

Yes, but in some ways it would have been more honest. But the real question, still, is why do either? How does retaliating against this individual benefit Google? (Not that it would be justified even IF the answer was "Their stock will go up 3x as a result" or something).

It's just dumb from what I can see. It's almost like some manager was butt- hurt that somebody expressed their opinion and decided to try and fuck them over for no real reason. That manager is the one who ought to be fired.

<comment><USER16> They might believe it would act as a visible deterrent to other employees. If employees at Google see activism go un-retaliated-against, then it may become so rampant that it actually does pose an existential threat to Google.

This way, even if she sues them and wins, it will scare a lot of other employees and make them second guess if they want to be put in a position to have to hire a lawyer, be dragged to court, risk losing, etc.

<comment><USER14> _If employees at Google see activism go un-retaliated-against, then it may become so rampant that it actually does pose an existential threat to Google._

That's fair. I guess the question, then, is whether or not this kind of activism can _actually_ represent a real threat to the company. I lean towards "I doubt it", at least in any realistic scenario. But I'd be interested to hear the arguments for that position.

<comment><USER16> You may be right, but a company the size of Google may view the legal costs + bad press that they have to hire PR people to expunge from the minds of the community as a fairly trivial overall cost relative to sending a damning authoritarian style message that they will hit back hard. With nearly infinite money & power, it is hard to speculate what their ethical calculus is in a situation like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I apologize if this is a naive question, but didn't they _expect_ to get fired? I certainly would, if I started publicly protesting my employer.

<comment><USER17> Okay, again, I'm uninformed: How is anyone supposed to establish WHY a company does something? The rule says, "For example, depending on the facts, it could be retaliation if an employer acts because of the employee's EEO activity to..."

The word _because_ bewilders me here. Who knows why anyone does anything? I don't know why I do 90% of what I do. If someone accused me of having tuna for lunch because of someone's EEO activity, how could I possibly prove they were wrong?

<comment><USER18> The same way that you "prove" anything in the legal system: Present your case in front of a jury, while your opponent has the chance to rebut your claims. Keep in mind that the legal standard for civil claims is "more likely than not," as opposed to the more famous "beyond a shadow of a doubt" standard that is used for criminal cases.

So, you'll go up at trail and present a bunch of data points, and build a narrative around those data points. Look, you say, I had good reviews from my managers and glowing recommendations from my co-workers. Despite this, I was fired shortly after I Did A Thing. Is this a coincidence or retaliatory? Your employer would attempt to provide evidence that your work quality actually dropped off, you would attempt to present evidence that either the quality stayed the same, or else that goalposts were moved for no good reason.

Note that both parties have the ability to compel various types of evidence to be produced. You would be able to subpeona the employer for emails between bosses, or manager notes, or reviews and such. You could be able to compel people to testify around a variety of facts.

... if this process sounds rather onerous, now you know why trials take a long time and many parties prefer to settle privately rather than engage in the full court process.

<comment><USER19> > as opposed to the more famous "beyond a shadow of a doubt" standard that is > used for criminal cases.

Curiously, this is a standard that isn't well understood. It's "beyond a reasonable doubt", not "any doubt whatsoever". You saw it a lot in some of the Bitcoin cases (Silk Road)... "Well, they can't prove that he wasn't set up or that the wallet matching his wasn't entirely a coincidence, (crypto signatures be damned), so there's doubt, and he should be acquitted".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is just all so weird.

If google is such a bad company, then quit working for them.

It's not really a protest, it's a tactic to wrestle control over the company and win social points with their "victory".

They want the social status of having protested something, yet with zero of the fallout.

They still collect google paychecks, collect google 401k money, still have google health insurance AND want to be able to say they "stuck it to the man"

It's just so odd all the way around.

They had a google walkout, then google didn't change anything, then the protesters went back to work.

It was all just a stunt.

<comment><USER4> Why does this exact same objection come up again and again? Why do we have to leave our companies instead of trying to make positive change from within? Why is the only prescribed solution to take flight to new lands, like locusts, staying ahead of the flood? What do we do when there are no more companies to which to flee, and the effects of that which we are fleeing is harming society?

<comment><USER21> It's a another version of the argument "If you don't like our country behaving the way I think it should behave, you should leave the country".

Absolutely sometimes the best thing for an individual to do is take their marbles and go home. But equally, sometimes the best thing to do is put your shoulder to pushing the wheels in [what you perceive as] a better direction. Companies (and countries) after all are not stand-alone entities; they are an expression of their constituent parts. Some of this is history/momentum, but a lot of it is just people.

[edit] of course I think the bar for "when should I leave my company" is an awful lot lower than "when should I leave my country".

<comment><USER22> I'm not sure I agree. At least not completely.

A person is within their rights to try and change the company from within before leaving. But, that will likely come with personal costs (right or wrong).

If those costs get to be too high, the correct action might be to leave. At a company, the impact of leaving could be much higher than the impact of moving to a different country on politics...

Google very much relies on "smart people" to earn money. If enough leave in protest, Google will eventually suffer. It would take a LOT of people leaving the US for there to be any noticeable impact.

<comment><USER23> Google will suffer a lot more if it continually takes big PR hits over crap like this.

<comment><USER24> I don't see people stop using Gmail, Maps, and Search over little PR problems only a small minority care about.

<comment><USER25> Because those products are unrelated to AI.

Big players will not (and are not) touching GCP's AI solutions for this exact reason: it's only a matter of time before the virtue signalers are no longer content with policing the decisions of their own company and start targeting customer workloads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Maybe I missed it in the other comments but is anyone else uneasy about the idea of your coworkers having a town hall to tell their "stories"? Just seems ripe for unfounded accusations or cherry picked facts to basically defame a coworker.

<comment><USER27> > is anyone else uneasy about the idea of your coworkers having a town hall to > tell their "stories"?

Sometimes, ironically, I think they specifically set those up to flush out non-conformists, the naive, and the trouble-makers. Invite them to "share their thoughts" then start building black lists. I am only half joking there [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign)

<comment><USER26> You better explain this than I.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Meredith Whittaker has a clear conflict of interest. As evidenced by her campaigning against Google's AI ethics board (and the resulting fallout), her organization's agenda for AI ethics conflicts with Google's, so she has to choose one or the other.

</comment><comment><USER29> About Kay Cole James, Ms. James served as Virginia Secretary of Health and Human Resources under then-Governor George Allen and was the dean of Regent University's government school. She is currently a member of the NASA Advisory Council. She is the president and founder of the Gloucester Institute, a leadership training center for young African Americans. She is an African- American woman.

In other words, she is eminently qualified. Yet Meredith Whittaker organized people against her because she disagrees with her politics.

Ms. James has not one incident on record where she caused harm to anyone. She is merely the head of a conservative think-tank.

Diversity of thought is very important. I feel little sympathy for the trouble-causers. Google looked idiotic when it disbanded the council.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm surprised they weren't fired for publicly admitting they weren't doing their job.

</comment><comment><USER31> Employees that bring politics to work are making the workplace uncomfortable for everyone else who has a different (or perhaps a more nuanced-) opinion, but can't speak up. They are creating constant distractions that take away from the work at hand, especially when it forces others to drop their actual work and engage (either passively by reading/keeping-up or actively by spending effort getting involved). These disruptive outrages are largely irrelevant to the mission of the company except via generous stretches of logic. Those involved in workplace activism also often violate the confidentiality that is expected in the corporate context, leaking email threads and weaponizing manufactured outrage via social media or journalistic outlets against the company and dissenting employees. The dynamic that has been created is also often politically-biased (rather than neutral), particularly at large tech companies, because psychological safety is only afforded to those who align with a progressive far-left platform.

Let's be clear, most of the justification (and claims of protection) for recent employee activism relies on mental gymnastics. There is no standing, for example, for random Google employees to expect to be involved in the selection of members of an AI ethics panel or in the acceptance criteria for clientele. There is no standing for employees to be involved in most of the company's decisions. This is especially true for the relatively-junior employees who are often driving these protests, since they lack the experience/skillset/visibility to have any useful/comprehensive perspective on complex corporate decisions. It is immature for them to expect involvement or transparency on-demand, and to protest decisions they disagree with that are beyond their horizon. If these activists were truly honest, they would conduct petitions via anonymous voting mechanisms (e.g. internal surveys) that let all employees vote for/against/indifferent, so that a broad voice is heard and not just a skewed vocal minority that faces no consequence. But these same activists won't do that, since these protests are not at all about making the best decisions or being inclusive, but rather about power dynamics and trying to get one's own way.

Google has lots of standing to take action against these employees. If these employees don't want to work at Google, or don't display motivation around their core role/function, let them quit or fire them. If they are not performing their duties and are instead spending work time on personal agendas, fire them. If they are disrupting the workplace by constantly fomenting outrage on the Internet, fire them. If they are hurting the company's brand and working against the interests of the company (or shareholders) by engaging in self-serving political activism, fire them. If they disrespect and alienate most of their customer base by only advocating for their own worldview, fire them. All this should be uncontroversial - <USER2> all, many others will line up for those jobs and Google will be just fine.

<comment> Ar-Curunir You're entirely mistaken if you think your work is apolitical. These people aren't bringing politics to work; their work is bring politics to them.

<comment><USER31> Work has a mission, which is to create value for customers and charge a price that creates income for the company (and transitively for shareholders, employees, etc.). The justification for saying "all work is political" is basically the same as saying "all actions have impacts". Sure, all actions do have direct and indirect impacts, but then we don't need a word like "politics" to exist in our dictionary do we? After all, if anything is political, what differentiates this word from other language we already have available to us? As such, I reject this notion that tries to position employee activism as being somehow similar to otherwise everyday corporate operation.

Expanding on this further: I think colloquially, most people would agree that certain actions are explicitly political and certain ones are not. I do not view Google taking on a military contract as a political action, but rather a normal, expected action for an entity that tries to create value for others. The neutral-most stance, if any, is for them to accept all willing clients. On the other hand, employees protesting because they disagree with the actions/impacts of one of Google's clients, or employees who disagree with a specific application of a technology (which others unrelated to them see value in), are bringing personal judgment, personal opinions, personal values, personal morality, and personal politics into the workplace.

The reason I label these as 'personal' is because these employees are imposing their worldview on the company's decision-making, and overriding the democratic/distributed nature of transactions taking place freely in the market between two consenting entities (the corporation and its clients). Those transactions are better and more-neutral measures of value than the voice of a small but vocal minority acting within the company. Effectively, such employee activism is a corruption of the notion of creating value for others (or others recognizing value in your products), and therefore not aligned to what the corporate mission is. Since it is not aligned to the corporate mission or the job the employees are paid to do, it is personal or political but definitely not normal or acceptable, which is why disciplinary action is justified.

<comment><USER32> _The neutral-most stance, if any, is for them to accept all willing clients._

This is not neutrality; it is capitalism without ethics, which is a moral stance that you are taking.

 _these employees are imposing their worldview on the company 's decision- making_

Your alternative is that the company should be able to impose their decision- making on the employees, and e.g. ask them to work on things which violate their personal principles, with their only alternative being to leave the company. In a world with a universal basic income without health care being tied to employment, where individuals were free to choose how to allocate their labor in a non-coercive environment, you might be able to argue this, but instead you are arguing that corporations have the right to freely transact in the market but employees (many of whom cannot pick and choose their employment or tolerate underemployment) do not have that right. Capitalism without ethics.

Corporations are simply groups of people. And those people are responsible for what the corporation does. They have not only a right, but an obligation to oppose actions by the corporation inimical to their worldview.

<comment><USER31> > This is not neutrality; it is capitalism without ethics, which is a moral > stance that you are taking.

I disagree. It is neutrality, because it is recognizing that different parties and individuals have different ideas of what is acceptable to them (morally or otherwise), and that they can decide that for themselves. If there aren't enough customers to sustain some product/service, then that business would fail. If it finds product-market fit, then that business will continue to operate. It is a distributed method of taking measure of what people value and don't value, which includes a distributed notion of morality.

> Your alternative is that the company should be able to impose their > decision-making on the employees, and e.g. ask them to work on things which > violate their personal principles, with their only alternative being to > leave the company.

Yes that is my alternative, and I don't see anything wrong with it. Those employees can choose to do the work that is asked of them or leave. The company is not imposing anything on the employees - they are compensating the employees for their time/labor, and get to specify in what capacity those employees can contribute. If you were an employee in the IT side of some company, and you saw the R&D side acquiring some other company, would you think "well I disagree and this makes me want to leave, but it is unfair that I was not consulted or don't have a voice in this matter or that my only choice is to leave"? Of course not. Why would it be any different on other matters?

Another example: If you hire a plumber to fix your toilet and that plumber took the opportunity to deliver a religious sermon at your home, would you find it acceptable? What if they lecture you on how you are parenting your kid or your relationship with your spouse? A lot of the recent employee activism is similar to these hypothetical situations, except at a larger scale.

> you are arguing that corporations have the right to freely transact in the > market but employees (many of whom cannot pick and choose their employment > or tolerate underemployment) do not have that right

Employees have the right to pick and choose their place of employment. They have that freedom, and tech workers drawing large salaries are especially employable today. If someone cannot tolerate unemployment, they can invest in making themselves more-valuable to would-be employers. And yes, that means that in the interim they need to choose between putting their head down/getting their work done and engaging in workplace activism. I don't think it is reasonable to feel entitled to everything all the time, which is how this comes off to me.

> They have not only a right, but an obligation to oppose actions by the > corporation inimical to their worldview.

Employees have limited rights at work. They are being compensated to perform a limited role and the measure of their success/failure is up to the company compensating them. Corporations also have a right to oppose actions by employees that are inimical to their worldview or interests. They can do so by terminating that relationship.

<comment><USER32> Again, this is moral stance that you have, which I disagree with. As assumptions, yours include that the market captures incentives efficiently, that what people value and don't value is accurately represented by flow of money (and thus, of course, that those with more wealth available have more valuable values), and that people do not have the right to speak out against what they perceive as injustice if the market has decided that said injustice is efficient.

Again, corporations are made of people, and those people make decisions. Nothing is "up to the company" because the company is a group of people. People make the decisions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Time for tech to unionize

<comment><USER27> There was just a story today about NPM employees trying that and getting fired. Tech companies are in this strange place where on the surface they are seemingly going above and beyond to be tolerant, and diverse. But it's mostly talk and gestures that doesn't involve making any hard decisions or spending much money. Try to mention "unionization" and that thin veneer drops and the ugliness come out immediately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Beyond being not remotely surprised at this, what constantly baffles me is: Why are they still there? And pending an answer to that: Why have they not walked out again?

Presumably the Walkout was a "fix this or we walk out" type of situation... but after Google refused to do 6/7ths of anything they demanded... they're still working for Google and not actively protesting. I would argue that Google called their bluff here.

A traditional protest against an employer, a strike, entails "give us this if you want us to return to work". Googlers walked out, made demands, and then walked right back in the door. Google said "we'll do one of the things you asked for because the rest of the industry was already going that way anyhow", and then refused the rest and everyone, for the moment, seems alright with this?

<comment><USER35> This (my) generation has been culturally conditioned against the idea of quitting a job... peers in struggling circumstances create a feeling of looming "economic uncertainty", there's a perception that forcing issues against employers means getting blacklisted, and social media placing wealth over values.

It's also a disseminate problem. Striking against long working hours is easy. Striking against corporate values that enable seemingly distant problems (surveillance states) while working on a friendly low-stress high-pay team... that's hard. Unless you _actually_ care.

Maybe some people are learning they don't actually care... that their "values" were just shallow social posturing, worth less than their stable high- income...

Hopefully, though, some also realize tech is one of the few areas where workers still truly have the freedom to actually demand an ethical employer - which may involve looking elsewhere. Follow-through is always scary, but no worse than uprooting our lives moving to college and then again moving to big- tech cities.

<comment><USER36> This reads very strangely to me.

> This (my) generation has been culturally conditioned against the idea of > quitting a job

This is a super bizarre claim. Wealthy Googlers are afraid to quit their job because of their peers who make a fraction of their pay? We're talking about Silicon Valley workers and somehow they are more afraid to quit their job than the previous generations? A common job strategy is to change jobs every two to three years.

<comment><USER35> Yes, exactly - it _is_ bizarre. Tech pays very well with no culture of corporate allegiance, yet this generation of skilled in-demand labor with (hopefully) sizable bank accounts does not exercise their economic freedom.

Why?

Maybe fear of radical change and lacking support from peers, or maybe unawareness of what labor resistance actually entails... or, cynically, that their beliefs are spineless social posturing... but I couldn't think of any flattering reasons to walk-out then stay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Don't they teach people not to bring politics to work anymore?

Rule #1 at work: don't talk or engage in politics

<comment><USER38> The current relization is that you often cannot work without being political because your work in some way is political.

In this specific instance, organizing a walk out, does seem to go much farther than what you would expect your employer to tolerate. Typical people who work typical jobs are fired for far less so the real suprise in being told that your 'role' is changing is that you still have a job at all.

Ultimently, I have little faith in these kinds of demonstrations - perhaps it will work for FAANGS since they have a pretty somewhat limitied supply of talent/employees. But for the majority of the tech industry, I expect the ability to choose where you work and the ability to organize unions will be a much more effective means of employee influence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> They should all quit. Then donate six months to Mozilla and find a way to kill AMP.

<comment><USER39> This definition is interesting: [https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Spineless](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Spineless) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> are employee 'walkouts' a protected class? Like a union on strike?

</comment><comment><USER41> Retaliation, while miserable for the people experiencing it, would be a positive sign that this kind of protest is having an effect.

</comment><comment><USER42> >Google has a culture of retaliation, which too often works to silence women, people of color, and gender minorities

Are there more stories on this?

<comment><USER43> no because its not true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> This is a private company and more so the AI ethics and the context of the walkout is not really a criminal or civil violation in the eyes of the country. So the company is free to do anything it wants.

<comment><USER45> > This is a private company

Alphabet is a publicly traded company. Which means it is expected to uphold certain standards of behavior.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Screw Google and every other tech company on this list

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- Tech_Employee_Antitrust...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High- Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation)

</comment><comment><USER47> What these people are doing takes tremendous courage. Posts here over the last few months have many wondering why people in Facebook and Google are not speaking up and in this instance we have some genuine dissent, activism and protest at least on one issue.

But history shows dissenters are always a tiny minority, from the initial struggles that secured labour rights to equality for women. Most people will conform and fall in line for whatever reason, and in these cases there is unfortunately always resentment against the dissenters from those who fall in line.

In most other situations you would expect the early dissenters to get growing unequivocal support as more people find their compass and courage by example but there is a moral crisis in the software community and it looks these individuals may not get the widespread support they need.

But these kind of incidents will make it increasingly difficult for Google leadership and others who work there to go to events, meets and publicly talk about ethics and others issues these protestors raised.</comment>


Understanding Macros and Code as Data - <AUTHOR> https://spin.atomicobject.com/2014/12/19/code-as-data/#.VJRQyMWH0j4.hackernews <comment><USER2> Macros can be useful as syntax sugar, but a lot of the time they obscure the meaning of the code. In general, data is better than functions, and functions are better than macros.

For instance, in your parser example, you could get exactly the same syntax just using higher-level functions. There's no need for a "defparser" macro at all.

Clojure treats macros as a last resort, something to reach for only when you've exhausted all other options. Without them, we wouldn't be able to have language extensions like core.async, core.typed, and core.logic packaged up as optional libraries, but in most cases they should be used sparingly.</comment>