HN user
I am a Googler who sometimes comments on Google-related stories.
My opinions are my own; I do not speak for Google.
They didn't get a terrian warning because they were landing. Being close to the ground is what they expected. They have both radar & pressure altimeters.
What might have happened is that due to the poor weather they thought they were closer to the airport, or they weren't closely following their glide path, or the aircraft was misconfigured for the RNAV approach. Perhaps a combination of the three.
Mining yellowstone for its geothermal power in order to prevent a volcanic eruption would be a Kardashev Scale Type I accomplishment.
In other words, such a thing is completely infeasible given our current understanding of science and technology.
The time required to develop such a capability would span so many lifetimes that is it effectively science fiction.
The current Waymo driver uses cameras, RADAR and LIDAR, which are meant to compliment each other's capabilities.
https://wondery.com/shows/how-i-built-this/episode/10386-the...
Googler here.
L4 requires experience. New grad hires are L3.
When you take off, you're going up at a rate of 500 fpm to 2000 fpm. Even if you go from +1000 fpm to -1000 fpm over the course of several seconds, you aren't going to feel much.
At cruise altitude, you're moving along at 500 mph, which is 777 feet per second. So going from +30 feet to -30 feet in a minute is just an adjustment of only about 5 degrees. You'd barely feel it, even walking down the isle. An acceleration of 33 ft/sec per sec is 1 g.
You experience greater changes in vertical motion on any flight you go on.
*edit: units
Almost all aircraft are equipped with ADS-B transponders, which transmit their tail number and location continuously. Anybody can buy a ADS-B receiver and see info for aircraft flying near them.
In good internet fashion, people figured out that they can coordinate large networks of receivers, which basically centralizes a nationwide database of all aircraft movement.
So, all this account did was tweet when Elon's jet moved from this central ADS-B database.
I can't help but think this is the only sensible approach.
Persistant performance related issues are management's responsibility. It's unfair to withhold their vesting mere weeks from their vest date when management should've addressed the issue earlier.
Here's the source talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C-JoyNuQJs#t=2480s
Take a look at the map. Chernobyl sits right on the border of Belarus, 130km to Kyiv on the western side of Dnieper river.
They didn't take Chernobyl to take the reactor, they took it because it is extremely strategic if the goal is to assault Kyiv.
I think the article was pretty well-informed and sourced analysis. Yes, as you point out, NATO has undertaken offensive campaigns. I think the author made a mistake of saying "alliance" here when they meant to say "treaty".
AFAIK, none of the NATO articles were invoked as part of the operation in Yugoslavia. That is to say, though it was a NATO operation, members were not bound by treaty to participate.
This fact muddles some of the points the author made, but the author speaks broadly of the ramifications of invoking Article 5, so I would say their analysis is well-reasoned.
There are a number of HN readers:
* https://hckrnews.com/ -> my favorite thread browser
* https://hackerweb.app/ -> a mobile focused app w/ dark mode
Disclaimer: am googler, my opinions are my own. I have no non-public knowledge on this topic.
It's not clear to me what the House committee is asking for. From what I read in their letters it's basically, "We think you have more than you've given us, so give it to us".
That's not how this works. If you want to subpoena information, you need to be specific and targeted. If you don't get what you think you want, call people in to testify.
Here's the actual Committee release [1]. Two quotes from the Alphabet letter:
"For example, Alphabet has not produced any documents that fully explain non-public moderation discussions and policies" "Additionally, Alphabet has not produced documents relating to YouTube’s policy decisions"
But, IIRC, YouTube (and Twitter) were pretty publicly vocal and specific about their policies for months preceding Jan 6th. I just don't see what warrants this round of grandstanding.
[1] https://january6th.house.gov/news/press-releases/select-comm...
Disclaimer: am Googler.
Self-hosting is a good option, especially when mixed with multi-cloud offerings.
The big rub is that it's really hard to approach the same level of availability the cloud offerings already give you. Depending on work-load, self-hosting is typically more expensive.
This is why the SRE book talks about availability budget. You can't have 100% uptime, so how much do you want to pay to get close to it?
In June, Google told rank-and-file employees it would reduce the pay of those who choose to work remotely or move farther from the office.
To echo the statement from the other Googler who posted, this quote from the article is simply not true. It implies that if any employee chooses permanent WFH, you get a pay cut.
If you follow the link [1] from the article, you'll see the following reasons:
* Google supplied an online calculator to see how their possible relocation would affect their pay
* Pay rates are defined by metropolitan statistical areas (MSA)
* Google says "Our compensation packages have always been determined by location, and we always pay at the top of the local market based on where an employee works from,"
So, if you choose to WFH permanently and you commute far enough to live in a different MSA than your office, then you might see a paycut.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/the-great-reboot/pay-cut-googl...
It's not clear to you how standard business practices aren't some sort of Google-specific Orwellian new-speak?
Googler here. My opinions are my own.
I would do this if the company provided the hardware and I only had to use the device to do work things during work hours. (As other pointed out Google does in fact provide hardware to employees needing this capability.)
Mandating use on personal hardware is a different story.
The approach described here is very lossy, and very inefficient since you have to search a huge number of permutations to find reasonable results.
It would be an interesting experiment to implement lossless compression, but it likely wouldn't achieve high compression ratios or be nearly as efficient as a purpose built algorithm.
Hi Wes!
I'm a big fan of Pandas, and didn't know about Arrow. I've been considering do a talk advocating for a consistent data-frame api across languages since IMHO, it's the next fundamental data structure that should have baked in support everywhere. So it appears you've at least somewhat beaten me to the punch.
Since Arrow is more than an API to tabular data structures, what would you think about a Promises/A+-like specification for dataframes?
How much of the Arrow API do you think end users will wind up using, as opposed to being a lower-level framework that projects like pandas and dplyr wind up using behind the scenes?
Finally, do you think that Arrow has the potential to be the logical successor to pandas? If not, what is your long term strategy to address the shortcomings that you see in pandas?
Another anon Googler here (with a slightly older account).
Your experience matches mine. I think it might even be somewhere in the mandatory periodic training.
Doing a patent search as a software engineer can only hurt you. Better just to route any questions to product counsel.
Hi Malte!
Great article. I've agree that design docs are great part of what defines engineering culture at Google. I'd recommend to anybody who will listen that their company should do it also.
Lots of people in this thread were burned by waterfall-esque requirements documents or formal specification, and I'd like to point out why I think design documents (at Google at least) are different and more effective than those things.
I like to think of design docs as not an artifact produced by a project but as a communication mechanism of a team. You have an idea and you write down:
* What are you trying to do?
* Why are you doing to do it?
* How are you going to do it?
* What considerations have you made?
Then you socialize it to one or two reviewers, who ask a lot of questions, then you take it to your team, who ask (relatively fewer) questions. The socialization part is key to the entire system. As you note:
"The primary value that such reviews add is that they form an opportunity for the combined experience of the organization to be incorporated into a design. Most consistently, ensuring that designs take cross-cutting concerns such as observability, security and privacy into account is something that can be ensured in a review stage. The primary value of the review isn’t that issues get discovered per-se, but rather that this happens relatively early in the development lifecycle when it is still relatively cheap to make changes."
If I printed out your article to show people, this is the part I would highlight in yellow.
Contrast this with formal doc systems that rarely capture the "why" and "why nots". Future maintainers have a document that captures the thinking at the time, rather than trying to document the full implementation plan of a system.
Hopefully this adds some context to those who've been burnt by more traditional approaches.
edit: typos
"When you delete data in your Google account, we immediately start the process of removing it from the product and our systems."
https://policies.google.com/technologies/retention
See also:
Unofficial Googler here. I have no non-public information on this topic and my opinions here are my own.
The Web & App activity is described a help page article [1]. There are different settings for Android, Desktop and iOS. If you follow the dialog for the Desktop version you'll see another dialog that displays:
"Include Chrome history and activity from sites, apps, and devices that use Google services"
It's not clear what's being claimed in the lawsuit, but they mention Firebase, which is an app and web site framework. I would expect those opting in or our of the Web & App activity would cover signals from Android and Chrome, but not server-side components like Firebase and Analytics. I would expect those Android and Chrome signals aren't just hidden from the user and that they actually aren't transmitted or stored. From what I have seen Google tries to be transparent with everything in the My Activity portal [3].
It's not clear what they claim is being collected via Firebase.
[1] https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/54068?co=GENIE.P...
[2] https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols?pli=1&authuse...
(Disclaimer - am Googler; these opinions are my own)
It's not an either or decision. One can do both.
https://blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/comm...
That is a good suggestion. Done.
Because it's not clear why the channel was taken down in the first place. I don't have any insider information in that regard. I don't have access to the system that would tell me the reason.
It's possible (however unlikely) that there was a justified reason for the take down. Has anybody heard from the original creator?
To clarify, I have no insider knowledge of this matter, I don't speak in any official context and all of my opinions are my own.
I consider adding that to every Google related comment, but it gets tiring.
Indeed, the question is what should be done, or how should it have been done differently? Should YT have grown more slowly?
FWIW, I don't think money is the limiting factor here. If there was a known good solution, but it took $10B to implement, I think it would be done.
You could pay X thousands (more) moderators, but there are drawbacks in a human solution as well. First is the fact since there's human judgement, rules will be applied inconsistently, and probably with some bias.
Second is the fact that moderation is a very mentally exhausting effort. You can observe some of the cyclical nature of this balance from the news over the past few years. Article about moderators with PTSD? Well, automation is the solution. Automation fails in a lot of edge cases? Well, why not hire armies of people to do it for you?
I don't think there is an obvious solution here, no matter how much it cost.
The BBFA and MPAA, if I understand correctly, watch every second of content they rate. They have a back-and-forth with creators when there are disputes. They can afford to communicate, well, this is one f-bomb too many and usless you remove it, it's an "R" rating.
Secondly, they work with (largely) mainstream content producers (e.g. movie studios), who rarely act with downright malicious intent because of reputation and money on the line.
I don't believe content moderation is a problem solved well anywhere.
Sometimes simple suggestions are complex to implement or have wide reaching implications.
For example, it is very hard to come up with a sort list of clear content rules. There are all sorts of ambiguities. For example, when is nudity ok? What about violence? Every line you draw in the sand will have false positives and false negatives. See any number of stories about Facebook moderators who despite having lots of content rules, will make subjective and contradictory judgement calls.
Furthermore, with a concrete list of rules, bad actors will act just to the left of rules violations. Clearly, having some feedback is required. In this case, however, we don't know what Jordan Pier knew, since this was initially a reaction to the channel's deletion without consulting with Jordan about what happened.
Finally, having a support deposit--no matter how small--will disadvantage many creators and increase the divide between haves and have-nots. I admit that it's frustrating that you literally can't purchase a human's attention, but every policy decision like this has profound ramifications when you have billions of users.