davidcgl

Direct link to her talk: https://youtu.be/j_K1YoMHpbk?t=2h38m40s

Map data and quality varies depending on your location.

Many readers are skeptical about the usefulness of personal AI assistants. This reminds me of what Jeff Bezos said about disruptive technologies [1], which I think resonates well among many tech company executives. You (they) need to be willing to be doubted for a very long time.

[1] http://www.geekwire.com/2011/amazons-bezos-innovation/

Any time you do something big, that’s disruptive — Kindle, AWS — there will be critics. And there will be at least two kinds of critics. There will be well-meaning critics who genuinely misunderstand what you are doing or genuinely have a different opinion. And there will be the self-interested critics that have a vested interest in not liking what you are doing and they will have reason to misunderstand. And you have to be willing to ignore both types of critics. You listen to them, because you want to see, always testing, is it possible they are right?

I'd argue they are consistent in that every candidate who made it past resume screening is given equal opportunity to partake in a well documented process. Whether or not the process itself is effective is a different question.

Sure, interviewers themselves are inconsistent (accents, prejudice, interview difficulty, etc), but that's not something that can be fully mitigated when every candidate gets a different set of interviewers.

Again, I'm not defending the practice and would just like to have a constructive discussion.

I'm not sure I understand -- who's complaining?

To be clear, I can see why big companies prefer coding interviews (it's more "consistent" when interview feedbacks are boiled down to a score), but at the same time I'm not defending it because like many have said it's not a great measure of an engineer's capability. I'm looking at the problem from the employers' point of view.

DeepMind reduced Google data center cooling bill by 40% in an experiment. If this effect is real, it probably more than justified the $500m tag Google paid to acquire DeepMind. Google might not have come up with a killer app, but perhaps the real killer app is not in the consumer space.

https://deepmind.com/blog

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12126298

Are you saying Google should've bought LinkedIn? How does that contribute to Google cloud platform?

Just because someone claimed Google manipulated search suggestions doesn't mean they actually did it. The video itself even acknowledged the lack of concrete proofs.

My guess is OP meant to say AWS vs GCP (Google Cloud Platform) instead of GCE (Google Compute Engine).

I agree that if you strip out all the complexities behind what you see on the screen, then yes someone can definitely build a bootstrap-y clone in a weekend.

If you boil down the entirety of Twitter into just a CRUD app that allows you to post 140 characters at a time, then yes, you can make that in a weekend.

Well, how about recommended posts / people to follow (ML)? Sponsored posts with a buy button (3rd part integration)? Growth and metrics (data analytics)? A software product is never just about pixels on the screen; and trivializing the engineering effort behind it is insulting to Twitter employees, some of whom are brilliant engineers I know.

any competent web developer could make A non-scaling Twitter in an afternoon

I wish people would stop claiming how they could clone a social media app in an afternoon / weekend.

There is an official guide: https://www.meteor.com/tutorials/react/creating-an-app

Nanodegrees may seem a good idea, and they no doubt make sense financially to google

Google doesn't own Udacity.

It's an easter egg. It's a pretty common thing Google does.

G+ wanted to be a rendezvous for all social/sharing activities on Google, and it turned out that many users didn't like it. Would G+ have fared better if it didn't force G+ onto every Google property? Maybe? It's easy to do armchair analysis, but hindsight is 20/20.

I'm not sure if you've worked at Google. There is a ton of bleeding edge software systems at Google that aren't user facing.

Someone stole the video and reposted it on Facebook. Facebook didn't do this.

Positive PR is probably a side effect, not the main reason.

So their interests are more aligned with yours.

Exactly how does a company that makes money through selling you products have its interests more aligned to yours?

Google says "don't be evil" and then goes out and does evil.

"Evil" such as serving you ads?

Google's product is your private info.

Better ads targeting using your private info - not selling your private info to advertisers/governments. It's evident how much you distrust Google, but don't spread and allude to FUD.

I agree and I don't know why you get the downvotes.

A large majority of users [1] take photos with their phones, upload a select few on social media, maybe with some basic filters/edits, and forget about the rest.

Google Photos is designed for that use case, and not for the 1% power users.

[1] No data to back this up, just my two cents.

Isn't this a tad presumptuous? Google is a large company - there are likely as many engineers working on ads spam as search quality.

FWIW, how their website looks like as of Apr 25 3:40pm PDT:

http://imgur.com/RBIsbKk

Spot on. Google Fi/Fiber both seeks to improve network connectivity for as many people as possible by accelerating competition from the incumbents (AT&T, Comcast, etc). When that happens, everyone benefits, including Google.

Other projects in this space include Android One and Loon.

  - You get mobile E-commerce websites with usability disasters during checkout.

If A and B are identical in all aspects except for mobile-friendliness (A > B), most users are going to like A better than B, given that information is laid out in a more easily consumable format on mobile [1].

User satisfaction not only depends on getting a relevant answer, but also how an answer is presented. Their degree of importance is where the weights come in.

[1] Otherwise, why would anyone build mobile-friendly websites in the first place?

Google ranks websites using hundred of signals with different weights. I bet a more relevant website is always going to trump less relevant ones, regardless of how mobile friendly they are.

  One minor algorithm change can (and has) wiped out the fortunes of thousands of companies.

Context: http://blog.samaltman.com/bubble-talk