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Doesn't that broadly seem like a problem? Given the preferred pronouns here are "they/them", which is what people ought to be using if they don't know, the problem stems from people inherently assuming "he/him" for any technical work. That's a problem beyond just trans/gnc issues.

Wow, this sounds eerily similar to my situation, though I was only there about 3 years.

I left to join an AV startup and it's amazing how much more I've learned and accomplished in a few months versus the time at Google. Things at Google move slowly, and the amount of work per person is relatively limited. Also, all the complicated infrastructure or codebase decisions were already made for you, or is being handled by someone L+2 at least and outside of your purview.

Edmond Lau's The Effective Engineer talks about this, except to the extreme that he wanted to do and learn everything at Google, and even then he left after ~2 years after he felt his growth was slowing.

I think for many, being at Google for a few years will give you invaluable experience, but then severely diminishing returns on growth and practical experience unless you're one of the lucky ones who gets promo'd every year or two.

For your actual question, though: >Now that I'm thinking of jumping ship to other interesting companies, I'm having serious doubts that I really learned what I should have learned during all those years.

Having Google on your resume always helps get people interested. Having experience working on big teams with big codebases is also something not everyone in this industry has, and there's value to it, even if you'll initially scratch your head at how to build without Blaze.

Especially since I'm considering companies with a higher hiring bar than Google.

Curious why you're confident in that statement. I've found that Google has a much higher hiring bar to the actual required skill -- they basically seem to hire as though everyone will work on GWS, when in reality many are just copy-pasting CSS and BUILD rules from another project.

On the flip side, many more interesting companies have lower hiring bars relative to the job requirement. It's harder to hire good talent when you're not FAANG with a pipeline right out of the Ivy League.

How can I keep myself accountable while I'm still at the company to deeply learn the FE/BE technologies to be better prepared for other companies? Should I start by preparing a checklist of technologies and dive into each of them for a month and continue from there?

Well, I would focus LeetCode, tbqh. That's still the standard. But whatever you want to do, focus in on technologies used in that industry/job role. Do some side projects. Maybe take some online classes. I think you'll find the practical experience requirement to be lower than you think. People can generally learn the right technologies, and companies know this. It won't be a big deal unless you're a frontend-only SWE who suddenly wants a ML role or something.

Lastly -- feel free to DM me, I use this handle on twitter and gmail, happy to help, especially if you're curious about where I ended up.

It also wasn't in isolation; he made very similar remarks in 2006 on his blog that he got flak for, but people mostly brushed aside as 'oh, Stallman..'

Comments here seem to mostly equate this situation to a Cancel Culture outcry over an isolated remark. That's not what happened here. rms has had decades of inexcusable behavior for any individual, much less someone affiliated with MIT and heading something as large as FSF. He had to answer for this eventually.

I sincerely appreciate his contributions to this world. But I also sincerely feel that we can't give people free passes for their behavior (see: courtesy cards at conferences) just because they've done well in other respects. We need to end the acceptance of Brilliant Jerks.

If you read through Autonomy by Lawrence Burns, the author states that Levandowski felt the project was losing focus & getting too bloated, and wanted to disrupt it with a Team Macintosh style parallel project that he would head.

It could've just been part of the big ego'd power struggle that occurred on the project and saw the exit of many early stage employees, but I also wonder if he had a point, looking back today at the stages the project went through. It's hard not to feel like they thought they were close to launch, only to hit some roadblocks and need to rebuild major chunks of it. Speculation. But they're a huge company with a product that is at risk of getting usurped at this point.

Read the license on this thing. "open data set" is a stretch here. It's against the license terms to publish a trained model, or its weights, or even use the dataset for models that are run on a physical vehicle (supposedly even if that's just a research vehicle).

Is this normal for 'open datasets'?

If I make project Foo, which leverages #Script, and make Foo MIT-licensed, by your statement #Script is now also MIT licensed in this project. So then Company Blah wants to use Foo, which happens to just be thin wrapper/modification around #Script, and is now permitted to take it and fork it into closed-source repos, yes? That is what this statement implies.

Regardless, this is why getting clever with software licenses, and giving guarantees in the form of comments instead of actual license legalese, is problematic. The intention might be clear, but the governance is only by law, and this appears to be in conflict with your statements.

This is one of our favorite jokes internally, often invoked when new signage is put up to clarify how trashcans work or the like.

Even on a lighter note, I'm getting more and more frustrated at cloud device providers changing features on a whim. For example, I own Nest products that I bought to integrated into my 'smart home'. Now Google is ripping out the API for Nest products and making us use Google Assistant. Google Assistant is repeatedly changing behaviors and breaking my workflow.

I understand I'm a tiny segment of the market, but it's hard not to want to switch over to fully owned, open source alternatives. Any suggestions?

During a snow storm/PABT outage this past winter, I observed a jitney line from 8th ave down halfway to 10th. It's pretty crazy to see the mishmash of alternative transit modes people will piece together when their main route (NJT, PATH, NJ bus, etc) goes offline.

Same. Basically anyone with a newer Veriphone system (which everyone seemed to roll out back when we switched to chip) seems to support it. I use Google Pay, so it's not Apple-specific anyhow. But it's so much faster to process than the chip cards, even if I already had both my phone and card in my hand.

Right. There's no enforcement of visa itineraries so long as your first one has valid flights & hotel. After that, you get 10 years of multiple entry with no required itineraries. I just brought it up as a point, that Xinjiang is not a place you would normally be going. People seem to assume that Xinjiang is just a normal crossing into China that has heightened security. That's not the case at all. You would never accidentally end up there on a trip to China.

I'm not sure and I don't want to misspeak. I know that my company does not do such a thing, and my phone when roaming (Project Fi) bypasses the GFW. However, I do know there are specific different IT infra requirements when connecting from China but none that are gov-monitoring related. It may be a misunderstanding, or it may be a procedure that your friends' IT was following that we aren't.

That being said, foreigners accessing the normal WWW is really not a major concern if you think about it.

If that's the case, it's worth noting (since it's often lost here, on reddit and in the news) that is app is only required at border checkpoints in Xinjiang. Putting Xinjiang on your itinerary would likely result in your visa being refused anyway. If you are traveling to China for business or pleasure, you won't need to worry about this.

Source: Was in Shenzhen within the past month. Normal customs/border control practices. Nobody asked for personal devices. Only surveillance that was obvious was biometric checkpoint at customs, and some sort of face scan (?) at the subway queue.

There's important findings in here, but it also reminds me of reactions to Prius, Tesla, public buses, etc., where people latch on to any viable excuse to continue their wasteful status quo.

Scooters aren't perfect, just like everything else, but there's some interesting innovations happening in micromobility that encourage more walkable cities and greener commutes. I'm excited to see where the trends head, even if the immediate scooter to car eco comparison is muddy.

I regret, though should be grateful, that I live in a space too small to fit my own model railroad setup.

Been thinking about building an El onto the crowning for a while, though.

Seems like misguided faux environmentalism, like banning plastic straws but keeping the longtail of plastic waste. Electric buses are good, of course, but a well-designed and highly utilized bus network, even with the dirtiest diesel engines, is going to get you serious wins over GHG/CO2/VOC emissions from automobiles if you can replace those trips.

Hold on a second. NYer here. Yes, we spent a lot of money on the problem. But we did not 'solve the issue.' Not even close. Our problem doesn't seem as bad as SF's (perhaps just less visible due to more clearing), but we still regularly have human feces to deal with, train cars trashed, people screaming/disturbed, etc.

I think it's key to remember the difference, albeit overlapping, between homeless and emotionally-distressed. You can be homeless and nobody would know -- living in shelters, working a job, etc. You can also have a home and appear, as far as we're all concerned, to be homeless, by begging on trains or acting in other anti-social ways.

This is SOP at most Big 4. It does strike me as funny, though, that MS would ban Slack/GDocs, that Google bans basically all non-Google cloud products, yet both companies are trying to convince other large firms that cloud is the future, on prem is dead, and that their data is safe with them. Seems hypocritical.

I've heard tales of cell towers having more or less automatic interference detection and the owners have a big incentive to let the FCC know. For other things, it's so rarely enforced or "self-policed" (like ham bands) that it's super rare for people to get busted, even with triangulization being what it is. Some kid here in NYC was trolling on the NYPD frequencies (analog FM still) and it took quite a while to track him down.

The idea that Tesla could get fully auto vehicles out of the existing Model 3s their building today is laughable. Even top-tier AV companies, with larger teams and far more advanced sensors, can't. There's a huge difference between working 95% of the time, and working well enough for a full auto fleet, and Tesla won't get there with pure cameras and a single front-facing radar. It's possible they could retrofit the old cars with new hardware, but other AV companies have suggested that retrofits aren't automotive-grade enough to last over time (sensor mounts drift too much, etc).

It is incredibly hard to have consistent results on e-sports tournaments.

The NYXL are a great example of this. Often undefeated in normal season stages but then choke when it actually matters.

It doesn't help that their strategies and skillsets become very rigid, and any changes in opponent strategy or game rebalances can completely throw them off. https://www.theringer.com/2018/7/24/17606796/overwatch-leagu...

As someone who attends community board meetings in Manhattan, this seems to be the average attendee's opinion too.

It got a little more complicated than that. I can't speak too much about the specifics, but people were definitely defaming the country itself and overall going out of line in hopes to amplify their protest. It's one thing to say that the project doesn't align with your ethical standards. It's another to attack the country (and by proxy its citizens) for high level political decisions that the people are powerless over, then imply that the people are complacent with it.

My only strong opinion is that I'm completely unqualified to opine on this as a white american westerner. When the Dragonfly outrage was happening within the company, many people stood up and helped kill the project (by leaking, by complaining internally, by refusing to work on it, etc.). But the Chinese nationals I work with weren't particularly pleased with all the westerners speaking on their behalf. Obviously my sampling doesn't represent the population, but the general attitude was that Baidu is woefully subpar and denying access to information, censored or not, was against Google's stated mission.

Believe me, I'm greatly disturbed by China's censorship. Talking shit about my own government is a right I can't imagine losing, let alone access to the treasure troves of anti-US thought. I also know how terrified I would be if my own government had the ability to lock down information. Imagine Trump and the GOP having that power, even for 4 years, and what damage they could do. (And GOP voters would make the same argument, of course, the other way around, and already do fear that tech companies are censoring their freedom of thoughts).

So believe me, I'm not trying to defend China here, nor am I trying to shill for the project. But it's not my lane to opine on, and I had hopes that if the project did launch, that some good could come out of it. But your concerns are absolutely valid too.

I think about this a lot when considering China's extensive High-Speed Rail network. China's government operates it at a loss, and the capital expense must have been enormous, even with their wages. But the government had enough social good and political reasons to bite the cost.

The USA and our interstate system are the same way. The cost was enormous, the maintenance burden continues to outpace the money we make on gas tax and registration, yet we had political and social good reasons for building it. The interstate was a massive investment, and investments of similar scale could give us a HSR network at least on major corridors. But for some reason, we have a social good attitude towards highways and a social waste attitude towards subsidizing rail.

On the other hand, censorship isn't perfect, and giving more access to the internet means more access to west and censored ideas by the masses. I can't predict how it will play out, but I was hoping that Dragonfly, if launched, would result in better access to information for Chinese who currently are already censored AND have worse access to the treasure trove of info on the internet than us in the West.

What you are referring to is your comments on my question about Silicon Valley members working in China: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19500740

This thread, which was about tech scenes in China for foreigners, cultural differences, 996, etc., started to breed discussions about organ harvesting accusations. The mods politely, but firmly, steered the conversation back on topic.

I disagree with the premise that HN is afraid to criticize China. This article being on the front page is evidence of that. But there's a way to do so civilly, and that was not it.

Edit: The replies to your top-level also show the difference between constructive discussion of China's authoritarianism and flat out attacks on the country, and the vote count reaffirms that, I think.

Edit 2: I might be confusing you with another user, unless you have an alt. Apologies if so. But the overall comment stands about moderators telling people to behave when discussing China.

Basically already done in Manhattan. If you want working internet in an apartment building, it has to be 5ghz at this point. Everyone's WiFi transmitters are cranked up to max to try to punch through the noise floor, plus all the city infra (7 train CBTC, the train bluetooth beacons, commercial/public WiFi, LinkNYC, etc)

Ah, damn. I'd heard from other sources when Bluetooth 5 was first coming out that increased bandwidth was part of the spec, so I was hoping that would resolve my congestion woes. 2.4ghz is unusable at some points in the city. It's rumored that's why the 7 train's CBTC setup took so much longer than planned.

It's all 2.4ghz. The 7 train uses 2.4ghz (literally WiFi I've heard) for CBTC. The other lines don't have train communication, but the bluetooth beacons on them and Transit Wireless (station WiFi) are on the same spectrum of course.