the ANSI C standard has a line length limit, so there are no guarantees that compilers have to function properly with longer lines than given in the standard.
It's anecdotal. However, it should not be hard to test it out with 10 non-tech friends. I also don't recall having my credit card on file on any website that uses naked domain. That's pure correlation. Which goes on to show how valid any hard evidence on this issue would be.
Performing your own little user study is the best way to take a stance, I believe.
It would basically double the current latency (about 100ms) by adding a 50ms trip to both receiving and sending. (And that's being generous -- it could easily add 100+ms to each trip.)
Problem is, people on HN are making decisions and building tools and startups. If everyone loses faith in Google, we'll stop using their platforms and tools which translates to loss of money.
The only example I can give is at my day job, I built a backup system that uses Azure blob storage because I actually trust Microsoft more than Google.
I wonder how many other people have a "anyone but Google" approach? It's not just cancelling services, it's the churn in APIs; they seem to be less stable than products from almost any other company.
You should address that question to d0vs, as he is the one who made that point.
But now that I have a chance to think about it, I can see his point. Most companies don't really take that particular risk into account and just kick the problem down the road. If you tried raising it as an issue, you'd get responses ranging from 'sure, figure out a way to value the risk and we'll add it into the model', to 'who cares really?'.
This. Most corps with Deep pockets already have a big team on procurement, and I have no say in what tools I am allowed to use to get my job done. All those stuff is already decided. I may go and say, "Hey, have you seen this, it's better than X", and that will not yield anything at all.
Funnily enough I am doing the exact same thing. In my mind Golang has a temporary spot on the roster, and I'm actively looking at Rust, Nim, and a few other languages for writing some server projects in the next few years.
If Google isn't careful, Microsoft is going to cannibalize their enterprise space. I think Microsoft has been getting the same vibes and it really seems like they are finally trying to be team players and not just catering to the low-hanging fruit of non-tech savvy folk.
I wouldn't be surprised if they take the gamble on releasing a (free?) online enterprise office application suite as some sort of MS Office Lite. Google is no longer the hero of innovation we all thought they once were, and slowly but surely, smaller niche companies and serious tech giants with the singular goal of squashing Google will replace their core products with products that are more open source, privacy-focused, and with real customer support.
I remember when I wanted to work for Google. God, I remember when I wanted to work for Facebook. What the fish was wrong with me.
Microsoft already has released Office Online. It's lite versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. They're quite good. They get certain enhancements when you buy an Office 365 subscription (in addition to the full applications).
IMHO there's nothing wrong with wanting to work for Google/Facebook/any of the big 4/5. Get one of those on your resume and you are set for life, even if the work isn't all it's cracked up to be.
I didn't know about Office Online. Glad to hear Microsoft is doing that.
The problem with Google and Facebook is that I've come to realize our ethics are extremely misaligned.
I'm not interested in building exploitable systems filled with damaging metadata that can be abused by totalitarian states or vengeful employees.
I'm not interested in forcing Africa into a world where Facebook and Google are synonymous with the internet.
I'm not interested in running an echo chamber that 1/4 of the world's population uses, subjecting others to political influence and carefully syndicated information that influences their thoughts and behavior, while providing massive quantities of foreign user data to three-letter agencies interested in squashing social uprisings in third-world countries.
And I'm not interested in shutting down my moral compass by accepting corporate propaganda that tells me what I am doing is right and for the benefit of mankind.
Only reason I ever wanted to work for either was the prestige, the badass lunch buffets, and the feeling that I'm doing something important, positive and ground-breaking. But those are all selfish desires and the last one isn't true.
Many of those reasons you wanted to work for them are very subjective. While you mentioned that the last one is not true, I find that the Google Deep Mind project to build a Starcraft AI is extremely interesting.
I'll agree, they are in some ways subjective, but I have to work with the assumptions and motivations I have when it comes to choosing my employer.
Now Deep Mind... I would work for Deep Mind. Or even just intern. I would love to work with some of the ML pioneers even if just for a few months and just soak in everything I can.
On the contrary. I've spent much of my career in the conservative "enterprise" world... and outside of the HN echo chamber, most established companies aren't yet making heavy use of Google products at all. Largely due to the cultural disconnect being discussed here.
Sorry, but "We'll give you 12 months notice!" is still nowhere near "enterprisey". Try a decade.
I work in the conservatibe enterprise world, and vendors dropping services with much less than a decades notice -- usually, but not always, with a recommended replacement that they are also willing to sell you -- is quite common.
I think Google's problem here, inasmuch as it has one, is marketing and relationships, not substantive policy.
First, isn't the HN echo chamber actually an important constituency for Google if they want to sell to businesses? Second, I think once you get one of these "over my dead body" reactions going, it has to hurt business. Consider the lengths Microsoft has had to go to to try to overcome their negative reputation in the tech community.
Depends on the field – e.g. in the cultural heritage space, many people used Google Reader and that still comes up any time someone mentions a Google service: “What will we do when they cancel this?” That doesn't mean that people won't use something but it definitely encourages a healthy discussion about lock-in.
I know a lot of big company CTOs –– for old, boring companies like insurance (blah!) and real estate (yuck!) –– and they are very concerned about tech companies' willingness to keep services around for the very long haul.
First of all it's far easier to learn than most people make it out to be. As for why I decided to learn vim: I grew tired of having to switch IDEs depending on the language I use and most importantly memorizing their different sets of keybindings. Now I only have to learn vim's keybindings.
Forge and Piper are built on Google's internal tech stack and designed for Google's production infrastructure, so open sourcing them would be a very big project. I think it would be a lot more likely for them to be offered as a service -- and that might be more useful to users anyway, since you'd be able to share resources with everyone else doing builds, rather than try to get your own cluster running which might sit idle a lot of the time. Of course, there are privacy issues, etc.
(Disclaimer: I'm purely speculating. I left Google over four years ago, and have no idea what the tools people are up to today.)
Because very few people have a need to support a billion-LOC monorepo on which 30K engineers make tens of thousands of commits daily. That's where this system shines.
For smaller projects, Git+Bazel (open source, non-distributed version of Blaze) works fine if you're working with C++, and other build systems work OK as well, if you're working with other languages.
Some languages do?