3 ms·

Comments like yours really piss me off. You have absolutely no self-awareness or empathy, and come off sounding like a know it all. Yes, we all know that stori

Comments like yours really piss me off. You have absolutely no self-awareness or empathy, and come off sounding like a know it all. Yes, we all know that storing date/time data is hard; they should use a standard timezone (without DST), and use time-locales to localize the timestamps to the user. We get it. The reason this knowledge is so well known is because previous programmers (without this helpful guidance) made many different technical decisions for many reasons, and learned the hard way. They then publicized their failures for our benefit. What was the last technical decision you made that turned out to be the wrong one? Did you make the wrong decision maliciously? Or were you doing the best you could with the information available? Would you really find it helpful for somebody to come along a decade later with the attitude "these guys have no idea what they were doing, I learned about these antipatterns years ago!" (usually followed by "better rewrite everything") I'll go out on a limb and say most people here haven't started from a single datacenter and grew to a global service. These engineers deserve the benefit of doubt unless and until more information is available. They certainly don't need armchair analysis from some randos on hackernews. /rant

manigandham 8y ago
>> we all know that storing date/time data is hard But... it's not hard. That's the point. This isn't a hard decision and has nothing to do with regional vs global. The lesson was learned by the entire industry decades before the company existed so a modern engineering team making that mistake, and never fixing it, is definitely open for criticism.
talonx 8y ago
Is it really believable that this engineering team started out by not thinking that their service (GCP) would become a global service, irrespective of how many datacenters they started with and where?
dang 8y ago
> Comments like yours really piss me off. You have absolutely no self-awareness or empathy, and come off sounding like a know it all. Oh dear. This kind of personal attack is not ok on HN and we ban accounts that do this. Could you please not do it again, regardless of how un-self-aware another comment seems or how you feel in response? Your comment would be fine without the first and last sentences. It's hard never to write such things but it's always possible to edit them out. That's what I do when something like that slips out. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: unfortunately it looks like you've been uncivil before, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16928159 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16928159. Please make sure not to in the future.
- theossuary 8y ago
  I see where you're coming from on the first sentence. I should have left it at saying his comment seemed to lack empathy. The last sentence I still think is fine though (I include myself in the list of people who don't have the perspective to criticize their decisions, I don't have the context to be constructive). I won't defend the other comment. It's easy to be unnecessarily rude in comments, but I would have said the same were we talking in person. I don't believe in hiding behind anonymity to say something you wouldn't say otherwise. All the same, I appreciate the input.

manigandham 8y ago

>> we all know that storing date/time data is hard But... it's not hard. That's the point. This isn't a hard decision and has nothing to do with regional vs global. The lesson was learned by the entire industry decades before the company existed so a modern engineering team making that mistake, and never fixing it, is definitely open for criticism.

talonx 8y ago

Is it really believable that this engineering team started out by not thinking that their service (GCP) would become a global service, irrespective of how many datacenters they started with and where?

dang 8y ago

> Comments like yours really piss me off. You have absolutely no self-awareness or empathy, and come off sounding like a know it all. Oh dear. This kind of personal attack is not ok on HN and we ban accounts that do this. Could you please not do it again, regardless of how un-self-aware another comment seems or how you feel in response? Your comment would be fine without the first and last sentences. It's hard never to write such things but it's always possible to edit them out. That's what I do when something like that slips out. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: unfortunately it looks like you've been uncivil before, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16928159 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16928159. Please make sure not to in the future.

theossuary 8y ago
I see where you're coming from on the first sentence. I should have left it at saying his comment seemed to lack empathy. The last sentence I still think is fine though (I include myself in the list of people who don't have the perspective to criticize their decisions, I don't have the context to be constructive). I won't defend the other comment. It's easy to be unnecessarily rude in comments, but I would have said the same were we talking in person. I don't believe in hiding behind anonymity to say something you wouldn't say otherwise. All the same, I appreciate the input.