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As quite a few googlers appear to read and write on HN, I'd really welcome an insider info on what's going on the last few days. Sure there will be some intern
by firebaze 6y ago
As quite a few googlers appear to read and write on HN, I'd really welcome an insider info on what's going on the last few days.
Sure there will be some internal turmoil going on right now, but isn't there some non-confidential info to share? Can't imagine this will hurt the image of google neither in the short nor long run, quite the opposite.
- divbzero 6y agoYes, I’ve been hearing about this issue from non-technical friends too. An explanation of “X crashed” helps even if they don’t actually understand what X is. The fact that someone figured it out and knows is reassuring.
- rat9988 6y agoI would advice anyone to not share any information that his company hasn't agreed explicitely to share.
- gurjeet 6y agos/his/her/
- eganist 6y ago> s/his/her/ s/his/their
- makeworld 6y agoI believe you mean: s/s\/his\/her/s\/his\/their/
- maest 6y agos#s/his/her#s/his/their# also works and avoids awkward escaping. The first symbol after s is used as the separator. Works in vim, at least. In other words: s%s/s\\/his\\/her/s\\/his\\/their/%s#s/his/her#s/his/their#%
- monsieurbanana 6y agoDid you just assume my regex engine is pcre gendered???
- makeworld 6y agoWow, I've never heard this joke before. Original and well-applied to the situation.
- aaronmdjones 6y agoawkward escaping Or as I've seen it called, "leaning toothpick syndrome".
- icedchai 6y ago'Their' works fine and has been gender-neutral English for ages.
- erhk 6y agoAges is subjective, it came back in to popularity only recently
- icedchai 6y agoThat varies based on location and regional dialect. Here in the northeast US, I remember using singular they/their since the 80's. It would be interesting to know when this become popular elsewhere.
- hnick 6y ago80s in Australia too, been hearing/using it my whole life. Though with respect to 'ages' apparently it's been around since at least the 14th century but certain purists tried to stamp it out at various times (just like the singular 'you' which no one currently has grammatical issues with I hope). https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/ https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...
- throwaway201103 6y agoHis and her no longer correlates to biological sex, so what does it matter anymore. Pronouns can mean whatever you want them to mean.
- jodrellblank 6y ago> "so what does it matter anymore" The same reason it ever mattered how you refer to people, politeness and respect. If someone you consider "him" asks you to refer to them as "her" it's like someone asking you to call them by their full name "Rebecca" instead of "Becky" or "Jonathan" instead of "Jon". If you like and respect them, you do as they request because things which matter to them matter to you, and being polite to them is important to you. If you ignore what they ask, call them what you want, you communicate that you don't respect them and don't want to be polite, that you want to dominate and 'win' instead. > "Pronouns can mean whatever you want them to mean" Only one way. A specific person asking you to use a specific pronoun for themselves is wildly different from you unilaterally and universally saying that all women should feel included by the word "him" because "him" has no meaning anymore.
- john_moscow 6y agoThere used to be times when people didn't care for technicalities like this because the focus was on the person's contribution to the discussion. Now that everyone's replaceable, the popular culture desperately tries to shift focus into arguing about pronouns and terms. Watch out, this is a road to nowhere. Forcing others to use the right pronoun won't build up your retirement fund, but will distract you from worrying about not having one. And the fact that you care about it more than about your opponent's T-shirt color could be an indication that you are being manipulated to not think about the long-term things.
- messick 6y agoI’ve read a lot of horseshit reasons against showing the least possible shred of humanity by using someone’s correct pronouns, but “then the Illuminati will steal your 401k!” is a new one.
- octoberfranklin 6y agoThis is a surprisingly profound and insightful comment so deep in the subthread of, more or less, a shitpost. Thank you, sir, for elevating our collective level of discourse.
- dxdm 6y ago> you are being manipulated to not think This is where it crosses from insightful into conspiracy theory territory for me. People seem perfectly capable of groupthink-deluding themselves. Why cheapen your argument by postulating some master manipulator when it's not necessary for the deeper point you're making? It will only lead to people focussing the discussion to challenge this particular aspect, or them disregarding all you've said, instead of engaging with the actual meat of the argument.
- kharak 6y agoI remember some people tried to get BLM into German discussions, which made absolutely zero sense, as we have a complete different history and culture. Now I see this popping up. I really hope Europe can get some cultural distance between itself and the USA in the near future. The time is ripe.
- zapdrive 6y agoWhite Knight bann ke fuddi ni milni puttra.
- ab8 6y agoYour username is rat9988. Been burned in the past?
- zadokshi 6y agoManagement at google are poking in to check up on their staff, to make sure nothing leaks.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- redwards510 6y agoIn lieu of an actual Googler, how about some educated speculation? It blows my mind that Google can even have problems like this. Aren't their apps highly distributed across tons of CDNs? Don't they have world class Devops people that roll out changes in a piecemeal fashion to check for bugs? How exactly can they have an issue that can affect a huge swath of their customers across countries? Insight appreciated.
- aprdm 6y agoBecause, maybe, like in every big company, the thing actually doing the work is some old oracle database with some huge monolithic around it...
- pmlnr 6y agoHush, you'll scare the shiny eyed faang wannabies away, they aren't supposed to know this until employed for at least two decades.
- sellyme 6y agoOut of all the companies Google might be relying on in their back-end, I think Oracle is probably pretty far down the list.
- jeffbee 6y agoI can’t imagine what part of Google’s history would lead someone to believe there was any third party system in their production stack anywhere.
- still_grokking 6y agoDidn't they use GNU/Linux form day one on?
- jeffbee 6y agoClosed-source like Oracle I meant. They've been big boosters of all kinds of open-source stuff like linux, llvm, mysql, ...
- IshKebab 6y agoI wonder if Gmail is just not a very well maintained codebase. Here's an issue where old emails just become inaccessible. Not fixed for over a year and they've locked the thread so I'm starting to wonder if they actually deleted the emails by mistake. https://support.google.com/mail/thread/6187016 https://support.google.com/mail/thread/6187016 Maybe time to switch to a more reliable provider.
- Alex3917 6y ago> Not fixed for over a year and they've locked the thread so I'm starting to wonder if they actually deleted the emails by mistake. Did you try pulling them down using the API tester?: https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/reference/rest/v1/users.threads/get https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/reference/rest/v1/us... Some of the internal formatting that Gmail uses has changed over the years, so more likely than not the API that parses the stored message for display in the Gmail UI is just throwing some kind of error.
- edoceo 6y agoI've never had issues over IMAP with old (decade) message in gmail
- Alex3917 6y agoRight but the version of an email message you download via IMAP is different than the version of an email message you see in the Gmail UI. That's my point, that the error is probably in the way Google is processing messages for Gmail, so you wouldn't see it in IMAP or via the API.
- IshKebab 6y agoI didn't but I did try Takeout and they weren't in it. Either way my point is that this is a pretty serious bug and they haven't even acknowledged it! Not a good look.
- lrossi 6y agoSince so little time has passed since the last issue, I am wondering if it could be the same cause. Maybe they didn’t fix it properly the first time.
- User23 6y agoThe question is what exactly is the new “feature” that got pushed skipping canary is.
- bigiain 6y agoNSA backdoor? <smirk>
- Spooky23 6y agoUneducated speculation, some sort of security incident. Whenever there is a major security issue in the wild, one of the big providers tends to have a problem within a few days.
- kleinsch 6y agoI don’t work at Google, I’m at a different big tech that’s in the news frequently. Sharing inside info on an ongoing incident is a great way to get fired. Big tech companies are way different than startups where everyone can do a bit of anything. There are people whose job it is to handle that communication. You make their job a lot harder if you disclose information. The company is so big that as an engineer you may not know all the factors involved in what would hurt the company long term - undisclosed relevant litigation, compliance commitments, partner obligations, etc. How much do you hate it as an engineer when sales people make tech promises to customers without asking you? For comms people, engineers leaking info publicly feels the same way.
- programmerslave 6y agoStop being such a corporate slave. These companies wouldn’t hesitate to kick you out on the street if they had to
- rurp 6y agoWhat you're saying makes sense but I don't think it really applies to anything the OP said. The "non-confidential" qualifier indicates to me that they only want people to share what they can responsibly.
- enneff 6y agoAnd the parent post’s point is that there are people whose job it is to specifically share that information, and so we should let them do their job. They are the domain expert in this particular task.