mdwelsh

10 ms·

31.
by mdwelsh 11y ago
See my reply above - I'm all for industry opening up where possible, and a lot of stuff gets open sourced these days (hell, didn't Facebook even open source its data center designs?). Opening up technology doesn't necessarily
32.
by mdwelsh 11y ago
While I agree in general that opening up opportunities for academic-industry collaboration is good, I don't think it's practical for academics to work on problems at true industry scale. Academics don't have access to the res
33.
by mdwelsh 11y ago
That's a fair point. I'm trying to draw a distinction between "speculative" research (which might pan out long term) and "industry-focused" research (which tries to solve problems we have today). My concern is
34.
by mdwelsh 11y ago
It's a good idea but fairly challenging in practice. The amount of information you need to reveal in a scientific publication may make many companies uncomfortable. My view is that academics should not just be focused on getting anothe
35.
by mdwelsh 11y ago
That's a fair point. The issue is that many of these papers don't seem to acknowledge that industry has (unpublished) solutions, and are somewhat naive as a result.
36.
by mdwelsh 11y ago
I'm not so worried about duplication by academics -- that does not happen often -- but rather about academic research that's just wrong: makes bad assumptions, uses a flawed methodology, fails to address the general case.
37.
by mdwelsh 11y ago
The issue is that when doing a sabbatical/internship at a company, it's often not possible to write a paper - either because there's not time, or the company may not want to publish the work (which could be confidential). I w
38.
by mdwelsh 11y ago
I'm not based in Silicon Valley, and I went to Cornell for my undergrad degree.
39.
by mdwelsh 11y ago
(I'm the author of the original blog post.) Ad hominem attacks aside, I do think it's a big deal if a bunch of academics are spending time working on the wrong things, if for no better reason than maximizing efficiency: Don't
40.
by mdwelsh 11y ago
This line: "You do not need to provide any personally identifying information in order to use Chrome" is intended to cover pretty much all of the cases you describe. I'm not going to speculate on legal issues.
41.
by mdwelsh 11y ago
This is not strictly true. In most cases, Chrome uses an encrypted (HTTP/2) connection to the Flywheel proxy which would bypass by ISP-side middleboxes. However, some carriers are downgrading the Flywheel connection to HTTP for the pur
42.
by mdwelsh 11y ago
I absolutely agree with your rationale for not wanting to opt in; we appreciate that this is a highly privacy-sensitive topic and one that users need to make up their own minds about.
43.
by mdwelsh 11y ago
I'm the tech lead for the Flywheel proxy. The original version of Flywheel actually started with PageSpeed (with a bunch of customizations to focus on compression). You can indeed emulate Flywheel's optimizations with the appropri
44.
by mdwelsh 11y ago
Note that use of the proxy is completely anonymous and we have no way of tying the traffic to a particular user.
45.
by mdwelsh 11y ago
I am the tech lead on the Flywheel proxy. We do not use the data passing through the proxy for any purpose other than compression. This is covered by the Chrome privacy policy which you can read here: https://www.google.com/
46.
by mdwelsh 11y ago
The proxy does much more than just gzip; this paragraph refers to only the impact of gzip on the Web (which was surprising to us given how widespread we assumed it would be).
47.
by mdwelsh 11y ago
I am the tech lead on the Flywheel proxy. The feature is currently launched for Chrome on Android, iOS, and desktop (including ChromeOS). There is no plan to implement this outside of Chrome.
48.
by mdwelsh 11y ago
I am the tech lead on the Flywheel proxy. Flywheel does not MITM SSL connections; it does not proxy SSL at all. If you just mean "MITM" in a generic sense, the fact that you believe you have "data sovereignty" is interes
49.
by mdwelsh 12y ago
That's a fair point. It's true my job has shifted much more towards being like a professor than being an individual contributor SWE. Still, lots of differences with academic life: Far lower overhead, far less administrative work,
50.
by mdwelsh 12y ago
OP here. Lots of people at Google have PhDs. Most do not. My role is actually a Tech Lead Manager, which is far more technical than a typical manager position, and indeed I am on the Software Engineer ladder. I would say about 80% of my tim
51.
by mdwelsh 12y ago
Well, I wrote a large chunk of the system and am still on the pager rotation along with the rest of the eng team. At some point we'll hand off pager duty to the SRE team.
52.
by mdwelsh 13y ago
I did the original study at Google on SPDY over mobile networks, which was a small-scale lab study. Since then, we have collected data from millions of Chrome Mobile users which shows that SPDY does tend to outperform HTTP on cellular, but
53.
by mdwelsh 13y ago
This is a nice article, but I disagree with the statement that "most of the time", users are accessing the mobile web via cellular (not WiFi) networks. The data that I have seen on this is that the vast majority of mobile web usag
54.
by mdwelsh 13y ago
That seems busted. I'll see if I can get someone to fix it.
55.
by mdwelsh 13y ago
Good point. Maybe you could check out one of the many other open source Go projects out there as an alternative. I'm not sure reading our code would give you that eureka moment, since it only made sense to me since I was so familiar wi
56.
by mdwelsh 13y ago
Unfortunately, probably not. Hopefully one day.
57.
by mdwelsh 13y ago
I haven't found that I needed generics so far, though I can see places where they would be useful.
58.
by mdwelsh 13y ago
Identical. The bulk of our system's latency involves making calls out to other services, so that is not the bottleneck in this case.
59.
by mdwelsh 13y ago
I would love to open source this system, but even if we did I'm not sure we'd be able to convince you that using Go was better than some other language in terms of developer productivity. How would having access to the source help
60.
by mdwelsh 13y ago
The Go module system for sure. Also I really like Go's interface model (as opposed to Java or C++ classes) as it is more flexible and in some ways more precise. Note that I don't know Ruby so I can't compare Go to that...

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