asuffield

I am interested in whether, if you turned the questions around and asked questions like "I want to give up my grocery store discount in exchange for the company running the store not collecting information about me", you would get the same results. Those loyalty cards are completely opt-in, the way they are used is widely known, and out in the real world with money on the line, people turn out to say "yes, I want this".

What does this tell us about the results of this survey?

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion, not my employer's. Not representing anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google, and use some of this stuff all the time.)

In all honesty, this diagram is missing so much information that you won't learn very much from it about how we do things (and all the things you can't see are confidential). It's more like a map of the relationships between the few bits that have been published.

However, I would tend to agree with your final suggestion that data structures are much more interesting than code.

Ah, if it's one of those arrangements then yeah, that was always a lost cause.

The dimensions of this can change somewhat when dealing with long-term loans. If you have a mortgage on terms which allow this, then you're probably better off keeping several months of overpayments in your mortgage account, on the understanding that you're allowed to stop payments for that long in an emergency. Most lenders have some sort of terms like these, but check yours carefully before doing this.

This implies setting your mortgage repayment rate at a level which leaves you with sufficient income to overpay it. Having set things up this way, you can then size your emergency fund on the assumption that you won't have to pay your mortgage out of it.

Why do this? Simply put, the savings on interest are massive and this improves your financial stability a great deal over time.

Why not do this? It requires careful and diligent financial planning, and that sort of person probably doesn't need telling how to take advantage of the subtleties of mortgages.

Also "know your exit strategy". Foreclosure means giving up control and probably losing everything, and you should try very very hard to stay in control of what happens here. Selling the house quickly might have been difficult, but the big immediate mistake here was not selling the car - anything that gets repossessed is gone and you won't get any of the cash, anything you sell yourself you have some control over where the money goes.

London's a special case: every single unit that can be converted from "affordable housing" to "luxury accommodation" is a massive profit realised by the developer. You can make a lot of money from building low-cost housing, but you can make an awful lot more from building really expensive housing, because there is essentially unlimited demand for both.

There is a secondary dimension here. The Hippocratic oath works because all the other doctors have also agreed to do it. Whenever faced with one of these scenarios, you also have to ask yourself: "If this is the hill I choose to die on, will it actually make a difference?" If the next person is line is going to look at your example, shrug, and do the thing you refused to do, then your self-sacrifice was a senseless waste, because the thing has happened anyway and the only change you have effected in the world is self-harm.

As a software engineer, it is extremely likely that you are replaceable, and you always have to factor into your considerations what your replacement is going to do. You don't usually have the choice between "the thing happens or does not happen"; your choice is often something more like "you can do the thing, try to convince people that it's a bad idea, or roll the dice and see if your replacement - who is expected to be more average than you - is both willing and more able to convince people that it's a bad idea".

The average doctor follows the Hippocratic oath. What does the average software engineer do?

(The above argument does not apply if your goal is publicity/drama rather than effective change)

Economists believe that a financial transaction tax would primarily result in reducing low-income employment opportunities and ultimately be paid for by low-income consumers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood_tax#Evaluation_and_r...

The TL;DR is that a transaction tax would primarily serve to increase bid-offer spread, which slows down the markets and results in every industry selling slightly less at slightly higher prices - which naturally means slightly shifting to favour those with more purchasing power.

There is no shortage of incentive for that in most of western Europe - such property is significantly profitable. The reason why not much gets built is because (a) cheap housing blocks results in ghettoisation, which most governments try to prevent with mixed-dwelling planning requirements, and (b) local residents invariably object to any planning request for housing more low-income people near them.

I've seen several cases that looked like this superficially, but never a case where it turned out to be true when more closely investigated. Every single time, it has turned out that the "10x worker" who "writes all the important things and knows everything" has been doing essentially nothing for a very long time. Every single time, the primary features of these people have been:

* They have an opinion on every subject, and express one in every discussion ("leadership")

* For any proposed task, they can give a list of plausible-sounding reasons why it should not be done ("technical expertise")

* Nobody challenges them because doing anything that sounds even a little bit like a challenge results in you getting shouted at ("respected by their peers")

Words in parentheses are what management sees.

Every time I have seen a case where these people have persisted, it has been because a clique of them back each other up and the rest of the people in the company are essentially docile. Every competent engineer who finds themselves in this scenario then discovers that they are (a) outnumbered, and (b) able to find a better job somewhere else, so that's what happens.

Suppose one company buys another company outright. Should that company keep its customer list (effectively transferring it to the new owner), or throw it away, ditch all its customers, and start from square 1? Would you be happy as a customer if you were told that because your cellphone company had been bought, your contract is cancelled and they can't offer you another one, you have to go to the store and start over? Would you be happy as an employee of this company being bought?

Now, suppose the purchasing company isn't buying the entire business, but (say) half of it? What's changed? (This is roughly what is being proposed here)

The key detail not mentioned in that article is that this is primarily an issue of London, which the rest of the country does not share. Outside London, house prices are a lot more reasonable and there isn't really a major shortage.

The planning permission details in there appear to be a distraction - release of low-value "green belt" land, like that pictured in the article, does happen where needed. The big problem in London is that any proposal for new construction will be met with fierce opposition from nearby homeowners on the grounds of congested roads, limited parking space, overuse of local amenities, and lowering the value of their own properties.

So the large media organisations - who tend to rely on government cooperation to produce most of their content - have done exactly the same thing that they did every other time. That's barely even news.

Does anybody have a proposal for how this situation might be changed?

It's kind of interesting that this is seen as a major achievement. To the best of my knowledge, under the standards set here (no more than 10 days on the street or in an emergency shelter), we've long had this in most of the UK and various other parts of Europe. It's almost true in London, modulo some people with mental health issues. Homeless people get picked up and moved into temporary housing about that quickly. Having everybody able to afford their own housing is a much harder problem - we're nowhere near that. But getting them into council-owned "temporary" housing? That problem's more or less solved. It's crowded, costs more than it should, and most families don't have enough space, and there's all sorts of things about the system which aren't very fair, but it's housing.

(There's a guy who lives under a road bridge, not far from my flat. He's been there for years. He wants to live under that road bridge. He's obviously crazy, but he's not a danger to himself or others, and it turns out that it's not illegal for him to live there. So he's a +1 to the permanent homelessness statistics, but he's perfectly happy with this - the standard as written will never be achieved in London because of cases like this one.)

Every time I see an article like this, it advances the "principle" that your own death has no effect on anybody else in the world.

Never have I seen this justified in any plausible sense.

I can think of many words to describe my reaction to this, but "surprise" is not one of them. I have never seen a regulatory body impose any meaningful security testing. Even supposedly "secure" standards are often self-certified, not tested.

The C language spec alone is not sufficient to build a useful system. You're also going to need some kind of operating system interface (defined in POSIX), binary format (ELF), and so on.

The specification that you're both trying to find is called the "System V Application Binary Interface, AMD64 Architecture Processor Supplement" and is found here: http://www.x86-64.org/documentation/abi.pdf

There are similar variations for other architectures. Microsoft does something different, I don't know where their spec lives.

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion, not my employer's. Not representing anybody else. I work at Google, not on borg)

You might find the borg paper very interesting: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...

The bits of containers that made it out into lxc are essentially borglet features. The rest of the infrastructure around it was never released to the outside world, and now docker is recreating some of that infrastructure. We've had borg for a long time ;)

There's lots more detail in the paper about how these pieces relate to each other.

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion, not my employer's. Not representing anybody else. I work at Google and have some involvement in this project.)

Others have discussed the technical aspects of what QUIC is achieving, but you can understand its purpose fairly easily by saying "QUIC" out loud ;)

If that's not clear enough, it stands for "Quick UDP Internet Connections", which I think makes it fairly clear what it achieves. You can read more about it in the FAQ: https://docs.google.com/a/chromium.org/document/d/1lmL9EF6qK...

Note that the blog post doesn't say "1% slowest sites", it says "1% slowest connections" - that's the mobile and satellite users. Think about how many seconds it takes to load google.com on your phone when your signal isn't great. How does taking a second off that sound to you?

> The school district spokesperson said that "our information technology department is working to get all our passwords centralized."

I think I can see the problem here.

I don't buy it. There are people of all ages on my team, and the same has been true at several other jobs I've had in the past few years. There is not even a particularly strong correlation between age and seniority.

My second observation is that in all the jobs I've had where this was not true, the company has not been particularly successful in the long run. It's unclear whether this is related, but it's interesting.

However, I can come up with an alternative statement that may be a better explanation of what some people seem to observe: if you are not a really good engineer by the time you turn 40, and you expect to be paid based on your "years of experience", get a plan B.

It would be a fairly poorly designed system if any individual could subvert it without getting caught. It's not all that important who's paying them ;)

I can't talk about internal systems at all, of course.

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion, not my employer's. Not representing anybody but myself. I work at Google, not on gmail.)

While the main point of this article is about legislation that enables interception, they're using gmail as an example and there's something I'd like to point out (took a little digging to find a place where this had been said publicly):

http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/staying-at-forefron...

"In addition, every single email message you send or receive—100 percent of them—is encrypted while moving internally. This ensures that your messages are safe not only when they move between you and Gmail's servers, but also as they move between Google's data centers—something we made a top priority after last summer’s revelations."

The NSA can lawfully intercept all of Google's inter-datacenter traffic at the borders of the US. Good luck to them in doing anything useful with this firehose of encrypted traffic.

I'm aware that it has history. The version I quoted is Pratchett's ;)

I can be proud of my employer's substantial efforts to address NSA warrants, and would challenge you to find any single entity that has done more.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25910694

https://www.reformgovernmentsurveillance.com/

http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/google-2015-will-be-the-...

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/31/apple-face...

http://dcinno.streetwise.co/2014/11/17/google-microsoft-appl...

The grandparent said it was smaller, and I was merely observing that it is not. If you want to talk about colours, the colours used in both locations are the same: one is white on blue, the other is blue on white. I suppose you can claim that one is closer to the centre than the other, but this feels like splitting hairs.

When I look at this page, these buttons both seem quite readable to me, and I don't feel that either of them is concealed or hard to press. I do not believe that this page is deceptive or misleading in any way. It clearly and directly tells you what it does. And let's not forget that it's not doing a bad thing, it's offering people a feature which appears to be popular. If you're particularly concerned about adding another layer of privacy defence on top of the already fairly formidable ones that you get by default, you can add your own passphrase to encrypt the information locally on each device, and you can examine the source in chromium if you want to be sure you know what it does.

If you're complaining that the people who designed the feature are trying to encourage people to use it, then frankly I think your complaint is unreasonable.

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion, not my employer's. Not representing anybody but me. I work at Google, not on lawful intercept.)

That's not what this article says. This article is about what happens when the government lawfully issues a warrant to obtain somebody's private data, and orders a private company to give them the data. When this happens the company has some rights to recover their costs from the government.

You may not like what the US government is doing here. I certainly don't. But it's still the law, and companies that operate in the US have to comply with it.

(Standard disclaimer: my opinions, not my employer's. Not representing anybody else. I work at Google, not on these projects.)

Most googlers who are also engineers can find out what most of these things are, and I would expect many are already aware of what those projects are likely to be. It is a core part of our culture that we share information openly within engineering, and don't leak it.

We can't tell you what's happening. That doesn't mean we don't know.

How do you believe this is misleading users? It seems quite clear to me, and while this is anecdotal rather than data, based on the people I know the feature seems to be quite popular.

That all seems clear and reasonable to me. I double checked the size of 'No thanks' and 'Choose what to sync' in the chrome dev tools: they are 13px, which is exactly the same size as 'Sign in' and 'Need help'. Signing in without making a specific selection gives you what the third line on the screen said it would do.

What, if anything, is wrong with this?