Hacker News Reader

datguacdohon Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand

You're basing that on pure speculation so be careful what conclusions you're drawing from it. Chromebooks have historically gotten very good support, even though they tended to be relatively underpowered - the pixelbook isn't so I wouldn't expect support to stop anytime soon.

datguacdohon OnSen UI – Develop HTML5 hybrid and mobile web apps

Even on a modern pixel 3, the slider animation is a bit behind. Everything else looks smooth, but the slider definitely feels "off".

datguacdohon IBM‘s Project Debater does debate club-style discussions with humans

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/19/google-duplex-restaurant-res...

Sounds like they are gearing up for a launch.

datguacdohon After 48 hours we haven't seen any sign people are using Waymo's service

They did focus on these early though. Literally their first fully autonomous drive on public roads was with a blind individual, explaining how the technology was going to be transformative.

Video: https://youtu.be/ArYTxDZzQOM

datguacdohon New Parents Complain Amazon Baby-Registry Ads Are Deceptive

Happened to us a few months ago. We got a pair of baby bath kits we didn't ask for. We looked afterward, and saw the ads mixed into our list with no way to remove them. Incredibly slimy practice.

datguacdohon Google Assistant will screen spam calls on the Pixel 3

That's built in already as part of the do not disturb feature. You can set a list of important contacts that can always get through.

datguacdohon $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

> On Chromebooks, Chrome's fantastic profile system is deliberately conflated with Chrome OS login sessions, which makes it harder for one user to maintain multiple independent browsing contexts than when using Chrome on other platforms. Power users on Windows can run multiple browsers, or use profile systems in browsers to keep separation, but on Chrome OS, you only get two de facto contexts (the white one and the black one with the cool spy icon), you blast the same cookies everywhere, and half your builtin applications are just hyperlinks to auto-log you into the corresponding Google product in your global white context. Applications like Hangouts (the app, not the extension) are rare, where the entire window inherits your OS login, but keeps your context entirely separate from what you're doing in the browser.

ChromeOS actually has the ability to sign into multiple accounts at the same time and fast switch between them. It's not obvious in the UI though, so many don't know about it. https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/6088201?hl=en

datguacdohon Google Assistant’s latest feature: “Tell me something good”

You should read the article, the headline is very misleading :)

datguacdohon Uber’s Vision of Self-Driving Cars Begins to Blur

They use remote assistance for tricky emergency situations. That's a pretty big distinction. The remote assistance can be called in to help the car if it gets into a completely unknown state, but otherwise the cars are self driving.

https://www.wired.com/story/phantom-teleops/

datguacdohon Google: Security Keys Neutralized Employee Phishing

Most remote desktop apps have a form of USB passthrough. And I believe you can also do this in a variety of ways with ssh plus some combo of libusb.

datguacdohon Google has started the global roll-out of its new Chat messaging service

In many parts of the world SMS is still very popular (most popular?) and upgrading that experience seems a net win. I wish there was a push for end to end encryption but I doubt the carriers would have agreed to that given that in many countries they are legally obligated to hand over data when a court deems it necessary.

datguacdohon Chat is Google's next big fix for Android's messaging mess

He mentions in the video that when he asked Google reps why they didn't just do iMessage, they claimed it was because of anti competition fears if they forced their own proprietary message platform on everyone's device, including those from partners like Samsung which already have their own messaging apps. That sounds plausible.

Disclosure: I work at Google but not on anything related to messaging.

datguacdohon Apple unveils new iPad 9.7“ with Apple Pencil support

I don't agree that an iPad is more durable for kids than the education focused Chromebooks, like the new lenovos that came out with drop resistance and spill proof keyboards: https://www3.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/lenovo/lenovo-n-series...

Disclosure: I work at Google but not remotely on chromebooks.

datguacdohon How Apple let Siri fall behind the Google Assistant and Alexa

Walt Mossberg has a funny "series" on his Twitter where he screencaps all the blatent failures he has with Siri. Many times, he or a follower will attach a screenshot of Assistant completing the action. It's not scientific by any means, but it's fun to go through and provides some concrete examples. His biggest issue seems to be that Siri is unreliable - there are queries that work, but only sometimes, and that makes the experience of using the product terrible.

datguacdohon New “Android Go” phones show how much you can get for $100

The difference isn't just the price. It's that all of these phones are also running an optimized version of Android that is going to run on the lower specs better than anything else. It doesn't matter if the specs seem the same between devices, if the vendor adds a bunch of crap or just drops aosp without optimizing for the hardware, the phone is going to run terribly. This is the current state of most low end android phone's which they appear to be addressing with Android Go phones.

datguacdohon Set-top box maker TiVo exploring options, could go private

I was also a long time TiVo user (3 units in 3 rooms for about 10 years) and gave up on them this year. Now I'm just using YouTube TV which has an unlimited DVR, and with a couple Chromecast and Roku devices under displays now, I don't miss it one bit. I get access to everything I need, anywhere I am, and don't have to clean up the disk constantly or pay extra on top of the TV service.

datguacdohon California to allow testing of self-driving cars without a driver present

They are already doing this in Arizona: https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/7/16615290/waymo-self-drivi...

datguacdohon SpaceX just launched two of its space internet satellites

Come on, they said this in the actual article. "But the vehicle will also have two additional satellites hitchhiking along for the ride: prototype probes built by SpaceX to test out the technology needed to beam down internet from space.

Sending up these two test spacecraft — named Microsat-2a and Microsat-2b — is a big first step in SpaceX’s long-term plans to create satellite internet." Sure, headlines nowadays tend to the buzzworthy but this article seems well written otherwise.

datguacdohon Ad Companies Love Google’s Ad Blocker, but Hate Apple’s Privacy Features

Project shield?

datguacdohon The insane amount of backward compatibility in Google Maps

If Reader was running on old infrastructure, it's very possible it could have cost more than that just to maintain status quo.

datguacdohon BeyondCorp: How Google Ditched VPNs for Remote Employee Access

We wrote a lot more about what we did to ensure then end user experience was good in https://research.google.com/pubs/pub46366.html

You're right that it's still early for companies that don't have the same resources of a company like Google, but products are slowly starting to emerge to make it more turnkey, so I have high hopes that this will be the norm for new companies in a few years.

datguacdohon BeyondCorp: How Google Ditched VPNs for Remote Employee Access

There's a lot more about the end user experience in the most recent published paper: https://research.google.com/pubs/pub46366.html

datguacdohon Google IT Support Professional Certificate

Yeah you definitely want to keep in mind that this cert, and especially Course 1, has to be accessible to anyone. So it's building a foundation of common knowledge for the other courses which absolutely go into much more details.

datguacdohon Google IT Support Professional Certificate

I sent this on to the right people. We audited the course and had a private external beta, so it's surprising to see obvious errors like this. I imagine there might be something else going on with the labs.

datguacdohon Google IT Support Professional Certificate

SRE are different, I'm talking about IT staff. The job title is corporate operations engineer.

datguacdohon Google IT Support Professional Certificate

In IT, it depends on the level, but early on we look for generalists, and then expect people to specialize over time. The interview process is similar to SWE, but for new grads the technical bar is lower. The title is Corporate Operations Engineer, unless you're in our IT Residency Program, in which case it's IT Resident.

datguacdohon Google IT Support Professional Certificate

For our IT Residency Program, we don't require it, but if you have a CS background, you might get asked about it. Maybe automate a simple task and maybe some discussion on optimization. The interviews tend to be customized to the candidate's background. We hire a decent number of people from non traditional degrees into our IT program, so we care more about you being teachable, knowing at least one technology well and having passion for tech and customer service in general.

datguacdohon Google IT Support Professional Certificate

We actually expect our support team (at least portions of them) to build internal apps that automate workflows for ops work or for users. It's not always as complex as a full soft eng role, but some of our IT staff do move on to those positions internally based on the work they do in IT. I think it really depends on the company you do IT for, and what they expect for the role. At Google, our IT staff are full time engineers.

Disclosure: I worked on this program and went through Google's IT Residency Program.

datguacdohon Google IT Support Professional Certificate

We based this on our internal training for our IT hires based on the gaps we found when we onboarded people over the last 7 years. We invested a lot in making the material practical and lab driven vs just rote memorization.

Disclosure: I worked on this program.

datguacdohon Google IT Support Professional Certificate

Disclosure: I am one of the instructors for this course and went through Google's IT Residency Program.

It's unfortunate that the company's external support has such a bad reputation. But our internal support team is actually highly regarded and loved by employees. The training here is very much based on the training we provide to our internal hires.