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gonyea

518 karma · joined September 27, 2015

Software Engineer on Google Groups.
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gonyea··on Google defends Gmail data sharing, gives few details on violations
I don’t get your point. These are third party extensions that you opt into. The alternative is giving a third party your password and letting them use IMAP. This seems like a better compromise that Google can actually log.
gonyea··on In killing Inbox, Google takes another swipe at its most passionate users
I don’t get this. Features complicate products and require maintenance. By your logic, features would never get built because they’d carry a lifelong burden.
gonyea··on Trump to Apple: 'Make your products' in the US to avoid tariffs
Well, they’re from villages all across China. They need somewhere to live and it might as well not have a commute.

Nearly every large employer in China has employee housing of some sort, including government agencies. Every single manufacturer has dorms.

gonyea··on I don't want to learn your query language
This is some A+ bah-humbuggery. You want companies to parse sql and translate that to backend api calls? What a nightmare. Data isn’t always co-located, and not all data is allowed to be fetched together (eg, protecting user privacy in Google Analytics).
gonyea··on Elm 0.19 Broke Us
this = a sound/strong type system:

https://www.dartlang.org/guides/language/sound-dart

gonyea··on Elm 0.19 Broke Us
I mean, Dart offers this. The difference between Dart and the other strongly typed options is that a massive pile of funding (and production apps) drive Dart and its direction. So it’s quite stable, if a little too risk averse.

That said, I’ve never found Strong Typing to be that essential for front end dev. TypeScript is incredibly pragmatic, which is why it’s been so successful imo.

Nothing stops people from writing all their dependencies in TypeScript. But it’s not necessary to use it successfully.

gonyea··on Elm 0.19 Broke Us
And this is why I love TypeScript: It's just JavaScript, with a type system. If it's not in the standard then it's not in TypeScript (by default). There's no risk to adoption.
gonyea··on Google, Apple and others no longer require employees to have a college degree
More than 1 in 10, iirc.
gonyea··on Google Needs to Come Clean About Its Chinese Plans
Why? It’s not like they’re using slave labor. Google will reveal their plans if and when it suits them.
gonyea··on Prefab housing complex for UC Berkeley students goes up in four days
Problem: Almost every SFH has an easement in the rear of the lot. And cities like Mountain View are using that as the basis for denying ADU applications.

If there’s telephone wires (not even a pole) then there’s an easement.

gonyea··on Google Public DNS turns 8.8.8.8 years old
Why the hell would Google offer a free service, and publicly commit to privacy in this way, just so they can lie and put the rest of their revenue at risk when a big law suit hits?

That’s bananas.

gonyea··on Google Public DNS turns 8.8.8.8 years old
Baseless fear mongering from a concern troll.
gonyea··on Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform
Dart is really interesting. It's a cool programming language, managed by some incredibly smart people. It could have been what TypeScript is today, but failed dramatically due to a lack of pragmatism and an outright loathing for JavaScript.

What soured me towards Dart is its continued history of ignoring community input. I remember when it was announced--the original "Hello World" transpiled to JS was around 70kb. 8-years later, and after all the user feedback (and shock in the original HN announcement), it's now around ~80kb.

Why do this? Why continue to play so poorly with JavaScript? Dart2js is an indefensible Rube Goldberg machine that no human being can reasonably understand or debug.

gonyea··on Former Apple Employee Charged with Theft of Autonomous Car Project Trade Secrets
It's not xenophobic to exclude people who are citizens of a country with no extradition treaty from working on sensitive projects.
gonyea··on Ask HN: Are my technical interview questions too hard?
The open-ended problem solving question is a coding question.
gonyea··on Ask HN: Are my technical interview questions too hard?
This endless interview question is really stupid. If you’re in an interview saying “OK, NOW!” then you’re a huge waste of time.

Ask specific, probing questions to assess knowledge in your ideal areas, in some combination with an open ended problem solving question.

gonyea··on You don't need ML/AI, you need SQL
This post is downright bonkers. “We don’t need ML/AI! Proof: list of things you wouldn’t use ML for”

There are so many problems you can solve with a neural network. Should Waymo ETL sensor data and do a WHERE NOT IN for bicyclists?

This is blog post is pretty dismissive. Statistics software has been in use since the beginning; see SAS. Financial institutions, actuaries, etc, have been using these methods with SQL data as the input and it’s the only reason they’re still in business.

If this blog post simply suggested hiring a BI Analyst in your startup, I wouldn’t disagree.

gonyea··on How to Steal 50M Bees
I don’t think you can really do that. Jamming mostly targets a receiver. Disrupting the signal that’s emitted by a tracking device would make you really easy to triangulate and find.
gonyea··on Fiat Chrysler Is Being Sued Over a Software Flaw
My expectation was that the car would start to have issues gradually. Eg, you can generally hear when an engine starts to misbehave. I got the Pacifica b/c it was a quiet, comfortable ride and accepted the higher cost of ownership. Now I wonder if their airbags will actually deploy in a crash.

Cars are now becoming a pile of soft-buttons, and I don’t see how that makes he experience better. There’s no physical lever to stop your car in an emergency in most new cars. Just a [P] toggle. Even the Chrysler has a really dumb knob for changing gears on the transmission (which people often confuse with a volume knob).

I may just buy a Chevy Tahoe next; it’s a much simpler car with sufficient luxury & tech.

gonyea··on Fiat Chrysler Is Being Sued Over a Software Flaw
I have this car and it’s done this 4 times so far. Really scary.

You’ll be driving and all of a sudden the engine stops, and the dash says to place the car into park to turn it on. Imagine making a turn and your engine dying mid-way; that’s exactly what happened to us. People die getting t-boned that way.

Buying a Chrysler was a huge mistake; no one will acknowledge the problem. There are Pacifica forums with over 100 pages of posts from people talking about this issue.

gonyea··on I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering
Yes, there is such a thing as a full-stack engineer. They'll cost you a lot of money (or equity), but will spare you from herding an entire room of specialists early on.

As products and teams scale up, cross-stack expertise becomes far less valuable than domain expertise and institutional knowledge.

This post also leaves off another area that I'd expect of a senior full-stack developer: Infrastructure/Ops.

gonyea··on Keyboard Service Program for MacBook and MacBook Pro
Where “certain MacBook and MacBook Pro models” means every single one? Ok.
gonyea··on Why create gRPC if you can run REST over HTTP/2, and there is websockets?
Driving the highest traffic sites in the world, and the backend systems that power them for 2 decades, is just marketing? Weird.
gonyea··on Gracefully Restarting a Go Program Without Downtime
“modern systems software”

Lol, no. Modern, professional software development uses a load balancer to manage a canary/red-black deployment strategy. Zero downtime deployments to a live server, outside of telecom/finance, is a sign of an amateurish team.

gonyea··on N.Y. landlord ordered to pay $6.7M for destroying graffiti
You didn’t read the article, did you?

The landlord destroyed the artwork before the courts resolved the case. This has nothing to do with artists; these power plays happen periodically and they’re subsequently beaten like a dog by the courts.

gonyea··on The Chinese think Palo Alto is dumpy
The entire South Bay is incredibly dumpy. One nice thing about the Chinese system: No NIMBYs. Central planners keep the housing stock really high, and that's great for social stability.
gonyea··on The Amazon worker: paid £18,000 a year to shift 250 items an hour
Amazon is wildly expensive compared with Target and Costco. Its success is convenience and extensive product reviews.
gonyea··on All shared Google Photos are open to the public
This seems like a lot of scaremongering. You have to balance a good UX with good security, and Google has done just that. If shared photos require a 10-step process for Grandpa to see them, he’ll never see them and you’ll be angry that Google photos let you down.
gonyea··on Cities with Uber Have Lower Rates of Ambulance Usage
It’s incredibly old tech and costs you maybe $5 in most countries.
gonyea··on Waymo will provide insurance to passengers in its self-driving cars
Literally anyone who drives me in their vehicle is required to have this by law.

I think this announcement is about Trov, not Waymo.

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