prlambert

Also sorry I missed this, not only are we in Canada, we just signed our first partner on Vancouver Island – in Victoria, Pacific Heat Pumps: https://www.pacificheatpumps.ca/

We'll have a partner in Nanaimo very soon as well.

Thank you! Yes, that is the hope. And what a blast from the past :) Hope you are well

Yes this is actually the worst – when open minded people get a heat pump for "the right reasons" and then have buyer's remorse. Completely backfires the transition. Do you have a ducted or ductless heat pump? Sounds like ducted, and if so that might be part of it too. The air cools down in the ductwork and if that's not accounted for - i.e. you reuse ductwork that was meant for a furnace – you run into issues like this. And you also need a cold climate heat pump.

(disclosure/transparency I'm the founder of Quilt, a ductless heat pump manufacturer)

That seems really weird, the only real difference is a reversing valve that costs a couple bucks. A heat pump is an AC, it just can be run backwards to produce heating as well. In cooling it's literally the same thing.

Cool to see a Heat Pump article near the top of HN! I'm the founder/CEO of Quilt (https://www.quilt.com/), which is mentioned in the article, and a decade+ daily reader of this fine site. At Quilt we've run the Nest playbook for ductless heat pumps as our first product. The plan is to do what Tesla did for automotive to the built environment infrastructure category (HVAC, plumbing, etc) and create the first major American manufacturer in a ~century.

The article has bullet #1 in problems to solve as "Contractors who default to what they know." This was one of my founding hypotheses to and it turns out I was wrong, this was the hardest won learning yet at Quilt. We originally were fully vertically integrated and had our own installation force because of this reason – we wanted to solve all the big problems, thought contractors were one of them, and so had to become a contractor. But we quickly saw we were getting in the way of our own mission to accelerate the energy transition (because we had far far more demand than we could scale operations to reach it). So in March we (initially cautiously) switched partnering with existing contractors and I have been delighted by the industry reception. There are so so many existing contractors who want modern tech and see working with us as a breath of fresh air. I definitely sold them short and in retrospect it was naive and even a little elitist.

Happy to answer anything more. Also I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that we're growing super fast and just posted an Embedded Software Engineer role: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/quilt/jobs/4952684007 :)

Yes, it's not about the menstruation, it's about pregnancy. Having a kid, especially the 1st, is the single largest shift in consumer spending in most people's lives (if they have kids). Aside from all the obvious spending on baby stuff, it predicts buying a house and where they might live, and puts that person (new mother, in this case) on a well-modeled path of buying behavior for the next 18 years. Needs and spending as children age through different phases are quite predictable and the spending is huge and touches almost every aspect of the person's life.

Not sure why you think that? The nomadic population is between 25%-30%, two sources: 1) World bank gives 25% "around one quarter of households live nomadic life in Mongolia" https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/counting-uncounted-how-...; 1) Wikipedia gives 30%, "Approximately 30% of the population is nomadic or semi-nomadic" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolia.

Population of of Ulaanbataar is 1.6M, Mongolia as a country is 3.3M. So just under 50% live in the capital city.

This is true in mid and late career, but not early. Lots of mathematically and engineering minded college students consider both CS and mech/aerospace as majors. Of course career prospects are a major influence.

Also fwiw my wife left a 10 year aerospace career, moving from NASA to Google, largely for comp reasons. She was a structural aerospace engineer, now she’s a data scientist.

Nice work! The most surprising part for me was that your websites says you are 20 years old – so I gotta ask, what was the motivation?

I'm 39, born in 1983, so I have serious nostalgia around Windows 95. I was 12 when it came out, my parents bought a Dell when it was new and those years were very formative for me. I assumed that nostalgia would be the only driver to do this... But you weren't born until ~8 years after it was released. I'm genuinely curious (and impressed!)

"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Edit out swipes." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The anti-Google frothing here has gotten so extreme it's crossed into comedy. Maybe instead of assuming incompetence and malevolence you should consider how hard it is to do this perfectly.

You don't have to like them, but the fact is the there are many many smart and competent people working on these systems trying to do the best for all users of Gmail and Google Accounts. Every day there are hundreds of very bad people around the world trying to gain access to Gmail accounts to do very bad things using that access. All the worst parts of humanity have found their way to leverage it. Balancing security and user-friendliness is one of the hardest problems in tech and it's impossible to do perfectly.

It seems from this thread that the OP did regain access and it didn't take that long.

Edit: I worked at Google for a few years, including on Gmail, and know that the people there really do care about all these things. But I left in the summer, no longer their employee.

You're at the wrong company. I've worked at a startup, at Twitter, and at Google and each time there was notable "raising of the bar" in the talent I was around. I know there's a lot of Google hate on HN, and it's such a big company it is true not every team is mind blowing, but... I've been there 5 years and I still have serious imposter syndrome and am constantly amazed by my colleagues. I get to work with some crazy smart and productive people. The suggestion isn't "go work for Google" (but maybe you should) but find a group of people that push you and amaze you and make you want to improve. They definitely are out there.

I don't think that's totally right. The idea is to give Canadians a leg up vs. foreign buyers (once the immediate 2 year foreign buyer ban expires, I assume). If your operating model is that foreign bidders are driving up the price and winning the marginal bid, then this is effectively a subsidy to allow Canadians to compete with the foreigners. Yes it will drive prices a bit higher and thus transfer more wealth to sellers. But the mix should be different, with more ownership ending up with Canadian purchasers than foreign ones (vs. today).

Yes, since 2017 no Gmail data is used for any Ad targeting, across any part of Google. Here's a NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html

Unfortunately this goes against people's default (and incorrect) mental model of how Google operates, so it's been a very hard message to land.

Disclosure: Current Googler and I was a PM on Gmail at the time.

My dad is a competitive runner and ultramarathoner (now well into his 60s). One of his favorite sayings is ‘how do you know if you’re a runner? If you don’t think about running while doing it.’ I finally got into it too, and for me/us it’s much more like meditation. Or taking a hot shower. I let my mind wander, come up with most of my best ideas, and generally don’t think much about running while out there.

If you can’t do this you’re probably running too fast for your fitness level. I was for a long time.

"If I worked remotely for Facebook and wanted to move somewhere central where rents are three times higher, would Zuck give me a raise? Somehow I doubt it."

I can't speak for Zuck, but Sundar does. I work for Google. We also have local market indexed compensation (which I support, but not relevant to this point). If you move to a city with higher labor prices, you get paid more. I've seen it multiple times with people in my team. It's a total non issue, just paperwork. Very very standard.

No, you get a thick skin pretty quickly as a Google PM (and come to think of it as a Twitter PM too, my former job). Constructive comments are helpful and even the raw frustration I know is coming from a genuine place. Having your tools disappear sucks. I feel that too.

Just to confirm, the Area 120 labelling is meant to do exactly that. Area 120 projects do not have long-term commitments, explicitly. But the goal is for the successful ones to graduate to be a fully supported Google product and gain those commitments at that time (we have a number of examples of that happening).

[Disclosure I work at Google Area 120 and would be partly responsible for this type of decision]

This is a really helpful comment and I like the nod to transparency. Thank you! Not sure we could get quite so concrete publicly (there are lots of unknowns and wouldn't want to make commitments we can't keep), but aligning goals between the business, team, and users/customers is a great idea and something we can improve on.

Distribution. Getting an app installed is super tough.

The headline number is annual total compensation. So yes, ~$200K of shares will vest every year. The normal deal is 4-year grant with even vesting (sometimes after a 1 year cliff), so in this case it would be an $800K equity grant over 4 years. Some places like Amazon and Netflix do it differently, but that's the standard.

They usually use the stock price on the day of the offer or the day you start or something similar. So in this example, if the stock price was $100 on the offer date, you would be granted 8000 RSUs on signing, vesting over 4 years. What they are actually worth on the day they vest depends on the stock market, which means each vesting usually results in a slightly different amount in actuality (even though the # of shares per vesting is constant).

"If you’re Google, it makes little sense to hire a generalist, I think."

I'm a Googler and a generalist. This is of course just my opinion.

In the two roles I've had, being a generalist is far better than being specialized: as a Product Manager and as a founder on a new project.

A big part of being a PM is being the connective tissue between specialist ICs and silo'd organizational structures. A joke is that we are 'failed engineers' but many of us just got equally interested in UX, entrepreneurship, and business strategy as code. We end up not being the expert in any of these. But we are pretty well qualified to coordinate among them. I.e. our strength is we're generalists. It's a bit like the nervous system that coordinates the heart and lungs and other specialist organs.

I'm now in a part of the company (Area 120) dedicated to funding new projects and businesses. The shape of the talent needs are very much like an external startup. We're headcount limited to 3-5 per project, so we really need people who can design and code, develop sales pipelines and do product management, "full stack" engineers and so forth. These people are super valuable where I am, because they are generalists.

I think anywhere entrepreneurial will need many generalists. I believe think Amazon has this culture too.

This also why I can create a lot more value in a company like this than if I was an individual contractor. I see comments on HN sometimes along the lines of "companies must be underpaying you, because if the value of your labor wasn't greater than your pay, they wouldn't make any profit." This is correct in a very narrow sense but missing the hugely important piece that the value I can produce embedded in a large organization is much, much greater than I can as a singleton (because I'm a generalist). As a rough example, maybe as a contractor I can create $100/hour worth of value and for the sake of argument can capture nearly all of that. Because whatever discrete task I'm hired for I'm Ok but not world class at it. But in a company like Google, I am leveraging huge assets and connecting them. If I identify opportunities and coordinate execution between (for example) specialist orgs like Search and Maps, the value I can create is massive because of the size of the levers. It's nearly unbounded but could easily be worth 1000s of dollars an hour. So if they pay me $200, everyone wins. The pie is grown, by being an embedded generalist, and I'm still doing better off than I would independently (even if my employer captures a bunch of the value I produced – which is fair, since they also provided the levers).

But they get two different X chromosomes with (hopefully) no correlation between them. Mutation interactions are complex.

My wife is a UofT grad, so spent 4 years in Toronto. That's where her snow feelings come from – she still tells stories of marching to class in -20C and snow. It may not be Calgary, but it's not California either. Maybe we're wimps, but such is the situation we find ourselves in!

Maybe we'll be back some day. Toronto is the most likely.

On topic for the parent – we're both Googlers but right now Google has no tech employees in Toronto proper (it's all sales and marketing). Waterloo is the only product/eng office and that's a tough commute. I'm not sure if that is changing with this announcement.

Yes there still would be: weather. There's literally no place in Canada that doesn't have a generally unpleasant outdoor experience for at least half the year. I say that as a proud Canadian. It's honestly the main thing holding my family from moving back. My wife is from Vancouver and hates snow. I'm from Calgary and can't take rain (I did 3 winters straight in Vancouver promising myself to never do another until I finally got out). We've been looking for somewhere in Canada and we can't find a solution.

It may sound small but it has a major impact on our happiness, energy levels, and overall well-being.

Also Haus (https://haus.com/) founded by Garrett Camp (Uber co-founder, StumbleUpon founder)

This article is from 2017

I agree and good point on the broader meaning of editorial judgement. If we had seen any negative impact such as the FB/YouTube examples we would absolutely take that into account. I haven't seen anything remotely like yet with regard to smart reply but would want to be the first to see it if it exists.

It's global

We also take qualitative metrics pretty seriously and found that this experience was well received on a more subjective level, high csat in particular. It surpassed the success criteria we set out for the feature and I'm happy about where it landed. Of course it's not going to be ideal for everyone, so we have a setting to disable.

To be clearer on our metrics: In addition to qual there's also a precision/recall tradeoff, so saying ctr alone was an oversimplification. We have coverage targets, but that doesn't really impact the positivity of the suggestions.