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To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
311–319 of 319 posts
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is cost prohibitive to spin off anything because it has to be ported to a completely foreign platform. Completely foreign platform is moving the goalposts here. I said in my original response that everything Reader depended on is very likely to be available on GCP, and is very likely to be in a form that is very similar to its internal versions. Besides, the giant leap the OP and you make is that cost prohibitio…
> Completely foreign platform is moving the goalposts here. No it's not, because you are consistently overestimating how similar the internal and public platforms are. I don't know how I can make this any more clear. Your estimation is incorrect. You are misinformed. > everything Reader depended on is very likely to be available on GCP This is, probably, approximately true. > is very likely to be in a form that is ve…
> This is demonstrably wrong, and I and others have already provided examples, which you've ignored.
I don't know what exactly you consider to be an example to demonstrate your point, but I must have missed it because I haven't read anything factual on the matter. If you think merely listing a bunch of infrastructure components and deeming the difference between external and internal versions is sufficient evidence, I have already stated that it doesn't convince me.
Maybe we have vastly different experiences in the software development we have participated in our careers, but I think the root of our estimation mismatch is you equivocating rewriting the infra glue code with the entirety of the application. I certainly don't see it that way.
> Moving from stubby to GRPC is a lot of effort. Moving from Google's internal user ACLing to OAuth or whatever is a lot of effort. Switching the APIs used for Google's internal monitoring infra with the ones that are used by GCP is a lot of effort. Removing dependencies on borg particulars is a lot of effort. Doing all of those things is a lot of a lot of effort and reasonably cost prohibitive. And that's ignoring a lot of other sources of "a lot of effort".
To my point, I have explicitly stated this infra glue code will be in need of re-writes. While "a lot" doesn't help quantifying your proposition much, you (or others in this thread) seem to equivocate this to designing and implementing the whole application from scratch, and that is where I disagree. Sure this going to be application specific, but I would estimate the engineering hours spent on replacing the infra glue code to be much less than that went to developing the business logic. I don't deem that to be cost prohibitive when we are talking about a company potentially selling that IP, much less so if it is going to run in their public cloud platform.
Besides, I don't know much about Borg, but if an application like an RSS aggregator is taking dependencies on implementation details of their replicated task scheduling and provisioning system, I think they must have been doing it very, very wrong.
> I don't know how I can make this any more clear. Your estimation is incorrect. You are misinformed.
Keeping repeating your assertions is definitely not going to help making anything clearer. Let your arguments do the talking, let the readers arrive to the conclusion on who is wrong or possibly misinformed. You are bordering on shallow dismissals which HN guidelines frown upon. It is bad form, please don't keep doing this.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Completely foreign platform is moving the goalposts here. No it's not, because you are consistently overestimating how similar the internal and public platforms are. I don't know how I can make this any more clear. Your estimation is incorrect. You are misinformed. > everything Reader depended on is very likely to be available on GCP This is, probably, approximately true. > is very likely to be in a form that is ve…
> This is demonstrably wrong, and I and others have already provided examples, which you've ignored. I don't know what exactly you consider to be an example to demonstrate your point, but I must have missed it because I haven't read anything factual on the matter. If you think merely listing a bunch of infrastructure components and deeming the difference between external and internal versions is sufficient evidence,…
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Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's not just about avoiding specific words, but avoiding the thoughts behind those words. People are always trying to control the thoughts of others by banning certain words. Is there any evidence it works? I've seen plenty of evidence it does not, as the new word simply takes on the meaning of the old one. Then that new word gets banned as well.
> People are always trying to control the thoughts of others by banning certain words. I can really only think of one truly banned word....
To give context, WalterBright is a libertarian with a clear bent to ignore white supremacy in western culture. He is also known for other reasons.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#315Anyone who has ever worked in trading in the past decade should be familiar with these sort of rules. Anything that you say that can remotely be interpreted as manipulating the market will get you written up or possibly fired. It could be something as innocuous as "Tesla's valuation is insane right now."
as in the Billions tv-series when they actually do influence the market, they'd say: "I am not uncertain that [blabla]"
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You mention this in the passing, but barring mechanical limitations of the new infra, reusing your business logic means retaining your APIs, auth models, data models, even database schemas, replication and deployment design decisions and tons of portable code. That is where the overwhelming majority of engineer hours go in an ordinary product anyway. If you haven't read the Google SRE Handbook, I recommend it. It p…
> Pretty much every aspect you listed is dependent on a custom Google-internal service, and would have to be rewritten. Except those as OP states have both open source versions and SaaS versions available and they don't need to be written from scratch. SRE automation software and being able to run a particular application are completely different things. I don't get why there has been a constant confusion between app…
Yes, but you can't run Google's RSS aggregator without depending on Google's particular monitoring or cluster management infrastructure.
And migrating away from all of those hundreds of dependencies, many fo which are in extremely central parts of your stack, is a huge amount of effort. See this[0] for an example of the interfaces the infra supports, and now you have to rip basically all of that away and replace it with something different. And that's in addition to all of the application level changes, and that's in addition to any high level design changes due to potential mismatches in capabilities between the internal and external systems.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you elaborate on this? How would it be illegal to target a different market?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel Cartels are usually thought of as groups in the same market colluding, but it's not limited to that. Two companies colluding not to compete in their respective markets is still a cartel.
Right, but what was described is not collusion. It's just targeting a different market without much existing competition.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#318> “Alphabet gets sued a lot, and we have our fair share of regulatory investigations,” reads another. “Assume every document will become public.” :)
The smiley face was supposed to mean "gotta appreciate the irony of that statement". I should've been more clear I suppose.
Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Capitalism is built around competition and anti-monopoly, philosophically. What the modern world has is corporatism, not capitalism, and so profit is the primary motivator. Competition gets in the way of profit by making production and pricing more efficient, so profit-seeking stifles competition and leads to monopoly. Quite unfortunately there is no way to align the incentives of competition and self-interest; pro…
> What the modern world has is corporatism No, mostly not (China has corporatism, Mexico under the PRI one-party regime had corporatism, fascist regimes had corporatism; the modern developed world has capitalism with corporations playing a central role, but thats how capitalism has always been and was a feature of the concrete system for which the term capitalism was coined.)
Thanks for the correction. I think the proper term I was looking for was "corporate capitalism"