How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud • Hacker News Board

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#91

Post by phonon » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 2:25 AM UTC

zaroth wrote: post #90

phonon wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ummm...the whole point is that she sold those shares to Google, donating large "paper profits" is a total other thing. EDIT: Perhaps you're saying she donated her shares to the Donor Advised Fund first, and then the Fund sold the shares to Google? Possible I guess, but that's not what the SEC notice said. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000090342316... "Diane Greene exchanged 7,244,150 shares of bebop…

Getting past my 'expertise' in this area, but she didn't personally sell her shares to Google. Her company was acquired by Google, and her shares in bebop were exchanged for shares of Alphabet. A merger/stock exchange is not a taxable event, she would keep her near-$0 basis in the now Alphabet Class C shares, and then donate the highly appreciated Alphabet shares to the Fund. You have to structure the deals this way,…

Yeah, but at that point, ABC shares are basically cash money--they may as well be Treasury Bonds given how liquid they are. She could easily sell half to cover the tax bill and keep the rest. So no, I don't see how "the the money is very likely to be worth more as a donation than as income."

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#92

Post by texthompson » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 2:55 AM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #78

bogomipz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Down-voted for asking a legitimate question related to the article? Why? HN is becoming a bit silly with this isn't it?

I think it's because you severely limited the perception to a basic ranking. It's a massive undertaking to actually move up against AWS or Azure considering the incredible scale of these platforms so continuing to be #3 in customers is not really an accurate measure of progress. The article is pretty clear on what's she's done so far. There's no denying that they have a lot of work to do but if you're actively using…

Being #3 in a growing market is not a bad place to be.

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#93

Post by zaroth » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 3:08 AM UTC

phonon wrote: post #91

zaroth wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting past my 'expertise' in this area, but she didn't personally sell her shares to Google. Her company was acquired by Google, and her shares in bebop were exchanged for shares of Alphabet. A merger/stock exchange is not a taxable event, she would keep her near-$0 basis in the now Alphabet Class C shares, and then donate the highly appreciated Alphabet shares to the Fund. You have to structure the deals this way,…

Yeah, but at that point, ABC shares are basically cash money--they may as well be Treasury Bonds given how liquid they are. She could easily sell half to cover the tax bill and keep the rest. So no, I don't see how "the the money is very likely to be worth more as a donation than as income."

Liquidity of the shares is not in question. If the tax rate is over 50%, you have two choices; sell the shares and keep 50 cents on the dollar. Selling the shares is worth 50 cents on the dollar because of the future tax liability that it eliminates. That is why I say it is "worth more as a donation".

By donating $150m to the Fund, you not only get the self-directed Fund with $150m dollars in it (which is a fun time in and of itself) but you also get $150m in charitable deductions. Each dollar of that deduction eliminates > 50 cents on the dollar of tax liability. Donating to the Fund effectively lets you have your cake and eat it too, again, with the caveat that you expect to have enough future income to use it all up, while remaining in the highest tax bracket.

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#94

Post by jordanthoms » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 6:37 AM UTC

jpatokal wrote: post #88

querulous wrote: post #37

google cloud seems like a repackaging of internal google services which is fine but most companies don't want to migrate existing code to google's homegrown tech. the story for running postgres, oracle, mssql, spark, hadoop, kafka, etc on google cloud is vastly inferior to the same on aws where they either offer it as a managed service or someone else has done and documented the work required to do it

Managed Spark & Hadoop = Cloud Dataproc https://cloud.google.com/dataproc/ One-click deploys for Kafka and Postgres: https://console.cloud.google.com/launcher/details/bitnami-la... , https://console.cloud.google.com/launcher/details/bitnami-la...

To be fair there is a big difference between a button to deploy an image and something like RDS which manages that instance going forward.

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#95

Post by jonwayne » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 7:39 PM UTC

fpgaminer wrote: post #45

mimming wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to hear things are more difficult. I'd love to hear specifics, if you're interested in sharing. I'd love to try to get them fixed :) And yeah, I'm a developer advocate on GCP

It's a thousand paper cuts scenario; nothing big and specific, just running into little problems constantly. Honestly, that's worse than running into big problems. It makes us go from trying to accomplish what should be a simple change, to spending three hours hammering an API with random combinations of inputs to find the magical incantation that makes it work correctly. Some examples: Cloud Storage doesn't support…

Re:

> Google App Engine's dev_appserver.py completely broke after an update, caused in part by another Google library being installed (protobuf...). Still not sure if the fix was rolled into a release yet...

We've been having a lot of fun with how tricky namespace packages are in Python. We've got a fix in for this issue that should hopefully be in the next SDK release, and we're looking into ways to better isolate dev_appserver from the OS environment.

A simple workaround is to activate an empty virtualenv before running dev_appserver.

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#96

Post by mimming » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 7:43 PM UTC

fpgaminer wrote: post #45

mimming wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to hear things are more difficult. I'd love to hear specifics, if you're interested in sharing. I'd love to try to get them fixed :) And yeah, I'm a developer advocate on GCP

It's a thousand paper cuts scenario; nothing big and specific, just running into little problems constantly. Honestly, that's worse than running into big problems. It makes us go from trying to accomplish what should be a simple change, to spending three hours hammering an API with random combinations of inputs to find the magical incantation that makes it work correctly. Some examples: Cloud Storage doesn't support…

Thanks for the writeup! I'll poke the appropriate teams. Sorry about the paper cuts -_-

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#97

Post by mbrukman » Tue, Jun 28, 2016, 2:18 PM UTC

godzillabrennus wrote: post #47

boulos wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whom would you like to reach? (sounds like PMs and/or engineers). I'd consider it okay that you ping me and I route your issues to the relevant folks (there's always going to be routing), but for existing customers most questions naturally should go through support (either directly or via requests from Sales when a customer contacts them). Are you an active customer who is having trouble reaching us? Or a prospective…

My startup was awarded $10k in Google Cloud hosting credits at Web Summit. By the time we went to launch they had expired. If you know of anyone at Google who would be open to helping us redeem them that'd be awesome! My email is hn (at) joinjune (dot) com

Hi, I'm a product manager on Google Cloud Platform. Sorry to hear that your credits expired before you could try out GCP.

I inquired on your behalf, and was told that the Web Summit you're referring to is from 2014 (2 years ago), and the credits expired in 2015 (1 year ago), and unfortunately, this program is no longer available.

That said, we do have a credits program for startups (https://cloud.google.com/startups/) but you cannot apply for it directly, you need to "contact your VC, Accelerator, or Incubator and ask about GCP for Startups application details." (quote from the site)

In the mean time, if you just want to kick the tires, you can sign up on https://cloud.google.com for a free trial.

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#98

Post by mbrukman » Tue, Jun 28, 2016, 2:38 PM UTC

ing33k wrote: post #24

boulos wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whom would you like to reach? (sounds like PMs and/or engineers). I'd consider it okay that you ping me and I route your issues to the relevant folks (there's always going to be routing), but for existing customers most questions naturally should go through support (either directly or via requests from Sales when a customer contacts them). Are you an active customer who is having trouble reaching us? Or a prospective…

Hi, sorry if it's the wrong place to report an issue that I faced recently with GCP. I had reached the limit of max projects one can have in their dashboard. I deleted some projects and when I tried to create a new project, I was getting the same message . I had to wait for a week to create a new project ( the time window in which user can stop project deletion ) this really prevented me from trying some new services…

I'm curious why you would need to delete projects and create new ones just to try out new products and services—could you please clarify?

A project is just a container for resources. You can use any combination of GCP products and services within a single project—you are only charged for the resources you use, so just deleting what you created earlier would get you to a zero-state.

Re: How Diane Greene Transformed Google's Cloud

#99

Post by mbrukman » Tue, Jun 28, 2016, 5:59 PM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #75

boulos wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whom would you like to reach? (sounds like PMs and/or engineers). I'd consider it okay that you ping me and I route your issues to the relevant folks (there's always going to be routing), but for existing customers most questions naturally should go through support (either directly or via requests from Sales when a customer contacts them). Are you an active customer who is having trouble reaching us? Or a prospective…

Perhaps I should restate: I can reach most people via forums/social (although ignored plenty of times including the main startup guy) but the conversations and the platform just seem informal as if this entire thing is a side project (I know it's not). We're a paying customer and I understand tiered support is available (as it is with every vendor) but there's a distinct difference in on-boarding, which is even more…

Thanks for all the feedback!

Appreciate your taking the time to write this up in detail, and thanks for not sugar-coating it. We'll share this with the relevant teams and work on improvements across the board. Great to hear that you like the changes to the docs!

Please keep providing feedback and suggestions.