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You're assuming the deal was anti-competitive. A lot of the time, the process is the punishment.

Chargebacks or disputes will lock your account, so definitely stay away from that path.

But just closing the bank account will stop auto billing (it's considered a decline). So if you closed the account, it would just stop paying for whatever it is, and then cloud may lock the gcp account until it's paid. (I'm not 100% sure what cloud does with unpaid invoices).


You've never tried to free-range raise your kids then. Some friends in our neighborhood had the police called on them for riding their bikes around the block, and the cops followed the kids back to their front door and then talked with the parents.

I have. I also, crucially, don't live in America.

This article, also crucially, does not relate to America


when did kyrra mention they lived in America?

When they spelt neighborhood, when the kids rode around the block.

When they said they live in a country where a police force follows kids on bikes

The clues were all there.


Side projects that aren't a conflict of interest when working at Google is rather limiting. Likely less so for small companies.

Not really, in my personal experience and per my friends, most of big companies are pretty lenient about it, except for Apple.

No, they're pretty strict. It just changes what you are allowed to do, with Apple being very restrictive in not letting you do it at all.

The problem is that proper legislation is a balance of interests and working through the details of the policy. If you put "abortion" on the ballot, what would that mean? There are a ton of different possible policies on what is or is not permissible.


Haven't the Swiss solved this?

Maybe you Americans should figure out the first step of engineering, which is to look at existing solutions and learn from them :-p


The main thing the Swiss have that Americans don't are referendums that can seriously challenge federal action. And then there are the state versions of that. And they don't have to wait for "the cycle". Or have results made null by arbitrary veto powers.


The Swiss have a representative democracy with a slightly different way of ‘representing’.


We can move the goalposts as much as we like, but the Swiss have the closest approximation of a direct democracy in the world, right now.

So before dreaming about 100% democracy, maybe the US could slide away from "flawed democracy", first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index#...


Sure, but who is going to be elected who would do that?

And as has been quite apparent, since the most folks will do is peacefully protest if outside the voting system - and be ignored - how else is it going to change?

And if either of those were working, we wouldn’t be complaining about this online anyway eh?


I highly doubt the US system can be fixed peacefully. I really wish it were, since the US affects a lot of the rest of the world (including where I live).


Direct YouTube link: https://youtu.be/Yg-qV6Fktjw


This. You can disable all smart features (which includes things like mail categories, AI auto-complete, and most things that look at your emails).

Gear -> All Settings -> General tab (default) -> Smart features: Turn on smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet

Linked help page: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15604322


How many would turn them on if they defaulted to "Off"? Probably not enough to justify the development cost.


True but that is a function of ignorance too. There are plenty of good features in Gmail that are off by default, like undo / delayed send and keyboard shortcuts.


"Enable delay send - Allows you to undo sending emails for 5 minutes", I'd argue that a lot of people would enable that pretty fast.

Keyboard shortcuts probably would work like I'd expect, people like me would go "Hell no, no keyboard shortcuts in browser application EVER", and power users would opt into that in an instant.


Allow you to undo sending for 5 minutes means email delivery is delayed by 5 minutes.


It doesn't have to be 5 minutes. It could be 15 seconds. I've used that feature (in Fastmail), and find it very valuable.


I'm confused. Doesn't gmail offer an 'undo' for send by default ? At least for the last 5 years ? It's in General settings "Undo Send" and can be set up to 30 seconds ?


And before that it was under the Labs experimental features, I think I enabled it in the late 2000s.


I really wished they would also let you disable those very annoying modal popups announcing yet-another-chatbot-integration twice a week: My company is already paying for your product, just let me do my work ffs...


> You can disable all smart features

For how long?

You don't own the platform. Google PMs may decide to roll it out to everyone at some point to hit numbers.


And this is generically true and always has been about every aspect of GMail?

What would you suggest people do. Self-host?

I'm just trying to understand why you posted this. It's generically true. Any company can change anything at any point. May as well just pack it up boys.


> I'm just trying to understand why you posted this. It's generically true. Any company can change anything at any point. May as well just pack it up boys.

Yes, any SaaS can change any feature at any time. Some companies have different motives though. We're not paying for GMail. When customers pay a monthly subscription and can cancel at any time, you usually want to keep them happy.

The internal motives are also different. Are employees promoted for just launching stuff? Are they running out of helpful features to launch?


> And this is generically true and always has been about every aspect of GMail?

In principle, but look at all the ways Gmail bends over backwards to keep ancient UI preferences working. You can configure it for different inbox presentations, different densities, snippets or not, images displayed or not, UI icons or text, you can disable and enable threading, you can put chat and meet on one side or not, you can have keyboard shortcuts or not, you can remap all the keyboard shortcuts if you use them, etc etc etc.


The point is to say that it’s bad and Google specifically can’t be trusted. It’s good to express disapproval of unethical business practices.


You can't self-host these days -- your emails will get stuck in every kind of spam filter there is, and you'll always have cause to wonder if your emails are received by their intended recipients, or lost to the abyss.

You've got to use either Gmail, Microsoft, Protonmail, etc. I don't love them, but Proton is probably the best of a bad bunch.


> You can't self-host these days -- your emails will get stuck in every kind of spam filter there is, and you'll always have cause to wonder if your emails are received by their intended recipients, or lost to the abyss.

this is not true unless you end up on an IP previously abused

if you don't want to take on the risk at all, there's email services for pennies / thousand emails


> if you don't want to take on the risk at all, there's email services for pennies / thousand emails

I'm seriously interested. Which ones would you recommend? Are they reliable?


Migadu, Fastmail, Protonmail, Zoho, Tutanota

These have all been running for many years and work fine, hell there's even the meme addresses at cock.li which has been running for over 10 years.

You don't need to be on a gmail account for reliable email.


I've had good luck with Contabo IPs


I do self host. The only problem I have is with MS, almost always with hotmail addresses.


Well, they're off by default in the countries mentioned in the top-level comment because they're legally required to be opt-in there (the implementation rather than the feature of course, but it couldn't really be otherwise).

I suppose, to your point, Google doesn't have to make it optional in other countries... But that discrepancy would seem to have a lot of downside (maintenance, optics, docs) for little upside (...force adoption against the will of users who would go out of their way to opt out of they could?).


They have around at least 3000 commits, assuming this search is right?

https://github.com/search?q=repo%3AFFmpeg%2FFFmpeg+%40google...

And they have done large pushes in the past: https://security.googleblog.com/2014/01/ffmpeg-and-thousand-...


The biggest for me: merge-conflict as first-class state within JJ.

I regularly have multiple commits being worked on at a time across different parts of the codebase. If I have to sync to head (or any rebase) and one of my side branches that I'm not actively working on hits a merge conflict, I don't have to deal with it in that moment and get distracted from my work at hand (ie: I don't need to context switch). This is a big productivity win for me.

If you want some other points, check out: https://fallthrough.transistor.fm/43#t=0h31m5s

Some points from the episode:

* With no separate index vs commit, (everything is just a commit), you don't need different commands and flags to deal with the different concepts, they are all just marked together. In JJ, if you want to stack/stage something, it's just a normal commit (no reason to have different concepts here).

* You don't have to name/commit a change at all. Every time you run any JJ command (like `jj log`, or `jj status`), it will snapshot the changes you have. This means that if you want to go work on some other branch, you don't have to go and commit your changes (they auto-commit, and you don't have to write a description immediately), then update to master branch and start working again.

* Or you can just `jj split` (https://jj-vcs.github.io/jj/latest/cli-reference/#jj-split), and split a working changeset into 2 separate commits.


This seems similar to the "Local History" feature in JetBrains IDEs.


This talk is focused on JJ within Google.

This is a Google-internal only GA. JJ is available externally just fine. Google is mainly a linux-dev shop, with all other platforms being second-class citizens.


Furthermore, many engineers at Google work on Macs, some even on Windows, but the actual code runs on a Linux box in a datacenter. I use a Mac, my editor is local, my terminal is local, but it's all SSH/remote to the linux box, so I've never needed jj to run on my Mac. This, or a high powered Linux desktop, are the norm.

The main exceptions to this are devs who work on iOS or macOS software, who will sometimes do local builds on their physical machine. They would benefit from jj support, but there are more hoops to jump through, and the jj port will most likely be less about running on macOS and more about jj supporting the weird ways in which source is accessed.


Not that there are any other options. You're not gonna run datacenters on Mac boxes or Window s, nor would you want to pay a Unix vendor


The datacenter OS doesn't have to be the same as the developer OS. At my work (of similar scale) the datacenters all run Linux but very nearly all developers are on MacOS


MacOSX is a popular choice for dev boxes (if I understand correctly, they provide some pretty good tooling for managing a fleet of machines; more expensive hardware than a Linux dev machine fleet, but less DIY for company-wide administration).

... but Google solves the "A Linux fleet requires investment to maintain" problem by investing. They maintain their own in-house distro.


> their own in-house distro

Not really, it is just a well known outside distro plus internal CI servers to make sure that newly updated packages don't break things. Also some internal tools, of course.


Relative to what the rest of the world does, that is maintaining your own in-house distro.

It's downstream of Ubuntu (unless that's changed) but it's tweaked in the ways you've noted (trying to remember if they also maintain their own package mirrors or if they trust apt to fetch from public repositories; that's a detail I no longer recall).


Own package mirrors where packages are re-built by ourselves. Adding external public repositories is simply not allowed.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goobuntu

In 2018, Google replaced Goobuntu with gLinux, a Linux distribution based on Debian Testing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLinux


> UNIX vendors

Well FreeBSD exists, just look at Netflix


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