rpcastagna

I dunno, if you look at the legacy of DigiNotar it seems like you're dealing with a lot of potential headaches for a couple thousand bucks that your customers hate paying you anyway.

(DigiNotar, of course, famously gave out a fraudulent * .google.com cert and is now defunct.)

As a CA you're assuming a whole lot of liability for not that much money (not that much at the scale of even a small business, anyway), and that just doesn't seem like it'd scale to a wildly profitable venture, especially considering the kinds of people who are actually well equipped to run a CA can probably make a lot more money doing basically anything else in web security. When you add up the contingency risks, the opportunity costs, and whatever actual day-to-day business expenses, it does seem like you'd be looking for other ways to make more comfortable profits.

That doesn't mean CAs should charge more or anything, just that I could accept that SSL certs for standard websites isn't what anyone with a good vision for their business is really trying to hold onto.

It's important to realize this post doesn't make any assertions about the fundamental merits of people who are rejected by Google.

"Google Cloud Security and Compliance Whitepaper" linked elsewhere on this thread: https://storage.googleapis.com/gfw-touched-accounts-pdfs/goo...

Relevant bits start at page 12:

"G Suite customers own their data, not Google."

"There is no advertising in the G Suite Core Services, and we have no plans to change this in the future"

etc.

Ultimately the biggest cudgel you have to wield here is in the sales contract you're signing, but my understanding is that the baseline privacy guarantees are standard for all customers at the strictest level -- people actually opt to reduce the restrictions on their data so that new features get built with their use cases in mind (otherwise we wouldn't know what those actual use cases were).

A lot of companies use G Suite and a lot of them have very strict privacy + security requirements. This is the same platform used by fintech companies, healthcare companies, MegaCorps, etc.

Sort of a thing with all non-web-search Google products: I can't fathom how people see the $5B/quarter "other revenue" line on our earnings statements and think that just doesn't matter and somehow we have to get the "real" money from ads. We definitely did ads-supported-consumer first and we've been doing it the longest and it makes the most money, but how many email providers would kill to have half of that quarter as their annual revenue? G Suite, Cloud, etc are very real businesses in their own right and that's even while being very young and coming from a company that didn't start with any inherent strengths in enterprise markets.

(I'm a software engineer on Google Drive.)

The answer is no. To the point where it's actually a pain in the ass for us because developing any ML-assisted capabilities for G Suite requires us to only get training data from specific subsets of customers who are under special contract conditions.

If you buy G Suite from a reseller then they might be doing shady shit but we'd terminate their reseller account if we found out about it.

I know people like to bitch about this kinda shit on HN but honestly I and my coworkers spend so much time on protecting our customers' data from literally everyone -- including ourselves -- that I want the chance to bitch back about how hard my job is.

If it makes you feel better:

Hospitals of reasonable size typically have an on-site clinical engineering team that handles those kinds of situations. Important (that is, capital expense category) hospital equipment will typically emit all kinds of warnings and alarms way before anything's actually a problem, because everyone would rather rely on the on-site engineering spending a little extra time silencing false positives then leave anything to chance.

It's weird to me you would treat this state of affairs as a static and universally-holding position. I think it's obvious (with several current examples coming to mind) that investors and business partners can be branded as "toxic" in a way that overwhelmingly devalues any money they could actually offer. In the same way the police will take a stolen watch from you after you buy it -- without much recourse on your part! -- you and your company can definitely be torpedoed by taking bad money if public opinion shifts that sharply.

These are the risks of working at the national and global scale; they have to be there, otherwise the rewards couldn't (sustainably) be so great. Even ignoring the moral arguments, the fact that anybody is making them changes the game theory perspective as well. The only way to truly stay on top is to make sure most people want you there.

These experiences also exacerbate the perception that I referred to before that can basically be summarized as "every previous attempt at making this better ended up being completely terrible". A whole slew of people want to improve things, but a lot of the time they don't take that responsibility seriously enough -- or know, fully, what that entails -- and when they bail that leaves the next would-be "disruptor" at a disadvantage.

Healthcare industry insiders joke:

Any theory of the current state of medicine that involves a cardio-thoracic surgeon feeling like they are not completely irreplaceable, one-in-a-trillion geniuses/minor deities, put here on this planet to spare us lesser mortals (as scheduling allows) seems... improbable.

It reminds me of Moneyball; in it, the author points out that the statisticians were frustrated by their inability to get traction within the MLB, but their pitch essentially boiled down to "you guys don't listen to statistics, you should listen to these new ones we just developed," which left unsaid that the statisticians made up new quantifiers because the old ones were ineffective. The MLB had the lived experience of those statistics being ineffective, so they knew Bill James et al were right about that, but the idea that the answer was more numbers that didn't make a lot of intuitive sense was a hard sell.

I would also add that my perception from working at a major east coast hospital has actually been that hospital IT clamps down on new tools more than anyone because of HIPAA requirements, etc, that the doctors ignore/don't care about as much as they should. It's a complicated, layered system.

I was thinking of Andre 3k at the OutKast reunion tour with the "sell out" thing here.

I'm also a software engineer at Google and I think our stock price has gone up too? I might be wrong.

The problem with sports analogies is that athletes typically actually matter to the success or failure of their organization, and that's both immediately visible to and recognized by everyone involved.

Even for athletes, though, you see more simple name recognition for NBA players than for, say, NFL players, simply because basketball teams are smaller and the individual players are so much more pivotal to the team's success.

To be honest I don't think the typical corporate strategy is irrational, either, because employees can be wrong about product and business decisions in exactly the same way that executives can be, and, ultimately, the construct of the corporation exists specifically so a pursuit can outlive any contributor to it. Endless discussion and fretting over every single thing hinders productivity, also.

But why am I supposed to feel good about being part of that system? And who decided that was the best we could possibly do?

19 years out from the release of Black On Both Sides and still all anyone wants is to tell me to try to have some fret in my heart behind the things that they do. I mean, I guess...

I don't have the context on the "engagement industry" or whatever that I think I need to appreciate this post as the specific criticism I think it's trying to be, but I think people really are bitterly unsatisfied with their jobs and saying the engagement "number has barely budged over the last decade" despite notable corporate success is sorta missing the point?

The idea that people's engagement or happiness -- or even just their general satisfaction at work -- is strongly correlated to their employing corporations' success is a persistent myth in tech that I just don't understand. People hate "sell outs" and they hate themselves when they sell out for a reason. You start as someone dedicated to a craft, you end up working somewhere that pays you a lot of money to do it but without giving you the chance to put yourself into that work at all, and then you end up making soulless work that not even you really like. But it made money so it keeps going like that until it absolutely blows up and everyone has to "rebrand" or another company slips in as the rebranded form in your place.

Steph Curry is happy when the Warriors win because he's on a team that is winning by playing the game his way. If the team made him go to dunk every time he got the ball I bet his satisfaction would be shit too -- and it probably wouldn't keep netting the Warriors more rings.

You're so low it's actually kind of uncomfortable.

+1000. Working in the warehouse at the bottom of a hospital would get weird sometimes because you had absolutely no indication what time of day it was -- working third shift could feel like the middle of the day since it was always so well lit.

In my experience, good lighting is pretty much the only thing you're guaranteed at various warehouses. Heating huge spaces effectively is basically impossible, rugs and other "soft" surfaces are out since they just wear down too quickly, equipment will be used continuously until it's simply unsafe... but you need good lighting to know what you're doing and keep yourself out of harm's way. As noted, even the parking lots and immediate exteriors will be very well lit as a physical security measure.

Bad lighting is the exact kind of thing people complain about when maligning "hot shots who think they know everything" and all those etceteras. It ends up being penny wise and dollar stupid when you factor in both logistical mistakes and pay outs to worker's comp when people injure themselves on the job. The equivalent in programming would be making all your developers use laptops from 12 years ago running Windows XP because you know someone who got you a really good deal.

Binary files (arbitrary example: images used for golden screenshots in tests) have no line counts and are likely skewing the numbers here -- in the way you're (logically) looking to interpret them at least.

From a system design perspective, being able to handle a large number of files regardless of type is an interesting challenge, as is being able to handle a large number of highly indexed text files. All three of those statistics seem potentially interesting for different audiences that might read this paper.

I think it's disingenuous to try to appeal to what you see as the norms of "professional IT culture" when Linus founded the Linux community, and with it, its culture. I think invoking the "Ugly American" concept when discussing this is interesting because saying that Linus and the Linux community should conform to "professional IT culture" at large seems emblematic of that mentality. Linus started a community and gets a disproportionate influence in setting its norms as a part of that.

I wouldn't say it's universally necessary, just like it's not universally necessary to speak any given language to convey information. We just all have our own natural ways of doing things and it's not necessarily productive to try to get everyone to force themselves into the same mode of communication. We all have the tendency to view our natural modes as superior in various ways but I don't think we should let that tendency lead us to try to coral others into conforming to our norms.

I think ldfdr made a good point in his sibling comment that deeming something as "unpleasant" is highly tied to your personal perceptions of what civility is, etc, which is generally rooted in your culture and where you grew up. I think we have to work to understand each other as much as possible and understand people come into conversations with different expectations. I think with someone like Linus we also have to realize that as a community founder he has a disproportionate influence in setting community norms, and people who want to get involved will tend to naturally gravitate towards his communication style. You wouldn't go to France and demand that everyone speak English all the time; we have to work to accommodate each other, and part of that is not assigning value judgements to a communication style.

> I would challenge that notion that using an aggressive and diminishing language doesn't imply being a jerk.

It's 100% a cultural difference. While you see it as personally aggressive and grating, a lot of people see "overly polite" language as a sign that you don't care about the topic being discussed and/or are trying to address an issue politically rather than by merits of a strong argument. Neither of these perceptions is really right or wrong, it just has to do with the perspective you have based on where you grew up and who you've interacted with the most.

From an engineering perspective it'd be optimal if everyone had the same universal expectations for how a conversation should be held, just like how it'd be optimal if everyone spoke the same language. People don't really work that way, though, and just like with languages we try to accommodate each other as much as possible and find middle grounds, etc.

>> What do they gain from removing advertising from any video? Any money you make is money they make.

> They would gain more advertisers paying them money to advertise with them.

I don't really understand what you're saying here. Why would more advertisers pay them money if less videos had advertisements?

I'm not totally comfortable with the fact that the knee-jerk reaction here is that an allegation of racial discrimination in hiring is wrong on its face. Although Asians certainly aren't a significantly underrepresented minority in tech on the whole, eliminating bias from hiring processes is a hard problem and it definitely seems plausible to me that Palantir could have, for whatever reason, fallen into an anti-pattern that effectively (if not consciously) discriminated against the Asian applicant pool.

Some of the comments here seem to suggest people might be instinctively identifying with Palantir when they talk about their own difficulties in trying to find qualified job applicants. It's without a doubt incredibly hard to find qualified job candidates, and there's a huge number of factors that can go into making any hire/no-hire decision, but for those very reasons these types of lawsuits from the DOL are both hard for them to win and pretty rare, which suggests to me that there's a fair amount of objectively quantifiable evidence pointing towards discrimination. I think, unfortunately, that it's much more common for widespread discrimination to never be addressed in certain companies than for the federal government to overzealously sue corporations on marginal evidence.

I don't think there's any question that Palantir is going to be ultimately ok as a company, however the law suit turns out. Even if the ruling was to wrongly come down against them, they'd pay $___ million, change their hiring processes so they're at least less likely to be sued again, and then move on with their lives as a hugely valuable multi-billion dollar corporation. Discriminatory hiring processes, on the other hand, I think need to be routed out wherever they may occur because systemic injustices ultimately hurt our society as a whole.

This allegation is very serious and I think needs to be taken seriously. When our instinctive reaction to an accusation of discrimination is that it's more than likely overblown or outright false, we're implicitly endorsing the idea that discrimination is both rare and always obvious, neither of which I think are true. I'm not ready to make any judgements about Palantir as a company or its hiring process, but it seems very likely that they (like any company) have blind spots in the way they're hiring that disadvantage some groups, especially if the DOL thinks there's enough evidence to win a court case over it. The great news for Palantir is that even if that's true, it's not an issue that really affects any core component of them as a company and it's 100% fixable with some extra HR spending.

I think the more constructive take-away from a news article like this is to think about what we ourselves do to eliminate bias from our hiring and potentially talk about what works and what doesn't. No one wants or needs us to hire unqualified candidates, but it's undesirable for us to unfairly exclude groups of qualified candidates because of race or any other discriminatory factor, both because of the societal implications and because we end up missing good candidates in a time where good engineers are in incredibly high demand. Like I said, establishing fair hiring practices is a hard problem; it goes a lot further than just trying to "do the right thing" and reaches into a lot of core parts of how we perceive the world. As engineers we constantly try to study and adjust for our imperfect brains' natural tendencies so that we can build more useful products and get more done. Why can't we try to fight bias in the same way?

> I've founded my own company and I'm voting against any progress of women.

I'm not sure you're going to establish a moral high ground by explicitly opposing the progress of equality... I understand you have concerns and you may feel you've been wronged by "gender aware" policies/attitudes, but I don't think it's very controversial to say that women are historically disadvantaged and we need to work that out in some way, however that may be.