Google was already fairly profitable when Gmail was started, and did a considerable amount of capacity planning.
It was also invite-only for a loooong time.
Readit NewsXorlev commented on Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day memory loss getdock.io/... · Posted by u/yadavrh
Xorlev commented on Show HN: Dock – Slack minus the bloat, tax, and 90-day memory loss getdock.io/... · Posted by u/yadavrh
> Free forever for teams up to 5. Unlimited search, unlimited history.
I understand the strategic value of offering unlimited features to differentiate from competitors like Slack, might drive some amount of anxiety. Buyers may question long-term sustainability or fear undisclosed "shadow" caps.
Since engineering limits are inevitable to prevent abuse (especially on free accounts), it might be better to set specific, generous expectations upfront. For example, 2 years of freeform search plus unlimited "tagged" (i.e. Decision Inbox) search. This avoids the skepticism that comes with promising "no limits" forever. It also avoids the trap of needing to announce a change later with predictably negative reactions.
If you do want to offer unlimited, then planning ahead with hard-to-hit-unless-you're-trying messages/hr limits might help you tame growth and avoid abuse. My initial thought when seeing unlimited anything is "I could write a filesystem on top of that" - especially if you allow attachments. :P
Xorlev commented on Lessons from 14 years at Google addyosmani.com/blog/21-le... · Posted by u/cdrnsf
Almost nobody else in engineering did this.
What you described is the job of a product manager. Are there no PMs at Google?
There are, and often times they're stuck in a loop of presenting decks and status, writing proposals rather than doing this kind of research.
That said, interpreting user feedback is a multi-role job. PMs, UX, and Eng should be doing so. Everyone has their strengths.
One of the most interesting things I've had a chance to be a part of is watching UX studies. They take a mock (or an alpha version) and put it in front of an external volunteer and let them work through it. Usually PM, UX, and Eng are watching the stream and taking notes.
Xorlev commented on Does showing seconds in the system tray actually use more power? lttlabs.com/blog/2025/07/... · Posted by u/LorenDB
In what world does holding the user's private data for 30 days make sense for a spell checker? Even sending the data at all is sad. We've had offline spell checking for decades.
This is often (though not always) blanket statement.
Logs are always generated, and logs include some amount of data about the user, if only environmental.
It's quite plausible that the spellchecker does not store your actual user data, but information about the request, or error logging includes more UGC than intended.
Note: I don't have any insider knowledge about their spellcheck API, but I've worked on similar systems which have similar language for little more than basic request logging.
Xorlev commented on FAA orders grounding of more than 170 Boeing 737 Max 9s cnbc.com/2024/01/06/boein... · Posted by u/ephesee
One troubling aspect of this is that it appears Alaska had reason to believe something was wrong with this plane but basically ignored it. They were getting pressurization warnings on prior flights, but the only action they took was restricting the plane from flying ETOPS routes.
They're the dominant carrier in my area, so these sorts of screwups make me nervous. I can't easily avoid using them without a fair amount of inconvenience.
Do you have a source for that? I'm not denying it, just curious to read more.
What makes you say zvols are neglected? In fact the people that did most of the work porting ZFS to Linux, i.e. LLNL, use zvols for their HPC cluster and they still employ a number developers and the primary maintainer of ZoL. I also remember a quote from them stating that zvols were in fact more mature than vfs.
https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/7631
This is a long-standing issue with zvols which affects overall system stability, and has no real solution as of yet.
I would assume that applications that process data faster than a few gigabytes per CPU-second are rare. It's more common that things are constrained by computation or memory latency.
You'd think so, but for datacenter workloads it's absolutely common, especially if you're just scheduling a bunch of containers together. Computation also doesn't happen in a vacuum, unless you're doing some fairly trivial processing you're likely loading quite a bit of memory, perhaps many multiples of what your business logic is actually doing.
It's also not as easy as GB/s/core, since cores aren't entirely uniform, and data access may be across core complexes.
One small piece of nuance here is that a lot of the times they're not selling your email address, they're hashing it and using it as an identifier for targeting on other sites (so that two sites that both have your email address can coordinate to sell you ads, but sites that don't already have your email address don't learn anything new).
Except it's also trivial to buy or produce tables of pre-hashed emails, so this cloak of "oh we don't know who you are, it's a hash!" is usually just lipservice.
It's' been a few years since I used an Android phone daily. But one of the nice things about iOS is the granularity of permissions. For Android app permissions are asked once during install and you take it or leave it. iOS is constantly renewing requests for location permissions and other things. And it reinforces that you are in control of your device. If you don't want an app or site to have location data you don't have to give it.
Android also reaps permissions that haven't been used recently. In the case of location, Android prompts for renewal even if it has been used recently.
Now both exist and get roughly the same feature set now, but the Java version remains popular given the vast variety of mods and servers.