The point is not that it's not "real" open source, the point is that he has less interaction with the big part of the open source ecosystem which is feeling the brunt of the downsides of AI, namely, giant useless bug reports and PRs.
(I do agree that it's still OSS even if you never maintain it or anything.)
I agree there's a difference between publishing code under an OSS license and actively maintaining a project while fielding the flood of low-quality AI issues and PRs. Someone in the latter category is obviously closer to that pain.
I still wouldn't go so far as to dismiss Carmack's view on that basis alone, though. It just means his experience is less representative of maintainers dealing with that specific problem every day.
He only released his software as open source when there was no more money to be made with it. The idea being that even if it is of no use for him, is could be of use to someone else. In a sense, it is crazy to think of such actions as generous when it is what everyone should have done, but since being an asshole is the rule, then breaking that rule is indeed generous.
To me, working in open source means that your work goes to open source projects right now, not 10 years later when your software is obsolete and have been amortized. The difference matters because you are actually trying to make money here, and the protection offered by the licence you picked may be important to your business model.
John Carmack is making gifts, which is nice, but he wasn't paid to make gifts, he was paid to write proprietary software, so he worked in proprietary software, not open source. On one occasion, he gave away one of his Ferraris, which is, again, nice, but that doesn't make him a car dealer.
What would lead you to believe that in the last 13 years MS would make the titanic investment of reimplementing their (alleged) Google-based search backend?
Perl's still got a special place in my heart, but honestly, I don't use it much these days. I mainly bring it out when I'm processing a lot of text or writing scripts to be used by Perl-savvy teammates.
But here's a cool thing - in coding interviews for non-SWE roles (I'm in security), when they say 'pick any language', I go straight for Perl. Why? Because it's very forgiving when prototyping a solution quickly, has great data-structures without a lot of setup (auto-vivification!), built in grep and map features, etc.
> After Heilsberg moved to MS, a lot of improvements were made in VB that utlimately made Delphi less attractive
Well, not actually. With Anders' move to Microsoft, VB6 (aka, VB "classic") was discontinued. Microsoft supported Visual Basic syntax on the .NET runtime, but the vast majority of VB programmers considered this to be a different language because developing for the .NET Framework (remember this is ~2001) was a huge departure from VB Classic.
Many VB developers petitioned Microsoft to open-source VB6 or continue releasing improvements on it. Microsoft did not and chose to continue with their .NET + C# strategy.
There's a bit of a gap there though between 1996 and Visual Basic classic being discontinued. VB.NET came out in 2002 but VB6 was supported until 2008.
VB5 in 1997 and VB6 in 1998 really closed the gap with Delphi from what I remember.
VB5/6 had native code compilers. Performance wise, the gap was reduced.
But it still was only object based and not full OOP, VCL was much better in all respects, so were the GUI builders. The component ecosystem was much better, despite having a much smaller user base. I prefer not to use Object Pascal today, but back then, it was superior to using VC++ or VB.
VB6 was my last VB. It came at just the time when getting a computer onto a network to download and install a giant distribution was touch and go. The building where I worked didn't have networking in the labs, the "labs" were whatever space we could find, and the "lab computers" were old cast-offs retired from office use. It meant that supporting VB.NET with a brand spankin new networked computer wasn't a safe assumption.
At the same time, I was playing with Linux at home, and wanted tooling that could run on either platform. I learned Python at home, and then made the switch at work.
One of my last VB6 apps, thousands of lines, has been running in the plant without issue for 15 years. On one occasion I had to bump up the declared sizes of some fixed length arrays.
As for GUIs, I never found anything close to VB, but also decided to just write a thin wrapper around Tkinter and let my layout be generated automatically by default. I haven't missed laying out my GUIs, which were always a hodgepodge anyway.
Having worked with both Delphi and Visual Basic, I've found that Delphi had the edge, especially for professional apps. Its use of Object Pascal meant you got compiled, efficient code right out of the box, and it didn't need an extra runtime like VB.
The VCL component library in Delphi is still unmatched in native code – very comprehensive built-in (and commercial) components, and customizable. Plus, Delphi's database connectivity was unparalleled and can be setup in the designer where you could see data queried and returned live in your grid component!
Delphi also supported advanced language capabilities (when compared to VB), like inline assembly and pointers, which were essential for low-level optimization or system hacking. The robust error handling in Delphi was another plus compared to VB's older 'On Error' style.
Interestingly enough, the VB6 runtime has been part of Windows for quite some time, to the point that my old VB6 projects still run fine, while my experiments with VB.NET in .NET Framework 1 and 2 currently don't, since the ringtone isn't preinstalled. (granted, moving those to modern .NET is probably fairly easy)
Without an understanding of their motive, I think tying "google" to a person's mental health crisis is clickbait.
Folks dealing with mental health issues might end their lives for a variety of factors. This is very sad to hear, but the headline (and article) that attempts to connect an employer to a person's death without any evidence is unfair.
Well if it was a google employee who committed suicide at home, or off of the various many other places you could chose to kill yourself in Manhattan, I'd generally agree. This person however, jumped off their employers office building.
Sure, there's always "room" for speculation, and someone will always speculate. But that doesn't give this speculation any basis nor should it excuse irresponsible dialogue that seeks to generate answers for the sake of answers instead of accuracy and real information. There's a time during which such speculation is straight up irresponsible. It fuels narratives and feeds anger for reasons that can't be justified with data.
Layoffs are happening across industries. Are you suggesting that there is something specific about the way Google did theirs?
Suicides are higher across all demographics right now, and there's a pretty clear emerging consensus that there's a growing mental health crisis, and that it's not tied to a single employer.
Does this mean that Google had nothing to do with it? We don't know. But for anyone suggesting a connection, at least provide a plausible reason the connection exists, how it explains this scenario, and why that explanation is specific to Google. Otherwise why would such speculation provide any value?
The HN community is pretty good about demanding evidence and eschewing simplistic narratives that have no evidence to back them. Suicide is a tragic subject that evokes emotional responses, but that does not excuse baseless speculation.
I never claimed there wasn’t “room” for speculation and I can’t stop people from speculating.
My comment was about the basis for such speculation - for which there is none - and a criticism of this kind of speculation due to the problems it causes.
It’s uninteresting and is often the precursor to misinformation/disinformation.
there’s no indication it was an intentional jump. the article says no note or video and that they found handprints, meaning at some point this person was hanging on a ledge.
so it is misleading to say he “jumped” if it ends up being an accidental fall.
there’s plenty of people who climb ledges in NYC to take photos at night, so would not be surprised if this ends up being entirely accidental as a result of trying to take photos
I've been through that building very many times. DigitalOcean NYC2 is there, I've had lunch/dinner/drinks there more times than I can count. You don't just "fall off" 111 8th.
Yeah, and I mentioned that he could have purposefully climbed a ledge to take nighttime photos and tripped.
I’ve seen dozens of “daredevil” skyline shots of NYC where people climb rooftops/bridges to take photos. Someone intentionally jumping does not “hang” on the side, they just jump.
unless they have a change of heart? or maybe they're standing on the ledge trying to get up the courage to jump, and slip? a lot of people who attempt suicide immediately regret it (of the survivors.)
Google employs 200,000 people. Suicide rate in the US is ~13 per 100,000 per year. This means there is an expected base rate of Google employees committing suicide per year regardless of working conditions that is likely higher than just 2. Maybe there is a real issue but two suicides within such large number of employees isn’t statistically significant.
EDIT: I added "statistically" in the last sentence to clarify my intended meaning.
> Google employs 200,000 people. Suicide rate in the US is ~13 per 100,000 per year. This means there is an expected base rate of Google employees committing suicide per year regardless of working conditions that is likely higher than just 2. Maybe there is a real issue but two suicides within such large number of employees isn’t really significant.
You're assuming randomness among the US population. Might be a good assumption.
However, there are externalities to this suicide that may affect others who work at Google or in NY, and so the story is worthy of being contextualized. It might be clickbait to put the word "Google" in the title but not because of probabilistic irrelevance. People who kill themselves at work have an impact on coworkers and company, no two ways about it.
Suicide is tragic regardless of the circumstances, and it's a really bad take to try to minimize this because it's not statistically "significant" or "clickbait".
There's nothing in the article (if you read it) that tries to paint that narrative. As far as NYP goes, it's actually pretty mild and factual. I don't understand why so many commenters here are jumping at the chance to defend poor little Google from the evils of bad journalism.
Also how is
> Maybe there is a real issue but two suicides within such large number of employees isn’t really significant.
It's /mildly/ crafting the narrative in the very title... "second worker," which is implying "this is a pattern." Even the first word of the title is "Google."
As for the minimizing, remember that on HN we aim to take the best possible interpretation of our fellow members' comments. I'll assume that the person who wrote "isn't really significant" isn't a heartless monster, and therefore what they meant what that "this didn't merit a Google-focused NYPost article."
I agree that suicide is tragic and we shouldn't minimize any instance of someone taking their own life.
I was trying to say that linking it to Google and implying it is a trend based on just two suicides given their extremely large employee count isn't statistically sound without additional supporting data. I was speaking about the link to Google rather than the suicides themselves.
If you want to have a meaningful comparison, then compare Google’s suicide rates with those of people in their thirties, gainfully employed / making six figures and have free access to mental health resources.
If you're seriously considering suicide, why would you bother going in to work, and then commit suicide in your place of work (your company's HQ, no less), if not to make a statement of some sort?
A worker kills himself at work by jumping off a work building and you are here trying to tell me speculation about work being involved has zero standing? I don't buy it.
It has no more standing than speculating that the suicide was related to a failed relationship with a coworker. And even in that case, a failed relationship is not usually the cause of suicide, even if it's a precipitating factor. Causes generally tie back to systemic issues.
Of all the ways one can die, suicide stems from the most deeply complex and systemic factors in one's life. To sit here and speculate about the cause with no information is irresponsible and I'd argue at the heart of what's wrong with social media today. For some reason people feel the need to have answers, even poorly considered speculation. I'd argue that it's far better to be willing to accept that there are times that require us to just withhold speculation until there's enough information to do so responsibly.
Whatever the cause turns out to be, these early discussions are the last contact most people will have with the topic, meaning whatever speculations are shared are likely to be the primary memories of those involved.
This community is quick to demand evidence and citations on most subjects (and rightly so), and this should be no different.
If it happened on the job then, yeah, they probably would. Just like there is a Walgreens security guard in the news currently for killing a shoplifter in SF. If he had killed someone outside his capacity as a Walgreens security guard, they wouldn't describe him as such.
If this engineer had killed themselves in another manner besides jumping off the top of their workplace, they might not be described as a Google engineer.
Edit to add: Statistically, I suspect that there have to have been many instances of Google employees committing suicide outside of work. I doubt those got headlines at all, let alone headlines including Google's name.
Their living in NYC is a more obvious connection, as there are studies showing that urban populations have significantly higher rates of mental disorders.
One of the statistical slights of hand of which I am rather unfond is gun deaths that don't mention that slightly more than half of them are suicides. This reminds me a bit of that.
Google says that Alphabet had 190,234 employees in 2022. The annual age-adjusted suicide rate is 13.42 per 100,000 individuals. Males die by suicide 3.5 times more often than females. A real actuary (I wish I had known that was a profession!) could work the numbers better than I, but I don't think this is out of line on a statistical level, sad as it is to say.
People also did this with Foxconn. Supposedly at Foxconn's scale, the suicide rate wasn't alarming, but with people living in dorms and having suicide nets set up, it looks bad.
It wasn't clear when I read that the rate wasn't alarming if they were comparing the Foxconn rate to the entire general population rate or just the employed general population rate.
> I think tying "google" to a person's mental health crisis is clickbait
It's total clickbait and highlights the shameful narrative on HN and Reddit about "Mmm, Google bad." A guy just died and people are trying to push their own narrative without any sort of validity. Shameful and disgusting.
THIS!! A high-quality cross-platform GUI toolkit that can be built using Delphi's RAD designer would be a huge hit in the market, IMHO. There is literally nothing that does this now.
Salesforce is a sales and marketing company that was founded (and is led) by a brilliant sales and marketing person in Marc Benioff.
They are not now, and never have been, and engineering focused company. The creation of the Salesforce platform itself is (or was) based entirely on Oracle tech...and it was SOLD extremely well because it solved business problems.
Salesforce has failed to innovate outside of releasing the CRM as a SaaS product back in 1999...which is why they have bought innovation, and then integrated it poorly...see Heroku, Slack, Mulesoft, Tableau, Quip, Demandware, ExactTarget, etc.
I worked there for a short bit. Most frustrating experience of my career. It was the epitome of rest and vest well before COVID.
Extreme lack of urgency, little attention to quality, and a huge focus on sales and marketing.
Salesforce will print money for a few more years until someone makes a less awful CRM solution and just crushes their business...so long as Salesforce can't buy that company, integrate it badly, and disillusion all the employees that made it great.
> Salesforce will print money for a few more years until someone makes a less awful CRM solution and just crushes their business.
This statement undervalues the lock-in Salesforce has. One should probably make migrate-from-Salesforce tool and sell to all the new VC funded CRM shops. You could be selling shovels during a gold rush.
Yeah, aren't there already a lot of CRM products? I know Close.io is particularly useful for salespeople, but I'm not sure of any that could touch the dominance of Salesforce in the enterprise.
Absolutely. To compete with Salesforce, you need to not only do literally everything Salesforce can do, you need to be compatible with all the horrific hacked in integrations that companies have made, and do it better enough where it’s worth the complete clusterfuck that switching off Salesforce would cause.
Absolutely. Back when I worked for a bank as a junior analyst, we were one of the first to jump on the Salesforce train. The software was garbage but Salesforce bought the handful of us many four figure dinners. I don’t really give a fuck how annoying the software is when I’m eating a $90 steak with a glass of $200 wine.
Tech companies have either a sales culture or an engineering culture. As a new employee, you usually figure out which your new company has by the end of the first day.
A lot of companies start with an engineering culture and transition out of it as they grow (actually, this is almost always the case) - examples: HP, Boeing, et al.
> Tech companies have either a sales culture or an engineering culture. As a new employee, you usually figure out which your new company has by the end of the first day.
Why wait until the end of your first day? This is a great question to ask in an interview.
This is my experience exactly. A few years ago, I joined a startup at 50 people that was very much an engineering culture. By the time we hit ~120 people it shifted into a sales culture due to pressure from our investors.
Sales people had complete free reign to promise everything under the sun to potential customers. It caused a lot of havoc in our product development and burned out most of the engineers pretty quickly.
Yep, Salesforce grows by acquisition and that really shows when you start implementing it, especially if you want to do anything more complex that use Marketing Cloud. Then you realise that it is a poorly integrated collection of distinct applications, each with its own data model, integration patterns and license fee model. You end up endlessly working out how to move data across applications and then back again.
I’m one of a handful of people with Salesforce experience in my company and we have a small usage of it. I’m brought into new projects thinking of using it as a counterpoint to the SF sales team, who promise the world and then disappear to be replaced by an implementation team that has to explain that things aren’t as easy, simple or cheap as the sales team promised.
> Salesforce will print money for a few more years until someone makes a less awful CRM solution and just crushes their business...so long as Salesforce can't buy that company, integrate it badly, and disillusion all the employees that made it great.
I’ve been hearing this for nearly a decade. There are VASTLY better CRMs out there. They don’t make a dent in SFCD’s business. That says a lot about the market.
Approximately all CRM products suck. Salesforce is better than no CRM and not worse than its competitors. We use it, and it's tedious and awful in many ways but it does the job. YMMV of course.
This reads like someone who’s never used the platform. It is broad, allows you to do a lot quickly and relatively more easily than most other platforms.
I’m not an evangelist, but I’m now a few years into using it at the startup where I’m CTO and it’s great at what it does and there isn’t really anything else that does it.
Out of curiosity, how many non-enterprise alternatives to Salesforce have you really, genuinely evaluated?
I've personally never met anyone who has had anything nice to say about Salesforce. I've never heard anything especially bad, but I've heard so many complaints (especially from folks who have had to touch the API). From what I can see, Salesforce only has an advantage because they're the biggest, so everything and everyone works with it (in the same way that every tool that touches email integrates with Gmail).
I don't have any hands-on experience with Salesforce, but to me this is reminiscent of Jira. Nobody has anything nice to say about it, yet it's still the dominant player and people's go-to for project management, and no other tooling has managed to supplant it.
You're sort of saying this but Salesforce has an absolutely enormous ecosystem of partners. Dreamforce is one of the largest conferences in tech. (CES is probably bigger but there aren't many.)
The API is fine and quite flexible. There are things that are very annoying (hello deploying updates from sandboxes to the production instance), but the APIs work, are generally well documented and have lots of options to generally get what I’ve needed to get done done.
This is true, I did not use the platform as a user. I know it solves business problems and theyve built a big moat.
My commentary is on the company culture and focus on sales over quality. I just don’t think this is a company that knows how to organically innovate or integrate purchased innovation…and I think that makes them vulnerable to being overtaken by a competitor that solves the same business problems in a different way than they do now.
They’ll be around for decades. Just like many other formerly innovative companies hang around for a long time.
I break down what you said as: "Sure, he's released code with an open-source license, but that's not real open source in the sense that matters."
I happen to disagree. OSS is OSS. AGPL is OSS. MIT is Open Source. Unlicense is OSS.