Personally I think it is not a good idea to assume that the world/universe is supposed to have some kind of meaning or direction. At some level, none of this really matters. Humanity will be gone in due time, and none of that will have any meaning anymore. We just need to be able to enjoy the ride and focus on the good parts.
I will take this opportunity to thank you. Not only was your talk very interesting and informative, I also found it very inspiring. It really made me rethink what my goals are as a developer. Hope to see more from you.
Recent does not always equate to better, note. There are exercises in Bach that are still relevant today. Milenkovic's 1987 book has a fairly interesting angle on design that one does not find elsewhere.
And several comparative operating systems books do not have the wide range of case studies that such books used to have.
That said: There are some interesting books on Solaris and MacOS internals that I did not have (and indeed that did not exist) when that FGA was written. The Windows NT Internals book is now two books (parts 1 and 2) and on its 7th edition (with a slightly unfortunate cover design, per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14321672). And of course there is a FreeBSD D&I book.
I've also bought an interesting old book on VMS internals, since then. It discusses ODS.
I love this list, and would love to see an updated list so I can add the recommendations to my reading list :)
Have you ever checked out OSTEP: Three Easy Pieces? (http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/) I am finding that a much more accessible, organized, and easy-to-ready resource than Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems. What do you think of it?
Speaking of the Linux kernel related books, I'd probably mention, Understanding The Linux Kernel [0] and Linux Kernel Development [1]. The LDDv4 is not going to happen any time soon; it seems there are no plans for a new edition at all.
It's not as bad as you'd think in total volume, it's just you get a lot of bursty concurrent traffic. Something as simple as a hundred requests in roughly the same second crash many blogs sadly.
Interesting. Weird response to something that doesn't seem that rare, like someone linking you to the mobile version of a page, just linking you to a different Google culture.
I think it really started when Google made its ill-spirited push to make everyone use Plus[1]. Before that point, Google was mostly beloved and most users were truly grateful for Google's free products. After that push, many lost YouTube accounts (including me), people who didn't even want to use Plus for chats were pushed to that page as the popular Google Talk app was killed (and then later forcibly moved from plus.google.* to hangouts.google.*).
In a fairly short period of time, people started seeing the same kind of "We're in charge and you're going to use _____ and like it!" attitude that Microsoft was once famous for. People wanted Plus about as much as they wanted Vista, but it got shoved on them anyway.
In more recent years—with AMP pages (and authors on Plus) getting an edge in search, google.com badgering users to install Chrome, a successful embrace->extend->extinguish strategy being executed against open source Android, etc—moves like this one don't look so innocent as they would have coming from the smaller, goofier and cheerier Google of 2005.
I have a theory that popular opinions within social groups can reach a sort of tipping point.
On one side of the tipping point, the company is seen as basically a bunch of good guys who may make occasional mistakes - but who doesn't? And they're always quick to correct them, or they're out of understandable commercial necessity.
On the other side of the tipping point, the company is seen as basically a detrimental force, hungry to gather and abuse monopoly power, responsive and accountable to no-one, and motivated only by things that will let them take more money and power from the likes of us.
Of course, for any company the size of Google / Microsoft / Apple / Facebook the answer is a little of column A, a little of column B.
But how people will see a given action depends on what side of the tipping point a company is on. When a company does something like buying another company's patent portfolio (for "defensive purposes"), or buying a startup and making their paid offering free, it'll confirm your existing beliefs - whichever side you were on.
If you went to Slashdot in the 90s, Microsoft could do no right - they could give free PCs to orphanages, and there'd be people saying they only did it to cement the dominance of Office.
I'd say Google is just kinda hovering around that tipping point right now, in HN's median opinion. Some people think it's on one side, some on the other.
Of course, us online-forum-readers and designers have to take some of the blame for this sort of reductionism - it's easy to comment without reading the article, or to design a system where parroting the collective opinion is rewarded with upvotes.
Well it's legitimately founded in that Google has a lot of power over how things are interpreted online due to its omnipresence. Once you reach the size of Google, every action is an experiment in the Butterfly Effect, with each change having many unintended consequences. Product Launches and Discontinuations on a monthly basis, flagging sites as malicious due to a false-positive, bubble search results causing discoverability issues, AMP, the list goes on.
Yes, some people will rag on Google for anything, but there are valid concerns when such changes are made without warning that breaks current functionality. Per the article, this time Google just enabled it for new apps with plans to roll it out to existing apps, but in the past Google as not been as courteous.
It's the classic xkcd situation that every change breaks someone's workflow; the difference being that when you're Google's size and have Google's reach of influence, you end up breaking a lot of someones workflows.
