Actually I do expect a certain degree of privacy while in public. No everyone is comfortable with Google spying and data mining everything they can get their hands on.
They do this across all their services and had been doing so for years. They really want you to use their (shitty) browser. I don't blame them though, it's just irritating to see people praise them as a "good" corporation that does no unnecessary evil.
The big problems with attendees last year were that the demographic imbalances were in many ways embarrassing, and that they didn't feel it was developer focussed enough. It'll be interesting to see if there is a giveaway at all this year, since a large part of previous woes could be down to people attending just for that, and I'd cynically observe that for many attendees the long term value was actually just the giveaway.
The lottery is a definite step in the right direction, but the branding is just all kinds of terrible, and makes me wonder how much they've really learned.
If they can improve access to the same content and people at remote locations that might be a game changer (i.e. hangouts to allow remote participation in some of their sideshows), as most of the value of attending the main event is what goes on outside the main talks, thanks to YouTube being so effective for hosting those.
It was definitely depressing to not get tickets last year then see a group of 9 year olds with their parents throughout the auditorium just looking to soak up the free stuff. I wish they didn't do any free stuff to discourage non developers from going.
I believe the thinking is that the previous setup meant that most people there were the kind that would obsessively refresh windows in order to secure places. The lottery means there's no benefit to those possibly excessively enthused about the idea, and so the tone of the whole thing could be more balanced and professional.
They're going to have to be careful about hotel bookings though, since the announcement of winners will cause a surge.
> They're going to have to be careful about hotel bookings though, since the announcement of winners will cause a surge.
Is this no different to selling out in minutes though? Besides, hotels already know a) the dates of Google IO, and b) how many people are attending, so you'd imagine they'd already have priced that into their rates. Unless you're talking about the actual booking systems going offline, but that seems unlikely as lots of people will use aggregators (Expedia, Kayak, etc) at scale.
Perhaps the parent objects to hellbanning on principle, and is partaking in some small amount of civil disobedience to right a perceived wrong.
If a single post happened to result in my being hellbanned, I would surely hope someone would tell me so I didn't continue wasting my time trying to participate, only to have it sent into the void. I could instead use it as a signal to either move on, or do some self introspection about my actions which resulted in the ban in the first place.
>"The big problems with attendees last year were that the demographic imbalances were in many ways embarrassing, and that they didn't feel it was developer focussed enough."
I'm curious, what kind of demographic imbalances?
Of all the better known conferences, material from I/O has routinely been the most interesting to me - I've gone through dozens of videos from years past on YouTube. I've been thinking about pushing to get some employer sponsorship for a trip to I/O one year in place of our typical trips.
The presentations and material are great but there are a lot of attendees there who are not developers which makes a lot of the interactions confusing. TBH if there were more developers there I'm not sure I would be been able to get a seat or stand for that matter at a lot of the technical presentations.
Every stereotype of the tech industry being a male dominated monoculture was reinforced. Very (very) few women, and general racial/ethnic imbalances not reflective of Google or the wider world.
As I alluded to, I'd recommend going primarily if you think you'll get value from interacting with interesting people there. I'm big on Android, but my highlight of last year was chatting to a Chrome dev relations guy about their approach to profiling, so it is the pleasant surprises that are the main takeaways.
How is Google supposed to address that? And why is it relevant to getting value from the conference?
The few female developers I know tend to resent the fact that the only women they meet at conferences are marketers, thereby ruining the chances other attendees will treat them as developers. It does not help developers to invite more marketers or recruiters in order to achieve gender balance.
The question is: who on earth cares about the demographics of a conference? You go there to get information, so why should you care about who the people sitting in the hall are, especially given the fact that you won't see them ever again?
I blame the trend in UI design to hide scroll bars. On desktop they're perfectly visible and it's not so difficult to work out that you need to scroll.
It used to be much worse with flashy microsites. You'd open them and wait minutes for the first page to load. Then click somewhere and wait again. And the UIs would be much more confusing. Scrollwheel would be disabled.
This flash throwback at the top with a scroll to the rest of the site that loads instantly is a big step forward.
If your UI requires that users "be attentive" just to discover the content you're trying to convey, then your UI is awful and the user's failure to see it is entirely your fault.
Well said. I blame it partially on designer groupthink.
Of course design elements (color, typeface, white space, etc) are important...but visitors of your site are interested in consuming content NOW (not a few seconds form now). People are lazy.
Actually, I'm inclined to bet this was one designer's concept and not the work of many people reviewing prototypes and giving feedback.
Design-by-group tends to produce boring, cluttered, seen-it-before layouts with little innovation. This seems to be on the completely opposite end of the spectrum -- with no one saying, "Uh, wait -- I think you need to make it clear that you can scroll for more info."
(And also: "Uh, I'm not sure developers are going to take kindly to Google requesting access to their microphones so soon after the NSA revelations.")
When Google originally started doing this it was essentially to open people's eyes to the capabilities of HTML. Lately, however, it has just been excessive. In this case it isn't even particularly clever: Click on stuff and stuff happens. If you had to actually align planets or build real molecules / atoms, then cool, but just clicking on highlighted things is not interesting.
What the ... I didn't realize that till I read this post of yours even after playing all those clicking games. I thought since it's far away, may be they only have these animations here and someone shared it only because of them.
The first slide is to blame, not the overall design. I scrolled from the get-go, but that's because I didn't engage with the "play" button on the first slide which seems like the only thing they want you to do. If there were no way to interact with something in that first slide, you'd scroll.
It seems a lot of responses here were they didn't know they could scroll. I'm in the opposite camp. Didn't notice there was a play option and just scrolled :/
That’s a shame because selfishly I want everyone to see the second slide which is of the Racer game we unveiled at last year’s I/O. Was a proud moment for us code-play folk ;) http://www.chrome.com/racer
In order to be allowed to buy a ticket they should have a simple dynamically-generated programming challenge so non-programmers can't search for the exact answer. Maybe some kind of dynamically generated boolean math problem to be implemented with if-else statements.
There are a large number of developers that still ask me "How do you do <simple thinghere> in regex?" quite often. I think that your suggestion may be narrowing the crowd a bit much.
boson2: "There's more Ajax in this loader than an epic greek poem"
boson3: "♬ Reunited and it feels so good"
boson4: "Are you there, Boson? It's me, Margaret."
boson5: "♬ Is he a dot, or is he a speck? When he's underwater does he get wet?"
exo1: ""Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives." - Carl Sagan"
exo2: "Call me V'Ger"
exo3: "As far as we know, the universe is not Tail Call optimized."
exo-argon: "Investigating: Class J Planet Argon"
exo-bleu: "Detecting: Class H Planet Bleu"
exo-cheddarwurst: "Discovered: Class D Planet Cheddarwurst"
exo-daytripper: "Located: Class M Planet Day Tripper"
exo-dunebuggy: "Detecting: Class D Planet Dune Buggy"
exo-emanthaler: "Located: Class D Planet Emmentaler"
exo-hoth: "Investigating: Class K Planet Hoth"
exo-izod: "Detecting: Class D Planet Golf"
exo-lacoste: "Discovered: Class D Planet Lines"
exo-meangreenie: "Investigating: Class J Planet Mean Greenie"
exo-measels: "Located: Class L Planet Measels"
exo-mumps: "Investigating: Class L Planet Mumps"
exo-neon: "Detecting: Class J Planet Neon"
exo-polo: "Discovered: Class D Planet Colors"
exo-purplehaze: "Discovered: Class D Planet Purple Haze"
exo-tatooine: "Located: Class M Planet Tatooine"
exo-xenon: "Investigating: Class J Planet Xenon"
exo-ziggystardust: "Located: Class L Planet Ziggy Stardust"
neural-banana: "Orange you glad I didn't say banana (╯°□°）╯"
Personally, I'm glad they switched to the lottery. I had the worst experience last year. Got a ticket after refreshing the page for a half hour, but then Google Wallet was broken so it wouldn't let me pay for it (cart expires in 5 minutes). Hopefully they can handle the server load spread out over 2 days this time.
Last summer I interned on Google+ Developer Relations so I got to go to IO for free and as staff, which is pretty rare even among Googlers.
IO is an incredible place to learn about the latest in technical best practices, especially if you're into Android or web dev. However there is so much to learn in so little time that it's impossible to see every tech talk that you want to. The real reason to shell out $900 + travel would be to go talk to Google DevRel and other people in your field to build your network.
If you're just going for the technical info, you're honestly much better off saving $900 and watching the YouTube videos the next day. They're incredibly well organized and you can pause to think as you watch. I ended up watching all of the ones I went to live for a second time when I got home.
Last summer I interned on Google+ Developer Relations so I got to go to IO for free and as staff, which is pretty rare even among Googlers.
IO is an incredible place to learn about the latest in technical best practices, especially if you're into Android or web dev. However there is so much to learn in so little time that it's impossible to see every tech talk that you want to. The real reason to shell out $900 + travel would be to go talk to Google DevRel and other people in your field to build your network.
If you're just going for the technical info, you're honestly much better off saving $900 and watching the YouTube videos the next day. They're incredibly well organized and you can pause to think as you watch. I ended up watching all of the ones I went to live for a second time when I got home.
Typically, they give presale access to repeat attendees ("Ions") before the general public gets access.
As an Ion, there's incentive to go every year if only to maintain your ability to go next year (nevermind interacting with the Googlers who build the APIs you rely or the hardware seeding, clearly also benefits).
I predict we will now see greater adoption on google wallet, since having a bunch of google wallets with virtual credit card numbers effectively gives you more tickets to the lottery. Sneaky plot by google there.
Make sure to enter the "lottery" with a company or app publishing account email if possible. Just polling people in the industry last time, people with emails from popular press and media often had no trouble at all. A possible reason is a whitelist for certain email domains.
134 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadI was going to get the development version. Should I wait after June 25?
Also, I love the binary countdown at the bottom of the page.
"This page has been blocked from accessing your microphone."
I don't have headphones on, and I see no other indication as to why they'd want to access my mic. Weird.
"Explore technology and its impact from small to large through tapping, spinning and making sound.
It seems that making noise causes the animation to do things.
The lottery is a definite step in the right direction, but the branding is just all kinds of terrible, and makes me wonder how much they've really learned.
If they can improve access to the same content and people at remote locations that might be a game changer (i.e. hangouts to allow remote participation in some of their sideshows), as most of the value of attending the main event is what goes on outside the main talks, thanks to YouTube being so effective for hosting those.
IMHO the best way is to just announce that there's no giveaway this year. Not the best promotion for the event though.
They're going to have to be careful about hotel bookings though, since the announcement of winners will cause a surge.
Is this no different to selling out in minutes though? Besides, hotels already know a) the dates of Google IO, and b) how many people are attending, so you'd imagine they'd already have priced that into their rates. Unless you're talking about the actual booking systems going offline, but that seems unlikely as lots of people will use aggregators (Expedia, Kayak, etc) at scale.
You're currently hellbanned, looks like because of this post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7273699
If a single post happened to result in my being hellbanned, I would surely hope someone would tell me so I didn't continue wasting my time trying to participate, only to have it sent into the void. I could instead use it as a signal to either move on, or do some self introspection about my actions which resulted in the ban in the first place.
I'm curious, what kind of demographic imbalances?
Of all the better known conferences, material from I/O has routinely been the most interesting to me - I've gone through dozens of videos from years past on YouTube. I've been thinking about pushing to get some employer sponsorship for a trip to I/O one year in place of our typical trips.
As I alluded to, I'd recommend going primarily if you think you'll get value from interacting with interesting people there. I'm big on Android, but my highlight of last year was chatting to a Chrome dev relations guy about their approach to profiling, so it is the pleasant surprises that are the main takeaways.
The few female developers I know tend to resent the fact that the only women they meet at conferences are marketers, thereby ruining the chances other attendees will treat them as developers. It does not help developers to invite more marketers or recruiters in order to achieve gender balance.
I hate this trend in web design.
This flash throwback at the top with a scroll to the rest of the site that loads instantly is a big step forward.
Of course design elements (color, typeface, white space, etc) are important...but visitors of your site are interested in consuming content NOW (not a few seconds form now). People are lazy.
Design-by-group tends to produce boring, cluttered, seen-it-before layouts with little innovation. This seems to be on the completely opposite end of the spectrum -- with no one saying, "Uh, wait -- I think you need to make it clear that you can scroll for more info."
(And also: "Uh, I'm not sure developers are going to take kindly to Google requesting access to their microphones so soon after the NSA revelations.")
Edit: And why in the world am I getting the webcam indicator on this site‽
Now with Java 8 out, it is pretty lame that one still needs to use a Java 6 fork to target the majority of Android devices.
"features like multi-catch, try-with-resources, and the diamond operator. " - [1]
[1] - http://developer.android.com/tools/sdk/tools-notes.html
Then non-network engineers wouldn't be grabbing up all the tickets.
Anyone else experiencing this?
When you sign up you have to have a Google Wallet account so that your ticket is automatically purchased if you're chosen.
Object {
boson1: "Reticulating Splines..."
boson2: "There's more Ajax in this loader than an epic greek poem"
boson3: "♬ Reunited and it feels so good"
boson4: "Are you there, Boson? It's me, Margaret."
boson5: "♬ Is he a dot, or is he a speck? When he's underwater does he get wet?"
exo1: ""Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives." - Carl Sagan"
exo2: "Call me V'Ger"
exo3: "As far as we know, the universe is not Tail Call optimized."
exo-argon: "Investigating: Class J Planet Argon"
exo-bleu: "Detecting: Class H Planet Bleu"
exo-cheddarwurst: "Discovered: Class D Planet Cheddarwurst"
exo-daytripper: "Located: Class M Planet Day Tripper"
exo-dunebuggy: "Detecting: Class D Planet Dune Buggy"
exo-emanthaler: "Located: Class D Planet Emmentaler"
exo-hoth: "Investigating: Class K Planet Hoth"
exo-izod: "Detecting: Class D Planet Golf"
exo-lacoste: "Discovered: Class D Planet Lines"
exo-meangreenie: "Investigating: Class J Planet Mean Greenie"
exo-measels: "Located: Class L Planet Measels"
exo-mumps: "Investigating: Class L Planet Mumps"
exo-neon: "Detecting: Class J Planet Neon"
exo-polo: "Discovered: Class D Planet Colors"
exo-purplehaze: "Discovered: Class D Planet Purple Haze"
exo-tatooine: "Located: Class M Planet Tatooine"
exo-xenon: "Investigating: Class J Planet Xenon"
exo-ziggystardust: "Located: Class L Planet Ziggy Stardust"
neural-banana: "Orange you glad I didn't say banana (╯°□°）╯"
neural-boom: "♬ All we hear is, radio ga ga"
neural-can: "It's got what plants crave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbxq0IDqD04"
neural-cat: "Cat Proximity: https://xkcd.com/262/"
neural-doge: "WONTFIX: Duplicate Doge joke"
neural-mona: "It's cool and all, but I'm more into his older stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Supper_(Leonardo_da_Vi...
neural-nes: "What's the fastest TAS you can complete for the I/O 2014 website?"
neural-pong: "Can you do this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8IVASo0umU"
neural-rhex: "Awwww, he's a cute little guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISznqY3kESI"
neural-ufo: "Teach the controversy!"
neuralfail0: "Hint: The eyeball follows the correct diamonds"
neuralfail1: "ಠ_ಠ You could scrape the code for patterns, but you should probably get back to work."
neuralfail2: "Hi HackerNews, I dare you not to complain about something involving Big O Notation."
planet1: "I think I can see my house from here."
planet2: "Our apologies to any visitors who suffer from Globophobia."
planet3: "TCP/IP is cool and all, but did I think "IP over Avian Carriers" would be way more fun: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers"
planet4: "-... . . .--. / -... --- --- .--. / -... . . .--. / -... --- --- .--."
si...
IO is an incredible place to learn about the latest in technical best practices, especially if you're into Android or web dev. However there is so much to learn in so little time that it's impossible to see every tech talk that you want to. The real reason to shell out $900 + travel would be to go talk to Google DevRel and other people in your field to build your network.
If you're just going for the technical info, you're honestly much better off saving $900 and watching the YouTube videos the next day. They're incredibly well organized and you can pause to think as you watch. I ended up watching all of the ones I went to live for a second time when I got home.
IO is an incredible place to learn about the latest in technical best practices, especially if you're into Android or web dev. However there is so much to learn in so little time that it's impossible to see every tech talk that you want to. The real reason to shell out $900 + travel would be to go talk to Google DevRel and other people in your field to build your network.
If you're just going for the technical info, you're honestly much better off saving $900 and watching the YouTube videos the next day. They're incredibly well organized and you can pause to think as you watch. I ended up watching all of the ones I went to live for a second time when I got home.
Seriously, I didn't even try to read the text on the page because its overall mood implies the text is not important at all.
This site simply looks like someone's homework rather than an info site for a conference.
39(base 10) does not equal 011,1001
39 == 0100111
Wonder if they've scrapped that this year too.