Social Movements Are Pushing Google Sheets to the Breaking Point:
For a brief period, panicking international students across the nation found hope in a Google Sheet.
When the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency announced on July 6 that international students who weren't enrolled in courses meeting in-person could face deportation in the fall, Sumana Kaluvai — the creator of H-4 Hope, a Facebook group that supports students of varying immigration backgrounds — built a system for connecting international students with peers who were willing to surrender their seats in courses that could grant their classmates the right to stay in the country. She used the closest tool in her reach, Google Sheets, to facilitate these class exchanges and began circulating the resource on social media.
Her spreadsheet quickly went viral, attracting levels of traffic that rendered it unresponsive. McClain Thiel, a data science student at the University of California, Berkeley, eventually reached out and offered to build a website to replace the Google Sheet, and on July 9, they launched Support Our International Students. Though ICE would rescind the policy days later, their new website managed to mitigate the problems the original Google Sheet encountered.
[...] When Stella Nguyen, a UCLA student from Vietnam, came across Kaluvai's spreadsheet, she "found it comforting that many students — international or not — were coming together." Google Docs has helped get us here, to an era where anyone who can create and edit a document can feel empowered to help others and foster hope and connection. Now, we just need tools that are as ambitious as we are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2020, @07:51PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2020, @07:54PM (9 children)
That's what you call it when a gaggle of women all use the facilities together. Everyone is sitting around, and suddenly, all the women disappear into the lady's room. Soon thereafter, a horrendous stench issues forth.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2020, @08:20PM (3 children)
Leftists also have social movements that achieve the same outcome...
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2020, @08:25PM (2 children)
My friend got stopped when going into a party on 4th of July with a "Black Lives Matter" Flag out front, because he was black and they didn't trust him.
That is how dumb these people are.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2020, @08:39PM (1 child)
You have no ̶b̶l̶a̶c̶k̶ friends, who are you kidding?
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2020, @09:42PM
Well sheeeeet!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2020, @09:36PM (4 children)
We always joke about the alt-right incels around here, didn't quite realize how accurate that was.
Rage harder its lulz for days!
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @06:00AM (3 children)
We need to get these incels under control. Lock up all people who can't give birth and don't have a current endorsement from somebody who is capable of giving birth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @11:51AM (2 children)
Hmm fascism or incels. I pick incels, it's much more entertaining reading.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @07:45PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @11:06PM
Usually it goes like this. That guy is a nazi we should do something fascist to suppress him. That's just hilarious. If you don't like bad guys, you should give 'em a hug, not become one.
(Score: 4, Funny) by krishnoid on Sunday August 09 2020, @08:39PM
"Why are you home early?"
"My friends and I broke Google."
Google: "Too many people tried using our distributed computing
research testbedservice at the same time, so we're going tosue themtreat this as a scaling challenge and improve it to better meet real-world needs. [mumble mumble whisper mumble] Oh yeah, first we're going to stick the 'Beta' label back on it."(Score: 1, Troll) by Bot on Sunday August 09 2020, @08:57PM
>international students who weren't enrolled in courses meeting in-person could face deportation in the fall
-student
-wat
-wat you doing here
-study
-good, where
-in my room
-wat
-i study online
-why you need to be here then
-because back home the connection sucks
-aren't you from korea? pretty big pipes there
-ummm because back home parties are duller
-finally some honesty. afraid i will have to send you back, political games you see
-that's unfair, you nazi deporters
-not really, you were sent here because of political games too
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday August 09 2020, @09:08PM (2 children)
It's interesting to know that there are limits to how far Google can scale their online apps. They even note that it's for less then or up to 100 people. Which is quite a bit larger then I would say is small scale collaboration. That said this was clearly not the intended usage. But I wonder where the bottle neck was/is.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by darkfeline on Sunday August 09 2020, @09:44PM (1 child)
Google Sheets supports real-time collaborative editing. So I imagine the bottleneck is around that. A similar comparison would be a massive realtime multiplayer game like PUBG, except with all 100 players together in the same area so that you can't optimize by pruning players who aren't in the same area; everyone has to be sending realtime updates to everyone else.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Sunday August 09 2020, @11:56PM
Oh...so it's for the Buggalo Boies then.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 2) by Zinnia Zirconium on Sunday August 09 2020, @09:28PM (4 children)
What technology was used? Flat files and grep in a Berkeley Fast Filesystem running on FreeBSD? That's gonna be my guess when the most informative word is Berkeley.
FFS why are McClain Thiel and UC Berkeley and Google Sheet specifically named but "website" is generic?
I tried building a website backend on flat files and grep. It sure didn't work fast enough.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2020, @09:48PM (3 children)
Using the PHP development webserver too? At a certain point, smoke signals are going scale better than the Zr stack.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 09 2020, @09:53PM (1 child)
Smoke Signals are still faster than a pack of Cub Scouts with semaphore flags. Fewer transmission errors, too.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Monday August 10 2020, @06:41AM
Cub scouts will be better at some transmissions, though.
(Where's my facemask?)
(Score: 3, Informative) by Zinnia Zirconium on Sunday August 09 2020, @10:08PM
SQLite and php -S are a winning combination.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @05:52AM
There's built for scale and there's built for viral scale.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @06:04AM
It was a dumb policy. It should have just recinded all students who are themselves or the offspring of CCP members. Piss off the CCP that they cant get the education they want for their kids and they will push their party in a better direction. People from SE asia, africa, south america should not be punished.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 10 2020, @02:09PM (1 child)
.... The real problem is using a spreadsheet for data that should have been contained in a database. A not uncommon sin.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Tuesday August 11 2020, @01:16AM
Exactly, its not like setting up a publicly accessible MongoDB is that hard, I mean you don't even have to try =)
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Monday August 10 2020, @06:40PM
So an awful evil company ruining the world had something bad happen to it, what is the problem here?
I am surprised actually they are not being accused of terrorism, given how stupid these companies and their legal departments are.
Expect them to change the eula to include this sort of thing as a criminal offense with liable damages.
thesesystemsarefailing.net
(but sometimes that is a good thing)
(speaking of which domain goes offline in 6 days if none of you spineless spectating freeloaders or pointlessly antagonistic asshats contributes)