A Strategy for Internationalization and Node.js - <AUTHOR> http://ejohn.org/blog/a-strategy-for-i18n-and-node/

<comment><USER2> Languages are _not_ countries. This website described in this article has the flag of the USA followed by "English", which as a British person I find both alienating and historically bizarre.

Likewise, you shouldn't be serving up content to Latin-Americans with the Spanish flag on it! How about the German flag for German-speaking Austrians? Or the Chinese flag for Mandarin speakers in Taiwan?

<comment><USER3> Why are British people so bothered by this? Why is anybody bothered by it?

I'm an American and have used plenty of (European) websites and product manuals where English is identified by a British flag. I have no problem with that. And plenty of (American) websites and product manuals where English is identified by an American flag. Which makes sense to me. Why is that such a problem to you?

It's true that languages are not countries, but languages almost always _do_ exist in country-specific versions. British English is not American English. Brazilian Portuguese is not Portuguese from Portugal. Spanish in Mexico is different from Spanish in Argentina.

Is doesn't seem that unreasonable to use the flag of the country-specific version of the language being translated. If you're doing Spanish, you have to choose _which_ Spanish in the first place anyways. The Portuguese can deal with a Brazilian flag if they hired a Brazilian translator. And for super-huge sites, you'll probably have different sections for USA and Britain _anyways_ , since they'll have different pricing, different products, etc.

<comment><USER2> Cultural imperialism is not acceptable. It is arrogance, and we British are acutely aware of that given the legacy of Empire.

You're failing to understand the magnitude of the insult which occurs when you conflate a flag - which is a transient political statement, with a language - which is cultural and fundamental to one's identity. Instead of a drop-down menu of languages, the developer ends up creating a drop-down menu of political allegiances.

Do you think that my friend's mother who fled the Iranian revolution wants to stare at the flag of the Islamic Republic just because she wants to view sites in Farsi? No. She has relatives who died because of what that flag represents. Furthermore your assertion about country-specificity doesn't work: she speaks the Iranian-specific form of Farsi.

Political statements really matter, people live and die for flags. Right now there are riots in Ireland over the British flag [http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57563606/police- attacked...](http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57563606/police-attacked- again-in-40th-day-of-northern-ireland-flag-riots/) Would you suggest that we display the British flag to the Irish to represent "English"? They don't have a country-specific form of English either.

How about we show the British flag in Zimbabwe, where it is the first language? It's probably a crime... Maybe the French flag in Quebec? Oops. How about the Cuban flag for Cuban-Americans who fled the revolution? The list goes on, and on ...

So really, really, don't mix up political symbols with languages. For many people, it's a matter of life and death. You're not going to have a specialised version of your website for every country on Earth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was thinking to a similar project, once I saw the poor quality of modules out there. Very happy to see someone like you working out the problem.

</comment><comment><USER5> There are javascript's i18n libraries by Alex Sexton.

<https://github.com/SlexAxton/Jed> <https://github.com/SlexAxton/messageformat.js>

<comment><AUTHOR> They are great libraries! Alex replied to my post and I replied with:

"I'm very familiar with your work (on both Jed and messageformat) – I hope to have a need for them some day! In my personal application I have no need for gender (there are no user accounts or socialization) and only very limited pluralization requirements (which can be mitigated with just basic one/other string replacement). Perhaps as the application grows something like that might be useful. We're looking at possibly using your work for some upcoming i18n work at Khan Academy, we'll see how that progresses!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there something wrong with the content negotiation header "Accept- Language"? My understanding was most browsers set it to the system language?

HTTP provides a mechanism, why does nobody use it?

<comment><USER2> Yes, it's broken in most browsers. For example my system language is set to en-gb which is British English, but my browser reports en-us which is American English. Most websites don't distinguish between these two languages though.

The main reason that Accept-Language is problematic is that it forces the user into using the system language, so a Sweedish person in London at an Internet cafe ends up with websites in English, so there must always be an easy way to change the website language within the browser.

But a browser-wide setting would just annoy bilingual people who want content is different languages depending on context.

<comment><AUTHOR> And this is the reason why I don't force anyone into viewing a particular version of the site -- I only use it for displaying an opt-out notice guiding them to the version that I think they may prefer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Most SEO people will end up telling you that sub domains endup splitting your page rank up since they are considered different domains. We ended up keeping our different languages under different sub folders. so:

whatever.com/

whatever.com/es/

whatever.com/de/

</comment><comment><USER8> Why "ja." for Japanese when the ISO country code is JP?

<comment><USER9> There is a difference between language codes and country codes. "ja" is the language code for japanese (ISO 639-1), "jp" is the country code for japan (ISO 3166-1 alpha-2).

<comment><USER8> Wow, thanks for that. I knew about ISO 3166 but not 639 (and somehow just assumed Japanese would match Japan). This leads to the rather surprising result that TLDs use .jp for Japan yet subdomains use .ja for Japanese, e.g. ja.example.co.jp. I imagine most laypeople would not well understand the distinction and think "Oh why can't those IT people ever make things easy?"

Well, never mind anyway, because it's google.co.jp, but google.com.sg. IT people really are annoying! ;-)</comment></comment></comment>


Who will steal Android from Google? - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/who-will-steal-android-from-google-af3622b6252e <comment><USER3> I think Steve's underestimating the power of Google's control over OEMs here. Every OEM wants to get rid of Google's hold over them, but how do they do it without putting their entire corporation at risk? Google has already shown they'll ban your entire company from Google Apps access if you try to produce a single Android device without Google Apps.

So any company who wants to exclude Google puts their entire mobile product line at risk on this play. It'd be hard to see anything coming of this unless multiple manufacturers can agree to make the jump together, creating a platform large enough that even Google has to support it for their own market share needs (which means, this group must include Samsung, who's hedged their bets on this sort of thing but seems too scared to make the jump). And even then, this only remains an option as long as the Pixel remains niche. If the Pixel gains an iPhone-like market share amongst the broader range of Android devices, Google can mostly tell other manufacturers to screw off.

His notions on cross-platform frameworks making a non-Android platform viable are spot on though. Not only through things like React Native, but PWAs, which Google is pretty bullish on itself, despite the fact that it may make Windows Mobile a viable idea again.

<comment><USER4> To your point - software is king. Any two-bit electronics company can ship a phone, but it's a useless paper weight if it doesn't run the right software.

iPhone is generally behind the curve when it comes to hardware specs, but nobody cares about that because iOS is such a strong platform.

<comment><USER3> And the "right" software is often controlled by one company. If you read a lot of reviews of Windows Phones, most reviewers seemed to more or less come to the same conclusion: That Windows was a faster, smoother OS, but that they had trouble going about their daily lives with it because it didn't have Gmail and the other five or six Google Apps they relied on.

As long as the market share of any newcomer is low enough, Google can leave them out in the cold for app support (or intentionally interfere by blocking YouTube access, similar to what they did with Windows Mobile, and now Amazon's Echo and Fire platforms), and they'll die off for that reason alone.

Whether it's an Android fork or a new OS like Tizen or some new Windows flavor, it won't beat Google unless it has the market share to force Google to support it with apps. And it's hard to get that market share without Google's support.

<comment><USER5> Windows Mobile/Phone actually was less capable than Android on similar hardware. That Windows Phone had superior resource management was a myth. Even on high-end hardware Windows Phone struggles to handle things that even a lower-end Android device can handle.

I don't know if Windows Mobile was ever faster or smoother, but for certain it was not in the last few years.

<comment><USER3> As someone who's spent years using both, I can definitely disagree. Even a budget Windows Mobile was far less sluggish than my high end Motorola flagship phones.

In fact, I had a phone with Microsoft's Android Bridge beta, and while people were complaining how slow the Android apps were on it... I realized that it was more or less just the normal performance Android apps ran at.

<comment><USER6> > I had a phone with Microsoft's Android Bridge beta, and while people were > complaining how slow the Android apps were on it... I realized that it was > more or less just the normal performance Android apps ran at.

Seems a _little_ disingenuous to pin performance against a half-implemented ASOP API running on an environment without all of the JVM bytecode tuning Google has put into ART/Dalvik.

<comment><USER3> I wasn't. I carried Android phones as my primary devices for over six years. I was comparing _that_ experience, to my experiences with the Android Bridge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Isn't the complaint about Android as a dev platform related to the frequent vs infrequent developer article that's now also on the first page? Sure programming Android is yucky (I struggled with the flavor/build/whatever hierarchy he mentions just this morning, and it's a mess, and even the examples in the official docs are incomprehensible), but so is programming on every mature platform. I write MFC code pretty much every day, and I dig down into win32 at least weekly. Ya it ain't pretty, but I paid the learning price 15 years ago, and now I know every nook and cranny and I can just get things done without googling every little thing, and chasing down if that answer on a forum from 2013 still applies (or is no longer a 'best practice' o how I loathe that term, but I digress...)

And sure, the 'getting started' examples of every new framework or platform that promises to fix the warts of the previous one look compelling - but then you start building actual applications, and people find out they need to add this and that and by the time it matures we're 5 years on; and it has accumulated just as much (different, but just as much) cruft as the ones before it.

<comment><USER8> I lost track with MFC during the early 2000, but from the documentation, it hasn't been rebooted half as much as Android has.

And if the Java layer is already a mess, with the documentation scattered all over the web instead of Android docs, those of us that adventure in NDK could use a quote from Dante.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Microsoft invests heavily in Xamarin, but I haven't seen an amazing cross platform app written in it yet, even though it's four years older than React Native.

React Native is really good, but I wounder how many developers will be able to move from OOP or Web development to Declarative Programming.

I think we'll continue to see a lot of Kotlin and Swift developers for the next decade, as both languages are still attracting many new developers. Android and iOS have been playing nicely with the compatibility layer, but could potential break it if they begin to lose control of the market place. Developing in React Native, while having lower costs, is still more risky than having two native development teams.

<comment><USER3> Microsoft feels like it always is moving towards a grand unifying vision, but it is always taking longer than you'd expect. Xamarin is still one of many heads of the great .NET hydra. Microsoft's been making big strides to tame them all under .NET Standard, but there's still plenty of work to go.

<comment><USER9> imo Microsoft has a problem of trying to force technology when it just isn't elegant engineering. Unifying .NET is both an engineer's fool's errand and one of the most obvious things things they can do to improve their business.

I was writing some dotnet core 2.0 code the other day and was shocked to find it was missing an officially supported odbc as well as many of the System.Data classes that use to be a big workhorse for developers. .NET has serious problems.

Microsoft invested in other technologies that were obviously doomed from an outsider's perspective for far longer than they should. Windows phone and Bing being the two biggest and most obvious stubborn failures.

<comment><USER3> Bing is hardly a failure, nearly every search engine that isn't Google has switched to it as a data source, and it's market share is growing. Bing's at a third of US search (according to Microsoft, at least): [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/08/bing-is-bigger- than-...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/08/bing-is-bigger-than-you- think-microsoft-boasts-at-33-of-us-searches/)

A lot of companies now compete with Google in one or several markets, and being forced to include Google Search would be fairly painful for a lot of them, so Bing tends to be an immediate contender for anyone who isn't Google trying to integrate search capabilities. Obviously, a fair segment of their market share is just "Bing is default on Edge/IE, and Edge/IE is default on Windows" as well.

<comment><USER9> 8.06% of market share isn't exactly a failure, but I suspect it loses money.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine#Market_share](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine#Market_share)

<comment><USER3> Baidu is pretty much limited to a single country, mind you. And Yahoo uses Bing data, and almost certainly pays Microsoft for it.

Microsoft almost certainly spends a lot less money on Bing than Google spends on Google Search, there's a good chance that Microsoft's spending per search query is lower than Google's. Bear in mind, being "good enough" costs significantly less than being "the best".

Also, Microsoft announced that Bing started being profitable in 2015, and they've grown since: [http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-bing-search- business...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-bing-search-business- finally-is-profitable/)

<comment><USER9> Consider my view on bing changed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think a lot of this is objectively wrong. Any of the Cordova-based platforms (including Ionic, Framework 7 and some others) were built to support every platform including niche players and it still never got much attention from developers. Xamarin as well was able to target Windows Phone and it didn't help. There are already big investments from Android competitors like Samsung in their mobile platforms and they absolutely suck.

Even then, a solid cross-platform dev platform like React Native is actually a boon for Android which is second fiddle to Apple when it comes to premium apps. Right now, anyone looking to reach profitability will go iOS first, then web, then Android. Making the cost of bridging the gap to Android smaller will only increase adoption.

<comment><USER8> They are pretty big in enterprise apps, usually targeted to employees.

Despite my opinions regarding native UIs, the fact is that we are yet to get pure native apps contracts, they are either Cordova/Xamarin/Qt or plain web based.

The majority of enterprise shops do not care about native UI/UX.

<comment><USER10> I'm working on an enterprise app for Android using Xamarin and we are taking the UX semi-seriously. App looks and performs fine.

I find the concept of "native look and feel" to be extremely nebulous and not particularly valuable. Apps should look good and be responsive and I don't notice or care when they look native.

<comment><USER8> I find the "native look and feel" concept quite valuable, but my experience in enterprise, it that most departments either want a "department/corporate look and feel" or "whatever works look and feel".

Thanks for your Xamarin feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I keep reading about Fuchsia. Maybe, that is Google's answer to the messy Android stack? I mean, why invest in cleaning up your stack or having a better cross-platform dev environment, when you can just have a clean new OS?

<comment><USER12> I tried to predict how Fuchsia + Flutter play into Google's overarching strategic vision in another comment here on HN, and got voted down into oblivion. My best guess is:

1) Pixels move to Fuchsia, native apps are in Dart/Flutter, compatibility layer for Android. Fuchsia becomes a distinguishing feature of Googles hardware, and allows Google to differentiate vs Android competitors.

2) Google continues to support Android, but only as it affects their business interests (as a funnel for search).

3) Google migrates some service level functionality away from Android and Pixels become a first-class citizen in Google's ecosystem.

In my mind, Fuchsia is a direct result of Google's newfound interest in hardware (as a business). I imagine the following:

\- Google sees voice (and maybe AR) as the next frontier, which is actually an existential threat for them--they are harder to monetize via ads.

\- Google decides to start making hardware (for profit), to monetize their services (a la Apple). That is, their Voice Assistant is now differentiated from Android, and to use that service, you have to buy their hardware. Now, they don't need to make money on ads for voice searches.

\- Google will continue to roll out more ML-driven services that are exclusive to their hardware, and eventually, exclusive to Fuchsia. This will allow them to both a) further differentiate their hardware from other Android manufacturers, b) better monetize their services (effectively through HW purchases), and c) steal market share of the most valuable customers from Apple.

<comment><USER13> Your problem is thinking they have a cohesive roadmap for Fuschia. Google has shown time and time again they can't seem to make two teams talk to each other or think about integrating things at all, and they have no high-level long- term vision or product strategy.

Fuschia won't replace Android or Chrome OS. It will just be the third OS product they make.

<comment><USER12> That's fair, I might just be grasping at straws. I for sure don't have the contacts or insight that Yegge has.

I agree with your point that Google's history has been to take a multifurcated (and sometimes conflicted) approach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Off-topic: can someone explain what is it that is so great about Medium, so that Steve finds it necessary to praise them? To me (as a reader) it's just a blog engine with horrible user experience. Of course, with time I have come to accept it as it is, so I don't get angry every time, but I still find it horrible.

<comment><USER15> Publishing to the internet, particularly nicely formatted and with a nice editor, is still a pita. A big pita. Worse if you're Steve Yegge and anything you write can get a hundred thousand visitors.

I ran a wordpress blog for a while. What a godawful piece of shit that is. Security critical updates all the time, and HAHAHAHA, they regularly break themes. I have no idea why, but probably because wordpress refuses to create a nice them api so they can try and gpl every theme. Plus it's slow. Plus it's difficult to secure. I had originally used a hosted wp instance until that got repeatedly hacked. Then I ran it myself. Yuck.

Then I used octopress for a while. I had to configure nginx and ssl and then deal with things like figuring out why pygments broke. Something went wrong with python which _obviously_ I'm using inside by ruby blog engine. Mathjax deprecated their cdn and I'm still too lazy to go fix it.

Medium, imo, creates a nice solution where (1) writing is pleasant, (2) publishing is easy and comes out nicely formatted, and (3) when you're busy, you spend the majority of your time writing instead of doing ancillary things.

<comment><USER16> Wordpress is a development stack that happens to have a Page/Post/Categories/Tags schema system. It is much more than a "blog."

It sounds like you didn't know how to secure your server with at least chroot jail, selective port filtering, and njinx injection filtering or apache fail2ban.

I have been running multiple wordpress sites for years and have never had issues. These sites have custom themes I wrote to take advantage of the wp_ apis, to do much more than just blogging.

For example: [http://gregoryscoffee.com](http://gregoryscoffee.com) is done entirely as a custom wordpress theme. The different coffees are actually posts in the Coffees category - their thumbnail is fetched by grabbing the image attachment on each of the posts. In fact, all the dynamic content is stored as posts. The owner has no problem updating the site, since it is all editable in the normal wordpress admin.

<comment><USER17> > Wordpress is a development stack that happens to have a > Page/Post/Categories/Tags schema system. It is much more than a "blog."

This discussion is about blogging, so IMO it's a valid comparison. While WP can be used for a whole bunch of other stuff, that doesn't change the fact that it's one of the most popular blogging platforms.

> It sounds like you didn't know how to secure your server with at least > chroot jail, selective port filtering, and njinx injection filtering or > apache fail2ban.

Well, I shouldn't need to know those things if all I really care about is blogging.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am a jr web developer. I attempted learning Android app development using java but gave up because it felt too complicated and hard to me as compared to web development. Last week when Google launched its flutter beta I reinstalled Android studio and worked through basic app development tutorials in their website. Dart feels cool and I feel like I can build something cool without making it too complicated. This is just my opinion but I might be wrong too as I have no experience with developing native apps.

<comment><USER19> I honestly cannot grasp this idea that Android dev is more difficult than web dev. Especially when, to get started with Android, you just download Android Studio (1 tool). To get started with web development, you have any number of competing or complimentary or overlapping tools, the combination of which seems to change every week.

<comment><USER20> I agree coming from the perspective of somebody who has a computer science degree and 5+ years of C-style language experience... but maybe you should consider the learning curve here for somebody who only has experience with web dev. Getting used to typing, compilation (though I'd argue Intellij makes this mostly invisible, and akin to a linter), not having the DOM (and getting used to Android's XML layout system instead), strings.xml, and other shenanigans would make things hard at first.

I think if you want to make a lot of relatively small projects, web dev might be easier for a while. But as your projects start to scale up in size, having proper inheritance, compilation, a type system, etc. has growing benefits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> At some point, Google is going to screw up. This will create business opportunity for anybody who's put a few years and a few hundred million into a strategic replacement. Android is already creaking at the seams in certain places, it won't be a huge surprise if some use-case comes along that invalidates enough of the platform that Google will have to replace it.

Don't forget, among the companies that are sinking money into replacing Android is also Google. They're preparing for a fight.

Times when OS's were fundamentally replaced because of industry paradigm shifts:

\- Unix -> Linux

\- MS-DOS -> Windows

\- Windows 3.x -> Windows NT

\- ProDOS -> GUI ProDOSs

\- Android with a Blackberry clickwheel interface -> Android with a touchscreen

\- Windows CE -> every other mobile platform

\- Mac OS -> OS X

\- OS/2 -> Windows NT

\- CP/M -> MS-DOS

and so on.

<comment><USER22> > At some point, Google is going to screw up.

Microsoft screwed up on numerous occasions with Windows. Once the monopoly was in place, that simply didn't matter so much. Consumer behavior reinforces the monopoly even in the case of screwing up: people very aggressively stick with what they know. The same will be true of Google-Android.

Getting consumers to switch is extremely difficult. Competing with Android is extremely expensive. Delivering your Android killer at exactly the right time, with a vast improvement over Android, with the right marketing hit, with the right partners, with the right hardware - good luck, it's not going to happen.

<comment><USER23> All true, but Microsoft (until very recently) had never tried to grab 30% (or w/e it is) of their platform's revenue through an app store. They bent over backwards for the developers by keeping old obsolete broken apps working on newer versions at zero cost to developers.

If I as a company was forced to give 30% of my revenue to Google (or apple or ms), you'd best be assured that the most important thing, long term, is to make sure I get 100% of my sales. That is a very important carrot that you can use to get developers to switch - and as you alluded to, its just one piece of the puzzle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > The irony being that most of the big shops are aggressively dumping it in > favor of Buck — Facebook's Android build system. Google is chasing a dying > strategy here.

Igave it a try to a "small" project and there weren't any noticeable advantage over Gradle (and given that Instant Run is working quite well, it was really buggy when it comes out).

I know for a fact that aside from Facebook, Uber uses it and comes out with a nice Gradle plugin for Buck called OkBuck[0]. I wonder what other big shops use as well. And I would like to know if anyone here has used it and saw any dramatic advantage over Gradle and worth investing time integrating Buck into current projects.

[0]: [https://github.com/uber/okbuck](https://github.com/uber/okbuck)

<comment><USER25> Well Google has their alternative to "Buck" aswell, called Bazel: [https://docs.bazel.build/versions/master/tutorial/android- ap...](https://docs.bazel.build/versions/master/tutorial/android-app.html)

<comment><USER26> Internally Google doesn't use Gradle at all (never did) so I have no idea what the author tried to tell with his paragraph.

The fact that iOS is successful without a comparable build system (everything is bound to Xcode projects and tooling based on that undocumented changing format), makes me think he's overestimating importance of the build system.

<comment><USER27> > overestimating importance of the build system

True. Gradle (and its Apache Groovy build DSL) conquered a market by first creating that market. There's really no need for a build system with a procedural build language -- a declarative language to describe a build like with Make and Ant/Maven is good enough.

<comment><USER28> my recollection from the days of the Eclipse plugin is that building from a command line and building from the Eclipse plugin were two separate pathways. you could get a different apk building through the IDE than through some CI system running the build from a command line!!

so, they addressed that pain point by using Gradle, which also did dependency management really well (compared to say Ant and, many would argue, Maven) and by incorporating/integrating the Gradle Android plugin with the intelliJ IDE.

<comment><USER8> They could have sorted out that problem by using Maven and improving their Eclipse plugins, just like tons of Java developers do every single day.

Instead someone at Googleplex managed to steer a team to rebuild the world to their favourite IDE and in the process reboot the whole Android development stack, which by the way is still not done.

Oh, and the NDK support was in limbo until Jetbrains released CLion. Had CLion not been released and to this day there wouldn't be a solution how to use the NDK inside Studio.

I bet Google IO 2018 will again have a talk about how to improve Android build speeds.

<comment><USER26> Pretty much anyone not insane these days is switching to the IntelliJ stack. Eclipse development is dead in the water and lagging behind more and more.

<comment><USER8> I am yet to use InteliJ professionally, specially given that it requires more beefy computers than Eclipse.

Indexing that one cannot turn off unless laptop mode is enabled, spinning the HDD all the time, really?

Also none of our customers IT teams allows InteliJ on their leased hardware/VMs to external partners.

The exception being Android Studio.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > I am talking about full-scale replacements for Google's entire Android > development stack. Microsoft has Xamarin, Adobe has Cordova, Facebook has > React Native, I mean it's crazy town. [...]

> It's like everyone who's ever tried to do Android programming gave up and > declared: "This is so bad that I will do my own startup to make it better."

> And Google, not to be outdone by their competitors, responded by saying, "Oh > yeah? Well you can't compete with us, because we're going to compete with > us!" and they launched Flutter, which is — I am not making this up — a 100% > serious Android development stack that competes with native Android, and > whose existence the actual Android team simply refuses to acknowledge.

This is incorrect. Every one of these I've heard of (all the big ones) and probably the rest don't exist because Android development is so terrible, they exist mostly to facilitate one codebase for both iOS and Android, or to allow the use of a different language.

I mean, that's incredibly obvious, so I don't know why he's got this here.

</comment><comment><USER30> None most likely. The closest we came was when Amazon unveiled their Fire variant. And the Google response to that was to move development of anything user facing out of AOSP.

Compiling AOSP today will result in something that look and behave not much different from late 2.x Android.

<comment><USER31> \-->Compiling AOSP today will result in something that look and behave not much different from late 2.x Android.

Any examples?.As a developer, the one's I think of are location apis (still available in the AOSP, but requires much more code to get right than the google play services version). And the look and feel does not depend on the play services sdk.

<comment><USER32> Before Android 2.3.7, AOSP included Google Search, Google Books, Google Talk, the Android Music app, the Android Launcher, Settings, Contacts, Calendar.

In Android 8.0, AOSP does not include any of these anymore.

In Android 8.0, you need to use Google Play services to get Location, Stepcounter, any device sensor, recent TLS on pre-8.0 devices, any of the above apps, background job scheduling (the new JobScheduler only works on 8.0 or Google Play services), and so on.

I've written apps that don't rely on Play Services, I had to reverse engineer and clone half of Play Services to even get a semi-working version.

Nowadays, the source code of a new Android version is released _months_ after the binaries are released, and over half a year before the first binary beta releases are released (Android P's first beta binaries are out today, the source code is expected in december).

You can already build apps for Android P, making use of the new features - <USER2> Google gives you the required code, which they only provide to themselves and a selected few developers.

Google makes it as hard as possible to compete fairly, and this has already caught the attention of the EU.

And then, of course, there's the fact that the Chromecast SDK requires Play Services (so you can't use Chromecast on Kindle devices), and that receiving Chromecasts is even entirely impossible at the current time for non-Google devices (these are the reasons why Amazon doesn't support Chromecast, but is instead together with Netflix trying to establish a cross-platform API that can use Amazon's sticks, Miracast devices, Chromecast, and many other devices).

Google has done everything they could to be as anticompetitive as possible, and of course this will lead to legal action. Potentially half of the Android ecosystem at this point may be based on criminally anticompetitive actions.

<comment><USER33> It's pretty sketchy, yes, but it seems to me that Apple has always done even worse equivalents to those things. When will the EU hammer come down on them?

<comment><USER3> There's a few reasons Apple doesn't run afoul of the law as often as Google does:

\- Anticompetition law applies to monopolies. While Google has several products or services with over 80% market share, Apple has none. Apple's highest share of iOS is in the U.S., where it rolls around 50% with Android, but globally, they barely make an appearance on the board. EU's anticompetition law has no interest in a phone platform with less than 15% of the market.

\- Apple tends to make a lot of things proprietary, but they're also only used by them in the first place. iOS only runs on iPhones. Google gets into a lot of additional trouble by exerting it's control over it's OEM "partners". For instance, bundling it's Google Apps together as a requirement for OEMs is definitely illegal, whereas Apple putting it's own apps on it's own devices is not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I appreciate having multiple players in the marketplace, it creates healthy competition and keeps progress brisk. My bigger fear isn't someone else stealing Android from Google, but _Google stealing Android from Google_ (e.g., via insufficient investment, insufficient maintenance, confusing strategy, etc.)

There are many examples, but some that come to mind are Google letting Google Voice near-die via insufficient maintenance/investment. Or Google literally giving away the opportunity they had in capturing chat (via Google Chat) due to a confusing strategy (Google Chat/Hangouts/Duo/Allo/app-of-the-day)

<comment><USER35> They're literally going to do this with Fuchsia I predict. ChromeOS is there too already the tablet space is confusing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Isn't the whole point of these competing stacks not to provide an alternative to Android but to provide an alternative to _all_ phone OSes? The idea being that you can write your application 'once' and it will be available on Android and iOS (and, as a comedy option, Windows Phone I guess)?

If you look at these toolkits in that light then their existence is justified without it being a nail in Android's coffin, so to speak. Not that the underlying tooling can't be better, but devs are moving towards cross-platform toolkits precisely because they are cross-platform, not because Android is terrible.

</comment><comment><USER37> I doubt anyone will steal Android from Google. I can see two scenarios where the Android SDK (which includes Kotlin, Java, NDK) + Google Play Services is really threatened:

1) the WeChat scenario. Amazon is probably the best positioned so far and their platform and services are also available on iOS and Web. The potential WeChat could avoid the Google tax by handling payment, but would likely have to offer many of the Google Play Services (notably voice recognition, maps, and location) so Google would likely still be involved (also e.g., GV invests in Lyft and Uber).

2) Future OS includes Android compatibility. Another platform that can also run Android (and therefore has Google Play) apps isn't really a loss for Google, but it is a way for Android to be commoditized in favor of another. Steve is betting on Amazon, but Samsung is probably the most successful with their store (which doesn't seem very successful). If anything Google itself has the advantage here - they mostly have it working on ChromeOS and I'm willing to bet Android compatibility with come to Fuchsia.

</comment><comment><USER38> My android experience is limited, but these aren't android replacements. They're replacements for creating native android apps. They usually throw on a few, if not ten, megabytes of libraries and glue to get them to work on the respective os/framework they are landing on. Download size still matters outside of metropolitan areas, and performance is always important.

</comment><comment><USER39> I'll just point out that Flutter has hot-reload as well. Maybe someone could do a comparison with React?

</comment><comment><USER40> > _For business and productivity apps, React Native offers reasonable > performance, cross-platform compatibility, incredible tools (the best being > from Microsoft. Hello, relevance! Welcome back!)_

When he says Microsoft has the best tools for React Native, does he mean something like ReactXP [0]? Or Does he just mean Visual Studio Code?

[0] [https://microsoft.github.io/reactxp/](https://microsoft.github.io/reactxp/)

</comment><comment><USER41> Isn't Google developing Fuschia OS to replace Android and Chrome OS?

</comment><comment><USER42> Completely off topic - but is the Android Gradle builder fully open source, or does it contain specific binary-only components ?!

(i.e. can i build the builder itself from source code ?!)

</comment><comment><USER43> This mainly sounds like a rant about cross platform development between IOS and Android. I mean couldn't these same arguments be used to justify using RN, or flutter, or etc.. over developing IOS native. I'm sort of missing why he's pointing to Android directly. The main issue is there are two major platforms and like he said people don't want to develop things twice.

<comment><USER44> I think you missed the parts of the article where he complained about API churn, high latency edit-test cycle, and device compatibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Google is saving billions by not having to pay for being the default search engine in Chrome and Android.

</comment><comment><USER46> Vulkan and Wayland are going to steal Android away soon, because you will no longer need it.

<comment><USER47> Seriously though, I'm glad I'm able to opt out of all this channelsy advertising-at-me business. I don't want to be a consumer in this market. I just want communication tools.

I'm looking forward to receiving my Librem 5, and I'm pleased Lineage continues producing phone software intended for users, not advertisers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> This conflates Android the operating system with Android's SDK. Let's say ReactNative wins and developers create apks that are mostly ReactNative... Google still wins. They don't care what an App is written in and customers can't tell either.

Android the OS is pretty safe, as cyanogen.com valiant run at Google from this angle proves out.

<comment><USER49> > _This conflates Android the operating system with Android 's SDK. Let's say > ReactNative wins and developers create apks that are mostly ReactNative... > Google still wins. They don't care what an App is written in and customers > can't tell either._

Which means other vendors can far more easily keep all their apps and move to a non-Google controlled mobile OS of their own.

<comment><USER28> I hear what you're saying, but how much more easy does this make it to move to a non-Google OS?

The thing is that with Google Play Services libraries and the Google Play Store, Google has a really strong lock on a huge collection of apps out there.

Using something like ReactNative on top of that stuff kind of seems like a baby step away from Google, but there's still so much Google control to eliminate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Another great, highly opinionated, but still great, Yegge post.

My favorite quotations:

1\. "Android's dev stack is the world's biggest poo sandwich"

2\. "And Android? Yep. It's the biggest poo sandwich of them all."

3\. "...there are two Android APIs for getting mouse-click events on a scrolling list, but one of those APIs doesn't work on LG. I mean come on."

4\. "I love Kotlin; it's the future of Java. But let's face it: It's not where the mobile market is headed. "

5\. ... the Android org at Google is not sure whether cross-platform is good for them or bad for them, but that they are leaning towards "bad"

6\. "most of the big shops are aggressively dumping [the android gradle build system] in favor of Buck — Facebook's Android build system. Google is chasing a dying strategy here."

7\. "guess who else is making a big play with a competing [android app] store? You guessed it: Jeff Bezos"

8\. "if you're locked in a fierce competitive race ... and need to launch faster, you should probably go with something other than Android Native ... Among the cross-platform options, React Native is looking like a winner"

9\. "there are a lot of big sharks circling the Android boat. Google needs to be careful."</comment>


Ask HN: Good SDK for client-to-client game prototype in the browser? - <AUTHOR>

I have an idea for an iPhone game that I'd like to prove out first without diving in to an Intel mac, iPhone and dev license.  The concept should be demonstrable through the browser, but it's a kind of head-to-head game where some content comes to and from a content server, but the logic would all be between two players fighting each other on different machines.  Graphics wouldn't be too fancy.<p>Can anyone recommend an SDK or set of technology to do this?  Most of my experience is with web app development using Rails, Sinatra, Django, etc.  I'm thinking that the client-side logic and graphics would be more suited to something like Flash or Silverlight or whether I could actually pull this off with a ton of javascript.  But, I don't know about network communications between two instances.  Any tips or leads? <comment><USER2> RTMFP or proxy all communication through the server, probably using Comet.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cappuccino might be a good start, as it's pretty cognant to Objective-C, and also provides the same kind of graphics primitives as you'd be using on the iPhone.</comment>


Why database technology matters - <AUTHOR> http://damienkatz.net/2012/06/why_database_technology_matter.html

<comment><USER2> I don't know that this is so much an explanation of why databases matter, so much as an assertion of faith that they do. While I would never deny the claim, you could substitute "morality" for database and it could be an excerpt from a sermon.

</comment><comment><USER3> I care about my data too. I think it is NOT acceptable that Amazon was down last week and all of the services were also down - they should have a backup plan.

This is why I LOVE NoSQL - it promises to disrupt databases by allowing easy replication and sharding. It exposes the fact that CAP is for ALL databases and you can make the choice if you want Consistency, Availability, and Partition tolerance</comment>


Should the U.S. Make Billions from Student Loans? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-27/should-the-us-make-billions-from-student-loans-

<comment><USER2> Yes. The new federal student loan programs are great. The total repayment is capped at 10% of discretionary income, and forgiven after 20 years. Having the system yield a profit will keep the program viable and reduce the temptation to cut the benefits under the program. It's also fair--people who need loans for school (I.e. Who aren't so rich to begin with they can afford school out of pocket) are pooling the risk amongst each other.

<comment><USER3> For such a heavy lede, the article is missing a LOT of information. How much profit does the government make? Profit, not revenue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've heard a plausible argument that federally guaranteed student loans fueled a huge increase in the cost of college ([http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76](http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76)), and much of the increased income went to administrator salaries and new construction, rather than faculty.

Perhaps it's time to force colleges to compete on price.

</comment><comment><USER5> That's a difficult question to answer. In the long term it's in the country's best interest for the government to subsidize college education, but perhaps not all degrees should be eligible.

The basketweaving degree mentioned here is a terrible example because there are legitimate degrees in fields where the average income makes it difficult or impossible to pay back the student loans to get it (Psychology, Early Childhood Education) - [http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/09/10/219372252/the- most...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/09/10/219372252/the-most-and- least-lucrative-college-majors-in-1-graph)

</comment><comment><USER6> It's just as crazy in Canada. The fixed interest rate on government backed student loans is prime +5%! That means that during a period of historically low interest rates, students are paying nearly 8% on their loans.

Why not prime? This is non-dischargeable debt, what is the risk to the lender? It's absurd.

<comment><USER7> Hmm. You get prime rates on a house -- where the asset's value fully covers the liability -- if you have a decent credit score and a source of income to cover the monthly payments.

Are non-dischargeable debts are just as good as having that asset there, and if not, how much worse are they? What's the additional risk added by having people with nil credit score and little or no sources of income -- more or less than 5%?

If this were really some sort of competitive market we could probably find out empirically by working backwards from extant rates, but apparently it's government-backed, so who knows :P</comment></comment>


Show HN: Kosmos – Homework Help Chat - <AUTHOR> Hi all,
We're committed to making it easier for students to get help with all school-related things (mostly homework). We launched a text-based tutoring service in January (called Humbot).
We've learned some things since then:
- Tutoring is not something students want; it's mostly something their parents want
- Therefore, it's a shitty experience for students
- The need for tutoring is a consequence of students falling behind in school (part of which is caused by not being able to do homework). We want to fix the cause, not the symptom.
- We thought homework help is also tutoring (which it is in theory), but students don't see it as tutoring
- They need instant help when they are stuck with homework
- Paying is usually not an option (even small amounts) for teens
- Teens don't really care if an MIT grad tutor helps them or some random, as long as it's instant and free (and makes sense to them)
- The interaction of a chat is a game-changer compared to "static" homework help forums, where there are almost never follow-up questions because it's just not dynamic enough
With these learnings, we launched our new app, Kosmos last week. It's available for iPhone and Android. It kind of feels like a Slack for homework help, however currently it's more a chat-based Reddit (with only one community and but subject-related channels). Or, if you're feeling nostalgic: A chat website with chatrooms :-)
Since launching last week, we already have ~600 downloads and ~60 daily active users.
It's pretty basic feature-wise, but we wanted to launch quickly. We're adding more features every week, and in general, our goal is to make it easier to post and discuss questions. Obvious things are a whiteboard feature and a graphing tool. However, threading, etc. will also be important.
Check it out: https://kosmosapp.io
Curious to know what you think. <comment><USER2> I love the process you guys have been through so far. 600 downloads in a week sounds like you guys are on to something! These learnings stuck out at me: \- Paying is usually not an option (even small amounts) for teens \- Teens don't really care if an MIT grad tutor helps them or some random, as long as it's instant and free (and makes sense to them)

So it's convenience over quality problem. This makes sense. Any ideas on how you could eventually make money?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We want to offer premium accounts eventually. We'll need to see what features are best to offer as premium, but two ideas:

\- Create private communities (as in "not public"). Could be useful for groups of friends, or teachers/profs who are looking for an easy way to communicate in a school context

\- Content: It would be awesome if students did all things school related in Kosmos. We could offer micro classes that cost a small amount of money (e.g. $1 per class).

But we shall see =)</comment></comment>


The Mind of a Mathematician - <AUTHOR> https://paw.princeton.edu/article/mind-mathematician <comment><USER3> I very much like that people like Tao are famous. It's relatively good for the intellectual spirit and hopefully it inspires others.

However this fixation with his "extraordinary capacity", scores, medals and accolades; I wish we could skip it.

Let's talk about the awesome work and why it's awesome. Let's play through some of it: I'm relatively sure most people know nothing more about Tao than "he's a genius". What's the point of that?

I think we'd be better off if we took the time to understand great work and let our appreciation of great people live through that.

<comment><USER4> This is an unsolvable problem. There already is plenty of expository content about what Tao actually does, e.g. his excellent blog. It's just that it can't get popular because it's technical; that's the iron law of STEM popularization, you can only choose one.

The most press he's gotten recently has been from this "eigenvectors from eigenvalues" thing that he solved three ways in two hours, probably because it's the least technical thing he's done.

<comment><USER5> > This is an unsolvable problem. [...] it can't get popular because it's > technical; that's the iron law of STEM popularization, you can only choose > one.

I'm reminded of education research of the form "We tried to teach topic T to students in grade G. We taught it really, really badly. Surprisingly, that didn't work! We draw the obvious conclusion... students in grade G are developmentally unready to understand topic T."

So yes, it might truly be unsolvable. It's certainly difficult. Non- interactive defusing of misconceptions is dauntingly hard - even harder than remedial filling of foundational gaps. Then you add constraints on article length, and the medium may just not be adequate.

But I would be more comfortable with such an argument, if there was wider recognition of how wretched our current science education content is, and how badly it's failing students. How poor the stories we tell about the physical world. If your five-year old wants to know what finger-paint color to use for the Sun, don't ask first-tier astronomy graduate students - there's a wide- spread misconception, so they'll mostly get it wrong. On HN a few days back, there was something like a 'best 2019 astronomy books for children'... and the books were something vaguely like 0 of 10 on getting it right. We're just not set up to teach misconception-free transferable broad understanding.

Seeing research talks, I frequently think "Oh nifty - <USER2> concept/description/graphic/video is awesome: accessible and clarifyingly insightful. It should be part of every introduction to this topic. Down to primary school even." ... and won't be any year soon. The pipeline from researcher conversation, to talk, to paper and professional tome, down and down to education and popular content, is regrettably also a gradient from accessible/insightful/transferable/correct to confused/superficial/unusable/nonsense. There just hasn't been the incentives and infrastructure to do better.

In another comment you mention intro physics and olympiads. So take friction. We now know how friction works, down to nanoscale. But last I saw, we don't even try to teach that. Instead it's the decades-old plug-and-chug on Amontons' Laws of large objects sliding on pig fat. Sure, there's some nice training on system decomposition. But if we cared about actual understanding of the physical world, rather than the educational artifact of "Introductory Physics", our teaching focus would need to be different. Similarly, professors complain about PhD candidates lacking a rough quantitative feel for the field, and the current educational focus is far from fixing that. But, perhaps I'm out of date, and things are more-recently improving? Fermi problems are becoming much more common, for instance.

Ending on an upbeat note. An MIT project to create introductory cell-biology VR, obtained domain expertise by pulling in and interviewing researchers. One challenge was apparently... getting them to leave. Such was their enthusiasm. Suggesting that if infrastructure has the right shape, the massive and scarce expertise needed for better content might actually be plausibly obtained. And personalized education via XR might be sufficient, and sufficiently disruptive, to deliver it. So perhaps there's hope to do transformatively better than we have been.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, but this is idealistic to the extreme. You are completely dismissing the results of education research by saying that every educator is incompetent, despite almost all of these people having far more education experience than both of us combined. Your proposal to fix education is apparently to hyper-focus on a few technical points, like friction and the Sun's color. I don't see how this will help; have you actually spent time teaching intro physics?

In practice, high school and even college introductory classes have a hard time making the basics stick -- stuff as simple as just F = ma. Redirecting half the time you spend on that towards an exquisitely detailed model of friction is not going to produce better physicists. On the average, it's going to produce students that understand F = ma even less, but can recite a couple friction-related buzzwords.

There is no magic curriculum fix that will suddenly make mass education easy. Everybody who thinks about education starts by imagining there is, then reality hits.

<comment><USER6> Human brains (and bodies) are relentless optimizers. "Use it or lose it" applies to everything from muscle tone and flexibility up to higher cognitive stuff like mathematics. The reason nothing "sticks" is because kids stop using it the moment they stop being tested on it.

We treat education like an assembly line that's supposed to turn every kid into a productive member of society, using a one-size-fits-all curriculum. That's a wrong-headed approach. We should treat it like a mix between olympic trials and career fair. Identify the precocious and the enthusiastic in each subject area. Let teens decide what they want to do.

It won't work, however, until we give teens the right to self-determination. Helicopter parents trying to force their kids to be engineers or doctors, ability be damned, is one of the most pernicious factors in the sorry state of education. The other, perhaps equally pernicious, is the parents who can't or won't help their kids with anything despite their eagerness to learn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What strikes me the most is the amount of support he received and the people he was able to meet when he was a child. I don't want to dismiss his talent, but this level of support is NOT available to 99%+ of population. His parents have done a wonderful job.

To recall my days as an undergraduate at a well-known UK university studying mathematics - large classes (300+) where everyone is disposable, nothing to do but sleep on the table when you work through the problems quickly at a workshop, no interesting projects or opportunities to latch on to develop yourself, nothing to do for days but party, waste talent and occasionally read a math book to catch up. Essentially you are hammered to be average until maybe you enter a PhD course. At that point it is too late.

<comment><USER4> Sure, Tao's an outlier among outliers, but in general nurturing a prodigy does _not_ require a lot of parental time or money. I've met a number of such prodigies in the course of my work, and generally their parental involvement amounts to buying them a book every few months, at their kid's insistence. The kids then teach themselves, often by sneaking glances at their books or math problems while hiding out at the back of a standard school classroom. They are not more privileged or supported than the average middle class child in a first world country.

The world's best educational resources are dropping rapidly in price; with some searching, you can even get an mathematical education up to what Tao knew in graduate school completely for free.

<comment><USER8> > I've met a number of such prodigies in the course of my work

If you don't mind, can you elaborate more on what kind of work you do? Do you run a school for the gifted (assuming such a thing exists)?

<comment><USER4> I've taught at the U.S. Physics Olympiad's training camp, and also tutor high school students who want to learn a ton of physics quickly. (These kids usually find me themselves, through Google.)

My most obnoxiously smart student was this 12 year old who would interrupt my lectures on classical mechanics with tricky questions I couldn't solve. The next year he came back, doing the same thing but for quantum mechanics, and the year after that he got bored of this and enrolled in an elite college. I want to stress that none of this required great wealth or privilege. The cost for his books was a small fraction of what other middle class parents would pay for, say, music lessons or SAT tutoring.

<comment><USER9> Any examples of those questions?

<comment><USER4> When covering Huygen's principle: the wavelets always give a backwards-moving wave in addition to the forwards-moving wave. In other words, Huygen's principle is time symmetric. So in real life, why don't you get the backwards wave?

When covering the principle of least action: often, applying it will give infinitely many solutions, or none at all. An example with no solutions would be the harmonic oscillator with x(0) = 0, x(t) = 0, and t not a multiple of half the period. An example with infinitely many solutions would be the principle of least time applied between the two foci of an ellipse with reflecting walls. So what happens in these cases? Does Lagrangian mechanics just not work?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Tao's _Solving Mathematical Problems: A Personal Perspective_ ([https://www.amazon.com/Solving-Mathematical-Problems- Persona...](https://www.amazon.com/Solving-Mathematical-Problems-Personal- Perspective/dp/0199205604)) mentioned here is an excellent book that provides keys to mathematical approach to problems and is now a classic ranking there with Polya's _How to Solve It_.

One thing the article doesn't touch on is Tao's prominence in massively collaborative math research through his blog (latest such work from there was discussed on HN a day ago [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21542054](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21542054)). This new approach, first proposed by Tom Gowers ([https://gowers.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/is-massively- collabo...](https://gowers.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/is-massively- collaborative-mathematics-possible/)) in 2009 has successfully solved a number of open problems in the past ten years ([https://polymathprojects.org/2019/02/03/ten-years-of- polymat...](https://polymathprojects.org/2019/02/03/ten-years-of-polymath/)).

<comment><USER11> I'll quote my own Amazon review of Tao's book:

\----

First, the bad news.

The front cover of this book gives its author as "Terence Tao, Fields Medal winner 2006". Well ... yes, and no. The thing is, this book was written when Tao was 15 years old. It reflects the precocious skill and insight of an outstandingly gifted 15-year-old, who had won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad at age 13 (most participants are 17-ish), but not really those of the outstandingly gifted 31-year-old who won the Fields.

It's only about 100 pages long; the problems it discusses are mostly relatively easy (meaning, say, national high-school mathematics competition level or thereabouts, rather than IMO, so not _that_ easy). It doesn't give away any very deep secrets (if there are any) about how to solve such problems. Write down what you know, look for symmetries, simplify step by step, etc.; the real rocket science, as it were, is hidden away in the bits of Tao's brain that instinctively know what symmetries to look for, what steps are likely to lead in the right direction, and so on.

The good news: You wouldn't know it was written by a 15-year-old if the preface didn't tell you. It _is_ a book about mathematics written by someone with a Fields-medal-quality brain, and a book about Olympiad-style problems written by one of the greatest-ever exponents of that art. It contains some nice problems, with solutions by (I repeat myself) one of the finest minds in the business. It's also quite cheap.

If you're interested in this, you should also look at Paul Zeitz's "The art and craft of problem-solving"; it has more pages and more substance to it, but it's twice the price and wasn't written by a Fields medalist.

\----

Pedantic note: _Tim_ Gowers, not Tom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Yitang Zhang, a mathematician at the University of New Hampshire, proved > that there are an infinite number of primes that are separated by, at most, > 70 million.

> To date, they have managed to prove that there are an infinite number of > primes separated by, at most, 246

I'd like to ask a very noob question. What kind of an approach would give us such an exact upper bound, when primes as a concept (in a layman's intuition) seem abstract and unconcerned with such specific figures?

I hope the question made sense.

<comment><USER13> Analytic number theorist here. I can answer your question.

The method doesn't really yield "exactly 70,000,000". If you traced through his method, and worked out each step in more detail, you'd probably get a bound of (say) 64,189,288 -- or some random number of like that. If you read through it still more carefully, and tried to introduce genuine _improvements_ , you'd improve this further.

Indeed, the bound has been improved to 246. You can see the(long!) proof here:

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/85pt6mvzf5ghukw/newergap- submitted...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/85pt6mvzf5ghukw/newergap- submitted.pdf)

Zhang stated 70 million because it's easy to remember.

Anyway, the basic strategy of the proof is to attempt to prove the twin prime conjecture, and not fall _too_ short.

Where do these numbers come from? You end up needing to do lots of random computations in the course of the proof. For example, can you compute a constant C such that the bound

e^(.1x^2 + .4x) + 5cos(pi * x) - sqrt(x^2 + 1) < Cx + 4

holds for all x between 3 and 5? If this appeared in the course of an analytic number theory proof, you probably wouldn't try to compute the absolute best value C. It would be tedious and boring, and nobody would want to read it. You'd just compute _something_ that was good enough, and move on.

<comment><USER14> I know you just threw together a random formula for illustrative purposes, but I was curious:

[https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=maximize+%7B+%28e%5E%2...](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=maximize+%7B+%28e%5E%28.1x%5E2+%2B+.4x%29+%2B+5cos%28pi+*+x%29+-+sqrt%28x%5E2+%2B+1%29+-+4%29+%2F+x+%7D+for+3+%3C+x+%3C+5)

-> You can find C by imposing equality for x = 5.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The author notes "Let us hope there are no real-world applications" when describing the Navier-Stokes regularity and smoothness problem. It looks like he meant to write the opposite and this was an error. However, in some sense, the statement may also be true. That is, people have been doing fluid experiments and numerical experiments (numerical fluid mechanics is a mature discipline) without relying on whether the conjecture is true. I mean, flight development was not waiting for an answer!

My point is engineering moved on without an answer to this particular question. At the same time, answering questions such as these (and the ones on number theory two of which were mentioned in the article) that occupy pure mathematicians provide more than artistic pleasure -- they provide the giant leaps that spur new technology. The often quoted example from Tao's research is compressed sensing but even bigger splashes like the idea of computers and the stored program, that can be traced back to Turing's seminal paper, comes from pure mathematics.

Charles Fefferman, mentioned in the article, makes 3 very cogent arguments[1] for the applicability of pure mathematics to the society, and in fact, says very pertinently that the line between pure and applied math is very blurry in the first place: [1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LgjMjVA4sY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LgjMjVA4sY)

1\. that unanticipated applications show up from purely theoretical questions

2\. a rigourous study of math provides a way of thinking that prepares students to work in a range of fields that require quantitative or analytical thinking.

3\. math is capable of revealing those ground breaking discoveries that happen rarely

</comment><comment><USER16> Can someone explain what the author meant with the following passage?

"... Navier-Stokes equations, which govern the flow of fluids, including air currents. In this case, let us hope that it does not have a real-world application."

<comment><USER17> One of Terry Tao's recent results shows that an equation that he calls the "averaged Navier-Stokes equation" can have solutions that "blow up" in finite time, starting from a perfectly nice initial condition [0]. Presumably the writer is referring to this, as such solutions would not be very nice to have if they are actually physically realizable, for example by an airfoil.

[0] [https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2014/02/04/finite-time- blowup...](https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2014/02/04/finite-time-blowup-for- an-averaged-three-dimensional-navier-stokes-equation/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Could anyone here recommend me something that actually talks about how genius mathematicians and others go about thinking about problems? I've read Hamming's "You and Your Research" and really liked it, but I would love to see similar things by other thinkers who might have a different take than someone like Hamming.

</comment><comment><USER19> I always use the Green-Tao Theorem[0] as my go-to example that very understandable problems are still being solved in modern maths research.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green%E2%80%93Tao_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green%E2%80%93Tao_theorem)

</comment><comment><USER20> Celebrating Tao's successes through media, movies and and other pop-culture vehicles, is very good, and I very happy this is happening.

Shining the light into the continent of Mathematics, and its celebrity inhabitants, brings attention and, just may be a bit of the appreciation, of complex and demanding it is to live there...

But, I do think, that to bring more and more people into the field, we have to also celebrate the diversity and range in the abilities, of the people who have, and who will have, contributed to the science of Mathematics.

I am sure that not every accomplished, and well respected mathematician need to have the cognitive brilliancy of Tao or Nash.

I find inspiration and, to a degree, comfort, in this quote by Alexander Grothendieck (specifically, the point where he felt, by far, he was not the most brilliant person in the room)

>" ..Since then I've had the chance, in the world of mathematics that bid me welcome, to meet quite a number of people, both among my "elders" and among young people in my general age group, who were much more brilliant, much more "gifted" than I was.

I admired the facility with which they picked up, as if at play, new ideas, juggling them as if familiar with them from the cradle—while for myself I felt clumsy, even oafish, wandering painfully up an arduous track, like a dumb ox faced with an amorphous mountain of things that I had to learn (so I was assured), things I felt incapable of understanding the essentials or following through to the end.

Indeed, there was little about me that identified the kind of bright student who wins at prestigious competitions or assimilates, almost by sleight of hand, the most forbidding subjects. ..

In fact, most of these comrades who I gauged to be more brilliant than I have gone on to become distinguished mathematicians.

Still, from the perspective of thirty or thirty-five years, I can state that their imprint upon the mathematics of our time has not been very profound.

They've all done things, often beautiful things, in a context that was already set out before them, which they had no inclination to disturb.

Without being aware of it, they've remained prisoners of those invisible and despotic circles which delimit the universe of a certain milieu in a given era.

To have broken these bounds they would have had to rediscover in themselves that capability which was their birthright, as it was mine: the capacity to be alone."

..."

see also discussion on HN here

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8604814](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8604814)

[https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/405977.Alexander_Gro...](https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/405977.Alexander_Grothendieck)

</comment><comment><USER21> "The awards and honors have only multiplied...."

I see what they did there.</comment>


Paul Graham Is Still Asking to Be Eaten - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@girlziplocked/paul-graham-is-still-asking-to-be-eaten-5f021c0c0650#.alwvxftxo <comment><USER2> Extensive discussion a few hours ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10831261](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10831261)

</comment><comment><USER3> > Graham never addresses how a startup economy would put men like Paul Graham > in positions of plutocractic authority, since the majority of us are > deprived of startup capital without first submitting ourselves to the > judgment of people like Paul Graham. It might not be overtly rent-seeking, > but it's definitely not democratic.

Yeah, a similar thought occurred to me last night a little after I'd stepped away from HN. By making startups the normal thing to do, venture capitalists get between otherwise-qualified employees and jobs that actually suit them. "You're in your 20s, do a startup." "Why stay in school? Do a startup." "You have your whole life to work at big companies, do a startup." And on the hiring side: "This kid didn't work at any startups during college, how about this other kid?" "Let's hire this person who was previously a CTO."

It's not _quite_ rent-seeking, because it's not quite as bad as I described it, but the normalization of either founding or working for a startup is directly profitable for people who make money on the startup economy, without clearly providing one cent of value for all those future-big-company-employees who don't manage to found/work for one of the few successes.

</comment><comment><USER4> In aggregate, startups certainly do create wealth. (So do other types of companies.) Certainly not every startup creates value. Perhaps even most don't.[1] But some startups generate a _massive_ amount of wealth. (Apple for instance, or Google, or Tesla, to give a few hopefully non-controversial examples. We are better off as a society for these companies having been started.) And the ones that don't create wealth don't tend to destroy much either. It's not like investment funds are just torched. They go to purchasing materials, paying employees, etc. For the most part these actions simply redistribute wealth, rather than destroying it. Therefore it seems clear that, in aggregate, startups create wealth.

I suppose one could argue that _more_ wealth would be created if everyone went to work for large, established companies, or started lifestyle businesses, rather than starting startups. At the very least it would be more difficult to disprove that assertion, but using the same logic as above it seems unlikely to be true. For all we're immersed in startup culture here, the number and people and amount of capital focused on startups is still small relative to the rest of the economy, and yet the benefits we've seen from just a few high- profile ones, let alone the smaller benefits accrued by many others, are very significant.

[1] Although, just because a startup "fails" does not mean that it has not created wealth during its existence. Obviously any time two people voluntarily make some sort of exchange (absent mistakes), wealth is created. IE, both people are necessarily better off than they would have been otherwise, else they would not have made the exchange. So it is very possible for a startup to create wealth on the way to shutting down.

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord _Wall Street is full of dirty rent-seekers whose recklessness has destroyed the American economy over and over again ever since Reagan deregulated Wall Street. The comic wealth that came as a result of that deregulation has allowed Wall Street to chokehold politicians in campaign finance and squeeze out from them financial policies that can only be fairly be described as federal handjobs._

Such shameless and misguided populism. Ostensibly, "Wall Street" are an evil cabal and not at all subservient to incentives granted by the state? Interesting. You could certainly critique the financial sector on basis of Hyman Minsky or even on basis of credit-driven boom-bust cycles, but this simplistic narrative of deregulation is insulting.

 _What actually happens is wealthy people like Paul Graham fund startups because they think these things are valuable. Through venture funding, rich people legitimate startups. Thus, they confer value upon the startup._

No shit. Value is subjective. Or perhaps you're still stuck in the political economy of Ricardo, I take it?

 _We, as a people, determine what is and is not of value mostly through what we believe to be legitimate and worthy of significance. And in late capitalism, we have all basically agreed to allow the market to dictate what is and is not of legitimate value. (This is what social critics recognize as Neoliberalism.)

But what the market deems valuable is not necessarily aligned with what is ultimately good for us as a society or even what we want. Because under conditions of extreme inequality, the market is biased towards people who have lots of money, at the expense of virtually everyone else._

What does this person think "the market" is? Some being existing independently of humans? Markets consist of exchanges, valuations and schedules of human participants, constrained by the institutional framework of governance in a particular jurisdiction.

That's not what "neoliberalism" is, either. Neoliberalism has two different meanings in the field of international relations, and in political economy. Neither of them have to do with the fallacious reasoning expressed above.

And just what, pray tell, is this mystical "social utility," some objectively measurable quantity of what is "good for society"? Demagogues always love to speak of it, and almost always it is a coded phrase for making humans subservient to whatever state policies they envision. There might be "social utility" in some theoretical metaphysical sense. In practice, one _cannot_ do interpersonal comparisons of utility, hence the famous "utility monster" paradox illustrated by Nozick. Thus to speak of any greater societal good without taking into account that every individual has preferences that they reveal, is a folly.

Now, the question of money. What is money? It can be many things, most notably a medium of exchange. But it's also an accounting device for settling debt obligations and coordinating exchanges through time. One of the key insights of the mutualists and later heterodox monetary reformers like E.C. Riegel is that there is no reason for the latter accounting function to be monopolized by a state. Having groups of people issue their own debt instruments to intertemporally coordinate their consumption and production on coarse-grained collective levels, perhaps through a mutual credit bank, would be a great boon on many. This is not the fault of capitalism that it's so rare. It is the monetary monopoly of the state doing this. It is an unrelated issue.

 _That is not the future I want so I really have no choice but to insist that we resist and come to terms with the fact that the Market we call god is a sick and twisted god, indeed._

The market is not our god. Not even close.

 _People like Paul Graham need to write essays like this so you don't question how undemocratic a market system is under conditions of extreme wealth inequality._

"Undemocratic". Another baseless buzzword. The market is not undemocratic. Its democracy operates on a more fine-grained level, and moreover for market participants to form a collective body of action to pool resources (like a corporation) requires unanimous approval on part of these people. A state only needs a thin majority (if at all).

<comment><USER3> Hm. What's your position on the article's claim that it is intutively absurd for schoolteachers and nurses to be valued millions of times less than Candy Crush Saga?

I think you can argue (and I think this is where she's going) that the schoolteachers and nurses are being fairly priced by the market, sad as it may be, but rhetoric about the tech industry is overvaluing Candy Crush Saga.

<comment> vezzy-fnord If by "intuitively absurd", you mean "counterintuitive", sure. Many things are.

Firstly, when you speculate on something like Candy Crush Saga, you're really speculating on what the brand and assets can yield you in terms of the rent gained from its unit services stretching out through the future. The risk is high, yet so is the anticipation of high yield. It might seem so stupid and trivial when seen superficially (it's "just" Candy Crush Saga), but what a brand like that can mean in a modern economy is surprisingly far-going.

Human labor is different because you can't reliably account for an individual productive laborer being there over some prolonged period of time without turnover. Otherwise, you'd be a slave owner, essentially. So, _ceteris paribus_ , some estimate of a worker's marginal value product (marginal physical productivity discounted by the rate of interest) has to be made, which in a real-world economy is of course difficult and never really converging. This provides ample opportunity for bargaining.

Of course, this is all a _ceteris paribus_ condition. State policies, institutional factors and unionization all severely complicate things.

<comment><USER3> Thanks, I did not expect this response and I'm thinking through it. I suppose Candy Crush Saga being valued at $X quite literally means that (some people believe that) if one were to purchase all of Candy Crush Saga, it would be able to generate about $X in value, either by collecting revenue or by reselling it or whatever. And at that point you could spend the resulting $X on nurses or schoolteachers or whatever.

I think my reservations with that are largely about how that interacts with "created" wealth, and whether created wealth is fungible for nurses and schoolteachers, but I don't think I have a well-formed response here yet.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Speak Up for SAY: Mattel suing Special Needs Toy Company - <AUTHOR> http://www.speakupforsay.com/ <comment><USER2> Based on their own evidence it looks like Mattel is right. Why don't they just change the name?

<comment><USER3> If it was for a product that mattel makes now it might make sense, but this is for a toy made in the early sixties.

<comment><USER4> There is a whole line of See 'n Say products still produced. e.g. [http://www.amazon.com/Fisher-Price-See-Say-Learning- Letters/...](http://www.amazon.com/Fisher-Price-See-Say-Learning- Letters/dp/B00005V3V0/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=toys-and- games&qid=1283354054&sr=8-7)</comment></comment></comment>


BuzzFeed Lays Off 50 After Pandemic Hurts Lucrative Ad Deals - tech-historian https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-23/buzzfeed-lays-off-50-after-pandemic-hurts-lucrative-ad-deals <comment> tech-historian [http://archive.vn/jFj5r](http://archive.vn/jFj5r)</comment>


Self-documenting easing functions - <AUTHOR> http://jqueryui.com/demos/effect/easing.html

<comment><USER2> Nice! You can try to replicate the curves on this CSS3 easing tool I built:

<http://cssglue.com/cubic>

Not all curves are possible due to limitations in the CSS timing functions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh hey, that's nice. Not too long until we'll be able to use this sort of thing in a cross-browser way as well. Not to say I'm not using it now, it's just restricted to little styling points.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The problem with using a property like height to demonstrate easing functions is that negative height is undefined, so the back/bounce/elastic functions don't really demo very well. It makes more sense to use position to demonstrate the curves that overshoot like that.

<comment><USER4> Margin-top works alright, but clutters the screen a bit: [https://github.com/windsurfer/jquery- ui/blob/master/demos/ef...](https://github.com/windsurfer/jquery- ui/blob/master/demos/effect/easing.html)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This struck me as rather smart: why bother having images describing the function's pattern when the function is embedded in the code on the page and browsers can now generate images?

</comment><comment><USER5> This is very cool. Bookmarked.</comment>


Four companies dominate our daily lives unlike any other in human history - <AUTHOR> http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a15895746/bust-big-tech-silicon-valley/ <comment><USER2> The USA now evaluates monopolies based on just one thing: their ability to control and manipulate prices charged to to household customers. Using market power to raise prices to household customers, the way Enron did to California electricy users, is against public policy.

The anti-trust dismantling of the tech behemoths advocated by this author cannot happen unless public policy changes so it also discourages monopsonmies. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony) In other words, companies like Amazon and Walmart don't increase prices to their customers. Instead, they have power to decrease their payments to suppliers. But that's not against current US public policy.

Also, I wonder about the wisdom of using market cap as a measure of a business's size. That's a peculiarly sili-valley way of measuring things, and can be very inflated. Take Uber. It's a pirate (informal) cab company with an excellent app. It loses money every year. Most cab companies would run out of gas if they did that. But not Uber.

It may be better to measure company size by revenue or even, gasp, by size of payroll or by profit.

And, the word "firm," used by this author, is jargon from the academic field of economics. It's a tell about theoretical vs. real-world advice.

<comment><USER3> You are correct.

The ONLY way that Amazon even GOT a fucking monopoly in the first place, was the absolutely fucking retarded ruling that awarded them a patent on "one- click shopping".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do they now? Out of these four the only one I really use daily is Google, followed by Amazon.

Apple doesn't have the highest market share in any category. Samsung for example, even if they're not quite there in terms of net income due to lower margins, is a much larger company. Actually there are plenty of companies who are both larger and wield considerably more power/influence.

Facebook is pretty much a dead man walking in my social circles. The last time I opened Facebook, it was to change my relationship status roughly a month ago. I don't know why I even bothered. People have no problem with migrating to another social network. It happened plenty of times in various countries (from and to facebook), and it will happen again.

Saying that these companies "dominate" (i.e. control) our daily lives is laughable. Most are hardly more than a tool. I am not dominated by my screwdriver just because I use it daily.

Even if it has some advertising on it.

<comment><USER5> Apple engaged in a deal with its chip supplier to restrict downstream competition[0] which was all the suppliers fault of course.

Apple had illegal tax arrangements in the Republic of Ireland[1], which was Irelands fault of course.

Apple may just have too much clout in the music biz[2]. This one is on them

[0] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-24/qualcomm-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-24/qualcomm- gets-1-2-billion-eu-fine-for-apple-chip-payments)

[1][http://europa.eu/rapid/press- release_IP-16-2923_en.htm](http://europa.eu/rapid/press- release_IP-16-2923_en.htm)

[2][http://www.cityam.com/280169/eu-warns-apples-bid-shazam- coul...](http://www.cityam.com/280169/eu-warns-apples-bid-shazam-could-hit- competition-ahead)

<comment><USER4> I don't see how any of this is even tangentially related to the article or what I wrote. Nice anecdotes though?

<comment><USER5> You seemed to be arguing that Apple were in no position to be a monopoly. I was showing that they have had the market position to have been included in some monopoly investigations already, and in that other part of the article have engaged in tax avoidance where they made an illegal sweetheart agreement with a _nation state_. I am suggesting that they have rather more dominance than you were making out.

Now a potential merger is being investigated by competition authorities which supports the article and directly contradicts your comment. Nice brush of though?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The foundational premise of the article is false.

Standard Oil, Ford, GM and US Steel to name four, dominated American life as much or greater than today's giants. Standard Oil essentially ruled the US economy, literally, for a few decades at its peak. Today's tech giants are comically weak compared to that sort of power and direct control over the economy.

Amazon in no way is dominating American life. Their retail sales are a third that of Walmart. They have lively competition in cloud computing, Microsoft is actively taking market share from them there, and Google is intent on competing aggressively (they can both afford to and have the technical chops to do it). If Amazon is lucky, one day they'll grow up to be as powerful in retail as Walmart was at its peak of dominance ~10 years ago.

Facebook is losing users in the US and that trend is almost guaranteed to continue. Competitors with appealing products will slowly siphon off users, new and old. Such platforms universally have an ebb and flow to them, they do not maintain peak power perpetually.

Google search is quite a bit less important than it was six or seven years ago. Their economic power is still slightly rising, their search product power is slowly fading. Microsoft knows that feeling, re Windows.

Apple? That one is almost pure bullshit. They've botched the home AI gadget competition. Siri is a mess. iTunes + iPod has lost its quasi monopoly. They have no dominant position in traditional computers. The iPhone is a juggernaut - so what. So is Boeing in airplanes and McDonalds in mediocre low priced hamburgers and Starbucks in coffee.

<comment><USER7> Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. It kind of makes you wonder why the subject is made so damned boring in school when it would take little effort to make it very exciting indeed.

<comment><USER8> And those who know it are doomed to repeat it too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> idiot here.

Tech is too big, OK. but why not:

* oil

* finance

* media

? is google that much more of a hoarder of billions and harmer of the public good than ExxonMobil and BP ?

hmmm

> You could merge the world's top five advertising agencies (WPP, Omnicom, > Publicis, IPG, and Dentsu) with five major media companies (Disney, Time > Warner, 21st Century Fox, CBS, and Viacom) and still need to add five major > communications companies (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Charter, and Dish) to get > only 90 percent of what Google and Facebook are worth together.

well that's a Thing, I guess

<comment><USER10> It's political. Liberals are generally suspicious of large companies, but are used to getting nowhere in fighting them. The conservative agenda has been controlled by big companies for a long time.

(This is the black-and-white version. I know it is inaccurate and oversimplified! Obviously the true story is more complicated.)

But these tech companies are big companies that are liberal to an unheard-of extent. So when a few liberals target them, the usual opposition is strangely missing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why bust it up? Just don't use something if you don't like it. Vote with your wallet.

More regulation means more government power. They are more powerful then all the tech companies you listed.

Why give them more power?

<comment><USER12> In many cases, there's no choice, unless you're willing to accept a certain level of inconvenience, or a monetary cost.

Need a phone that is reasonably modern? Google or Apple, that's your choice.

Need to stay in contact with a diverse and spread out group of friends, without manual mailing lists? Facebook is your choice.

Sure there is actually a cost, but it is invisible to most people.

It is borderline impossible to live a reasonably connected life today, without at least one of the big four, and probably most of them.

Big companies basically own the US government.

<comment><USER13> > In many cases, there's no choice, unless you're willing to accept a certain > level of inconvenience, or a monetary cost.

Yes, choices come with tradeoffs, that doesn't mean you don't have a choice. The big 4 are successful because they are incredibly convenient and good at what they provide.

> Need to stay in contact with a diverse and spread out group of friends, > without manual mailing lists? Facebook is your choice.

What was your choice before Facebook?

> It is borderline impossible to live a reasonably connected life today, > without at least one of the big four, and probably most of them.

If you're willing to use an AOSP phone it seems like it is pretty easy to avoid using the big 4. Don't buy things on Amazon, use DDG or another search engine, use another email provider, don't buy Apple products, don't use Facebook.

Sure, it is inconvenient to not use those things, but that's because they are the best at providing what they provide. If they weren't you would already be using something else.

<comment><USER14> They were already too big 5 to 10 years ago, and thus bought their way into continuing to be the best at providing what the provide (subsuming smaller innovative companies and arguably leaving us worse off than we would have been had they been left to innovate independently). Many of the market leaders cited in the piece were already market leaders when they were bought by these 4 (I'd add MS to the list).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Well, yes and no. The Four have so much power over our lives that most of us > would be rocked to the core if one or more of them were to disappear. > Imagine not being able to have an iPhone, or having to use Yahoo or Bing for > search, or losing years' worth of memories you've posted on Facebook. What > if you could no longer order something with one click on the Amazon app and > have it arrive tomorrow?

Uh.. I'd survive.

</comment><comment><USER16> The article calls for the splitting up of Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon.

If the companies are not being anti competitive is it fair for a Government to break up private enterprise that is not breaking the law?

I feel that it's going too far allowing Government to split apart corporations acting legally just for being successful.

What are your thoughts?

<comment> loup-vaillant "Fair" should not even be on the vocabulary when talking about what we should do to companies. Companies aren't people. What we do to them is secondary to whatever we do to actual people.

Now, how a split would affect the people involved, that's another story. But if you weight the number of people in those companies, versus the number of people they affect worldwide, well… the moral weight of the company is a rounding error. The only thing that really counts is how stuff like a split would affect the rest of the world. And if it means putting those four companies out of business, well, tough luck. The greater good must prevail. And even then, there are ways to compensate for the subsequent spike in unemployment.

<comment><USER17> You most certainly heard about a thing called "law". In short, it's a paper that limits actions of everyone, including the government, to some known safe subset.

Arbitrarily breaking the law, that is, limiting the so-called "rights" of people, is considered bad, that very law prohibits it. You cannot just go and prevent somebody from doing a thing not prohibited by the law, such as carrying an iPhone, because suddenly you realize that you need to grab the iPhone and split it to pieces to make the world as a whole a better place.

Same applies to other properties, like companies. Unless owners of these are breaking the law, you can't grab and split their companies, because you consider it a greater good.

Of course, there were numerous examples when people ignored law and did arbitrary things, because "revolutionary conscience", "divine right of kings", or just plain having a gun as an argument. While merits of these options can be discussed, they all are incompatible with "rule of law", let alone "democracy", that many hood dear and consider the very soil on which the economic prosperity has grown. (We have most of Africa and Central Asia as a control group.)

<comment><USER5> All true, but please allow for the fact that certain kinds of market practices are against the law in certain jurisdictions and some of the companies mentioned have already been found guilty of these.

Also allow that laws may be changed.

<comment><USER17> Yes, laws may and should eventually change.

The process of changing laws is usually relatively slow, and involves discussing various consequences the change may have. I just wish this process was applied in the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Apple and Amazon should be replaced with Microsoft and Intel.

<comment><USER19> I can, (and usually do) quite easily get by without Microsoft, Intel, Amazon, and Apple. I'd love it if everyone dumped FaceBook. Google would be more difficult, but not impossible. Part of what keeps these companies going is the inertia and "friends" factors, but much of it is that people like how well they work. They have to keep in mind that they're one good competitor away from having a serious chunk of their business taken .... assuming they don't just buy out the competitor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> You might like Seattle. It's illegal to honk except for emergencies[1]. But even if it weren't illegal, no one would do it anyway.

[1] [https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/qa-honking-can- be-...](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/qa-honking-can-be-illegal- lake-city-hazards/)</comment>