Google Gets Record $2.7B EU Fine for Skewing Searches - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-27/google-gets-record-2-7-billion-eu-fine-for-skewing-searches <comment><USER2> Potential dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14643712](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14643712)

</comment><comment><USER3> While I think net neutrality (as it is defined) is important Google is a serious consolidation risk. Gmail has 1b users the internet has 3.2-3.5. Google probably controls 2/3 of that. Not only is search quality going down, but this is absurdly dangerous. Controlling shopping results is tame compared to the potential for misuse

<comment><USER4> > Not only is search quality going down [...]

How so? I like to think Google Search is constantly improving. Do you care to elaborate?

<comment><USER5> Because the first page (at least above the fold) is literally all adds, for many searches.

<comment><USER6> I haven't seen an ad on desktop for years thanks to adblock. But mobile is getting pretty awful, true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wish there would be a similar reaction to Google "skewing" searches in general towards what seems to be the most popular and highly-SEO'd, but also not very useful nor informative sites. When searching for more obscure things I sometimes have to go beyond 3-4 pages to find the good content, repeat with small variations of the query, etc. I often even go to the "last" page of results, without finding anything (and think to myself, "this is the Internet, where all of human knowledge is supposed to be; and yet, why can't I find anything about X?") I also seem to trigger the "you may be a bot" CAPTCHA more frequently than before.

Of course, that's unlikely to happen because there's no money in it...

IMHO the usefulness of Google as a search engine has decreased rather noticeably within the past few years. It's become less precise, less thorough (they've always been inflating the result count, but recently it seems worse), and nearly hostile to those "advanced seekers" who know exactly what they're looking for. I still remember, many years ago, discovering new and interesting "corners" of the Internet with Google. If Fravia were still alive, he may have something similar to say.

To a huge majority of the Internet-using population, Google is _the_ Internet. It holds a huge amount of power in controlling the information people can find, and that's absolutely scary. It's something that governments have always wanted.

<comment><USER8> When I'm performing a precise search, where the search engine should do exactly what I tell it, I use Duck Duck Go. I use Google when I want to rely on their "smart" algorithms. Basically I default to DDG, and if I'm not finding the results I want, I see if Google's magic can do better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Although I don't like advertisement, my understanding is that Google provides massive added value there. So why on earth do they have to skew their results ?

Or, maybe I don't properly understand "skew", i.e. the european commission condemned not so much a voluntary bias from Google rather than a "natural" bias from Google...

The good news is that if we can constraint Google on economical ground, we can also constraint them on more ethical stuff, such has fight against terrorism...

<comment><USER4> For the european market there is the product search engine [https://geizhals.eu/](https://geizhals.eu/) which is in all aspects better than Google Product Search ever was.

However, when you search for a product on Google Search, for example, "intel 7600k", Google Search displays the side bar "Google Shopping Results" but no link to this site.

I imagine people who do not know about geizhals tend to just use Google Shopping then..

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A fine of this scale sets a dangerous precedent. How hard would it be wrong everything that Google has built with the same logic? Aren't inline word- meanings hurting revenues of the dictionary sites? How about currency conversions?

</comment><comment><USER11> Google is a private company/website, couldn't they just put a disclaimer up saying something like 'we're only going to show you results from our stores, if you don't like it, go elsewhere'.

People aren't forced to use Google, and Google can show you what they like. Is that the real issue, that they were saying they treated all companies fairly but didn't?

<comment><USER12> Except Google has pretty much a monopoly on search. It is barely an option 'not to use google'. Once you reach a status like that, different rules apply than saying 'we can do what we want because we are a private comoany'.

If you have questions and ask someone, they tell you to search on google. Same if you ask on chat channels and forums.

<comment><USER13> Like hell they do(have a monopoly)! there are plenty of other searchengines out there, and ther is nothing that forces you towards google (unlike some other services, all search engines are available everywhere, barring government censorship in some countries)

try Bing.com, duckduckgo.com, or even yahoo.com (and there are many more)

and then tell me google is the one that should be sued because of the results in their searchengine

A really hate when people confuse "better than everyone else,with margins" with "has a monopoly". It's not even like their searchengine gets pushed on computerbuyers by the software installed by default, since that software would normally be windows with accompanying browsers, that all try to push Bing.com as their default search engines...

but people use google anyway because they generate the best results to searches, if they stop doing that, there's nothing to stop everyone from switching, that's why they have to keep it good. there's no lock-in.

what really pisses me of with these decisions is that if you replace "google" and "alphabet" with placeholder-names, none of their arguments holds water to any reader. try it yourself! ;)

<comment><USER14> > _Like hell they do(have a monopoly)! there are plenty of other searchengines > out there, and ther is nothing that forces you towards google..._

90% market share.

Besides, I keep hearing that argument but it never made sense to me. The monopoly is not (mainly) about the _users_ of the search engine - they could in theory switch to something else (even though for some mysterious reason, most of them don't. See above.) The actual monopoly is for the sites that depend on Google to be found. The simple choice for then is to submit to Google's standards or lose the majority of their traffic. So talk of force is justified here.

<comment><USER8> I have shied away from certain designs because Google has very specific ideas about how a site should be structured, rooted in the pre- web app days. If Google had real competition, they would adapt to better index "modern" designs and architectures. Instead, developers/designers have to limit ourselves if we want Google to not only index our content, but not penalize our rankings.

<comment><USER15> Well, that or look at your headers and serve the googlebot what it expects, and show everyone else what you actually want to show - as long as it's not too different content-wise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> You can be quite certain if google recognised their revenue in in France, not Ireland, this would not have happened. Yet another shakedown, no matter what you think of the merits of the case

</comment><comment><USER17> Why so low? (Not sarcasm)

</comment><comment><USER18> Yet... the EU still wonders why they don't have a Silicon Valley.

<comment> kuro-kuris For a society where you don't go bankrupt for being ill and less than a percent of the population is in jail I am willing to trade not having Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER19>
        Don't feed the trolls</comment></comment></comment>


Sand Hill Road elite now resorting to death threats against MOC - <AUTHOR> https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2016/02/05/32-2/ <comment><USER2> In case anyone bothers to look at this, the post was flagged by regular users, not HN moderators, and the [dead] comment was by yet another michaelochurch sock puppet, as was the submission to begin with.</comment>


BitBucket Down? - <AUTHOR> https://bitbucket.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently an SSH-related issue: <http://status.bitbucket.org/>

Also getting 503 errors trying to push up to repositories, FWIW.

</comment><comment><USER2> Was down, but responding for me again.</comment>


Chapters 7 & 8 of the Rails Tutorial are out ("Sign up" & "Sign in, sign out") - <AUTHOR> http://news.railstutorial.org/chapters-7-8-of-the-rails-tutorial-2nd-editio

<comment><USER2> The original videos were the first screencast series I ever finished. Being fairly new to server-side development, I often get distracted around the 4th or 5th videos in these learning series. Yours were captivating to me because I was actually building an application or learning a development process every step of the way. Sometimes tutorials wander too far off into the theory mid- way and I start to lose focus.

It started to be hard for me to keep up around the middle of chapter 6 when authentication is introduced, but with the new built-in authentication now, I imagine I'll have a better time keeping up this go around.

I can't wait for you finish!

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks so much - I've been teaching myself rails from the first edition of your tutorial. I made it about halfway through and was spending a ton of time trying to fix the app for heroku commits. Upon realizing that there was a second edition in the works, I've started over again from the beginning of the newer ed.

Anyways - this is the first tutorial I've followed where I feel like I'm actually learning and maintaining concepts. It seems like every other language tutorial I've followed in the past has gone in one ear and out the other. You rock for making something so interesting, educational and easy to follow.

</comment><comment><USER4> Thank you very much, it is very useful to me especially since I'm about to integrate user handling in my rails app.

</comment><comment><USER5> Again, awesome and thank you!

<comment><AUTHOR> My pleasure!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> very nice, i learned rails with your tutorial(great videos!) and now being a Rails dev (i migrated from hardcore backend c++) it will be nice to revisit it! thanks a lot!

</comment><comment><USER7> ¡Muchas gracias!

<comment><AUTHOR> ¡De nada! El placer es mío.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> merci!</comment>


UK police say 92% false positive facial recognition is no big deal - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/05/uk-police-say-92-percent-false-positive-facial-recognition-is-no-big-deal/ <comment><USER2> Reminds of similar stats on stop and frisk - where only a small percentage of stops actually resulted in some sort of criminal conviction. And only a tiny fraction of those convictions were related to the original reason for stop and frisk[1] - discovering illegal weapons.

From the cop's perspective they're looking for a needle in a haystack. Public pressures are especially intense when it comes to anticipating and preventing terrorist attacks or curbing violent crime. But predicting rare events is very difficult. Due to the nature of the problem it's going to be mostly haystack (false positives) most of the time.

So I can understand why the UK police remain unperturbed by 92% false positives. And why the NYPD was largely indifferent to a similarly high rate of failure with stop and frisk.

The problem though is _we are the haystack._ There's a bit of the snake eating it's own tail here. In order to keep you safe we need to own your privacy. In order to protect your person from violent crime must be able to search your body at any time. Whatever freedom might be I can be sure freedom is not _that_.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/14/stop-and- frisk...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/14/stop-and-frisk-new- york-conviction-rate)

<comment><USER3> _Whatever freedom might be I can be sure freedom is not that._

Yeah, it's all kinds of _throwing the baby out with the bathwater._

It's common for parents to tell kids stuff like "If someone other than this short list of names wants to touch your private parts, scream." And I wasn't comfortable telling my kids that. I felt that would be robbing them of the very innocence I desired to protect.

Instead, I taught them that affection required permission and if anyone did not respect their answer of "no," come get me. That worked remarkably well.

I don't know how to translate that to adult security issues out in the world. But there are definitely inherent problems with the current course we are on that increasingly reminds me of what I heard about East Germany: that everyone was reporting on everyone just to try to cover their own butt because everyone lived in fear of the government and it's surveillance state tactics.

<comment><USER2> The adult response is to acknowledge the trade-offs involved and to learn to live with a certain amount of risk. A free society is always going to be vulnerable to terrorist attacks to some degree. Reasonable policies might reduce this risk by 25%, 50%, 75%, 90%, etc. But they'll never reduce the risk to zero. So the conversation can't be _how do we make sure this never happens again._ Instead it must be an analysis of the trade-offs involved in securing against rare events while maintaining the freedom of movement and privacy that a free society requires.

Facial recognition in the UK, the mass phone metadata collection in the US and abroad, stop and frisk in NYC; public support of or indifference to these measures depends on the perception of the trustworthiness of government. That is, for populations that perceive that government as "on their side", the tradeoffs these policies require appear innocuous or beneficial.

So what if the NSA is storing my metadata? They're the good guys trying to catch terrorists. From this perspective the risk of bad government actors is smaller than the risk of terrorism.

So what if cops go hands-on with someone walking down the street? They're finding illegal guns and contraband, and bad guys with warrants. The inconvenience of being stopped is a cost worth paying for safer neighborhoods.

But the fulcrum of government can quickly swing from trust to oppression. There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen. We cannot keep evil people from attaining power. But we don't have to give them rope with which to hang us. Privacy protections, respect for bodily autonomy, adherence to the rule of law, and the decentralization of economic and political power are all bulwarks against tyranny.

<comment><USER4> Again, as mentioned above, read up on East Germany. All your questions about "why is this bad?" have already been lived by tens of thousands of hapless people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The problem isn't the inaccuracy, it's that people will inevitably treat it as far more accurate than it is.

</comment><comment><USER6> As long as it's just flagging people and not arresting/harassing them, I don't think the error rate matters that much.

Even a system that says "there's a 10% chance this guy is a wanted criminal" seems useful.

<comment><USER7> The probability of _any_ positive, and the probability of a _false_ positive are quite distinct things. It makes a big difference if, of that 10%, 99% are false positives, or 1% are.

If 99% are false positives, then there is another form of harm being done even if the police are not abusive. Time and energy are being spent to vet those positives. It's like medical tests that say you have cancer. If there are a lot of false alarms, people waste effort and don't catch the real issues.

The number of false negatives also matters, and is also not determined by your 10% figure. That is, out of the 90% that weren't flagged, how many should've been?</comment></comment>


Super Mario Run - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id1145275343?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4 <comment><USER2> After playing just one level, you can tell that is the real deal.

If you have an aversion to mobile gaming, give this a try.</comment>


Marco Arment on the Open Compute Project - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/4458987911

<comment><USER2> I agree with the closing statements that facebook is making a point here, it strongly says "we are here for the long haul". I think openness like this also advances datacenter technology and efficiency as a whole, its one aspect that's overlooked by most of us but plays a crucial role in scaling. If you can reduce power consumption, improve cooling and squeeze more servers in racks then we are looking at a lot more hardware to play with. I cant see small startups benefiting from this but large scale companies definitely, twitter comes to mind. Their communication platform will only continue to require more processing power and capitalizing on open compute would be a key growth advantage for them.

</comment><comment><USER3> When I read about the OCP the conclusion I drew was that facebook liked their designs but felt they were paying too much of a premium over true commodity components. If you release the designs and get people interested it would seem to lead to greater demand from data center customers and greater supply from OEM's that would move to fill the demand. The resulting marketplace would be substantially higher volume and served by multiple competing manufacturers. That should drive facebook's own acquisition costs down, increase the volume they can order in a short time without paying expensive tooling fees, and allow them to play one vendor off another to obtain better terms.

I didn't really pay attention to the previous discussion, so I don't know if for some reason that theory's been debunked. It sounds a lot more plausible to me than it being a ploy to recruit software engineers, though.

</comment><comment><USER4> While we're guessing why fb did this, it certainly looks like something that govt bodies which might need to run such infrastructure can borrow. If fb is, for example, shooting for the "national id" programme as I read somewhere, who'd you expect a govt to pick? - a company whose infrastructure cannot be touched or certified for suitability and security or one whose arch is laid bare like so? Of course, the software is part of the architecture, but would the "open graph" suffice?

(ok, 'nuff wild speculation for the day!)

</comment><comment><USER5> Where is the Bios code?

<comment><USER6> Getting coreboot running on the Facebook motherboards would be a nice next step. It's probably not feasible for the Intel boards due to NDAs, but AMD is probably game.</comment></comment>


White House says all officials–except Trump&Pence–must wear masks at all times - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-directs-officials-to-wear-masks-at-all-times-inside-white-house-source-11589224333 <comment><AUTHOR> [https://archive.vn/t2snS](https://archive.vn/t2snS)</comment>


Indexing the hidden web - <AUTHOR> http://www.manton.org/2012/04/indexing_the_hidden.html <comment><USER2> I think people are thinking too much about beating Google solely with technology, which users clearly don't give a crap about. The best play against Google lies in branding a search engine.

I'd love to see someone to pony up and purchase a first-generation search engine (ie: Altavista, Lycos, Hotbot) that still has some nostalgic branding left. AOL, Yahoo, MSN have all been around since that generation but they've all gone through failed re-branding issues in a struggle to keep up with Google.

Pair it with a solid technology backend (DuckDuckGo) and you might actually have a chance to pick up the biggest US internet user demographic (Gen-Y) that happened to grow up with those sites.

</comment><comment><USER3> "It's time for a search engine that isn't all about ads."

How does a search engine make money then?

<comment><USER4> Why would ads be the only way they can make money?

<comment><USER5> I'm curious: What could another viable business model be for a search engine?

Back in the days of something like the yellow pages, it was also an advertising supported model (or pay-for-placement, something that might damage the credibility of a search engine). What I also found very interesting is the term 'yellow pages' is in the top 5 highest revenue generating search terms. [1]

[1]:<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Pages>

<comment><USER4> Lots of things come to mind ...

1) paying for fine-grained index controls, eg you publish something new, head over to search engine and tell it to spider your site, or you tell it to spider it between 2 am and 3am, whatever. You could also use this to test updates you're making ... imagine being able to do a dry run on your new version and see this is going to cripple your SE traffic. Or get your new article analyzed before you publish it.

2) dress listings up ala ebay ... not sure if they still do it but they used to do cheesy crap that let you make your listing stand out more than the other guys, if there's a tasteful way to do that on a CPM basis it would print money

3) charging for an api like bing etc are doing

4) charge for reports on phrases, websites, industries

5) charge for telling you why your competitors are outranking you

6) charge sites a subscription ... AOL probably gets most of their traffic straight from Google, and they probably _deserve_ almost none of it, so make them pay for that traffic. The large, eyeball-driven sites could easily be discriminated against.

7) charge low quality sites to un-penalize them. This is not a pardon, it's just a reset and it'll eat into their margins but whatever, they need your traffic.

This all revolves around two things: tax garbage sites, and provide tools for legitimate sites. These feel like low hanging fruits to me, there'd have to be much more interesting ways to monetize it than these.

The only hard part really is getting people to give a shit that you made / have / are a search engine.

<comment><USER6> There are two big problems with this:

1\. You can get a lot of that data and those tools for free already. Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics.

2\. Many of the things you'd charge for are things people don't understand anyway. In our little hacker bubble we know how valuable this stuff is and see a fair amount of companies use it but the vast majority of websites are operated by mom and pop shops and mom and pop can barely figure out how to turn on their computer. Expecting them to have any interest in getting or interpreting those reports is like trying to get them to learn quantum theory. You'll end up with a very limited customer base.

These paid options create an unfair advantage. It's the exact reason why Google was so successful. Google is trusted and popular because it _isnt_ a pay-to-play system. People will quickly figure out that the rankings are biased and quit using the engine. This is a step backwards in search.

Saying that charging to unpenalize a site isn't a pardon but a "reset" is disingenuous. Call it whatever you'd like but in the end it really is a pardon. The idea is to discourage sites from gaming the system and your whole idea is to encourage them to. What we'll end up with in the end is that what you call "garbage sites" are just sites without a lot of money and "legit sites" are those with money.

I'm sorry but your plan just takes us back to the pre-google dark ages of search.

<comment><USER4> 1) You can't get any of those things from Google at all. You can get a few little morsels of vagueness from GWT which is free because it doesn't do anything worth paying for. And GA is a whole other service that has little to do with anything I described. Probably the only _decent_ tool they offer is the AdWords keyword research tool and again ... it's not worth paying for, you have to come up with the keywords yourself... that's not useful. There's a whole industry of SEO tools like <http://ginzametrics.com/> and of course <http://seomoz.org/> that aren't cheap and compensate for the lack of 1st party tools.

2) There's a whole SEO industry that operates on a hazy interpretation of what Google is supposed to be doing these days ... lots of companies know what SEO is, they know what it does, they know why they need it, and they pay out the arse for it. This brings clarity to that industry and those companies instead of letting them reverse engineer the changes you make and speculate on what matters. If they're willing to pay $100s/hr for SEO they'll surely pay $1000s for a roadmap straight from the source. That's like a printing press for money because that data expires when you act on it.

Money creates an unfair advantage right now. Pay people to spam backlinks to your website and you'll rate higher. Pay people to write summaries of blog posts and eventually you'll rate higher than those blogs you're sourcing your content from just because you can afford to generate more content faster. Pay people to submit and vote on digg, reddit, bla bla bla. Pay people to write about your product and create content. Pay people to market your site by writing content tailored for social media communities and get 1000s of backlinks. Pay people to do viral marketing stuff. Pay people to link to you. Pay Google to feature you above the search results.

The 'pardoning' is a little scammy and would be difficult to implement but the goal isn't to encourage them to take advantage of the system, the goal is to get your share because they're going to take advantage of it regardless. Google does this already via AdSense.

<comment><USER6> One of us doesn't get it. Maybe I'm not understanding but I don't see how what you describe would be any different than how it is today. If search is all about the most relevant results then the engines would still operate much the same as they do now so money would still create an unfair advantage and reward scammers who would still do everything you described in addition to using the paid features.

Furthermore I don't think there is a way to get data that is any less vague than it is now. Each site is so unique that this solution can't scale and you'd have to settle for analyzing the data yourself. Also, Analytics does have to do with what you described when it comes to seeing what's working as far as SEO goes and yes, AdWords would be more appropriate as an example when talking about competitor and keyword research. For some reason I thought those tools were in GA.

Generally though this really seems like a return to the bad old days except instead of keyword stuffing your meta tags you pay to play. Your whole plan would lead to the end of truly organic results. Yeah, the system a Ready gets gamed now but at least everyone has am equal shot of gaming it. All you need is the knowledge. The current paid techniques of gaming the system would simply shift from third parties to the search engines themselves. I also feel like what you describe is closer to a paid directory with search functionality than a search engine. I mean, even if it worked like search does today plus those paid features it wouldn't be long before the true search functionality became irrelevant and we'd be left with a directory where whoever paid the most came out on top.

To your credit, I agree that it would be nice to get some more data, better data, and data presented in a more human-friendly/layperson-friendly way but you lose me as soon as you get into a lot of these paid features that help you rank higher.

<comment><USER4> Today everything SEO is a combination of educated guesses and common consensus. Even with incomplete or flat out wrong information people still successfully manipulate rankings to push good or bad content higher.

There is nobody out there who knows _exactly_ what is going on or whether your redesign is going to help or harm or whether your content is the best it can be. But they will charge you lots of money to apply what they've observed to work before or to automate processes and monitoring and performance.

All of this happens today _without_ any specific clarity into how Google works, I don't think it would worsen the situation if the guesswork was taken out of the equation - sites with no SEO still won't matter, sites with SEO still will, and bad people/sites will still be an on-going game of whack-a- mole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the next innovation in search is crowd-sourced search. Users contribute directly to the index through a browser extension or somesuch. That way, you can get the site itself, how popular a site is by how many people visit it, and you also get the referrers.

I experimented with this idea about a month ago. You can grab the source here (<https://github.com/SeditiousTech/Avina>) and visit the index here (avina.apphb.com). It's not a real search engine per-se, but it is/was a pretty cool experiment. One of the problems is that people will forget to turn the extension off when accessing personal information (banking, porn etc).

<comment><USER8> Google already use social signals. This is why they want +1 buttons everywhere. They have many more social signals than just the buttons though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If it can be indexed then it's not hidden, right? Though I guess in this context hidden doesn't mean 'hidden on purpose', more that it's inaccessible.

</comment><comment><USER10> Who has a leg up in this? Duck duck go maybe? The more I use them the more I love them...

<comment><USER11> I like DuckDuckGo for some uses, mainly those that let me specify the context of the search term (for example <http://duckduckgo.com/?q=firefly> ). However it's inferior to Google search for local content (from my country) or understanding strange error strings I get while programming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Did anyone else read this as having a subtext that basically implies Google needs to be taken down?

Why is it that when we talk about making search better many (seriously, like gobs of people) talk like the only way to improve it is to overthrow Google. Improvements in search can come from anywhere. If Google can deliver on what the author talks about then that's great. If someone else can then that's great too. The point is to improve search not overthrow Google's dominance, right?

I'm all for the ideas in this article but I was totally turned off by the subtext that implied a need to take down Google. We don't really need a next Google. Google can be the next Google. It doesn't matter so long as the hidden web is indexed.

Why is it that as soon as a company is no longer the underdog we immediately throw them under the bus. Microsoft made PCs the norm in US households and now we love to tear them down (rightly so in many cases, admittedly). Facebook used to be the coolest thing ever and now we love to hate them too. Same with Google and Apple. Why do we hate incumbents so badly?

In any case, yes, let's index that hidden web. But let's focus on the indexing itself rather than who does it. If Google succeeds at doing this will it not count and will we still call for someone else to "disrupt" the new hidden web indexing industry?

<comment><USER12> I think we love hating incumbents because of the history. Modern incumbents arguably aren't that bad at all, but in the old days incumbents were always the ones putting a handbrake on progress.

For instance, a whole city rioting to break new looms because it was putting "honest weavers" out of business.

Or the publishing world rioting against anything that smells of sharing ... since forever.

Google surprisingly doesn't act like an incumbent at all. And that's good. We shouldn't hate on them because they are incumbents since they're doing a damn good job at it.

edit: Also the whole idea that "When a market is dominated by a single player. That market is ripe for disruption."

<comment><USER4> Google excels at some things but they are useless and _should_ be replaced with others - you shouldn't have to come crying to HN after Google banned your account with years of email, or thousands in adsense revenue, or whatever, in the hope that a Google employee _here_ might see it and act on it.

<comment><USER6> They _should_ be replaced? Why? See, that's my whole point. Why can't they simply correct what's wrong? What they should _really_ do is fix some of their problems. It doesn't have to take a competitor for this to happen and Google has historically been pretty good at getting better over time. Why do we place so much focus on _who_ gets the job done when what we should really be focusing on is simply getting the job done no matter who does it?

And your examples of losing email or Adsense accounts isn't so solid. Those are really edge cases and its a problem endemic to creating applications that need to catch abuse especially when the user base is so enormous. We know computers aren't people and they can't exactly think so considering the amount of data Google has to filter through and knowing you'll never write code that's one-size-fits all I think they're doing a good job. I'd presume any competitor would have similar problems once they grow to a certain size.

I expect someone to call me out for saying you can never write one-size-fits- all code -- to them I'd say it's true; as long as humans continue to be fallible then so will the systems we create. There will always be an edge case and it'll take every last one to pop up before we can even conceive of trying to catch them all. But that's off track so I'll end it here.

<comment><USER4> It's far, far too generous to just forgive them and write off their problems as being an inevitable result of Google's scale - their scale makes support expensive, not impossible. Support is a problem plenty of giant companies have figured out already even if they do it poorly.

As for the 'who' ... doesn't really matter whether it's Google or someone else that fixes whatever problems but historically it's not in their DNA to care about individual users so it feels quite natural to assume they'd be replaced rather than repaired.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd like to see the actual hidden web indexed. I'm not talking about data behind apps, I mean a browser with built-in onion support, and onion-google.

<comment><USER14> Something that ignores robots.txt?

<comment><USER13> What? No, I'm talking about torweb here, what are you even</comment></comment></comment>


Discontinuing Support for Clef - <AUTHOR> http://blog.getclef.com/discontinuing-support-for-clef-6c89febef5f3#.eru7jthi2 <comment><USER2> They have been providing two-factor authentication for websites either as a plugin to existing frameworks like WordPress or through API.

The users will have to drop everything and scramble to get a stable working login within the next 3 month, not counting the accounts migration that needs to happen. Poor ppl.

Seems to be a successful product with plenty of happy paying customers and no real competitor. Looks like killing a golden egg laying goose. Why would it be shut down so abruptly? The customers at least deserve a reason.

<comment><USER3> There are a couple of competitors out there. Tozny ([https://tozny.com/secure- login/](https://tozny.com/secure-login/)) and LaunchKey ([https://launchkey.com/](https://launchkey.com/)) both offer similar solutions. Both also offer APIs for integration with other products and ship WordPress plugins (for anyone who needs that particular integration).

So there are options out there, and 3 months is plenty of time to migrate accounts that need to migrate (I'm sure either of these, and any other companies offering alternatives, would be happy to help anyone making a change).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, that was sudden. No post-mortem? I thought Clef's whole thing was transparency/company culture/etc.

<comment><USER3> > Our team will be joining another company, which we'll have more news about > in the next few weeks.

Sounds like some kind of acquisition or merger, with a promise of a future update. In other words, there will be a post-mortem, but they were alerting everyone to the coming death of the product and the services it depends on as soon as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For being a security product that businesses depend on shutting down with a three month notice seems horrible. A lot of people will have to scramble to build their own auth system now instead of focusing on the things they should be focusing on.

It'd be fine given a year to do this, but three months? Harsh.

<comment><USER6> That's true, but there is precedent: Balanced gave a 90-day period for moving off its platform before shutting down.[1]

[1]: [https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/13/balanced-is-closing-its- ma...](https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/13/balanced-is-closing-its-marketplace- payment-platform-in-90-days-strikes-transition-deal-with-rival-stripe/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's also Unloq: [https://unloq.io/](https://unloq.io/). Wordpress plugin page: [https://wordpress.org/plugins/unloq/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/unloq/). It offers 3 MFA options, transaction authorisation and encrypts all data in transit and at rest with users' personal encryption keys. Plus, if you lose your phone or laptop, you can do a remote logout or device deactivation and your info is safe. It's free up to 100 users/ account, and it's an inexpensive alternative to Clef.</comment>


Linux Command-line Journey Day-5 - <AUTHOR> http://community.webminal.org/posts/ue4XFe6u7fNi6BYRx

<comment><USER2> not opening</comment>


What's a good idea? - <AUTHOR>

Is a good idea something that no one's thought of yet, or something that everyone's thought of? I come up with ideas, only to find them implemented almost exactly as I had imagined them. Would it be a good <i>idea</i> to just take the one with least competition, try to improve it, and go with it? <comment><USER3> Regarding the competition: if a competitor is doing a good job, but there are still customers out there waiting to be found, then replicating their technology and capturing that unfound part of the market would be a good idea. Try to get a feel for how many people want that product/service. See the following for links on the infamous parrot ebook:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=520887>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516215>

I suggest delving into a subject that interests you, but that isn't too difficult for you to both understand, and make a contribution to; e.g. focusing on cryptography itself would be a bad choice, but maybe you have a novel idea about how to use crypto in a P2P application. You can then apply your domain-specific knowledge in order to implement your idea faster and better.

</comment><comment><USER4> To me, a great idea is one that is solving a big problem in a large market. But that alone is not enough because if you don't execute it, competitors can come in and perfect your idea to its full potential.

This problem usually tends to exist because nobody has solved it yet or has not solved it in a manner that is practical enough for the masses to pick it up.

The fact that your ideas are implemented exactly as you thought of them confirms that if the company that is currently doing this becomes successful your ideas are good.

If the company doing your idea is being successful it confirms the market exists and I would look for innovative ways to improve on their offering - <USER2> execute better than they do. You want a strategic advantage when entering the competition.

It would also help knowing what kind of team/resources they have available. So that if you show up and take market share how quickly can they respond?

</comment><comment><USER5> Twenty bucks, same as in town.</comment>


Italy issues a nationwide Uber ban - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/7/15226400/uber-italy-ban-court-ruling <comment> m-j-fox It's fashionable to hate on Uber these days. But does anyone really want to go back to the bad old days of taxis? No thank you Italy.

<comment><USER2> What's wrong with taxis? Genuine question. Won't a taxi cab get you to where you need to go just the same? They may not have an app, but you can probably use your phone to call them.

<comment><USER3> Leaving the bar at 2:00am, trying to find a number for a cab company, calling their dispatch and communicate your location, then you hope the taxi actually shows up (you have no idea how long it will take, or if they actually will show up at all), being pressured to pay in cash because their credit card reader is "broken", and not knowing how much the total will be until you arrive...

There's a huge list of reasons why Uber is nice to have, taxis and Uber are not even close.

<comment><USER4> where do you live that taxi companies don't have there yet apps? heck wet have already aggregators so you don't need bunch of apps

so what's benefit for user? all i see at Uber is avoiding taxes and breaking competition by ignoring regulation which is why they are not that big in EU

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Won't they just... continue to operate? Seems like that's how they tend to handle this sort of situation.

<comment><USER6> Can confirm. I'm in Bangalore, and a few months ago the city banned Uber pool. The next day Uber sent out an email "all pool rides are now ₹49". They eventually got the order overturned in a couple of weeks (by suing the city I guess). But they never stopped operating.

<comment><USER7> Governments could always require ISPs in a country to blackhole DNS to Uber's API endpoints. Or blackhole traffic to their netblocks.

Uber is not above reproach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What is Uber except for a kind of insane taxi hailing system?

Here today, gone tomorrow!

<comment><AUTHOR> A taxi hailing system valued 70 billion.

<comment><USER4> myspace was also valued pretty high in past, so was Yahoo

i can live without Uber, there are tons of LEGAL alternatives respecting local laws, we don't really need this bully company</comment></comment></comment>


Daring Fireball: Regarding the Idea of iPad Apps Running on Mac OS X - <AUTHOR> http://daringfireball.net/2010/11/ipad_apps_mac_os_x <comment><USER2> In the iPhone HIG, there's a section on bringing a desktop application to iOS[1]. The entire HIG spends a fair amount of time talking about the different needs of mobile and desktop users. Until Apple releases a document tailored for them, any iOS developers who are planning to port their app to the Mac might want to reread the HIG, this time looking out for what's expected from a desktop app.

[1] [http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/UserEx...](http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/MobileHIG/DevelopingSoftware/DevelopingSoftware.html%23//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40006556-CH5-SW9)

<comment><USER3> For anyone who is interested, this is the corresponding HIG document for Mac OS: [http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/UserEx...](http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/AppleHIGuidelines/XHIGIntro/XHIGIntro.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30000894-TP6)

(Easiest way to read both of these is to click the "PDF" button in the top- right to download the whole document.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Couldn't have said it better myself. Really think Gruber's response is very astute and spot on. iPad apps that work exactly the same on OSX? Um ya don't think so.

</comment><comment><USER5> The key point being that Apple's strategy is the exact opposite of write-once run-anywhere

<comment><USER6> I don't think so. Right now you can write universal applications for iPhone/iPad changing the view controllers, resources (textures) with the same underlying core code. I think that Apple next big step will be an unified architecture which will allow developers to build cross-platform applications that will run on iPhone/iPad/Mac using an hybrid UIKit/AppKit. Maybe in OS X 10.8, time will tell.

<comment><USER7> "Write once, run anywhere" is a phrase that historically has referred to multiple platforms by multiple vendors--that is, platforms other than ones maintained by a single company. That is, not just Macs and iOS. Even if they do unify their development interface for all of _their_ platforms, that still will be far from WORA, since I don't see them coming up with an easy way to port their apps to Android or Windows or Ubuntu anytime soon.

While you didn't use that phrase yourself, the implication that it could be applied to Apple's offerings reeks of co-option to me--I think Gruber's right about that, since Apple appears to focus on providing the best experience for each individual device (and devices from other vendors aren't even an issue for them--why should they be?). That said, however, I think you're right in that it would certainly be sensible from their perspective to make it easier for developers of one of their platforms to pick up development for their other ones.

<comment><USER5> Actually - good point.

Historically Next/OpenStep ran on Windows and there were always rumours that Cocoa for Windows (aka Yellowbox) would be released. And there was GNUStep, which was an independent open-source clone of OpenStep. I wonder if they have maintained Yellowbox in the same way as they maintained the Intel version of Mac OSX?

Meanwhile, Apple's Windows UI strategy with iTunes is to mimic the Mac as much as possible - presumably to try and ease things for people if/when they switch.

But the net effect is that their Windows software is just awful - proof that one UI to rule them all doesn't work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was thinking the same when Jobs presented but thought I was being a bit rash and naive. I guess not.

</comment><comment><USER9> I suspect this will remain true right up to the point at which Macs start shipping with touchscreens.

<comment><USER10> During the latest keynote Jobs said that this is not going to happen. It is kind of obvious too, just do the following experiment: Pretend your laptop or desktop screen is multitouch and start touching and "moving" things just for 1 minute (time yourself). It is exhausting.

<comment><USER11> That's not exactly what he said. He said that touch surfaces want to be horizontal.

Here's my (purely speculative) take:

Fullscreen apps in OS X are a transitional component. Future Macs are going to be dual mode. Remember the patent Apple filed with an iMac that converted from vertical to horizontal (1)? So imagine you've got an iMac on your desk. You're working away in OS X as you always would with a mouse and keyboard. You pull your iMac toward you and it pivots to a horizontal orientation. Sensors in the hinge signal the app to switch to fullscreen mode and you begin using the app through a touch interface using your fingers. When you're done, you return the display to the vertical position and move back to your mouse and keyboard.

My level of certainty isn't terribly high here, because I think there are ergonomic challenges to a pivoting touch screen device that sits on a desk. When using my iPad, the ideal position is definitively not at desk height. The device needs to be very, very close to you in order to avoid the fatigue associated with reaching. A pivoting iMac is still going to require some reach.

I'm also realistic about the fact that not every patent Apple files makes it to production. It's just some idle pondering.

1 - [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/7961480/Apple- fi...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/7961480/Apple-files-iMac- touch-patent.html)</comment></comment></comment>


ProteinNet: A standardized data set for machine learning of protein structure - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/aqlaboratory/proteinnet <comment><USER2> > Construction of this data set consumed millions of compute hours

It's great to see such datasets shared publicly. I hope it achieves the intended purpose and spurs innovation in protein folding.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can anyone point to a comprehensive review of the machine learning work done so far in protein structure prediction?

<comment><USER4> I'm no expert but this was posted on HN several weeks ago and has a decent review of the literature. Might be a place to start:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16407170](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16407170)</comment></comment>


Author Slams eBook Piracy, Son Outs Her As a Music Pirate - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/author-slams-ebook-piracy-son-outs-her-as-a-music-pirate-101213/ <comment><USER2> I've seen the following argument a thousand times:

"Well the marginal cost of a copy of [some digital good] is 0 so it isn't stealing!"

That argument is actually completly irrelevant.

I took a train the other night, and there were only 2 people in my whole car. The previous week it was packed. Both times I had to buy a ticket at the same price.

If you don't see what that has to do with pirating music (or software, or movies, or TV), then you don't really understand economics.

Everyone compares it to widgets where there is some fixed cost and some marginal cost, and suddenly the marginal cost is 0 so we should be able to have it for free right? Right?

Wrong. The train has 0 marginal costs, and all fixed costs. Whether that train is empty or full, they pay for the conductor, the engineer, the maitanence and the gas. But you are expected to pay for your ride whether you are 1/1000th of the total population on the train or 1/20th. And if you don't pay, you are breaking the law. Stealing services.

Digital goods are things with a high fixed costs (software developers, authors, directors, actors etc) and 0 marginal costs. There are plenty of other things out there with the same economic model and you are expected to pay for all of them. The only difference is that it is far easier to steal from content creators than service providers.

So please correct everyone you see making that arguement. The fact that copying the music costs nothing really doesn't matter. It comes down to dividing the fixed costs by a certain amount of customers, or there simply won't be content creators anymore. Maybe the songs need to be 2 cents each, I don't know, but the fact is there are high fixed costs and they need to be covered somehow by someone. The lack of marginal cost just doesn't matter.

<comment><USER3> There are still a fixed number of seats on the train (or plane). If someone "steals" a seat then that's a seat that someone else cannot have. This is dramatically different from the case of digital media where there is no similar impact.

For music piracy the only cost is the potential lost sale of the music to the "pirate".

Edit: to follow up, I'm a music pirate and proud of it. In my experience there are three types of people who pirate music. There are casual pirates who occasionally download the most popular songs of the day. There are hardcore pirates and digital packrats who refuse to pay for anything they don't absolutely have to and download music they might not even like, just to have it. And there are music lovers who have an insatiable hunger for lots and lots of music and enjoy discovering new music. From a financial perspective for the artists piracy is not generally a serious problem. Casual pop-music pirates generally download only songs that are already mega-hits, and the artists have been compensated thoroughly from. Hardcore anti-business pirates aren't necessarily a significant impact on artists because they wouldn't have paid for the albums they've pirated regardless.

The really interesting aspect comes from the 3rd category of pirates. Music lovers may "pirate" music but they also buy music too, and being exposed to more music means only that they end up buying more music (and going to more concerts), which is nothing but good news for those artists. Some of my favorite music I've discovered only by first pirating it, and in many cases this has lead to supporting artists financially (through album sales, merch, and concerts) that I never would have known about and never would have given a dime to previously. I can't see that as anything other than a good thing.

The current hypothetical non-piracy model for music is broken, and it always has been. There is too little variety on the radio and 30 second or 1 minute clips of songs don't cut it. Sometimes you just need to borrow an album and listen to it a few times before falling in love with it. This is the way it has always been. There's always been borrowing and copying in music, but the internet has made it infinitely more effective and so cast the issues into much sharper relief.

There is an even more important point at play here. And that is that a train line can prevent you from sneaking onto a train without a ticket fairly easily, but it is nigh impossible to put the music piracy genie back into the bottle. Music piracy is going to happen. The technology makes it too easy now, and there is a cultural desire for it. There is no choice to stop it, the only choice is to figure out how to live with it.

P.S. Some people might enjoy listening to this: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdRAQWp73S4>

P.P.S. [http://www.gemm.com/item/GEINOH--YAMASHIROGUMI/ECOPHONY-- RIN...](http://www.gemm.com/item/GEINOH--YAMASHIROGUMI/ECOPHONY-- RINNE/GML12205369/)

(perhaps this is an experiment?)

<comment><USER4> The fixed seats on train is only relevant if it fills up. So just imagine the case where it doesn't totally fill and consider his point again and you should see the parallel.

<comment><USER5> There are parallels, but surely there's a large, morally important difference between sneaking onto a half empty train with $50 seats, and stealing $50 from someone's wallet.

<comment><USER4> Surely it's important to pay attention to what is actually said in discussions. What was being said is that taking a train seat with zero marginal cost to the train owners is parallel to downloading a song which has zero marginal cost to the band or record label. Both are taking something with no marginal cost.

The point was that stealing that train seat really is stealing. That means that the argument "there is no marginal cost" is not a sufficient defense of music piracy. It does not exclude some other defense of music piracy.

<comment><USER5> My interpretation...

krschultz: "Trains have zero marginal cost. We call them stealing. Therefore, zero marginal cost does not prevent something from being called stealing."

InclinedPlane: "Trains are different from music, in that the latter never fills up. Therefore, it is possible for zero marginal cost to be a defense."

You: "InclinedPlane, just imagine a train which doesn't fill up."

Me: "You are right that the half-empty train and piracy are similar. This still doesn't justify calling it stealing."

You: "[Snarky comment]. All I was claiming is that they are similar."

...and I agree. I wasn't saying you were wrong in your initial comment, I was saying that you were right _but_ it doesn't complete krschultz's argument.

No need to get snarky. Not every reply to your comment is an assertion that you're wrong.

<comment><USER4> Your comment was completely off topic. You said there was a big difference between zero-mariginal-cost stealing and entirely-mariginal-cost stealing. Of course there is, but that has nothing to do with the arguments in the discussion. That's why I said you weren't following the discussion and explained the discussion to you.

Now you've rewritten your comment to remove the part about taking money out of someone's wallet and summarized it as "Your statement is true but that doesn't justify a conclusion [that you never asserted]". But the wallet part of your comment was important to your comment and is the reason I replied as I did.

The topic of my comments was about the parallel btwn no marginal cost activities (someone denied it with a bad argument, and I said so), so your reply to me (yes it was a reply to me, or you wouldn't have it nested under me) was off topic and missing the point of what I was talking about. It now sounds like you wanted to be talking to the original poster, krschultz, not me, which would have made more sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think that humans have an inherent problem with seeing piracy as theft unless they are the victims. Theft in a traditional sense is almost always zero-sum, and piracy isn't. We weren't really built to deal with this. The closest thing that I can think of is having someone sleep with your spouse—it's kind of like stealing, but it's not zero-sum. And it's not illegal.

It also doesn't help that our intellectual property laws have a lot of inconsistencies. If I steal your ideas for a startup, that's ok unless you have patented technology. But if I make a copy of something that I own and share it with a friend, that's illegal.

Up until now there had never been a way to take a material possession and duplicate it at essentially no cost. I think that we have a long way to go before we develop strong cultural norms on how to deal with intellectual property.

<comment><USER7> Duplicate it at no cost to anyone except yourself, I think you mean.

It often does cost time and money to pirate things.

And now that RepRap and similar 3D object printers are becoming more popular, they will continue to come down in price. It won't be long before printing physical items is a possibility, and then wholesale pirating of things that used to be protected by patents will start.

And if you're having trouble imagining that happening, don't worry. It was just as hard to imagine music piracy before MP3s. It happened on a VERY small scale before that due to difficulty and media cost.

<comment><USER8> Can you actually think of any examples where "printing" 3D objects that are protected by patents is likely to be a problem in the foreseeable future?

<comment><USER9> I think that it depends on your definition of 'foreseeable'.

One of the first markets I can see this disrupting are things like war-gaming miniatures, and board gaming pieces, which have a HUGE markup, but could be reproduced in plastic relatively easily after a more few generations of this tech. I'm not sure about patents per-se, but it's certainly an intellectual property issue.

Once these printers gain the ability to draw circuits and build or insert basic electronic components, things will really take off, but even before then there are some big markets for what are basically hunks of plastic and metal that are only expensive because they're well designed/marketed.

Will you be printing off an iPhone in 5 years? Of course not. But that fancy $60 paperweight on your boss's desk? There's a big market for those too.

<comment><USER8> This made me think of what is potentially a very large market - kids toys. As any parent will tell you, an awful lot of toys (especially for young kids) are cheap bits of plastic where the only "value" is the associated licensing of a brand/character from someone like Disney.

<comment><USER10> The relevant patents on Lego® bricks expired decades ago, and you would think clone bricks would have flooded the market by now. And yet Legos still sell—even the sets that aren't licensed brands. My experience with Mega Blocks, cheaper bricks that are supposed to interlock with Legos, is that they don't interlock very well—the tolerances are just far off enough to cause frustration. There must be something in Lego's manufacturing process that keeps their quality high even though, on paper, nothing could be easier than replicating their technology.

<comment><USER11> Lego bricks are easy to replicate on current-generation 3d printers. It's nothing to do with the manufacturing process, it's just that making the molds a bit looser makes them much easier to separate, and cheaper. They also tend to round the peg size up to 5mm, when actual legos are around 4.9. This <http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1005> is a lego-compatible part designed from scratch that describes the issue. Using that, it's easy to make custom parts that attach to legos. Here's one that I designed and someone else printed: <http://www.thingiverse.com/derivative:5042>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I feel for the kid. I still grimace when I think of bragging to the game warden when I was 4, about how my dad caught a salmon with his bare hands. Of course, it wasn't fishing season, nor did we have a license. Even at 4, as soon as I said it, I knew I had screwed up. Luckily, everybody just laughed, as the game warden was a friend, but to this day, that slip of the tongue reminds me to think before I speak.

<comment><USER13> Yes the kid 'outs' her, however she also digs her own grave and makes some points that can easily be used to justify book piracy.

e.g.

 _"Pirated handbags? Yes, I do buy them," she said. "I feel that the genuine Prada bags have such an inflated price."_

and

 _"You have a pirated MP3 collection," Jo added, helpfully. "We copied the first 1500 songs from one place and 300 from another."_

 _"Yes," admitted Ragbe. "There were a lot of things on the iPod."_

<comment><USER14> >"Pirated handbags? Yes, I do buy them," she said. "I feel that the genuine Prada bags have such an inflated price."

I feel that lumping handbags in here is wrong. There's probably a trademark infringement as well with the handbags. But, whilst there is copyright infringement in the design does the design have an artistic quality or is it "just" a design. The fact that there is a skill and materials expense in producing the handbags gives it a different quality IMO.

The important part with the handbags is the infringement of the Prada trademark whilst with the books and music it is the copyright infringement.

A fashion designer would probably disagree?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The problem most authors (artists) face is not piracy, but obscurity.

Not condoning piracy, but simply an observation. (I'm skeptical that people who pirate the e-books would necessarily otherwise purchase them, so I'm always uncertain about estimates of "losses" like in this article. Many times someone will download it to just check it out, similar to flipping through it in a bookstore, which you don't have to pay for.)

<comment><USER16> I feel it is instructive that we remember Tim O'Reilly's incisive piece titled "Piracy is progressive taxation"[0].

It makes little sense to claim that an author/musician is losing money through piracy when the likelihood is that the [majority of the] pirated copies would not have otherwise been bought.

Footnotes.

[0] <http://tim.oreilly.com/pub/a/p2p/2002/12/11/piracy.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This still doesn't change the fact that piracy does hurt authors.

The sad fact is that piracy is only getting worse. Even when you can get a song for 99 cents with no DRM or restrictions, music piracy is still rampant. I'm waiting for the next set of excuses.

In '99, it was because music was too expensive and the artists were getting screwed (which is a funny excuse, because 1% of something is something, but 1% of 0 is 0). Later, it was because DRM made it too difficult to play music. This is why you don't negociate with criminals. They will just keep bleeding you dry. The music industry is learning this lesson at the expense of their profits.

Now there is a new generation of kids that feel entitled to music, software, and movies for free.

This is one of the main reasons why I no longer sell applications. I have converted them all to services. This way, there is no way someone can pirate it.

<comment><USER8> Music piracy has _always_ been rampant

I can remember being a kid in the 70s and 80s and we all borrowed albums from friends and made copies on cassette tapes.

Or at least all my friends did.... ;-)

<comment><USER18> I once had a polygraph interviewer tell me this exact same thing and "not to worry about small shit like piracy."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I sell e-books and they almost all get pirated. I don't care, I just focus on the people who want to pay for my stuff. No skin off my nose if they don't.

<comment><USER20> Same here. A file that can be copied infinite times without cost is not worth much. I put 2 years of work into a book that gets pirated all the time. I have no problem with it at all.

I think we would be better off reevaluating business models rather than suffering the effects of trying to preserve out-dated ones.

<comment><USER21> What mediums do you two sell your books through?

<comment><USER19> Lots, but it's the PDFs that normally get copied.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > "Books are priced too high"

I don't think he (the "pirat") has an idea of how much time has to be invested in the production of good books. I personally think that books are drastically undervalued and that people are not willing to pay enough for good books which has the consequence that they are either served well targeted bestsellers, which can be produced at that price, or junk. Big publishing companies and bestseller authors don't have that much of a problem selling their books at a lower price so that people are less inclined to download a pirated book.

<comment><USER23> The App Store has proven that most software is overpriced. If there was a book store with $.99 and $1.99 books, I think we would discover something very similar.

<comment><USER24> The question could be argued about if software was overpriced, or were there too many layers in the distribution chain that all wanted to make something off the software sale. The iTunes App store has collapsed the distribution chain. The OS X App store may do the same.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> _.. no one possesses the less because everyone possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me receives [it] without lessening [me], as he who lights his [candle] at mine receives light without darkening me. --Thomas Jefferson_

And so the progress of virtual goods has turned their producers into teachers. The consequences are still unknown.

</comment><comment><USER26> What struck me most was this passage:

 _In order to thwart piracy, she refused to allow her latest novel to be released as an audiobook since the format is popular with file-sharers and also denied the publication of Russian and Chinese versions._

Isn't it like taping on the cover of the book: "Only for white"?

<comment><USER17> "Only for white"

hmm..so there are no whites in Russia?

Most e-commerce companies where I've worked block both Russia and China due to massive piracy or credit card theft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Oh come on. It's easy to call someone a hypocrite -- everyone agrees its wrong, whatever their other moral principles might be. The failures of an individual don't really have much bearing on whether the individual's moral beliefs are right.

EDIT: changed "everyone agrees its wrong" to "everyone agrees hypocrisy is wrong"

<comment><USER28> _The failures of an individual don't really have much bearing on whether the individual's moral beliefs are right._

If you assume they're failures, they don't have much bearing. If, however, you assume that people's actions reflect their beliefs more closely than their arguments do, the fact of hypocrisy regarding a given belief suggests rather strongly that even the person making the argument doesn't believe it. When an argument's proponents don't even believe it, I think it's reasonably strong evidence that it isn't true.

<comment><USER27> I actually disagree that people's actions reflect their beliefs more than their arguments. I suppose these are fundamental assumptions that you can't really present much evidence for either way, but I do think that people try to hold themselves to standards that they can't often achieve. To take a simplistic example: suppose I'm trying to stick to a rigorous diet, but I lapse every so often. Does this mean that I really don't believe the diet is important? Or if I'm trying to learn a new programming language in my spare time, perhaps I'm not as studious as I'd like... but that doesn't mean that the language isn't worth learning. It just means it's hard, and people tend to give in to laziness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> All I can say is: ha ha ha. And: we need to come up with a better system for selling intellectual art these days!

</comment><comment><USER30> Bogus Prada bags hardly seems to compare. Maybe if one took fancy dust jackets (Hennessey and Patterson, Musil, whatever) and wrapped them around Readers Digest condensed books one might have a comparable case.</comment>


Joyent gives their lifetime customers a better offer - <AUTHOR> http://joyent.com/migration/migration-faq.php

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately it's behind an email form, so I'm not sure if each customer is receiving a different offer, or if it's just a way to track customers.</comment>


Faceted search with ElasticSearch - <AUTHOR> https://amsterdam.luminis.eu/2016/06/21/faceted-search-with-elasticsearch/ <comment><AUTHOR> Faceted search strategy with ElasticSearch

<comment><USER2> Hugged to death by HN...</comment></comment>


The Universal Design - <AUTHOR> https://christine.website/blog/the-universal-design-2015-10-17 <comment><USER2> Xena is right to note that this simple state-transformation function, f(event old-state) -> [actions new-state], is the obvious and eternal way to build a server. It's also worth noting that it's basically Haskell's State monad.

Whatever you call it, it's a design pattern, not a system service. Urbit on the outside, as an "operating function," is defined by the "universal design." But since it's a pattern rather than a service, it will tend to reappear at each layer of a layered system. Urbit on the outside uses this pattern and so do Urbit applications, but these are very different layers of Urbit.

At the application layer, a command to an IRC daemon is a great example. There still seems to be a good deal of boilerplate in the Lua code presented here. The attraction of the "universal design" is the goal of eliminating all, or almost all, boilerplate code in a network server daemon.

How would one go about that? First, be a single-level store, so the daemon is automatically a database. Second, make application messages are transactions with end-to-end acknowledgment, no return value, and exactly-once delivery. The message is automatically deserialized and validated, and passed to the application as a simple typed argument. If there's a problem with the operation, just crash; the result is delivered as a transaction failure with an annotated stack trace. Also, messages should be sent over an encrypted P2P network and authenticated by scarce, memorable identities...

On the other hand, I'm sure the Lua daemon is a lot faster!

<comment><USER3> (Event, State) -> (Actions, NewState) is indeed how Erlang/OTP applications and components have been structured for the last 20 years! Concrete existence proof.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> >This design will also scale to running across multiple servers, and in general to any kind of computer, business or industry problem.

If I understand what you're getting at, you're saying that locking is the solution to all concurrency problems? This section is the most interesting to me, as I've been researching concurrency at a high level lately. I'm a little confused by your conclusion. It seems naïve to claim that multiple hosts can agree on what action to take "just" by using locks. What if a peer is holding a lock and becomes unreachable? What if the peer isn't dead and thinks it still has the lock? What if the core that is issuing the locks becomes unreachable?

<comment><USER5> I didn't see anything really interesting in there about concurrency or consensus beyond the naive. What she does talk about is almost a microservices pattern though, and that can be an awesome tool for solving certain kinds of problems. I don't think I agree that it's more useful than other tools across all problems though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Beware a typo in this code: search for "mepliles". Unsurprisingly, the error is in an error handler, so it was assuredly never hit. This kind of thing has started making me yearn for type safety and static compilation.</comment>


Die, You Gravy Sucking Pig Dog - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001211.html <comment><USER2> > "In the C programming language, you're regularly forced to deal with the > painful, dangerous concepts of pointers and explicit memory allocation. "

> "I'd wager the majority of programmers alive today have never once worried > about malloc(). I call this progress..."

Anger. Must... resist... anger.

I've come to believe that Jeff Atwood is on a personal mission sent by God himself to piss me off.

Just remember, Jeff: every time you fire up that pretty C# code of yours, and make all your little variables through your ORM, letting the garbage collector clean up the mess you've made and then proceed to pump out those cute little web pages through your cute little templating language, to be sent off to some other computer through some magic wire to some magic browser to be rendered... that thousands and thousands of programmers (who, it should be noted, are almost all still alive, today) worrying about "dangerous" and "painful" concepts like pointers have slaved to make your silly little ORM, your database, your templating language, your network stack, your web browser, your web server, and your operating system.

As I've said before, some of us are in the trenches worrying about all the "dangerous" stuff, like pointers. The primary difference between you and I, though, is that I actually know you exist. I don't believe that at some point in the mid 80's, a network stack and a file system (each created in the "before time") really really loved each other and out popped a web server.

<comment><USER3> I know its somewhat trendy to pick on Jeff Atwood, but I don't really know what you're getting angry about.

He never said that malloc and free are irrelevant. And manual memory management is dangerous and painful. Anyone who's written a modicum of C would agree with that.

That a majority of programmers today don't have to worry about it is, in fact, progress.

<comment><USER4> _Anyone who's written a modicum of C would agree with that._

I've written tens of thousands of lines of C and maintain a codebase of over 50KLOC. I also am a somewhat less active maintainer on another project with almost 400KLOC. And I would strongly disagree with that, so you shouldn't make wide generalizations like "anyone."

I have devoted probably less than an hour of my time _out of over a year of development on this codebase_ to memory management. I have never understood why people think it is so hard to call free() a couple times when your program shuts down.

At least in my experience, if you're finding memory management to be "hard", your program is structured in a bad way to begin with. Your program shouldn't be covered in mallocs and frees.

<comment><USER3> >I have devoted probably less than an hour of my time out of over a year of development on this codebase to memory management. I have never understood why people think it is so hard to call free() a couple times when<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=435267> your program shuts down.

I'm completely and utterly unable to comprehend how a code-base of the size you mentioned could have its memory managed by a couple of free() calls when your program shuts down. (And if you're program is shutting down, why would you even need to call free() at all? )

Are you using some kind of garbage collector tacked on top of C?

Edit: Can you elaborate on the nature of these programs? Because if you're building any sort of non-trivial data structures in your code at all, then you almost certainly need allocations and deallocations

<comment><USER4> We have to call free when the program shuts down because the program is available through a library interface, and so it can be called as a linked library in addition to being used as a standalone program. If it wasn't for that, we wouldn't even need free.

The program is structured so that based on the parameters it is given, we know exactly what needs to be allocated: how many video frames need to be malloced and so forth. This is all done in the initialization functions and after the program has started, it _never needs to grab any memory ever again_. This is not a case of "we're allocating the max we need and distributing it later"-- it's a case of _since we know how the program works, we know what exactly what it will need to do and how many frames it will do it to simultaneously_.

There are only four things in the entire program that are malloced:

1\. Video frame objects (big structs with tons of pointers to data that goes along with a video frame). A new_frame function exists to malloc and return a video frame. This makes it easy to check mallocs. We know exactly how many frames will be needed on startup. These frames make up the vast majority of memory usage of the program.

2\. One data struct for each thread. Each thread has its own local struct that it passes around containing data currently being worked on.

3\. A scratch buffer, per thread. This is a small malloced buffer used for a few calculations that require variable-size buffers, usually depending on video frame width (i.e. something known at initialization, but not known at compile-time).

4\. Bitstream output buffers for each thread. In the extremely rare case that a bitstream exceeds the initial allocated value, this is realloced on demand.

Every single one of these can be free'd trivially at the end of runtime.

<comment><USER3> Interesting. Thanks for the details.

I'm guessing this is a non-interactive library\application which takes input at start-up, does work and then exits?

(because otherwise, I assume it would be impossible to reason about how much memory is required)

<comment><USER4> The program is x264 and it can be interactive to some extent--it has a "reconfig" function that allows you to reconfigure the parameters on the fly, though it has some limitations as to what you can adjust and what you cannot.

One potential purpose of this is a "speed control" feature where you adjust settings on the fly to ensure realtime operation, such as for a broadcast encoding server (my company does this).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is perhaps one of the most astonishingly vacuous article I have ever read in my entire life. What was is about, exactly? A funny function name? Not to mention that 70% of it is quotes from other people. Pure link bait.

</comment><comment><USER6> Funny, after I moved from programming assembly to mostly C (on microcontrollers) I thought pointers and memory allocation were the neatest things. I guess it all depends on your perspective, write a few thousand lines of assembly on a chip with 256 bytes of ram and pointers seem quite magical.

I also think Jeff doesn't realize just how many people out there still write code for small 8 and 16 bit processors, much of which is in C. Although I would not really recommend using malloc in most of those cases the "dangerous concepts of pointers" are still very alive and well.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> With regard to:

sqlConnection.Close(); sqlConnection.Dispose(); sqlConnection = null;

The irony is that the .NET Framework and it's compilers are very good at optimisation and will almost certainly make the object available for garbage collection at the first opportunity - with a good chance that the second two statements would not even make it into the assembly.

<comment><USER3> I haven't dealt with this stuff in some time, but I recall that those last two statements are actually needed. I think it was a work-around for a bug\design- flaw in the earlier .NET garbage collector.

That last bit on explicitly assigning to null was really weird but in some cases, necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Okay! Okay!

It's killing me.

"Gravy Sucking" should be "Gravy-Sucking"

There.

I feel better now.

</comment><comment><USER8> This programmer shows a lot of temper; I won't hire him.

I once worked with a guy from Ukraine who use to swear in his native language at office, trust me it's not nice. It's disruptive and ultimately non productive for the programmer and others around.

</comment><comment><USER9> I like to use the template pattern for that sql connection problem.

</comment><comment><USER10> I like Gravy.

<comment><USER11> I like Dog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Let's just not say if he's right or wrong. But I don't think he went to a decent CS school, did he?

<comment><USER12> I mean I didn't mean any disrespect nor do I've any problems with this success. But at times he's just plain wrong. I mean others have said enough.</comment></comment>


How to turn off Android TV's homescreen ads, 'staff picks' - <AUTHOR> https://9to5google.com/2020/08/18/android-tv-homescreen-ads-turn-off-staff-picks/ <comment><USER2> I have said this before. Few reasons why I prefer dumb TVs, just a flat LED panel:

1\. You have control over bullshit like this

2\. You can make them smart by attaching the external box (like Raspberry PI with osmc)

3\. You don't have to throw the TV because your Software is now old, just change the box.

4\. There's new format which requires hardware support (av1 is coming), change the box.

5\. Want to add new hardware? Upgrade the box.

<comment><USER3> Can you even buy those any more? I looked into it and there's nothing of quality available.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the only truly dumb screens that you might be able to buy are designed for commercial use. But yeah, consumer oriented TVs all have their own smart features.

<comment><USER4> Is there a way to hack a smart TV into a dumb one?

<comment><USER5> What happens if you simply don't connect it to the internet? Can't you just use it as a dumb TV? I don't have experience with a smart TV so I cannot say.

<comment><USER6> I have a Samsung smart TV for work that has never been connected to a network. It insists on an identification check whenever a new device is connected to an input. It doesn't have access to the Samsung database so it just spins its wheels until you clear the overlay.

<comment><USER7> It does that even with network access (I didn't see any additional traffic when it happens in a packet capture). I have to use a programmable HDMI splitter that presents an EDID when the real input is off just to get rid of that behavior. My computer resuming from sleep triggers it.

<comment><USER6> Our hardware has valid EDIDs. Just nothing that Samsung would know about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> These homescreen ads are really interesting because in the future of television, they might be the only thing viewers are guaranteed to see a glimpse of.

In the era of linear TV, the masses had to watch what the networks put in front of them. People had to watch whatever was available in the broadcast medium of their choice (air/cable/satellite). Channel flipping meant that the networks had a brief moment to expose themselves to viewers, and maybe even hook them with those repetitive post-commercial recaps.

But non-linear television means that the network execs can fuck right off because people will watch whatever they want, whenever they want, on the subscription service they want. The fragmentation is real.

The homescreen ads present themselves as a rare chance for channel producers to say "hey! come look at our amazing content!". Right before a viewer fires up Netflix or whatever.

(On a personal note, those overly loud and obnoxious homescreen ads are fucking annoying and usually turn me off from whatever the hell is being advertised. Turning on my TV should be a source of joy and relaxation, not a a desperate desire to pull up Netflix as fast as humanly possible. I'm also certain that in the future when all of our smart TVs have 128-core RISC-V CPUs with 16GB of RAM and can run k8s, TV software producers will intentionally slow down the loading of apps so viewers are forced to watch the homescreen ads.)

<comment><USER9> > Channel flipping meant that the networks had a brief moment to expose > themselves to viewers

Offtopic, but modern TVs are terrible at channel flipping. I don't know if it's the TV or the cable box or the DRM, but something makes it take 3-5 seconds to change a channel. This feels like something they could fix.

There not being a reasonable way to opt-out of the homescreen ads tells me that Google knows they are garbage. Google has 20+ years of data from many of us. They promised us that sharing our data with them would let them produce targeted ads that we would value. The ads on my TV homescreen feel less targeted than the ones I see during a baseball broadcast.

<comment><USER10> > Offtopic, but modern TVs are terrible at channel flipping. I don't know if > it's the TV or the cable box or the DRM

A combination of digital video encoding chocies and a UX decision that nothing is better than the artifacts from not waiting for a full frame to start display.

<comment><USER9> Feels like they could have a bunch of decoders and make a guess at what my next channel will probably be and keep a few streams ready to go.

<comment><USER10> > Feels like they could have a bunch of decoders and make a guess at what my > next channel will probably be and keep a few streams ready to go.

If you have a multichannel cable box (usually, to support simultaneous DVR and viewing), some of them I think _do_ do that (or at least camp on the last-used for each tuner that isn't needed for active display or recording) and give a fast switch if you hit one that it's on, but the ratio of decoding streams to available channels tends to be very low. And I would imagine that video decoding is the biggest use of horsepower in a cable box or smart TV, so there's probably a non-negotiable cost (including in power usage, heat, and component lifetime) in malign a significant change there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does anyone have a proper replacement for a "smart" TV interface that runs on plain Linux instead of some random Chinese Android box?

My TV is relatively old and the Netflix app just can't keep up anymore. I was considering running some Android TV box but if those show ads now I'm not interested anymore.

Right now my TV is hooked up to my server running Kodi, but I'd like something that plays YouTube at full resolution (as opposed to Kofi's 720p limit because of some obscure dependency issue) and is also capable of running Netflix.

I'll probably have to cave eventually and get myself a Chromecast but if there's an option that doesn't rely on Google, I'd like to hear about it.

<comment><USER12> Is there a reason a standard computer can't work? You have linux and firefox with proper adblocking. Youtube runs at full resolution, netflix always works in the browser, as well as other services. I havent watched an ad in years and can't imagine going back.

<comment><USER11> Currently my TV is hooked up to a computer but it's hard to use the interface as a TV.

I want to use the TV as a TV, not just as a remote desktop. I've tried using KDE connect with mouse pad + keyboard remote control but the experience isn't great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The Android Debugger is best for wrangling these unfortunate creations. Here are some random notes I took while beating my Sony Bravia into submission.

# Enable Develepor Tools TV > Home menu > Settings > About.

Click the build number 7 times to activate the developer tools menu item.

Open it and click on "enable ADB debugging."

# Default ADP Port TCP - 5037 and 5555

adb connect 192.168.x.xx

A popup will appear on your TV. Use your remote to check the box to always allow connections from your PC

# Sideload app

TV > Settings > Security & restrictions > Unknown Sources

adb install apkname.apk

# List all apps

adb shell pm list packages -f > bravia-tv-packages.txt

# Uninstall an app.

adb shell pm uninstall -k --user 0 tv.samba.ssm

adb uninstall tv.samba.ssm

# Reinstall (example only)

adb shell pm install -r --user 0 tv.samba.ssm

# Disable an app if uninstall fails

adb shell pm disable-user --user 0 <package_to_disable>

# Re-enable a disabled app

adb shell pm enable <package_to_enable>

# Safe Mode

Unplug or Reboot (Settings > About)

Press and hold volume down

# Factory Reset

Unplug

On lower left (ports side)

Press and hold bottom two

Plug back in

# Filter to only show system packages.

adb shell pm list packages -f -s

# List including uninstalled packages.

adb shell pm list packages -f -u

# List all disabled apps

adb shell pm list packages -d

# Force stop app

adb shell am force-stop com.netflix.ninja

adb shell top

adb shell ps > android-processes.txt

adb shell dumpsys wifi > dumpsys_wifi.txt

adb shell logcat > logcat.txt

adb shell dumpsys package com.foo.bar > dumpsys_com.foo.bar

adb shell pm [grant|revoke] [package] android.permission.CAMERA

When done, turn off ADB debugging on the TV for security.

</comment><comment><USER14> I've been wanting to replace my Android box with a Linux box for a while, and I think this signals my Android TV exit. The main reason I have an Android TV box is because of its easy to use UI. I haven't found a suitable desktop environment or web browser configuration that supports a TV-scale UI on Linux. Does anyone have a Linux HTPC setup they're happy with? I really don't want to need a mouse and keyboard to watch Netflix, etc.

<comment><USER15> KDE has a tv environment. I'm not sure how good it is though, I use an Apple TV.

[https://plasma-bigscreen.org/](https://plasma-bigscreen.org/)

[https://dot.kde.org/2020/03/26/plasma-tv-presenting- plasma-b...](https://dot.kde.org/2020/03/26/plasma-tv-presenting-plasma- bigscreen)

<comment><USER16> I don't like the voice control, but I suppose some people do like, OK, but ensure it will work without Mycroft and without a microphone, too.

Better might be assign a numeric code to each file, and then you can key in those numbers on the remote control to select them. The remote controls they show there isn't very good. Put numbers, play, pause, rewind, fast-forward, stop, previous-track, next-track, high-volume, low-volume, mute, main-menu, and perhaps a few more, rather than what they have there it isn't very good I think.

Is there such a better remote control that you can use instead? Instead of up/down/left/right/enter, you can have the numbers and the playback controls.

<comment><USER15> I find voice control helpful when entering text. Instead of trying to arrow in "The Simpsons season 6 episode 3" on a remote, you can just get it transcribed.

<comment><USER16> Yes, that is one reason why you might like it (especially if you do not know how to spell the name of the show you want to watch, although voice recognition can also get it wrong sometimes). However, I would ike numeric input. Key in some ID number of the show (after you can first figure out what that ID number is), and optionally the season number and episode number. If you omit the season number, it will list them; if you omit the episode number, it will list the episodes with descriptions; you might also search by the original broadcast date. Of course, that doesn't help if you do not know the ID number of the show, so text search (and voice, if you have a microphone and voice recognition software) is still useful too, and then you can learn what is the ID number. For text entry, I would like Hollerith chording (or a full keyboard if you happen to be using one, which some people do), but that won't work if the remote control doesn't support chording, so other methods may also be used. Category numbers (in various classification schemes) may also be helpful, if you do not even know the name of the show, or what show you want, perhaps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Note that there is no open source version of Android TV like there is for phones. You can't just throw on a custom ROM with the modifications you want. This was a purposeful choice by Google to enable anti-features like this and prevent any kind of ad blocking or customizations that would help make TVs into an open platform.

<comment><USER18> This is not true, see here for example: [https://www.google.com/search?q=aosp+android+tv+devices](https://www.google.com/search?q=aosp+android+tv+devices)

There are vendors shipping aosp devices, particularly in cost sensitive markets.

<comment><USER19> Not sure about currently, but I'm the past there were quite a number of options for running Android on a set top box, but very few options for running Android TV on one. You need to make sure the device you're looking at is actually running Android TV, not the standard version of Android.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This ticks me off. I have an Nvidia Shield TV and it's supposed to get this "update" also. I can live with some ads in apps (as long as I didn't "pay" for the app). But I HATE the idea of ads in my OS. This industry and the pressure to turn everything into a money grab is digusting?

<comment><USER21> Yeah, I'm pretty irate as well. I finally gave in and got a Shield a couple weeks ago to reduce complexity. Now this?

Maybe it's not too late to mail it back to Nvidia. Perhaps wrapped in this week's snailmail spam catalogs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I bought a Sony XBR65X950G (great name) a year ago and the hardware is nice but the software is terrible. I noticed the ads a couple of days ago and tried to find a way to hide them but there's nothing.

The ads combined with the shitty Android TV software is making me think I need to unplug the TV from the internet and buy an Apple TV or similar device.

Either that or get a Homekit power outlet so that I can power cycle the TV every night.

<comment><USER22> I'm missing your point... What would power cycling the TV daily do?

<comment><USER23> It's bad enough that I set up my Sony Android TV on a "smart outlet" that power cycles each night. And I can yell at my Google Assistant to restart it when it breaks down on occasion

<comment><USER9> The TV has a built in Google Assistant. I wish they would add a phrase like "hey google, reboot the tv" to save me time from navigating through the menus looking for the restart command (it's under "about" for some reason).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I bought a Mi TV 2 months ago. Worst thing ever. I was much better off just using my chromecast. I was hoping a much richer ecosystem of apps for android tv, but they pretty much suck. Dumb tv + chromecast is perfect, or plug a pi for something more complex.

<comment><USER25> Block everything on your router or via PiHole. Setup and forget

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't see the outrage. This looks pretty similar to the design of every streaming service these days? Netflix, Prime, etc. The top bar is the largest and displays the newest/trending things to watch.

The only difference is what they might display on the top bar. On Netflix they just show you the newest/trending stuff regardless of I'm interested in it based on my viewing habits. Netflix really wants me to watch Tiger King. So if these streaming services were smart they would pay Google for this ad space based on my viewing habits, or it'll be the newest/trending stuff from these services and it's basically the same/useless then.

<comment><AUTHOR> I paid good money for a Nvidia Shield in part because I liked the simple interface. Would you like it if in the next Android update you had "trending stuff" occupying a third of your smartphone home screen?

I wouldn't mind it if it were optional, but it seems that it will not be.

<comment><USER27> I agree this is shity design, but is it "ads"??

To be clear: I don't like been forced "recommendations" that some AI algorithm digged up for me.

But this is still far far from the consumer product ads you see will on traditional TVs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Next up: Chromecast

(We desperately need an alternative to Chromecasts, they are becoming too dominant)

</comment><comment><USER28> What's the best external tv hardware box these days? It needs to be something easy enough for my non-technical family to use, that's also stable enough that I don't have to worry about upgrading or debugging it, and provides all of the popular providers controlled by a remote -- or is at least _compatible_ with a universal remote.

Up until recently, my Roku ticked all of the boxes -- Amazon Prime, Netflix, HBO Now/Go, Plex, CNN, Hulu, all controlled by a Logitech universal remote. But as of August 1st, HBO has pulled their apps from Roku.

Is one of these a better option?

\- Android TV

\- Amazon Fire

\- Apple TV (without other iOS devices?)

\- _something else?_

<comment><USER29> The nice thing about Android TV and firetv is that you can sideload apps like NewPipe (better YouTube client without ads) and Kodi. Android TV has been better than FireTV until now, as it has not had an annoying homescreen littered with ads, like the FireTV.

I'd switch to an AppleTV, if I could sideload things like NewPipe, but for now I'm sticking with my Nvidia Shield, which runs Android TV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Seeing all this hate about smart TVs here

I have a smart Samsung TV, I don't remember the exact name, and it's... fine? I changed my opinion on Smart TVs

It does its job, the 3 apps I have there work fine, there are no annoying ads. There is also working AirPlay for iOS (funnily enough, it's easier to stream from iPhone than from Samsung Galaxy on Samsung TV). The UX is great overall.

The "browser" there is horrible, but you won't be doing much browsing on TV anyway

</comment><comment><USER31> Are there any FOSS alternatives for the operating systems on current smart tvs?

I haven't heard of any, but it's certainly something I'd be interested in.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm guessing it's not possible to just write an app that replaces the homescreen? :/</comment>