Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust lawsuits against Google - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-department-state-attorneys-general-likely-to-bring-antitrust-lawsuits-against-google-11589573622 <comment><USER2> This is interesting because it seems like the DOJ's definition of monopoly is changing, which I think is a good thing. Since the late 80s (roughly), antitrust litigation has only been brought on the basis of a monopoly's negative impact on consumer prices (i.e. does the existence of a monopoly cause the consumer to have to pay higher prices?). That ignores monopolies that impair the ability of smaller companies to enter markets (which is one of the issues raised with respect to some of the current internet giants). Prior to the 1980s, this latter kind of monopoly would have been subject to scrutiny and possibly litigation by the DOJ, but since then it has been ignored.

<comment><USER3> Google's dominant market position was achieved through market competition not through impairing the ability of smaller companies to enter markets. Even in Google Chrome you can pick DuckDuckGo and Ecosia as your default search engine. Most of Chrome users probably never heard of those two search engines.

For example would YouTube be successful as it is today if it wasn't Google's resources and knowledge to skyrocket it? I think not.

<comment><USER4> > Even in Google Chrome you can pick DuckDuckGo and Ecosia as your default > search engine.

And making this argument is exactly why they added search engine selection. They wanted to be able to point to this tiny insignificant detail that might cost them a negligible fraction of Chrome searches and hold it up as market competition when the inevitable antitrust suit came along.

Have you ever heard of a for profit company gifting traffic to their direct competitor? It would be irrational behavior in a competitive market. If anything this is _evidence_ of Google's search engine monopoly and Google built the selection feature into Chrome it in furtherance of that monopoly power.

<comment><USER5> You're saying that _both_ "adding search engine choice" and "removing search engine choice" are monopolistic tools for Google?

<comment><USER4> I'm saying Google added search engine choice to Chrome in order to create the _illusion_ of competition in a monopolized market. If Google didn't have monopoly power in the search engine market they never would have added search engine choice to Chrome in the first place for the same reason Starbucks stores don't sell bags of Dunkin' Donuts coffee beans. A rational enterprise in a competitive market doesn't benevolently give market share to a competitor.

Kind of like the cellophane paradox[1] I suppose. From Wikipedia:

> As Richard Posner wrote, "Reasonable interchangeability at the current price > but not at a competitive price level, far from demonstrating the absence of > monopoly power, might well be a symptom of that power; this elementary point > was completely overlooked by the court"

But instead of a price denominated in dollars it's in consumer data I suppose.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellophane_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellophane_paradox)

<comment><USER5> Hm. If I understand the cellophane paradox, it says that the "substitutes exist" does not imply "there is no monopoly".

That seems different from your argument, which I understand to be "only a monopolist would make it easy for consumers to choose a competitor". But again, the conclusion that Google is a monopolist seems to be baked into this logic -- would you really say Google is not a monopolist if they did not offer search engine choice?

<comment><USER6> > which I understand to be "only a monopolist would make it easy for consumers > to choose a competitor"

No, not "only".

The argument is that while non-monopolists have a motivation to add those choices, monopolists have a motivation too.

Therefore seeing the end result isn't very strong evidence for whether something is a monopoly or not.

<comment><USER5> I agree with your statement. The comment I was responding to does not:

> If anything this is evidence of Google's search engine monopoly and Google > built the selection feature into Chrome it in furtherance of that monopoly > power

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> IMHO they're not a monopoly, at least not in the traditional sense of the word.

Traditional monopolies "control supply of a good or service, and where the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted."

In this case, the supply of a good or service (social networking, webpage indexing and searching) are not controlled by Facebook and Google because they aren't finite resources. Anyone can index the web and anyone can build a social network and Google/Facebook aren't going to crush you with lawsuits or some other nefarious tactic to maintain their position (AFAIK).

Entry of new producers of these services is not prevented or highly restricted. New social networks and search engines pop up all the time.

What Facebook and Google have is massive, large scale user loyalty. Despite alternatives existing (Bing, Mastadon, DuckDuckGo, Myspace, etc.), users are voluntarily choosing to use Google and Facebook. This is not a monopoly.

I think we need a new term for this situation.

<comment><USER8> "Monopolization Defined"

 _The antitrust laws prohibit conduct by a single firm that unreasonably restrains competition by creating or maintaining monopoly power. Most Section 2 claims involve the conduct of a firm with a leading market position, although Section 2 of the Sherman Act also bans attempts to monopolize and conspiracies to monopolize. As a first step, courts ask if the firm has "monopoly power" in any market. This requires in-depth study of the products sold by the leading firm, and any alternative products consumers may turn to if the firm attempted to raise prices. Then courts ask if that leading position was gained or maintained through improper conduct—that is, something other than merely having a better product, superior management or historic accident. Here courts evaluate the anticompetitive effects of the conduct and its procompetitive justifications._

"Market Power"

 _Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power._

[https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition- guidance/guide-a...](https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition- guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/single-firm-conduct/monopolization-defined)

Your humble opinion has little relation to governing regulatory law.

<comment><USER9> I must be dumb but I didn't see how the stuff you quoted fit the Google situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't have a problem with this. But I wonder why there isn't similar willpower to pursue, say, telecoms, banks, Monsanto, Luxxotica, Disney, and the like. Why is it just big tech?

<comment><USER11> What, you mean go after their friends? Are you crazy?

It's complete nonsense. Telecoms have been fucking people over for decades and yet we still see mergers resulting in 3 providers going to 2 despite it being downright impossible to start a new one (see: Google Fiber), that is if you're even lucky enough to have more than one in your region.

<comment><USER12> Google fiber was fine. Google just stopped caring once they realized how little ROI is in the field. Turns out being a last mile ISP is a pretty low margin business.

<comment><USER11> Google Fiber was never about ROI. Fiber stopped expanding after encountering legal resistance in market after market from the preexisting telecom (take note the singular, because there's usually just one). Every market they successfully pushed through, the existing telecom dropped prices and improved service to stay competitive. These competition-stifling monopolies are costing taxpayers tons of money when the taxpayers were the ones that funded the infrastructure the incumbents are holding out on now.

<comment><USER13> Starlink can't get here too soon. [https://www.starlink.com](https://www.starlink.com)

Satellite eliminates local regulatory capture from blocking new entrants.

LEO eliminates the latency issues with current satellite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As some variant of millenial, I'm continually bemused by how many of my peers are on board with breaking up "big tech" and use "big tech" products multiple times every single day.

If I bring up federal contracting, which is an industry of comparable size, and which is dominated by companies founded well over 50 years ago [1], and which is way more politically opaque, and whose funding they cannot as tax- paying US citizens opt out of, the response is never anything more than "meh".

I understand that one is more relevant to daily in-their-face life. These aren't dumb people. They read, argue, write, vote. But the choice of what to agitate for is so odd to me.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_100_Contractors_of_the_U.S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_100_Contractors_of_the_U.S._federal_government)

<comment><USER14> I'll take a stab at this.

Perhaps it's because the internet (and surrounding technologies) are so much more foundational to society. Without information moving freely and fairly, we'll mostly never learn about any of the other big problems that need addressing (of which, the one you pointed out seems perfectly valid).

Also, I think the average person feels more empowered with regards to shaping the future of the internet, than they do with something so entrenched, opaque, political and corrupt (IMHO) as federal contracting.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the response.

The first point makes sense, but it's hard for me to square with breaking up companies. I don't think any of FAANG has played a real censorious role on the internet. I'm just as free to spin up a random webpage to espouse whatever as I was in 1999. People move around the web differently, but I can still send it to whomever I want. I could also see an argument that AMP and similar technologies hurt journalism, but I hardly ever see that claimed.

If it's a question of agency, to me it feels much better to "vote with my feet" and not patronize companies I dislike than to write my congressperson and receive a form response from some intern. You may be right that people just expect better from the internet than federal contracting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A take: monopoly in tech is good. Because Google/Amazon/FB have so much money they can do things that push tech forward as a whole. Think about the revolutionary improvements Google has made towards data centers, AWS, and all the research/open source contributions these companies have done.

Unlike other monopolies (telecom, defense contracting) etc. where the monopoly is used to stagnate innovation (see Comcast being terrible), here the monopoly leads to more innovation. Smaller companies can't embark on Google-sized projects.

Sidenote: I'm pretty sure this lawsuit is just a political attack. It seems reasonable that other monopolies in healthcare/defense/etc. are much much worse, yet they aren't "liberal"/"blue" companies, so there are no lawsuits.

Disclosure: I'm interning at Google. I don't think this matters at all, but someone called me out on this in the comments.

<comment><USER16> Google/Amazon/Facebook have each served to stagnate tech, not push it forward. If you read their headlines, sure, you'll believe they're doing groundbreaking things. But in reality, these behemoths have killed thousands of innovative startups to protect their cash cows. The uncommitted experiments they run, meanwhile, never amount to anything useful for the world.

There were better social networks than Facebook, but they didn't make money the way Facebook does, so Facebook bought them and killed them. There were better online stores than Amazon, but they didn't abuse humans and play the same games Amazon does to succeed, so they died and it won. Tech monopolies are monopolies, and they're particularly aggressive ones.

I also don't think you grasp the scope of tech monopolies. You cannot operate a business today without doing business with Google. You can hate Google, but you still _have to do business with Google_. Because if you aren't putting out Google Ads or at least optimizing your SEO for Google's bots, if you aren't launching your app in the Play Store, you're cutting off the majority of your customer base, and you're dying.

Healthcare _has to do business with Google_. Defense _has to do business with Google_. Effing Comcast _has to do business with Google_. There has never been a monopoly on this planet that had more power and that was so unavoidable. And it doesn't take a lot of research to find places people are being hurt or having their livelihoods taken by the unholy beast that it's become.

<comment><USER5> > Healthcare has to do business with Google. Defense has to do business with > Google.

Can you elaborate on this? Neither industry seems to rely on ads or SEO or app stores.

<comment><USER16> You'd be surprised what you can find on Google Play: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lmaeronaut...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lmaeronautics.c130support)

Obviously healthcare providers market to consumers, medicines are marketed to consumers even when they're supposed to be prescribed by doctors, and of course, marketing healthcare wares _to_ doctors is a pretty big deal.

But ask yourself how healthcare companies and defense contractors market themselves, find new talent, even lobby. (Targeting advertising can literally shove ads just in the face of people in federal government buildings.)

Google has the eyes of well over 80% of the global population. Which means if you want to talk to... pretty much any group of people, you likely have to do it through Google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The big problem with this is the extreme mediocrity of every other industry. Amazon and Google are winning everything because none of their competitors have even attempted to do better than they did 10 years ago.

Amazon should have won in very few of the markets it entered. Instead, its competitors just decided to lie down and die, with a couple of yelps on their way to their death.

<comment><USER18> Google is partly winning because many sites are now hostile to crawlers other than Google's.

If we want real competition in the search engine space, Google's crawl should be opened up as a "common crawl", accessible to any company that wants to pay a nominal sum to access it for building an index.

<comment><USER17> What do you mean by hostile? Do they ban non-Google crawlers?

<comment><USER19> Yes because it's harder to verify the intentionality or harmoniousness behind the other bots.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> 'Both the Justice Department and a group of state attorneys general are likely to file antitrust lawsuits against Alphabet Inc.'s Google—and are well into planning for litigation, according to people familiar with the matter.

'The Justice Department is moving toward bringing a case as soon as this summer, some of the people said. At least some state attorneys general—led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican—are likely to file a case, probably in the fall, people familiar with the matter said.

'Much of the states' investigation has focused on Google's online advertising business. The company owns the dominant tool at every link in the complex chain between online publishers and advertisers. The Justice Department likewise is making Google's ad technology one of its points of emphasis. But it is also focusing more broadly on concerns that Google uses its dominant search business to stifle competition, people familiar with the matter said.

'Details about the Justice Department's legal theories for a case against Google couldn't be learned.'

<comment><USER21> The case against Google is "whatever we can throw together to pressure them to stop pushing end-to-end encryption we can't break". Google is by far the biggest proponent of this, and they have both the most popular browser and some of the most popular sites on the Internet, so they can very easily do so.

Whether you think Google is a monopoly or not, and whether you think they've done harm with that monopoly or not, I think this case is going to do net harm to Internet security.

<comment><USER20> What are you referring to when you say: 'Google is by far the biggest proponent of this [end-to-end encryption]'? In what way do you mean?

<comment><USER21> Google has done a great deal of work to push and early-adopt new web security standards, including QUIC (which inspired HTTP/2 and became HTTP/3), by changing the Chrome browser, Android, Google services, etc. They've also heavily pushed Certificate Transparency. And they've pushed for device encryption, as well, on both Android and Chrome OS. Those and many others are technologies that better support a web without backdoors and devices without backdoors.

I'm not necessarily suggesting that they've done the most work in all those areas, and _many_ others are doing critical work, some of which should get a lot more attention than it does. But Google is literally the _biggest_ proponent, insofar as they can push it the most quickly because they control the most endpoints.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I will continue to believe that this is another tentacle of William Barr's political harassment of Google and tech in general until he leads the same crusade against other 'monopolies' of the same degree like Comcast, Apple, Boeing, Amazon, United Airlines, etc.

<comment><USER23> Not saying google isn't a monopoly, it classically is, same with facebook. But I wonder if Goog wasn't a majority "blue" company would he aggressively go after them. The problem is there are so many oligarchy's controlling industries. Chips, well its a two or three company game(intel, amd, ARM). Lets look at airlines, well its united, delta, american etc. Communications(cell phones), ATT, Verizon, Sprint/Tmobile. America is increasingly becoming a land of large companies controlling industries where the consumer almost always loses, think higher prices due to less competition. I point out google/facebook as they are the only companies in their space (search, social media) that control more than 75% of the space by themselves.

<comment><USER24> > But I wonder if Goog wasn't a majority "blue" company would he aggressively > go after them.

"Majority blue" is in a majority of their employees vote Democrat? That's just what happens when you're headquartered in California, in a metro area, with a workforce that skews younger.

I don't think that Google is somehow pushing liberal objectives in a meaningful way.

<comment><USER25> Yes it does: [https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/dan-gainor-yes-google- censor...](https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/dan-gainor-yes-google-censors- conservatives-even-liberal-journalists-now-admit-it)

A study showed that Google News returned links to CNN vastly more often than links to Fox News, even though Fox News has triple the market share of CNN.

See also censoring of YouTube videos: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-let- google-get-away-with-c...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-let-google-get- away-with-censorship-11565132175)

> How else to explain why Google has restricted more than half of our 15 > videos that are pro-Israel—even one by former Canadian Prime Minister > Stephen Harper?

Google may or may not be doing this intentionally; it may be some byproduct of the algorithm plus unconscious bias from left-leaning Googlers. But the result definitely pushes liberal objectives. Your typical Googler reviewing YouTube videos living somewhere like San Francisco simply isn't equipped to figure out what is and isn't within the mainstream of acceptability.

<comment><USER26> Might be based on user preference influencing weighting for search results. I've know I've personally done all I can to block Fox News and other low quality sources from Google News.

<comment><USER25> Fox News is by a large margin the #1 cable news network. If search results were weighted based on user preferences you'd expect it to show up more, not less.

<comment><USER26> There might be less overlap between people who passively leave their TV running on Fox News and people looking up articles on the internet than you think. It's ranked #21 in News and Media sites[1]. CNN is ranked ninth, so actually it'd be pretty questionable if Fox News were returned in search results more than CNN.

[1] [https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/category/news-and- me...](https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/category/news-and-media)

<comment><USER25> Why is that the correct metric to use? CNN is a global news outlet, while Fox is primarily domestic. Unsurprisingly, CNN ranks highly on a measure of global website visits. What does that have to do with preferences in the US?

I mean, one possibility is that Google's algorithms are causing the politics of web site visitors people in France to affect the search results of people in Kansas. That seems like an unintentional form of pressing liberal agendas.

<comment><USER26> You can drill down into US traffic, sure (and I'm sure Google delivers results that are ranked appropriate to region), but Fox still doesn't win there - it's beaten by Huffington Post, CNN, Google News, and Yahoo News.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This antitrust case is the most straightforward one for prosecutors to win. It's been a long time coming and the FTC would have brought one during the Obama administration if they weren't so captured by the tech industry and Google in particular [1][2]. I expect Google will lose their antitrust cases globally. Cases against other tech companies like Facebook and Amazon seem less certain, but I haven't really thought about antitrust theories too deeply for them.

[1] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-u-s-antitrust- probe-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-u-s-antitrust-probe-of- google-1426793274)

[2] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323689604578221...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323689604578221971197494496)

<comment><USER28> Isn't settlement far more likely than losing all the way through appeals? And in what way is it straightforward? Does it not require a new interpretation of antitrust law? Google isn't using monopoly power to increase prices for consumers.

<comment><USER29> >Google isn't using monopoly power to increase prices for consumers.

This is whole reason for the criminal trial. If they can prove Google stifled competition in the advertising business, it is going to be a cut and dry case.

<comment><USER30> Facebook and Google only account for 50% of all digital ad spending online, so clearly there are lots competition, it's just fragmented.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> [https://archive.md/UOrGM](https://archive.md/UOrGM)

</comment><comment><USER32> Amazon and Facebook should be next. Break them all up with extreme prejudice and put strict new anti-trust laws around acquisitions in place for the future.

We're going to do this and open technology back up to innovation and progress, or just watch the tech giants continue to grow in power and abusiveness year after year while new startups continue to decline.

<comment><USER11> Break them up into what?

<comment><USER33> If you were going to bother, you'd split Amazon and AWS. Amazon becomes mostly a retail company again. Without the AWS subsidy margins, they'll be down to retail margins and the ad business (with ads, it's plenty). They can perhaps keep the gadgets, splitting every major aspect apart might be going too far.

AWS is a $400 to $600 billion market cap company right now if it were trading on its own, based on its operating income and the insatiatable market demand for anything cloud. The ticker is even available conveniently. They'll get to $150+ billion in sales and $25+ billion in operating profit in the next six to seven years (average of 21% annual growth over seven years; very much within reach). It might approach being a trillion dollar company a decade from now (at MSFT type multiples).

You'd split Facebook and Instagram as the most obvious separation line (and then do something with WhatsApp, it can be spun off or go with either or; FB already has messenger, so it probably shouldn't go with that entity).

Instagram is a $100+ billion publicly traded company on its own plausibly. There is some question on erosion in both FB and Instagram once you detach them from eachother. They both lose a huge protective moat and cross promotion (Instagram has become a lot more mature at this point, it'll be more at risk to userbase erosion going forward, versus say five years ago; and FB is definitely at high risk for userbase erosion with fewer moats).

<comment><USER34> I think the sum of the parts would end up being worth more than the single entity. Which would make Uncle Jeff worth even more. Not that I care.

<comment><USER35> Happened with Rockefeller so probably

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Do DOJ rules only apply to Google's operations in the US?

Could DOJ also do this to overseas-based companies that operates in the U.S.?

Say you break up Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc., and people begin to adopt the platforms like say, Baidu, TikTok, Alibaba, etc. which grow to 90%+ market dominance. Can DOJ bring antitrust lawsuits against Alibaba?

<comment><USER37> Huawei don't even sale their stuff in the US and look at where we are now. DOJ won't just bring the case they'll also find the proverbial WMD in Iraq.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The big one is Amazon. The revenue from AWS funds the ability for them to crush the high street on the shopping side. They should be forced to sell off AWS as a separate company.

<comment><USER39> This is all beneficial for the consumer, no?

Having a competitive advantage is not illegal. Someone correct me, but isn't the law's intent to protect people from abuse of monopolistic power? Which wouldn't be the case here.

<comment><USER40> The laws intent is debated. Some think it is there to protect consumers. Others to protect free enterprise and eliminate the ability to manipulate a marketplace - pro consumer or not.

Lately, the outlook of protecting consumers has won out in the US, as that is what the Supremes laid out as a determining factor in the later half of the 20th century.

But it wasn't always that way. And the laws aren't written that way.

In my opinion, focusing on consumer benefit is a red herring. We are all both consumers and producers. An economy full of companies shutting out competition through market manipulation may be good when I'm trying to buy something, but it's bad when I'm trying to find work, because they can dictate whatever terms they desire in that half of my participation in the economy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> While it's probably true that most of the tech companies have some form of platform monopolies, William Barr, out of all people, is not to be trusted. Hatchet man through and through.

The motives here are entirely political. Notice that the ISPs, telecom industry in general, defense industries are left out of this discussion.

Tech companies lean left, largely donate to the Democrats, and have been the focus of conservative groups for years as they are considered "biased" towards those on the Left. Like many things about Trump's administration, it's about revenge against those who oppose him, be they companies, state or individuals.

</comment><comment><USER42> I think to myself how I would probably be just fine if the Google search engine became a public service tomorrow and all advertisements were removed, or perhaps only a small area of the page were allowed to be used to make enough money to pay the costs of upkeep.

I'm reminded of how I was so enamored by the internet during the age of the directory. Humans assembled information to share with each other, and there were different search engines you could use as well. It was just so much more interesting at the time.

There are still wonderful examples of information being assembled by humans like Wikipedia. But these types of sites struggle to have enough money to operate, while other companies just dominate everything, especially anything that involves money. That's how the market works.

But there are certain things the way having libraries, police, firefighters, maybe you can health insurance, where if profit is the only thing that's going to be considered, it just creates a society that is less worthwhile. Perhaps the search engine needs to be considered a public service.

<comment><USER43> Right. Just like how publicly funded broadcasters have never promoted any kind of propaganda, a publicly funded search engine will be politically neutral in every way. Who funds this public service? The US? Everyone? Well I don't live in the US, why should I have to fund your public service? What if I don't want to use Google, but DuckDuckGo instead?

(You see, the arguments go on and on...)

Private sector companies done right (aka incentives align correctly) are inherently more trustworthy than public sector.

Disclosure: I do work for Google, but I've held these opinions for a long time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Just in time for the elections! Pretty transparent.

</comment><comment><USER45> Google has achieved its market position through providing a service its customers want to use. They have not restricted any competitor. Anyone can easily use another search engine, and Google does nothing to stop them.

The US government's increasing hostility towards peaceful trade is alarming. Google is one of America's greatest business successes of this century.

</comment><comment><USER46> It's election session, corporate clients need to pay their dues.

</comment><comment><USER47> Regardless of any one's opinion about this being right or wrong, good or bad, Google has spent enormous resources preparing for this moment. From lobbying efforts to the Alphabet restructuring, Google has been acutely aware of this possibility years ago.

This will not be an easy case for the states.

</comment><comment><USER48> AWS needs to be spun. That's the largest enabler for a monopolistic company I can think of right now.

</comment><comment><USER49> I think this was a long time coming. However, I don't trust the current administration's motives for doing it. My instinct is that this is just some behind-the-scenes string pulling to eliminate an entity that is seen more as a political threat than an economic one.

</comment><comment><USER50> Its interesting that Google is the first target here. From my anecdotal experience the last decade has been.

Content discovery: Google Reader -> (Twitter, Facebook, Apple Podcasts) Chat: Google Talk/Hangouts -> (Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Imessage, Facetime, Zoom) Product Search: Google -> Amazon Video: Youtube -> (Youtube, Prime Video, Apple TV, Netflix, Tiktok)

A lot of these examples are big tech -> big tech but still if anything it seems like the rest of the FANG that have grown their businesses.

Obviously any lawsuit doesnt need to win over consumers, but personally I could care less who owns what in adtech.

</comment><comment><USER51> Looking at that picture, it's amazing how much more put-together Sundar Pichai is than Bill Gates. Some of that might be their individual personalities, some might be that the tech industry has grown up a bit.

</comment><comment><USER52> About fucking time. Search is the big one but please don't neglect Android and Chrome.

And take Apple to task as well - their app store policies and new app signing requirements for OSX are absurd.

Amazon has just started abusing it's monopoly so they'll be in the next antitrust wave I imagine and get away here.

Don't even get me started on Whatsapp.

Consistently anti-user and competition crushing behaviour in tech should be dealt with forcefully. Not some 5 billion $ chickenshit fine please.

<comment><USER53> I don't care about search. This should be about chrome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Why not Apple????

I don't understand. Apples has more than 50% of the phone marketplace AND locks everything down. They also have twice the revenue of Google.

<comment><USER55> Apple has 10% of the market, depending on where you look. The high penetration in NYC and SF is an aberration.

<comment><USER56> They have 45% in the US. The fact that only approved apps can be installed should be taken to court.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> one thing I always have a hard time understanding. What if a tech giant is considered a Monopoly but it makes my - as a consumer - life easier? I mean having flights tool readily available near Google Search which helps me quickly find a cheap flight without upselling me with hotels and car rentals etc on aggregators like Expedia is something I love and makes my experience better.

<comment><USER58> You're not a consumer though, you're the product.

Google needs to sell eyeballs, so it creates products for free (subsidized by ads) and along the way destroys competition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Anyone know of any reasons DOJ might be going after Google for reasons unrelated to antitrust issues?

Globally, how does breaking up Google benefit the US?

</comment><comment><USER60> I think it's kind of funny that there was an article today about Google's Pixel division being disjointed and not integrated enough with the Android division.

Maybe part of the reason for the publics perception of Google's teams and divisions seemingly operating in an independent and chaotic manner is a way of minimizing the attack surface for antitrust accusations.

<comment><USER61> Integration is hard. The amount of work to keep good integration between all services in a business grows as the square of the number of services. Missing "obvious" integrations is just a natural consequence of being large.

<comment><USER62> > The amount of work to keep good integration between all services in a > business grows as the square of the number of services

That's true if each of the services directly integrates with each of the other services—or, more generally, if the number of integrations per service grows proportionally to the total number of services.

But the number of service interactions per service seems, IME, to increase sublinearly with number of services, and a decreasing marginal rate.

<comment><USER61> Even the effort of being on the lookout for whether two services should naturally integrate with each other scales superlinearly. Eventually you reach a point where most teams don't even know of the existence of most teams.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> I think some antitrust enforcement in tech is overdue. But it needs to be applied broadly and fairly across the entire industry. Singling out single companies is just picking winners and losers.

Making big acquisitions much more difficult and reviewing the big acquistitions of the last decade would be the right place to start in my opinion.

<comment><USER64> Thankfully USA has provisions codified in law for this kind of thing. It was famously enforced against Microsoft. Now enforce it against Google. And then do it against Facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> What happens to the stock if it's actually broken up? Another split or will the stock price just go down?

</comment><comment><USER66> If this sets a precedent to sue say the telcos or banks or oil companies, I'm all for it.

</comment><comment><USER67> I'm sure I don't need to point it out but:

If we believe for a moment, this is a play against Google's liberal position, or at the very least Google's employees liberal outlook.. (I will try to pull up references).

Lets say it's true: These actions are by all accounts the same as the old communist states.. Only this time they're under the guise of legal proceedings which have some precedent. Americans would usually be so alergic to the idea of such a thought that there would be uproar.. But nationalism and faith in a leader/idea has prevailed.

I would argue that it's super rich for the Justice Dept to be worried about antitrust all of a sudden, as a European, I've been fortunate to be protected far better than the US over the years by why of data protection laws. Also knowing Google and other major tech companies penchant for moving their headquarters abroad (Ireland for example), its super interesting to see a swift interest in antitrust..

The US has had, and still does I believe, a huge fight to get chip & pin on debit and credit cards because of insurance liability.. But hey.. Those tech companies.. Gotta get them first.

I'm no tinfoil hat wearer, but if it walks like a duck .

</comment><comment><USER68> Tech is an area where the contradictions inherent in the liberal approach to regulating companies are most clear. Liberal theories of nice capitalism require multiple competing companies on "fair" grounds. But it is obviously annoying and inefficient to have market competition in software most of the time - once a tool is developed, it's nearly free for 100% of people to use it rather than 50%, and it's crucial that all such tools interoperate nicely. Hence why various walled-off social media platforms are annoying and people are squeezed into at most only a couple for a given purpose. When right wingers point out that anti-trust stuff is inefficient, to an extent they're right.

The rational thing is to have a "monopoly" that isn't evil. But that means that democratic control shouldn't be after-the-fact, external regulation (shown time and time again to be insufficient and generally bought off) but fundamental to the operating of these companies. In essence, Google makes the case for democratic management of production - socialism - very clear.

But the other important part of this theory is it's not just about "what would be nice to have" in some utopian sense. Larger companies have competitive advantages that cause them to grow even faster - some real economies of scale, more political heft, greater bargaining power. This leads to the system being inherently unstable and tending towards concentration, which is apparent in pretty much every sector of tech. Trying to permanently reverse this trend through anti-trust is as nonsensical as suggesting people go back to living in the woods; it is in opposition to the fundamental trends inherent in market economies. The only way we can move is forward, to the resolution of these contradictions by working class ownership of all by all.

<comment><USER68> To try to preempt one counterargument: such a system doesn't mean we can no longer have "competing" software projects that do similar things if it is beneficial to compare different approaches. We can easily do that if it's better overall. But in such a case, each approach to a given software problem would be fully open, and developed in coordination with the others and with an understanding of their successes and pitfalls, to maximize productivity. This wouldn't be siloed-off, hostile competition but a scientific, coordinated approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> They'd me much better off having them open source YouTube and/or Gmail. I don't really think Google as a whole is an evil corporation, and there are a lot worse companies out there with a clear monopoly.

</comment><comment><USER70> I can't help but think that fighting big tech with anti trust approaches is like fighting the T-1000 with a katana. You can win a few fights, but it just reassembles itself because they will outsmart the challenge adapt to the new situation.

If you want real change then you got to be more radical than just separating Google search from Gmail or Instagram from Facebook.

I have no idea how, but the goal should be to change their incentives.

</comment><comment><USER71> We need to replace the Google platforms with distributed public ones.

</comment><comment><USER72> Wonder how long before the DoJ focuses on Amazon too.

</comment><comment><USER73> It's funny how Microsoft has learned that anti-trust has nothing to do with competition and is 100% politics and public perception. Just sell to other businesses and you can do whatever you want.

</comment><comment><USER74> Is it possible this is politically motivated?

</comment><comment><USER75> Everyone, breathe a sigh of relief.

</comment><comment><USER76> It seems that all the recent cases by the DoJ have been motivated more by a desire to poltically pander than solid legal precedent.

</comment><comment><USER77> Good article/video.

</comment><comment><USER78> About time. We need to claim back the free web from corporates like Google and Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER79> sells a few $ billion in shares for the rainy day fund. buy some treasuries, wait for a few quarters.

</comment><comment><USER80> I really hope they start splitting tech giants up. It would be a boom for the economy, jobs, and create much needed competition.

<comment><USER81> > It would be a boom for the economy

Why? Are they inefficient? Have their resources been mis-allocated?

> jobs

For the sake of jobs? That pay more or less?

> create much needed competition

Are they charging too much?

<comment><USER82> It's dangerous for us all to be so dependent on a few companies. I doubt that's what motivates the DoJ in this case, but right now, if you have a problem with Google, you have to post a _cri de coeur_ on Twitter or Hacker News and hope it embarrasses somebody at Google enough to take action on your behalf.

More competitors in the advertising and search space would certainly help, or at least keep the situation from getting worse.

As for Amazon, the antitrust enforcers should have come down on them like a ton of bricks the moment it appeared that they were leveraging internal business intelligence to compete with their own sellers. I use Amazon constantly, I have an enormous amount of respect for them, and I value their services a great deal, but come on. There's no point in even having antitrust laws if they don't apply in this instance.

<comment><USER83> Re: Amazon, many companies do the same thing (e.g. CVS, Target, Costco). With Costco in particular, Kirkland products are higher quality and cheaper than the competition in almost all categories they are in, which is a benefit to me as a consumer. Should Kirkland be broken off just because other companies can't compete with it? If not, what's the justification for Amazon?

<comment><USER82> The victims are the third-party sellers. Store brands are a completely different subject. They are purchased and licensed from the manufacturers.

Do you think Costco has a factory making paper towels someplace, next door to their factory making alkaline batteries?

<comment><USER83> So you're saying it's okay for Amazon/Costco to put up Amazon Basics/Kirkland, so long as they're paying someone else to make it for them?

<comment><USER82> I don't see why not, but admittedly I haven't thought it through any further than that.

The comparison with store brands doesn't really work because Costco and Sam's and Target don't invite third-party sellers to build their businesses on what amounts to sharecropped shelf space. Procter & Gamble and Berkshire Hathaway can hold their own in any negotiations with Costco and Amazon. For small businesses, the situation is more like the complaints we always hear about Apple's app store, where the company buys or builds their own first-party competitors in categories that prove unexpectedly successful.

Dirty pool, but legal enough... at least as long as you (a) don't hold a monopoly on distribution, or aspire to do so; and (b) didn't just get back from Washington, DC where you told Congress that you didn't do this. Both of these factors are problematic with Amazon, IMO. It's true that they don't hold a monopoly on distribution, technically speaking, but where else are third- party sellers supposed to turn?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> This is good to see as there has been tons of posts here on HN detailing Google abusing their power in the last few years.

Prior to I'm guessing 2013 to 2015, Google to many was viewed as the company who actually did no evil & a dream company to work.

Maybe them absorbing other company's and their cultures affected them?</comment>


Converting objects to hash signatures in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://kuby.ca/converting-objects-to-hash-signatures-in-javascript/ <comment><USER2> If you're doing this in a serious setting, use a stable JSON stringification (like json-stable-stringify) that sorts object keys, and then take the SHA of the resulting string.

Better collision properties, easier to implement, and a cryptographic hash to boot, just as long as you don't have circular references and only care about the serializable "contents" of an object.

<comment><USER3> It would be nice to have a library that had es6 data structures such as set, but supported object hash codes using a technique like this. That's a weird thing missing in the js standard lib.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> To make stuff like this work in all scenarios, you have to have to implement your comparator function in your class, but also all members in that class need to have that comparator defined as well. Then, when you call your comparator in the object you want to compare, the comparator will also call the comparators in the members, and these in their own members recursively until you get all the way to the end.

In addition, the containers need to have these same comparators, so all your data structures will need to be wrapped or redefined (arrays, hashmaps, etc).

It's much harder than it appears on the surface. You may get cases of infinite recursion in cases of mutual references. For a quick and dirty comparison, you can convert both objects to JSON and compare those strings. In fact the JSON string, if made to be deterministic, can exactly fulfill this function of this "hash" which is used to compare two objects.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's a good practice to have a way to compare objects anyway, and it should be standardized, like __hash__ in Python or hashCode in Java.

Even a basic comparison between two nested arrays is work in JS, so we need articles like this for things we use day to day. It's weird that the orgs building the standard think that a common promise API is a priority, but a decent namespace system or a way to manipulate builtin datastructures without 3rd party lib isn't.

<comment><USER6> I would hate to have to debug a scenario where this type of comparison gives an incorrect result.

I seem to remember the early days of Java where hashCode for string only looked at the first few characters - which had amusing results when storing URLs.

<comment><USER5> Well, I'm sure it can't be worse than debugging a code using == instead of ===: at least you can look at the implementation :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was waiting for people to say something first. I was sure I was missing something. But for the love of God, that's horrible! Not only what ermir said, but what about collision in 32 bits? It's only 4 billion entries. I keep thinking I should do something in Node to learn, then I read stuff like this. Is this Javascript, the Good part, or the other part? I can't tell.

<comment><USER8> Additionally, if any of your class's members include the separator character, you can end up with possible collisions.

<comment><USER9> And it treats null as undefined as the empty string.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I tend to just use json-stable-stringify to get a consistent representation of JS objects. Then can hash or compare that.

Browser:

        const crypto = window.crypto || window.msCrypto; // IE11
        return window.crypto.subtle.digest('SHA-256', stableStringify(obj));

Node:

        require('crypto')
          .createHash('sha256')
          .update(pwd)
          .digest('base64');

[1] [https://www.npmjs.com/package/json-stable- stringify](https://www.npmjs.com/package/json-stable-stringify)

</comment><comment><USER11> This feels like cargo culting of Java's hashCode (or similar) to me. As I understand it, hashCode is used as an optimization in the implementation of data structures like hash maps and sets, not as the primarily equality check, since collisions can occur.

It would be simpler, faster, and more correct (no chance of collisions) to just implement an isEqual method.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'd prototyped this solution as well for deep object comparisons, storing the hash in a weakmap, so hashes could be garbage collected as the Objects themselves, which act as keys, are collected; this also solves any potential infinite recursion, as the same object key points to the same value, and you could terminate after a collision there.

That said, why are we doing this and where is our native isEqual method?

</comment><comment><USER13> Fine but please don't hang new methods off the Object prototype (or other built ins). We used to do that and it made a terrible mess.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you handle internationalization in your app? - <AUTHOR>

Just curious, what techniques do people here use to handle internationalization?  Do you use a database?  How do you manage graphical assets, etc? <comment><USER2> I cry and hope it magically happens while I'm not looking.

But seriously I have not really addressed i18n in my apps yet. I would say how you go about it is going to depend at least a bit on your framework/programming language. I'm using Ruby on Rails for my apps so I would probably just follow the generally accepted RoR best-practices on 18n which dictates using the file system and YAML translation files based on keys that you use in your app (at least the last time I looked that was the best practice).</comment>


Fit: a variable font that makes text fit - <AUTHOR> https://djr.com/fit/ <comment><USER2> Very cool. I would love to hear the story about it's development,

If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good 'Show HN'. Show HN guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I should work on a blog post about its development.

Sorry to be a HN newb...does it make sense to repost it with "Show HN" at the beginning of the title? Or just something to consider for next time?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow.. the font has impact! May not be the most readable, but has a lot of character. Perfect for a message like "STOP" or "DONT"

</comment><comment><USER4> Ouch! Not readable at all, no cookie for you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, readability wasn't a high priority on this font. Since it is designed for high impact, large sizes and small amounts of text, for only small text at very large sizes, I hope that it will not be judged using the same criteria as a text font.

If you reconsider, my favorite is cranberry white chocolate chip! ;-)</comment></comment>


Vagrant High Sierra Workaround - hauck-d https://hauck.io/vagrant-high-sierra-workarounds/ <comment><AUTHOR> This isn't a _Vagrant_ issue, it's a _VirtualBox_ issue.

I've been using Vagrant with parallels since I installed High Sierra without issue.

Edit: yes, actually as mentioned below, it _can_ affect Vagrant in general (when using NFS), but it's only really with VirtualBox that you need to use NFS - with other Providers they have their own filesystem methods for the guest that actually work as expected.

<comment> hauck-d It's a vagrant with virtualbox with NFS issue.</comment></comment>


Mayday PAC's Candidates Fail to Win Elections - <AUTHOR> http://www.politico.com/story/2014/11/2014-elections-mayday-pac-larry-lessig-112617.html

<comment><USER2> If their candidates were underfunded and still won elections, it would disprove their hypothesis: that money strongly influences votes.

With only $10M, you'd obviously expect their candidates to lose. Those candidates aren't pledging to refuse money because they had a lot of it to begin with. There aren't any mainstream, well-funded candidates taking that pledge.</comment>


Redox-Flow Cell Stores Renewable Energy as Hydrogen - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/storing-renewable-energy-hydrogen-redoxflow-cell <comment><USER2> Good to see progress in large-scale energy sources. As always we ideally would like to know current and prospective costs per MWh of storage, per MW of capacity, round-trip efficiency, raw material mass flows and recyclability, and space requirements to fully judge. I understand that these metrics are not always reliably available in new issue tech. We should make a worksheet or something to help navigate these complex issues.

At least more people are talking about hydrogen as an energy carrier these days as opposed to a raw energy source, which was a huge misconception in the hydrogen excitement bubble of ~2005.

And a nitpick: headline should be about storing intermittent energy, not renewable energy. I personally hate the term renewable because not all renewable energy is low-carbon (e.g. most biofuels) and not everything that's sustainable for hundreds of millions of years is considered renewable (e.g. nuclear with breeder reactors or seawater uranium extraction).

</comment><comment><USER3> So how does this thing work?

> A redox-flow battery, in essence a reversible fuel cell, is typically made > up of a positive and negative electrolyte stored in two separate tanks. When > the liquids are pumped into the battery cell stack situated between the > tanks, a redox reaction occurs, and generates electricity at the battery's > electrodes.

> By comparison, the new invention has only one electrolyte, comprised of an > iron salt (rather than the more commonly used vanadium) dissolved in acid. > When hydrogen ions react with the iron salt (Fe2+), hydrogen gas is produced > at the platinum-coated carbon cathode in the battery stack.

> "We introduce iron as a middleman, so we can separate electrolysis into two > reactions," says Wang. Doing so allows one to control where and when to > reverse the reaction to produce electrical energy to supply to the grid. > "The system gives you flexibility... you could do the regeneration during > evening time when electricity prices are at a peak," he says.

> Regenerating Fe2+ in the reverse reaction also allows for the continuous > production of hydrogen gas, he says. "And because the hydrogen-iron cell > uses about half the voltage of a traditional electrolyzer, you can generate > hydrogen at a much cheaper cost if you do everything right."

It sounds to me like there are two things going on here.

Firstly, they have a redox cell which has one electrolyte, in which iron ions move between the II and III redox states.

Secondly, they have a way to shuffle electrons between iron and hydrogen, so they can take energy from the iron in the redox cell and use it to make hydrogen.

So, over short timescales, the system just works like a redox battery. No hydrogen is produced or consumed. But if the battery gets full, or they want hydrogen for other purposes, they can produce hydrogen, and in doing so, regenerate the iron.

Is that right? If so, what are the reactions here? What is the composition of the electrolyte, and what stops the iron ions decaying to the lower-energy state? How do they use iron ions to make hydrogen from water?

</comment><comment><USER4> Redis, Redux, Redox, and now Redox-Flow. My brain is getting a little confused now.

</comment><comment><USER5> So electrolysis has a thermodynamic efficiency currently at best at 80%. Fuel cells are 40-60% for the regeneration of the electricity.

I've heard that pumping water for gravitational potential energy is 90% end- to-end though.

I don't see a thermodynamic efficiency metric, so that's not encouraging.</comment>


CA housing bill targeting wealthy cities could rezone nearly all of Palo Alto - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-california-apartment-construction-density-palo-alto-20190422-story.html <comment><USER2> > Greg Schmid, a 78-year-old retired economist, said the region should slow > the expansion of large companies.

Slowing the expansion isn't good enough. Your city should have never allowed all of those offices if it wasn't going to allow a proportionate amount of housing.</comment>


Jawbone Raises $70M From JP Morgan - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/12/jawbone-raises-70m-from-jp-morgan-asset-management/ <comment><USER2> My Jambox is the most impressive piece of tech I've purchased this year. Smaller than I thought it would be, but plenty loud. If it was $99 instead of $199, I could see it taking a small chunk out of the iphone/ipod docking system market.</comment>


In-browser FLV decoding via Fragmented MP4 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/nareix/mama-hd <comment><AUTHOR> The README is written in Chinese so here are a few points from this project's README:

# Rationale

Using Flash to watch videos on Macbooks generates a lot of heat. Many Chinese video websites have near-zero support for HTML5 videos on PC/Mac browsers. The old method of using <video> and streaming from the mobile version sites can't get you 1080p videos.

# Rough Implementation

This project plays FLVs in browsers by slicing them into fragmented MP4 (fmp4) files. A set of Stream operations are defined in mediaSource.js, which in turn depends on ./flvdemux.js for demuxing the FLV and mux.js (from videojs) for various other functions. Uint8Array is used for speed.

The rest of the project consists mostly of UI (keyboard only), file-sneaking functions for video sites and things like flash blockers.

# Performance

20~40ms transcoding time for a 10s video segment on i5 2.9G.

# Availability

Available as Chrome extension "hoihfdmeofbkbbjpieicemdhmjgfdihm".</comment>


How to use Firebug on your iPad and iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://martinkool.com/post/13629963755/firebug-on-ipad-and-iphone

<comment><USER2> My friend Sky wrote an HTML/CSS debugger for iOS - <http://skyapp.co.uk/dbug/> \- it doesn't give you all the functions of Firebug, but it's very handy and easier to start than this.

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks like a pretty good last resort.

I find that majority of iPad issues can be solved by just resizing safari to the iPad dimensions. Most issues I come across appear on both platforms so troubleshooting isn't too bad.

<comment><USER4> It works well, except when you have to deal with a really mobile specific stuff (e.g. -webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio, -webkit-text-size-adjust) then you're left with no choice but to debug it on actual device (or in a simulator) although using Firebug on a small screen device is really awkward.

WebKit Remote Debugging[1] would be an ideal solution when it lands. For the time being, weinre[1] looks like a good (stopgap?) solution.

[1]: <http://www.webkit.org/blog/1620/webkit-remote-debugging/> [2]: <http://phonegap.github.com/weinre/>

<comment><USER5> We use Weinre for remote debugging of iPads and it has worked out very well for us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting. I wonder if this also works on the Android - the Transformer Prime might be a handy devel box.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is nothing new, there are plenty of tutorials on how to get bookmarklets onto iOS devices.

Souders created a nice bookmarklet a while back with I bunch of the top debugging / testing bookmarklets:

<http://stevesouders.com/mobileperf/mobileperfbkm.php></comment>


Full body of the user in virtual reality - <AUTHOR> We developed this prototype to have full body of the user in virtual reality without wearing sensors http://iarstore.azurewebsites.net/ . We're very interested in any kind of feedback for it... and if you'd like to enter our beta-tester team, that would be great! <comment><USER2> This seems great! How do you sign up as a beta tester?

<comment><AUTHOR> You go to our landing page [http://iarstore.azurewebsites.net/](http://iarstore.azurewebsites.net/) and click on the blue buttons, fill the form and then we'll send you the beta SDK in one day or two! If you can't download the beta for whatever reason, but want to keep you updated about our project, click the green buttons!</comment></comment>


Coinbase is monitoring your transactions. (Poorly) - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2q90m9/coinbase_is_monitoring_your_transactions_poorly/

<comment><AUTHOR> Coinbase closed account, accusing owner of buying cannabis seeds. Owner denies this, claims to live in Colorado where he'd rather buy cannabis legally at a brick & mortar store.</comment>


Cappuccino developer conference - <AUTHOR> http://cappcon.org/

<comment><USER2> Does anyone know the motivation for using Objective-J instead of vanilla JavaScript? Maybe it just makes things more comfortable for iOS developers who want to move to the web?

That's the major thing that would stop me from using Cappucino over SproutCore... I don't mind learning a new language if there's a compelling need for it, but I just don't see the point here. I'd love to be proved wrong though.

<comment><USER3> This is probably the best explanation available online [http://cappuccino.org/discuss/2008/12/08/on-leaky- abstractio...](http://cappuccino.org/discuss/2008/12/08/on-leaky-abstractions- and-objective-j/)

Also, objj is an extension to js, so "learning" it is not some monumental task, kind of like learning the latest additions made by ecmascript 5.

<comment><USER2> Thanks! I was just coming across that as you replied. It clears up a lot. The "syntax is not harder to learn than API" argument is compelling... although the "syntax is aesthetically better than API for certain features" argument doesn't really move me. Glibc and CLOS work quite well.

I think there's a tension right now in the web platform community about whether we're in the post-HTML+js world yet. Cappuccino, GWT, jqueryui, etc are all moving in that direction. But there's a tension between libraries that want to treat HTML+js like dumb rendering layer, and libraries that keep HTML+js as the developer-level workspace, and just extend it by adding API.

There are a lot of things that work really well in HTML+js (links, urls, scrolling, etc) that get screwed up as you add more post-HTML widgetry. So the developers of post-HTML tools eventually end up rewriting _everything_ HTML did in their new toolkit. The toolkits get better and better, but I have yet to see one that didn't break _something_ that HTML did well.

So it becomes an either/or proposition. Either I jump fully into Cappuccino, accept that it will break things about HTML and I will not be able to fix them, or I stay in the land of HTML, and I try to implement the cool stuff Cappuccino does (windowing, OO, advanced widgetry, etc) with HTML+js and whatever JS libraries I can find, but generally sick with The HTML Way wherever possible.

The thing is, I know what HTML sucks at. I have no way to know what Cappuccino breaks that HTML does well until I am waist-deep in a Cappuccino app. I think that makes it hard for me to jump.

And so my preference (although it's just a preference) is for small tools that add one thing to HTML+js, but they do it really well. So if I want to make a mobile app for iPhones, I want to start with a JS library that lets me make touch-slideable panes, that's incredibly fast and smooth, and that's it. I don't need it to create a whole complex windowing model, or re-implement HTML buttons in javascript, or anything like that.

But I feel like the tide is slowly turning... the post-HTML frameworks are getting better. At some point one will be good enough that I really can leave HTML behind. Maybe I'll try out Cappucino for my next weekend project and see how it goes.

<comment><USER3> Its important to note that you are describing two things here: Objective-J (a language extension to JavaScript) and Cappuccino (a framework built on top of Objective-J).

Objective-J is just a language that adds what we consider to be a lot of nice things to JS. You can use it and still keep HTML/CSS/etc (much like you would use CoffeeScript). Similarly, you can use it to, say, write command line apps for the terminal and never touch any web technology at all.

Separately, there is Cappuccino. I do not personally believe the situation to be either or (or not necessarily anyways). I think HTML and CSS are very powerful tools, given the right task (presenting documents). However, if I wanted to write super mario brothers, I would not miss lists and links, but would want strong graphical abilities. HTML has basically conceded this by adding the canvas element (which if you think about it goes against everything HTML is about -- semantic meaning). In the end, you should use the best tool for the task. For example, our GitHub issues app builds its chrome using Cappuccino, and displays the actual bug report as an HTMLView. No re- implementation of all of HTML, just literally loading HTML when we want it (Similar to how Mail's chrome is Cocoa, and the actual mail message rendering is an HTML WebView).

And, as you say at the end, of course it is only a matter of time until everything is "post HTML/JS". The fate of every language or framework is to either die or to be built on top of and abstracted away, there is no "last technology".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not a cappuccino user, but I'm glad to see that a client-side web framework has become adopted enough to warrant a conference. Hopefully we'll start to see a lot more of these pop up.

<comment><USER5> GWT has a fair number of sessions at google i/o as well - so not a dedicated conference, but a dedicated track at a conference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Lanyrd link for those interested: <http://lanyrd.com/2011/cappcon/>

</comment><comment><USER7> I honestly had no idea Cappuccino was still even a thing since Motorola bought 280 North. Didn't they kill development?

<comment><USER8> We just put out a new major release about a month ago. We're very much alive. :)</comment></comment>


Tesla that crashed in Autopilot mode sped up before hitting truck: police - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/24/tesla-that-crashed-in-autopilot-mode-sped-up-before-hitting-truck-police <comment><USER2> Tesla "Autopilot" cannot see stationary objects. It has a radar, but it is 1-D and low resolution. It uses this to localize other moving cars. In theory, it could use this to see a highway divider or firetruck it's about to hit, but since it's 1-D that would also mean that it would have to slam on the brakes when it sees an overpass coming up, because it can't tell the difference between an overpass and a highway divider or a firetruck. It can assume that overpasses aren't driving at 60mph, so it will see other cars. The Tesla algorithm is "look for lane markings and try to stay between them, and don't hit any moving vehicles. If there is any stationary object, including another a vehicle in your lane, the "Autopilot" will plow right into it. If they're not explaining this to customers, it's negligent.

<comment><USER3> But the Autopilot has cameras, and therefore it has 3+1D data (2D frames, 1D inferred depth from stereo or training, 1D time from frame diffs). Even with a 30fps frame rate at 60mph, two frames from a video feed would see the truck move closer by a meter. The network can be trained to distinguish a truck in the lane from an overpass, so those two frames should be sufficient to signal danger. Instead, the car accelerated over 70 meters before the human, again using just her eyes, applied the brakes.

This is an edge case, and clearly something that requires more training to avoid. The challenge in edge-case learning is to encounter them often enough, or perhaps create them artificially, and then to ensure the learning can be transferred and generalized to all similar situations.

<comment><USER4> This is not even the first time they hit a giant red stationary fire truck.

<comment><USER3> Seems like it happens whenever a car in front moves out of the way. It goes full stupid-cruise-control mode and just accelerates to the stored speed. Of course there's a lot of noise in terms of things in the stationary reference frame, but still, big red firetrucks don't exactly look like lane markings.

At the very least, as a driver, I'm slightly cautious when I see a car move out of the lane in front. I feel like the solution lies in: (a) separating the signal from the noise in the set of things moving with the ground, and (b) getting the car to 'understand' why other cars change lanes. Sometimes it's so they can avoid obstacles in the road. It almost feels like cars need to have a theory of mind of other cars. I certainly drive with an intuition of driver intentions stuck in my head.

<comment><USER4> The thing is Tesla will never be an autonomous car or a reliable semi- autonomous car with its current hardware. Elon needs to admit it (he insist, this isn't the case) and he needs to reliably convince his customers this isn't the case. Tesla needs to see a couple of cars before, in order to drive safely (these are no edge cases, this happens in real life a lot), but it can't see ahead without LiDAR but Elon insists they don't need LiDAR.

The problem is you can't have a pre-existing bias when working with this kind of technology, you need to be able to adapt to whatever changes that need to be made.

<comment><USER3> Well it's not completely clear to me that cameras can't look a few cars ahead. If we can, cameras can too. Maybe they're not smart enough yet, but I don't see the fundamental limitation. Apart from that, I agree that cheap + effective LIDAR would help significantly to get autonomous vehicles on the road now.

<comment><USER4> > If we can, cameras can too.

A camera is not a replacement of how our eyes work, how our brain distinguishes between objects and understand from prior experience and can make independent decisions on the fly. But neither does LiDAR, but with LiDAR and good machine learning (ie, Waymo), you can drastically improve the reliability of your autonomous system.

Elon is insisting on a no-LiDAR system at the same time advertising tesla autopilot as an autonomous system and has said multiple times that All Tesla on the road is already equipped with the hardware needed for fully autonomous driving. This is dangerously false.

There is not a single autonomous car out there (at least serious ones that we know of), that has a non-LiDAR system.

Reality Distortion Field is strong with Elon, Unlike Steve Jobs and Apple products, this one will kill people.

<comment><USER5> So I do a lot of work with both vision and lidar data, and am pretty intimately familiar with the public state of the art in terms of perception systems that rely on each or both, if not planning.

I don't think you need lidar.

I'm not saying that vision-only won't take longer, because it will, but I believe it'll probably happen unless the cost of lidar falls a great deal.

Have a look at, for example, "learning to see in the dark" (the CVPR 2018 one), DensePose (the FB research one) to get a sense of how quickly difficult problems are being solved.

<comment><USER4> The cost of LiDar has been falling for a while now: [https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/01/driving-around- without-...](https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/01/driving-around-without-a- driver-lidar-technology-explained/)

Waymo LiDAR is custom made and they cost a lot less than what is available in the market. [https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/01/googles-waymo- invests-i...](https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/01/googles-waymo-invests-in- lidar-technology-cuts-costs-by-90-percent/)

I don't think it's a cost, Elon has a personal bias, or maybe he didn't account for the fact that in the not so near future LiDAR cost will go down drastically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Tesla has no autopilot or self driving capabilities. It is just something called Adaptive Cruise Control and Lane Assist in other vehicles with some minor additions. Tesla's marketing gives the impression that it is much more, but it isn't.

<comment> bjelkeman-again After talking to quite a few drivers and driving thousands of miles on Auotopilot myself, I don't think people are confused by the name. It is pretty clear very quickly what the car can or can't do. I think people are poor at estimating risk and we would have these accident whatever you call these semi- autonomous features. The interesting thing for me is that despite the shortcomings of the current Autopilot, I wouldn't go back to a car without. It lowers the strain of driving sufficiently to really be worth it. And I am a driver with a hand on the wheel and eyes on the traffic, all the time.

<comment><USER7> Then tell me. Why do we hear news from Tesla cars all the time and none of VW, BMW, etc. where we had adaptive cruise control for quite some time?

<comment><USER8> Why do we see headlines every time an iPhone spontaneously combusts, but nothing when there are (isolated) incidents with Samsung, Huawei, LG etc.? Because one brand generates clicks, the others don't

<comment><USER9> Samsung phone combustion gets coverage. You may recall a while back where they had to recall a phone due to them bursting into flames, and some airlines specifically banned the combusting model.

<comment><USER8> I had that in mind, which is why I specified isolated incidents

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am now starting to fear being in front of a Tesla on the freeway, or on the streets.

Why? Because the idiotic driver might not even be paying attention to the road, and is dazing off and looking at the clouds, or his phone, instead of focusing on the car in front of him, or the surrounding traffic around him.

These Tesla crashes are not only a danger to the Tesla occupant, but, it is even more dangerous to the victim that the Tesla would hit! Because that victim can now suffer from whiplash, or worse.

<comment><USER11> The trouble is, I see a lot of drivers that aren't paying attention to the road, who are dazing off, who are looking at their phones/clouds whatever. The majority of them aren't driving Teslas. At least with a Tesla I know there's a backup system (the 'autopilot').

I'm not saying the Autopilot is 100% faultless/reliable. I am sure however that humans have a much higher chance of handling a situation badly than the autopilot, simply because they're human and humans do stupid shit.

<comment><USER10> Let's take a scenario. This seems to happen all the time on the freeway.

You're cruising down the freeway at 75 MPH. All of a sudden, traffic comes to a screeching halt.

There are 3 cars in this scenario. The first car is the one that slams on his brakes, and comes to a stop.

The second car, cannot stop in time, and he swerves out of the way, and safely gets into the adjacent lane. Close call, but he drives away safely.

The third car, is the Tesla, with the driver on Autopilot, and browsing Facebook on his iPhone. So, he is inattentive.

The whole sequence plays out in less than 5 seconds.

In this scenario, the third car, the Tesla, will not recognize the situation that the second car swerved out of the way. So the Tesla will collide into the first car at high speeds. The velocity of the impact kills all occupants inside the first car, and the third car, the Tesla. So, if both cars are full of occupants, then maybe up to 10 people are now dead.

The problem is that the Tesla does not have situational awareness. It cannot read the current road condition. It cannot see through the tinted windows of the 2nd car, to see that the first car has slammed on his brakes.

So, the accident severity of the Tesla, is much greater, than compared to a scenario where a human was driving the third car.

In this scenario, I think the human might be able to see the situation, and attempt to avoid it. Or to at least mitigate the severity of it. Like, he would slam on his brakes, or steer out of the way, or something. He might still collide with the first car, but probably at a much lower velocity, that all occupants of both cars can still survive.

It just seems that the severity of the accident with current robotic cars, just seems greater, than compared to when a human is the driver.

<comment><USER12> Now let's add a fourth car, a Toyota without TACC, whose driver is also browsing Facebook on his phone. This driver also does not recognize the situation and will collide into the first car at a high speed. Is this worse than the third car? No, probably not. In short, the assumption that a human driver without Autopilot is paying attention and will swerve out of the way is not a valid one. People drive distracted in traditional cars _all the time_.

BTW, from what I have heard, Teslas might actually be better at seeing through other cars than human drivers are, since radar can bounce in ways visible light can't.

<comment><USER9> A Toyota driver probably wouldn't put that much faith in a mere Toyota. Tesla drivers who are high on Elon's farts put that much faith in their cars.

"BTW, from what I have heard, Teslas might actually be better at seeing through other cars than human drivers are, since radar can bounce in ways visible light can't."

Or maybe not, since a Tesla couldn't even see a stopped fire truck.

<comment><USER12> People who drive normal cars are on their phones while driving _all the time_. There's no "probably" about it — I know lots of people who have had their cars hit by inattentive drivers. I myself got rear-ended by a guy who was honest enough to straight-up admit that he didn't see me stop because he was messaging on his phone.

Also, I'm not sure what connection you see between recognizing a stationary fire truck and seeing two cars ahead with radar. They seem like pretty different tasks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't get it.

"Autopilot" aka adaptive cruise control is going to continue failing since drivers think it's more than that.

More people are going to die in spectacular, headlining fashion.

Imagine if that was a schoolbus instead of a firetruck.

Even Tesla's "non-autopilot" crashes are front page news because it's such a story.

Every front page story whittles away a little at the magical Tesla brand.

A brand, which in the midst of production issues, capitalization issues, and leadership issues is their major asset that _could_ carry them to the other side.

Turn the thing off if hands aren't on the wheel, end of story.

<comment><USER14> > Turn the thing off if hands aren't on the wheel, end of story.

I assume you mean that Tesla should do this automatically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It irks me that not only this feature is called Autopilot, but it doesn't even come with a "beta" label. Gmail was in beta for like 5 years.

You go to Tesla's website and it greets you with (as of the time this comment was written):

"Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Cars"

"All Tesla vehicles produced in our factory, including Model 3, have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver."

Which gives the impression this car can drive better than one can, and gives little indication to the fact the _software_ is in active development even if the hardware for "full self-driving" is already there.

</comment><comment><USER16> As an autopilot regular, I hate reading stories such as this. Just last night I had a 150 mile drive in non-perfect conditions (light rain and dusk) and had Autopilot (v1 with a single camera) engaged for the vast majority of it. It is probably my favourite feature of my Tesla. It is significantly better than Audi's lane assist features I have used and genuinely reduces strain on long journeys. I now perform journeys without hesitation (sometimes looking forward to them coupled with a supercharger stop to recharge myself) when before I'd expect to arrive at my destination stressed and exhausted.

However, I will admit that to use Autopilot safely and effectively you MUST understand the system's inputs, what its behaviour is based on those input (and driver controlled variables) and what its limitations are. I am a software developer by trade and whilst I couldn't hope to replicate the autopilot software stack, I probably could write a detailed pseudo code representation of the systems behaviour (without factoring in sensor failure etc).

<comment><USER17> How much do they detail those inputs, variables, and limitations vs you making assumptions about them?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It seems fairly obvious me that an imperfect autopilot is worse than no autopilot at all, since it trains drivers to "relax" and let the computer drive when some non-trivial percentage of the time the autopilot will get things wrong.

It's unfortunate that there's no real way for there to be a perfect computer driver, and all the real world training data these things are collecting is needed to ever get close.

But if these systems keep making mistakes like this that seem "stupid" to humans, I suspect these things will be banned before long.

<comment><USER19> I agree. Moreover, it's obvious to me that an imperfect human pilot is worse than no human pilot at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > The driver of the vehicle, Heather Lommatzsch, 29, told police she thought > the vehicle's automatic emergency braking system would detect traffic and > stop before the car hit another vehicle.

> Police say car data show Lommatzsch did not touch the steering wheel for 80 > seconds before the crash. She told police she was looking at her phone at > the time and comparing different routes to her destination.

This is not news. This is someone not following the explicit instructions of the manufacturer to maintain control and awareness while driving. They choose to ignore those instructions and it resulting in a crash.

Replace "Telsa" with "Audi/VW/Toyota/Holden/Ford/GM using adaptive cruise control", and this doesn't make front page news.

aresant's comment below is spot on. "Turn the thing off if hands aren't on the wheel, end of story."

<comment><USER21> Audi/VW/Toyota/Holden/Ford/GM didn't name their feature "autopilot" though.

<comment><USER22> And don't advertise on tesla.com/autopilot that the feature is capable of driving itself.

<comment><USER23> In bold letters on the same page:

> Please note that Self-Driving functionality is dependent upon extensive > software validation and regulatory approval, which may vary widely by > jurisdiction. It is not possible to know exactly when each element of the > functionality described above will be available, as this is highly dependent > on local regulatory approval.

Are you suggesting that it's not the people's fault they can't get to the bottom of the marketing page before going out, buying a Tesla, ignoring obvious UI warnings, and driving it without knowing that it currently doesn't full drive itself?

<comment><USER24> Yes, it's not the people's fault, when there's a large video right there showing the car driving itself. The text makes it seem like it's just a "red tape" thing where autopilot is there like in the video but it just needs approval in your jurisdiction. If this marketing came from any other car company, you probably wouldn't be defending it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Why doesn't Tesla have an eye tracking camera that ensures the driver is watching the road? It would cost hundreds of dollars at most. Basic eye tracking is a solved problem and would ensure drivers are actually paying attention.

<comment><USER26> It's definitely not a solved problem in the real world. Eye tracking in the lab works great but in the real world there are lots of challenges. Low light levels at night, drivers wearing sunglasses, drivers squinting etc.

<comment><USER25> That's solvable: if it can't see your eyes, then you can't use Autopilot. That should still let the majority of people use Autopilot the majority of the time.

<comment><USER27> I want to wear sunglasses.

<comment><USER28> Your desire to wear sunglasses is a lower priority than the health of the people you share the road with.

<comment><USER29> So being blinded with autopilot on is safer than being able to see, but allowing the possibility of inattentiveness? That's ridiculous.

<comment><USER28> No. Your assumption that I'm saying that is, frankly, ridiculous. If you're being blinded, put the sunglasses on and turn Autopilot off. Of course, I doubt that eye-tracking works particularly well if you're squinting and averting your eyes anyway: the act of being attentive precludes being blinded in itself.

<comment><USER29> Why would the attentiveness monitor be tied to autopilot? Some modern cars without autopilot already have attentiveness monitors. It's ridiculous to require people not to wear sunglasses. Just for the sake of attentiveness monitors. Anybody driving east to west in the afternoon or west to east in the morning wouldn't be able to use it at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Hm. Any one hear willing to talk about the fact that the driver didn't had the hands on the wheel for 80 seconds before the crash and got away with "just" a broken foot?

<comment><USER9> "got away with "just" a broken foot?"

She's fortunate she didn't plow into the back of a church van full of kids instead of a fire truck. The kids would probably be dead thanks to the high speed impact of a 4,900 pound car.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think a lot of factors could be ironed out by a solid mathematical grasp of the problem, instead of letting customers become guinea pigs or running simulations and then deduce a blanket solution that looks okay in those average cases, a room with a bunch of mathematicians will surely state the problem, limits and solution in a infinitely:) more solid way. I have seen this happening with software countless times, spend the money on a math ph.d and save endless testing time with half guessed solutions where limit cases are ignored...etc.

</comment><comment><USER32> To be fair, the fact that the car increased speed just before the crash is entirely irrelevant here. It is not as if the car was some conscious agent being willfully reckless.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm an early adopter but I have no idea why anyone would early adopt self- driving or autopilot features, much less pay for it.

</comment><comment><USER34> Another one of those dreaded "autopilot" malfunction reports. When are people going to realize that an 'autopilot' system required to be supervised at all time is not something any non super-human driver is able to override timely.

<comment><USER17> When Tesla stops advertising it as such? Maybe also when the system aggressively disables itself when not under human supervision (hands on wheel)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The Darwin Awards are going to become a big Tesla advertisement.

</comment><comment><USER36> The use and marketing of the word "Autopilot" will go down in history as one of Tesla's biggest mistakes.

</comment><comment><USER37> Huh, I'm a little concerned with how much information they were able to collect and therefore possibly get her to admit she was looking at her phone instead of the road and hands on the wheel.

I hope she's got great insurance because that guy who got whiplash is probably going to get a bit of money.</comment>


Learning Machines and the Future of Academics - <AUTHOR> http://stochasticresonance.wordpress.com/2011/12/23/learning-machines-and-the-future-of-academics/

<comment><USER2> The idea of an 'open-source' replacement academia is compelling. Currently academia generally has partial transparency and a closed competitiveness between research groups, where replicating results is non-trivial (at least in the comp sci research field I am in where sharing source is not standard).

The analogy of a git-hub for experiments makes sense; research is about expanding knowledge freely. In contrast, the partial disclosure and under- sharing of tricks of the trade between research groups is about the entrenched interests of particular groups.

The article makes a strong case for a system that removes the inefficiencies of the status quo, that disrupts the current university system, because that institution is no longer serving its initial purpose as well as it could be.

However, what is less clear, is what financial system would provide incentives in the academia-github system? Would the traditional advisor/advisee relationship provided in PhD programs also be substituted for something else? Would more people be doing volunteer research instead of being paid for it?

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I think the financial incentives lie at the heart of it. While there are people who are just jerks, a lot of the jerkish behavior is because it's incentivized: if you're thrown into a hyper-competitive environment where you're pitted against other researchers for a limited number of tenure slots and grant funding, it doesn't encourage sharing. You _could_ share that great data set you collected, but all you'll get in return is some fuzzy thanks, while if you keep it proprietary you might get another 2-3 journal papers out of it, which'll get you tenure+grants.

I think fixing those incentives is the key to fixing that. Alas, I see it mostly going in the other direction: universities are moving more and more towards a quantified business-type model, where professors are judged wholly on money brought in and publication metrics, and the competition is only getting fiercer. If someone wants to be open/sharing/generous with research _and_ have a job, it's not impossible, but it's fighting against the system more than with it.

<comment><USER4> Rational agents at a Nash Equilibrium.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Blockify – Blocks of Portable HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP - <AUTHOR> https://blockify.co/pro/

<comment><USER2> The "pro" trend for code libraries is driving me mad. If you want something like this, but without the crazy-pants PHP, check out Atomify: [http://github.com/atomify/atomify](http://github.com/atomify/atomify)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow I was annoyed at how few information was available at the actual product on that page. Then I saw you linked to the pro page with only "Pro" related information.

The real homepage is here: [https://blockify.co/](https://blockify.co/) :)

(just three free blocks? Really.. :()

<comment><AUTHOR> More are being added before the end of the week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have been looking at the site for several minutes, but I was unable to understand what the product does.</comment>


Tech's push to teach coding isn't about kids' success – it's about cutting wages - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/21/coding-education-teaching-silicon-valley-wages <comment><USER2> I sincerely believe we need a higher level of literacy around computers.

If you look at historical trends, 14th century Milan - knowing how to add and subtract was a specialized skill; General reading and writing skills coincided with the availability of general formal education; In the 1970s, typing pools disappeared, and any worker is expected to be able to not only read and write, but type. Not long after that, ability to operate a computer becomes an entry level skill. Like it or not, the ability to automate work that you are a domain expert without going through intermediaries like business analyst and programmers ought to be a basic skill. It might not be "coding" as we know it, but it'll involve some ability to reason and compose basic operations.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article was really insightful. I never thought of the tech industry's pushing for coding education from this POV.

</comment><comment><USER4> I thought it was already well known that the whole push for teaching kids to code as well as all the other initiatives to increase diversity was all about expanding the labor supply.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is about catching people with an aptitude. It seems to be a small percetage in all races/sexes/geographies, so valuable. It sucks to be one.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yes, it's about labor costs. All else equal, more supply = lower price.

<comment><USER7> What really surprises me is that people on this site rarely discuss unionization in tech. This is a must if we wish to keep wages high.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I thought that was obvious?

</comment><comment><USER9> Two birds, one stone?</comment>


Sexual Economics: The Price of Sex at USC - <AUTHOR> http://www.neontommy.com/news/2015/02/price-sex-usc <comment><AUTHOR> The thesis referenced in the article can be accessed here: [http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p15799coll3...](http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p15799coll3/id/445745)

Full-disclosure: Sean, the author of the thesis, and I are friends. I was also once his policy debate coach, back in the day. The paper has been out for a while and Nathaniel Haas's article has already received plenty of traction in the press. So I would hardly consider this a plug.

I'm interested in the community's thoughts on the subject. (Though I highly recommend reading the paper and not just the article.)

[Edit note: communities was changed to community's]</comment>


How do you mock-up / sketch your web app? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> We've been using plain paper & pen to create mock-ups, but it's kind of hard to collaborate online (many interactions of scan-email-comment).

So far I liked this one: <http://www.mockupscreens.com> . There's another one called Axure, but it's quite expensive: <http://www.axure.com> . I tried Denim a while back (<http://dub.washington.edu/denim/> ), but it's a pain to use with a mouse (Denim was designed for tablet-pcs). Drawing tools are ok, but they do not have ready-to-use UI components like buttons, drop-downs, etc... Visio has UI components, but it's expensive.

Are you using any tools for web app mock-ups?

<comment><USER2> MS Groove is pretty decent ....

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I use Adobe InDesign - it allows you to put together a library of symbols and shapes that you can re-use to build your mockup very quickly. Once you've put in a little bit of work getting these elements together you're good to go. It also allows you to add additional pages, auto page number, import images... you name it. Probably not what Adobe had in mind, nor is it a cheap option but it's certainly versatile.

</comment><comment><USER4> pencil, paper or software, words or images?

Pen, pencil and paper are fluid, cheap and unconstrained. What do I mean by unconstrained? Well it has to do with brain structure. Drawing visually uses very primitive parts of the brain that efficiently processes information with little interpretation overhead. So your ability to transfer ideas using pencil to paper work with diagrams (images) better than words. [0] Your ability to create your ideas is superior [1] with pen and paper than some software tool.

My personal preferences are to use pen/paper, then white-board and marker, camera and lego. [2] Then text (electronic) and only then to some form of constrained tools like a diagramming tool, methodology.

Reference

[0] Curt McNamara, 'Applied Systems Thinking '

<http://www.tc.umn.edu/~ahler002/TFTCON.HTM>

[1] WIth limitations most of them relate to the proximity of your team.

[2] Notice they are all tactile stuff. They don't work with things that require numbers or complicated structures very well.

</comment><comment><USER5> I use Photoshop to mock up the wireframes. I found it to be an excellent way to get your thoughts down visually and quickly adjust on the fly. With a PS document's layers and commenting tools, it works well for ongoing, collaborative changes. And once it is to your liking, you can easily make it a final draft for implementation.

</comment><comment><USER6> I scribble a very rough sketch on a notepad. Once I have a reasonable idea of the layout and functionality of a page, I just move right into rails and iterate from there. You get realism and real code that way. Moderate proficiency with XHTML/CSS makes iterating not that much more difficult than pen and paper.

I remember reading that 37signals does all their mockups directly in XHTML/CSS.

</comment><comment><USER7> Voodoopad. Use tables and links to layout your site very quickly.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm a designer, so I always have mocked stuff up in CSS/XHTML in Dreamweaver, plus Photoshop where graphics are necessary.

</comment><comment><USER2> What do u mean how?? Ruby on Rails :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Paper and pencil, it just works.

</comment><comment><USER10> On paper with a pen :)</comment>


Are you a Super Connector? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.letslunch.com/2012/02/09/are-you-a-super-connector/

<comment><USER2> Living the pay it forward mantra. Can't wait to connect people through LetsLunch. Really need something easier than email/LNKD/etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> A great way to build my network. Time to implement.</comment>