NY lawsuit asks: Is graffiti art protected under federal law? - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-5pointz-graffiti-art-2017-story.html <comment><USER2> I say this as an active collector of pop and street art. If you want to retain total ownership of your art then you should probably own the surface you create it on.

No matter how much we may appreciate street art, in it's most common medium, it's technically vandalization. I think it's in poor taste for building owners to tear down walls and sell them to art dealers, but that's what happens when you paint all over someone else's property.

<comment><USER3> *vandalism

<comment><USER4> Yeah honestly it's annoying enough already to pick out one specific word from a whole thoughtfully written comment and point out that it's incorrectly used, but you're not even right in that.

Furthermore, you can't even be bothered to spend 5 seconds Googling your belief, rather you just blindly stick to your incorrect assumption and post a one word completely nonconstructive reply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Like most interesting stories, I find myself without a clear opinion as to which side is correct. It would be annoying to be a judge.

Losing art sucks, but it doesn't sound like the owner acted in bad faith.

I know the real question the judge must answer is whether or not a law was broken, but I assume since they're humans they often act from a sense of personal justice and then rationalize backwards to a sensible legal argument.

<comment><USER6> > Losing art sucks, but it doesn't sound like the owner acted in bad faith.

The owner rented out the interior of the building to tenants as studio space and the exterior to 5Pointz as gallery space while claiming the building was empty and writing it off for tax purposes.

He wanted to sell the land to a developer to demolish it and put up a high- rise. When there were murmurings that the building might get declared a protected landmark, thereby preventing him from demolishing it, he hired people _overnight and in secret_ to whitewash the exterior and destroy the graffiti art. That way, there's be nothing left to protect.

If that's _not_ bad faith, I don't know what is.

<comment><USER7> I don't consider any of that to be bad faith.

The alternative view is that the owner allowed graffiti artists many years of free usage of the space and they're trying to penalize him for it by preventing him from rescinding that offer. The tax status of the building isn't relevant. Every graffiti artist that tagged that building knew it could come down at any time. They knew they could be either replaced or entirely removed. To claim some ownership to the exterior now that he wants to tear it down is ludicrous.

If anything, I see this type of litigation to have a chilling effect on landlords allowing public usage of their property. I wouldn't want to open myself up to future litigation just because I allowed some artists to paint a mural.

<comment><USER6> > the owner allowed graffiti artists many years of free usage of the space

It wasn't free

> they're trying to penalize him for it by preventing him from rescinding that > offer.

No, they're suing because he destroyed installed art.

> The tax status of the building isn't relevant.

It is, because it _does_ imply he was acting in bad faith, especially given the broader context.

> Every graffiti artist that tagged that building knew it could come down at > any time. They knew they could be either replaced or entirely removed.

This is not the legal standard that installation art is held to.

<comment><USER8> > Every graffiti artist that tagged that building knew it could come down at > any time. They knew they could be either replaced or entirely removed.

> This is not the legal standard that installation art is held to.

It is not unreasonable that it should be, absent any agreement to the contrary. At least, it is not unreasonable that the standard could be reexamined.

<comment><USER6> > It is not unreasonable that it should be

It actually is, and if you're interested in understanding why, I'd invite you to read up on installation art and the copious case law surrounding it, both in New York City (where a lot of that precedent was initially set, incidentally) and across the country (since this is a federal lawsuit).

> At least, it is not unreasonable that the standard could be reexamined.

That's not how common law works. When there's a clear legal precedent (which there is, in this case), it's not the responsibility of the judge to legislate from the bench and overturn existing standards (either codified standards - like this one is - or standards set by case law).

The question in this suit is whether the legal standard applies; the jury determined that it did.

<comment><USER8> You are repeatedly quoting the law to avoid discussing whether there are any ethical issues here, but if this were purely a matter of the law, it would be uninteresting.

<comment><USER6> > You are repeatedly quoting the law to avoid discussing whether there are any > ethical issues here

That's a pretty great distance to move the goalposts. The original comment questions legal matters (whether the owner acted in bad faith, whether the law was broken, and which side the judge [should] decide to be correct). Hence why we're discussing the legal standards.

If you want to discuss ethical issues, I'd suggest a new comment thread, because that hasn't come up at all in this one.

<comment><USER8> You might have taken a look before you wrote that, as the original post in this thread is pretty clearly about the ethical issues beyond the narrow facts of the law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The quote "These individual artists may be compensated, but what is going to be the long-term effect [is] buildings don't allow public art because they don't want to face damages" looks right to me.

</comment><comment><USER10> I was wondering what federal law could support the artists here. Answer: "Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 A subsection of copyright law"

It's pretty short and the undefined terms stand out strongly. This was a useful overview for me to understand why the law exists: [http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/martin/art_law/esworthy.h...](http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/martin/art_law/esworthy.htm)

<comment><USER11> Mentioned in the article:

> The lawsuit hinges on a federal law called the the Visual Artists Rights Act > of 1990.

> A subsection of copyright law, the act grants visual artists the right to > claim or disclaim a work and to protect their work from mutilation or > distortion that would harm their honor or reputation. And if the art is of > "recognized stature," the act can be invoked to prevent their work from > being destroyed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This should be simple. Artists gets a contract with the property owner to use the wall for a duration. If there's no contract, the owner's rights prevail.

<comment><USER6> > This should be simple. Artists gets a contract with the property owner to > use the wall for a duration. If there's no contract, the owner's rights > prevail.

That's not at all how art works, and thankfully we have plenty of case law and common law tradition to the contrary.

<comment><USER12> What alarms me is the inability to think through consequences. If the artist wins this case, property owners will stop letting artists paint on their buildings. They'd be stupid not to. Permitting it would be giving artists a permanent easement on their property. But if people want to go that way and destroy an art form..

<comment><USER6> > What alarms me is the inability to think through consequences. If the artist > wins this case, property owners will stop letting artists paint on their > buildings. They'd be stupid not to. Permitting it would be giving artists a > permanent easement on their property. But if people want to go that way and > destroy an art form..

This apology is rather off-base. It's not like property owners generally permit artists to paint on their buildings in the first place.

5Pointz was a different case in that the landlord permitted the use of the building as a museum _and charged for its use_. It wasn't an illicit or secret subversion of the property; it was the agreed-upon, intended use for about two decades.

There's lots and lots of case law for this. It's not new. It's not like ruling in favor of 5Pointz would create some new, anti-artist precedent. (Yes, that may be what the lawyers representing the landlord want you to think, but it's very demonstrably wrong.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Initially I was concerned that someone was copying and reselling the works of others. However once reading I have to side with the developers and/or owners of the property. Those being sued are simply being sued because they have the means to pay.

It simply comes down to one fact. The art was all temporary with artist after artist replacing some of those before them. Their work is not being exploited by others for profit. Hence they are not owed anything, nothing was done under commission and it had been they would have been paid at the time.

this is a money grab with a group attempting to play the victimization card. if those demolishing the buildings had no money there would never have been any issue raised nor if the buildings had been torn down for safety issues.

</comment><comment><USER14> They should have had a contract

They all spraypainted over other people's work that came before them

The owner will let them come back and graffiti more with a contract detailing ownership

The informal agreement is outmoded and should therefore default to the property owner, even in the world where it doesn't, the artists forfeited their right to say otherwise when they did the exact same actions to the prior artist's works on the wall

</comment><comment><USER15> Random musing: By the logic of this case, would taking down confederate monuments be illegal?

<comment> GuB-42 I suppose most confederate monuments are not copyrighted, unless they have been created after Mickey Mouse.

<comment><USER16> Not most, but it might be closer than you think: [https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/whoseheritage_...](https://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/whoseheritage_splc.pdf) [PDF] (Pages 12–13)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Better have an artists contract with your house painter, otherwise if you decide to repaint with another firm you are destroying their Monochrome painting in the style of Klein and others.

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

<comment><USER18> I know your comment was supposed to be sarcastic, but it has nothing to do with what is being discussed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> For anyone that's interested in this, I'd like to recommend an awesome documentary called Vigilante Vigilante. It's about anti-graffiti vigilantes that take it a little too far.

<comment><USER20> Saving Banksy is another really good one, talks about some of the struggles in preserving street art.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Ah hah! Now _that's_ a conundrum... How can it be grafitti if it's not subversive? Grafitti as _art_ would vanish in a puff of logic.

<comment><USER22> Well the same could be said of most forms of art which were often created as a reaction to established order only to become the new established order. See: rock, rap, jeans, snickers, German language opera, abstract modern art.

<comment><USER23> Snickers?

<comment><USER24> Perhaps "sneakers."

<comment><USER22> Lol right. Not a native speaker, sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Perhaps technology can help answer this.

E.g. if a large number of facebook users "like" a photo of the artwork, then it can be considered art.

If someone wants to know if something is art, they can take a picture, and submit it to facebook, and they can then photo-id it and determine its "art" status.

<comment><USER26> 1000 years from now, do you want our distant descendants to judge our aesthetic merits by the Kardashians?</comment></comment>


Veterans Day - remembering 2 Medal of Honor recipients - <AUTHOR> http://1000memories.com/blog/20-remembering-hero-s-on-veterans-day?locale=en

<comment><USER2> Kudos for remembering that it's "Medal of Honor _recipients_ " -- I've read that they don't like the term "winners," nor do they like it said that they "earned" the Medal. That's because (i) the ones that didn't receive the Medal posthumously usually lost friends in the combat action in question, and (ii) recipients almost invariably say that the Medal belongs to their squad, platoon, shipmates, etc., they're just the one who wears it.</comment>


What I Saw in Ferguson - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/saw-ferguson <comment><USER2> For a good insight into how city police are trained, I recommend reading Cop In The Hood by Peter Moskos.

Peter joined the Baltimore Police and describes how they were taught to "own the situation", which in effect means responding with escalating force until the situation is under control. This approach is evident in the reports from both the Washington Post and Al Jazeera journalists. From the book's description of the training, there appeared to be little effort to educate on correct responses for different situations.

I have friends in the UK Police force (I am not a cop myself) that tell me they are taught how to diffuse situations rather than escalate them and that getting into a violent confrontation is seen as a last resort, not a first response.

I have every sympathy with the police, and the tough job that they face, but I can't help but feel that the differences in approach and specifically the inflexibility of the US police training does not help them.

<comment><USER3> If you've heard of the South African shooting of mine workers in Marikana, in which 35 miners where shot, you can see what sort of tragic results can happen where the police are militarized. It's a path to catastrophe. Instead of engaging protestors they come with indimidating riot gear, automatic rifles, armored vehicles, helicopters, flash bangs and tear gas. They wear visors which conveniently hide their identity. Any tragedies are met with an "investigation" which usually leads nowhere or goes on forever.

When you are face to face with a cop, I've learned your rights don't mean anything. The only thing that matter is power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well written; horrifying.

> His prone figure sprawled on the street for four hours in the unforgiving > August sun, with blood on the asphalt—an indignity in sharp contrast with > the quick departure of the officer from the scene.

> Police, some outfitted in riot gear, others in military fatigues, barricaded > the streets. At least one of them draped a black bandana over his face; > others covered their badges.

> One homeowner walked out of his house to find a spent flash grenade on his > lawn. An armored truck rolled down the street, a flume of tear gas issuing > from the back.

</comment><comment><USER5> How America responds to the events in Ferguson will affect what we see in our _own_ neighborhoods in the coming years.

</comment><comment><USER6> _Police, some outfitted in riot gear, others in military fatigues, barricaded the streets. At least one of them draped a black bandana over his face; others covered their badges._

Utterly shameful.

To the people flagging this off the front page: if you don't see what the suppression of protest and the arrest of reporters by a militarized police has to do with a site focused on startups and the disruption of existing power structures, you need to think harder.

<comment><USER7> What I find equally shameful are the individuals and groups using the riots as an excuse to loot and plunder the streets.

If I was a business owner over there and my shop was robbed blind... I'm not sure what I would do.

(also, the escalation of the police force is in proportion to how aggressive the people are getting - not excusing the situation -- just point out that people are firing rockets, fireworks and other projectiles at the police, flipping vehicles, looting and plundering...etc... absolute chaos.)

<comment><USER8> So the cops arresting journalists in McDonald's, or shooting tear gas canisters at Al-Jazeera on an otherwise empty street, that's a proportional response to aggression?

If one a-hole in a crowd hucks a bottle at you, gassing the whole crowd is not proportional.

<comment><USER7> Well, that's not the entire story of what is going on over there.

As I said, I'm not dismissing the situation -- but if I owned a store over there, I would want the police to protect my storefront from vandals and looters in force.

As for the other things that are going on -- I think it's best to wait for the full report being assuming [the worst] things.

Just remember, 99.9999% of police don't wake up in the morning and say to themselves "how can I screw over citizens today". They are just people like you and me. There are always two sides of any story.

<comment><USER8> It's a very indicative part of the story. Given the story of the Wash Post guy and the Al Jazeera guys, both very well documented, it does indeed seem like a substantial portion of those particular cops do wake up in the morning thinking something other than what I'd like.

If this is how they power-trip and shove around journalists, how are they treating people who are less of a PR threat?

[http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/live- news/2014/8/al...](http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/live- news/2014/8/al-jazeera-americareportergetshitwithteargasinferguson.html)

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-ferguson- washingto...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-ferguson-washington- post-reporter-wesley-lowery-gives-account-of-his- arrest/2014/08/13/0fe25c0e-2359-11e4-86ca-6f03cbd15c1a_story.html?hpid=z1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Unlawful assembly? Isn't assembly a constitutional right?

<comment><USER7> It's lawful until un-lawful activities start taking place (the looting and plundering, vandalism, projectiles being fired at people and police, etc)

<comment><USER10> Except these cops are eager to escalate the situation even if no looting is taking place: [http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/2...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/2014/08/ferguson_police_attack_protestors_with_tear_gas_rubber_bullets_on_site_reporting.html)

<comment><USER7> > eager to escalate the situation

I don't think "eager" is the right word here -- I hardly believe anyone, cop or citizen, is eager to escalate a situation where nobody is going to win. It's bad mojo for both sides if it continues.

<comment><USER4> There was a quote from a police office involved to the crowd that went something like "bring it on, you animals".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best way to learn ios dev? - <AUTHOR>

I've got an idea for an ios app and I want to build it myself. Only problem, I've never written a non trivial app before.
Here what I'm doing to lean ios dev:
1. Reading the docs on Apple's Dev site.
2. Working through Paul Hegarty's CS193P class up on itunes U.
Are their any better methods for learning ios dev? <comment><USER2> I've got 1 app in the app store and 2 more on the way. I finally feel really comfortable with ios development now.

Here's what helped me most:

\- Taking a pragmatic studios course in Chicago. (might be expensive for some but worth it for me as I needed to get away and focus)

\- Apple sample code

\- The big nerd ranch book is great IMO

\- maniacdev does a great job aggregating tutorials

\- ray wenderlich's stuff is great (I've purchased all his products)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, maniacdev looks like a great resource. The format of the four day course may be a bit too much for me to handle at my current level, but I'll keep it in mind.

[edit] What's the name of the app in the app store?

<comment><USER2> Oh, it's just a farmers market directory for the west coast. It's old and I'm not proud of the design ... but hey, I shipped something.

<http://farmersmarkitapp.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> The app looks useful, if I was on the west coast I would buy it. Have you given any thought on expanding east?

Just looking at the screen cap you could increase the design aesthetic by using a solid frame instead the wood. The wood makes the titles hard to read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The book `Programming iOS5` by Neuburg is probably amazing. I read a good amount of his last book `Programming iOS4` and it was, by far, the most comprehensive book I found on the subject. I hope it is fair that I am recommending a book I have not read yet, based on his last book with the same subject :).

</comment><comment><USER4> check out the Ray Wenderlick tutorials, really well explained, up to date with storyboards and really well paced tutorials. Our staff loved them, and helped them get up to speed very quickly. <http://www.raywenderlich.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> The tutorials look great, thank you. I'll give'em a run through. I like setting time frames whenever I'm trying to learn something new. Just as a reference point, how long on average did it take for your staff to get up to speed?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This thread offers some good resources <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3934911>

</comment><comment><USER6> Are there any interactive resources (like CodeSchool / Codecademy) available for iOS?

<comment><USER7> Yes, check out Treehouse, very hands-on and updated (explains all the nitty gritty new stuff of iOS 5) (if you like it, I'd appreciate you using my referral link: <http://referrals.trhou.se/freshfey> \- thanks! :))!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> also check out lynda.com -- they have a number of video courses.</comment>


Android Architecture Blueprints - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/googlesamples/android-architecture <comment><AUTHOR> How about this concept?</comment>


What Makes for a Good Blog? - <AUTHOR> http://www.43folders.com/2008/08/19/good-blogs <comment><USER2> One of the best blogs IMO is Steve Yegge's. One of the qualities that makes it really good is that he doesn't post often, each individual post is very long and discusses some particular thing in great detail. Incidentally, this is not mentioned in the OP. As a metaobservation, this particular post is neither very long nor does it really discuss the target topic in great detail.</comment>


How Can WeWork with $1.8B in Revenue Lose $1.9B? Here's How - <AUTHOR> https://wolfstreet.com/2019/03/25/how-can-a-company-with-1-8-billion-in-revenue-lose-1-9-billion-wework-shows-how/ <comment><USER2> It's pretty easy to see what's going on. The central banks have flooded trillions worth of bank money in a zero growth economy. And companies like WeWork are converting that into hard money for insiders. Every billion they spend insiders strip off some percentage. That's all WeWork is about.

<comment><USER3> I don't quite get it. Is SoftBank part of the "con"? Are they getting advantages too? Or will they end up screwed with the billions they invested?</comment></comment>


Will the Rise of Javascript Mean the End of LAMP? - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/04/javascript-lamp

<comment><USER2> I think the acquisition of mysql by Oracle was the end of LAMP.

Technical people seem to be fleeing it in droves to postgres, et al

</comment><comment><USER3> Cheap rehash of post previously discussed here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2425316></comment>


News.me is all grown up and now free - <AUTHOR> http://newsme.tumblr.com/post/10206038408/news-me-is-all-grown-up-and-now-free <comment><USER2> I wonder how this will play out will the publishers. As I understood it, they had a revenue sharing agreement with a large number of content producers: news.me charged money to their users, the publishers got a cut of it, and the users of news.me got to see the content in a clean 'readability' style view. Now that its free, I can't see how this will work out with their existing publisher agreements ...

</comment><comment><USER3> This is very exciting news. I used it during the free trial period, but couldn't bring myself to pay for it when I could just go back to Flipboard (which, btw, I don't like as much).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> When I first downloaded it there was a free trial but by the time I got around to checking it out it had already expired. Nice to have a second chance.

</comment><comment><USER4> woot!</comment>


Why did cities freeze in the 1970s? - <AUTHOR> https://jakeseliger.com/2015/12/27/why-did-cities-freeze-in-the-1970s/ <comment><USER2> Hey, I hit flag on this. Mobile mistake. Plz ignore, or fix.

Thanks :(

I see unflag option on refresh. Used it, but still.</comment>


The Google Squeeze - <AUTHOR> https://stratechery.com/2019/the-google-squeeze/ <comment><USER2> It's not just Google, I've noticed this across all the major ad platforms: Instagram, Twitter, FB, etc, have all cranked up the number of ads to prop up revenues.

I stopped using IG & Twitter largely because it went from having relatively few ads to where I started seeing an ad nearly every other post. The value of the platform proportionally declined significantly and I no longer bother using them.

Google is slowly becoming useless (even with an ad blocker) because you have to hack search terms in order to get useful results. For example, I append words like "wiki" or "reddit" to get results that aren't SEO'd. Search for something generic like "computer" and you can see an example of how hard it is to get information instead of ads.

It feels like ads are definitely a bubble, and I suspect the next big tech companies will not be ad based.

<comment><USER3> Do you even notice the instagram ads? I'm so blind to them while I flick through I can't even tell if they are for a bank or for clothes or whatever.

> _Search for something generic like "computer" and you can see an example of > how hard it is to get information instead of ads._

To be fair, "computer" is such a generic term, I can't even imagine what you expect to see when you search for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Isn't that the idea? The Instagram ads are supposed to look like the posts you're looking at and hopefully your lizard brain stores the ad image as you scroll by.

<comment><USER4> I wonder to what extent this is a function of how one uses Instagram: ie, perhaps the parent comment's feed contains posts superficially similar to ads, while the composition of yours makes ads stand out in content and caption (my experience is closer to yours on Twitter and upon occasionally IG use).

Tangentially, I find IG's place in the social media panoply to be fascinating. It's the only service that everyone seems to feel positively about: it doesn't inspire the loathing that Facebook and Twitter does or the mockery that Snapchat does (even by their users).

But watching people use Instagram is the closest I see people coming to the popular addict/junkie metaphor and the stereotype of smartphones and social media turning us into slackjawed automatons in thrall to a colorful Skinner Box. It's really eerie.

<comment><USER5> > It's the only service that everyone seems to feel positively about: it > doesn't inspire the [...] mockery that Snapchat does (even by their users)

Well there is actually some mockery about the lengths some people go to alter their perceived appearance[0].

0: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Instagramreality/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Instagramreality/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I feel like Google is increasingly becoming useless as a general purpose search engine.

When I try to find information on a generic topic where I can't exactly tailor the query, the results are usually filled with low quality, SEO optimized promotional sites, clickbait articles/YT videos or aggregators. With some luck there is a good blog post with quality links on page 2 or 3.

Good results are now mostly restricted to areas where Google can utilize structured data sources (Maps/Business data, Wikipedia, ....).

This is extremely ironic, since Google originally rose to popularity because it was much better at "real" search than the competitors.

The interesting question is why!

Is Google just not able to compete with SEO tactics? Are they overly fixated on ML/"AI" techniques that don't work well in practice?

Or are regular search results allowed to become worse on purpose, in order to maximize ad revenue? It is something a near-monopoly could afford to do.

<comment><USER7> Originally, Google was very effective at looking at the interconnections of content people had put online and using that to infer which pages were most relevant. SEO tactics immediately started gaming this system to create false signals of relevance, but for many years Google did an impressive job of staying ahead of that game.

I think what finally killed their search quality is the fact that there's no longer a public human-curated network of websites to draw meaning from. Most content on the web is bulk-generated crap, personal blogs and websites are rare, and many passionate hobbyist communities are hidden from crawlers in places like closed Facebook groups.

<comment><USER8> I wonder what the next search engine algorithm will be... I've been thinking about up-votes/down-votes. And I could swear Google experimented with Random ranking a few years back, which gave very good results, but it was a bit annoying when you forget to bookmark a site, and not finding it when searching for it again the next day. But I'm thinking random plus voting, so if you find a good site, you upvote it, if you find spam you downvote it. If you want to find that good site again, you just check your upvote history. Random sorting give small interesting web sites a chance to get found. When doing a search you can use sliders to fine-tune the order using popularity (upvote/downvote ratio), last updated, first found, region, and a checkbox to only show links you haven't already clicked on, or haven't already voted on. And there could be an option to discover sites you would probably like, based on which links you have upvoted, and what people that upvote sites simlar to you also up- voted - but you have not yet clicked on. The problem with upvote bots have already been solved by social networks like Facebook, where using like-farms, follower-farms etc are not very effective. You should not be too baised on the votes though, or you would end up with echo-chamber loops like with Spotify and Youtube. The key is randomness! A random brute force-like algorithm is often just as good and sometimes better then a sophisticated system. It would be hard to game/cheat a random algorithm.

<comment><USER9> All of this almost has me wishing for a human curated list of high quality sites for each topic, though that would obviously have its problems, too.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I remember talking to a student over at our local college a few years back who had started doing that with a classmate. They called it Yet Another Hierarchical... something or other. Jerry, I think his name was. I probably should have joined them. It turned out to be quite an experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The funny moment of all this is how Google is becoming the type of search browser that existed in 2000. Altavista, webcrawler, yahoo, and others were the default search engines, but then they started to let advertisers override the search results to be inserted in the search results. Initially, the results were clearly delineated, but over time, they fell in and the note of it being an "ad" fell away.

To be fair, the internet is being conflated into a platform to drive people into walled gardens, and google is trying to deal with helping people into them.

I wondered how long it would take for the site to descend into the dark patterns that caused google to ascend.

<comment><USER12> Image Search has also been completely ruined by their push for ML based results without even checking if it's better.

Years ago I could Image Search a frame of a film and get the film title almost every time, now I get a generic "Street" or "Man" search term and then a bunch of photos that have streets in them with a similar color palette which are never from the film.

They've got so excited by the tech that they can identify an object or setting that they've forgotten just finding the same image elsewhere online and using the context of the web page would give a better answer.

<comment><USER13> Luckily, there's an alternative: images.yandex.com

It effortlessly does both reverse image search AND image objects search. Results are usually so good, it almost seems like Google decided to cripple their image search on purpose.

<comment><USER14> The fact that Yandex includes the OCR'd text in any image you search from is awesome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Two things surprised me about this article. First, I thought Yelp had an abysmal reputation. Threatening businesses with a poor review if they didn't buy an ad. Taking money for boosting a businesses rating. Was this all just FUD from its competitors?

And second, I find Amazon's product search to be almost complete crap. I can't count how many times I've moved back to Google to do a product search because I know the product is out there I just can't remember the name, Amazon comes up with nothing and google has it on the first page. Again, is this only me?

<comment><USER16> You're not alone.

A friend rented out her place to a tenant who was a total nightmare and then he went and made a yelp page for her as a person, because she's a real estate agent, defaming her on yelp (not for real estate business, but for being his landlord). So there's now a yelp page with her face on it and angry "reviews" from this tenant and his partner, and she has no way to remove it. Yelp refuses to do anything.

Amazon product search usually works for me but I often use google to make sure there isn't a better price somewhere else on the internet. So I end up repeating my search terms to Google anyway.

<comment><USER17> Can't businesses opt-out of Yelp by sending a cease and desist letter or eventually suing Yelp?

Restaurants can't opt-out because they would no longer be discoverable on the internet, but a real estate agent should be able to opt-out of Yelp and still be reasonably successful.

<comment><USER18> What exactly would Yelp be ceasing and desisting here? Surely things like the name, location and contact info for a business are public information that can be freely reproduced. Everything else on Yelp (primarily user reviews/photos) aren't the property of the business in the first place.

If anything I'd expect the example in GP's case to be a rare instance where even US defamation law might be helpful to the landlord. I don't see that extending to businesses in general though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> grumpy-cowboy Tired of all this ads. I understand that some level of Ads is required (nothing's free!). But this becoming ridiculous (and I'm not talking about personal data mining). Instead of just whining about that, I decided to move away from this:

\- My email/calendar/contacts on paid Fastmail.com account using my own domain. I don't want to deal with all the work required to maintain an email server: spam filtering, prevent being falsely flagged as a spam server, .... And I use an alias per account I have. For example: firstname.lastname@example.com, email@example.com, ... So if my email got spammed/stolen, first I'll advise the site and I'll just create a new one (ex: firstname.lastname@example.com).

\- Host my own federated servers like Matrix, Mastodon, Peertube, Pixelfeed, ...

\- Host my own Git "social server" with public and private repos.

\- ...

I think we have to come back to what the Web/Internet was before: a federation of servers working together (ex: Usenet). When I talk about that to people, they don't understand. I then use a simple example of this: email servers. You can have an email account on any servers on the internet and send a message to anyone who have an email account on another server. You CAN'T do that with FB/Messenger, Instagram, Whatsapp, ...

Big corps shoot themselves in the foot. People have limits and they are not that stupid. When you taste a new (old) way to exchange with other people without being flooded with Ads (Mastodon, Matrix, ... or simply emails), you can't come back.

edit: formatting

<comment><USER19> _Some_ people do have limits, but the crowd, on the opposite, is lazy and hypnotized. From their perspective, you're the one missing out all the fun and ease of digital life/world. It's _you_ (a black sheep) who can't be reached via the most obvious communication channels (FB, WhatsApp, Viber, etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> _Google being evil, yet again. In fact, while I understand the frustration of Expedia and Trip Advisor, I think it is a bit more complicated._

I don't think so. I think that the hotels module may be useful, but it's also confusing. In particular, it breaks the user expectation that Google search will give you the best results from the open web, and not give you a "module", particularly not one with paid placement. That is, IMHO, Google is overstepping its bounds as a search engine by providing (even useful) modules. And I think this has a negative cognitive impact on users (in particular, it ruins their intuition about what they are seeing, who's paying for what, and why).

<comment><USER21> Only for people like us, technically inclined and on this forum and probably those who saw Google being born and innovate its way to the top of the market. Most of the people I know find google's results insanely useful. It's no longer a search engine or an app. You want to find out something? You "google" it. They do not distinguish it as "just" a search engine.

>it breaks the user expectation that Google search will give you the best results from the open web,

That expectation is no longer true. That probably died a decade ago when Android started gaining steam all over the world. And certainly not true for those who don't remember the world before smartphones or when gmail offering unlimited storage was "big" deal.

<comment><USER20> Users don't like it when you change context, the underlying assumption of the interaction. Usually they can't articulate what's bothering them. In this case, they are sub-consciously expecting "fair" results, e.g. something consistent with the "Google Bargain" back in the beginning, that Goog would give you great, fair, results, ranked by utility, and add only a few simple, mostly text ads that you are easy to tune out completely if you want to. The Bargain has changed in many significant ways over the years, and things like the Hotels Module certainly subvert the Bargain in a serious way, and I would argue it's unsettling to people (although I don't have hard data on that).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A year ago or so I was listening to podcasts on YouTube while falling asleep. I didn't mind an occasional ad. Then they ramped up the ads like crap. Easily every 5 minutes or so (the funniest ones were the "Troubles falling asleep?" ads that jolted me awake). I stopped almost completely ever since. The sad thing is that I would gladly pay for the service, but I'm not going to pay a company that uses my data AND my money. Plus I have to use it with an account at google. No thanks. I have no hopes for an ethical competitor to arise, there's simply no market for it.

<comment><USER23> YouTube premium costs 10$ a month. Anyone living in first world (while posting on hacker news) countries and spend hours a week on youtube shouldn't be complaining about ads on youtube.

<comment><USER24> How about complaining on behalf of all the people who can't afford $10 a month, like teenagers, people in lesser developed countries, etc? You're happy for them to be spammed with toxic advertising while people who are better off get an opt-out?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> They heyday of Google were the years Eric Schmidt was CEO and the short time Larry Page was CEO before the ill-fated Google+ strategy.

After that he seems to have burned out, spun a tale about being a capital allocator with the whole Alphabet charade, then retired.

Sundar Pichai's mandate has been plainly obvious: generate profits (that mandate became more explicit with hiring Ruth Porat as CFO).

<comment><USER26> From an outside perspective, it's not even just "generate profits", but also morphed into "focus only on high-margin, high-revenue products and kill everything else". Which makes perfect sense for shareholders, but pretty much turned Google into just another soulless BigCo.

<comment><USER4> The story is that, around the time Larry Page became CEO, he went to Jobs for advice, who gave him exactly this advice. Obviously Google never sunk as far as becoming Apple, but this fits the narrative of killing Google's soul to make it a little more like a place like Apple.

<comment><USER27> There is nothing similar to Apple's business model to Google's.

\- Apple's users are its customers. I give Apple money and they give me stuff. Google's customers are advertisers and others trying to reach users.

\- Apple is mostly concerned with its own platform and doesn't have services across platforms with a few exceptions (iTunes on Windows, Apple Music on Android, Apple TV+ everywhere). Google wants to be ubiquitous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Many people seem to complain about the low quality Google search but don't often offer any better alternatives. I can't help but feel like sometimes the quality of the Google search results reflect the quality of the web in general: stocked with a whole lot of spam content that people actually consume.

How do we fix the web?

<comment><USER29> Someone suggests DuckDuckGo in practically every single post that even mentions Google.

<comment><USER30> In my experience, DDG search results are worse, not better, and people who say otherwise are mental or lying.

I discovered the other day that DDG uses Bing for image searching because without safe searching enabled it randomly returns tons of pornography for innocuous searches like "filled torus".

<comment><USER31> > it randomly returns tons of pornography for innocuous searches like "filled > torus"

so I tried to search for that one, disabled safe searching and I'm coming back disappointed (no porn)

<comment><USER19> My experience was very different:

WARNING: NSFW!

[https://ibb.co/88Lx5yC](https://ibb.co/88Lx5yC)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> With travel booking it's hard to have sympathy for anyone, I don't really care if "evil" Google defeats or buys up the other brand. I pretty much feel ripped off no matter what service I use.

I also call up the hotel directly most of the time to see if I can get a better rate or room, often works.

With air travel I want the one with the best grid to win, if I have to launch a new search every time I try a new date or nearby airport it's a no-go for me.

<comment><USER32> I have no idea why people would ever choose to deal with a middleman than the merchant directly, especially when they have their bank as the arbiters in disputes since they're paying with credit cards.

<comment><USER33> Because the middleman can be _significantly_ cheaper.

This is for straightforward business reasons: if you're visiting a hotel's site directly, you clearly already have a strong interest in it, and are less likely to be comparing by prices.

Whereas if you're advertising rates on an aggregator, you're competing much more strongly on price, and are forced to provide discounts.

And for a significant number of people, it never occurs to them to check an aggregator to save money.

When traveling, I'm almost always saving 30-50% off the prices listed on hotels/lodging on their sites simply by using one of the aggregators. (Discounts tend to especially skyrocket when booking day-before.)

Does that answer it?

<comment><USER32> The hotel brands I stay at (Hyatt/Hilton/Marriott/etc) offer the cheapest pricing directly on their website, with best price guarantees giving discounts or free nights if another website offers it for cheaper. I've never seen it cheaper anywhere else though, so I'm pretty sure they have their computer systems configured not to allow it to happen.

And I reserve a cancelable price so that I can always see if they lowered the price before the cancelation deadline, sometimes yes, sometimes not.

Even if I wasn't staying at a brand that offered a best price guarantee, I would still contact them and offer them the chance to win business directly by being lower than the aggregator and avoid paying commission.

<comment><USER33> Yes, that's been my experience too with the big business hotels.

I'm talking mainly about everything else that isn't a humongous chain, which is actually the vast majority of properties in most cities -- boutique hotels, small hotels, 4-unit guesthouses, generally with 15 rooms or fewer. (Just my personal preference as to where I like to stay.) The difference between "list" price and aggregator price can be enormous -- usually because I'm booking the last room. (The actual last room, not a fake one -- the property disappears from the listings after I do.)

And maybe it would be the "morally" right thing to do to contact them directly and get them to match the price, but it's not worth the hassle and risk to me -- being put on hold for 10 minutes, dealing with someone on the phone for whom English isn't often their first language (when traveling abroad), time zone differences when nobody's at the front desk, risking the room disappearing while waiting for an e-mail reply, and above all the chances of a date or price or other mix-up when transacted verbally.

If I do it through the aggregator, I lock in the room instantly, with instant e-mail confirmation that all the details are correct. Zero worries, zero mixups.

<comment><USER32> There is no moral imperative to contact the merchant directly, it's the merchant's choice to use a middleman if they want the benefits of price discrimination or marketing power.

However, I assume I would be better taken care of by the merchant if I contact them directly rather then go through an agent, although I can see if you are going to a very small merchant who needs the agent more, then you may get better service from the agent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> > This seems like unequivocally a good thing, no? Booking knows it can't > depend on the Google channel, that its future is best secured by innovating > and building a customer experience that convinces users to go to Booking > directly. That is competition working to the benefit of customers!

This is my impression too. I avoid Expedia like the plague. I only use TripAdvisor to read the forums. Booking doesn't even rely on SEO. They don't have a forum or don't make content. Booking has _lots_ of dark patterns when booking but it just works and it has lots of choices at pretty good prices. The experience and the convenience is why I was booking at Booking.com in the last 5-6 years. I don't even use Airbnb. Booking has apartments too.

Expedia and TripAdvisors are similar to _tourist traps_ in the touristic hot spots. They leveraged their SEO positions to grab whatever money they can get. Now that Google has figured out they can get some of that money, they got in. It's very easy, just move the juice to the partners and charge them money for that.

Expedia/TripAdvisor/Traditional-travel-agencies will need to turn their businesses around otherwise they are going the way of Thomas Cook.

</comment><comment><USER35> I find it really refreshing how Ben reflects on his past writings and admits when he was wrong than explains why his initial thinking was false. Really makes him a powerful thinker and writer.

</comment><comment><USER36> Apple has to be mulling an entry into search. Apple Search would be the default search engine for iPhone users, the majority of whom conduct almost all searches on their phone.

Being the one aggregator to rule them all has so many advantages. Google can extract outsized profits from almost every single industry because people are too myopic/lazy/indifferent to go directly to the source.

Apple could change the game. It could use its war chest to build a search engine as good or better than Google. It would forsake some profit because Apple Search would, through deep iOS integration, improvement of Siri, and bolstering of upcoming AR offerings, create ever greater lock-in to the Apple ecosystem. Furthermore, Apple's entry would give bargaining power back to content providers, galvanizing content creation on the margins.

There is an iron rule in business: competition will eventually erode profits. It's not a matter of if, but when. Will it be in 5 years, 10, 30, or 50?. GE used to be a seemingly unflappable industrial powerhouse. Look at it now. Google can stay way ahead of the competition if it continues to leapfrog on AI, but as soon as it becomes more iterative, or if the government decides that it's a monopoly, its decline would be non-linear. Apple faces another dilemma with a similar outcome. If some technological shift or government intervention opens up the App Store and iMessage to all mobile hardware, profits would drop precipitously. The only antidote is massive R&D and innovation.

<comment><USER37> Apple already has a search engine.

Swipe down on the home screen and type some stuff, and you get "Siri suggested websites". It also answers basic questions and gives previews of relevant parts of the sites.

<comment><USER36> I meant whole-internet search, not local device search (Spotlight) and Siri suggestions.

<comment><USER37> It does whole-internet search. Give it a try!

<comment><USER36> I don't think so. It pulls results from other search engines, including Google.

<comment><USER37> "Siri suggested websites" (the thing I mentioned in my first post) are not from other search engines, they're from Apple's.

Same goes for the "Siri suggested website" when you type some terms into Safari. The top website on the autocomplete list is selected by Apple's search engine.

<comment><USER36> Ah, my apologies for the misunderstanding. I was not aware of this. My point still stands, since relatively few people treat Spotlight as a discrete search engine. Its layout and features are not conducive to anything but the most elementary research. Moreover, it is not accessible through web browsers.

<comment><USER37> Yeah, my post was definitely intended in a sort of "it's crazy but it's true" way, because yeah, Apple has gone through insane amounts of engineering effort to create a working search engine that crawls the entire web and does a decent job of selecting top websites, but you can't use it anywhere except in a few chosen UI elements inside iOS/macOS. The whole thing is hidden in plain sight.

<comment><USER36> The fact that they went through all that trouble makes me even more convinced that they're considering a bigger entry into search. They're dipping their toes in the water.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Google Search becomes less and less usable/desirable. The pressure for growth by Wall Street and the lack of profitable products besides Search would be the existential threat to Google Search.

Well, it would be in theory. The problem is mobile. Since both major OS are tightly controlled by Google and Apple, Google Search won't be challenged by any alternative. Apple won't give their search profits away to push DDG or any other company, and Google wouldn't even think about that.

Any search engine that wants to cut into Google's market share has to start on the desktop web, buy the iOS integration for billions and would need to develop an alternative to Android, or call on regulators to force Google into showing a selection screen as they did to Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER39> On a bigger picture, it is concerning that all big tech is now growing by squeezing their existing assets as opposed to by gaining more users. For example, Microsoft Windows used to cost me $20/yr in licensing cost, no wait coasts $100/yr. Similarly number of ads in FB, Twitter and Google has gone up by 5X. All these stunning quarterly results are mainly coming from squeeze. I wonder how long this can go on.

</comment><comment><USER40> The quality of a product is subjective, but I dont see any example in this article of big tech squeezing out a competitor with an inferior product.

Yelp (despite the glossy profile in buzzfeed news) has not really advanced the product in a long time. Their site was always extremely frustrating, forcing you into using the app. And they were super slow to add things like delivery.

In comparison Google Maps is a search engine for the physical world. They've done all sorts of complex things like using street view to correctly place a business on the map, adding duplex for making reservations. Even for reviews, I trust the reviews from the meal delivery apps a lot more as they are based on real orders. If I want a detailed review, sites like Eater and local blogs are more useful (and are ranked higher than yelp now). These are all areas Yelp could have invested in, instead they kept the product largely the same.

Likewise with Expedia, their website uses every dark pattern in the book, and they got completely blindsided by Booking.com with a superior agency business model (that also means it makes more sense to go straight to their website).

I used to use yelp for reviews, now i use google. Likewise I used to use google for products, now I use Amazon. Flights and hotels I'm mostly using google. In all cases it's because the product is better.

</comment><comment><USER41> _This is by far the most compelling pitch I have heard Yelp give for itself: "The big companies are full of spam and misinformation, while we take the time to get reviews right." It is hard not wonder just how much more popular Yelp's product might be if this message were spread as stridently as its anti-Google arguments._

If only it were that simple. Yelp does not personally review reviews. Nobody from Yelp has ever called me to make sure I got my review right and I wasn't being unreasonable. Ensuring that reviews aren't spam is an algorithmic problem. Yes Yelp has some features which provide hints to the algorithm but at the end of the day it's about ML. For every upvote from a fellow reviewer on Yelp, Google has 100 other data points on me as a reviewer. So who is going to get the algo right, Yelp, or Google?

My personal experience has been that 4.2 stars on Google means the meal will be good, 5 stars on Yelp means it's a trendy trap with bad food and worse service which I will not enjoy.

Go figure.

</comment><comment><USER42> I like the Booking.com approach of focusing on their product and website so that users come to it directly (I must say though that there are many things I don't like about their site, like all the "1 last room at this price book quickly!!"). Yelp shot itself in the foot by not letting mobile users read reviews without downloading the app. It's not worth most people to download the app for it.

For travel I usually go to Kayak directly. Their site is simple and useful. But I must admit that seeing all the options on a map is pretty useful and I often use the hotel module in Maps. For me Maps is the best product Google ever made since their initial search engine.

</comment><comment><USER43> > This is by far the most compelling pitch I have heard Yelp give for itself: > "The big companies are full of spam and misinformation, while we take the > time to get reviews right." It is hard not wonder just how much more popular > Yelp's product might be if this message were spread as stridently as its > anti-Google arguments.

Probably because the blowback would be louder than the message. The heresay I've heard is that they hide the good reviews if you don't pay them, and hide the bad reviews if you do.

</comment><comment><USER27> _The first and most obvious way that Google showed users more ads was by literally inserting more ads into mobile search results_

So if it wasn't already clear why Google never allowed any type of content blocking framework in Chrome for mobile and iOS has had it for five years, it should be clear now.

So Google pays Apple a reported $8 billion a year to be the default search engine while Apple still builds in a framework to block those very ads.

</comment><comment><USER44> This article doesn't seem to directly address the overarching reason Google is sidestepping irrelevancy - the increasing value of data and AI analysis of it.

As data becomes even more valuable than oil [1], few orgs are as well positioned to capitalize on it than Google. With their massive trove of user activity since almost the dawn of the Internet age, combined with the purchase of Deep Mind, the kind of business and strategic intelligence Google can deduct will be invaluable.

Being more effective at selling ads, as the article addresses, is just the start of it.

[1]: [https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/05/06/the-worlds- most...](https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/05/06/the-worlds-most- valuable-resource-is-no-longer-oil-but-data)

</comment><comment><USER45> Why isn't this antitrust? Google using its search monopoly to muscle into hotels and other markets?

</comment><comment><USER46> When I click on the product ratings of some of the PLAs on Google, I am redirected to the landing page. But actually I am supposed to be redirected to a page aggregating the ratings from different sources hosted by Google.

I think Google might be suffering from revenue pressure since navigating users to the advertisers' landing page will let the advertiser pay Google directly. And obviously it will harm the user experience since the ratings are actually aggregated from different sellers and will be incomplete on the landing page while the user wants to see all the ratings and reviews when he clicks on them.

</comment><comment><USER47> A major antitrust issue is that too much competition is annoying for users. I'm not going to check every airline carrier when booking a flight, I will use an aggregator. Same thing for hotels, restaurants, etc.

Look at the current streaming environment: it's becoming highly fragmented and I predict when the dust settles there will only be 3 major players, there's only so much content an individual can consume and is willing to pay. Google's role as the aggregator for queries will be incredibly difficult to disrupt as long as there is _some_ friction to using another service.

</comment><comment><USER48> It's still very cumbersome to type a search on mobile, and having to type a url first or launch another app is almost half a minute more. That alone drives people to google. The rest is just google taking advantage of users that have fallen in its trap. IMHO, if these major companies like expedia stopped going after mobile aggressively , that might inconvenience users enough so that they would switch to use a desktop for their travel searches of deals, where they have much more control

</comment><comment><USER49> >In this case the unique product is demand — users. And this is where I am tempted to defend Google: at the end of the day, the company has the dominant position in its value chain largely by providing a better product.

This is the gist of it; Google, despite all the ads, and SEO spam, and other unscrupulous crap, still has the best tech. I use DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine, atleast on desktop, but I still have to swithc to google 1/5ths of my critical info searches.

</comment><comment><USER50> I thought the quote from the Yelp CEO was interesting. I mean, if Yelp was actually more skilled at helping the customer find the relevant data than Google, then that would be a compelling reason to use Yelp. But is his claim accurate? Is Google search optimizing for attention?

It's hard to see how that could be, honestly. Nobody browses search result pages for fun. Whether they're succeeding or not, it's hard to picture Google optimizing result pages for anything other than "get the user on to their most relevant (and/or lucrative) destination as absolutely quickly as we can manage."

If I were Yelp, I would not try Stratechery's arguments here. What they should be saying is, "Google's search results for restaurants are crap. If you use us, _your valuable time and money will be better spent_ than if you trust Google." Honestly, this is what I always worry about first when I look at online reviews. Is it honest and is it an accurate predictor of how I will feel if I choose this product? I have to confess, Yelp has not done a much better job engendering that trust in me than Google has. Not that I trust either very much, especially about restaurants. But if Yelp were able to crack that nut, I would be hugely grateful, and a loyal fan for life.

</comment><comment><USER51> I had identified the problem of google information dominance and inefficiency long time back and release a prototype micronest.com/searchly

The solution would be very complex but i had the problem identified..Now working to release an enterprise version inspired by this.

</comment><comment><USER52> The 'Peak Google' based on Peak Microsoft estimate I'd say missed it's mark because Google hasn't been smacked down with an anti-trust yet.

</comment><comment><USER53> Oof. I mistakenly shorted Yelp before their earnings release expecting the same results, but they ended up jumping 15%. Not that they've performed well YTD.

</comment><comment><USER54> Thank you for this very informative piece. This is one of those articles that when you finish them you feel you have much more context than before.

</comment><comment><USER55> I've seen 4 ads on Google SERPS but I've seen as many as the first 5 results being ads on Bing. This is getting out of hand.

</comment><comment><USER56> Google has many services that should become public services once they're identified as a monopoly.

</comment><comment><USER57> {$BIG_N_TECH_CO}'s customers are the advertisers.

They are serving their customers, and they're doing it well.

</comment><comment><USER58> Amazon Advertising is also squeezing the shit out of search result pages.

</comment><comment><USER59> on a related note, is there anyone with a swardley map for this industry? Would be interested in seeing it next to Stratechary

</comment><comment><USER60> If you really want ad free, non-capitalism polluted search results, why don't you ask the government to make better one? And we all know it's not the answer

</comment><comment><USER61> A side note: for anyone not aware (or confused by Silicon Valley tradition on constantly rewriting origin stories), TripAdvisor started in the dot com bubble as a B2B site. They clearly stated their business model was to provide reviews to other sites. Only that after the bubble burst, TripAdvisor had none left. They then basically invented modern SEO: long descriptive URLs, pages pulled out of a db with keyword variations in mind, constantly refreshing content with user submissions, and, the killer, buying links to influence Google's naive ranking methods (which quickly evolved this to buying entire sites for their SEO potential). The billion dollar public valuation is entirely the result of a decade long SEO play.

(Source: was in online travel related business at the time. Was the first to buy links form Matt at SeatGuru, later acquired by TripAdvisor)

<comment><USER62> I won't cry for TripAdvisor and Expedia, their websites were awful.

Booking Group websites (booking.com and agoda) are still doing great in 2019 as the article states, because they don't suck

<comment><USER63> What's better than TripAdvisor for finding sights and experiences?

Very much not a rhetorical question.

<comment><USER64> Yelp, Google, Facebook, Foursquare, are all alive and well, as is a lot of local journalism. Subreddits about specific cities also hit well sometimes.

Now if i could just aggregate all their results into one listing per event/location.

<comment><USER65> Almost like...TripAdvisor

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> > By increasing the shard integrity check rate, we potentially moved failures > that were going to be found in the future into Q3. While discovering > potential problems earlier is a good thing, it is possible that the hard > drive failures recorded in Q3 could then be artificially high as future > failures were dragged forward into the quarter. Given that our Annualized > Failure Rate calculation is based on Drive Days and Drive Failures, > potentially moving up some number of failures into Q3 could cause an > artificial spike in the Q3 Annualized Failure Rates. This is what we will be > monitoring over the coming quarters.

Wouldn't survival analysis on interval-censored data handle this problem automatically? All of your observations of failure presumably are actually interval data, where all you know is that the drive failed sometime in between the last good check and the first bad check. Then it doesn't matter if some time periods have large intervals and others have small intervals, that just affects the precision of estimates.

<comment><USER67> I think you're looking for this thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21515084](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21515084)

<comment><USER66> Oops.</comment></comment></comment>


Apparently, zero divided by zero equals 2 - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/interestingengineering/photos/a.139188862817493.25247.139188202817559/1009031262499911/?type=3&theater<p>Even as a degree-less person who is currently teaching himself computer science and mathematics, I realize the problems starts between the fourth and the fifth equal sign in the 'ans' section. If you independently do the calculations at the fourth step, you get 0/0. Interestingly, the same miraculously changes to 20/10 at the fifth step i.e (10+10)/10. The trick seems to have been diving (10-10) by itself and falsely giving 1 as the answer rather than the infinity it is supposed to be. After all, (10-10) is 0 which divided by 0 becomes infinity. Therefore, the conclusion cannot be correct. Anyway, someone seems to have cleverly played with mathematics, here. <comment><USER2> > The trick seems to have been diving (10-10) by itself and falsely giving 1 > as the answer rather than the infinity it is supposed to be

Most probably that's where the error is hidden, but it's not supposed to be infinity. Never mistake such an _invalid_ operation for one resulting in a symbol. The operation is just invalid, there's nothing more to it.

For your intuition to build up a little on this, why not negative infinity? This one matches just as well.

Arithmetics simply has no concept of infinity. You get this concept when you move to set theory (count of natural numbers) or to calculus (limits), but not on the arithmetics level.</comment>


Instacart Is Raising North of $100M at a $2B Valuation - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/05/instacart-2b-kleiner/ <comment><USER2> We use instacart, and it's great for the small weekday shopping trip. Maybe in our home we're just more selective grocery shoppers than most, but I would never use them for meat and even much produce. Meat, for example.. I've asked for boneless chicken breasts from the butcher and instead i've gotten prepackaged shrink-wrapped, and recently I requested a single double-cut beef tenderloin and instead got 2 single-cuts. In both cases, InstaCart made amends (50% refund) but I have a meal to cook: I don't want a refund, I want what I ordered.

Another reason we couldn't move totally to IC is how they handle credit cards. We get 6% cashback at grocery stores using the Amex Blue Cash card. (And have a 5% cashback Visa for the stores that don't take Amex). Unfortunately, IC charges come thru as internet services, not grocery. So that's a 6% price increase right off the top, in addition to mark-ups on products and delivery fees.

We purchased their "prime" and will continue to use the service, but i still have the dream of being able to replace all my in-store grocery shopping.

<comment><USER3> I'm from abroad. What's this "cashback" thing that I keep reading about? They give you money back onto your credit card, after you paid? Why don't they just give you the discount right away? And what do credit card companies have to do with grocery stores?

<comment><USER4> The credit card company charges the shop a transaction fee for using the card. The retailers allow this as it increases the chance of someone making a purchase, especially bigger purchases.

The credit card company sets out in it's terms of business that the shop must not have a surcharge, and must charge the list price for good paid for by credit card. This is so that using a card is attractive to the customer.

The card fees can be quite high. High enough for there to be more money than the transaction really costs, and the credit card company can then offer some of this money back to customer to entice them to use this card rather than some other card that doesn't offer cash back.

The end result is that customers who pay cash are subsidising the prices of those who pay by card.

It's hard to break the cycle because if a shop doesn't offer payment by card, not many people will shop there as people don't carry much cash.

Amex have the highest fees. I don't know why shops even allow amex.

<comment><USER2> Shops allow Amex because wealthy people use Amex. Not exclusively of course, and I certainly don't consider myself wealthy. But Amex cardholders charge far more than the industry average.

Also it's not just the ppl paying with cash subsidizing card usage. Cards that offer >1% cashback are usually more difficult to get, and targeted toward higher-spenders. These benefits are subsidized by the people using cards with no benefits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Instacart prices are consistently more expensive than having it delivered from the stores directly (including a shipping fee). Here in NYC, where grocery prices are already expensive, it aches me to pay even more.

Seems like NYtimes (1) had done an article on Instacart being expensive (and Instacart's FAQ says that they add a markup)

Google Express is not a competition yet. They do not carry many popular products / perishables.

(1)- [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/22/technology/personaltech/on...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/22/technology/personaltech/online- grocery-start-up-takes-page-from-sharing-services.html?_r=0)

<comment><USER6> Hey! This is apoorva from Instacart. Our prices for most stores are the same as the store and we are working on getting other stores to have the same prices as well. Stay tuned :)

<comment><USER7> Which stores are they? I mostly shop at Whole Foods and Costco, if those prices are exact, I wouldn't mind throwing more business Instacart's way.

Oh yea, losing 8% cashback at wholefoods that Amex gives is a sting in the back of the mind too. You should work on fixing that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Absolutely proud of what Apoorva, Brandon, Max, and the entire team have built. I remember working on their first Android app back in Max's apartment. They're truly deserving of their success so far.

Can't wait to see what they do next with this war chest.

</comment><comment><USER9> Congrats Apoorva and team! Wow.

Instacart wasn't first. Webvan was around over a decade ago. More proof that ideas aren't worth much. Execution is everything.

<comment><USER10> I'd say the lesson here isn't just execution, it's timing.

<comment><USER11> To provide some figures for your point, Webvan was founded in 1999 when there were ~100M internet users in the US. Instacart was founded in 2012, when there were over 250M internet users. The success of these services is definitely a question of achieving sufficient scale to break even, which is much easier with a nearly 3x larger market.

[http://i.imgur.com/44lkXHa.png](http://i.imgur.com/44lkXHa.png)

 _Edit:_ Clearly it's not the only reason they've succeeded, they've smartly avoided all the capital infrastructure that Webvan relied on and mobile devices have improved tremendously but when you're talking about tenths of a percentage points in penetration, tripling your TAM is huge.

<comment><USER12> The major difference is not the size of the market. The major difference is that Instacart piggybacks on the existing grocery store network, meaning that they don't have to pay for the overhead of a big warehouse. That lets them scale up with their user base instead of having to invest a lot of money up front in warehouses.

<comment><USER13> So does Safeway. The trouble with doing this out of grocery stores is that the order system doesn't know what's in inventory, and some fraction of your items won't show up.

Amazon Fresh is doing this with their own warehouses and robots. They know their own inventory, and will probably crush these manual-picking operations.

<comment><USER14> Amazon has never had to deal with their own delivery fleets before, or perishable goods in their warehouses. While it's true Amazon has other revenue streams, Fresh is still just an experiment at this point.

It's a race to see who can take the market, and Amazon is taking a slower, infrastructure based approach. It will be interesting to see if they will see it through to the end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> > _The raise will value the startup at $2 billion, or more than quadruple the > $400 million valuation of its Series B financing from June._

Quadruple? In less than 6 months?

That's not hockey-stick growth, that's just plain insanity.

<comment><USER11> As a comparison, Uber raised money at a $18B valuation in June, and then closed a round at $40B a few days ago. While a smaller percentage increase, Instacart's $1.6B increase in value looks pretty trivial compared to Uber's $22B increase over the same time period.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Woah, as an instacart-lover and yc alum, big props to Apoorva and team. Joining the rare group of $1B+ YC companies!

</comment><comment><USER16> Instacart is one of the first businesses I've interacted with as a customer that I can hardly help telling everyone I know about. It's just that amazing.

And where do they find such pleasantly disposed people to deliver the groceries???

</comment><comment><USER17> seems like their executing incredibly well and big congrats to the team. I do wonder a bit how defensible this model is - it seems to me that safeway already has most of the infrastructure available to do deliveries and then could significantly outperform instacart deliveries from safeway in terms of customer experience for example.

\- they always know what's in stock in which facility when you order, no more replaced or missing items \- they don't charge the high 20-30% markup that instacart charges to their customers

in terms of marketing, they could probably have lower cost of acquisition on scale as well. \- they could market their app in-store very aggressively at every single checkout counter.

what Safeway is most obviously lacking is a frontend that's as good as instacarts, but now that instacart has shown how to build it, it should be easy for safeway to build this out.

maybe they don't have their distribution setup such that they could actually deliver within 1-2 hours? what else am I missing? how can this be a defensible business long term?

</comment><comment><USER18> We used them recently in nyc and user experience was great. However once you do the math, a 10 - 15% markup on most products in addition to delivery fees, tips, (or prime) is simply too much if you use them on a regular basis. The annualized cost for a small family is easily north of $2000.

Now I know that "price is what you pay and value is what you get". So there are definitely occasions when I will use them. But I honestly doubt that most of their users realize the true cost of their service.

</comment><comment><USER19> Just ordered some groceries for tomorrow, hope it goes well. I find myself constantly too worn out after work to buy groceries, and buying amazon fresh is only good for some stuff.

</comment><comment><USER20> Any plans for expansion beyond USA?

I hope Instacart is coming to Canada soon. Toronto is an obvious choice.

The other city that would very likely be receptive is Vancouver. They're keen on the sharing 'economy' \- including a home-grown car-share company called Modo. There are also a few Whole Foods stores in-town. I also read recently that cities with fewer cars per residents are more receptive to home delivery services.

So yes Canada awaits for your arrival eagerly!

</comment><comment><USER21> Interestingly they got rejected by YC in the first place: [http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/18/how-instacart-hacked- yc/](http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/18/how-instacart-hacked-yc/)

</comment><comment><USER22> This concept is absolutely fantastic. I can't wait to see this cover more cities. The potential for this is enormous.

Keep it up guys!

</comment><comment><USER23> Based on numerous reports, such as this one[1], Instacart Shoppers are currently being classified by the company as independent contractors.

Apparently, Instacart Shoppers are trained, set a work schedule with the company, have their work activities controlled through an app, and even wear Instacart clothing. While classification involves numerous factors, I personally don't see how any of this passes even one of the most fundamental, the "nature and degree of control by the employer" test.

Other on-demand companies that use independent contractor classification are facing class action lawsuits [2][3] over classification and given the general trends in the courts[4], there's little doubt we will continue to see the number of class actions alleging misclassification grow.

Putting aside the costs of defending and settling a class action, or paying damages in an adverse ruling, the real question for investors in any on-demand company that currently relies on independent contractor classification is what employee classification would do to the economics of the business. Think of this as an "employee stress test."

In some cases, on-demand companies are using independent contract classification to shift costs that have traditionally been borne by competitors in their markets, giving them an "unfair" pricing advantage. If they are found to be misclassifying their workers, their ability to compete on price will be affected.

In other cases, companies charge a premium for a service that offers convenience. If they are found to be misclassifying their workers and are forced to pay their workers as employees, the premium charged to consumers would either have to increase or the company would need to be able to live on reduced margins.

The effects of reclassification would be particularly significant for transportation companies. For example, in California, under Labor Code Section 2802, employers are on the hook for expenditures or losses incurred by their employees "in direct consequence of the discharge of his or her duties, or of his or her obedience to the directions of the employer." This includes expenditures related to travel/mileage.

It's going to be very interesting in the coming years to see which of these on-demand companies continue to thrive because I personally think it's inevitable that many of them are going to be forced to reclassify their workers as employees. I suspect some investors aren't giving this enough consideration in their due diligence.

[1] [http://news.morningstar.com/all/market- watch/TDJNMW201411076...](http://news.morningstar.com/all/market- watch/TDJNMW2014110765/update-delivery-startups-echo-dot-com-boom-and- bust.aspx)

[2] [http://uberlawsuit.com/](http://uberlawsuit.com/)

[3] [http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Handy-com- housecleane...](http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Handy-com- housecleaners-lawsuit-could-rock-5891672.php)

[4] [http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-10-16/fedex- ground...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-10-16/fedex-ground-says- its-drivers-arent-employees-dot-the-courts-will-decide)

<comment><USER24> If there is nothing else I've learned from Hacker News it is that there is a non-trivial percentage of the startup community who not only don't care if a tech startup breaks the law, but they actively support and encourage it. Besides that, companies treating contract workers as employees in this way has been a thing for a long time, and I suspect it will take massive disgruntlement to fuel an equally massive lawsuit in order to get any of them to change.

<comment><USER23> > I suspect it will take massive disgruntlement to fuel an equally massive > lawsuit in order to get any of them to change.

As I noted, there are already lawsuits targeting some of these startups and there are prominent class action attorneys who have publicly stated that they're eying some of the startups that haven't yet been sued.

To file a class action, plaintiff's counsel needs as little as one lead plaintiff. If and when class certification occurs, plaintiff's counsel represents all members of the certified class. Members of the class who don't wish to be a part of the class must opt out. In other words, you do not need "massive disgruntlement" to have an attractive class action. Even the largest of class actions frequently have just a handful of named plaintiffs.

Note that there are practical reasons class action attorneys have not rushed to sue all of these companies. One of them: with their rapid growth, the number of potentially misclassified independent contractors is increasing quickly. Given the applicable statutes of limitations, patience can be rewarded with a larger class and damages that span a greater period of time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Congrats to Apoorva!

</comment><comment><USER26> webvan</comment>


xkcd: Operating Systems - <AUTHOR> https://xkcd.com/1508/ <comment><USER2> I think I've fallen for the 'GNU Hurd is Now Complete!' April Fool's joke for about 3 consecutive years now.</comment>


Are you awake? - <AUTHOR> http://www.colorfulwolf.com/blog/2011/03/17/are-you-awake/

<comment><USER2> Wow, that's a pretty presumptuous article. The OP somehow confuses "extroverted adventure seeker" with "awake". Maybe we're arguing semantics here, but in my experience these are some of the least awake people I know. In my conception, to be awake involves a lot of meditation, enough in fact that it affects your demeanor in ways that can make you come across as reserved, not really there, and even "asleep" to those with bubblier personalities.

Quite contrary to the OP, in my experience the true inner state of a person is one of the hardest things you can tease out, and it's very very easy to be mistaken. To claim that it's fairly easy to distinguished awakened people by way of some light questioning, well, that just seems to me rather hasty, if not even silly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, your reply is not one I was expecting. I am in fact quite introvert myself and I was certainly not implying that extroverted adventure seekers are what I call 'awake'. If anything, I'd say that introvert/extrovert has little to do with it. I've met some awake extroverts and some awake introverts, but not many. And when you travel you're bound to find (and speak to) more extrovert people than introvert people. I'm sorry I made you think of extroverts, because that's definitely not what I mean by being 'awake'.

<comment><USER2> Hey, don't worry about it, that's just how it came through to me, most likely because of my own experience in thinking about these things. I often noticed how extremely excited my brother gets about traveling and how he tends to evaluate people predominantly on criteria related to it. From there I noticed how other travelers have a tendency to overdo the traveling thing as well. When I read your examples and how quickly and carelessly you labeled these people, you came across as someone like that too. Maybe it was a you-had-to- be-there kind of thing, but when you dismiss people like the first 2 japanese guys as not awake simply because of their attitude to traveling... well, I don't grok that.</comment></comment></comment>


Crispr gene editing in human embryos wreaks chromosomal mayhem - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01906-4 <comment><USER2> Crispr sounds like a terrible editor. Biologists should use emacs instead.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well let china do this and end f humanity down the line will be a problem - remember the hiv crispy babies - CRISPR gene editing in human embryos wreaks chromosomal mayhem

And nature seemed not update the landscape since 2015: [https://www.nature.com/news/where-in-the-world-could-the- fir...](https://www.nature.com/news/where-in-the-world-could-the-first-crispr- baby-be-born-1.18542)

</comment><comment><USER4> So how is crispr fundamentally better than restriction enzymes?

</comment><comment><USER5> The horror! That sounds like Orochimaru level mad science.</comment>


Show HN: PassMass, Chrome extension, Firefox addon and Android/iOS app - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sepisoad/passmass <comment><AUTHOR> pass mass is a dead simple password less credential manager, you just use a master passphrase and the based on the domain name of the service you want to register/login a password is automatically generated for you</comment>