Show HN: User-owned image sharing - <AUTHOR> https://surfer.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys. I worked on this with a couple of friends. We were looking at the number of views posts on the front page of reddit get and trying to calculate ad revenue generated by this stuff. It seems crazy that top redditors can drive like 1M views and never see a penny--not to mention the fact that most image sharing sites basically claim ownership of your images. Even youtube gives users a cut of ad revenue.

This is an idea we had for making user-generated-content sites in a more user- friendly way.

Let us know what you think.

Edit: [https://surfer.io/t1Uft](https://surfer.io/t1Uft)

<comment><USER2> Do you take a cut? How do you make money?

<comment><AUTHOR> If it takes off and becomes expensive to run we'll take a cut but right now we're just distributing all the adsense rev to users.

<comment><USER3> You could state that somewhere. I was assuming you take a cut and purposefully didn't mention how big it is.

<comment><USER4> This is something Surfer is going to have to state clearly during the sign-up process to avoid being villified by the Reddit and Imgur crowd.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with you but I'm also super confused by that. Imgur does the same thing but their cut is 100%.

<comment><USER4> True. But when money and the mob mentality is involved, being upfront will protect you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good initiative but it lacks severely. First of all you will face all sorts of intellectual property problems. Then, you will have to deal with adoption. Imgur users are often linking to the HTML page of an image because Imgur is so clean and unobtrusive AND because it has extra features.

Why would people link to your HTML page instead of directly to the image? There are no comments, voting systems or even view counts, just the idea that someone is getting money might be disturbing to some.

Then, you have anonymity and ease of use. Unless your product is so good and unique, which it isn't right now, why would I register? The only thing is that I am getting some dollar cents if my content goes viral. I first have to register et cetera. Can I crop my image? Rotate it? Remove EXIF data?

I hope you manage, but I doubt it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks bro!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Let's try it out. Here is an excellent photo of two snails that I've titled "Slow Romance"

[https://surfer.io/BkJ3L](https://surfer.io/BkJ3L)

<comment><USER7> Just curious. Is this an image you own? I remember seeing it on Reddit a few days ago.

Edit: the point was made.

<comment><USER8> and the point being that the service allows copyright infringement? Not being sarcastic, I'm genuinely trying to understand.

<comment><USER7> That's the point I took away from it yes. Person posts image that they do not own and profits from it. That could be problematic. Imgur, YouTube, etc.. Aren't responsible for user generated content. That's their out. Once a "user" wants to profit from content that isn't theirs, I don't see that flying.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for clarifying. Interesting point. I think that DMCA and the likes will protect this site just as it does for imgur, youtube etc. Youtube users can make profit from advertising as well. So I don't think the DMCA distinguishes between infringing copyright for profit or otherwise.

That being said, if this site gives much more opportunity to making profit from copyright infringement, then it's more likely to become a target for 'pirates' trying to make a quick buck out of other people's copyright work.

The site can do something similar to what youtube is doing, which is to forfeit any profits if a copyright complaint is made (and maybe even giving those profits to the original copyright holder). This could deter / nullify infringements at least in theory.

It is rather complex and difficult process to manage, so any site hosting user-generated content should consider those implications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My buddy built something similar on www.razzi.me (now defunct). They let users use their own adsense id and displayed their ads 50% of the time. They got banned from adsense and tried other providers but that didn't work out well either and they eventually shut down.

<comment><USER10> Any idea why they got banned from adsense?

<comment><USER11> Most likely because a user uploaded something that Google didn't like.

Google Adsense is pretty strict on the pages that you can display their ads on. If someone uploads a pornographic or offensive image to the site and theres a Google adsense ad on it, then Google will ban the entire site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you want to be in control of your own images, videos, audio, whatever: set up your own instance of MediaCrush. It takes less than 10 minutes and you have _complete_ control. You can go buy an Arch Linux droplet on DO and have your own media hosting solution done before you know it.

[https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush](https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush)

<comment><USER13> If you have slightly different needs, MediaGoblin is also a good choice.

[http://mediagoblin.org/](http://mediagoblin.org/)

<comment><USER12> MediaGoblin is also pretty cool, but it does indeed serve a different purpose. MediaGoblin also comes with a sort of lightweight social network (similar to Imgur), where as MediaCrush is meant to provide a platform to share with existing social networks. Also, MediaCrush uses a more permissive license (MIT).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Hm. Not sure I completely understand what's going on here. Is this supposed to be better than imgur?

I'm always a bit leery of something that immediately wants my credentials before making it perfectly clear what the product is. I actually got the most information from your terms page [1].

1 - [https://surfer.io/terms.html](https://surfer.io/terms.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it's basically our first stab at making an imgur like site with distributed ownership. We're aiming mostly at the reddit crowd right now but they seem to be VERY loyal to imgur so we'll see how that pans out.

Thanks for taking a look!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> UI feedback on the image page: it's not immediately clear that the image itself is clickable (putting you into full-size view). Perhaps you could set `cursor: pointer` on that element.

</comment><comment><USER4> Support for Surfer on Reddit Enhancement Suite will be crucial for this to do well on Reddit. Gfycat did this and it has paid off for them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip, we'll look into it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> You get an internal server error if you submit the signup form on the front page without filling any fields.

You should probably let people just upload their pictures without signing up: offer money for those who do sign up. Currently, it's like that your service's main idea is to make money to the user rather than to let them upload images.

</comment><comment><USER16> What's your plan to handle instances where users generate ad revenue from images they don't own?

<comment><AUTHOR> So that's one of those gray areas that all user generated content sites have to deal with. For now I think we're (perhaps naively) thinking that we're protected the same way youtube, facebook, or imgur is from being liable for user content.

<comment><USER17> Look into "DMCA safe harbor registration" if you want protection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's a really interesting concept, if it takes off it would be nice to see how it affects the types of content people are posting (whether having the incentive of payment pushes people to generate/find more 'popular' content).

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now traffic is low enough that we can manually verify each image [1].

[1]: [http://paulgraham.com/ds.html](http://paulgraham.com/ds.html)

Edit: I totally meant for this to be a reply to a different comment. Copying it there.

<comment><USER19> Is checking each image compatible with the DMCA safe harbor?

<comment><USER13> Not that I know of. I'm pretty sure that any kind of active curation ruins your safe harbor protections.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> adsense or any ad server can block your account/domain because of a single inappropriate picture. How will you deal with that?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now traffic is low enough that we can manually verify each image [1].

[1]: [http://paulgraham.com/ds.html](http://paulgraham.com/ds.html)

<comment><USER20> DMCA and Ad compliance are core to the business model. They cannot be ignored by pointing your users to this link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This seems like a really cool idea! I'm not sure how well this would go over on reddit since they prefer direct-link images usually, but I love the idea. Good luck, I hope it takes off!

How are you sending revenue back to users? Do you wait until they reach a certain threshold before you transfer it to them? And do you use a particular service for doing the transfer? Does it eat a hefty piece of the transaction?

</comment><comment><USER22> A good thing about imgur is that images load very quickly. I am not getting the same experience from your website.

[http://imgur.com/99kuTjE](http://imgur.com/99kuTjE) took 3000ms to load, [https://surfer.io/t1Uft](https://surfer.io/t1Uft) took 7000ms.

The same image direct-linked from imgur took 300ms.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, the first time it loads at a certain size it makes a resized copy so that's probably the lag you're seeing. I'll update so it does the resizing on image upload and see how fast we can make it.

Thanks for trying it out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think you have a really good idea. I also agree that a lot of users would use an image sharing site if they know potentially they could make _some_ money instead of none.

There are some really good points brought up in this thread, that I think you are going to have to battle against. Maybe not as severe as Popcorn just faced but these are issue.

</comment><comment><USER24> Check out [https://infotomb.com/](https://infotomb.com/) \- these guys promote themselves - "Share files securely and anonymously." and "Your data your way". Might be similar value offering.

</comment><comment><USER25> Awesome concept. It was about time someone made a system like this. As an avid redditor with quite a bit of useless reddit-karma, I'll give your site a try. If you were selling company shares, I'd buy some right away :) Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER26> Concept is interesting. I'm a photographer... is this thing worth it? How many views do I need to generate 1 US Dollar? BUT you site is too slow. I will not predict a bright future with this speed. It takes too long.

<comment><AUTHOR> So, $/views isn't a simple calculation because it depends on the quality of traffic. Basically I just look at my adsense account every day and divvy that between users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Why do you require registering to upload? You want it to be as quick to get started with as other services and on top of that you get to collect the ad revenue until they decide it's worthwhile doing so.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is a great idea. The domain name is not the best, but the intent is. Best of luck to you, and I hope to be able to share photos on it one day, if I ever think I can make money off of one.

</comment><comment><USER29> How does the payout of ad revenue work legally? Normally you can't just write checks to people without either employing them or requiring them to have a company.

</comment><comment><USER30> Cool idea! I really like the site design. Coincidentally enough, the color scheme and flat design style looks almost exactly like something I'm working on haha

</comment><comment><USER31> Seems nice, but it seems to ignore the exif rotation/orientation data... is that something that should be handled when the image is uploaded?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, that may be a problem with the image-resize server we're using [1]. We'll take a look ASAP. Sorry about that.

[1]: [https://github.com/jimmynicol/image- resizer](https://github.com/jimmynicol/image-resizer)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are you using for cross platform games? - <AUTHOR>

I've been making games for iOS for about a year and my current client wants their game on iOS and Android. I have never made anything for Android.
What are the most popular solutions for cross platform game development right now?
Are there any easy ways to port this game to Android without learning this whole other platform? <comment><USER2> For 2D stuff, Haxe/OpenFL has been quietly gaining a fanbase, including some successful higher-profile releases. Comfortable environment for former Flash devs since it builds on the same API. Some other FOSS options I've often seen come up: LibGDX, Cocos2D. Haven't shopped around lately.

Unity is extremely common(bordering on the default option) for 3D. It has a small industry of Asset Store add-ons that fill in the gaps and can (sometimes) substitute for knowing how to code things. I recently decided to familiarize myself with it enough to take on freelance work, since there's a lot of activity there.

Unreal has been in a price war with Unity and since this past GDC it's now in a "free plus royalties" deal. You're given complete source code access, not just proprietary runtimes. It's behind Unity on buy-in and the subsidiary market, but the core tech is generally more interesting and it has a big legacy in AAA. You may like the Unity workflow more, depending.

</comment><comment><USER3> SDL. It is solidly cross-platform (supports Haiku, which makes me smile, as well as Linux, Win, iOS, Android and so on and so on) and zLib licensed (pay nothing; use it, distribute it, static link, dynamic link, whatever you want - the zLib licence fits on a postcard).

Here's someone talking about it at a steam dev day:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeMPCSqQ-34&list=PLckFgM6dUP...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeMPCSqQ-34&list=PLckFgM6dUP2hc4iy- IdKFtqR9TeZWMPjm)

</comment><comment><USER4> Unity is very popular for creating 3D mobile games; easy exporting to all the major platforms and a visual editor. If you are a junior programmer, I'd recommend Unity even if you are doing 2D. More advanced developers might find themselves fighting against the design philosophy of components and game objects in Unity, kinda like Entity System, but not quite. The engine design makes debugging harder. Note that all Unity games run in a 3D scene even if it's purely 2D so the raw performance and battery drainage is worse than in pure 2D game engines.

Haxe+OpenFL, Haxe+OpenFL+Flixel and Haxe+OpenFL+HaxePunk combos are all good if you need to do lower level stuff like manipulating video buffer, which is rare but can give you pretty unique visual effects. Multiplatform support is working, but I wouldn't say it's great in these.

Cocos2d-x is good for physic based 2D games. Good performance and a great tool in the hands of more advanced programmers. Multiplatform support is better than in Haxe but worse than in Unity.

I'll also note that development environment setup is a lot more painful in Haxe and Cocos2d-x compared to Unity.

Source: my experience. Consume the information with a grain of salt.

</comment><comment><USER5> According to Unity Technologies (the makers of Unity), who say they're quoting an unreleased McKinsey report, "Worldwide, Unity takes a plus 45% share of the full feature game engine market, approximately three times that of our closest competitor."

From: [http://unity3d.com/public-relations](http://unity3d.com/public- relations)

To get a sense of all the options for developing games that run on both iOS and Android, see:

[http://www.mobilechameleon.com/](http://www.mobilechameleon.com/)

<comment><USER6> consider cocos2d-x , its open source can be develop with c++ , java script or lua got good community and the engine have good support . you can check my open source game to get the feeling [https://github.com/meiry/Cocos2d-x- Guessing-Game](https://github.com/meiry/Cocos2d-x-Guessing-Game)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I prefer cocos2d-x. I used it for my music game ([http://www.adhyet.com](http://www.adhyet.com)).

Check out their Programming Guide ([http://www.cocos2d-x.org/programmersguide/1/index.html](http://www.cocos2d-x.org/programmersguide/1/index.html)), that has a decent overview that will tell you why you should give it a go.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wrote a fairly large and complex HTML5 platform game (a reimplementation of MegaMan, actually) using EaselJS: [http://executive- man.com/](http://executive-man.com/) here it is on github if anyone is interested in taking a look at how it works: [https://github.com/CamHenlin/ExecutiveMan/](https://github.com/CamHenlin/ExecutiveMan/)

</comment><comment><USER9> For me, I prefer Cocos2d-x. Before I decided on it I tried Unity and UnReal and I felt like Cocos2d-x offered me a way to learn and as I grew in experience the engine grew with me. There are forums available that are also very active: [http://discuss.cocos2d-x.org](http://discuss.cocos2d-x.org)

</comment><comment><USER10> For 2D, I'd recommend the HTML5-based Phaser: [https://github.com/photonstorm/phaser](https://github.com/photonstorm/phaser)

Wrap it with Cordova to support iOS, Android, and many other platforms, as well as a free web client.

</comment><comment><USER11> I would say cocos2d-x or maybe libgdx</comment>


Kill Google AMP before it kills the web - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider_google_amp_bad_bad_bad/ <comment><USER3> Ive forced myself to use Bing since google introduced AMP. Do I like it better than Google? No, I don't. But! I like not having google become my single source of content more than I dislike the slight drop in quality as a result of using Bing. I like the sites I go to, to have control over their content and being able to easily link to them.

I think it's reprehensible for google to push this so relentlessly and beyond simply stealing links it makes google into the "internet."

This (AMP) could easily be a standard, in fact it's mostly just common sense (good lightweight HTML/CSS/JS). Instead of Google forcing its way on users and creators it could just lower the page rank of the offenders.

One other thing about AMP that pisses me off as a user and an engineer is it's one more place to maintain meaning one more shitty neglected experience. As a user I hate it when AMP pages are broken and I somehow can't get to the non- AMP version. I don't blame the developers because we have enough on our plate. My anger is solely directed to google for making the damn mess in the first place.

<comment><USER4> Checkout Duck Duck Go, still not Google-level results, but it's still pretty good, and not Bing.

<comment><USER5> Duckduckgo is a lovely idea with abhorrent search results. Like, unusably bad results, at least to the extent that I'm a reasonably tech savvy user. I'm often searching for papers as a grad student, or typing things "close enough" and hoping Google figures it out for me etc. Duckduckgo cannot keep up. I love Bangs, I love the idea, but the search is nigh-useless.

That said, I use StartPage, who have a contract I believe with Google. It's Google's search results, minus the tracking. It's as much as I am willing to compromise on something as fundamental as search.

<comment><USER6> The results for localized stuff, e.g. a local store, are horrible. The results for complicated questions where the query is either not very specific or the page might not have all words, are also really bad. But if you have a good idea of what you're looking for, which is most of the time for me, it works very well.

At least it's honest about not having results whereas Google presents 5 billion, all of which are missing one of the three keywords (which it notes in a small, light grey text, which you only notice after the first three results were _completely_ unrelated and you were wondering what went wrong).

For example, "new double c++" is the query I did most recently and in the top 3 there are 2 results that answer my question.

Making something up at random like "torrent clients" gives me as top hit the Wikipedia article "comparison of bittorrent clients", which is better than expected.

I can't seem to think of a vague query right now. "audio books" gives me sites with audio books; "psychology books" gives me articles of 'the best 50 psychology books' and such; and looking in my query history, "draw unicode" seems vague but the top hit (shapecatcher.com) is the one I was looking for.

Something localized then: "drankwinkel echt" (where Echt is a place and drankwinkel a liquor store) indeed gives terrible results. The store name, surprisingly, works though: "gal & gal echt" gives similar results to google.nl.

<comment><USER7> > _At least it 's honest about not having results whereas Google presents 5 > billion, all of which are missing one of the three keywords (which it notes > in a small, light grey text, which you only notice after the first three > results were completely unrelated and you were wondering what went wrong)._

Yes, that's really bad; it's what killed Altavista and could really be Google's undoing.

Still, Google is miles ahead of the competition.

Small experiment: searching for "movie old man balloons" on Google and Bing.

On Bing there is a first line of 4 videos, none of them related to the movie "Up" in any way. The second link is to Up on Imdb (good). The 3rd link is to a crazy religious fanatic site page titled "Disney PIXAR's, 'Up' \- The Sugarcoating of Pedophilia!" (WTF??!? - but at least related to the movie). The 4th link is again to a youtube video with no connection to the movie.

On Google, the first 8 links are to the movie. There is a line of images, all from the movie / movie poster. There's a list of 4 questions "People also ask" that shows questions about the movie ("How many balloons would it take to lift a house?"). To be fair, the crazy Baptist site does show up on Google too (God has good SEO!), but way down below the fold.

Anyway, my point is, when answering the question, Google is _certain_ you're looking for information about Up, and tries to give it to you.

Bing seems to have doubts and tries to guess if maybe you're looking for a funny video of a man in the subway wearing a balloon hat (??!? it's not a "movie"!!) or the hit song "99 Luftballons" from 1983 (not a "movie" either!)

Bing tries hard, but is obviously more than a little clueless.

<comment><USER8> >crazy religious fanatic site

FYI, Landover Baptist Church (which that article is from) is a very old, very well known spoof site.

<comment><USER9> And a canonical example of Poe's Law in action.

<comment><USER7> Yes. But the fact that it's a parody of fundamentalist Christianity makes it a very bad result, because it's a comment on religion (or fanaticism, or Internet culture, or what have you) and not about the movie itself.

A perfect search engine would not return this on the first page of results about the movie, because it's not about the movie.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Google has no respect for [iOS Safari]. It's a deliberate effort by Google > to break the open web.

I could make the same argument that Apple cripples iOS Safari's implementations of emerging standards that aim to bring the web experience closer to a "native feel" to keep its app store revenue churning:

[http://caniuse.com/#feat=stream](http://caniuse.com/#feat=stream)

...but really it's a lot more likely that getting _all_ things right on _all_ platforms is the really, really hard thing about the web, for browser vendors and web developers alike.

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence (or in this case, sheer overwhelming difficulty).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor)

<comment><USER11> But also:

sheer overwhelming difficulty + no incentive = no action

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> With respect to scrolling: We (AMP team) filed a bug with Apple about that (we didn't implement scrolling ourselves, just use a div with overflow). We asked to make the scroll inertia for that case the same as the normal scrolling.

Apple's response was (surprisingly) to make the default scrolling like the overflow scrolling. So, with the next Safari release all pages will scroll like AMP pages. Hope Gruber is happy then :)

<comment><USER12> On top of this: we currently have a team working to fix webkit bugs that are problematic for AMP. This, of course, will make webkit better for everyone.

<comment><USER13> Can you team also work on a way to let people opt-out of Google AMP?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In theory* I don't mind the idea of having a more standardised subset web page that has a consistent internal structure and that renders quickly.

However, having Google load this structured content and host it on its own platform is a terrible idea. Content should remain on the publisher's site. Putting too much content in one place is dangerous for competition.

* In practice there are implementation problems too, e.g. those mentioned in the linked article.

<comment><USER15> > I don't mind the idea of having a more standardised subset web page

We already had this two decades ago: WAP, its contemporaries (i-mode), and its immediate successors (XHTML Mobile Profile).

<comment><USER16> Except mobile Web adoption in 2002 was poor because of form factor, among other things.

<comment><USER15> Oh sure. Though I'm not actually trying to criticise the idea of a subset, if anything I'd support it. I'm just pointing to potentially useful precedent. It's not a new idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Here's your one step recipe to kill AMP:

* Build fast webpages.

The linked article says: "Yes, AMP pages load fast, but you don't need AMP for fast-loading web pages." Well yes, but people don't build fast webpages without AMP. They could've done all the time, yet webpages got more sluggish over the years.

<comment><USER18> Building fast webpages won't get you preferential placement in Google search results.

<comment><USER19> Unless I'm missing something, it does: [https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/using-site- speed-i...](https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web- search-ranking.html)

<comment><USER18> You're right, I was imprecise in my brevity. Speed is definitely a signal in ranking. I'm mainly grousing at classes of results -- like the "Top Stories" carousel -- that are only available to AMP pages, and rather difficult to organically rank above. The AMP results also get more vertical real estate, flashy thumbnails, publisher logo images, etc.

For example, searching for "Python" returns five pages of results where only _two_ aren't about the programming language. But at the top of the page, bested _only_ by python.org itself, is a huge carousel of 11 AMP stories about snakes in the everglades. These stories _also_ appear in the normal search results, but not until the bottom of page 7.

So somehow the #68 result, "Python hunters eliminate more than 100 snakes from Everglades," got boosted to #2, because rankings #2 through #13 (if you count the AMP carousel) are not available to merely fast and relevant content.

<comment><USER19> Ah, yeah. Truth be told I realised after hitting 'send' that you may have meant that.

This being the case, I think even if building fast webpages may not allow one to circumvent AMP in the instant, it is still a strong way of removing much of the grounds for its existence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The complaint about AMP's strange UX paradigms is valid: it works very hard to pretend like every AMP article is a standalone website, but it actually behaves like a viewport-wrapping iframe, where Google Search is on the outside and the article is on the inside [1]. But it's not a personal affront to iOS; it's more of an artifact of Google's confusing market strategy and conflicting requirements for AMP's deployment: pretend like AMP pages are real browser- resident tabs, while actually driving traffic around within the confines of Google Search (vs. outside) when possible. As much as I don't care for their strategy, I respect needing to balance conflicting requirements. They should scrap the dishonest UX and be up-front about what they are, as I write [1].

But Josh descends to hyperbole. I've been both critical and supportive of AMP on here [2], but it's important to not lose sight of the big picture. AMP isn't an effort by Google to kill the open web; it's a technology whose existence was forced by Facebook Instant Articles' meteoric rise, a competitor from a company that doesn't even operate on the level of the open web, but runs a family of products where the data flow is one-way: inbound.

Instant Articles made publishing harder on the web, giving preferential treatment to articles posted within Facebook's walled garden (cf. AMP giving preferential treatment to content that adheres to the AMP spec, the same way they give preferential treatment to content served with TLS). With Instant Articles fizzling a bit [3], AMP's importance as a strategic play is lessened, and we can enjoy its benefits without feeling like we're pawns in a game between two massive content aggregation portals.

Besides, Apple News is the same idea as AMP; I'd be curious how Josh feels about that.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13415625](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13415625) [2] [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=niftich%20%22AMP%22&sort=byDat...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=niftich%20%22AMP%22&sort=byDate&type=comment) [3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14126073](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14126073)

<comment><USER21> Is Apple news more than a feed spec like RSS / is the content hosted by Apple directly, like how AMP pages actually live on google.com?

<comment><USER22> Apple News is really just RSS. I think Gruber's Daring Fireball stuff in Apple News just comes from his RSS feed. It's all hosted on your servers, so it's basically just a specialized browser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> HTML is already fast. It's the stuff that's added to the page that slows it down, and we already have plenty of standards, techniques and solutions to make sites faster.

AMP is just an alternate HTML framework that prevents certain things, that's all. Not sure why everyone is so eager to opt-in to a less flexible system instead of fixing their existing web presence. All it does is increase the amount of time and resources needed to now maintain effectively 2 different versions of the same site while also losing control over rendering, URL location and privacy.

Also the main reason for slow sites is all the ads - ads which are are usually served by DoubleClick, the biggest ad server on the planet and owned by Google.

<comment><USER24> I am on your side -- just chiming in to share my observations.

To 99% of the businesses I worked with, _software development is a singular expense_. It's treated like buying a tractor for the farm. Hell, even farming equipment is more generously funded by the buyers for possible future expenses (compared to most software development) -- maintenance, repairs, parts that periodically need replacement, fuel.

For one reason or another, most businesses treat software development like buying a socket wrench from the local store and never even thinking of spending another penny on the developed product in the future. They expect it to run perfectly forever.

It's a sad state of affairs.

<comment><USER23> That only makes AMP worse. Many publishers are already squeezed with dev resources, the last thing they need is yet another standard to support instead of putting that time towards the original HTML that is universally available to all users and devices.

<comment><USER24> Absolutely. You know, in a perverse way of seeing at it, I kind of feel good that Google forces AMP; they are like "Hah, you all stupid motherduckers couldn't get your own crap together for 15 years, guess it's time for you to be ruled, if you can't make use of your freedom". If you look at it that way, it makes sense.

Still, maybe it's time the web development in general gets its crap together indeed. One can dream, right?

<comment><USER23> Yes. Most often, it's a business management and priority issue than anything technical. It's far easier for developers to point to AMP limitations and just say "its just not supported" rather than try to argue against adding more cruft to the page and get overruled anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I know it might not be their shtick, but I wish the post focused more on the "publication independence" part of the criticism. Giving Google control over prioritizing a subset of the web, and letting them optimize for it, just gives them a better way to filter content. They seriously have enough power over the web as it is.

The other criticisms about how it performs on iOS seem truly secondary, they could easily fix them but we're still left with the far bigger issue.

Additionally, criticisms about iOS having a closed ecosystem seem irrelevant to this. An App Store is one thing, but starting down the path of effectively adding "high speed lanes" to the supposedly free web is scary.

<comment><USER26> Gruber's first link ( that's not part of the quoted block or a link to the article he's quoting from ) going to a previous piece of his about the publication independence problems of going along with AMP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The only reason AMP is even viable is because the current alternatives are even worse.

Publishers have to date shown a remarkable inability to grasp the idea that _user experience matters._ Just about every major online publication is painful to browse on a mobile device, even ones that have embraced responsive design, because of things like slow-loading ads, excessive use of JavaScript, and enormous modal prompts for things like subscription offers and newsletter signups. Every year the situation gets worse. And no publisher appears to be willing to buck the trend; presumably they believe that, as long as everybody else's site is just as bad, doing so would just be leaving money on the table. So the economic incentive for change is not there.

AMP is a terrible idea for a lot of reasons, any one of which would in a sane market make it an instant non-starter. But the state of online publishing demonstrates that it is anything but a sane market; it's a market trapped in a death spiral, and in that situation _any_ idea that seems to offer a way out is going to get some traction. So it is with AMP.

The only way to make AMP (or something like it) irrelevant would be for the publishers to get their houses in order on their own, without the need for external pressure. But their leadership doesn't have the kind of farsightedness such a move would require, and that leaves room for someone like Google to come in and do their jobs for them.

</comment><comment><USER28> AMP is Google's latest attempt to build a walled garden. It's more dangerous to the web than Facebook's WG because of Google's near-monopoly on search. AMP does indeed need to die in a very hot fire.

And in the long term, it's high time somebody built a less creepy, better functioning search engine.

<comment><USER29> Bing works fine. The more people use them, the better they'll get. DuckDuckGo mostly feeds off other engines, but is also good.

I personally don't really recommend StartPage because you can't get away from Google's opinionated ranking on a site that provides Google results.

But in short, use other search engines and they'll get better. Stop giving Google your search behavior, it's what they use to keep themselves on top.

<comment><USER30> You realize Bing supports AMP and has an AMP cache as well, right? And if you use DDG, you're effectively using Bing.

BTW, Cloudflare has an AMP cache as well....

<comment><USER29> I am aware Bing also supports AMP, but reducing Google's dominance in search data is key on preventing them from determining web design going forward.

DDG uses multiple sources, including Bing and Yandex. They also have their own efforts like their knowledge graph-type data features, which are open source and can be contributed to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Honestly? I've come to loathe the abysmal performance of the modern web so much that I'm ready to accept AMP. Half the reason I come to hacker News is that the site runs fast. And half the reason I comment before reading the article is because it doesn't.

<comment><USER32> I often comment without reading the articles because on an older device it's impossible. 90% of links will just crash the browser in 10 seconds. I can watch an hour long youtube video just fine, but trying to load a newspaper article will make it keel over and die.

Disabling javascript does fix a lot of it, but then I can't vote on HN, and I like doing that.

<comment><USER33> There are extensions which add buttons to quickly enable/disable JS on per- site basis like NoScript for Firefox.

Also, Firefox reader view fixes many websites which otherwise render empty with JS disabled for reasons I didn't bother investigating.

<comment><USER32> I don't think it's possible to get browser extensions on an old iOS device.

<comment><USER33> Fair enough, I didn't realize you meant iOS devices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> AMP needs to either be drastically rethought or killed. Nothing more annoying for me on my iPhone than clicking a link and it's AMP - as it means missing features, broken scrolling, masked URL and worst of all, in page search is totally broken on the iPhone! So annoying that there is no way to disable it - if Google persist in pushing it then it might push me to try alternatives!

<comment><USER35> Google's broken AMP crap is what made me switch to duckduckgo on iOS.

<comment><USER36> It seems to me that only iOS users are complaining -- as an Android user I am blown away by how readable AMP pages are.

I can just get to the page, read it, and then leave. There's no futzing around with:

* long scrolling down "the fold" filled with clickbait in-site links or other unrelated nonsense

* interstitial and overlay ads

* crappy non-mobile interfaces

* "Shared" buttons stickied to the bottom or top of the viewframe

There's still ads around the page (in-content ads between paragraphs and "you may like" or "recommended" ads at the bottom of the page) and navigational elements to browse outside of the AMP page. It's the mobile content consumption experience as it should be.

<comment><USER37> Yes, the people who don't own a phone OS by Google are complaining about Google's AMP. That is part of the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> If you hate AMP as much as I do, I highly recommend switching your mobile browser to DuckDuckGo. The results are as good as Google and no AMP.

<comment><USER39> > The results are as good as Google and no AMP.

I use ddg myself and as much as I like it, it's still quite a bit away from Google in quality of search results. Usually it's good enough, but I still get result pages where ddg has nothing I want and appending !g gives me what I want in #1

<comment><USER21> Same, I use DDG, but fall back to the

> !g

bang quite often when I need to really find something

</comment></comment></comment><comment> d-sc I feel like I may be in the minority here. I don't like the philosophy behind AMP, but with the internet at my mildy rural house, AMP articles can be sometimes the only way to access the news without waiting 30+ seconds for a single article.

<comment><USER40> And that's valid. The problem AMP is trying to solve is absolutely real, but the way they are trying to solve it is shady.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> AMP was born dead no need to kill it. As the webmaster of many websites, the last time I heard customers complain about rankings in SRPs was ten years ago. Their main concern nowadays is likes, follows and shares. I keep telling them: put some effort on your website, own your audience, you do not _own_ your FB page much less the fans and likes there. They don't listen. Trapped in the hype.

In this light, how do I sell to them the idea that investing in AMP content (same trap different server) will help with rankings/performance where they do not care?

Sadly enough, the Internet is happening inside social networks, Amazon and mobile apps. AMP is late to the party, no?

</comment><comment><USER42> What kills me about AMP's UX is that not only is it a dark pattern, it's not even a _new_ dark pattern.

Back, say, 10-12 years ago it used to be really common for sites to jigger their outgoing links, such that the target site would appear in an iframe underneath a toolbar from the original site. This was widely reviled, and mostly died out, and the fact that Google is reviving it really bothers me.

<comment><USER36> How is this a dark pattern? Sites opt into it, users get a streamlined interface for content consumption, everybody wins.

The only losers in this are those seeking to "curate" the user experience (UX) on their sites, and personally I lump them in with malicious ad peddlers -- to hell with them.

<comment><USER37> It is the same opt-in as mob protection: "nice search results you have there, be a shame if something dropped you to page 2"

<comment><USER36> The only way that would be accurate is if Google targeted content creators randomly for rent seeking, but the fact of the matter is Google has a vested interest in making sure their search results are compellingly useful to users.

Personally I'm using Google search more _because_ AMP makes things faster for me. It's a win-win for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I do not understand the dislike this community harbors for AMP. I personally really enjoy the system; whenever I'm searching for any type of article on my phone (Android), I prefer AMP pages, because they load faster and are far more responsive than some of their more bloated counterparts.

<comment><USER26> The fact that you say android explains everything to me. I'm sure Google made sure it was a decent experience on their operating system. But it's clear they didn't give two seconds thought to iOS, and haven't bothered to improve it since it was released.

It really does make google search feel broken. Many of the top results no longer "work right".

Ignoring all the other issues of who is in control and whether it's a walled garden and all that other stuff… On iOS it's a terrible user experience. That ALONE would make me hate it.

<comment><USER44> Well now you know how most of those web pages felt on Android before - <USER2> devs tested on mobile Safari and left pages broken and utterly stuttery on Android web browser.

<comment><USER45> That's because Chrome on Android sucked.

<comment><USER46> Android Browser wasn't Chrome on Android.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Long before amp, Google began prefixing search result urls with "google.tld?url=" and adding Google parameters as suffixes such as "sa=", "ved=", etc.

Unless I am mistaken this parasitic cruft only serves Google, not end users.

Below is quick and dirty program to filter out the above. Replace .com with .cctld as needed.

Requirements: cc, lex

Usage:

       curl -o 1.htm https://www.google.com/search?q=xyz
       yyg < 1.htm > 2.htm
       your-ad-supported-web-browser 2.htm

To compile this I use something like

       flex -Crfa -8 -i g.l;
       cc -Wall -pipe lex.yy.c -static -o yyg;

Save text below as file g.l Then compile as above.

       %%
       [^\12\40-\176]
       \/url[?]q=
       "http://www.google.com/gwt\/x?hl=en&u="
       "&"[^\"]*
       %%
       main(){yylex();}
       yywrap(){}

As for amp, I read that it needs to use iframes (and Javascript). Yikes. We can easily write a program to strip out iframe targets as well as links to Javascript.

amphtml does look great in a text-only browser that does not load iframes automatically.

<comment><USER48> It's really annoying trying to copy and paste URLs from Google results. It also seems largely unnecessary, can't they detect clicks using javascript? I have noticed they have started doing this with links sent through Google Hangouts messages as well. I do remember a time when they weren't doing this and it was very refreshing because everyone else was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Google, Facebook, and Apple all have walled gardens for reading the news on mobile.

The web as we know it was killed when you couldn't link to a news site because it'd serve ad interstitials (Forbes) or full screen pop-over ads (basically everyone).

I think the real problem is journalists rely on advertising income to do their job. That model requires them to rely on Apple/Facebook/Google for their livelihood, and to focus on sensationalist headlines and quantity over quality (to get ad impressions). One of the most shocking things for me was seeing Buzzfeed have some of the better written pieces in the last year -- all of those stupid "10 best/worst/funniest" type lists provided the ad revenue to do actual journalism that other publications didn't have the budget to do. But it's not clear to me how to break this dependency; for example, UBI might come with strings preventing the publication of pieces critical of the government.

</comment><comment><USER50> I'm honestly just too scared that Google would gain an even larger foothold in the web to consider implementing AMP on any sites, but the UX argument is valid as well

</comment><comment><USER51> I agree 100% with his frustration with AMP scrolling behavior on iOS.

<comment><USER45> Yup. It's like Google want everyone to experience the crappy scrolling on Android everywhere. :)

On a more serious note it is extremely frustrating. Everything about the AMP UX on iOS is broken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I actually really like AMP but not for articles but for products in webshops. The media on the internet is such a mess nowadays anyway that having AMP pages makes no difference whatsoever for the content, sharing and talking. How is google optimized content any different than having to print magazines so that they fit through your mailbox? It is just a alternative method of delivery. The truth is that for the everyday user the only interesting part is the content. Not the ads, not the comments, especially not the page layout and hopefully not the links to other "You never believe what X things about Y" articles across 10 X different page loads. AMP for web articles may die as publishers try to remain more independent or relevant in other forums (snapchat, instagram stories, facebook live etc.) but the idea of fast and simple mobile pages should remain.

For webshops where product discovery is really important and having a fast google search result could (I dont have data to back this up) really drive users to use your webshop instead of the competitors. AMP style pages force developers to focus on what is actually important on the page.

<comment><USER53> > How is google optimized content any different than having to print magazines > so that they fit through your mailbox?

That's pretty much the point. The web was supposed to free us from those kinds of practical constraints - why let Google keep them alive for grubby commercial reasons?

<comment><USER52> Freedom would be to choose whether format you like. Web is anything but that as every developer and user has to rely on set of rules and software to be able to communicate and access it. In practice most of us have zero power on the system itself. Someone else (businesses and organizations funded by businesses, developers working in such organizations) have the power to control how the web works. At the moment google yields much of the such power as does facebook, amazon, twitter, apple and others. Truthfully I see the whole internet today as a business enterprise that as a side effect allows everyone to share their everything. Internet as we know it will never be free and thats probably part of the reason why there has been a movement to "fix the internet" ([https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/technology/the-webs- creat...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/technology/the-webs-creator- looks-to-reinvent-it.html?_r=0))

Practical constraints and solutions stem from real world problems. AMP is an attemp to fix broken thing. Yes, internet was created for very different use and with different motivations than what it stands for today. I truly understand the concern of having a big tech behemot take control over the content for monetary gain but I dont really see the problem as a technical one. Whether you use Bing, Google or even DuckDuckGo you rely on someone else to find you stuff and thus give them the control to feed you information they think you want.

The bigger issue is the legistlation and how basic economy works, especially in the states where companies probably yield the most power over the government than in any other place in the world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Looks like Google have recently added a means of getting out of the AMP "jail" and arriving at the original source site by clicking a little link icon in that irritating header that constantly pops over content while scrolling.

This is very welcome. My biggest gripe with AMP was that there was no way out of it.

<comment><USER26> Too little for me. I still can't easily copy that URL, and there's no way to opt out of it. Instead of fixing their complete break to the way with the web works, they put in a little tiny patch and clean it's just as good.

<comment><USER54> If you're on iOS You can copy it by long-touching the URL that pops up when you touch the link icon.

<comment><USER26> You can now (although that's still different from any other site). I'm pretty sure that was only added a few months ago and when it was first released you couldn't easily copy the URL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> "it breaks the decade-old system-wide iOS behavior of being able to tap the status bar to scroll to the top of any scrollable view"

Wait. I don't know of this feature. For example I attempted to tap my addresss bar on iOS but it just goes to change the address. How do I use this feature?

<comment><USER56> Double tap. I think it only works with one tap if the address bar is already open.

<comment><USER26> No, it's a single tap on the status bar (where the clock is). It works almost anywhere in iOS there's a long scrolling thing.

<comment><USER56> No, in Mobile Safari if the address bar isn't visible you have to tap twice, once to show the address bar and once to scroll to the top.

It is a single tap in most other apps though.

<comment><USER26> Oh, ok, I get you now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> So AMP benefits google because faster page loads = more DFP views (and also more $ for publishers); AMP benefits consumers because JS is not murdering their memory and dataplans. It seems like web developers are the ones that hate it.

<comment><USER26> Have you been to Daring Fireball? It's one of the fastest loading pages on the whole Internet because it's not crapped up with lots of stuff. Gruber's site is proof you don't need AMP to have fast loads.

I honestly don't know this: how exactly are AMP pages monetized? Weren't there articles recently that publishers who went with AMP or Facebook's version saw steep declines in revenue?

<comment><USER58> > how exactly are AMP pages monetized?

AMP has an ad component.[1] It seems to have gotten a lot of ad network participation now, but it was pretty limited (i.e. effectively no money via AMP views) last year when I was working for a major content publisher. It's undoubtable that the company lost a lot of ad revenue in exchange for protecting its position in Google search results.

[1]: [https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/extensions...](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/extensions/amp- ad/amp-ad.md)

<comment><USER26> Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I want Apple News and Instant Article to join in AMP so that media developers could reduce the cost of news distribution following the single standard. I even want crawling services, Feedly or Pocket, to serve AMP with advertisements so that I could support writers, journalists and media companies; besides, I have no idea if web feed, RSS or Atom, could consume AMP.

Google, which would gain the most benefit from AMP, deserves criticism for potential abuse of their power. Online media, which serve pages with poor performance, deserve criticism for its reluctance to improve their poor UX. AMP, however, hardly deserves criticism, through a perspective of user experience and news distribution.

AMP may look intimidating to the open web philosophy, be tepid approach from a technological point of view. But we need more experiment as it stands: everyone can become a media with the Web, old media is still playing a valuable role in society, online media lack prospects for the future to be profitable enough to invest in journalism. Fighting for the open web is good, but fighting for it without caring about anyone but technological principle is no good.

</comment><comment><USER60> > Except that, hilariously, to create an AMP page you have to load a, wait for > it, yes a JavaScript file from Google.

What does the Javascript file do? Is there an open-source equivalent? If it transmits data to Google, could you instead collect the data server-side and send anonymized data with a cron job once-a-day to Google's endpoint to reduce the slowdown and privacy issues?

It looks like AMP bans all Javascript except for the one Google-provided Javascript file, which provides common UI components:

[https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec)

"While it does allow styling the document using custom CSS, it does not allow author written JavaScript beyond what is provided through the custom elements to reach its performance goals."

Unless Google's library includes everything, even a simple 'Delete' button requires Javascript if you want to use the right HTTP verb. I'd worry about using anything that leads me into a corner like that.

</comment><comment><USER61> Jokes on google, AMP sites always crash on my old iphone 4s (the one I use for mindless browsing), so I just avoid AMP content

</comment><comment><USER62> As a web developer I have AMP but as a user I love it! Websites have been so bloated that something like this was badly needed.

People loading just 100-200 kbs of fonts to serve 10kb of original content.

<comment><USER63> Okay, I know of a website that loads almost 2MB of javascript to show you 140 bytes of actual content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> I feel like the majority of the benefits of Google AMP could be realized with an nginx & Apache plugin combined with Google's CDN.

If it was implemented in this manner, you could keep your existing URL structure and not be forced onto Google's domain. I'm sure many more developers would be okay with AMP if this was the case.

</comment><comment><USER65> I don't like AMP for no other reason than I don't believe there are any genuinely decentralized initiatives anymore.

"Oh, we _open source_ it, you know", seems the common answer.

If an initiative is rolled out from the innards of one of the tech giants, and there are a bunch of other tech giants contributing to the initiative because it is open source, and most of the contributors and maintainers just accidentally happen to be also be employees of the tech giants, then stop and wonder about it for a while. And then reject it. That is, don't participate in the initiative.

Here is why: at the moment, the cost of open sourcing is minuscule for the giants but the benefits are enormous, and surprisingly often leads the entire tech sector down the path of greater oligopoly (Android being an excellent example). Another way to put it is, given none of the tech giants directly compete with each other in their respective core profit centers, open source is becoming a nice little platform (intentional or unintentional) for extending oligopolies.

There is no realistic chance that the open source code can be used by a competitor against the one who proposes the initiative (if you know of a counter-example, I would be happy to hear about it). But, there is every realistic chance that an initiative like AMP could extend a heavy toll on a genuine but small competitor in terms of code compliance (e.g. DuckDuckGo) and put them out of business.

But then, don't we all benefit from the nice byproducts of their technical innovations? In sum total, once you see the reduction in privacy, competition and decentralization of the web, probably not.

</comment><comment><USER66> It took 8 seconds, 1.7 Mb of data and 233 requests to load this article. May be a web like this deserves to be killed.

</comment><comment><USER67> Is this why Google News on mobile is so terrible? Feels like using an android news app inside of Safari. Thumbs down.

</comment><comment><USER68> I suspect whoever made that executive decision at Google to use "AMP" was too young to remember Frontpage and so many years fighting with MSIE. How soon we forget. AMP is bad news. Keep your hands off my design. It's not your Internet, Google. PS: I'm on Linux, not an Apple fanboy :-D

</comment><comment><USER69> On our site, we just load AMP as a base experience, and load our other stuff on top of it if it's not served in the AMP browser. So we get the initial render speed of AMP, along with the SEO advantages, and can still implement features not supported by AMP for the majority of our users.

</comment><comment><USER70> The problem he is seeing is with safari rendering rather than amp itself. He should ask Apple to fix that.

</comment><comment><USER71> "If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own."

Is anyone working on a competing standard?

<comment><USER26> It's called HTML, and it's been around for a number of years.

If you don't put 12 megs of JavaScript on it and five auto playing video ads… you'd be surprised how fast web pages can be.

This isn't a problem that "needs" solving. It's not like it's impossible or even difficult to make a fast loading pages with the existing technologies. The people who didn't care before or just outsourcing it to someone else who doesn't care about them and everyone's losing in the process.

<comment><USER71> You're missing the point. Once you've clicked on the link, it's too late. Putting an icon on the link that says "this isn't one of those bloated pages" seems useful, particularly for people on slow connections.

In theory, someone else could create another standard and write browser extensions to put an icon on links that meet that standard.

The HTML standard doesn't help with this, not by itself, anyway.

<comment><USER26> In Safari I've gotten the sense (don't know if it's true) it pauses the connections when I go into reader mode for JS and such.

> The HTML standard doesn't help with this, not by itself, anyway.

True. But it also doesn't CAUSE it which some people almost seem to be arguing from, as if fat HTML pages are a fait-accompli.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> I'm not sure when there is going to end up but because google amp is hosted on google servers you can actually read such articles on GoGo plane flights with out paying for Internet. It was kinda nice although I'm not sure how long until this will be fixed.

</comment><comment><USER73> Original Register link: [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/19/open_source_insider_google_amp_bad_bad_bad/)

<comment><USER74> Thanks! We updated the link from [https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/05/20/gilbertson- amp](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/05/20/gilbertson-amp).

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> > it breaks the decade-old system-wide iOS behavior of being able to tap the > status bar to scroll to the top of any scrollable view

Is that what was happening. It just felt like scroll was spazzing out. Usually I was just trying to push a button near the top of the screen.

</comment><comment><USER76> A competing decentralized implementation if anyone is keen to pitch in: [https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/8534](https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/8534)

</comment><comment><USER77> As a user, I love AMP. Pages load fast, and that's about all I really care about.

I don't really do web dev anymore, but if I was I think I'd be happy about using it.

Maybe a content creator feels differently but I don't have any experience with that.

</comment><comment><USER78> News websites dug their own graves. AMP is a solution to a simple problem: the inability for websites to reach acceptable perf levels. For users, AMP is a blessing. It even improves the ad situation a bit (no more perf impact).

</comment><comment><USER79> Yes, of course. Just as we are killing publishing on Facebook, right?

</comment><comment><USER80> When does that bloody pagerank patent expire anyway? Maybe we can see slightly better quality on other major search engines if they used the same algorithm Google "invented"

</comment><comment><USER81> Google news has a bug on iOS safari for me that makes it just load the header - it's actually cut back a lot on my idle news consumption - please don't fix!

</comment><comment><USER82> From the publisher side does anyone have data on AMP's impact on search rankings (to the original publisher - not Google :-))

</comment><comment><USER83> There are worse things than AMP. "Wix" sites, for one. 20 seconds to load a page where all the useful info is static.

</comment><comment><USER84> Do you remember the time when slow webpages with megabytes of ads in popups/iframes were killing the web? When almost every webpage was trying to get you install their half-baked mobile apps?

AMP webpages are fast and responsive. Publishers that don't use AMP now have to make their webpages fast. Competition is good for the user and the web.

</comment><comment><USER85> Can someone explain How is this killing the open web? Isn't this an open standard?

<comment><USER86> It's not the standard, it's what google does to amp sites: re-hosts them on their own site so your site is now (essentially) google.com/yoursite.com.

AMP as a standard is great: limit javascript to a known set of behaviors, ensure images/etc all have defined sizes so content doesn't jump around... but google's using the benefits of this standard as a trojan horse to route even more web traffic to their servers, enabling them to get better and better analytics and insights to your browsing behavior. (Now all the things users do on your site are visible to google too, even after they've "left" the search results).

The whole thing sets off alarm bells and indicates an overall strategy that's aimed towards moving the web into a google walled garden. There's all sorts of dystopian futures we could imagine here: promote search results that are AMP, while users appreciate the speed benefits, and become less likely to click any non-AMP links, and suddenly every web publisher has to get on the train or lose viewership... so that they can monitor yet more of what we do online, widening their competitive moat, etc.

It's scary stuff and there needs to be a CLEAR separation of the benefits of AMP as a standard, from what google's doing with it.

<comment><USER36> But it's entirely opt-in -- how is this controversial?

<comment><USER86> Because users seeing AMP links as faster will pressure more sites to do it.

Keep in mind, AMP pages on google aren't just fast because you're not using bloated javascript, they're fast because:

\- The JS that _is_ used is CDN cached and shared with all other AMP sites

\- You're loading the content from the same origin (google.com) so no need to establish a new TLS connection, or look up DNS, etc

\- Google's servers/networking/etc stack is very fast, faster than what is in reach of most sites

\- The new content is loaded into the existing DOM of the search page, which can be much faster

And probably the most damning:

\- Google will eagerly-load the contents of the first few results, making them not just fast but 100% instant.

What choice do sites have?

<comment><USER36> > What choice do sites have?

Offer better experiences on their websites and apps, the technology is available but publishers choose to shovel crap in with food and call it beef tenderloin. Now Google is offering something better.

What did you expect Google to do when Apple News Format and Facebook Instant Articles are creeping up? Both offer impressive experiences and this isn't even nearly as impossibly mind-boggling.

AMP is an _open standard_ that _any publisher_ and _any search engine_ can implement and if all search engines get on board then users win so much -- pages load faster, they require much less network bandwidth, they're easier to read. Nobody, absolutely nobody, will have sympathy for publishers after all the bullshit we're being forced to experience both now and historically.

<comment><USER86> If your argument is "other walled gardens are doing it too", it sounds like we have the same understanding of the problem. You just seem to think it's ok and I don't.

<comment><USER36> My argument is Google took an alternative road here, like they did with SPDY and HTTP/2 development -- they developed an open standard and threw their weight behind it. I don't see how AMP is a walled garden since any and all other search engines are free to implement the standard as well. Content aggregators like HN can cache and serve up AMP pages as well.

The only controversial thing here is this: publishers' content is being cached and re-hosted on a platform outside of their control. This is a non-issue because publishers are opting into this system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> Man, business is hard. Millions of voices, easy to die by a thousand of cuts.

</comment><comment><USER88> This, coupled with the common anthem from the tech crowd of using Chrome _and_ only Chrome is a dangerous precedent.

Stop supporting AMP, and use something other than Google Search and Chrome _today_.

</comment><comment><USER89> Are they serious with the following?

AMP HTML uses some stupid Unicode emoji character:

      <html >
           ^ HN filtered out the voltage symbol, bravo.

Just, no, Google. You're not Ken fucking Iverson, and this is not APL. Just supporting one way of doing it, <html amp>, is perfectly fine.

<comment><USER90> I suppose they do this because some html processors do stupid things with `amp` - because it might be part of the ampersand html entity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> I gotta say, this mostly seems like an attack on the implementation of AMP in Safari than it is on AMP itself.

</comment><comment><USER92> Love my duckduckgo

</comment><comment><USER93> What is AMP? EDIT: I mean technically, not what the acronym means.

<comment><USER36> Per the specification:

> AMP HTML is a subset of HTML for authoring content pages such as news > articles in a way that guarantees certain baseline performance > characteristics.

Source: [https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec)

Basically you have your website serve up your content within a subset of HTML so that your pages _have_ to load faster. JavaScript is permitted but with limited functionality (again, the intent is your website loads quickly).

Also, Google will host _your webpage_ on their servers after crawling your website. When a user clicks on an _AMP_ link from Google's search results, the content will be served up from Google's servers and thus the page will load much faster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> talk about being over-dramatic

</comment><comment><USER95> "publication independence"? Really? The man who is famous among other things for supporting the most closed ecosystem there is around: iOS, where a single company decides what apps are worth publishing and wish ones doesn't. Or does newspaper publication independence is really that more important than software publication independence. The irony is so clear that it's weird that he didn't even mention it.

That genie is out of the box, when you decided that you didn't mind a company gatekeeping which software you can install on "your" devices you opened that can of worms, the one where any company can gatekeep anything they want as long as it is "convenient" for most people.

<comment><USER96> Well, it is Gruber we are talking about. He believes in openness when it suits Apple - AMP outputs standard HTML5 which Safari renders - it does its own scrolling but he doesn't quite like it. Google doesn't 'respect' that closed platform. On that 'crime' Gruber has this to say - "If I had my way, Mobile Safari would refuse to render AMP pages."

You might have valid reasons not to use AMP but Gruber's are merely that he ends up sharing google.com URLs on twitter, it's Google, and it does its own scrolling on iOS.

<comment><USER26> AMP does NOT outperform HTML5 unless the HTML5 page is horribly designed and ridiculously bloated. But that can be fixed without Google's help.

I'm not sure why your dismissive of the scrolling thing. Having something breaks the feel of the web browser is a really bad idea.

Additionally he's completely right that it breaks other platform conventions that users expect to use. You can't use the share button, you can't tap at the top of the article to jump back to the top.

I can tell you as someone who uses mobile Safari, AMP is incredibly infuriating. It's gotten to the point where I actively avoid AMP search results.

Google has single-handedly broken the way it's search results feel for a number of top sites on iOS, and doesn't seem to care. Further, there is NO OPTION to turn it off.

I would LOVE to have a way to tell mobile Safari not to render the AMP version of the page. Then I could use Google easily again.

<comment><USER97> I have to admit, I've been on iOS for years and only ever use Safari for browsing, and NEVER had I heard about this tap the top bar to scroll to the top behavior.

<comment><USER26> It's one of the standard iOS gestures and works nearly everywhere.

iOS is FULL of handy little things like that, but I'm not sure many of them are ever _explained_. You just have to stumble across it or read about it somewhere like reviews of the new versions of iOS.

Did you know in mail (and many other places) you can swipe table rows left or right for quick actions? Marco Arment recently changed Overcast to make features more visible because it seems many people, including power users, weren't even aware that gesture existed.

Now that I have an iPhone 7 re force-touch stuff can be very handy. But I forget it exists for weeks on end because I went so many years without it and it's totally hidden.

<comment><USER98> Another nice gesture that's lesser known is hold down on the left side of the screen in any app then drag to the right to open the app switcher.

<comment><USER26> That's one of the new force press gestures that came around in the 6S. It really is useful, but I'm having trouble getting over almost 10 years of muscle memory that no such gesture existed.

Plus it's a bit fiddly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> What's going to be interesting is if browsers can at some point render a APM version of a page natively. What I mean is render the original page on the source website as APM content. That will stop the monopoly and hijacking (or rather the rationalization of it) of target websites in Google results.

<comment><USER99> Or as a start, maybe a browser extension/plugin where it renders it for certain configured sites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> Original link was submitted, flagged (why?) and vouched for. Tried to submit again and, instead of up voting the previous one, it got resubmitted.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14381919](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14381919)

<comment><USER74> Thanks, we updated the link of this submission to the original from [https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/05/20/gilbertson- amp](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/05/20/gilbertson-amp).

The previous submission was older than the threshold to be considered a duplicate, which is why it went through on its own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER101> Hate it or love it if you are a content producer and want to compete in SEO you have to AMP.

</comment><comment><USER102> i agree that AMP is troubling for a variety of reasons - none of which, however, change the fact that the author of this article is unquestionably a Weenie.

</comment><comment><USER103> agreed

</comment><comment><USER104> I honestly would support Apple or Mozilla from refusing to render AMP pages. I use DuckDuckGo on Safari so don't have to deal with it thankfully.

<comment><USER105> AMP is built on open HTML5 standards. What you're suggesting is that Apple and Mozilla intentionally stop supporting the open web.

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> A little late to the party.

People have been criticising AMP for all of the reasons mentioned in this pointless article for many months prior.

<comment><USER26> Yep. I think he's written about it before too. The first thing in the article that's not a quote is a link to one of his previous articles.

But he has a link blog, he saw a article he wanted to share, and he added his thoughts as he always does.

And if people listen this time now that we've all had experience of AMP being around for a while ? Sounds good to me.</comment></comment>


Microsoft offers language-agnostic coding technology - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoworld.com/article/09/02/24/Microsoft_offers_language_agnostic_coding_technology_1.html

<comment><USER2> Language-agnostic...as long as it's .NET</comment>


Why Are Haiti's Coffee Trees So Tall? - <AUTHOR> https://reason.com/archives/2016/09/18/why-are-haitis-coffee-trees-so <comment><USER2> It's odd, the article has this to say early on,

" _In Haiti, you can often make as much or more through temporary aid funding than you can from productive endeavors. Which means that, even as the market for unique coffee with an interesting backstory booms, cultivating it in the country has become as much about chasing charity as it is about trying to run a viable enterprise that produces excellent coffee year after year. "_

Then it spends the better part of a page and a half detailing all of the issues of political instability and so on which actually are the major factors and have nothing to do with "chasing charity".

<comment><USER3> Well the site this is on is after all "reason.com - free minds and free markets".

<comment><USER4> Please don't be dismissive on HN

<comment><USER5> Understanding the political position of Reason is important to understanding their articles. For example, elsewhere in this discussion someone mentions that poor roads are a problem. This isn't something that Reason would bring up because they see businesses as strong, self-sufficient organizations only held back by government interference, and admitting how much they depend on government-created infrastructure would damage that argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Revolutions podcast has dedicated 19 episodes (around 10 hours) this year on the Haitian revolution, particularly the French occupied half, in which the coffee plantations feature prominently.

Of particular interest is the fact that in 1825 Haiti was forced to pay reparations to French ex-slaveholders, in the order of $40B in 2010 dollars, which they only managed to finalize in _1947_.

[http://www.revolutionspodcast.com/2015/12/index.html](http://www.revolutionspodcast.com/2015/12/index.html)

<comment><USER7> This is the particular podcast[0] that quickly goes through post-revolution Haiti. Highly recommended podcast and the Haitian revolution was in particular really interesting. The author is currently in the middle of the Simon Bolivar's revolution in Venezuela.

[0] - [http://www.revolutionspodcast.com/2016/04/419-the-history- of...](http://www.revolutionspodcast.com/2016/04/419-the-history-of- haiti.html)

<comment><USER6> _The author is currently in the middle of the Simon Bolivar 's revolution in Venezuela._

And which, I'd like to add, was helped by post-revolution Haiti, who helped Bolivar with ships, weapons and volunteers, in exchange for pushing for the abolishment of slavery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Article lacks images and indeed a quick look on the net yielded nothing noteworthy to back this up and all I saw were the usual bush sized ones. So somewhat curious if this the norm or just a few exceptions that got picked upon.

Also they say coffee but there are many types of coffee plant/bush/tree, so no idea what variation of plant. Also note a bush is just a small tree too many.

</comment><comment><USER9> TLDR; Haiti is pretty bad for growing coffee, for a number of reasons spanning politics to poor farming practices. So the coffee trees tend to be really tall because if they actually manage to grow one which produces beans, they are hesitant to cut it down.

<comment><USER10> Haiti has social, economic, and political issues with growing coffee. The core issue is most coffee trees are not on farms, even if it's useful for them to clam to be farms.

PS: Haiti has over 800 people per square mile, that's on par with Massachusetts which does not do a lot of farming (0.1% GDP).

<comment><USER11> This reminds me of Colombia albeit the situation is better due to the peace agreement they reached with the rebel group/they are a hilly country but they are also plagued by massive corruption yet one of their biggest exporter is coffee. Interesting to compare the 2 places

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have spent about 9 months cumulative in the coffee-producing region of Nicaragua, known as Jinotega, and have been fortunate enough to spend some time with small coffee producing farmers (fincas), and have followed the entire production process that they have in-country from drying the beans to roasting and packing. I have also spoken to various coffee importers here in America, in my local metro area, about how they purchase, both fair-trade and not. I have also spent about a year cumulatively in Haiti, and worked for a Haitian manufacturing company. I hiked from sea level to the highest point in Haiti, and saw a lot of rural areas in the middle portion of the country, but I didn't see much coffee growing in Haiti personally, although I did drink a lot of Rebo brand Haitian Coffee. I would agree that the technical level of coffee production in Nicaragua is likely higher, and that they do at least appear to have a larger export market. I have heard stories about how it's challenging to export agricultural goods from Haiti to the US, in general. Technically it's an ITAR restricted country, which is not a good starting point at all, for any kind of exporting. Beyond that, while both Nicaragua and Haiti have had massive amounts of political instability, it's just more expensive to import all sorts equipment to Haiti, because it's an island. You can get all sorts of coffee grinders and roasters in Nicaragua by driving it down from Mexico or wherever, but in Haiti it would have to be brought in by boat or from the Dominican Republic. This creates an expertise/knowledge bottleneck. Multiply this expertise/knowledge bottleneck out over every industry, and every piece of equipment. Also the geography and infrastructure doesn't help. Nicaragua has a huge highway leading from the coffee producing region, so it's an hour drive from Managua. Back in 2004 it took more like 4-6 hours to drive there from Managua. In Haiti...you have nothing of the sort...it's just crappy roads, pretty much everywhere. Multiply that cost over the cost of importing vehicles, parts, the lack of mechanical expertise, etc...everything is just more expensive. So it's also a distribution problem. That's basically how I see Haiti in a nutshell, compared to Nicaragua, not just in the coffee realm.

The comment about, "things being done for charity rather than business," is both true and not true...it's an over-generalisation. There are a lot of people making money and producing things in Haiti as well. I don't have an official breakdown of charity dollars vs. non-charity dollars.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's quite a contrast between the two halves of that island. If you like Jared Diamond, he wrote an interesting essay on the subject[1]

[1] [https://books.google.com/books?id=iIeTZ6SfOnkC&lpg=PA128&ots...](https://books.google.com/books?id=iIeTZ6SfOnkC&lpg=PA128&ots=dlJN0yUf2h&dq=trujillo%20vs%20duvalier&pg=PA120#v=onepage&q&f=false)

</comment><comment><USER14> The most salient thing I learned from this article is there are lots of old jokes in Haiti.

</comment><comment><USER15> Three word answer: high time preference.</comment>


How to automate invites to a Slack community - <AUTHOR> https://blog.stamplay.com/launch-your-community-with-a-fully-automated-slack-signup-page/

<comment><AUTHOR> In this post, we explain how to automate invites to create a Slack community. The hack is done using our API-based development platform Stamplay, takes few minutes to be implemented and can be done for free.</comment>


Confirmed: IBM moving Power Systems manufacturing to Mexico - <AUTHOR> http://poweritpro.com/news-amp-views/ibm-move-power-systems-manufacturing-out-rochester-updated <comment><USER2> IBM's spokesperson:

"The reality is, we constantly evaluate our operations, and we look at the best possible infrastructure to maximize our competitiveness in a global market . . . and this is one of the ways we can do that."

WTF does that mean?

<comment><USER3> Either no one wants to move here or they want to much.

Loved Rochester, MN in spring and fall, you can keep it in Winter or Summer. The city has the Mayo clinic so its not going to fold up if parts of IBM move.

That site is home to their iSeries and the bulk of their level two support and development occurs there.</comment></comment>


For Black CEOs in Silicon Valley, Humiliation Is a Part of Doing Business - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-16/black-lives-matter-highlights-adversity-facing-black-tech-ceos <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23540162](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23540162)</comment>


Code copy paste caution - <AUTHOR> I created this little swift logging library, https://github.com/goktugyil/QorumLogs
It allows you to save your critical logs to Google Drive very easily.
I also created a little public demo sheet, so people can test their logs.
https://github.com/goktugyil/QorumLogs/blob/master/Log%20To%20GoogleDocs.md
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rYRStyI46L2sjiFF9DTDMlCb2qR2FMtKrZk3USRdXkA/
For months, users just tested it casually on the demo project. Today some dude decided to send his logs which includes passwords and usernames in the public demo sheet. At least the app isn't live yet. :) <comment><USER2> I am still waiting for the answer to "This is why you don't outsource to India"

</comment><comment><USER3> is this suppose to be a catchy title? I did not understand your reason for title after reading the post? was that user from India? anyways you can find people making (silly) mistakes all over world...</comment>


Pre-dating Soylent by over 20 years: The Ultimate Meal - <AUTHOR> http://theultimatelife.net/CatalogMeal.htm <comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this Colin.

Once the subject of Soylent came up, I've been thinking of contributing this myself but I don't think I have enough karma to make a difference.

Too expensive for me to use as a meal so I would use it as a supplement. I've been formulating my own mixtures for years and this is one of the helpful ingredients. I test every supplement under extreme conditions, and this is a proven performance enhancer to me.

Currently at formulation #22 according to the label, the website still shows #21 in their JPG of complete ingredients. Take a look at the components to see if you are already getting these in your diet. If not, maybe that's what supplements are for.

Thanks to HN I looked at Soylent, too bad it is not free of artificial ingredients.

Add some of this to Soylent and it sure would make it green though. Now I'm no youngster and I do remember when the original movie of Soylent Green came out. It was in response to the 1970's meat crisis, which was along the lines of the Arab oil embargo. Heck, I even remember when the NFL was still drinking Kool- Aid and only the Gators had Gatorade. By the time I got there they had an extreme system which made it difficult to rise to the top unless you were likely to be able to invent something as popular. Regardless, I've not been interested in popularity but I do formulate my own sports drink too, which has none of the artificial components of Gatorade, and excels in performance trials.

</comment><comment><USER3> Comparison to Soylent [1], looks very imbalanced. 2.5 times the cost per kcal. Half of the micronutrients are met with only 7% kcal target, some not even there.

[1] [http://diy.soylent.me/recipes/ultimate-meal-powder- test-1?nu...](http://diy.soylent.me/recipes/ultimate-meal-powder- test-1?nutrientProfile=520cd8c4ffac6c0200000065)

</comment><comment><USER4> Also, pre-dating civil rights by over 20 years.

"THE ULTIMATE MEAL® and MEALBAR® are totally free of yeast-based vitamins and minerals, soy, ... or anything from China."

I can see how local is better than sourcing internationally. There is no need to support anti-Chinese sentiments though, especially considering that the copyright on the sourced website is 2003.

<comment><USER5> There have been several cases of adulterants in both food and medicine from China for the purposes of increasing profit margins -- and two cases that come readily to mind were in 2008.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's not much of a meal -- one serving contains only 170 calories [1], or 350 if you add an apple and a banana, as directed.

[1] [http://www.theultimatelife.net/images/tumeal- eco21.jpg](http://www.theultimatelife.net/images/tumeal-eco21.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER7> Ultimate Meal suggests, and almost requires to be edible, a Banana and Apple blended in. On its own it tastes like grass clippings. Not quite as user friendly or accessible as Soylent which differentiates the two.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would hope that _some_ progress might have been made in the intervening years ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is this just an advertisement? How does it differ from the many other pre- Soylent meal replacements such as Garden of Life? The appeal of Soylent isn't just that it's a meal replacement shake.

<comment><USER9> What, other than being a meal replacement shake, is the appeal of Soylent?

Other products exist which can replace all food. Naso-gastric tube feeding isn't new and people spend long times on that. These products exist in a variety of sweet or savoury flavours (or even "unflavoured"); they exist as shakes, soups, or "juices"; you can get them in little bottles or big tubs of powder; they cover a range of different needs (weight loss; weight gain; different compositions for people unable to cope with certain nutrients etc).

It's nothing to do with developing world. WFP already have a bunch of product which is cheaper, already being produced in bulk in the local regions, and doesn't need as much clean water.

<comment><USER8> To me the interesting part of Soylent is the development and the engagement with the community. Having a blog talking about how it was made and the struggles they had as well as having a place for DIY solutions on the same website as the product they're selling, that's interesting. Food replacement comes second.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The website and product packaging is definitely more recent. They have reference to GMO and stevia.</comment>