Fight back against Google AMP (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.polemicdigital.com/google-amp-go-to-hell/ <comment><USER2> I strongly agree. Web developers and app designers should work to build fast, performant web sites that use bandwidth carefully because that's good for end users. But the entire AMP approach to doing this is questionable, and as we have seen over the years it appears to act more like a way to give Google more undeserved and unnecessary control over what should be an open web.

More broadly, I consider this yet another reason to avoid using Google properties where possible. They have shown themselves to be bullies and bad actors who want to control the internet and oppose an open web. I recommend simply not building AMP pages at all, but instead working to build high quality, performant websites which gracefully handle device size changes and lack of javascript.

<comment><USER3> > I strongly agree. Web developers and app designers should work to build > fast, performant web sites that use bandwidth carefully because that's good > for end users.

They should, but they didn't. Before AMP most of the web was unusable on slower Android phones and frontenders just laughed at you and told you to drop 800$ on an iPhone if you want to see their pages. Is it a surprise that Google shoved a technology to fix web on their platform down developers throats?

Nothing else before AMP helped. Why do you think those developers will suddenly wake up and start building lightweight web pages now? Instead of ad bloated, video playing monstrosities?

Web developers were slothful. This is how purgatory looks like. ;)

<comment><USER4> > They should, but they didn't. Before AMP most of the web was unusable on > slower Android phones and frontenders just laughed at you and told you to > drop 800$ on an iPhone if you want to see their pages. Is it a surprise that > Google shoved a technology to fix web on their platform down developers > throats?

So let me understand this: Google allows OEM's to ship Android on shit hardware with terrible performance, is rightfully complained at for rubber- stamping hardware with no oversight, no standards of quality, and no requirements of suitably good UX, and then Google passes the burden of supporting the shit hardware they by-virtue-of-silence gave permission to onto a ton of unsuspecting content publishers, who now either face delisting from the dominant search engine not because their content is bad, but because their website requires resources not met by Google's, proxy, shit hardware? And you're okay with that?

<comment><USER3> Yes, I'm OK with world having the ability to buy a smartphone for 50$ outside US. Mobile devices shouldn't be reserved just for rich westerners. Same for the whole web - I don't see the reason why it shouldn't be usable on a dual core laptop with 2GB of RAM.

I'm fine if supporting people with older and slower devices costs more development time for developers in Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER5> Years ago the web was fast on a 1 GHz single-core with 512MB of RAM. What changed, other than ads and ad networks like Google becoming far more invasive by wasting more and more memory and CPU?

<comment><USER6> In the days since 1 GHz CPUs, web pages have also grown from simple HTML/CSS to huge JavaScript frameworks, in which displaying the simplest static content requires a ton of JavaScript.

But if you install a browser add-on such as uMatrix, you can see that surprisingly many web sites will still work just fine if you disable JavaScript (even first-party JavaScript). One example is nytimes.com.

<comment><USER7> Should mention that megabytes of javascripts are slow to download, compile and execute. While a few seconds may go unnoticed on the developer desktops, it will be a lot more on a mobile or laptop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> EU citizens can submit formal complaints to the European Commission for suspected infringements of competition rules.

Here is more information on how to file a complaint: [https://ec.europa.eu/competition/contacts/electronic_documen...](https://ec.europa.eu/competition/contacts/electronic_documents_en.html)

If you believe Google engages in anti-competitive practices with AMP, you have the power to signal these issues, which may result in an investigation.

You can also share your concerns with a simple email to comp-market- firstname.lastname@example.com.

> You can report your concerns by e-mail to comp-market- > email@example.com. Please indicate your name and address, identify > the firms and products concerned and describe the practice you have > observed. This will help the Commission to detect problems in the market and > be the starting point for an investigation.

<comment><USER9> I sent it a complain relating AMP to margrethe vestager over 2 years ago, when this was relevant

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13414570](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13414570)

and they did nothing, I doubt they even study the case, nothing was on the table of the parliament related to this. Google have continued to abuse and will do more if no one stops them. It's important to complain again and again until they step in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> AMP Is ruining mobile web. I cannot stand it. If it was actually made to be fluid, I'd see the value. But it's such a terrible UX, and so janky with the way it "pops in", and messes up "browser back" abilities. Out of all the shitty things Google has ever done, AMP is #1 to me on that list.

Orrrrrr just give me a damn option to turn it off, if I want. I will never understand why companies force people into these types of major UX decisions on their behalf. Stop assuming every user is stupid. Sure, make it the default, I don't care about that for the everyday user, but for something as fundamental as the browser, I should have an option to turn off every single Google opinion they bake in.

<comment><USER11> If you use DuckDuckGo you don't have to deal with AMP at all. Giving it a go on mobile is a good way to see how well it works for you too as searches tend to be less mission-critical compared to desktop-based searches.

<comment><USER12> Any good alternative to Google News?

<comment><USER13> RSS.

<comment><USER14> This is what I did. When the Google News redesign happened, it made Google News substantially less useful to me. Enough so that came up with a replacement.

It's not for everyone, as it requires running your own webserver, but I use Tiny Tiny RSS to aggregate the feeds of the various sources I'm interested in, then can read the aggregated feeds (I have multiple, a different feed for each general subject) through the web interface and/or by using an RSS reader. I use an RSS reader (gReader) on my mobile devices to do this.

<comment><USER15> I'm pretty sure that not all RSS clients require to run your own webserver? Opera used to have one, Thunderbird maybe ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This article focuses on what it's like for web developers and for the web ecosystem, which are both important issues. But AMP is also really annoying for end users.

As an end user, AMP gets in my way and complicates my experience. There's extra work to figure out what's going on. This page is from whatever site but "delivered by Google". As an end user, my reaction is basically: what the hell does that mean, why is it here wasting my time and cluttering up my screen, and when can Google cut it out?

Then sometimes I go to share a link with a friend over Slack or whatever, I hit the share button, and the URL comes out all fucked up. I know they're going to look at the URL to figure out what it's about (because in the real world, people do look at URLs), so I feel compelled to fix it, so I have to back up out of there, then dig around in the UI to figure out how to get a real URL. Maybe "open in chrome" will do it, or maybe I need to flip through the page itself to find where it gives a link to itself. I can never remember what works, and I don't want to have to.

I know AMP pages are supposed to load faster, and they probably do a little, but I would gladly trade that for simplicity.

Also, I would turn it off if they would give me the option, which wouldn't be hard but they don't, which tells me they don't want people turning it off.

<comment><USER17> Yeah but on the plus side, it loads in a second, isn't sluggish to use, and isn't full of annoying fixed elements. Most non-AMP news websites which take many seconds to load and are really slow and annoying when loaded.

I get all the arguments against AMP, but "annoying for users" surely isn't one of them.

<comment><USER16> If I understand AMP correctly, there are 3 alternatives to compare:

(1) Google doesn't intervene at all, web sites are full of bloat

(2) Google requires mobile sites to not suck if they want decent rankings

(3) Google requires mobile sites to not suck and also delivers the bits instead of the site's servers.

I agree that #1 is not a good state of affairs. I'm fine with Google pressuring mobile developers to create sites that perform well. I just prefer #2 over #3.

<comment><USER15> (4) your remove bloat from websites yourself by disabling JavaScript.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Websites WERE building horrible, non mobile news articles in HTML when AMP started at Google in 2015. The news articles were so slow and wasted so much bandwidth that many news orgs wrote bad apps (think CNN app; BBC app) to replace shit with even worse shit. That's what you get when you skimp on frontend engineers!!!

AMP gives little guys, the ones starting blogs and trying to grow, a shot at freedom of speech. The web was developing in a way that the big players like BBC and CNN would dominate with big budget winner-take-all walled gardens. AMP is one of Google's most anti establishment services, which means I'm sure Ruth will be killing it very soon!

This meant Google search on the mobile web was literally dying. Every year more and more content was being locked inside walled Gardens!! I was a maintainer of AMPHTML 2015 - 2018 at Google. The project is hibernating and loses a ton of money I know I worked on the budgets for flash memory for AMP. At the time Facebook and others were proposing proprietary non HTML news document formats. Google, to keep HTML alive, decided to cache amp for free, which subsidized hosting costs for ALL news websites. I hate it that now I have to switch browsers 2x to write an article comment, too! But news apps NEVER supported this AT ALL!! News apps NEVER supported a working search feature AT ALL!! News apps NEVER supported a good user experience or global search AT ALL!

If you want to rant, blame the bloatware mess that is HTML, it has almost at killed The mobile web, not AMP! AMP is Google's attempt to keep HTML alive on phones ...

<comment><USER19> Seriously, is html performance a real issue? Mobile traffic keeps growiong and growing and growing, according to google, who now crawls most sites mobile- first! Phones have 4 cores and download 300-MB games daily. There is absolutely no need for this abomination. If it cared, google could threaten to derank slow sites for slow phones and the average website size would be slashed to half in a week!

> AMP gives little guys, the ones starting blogs and trying to grow, a shot at > freedom of speech.

woosh, i now realize u re joking

<comment><USER3> Yes, it was a huge issue and many websites were unusable on anything but an expensive iPhone for a long time. Especially a few years back.

While this might not be a problem with most Apple-toting frontend engineers, most people of the world can't afford to constantly pay for very expensive phones just to browse the web. And until AMP there just wasn't a way to make anyone care it seems. Even here on HN.

Just to be clear: I dislike AMP. But I dislike the crap attitude towards users the web developers have shown time and time again more.

<comment><USER19> > just to browse the web.

I must be crazy because i never had a catastrophic issue with an iphone 8 - with an adblocker. If ads are the problem, well guess who is serving those ads.

AMP doesn't even scale anyway - it will bloat like HTML pages bloat over time, because web ppl have a bad habit of only adding things to sites, not removing. What happens then? We invent Amp-html2 to fix amp? AMP is a very-ill-thought bandaid to a culture problem that can be solved with simple nudges (have people forgotten what seismic changes happen to the web every time google rolls out a new SEO algorithm?). Amp s probably the silliest tech idea of the decade.

<comment><USER3> Yes, of course you didn't have an issue with a new Apple device, that's exactly my point.

Did you try browsing the non-AMP web on something like Nexus 4? Motorola Moto E? Oppo and Xiaomi lowend units from 2015?

<comment><USER19> there are so many better ways that google could solve this issue other than amp (derank sites for slow devices / mark them as slow / pass a parameter for slow-phone visitors / create a chrome version for slow devices). AMP is a dictatorial attempt to keep websites forever bound and limited to what google is offering.

<comment><USER3> Yes, Google did whatever maximally benefits Google. They're a corporation and behave as such. Just like Apple won't de-DRM their cable protocols just because it's "right".

The question is - what can the web community do to make AMP redundant outside of complaint posts.

<comment><USER19> > to make AMP redundant outside

First, AMP is already redundant. it doesnt offer anything that stripped-down html can't do. The primary reason sites choose it is because google ranks the pages higher! it's purely coercive.

Second , it's not as if AMP has taken over the web. But this coercion has to stop. Third, it's real easy to make a faster website with 10 minutes of work. I 'm not sure we need some kind of activism to stop amp i do believe it will crash on its own as soon as most sites look exactly alike and start losing revenues. But until then ... maybe ban AMP links?

<comment><USER20> If it's so easy then why have so few websites done it? Google has understood what Google/AMP haters refuse to see: web performance is not an engineering problem, it's a product and marketing problem. Coercion is exactly what's needed to push website owners to prioritize performance, because HN's monthly whinefest isn't cutting it. Here's two basic things AMP offers that stripped- down HTML can't do: a world-class CDN that many website owners won't justify investing in, and a clear, marketable incentive to develop a mobile-efficient website that VPs, marketers, product managers, and other business stakeholders can immediately understand.

<comment><USER19> > why have so few websites done it?

Because the vast majority of websites are reasonably fast on mobile? Loading times of 1,2 or 5 seconds are a non-problem that amp is addressing. The worst offenders i see are too high res images and autoplay videos, but frankly i cant remember seeing any of those recently. Most blogs/news sites are fine. Where is google sourcing their data that users are desperate for web-breaking solutions that bring them 200msec response times? The purpose of AMP is so that people flick a website instantly and then go back to google. That's obviously not in the interest of the publishers. The whinefest is because google is actively prioritizing amp publishers thus forcing it on the web.

> Coercion is exactly what's needed to push

this is not a defensible statement

> a world-class CDN that many website owners

facebook needs a world-class cdn, not blogs.

> a clear, marketable incentive to develop a mobile-efficient websit

the "marketable incentive" is the de-ranking of the site. It's entirely unnecessary to force amp for that, a simple page speed deranking would do

<comment><USER20> Google knows load performance is a critical user need from the ample data they collect from Google search users, they've talked about this before. I forget the exact number, but every 100ms less load time drives significantly more traffic and engagement. I have no idea what data you're looking at that implies 5s load times are not a problem. I, for one, am overjoyed the Google is tackling this problem and succeeding at it.

Google has applied performance penalties to sites before and it still does. It's not enough, and there are limits to the penalties they can apply because these websites are ultimately very useful and relevant, it would worsen search quality to derank useful but bloated websites. The carousel is a good balance of incentive and penalty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is a really old article, but as long as we're here: just a quick reminder that the AMP standard still includes platform-specific components that favor individual companies[0] over smaller creators. It's still not clear what will happen to the components when those services disappear[1], and it's still not clear whether Google has the guts to tell someone like Facebook that a new component feature isn't performant enough to be included.

Quick reminder that the only way to do captchas in AMP is to use Google ReCaptcha.

There are a lot of reasons to hate AMP, but one big reason I hope doesn't get drowned out is that it's not just anticompetitive in the sense of handing control of traffic or hosting to Google. It's anticompetitive in the sense of reducing _functionality_ on the web to a handful of large corporations that have every incentive to reduce diversity and place harsher performance restrictions on competitors than they place on themselves.

[0]: [https://amp.dev/documentation/components/?format=websites](https://amp.dev/documentation/components/?format=websites)

[1]: [https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp- vine/?format=we...](https://amp.dev/documentation/components/amp- vine/?format=websites)

<comment><USER22> > _" Quick reminder that the only way to do captchas in AMP is to use Google > ReCaptcha."_

That is terrible. ReCaptcha is the worst. Also, ReCaptcha seems to discriminate against Firefox, and if AMP discriminates against other captchas, this might actually count as monopolistic abuse by EU rules.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I love AMP sites that do it the right way, like Politico. Keeps the real domain, loads fast, clean interface. I wish more sites were like this. I think the first version of AMP where the URL was always "google.com/amp/politico/sdgffsdf" was awful but you can now keep the correct domain and I sometimes prefer it to the regular version of a lot of sites.

[https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2019/12/04/trump- impeachme...](https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2019/12/04/trump-impeachment- next-phase-removal-075013)

<comment><USER19> is this served from politico's servers and how is it different from a stripped down version of their site?

<comment><USER24> It's not. It's using "Signed Exchanges", which Chrome supports, but most other browsers do not.

It's just AMP with some crypto that lets Google masquerade as your domain.

<comment><USER19> oh wow, Signed Exchanges are worse than AMP!

"make sure you are visiting mybanksite.com" is no longer safe.

<comment><USER25> > oh wow, Signed Exchanges are worse than AMP! > "make sure you are visiting > mybanksite.com" is no longer safe.

Sounds like you don't trust public key based content signing. This is just broadening public key based signatures beyond the domain to include the domain and the content itself, and using signing to make the authenticity of the content independent of the physical infrastructure that served it.

That' what's being used here to verify authenticity of content's source, just like PGP/GPG does for signed emails.

That's a far stronger guarantee than "the data is authentic because it came IP address range X purchased by company Y".

In fact, without a such signature, there is no guarantee that just because a piece of content came from a particular server/datacenter, that it is authentic.

With signed exchanges, the chain of authenticity is pushed all the way back to the website's content creators - it doesn't stop at the web server. Also, this can't be phished unless you break the the content signing algorithms, and if that happens ... we all have bigger problems.

<comment><USER19> first, it breaks the URL specification, as the "host" is no longer a host. it breaks user's expectation of one of the VERY FEW things that everyday users understand about the internet.

one may manage to upload an html file to the bank's server and serve a -signed- page that google amp will cache, and then use it to phish customers from within the bank's domain. Or just use a stolen key to make thousands of such pages before the bank finds out. I think , contrary to what you say, it's a brand new, major attack surface.

<comment><USER25> > first, it breaks the URL specification, as the "host" is no longer a host.

By this definition, "host" hasn't been a host in a long time, since the time it was possible to route DNS traffic to multiple IP addresses, possibly in different datacenters.

> it breaks user's expectation of one of the VERY FEW things that everyday > users understand about the internet.

How is signing content directly less authentic than signing only at the web server? Signing content directly at the time of publishing ensures that it was created using the private keys of the entity in question, regardless of the delivery mechanism for the content.

> one may manage to upload an html file to the bank's server and serve a > -signed- page that google amp will cache,

Signed content exchanges specifically limit that by putting the content signing step at the content creator level, not the web server level. Unless you steal the content creator's private keys, you can't represent your content as theirs.

<comment><USER19> > "host" hasn't been a host in a long time,

Does SXG make this better or worse?

> ensures that it was created using the private keys

signing at the server ensures that it was created using the key AND served from a host they control. How is that not better?

> you can't represent your content

wouldn't the server sign all http responses by default? all you would need to do is upload a file

<comment><USER25> > wouldn't the server sign all http responses by default? all you would need > to do is upload a file

No, the content has to be signed when it is created, in the content management system or similar content creation tool, not when the server sends it. The content management system itself must have strong controls on it (ACLs, controlled user accounts, protected private keys stored only on encrypted and access controlled media, regular audits, etc).

Basically the server itself is no longer trusted as the arbiter of content authenticity, the actual content creator is. Concretely, when the editor at a publication approves an article after reviewing it, it is signed for delivery at the moment of publication, not at the moment that the request is served.

<comment><USER19> so that means i can sign a page on the editor's computer, take it with me and serve it to amp from my website? that sounds even more dangerous tbh. it delegates security from people who may know a little bit about it (web hosts) to people who likely know nothing about it (writers)

what happens if someone's key is stolen and they need to re-issue it? All the previously published copies are now invalid?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I had been told (and I have 0 special knowledge here, this is just what a consultant in this space explained to me a few years ago) that AMP boosted your placement specifically because latency was a scored and important factor.

As such, all you needed to do to get similar rankings was use any sort of CDN hosting for your page and you would get similar results to using AMP.

Also, it sorta seems to me like the author is complaining, "I can't just do a minimum effort AMP page for the search juice, I actually have to make a functional AMP offering or not use AMP at all." Strictly as a consumer, I feel like maybe Google is doing me a favor while telling off a publisher.

<comment><USER27> The first part of your post is incorrect, AMP is instant because it is prerendered, which just using a CDN can't achieve.

The second part is correct. I hate Reddit AMP results, and I'm happy that Google is telling them to fix it. I'll be even happier when they and other search engines demote Reddit AMP pages that do not match the canonical pages.

<comment><USER28> > I hate Reddit AMP results, and I'm happy that Google is telling them to fix > it.

Is there some kind of real news about Reddit AMP changing, specifically? I don't see that in the link.

<comment><USER27> It says Google is validating that AMP pages match the content of the canonical pages and warning webmasters when they don't. I desuced that Reddit would get these emails because their AMP pages are the biggest offender that I regularly see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Have you ever visited a news site without AMP enabled? It's literally impossible to use. Popups flying all over the place, unwanted advertising videos loading, megabytes of tracking JS loaded etc. AMP is forcing publishers to make sites people can actually use.

<comment><USER30> My alternative is generally to load the site in [https://outline.com](https://outline.com)

As with the former Readability, or Pocket, this offers a simplified page view.

On Firefox or Safari, use Reader Mode.

(Ironically, Chrome has a Reader mode which is 1) automatically enable, 2) _not_ disablable, and 3) is uniformly styled horribly.

I believe there are now browsers and/or extensions which enable Reader View by default, or at least on specified domains/sites.

I've got a modicum of sympathy for Google here. _Yes_ , the Web _is_ a problem, and HTML's fast-and-loose attitude "be generous in what you accept, conservative in what you emit" has turned out to be a long-term liability.

Allowing Google and Google alone to play both sides of the deal in specifying and benefitting from the standards, is a flagrantly glaring conflict of interest (and very likely antitrust violatio). But the underlying stated concerns are real. And absent some entity with the ability to tell website publishers "no, your cavalier so-called HTML Does Not Play Here", the descent into further levels of markup and Javascript hell will continue.

I've found the most useful process for re-rendering sane HTML from most websites is to dump to plain text first (w3m or lynx, if they'll handle the site, copy/paste if not), and then re-add whatever minimal markup is actually required (usually via Markdown), then generate clean HTML.

Actual content payload is often only a few single-digit percent, and often far less, of the page's markdown. And that's _excluding_ additional asset loads (CSS, JS), let alone image and media files.

Again: until there's a cost to publishers for pulling this crap, we're going to see more of it.

<comment><USER31> I believe you can disable Chrome's reader mode in flags. I know you can force it to show up on all pages, as that's how I have it set up on my tablet (I use Firefox and Brave primarily, with Chrome or Bromite as a fallback)

<comment><USER31> Also, you might be interested in brow.sh, as it should provide easily readable, clean HTML that only contains visible elements. It _should_ be better than dumping pages from links, as it supports scripting.

<comment><USER30> At the cost of running a headless Chromium instance.

I might look at that, though it seems inelegant / not quite what I'm looking for.

Perfect vs. good, etc., etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> In the last few years my opinion of Google has gotten worse and worse. I dread to think of what it will look like in 5 or 10 years time.

<comment><USER33> There's hope. Microsoft somewhat turned it around after a change in directors.

<comment><USER34> They were pretty much forced to change though

<comment><USER35> How so?

<comment><USER34> Because their traditional extend, embrace, extinguish strategy no longer worked. Windows Phone and Internet Explorer failed and they were losing so much mindshare switching from one failed api to the next. The monopoly was becoming pretty fragile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I don't know why people get so bent out of shape over what Google does. They'll just cancel it in two years. ;)

In all seriousness, though, I've been on the "screw google" train for a while. Everything good hey do they throw away (Google Code, Google Reader, Google Plus, Google Inbox, Google Wave... _pours one out for OT while I work on my CRDTs_ ) while anything they make which originally held merit they just make more awful, year after year. I don't know if they're aware just how unsustainable a business model screwing over their users might be, but I'm guessing they're willing to find out.

</comment><comment><USER37> I have a page that I put on the web about 13 years ago, that somehow became the top hit for "how to <X>" for a particular <X>. I have never done anything to promote the page, and do not have any ads on it.

A few years ago, it lost the #1 spot, but is still on the first page.

(I'm specifically not saying what <X> is, or what domain the page is on, because I do not want to do anything that might get people to go there. I want to see how long a simple page with no promotion and no ads can stay on the front page of search).

I just noticed that Google says in the search results "Your page is not mobile-friendly". Would that be because I don't have an AMP version of the page?

Clicking on that notice goes to a Google tool that analyzes the page for mobile friendliness...which tells me that the page IS mobile friendly, so I'm a bit confused.

The page is very simple. Just some paragraphs of text, some h1 and h2 headings, a few tables, and a couple of lists. The only CSS is on the page itself via a <style> tag, and only has one rule, setting the width of th to a certain number of px.

<comment><USER38> You can definitely have pages that Google considers "mobile-friendly" without using AMP. Do you have a viewport meta tag on the page? If you have any CSS at all some mobile browsers will default to a desktop view that requires zooming to read, and that's probably what Google is detecting.

Regarding the analyzer tool, I suspect this is a case of Google's left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. As I recall, Google is in the process of switching from a static analyzer to a Chrome Lighthouse-based analyzer (or something to that effect) and I'd guess that the mobile-friendly rules are slightly different between the two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I love these posts - this has been talked to death.

The last thread had some good illustrations comparing media sites non-AMP pages (the bloat from ads / javascript / etc was INCREDIBLE) to AMP pages.

Google puts a little icon next to amp pages at least some of the time. These pages usually load VERY quickly in my experience - somehow whatever AMP/Google is doing results in less bloated pages on these AMP pages.

I wouldn't be surprised if users start naturally gravitating to these pages for the better experience. I know I have sometimes just because I know the page is not going to trap me on their site if they are AMP. I can usually get back to search results with AMP, where other sites do a weird thing where they pop up a registration page in front, then even if you fight through that you have to fight through some registration redirects to get back.

I wish google would push down news sites I don't have memberships too though - banging on paywalls is annoying - I pay for a few sites already -> be great to have those be the ones surfaced most often.

<comment><USER40> > somehow whatever AMP/Google is doing results in less bloated pages on these > AMP pages.

The article links to another page that dives into this: AMP isn't actually creating less bloated pages.

The speed increase is because Google Search preloads the content for all AMP results so you're effectively getting a cached page when you click on it.

That is incredibly monopolistic behavior because it can't be reproduced any other way.

<comment><USER39> This is terrible misinformation.

The rules in AMP designed to speed performance are extensive.

Lots of things you can do in HTML - linked style sheets, synchronous third party java-script and ad frameworks etc etc are heavily restricted. There are size limits even on the inline CSS I think or even on the separate web worker javascript even animations are restricted so they can be accelerated.

The speed increase is not just because of preload. Turn on dev tools and look at network round trips / page size / CPU usage on an AMP vs nonAMP page.

<comment><USER40> Thanks for the downvote just because you don't want people to know the truth: all those "parts of the standard" that "make pages faster"? Don't do much at all. Bother to read TFA please - the average AMP page still loads in roughly 8.5 seconds on normal 3G. What makes them seem "fast" is Google preloading their content on the search results page and using Google's CDN to serve what remains.

YOU are spreading misinformation and one might ask why.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Discussed last year with 340 comments: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17920720](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17920720)

<comment><USER42> That was Sept 2018.

<comment><USER41> Oops, didn't look at the year. Updated

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I stopped caring what designers (and the community that really hates amp is designers, in addition to the "everything Google food is evil" crowd) think when scroll hijacking became popular. Sorry but the web would be better off without you guys.

</comment><comment><USER44> How to Fight back against Google AMP:

1\. Don't use Google search. Other search engines such as Qwant and DuckDuckGo don't rank AMP sites

2\. Don't use Chrome browser. Firefox has built-in adblocker and a Reader Mode so any site can be fast and clutter-free without AMP

As a site owner/developer:

1\. Don't use AMP on your own site

2\. Make your site lightweight on its own: lazy load images/videos, restrict unnecessary elements, restricts third-party connections and scripts

</comment><comment><USER45> AMP made me switch to DuckDuckGo on my phone.

</comment><comment><USER46> I know that AMP is an intensely controversial topic, but I have to provide a counterpoint here because I don't think the web developer community fully appreciates the real state of the web on mobile:

> How many of you think that the amount of time spent on the mobile web as a > fraction of total time on device has increased in the last five years? ... > it's well below 7% and in a lot of markets it's falling. We have pretty good > telemetry inside of Google and what it tells us is that the web is not > essential to the future of computing on mobile.

The Mobile Web: MIA, Alex Russell, [https://vimeo.com/364402896#t=13m00s](https://vimeo.com/364402896#t=13m00s)

The gist of his argument is that history suggests that when computing platforms drop below 13% of usage (or perhaps it was 10%, I don't remember the specific number), the platform is in a death spiral.

In my 5 years in Web DevRel at Google, I've never heard "it makes the web easier to index" as the main motivation for AMP, I've actually never heard it as a motivation at all. Maybe it is a motivator. The argument definitely makes sense. But I've not heard indexing as a motivator, not even in passing.

As a Googler involved in the web I know that I'm inherently biased and everything I say is likely to be written off, but I'm being 100% transparent with you here. There's a lot of people that care about the open web within Google and see it as the best platform for a lot of the same ideological reasons that you all probably love the web. The open web enthusiasts consider the real competition to be: the web versus whatever other platforms are dominant on the computing devices of the future (right now, that's iOS and Android on mobile devices). AMP is a strategy to incentivize websites to provide user experiences on par with whatever else is out there.

Disclosures: Googler in the "Web DevRel" team. FWIW we don't report to AMP. So my understanding of AMP may not actually align with the AMP team's. Note that I'm not even saying here whether I think AMP is the right approach to tackle the web's big problem, but I do understand why some people felt AMP is necessary right now. This post is definitely my own personal opinion and doesn't even represent Web DevRel's opinion. I may in fact get in trouble for speaking out about this ;)

</comment><comment><USER14> This is an excellent essay.

I strongly dislike AMP pages, and I avoid them. The essay touches on many of the reasons why. Any sites that were entirely in AMP are sites I would not be using.

</comment><comment> GuB-42 Google AMP is bad, but I think publishers got what they deserved, at least most of them.

When AMP was launched, news sites were horrible. Bloated, buggy, unintuitive, with intrusive ads all over the place and barely functional on mobile. Something needed to be done. Unfortunately for the open web, the one to find a solution was Google, and it turn a real need for a better user experience into a way to control the web.

And what comforts me in this idea is that many articles criticizing AMP do it for all the wrong reasons. Publishers want to add whatever bloat feature and complain that AMP don't let them do it. Guys, that's the part of AMP the world really needs. Complain about the Google bits, not about the efficiency improvement it brings.

Now, if you take a look at AMP, there are actually two parts. One is a very sensible set of rules for making efficient websites, the other is a big blob of JS with plenty of Google stuff inside, as well as a few functions that help you follow said rules.

You want AMP to go to hell, simple, follow the relevant rules from AMP, ditch the Google turd of a JS and keep only the good stuff. That way, your website will be even more efficient than the AMP version. Show the world that AMP is not what makes the web faster.

</comment><comment><USER47> 275 comments and nobody mentions that AMP is no longer a Google technology, but a Linux Foundation project? Is that good or bad news that nobody seems to notice?

Well, Google is probably one of the bigger sources of income for the LF, and the LF does not say no to money.

Technically AMP is a project in the OpenJS foundation, one of the dozens of foundations the LF is spawning of. Managed by Robin Ginn ex Microsoft. Good at driving the interests of the strongest if at anything.

</comment><comment><USER48> That makes sense. Since AMP is intended to be a more optimized site structure than the average website, pages adhering to the AMP standard should increase the performance of the web on average, whether or not the site actually gets indexed into Google's localized caches.

We have HNers complaining about bloated JavaScript pages all the time. Maybe Google has actually found a way to tip the market away from those page designs?

<comment><USER49> If it were just an optional web standard, that might be okay. But it's a system that removes control from webmasters and hands it over to Google, and Google are using their incumbent advantage to coerce you into the AMP system. I can build a site just as fast as AMP without sacrificing the UX of the web itself in the process, and I intend to do so. But there are many businesses jumping on the AMP bandwagon because they think there will be an SEO benefit.

As a user, I hate clicking on AMP links by mistake. It's not even clear where you are, is it a website, is it still Google, how do I get to the website from here? Who even served me the content? It says it's from this website, but it wasn't?

<comment><USER48> It is an optional web standard. There are other search engines than Google.

I can't help but wonder why none of them have thought to start indexing AMP pages (or pages with some other standard or even no standard) in local cache and serve them faster to their users; seems like a space they could choose to compete on.

<comment><USER50> > There are other search engines than Google.

Consumers can ignore Google and use another search engine, but a publisher that ignores Google won't be in business very long.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Am I the only one who read this piece as a screed against having web standards at all? "The web is a messy, complicated place.... The end result is an enormously diverse and anarchic free-for-all where almost no two websites use the same code." In any other article I would expect the next paragraph to start with "That's why we're introducing Fribble, a framework for structuring your data so that blah the blah...." But, somehow, the author makes out that well-structured data and appropriate use of semantic tags is a ploy by this one evil company to secretly profit from your work.

I'm sure there are well-reasoned arguments against AMP, ways it could be improved or competing ideas for how to encourage fast page loads, expose content in a machine-friendly format, etc etc, but I haven't heard any of them in this article. It boils down to "We don't want your rules, maaaaannn" and it frankly isn't worthy of HN's attention.

</comment><comment><USER52> Personally, I'm okay without AMP if 99.9 percentile latency on the overall mobile web ecosystem was within 2~3 secs. Unfortunately, it's more of 20~30 secs on non-AMP sites, which made me to take an ambivalent stance upon AMP. My ISP is obviously not doing a great job, but it's also a publisher side problem which is nearly un-fixable anytime soon.

</comment><comment><USER53> Yes, AMP is horrible for the end user, the UX is a nightmare, etc. But the same thing can also be said about the web in general.

On a purely technical basis, this is my favorite news site: [https://text.npr.org/](https://text.npr.org/) Loads lightning fast, never any ads or comments!

</comment><comment><USER54> For firefox there is this extension to protect yourself from AMP: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/amp2html/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/amp2html/)

Works on mobile too.

The downside is that page redirection takes some time.

</comment><comment><USER55> I'm sad caching http proxies are all abandoned nowdays... I bet those would also help noticeably, there's enough stuff browsers don't know to cache... also in proxy vein, adblockers cannot be blocked, only in-browser convenient ones can...and ublock origin dev edition got lately hit on the chrome app store again ("lately" as in this year), I think...for no reason... as other people said, the AMP is good so devs have a justified practical reason to push back against the lazy clients who'd happily have 20mb pages over their fiber connection...but it's bad in every OTHER way... google monopoly really should be broken...they got like, 90% of BOTH search engine, and browser market...and a lot of people don't even know alternatives EXIST... why do people got such stupid nowdays...

</comment><comment><USER56> Huge motivator for me to switch to DDG.

</comment><comment><USER57> I switched to duckduckgo entirely in the beginning of November. Just to see if I'll like it.

I kind of forgot I did. I really dont notice a loss of anything other than not having to ignore really bullshitty sponsored posts and the Fisher Price feel of google telling me what I want because of "trends".

That I feel like maybe tech companies need something like the alcohol industry in the US. A person cant have ownership in a brewery, distributor and alcohol retailer. They can only have ownership in one. Maybe tech needs to be broken up that way? I'm not sure exactly when it comes to fine lines. But I know a search engine controlling ads, news, tracking data, phones, and just data in general... well it's not good.

</comment><comment><USER58> I wonder how different Google would be if they were able to diversify their revenue to not rely so much on ads.

AMP = faster page loads = more pageviews = more ads served

AMP shouldn't need to be enforced to achieve a faster internet. It's not just Google that knows more pageviews = more ads = more revenue. Publishers know this too, and therefore publishers themselves have the same incentive to reduce page load time as does Google.

It's disorienting to see Google frame AMP as something that's for the good of the user. If it is, it's only a side effect of also being good for Google's business model.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I posted this after googling something along the lines of 'firefox mobile turn off autoplay amp' and coming across this article which was a fun hate read.

For some reason it manages to sneak past autoplay disabling? How?

</comment><comment><USER59> I know my opinion here is completely self-serving..

But I prefer AMP over pretty much any news article or website.

As a developer, I can't trust operations nor my wider organisation to invest in making things run better.

This is proven by browsing the top 20 news websites in my country. All are slow, bloated, ad-riddled trash. Turning on an ad blocker helps, I've signed up and trialed just about any semi-reputable news sites in this country (AU) and none of them do anything to curb or make the experience any better.. Just "unlocks" more popular articles or reduces the TTL for me.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is stupid. If you build an Apple News article with different content from the actual article, Apple users will complain, just as if you build an AMP article that is worse than the normal page, search engine and link aggregator users (not just Google's) will complain. That's why people hate Reddit AMP results. If you ignore these warnings, Google will probably demote your AMP pages, and rightly so because users will hate those results.

The author is basically broadcasting that he is clueless and actively harming his clients' businesses.

</comment><comment><USER60> Putting aside the merits of AMP or Google entirely, I find this author's outrage suspicious. It says in Google's message, "this issue will not affect your appearance on search...". There is a false equivalency proposed that Google is strong-arming publishers to switch their entire site to AMP by sending these messages.

I am not saying Google is blameless or that AMP is perfect, but reading the author's argument literally, I don't understand why this action is the focus of their outrage. Just ignore it.

</comment><comment><USER61> I totally understand the issue raised by this article.

But I have a problem: I _like_ AMP because it is so fast!

Publishers have done this to themselves by loading up simple web pages with hundreds of scripts that slow it down to almost unusable levels.

Maybe if publishers stopped doing that, then you could start criticizing AMP.

"Some of my clients will ask me what to do with those messages. I will tell them to delete them. Ignore Google's nudging, pay no heed."

And then your clients will be unhappy with the traffic results. Are you going to also tell your clients the drawbacks?

<comment><USER40> It's kind of a "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" type of thing.

Google had the option of simply highly ranking pages that are performant and lightweight on mobile. They didn't take that option, instead they went with AMP. There's intent there. I'm not going to speculate on the intent, because it isn't relevant: the point is that because there was a simpler technical solution available _that they didn 't take_, there is clearly intent in going the harder path. It's worth asking what that means.

AMP provides all the benefits that a well-built, well-architected site would, and that would have been the "non-evil" option. Use web standards and push people to respect them, imagine that...

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> After AMP was introduced, I converted to DDG (DuckDuckGo) and after taking some time getting used to it and personalizing it's settings, I haven't gone back to Google.

</comment><comment><USER63> Though I agree with the sentiment of the article, I believe AMP can easily be thwarted by efficient website structuring and use of libraries with mobile efficiency in mind. What is good about the AMP indexing process is that, I think, Google still favors the non-AMP version of the site if the AMP site is less efficient than the standard version.

Some time back I built a library called DSOlib ([https://github.com/jamesbiv/device-streaming-object- library](https://github.com/jamesbiv/device-streaming-object-library)) which deals with this problem particularly. The aim of DSO was to ping the server using Resource Timing ([https://www.w3.org/TR/resource-timing/#resource- timing](https://www.w3.org/TR/resource-timing/#resource-timing)) in-order to determine if the link speed is under a certain threshold.

Should the threshold not be met, then a reduced, non-interactive version of the site loads using the same HTML, as non critical HTML can be moved into templates if needed, and the "Critical Rendering Path" is used to form a decision on how the site should download the sites' elements using DSO. Since images, CSS and JavasSript make up the bulk of the download footprint.

DSO aims at optimising the footprint via the following concepts.

\- Offering only the CSS files relevant for breakpoints just for that device;

\- Scaling down images and lazy loading them at the lowest possible resolution;

\- Blocking out elements of HTML using "display: none" for areas that wont be loaded; and

\- Most importantly, only download the minimum Javascript libraries for non interactive viewing.

There are other features DSO has such as background downloading for full interactive after non-interactive has loaded; prompting the user and asking if the interactive version is to be downloaded later, and a few other things. However, I haven't completed the entire project as I was side tracked with other projects but building a solution such as this that works along side WebPack would be the best senario.

Further, I'm not too sure if there are other solutions out there similar to DSO since I stopped development, but surely sidestepping AMP should be a rather straightforward process.

</comment><comment><USER64> There are two paths we can take to change this. Some should go down each of the paths.

1\. Regulation. People organizing to stop monopolies and cartel behavior like this.

2\. Competition. Both in the form of news aggregator systems and search engines.

Of these things the only thing I see much action on is the search engines and that's minimal. There are opportunities for action and businesses.

</comment><comment><USER65> I've written a piece about how to remove AMP support from your website without sacrificing organic traffic and performance [https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo- rating-performance](https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-performance)

</comment><comment><USER28> Reddit already has a fast, mobile-first site that looks almost exactly like the AMP site.

Why do they put up with AMP and all of its annoyances? On a site where half the appeal is in features such as upvoting that are incompatible with AMP!

It must be only for the supposed SEO benefits?

</comment><comment><USER66> I thought we were done with seeing old articles complaining about AMP. I feel like I should set up an account that just reposts anti-AMP articles once a day, and see how many points it gets. Clearly HN demands more opportunities to rail against it.

</comment><comment><USER67> [https://ferdychristant.com/amp-the-missing- controversy-3b424...](https://ferdychristant.com/amp-the-missing- controversy-3b424031047) is relevant to the discussion as well.

</comment><comment><USER68> Not sure about the technical merits of AMP, but it's sufficiently embraced by Google's tentacles that I just don't trust it.

Which perhaps is commentary more about Google than AMP.

</comment><comment><USER69> Google is also adding AMP to emails: [https://amp.dev/about/email/](https://amp.dev/about/email/)

</comment><comment><USER70> We all know that HTML sucks, but what's wrong with AMP? I like AMP, I'm forced to pay for each byte I use and 2mb web pages are killing me. The author doesn't give any technical reason why AMP is bad. And I don't think that it's open source but google employees contribute more than anyone else is a good reason: if we are against open source projects that have open source contributors from predominantly one company we should think that Java, Scala, R, Kotlin, Swift, MySQL, ReasonML, Haskell, F#, and much much more are "evil". In short, I don't think we can conclude that "AMP can go to hell".

</comment><comment><USER71> On my phone I switched to DuckDuckGo simply because I have no way to disable AMP in search results otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER72> starts off strong but starts to unravel to a crescendo here:

> F#&! you Google, and f#&! the AMP horse you rode in on.

followed by arguments about "our web". by which of course he means advertisers' web. "our web" would in fact look more like the AMO web.

he's right though. this is an abuse of google's power.

</comment><comment><USER73> I've switched to Duck Duck Gonon my iPhone specifically to avoid AMP links.

And you know what? It's not half bad.

</comment><comment><USER74> Google AMP is merely the next iteration of Google Sites.

</comment><comment><USER75> I'm really not looking forward to the google web...

<comment><USER29> Real people aren't moving to Firefox or Brave, they are moving (or have moved) to the Facebook mobile app. It has instant articles, ([https://instantarticles.fb.com/](https://instantarticles.fb.com/)) an amp- like lightweight way to load news stories, all hidden inside Facebook's system. Don't worry about searching for news, Facebook will just give you whatever it feels like.

Then there's Apples iOS only "News" app. Who knows how that works.

AMP is clearly a far more open competitor to the above. It is saving news publishers from themselves.

<comment><USER76> The facebook articles are worse than amp. The pages get broken halfway through the article and don't load the rest of the content for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> People still read the news (propaganda machine)?

</comment><comment><USER78> I sure do love clicking on a search result, clicking the tiny info icon in the top left, and then clicking the real link I wanted.

</comment><comment><USER79> I don't think the rewritten title is faithful to the link.

I understand why the original title of "Google AMP Can Go To Hell" was rewritten, as it is unnecessarily inflammatory and clickbaity, but

"Google wants websites to adopt AMP as the default for building webpages"

really isn't the point of the article, _at all_. It is necessary _background_ for the article, but the point of the article as I read it is that there are specific implications of the AMP effort that are nefarious, insidious, and dangerous to the open web. A rough outline would be

* Background: Google wants websites to adopt AMP as the default for building webpages

* Contention 1: Adopting AMP is technically difficult

* Contention 2: Adopting AMP will harm non-google web properties in the future

* Call to action: there are several things you can do in order to "...fight back. You could tell them to stuff it, and find ways to undermine their dominance. Use a different search engine, and convince your friends and family to do the same. Write to your elected officials and ask them to investigate Google's monopoly. Stop using the Chrome browser. Ditch your Android phone. Turn off Google's tracking of your every move. And, for goodness sake, disable AMP on your website."

I don't think any reader would think the Background statement provides the best summary of the posts thesis; it's clearly the call to action. By changing it to the background statement, it changes the "meaning" of the article completely.

So "Google AMP Can Go To Hell" is much better than the revised title, and if it's unacceptable, then "Fight back against Google AMP" is both faithful and uses the author's own terminology.

I think in this instance that the editorial control exerted over the post title could have been better considered (notwithstanding the same change made in the prior submission; the same mistakes were made then, as well)

<comment><USER42> The main thing we're trying for in title changes is to use representative language from the article itself. Since it does use the phrase "fight back", we can go with your suggestion.

</comment></comment><comment> Joe-Z Nice one HN, by changing the title (to something that is not the title of the actual submission!) you just inverted the meaning of the first sentence of the top comment at the time of writing [0]

If you are going with the second headline why not include the "Tell them no."-part too?

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21703750](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21703750)

<comment><USER42> Because HN has an 80 char limit on titles.

Edit: we've since changed the title from "Google wants websites to adopt AMP as the default for building webpages (2018)". See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21705610](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21705610).

<comment> Joe-Z There I was, ready to be furious and dang strikes yet again with nothing but reason. Thank you for your service!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> Mods: [2018]

</comment><comment><USER81> s/amp//

</comment><comment><USER82> Hell yeah!

</comment><comment><USER83> The only thing worse than AMP? Paywalled AMP sites.

</comment><comment><USER84> re: "Google is also the reason AMP sees any kind of adoption at all. Basically, Google has forced websites – specifically news publishers – to create AMP versions of their articles."

Actually, that's not quite right. Publishers have forced Google to forced publishers to use AMP. That is, publishers can't control themselves and are adding more and more and more bloat to their pages.

I am by no means a Google and/or AMP fan, but the truth is most sites have no respect for the receiving device and/or connection speed.

<comment><USER85> How many average people are walking around saying "I've quit the web! It's too slow!"?

Nobody. It's a non-issue because, despite the faults of the web, the average person is still clicking on chum-boxes, sharing clickbait, and using Google services.

Google isn't trying to save the web. They're trying to _become_ the web. And they've already made their money, so what makes you think they care out of the goodness of their hearts?

<comment><USER86> > How many average people are walking around saying "I've quit the web! It's > too slow!"? Nobody.

Everyone did. It's why web apps are dead & buried, and native apps rule the world. Nobody talks about cool web experiences anymore. It's why we're all talking about the experience of viewing a search result instead of the experience of browsing the web.

Entire areas that started exclusively on the web are now dominated by native apps, like social.

The web only exists for long-tail, rarely used content. That's the actual area it occupies now. Google, with AMP, are optimizing for the usage the web has left. It's a realistic approach to the web.

<comment><USER85> Show me the numbers. Everyone just spouts this rhetoric about the web being "dead" but where's the evidence? Please show me evidence. If people are still using The Google, then I doubt the web is "dead".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> As a user, I do find AMP pages load faster than canonical pages and provide a more consistent experience across sites.

I wonder if publishers that put resources into building AMPs see increased traffic to their website? If so, that's a win-win situation.

</comment><comment><USER88> Instead of blaming Google for creating and pushing AMP, how about blaming publishers for forcing Google to create AMP?

</comment><comment><USER89> Sorry isn't this just another web developer complaining that they have to use someone else's technology? I mean the first time I looked into supporting AMP I had that same visceral reaction "f this it sucks". After spending sometime with it it's not that bad and I get the value prop - AMP is content being served up directly on google.com or cloud flare or any cdn provider that is essentially the evolution of google's cache. Pretty cool if you stop to think about it. In the past to access google's cache you got a pretty fast page response but it was kind of also very broken because not all of the essentials would load correctly. Now with AMP you have some control over that cached page that is offloaded for free to google's servers. I think there are some UX issues for sure - IMO it's open source so you can always open a pull request/issue and try to make it better... or ignore it and continue to build something great... if you have something great people will find it whether you use AMP or not.

<comment><USER90> It doesn't matter how good or bad the technology is, or whether it's convenient or profitable to use it. AMP is a brazen attempt by Google to use their monopoly to take control of the web. The current version of AMP is not their intended final destination.

<comment><USER89> so I remember being upset that I could not run my javascript code in amp too... is that maybe what has you feeling it's google trying to take control of the web... the thing is google make money selling ads not controlling your web content so I just don't see how your assertion makes sense?

<comment><USER91> Just think how Youtube evolved from a seemingly open platform - to now where tons of people are being 'deplatformed' for not towing Google's line. That's what happens when Google gets 90%+ market share.

Remember when the Chrome team decided that certain sites won't be allowed to Autoplay videos? Yet other partner sites (and Youtube) were allowed to Autoplay. What if every single f-ing goddamn feature on your website was restricted based what Google says? If you're not "AMP-compliant" enough, following the arbitrary rules Google sets then they might restrict certain features like video viewing on your AMP site. That's the future people are buying into by implementing AMP. Free speech and the open web will die if AMP gets dominant market share.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Lessons of Moneyball for Big Data Analytics - <AUTHOR> http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/09/23/the-lessons-of-moneyball-for-big-data-analysis/

<comment><USER2> Here's a take on the book and movie from Daryl Morey, GM of the Houston Rockets, who's attributed for the most part in bring sabermetrics to the NBA:

[http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7001767/moneyball- housto...](http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7001767/moneyball-houston- rockets)

Mark Cuban owns the Dallas Maverick and is heavily into data analysis as well: [http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/state-of- sabermetr...](http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/state-of-sabermetrics- insights-from-the-2010-sloan-sports-analytics-confere/)

It's a lot more interesting (and complex) in basketball than baseball in my opinion because it's more of a fluid sport where the actions of a player will directly affect those of the other nine.

Also I can't get over the fact that a movie about data will be shown this weekend in almost 4,000 theaters and will star one of the biggest movie stars in the world!

</comment><comment><USER3> Paul DePodesta, the subject of the film Moneyball, actually spoke two days ago at the O'Reilly Strata (big data) conference in New York.

[http://strataconf.com/summit2011/public/schedule/detail/2165...](http://strataconf.com/summit2011/public/schedule/detail/21651)

So you can get his insights, straight from the horse's mouth, in a talk aimed at data geeks. For me, one of his main takeaway points was to question your assumptions. Always ask: "If we were to start again today, would we do things this way?" This exercise is used to tease out entrenched biases that you might not normally examine.

Because it was a keynote address, it should be publicly available on the O'Reilly youtube channel in the next few days, if not sooner: [http://www.youtube.com/user/OreillyMedia#g/c/2543D0F253DD85C...](http://www.youtube.com/user/OreillyMedia#g/c/2543D0F253DD85CE)

<comment><AUTHOR> The story is based on DePodesta's talk at the Strata Summit. The video's not posted yet, but there are videos available from many interesting presentations at the Summit, so definitely check out the link Bravura posted to the O'Reilly video page.</comment></comment>


Venture Fund Uses Lottery Model - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Venture-Fund-Uses-Lottery-tsmf-2412958083.html?x=0&.v=1

<comment><USER2> _the firm, launched last month, has a pay-to-play plan that works like this: As many as 100 startups each pay $5,000 to compete for a maximum $250,000 initial round of funding. The runner-up gets $50,000. The rest get feedback._

This is a scam.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here, I'll accomplish the same thing for you:

You give me $1, and I'll give you $0.60 back, plus some advice.

Here's the advice: You're a sucker.

You'd be better off playing Powerball, at least when the jackpot is over $200M or so.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice, access to Microsoft Bizspark, the ultimate selling point.</comment>


dent in social networking :) - <AUTHOR>

im looking for techies who cn partner me ,,,in a project focussing on ecommerce nd social media integration,,,,anyone there for it <comment><AUTHOR> ???cmmon ppl</comment>


SheCanCode Launch Beta Job Board for Women in Tech - <AUTHOR> https://jobs.shecancode.io/ <comment><USER2> Interesting that there is not a single job listing in San Francisco or a mountain View.</comment>


The Robots Are Winning - <AUTHOR> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jun/04/robots-are-winning/

<comment><USER2> The NYT Review of Books has a much better article: "How robots & algorithms are taking over", about "The Glass Cage: Automation and Us", by Nicholas Carr.[1] That's about the future of work. Computers are taking over because they're so incredibly cheap, and now they're getting smarter. Anything a computer can do, it can now do cheaper than a human. Usually much cheaper.

Yes, people have worried about this before, all the way back to the 1920s. This time, though, the skill sets of machines are getting much closer to those of humans. The list of things machines can't do gets shorter every year. "There is about a 50 percent chance that programming, too, will be outsourced to machines within the next two decades." The Glass Cage cites a skill study which analyzes job categories by difficulty of automation.

"Peak factory worker" was reached in the US in 1977. Manufacturing output continued to climb. (There was a drop in output after 2008, but output has totally recovered. Without an increase in employment.) The next big event to watch for is "peak office workers". At some point, the number of people needed in offices will start to decline.

This is getting more attention now that automation is finally cutting into the chattering classes. The "college equals lifetime middle class employment" concept that sustained the middle class in the developed world is dead.

We have plenty of productive capacity and lots of capital, yet can't figure out how to structure society to cope with that. That's the real problem.

[1] [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/apr/02/how- rob...](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/apr/02/how-robots- algorithms-are-taking-over/)

<comment><USER3> Yeah the robots will take our jobs.

Just 1 question - finance is the pioneer of commercial application of digital machines. Not talking HFT here at all. Algorithms in trading stocks/otpions. Algorithms and programming in valuation in private equity. Algorithms in insurance and lending. Automation is everywhere. How come jobs in the sector only grow? Both in the big employers and in new employers.

How about an example closer to the HN crowd - BI. Such a prolifiteration in self-service BI. You previously had to wait 2 weeks for IT to update the cube, now you can do your analysis yourself in 50% of those cases. Corporate BI and reporting jobs should be declining because of this automation, right? How come the sector is exploding?

<comment> T-A Not sure about finance: [http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES5500000001?data_tool=XGtab...](http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES5500000001?data_tool=XGtable)

<comment><USER3> Oh gees, the financial crisis affected the job market. Shocking...

<comment> T-A The financial crisis broke out in the fall of 2008. Employment in finance peaked in 2006, and it has yet to reclaim 2005 levels. I would not be terribly surprised to see that chart turn down again before it does.

<comment><USER2> Observers of the financial services industry talk about how the industry has a lot of "self-generated work". If the legal environment of the industry were rolled back to, say, 1980, the industry would be smaller and much more boring. From 1934, when the SEC was created, to 1980, the US financial industry was highly regulated, boring, and had few crises. It also created no billionaires.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Charles Stross _Saturn 's Children_ and _Neptune 's Brood_ include a theme of robot slaves. Both are told from the perspective of a robot, with many variations of free-will override. Stross wrote, [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/07/crib- she...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/07/crib-sheet- saturns-children.html), _" A society that runs on robot slaves who are, nevertheless, intelligent by virtue of having a human neural connectome for a brain, is a slave society.."_

There's a panel discussion video with the creative team of _Ex Machina_ : [http://sxsw.com/film/news/2015/video-spotlight-team- behind-e...](http://sxsw.com/film/news/2015/video-spotlight-team-behind-ex- machina-discusses-resurgence-ai)

On visual effects, [http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/8/8572317/ex-machina-movie- vi...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/8/8572317/ex-machina-movie-visual- effects-interview-robot-ava), _" The hardest stuff to track is when someone is not moving. Because nobody is not moving, they're moving but really, really subtlely ... It was the first film I've ever done where we did not put a single greenscreen up ..she had to be mechanically plausible ..things like the muscles contracting properly, and the various pipes and wiring having just a tiny amount of jiggle."_

<comment><USER5> Well, I think the important thing is not whether there is slavery, but whether there is suffering. If the robots are programmed to be happy as slaves, _voluntary slaves_ , is it so bad?

<comment><USER6> You can 'program' humans that way too. Doesn't mean they aren't slaves and it doesn't mean it isn't bad.

And anyway I suspect that your use of the word suffering implies a rather narrow definition of suffering that counts only material suffering as important.

<comment><USER7> Don't know that I agree. I view computers as Turing machines, which is just a really fast clock or engine. I don't think my clock can 'suffer'.

<comment><USER8> I view people as Turing machines, which is just a really fast clock or engine. I don't think my clock can 'suffer'.

<comment><USER7> Turing machines aren't self-aware. And in my opinion, it will be a century before a computer can truly mimic self-awareness. And even then it's mimicry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > We recommend expanded research aimed at ensuring that increasingly capable > AI systems are robust and beneficial: our AI systems must do what we want > them to do.

The author points out that the meaning of this statement hinges on the word "we". Hasn't the world already arrived at a dystopian future where AI systems simply maximize revenue and ad clicks for their owners? Whereas "good" AI would be emloyed "for the people", i.e. to maximize social welfare while taking into account externalities (poverty and global warming).

The fear is of some future AI which acts only to further its own pathological interests... but how would that be different from present-day corporate bureacracies, with business processes increasingly driven by weak (but rapidly improving) AI? Seems to me that the owners of such systems are the only people who would fare differently under the two scenarios. But for the vast majority of the world, their experience would be the same in both cases: exploitation by autonomous AI, or exploitation by bureaucracy. Changing the parameters that control the way either one operates is equally difficult.

<comment><USER10> >The fear is of some future AI which acts only to further its own pathological interests... but how would that be different from present-day corporate bureacracies, with business processes increasingly driven by weak (but rapidly improving) AI?

It's not that different at all, which is precisely why we need to avoid both options on this dichotomy. Also, I think you meant to reply to the thread about the other NYRB article above.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The point of labor is to turn raw materials and energy into useful things and perforn services. When robots do this, those who own raw materials and energy will have increasing power.

I would invest in farm land, mines, water and solar panels. In the future we will have automated mining and prospecting robots that are tied to automated foundries that are tied to 3d printing and other forms of automated manufacturing. Within a small area you could have a fully vertically integrated brick factory or metal chair factory.

In the Soviet Union they once built a iron smelting factory out in the middle of nowhere near a big iron containing mountain. The engineers said they should build it near a population center, like in the west. It was very inefficient in the end because once the deposit ran out they had to ship the iron and people in to work there. In the future, the factory will be containerized and move itself around to where it's most convenient and that doesn't have to mean near a population center, because it will be fully automated.

<comment><USER12> Farmland and mines (or the minerals in them) seem to be limited world-wide and maybe good investments (though we may improve artificial ways to produce food that are less dependent on land).

Water is a regional thing (for some places it's less of a problem). Not really sure how one effectively "invests" in water.

Solar is entirely different. I think solar has a great future, but as an investment, I'm not so sure. It seems highly likely that we will needs lots more power in the future and it does seem that much of it would come from solar. Current solar technologies are still relatively young, inefficient and (relative to future technologies) expensive. Investing in solar at this point would be like investing in an car manufacturer in the early 1900s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Film critic hulk had an interesting reading of this movie [SPOILERS GALORE]:

[http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2015/05/11/film-crit-hulk- smash-...](http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2015/05/11/film-crit-hulk-smash-ex- machina-and-the-art-of-character-identification)

Namely that the main character is projecting his own views of what is considered patriarchal onto another being that's been trapped in a toxic 'relationship'.

</comment><comment><USER14> The most important factor I think people are over looking is the fact that it is HUMANS who have to put in EFFORT and TRY to CREATE these robots. They don't just spawn from an old female computer. Humans have to put in work to create these artificial intelligence. We have 100% control over the future of AI.

</comment><comment><USER10> Well, by now, the robots are harder to make than the human workers, and more expensive -- so they get treated better. Welcome to capitalism.

<comment><USER4> Raising the minimum wage for humans will make robots more economically competitive.

<comment><USER15> But it will raise the cost of building new robots!

<comment><USER16> Making robot construction a prime target for automation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Rant, a procedural text generation language - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/TheBerkin/Rant <comment><USER3> I think this is how Peyton Manning chooses his audibles. <midwest-city> <soup- brand> <num:1:200>!

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks like an advanced version of "spintax"[0], which is popular amongst seo blackhatters. I could certainly see this as a replacement.

[0] [http://umstrategies.com/what-is-spintax/](http://umstrategies.com/what- is-spintax/)

</comment><comment><USER5> This is really cool, I had been working on something similar.

I do think it's a little 'pejorative' to try to computationally define creativity, though.

Creativity seems to involve so many levels of cognition, and it really seems like you can automate it, describe it, or define it.

But as soon as you seem to define it methodically, and think you've got it, it changes in a way you can't anticipate, but which draws you into it with this force you can't ignore or escape. It's incredibly frustrating, but it's also very human.

</comment><comment><USER6> Sorry, newbie here. Is there some sort of way to keep a reference to a generated term? For example if I generated the name "Mike" and wanted to use that same name several times.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely! Try this out: <name::=a>, <name::=b>, <name::=a>, <name::=b>

This is called a match carrier. [https://github.com/TheBerkin/Rant/wiki/Query- carriers](https://github.com/TheBerkin/Rant/wiki/Query-carriers)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very cool! I attempted a very primitive version of this for generating band names[1]. Now I'm tempted to port it to Rant :) One bit of advice though - <USER2> "getting started" section could be a bit more helpful for new users... it should at least mention the language it's written in (C#)!

[1] [https://github.com/dandelany/band- name/blob/master/templates...](https://github.com/dandelany/band- name/blob/master/templates/templates.js)

<comment><USER8> Does it work on Linux?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes!

<comment><USER8> Thanks. I asked because it's written in C#.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What are some real world applications which use this approach of text generation?

<comment><USER10> Well, they say that naming things is one of the hard problems in CS, right? Use this to generate names for all your functions/classes/variables. Just preprocess your source code before you compile!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think these languages for generating data are really useful. There is one called Protodata ([https://github.com/evincarofautumn/protodata](https://github.com/evincarofautumn/protodata)) for generating binary data. From the README: "Protodata is a language for describing binary data, originally written for prototyping and reverse engineering binary file formats. It is particularly useful for generating annotated data in a custom format, without having to write custom editing tools."

</comment><comment><USER12> This reminds me of polygen[1,2] that I discovered among the many programs packaged for Debian... but looks at least in some ways friendlier. Is it very limited/tailored/specialized for English?

[1] [https://github.com/Enucatl/polygen](https://github.com/Enucatl/polygen) [2} [https://www.polygen.org](https://www.polygen.org) [Mostly in Italian. I seem to recall there was a section in English ... but if there is I can't find any more]

</comment><comment><USER13> I've made a similar project about two years ago in Python, called Choice Words [1]. I've had some really interesting results by encoding the grammar of SVG, which generates procedural drawings (the GitHub project shows an example).

My project was based on the Kant Generator, an example project from Dive Into Python[2].

[1] [https://github.com/fdb/choicewords](https://github.com/fdb/choicewords)

[2] [http://www.diveintopython.net/](http://www.diveintopython.net/)

</comment><comment><USER14> Very cool.

I just wish I wasn't so certain that the developers of spamming tools will rip this off with shrieks of glee and use it to stuff our inboxes with yet more junk.

<comment><USER15> Or to spam disqus comments on various sites. I always see similar spam bots with comments like "I agree with bob here. Let me also mention a great way to make 895 dollars a day from home".

Also more on topic I could see Rant being helpful for online language lessons or something. I remember exercises in grammar school where you would have to identify parts of a sentence(ex: possessive pronouns, transitive verbs, etc). I think it would be fairly easy to use Rant to generate unique questions for each student. Not sure how practical or useful that actually is, but it could be fun to make.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Interesting tool. I can't help but wonder if it could be used as a way to resist forensic linguistics.

</comment><comment><USER17> Maybe not bad, definitely has few very cool features (rhymes impressed me), but I'm struggling to imagine when I'd actually need to use it. Sometimes I do need some random natural language text for testing, but then I usually just copy something from wikipedia or some book and it's guaranteed to be more random and more natural than anything I'd generate myself. No, hardly I'll ever need to generate natural-language sentences using this. Generating something more primitive, like random IPs? Well, if I need few I hardly would struggle to remember syntax (or even name) of some tool I downloaded long time ago and never used since, or I need many structured data of some sort and then it's almost certain that using this DSL wouldn't be enough or simply practical, and I'd end up using Python (which already has libraries for generating random data anyway).

Edit: to guys who are actively minusing this comment, I would be grateful if somebody could actually suggest any use case.

<comment><USER18> I think people are downvoting you because you're post reads something like, "This is neat, but useless and it's been done before."

Fwiw I didn't downvote you, but it'd probably be taken better if you just said something like, "This is really interesting. I'm not sure what I'd use it for personally, but I'm interested in knowing if you had specific use cases in mind, and what sorts of projects are you seeing it be used in now?"

For me, it looks like it'd be handy to use to generate test data and/or to make fun/weird little game apps, but still be able to keep everything in a .net language, since I work for a .net shop. (I could use python or whatever I want, really. we're flexible. it's just nice to keep things uniform)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I find the .gitignore a good way to gauge the quality of a repo. This one does not exhibit quality.

<comment><USER20> What criteria do you use to assess "quality"? In any case, this .gitignore is almost entirely the standard GitHub setup for Visual Studio projects.

[https://github.com/github/gitignore/blob/master/VisualStudio...](https://github.com/github/gitignore/blob/master/VisualStudio.gitignore)

<comment><USER19> Well, that's a knock on /github then. The entries should be as minimal as possible, in number and in individual length.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm seeing a lot of people in comments talking about how they wrote something similar or other tools exist. Can someone explain their use cases that don't involce SEO or some other kind of thing that's "bad"?

</comment><comment><USER22> Very nice tool, thanks. Where can i find a documentation or a list of commands?

<comment><AUTHOR> Rant is very well documented and it can be found on the GitHub wiki. Here's a link! [https://github.com/TheBerkin/Rant/wiki](https://github.com/TheBerkin/Rant/wiki)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> One place I can see this really shining is as part of a script that generates fixtures for Django apps.

</comment><comment><USER24> Fascinating - I've just written one of these for a project in Go.

</comment><comment><USER25> Could this be used in reverse to match text?

</comment><comment><USER26> Very fun!</comment>