Inside the U.S. Antitrust Probe of Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-u-s-antitrust-probe-of-google-1426793274 <comment><USER2> Where's the Antritrust Probe of Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and all of those other shit-eating ISPs? At least Google gives me some fantastic services at little cost to me.

<comment><USER3> The US Government already controls Comcast and Time Warner Cable through the regulations in the telecom industry, the FCC, and so on. The Feds, for example, can easily interrupt their merger at any time they see fit. These companies are government regulated monopolies (or at the least near- monopolies), much like AT&T and Verizon.

The problem with Google, as far as the US Government is concerned, is that it is not a government regulated monopoly. They fear anything with such vast scope and influence / power, that they don't have a certain level of direct control over.

The purpose of pursuing Google on anti-trust is to bring them under supervision of the US Government. The same reason the Feds were interested in Microsoft. It surprisingly takes very little to cause anti-trust problems for a major company, as little as one powerful senator dedicated to the issue. Google will be brought under a consent decree in the next few years most likely, and by the time the Feds get around to doing that, the market will have likely already made Google's dominance in search a lot less important.

<comment><USER4> | ...by the time the Feds get around to doing that, the market will have likely already made Google's dominance is search a lot less important.

Can you elaborate on _how_ that might happen, operationally?

<comment><USER5> As internet shifts to mobile phones & apps become the dominant way to use the internet, it will automatically diminish the importance of Google Search, & the market will (is already) pricing this in.

I think Peter Thiel alluded to this in an interview recently. From what I recollect, he suggested that by the time Feds act, the monopoly has already been disrupted elsewhere.

45 minute mark of this interview [http://thisweekinstartups.com/peter-thiel- launch-festival/](http://thisweekinstartups.com/peter-thiel-launch-festival/)

<comment><USER6> Apps are a temporary state of affairs (but isn't everything these days?). In a few generations, your phone will be little more than a terminal that connects to your personal virtual machine hosted on Apple/AWS/Google servers. This VM will run the respective company's OS as well as its native apps. These apps will be unrecognizably more powerful than the ones currently on your phone, and your phone itself will be significantly lighter and more efficient (and, yes, probably wearable).

Google will continue to make money from ads delivered into this virtual space and it will also have more leverage to regulate 3rd party apps, giving it access to the space within the apps as well. Oh, and also all these virtual spaces will have private and public modes.

The biggest problem really is screen area. The only reason Google can't exploit Android to its fullest potential is that phone screens just aren't large enough to dedicate a sufficient screen area to advertisement (it's a funny paradox: the phone as a real-life implement is limited to a form factor that precludes advertising space, which by its nature is always limited to 'sub-prime real-estate'). Perhaps OLED will be the solution to this, though I am more partial to drone-phones that hover beside their owners and use lasers to project the "screen" onto special eye contacts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The FTC report exposes the bullying of content providers, such as Trip Advisor, Yelp and Amazon, who were told that if they didn't want their content scraped they would be blocked from search results.[1]

And Jason Calacanis is all upset because the report says that Google tweaked their algorithm to hurt competitors, which he claims killed his human-powered search engine, Mahalo [2]

[1][http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/19/8260073/google-ftc- leaked-...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/19/8260073/google-ftc-leaked-anti- trust-report)

[2][https://twitter.com/Jason/status/578731213554233346/photo/1](https://twitter.com/Jason/status/578731213554233346/photo/1)

<comment><USER8> How can Google index content it can't scrape?

It doesn't seem anticompetitive to me - it seems like common sense.

<comment><USER7> Scraping page titles and snippets to create a list of websites is one thing, but scraping unique content from the pages that keeps people on Google instead of going to the source site is a problem. Say a bunch of restaurants are given star ratings by Yelp. If Google adds those ratings to its search listings then users don't need to go to Yelp. Google gets a double benefit: Yelp's content enhances the Google brand, and it stops them going to external sites. Yelp suffers a double loss: It loses unique content _and_ loses traffic.

Google's Knowledge Graph is where Google scrapes facts that other sites have compiled, most notably from Wikipedia, and presents it as its own data. This devalues all the sites that have compiled the facts, but greatly enhances Google.

When Google acts as a content site in its own right it inevitably comes into competition with the sites it ranks on the search engine, hence the (inevitable) anti-competitive behavior seen in the report.

<comment><USER9> I kind of agree about presenting Yelp ratings and only giving them the option of that or not being indexed, but you go too far in the other direction.

Snippets in search have long been held to be fair use and, quite honestly, I see the Wikipedia thing as an SEO crank red flag: even beyond the fair use argument, Wikipedia is _explicitly_ licensed to enable that sort of transformative use. Remix culture and all that.

<comment><USER10> Conduct that's legal from a copyright point of view can still create an antitrust problem.

<comment><USER9> That's true, but I would love to hear a specific theory on how using data from Wikipedia would create an antitrust problem :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Antitrust laws are couched in vague undefinable terms and do not define what is "monopolistic" in advance. Any and all business can be considered monopolistic under antitrust law. Rulings are ex post facto. No business can know whether they have committed a crime or not, and will never know, until government decides to bring a case.

It is vain, however, to call simply for clearer statutory definitions of monopolistic practice. For the vagueness of the law results from the impossibility of laying down a cogent definition of monopoly on the market. Hence the chaotic shift of the government from one unjustifiable criterion of monopoly to another: size of firm, "closeness" of substitutes, charging a price "too high" or "too low" or the same as a competitor, merging that "substantially lessens competition," etc.

<comment><USER12> > Any and all business can be considered monopolistic under antitrust law.

That's not even remotely true.

> No business can know whether they have committed a crime or not

That's not even remotely true. There are plenty of factors that characterize 100% of businesses not investigated (much less, penalized) for their alleged anti-competitive practices. It is very possible to determine whether a business carries any risk of investigation.

> For the vagueness of the law results from the impossibility of laying down a > cogent definition of monopoly on the market.

Again, you just aren't paying any attention. Regulatory capture has indeed made it far more challenging to bring an effective action, as well as de- fanging of antitrust regulation that served our parents' generation pretty well. But it's not actually difficult to use existing law to differentiate Google (natural monopoly) from cartel monopoly maintenance behaviors.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: [https://www.google.com/search?q=Inside+the+U.S.+Antitrust+Pr...](https://www.google.com/search?q=Inside+the+U.S.+Antitrust+Probe+of+Google)

<comment><USER13> Oh the irony.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that crossed my mind when I linked it up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Danny Sullivan has much better coverage and explanation: [http://marketingland.com/ftc-report-google-purposely- demoted...](http://marketingland.com/ftc-report-google-purposely-demoted- competiting-shopping-sites-122234)

<comment><USER15> The article (and the articles it links to) multiple times points fingers at other services doing things Google was accused of. But the "others did it too" excuse isn't as straightforward to apply when you have a monopoly. Same reason why Apple gets a free pass for stuff that Microsoft would be and was crucified for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What we really need is a fully distributed search system which can deliver results as good as Google in the same time frame. Such a system, which would essentially be just a protocol, would level the playing field. Add to that a distributed DNS and we would have a truely censorship free Internet.

<comment><USER17> You forgot the pony.

<comment><USER16> It comes with a pony.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Related: [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-02-28/google- hel...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-02-28/google-helped-honor- ftc-chairman-during-agency-inquiry)

</comment><comment><USER19> So a bunch of senators are shaking down Google for a campaign contribution, eh.

</comment><comment><USER20> The EU antitrust probe is going to put a hurt on Google, and it won't stop with just search. Android is going to be investigated as well.

Also related to this story is the massive amount of lobbying Google did to avoid charges being filed.

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-google-is- transfo...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-google-is-transforming- power-and-politicsgoogle-once-disdainful-of-lobbying-now-a-master-of- washington- influence/2014/04/12/51648b92-b4d3-11e3-8cb6-284052554d74_story.html)

<comment><USER12> Microsoft has repeatedly shown to have lobbyists working to cause these newsworthy investigations, but they have almost entirely fizzled, because they are little but paid-for press events for Microsoft.

Google was born into Microsoft's monopoly era. They have executed their monopoly in a profoundly different way. They don't have to commit anti- competitive acts to maintain their monopoly.

This is exactly the kind of monopoly we should want.

<comment><USER15> Except if you read the articles and others linked on this thread, their alleged actions (if true) are clearly anti-competitive. "Give us your content, else we'll demote you in our rankings, which by the way is the biggest source of your traffic"? Really?

While they are usually more subtle about it, I am not very surprised. I personally am aware of at least one deal where they used their size to squeeze a smaller company. Only they called it a "level playing field" ([https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/level-playing- field/](https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/level-playing-field/)). Sounds so much nicer! Except what it means is, "Our users want to take _their_ data from our service to yours, but it's not 'level', so hey, give _us_ something in return". And of course, who can forget the whole YouTube thing with Zoe Keating.

This has been a trend for a while now, only their PR has been pretty good at covering it up. Like calling it a "level playing field".

<comment><USER12> > alleged actions (if true) are clearly anti-competitive

I think you may be confusing monopolistic practices with anti-competitive practices. The former does not imply the latter. If Google were also illegally protecting a monopoly (e.g. leveraging monopoly in another market, let's pretend they have an office software monopoly, to protect their monopoly in web search) then we would have a problem, but that hasn't been shown.

> I personally am aware of at least one deal where they used their size to > squeeze a smaller company.

Again, the facts would have to show anti-competitive practice and not just being bigger. Are they doing anything unfair like taking a loss in their victim's market, or threatening their vendors?

<comment><USER15> It seems clear to me that these practices leverage a monopoly in one market, search, to compete unfairly in another market, that is ratings and local reviews.

The actual laws are more involved, including legal theories like "tying" that I can't claim to understand (and I suspect most here can't either) but this looks no different than what Microsoft was accused of doing, which was portrayed as leveraging a desktop OS monopoly to compete in the browser market (as silly as that sounds today).

<comment><USER12> > a monopoly in one market, search, to compete unfairly in another market, > that is ratings and local reviews.

I understand how similar it looks. However, I also note that regulators who are expert in the relevant legal topics have investigated and found no cause for action. Microsoft was not shy about providing all the detail they could to help the investigations in Europe, either.

My best guess is ratings and local reviews are also search, or 'search' isn't a market on paper the way it seems to us as consumers.

<comment><USER15> Actually, investigators in the US "settled" with Google making some minor changes to their services as concession.(And as TFA implies, these "experts" may have been influenced by Google :-) You'll note that investigations in Europe are not going nearly as well for Google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I am surprised they didn't mention how they handle services and platforms. Then again, those are just conveniences to individuals, not something that can affect a business or livelihood like search and ads.

</comment><comment><USER22> paywall?

</comment><comment><USER23> Do no evil indeed...

<comment><USER23> Downvotes because it's obvious? No google bashin'? We like monopolies?

<comment><USER24> Primarily because it contributes nothing to the discussion but also, yes, because it's an obvious comment to make.

If you have strong feelings about the issue, use that emotional fuel to write something substantive, or take it to Reddit.

<comment><USER23> Wait, I thought this was the new Reddit... but I kid. Point taken. I think I've got a good feel for the culture around here, lately. I must have had a small lapse into snide sophomoric snipery.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What open source projects are you contributing to? - <AUTHOR>

These days it is probably a given thing that hackers should contribute to open source projects to hone their skills. Except for the odd bug report, I still haven't found the time, as currently I don't even manage my own projects very well.
I would be curious though, what projects are you contributing to, and how did you get started? Are people more likely to start their own projects, or join existing ones?
For what it is worth, I consider open sourcing my unpublished mobile games, most notably a "who wants to be a millionaire" style quiz game. Perhaps if somebody else would be interested, I could work up the motivation to do so... <comment><USER2> There's a list here:

<http://www.welton.it/freesoftware/>

With the most important one right now being Hecl. Rivet was moderately successful in the past, and got me into Apache. I've done lots of minor patches for things, including the linux kernel (lameasses never accepted nor rejected it...), Erlang, Tcl, OFBiz, etc...

I would probably spend all my time hacking on open source software if money wasn't a concern... it's a lot of fun.

<comment><USER3> I did GSoc for Freenet and hopefully will find more time to contribute to it.If money werent an issue,i would be working full time on the kernel and Freenet, but unfortunately it is :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wrote TagLib, JuK, a couple other small KDE applications, and a handful of the library classes (inline spell checking, search widgets, maintained the listview classes for a few years) and more recently implemented a number of algorithms and classes for ChucK (music orientated programming language).

I'd recommend working at least tangentially in one of the larger projects since I feel like hooking into those cultures is a really instructive and challenging environment. Don't underestimate the social component of OSS projects.

In a big project the easiest way to get started is to pick something you already use, start running the unstable version (from CVS, SVN, whatever) and sign up for some mailing lists. You'll hit bugs, and if you've been on the lists for a bit you'll get a feel for how they're handled in that project. IRC can also be useful. Often you can find someone there that will kind of informally mentor you in the project if they like what you're working on.

One big caveat that I always point out: Don't worry about your skills. You'll learn them if you're motivated, latch on to a good community and have moderately thick skin.

</comment><comment><USER5> I work on a ton of stuff: god, chronic, fuzed, grit, erlectricity, yaws (those first four are mine or co-mine). You can see them all (and clone the git repos or look at a feed of my commits) at <http://github.com/mojombo/>

</comment><comment><USER6> Mostly my PHP projects lately: my take on ORM (ORMer); a database abstraction layer (dbFacile); and some others. They're all geared at making things easier on the developer.

Also started a console multiplexer app called Knox a few years ago that's been sitting dormant.

They're all at: <http://greaterscope.net/projects>

In addition to those I submitted a patch to Xynth a few months ago for Debian support (<http://xynth.org>)

</comment><comment><USER7> Avant Window Navigator, <http://awn-project.org/> (also, wiki here <http://wiki.awn-project.org>)

It's a dock for Linux with Python-based applets.

</comment><comment><USER8> Apache Xap and Dojo Toolkit.

In addition I have a few things that I've built that I would love to open up. I just haven't found the time to spend to get the last 5% done needed around packaging, clean up etc.

</comment><comment><USER9> I used to contribute to yaita.sourceforg.net. It's a GUI testing tool for swing app, using AOP. It started as a class project me and a couple of friends had while we were taking our degrees.

</comment><comment><USER10> Blender and Second Life. I also started some work on GIMP but I haven't submitted anything for GIMP yet. To get started I just sent an email to the relative mailing lists.

</comment><comment><USER11> Orange data maining software. <http://www.ailab.si/orange/>

</comment><comment><USER12> started the returnable project, over at <http://returnable.org>

</comment><comment><USER13> I tend to contribute to projects that benefit whatever else I'm working on at the time. If an open source project gets me half way to fulfilling a feature, I have no problem taking it the rest of the way and contributing back. It's better than starting from scratch!

</comment><comment><USER14> None!

I have never seen the point why highly qualified developers work for free instead of turning their skills into real money.

Maybe someone can enlighten me (and others who read this and don't understand too).

</comment><comment><USER15> I've contributed some icons to The Fedora Project in the past, but not nearly as much code related contributions.

</comment><comment><USER16> the Cairo graphics library

</comment><comment><USER17> I really want to see some sort of iPhone open sauce apps (:

</comment><comment><USER18> panda3d - python c++ graphics library <http://panda3d.org>

</comment><comment><USER19> i manage <http://newskicks.com>

</comment><comment><USER20> Banshee.

</comment><comment><USER21> I started TrakEM2: register/edit/analyze/3D model terabytes of images. For scientific image processing -mostly neuroscience, mostly electron microscopy images, but also other fields and imaging techs.

<http://repo.or.cz/w/trakem2.git>

<http://www.ini.uzh.ch/~acardona/trakem2.html>

It's based off ImageJ. And yes it is in Java, with plenty of jython scripting on top.</comment>


Ask HN: Who uses the comand line? - <AUTHOR> Hello HN, I started Learning SSH, and started Learning about the comand line. I'm curious who actualy uses that ? What are the advantages ? Thanks. <comment><USER2> I wrote a book about Unix which has never been published, and in that book I suggested that the command line's benefits are

1\. Remote administration and remote command execution

2\. Scriptability and automation

3\. Low ambiguity and high information rate

4\. Extensibility, generality, and reuse

5\. Low technical requirements for supporting user interface

6\. Ease in reproducing and documenting problem solutions

7\. Ability to work "close to the machine"

I'm happy to clarify any of these if you'd like.

I use the command line every day both on my own machine and on remote servers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the clear answer! I'm Learning here by playing this game, it's fun because I have to do my own research and do some trial and error. What do you think ? Is it a good way of Learning the command line ? Or you can suggest something else ? Thanks.

<comment><USER2> There are several games that offer particular challenges and some of those should be a nice way to learn.

You might also want to take a look at the FLOSS Manuals _Introduction to the Command Line_

[http://archive.flossmanuals.net/_booki/command- line/command-...](http://archive.flossmanuals.net/_booki/command-line/command- line.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow! It's a great ressource! I'll have a llok into it, thanks!

<comment><USER2> If you want, I can also send you a draft of my book. However, my book is very interested in history and culture so it doesn't have a practical orientation or organization and may present topics in the wrong order, and go into details that most command line beginners didn't want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I use it, automation, quick command reference, tab complete, much more powerful options, ability to chain/pipe commands.</comment>


Bitcoin Will Spiral Up and Down Forever - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/10/bitcoin_s_deflation_problem.html <comment><USER2> I think these massive deflationary cycles will only cease when it becomes the currency of record for more than just exchanges.

But that's my layman's speculation. I have no economic training. Feel free to repudiate.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a bitcoin skeptic but not for this reason. If this were true than we would have never had a functioning currency until fiat money, but we did. (Since gold, ergo money, was a scare resource as well.)

The biggest hurdle to bitcoin is simply that so far it has not registered on the radar of world governments. If bitcoin ever gets to the point of being a legitimate participant in the currency wars, it will be facing the wrath of all central banks and governments. They will find a weakness.

<comment><USER4> You can subdivide gold and other scarce resources. A gold bar you might trade with is 12.4kg, or at current market rate, about $700,000. But you wouldn't carry that to your local market to buy some toothpaste and a toothbrush, which might be valued at $5. But you can remove a small portion of the gold so that the trade is fair.

Can you give someone one tenth of a bitcoin?

<comment><USER5> Yes, Bitcoin is divisible down to extremely small fractions.

<comment><USER2> To clarify; the smallest division is the Satoshi, at .00000001 bitcoins.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Huawei publishes implied P9 camera sample, EXIF data shows $4500 camera took it - <AUTHOR> http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/07/04/huawei-publishes-implied-p9-camera-sample-but-exif-data-reveals-4500-camera-took-it/#1 <comment><USER2> This sounds like someone was trying to do some deceptive advertisting and did not know about the technology they were using :O</comment>


Party like it's 1234567890 - <AUTHOR> http://www.1234567890day.com/

<comment><USER2> We actually celebrated when it rolled over to a billion. Was a heck of a party.

Sadly I doubt I'll be around in 2286 when we get another digit, but I can look forward to turning a billion on March 13, 2015.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://coolepochcountdown.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I love the look but it doesn't help me get beer!

<comment><AUTHOR> I take it back, the music and explosions were fine!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's how it's done folks: <http://flickr.com/photos/ttrueman/3277754052/>

</comment><comment><USER5> In 2015 we can celebrate 01010101010101010101010101010101 day.

(Bonus karma if you can calculate the exact day and time.)

<comment><USER2> Fri, 15 May 2015 02:09:25 GMT

</comment></comment><comment><USER6>
        ruby -e "loop{tn=Time.now.to_i;puts\"#{tn} (T-minus #{1234567890-tn})\";sleep(1)}"

I nearly forgot, and literally finished writing that ~10 seconds before 1234567890!

</comment><comment><USER7> Yay! It has happened!</comment>


IPhone 4S the most high-tech Hand Warmer [Wikipedia] - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_warmer#iPhone_4S

<comment><AUTHOR> Screen capture, for when it inevitably gets removed: <http://twitpic.com/7etbgk/full>

</comment><comment><USER2> ;-) hilarious!</comment>


Websites Vary Prices, Deals Based on Users' Information - <AUTHOR> http://on.wsj.com/VYoaFD

<comment><USER2> This link worked for me to get across the pay wall: [http://muckrack.com/link/QEXd/websites-vary-prices-deals- bas...](http://muckrack.com/link/QEXd/websites-vary-prices-deals-based-on- users-information)</comment>


Ask HN: Do you believe medicines don't work beyond expiration date? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I agree with Wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_expiration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_expiration)</comment>


Redesiging a Broken Internet: Cory Doctorow [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J_9EFGFR-Y

<comment><USER2> Judging from the first 5 minutes, this Wired article by the same author contains pretty much the same content in textual form - [http://www.wired.com/2014/12/government-computer- security](http://www.wired.com/2014/12/government-computer-security)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the link. Do you know what he means when he says the "World Wide Web Consortium continues to infect the core standards of the web itself to allow remote control over your computer against your wishes?"

<comment><USER4> He's referring to their standard for embedding hooks for DRM into web pages, the so-called "Encrypted Media Extensions":

[https://w3c.github.io/encrypted-media/](https://w3c.github.io/encrypted- media/)

<comment><USER3> I don't understand, doesn't this only apply to DRM content? How does this enable remote control of your browser?

<comment><USER5> No, it's about control of your browser.

In standard HTML a server sends you some text bits and data streams and your browser chooses what it wants to do with them. Save them, display them on the screen, ignore them, etc. With DRM the browser has to be specifically engineered to do not what you want it to do, but what the person sending the data wants it to do. This is almost always done inside of some kind of 'black box of digital magic', be it software or hardware. If you had control or insight of the black box it is likely you could subvert control of the encrypted media.

Now I won't say that it directly enables control over your browser any more so than Flash does (Only 76 CVE's in 2014), but every black box is a point of attack for hackers.

<comment><USER3> Ahh gotcha. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wish the title were different, since the talk has nothing to do with a broken internet. But the actual topic; computers working for or against their operators, DMCA as a meta-law to be exploited by private enterprise, and DMCA as restraint on public vulnerability disclosure, are all important public discussion.

The key point I heard, and I'll embellish a little further; -- legislators are passing laws like DMCA thinking they are merely trifling with entertainment options, but they are mucking with critical infrastructure, the central mediating artifact of our lives, maybe even the platform for our existence. Tread lightly.

<comment><USER7> > I wish the title were different, since the talk has nothing to do with a > broken internet.

The rest of your comment sort of negates that first sentence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> While I would be apt to agree with his conclusion I have trouble with his arguments, which I find sloppy.

Thesis: the high level problem is that general purpose computing (and general purpose manufacturing, like 3d printing) dramatically lowers production and distribution costs in the face of established and ingrained financial and societal structure. This expresses itself in multiple ways in the real world. The author tries to grapple with these but is always so far into specific cases that the root causes remain hidden.

1.) Cost of production and distribution is lowered below profitable margins for several large industries including entertainment and news media.

2.) Regulation of the means of manufacturing chains has been a useful tool for the governance of products, consumers and society (guns, drugs, chemicals).

3.) Lowered costs, where they can be gathered instead of passed to consumers, means high margin profit businesses (Microsoft's business model).

4.) With lower communication costs, 'services' are an emerging (and now very established) model to replace or pair with the 'restricted machine' model.

The problem is that pockets of accumulated Capital, established market leaders (and often entire industries), and conventional mechanisms of regulation are all trying to resist the giant transformational changes that the digital front could represent. They have succeeded for a full generation now and the new generation doesn't understand the terms of the issue.

This is _not_ to say that this is a purely _bad_ thing. These transformations completely upend the world. The US government (or whichever) needs to cope with these dramatic changes - either by softening them or by undergoing radical transformations itself. For example, one might think it's a good thing that guns don't cost $8, can be produced by anyone, or lack serial numbers and other forensic signatures.

To welcome the utopic world that Cory Doctorow (and I) espouse we need to figure out a way to structure society so that $8 anonymous guns don't represent a serious problem. Until there are solutions to that problem it is inevitable that legislation will do everything it can to balance the benefits of general purpose manufacturing with artificially raised costs and barriers to criminalized enterprises. Doctorow recognizes that the 'balanced' solution - 'services' and 'pseudo-general purpose machines' \- are a bad deal. But he does not yet recognize that without answers to some difficult societal questions _so are the others_.

</comment><comment><USER9> I always cringe when I see a talk or a blog post in tech talking about "fixing" something that is "broken", especially something as complex as the internet. It's just sensationalism. The state of "brokeness" of the internet is totally ill-defined. I would be much more likely to give this talk my time and attention if the topic was more clearly stated in the title.

</comment><comment><USER10> He is not wrong.

Comprehensible Examples from the news that show a trend of dangerous and inevitably technically incompetent control and surveillance.

Doctorow is a great speaker, well versed and full of citations and recognises that an educated populace and individual liberty are the true wealth of nations.

You might think such a seemless and high bandwidth delivery is well rehearsed but the same seemingly effortless intersections of facts and culture occurs spontaneously in the Q & A - as a speaker virtuosic.

The crypto wars, the copyright wars, the war for general purpose computing, chilling effects on vulnerability disclosure, drm, de-CSS - these define the limits of electronic possibility.

Freedom is being eroded by totalitarian feature creep - Doctorow is one of the few technological evangelists who realised this very early on.

</comment><comment><USER11> General purpose computers are so last-cen. Today, we have mobile! The arguments about control today are between the mobile network operators, the mobile device vendors, and governments. Users have little if any control or input to that process. Apple doesn't even allow IOS apps to have programmability.

<comment><USER11> I see the Apple fan club is on duty.

It's amusing. Any negative mention of Apple takes about an hour to be recognized. Then it gets modded down. The same thing happens on Slashdot, with about the same amount of delay. Then, if the comment is any good, it gets modded up again over the next day or so. Apple's operation seems to have a fixed moderation window.

<comment><USER12> You claimed that Apple doesn't allow apps to be programmable.

That is objectively wrong. It has nothing to do with "fan clubs".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Cory Doctorow just needs to STFU and go away.

Lets be clear here, CD is primarily a science fiction writer (feel free to look at info up yourself), not a programmer/engineer (like Richard Stallman), not a researcher (like Michael Geist), not an activist (many many examples we all know) or quite frankly anyone of any relevance. He's the new breed of self-aggrandizing web whore that gets himself shoe horned in "tech" sites or simply via his dumpster blog Boingboing. To stay relevant he takes popular internet news (say gamergate) and takes the most hardlined politically-correct stance on it. A great example of this would be how he recently co-authored a fictional book about a "female gamer". I mean... comon...

For the sake of the internet please ignore this person and support people who make a real difference. (I fully expect to be voted down for this by not brainlessly applauding these hipster heroes)

<comment><USER14> Cory Doctorow's writing influenced me in an important and personal way, so I can't agree with your assessment. Your tone is hostile and your examples are not specific enough to refute, so there's no point engaging on them. I hope this will serve as reasonable explanation for why I've downvoted your comment.</comment></comment>


Man Legally Changes Name 2 Host Gator.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6R6O7uqPSc&feature=youtu.be&a

<comment><USER2> Lets see how awesome it turns out when he has a DUI or something.

"hostgator dotcom kills family of 4 in tragic drunk driving accident."</comment>


Package Thief vs. Glitter Bomb Trap [video] - <AUTHOR> https://youtube.com/watch?v=xoxhDk-hwuo <comment><USER2> I was surprised the thieves who got glittered while alone (in their car, for example) exclaimed out loud about it.

Do people naturally talk that way when there's nobody listening? It's not like they stubbed their toe.</comment>


Adversarial Examples That Fool Both Human and Computer Vision - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08195 <comment><AUTHOR> PDF: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.08195.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.08195.pdf)

Figure 1 - an image of a cat, adversarially perturbed to look like a dog.</comment>


Logitech to Acquire Streamlabs - <AUTHOR> https://blog.logitech.com/2019/09/26/logitech-teams-up-with-streamlabs-to-further-enable-game-streamers-to-pursue-their-passion/ <comment><USER2> There are much worse companies to be acquired by. At its heart Logitech is still Swiss, they are about as ethical as it comes in the IT landscape and all my past interactions with them were about as proper as it gets.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Logitech press release: [https://news.logitech.com/press- release/corporate/logitech-a...](https://news.logitech.com/press- release/corporate/logitech-agrees-acquire-streamlabs-adding-streaming-tools- its-gaming-offerin)

Streamlabs blog: [https://blog.streamlabs.com/logitech-streamlabs- awesome-52c7...](https://blog.streamlabs.com/logitech-streamlabs- awesome-52c7774ada29)</comment>


How to (hire the best || never get laid off) - <AUTHOR>

Employee/Employer relationships are the topics that come up with enough regularity across hackernews, reddit and other articles, but other than a couple of random nuggets of wisdom here and there, I never quite came across the fundamental rule to drive them all until today.
Most everyone focuses on the various strategies for weeding out people or specifics for getting noticed. Firm handshakes, interviews beginning with the receptionist, interviews being replaced with mini-projects, whiteboard coding, judging on appearance, punctuality etc etc etc.  It's basically a big set of articles with various advice on how to tune the bayesian employee filter or get through them.
While useful, I think we haven't given enough attention to the real rule that underlies everything else.
Obviously, "best" for everyone is quite different, however I'd be willing to bet that there's one golden quality that consistently underlies those that most of us consider "awesome" co-workers or employees.
In the short essay, "A Message to Garcia," it underlines the qualities of the man that is so valuable that no employer can let them go. Ultimately, it's embodied in the man who can carry the message to Garcia.
http://www.benning.army.mil/infantry/199th/ocs/content/pdf/Message%20to%20Garcia.pdf
It's a quick 5-10 minute read, but the story distills itself into being the person we describe as the "gets-shit-done-guy-without-complaining." <comment><USER2> This was required reading for me (and most others) while going through the Marine Corps officer training program... A great read and probably one of the core reasons to hire former members of the military (in my biased opinion) along with a handful of other reasons that can't be taught in school.

The officer selection program screens individuals for potential to lead and thrive in a variety of very stressful situations THEN once they've screened for top performers they assign them a job and train them how to do it.

A completely different process than most companies who expect all of their talent to show up with a very specific skill set. Unfortunately this leads to some amazing people being excluded for the talent pool because "it is too much work to train" someone. If one learns the traits to look for I'd guess that training them becomes a breeze and you'll end up with a better hire who will stick around in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER3> Clickable link [http://www.benning.army.mil/infantry/199th/ocs/content/pdf/M...](http://www.benning.army.mil/infantry/199th/ocs/content/pdf/Message%20to%20Garcia.pdf)</comment>


Ulterior States (2015) Cypherpunks, Bitcoin and changing the world through tech - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/Documentaries/comments/5k7wu7/ulterior_states_2015_hackers_cypherpunks_bitcoin/ <comment><USER2> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQGQXy0RIIo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQGQXy0RIIo)

One of my favorite documentaries on Bitcoin. Worth watching / listening to Andreas M. Antonopoulos talks on youtube too. He's the only person who could describe the inner workings of Bitcoin that I could understand</comment>


This is how bad the gender gap is at tech companies - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekwire.com/2014/chart-bad-gender-gap-tech-companies/

<comment><USER2> The higher the salary, the more complex the work, the more stress there will be in doing the job. 39% of women quit due to the stress of the tech workplace?

I think we can solve that by teaching stress management skills. In fact both men and women need them in the tech industry.

39% of women leaving because of macho environment? I've heard of this 'brogramming' or 'mansplaining' I think in most cases it is a communication issue, and men can be trained to talk to women better than this macho talk or whatever. Since 80% of the job is communicating with other people, it is also another skill that can be taught. The problem is a lot of men don't have the social and people skills and just talk rough like one of the guys from a locker room after a Football game. They can be taught the social and people skills not to talk macho or whatever.

As for the rest, compensation, just pay women the extra 23 cents an hour that HR cheated them out of in order to save money. Pay women the same as men based on the position and experience and job performance. This is not a worker problem it is a problem with HR or management or whomever sets the salaries, just have them pay women the same as man based on whatever factors they use.</comment>


Ask HN: Are there any sites that connect entrepreneurs with developers? - <AUTHOR> I can't even begin to estimate the amount of hours I've spent researching and brainstorming startup ideas. I've gone to implement a few and they never got off the ground. I mostly blame the execution but I'm going to be honest... the ideas weren't that great. Honestly I'm  just tired of trying to "come up with something". I feel like one day the right idea will hit me and I'll pursue it. Then it will either succeed as a business or serve as another learning experience.
Until that day, I'm going to take a different approach. I'll just help other people build their ideas. I am okay with that "risk". I'm not trying to find a stable and slow-growth job at the moment. I'm trying to find another like-minded dreamer that has an idea they're working on that could benefit from another developer. I'm not sure if there's really a dedicated site/forum/etc for this. If there is one, I've never heard of it.
One part of me is thinking that it's foolish to think I could find what I'm looking for this way but until I find a better method, there's not much I can do other than try.
So, if you have any advice or comments then I'd love to hear it. Or if you would like to discuss anything related to this, then please feel free to reach out. I'm easy to find on LinkedIn.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesseleehorne/ <comment><USER2> Honestly, HN is pretty good for this. You might check out Openland too.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've seen some comment threads almost take off into products when a couple like-minded people "vibed". That was neat. I guess I haven't been in this mindstate long enough to really utilize HN for it. Now that I think of it, I could probably just wait long enough to see people share what they're working on and then go ask them if they need help if the project is interesting enough.

What is Openland, by the way? Google is pointing me in a number of directions!

<comment><USER2> There's a community at [https://openland.com](https://openland.com), I like it a lot. Lots of smart people and very good SNR.</comment></comment></comment>


The Billion-Dollar Bet On Jet Tech That's Making Flying More Efficient - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2013/01/23/the-billion-dollar-bet-on-jet-tech-thats-making-flying-more-efficient/

<comment><USER2> Geared turbofans are not new and reasonably common - eg see link below. Not sure what the innovation is...

[http://www.honeywell.com/sites/aero/Turbofans3_C67D99379-538...](http://www.honeywell.com/sites/aero/Turbofans3_C67D99379-5387-BE15-B14A-CEC340B87662_HBAD5694B-4CA1-AFC7-FFF9-80390091EFE5.htm)</comment>


I love globals, or Google Core Dump - <AUTHOR> http://www.yosefk.com/blog/i-love-globals-or-google-core-dump.html <comment><USER2> _Possibly under the clever disguise of a "Singleton". Not a bad thing after all, that moronic "design pattern", because it ultimately allowed to counter cargo cult programmers' accusations of "globals are evil" with equally powerful cargo cult argument of "it's a design pattern"._

Beautiful.</comment>


Accelsor Takes Web Sites From Prototype to Publish in Zero Steps - <AUTHOR> http://voices.allthingsd.com/20110328/early-adopter-accelsor-takes-web-sites-from-prototype-to-publish-in-zero-steps/

<comment><AUTHOR> The Founders are awesome and it's quite an intriguing idea, whether it can stack up is yet to be decided I suppose.

<comment><USER2> I see some serious potential. This could allow people to make their ideas come to life or at least increase the amount of nicer designed sites and personal websites.</comment></comment>


Bug 986019 – Turn off SSL and Code Signing trust bits for Equifax 1024-bit roots - <AUTHOR> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=986019 <comment><USER2> This is a lot like the drunk who lost his car keys and was looking for them underneath the street lamp, because that's where the light was. I.e. not very useful activity.

I'm using Firefox 35, and the very first certificate it trusts is from TÜRKTRUST Elektronik Sertifika Hizmet Sağlayıcısı. Huh? So there are still hundreds of random trusted certificate issuers controlled by dozens of random authoritarian governments?

I'm supposed to be concerned about theoretical 1024 bit key strength, while we _know_ _for_ _sure_ that various certificate authorities have been compromised in the past?

Bah. They should fix the real problems first.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The only 1024-bit root that will remain after Firefox 36. RapidSSL were also late with the SHA2 intermediate too BTW. Also the infamous 2008 MD5 collision also used RapidSSL.</comment>


Touching Your Junk: An Ontological Complaint - <AUTHOR> http://eblong.com/zarf/thod/38.html

<comment><USER2> It may not technically be a Venn Diagram but I still think it is a legitimate way to represent something - and do it better than the author's alternatives.

You have to look at the chart differently but I don't think this makes it a bad graphic.

Each intersection is a way of representing what the two intersecting groups have in common, rather than demonstrating what the groups are.

The question is, "What do doctors and TSA agents have in common?" and the answer goes in the intersecting region.

While not technically a Venn Diagram I think it is still a useful graphic.

<comment><USER3> I disagree.

"Venn diagrams or set diagrams are diagrams that show all hypothetically possible logical relations between a finite collection of sets" <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venn_diagram>

There is nothing wrong with showing Venn diagrams of property's of something. It's really just another set.

PS: Numbers are abstract ideas not physical objects. So, Venn diagrams where really designed to show relationships between ideas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article takes something simple and elegant (if incorrectly labeled) and turns it into a sad tortured example of how to get yourself picked on in high school.

<comment><USER5> This article takes something funny and turns it into an insightful article without being a bitch about it (I found it quite humorous). You're all hating too much.

<comment><USER6> I accidentally up-voted the GP, but I agree - it's well written, and makes a fair point which I think isn't too pedantic. Although he mislabels <http://eblong.com/zarf/pic/thod/venn-wtf.png> 'Strumpet MDs' and 'Medical Security Guards', should be reversed.

<comment><USER7> _I accidentally up-voted the GP_

Actually, that's perfect for a segue into epistemology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> He's right though. Line diagrams as JPEGs _are_ annoying.

<comment><USER9> He complains about using JPEGs yet his PNGs are unreasonably large (60-120KB). I compressed one of his 80KB images into 15KB just by re-saving it.

<comment><USER10> I suspect he doesn't care much about the storage space. JPEGs make the edges of the lines blurry or noisy - they're designed for things like nature photographs, not sharp hard edges between single-color areas.

<comment><USER11> It's not about storage space, is about loading time. When I read it through the connection I have at work, it took about 2 minutes to load.

<comment><USER8> When it's JPG artifacts in an image best suited for PNG you blame the publisher.

When it's slow loading times you blame the pipes and the piper.

Me? I blame three letter acronyms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The original image is a proper Venn Diagram if you think of the diagram representing various properties of professions.

The only correction you need is to replace "Doctor" with "other properties of doctors", etc, to be technically correct -- though i much prefer the original.

Nice post anyways

<comment><USER13> To this end: we can (WLOG) make the degenerate observation that a property of all doctors is that they are doctors. Then the original chart just shorthands away whatever conjugation of "to be" is proper in the outermost bubbles, and does indeed map properties of the various groups.

<comment><USER14> It's still not a Venn diagram. A Venn diagram labels regions, not points in the regions. The diagram could be made correct by placing little dots in the intersection regions to show that these are points in the intersection, whereas the outermost categories are sets of properties. But it still wouldn't really be a Venn diagram :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I laughed out loud at the bit about "probably something from Bruce Schneier". Really funny stuff overall. If you didn't like this, you need to relax and have more egg nog.

</comment><comment><USER16> > De Morgan's law. The union of two properties is the intersection of the sets > of people who have those properties. (And vice versa.)

De Morgan's Law!!!!!!! I first learned about this in a Moore-method point-set topology class in 1995, and I have been trying to remember the name of this property since. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

</comment><comment><USER17> Is it weird that internet memes still manage to find a way here, albeit in a roundabout manner?

<comment><USER7> Often, it's not so roundabout.</comment></comment>


A Billion Holes Can Make a Battery - <AUTHOR> http://www.umdrightnow.umd.edu/news/billion-holes-can-make-battery <comment><USER2> I wish there was a science magazine that would let me follow particular advancements to know when they announce additional results, begin manufacturing, etc. I keep seeing optimistic articles on battery tech and I have know idea if the ideas fizzle out or just are not sexy enough for continued coverage.

<comment><USER3> I do battery research and even I don't know what happens to most of these things. I suppose the funding ends and no one continues working on it.

<comment><USER4> Battery research has been a constant "just around the corner" thing. Sure there have been advancements but not the level of expected advancement if you just read news releases of "breakthrough battery" technologies.

I would guess this is a mix of it being hard to get from a concept to mass production, i.e. easy prototypes but lots of walls come up when trying to mass produce it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nnano...](http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nnano.2014.247.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Not a watt in sight. What magnitude of energy per cubic volume are they dealing with? Energy per weight? Most articles like this make moderately vacuous claims about applications like powering a chip that cures a disease. I complain about that, but then to not have any inkling of practical implications and no link to articles??

</comment><comment><USER7> Great discovery . may be in near future we will be able to use smart phones with a battery that will last longer than a week with single recharge</comment>


Ask HN: How to find 'error budget' as a DevOps Engineer? - <AUTHOR> I am trying to find an error budget for a site that has several outside APIs integrated in it for its core features. How can I find the error budget for it? <comment><USER2> Error budget = the actual downtime duration your site can still afford within a given time frame.

If you have the SLA of your outside APIs, you may compute your own maximum possible SLO and deduce from that your full error budget. But your error budget will diminish over time, as you use it.

Say your site depends on 3 external APIs having each a 99% SLA, your best possible site SLO would be 99% x 99% x 99% = 97% (= your site is, at best, as much reliable as the product of the reliability of your dependencies).

That is, unless your site has some built-in tactics for the specific downtime scenarios of these APIs (caching, retry, slow down, graceful limitation of features, etc.).

Should you pick a lower SLA than your SLO for your site then? Always. Things happen.

Let's take 95% SLA for simplicity.

Your max error budget would be, for 30 days, as a formula:

      + total time frame (say, 30 days = 720 hours)
      - target availability (at 97% avail. that would be 684 hours)
      - total downtime you've had already within this time frame
      = 36 hours or less

That's a start. Then you may track your actual production own indexes and adjust accordingly.

Reminder: [https://enqueuezero.com/the-difference-between-sli-slo- and-s...](https://enqueuezero.com/the-difference-between-sli-slo-and-sla.html)</comment>


Show HN: Four Questions for Developers - <AUTHOR> http://fourqu.es/tions

<comment><USER2> Cool!

(FYI: horizontal scrolling results in broken styling on Chrome.)</comment>


Google collects face data now – what it means and how to opt out - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/how-to/google-collects-face-data-now-heres-what-it-means-and-how-to-opt-out/ <comment><USER3> No mention of Illinois, which is the state with the only biometric privacy law with teeth.

> _The Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) was passed by the Illinois > General Assembly on October 3, 2008. Codified as 740 ILCS /14 and Public Act > 095-994, the BIPA guards against the unlawful collection and storing of > biometric information.[1] When Illinois passed the law in 2008, it became > the first state to regulate the collection of biometric information.[2] > Washington and Texas have since passed similar laws.[3] However, the BIPA > remains the only law that allows private individuals to file a lawsuit for > damages stemming from a violation_

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

Edit: my conspiracy theory is that the tech industry's lobbyists are pushing for legislation on privacy at the federal level because they know such a law would be more watered down than what states would pass.

And almost certainly much weaker than IL's current laws in protecting privacy in this regard.

<comment><USER4> Google won against Illinois in a recent case: [https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-oks-google-facial- recog...](https://www.courthousenews.com/judge-oks-google-facial-recognition- software/)

<comment><USER5> > "But a ruling issued by U.S. District Judge Edmond Chang on Saturday found > that the law cannot be used to protect users from the non-consensual > collection of information about what many consider to be private"

If the law can't be used to protect us what measures remain available? Storming Google's data centers by force? The legal system is supposed to be the acceptable option so mobs and violence aren't all we have. Eliminate legal recourse and what's left?

<comment><USER6> > If the law can't be used to protect us what measures remain available?

"Google" is not an entity -- it's composed of people, who make decisions and enable the things that Google does.

Don't hire them. Don't associate with them.

They're working for a company that, at this point, is obviously doing harm to the world. That's a choice they have the freedom to make. We have the freedom not to associate with people who make that choice.

Note that this advice is specific to non-visa-limited people in high-demand occupations, like other software engineers. They have a choice.

<comment><USER5> > "Google" is not an entity

It is. It's a legal entity called a corporation

> Don't hire them. Don't associate with them.

You no longer have a choice to opt out of google invading your privacy. The websites you visit everyday are letting google track you. The websites I use for my work are tracking me via google. My employer also requires chrome for some tasks which allows google to track what I do. I've even seen government websites using google trackers. You just can't escape google on the internet. Google is so pervasive even ARIN is allowing google to track people who go to their site.

Google is quickly intruding on offline public spaces as well.

When a user-hostile company becomes impossible to escape the only option left is to regulate it to limit the damage, but Illinois made a solid effort to do just that and it made zero difference

<comment><USER7> You do have a choice. You are allowing them to track you. Use protection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Whether this is opt-in/opt-out is not clear. What bothers me, though, is how Google won't delete your images used for training automatically.

[https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9320885?hl=en](https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9320885?hl=en)

> Note: Disabling Face Match will delete your face model from your device but > it will not delete the enrollment images used to create your face model. To > delete Face Match enrollment images, visit myactivity.google.com.

So, the real question is, why do we have to be aware of some gotcha that's deeply embedded somewhere in some support page that majority of us won't look at? This is the case with most of Google's opt-out strategies.

<comment><USER9> This is the only basis that tech co's have been convinced to provide ways to opt out and appear to care for your privacy. They make it difficult so the majority don't do it. In my opinion laws should be in place to ensure stuff like this is OPT IN only. The current situation is madness.

<comment><USER10> GDPR was supposed to do that.

Sadly looking at reality it is too watered down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Hey, Google, use every discernible iota of my personal information to build the foundation of a Chinese-style, authoritarian, digital dystopia, because I'm too lazy to learn basic, self-managed organizational skills."

<comment><USER12> Pretty much this. I think users today are extremely lazy and are unwilling to learn anything. It's to the point where they are the ones being used instead of doing the using.

<comment><USER13> "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

<comment><USER14> Only at the margins are other people with machines enslaving anyone.

I think it's mostly an emergent phenomena enslaving everyone into some cultural and behavioral paradigm that nobody intends or particularly wants.

But the costs of shutting down all these incentivizing/nudging/conditioning/addicting technologies would kill most of the tech sector (by market cap), and therefore can't be seriously entertained.

<comment><USER5> > But the costs of shutting down all these > incentivizing/nudging/conditioning/addicting technologies would kill most of > the tech sector (by market cap)

I couldn't care less if predatory companies collapse. None of the tech itself is inherently evil, its only being used against us instead of working for us. If google were disbanded or broken up today new companies would rise up continue to do what they do now under more responsible terms. Those companies can continue to provide cell phones and email accounts without using those things to build dossiers on the people who just want to communicate with friends and family.

Many people today think it's impossible to offer anything if you aren't abusing your users because that's all they know, but I remember when there were hundreds of free email providers long before it became technically feasible to read every last email stored on the server to spy on users.

<comment><USER15> > _new companies would rise up continue to do what they do now under more > responsible terms._

I think that's a naive position to take. People are people, and human nature really is hard to fight. It's a virtual certainty that anything replacing google, will be violating your security and privacy. Especially if it's "free".

<comment><USER5> I think it'd end up like what happened when Ma Bell was broken up. Over time the companies have merged back into just a few and not everything got better, and tech evolved rapidly which complicates direct comparisons but at the same time, I've got several phones in my home and none of them have "property of AT&T" engraved into them. Some things improved.

Companies are amoral monsters who care about nothing but making money and there will always be a struggle with regulation followed by deregulation followed by more regulation as people push back against abuse, but that cycle has kept things in relative order. Companies have gotten very good at inserting themselves into government, directly and indirectly, to stand in the way and prevent the people from keeping them in line, but I don't think it's entirely hopeless yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Apple doesn't earn revenue by selling targeted ads"

Apple earns billions yearly from their search deal with Google. Apple earns billions from sales of targeted ads.

<comment><USER17> False.

Apple does not earn millions from the sales of targeted ads. Google does.

Apple earns millions from selling a link to Google.

They also want to provide their customers with access to the best search engine. I'm sure they'd prefer that not to come with ads, but that option is not for sale.

Claiming Apple earns the money from targeted ads is like saying Herman Miller or PG&E make money from targeted ads because they sell something to Google.

Obvious bad reasoning.

<comment><USER18> So if there wasn't ads on Google, Apple would totally still be earning billions on this deal? It's fairly obvious where the cash flows from.

<comment><USER17> The advertising is Google's business model - not Apple's.

Google could make its money a different way.

It's true that if they did so they might not be a monopolist.

Who knows what the bidding for the default search spot would look like in that case, but it is their choice.

<comment><USER18> Just because you buy something from someone outside your company does not mean you're not benefiting from their business model. Companies don't operate in a vacuum.

To put an extreme example, just because Apple pays Foxconn does not mean they don't benefit from what's effectively slave labour. They're not removed from the effects of their transaction. The principal works in reverse too.

<comment><USER17> Sure - but Apple doesn't control Google's business model any more than I do.

I dislike Google's business model but I use google search amongst others because they have a monopoly.

If a competitor arose that Apple's customers were happy with, I'm sure they'd prefer to choose a different company.

<comment><USER19> Apple knows exactly where their money is coming from and is complicit. They don't care, because Google has the best user experience, and their users that do care are power users that can opt-out. As much as Apple cares about privacy, nothing matches Google in search quality.

Steve Jobs once said in an interview with Wired:

> _When you 're young, you look at television and think, there's a conspiracy. > The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little > older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give > people exactly what they want._

Sadly, I think that quote applies a lot to Google as well. I think a lot of people, and at least anecdotally almost everyone I talk to, just don't/doesn't care about (or maybe understand the threat of) the collection that is happening. In the case of Google, they just want to find stuff on the internet without trying multiple times or adding additional keywords to their search.

<comment><USER17> Apple didn't design Google's business model.

<comment><USER20> They chose to associate themselves with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I am suspicious of the IR/depth capabilities that will allegedly be on the new Pixel 4 for this reason. There's not a huge user demand for depth data, but there are great reasons Google might want to collect and process that data from its users.

This, along with the previous changes to make the photo capability be a short video capture that gets sent to Google, make me very suspicious about what they are doing with all of that data.

Things like the facial action coding system for microexpression analysis have been around for decades for anyone with a college library card. It's just been very difficult for software to parse from video. I can definitely see the camera changes making this a lot easier.

</comment><comment><USER22> Can we please change the article title in a way that stops implying that Google does that without consent? You need to explicitly enable and train the feature when setting up the device.

<comment><USER23> You also explicitly enable and train FaceID on an iPhone, yet Apple does not collect or store any biometric data anywhere but on your phone.

The issue here is the _collection, storage, and potential use_ of the data by Google. Google should allow you to opt-in to them collecting that data anywhere off-device, but for now they do not.

<comment><USER24> Why should they? Don't use it if you don't like the terms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The good old opt out. In order for us to not hold your face we need to hold all sorts of information to identify you as the opter outer. Either way we have to know who you are.

</comment><comment><USER26> Anyone else find it somewhat ironically humorous that a big popup promoting Alexa comes up as you scroll down the page? [https://i.imgur.com/guKdbFA.png](https://i.imgur.com/guKdbFA.png)

</comment><comment><USER27> I visited the Amazon Go store on Market St. in SF. I really enjoyed the convenience of not waiting in line.

With that said, the Richard Stallman in me still regrets giving Amazon the opportunity to capture HD video of me in meatspace that is linked to my customer profile.

<comment><USER28> My local supermarket has recently rolled out scan-and-go (is that the proper name?), where you carry a scanner around the store with you and at the checkout just return it and pay. It's funny because at peak times there is a queue of people at the self-service checkouts (which were supposed to make shopping quicker), but with this you can walk straight past them and pay. I just pick something off the shelf (and weigh loose produce), scan it, and put it straight in my bag.

I'm surprised it has taken this long to roll out, as I remember in the mid 90s one supermarket trialed it, but then they abandoned it, and twenty years later it's back.

IMO this gives most of the benefits (admittedly theft may be easier, but it's no different than regular shopping), but non of the they-are-tracking- everything-I-look-at privacy issues.

<comment><USER20> > _" self-service checkouts (which were supposed to make shopping quicker),"_

I don't see how that could ever have been the case. Self-service replaces skilled labor (employee cashier) with unskilled labor (customer cashier.) Why would that ever be more efficient? When you throw in matters like needing to wait for an employee every time somebody buys liquor or cough syrup, it's clear self-service is doomed to be much slower.

It seems to me, self-service is actually designed to reduce labor costs for the store.

<comment><USER23> Self service checkout does not speed up the time it takes you to check out, but it can (and usually does IME) dramatically reduce the amount of time you wait in line to begin checking out.

<comment><USER20> When a store has a single full-service line staffed and four self-service lines open, the presence of those self-service lines certainly seems to improve the situation, vs a single full-service line. But what if it were instead compared to five full-service lines? The five full-service lines would doubtlessly be the fastest.

<comment><USER29> Sure, but the supermarket would have to pay to staff those other four lines, and they've decided they'd rather pay to maintain self-service machines instead.

<comment><USER20> I'd consider using those machines if they gave me a discount. But as it is, they're slower, exploit my labor, and are used to suppress the wages stores pay out to members of the community (making regional wealth extraction more efficient.) And worse than any of that, the machines are pedantic and finicky.

I see no conceivable upside. I totally get why companies are installing them; it's plain old greed. There is nothing complicated about that. But knowing that doesn't make me want to use them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > Apple... acknowledges that it shares some facial data with third-party > developers.

So much for apple keeping data private.

<comment><USER23> That's some inflammatory wording there - what Apple does is allow people to write apps that can use the front camera and a limited depth map - <USER2> asking the users permission. How else could a 3rd party app take selfies or use depth mapped filters (Snapchat anyone)?

This is completely different from what the article implies - that Apple shares FaceID enrollment data with anyone who asks.

If Apple restricted access to that hardware, the internet would flip out and cry foul. So they allow it, with a lot of limitations, and people still try to make an issue of it.. sigh....

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Honest question. Why do we always need to opt out of something that we may or may not have signed up? Shouldn't these organizations be asking us to opt in? I'm beginning to think more and more that we need a data privacy bill of rights.

[https://epic.org/privacy/white_house_consumer_privacy_.html](https://epic.org/privacy/white_house_consumer_privacy_.html) Note. I don't know how i feel about EPIC so buyer beware. Yet sounds interesting.

<comment><USER32> When you buy a Fitbit, do you want to opt-in to it checking your heart rate?

Serious question.

I don't know how you draw the line between what would have to be opt-in and what would have to be opt-out.

<comment><USER33> Not your parent commenter.

Yes, I want to opt-in explicitly, even for heart rate when I buy Fitbit. The default should be _do not track, do not do anything without explicit permission from user_. This includes even harmless features and core features of a product (like heart rate monitor for fitbit).

This wouldn't be the case if companies played nice. We are well past that now. We can't believe pretty much any company online, not to sell data, mess with their users' privacy etc.

Explicitly opting in is a minor inconvenience compared to destroying everyone's privacy.

<comment><USER34> Agreed! This is a quick checklist in the setup of the device. Worth the 30 seconds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I swear, we need many more people and orgs creating privacy-preserving products like Reflectacles: [https://www.reflectacles.com/](https://www.reflectacles.com/)

I'm not at all affiliated with Reflectacles, but when i first heard of them (on HN) I loved the idea! Where else beyond Reflectacles can i throw my money at in order to preserve my privacy?

<comment><USER36> Well, currently you're not throwing any money at Reflectacles because they aren't expected to ship until next year.

<comment><USER35> Acknowledged...

I meant: what other projects exist like Reflectacles that i could (either now or soon) happily pay money for (in order to help preserve privacy)?? For me, privacy is no longer a "nice to have" feature, but rather, a top-most feature for products/services that i pay for.

<comment><USER37> Librem 5

Your own server (physically in your home) running your own services. Enables you to access your data from your phone/laptop/desktop while retaining control.

<comment><USER35> Yep, librem 5 - and other similar products - is exactly what we need more of.

As far as my own server, yep, I'm already running services like nextcloud, etc. My challenge is more on the hardware and other non-digital products/services.

But thanks for bringing up librem 5 - kudos!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> What's really scary is that anyone can be collecting your info from publicly available sources. Tools like this make it really easy [https://github.com/Greenwolf/social_mapper](https://github.com/Greenwolf/social_mapper).

The age of privacy is over.

<comment><USER39> Yikes, my guess is that the linked project most likely isn't being used for good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> "now"?

What is Google photos? Isn't half the purpose of Google photos to be food for machine learning?

<comment><USER41> It is, I have been using it because it's very convenient to find specific photos if you have a huge archive. You can type basically any object, name or name + object and you'll get the relevant photos.

I am thinking about stopping it because I'm uncomfortable with Google having all that data. I'm going to look into any local and/or open source solutions in this space.

<comment><USER42> I wanted to show a friend a picture of our cat sitting on top of our TV (which is hanging on the wall). I spent a few minutes scrolling through my photos unable to find it. Ended up searching for "TV cat" and it came up right away. Wish I had started with that.

I just don't trust myself enough to not fuck up and lose all my photos if I self hosted something that was equal. I run a small home lab and I never store anything on it I cannot afford to lose.

<comment><USER36> I do such searches on my iPhone all the time. Especially cat photos. According to the Photos app, my recent searches include "cowboys," "april 2019," "colorado," "trains," "canyons," and "cat."

The iPhone was able to complete all of those searches without sending my data to Apple. When companies like Google say they have to have a copy of your pictures, they are lying.

<comment><USER43> That's only useful if all of the photos that I want to search are already on my iPhone. I can't search from a different device, and I can't search the hundreds of GB of photos from years ago because they don't fit.

> When companies like Google say they have to have a copy of your pictures, > they are lying.

Did Google actually say that? I think they just built a product with different trade-offs than Apple Photos.

<comment><USER36> If I need to search hundreds of GB of photos, I can with an iPhone, too.

The phone automatically offloads the full-resolution images to iCloud while retaining thumbnails and metadata. The photos on iCloud are encrypted so that even Apple can't see them.

Moving the goalposts doesn't change the fact that everything you want can be done on-device, with none of the privacy-destroying methods that Google has imposed on the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> > Welcome to the era of living publicly and naked. Enjoy.

You could always just...not use/buy their products

<comment><USER45> Without knowing the specifics about how this product works on the engineering side, do you think the following is true:

If I, random delivery man, walk up to a Nest user's home, and his camera scans my face to compare to the data stored for facial confirmation, that this information is not used/stored by the recognition software?

The system is always on/scanning. It's using my face somehow, and I'm not using or buying their product, I'm just a person going about my day.

<comment><USER46> Hey, now. Everyone knows that in a liberty-focused society -- especially one in which we finally get rid of all burdensome regulation which would keep the free enterprise system from ushering in a market-guided utopia -- you are perfectly free to tell anyone whose house you're going to that you will not go anywhere that has a doorbell camera.

Or to a business with a security camera.

And as for the delivery man angle... sure, that may seem like compulsion, but for one thing, the delivery man can always quit his job (especially in an optimally functioning market which will of course increase labor opportunities and will definitely not reduce wages for labor to its marginal production costs), plus eventually they'll have to quit because we're going to automate delivery anyway.

<comment><USER36> _you are perfectly free to tell anyone whose house you 're going to that you will not go anywhere that has a doorbell camera._

Doorbell cameras give perfectly adequate views of many places other than people's porches.

If Google wants to put a data-collecting robot on the street with a big sign reading "We're scanning your face to sell to advertisers!" there's nothing I can do about it, but at least it's honest.

Google using Nest cameras to scan the activities of people just walking down a nearby street is not cool.

<comment><USER45> I believe OP was being sarcastic. We're all on team "FOH Nest" in this thread so far.

<comment><USER46> Confirmed. I was hoping phrases like "market-guided utopia" would give it away, but I do realize Poe's law can make it hard.

<comment><USER36> That, and I was trying to read while on a train, so my attention wasn't fully on the task at hand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> > Face Match, introduced on the Google Nest Hub Max

If I remember correctly, Nest is a thermostat. Not sure what a camera is for in my thermostat, but so Google is indexing your face only if you bought a device of theirs with a camera and installed it in your home? Not that that makes it much better (imagine your Google Play Services suddenly figured this would be helpful to you and makes it opt-out), but the current title implies it indexes all faces on image search or maybe pictures on their file upload system or something.

<comment><USER48> The Nest Hub Max is not a thermostat. It's basically a Google Home with a big speaker, a camera for video chat and a screen.

In one comment you made an incorrect assumption about what the product is, what Google is doing, proposed an imaginary situation about them doing something even worse and then drew a wild inference based on the title of the article.

<comment><USER47> Goes to show how accurate the title is, which was my point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Well, I can type my daughters name into photos and find her photos, so yes I would agree.

</comment><comment><USER50> Funny that on cnet you get an opt out screen for their tracking that is totally unresponsive on my phone. And they worry about google.

</comment><comment><USER51> Reminds of FaceApp. Simple channel to collect Americans face pictures for later use in who knows what...

</comment><comment><USER52> I like how the pop up I got on this story offers to let me "Do More With Alexa" if I subscribe

</comment><comment><USER53> TL;DR: Can't opt out.

 _Can I opt out of all of these as well? Unfortunately, not very easily. With Google Photos, you can choose not to run the facial recognition tool on your own photos, but you can 't control what other people who may have uploaded photos of you decide to do.

Facebook just recently switched to an opt-in setting for allowing its software to suggest friends tag you in their photo posts, meaning the social network will no longer make such suggestions by default. But that doesn't mean Facebook isn't scanning or processing your image, only that it won't share that information with other users unless you choose to allow it._

Welcome to the era of living publicly and naked. Enjoy.

<comment><USER54> This is what pisses me off the most about companies like Facebook and Google.

I can spend all the energy I want to not use their products or limit the amount of data that I have, but the second someone else uses it (that I communicate with, has photos of me, etc) and gives them unlimited access they know more about me than I consent to.

<comment><USER55> How do you realistically expect to prevent a company (that uses facial recognition for perhaps useful features e.g. tagging) from scanning your face? For it to know that the pixels it sees is your face, it has to have a model of your face somewhere. I guess there is no good solution to this problem.

<comment><USER54> For me, I have less issue with the fact that the technology exists.

My biggest issue comes from where the processing is being done. If it was 100% on device I would be more ok with it. Same for processing photos and anything else that needs to be done with my data.

But most companies instead ship all of your (and other people's data you happen to have) to their servers.

<comment><USER56> That is not possible on every device given memory and battery restrictions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> This is a fucking cool feature. In house, opt-in. I love it.</comment>


My Father-In-Law Won't Become a Coder, No Matter What Economists Say - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/death-salesmen-why-my-father-in-law-wont-coder-matter-dustin-mckissen <comment><USER2> I don't think that companies are effective at guiding your career. I tell folks every time I can: take responsibility for your own career and development, or risk one day waking up, looking in the mirror at an obsolete person. That is a risk you cannot take.

If you are hoping that HR or "the company" will train you, you have abdicated the single most important determinant of your overall professional worth.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure why (maybe because there was so much competition on the labor side or they don't expect employees to stay around as long), but companies stopped training people. My industry has one major conference every year. They all talked about how 20 years ago the company would close down for a week and pay for everyone to go. In the past 10 years for me, about half the time I got paid my salary, the other half I took a vacation day. Never have they paid for my tickets. I do think this conference isn't as useful to the average worker as it was 20 years ago, but I think it's also an example of companies no longer investing in workers. Disney helped form CalArts, as another example.

There was another thread last week where someone brought up why certain domains in programming are considered "dark magic." A few examples would be databases or computer graphics. Many programmers only learn them superficially and consider them intimidating and scary. I feel like there's a stigma and just means there's domain knowledge you don't have. Honestly, computer programming is like that for the average person. I've seen a lot of examples, like insane Excel spreadsheets, where it is technically programming by someone who would be scared of "programming."

<comment><AUTHOR> I always got the impression (not backed by any verifiable numbers, mind you) that many tech companies cooled to training employees because of poaching and the relative frequency of changing jobs. If you devote company resources to training an employee, only to have that employee end up working for your competition, you just helped erode your business. Now, I think that's a short- sighted viewpoint, but it's one I've heard expressed before by CTOs.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, that's pretty much it, and it's not just tech companies. Prior to about 1990 or so, if you spent less than about five years at a company before moving on it was considered a black mark on your resume. If it was a regular pattern you were only going to get hired if your prospective employer couldn't find someone else.

So companies had some confidence they would get a return on their training investment. They couldn't force you to stay, but they knew you realized it was in your best interest to stick around for awhile.

That all changed. These days, particularly in tech, it's pretty normal for people to move on after 18 months or so. While it might make sense for the _industry_ to train people, for an individual company it's stupid to put effort into an employee's career development only to have him move on to a competitor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If they worked in sales in one industry, I suspect they'll just move on to sales in another industry.

People have been trying to automate sales forever. Catalogs, telephones, websites, etc. We still seem to have tons of sales people.

<comment><USER4> I agree. His skills as a salesman will never actually be obsolete, whereas if he becomes a coder he'll be on the skill upgrade treadmill like the rest of us.</comment></comment>


Parallelizing Enjarify in Go and Rust - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@robertgrosse/parallelizing-enjarify-in-go-and-rust-21055d64af7e <comment><AUTHOR> "Enjarify is a tool for translating Dalvik bytecode to equivalent Java bytecode. This allows Java analysis tools to analyze Android applications" ([https://github.com/google/enjarify](https://github.com/google/enjarify))</comment>


Flyby pills: No more Hangovers - <AUTHOR> https://www.flyby.co/ <comment><USER2> First, lets establish that drinking is bad for your health: [http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11660210](http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11660210)

Even moderate drinking can be addictive: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1869046](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1869046)

Hangovers is a way for our bodies say, 'okay buddy, that was a little too much. Please don't do it again'. Taking this pill is like telling your mom to shut up when she is giving you meaningful advice.

Instead of a pill to get rid of hangovers, how about a pill that puts you in a good mood (provigil/modvigil?).

<comment><USER3> But taking a pill that puts you in a good mood is like telling yourself that you need to be dependent on a drug to feel good.

Instead of drinking or taking a drug or seeking other external ways of feeling good, how about looking internally?

Things I usually do to make me feel amazing is exercise, meditate, play with my dog, read, write, have meaningful conversations with friends, watch GOT, make videos and more.</comment></comment>


Washington State University sues own spinoff over 'apple of the future' - <AUTHOR> https://www.geekwire.com/2018/cosmic-crisp-conflict-washington-state-university-sues-spinoff-company-dispute-apple-future/ <comment><AUTHOR> "The New York Times said it's considered "the most promising and important apple of the future." Washington farmers ordered 12 million Cosmic Crisp trees, with the first grocery store deliveries planned for 2019 — the biggest apple launch in history, according to The Guardian."

Surprised I missed reading about this before. I wonder how many university agriculture research projects turn into products.</comment>


MegaWords - The game we've been working on for the past 4 months - <AUTHOR> https://market.android.com/details?id=com.scroggler&hl=en <comment><AUTHOR> We built this game as a part-time project, to prove that it's not too hard for indie developers to make money on the Android Market.

Investment:

\- 100$ design (template)

\- about 200 hours of work for us, two developers

Since this is HN, some technical details:

Because of limitations on google's push notifications (C2DM), we rolled our own solution, with an xmpp server helping on that side. Every other web- service is built with plain PHP, residing on a different linode vps.</comment>


Chromea Coders Make $50,000 Social Game Engine Available Free - <AUTHOR> http://www.chromacoders.org/blog/?p=702

<comment><USER2> Where do $50,000 come from? Is that the cost spent on development or what they think it's worth? Code leaves a lot to be desired...

Whoever packaged this forgot to remove their Facebook API Secret code from the code before posting it, too...

</comment><comment><USER3> Check the title, it's Chroma, not Chromea.</comment>


Job title: Software Engineer - Mac OS - <AUTHOR> http://jobs.apple.com/index.ajs?BID=1&method=mExternal.showJob&RID=58106

<comment><USER2>
      We have something truly revolutionary and really exciting in progress

I'm guessing that it's not to bring back HyperCard...

<comment><USER3> Maybe they decided that NeXTSTEP was a bad idea, so they're going to switch back to A/UX.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which language for fast prototyping of hobby projects? - <AUTHOR> Tldr: What is the 2019 equivalent of visual Basic?
I have a bunch of side project ideas, (mostly one off. Mobile apps/webapps for my kids). I don't plan any kind of QA on these apps/websites. Just some quick and dirty stuff for personal use.
What programming language do you recommend? I read here multiple times that visual basic was good for these projects. How is the 2019 equivalent of it?
For what its worth, I am proficient in Java and Python. but these languages would not work unless I get all syntax correct or unless I import al libraries correctly etc. I am looking something that can closely mimic my thoughts at the cost of efficiency or maintainability. <comment><USER2> I agree with "whatever you already know". Other than that, personally, the fastest way from idea to prod of a web app is python with django.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just use what you're already proficient in.</comment>


Teacher: I see the difference in educational privilege every day - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/01/29/teacher-i-see-the-difference-in-educational-privilege-every-day-i-live-it-i-am-disgusted-by-it/

<comment><USER2> Kansas City school experiment: $2B over 10 years and blacks still didn't get their shit together.</comment>