> The problem is when a company or two dominates a single market.
It would also be bad if one company dominated multiple markets. (just a nit pick on your phrasing)
157 karma · joined February 7, 2020
It would also be bad if one company dominated multiple markets. (just a nit pick on your phrasing)
https://www.businessinsider.com/r-youtube-under-pressure-for...
The remaining 20% were apparently taken down due to nudity and other policy violations.
To be clear: I have no idea whether they're profitable or not. Just pointing out this article.
You've stated this as a fact, but it's not self-evident. There are obviously cases where some degree of "protectionism" makes sense. For example, you probably wouldn't want to let yourself get into a situation where another country supplies 100% of your food, if you could help it. As an extreme case, if you can produce all your food locally and it only makes your food 1% more expensive (than the tariff-less case), that's very likely a great trade-off.
Some degree of protectionism can make sense in certain circumstances. I'm not claiming it necessarily makes sense in this case (could very well be a terrible idea), but I think you'd need some evidence or reasoning behind the claim that it's definitely a bad thing for Europe.
If you have a use-case, or some ideas, there's Chrome bug page for "offline-only PWAs": https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=995236
They could just display the "please disconnect" error for a while, then sneakily stop checking after some date, collecting data every time you forget to disconnect. You'd need to check the code, or never forget to disconnect - the latter is probably a mistake waiting to happen.
Chrome bug page for "offline-only PWAs" if you want to star it: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=995236
The examples[0][1] of humiliation from the article, and the many examples from black folks in this thread don't paint a picture of an industry that is particularly appealing to a student thinking about their career options. That's if they've even considered the industry in the first place - the dearth of visible/powerful black faces in tech is very likely causing a "can't be what you can't see" effect in the minds of many young black kids.
The fact that the industry is currently doing some introspection is great, but real-world, noticeable progress on these issues will probably take decades.
[0] > That message hit particularly hard in 2015, when Givens and his co-founder Eric Williams, who is also Black, brought some of their employees to Churchill Downs Racetrack, home of the Kentucky Derby. They were at a VIP suite to celebrate the first big installation of one of their bartending machines. Guest after guest walked past the pair of executives to greet their White employee, offer their congratulations and ask how he got the idea for the product. The mood dimmed once the well-wishers realized their gaffes. “It went really quickly from ‘I have a drink in my hand, and I want to network’ to ‘I just want to get out of here,’” Givens recalls.
[1] > His first two fundraising rounds were challenging, according to Hayes and his apparent doppelgänger, Messick. The recurring confusion about who was CEO, and the embarrassment and apologies that followed, certainly didn’t help. “I usually remember the room and the look on the face,” Hayes says. “The energy would drop dramatically.”
Should have left it there, mate.
Many people who are members of a minority group feel pressure to do everything "perfectly" because people will naturally use them as a reference for the whole minority group. That's just how human brains are wired - we use patterns that we observe to predict the future. If we don't have much data, we form crude stereotypes.
It takes active effort and learning from people like you and I to help overcome those biases so that members of minority groups aren't exposed to this pressure and can feel safe in making mistakes (or at least, as safe as members of the majority feel).
In general, if you don't know what you're talking about (at least you were honest about it), it's best to do some more learning rather than to add noise to the thread. I'm not claiming that I know much here, but I know enough to know that a solution like "just be you" is not going to be helpful here.
Apparently 20% of Apple's revenue comes from their marketplaces (music, apps, etc), but in terms of profit it's probably significantly higher since the costs ought to be much lower than their hardware.
So it seems like there's a decent chance that at least third of their profit could get wiped out by PWAs in the long run. You'd think they'd be treating developers a little better.
I'm excited by what you're building here!
> kind of arrogant "make the world a better place" attitude
It's not "arrogant" to want to make the world a better place. If GP thinks they're lying, they's better described as "deceptive". If GP thinks they're naive, they should say that, and ideally provide some constructive feedback. This kind of knee-jerk comment (and the subsequent knee-jerk upvotes) is my least-favorite thing about HN.
> Apple allows these kinds of client apps — where you can't sign up, only sign in — for business services but not consumer products. That's why Basecamp, which companies typically pay for, is allowed on the App Store when Hey, which users pay for, isn't. Anyone who purchased Hey from elsewhere could access it on iOS as usual, the company said, but the app must have a way for users to sign up and pay through Apple's infrastructure.
I might have misunderstood your comment, but if you've just started learning to code, I'd probably start with simpler tutorials and projects - just to get a handle on the basics. Depending on your background it could take a good 6 months of daily practice to get comfortable with the basics. It took me and my friends at least that long - similar time frame to learning a spoken language like Japanese, say, to a basic level. Learning to code is absolutely worth it though - 6 months is a very cheap price in my opinion. I'd probably start with a tutorial like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPWkPOfnGsw Or the Khan Academy computer science course.
Internet speeds are still increasing exponentially, so hopefully the model size problems will become less of an issue - perhaps aided by some CDN-served (and thus cached across domains) "base" models that are fine-tuned with some parameters downloaded from the server. I think I could start playing with it seriously if I could get the model sizes under 30mb or so. In a few years (with increasing internet speeds) that might be 50mb. I think huggingface's distilled GPT-2 model is a couple of hundred megabytes, for reference, so we're certainly not going to be doing anything revolutionary in the browser, but I have a bunch of neat little ideas that I think would be useful.
For bringing the "big" stuff to the web we're probably stuck with APIs, like OpenAI's new GPT-3 offering. I think access to SOTA models on hard problems is going to be almost exclusively via APIs for the foreseeable future.
[0]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloud-computing-without-containe...
They seem to be doing fine:
~10.0M global visible accounts
~2.5M messages per day
~4.5M unbridged accounts
~500K unbridged messages per day
~2.1M rooms that Matrix.org participates in
~20,000 federated servers
~3000 msgs/s out, ~30 msgs/s in on Matrix.org
~400 projects building on Matrix
~70 companies building on Matrix
They're up to 20k visible servers from about 5.5k servers in September 2018, and if you look here: https://youtu.be/1TPICntbC5w?t=1692 you can see the growth curve looks pretty good.
> Also, universal standards are not necessarily a good thing. Decentralization with multiple competing tools and standards is good
Matrix explicitly doesn't try to be "the one true standard". That's the whole idea of their bridging model: https://youtu.be/1TPICntbC5w?t=296
There's potentially a misaligned-incentives problem with review sites which themselves do the reviews. The latest episode of the FYI podcast[0] goes through this problem with the founder of Capiche[1] (looks like a competitor of yours) and the founder was explaining how firms like Gartner basically have two sets of customers: The software buys and the software sellers. The software sellers can actually pay Gartner to get in front of an analyst and sell them on their product.
I don't know to what extent this makes Gartner's recommendations less useful, but it seems like it would make it hard for smaller companies to get on the radar. I think the fundamental problem is that the analysts are not actual users of the software.
So I like Capiche's direction, but I dislike the fact that they're a "closed" invite-only website.
[0] https://twitter.com/ARKInvest/status/1261421627717218305
That's a false dichotomy, I think. This issue is about neither of those things. It's about creating a system of incentives which we predict will create a better world in the long term.
An obviously-good incentive, so far as I can see, is "If you try to enslave a bunch of people, you'll have to pay for the negative externalities of that later".
One could perhaps argue that governments are too short-term oriented to care about the future costs of their actions (see climate change), but I'm hopeful that we're slowly moving towards a better world in this regard.
> blood feuds
Again, no one is arguing for that. We're trying to create policies which incentivize good behavior and disincentivize bad behavior in the world, in the long term. The straw person that you're fighting there has been defeated, but this has not (from my above comment):
> They're making the very reasonable claim that one group of people oppressed another and that this put the oppressed people at a significant disadvantage relative to those who benefited from the oppression, and thus that resources should be redistributed to balance that - a policy that makes perfect sense in terms of economic incentives.
Though I can't see that the compensation would ever have been significant enough to cover the costs of having been enslaved.
Most slaves were banned by law from learning to read or write, and that alone (I mean, even without being enslaved) would have been an _immense_ cost on any individual trying to make their way in the world at that time.
So I could go to a poor country and enslave a bunch of people and train them up and get them to write code for my companies for several generations (all completely against their will - through physical force), and that would be fine with you?
We're trying to construct good incentives for the world here. Your system of incentives doesn't sound great to me.
You have no idea what you're talking about. You ought to read about this before making such sweeping claims. The Dutch invaded islands, killed and tortured the locals into submission, razed the island and enslaved the women and children to work on spice plantations.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/11/26/165657050/no...
> Current ancestors of those working classes are not responsible for their ancestors oppressors.
No one is arguing that. They're making the very reasonable claim that one group of people oppressed another and that this put the oppressed people at a significant disadvantage relative to those who benefited from the oppression, and thus that resources should be redistributed to balance that - a policy that makes perfect sense in terms of economic incentives.
In any case, even if killing someone's family members just so happened to help increase their country's GDP in the long run, that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be compensated the killing of their family.
When thinking about what we "should" do here, we're really just thinking about what policies would create the most ideal incentives in service of creating a better world in the long run.
EDIT: To be clear, I'm not claiming anything about this Dutch case, I'm just playing along with your contrived example.
Of course, the fact that this "disaster" was directly caused by the government probably builds a stronger case for the government having to use some of its budget to help them out. That just seems like a good policy in terms of incentive design.
Edit: Maybe your argument is that Indonesia should have (in effect) sued the Netherlands if they wanted to get compensation for their citizens?
Regarding the "silent" down-weighting, unless I've misunderstood, I think that's a very bad idea. I think all moderation activity should be transparent to the users of the community.
> we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or its startups are involved
I think it's great that you have this as an explicit policy! Thanks for all your work moderating this community.
Aside: I found the Airbnb post interesting because I recently saw a map showing a massive rise in the number of apartments for rent as home owners move off Airbnb. I'm in the market for a new rental, and I totally didn't see this surge in supply and consequent price-drop coming. So this topic is interesting to me. But, more generally, the particularly "harsh" externalities of the pandemic on specific tech markets/startups is interesting to me, and I saw this Airbnb post as another data point to add to my mental models of how pandemics like this affect various markets. I think the fact that it got 15 points in 30 minutes is evidence that some non-trivial subset of other HN users felt this way too. In any case, transparent moderation would probably help the community to inform you of accidental bad moderation choices (not to say you should always go with the crowd's decisions, of course).