notSupplied

Mobile browsers need to show a red banner above domains that are known to "significantly drain your battery". In the really bad cases even show an interstitial similar to the "This site is not secure" pages before people proceed to them.

This targets more of the performance side of problem than the tracking & privacy side, but it does assign cost and works as signaling mechanism back to publishers when they do something that harms the user experience.

Net neutrality is deeply entangled with freedom of speech issues. In fact one of the ISP's main arguments against it is that it violates their 1st amendment rights.

No one has the "right" to have their speech amplified by 3rd parties. However, I don't think Cloudflare is in the business of providing amplification, they are in the business of providing access, which I think is closer to censorship than restricting amplification.

Access means people who WANT this content can get it easily. If you're making it harder for people who voluntarily choose to view 8chan content, you're restricting access.

Amplification means getting content in front of new eyeballs that wouldn't have otherwise seen it. E.g. if Facebook determined that given this user's age, race, zip-code, and favorite TV shows they might be in interested in this racist-meme sharing group that one of their friends joined, and then surfaces that content, that's amplification.

"We know what's best for the user" is assuming you are even designing for the user in the first place.

The user is often not the customer, and design changes are ultimately here to serve the company, not the user:

- How can we increase number of ads users will tolerate? - How do we increase the amount of content users share? - How do we increase the number of likes/hearts they send?

I wouldn't be surprised if the lionshare of user backlash comes from decisions that weren't meant to serve the user in the first place.

It is also one of the most abused rules, often used to justify extremely sloppy "big picture thinking".

Breakup by region would not increase competition from the perspective of most consumers. They would have the same number of options.

ATT nor Verizon would be able to acquire Sprint the company. But if the company goes down without being acquired by T-Mobile, let's say their customers would migrate to the remaining 3 carriers proportionally existing market shares. This outcome would be pretty great for AT&T and Verizon and strictly increase the market concentration.

Approve or not approve, regulators are sometimes forced into a position of "picking winners" :-(

Another thing that needs thinking through is what happens to Sprint's spectrum if the company goes under. What kind of rules will be placed on that auction? Would ATT and Verizon be likely winners of such an auction?

T-Mobile moght, Sprint won’t. They are a distressed company and no amount “shoulds” will change their trajectory. The question is whether T-Mobile deserves to grab all of Sprints customers in a “migrate by default” scheme, or their gonna have to fight for those customers when Sprint inevitably goes down.

It is an incredibly bold move. Just as tech monopoly power comes under scrutiny--in Apple's case the AppStore--they wield said monopoly power...but for a seemingly good cause.

Quite the gambit.

Agreed.

What does high end even mean? A modern high rise with high end amenities like a roof top swimming pool and nice interior appliances and craftsmanship?

I visited a friend in Atlanta who lived in such a high rise at a fraction of the rent of what a similar unit would cost in SF. A vast majority of the price of housing is from the supply-demand of that particular piece of land. Sticking a pool and some quartz countertops in there doesn't suddently make it ONLY viable as a rich-man's home, incapable of satisfying any of the middle-class demand that is overflowing in the area.

Cheaper debt can be canceled out by higher prices. The fact that home values correlate so strongly with interest rates is very tellling. I think the net effect is simply higher asset prices and a greater portion of society's capital locked up in land. Easy money via debts is making every household more levered and more exposed without fundamentally improving access to housing.

Perhaps the problem is not China in particular, but the substitution of trusting brands for trusting reviews. Great Chinese brands exist, like Anker, but people still seem to go straight for that 5-star (probably fake) lorem-ipsum-esque brand at half the price.

Local representation is the crux of the issue here. Amazon is selling imported products straight from Chinese manufacturers. Without an American entity who has something to lose (or even go to jail) as a middle man there will never be safety. This obviously adds cost value chain, but ultimately a very real cost that needs to exist somewhere.

The claim is that Fb is most definitely not a monopoly on access to political speech. People are not stuck in an information vacuum the moment Facebook bans their favorite content. People who want to access Alex Jones can still do so easily.

What Facebook IS a monopoly of is getting your content to go viral. I argue this service is not speech. Which is why I oppose web hosts and cloudflare censoring content, but support social networks banning users. When web hosts do it, users who WANT that content can't get it anymore. When social networks ban people, they merely can't find new eyeballs that never specifically requested that content.

I don't see a huge difference between #1 and #2, so I'll address them together:

Home ownership as it stands today does not provide financial security / stability because of the degree of leverage required for most Americans to own a home. It is funny how much basic financial advice boils down to "diversify!" but then we turn around and define the "American Dream" as levering up to buy a single asset that is worth several multiples your networth.

Home prices are absolutely not hedged against market forces, and the double whammy of losing your job WHILE owning a house whose value is down significantly from your purchase price is substantially worse than losing your job while merely renting your home.

When your house value is underwater, your only play is to stay and wait it out until prices recover. But if you also get laid off and can't make the mortgage, you can't simply move to a smaller / cheaper home like you could had you been renting. You'd be forced to sell at the bottom, or try to rent out at currently depressed rental rates to make up for your mortgage that was locked in from when your house was worth much more.

To own a home is to be in a state of constant stress over the value of your home, and the more levered up you are, the worse this gets. This source of stress is why I believe NIMBYism is so prevalent.

The conspiracy doesn't add up in this particular example given that Screen-Time does nothing for their bottom line. Don't get me wrong, I would definitely perk up my ears if there is a story about how Apple competes with Spotify as there is a lot to gain/lose on that front. But Screen Time? What is there to "win"?

The Madoff scam has nothing to do with public companies being unable to turn a profit though.

Programmers need it the least. They are paid the highest and have the best alternatives employment options. I think we should be talking about the production artist and testers in a completely separate breath from the programmers. In fact, this could explain why people are arguing in circles here, they could be talking about separate groups in completely different situations as far as compensation & leverage goes!

Oh, was that a thing? For example was there a lot of outrage and pressure on payment processors to deplatform FetLife, or for Patreon to remove cam girls? I don't recall anything along those lines.

The litmus test I think we should use is "We should honor the intent of the user".

If a group of users explicitly want access to white nationalist content, they should be able to get it. So I would oppose blogs, webhosts, and cloudflare deplatforming anyone for any reason besides the outright illegal.

Facebook and Twitter are not just about serving content to those who have the intent to view it...infact the whole point of these social networks is that they expose content to NEW people who didn't initially have any intent to view. This is promotion, not access, and I have no problem with private entities choosing what they want to promote.

I would apply this same test to payments. Users who have explicit intent to financially contribute to objectionable content creators such as Alex Jones should still have a way of doing so. When Patreon, Matercard, etc etc deplatform him it closes the door to those who already have intent. Of course, I'm all for FB and Twitter shutting down the campaign so the word wouldn't spread nearly as far.

As a moderate liberal who finds sexual content over-censored, yet am disgusted by right-wing and anti-vax (anti-vax is often leftist!) conspiracy theorists, I think this test "honor their intent" test is a great way to keep the internet relatively sex positive, and extremist content relatively niche.

Exactly. Look at LA Teachers unions demanding cap on charter schools.

Charter school teachers are non-unionized, so this demand harms the pay of non-unionized "outsiders". If they succeed, they can parade the statistic that "Unionized teachers have gained income over non-unionized teachers thanks to the wonderful work of unions", when in fact what they have really done is transfer wealth from outsiders to insiders.

What really disappoints me is when unions make demands unrelated to pay or work conditions, but to restricting competition. See LA teachers union and their demands to cap charter schools. This is a direct demand to punish teachers who are not part of unions. This is a stark reminder that unions is a "fight coercion with more coercion" solution.

It is important to remember that economic coerciveness is a result of overwhelming scale and bargaining power of one party over another. Kickstarter is a 100-ish headcount company located in Brooklyn, NY. This is hardly a captive employee pool compared to say, factory workers in a small town whose entire economy is centered around that one factory.

If Kickstarter workers unionize, I don't not believe it will results in two sides with equal bargaining power, Kickstarter will be in a substantially weaker position. If Kickstarter refuses the offer, all function ceases. If the workers refuses the offer, they have the robust job market of Brooklyn NY to fall back on.

Hello fellow Doom Nightmare player. I think Stadia is not for folks like us who have tasted the fill experience on high end rigs.

It will instead, expand the audience to a lot of casuals who just want a little demon-slaying power-fantasy on a low difficulty. Nothing wrong with that, and it is a damn big addressable audience. Just like how mobile didn't "kill" any other platform, it just added a whole lot of candy crushers.

It seems likely that the dominance of American tech could be due to how they pay their engineers. It is not as clear that America dominates game development, nor that it is due to paying devs rockstar level compensation.

Yeah since this is Hacker News, we tend to focus on the software engineers, who have lots more negotiating leverage compared to say, a PFX artist.

In a way, software engineers are constantly automating their own jobs each time they improve code-reusability. The reason they haven't driven themselves out of work is because in software and especially in games, as soon as you automate something, your ambitions immediately expand to fill the void. I think the uniquely creative + technical nature of games means the industry will be more resistant to automation...however, it is also the source of crunch.

Yeah you can't have a conversation about unions without also mentioning the state of labor laws in the US, which are far behind those in of the EU.

The things that I believe in: minimum wage, overtime pay for anyone below a director-level salary, healthcare benefits if working more than X hours per week, are all accomplishable legislatively, as have been done in Europe. Doing so has the added benefit helping every industry at once, not just the ones organized enough to unionize.

There are also things I DON'T want: Unions fighting for job security of the lowest performers, making it nearly impossible to fire for incompetence or conduct layoff when the business struggling. I believe employment should compensate fairly...but fundamentally at-will. I'm also not a fan of the element of coercion in American unions--that if sufficient people unionize in your company, your employer will become union exclusive and you MUST join the union or leave your job.

Do you really believe this is the main motivation behind people who are blocking Spotify ads? That they are sophisticated tech users who wish to express their distaste for intrusive script-based ads? Or is it simply because they want to use Spotify ad free without paying (in other words, engage in piracy to save some money)?

I find this rationale, while likely true for many readers on Hacker News, unlikely to generalize to overall population fo Spotify ad blockers.

This isn't sufficient, as it highlights the sub-domain, which is the main trick scammers are using. For exmaple: http://google.com.gmail.inbox.totallynotgoogle.com

It's a question of whether "played with human level latency and precision" be a part of the rules of the game we are making the AI play.

I would say yes, because StarCraft was very clearly balanced for human players. We already saw some indication that when played with super-human micro, mass blink stalkers is a stronger strategy than when humans are in control. Without the active intervention of game balancing, RTS metas tend to devolve into "mass one or two units" which was what happenes to every Command & Conquer game (and why SC is a respected eSport while C&C is not).

I suspect this will happen when you have agents playing parameters that don't match what the game was balanced for. The strategic landscape will shrivel up and the game cease to captivate us.