snird

Am I the only one who thinks this is to be expected?

Stealing good ideas is literally amazon biggest strategy in retail. They monitor best selling products, then launch their own brand and crash the competition.

Why anyone expected them to change strategy with business ideas? This strategy served them well.

(This comment grew so much, I actually posted it too https://snir.dev/blog/google-10-years-lead )

Initially, I thought this is because Google targets only big business customers, competing with Microsoft 365. Other product innovations do not scare them, they still offer a package with mail, video conferencing, docs, sheets, drive, etc' etc'. Great for big business collaboration tools. They just don't care for things like Notion or HEY. It's not their target and they don't make money from it.

But then I thought, this is an example targeted against Microsoft with a similar offering. What about Google Cloud? What about Android? They are both innovative. What happened there?

Then I saw it. Google consistently follows the market preventing its competitors from achieving market control. And in Google's case, "the market" is Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook.

We'll start with Microsoft since they were the first. And beating them down took place ~10 years ago, that's why it seems like the tech from back then never progressed much. Because the hit already strike.

Microsoft dominated the corporate world with its mail software Outlook, and with its Office suite, Word, Excel, etc'. Google is native to the web and they leveraged their position to slowly hit Microsoft in this spot. Gmail first, then Google Drive, and then Chrome to kill IE as a final strike. And it was successful.

Amazon got big into the tech business through AWS. Google went out to a fight through Google Cloud. Not only the offering is cheaper, it also provided technologies you can't explain any other way than just to hit AWS. Kubernetes as an open platform is against any business textbook to lock in customers. But it will allow for an easy way out of AWS in the long run, preferably to GCP but it can be any other cloud provider that provides Kubernetes service as well. It is strategically more of a hit to the front runner, Amazon, then a benefit to GCP.

These priorities order of first hit the front runner, then everything else is also seen with the Apple case. Android came after the iPhone. It has a much larger market share, and yet, it generates far less revenue to Google then the iPhone is to Apple. That's because the main goal is to prevent Apple from winning the market. And in that, it is successful.

Google Buzz. Ouch. Google Plus. Double ouch. Google spent so much effort into hitting Facebook as hard as they can. They were not successful here, but from the history of things it is obvious how Google try to hit Facebook. They did not try to create a new social platform, no. Otherwise they would come up with something that is not.. well, exactly like Facebook.

Google home initially released at 2016. Amazon Alexa in 2014.

I have so many more examples that comes to mind as I write, but the point is already clear.

On a final note, I'll say, Google is not only trying to bend down competitors. Google Glass is one new product market they tried to create. The self-driving cars initiative is another example the comes to mind. They do innovate.

They just have so much money, blocking out other big tech companies is a strategy they are not willing to give up. And when this is the strategy, well, Google sheets already took a huge chunk from Microsoft, what more does it need?

Young people use facebook to find apartments.

So if your apartments target young couples or room mates, facebook is your place. For families we have craiglist-like solutions.

I can say that people in Israel prefer facebook groups for many reasons:

1. It allows for "team search". My friends knew I'm looking, so they tagged me in relevant posts they saw. Can't do it anywhere else (including marketplace by facebook themselves)

2. It allows for group communication with the publisher of the post. One asks - everybody sees.

3. It gives a sense of power to those who seek to rent. Many posts with high prices have comments like "You are crazy", "You are a pig", "whoever pays this much is as sucker". It almost warms the heart, we fight the greedy landlords. It almost make it fun, like a witch hunt.

I was a CTO of a company that did scraping to gather data and sell the analysis. We did this for sellers on Amazon.

In short about legality - it depends on the country. But most will define user content as owned by the user, not the platform, therefore legal to scrape and use, as the user intents for the data to be public.

But sites will fight you on this. Amazon specifically give up a really good fight.

Ofcourse, this talks about user content in an "open" platform. If the content is owned by a business that has no intentions for it to be open for everyone in every medium, its probably illegal.

In regard to being a dick move, it depends. If someone posted an ad in facebook, he intended for it to be seen. He doesn't care how. I just tunnel it to myself in easier way for me to consume.

It's probably not what you meant, but I recently created a weekend project bot that scans facebook for apartments rental ads. Thanks to this bot, I landed an opportunity I wouldn't have catch otherwise, saving me 6,000$ a year. Assuming I will hold my new apartment for 3 years, this is a net savings of 18,000$. I haven't sold anything, but yet I created something that "generated money" for me.

My code is open source by the way, and I wrote about it here: https://snir.dev/blog/apartments-bot/

Uber didn't almost killed you, an irresponsible driver did. It is very dangerous to strip all responsibility from the actors themselves, even though Hacker News likes to hate Uber and usually upvotes this kind of stories.

In my opinion, this is a bad practice. 1. It prevents discussion. Whomever wrote the "TODO" solemnly decides what is there "TODO", without the ability to discuss options. 2. It does not allow prioritization of tasks easily. 3. You need yet another tool to discover issues. 4. It prevents ownership of an issue.

All those issues have already been solved with a simple ticket system (github issues, JIRA tickets etc'). Why reinvent the wheel? What is the benefit here?

And they should be able to do so.

We are free people (I hope). If one decide to buy tobacco, it's his own responsibility, and he should have the freedom to do so.

This seems to defeat the idea of flexbox. Grid systems were needed for old CSS, but with the powers of flexbox, we better off using it directly then using it with a grid system, as the grid system will be limiting and will not give any significant comfort.

But what if I want a messaging service to specifically be disconnected with other services?

By your offer, not only that you are forcing me to connect with everyone, you take an essential part of my privacy. Your suggestion is anti-freedom by its core.

Everything you said is true, but I don't think the argument here is about the past, but rather about the future.

MongoDB was great and innovative compared to other solutions when it started, but now, it's dragged behind while other solutions are much better.

I think you might be mistaken in the assumption that remote working leads to less productivity than co-located.

This is purely up to the team. Sometimes being co-located leads to over meeting and lots of time spent on disruptions and chats, while remote working lead you to be more professional and talk to your co-workers only when necessary for the job.

I'm using Ghostery as a privacy and ad-blocking extension. Does anyone have data on the impact Ghostery might have on the browser memory usage?

There is no "free". someone is paying for this, and this someone is you through taxes, but most of it is the companies taxes in Spain.

This makes small businesses lives in Spain hard, and make big corporates think twice before getting real big centers in Spain.

This lack of competition is the reason you need to consider moving to US to have a good chance of a better life.

yep, but those will crush financially at the end. They will have to improve. Governments not, they'll just take more taxes.

I suggest the opposite.

The reason you can't work just 3 hours a day is that you need to make money for other people as well. Too many governmental jobs that has really no real value, but exist due to socialistic idea, governments want to give work to people for votes and for statistics.

And you must pay for those jobs yourself, be it through direct taxes or by the fact that products you buy cost more, because companies are obliged by regulations to hire someone to do something that they have to pay for.

Why is it for the government to decide for the people how much time to work? where is the individual freedom of choice?

Breaking up a company is a violent action. No one forced you to use their service, and they do not use violence or any kind of illegal actions to kill those who try to compete with them. Google simply are the biggest due to being the best. It's that simple. If you'll break up everyone who is too good, then what is the society we are walking toward in this situation?

The concept looks a lot like Yahoo! aviate launcher.

The point is, that requiring an add-on, either this one or Hacker News Enhancement Suite is not the right solution. it's too easy to implement to keep the comments system here as-is.

Well, that's straight up fascism. You have your opinion and you think it's right to enforce your opinion by force on others. I shouldn't fear for my freedom, that's not a good functional society.

"as they should be able to"? That's it? we are living in a world where privacy and freedom aren't ours to demand? Governments "should be able" to kill off our freedom? I haven't noticed we've gone that far away.

What about the Servo project updates? I really like those, to watch it's progress.

you are right, I haven't stated my point correctly.

The missing point is that of the market demand. DRM is out there, it's too late. It will be used anyway, with flash\silverlight or what have you.

So, this demand should be answered, using flash is no overhead for the site, but rather a bad thing for the end user. not implementing DRM isn't hurting the sites wants it, at that point, it only hurts the end users. so implementing it is the right decision.

Because it's a need of the market, using third-party plugin is no harder, maybe even easier to implement. So it's not an overhead for the site implementing it.

But rather it's an overhead for the user. you'll have to install a third-party plugin on your computer. Making it to your job now to make sure this plugin is not security vulnerable, that it is updated etc' etc'. And, it's probably closed. the web is open.

Technology should never force it's users (the sites creators) to use one technology or another. Not implementing DRM is idiotic for couple of reasons:

1. The decision of whether or not to use DRM should be of the site creators. That's as "free" as it gets. forcing them otherwise by not letting them the option is bad.

2. Even without implementing it, DRM is available through flash or silverlight or any other third party plugin. The only result not implementing DRM gets is that of hurting the HTML5 video component.

Hi yegg, I want to express one wish I would like to see Duck Duck G0 maybe considering: I use duck duck go for its privacy, but it seems like duck duck go assumes I want absolute anonymity which is not necessarily right. I just want my own controlled privacy, and I want a good search engine that know me a bit. and I wish to give some of my privacy for that. what do I mean? if there will be an option to tell duck duck go what "categories" I'm interested in, so that it will use this data to give me better results I would love to do that. say, I can mark 'technology' and 'science' under my subject of interest and 'celebrity' and 'sports' under my subjects of disinterest.

Do you think something like that might be possible someday or it completely goes against your philosophy?

Here is the pen with the updated syntax for CSS variables, for those who run Firefox aurora (31) where it is updated and enabled by default: http://codepen.io/snirda/pen/vnDkb

They are comparing IE to other real modern browsers - it's rather surprising to see. Like saying "The competitors are far ahead, here what they already do and we don't and out of that what we plan to do next and what not.".