skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well just think about how much it would cost you to host, encode in many many formats, billions of hours of video, consuming exabytes of storage, providing a fully reliable service for 15 years.

Might also be worth considering why there are effectively zero competitors.
> What you need is discipline.

Part of discipline is knowing which contexts work for you. For some this is mindset, while for others it’s a virtual or physical environment. To each his own.
How does astronomy factor into it?
> I know that there's a quota of at least one "Google bad" article at the top of Hacker News each day, and that's fine and all, but I feel like the bar for them is getting lower.

Feel free to make a better one, I'll upvote that as well ;-)
> Fielding's thesis described an abstract architecture that characterizes the modern web, where complex experiences (websites) can be delivered using standard, open technologies (HTML/CSS/JS)

Uh, we already had HTTP for delivering html/js before Fielding’s paper on REST.
The US has had a huge immigration program (although it has waxed and waned) over many years because settling vast tracts of land requires a lot of human labor. Same story in Australia.
There is really no reason to get mad at that, if they want it in the final history, you can always edit it out with rebase when merging on stable.

But I don't see how it hurts.
It is more dangerous to leave Amazon and Facebook in their current state as Google but yeah all of them could be split into smaller companies. Also Apple also.
Amiga Halfbrite Mode
I'd say the article explores the issue without taking a hard stance on it. It doesn't take the answer as a given; as in a premise.
I've heard the line they're right on the edge of profitability but I've never gotten any real confirmation. I was younger when I heard that and I always though youtube was just a cash cow. But think of how much servers (huge streaming metrics for each person watch + encoding servers), bandwidth and CDN must cost them. Ever with their own cloud, that has got to be huge. I worked at Amazon Instant Video and our CDN bills made my eyeballs pop out like I was a loony toon character. Traditionally they've only made money video advertising but I'm just not sure thats a great business model for video anymore. And, also throw in live streaming that people have been using, especially during covid, which is also free, and you have even more load they pay for free.

An idea I always had was embedding a big zip or something into the mp4 format and uploading it for storage. Would they save the original files for download or would they be encoded to a lower bit rate and make them unusual. Maybe data encoded in an audio track would be better? Sounds like more than a weekend of experimenting but would be a cool little project.
Wouldn't this be more in favour of breaking up Google? If YouTube is unprofitable, then Google is essentially dumping this service. It is harming competitors who do not have deep pockets of Google to bankroll their service. Breaking up YouTube means there would be a more level playground.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Child_Nation is what they did with benevolence in mind. When you strip that veneer of benevolence away …

The documentary is worth watching, although not the easiest one to watch.
Thanks for responding.
I love Bulma. It's the simplest and most intuitive CSS library I've ever used.
It's all an illusion. Software kinda isn't lasting, some things merely have competence behind them

Look at the GNU coreutils, things you probably think shouldn't have changed in a while: https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/tree/master/src

There's actually frequent edits. Legendary disk destroyer was just updated last month. The difference is the competence
Okay so when I meant Google is "successful" was that they successfully beat MS in smartphone race and became a dominant player in the industry. They are definitely not even close to being a proper industry stalwart like Microsoft is, and it's quite possible they won't even survive the next decade if Government starts regulating them.
I imagine android would probably survive via search engine placement fees similar to safari / iOS / firefox.
> YouTube wasn’t profitable for a while. Even if it is now, it is probably barely so.

First search result...

"YouTube generated nearly $5 billion in ad revenue in the last three months, Google revealed today as part of parent company Alphabet’s fourth quarter earnings report."

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...
> The word "monopoly" doesn't appear once in the whole article

„For many years, the astonishing torrent of money thrown off by Google’s Web-search monopoly [...]“
I think that biochar is interesting but make no mistake, the astronomy side is pure pseudo-science at the same level as homeopathy.
The Eye of the Storm
Is anyone else tired of seeing the same hate Facebook, Zoom and Google narratives every single day.

So, we want to break up Google because it has gotten too big. What about Luxottica? It has over 80% market share on eyewear brands. What about Pearson? It has over 60% market share on testing market? What about Paypal? It has over 80% market share on online payments. What about Aetna (merged with Humana) on health care market? List goes on..
> the unelected Page and Brin having all that power with no recourse for the market

The effective market when it comes to voting shares consists of hedge fund managers like Carl Icahn and Bill Ackman.

Nobody else is organized enough to beat the activist investors and they do all sorts of terrible things with that kind of power.
I agree - There is no way that Youtube could compete without access to google resources. If they had to pay for their own bandwidth, hosting, transcoding, etc while surviving off adsense revenue (paying same google "commission" as everyone else), they would quickly drive themselves into bancruptcy simply due to their popularity!

They are stifling competition because they have unlimited funds to throw at anything they want. They should definitely be split up.
Wow, I can't believe how smooth that is.

I've got to say, the icon for .txt files brought on some very specific hit of nostalgia.
Screw actual prices! Charge more for bad things.

If there are extra taxes on tobacco and alcohol, there can damn sure be extra taxes on junk mail. Let's start at 5000% and adjust from there.

Or, put some sort of escrow/credit/thing in the opt-out mechanism. Where the sender has to swear on a stack of dollars that I actually want this. And if I do actually want this, cool, I keep receiving it, they keep their money. But if I opt out, then the sender forfeits their bet, and next time it's more expensive for them. This would incentivize senders to make their mailings carefully chosen or highly valuable (think bribes to the recipient), or both.

Really, what I want is a postal equivalent of that "button that shocks the shit out of someone on the internet". I would just lean a brick on the button until the junkmailers have smoke coming out their ears.
The same weakness that resulted in lack of backups may be related to how the intruders were able to get onto the machines in the first place.
Funnily it doesn't actually say where the broken-off Search is supposed to go. Along with the ads division? Doesn't really feel in line with the break up idea...

Disconnected from the other stuff it subsidizes, what is the massively profitable search business actually supposed to use that money for? Massive dividends? Diversifying into anything just gets them into the same kind of problem immediately, no?

It sort of feels like the main benefit here would be from the proposed privacy law vs. breaking up Google.
Yeah, let's break up Google! I've been depending on their software for almost 15 years now, I use something they made practically every hour that I'm awake, and never paid a cent for it! I'm really getting a raw deal here!
It was meant ironically but not the part of the US’s benefit from the brain drain. There’s a lot of hysteresis in the system but the current draconian rules will probably drive a lot of research elsewhere, especially when you can live in a wealthy country and not have to put up with the hassles of living in the US.

My guess for the big beneficiaries are Canada (right next to the US, with both Vancouver and Toronto benefiting) and Germany, despite the lack of English.
I think we can all agree that software should be designed to last :)

My experience tells me that when this fails to happen its usually not explicitly due to too many dependencies. Rather it is because the developers have a poor/partial understanding of the problem domain.

External libraries help this problem a bit because it allows developers to offload tasks onto other more experienced developers. They can (and occasionally will) misuse those solutions, but that is not the dependencies faults. On the contrary skilled developers will produce quality solutions with or without dependencies.

The signal seen (poor software has many dependencies) does not mean that software with dependencies are poor. It means instead that developers who have a poor domain understanding but good business skills are disproportionately successful compared to their peers that have good domain understanding but poor business skills.

Make of that what you will :)
we should connect x) I'm also in Taiwan
Hospital deaths are down to their lowest ever, yet cases are high.

Could just be that we are testing whereas previously we were not. And the past case volume was much higher, we just didn’t capture an accurate data point.

Doesn’t help that most States are changing how they log data.

Tldr daily cases isn’t necessarily representative of actual covid infection rate
What fishing expeditions are you talking about? Every major physics construction project to date has been justified by at least one, maybe more specific expected result that is theoretically predicted. There are a handful of we don't know things going on, like keeping a staff on hand for Voyager probes, but the main project was a smashing success.
"[In Q3 2018] YouTube removed about 1.67 million channels and all of the 50.2 million videos that were available from them. Nearly 80% of the channel takedowns related to spam uploads, YouTube said."

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.
How do you do that? i'd like to try, but don't feel i can be truly anonymous.
Sell expensive top-class products

Yes, I'm guessing margin is everything for Apple. If they can't make 30-40% on a product then they will leave it for someone else.
> There would be no A bomb without this, for example, nor US moon missions.
These were mostly German weapons scientists brought to the US near the end of WWII. The alternative was being sent to Russia. Russia was brutal to PoW's so given the chance everybody tried to surrender to US and European troops. Not really regular brain drain that time.

Brain drain always happens from poor to rich countries. Those able to move to greener pastures will, I don't blame them. This is even happening within the US in Illinois. High taxes and precarious government have led to massive migration away from the state. Highest percent of college students going out of state, and average person moving to Illinois makes nearly $25,000 less than average person leaving.

You can't blame people from wanting a better life for their family. In the end it does concentrate wealth, but maybe it will eventually just concentrate the population? This seems to be happening in China, with massive migration to megacities. Rich or poor, the countryside is being abandoned, so there's not many being hurt by the migration, just empty buildings
Aetna shouldn’t be broken up - it should be nationalised!
I agree, a lot of very large companies should be broken up.

At the same time, why can't someone's blog focus on one? Why can't a given company be held under the spotlight for something? Being asked to criticise all of them, or none of them seems like an unfair criticism. This post being about google doesn't preclude another one being written about all companies, or Facebook, or amazon, etc etc. Getting the ball rolling on even one of these companies would be a good start, so I don't see the harm in people writing posts focusing on one.

> and why do we see these posts frequently making it to top ten of hacker news?

Presumably because a lot of people agree with the proposition?
I think that "occupant" still counts as addressed if it also has a street address etc.. By unaddressed I mean that there is no address at all, they are just delivered to every mailbox in a specific area (except for "no ads" boxes).
"The word 'monopoly' doesn't appear once in the whole article"

You're correct on that! It appears three times.
What's in the New iOS 14
Sure, but how much did that $5B cost?
If your router needs configuring before it can access the Internet, then it can’t use certificates that require the internet to generate or validate.

Or if you change ISP and need to change your router internet connection configuration, your router cannot be accessed.
You mean, I didn't include it as prior art for Promnesia or Grasp project?

For Promnesia, the goals of Roam and Promnesia are pretty different at the moment (although Roam data can be used with Promnesia, as I mentioned). In addition, I can't personally bet on a closed source tool.

For Grasp, simply because Roam wasn't known (or possibly didn't even exist!) when I wrote it. But even now that I tried Roam now, I don't think I can go back from using plaintext files, it's just so much snappier and more hackable.

Thanks, I used archivebox! Still need to set up a proper automatic archiving, and integration Promnesia with personal web archives is also in my plans!
What's wrong with the kernel supporting a wide variety of hardware?

I think you misunderstood my reply. I'm not saying the kernel should drop support, I'm merely replying to the 'doesn't bother anyone' with a practical example of why it might bother someone on a particular level.
I used to joke that Windows 95 hated me more than I hated it, since it managed to "uninstall itself" within a couple of weeks. (For some reason, there was massive data corruption.) The odd part is that the computer was perfectly reliable under DOS/Windows 3.1, Linux, and OS/2.

The quality of drivers could be a serious problem in the Windows 95 era. If it was a driver shipped with Windows, everything seemed to work fine. If the driver was provided by the vendor, the reliability was so inconsistent that I would try to find a compatible driver that shipped with Windows even if it meant missing out on some features.
Tips to Concentrate Better at Work
If you are concerned about maintaining access to the international post system for poor people, how is this change going to help?

Surely it does the opposite - someone living in the poorest country in world would have to pay rich-European country rates to access their postage system.

Btw. I strongly suspect that the international rules on charging for postage were chosen for simplicity of implementation and not out of a sense of altruism for people in poor countries.
Break Google's ad business and their other products. Imo, that is the way to go.
My blog is literally the link I posted ;)

Perhaps this page https://beepb00p.xyz/blog-graph.html would be a good start if you want to explore
Shame we're limited to 16 colors...miss those title bar gradients :D

Was this the pinnacle of UI design, or is nostalgia clouding our judgment?
That doesn't demonstrate that it turned a profit though. Video streaming is costly and they pay over 50% of that to creators.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21121370/youtube-advertisi...
Why Japan Has Blue Traffic Lights Instead of Green
Still the case.

The features is no used enought, people don't know about it, and because of that, there is no pressure to improve it.

E.G: the "forget this site" button will remove all cookies, local storage, cache, etc. for one site. Very handy, because I don't want to bust my entire cache every time. But it will remove them for all containers, which sometimes is not what you need.
If you only have one device (all in one AP/Router/Switch), very. If you have a firewall in front of the APs, extremely easy. You can take a few minutes to check what DNS entries and IPs it's talking to and block that.
Because this is HackerNews and we are more affected by Google than those other companies.
Whoa! This is awesome. Made me Google again (hadn't since my first trip to Japan) for any melodies I could find as a download to use as a ringtone/text tone (not that my phone is ever off vibrate mode).

Thanks!
Like others have said, their storage needs are staggering. I would not be surprised to find that YT's storage is bigger than the entirety of Google's web archive, which is mostly text. Possibly much bigger.

If YT were not part of Google, they would still need Google-scale infra in order to handle the insane number of pixels they're streaming every second of every day.
Facebook doesn't sell that data to anyone though, they just use it to target ads. Anyone can buy that other info from Infogroup.
There are VLANs, but I don't use them. I found it's easier to use vpncloud (https://vpncloud.ddswd.de), that way I can use the same setup for development/staging/production, and it doesn't matter if the specific provider used supports VPCs/VLANs.

Also, with vpncloud I know that my data gets encrypted and is private — not necessarily the case with various VLAN setups.
Just because we don't have a good framework for it now, doesn't mean we shouldn't look at creating one.

For instance, we could have companies get into "pre-monopoly" reviews. What would activate such reviews? Stuff like buying out competitors for more than $50 million let's say (the number can be decided from some analyses of harmful mergers), aggressively invading other markets with money from their core business, passing over 40% market share in its core market, exclusive deals with suppliers/clients, competing against your own clients on "platforms," arbitrary bans of clients from said platforms, etc.

At the very least, I think attempting to stop/break-up/sue a company for "monopoly" only when it goes over 90% market share is WAY too late in the process and is too short-sighted. By that point whatever measure is taken is too disruptive on the whole while also being too ineffective as a punishment/deterrent for whatever the company did. Not to mention that most of the damage might have already done since a decade prior to that point against customers, smaller competitors, etc. It's not a very useful system at all. It needs to be changed.

For all the hype about AI that these companies create, and then that AI gets used to create automatic killer robots, arrests and even convictions, maybe it's also time to turn that against them and use all of the above factors and more to create an "AI solution" that will identify when a company is starting to become a "risk" of turning into a monopoly, and try to restrict/prevent that from happening before it's too late.

For instance, I've noticed a lot of anti-GDPR criticism here saying stuff like "but now GDPR will only hurt the new guys, as Google/FB have already gotten all the data on everyone and can use it for their algorithms, etc".

Now, wouldn't it be nice if we could've prevented that from happening before it was too late, because we had an "early monopoly alert" system in place go off a decade earlier?
If the ball gets rolling with breaking up one of these companies and the rest follow, isn't that a good outcome? Arguing for all-or-nothing feels like letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

For what it's worth I do think those ones should be broken up as well, no reason to confine our attention just to popular tech companies.
> I strongly suspect that YouTube is not profitable, or is just barely profitable

Why suspect when you can Google...

"On an annual basis, Google says YouTube generated $15 billion last year and contributed roughly 10 percent to all Google revenue. Those figures make YouTube’s ad business nearly one fifth the size of Facebook’s, and more than six times larger than all of Amazon-owned Twitch."

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...
They're also quite happy to discriminate based on the genetic relationship: My parents let my brother and me live in their house, rent-free, and we were even fed! They did not do that for anyone else, even though nobody chooses their parents, so it is discriminatory.
> Nobody else is organized enough to beat the activist investors

I mean, except each other, and I think I'm OK with that? I'm not saying this is a whole solution, but making Zuck and co accountable to investors is an _excellent_ start. We got the Magna Carta as a result of rich people competing with other rich people.
All these companies obtained this market share by purchasing competitors or integrating surrounding businesses. You're right though, they're all problems and shouldn't have been allowed to acquire so casually to their current market positions.

That being said, Google gets primary access to your personal data and habits, and then also gets to sell advertising based on that data. That's certainly more unseemly than having too few choices for eyewear, don't you think?
And what about the costs? I don't know how to find that for youtube, but here's netflix:

> Netflix operating expenses for the quarter ending March 31, 2020 were $4.809B, a 18.4% increase year-over-year.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NFLX/netflix/opera...

They're obviously not comparable directly like this, but just based on internet bandwidth usage, they're probably in the same ballpark, but netflix has a far, far easier technical problem. They have a relatively small library that can probably be cached easily. Imagine the infrastructure that is behind a youtube CDN.
90 days certs that needs renew based on external service API that can change says No.

Software in a hardware that is designed to do certain job should indeed last. Like Telecom towers should work fine "forever".

But software as in APIs and services that constantly has to evolve and be expanded. Yeah that is a harder sell.

We live in crypto world where each advancement in cputing or ways to solve could render algorithms "bad" means we have to update and adapt.
Also funded by all the phone manufacturers who have a vested interest in seeing it not die (like the Linux kernel)
> I have a big problem with him and the unelected Page and Brin having all that power with no recourse for the market.

I just don't get that mindset. Private-company Google said "hey, we're down to be public, but Larry and Sergey will always control the company... cool?" And the market said: "yeah whatever give us those shares".

It's not like anyone was holding a gun up to anyone's head, forcing them to buy GOOG. They went into it knowing that their shares' votes would be useless.

Page and Brin are elected: the shareholders have validated their control every day since Google went public; anyone who owns GOOG has either been ok with that arrangement, or foolish to hold those shares.
But doubleclicking a number to remove knowns doesn't work? Or didn't it work in the 95 version?
Some compounds from Neem leaves extract exhibit binding affinity against COVID19
> China’s new Communist rulers ordered thousands of soldiers to settle in Xinjiang, pushing the Han population from 6.7% that year to more than 40% by 1980. The move sowed anxiety about Chinese migration that persists to this day.

So, xenophobia?
This is not true. It’s because they and their employees are ideological and believe in their own moral superiority. The media in general is not leaning strongly to the left as a business decision. They are run by people that are intolerant ideologues who morally can’t allow counter arguments and opinions to be heard or seen.