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It's such a perfect representation of the coder trope of loudly proclaiming that this new thing I found makes everything else obsolete. Eight years later, MVC is still miraculously not dead!

But that's not really where the data benefits them. The power is in aggregate data: Product sales history, trends, etc.. The things you can do with that kind data, in that volume, across nearly endless markets and verticals... Throw in an army of third party sellers paying you while they do your research and power your analytics for you for free: The real mystery is that they're not eating the internet retail industry faster.

If the former, the injection vulnerability would be in the script talking to the server/database via CGI, rather than in CGI itself.

If the latter I don't remember any major unpatched vulnerabilities in CGI.pm, but it was epically inefficient.

That kind of tactic used to solely be the domain of companies with no faith on their product. They expected low retention so it made sense to add an extra step where they could hard sell, knowing that a reliable percentage of the population has a hard time saying no to a human.

But I like the author's point: It's cool that people still care so much about books in the digital age.

Long live books, in any increment.

The post was well written and covered what I think are the important points.

There's only one thing I think deserves more attention than she gave it: The economics. The US' place in the tech world is largely a result of limited barriers to innovation in tech.

The kinds of "duties" proposed by this bill would be bad for big tech (a huge part of the economy) but worse than that they would be prohibitive for new innovators.

New social media services which attempt to serve the increasing demographic of people disillusioned with big tech aren't even going to try to get into a market with draconian requirements amd potential legal obligations like those proposed (or those that logically follow from the proposals).

Which means those services will be built elsewhere or not at all.

And of course there are the innovations we haven't imagined yet which won't be allowed to happen.

The problem here is that government doesn't understand technology well enough.

Which makes sense, the majority of people don't. Your post is an example, no disrespect meant.

You can't have transparency in search. It's an arms race between search engines and black hat SEO gaming. It's been that way for decades, likely always will be. That's why the algos absolutely have to be secret, and there has to be no barrier to rapid iteration and innovation. The minute that changes, black hat wins and search goes back to looking like Altavista before it died. In that scenario everyone loses.

It's also imperative that there's a financial incentive to continue to innovate and stay (sort of) ahead in the arms race. It's easy to imagine that a government (or a nonprofit) could run search well, but that's only without an understanding of the scope and depth of the technology involved.

I'm not sure what the best solution is, but there's no question transparency isn't it.

I do, by the way, appreciate your idea of mandating more reasonable due process. However I'd add that if your business relies on search, you're gambling. It's often a smart gamble, for as long as it lasts organic rankings are free money, but be honest with yourself about it.

There's no evidence that hypnosis is reliable, true.

But "widespread perversion against children" as we now know, is not just probable, it's reality.

28% of children according to one study. No one really knows though, since it's of course one of the most underreported crimes.

https://victimsofcrime.org/media/reporting-on-child-sexual-a...

It only hurts them if there is enough of it that it pushes advertisers elsewhere, which is why so much of it is caught (in which case no one pays for it).

If you're willing to root your device, you can have the best of both the functionality and privacy worlds.

That only applies to motivated and reasonably tech savvy users of course, out of the box iOS is still the better privacy option.

With all of the carefully crafted marketing aimed at bypassing the forebrain and making people feel as though corporations care, it doesn't hurt to keep the fact that they don't at the forefront of the conversation.

It's a small demographic, much of which is reaching retirement age. A lot of the rest dropped out of the corporate employment world along the way to found their own companies.

I wouldn't be surprised if those numbers change as time passes and there are more available people with that much experience.

And that's just the easiest example. Past revolutions which have decreased the cost to provide basic needs happened considerably slower than the digital revolution is happening.

I don't think it's an imaginary problem at all. Overblown yes, I completely agree... but if that's what it takes to keep the conversation moving, I'm ok with that.

The urgency, I think, is not "all the jobs will go away tomorrow", but that it's a big enough problem that the time to start solving it is now. And unfortunately the world is really loud these days, it takes volume to be heard over the noise.

> We automate tasks, not jobs

We automate both. One popular example is trucking. There are 3.5 million truck drivers in the US alone. And of course this is an area where complete automation is on the horizon. The tech exists, it's getting close to ready for large scale deployment and big players are working on it.

The industrial revolution comparison is apt but only to a point. The rate of innovation in tech is speeding up and our ability to automate jobs away faster than we can adapt along with it.

That said the article goes on to focus on what I think is one of the key points in the automation conversation: wealth inequality.

If we don't come up with a way to share the wealth produced by increasing automation, the current system will funnel almost all of it to the top.

But I also don't think it's 'obviously' untrue. Yes, the level of detail is mind boggling. But quite a lot of that detail follows naturally from the framework itself: The complexity of an object moving through space and time, interacting with heat and light and atmosphere and etc. is huge. However once the framework is in place (physical laws, light models, properties of materials and so on) everything happens 'naturally' provided you have the processing power to render all the variables.

It's not difficult to imagine a point where a detailed enough framework, and the processing power to render it, could exist. Not soon, but eventually.

Add to that the established tendency of our minds to normalize (ignore things that don't seem to fit, rationalize and otherwise edit reality for palatability) and the power of our neurotransmitter systems to override rational thought... The biological interpreter of the theoretical simulation is well designed to be fooled given a deep enough understanding of it's workings. Which is also not difficult to imagine as a future possibility.

Still, not likely, but too compelling a thought experiment to call bunk IMO.

It's not a problem that's exclusive to coding, you find people talking loudly about absolutes in most fields. People like definitive answers. Makes us feel secure.

Which makes absolutes easy to sell, and especially popular with people who feel out of their depth. It also makes them popular in academics.

You also find flexible, creative thinkers in the same fields. They're just not as loud, or as numerous, in my experience.

This is why whistleblowers are so important. The "state secrets" firewall means that the public has no ability to police government surveillance.

It's a frustrating situation because intelligence agencies obviously do need to keep secrets while at the same time they can use this as justification to keep anything they want secret, even when there is no real national security concern with revealing the information.

Don't underestimate the EU though, given some of the ignorant tech regulation they've already passed, it could happen at some point.

As Bing has demonstrated, Google's dominance in search is a result of superior technology and a huge lead. Even a company with the resources of MS hasn't been able to do anything but follow behind and create almost good enough copies at each step.

Although to be fair that's what MS has always done so maybe a more nimble company might have a shot some day.

In the near future AI and machine learning coupled with computing advances could be a way into search for competitors if G doesn't get there first.

The technical complexity difference between power distribution and internet search is so large that you can't compare the two.

Motivation to keep improving is vital in search. It's a decades old arms race between quality results and black hat algo gaming. And it plays out on a dataset that's always growing, and that growth is always accelerating. If iteration slows down even a little, black hat wins and everyone else loses.

Your suggestion would effectively kill Google, which is maybe the goal, but unless it applied only to Google it would kill the searchability of the internet along with them.

Remember Altavista? It would look like that.

Which is not to say there aren't regulatory answers to Google's dominance. Forcing a firewall between their interests (i.e. search and advertising) would be a start.

It's pretty hyperbolic to call Google results a "full page ad". For example, if I do a Google search for "clickbait", on mobile all I see above the fold is a dictionary definition stub followed by a wikipedia snippet. There is actually no sponsored content at all. Even scrolling doesn't turn up any ads.

And yes, of course, there are other types of searches where the first thing you'll see is shopping results, followed by more sponsored results. And yes I hate it as much as everyone else.

But I don't think it's reasonable to say it's an "ad engine".

The amount of real estate devoted to monetization has been increasingly silly for years. It will no doubt get worse. They do have an effective monopoly. It sucks for the internet that this is the case.

But Google is still an impressive search engine underneath all the monetization. One where a huge part of the mindshare at the company is still devoted to organic search. I don't think HN is a place where you can reasonably hope to get away with claiming otherwise.

The app I was actually looking for with the search isn't in the top 10, but you can see that it's been tried more than once.

Do you mean paying a potential match? It would be a dating site for cam girls and professional escorts.

I mean, you might actually be on to something there :)

It's no doubt overly idealistic but I envision it as a new renaissance.

One thing is certain: as technology continues to make providing basic needs cheaper and cheaper, we need to come up with some way to give a significant part of that surplus to the masses.

The current system will allocate it to the 1% and we can look to science fiction for what happens after that.

What I find frustrating personally, living in the US, is the irrationally vehement opposition to the idea. Like universal healthcare, accessible higher education, affordable child care, sane vacation time, reasonable parental leave and etc.. the US will no doubt be decades behind the rest of the world here too.

However, potentially UBI does more than you imagine. There are measurable differences in both behavior and development when meeting basic needs is a struggle. Rutger Bregman did a great job touching on some of the basics in this TED talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/rutger_bregman_poverty_isn_t_a_lac...

By giving low income people extra cushion (even a small one) you can improve their cognition and decision making, giving them a platform from which to improve their lives, pursue education, even innovate. All without complicated, difficult to implement and expensive social programs designed to achieve the same goals. Poverty squanders potential.

And then, of course, there is the oft talked about, and in my opinion self evidently valid, concern about an increasing number of white collar jobs being replaced by automation. At some point we'll have no choice but to come up with a solution for a shrinking pool of unskilled or semi-skilled jobs.

Conveniently the same process that will remove those jobs, will also make the production of the goods and services they relate to dramatically cheaper. UBI gives some of that surplus to the lower and middle classes, which is important given the danger that it would otherwise be absorbed by the rich.

I didn't use it often but I checked on it periodically just to keep up on what was, hopefully, going to be a contender in the social media world. What I saw was almost no change in user facing functionality over the course of it's existence.

There also didn't seem to be any significant attempt at marketing, monetization or collaboration with the community.

Meanwhile there were significant influencers and content producers with large numbers of followers. The dream of any social media company.

I always assumed it folded because they couldn't agree on a path to monetization.

But from the perspective that they actually did care about it (which I read as they devoted significant resources to it even if that didn't translate to anything that was publicly visible)... It starts to sound more like a company that's hit the self hobbling critical mass of size and internal bureaucracy.

What did it look like from the inside?

I get ditching things that don't work, but G+ is a great example of something that had plenty of traction in it's early days and, as far as I can see, lost it purely because G didn't seem to care about it.

It's a bit like a straw man fallacy.

It happens a lot less often on HN though in my experience.

Right after the bit you quoted I noted that WB buying an expensive car doesn't even things out.

The idea of sales tax as a replacement for income tax isn't new or lacking rigor. Over the years it's had a lot of support from both economists and politicians. The math, at least on the surface, does work.

Personally, I haven't spent enough time looking at it to have a lot of conviction one way or the other about it's viability.

But it's an interesting idea that isn't invalidated by comparing cars.

He's spending more on everything than you are.

That doesn't even things up, of course, but then neither does the current system. It would arguably be closer to even.

The beauty of a universal sales tax (as an alternative to income tax), in addition to the fact that the wealthy consume more of everything, is that a transaction tax is more difficult to lobby loopholes into.

And, of course, it potentially doesn't need as large (read expensive) a bureaucracy to manage and enforce it.

It also removes the burden of record keeping/reporting from consumers and payroll tax from employers.

A lot of people have spent time thinking about the idea. One example: https://fairtax.org/

It's not a problem free solution of course, but neither is the current one. Someday a proposal for a transaction tax might even make it out of committee.