Indeed, Google is too big and has a massive effect on the Internet across the whole world. A single capricious decision made by Google/Alphabet can cause dozens of businesses to shutter or fail. And that is a big problem, especially if we care about upstarts and new companies.
However, that responsibility they fail to take in consideration except by lawsuit, does not counteract YELP's BaaS - Blackmail as a Service. They have been known to, time and again, to shake down companies as local as mom-and-pop restaurants and other "juicy" targets. If YELP were to die today, we would be better off. They are the broken window in the Broken Window Theory of economics, and exact their damage by "Oh no, someone else wrote bad things about you - Pay us and they'll go away".
The courts ruled incorrectly about their doings. They should have been ordered to cease and desist. Or owners should be able to order them to bring down their respective reviews. Perhaps impartial review sites have a good reason to exist, but Yelp has shown that if you don't pay their protection money, you get all the bad ratings put forth and all the good ones 'disappear'.
Blackmail as a Service. As founded by the Better Business Bureau, and continued by Yelp.
(Edit: Evidently, I struck a chord that people don't like. I'd prefer that people rebut me instead of -1's that mean effectively nothing other than "shut up". )
You've behaved so atrociously in this thread—with personal attacks, rants, and other violations of HN's guidelines—that you managed to sacrifice whatever high ground you began from and end up well in the hole. It's dismaying to see how much damage a single commenter on tilt can do.
We ban people for this kind of thing, so please don't do it again. Civil and substantive comments only (or no comments) from now on, please.
You're absolutely right. Yelp adds no value the dozens of other review apps don't, they simply succed because they extort and blackmail small businesses. I refuse to install their app and the quicker they die the better.
> However, that responsibility they fail to take in consideration except by lawsuit, does not counteract YELP's BaaS - Blackmail as a Service.
...and that you have reason to dislike Yelp or even think they are hypocritical does not counteract the problem with Google, which is the topic at hand, making your comment seem like nothing more than a defense of vigilanteism :/.
I would accept the accusation of defense of vigilantism, but I only highlighted the issue. I see it as a "Pot calls Kettle Black", but I do not advocate a response, other than that the courts handled it incorrectly.
I can have fault with both Google/Alphabet and Yelp. They each can have their own form of hypocrisy and potentially illegal behaviors. Me calling one out doesn't lessen the other's actions.
Stoppelman says that businesses want to control their reputation, and Yelp's position is to charge for that. Question here is, if money means hiding bad reviews, is that extortion? Sure seems so.
The courts said that "Pay to Play" isn't strictly extortion. And claims that Yelp themselves wrote bad reviews were unsubstantiated (no proof, server logs can be a 'tricksy' thing....).
This has gotten bad enough, that businesses are telling customers to seed YELP with good "Bad reviews".
-----------------------------
Seriously, when they call, and you fail to pay, your page on YELP goes to the toilet. How much "proof" do you need? There seems to be a misdirection by blaming 3rd party customers, but seriously. They're using blackmail as their market strategy.
top comment from the same page: so, I found the Yelp page, and there are 26 reviews filtered out. Of those, the reviewers have a combined 27 friends, and they all come from just 5 people. None of them has more than 15 reviews, and the majority have less than 3. If you have almost no friends and almost no reviews, your reviews are probably going to get filtered out. Also, a lot of her 5-star reviews happened in a 3-day period, which reeks of fake-reviews,
> Question here is, if money means hiding bad reviews, is that extortion?
you have not yet demonstrated "money means hiding bad reviews" but already sure it's extortion,
Honestly, I'd say longer than that. The Democrats have very little impetus to do them either, given their corporate funding record.
It's been about 30 years since the Democrats gave up on the working classes to cater to "Cause of the Week", "Big Media", and associated areas. Even Obama, with the ACA, set it up that we're required to pay for-profit companies for insurance. He even had a super-majority to enable Medicare for All... but didn't.
Republicans claim they're for the "Common Working Man", but time and again we see policies that ascribe to 'Socialism for the Rich, and Capitalism for the Poor'. And that's not discussing Trump, who has been criticized by both US parties for his actions. (I'm focusing on R-Congress and state governors.)
Something's got to give, and I don't see this going well at all. The fact that regulators and congress refuse to do anything is just a symptom.
Medicare doesn't cut out the private insurance companies either. If you have 'Medicare Advantage', the Feds are subsidizing your private insurance premium. If you have regular Medicare, the Feds are paying one of a handful of private insurance companies to manage your account. It has been this way for quite some time now.
I like the better question: "What is a measurement?"
What does the measurement actually entail? If a computer reads the contents, does that mean the computer is entwined with it? What does our consciousness do to the measurement?
What does the double-slit experiment show if only computers read its result? Does the result compare when we observe it?
Crazier yet, do different human observers see the same results? Has this even been tested?
> There are a dozen different possibilities for what the photon has done - a dozen different universes, if you like. As long as the photon never interacts with anything else, this bundle of a dozen universes can act much the same as a single universe. Certainly if you're just looking at a telescope, all dozen versions of that telescope are behaving the same, so they behave like a single unified instance.
Well that's interesting you bring it up this way.
If what you said is possibly true, then light could be a carrier of things like multi-dimensional spin, or possibly where dark matter really comes from (inter-dimensional interference).
I know Greg Egan has discussed the possibility of infinite orthogonal dimensions that energy can leak into. And by energy conservation, the result would be things like dimensional rotation and other effects we cannot yet perceive.
One theory is that the EM-Drive uses a rudimentary version of this effect. We're all still awaiting the results.
> If what you said is possibly true, then light could be a carrier of things like multi-dimensional spin, or possibly where dark matter really comes from (inter-dimensional interference).
That's a total non-sequitur. What on earth are you talking about?
Yeah, that may be true.. But Scihub is an onion site. That means there's not much in the way of "who", but in the way of last hop before hitting the onionsite.
And I would daresay that one should probably not trust logs when going through Tor.
Speaking of this, Utamaro's artwork is featured in one of the Freer Sackler Smithsonian Museum of Art on the Mall in Washington DC.
They have an extensive amount of his artwork on display, including 3 of his largest paintings.
I'm unsure when they're going to take it down. The exhibit was exquisitely done... But my own personal tastes - I dont like the artform. But there definitely is tremendous skill.
> My math profs always admonished us to ensure foundations are completely watertight before advancing to the next thing in tiny increments.
Of course someone who gets paid to teach would highly stress learning tidbits slowly and excruciatingly. That's their economic incentive. Schools also stress learning detritus for "learning's sake", even if the very people who teach it can't properly explain what it's actually for.
I also have learned compsci with his similar methods of finding interesting areas and digging in. I know my programming knowledge has holes, and I fill them in as I come to them. I like to know how things fit together, even if they are cross-domain and seemingly disparate. I come on in, and go "see these two areas are pretty similar, let me show you what can be done". And then I look like a miracle worker, because I see the generalities.
Frankly, professors would be more useful to me, if I could purchase their time by the hour over issues I don't understand. I can teach myself most things. Sometimes, a professional helps with the jump-start to get a good grasp.
> Of course someone who gets paid to teach would highly stress learning tidbits slowly and excruciatingly. That's their economic incentive...
Well, I can see that's a factor, but not necessarily an overriding one. As someone who's taught at uni myself (not pure maths) we are not usually that cynical or fond of serving up "detritus". It's not as if we lack for valuable and interesting stuff to teach if we go through foundations too quickly, and we aren't paid just for teaching. Anyway, I think most do benefit from a quite painstakingly incrementalist approach to maths; me taking that too far and sometimes getting stuck is a personal failing.
(I recall a quote by a colleague of the group theorist Simon Norton, who famously suffered a career collapse/hiatus after a series of brilliant results, something along the lines of him having opened a doorway into a wondrous realm of new mathematics, but ending up stuck there, at the doorway, obsessed by the details of the doorframe.)
If I was teaching a linear algebra course, I'm not going to say "by the way you can skip this subject entirely because it will just fall out of your working backwards through Wiles' proof of FLT". For those of us without a once-in-a-generation mind I think the traditional approach is the right one. I was only trying to say, I personally sometimes get stuck and it will be interesting to try the opposite approach.
> Frankly, professors would be more useful to me, if I could purchase their time by the hour
If you go to a good uni, at least by postgrad level you do have that kind of access, and, if you get along, you retain it for free after you leave.
> Well, I can see that's a factor, but not necessarily an overriding one. As someone who's taught at uni myself (not pure maths) we are not usually that cynical or fond of serving up "detritus". It's not as if we lack for valuable and interesting stuff to teach if we go through foundations too quickly, and we aren't paid just for teaching. Anyway, I think most do benefit from a quite painstakingly incrementalist approach to maths; me taking that too far and sometimes getting stuck is a personal failing.
Possibly so, but I never went in any of the grad programs. Most of the lower classes are taught by AI's and contract-based "instructors" paid by the uni on a per credit-hour basis. And much of the time, the department shovels the syllabus and required areas to them for the students.
And unfortunately, this avenue of teaching very much shows. You have instructors who have some semblance of caring, but not terribly much. They teach weeder classes with the intent of failing much of the class. Whomever is teaching isn't always able to explain what's going on in an area - they can do the process, but can't explain why their actions work.
Perhaps it is a jaded viewpoint. But after spending way too much money in "Higher Ed", along with working at an institution, I know the game. And I'm sure it's better if you're a post-doc with prestige or on that track. But the rest of us are spoon-fed bland crumbs these days, and pumped-and-dumped for excessive scholastic loans to get a job to pay the loans back with.
> If you go to a good uni, at least by postgrad level you do have that kind of access, and, if you get along, you retain it for free after you leave.
Yep, and if you're not on that track, the access isn't there. I'd be willing to pay for it directly. Google had a program quite a while back, of paying experts for direct guidance in specific fields. Too bad they cancelled it.
I did have bad experiences with bad lecturers as an undergrad (hello, here is a handout, now I will project the handout on a screen, now I will read what's on the screen without any elaboration, goodbye), but they were the exception. Obviously this depends hugely on the exact institution in question. And yes, many are now increasingly functioning as blandly corporate battery student farms...
> Yep, and if you're not on that track, the access isn't there.
Actually I'd also be interested in such a scheme, now that I'm exploring ideas far away from my original research area. Although if you have a bona fide interest to discuss something technical and specific with an academic who has the relevant expertise, I've found they can be pretty approachable, even if you email them out of the blue to ask for a chat... but I do have the right sort of background to do that I suppose.
How do you identify the "holes" when you reach them? How do you even know whether you've reached one?
"Aha! This is clearly a situation in which a monad would be the best approach. Time to go learn about monads!" Just doesn't seem like a reasonable method to me. Some things you just to to learn well before you can even recognize when you need to remember them later.
That's not a valid criticism if you have intent and will to learn.
As for your monads example, getting into functional programming via things like CLisp, Erlang, Haskell, and the like will expose you to lambda calc pretty darn quick. And learning how monads work is near the beginning of that path.
And just being inquisitive leads to a whole lot of areas that give indications on what to learn. For example, doing computer vision enforces you to learn how linear algebra works. Machine learning teaches a great deal of how statistics works. Finite State Machines have their own really interesting niches to work with. Working a crummy operator job teaches how to do automation (on the sly!).
It really depends on how you approach learning. If you're just slowly grinding away because you have to, going through a 4 year BS degree is probably better.
If one wants to learn anything in the sciences, we things like MIT Courseware, Arxiv, Libgen, SciHub, and "canihaspdf" on twitter. Yes, these are primarily pirate options - so what?
I can publicly see the course projections for any arbitrary degree, along with class titles. And many have book lists linked, so I can hunt for the books online using less legal methods. The only difficulty with some STEM learning paths is they require laboratories - those are hard/impossible to do at home and thusly necessitate academic environments. Computing, on the other hand, is easy to learn even at a Starbucks with a laptop and a phone.
What's stopping people from learning what they wish is primarily time and the will to (and the fact that school does a great job at beating the will to learn out).
> I also have learned compsci with his similar methods of finding interesting areas and digging in
I don't think those things are similar. His method -- working backward for Wiles' proof of FLT to Linear Algebra -- is not really analogous to teaching yourself some undergrad CS. It'd be more analogous to deciding you want to understand Mulmuley's latest results from nothing and discovering while loops along the way.
There's a difference in kind. Maybe this is splitting hairs, and at some level they're both "self teaching", but the huge chasm in relative difficulty/impressiveness still irks me :)
> Frankly, professors would be more useful to me, if I could purchase their time by the hour over issues I don't understand
Find a decent university and go to office hours / ask for independent studies.
Paying tuition is quite literally purchasing their time. Only a small amount of official instructional time is spent in lecture halls. And most professors spend more time on teaching than they're technically required to. At decent universities that prioritize teaching, maybe 80%+ of teaching time is spend in one-on-one or small group interactions.
IME most people who dislike formal higher education never learned how to use it properly in the first place. Or attended undergraduate at colleges primarily known for the attached research institutes, not their undergraduate program.
> Of course someone who gets paid to teach would highly stress learning tidbits slowly and excruciatingly. That's their economic incentive.
Believe me: Most TAs and professors would prefer to teach much more advanced stuff in a much faster pace - but for (good?) reasons they are not allowed to do.
What you learned, is if you develop the automation, do NOT tell others that you did. And in your case, you should have implemented a time-delay from page-generation to page-creation, to make it look like you did it.
Ive automated a portion of my job. It does require me having to type my OTP token, but I can build more and more with my private stack. It also means I can do less and still do more.
Nope. Eventual Consistency seems to be the best policy.
The constant "C" isn't changing (or if it is, it's not much). that means there's a definite amount of time for a DB to be consistent to cover transit around the world. When the 3 DB machines are in the same rack, sure, we can approach 11.8"/nanosecond latencies, but the latencies are still there.
The larger and more global (and soon, interstellar), the more these C related lags become. And it is glaringly obvious to me, that "eventual consistency" is the big solution here.
The only case where it doesn't seem to be good, is transactional stuff like banking and investments. In those cases, seem to require CP and hardware like atomic clocks to verify every copy of the DB is on the same page.. Or perhaps an internal blockchain would be more appropriate, since it enforces consensus. But I digress on that one.
To go a little further, I suspect with CP cases like banks the real underlying problem is more fundamental. You can't realistically, under the laws of physics, have a hard notion of transactional ordering (did the account's money come in before it went back out?) without pinning down the concept of an account to a location. At least, not efficiently or quickly.
In other words, eventual consistency in the face of asynchronous remote actors never makes sense when your requirements dictate hard, consistent transactional ordering. You have to think of it as "the transactions happen in the order they arrive at the account's virtual location in New York". To think of them as globally-distributed in nature is always going to cause logical problems at some level. If your database was eventually-consistent, you'd have to build in some sort of after-the-fact safety checks that have the ability to abort the outer transaction, at which point you've wasted a lot of effort patching over the wrong model.
So either you have a need for strong consistency guarantees (order really matters), in which case you have to pin the transactions' locality down (where do they meet up at for their efficient strict ordering?) and CP is your model, or you don't (simpler things like social network updates) and you're better off with AP and eventual consistency to scale things out easier and make it faster for everyone, and really who cares if once in a great long while a user-visible race happens and some people see a couple of posts in a different order than someone else does for a few minutes until things snap back into sync?
> You can't realistically, under the laws of physics, have a hard notion of transactional ordering (did the account's money come in before it went back out?) without pinning down the concept of an account to a location
You've just made me realise that the universe itself is only eventually consistent - that's what all those weird quantum observer / wavefunction collapse events are.
Yep, that's what I was trying to get at, but failed in my explanation.
Everything's eventually consistent on an ever-present sphere around the incident expanding at the speed of light. No faster.
Even if the sun were to blink out of existence, we'd have 8 minutes that we wouldn't know. Gravity would still be there, holding Earth in place. The light would still warm us. Then 500 seconds later, darkness. We'd be flung out on a tangential course.
This isn't quite right. Even with SR and the speed of light its possible to build consistent systems and achieve consensus. Not-eventually-consistent doesn't mean instantaneous. The SoL just sets a lower bound on the speed of consensus.
It's important to not overstate the importance of that bound, though.
Sure. CA fulfills that requirement. Of course, you throw away any semblance of partition tolerance.
Of course, a single machine guarantees there can be no partitioning, and really easy to obtain consensus. It might not be terribly fault-tolerant, however.
CA is a not really a valid/possible thing in the context of CAP. The original phrasing of the theorem was poor and the "choose 2" myth persists. You can choose to (or accidentally) give up C or A but you don't get to choose to not have partitions. Not being partition tolerant doesn't really make sense (you're just broken?) if partitions are going to happen. A better phrasing of CAP is "in a network with partitions a distributed system cannot be both consistent and available." (note: this doesn't guarantee that you are one of C or A, you just can't be C and A.) You can see that definition used in formal treatments, e.g. Theorem 1 in https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~adrian/731-sp04/readings/GL-cap.p...
(Briefly, note that the original article is critiquing that definition of availability in practice which is legitimate but not relevant to this sub-thread.)
What I'm saying is that EC is most definitely NOT a requirement of physics/the speed of light (what your original post claimed.) The speed of light only sets a (theoretical) limits on how fast you can implement a consistent system.
The original Paxos paper ("The part-time parliament") uses an analogy of a quorum of parliamentarians occasionally getting together in the the same building and agreeing on something. Of course it being the same building is arbitrary and doesn't actually matter, but it's easier to intuit that the speed of light isn't an insurmountable road-block at that scale.
Special relativity and the speed of light impose some fundamental lower bounds on the cost of consistency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity . This theoretically manifests as lower bounds on the performance of consistency in distributed systems.
I don't think so. It's not hard to see the beginnings of a satellite communication platforms around the Moon and Mars. And once we start looking at the local solar system, we start dealing with C being a significant source of lag.
For example, communications to and from Mars can take upwards to 20 minutes, depending on where the Earth is in relation to Mars. If this doesn't call for eventual consistency, I'm not sure what would.
The more humans grow, C is a thing we'll have to take in consideration for our communications mediums. Planet-wise comms still feel instant, but that's still on our ball of rock.
Even if you discount manned travel, we have an entire solar system full of humanities remote sending gear in flight, hence the need for an IP-ish store and forward network.
A: He continually berates because "he called and Brian Krebs never responded"
B: Cloudflare CEO states that the booters (ddos pay-as-you-go sites protected by cloudflare) don't even pay, or pay with stolen credit cards. And admits is "just a disaster".
C: Direct insult towards Krebs onstage "Well, who needs to actually ask questions as a journalist?" 48:08 [/Youtube Video]
I'm not sure I see this from your perspective; multiple people in the crowd clap after your point "C", and much more clapping is heard when he sits down. If I were forced to classify the behavior (edit:specifically at 48:08) I would choose "smartass". The entire discussion is interesting in light of what happened recently with Uber/Kalanick.
I was listening to the booing, shouts of disbelief and guffawing (and clapping) when he gave his zinger about journalists.
He was invited on stage, and continually berates Krebs. He could have did that graciously, but instead continually insults. He admits that when the Booters do pay, they're paid with stolen CCs. And then, finally attacks Krebs' standing as a Journalist.
Uh, no. Absolutely not. No way, no how.
I'll deal with Google, Amazon, Microsoft.. Whomever for a CDN. I'm not touching CloudFlare.
My impression was the crowd's response was more of a "sick burn" (Krebs himself smiles and nods in this manner) rather than booing, shouts of disbelief and guffawing (and clapping). If anyone is seriously considering avoiding CloudFlare based on your summary of the interaction, I encourage them to view the video for themselves.
I personally appreciate the willingness to be true to oneself with a quick-witted reply rather than 100% PR-safe professionalism all the time. However, I don't mean to imply that your impression somehow should change or that you should change your decision! My world would be so much nicer if I could just avoid working with people that rubbed me the wrong way.
But the content is about if CloudFlare will kick off booters off their platform. And he defends them, EVEN after saying they don't even pay.
This isn't a "Should we let the KKK march in the streets?", or "Should $sexist group be able to spread propaganda?". This issue is directly about people who harm the fabric of the Internet, and the companies that knowingly allow it and continue to propagate it.
I get defending controversial things in terms of defending Free Speech. But these skiddies want to precisely use their "Free Speech" and actions to deprive others of it.
However, that responsibility they fail to take in consideration except by lawsuit, does not counteract YELP's BaaS - Blackmail as a Service. They have been known to, time and again, to shake down companies as local as mom-and-pop restaurants and other "juicy" targets. If YELP were to die today, we would be better off. They are the broken window in the Broken Window Theory of economics, and exact their damage by "Oh no, someone else wrote bad things about you - Pay us and they'll go away".
The courts ruled incorrectly about their doings. They should have been ordered to cease and desist. Or owners should be able to order them to bring down their respective reviews. Perhaps impartial review sites have a good reason to exist, but Yelp has shown that if you don't pay their protection money, you get all the bad ratings put forth and all the good ones 'disappear'.
Blackmail as a Service. As founded by the Better Business Bureau, and continued by Yelp.
(Edit: Evidently, I struck a chord that people don't like. I'd prefer that people rebut me instead of -1's that mean effectively nothing other than "shut up". )