There's a menu that you can click on at the top if you move your mouse/trackpad in the right way and that brings up additional pages. Whoever designed--and I use that word in the loosest possible sense--the pages needs some remedial web design school, as does anyone who approved it.
IBM has always served as a medium between mankind and machine.
Between the natural and the engineered.
The emotional and rational.
The classic and the cutting-edge.
Our most important job is to help humanity and technology move forward together.
IBM Plex™ brings these relationships to life through letterforms.
I was able to read this stuff by first pounding my knee with my fist, then biting so hard on my left hand I nearly lost some fingertips. But I made it through it. The challenging scrolling actually provided some additional and welcome distraction from the sheer horror of the words.
> I think gutting the value of a forum so that people can remove all their content at will on a whim can readily go bad places.
Thankfully, there's a really easy solution that HN today will not consider/is not taking seriously enough: Just change the goddamn displayed username for each comment to "<deleted>" or whatever.
1) this kind of (seemingly; it's all a black box in reality though) naval-gazing-based decision making is exactly why the GDPR makes sense. We can't run our lives on the whims of a few random people.
2) Does YCombinator tell us all of this stuff when we sign up to HN? No. We have to find it out by ourselves. When we e-mail them to ask them to delete our contributions, since there's no delete button, they just say "sorry, we can't do that".
I bet Poland and Hungry are next to leave. It's a sad, predictable situation, take away the people's ability to check their own government, it's almost a law of physics that next to go is free speech (now), and then... history repeats. The BREXIT vote shows they know, but it's to be seen if the British can turn this one around.
There's your requested blog post. It's been slightly edited from the original (plus a few paragraphs tacked on to the end of it), so you can enjoy reading it a second time to look for the small differences between the blog post and what you remember of the comment.
(I have fixed multiple typos in the past few minutes. If you refresh, it might stop being gibberish.)
Hello HN poster with multiple handles and negative karma who keeps complaining about HNs unwillingness to comply with the GDPR, creating new accounts and cross referencing them yourself by self identifying that you are also these multiple other accounts.
FYI, the piece is not a rant.
Also FYI, I am talking about people like you. Your problem cannot be solved by the mods deleting your multiple cross referenced accounts that you complain you want deleted while continuing to make new handles and then voluntarily outing yourself each and every time. It just would create headaches for the mods while feeding your delusion that your behavior is not the issue and does not need to change.
I posted that (I'm vgf). My account was rate-limited and the post was very clearly artificially pushed to the second page, then the third. Just minutes before that it had started to climb up the front page relatively quickly.
Your account was rate limited before you posted that, and the submission dropped in rank because it set off the flamewar detector. Moderators didn't touch it.
You have a long history of—among other things—breaking the HN guidelines, ignoring our requests and warnings to stop, getting banned, creating new accounts, and posting false statements about HN moderation. I mention that because readers have a right to hear true statements about this and not just the false ones. I don't mind being criticized for mistakes we actually make—it's good to be, so we can correct them—but spreading outright lies destroys this community by undermining its confidence in the site. That's not ok.
Since you obviously don't want to use HN as intended, I've banned several of your accounts.
That's one part of the negotiation puzzle. EU would want it's citizens to retain access to their google-hosted emails.
Legally speaking, I'm sure there's plenty of ways the EU can force Google to do things it currently does not want to do.
I'd say the EU has lots of negotional angles currently to win things from Google. That is kind of what you get when you have more or less universal legislation power over 40% or so of the world's purchasing power (please correct me, I just bullshitted that guess). And that, alas, was also a large part of why the EU was born. So now we'll will reap the benefits.
If I could say anything to our EU negotiators in this case, it would be: stay brave.
> That is kind of what you get when you have more or less universal legislation power over 40% or so of the world's purchasing power (please correct me, I just bullshitted that guess).
Europe GDP is 20.9 Trillion USD. The world GDP is 107 Trillion USD. So Europe is only 20% of the world GDP.
But one can make the argument that EU citizens are better connected and spend more on digital goods. Though I'd be surprised if it drives more than 30% of Google revenue.
My bullshit-guess is that out of those 32.5 percent units, EU/EES was responsible for about 31 units or so, and the rest 1.5 was from the middle east and africa. (Reasoning: the ME certainly has money, but no population to speak of. Africa has lots of people but besides relatively tiny South Africa very little revenue for Google.)
Note 2: This kind of comment from a moderator feels a bit out of place, given this. At least without a disclaimer explaining the relationship between the topic and the moderator's employer.
Three thoughts. First, the overwhelming majority of users who we stick up for with comments like this (including the GP) aren't affiliated with YC in any way, so I don't see what problem that would solve.
It would insult readers' knowledge and intelligence to put nitpicky disclaimers on everything, especially when the affiliations are all public. Presumably you knew these things without special access; why assume less of others?
HN is a spirit-of-the-law, not letter-of-the-law place. The principle at issue is that fellow users deserve to be read charitably. I don't see how that needs any disclaiming.
Posting from a throwaway account since I work on a competing browser.
I think Google needs to check its steps quite carefully when doing things like these. For quite some time they have leveraged their search monopoly (think about their EU search market share) to bring search/browser-type integration features to chrome first. I would say this is abusing a monopoly in one market segment (search in the EU) to attempt to create a monopoly in another segment (browsers in the EU) by continually making sure that Chrome is the browser that works better than other browsers when using Google search services.
Yes, this is innovative, but there is also a concept known as antitrust laws. Another way of bringing this to the market would have been to invite competing browsers to use this and build a credible time plan for a simultaneous launch for all the browsers that wanted to support this.
Perhaps their implementation differs, but they even showed the JS they're using to perform the prefetch in the post. It doesn't seem like they're trying to hide anything.
They kept the fact that they were going to deploy this on the search service that has a monopoly on search in EU secret until it was launched in Chrome. Before this, this link prefetching has seen very little use in the wild.
This statement, as written, is false.
In both the US and the EU, it is only illegal if you use certain techniques to accomplish it, and only then, if it has actual anticompetitive effects.
For example, Microsoft performed a technique known as tying.
But even the claim was not simply "they shipped IE with Windows 98" , or that they introduced other product features to work well with IE first, but "they made IE deliberately difficult to remove, and deliberately and intentfully made it harder for netscape navigator to work". This is not the same as "we made IE the best, and did nothing to competitive products". In particular, it is not the fact that they introduced stuff to IE first, it is the fact that they deliberately harmed the other products.
Even then, the court held the tying should be analyzed deferentially, and that the US would have to prove this had actual anticompetitive effect.
See in particular, the court's admonition at 93
"As a general rule, courts are properly very skeptical about claims that competition has been harmed by a dominant firm's product design changes. See, e.g., Foremost Pro Color, Inc. v. Eastman Kodak Co., 703 F.2d 534, 544-45 (9th Cir. 1983). In a competitive market, firms routinely innovate in the hope of appealing to consumers, sometimes in the process making their products incompatible with those of rivals; the imposition of liability when a monopolist does the same thing will inevitably deter a certain amount of innovation. This is all the more true in a market, such as this one, in which the product itself is rapidly changing. See Findings of Fact p 59. Judicial deference to product innovation, however, does not mean that a monopolist's product design decisions are per se lawful. See Foremost Pro Color, 703 F.2d at 545; see also Cal. Computer Prods., 613 F.2d at 739, 744; In re IBM Peripheral EDP Devices Antitrust Litig., 481 F. Supp. 965, 1007-08 (N.D. Cal. 1979)."
Note that these are also tying between sold products and given away products, not justgiven away products. Otherwise, open source linux distributions with large market share would have tying issues (and in fact, they've been unsuccessfully sued for illegal competition before)
As far as I can tell, synergies between your products has been 100% OK since the dawn of time, even if one or both of your products has monopoly status. The anti-trust cases come when you start locking out competitors.
