asr

I use lights every day, but I know way less about electricity than my grandparents, two of whom who could remember when their town was electrified as children and who therefore treated it as the marvel it truly is. And also because we've worked out a ton of bugs in electricity and it often just works.

My kids will know way less about filesystems than I do, because I had to learn DOS commands to navigate around the operating system if I wanted to play computer games, which led to a lifelong interest in how computers actually work at a level they can (and, so far, do) happily ignore.

Exactly the right attitude. If you're dealing with an employer that thinks everything should be transactional and that it's no issue if they nickle and dime you on small things, it gets tiring (ask me how I know). When your employer acts in ways that value their employees, it's ok to put a value on that, even if you recognize they're not your spouse and they may lay you off or act in other un-loyal ways in the future.

GoDaddy will have known of this investigation since it began—probably for years. So it’s 90 days from now(ish), but they (should) have gotten a head start.

Hah! But if you say “on holiday,” I would have expected you to know “lift.”

(or is there a region in the US where this is common? Everyone I know would say “on vacation,” but the US is very regional.)

Not MSFT’s fault: https://stratechery.com/2024/crashes-and-competition/

in the olden days Microsoft wasn't allowed to add APIs to Windows that could only be used by IE

This is not true.

Worth caring about why?? Because you think Google shouldn’t be allowed to make things better for their users? Like I said, you are so concerned about fairness you’re missing the point.

So the concern is that Google is making Hangouts better in a way that is hard for competitors to replicate? (And by "hard," I mean, "competitors have to ask users to install something," not hard in any HN-relevant sense of the word.) This forum sure has a lot of wanna-be Handicapper Generals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

Four years ago, Altman’s mentor, Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, flew from the United Kingdom to San Francisco to give his protégé the boot, according to three people familiar with the incident, which has not been previously reported.

This makes no sense. Phishing comes from phreak + fishing, but the "ph" in phreak is already from the word phone (phone + freak) -- so the ph in "phishing" already comes from the word phone! The telephone version of phishing should be... "phishing."

But thanks for the explanation.

Your question is worded to suggest you are not actually open to the answer, but I will try anyway: in antitrust law. You cannot create an open App Store ecosystem, invite in outside developers, and then pivot and kill them all off by steering customers to your own app. Closing off your previously-open ecosystem can be illegal. Read Eastman Kodak Co. v. Image Technical Servs.

Actually the US and the EU both target anticompetitive behavior. The US law is older and so is call antitrust for historical reasons, not because of a legal difference.

This is basically how Texas sells electricity.[1] I'm not an expert on it but it makes a ton of sense.

Of course, it may be easier to do this for electricity, where the fundamental technology doesn't change quickly anymore (as far as I know), than for internet connectivity, where we are still undergoing fairly rapid technological change, relatively speaking.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation_of_the_Texas_elec...

Not only is this not "entirely" true--it's not at all true. The author is disguising a (hotly contested) opinion/minority position as a well-accepted fact.

The mainstream position in the antitrust world, even among liberals (at least until recently), is that Bork's theory is generally right. (For example, Barack Obama's antitrust appointees would generally have agreed with it.)

What Bork did was bring economic models (i.e. math) to bear in antitrust analysis. Before Bork, antitrust law was basically run on judges' intuition about whether business practices were good or bad. After Bork, there is more structure to the analysis--if we are trying to figure out whether things are good or bad for consumer prices, there's an economic framework we can use so that we're not just making random guesses.

You can quibble with the math, but it seems crazy to go back to a world where we just say "big mergers are bad." Some mergers are bad, sure. But some are not. For example, I have yet to hear anyone explain why Amazon's purchase of Whole Foods is bad for anyone other than other grocery stores (who have to try to compete as Amazon figures out grocery delivery).

On the one hand, this seems like a real missed opportunity by Mozilla. As Chrome reigns in extensions that conflict with Google's business model, this is a reason to use Firefox.

BUT - extensions are also often the cause of a slow and frustrating Firefox experience, which then leads folks to talk about how Chrome is better-performing/faster (I've been guilty of this myself in the past). Mozilla needs to make sure Firefox is keeping pace with Chrome, which they've presumably decided means de-emphasizing extensions.

That said, not sure why Mozilla needs to de-emphasize donation buttons.

Quorum rules are to make sure you're not holding a sneaky midnight vote with two councilors asleep. Councilors who are present but recused should count toward a quorum.

You might still have a rule that at least two votes are required to pass something (to prevent a 1-0 vote with four recusals). But requiring at least thee votes on a five-member council is requiring an outright majority, which means a recusal is the same as a no vote. That seems unfair.

Yes, this seems like a critical part of the story. I take it the actual vote was 2-1 in favor of the permit, but you need at least 3 votes to pass something in San Bruno, no matter what? If so, the city council's rules don't deal appropriately with recusal and those should be changed ASAP.

At the same time, whether or not this project succeeded or failed, the larger story about how hard it is to build housing remains fundamentally true (and broken).

My (uninformed and possibly wrong) guess is that YouTube wanted to maintain the fiction that, to the best of their knowledge, everyone using the service was the person who signed up, so that it could argue it was not intentionally showing videos to children. When YouTube knows kids are using the app, it's supposed to be doing lots of things to protect their privacy (which it has not been doing).[1]

Building an algorithm to guess when children were likely using YouTube on their parents' account, in order to show age-appropriate ads, would show that YouTube does know that kids are using the app. So my (again, uninformed and quite possibly wrong) guess is that YouTube did not try and fail at creating such an algorithm; they deliberately decided not to try.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/19/ftc-app...

There’s nobody to like here. Your eye doctor can make a bunch of money selling you contacts and therefore doctors will say lots of dumb things about how dangerous Hubble is. Were the same doctors also talking about how dangerous contacts were a few years ago when this technology was state of the art? No. They are doing a much better job of looking out for themselves than for patients.

At the same time, it’s probably ALSO true that, if you can afford it, a brand using newer technology may be better. And you should talk to an eye doctor about the decision. I just wish eye doctors were not selling you anything and were in business to be doctors; that would make it a lot easier to trust that you were getting good advice.

PS I have a lot of experience with the price of contact lenses from my job, weirdly. For the best prices, you should buy contacts from either Costco or any online retailer besides 1-800 Contacts (Walmart, etc.). But I would suggest you buy the brand you’ve been prescribed.

Your doctor was (is) required to give you a copy or your prescription if you ask.[1] Next time, make sure they give you one and you can use that to verify when shopping around.

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/rules/rulemaking-regulatory-...

“Correct” here was not supposed to mean you must agree. As others have pointed out “loophole” is often in the eye of the beholder. But I mean to say that it’s not inaccurate to use the word loophole in such a way that a mod should change the title.

The New York Times headline uses the word “loophole.” It’s not appropriate to rewrite that headline simply because you don’t like it. If “loophole” were an incorrect choice of words it would not be in the headline.

EDIT to add I understand moderation is a thankless job and thank you for doing it. But I disagree with this particular call.

Congrats on building the country! Oh wait, you didn’t, it was your ancestors. Not sure why you think you deserve something based on your lineage—that’s an unamerican idea if I’ve ever heard one.

Your idea that there is some deep conflict between immigrants and people already here is also basically wrong. Immigrants have always been a huge source of strength for America and a net benefit to those already here.

Normally the point of an IPO is to raise cash.

Manufacturers often pay stores for space on the end cap. http://www.cockeyed.com/citizen/retail/raleys.php

As far as I know, "Amazon's choice" is not an advertisement/suppliers can't bid to be Amazon's choice.

Monopolization requires anticompetitive conduct. To prove this, intent evidence is often helpful. For example, in the recent Qualcomm case the judge cited evidence that Qualcomm executives knew their business model created antitrust risk.

But intent evidence is not required. A corporation doesn't have a state of mind. Also, wanting to beat your competitors is fine (and good). So it's tricky to distinguish bad intent from good intent.

Starting with the recent EU decisions is probably a good bet. There are three fines the EU imposed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google#EU...

I just double-checked and you are right! Filed Jan. 17, 2019. Apologies. For some reason I thought it was filed a few days after Trump became president, but I was mis-remembering.

Very interesting I had not seen this.

Note there are five ftc commissioners. Christine Wilson is one of three republicans. She is unfortunately the one who seems the most trumpian. She misleadingly quotes a filing her own agency made in this op-ed. Because of that, and a few other turns of phrase in here that appear frequently in Qualcomm PR (such as the factually incorrect statement that this case was filed during the Obama administration--it was actually filed under Trump) I'm willing to bet a lot of money Qualcomm wrote this and gave it to her and she signed off on it.

This is a tangent, but FYI, there is a DRM'd Keurig case, and it is still going! https://www.pbwt.com/antitrust-update-blog/in-long-awaited-o...

The judge essentially paused the case for four years while he ruled on a motion (which is ridiculous) so it's been quite slow. But I'm still watching it...