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Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

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Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#181

Post by capableweb »

mulmen wrote: post #141
Spivak wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t really think Google’s plan is that weird. And it would be amazing for decentralized networks, archiving, and offline web apps. Google can’t just serve nyt.com — they can serve a specific bundle of resources published and signed by nyt.com verified by your browser to be authentic and unmodified.

How does centralizing content on Google from multiple sources improve decentralization? The web is already decentralized. That's why it is a web. AMP is a scourge. It's a bad idea being pushed by bad actors.

The current implementation of the AMP cache servers obviously doesn't help the decentralization.

I think what Spivak is saying though is right. If we could move from location addressing (dns+ip) to content-addressing , but not via the AMP cache servers, in general, anyone could serve any content on the web. Add in signing of the content addressing, and now you can also verify that content is coming from NYTimes for example.

Also, I'd say that the internet (transports, piping, glue) is decentralized. The web is not. Nothing seems to work with each other and most web properties are fighting against each other, not together. Not at all like the internet is built. The web is basically ~10 big silos right now, that would probably kill their API endpoints if they could.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#182

Post by saagarjha »

pwdisswordfish2 wrote: post #165
pdkl95 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the library can be inspected Really? Could you publish how you are inspecting an unknown program to determine if it exhibits a specific behavior? There are a lot of computer scientists interested in your solution to the halting problem . Joking aside, we already know from the halting problem[1] that it you cannot determine if a program will execute the simplest behavior: halting. Inspecting a program for more compl…

By reading the source code? def divisors(n): for d in range(1, n): if n % d == 0: yield d n = 1 while True: if n == sum(divisors(n)): break n += 2 print(n) I don’t know if this program halts. But I’m pretty sure it won’t steal my data and send it to third parties. Why? Because at no point does it read my data or communicate with third parties in any way: it would have to have those things programmed into it for that…

> I don’t know if this program halts.

Be cool if you did ;)

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#183

Post by saagarjha »

Kevin605 wrote: post #164
reaperducer wrote: post #142

People have been railing against Google's Amp on HN for years, and I think I finally figured out what it's for. It's Google way of combatting phone apps. If all of the world's information — especially current news and similar information — moves from the open web into apps, then Google can no longer crawl, index, or scrape that information for its own use. The rise of the mobile phone app is a threat to Google on so…

This has already happened in China, where Baidu (The Chinese equivalent of Google) can’t crawl any articles from WeChat (The Chinese equivalent of Medium), as a result, the usefulness of its search result has deteriorated significantly. Recently, Baidu has been trying to start its own publishing platform with little success.

> WeChat (The Chinese equivalent of Medium)

TIL

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#184

Post by IanCal »

pdkl95 wrote: post #147
gregable wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that's theoretically possible, the library can be inspected and does not do these things.

> the library can be inspected Really? Could you publish how you are inspecting an unknown program to determine if it exhibits a specific behavior? There are a lot of computer scientists interested in your solution to the halting problem . Joking aside, we already know from the halting problem[1] that it you cannot determine if a program will execute the simplest behavior: halting. Inspecting a program for more compl…

> Could you publish how you are inspecting an unknown program to determine if it exhibits a specific behavior? There are a lot of computer scientists interested in your solution to the halting problem.

This has nothing to do with the halting problem because that is concerned about for all possible programs not some programs.

We obviously know if some programs halt.

    while true: nop
Is an infinite loop.

    X = 1
    Y = X + 2
Halts.

More complex behaviours can be easier. Neither of my programs there make network calls.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#185

Post by mikro2nd »

Kiro wrote: post #153
mindfulhack wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose 328 votes so far show the usefulness of repeat discussions. This article is a catalyst to keep this one going. The votes prove that it's an important enough issue to continue talking about.

Not really. HN just loves to hate on AMP.

Perhaps there are some good reasons for that.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#187

Post by [deleted] »

reaperducer wrote: post #142

People have been railing against Google's Amp on HN for years, and I think I finally figured out what it's for. It's Google way of combatting phone apps. If all of the world's information — especially current news and similar information — moves from the open web into apps, then Google can no longer crawl, index, or scrape that information for its own use. The rise of the mobile phone app is a threat to Google on so…

[deleted]

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#188

Post by mikro2nd »

Kiro wrote: post #160

AMP is disliked by privileged people who have never experienced how truly awful browsing the web with a bad internet connection can be.

Can you elucidate what you'd consider a "bad" internet connection?

I live Out In The Styx, in a Shithole country, at the end of an allegedly 2MB/s piece of wet string masquerading as an internet connection that seldom lives up to its adverted performance. AMP has never once made any significant difference to my web experience.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#189

Post by hortense »

reaperducer wrote: post #142

People have been railing against Google's Amp on HN for years, and I think I finally figured out what it's for. It's Google way of combatting phone apps. If all of the world's information — especially current news and similar information — moves from the open web into apps, then Google can no longer crawl, index, or scrape that information for its own use. The rise of the mobile phone app is a threat to Google on so…

Amp was a reaction to Apple News and Facebook News: using those applications to read the news was a much better experience than using the web. Why? Mainly for two reasons:

1/ Apple and Facebook were hosting all the content.

2/ The content did not come with megabytes of JS and other unnecessary crap.

Amp is an attempt at saving the web, and Google is interested in that for the reason that you gave: they make their money from the web.

Re: Where Am I? NYTimes or Google?

#190

Post by lultimouomo »

izacus wrote: post #156
lultimouomo wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But does AMP makes internet usable on those $40 phones? I have a recent mid-range $200 phone and pretty much the only website the regularly hogs my browser is Google News, which coincidentally is also the only one that uses AMP. It's anecdote, but in my experience AMP (or whatever else Google News does) degrades performance to an amazing extent.

Google News is far from being the only one using AMP and there's a massive difference in loading times and rendering speed for most news sites between AMP and non-AMP versions even on my 1GBit internet connection.

FWIW my impression is not that Google News is bandwidth heavy, but that it is JavaScript heavy. It works fine on the computer but it's hard to use on the phone, even on the same connection.
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