Actually, this submission was an hour earlier, and has the correct title and no url clutter. Yet for some reason the other submission got a lot more upvotes.
Often happens. When we do moderation things we try to privilege the earliest submission of a story but it isn't always possible.
We'll eventually get around to working on a more sophisticated way of handling duplicate submissions, but the simplicity of the current approach (i.e. allow a few reposts if a story hasn't had significant attention yet) has much to commend it.
Perhaps the algorithm could be tweaked so that simply voting on a story pushes it closer towards the top of the homepage.
I always search before submitting, and just upvote an existing story if someone has already submitted it (unless it's a from different source, which may get more traction due to being better written).
I think the idea is that Alphabet will be spinning this department to become their own company. This means they need to have a product that they can sell and not have the bottomless well of funding they previously saw.
I was already imagining Google would be much more interested in dominating the algorithmic and software aspect of it than competing with their own car, since self-driving software will probably be winner-take-all, it's of course much better to license the tech for every other carmaker... I'd guess the car was just a 'vehicle' for the R&D all along.
Or it reeks of "turns out, building cars at scale is really hard, and we'd have to compete directly with experienced companies for uncertain gain". Partnerships or M&A are a much better way to go here then software companies trying to build car factories from scratch.
But making, marketing and distributing 10's of thousands of cars is so outside the scope of anything that Google is good at ...
Cars are crazy regulated, massive supply chains, complex distribution networks, massive finance issues both in terms of production but also consumer financing, massive labour issues, massive and long term capex in plants and equipment ... it's just not Googley.
I suggest that it's probably the right thing for them to do.
