MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by snapplebobapple | 2025-05-01 05:43:57+00:00
You have to look at all the parties and how they traditionally align to understand what happened. We have two very far left parties (green and NDP),a fairly far left party (Liberals) that is historically closer to center left a center right party (conservatives) and in quebec a quebec nationalist party (bloc). What we had this election was a massive move to center right with a big upswing in conservative votes and at the same time we had an utter collapse of the far left NDP and green party vote which mostly went liberal and a softening of support for bloc in Quebec that mostly went liberal. So the conservatives captured a percent of the popular vote that would have been a staggering majority at any other time and still lost because the concentration of the very far left vote into the liberals overwhelmed it.

I would also say the liberals have not moderated a bit, they just said and did some disingenuous things to trick people into thinking this guy was more like Chretien, when his books read like the green party mixed with greed. Time will tell if this view proves correct or not.
by hattmall | 2025-05-01 05:44:20+00:00
I've never understood the hate for table layouts. They literally just make sense. And now all they advanced css frameworks have basically just recreated table layouts via divs with row and column classes. I get the need for responsive designs but I still think we could have gotten there with tables.

It's like people got mad that tables were being used to for something other than strictly tabular data, so they recreated the idea behind table as a layout tool with "css grid" and made it 50x more complicated.

I wish web design could follow like woodworking where the most focus is on using the base tools very effectively. The introduction of new tools is mostly frowned upon. Of course that's all because of the inherently dangerous nature of using power tools. Regardless of tech stack you aren't to likely to lose a finger from coding.
by chii | 2025-05-01 05:44:54+00:00
and there's plenty of somewhat usable browsers out there too.

But the OP's implication is that there ought to be a fully working browser (that satisfies the standards of the day), but creatable from someone in their garage.

That hasn't been true for cars, appliances or any modern equipment for ages. And the same phenomenon being applicable to software isn't really that unimaginable (nor a problem).
by chneu | 2025-05-01 05:45:49+00:00
The county I grew up in recently stopped posting mugshots online.

There was a whole cottage industry that sprang up where people were selling these like..tabloid periodicals that just had people's mugshots in them. No guilty verdict or anything.

So people would be at the gas station or convenient store and there's a stack of free mugshot tabloids. It was wild. Once or twice a year I'd get texts from friends, "hey did you see that so and so got their mugshot taken!?"
by thayne | 2025-05-01 05:46:06+00:00
1) all those forks are soft fork that rely on Google's maintenance of chromium. So unless they are willing to invest a LOT more into development, or someone else does a hard fork and puts enough resources into it, whoever buys chrome will inherit a lot of power over those forks.

2) Without the funding from google search, Firefox's future is very much in question. Unlike Apple and MS, Mozilla doesn't really have other funds to pull from to maintain a browser.
by fsloth | 2025-05-01 05:47:01+00:00
The web browser is an ugly mongrel that in a “sane” world would never exist. The only reason it is a platform is due to the immense wealth funneled to ductaping and reinforcing it to hold.

It’s basically a statue of liberty made of ductape and chewing gum, then reinforced with formula-1 level engineering and novel materials research.

The building blocks and lessons learned could be used for something novel (nope not gonna happen it’s permanent now). WASM, json, Skia renderer, pretty awesome v8 virtual machine etc etc … all of that are pretty neat.

I guess the key thing is what is the value of browser now?

It’s the ui to bazillion networked business and government systems, productivity tools etc.

I would argue the sticky moat here is not the web interface, though, but the data and the familiar usage patterns. _Theoretically_ the ux is portable to any system with vector graphics renderer and the data itself should be (a long stretch right) independent of the client ui.
by orangeboats | 2025-05-01 05:47:44+00:00
Not just RISC-V, when it comes to performance the Loongson CPUs (with the LoongArch ISA) are likely the most competitive -- the IPC of Loongson 3A6000 is around that of 10th ~ 12th gen Intel CPUs! And 3A7000 is coming soon.

Zhaoxin is China's answer to "what if we need a drop-in x86 replacement immediately?" It does not represent the frontier of CPU development in the country.
by Too | 2025-05-01 05:48:10+00:00
Wow, that's just a blatant scam. Wakes up bad memories of the old Windows XP days, when this type of trick was used everywhere. And people wonder why we use adblock. Google (the most wealthy company on earth) will of course claim they don't have the resources to review them, when the truth is they are happy to reap their profits from scamming old people. Same with Facebook, happy to serve ads that lure old people into logging in to fake banks and get all their savings stolen.

There's probably a rule against apps impersonating the OS on the App Store, one could only wish for Apple using a more heavy hand against this type of "experience".
by ec109685 | 2025-05-01 05:48:12+00:00
This is so alarmist. Whatever company buys chrome would have incentives to keep investing in it.

Similarly if Google can’t bid for search engine placement, someone else will.

While Chrome has done great things for the web ecosystem, neither Google or Apple have released a browser that can truly produce apps that rival native experiences. If the keepers of the web didn’t have their own app stores, would that change?
by logifail | 2025-05-01 05:49:59+00:00
> We should and do

The European Commission ended up in court trying to keep Ursula von der Leyen's messages secret 'claiming that the texts were “by [their] nature short-lived” and were not covered by the EU’s freedom of information law'

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/10/i-aske...

https://www.politico.eu/article/ursula-von-der-leyen-eu-comm...

Outcome? A(nother) nothingburger.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-05-01 05:50:04+00:00
In terms of enjoyment, I think that as a whole things were much better in the late 00s and early 10s. Proprietary crashy resource hog browser plugins had effectively been killed off and JS bloat was still relatively low, so with a few notable exceptions the web was fairly light and sites on average weren’t nearly as irritating or intrusive. Furthermore, devs hadn’t normalized feature chasing and so any modern browser worked correctly for the overwhelming majority of the web and adblock extensions generally didn’t break things.

It’s all been downhill from there.
by al_borland | 2025-05-01 05:50:12+00:00
I’m not at a FAANG, but a F250 company, and it’s the same way. It used to be pretty stable and things made sense. However, one they started bringing in a bunch of people fresh out of school, and gave them the keys to the kingdom to “modernize”, everything became a convoluted mess. They don’t understand what it means to support something in production through its lifecycle, and don’t care, because they always have one foot out the door.

It’s probably worth sticking it out, as having 1-2 years there will look good on a resume, while a month will not.

I’ve dealt with imposter syndrome most of my career. You never really know how you’re being perceived by others until they tell you. I went into a review a couple years ago 100% certain that I was going to be shredded, because I felt like I had really been phoning it in and the boss had made some comments very early on when he took over the team. When I showed up to the review I was met with 45 minutes of praise. After it was over I just sat there for 15 minutes in shock. I couldn’t seem to integrate the false reality my imposter syndrome created in my head with the reality of what just happened.

Your expectations for yourself and the company might need time to align with the reality of how the business actually runs. Most companies are way more dysfunctional than anyone would want to believe. This is why Dilbert was such a popular and relatable comic for so many workers.
by devjab | 2025-05-01 05:51:05+00:00
This is anecdotal but I often buy yearly plans on products that I've got a pretty good idea that I'll use, even if it's the first time I buy them. Though I'll freely admit it's always been the option of getting 1-2 months for "free" by signing up for the yearly plan. I've done it with various products, Proton, Disney+ (which saved them from my Danish boycot wrath to my daughter's delight) and so on. I've never even thought about it as a way of tricking me into buying the yearly plan, and now that I've thought a bit about it, I don't think your pricing would either. It's hard to say how I would've thought if I'd looked at the pricing page before reading these comments, but I genuinely don't believe I would've thought of it like that.

That being said, I would not base my pricing too much on a few random comments on HN. These responses can be a good indication, but I'd frankly reach out to some of my trial sign-ups who didn't transition into a paying client as well as some of my actual customers to get their view on it. I think pricing is going to be especially tricky in the AI space since it's so new and there is so much competition.

Good luck though.
by Teever | 2025-05-01 05:51:34+00:00
I don't want to derail the conversation too much with this but this is the kind of thing that blows my mind with seeing obscenely wealthy/powerful people like Musk and Trump on social media.

At some level of wealth you reach a point where no one can get to you physically. You're completely physically safe and isolated and can't be hurt. That means that the only way someone can get to you is through communicating with you and making you hurt yourself.

That means that social media is your only weakness. This is how adversaries can affect your plans and goals and disrupt your mind. Yet so many of these people seem so oblivious to this and are as terminally online as your average 4channer or facebook mom.

Does this speak to some sort of weakness in these kinds of people or the addictiveness of social media?
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-05-01 05:52:37+00:00
> All the major browser innovation that has happened during the last decade is because of the funding from Google towards Chromium.

And what was Chromium based on? WebKit. And what was WebKit based on? KHTML.

Chromium was simply a continuation of innovation that had started before Google even existed.

But in parallel it was Firefox that broke the Internet Explorer monopoly that made 3rd party browsers technically possible in the first place.

But all of that would have been irrelevant if it wasn’t from anti trust actions that prevented MS from doing the stuff they’re doing now (now that the antitrust probationary period is over) such as forcing their browser to be the default browser.

If it wasn’t for antitrust action against MS they would have taken these actions when they were much stronger and the other browsers were not as advanced and Chrome would likely have been nowhere to be seen.

Anyways, you’re wrong even with the idea that chromium has innovated the most. Most of the ideas that Chrome has today were implemented in other smaller browsers such as Opera well before Chrome ever integrated them.

I suspect if Chrome were to disappear tomorrow, browser technology would be far more innovative 2 years from now than it will be with Chrome as the dominant browser.
by yash1hi | 2025-05-01 05:53:02+00:00
I appreciate the insight! I hope this isn't something I regret, mainly because the product just came out naturally from my character. I still love learning, and I plan to be a life-long scholar (part of why we are both likely on HN).

Despite the "speed running," I didn't actually give up too much. I managed to be a treasurer/photographer at the school fashion magazine, study abroad, make a huge amount of friends, and even land a really nice internship during my time here. It all was condensed into the 2 years, but I did do it all! I do hope that this becomes a choice that reflects who I am as I grow, rather than a regret later on. Either way, I'm still a teenager, and I'm sure this isn't the worst mistake a teenager can make :)
by fsloth | 2025-05-01 05:55:02+00:00
The crazy complexity is stupid. It’s mostly lasagna engineering where the effort is spent to fix the design mistakes in earlier levels.

Practically at this point it’s configuring a Skia render context. This gives a known api to target for the graphics stuff.

There is near 0 value for designers to pain themselves over this.

The design interface should be 85% graphical.

The implementation should be a runtime for a configurable context and it should be configurable with code.

The ui given to designers should be a graphical tool. There could be many, many such tools!

I’m writing this as a graphics engineer who has followed this for over 20 years. I would love to hear engineering based counter arguments to this pov.
Ask HN: Parents of young kids: how do you teach that hitting is not acceptable?
by recursiverogue | 2025-05-01 05:55:08+00:00
Our 5-year-old sometimes hits when he’s frustrated—usually in situations where he feels overwhelmed, ignored, or forced into something he doesn’t want to do. At home, we’ve been working on helping him name his feelings, pause before reacting, and repair after a mistake.

The real challenge is at school. When he hits or pushes (even mildly), the consequences are immediate and severe—being removed from class, suspension, etc. While I understand the need for safety and boundaries, these responses often don’t seem to help him learn better regulation. In fact, they sometimes make things worse by increasing his anxiety and reinforcing feelings of exclusion.

We’re trying to partner with the school, but it’s hard to find alignment between what’s developmentally appropriate and what fits the school’s behavioral model.

I’m looking for practical, effective strategies that have worked for you—especially things that build empathy or help with self-regulation.

Would love to hear from other parents, educators, or folks who’ve been through this.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-01 05:55:28+00:00
> European Commission ended up in court trying to keep Ursula von der Leyen's messages secret 'claiming that the texts were “by [their] nature short-lived” and were not covered by the EU’s freedom of information law'

Sure. They still wound up in court. Hegseth hasn't had to go to court to defend himself because he hasn't even been investigated. You really have to go back to the Austro-Hungarian Empire to find these levels of exploitable ineptitude at the highest ranks of a major military structure.
by taftster | 2025-05-01 05:55:37+00:00
You're speaking my language here. I think this is exactly what happens when a company has cornered the market. We have completely stagnated, as you say, for at least a decade, maybe more.

Lots of innovation has happened, don't get me wrong. And maybe the web browser as we know is "mature" and therefore lacking need to evolve.

But I'd argue (as I did in a sibling comment) that maybe this drying up of funds could pave the way for new innovation. The web, the creative parts of the web, and definitely the internet as well, didn't have monster budgets to drive its innovation originally. It had some (DARPA, et al), but not like today.
by realusername | 2025-05-01 05:55:48+00:00
> because having a closed platform looks like the only way to enforce a minimum standard of quality and to keep malware out precisely because normal-human-users (i.e. our collective mothers) will install malware because the installation instructions

Well no, the most secure platform in 2025 is still the web. You can't get as much data in a web browser as you can in a mobile app and the sandboxing is tighter.

And I may mention that the majority of the appstore revenue comes from casino like games, not really something I would give it to my family.

And sure, I'm opened to the idea that the appstore was innovative in 2008, unfortunately for Apple, we're now in 2025 and it clearly isn't anymore.
by kylebenzle | 2025-05-01 05:55:52+00:00
I read a lot of sci-fi and because it's come up in recommendations I've tried two or three times to read that book, "This Is How You Lose the Time War".

The popularity of that book along with stuff like N.K. Jemisin winning "Best SciFi book" of the year 3 years in a row prove more than ever that the vast majority of people simply don't have taste in the sense they can not decide if they actually like something or not they can only like what other people like.

That book was objectively bad but it keeps showing up on the top of best sci-fi book lists for some reason and so a lot of people keep (mistakingly) thinking they liked it.
by ActorNightly | 2025-05-01 05:56:15+00:00
Yes, its unconstitutional.

However, doing something like declaring election fraud, having Vance not certify the vote, and then in chaos, remaining in power, its totally doable, granted he has legal immunity.

The things is, they are doing so much illegal shit that they know if Dems get in power, people will go to prison. So everyone around him has as large incentive to go along.
by andelink | 2025-05-01 05:56:27+00:00
"Cutting off the funding" is the most insane framing of the situation. It makes the DOJ sound like the wrongdoers or ones responsible here. This "funding" should never have happened in the first place. It totally distorts the economics of web browsers while also giving Google undue influence over the whole ecosystem. But sure, some browser developers will no longer be receiving some income, so let's allow it. Makes zero sense.

I personally am excited to see what changes. Who cares if it costs more money for Apple, Mozilla, Microsoft. There are real costs to browser work that they should be feeling. Even if it slows down feature development, so what? I don't see how this can be worse than the status quo that got us here.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-01 05:56:42+00:00
> Does this speak to some sort of weakness in these kinds of people or the addictiveness of social media?

They're online because their followers are online. Social media may be the actual lead pipes to our empire [1].

So yes, they are absolutely weaker than leaders with digital hygiene. But the reason they're there is because the American public is similarly weaker.

[1] https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/wi...
by taftster | 2025-05-01 05:57:13+00:00
I wonder if it's only downhill once you have reached your own point of enlightenment. For me, that wasn't late 00's, but more like late 90's and early 00's. Maybe that was my coming of age.

To me, it's been downhill pretty much before it got started. I'm always feeling "behind" having missed the fun at any stage.
by beloch | 2025-05-01 05:57:30+00:00
The other members of the five eyes had better be careful about what they share with the U.S. while this is going on.

Public key encryption, like Signal uses, offers good security for most purposes. e.g. It's fantastic for credit card transactions. The problem with using it for transmitting state secrets is that you can't rely on it for long-term secrecy. Even if you avoid MITM or other attacks, a message sent via Signal today could be archived in ciphertext and attacked ten years from now with the hardware/algorithms of ten years in the future. Maybe Signal's encryption will remain strong in ten years. Maybe it will be trivial to crack. If the secrets contained in that message are still sensitive ten years from now, you have a problem.

Anything sent with Signal needs to be treated as published with an unknown delay. If you're sharing intelligence with the U.S., you probably shouldn't find that acceptable.
by magicalhippo | 2025-05-01 05:57:35+00:00
Yeah I find generally YouTube to recommend me interesting stuff.

I've gotten recommended videos by creators with <1k subs that I really enjoyed, and many with <10k subs.

I've gotten recommended videos with topics I hadn't really thought about but which I ended up enjoying.

Sure there's about 10% or so that I'm not interested in, but I just mark those as "don't recommend channel" and move on. And the times I just need to check out some stupid clickbait, I make sure to remove it from my history afterwards.
by 8n4vidtmkvmk | 2025-05-01 05:57:47+00:00
Even without AI winter, I don't know how you can catch up to intellij. Vscode is a hodge podge of dubious quality plugins by randos. I'm sure you can build yourself a nice IDE by being very selective, but part of what I'm paying for is the curation and cohesiveness, and I think you need a big player that is invested in building something for a large variety of use cases. I think Microsoft has their own set of tooling that works for them at their company and so does Apple and I'm not sure Google really wants to make a public IDE. Any small scale startup will take many years to catch up.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-05-01 05:58:18+00:00
Those at least have to be downloaded and installed by the user, which indicates a high level of intent/consent and is difficult to do accidentally. In the browser environment, malicious content can be navigated to without any user intent or consent whatsoever, which when combined with holes punched in browser sandboxes for the sake of fancy features makes for danger with a dramatically larger scope.
by scripturial | 2025-05-01 05:58:57+00:00
A company can lock the hardware but not the software, or lock the software but not the hardware? I’ve not heard this idea before, it sounds like an extremely logical idea. It would easily be achieved by splitting apple in two. I wonder if there are any downsides to that? The “walled garden” of hardware and software does have some benefits, but the cost to society is too high.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-05-01 05:59:27+00:00
I don't know what is different on your system, but my Windows startup experience is that it's blazing fast. Granted, that's on a gaming rig with a decent CPU and it's Windows 10, not 11, but I don't remember having to do any custom de-shittification and it boots way faster than Linux, short enough to not really perceive the boot process as an interruption.
by pama | 2025-05-01 06:00:06+00:00
Unfortunately the intuition and the math proofs so far suggest that autoregressive training is learning the joint distribution of probabilistic streams of tokens much better than diffision models do or will ever do. My intuitive take is that the conditional probability distribtion of decoder-only autoregressive models is at just the right level of complexity for probabilistic models to learn accurately enough. Intuitively (and simplifying things at the risk of breaking rigor), the diffusion (or masked models) have to occasionally issue tokens with less information and thus higher variance than a pure autoregressive model would have to do, so the joint distribution, ie the probability of the whole sentence/answer will be lower and thus diffusion models will never get precise enough. Of course, during generation the sampling techniques influence the above simplified idea dramatically and the typical randomized sampling for next token prediction is suboptimal and could be beaten by a carefully designed block diffusion sampler in principle in some contexts though I havent seen real examples of it yet. But the key ideas of the above scribbles are still valid: autoregresive models will always be better (or at least equal) probabilistic models of sequential data than diffusion models will be. So the diffusion models mostly offer a tradeoff for performance vs quality. Sometimes there is a lot of room for that tradeoff in practice.