MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bigyabai | 2025-05-01 05:25:29+00:00
> Epic wasn't able to prove Apple a monopoly, because it's not.

Unless your name is T. Cook, you lack the authority to make that statement conclusively. The judge claims that Apple is guilty of perjury, and never corrected the executive that made misleading statements. If that testimony was fabricated, then there is every reason to believe Apple is obstructing information that could benefit the prosecution. There is no other feasible alibi in this scenario besides their lawyers all calling in sick. It's one thing to make a mistake, it's another thing to insist it's truth.

Let's not forget that Apple was headed down this same road with the DOJ, too. They are being investigated for a pattern of behavior that is not new, meaning they very well could be guilty of monopoly abuse right this very second. Saying "because it's not" is like telling Lance Ito to drop the OJ charges. Apple is not guilty until proven innocent; but claiming their innocence in certainty is a base lie. You do not actually know, either.
by timewizard | 2025-05-01 05:26:33+00:00
> And the DoJ has also argued that Google should be forced to sell off Chrome, forbidding Google from paying for Chrome and Chromium.

Part of the DoJ's argument is that Google currently underinvests in chrome to keep the ecosystem locked in place. Particularly when compared to the insane amount of money that searches initiated from Chrome bring into Google.

They also believe it's an attractive business and will be easy to find a buyer for because of this. It's worth way more than Google would let you believe. Just look at what they pay Apple to _not_ be in the search market.
by LZ_Khan | 2025-05-01 05:27:25+00:00
First of all, congratulations. That's a huge feat and you seem to have overcome a lot of hurdles to make it.

That being said, I find it a bit discouraging that small-team passion projects with even the best product-market fit and minimal marketing spend only reach this level of profitability after 5 years.

Like, I can work at a FAANG, coast, make no real contribution to society and collect a 400K/yr check. Or I could go all in on a cool idea and risk getting no customers. Option 2 sounds more fun, but it's still so much stress and uncertainty for little payoff.

Do others feel the same?
by bigyabai | 2025-05-01 05:27:49+00:00
Finder and Notes are artificially and arbitrarily designed to hook into iCloud first and refuse any convenient synchronization with other cloud platforms. It is pretty easily argued that these apps are designed like this to upsell Apple iCloud subscriptions, not because it's easier or smarter to do that way.

Similarly, Safari isn't clouds and rainbows either. It serves the same purpose IE did back in the day; furnish a "premium" experience that is deliberately irreplaceable and intertwined with the OS. We saw this with the push notification API, "Add to Homescreen" functionality and so many other places where Apple dragged their feet and refused a featureset that would enable competition with native apps. This is a hell of their own making, Apple can leave any time they want by acquiescing to app publishers the same way they did on Mac.
by al_borland | 2025-05-01 05:28:52+00:00
For the occasional user, various online office suites are also an option.

On my personal computers, I haven’t use MS Office in close to 20 years.

I use it at work, because that’s what we’re given to use, but 95% of my usage is opening CSV files in Excel. I find documents are rarely written in Word anymore, and the use of PowerPoint is actively discouraged at this point.

If the parent commenter only uses Office a dozen times per year, they should quite easily get by with something else. Google Docs, iWork, a simple text editor… there are options beyond LibreOffice. Which specific options would depend one what those dozen uses actually are.
by almosthere | 2025-05-01 05:29:57+00:00
This isn't what fake news is usually about - fake news is a real event with an interpretation or spin on top of it that leans to an ideology rather than keeping the story neutral. The ideological spin makes it fake because of disingenuous assumptions.

There is literally no way I can tell if "poop drones are keeping NYC sewers clean so humans don't have to" without actually looking up the news.
by shoelessone | 2025-05-01 05:30:08+00:00
Thanks for taking the time to explain!

So your original comment / request was regarding USB specifically then?

I ask because I'd have guessed (possibly incorrectly!) that implement HID via GATT (BLE) you'd be able to support anything the BLE hardware revision could implement?

Perhaps the disconnect for me is that it's unclear when there is some special hardware that exists within the ESP32 itself (I think I2C, I2S, etc would be examples of this) vs something you are just implementing by manipulating the IO pins. Perhaps HID is one of those things?
by photonthug | 2025-05-01 05:30:36+00:00
This is going to be unpopular but.. just to illustrate that we didn’t have to be stuck here. Using things like xpra/xephyr to serve a whole x11 gui over web is surprisingly easy and awesome and like 1/100th the complexity of a modern web stack.

This might not be cheap to serve, but it’s cheap to build, and it makes you wonder about the intersection and inflection of those cost curves. And of course we haven’t spent decades optimizing for it.

Don't get me wrong.. REST APIs, HTTP, HTML5, all wonderful. But as a user, the cost/benefits of ubiquitous JavaScript in depth simply to win interactivity and single page apps at the cost of um, everything wrong with the web (and by extension much of the world economy via surveillance capitalism) are a bit suspect.
by scott_w | 2025-05-01 05:31:09+00:00
> What you could do is take a language that has arbitrary starting index value and set it to something weird. Like 42 or -5. Then rewrite your programs. See how many off by 41 errors you make. Then once you no longer make mistakes with it. Go back to 0 indexes.

Do you need me to comment on the difference between 0 and 42?
by snapplebobapple | 2025-05-01 05:31:57+00:00
That's not going to happen because the labor markets are fundamentally different. USA has a drastically stronger capital market that invests dramatically more in startups. While this is true, the wages will always be dramatically higher and the growth in jobs will always be dramatically more in the usa. After those companies grow decently, Canada will be the first or second stop for those USA startups looking to save some dough on wages hiring cheaper labor and as a place that will be much easier to migrate even cheaper third world labor to for a similar, cheaper purpose as hiring Canadian. Americans moving to Canada for Programming jobs will be ideological, not sound financial decision based.
by mickelsen | 2025-05-01 05:32:04+00:00
I'm not so sure about that, I bet we'd probably still have Flash, Java Applets, Silverlight and ActiveX controls. The web was a mess before. The recent capture by big platforms is more about taking you out of the web, into their superapps.

edit: On a second thought, as a dev now, I look at React, Angular, all these mega frameworks... and wonder if we're just patching over problems big tech baked into the modern web. First point still stands tho.
by taftster | 2025-05-01 05:32:17+00:00
"Almost at parity" in feature set, maybe.

But practically? How many sites actually offer an innovative and/or mobile-first version of their website anymore?

There was definitely a time when we had websites delivering various layouts based on the viewport size of the user agent. CSS media queries, flexible layouts, etc. were all very important innovations for a very short lived period of time.

Now, every serious web presence has moved on to offering their own mobile app, pushing users that direction. The browser was stubborn and erred on the side of privacy. So it didn't quite offer all the integrated (ahem, intrusive) means to interact with the user's device in order to bleed every penny and every bit of data mined from your usage and behaviors.

So I don't see anything lovely in the current situation at all. The traditional web -- you know the one where you surf with a web browser to discover the world -- has been dying for quite some time. It might even be dead and we just don't realize it yet.

We don't need web browser parity with mobile apps. We just need the web to be what the web is good at. It's a lost cause thinking that the web browser will ever integrate with a portable device quite the same as a native app. Those days are gone.
by mil22 | 2025-05-01 05:32:37+00:00
This matches my own personal experience of corporate America, and is one of the primary reasons I left.

And it’s not just the lying that’s the problem - it’s the lack of critical thinking, the gullibility, the willingness to suspend disbelief and give benefit of the doubt and credit where it’s not due, amongst those being lied to, be they employees, or voters.

The way out is to see through it, to question it, and to stop acquiescing to it. If we all do that, the liars will never ascend to the positions of power we have allowed them to have over us today.
by shoelessone | 2025-05-01 05:33:46+00:00
Thanks for the link, but yeah as the other poster mentioned, this is for a dev board. I'd be interested in buying the module (which is somewhere between the bare IC and the dev board). Here is an example from their store of an ESP32-S3 module: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006334720108.html?pdp_np...
by tsimionescu | 2025-05-01 05:33:58+00:00
I think both things are needed. Despite what you're saying, shareholders have the ultimate responsibility and control over the company: they own it, they name the executives, and all the profits are ultimately returned to them. So it's absolutely necessary for the shareholders to be penalized, massively, if they profitted massively off of illegal business practices. Even if the executives were hiding this illegality from them, they are still responsible for having set up the company in a way that allowed that.

If you only punish the executives for illegal business practices, but leave the company alone, then you create an incentive to hire patsies as executives, continue letting them do illegal stuff, go to jail, and pay them handsomely after they get out.

Ultimately it has to be the company that's losing money when the company made money from illegal business, otherwise the company can just find other people willing to continue and provide for everyone who gets caught.
by otterley | 2025-05-01 05:34:25+00:00
Before resorting to violence, the remedy is to impeach and convict the President, and, failing that, elect a replacement President. Only if the incumbent fails to cede authority should further consideration be taken.

And, to be honest, I’m not really sure that a bunch of unorganized wingnuts that slobber all over their big-man toys are going to prevail over the National Guard, if the latter remain loyal to the President, and a lot of innocent lives will probably be lost due to militia incompetence.
by fsckboy | 2025-05-01 05:35:03+00:00
>ASCII is not enough to represent my language, or even my name.

Hebrew and Arabic don't include vowels. While you think that writing your language needs vowels, we can tell from the existence of Hebrew and Arabic that you are probably wrong. It would take some getting used to, but just like that "scramble the letters in the middle of words, you can still read":

https://www.sciencealert.com/word-jumble-meme-first-last-let...

>Aocdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Vinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the Itteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt ting is taht the frist and Isat Itteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcusee the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey teter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

your language, too, is redundant and could be modified to be simpler to write.

I'm not asking you to write your language with no vowels, I'm simply saying you could reduce to ASCII, get used to it, and civilization could move on. Stop clinging to the past, you are holding up the flying cars.
by snapplebobapple | 2025-05-01 05:35:53+00:00
You should read his plan again. It's not for you, it's for business and/or government owning rental property that you will then pay to rent. It's going to enrich large companies like Brookfield, not help the average person own a home. The part about manufactured homes is also dumb. Unless he's invented better manufacturing technology, those are more expensive to build than stick frame.
by Mountain_Skies | 2025-05-01 05:36:39+00:00
Federal prosecutors have insanely high "winning" percentages but the closer you get to the local level, the more that drops. I suspect that local prosecutors, in addition to often having a poor understanding of the law, often try to up their win percentage by pushing cases like yours because they know most people will find it easier to just pay whatever token amount it takes to make it go away.
by hereonout2 | 2025-05-01 05:37:26+00:00
Maybe this misses the point slightly?

I'm talking about a time when investment in browser development and web standards was so lacking that being able to achieve things like this blew everyone's mind:

https://meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/menus/demo.html

Hackernews, were it around back then, would've gone as crazy for this post as we do the latest AI model today.
by shakna | 2025-05-01 05:37:39+00:00
Negotiation over plaintext is a vulnerability, yes.

Neither side of the pipe is secured, so absolutely everyone inbetween is a MITM waiting to happen. Someone else can negotiate what encryption gets used. Such as the still supported MD5 signing-only.

Which also means your IP whitelisting does bupkus, unless you trust every single interchange of your, and your clients, telcos.
by t-3 | 2025-05-01 05:39:37+00:00
How many politicians have you seen blatantly breaking the law like this and having no problem? It happens over and over again. A lower-level flunky would be in prison, but a political appointee is going to be just fine, forced resignation is the worst that could possibly happen to him. Our system is just that corrupt. The same thing happens with leaks - politician or cabinet member leaking is normal, rando bureaucrat leaking is enemy of the state.
by forgotoldacc | 2025-05-01 05:39:51+00:00
I'm going to take a fairly contrarian stance here and say that I've noticed zero improvement this past decade. In fact, stuff seems to be worse.

Google crippled ad blockers on their platform and ads are getting through with increasing frequency.

Stuff that really should be working on my browser or did before is now getting blocked because I apparently should be using a webkit browser. One example is my credit card is getting rejected more and more often lately. But things work fine when I open up Chrome and make a payment.

What things do I want improved? Popups/popunders still happen sometimes. There's still no real solution to block those annoying mailing list popovers either. The dominance of Chrome seems to have frozen the internet in time around 10 years ago. Nothing has really changed between then and now, while before there always seemed to be a feature to look forward to. I guess the last big thing was web assembly, and even that was released nearly a decade ago.
by d1sxeyes | 2025-05-01 05:39:55+00:00
I completely agree.

But autism is what we say it is (until we understand better and find some kind of absolute test).

A bacterial infection doesn’t care what we think it is.

Anyway it feels almost like the crux of what you’re saying now is “cases of autism have increased because we define autism differently now”. This is true, and I don’t disagree.

I objected to your suggestion that the increase in cases is largely illusory because it discards possible environmental factors, and encourages people to “stop looking”.

I don’t agree with demonisation of autistic people, but I do think trying to better understand autism and its causes is useful.
by bruce511 | 2025-05-01 05:40:57+00:00
Taking your suggestion in good faith, I'm intrigued by your concept of democraticly controlled, worker owned. Please explore this further.

I guess I'm wondering primarily what "democratically controlled" even means. Like everyone votes on every decision? Or we elect people to make decisions? Or we vote on "big decisions"? (Who defines "big"?

Most companies are democratic. In the sense that the shareholders appoint the decision makers. Shareholders -> Board -> management.

Your point about "worker owned" simply means the workers own the shares, and hence "democratic" would seem to be redundant. Unless you are suggesting that the democratic function is exercised in another way?

Now clearly Mozilla is a mix of non profit and for profit. A non profit doesn't really have shares (there's usually some other approach to appointing decision makers.)

So, I think you are suggesting that the voting rights move from "shareholders" to employees.

Naturally this opens the door to 51% attacks, or more specifically incentivises workers to coalesce into groups with mutual-support voting.

Given a reasonably high turnover in workers, we should therefore expect decision making to be mostly short-term not long term? (Simplistically, most people will vote to further their short term returns, ignoring long term goals because in the long run they're not here.)

In other words the company starts to behave a lot like a govt does. Regular elections promote short-term goals and results (don't start a project that will complete after you've left) at the expense of things like maintainence etc.

It also values political skills over say engineering skills. Being a good speaker counts for more than being competent.

Do you believe this structure will make a better browser? When funding runs low, will they make better decisions on which staff to cut?
by otherme123 | 2025-05-01 05:41:39+00:00
Or it can be auto-triggered. I remember a history of a Call of Duty game were a number of players were being annoying, cheating and making the game horrible to play. Someone wrote in the chat "Tiananmen Square massacre" and instantly more than half the players were disconnected.

Or maybe if you keep the convo about KJU being fat, you trigger an alarm that schedule a police visit to your house, in a state were they first act and then ask.
by uptownfunk | 2025-05-01 05:41:48+00:00
FAANG was only good for the name and the money. Now I would say neither. I think we are now in a post-FAANG world. Maybe at the highest levels sure you’ll clean up but not as FEE. Honestly there are a ton of private companies now (stripe, Databricks, the GenAI companies, etc where the name carries a lot of weight and you can clean up well if you have a few years).
by zzo38computer | 2025-05-01 05:41:49+00:00
If CSS is disabled or using a browser that does not implement CSS, that might also be an issue. (A mode to disable CSS should ideally also be able to handle ARIA attributes (unless the user disables those too), but not all implementations will do this (actually, I don't know if any implementation does; it doesn't seem to on mine), especially if they were written before ARIA attributes were invented.)
by WalterBright | 2025-05-01 05:41:59+00:00
During the Battle of the Bulge in WW2, the Germans infiltrated Allied lines with fake officers who would give orders that messed up the Allied command structure. The fake officers were Germans who spoke perfect English and had often grown up in the US.

The GIs discovered they could just ask the officers about baseball. A wrong answer, and the officer got shot.

I heard this from my dad (WW2 vet). I don't recall seeing it in any documentary. He told me I would have been shot :-/ as I had zero interest in baseball.
by sally_glance | 2025-05-01 05:42:11+00:00
The CMake (and C++) integration story for VS Code is not great... I ran into lots of issues when I tried some years ago, and now this happened too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43788125 I assume you can still get everything to kind of work, but be ready to commit to a fair bit of fiddling with extension settings.
by theshackleford | 2025-05-01 05:42:49+00:00
> and there is no way to hold your phone without touching the screen

Sure there is. iPhone or otherwise, I don’t touch the screen when holding my phone.

Might be an issue for people with small hands perhaps. I’m trying to figure out in what circumstances I would be forced to touch my display whilst merely holding my phone but can’t of one, so it must be a size/grip thing, or I’m just holding my phone like a weirdo.
by joshjob42 | 2025-05-01 05:43:15+00:00
What is a pet in the relevant sense here?

Let's assume you have everything in the Culture except the ASIs. So you have full blown Drexlerian nanotechnology, access to all the technology more or less possible out to the limits of physical law. Energy is functionally infinite, and if you want basically anything to be produced you simply order it from the AI equivalent of ChatGPT today and it is directly manufactured from base chemical feedstocks and delivered to you by a simple automaton. Food, clothes, furniture, any sort of electronics. Homes are extremely plentiful and similarly require ~ no effort to obtain, since they are just snapped together from atomically perfect panels. When you're done with something, it gets recycled back to feedstocks to be made into something else.

Okay. Now what? You're free to love who you like, befriend who you like. But nothing you do matters really for anyone else beyond sentimental value, since nothing you do effects whether they live or die (you're all functionally immortal after all, plausibly you can backup your consciousness and get resleeved if something truly catastrophic was to happen to you). There's no scarcity, no need to horde things, you play games and amuse yourself in whatever little hobbies delight you, and you socialize with those who you care to.

What exactly is the grand thing that you think people are going to be doing in that scenario that they can't do in the Culture?

It seems apparent that for the overwhelmingly enormous majority of people the Culture is identical to the case where there are no Minds, because to whatever extent some tiny portion of humans needs to make some sort of major decisions in a post-scarcity world with no Minds, 99.9999+% of people will not be among them. We see mostly people interacting with Special Circumstances (a tiny fraction of the overall population) and most of those who live on GSVs etc managed by Minds in SC themselves are also just going about their days and not involved with whatever machinations the Minds have going on.

Like, what is the problem that ASI really introduces here for regular people? And in a world where you are indeed free to leave the Culture (as we've seen) if you really want to, and there's plenty of variety in how smaller groups in the Culture live their lives, what exactly is missing? There is no oppression, no brutality, no war, disease, famine, poverty, or want and you're free to do as you like except kill people without their consent and/or otherwise hurt others. What more freedom do you really want?
by ivraatiems | 2025-05-01 05:43:20+00:00
Thank you for that incredibly thoughtful comment, caseyy! You are at the forefront of the high quality content that Hacker News is known for. I am so glad that we have this opportunity to speak with each other in a textual medium, where it's trivial to have the useful tools of AI mediate our conversation.

In fact, to ensure that my comments are 100% more legible and 500% more useful to the end comment consumer, I will leverage AI in all comment responses here on out for at least 10% of my words! This change will ensure excellence and improve results, and most of all, will not in any way lower the high standard of comments you've come to expect from me.

My new Comment Advisory Panel is fully ready to engage with any and all commentors who want advice on how to use AI to make even better comments.