MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yashvg | 2025-05-10 19:28:44+00:00
Summarized by o3:

1. Why YC cares

- VC “kill-zone.” YC says Google’s decade of default-search contracts (Apple, carriers, OEMs) froze half of all U.S. search queries, scaring investors away from search/AI startups.

- AI inflection point. Generative/query-based/agentic AI could disrupt search—but only if newcomers can reach users and train on data Google hoards. Without action, Google will “pull the ladder up” again.

2. What YC wants the court to order

- Open index & dataset access. Force Google to license its search index + anonymized click/embedding data on fair, reasonable terms so rivals can build ranking stacks + AI models.

- No self-preferencing in AI results. Google can’t boost Gemini-style tools or demote rivals. No exclusive AI-training corpora access either.

- Ban pay-to-play defaults. Outlaw “billions to be the default” (search, voice, browser, OS, car). No payments for choice-screen placement.

- Anti-circumvention & retaliation guardrails. Independent monitoring, fast dispute resolution, steep fines, and—if Google cheats—possible Android spinoff.

3. Historical playbook YC cites

- 1956 AT&T consent decree opened Bell Labs patents → semiconductor boom.

- 2001 Microsoft browser decree → Firefox, Chrome, Google itself.

- 2023–24 Nvidia-Arm block → both companies exploded in AI.

- YC says same pattern can unlock “the next Stripe/Airbnb—but for search/AI.”

4. Why HN should care

- Open Index ≈ ultimate dev API. Lets you build retrieval-augmented AI agents without a nation-state’s crawl budget.

- Distribution shake-up. Killing default deals revives mobile/browser competition; could birth real alt-search on phones.

- VC signal. YC telling a judge “give us a level field and we’ll bankroll challengers” means real capital is ready.

- Policy trend. Regulators now want to pre-wire markets (index access, AI data parity, Android contingency) before the next moat forms.

5. Bottom line: This isn’t about a fine. It’s about cracking open the data + distribution bottlenecks that froze search since 2009. If Judge Mehta adopts YC/DOJ’s plan, the door opens for real search/AI innovation—and VCs are ready to sprint through it.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-05-10 19:29:54+00:00
I am reminded a little of the Postgres-backed IMAP server Archiveopteryx: https://github.com/aox/aox

The schema from AOX always looked really good to me, but I never have gotten to really giving it a try. I wanted to use it, primarily, to get analytics about my mail and for search (not a daily-driver IMAP server).
by fsflover | 2025-05-10 19:30:30+00:00
> holding or processing user data as part of providing a service

Did you read my link? The Apple's data collection is far beyond what they need to provide the service. Unlike the doctor. This is my main point.

> Does a small ad business use personal data?

Again, you are missing the point. Look at the trend, not the current state. The ad business is expanding, and you can't be sure that it stays small for long. See also: enshittification, https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/
by fc417fc802 | 2025-05-10 19:30:31+00:00
> sites going to great lengths to block search indexers

That's not it. They're going to great lengths to block all bot traffic because of abusive and generally incompetent actors chewing through their resources. I'll cite that anubis has made the front page of HN several times within the past couple months. It is far from the first or only solution in that space, merely one of many alternatives to the solutions provided by centralized services such as cloudflare.
by kaffekaka | 2025-05-10 19:30:41+00:00
How do you know whether dying people think through the counterfactuals?

Of all the people I can think of, my future self would absolutely be on the short list for who I would like advice from.

My older self can definitely advice my younger self to not work so much and so hard, without meaning that I should "relentlessly prioritize relationships". (Edit: I already prioritize relationships, but not relentlessly)

In my eyes, this is nothing controversial at all. In this thread I am surprised that the concept of "deathbed advice" provokes so many people.
by fennecbutt | 2025-05-10 19:30:43+00:00
That's what I've found recently.

When I turned 30, I was like what the heck, I'll get a game boy color and play some games I played as a kid. That's since spiralled into gbc, gba (all models), psp, ds/3ds, ps1, ps2, xbox, 360 etc. Along with a now fairly sized collection of the requisite games.

I've been picking up all the games I missed on those platforms, because most people seem to have only played 2-6 games per platform when they were kids, same as me. I'm getting recommendations from friends of games I'd just never gotten into and coming out loving them and having many new perspectives on which game mechanics work and which don't. Especially given barely any modern games are coming out that are compelling enough for me; I barely ever gamed anymore before getting all this old stuff - new games just seem like the same old copy+paste for the most part.

Atm I'm playing through coded arms on psp, pikmin 2 on gc and timesplitters fp on xbox.

The gaming world has lost so much magic and fun stuff imo. From weird hardware like the motion sensor in kirby tilt n tumble, light sensor in boktai to game mechanics like the furious lassoing in pokemon ranger, or the unique gameplay of Archer Maclean's Mercury.

I haven't done a game jam in years but I'm so ready to smash it if I end up doing another one!
by mrweasel | 2025-05-10 19:30:56+00:00
Can someone explain Tesla to me, assume I'm an idiot. If Tesla sales are down, the Cybertruck is an unmitigated failure and now they are losing money on insurance, then why on earth is the Tesla stock not going down?

Not only is the stock not going down, it's doing well, up almost 5% year-over-year.
by stevev | 2025-05-10 19:31:06+00:00
One major obstacle to grasping high-level abstractions and their implementations lies in poorly designed systems or language limitations. At this stage, any human-produced effort—be it documentation, explanations, or naming—should be reviewed by AI. Language models often excel at crafting clearer analogies and selecting more meaningful or intuitive naming conventions than we do. In short, let LLMs handle the documentation.

— written by ai
by powerbroker | 2025-05-10 19:31:24+00:00
I was driving the Model X a few years ago and ended up T-boning a minivan at ~45 MPH. Minivan rolled over. Our airbags deployed. Post accident, I discovered my glasses remained on my face and it seemed that the airbag did not even reach my body -- with the webbing taking the bulk of the impact. Car took months to repair and ~$30,000.

Not bad when you consider we were driving to the hospital at the time, and the accident prevented us from reaching the hospital as well as preventing us from calling on an ambulance.

3 'assists' that the car gave us:

1. Crumple zone is bigger;

2. Battery made our vehicle heavier;

3. (speculatively), the 'crumple parts', crumpled more and costed more -- leading to less (none) bodily injury.
by progbits | 2025-05-10 19:33:02+00:00
It's not really stateless. How do you want to support SSE or "Streamable HTTP" on your lambda? Each request will hit a new random worker, but your response is supposed to go on some other long-running SSE stream.

The protocol is absolute mess both for clients and servers. The whole thing could have been avoided if they picked any sane bidirectional transport, even websocket.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-05-10 19:33:03+00:00
tl;dr:

>The overall effects of ChatGPT on enhancing learning performance, improving learning perception, and promoting higher-order thinking were calculated as g = 0.867, g = 0.456, and g = 0.457, respectively, indicating that ChatGPT has a large positive effect on learning performance and a medium positive effect on learning perception and higher-order thinking.

----

I would think that as schooling modernizes, there ought'a be separate components (one involving digital devices, the other not). I'm old enough to remember teachers admonishing "You won't always have access to a calculator," so the current tech already overwhelms...
by divan | 2025-05-10 19:33:17+00:00
Is it the same lines of RooCode task orchestrator [1] or claude-task-master[2] ?

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTCoding/comments/1k8641f/roo_...

[2] https://github.com/eyaltoledano/claude-task-master

Seems like this task orchestration is the next must-have thing for every agentic AI solution and it makes perfect sense.
by ThinkBeat | 2025-05-10 19:33:24+00:00
What is the cost for bandwidth here? As someone with a 40GB+ Gmail account, will I get billed for the transfer using this tool?

It is easy to fix though, since I can get Google Take Out (is that the name?) which I think is free and then parse file files once downloaded.

Still using this tool would be faster from a get it going perspective.
by LexiMax | 2025-05-10 19:33:44+00:00
I feel like the lack of marketing push is for two reasons. One is that it feels like Odin simply doesn't desire the kind of attention the other two languages have. Two is...I can't speak for Rust, but I feel like Zig punches well above its weight because of comptime, privileged support for Result <T, E> in the form of error unions, and having a realistic roadmap for porting C code thanks to translate-c and its build system.

From what little I've seen of Odin, it doesn't have anything in particular that's especially headline-grabbing. However, Odin does have one thing that Zig doesn't, and it's that the language is considered "complete" despite its git repository being newer than Zig by a year. When it comes to programming languages, I do feel like there's something to be said for ease-of-implementation, and although Zig _feels_ simple from a feature-set point of view, I imagine it has a much higher bar to clear in terms of implementation complexity.
by pixl97 | 2025-05-10 19:33:45+00:00
No, the word harm is in no way watered down, you just completely miss the context.

"We don't our AI buddy saying some shit that would come back and monetarily harm Google".

And yes, the representatives of companies are censored. If you think you're going to go to work and tell your co-workers and customers to "catch boogeraids and die in a fire" you'll be escorted off the property. Most companies, Google included, probably don't want their AIs telling people the same.

There are places we need uncensored AIs, but in no way, shape, or form is Google required to provide you with one of them.
by jmyeet | 2025-05-10 19:34:02+00:00
That's like asking the foxes how the farmer should manage his chickens. Kagi is a (wannabe) competitor. Likewise, YC's interest here is in making money by having viable startups and having them acquired.

I also don't think crawling the Web is the hard part. It's extraordinarily easy to do it badly [1] but what's the solution here? To have a bunch of wannabe search engines crawl Google's index instead?

I've thought about this and I wonder if trying to replicate a general purpose search engine here is the right approach or not. Might it not be easier to target a particular vertical, at least to start with? I refuse to believe Google cannot be bested in every single vertical or that the scale of the job can't be segmented to some degree.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/06/16/the-perfect-web-spider...
by bosky101 | 2025-05-10 19:34:35+00:00
I drew a cartoon/satire on mcp titled zombie prompting. You can find the original here https://x.com/0xBosky/status/1906356379486679521

Tldr; it's json array passed to llms. Swagger would have sufficed. How and why youcome up with the array shouldn't matter. We shouldn't need 10000 redundant servers.
by RainyDayTmrw | 2025-05-10 19:34:48+00:00
I'm less worried about GMail. It's much easier to start a GMail competitor today (in relative, not absolute, terms) than a Chrome or Android competitor, because of network effects. For example, Fastmail is tiny (comparatively speaking), and will probably stay tiny forever, but their service works fine, and there's no major obstacles (comparatively speaking) to replacing GMail with Fastmail for any of us personally.
by _xerces_ | 2025-05-10 19:34:49+00:00
If Tesla Insurance is paying out for parts to fix damaged Teslas aren't Tesla effectively paying themselves and so recouping some of the paid out monies? Sure, it goes on a different balance sheet, but it's all Tesla in the end.

On second thought maybe this loss ratio is based on buying parts at cost from the auto division and so there is still a loss there to Tesla who has to supply them from China or whereever.
by stonogo | 2025-05-10 19:34:50+00:00
You keep qualifying your comments with "by tech people" but the problem is that Google bought their way into non-tech people's computers. Every single Google product on every single pageload had an "install Chrome" link at the top. Every Chrome release blurred the line between 'signing into chrome' and 'signing into google' and, later, 'signing into your phone'. Most Google products broke on non-Chrome browsers on such a regular cadence that deliberate sabotage was a common assumption. So yes, Google has always been a darling to the "tech people", but the aggressive ways they worked to ensure that people adopted Chrome were very real.
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-10 19:34:54+00:00
First of all, the API is experimental, so a healthcare provider choosing not to wait for a stable API is already pretty stupid.

Then there's a variability of LLMs as they get trained. LLMs are (as currently implemented) not deterministic. The randomness that gets injected is what makes it somewhat decent. An LLM could at one point output a document filled with banana emoji and still be functioning otherwise correctly if you hit the right quirk in the weights file.

Reusing general purpose LLMs for healthcare has got to be some of the most utterly idiotic, as well as dystopian, ideas. For every report of a trauma survivor, there's fanfiction from a rape fetishist in the training set. One day Google's filters will let one bleed into the other and the lack of care from these healthcare platforms will cause some pretty horific problems as a result.
by pfannkuchen | 2025-05-10 19:35:13+00:00
I have seen less Teslas around in general since that started. I used to regularly wait in line at the charger, and lately there has been no line.

What you noticed could be a deeper correlation between driving ability or conscientiousness and who is more influenced by perceived social pressure to stop driving a type of car.

Most Tesla owners also have a gas car, so it’s not as if they need to purchase a new vehicle to change their driving habits.

Another explanation might be that the crazy driving was mostly from new owners before they got used to the acceleration, and with fewer new owners now the crazy driving has reduced.
by allturtles | 2025-05-10 19:35:24+00:00
> There wasn't much innovation in telecommunications once Bell's monopoly was entrenched. Once it dissipated, innovation was everywhere in the space.

I don't think that's accurate at all. If we take say 1920 or so as the date when the monopoly was entrenched and 1984 as the break-up, there was tons of innovation in telecom in that time period. Novel telecom technologies introduced in that time period include television, microwave relays, satellite communications, submarine telephone cables, cellular telephones, fiber optics, electronic telephone switching, packet switching, the Internet.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-05-10 19:35:32+00:00
> then you set traps like disallowing something in robots.txt and then ban anything that tries to access it

That doesn't work at all when the scraper rapidly rotates IPs from different ASNs because you can't differentiate the legitimate from the abusive traffic on a per-request basis. All you can be certain of is that a significant portion of your traffic is abusive.

That results in aggressive filtering schemes which in turn means permitted bots must be whitelisted on a case by case basis.
by throwanem | 2025-05-10 19:35:54+00:00
The argument in essence is that only permitting pharmaceutical companies these outrageous profits will induce them to continue investing the likewise outrageous costs of new drug development now that all the low-hanging fruit like antibiotics, and sildenafil and other antihypertensives, has been picked. This extends (usually by implication) to trivial variations in molecular chemistry which have no functional effect on a medication but which are used to extend patent protections solely on the basis of a structural change - a practice also visible in the history of one family of drugs I have mentioned, and one which without some sort of justification might be taken for an example of a law's letter being abused to violate that same law's intent.

Look, I didn't say I buy it. But you asked for the basic argument advocates make in support of such practices, and here it is.
by ethbr1 | 2025-05-10 19:36:03+00:00
> Give it more than a couple months though and I think we'll see it mature some more.

Or like the early Python ecosystem, mistakes will become ossified at the bottom layers of the stack, as people rapidly build higher level tools that depend on them.

Except unlike early Python, the AI ecosystem community has no excuse, BECAUSE THERE ARE ALREADY HISTORICAL EXAMPLES OF THE EXACT MISTAKES THEY'RE MAKING.
by 52-6F-62 | 2025-05-10 19:36:22+00:00
I’ve also experimented with them in that capacity. I like to know first hand. I play the skeptic but I tend to feed the beast a little blood in order to understand it, at least.

As a result, I agree with you.

It gives me pause when I stop to think about anyone without more context placing so much trust in these. And the developers engaged in the “industry” of it demanding blind faith and full payment.
by blub | 2025-05-10 19:36:35+00:00
People are paid to work on standard libraries and there’s a whole process behind developing and releasing this software.

Tokio on the other hand is the library whose maintainer decided to download a binary blob during build: https://github.com/tokio-rs/prost/issues/562 https://github.com/tokio-rs/prost/issues/575

Good luck catching such issues across dozens of crates.
by ethical_source | 2025-05-10 19:37:04+00:00
The worst case scenario being, what, someone implementing the spec instead of using the SDK and doing it in a way you didn't anticipate? Security and interoperability will not yield to concerns about generating FUD. These concerns are important whether you like them or not. You might as well be whispering that ill news is a ill guest.

At the least, MCP needs to clarify things like "SHOULD rate limit" in more precise terms. Imagine someone who is NOT YOU, someone who doesn't go to your offsites, someone who doesn't give a fuck about your CoC, implementing your spec TO THE LETTER in a way you didn't anticipate. You going to sit there and complain that you obviously didn't intend to do the things that weird but compliant server is doing? You don't have a recourse.

The recent MCP annotations work is especially garbage. What the fuck is "read only"? What's "destructive"? With respect to what? And hoo boy, "open world". What the fuck? You expect people to read your mind?

What would be the point of creating GH issues to discuss these problems? The kind of mind that writes things like this isn't the kind of mind that will understand why they need fixing.
by dgs_sgd | 2025-05-10 19:37:30+00:00
This is a good point. You have to strike a balance between immediate and delayed gratification.

I try and conduct myself in a way that future me could look back on present me and say "past me took advantage of life experiences that were only available at the time" (think: youthful adventures, travel, friendships, etc.) but also "past me did a good job of setting present me up for happiness and fulfillment" (think working reasonably hard, being conscientious, financial responsibility, etc.)
by pixl97 | 2025-05-10 19:37:53+00:00
At least in the US trauma therapy is commonly unavailable to people due to expense. Moreso the common stigmas around therapy can make it difficult to start the conversation, either due to fear or cost. On top of that quite often free or cheap therapy here in the US is provided by religious groups with their own, unwittingly sinister, motivations. Adding religious trauma to sexual trauma doesn't help in my eyes.

The dystopian horror is already here for a lot of people.
by throwitaway1123 | 2025-05-10 19:38:32+00:00
It's worth pointing out that Node has a built in globbing function: https://nodejs.org/docs/latest-v24.x/api/fs.html#fspromisesg...

> Also there's arguably design. Should a 'glob' library actually read the file system and give you filenames or should it just tell you if a string matches a glob and leave the reset to you?

There's a function in Node's stdlib that does this as well (albeit it's marked as experimental): https://nodejs.org/docs/latest-v24.x/api/path.html#pathmatch...
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-05-10 19:39:01+00:00
I'm not sure people understand what the consequences of taking away Google's ad revenue is. If a large enough bank goes under, it takes out not just the bank, but huge sectors of the economy, affecting many more businesses and jobs. That's why the government bailed out the banks when they failed.

The same will happen when Google loses its ad revenue. Google is an ad company. By opening up all its trade secret data, it loses its advantage. That will make it lose its core revenue. The end result will be Google collapsing entirely within a few years. Then those component parts people are talking about "opening up" will be gone too.

Here's a small number of things that will die when Google dies. Can you imagine how the world will be affected when these go away?

- Google Maps - Google Mail - Google Drive - Google Docs - Google Groups - Google Forms - Google Cloud - Google OAuth - Google Search - Google Analytics - Chrome - Android - Android Auto - Fitbit - Google Fi - Google Fiber - Google Flights - Google Translate - Google Pay - Waymo

In the best case, killing these will force consumers to move to Apple. You wanna talk monopoly? You haven't seen anything yet.

Apple has no alternative for much of the Business-focused products, so that will take considerable time for companies to adopt alternatives. But in the meantime, the world will become pretty broken for a lot of companies that depend on these tools. This will affect many more people than just Google's direct users. The whole web will shrink, and huge swaths of the worldwide economy will disappear. Businesses closing, lost jobs, shrinking economies, lack of services.

There are plenty of parties who want to see Google lose or take part of its businesses. But if it's not done extremely carefully, there's a very large stack of dominoes that are poised to fall.
by outlace | 2025-05-10 19:39:10+00:00
Well one could make the argument that Musk is a short or medium term problem and that in 4 years when Trump is gone everyone will forget about hating on Tesla and it will be a great car company again. Musk is in his 50s and won’t be CEO forever. So if your investment horizon is 10+ years and you don’t predict total company collapse then it might be a bargain time to buy.