MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by echelon | 2025-07-13 00:49:38+00:00
The answer is antitrust.

The FTC / DOJ should strip Google of Chrome.

Honestly, they should split Google into four or five "baby Bell"-type companies. They're ensnaring the public and web commerce in so many ways:

- Chrome URL bar is a "search bar"

- You have to pay to maintain your trademark even if you own the .com, because other parties can place ads in front of you with Google Search. (Same on Google Play Store.)

- Google search is the default search

- Paid third parties for Google search to be the default search

- Paid third parties for Google Chrome to be the default browser

- Required handset / Android manufacturers to bundle Google Play services

- Own Adsense and a large percentage of web advertising

- Made Google Payments the default for pay with Android

- Made Google accounts the default

- Via Google Accounts, removes or dampens the ability for companies to know their customer

- Steers web standards in a way advantageous to Google

- Pulls information from websites into Google's search interface, removing the need to use the websites providing the data (same as most AI tools now)

- Use Chrome to remove adblock and other extensions that harm their advertising revenues

- Use Adsense, Chrome performance, and other signals to rank Search results

- Owns YouTube, the world's leading media company - one company controls too much surface area of how you publish and advertise

- Pushes YouTube results via Google and Android

... and that's just scratching the surface.

Many big tech companies should face this same judgment, but none of the rest are as brazen or as vampiric as Google.
by autobodie | 2025-07-13 00:50:31+00:00
>the only correct course of action is to ditch Chrome

History shows mere boycotts to always be abysmal failures one after another. The only few examples of ostensible outcomes were critically meaningless and necessitate zero-friction alternatives, like when bud light was encouraged to spend a bit of its marketing budget differently — wow, really showed them!!

There's no detour for politics.
by rs186 | 2025-07-13 00:51:50+00:00
If you really care, it's ok to just Firefox for the majority of your web browsing activities but use Chrome or a fork for PWA.

Although using Firefox increasingly means a worse experience, including:

* infinite loop of Cloudflare verification * inferior performance compared to Chrome (page loading, large page scrolling) * subtle bugs (e.g. audio handling) * WebUSB support

I have personally run into all of them. Some are under Firefox's control but others are not. I do still use Firefox for most websites unless it's technically not possible, but unfortunately the exception is happening more and more.
by Waterluvian | 2025-07-13 00:51:51+00:00
Maybe arguing over different interpretations of it, but I think it's obviously true. Once you become separated by too many generations from the first-person experience of a world war, a famine, now-preventable childhood illnesses and deaths, fascism, etc. it becomes impossible to truly grok the fully weight and critical importance of why we take these menaces so seriously. And some of these things have happened more recently to some, and you don't see people from those regions being as confused as Americans, for example, for why you don't embrace fascism, or Russia, or anti vaccinations, etc.

When a population spends a generations enjoying a world without all these diseases, they lose the social herd immunity to the intellectual stupidity that's proliferating today, now helped along by increasingly prominent figures, including one government health department head [1][2][3].

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/07/08/nx...

[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-health-secr...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
by strken | 2025-07-13 00:51:52+00:00
If the US government calls it one thing and everyone else calls it another, that's a dispute. I'm Australian. It is called the gulf of Mexico here. I still acknowledge that there is now a naming dispute between the US and basically everyone else.

The exact word "controversy" might have been the wrong choice by me, but whatever, I'm not a Wikipedia editor and I don't run Google Maps. The world has standards for dealing with government disputes and with i8n.
by yupitsme123 | 2025-07-13 00:54:06+00:00
I think you kind of missed his point. The current era of tourism does to foreign cities what gentrification did to working class neighborhoods.

At first, people want a taste of something different and authentic. But eventually the place sells out and stops being a real place and starts catering to the new entrants, pushing out the natives in the process.

Florence is a good example of this. Not long ago it was a real place where real people lived. Nowadays everyone there is a foreigner, including the workers and the people who own the businesses and Airbnbs. A tourist goes there and feels like they've gotten to know Italy, but really all they experienced was a theme park designed to take their money by catering to their expectations of what Italy is supposed to be like.
by overfeed | 2025-07-13 00:57:15+00:00
Also works perfectly fine in fire-and-forget, non-interactive agentic workflows. My dream scenario is that I create a bunch of kanban tickets and assign them to one or more AI personas[1], and wake up to some Pull Requests the next morning. I'd me more concerned about tickets-per-day, and not tk/s as I have no interest in watching the inner-workings of the model.

1. Some more creative than others, with slightly different injected prompts or perhaps even different models entirely.
by lucb1e | 2025-07-13 00:57:20+00:00
I don't think you're normalizing ad-supported content when running an ad blocker

As for paying for the content you consume, most of the costs aren't on Google's side. I can understand paying for Youtube as a shortcut to hopefully giving some pennies to each person you watch, though, at least for those with no moral objection to making Google's/Youtube's monopoly in online video stronger
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-07-13 00:57:25+00:00
> but also because the law sets the standard, it can also provide a new one.

If the people writing the law cared about privacy they wouldn't have passed that one, and anybody who does would be repealing it rather than trying to find the best shade of lipstick for the pig.

> Which information is collected is made legible by the user agents

This is the part you don't need a law in order to do because the user can choose their user agent. Or if they can't, you should stop talking about any of this and go fix your antitrust problem.

> you are still legally required to age verify online alcohol purchases but

By conceding this you've already lost, because:

> it’s illegal to use information collected for that purpose for other purposes

This is the part which is hopeless. If they have the information, you're already screwed, because once they have it it's almost impossible for you or the government to know what they're doing with it, which makes those laws nearly impossible to enforce. And on top of that, a large part of the problem is what criminals or governments do once there is a legally-mandated database of all of that stuff, and those entities aren't constrained by laws.

Which is why anybody who really cares about this knows that the only solution is to not have the law requires that data to be collected.

> Good luck changing financial disclosure laws, though

"Slippery slope is a fallacy", they said. "It's just one inch", they said.
by cls59 | 2025-07-13 00:57:36+00:00
Many businesses in the US check ID at the door. If you are underage, they don't let you in.

On the surface it seems reasonable to ask for an equivalent ID check online.

But. The bouncer doesn't photocopy my ID and store it in a poorly secured back room that is regularly raided by criminal enterprises or outright sold by unscrupulous owners of the establishment. Similarly, they don't check in with the government in a manner that leaves a record.

I'm fine with an ID check, but I think it is also reasonable to demand the same level of privacy that one gets when visiting a bar, casino, burlesque club, or similar establishment.
by 8n4vidtmkvmk | 2025-07-13 00:58:56+00:00
Excuse me. If it's on MDN, I'm going to use it if it's useful for my app. Not my fault if not all browsers can keep up! Half JK. If I get user complaints I'll patch them for other browsers but I'm only one person so it's hard and I rely on user feedback. (Submit bug reports y'all)
by do_not_redeem | 2025-07-13 00:59:20+00:00
I'm generally a fan of Zig, but it's a little sad seeing them go all in on green threads (aka fibers, aka stackful coroutines). Rust got rid of their Runtime trait (the rough equivalent of Zig's Io) before 1.0 because it performed badly. Languages and OS's have had to learn this lesson the hard way over and over again:

https://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG21/docs/papers/2018/p13...

> While fibers may have looked like an attractive approach to write scalable concurrent code in the 90s, the experience of using fibers, the advances in operating systems, hardware and compiler technology (stackless coroutines), made them no longer a recommended facility.

If they go through with this, Zig will probably top out at "only as fast as Go", instead of being a true performance competitor. I at least hope the old std.fs sticks around for cases where performance matters.
by rkrisztian | 2025-07-13 01:01:43+00:00
If you guess at random, that's 25% probability to get the right answers, which gets you 7/28 points in average. I got 14/28 by trying hard and I still hate the result, but it's also true that the questions were largely impractical: noone parses dates like this in a real production app. We always validate the date format first. So noone should feel bad at their results.
by lucb1e | 2025-07-13 01:01:52+00:00
I was a bit surprised to find that Patreon also keeps a pretty large commission. But, yeah, at least it's not owned by Google and what else are you going to do when most creators list this as their only option. I'm just confused when there's easy options like sending cash directly to their IBAN or using a nonprofit like Liberapay (they just have their own donation page and, instead of taking a cut, make money that way: https://liberapay.com/Liberapay)
by homebrewer | 2025-07-13 01:02:29+00:00
Users were supposedly massively exiting Reddit when that cesspool imploded, but if you find one of those threads through any search engine and click around on usernames who were leaving their "last messages ever, fuck reddit, I'm out", I'd estimate about 95% of them never left.

Do it if you have 10 minutes to waste, it's easy to check and changes your opinion about how much people are willing to endure to avoid actually doing anything.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-07-13 01:02:39+00:00
Requiring someone to have a government ID isn't anywhere near 100% effective because people will just borrow one from dad's wallet while he's not looking or use a device already signed in as someone else or the high school freshmen will get one from the high school seniors etc.

If we're admitting solutions that aren't 100% effective, why can't we admit solutions that aren't 100% effective but are much better at preserving privacy?
by strken | 2025-07-13 01:03:25+00:00
In all those cases, you can explain the existing sides and show the available evidence for each. This isn't perfect, but those cases don't show the imperfections clearly enough.

You have to look at the details before you find the grey areas. Consider the case of abortion, and further consider the question of the existence of the human soul. There's no scientific evidence for souls, but the decision to look only at scientific evidence is itself a bias towards a certain way of understanding the world.

This is still much better than just deciding to pick one or the other side and ignoring the dispute.
by andyferris | 2025-07-13 01:03:28+00:00
I think of it this way.

Given an `io` you can, technically, build another one from it with the same interface.

For example given an async IO runime, you could create an `io` object that is blocking (awaits every command eagerly). That's not too special - you can call sync functions from async functions. (But in JavaScript you'd have trouble calling a sync function that relies on `await`s inside, so that's still something).

Another thing that is interesting is given a blocking posix I/O that also allows for creating processes or threads, you could build in userspace a truly asynchronous `io` object from that blocking one. It wouldn't be as efficient as one based directly on iouring, and it would be old school, but it would basically work.

Going either way (changing `io` to sync or async) the caller doesn't actually care. Yes the caller needs a context, but most modern apps rely on some form of dependency injection. Most well-factored apps would probably benefit from a more refined and domain-specific "environment" (or set of platform effects, perhaps to use the Roc terminology), not Zig's posix-flavoured standard library `io` thing.

Yes rust achieves this to some extent; you can swap an async runtime for another and your app might still compile and run fine.

Overall I like this alot - I am wondering if Richard Feldmann managed to convince Andrew Kelley that "platforms" are cool and some ideas were borrowed from Roc?
by mrandish | 2025-07-13 01:03:48+00:00
> I still find some pages don't work 100% correctly in Firefox.

Sometimes this is simply because the site preemptively throws an error on detecting Firefox because they don't want to QA another browser with a smaller market share. Usually those sites work fine if you just change the user agent Firefox reports to look like Chrome (there are add-ons for that). Personally, I haven't had to resort to a non-Firefox browser or user agent spoof even once in well over a year now.
by kgwxd | 2025-07-13 01:03:54+00:00
To kids these days, a laptop with a something like Roblox Studio on it is pretty magical. Most of their "laptop" exposure is with Chromebooks that only run school stuff, everything else is on consumption-focused tablets and phones that don't leave much room for creativity, or even basic customization.

I have a Commander X16 and my kid had fun doing that Basic infinite maze program, but after that, my dream was over :)
by margalabargala | 2025-07-13 01:04:14+00:00
> I implore you to do some reading from actual medical professionals and groups on this.

Reading their comment charitably, one might want the trans youth to also get their information from actual medical professionals and groups rather than random internet strangers.

Analogously, sharing information about DIY at-home abortions with people on the internet is also dangerous as hell and will hurt people. In the world we currently live in it may be better than the alternative, but in a better world both of those are not pieces of information that anyone should need to find online.
by mlugg | 2025-07-13 01:04:41+00:00
The key difference to typical async function coloring is that `Io` isn't something you need specifically for asynchronicity; it's something which (unless you make a point to reach into very low-level primitives) you will need in order to perform any IO, including reading a file, sleeping, getting the time, etc. It's also just a value which you can keep wherever you want, rather than a special attribute/property of a function. In practice, these properties solve the coloring problem:

* It's quite rare for a function to unexpectedly gain a dependency on "doing IO" in general. In practice, most of your codebase will have access to an `Io`, and only leaf functions doing pure computation will not need them.

* If a function does start needing to do IO, it almost certainly doesn't need to actually take it as a parameter. As in many languages, it's typical in Zig code to have one type which manages a bunch of core state, and which the whole codebase has easy access to (e.g. in the Zig compiler itself, this is the `Compilation` type). Because of this, despite the perception, Zig code doesn't usually pass (for instance) allocators explicitly all the way down the function call graph! Instead, your "general purpose allocator" is available on that "application state" type, so you can fetch it from essentially wherever. IO will work just the same in practice. So, if you discover that a code path you previously thought was pure actually does need to perform IO, then you don't need to apply some nasty viral change; you just grab `my_thing.io`.

I do agree that in principle, there's still a form of function coloring going on. Arguably, our solution to the problem is just to color every function async-colored (by giving most or all of them access to an `Io`). But it's much like the "coloring" of having to pass `Allocator`s around: it's not a problem in practice, because you'll basically always have easy access to one even if you didn't previously think you'd need it. I think seasoned Zig developers will pretty invariably agree with the statement that explicitly passing `Allocator`s around really does not introduce function coloring annoyances in practice, and I see no reason that `Io` would be particularly different.
by aaronmdjones | 2025-07-13 01:05:08+00:00
Engine overheating even on idle thrust (if this happens after V1, you would idle it and continue the takeoff anyway; you are beyond the point at which you can safely abort).

Engine oil leak has drained the oil completely and the engine is about to fail catastrophically (unlikely on takeoff but you never know).

Engine is on fire (out of all of the things that can go wrong with an engine during takeoff, this is very likely).

Engine has blown up (ditto).

Engine is missing from the aircraft (not likely, but engines have fallen from planes on takeoff before).

Debris / Ash / etc is in the engine (not likely).

Severe fuel leak (not something I'd worry about during takeoff).

Probably other reasons I can't think of.
by tomhow | 2025-07-13 01:05:46+00:00
> Fucking troll.

That comment was unacceptable and I replied to them to say so, but it's also not OK to comment like this on HN, no matter what you're replying to. If we want others to be better we need to be better ourselves.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by LexiMax | 2025-07-13 01:06:24+00:00
Here's the quote about their plans for transfolk:

> Transgender people will see their existence denied and their rights stripped away under Project 2025. The authors equate "transgender ideology" to pornography, calling for it to be outlawed. While the far-right policy agenda cannot directly ban transgenderism, it aims to do so indirectly by labeling it as pornography, and then outlawing pornography itself - effectively erasing transgender identity from the U.S.

Source: https://doctorsoftheworld.org/blog/project-2025-lgbtq-rights...
by exiguus | 2025-07-13 01:07:22+00:00
> My intuition here is that this study mainly demonstrated that the learning curve on AI-assisted development is high enough that asking developers to bake it into their existing workflows reduces their performance while they climb that learning curve.

Could be the case for some, but I also think, that there is not much to climb on the learning curve for AI agents.

In my opinion, its more interesting, that the study also states, that AI capabilities may be comparatively lower on existing code:

> Our results also suggest that AI capabilities may be comparatively lower in settings with very high quality standards, or with many implicit requirements (e.g. relating to documentation, testing coverage, or linting/formatting) that take humans substantial time to learn.

This is consistent with my personal/pear experience. On existing code: You have to do try and error with AI until you get a 'good' result. Or highly modify AI generated code by yourself (which is often slower then writing it yourself from the beginning).
by fc417fc802 | 2025-07-13 01:07:30+00:00
Sure, every time mass communication got "stronger" various social issues were exacerbated. So naturally people complained about that. The same thing is happening here. A new technology is exacerbating some preexisting problems and people are complaining as a result.

> Every new form was said to be a herald of the end times,

The two world wars and surrounding economic upheaval arguably came close to that in many ways. "We somehow managed to survive previous technological advances" is hardly a convincing argument that we need not worry about the implications of a new technology.

> and yet here we are, in many ways stronger than ever.

The implication doesn't follow. You haven't explained how you would differentiate a system that had plenty of safety margin left from one that was on the brink of collapse. Without that distinction the statement is no more than hand waving.

> Im not arguing one way or another

You certainly seem to be taking a stance of "nothing to see here, this is business as usual, these recent developments pose no cause for concern".

> It's difficult to see how this technology is relatively any more transformative than any of the others.

It's difficult for you to see how computers being able to speak natural language on par with an undergrad is more transformative than long distance communication? You can't be serious. Prior to this you could only converse with another human.
by andyferris | 2025-07-13 01:07:49+00:00
It actually has much the same benefits of Rust removing green threads and replacing them with a generic async runtime.

The point here is that "async stuff is IO stuff is async stuff". So rather than thinking of having pluggable async runtimes (tokio, etc) Zig is going with pluggable IO runtimes (which is kinda the equivalent of "which subset of libc do you want to use?").

But in both moves the idea is to remove the runtime out of the language and into userspace, while still providing a common pluggable interface so everyone shares some common ground.
by azangru | 2025-07-13 01:08:12+00:00
> instead of learning Web standards, rather ships Chrome alongside their application

I am confused.

- The "shipping Chrome alongside their application" part seems to refer to Electron; but Electron is hardly guilty of what is described in the article.

- The "learning web standards" bit seems to impune web developers; but how are they guilty of the Chrome monopoly? If anything, they are guilty of shipping react apps instead of learning web standards; but react apps work equally well (or poorly) in all major browsers.

- Finally, how is Chrome incompatible with web standards? It is one of the best implementer of them.
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by mlugg | 2025-07-13 01:08:57+00:00
I'm not sure how you got the perception that we're going "all in" on green threads, given that the article in OP explicitly mentions that we're hoping to have an implementation based on stackless coroutines, based on this Zig language proposal: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/23446

Performance matters; we're not planning to forget that. If fibers turn out to have unacceptable performance characteristics, then they won't become a widely used implementation. Nothing discussed in this article precludes stackless coroutines from backing the "general purpose" `Io` implementation if that turns out to be the best approach.