MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Scoundreller | 2025-08-23 02:09:31+00:00
Canada Post and others are already building out a system to collect the duties (from senders...). Something operated by a company called "Zonos". Looks like they've locked in the Universal Postal Union & governments will become dependent on a private entity for all of their customs needs. I'm sure they'll keep their prices low. https://www.upu.int/en/news/consultative-committee/activitie...

To be determined what Canada Post's charges will be in addition to the tariffs. If Canadian items inflate in price by 35% from the first $1, that's going to cook a lot of sellers/sales.

(Note: if it's sold on a marketplace like eBay, the US state/local/county/blah sales taxes are already being charged).

I plan on jacking up my "shipping" costs to USA to make it revenue neutral. But it's a bit of a pain if you sell items with different countries of origin and tariffs changing by the bathroom trip.

Do the prices of consumer-imported items get captured in inflation numbers?
by cheald | 2025-08-23 02:09:40+00:00
Same boat here. I'm 6'10", 260, and athletic. I'm very acutely aware of the shrinking space available on aircraft, and there's precious little that I can do about it. I typically just get an aisle seat and raise the armrest after takeoff (and then spend the whole flight dodging people going to the bathroom and refreshment carts, but it's better than nothing).

There is a problem with heavily obese people taking up significantly more horizontal space than is actually fair, but it's absolutely compounded by the airlines shrinking the per-passenger space to the size of the average passenger.
by softwaredoug | 2025-08-23 02:09:45+00:00
The “our president made a deal!” part of it makes me skeptical of actual long term patterns past a Trump administration.

While not walked back completely, a lot of what Trump does is minimized and scaled back after the initial theatrical moment. Still in a bad place, but usually some TACO moment happens.

And then, in the end, it’s some executive action that lasts as long as the current president is in power.
by CosmicShadow | 2025-08-23 02:09:53+00:00
I sell a niche, handmade product for a living from Canada and 90% of my sales are to the US and this bullshit really fucking sucks. Even our shipping partners don't know what is going on and usually can only fill us in on or after a due date goes past because nobody on either side of the border has any idea what to do or what is actually supposed to happen.

Here's the stupidity: USPS doesn't know who is supposed to collect the tariffs...hmm it's the person in the US who bought the product, and you collect money from them, like UPS and FedEx do all the time. It's going to your own government, how do they not understand? I know it's unrealistic for mail carriers to be able to do that en-masse now, but I'm not sure why they think Canada Post should be collecting tariffs, they don't have employees that deliver mail...IN THE US! So we can't ship with Canada Post to the US now as they'll just send it back. Canada Post can also strike again at any moment, but that's another story.

So the current advice is for us to now ship our products as Delivery Duty Paid or DDP, which means I'm supposed to pay the tariff that the buyer should be paying all because USPS doesn't know how to collect the money to give to their government. I'm getting double boned.

Oh yeah, I also have to pay an extra $2 per shipment to a broker now in addition to the tariffs, which nobody really has any clarity what they will be yet and there doesn't seem to be a good source saying if the items I sell are CUSMA or not.

It's one hell of a mess for sure, and especially damaging when you sell low ticket items on volume. I'm going to have to jack my shipping, which will hurt as our shipping is already more expensive than what someone would normally pay from someone within the US.

Once we can ship Delivery Duty Unpaid or DDU we will expect 4 out 5 customers to send angry emails asking what these "Hidden fees" are as we don't expect anyone to realize they actually need to pay tariffs and then we get stuck on the defensive side educating people what tariffs are and who caused them and who is supposed to pay them, which is not great for business, sanity or time :/
by CommenterPerson | 2025-08-23 02:10:11+00:00
Doctorow's writings are good, and this book summary is excellent.

One of his recommendations is unlikely to go far: tech worker unions. Most comments on HN underscore the extent to which techies have bought into capitalist propaganda, which we slavishly repeat. We dream of becoming the next multimillionaire, but it's far more likely we'll get laid off at some point(s) in our career by the enshittification machine. A worker's union isn't communism, it represents the workers who build the systems. Germany, a social democracy, provides for a worker's representative on company boards. This isn't communism!

BTW, it's the reviewer who suggested abolishing companies, not Doctorow. Now that is communism. What we do need is some regulation of companies that have become information utilities. Same as regulations for the water company or the power company.
by shirro | 2025-08-23 02:10:42+00:00
Anti-cheat behaves exactly like malware. It inserts itself in your system in a privileged state to monitor your activity. It's only job is to spy on your behavior.

If you want to run it I don't see a problem. Use a dedicated machine. Lets call it a console. Use it exclusively to play online pvp. Don't use it for anything else.

Privacy and security conscious people who use Linux desktops as general purpose computing devices generally don't want anti-cheat systems on their computers. I have no problem with the technology existing for other people. Don't try and force me to use it or I won't support your games/service.

I think a lot of the posturing from game publishers about anti-cheat on linux is really about dissatisfaction with Valve's control of the platform and revenue cut. Competitors aren't prepared to invest in development to build a strong platform like Valve but they are jealous of Valve's income. Nerfing their product on Linux is likely a way of pushing people to other platforms. I don't know what they are smoking because Sony, Apple, Nintendo and Microsoft aren't going to be any better for them.
by DirkH | 2025-08-23 02:10:43+00:00
Name one other industry that has adherents that say its products will kill us all as a means to boost sales. Assuming you're actually claiming people are actually saying AI might kill us all to boost AI market share. Like this is absurd. Apply it to any other industry:

Oil companies: "Climate change will soon end the human race and we are pushing scary narrative here so that people will buy more oil"

Biotech: "Our lethal compounds can be synthesized to a degree to end the human race. Clearly me scaring you like this will boost sales"

Arms dealers: "We are selling bombs that will guaruntee end the human race with 90% certainty. Wanna buy?"

It makes no sense. Hundreds of top AI searchers with zero financial stake in the private sector have raised the alarm about AI posing a risk on the same order of magnitude as nukes, climate change and bioterrorism.

Saying this is all just commercializing the human fear response is the same sort of lazy dismissive reasoning I can imagine was used when the first warning signs from epidemiologists came out regarding covid-19. "You're just trying to get funding for your anti-covid-19 research or some other political reason & and you're just using covid-19 fear to get what you want, how dare you!"

How much risk their is I can agree is up for debate, but that the motivations of people bringing up thee is a risk is just to commercialize things is so blatantly false it is a comical view to hold at this point. One of the fucking founders of AI Geoffrey Hinton spent the entire time during his Nobel prize award speech warning AI has a significant chance of killing us all if trends continue.

Like what, you think his old ass really cares about boosting book sales or trending on Twitter for saying something contrarian or something? No, he sincerely believes what he is saying.

If none of this convinces you something is up, what will? What do you need to see for it to be reasonable to go from completely dismiss to consider it as possibly serious?
by oooyay | 2025-08-23 02:11:22+00:00
While I share your frustration can I also share with you that I think your original take is entirely dim-witted and ignorant that populations are not singular voting blocs? That's to say, I lived in Texas for a long time as a leftist and people like you would come in to dunk on our suffering. Nearly half the state votes Democrat but that didn't matter to folks like you. It's unproductive and isolates more people than it gratifies.
by arscan | 2025-08-23 02:11:40+00:00
Thanks for this. Browsing the latest sierra, microprose, etc games at the local egghead store was my absolute favorite thing to do as a kid. It was in a strip mall next to an actual mall, so my parents would get me to go along on shopping trips as long as we could swing by the egghead to see what was new on the way home.
by wmf | 2025-08-23 02:12:48+00:00
Retail stores have always charged 30-40% so that's where the number comes from. You can see the exact breakdown in Europe: it's x% for payment processing, y% for app review/downloads/updates, and z% for recommendations etc. They're fighting to hold on to it because it's billions of dollars of profit. Obviously the app stores do not need or deserve 30% but that argument could apply to any profitable company.
by 000ooo000 | 2025-08-23 02:12:59+00:00
AI is just a tool, and depending on ones seniority, a tool of possibly low value. Sacking people who elect not to commit to a tool, a tool THEY are best placed to evaluate in terms of value, is just as unhinged as sacking someone who uses VSCode over Rider. This is just another example of an idiot CEO, and it's depressing to think anyone might consider this anything else.
by csa | 2025-08-23 02:13:38+00:00
> The woman is going to claim it’s a service animal. There’s no real rules about service animals

I agree with your overall point, but there are actually rules about what types of behavior are unacceptable for service animals. Uncontrolled or disruptive barking is one of those unacceptable behaviors.

The store would be entirely within their right to warn this person and remove the owner and/or ban the “service animal”.

That said, unless you have a legal team that aggressively embraces these sorts of acts against people who abuse the service animal rules, it’s almost always more practical just to let it go. Some of these folks have significant psychological issues, and you’ve already lost once you’ve entered a conflict with an unstable person.
by nobody9999 | 2025-08-23 02:14:13+00:00
>I'm not 100% sure about upcoming changes, seems similar from what I can see, but ACA gives an option for this. No job = very low income = you'll qualify for hugely reduced premiums

The premiums are not reduced, at least where I live. What happens is I can deduct those premiums from the taxes paid. But wait, if I have no/little income, I don't pay taxes. And so I get no subsidy.

Is that what you're talking about? Woo hoo!
by YZF | 2025-08-23 02:14:48+00:00
A lot of the great things that were achieved were done by companies. Some bad things as well.

Companies (and I guess capitalism) is a great system. But it needs to have checks and balances. The problem isn't the idea of a company. The problem is companies with so much influence that the historical checks and balances do not work any more. The Internet, which was a public resource, is how those companies got to be so influential.

If we look at the Amazon example most of the issues could be solved via regulation. The company can be broken up. There can be laws that govern its behaviour (like extending consumer protection laws to cover newer situations). The problem is that where in the past law makers were less "afraid" to take on businesses now they are. Especially in the US where money talks and companies spend large amounts influencing policy makers. This is by the way not a partisan issue, it's a systemic issue.

EDIT: Maybe a precursor, or another variation, of some of this was allowing companies that had a business model of "circumventing" the law to operate (Uber, Airbnb etc.). Being a taxi without requiring a taxi fee, being a hotel without the requirements of a hotel etc. If this is our innovation then it shouldn't be a surprise when more laws are bent and worked around.
by stego-tech | 2025-08-23 02:15:26+00:00
> But kids are under extreme peer pressure

Here's the thing: kids are always going to be under peer pressure, and time and time again we keep falling for the pitfall trap of harming adults under the guise of protecting kids.

When it was the drug scare of the 80s, entire research about the harms of DARE's educational methods were ignored in favor of turning an entire generation of children into police informants on their parents. When it was HIV and STDs in the 90s, we harmed kids by pushing "Abstinence-only" narratives that all but ensured more adults would come down with STDs and HIV as adults due to a lack of suitable education (nevermind the reality that children are often vehicles for new information back into the household, which could've educated their own parents as to the new dangers of STDs if they'd been properly educated). In the 2000s, it was attempts to regulate violent video games instead of literal firearms, which has directly contributed to the mass shooting epidemic in the USA. And now we're turning back to porn again, with the same flawed reasoning.

It's almost like the entire point is to harm adults, not protect children.
by Scoundreller | 2025-08-23 02:15:32+00:00
There's two elements to this:

1. Removal of de minimis / low-value duty free exemption. Plenty of countries have very low thresholds to start collecting sales tax on imports. A moot point as a lot of platforms (Etsy/Amazon/Ebay/Aliexpress/Temu) charge the destination's US/EU/Aus sales taxes already. Usually a higher threshold to start collecting duty. Duty is much more cognitively difficult to assess. Historically, sales taxes were more than duty for most items anyway. US is now another exception here.

2. US not accepting "duty-unpaid" postal shipments. This is VERY unusual.

As of today, I can walk into the post office and send a parcel to any country in the world. The destination customs will figure out if/what duty/taxes are owed and collect it from the recipient. I don't need to know, nor care, what the rates are in Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Colombia or San Marino. The buyer should know and can complain to their gov if it's unreasonable/incorrect.

Next month, USA will be the sole exception to that. Air freight to USA is going to get a lot cheaper if anyone is looking.
by Guvante | 2025-08-23 02:16:09+00:00
The US imported $3.3 Trillion in 2024 and had goods value add of $4.9 Trillion of which $2.1 Trillion were exports.

Given generally speaking imports and exports tend to be distinct products we would need to add 118% goods production to not need to import.

The US isn't capable of doing that in even a decade.

And it is going to impact everything because unlike most tariffs which exclude manufacturing goods this set hits everything so you cannot competitively produce things unless the entire production chain from raw materials is in the US.
by abraham | 2025-08-23 02:16:29+00:00
For a long time web components generally built on four standards:

- Custom HTML elements - Shadow DOM - HTML imports - HTML templates

https://korban.net/posts/elm/2018-09-17-introduction-custom-...

Eventually it became clear some browsers were not going to implement and the design of HTML imports was better handled be ES modules.

https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/127482/on-wha...
by shirro | 2025-08-23 02:16:52+00:00
Cultures develop within companies like any other organization. As those cultures develop they tend to push the decent people out and promote more of the same. Some companies are clearly abhorrent. My argument is that its a cultural issue unrelated to the legal framework. You can find similar weirdness in any group of people. Those bad companies exist due to a lack of regulation and transparency. Unfortunately just as companies can amplify the potential of groups of people to do productive things they can shield bad people and become hostile to democracy.

If they are attacking us we need to learn to push back. I don't understand why people go from being walked on to wanting to burn stuff down. There is a really good middle ground and too many people have abandoned it.
by johncolanduoni | 2025-08-23 02:17:07+00:00
To be fair, some things should be legitimately considered to be removed from the standard. O.G. XHTML basically mandated that you accept XML logic bombs and we got over that.

Also, while this is certainly Google throwing their weight around, I don’t think they are doing it for monetary advantage. I’m not sure how removing XSLT burnishes their ad empire the way things like nerfing ManifestV3 have. I think their stated reasons - that libxslt is a security disaster zone for an obscure 90s-era feature - is earnest even if its not actually in the broader web’s best interests. Now that Safari is publicly on board to go second, I suspect it’s an inevitability.
by Bender | 2025-08-23 02:17:25+00:00
For my silly little semi-private sites I will likely shut off the clear-web daemons and stick with .onion hidden services. Some will leave and that is fine with me. It's just hobby stuff for me. I will still use RTA headers [1] in the event that some day law makers come to their senses. Curious what others here will do with their forums, chat servers, etc...

[1] - https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php?content=howtofaq#single
by ivewonyoung | 2025-08-23 02:18:09+00:00
It can happen yes, but VCs have very strong incentives to not waste their own money, if they feel like putting the effort into it. If they fail they may learn the lesson not to waste money, or even end up not having money to waste. In the government all the incentives are the opposite, to keep spending money or the budget would get reduced next year. If anyone tries to save costs, they make a lot of enemies both within and outside. They get nothing if they succeed, so the incentives are bad.
by shakna | 2025-08-23 02:18:21+00:00
The meeting referenced there, from March not last month, also gives no indication that they'd go ahead and make any moves - "stick a pin in it". But they did anyway. [0]

panos: next item, removing XSLT. There are usage numbers.

stephen: I have concerns. I kept this up to date historically for Chromium, and I don't trust the use counters based on my experience. Total usage might be higher.

dan: even if the data were accurate, not enough zeros for the usage to be low enough.

mason: is XSLT supported officially?

simon: supported

mason: maybe we could just mark it deprecated in the spec, to make the statement that we're not actively working on it.

brian: we could do that on MDN too. This would be the first time we have something baseline widely available that we've marked as removed.

dan: maybe we could offer helpful pointers to alternatives that are better, and why they're better.

panos: maybe a question for olli. But I like brian's suggestion to mark it in all the places.

dan: it won't go far unless developers know what to use instead.

brian: talk about it in those terms also. Would anyone want to come on the podcast and talk about it? I'm guessing people will have objections.

emilio: we have a history of security bugs, etc.

stephen: yeah that was a big deal

mason: yeah we get bugs about it and have to basically ignore them, which sucks

brian: people do use it and some like it

panos: put a pin in it, and talk with olli next time?

panos: next thing is file upload control rendering

[0] https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11146#issuecomment-275...
by mlyle | 2025-08-23 02:18:47+00:00
I think this is a silly take. Not all species had evolutionary pressure for cross-organism understanding. A different species that has selective pressure for social understanding and greater mental understanding is probably going to understand what an insect wants better than say, another insect.

That is, how well you can understand someone else doesn't depend just on common ground, but perhaps even more on how mature of machinery for understanding that you have.
by pixl97 | 2025-08-23 02:19:18+00:00
It's really more complicated than this.

There are two things there that tend to work together building each other up at the expense of individuals.

One is technology allows things to scale massively if you insert enough money.

The other is there are massive amounts of capital available for those that can spin a good enough story that said investors will get a return.

These two things together tend to lead to a few dominate sites at the expense of all the others. Especially when it comes to social sites and the network effects from them.

But it doesn't only affect social sites. In countries with strong IP laws like the US it leads to a few businesses that can raise capital to corner their markets by buying our or bullying any competitors leading to almost no competition.
by bb88 | 2025-08-23 02:19:41+00:00
The practical alternative to communism is capitalism. But pure, unadulterated capitalism isn't what we want. Otherwise we end up with lead paint in children's toys and adulterated pet food that kills dogs.

The reason regulations exist, is because humans -- for whatever god damn reason -- are willing to throw their fellow humans under the bus for a quick profit.

What if a company could figure out how to profit from destroying the social fabric of the US, even if it wasn't a direct intention of it's original inception? Well now you're talking about all of social media in 2025.
by dennis_jeeves2 | 2025-08-23 02:20:19+00:00
>dismiss them entirely, out of hand.

I've come to believe that this petty behavior is the default in most people. If in the mind of the observer something is impossible, and if that something is shown to be possible, it is ALWAYS attributed to trickery.

It takes a wise man to carefully examine a claim without being gullible. (My modified version of the rather banal quote: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but it ALSO require extraordinary investigation.)
by ants_everywhere | 2025-08-23 02:20:31+00:00
He's not a fallible hero. Has he ever been anything more than a propagandist?

He did some work on grammar long ago. Then he held back research in cognitive science for decades promoting nativism.

And he's spent most of his time embracing Kremlin talking points both during the cold war and post cold war. Some of that work includes denials of genocide that he has still not apologized for.
by WaltPurvis | 2025-08-23 02:20:43+00:00
> There's literally zero chance that companies in general are abolished (in favor of what, exactly?)

You have extremely overstated the author's position. He doesn't say anything about abolishing companies in general, and for the handful of companies that he suggests could be abolished, he says very clearly in favor of what.

He talks about possibly having public broadband providers instead of just (for example) Comcast, says there could possibly be "a nationalized search engine to compete with Google," and says we "could even have public alternatives to social media networks like Facebook and Twitter."

That's it. That's the sum total of the alternative he's proposing. Whatever you think of the merits or likelihood of that alternative, the idea is hardly a "childish" fantasy.
by johncolanduoni | 2025-08-23 02:21:26+00:00
I believe the spec is at XSLT 3.0 but no browser actually implemented past XSLT 1.0 (not 100% sure - almost nobody cared about this feature last month so hard to find good docs on support). HTML5 and C++ are cut from the same cloth - massive and no reference implementation so full of features that have been “standard” for 10 years but never implemented by anyone.