Never underestimate the level of grievance these people wallow in every day. Legitimately a big part of it is making up stories so they can feel like they have been victimised and can therefore say and do what they want in response because they were wronged first. The account you’re replying to is a masterclass in this exact behaviour
Unfortunately this is more misdirection from Apple.
When they were asking for community input as to what developers wanted to be a part of interop 2025 that then had to go for a further non-public round with the browser makers.
Apple then proceeded to veto all of the most popular suggestions and insist that then running grep over their codebase in order to fix a comparability bug [1] with chrome and Firefox version 1 was somehow a legitimate contribution precisely so they could game the interop stats that you’re citing here.
This is misleading. The “real statistics” you link to include non-standard, Blink-only APIs like Web Bluetooth and Web USB. These are not web standards. Google proposed them and both Mozilla and Apple have rejected them on security and privacy grounds. Google have not been able to convince anybody to implement them.
Web standards are not simply whatever Google unilaterally decide they want. Standards require consensus.
Jim once again you are jumping in to defend Apple no matter what the topic is. It’s a really strange behaviour yet again.
Since you seemed to be in such a rush to offer a defence it seems you misread what the chart was… like every other time this topic comes up over the past few years.
That chart is *the official web platform standards* and shows which tests ONLY FAIL IN A SINGLE BROWSER
So this idea of “oh no it’s just evil Google doing their own thing doesn’t actually apply here because that’s literally already accounted for by the fact that it’s how many of the official web standards only fail in one browser.
I don’t know why you keep glossing over this no matter how many times it has been politely pointed out to you.
> Jim once again you are jumping in to defend Apple no matter what the topic is. It’s a really strange behaviour yet again.
Is it possible for you to respond to me without personal attacks? This is the second time this week you have decided it’s appropriate to call me weird.
I have not misread anything. Web USB and Web Bluetooth are not web standards.
> This specification was published by the Web Bluetooth Community Group. It is not a W3C Standard nor is it on the W3C Standards Track.
The specifications literally tell you they aren’t standards.
They have been rejected by both Mozilla and WebKit:
> This API provides access to the Generic Attribute Profile (GATT) of Bluetooth, which is not the lowest level of access that the specifications allow, but its generic nature makes it impossible to clearly evaluate. Like WebUSB there is significant uncertainty regarding how well prepared devices are to receive requests from arbitrary sites. The generic nature of the API means that this risk is difficult to manage. The Web Bluetooth CG has opted to only rely on user consent, which we believe is not sufficient protection. This proposal also uses a blocklist, which will require constant and active maintenance so that vulnerable devices aren't exploited. This model is unsustainable and presents a significant risk to users and their devices.
> The low-level nature of this API means that it is insecure, has a massive privacy risk, and perhaps most importantly doesn't meet the web platform's device-independence bar.
> Because many USB devices are not designed to handle potentially-malicious interactions over the USB protocols and because those devices can have significant effects on the computer they're connected to, we believe that the security risks of exposing USB devices to the Web are too broad to risk exposing users to them or to explain properly to end users to obtain meaningful informed consent. It also poses risks that sites could use USB device identity or data stored on USB devices as tracking identifiers.
> We have previously stated privacy concerns, thus the concerns: privacy label. We agree with Mozilla's security concerns raised in their standards position issue, thus the concerns: security label. This spec also depends on a specific hardware technology, and enables dependency on specific attached hardware accessories, which risks the device independence of the web; thus concerns: device-independence.
Something isn’t a web standard just because Google decided to publish a specification. No other rendering engine has accepted these specifications.
> I don’t know why you keep glossing over this no matter how many times it has been politely pointed out to you.
I don’t believe anybody has ever said this to me before, let alone repeatedly, let alone politely, but perhaps I am forgetting. Could you refresh my memory? When did this happen?
Listen spending all of your free time to defend the worlds richest company no matter the circumstances is strange behaviour, I don’t know how else to put it. I think you’re odd and I’m not trying to be impolite but you’re going to have to accept the fact that people find your hobby weird.
You have once again however just done the exact same thing I accused you of where you are responding to an argument that nobody actually made and then pretending you’re somehow victorious which again is odd behaviour.
Please explain to me how you’re reconciling the idea of:
1. Apple and Firefox decided not to implement Web USB
2. The chart is measuring something entirely different.
In the web USB example that doesn’t show up in that chart precisely because more than one browser fails those tests.
The fact of the matter is that the world richest company makes the worlds shittiest browser and has some of the most unusual fans.
> spending all of your free time to defend the worlds richest company
I am not doing this. Every time you and I disagree on this subject we are both participating in the discussion, yet you characterise only my participation being unreasonable. This is a double standard that you are using to tell me to shut up.
> I think you’re odd and I’m not trying to be impolite
I have asked you repeatedly to stop this. At this point it is not so much impolite as deliberately antagonising. You know this. You continue to do it.
> but you’re going to have to accept the fact that people find your hobby weird.
This is not my hobby. When we disagree, you jump into personal attacks. That is what is happening, repeatedly.
Stop dragging these conversations down into the mud. If you cannot reply without being insulting, then simply do not reply.
You keep doing the exact same thing on repeat literally for years at this point.
You are the one who replies here looking for a response despite knowing exactly how it was going to go. Don’t be upset when you put yourself in that situation intentionally and it doesn’t go the way you want it to and for no other reason than to misrepresent the data to suit your favourite company yet again.
Please just do both of us a favour and don’t reply, if there was a block button on here it would be much better for both of us. I’m not trying to be rude to you I just really don’t enjoy talking to you.
I don’t see how this really changes the underlying problem of the device pays on you and then they sell that information to the highest bidder? I’m not reaching for a financial report to fix that.
Apple doesn't sell information, they sell access to eyeballs. Quite a big difference. The whole point of first OPs point was that ad revenues to Apple are not worth hurting the other parts of their business built around privacy. Pointing out that Apple shows ads for owned services within their own OS isn't a case otherwise.
Apple absolutely does allow wholesale data harvesting by turning a blind eye to apps that straight up embed spyware SDKs.
This isn’t some hypothetical or abstract scenario, it’s a real life multi billion dollar a year industry that Apple allows on their devices.
You can argue that this is not the same thing as the native ad platform that they run and I’d agree but it’s also a distinction without a meaningful difference.
All you've done is move the goal posts, and it's not even ads related. I'm not entirely certain what you're arguing, other than having some feelings about Apple.
That’s not how the law is structured. You CAN do that no problem but it’s then WHAT you do WITH that which is where the law comes into play. If it’s just for security purposes then there’s no problem I believe.
Have you actually ever browsed the secret “active” page where you can see what people are actually voting for without the mods putting their thumbs on the scale? It’s constantly filled with dead posts because someone said something that was vaguely unflattering towards Israel, venture capital, capitalism in general, the United States or Apple. Literally happens dozens of times every single day.
It's hardly secret—it's on the /lists page which is referenced in the footer of every page on HN.
It simply isn't the frontpage, for reasons that ought to be obvious to anyone who has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. How you guys turn this into sinister suppression continues to escape me.
Edit: perhaps this will help:
HN is designed to downweight sensational-indignant stories, internet dramas, and riler-uppers, for the obvious reason that if we didn't, then they would dominate HN's frontpage like they dominate the rest of the internet. Anyone who spends time here (or has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) knows that this is not what the site is for. The vast majority of HN readers like HN for just this reason. It is not some arbitrary switch that we could just flip, if only we would stop being censoriously sinister. It's essential to the operation of the site.
It's on display in the bottom of a locked homepage footer stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.
Footers are very rarely useful and I don't know anyone who habitually reads them. They usually contain useless but technically required legal information. Meanwhile the lists you actually want people to use are in the header.
The level of discrepancy between the rules as they are written and how things work in reality is miles apart. Every day.
Edit: since I can’t reply because my account was throttled for “posting too past” with a whopping 5 comments in the last 24 hours. Allow me to paste it here…
It would probably help if I were to bring a bit more specificity to my accusations here so we aren’t just talking about an abstract concept.
I’m making the claim:
1. The active page (what people are actually engaging with) and the front page (mods choice) regularly are regularly out of sync not just in general but in very specific and consistent ways.
2. There is a small group of people who intentionally use the flagging functionality in ways that have absolutely zero to do with the rules as they are written. People are incredibly open about this on a regular basis.
3. We are left with a de facto situation where that same small group are able to effectively censor what the rest of the community is allowed to talk about.
4. The moderation team seems to operate on the idea that everyone is just acting in good faith despite evidence to the contrary.
5. When the discrepancies between the rules as they are written and how things work in reality occur they are very rarely corrected by the moderation team and I don’t know what other conclusion to draw other than you seem to think that things are going great as they are and there’s no need to change anything.
6. You say the active page isn’t a secret but people are always saying they had no idea it existed. Surely you have some actual hard analytics numbers to show what percentage of logged in users visit the active page? I presume it’s in the single digits percentage wise but I’m open to being told otherwise.
The closest I can give to an account of "how things work in reality" is the 80,000+ moderation comments I've posted over the last 10+ years: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang&type=comment&dateRange.... You're free to decide it's all lies, of course, but if you (or anyone) randomly scroll back through that feed, I doubt you'll find much that's miles apart from the rules as they are written. In fact I'd be surprised if you found anything that could be fairly be described that way, because trying to apply the rules as they are written is a matter of integrity for us. If it weren't, we'd change the rules until it were.
I had to rely inline above because of some questionable circumstances but not here to debate that part at all.
But on the topic of this active page I do find it rather poetic that in this exact thread we have people asking what is this page they’ve never heard of.
When I call it secret, I don’t mean it’s necessarily a coverup or something I mean that nobody seems to know that it exists or that the front page doesn’t actually represent what people vote for.
You might want to use a more accurate word like 'obscure' in that case.
At this point I'm not sure what you're accusing us of, other than HN not being a different kind of site. The mandate of this place is clear (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and it simply isn't primarily to feature political/sensational/outrage stories. That's the root issue. The mechanics of voting, flagging, etc., are in service of that.
From my perspective, you're arguing for a health food store to devote its shelf space to chocolates and pastries. Or, if you prefer the other way round, for a confectionery to devote itself to turnips.
I don’t think that actually engages with literally any of the points I’ve made but sure, I wasn’t expecting anything else. Like I said earlier it seems from where you’re sitting everything is going great and there’s nothing to answer for.
I was hoping however you could at least shine some light on the active page question… what percentage of users actually visit in on any given day? We can play semantic games about secret vs obscure but it’s not a debate about semantics.
If you knew how bad HN regularly makes me feel, you would be attributing very different sentiments than those. The point isn't that HN is perfect or even very good. It's that your objections are ignoring what the site is for. Improving the site means making it better fulfill its mandate, but you're not arguing from that place at all, and in fact are (implicitly) arguing that we rip out that mandate and replace it with a different one.
I haven't looked up the number of users who visit the /active page because I don't accept the premise of your question. Of course fewer users look at it than the frontpage; otherwise it would be the frontpage. This is just another variation of the mandate argument.
I’m not here to try and make you feel bad but if this place doesn’t work for you anymore I hope you’re able to do something about that.
I’m going to wrap this up here. You unfortunately responded in exactly the way I’d expected to just hand wave away everything, find reasons to not respond to any of the points and then seemed to misrepresent what I was even asking for.
I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that.
Life is hard enough already and I’m not looking to make it worse for you. I hope you have a nice holiday season and good luck out there.
You're not making me feel bad! I just mentioned that HN regularly makes me feel bad as a way of letting you know that I definitely don't think this place is perfect.
I'm not disinterested in answering your questions—that's why I've been replying repeatedly! Nor am I interested in making hand-wavey responses; that would be a waste of time. We must be working with different assumptions, though, because I feel like I'm answering your questions and you feel like I'm not.
If you want to try again, I'd be happy to, but maybe we could take a different approach? I would like to know what principle you care about here. What principle are we failing to abide by, that you think we ought to?
Having been trapped on a 2 day flight to Madeira via Madrid, Porto and Porto Santo, eventually your powerbanks and headphones run out of charge.
EU621 comp was denied because the aircraft could not land due to wind.
I did spend about 12 hours in a fancy all inclusive on ryanair's dime (a bus arrived at the airport un-announced to the airport staff or us customers) while some slept in airbnbs and on the floor.
You can reimburse your costs of unplanned overnight stay, even when it happened because of weather. So those AirBnBs were also free. Even the taxi to and from there. Ryanair was unlawful if they hadn’t given this information.
Btw, there are power banks and headphones which can easily handle 2 days.
Surely you can recharge them on the ground too. Do Ryanair not provide in seat usb sockets? Wouldn’t surprise me if they saw an opportunity to charge £5 for their use (log into wifi and activate them etc).
You have to be a special kind of ignorant to try and say it’s a higher quality of life with a straight face. On essentially zero of any of the metrics which are specifically designed to measure exactly this does the US come out on top. Thats just a jingoistic nonsense you heard somewhere and decided to repeat it like it was a fact.
A number of European countries have PUBLICLY come out to say they are suspending cooperation on a number of different fronts. You can only imagine what it’s like in private.
My question was from the context of non-research staff looking to provide financial and institutional support to research staff - looks like your resource is useful for researchers but not for me. thanks in any case.
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