I vibe coded a chrome extension that highlights new links on HN frontpage since your last visit, so that you dont have to waste time looking for which links are new.
I've been using a js bookmarklet every single day for over a decade. It sorts the entries by most voted and dims the ones already shown last visit. I won't post it here as it may mess up with formatting, so here is a link to pastebin:
"Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that.""
I know it's annoying when a comment is wrong and the correct information is in the article, but it's enough to provide the correct information. Empty putdowns etc. just add poison, not information.
I have another issue. Randomly my M1 Macbook Air's frames drop below 20fps and I can see a trail behind the cursor and when I swipe between diff apps. Happens quite regularly with cpu idling at 97% and 6-7gb of memory left unused
I've had this happen once so far in my 2-year ownership. A reboot resolved it and it hasn't returned (yet). Feels like it could be a display driver bug.
It doesn't matter what anybody says, if some users love you and it is sustainable then keep building and make it a big success. Don't listen to the weirdo-naysayers here.
A tangent but, a lot of google's sites disobey browser standards and rules like for example sound autoplay on load. When you visit https://santatracker.google.com/ or youtube, it automatically plays sound without any user interaction, which is impossible for non Google sites to do
> But they purposefully use CLS in Search to increase clicks on Ads
You present this as a fact, but it would be absurd that Google would use such a cheap and easily detected trick to increase CTR. It would be bordering on ad fraud and I'm sure that Google, of all companies, knows better than that.
Occam's Razor says that this is a stupid async content loading bug, which they subsequently fixed. I've never seen this happen and when I just tried it without adblocker with that exact search term, it didn't - the page loaded with the ad.
> You present this as a fact, but it would be absurd that Google would use such a cheap and easily detected trick to increase CTR.
3 years ago and I wouldn't believed it at all but around 2 years ago I saw it happen consistently with a colleague at the desk next to me.
I cannot say for sure that it wasn't an extension in his browser but I can say for sure that I think Google has been really busy tearing down the mountains of trust they had before 2007 - 2009.
Similarly, thanks to async ad loading, gmail replaces first two items in my email list with ads with such a convinient delay that I accidentaly click on the ads more often than I would like to. Occam's razor would say that if it can bring more money, it is not accident.
Accidental clicks are invalid clicks according to Google's own documentation[1][2].
For this to not be an accident, one would have to assume that Google actually makes more money from those invalid clicks, and that someone decided that yep, rendering ads asynchronously was a decent and legal approach at increasing advertising revenue, and requested the GMail team to implement it.
This kind of corporate misbehavior is not unheard of, but I just can't imagine it happening at Google.
It's much more likely that this is just unfortunate UX design to "improve" rendering performance without considering users on slow connections.
(I can reproduce this one just fine in desktop GMail - on the first render of the "Promotions" tab, the ads render asynchronously)
"No you don't understand: invalid clicks are things that happen on other peoples properties. You definitely meant to click that ad in gmail. We know, we're google, you can definitely trust us about this"
'Unfortunate UX design to 'improve' rendering' is the plausible-deniability they can use to justify this.
> This kind of corporate misbehavior is not unheard of, but I just can't imagine it happening at Google.
I definitely can, I don't think anywhere is immune to this once you reach a certain scale. They have a profit-motive to make money, they will absolutely try and get away with as much as they possibly can.
For example, the scourge of "people also ask" at the top of search results, that appears synchronously where the top result was a second ago, and has a randomly-generated container ID to prevent easy blocking. Not an ad, but, equivalently, content that I didn't ask for but that Google, for some reason, clearly really wants me to click on.
The android gmail app is horrible with this. They load a couple of your emails above ads so that the ads start on the second or third row.
And the re-ordering happens as your mails and the ads are loading! You might be about to tap your email, then the ads load in and you suddenly click on an ad. Or you want to tap the top row, but the app decides to put a different email above the ads and you end up tapping into the wrong mail because it was reordered just before the tap.
> [...] which is impossible for non Google sites to do
No, they don't. This is false. It's a mechanism called Media Engagement Index, Google properties have zero advantage, and any site can get a high score.
Chrome ships with a preloaded MEI assembled from global telemetry data, which is then trained locally:
This is part of the plan, but I find this angle to give too much credit to Google.
Once they reached a dominant ad network position their whole strategy has been “advancing the web is advancing our revenue”, and it bled into mobile to the point where building and maintaining a whole ecosystem for free makes sense as long as they stay the search and ad engine of choice (that’s the only thing they’ll fight to impose).
Chrome is built in the same optics: push forward the web and webapps as long as search is theirs.
I read somewhere - I believe on HN actually, some time ago - that a number of high profile sites were exempted from this restriction, Netflix among them. Really, wasn't this a thread right here on HN, saying that this was anti-competitive, oligopoly essentially, making any other sites of smaller competitors and upstarts automatically worse off? I'm sure someone will be able to provide a link...
There are other examples where only the large sites benefit while everybody else has to play by stricter rules: "EU Parliament bans geoblocking, exempts Netflix and other streaming services" -- https://www.dw.com/en/eu-parliament-bans-geoblocking-exempts...
EDIT: User teraflop posted a link to the list of "sites that are allowed to autoplay video even without any prior media engagement" right here in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24818178
Reddit and Twitter starts video with muted sound on my browser (Edge).
My guess from someone who had to develop a web video player at work, many websites will attempt to autoplay the video with sound and if it fails, it's easy to catch the failure event, they will mute the video and try again.
I'm talking specifically about Chrome. There's no web standard that says what a browser must do about autoplay requests, and Chrome permits a large number of sites to autoplay with sound on.
Web browsers are also capable of determining that autoplay on technically-not-load-but-automatic counts as autoplay. (There's even text in the spec about it.) In particular, they can tell whether it is in response to a user action/gesture on the site or not.
Chrome has some special logic about autoplay. The following page describes them, but I feel like it's a bit more complicated in more recent versions of Chrome.
Wow, this is terrifying. I am a big supported of Google and dislike the recent attacks on FAANG, but this is shocking to me. If they are exempting themselves from this, what else could they be doing?!
The comment implies that this is somehow hardcoded just for Google sites, which is not true. Autoplay is allowed for sites with a high enough media engagement index. You can check chrome://media-engagement.
The media engagement index is based on a user's past activity on a site, but Chrome has a special list of "preloaded" sites that are allowed to autoplay video even without any prior media engagement.
One has to wonder whether they intentionally obfuscate this list. It sounds like they “trained” a browser, and captured the resulting state. I’m sure you can argue this makes things more fair (we trained it using real world behavior!), but I really can’t give them the benefit of the doubt anymore.
It's generated by a Python script [0] from a list of URLs, but the input list doesn't seem to be included in the Chromium source (only the binary output of this tool).
> The pre-seeded site list is generated based on the global percentage of site visitors who train Chrome to allow autoplay for that site; a site will be included on the list if a sizable majority of site visitors permit autoplay on it. The list is algorithmically generated, rather than manually curated, and with no minimum traffic requirement. With the implementation of the autoplay policy for Web Audio in M71, Web Audio playback is also included in calculating the MEI score for a given site.
Will this not have some kind of self-reinforcing behavior, as the measurements are biased towards sites that are currently unmuted by default?
According to the MEI it actively measures user behavior and one of the most important measures is that a video is unmuted. From the document:
“The MEI is meant to allow media heavy websites (e.g. YouTube, Netflix) that rely on autoplay for their core experience. It is a non-goal to allow websites with a “good media behaviour” to autoplay without restrictions”
It doesn’t sound too good, and still doesn’t really explain how everything is seeded.
Amazing. I once built a web app with autoplay, which worked for me, probably because I was using the app a lot which gave it high media engagement, but didn't work for others, and I never figured out the problem until now.
That site doesnt even load in my browser... I only see the Google wave (Firefox mobile v6x)... but on the other hand, there are Firefox extensions that make websites load as if you were using Chrome.
How would an argument against Chrome this even hold up? Google has decoupled the technology from the distribution. The chromium browser is open source, any body can build on it and many companies have. The platform where chrome is pre-installed doesn't prevent the use of other browsers and underlying technologies unlike Apple. How does consumer preference make one a monopoly when moving away from chrome is not difficult at all as you have no lock-ins
Have you ever used another browser and seen a "This site works better in Chrome, download now" on a Google property?
They do it even to other Chromium based browsers. They degrade the experience on Firefox, Safari, and Microsoft Edge, persistently nagging people to switch browsers.
That persistent nagging has an impact, especially for non-technical users who might only understand that Google, YouTube, Google Maps, or another Google property they trust is telling them that Chrome is better. Well, if Google is saying it, it must be true, right?
And that's not even mentioning the ways in which Google has degraded the experience in more tangible ways by turning off features for mobile browsers, fighting app compatibility on Windows Phone to the point of breaking Google Maps - literally just serving an inferior experience and using user agent detection to impair Windows Phone - or blocking the YouTube API on the device.
I just opened up google.com on Edge and this popped up in the top right corner:
"Switch to Chrome for Windows
Built for Windows. Hide annoying ads and protect against malware on the web."
I then went to maps.google.com:
"Google recommends using Chrome
Try a fast, secure browser with updates built in"
I then went to news.google.com:
"Google recommends using Chrome
Try a fast, secure browser with updates built in"
That was just a fresh first sign in experience, and as I understand it, these prompts recur - I still see them occasionally on my primary browser, Firefox!
Even the freaking Gmail app for iOS has a convenient "bug" where it keeps forgetting your browser selection and suggesting you download Chrome and use that instead of Safari.
Browser selection in the iOS Gmail app has been broken forever. If you select "Chrome" it opens links in iOS Chrome. If you select "Safari" it opens links in an in-app webview which doesn't share cookies with actual Safari.
This webview behavior seems to be common across a lot of apps. I habitually tap the Safari icon on the bottom right of the webview to get into the Safari app. I had the impression that iOS must require this, perhaps to prevent an app from being able to effectively pollute the user’s global cookies, or to prevent broken UX when the user has some existing global cookie that changes website behavior in a way the developer doesn’t expect. It’s annoying to have to tap out of the webview to avoid repeated logins, but I could imagine it being the least-bad solution to a more complicated problem. Maybe a less confusing way to present it would be for the webview to open in a private tab?
I'm skeptical that Apple is imposing this on them. Many apps (Reeder, Reddit, Discord, Toot!) have an option to toggle between opening links in an in-app webview or Safari.
Reeder's options are "In-app browser," "Safari," and "Firefox" on my device.
On my Gmail app it opens a Safari webview every time. I see in the Gmail “Default apps” settings there’s a “Ask me which app to use every time” slider. Maybe you have that turned on?
On Chrome, no captchas. On other browsers, I've literally gone through 5 minutes of fire hydrant selection with no end in sight. Sometimes it'll simply reject it and tell me to start again a dozen times, and other times it's just infinitely adding more.
I really want there to be a third party captcha system that isn't just a covert push into Google's filthy, corrupt, incompetent ecosystem.
CloudFlare's switch to bCaptcha or whatever it's called has made that experience much more pleasant when using non-Chrome browsers, because you can install the Privacy Pass addon and see them much less frequently
As a Firefox user, I regularly see sites that ask me to switch over to Chrome. Even some very mainstream open-source projects only support Chrome properly.
Why do you find it hard to blame Google (the business behind Chrome) for making a business decision of pushing for Chrome installation? This is a straightforward relationship.
[1] As it happens Google advertising Chrome on Google websites seems fairly reasonable to me, but anyway.
This is the very definition of monopoly abuse: Using your monopoly in one market (search) to push into another market (browsers). Exactly what got Microsoft in trouble in the 90s... and looking at firefox marketshare, it's having exactly the same results.
Hi Peter! If YC accepts a company from a south asian country like India and the founders decide to relocate their company to the US, what does the visa/immigration process look like for them?
For those participating in accelerators and incubators in the U.S., the B-1 visa is the default option but this visa doesn't allow the founder to be compensated, only reimbursed for his or her reasonable business and living expenses.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hn-new-links-highli...