> There is significant work beyond the renderer that would need to happen to run Zed in a browser - notably background tasks and filesystem/input APIs would need web/wasm-compatible implementations.
This news article boils down to "a few people on reddit did something", which is interesting. But we know reddit and HN are definitely not mainstream.
Is this hurting Amazon? No, it is not. As long as they're honouring return requests freely, you know that the number of returns is within their accepted levels of distressed inventory. If it's getting into uncomfortable territory, they'll start rate limiting people by saying they're past the return window, or they should try again after a week.
If Amazon's return policy changes, that'll be much more interesting to see. But chances are, people forget about this in a month and their sales are unaffected. This may go the way of #deleteUber, #deleteFacebook and similar boycott campaigns - minor blips at best.
While I agree that the return numbers are probably very low, you may be underestimating Reddit's impact in terms of product recommendation. I noticed that Reddit results are often pretty prominent on Google search when product reviews are searched for.
Security camera market is pretty competitive and a single factor like this could easily sway people to choose alternatives.
> Reddit is filled with very vocal terminally online people.
Reddit went mainstream many years ago, hence the marketing dollars spent there on astroturfing, and brands acquiring pet moderators. The posters/commenters/readers follow power-laws like any online/offline community.
Its top 100 or so subreddits are moderated by the same ~10 or so individuals who impose their ideological views on the subs and delete posts or ban anyone who dares challenge them.
A great example of how community moderation inevitably slides a platform to one side or the other of the political spectrum.
I honestly don't think mods on reddit should be allowed to moderate more than 1 or 2 of these top sub-reddits, this would at least force some semblance of diversity of thought on the platform.
I think you’re dramatically overestimating how many sane adults would want to mod a top 100 Subreddit for free. It’s a job that generally only attracts the very dedicated, the very bored and/or those who’ve figured out how to monetize it.
Reddit is at the core forum platform, therefore it's as misleading to attribute whatever is happening at any one [group of] subreddit to the whole of Reddit as it is misleading to do the same with closed Facebook groups.
Remember forums of old. Larger sites with daily visitors in the thousands already had nearly isolated topic silos within the forum. The effect is even stronger here.
The thing about Reddit is it really amplifies voices. 10-100 people can be on the same subreddit and comment or post something, and it looks like “a lot” of people.
It’s also much easier to be a non-representative sample at 3% of the population than 50%. And, there’s a big sample bias for this sort of thing. I think someone is way more likely to post “I’m getting rid of X” versus “I don’t care and I’m keeping X”.
For Facebook alone, it’s less than 30x. The “family” in “Family Daily Active People” is also referring to “Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and other services.”
Roughly 6x the users and 7x the traffic. “Thousands” is a bit dramatic. Reddit is a massively popular site now, pretty sure it’s among the top 10 most visited in the world.
and also because many modern platforms are app focused and don't care about web traffic
and Reddit is a huge target for scrapping int the US so traffic numbers of recent few years have become a meaningless metric
Outside the US Reddit is often far less relevant then in the US, still somewhat relevant in many "western" countries but often far far less then in the US (like e.g. where I live no on "young" (<20) nor "old" (>50) people use it and the people which do use it are mostly from a _subset_ of often very US influenced tech/nerd/gamer cultures).
And if you go to countries where speaking English is far less the norm Reddits relevance drops sharply. The thing is, that is something like 50% of the word population... In India Reddit doesn't matter, nor does it in China, nor does it in many (but not all) of the highly populated areas "between" (south) China and India.
So why I don't know if "site [..] 10 most visited in the world" is technically true or false it is highly misleading even if true and seems to be bordering on US defaultism, through maybe more "the west" defaultism.
Now to be fair people forgetting like half of the word population in their arguments is pretty common, in not just the US, but also the EU.
It's a bit like with HN, it might feel representative for the IT industry world wide, but it is only representative for a certain FANG/US-startup/US-hacker culture influenced subset of it. Beyond this it has hardly any representation weather it's wrt. articles or people commenting. But "beyond this" is on a world wide scale a _very_ huge part of the industry.
from the not very representative context of people I know/where I live (not US):
Ring customers are often old overly worried people which "don't really care anymore" about ideal (often due to an over exposure to fear inducing propaganda, like the kind of stuff which first ties to make you think you live in far more danger then you do and then blames it on immigrants; And ring them comes in by being cheap, reliable and convenient and maybe the only AD reaching that demography. Worries about privacy are on the other hand shadowed by fear about people breaking in and beating them up.)
Other people needing cameras tend care more about privacy ideals and do more research. In turn they won't use ring.
And people not needing cameras most times also really don't want there to be cameras, especially not internet connected ones.
Through in general the relationship to surveillance is very different here compared to what it seems to be in the US.
I don’t entirely disagree with that but with that kind of traffic/userbase clearly it’s far more mainstream than is being implied. Also, young people are definitely not getting on Facebook, which impacts how “mainstream” we can consider it. Reddit skews a fair bit younger than FB.
> young people are definitely not getting on Facebook
but Reddit is mostly relevant "in the west" where most countries have an inverted age pyramid and most old people are not on Reddit, but on Facebook
and reddit relevance outside of the US is often far less then people think, to a point where many people not even know what it is. It doesn't has a network effect pulling in "friends and family".
and a lot of people "around 30" are still on Facebook due to network effect and active enough to count as active users (which doesn't mean much to be fair)
And in the US around ~18% of US users where in the age group 18-24 in 2025. Idk. how but somehow Facebook still manages to convince surprisingly many "just adults" to join it. And if they aren't on Facebook then they are on WhatsApp and maybe Instagram.
Now all of this doesn't really fully show how relevant reddit is because checking some minor memes once a week makes you show up as active user but also means it's pretty much irrelevant for you.
And if I look at people I interact with or where I can see a bit how they interact (i.e. _very highly biased by social environment_) then thinks look far worse for it. Reddit seems relevant in the US, mainly for people "around" 30. But outside of it, it seems to be more like a footnote. Used, but something most people would not care if it's randomly gone.
I don’t know why you are commenting in two different places with roughly the same points but I’m just going to stick to this thread if that’s alright.
You are making some assumptions and guesses when all of these numbers are generally searchable - I don’t disagree with your point largely speaking, but the magnitude(s) is what seem off to me. Over 50% of Reddit traffic is international, about 75% of Facebook’s is. Yes clearly Reddit biases “the west” but a couple of y’all keep trying to paint these incredibly stark pictures.
Reddit and Facebook are both massive. They both have significant influence on culture and discourse worldwide. You’re also disputing Reddit’s traffic but again a search will confirm it is the 7th most visited site in the world. We can argue with the significance of that is given their demographic distribution, but then we would have to do the same thing to Facebook and I just don’t think that’s a particularly useful conversation without some concrete data at our fingertips. If you have some I am legitimately interested to see it.
Either way: Yes facebook is more international. Yes it is larger. But the gap isn’t 1000x. It’s not even 100x. They both have mainstream appeal, they both have shortcomings that keep them from being “truly” representative. It doesn’t help that Facebook hides their DAU’s among their other offerings to obscure the stall (perhaps it’s now even in decline) they have experienced. That’s not a good look I’ll say that much.
Don't know why you are being downvoted. Thousands of times more is clearly wrong. Facebook has billions of users. Reddit has way more than single digit millions of users.
You've identified the problem. It's never "reddit", it's a specific subreddit. It really depends on the size of the subreddit. Smaller subreddits can easily get riled up, and also create a sealed echo chamber by banning people left and right. But I wouldn't worry about a sub unless it was really big.
For example: I'd say HBO should worry about what the game of thrones related subs are saying about their latest show (which is good, shoutout) but only as a vibe check. The normies will always outnumber the kind of people who go to a subreddit to discuss their favourite show. Normal people just watch and forget.
> But we know reddit and HN are definitely not mainstream.
Reddit is one of the most visited websites on the planet, not sure how you can say it isn't mainstream.
> Is this hurting Amazon? No, it is not.
Depends on your definition of hurting Amazon, but regardless Ring is a tiny portion of Amazon's revenue so even if every single Ring owner returned it wouldn't "hurt Amazon"
> This may go the way of #deleteUber, #deleteFacebook and similar boycott campaigns - minor blips at best.
Not sure about Uber, but #deleteFacebook absolutely did have a long term impact in certain demographics.
I’m not so sure. In terms of total revenue, yes probably insignificant. But in the world of subscriptions and a highly speculative market, I think declining subs can have an outsized impact on share prices.
Could you analyse AB InBev's stock performance in that period? Because it doesn't look bad to me. [1] It looks like it was $65 before the boycott in April 2023, falling to $55 a couple of months later. But it was back up to $65 by the end of the year. It sits at $80 today.
If I hadn't told you the date of the boycott, would you have been able to spot it on this chart?
Budweiser stock did recover, but they haven't (afaik) repeated the behavior that got them boycotted in the first place. It appears that this boycott achieved exactly what was sought.
I'd agree that this is a rare exception, and that boycotts are almost never successful. But this really is an example of that unicorn.
> America’s economy added 130,000 jobs in January, almost double the number that analysts had been expecting, indicating that the labour market might have picked up after months of apparent stagnation. Unemployment also fell to 4.3%, a slight dip from the previous month. The figures may put off the Federal Reserve from lowering interest rates as quickly as Donald Trump would like.
Yeah not sure where the 600k figure is coming from. But that 130k that's being reported is almost certainly not correct, and will be revised down.
The ADP is only reporting 22k for January. Which lines up very closely with the monthly pace of job creation for 2025 (~15k, on average).
The downward revisions on the BLS numbers for 2025 are the largest on record. There's a sentiment that the monthly numbers were purposely inflated for 2025.
> There's a sentiment that the monthly numbers were purposely inflated for 2025.
Jobs data (which comes from a survey of employers) is always subject to revisions, and the revisions have gotten worse. But it's not necessarily political. Back when Trump unprecedentedly fired Erika McEntarfer (former head of the BLS) I looked into this and tried to understand where the data comes from, how it works.
Basically, the BLS surveys 50k out of the several million companies in the US. But response rates have dropped rather strongly since the Pandemic in particular. If you give them 3 months, it gets up to 90%, but after 1 month it is only 50%. This would be okay, except that the response rates turn out to be skewed: large companies almost always respond quickly, small companies respond more slowly. And small companies tend to be much more responsive to the state of the overall economy than large companies- for good and for bad. And even the response times of the small companies turn out to be sensitive to economic trends, for good and for bad: the companies that respond more slowly to surveys, it turns out, tend to be the most sensitive to the broader economy, the first to fire in a recession, but also the first to hire when the economy is getting better.
The final thing is that these companies can be highly correlated with each other and the broader economy. So there are always corrections, but in placid economic weather the corrections cancel out- some of the extrapolations are high, some are low, it ends up being close to 0. And the financial markets understand how to read these corrections. They understand that when the economy is shifting you will get all of the misses in the same direction- either high or low- and to pay attention these corrections data.
All of these misses low in 2025 are a very bad sign for the economy overall, not necessarily a sign of political pressure. That would probably show up in large, sustained differences to the ADP numbers or other privately reported numbers, rather than revisions announced by the BLS itself.
Both Trump I's appointee to head the BLS, William Beach (who served from 2019-2023) and Biden's appointee Erika McEntarfer (whom Trump fired in 2025) wanted to modernize the survey system, make it easier for companies to respond, and get better and faster data collection. But, because this system is so incredibly important to the markets, they wanted a larger budget to run the new system and the old system together for a significant portion of time (several years) so that everyone would be comfortable understanding the intricacies of the system, what revisions would mean, etc. And since they didn't get that budget (in fact it got cut) they decided to prioritize the old system rather than throw it away and experiment with something different.
Good explanation. I think it's sad that people find it easier to adopt imaginary theory of why labor statistics are flawed than they are to simply go read their methodology. People don't want to believe that there are BLS statisticians working the phones and knocking on doors. They don't want to know that there are hundreds of USDA employees tasked with writing down the retail price of carrots in every major American city every day. They aren't interested in how Census takers judge the population by counting gas and electric meters. They'd rather believe that bureaucrats are evil and incompetent.
I think it's the rise of authoritarianism: we are losing trust in truth, in what is said, the day to day social trust is dissolving. It worries me an awful lot, but it seems like we're (1) destroying the basis for much of our society and prosperity. All of the social technology we've amassed over the past century and a half seems to be in decline.
1: American English language culture I can read as an insider, and I pay some attention to the UK culture as well. I'm sadly monolingual so I have vague understanding of other countries, but they seem on a broadly similar path.
I'm assuming this is talking about the revised numbers for 2025? And if that revised so heavily downward, hard to imagine the latest numbers are somehow more stable?
The same way that anyone would: they conduct a statistical sample and report unemployment numbers based on that. Source: 15 years ago I was one of the people they contacted. As I recall, a letter came to our apartment, asking for the adult (18+) who had their birthday closest to that date to contact them and provide a phone number and some basic demographic data. That was me, not my roommate, so for the next 12 months I got a call once a month asking me for my employment details about a specific week that month- had I been looking for a job, was I still employed, etc.
If you weren't aware previously, you'll be pleased to learn that you can still program in Flash if you really want to, and distribute your programs on the web. https://ruffle.rs
We have the web, we don't need ruffle, what we need is indeed a open source flash editor. Wick editor was quite close, by outputting standalone html files
I think they mean you don't need ruffle if you can just export to web. The programming environment can be anything, but adding ruffle in the middle when it really doesn't need to be there, does indeed feel a bit tacky. Flash used to be necessary to add functions to browsers that were otherwise impossible, but these days you can do anything in a browser.
Yes indeed. The web with webgl/webgpu and wasm and all the other webapis has enough power to replace what flash could do since a long time. Just doing it by hand is messy, but as a target plattform it is good enough.
Seems cool. Took a couple minutes how to set up a basic object and do a multiple part bouncing ball tween. Haven't really explored the scripting or export options yet.
I love seeing people from other countries share their own folk tales about what makes their countries special and unique. I've seen it up close in my country and I always cringed when I heard my fellow countrymen came up with these stories. In my adulthood I'm reassured that it happens everywhere and I find it endearing.
On the information density of languages: it is true that some languages have a more information dense textual representation. But all spoken languages convey about the same information in the same time. Which is not all that surprising, it just means that human brains have an optimal range at which they process information.
Further reading: Coupé, Christophe, et al. "Different Languages, Similar Encoding Efficiency: Comparable Information Rates across the Human Communicative Niche." Science Advances. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594
Different representations at the same bitrate may have features that make one a lot more resilient to errors. This thing about Italian, you fill find in any benchmark of vastly different AI transcribing models. You can find similar results also on the way LLMs mostly trained on English generalize usually very well with Italian. All this despite Italian accounting for marginal percentage of the training set. How do you explain that? I always cringe when people refute evidence.
For me it’s a related but different worry. If I’m no longer thinking deeply, then maybe my thinking skills will simply atrophy and die. Then when I really need it, I won’t have it. I’ll be reduced to yanking the lever on the AI slot machine, hoping it comes up with something that’s good enough.
But at that point, will I even have the ability to distinguish a good solution from a bad one? How would I know, if I’ve been relying on AI to evaluate if ideas are good or not? I’d just be pushing mediocre solutions off as my own, without even realising that they’re mediocre.
This reads like a nothingburger. Couple of quotes from the article:
> the idea that WhatsApp can selectively and retroactively access the content of [end-to-end encrypted] individual chats is a mathematical impossibility
> Steven Murdoch, professor of security engineering at UCL, said the lawsuit was “a bit strange”. “It seems to be going mostly on whistleblowers, and we don’t know much about them or their credibility,” he said. “I would be very surprised if what they are claiming is actually true.”
No one apart from the firm filing the lawsuit is actually supporting this claim. A lot of people in this thread seem very confident that it's true, and I'm not sure what precisely makes them so confident.
I'd be surprised as well. I know people who've worked on the WhatsApp apps specifically for years. It feels highly unlikely that they wouldn't have come across this backdoor and they wouldn't have mentioned it to me.
How are people mistaking what is clearly easier business visas to facilitate short term visits for migration? The EU can't commit to changes on migration because individual countries decide that.
You got flagged, but yes. Ironic especially as someone who has funded a US-India startup who's components helped the AFU maim orcs and who warned the Obama 2 admin against appeasing Putin/Medvedev.
Ironic that for someone thumping their chest on being a successful founder, a lot of your comments on HN seem to revolve around calling everyone who disagrees with you as Russian trolls/bots or racist.
You're even repeating yourself over and over in the same thread, like for example here you wrote a wall of text TWICE, on why people should stop talking about the immigration clause of the trade deal with India because according to you they're racist if they bring it up.
These takes of yours here are very patronizing, disingenuous and in bad faith meant to just accuse all critics of racism before they even open their mouth, when the arguments people bring up are genuine and in good faith.
Anyone who did research (like we did locally) has seen the repeated flood of right wing attack messages following any EU news on any social media. There's been plenty of research connecting them to Russian bots and their pets (e.g. Orban, AfD and other right wing organizations).
Taking them seriously and defending just makes you their useful idiot.
> There is significant work beyond the renderer that would need to happen to run Zed in a browser - notably background tasks and filesystem/input APIs would need web/wasm-compatible implementations.
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