I have to say, I don’t understand what ”for you” means in ”best/worst possible life for you”. At first I read it roughly as ”given the fundamental unchanging circumstances of your life, such as where and when you were born, who your parents are, and your basic health” but maybe they mean something like ”in your subjective perspective on what is good/bad”?
My thought as well, but the question is: does it matter for what the survey is trying to achieve?
Some people will interpret it one way, some a subtly different way, but is there a reason that people's interpretation changes over time in a way that is more rapid and more significant than the underlying question of how good their life is broadly? Probably not.
There may be cultural differences that make it tricky to do comparisons between cultures / countries, but it should give something useful when looking at the same culture / country over time.
Fitting HN, that seems to follow the Silicon Valley mindset perfectly - we’ll ignore laws and trample on people’s rights in the name of reducing some absolutely trivial ”pain”.
I doubt any laws are being broken. When you contribute something to the public record on a website that is unquestionably public, even the GDPR has carveouts and exceptions for public interest, freedom of expression, and data necessary for continuation of the original purpose.
There is a growing misconception that the GDPR and similar laws give complete control over any user-contributed inputs to a website, but that’s not true.
European digital law explicitly allows for a "right to be forgotten". Something which HN vehemently opposes because it breaks the flow of threads or some other BS reason.
As I explained above, the GDPR law has a lot of exceptions and carveouts.
It has been widely misinterpreted as a tool to force website operators to remove anything you've contributed to the website or any information about you, but that is neither consistent with the language of the law nor consistent with what the courts have found.
You are free to remove your own e-mail address from an account (visit your account page) or to never provide any identifying information at all to the website. I've also seen the moderators change account names away from identifying information for those who request it.
However, there is no GDPR requirement that websites must universally delete any and all contributions you provide to a public website if you retroactively decide you don't want you public posts to be public.
Like I said, I doubt casual HN commenters have a better grasp on the law than Y Combinator's legal team.
If HN removed their record of the email address associated with a username, might that satisfy GDPR? The personally identifying data has been "forgotten". From that point on, the comments could have been entered by "anyone".
Why would it? A comment in itself might contain information about anything and anyone, and always contains some personal information about its author, such as the time they published it and the handle they were logged in as. That doesn’t go away because the email associated with it is removed.
Surely it does, if there's no way to point back to the specific user. The best one could say is "someone using this username posted this message at this time, but we can't tell who that was".
I accept that if someone data-mined every comment by said user, they might be able to build a picture of said user clear enough to identify them (e.g. posting times might indicate likey country of origin). Possibly, depending on the content they posted.
(I'm just thinking around the problem. I'm not a security/privacy researcher designing systems I'd like others to use, just an interested user curious where the lines in the law lie, and also what the threat models might be to me as a user.)
I like this idea, actually. A good chunk of HN is throwaways and accounts otherwise disconnected from any sort of person-hood these days, the messages from "forgotten" accounts wouldn't even particularly stick out.
Unfortunately, it’s also intended to be not just accessible, but ”principles-driven”. Can’t have that. (More seriously, it’s probably more appropriate for screens than print)
For what it’s worth, the very page we’re on here still uses tables and spacer gifs, in 2025. (EDIT: I don’t mean to imply that this is good, just an inescapable observation in this context)
> They say "the API that we are building" and assume I know who they are and what they're working on, all the way until the very bottom.
This is a common and rather tiresome critique of all kinds of blog posts. I think it is fair to assume the reader has a bit of contextual awareness when you publish on your personal blog. Yes, you were linked to it from a place without that context, but it’s readily available on the page, not a secret.
Well that's... certainly a take. But I have to disagree. Most traffic coming to blog posts is not from people who know you and are personally following your posts, they're from people who clicked a link to the article someone shared or found it while googling something.
It's not hard to add one line of context so readers aren't lost. Here, take this for example, combining a couple parts of the GitHub readme:
> For those who are unfamiliar, the Sanitizer API is a proposed new browser API being incubated in the Sanitizer API WICG, with the goal of bringing this to the WHATWG.
Easy. Can fit that in right after "this blog post will explain why", and now everyone is on the same page.
> Most traffic coming to blog posts is not from people who know you and are personally following your posts
Do we have data to back that up? Anecdotally the blogs I have operated over the years tend to mostly sustain on repeat traffic from followers (with occasional bursts of external traffic if something trends on social media)
Here's my anecdotal data. Number of blogs that I personally follow: zero. And yet, somehow, I end up reading a lot of blog posts (mostly linked from HN, but also from other places in my webosphere).
(More than a bit irritated by the "Do you have data to back that up" thing, given that you don't really have data to back up your position).
> (More than a bit irritated by the "Do you have data to back that up" thing, given that you don't really have data to back up your position).
It wasn't necessarily a request for you personally to provide data. I'm curious if any larger blog operators have insight here.
"person who only reads the 0.001% of blog posts that reach the HN front page" is not terribly interesting as an anecdotal source on blog traffic patterns
What's hard in this case is that you end up making it 80% of the way through the article before you start to wonder what the heck this guy is talking about. So you have to click away to another page to figure out who the heck this guy is, then start again at the top of the article, reading it with that context in mind.
One word would have fixed the problem. "Why does the Mozilla API blah blah blah.". Perhaps "The Mozilla implementation used to...". Something like that.
For a good while, Mac hardware was held back because of hardware design. That changed soon after Ive left. Maybe the same can happen with software now.
I want the home button back, TouchID or no. It's (I'm not joking) among the best applications of computer UI ever and it has not been obsoleted, they just abandoned it for worse options.
Cell phones from other brands have Touch ID and it works great. Apple has Touch ID on their iPads and it also works great. As it does on the MacBooks. As it does on the iPhone SE. It should be brought back.
It works OK for me on Mac, but all touchID drops to about 50/50 for me in Winter, under the (otherwise) best circumstances. Dry air, I guess.
On iPhone, specifically, it was awful for me. I was too likely to have wet hands (raining, just got out of shower, whatever—even dried, the higher moisture in my skin meant it didn't work) or gloves on or some other problem that made it fail. Trying to hold it the right way, one-handed, to get a finger in the right position (waaaaay down near the bottom) was also a high-risk maneuver for a drop, and was not a way I'd otherwise have tried to hold the device.
I am not a fan, simply because of the screen real estate that needs to be sacrificed.
Other phones tend to have it on the back, and I have heard there's good progress in having embedded thumbprint readers in the screen.
I have, however, really come to like Face ID.
[UPDATED TO ADD] I think that it's interesting that folks ding comments they disagree with. I upvoted all the responses to my comment, even though they may disagree with me, because they were made in good faith, and contribute to the discussion.
> My Google Pixel 10 has both an in-the-screen fingerprint reader, and a Face ID, and I use both. They're both useful in different situations.
That sounds great.
> Some iPads have the finger print reader on the side of the device, on the power button.
My main iPad is a Mini (latest gen). It has the Touch ID on the top. I find it to be a bit "flaky." It often misses prints. However, I think it works amazingly well, given that it's just a strip.
I also have an iPad Pro, with FaceID. That works nicely. I like that it works in both portrait and landscape. That didn't happen in my older phones, but seems to be the case in my latest (17 Pro).
>I have heard there's good progress in having embedded thumbprint readers in the screen.
Samsung phones have had a perfectly working finger print reader under the screen for many years now. There is no more progress to be made, it is complete.
Face ID is severely lacking compared to MS Hello, simple as. It's at best 50:50 hit/miss compared to Hello which logs me in always. Granted, that figure doesn't include false positives, but the difference is substantial and makes Apple's implementation look really lame, to the point I'd like to see it removed.
See there are users who like Liquid Glass, just as there are users who like TouchID. A lot of Apple’s best work turned out to be quite polarizing at the time.
iOS 7’s design language was almost universally panned, but if it were “the wrong decision,” other phones wouldn’t have adopted similar design language. Material appeared just a year later in 2014. It wasn’t bad, it was just arbitrary.
(“I like Liquid Glass! I like Liquid Glass!” I insist as i slowly shrink down into the size of a corn cob)
On the topic of Alan Dye and the home button though, the swipe gesture interface they introduced when they removed the home button strikes me as one of few genuinely successful system-level Apple design innovations in recent years. That at least seems to have happened under his leadership. Can’t think of much else good to say about what I associate with design under him.
It’s my understanding that Chan Karunamuni was largely responsible for leading the iPhone X home buttonless interface, which, I agree, is fantastic and probably the best bit of UI to come out of Apple in years. Also, the Dynamic Island, which is less impactful, but really good and clever! Anyway, he’s excited about Lemay, so I am too. https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/05/acclaimed-apple-designer-says...
At this point, they are still as high on their own supply on the software side as they were on the hardware side in the heyday of butterfly keyboards, slow/overheating CPUs and broken screens.
For images, https://same.energy is a nice option that, being abandoned but still functioning since a few years, seems to naturally not have crawled any AI images. And it’s all around a great product.
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