robtherobber

Not disputing this possibility. But we should also keep in mind that the company itself has admitted in the past it has censored certain speech (for right or wrong reasons) on its platforms [0] and that it wasn't the first or the only time when it has done that. [1][2]

It has censored content for a variety of reasons, including to comply with government requests (which may very well be the case here, I don't see why it's not possible) [3]. In fact, the company has backtracked a number of it previous promises, when it positioned itself as a bastion for accurate information. [4]

I'm not trying to portray it as some kind of Big Tobacco monster, but it would be naive to believe that it's here for the benefit of anyone other than the shareholders.

[0] https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/google-admi...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google

[2] https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/2010-...

[3] https://www.manchesterdigital.com/post/manchester-digital/go...

[4] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/26/how-google-abandoned-facts-f...

It's hard not to answer to such titles with versions of "Eating food is a mistake; here's how to cut down on food so you can die with more money in your pocket".

While Hayek - the article mentions his elucubrations - wasn't altogether a hack, he wasn't exactly a well-meaning economist when he recast economic inequality and private power as secondary problems, while portraying state planning as the primary threat to liberty; not only that it's not actually supported by evidence (unlike the opposite comclusion), but liberty is very much a wishy-washy concept that can be shaped into multiple meanings without saying or doing anything tangible (basically he managed to convince lawmakers that universal freedom is really perfectly aligned with business interests - we knew back then that it was a ridiculous claim and it is painfully obvious now why).

He's also put quite a bit of effort into blurring the distinction between authoritarian central planning and ordinary democratic intervention such as public ownership, redistribution and economic regulation. So, no thank you. We've had so, so much of this nonsense already.

Was there a link to the project on Github? I think that you've mistakenly shared Github's search tool/path

Whilst I understand that reasoning, I disagree with it. Private insurance should not be necessary to begin with, and if it must exist for whatever rational reason, the insurance should be public as well. Anything that has to do with healthcare (not talking about optional cosmetic surgery, of course) should be handled by / via public healthcare services.

Furthermore, I would say that it's wrong to look at the situation in terms of "reducing the burden on the NHS Dental", since that is literally what's there for. If people don't opt for cosmetic surgery, then it's a healthcare issue and we created this institution/branch for this very purpose. Otherwise we can easily end up speaking in terms of how much of a burden being alive is, and how eating (regular) food and drinking water are poor economic decisions, a topsy-turvy way of looking at the very reason to have an 'economy'.

Are we going to pretend that this is what's in the article, or are we going to engage with the substance of the article?

AI development is not purely a private-sector achievement, it never was. Governments fund research, infrastructure, education, energy systems, procurement and industrial policy that make large-scale AI possible. So taxpayers already absorb part of the cost and risk, while private companies seek to keep the resulting assets and profits for themselves.

If we look at how (or on what) AI is built, it becomes obvious that it's not even a public funding matter only, since these tools effectively extract humanity's accumulated language, writing, research, culture and knowledge. Not private info, not private resources, not some person's secret invention, but our shared knowledge. The companies have enclosed a collectively produced resource and converted it into private property.

Furthermore, we either accept that IP is legitimate / a strong argument, in which case humanity should have a easy claim over the knowledge used to build AI, or that IP is weak / a bit of a joke, in which case AI companies' claims to exclusive proprietary control are automatically weak and we have even more reason to nationalise these services.

No, thank you. As long as better options exist - and they do - I shan't.

How do you think an alternative to duopolistic apps valued hundreds of billions could emerge without funding ?

Government or non-governmental public bodies. Or new legal / administrative entities that are not driven by profit; we are not, as a matter of fact, tied to a binary choice situation whereby private businesses are the better option for such a crucial service.

Isn't open-source software the closer model to what you desire ?

It can (and it should) definitely be open source, I concur. But that's not necessarily an ownership and control discussion, even less so when we're taking into consideration the infrastructure required for such a project. Genuine public ownership / control assumes giving the leverages (decision-making, governance, choices, infrastructure, model etc.) to the public itself in one form or another. It can be done via a government, but there are reasons to suspect that governments will eventually abuse it or under-fund it, like they often eventually have done; however, that is still a better option than private ownership and control.

A "public" map app in the sense of "developed and hosted by the government" could enable large funding, but could also be quite frightening.

I disagree. If it's a dictatorship, then private ownership and governance are already not very credible or private. If it's a real democracy, then the public should be able to exert control over it via its institutions and democratic processes. That said, I also prefer a model where the government doesn't own such a platform and dictate how it's developed and used.

In a hierarchy of ownership and governance models from worst to best, private is likely the worst (Google, Apple & the like), followed by governments, and genuine public ownership where citizens themselves can decide how it operates and evolves. The question of money is also partially real: private companies themselves don't create money out of thin air, they rely on public infrastructure (from currency, to legislation/operating rules, to the economy) to operate and need paying consumers that have money, especially a b2c company like this one. In other words, the money is already there, it's just out of reach.

It should be noted that what Americans often define as left (Kamala Harris), most of the world correctly defines as right. Bernie Sanders and AOC are left, but even they are centre-left.

Otherwise, good observations.

Why not a donation system?

We considered this option: letting everyone contribute an amount of their choice to support the initiative. But Cartes.app is not a charity, nor is it a free software component on a shelf: it is a service that consumes resources with every use and must handle the load of thousands of daily users.

Moreover, we still have many features to add to compete with Big Tech, which requires investments.

So you want the public to fund your business and what it gets in return is the honour of improving your business and "compete with Big Tech"?

I think there's a strong incentive to take their chances with Big Tech until a better alternative pops up. In my view, a public service should benefit (and be controlled by) the public. If it's not controlled by the public, there's little difference between a big US provider and a big Chinese or European one.

Only joking, but I would not be surprised to find a "number four will shock you" on that page.

I don't think that you're necessarily wrong but I tend to doubt it. Who exactly has advocated for that? What is commonly referred to as "the left" is in fact an extremely fractured set of subgroups and political nuances. So perhaps it's more of a case of "some people"?

Off topic and an entirely shallow take, I'm afraid to say.

Edwin Black, whose book IBM and the Holocaust was published in hardback last year, says new evidence set out in the paperback version shows that executives at the firm's New York headquarters directly controlled a Polish subsidiary which leased punch-card machines used to "calculate exactly how many Jews should be emptied out of the ghettos each day" and to transport them efficiently on railways leading to the camps.

When the Nazis invaded Poland, Black wrote in the Jerusalem Post, "IBM New York established a special new subsidiary called Watson Business Machines," after its then- president, Thomas Watson. "IBM's new Polish company's sole purpose was to service the Nazi occupation during the rape of Poland." Watson Business Machines even operated a punch-card printing shop over the street from the Warsaw Ghetto, the paperback claims.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/mar/29/humanities.hig...

I don't suppose that you can share the setup with us? What firewall, how are the backups performed, how regular etc.

Private businesses should not have any insight on what's on people's phones, let alone the ability to ban images. Whilst we, as a society, may have an issue on our hands in that sense (I believe that we totally don't), it is for us to decide how to tackle that, not for governments to actively allow and enforce such rules via private enterprises.

Unsure why it was flagged, it seems like a reputable alternative, which is always welcome.

I don't trust online reviews that much, but some of these may be relevant:

- https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/runbox.com

- https://cyberinsider.com/email/reviews/runbox/

- https://uk.pcmag.com/cloud-services/94763/runbox

- https://old.reddit.com/r/mail/comments/1qdlyrh/runboxcom/

Daily Mail is not news or anything at all other than an insult to anyone's intelligence.

E: why are you almost the only person sharing stuff from DM?

Nah, I'm not unhappy that SO burned. Either the platform became a community-owned, not-for-profit, volunteer-driven project whose sole purpose was to be useful, or it was going to become yet another enshittified platform - which is exactly what happened. In that sense, it deserved to disappear. We're worse off without it, I agree, but we were heading in that direction anyway.

In 2 out of 3 cases, the responses I received to my questions were poor, wrong, snarky, or generally unhelpful.

I still believe a platform like that would be useful: something closer to MDN Web Docs, but with a Q&A mechanism. It should exist as public-interest technical infrastructure funded by govs, not as another asset to be squeezed until the community that made it useful has nothing left to give and everyone was worse off apart from the owners.

That's so unambitious, I'd argue.

In 1940, the federal tax rate on income over $200,000 started at 66 percent. By 1944, the top tax rate on all income over $200,000 — about $3.4 million in today’s dollars — had jumped to 94 percent.

https://inequality.org/article/tax-the-rich-we-did-that-once...

It's mighty difficult to refrain from calling out the naïve who kept criticising unions only hours ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48222241

I find the left/right approach altogether ridiculous for this, it's but a spurious oversimplification which usually shows lack of understanding for the topic discussed. In this particular case, it also shows that you didn't bother to read what meritocracy actually is, since you claim, against the very inventor of the word, that it's a good thing without producing any evidence or reasoning.

On paper, meritocracy sounds great.

In reality, meritocracy was a slur word. It was coined in 1956 to describe a farcically unequal state that no one in their right mind would want to live in: https://archive.discoversociety.org/2018/10/02/meritocracy-a...

I'm not suggesting that this is the only reason why more anger is not visible, but surely it must account for a degree of it: https://novaramedia.com/2020/06/20/why-does-the-police-exist...

Wherever one looks at the origins of the police (and prisons), one finds they “develop hand in hand with social inequality and hierarchy”, as Robert Reiner, the UK’s leading scholar of police, explains. The police is, he writes, a “means for the emergence and protection of more centralised and dominant class and state systems”.

Timely and much needed, I argue.

When publishers complain it's never to protect the authors or journalists, but a specific (extractive) business model. Not that I side with Common Crawl on this one.

Dystopian stuff.

Appreciate the reply. And I wish you good luck with your business, and everything else.

Only if it's done in a specific timespan, like 10 minutes or less. After that, it can't be edited any longer.

Good point. HN automatically strips certain words from the titles and I wasn't snappy enough to catch it on time.