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I'm having a hard time reading this as a reasonable suggestion, so I apologize in advance if I'm being closed-minded.

Do you not believe that this would lead to further bad outcomes? Children need something to do during the day, and with neither the ability to work, nor other obligations (not to mention their brains are not fully developed) it seems like they would end up far worse off than they would otherwise, even if the school was under-performing.


All the browsers on my machine report my resolution as 1080p despite using 4k. I assume this is because I run at 200% scaling (I believe this is relatively common among anyone using a 4k resolution)

If the above-linked website uses data reported by the browser, I wonder how this scenario might be taken into consideration (or even if such a thing is possible)


A pixel is defined as 1/96th of an inch in the web world so it is dependent on your dpi/scaling. There is a window.devicePixelRatio that JavaScript can use to get actual pixels.


There is a level of trust involved as unless you pull down the code, audit it and only ever run it locally, you really have no way of knowing that on any given page load the code hasn't changed.

While I also appreciate tools that don't send data, I don't like the normalization of teaching people to paste (potentially) private data into a browser while blindly trusting that it's not being offloaded to some server somewhere.


It is one of the few things for which i could see the use of a new web document type.


I think you're referring to a similarly named N64 game. This story is about a game played using the seeds of horse chestnut trees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conkers


The widespread adoption of Chrome was largely driven by word of mouth, people like you and I installing it on our friend's/relative's computers and telling them it was safer/faster/better.

Nothing stops us from doing the same thing again. I've been recommending Firefox to all my family/friends/colleagues for years (ever since I've seen the writing on the wall for Chrome). While Firefox isn't perfect, it's in a much better place than Chrome is, and meets the the needs of nearly 100% of people.


>The widespread adoption of Chrome was largely driven by word of mouth

No, it was driven by having a banner in the most privileged spot of the Internet, Google.com (the most visited site in the world with 0 ads on the homepage) saying that was faster and more secure than the alternatives. In fact Firefox benefited from some free ads on Google.com against Internet Explorer before Google developed Chromium.


The other aspect, somewhat memory-holed, was that Chrome was automatically installed as shovelware if you went to install Adobe Flash for IE or Firefox:

https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/23jnmy/why_is_chrom...

This kind of not-freely-given consent was key to Chrome's growth.


Chrome was bundled with so many installers. Google probably spent billions shoving Chrome into any machine they could.


Tellingly, that very bundling is how Sundar got into the spotlight at Google.


It was kind of both, depending on the timeline. Early on it was word of mouth, then Google saw they had momentum and they capitalized on it with the banners and aggressive marketing.


It was a long time ago but I'm 99% sure that there was a banner for Chrome on Google.com since the first public release.


So many replies in this sub thread opining authoritatively. Share your source. Did you have access to the data on Chrome's user growth and which marketing campaigns were the sources of which users?

From my perspective, all of you are saying a lot of things as if you know them to be true, but you have no idea whether they're true or not; really, you just find them to be plausible.


Is this really something particular to this thread? I feel like most comments on HN are "opining authoritatively".


They were pushing from the very start. They knew the potential of taking over the browser market share.


Early chrome was driven by the fact that firefox was a piece of garbage. Firefox 3 was not good software, and had an unpleasant habit of totally crashing the entire browser regularly. Your only other popular choice was ie8. Also not great.

Later Google's ability to buy installs and put it on google.com came into play, but for at least the first 5 years and probably longer, chrome was a far faster, more secure, and more reliable choice. They also pioneered the multi-process model to isolate different components of the browser.


… isn’t that banner an ad?


Yeah, I feel like in general we on HN give ourselves way too much credit in terms of our ability to drive public opinion or affect purchasing/usage patterns among the public. The idea of the “nerd-led revolution” may have had some impact in the past, but I think the days of that are over. Large corporations now know what they’re doing in ways that they hadn’t figured out in the 2000s or even the early 2010s.


I swear I also remember it getting included in installation wizards for unrelated software (on Windows), so people would end up with Chrome/Chromium without even realizing it.


I’ve been out of the windows game for so long I forgot all that malware that was installed by various installer engines and was so relieved when I found portable apps and oldversion.com and ninite. And now I guess there are things like chocolaty that do similar things. Switching to Mac and Linux I don’t really miss it at all


The adoption of firefox was driven by word of mouth.

I still can't search on google with them trying to shove chrome down my throat


Did you miss the barrage of ads for Chrome that google played for literally years on the internet and television?


Yes. Thanks adblock!


If you don't acknowledge them, they'll get bored and move on. They're only looking for attention, so your best weapon is to not give it to them.

Definitely agree about it being cute/impressive. There's lots of clickables that further showcase things. Don't forget to explore!


> you cannot avoid all ads (for example, sponsored segments).

Look into SponsorBlock, as it allows the community to mark such segments, and your browser will automatically skip them.


There is also projects you can run in your local network that skips the segments when playing youtube videos on chromecast. Using the same crowdsourced data from SponsorBlock. The one I use: https://github.com/gabe565/CastSponsorSkip


I went to pick up my dog from the groomer and they asked me for a tip as soon as I said I was there to pick him up.

I replied "Can I see my dog first?"

It just shows that there's an expectation, and at that point it should simply be built into the advertised price.


I fully expect the data to be de-anonymized and then used against people that have familial links to those who have donated their data.

"Oh, your great great-great-grandfather had <disease>, so now you're classified as a high-risk individual and you have to pay a higher monthly fee for insurance"

Only they won't tell you why you have to pay more, just that you do.


That is essentially why HIPAA exists. And the negative and limiting effects of HIPAA on clinical trials is well acknowledged and is considered as an acceptable cost of HIPAA.


HIPAA was written in 1996. The human genome project was completed in 2003, and WGS wasn't in the clinic for another decade. Nothing about HIPAA is considered or intentional in the context of current medical practice or research. It's just an old law that carries forward mindlessly like all laws do.


1. It's illegal, and insurance company employees aren't suicidal.

2. If health insurance companies wanted to break the law, they would simply violate the existing prohibition on discriminating on preexisting conditions, which gives them vastly more actionability than some tenuous, diluted link to a relative.

This is all frankly nonsensical because insurance companies charge people within tightly-regimented tiers, there's no wiggle room for mystery +30% fee increases.


Thousands of Wells Fargo employees would like to have a word with you about #1. “Illegal” is outweighed easily if there’s a bonus to be earned by doing something that everybody says you won’t be caught for doing. Plus, the company itself can’t be put in prison and the employees whose bad idea it was will probably get a slap on the wrist. And if it’s a big enough company, they won’t endanger it by truly hurting it with fines. #2 is a pretty good point though.


The initial QR code isn't a TOTP code, it contains the secret used to generate the TOTP codes.


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