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Jon Stewart – One of My Favorite People – What Now? With Trevor Noah Podcast [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44uC12g9ZVk
1•consumer451•1m ago•1 comments

P2P crypto exchange development company

1•sonniya•15m ago•0 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
1•jesperordrup•20m ago•0 comments

Write for Your Readers Even If They Are Agents

https://commonsware.com/blog/2026/02/06/write-for-your-readers-even-if-they-are-agents.html
1•ingve•20m ago•0 comments

Knowledge-Creating LLMs

https://tecunningham.github.io/posts/2026-01-29-knowledge-creating-llms.html
1•salkahfi•21m ago•0 comments

Maple Mono: Smooth your coding flow

https://font.subf.dev/en/
1•signa11•28m ago•0 comments

Sid Meier's System for Real-Time Music Composition and Synthesis

https://patents.google.com/patent/US5496962A/en
1•GaryBluto•35m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Slop News – HN front page now, but it's all slop

https://dosaygo-studio.github.io/hn-front-page-2035/slop-news
4•keepamovin•36m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Empusa – Visual debugger to catch and resume AI agent retry loops

https://github.com/justin55afdfdsf5ds45f4ds5f45ds4/EmpusaAI
1•justinlord•39m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Bitcoin wallet on NXP SE050 secure element, Tor-only open source

https://github.com/0xdeadbeefnetwork/sigil-web
2•sickthecat•41m ago•1 comments

White House Explores Opening Antitrust Probe on Homebuilders

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-06/white-house-explores-opening-antitrust-probe-i...
1•petethomas•41m ago•0 comments

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https://minddraft.ai
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How do you estimate AI app development costs accurately?

1•insights123•47m ago•0 comments

Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 5

https://libroot.org/posts/going-through-snowden-documents-part-5/
1•goto1•48m ago•0 comments

Show HN: MCP Server for TradeStation

https://github.com/theelderwand/tradestation-mcp
1•theelderwand•50m ago•0 comments

Canada unveils auto industry plan in latest pivot away from US

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgd2j80klmo
3•breve•51m ago•1 comments

The essential Reinhold Niebuhr: selected essays and addresses

https://archive.org/details/essentialreinhol0000nieb
1•baxtr•54m ago•0 comments

Rentahuman.ai Turns Humans into On-Demand Labor for AI Agents

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ronschmelzer/2026/02/05/when-ai-agents-start-hiring-humans-rentahuma...
1•tempodox•56m ago•0 comments

StovexGlobal – Compliance Gaps to Note

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https://afelyon.com/
1•AbduNebu•1h ago•0 comments

Trump says America should move on from Epstein – it may not be that easy

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy4gj71z0m0o
7•tempodox•1h ago•4 comments

Tiny Clippy – A native Office Assistant built in Rust and egui

https://github.com/salva-imm/tiny-clippy
1•salvadorda656•1h ago•0 comments

LegalArgumentException: From Courtrooms to Clojure – Sen [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmMQbsOTX-o
1•adityaathalye•1h ago•0 comments

US moves to deport 5-year-old detained in Minnesota

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-moves-deport-5-year-old-detained-minnesota-2026-02-06/
9•petethomas•1h ago•3 comments

If you lose your passport in Austria, head for McDonald's Golden Arches

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Show HN: Mermaid Formatter – CLI and library to auto-format Mermaid diagrams

https://github.com/chenyanchen/mermaid-formatter
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RFCs vs. READMEs: The Evolution of Protocols

https://h3manth.com/scribe/rfcs-vs-readmes/
3•init0•1h ago•1 comments

Kanchipuram Saris and Thinking Machines

https://altermag.com/articles/kanchipuram-saris-and-thinking-machines
1•trojanalert•1h ago•0 comments

Chinese chemical supplier causes global baby formula recall

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2•fkdk•1h ago•0 comments

I've used AI to write 100% of my code for a year as an engineer

https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1qxvobt/ive_used_ai_to_write_100_of_my_code_for_1_ye...
3•ukuina•1h ago•1 comments
Open in hackernews

Ask HN: Are there any business monopolies that you like?

2•NewUser76312•2mo ago
It seems a common pattern that a business gets big enough, dominate through network effects and/or regulations and high barriers to entry, and then their services and customer support deteriorate to awful levels. But they end up being the only major game in town, so consumers begrudgingly use them.

That's the common pattern I see, at least.

So I'm curious about the opposite - are there any businesses that are relative monopolies in their industries that you're happy to use / do business with?

I'm struggling to come up with an example myself. Are monopolies doomed to become awful to consumers?

Comments

toomuchtodo•2mo ago
Costco, Bosch, companies with moats who aren't extracting from their customers (broadly speaking). I would've included Southwest Airlines until Elliot Management came in to squeeze the org for returns, and has enshittified the carrier in the process.
NewUser76312•2mo ago
Costco doesn't seem to be like a monopoly, broadly speaking they compete with many grocery stores and bulk food outlets. That being said they often have solid inventory, and the samples used to be a nice touch until all my local locations got way too crowded.
fragmede•2mo ago
Who else competes in that specific market though? Sam's Club and Smart-and-Final are the two I can think of, and it's been a while since I've seen either one of those. Oh, and actual restaurant supply stores, but those are different, imo. Costco's not directly competing with Safeway, for example, as they are different parts of the market.
toomuchtodo•2mo ago
Can you provide some examples of monopolies for context in this discussion?
PaulHoule•2mo ago
Steam?
NewUser76312•2mo ago
They seem decent enough. I barely play games these days, so I don't fully understand the value they add. Just seems like a convenient app store that lets me port my collection across different computers.
fragmede•2mo ago
That convenience is everything. Doing it well, and not falling into the trap of putting profit (too far) above users is the challenge that is too hard for other players (except maybe GoG) to get right. It's like WiFi. You go somewhere, connect, it works, and then you don't think about it unless it's surprisingly fast, or there are problems with it. Everyone else's offerings on this space just feel janky and liable to take your money for some reason. Steam, for the majority of its users "just works". That's not to say there are zero buys with the software and that nobody has valid complaints about it, but just that in general it's great.
PaulHoule•2mo ago
It's still facing the headwind that a lot of people still don't believe that Steam can give you a lean-back experience which is fun like a game console. Some people still think PC games all have sweaty keyboard and mouse control schemes and those crappy huge joysticks from the 1990s that were always falling apart and had to be recalibrated every few minutes -- and that's what is keeping the PS5 alive.
benoau•2mo ago
There's really two different Steams, there's the beloved one with 30 - 50 year olds getting great value from good games and frequent discounts and bundles. Then there's the shitty stuff that the kids plow money into where they pioneered concepts like lootboxes, some of their biggest cash-cows may become illegal under the EU's Digital Fairness Act.

https://www.digital-fairness-act.com/

pestatije•2mo ago
sports competitions...i guess their appreciated cause the consumer doesnt pay directly