MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by afavour | 2025-07-13 13:58:00+00:00
I disagree, hiring a CEO for well below market pay because they believe in the mission is a recipe for disaster. Very likely you’ll end up with someone whose heart is in the right place but can’t execute.

2-3x staff engineer salary is a lot of money. But no matter how much I believed in a mission if I could make 10-20x that and set myself up for life financially I’d have a very hard time turning it down.
by techjamie | 2025-07-13 13:58:26+00:00
https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/privacypass/about/

Perhaps a system like Privacy Pass would be ideal. Where a verifier generates a verified client a number of redeemable signed tokens for a session, but when presented by a client, the site doesn't know who that token was issued to, but they know they authenticated this person and can verify they made the token. Therefore they get access.
by braiamp | 2025-07-13 13:58:40+00:00
I already posted a hot take [0], but this one is even hotter: there's no strategy that Mozilla could have employed to make any of their products popular.

I will substantiate that assertion with a simple argument in the form of a question: what were the most popular internet browsers in each period of history, for each platform, and why?

IE was popular because it came with Windows. Safari is popular because it is both Mac and iOS default browser. Chrome became popular because Google convinced you that IE was slow because it was IE, not because your PC was slow already.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44549224
by johngossman | 2025-07-13 13:58:51+00:00
Huge Tolkien fan here. But the list of great authors and great books is long. It is certainly not unfair to compare Nabokov, Rushdie, Kingsolver, Ferrante, etc etc etc to Tolkien. Some were linguists, translators, literature professors. Some were journalists. Some had no obvious qualifications at all. Some wrote their novels very quickly, some took decades. Shakespeare and Dickens were not linguists and (mostly) wrote very quickly.
by avs733 | 2025-07-13 14:00:20+00:00
Not really? If one seeks to gain basic information these are reasonable sources but they are not authoritative, nor are they deep enough to generate deep and rich understanding of most phenomenon.

I was taught since at least high school that you don’t cite encyclopedias as sources because they are not sources - they are summaries of sources.

LLMs are similar but worse. They are a statistical approximation of truth, without a concept of truth. They are fuzzing sources that you and I have access to already. I find calling that hand off of agency and responsibility “being informed” deeply disturbing.
by idoubtit | 2025-07-13 14:01:37+00:00
"Preislamic" is a common term for near-East history. Islam is well dated, it introduced many changes and unified the region, so it's a powerful marker.

I've never encountered the word "Pre-Arabic" about the Arabic peninsula. It would be hard to define precisely. The word "arab" is probably more than 3000 years old. The Arabic languages may be older ; they're semitic languages like the Akkadian of Mesopotamia. And when did an "Arab" people or culture emerge from the semitic people and culture? I guess between 6000 BP and 3000 BP, but it was probably a long process, and nomad tribes didn't leave many vestiges.
by adamgordonbell | 2025-07-13 14:02:50+00:00
The study coauthor actually seems positive on their potential:

'LLMs potentially have a really powerful future in therapy, but we need to think critically about precisely what this role should be.'

And they also mention a previous paper that found high levels of engagement from patients.

So, they have potential but currently are giving dangerous advice. It sounds like they are saying a fine tuned therapist model is needed because 'you are a great therapist' prompt, just gives you something that vaguely sounds like a therapist to an outsider.

Sounds like an opportunity honestly.

Would people value a properly trained therapist enough to pay for it over an existing chatgpt subscription?
by rpdillon | 2025-07-13 14:03:51+00:00
There are a lot of different ways to respond to you, since there are so many features that have different effects. But I'll focus on one I care about, related to tracking. UBo can detect cname cloaking, where a provider hosts 3rd party tracking via a CNAME DNS record attached to their domain. UBo can detect this and block it, while the lite version cannot.

If you care only about ads, then you can determine whether the extension is working purely based on your annoyance level while surfing. But I care about tracking as well (CNAME cloaking is one example), as well as the ability to customize the experience (import my own filter lists, for example).

These capabilities aren't present in UBo Lite. So it feels like a real gap to me. For context, I was an avid UMatrix user for a very long time, but Gorhill discontinuing that showed that I was in a tiny minority. Reminds me of when James Gosling told me I was a dying breed because I still used Emacs. If the inventor of the technology doesn't even use it, maybe it's time to move on! =)
by calgoo | 2025-07-13 14:04:04+00:00
I have seen CEOs that where earning 250k in the EU with thousands of employees. The issue is an entitlement issue, where today's world makes people think that they deserve millions of dollars for leading a company, same issue as developers expectings hundreds of thousands for their work. Its a corruption of the system which is both a effect and a cause of the current death of capitalism in the US.
by homebrewer | 2025-07-13 14:04:19+00:00
You can have the best browser in the world, and it's not gonna help you if nobody tests for it because its market share is approximately 0%. We're already seeing people getting stuck in endless captchas because they're using a weird browser that behaves differently to 95% of other users, and shitty websites inadvertently relying on bugs in Chromium which results in stuff not working, or running slow as molasses, in FF.

I've been running into both pretty much daily. As a long time Firefox users (since 2.0 almost exclusively), it didn't used to be like that, it's a recent phenomenon.

Much can also be said about them removing features and not implementing things people keep asking for for decades; for example, the vertical tab feature request was there for more then 20 years, I think?

It's not a criticism of developers, they're doing what they can, it's obvious set by managers.
by ricardobeat | 2025-07-13 14:04:33+00:00
The parent is referring to things like Coop (social media), SkyWriter (IDE), Persona, Solo (website builder), “data futures”, Servo [1], “big blue button”, most of them have little to no potential for revenue.

Meanwhile you can’t really have more than a few YouTube tabs open in FF otherwise it starts freezing, and it’s been behind Safari in adding new features for a while.

[1] including Servo here since it seems to have had no real roadmap to become integrated into FF, making it more of a vanity project - it’s already thirteen years old at this point
by derbOac | 2025-07-13 14:04:54+00:00
Each of the major strokes has a distinct functional example: front crawl is fastest, breaststroke lets you sight directly in front of you with each breath (which is useful in general open water), and backstroke allows you to breath uninterrupted.

It makes sense to me to have different stroke events, although I wish there was a true freestyle that allowed for anything, including underwater.
by adriand | 2025-07-13 14:05:00+00:00
That’s really just one issue among many, and it actually makes me worry more about this technology, not less: it provides a clear incentive for the officer to stand by the contents of a report that he or she did not write, even if they realize at some point it is wrong, because they hastily or lazily signed it.

The way this technology is designed is a clear example of dystopian outcomes driven by market forces: capitalism inserted into processes (like justice) which society ought to protect against perversion by profit motives. I can imagine a version of this technology that is designed with societal benefits in mind, but instead we get one designed to make the sale.
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-13 14:05:16+00:00
Those things go hand in hand though. If they truly were the best people would line up to use it.

I still use it because it's the least bad option. They have a long history of ignoring the community in favour of the mainstream, ironically a user group they have lost a long time ago. So now they're just alienating their remaining supporters in order to cater to users that don't even remember they exist.
by conartist6 | 2025-07-13 14:05:46+00:00
I can only assume you meant to write "shouldn't" instead of "should", but if you study human factors you'll discover that certain kinds of taking-shortcuts behavior are inevitable when dealing with humans. Speeding when we drive, for example. We know we are creating a material risk of getting pulled over and fined, but we just basically decide to ignore that risk because for most of us it is outweighed by the convenience (and real value) of getting everywhere we're going faster.

As always considering how a person would interact with an intern is surprisingly instructive to how they will form a working relationship with an non-sentient tool like a language model. You would expect them to give it a probationary experience to earn their trust after which if they are satisfied they will almost certainly express that trust by giving the tool a greater and greater degree of freedom with less active (and less critical) oversight.

It is not the initial state that worries me where the officers still mistrust a new technology and are vigilant of it. What worries me is the late-stage where they have learned to trust it (because it has learned to cover their asses correctly) and the AI itself actually ends up exercising power in human social structures because people have a surprising bias towards not speaking up when it would be safer to keep your head down and go with the flow, even when the flow is letting AI take operational control of society inch by inch
by theptip | 2025-07-13 14:05:53+00:00
> So we don’t store the original draft and that’s by design and that’s really because the last thing we want to do is create more disclosure headaches for our customers and our attorney’s offices

You have to wonder if this will stand up in court. I hope not.

AI has a great opportunity to take processes that contain hidden bias and make them more legible and therefore amenable to fixing.

But it also has the opportunity to do the opposite, and we should be cautious to make sure guardrails are in place when putting this tech into life-and-death systems.

“Stamp this LLM text in a hurry” is an invitation for whatever errors and biases are baked into the system to be propagated. You need provenance and measurement of LLM outputs.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-13 14:06:12+00:00
This was probably the day that Firefox jumped the shark for me:

https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robo... | https://web.archive.org/web/20250701115346/https://www.theve...

I still use it, but I lost all respect for the management. This level of tone deafness should cause everyone on the board and c suite to personally write an open letter of apology to the users, but instead we got a half-hearted victim-blaming non-apology:

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/update-looking-glass-add... | https://web.archive.org/web/20250701115352/https://blog.mozi...

This is really rather telling. Here is how Mozilla articulates what they think users have a problem with:

> We’re sorry for the confusion and for letting down members of our community. While there was no intention or mechanism to collect or share your data or private information and The Looking Glass was an opt-in and user activated promotion, we should have given users the choice to install this add-on.

Mozilla is willfully inept. They think that pre-loading third-party non-free code and ads without my knowledge or consent is not an issue! Moreover, Mozilla thinks that this doesn't conflict with Mozilla's interpretation of what opt-in means and the values it embodies.

Mozilla is looking more and more like controlled opposition. Mozilla undermined their own users' faith in Mozilla's add-on/extension capabilities and act like releasing the source after the fact resolves any issue at all regarding doing this without consulting users or receiving prior affirmative consent.

This comment is getting long enough as it is. I'll just leave this here.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/manage-firefox-data-col...
by iluvlawyering | 2025-07-13 14:06:55+00:00
Been doing this for almost a decade. Drive-by social media. My pages are all public too.

Check iluvlawyering on Instagram and you'll see hundreds of posts without any responses. There's even a post that I made as a channel marker of sorts (paraphrasing: click on this and tap on that, all day long its click, click, clack, feel free to click on this there's no tapping back.

Needless to say I haven't scrolled or engaged with anything on any of my own feeds in years. It's also important not to curate or review what you've already posted. That was an issue for the first couple years but it's all smooth sailing now.
by arp242 | 2025-07-13 14:07:12+00:00
Pre-Islamic Arabia is, as far as I know, a fairly widely accepted term. Not that different from pre-Roman Britain, pre-Columbian Americas, pre-colonial Africa, pre-imperial China, or even Pagan Europe. In all these cases a significant change took place which drastically changed the course of the region (usually some sort of unification as a nation or religion, not always peaceful or voluntary of course).
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-13 14:08:47+00:00
Microsoft is absolutely terrible at Firefox support. I feel like they do it in purpose. In fact when I set my user agent to Edge half the issues in O365 disappear! Suddenly things actually work.

The latest crap is that it now requires me to sign in every single day on Firefox. And often after I sign in it immediately goes to "hang on while we're signing you out". Meanwhile they're pushing edge heavily as a vehicle of copilot promotion. So I'm pretty sure this is just intentional breakage..
by DoctorOW | 2025-07-13 14:09:16+00:00
Whoops, it happened. An internet argument changed someone's mind. :)

According to their latest financial transparency report[1], software development as a line item is about 60% of their expenses. However, your question wasn't about where revenue has gone, it was about where new donations would go. That lead me to the donation FAQ which reads:

> At Mozilla, our mission is to keep the Internet healthy, open, and accessible for all. The Mozilla Foundation programs are supported by grassroots donations and grants. Our grassroots donations, from supporters like you, are our most flexible source of funding. These funds directly support advocacy campaigns (i.e. asking big tech companies to protect your privacy), research and publications like the *Privacy Not Included buyer's guide and Internet Health Report, and covers a portion of our annual MozFest gathering.

If I'm reading this correctly, this means you are not able to donate to Firefox development at all. This explains the lack of Firefox on their website. Any mention of it as a product of the foundation would be misleading about where the donations go. From the point of view of the Mozilla Foundation, Firefox is just another revenue stream for outreach efforts.

This really bums me out, because I'm a huge fan of Firefox. It's my go to browser on my computer and my phone. I advocate for it as much as possible. I've donated before, but I've likely never actually financially supported development of Firefox. I support the EFF, so it's possible I could have donated to this foundation on its own merits. But I didn't.

[1]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...

[2]: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/help/#frequently...
by nabakin | 2025-07-13 14:10:09+00:00
I keep seeing comments on HN that misunderstand what's happening with Mozilla and it's kind of frustrating.

Right now, if you were to take away Google's money, Firefox would not be able to compete with Chromium and Safari. It would die.

All these side-projects are attempts to find a source of revenue aside from Google and are necessary to Firefox's survival. So saying they should stop doing them, completely misses the point.

Unless we want Firefox to die, we should understand Mozilla's situation and encourage this exploratory process, not hate on it.
by gtsop | 2025-07-13 14:10:12+00:00
> don't know if you have ever worked in a larger team that lacked someone to make decisions, take responsibility and set a strategy

I had once. The ultra micro-managing boss went to surgery and was off for two months. The whole company happily cruised along, numbers kept going up, his toxic pressure was absent, people kept working and making things.

I don't know how it would go for long term, but these were some of the best months.
by auxide | 2025-07-13 14:10:32+00:00
Yes, forks do indeed piggyback off of their code; that's the point of free and open source software anyway. And Mozilla, in its current state and current leadership, is not sustainable and still won't be with people paying for Firefox. Its marketshare is dwindling, and people are moving to forks such as Zen or to other browsers like Vivaldi. Adding a paid version will just make that trend go faster. And you don't even need to make a fork, because user.js tweaks such as Arkenfox or Betterfox exist anyway.
by clysm | 2025-07-13 14:10:34+00:00
It helps build a new system, but all existing wallets would be hackable until they migrate. And we expect everyone to have the time and resources to do that? For a “store of value” system?

All of my hardware wallets are now worthless? All of the hardware security modules used for wallets managed by corporations no longer work?

It's an absolute mess for so many reasons that a "protocol fix" just doesn't cover.
by pyman | 2025-07-13 14:10:44+00:00
You didn't click on the link I shared. I'm talking about the cost to produce the response, not the request. One AI prompt uses around 10 times more CPU and energy than a Google search.

If ChatGPT handles 1 billion queries a day, that's like the energy cost of 10 billion Google searches every single day.

Someone has to pay the electricity bill. We all know it's not free like you claim.
by myaccountonhn | 2025-07-13 14:11:17+00:00
From experience, parsing input into data structures that fit the problem domain once at the "edge" is a good idea. The code becomes a lot more maintainable without a bunch of validation checks scattered all over the place, picking a data structure for the problem at hand usually leads to cleaner solutions, and errors usually show up much earlier and are easier to debug.

From experience though I've found that wrapping all data in newtypes adds too much ceremony and boilerplate. If the data can reasonably be expressed as a primitive type, then you might as well express that way. I can't think of a time where newtype wrapping would have saved me from accidentally not validating or accidentally inputting the wrong data as a parameter. Especially the email example is quite weak, with ~30 lines of code just being ceremony due to wrapping a string, and most likely it's just going to be fed as is to various crud operations that will cast the data to a string immediately.

Interacting with Haskell/elm libraries that have pervasive use of newtypes everywhere can be painful, especially if they don't give you a way to access the internal data. If a use-case comes up that the library developer didn't account for, then you might have no way of modifying the data and you end up needing to patch the library upstream.
by cs702 | 2025-07-13 14:12:15+00:00
TL;DR: The OP believes that if we train large AI models via RL to duplicate the behavior of existing software (for example, train them to duplicate the behavior of an existing spreadsheet, an existing command-line tool, or an existing application), large AI models will get good at:

* reading and understanding long, complicated, detailed instructions,

* executing those instructions meticulously and precisely, without errors,

* noticing its mistakes, if there are any along the way, and recovering from them,

* not settling prematurely for solutions that look "good enough" but aren't, and

* undertaking large, complicated projects which previously could be completed only by teams of human experts.

There's a good chance the OP is right, in my view.

We sure live in interesting times!
by anton-c | 2025-07-13 14:14:15+00:00
To be honest i agree, idk if I gained a ton of knowledge from KSP(I know what deltaV is now) but man does that stuff - as well as the flight simulators - let you grok some concepts better than any other way. Except actually flying I guess.

Seeing a planet on the map appear close but be invisible, then turning into my whole view really helped me grasp the distance between bodies in space. And KSP is scaled down!

Reading about stalls helps but crashing the tutorial Cessna twelve times really helps you understand what a stall is and why it happens.
by Gentil | 2025-07-13 14:14:26+00:00
> Mozilla CEO

Laura Chambers is just an interim CEO. I am not sure how Mozill Foundation/Corporation is exactly linked in the decision making. But the key people are still Mark Surman and Mitchell Baker who is the Chairwomen of Mozilla Corporation.

If Laura is getting paid lots like Mitchell Baker, it is still an issue. But, wouldn't she be just a scapegoat? I am pretty sure as Chairwomen, Mitchell Baker still has more power than Laura the CEO when it comes to Mozilla Corporation. I have felt this is just to chill the uproar against Mitchell Baker. Now everyone will blame the next CEO. But I wonder how much power she has. I could be wrong of course.
by safety1st | 2025-07-13 14:14:38+00:00
Okay. If you think they should be above the law, that's who you are. Those are your values. Thanks for letting us know.

I'm of the humble view that it's at least as important to enforce the law when it comes to the most powerful corporations in the world, as it is to enforce it on the average person.

But maybe you see things differently.
by onion2k | 2025-07-13 14:14:41+00:00
Consumers pick _largely_ based on cost and features, with a things like brand, ethics, and environment coming second. However, consumers can only pick an option from choices they've heard of. Advertising is about getting into the list (and influencing choice a bit by demonstrating the brand image); the product itself still has to a good choice for the customer to make a purchase.
by Aachen | 2025-07-13 14:15:38+00:00
Wait until you hear what issues the ubiquitous dihydrogen monoxide can cause! https://web.archive.org/web/19961031232918/http://media.circ...

These points would greatly benefit from being put into perspective

You can't seriously think a significant percentage of people are emotionally unstable because they looked up porn of their own will at an age of their own choosing, even if I trust that it can be listed as a contributing factor for some infinitesimal fraction of those with that issue
by IshKebab | 2025-07-13 14:15:45+00:00
I think you need a CEO, you just don't need a CEO that is paid $7m/year. That's ludicrous. What amazing decisions have they been making that were worth that amount? Have they really contributed more than a team of 70 developers could?

There are plenty of competent people that could be CEO for far less, like $200k/year.
by bevr1337 | 2025-07-13 14:16:03+00:00
Their handling of MDN has been disappointing. Laying off their staff, asking for unpaid contributors, and selling more advertising space was greedy business.

They're currently running a REDIS advertisement that looks like a critical error. The ad is a bright red toast!

_Speaking personally_, MDN is Mozilla's most valuable resource. It is the only resource I want to survive Moz's leadership.