skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> As a comparison, the EFF received only $13 million in annual donations

The EFF is hardly a relevant comparison. Most Firefox users have no idea what the EFF is, but most Firefox users do know what Firefox is. (And even if they don't, and just know Firefox as "the Internet", as some users don't understand what a browser is, it's still a lot easier to tell them what Firefox is and why it's important than to explain to them the work the EFF does and why that's important.

I am not speculating here; I am speaking as someone who donates to both Mozilla and the EFF and reminds his non-tech friends and family each December to do the same.

The challenge with getting a critical mass of Firefox users to donate is not in convincing users that their web browser is worth ~10¢/month, but in the friction required to get them to make a payment the first time[1].

[1] (This is the exact challenge that basically every non-profit ever has faced with recurring donations. Some are better at solving it than others.)
Does somebody know if nuclear power will actually be an improvement for the environment (only considering temperature here)? Essentially you just release heat which is stored as mass.

A quick calculation shows that if you only consider heating up our atmosphere and assume an entire switch of all our energy consumption to nuclear energy you end up with a temperature rise of 0.1 deg C per year. I know it is a worst-case scenario - energy will be stored in land/water as well, dissipation etc. - but still.

Compared to fossil fuels, the plus side is you do not produce any greenhouse gases. However, I'm unsure which contributes more to global warming, could well be the former is negligible. Would love to hear an expert on this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10627873
Normal people do not care about the EFF and have no idea what it is. What EFF products does your grandma use?

How much does Wikipedia (something normal people actually care about) raise?
A large enough HVDC grid would almost totally eliminate the need for backup power. There's always wind or sun somewhere and HVDC transmission losses are <5% per 1,000mi. It's possible to build a grid where pumped and battery storage alone can smoothen out any fluctuations.
It's not as if women didn't fight in WWII: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Witches
They are either lying or really stupid.

Any person in his right mind would have known what was going to happen. Imagine a "Share to Instagram" button when you right click an image. Or maybe that Firefox automatically detected phone numbers in webpages and offered you to install Skype to call them (sort of what the Skype plugin does).

What the hell were they thinking about?

So since I'm sure there are competent guys inside Mozilla, I'll say that they are lying.
My first professional rule is to try to be one of the dumbest people in the room. By that I mean, I want to surround myself with people who know more about things that I don't know much about. At my last job, there were five engineers. One was the best manager I've ever had and taught me a lot about being a professional. Another was a phenomenal software architect that taught me a lot about how to build large applications. Yet another really knew everything about the front-end, and the fourth was a terrible coder, but taught me a lot about how NOT to code.

My second professional rule is that when I stop learning, it's time to move on. I always want to challenge myself. If I'm not challenging myself, I'm not improving and, like you, I get bored.

I don't know a lot about your situation, nor do I have an inkling of your capabilities. That said, it sounds like your situation doesn't satisfy either of my two rules. If that's the case, I recommend you look around for something new, where you can find people that will push you to be better.

That said, there are other options. You may find that teaching others is a rewarding experience. Perhaps a more engaging social life will mitigate boredom at the day job. You may find that having some side projects can invigorate your interest. Or perhaps digging into another language or new technology can help keep you interested in your job.

You say you've got a lot of experience on the back-end. Maybe another step would be investigating more DevOps type roles. Implement containers and autoscale, automate deployments, build a CI server. Or look into starting a professional development group at work to teach or learn new skills. Ask directly for feedback. If nobody is offering, ask them. Offer to take on new responsibilities. Identify some pain point that the company has and solve it. It might lead to opportunities to grow the team.

If you're bored for too long, you're going to be miserable. The only way to fix boredom is to seek out change, whether that means a new job or a new skill or new friends. Unfortunately, this is a very, very common scenario out there. The good news is that it is entirely within your power to fix.

Good luck.
WoW right on the Embarcadero, that can't be cheap!

On a different note .. devoted Mozilla web browser user here since 2003. I forget what it was called prior to Firefox.
The obvious solution here is pattern matching. Whether traditional machine learning or NN's, certain situations need dedicated pattern matching looking for them constantly with some probability and algorithm to decide how to act on that. Other areas for improvement, too. Here's some suggestions:

1. Human players use scouts to counter fog of war followed by looking at build patterns to determine likely strategy. Spotting strategy should be easy for pattern matching. They also often micro the scout to (a) disrupt mining or (b) keep it alive for as long as possible. This should be similarly easy.

Note: Units damaged from a prior battle can also be used as scouts and simply not factored into further combat.

2. Simulations should be done using most likely combos of units for each strategy against most likely combos of opponents' units. This should be done for macro and micro. Patterns here will be used in the micro-engine. Bonus against machines: use unlikely combinations that prove effective in simulations.

3. Combat analysis should be a global thing that factors into overall goals. That the human player moved units from one base to another should never surprise an AI. The AI should've shifted some or all defence to that base immediately with use of fast-moving scouts (eg zerglings) to track opponents if they run.

4. Building laying and build order heuristics should be datamined from top players while attached to specific strategies. No one size fits all. Have two for each: one ideal, optimized build order; a heuristic, on-the-fly set if an attack or change throws off the plan.

5. Identify the common strategy changes that happen as a result of what enemy does. Simulate likely situations with units or build orders for those. Identify heuristics for safe transition. Will help for adaptation.

6. Put as many human strategies in there as possible from the A-listers, both specifically and generically.

Those are where I'd start on improving the situation, esp against human players. However, I think an even more interesting line of research is augmenting human players with an AI to efficiently execute their strategy. One that constantly assesses, micro's, follows build orders, etc. Basically never misses a step. More practical for real-world applications.
For an American, no. $5 USD is nearly 100 Moldovan Lei. In other countries, it can amount to 2 ~ 3 days worth of food.
ESCORT+COUPLES+-+Golden+Diamond+Escort
And assuming you have dynamic keyboard shortcuts turned on (and why wouldn't you? Best thing ever.) this is about as painless as it gets.
Webtesting.io Docs and Tutorials
Show HN: Weekend project: Emojiplot, Emoji-based ideas for your next short story
If you use Chromium (or Google Chrome), you can use this extension. It has helped me greatly with my pronunciation.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/english-dictionary...
Sorry its really not intended to be a personal attack and i regret the wording.

To clarify what I was trying to convey, the issue I personally find is that JS errors often produce difficult to understand descriptions and misleading traces when compared to some alternative languages.

I do believe that there is good work being done to convert these errors into more usable alternatives. Just recently I caught a glimpse of this: https://plus.google.com/+AddyOsmani/posts/DdWkiKsvbA2

Segmentation faults can also be very cryptic, especially in the memory related cases like you suggested, but its likely that any tool would behave in fairly unpredictable ways when it comes to any form of corruption or out of memory scenario.

Sorry again and hopefully that clarifies my thoughts.
You're right. I overlooked Beanstalk.
Oh, I so completely understand the lack of resources, though imagine you are in Norway instead. I took a year of french and a couple years of German in high school, unfortunately that was years ago. I've been here 2.5 years, and tried to teach myself. I started my second year of language classes in August, which has worked out much, much better.
It's hard to be a relevant web browser if your users can't watch Netflix.
It is not good that the software malfunctioned but it should be totally isolated from rest of airplane function. Also if software could cause overheating, someone should have redesigned the hardware (heatsink/fan for example) because it was already marginal.
The rendering backend and Javascript portion, absolutely. The total lines of code for all of Firefox (Gecko, Spidermonkey, etc) rivals the Linux kernel.

But I fail to see why we can't have a full-featured browser front-end that uses Webkit, V8, etc as libraries. We have a lot of these projects, but they are always very spartan on feature-set, portability, extensibility, etc. It's almost always a team of 1-5 hobbyists, instead of a serious team of full-time employees. At $30m per 1% of the market, there's a whole lot of money to be made.

Just make it look like a native app on each major OS (Windows, OSX, Linux, BSD), let me move all the toolbar buttons around, let me put my tabs where I want them, let me load my ad blocker and script injector, don't spy on me, don't pack it full of adware, and I'm a happy camper.
Yes you're right they do provide a trace, however the trace can be misleading and difficult to understand. I attempted to clarify my position in the comments above. Sorry for any offence I caused.
> No matter how many times it's disproven, this meme just never ends, does it?

I can tell you from personal experience that trivial things like facts or proof have no bearing on popular misconceptions, and trying to change the narrative is unrewarding at best, and counterproductive at worst. Tilting at windmills, and all that.
For ~$30M per 1% share of the browser market, I'm surprised that:

1) There aren't more competitors
2) A subgroup of them hasn't agreed to a conformant subset of HTML/Javascript/CSS and stuck to it
How bad would it be if we accidentally made a black hole?
All energy sources carry the same essential thermodynamic burden. The difference is that nuclear doesn't also emit green house gases.
Do you see this mismatch in "generosity" in the American south versus the rest of the nation correcting itself anytime soon, whether through a change in demographics or whether through the changing tide of policies as a result of more & more progressive administrations in the coming years?

It is generally agreed by political commentators that we are in the midst of a sweeping progressive political regime which is expected to last at least for another decade if not more.

Or do you see the southern states further entrenching themselves in their ways, digging in their heels in these and other social upliftment areas?
interesting, I had never heard that term before.
I'd much rather have a little wifi-connected board that I can SSH into than a little board that I can plug into a monitor.
Before the arguments were "Save Mozilla from Google" instead of "Save Mozilla from Yahoo". Spreading the reliance over multiple search vendors is at least a step in the right direction.
Correct, however given that any addition to the plane has the potential to cause unintended conflicts with critical systems (i.e. in the downed Swissair flight 111 example I gave in another comment) I was suggesting that these should still be treated just as seriously.

Don't get me wrong though, I don't think that using JS in a plane is a bad idea. In fact I think the aviation industry is extremely slow moving and it frustrates me, fortunately the experimental category has access to some interesting tools but for certified aircraft you're very restricted in what you can and cannot do to modify the aircraft.
Phoenix, then Firebird.

(user since Phoenix 0.1 here :)
I'm thinking more the case where my case class has more fields than are in one database table. For example, what if the Person class has a List[Address] whose values are stored in another table? I guess you would suggest separating the address list from the Person model?
Let's put it this way, most coal plants release so much nuclear waste that if you could capture the uranium and thorium released you could generate more power with it than the coal it came from.
Wikipedia, with their incredibly visible donation campaigns and ubiquitous user base, raised some $75 millions last year and $52M the year before.

Assuming that every user would donate is wildly off-target. I'm sure Mozilla could raise respectable numbers too, but I'm not convinced this is what we should focus on to get things to change.
A surprising number of people aren't able to separate the concepts of "the internet" and "the world wide web". When you try to explain that USENET is a whole separate entity from the web, running along side it on the Internet, their eyes tend to glaze over.
Greenhouse gases matter. The heat generated by power plants etc is irrelevant.

Venus and Earth receive (very roughly) similar amounts of sunlight. They generate similar amounts of heat through radioactive decay in their core. The reason Venus is a hellhole and Earth is, well, Earth - greenhouse gasses.
I like SeaMonkey a lot, but I'm quite worried about its long-term health. They've had a lot of trouble building new releases lately.

It also takes a lot of work (not just userchrome.css hacks, but outright extracting omni.ja(r) [and its intentionally corrupt header that prevents most tools from being able to extract it], hacking at the XUL layout, etc) to make it look even remotely like it belongs in 2015 (the default is right out of 1995.)

And then there's quite a few serious limitations. The cookie manager is all but impossible to use, there is no web inspector (required to use Adblock well these days), no network debugger tools (great for writing/debugging web servers), fullscreen controls don't work at all, etc.

That said, SeaMonkey's probably my best shot going forward. I keep trying to switch to Chrome, but it's just so darned inflexible.
Yep. Likely multiple failures. The software shouldn't cause extra heat, the hardware should be able to handle it, the insulation in the plane shouldn't have caught fire, the pilot should have pulled the circuit breaker sooner...the list goes on.
http://mobile.geek.com/latest/256898-penis-detection-deraile...

Lego can't even allow an open world MMO with the risk of players building penises. They would never risk someone selling penis kits through their website.
Everything is a finite resource, the sun isn't going to last forever either.
When and where did you grow up?
Hasn't it been 64-bit on OS X and Linux for a while? Presumedly those releases had acceptable performance, so what are the Windows-specific problems?
No - not even mine! It was a satirical comment, really. PHP's a bit of a mess, but it's the first choice for many developers doing many projects - and mine for web.

Also Python isn't the only language we encourage. We ship Raspbian with Ruby, Java, Mathematica and more and have resources in many, including PHP.
This is why I can't stand talking to most enviros they claim on one hand that cc will end humanity and then claim geoengineering is too dangerous...
Discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10594143 (12 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10592195 (2 comments)

Other submissions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10623730

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10609759

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10601253

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10599123

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10597522
That sounds pretty damn low, so I had to look it up myself. And you're right about the number.

American counterpats earn x3 as much, and even top 5% Americans earn more than 125k euro.

At my company, many people with so-so talent make $90-$120k. There is no way they could make anything close to that anywhere else in the world.
Ace Music Producer Splashes Dollars on Guests as Souvenir
Not if you live outside the sunbelt. Distribution of electricity is hardly free
THANK YOU!!! Didn't know that, will try it as soon as I can. You made my day. :)
I think it's problematic to frame the question as whether or not someone can "compete" with Google. I think the entire browser ecosystem could change for the better if we built a "Meta browser". So the developer of the web page chooses which engine they prefer for rendering their site. The user only installs a single meta-browser, and if they don't currently have the preferred engine (as noted by developer in HTTP Headers) the user is notified and has the option to download and install that engine.

Here is a short blog post I wrote about this:

https://medium.com/@datashovel/why-isn-t-there-a-meta-browse...

With a meta-browser developers don't have to worry about building a site for all major browsers. They could write for a relatively unknown engine and as long as the user has that engine installed it will work seamlessly when the user navigates to that web page.
They have about 15%, and that's 15% of a huge market: every single person with an Internet access uses a web browser. That's about 3 billion people last time I checked.

15% of 3 billion is still 450 million, which is a lot of users.

In addition, a web browser is pretty easy to monetize because it's the entry point for the web. The default search engine has the lion share but there are other revenue streams (like non-default search engine, for ex. Amazon, the unfamous pocket button...)

From the number you said, they're monetizing less than $1 per user per year, and actually I think it's a bit low. It may be due to them not monetizing on European users where they have a strong market share (about 22%).
I think "fun" can be used pretty loosely here, the number of bugs and gotchas were quite large. It's hard to say how much of that was due to everything being built on MEL but it certainly wasn't pretty.
The point is not that critical thinking is a useful tool, I agree here. The title is about being a necessary skill. Here I disagree, many people can learn the craft by accumulating a lot of experience. Is like machine learning, you only need to have a lot of data (experience). Human are good at learning by example. Creative people are necessary for our culture to progress, but is not something necessary. You can live your life doing a good job and contributing to the welfare of society without critical thinking. Many times the good ideas come from nowhere inside us. Many great mathematicians create ideas from insight not by reflexive critical thinking.
Norway dubs childrens showsm including things like Disney. It was helpful; At one point in my learning Norwegian, I was watching Spiderman cartoons because the language is always very simple and clear. Children start learning English in school formally around age 6. It helps that video games and popular more adultish movies only have subtitles. A few workplaces are English-dominant, but in general one can't find job with english skills alone.

The actual effect of this is that I'm easily understood when I speak english by many and get advantages like being able to use an english word when I am unsure or being greeted by many words that i only need remember pronunciation. But not everyone can actually speak english well, or they are just as unsure using english as I am norwegian - which weirdly, doesn't seem to be such a problem speaking english with other non-native english speakers.
i like mozilla but they are more concerned about bringing firefox to black boxes like iphone than open platforms like Ubuntu Phone
The fact that you asked for "evidence that XX-chromosome humans have the same distribution of interests and aptitudes as XY-chromosome human" shows that you believe the opposite. Otherwise you wouldn't ask for the evidence in the first place. And I just gave you some evidence, but you seem to think it's not good enough. That's about as good as the research gets, which is itself a commentary on how little the scientific community seems to think this line of questioning is worthwhile. But fine, here's some more: https://books.google.com/books?id=xeYJAAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA110&ots...

I'm trying to figure out how you would even begin to do an objective study of what you're looking for since by the time kids present meaningful interests, they're already irrevocably influenced by society and their parents' expectations.

And no, that's not a parsimonious explanation at all, it's one of many that fits a particular narrative. Equally plausible is that toys today are a relic of thousands of years of traditional gender role pressures that have no place in today's knowledge economy. You can trace "dolls are for girls" back to hunter-gatherer times where it made sense for boys to be given knives and bows, and girls to be given baskets and dolls. The problem is those roles are deeply ingrained in today's society even though they don't make much sense anymore since today women are more likely to build robots than men are to hunt their own food.

[1] Is a genetics study, the very thing you're asking for evidence of. That's how you would test a hypothesis that genetics is key to occupational interest -- look at two animals with identical genetics and see if they show the same interests regardless of environmental factors. If they don't, then the entire XX vs. XY distinction is a moot point. i.e. if two people with literally the same DNA don't show the same interests (as is the case for many identical twins), that's rather strong evidence that genetics doesn't mean much for occupational choice at all. And if you're discounting the study merely because it uses rats, you're going to have to throw out an awful lot of research from the last 100 years on just about everything related to biology.
$45 million in donations and contributions over the 2012-2013 fiscal year. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Wmf_AR12...

(That's the Wikimedia Foundation and does not include the local chapters such as Wikimédia France.)
Perhaps I completely misread it? It still sounds inflammatory to me, especially the "deserved" bit at the end, which seems like tossing in a Molotov cocktail.

If you did intend it as an anti-flamewar measure, that's a good intention, but as you can see from how badly it backfired, not a good way to go about it.
> Assuming that every user would donate is wildly off-target

I'm not sure what point you're refuting, since the original post says:

> I don't think every user is going to pay $1

The comparison is an illustration of the average donation necessary per user, not a prediction that every user will donate the mean amount.