skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I aways have a problem with this aurgument.

Most users do not care because they do not understand the true ramifications of their not caring. It is not like that looked at all the data, then made made an informed choice to share everything.

FF should be at the heart of caring for users privacy EVEN IF THEY THEMSELVES DO NOT.

The average person does not understand technology, how much data they are leaking about themselves and how this data can be used against their interests

Taking advantage of that ignorance for any type of gain is unethical IMO, most companies willfully exploit this collective ignorance Mozilla should be better than most companies.
I'm the parent of a kid who took part in the 2015 school lottery in Amsterdam, and since I had skin in the game I went as far as studying the original nobel prize winning papers on the DA algorithms to understand exactly what was going. This article is actually a really good summary, the amount of misinformation out there being spread by journalists who did not fully grok the (admittedly complex) system is astonishing.

One thing that the article only touches on is the "preferred placement" that some schools managed to bring in from the old system, e.g. Montessori kids get preference for Montessori schools. This ruins the elegance and inherent fairness of the algorithm. In particular it makes it possible to do some form of strategic selection again if you have a preferred placement option that you can trade. This tends to benefit kids with clever parents disproportionately, as the article notes.

A "lesson learned" for policy makers should be that even though an algorithm performs better on being "fair" (Multi-DA), it can still be better to choose an algorithm that is easier to explain. (They did end up switching to a different algorithm the next year)
Except for a few ones. Naughty Dog comes to my mind. Everything they have produced have been consistently good. I'm following the ex team of infinity wards as well (haven't played titan fall but heard good things). Nintendo always produce good flagship games. What else can be praised out there?
As I am uninformed on the subject, could you tell me the difference between /dev/random and /dev/urandom?
As others already mentioned, it sounds like your preference is building a bootstrapped company from day one without need for any VC funding. You're not the intended audience for the author's blog post.

But to respond to your other questions...

>Is the way to do that really by employing an "executive team of leaders"?

Yes. Many founders can't delegate and end up obsessively micromanaging others which puts a ceiling on growth.[1]

>he author writes about an IPO, which is something that feels so far from the initial founding stage that it is useless to think about?

The IPO thinking at the very early stage isn't necessarily premature because the founders may make early decision to offer equity (stock options) to employee #2 instead of a higher market salary. (Because they have no money to pay high salaries.) If so, they've basically chosen the fork in the road towards an IPO. If the employee can't eventually sell the stock (liquidity provided by IPO), there isn't much point to offering equity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder%27s_syndrome
Yup.

They'll get high quality games, 1-2 years after they have their mainstream release.
Relic has a great track record, but unfortunately the last great RTS they made was Company of Heroes 11 years ago, and the last good RTS was Dawn of War II 7 years ago.

Their last 2 games (Company of Heroes 2, Dawn of War III) were not nearly as good and were not well recieved, basically rehashes of past series aimed at an audience that doesn't play RTS games anymore.

Pretty sad considering they're pretty much the last old RTS developer still alive, and almost no one new is making RTS games.
That’s exactly why Firefox is around 5% global marketshare. Only the powerusers are left.

And this move will also drive them away.
MyWidget, Content Recommendation Service, Launches WordPress Plugin
Does anyone know why Firefox always phones home to:

somerandomserver.compute.amazonaws.com

I have a tool called TCPView (a Microsoft sysinternals tool) that inspects my traffic. I disabled all the Mozilla telemetry and it still phones home to this server. The connection is encrypted going through port 443. It even appears in different forks of Firefox like Waterfox. Is this unique to me, or does anyone else notice this?

My best guess is that it's some sort of telemetry they're collecting. Keep in mind I disabled updates so it's not pinging update servers either. Also: It happens only when I visit a website, and doesn't appear when I start up the browser for the first time. I also have no plugins installed. Since I see some Mozillians in this thread I figured it's the best place to ask!
Do you use laravel, interested in moving to Asheville, NC? My company is hiring :)
Does an IP address actually require an opt-in? And if it does, does it only apply if it is being stored?
See the OP.
People keep saying this, but it just isn't true. All you have to do is match transactions with price. It can be done automatically.
Not from Japan but one on the things I miss the most now that I have a car is being able to sleep around 5 hours and catch up during commute.

It's crazy how good you get at falling asleep instantly and how you get a "my stop is at the right corner, I need to wake up right now" sixth sense.

Now I require more sleep and commute makes me more tired when I get to work and back home.
After an initial seeding the only thing additional entropy adds is limiting the damage from a compromise of the internal state of the PRNG. And if the OS's internal PRNG state is compromised, what makes you think your process isn't?
That's ... sad. Sum types and product types are simultaneously easier to understand and are more useful to know about than inheritance.

Sum types are simply types whose values can be one of several choices - surely that's something a child can reasonably understand!

Product types might be a little harder to grok - they're essentially structs - but surely no harder to understand than inheritance and the whole IS_A/HAS_A mess
And here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15072276
It took me a long time listening to NPR to realize this, though I'm sure a rural conservative would pick it up in a day.

It's common to watch for bias on a per-story level, looking for either bad facts or heavy spin. That's the level where liberals insist conservative media is biased and other media isn't. NPR is generally great on that level - if they run a piece, it'll be factually accurate and told from some basically reasonable viewpoint.

But it's also worth talking about multi-story bias - what will you come away believing if you hear 100 (factually accurate) stories from this source? That's the usual level where conservatives complain about liberal media bias. (They're not wrong, though conservative sources do plenty of the same.) NPR looks way less good on that level; the scheduled programs (e.g. Fresh Air) lean very liberal/cosmopolitan, while the news reports are prone to a focus on political, coastal, and international issues without so much awareness of the 'interior'.

It's still a vastly better source than most news for learning about any single event, I generally prefer it to NYT coverage even, but it's not exactly comprehensive.
Quite a long read, but I think it explains the situation quite well: https://www.2uo.de/myths-about-urandom/
In Turkey, when you move your phone number, 2FA automatically gets locked (you can't receive the code till you reactivate) for banks, requiring calling customer service or visiting a branch to reactivate.

It would be nice to have a similar system for all kind of 2FA solutions involving cell phones.
This shouldn't have been downvoted because it is exactly correct.

Cryptographic generators don't work like PCG and xoroshiro and Mersenne Twister. They're generally built by taking a cryptographically secure cipher or hash core, "keying" it with secret entropy, and running it in a streaming configuration (like CTR mode).

A properly designed CSPRNG can only be "cracked" in a few specific scenarios:

1. The primitive it's built on (or the streaming construction it's configured in) is broken, in which case the news for cryptography as a field is significantly bigger than the fact that an RNG has a flaw.

2. An attacker has exploited a systems flaw to directly disclose the contents of the memory the CSPRNG is operating out of, in which case you have bigger problems than your CSPRNG.

3. The secrets that key the generator have become predictable. This is in practice the only way CSPRNGs get broken (unintentionally), and, in practice, always means the CSPRNG wasn't initialized properly (the "cold start entropy problem").

You should use the getrandom() system call, or read from /dev/urandom, to the exclusion of all other mechanisms.
Pegging "capitalism" into a teleological historiographic narrative (aimed at justifying non-capital producing collectivist dictatorships) has been around for so long that its retro chic again.
I generally trust Mozilla, but I really don't understand what they are going to get out of the data. Their explanation leaves me scratching my head. Perhaps it's simply because I don't work on browsers?

How does seeing which sites users use that need Flash drive their decision-making. Either they support Flash, or they don't.

And- ditto for "Jank" (not sure I understand that term, frankly- why is it capitalized?). Some developers don't optimize well- how is Mozilla going to use this? I think they do a good job over on MDN.

I guess I'd like to be sure I understand what problem they are trying to solve. Maybe they feel like without understanding their users they can't keep up with Chrome. I see people talking about how good Chrome is. And I must admit- it is sweet for me too. But that may be because (1) I don't have it loaded up with add-ons like I do Mozilla and (2) they have optimized for certain sites like youtube and gmail and I just can't get Firefox to work all that well on those sites.

But I'm not convinced that they need my data to fix that.

EDIT: On the other hand, Chrome seems to lose my passwords on every upgrade so it won't be my main browser until if fixes that little issue, which is going on, what, 5 years now?
Wouldn't spoofing IP addresses risk the data packets being filtered out by ISPs or other upstream network providers? IMO if keeping IP addresses hidden is a concern, it'd be better to use something like TOR.
Yeah I mean there has been a fem gems, but it's a small fraction of the crap that's released. The bigger point is that there's no incentive to release polished, finalized games. People will pay for it either way, based on hype alone.
Do those security updates also include kernel vulnerabilities?
> Your assembly skills have to be of quite a decent order to beat a modern compiler.

Start with compiler output, add intrinsics where you can see help is needed, benchmark, repeat.

Pathologically-slow ASM is pretty rare from modern compilers in my experience.
The server doesn't support java plugins for bukkit/spigot. Because none of the internals are shared any interface layer would be needlessly complex and a drag on maintenance.

The lua plugin system is well-developed and documented [1] so most plugins could be changed over easily.

[1]: https://api.cuberite.org
When I browse to firefox.com I get [1] which has this text:

More privacy

Firefox doesn’t sell access to your personal information
like other companies. From privacy tools to tracking
protection, you’re in charge of who sees what.
Here’s how Firefox protects your privacy

So yes they still advertise with that as one of the major features.

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/?utm_medium=referral&u...
Unless Quantum Uncertainty holds true, and your RNG uses Quantum randomness then all RNG are pseudo.
No compromise, I switched to FF on Android to avoid this crap from Chrome and now you'll do it as well.

I look forwards to the fork.
I'm not sure I buy the premise that every service needs its own coin. Surely in most cases it would be better to just use the most widely used, most stable coin?

If the concept of cryptocurrency is going to survive I think there needs to be one or two clear winners to eventually bring some stability to their value.

Of course, not issuing your own coin doesn't leave as much opportunity to get rich quick off a bit of hype.
...OMG actually dipped and is a good buy right now...
Key Metrics for Every Social Media Role – Buzzlogix
Existing telemetry dosent collect browsing data
All and any.

That includes IP addresses (just connecting to a socket without a user explicitly starting that action), names, emails, hashed IPs, it includes usernames, CC data, messages, interactions with webpages.

Anything that in any way is connected to a person is covered by this.

This directive is also the origin of the cookie disclaimers, which require opt-in before collecting statistics or loading any third party tracking solution.
Ask HN: How would you fund Firefox while preserving user privacy?
I saw a lot of disappointment regarding Mozilla's recent proposal to collect user data, but I'm interested in seeing alternative ways for them fund innovation and development in their browser.
> a few years back

I'm a centrist from Minnesota, which is where a lot of NPRs content is made through our local public stations MPR. We are pretty proud of our public radio here and pretty much both sides listen to the non political interest shoes like car talk, prairie home companion, etc.

NPR news and political opinion pieces used to be neutral with a libral flair: biased, but only a little bit.

The last year or so is when they really started going crazy left and it has become unbearable. I really think that whoever the editors are made a conscious decision right around the time of the primaries to stop trying to be neutral and just go full left propaganda. There was a noticable shift and I was no longer able to listen because of how overt and propaganda ish their reports became.
A practical example is a function that can return either a value or an error. Those are two different types that are combined into a Sum type called a Result. When you write some code that handles results, you need to account for both possible outcomes or you'll get a compiler error (or a panic).

A product type is basically an object where you have a person type which in includes attributes like 'Name', 'Age', etc.
Ok, boldness in "seeking feedback" on systematically leaking private information. Same concern.
I think the core disagreement here is not ideological per se, but on premises. I agree with the motivation of not collecting any data.

That said, I don't feel that we have a choice but to compromise. If we don't build a better browser, then the other browsers will win by default, which means you lose all those privacy and security motivations anyway.

This is not some gleeful romp down the yellow brick road of data collection. It's a hard-searched, difficult compromise to a question that there are no good answers to, and LOTS of disagreement about.
The Serbian Orthodox Church still hasn't switched from the Julian calendar. So now their religious holidays like Christmas are a couple weeks off from the rest of the world and will continue diverging.
Highly recommended. Sequel is quite good as well.
Why is this man now being classified as ”alt-right”? It seems to me he's 'just' sexist, I haven't really seen any indication regarding his political beliefs in general, certainly nothing along the lines of the unthinking intolerance towards minorities, anti-immigration stance, subscription to weird conspiracy theories, and white supremacy that need to be broadly satisfied in order to reliably define somebody as being alt-right. (Yes, it will be argued that sexism correlates with other forms of discrimination, but what is roughly true on average is not necessarily true in every particular case.) Just tarring him with the label of being "alt-right" as a manner of shouting him down seems very lax, particularly when he can be countered with far more compelling arguments.
Actually all mentioned countries have sizeable immigrant minorities (except Denmark I guess).

I'd say burden of proof is on the side claiming "developing integration problems" and such in Australia / Sweden / Germany. Without any data it seems like empty rightist populism.
DoW = Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, a real-time strategy series set in the Warhammer 40000 (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TabletopGame/Warhammer...) universe

CoH = Company of Heroes, WWII-themed real-time strategy game

RTS = Real Time Strategy

DotA = Defense of the Ancients, a (the original?) MOBA

MOBA = Multiplayer Online Arena Battle, initially a more action-oriented subgenre of real-time strategy, though IMO closer to real-time tactics games as it's smaller scale with more important units and itemisation, no base construction/management and more limited resource management. I think the RTS link only exists because the "original", DotA, was a mod on an RTS (Warcraft III) (it was not the original one but as with e.g. Minecraft it basically opened up and popularised the genre), probably the most popular eSport category today

AoE = Age of Empires, real-time strategy game set in a semi-realistic past, the first two installments were roughly set between the stone age and the middle ages or renaissance, the third one does not exist and is set during the Age of Discovery
I have once worked at a startup where CTO literally forbade me writing any unit tests. - "We're not a consultantcy shop, we're trying to build our own product, we don't have time to write tests".... I left. Company went bankrupt a few months later.
You cannot legitimately suggest using Opera as a privacy-respecting alternative to this possible new Firefox.
Just a heads up -- your site emailthis.me is down.
Services like Riseup constantly ask users not to store much information on the servers in order to contain the costs. The quotas are usually much smaller in such services.

P.S.: I do have a Riseup email account that I barely use for some specific areas of activism.
I can't think of a statement more vague than that.

Or why any external data would be needed at all, let alone why the opt-in data would not be sufficient?
Not to mention, if we're talking about IPv6 addresses, they often get allocated as /64 (or even /60 or /56) blocks. Such "anonymization" becomes useless at that point.
They can't arbitrarily enforce those standards on his account without kicking a lot of other people off:

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/346996-miss...

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/kathy-griffin-spark...

edit: The first one is actually Facebook, but it's typical of a lot of online discourse, found it in a bunch of tweets threatening Trump.
The question was more interesting than the answer.

tl;dr version--the author's hand-written assembly was poor.

I guess the more interesting takeaway is "Just because it's assembly doesn't mean it's good assembly."
This is very cool. I primarily write in Word and Texmate. Word is noticeably slower (greater latency) in many if not most circumstances. As file size grows, in particular, Word seems to slow more.
I'm not sure if Google Cardboard is a good way to "try it out". For me it was terribly underwhelming experience when compared to Vive; certainly wouldn't get me more interested in VR.

On the other hand, I got to try Vive before Cardboard, so that probably raised my expectations for VR quite high and thus Cardboard seemed so limited.
Does it only require permission if the IP address is being stored?
I was looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_type FWIW.
Threatening other people?
The Toll of Tasers
When did I mention an attacker should use this? How does that argument make sense at all?

Legitimate ICOs should take on use of these widgets and contracts, educating users in the process to only send to particular contracts. This requires a great deal of improved hygiene for ICO providers and education for consumers, but there’s no easy foot forward here.
Drilling Down the Visitor Pattern
FWIW you rarely hear the term CSPRNG in crypto I find. I always call these PRNGs but I can see how having a naming distinction could help prevent misuse in the applied world.

Edit: thinking a bit more about it. I guess it wouldn't make sense to call anything "crypto" in crypto. It's like calling fries "french fries" in France. There they're just fries. I know this is a bad example because french fries are probably not from France :o)
I don't think it had anything much to do with the Moments feature.
You'd just send a UDP packet with a spoofed source address and forget about it. There's no need to open any sort of 2-way connection for data that's only being transmitted in one direction (from browser to metrics server).
Blizzard. Their last two games (Overwatch, Hearthstone) were incredible. I think their only mediocre game was Diablo III, but they actively worked to fix it.
A lot of things "can be done". And what is not true? Bitcoin IS considered an asset by the IRS
Another huge looming problem: My emails were hacked recently with a fraudulent domain transfer using a fake ID. This exposes other accounts that use emails from the domain for recovery.

I lucked into some compelling evidence I'd like to share with any security experts that would be able to help me.
#define FIZZ 1
#define BUZZ 2
static const uint8_t divs[] =
{FIZZ+BUZZ,0,0,FIZZ,0,BUZZ,FIZZ,0,0,FIZZ,BUZZ,0,FIZZ,0,0};
static const char* strs[] = {
[0] = "%u\n",
[FIZZ] = "fizz\n",
[BUZZ] = "buzz\n",
[FIZZ+BUZZ] = "fizzbuzz\n"
};

void fizzbuzz(uint32_t upTo)
{
uint32_t i, state;

for(i = state = 0; i < upTo; i++) {
printf(strs[divs[state]], i);
if(++state == sizeof(divs) / sizeof(*divs))
state = 0;
}

No divisibility tests at all

One level of arrays may be skipped at cost of extra .rodata size (store string pointers directly in divs). But in a modern cpu cost of the extra load is small
Show HN: VNote, a Note-Taking App Knowing Markdown and Programmers Better
Machines Taught by Photos Learn a Sexist View of Women
Academics writing sketchy code is like software engineers writing sketchy docs. We all agree it's not ideal but we can understand why it happens.
Also, James Damore interview with alt-right troll Milo Yannopoulis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2J5E8sSdsI

Most recently, Milo had posted images of several Google employees who were gay, lesbian, or transgender.
How long until he starts running sponsored posts?
Also an interesting and related article https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2014/02/25/safely-generate-rando...
Helper to sort an array of object by certain property in js and react-native
What are we attempting to "win". Again I go back to my statement of compromising princibles in the name of market share

I have used FF since Ver 1.0 for a few reasons the top ones being it is Open Source, it has always been the most privacy and security focused browser, and were strong advocates of Open Standards that where inter-operable on ALL platforms with out vendor lock in

FF is still open source.... the rest that seems to be in flux now.
When your only tool is a hammer everything looks like a nail.

This looks like a hardware guy looking for a hardware solution. Think me may have given up too easily on a software solution?
Databricks raises $140M in Series D Funding led by Andreessen Horowitz
Unfortunately, the article isn't in the best shape right now.

Back when it was written, things were clear: random and urandom are the same. Then came getrandom as a distraction. Now urandom is based on chacha. So it's different (but not worse – still, harder to explain).

The article's structure couldn't easily accomodate those changes, and time was and is in short supply, and so it's not wrong, but much less forceful and clear than it used to be. I hope it shapes up soon, but don't promise anything!

Still, I don't know a more up-to-date article. Maybe Thomas Pornin has something newer on StackOverflow?