skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An extension popped up in the extension list, which did nothing at all, but had a weird name that made people panic they had somehow gotten malware.

And it was pushed as part of an unpaid marketing campaign for Mr. Robot. Which people thought was Mozilla cashing in big time by installing an extension they didn't want. It was done on a friendship basis. Mr. Robot has been pushing Firefox and so Mozilla wanted to give something back.

Which was a fun little easter egg that Mr. Robot fans could have activated. It would have flipped some words on webpages upside down as reference to Mr. Robot. Which, again, it didn't do, it did nothing unless you specifically went into about:config and activated it there (which is what Mr. Robot fans should have figured out themselves).

This also resulted in a discussion of how it's unthinkable that Mozilla can install an extension without asking you.

...in their browser that people are ok with them auto-updating, through which they can push even less restricted code than in an extension, and that completely invisible.

So, it was a fuck-up on Mozilla's part (in that the extension was visible in the extension list; if that wouldn't have been the case, it wouldn't have been a problem at all), but man was it blown out of proportion by journalists and know-it-alls, who just have to show that the innocent-thought Mozilla is evil.
Yes, I agree with that.

If you have more thoughts on that, I'd love to read them. So I want to encourage you to write about it. It's a very much underdiscussed topic.

I thought about it in the context of the "Tech's Two Philosophies" article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17030339) that showed up a couple hours ago. I look at the overall way Emacs works, and how many other powerful OSS tools work, and then I look at those companies mentioned, and it makes me deeply sad. Those companies, which happen to be trendsetters of our industry, are so up to their ears in moneymaking that they no longer realize most of their practices and recommendations are user-hostile and productivity-minimizing.
It would be nice if C# simply had a nullable type for reference types. So like int? you could also have string? or SomeClass?. Structs with non-nullable reference types would have to be initialized at creation time. This would solve a lot of errors. But you still need to have the option to have nullable references.
Firefox still has an edge over Chrome here; Mozilla continues to add new Web Extension APIs for frequently-requested functionality. For example, this release added tab hiding, making it possible to build extensions that add Panorama tab groups.

Anyway, maintaining the old extension API wasn't sustainable. Many older extensions broke repeatedly due to refactoring efforts like Electrolysis. These refactors ultimately resulted in some of Firefox's current speed gains.
Ask HN: Is Facebook still innovating?
We all know that Facebook is busy now implementing (or pretending to implement) some privacy features. But did Facebook do anything innovative in the last, let's say, 2 years anyway?
Did Molokai farming end because of soil depletion, or ...?
I appreciate your posts -- and the few others that voice their ideas that are astray of whatever the current YC-manipulated ethos is.

For one, I have little fucking clue what any of those statements mean. However, from the understanding I have gleaned, I've found to be more close to the metal, than what either, heavily-lobbied side, can offer.

Back to lurking. No place is safe from manipulation. Not [0-9(a-z){0,3}]chan, neither HackerNews. Meritocracy of ideas is dying, etc. etc. ad captandum vulgus.
Sure, but Mozilla's standards are far beyond what the EU demands, too. Which they are in this case as well, as this is not privacy-invading at all.
Ask HN: What's it like to live in San Francisco?
How are the people and what's the current attitude like?
Eating fast food linked to infertility
Maybe more, but is it enough more? Remember that prop 13 doesn't completely freeze property taxes, nor does it eliminate various special assessments and parcel taxes and other non-percentage-of-value taxes.
If there is missing data to occur within a column, then pragmatically, you split that column off into its own table with the associated key from the original and store only those keys that have valid values.

If you do anything else, such as using nulls, then you are just creating a problem that WILL come back and bite you in the nether regions of your psyche.

Of course, there will other opinions about how to handle this. As far as I am concerned, Nulls are a curse foisted on us by those vendors and standards bodies who took the the easy way out.
Speak for yourself. I just purchased Mission Bay adjacent property and the neighborhood is fine. The park in particular is pleasant and well-maintained, and that new public library branch is a very nice addition to the city. UCSF is anything but "dangerous": I have no idea where you got that notion from. And retail is just tough in the modern environment. If there's someone to blame for the woes of retail, it's Amazon. Not the developers for catering to the whims of the Planning Commission.

I'm excited to see the new Pier 70 development, and I wouldn't have bought if I didn't think the new development was going to be anything other than a nice way to make the central waterfront accessible again and some sorely needed housing. How could I be a NIMBY when the area doesn't even have a grocery store yet?

You know what isn't a livable neighborhood? The Sunset, with its rows and rows of ticky-tackies with ugly little yards in the back. Give me Mission Bay over that pastel low-rise concrete jungle any day of the week.
The problem with BART is that it runs 4 out of 5 lines on the same single stretch of track through SF. So even with the most modern signaling, there will still be 1/4th the maximum train frequency after the individual lines split. The Pittsburg-Bay Point line counteracts this during rush hour with trains that come just into the city and then turn around, but it's still only an average of ~7 mins between trains. Compare with the Victoria line in London which I believe runs 36 trains an hour!
So I heard, yes, but before Emacs 26, I had problems with some buffers (particularly SLIME and eshell) slowing down as they accumulated a couple thousand of fontified lines. I usually had to clear (C-c M-o) SLIME buffer after 1-2k lines because the slowdown in typing got noticeable. Since switching to Emacs 26, I had SLIME accumulate a hundred thousand lines without visible slowdown.

I didn't spend much time digging into Emacs and profiling the problem, so I can't tell you much beyond my guesses that it had to do with fontification.
I think in humans burps are a release of swallowed air, while farts are gasses produced by fermentation in the intestines. Ruminants OTOH have a fermentation chamber (rumen) as the first part of their digestive system (their first 'stomach'). Other animals have different fermentation strategies.
He has strong opinions about typography, period. It's not just about Kindle or any other device or format. I do recall asking about a PDF or ePub version of Practical Typography [1], but he refused saying none of the eBook formats are good enough. While I understand that to some extent for a book on typography, I don't understand it for a book on programming.

[1]: https://practicaltypography.com/
Show HN: Command-Line Business Card
Glad to know that a vaccine was pulled out of market due to safety concerns...Another one that followed the same was the Rotavirus Vaccine [1], even after it was found "safe" during trials.

1. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4843a5.htm
> I really wonder how our entire economic system, which is based on ever increasing levels of debt

Actually our entire economic system is built on increasing assets and income. A fractional share of which is stacked against debt and interest expense.

Asset growth has outpaced debt growth, income growth has outpaced interest cost increases.

If that weren't the case, the world would have imploded a long time ago given the debt increase over the last 20 years.

China is a particularly potent example of this in action. Their debt accumulation has been very dramatic the last ten years. Despite that, there's no indication their vast income and asset expansion is unable to offset it. Their income expansion continues to exceed the additional interest cost by about a 2x to 3x margin.

Or take the US. US Government interest expense was $458 billion in 2017. It was ~$350b commonly in the mid to late 1990s. The US economy is 2.5 times larger than it was in 1996, and the public debt is about three to four times larger; meanwhile interest costs have increased by about a quarter.

US household wealth was $30 trillion in 1995/96. It's $100 trillion today. Wealth has increased by $70 trillion. Debt has gone from $6 trillion to $14 trillion. Net wealth has gone from $24 trillion, to $86 trillion. Wealth expansion has far outpaced debt expansion. In 1996, household debt was equal to about 20% of household assets; today it's 14%.

US household debt service payments as a percentage of disposable income are the lowest they've been in four decades.

The premise that either the US or global economy is built on unsustainable debt, is false.
I'm not sure how that's relevant. As others pointed out, even if it's very niche, it still exists. Yes, there are a number of articles fetishizing all of the "weird" aspects of Japan and perhaps in some way making them seem pervasive to people who haven't visited, but this article is doing absolutely none of that. (And even if it were, that's not the point.)

I'm going to gather you didn't make it past the first few paragraphs, because the entire point of the article, particularly in the last third, is an analysis of reality and what constitutes real relationships. The author tries to use this subculture to evaluate the context of families, unconditional love, and how money may or may not change the equation. For that reason, I think it's one of the best articles I've read recently, as it's a thought-provoking insight into human needs and the realities of modern relationships.

Give it another read. Just because the story takes place in Japan, doesn't mean it's about Japan.
Tenant activist groups want to return the Bay Area to the way it was in some romanticized time in the past, often the 1970s. They want nobody to move in and for tech to move out.

It's certainly true that magically freezing California in time would solve displacement and gentrification. (Of course, it's not possible to do so, and it would be deeply unfair for the same reason the Chinese hukou system is unfair, but that doesn't stop them.)
>The principle that a central authority gets to decree how we live, eat, breath, and think is inherently dangerous, especially when it comes with no evident limits.

I don't agree that such an authority is inherently dangerous, this kind of legislation is specifically an example where danger is explicitly reduced.

The below is an attempt to show this isn't just a noble gesture, but that environmental legislation has huge positive impacts, and is exactly the kind of thing we want a state doing.

California generates most of its power through natural gas [1], which the burning of creates smog, which has measureable impacts on life expectancy. Early numbers from China indicate that the difference between highly urbanized areas and less urbanized areas amount to at least 5.5 years of reduced lifespan. [2]

It may surprise you to find out that California, in many heavily populated areas like the Bay Area, where most people are living, actually has worse smog than that in Shanghai [3].

Let's try a simple model and do a back-of-the-envelope calculation of what this means for Americans:

Let's say that in the bay area, the smog is (ass-pulled in direct contradiction to my above source, so we're being conservative) half as bad as in China's urban areas, and therefore longterm exposure to smog reduces life expectancy by 3 years. Let's say that long term, solar panel usage allows California to reduce natural gas burning for power generation, which ultimately reduces smog in a way such that it halves the impact on life expectancy to 1.5 years.

There are 7 million people in the Bay area. If you're willing to buy the above model, you are saving 10.5 million years of human life just in the Bay Area by making the change, before we even begin to discuss external positive environmental impacts and subjective quality of life benefits of smog reduction.

Last thought? The average human lifespan in America is 79 years[4]. If the above model is correct, such a change is equivalent to saving 132,000 lives. You don't notice that all this life is being lost because the effects are so diffuse.

There are times to leap to your pitchforks about the harms of the state, but environmentalism definitely isn't one of them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_California

[2] https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/coal-and-other-fossil-fu...

[3] https://www.ozy.com/acumen/think-chinas-pollution-is-bad-try...

[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
The posted map already contains all asteroids above 100m in diameter.
> automation vs. amplification is a perennial issue

How is that even a difference? Amplification is done by automating subcomponents of what you're trying to do. If you automate away the entire task, it means you amplify the human working one level up.
Wishful thinking, the president would not sign the bill and there's not a supermajority in the Senate and the house to overrule him. This is going nowhere.
I agree with you. But! If screen real estate is a priority to you, you may want to use something compact like weechat-matrix anyway, and let those with spare space have their mostly empty UI. It's really refreshing to finally have an open protocol with free client choice.
I don't think the FDA has turned healthcare into a boondoggle, especially since incidents like Thalidomide have revealed why the pharma industry must follow a compliance framework for R&D.

I don't think the USDA has turned agriculture or consumer food into a boondoggle. The Jungle is still a gripping read today, because the conditions of unregulated meatpacking factories were unbelievably grotesque, beyond the absolute worst of contemporary hidden camera food industry scandals.

I don't think the EPA has turned the environment into a boondoggle. Acid rain was an incredibly serious problem in the 1980s that's pretty much behind us today, because regulation of sulfur dioxide emissions in the clean air act incenticized companies to lower their emissions.[0]

[0]https://www.edf.org/approach/markets/acid-rain

Other commenters have accurately pointed out the more directly disagreeable parts of your post, but you have absolutely not provided an accurate representation of the government's historical role in regulated markets. I believe it is more possible to vote in a competent government if you are willing to accept the challenge that it is possible for one to exist.
I'm new to this HN thing so in an attempt to be "civil" I'll simply say I disagree with every single thing you said.

The decision to implement California car emissions standards was not a heavy handed or half baked idea. The Rand corporation was called in to help figure out a solution other than catalytic converter and the ultimate decision was signed off by Ronald "not a fan of regulation" Reagan. Not only have there been improvements in the catalytic converter but also there's this company called Tesla that has innovated and provided an alternative. Your suggestion of goals was implemented in the last administration and is in the process of being removed. Lobbyists kill goals/limits.

A total net power draw is regulating the users behavior. Is that what you want?

Smaller windows or better insulation...? While home A/C is a factor, this is not about the user. This is about clean power for California (whether it's effective at producing the power is a different conversation). Users can still get better insulation or smaller windows or innovate as they see fit. California had two nuclear reactors. It has shut them down. This legislation (which I didn't know about till today) is one in a long string of movements toward cleaner air starting back in 1967.

https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/about/history

An unrelated note, I hear all this talk about money As others have said, this is an economic non-starter for a home in California. One thing that has not been mentioned is that currently home appraisers do not consider solar panels in the value of a home.
Even so, animal ag still uses lots of land, water, risks pollution of air and water, pandemic and antibotic resistance.
yea it seems weird that the methane would be the only thing to keep OP up at night...
I always liked the idea of an object that transitions smoothly from solid to liquid without a well defined boundary. Does such objects exist on Earth?
I find that to be case in SaaS. Better is the enemy of good enough.
Not to introduce flame bait but one of the reasons the NRA is powerful is the ability to quickly motivate their very vocal members.
I chose a company without really considering the city (SF) after college. A lot of my friends ended up in the area as well. Then my network grew and it's become harder to leave, even though I keep planning to.
It ended because it isn’t cost effective.
Windows 10 being "littered with ads" might be an overstatement, but I remember seeing plenty of them in start "menu". AFAIR the start "menu" in Windows 8/10 is by default filled with bullshit pseudo-ads like tiles with crap newsfeeds, tiles linking to Windows Store games you really should play, Xbox games ads, etc.

I always aggressively clean up the start "menu" whenever I get on a new Win8/Win10 instance, so at the moment I don't have one near me to tell you exactly what the ads were.
> you split that column off into its own table with the associated key from the original and store only those keys that have valid values.

That will create real problems and bite you immediately.
Have you used any language that has a type system powerful enough to support arbitrary sumtypes (and also has null as a separate type)? If not then I can recommend playing around some with Crystal.

IMO optimals are just a crutch to make up for a too weak type system.
> References in C++ are non-nullable so the precedent already existed.

Wrong analogy. References in C++ are not first-class entities. Conceptually, they're _alias names_ for existing objects. Unlike C# and Java "references", you cannot "reset" a C++ reference to "point" to another object. Because it's not a pointer. It does not "point". It's an alias. `void f(int& ref)` in C++ is the same as `void f(ref int x)` in C# (the equivalent doesn't exist in java). Inside `f`, you cannot change `x` to "point to some other int" because it's not a pointer!

C# and Java "references" are semantically the same as C++ pointers minus arithmetic.
Impossible Burger revolution is a better solution than an incremental improvement.
Climate Change: India’s battle between economy and environment
I remember back in early 2000s getting premium satellite tv for free was as easy as just installing a firmware on your STB. Eventually, the encryption got too hard and expensive to crack, so regular hackers stopped working on firmwares.
Objects are overkill. Use an iterable of getitem lookups. They compose easily and don’t have much overhead (cpu or cognitive). From the library I use at work, inspired by clojure.core/get-in, it would look like this:

def get_in(obj, lookup, default=None):
""" Walk obj via __getitem__ for each lookup,
returning the final value of the lookup or default.
"""
tmp = obj
for l in lookup:
try:
tmp = tmp[l]
except (KeyError, IndexError, TypeError):
return default
return tmp

data = {“foo”: {“bar”: [“spam”, “eggs”]}}
# find eggs
get_in(data, [“foo”, “bar”, 1])

By using __getitem__ you naturally work with anything in the python ecosystem.
That’s cool. Ty.
As a programmer with assembly language in my blood, all I can think is "Why should I care that this silly person thinks 'zero' doesn't exist?"
My company tracks our employees - but it's for good reason: We work 7 hour days.
you assume too much when you say it will make the world a better place, instead there's always something that can go wrong with such experiments, and their unintentional consequences
re: Programming in DSLs

I'm working on an engine for this https://geb.hofstadter.io
The panels on my house are warrantied for 25 years, and expected to last years beyond that. There are no moving parts, not much to degrade, so the useful life is quite long. Though I expect in 30 years the newer panels will be more efficient and super cheap.
> According to the United States government, the company used an elaborate system to sell American-made goods there, and then lied and deleted emails when the Commerce Department began to investigate. It even made plans to resume shipments to Iran while the investigation was ongoing, according to the Commerce Department.

Unfortunately the truth doesn't make good headlines like "TRUMP STARTING TRADE WAR", but I think this best sums up what's happening and why.
AI in Human Resource Department: What’s in It for HR Managers – WorldNews
...and yet it does...
1. It's hard to support circular data structures in an imperative language without null pointers.

2. Restricting a language to non-circular data structures will not be popular.

3. Having a nullable and non-nullable version of every pointer or reference type is not usually super popular either.

Phrased differently: nullable types are actually a fairly reasonable compromise from a set of not fully appealing choices.
Pirating happens when consumers are faced with unreasonable inconvenience and cost to get what they want.

Like being forced to purchase a bundle of channels or a season of games when you only want to watch one team or a specific sport.

If these media companies would make it convenient, ala carte, and priced reasonably, piracy would plummet.

All you need to do is look at iTunes, Spotify, etc.
So far, just for Windows, I've had ads:

1. On the lockscreen
2. In my start menu's tilebar
3. In my start menu's search results
4. In my start menu's program list
5. In Explorer, for OneDrive
6. In Edge, on a "blank" page
7. In toast notifications

And that's just what I remember offhand; I'm certain there's even more.
check out ritekit, they do this
Both approaches are really equivalent on the technical level. Augmenting the mind is done by automating and abstracting away lower-level stuff - taking the mind out of the loop and letting the robots take the details over.

And the problem with all those companies is agency. It seems they all try to minimize user's agency, by making it purposefully impossible to control or dig into underlying automation. They differ by the effort put into taking control away from the user, with Google being the leader in blatantly dumbing down and isolating everything.
Electronic only, or printed?

Do you control the venue(s)?
A correction, there are no "tri-state booleans". Booleans are two state logic systems. Extended Booleans require 2 ^ n states where n is an integer >= 1.

Any other number of states automatically ensure that the logic is non-Boolean or non-Extended Boolean.
Cavium ThunderX2 Review and Benchmarks a Real Arm Server Option
and detectlanguage, smooch - there's quite a lot of API as a Service companies out there
CVE-2018-8897 – POP SS Hijack
The problem is not that they don't work as intended, the problem is what is intended. You can't just throw application developers an API like a system wide key value store and expect the whole worlds ecosystem of applications to organize itself around it. Android and iOS solve this much better by sandboxing application settings within the app. Uninstalling the app is guaranteed to remove any traces of it (unless you give access to "all files and photos"), whereas on windows there is always some remains.