skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Firefox once again holds its own when it comes to speed and performance. Try Firefox as your default browser for a week and then decide.

Challenge accepted.

A week later, after having set Firefox to default on my systems and working with it, I decided that:

* There's still no good replacement for DownThemAll or Tree Style Tabs (the gimped, non-feature-complete alternatives to those are not acceptable alternatives),

* That the unfixed dupe SSL cert problem that makes Firefox unusable at work is going on a decade old and has no movement on it,

* That Mozilla deciding what I can install in the browser is an infringement on my freedoms as a user in a much more real way than philosophical concerns about licensing (no, running a fork of the browser is not an acceptable alternative)

* That they keep making extremely questionable decisions regarding privacy, telemetry, and overall user control over those things,

And overall:

* That Mozilla's stated commitment to empowering the user cannot be trusted inasmuch as it applies to people with strong computer literacy.

--

So for now, I stay on Chrome. Your choice of web browser comes to to functional concerns, not the kind of political wankery that this blog post represents. With that in mind, why would I choose something that's basically Chrome that offers maybe one or two useful additional features, but is basically worse in every other way?

Speaking of which:

>That’s what happened when Microsoft had a monopoly on browsers in the early 2000s before Firefox was released. And it could happen again.

This is bald faced fearmongering, edging dangerously close to maliciously lying. The main problem with IE6 of the day is that it is closed source and very difficult to interoperate with, given its rather special take on web standards.

Chromium is open source and can be forked given the will to do so - which will happen should this doomsday scenario they're predicting come about. Hell, Firefox was responsible for ultimately unseating IE as the browser of choice a long while ago, and they did not have this advantage.

Say what you want about Google/Chrome(ium)'s motivations, but I see very little in the way of things they do that go out of their way to make my life miserable. They're hardly perfect or blameless, but at the end of the day, I've spent a lot more time cursing at Firefox than Chrome.

What it boils down to is that firefox is dead to me until they are cured of the dread GNOME disease of deciding they know better than the people who use their software what the people who use their software want and need. You know, priorities. Like making the actual browser better, rather than shoveling in crapware like https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/price-wise and ancillary, niche garbage like WebVR. There are a hell of a lot of questionable resource allocation decisions being made here.

I'm looking at Vivaldi with a great amount of hope:

>Your browser matters.
Take control with Vivaldi.
We live in our browsers. Choose one that has the features you need, a style that fits and values you can stand by.

This is a philosophy that is a breath of fresh air to me.
They don't keep breaking extensions. They HAD TO drop XUL, because you couldn't have multi-process, sandboxing etc. with it.

I bet if they kept XUL, people would complain about the other things, in Fact they used to.
Even with Haskell you can still have deadlocks [1]. They give you the tools to write code that you can prove won't have them, but restricting the kinds of programs you can write. But it's an opt-in thing, it's not a promise of the language that you can't do it. Rust is trying to do a similar thing, but it's still also possible to write yourself into a corner with deadlocks if you work against the feature.

Another language I saw recently that has this promise was Pony which uses an actor and message passing model to try to accomplish this but it doesn't actually prevent you from hitting the case, instead it'll just kill a random actor until the deadlock is gone [2]. This can work but it needs to be up front that you MUST write your software to be ready to be killed at any time and continue to function.

It's really an impossible situation to completely "solve", given that doing so would require a solution to the halting problem. So it's always a fun place for me to start looking at any new language if they talk about locks and dead-locks. So far I think Haskell and Rust (and probably other ML family) have the best balance being struck since you can opt in to statically proving this if you restrict those parts of your program but you're not required to do so by the language itself.

[1] https://www.fpcomplete.com/blog/2018/05/pinpointing-deadlock...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9485333
re: Android app and them working out ways to circumvent permission request dialogs for reading SMS/call logs to build user coefficient levels (who knows what else)

’The Growth team is now exploring a path where we only request Read Call Log
permission, and hold off on requesting any other permissions for now.
’Based on their initial testing, it seems this would allow us to upgrade users without
subjecting them to an Android
permissions dialog at all.
‘It would still be a breaking change, so users would have to click to upgrade, but no
permissions dialog screen.’
How to Use Kelsey Coin for Your Business
Exactly! unless they make different seed for each WebGL random (which used in fingerprinting) I don't see the point. Plus, they have your IP (or your VPN's), so at most you make your profile less specific, but never "isolated".
The article covers most of what I was going to say.

A big realization of mine the past few weeks however, is that with the decreasing difficulty curve, the price of BTC will simply sink lower and lower.

https://www.coinwarz.com/difficulty-charts/bitcoin-difficult...

Bitcoin, and other cryptocoins, have dropped their difficulty by about 30% over the past few months, which means it is now 30% easier to mine BTC. Unfortunately, that sets a new price floor for the miners. Miners are now willing to sell BTC at 30% lower prices.

Assuming the previous average was ~6500 USD / BTC, the current price of ~3500 USD/BTC is still far lower than 30% difficulty. Suggesting that miners aren't quite making money yet from the difficulty drop.
I think you're wrong. The version that defeated Ke Jie and 60 masters online was AlphaGo Master, which afaik did train on human games.
People have the idea that gun control affects who either can and can't have guns. They forget about the third possibility: Schroedinger's gun owner who is in a superposition of can and can't have guns at the same time.
I'm sorry you feel that way. I've written Firefox extensions as well. Also, I've written software using GTK2, Python 2.4, Django 0.9, a bazillion JS libraries that no longer exist. I've written code for games that have shut down. I've written code that I backed up on CD roms that are no longer readable. Hell I've written plenty of code that never even worked in the first place.

I don't feel like any of this time went "down the drain". Why do you? Software doesn't usually last forever.
Assuming that you can trust the computers it's running on.
Which is better: 1 specification in psuedocode that 4 companies implement unevenly, or 1 codebase that 4 companies contribute to?
Cryptography is basically a computational treadmill: you want to make it cheap enough that it's not burdensome for the actual users, but that reversing the information without the key is computationally expensive. Processing power, especially for the highly parallelizable task of grinding through potential keys, follows an exponential curve; ergo, even the present exponential gap is not a long-term protection mechanism.

The expiry date of a certificate was present in the original implementation of X.509 certificates; the infrastructure for certificate revocation lists was added later. Furthermore, a certificate revocation list includes every certificate ever revoked that has yet to expire. If you relied on certifcate revocation for expiring old certificates as well, that would be a nasty long file you'd have to download before you can start connecting to any website.
Instead of waiting last minute, you'd think a large company would have planning to renew certificates X amount of time before they expire. Alas I understand it's not that simple.
I wish the addon would sync its container configuration accross Firefox Sync. Setting my containers manually on the multiple computers I use daily is a real pain in the ass.
More Itertools
> Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat.

Bernie Sanders is occasionally a Democrat; particularly, he was when running for President in 2016 and almost certainly will be if he runs for President in 2020; as a Senator he is “merely” an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, doesn't have the Democratic Party support candidates against him, and is the Democratic caucus’s ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee.
This. So much this.

Raising a family is one chapter in your lives. Make the decisions/sacrifices/changes/committments to do it right. You only get one chance.

Here's one possible way: move out to the country, so that you can set a housing budget that does not require two salaries. With your mate, look at your relative strengths and desires, and adjust your work lives to get the income you need and not more. Spend the rest of the time with your kids. Give work travel to your colleagues with no kids, stay home. It's just 15 years, you've got plenty of career after this chapter is over.

Also, to have two parents available, you need to not get divorced. Which means in addition to keeping you kids healthy you have to protect your relationship from degrading.

Good luck!
WebKit and Chromium are both still open source. While they may not be porting commits back to KHTML specifically, they are certainly making all of their enhancements available for free to the community. Personally, I wouldn't call that little to nothing.
apple released the fix just 6 hours back
This seems like a really neat idea! I think it would be cool to use plain source code to completely bootstrap a system. But, at the same time, this sounds like a maintenance nightmare! Maintaining older or smaller versions of software just to avoid self-hosting is bound to hit all kinds of bugs - big and small.

At the same time, I'm not convinced this completely solves the problem. Maybe you can trust your C compiler now, but can you trust your Bash interpreter, or your sed command? What stops them from injecting things into your C compiler while it's building. At the end of the day, you have to trust some software, why not include your C compiler in this list?

Anyway, I am much more concerned about much higher places in free software bootstrapping. Lots of software has switched from Autotools to Meson without thinking about how we will bootstrap this stuff. Meson requires you to have Ninja to work, but how can I bootstrap Ninja without Python? Autotools is admittedly bad, but at least you only needed bash & make for it to work.
If NetMarketShare can be believed, the #2 browser across desktop, mobile, and tablets is Safari which uses WebKit.

https://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?options...

Not much has changed in the past year, with Safari holding steady at around 19% and Chrome going from 60% to 63%. Firefox is baring holding on to its 5%.

So while it's concerning to see MS embrace the Chromium engine from the standpoint of adding fuel to the Google fire, I don't see this having any real effect in the near term on the browser market nor the development of new web technologies. Firefox is certainly right to promote its excellent Quantum-based browser these days, but honestly I only see Firefox as being relevant on Windows. On the Mac, Safari is an excellent browser and one I use personally as well as for web development, and iOS doesn't allow any engine other than WebKit to be used. And with Android, Google has the upper hand on that platform.

In summary, as much as I want to cheer for Firefox and the Gecko Quantum engine from a philosophical standpoint, the only real competition to Chrome and Chromium right now is Safari and Webkit. Let's just hope Apple continues to put adequate resources into the development of its browser and keeps pace with Chrome.
I have a Kobo eReader with Pocket integration and I actually use it quite often.
You'd certainly think so. If you have frontend probers that exercise your accessible endpoints (HTTP or whatever) then those probes should fail when the certificate expires in less than 30 days. I couldn't comment on whether an organization like Ericsson or O2 would be expected to have such probers.
The astronomer who said Oumuamua might be a sign of extraterrestrial life
The former, because I don't have to get the other four companies' permission to improve infrastructural things that don't affect web compatibility. (For example, parallel styling and layout, WebRender, etc.)
What you are describing is called "compounding" in Economics, but that's not a network effect. You might want to read [0]

Microsoft has the money to to host and curate a large search index, funded by their other businesses. And after more than a decade, they've gotten almost nowhere -- everyone I know who tried Bing (or DDG) goes back to Google for quality.

Whereas e.g. Facebook and WhatsApp do have a network effect - you have no use for them unless your friends use them too, so a new contender - no matter how well funded e.g. Google+ - is not useful until critical mass is achieved; and critical mass is not achieved until it is useful.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
Hint:

git add -i
The Mozilla Foundation is a nonprofit. It is involved in a number of efforts, including policy advocacy, but does not itself develop a web browser. When people make donations to "Mozilla", those go to the Foundation.

The Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Foundation. It is _not_ a nonprofit and develops a web browser as well as most other software you would associate with "Mozilla". It pays dividends to the Foundation which the Foundation uses, alongside donations, to fund its work. The Corporation pays taxes on its profits, like any other corporation that is not explicitly a nonprofit. Note that I am explicitly not using "for-profit" to describe the Corporation, because profit is not the Corporation's goal. Again, the only shareholder in the Corporation is the Foundation, though they do have separate boards and somewhat separate governance.
Technically the transactions are trades though. The terminology can get a bit ambiguous.
This work is unethical. Those people never approved for their privacy to be violated in such a flagrant way.

Would you approve researchers from 100 years in the future using facial recognition to identify and shame meat-eating bastards from today, such as you or your friends, such that for example your work and legacy to be de-platformed?
FreeNAS 11.2 released: New interface, better plugin support
You can see from gqrx that his rtl-sdr can barely pick this up when it's 6 inches away on his desk. Somehow I don't think this is causing a significant amount of harmful interference. (Admittedly it is quite a distant harmonic - the actual signal will of course be stronger).
Release Notes for Safari Technology Preview 71
Still think there’s a total hardware mismatch here. AlphaGo got 2 TPUs and 44 cores vs Stockfish on just 44 cores.

AlphaGo is undoubtedly impressive but would love to see an FPGA version of Stockfish vs AlphaGo.
It seems to only happen with certain Retina MBPs.

Which is a shame - I really wanted to like Firefox on Mac.
Very cool to see this launch! I beta tested Multiplayer a few short weeks ago, and it looks like it's improved quite a bit since then
If you dig through that list to the articles that are actual journalism (as opposed to explicitly labeled opinion and commentary articles), the last 3 are:

- "Facebook Used People’s Data to Favor Certain Partners and Punish Rivals, Documents Show" [0]

- "A Hot Seat for Facebook, an Empty Chair for Zuckerberg and a Vow to Share Secret Files" [1]

- "On Thanksgiving Eve, Facebook Acknowledges Details of Times Investigation" [2]

All three strike me as substantive. Yes, the NYT opinion section is a bit fluffy, and yes, that strikes me as a problem in a world where folks are increasingly unable to distinguish between journalism and editorial, but at the end of the day commentary like that is what the "opinion" label is for.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/technology/facebook-docum...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/technology/facebook-briti...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/22/business/on-thanksgiving-...
It's interesting to me that Go does so well. I have a buddy who convinced his shop to switch over to Go for the following reason: he knew that they were not going to be able to consistently hire good programmers, and he thought Go was a way to mitigate the problems arising from this situation. In other words, Go is a language where newbie programmers can still do okay. He also claimed that Google developed Go for this reason, referencing the infamous Ron Pike quote ("They're not capable of understanding a brilliant language, but we want to use them to build good software").
Thanks a lot for the links. They look quite interesting. It does seem that Deepmind is aware of this, and are working on evaluating this.

Transitivity might be true within AlphaGo versions, but that doesn't give me any confidence that it would also hold when a human is in the equation. If a group of policies more or less occupy the same state space, they are likely to be transitive, but if they occupy disjoint state spaces, I don't think we can be sure of transitivity.
How do you provide your initial credentials, though? Providing decently secure default initial credentials is possible, but tricky.

And that's where I'll turn around 180 degrees and say: If you can't give me a hard reason why you'll be a hard target on the internet, you shouldn't have a public address. Default authentication isn't enough.

I dislike trusting my edge firewall, but it gives me time to handle weak internal systems.
By 2008 it was fairly obvious that MS wasn't serious contender in the browser market anymore. This was two years after IE7 release which itself was pretty lackluster, and IE8 was still nowhere to be seen. Firefox popularity was pretty much at its peak, and Chrome was just released immediately starting to eat up the world.
An interesting new project is Handshake which is attempting to use decentralization to remove centralized certificate authorities. Maybe it will help stop these and similar situations in the future.

https://handshake.org/
Since employers are generally strictly liable for workplace injuries (a liability they manage via worker's compensation insurance, either purchased or self-administered), yes, almost certainly.
Except C++03 isn't getting any more features added to it and neither is C++11 (which also use the year, not version number). 2015 edition will continue to get new features.
I mean, it kind of is?

You have to understand that there's making a stand on what's right, and then choosing to focus on the rest of your life... which, in this case, means not being annoyed by a browser that isn't keeping up. Firefox is great, many of us have loved it since Firefox 2 (or even before!) but you don't get significant increases in users by being the "more greater good" option. You get them by keeping up in the race. A browser is a tool and I want it to feel like it belongs, let me move, and then get the hell out of my way.

Every single time I use FF on Mac there is something weird or buggy about it, and this holds true even if I install it on a freshly bought unpolluted MacBook Pro. The UI stands out like a sore thumb, and it doesn't feel like it belongs.

I'll continue using Safari.
Since when LoC is a meaningful metric?
Maersk pledges to cut carbon emissions to zero by 2050
This is a reason to shorten expiration times, not remove them (which companies like LetsEncrypt are doing)
Would it not be possible to expire the cert if the domain expires?
I can replace those 1000 lines with a bash script of 1 line that just calls the Go program ^_^
The Bad Way to Teach Music to Babies [video]
I miss WebOS
Did a Small Twitter Account Hijack Google Search Result for Twitter?
They don't have electricity at the airport? The Tesla superchargers use regular commercial hv lines, nothing special. The additional expense for an airport that will be a new transformer. This is why Tesla is able to put chargers in so many locations, cause it doesn't cost 3 million dollars each time they do it. Dig a whole, run the power, add a transformer, pain, fill in the hole. They built one in a week nearby.
I think vine situation is a bit different then this examples.

First of all, let's see the facts.

- Sharing user's friendship data with all applications was wrong decision. There were a lot of bad actors.
- So Facebook decided to stop this practice. But in the process some good actors are also burned, so they implemented some system to share some limited data considering:

- You have some critical mass of users
- sign a special agreement to promise you will not use this data in a bad way
- if having not access to this friendship data breaking your app's model
- and probably your app is not competing with facebook's business model

so twitter came, agreed on this terms, got whitelisted. Then probably stepped over fb's toe with vine, and facebook revoked their access.

The thing is facebook didn't remove because it was competitive, they didn't allow competitive in the first place. This is not different from Apple not allowing another browser engines, or another app stores in their ecosystem.
Healthcare in the US is taxpayer welfare for big US companies that can afford to pay employees via pre-tax healthcare (insurance).
Yes, there are longer-term contracts, only a portion of the power is traded at the spot price.

That said, you would think that the gas generator company could just bid the load they've agreed to supply under the long term contract into the spot market when the price dips negative. I assume there is a good reason why this isn't done.
Different commenter here, but same issue as the parent. I'm on a 2016 MBP. When I use Chrome, my fans stay off or at around 1200rpm at all times unless I open a video or a Twitch stream, at which point they jump up to around 1400rpm and the highest the CPU temp gets is around 50c.

On Firefox, my fans will randomly jump up to 3000rpm when doing only normal web browsing, even on simple sites like HN. I'm using FF right now to post this comment, and as soon as I opened HN, my CPU temp went from 40 to 50c. And this is the only tab I have open. If I open a video, or heaven forbid a Twitch stream or Google Maps, my fans instantly go to 7000rpm and my CPU temp goes to 70-80c. Even just opening Gmail makes FF go haywire. And it isn't just "my fans spin up, big deal". Browsing the internet on FF turns my MBP into a slag of near-molten metal that is too hot to even touch, and I can only imagine what it's doing to my battery life.

I want to like FF, I really do, but this is simply a dealbreaker for me, and even though it's a known issue, Mozilla seems uninterested in fixing it (I have previously seen a response from Mozilla that essentially amounted to "it's hard for us to optimize FF for certain sites, so we aren't going to even try").

It's clearly not an issue for everyone, but I definitely have noticed that I'm not the only one who has these issues, either.
I was able to solve the issue and revoke the access:

1. I modified the URL to add the `https://www.googleapis.com/auth/plus.login` scope.

2. This caused Google to re-ask me for approval, because I did not yet acknowledge the scope.

3. Afterwards the app appeared in my list of authorized apps.

4. I revoked access there.

5. I confirmed that access was revoked, when I tried to login back into the app Google asked me for approval.
But then you need to make sure that the automated cert renewal system is still working...