skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
On iOS and macOS, blockers can have more filters than this "limit" by simply exposing more than one list, since the quota is per-list. I think AdGuard exposes four, for example.
Someone correct me, but can’t ad blockers just be installed through the OS and not be dependent on the browser?

I recall this is what I had to do for Safari since there wasn’t a supported extension for the new browser yet.

This would lessen our dependency on a browser for ad blocking in this ongoing browser war.
I switched from Chrome back to Firefox last year and haven't looked back once.
Anybody know what time the strike occurred?
did exactly the same, although I’m now thinking of that sexy X1 Yoga. That being said, having to deal with Windows 10 almost (but not quite) takes away the advantage of the superb hardware design - the keyboard alone still makes it a winner for me though.
I think this is a fair point, and the final section of the post attempts to address this. For what it's worth, most studies do not selectively draw from a highly-motivated cohort - participants are rarely the most severely obese, and they also usually aren't people who are actively looking for clinical trials or free weight loss programs. Money is also controlled for, since the interventions are almost always offered for free, and any time or work involved with the study will be compensated as well. From my perspective, if anything, the motivational factor may actually be _too_ well-controlled in many of these studies, so the observed result does not translate properly to real-world settings.
withgoogle.com is clearly a phishing domain.
> Sadly I constantly hear people say that you should get an Nvidia card for both Linux and FreeBSD, because the drivers are better.

Not in the recent years. The trend has been positive for AMD and negative for Nvidia at least among Linux users for quite some time already.

See: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&vi...
I use Chromium on linux because Firefox doesn't have touch-screen support and smooth-scrolling feels a little rough. I wont hesitate to switch over if these changes are made though.
The problem is I see a ton of people in the comments assuming this is a change made with the intent of disabling/breaking ublock. Clearly it's not, and it will affect more extensions than just that.

We should demand a LOT more evidence before claiming that Google intends to break adblockers before accusing them of that. If they are doing that, I want to be the first one raging against them, and I don't feel comfortable raging on something that deserves the benefit of the doubt.
> There would be short-term blowback about it and that would pass in a matter of weeks.

They could potentially stop selling software products and disable service access entirely.

What if all customer photos on iCloud become inaccessible, all iTunes and App purchases become inaccessible and OS updates stop. Then Apple stores shut down, customer support or repairs become unavailable, thousands of jobs are lost. I feel like the blowback would last much longer than a few weeks.

That's an extreme response, but if Apple really wanted to get the point across they can easily include it alongside any other threatening proposals.
From what I understand, there are currently events which gave you the ability to inspect, and also cancel a request if you want. This allows you to do things like cancel a request if it's trying to download a big video file.

But Google wants to remove the ability to cancel a request through the events, and they want to replace that with declarativeNetRequest[1]. If you look at the link, in the Rules section, it seems to be simple, kinda hardcoded (but configurable) filters.

You can also see there's a limit of only 30,000 rules[2], which is not enough for EasyList[3] (example used in the tracker), which seems to have ~74,000 rules.

This is not targeted to ad blockers specifically. It's a change that makes blocking requests less flexible. For example, uBlock and uMatrix rules can be overridden by more specific rules, something that declarativeNetRequest can't do.

1. https://developers.chrome.com/extensions/declarativeNetReque...

2. https://developers.chrome.com/extensions/declarativeNetReque...

3. https://easylist.to/
Other commenters have covered my issue with worker rush. My larger point was that it seems like the AI has learned that this works against the standard Ai, because the standard Ai cant properly adapt to such a strat.

That might solve its task, but it’s a far cry from learning to play Starcraft well. I was surprised they seemed to have trained it against the standard Ai as that’s not useful.
1Blocker for iOS and Mac works around this limitation by segmenting it's blocker list into categories, and each category is a separate blocker extension but they are all shipped together in the same app.

This way they can have pretty much as many multiples of 50,000 rules as they need.
Flight Simulator 4 from 1989 running on three immersive monitors (2017)
Firefox with uMatrix will smoke Chrome without it, in nearly any real world use-case.
at the very least the machine will 1-putt from anywhere on the green
agree completely, I started Firefox many times and each time left it because of the interface.
Trading Google overlords for Apple overlords does not seem like an upgrade.
"We went ahead and uh, fixed the glitch."
Edge moving to Chromium has handed Google a lot of extra power which gives them the ability to make changes like this.
Most of my logins have been syncd via Chrome. Makes logging into a new computer a breeze, or if I need to borrow someone else's stuff really quick.
Agreed. While I still use it, Firefox on Mac just hangs on some js-intensive sites.
The "blocking version of webRequest" means that page loading stalls until the extension decides whether to allow, deny or modify each request. This gives extensions enormous power, which can easily ruin user experience if the extension is slow about handling requests.
1/1,000,000,000 has no meaningful impact on any of those.

Silent Spring was written by a Rachel Carson and had real impact. However, her personal lifestyle was irrelevant.

PS: As to someone going first, that is not an issue when say a state adds a sales tax. In such cases the first person to pay the tax is a sign that it's already in place.
Why would anyone say anything that incriminating? The reason your manager is incompetent is because his managers like him as such, else they wouldn't have promoted him.
Looks like they are removing blocking API from extensions, and replacing it with buildin Chrome blocker (limited to 30K rule entries).
I think the issue is that most cities are nothing like New York. The density is just completely different.
My spouse stays at home, which makes the whole thing possible. She's a champ, to be sure.

She's on a number of Facebook groups for homeschoolers and we've been able to meet other families that way. We've made a number of good friends through the groups and now we're even involved in putting together our own co-op.
Could someone please help explain the technical details of this?

From what I can gather from the chrome.webRequest and chrome.declarativeNetRequest documentation, it looks like this change would make it difficult to have long lists of blocked hosts, or perhaps to update such lists automatically. Obviously there is a conflict of interest here for Google, but it looks like there are at least a few non-bogus justifications for the proposed change.

See also (especially the section "Comparison with the webRequest API): https://developers.chrome.com/extensions/declarativeNetReque...
Google is the biggest advertising company, is it so strange that they want you to see their non-disturbing ads. ABP want's this as well and now Chrome wants to enforce their syntax.
how does this interact with TLS, particularly DNS over TLS? An OS level http proxy would have to MITM the TLS stream.
China launches two satellites for multispectral imaging
Yeah, even with all the speed increases from the rewrite, Firefox still feels awkward and slow at times when compared to Safari and Chrome. Every time I decide to try and switch over from Safari, I get pages where scroll performance is a lot slower than what I'm used to and then I get bothered by it and switch back.

It annoys me because I really want to use it. I'm very happy that we have it and I hope that the wider community will hold Mozilla to account every time they try something shady to protect the best free and open browser we have. If we lose Firefox, we lose the Internet to corporations.
Sadly not included in the list (probably because it was 1991) was the Audi Avus [1] whose construction and J Mays design language can still be found in Audi production cars. The quattro Spider Concept would have felt at home on that list as well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audi_Avus_quattro
And IPv6 then becomes an even more confusing clusterfk than it already is.
Firefox just doesn’t have enough advantages yet that would convince someone comfortable with Chrome to switch over. While privacy is an ever growing concern, it isn’t a strong enough feature for most people.
I think it can be done through /etc/hosts or similar yes? The downside is maintaining the blacklist, but I believe it’s still doable.
The design doc — the part quoted in the note linked here even — explicitly notes that it will probably be required to retain some degree of the existing functionality slated for eventually removal until the new API and other replacements cover all use cases; the response linked here appears to (not improperly, in the context of making a case for why much of the functionality is needed) ignoring that and treating the planned intent as removing all of the existing WebRequest API functionality that is not observational for a hard cutover to the new API which does not immediately supports large swath of currently used functionality.

I think the response is appropriate, energetic advocacy, but the HN headline is hyperbolic.
Yikes! I'm one of the maintainers of the Remote Browser open source project [1]. It's a cross-browser compatible automation framework which heavily leverages the power of vanilla JavaScript and the Web Extensions API to offer features comparable to those of Selenium (without the legacy cruft). Removing the ability for extensions to interact with arbitrary pages would effectively break Remote Browser's compatibility with Chromium/Chrome overnight. I have a feeling that there are a staggering number of interesting extensions that will break due to the various V3 manifest changes. Hopefully the outrage over uBlock Origin will push Google to reevaluate this decision.

[1] - https://github.com/intoli/remote-browser/
Netflix Joins the Motion Picture Association of America
Any comment on how well the single server install scales before needing to invest in the more complex HA solution?
Sizes of objects in the Universe in roughly 10x increments
I assume they meant that with Microsoft moving to Chromium there is less competition and thus less reason to fear that the change will hurt Chrome.
Not really. Unless you agreed on it before the introduction on paper. The VC agreeing with it would help it be less scammy.
Thank you!

To summarize I understand: A) the local working copy (locally replicated in your case), B) the local backup and C) the cloud/very remote backup. B & C cover each other if any datacenter is completely wiped out.
Nouveau developers actually suggested getting AMD cards multiple times (at least to me).
I also went with AMD for my gaming rig. The only reason for me to choose nvidia is for computing (opencl/cuda)
> You can go all the way from adding some lightweight formal specifications a posteriori with e.g. a fancy type system, to developing all your code formally by starting with some axioms.

This statement particularly interested me. If I wanted to learn more about this, what resources do you recommend?

If you ask how deep I want to go, let's say we have a scale of abstraction that's from 1 to 10, where 1 is a two paragraph executive summary and 10 is an entire Ph.D's worth of training. I'd probably be looking at a 2.5 to a 5.
It's more like 300 or 400 real actions during the heavy, action-packed moments. It's just insane. I doubt I can even click a mouse that fast.
> As is so often the case in Rails, it's set up to be nice and simple for a hello world example but little more.

This is just wrong. Rails works very well for 90% of the situations. When it stops working that’s great news:

You’ve won!

You’re Twitter, Facebook or the next big thing. You’ll find talent and money to replace your rails app.
I am not sure about this, but could imagine it being the case that Amazon has done some analysis and found some fake reviews for counterfeit or legal knock-off items to be in their interest.

If the average customer believes that a lot of positive reviews means the quality of the product is high, they are more likely to buy the product. As long as the product is a least decent, they will probably be happy with it. If they are unhappy, they can complain and Amazon will refund them to make them happy (this is probably rare so not a huge impact on profit). Amazon gets to keep lots of the margin on the lower quality knock-off items, instead of the original IP owners. If the item really sucks and they get a lot of returns, Amazon can then use that as a signal to bury it.

If Amazon produced millions of fake reviews themselves, it would be a huge scandal. But if thousands intrepid sellers invest in making thousands of fake reviews, it’s not as much of a scandal for them. Amazon makes a show of fighting the most obvious fake reviews, so people will continue trusting the platform. But are they really using their top talent to fight the fake reviews? I work on a ML / data analysis team and I feel like we could do a much better job at that task than Amazon seems to be doing, and they ought to have more resources than we do.

I’m not accusing Amazon of doing this strategy intentionally, but perhaps there is an understanding that the ROI of engineering talent spent fighting fake reviews and counterfeit items is low or negative.
How does it make sense to tack on the last letter?
I think most ML-derived languages strike the right balance - functional languages that incorporate enough OOP principles to get things done in the real world.

I increasingly advocate F#, and many people recommend Elixir for these purposes too (though I'm not familiar with it myself).
I am pretty sure that most of the people using firefox right now are from the hacker communities though.
https://www.ghacks.net/2019/01/22/chrome-extension-manifest-...

ghacks does a great job of explaining this (saw it first here).

Paraphrasing the article: Basically, they are limiting filters (used by ad-blockers) to 30k. Lots of blocking lists use more than 30k.

This is part of (possible) removal of blocking options from the webRequest API and the (possible) move to declarativeNetRequest to handle blocking requests.
Not to mention, once adtech gets the carrot dangling in front of them they will all overload their code with a ton more variations to escape the broad net of the top 30,000 rules. Which means the worst actors would be the ones most likely to escape filtering.
I think that is exactly right. So lets say you consider a news story as a 'stream' of bits. And you can demodulate those bits using some formula and there are enough extra bits in the message that you can correct for errors in the channel.

If you get 5 streams of bits and four of them correlate with some epsilon number of new bits, and the fifth has 10x epsilon new bits, one of things is likely true. Either the odd stream out is corrupted or the stream has changed.

Apply that to news stories where the ontology (O) and knowledge graph (KG) are combined to "error correct" the content of the story. "Error bits" would be defined as relationships that don't match what the ontology says can be true, or facts that are different than those facts already in the knowledge base. You can flag the odd news story as lacking alignment with the existing KG&O, further you can quantify that lack of alignment fairly precisely.

So if the news story has 0 bits of information it correlates very strongly with other existing stories. If it has many bits of information it contrasts with other existing stories. At some number of stories on the same topic you can begin to reason about which are more likely 'true' and which are more likely 'false.'
Google will start retiring Hangouts for GSuite users in Oct
But the abhorrent, sterile steel-and-glass isn't the only style that can be built up. The many art deco or gothic revival skyscrapers should serve as a suitable counter-example.
Another reason to try out the new brave which has all the capabilities of chromium without downsides
> we're moving to a more modern solution

What exactly qualifies as a modern solution that Java(/jvm?) is disqualified?

Syntax, library eco-system, paradigm, type system, cruft? Is "modern solution" some function of blog post count? A social blade type score for how many early-20 somethings are using it?

Or is it going to be something "simplistic" & "clear" which will eventually inherit the cruft all other large languages do?
The dev console is better than Firefox one. It's faster. Minimalistic interface is great. HOWEVER - Firefox console is catching up. Firefox is fast enough. Chrome is getting more and more bloated and interface is starting to suck compared to initial version of Chrome. Now they're trying to do stupid things and promote ads more and more. It gets worse every day and hopefully, they'll screw up to the point it dies. I loved Google before, now I'm disliking them as much as I do Facebook. I root for Firefox, but it's still not there yet.

Guys who maintain Firefox - thank you. I hope I'll join the FF users once more in the near future.
I’ve been off of Chrome for almost a year. Don’t miss it at all.
I am curious, what do you not like about the Firefox UI? I honestly could go back to like Firefox 3.5 and still be fine with it. I prefer the UI of the debug tools in Firefox over Chrome as well.
duck.com + mozilla.org
As was discussed recently on HN (and linked to elsewhere in the comments for this article), packages are signed, and APT checks those signatures; however, APT does download both the packages and the signatures in the clear. So, normally, the signatures get checked, which ensures that you get the package you intended. This is fine, mostly. (If you don't care about privacy, but it does prevent tampering, normally.)

APT does not, however, give privacy, which HTTPS/TLS would. (Those in favor argue that TLS doesn't help here, as you can still see that you're connecting to Ubuntu, so it's still obvious that you're downloading updates. I personally disagree w/ this stance: I think there is value in protecting which packages you're pulling updates for, as what packages you have installed can inform someone about what you're doing. I think there's further argument that the sizes of the responses give away which updates you're pulling, but IDK, that seems harder to piece together, and TLS at least raises the bar for that sort of thing.)

The bug discussed in the article circumvents the signature checking, by lying to the parent process about the validity of the signature by being able to essentially execute a sort of XSS/injection attack.
High Speed Rail from Sacramento to San Francisco
Why hasn't this happened yet? I've heard stories of people
paying to fly into the Bay Area from Sacramento by helicopter daily. If housing is so ridiculous in the Bay Area, why not expand the metro area?
biking in Boston is... interesting? drivers are not outwardly violent, but don't seem to appreciate bikes much. People seem to (reluctantly) tolerate you but can't resist some passive-aggressive behaviors and lots of honking.

It was still better than cities where the drivers are so oblivious of bikes (and pedestrians) that they wouldn't even notice if they ran you down. (looking at you Montreal)
What about the UI don't you like? I've heard this complaint before, but the two appear pretty similar to me, at least to the point that I never considered one more appealing than the other.
Came upon this review the other day, that placed Firefox on #1. Didn't read the detailed report (I'm on FF and feeling happy), but maybe worth a look: https://www.toptenreviews.com/software/internet/best-interne...
Hey, you should give w3m a try then.
> Clearly it's not

What is your basis for this claim?

I am not an expert on this topic, but Gorhill is and has a demonstrated history of technical/privacy judgement.

Gorhill's comment makes it clear that impacting the functionality of blockers is an intentional change, as the proposal not only removes previous functionality, but also enshrines one particular and limited approach to blocking.

Edit: I would also note that "break" may suggest the possibility of altering blocking extensions such that they could keep working and maintain their present functionality. Gorhill's comment makes it clear that this is not the case.
That can only do blocking at a coarse dns level. The browser extensions do a lot more. If you want to do everything at the OS layer without browser extensions, you'll have to MITM your ssl connections by trusting your CA and set up a parallel engine that does what extensions do right now.
Firefox also has password/history/bookmarks sync between devices.
Corporate America Is Getting Ready to Monetize Climate Change
The new update added support for Chrome extensions. Are the ones it doesn't support?
LJ also had a culture of longer, more introspective posts. Facebook encourages the light, picture-plus-a-quick comment post because they're easy to make. LJ was much more comfortable for deeper engagement.
I use Safari as my preferred browser and I'm really happy with it, it's become a lot faster with each update, noticeably so. But I don't trust Apple any more than I trust Google to fight for a free Internet. We need an open browser.
Don't get me, or other queens-english speakers started on the american habit of twenty hundred one (notice no "and")
I've been using Brave for a few months now and they have come a long way -- with many bumps along the road. When sync is finally released (its in beta now), I really think it will be a contender.
2005. did what he predicted happen? I think not?
i will go wherever uBlock Origin and uMatrix go
Mozilla is really no better than Google... in fact Chromium on my Linux distro vastly outperforms Firefox.
Is there something special that needs to be done to configure it? Every time I go over 50,000 I get a red warning at the bottom of the AdGuard filters setting screen telling me that I'm over the limit.
Which is why I'm all the more disappointed that Mozilla is unable to resist the siren's call either, what with the Looking Glass decision and their tendency to deprecate UX functionality with no replacement (like custom keyboard shortcuts).
A1C is not the fasting glucose test.
Because the plural of lego is lego, does not mean the plural of math is math..
Because by moving to Chromium, Microsoft increased Google's control of the browser ecosystem by killing one of the last remaining competitors to it. Now only Firefox is left.

Before they dropped Edge, a move like this would have been a great marketing opportunity for Microsoft: "Come to Edge, where your ad blocker still works."
Next move by Google: slowly crippling the functions of most Google sites (YT, Gmail, etc.) on Firefox for "better UX on major browsers."

You see? Power corrupts.
Brave is my new everyday browser since they added Chrome plugin support.
That's totally fine, but it's still disingenuous to claim that Firefox is the only other browser out there.