skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They're also one of the founders of LetsEncrypt, maintain MDN, etc.

Furthermore, one time long ago, Mozilla might have thought they didn't need to build a mobile browser, and focus on their main product: Firefox for Desktop.

Next thing you know, Firefox is completely irrelevant on what's becoming the dominant computing platform.

I don't know whether VR/AR or IoT will be a thing, and I'm sure that they will be criticised for their projects there when they don't, but I'm certainly glad they're at least trying to make those open platforms - just in case they do become mainstream.
"Alexa set a timer for 15 minutes." (She's a cooking timer)
"Alexa what time is it" (She's a clock)
"Alexa switch the tv off" (She can't switch it on)
"Alexa, meow meow/Pika/fart" (Novelty nonsense)
"Alexa, turn the heating up in the living room" (Nest integration)

Yeah that's about it. The only really useful thing she does for us is music control on our sonos system - "Alexa, play the album X by Y in the kitchen". That's quite neat.
Perspectives are fascinatingly different. For me, the biggest issues of the near-dysfunctional web are:

1. registration popups (newsletters, membership) and paywalls that appear when I click on promising links.

2. cookie banners, popups, interstitials that pointlessly require additional actions everywhere, like a stupid second door on a fridge.

3. stuff that is broken because obscure JS / new non-standard browser feature doesn't work, possibly because of ad/tracker blocking.

4. copyright scares and other legal obstacles and uncertainties for publishers (e.g. GDPR) that drive smaller, especially noncommercial publishers away from the web, so users become easy victims of multinational corporations with predatory business practices. This is a much bigger issue than hacking for small publishers.

What do "polarised discussions" even have to do with the web? We have them in every pub. The fact that they're prevalent on the web is a sign that something works, not the opposite.
Facebook supported xmpp until about 2015 iirc.
You just described my user experience with Brave.
> Work doesn't need to be Disneyland.

Why not? I spend a lot of time at my workspace, so it's only natural for me to choose a nice one.
I have several, along with Google Home too. They all suffer from the same issue: it's awkward to use with third party skills. Unless they are the highly integrated ones (Spotify, Logitech Harmony) in which case it's great.

It's the same for Siri, the API is so restrictive.

The whole "tell XX to YY" isn't convenient.

One workaround on Google Home is to use IFTTT, and in that case you can customize the whole phrase and response, and then it's pretty nice, even though the latency is high.

"-Okay Google, open the blinds -Sure thing Commander" never gets old.
Can you provide some details on the claim that Matrix is deeply insecure?
Also electron is already not using Mozilla technology and that was a major factor
Skills targeted at children are the worst. I am not a child! Why should I have to jump through hoops because other people have children?
Software Testing – Testers' Dream: Tracking Issues More Effectively
* https://www.akamai.com/us/en/resources/waf.jsp

* https://www.fastly.com/products/cloud-security/web-applicati...

Not saying they are better than Cloudflare. I use Cloudflare myself. But they are good alternatives.
Generally my answer is that this is for the same reason that fitting lines of best fit to data is nearly always done via a least-squares fitting.

Squaring has a few major benefits.

The first is that is never negative.

Therefore, one might ask why don't we just take absolute value (1-norm)? It turns out that the absolute function makes many calculus expressions very messy. Thus, ironically, when analysing these concepts theoreticlly/algebraically it is usually easier to square the errors (use the 2-norm), rather than the 1-norm.

The x^2 function is a very elegant function that smoothly curves. The |x| function has a pointy corner at x=0, which causes many analytical headaches.

(Although, I must admit that in recent years with large-scale computing, errors based on the absolute value are making a notable comeback, especially in machine learning!)

Secondly, history seems to have shown that squaring is frequently the simplest transformation that leads to non-trivial results. Thus, the principle of Occam's razor, would suggest that 2 is a very good place to begin and end.

Finally, if we consider higher powers, it makes sense to ensure our errors are not negative, so that generally rules out cubes. Finding square roots, and roots of quadratic equations is relatively simple, but finding roots of degree 4 polynomials is very tough, and finding roots of higher even degree polynomials is usually intractable.

Hope that helps!
I would still like to know what kind of features are unavailable in Firefox to warrant a complete block on the browser. This would also help Firefox developers to implement them or fix the bugs. I mean I always see "Firefox does not implement all the features we need for our cutting edge web app" but I've yet to see anything more specific. Do any of you with more frontend experience care to comment?
What tools did you use to make the drawings in the post? They look great!
And kill dev productivity.
It does. Skyrim for Alexa. https://youtu.be/BQl3T0uD5Aw
Absolutely. Until the voice assistants become a bit more intelligent with the language used to activate them, it feels so rigid and un-natural communicating with them.

I don't see a great future for voice assistants in the near future, until we truly solve the problem of intent (in a natural way) and accordingly can respond.
Average Joe has a facebook account with a network of friends. They do not have a twitter account let alone any followers (Facebook DAU: 1.5 billion; Twitter DAU: 126 million)
The claim that Boeing is an arm of US policy is pure bull. Just look at what the US putting sanctions back onto Iran is costing Boeing in lost sales.

Nobody is dismissing the deaths, they're simply waiting for more information considering that the plane hadn't had any major issues until now (engine troubles on a Norwegian Air flight that resulted in a landing in Iran are not believed to have anything to do with the plane itself). If other airlines and pilots really felt that the plane was unsafe, they can always ground the plane themselves.
Yeah they instead have a $349 speaker with Siri. I rather just buy two Mycroft Mark 1's for that chunk of change.
The illustration tries to visualize a (gravitational) potential by equitorial lines, and to cut where the event horizon is in Schwarzschild coordinates. Such an illustration is probably an honour to Karl Schwarzschild (the guy who first solved Einstein's general relativistic field equations) but not to Hawking, who got famous for making first predictions how quantum matter interacts with general relativistic spacetimes, i.e. black holes.

It's only the equation which displays the definition of Bekenstein-Hawking entropy which is connected to Hawking.

I'm not an expert in designing coins, but I feel this is not the best way to visualize Hawkings impact on science.
Wow, someone from Cliqz! I always wondered: hasn't your company name been tainted too much? It might be because of the circles I'm in, but Cliqz has become synonymous with "privacy invasion", and though I know it's often misrepresented, that's some bad branding for a company focused on selling privacy tools. Is this seen as a problem internally?
It's done. Here you go, only a few hundred dollars:

https://www.dynonavionics.com/aoa-pitot-probes.php
Progression, Curiosity, and Burnout with Dan Abramov (2017)
Manufacturing Bula: Mass Tourism in Fiji
This comment could be re-written to be just as useful but much less combative.
Thanks! I just updated it. Cheers
How productive is 8 to 13 hours of deep work? Personally I need a break every so often to celebrate the incremental wins, else life becomes one long problem to solve.
DNS is a sideline for CF, it's the DDOS-resistant CDN that people choose them for.
Note that I was thinking about a possible successor to the Web, not the Internet.
It’s maybe even worse: 737 Max designers should have maybe changed the design of the plane to make it more stable instead of “we’ll fix it in the software” (that will surely eventually unproportionally badly fail) approach. If I understood correctly the “management decision” was to keep the body effectively unchanged but fitting the engines with the different effects on the stability, then relying on software, instead of changing the plane geometry.

Currently, 335 people are dead in the Boeing 737 Max accidents, flying commercially only since May 22, 2017. Not even two full years.
The problem is deeper than you imply. It's not just standards, at least not for everyone. I'm currently replacing a website that was developed several years ago that does not work on Firefox.

It is nothing special. It's your standard CRUD app. Not even an SPA. From what I can tell the tech they use is all at least 5 years old.

They obviously never even checked to see if it worked in Firefox. It should work in Firefox. There is no excuse for it not to.

If you are actually analyzing your featureset and saying "I could really use these new standards Firefox doesn't support", that's one thing. If you are just coding whatever and seeing it works in Chrome and calling it a day, you aren't coding to a standard, you are coding to whatever happens to work in Chrome.
But we have already seen it happen with the telecoms, so while they may not be "rational actors" clearly it's not too small a market oportunity to be worth it for some spineless businesses.

Telecoms also generate their revenue by just keeping the power turned on with their existing infrastructure (yes it does require maintenance and monitoring), but that didn't stop them from trying to find additional revenue streams by further exploiting their already paying costumers.

I do use Cloudflare on their free tier, and I don't think they are spying on everyone and selling ads against some profile they have built up. We'll just have to be vigilant because the status quo right now is to be big brother and sell targeted advertising.
> comes with its own host of problems

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/21/african-grey-parrot-rocco-wa...
Gifts to charity can only be deducted up to 50% of AGI. Gifts of appreciated assets only up to 30%. If you are giving to private foundations, the limits are even lower. It is possible to carry forward excess deductions for a limited time, but that doesn't really help in the long run. If you are trying to consistently reduce your AGI to zero this approach does not work.
For DNS there's also https://ns1.com/ .
A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality
I too would like to live in a magical fairy land where all of my dreams came true. Since I don't believe in magic, I'm forced to think in terms of real world implications.

A centralized structure with a dedicated backbone will always be more efficient than any kind of mesh net. Additionally, such a structure requires a critical mass of people to operate.

Since people don't want to be the infrastructure when they could be a client and have much more bandwidth, that alone sinks the whole deal. If you're not convinced, consider the fact that the incumbent providers will fight such a structure at the legislative level as well as trying to undercut its userbase.

Also, net neutrality rules, as established in the US in 2015 were pretty straightforward. They wouldn't inhibit a meshnet, meshnet clients likely do not fall under the definition of ISP, and in fact such rules would probably be necessary to it's effective operation. Remember, they were based on three simple rules: "ISPs cannot block legal content, applications, or services", "ISPs cannot slow down or degrade internet service based on the content, application, or service accessed by users", and "ISPs cannot accept payment to give content, applications, or services more favorable access to users."

So back in reality-land, there won't be any meshnet to compete with the current internet for the foreseeable future. If you value freedom of speech and free movement of information online, I strongly suggest you support the rules outlined above.

EDIT: It's also worth noting that such a meshnet would solve none of the issues raised by Sir Tim.
Right, and right now we are having the choice to use just those oligopolies. If we bring this down to the car analogy, it would be like if you had the choice between Ford, Toyota, VW and a bicycle. You could ride your Ford on the ford-roads, your Toyota on toyota-roads VW on vw-roads and if you feel mighty you could even bike but there's no way you will be allowed on the same road as the big guys and eventually you'll meet the dead end.
Things to Do with Our Daughter Before She Gets 18-Years Old
More like two people having a conversation in the street, except one of them is screaming every word and you're just asking to please tone it down a bit, which is too much to ask for that person.
Also make the text a hyperlink, in honor of the 30 year anniversary of this hypertext platform, rather than sticking a small link icon to the side that's an inconvenient click target.
I wish I could trust Firefox not to be basically the same evil Chrome is if it gets to roughly the same position. It has already betrayed the trust of its userbase twice in recent memory.
I think Firefox/Mozilla is still a bit on the "too big" side, and they've done some mollycoddling/anti-user-freedom stuff in the past too.

IMHO if you want to "protest" the browser monopoly, use something more like Dillo or NetSurf. They have no JS, so web apps are out of the question, but work well for the document-centric sites.
...and regarding environmental controls instigating a recession, that is very far from the truth (again, in my experience).

Extending the above 'ship design industry' example, when IMO imposed emission caps on ships, did the shipping industry (and supporting industries) faulter or thrive? They're thriving. Why? Because they need to build new things to replace the old things.

-MAN B&W and Wartsilla (Engine Manufacturuers) are now building dual-fuel engines.

-These guys, and their affiliates are offering Exhaust Scrubbing systems (e.g., EGRs, SCRs, Scrubbers, etc.).

-Because of the increase in SCR's, there is now a new, large market for UREA (the active agent, basically Ammonia, in SCR's)

-Propeller manufacturers are offering more hydrodynamic designs, and tow-test tanks are employed to help design those propellers and hydro-improved hull forms.

-New companies have sprouted up (e.g. Energy Focus, etc) just to supply energy efficient LED lighting for ships.

-Contractors are being employed to design new LNG-fuel supply infrastructure to piers world-wide. New training facilities/programs are being built to teach sailors/shore crew how to safely handle LNG.

-Marine hardware suppliers now have a host of new products to sell to meet the demand for energy efficient plants (e.g., high accuracy fuel mass flow meters, shaft torque/thrust sensors, tank gauges, smart controls for HVAC plants, low-power water production units, etc.)

-Companies have sprouted up to supply newly conceived "energy dashboards" that use genetic and machine-learning algorithms to find optimized ship operating configuration (speed, equipment line-up, trim, etc) for a given set of environmental/mission inputs (e.g. weather, voyage plan, etc.).

-I could go on for a long-long time.

Does this sound like a recession to you???

The argument that increasing environmental regulation will stifle the economy is just not true. From what I've seen, the opposite is true. Competition is spurred and new markets emerge, putting more people to work in jobs that actually matter.
Of umbrellas, transducers, reactive streams and mushrooms
> I guess column-oriented databases are also conceptually similar, though structure of arrays is certainly a closer analog.

Isn't a column oriented database pretty much just an SoA on disk. And a row oriented database is pretty an AoS on disk. modulo some complexity around indexes?
ABP, umatrix, 16G, spinning rust, first gen i7. FF does take about 10G right now (Linux), so it is not exactly super efficient but given the amount of windows and tabs open I really can't complain.
> will never admit to or show any weakness

I still don't understand why? Why is it even a weakness if they admit there might be a problem?

Boeing is if not largest, one of the largest aircraft manufacturers and they have a good record. So, why having two accidents can be bad for them?
I can't see any negative impact if they admit that there might be a problem. It would be even way safer for them to ask airlines to ground 737 temporarily during the investigation.
> Money (highest you will get outside of FAANG or winning the startop lottery)

In some cases finance > FAANG. But you're still treated like a very highly paid janitor.
"will" (I hope that word eliminates the possibility of a source ... :) )
> Stop talking to them about freedom and censorship resistance and how the fascist capitalist overlords have turned them into sheep and make it easy for them to share their cat pictures.

Oh, that's a problem already solved by FB.
I noticed tea biscuits (digestive cookies, ginger cookies etc) and chips (en-us) / crisps (en-uk) being better than in Germany in the UK. Chips are better than in Germany in most any country I've been to - though Lay's has been raising the bar (back, since Chio deteriorated) since their market entry. As far as you can buy Indian food in supermarkets, probably that too - at least the standard in restaurants is much higher in the UK.
You can't love Aldi and Lidl at the same time - that is not allowed. You have to choose which you love. Of course, you can still occasionally visit the other but only while bearing a subtle smirk of contempt. Like Star Wars and Star Trek or Lego and Playmobil. I'm proudly follow Aldi now in the third generation.
Thanks.
No, you aren't crazy, but maybe my typos made you crazy! ;)

I have now fixed a couple of typos in the grammar and continued fractions expressions for that section.
Less fun than it is today. So even more less fun than it was some time ago...
Google Earth Engine's geometry constructors build geodesic geometries by default

https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/geometries_planar...

A geodesic is a locally length-minimizing curve. Equivalently, it is a path that a particle which is not accelerating would follow. In the plane, the geodesics are straight lines. On the sphere, the geodesics are great circles (like the equator). The geodesics in a space depend on the Riemannian metric, which affects the notions of distance and acceleration
OpenAI has decided to pursue profits
My Echo was an interesting novelty at first. But a couple years in now, it is essentially (in order of usefulness):

1. An alarm clock / kitchen timer

2. A thing that tells me the weather report during morning coffee, so I know what to wear

3. A DJ that my kids yell at to play pop music

If it died tomorrow, I'd probably just go back to using my phone for these 3 things rather than buy a new one. I can't imagine getting into it enough to explore third-party "skills".
Are all chrome extensions available by default on firefox?
Are white women racist in general
Shame that we can't do the same in Canada
Choose a Licence Wizard
> russia's government, china's government, the NSA, Europes regulations etc, who not only want to restrict their subjects physically, but also want to own all their information.

Those really do not belong in the same sentence, especially given that many of the European regulations are for the preservation of the individual's rights over their information, in a way that doesn't exist elsewhere.

> we just can't rely on the electorates to protect freedoms, we need wide consensus

Consensus among whom, if not the electorate?
Well, they were rattled enough to postpone the global launch of their new 777X which was slated for this week.
Show HN: Cretter – Backup anything you tell the world is true
The problem is the interface. Voice commands and their responses are linear, one dimensional. It’s difficult to represent complex interaction within that scope. Think of all the investment that has gone into telephone based automated customer support. The best interface conceived so far is the dreaded phone tree. That’s essentially the same interface smart speakers are exposing.

The opportunity is to figure out how to better utilize the voice based medium. No one has done it yet. When they do, it will also likely improve the experience around screen readers and accessibility.
Case in point: I was in a new Volvo XC40 just yesterday and the fans were going like crazy. I tried adjusting this on the big screen in the middle but ended up having to park and adjust it while standstill because I couldn't figure out how to do it without taking a (long enough to crash) moment to look at the screen to know where to point and drag. Before they went on board with the touch screen craze they had physical dials for this, did the job every time. Mercedes have buttons, which is less ideal, but still better than a touch screen I have to navigate through.
The creator of the page here, I'd be happy to answer any questions :)
Or even just a bad cop like this guy: https://nypost.com/2019/03/11/sergeant-used-police-databases...
Meanwhile I am still waiting for a free tier on the serverless workers [1] stuff they've been advertising whole of the last year.
There is no real reason in paying $5/month for 10M requests when you can't even get accustomed or do a proof of concept beforehand.

[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/about/how-workers-...
Does ProtonMail work in China?
OLTP vs. OLAP – What's the Difference
I like this summary, as it captures how much it's an overloaded term that lumps all sorts of things good and bad together.
That will be a problem as you can't unring a bell - it is far easier to unscramble an egg.
It's a standard "do What The Fuck you want to Public License" It's not recommended because it has no liability disclaimer and also because it's difficult to get approved by the legal department https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL

You can get the same effect with a standard license like MIT/BSD/Apache. They are similar but not equivalent, so read the details before choosing which one.
NYTimes Opinion: The Good Enough Life
> Hello

That was an experimental, lightweight Skype alternative, that didn't take too much effort to build beyond introducing WebRTC into Gecko (which they had to do anyway) and which probably helped them iron out bugs in Gecko's WebRTC implementation. Also, for the record, when I used it, it worked mostly fine.

> Persona

It worked, but almost nobody used it (you could argue that that is "not working out" from a social, if not technical point of view).

> They also abandoned Thunderbird, which I will never forgive

They didn't abandon it. They transferred it into other people's caring hands. They still provide some support for it under the Mozilla umbrella and they still coordinate (to some extent) with Thunderbird's current developers when modifying the common base Firefox and Thunderbird depend on.

> Cliqz

Partially true, if rather overblown. It affected a tiny number of people (~ 1 % of new users, in only one country), the data was anonymised and the code running on the server to which the data was sent was FOSS, though obviously there's no definitive proof that Cliqz didn't substitute it with malicious code. It was an order of magnitude less bad than what Google always does and considering that the point was to build an alternative to Google search, if it had worked out, it would have been a massive privacy gain. The most disappointing part was it being opt-out, not opt-in, for the randomly selected users.

> remotely installing an addon to advertise the Mr. Robot show

That was a very silly (and stupid) gimmick, but it didn't invade your privacy.

> installing Pocket by default

Having Pocket installed by default is not a privacy violation, even if it is slight bloat-ware.