skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is there a way to synchronize between Firefox (or another browser) and RSS reader which links have been visited? If I use Firefox on every device, and I use Firefox Sync, then the content of synced including tabs, history, and which sites have been visited. These have a different color (e.g. when I visit HN). How do other people work around this? By never using a browser? If that works for you, then I suppose you use some way to synchronize your RSS readers.
Boy, I am with you on this one. Full-time FF user too. The whole CSS grid thing is very well done and useful.
Integrating vscode in your react-native development
See here https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12606610

Pension age was also equalised (women used to get it age 60, men 65) but feminists are still fighting tooth and nail against that one. https://www.independent.co.uk/money/pensions/pensions-change...
It's largely a historical artifact:

> Eastern Japan (including Tokyo, Kawasaki, Sapporo, Yokohama, and Sendai) runs at 50 Hz; Western Japan (including Okinawa, Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Nagoya, Hiroshima) runs at 60 Hz. This originates from the first purchases of generators from AEG for Tokyo in 1895 and from General Electric for Osaka in 1896.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Japan#Tr...
They're separate binaries, and can be easily unbundled.

That they're part of the same project is actually a win for me, it helps to make the various components work well together. Also there is a common thread or philosophy in how things are built, making learning easier.

In fact "the system is a single project" approach reminds me of the BSDs, which is arguably better than Linux as far as usability and security is concerned.
Amazon Should Acquire the US Postal Service
> Touching the DOM in Firefox is a terrible bottleneck, for example

Yep. Speedometer 2.0 shows this pretty well. It's 25% faster in Chromium for me on desktop, and over 100% faster! in mobile Chrome than Firefox for Android. Mozilla have done a remarkable job of catching up on raw javascript engine performance and the speed of the renderer, but they have a ways to go yet in other areas, probably none more so than bringing recent improvements to mobile.
One of the hospitals affected by the blackout describe in this article had it's generators fail to come online cleanly, they had to go manual in ICU.
If that's true, then they're at least 50% failing. Thunderbird absolutely blows, to the extent that I've chosen to use Apple Mail instead. That's saying something.
todo.txt has `+project` and `@context` fields, you could either follow that format (different leading characters) or use `@main@sub1@sub2` or `@main/sub1/sub2` for hierarchial project tags.

I mean, anything that's well formed and won't clash with typical project names is going to work.

Or rely on the file system. `journal/` as the root non-project folder and then `journal/project/sub1/`.
> We know from the kernel command line debug debacle they rather see the world burn down than admit they did something wrong

Can you expand? I've not heard of this.
This will easily beat X11 forwarding in performance and latency. The reason however is not because that the X11 protocol itself is bad. The designers of popular toolkits like GTK and Qt are too stupid to use X11 properly by introducing many unnecessary round trips and not utilizing the server side rendering capabilities of X at all.
The other day at the office, I was the only one that had heard of, let alone used, Slackware. I am also the oldest in the team, this is probably no coincidence.
I solve this problem by having a clean profile with only uBlock that I can open up when I want to make sure a purchase is going to work. uMatrix has a glitch where even when you enable something it sometimes won't work / load even when you refresh the page multiple times, but I don't think I've encountered problems on many pages with just uBlock.
Yeah.

It would be kind of awesome if we could “hash tag” scenes such that at some point we could search fot “remember that #action scene in movie X where the [something happens]” and it can pull up that clip of the scene...
Automatic differentiation in machine learning: a survey
The examples were intended to illustrate the point that Mozilla has a lot of non-Firefox software development going on, not to be an exhaustive accounting of everything they do. But even so, I have to question only allocating $13 million to the items I listed. Particularly Firefox OS and Firefox Reality. Those are big projects. The blog post I linked even has a pull quote emphasizing how much work the latter was:

> We had to rethink everything, including navigation, text-input, environments, search and more. This required years of research, and countless conversations with users, content creators, and hardware partners. The result is a browser that is built for the medium it serves. It makes a big difference, and we think you will love all of the features and details that we’ve created specifically for a MR browser. – Andre Vrignaud, Head of Mixed Reality Platform Strategy at Mozilla

Even something like Firefox Monitor has lots of design work and art assets and backend infrastructure and management overhead that makes it not as trivial as you make it sound.
I doodle. At home, I work on artwork, preferably putting in details or something else somewhat "mindless" - anything where the artwork is mostly autopilot.

The same thing works for many repetitive activities. Wear headphones while doing dishes. Listen while driving, walking, anything of the sort. The important thing is to have something that takes up a bit of brain, but not too much.
From where though? I've seen about high-class nannies, and presumably they might work their way up to being housekeepers (by which I mean managers of households as opposed to cleaner/cook type positions).

In the past private school fags, or military batmen presumably might follow a "gentleman" in to later service, but I don't see where it fits in now? I'd guess it must be like being an equerry, about social positioning in the first place?
IIRC, they printed more messages to the console when booting Linux with a debug parameter than Linux could handle.

Systemd developers were like "nobody can tell us how much detail to print", until the kernel developers made clear that the boot console belongs to them and if systemd doesn't back down immediately they would take away all console access. Systemd then backed down.
Built a $1.6B Business by Helping Their Parents with Their Struggles as Plummers
There's a difference betwwen "X is in attendance" and "X spent 12.3 s at the water fountain in the company of Z, P, R" though.
> There's nothing smart about not benefiting from the new features today for the sake of saving a few hundred dollars.

I suppose you mean that it's obvious (i.e. doesn't require some masterstroke), not that it's a bad idea?

Sounds great to me. I don't upgrade my computing hardware until it's no longer fit for purpose for the most part, it would be stupidly wasteful to buy a new thing every 6 months regardless of whether I can afford it.
> There's nothing smart about not benefiting from the new features today for the sake of saving a few hundred dollars.

Sure there is. For every life-changing new feature, there are a dozen that end up not going anywhere. For the ones that are, their true advantages and disadvantages only become clear after they’ve been in the world for a while.

I’m thankful for all of the early adopters out there that hapily deal with the churn and find out what’s actually good so that I don’t have to— I can spend that time focusing on what’s important to me and still get most of the benefits, if only a year or two later.
Cool idea, cool technology, cool project.

I really just don't get the "why", even after watching the ElixirConf presentation [1] about it. Like what is the use-case for this, specifically?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMgTIlgYB-U
> does ONE thing and does it well: it manages the system

"managing the system" is not "ONE [problem]". A big part of the problem with systemd is this presupposition that management of something as large and complex as a modern OS is a single monolithic[1] problem.

> it's complex because it does a complex work.

See, you agree that it's a complex problem! It's so complex with so many different use cases it isn't even possible to have one solution, because some of those use cases are mutually exclusive. Hench why a modular design is important, so it isn't too difficult to replace the management of different areas if needed.

> It's the missing layer between kernel space and user space.

That "missing layer" isn't well defined. There certainly wasn't any "missing layer" on my old server, or the compute boxen we used at ${research_lab}.

If you're talking about desktop system, I agree that there was a gap between traditional system management and the GUI, but that isn't really a new "layer" between kernal and user space (it might involve GUI userspace programs with perhaps some of them being SETUID or a privileged daemon).

[1] Any objections trying to claim systemd isn't a tightly coupled, monolithic design will be ignored. If you think the number of binary program files is in any way useful as an objection, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19024256
Most other countries don't have such a monopoly on being the best place to go to. For an engineer or scientist at least, America is often where your career can go the furthest.

It seems a bit non-straightforward that the right of a private club to choose members seems like an important freedom, but that that only applies when there are numerous competitive alternative clubs. For countries, that's usually the case but America is number one in many ways and sometimes by such a wide margin that applicants don't really have a choice that isn't much worse. So maybe it has more responsibility to be fair in order to avoid being tyrannical to the rest of the world.
Honestly, I much prefer systemd timers over cron. They work just like systemd units and shed all the odd special cases that cron accumulated over the years. They’re pretty well defined in how they behave in face of systems being down while a job was supposed to run (more a desktop thing, but relevant for some server cases as well). It makes sense to use the same config mechanism.

Still, systemd timers are exposed to the usual selection pressures: systemd the init does not rely on systemd timers. They’re a convenient addon that integrates well. But anything more convenient could replace them with no problem (as evidenced by cron still working on systemd enabled systems)
> They're separate binaries

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19024256
This is on their roadmap: https://github.com/orgs/mozilla-mobile/projects/28#card-2405...

It looks like there are some other tickets on the road map that have the needs:gv label (Needs Gecko View). So, it seems they are on it or at least aware of it and there is some unfinished work to bring over more of the components they have for Fennec and Desktop.
The Mysterious Vaping Illness That’s ‘Becoming an Epidemic’
> I can understand your view. With that said, I am quite happy they funded Rust and also gave a grant to the Godot project to develop their webassembly interface.

I agree, but it seems problematic they aren't monetizing that. They're making money doing the things users don't really like while not making a dime of good things like fostering a legitimate free and open web.
Actually there were actual monkeys involved in this story - the manager, and presumably his higher-ups as this kind of mindset usually doesn't come alone.
I just wish that smartphones had a more standardised OS.

Old laptops are fully usable in exactly the same way as a modern machine. They might be slightly slower.

Well, I mean, it's getting more difficult to deal with 32bit hardware, but that's about 10-15 years old now.

My 32bit atom netbook is still usable; still gets security patches; runs the latest everything (it's just very slow, and e.g. some distros dropped 32bit support).

I think that the phone manufacturers, Google, etc, should address the fact that they are creating mountains of e-waste for no good reason. The last new phone I bought was partly because old software stopped running on my version of Android. That's really a shame.

I'm keeping an eye on the progress of the Librem but that's a tiny niche market for nerds like me and doesn't address the wider problem.
What Draws Hundreds to This Lake Bed? Spellbinding Crystals
I'm one of those people still using version 3.3.2 and I've just exported from it and imported into version 5 and.... it loses all the folders and subfolders I've spent years polishing up.

All feeds are now at the same level and basically unusable :-(
From [2013], or even [2007]
1. The Post Office is a government sponsored entity mandated by the Constitution —- Amazon cannot “acquire” it.

2. The lie about the USPS losing money ignores that Congress requires the USPS to pre-pay for 70 years of worker benefits. The truth is that left to manage their own business the USPS would be making huge profits and pouring them both into innovation and services as well as the US Treasury.

3. The same interests which coerced Congress into making #2 happen will recruit every logistics and retail competitor of Amazon to storm Congress with lobbying and money to make sure Amazon can’t make the kind of deal suggested in this article. Amazon is big but they would motivate an army of companies across several industries to oppose them.

It’s far more likely that Amazon will start acquiring logistics companies and ramping up their last mile service more aggressively.
Interesting! I've been following this through cleantechnica, electrek & other sites.

It's transforming a complex heat/fluid/mechanical system issue into a computer network and security issue. Usually the home network internet access market is very concentrated so a failure there could make the VPP unavailable. Solvable by putting control servers in various places and having each box connecting to multiple redundant control servers hosted with diversity and redundancy in mind.

Also ISM low bandwidth IoT radio technology like LoRa and sigfox might help redundancy too.

Might become important is VPP grows beyond handling rare grid events.
Can't wait to see the comic this inspires.
Sounds like tracking protection blocks some elements.
New Fabric
What are the most valuable properties a new fabric must-have?
> It's complex because it does a complex work

Hence it's pointless because it doesn't make things any simpler. All it does is making things monolithic and wrapping concepts that are perfectly fine by themselves, forcing third-party software to write to systemd's APIs.

> Systemd actually does ONE thing and does it well: it manages the system.

"Managing systems" is not what is meant by "doing one thing, and doing it well". Systemd takes over init scripting, logging, host names, IP, time, locale, and login, plus tens of more services. Making development of this software a Lennart Poettering/RH-only business rather than community-driven.

The trend to get rid of systemd and its metastasis into most of Linux is excellent news. Note that Slackware and Devuan are also systemd-free (and have been from the beginning).
While the title is cruel the article itself is clear in describing the Astronaut as a human being under unthinkable pressure and stress and does in fact show empathy for her plight.
My usual design is to monitor AC powerline with opto-coupler and then enter the brownout procedure in MCU when the power loss is detected. The remaining energy stored in AC/DC converter capacitors are then used for a graceful shutdown purposes.

The usual brownout procedure actions are: a) flush the current state to MCU flash memory (EEPROM) so that the work can be automatically resumed; b) wait for a power-on condition.

In this way, the device is able to significantly reduce flash memory wearing. It turns to be a significant winning factor in cheaper MCUs, as they only allow about 100,000 EEPROM write cycles max.

And it comes for cheap, as the only thing you need is an opto-coupler plus a bit of software wizardry.
Pretty sure I could eat that myself.
Theoretically they could still focus on developing a privacy-first browser on top of the core engine, and continue to influence web standards by implementing them as plugins with some glue patches maintained as a running fork on top of the Chromium code. As it is now, the fact that Firefox uses Quantum instead of Blink and SpiderMonkey instead of V8 isn't really a differentiator for the vast majority of users. There's a vague sense that a technology monoculture is unhealthy, but I would argue that the real threat is a browser monoculture, and Mozilla apparently can't stop that from happening with their current strategy because Firefox is losing.
Support for zoned drives is bubbling up through the kernel layers and just reaching filesystems now. Once filesystems paper over the shortcomings well enough any saving is worth it for bulk storage that involves more than 1-2 drives.
How nextdns made DNS both fast and private with ECS
I have never had payment fail in Firefox.
Isn’t upgrading to ext4 trivial?
Did you watch the entire thing?
Dropbox doesn't care about its users. Have you ever had them lose gigabytes of your files? I have. Several days went by with not a peep after I reported that my client's files had disappeared. And I was a paying customer.

Meanwhile, I signed up for Google Drive and re-uploaded all of them within hours, after Dropbox took a full day for the same upload.

A year later, Dropbox still hadn't provided an explanation for the files' disappearance. They suck.
I would go as far as suggesting that these things should be routinely tested. In the UK most public buildings test fire alarms once a week; a programmed plan of localised, managed blackouts, to be carried out once every few years, would probably help in the long run - particularly as the grid is rapidly changing as described at the end of the post.
How to Use an SPF Record to Prevent Spoofing and Improve Email Reliability
> Knoppix claim to fame is automatic configuration. If your Xorg or sound was giving you grief after a fresh install, you'd live boot Knoppix and copy the configuration files back to your installation.

Is it really so? I would expect all distributions to have stolen that feature by now. Xorg works out of the box basically everywhere. I've had a glitch with a microphone on a 3-pin jack on a Ubuntu system, and I doubt Knoppix would have known that a modprobe config change was needed.
Unification wouldn't be a such an issue, if it was done with forethought, design and consistency, like BSDs tend to have.
Perhaps, but the UK is officially a monarchy and the Prime Minister has the power to prorogue parliament. At least the Financial Times isn't calling it a "constitutional crisis" like US news outlets are doing... the UK doesn't have a constitution. Implementing one would rival Magna Carta in English political history and there's a coin-flip's chance they would try to abolish the monarchy while at it, something which is a deeply divisive topic in the UK.
Same. There was a quick slide joking about how this solves the fully offline client side browser app problem but even Chris McCord said that in all his years of consulting, he's only gotten a handful of requests for these types of apps.

I'm sure they have their reasons for taking on such a project but as an outsider I would have liked to see more announcements that apply to what the majority of people are using Elixir for today (web apps). There's Nerves too which I'm not into personally, but there were things at the conf for that so I'm sure that crowd was happy.

For example, telemetry was announced over a year ago with a hint that it was being worked on next and will be implemented into Phoenix as a web dashboard in the future but there was no hint of that mentioned this year -- at least not in any of the Phoenix related talks and Chris' keynote. I also didn't see it in any of the other talk's titles. But telemetry is one of those things where if it existed in the form they talked about last year it would be one of the biggest killer features of any web framework available today (not a single one does what they proposed).
> I prefer the Slack web client to the native version.

Slack doesn't have a native version, does it? They have a desktop client, but that's just the web version wrapped inside Electron.
"I don’t see Dropbox screwing up that badly"

HA HA HA! Spoken like someone who hasn't had them lose gigabytes of files that a client was waiting for... and never found.

And I was a paying customer.
Top comment is currently a Jan at the title and byline. I hope people will overlook that fault and read. It's astonishing to look back at this incident from over a decade ago, remember my reaction to it then, and compare it to my understanding now. My perceptions of NASA and my empathy for Nowak are night and day.
This is exactly the question that came to my mind (and that comes to my mind whenever I hear ‘potatoes’, ‘tomatoes’, or other New World imports mentioned as ‘tradition’ of some European country).

For example: I come from Italy. The number of times I’ve heard/read stuff about the supposed benefits of the “Mediterranean diet” being “recognised as far back as the Ancient Romans” and featuring some photograph of a platter involving fish and tomatoes... it just makes me want to flip.

When I saw sliced tomatoes on the table in the film The Gladiator it made me want to walk out of the cinema.
I have worked at more than one place where I was the only one who had heard of Linux. I skip paraphrasing the 'let alone used' part, for of course everyone was using it in their routers and phones and proverbial toasters.

It is my clear impression that many Windows users would be hard pressed to explain what 'Windows' is and does.
First, this is not discrediting psychiatric evaluation. It's just another article that tries to be controversial but really isn't.
As pointed out in the comments, any professional is very aware of the problems outlined in this article and researchers are working on finding clearer markers for psychiatric diagnoses (see the emerging field of Computational Psychiatry for example)

The one problem I'm familiar with and I'd like to point out is with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD).
MDD is diagnosed if 5 or more symptoms are present for at least 2 weeks. Some of these symptoms are actually in contrast with each other.
This means that is possible for two people to have completely different symptoms but still be diagnosed with the same disorder.
This is shocking.
So it is clear that the problem is with labelling these disorders. That's why researchers, to better understand how the neurological substrate affects the behaviours, are focusing on individual symptoms and only then relate them to categorical differences.
That’s probably because it’s a full rewrite.
I read your list and see a bunch of 'technical debt.' Trains put into operation without the ability to survive a power transient without intervention. Life critical backup power system failures. The set of critical sites is not being maintained properly. In my mind these failures are are not entirely unrelated; reliable power is taken for granted and the testing and maintenance necessary to cope with power outages is neglected.
Are you talking about randomly shuffling the bits or getting a new permutation? Any suggestions on how to quickly randomly shuffle the bits of a number?
I only recently moved from an iphone 5 to a 6. I actually consider it largely a step down due to the larger form factor. The 5 worked fine except for some applications I needed moving passed 32 bit support. If not for that I never would have upgraded. I'm always amazed at how people just must have the newest phones. Other than my issue with the 32 bit I saw no reason to change.