skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I understand from a technical and business perspective (particularly due to the security implications of needing to manually review each and every new addon) why Mozilla eventually went down the WebExtensions route, having personally revived the old XUL/XPCOM "MessageFaces" addon (a Plan9/unix era vismon/faces knockoff for Thunderbird/SeaMonkey) from 2004 when I was in college in ~2016, I was devastated to hear that Mozilla was removing support for XUL/XPCOM and the Add-on SDK from Firefox.

Nothing that the extension achieved is even remotely possible anymore — adding custom column in mailbox Thunderbird XUL, custom icon vbox in the Thunderbird mail header, reading from a browser profile directory to display picons, windowed preferences, etc. I find this sad.

https://github.com/JohnDDuncanIII/messagefaces/

http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/sites/messagefaces/

https://kinzler.com/picons/ftp/

What's most sad to me is that my workflow was never quite the same after I stopped using SeaMonkey with many of the famous XUL-based extensions (Old Addons Page, Chatzilla, MessageFaces, etc.) — it was aesthetic bliss, particularly with the Orthodox (Netscape/Mozilla Suite) complete theme.

I've ranted about this in the past, but I still feel like XUL was a bit ahead of its time (see Facebook's JSX). Had Mozilla invested more development time in fleshing out the XULRunner APIs and marketing it as a universal platform-independent "native" UI language, perhaps the modern web ecosystem would look a bit different today.

I fear that the web today is slowly converging, aesthetically speaking, through the further limitation of site interfaces and UI, into a corporatized unary devoid of any creativity/novelty.
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
This is simply not true anymore. Modern fires are far hotter thanks to the accumulation of decades of brush as we've refused to do prescribed burns. Modern fires destroy forests. There's nothing natural about them.
>If a student leaves campus without permission, the app will alert the school, and the student’s ID card will be locked and access to campus buildings will be revoked

This seems so flawed and easy to bypass. Leave your phone in your dorm and sneak off campus, it's as easy as that.
An observation I've made is that DaVinci Resolve seems to be a more technically capable still image editing tool than Adobe Lightroom, despite being designed for video colour grading instead of photography.

For example, Lightroom does not allow custom colour spaces for the output, they're restricted to a fixed list of baked-in ICC profiles. The only option is to export in the large ProPhoto space and then externally convert to the target space as a second step.

Lightroom has no support for true HDR, the type that requires HDR10 or Dolby Vision displays. If you want to edit a 14-bit RAW photo for, say, the background image in a HDR computer game or a YouTube video, Lightroom can't help you.

Even in SDR mode, the colour grading in Lightroom is much more primitive than Resolve. There's no vector scope, for example, something that would be trivial to implement for them.

Adobe talks a lot about their "AI" features, but they're very basic. They've left a lot of low hanging fruit on the tree. For example, it would be great feature that when flicking through a bunch of shots of a face while zoomed in, the eyes should be automatically aligned between each shot to make it easy to compare shots. Similarly, they could train an AI to recognise in-focus and out-of-focus faces, and automatically "score" a shot based on things like: "Are both eyes in focus, or just one?"

These days, this stuff is trivial to implement in software, yet Adobe is still firmly rooted in the 1900s era of "It's just like your darkroom! All the terminology of the black and white film era is unchanged! You can dodge! You can burn! Just... with a computer!"

Reminds me of AutoCAD 20+ years ago: it was a digital blueprint software. More computer-native CAD with proper 3D modelling capabilities such as SolidWorks ate their lunch...
Stock price ≠ productivity
Stagnant water isn't a rural exclusive, and increased population density isn't a great way to slow transmission of a disease spread by an insect that relies on blood to reproduce. Either way, I've lived/been raised in a range of environments, from rural to the megacity I currently live in.

And yes, I've contracted malaria numerous times since I was a small child (much more frequently as a child, actually - it's slowed down to twice or so a year as an adult, due to partial acquired immunity). I'm not even an outlier in that regard; many people I know have a similar case history. We "survived" largely by virtue of being well-fed on varied, balanced diets and having informed, attentive parents who could afford to care for us properly (this sounds more complicated than it actually is - it's mostly making sure the child keeps to the medication schedule, taking steps to reduce the fever and providing enough sugar and iron to offset the worst of the hypoglycaemia/anaemia). If that sounds like a ridiculously low bar, that's because it is - and yet, it's a bar that millions of people fail to clear due to poverty.

> What'd be the most important such things from your perspective?

Short to medium-term, access to power and internet. The power grid is an embarrassment, internet infrastructure even more so. And a lot of other potential measures rest on those two - for example, it would be much easier/faster to provide financial services to the millions of unbanked/underbanked (or to provide supplementary education) over the internet, and having enough power to preserve food properly would go a long way in improving nutrition (all the way up to improving the efficiency of the supply chains).

Long-term, education. Illiteracy is a near-insurmountable barrier to economic advancement.
I'm interested to know more about this. I've used about five different e-commerce solutions and they all make API calls to shipping providers. What was different here?
You could also talk to a second doctor.
Zoom is the new culprit. Occasionally it’ll demand so much from my computer that the 100W charger won’t be able to keep up, causing my battery to begin to discharge.
>any more than a Xerox machine can generate poetry

You assume, but are you sure...?

https://www.theregister.com/2013/08/06/xerox_copier_flaw_mea...
The people who found pizzagate codewords in the emails were never going to vote for her anyway, and you can’t possibly hold whoever released them at fault for some crazies coming up with their own fairy tales.

There were a few details that legitimately pissed people off though. I recall her being fed debate questions, as well as efforts to undermine Sanders. Those are Hillary’s fault for doing them, not WL or Putins fault for showing people.
I grew up in Canada, I agree with you. I’m just trying to help structure it in a way that California might actually adopt.
Do people actually struggle with not being snarky to the point where they have to explicitly say that, and still come across as snarky?
You may be right, but details such as: Audience Age, Audience Gender and, Audience Location were details I thought only the owners of YouTube channels were able to see.
Fashionably late!

We couldn't exist in the early Hydrogen/Helium only universe. The Universe had to go through a lot to accommodate us!
The board has a fiduciary duty to act in the interest of shareholders.

If the shareholders were not part of a vote, ie. the board voted, then the board is potentially liable for damages.
I've wanted something more like Emacs for the web -- a bunch of fast primitives and hooks everywhere, with a good-enough language to allow me to modify everything about the browser as I see fit, without having to drop down into the C++ hex mines.
Sure, the right to get paid out the same as all other common shareholders.

But will the company structure an acquisition so more of the payout is golden handcuffs than equity payout, if it's better for retention? Well, yes.
The data points to this but "Einsteins greatest blunder" and earth-centric universe come to mind.

Simply (and I'm sure many have thought of alternatives), it is based on what we see. If, as is commonly thought, the universe will expand till we are alone, then there is no guarantee that this hasn't happened already which means we may have no idea what lies outside the cosmological horizon.
I'll agree this is all true for power users but I think that catering to that small number of power users at the expense of having a faster, more stable, more secure browser earlier was a major mistake.

I loved Tab Mix Plus too and yes, there are some things you still can’t do in WebExtensions that you could do before. And that sucks. But I stopped using Firefox despite those options because it was so slow and unstable, especially on the Mac. By the time it got better, it was not only too late, but Chrome had extensions.

Catering to the loyalists is what killed Firefox. What’s more important to normal users is speed, not Tab Mix Plus.
Sutras like Panini's Grammer written 5th century BC are great product of formal knowledge from India. However, writing emails is not the same thing:

- Sutras solved the problem to retaining large chunks of knowledge.

- Sutras had formal rules to keep the meaning unambiguous.

- Sutras were written by the sages who had lot of knowledge and control over language.

-Sutras were written in Sanskrit. A highly malleable (due to SANDHI and SAMAS) yet a precise language.

- English is not the right language to write tersely.
Nope, I thought the same thing and said it in my comment. But you are smarter than me, clearly :-)
All that is true, but we humans also tend to cause fires more frequently too? I live in a fire zone (I'm writing this from a hotel room that I've been forcibly evacuated to) and while Lightning gets the blame this time (I'm sure PG&E execs are quietly sighing relief), it doesn't seem to be the cause most times.

I wonder what the quantifiable overall effect is.
How to Write a Software Engineer Resume
So long as it's not doing that while operating on ciphertext.
Will some shareholders sue? Probably. Will they recover any additional value? Maybe! Have to see how it plays out in court if a settlement doesn't occur first.
>once we reform Healthcare

Your optimism is inspiring, but there's been "bipartisan support" for meaningful healthcare reform going as far back as Nixon. Probably further. If the people who actually make the rules wanted it done, it would be done.
>Any add-on that breaks other stuff doesn't really get adopted.

Yes it does, Firefox is a mainstream browser not a niche product used by experts. Most people couldn't even figure out which of their fifty extensions was causing issues. So they just used Chrome.
More than just your dependencies. I've unfortunately seen multiple systems where you basically would need a snapshot of the system it was last successfully built on to build it again. Ideally, that would be less common these days (people using modern CI really helps), but in practice I fear more systems are being built that way than ever before.
Homes can potentially still be built in these areas, but they need to use fire resistant construction, maintain defensible space, and accept the risk that it might still burn.

Some locales have adopted a (reasonable) policy of abandoning your house to the wildfire if you have not done your due diligence of defensible space.
No, this is simply not true. There's nothing special about these "modern" fires. Some people like to think that it's different because we're around to see things, but we're not. 1000 year old trees are nothing compared to geological age. Most importantly, you have no idea how hot "ancient" fires burned so how could you possibly compare them to today?

If you're expecting that within a couple of years there's no new growth in Big Basin, and that it will remain some sort of dead desert, then you're sorely mistaken.
Part of your Creative Cloud license is insurance/indemnification against third-party infringement claims. That is, if Adobe were to pirate someone else's software, and then that person decided to sue you for copyright infringement, Adobe would defend you.

What happened is that Adobe pirated someone else's software - specifically, Dolby's. They slathered surround-sound support into all their apps, but used very questionable accounting methods to avoid paying for all that licensing. For example, if they added 5.1 support to Premiere, they'd only count it as a "sale" if you actually opened Premiere and used that particular feature. This is a blatant license violation.

Creative Cloud used to have a feature where you could install old versions of their software, all the way back to CS6. Of course, if Dolby's lawsuit worked out, each version you installed could count as a separate license violation. Hence, they took away that very generous old version support and said you only get the latest version and last year's version.

As one of the developers for Ruffle, this absolutely sucks, because there is no Adobe-sanctioned way to generate test Flash movies with ActionScript 2 code anymore. That support was removed when they released the first Creative Cloud version of Flash, which is already many years old and also not provided by Adobe anymore.
I tried two versions, 3.3.0+185, and 3.2.1-1, one through pacman and the other compiled from source.
I understand the reasoning behind why XUL and XPCOM had to go, but I learned about this technology when I was in college, just starting to become really passionate about technology, and Mozilla sold these things as "important" ideas, technological paradigms that were not just the best way forward but would make the world a better place by making development easier, exposing more things to power users, allowing better sharing of common components, etc.

Except in the end these were not the best way forward (well, at least for now, old technological paradigms do come back periodically, making the whole idea of an obvious unified "best way forward" questionable), and so Mozilla had to ditch them, and I understand that.

But that means when Mozilla is preaching that WebAsm or Rust or whatever is a truly revolutionary technology that will save the world, well, I don't ignore Mozilla, I just don't trust in their technological foresight like I used to.

In the bigger scheme of things, I tend to be more skeptical that programming paradigms like this really are revolutionary in general. Programming paradigms are interesting ideas, but I no longer see them as some forward march of progress that is paving the way to a golden age of technology.

I feel a little silly that I once thought this way, and a little silly for once being as passionate as I was for Mozilla.
Ask HN: What is the lifetime of tools like React, Angular, Vue etc.?
lol was that udacity? If so, I don't think colleges will have to worry about competing with them.

The problem is not 'job training' but that there are actual jobs available. If google really wanted to lower unemployment they would use their capital to invest in new industries and their spread. Obviously it's not what they are talking about here and that's not their goal.
That's when everyone started assuming always-connected high-bandwidth internet.

Before that, given the relevant files on a disk, you could rebuild the software. And even on later systems, given a sandboxed VM or emulator, you could run it. After that, neither is guaranteed or even expected.

Unless you also have a fully-functioning snapshot of the entire internet from that point in time also on your disk/VM.
So would an extension with that kind of power. FWIW, extensions as they are already do require quite a bit of maintenance, and it is also reasonable unlikely that any one source file would be modified in one given update.
Dangerous headline. ThIs is only according to a guy who estimated the gains between A14 and A14X based on previous gains.
Pretty sure anyone who can afford this boat isn’t concerned about Candela selling their data. Likely far more concerned that Candela uses the data to improve their experience.
Portable air conditioners are a band-aid for people whose landlords or HOAs prohibit external HVAC components.
We pay 50% income tax in California and don’t have any decent public services.
A difficulty that has been pointed out on other forums is that after an unexpected delete bug that caused permanent data loss, during any subsequent legal action you may have no evidence to demonstrate what you have lost. If you do have a backup available from elsewhere to demonstrate the damage that was done to your device, you have also demonstrably limited that damage to a small inconvenience in having to restore the backup.

I support the principle that having permission to install updates should not grant carte blanche to have those updates do anything no matter how harmful, and indeed I would be in favour of much stronger regulation of technology in this area. However, I'm not sure how much that would help if there isn't some mechanism for regulators to assess statutory/punitive damages in some form. Even then, there's no way for a regulator to fairly allocate any financial compensation available to users who were, or claim to have been, affected. We're effectively trying to create a deterrent rather than trying to compensate for actual losses here, and with something like lost personal work, you can never make good the damage just with money anyway.
The ratio of thermal power moved to electrical power input is more properly called "coefficient of performance" rather than "efficiency", but it's far greater than 100% in modern equipment.

> From 1990 to 2013, U.S. shipment-weighted efficiency for residential split-system A/Cs increased from 9.5 SEER (~2.2 COP) to 14.9 SEER (~3.8 COP).

https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2016/07/f33/The%20Fu...
I share your pessimism, it was a rhetorical device, hence the "Once we're done reforming", which will likely never happen. Since Biden is against any form of Universal Healthcare, it is literally impossible before 6 years into the future.
Chromium's Impact on Root DNS Traffic
Regional clowns trying to be dictators, time to get solar and move somewhere free. California seems to be imploding.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/08/20/exclusive-look-first-...

Hope the trees or at least most of them survive. Its a special place in the South Bay. Bldgs can be rebuilt. I guess trees will grow back too, but there is a sadness in loosing these ancient trees :( They were witness to the rise of our recent society ... Had a chance to bike to the park in May. It was shut due to Covid .. already eerie and quiet and amazing. Just one Ranger and a Sherrif watching the place. They were kind enough to let me get a pic in front of the huge Redwood cross section hanging there at park HQ ... Have to go back again when things clear ...
Braess' Paradox and the Price of Anarchy (2019)
The commercial aspect of Prop 13 is on the ballot for repeal this November.
Main Principal Key to Succeed in Life
I've got a good eye for UX and have sent several improvements / feature adds via the /feedback mechanism. (I was one of the earliest complainers about the WYSIWYG fiasco, for ex.) For everything I've suggested they have some inane response tantamount to "that would allow users to do something that we decided no one should need to do." Their Product Engineers are shamefully obtuse is the vibe I get.
I suppose a better restatement would be:

"The universe has about as many stars as it will ever have."

Still not quite about density but rather count but closer!
The Ways YouTube Uses Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Worse, I understand you can pass the property and low tax rate. on to your children when you die.
Show HN: LotsDots – Non-Linear Writing and Note Taking for iOS/macOS
Do you genuinely, honestly believe that this policy isn't going to be expanded?

The same way that we believed the original signing requirements would only be used to block specific malware, and not to enforce general policies?

There are already system-level APIs that are restricted to the Mac app store[0]. If you want to use Wireguard on Mac without going through the store, your best option is probably using the command line. That's crazy; in order to get a free VPN client with a GUI running, I'm being forced to give Apple a credit card number and an email address, and there's nothing the devs can do to get around that requirement.

[0]: https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2019-February/00...
The reimbursement requirement is baselined with respect to minimum wage, so it could be effectively $0. If it is not $0, the form would be additional W-2 pay, which is allowed by law, and this would be subject to all taxes. On top of the tax loss, calculation would not be at the generous IRS mileage rate that drivers currently exploit, but true expenses which most say are lower. Yet people continue to think drivers are stupider than they are at doing what they do every day. It's pretty fucking arrogant.
We need some goats to eat all the fuel while it's still growing. Herbivores will also trample dead plants to the ground so grass can grow. Apparently there's too much work for the herders, based on articles published after the last round of fires.

Further reading:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/03/30/goats-...

https://www.google.com/search?q=california+goat+herders&oq=c...

https://www.ted.com/talks/bobby_gill_it_s_not_the_cow_it_s_t...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9yiclBCxMo
This is why whenever it’s possible I will sign up and pay for the subscription via Apple’s IAP. It’s simple, no bullshit, and I can cancel my current month’s subscription immediately.
Rust - noted by a wide cross-section the industry as a huge step forward in memory safe languages - and XUL seem like an unfortunate equivalence to draw.
Please cite a law here. The money was owed, it may have been distressed and in default (so due immediately) the balance was paid.

Seriously, no lender is responsible for investigating at the level you are talking about - seriously, they do not need to figure out if you used your own money, the paying agent used their money, a title company paid out a title claim and used their money, an insurance company settled the debt as a result of a loss event etc.

Paying agents in other areas (securities / bonds) pay trillions a year - the system would not work if everyone was always having to worry that the "good funds" being used to pay debts were not good funds.
> Big O (there's no dash, first of all)

NIST disagrees [1]. It is in common use both with and without the dash in both CS and math. Looking around in various books I downloaded from Springer when they made nearly 400 books free for a couple of months in response to COVID, I see several that include the dash.

Laczkovich and SoS, "Real Analysis"

de Berg, Cheong, van Kerveld, and Overmars, "Computational Geometry"

Lee and Hubbard, "Data Structures and Algorithms with Python"

Borthwick, "Introduction to Partial Differential Equations"

Paar and Pelzl, "Understanding Cryptography"

Haubold an Borsch-Haubold, "Bioinformatics for Evolutionary Biologists"

[1] https://xlinux.nist.gov/dads/HTML/bigOnotation.html
If they exercised their stock options before they left the company, they receive all details (including executive comp). But they wouldn’t know what the other offer was.

Btw this applies to those who are still employees too (if they explicitly bought vested options)

My advice to anyone joining a startup - if you have the negotiating power, insists that you must pre-exercise and purchase all options immediately when you start your job. You must put some money, but if you don’t believe in the company, why spent years there. Most companies don’t like this and their VC will object. This is why I said “if you feel you have the power to ask that”. If you can’t do that, exercise as soon as they vest

Edit: to clarify - this isn’t same as accelerated vesting. Vesting rules still apply - but you become a shareholder with appropriate rights.