skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Who’s up for prison next? Jonathan Cook perhaps?
> Apple deliberately hobbles their browser to prevent competitiveness with native apps.

It might be true that it’s not competitive but no evidence that it’s deliberate.
If you've got big offline edits (or you're merging multiple large sets of edits), even existing CRDTs will generally handle that more efficiently than OT will. OT algorithms are usually O(n * m) time complexity when merging n edits from one peer with m edits from another peer. A CRDT like diamond-types is O((n + m) * log(s)) where s is the current size of the document. In practice its super fast.

As for holding deleted states and richer information per unit, its not so bad in absolute terms. 1-2mb of data in memory for a 17 page document is honestly fine. But there's also a few different techniques that exist to solve this in CRDTs:

1. Yjs supports "garbage collection" APIs. Essentially you say "anything deleted earlier than this point is irrelevant now" and the data structures will flatten all runs of items which were deleted earlier. So storage stays proportional to the size of the not-deleted content.

2. Sync9 has an algorithm called "antimatter" which mike still hasn't written up poke poke mike!. Antimatter actively tracks the set of all peers which are on the network. When a version is known to have been witnessed by all peers, all extra information is safely discarded. You can also set it up to assume any peer which has been offline for however long is gone forever.

3. Personally I want a library to have an API method for taking all the old data and just saving it to disk somewhere. The idea would be to reintroduce the same devops simplicity of OT where you can just archive old history when you know it probably won't ever be referenced again. Keep the last week or two hot, and delete or archive history at will. If you combined this with a "rename" operation, you could reduce the "hot" dataset to basically nothing. This would also make the implementation much simpler - because we wouldn't need all these performance tricks to make a CRDT like diamond-types fast if the dataset stayed tiny anyway.
https://idealist.org might be a good starting point (it’s a large job board for nonprofit jobs, and includes tech jobs)

I’ve seen tech jobs posted there that were at the EFF and ACLU, among many others.

Also, I just saw this go by (Senior fullstack engineer at MoveOn):
https://front.moveon.org/careers/?gh_jid=3331988
The author also is critical of Apple’s control of the App Store. There is no contradiction.
I actually prefer PCC to GCC, because in most cases it just says, "line xxx, syntax error" and lets me figure out the rest. Reading GCC's or CLANG's multi-line error messages is a total waste of time (to me).
I guess you'll see next year when the timetable is released
This is a well structured comment and much of the reason I still spend time on this site. Thank you.
I've been a Firefox user for at least 15 years as well, and the recent UI updates in v89 is the first instance of me refusing to update Firefox.

I updated my user prefs file to permanently disable updates, so I'm remaining on pre-ProtonUI v88. Of course, I don't know how much longer I could sustain that because I'd also not receive security patches, but in the short term it's what I'm doing.

The new Firefox UI is incredibly frustrating, and feels like it walks back sensible UI principles. Removing icons in the main menu was celebrated as "de-cluttering" [0], when in reality icons improve ease of use. The "floating" tabs feel more distracting [1], when they claim the opposite. Heck, even user prompts no longer colorize the "primary action" button [2].

Also, what's with modern UIs becoming increasingly childish and watered down? The word I'd use to describe the new proton UI is "blurry".

[0] https://www.mozilla.org/media/img/firefox/releasenotes/note-...
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/media/img/firefox/releasenotes/note-...
[2] https://www.mozilla.org/media/img/firefox/releasenotes/note-...
Good old closed-source, Chinese-controlled, chromium-based Opera.
Some of the problems come from codec licensing issues (which have a major competition hindering effect since over a decade? by now).

But things come also from Google (and Microsoft, they seem to use the same logic) implementing some logic but based on "how the web standard" works but by "how it happens to work on chrome", this leads to frequent issues with selected input devices and screen sharing.

And fixing it is easy, probably way less then 10h of work one single time. (As far as I know.)

Similar the codec issues only matter if certain slow devices are involved, e.g. non high end phones, high end phones in energy saving mode, old tablets. If no such device is involved it's not rare that the conference will anyway use different codecs. So they could support FF for many conference calls, but instead they decide to reflect to even try to work on FF (which is a web no-go btw.).

So there are "reasons", but it's clear that's they intend to not support FF at all.

Btw. Microsoft is the worst here as they reject to work with FF even for things which do not have any reason to have problems on FF.
If it weren’t for academic papers, we probably wouldn’t have the beautiful and nice concept of a CRDT in the first place. We might have 100 different solutions promising us 100 different replication schemes, some with and some without guarantees, hiding behind a gazillion different undefined terms that want to make us believe each solution is better than sliced bread. Also, I don’t thing Google Wave didn’t make it due to its OT algorithm.
This is why I said "not necessarily efficiently". At a very macro level, you can increase economic output by either working more or increasing efficiency (productivity per hour).
Anecdotal but...can we mention burn-out? as a "blue collar" worker i dont think anyone mentions it enough.

I have a coworker who left a 9-5 body shop making decent money as a painter for a medical billing job that was closer to her father in 2020. she came back to that body shop just two weeks ago because she was pulling non-stop mandatory overtime in a salary position that treated her like trash. she never even gave notice she was quitting, just stopped showing up.

I have a friend who quit his bartending job to work at a grocery store and had the same experience. mandatory overtime, limited breaks, and the angriest customers. He quit about seven months into the pandemic and picked up a CDL position as a regional truck driver.

these "hero" fields that exist as a sort of meat grinder during covid have chewed through all the social credit most people are willing to give them.
But carbon in the atmosphere has a much worse effect on the biosphere than plastics in a landfill.
Speculation and rent seeking are currently being rewarded more than hard work in this phase of the economic cycle, combined with high inflation which is eroding gdp in real terms.
Two CRLF pairs (one to terminate the status line, one to terminate the (empty) headers), which this is one CR short of. Trivially fixable, though it'd mess up the P slightly…
The author never says that - you are misrepresenting them. They are against the walled garden.
I think that's the core innovation here, smart HTTP block storage.

I wonder if there has been any research into optimizing all http range requests at the client level in a similar way. i.e. considering the history of requests on a particular url and doing the same predictive exponential requests, or grabbing the full file asynchronously at a certain point.
> They explicitly call out the summer [and winter] holidays effect above the first graph

Given that this is a measure of "Desktop clients active in the past 28 days", that means that there are people tech-savy enough to be regular users of Firefox on a desktop – but who go an entire month without using Firefox because it's Christmas. And enough of those people to show up on this graph.

That blows my mind a bit. I don't doubt it, but wow.
In 2007 I ran an automated testing team for a product that had 60M in revenue. It was just me by myself. Today you can find startups with less than 5M in revenue with 5 people with the same productivity. Organizations have expanded to fill the budget provided of them mostly through headcount. Similar to Conway's Law.
OK, the greenhouse-gas argument is correct, but misses the point of plastic recycling. The point is not oil use, it is plastic use and plastic pollution. If you've ever been to a beach in some countries that's completely covered in plastic bags, you'll instantly feel differently about disposable plastic, which just seems to blow in the wind and float up to the beaches. If oil were free and environmentally friendly, I'd ask them to burn more of it to give me a solution to plastic -- not more plastic.

Glass is sand -- throw it in the deep ocean or pile it up I don't care. Aluminum is recycled because it is cheaper than mining new aluminum. That's a win.

Still, your comment is spot on. Many, many environmental initiatives have feel-good effect (Straws!?) and many, many legislation efforts are not based on sound math.

However, _trying_ to recycle plastic is noble enough, especially if we're trying some fairly advanced methods. A sound recycling method that produces usable fuel would go a long way for those third world countries. I can think of no greater incentive for recycling than a little cash in the pocket of those who collect and return. Hell, every Tuesday some poor soul comes and steals all the aluminum cans out of our recycling bins for precisely this reason. Imagine if plastic were equally reimbursed.
I think the tweet linked to by OP is using the colloquial definition of productivity (i.e. I can get more stuff done) and uses examples of computer technology etc.

This isn't to be confused with the economic definition of GDP per hour worked - which has far more to do with the sectors of industry that a country has.

After all, a few financiers doing million-dollar deals is always going to generate more GDP per hour than coltan miners, even though it's not obvious which is actually generating more wealth. Robert F Kennedy famously said the GNP "measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile".
Were YOU doing SRE and DevOps before they were “invented”?
I think this data structure is usually called a Counted B-tree https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/algorithms/cbtr... instead of range tree
If you left the pandemic decisions to a majority vote, most places would be fully open by now.
It’s less of an issue with 5, than 1. With 1 you still have the issue of a disk failing and having to rebuild. But you just have to have more raw and less available.

If you have 4 8TB disks set up as a volume in RAID1 or 5, you have the same risk of disk failure affecting the entire volume. But you have 16TB available in RAID1 and 24 in RAID5.

You could create two volumes with RAID1 but then data management is more of a hassle, and you could just bump it to 6 drives and have two RAID5 volumes.
Hours After GOP Revolts Against Pelosi – Capitol Police Toss Nancy’s Arrest
Yesterday, Capitol Hill was in turmoil over Nancy Pelosi’s recent demands.

Much like the CDC, Pelosi flip-flopped, requiring vaccinated House members, visitors, and staff to wear masks.

She went even further, calling on the police to arrest anyone that refused to comply.

Well, it seems like this is the line in the sand for many Republicans. Because they fought back and hard.

From Breitbart:
Weed withdrawal
> The minimum net salary in Romania is about €280, which is about $360, which is about $500 net.

This looks like you double-converted, and and also at an exceptionally high exchange rate.

And besides, we should probably be comparing euros directly to Apple's prices in euros, which, best I can tell, are in fact bigger numbers than their USD prices—the baseline offerings are listed at €1,449 and €1,679 (vs $1,299 and $1,499), and I can get the configurator up to €2,599, which puts us at a €370 monthly junior dev salary.
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” – Jeff Hammerbacher
[nit] you should really run analyze before vacuum, not the other way around (https://github.com/segfall/static-wiki/blob/6d455de149c24e2a...)
Just use the official version instead of your distro's version if you don't want your distro to control the update timing - seems like a self created problem. Official Firefox has a setting for "Check for updates but let you choose to install them" which will alert you but let you choose when instead of forcing it.
> Stephenson really deserves a higher place in our cultural pantheon.

+1 (though I think his place is higher and more secure than this comment suggests. Or not!)

Stephenson's place in the sci-fi canon (if such a thing can be said to exist) was sealed when he wrote, first, _Snow Crash_ and, later, _Cryptonomicon_ (though I find the latter a tad overwrought).

With zero insight into the film industry's relationship to Stephenson's literary estate: Many of Stephenson's novels have trouble sticking their endings. _Snow Crash_ does not have this problem but _Cryptonomicon_ does. Same problem for _REAMDE_ which is very cinematic but takes a long way to wrapping its plotlines.

Extrapolating from that speculative line, if Stephenson refuses to give the film/TV industry artistic license with regard to screenplays of his novels, producers may be unwilling to move forward. That said, I thought Amazon was going to do a version of _Snow Crash_…

Taking a moment to sing Stephenson's praise names, _The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer_ is my favorite of his novels. Superb pacing, fascinating vision of technology, and strong sociocultural relevance. Plus, _The Diamond Age_ knocks the stuffing out its ending!

If you've not read it yet, what are you waiting for?
It does, because precious metals mining is environmentally intensive, and by recovering some from trashed electronics instead you're having to do a little bit less mining.

It's something like 31 tonnes of ore must be processed per ounce of gold yielded. That's a lot of energy, fuel, caustic chemicals, and polluting mine tailings.
I'm not an expert, but a plastic bag takes longer to disappear naturally than a paper bag.

Your energy accounting and waste source/destination issues are just the top of the iceberg. The elephant in the room is the plastic.
Anyone who’s been around /r/firefox this last year or so knows that Mozilla systematically ignores users feedback.

Even someone like me that uses Firefox since it’s inception just gave up. I feel like Mozilla is alienating its userbase to cater for new users. It’s a failing strategy as it will never be able to compete with the hand that feeds (google).

My hope is that Mozilla fully dies and Firefox is able to continue as a community project like arch or Debian. It will never be popular but the community will have some control.
74% of recent Covid cases in parts of MA were among the vaccinated – CDC study
No, IMHO they should be forced to comply with web standard and at least try to work with browsers they don't support first class. (Microsoft simply doesn't allow you to open any of their web apps, weather it's for teams or some of their other apps.)

Especially if it involves quasi monopolies.

I.e. the it's a quasi Monopoly of chrome like browsers spear headed by Google and Microsoft.
Simple Countdown Timer Using JavaScript
I generally am not a fan of mobile browsers, but for me Firefox is the only passable mobile browser because it supports uBlock Origin.
> Turns out you have to re-use a paper bag 43 times for the energy use to be the same as plastic grocery bags

But that’s okay. Energy is not the issue with bags but the fact that they don’t decompose. Using more energy to switch to something that decomposes is a good enough deal.
> Most of my computer tasks are automated via scripts and homebrewn programs. Maybe I'm some sort of rare example of the third point in the article ("The productivity is here, it’s just only harnessed by the indistractable few."), but I doubt I'm special in any way. It's not like the past had no distractions, and I'd argue distractions in the past were harder to dismiss (having to personally travel to X place to do Y paperwork instead of resolving that with a quick phone call or digital process).

This makes you a rare example. I’ve been saying for years that the real computer revolution will happen when people work with computers, rather than on computers.

Most of the workforce does the same things they did on paper but on a screen. For example, I’ve seen people fill out spreadsheets manually, with a calculator.

A lot of jobs have not seen the speedup of automation, while compliance costs keep growing.
Thanks! I always wonder how many people catch that reference. You win cyberpunk trivia today!
can you explain what the value is of having that many tabs open? i hear people do this but never understood it. what's the point?
I just want my 2 external monitors to work, 1 in portrait, the other in landscape in my M1 MacBook Pro.

I bought a Pluggable doc, for $300, of course it wasn’t until after I couldn’t get it to work did Pluggable team tell me it wouldn’t work, “a known problem”, which they didn’t disclose. This was 7-8 months ago.

I needed the extra ports so I kept the dock, and used both monitors in landscape mode, it killed my productivity.

About 2 months ago I needed to reboot my machine, Zoom couldn’t find audio.

When the machine restarted one of the monitors was in portrait mode, it hadn’t been configured in portrait mode, but it was in portrait mode. I hadn’t done any updates, automatic updates are turned off. Then machine started with 1 monitor in portrait mode.

Everyone tells me it can’t work, Pluggable, Apple, Apple support forums.

This experience tells me the M1 release was half baked at least on the OS side.

The product was rushed to market maybe to capture market segment, maybe because component parts were already allocated, and shipping the M1 devices would help Apple to offset lost sales due to parts availability for the Intel Mac’s.

Hard to say, but I would have also expected something as trivial as rotating the display to be available without the need to buy a 3rd party $300 device, that isn’t supposed to work.
This should finally validate hacker movies that do a swish 3D fly-by of the bank/casino/high-school they're breaking into.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch…
the article is a bit weird, I think it refers to productivity paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

But it is a well studied topic, with much more than 5 possible explanations offered for it.

I personally think the whole thing is a bit of a nothingburger that comes about as a simple consequence of how we measure productivity, which is via measuring how much money is paid to people. And since monetory / fiscal policy more or less ensures that all the people are always paid something for something, productivity growth is manifested as invention of new service industries, from personal trainers to dietologists. In other words, our productivity metrics mostly measure hours worked.

Better metric would be how many hours worked it takes to produce a ton of nickel, or a bushel of corn, or a typical family car. And those number have been going down consistently, suggestive of strong productivity growth and no paradox.
> The compiler also loves to tell you that your borrows aren't long-lived enough and you need to make them `'static`, when making them `'static` is almost always the opposite of what you actually do to resolve the problem

Most of the time the compiler complains about an unmet 'static lifetime, what it's actually talking about is about wanting an owned type. Sadly, I haven't gotten around to making those diagnostics more accurate (from the user's points of view).

> I've seen multiple colleagues new to Rust ask me for help with their code that has `&'static mut`, and when I tell them that's never going to work and ask them how they got there, it's always because the compiler told them to do it.

> Like [1] says, you eventually get the experience to ignore the compiler error message (or at least the "suggestions"), and instead understand the real problem and apply the real fix yourself.

I would appreciate bug reports at https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/ when encountering these kind of situations. If there's something worse than missing suggestions is inaccurate or misleading suggestions.
I often see this claim but never any evidence for it. How do we know it’s Western plastic being dumped in rivers instead of their own thrash?
'Why aren't we far more productive?' sounds not too different from 'Why don't we have infinite growth on a finite planet?'

- There is not enough meaningful democratizable work. Most work is either menial, or challenging. And I'm not even talking about the third kind of work [1].

- Menial work is getting more and more automated.

- Challenging work doesn't necessarily scale with human resources beyond a certain point (e.g., If 1000 researchers are already working on cancer, increasing the number to 10,000 isn't necessarily going to help find a cure faster).

[1] https://www.strike.coop/bullshit-jobs/
>Mr Robot extension they installed remotely for everyone

Absolute bullshit. The Looking Glass extensions was installed through their SHIELD experiments program, only for people who had enabled it, and to a very small proportion of those, too. Additionally, it did not capture any data, as creepy as it was.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/retrospective-l...
The problem is not so much how to learn something quickly, but how to remember it for a long time.

From personal experience I would say that in most cases both goals are mutually exclusive. Learning slowly and repeating something often, which takes time, helps to form a lasting memory.

What also helps is an intense emotional context. It does not matter so much whether the emotion is positive or negative. For example, if I had to solve a sever IT problem under time pressure, I might remember the details quite well. But when I worked calmly for weeks on an implementation, may it be simple or complex, I start to forget the details almost immediately after shifting to something else. However, I discovered that I might often quickly immerse myself back into it again at a later time.

There is also this phenomenon that I can reproduce in detail knowledge that I learned decades ago at school or university, but that I am not so good in reproducing what I implemented in the last couple of years. On the other side, I am nowadays a lot faster in adapting new things that are somehow related to my old knowledge, such as looking at a piece of code in an unfamiliar programming language and understand the algorithm.

What also helped a lot in creating a lasting memory was writing explanatory essays or tutorials. I mean not quick notes, but really intense thinking and optimization of the writing up to the point where it would even please your enemy.
And that's why I regard anti-trust laws as inconsistently applied cudgels and not as legal gospel. If tying (assuming there's a consistent definition of the word) is such a bad idea to begin with why does it matter whether it's done by a company at 90% or 10% of market? Equality under the law should be the measure.
This is it. There are no secrets, no short-cuts. If there were we would all be using them.

Techniques like spaced repetition and even the good-old "programmed instruction" that was popular into the 80's might help a little if the information is amenable to that. Some folks do better with certain techniques and not others. Some folks are better able to pivot previous skills into learning new ones faster. All of these require focus and planning-- which is just another kind of work.

I do believe however that having a mentor, someone that can challenge you in the right way, evaluate your progress, and direct your attention is more valuable than any self-help hack.

It's sad that "quickly" is such an important condition, though. Why quickly? Some things just aren't quick.