skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Firefox is better in every way

I stopped using Firefox largely because I got tired of having to pause when commenting to deal with its spell checker. Firefox has worse spell checking by far than any other major browser. It's also worse that LibreOffice which is odd because it uses the same open source spell checker as LibreOffice (and as Chrome and MacOS). All the words mentioned below were handled correctly in the other browsers (and LibreOffice, Microsoft Office, and Apple TextEdit).

Here are words I submitted to their spell checker error Bugzilla bug over a year ago that are still not fixed: manticore survivorship ferrite massless rotator dominator untraceably synchronizer.

Here are words I reported about 11 months ago that are still not fixed: another's backlight coaxially hatchling impaction intercellular irrevocability licensor measurer meerkats mischaracterization misclassification misclassified partygoers passthrough plough retransmission seatbelt sensationalistic trichotomy underspecified untyped.

Here are words that I reported that are now fixed, but took a year or more to be fixed: all-nighter auditable automata blacksmithing bubonic cantina commenter conferenced epicycle ethicist fineable initializer lifecycle micropayments mosquitos pre-programmed preprogrammed prosecutable responder solvability spectrogram splitter subparagraphs subtractive surveil tradable transactional tunable verifiability verifier ballistically chewable counterintuitive exonerations mistyped phosphine programmability recertification shapeshifting tradeoffs webmail.

Chrome does have a spelling annoyance. It frequently flags "of". It seems to be flagging it for grammar, not spelling, since rewording the sentence after the "of" can make it go away.

This is a bit annoying, but an order of magnitude or more less annoying than Firefox's false flagging because I can always immediately recognize that I have in fact spelled "of" correctly. With Firefox's false flagging of words like "manticore" or "survivorship" or "ferrite" I'd have to check a dictionary or the web.
on their website they have that, and also what appears to be a ground-to-space LEO data service.
Having had the pleasure in training three kids on how to ride a bike, forget training wheels, or taking the pedals off!

find a reasonable long grass hill - not to too steep, but steep enough to allow a kid to go down the hill riding the bike with out pedalling.

and then goto the top of the hill and let them go down the hill on the bike. Once they master the balancing part of going down, they seem to pick up the art of turning the pedals at the end of the hill to keep going (if not, explain what to do)

advantages: doesn't hurt when they fall off, gets them used to rough terrain. it becomes fun once they start to master the balancing bit
>What really frustrates me in this whole debate is the question asked so to dismiss nuclear by asking about what to do with nuclear waste. As if it’s insurmountable or somehow worse than fossil fuel pollution.

In a US context it is even more silly considering built a place to store it costing billions of dollars and then decided not to use it. If the US doesn't want to commit to long term storage then they at least need to start reprocessing it to reduce the amount of waste.
It lets the hacker take over the machine because there are strings which are interpreted as (IIUC, I am not a java engineer) variables within a class, and you can express a remote URL to load a class from, apparently (through something like (jndi://... ldap... URL), resulting in fetching code from somewhere and running it, in the service of writing a log message. This is apparently being exploited in the minecraft ecosystem by simply writing chat messages containing the full exploit, which gets executed by both servers and clients.
Brain injuries are nightmares. I hope he feels better in the future. Neuroplasticity is at least a reason for optimism
> But as a developer, I disagree, my employer would simply need to pay for the stuff I use, or they'd pay me or another developer to build them one.

Good point, but you would have a much smaller industry and platform without FOSS, and there is no way you could build all the libraries, tools, etc., yourself. Even FAANG depends on FOSS. If everything had to be paid for and professionally developed, licensed, etc., there would be much less around, and nobody could fork and innovate - there's a reason people develop and use FOSS.
Yes it's thriving, but it's also broken. From a tweet[1] cited in the article:

> This is the maintainer who fixed the vulnerability that's causing millions(++?) of dollars of damage.

> "I work on Log4j in my spare time"

> "always dreamed of working on open source full time"

> "3 sponsors are funding @rgoers's work: Michael, Glenn, Matt"

[1]: https://twitter.com/FiloSottile/status/1469441487175880711
Elon Musk's Latest Innovation: Troll Philanthropy
Traditional Chinese medicine origins: Mao invented it but didn’t believe in it
Archived: https://archive.ph/2pqCa
People and, many companies seem to forget that such software comes "AS IS" and it means, AS IS, I would be glad to see fortune 500 companies try to put together a team providing flawless logging capabilites. In reality I know they would not be able to get to be half as good as an open source library, fist of all drowning developers in unnecessary administrative tasks, imposing stupidly unreasonable deadlines and fully ignoring engineering advice from... well the engineering team. It's an insult that those companies profiting masively from so many open source projects still have the audacity to put blame on (again) software whose premise is "AS IS" specially when if you look at their projects (even the ones they sell to their customers) are basically bullshit put thogether with spit and boogers (and I've work in more than one FAANG to know this is truth by experience)
But Amazon advertises that they DO understand the complexity of this, and that their understanding, knowledge and experience is so deep that they are a safe place to put your critical applications, and so you should pay them lots of money to do so.

Totally understand that complex systems behave in incomprehensible ways (hopefully only temporarily incomprehensible). But they're selling people on the idea of trading your complex system, for their far more complex system that they manage with such great expertise that it is more reliable.
If the alternative is Ubering everywhere, you may just be creating “overhead” carbon in the form of the “to and from your location” trips the car will make.

EV and PHEV options are much more easily available now. Chevy Bolts can be had for a song.
> This is what I was thinking: it seems like any security and reliability vulnerabilities from OSS are at least as bad, if not worse, in paid software or closed-source.

This is wrong: it's better in open source land. Closed source means you, the user have to wait for the vendor to ship a fix. With closed source, the answer sometimes is the version you are on is no longer maintained, and you must buy a new licenses to fix the vulnerability in your closed-source product. Other times, the answer is, sorry, we discontinued that product and will not be patching it.

With open source, you have options when a maintainer says the version is too old: fix yourself, use a patched fork, or migrate. Any way you go, the situation is substantially better than closed source.

> OSS actually gives you a benefit that you can see the code and technically discover any bugs or exploits (even though of course nobody will).

People can and do find and report bugs and exploits in OSS all the time. It's what makes open source work so well.
That's interesting hey. Just imagine though, how does a company define what is "the core of the tech" and imagine the arguments in meetings between legal and engineering defining those terms.

The way this industry has evolved is a complete dumpster fire, where the dudes that glue the pieces together are paid 10X the value the dudes that actually built the hard part!
Her video about Envy stands out as one of the best I’ve seen on YouTube. Up there with Sagan or Harari in how it’s affected my worldview.

While her videos are enjoyable to watch, they are also quite listenable during a long trip or while cooking.
I don't believe so, as it's more about competitive games and about incomplete information. They did release Agent 57 last year, and that got better than human results on all Atari games (though still not sample efficiently).

More recently there was EfficientZero, an extension to MuZero, which is pretty cool as it is both sample efficient and quite performant, though I don't think it can do Montezuma.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.00210
On Christmas, the rank numbers alternate between black/green and red.

But this isn't alternation. Very odd.
> This is where software goes wrong the most for me. I want, year after year, to come back to a tool and be able to apply the knowledge I acquired the last time I used it, to new things I learn, and build on it. I want to hone my craft by growing a deep understanding of the tools I use.

This resonates with me deeply. Mastery of any subject needs a level of stability and permanence so that a skill base and a knowledge base doesn't erode away over time. Change is that erosive force, and we're so bad at knowing what changes to make in the software world.
That's fair. You can't annualize a daily risk by multiplying by 365 (volatility must be taken into account), but the broader point that annual vs. daily risks are different orders of magnitude is well-taken. Unfortunately, I don't have any examples of risks that low measured on a daily basis.

> over 1000 deaths per 100,000 people per year for the double vaccinated but not boosted.

We know this isn't even close to true by looking at aggregate numbers. For example, a truly conservative back-of-the-napkin calculation: 800k deaths in the US @ 50M reported cases (which we know is low by a factor of at least 2...) -> 1600 per 100,000. And many of those (half?) happened prior to vaccines; many now happen in the unvaccinated population. It's fairly obvious that 1000 per 100,000 is much too high an estimate.

(...and this isn't even the correct number to compare...what you really want is absolute risk per person, which will be far lower than the risk if you get infected, which is what I've estimated above. If you do that calculation, you get ~240 per 100,000 in the US over the entire pandemic. That's somewhere between the annual risk of dying in an accident (1 in 700) and the annual risk of dying from cancer (1 in 500).

Generalizing from the sample in the study is problematic for a bunch of different reasons -- not the least of which is that it's an older group of people -- but I didn't want to get caught up in a debate about IFR estimates.
> Open-source is only broken in the sense that we frequently conflate it with free as-in beer.

Sadly many open-source evangelists are advocating for it because of the price tag not because it is free.
Firefox's JavaScript engine isn't a mess. It does some things faster. The problem is some developers don't test performance in Firefox. Or someone decides it isn't worth fixing. Using Chrome because of it is short term rational of course. But it makes the problem worse.

Sandboxing is a mix.[1]

It seems like Safari gets new features last usually. And other browsers never won't lag Chrome when the only criterion is if Chrome supports something.

What windows look like Firefox 3? What's wrong with the bookmarks toolbar margins? What amateur projects do a better job?

Ctrl+click opens a menu for bookmarks and links. Cmd+click opens a new tab for bookmarks and links. The only difference is Cmd+click on a bookmark switches to the new tab. I guess you want to open bookmarks without switching?

Best is subjective obviously. I wouldn't even say there's 1 best browser for me.

[1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/12/webassembly-and-back-again...
> as users expect more features

I think mobile was a reprieve for commercial software and UX specialists and the increasingly negative comments on new OS versions indicate it is close to done like desktop.

For every user that likes a change there are 19 that prefer the flow they already learned to stay exactly the same and at least half are looking for exploitive attempts to modify their behavior in anything a publisher changes.
Apple Watch practically requires an iPhone though.
Not within a single application, usually. You get the application updated or not, but not 'just the security fixes' and the rest of the application stays the same, especially not with the likes of Firefox.
Just to clarify, this is the normal remote fob that operates on 433mhz, same as the one that opens and closes doors. This is not anything cell based. The same fob that has been doing this for free since the early 90s. Toyota has ZERO opex to provide this. It is not cellular. It doesn’t need a sim. This is just a money grab. Next year maybe you’ll need to pay extra for remote door unlocking. And in 2025, the panic button on the remote will be $5 a press.
> I admit to a certain level of exaggeration but, at the same time, we are talking literal peanuts to a large company.

I'm not sure you understand what you are asking, and I'm kind of dumbfounded by the sense of entitlement of your request. You are expecting others like me to be forced to work weekends on a problem that doesn't concern me (because my service is already patched) for absolutely nothing in return, and instead risking owning a problem and the blame of not coming up with a one-size-fits-all magic bullet.

All downsides and absolutely no upside at all, for my employer and let alone for myself.

Let me ask you this: how much of your personal time did you invested in coming up with a fix for this vulnerability? And yet you feel entitled to demanding this from others?
> I mean, are you willing to spend your weekend working around the clock to fix my problems?

Surely the difference is you are getting paid, and if your boss says, help these guys out, you can do it? As opposed to some guys with jobs who have a project on the side. The big guys could even do something like offer to pay the maintainers and maybe they can take leave or something.

I agree with both sentiments. The big guys are under no obligation to fix an issue in some library they happen to use. But the log4j guys are under even less obligation when they do it in their spare time.

Everyone should enjoy their weekends.
The article doesn't clarify what this TV is for.

Couldn't she swap it for a monitor?
Similarly, since 2016, the obligatory "I hate Trump but" [discussion of why a Trump proposal/initiative may not be a horrible idea]
Started all 3 of my kids on a balance bike at age 2. All my kids could ride a regular bike by the time they were 3. It occurred to me that they will never remember not knowing how to ride a bike. Also it’s amazing to me how quickly they all learned. Conversely, I couldn’t ride a bike without training wheels until I was maybe 7 or 8.

OT, the longer I work in technology the more amazed I am at the capability of biological systems.
Intriguingly, this post was one of them when I saw it. Lol. Maybe dang will show up to explain.
I'm wearing mine for a few weeks now, but it's been rather unstable for me. BTLE disconnects are common, and I'm not sure what the source of the problem might be. Also, it sometimes freezes in an infinite loop and drains battery really quickly when that happens.

These are all problems fixable with software updates, and it's very early stages of the project. The app store grew from 80 to 130 apps in the last 3 weeks.

The hardware on the other hand is great. It doesn't feel cheap, but it's really lightweight, which I enjoy. The e-ink display is crisp and clear, easily readable in direct sunlight, and it has 8 colors, which is a cool feature for an e-ink display.

Didn't get my hands dirty with the SDK yet, but will hopefully find some time during the holidays. It looks well thought out though, and the web IDE and emulator seem useful.

Really looking forward to dig into it.
Yes, that's one of the things it made me think of as well. Perhaps an accidental push to prod while testing something for this year's Christmas?
Companies will use whatever is at their disposal to grow faster and more efficiently, this is the free market working as intended (and isn't a bad thing by itself: see free software companies like SourceHut benefiting as well).

I think the core of the problem lies in distribution. We've gotten so used to other people distributing our code for us (through the use of package managers and such) that we've made it hard to actually have a dialogue with our users. Many consumers of packages just know their dependencies by the npm package name, rather than actually seeing what the person has to say about the software, how they plan to maintain it and for how long, etc.

Even things like licenses are really just ignored at large, with there being a general mentality of "it's on Github therefore it's probably MIT". There was something I remember reading a bit ago about a Go project whose license was simply "you do not have permission to use for any reason ever" which was depended on by projects from big organizations such as AWS[0].

This is mostly just a rambling and I don't have any concrete way to solve this, but I think it should be taken into account when assessing whether the problem really lies in the individual license choices of developers, or whether this is some kind of effort by big market actors to keep open source solutions at a subpar level of quality in comparison to commercial offerings (for example: some of Microsoft's VsCode extensions only work on the proprietary version, not any open source forks[1]).

[0]: https://fossa.com/blog/bouk-monkey-importance-knowing-your-d...

[1]: https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/issues/240
This is how writing should be done.

First - you throw out your main idea.

Then - you stop, put a period, and hit publish.

If only all web content was like this post!
Here's something I wrote in 2018 that could basically be the exact same thing written today: https://medium.com/@paulbiggar/how-to-fund-open-source-8790e...
> one day it just clicked

That happened with me too, and it was looking at Rothko one day when abstract expressionism just clicked.

I think people are intimidated or feel dumb when they can't understand it, which is why they insult it and insult people who like it. I try to tell them: I didn't understand it either; you're not dumb; just keep an open mind and one day you'll discover something transformative.
This feels encouraging to read. Thanks for posting it. I only have 5 years of experience, but I've gone through something similar and it's extremely disheartening to see yourself failing these convoluted, labyrinthine tests knowing full well that you'd be able to do the job you're interviewing for pretty well given half a chance.
There are free consults, but then you aren’t their client. Paying for an hours time gets a more detailed consult and makes you a client that gives me more meaningful iformation and also some “work.”
> People spent their entire lives sometimes creating delicious varieties only to be blown out by produce that was cheap to grow and looked good on the supermarket shelf (taste didn’t matter).

Why would taste not matter? Surely people take into account taste when purchasing food. But they also decide to make tradeoffs in how much extra money to spend for the additional rate versus other things they could try with the additional money.

But given two foods at the same price and nutritional qualities, surely taste is a prominent factor.
Nobel Peace laureates blast tech giants and warn against rising authoritarianism
I mistook. Enough solar for the US is a 200x200 mile square. Still fairly insignificant, much less than the amount of land dedicated to parking lots.
There is too much information out there to know all of it. Sure everyone knows how to do it, but it's often not worth the time to do so.
If you really want to see good quality rice, take a look at the quality and selection of product that an expert Pakistani chef will use for a top quality biryani. Or the rice that Afghans will use when cooking a Palaw the slow way. Generally within the category of long grain basmati, but there's a lot of difference between sub-types.
>> I'm still flabbergasted that the original maintainers are rushing around trying to patch these problems.

Agreed, while reading it I also disagreed at this point:

>> the maintainers of log4j would have loved to remove this bad feature long ago, but could not because of the backwards compatibility promises they are held to.

Nobody is holding them to anything. If they want to remove an old feature, go right ahead. If those using it think it's that important they can fork the project and maintain it themselves. Oh right, that would take effort or money.
I really don't understand this mentality. This is what we've all been fighting for since the 90s. A free (as in beer) and open stack of software that anyone can pull off the shelf and use.

So many commercial platforms rely not just on ffmpeg and vlc but also on nginx, php, python, nodejs, linux, mariadb, and everything else you can imagine. We also pay for some very niche things that are simply not available from the open source community.

If my company was liable to have to pay out for each one of these projects we would be bled dry and our business would no longer be profitable. A bunch of people would also lose their jobs in the process.

At my company we have revenue sharing so the idea of having to cut out a piece of the pie for an open source project would not be popular among staff. Most of them aren't even in tech.
Yeah, sounds terrible. I wonder what medical treatment he's seeking? My understanding is that there wasn't much you can do other than rest https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/concussion/di... but there must be something hopeful if he's willing to move states to seek it.
I'm not sure if the submitter is Scotty from the video, but I'm sorry to hear this. I hit my head on a rock surfing almost 4 months ago and have been dealing with similar issues. I don't have any tips or tricks to share about relieving symptoms, but just wanted to share in case it's helpful in any way to know there are others, because just watching this video was helpful for me.

Feel free to message me if you want to talk more about your experience with someone
Makes sense. This is the first study of its size to observe ivermectin prophylaxis in a sufficiently-sized set of healthy patients.
Cycling, along with swimming, are the two activities I give that exemplifies how poor people are at explaining what they are doing. For cycling, most people will adamantly claim that to turn left, you first turn the handle bars to the left. When they show me on a bike, they are surprised that they never noticed that they turn the handlebars right first. The funny part is, even people who know this and know it is called "countersteering" proceed to explain it in such a way that is actually less insightful than just telling someone to turn left. Almost no one mentions that the goal of a turn is to get the correct lean to a bike.

With swimming, I did 7 years of lessons and never enjoyed swimming. My legs always got fatigued in a couple of minutes and could not go as fast as others. It did not matter how many good swimmers or instructors I told this to. It was not until a fellow engineer at university told me that your arms are what propel you forward and your legs simply keep you afloat. Such a simple statement did more than all those years of lessons.

It is amusing to think about that, even with the best intentions, sometimes being taught something is the worst thing that can happen for you to actually learn it.