skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They have similar objectives but achieve them differently. Roughly, Private Click Measurement uses very low entropy identifiers to achieve rough of clicks and conversions. IPA uses multiparty computation instead. Probably the most salient differences are:

PCM leaks some information about user behavior, but it has a high degree of uncertainty due to the structure of the reporting. So, you might be able to say that there is an X% chance someone saw this ad. IPA is intended only to reveal aggregate information. The price of this is (1) computational complexity and (2) that you have to have some level of trust in the aggregators (e.g., you trust that they don't collude).

PCM doesn't work in cases where the click and the conversion (purchase) happen on different devices (e.g., a phone and a laptop). IPA potentially does.

Ben Savage's slides cover this in more detail:
https://github.com/patcg/meetings/blob/main/2022/02/09-telec...
Elon’s alcoholic and abusive father (whom his family fled South Africa for Canada to escape when Elon was 17) claims to have had a small ownership interest in a now defunct emerald mine, but there’s no record of it and the rest of his family have all denied his claim. He was by all accounts a broke drunk.
We can now treat a lot of conditions we couldn't before. People used to die all the time of infections or any number of other conditions we now consider fully curable. Medicine as we know it is a relatively young science compared to physics or mathematics for example. We can treat most bacterial infections. We can manage most virus infections. We can perform life-saving, high-precision surgeries. We couldn't do any of these things just 100 years ago — that's nothing on a historical timescale.

Thing is, medicine/biology is a unique field because it relies quite a lot on advancements in other fields for its tools. You couldn't research cells before microscope was invented. You can't begin figuring out what each part of a genome does before you've sequenced it. You can't begin to research functions of specific proteins before you've solved their structures and got the ability to manipulate their production and/or attach markers to them. And so on, and so forth. Not so long ago the main approach in medical research was basically "try stuff randomly on lab animals and see what has a beneficial effect". Now that we can peek into the internal workings of biological systems we can use a more direct, more engineering-like approach.
Thats it , i am done , i had installed mozilla because of sympathy , now its time to uninstall.
I think it’s Meta now. There was a video where Zuckerberg dressed up like Steve Jobs and described Second Life.
> A totally anonymous phone card would be a bit tougher
Depends on where you buy them. The internet is big and you can have stuff delivered anywhere, including somewhere that doesn't have your name or address.
Ask HN: Consequences of the Russia-Ukraine War in the software industry?
What would be the possible consequences of the Russia-Ukraine War in the software industry?
Last thing I want is my browser helping advertisers
On the multiplayer side - Eco. An incredibly underrated game. You have a month of playtime to extract resources, develop your society, and be advanced enough to stop an asteroid. Leaving minimum impact is heavily encouraged, and it has the most sophisticated economic system I've seen in any computer game.
If traits map to interfaces and you have concrete implementations of those which can be composed into Car then rust is still just subtractive and eliminating inheritance. There's nothing you can do in rust then that you couldn't fundamentally do in OO languages by avoiding inheritance.

Which gets to the point of if we should be talking about avoiding inheritance specifically? Because "OO" is somewhat ill-defined.
What exactly does "a product company" mean in your mind?
How much did Meta contribute to Moz as a part of the deal?
major red flag
I understand why people use Google Docs, it's a very convenient platform.

But this is a technical document about browser features, I'm a little frustrated that this is being coordinated over a proprietary SaaS service instead of over Git[0] with markdown or something.

I think a lot more than that, I'm frustrated that the document is being made publicly available on that platform. When someone links to a web standard on Github, often it's because the standard is seeing active participation. For something that is being linked to a public view, I would have loved to see at least a PDF export or something.

It's not that it's completely inexcusable, I'm sure Mozilla is making use of Google Doc features, markups, contribution history, whatever. It is just disappointing to see that apparently there isn't an Open collaboration platform that Mozilla thinks is good enough for this process, even a self-hosted one.

It's not the biggest deal in the world, it just feels like a bad look to see Mozilla tout that it's built this great standard, and then click on the link and get sent to a Google Doc. I mean... this article is about privacy, if I'm currently signed into Google and I click on this link, does it mean anything that Google now knows I personally clicked on it? I know it's not the end of the world, but Mozilla literally just finished telling me how good it was at anonymizing data, and now it's leaking my reading habits to Google in an extremely targeted, de-anonymized form.

----

[0]: Yes, I know that many standards processes on the web use Github, which is also a proprietary SaaS, but at least the majority of that process (issue tracker aside) is usable just as an endpoint.
My Bayesian prior is that anything that upsets FB is almost certainly a good thing, and vice versa.
If there were a way to directly fund Firefox (and only Firefox, not any other Mozilla stuff), I'd do it in a heartbeat. But I imagine I'm in the minority.
There seems to be access control on it now, as I get "Access denied" even while logged in.
US intelligence agencies are increasingly hurting US business interests. I’m really wondering why big business in US allows this to happen. I was always under the impression, that money trumps everything in the US. But times are changing. The US seems to change from pure capitalism into a surveillance state.
Yea, there seems to be an unwarranted assumption that Facebook is somehow a necessary part of the ecosystem. They aren't. The internet will continue without them and doesn't need them.
That was literally me. Went to community college and, as you say, had a much easier time transferring to a UC. I wasn’t even among the smartest graduates in my program — not by a long shot. And yet, opportunities abound.

Like I said, the software engineering job market is red hot right now. I rejected a few offers and they still asked me a few months later if I would be interested in joining. That’s how desperate they are for anyone with even a reasonable amount of talent.
> why would anyone pay for a browser when all the rest of them are free?

The browser that does not track you, does not report to Google or facebook, etc? That's why.
As a non-profit working on a browser, I don't get what the need is to "partner" with an advertising company. It's like they are saying ads are necessary evil. But who gains from that? Corps obv.

Why not partner with another ad company Google? Oh...because they have chrome.
Have you found a replacement for profile-sync, assuming you ever found such a thing useful? It's what keeps me on google-chrome vs chromium atm.
> I personally would be fine with every site that relies on advertising for its existence to go away

That would arguably include HN, which publishes some sponsored threads for YC companies
Yup this is hilarious. Maybe I'll start selling special sticky notes you can put on your monitor.
It might be fraud for a child to give a false birthday to get access to an adult service (or vice versa) but it's not fraud merely to give a bogus birthday.
It's not black and white you can do advertising without "personalisation."
It always was this easy. Apple has't made it easier because it has built-in anti-stalking which you cannot disable. You can tamper with the speaker, but not with the BTLE or UWB radios (well, you technically can but at that point you can't use them to track anything either).

The only thing you could theoretically attribute to Apple is that it is now much more known that this can happen. That is both good (you can now look for it) and bad (dumb people will try to use this to stalk/steal, not realising that they are tied to their AppleID, and thus to their SIM, IMEI, MAC, and device serial number and thus to them).
Yep, currently playing through DSP myself, as a factorio veteran.

DSP is a great successor, even more than Satisfactory. It's amazing how well the DSP devs have figured out how to scale from small factory plots to inter-planetary supply chains to galaxy-wide economies, all to build a mega project.

The only thing that's really missing (and same with Satisfactory, IMO) is the punishment for expanding too far too fast, the way the bugs in Factorio operate. DSP is supposedly adding combat later though, so we'll see how it pans out.
Eigenvectors and eigenvalues are (among other things) connected to something called diagonalization. In math, this is incredibly useful because it lets you describe a matrix as being put together from simpler, easy-to-understand matrixes.

Eigenvectors and eigenvalues are also a major focus of quantum mechanics. For example, when you measure the energy level of an electron in a quantum mechanical system, the measurement itself is a linear operator on the underlying wavefunction (linear operator = think "like a matrix"). The eigenvalues are the different energy levels of the electron, and the eigenvectors are the wavefunctions which are states of the electron with the corresponding energy level. You can experimentally verify that the eigenvalues correspond to spectral lines (the rainbow you see when you look at the substance through diffraction grating).

There are a ton of other things going on with eigenvalues and eigenvectors, they're used all over the place. If you want to understand a Markov process, for example, it can be described in terms of linear equations, and if it has a steady-state, it's an eigenvector.
Why do people insist on using this as a point?? It's just guilt by association! Taking Google's money has absolutely nothing to do with privacy. Google paid Mozilla to set them as the default search engine. That in no way decreases the privacy for the user and it gets Mozilla the funding they need to develop privacy-enhancing features that do benefit the user.
"The very architecture of the Chernobyl reactor was faulty", often repeated in some media, is a lie, and therefore the more-or-less implicit "our architecture cannot lead to such a disaster" falls flat.
Bill to require job postings to include salaries passes Washington Senate
The information age is making us realize the volume of novel ideas is so so much smaller than we thought previously in all fields.
This comment section would not exist without the article.
I personally hate this type of argument in support (or against) something:

> Now, that was also a response that many people had to the world wide web. To existing software developers of the day, it seemed trivial. So even though the technology is slow and very expensive, and it's hard to use distributed databases, there's a lot of investment pouring into the space, and people are trying to figure out actual things that might actually be useful. And I think that it is certainly possible.

Reason is we have no data on other ideas or concepts that never made it that people said the same or similar things about. Reminds me of stories of how HP turned down Woz's idea out of context to other ideas Woz (or others) might have had (could have been thousands) that they were right about.

> You look at OpenSea
the largest NFT marketplace, and it has 600,000 users. By the time the web got to these kinds of valuations, we were talking about hundreds of millions of users. So I believe that it really is a pretty serious speculative bubble on a very small foundation.

Again 'n=1' (which btw doesn't mean he isn't right but not sure you can just dig up a number in that way to prove a point).

Remember Amazon lost millions for so many years before becoming profitable but you can't use Amazon as a reason why another company losing money will succeed. 'Oh look they said that about Amazon so...'

> And even then, how much time will people spend in this VR online space? I don't really know. Financial, cultural and political norms are changing.

I think there is a way to figure out 'how much time' by comparing it to other ways that 'people waste time'. Look plenty of people 'waste' time at sports events. But even more waste it by watching tv because that's cheaper and easier and more comfortable. I think this could be modeled.

> I could be wrong about all of this. We're in a period of great fluidity around norms.

I think this weakens what he has said 'I could be wrong'. Implied is you could be wrong. Why weaken by saying that (to start your last thought) even though he more or less gives a reason why he could be wrong.

He could have said 'based on how things look today this is what I think but like with anything it's impossible to predict how future events will impact how successful or not this becomes.
It has a product that people pay for. It finds the market for its product and features for its product not based on "we are Chrome alternative don't pay attention to us sending all the stuff to Google and others who would give us money" but on what its paying customers want to see.
For me, the urges for sugar and alcohol are very very similar. I've never had urges to binge either, but cutting either out completely after semi-consistent use does result in similar cravings. And I've noticed that my urge for both seems to be reduced if I choose to eat large meals at night instead.
Right.

Define L = (a+b)/2 and R = (a-b)/2, so that a * b = L² - R² for all a, b.

If there exist positive integers a, b such that a * b = n with |a-b| <= k n^(1/4) [constant k]

Then there exist L, R (either both integers or both half-integers)
with L² - R² = n and |R| <= (1/2) k n^(1/4)

From which one can deduce:

R² <= (k²/4) √n

L² - R² >= L² - (k²/4) √n

n >= L² - (k²/4) √n

L² <= n + (k²/4) √n

L <= √(n + (k²/4) √n)

L <= √n + k²/8

If k <= 1, then L must be ceil(√n) or ceil(√n) - 1/2

If k <= 2√2, then L must be ceil(√n), ceil(√n) - 1/2, or ceil(√n) + 1/2

(my original estimate of 2 steps was due a slight miscalculation)

Adding epsilon would re-introduce an exponential component to the search. In fact, epsilon = 3/4 gives you total power. But this is only relevant if the reduction (https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/a/4785) can be made precise enough to bound L, U to within a fixed small epsilon. It could even be the case that you can bound to an arbitrarily small epsilon, but only at the expense of exploding other parameters. (B, T, k).
One thing I don't see mentioned on here often is actually rather surprising. Modded Minecraft! There are a lot of highly technical mods that are focused on providing resources that enable mass automation, and many modpacks that push the limits of that concept.

Some of my favorite modpacks are Enigmatica 2: Expert, Omnifactory, and one I just started recently, Divine Journey 2.

They all have a similar process of starting with nothing but a book full of quests to guide your progression, and end up with you automating everything from farms to quarries to mob grinders in order to produce items that have comically difficult "recipes" to craft.

Scratches the same itch as Factorio, Zachtronics games, Satisfactory, etc. but often has some fun side goals such as making your factory look beautiful, exploration, fighting bosses, and best of all, getting your friends hooked on the game and playing on a server in a group!
I think the shifts in agriculture could definitely spark something, but robust political institutions and state capacity would have allowed them to weather the issues and adapt. Instead political fractures grew into much bigger problems bringing instability causing a downward spiral.

Not to mention some of the biggest political shifts that happen around that era. The shift to the Late Roman empire is marked with a series of assassinations of the Emperor. Partially because of consolidation of the position's power and prestige. And in contrast other empires to the East and West organized and grew in power.
I thought that was interesting. Especially when the next news article I read called it a "dying star" (presumably their literary license on red dwarf). Everything's relative!
Mercury orbits in 88 days. This other place orbits in 5 days.

And Mercury is almost tidally locked. Venus will be, before long.
> It is just disappointing to see that apparently there isn't an Open collaboration platform that Mozilla thinks is good enough for this process, even a self-hosted one.

Mozilla has been hosting an EtherPad instance for some time now, which may have worked in place of Google Docs for this.

https://pad.mozilla.org
The extension has a counter that'll tell you how many were removed.
A ton of places in the US built a bunch of civil infrastructure (primarily roads, water, sewer) to support suburban sprawl that is simply not sustainable given the level of property-taxes-per-square-area and the cost-per-mile to keep it in good working order.

Lots and lots of suburban decay is scheduled for the next 2-3 decades. This stuff has a working lifetime and with no money to replace it it's just going to sit there and rust.
For someone who hasn’t encountered this before and is expecting their first child in a couple months — how common is this in practice today?
Quick reminder that KASLR is broken by "metadata leakage" (the metadata is the page table mappings) on AMD processors by default unless you manually enable KPTI.

This was discovered by the same team that discovered Spectre and Meltdown and the official AMD stance is WONTFIX because it can be mitigated by enabling KPTI, however they also refuse to state that KPTI should be enabled by default on their processors because that would tank their benchmarks.

They don't put it in quite those exact words in the bulletin, but the "user and kernel address space boundary" they are referring to that the exploit cannot cross is KPTI. Turn it on and it's mitigated, if it's off kernel pages and user pages live in the same tables and are thus vulnerable. However AMD's official stance is KPTI off-by-default, so generally they are still vulnerable unless you manually enable KPTI.

(their ass is covered by the "obey good security practices", i.e. if you actually care you should be turning it on because it's a good security practice in general, but it would nuke their benchmarks just like it did to Intel, so they want it off by default since that's how things are usually benchmarked.)

The paper describes several approaches, some of which can be mitigated (the time and power measurement attacks) and some of which cannot except via KPTI (TLB-Evict+Prefetch). The issue is, broadly speaking, unfixed. And actually I think at this point it's past metadata leakage and actually just leaking data considering Lipp has extracted actual memory from the kernel.

https://mlq.me/download/amdprefetch.pdf

https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/product-security/bulletin/a...
Also no one is willing to admit that they might not be that smart. People here think because they’re an engineer they’re smarter than their peers; by my estimation, my smartest friend works less than 40 hrs a week selling mortgages, has never heard of leetcode, doesn’t have anything past a bachelors degree, and will make nearly a million dollars this year
If there is no Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, what will replace it?

Already it seems using Google Analytics is illegal in some countries at EU.

What about Microsoft Teams, Windows 11, etc? How can I prevent those sending any telemetry data etc to outside of EU? Will Microsoft Teams, Windows 11 etc be illegal too?
Mindustry and Shapez IO (browser) are pretty good.
I don't think it's that black and white. Whatever happened to "do nothing" and leave things as they are?

We don't need a special FLoC 2.0, just leave the dang web as it is, some people will block ads and some won't, and FB will just have to deal with it? I'm honestly shocked Mozilla is even entertaining this nonsense.
I guess I don't live a "regular life", but those counter-measures exist where I've worked.
It would be plenty profitable without their organizational bloat, especially if they refocused on what their actual users want instead of other initiatives.

How? donations. Look how much money Wikipedia generates in donations every year without selling out their users. Even a small fraction of this amount should be plenty to pay competitive salaries to the Firefox dev team, but the Firefox development team is a small fraction of their org.
... we did not identify any studies that tested whether these effects persisted into adulthood. These estimates should thus be regarded with caution.
There are some issues building webkit-gtk2 on mac, there's no stable package so far. If anybody gets it building reliably, it might make it to homebrew.
Because it would be so much better than the alternatives?
Previous discussions from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15249289 and 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24642134

However, I suspect that overall architecture has far more energy impact than programming languages. Things like optimizing your database schema could probably save far more energy than switching to Rust.
I think that Musk is technically right.
This is correct for the most part, but please consider that Mozilla tried to stop DRM being standardised and only has it as an opt-in extension: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/drm-and-the-challenge-of...
There was this research (phoning 1000 people who invest more than 10k with 50k income in the US) that 25% of Americans hold crypto:

https://grayscale.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Grayscale-2...
Princeton is 100% free if your parental income is below $65,000; you only have to pay for room and board (not tuition) if parental income is below $160,000.

Regardless, you're not paying for instruction. You're paying for networking, access to world-class experts in your field of study, a name-brand, etc.
I am unable to view the linked overview [1] of this privacy preserving technology - Google demands I sign in to view the document. Not a good start.

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KpdSKD8-Rn0bWPTu4UtK54ks... - omitting the "/edit" suffix does not help
Somewhat glad to have moved on to Safari about a year ago (decade-long Firefox user).
Difference is that road noise would be varying and mostly abate at night. Wind turbine noise would be constant with wind speed at all hours.
Totally agreed and well said. It can be easy to read too much into something (especially when people are learning how to understand literature in high school), but some level of decision-making, i.e., design, goes into every word.

Nathaniel Hawthorne didn't choose scarlet because it was his favorite color.
I'm currently building a game and using firebase for custom levels. Won't even know what to do if they shut it down, but it wouldn't surprise me too much
If you read the article they say that they did achieve success in the class, but the experience could have been much better/easier. Only if you believe that an ivy league institution is there to provide a kind of S&M experience for its students does your comment ring true.
Presumably the nuclear arms would be the reason they were proxy wars.