skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do you think that Google (part of PRISM, remember?) protects your privacy better by automatically linking your browsing data with your Google profile if you ever have the idea of logging in on a Google website before tweaking the settings?

And as far as I know, Mozilla can't access the key that encrypt Firefox profiles (as long as your profile password is not 123456). Didn't check the source code, but I guess that if they weren't doing that for real, someone would have spotted it already.
I don't think I know a single person or organisation who does... (and likely, that's a problem in itself)
Poland here, same thing. Summers are great, but winters are basically 3-months long country-wide depressions.

It's made even worse by the fact we use the same timezone in Poland that Spain uses. So it's bright in the winter at 7, but it gets dark at 15:00 :/ If you work 8-16 as most people do - you get up in the dark, commute in the dawn, work while the sun is in the sky, and comute back in the dark...

I would much prefer if we moved 1 or 2 hours east timezone-wise. I'm fine with comuting in the dark one-way, but please give me at least 1 hour of sunlight after work...
Google cripples adblocker extensions because of high interest rate and investor unease over the stock. If FF's market share was 50%, they'd still try to cripple adblockers.

Once people start hitting two 30s unskippable ads on every song they want to listen to on YT, they'll start searching on how to fix that. FF could capitalize on this trend.
Well there isn't much browser action on iOS, so nobody but Apple can win that.
Two things about this:

1. Firefox blocks various analytics and tracking quite aggressively by default. Additionally, users of Firefox are, by and large, privacy minded and will have further mitigations. Any count of Firefox users is likely to be undercounting.

2. For the kind of basic web stuff(simple pages, forms etc) that USWDS supports it shouldn't matter greatly if Firefox is not supported. Theses standards are mature and Firefox supports them well, most thing should just work. Now, if websites go out of their way to block Firefox users that's a different problem.
Sorry, but if they can get away with it, they'll release it as a paper.

It's not like most papers are much above that anyway...
This rings true.
i think the remote lock makes it a backdoor and probably criminal?
Firefox will be better off longterm as a true community project free from Mozilla.org.

Let Mozilla.org die.
If Mozilla is looking for a new CEO I’ll sign myself up.
Why is DNA investigation supposed to be limited to "severe" crimes? It's just another investigative tool. The idea that it should be limited implies there's something sordid about it. Why should I accept that implication?

An amusing thing here is that the arguments against DNA were also made against the use of photography, back in the 1800s. At some point people have to realize that personal unease is not an argument.
The vast majority of people aren't buying or selling eggs and sperm. So I doubt the price of eggs and sperm are creating an economic divide.
This is awesome!

My non-NYC jurisdiction requires most parking lots be paid by mobile app. As I do NOT carry a phone, I just don't bother paying [fake license plate trick]. I would (and did) pay for this parking before they removed the in-person cashmeters.

People won't believe me when I inform "I don't carry a phone;" even less so when told "I don't use email anymore." Both TRUE statements.
looks like it's overloaded all right
12s of your time is the cost of compromised morals? That seems p cheap and unfortunately indicative.
I suspect this will be the hoovering approach. Suck it all up, then figure out what you care to act on.

The government is a lot of things, and none of them are subtle.

Source: The ironically named PATRIOT ACT and similar.
Symbian actually had a negative effect - it held back Maemo internally and that and the internal politics surrounding the Symbian group asserting their dominance at the time ultimately hurt way more in the long run.
While not recommended, and I would run firefox developer edition for that, you can disable (make the value false) `security.ssl.enable_ocsp_stapling` in `about:config`. You will be able to view sites with invalid certs/config. But will still prompt you that that something is invalid, and you have the choice to proceed forward.

Again, I would not recommend doing that on vanilla Firefox, they have Firefox developer edition version for these reasons. And you can run both side by side.
Be careful you don't break something with those gymnastics.

The immediate concern I had with this story is nefarious groups or individuals purchasing this data to target people with violence based on their ethnicities. Imagine if the genome of millions of Europeans was available on the black market in 1930s Europe.
Can confirm, I currently have around 240 tabs open (yeah I know...), and most of those a running for at least multiple weeks now.

I am on X though, perhaps a Wayland related bug or config thing?
Prompt Injection Handbook
I tried, but I see only a loading page, it never starts.
This is tin-foil hat nonsense.
And yet, Mozilla earned close to $600 million in 2022

https://www.ghacks.net/2023/12/05/mozilla-earned-close-to-60...

Surely enough funding to keep going?
I miss this in the days of APFS actually. As much as it’s potentially dangerous, in a system without bind mounts readily available it really was sometimes the best solution to a problem. Mainly used it to allow various directories that couldn’t be moved to be re-homed, looking at you OneDrive.
There's a great lesson here for marketers: the prospect can be convinced with the simple presence of graphs and data and measurements.

Even just the mere presence of data and data visuals is enough to legitimize what you're selling in the eyes of the prospect. When the prevailing religion is Scientism, data bestows that blessing of authority and legitimacy upon whatever it is you're trying to sell. Show and tell whatever conclusions you'd like from the data - the soundness of the logic supporting that conclusion is irrelevant. All that matters is you did the ritual of measuring and data-gathering and graph-ifying and putting it on display for the prospect.

There's a great book, How to Lie with Statistics, that covers this particular case, but demonstrates other popular ways in which data and data visuals are manipulated to sell things.
Tell HN: ChatGPT is the biggest privacy disaster ever
A lot of people share personal information with ChatGPT. Most people know this. But many might not know that what you write is by default used to train future versions of ChatGPT.

It's more concerning because the setting that lets ChatGPT use your chats for training is turned on automatically. This setting is saved only on your device, not OpenAIs servers. So, it's difficult for you to proof that you disabled the flag (if OpenAI is audited, they can say they never received prompt queries that asked for respecting the users' privacy).

There's also a new feature where you can give personal instructions with each message. These instructions can include personal details. The setting for keeping your prompts private ("Chat history & training") doesn't affect these instructions. To turn off this feature, you have to email OpenAI, but finding the right email address is hard, and OpenAI is known not to respond quickly.

I wanted to warn people about these privacy issues. I think the European Union might do something about it, but it could take a year or more for them to realize the degree of harm that is currently being caused. It looks like Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, is pushing the boundaries. This situation reminds me of what Marc Zuckerberg did, but it seems much worse.

Also, when you turn off the "Chat history & training" setting, the chat sometimes clears itself. This happens quite a lot. I'm not sure if it's intentional or a mistake. Since it's been happening for over a month and affects my colleagues too, I think it might be done on purpose in order to annoy users who prioritize privacy.

FYI: It seems that OpenAIs models still include training data 1:1 (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38499575).
This reminds me of how there was a boom in half-baked studies around COVID, e.g. modelling this or that aspect of the pandemic, or around mask wearing.

I imagine that most of these will simply have had little to no impact, and will only serve to bolster the publication list of those who wrote them.
just ban it
I wrote about this a couple of years ago as a post titled "Rudeness – the moderation tool of last resort"

Part of that...

> One of those things that comes up time and time again in virtual communites is that of “everyone here is mean.” There is some truth to that.

> Try as we might with “be nice” policies and censoring rude comments that have the possibility of driving newcomers away, rudeness still thrives. While one component of this is John Gabriel’s theory ( https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa... ) and that people are more likely to act out when protected by some veneer of anonymity, it doesn’t handle that on usenet of old and many professional leaning forums where the link between online and real world identity is more tightly coupled for many users.

> Clay Shirky touched on this in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy where he talks about a community oriented BBS (it was the 70s with all the ideals that implies) that was overrun by kids and the community there lacked the tools to be able to moderate or censor them (these tools were never built because it ran counter to those ideals).

> This brings us to Usenet in the 80s and 90s. Usenet was much larger than the BBSs of old and it had some moderation tools with it. There were moderated news groups that restricted posting to only approved posts – this didn’t scale well. There were also cancel messages as part of the control protocls that were part of cancelbot wars against spam. At the personal level, there were was really only one tool available – kill files which caused specific posts, threads, or users to be ignored by you and only you. The reprocussion of this was that in order to have someone get disinvited from a news group, one had to drive them away with social tools. Rudeness.

> Today’s sites are much larger than those BBSs of the 70s and the largest of those contest the volume of data of a full usenet feed at its height. The community moderation tools have simillarly grown in capability as the moderated usnet groups would not scale to thousands of posts per day (Reddit has on the order of 200k posts per day, Quora and Stack Overflow/Exchange have on the order of 10k posts per day).

> The problem of rudeness arises as people run out of the ability to moderate using the tools provided in software. Votes, the ability to push a post into the workflow of “make it dissapear for everyone” and the ability to completely hide a post or person from ever showing up on one’s feed again – when those tools run out or aren’t provided the “social” moderation tools are the ones that remain.

> Thus rudeness and the attempt to drive an individual away because other moderation tools have run out or are ineffective. Rudeness is the moderation tool of last resort. When one sees the umteenth “how do I draw a pyramid with *” in the first week of classes on a programming site – how does one make it go away when the moderation tools have been fully exhausted? Be rude and hope that the next person seeing it won’t post the umteenth+1 one.
MS is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in Windows as well and yet I have no idea where that money goes. It's not like you can see all of the investments in mature products...
There's nothing in the Constitution that says the government has to use a cash basis for levying taxes.

Sixteenth Amendment: "The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration."
Not just in absolute terms, what could possibly justify a 600% increase in salary in 7 years?
I have not experienced this. Could it be because I only browse the web with uBlock Origin enabled?
Nobody has perfect 100% individual choice/freedom. By itself, maximizing for it is a non-argument. The best explanation I've heard is that "my rights end where yours begin (and vice versa)". That is not an easy line to draw, so the debate becomes where exactly do we, as a society, decide to draw that line. (Noting that this also is never a singular, fixed answer)

Even without defining a specific model around how genetic data should be handled, I think it's more than fair to say that most people right now don't even consider how their choice to sign up for 23andme might affect their relatives (already born or otherwise). Even if they do, in my experience, it's only to a very surface-level degree.
nobody will listen to your counterargument. They don't care.
PostScript is actually a pretty nice programming language, once you get used to it.

Edit: I used it for a few years within NeWS & HyperNeWS.
We use Puma in production.
The article is quite pessimistic, example being that the FF usage graph has flatlined. It's not going down soon.

I understand things are bad, but this is a little too dramatic.
I mean, it covers stats and maths, and then seems to jump right into transformers and neural networks more generally.
Firefox needs to focus all their effort on making a good web browser first. If the browser is slow, has a clunky interface, or lags behind on features, then people won't use it. Mozilla focus way too much of their attention on privacy and non-browser related projects.

Look at how much attention that The Browser Company has gotten for their Arc browser on Mac. Their primary focus is great UI and making an excellent browser for their users. What has Firefox been doing with all their money and time?
The Curse of the Goitre in Switzerland
That's probably something close to DaemonMode.jl?

If the problem was just running a daemon, it would be an inconvenience at worst. The problem is that changes to the code tend to trigger a recompile, can't be made (e.g. structs can't be redefined if I recall correctly) and most crucially the session can get "silently" into some unexpected confused state.

If you don't need to change the code (and it's structured well enough not to hold a state between calls), then running in a process is no problem. But for that you can do just plain old AOT.

Aside from my personal gripes, which I have probably aired here more than enough for everybody, I think the design that more or less forces REPL/notebook style is detrimental to quality of scientific code. Scientists don't learn to modularize their code and don't learn to understand the basic control flow. I see this all the time with my colleagues and the "pedagogical problem" of notebooks/REPL is very common when I teach programming. E.g. a common problem is that students don't understand variable assignment because with REPL/notebook it doesn't necessarily follow the normal program flow.

I'm kind of amazed how little the scientific programming scene is concerned about this. From software development perspective (I'm an ex software developer turned scientist) having clearly defined state transitions, independent modules of code and the code doing what it says are really really fundamental things, without which you have no chance in hell in making anything more than a few lines to not turn into an unmanageable and buggy mess.

Maybe there's a (mis)conception that scientific code is somehow fundamental different beast than "general programming". But it's not. It's just a relic of having bad systems languages like C and C++ and bad special purpose languages like MATLAB and R. That Python can be and is used for both is an existence proof that there is no such divide. But we need a better Python for both general and scientific programming.
If that's the case there would be a sudden decrease in the market share graph around 2019 (although that graph is from Statscounter which has Firefox currently sitting at around 3.2%).

The decline has already been happening since around 2010 without any drastic ups or downs.
He did that in a bedroom studio? Was he working elsewhere at the time?
How does Shazam work? (2022)
And even when you give them an app and basically spoonfeed them with the alternative, the small group that has come before will act like a bunch of elitist NIMBYs who will cry about their small "community losing character".
Who are these hackers and how did they get their hands on a train, among all things?
It's of no relevance to MOND, at least none that I can see.

MOND gives a different scaling relation, and is therefore contradicting general relativity. Its goal is to explain the effects we associate with dark matter, without the need for dark matter.

General relativity is (we are pretty sure) inconsistent with quantum field theory. String theory tries to fix the issue by replacing the particles in field theory with strings. Oppenheim is trying to fix it by putting general relativity as a classical phenomenon that lives "outside" of quantum field theory.

They're trying to solve different problems. And, Oppenheim's classical gravity picture could be used just as well with MOND instead of standard general relativity, if that's what you wanted.

MOND is getting less popular every year as evidence for dark matter piles up. The Bullet Cluster is a particular instance where we can actually "see" the dark matter flying around, in a way MOND couldn't hope to explain. LIGO has also given us a lot of confidence we have the right theory of gravity, at least up to the quantum scale.
When it comes to science, only the British seem to be able do that.
I would self-host on a cloud instance for a monthly fee if it required no maintenance overhead from me.

I might also self-host if residential ISPs didn't treat home servers as an aberration.
I watched it smoothly and the peer count was 3.
Something has to change. Firefox is a GREAT browser. I think a lot of these things boil down to poor marketing. Things like these have to appear 'cool' and appeal to people. There has to be a reason for people to go out and actively want to download Firefox. Something akin to Apple's privacy adverts is how I'd go about it.
I've had very similar experiences on Windows and Mac. I really wish Moz would fork WebKit or Blink and work on a browser for the modern age.
That's been discussed:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19173326
Mozilla is the Washington Generals to Google’s Harlem Globetrotters.
I remember back in the Solaris days there was the "link" command that would allow you to make hard links of directories. My memory's bit rotted but I believe fsck would complain about the hard linked directories; I don't remember what it did with it.

Apparently the link[1] command still exists and the man page says "this does not do any error checking"

[1]https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26505_01/html/816-5166/link-1m.h...
I always wished that CPU/GPU manufacturers would make a "online gaming edition" with hardware level encryption/anti-cheat. I know many people would love to play exclusive lobbies where it is virtually guaranteed there are no cheaters.
Stateless Postgres Query Router 1.0.0 released
The US does do DNA collection for anyone it detains whether they end up being granted legal status or not.

They were processing so much DNA that they had to write a special rule allowing border agents to _not_ collect it if it would cause operational difficulties to do so.

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/03/09/2020-04...
Joakim Sandberg made, “The Iconoclasts” entirely solo, which was impressive for a modern Metroidvania that had 20+ bosses with all sorts of varying fight mechanics. It also included multiple console ports.

Granted, he’s done a ton of animation work over the years, including for WayForward, so it’s not a surprise that The Iconoclasts looks as great as it does.
There is a delay, I had to install this software to fix it: https://github.com/gkpln3/CapsLockNoDelay
Now take that data and use it to power a co-founder matchmaking network, rather than it just being between two people!
Apples and oranges comparison.

You couldn’t get the same participants, but you could get the same drugs.
If you could get identical participants, that wouldn’t be very helpful since humans are so varied.

But for GPT based papers, what you’re actually testing could change without you knowing.
There’s no way to know if a paper is reproducible at all.

If you can’t reproduce results, is it really research, or just show and tell?
> The US is the only country in the world that taxes its citizens and green card holders for life after they leave.

Yes on citizens, but not true about green card holders.
I'm always curious to see if peertube is going to work but I have to admit it started immediately, said it had 9 seeders, and worked fine.

But I wonder how it works after a few weeks when it's not being HN'd and the author isn't seeding it.
Browsers need some advanced/i'm-a-dev mode. I'm getting sick of things (TLS details, urls, unsafe) getting hidden away/removed.

edit: Well comment below me just mentioned a Firefox developer version, wasn't aware of that.
Every time I see these articles, I feel like I have to reiterate this: Firefox contains tracking protection that blocks a lot of analytics websites, like Statcounter. 2% of Statcounter's visitors being Firefox doesn't say much about the actual Firefox visitors on the websites themselves.

If you're deciding to drop Firefox, ignore Statcounter or any other data mining sources. Use passive analytics and your website's actual visitors (GDPR/CCPA restrictions may apply).
> urbanization increased social stratification

Urbanization increases social stratification in that the upper class and the upper middle class tend to live in or near cities. As far as the poor and working class, the majority live outside cities in agricultural societies, and in or near cities in modern societies.
They're saying that Chrome would have to kill adblockers to be as bad as Firefox for them.
Presumably they have captured the Mozilla foundation board?
Ironically now that smartphones are a thing this kind of thing I would have thought would be more prevelant, but instead of barcodes I am imagining QR Codes
That's exactly the problem though. I know it's somehow possible, but the fact that I have to search for what's the internal boolean name for whatever feature I want to disable is simply a bad dev UX.

If there's a Firefox developer edition (I had no idea), they should enable all "I want to continue anyways" buttons by default. I mean, it's a developer edition!
The problem is that if AI enables mass spying, then the costs will no longer be prohibitive to target an individual because the infrastructure could be built out once and then reused to target individuals at scale with AI doing all of the correlation behind the scenes.
Thank you for pointing out that it was silver.

But the gold and silver had more equal value at the time so direct comparison is not fair. In Roman times the silver was valued around 10 times less than gold but today it is around 100 times less valued.

From this perspective the better approach might be indeed through labor as GP proposed but again how labor has been valued over time has not been uniform and might not compare to today.
Could we get numbers from the rest of the world before we make a verdict? There is 10 times the people outside the US, as inside...
I agree. I'm not a Firefox fanboy. It has literally run better for me than Chrome for a few years now.
Ooooh that’s right. I’d forgotten that.
Does this occur for you with an ad blocker active (like uBlock Origin)?