skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I remember one small town post office we frequented wasn’t much to look at outside—brick, but not fancy—but was gorgeous inside. Marble everywhere, including floors, brass everything including solid wood brass-clad exterior doors and fine, ornate brass PO Box doors, et c. Probably built at the tail end of the 19th century.

Just a sleepy little town post office, but they built it like it’d be there 300 years. I can’t imagine what those nice, serious-feeling doors alone would cost to get today. I know no small town post office would ever get them, that’s for sure.

All the ones near me now are much newer and are the same sort of disposable stripmall-type construction as everything else. They don’t feel nice to be in. They don’t feel serious. They will not be here in 100 years, probably not even 50.
It's not as bad as all that. The stuff you control at home doesn't have to support hundreds/thousands/millions of end users, it's just for you, and it doesn't need to be publicly accessible. We're talking quarterly maintenance at most.
flat city on a big lake = lots of lake effect snow and wind. they don't call it "the windy city" for nothin...

public transit isn't bad but also isn't great and can be rough at times. also necessitates walking in said bad weather.

> Can't you hunker down and get everything delivered to reduce outdoor time?

COVIDs over bro. what's the point of living in a city if you're hunkered? move to a far flung burb and become a hermit.
Yes. The occasional high-profile case aside, if you look at the actual records of people who lose their homes based on unpaid property taxes, you're going to see a vastly disproportionate number of moderate- to low-income people. Sometimes people with very low incomes (e.g. the 81-year-old woman who lost her home of 40 years due to ~$500 in unpaid taxes).

I myself have some first-hand experience in this area. A now-deceased relative owned some (quite modestly valued) property in another state. It came within a hairs-breadth of being sold for $12.00 in back taxes. Yep, twelve bucks. It seems she'd neglected to pay the $4.00/year in taxes while she was busy dying of cancer.

Fortunately one of the neighbors took the time to search me out and let me know about this, so I was able to save it. It was a near thing, though.
What could get people to move to firefox? Is the only way really to have have your browser be popular is to have it either be installed by default, or being advertised on a page that people use daily? Would be crazy if facebook had a banner stating "switch to firefox now" suddenly
> Honestly - surprised how much activist/inclusive/political content there is here.

That's because Mozilla are an explicitly political organisation...
"surveys are important sources of information about the perceptions of the school learning environment. These findings can be used to monitor continuous improvement efforts and inform school improvement goals. Interpretation of this information should take into consideration the number (N) and percentage of survey respondents. Survey data best represent perceptions of the school environment when response rates are high."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHGTDTIE23c found it video from the same author
This article is like 6 years too late. The drop has happened, there's not really anything to base an "continuing free-fall" on. Even the articles own data show that Firefox usage has flatlined.
Branson's wallet snaps shut for Virgin Galactic
The browser itself is good these days. All these complaints are themselves activist bullshit that doesn't really matter.
PGP/GPG needs to die. It's too clunky, and that means it does not work the way people need it to work.
Comments like this are so absolutely cringe.

I dare you, go to google and search for "opinions on green shakes reddit" and you'll have a thread of 20 people discussing the various vitamins, heavy metals, fibers, brands, gut-health, gut-feeling, etc that a green shake provides them.

Then you have 3 comments from little timmy stabbles going "I don't understand why you people just don't eat bowls full of fruits and vegetables throughout the day. Monday through Sunday. It's so easy. I don't get it. You just eat fruits and vegetables that might rot in your refrigerator over 3 days how can it be so hard."

Then you have 20 comments to them going, "Well, Timmy, the reason that we call supplements "supplements" is because they supplement something that for whatever reason we find ourselves not consuming enough of throughout the day. Contrary to your lived experience, your lived experience is not our lived experience and we have our reasons for not doing things exactly as you do them."

Like, do you think this comment was going to set off light bulbs in our heads going "Wow, I didn't think of that. I'm going to add an entire half pound of brocolli to every meal! Thanks stabbles!!"

"Why would you ever take fiber supplements.." my god. Tell that to, by far, their highest portion of consumers- the elderly.
With Google trying to cripple adblocker extensions, I hope users will find their way back to Firefox.
Instagram and Facebook Messenger Chats to Disconnect This Month
That brings back some memories. IIRC, showEQ was used to prove several theories and bugs that Verant/Sony steadfastly denied:

- there were hell levels

- Halflings instead of Humans got the XP bonus (and that there actually WERE race/class XP differences?)

- early Shaman alchemy actually WAS broken

Also wasn't it what lead to eqemulator.org?
It's perfectly fine to bash both Chrome and IE.
Bogus usually implies something meant as a fake or counterfeit, I think a better way to describe it would be "incorrect", I don't think these scientists are trying to fake anything.
I'm curious, what would caring about Firefox look like to you? They've released around 12 new versions of Firefox during 2023.

The side projects that some complains about I to some respect think is a good thing as it can help to diversify revenue sources. The only way Firefox is ever going to be a cashcow is how it is a cashcow today which at the end of the day puts Mozilla in a somewhat precarious situation.
Fair enough for desktop, but also remember that MTGA runs on phones.
Is it? Firefox has had this sheen of "jank" for the past 6 years.
1..10==0..9
I agree - I just think that there are far more enriching businesses to build than social media. Especially with the current business model. Not much good in that IMO
Signal Facing Collapse After CIA Cuts Funding
> I hope that they continue fivem community modding stuff and don't lock it down like many modern games do.

Part of me is hopeful their recent acquisition of FiveM means they will have the FiveM be part of GTA VI for PC before the launch. Ideally they'd be able to port over all their native functions to the GTA VI engine. That way we could have an active RP community on GTA VI nearly from the start.

Another part of me is fearful of them shutting down FiveM with the launch of GTA VI. I'm sure they don't like the idea of people obtaining in-game money without purchasing any Shark cards. They could bring it as some sort of "We worked hard with the FiveM team to make FiveM part of GTA VI from launch, with GTA VI having all features to support a roleplaying community", and then shutting down the mod and disabling all external scripting.
"Here they seem to say that on some quantum level spacetime could vary drastically."

This is not a result of this theory. Our best current theories say this too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_foam Spacetime getting distinctly different at very small scales is a vital part of all modern theories and I doubt it's going away. Even if spacetime is shown to be continuous itself, which I tend to personally doubt [1], getting close to the scales where the uncertainty principle becomes a major influence rather than an almost academic curiosity will inevitably have major impacts on the behavior of things.

"Like giant "wrinkles" in spacetime?"

Giant wrinkles in space time don't act like dark matter. They either smooth themselves out basically instantly (on cosmological scales) or form something other than a giant wrinkle, such as a cosmic string: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_string

In fact one of the low-key mysteries extant in the universe today is that our best theories say cosmic strings really ought to exist, but we don't see them. Though I think the confidence in our theories being pushed to that extent is low enough that this is not generally considered the biggest problem, and very unlikely to be the thing that cracks the mystery, so it isn't something that gets talked about a lot. So you could say that we actually don't "expect" space time to be homogeneous and one of the mysteries is why it observationally is!

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38433917
Maybe it was never really about the browser, but the platform. Safari dominates all Apple devices. Imagine if all computing was truly open and we could run any app anywhere. Would Chrome have had a reason to exist to begin with, or would Firefox have become truly ubiquitous?
As somebody developing websites, I always find myself on the edge of ugly internet with Firefox.

I like it's disturbing monopoly, but it's rendering makes my life harder
This is a very important aspect of balancing progressive game play.

Remnants of the Precursors does a good job of teasing out the arms race.
I'm currently dealing with it by simply holding on to my job. In prior markets, I might have began seriously looking for another job after ~1.5 years, but not now. My job pays well and is flexible enough, mostly outweighing the negatives. If I lose that job, I have access to about a year's worth of expenses, and a little more than that if I sell tangible assets like my motorcycle, but I really hope I don't have to do that.

For the long term, I'm trying to figure out whether I need to retool my skills. I'm very tired of web development and the lack of craftsmanship in the field, and I think such jobs are going to be chronically in decline due to things like no-code and AI. Also, once there is enough of a collapse that only the most talented survive being laid off, those experts will clear the detritus and further reduce the need for "engineers" to play janitor with codebases. So if I still want to be a programmer, I think it's got to be in something else. Rust? Clojure? COBOL? Hardware development? Game dev? I don't know.
> separate billing

IME mixing financial concerns with engineering concerns puts you into an architectural corner. Suddenly the business wants an integration between the two projects - which cluster does the integration run on? Do you spin up a whole new cluster / account just for the integration? Inside a project, you need to run dedicated infrastructure for large customers. How do you report that for billing?

Just set up tagging correctly.

> For very small projects, one cluster per product is expensive, so mutualisation makes sense.

If you're not working for a BigCo, every project starts out very small ;) You shouldn't optimize prematurely.
> the only technology we should be using to create web UI is JavaScript.

aight bud. do it without html and css. go on.
Well, yes and no. It does matter because if they had spent that money and effort on the browser and made it possible to donate directly to the browser project then there is a fair chance that those numbers would be better.
Hence why the IRS has to actually pay people to review tax returns against other sources of information. We know that cheating happens on a regular basis because periodically it’ll come to light in some other way but that also suggests that it’s fairly common since it would defy probability that the only people cheating were the ones who slipped up otherwise and brought their finances under more scrutiny.

The easiest way to think about this: cases dropped after Republicans cut funding for investigations in 2011. There’s no reason to think that everyone became more honest at the same time, so we’re under collecting taxes by at least the gap between now and then – and well under the optimal rate where enforcement is likely enough to deter most people.

https://www.propublica.org/article/after-budget-cuts-the-irs...
Maybe if Google started messing with ad blockers in Chrome?
Firefox regularly crashes for me on wayland.

It slows down my whole system when it tries to load a page in first boot (but librewolf doesn’t for some reason) the HID and webgl/webgpu support is bad…

It’s just not a very good browser compared to chrome forks or webkit based ones.
The article is specifically about US government guidelines for browser support.
Mtn Dew Raid Q&A [pdf]
I don't see how sanitizing inputs is a bad thing other than additional work, but considering how much dev time gets wasted, I don't think it's a lot to ask.

Multiple layers. Tight code, sanitized inputs, guardrails, etc.

edit: OH YEAH AND ERROR MESSAGES WITH MORE THAN THE FUCKING USELESS,

"An error has occurred. Contact your Systems Admin, so he can be confused too, because we provided fuck all in diagnostic info in the error message!"
Peertube is supposed to be peer to peer but even though there's 8 seeders right now I can't even watch the video...
I always get downvoted for that, so it seems that Firefox supporters are subjective about their beloved browser, … and it doesn’t matter anymore whether I phrase it properly, since it will be shunned anyway, preventing Mozilla from actually recognizing their culture problem…

But Firefox has ads. It also has a lot of obnoxious browsing-interrupting interceptions saying that they care about our privacy. Which isn’t possibly true, because they also encourage, sometimes in the same page, to create a Mozilla profile… which gives them all required information to track us better - no matter whether they do it, gaining the ability to do it is pretty much a blank card to the NSA.

So thanks NSA and their Mozilla front and their downvoters on HN, have a safe imaginary trip to privacy!
The financial statements are also currently on the front page. That's a nice hot take, but the number that really stands out is 25% of revenue on management, a full 50% of salaries.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38530382
Google cripples adblocker extensions because users won't find their way back to alternative browsers anymore.
Yes, some people will do this. I just read the whole project, it's actually a pretty simple program.

I'm installing it now and the best part is if I don't like something I can change it. OSS FTW.
From the article: As plausible as the cosmopolitan mixing hypothesis might seem, big cities also provide new opportunities for self-segregation, because they are large enough to enable people to seek out and find others who are similar to themselves

It kind of makes sense that people that earn more or have a higher potential want to mingle with people that are the same. There's no upside for better off individuals to stay in low income neighborhoods.

No matter how much subsidized housing or whatever, low income individuals will be priced out of events or social gatherings.

And the bigger the city, the more opportunities there are, the more segregated economically they tend to be because just a small percentage will "make it". And the rest I think will follow a half Bell curve.
There's a difference between NPR affiliated independent radio stations and NPR. On average NPR gets less than 1% of their budget from the federal government. https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...
Only because of iOS, I assume. But it looks like Apple might be forced to open things up and allow other browsers to run on iOS. If that happened, I'd expect Safari to drop like a stone.
Can we (folks who didn't use 23&me but may still be affected because our relatives might have) file a class action lawsuit?

We haven't signed any licensing agreements with 23&me waiving our privacy, so presumably we still have some rights?
<insert Star Wars joke here>
>You are comparing cathedrals with regular living/working places.

The house i'm renovating was built by lower class people now dead. The fireplace has some marvelous emaile work.
My grandparents on one side were factory workers (glass cutter and cigar roller specifically) and are still ridiculously frugal beyond belief due to their experiences in the world wars. Their living room has lovely cornishes, etc. Their fire places have art of goats and nature on em.
The modern equivalent of that fireplace is a comparatively ridiculously expensive box with 0 ornamentation.

On the other hand the expensive new builts now go 2 ways with some harking back to old pastoral styles but with less detail and the other ones are cubic featureless boxes inspired by american flat roofed villas but without the wealth to take it much further.

I could go on and on about the death of detail in design and elsewhere and i know it's just annecdotes but it's to be found absolutely everywhere. Not just the cathedrals and major buildings of the state and the rich.
Chatty Jeeps
My anecdata shows that Google's recent decisions on the direction of Chrome and changes at Youtube have technically savvy users abandoning Chrome for Firefox,
This. It was only a matter of time.
Being old, I was thinking War Games, but you make a completely valid point RE: SAW. I sit corrected.
A risk I’m willing to take for a lifetime of love, companionship and observing their infinite curiosity. (Definitely not written by an infected toxoplasmosis human)
Sounds like a configuration problem. Firefox on Fedora/Wayland is very fast, haven't had it crash in a long time.
This makes no sense to me? How is chrome maintainers connected to Firefox?
> What you wrote puts a shiver down my spine. If I can't disclaim any sort of warranty, and my FOSS has a bug which a company incorrectly thinks is nefarious code, what defense do I have should that company decide to sue me?

I am not a lawyer, you are not my client and this is not legal advice.

My layman’s understanding is that it is not possible to disclaim liability for malicious action which harms another.

If someone believes that you have maliciously harmed him, then he may try to recover damages from you for doing so — this is independent of software (he could do the same if you broke his leg).

> And now you suggest it might be otherwise, and I might end up paying a lot in lawyer and court costs over years?

Yup. The mechanism for sorting out claims of truth and liability is court, and wise plaintiffs and defendants engage lawyers. Unfortunately, this can be expensive, and in some cases the process is the punishment: one might be exonerated, but only after years and years of litigation and worry.

I imagine that generally a potential plaintiff’s lawyers would advise him that absent clear evidence of malice that he is unlikely to win, and would be wasting his money. Particularly if you have no real assets, the game is not likely to be worth the candle. But if he is rich or foolish, he might waste it anyway.
For an independent POV with a clear leftist slant, this is a good explainer, with links: https://www.publicnotice.co/p/moore-v-us-brief-charles-kathl...
I had that problem, too. It went away when I replaced my Nvidia card with an AMD one.
Nobody, and not even remotely in the plurality you're describing "simply refuse to eat fruit and/or vegetables." Stop hanging out with unhealthy lifestyled people if that is your friend group and a concern of yours.
I think there are plenty of decisions worth consideration, but this is nothing to do with why Firefox is declining. It's because if I buy an iPad it comes with Safari and doesn't really let me use anything else (only a skinned version of Safari). If I buy a PC it's Edge. If it's an Android device it's Chrome. A Mac? Safari. Firefox is the default nowhere, and in this world because Google has almost limitless marketing power and owns one of the world's most popular websites they can push Chrome to mean that on PCs and Macs there is a strong push for people to move from the defaults to Chrome.

Firefox works great for me. It's just incredibly hard to get anyone to use it.
Not yet. Your faith in people not being led astray by the LLM is too high right now IMO.

I've seen way too many people who I consider generally intelligent, completely falling for the convincing bullshit. Mostly in my online communities, but also a few times in person.
It’s not on the brink, it’s that Firefox shims GA[1] with Enhanced Tracking Protection, which is on by default.[2] analytics.usa.gov uses GA.

So you really can’t rely on usage figures that don’t represent the truth of your situation.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/413b88689f3ca2a30b...

[2] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-now-ava...
It is, but I wanted to find the pedants, so I misquoted intentionally. ;)
I don’t think there is one.

Chrome got big bc it was radically different than IE and Firefox jumped on the lightweight trend far too late.
> The US has shifted to high skill tertiary economy.

I don't think this has anything to do with it. The physical class divides have been around since the beginning of the United States. If anything, it's a symptom of capitalism where those with greater wealth use it to segregate themselves from poorer folks.

In effect, capitalism takes advantage of human nature and as a side effect that same human nature self-segregates based on how "nice" any given area is. You want rich folks to mingle with middle class folks? Make the middle class area the nicest place and don't let the rich completely "take it over" (aka gentrification).

The way the modern world is becoming though we're self-segregating more and more though so I don't think it's realistic to expect any sort of top-down planning or policies to force mingling. Upper middle class people don't even go to the grocery store anymore and thus, don't end up mingling with lower middle class people.

Maybe we should promote more "mixing hobbies" where people physically need to show up and interact with each other? Subsidize board game shops, paintball, indoor rock climbing, and similar? Might help humanity a little bit.
Add community notes
A lot of developers I know have moved to Firefox recently because of containers.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-firefox-contain...
Yup, this is how you scale an application past the 10k node soft limit.
I haven't seen a FF crash in the last five years and I typically have a few hundred tabs open across multiple instances.
TECO, though not a visual editor, used the same `[count] command [text ESC]` structure as vi. (It's not a mode switch, it's an argument terminator.)
Huh... I've exclusively used Firefox on Wayland for a long time now due to good fractional scaling support (unlike Chrome which took ages to stop using x11 by default). I agree that the webgl/webgpu support is bad but haven't seen the whole-system slowdown.
I wonder what this does for people who cannot picture things in their brains?
I’m using an amd card :(
I just wish they’d hire the guy that reversed engineered Grand Theft Auto to optimize the loading code to do something about the memory leaks.
Then how do you encrypt your emails?
IBM Debuts Quantum System Two
For English, I think it's equal to a general "go/do it" cheer. E.g., "Let's go!" to cheer for a team, and "You can do it!" when talking to a single person or a few people. And just as shallow or sincere as one may make of it.

Completely agree on the Japanese equivalent, though I feel that indeed has a bit more of a "strive/do your best" sense!
If they really were trying they'd make material improvements to the browser to entice new inexperienced Firefox users, for instance by shipping an adblocker, turned on by default, like Brave has. Of course experienced users can install an adblocker themselves, but there is no growth potential in maintaining the status quo. Buying ads is pointless if they can't clearly communicate unambiguous objective practical upsides to switching.

For bonus points, this would also silence their critics who say Mozilla is Google's lapdog. But of course they cannot do this because the critics are correct.
Steve Jobs Signed 'Apple Computer Company' Check to RadioShack