skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
- An addon like vimium shouldn't need too many updates so auditing and disabling auto-updates might be worth it.

- Firefox has 'recommended' addons. In addition some of the more popular addons are security vetted (Their addon pages doesn't come with the scary "not reviewed" warning. These can be reasonably assumed to be safe.

- Also read my other reply to gp.

> These days I just use a small handful of extensions

Same here. Resisting fomo and temptations for new shiny is the hardest part but still worthwhile imo
Flipping through https://www.google.com/search?q=photoinitiator+absorption+sp... suggests that some photoinitiators work with 222nm UVC light.

That wavelength is currently undergoing safety testing for killing germs. Maybe that's a possible alternative? Penetration depth might be an issue, since that's what (supposedly) makes it safe for skin.
Code to an Interface
Fiverr doesn't work for software projects
I have a little calendar problem in my life, which I want to solve with software. Software, that I didn't want to write myself, but rather outsource to someone I can pay for developing it for me. Here is why I ended up coding it myself and why Fiverr doesn't work for these kinds of projects.
> The use of a gun limited effective range to no more than 1500 yards

Aren't sniper rifles effective at that distance (if they hit)? A weapon not constrained to human limits in dynamic movement, heat, sound, pressure, size, etc, isn't effective at a much greater distance?
The Archetypes of the Well-Read
We do see some of this data mirrored in other stats.
Perhaps an innoculation against this is to respond "Yes, but so would Ada"
GPT4 has a theory of mind; if you describe a situation to it, it can predict reasonably well how a person in that situation would respond to a particular stimuli. So clearly there isn't a biological basis to having/lacking a theory of mind.
If the article was from "people on the street journal" then I suspect it would be whistling a different tune.
Debugging skills transfer somewhat to solving problems in other domains. However, the reverse is also true and also you often need substantial expertise to actually apply your debugging skills.

Honestly I could imagine a mechanic writing the opposite sentiment, saying they don’t respect software developers because they called a support line and the only advice was to restart the computer and then to reinstall it from scratch.
There was a lot of internal pressure as well, smooth scrolling was such a key product feature that they eventually admitted it was impossible to do in a browser if there was any complexity to the app at all.
https://archive.ph/ZAyLI
It's not "broken." Apple has been increasingly hostile to "traditional" file servers (dropping AFP support - AFP is still superior to SMB both performance and compatibility-wise) and non-iCloud file sync services. They also disabled third party cloud syncing to folders on external drives fairly recently. I'm blanking but there were other changes in Ventura related to third party cloud sync, too.

There's a reason your iPhone/iPad defaults, every fucking time you try to save a file, to iCloud storage and the "default storage location" option was removed from preferences.

Apple is taking the "frog in the pot of boiling water" approach, slowly pushing everyone toward iCloud file storage, despite it being a dogshit service with numerous problems because the dev team are more interested in coordinating their nail color to their McLaren (I wish I was joking.)
I think it's because of two things.

- The first one Chrome OS.

- There's a noticeable trend where the general population is increasingly favoring smartphones over traditional computers for their digital needs. This shift has predominantly affected Windows users, as they represent a significant portion of the casual computing market. As a result, the proportion of dedicated Linux users has become more pronounced
For anyone who doesn't make using Apple hardware the top priority, might be a lot easier to just find more-open laptop hardware that you like, and use stock Debian atop that.
Wow! Another configuration language post. 2nd day in a row. And that too on the front page. It's 2024 and the software industry has not solved the problem of configuration yet. Umpteen solutions every year - languages, formats, etc - all for just doing configuration. Just wow! It amazes me. It would be so much better if all the great minds focused on real issues than keep spinning on the hamster wheel of config file formats and languages.
Are you being serious right now? Have you tallied the number of times you've outsmarted someone of another profession. Maybe you know more than you think you do about auto repair???
> Your ability to follow simple conversations is far too poor

Crossing into personal attack will get you banned here. Please don't do it again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yes, batteries also become cheaper over time.
VLC is my daily driver, but I get a few audio buffering issues that do not appear to be present in mpv. mpv also handles incomplete/partially broken files significantly better.
Only if you intend to run the scam only once, or if all of the work is completely bespoke and not reusable for future attacks.

That seems unlikely. I'm pretty sure there's actually a lot of economies of scale here, where the attackers' pipelines will become vastly more efficient and higher quality over time, with each attack requiring less manual work.
> Next, the tech bros came for the middle class, and I said nothing. Making sure that wages remained stagnant, and that young adults had to live with their parents because they couldn’t afford accommodation, and that they would be the first modern generation that would have a worse standard of living than their parents

That one's a first, not sure how the author got there
I love that he doesn't force content. It's ready when it's ready. He does have a newish channel "2 Much ColinFurze" which I like. It's less polished content, but I enjoy it.
This is beautifully put! I hope more people are able to understand the point you're making, especially how "having a globally accepted standard for anything is a unique and historic achievement".
Small price to pay for adblock
i have not read the content. and i do not think i will. the headline seems already like some opinion piece which is not worth the electrons with which they are sent.
Too many of those features are literally not on any standards track (Background Sync, User Idle Detection etc.)

Too many of those features are literally Chrome-only non-standards that both Firefox and Safari oppose and won't implement (WebUSB, WebSerial etc.)

And yet, as is the case with such lists, they are presented as actual standards and used in the crusade against anything non-Chrome (which implements all those and enables most of them by default)
I don't think we can ever change human nature (if such a thing
exists), no?

That's not the same as changing culture. That by definition must
change.

You're talking about changing rules (EPA)

Are you familiar with the work of Meadows? She gives names to each of
these levels and sets up a relation between them.

Here's a couple of digs into that if you're interested [0,1]

[0] https://cybershow.uk/episodes.php?id=19

[1] https://cybershow.uk/episodes.php?id=21
Any actual criticisms of the article except for ad-hominems?
Image of Man
We've found asking for something specific in the advert - whether a covering letter, or mention of their suitability for a specific aspect of the job or... makes it easier to filter the spam.
> Next, the tech bros came for the middle class, and I said nothing. Making sure that wages remained stagnant, and that young adults had to live with their parents because they couldn’t afford accommodation, and that they would be the first modern generation that would have a worse standard of living than their parents.

Wow. Tech bros have time machines now! Otherwise I'm not sure how they were able to start the inequality and wage stagnation issues all the way back in the 1970s and 1980s!

edit: Almost all the rest of the hyperboles are equally inaccurate or non-sensical. Then again what do you expect from someone whose livelihood for decades seems to be based on peddling this narrative. Click bait pays the bills!
Uber has the same problem that Death Stranding and Resident Evil have: you can't keep shittons of data cached on-device unless you have it installed as an app and not a webpage. Uber specifically needs to support someone traveling from Sao Paulo, Brazil to Mumbai, India without needing to have more than a whisper of connectivity at their destination. The way you do that is by keeping the UI for every payment provider in the world in the app.

F2P mobile games need to be able to send you notification spam, because they're based around habituation and addiction. You couldn't do that in MobileSafari until very recently[0].

[0] Supposedly. I pinned Google Fi to my homescreen on my iPad, it asked for notification permissions, I see a notification count badge on it's app icon, but it still doesn't actually notify me when I get a text message or call.
Q: There are few companies that have done more to enable the spread of IPTV in the uk than Amazon and their easily modable firestick. That has opened up IPTV to a non-tech audience, via the dodgy guy in the pub selling something that just works.

Is this in part a predatory attack on media companies, a la BSkyB/NDS on ITV Digital[1]?

[1] - https://www.thejc.com/news/panorama-claims-nds-hacking-broug...
I just find it odd that people think folks who allegedly value observation enough to make it their full time job would be against observing themselves.
While obviously I'm rooting for Linux to become the de-facto OS, I'm much more excited to simply watch Windows die a slow and painful death.

IMO Microsoft is in a terminal spiral they have no hope of recovering from. The enshittification of Windows is marching forward unabated and is only going to get exponentially worse as time goes on. It's already entirely untenable for anyone who cares, and is quickly approaching a point where it's untenable for the common layperson. Soon it will be untenable for business entities. After all, who would trust their business data to an OS that doesn't even try to hide the fact that it's exfiltrating all kinds of data to Microsoft?

Can't wait to see the fireworks when W10 is EOL'd and 11 becomes a mandatory forced update. I think it will drive a lot of Linux adoption
Globally Android is also bigger than Windows it seems https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share#monthly-202302-20...
Looking for niches is overrated (I say this as someone who chose to start an uptime monitor in 2021).

Tell a prospect/customer that you'll do something, actually do it, and you'll be better than 99% of the businesses out there.
I don't know the details, but the table is saying "partial" for MSVC as well, right?

Edit: at a deeper look, I think I misread the table a bit, I guess it's saying that the feature is partially supported in MSVC 19.00 and 19.10, but full support in 19.28. Sorry about that misunderstanding.
They list it as a "perfluroalkyl substance", which is exactly what I'm saying is wrong -- Teflon is nothing like the other substances, if only in that it isn't water soluble (it's more than that, but just for starters). You can't just group everything together under that category and claim they're all the same. These are ontological games played by people who either don't understand chemistry, want to scare people, are themselves irrationally scared, or have some other motivation for drawing the broadest possible definition of "PFAS".

If you don't understand the argument someone is making and have to rely on the verbatim language in a wikipedia article, you should probably resist the urge the label things "misinformation". Instead, just say "I don't like/agree with what you're saying", which is really what you mean.
I don't know, I haven't spent much time there and have only visited 3 major cities. But in each it was evident that they prioritize cleanliness and order, so I might guess that they generally use cans with better lids.

At around 9pm in downtown Tokyo I stopped to watch a clean up crew scrubbing something of the sidewalk. So perhaps it's partly due to where their tax money goes.
Cue the Philip Glass soundtrack! clouds start to whizz by
AI still a key theme in tech earnings calls, with custom AI models the top ask
AI remained key theme in tech earnings calls, with custom AI models a top priority
BTW That's a pretty common control scheme for Soviet and Soviet-derived ATGMs. https://thesovietarmourblog.blogspot.com/2021/07/soviet-atgm...
I wrote a poem nearly identical to this in grade school 30 years ago. It was truly profound in my head.
If they can't see the target, how do they shoot missiles at it?

I've wondered the same as the GP: Why not just send a wall of metal at the drone from one of these things?

If not that, why not traditional anti-aircraft fire, with projectiles that explode in shrapnel clouds?
Without the absolute numbers it's a bit tricky to conclude much. Linux could simply be stable, while many are simply giving up on desktops and just use their phone or maybe a table. The Linux users aren't the ones dropping the desktop or laptop, it's the people who where using a cheap Windows computer 10 - 12 years ago.
Please remember that your experience discovering you were not suffering from ADHD is not shared by all your readers.

I have only been diagnosed after 30+ years of guilt and shame related to procrastination and other behaviors associated with ADHD.

Please recognize some of your readers actually suffer from this.
It doesn't ring true for installed software anymore — "virus scanners" have gotten to the point where they just work for most people, desktop software is more difficult develop (for your average hacker wannabe), more difficult to get users to install, and has far less valuable data to go after.

I actually very much like Apple's approach to browser extensions forcing them to be truly installed software and in the purview of tools that protect the rest of the system.

The Chrome browser extension ecosystem is perfectly fine in theory but suffers from reinventing installed software without taking any of the lessons we've learned about OS software. Nice cautionary tale but the web is different.
Is there a professional sports league anywhere that is not the same?
My feeling is that these laws are mostly advocated for and passed by people who own and drive cars, even as they make life harder mostly for people who don't drive cars. This is despite the fact that driving a car clearly releases orders of magnitude more carbon than some disposable plastic bags.

If more people were willing to give up their cars (or accept something like a 100% extra tax on gasoline to be put towards carbon removal efforts), I would be more open to arguments to give up my plastic bags.

Put another way: I would like legislation which makes walkable, car-free living as easy and painless as possible. Disposable plastic bags make car free living more pleasant, so they shouldn't be banned unless there is a very strong case for significant and meaningful carbon savings.
interacting with your peer group isn't a luxury. If you're the only one with an unstable or weak connection, it makes it harder to participate fairly. If you're already not member of a privileged socioeconomic group, why are we making it harder?

what about the new huge pre-trained AI model my highschool kid wants to play with. She only has a few hours a day, but you're right, having it downloaded within a week would be a luxury. she's lives in a poor neighborhood so she should have to wait while everyone else gets to explore, experiment, and contribute commits back to the repo it came from.

But instead of attempting to enumerate a large set of things made more difficult. would you say that also applies to electricity? Having a washers and dryer is a luxury right? shouldn't $ELECTRIC company be able to charge more before they install the lines for you? Oh sorry your neighborhood isn't zoned for ovens. This is unavailable, check back in a few years.

Sure I agree with your premis. We could totally allow people to get away with being shit, and unfair to people without money. But we shouldn't.
The mobile network comparison the wsj did between America and Europe is comical. 5g means nothing when the cell sites are over saturated and everyone has a useless web connection. Verizon in particular I awful and a far cry from what it used to be.

At least I get a signal that’s usable in Germany whereas I’ll get a 5g signal with 2g speeds in major us metro areas.
The US has strong anti poverty programs and provided more generous pandemic aid than any European country. At some point, you have to consider street homelessness a lifestyle preference of the American political system. A lot of the people on the street in America would be in locked treatment facilities in Europe, but it seems like the American democratic process prefers the current solution.

(Yes I understand a big part of this has to do with high rents and not mental illness, but even that is primarily caused by America’s adherence to the dysfunctional Anglo land use regulatory system. Its solution, to simplify, is less regulation not more. And the best schemes to copy from are in Asia not Europe.)
That link crashed my browser with its cookie popups.
Me too. Feels like I have an uphill battle with this at $dayjob. Would be nice with some ammo for the showdowns.
Uber's native app and its focus on acting partially like webapp to dynamically download new content based on locality is one of the worst aspects using Uber, and is even worse with PWA.

All it takes is for network connectivity to be a little bit spotty (admittedly, Uber made it work a little bit better these days).

In the past, I've been more than once frustrated to rage from the fact that Uber couldn't just grab my A-GPS position, ping for address and send a short packet to order a car, but it had to download potentially megabytes of promo html before it let me actually do anything useful.

Avoiding it with PWA is afaik even harder (currently looking exactly into making PWA because I don't want to deal with iOS).
Nah. The Amiga 1200 debuted in 1992 for $600. 2MB RAM and a 14Mhz 68020. No monitor.

In 1992 you could get a 486dx 33MHz with 4MB for like $800 (a two year old chip) with similar peripherals. Way more than double the power for a marginal increase in cost.

The Pentium arrived a year later in 1993 and by 1994 we had the 486dx4/100MHz and Pentium/586 at similar clock speeds. This is around when doom arrived and Amiga was long since toast.
Wall Street Journal gets bought by Rupert Murdoch into last place.
Strategically I still think selling out Windows like they did is a massive long term mistake. Windows is a entry getaway to the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem and while they are okay to let it rot to focus on the cloud instead, it's going to bite them later.
You're welcome. I just finished linux-ifying the last pc in the house. I'm sure this is what brought us over the edge.

I mean all we need is a browser and steam. Both work halfway decent on mint on older hardware. Sometimes inkscape, gimp, freecad and a slicer -- all are cross platform. As long as we stick to pre-2022 aaa titles, it works just fine. Sure was cheaper than a full household tech refresh.

Thunderbird really stepped up their game too. Maybe this is the year. Maybe.
That'd help, but a problem is they could still go closed-source and you wouldn't know - the store itself has no concept of open or closed source so it's not like you could check an "uninstall if it goes closed source" box. Maybe there's room for a browser extension that hosts other browser extensions but with a much better security model than what Google allows.
The article is paywalled so I can’t read the whole thing, but it seems to be making the flawed assumption that short term financial success is the only things that matters… rather than looking out for things like the long-term well-being of the populace.

If there’s one thing capitalism as a system is really good at, it’s finding efficiences, no matter the consequences. It needs to be kept in check with regulations.
Related:

ProofWiki is an online compendium of mathematical proofs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31293073 - May 2022 (16 comments)
Related - the best ever documentary about doping, Icarus. Enlightening and brilliant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus_(2017_film)
Alternatively (if your only goal is not making the most money), Europe regulates its way to the best protection on the planet for its citizens...
Not necessary in this case. Taking the article seriously is demeaning.
It is not Digitopia, it is Internet Addiction Disorder.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_addiction_disorder
Actually hilarious that we have people here defending removing extensions, as if they didn't live through the days of Internet explorer. Well, maybe they didn't I hope they enjoy the eventual return of popups.
It's also nice to see that this is just the latest data point in a steady increase of Linux's share since 2009, and not just an anomaly.
> On the other hand, literally every single workaround I’ve had to write in the recent past in web related code has been due to Safari's princessness.

On a recent project I was working on, I noticed that having a long list of items in an overflow: scroll container would still allow the root page to scroll as far down as the items theoretically would. You could just scroll far past the actual HTML root tag because somewhere on the page I had a long scrollable list.

The catch? I only noticed this on Safari.... and Chrome. Firefox is the only browser that doesn't shit the bed on that page.

I just find it amusing that the most annoying problem I've experienced recently with web dev was not because of Safari's "princessness" (it was doing the exact same thing as Chrome), but just because browser engines have become complex enough to be eldritch gods we just have to pray to and hope.

Finally, parity with the desktop.
Generating code was never the hard part
I shut down a couple of my personal projects when the EU GDPR came along (streetlend.com and cointouch.com). I wasn't doing anything ethically wrong, but ethics and law are two different things, and seeing as I wasn't making money out of my projects, I couldn't justify taking compliance risk.

The GDPR is a bloated, awkward directive, with punitive penalties measured in millions of Euros. To guarantee compliance with complex regulations like this requires legal expertise. I'm not Meta or Google. I don't have a legal team to back me up.

I'd rather not risk starting a tech business in Europe. I'll just keep working remotely for a successful American business instead.
Hacking Electronic Flight Bags. Airbus Navblue Flysmart+ Manager
Perhaps a$byte⁻¹s⁻¹

A physicist generally should use the metric system. SI units convert to s⁻¹ from month⁻¹. Usually put the metric prefix first so T⁻¹ becomes pico. 2.6298e+6 seconds per month so pico becomes atto. Can't use B because that is magnetic feild in Tesla in SI units. $ is perhaps not as clear as USD, but feels like a better symbol to me (ideally with USD subscript but hard you write that here). I'm not a physicist, but generally I expect a physicist to use whatever is least ambiguous: which in this case is what was given (not my terrible attempt to convert to SI units!!!)
Chrome OS and Android are their own category in this list.