skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Firefox market share declined first because Google used their market position to advertise Chrome

Yes, indeed. This may or may not have been wrong of Google, however this is also called "competition". And what did Mozilla do?

It flinched.

Many users loved Firefox, and disliked that Chrome had barely any ability to customize anything when released. It was literally years before you could change even the most basic things about the interface. When released, almost nothing could be configured about it, and it was a far cry from Firefox's ability to give the user what they wanted.

Firefox's response to Chrome's minor speed improvements? Was to literally begin a campaign to become the enemy. Firefox devs worked diligently to make Firefox a second rate clone of Chrome. They removed features, configuration, the ability to modify the interface, and more.

Mozilla could have so easily kept all that configurability, its strong point, its unique factor, but instead panicked. And in doing so it rendered itself incapable of competing on any footing.

Put another way, yes Google had vast resources. Yet this is precisely why you never compete on the same footing as them. You instead compete on what they do not have.

And that was the ability to theme Firefox, to configure it as you wanted, to turn off features you did not want, and more. Chrome had none of this initially. And Google is literally famous for, and incapable of listening to users. They're not built for it. Mozilla was.

And they threw all those strengths away, the only way they could compete with Chrome.

So yes, there were things they could have done. And yes, endless people told them that in bug reports, in emails to them, and more. If anyone's thinking here is myopic (great personal attack, btw), it was Mozilla's.
Is Mozilla still receiving money from Google for making Google search the default?
It was reviewed by multiple appeals and a state commission for 6 years until the new governor disbanded it.

After the commission disbanded Williams agreed to plead guilty with an Alford plea and accept life in prison but that deal was rejected by the courts so the execution moved forward.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/24/us/marcellus-williams-schedul...
Why would an ad company ever use this instead of tracking users? Even if it exceeded <5% of users (or whatever Firefox has these days), why not just keep tracking and add this one more data point?
It's a little like how "if you aren't paying, you're the product" turned into "if you pay, you're still the product".
I wrote https://bugsink.com/ especially because of the complexity and high requirements of self-hosted sentry, but the focus is on Error Tracking rather than being a full APM-like solution
>I say this as an accomplished programmer and an absolutely shit musician. the parts of programming that are fun and the parts that make money, also, have almost no overlap whatsoever

This hasn't been my experience. While it's certainly true that much of my time as a corporate cog has been wasted in non-fun things like department meetings and stand-ups and Jira and MS Office documents and reviewing or debugging bad code from other devs, there's also been some time working on genuinely interesting programming problems.

But you're right about music: interesting programming assignments don't come along every day, whereas I can pick up my guitar at any time and play something (however badly) and hear something nice right away.
Given a 4K monitor you have 3 options:
- No scaling, produces tiny text and UI elements
- 2x scaling, use a logically 1080p display leading to very large text and UI elements
- 1.5x scaling, logically a 1440p display

4k at 1x produces UI that's too small, 2x scaling is too large for a 27 inch monitor. 1.5x sizes everything like a 1440p display but you still get the higher resolution rendering at 4k.

Fractional scaling _is_ rendering at the 'proper' resolution of the display. It can be challenging to workaround some issues like how to deal with window sizes that scale to a fractional native buffer (i.e. a 501 logical pixel wide image becomes 751.5 physical pixels?). Apple decides 'no' to native fractional scaling, so does GNOME unless that's changed recently.
I follow, yet I disagree that "first priority" must always be a reproducer. There are a lot of conditions that can be rootcaused clearly from diagnostics; say, Linux kernel code deadlocks can exhibit as two different (in their stacks) repeatedly shown "task stuck for more than ... seconds" messages; the remainder follows from the code (to see the abba-lock-ordering violation).
There's a certain fetishisation of reproducers not unlike the fetishisation of build-time testing - to denigrate a bug because "you can't reproduce it" or "if it doesn't show in the tests it needn't be changed". Personally, that mindset irks me.
Fortunately, most developers are happy to learn more about their code any which way. And debugging, tracing, monitoring is cool in itself.
> a false narrative not backed by their actual communication about the feature

You're correct: Mozilla didn't try to hide this. But they didn't try to talk about it either. This isn't an obscure about:config setting; it's a new revenue source [1].

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-anonym-raising-t...
Clickbait title. Mods please correct to reflect actual title of article.
Female Leadership: From Stuck to Promoted
This is so disappointing. Zuckerberg's frustration is palpable. I sympathize in a 'no good deed' sense.

He spent millions trying to fix education. And what was his reward? At best the experiment failed. But we saw how the power structures felt threatened by his experiment.

And now I see presidents refusing to leave office and presidents' administrations pushing media censorship. Everyone should be concerned about this move towards Oceania.
Crudely and slowly, ChatGPT has already been demonstrated controlling a humanoid robot.

The current humanoid robot startups are talking about 100s of thousands of units, and if they're attached to an AI that's even merely normal human level (or can fake it in practice) then they can run every step of logistics and manufacturing to make more of themselves.

At 100kg/unit, Starship could pop a thousand or so on the moon per launch.

So, in such a hypothetical scenario, if you don't get this right then your war game planners will be very quickly suggesting 7.3e20 individual androids burying everyone under a 43km thick layer worldwide.
I never said anything was "just fun". I dont know why you would guess that. Inversely, do you think he had no fun in his time with FTX, and it was all misery?
In my opinion, instead of searching for alternative we should use good programming languages that are extremely refactor-friendly and legacy-resistant.

That's why I love ELM as a front-end langauge (and hope to see a successor ROC succeed).

For back-end, that's why I love Rust, Haskell etc. All languages that are closer to Pure, FP. Because I can leave codebase to other devs and still know that it's not gonna turn into something which I've seen happening to Python, PHP and other OOP language codebases.
Looks like Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos is also in this sort of camp in Bryan, Texas. Minimum-security of course.
> Just make sure the subqueries return at most one row.

The JSON functions most RDBMS offer are awesome for that. One subquery to get a JSON if you have multiple results for the field then you only have to decode it on the app side.
There are already a plenty of forks.

We need another player on the field. https://ladybird.org/ looks very promising.
U can get it dirt cheap from India (indian pharma grade from sunpharma)
Go and my realization about what I'll call the 'Promises' pattern
50 this year. Though I can no longer drink coffee as it now gives me IBS like issues. Other forms of caffeine are fine, just not coffee or decaf or instant. :-(

It's worth noting, from a youngish age (15) I spent about 10 years working as a Baker, sleeping all sorts of strange hours... so I developed by nessacity the ability to put my head down and sleep no matter whats going on. Caffeine has never hindered that in me.

Coffee powernaps sounds wonderfull and totally logical. I might have to experiment with that concept!
This is one of many reasons humanity really needs to work on anti-aging and life extension therapies. If we can make these old-timer maintainers biologically immortal, we won't have to worry about this stuff collapsing one day.
Aversion to open conflict isn't an American thing. It's an imperialist thing. And it's really annoying.
German Interior Ministry Dodges Questions on Chain Analysis Software, Mixer Risk
Mandatory game for those who managed not to see it already: https://neal.fun/password-game/
The results are what science exists for, ultimately. If you're not going to go do science, you still benefit from understanding what the world is - not just for engineering, but as a basic human need for understanding the world you live in.
Office Space in Toronto
Hey HN,

Our startup is leaving our office space in downtown Toronto with the address 180 John street on the 7th floor.

It has a patio in a co-working space and can fix up to 6 desks, more if you squeezed.
And I take it CTEs are implicitly being discouraged.
Tried it for some days, on iOS and macOS. It still has bugs, and extensions don't work as good as they should. Sometimes they don't work at all. The UI is a a little buggy, but that's acceptable.

Worst thing for me is that it's closed source. They can claim whatever they want, if they can't prove it, I cannot really trust them.
The prosecutor doesn't pick a time, and cant promise it. The judge selects the sentence. This judge thought 2 years was reasonable after the fact, and was not bound to it.
While Doom many not have, I assure you many felt doom when waiting for the result.
Incus looks promising, see here https://linuxcontainers.org/incus

As for systemd, podman is amazing https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...
Moderation is a double edged sword, I get Musk stance, he is just pro freedom.

Of course bots and state's funded campaigns on internet are to be hunted because they prevent everyone's freedom but beside that people should be free to say the dumbest possible things. Whatever it hurts someone else, that's the only way to make people change their mind.
That's hilarious, actually.

So I suppose my answer would have to be "This one".
A friend of mine works on DotBigBang which is pretty approachable. May be worth giving it a try!

https://dotbigbang.com/
Whoops you're right. Cant delete my useless comment now oh well
> I had my ISP register my Fritz!Box Fiber 5590 as my ONT yesterday

what did registration entail and how long did it take?
Tbh. I don't get the negatives about Firefox. I have to use Chrome for App development and have been using it a little more in the last months. I cannot see why I should prefer it over Firefox. It works well, has (or soon used to have) good extension support and is smooth, but so is Firefox. Like, I could not say one single thing that I prefer in Chrome.

And all this while I have to ignore the single biggest negative about Chrome - that it's "run" by Google.
I have been given a form of a death penalty even though I have never been arrested for a crime. It started from a false accusation in Tennessee, which ended up being the problem of the Colorado Attorney General, which was a former employer of mine. Turns out it wasnt a real job and they worked with TN to declare me incompetent to stand trial. I have tried everything just to even be charged for what they say I allegedy did 10 years ago.

They have violated my due process rights. I am told by everyone I get no arrest or trial. It is a long story.

At any rate, I can say that Dallas, Memphis, Nashville, Denver, San Diego, L.A., Santa Monica, and now San Francisco at the city, with police and city services and all the way to the state Govts, including the Feds and DOJ all agree to let what they call a BBQ to continue. Basically, the idea is to take the accusation of a crime as a conviction, and use it to cook the accused so that they die before even charges have to be filed.

Welcome to America
The Art Market Is Tanking. Sotheby's Has Even Bigger Problems
If you have been given the guilty verdict, then you have been proven guilty. Subsequent DNA testing in this instance would be to exonerate this verdict. So innocent until proven guilty, then once proven guilty, it becomes guilty until proven innocent via appeal.

To your second point, if you classify the literal possession of the stolen items from the burglary as a suspicious coincidence, I'm not really sure what you actually consider evidence? This is pretty much the smoking gun here, we even have testimony that he sold the stolen laptop so it's not like they just magically appeared in his car without his knowledge...

I do find it strange the county prosecutors are pushing back though, but that's where it ends really.
With wei/attestation and every site I go to begging me to log in with Google (and only Google) just to use it, it’s clear anonymous browsing will be dead soon.
When i look at the first picture the Mac is blurrier but at same time the Windows doesnt keep the balance of the font. Look at all the horizontal vs verzical strokes in ZLF they are for sure drawn to be same optically thickness but on windows they are very wrong.

I dont think windows is such clear winner here. Seems like different philosophies.
When you comment the first statement, that doesnt have the ",", it will break and you still have to remove the "," from the second line, so your comment is not valid.
And if you can repro in rr, you've done 99% of the work most of the time.
Show HN: ADHD Chrome Extension
I wanted to build something fun and useful and that's how this ADHD Reader was born.

- It turns any webpage into distraction-free reading experience.
- It removes ads, images, banners (pretty much everything except text).
- You can set your preferred font size.
- I also added bionic reading experience.
Some kind of "brilliant" billionaire had put his clown shoe down and blocked Twitter's 5th largest, and conveniently predominantly Portuguese speaking population
The GitHub page is very refreshing with how simple and self explanatory it is.

On topic I've been looking for something open source like this since we demo'd paid software at work that really highlighted how time was spent and let me focus on improving my productivity. I'll check this out.
Not at all actually, I just hadn't really planned to add this as a tip.
Additionally I thought an in-line view was fine for the examples included.
But maybe I will!
To be fair, Jurassic Park also doesn’t present cloning dinosaurs as a safe career path.
Minecraft can do stuff with command blocks
It was the same issue, solved for mac also.
Neurology has shown that a lesion of the string section induces a local dispersion response, therefore we propose to rename this area the cohesion promoting region, replacing the previous name of tan-ish matter, which was based on outward appearance of the structure.
Can't we just leave passwords behind once and for all...
Then where is the setting in the normal privacy preferences to turn it off?

Instead it's been sneaked in behind a magic about:config URL and dialogue box saying:

> Proceed with Caution

> Changing advanced configuration preferences can impact Firefox performance or security.

At the very least that is designed to discourage you from opting out.
Not OP but I have started with https://github.com/FooBarWidget/debian-packaging-for-the-mod... - it's 4 years old but the basics are still valid. Then I would recommend the debhelper documentation. I maintain a few binary deb packages for my own repo myself. For this I would recommend reprepro.
Don't forget the part where Automattic invests money into WPEngine, 13 years ago.
It's pretty difficult to play any classical instrument at the level required for elite philharmonic/symphony orchestras. It's why musicians all have to min-max on that instrument from an early age and go through many years of coaching and practice.

Playing the violin at an elite level seems to require a much earlier starting point, so I think that signals a higher level of difficulty. The range of possible sounds while being an incredibly unforgiving instrument in terms of sound quality add to this.

But I believe its stardom comes from its versatility and timbre.

Versatility: It can play any key naturally. Its relatively small size allows for fast passages to be played relatively easily. It can play two notes at a time, and even three or four in quick succession to simulate a chord. It is expressive in a way a tuba isn't.

Timbre/Expression: The Western classical tradition valued the Soprano voice as the "main" voice for melodies. The violin was more or less designed to emulate this voice and the characteristic agility, lightness, and clarity that defined any melody line given to it. So, composers would reach for the violin and make it the star of their compositions. As time went on, the tradition stuck, the virtuosity increased, and the ensembles grew ever larger and larger so the violin sections grew larger and larger.

For whatever reason, the Western Classical Tradition doesn't quite like the sound of, say, a French Horn, dominating the melody line the same way violins do.

What leads me to believe this is all the musical traditions that started off with violins and then quickly ditched them once an instrument that provided the needed versatility and timbre the tradition demanded. Here, I'm mostly thinking of Jazz. Jazz violin was common during the early days of the genre, but quickly fell out of favor in comparison to the guitar, the trumpet, the saxophone, and the piano. For many of the same reasons the violin became the star of the Classical world.

It's also why violins don't really go with rock music. The guitar has the versatility required and the vocal expressiveness that suits the genre.
"your password is on fire!!"
This article doesn't describe the function in enough detail to convey why it's a problem. So if you know why it's actually a problem, by all means share with us.
Why would we mimic Redfin, who's a fairly small & declining player in the real restate brokerage space, when we could mimic features of much more successful players like Keller Williams
Thank God.

I’ve been noticing this downward spiral for more than a decade now. It’s becoming unmanageable to use authentication.

It’s MFA, passwords and passkeys in multiple forms. I have to reach several times a day for the phone to get yet another MFA from the Authenticator or SMS to login the same site I’ve used yesterday. Constant nagging for “security“ from everywhere, and on top of these, these unproductive password changes requests described in the article.

I been thinking about it the last months, and we really need a paradigm shift when it comes to authentication. I’m not knowledgeable enough to know what, but I can see the problem pilling up in front of my own eyes.
This.

I never read any discussion about the obvious question: Who guarantees that enabling Privacy-Preserving Ad Measurement will keep all the other tracking away from me? No one! I've never read anything at all about the thought process behind this.

As you said, with current (EU) law and regulations, it's just one more data point.

So it's worth nothing.
> SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically)

Are there employers that follow this advice? Mine won't (and won't say why).
Aadhaar has come into existence to facilitate direct benefit transfers to eligible recipients of state and national level welfare schemes.

This is necessary because of massive corruption in distribution of wealth in such schemes, where the actual beneficiary gets just 20 bucks or so for very 100 bucks allotted by the govt.

It has slowly transformed into an identity in itself, which is wrong. However, with 1.5 billion people, what other alternative is there? Any and all solutions end up looking like a centralized identity system.
The switch to massive, centralized logistics, is itself a indicator of the impending death of a society. It removes the little local depots that are department stores, thus allowing supply-chain "kicks" to come in ever harder.

If you remove dampening elements, the resulting system is more agile but also more fragile and potentially self-destructive.
Both look shit.
This is also false. Where are you pulling this from?

There is a user-visible setting in the normal preferences. It's grayed out unless you have telemetry enabled.

I think the initial version they shipped PPA in had no such option because, again, the feature didn't actually do anything at the time (and I'm not sure they expanded the allow list yet either).
vibe of 80s/90s TV phone-in games!

Well that brings back memories. I recall "Ranger Bob" in Northern New York, Rochester I think, who used to host skits, and other things around cartoons. And they had a TV game where you'd yell 'POW' over and over to shoot things.

As a Canuck I'd watch US TV, and it's neat to know that the UK had such cultural similarities too.
> On personal level I may want to have a public account for something but also don't want some person I know to see it and connect the dots that it is me.

Blocking them isn't going to help right? They might see they're blocked and wonder why and log out to see the posts. This doesn't make sense to me...
> is pretty much the smoking gun

The evidence undeniably places him in proximity to the crime. But it doesn't prove he did it.

It might have, had the cops not been so sloppy with the evidence as to mess up the fingerprints on the knife. But the point of a smoking gun is that it's smoking and it's the gun. Not random stuff that was also in the house when the gun was smoking.
But you had a theory you could test. The hardest bug I had to debug (over a month of constant work) was very difficult to reproduce on demand. The program (a single threaded server) would crash after running a few hours in production. I was able to get it to crash on the development server only if I let it run handling requests for a few days. The core dumps (and yes, there were plenty of core dumps to look at) were inconsistent---each crash was in a different location.
There was no reason I could find that caused the crashes, so no theory I could really test.

I was able to locate the root cause, which was calling a non-async-signal safe function from a signal handler, but that came only after staring at the code and thinking hard for a long time.
my bank offers phone banking.

Which involves you speaking a pin over an ordinary insecure phone call.
I did once, and got a reply, but it was like 25 years ago.
I've seen this recently - it was a smaller orchestra without a conductor, and the lead violinist was moving upper body a lot in patterns resembling what a conductor does with a stick.
This already kind of happens. There is a right wing commentator who blocked me as I kept fact checking his posts.

However, if I create a list and someone on that list retweets the blocker's post, I can see it.

Clearly Twitter can't be bothered to implement blocking properly, so they've taken this step to "unblock" all content.

At least it is consistent.
There is an old adage about systems: at some point they grow to only care about themselves and not to provide the service for which they were created
jailtime for a mouthful of internet is somewhat of a stretch
Direct link to source https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-4/sp800-63b.html#passwordver