skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Debian feature request: A system-wide switch to disable all telemetry and "cloud integration" features that make any network connection to the developers' or developers' partners' servers, applied to all software distributed in the official repositories.
That text continues with this:

> We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).

So they share data with partners, which helps to make Firefox commercially viable, meaning those partners pay them for that data. Or in other words, Mozilla sells user data. Even when anonymized or aggregated, it's still selling data.
What "sale of data" falls under a legal definition but would be understood by everyone to not be selling data? An example?

It sounds more like 'we sell your data, but we do it in a legally protracted way so we could claim up to now that we don't'.

Given this relates to Firefox's central selling proposition, they surely have an essay detailing exactly what data they're selling?
> LLM development has hit a wall

The writing has been on the wall since 2024. None of the LLM releases have been groundbreaking they have all been lateral improvements and I believe the trend will continue this year with make them more efficient (like DeepSeek), make them faster or make them hallucinate less
I used to use Skype to call my grandfather's landline back home, until he passed away two years ago. I just opened Skype to scroll through our call history all the way to 2018. It will be gone soon just like he did.
To be fair I have the exact opposite experience. Talked to stripe support more than once and never even managed to get a single real word out of PayPal

I would recommend avoiding both and only charge without middle man.
Oh sure, agreed. That's pretty poor.
> Firefox has better memory usage

At the cost of a subpar cache; it's not like Chromium is leaking memory, & its memory pressure effects are both well-studied and well-understood. Yet, Firefox stans keep touting lack of comprehensive caching as some kind of advantage. I'm sorry, this is not 2005. It took Mozilla two years to implement some kind of JIT pipelining, and guess what, Chromium had V8 all along: an engine that can benefit from "open web" cooperation courtesy of Nodejs and the vast ecosystem around it. SpiderMonkey? Please. This is the crux of the issue.

> The idea that you'd "happily buy Firefox" misses the point of Mozilla's mission for an open web.

The idea that the web—chaperoned by the likes of Mozilla, can be "open"—is the crazy, unsustainable one. OP is being pragmatic, and considering their privacy carefully. Mozilla's track record is that of a gravely mismanaged, disoriented, and subservient (Google) organisation. Firefox codebase is arcane, was already showing age even ten years ago, & now there's a whole ecosystem of Chromium-based browsers that can benefit from "open web" cooperation.

Firefox has zero moral high-ground, & pretending like it possesses some kind of virtue is a crime against semantics.
How about addressing the point made first? If you have to spend 200B dollars to train a system how to read, would you call that intelligence? Either human or artificial?
What? Teams was and is everywhere. The opportunity was taken so hard, the EU ruled that Teams must be decoupled from the Office Suite and Windows because it was near impossible to not have or use Teams. All that happened because and during the pandemic.
Amazon Web Services introduces its first quantum computing chip
Rest in peace. One of the top GMs of all time. Former world champion. Wonderful player. Thanks for all the amazing games.
I see those messages all the time on Google websites and web apps.
>A poem.

Which is what? You cannot define a poem as "a poem" any more than you can define a dog as "a dog" or any other category just as itself.

>And my friends understand what I mean when I say that. That you don't understand is hardly my concern, like I said I find this amusing, convincing you is not a goal of mine.

The Emperor's subjects understood what he meant too, when he was talking about his new outfit.

>The purpose of such categories, their only value, is to be understood by the communities which use them.

And the community as a whole is not serviced by people like you pretending that you have the authority to define every category of things in the English language as meaningless.

>Whether David Bowie's 1980 album Scary Monsters is art rock or post-punk has no real bearing on the album itself, no value beyond being understood by those discussing it.

Once again you miss the point spectacularly. I specifically said "My claim is not that when you draw a hard boundary these things are technically not poems because they sit just outside the line, but that if you have any sort of boundary at all then they aren't even close."

We are not talking about things that are right on the boundary of what constitutes poetry. They are as close to poetry as a cup of tea is to a glass of milk. "What exactly is tea anyway, it is all subjective, everything is in the eye of the beholder, how can you draw genre boundaries in the medium of liquids, what even is tea anyway?" Total rubbish, and just the same argument you are making.

Epic poetry has specific aspects that make it poetry. It is not ambiguous or difficult to call it poetry. It is clearly poetry. A breathless and stupid rant about politics is not poetry.

The fact you claim that a random HN comment could be a Haiku if the author said it was one, and tried to justify that by the fact that the mora and syllable concepts differ a bit between English and Japanese, shows how completely addled your thinking is. You have followed a stupid ideology so far into the extremes that any sensible person would understand that they have proved their assumptions false by contradiction and gone back to reexamine where they went wrong. You are the sort of person to say "okay, a/b is both in most reduced form and not, at the same time, how wondefully avant garde!"
I can recommend todo.txt, as I've been using it for years. Todo.txt was one of the inspirations to create calendar.txt.

It also works nicely together with calendar.txt for me. I can 'grep' trough both to see all todos and events related to a project or a +tag.
Safari exists because Apple wanted a Browser they control. They absolutely would have had the capability to create a rendering engine from scratch - KHTML already existing was just a minor convenience.
48.3% of votes Harris
49.8% of votes Trump

The majority of American (voters) choose Trump. The statement is still true.

You understood what I meant tho, as you instantly provided stats relating to the vote and not in the context of all Americans which would also include the people who are not eglible to vote but can still be Americans.

I have no idea what the will of all Americans is, but I can confidently and truthfully state the Americans that voted chose Trump by majority.

Not good at math but pretty sure 49.8% is more than 48.3%.
Even with their recent privacy policy changes, Mozilla's approach is structurally different from Google's core business model.

>This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't that the entire brand identity of Firefox is Privacy.

>It's like discovering there's ham in a vegetarian sandwich. When you ask them they look puzzled and say their focus group was clear it tastes a lot better that way, besides it's just a little bit and the bread is vegetarian and there's way more meat in a Big Mac.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30715947
Just use https://librewolf.net
This is GPT-5, or rather what they clearly intended to be GPT-5. The pricing makes it obvious that the model is massive, but what they ended up with wasn't good enough to justify calling it more than 4.5.
I would wager most people that offer to buy software "one off" typically underestimate their lifetime worth earned through other means like ads and data sales.

Would you pay a one-time $10 for a lifetime Firefox license? $100? $1,000? $10,000?
With every new model I'd like to see some examples of conversations where the old model performed badly and the new model fixes it. And, perhaps more importantly, I'd like to see some examples where the new model can still be improved.
Sir they are selling text by the ounce just like farmers sold tomatoes before Walmart, How is that not a business model?
I am getting them on openbsd, I assumed it was going to be some sort of certificate issue, I was going to update, but with these recent reports of Mozilla getting ready to turn full bore into a ad company, I might just wait until after March 14th and see what happens.

What is especially funny/insulting, is there is a click here to update button, and I am like "there is approximately a 0% chance that will actually work on openbsd".

update I looked it up, they say it is a certificate issue. https://support.mozilla.org/kb/root-certificate-expiration
On modern systems you have about 28k ephemeral ports available. 65,535 is the total number of ports (good luck trying to use them all). Either way, if you have more than 20k connections open to a single backend (remember linux does connection tracking using the 4 tuple, so you can reuse a source port to different destinations) you are doing something seriously wrong and should hire competent network engineering folks.
What do you mean that Text is already gone? SPAs and React render plain HTML.
They made too many decisions on their own to be a 1:1 replacement. I think there needs to be a new fork, which would just remove all of the spyware bits.
> to their full productive potential

You're assuming that point is somewhere above the current hype peak. I'm guessing it won't be, it will be quite a bit below the current expectations of "solving global warming", "curing cancer" and "making work obsolete".
People complain about Google killing projects that have only a few hundred million users, but then claim Firefox is dead at single digit market share because that's… 150 million users.
Yes, it is the 200+ tabs (probably closer to 500) over multiple windows.

My latest move was to merge every tab in all windows to one window only (with an extension) and start using vertical tabs (better scrolling and overview of tabs) Then sort tabs by title with another extension (Edge built in AI tab sort sucked on sorting so many tabs). With sorted tabs I could start create tab groups, Edge AI tab sort worked better when the tabs was already sorted alphabetically and managed to create most of the tab groups for me. With all this reorganization it was easier to manage all of them and to start closing tabs.

I’m not done yet but it is much better and number of opened tabs has been significantly reduced. Now I have one main window with all the tabs and some temporary windows that is only used for temporary stuff that get closed within a day.

What makes things a bit more complicated is that I also use two profiles, private and work. Firefox always sucked on multi-profile setup. Firefox’s new container stuff is somewhat improvement but not fully (at least when I tried last)
The absolute lack of professionalism among most web developers—many of whom are essentially glorified framework developers, barely understanding what they’re doing—is what led us here. This, combined with a complete disregard for web standards and the W3C (dismissed as too consensual, too European, and too slow of an approach), created the perfect shit-storm.

Google insists on pushing its own "standards". And other browser vendors are criticized for being slow to conform to these non-standards. The result? A web cluttered with pointless animations, devoid of cross-browser compatibility, and drowning in superficial bells and whistles.

And the irony? It’s boring. Every website looks the same.

If you’re not testing across browsers and engines (including non-Chromium ones), you’re not building for the web. You’re shipping Chrome-specific extensions that happen to use HTTP. You are not a developer, you are a plumber, and an incompetent one. Good plumbers are so damn rare.
It's time for distributions to only include browsers developed by non-profits
Only a small percentage of people are willing to pay for internet services. It is psychology and competition between the sites who offer services for free vs requiring payment. Paying for a service is a barrier to entry, while getting it for free and selling your data instead is not perceived as such. That is why all the big sites never would've taken off if they had paywalls.
How long will Firefox take to fall? Until Google tells the lawyer who runs Mozilla that they'll stop sponsoring her if she doesn't fall in line?
All you have said is that it's easy to write something that takes you 90% there and ignores the last 10% of requirements. I worked in webdev some 15 years ago and if I could have dropped IE support sooner my code would have been so much simpler as well :)
Citigroup mistakenly credits customer account $81T in "near miss", FT reports
Hundreds of NOAA weather forecasters fired in latest wave of cuts
I have long left the sinking ship and switched to enshitified and actually private https://librewolf.net/
This is exactly how Flutter (now) works on web - the browser loads a JS/WASM blob, and your app renders everything to a canvas - and you're right, almost everything you mention is problematic.

There is a time and a place for that paradigm, but it's niche. The lack of SEO alone is usually enough to stop it in its tracks.
> they got triggered by the few people who abuse Red Hat license model and rugpulled everyone

Alma is not a clone of CentOS Stream. You can use Alma just like you were using CentOS. It's really no different than before except for who's doing the work.

I agree that communication was bad. But why do you believe that Red Hat isn't able to screw up on their own?
We need an EU alternative to Firefox.
When ChatGPT was cool in 2023/2024 I used it a little bit for a few things, but I decided I hated how “perfect”/“robotic”’everything it wrote sounded.

I actually now have a preference for my grammatically incorrect writing.

My emails are especially littered with grammatical errors because I don’t care about emails.
It's not really meant for end users currently. Your only option is to build from source. But it has made a lot of progress in a relatively short time.
Yes. Thank you.:)
Rather than downloading random binaries from random forks (or clamour for governance at the sidelines), you can take back more control by building your own fork.

Librewolf and Waterfox are two fine choices to use for upstream sincr they have saner defaults and make the forking and building easier to wire up.

Ive been running my own FF fork for a few years like this now.
> GPL is all about politics

People use this excuse to make open source software about politics that has nothing to do with software, ownership etc.
So... for the most practical question:

Anyone have a favourite Firefox fork that removes this and doesn't add other spyware or reinvent the UI too much?
Maybe this app will do
https://hypercritical.co/front-and-center/
I really hate this kind of response to criticism. No Mozilla, fundamental disagreement does not mean that peole are confused and need to be told what to think.
Oh hei, HN! Post author here.

Of all the giant blog posts I've written (brevity is not my strong suit), this one must have sent me the most traffic... Clearly there is a persistent unmet demand for Org Mode explanations / experience reports. Please write!

For non-Emacs users:

I've listed a bunch of alternatives that offer useful sub-sets of the Emacs version. On my Android phone, I use orgzly. I don't sync back and forth, preferring to hand-transcribe anything that is worth my while (I type fast enough on my computer). However it's good to know that my notes are just plain text, therefore always accessible.

Recent-most epic win of using org-mode:

Trivially exported the live demo version [1] of my talk [2] (org-babel) to a single web page [3] (reveal.js deck). It was a remote presentation, so it was great to be able to share the deck with the attendees.

[1] clojure-web-app-workshop-functional-conf-2025.org here: https://github.com/adityaathalye/slideware/ (see raw source for export directives)

[2] Talk video in this playlist: https://youtu.be/YEHVEId-utY (the playlist has video of the example I described in my blog post.)

[3] All blog posts are just tiny websites :) https://www.evalapply.org/posts/why-and-how-i-use-org-mode/d...

---

Edit: Discussed previously here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34967802 (164 points, 159 comments)
My experience too. Early Spotify had the best music and I could find pretty much everything I liked, plus excellent recommendations. I don't think it was that the music I liked was particularly obscure or anything, it was just that it was all there. I just couldn't believe how great it was! Once out of beta (alpha?), it lost that magic.
You put the blame on Google but isn't it your fault, people who get excited every time a new feature gets added to web standards, and developers who use it? Like CSS masonry, or WebRTC, or web components with shadow DOM? Features like this get lot of upvotes here.
Those perceived to be doing good are often used to lessen the blow of those perceived to be doing bad. Like how it's not so bad if your train sinks of faeces if there's a bus you can take instead. Losing the safe alternative makes the original sin worse.
In the context of a discussion about websites becoming binary blobs of WASM code that make it essentially impossible to block ads on, the choice will be to use a site and see adverts or not to use that site. I'm saying that we should make the choice not to use a site that displays ads. It will require some sacrifices (or, more likely in my opinion, spending some money for some subscriptions.)
"woke" encompasses far more than that, it's about being aware of the past 500 years of global history, systematic systems of oppression, racism, discrimination, religious wars, a reasonable understanding of the root causes of the major wars of the past 100 years and their aftermath, various genocides, pogroms, assassinations, coup d'etat, economic disparities between wealthy nations and developing nations, global patterns of push and pull factors for immigration, the role that major international organizations like the UN, NATO, EU play in global politics, culturally specific implementations and practices of non-binary and non-heterosexual gender norms in cultures very alien to western european cultural backgrounds, I could go on for quite some time.

now in its current implementation as a derogatory term by a certain political sect in the usa, "woke" has come to mean "anything we dislike which is vaguely left of center that encompasses the well known tenets of progressive/liberal/leftist politics".
Shame they don't sign their macOS builds.
Swift is underrated, it's a good alternative to C++ for those not interested in Rust.
People use it because it is essentially Chrome with uBlock-Origin built in (I think the developer of uBlock Origin is employed by Brave) and it removes the stupid cookie modals that are on every website. Between running a pi-hole and Brave, I rarely see an advert on a website.

Turning off the "crypto-crap" can be done quite easily (you literally right click on the BAT icon and it is gone) and the new tab ads are removed again with a couple of clicks. I've found it also runs much better than Firefox on older hardware.
I don't know much about the internal details of postgres. But there is a ton of detail underlying "it's just tuples of some kind" and there are lots of ways to implement indices, no? Is it so difficult to imagine that different implementations have different performance properties?

There's also the query planner layer to think about too.
Which decisions? LibreWolf ist exactly that + hardening used in tor browser maybe you mean those but all of them you can change in setting.
TeamForm, ServiceNow, Workday
5 years away?
Teams is a heavyweight behemoth with awful UX while Skype orginally had a very lightweight feel to it. Of course, Microsoft had to kill that through various UI "improvements".

Also, Skype has an official Linux client.

Instead of developing Teams (NIH at its best), they could have carefully developed Skype into a similar platform. But I'm not sure a giant like Microsoft is capable of something like this. But at least their 8.5bn investment wouldn't have been just to kill a competitor.
If Kafka is nicer to work with, then it must be horrible.
Looking at his mental and physical health I'm inclined to think that people just fantasize way too much about what wealth can really buy.
I also thought Brave is the browser with the annoying token. But I still haven't seen anything about BAT but happily using brave for a while now.
> ...as the data structure is so different in every way from a relational or document store.

No, it is not.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worst-case_optimal_join_algori...

Graph processing can create substantial amount of intermediate data if it is done in typical join implementation fashion (nested loops or hash join). So it may appear that graph processing needs a tailored approach.

But what can help graph algorithms can help SQL query execution as well and vice versa, see the link above.

For example, TPC-DS contains queries that (indirectly) joins same tables multiple times (query 4, for example). This is, basically, a kind of centrality metric computation for a graph represented by the tables.
This. In German the word for "video-calling" is "Skyping". Similar to MSN, the strength of the brand and goodwill that it has in some geographies is on-par with Google for search, or Coca Cola for coke. The fact that the software got consistently worse, year on year on year is hard to grasp for me. Microsoft made the right call to cannibalize and use teams. But how was Skype such a pain? Not being able to share screenshots in chat killed it for me.
The problem is more that they actually do want to sell user data (albeit anonymized and/or aggregated), and they want to present themselves as a privacy-favoring alternative.

They literally say:

> Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).

Sharing data with partners and getting money in return (that's what "to make Firefox commercially viable" means) is selling user data. They want to change the definition of selling data to exclude what they want to do, but they don't get to decide what the meaning of words is.

So they're not as privacy-friendly as they want to appear, and that's a difficult position, and that's why this policy allows them more access to data than a naive reading would indicate.
>Not good at math...

Clearly. From Robert's Rules of order [1]:
The word “majority” in this context means, simply, more than half.

[1] https://robertsrules.com/frequently-asked-questions/
Until sites block them completely, which will be easier with attestation