skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For anyone interested in what features there are (I should really have this on an article on the website, but also... how do you market all this? I went for a 'generic' landing page as I assume the average person cares little)

Please note some features became available in Firefox after we added them, not related I believe it was just coincidental.

A high level overview of what Waterfox offers vs Firefox:

* DNS over Oblivious HTTP to encrypt and anonymise DNS requests. Currently the only browser on the market to do so by default I believe? Just a note that we've partnered with Fastly for this and they control the "relay" node in the middle, for proper privacy sanitisation. More info: https://blog.cloudflare.com/oblivious-dns/

* In-depth configuration of numerous preferences within the Firefox codebase, striking a balance between privacy and web usability.

* Full support for JPEG-XL (including for animation, alpha, progressive decode, and colour profiles).

* Vertical tabs and sidebar support: https://www.waterfox.net/blog/waterfox-x-treestyletab/

* In-depth UI customisations. Currently working with black7375, on Lepton for customisations specific to Waterfox. You can view all the UI changes not available in Firefox but available in Waterfox at https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/wiki/Options.

* "Classic" about:config available at about:cfg and "classic" password list at about:passwords

* Removal of all telemetry within the browser.

* Removal of all A/B testing within the browser.

* Removal of all unnecessary external connections (Google, Mozilla, Meta, etc.) where feasible.

Quality of life changes:

* Ability to disable auto-updates (not available in other forks)

* Integration with Ubuntu's Unity menu on Linux

* Ability to "restart" the browser in one click

* Ability to right-click "unload" tabs not in use

* Ability to "copy" tab URLs

* Ability to enable an old-school status bar—allows you to pin functions and addons to the bottom of the browser UI.

* Ability to disable Ctrl+W (or cmd+W) with a preference.

* Ability to play DRM content such as Netflix, Disney+, etc., not available in any other open source forks.

* Private Tabs (you don't need to open a new private window if you don't want; you can instead open a private tab).

* Ability to have tabs above address bar, below address bar, or at the bottom of the browser UI.

* Extensive changes to the about:preferences page, allowing changing of browser settings usually hidden.

* Technical support for Chrome and Opera extensions (this needs work!)

* Usage of a more privacy-centric search engine when in Private Window mode.

There's a bunch more, but still need to collate them more.

Oh and also no AI bullshit that siphons your data off to 3rd party providers. Doesn't mean I'm completely against it, but it has to be local only and performant IF it were to ever make its way to Waterfox.
Fair. If that's the deciding factor on whether you use a computer program, that's your prerogative. I assume, then, that every app on your phone allows you to select every bit of text in it?
You've made at least 2-3 personal attacks against me while seemingly not even trying to address the problem that I highlighted. If that's your goal, OK. It definitely goes against the spirit of the rules here if not the letter.

Delaying the flu vaccine? Ok that's bad, sure.

It's also a real goalpost move and also doesn't address the technical problem "insiders going to inside" I raised in answer to the parent's paraphrased "I can't understand this, why is this necessary?"

I don't know that doing things this way is strictly necessary. But I also don't think it's reasonable to just hand-wave away or worse completely fail to even acknowledge much less actually address the insiders problem.
physics is merciless, especially the laws of thermodynamics. You can dislike it as much as you want, but the creation simply can't be more perfect than creator. So no, large language models won't replace us. They are google 2.0, nothing more.
Couldn't at least part of the reviewing be done by foreign experts?

Having said that, this smells witch-hunty to me. The US can boast decades of excellence in medical and biological sciences, which in turn generates a massive windfall. Completely upending the architecture behind this dominance on the suspicion that a few hundred million bucks are less-than-optimally spent is a hell of a gambit, and even ignores all the higher-order effects that even that "spare change" bring about.
Is Kagi making money? I know they exist, but are they paying their own bills or living off of investors. (I couldn't find a direct statement, but their timeline implies they could be)
I have both a modern Radeon and Nvidia card in my PC.

Radeon overall offers a smoother desktop experience, and works fine with gaming, including proton-enabled games on Steam. OpenCL via rocm works decent, with some occasional crashes, in Darktable. Support for AI-frameworks like jax is however very lacking, and I spent many days struggling to get it to work well, before giving up and buying a nvidia card. geohot's rants on X are indicative of my experience.

The nvidia card works great for AI-acceleration. However, there is micro-stuttering when using the desktop (gnome shell in my case) which I find extremely annoying. It's a long-known issue related to the power manager.

In the end, I use the nvidia card as a dedicated AI-accelerator and the Radeon for everything else. I think this is the optimal setup for Linux today.
AMD Radeon RX 9070 Series Technical Deep Dive
Curious - what's your crypto exposure?

I'm starting to diversify into it as a hedge against the collapse of the US dollar. Definitely not all-in though.

I'm anti-fasicist today, but I wonder if I'd be a Muskovite had TradeHill not kept 'my' bitcoins when it closed in the early 2010s.
Looks interesting.. how does it compare to Launchbar?

https://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html
Can Waterfox load all the up-to-date Firefox extensions or it is stuck with the old plug-in system?
They better, the intel will be used against them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=43173984&goto=threads%...
So about 20% better value than Nvidia comparing MSRPs. Not terrible but that’s what they offered last generation and got 10% market share as a result. If the market price of Nvidia cards remains 20-50% above MSRP while AMD can hit their prices, then maybe we have a ballgame.
Much better performance on less powerful hardware (I don't care about synthetic benchmarks, do your own testing and you will notice the difference).

Vertical tabs. Built-in tor support, built-in efficient adblocker that supports ublock origin rules, but is complied into native code.

More anti-tracking and anti-fingerprinting measures (in total, and only counting those enabled out of the box). Configurable shortcuts for absolutely everything. Probably something else I'm forgetting.

Plus a bunch of crypto bullshit, but it's disabled unless you make an effort to enable it.
Second Life has operated the Lindex service for more than a decade.
>so comparing it with 7B lump sum is silly.

It's not that silly, because that's a huge amount of money. What do you think the gross expense of building software like this should be? Because this may be the end of the line.
How we evolve our code: Notion's "ratcheting" system using custom ESLint rules
I think the bigger issue is legacy software on Windows. It is Windows biggest moat and also their biggest albatross. So many companies and individuals rely on a specific piece of software that will never be ported to ARM. Microsoft can’t force the conversion. Developers have no incentive to support both until there is a critical mass of users and there will never be a critical mass of users unless ARM is 3x better than whatever Intel / AMD can deliver. On mobile it got close for a moment in terms of efficiency and then Intel and AMD immediately closed the gap. No incentive for users to switch.
Bundling malware with keygens is a very common practice. It helps because the victim doesn’t suspect anything is wrong when the thing they downloaded appears to work, unlike the sham downloads in the linked article. Gives the attackers more time to exploit the system.

You also need to look at the bigger picture: Keygens are something you very much do not want anywhere in a corporate environment for obvious reasons. Being able to flag them on Windows machines is very valuable.
It's definitely true for certain things. To consider a relevant example, it wasn't too long ago that homosexuality was broadly considered to be immoral. Now there's strong disagreement over this.

Of course, for this particular example this is actually a good thing. It would be even better if there was broad agreement that homosexuality wasn't immoral, but having a substantial number of people on that side is better than having almost none.

I think the other comment misattributes the problem. The problem isn't the loss of the old broadly shared morality, the problem is that we haven't yet managed to coalesce around a new and better one.
You have to trust and/or monitor and apply active pressure to (something that virtually nobody does) the developers to some extent either way. The difference with a paid distribution is that there's at least some revenue that helps keep the project afloat, and with a free distribution there's not.

e.g. if you have a CEO/lead developer that's initially acting responsibly, but has a "bankruptcy threshold" beyond which they'll start selling your data, a revenue stream will stave that point off.
I don't know if I'm in a parallel Universe or hallucinating, but these are graphics cards, designed and created for people to install in they deskop PCs and run games. Just like they have been doing it for decades now.

What's with the P40, CUDA and fp8? Seriously people, chill. AI has been using graphics cards because that was the best available route at the time, not the other way around.

Otherwise I must question, why don't you talk about DisplayPort2.1, DirectX12, FidelityFX.. and other dozen features graphics related.
Waterfox seemed a bit too opinionated as well, especially in terms of extra code, weird versioning, patch delays.
I appreciate your candor and good-faith, benefit-of-the-doubt reading of this clause.

However,

> Lawyers get paid good money to word them very precisely.

This is true, but not in the way you are presenting. The precision is often to provide unilateral freedom under the guise of protection. They will "lawyer" you.
"As indicated by you" is a grossly broad phrase. An indication is not an express, enthusiastic consent.
(FWIW browsers have a lot of lessons to learn from sexual misconduct training, but I digress).

Importantly, you are making an implicit assumption that actually is not protected by the statement. And that is when the intention was shared.
If you accept the terms of a Mozilla service elsewhere that indicate you are amenable to, for instance, being served ads in exchange for using the browser a certain way --it can now be argued that the data can be exfiltrated.

So, there are two points of failure with your assessment.

1. "Indicated by you" is subjective and Mozilla can solidly argue implicit consent or action
2. The indication need not be contained to the same operation which which the information in question is being sent.
This is by the same person as the OP btw (and linked in the original article).
I was using Spotify Beta way back when, and they absolutely had songs named like that as well. I specifically remember one of Pink Floyd's albums (pretty sure is was a copy of the wall) as such.
PvP MMOs tend to all have a similar make-up of players. At the top are the elite griefers prey on noobs, and beside them are the elite duelists who challenge each other. The griefers and duelists don't interact too much. Below them are the middle-skill players. They have enough fun to keep playing, but lose more than they win; they put serious effort into becoming an elite. At the bottom are the noobs, who join with dreams of making it big (some may), but mostly serve as cattle for other players. A lot of the noobs will get discouraged after repeated ganking and leave the game.

The game only thrives if there's a steady stream of new players to replace the numerous quitters. If there aren't enough, the middle-skilled will become the new bottom and start losing way more often. So they'll start quitting. When enough of them do, the griefers won't have as much fun and will leave. That just leaves the duelists in an otherwise empty world. It's not as fulfilling to say you're the best fighter in a dead game.

Then a new PvP MMO appears. Everyone is new, so the griefers aren't yet overpowered. New players flock to it. Eventually, the duelists from the first game see another game with a much more vibrant community. So they'll go there.

The parallels with crypto actually make sense.
I've been reporting these repos forever, they just keep on coming.
On a related note, a bit over a decade ago I had installed logmein on my parents' computer to be able to easily help them with any IT issues. But they since pivoted away from personal accounts and I never found anything else as straightforward. I feel that in a lot of ways tech has regressed.

EDIT: I just found that logmein actually offer a personal product again, named GoToMyPC, but what used to be entirely free at the time, is now priced at $35/month.

[0] https://get.gotomypc.com/plansandpricing#feature-list
> Less then 10% of them have open issues with complaints - others look just fine.

I don't know why anyone running one of these schemes to distribute malware would even enable the issues tab on github, let alone not delete every issue posted containing keywords like malware, trojan, virus, etc. with a script.

Are hidden until approved issues not supported on github? Is this caused by some limitation of creating these repos programmatically?
> Without a doubt every search result I found on that forum from someone having a similar issue never resulted in a useful lead.

This was subsumed into answers.microsoft.com and it's turned into a few of those original "good with computers" retirees spending all day answering from within their own knowledge, now overwhelmed by countless individuals with names or flavors of English suggesting emerging economic zones "answering" everything with copy paste non-responsive responses.

If the asker persists through enough (5 - 8?) turns until the copy paster grasps that they don't understand the problem, then it turns into (paraphrasing) "no clue, I'm not real but was just trying to help, try Microsoft support".

This is so consistent, I wonder what is driving it. They seem to try to look official, but eventually say they are not actually Microsoft, and punt. What is this accomplishing? Why are they spending all this time? Is it some kind of training exercise or on-ramp to support jobs? Inquiring minds want to know!
I think a way to look at it, from an SEC trying to do their job in a pragmatic manner, is 'a crypto currency is likely to be run by professionals, a memecoin is likely to be run by teenagers'.

SEC deals with oversight and regulation actions/cases against obstinant defendants all the time. That is hard because those folks know the law.

Trying to deal with a teenager or influencer who doesn't even have a concept of the securities law is not something they do regularly. It doesn't fit with their system of function, and would likely become an absolute doom spiral of wasted time and distracted effort. Imagine trying to do a deposition where every other response is 'skibidi'. Even if it worked what are they going to collect or recover? Other meme coins?

In short: Setting aside the fundamental logic of this position, the SEC is built to battle with Bobby Axelrod, not Huawk Tua girl and those are fundamentally different skillsets.
npm is full of this shit too, eg. https://www.npmjs.com/package/openssl-node which I reported weeks ago but is still sitting there.
And why don't we blame Eich for making things worse with his "good intentions"?

Why don't we consider trying to pass laws that hurt your coworkers to qualify as "being nasty with coworkers"?
We're All Just Looking for Connection – Engineering at Slack
Checked prices, Skype is more expensive.
yeah, that was my suspicion as well, seems that AI generated content is mixed with seo-spam or malware. I even tried to report feedback.azure.com as a deceptive site to the major browsers, but they don't share my concerns ;)
Rather odd policy choices is an understatement.

The context to keep in mind here is that Mozilla purchased an ad company back in June. They spent money on it, and they will move to earn a return on investment.

Absent that context this could just be another tone deaf policy choice that gets rolled back when there's enough heat, but with that context in mind it's far more likely to be them laying the legal foundation to incorporate Anonym's targeted advertising into Firefox.

From the Register article about the acquisition:

> Arielle Garcia, director of intelligence for ad watchdog Check My Ads, told The Register in an email that she's generally skeptical of claims about privacy-preserving ad technology.

> "For example, how do Anonym’s audience capabilities, like their lookalike modeling, jibe with what Mozilla considers to be 'exploitative models of data extraction?' The data that is 'securely shared' by platforms and advertisers to enable ad targeting and measurement have to come from somewhere – and there’s more to privacy than not leaking user IDs."

https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/18/mozilla_buys_anonym_b...
I'm surprised see Microsoft buying a competitor to only then shut them down at a later date. It's not like them at all to act like a Monopoly.
Can't be more obvious.

<acknowlege and describe post you're replying to, use at least one "—">
<shill>
<shill + acknowledge>

How hard could it be to add "add a few grammatical and spelling mistakes. Use no emojis. Reply like someone on instagram" or something to the system prompt? I shouldn't give them ideas, but come on, that's low hanging fruit.
in my experience, many managers tend to try to dumb products down as much as possible, to make it work for the most people. the problem is that this, together with the usual bad ui/ux, makes the product inefficient to use, especially for power users.

then, every couple of years, a startup tries to carve out a niche by making a product that caters to power users and makes efficiency a priority. those power users adopt it and start to recommend it to other regular users. this usually also tends to work quite well because even regular users are smarter than expected, especially when motivated. thus the product grows, the startup grows and voila, a tech giant buys it.

now one of the tech giants managers gets the task to improve profits and figures out, the way to do this is to increase the user base by making the product easier to use. UX enshittification ensues, the power users start looking out for the next niche product and the cycle starts anew.

rule of thumb: if the manager says "my grandma who never used a computer before in her life must be able to use it", abandon ship.
America has multiple examples of companies that thrived for decades until a certain type of manager showed up (of which leet code engineers are an aspect; clueless MBA grads are another; there are more). Sears. General Electric. IBM. Companies need to develop a sort of immune response to this type, as they are as charismatic as they are deleterious to company outlooks, and WILL worm their way in if not checked. A more effective Matthew Broderick to stay the Reese Witherspoons of the world.
Did America voted in an enemy as their president????
Or any website in EU. Those idiotic cookie popups are half the reason I have uBlock installed.
I’m sure they report serious crimes and at least retain records for questionable activity.

I don’t get visibility into internal Discord operations, though. We just see that the perpetrators lost both their Discord server and their accounts disappeared from other Discords they were in. They angrily returned later with new usernames.
I think the format I suggested would parse in markdown, but I created it pre-markdown.

For me the best parts are:

1. You could write a parser very quickly.

2. It's very easy to edit and add to as a human.

3. It can easily be tracked in git or via a diff-based tool.

I did already think about the repetitive tasks, a long time ago I used to have a tool that would look at the past tasks and recommend future tasks (with appropriate distributions). One example was booking a dentist appointment every 6 months, even if I forgot to schedule something it would remind me to book one in, dismiss it or push it back.
For a long time, Macs shipped with a tutorial that trained people to double-click. Unlike a second button, it's not discoverable.
Give us a single make/model that does this.
The co-founder/CTO died due to unknown reasons after the settlement

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Greenberg
Software Experiences Podcast (Proiex)
I’ve been running an informal podcast where I talk about all kinds of software-related topics—not just technical deep dives but also industry stories, career shifts, and unusual tech perspectives. Recently, I had a fascinating chat about how to get developers to actually care about security (without making their lives miserable). It got me thinking: what are some of the most unexpected or fascinating things you’ve learned in your software journey?
(If you’ve got a cool story, I’d love to hear it—maybe even have you on as a guest!)
> I am saying that this site's cofounder is sympathetic to DOGE, which is not treating people well.

I agree. And guess what: I don't approve of pg's views on this either. If he ran the company where I worked, I'd support removing him too.

But he doesn't, so what's your point? How do you make the leap from "I'd want to remove him if he were my boss" to "I should stop commenting on HN"?

If anything, consistency would require that I demand that he be removed from his leadership role in HN, not that I should be the one to leave.
2019, 109 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20047170

2021, 101 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28815747
Should the new "Five Eyes" be Australia, Britain, Canada, France, and New Zealand? The folks in Paris seem aware that it's a Bad Sign when they have a big, belligerent nation to their east. Plus, Britain and France were best buddies in the decade or so after WWII - mostly out of fear that the Americans would get tired of the whole "NATO thing", and leave Europe to the Red Army's tender mercies.
Thanks for the link.

Sometimes I wish Xanadu had actually happened. The moment I opened the article I saw something like |R^3. Honestly speaking I don't really know what |R means. And R keeps showing up all over the article.

I will dig more into this using ChatGPT with time.

But I could understand very little from reading the article.
You'll get nothing that works and like it!
Well, to be honest that's where I cheated because I assumed that auto-format would fix it.

In Sublime Text there was an addon that did that. I assume something similar exists for VS Code.

To align the items manually I would Tab (or Space) as much as necessary so that each item has enough space for the alignment. I would then use the mouse to create multiple cursors in the same column. In VS Code it's drag MMB, in Sublime it's Ctrl+LMB or sth. Then Ctrl+Shift+Arrow_Right, Ctrl+Shift+Arrow_Left to select the spaces up until the (misaligned) beginnings of the words, then hit Delete.
How much of Edge switching to Chromium was a way for MS to shoot themselves in the foot and focus monopoly discussions on Google instead of themselves?
Because any code using it was considered a derivative work and thus should be under GPL too.

That's what happens when you try and shoe horn non-GPL code into the kernel.
Write to Escape Your Default Setting
...why? what's the difference between "POST payload to discord webhook" vs. "POST payload to VPS rented anonymously"? it seems like an inexplicably bad decision to use a proprietary US service for your malware C&C