skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Im really disappointed by Rossman criticizing the CCPA as if it’s the best problem and then goes on to list all the ways Firefox had been selling the data. I’m not sure Google paying for placement is the only way that happens AND I’m not sure that runs afoul of the CCPA. Sometimes raised awareness is a feature not a bug and I don’t think it’s a “it depends on what your definition of is is”.

Moreover, the main reason Firefox runs afoul of the CCPA is that it requires a single “opt-out” button for all privacyware but they have a dark pattern (like chrome) of having 50 different settings to manage. That’s another reason why I think the Google search bar placement isn’t the reason they’re having issues with the CCPA.
What sort of definition of efficiency are you operating with? A system is not efficient if billions of dollars are "evaporating" out of the system.

Yes, the participants of those markets are various degrees of willingness. No, I do not agree that makes them efficient.
The weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option (2022)
Interconnecting SAP, On-Premises and AWS
> It explicitly says that the license is for “operating Firefox” and “for the purpose of doing as you request”. Not for improving it, or serving you ads, or for understanding your usage.

It does not. That is explicitly stated as a subset of their rights. Before that sentence you might notice:

“This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice.”

So check the privacy notice and you find…

“How we use data

We use data to keep Firefox running smoothly, improve features and help sustain our business”

So they can use the data in anyway that helps sustain the business.
A History of Cryptography from the Spartans to the FBI
Capstone filed for chapter 11 in 23. I wonder what's the fate of their tech.
I wish that the private companies I’ve worked for were ruthlessly efficient amoral profit-optimizing machines. At least then one would be able to make some kind of sense of management decisions. Once companies reach a certain size, decision making tends to be extremely messy and political. I can’t count the number of decisions I’ve seen made that were obviously going to be bad for the bottom line. This is especially so in VC-backed companies, where a lot of what’s being worked on is pure nonsense that serves only to provide material for an elaborate story-telling exercise designed to separate rich fool from money in the next funding round.
>Google is not named, but to my understanding the "one customer" refers to them. Their aggressive monetization strategies are neither effective nor work to retain what little users they have left. This money is also being spent on crap like executive bonuses and acquiring adtech firms, so no wonder people feel alienated.

What should they do instead? Their "Program" (ie. non-management) salaries alone are $200M+ per year. That's not something you can replace with a Patreon.
There's a spectrum of efficiency/redundancy choices an organization can make. On one (theoretical) end of the spectrum the organization maximally leverages each individual's unique skills/knowledge. This is the most efficient part of the spectrum. On the other end every person is an interchangeable cog. This is the most resilient but also least efficient part of the spectrum. Small organizations usually skew much more to the efficiency end of the spectrum because they typically have significant resource constraints. As an organization grows, more people depend on its existence, and my observation has been that resilience and self preservation typically become more important than efficiency. This phenomenon is not unique to governments, it happens in all kinds of organizations.
I feel the same way. All of git's weirdness seems totally reasonable once you understand it on its own terms. It doesn't even take a ton of understanding to get that that point either.
Unless I’m mistaken, XNU’s license (APSL) doesn’t forbid it being forked and reused in other projects (FOSS license compatibilities aside).

For example like how OpenIndina was forked from OpenSolaris (CDDL) when Oracle dropped OpenSolaris development and support.

APSL has been approved by the FSF which other “Source Available” type licenses aren’t.

Personally though, I’d still rather people supported (for example) FreeBSD rather than Darwin/XNU.
This. I’m starting to wonder if it could be possible to raise some funds and hire people to work on Firefox (and Firefox only). Maybe partner with the FF forks to help raise money? I don’t really know how that would work.
Oh how I love a good game UX for DevOps.
Rubicon Model
Looks like it is Mac/iOS only.
You can view the website without registering though? Just click the link and browse without registering.
I was just checking their site. Not even mention of Firefox other than an external quote? Looked a bit shady tbh.
They also post to Threads

https://www.threads.net/@fireflyaerospace
With the older tree-sitter package[1], I was able to use it with the existing major modes. The new built-in emacs tree-sitter seems to be more ambitious, involving new major modes.

[1] https://emacs-tree-sitter.github.io/
Hate to break it to you, but DDG browser is either WebView, WebView2 or WebKit dependent on the platform.

Note how two of those are still Chromium.
LSD showed good efficacy in anxiety with no signals of "lifetime of mental health issues" or other safety concerns, so isn't it possible that the problems you describe are really caused by contamination or adulteration of substances purchased on the black market rather than the drug itself?

Perhaps, rather than casting aspersions based on anecdotes on an entire category of potentially useful drugs, we should credit actual data generated in the clinic. Or maybe your warning should be about the fact that extra-legally obtained substances might contain almost anything regardless of what they're sold as.
I think this framing isn't quite right either. DeepSeek's R1 isn't very different from what OpenAI has already been doing with o1 (and that other groups have been doing as well). As for distilling - the R1 "distilled" models they released aren't even proper (logit) distillations, but just SFTs, not fundamentally new at all. But it's great that they published their full recipes and it's also great to see that it's effective. In fact we've seen now with LIMO, s1/s1.1, that even as few as 1K reasoning traces can get most LLMs to near SOTA math benchmarks. This mirrors the "Alpaca" moment in a lot of ways (and you could even directly mirror say LIMO w/ LIMA).

I think the main takeaway of GPT4.5 (Orion) is that it basically gives a perspective to all the "hit a wall" talk from the end of last year. Here we have a model that has been trained on by many accounts 10-100X the compute of GPT4, is likely several times larger in parameter count, but is only... subtly better, certainly not super-intelligent. I've been playing around w/ it a lot the past few days, both with several million tokens worth of non-standard benchmarks and talking to it and it is better than previous GPTs (in particular, it makes a big jump in humor), but I think it's clear that the "easy" gains in the near future are going to be figuring out how as many domains as possible can be approximately verified/RL'd.

As for the release? I suppose they could just have kept it internally for distillation/knowledge transfer, so I'm actually happy that they released it, even if it ends up not being a really "useful" model.
I haven’t seen the main impetus for the layoffs brought up yet: the people let go were unable or unwilling to send an email listing 5 things they accomplished in the last week, twice. People are acting like DOGE is attacking tech support recklessly with a chainsaw. This appears to be a targeted cut of insubordinate or redundant individuals.
> What rocket equation cares is reaction mass not energy: ve

Break out exhaust velocity.
> Despite tensions over Taiwan, Zhou sees Trump as overall being “rather friendly” towards China, noting that the tariffs on Chinese imports announced in Trump’s first days in office were much lower than the 60% he had threatened.

Just like you would call someone friendly towards you for announcing to set your garden shed on fire, instead of your house as they had threatened earlier.
It's WebKit. The number of browser UIs is less relevant than the engines.
You suggested Australia and Canada have something in common with the US in this area that Germany doesn’t - but when challenged you can’t actually name anything specific, you just fall back on vague generalities

> IMO, the only large federations structurally comparable to Germany are probably France and Italy.

Unlike Australia/Canada/Germany/US (among others), neither France nor Italy are federations, both are unitary states with some degree of devolution (significantly more for Italy)
Money is fungible. Every dollar you donate earmarked to "Firefox engineers" can theoretically be offset by the Mozilla foundation/corporation moving one dollar to something else. This eventually breaks down if the sums are large enough, but at the scales that individual donations can muster, it'll probably hold.
I completely agree with you, yet this morning I was looking at pictures of Lingchi execution, and now I'm picturing the victim thinking to themselves "you know, my problems really aren't that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things."

For those also morbidly curious (consider yourself warned) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingchi
Installing LibreWolf on Apple Silicon seems to require disabling the macOS Gatekeeper.
No. Trump had the largest share, not the majority.
Schools reviving shop class
Not every organization can make decent clients/apps. And those that can will embed unblockable ads and dark patterns into them.

For example Amazon.com is usable with an adblocker but the Amazon app is a horrific mess of ads. Facebook.com can be made barely usable using a dedicated browser extension but their app is similarly 95% ads and “suggested content” and 5% actual content from your friends.
I’ve seen a lot of positivity surrounding login.gov on HackerNews. I’ve never used the service and am unfamiliar with the quality of its implementation. Many commenters here point to login.gov as an example of the US government shipping good software. [1]

1. From the end-user’s perspective, what makes this a quality service? Is it simply better than other government alternatives, or does it compete with equivalent modern services from the private sector?

2. From the technologist's perspective, why is this considered quality software? I see it's an open-source Ruby on Rails app[2] with basic documentation, tests, and monitoring. As a non-RoR developer, I'm curious where this project falls on the spectrum from merely adequate to exceptional, and why.

[1] e.g., in this comment section: “login.gov is one of the few government services that as a private sector techie I'm in awe of”

[2] https://github.com/18F/identity-idp/
Judging by the features they have been adding into Firefox lately, I would guess that actually just maintaining and updating the browser doesnt cost anywhere to $200m per year.
Look to your peers as the ultimate litmus test of capability and velocity. Shitty peers mean you are in a line of work that has little or no future for technical growth.

Here is a checklist of things to look for:

* cannot differentiate their products needs or priorities from their personal needs

* cannot measure things

* fears writing original software

* cannot write documentation

* cannot write emails

* cannot do work outside of a highly specific tech stack
https://archive.ph/iGeZf
I think schematics are easier to read than looking at a (fritzing?) breadboard layout.
Discrete resistors aren't necessary for the buttons if you enable the internal pullups on the RP2040.
The same reason why text LLMs show exaggerated emotions (enthusiasm about your questions, super-apologetic tone when you dislike the answer, etc).

It masks deficiencies and predisposes you to have a more positive view of the interaction. Think of the most realistic and immediate ways to monetize this tech. It's customer support. Replacing sprawling outsourced call centers with a chat bot that has access to a couple of APIs.

These bots often interact with people who are in some sort of distress. Missed flight, can't access bank account, internet not working. A "friendly" and "empathetic" chatbot will get higher marks.
Will achieve 80% automation in coding by year-end, engineers will be out of jobs
> broken election system in the US, which has made it practically impossible for any new party or independent candidate to establish themself.

As in ballot access restrictions and how the two big parties collude to keep other candidates out of the presidential debates? Or the low turnout for primaries? Or how voters don't pay enough attention to local races?
You want to downplay the malice to avoid arguments about whether it's really malicious. I want to spotlight the malice because it's really fucking bad and a lot of people are going to get hurt, and that's not an accidental outcome.
When testing mobile apps, how do you manage the data at the backend? i.e how do you ensure that data that you see in the app is he same every time and actions during the test do not affect the data for the next test?

When testing the backend in frameworks such as Rails, this is taken care of by seed data and DB transactions.
Is there a good alternative to thunderbird on desktop?

Edit - Windows options?

For web access I use RoundCube. FairEmail on Android.
"Yes, your honour, I did shoot him point blank in the chest. But you can't use that fact as evidence that I wanted to kill him, that's just evidence of how he died."

Murder, manslaughter, intent, accident, purpose, neglect. We have many words that try to put a degree of malice on the act of taking a life, but the life is still gone.

At some point, you need to draw a line in the sand and say "They're going where I can't follow.". Right now, it seems like you're drawing the line right after they come out and tell the world that they specifically intend to burn America to the ground and auction off the remains for their personal profit. Where you draw your line is your own personal choice, but it's worth thinking about ahead of time.
Wow! Thanks for posting this.

Stanley Jordan is one of my favorite guitarists. I had no idea about his his ties to computer music, but according to Wikipedia he worked with Paul Lansky at Princeton. This in turn led me to stumble upon this two-part podcast hosted at Princeton Engineering featuring Jordan:

https://engineering.princeton.edu/news/2024/03/19/episode-1-...

This is part of a larger series called "Composers and Computers" -- https://engineering.princeton.edu/series/composers-computers...
Yes, we all know that. But the ones that "don't want" to know that are the lawyers and the legal entities. Whatever we scream down here, Mozilla Corporation is the one who will face those legal confrontations, and whatever we agree implicitly here with the softwares won't hold candles to those lawyers and courts without explicit legal wordings.
"If you want to turn someone into an anti-government laissez faire capitalist, send them to work for the Fed for a few years. If you want to turn someone into a communist, send them to work on Wall Street for a few years."

Someone who used to work in finance told me that once.

Humans are very, very bad at large scale organizational efficiency. I have never seen a very large organization that is not an absolute disaster in terms of waste. The relationship seems to be exponential as a function of organizational size.

There's an extra wrinkle with government though: I am not sure we want government to be too efficient. Government has a monopoly on force. Making it into a bureaucratic tar pit is one time tested way to restrain it and make sure it's subject to proper checks. The cost is high, but the cost of a runaway murderous regime is higher.
I wonder why they haven't tried that yet:

Firefox Support Edition, for $10 a month you get nothing (or maybe some Sync stuff) but all the funds go to Firefox exclusively, and your copy will show a pretty star on startup or something else.

Patron Edition: for $20 a month, same thing but you also get the VPN from Mullvad.

160M users. If 10% subscribe, you get $160M every month. I'm a marketing genius.
Datura is an interesting example that proves that what makes drugs criminalized is not their potential for damage, but rather their potential for fun.

Datura can (and I'm sure does) fuck you up permanently. It's perfectly legal.

MDMA is far safer, but far more fun, and so illegal.

Alcohol is interesting in this context. Kind of fun, kind of dangerous.

In other words, what the govt is trying to minimize is not harm, but rather "incidence of mind-altered states" which reduces to "criminalize those substances that are so unambiguously delightful that if they were legal people would take them all the time, regardless of danger, risk, or health effects."

This also explains why psychiatric medicine sucks: it's not allowed to be fun! If it were fun, it would be prone to "abuse" (read: recreational usage). That results in an entire class of treatments being disallowed, and makes available only those where the side effects (constipation, brain fog, loss of libido, etc) are of greater magnitude then any mood-altering effects.
Which facts do you believe are not straight?
Opera is chrome based. the last non chrome opera was 12.x
Trump calls for creation of 'crypto strategic reserve'
They are not. Most of the apps embed a browser.

HN client would use what, RSS? HN does not have an API to get at the posts now?

X is dead and buried. Pipewire is almost ready instead for the purpose, but the UI needs to be made. And remote input handling.

OpenAI is a proprietary system, it can crash and burn at you at any time. Go run Sonnet or Claude or something.
Mostly the former. I wanted our website to celebrate storytelling, and naming it after one of the oldest Japanese stories felt fitting. Plus, I did love Kaguya from the anime—so that's a bonus. :)
> They haven't had the best interests of there users in mind for a long time

Mozilla are a non-profit. They don’t work for their users. I’m honestly convinced a non-profit open-source model isn’t a good fit for browser development.

Kagi’s Orion [1] has the right idea. If the users pay you’re accountable to them.

[1] https://kagi.com/orion/
Not until the USA invades Venice.
Millenarian philosophers whose arguments rest on this kind of technological singularity/rapture event, especially one fueled by technocapital development have to contend with the fact that historically capital has stepped away from the fray multiple times. And it's in their interest to, as they want to preserve class relations. A bolstered welfare state and worker protections passed during times of upheaval have happened periodically when there's been backlash. This is how we end up in "The End of History", and though that seems to be unraveling, there's no reason to believe the politics of today aren't a temporary push of capital to reorganize the world that will also come with a backlash. This is where I take issue with orthodox Marxism, because ultimately capital does not want to destroy class relations. Will this be the case in the future? I'm skeptical of anyone saying it won't or can't, but I ultimately have no interest in this kind of prediction market philosophy of historical materialism.
I agree with your observations, but your comment gives the perfect context to understand why in my opinion, by rapidly expanding web standards, Google makes it harder for independent browsers to sustain themselves (deliberately or not - I don't know).

Web API surface is large, and if we see new features like:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43113790
and developers start using it, then websites start to "look worse" in Firefox (or work slower if polyfills are used).. then in order to keep up, Mozilla might feel pressured to expand their engineering team to implement things, and this is expensive..
That is a feature, not a bug. Government is our safety net which has catastrophic consequences when it fails.

If you have issues with certain programs or funding, then that is handled by congress NOT the executive.
> the hivemind's opinion was solidified long ago

I have vetoed it at several organisations on the basis of its crypto tie in. Has that changed?
git is paradise, I now have to use svn, fuck that shit
Chacon & Straub’s Pro Git, available for free online [1], is an excellent resource and has a lot of visual diagrams.

[1] https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2
Gnome Evolution works for me. There's Geary, but that never won me over.
It's organic food vs plastic noodles. But it goes only as long as people can hope to tell real fish apart from artificial ones in the pond. We are desperate and running back to our biological habitats - with real people, real talk and real imperfection.
>>> The difference is private companies that accumulate too much waste and useless things can fail and be replaced.

Like health care and higher education?
Plastic bottles easier to recycle with new degradable glue
How does AI keep up if they shutdown their primary sources?
Really?
How many requested features have they implemented? Do you vote with the amount of money you pay to them?
> damage from musk n co will be monumental in the years to come.

That is the point.
Thanks for this. I’m planning a tour of hacker spaces, maker spaces, and any DIY-related places across Europe in April and May. Will definitely be using this for my research. If you have any other recommendations for Berlin and surrounding areas, I’d love to hear them.
Thanks for the advice - maybe I will have more questions in near future about this
https://archive.is/q9a5B

https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/01/world/...
Kmail also still exists.
> If you use something frequently you should know it in-depth.

I prefer to remain oblivious to many things. Two views of the Mississippi and all that.

Git works reliably and achieves my humble expectations. Thanks git.

But in reality I use about the same set of commands. The exception being ‘cherry-pick’ which I avoid solely on disliking the name.
> How many requested features have they implemented?

One! And I haven’t even started paying for Orion directly! (I pay healthily for their search product.)
No, remove the quarantine flag on the command-line (find how on Google).
That program shaped my brain in ways I can't articulate. Took things I learned about computers and animation as an 11yo for granted as basic knowledge.
It probably wasn't mine[0], but this is how I tend to put it:

>> "The more you can see the inputs and outputs as blobs of "stuff," the better. If LLMs think, it's not in any way we yet understand. They're probability engines that transform data into different data using weighted probabilities."

Stuff in, stuff out.

[0] https://kyefox.com/ai-assisted-creativity/