skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I bet there are still some software developers there who genuinely care about the mission.

Other than that, I've had to backspace and abort comments so much tonight, because I was angry beyond decorum, at the repeated betrayals.
Can you share more about Weitek and the work there? This name is new to me and I'm sure to a lot of people here.
Their CEO made some comments in support of Trump. https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-tru...
That was the funny story - Nokia got it's latest CEO (Stephen Elop) from M$, successfully almost-destroyed company, got it acquired by M$ and hopped back to M$. So, probably, it was the plan all along
Obligatory GDPR post.

Data of UK and EU users is protected. Why doesn't the USA have such sensible data protection laws; the only hostility I see is from surveillance capitalists spreading their FUD.
> "Chrome works marginally better"

Performance, compatibility, security. Chromium runs faster, it works with more websites, it's sandbox is better, particularly on Android. I don't care much about memory usage as I don't need a billion tabs open at once (does anyone). There's options available beyond Chrome that offer most of the same privacy benefits as Firefox does.

I think marginal is an understatement. As for Mozilla's business model, what business model? They're throwing everything at the wall to see if it sticks and virtually nothing has, all the while their browser has languished. Going full cynic, at this point the only reason it is allowed to exist is because Google deem it useful to have it around as a counterpoint to accusations that they have a monopoly.
I just wish this was GPL (or any other copyleft licence). With everything that's happened over the past decade I would have thought it was obvious. If you contribute to permissively licenced software you are working for corporations for free. If you contribute to a copyleft project you are working for the community. I just don't want to see history repeat itself. If this ever gets good enough it will be eaten by big tech just like everything else. Copyleft is what we need. Stallman was right.
Personally I think their big, incomprehensibly stupid manoeuver was the Skype vs Skype for Business (Link) split. Had they merged them into a single client that could speak either protocol and share contact lists the story would have been very different.

Why are megacorps so incomprehensibly clueless about this? Is the money pit so deep that they knock each other in while in-fighting for control on the edge of it?
Is it official then?

Most of us have been waiting for this moment for a while. The transformer architecture as it is currently understood can't be milked any further. Many of us knew this since last year. GPT-5 delays eventually led to non-tech voices to suggest likewise. But we all held our final decision until the next big release from OpenAI as Sam Altman has been making claims about AGI entering the workforce this year, OpenAI knowing how to build AGI and similar outlandish claims. We all knew that their next big release in 2025 would be the final deciding factor on whether they had some tech breakthrough that would upend the world (justifying their astronomical valuation) or if it would just be (slightly) more of the same (marking the beginning of their downfall).

The GPT-4.5 release points towards the latter. Thus, we should not expect OpenAI to exist as it does now (AI industry leader) in 2030, assuming it does exist at all by then.

However, just like the 19th century rail industry revolution, the fall of OpenAI will leave behind a very useful technology that while not catapulting humanity towards a singularity, will nonetheless make people's lives better. Not much consolation to the world's super rich who will lose tons of money once the LLM industry (let us remember that AI is not LLM) falls.

EDIT: "will nonetheless make people's lives better" to "might nonetheless make some people's lives better"
How many tabs do you have open? I am often surprised at such statements, because my browser have basically never been slow the last 20 years. Like, never. Sometimes they crash / hang. But then I view on screen sharing colleagues who have like 200+ tabs open, and then I'm like "ah, this must be it". Not discarding your case but maybe try to have better digital hygiene?
It's seamless-ish.

Sometimes the more aggressive privacy settings stop some sites from rendering properly unless you add canvas exceptions, for example Openstreetmap and UK National Rail.

I'm happy to make the effort.

/Librewolf on desktop, Waterfox on mobile.
I suppose the main target here is to sell firefox sync bookmark and history data?

It is possible to host your own firefox sync instance but it's too much work. I hope it gets easier with these announcements lighting a fire under people.
Just wanted to say thanks for your work on Nomad. Amazing tool that had me rethink a lot of things about how i work with infra and software in general and is always pleasant to work with by itself.
PyPy v7.3.19: release of Python 2.7, 3.10 and 3.11 beta
Well, I suppose one might say there's no risk so long as the corporate veil isn't pierced and the company is limited somehow. But that is a bit cynical and reductive. In cultures that hate piracy, the personal reputational risk is high. Besides, company officeholders are sometimes sued personally for their company’s ills. Even if they can defend themselves, it will cost much money and years of stress. Another risk, I suppose, is various opportunity costs—one wastes time and funding that could have been better used.

I also agree with your assessment, by the way.
Firefox is open source. You can take the source code and strip out all
of the malware, spying, telemetry and corporate harm leaving a safe
and private browser (to the extent any modern browser can be).

There are multiple forks that do that. Download one of them
instead. Mozilla Corporation has no control over those, so if you
don't like what Mozilla make, exercise your software freedom.

The problem with Mozilla, as far as I can see, is not the the
compromises they make for obtaining money (everyone suffers that), its
that they're deceptive and underhand about it. That makes them
unethical. I wrote plenty regarding that here [0]

[0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/you-are-too-dumb-for-tech/
How is it compromised?
Found this gem in Recorder.cpp of generals:

//Kris: Patch 1.01 November 10, 2003 (integrated changes from Matt Campbell)
// Since we don't seem to have any *visible* desyncs when replaying games, but get this warning
// virtually every replay, the assumption is our CRC checking is faulty. Since we're at the
// tail end of patch season, let's just disable the message, and hope the users believe the
// problem is fixed. -MDC 3/20/2003
//TheInGameUI->message("GUI:CRCMismatch");
I don't understand or know alot about extensions, but what is so incredibly impossible about adding new capabilities to manifestv3? It's a manifest describing what the addon wants to do and some UX to allow it right?
Not true. Nokia was already dying. Microsoft made a bad attempt to save Nokia when the heart had already stopped.
I think power users are the type of users who can be bothered to install a browser that supports the features that they want (and doesn't implement the misfeatures that they don't want) ;)
I spend a lot of time on the internet and try to avoid the socials, so I visit a healthy variety of websites of all kinds.

But I never encountered a single "works better with chrome" message. Am I missing something?
Oh yeah, I should have gotten that!
Setting humanitarian arguments aside, here it is:
Because preventing pandemics is cheaper than ignoring their possibilities.
if i want to block data collection by Mozilla, what do i configure in pi-hole?
This is similar to "burn-in" for markov-chain montecarlo. When the chain is initialized to some bad value, it requires a number of iterations to get into a "good chain". But for a uniform RNG, any value should be good.

So the RNG doesn't seem great.
yes you can download your skype chats https://secure.skype.com/en/data-export
>The majority of Americans voted for this.

Not true. Trump got 49.8% of the popular vote [1].

[1]https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/results/president?election...
Using Microsoft's Copilot to Expose Private GitHub Repositories
So the underlying storage is conventional, it's still tuples of some kind, and it's only a matter of how indexes are laid out? Otherwise, I'm struggling to see how it could "optimise" for certain access patterns. How would a typical graph database index be different from a btree access method in Postgres?
Whatever legal requirements might be at play, the fundamental difference is that a US company will comply, whereas a non-cooperative external party would still need to be broken, which is very much non-trivial in the age of strong cryptography, even if you're NSA.
They never did that, but here, as these things are being purged.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250131212146/https://www.usaid...

https://web.archive.org/web/20250131235054/https://www.usaid...

Where the money went:

https://www.theglobalfund.org/en/

https://www.usaspending.gov/award/ASST_NON_AIDGHIO1700003_72...
I've been using Mozilla since the browser was literally called Mozilla, and I remain loyal simply because I don't think we should fragment the ecosystem. One company focusing its development resources is a lot better than 3 open source projects.

But fact is that Mozilla is effing up big time. They remain in the bay area where developers are paid super high salaries when they should be a 100% remote company. They have bugs and issues decades old. They keep flirting with big business.

They are also our last big corporate hope against the enshittification of the web.
my theory is that their own DeepSeek writes the code for them, so they are highly productive.
that may be great for stand up comedy, but on HN we tend to expect slightly more substantiated discussions.
C64 Demo "Nine" – Magic Secrets Explained [video]
The illusion of mozilla having any privacy principles collapsed for me on May 2019 when they required users to enable telemetry to allow using adblock and tracking blocking extensions.
My first thoughts exactly. How do you prevent this from turning into what we had with flash if you don't provide the framework to build the UI components.
Only if they disguise as non malware I guess?
TCP slow start is not an issue for load balancers, as operatings system cache the congestion window (cwnd) on a per-host basis, even after termination of all connections to that host. That is, next time a connection to the same backend host is created, the OS uses a higher initial congestion window (initcwnd) during slow start based on the previous cache value. It does not matter if the target backend host is in the same datacenter or not.
> Users should never had the power to block what we did in the first place.

-- Some prominent ad company which happens to run a search engine as a side business and build a web browser to make ad-targeting better for their customers.
Yeah should have figured parent meant Musk, I've referred to him as President Musk enough times to make the same point.
> you've put Apple on such a high pedestal that you won't accept any criticism of them.

Apple's market share is like 20%, 30% globally. There is clearly a lot to criticise; most people don't use iPhones. If you want to compare an Apple phone and a Huawei phone then Huawei has them beat on a number of things. One of them can probably makes a phone detectably safer than the other too.

The issue is the criticism being used to justify going from decisions being made in Apple (capable of getting double digit percentages of the world that they make the best smartphone) to the EU (incapable of convincing anyone they know how to make a smartphone & a track record of driving business out of Europe).

What if we let people who don't have a proven track record of gross incompetence make the decisions? I think that is a good starting point. Giving design decisions to the only group of people to have destroyed and bungled their own smartphone industry is a bad idea.
Nah, I'm pretty sure that Musk in particular genuinely hates trans folk at this point, and he's certainly a major part of "THEY" with actual power.
Google Play Music also used to do this.
My life is being destroyed by Donald Trump
Yeah I agree parent meant Musk. It really is bizarre the power he's been handed. Crazy the party that supposedly backs 'small government' is fine with that even if it takes the form of an unelected fool billionaire being given unreasonable amounts of power and doing nothing but causing damage.
Honest question since I am not exactly of a skill level that really understands what goes on under the hood of popular browsers, but I am baffled as to why people are so resistant to just switching to Firefox.

Every time this conversation comes up here and elsewhere, you get a huge swath of comments decrying Mozilla or suggesting Brave instead, which is Chrome in a trenchcoat last I checked. I've used all sorts of browsers over the years, and I keep returning to Firefox, at this point being able to configure it for good level of privacy in less than a minute with each install on a new machine.

My experience is perhaps skewed, but I view Google and Microsoft as modern enemies of the Web I want to see happen, perhaps having started off the hero, but living long enough to see themselves become the villain. Their products seem actively and aggressively hostile to users and compliant with websites that demand we use them for "best experience" which, by now we should all know means harvesting our data.

Again, I have some ignorance here that needs to be rectified, but where are the true apples to apples comparisons of all browsers so that users can use to evaluate which is best? I don't mean just surface level features and marketing woo, but what's happening at the code level that allows the developer or websites we visit to treat us like data thralls. Where are the resources to learn about that in these discussions?
> (does anyone)

Oh yes. And you don't even need that many tabs open for Chrome to eat half of your RAM.
Prices have come down
Yes, I was thinking the same.. For several years, I'm pretty happy with PathFinder by Cocoatech: https://cocoatech.io/

The things I miss the most when I accidentically open a Finder window: Cut files wit CMD+X to move them (never understood this when coming from Windows), cycle the files in a folder (start on top if you reach bottom and vice versa) and the comprehensive info bar on the right for files and folders. Give it a try :)
Worked for all the AI labs as well. Turns out you can steal the entirety of copyrighted works in existence on the internet without consequence if the resulting company is big enough.
> If you use the uBlock Origin extension in Google Chrome or Edge, you should probably start looking for alternative browsers or extensions—either way.

I've used Firefox on android for a while as android chrome hasn't had adblocking for a long time.

Am pretty anti-google these days but it'll take some time to untangle myself from the ecosystem.

Anyway, I've largely moved back to Firefox on the desktop too, swapped a few icons about so my muscle memory now opens Firefox instead of Chrome and it's been totally painless. An easy win.
Is there where stripe people vent out. You must have been selling something dodgy or not responding to customers, otherwise why would people want to dispute it?
I mean, local LLM, for example: can it be run with llamafile instead of cloud AI?
And here we are, in a world where Apple has made arm work wonders for them and Windows still isn't really a thing on ARM 10 years after ballmer resigned.

Then again arm doesn't seem to be necessary when looking at AMDs APU offerings. It was just a decade of intel struggling with their fabs.
Tech workers resign to not dismantle critical public services
This is not politics anymore
> and making a whole new web browser from the ground up is effectively impossible because the browsers vendors have weaponized web standards complexity against any newcomers

I would argue the exact opposite. Web standards have steadily increased in quality. The web has become much less quirky over the years and you no longer need to emulate broken browsers in order to get a functional browsing experience.

Building a web browser is hard, but it's not impossible. Just look at how much progress Ladybird has made in a year. If Ladybird isn't an existence proof I don't know what would qualify.

Our industry as a whole is way too willing to put up with broken software for literal decades because building a better version is believed to be impossible. And that's how we end up squandering endless (volunteer) resources to marginally improve old projects that essentially have no future.

We can have a better future, but only if we choose to build it. As Henry Ford said: "Whether you think you can, or you think you can't – you're right."
Yes, but there seems to be a growing hiatus between the tools used by power users and normal ones. Fifteen years ago everyone had a PC with Firefox, now this browser has a marginal market share, and even personal computers are starting to be a second-class platform, the focus being phones. And products used by a minority tend to be less supported – as shown by the increasing number of sites that don't support Firefox.
> will nonetheless make people's lives better

Probably not the lives of translators or graphic designers or music compositors. They will have to find new jobs. As llm prompt engineers, I guess.
Google - mozilla contract alone gives mozilla 500 000 000$.

Wikimedia budget is 170 000 000$.

I'm sure that developing a browser is more expensive, would mozilla be able to make it work with at best a third of the budget ? I don't think so..
Firefox is the best browser on Windows IMO
> Is the money pit so deep that they knock each other in while in-fighting for control on the edge of it?

I remember somebody saying "Micorosft is an amalgam of different power centers and dynamics. Some people inside genuinely loves open source and wants to be part of that, and some hate it like it's the evil itself. So, there's in-fighting and power struggles in many areas in Microsoft".

I think the comment came after a project manager personally gutted .NET Core's Hot Reload support to give closed source parts a boost, and things got very ugly both inside and outside of Microsoft.
That code is a few lines maintaining a mapping though, changing it is not going to be hard and all the mappings are captured explicitly which makes it even more straightforward versus shaving off lines of code by making some of them implicit (e.g. by seeing a pattern in the mapping and using an if statement to capture them all). I'd really love to know what you think it should be to be more maintainable!
Lab and hub are different words.
> ...had access to the best porn tracker in the world where I could find almost anything I wanted and trust me it did not fulfill me.

Why does everything have to be about fulfillment and enrichment?

> ...Watching porn is like eating junk food or doing cocaine. Next dose you need something stronger, or more novel.

Did you similarly cancel all your streaming services? How is binge-watching a Netflix show different than binge-watching porn?
Apple removed encryption for iCloud users in UK. I don't see the outrage on HN why?
> I remember trying to hire people for it and not a single person ever even heard of it.

I know, it's really sad. Kubernetes won because of mindshare and hype and 500,000 CNCF consulting firms selling their own rubbish to "finally make k8s easy to use".
LaunchBar?
> It's amazing how much they dropped the ball during Covid.

Afaik Skype was a buggy mess and thereby not a good foundation for development, and very much had a reputation of being software for consumers, not businesses, so not a good foundation to make money.

Microsoft meanwhile is a corporate powerhouse, not a consumer powerhouse. Most of its profits are from corporate software and servers.

So it made sense that they developed MS Teams as a corporate product for their Office product range.

It's closing in on half a billion users and its annual (!) revenue already exceeds the purchase price of Skype. 90% of fortune 100 companies use it, and I think it's the go-to product for virtually all corporates that run on PC/Windows.

Not doing this sooner (14 years ago) is where they definitely dropped the ball. But during covid? I think MS completely nailed it with a hugely succesful rollout of an integrated tech in MS Teams.
It's all just part of Mozilla's ebb and flow. Give it until 2027. They will have lost all community support and be trailing in many browser metrics. And then they'll do something that once again builds them a niche of devoted fans.

It has happened before. And before that, and before that.
This has been solved for 10+ years. Properly configure your load balancer with HTTP keep alive and piplining.
I think Firefox on Android could be better, but even in its current state is better than Chrome.

The next step is start paying for Kagi...
Of the many things I don't understand what I really don't understand is why anyone keeps calling that shit show democratic country and "land of the free" and whatever
To Mozilla: if your intentions are indeed good as you claim in your post[1], then update the ToS accordingly.

Chrome is removing µBlock origin, I and probably a lot of other users saw this as a good moment to promote Firefox to our relatives, you are missing a chance and alienating your user base here.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/fi...
This sounds like flash all over again.
But at this point, why not switch to Firefox?
'Mac OS brings to top all windows of the respective app' - I bloody hate this behaviour.
Checkout https://github.com/Pometry/Raphtory, it's written in Rust, embedded (the binaries are about 20mb) and you can use the Python APIs as a drop-in replacement for NetworkX. Disclaimer, I am one of the people behind it.
> No better place to leave for

This is an amazingly common psychological trap. You wouldn't believe
the number of people, men as well as women, who end up in the therapy
chair, at the police station or at the hospital A&E, because they are
"stuck" with a violent and abusive partner.

The modern tech landscape is all about abuse. People use fancy names
for it like "enshitification" or "rot economy" - but at the end of the
day it's about domination and abusive relations.

A very common position here is that the victim sees "no alternative".

And... surprise surprise, where they get that idea from is the partner,
friends, group/organisation that is also toxic and colludes in
gas-lighting and co-abusing the victim into a limited worldview.

Once the victim spends any amount of time outside that mental prison,
they regain perspective and say... "Oh, so I actually do have
choices!".
You're right of course, it has virtual channels. I just think it would have been good to break with the old HTTP semantics and change to something reflecting modern usage.
Google will fix (but broken) song detection feature for Pixels
> One developer account can distribute to 100 iPhones without the App Store.

But I had 200 friends.

> You can distribute to an unlimited number of devices if you leave the app in a permanent beta test without full App Store approval. You simply distribute via Test Flight.

How does each user modify the code you've given them without them each needing their own developer account? The goal here is low-friction bazaar-style development of open source applications, where new users who may not know how to develop an app and have never done it before now can figure out how two change two lines of code in an existing app, and will if it means they can fix a problem they themselves have and then run it on their own device.

"You have to pay $100 to attempt that" creates friction and inhibits opportunistic improvements, which is the evil to be prevented.