skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Has spam email gone up exponentially in the past week?
Since about 1999, I have maintained my own mail servers, and probably have too many email accounts to mention (my own domains, of which there are several, gmail, work, which is O365, old work addresses, other companies email servers I maintain, etc), and I note that over the past week or so, spam that has not triggered filters has skyrocketed on all of my accounts (which are not related, e.g. usersnames and domains are different).

Am wondering, typically I see ups and downs in spam from one service or another (e.g. "gee, this week gmail sure is not doing a good job" or "wow, my own filters are doing great, not a spam message in three weeks" etc), but this past seven days have seen an across the board exponential increase in pure spam that filters just are not filtering.

This leads me to also wonder about the state of the art in machine learning spam filtering. There was a time when there seemed to be great interest or promise in it, but quick searches only seem to revel the same (older) posts about training simple models, which seem to marginally preform better than bayes (aka spamassassin/amavisd).

Just an endnote, not interested in arguing about running my own mail servers, or complaining, truly just curious if other mail admins have seen this huge uptick, or are thinking about ML for spam detection.
Yes, but at least one avenue of attack is cut off by using a walled-garden phone.

The problem is scammers. We have a lot of vulnerable people in this world, saying “well obviously they’re too stupid to participate in modern society” isn’t really a good answer.
The suggestion is not for all distributions to support all applications, it's for Debian to support system-wide disabling of telemetry in the software it does support.
That's MSDN, and these "senior hobbyists" were given a badge by MS to look credible: "MVP" (most valuable professional).

Cherry on top: you used to pay to have an MSDN membership and access this wonderful community.

To be fair though, the early MSDN was really good, and in a distant past MVP was a real achievement (say early 2000s). Now it's a weird mix real issues and "my printer blinks red, how to fix?"

I don't think anyone reads MSDN at Microsoft anymore, it's a deadland, but I guess they generate some metrics of user engagement and product feedback from there.
> How is sharing data with partners in order to make Firefox commercially viable (i.e. getting money in exchange) not "selling data"? Anonymized or aggregated data is still data, and it's quite disingenuous of them to try to weasel it in by changing the definition.

This situation isn't perfect, but I disagree that this is particularly weasely or disingenuous. It's not black & white and there are meaningful differences here.

I think the assumption of 'selling data' and primary concern from most users is the sale of their identifiable personal data - i.e. telling advertisers "this user is interested in X", using their privileged position as a browser to track and collect that information. This is absolutely what Facebook is doing when they sell your data, for example.

The description here is suggesting that Firefox are still committed to never doing that or anything similar. That is the main thing I'd want to know, so that's great.

However, it sounds like they may be selling generic anonymous data in some way - for example telling Pocket what percentage of people use the Pocket extension, or telling Google what percentage of people change their search engine away from Google. Both of those are cases where you can imagine they might receive significant extra income from partners given that data, and they feel this is reasonable but means they can technically no longer say the 'never sell your data'.

You could consider that level of data sharing problematic of course. That said, there is spectrum of problems here, and personally (and I think for most people) I am much more concerned about the tracking & distribution of actual personal identifiable data than I am about generic metrics like those, if that is what's happening (unfortunately, they haven't explained much further so this is still somewhat speculation - I fully agree more precise language would be very helpful).
Yeah I was just about to say this -- I used Sametime via Pidgin (I think it may still have been called Gaim back then) on my work Linux machine and it was actually quite nice.

My favourite Sametime feature within Pidgin was, well, tabs (I can't remember if the Windows client had tabs as well..?), which was revolutionary for an IM client in 2005.

But my secret actual favourite feature was the setting which automatically opened an IM window /tab when the other person merely clicked on your name on their side (because the Sametime protocol immediately establishes a socket connection), so you could freak them out by saying hello even before they'd sent their initial message.
> Your use of Firefox must follow Mozilla’s Acceptable Use Policy

The fact that Firefox isn't a "Mozilla Service" seems irrelevant.
GDP is adjusted for inflation.

Some trade barriers have also been lowered since Brexit, reducing costs - e.g. EU protectionist tariffs and quotas on things such as oranges and rice which reduces the cost of living.

The effects of Brexit are tiny compared to the lingering effects of Covid, and the increase in global prices caused by the invasion of Ukraine.
Ah ok, but do they have a worse track-record then Google Microsoft or Mozilla?
so it's still controlled by a single (anonymous!!!) person
> Like when I click a window, Mac OS brings to top all windows of the respective app

It doesn't happen here with any of the app currently in use: Chrome, Finder, Terminal, Outlook, or Teams.
you should make an ai enabled ear acupuncture device.
In my experience, I have been "exempt" even though I have zero supervisory or management authority as an individual contributor. If there are people like me in any organization, the CEO should not get extra pay for being exempt.

Yes, it is a little extreme to demand median pay but this is the starting point of a conversation to highlight that CEO make 10 or 100 maybe more times the median salary.
But most of the coding assistants were glorified autocomplete. What agentic IDEs/aider/etc. can now do is definitely new.
I agree, which is why I used vanilla Firefox until now. I don't want or need the additional privacy features LibreWolf (or other forks) offer.

But I don't want to use a browser from a company which gives themselves a broad license to do whatever they want with whatever data I enter into the browser. It's probably just a matter of time until Mozilla exercises this right to send stuff I enter into Firefox back to Mozilla for ad targeting and AI training purposes, and I don't want that. I have some faith that the LibreWolf team will notice such features and rip them out when they appear.
$100,000k is $100m. Is that what you meant? $100m bitcoin might be worth $1m in 10 years, or zero, or $10bn.

I don't think that qualifies as "losslessly".
The main problem with the "important part in cursive" is that it's Mozilla execs who decide what is actually a "to help you". There is no way to opt-out of "help".
How old is your kid? I have feeling digital native growing up with conversation voice assistant is another cohort/generation from digital native that grew up with phones. I'm taking 8 year olds being habituated to talking to AI not 16 year olds many of whom are closer to boomers and find it weird.
Flutter even had a DOM renderer which should in theory have fixed approximately all the issues (I don’t know for sure, I never knowingly encountered anything using it), but they’ve killed it off fairly recently, doubling down on the fundamentally unfixable direction that is the pure-canvas approach.
It doesn't have to. The tab order seems shortcuts are there and very usable... if anyone bothers to implement them.
Sir this is not X
cpitman!!!! Miss you a ton!!!
The 50s must have been odd
> I don't see how regulated entity is better in any way than individual.

I feel you. Regulatory bodies have definitely fallen short in many cases, and we've seen concerning proposals from governments that threaten digital privacy and freedom. "Who watches the watchmen" seems incredibly apt nowadays.

However, I feel there's a fundamental difference between imperfect accountability and no accountability at all. With a legal entity governed by stated policies, users have:

1. Transparency about who makes decisions and how

2. Clear terms that create binding commitments

3. Legal mechanisms for recourse if those commitments are violated

4. A persistent entity that can't simply disappear overnight

Perfect? Not really. The ICO in the UK, for example, hasn't been amazing at enforcing data protection. But the existence of these frameworks means that accountability is at least possible - there are levers that can be pulled if someone can be bothered to.

In contrast, with software maintained by anonymous or loosely affiliated individuals, there's no structural accountability whatsoever. If privacy promises are broken, users have no recourse beyond abandoning the software.

FOSS and auditability are valuable safeguards, sure, but they primarily protect against unintentional privacy violations that might be discovered in code reviews. They don't address the human element of intentional policy changes or decisions about data collection.
> Or we don't, and then have no one to blame but ourselves if it blows up in our faces.

Actually we have scammers to blame, this is pure victim-blaming on your part. I find it pretty awful when this sort of attitude is displayed towards people who are the victims of crime.

One perfectly valid way to take responsibility for oneself is to choose a secured platform that precludes these sorts of problems happening in the first place. Given that people must use technology to interact with their government, and increasingly their finances, this seems a great way to go about things.

> But building systems for the lowest common denominator is rarely the right solution.

This is a moral viewpoint, not a practical one. Pragmatically, it clearly is a perfectly fine solution for a lot of people. Myself included.

None of this is to say you shouldn’t e able to buy an open platform if you want one, but not everybody does, and it’s not to everyone’s advantage.
20 years? no jobs for sure. AI will do everything
My format used to be as follows:

* [ ] YYYY-MM-DD
* [ ] 1800: Dinner with parents
* [x] Walk the dog
* [ ] YYYY-MM-DD
* [ ] 0900: Interview new recruit
* [ ] Prepare interview questions
* [ ] Upload result to HR system

This worked really well for me and was easily searchable. One benefit would be that it is easily trackable in Git.

These days I have a little A6 lined notebook and manually list tasks there. Each page is a new day and the tasks are listed similarly. The only modification is that sometimes I put some letters to theme a task, i.e.:

* [ ] YYYY-MM-DD
* [x] Home: Walk the dog
You have a hardware implementation of Docker?
No, I didn't. I did get those emails a lot on my university dot edu email. I understand there are legacy/compatibility challenges with the telephone infrastructure but you'd think this problem is entirely solvable with emails. :/
Meta apologises over flood of gore, violence and dead bodies on Instagram
Nothing. The ToS is not part of the license to the code.
"Or why you should never download game mods"...

Like everything else, you shouldn't blindly search on github - or any other download site.

Only download from links referred from the official site if there's any, or the game's forum, or any other trustable and human reviewed source.
Ok that’s good! I’ll hav to try it out
Stictly speaking (non-recurrent) LLMs are Markov chains.

Per e.g. Wikipedia: "In probability theory and statistics, a Markov chain or Markov process is a stochastic process describing a sequence of possible events in which the probability of each event depends only on the state attained in the previous event."
Hey, check this one out with all the different flavors that existed out there. I think I made something better. https://cofyt.app

As far as I am aware, feel free to test it head-to-head. This is better than gecall, and you can chat with a transcript for detailed answers to your prompts
Would cdn-debian.org be allowed? Its on a different domain, but I've noticed a lot of websites use a different domain to host their CDN.
What is the definition of "help"? Is it showing ads to help you discover the products or services?
https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/who-really-owns-spotif...

> Speaking of industry incestuousness, I suggest you read more about Tencent’s 9.1 percent stakeholding in Spotify, which is awe-inspiring in its spider’s web of vested interests. The short version: Tencent Holdings is about to own 10 percent of Universal, which in turns owns around 3.5 percent in Spotify, which in turn owns around nine percent in Tencent Music Entertainment, which in turn is part-owned by Universal’s two main rivals (Warner and Sony), but remains majority owned by Tencent Holdings, which in turn owns 9.1 percent of Spotify. (And, yes, no kidding, that’s the short version.)
I'll keep using firefox simply because I keep it behind a proxy server with all pocket, mozilla, firefox and google domains blocked.

The larger impact I suspect this will have in my life, is that I'll increasingly turn to not using websites, opting instead to using tools like yt-dlp.

These changes didn't just happen because of a bunch of greedy ad pushers. This and many other changes over the last few decades came about by taking my tax money and pouring it into these companies to gain compliance to state agendas. This isn't something the 'community' will be able to stave off.

If the internet is just going to become another medium like TV, Radio and newspapers were for so many years, adding on top the ability of the producers to watch me watching them, then it's over. The tech community is full of intellectual dishonest sellouts. Game over. Let's push letsencrypt again in response to the state backdooring the certificate authorities, duuurrr. "AI", duurrrr.
I have been using Skype to call my parents every week for the last 15 years... and i still do. It works!
If I listen to robot voices for to long it gets unbearable. The fascinating part imho is that human voices apparently have other communication channels that bypass the conscious mind. Like regional accents contain a kind of collective mood but more granular. It must therefore be possible to encode a beneficial feeling into the robot voices. We could all be Irish :)
Smallest shooting video game uses nanoscale technology
syncthing for all my org files
If you interrupt antibiotic treatment (like we're right now to a few million people, no big deal) you evolve antibiotic-resistant strains that are no longer treatable.

- "According to the report, approximately 20% of TB cases globally are estimated to be resistant to at least one of the first- or second-line anti-TB drugs, and 5% are resistant to both isoniazid and rifampicin, the most powerful and commonly used antibiotics in first-line treatment. Of the estimated 480,000 cases of multidrug-resistant (MDR) TB, approximately 10% are either extensively drug-resistant (XDR)—with additional resistance to second-line drugs—or totally drug resistant."

- "While TB is curable when patients adhere to the treatment regimen, MDR- and XDR-TB are more problematic. Treatment options are limited, expensive, and often toxic, and drug therapy can last up to 2 years. The report estimates mortality rates of around 40% for MDR-TB and 60% for XDR-TB. And while China, India, Russia, and South Africa have the highest burden of MDR- and XDR-TB, widespread international travel and migration means drug-resistant TB has no borders."

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/antimicrobial-stewardship/report-... (2017)
The author implies the hardest part is HTML+CSS rendering + a JS engine. You still have to implement all of the IO and permissions etc, which I'd argue is still pretty hard. I'm a bit sceptic about this approach.
I'm not sure why it can't be both. Given the current walled environment of app stores, web pages are a much better way to ship apps across platforms. That doesn't have to detract from the native function of www. Should you make your client's website an inaccessible blob of interpreted bytecode in 2025? Probably not. But can you embed an awesome game inside it with some weird custom UI? Why not!
Think of it like Etsy but for multi category services!

If you're a founder you can offer someone a product review or a GTM consultation

If you're a developer, you can help people get started with coding, you can offer to debug code or do a code review

If you're a product manager, you can do a product review

And if you love dogs, you can offer to pet sit

Offer anything under the sun!

The possibilities are endless
You are forgetting that Firefox has been around until now with no profit except Google's bribe.

They could've at least tried to sell a paid version - what's the worst that could happen? Any sale would be on top of what they're currently earning per download, i.e. pure "profit" that could be reinvested in the product.

It never was an "either/or" proposition.
Like i said i'm not in the US, but our "healthcare secretary" equivalent similarly uttered "mask don't work, don't buy them, and if you have some, give them to hospital" at the start of Covid, amongst a littany of other disinformation, so honestly, not surprised.

It's like the GIEC group 3. If you really want to understand what is happening, you need to read group 1 and 2 data directly (i did that during Covid, it took 3 month and a new notetaking app), because you have science, and "science" (what's funny is that one of the justification for lying was "avoid sentiment of helplessness and despair").

Anyway, not surprising, USians "elites" seems super-condescending all the time (on both side), i think it's baked into their personality, so they lie to "reassure" or shit like this. We have the same in our country, even if its not as widespread.
What gets me is the whole cost structure is based on practically free services due to all the investor money. They’re not pulling in significant revenue with this pricing relative to what it costs to train the models, so the cost may be completely different if they had to recoup those costs, right?
Perhaps the legal situation is different somewhere, but I would think the browser isn't acting at all. It has no agency; it's just software running on my computer, following instructions I give it. Mozilla has no agency in that situation either; the software is running on my computer, not theirs.

The new terms grant Mozilla, the corporation a license to do things with my data.
> At least in Germany in hacker and IT-affine circles, you will often be frowned upon if you voluntarily use Chrome or Edge (except if you have a really good reason).

That's largely the same here, at least for anyone worth their salt. But how does that matter when Mozilla's pulling things like this?

For years now your only browser choices are "Google", and "funded by Google", and it shows.

I can't even give someone too hard of a time for using vanilla chromium or similar anymore; Not like it's any worse than literally every other browser offering nowadays, minus rare exceptions like librewolf or ungoogled chromium that also add a whole host of minor technical complications to use.
That bit pretty much sounds like "by using the software you're agreeing to whatever"
Write for Yourself
Correct, that quote is very typical corporate language that includes selling your data to advertising companies to ""help users discover new experiences which align with their interests"" or some other weasel speak. People acting like that language meaningfully changes the meaning are either painfully naive or think the rest of us are.

If it's simply a matter of principle, quoting the full section with no abridgements because we're larping like we're in a court room or something, whatever. But get real, that section doesn't make Mozilla look any better.
A Comment on Mozilla's Policy Changes
This approach to technology has serious problems. I would send a message to someone and turned off my computer, thinking that the message would be sent whenever the recipient was online. However, that was not the case. The message only arrived when we were online at the same time. Therefore, Skype is completely useless as a tool for asynchronous communication, for the main type of messaging!
Apple still does (CD is not required), it's called iTunes Match. It used to be standalone, but nowadays it's part of Apple Music.
its https://xkcd.com/927/ all over again
Why is he writing that there are only 2 browser engines, soon to be down to 1? I thought there were three (Webkit, Blink, Gecko). I assume the "soon to be" part is referring to the expected demise of Gecko?
You know, I was just wondering why no one has yet shaped the Rust vs C/C++ in US culture war terms. One side is clearly progressive in the sense of wanting to make changes for the sake of a better (more memory safe) future. The other side is more conservative, seeing enormous benefit in keeping the status quo unchanged.

And that's before getting into the politics of the people working on the language, of which I won't say more.

Here was me thinking we had at least one discussion where the US culture war hadn't metastasised. But I guess in the long run twitter.com/lundukejournal and friends will eventually win. Can't say I'm looking forward to it.
I think those are holdovers from Dune 2, if you search for Dune you'll find explicit references to Dune 2 stuff.
Yes exactly this -- thank you for getting my point, I'm a little tired of internet people misunderstanding things. I'm not even disputing that Mozilla is trying to pull a fast one on all of us, I'm purely questioning the framing by the "journalist" this post links to. To be taken seriously, quote the whole thing -- if it really is a case that the last part of the sentence is meaningless, then leave that in your quote, and address that in your wittering diatribe, explaining to all of us why it's meaningless. Without that, all I see is someone cherrypicking half-sentences and trying to mislead people.
look, i'd have similar clauses if I ran such a service. Porn gets very messy very quickly. Revenge porn, porn of generally unconsenting parties etc. are all to common and people who share know it is wrong and so try to use things like vpns to hide. The problem for you as a vpn provider is proving they're doing the wrong thing with your service, so it is much easier to simply say there is a blanket ban and then selectivly enforce.

The upside for users in general is such a vpn service tends not to be associated with underbelly behaviour and so isn't blocked from 90% of the web.
Let's see if DeepSeek will make a distillation of this model as well
This article investigates the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in education through a systematic review of 35 peer‐reviewed studies spanning from 2010 to 2024. AI-driven pedagogy—including personalized learning, multimodal models, and emerging lifelong learning trends—has demonstrated its ability to enhance student engagement, support educators, and foster innovative content creation. However, ethical challenges related to data privacy, algorithmic bias, and the digital divide persist, demanding careful consideration. This study integrates hybrid human-AI teaching models, global case studies, and perspectives from both students and teachers to address gaps in equity, evolving teacher roles, and the emotional impacts of technology in the classroom. Actionable policy recommendations, such as novel funding models for rural AI access and the establishment of robust educational AI ethics standards, are proposed to ensure inclusive and sustainable learning environments. Optimized for accessibility and future-focused insights, this work aims to inspire transformative practices and further research on the integration of AI in education.