How to Cure Your Social Anxiety in 30 Seconds - <AUTHOR> http://wexnotes.com/cure-your-social-anxiety-in-30-seconds/ Instead of focusing on other people, focus on creating an internal positive state within yourself. <comment><USER2> Wow! I had no idea that 2 ambiguously-phrased suggestions would completely stop the biological processes causing my overactive amygdala!

This is it everyone, the field of therapy is dead. Let's destroy all the benzodiazepines prescribed for anxiety, and simply give out a piece of paper with this article on it to everyone who ever seeks help for panic attacks!

<comment><USER3> Metta-meditation (similar to what is described by OP) is starting to be researched by the west (as well as general mindfulness and meditation _without_ religious undertones) and is showing some promising signs - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mett%C4%81#.22Compassion_medita...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mett%C4%81#.22Compassion_meditation.22_research)

Will this solve everyone's problems? Absolutely not. But, don't immediately discredit a technique due to a knee-jerk reaction, look into it and form your opinion after researching it, not before.

<comment><USER2> Meditation, undertaken through rigorous discipline, shows evidence for something. What that is, is still up for debate.

If you're referring instead to feedback techniques to curb anxiety responses, that is used in legitimate therapy.

Neither of those represent the content of this article. Furthermore, it suggests that anxiety can be simply reasoned away in 30 seconds. That is insulting to anyone who has ever had anxiety.

<comment><USER3> I've had social anxiety for 25+ years.

> When you focus only on boosting your internal state, your social anxiety > will disappear.

That is the line I drew the connection from. The first part of metta is to focus on yourself before moving onto others. Again, I _explicitly_ said it would not work for everyone (and I disagree with the word "cure" both in title and text), but to outright dismiss everything about it is equally absurd.

Furthermore, one of the larger benefits that people find in meditation is that they can more easily detach themselves from their emotions, which _could_ allow them to see that they are not _only_ their emotions and _may_ have more control over how they respond to emotions than they previously had. _None_ of that cures anything ... but, it _can_ help an individual in showing them that they have more control over their internal state than they had previously believed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Easier said than done, hehe, but still good advice. I'd definitely recommend mindfullness and meditation to those that suffer from social anxiety, it's worked wonder for me (and may or may not work for you ... ymmv)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it definitely takes practice! :)

<comment><USER3> This is the Android app I've been using that has helped me more than any other app or forum or any other resource - [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nwalex.med...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nwalex.meditation) (I am not associated with this app at all, I'm just linking because it's helped me so much).

The real win with it is that you can place a widget on your homescreen with 1) the number of days in a row you've reached your daily-duration goals, and 2) your all-time best chain. So simple but so effective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The title is nonsense. But I think there is some truth in this advice. I feel a lot more secure when I am happy and relaxed. On the otherside I feel very insecure around others when I am stressed out. I learned that I can actvely influence the way I feel and it is something I can get better in. So I want to add the advice: Learn what makes you happy and relaxed. Also learn what makes you feel bad and stressed out.

<comment><USER5> This is certainly true for me. I've convinced myself that feeling happy is just a choice.

The philosophy has done wonders for me. When I'm paying the proper attention, I can take a bad situation and make it positive just by deciding to relax my body, release my concerns and realize that happiness is something I can decide to feel no matter what else is going on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm a fan of the Buddhist way: breathe in, breathe out.

Vipassana, samatha, and jhana are a bit more complicated than that, but it's enough.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is the most useless advice I have ever read.

1) Other people can tell you are having social anxiety.

Oh, ya, that makes me a whole lot less nervous.

2) Stop having anxiety. By thinking really hard about it or something.

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't get or know any of the keywords expressed in this advice. A bunch a words with no meaning given the context.

</comment><comment><USER9> Yesss. This is right on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah try it! It works wonders :)</comment></comment>


Business Method Patents Limited by U.S. Supreme Court - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-06-28/business-method-patents-limited-by-u-s-high-court-update1-.html <comment><USER2> Thank you, Microsoft and Google.

<comment><USER3> IBM's amicus brief was interesting. The said "This judicial direction has resulted in substantial economic, technological, and societal benefit because software patents promote innovation both within and beyond the field of software" and had a footnote to elaborate on that point.

The footnote said:

"Without the benefit of patent protection, software companies would be forced to rely on secrecy which limits the public's ability to learn from software innovations, since patent documents are a significant source of technological disclosure. See, e.g., In re Alappat, 33 F.3d 1526, 1571 (Fed. Cir. 1994) (Newman, J., concurring). Given the reality that software source code is human readable, and object code can be reverse engineered, it is difficult for software developers to resort to secrecy. Thus, without patent protection, the incentives to innovate in the field of software are significantly reduced. Patent protection has promoted the free sharing of source code on a patentee's terms—which has fueled the explosive growth of open source software development."

Another interesting brief was the one from the FSF. They spent _13_ _pages_ on their "Interest of Amicus Curiae" section (where the submitter explains why they have an interest in the case). That's something like 40% of their brief.

In this 13 pages, they talk about how Linux should be called GNU/Linux, the 1992 US Air Force contract with NYU to produce a GPLed ADA compiler, how RMS is a genius, and much more. It reads like a press release.

For comparison, most of the rest manage to state their interest in a page or two, and then get on to their argument.</comment></comment>


OVH scales up in North America - <AUTHOR> https://www.ovh.com/us/a1952.inauguration-new-headquarters-ovh-montreal <comment><USER2> bad karma perhaps, they just suffered a major outage

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10494475](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10494475)

</comment><comment><USER3> The entire BHS DC is down due to a single fiber cut.</comment>


Adaptive Resampling in D3.js - <AUTHOR> http://bl.ocks.org/3795544 <comment><USER2> Since it's not clear from the link, I'll clarify that this refers to resampling for map (cartographic) projections. For more on our recent work on extended projections, see the geo/projections plugin:

<https://github.com/d3/d3-plugins/tree/master/geo/projection>

And more cool mapping demos here:

<http://bl.ocks.org/jasondavies> <http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock>

<comment><USER3> I spent a good portion of my internship last summer working with d3 at Splunk, just wanted to say thanks for the cool framework. I love the "data", "enter", and "exit" calls, it's a really great way of thinking about data binding.

I'd like to try to incorporate it into something other than svg/canvas visualizations too, maybe just a normal web app or something, do you know of people using it like that?

Thanks, again!

<comment><USER2> Thanks! Yeah, you can definitely use D3 outside of data visualization; the data-join pattern is useful whenever you want to generate a DOM from data and keep the DOM up-to-date as data changes.

D3 also provides custom event dispatching for loosely-coupled components:

[https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Internals#wiki-d3_dispat...](https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Internals#wiki-d3_dispatch)

That said, there are higher-level abstractions (e.g., Backbone and Ember) that are explicitly designed for this purpose, and provide useful ways of structuring big applications into separable components. Depending on the size of the application you're trying to build, you might find those useful as well, perhaps in addition to D3.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does not work on Firefox 10.0.7 unfortunately.

<comment><USER5> Is there a reason you're using a horribly out of date browser?

<comment><USER6> According to Wikipedia, that version was released last month.

<http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#section_6>

<comment><USER7> Anyone know what's up with that? Why'd they release a 10.0.7 if they are on a fast dev cycle?

<comment><USER8> Mozilla has "Extended Service Release" versions of Firefox which receive updates for major security issues. v10 is the current (v17 upcoming). Organizations are expected to migrate over quickly once a new ESR is available.

<http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Follow Hacker News on Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/newsycombinator I made a script that takes the top 5 stories from Hacker News and feeds them to Twitter, so you can get breaking stories directly to your Twitter stream <comment><USER2> cool. am following as NotoriousBRK.

<comment><AUTHOR> It updates every hour so it should show new stories pretty regularly, I made this for myself but I thought that other people on here would fine it useful too

<comment><USER2> Hourly is good. Any more frequent and it might be annoying ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> I made a very similar bot for del.icio.us popular too, if anyone's interested:

<http://twitter.com/twittilicious>

<comment><USER3> Why not write something generic that lets you follow any RSS you want on twitter in an hourly interval...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> heh. I like how the top story is this story.

</comment><comment><USER4> nice work mr lomas.</comment>


Use Stress to Your Advantage - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/use-stress-to-your-advantage-1431700708 <comment><USER2> Dr. McGonigal is on the right track, but she's missing the bigger picture.

She needs to realize that stress is not just one big thing and that there are many different types of stress.

Here we can see a difference between physical stress, and mental stress.

Physical stress being the stress that the body puts on itself to be able to perform a task to it's best ability when it's required. Whether that be writing your name, or pulling yourself up from the edge of a cliff.

Then there's mental stress which works on your body's ability to perform cognitive tasks.

When you are worried or anxious about something, it creates a sense of resistance in the body and mind. When you are more accepting of the stress or the feeling, you are able to free yourself from that resistance and all of the mental work that goes into the resistance, which allows your mind to have more capacity to focus.

The physical stress remains because your body is still pushing itself to perform a task under pressure.

Put all of this together, and you get the same result, except it makes much more sense to not think about stress as just one single thing.

</comment><comment><USER3> This theory makes a lot of sense to me. Reminds me of loss of control when on a drug trip: If you deny and fight it, you're gonna have a bad time, if you embrace and accept it, you're gonna be fine.

That being said, being chronically stressed is probably still unhealthy for body and mind.

</comment><comment><USER4> Other example is being present if a close friend has something deeply emotional going on. Ideally you should try to stay present with the emotions both with the other person and yourself. If you kept feeling, "lets move on with this", that would not be supportive.

</comment><comment><USER5> The Ballmer effect.

</comment><comment><USER6> Be the stress.</comment>


Upgraded reminders aren't compatible with earlier versions of iOS and macOS - <AUTHOR> https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT210220 <comment><USER2> _If you upgrade your reminders on your iPhone with iOS 13, your iPad and Mac using the same iCloud account can't access your reminders until iPadOS and macOS 10.15 Catalina are available._

You gotta love Applespeak. "Earlier versions" means all available versions.

</comment><comment><USER3> This has happened in the past with photos and iCloud syncing or something. Probably doesn't affect a ton of people but it's presumably annoying to have to wait for the Catalina update for those with iOS 13.

<comment><USER4> it happens for all people. imo thats a major fail from apple. why don't they roll out the necessary backend changes in 12.4 or sth?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> No, that's not the page's title. Don't try to clickbait your way towards karma.

<comment><AUTHOR> The original title "Get ready for the new Reminders app " does not convey the message I want to be heard. I've updated this title with citation from the article instead.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the most important OSS projects of all time? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
I was talking with some of my co-workers about how important OSS has been in advancing technology. I argued that without OSS, technology wouldnt be close to where it is today. Some of the projects I listed as being the most important were the following:
* Programming Languages - Php, Python, Ruby, etc.
* Linux - the OS basis for nearly everything * Android - powers a large percentage of the worlds smart phones * Wordpress, Drupal, blogging platforms - Empowering peoples voice
What else am I missing? Any other threads I can read about this? <comment><USER2> The Berkeley Software Distribution, first released in 1978, was a very important early open-source project. The second version, released in 1979, included the vi editor. When Sun Microsystems formed, they incorporated BSD into their OS, SunOS. In fact, people on the internet have asserted that the TCP/IP stack for most operating systems, including the first stack incorporated into Linux and into Windows 95, was copied from BSD's stack. Since sharing source code is an effective way to increase the chances that two different systems will be able to interoperate on the internet, this TCP/IP stack from BSD (whose creation was funded by the US government) probably materially sped up the growth of the internet.

The original BSD license, which is quite close to the BSD license used by many open-source project today, was created because the owners of BSD (the University of California) believed BSD had to be placed in the public domain because its creation was funded by the US government, and the US government is prohibited by law from copyrighting its creations. Actually, they did not release it into the public domain, but the license they chose is very close to "public domain" in that the restrictions it imposes are very light.

Before 1993, _most_ of the software used for communication on the internet was either explicitly open source (i.e., under the GPL or the BSD license) or "informal open-source", meaning that it did not come with formal license terms, but its source code was available, and it was widely believed that it was unlikely that anyone would try to stop you if you modified it or redistributed it.

<comment><USER3> BSD was encumbered by AT&T code & licenses and most definitely not open source until something like 1992 and BSD4.4-Lite (which really begat the open source *BSD releases) didn't come out until 1994.

<comment><USER2> Yes, and that does not contradict anything I wrote. Particularly, the BSD license long predates 1992, and Sun Microsystems took advantage of that license to sell computers in which BSD constituted a large fraction of the software starting in 1982.

The fact that there was a decade or more of legal uncertainty over whether AT&T could use the courts to stop the distribution of BSD by the University of California certainly had an inhibitory effect, but never actually stopped the distribution of BSD by the University, and did not prevent BSD's source code from being redistributed freely or from being incorporated into most operating systems capable of connecting to the internet even before the legal uncertainty was resolved in the early 1990s.

<comment><USER3> That's not how what you wrote read. You may have meant that a BSD license existed in '82, but you implied the BSD modified Unix operating system was generally open source long before it really was. The fact that many manufactures secured separate licenses (for which they paid Berkeley a lot of money) is irrelevant. The simple fact is that the truly "free" BSDs did not exist before the early 90s and the resolution of the dispute between AT&T and Berkeley. Full stop. End of story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> GNU everyhing, just go to gnu.org, and remember that what we refer to as "linux" is mainly the os kernel, most of the user space programs, libs etc. are GNU projects.

<comment><USER3> I'll get behind the toolchain (GCC, as, gdb, etc) as a game changer, but "everyhing"? Please...other than GNU rewrites of BSD 4.3 userland programs (not hard), most of the projects on gnu.org happened _after_ Linux became ascendant if not dominant. And of the major pre-Linux projects, how many are still indispensable? How about the colossal waste of resources behind GNU Emacs? GNU could have recreated Genera, and done it better, and really changed the world for all that went into it and it did nothing more than create a fetish for a tiny and declining group of people. We don't even need to go to Hurd; it's punchline to a software project joke right there with Duke Nukem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The GNU development toolchain (GCC, etc). Without a solid, free, complete, self hosting development environment, literally nothing else you mention would exist.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think jQuery should be on the list...it has had a big impact on front-end programming, and it powers over half of the top 10000 sites.</comment>


Ask HN: Tips for getting domain from domain sitter? - <AUTHOR> I have the .co.uk and .net for my site but someone got in a couple of years ago and bought the .com and has never utilised it.
I would like to own the .com
Any tips for how to navigate this situation? <comment><USER2> As someone, who bought a (for me) quite expensive domain lately:

Get some sense of the actual value of the domain and make an offer. Prepare for all kinds of bullshit: There are no other bidders, there are no limits of any kind, the seller "has to do" nothing, everything he says is a lie. Offer instant cash. If you made an offer roughly around the actual value, this argument wins, use it against everything the other side comes up with.

What other comments are saying is not true. They won't sell you the domain for cheap, because of a bad market or to save fees. Domainers are shady sales guys, who want to extort as much money from you as they can. You are vulnerable to them, because they already know, that you want the domain, because you already have chosen that name. You have to offer them a deal that is roughly around the actual value (e.g. what others would pay) and be ready to walk away at any time. Instant money is the argument that gets you a discount.

<comment><USER3> Any tips on how to determine the actual value of the domain?

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately, I don't know the market for English .com domains. What I would try to do is search for the price similar domains have been sold for, similar meaning of similar length and keyword search volume, CPC etc.

For the German market there are some quite active Facebook groups where people sell (mostly German) domains. I befriended one of the bigger guys there and he helped me with an actual number the owner guy would definitely sell for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It really depends on the name. Is it generic? Is it brandable? etc... Also, is the owner someone who bought it as a domainer, or someone with a side project that never came to fruition. One way to check is if HitFarm is the parking company, or if there is a professional sales pitch to buy on the name. (vs. a godaddy parked page.)

Step 1:Resign yourself to the possibility of not being able to buy it. This is crucial because there is no incentive for the guy to not ask for a million dollars even when they are willing to sell it for ten dollars. You absolutely need to be able to walk away from an outrageous offer.

Step 2: Decide how much you are willing to pay for the domain. Since this is for your own company, the market value is irrelevant. The only metric that matters is how much its worth to you.

Step 3: Offer 65% of the amount you are willing to pay.

Ideally, you should not let the seller know you own the related domains (unless thats public). The best case scenario is that you play dumb, and pretend you are a nobody with no real commercial interest in the name. (i.e. my dead puppys name was domainname.com and I want to put a memorial blogpost on the domain and show them a terrible blogspot site that looks like a 12 year old made.)

Bottom line, unless you own the trademark on a non-generic name, the domainer holds all the cards...

</comment><comment><USER5> Using lots of "the same domain" with different TLDs is also a form of "domain sitting".

</comment><comment><USER6> 1) make a reasonable offer 2) move on an find a different domain name because a) it probably doesn't matter and b) if it does, they're not going to part with it easily.

</comment><comment><USER7> Contact him and give him a firm good first offer. Stand by that offer and don't waver away from it.

</comment><comment><USER8> You can always try to buy it.

Prices for domain names have been depressed for the last few years and the owner might be happy to part with it for something on the order of 10x or 20x a year's registration which is not insane.</comment>


Seymour Cray "Father of Supercomputing" - <AUTHOR> http://www.cray.com/company/history/seymour-cray <comment><AUTHOR> More info

interview (linked in the article): [http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/cray.htm](http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/cray.htm)

Long detailed article on The Register: [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/02/seymour_cray_90_anni...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/02/seymour_cray_90_anniversary/)

Obituary by John Markoff: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10422103](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10422103)

Wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Cray](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Cray)</comment>


Race Is on to Deliver Internet from Space - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/race-is-on-to-deliver-internet-from-space-1455670439 <comment><USER2> Slow race. Motorola tried this once already and failed with the Iridium Constellation in the 90s.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellation)

The venture went bankrupt and Motorola was actually on the verge of burning them up in the atmosphere when the Pentagon stepped in: [http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=119255](http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=119255)

Another interesting thing about the Iridium Constellation is that the satellites have an unusual arrangement of large, flat antennae. This, along with detailed data about their position and orientation means that they create very predictable flares of reflected sunlight that are quite visible from Earth. You can usually a fairly bright flare every couple days:

[http://heavens-above.com/IridiumFlares.aspx](http://heavens- above.com/IridiumFlares.aspx)

<comment><USER3> The costs of building and launching small satellites has dropped significantly since the 90s. People are also traveling more and demanding more connectivity, so it seems that Iridium may have just been a bit to early to the game.

<comment><USER4> Early, or late. One of Iridium's problems was that by the time they actually became operational, a huge chunk of their potential customer base had been eaten up by terrestrial cellular phones. The number of people who needed something more than a cell phone was a lot smaller in 1998 than it was in 1987.

Iridium service was also unbelievably expensive and not all that useful. (For that matter, still is.) If you had a choice between Iridium and a cell phone, the cell phone won every time. Iridium was a product for those with no other choice. If they had come in earlier, they might have had enough people with no other choice to make it. Later, and they might have been able to offer something that could actually compete with terrestrial services. As it was, their timing ended up being really bad.

<comment><USER5> Interestingly, they're still popular with some very adventurous groups, e.g. Round-the-world sailors, motorcyclists going through remote locations, climbers and hikers in remote places / foreign countries, etc.

Very useful if it's the only thing that will work.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. For some cases it's an amazing service. It just wasn't enough to sustain a company that had to spend $5 billion up front to get things started. Once that got discharged in bankruptcy, it managed to do OK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Has anyone figured out how to deal with the issue of latency for space-based internet? Things like online games and video calls will just not work if the traffic hits space. I could see an ISP offering a service where traffic that needs low latency gets routed on land, while web pages and the like get routed through space. At a cost, of course.

<comment><USER7> All of the past versions of "space internet" have been geostationary orbit, which is around 25,000-26,000 miles above sea level. The new iterations, such as SpaceX's idea, is to use many many more microsats and put them in LEO. Low Earth Orbit is closer to 750 or so miles above sea level. Since the ping latency of geostationary sat internet is around 500-700ms, it would be massively less for low earth orbit.

The two technical issues I'm aware of are the sheer number of satellites required for LEO internet, and the fact that you can't point your dish at a single place. There would need to be some sort of actuator or omnidirectional receiver for tracking to satellites at every client site. This makes the installation a bit trickier, but the ping times should be entirely reasonable provided someone gets the funding to put hundreds of satellites into an internet constellation.

<comment><USER8> As someone who has worked in this industry and seen a lot of these ideas fail first hand - another big challenge is going to be ground entry points. For GEO satellites, each satellite serves many customers and may only need maybe 2-3 (for redundancy) groundstations.

For LEO constellations, each satellite can only see a small portion of customers at any time and will quickly move out of coverage of a single point on the earth, requiring many groundstations.

Alternatively, the satellites can crosslink and eventually hit a groundstation, but these handoffs and trip lengths quickly get back to the ping latencies of making a single trip to GEO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What I think they should do (not sure of what this is called ) is UDP- broadcast "caches" of popular sites such as reddit, (hacker news :) ) wsj, etc, continuously.

I'm willing to bet that a very large portion of people only access a relatively small number of sites. If they streamed a cache this way, it could probably cut their bandwidth substantially.

<comment><USER10> multicast

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> ViaSat works great. Yes there is actual packet latency but practically speaking voip/videochat just works. Download speeds are fast, absolutely no problem watching streaming HD.

The biggest problem is that you get a fixed amount of traffic. They are starting to come around to throttling once you go over, but so far not for everyone.

Edit: need to amend \- As a technology it works great. \- I use it at a remote cabin and it's fine for weekend use. \- Getting the Internet in middle of nowhere, yes+++. \- If I had to live with it for day to day use I would not be happy because of the traffic limits.

tl;dr geo sync internet without traffic limits would get the customer 99% where they wanna be.

</comment><comment><USER12> Any thoughts on how to get around the paywall?

The google search trick isn't working for me.

<comment><USER13> [http://canmua.net/world/race-is-on-to-deliver-internet- from-...](http://canmua.net/world/race-is-on-to-deliver-internet-from- space-434318.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder whether China would consider any internet-supplying geosynchronous satellites over their borders as an affront to their sovereignty. Satellite internet (without a land-based backhaul) is surely the most effective way of subverting the Great Firewall.

<comment><USER4> They will probably be able to convince the service providers not to offer service within China. Flying the satellites over the country is fine, various international treaties take care of that, but once you start actually doing business in the country (even at a remove) then you'll run into trouble. It would be interesting for an outside company with no ties to China to just say "screw it" and ignore Chinese demands for restrictions or bans, but no company large enough to provide this service would start a fight like that in the first place.

You can see this at work already with existing services. Random example, check out the satellite coverage map here:

[https://www.united.com/web/en- US/content/travel/inflight/wif...](https://www.united.com/web/en- US/content/travel/inflight/wifi/default.aspx)

Note the distinctly China-shaped hole in East Asia.

<comment><USER15> > Note the distinctly China-shaped hole in East Asia.

Quote: "Please note: Satellite coverage may experience outages for reasons such as government regulations"

I guess this is intentional because China may retaliate against violators (e.g. prohibit fly-overs).</comment></comment></comment>


Asterix: Latin Jokes Explained - <AUTHOR> http://www.andrewgirardin.com/asterix-latin-jokes-explained.html <comment><USER2> Ok, so this is actually a couple of blog posts explaining why the "Asterix: Latin Jokes Explained" site _failed_.

I actually wanted to _see_ the Asterix: Latin Jokes Explained" site itself (cos I loved those books when I was a kid), but could I find a link to the site at all? Nope, no sign.

I'm getting a clue why the site was unsuccessful... (it's at: [https://www.everythingasterix.com/](https://www.everythingasterix.com/) if you want to check it out).

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I mixed them up when submitting. I wanted to submit your link.

Maybe you can flag it and the mods can either change the title or point it towards the other site?

My apologies!</comment></comment>


Show HN: Rabbit Hole, a free iOS App that randomly pulls a pic from imgur - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/rabbit-hole/id568398282?ls=1&mt=8

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's an album if you don't have an iPhone so you can check it out: <http://imgur.com/a/GdCAC>

You can favorite pics (save to app to view), save to device and share to FB, Twitter, Reddit, and Email. This is just a quick side-project we made, but it's turned out to be super addicting. Let me know what you guys and gals think!

</comment><comment><USER2> Fantastic app! Add a preload of pics and a real slide effect! Contact me, I had a similar idea with different content and we could build it together.</comment>


Firefox 65.0 released - <AUTHOR> https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/65.0/releasenotes/ <comment><USER3> Recently switched from chromium to Firefox. Very pleased with its performance.

Android Firefox demolishes chrome too but probably just because I no longer need to download and render all the ads (thanks ublock.)

While I was at it I also took the chance to migrate passwords out of Google land into Bitwarden.

Session restore is amazing, my .cache is tmpfs but it still manages to instantly recover all my tabs on reboot. Tabs are addictive in FF and don't have the same usage constraints like in chrome.

The container system for managing different developer/test/personal profiles is a dream. No longer have to worry about Slack links opening in whatever random chrome instance had focus last. (Back up your user data, sync on these container settings doesn't work - yet)

Also enjoying different proxy profiles per Firefox profile as well.

Yes,

Work profile + work containers + works SSH tunnel proxy.

Personal profile + personal containers + NordVPN.

Passwords managed by bitwarden and any required crossover is shared via a private organisation. This gives me minimal work access on my phone, and minimal private passwords on my work profile.(GitHub/stack overflow)

It's kind of complicated but it's such a quality of life change coming from 20 odd chrome profiles and the nasty sync issues that ensues. Most people can probably get by with a single profile. I just have multiple systems and need to keep work stuff separate but end up using work laptop as a daily driver most of the time.

<comment><USER4> I hadn't heard about Bitwarden. Looks like it requires 2-4GB of RAM and a x86 CPU to run your own server due to relying on MS SQL server. Bummer!

<comment><USER5> There's an unofficial rust implementation[0] that runs in a docker image and uses sqlite for persistence. I don't know what the details are for storing data at-rest in the sqlite db, but it's supposed to be much better on system resources.

0: [https://github.com/dani-garcia/bitwarden_rs](https://github.com/dani- garcia/bitwarden_rs)

<comment><USER4> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm a diehard Firefox user and supporter, but with every release there are still things I wait on the WebExtensions support to improve:

1\. There's still no full featured Tab Mix Plus possible with the current APIs. That's been a big bummer for some years now.

2\. The most downloaded session management extension now is still not as rich and good as the old XUL extension Session Manager (from mozdev).

3\. I probably have to search again for a WebExtension equivalent for this one. Lazarus was a nice form saving extension in the past. Not sure if something similar exists or is even possible.

<comment><USER7> Best not hold your breath. You are an old-school power user and 99.9% of users no longer know or care about any of the functionality you're talking about.

I don't have any specific retorts to your points other than pointing you to [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/textarea- cach...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/textarea-cache/) for a Lazarus replacement (although I thought Firefox does this by default, and I don't understand why you need an extension at all).

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the pointer to this extension. I'll check it out. One of the things Lazarus provided (at the cost of adding some effort in maintaining privacy) was to save the history of form fields across sites and across restarts. In my knowledge, Firefox allows saving text fields, but not text areas. Periodic saving and history were quite helpful especially when writing longer walls of text like on HN comments or posts on other platforms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> FF65 also supports WebP images and animations. Here's few test images: [https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/gallery1](https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/gallery1)

<comment><USER9> I wish they implemented the feature sooner. AVIF, an image format based on the new AV1 video codec with even better compression is already on the horizon.

<comment><USER10> Yes. As much as I was hoping they'd implement it back then, I kind of wish that they _didn 't_ implement it now. If they couldn't do it years ago, might as well wait for AVIF instead of letting webp proliferate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was intrigued by this statement:

> A better video streaming experience for Windows users: Firefox now supports > the next-generation, royalty-free video compression technology called AV1

Since I don't care about Windows, I was curious as to whether this had already shipped for other platforms or not. At least using Firefox Developer Edition v66, it works fine behind the media.av1.enabled flag on Linux.

\----

Also seems that [https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known- vulnerabilities...](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/known- vulnerabilities/firefox/#firefox65) has yet to be updated.

<comment><USER12> > I was curious as to whether this had already shipped for other platforms or > not.

AV1 support is available on all platforms behing the flag; this release just enables it by default on Windows [1].

[1]: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1452146](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1452146)

<comment> TD-Linux AV1 also uses the brand new media codec sandboxing feature (RDD process). It has platform specific code, hence why only Windows was ready by 65 (but Mac + Linux should be available soon).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Support for Handoff on macOS: Continue browsing across devices. Pick up > where you left off with iOS (via Firefox or Safari) on Firefox on Mac.

OH YES! Finally!

<comment><USER14> I tried both Safari and Chrome of macOS but went back to Firefox for one simple reason. When watching streaming content if the browser was not in the foreground it would reduce the quality of the streamed content which could take almost ten seconds to revert back when focus was given.

Firefox doesn't seem to know/care if its not top window

<comment><USER15> Safari user, always play videos in a background window, never seen this. I suspect it's not the browser's video playback but perhaps more to do with how it handles spikes and drops in connection quality?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have turned on Webrender in FF66a (nightly) and it's fantastic; it sped up a site I quickly threw together for a friend no end [1] and almost everything with lots of graphical painting is buttery smooth.

Even though they are only starting in nightly to make it the default on Nvidia hardware it seems to work without incident so far on this 2016 AMD Radeon'd MacBook Pro.

[1] [https://uparchitects.co.uk/](https://uparchitects.co.uk/)

[2] [https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/have-you-tested- webrender/16...](https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/have-you-tested- webrender/16137)

<comment> dan-robertson Well the limit in nightly to nvidia on windows is less about saying "we think WebRender only works/is stable on nvidia on windows" than it is about saying "we want more people to try it and possibly send big reports but we don't want to risk breaking the entire nightly population or have them all sending in big reports, so we will start with a small subpopulation where we think bugs will be due to WebRender rather than graphics drivers"

<comment><USER16> Ah fantastic, definitely good to stagger the releases. I do understand the driver/stability situation being much more fragmented on Windows, just nice to be able to confirm how big the improvements are to Firefox that are still to come; the fastest browser by a long way IMO!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't understand why Firefox doesn't include an option to download the .deb package instead of tar file for Ubuntu and Debian during release announcements. The market share is already shrinking and why make it harder for people to install or upgrade Firefox? Chrome does it. Why can't Firefox do that as well?

<comment><USER18> This brings up an interesting point about releasing software in general. If you spend huge amounts of time programming cool things and tuning every last knob, but then it is difficult for your average user to find out how to install and start to see all the cool things you've produced, when it would take far less time to just make an easy installer than it took you to make all the cool things, then there needs to be some balance in usability. The pipeline to getting the software in front of someone is sometimes more important than adding new cool features. A basic thing that is easy to use will get more adoption than a mind-blowingly awesome thing that only sys- admins can figure out how to use.

<comment><USER19> "Ubuntu and Debian" "average user"

I dont disagree with your point, not sure it is relevant however.

<comment><USER20> The pretense that all Linux users should be (or already are) technically capable is really harmful to the ecosystem. No, you should not expect Ubuntu or Debian users to figure out on their own (1) why the tar.gz file they download doesn't do anything meaningful and (2) how they will get this version of Firefox instead without any further instructions.

Running Firefox from a tarball is a very specific use case for a small subset of highly technical users. Even if you figure out how to do it, the lack of system integration gives a very poor impression of the way things work on Linux. Even the vast majority of technical users don't want to run Firefox this way. Yet that's still what the website offers you.

We should be able to recommend _at the very least_ Ubuntu to average users. And people do that, sometimes quite successfully. But with the attitude that all Linux users can save themselves - "we don't need to think about the UX" \- we can't really keep doing that.

<comment><USER21> Wouldn't the average Ubuntu user be best off by getting it through the Ubuntu package repo once it's updated there? Or doesn't Ubuntu have a channel that would provide that soon by default?

<comment><USER22> Well, yes and no. I'm precluded from installing new Firefox via apt-get because my Ubuntu version fell off active support. Running a dist-upgrade is risky, and I don't feel like doing it until I know I have a spare free day to fix everything in case of a problem. A Firefox PPA would be a nice thing to use instead, for now.

<comment><USER23> Average user: "Pee pee what now?"

If Firefox offered a .deb for $OS on their homepage, and Grandma attempts to install it while running $OTHEROS, then likely she will either 1) fail or 2) break her system. That's a worse user experience than a .tar.gz.

Asking Firefox to maintain packages for every outdated Debian-based distro is unreasonable. Nice to have, yes, but unreasonable to ask.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I recently made the transition back to Firefox too, like a lot of other folks in here it seems. Containers makes working with all my AWS much easier, and the containers isolating Facebook are great.

One problem though, that I can't solve, is that every once in a while I _want_ to log in with Facebook, like for AirBnB. But I can't, because the cookie only lives in the Facebook container, but I can't add AirBnB as a hostname to the Facebook container.

Has anyone solved this?

Edit: I just solved this. You have to disable the built in Facebook Container extension and then it works as expected.

<comment><USER25> Would you happen to know how safe and separate the containers are?

Like, if I had a specific container used for Banking sites, would it be relatively safe from other containers?

Currently, I use Firefox for casual browsing and Chrome for email and financial related sites. But it would be nice to just use Firefox for both. I'm just worried it would be less safe.

<comment><USER10> Is there a way to configure Firefox so that a single-use container gets created when certain sites get visited, and discarded when they're closed?

I don't want to delete cookies by default (since I don't like to lose my shopping cart due to accidentally closing a tab in a shop I haven't used before), but I certainly would like to be able to ban sites that use cookies in a user-hostile manner from storing cookies permanently.

It would be even better if Mozilla used the voluntary telemetry + manual user feedback to decide which sites benefit from cookies (e.g. web shops), and applied this to everything else (e.g. news sites).

<comment><USER26> > I don't want to delete cookies by default

IIUC you want a container to be isolated to a single website, you have to create a container for that website, open the site in that container, and then click the multi-account container tab in the toolbar, and select to option to open this website in that container by default. From then on whenever you open the website, it gets opened in that container by default.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I just updated and immediately noticed two things that bothered me:

1\. It added a new search engine (amazon.com.au) to my list that I'd culled down to just DuckDuckGo

2\. It started recommending extensions for websites I visited

Maybe I'm overreacting a bit but why does it feel like every time I update anything recently I then have to spend 5 minutes going through the preferences to make sure it hasn't changed anything. It makes me hesitant to update any app when I feel like the developers are working against my interests.

<comment><USER28> I was annoyed about the recommending plugins thing as well. It's quick to turn off if that's any help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> No one mentioned WebP support yet! This is great news, Firefox will now feel faster on all the sites that use WebP. Safari is the last major browser to hold out.

<comment><USER30> What's so great about webp? I haven't heard about it. Is it one of those jpeg competitors? Because I did see a blog post recently that said none of the the things people are coming up with are more than marginally better despite jpeg's age.

<comment><USER31> I suspect those blog posts focused on photos.

However, WebP works well for a much larger range of image types[0]. It has lossless options with better compression than PNG (because PNG is _incredibly_ simple compared to more recent image formats, in my opinion in a kind of beautiful way). And when compressing graphically simple illustrations with lossy settings, it can get much better results than JPG, both compression and quality wise.

Having said that, I still hope FLIF (or some descendant of it) will get some traction eventually[1].

[0] [https://www.andrewmunsell.com/blog/png-vs- webp/](https://www.andrewmunsell.com/blog/png-vs-webp/)

[1] [http://flif.info/](http://flif.info/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I love Firefox and use it all the time, but for the last few years one of my biggest pains is the OSX performance on my Macbook Pro. Is this close to be resolved soon?

<comment><USER33> Are you using a non-native display resolution? That seems to be the common factor for people who have significant problems.

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042)

<comment><USER34> A scaled resolution is now default on most MacBooks. I haven't noticed battery problems but certainly seen RAM usage at least double that of Chrome and considerably above Safari.

<comment><USER35> If you are worried about battery performance, I can personally attest that Firefox is better than chrome in terms of battery performance.

Still Safari is the best in terms of battery endurance (its a VERY SIGNIFICANT difference). But then again its Safari, so you have to decide whether you want a capable browser (FF/Chrome) or a battery efficient one.

<comment><USER36> IMO Safari is a very capable browser. I switched to it long ago and found I didn't miss anything from Chrome. Experimenting with Firefox now because I love the containers feature, I hope we'll see it in Safari some day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I feel like I've been waiting a long time for autoplay blocking - does this keep being pushed back or have I missed a feature cancellation/config setting/extension announcement?

<comment><USER38> I was hoping to see this pushed out by default because I agree that it's the best 'new' feature I've found in the browser in some time. You can change it in about:config, searching for 'media.autoplay'. I've changed the following:

1) Set 'ask permission' to true

2) Set 'block webaudio' to true

3) Set default to 2, which is 'ask per domain'. As I understand, the default of 0 is 'autoplay', 1 is 'block' and 2 is 'ask' but your favourite search engine of choice can provide clarification on this and the other settings. 2 will cause a pop-up beside the URL bar, like with password save popups, letting you accept or block and with a checkbox to set it permanent.

<comment><USER39> Why don't they write it as Block, Ask, Allow? Much easier this way.

<comment><USER38> Apparently, setting both "ask-permission" and "enabled.user-gestures-needed" to true then enables a setting in the privacy area of settings to have a dropdown box with these options. I'm guessing it maps to the 0/1/2 setting I mentioned earlier

[https://support.mozilla.org/en- US/questions/1238033](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1238033)

<comment><USER40> Thanks! I also found this page with a bit more info on the settings:

[https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/FirefoxMediaAut...](https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/FirefoxMediaAutoplaySettingsII?showcomments)

I changed all the media.autoplay settings from the default except block- event.enabled, with default set to 1. With that it seems to do what I want. I'm not sure if the strange media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground behavior described in the comment is still happening but I set that to false also.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Is there any news on Wayland support? I had read here previously that Firefox 65 was when support was going to be available by default[0] but there are no references in the release notes.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18657960](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18657960)

<comment><USER42> It's opt-in at runtime. [https://glandium.org/blog/?p=3899](https://glandium.org/blog/?p=3899) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18465506](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18465506)

And because that can cause problems when spawning third party applications from Firefox, there's another environment variable to opt-in in last nightly: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1522780](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1522780)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> They finally implemented globalThis [0]! It's not a huge or complex feature, but it's been something I've been wanting for a long time. Now there's a portable way to access the global object. I would've preferred `global`, but that broke web compatibility which made it a non-starter.

I just checked and was a bit sad to find that the latest version of node still doesn't support it. This is a bit surprising as globalThis is already supported in Chrome.

[0] [https://github.com/tc39/proposal- global](https://github.com/tc39/proposal-global)

</comment><comment><USER44> I would love to switch to Firefox but it still lacks -

* Per-site JavaScript controls (which Chrome has)

* Pinch to zoom (on macOS)

* Customisable keyboard shortcuts for Add-ons (which Chrome has)

* No elastic scroll (bounce effect) (which Chrome has)

I stick with Chrome as it works how I want it to although I find myself using Safari now and then but Safari's extensions are pretty crap in comparison to Chromes.

<comment><USER45> Customizable keyboard shortcuts for extensions just landed in nightly last week. Expect it soon.

<comment><USER44> Well god damn! I had no idea. Thank you for replying :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I wish Mozilla started to compete with Google on ChromeOS. Just make it the browser and leverage containers to keep things locked down. There's a total business here and Mozilla could make it happen, without the entanglements of the ads business. Real missed opportunity to help promote open standards at the services level as well.

<comment><USER39> They had FirefoxOS remember? Doubt think they'll want to do it again soon.

<comment><USER47> I think the intended market for FirefoxOS was pretty different than ChromeOS. Wasn't FirefoxOS for low-powered phones? ChromeOS is designed around a "streamlined" laptop system.

<comment><USER48> Yeah, FFOS essentially had the SteamOS problem - targeting a market that didn't have any 'wedge' users in their existing demographics. For Firefox OS and Steam OS to take off you needed to buy new hardware and the people most on board with this already had hardware and didn't have a use case for buying more (low end phone for Firefox, PC-as-a-console for SteamOS). In either case there was a small pool of first movers and then almost no early adopters. This was pretty stark in the steam case as Linux usage, sales and games rose considerably but hardware sales were pretty thin.

<comment><USER46> Schools. Schools would be pretty motivated to drop Google because Google is an ads company.

Schools love chrome books and gsuite, but struggle with trusting an add company.

<comment><USER48> If they refactored Firefox OS to be a ChromeBook competitor, sure. They heavily marketed their phones to the developing world markets.

I may be wrong, but I have a suspicion that Chromebooks only got a foot in the door in the education sector because they had such a large marketing machine behind it. I wouldn't mind betting money that Firefox wouldn't be able to get an equivalent foothold (even comparable to their browser market share right now with like-for-like hardware and form factors) just because their exposure for any given initiative is a fraction of what Google can summon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Huge props to the Mozilla crew. Firefox has been an awesome browser and I'm thankful for their product.

My only major gripe is video sort of sucks in it, especially when I'm on my laptop.

I'm glad we're starting to see AV1 rolling out in places. Full support can't come soon enough. Last year at NAB everyone was saying it's about 2 years out from solid support. 2020 should be a good year. AV1 looks pretty promising.

</comment><comment><USER50> I'm _very_ happy with the wayland performance in this release. XWayland looks really bad with sway on a HiDPI display, and previous to this release, firefox wayland was too slow to be usable.

That's no longer true. I'm giddy with how clear everything looks and how fast it is. This is a huge deal for me.

</comment><comment><USER51> At the risk of a downvote storm, a few months ago I tried to switch from Chrome to Firefox until I had a call of two hours via Google Hangouts and Firefox started to degrade the voice until a point of no return. I don't know if this is common in very demanding "web apps".

<comment><USER52> Blame Google, not Mozilla. They're doing it on purpose and it's the main reason why more people should make the switch _now_ before it's too late and nothing else works with Google's stuff but Chrome:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824)

[https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/the-web-now- belongs-...](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/the-web-now-belongs-to- google-and-that-should-worry-us-all/)

Google intends to kill Hangouts by the end of the year anyway:

[https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/22/18193303/google- hangouts-...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/22/18193303/google-hangouts-end- transition-october-gsuite-chat-meet)

I don't have any proof for this, but I think everything I've seen about Google's Invoice was also meant to kill the open email standards by convincing everyone that the proprietary "AI-enhanced" features of Invoice were worth it over interoperability with other email providers.

Thank goodness that app failed. They're still trying to do it through Gmail now, but it's going to be a much slower process and hopefully people will have enough time to catch on to them before it's too late.

Google is becoming a monopoly in the classical "evil company" sense - <USER2> monopoly that's no different than any other monopoly in the past, and that will try to exploit the users and kill competition in the same way others have done it before. More people should start to seriously consider this before going more "all-in" with Google than they already have.

<comment><USER53> > I don't have any proof for this

That sums it up nicely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Is there any progress with GPU accelerated video decoding / encoding in the Linux version? Now that WebRender is in place it should be possible?

Without it, any WebRTC video conferencing applications are very CPU heavy, which cripples them on laptops especially.

<comment><USER55> I don't think WebRender has anything to do with accelerated video decoding.

Here's the bug btw: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210727](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210727)

<comment><USER54> WebRender seems to be a prerequisite for it: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=563206](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=563206)

 _> The GPU->GPU copy is only usable if you also have hardware accelerated composition._

I thought WebRender is implementing such compositor.

<comment><USER55> It is, but there was also another one in Firefox (you could enable it on Linux by setting layers.acceleration.force-enabled to true).

<comment><USER54> I suppose they didn't want to actively work on such features for something that's going to be deprecated. Since WebRender is their way forward, they can as well implement video acceleration together with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> >Firefox will now warn you when closing a window (regardless of whether you have automatic session restore enabled for restart).

To whoever is responsible for pushing this change through: _Thank you._

<comment><USER57> Chrome's "hold cmd-Q to quit" popup is just about perfect in that regard.

<comment><USER58> I hate that thing! Is there a way to switch it off? (I get it, it can be useful. It's my personal preference, and showing it is a sane default. Less intrusive than a (modal) pop-up for sure. But I like software which I can set up to my liking.)

<comment><USER59> It's in the 'Chrome' menu. 'Warn before quitting'.

<comment><USER58> Ah, thanks. I use firefox as my daily driver, but go to chrome for some web pages anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Fantastic product, excellent release.

Just a little complain if website team reads this. Being on main landing page[0] there is no way to find out which version of Firefox is currently the latest.

0\. [https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/](https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/)

</comment><comment><USER61> Is it just me, or the font used by FF is changed on OSX? It's a bit crispier and it's not antialiased

<comment><USER62> Are you on macOS Mojave?

If yes, it could be because Firefox started honoring the system font settings of Mojave [1].

Enabling font smoothing in System Preferences now results in slighlty bolder fonts, and grayscale font smoothing. Firefox and Chrome needed some time to adjust to these settings, but now have the same rendering than the rest of the system.

[1] [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1495282](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1495282)

<comment><USER61> Yes, on latest Mojave. Thanks for the heads up, did not know that FF just started supporting the Mac settings

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Does anyone know what the decoding performance of AV1 is these days? I'd love to play with it, but back when I last tried my oldish laptop did NOT like decoding it.

<comment><USER8> I have tried AV1 video on Chrome and it seems to be using the same amount of CPU as VP9 on my computer.

I can't test Firefox support for AV1 on my Mac, because it seems to work only on Windows.

<comment><USER64> It's only on windows by default, but you can enable it using about:config flag media.av1.enabled

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Still waiting for vimperator so I can use browser like I used to use only 2 years back.

Tridactyl is good but no :map, no :js and alphabets instead of numbers for links.

<comment><USER66> When did you last look at Tridactyl?

\- :js is there

\- You can have numbers with :set hintstyle numeric

\- You can have Vimperator style link filtering with :set hintfiltermode vimperator

\- There's no map (and probably never will be), but you can bind sequences of keys to "ex-commands", which is probably 99% of what you want, e.g, :bind <C-b>t open google what time is it

The main problem I have with Tridactyl is that it's pretty janky at the moment.

<comment><USER65> You're godsent- `:js` is there now and it works!

I tried `:set hintstyle numeric` and the command was accepted but it didn't work. Same for `hintfiltermode`. But that they exist means I it's probably me doing something wrong.

I couldn't get bind to work the way I wanted- I typed `:` followed by `bind w :tabnext<CR>` but that didn't work.

Also, C-i for opening vim on textareas and C-c for cancelling a page load don't work either.

I'm beginning to think though that "all" stuff already there, it just works differently (JS wasn't there when I tried a few months back) so I just need to re-read the documentation and not expect everything to work "exactly" like vimperator.

Thank you so much! You've changed my life (partially :))

<comment><USER66> We don't have much validation on `set` - people can use it to make their own settings if they want - so just because it was accepted doesn't mean that it worked in the way you thought it would...

In this case it's because I misremembered the setting. You want `:set hintnames numeric` instead : )

Regarding bind: as I said, it maps sequences of keys to an ex-command. Your attempt is a sequence of keys to a sequence of keys. The correct invocation is `bind w tabnext`.

We left ctrl-c unbound so it could be used for copy, not least because I know it would annoy the hell out of me. You can rebind it with `bind <C-c> stop`, but because we only have access to pages after they've loaded a bit, it might not quite work as often as you'd like.

Ctrl-I will only work if you have `:native` installed, and, if you're on OSX, an editor I thought to add, which I think might just be MacVim. I'd hope it would give you errors if any of the above was untrue...

We definitely aren't at feature parity with Vimperator. Some stuff Mozilla just won't let us do (e.g, emenu), other stuff we can do but haven't got around to it yet (accepting keyboard input on privileged pages - we have preliminary approval for extending WebExtensions).

I'm glad I could help. There's `:tutor` which is fairly short and probably the most user-friendly way of digesting general information, and there's `:help` if you fancy a very dry novella; there's also somewhat hidden help pages for settings and commands for use in insert/ex mode, the latter of which I can't remember how to access. I think there's a link hidden on the main help page.

<comment><USER65> Thank you. Your using `we` made me go to github contributors and sure enough you were one of the top guys :)

I guess with the right `hintnames` and `:bind w tabnext` working I am 95% of the way already.

Couple of things if I don't come across as ungrateul-- :nativeinstall didn't work for me, so I manually did the (seemingly risky) step. :native now shows 0.1.10 installed but C-i doesn't yet work. I'll look around and post back. I am on Linux.

I tried binding C-c but it doesn't seem to work as you guessed. Also- how about using C-z for stop once you have imap and nmap working? Because you're right C-c could get annoying but `stop` is an oft-used feature too.

About feature parity- vimperator also gave you `readline` style C-a, C-e C-w in text-fields.

I'm going to read the hell out of the tutor and help as soon as I get some time. Vimperator (now Tridactyl!) means a lot to me since it makes me much more productive.

<comment><USER66> What do you mean by the manual step for nativeinstall? It is risky if you don't trust us, which is why Mozilla won't let us do it automatically, so it has to be manual.

What do you mean by imap and nmap? We already have separate binds for normal and insert mode (which is why you can type into text boxes ;) ). I think Ctrl-Z was bound to ignore mode in Pentadactyl. Now I think about it, I don't know why it isn't bound to ignore mode; I should probably do that. Anyway, `stop` is just fundamentally broken at the moment because we can't access the page until it loads a bit. It is bound to `x` by default.

We actually have most of the readline binds. They're hidden away on the help page - if you look at the third paragraph "text areas that can be found here" \- but we left them unbound by default because I don't use them and we can't rebind ctrl-w. I don't want to train people that we have readline binds and make them close tabs that they're editing text in :)

As for your editor - I don't know why it isn't working without more information. Feel free to file an issue on GitHub. (For the avoidance of doubt - you need to have a text box focused to use it - I know it sounds silly but it has come up before).

You don't sound ungrateful - Tridactyl is complicated, has weird defaults, and is badly documented.

<comment><USER65> Sorry i immediately set editorcmd but the edit was for some reason posted as a sibling comment that I then deleted.(I couldn't reply immediately afterwards because this website didn't have a reply button for your comment then)

Maybe ZZ could be stop then?

<comment><USER66> ZZ closes all your tabs and windows. `viewconfig nmaps` will show you all the normal mode binds, if you're curious.

I'm reasonably happy with "x" for stop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Chrome has a very annoying (and somewhat severe) Japanese input issue on Linux and pretty much forced me to use Firefox.[0] But I do like Firefox from feature perspectives, too.

[0]: [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=681389](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=681389)

</comment><comment><USER39> Once read that Firefox is working on a Chrome-like language translation feature. Anyone know when it'll be done?

</comment><comment><USER68> The other day I found out that live bookmarks can still be made to work in Firefox 64, in a way:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/advckx/live_boomar...](https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/advckx/live_boomarks_still_kind_of_works_in_firefox_64/)

Not sure if the same applies to 65, but it might help someone...

</comment><comment><USER69> I really like Firefox containers. Having different containers for each of Google, Google G Suite, Hacker News, Twitter, and Reddit lets me have one browser open and keep cookies separate.

I started using Firefox again when I got a new Linux laptop last December (from Sytem76 - love it). After getting used to having containers, then I started also using Firefox again on my MacBook.

</comment><comment><USER70> The energy usage in the task manager doesn't seem to be very accurate.

I tested by opening a new window with a cpu-intensive webpage ([http://www.digitalattackmap.com](http://www.digitalattackmap.com)). Real CPU usage jumps all the way up, but energy usage in the task manager is still showing low. Why?

</comment><comment><USER71> I'm hoping it will be less crashy than the last three or four releases. But they don't say so in the announcement...

Does anybody know whether we get to blame Servo for the crashiness? Rust code is supposed to be "safe", but that never really pans out in industrial use; maturity is a better predictor of stability.

</comment><comment><USER72> I'd love to switch over to Firefox, but I'm used to Chrome's developer toolkit. I understand it thoroughly and can use it proficiently.

Any insight as to the comparison between the state of FF's developer tools and Chrome's would be appreciated. I'd love to be convinced to switch.

<comment><USER73> I don't use Chrome or its developer tools, but I do use Firefox's. They work well for my needs, because I can inspect network requests, including editing and re-sending them, and I can debug JS.

<comment><USER74> Wait, how do you edit/resend a network request?

<comment><USER73> Using the network inspector, there's a button when you click on a specific request to edit and resend it.

Here's a SO answer: [https://stackoverflow.com/a/28775346](https://stackoverflow.com/a/28775346)

<comment><USER74> Thank you! This is my new killer feature!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> > Firefox will now warn you when closing a window (regardless of whether you > have automatic session restore enabled for restart).

Excellent! The number of times I've accidentally hit ctrl+q instead of ctrl+w and then had to relaunch firefox and restore my session - this will be a welcome relief.

<comment><USER76> This stopped happening to me once I moved to Dvorak.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Anyone else had a problem with AMP on Android with Firefox set as the default browser? Tapping on AMP search results from a Google search resulted in a blank page and a never-ending progress bar.

Installing the "Redirect AMP to HTML" plugin sort of solves the issues but adds a delay.

</comment><comment><USER78> I remember about a year or two ago, there was a lot of press on HN about a new Firefox engine that made it extremely fast. Ever since then, I've only seen negative comments about Firefox. Did that just not pan out as much as people had expected?

<comment><USER79> Firefox is fantastic! But I have noticed a similar trend with Firefox getting negative comments.

One particular reason might be that HN has a lot of current and former Google employees on it, and they are pretty vocal and actively defend Google and downvote everything else - I have experienced this multiple times when bringing up anything negative about Chrome - which is really not that great of a browser. Especially the security (look at past number of patches) and memory usage is bad. I'm not sure why the community here speaks so highly about it.

<comment><USER80> I personally find the opposite, where it is usually Mozilla fans bashing Chrome. Mozilla doesn't have any better record when it comes to security. I still have access to all my favorite privacy extensions within Chromium. I also find the performance on Linux (Arch with VAAPI) for Chromium to be much better than Firefox.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> Downloaded Firefox 65 (Windows) and quickly loaded a web page... and still no pinch zoom. :-(

I hope macOS & Windows Firefox will get pinch zoom soon, so that I can finally switch from Chrome.

Firefox seems to have good performance and user-centric features & functionality.

<comment><USER82> there is a capable extension for that [https://github.com/haxiomic/firefox- multi-touch-zoom](https://github.com/haxiomic/firefox-multi-touch-zoom)

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Could any seniors give more information on what do they mean by this firefox update: A better video streaming experience for Windows users: Firefox now supports the next-generation, royalty-free video compression technology called AV1?

<comment><USER84> AV1 is a new video codec, produced by the Alliance for Open Media.

AOM is a consortium of browser vendors, content producers, streaming platforms, teleconference providers, hardware companies, and others to produce a state of the art, efficient codec that's also free of the outright extortion that comes with patents on codecs from MPEG (like H.264 and H.265).

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> I hope someday we'll see Duck Duck Go partner with Firefox as the default engine.

<comment><USER86> This is the case on Linux Mint. I can't even set Google as a search provider if I wanted to! Too bad Duck Duck Go is simply re-branded Bing results, and they kinda suck.

<comment><USER85> > Too bad Duck Duck Go is simply re-branded Bing results

Do you have any source for this claim?

<comment><USER86> [https://duck.co/help/results/sources](https://duck.co/help/results/sources)

"In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we also source from a variety of partners, including Oath (formerly Yahoo) and Bing."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> Tangential, but has anyone here figured out how to get menu copy and paste working in Firefox on webapps such as Google Docs?

I've tried suggestions such as changing the dom.clipboard settings in about:config, but that doesn't help.

</comment><comment><USER88> How do the new privacy blocker settings interfere or conflict with uBlock?

<comment><USER45> You mean the enhanced tracking protection? There's no interference or conflict with uBlock.

<comment><USER40> It can at least be confusing and there might be conflicts. I'd recommend turning off the built in tracking protection if using other tracking.

They might have fixed the particular issue, but at one point I had stupidly enabled "strict" tracking protection and used that with uMatrix and found that it broke something major (I forget what, maybe reCaptcha) even when the internal tracking was disabled on a per-site basis. Very confusing and unnecessary to have the internal tracking protection if you already use a blocker.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> Happy with a lot of stuff 65 introduced (this is a nice trend in a lot of recent Firefox releases)

One thing I'm _not_ happy about; opted-in recommendations for addons when you browse websites.

</comment><comment><USER62> Handoff on macOS, finally! \o/

Just tested opening Firefox on iOS, and the "Open page in Firefox" pops up in the Dock of my Mac. Neat.

(It is advertised as also working with Mobile Safari.)

<comment><USER90> Does any of this work with Firefox on Windows/Linux? It would be nice to have this kind of syncing across all platforms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> Committed FF user after finding you can stop auto playing HTML5 videos without the need for an extension.

Plus: Google's auto-login debacle which precipitated the move.

</comment><comment><USER92> Any big reasons to up date to this over the ESR release (60)? So far it seems like mostly minor updates since then or did I miss something?

</comment><comment><USER93> Anybody else seeing blurry text for the bookmark toolbar and background tab titles? macOS 10.14 on an external monitor.

<comment><USER93> Hmm, looks like it only happens with dark theme enabled, it looks ok in light mode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> Darn was hoping for default urls for containers. so when you open a container the tab will open a specific url also.

</comment><comment><USER95> Finally it seems the performance issues on macbook pro with retina display have been solved, at least for me!

</comment><comment><USER96> The hard-coded alt+# for switching to numbered tabs is a deal breaker for me. I wish it wasn't but I have ingrained ctrl+# for switching and alt+# is used for my window manager. I accept I'm in a minority, but it seems like a strange design decision for an open browser.

</comment><comment><USER97> What would it take for firefox to support Gmail's offline mode?

</comment><comment><USER98> Is there any decent mouse gesture solution yet?

</comment><comment><USER99> Is per site autoplay control still not available?

</comment><comment><USER100> I wish I could revert. 65 regressed and the tabs are back above the address bar.

<comment><USER101> Firefox has placed tabs above the address bar by default for almost 10 years. Addresses are specific to (inside of/"below") tabs, so the default interface makes better sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER102> A question regarding the advertisements they show on the home page: [https://www.neowin.net/news/firefox-640-is-now-showing-a- boo...](https://www.neowin.net/news/firefox-640-is-now-showing-a-bookingcom- ad-in-the-new-tab-page/)

Are these ads introduced with these updates, or does Firefox include a backdoor so the Mozilla Corporation can show whatever they want on your home page?

<comment><USER103> Firefox as an organization does not get branding at all. They claim to be the champions on privacy and user freedom yet they keep breaking that image over and over again with unwanted ads, telemetry, and services you can't disable. I still use Firefox as my main browser, but I can't fathom how they come up with such poor decisions every single time.

<comment><USER104> Maybe if users were willing to pay for a browser, they wouldn't be so desperately scrambling around for non-Google revenue sources.

They could try to offer some kind of "pay us to forgo marketing partnerships" deal, but I somehow doubt even most of the well-paid privacy advocates on HN would sign up.

<comment><USER105> > They could try to offer some kind of "pay us to forgo marketing > partnerships" deal, but I somehow doubt even most of the well-paid privacy > advocates on HN would sign up.

I would pay for this, provided it was a one time payment! (I feel I need to add that caveat nowadays, since subscriptions are all the rage.)

<comment><USER106> > I would pay for this, provided it was a one time payment!

The problem is that web browsers require some of the most intensive software maintenance of any software, ever. They're one of the most exposed attack surfaces to external security threats; and piles of new features are unfortunately getting continuously added to web standards, which need to be supported for compatibility reasons.

I think a one time tip-jar payment makes sense for a lot of software, but not for web browsers. I think a subscription-type contribution makes the most sense for them.

<comment><USER105> Put the money into a trust fund? I suppose I could do that on my end, but that's a little extreme from an effort point of view.

Subscriptions are just difficult to manage, I can't deal with individual recurring costs for so many pieces of software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER107> No changes to the interface again! Will not go back to FF till they take graphic design seriously.

<comment><USER108> curious, what changes do you want to see?

<comment><USER107> Here are my comments. There is too much color in the tab and bookmarks bars. It should fade with focus on the content. The icons are too contrasting, the outlive around the folders is too harsh. I don't think they changed the icons design in 10 years or more. I find his lack of aesthetic attention jarring. Same goes for navigation and settings interface.</comment></comment></comment>


Restoring felon voting rights a 'mess' in battleground Florida - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-florida-felons-insight/restoring-felon-voting-rights-a-mess-in-battleground-florida-idUSKBN1WM0YV <comment> mAEStro-paNDa This is only a "mess" because of undemocratic push-back against a ballot measure that was voted on by the people.

It isn't limited to just voting rights either. Look into the push-back in Arkansas over a ballot measure passed last year to raise the minimum wage.

<comment> munk-a Yea - I must have missed the "who have cleared any debts and fines outstanding" clause following the reinfranchisement of felons.

I know there is a large partisan divide, but one of these parties is for enfranchisement and the other one is trying their hardest to keep all those felons from voting.

<comment><USER2> > Yea - I must have missed the "who have cleared any debts and fines > outstanding" clause following the reinfranchisement of felons.

Apparently they have to complete all terms of their sentences:

> > No. 4 Constitutional Amendment Article VI, Section 4. Voting Restoration > Amendment This amendment restores the voting rights of Floridians with > felony convictions after they complete all terms of their sentence including > parole or probation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is one of the big reasons I think Warren's first priority plan of voting reforms might be more important than any other. Gerrymandering, poll closures, voter ID laws all of it is one big effort to hold on to power despite losing the support of the voters which is the whole basis of the legitimacy of government power in the US.

<comment> mAEStro-paNDa How exactly do you think she will execute that plan?

Voter ID laws have been enshrined in some states through ballot measures voted on by the public, for example.

Not only that, turnout and money in politics are arguably more of a priority to tackle, in that they would make addressing voter ID laws or gerrymandering much easier.

Overall I'm not sure her "plans" to solve these issues goes far enough, or gives enough detail of how they would be executed.

<comment><USER3> There's the most power on the level of federal elections where congress has the power to dictate the "time, place, and manner" at any time (Article 1 Section 4). So for the whole of Congress they have pretty full and broad powers to make whatever they want happen. To get similar things at the state levels there's the ever useful strategy of just dangling a large pot of money for states. And ballot measures aren't completely binding they can be modified by the legislature of the individual states.

I do think money in politics is a big issue but with Citizens United it's hard to do anything about that since "spending money is speech" means there's very very little wiggle room in the 1st amendment for putting a stopper on the geyser of corporate money. [1]

[0] [https://medium.com/@teamwarren/my-plan-to-strengthen-our- dem...](https://medium.com/@teamwarren/my-plan-to-strengthen-our- democracy-6867ec1bcd3c)

[1] Is a real messy problem. Personally I think corporations getting the full rights of citizens is a bit bonkers and I wish there was an easy way to draw a line between people collectively pooling their money for speech and a corporation doing the same thing. Maybe some test around profit making or something to tamp down on the feedback loop of companies spending money to make way more money in return from legislative changes.

<comment><USER4> In the vein of "dangling money", elections are expensive to run and states would not want to double spend to follow their rules + Fed rules.

<comment><USER3> Yeah I imagine that's part of the calculus too that it would be easier to use the same rolls, machines and rules but getting them to reform the district drawing process would be somewhere our hypothetical Warren admin would probably have to incentivize with money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, this is pretty crazy.

> Under a Florida law that went into effect July 1, he must pay those > penalties before casting a ballot or risk being prosecuted for voter > fraud... Florida has no comprehensive system for tracking such fines

It's not uncommon for states like Florida to make voting difficult, but this is Kafkaesque and ridiculous.

<comment><USER6> If you don't live in a Republican majority state, then you might not appreciate the lengths they are will to go through at a bureaucratic level to prevent non Republicans from voting and to otherwise minimize their political power. You almost want to admire how clever and dedicated they are to it: gerrymandering, removing classes of people from ballot roles, inconvenience tactics of minimizing voting machines/locations for non-R precincts, minimizing early voting and vote by mail (or defunding them), physical intimidation at precincts, and maneuvers like the subject of this article.

You can look at the members of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Advisory_Commissi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Advisory_Commission_on_Election_Integrity) (Hans van Spakovsky, Chris Kobach) and see the impressive and coordinated job they are doing at nationalizing the effort.

They have an incredible pipeline to create "movement" attorneys and advancing them into the judicial system with the ADF, programs like the Blackstone legal fellowship, and the relatively recently accredited Liberty U law school as a feeder. They don't draw a ton of attention to themselves, but let's just say... hopefully you are Christian, white, heterosexual, and don't want/need contraception. They essentially have already won, the precedent is just working its way through the judiciary.

<comment><USER7> This isn't something to blame on one party.

Maryland is not a Republican majority state. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryland%27s_3rd_congressional...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryland%27s_3rd_congressional_district)

Illinois is also not a Republican majority state. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois%27s_4th_congressional...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois%27s_4th_congressional_district)

<comment><USER6> I'm sorry, it is in fact a single party issue at a national, coordinated level right now. Not every R state is gerrymandered, and Maryland is a great example of how not every D state is not gerrymandered. But you have Eric Holder and the NDRC on one hand. You have Hofeller, Kobach, and von Spakovsky on the other. It should be bipartisan and simply a matter of civic duty, and I look forward to when it's that way again.

And IL 4 was drawn by Republicans after [https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district- courts/FSupp/7...](https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district- courts/FSupp/777/634/2259862/)

From [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois%27s_4th_congressional...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois%27s_4th_congressional_district#History) _" In June 1991, Congressman Dennis Hastert, a suburban Republican, filed a federal lawsuit claiming that the existing congressional map was unconstitutional;[11] the present congressional district boundaries emerged as a result of that lawsuit. A three-judge panel of the federal district court adopted the map proposed by Hastert and other Republican members of the Illinois Congressional delegation"_

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >But another argument is shaping up to be central to the plaintiffs' case: Florida has no consolidated system for determining what felons owe or certifying that they have paid up. It's a situation that ex-offenders say makes it virtually impossible for them to prove they are eligible to vote.

This seems absurd.

You can't vote because you owe us money... but we're not going to tell you how much you owe, if anything at all.

<comment><USER9> Why is paying up linked to voting? This just creates an incentive to strenuously police and fine minorities so they can't put you out of office.

<comment><USER10> Yes, exactly, it's a modern day poll tax and many people in power want such a thing.

<comment><USER11> This might be UK bias, but I take "poll tax" to mean a fixed tax on each resident for community services (as opposed to say a tax based on the value of the residence), but has nothing to do with voting. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_tax)

<comment><USER12> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_taxes_in_the_United_State...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_taxes_in_the_United_States#Voter_registration)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I sure hope their lawsuit is successful this seems like an overreach of the power of the legislature. If the people vote to make a constitutional ammendment then it should be law!

> The Tampa pastor is now a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the payments > law, which was crafted by Florida's Republican-controlled legislature and > signed by Governor Ron DeSantis, also a Republican. The law came just months > after Floridians approved a ballot initiative restoring voting rights to > more than 1 million felons who have completed their sentences;

<comment><USER14> Not surprising that people try to hold on to power by hook or by crook. (And there are a whole lot of crooks among Florida's power elite.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I haven't ever understood how being a felon removes a right ?

Rights aren't something the govt gives so how can the govt remove them ?

<comment><USER16> You may be deprived, under the 5th Amendment, of life, liberty, and property via due process of law. Since felons have been convicted of crimes under due process, their right to vote (liberty) can be deprived.

<comment><USER17> I strongly doubt the Founding Fathers intended that to mean "we should continue to deprive felons their rights to life, liberty, and property even after they have served their sentence".

<comment><USER18> In this case it matters less what the founders intended and more what the framers of the 14th Amendment thought almost 100 years later. You can read in _Richardson v Ramirez_ a bit of a history of felon disenfranchisement; a reasonable summary might be: "there was a lot of haggling over the specific language of the clauses of 14A, but disenfranchisement for crimes was a consistent point of agreement".

Of course, that doesn't mean that it's right to disenfranchise felons (it almost certainly isn't), nor does it mean any state is obligated to disenfranchise (most states don't). It does however mean that it's not straightforward to appeal to the Constitution in arguing to get rid of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Database and records issues aside, it seems that the constitutional amendment was pretty clear:

"No. 4 Constitutional Amendment Article VI, Section 4. Voting Restoration Amendment This amendment restores the voting rights of Floridians with felony convictions after they complete all terms of their sentence including parole or probation. The amendment would not apply to those convicted of murder or sexual offenses, who would continue to be permanently barred from voting unless the Governor and Cabinet vote to restore their voting rights on a case by case basis."

If the fees are part of parole or probation, then the felons should be not be able to vote. Does florida not have a database of who is or isn't on probation?

If the fees are not part of parole or probation, the new law should be clearly unconstitutional.

<comment><USER20> > Does florida not have a database of who is or isn't on probation?

Apparently not when it comes to fees owed as part of that.

> Tyson searched court records, first on his own, then with the help of a > nonprofit legal advocacy group. They say that because Florida has no > comprehensive system for tracking such fines, the documents don't make clear > what he owes. The records, viewed by Reuters, show potential sums ranging > from $846 to a couple thousand dollars related to crimes he committed in the > late 1970s and 1990s. Tyson says he won't risk voting until Florida > authorities can tell him for sure.

<comment><USER19> >Apparently not when it comes to fees owed as part of that.

I think there is another more likely answer: Probation is tracked, fees have not traditionally been considered a requirement for probation completion, and the legislature is trying to shift the lines.

<comment><USER21> > ... fees have not traditionally been considered a requirement for probation > completion ...

Is that the case? It seems like I've heard of cases where probation comes with requirements ("wear this tracking bracelet") that are provided by a private entity who bills the convict, and if the bill isn't paid, probation gets revoked.

<comment><USER19> My understanding of the article is it applies to those who completed probation, not those who's probation is ongoing or revoked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "developing a procedure to send counties regularly updated lists of felons on their rolls who have unpaid fines and fees, but it has no timetable as to when it will be ready"

Oh, I know when it'll be ready. About 2 weeks before the election, just in time to purge voters without giving them enough time to do anything about it.

</comment><comment><USER23> I wonder if labyrinthian fines could get classified as excessive fines, somehow. But if the fine complexity is O(n) where n is the number of convictions you have, I don't see what the big deal is.

<comment> crooked-v The problem isn't the number of fines, but that different clerks and offices will all claim that the total and remaining fines are all different amounts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> For a bit of context the current governor, Desantis, squeaked into the win with less than 40,000 votes. He is trying everything in his power to not be a one-term governor. So far he has:

* Liberalized his platform to appear more moderate. Terms are 5 years and a new generation of voters.

* Supress black votes through kafkaesque voter registration.

* Suppress black votes by denying ex-convicts (who make up a large block of felons) the ability.

</comment><comment><USER25> It shouldn't be a mess. We voted for it and it passed. When we voted, there was no stipulation that repayment was necessary. That came after and that bill should have been struck down because that was not the will of the people.

</comment><comment><USER26> On the bright side, there is no governorship or senate seat up for grabs, so the stakes are considerably lower.

<comment><USER27> Yup, just the 29 Congressional seats and President. Oh, and all the state legislative seats. Not to mention mayoral seats and other state measures. Or any 2020 ballot measure. Not much at all, really.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Just another poll tax.

wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_taxes_in_the_United_States

<comment><USER29> If too many poors voted it would undermine our class structure through democracy. Can't have that happen. /s

Building on what you said, everyone should have the right to vote, totally unobstructed, even if they are in jail. Otherwise, you incentivize putting people the powers that be don't like in jail.

<comment><USER30> At least one state (Vermont) does allow people behind bars.

For the rest of them, prison populations are another form of concentrating and diluting power: prisoners are counted toward district population, but have no voting power.

I'm in the camp that thinks everyone should have the right to vote, prisoners included. Voting is a fundamental component of citizenship, and being imprisoned shouldn't take that way as a matter a principle, nor should a citizen be disenfranchised after their release (as is also common, especially in the states that enacted all these laws in the Jim Crow south era).

Especially if we want former prisoners to play a more positive role in society after their release, stripping them of a right of citizenship, possibly indefinitely, seems like a bad way to do it.

<comment> crooked-v A simple thought experiment that can also help people reevaluate their views on this kind of thing:

Imagine if [thing you like] was illegal, punishable as a minor felony with a year in jail and the subsequent loss of voting rights. You know that 60% of the population supports [thing you like] and would like to have it legalized, but because a substantial chunk of this population has been or will be punished this way over their lifetimes, support of [thing you like] only gets a minority of the vote. The 40% of the population that opposes [thing you like] uses this to claim that most people oppose [thing you like] and want it to remain illegal.

<comment><USER31> That is the whole issue with the criminalization of drug consumption it creates all kind of societal issues and it screws up other areas that at one time where and still should be reasonable. It get compounded with laws like the 3 strike rule where you get hit with 3 small non-violent offenses and then they can really jack up the charges and get you on a felony.

I am all for true felons loosing their right to vote. I don't want people that have run ponzi schemes, violent high volume drug dealers or pedophiles to have the right to participate in the society I live in. I think it is criminal that some meth head that gets slapped with a felony for having a little too much on them goes to prison, gets out, turns around their life and now cannot participate fully in society due to poor laws.

<comment> crooked-v I would personally prefer voting remain unconditionally open to everyone, because treating it that way avoids future societal repression over [insert moral panic over reasonably harmless subject here] and because the total number of the kind of people you cite are a rounding error compared to overall voter turnout totals.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>