Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Ethically Iffy 'Philanthropy' - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/musk-zuckerberg-bezos-and-ethically-iffy-philanthropy/ <comment><USER2> This is one of the laziest articles I've read. Let me boil down the author's entire argument into one sentence: _" These tech billionaires want to help millions of people, not just the person next door. How heartless!"_

There are many valid critiques that could have been made. For example: _" Zuckerberg claims that all lives have equal value, and hence, we should prioritize the countless future humans over existing ones. However, human quality of life has been growing exponentially across generations. Extreme poverty has been decimated over the past generation, and can realistically be eliminated completely in the next few decades. Similarly for medical progress. Hence, it is those suffering in the present, who will suffer the most, and need the most help."_

Or with regard to Blue-Origin or OpenAI: _" Bezos and Musk think that by pouring billions of dollars of resources into sci-fi projects like AI and Space exploration, we can best help humanity. However, these projects are nothing more than vaporware. We have no idea how or when truly intelligent AI will be built, and worrying about super-evil AI, is like worrying about dinosaur attacks. With regard to space exploration, humanity's problems today have little to do with physical resources, and everything to do with disease and human development. Building space rockets isn't going to bring humanity forward any more than building ferraris. That Bezos and Musk are spending billions on such hobby-projects, shows how out of touch they are with the suffering of the world's poor."_

I'm not saying I necessarily agree with the above arguments, but I can at least respect them. Unfortunately, the author doesn't present any such argument whatsoever. _" These billionaires have big ideas on how to change the world, and how to best help billions of people. How heartless! Clearly they have no respect for us as individuals."_ /s

<comment><USER3> Is it horribly irrational to simply assume that the philanthropic gestures of the very wealthy are just targeted to achieve their own personal utility maximization? I think that it is normal to just assume self interest even in the case of philanthropy and this of course limits the type of philanthropy to that which has over-unity personal cost benefit ratio.

<comment><USER2> If by personal-utility, you're including the satisfaction and happiness that good-hearted people derive from helping others, then I completely agree. Not just for the "very wealthy", but for everyone.

Often, people twist this into somehow being a bad thing. _" Bill Gates isn't a good guy. He's just donating billions to charity and saving millions of lives because that makes him happy"_.

Problem is, you can twist any good deed into pure selfishness, using this chain of logic. " _Your father wasn 't a good man. Working hard to take care of his family, gave him great happiness, and that's why he did it"_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Bezos is right. Most people don't think about the long game. What can we do today to more quickly increase our tech tree 25, 50, 100, 200 years into the future? If we spent more of our GDP 50 years ago on R&D, our knowledge would be much greater than today. Solar energy, electric vehicles, etc would already be mainstream, for example. Our ability to treat cancer(s), alzheimer's, heart disease would be 20 years more advanced.

"Jeff Bezos, too, is thinking at the species-existence level. "The solar system can easily support a trillion humans," he says. "And if we had a trillion humans, we would have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts and unlimited, for all practical purposes, resources and solar power unlimited for all practical purposes. That's the world that I want my great-grandchildren's great-grandchildren to live in." That's why Bezos is spending a billion dollars a year on Blue Origin, his space travel company—and that's why, controversially, he thinks that Blue Origin is really the only way to spend such enormous resources. If something you did today could materially improve the lives of trillions of humans in the future, then that benefit would have to outweigh anything you did for mere millions of humans in the present."

<comment><USER5> With a trillion humans, a lot more of the energy available to perform work would be human effort. The humans providing low-level effort will be desperately poor, because that low-level effort isn't worth much.

The Black Death did wonders for the peasant class of Europe by killing a third of them. Those who didn't die were much richer than peasants had been previously. (Nobles were poorer, because most of the wealth of nobles was the peasants who worked their land. Losing a third of your wealth isn't so great; losing a third of your competition is.)

If you want humans to have unlimited resources and unlimited power, you should focus on driving numbers down, not up.

In a different but related analogy, _Seeing like a State_ likes to emphasize how intensive agriculture by peasants who are intimately familiar with the local land, weather, crops, and pests is more productive (in terms of food produced per acre) than modern industrial agriculture. The difference is that the local peasant devotes all his time to cultivating a man-sized area of land. The extra productivity goes to him, and he eats it, but he's very poor. One man using inefficient machines to cultivate 20 fields at 80% efficiency is a lot richer than any of the 60 men cultivating a third of a field each at 100% efficiency, and the society around that one man is richer too because, unlike the 60 peasants, he produces a lot of surplus to trade with them.

<comment><USER6> Socialism is inevitable. We just need to first develop technological systems which can assist the proletariat in identifying and eliminating corruption by the elite and/or powerful.

We can already afford to feed and house every person on the planet, probably several times over. Yet many are still hungry and homeless. It is not a lack of capital so much as a resource allocation problem - how do you 'throttle' greed so that you still motivate productive work without allowing those with disproportionate power to game the system in their favor. Technology can help us solve this.

<comment><USER7> I think that the idea of technology saving us from our inherent natural tendencies is nice to think about but ultimately naive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If we're going to squint at charities, there's a lot more squinting to be done one or two rungs down the ladder from Gates and Bezos. Of course, that would involve uncomfortable observations about people who care about what is said about them and have the resources to spread their displeasure, so we don't see that journalism.

</comment><comment><USER9> The part of this philosophy that I disagree with is that I believe solving the problems of today will put us in a much better position to solve tomorrow's problems.

With that in mind I feel that completely discounting people alive today in favor of a theoretical future is both cruel and short sighted.

</comment><comment><USER10> If it's unethical for billionaire tech founders to focus on the needs of future generations, what moral grounding does, say, environmentalism have?

By this logic, would it not be fair to say that every dollar invested in green solutions comes at the expense of other worthy societal projects that could meaningfully change the status quo?

Those efforts are largely seen as virtuous. Seems to me the only difference here is the origin of the money: tech.

<comment><USER11> I agree. And reading through the article, I didn't really see any argument made against why what Musk, Zuckerberg, or Bezos are doing is unethical.

When all is said and done, Bill Gates will go down as the person who saved more human lives in a systematic and deliberate way than any other human in history. We need people like him. We also need people like Jeff Bezos, who seems to naturally operate on a super long-term thinking mental model. I've said it before on here: Thousands of years from now there will be hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of people populating multiple star systems in this galaxy. Their existence will be due to the efforts of people like Bezos and Musk, and the steps they are taking today to address space travel and AI.

<comment><USER5> > Bill Gates will go down as the person who saved more human lives in a > systematic and deliberate way than any other human in history

There's nothing special about doing it in a systematic and deliberate way. According to legend, the Yellow Emperor taught the Chinese to practice agriculture. In terms of contribution to human life, this would dwarf anything Bill Gates could ever accomplish.

In reality, of course, agriculture arose in an unorganized way, but does that make it less significant?

<comment><USER12> Reminds me of Haber-Bosch, credited for saving billions of lives via synthetic fertilizer. [http://www.scienceheroes.com/](http://www.scienceheroes.com/)

<comment><USER13> Assuming this is true, it seems reasonable that on larger timescales, and with greater resources, even more future human lives can be saved. It's a refreshing view, considering my main impetus for a long time has been, "Reduce suffering in the universe." Actively trying to create more life is antithetical to that goal, as suffering is an integral experience of a sufficiently intelligent being. I don't mean to say that that's where I've landed, but my mind is beginning to claw at the edified ethical structures it has built up, thanks to this mega-long-term frame.

Does it make sense to make the universe more welcoming to life, if life is the vehicle of suffering? Would Super-AI's possibly have unbounded levels of suffering-potential? If there is a non-zero chance of that being true, is creating AI the ultimate ethical iniquity possible?

The people that were saved by this fertilizer, did their lives contribute to a net reduction in suffering in the universe? I'm doubtful of that but I'm beginning to question the edge value of this Singerian utilitarian philosophy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > In the eyes of Bezos and Zuckerberg, it's equally bad to concentrate on the > suffering of the living, if doing so means ignoring the needs of the untold > billions of people who are not yet born.

> To think in such a manner can certainly be considered heartless.

How does that follow? They're considering the needs of untold billions of individuals not yet born; I would say that it's heartless to consider the needs of those billions presently alive to the exclusion of those not-yet- living. Self-serving, even.

<comment><USER15> >> To think in such a manner can certainly be considered heartless.

> How does that follow? They're considering the needs of untold billions of > individuals not yet born

Are they _really_ considering the needs of unborn individuals, or just ignoring the needs of actual living individuals to focus on sci-fi tech stuff that excites them?

By focusing too much on the speculative sci-fi needs of future generations, you may condemn those generations to suffer through the same hard problems we have now that were left unsolved so some tech billionaires could focus on sexy stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The main thing I dislike is Bezos mentioning there being trillions of humans, with the assumption growth must continue and we'll figure it out.

The assumption that we must grow and spread through the galaxy, rather than determine if there's some sort of reasonable limit to keeping Earth in order first, seems inherently flawed in assuming unlimited population inflation in itself is net 'good.'

</comment><comment><USER17> Maybe solving the 'sci-fi' problems will make today's problems irrelevant. I feel that's what they all are counting on.

</comment><comment><USER18> a trillion humans, 8 of which own 90% of the wealth

<comment><USER8> It is natural for the Ruler to desire more Subjects.

<comment><USER18> "you must suffer now so that generations to come can worship me"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't like the idea of the current debt based economy that allows infinite amount of US debt to be printed in the first place, effectively meaning that other countries has to be poorer.</comment>


Quick Poll (programming preference) - <AUTHOR>

Ruby on Rails or PHP?

-For Webservice Consumption
-Webservice Deployment
-Database Interaction
-Scaling

anybody? <comment><USER2> You're comparing a framework to a language.

Rails vs Django vs Cake vs CodeIgniter vs ....

As someone who just went through this selection process for a large scale production site...

Rails. Rapid development, deployment. Serious effort to scale. Needs a lot of metal. Database heavy applications require a lot of tooling/optimizing, to the point that Rail's features for autogen become defeatist at a certain point.

Django. Rapid development, awesome performance, stuck with the Django way or the highway. Once you get deep into development, the benefit of the rapid development can become a hindrance. See notes above about Rails.

PHP w/ MVC Framework. Rapid development, frameworks not designed for scale, most frameworks designed for a language other than PHP (most seem to think they're being written for Java). Easiest to scale out of the three I've mentioned, not hard to make the framework bend to your needs.

.NET, if you want to pay licensing fees that could sink your business if you don't have the budget.

That said, we chose PHP with PostgreSQL. We rolled our own framework taking design cues from Rails, ASP.NET and Django. Foremost built for scale, ease of development second priority. We run weekly performance comparison with other PHP frameworks, and are able to beat them all by 50% or better; but that's because of a design choice for the framework. We chose performance over ease. I'd much rather spend the upfront effort to sleep well at night once launched. Heavy use of memcache, strict rules regarding use of session, cache at every level (database calls, html fragments, models). Custom templating for views that incorporates reuse and encapulation principles via ASP.NET/JSP style tag libraries/controls.

That said, PHP sucks. Horrible hackish language. But it's easy and sleazy, scales easily. Scaling the database is a separate issue. MySQL possibly better for this, but PostgreSQL is a better RDBMS on many levels. Most frameworks for PHP suck because most of the people designing them aren't disciplined in other languages and make horrible assumptions about best practices.

Flame away.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for all the feedback...I just wanted to see what people thought.

At work I'm attempting to scale a mix of procedural php(60%) and object oriented php(40%) for a temporary 'system'. While I build a new one from scratch; I have complete freedom as to what the new system is written in and I was feeling that Ruby on Rails would be a good starting point because of its 'rapid development'.

The 'busy' season for my company is less than 2 months away and there are alot things that need to be done: -Restructure DB -Handle Web Service Consumption(WSDL with SOAP binding) on multiple occasions -Deploy our own web service for Sales through 'affiliates' -Have be able to be extended in the future by programmers other than myself

I am kind of stuck because with PHP it's ridiculously easy to consume webservices via nusoap(os library/class), but then I lose the ORM, but I have the freedom of customizing my DB interaction.

Then if I choose the ORM(rails) I have to deal with a slightly complicated webservice communication procedure. Plus there is a high probability that I will have to customize the db interaction so much that it may defeat the purpose in the first place.

So I'm leaning towards writing my own PHP+MySQL code from scratch, but I'm all alone so writing it wouldn't be something that seems accomplish-able in 3 months. Ruby on rails seems fast enough, but that web service thing seems like a real PAIN. I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Anyway, Thanks for everyones feedback!

</comment><comment><USER3> Python + Postgres, or ColdFusion + Postgres. Failing that, I'd choose PHP if there's a chance anyone besides me will ever touch the project, or Ruby if its gonna be me all the way. Just because good php coders are easier to come by than Ruby ones, and because you've added "Scaling" as an item. I'm saying Python and Ruby and not Django/Pylons/Rails because I won't pick a framework be default - only if it 100% fitted a particular project. Otherwise I'd rather code it myself from scratch. Harel

<comment><USER4> ColdFusion? Why?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Of those choices? Rails, hands down, but don't limit yourself. There are a lot of options out there. I find it interesting that you're comparing Ruby/Rails and PHP - they don't have much in common. It's also noteworthy that Ruby works pretty well without Rails. RHTML works a lot like PHP, but with Ruby as the language.

What, exactly are you trying to do with it?

</comment><comment><USER5> DrScheme + S3/Shards + EC2 + AllegroGraph + Varnish

<comment><USER6> Now that's something different that I don't see come up too often in the Ruby vs Python vs PHP debate

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Depends on what you mean by webservice - SOAP or REST. Rails works great for REST, but not for SOAP. For DB interaction, I really like ActiveRecord. Don't think that PHP can offer any serious ORM alternative. As for scaling, well, Rails has just a few real world test cases, whereas PHP has many.

</comment><comment><USER7> Depends on what you mean by webservice - SOAP or REST. Rails works great for REST, but not for SOAP. For DB interaction, I really like ActiveRecord. Don't think that PHP can offer any serious ORM alternative. As for scaling, well, Rails has just a few real world test cases, whereas PHP has many.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've been enjoying RoR + MySQL, but I haven't launched a project that has any widespread audience yet.

</comment><comment><USER9> Neither. Django/MySQL (SQLite for dev/prototyping)

</comment><comment><USER10> PHP all the way, and maybe .NET for some apps

</comment><comment><USER11> PHP 5 all the way + MySQL or Postgres.

</comment><comment><USER12> Perl, Apache/mod_perl, PostgreSQL

</comment><comment><USER13> php5 + mysql + memcache

</comment><comment><USER14> Smith Project and MySQL

</comment><comment><USER15> django, PostgreSQL

</comment><comment><USER16> Pylons

</comment><comment><USER17> RoR</comment>


Ask HN: Why was the recent Wired article about Fox News and Wikipedia flagged? - <AUTHOR> ^Title. Here's the link to the flagged submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24129479<p>I read the article in the submission, and I'm just curious why it was flagged? Maybe I don't understand flagging in general, but the submission seemed pretty relevant for HN, objectively speaking. What am I missing? <comment><USER2> A user emailed with the same question. I'll copy the answer here:

Users flagged it. This is the usual tug of war between upvotes, flags, and vouches.

We sometimes turn off flags if the article is substantive and we feel like it can support a thoughtful discussion. In this case, I'm wavering. I'm not sure how significant this information really is, given how many such things are happening right now (lots of moderation thoughts on that at [1] and [2]). The question is whether the resulting thread would be significantly different from previous discussions or not, or whether it would just get sucked into the nearest black hole, i.e. the nearest flamewar topic.

Wavering isn't a strong enough reason to override the community verdict so I guess we'll leave it as is. Sorry to disappoint—there's lots of room for disagreement about this stuff, and lots of interpretation involved. I'm not saying we're right, and certainly not always right, but someone has to make these calls.

[1] [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22significant%20new%20informa...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22significant%20new%20information%22%20by%3Adang&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment)

[2] [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=follow- up%20by%3Adang&dateRang...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=follow- up%20by%3Adang&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for weighing in. Administering this stuff is undoubtedly exhausting, and I appreciate the honest explanation here. I agree that community rule should be rarely overridden, and to be honest, until I asked this question I was under the false impression that flagging was a moderator action. If I had done my homework and seen that it was the community who decided it wasn't HN worthy, I wouldn't have posted this. But I'm glad I did! Live and learn.

The fact it got flagged is interesting all on its own. Maybe Wired is inviting flame wars by simply saying Fox News in the title? I wonder if it would've been flagged had they not. Food for thought.

Thanks, dang!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's the wired article the submission linked to: [https://www.wired.com/story/why-wikipedia-decided-to-stop- ca...](https://www.wired.com/story/why-wikipedia-decided-to-stop-calling-fox- a-reliable-source/)

I got the submission in my RSS reader (Feedly) which regularly shows me posts that end up getting flagged for removal. After seeing the linked article elsewhere, this seemed like an odd submission to remove.

<comment><USER3> Click the time-stamp of the submission. You should have a [vouch] link. Vouch for the post. If enough people vouch for the submission it should unkill itself.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could be mobile safari but I still don't see a vouch button. :(

I have 4 karma, my guess is that HN admins restrict who can vouch, which would help stem the tide of spam.

I'm not spam. If this is working as designed, I'd like anyone calling the shots at HN (if they read this) to know that I am vouching in spirit and wish I could vouch in reality. :)

Update: I'm dumb, this comment explains what I'm too lazy to search for:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24133425](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24133425)

<comment><USER2> You need > 30 karma to vouch, same as to flag.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe a lot of users flagged it because they aren't interested in having continuous political discourse also on HN.

<comment><AUTHOR> This isn't about political discourse. It's about information reliability and how websites are dealing with it.

Don't flag important conversation starters about problems endemic to the internet!

<comment><USER4> 'Fake news' stopped being newsworthy to anyone in tech probably many years ago. I find the following HN guideline to apply well to this:

 _Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they 're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic._

<comment><AUTHOR> Wikipedia questioning the reliability of a major cable news network is an interesting new phenomenon.

Fake news is an incredibly important topic of discussion for anyone in the social media side of the tech world.

I think you're wrong. Debate me?

<comment><USER4> You'd probably find me a disappointing debate opponent - my opinion of modern news is loosely the following:

[https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/942367860709609472?lang=e...](https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/942367860709609472?lang=en)

<comment><AUTHOR> I totally agree with your opinion of modern news.

Your opinion of HN and what deserves to be on here is what I take issue with. It felt initially like you argued that because Fox News was the subject of the link, it would start a shitstorm of garbage talk and therefore shouldn't be on here. While it may start a shitstorm of garbage talk (it totally would, no doubt), I think this particular headline is interesting because it's a move made by Wikipedia, one of the most widely used references on the internet.

I would argue that despite the shitstorm, we should still be allowed to talk about it on HN because it's relevant to policy makers at various internet companies. We can see that Wikipedia did something they haven't done before, and it might influence how others move forward. i.e. "If the good folks at Wikipedia doubt Fox News' credibility as an information resource, maybe we should too? Let's talk about that."

It wouldn't matter to me if it was Fox or CNN or MSNBC or what have you. What matters (to me) is that it's Wikipedia, and I would love to know what people smarter than me think about this situation.

But how can I get their opinion if posts about this get flagged to oblivion?

Edit:

For example, if I could poll what information overlords at companies thought, here's what I'd ask:

\- At what point does a particular information resource deserve to have its reliability status revoked?

\- What is a good summary of some of the internal discussions happening at Wikipedia regarding this problem and it's surging importance?

\- How do you, as a company, respond when the mob attacks with something along the lines of "Leftist/Rightist bad people at company XYZ told me my favorite news entertainment network wasn't truthful, let's cancel them!" (Personally, my answer to this one would be: nothing.)

\- What do sociologists say about this, given historical context of misinformation and the cults that grow to protect it? How do we bridge existing knowledge about combating bad info with the instant-communication age we are in?

Honestly, I could go on forever. Might not be the kinds of discussions you personally want to see on HN, but as a long time lurker, these are _exactly_ the kinds of discussions I'm looking for, and it's disheartening to see that other people think they shouldn't happen just because it ruffles feathers.

<comment><USER4> Why not write a blog post about this yourself? It would be well received over here. It is obvious this is a topic you care about and have thought about through different angles, which is the type of thing HN folks love.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I clicked on "vouch" and it removed the flag, but maybe just for me?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not just you! I'm just HN illiterate. Had no idea that was a thing.

Thanks!

<comment><USER6> You need a minimal amount of karma to get the "vouch" button, probably 200 or 500.

<comment><USER7> I have 800 and I don't see such an option. Also, it's still flagged.

<comment><USER2> The threshold is > 30, same as for flagging. 'vouch' links only show up when an item is [dead], though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Because it would turn into a dumpster fire argued along party political lines.

<comment> non-entity Then why don't we flag all political articles? I have yet to see what you describe _not_ happen on any political threads and many of those make it to the front page with hundreds of upvotes.

For better or worse, there seems to be enough people who want these discussions on HN.</comment></comment>


Firefox 70 - <AUTHOR> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/10/firefox-70-a-bountiful-release-for-all/ <comment><USER4> Not mentioned in this article (although it's in the Release Notes [1]): the amazing work done regarding the macOS compositor.

This should give pretty noticeable speed and battery improvements on Retina Macbooks.

[1] [https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/70.0/releasenotes/#new](https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/70.0/releasenotes/#new)

<comment><USER5> Battery life is my primary concern, and unless they release battery life benchmarks I'd be hard pressed to switch off of Safari.

<comment><USER6> Safari means no ublock, the web without is annoying.

<comment><USER7> There are other options (paid ones) that are equal —or even better since they are quite automatic— than ublock.

The only two things I'm missing in safari to be hones are:

\- A no-script extension or similar.

\- Sync part of my work is on a no macOS machines I don't have safari there, so no sync. I partially overcome this with bookmaster for bookmarks, but I still missing tabs and read it later list. However, firefox doesn't have this later feature on desktop —and I don't why.

<comment><USER8> Firefox Sync syncs your tabs, bookmarks, passwords, etc. Your read it later list is synced through Pocket (which is owned by Mozilla). They exist on desktop and mobile.

<comment><USER9> Still using pinboard; one of the best investment I made in my entire life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am not a Firefox user but know that matching Webkit performance on macOS is going to be very hard.

So just fired a test on my Macbook Air - Safari 13 vs Firefox 70.

Opened top 10 links from techmeme. Both windows in background.

Firefox 70: Energy use 30-200; CPU 20-25%; Threads 82

Safari 13: Energy use 0.1-5; CPU 2-5%; Threads 11

If this is to celebrate I can only imagine what the things looked like before this release. Save for Apple fiddling with the energy use numbers (VW style) this means that my battery is going to last 4-5x longer with Safari. Can anyone replicate this for the sake of argument?

Edit: uploaded screenshots [https://imgur.com/a/4L64ShP](https://imgur.com/a/4L64ShP)

<comment><USER11> > this means that my battery is going to last 4-5x longer with Safari

Well it might last 4-5x longer if you run safari in the background, since that is what you tested. But wouldn't the real test be running both browsers as the active window and comparing those results?

One thing that Safari is incredibly good at (and its' engineers are proud of) is the ability to reduce resource consumption for non-active tabs and windows to nearly zero. This is really good when running on battery because it is a shame to dedicate resources to things that aren't even visible on screen. But this could make the results far more dramatic through your test.

I would hypothesize that Safari still wins your performance test (if you were to re-test using them both as "active" windows), but probably not as dramatically as in the inactive window test.

<comment><USER12> > One thing that Safari is incredibly good at (and its' engineers are proud > of) is the ability to reduce resource consumption for non-active tabs and > windows to nearly zero.

I understand this is rare, but I just have a very very hard time understanding what is so hard about this.

Page not visible? Just stop it. Stop the layout engine, stop the javascript VM. If there was a transfer in progress, let it finish, a page might get the callback when it's active again ...

(I know there are some tricky cases, a lot of them, but there just isn't any reason why a browser with 30 tabs should be consuming over 1 % cpu...)

<comment><USER13> YouTube music video running in another tab. Should it stop render the video and keep playing the audio? Maybe feasible but it should keep receiving both the video and audio data. Stop all of it? Not what I wish to happen.

<comment><USER14> The javascript engine and rendering engines are what are generally affected by being backgrounded. So yes, generally the media library will continue receiving the combined video/audio stream and not bother rendering the video frames

<comment><USER15> Youtube uses the Media Source Extensions API, which means that JS is responsible for fetching compressed video data and feeding it into the decoder, so it can implement adaptive streaming. Pause JS for more than a few seconds and the video will stop playing.

<comment><USER14> Yes, and this is likely why Youtube now periodically pauses in the background on current macOS/Safari.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Firefox 70 introduces three new properties related to text > decoration/underline:

> text-decoration-thickness: sets the thickness of lines added via text- > decoration.

> text-underline-offset: sets the distance between a text decoration and the > text it is set on. Bear in mind that this only works on underlines.

> text-decoration-skip-ink: sets whether underlines and overlines are drawn if > they cross descenders and ascenders. The default value, auto, causes them to > only be drawn where they do not cross over a glyph. To allow underlines to > cross glyphs, set the value to none.

I'm so excited for these. Implementing sane underlines for headers has been a pain in the ass for far too long. Writers rejoice!

<comment><USER17> Don't want to rain on your parade, but this is a long way from being generally available: [https://caniuse.com/#search=text-decoration- thickness](https://caniuse.com/#search=text-decoration-thickness)

11% coverage, and almost all of that is iOS Safari.

<comment><USER18> This is one of these cases though, were coverage doesn't really matter. The fall-back is fairly reasonable.

<comment><USER17> That's true, but if I used all CSS properties with this amount of coverage it would cause a lot of extra work for very little gain. If this is something that really gets your goat, and you use Firefox, perhaps it's worth it to scratch the itch, but otherwise pretty useless currently.

<comment><USER19> But if you'd otherwise use border-bottom hacks, this is a good reason to stop doing those and just have Chrome users live with the not-terrible default underline until Chrome supports those properties as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Links for the password manager, "Firefox Lockwise" go through adjust, which appears to be a tracking/analytics/marketing platform. This is both through their website and by clicking through the Firefox UI menu.

I guess it's harder to walk the walk yourself when the desires to track usage and analytics come from within your own teams.

Check the links yourself over at:

[https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/lockwise/](https://www.mozilla.org/en- GB/firefox/lockwise/)

And built in to Firefox by going about:logins, the top right __* menu and clicking Lockwise for Android or Lockwise for iPhone

You end up with redirect links like:

[https://app.adjust.com/6tteyjo?redirect=](https://app.adjust.com/6tteyjo?redirect=)

<comment> tom-khagai To be fair, it's common practice to measure marketing campaign effectiveness. Mozilla doesn't hide that they share data to "Measure and support our marketing"

"Campaign and Referral Data: This helps Mozilla understand the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns."

"On iOS and Android: Firefox by default sends mobile campaign data to Adjust, our analytics vendor, which has its own privacy policy. Mobile campaign data includes a Google advertising ID, IP address, timestamp, country, language/locale, operating system, and app version. Read the documentation."

Src: [https://www.mozilla.org/en- US/privacy/firefox/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/)

<comment><USER21> I mean, they act like all of the info Google takes in goes straight to ads, when a lot of it goes to it's analytics platform

<comment><USER22> I fail to see how the latter prevents the former. This is digital information that can be copied endlessly, not a physical object that can only be owned by one entity at a time.

<comment><USER21> Google doesn't share data between Analytics and Ads behind the scenes, only if you set it up through the the site owner and it doesn't go through to other sites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The one thing that prevents me from switching to Firefox is the spell checker. Like many non-native English people, I'm constantly switching between languages when typing. Chrome is smart with that, and detects the right language sentence per sentence. Is there a way to have FF do this? Did I miss something?

<comment><USER24> Please vote and/or speak up (constructively, no "mee too" comments please) on [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69687](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69687)

<comment><USER25> Go ahead and vote if you wish, but please do not add "me too" comments to our bug tracker.

<comment><USER24> Thanks for the reminder. I edited my above message to reflect the same sentiment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > Pause on DOM Mutation in Debugger

Heckin finally!

The dev tool improvements all seem good. Still no support for inline code edits, which means JS debugging will still be something of a pain, but strengthening Firefox's position as one of the better tools for debugging and prototyping CSS.

<comment><USER27> Saw that too. What a wicked feature. Will make reverse engineering and debugging other peoples code much much easier!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Switching to CoreAnimation is very, very nice - however, this still doesn't feel quite at home on macOS because of a bug that's pretty old at this point.

Overflow/rubberband scrolling needs to be added here, because that is how scrolling is supposed to work on macOS. If you don't have it, you feel very alien. I'm not entirely sure why this isn't fixed after all these years, especially since Chrome managed to do it - it's not like an open source implementation doesn't exist at this point to crib the math from.

<comment><USER29> Firefox still doesn't render native OS elements like select boxes and right- click menus, so I have little faith overflow scrolling will ever be fixed.

<comment><USER28> Yeah... Firefox is probably the biggest example of why you shouldn't reinvent the wheel in terms of cross-platform GUI. It just looks and feels so out of place, whether it's macOS or some niche setup like running it under KDE. If you're in Gnome or Windows it can look fine, but I still question much of the iconography and general layout.

Any time you bring it up, though, you get batted away and beaten over the head with privacy, browser monoculture, or open source arguments. It's really frustrating; if you want open source to succeed, you have to also want it to compete on the same level.

It's like expecting people to eat vegan food when you call it the same as the non-vegan option... and then they don't want to, because it tastes nothing like what they expect.

In fact (I can't believe I'm saying this) I almost wish they were a Qt shell.

<comment><USER15> Every browser reimplements the native platform widgets. Even Safari! You have to, because the native platform widgets never support all the features a browser needs (CSS styling, JS event interception, etc etc).

Unfortunately, copying the look and feel of the native platform is an endless treadmill as those platforms evolve, and for obvious reasons Safari is always going to be better at keeping up with that on Mac than Firefox is.

<comment><USER28> Dude, I know - read my original comment, I'm clearly aware that Chrome had to implement their side of things.

Firefox goes out of their way to draw controls that don't fit in. Chrome, for all their faults, tries very hard to emulate the proper look/feel/functionality.

<comment><USER15> AFAIK Firefox does not "go out of their way to draw controls that don't fit in". On Mac and other platforms, the policy is that the controls look and feel like their native counterparts (unless overidden by Web authors) ... unless it's changed since I left Mozilla, and I don't think it has. In some cases, however, that has not been achieved. I haven't had a Mac for long time so I can't speak to the details of what works and what doesn't.

FWIW I use Linux and on Linux, Chrome makes no attempt at all to use the native platform theme, while Firefox does a pretty good job.

<comment><USER28> It's pretty off on Mac, sadly.

I will, however, apologize for saying they "go out of their way". I fired that bit of text off without thinking, but it's needlessly assuming (and likely outright wrong) on my part. Thanks for the correction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Wow, blown away by how much better the new password manager is! If they add support for custom fields on each login, this could almost completely replace my need for a 3rd party solution.

<comment><USER31> Couple other features I'd like: \- Import from other formats (Keepass, or at least any format Keepass can export to) \- Share items with someone else

<comment><USER32> I'm blown away that there's no import yet. How else am I going to switch from another password manager?

I also saw a comment from the dev team that they're "aware" of the need for such a feature but it's not on a road map yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Love the new mission statement: `Firefox is tech that fights for your online privacy.`

Apple has demonstrated that privacy is a very effective value proposition. Maybe Apple should look into investing in Mozilla/Firefox.

<comment><USER34> But they ship their own browser?

<comment><USER35> Yea and they don't allow Firefox on iOS, even though Google allows it on Android and they too have their own browser!

<comment><USER36> firefox (and lockwise) are very much on iOS and very well integrated with the system.

<comment><USER15> Firefox on iOS is Webkit wrapped in a Firefox UI shell. It does not use Gecko, and so is very different from desktop and Android Firefox, much more like Safari actually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Firefox + Mozilla are awesome. I still have a Mozilla 1.0 t-shirt from the first release party!

I've recently seen a ton of FF fans state that the reason they love Firefox is that it doesn't have ads or track you and preserves your privacy.

However, Firefox wouldn't exist without Google and (to a lesser extent, Google Chrome).

They make 94% of their revenue via bundling and distribution deals with companies like Google.

So to say that Firefox doesn't really have ads I think it is a bit disingenuous. They don't have ads directly but they benefit directly from the ecosystem.

Without Google's ad business Firefox wouldn't exist.

Not saying this to be rude or call you guys out. I think we need an honest discussion on this issue.

Across the industry, we see users just outright refusing to pay for products because they're accustomed to 'free' being the norm.

News, social media, browsers, etc.

If you charge for a news site the users will revolt and go somewhere else.

If Facebook tried to charge users they would revolt.

Same thing for browsers.

Yet a large percentage of these same users will get angry and yell that they're privacy is being sold.

I'd rather things be direct. I'd rather we live in a world where customers paid directly for the product and _I_ was the customer (not the product).

<comment><USER38> > Without Google's ad business Firefox wouldn't exist

Really? My recollection of events 15 years ago is a little hazy, but wasnt FF a browser-only release of Mozilla, itself Netscape which has been around as long as time itself (~25 years?)

What are we talking about here? There was very definitely a push around 2003 to get FF adopted en masse, and I guess Google probably were a big factor in this ...

Bit of a stretch to say FF wouldn't have existed otherwise though. There was very definitely some dissatisfaction across the board with IE dominance and its not hard to imagine something like FF being inevitable.

<comment><USER39> Most of Mozilla's funding came from Google in exchange for making Google the default search page.

<comment><USER38> Right ...

It really isn't inconceivable that they wouldn't have got funding from somewhere else. It was a marketing opportunity for Google, them being the David to Microsoft's Goliath. Remember that whole _"don't be evil"_ thing? Turns out it was jusy a ruse to be abandoned once the market had consolidated.

<comment><USER40> There is also an argument that back in the day Firefox saved Google rather than the other way around.

Why? Because when Microsoft had 90% browser share, gained through tying IE directly into Windows, there was a very real chance that they could have adapted IE so that it was harder to use Google than a default MS Bing search engine.

Having a better, cross-platform alternative to IE allowed Google to stay in the game and make use of FF's cutting edge features.

Remember the old Microsoft was quite happy to cripple Windows to kill it's competitors. For example "Windows ain't done until WordPerfect won't run" and the weird "errors" you saw if you tried running Windows on top of DR DOS.

<comment><USER41> I'm not sure that adds up. When Bing was introduced in mid-2009, IE had about 60% of the market, and it was dropping fast as Chrome's popularity exploded [1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/media/File:StatCounter- browser-ww-monthly-200901-201905.png)

<comment><USER40> I believe that Microsoft's interest in Google's business predates the launch of Bing. You can replace the brand name "Bing" with "some kind of search/advertising/internet gateway" business.

Remember Microsoft used to be a very competitive outfit with a history of using their dominance of desktop OSs to enter new markets.

It's easy to forget that Microsoft of old were able to keep bankrolling loss leaders to "cut off the oxygen"[1] of any market that they saw as threatening Windows.

[1] [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1998/04/98/microso...](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1998/04/98/microsoft/198390.stm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Love Firefox. The philosophy, its snappiness, its many add-ons, the UI. - <USER2> to have an alternative to Chrome! Keep up the good work, Mozilla & Firefox team.

<comment><USER42> _Glad to have an alternative to Chrome!_

Many would argue that Chrome is an alternative to Firefox, given that Firefox predates Chrome as the first real viable browser alternative.

<comment><USER43> Historically, yes, that's true. But these days Chrome has a huge lead in the market compared to every other browser, so FF is the alternative again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I noticed that firefox (dev edition) got rid of possibility to disable update notifications. I prefer my browser to be updated from repository rather than by itself. Did anyone has the same issue or found some workaround?

<comment><USER45> Surely if your package manager installs firefox into /usr or whatever, it's not gonna be able to update itself either way, right?

<comment><USER25> Yes, distributes packages work differently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> > Lastly, Core Animation allows us to move rendered content around in the > window cheaply. This is great for efficient scrolling. (Our current > compositor does not yet make use of this capability, but future work in > WebRender will take advantage of it.)

Oh I am so excited about this! Where can I follow along with this development?

</comment><comment><USER47> I recently switched to firefox to give it a try. Does anyone else 2x-3x their video playback and notice the audio distortion in FF on mac? I've tried to find some discussion or workarounds for it, but no dice. Hoping that maybe the renderer in this release might help a little.

<comment><USER48> Yes, we (the media team at Mozilla) know about this, and we're having a look.

The algorithm we use it not the best (and I think it's not the only cause of bad quality here), and we're investigating what to do.

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427267](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427267) is where we track this issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I recently tried Firefox again and I liked a lot. Only drawback for me at the moment is the lack of hardware video decoding on Linux. I hope it arrives soon.

<comment><USER50> What does it mean?

<comment><USER51> It decodes videos using the CPU, leading to a huge increase in power usage and dropped frames if your CPU isn't fast enough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Tree Style Tab needs a top comment here: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/)

</comment><comment><USER53> Does anyone know how Firefox Lockwise compares to other password managers? For example, can it store additional notes next to the password?

<comment><USER54> It does not allow notes, only login/password.

I use it to sync passwords with my phone. I like that I can use a fingerprint to unlock the file on my phone (instead of passphrase). I used to put silly passwords on sites I didn't care about (variants on a common password), but now I systematically generate a random password for all sites because there is no loss of convenience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> My message to the team would be: Please bring back the shader editor in devtools.

In a previous release, we had access to live reloading shader editor, which was really useful in my case, developing real time WebGL apps. It was a truly nice developer feature.

</comment><comment><USER42> _Permission requests can no longer be made while in fullscreen mode_

This is great news. What a huge security hole that has been.

</comment><comment><USER56> Mozilla won't quit - I love it. We need a third browser engine in the game and that should be sufficient as I've determined arbitrarily. There should be an open source browser that's a little more amateur and "democratically developed" than the big ones. Although browsers are approaching OSs in terms of complexity (or already there). Tried switching back to FF a while back but was still not as smooth as Chrome. I'll give it another shot. Good job, Mozilla!

<comment><USER56> Just a slice of my stream of consciousness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> So happy that Firefox is making steady progress.

I'm surprised though to see new CSS features so prominently in the announcement. Doesn't this add unwanted additional fragmentation to browser CSS support?

A cosmetic feature like that naively seems better implemented with a library rather than folding it straight into one particular browser, but maybe I'm witnessing the process of text-underline-thickness being cemented in the standard after years of such library-based support?

<comment><USER58> These look standard. Chrome already implements them:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/text- decora...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/text-decoration- skip-ink)

<comment><USER59> text-decoration-thickness is the most niche, since the only other implementor is Safari.

That said, yeah, they're all off the level 4 working draft, so they're standards-track at least.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> How can I, as a mere user, support Mozilla (except spreading the word)? Is it still true that their main source of income is a search agreement with Google?

<comment><USER15> Yes, that is true.

You can donate money to Mozilla. However, what Mozilla needs more than anything is more users, so spread the word!

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Still has serious bugs with certificates that I don't think will ever be fixed.

On Mac, loading all the appropriate DoD certs and trying to log into OWA causes an unrecoverable hang.

Loading _only_ DOD ID SW CA-37 will allow login to numerous sites. However, after closing those tabs, all _other_ sites time out while "Performing a TLS handshake..."

Lastly, quitting Firefox after a PIV/CAC login causes an unrecoverable hang.

<comment><USER35> Have you filed a bug report on their bugzilla? Is there a way they can test test certs? Are there public facing websites or are these all going to be internal/government?

<comment><USER61> I've filed some bug reports but not others. The issue is it's such weird behavior it's hard to isolate.

The issue seems to be related to PIV/CAC cards specifically, which obviously increases the difficulty of anyone on the team replicating the bug.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> How does Firefox Lockwise compare to 1Password and how does the ad/tracking protection compare to using Chrome with uBlock Origin?

I do like how Firefox you can set to never auto play audio or video but the chrome flag does not seem to prevent that. Haven't really given Firefox a chance in easier and am pretty married to Chrome (especially with switching profiles between work, personal that works very well).

</comment><comment><USER63> > In the Firefox UI, you'll then be able to generate a secure password like > so:

That's great. But what if I now want to log in to the same site from my iPhone?

<comment><USER64> [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/firefox- lockwise/id1314000270](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/firefox- lockwise/id1314000270)

<comment><USER63> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Compared to current Chromium based browsers (I'm using Edge/ium), how does this Firefox release's DevTools compare?

<comment><USER66> Some of those updates are to catch up to Chrome's developer tools. If I were in charge of Firefox, I would honestly have them hire a developer or two to focus solely on the Developer Tools. I'm sure there's many things that browser developer tools could do that we have not even scratched the surface of. I prefer Firefox overall, only use Chrome due to manager only looking at my work on Chrome (it will be deployed in a WebKit container). The DOM Breakpoint feature is one I found out this week about in Chrome, glad it's now in Firefox.

<comment><USER67> Firefox has an entire team dedicated to developer tools, fwiw. I'm not sure whether your suggestion was "one or two more, in addition to the 7 or 8 already working on it", or "one or two more, instead of the 0 working on it now"...

<comment><USER66> I'd happily add more people to the mix yeah, had no concept of how many were working on it currently though, I assumed some people worked on it but not dedicated. As I wrote my comment I realized that kind of tooling is not necessarily easy to work on potentially.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Since they censored Dissenter, they are dead to me. They can be the best web browser ever made, but it will never touch the sillicon of my hard drives ever again. With Goolag, at least I know where they stand and I know what to expect from them. Mozilla betrayed my trust and I am not fan of second chances.

<comment><USER69> With Firefox, I'm mostly free. Alternatively, I can let Google be my feudal overlord. Nothing Firefox prohibits is permitted by Google. Easy choice

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> What's the state of saving & autofilling credit card info? That's the one thing that keeps me going back to chrome (rather than typing in my card by hand).

There are some bugs on this that look quite stale, and they don't seem interested in finishing support, and its disabled by default..

<comment><USER71> It's not on Chrome's level, but it does have autofill. I hope that is next on their agenda. I love how Chrome prompts for security code and generates based on that.

I switched over to FF recently and just use Chrome for password generation, but looks like I can switch for good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Is Firefox's sandboxing on par with Chrome yet? And on Linux in particular?

<comment><USER73> Containers. Better.

<comment><USER72> I do like the containers feature, but I'm not referring to cross-site sandboxing here.

<comment><USER73> I don't know, though this Wiki entry seems to most generally address the question. It references releases as recent as FF 60.

[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> I just had f.lux turn on night mode after upgrading. Firefox 70 does not handle this well. Some elements on most sites (including HN) randomly flash in and out of nigh mode colors.

<comment><USER75> Excuse my ignorance. What does Firefox have to do with f.lux? I thought f.lux was a separate package that tinted colors on a level lower than the applications themselves?

<comment><USER74> I thought so too, but the only time I've had this issue is after upgrading Firefox today. It's not happening anymore, so I'll just chalk it up to a weird one-off for now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> I had to stop using Firefox 70 Dev Edition because it made my 2015 Mac run out of memory. Switching back to regular 69 fixed the issue, but I hope they have corrected it by now...

</comment><comment> dan-robertson I'm a little surprised about the two word display specifiers (e.g. display: inline flex). Specifically they say they are the only browser to support it but I feel like I saw this somewhere (maybe in a nightly release of some browser) at least two years ago.

Maybe I just saw a spec or maybe I'm just wrong

</comment><comment><USER77> > Web socket inspector - In Firefox DevEdition, the Network monitor now has a > new "Messages" panel, which appears when you are monitoring a web socket > connection (i.e. a 101 response)

Yay, this is great news. Thanks guys! Nice to not have to revert to Chrome for websocket debugging.

</comment><comment><USER78> Please excuse my ignorance, but why is this being published from "hacks.mozilla.org"? Is that just the name of their technical blog? It sounds like a platform that's more clandestine / unofficial to be used to announce a public release.

<comment><USER79> You do realize that you are writing this comment on a site literally called "Hacker News", right?

(and yes, that is simply their technical blog)

<comment><USER78> Yes, the irony of my comment did not escape me :) I guess I was just seeking confirmation. Cheers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> Does the mobile Firefox have something like the Developer Tools of the desktop version? Because those are generally missing on mobile, I made my own site that serves some JS to do (part of) what built-in developer tools would do.

</comment><comment><USER81> > In supporting browsers (just Firefox at the time of writing), the single > keyword values we know and love will map to new two-keyword values

Really neat how FireFox seems to push the web standards forward here, in a world where Google seems to have total control.

</comment><comment><USER82> It will be interesting to see in the report which trackers sneak past my uMatrix rules. :)

</comment><comment><USER83> The WebSocket inspector is very welcome!

Now, will it work for Server-Sent Events too?

</comment><comment><USER84> It's been more than a year I've installed Firefox again and use it full time, both in my phone and macbook. I feel like it's the perfect browser now. I want even more privacy features and speed, more speed!

</comment><comment><USER85> > hard to tell which script changed the page and caused the issue when you run > into a problem

Firefox 70 is developer's delight. Breakpoints on DOM changes is the one of the most difficult parts. FF70 solves this. Great.

</comment><comment><USER86> My main problem with Firefox is the audio modulation when you speed up sound.

I consume hours of video/audio content in my browser daily. Most of it I speed up to 2x, and in Firefox my ears are destroyed if I do that.

</comment><comment><USER87> I wonder, why they implemented Baseline JS interpreter in C++? Why not Rust?

<comment><USER88> I was under the impression that this was a side goal of the servo project. Of course now it looks like it is it's own thing: [https://servo.org/](https://servo.org/)

Does anyone know if servo is supposed to be related to Firefox in some way, or if it is always meant to be independent?

<comment><USER89> Servo is supposed to be a playground of sorts for architectural innovations in the browser space. Successful experiments from Servo will then get ported to FF. Project Quantum ported over the Stylo CSS improvements from Servo: [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/08/inside-a-super-fast-css- en...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/08/inside-a-super-fast-css-engine- quantum-css-aka-stylo/). WebRender has also been making it's way over: [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/the-whole-web-at- maximum-f...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/the-whole-web-at-maximum-fps- how-webrender-gets-rid-of-jank/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> This is great news! I tried to switch to firefox to do my (frontend) development in, but I noticed serious slowdowns compared to Chrome with multiple tabs open. Going to give this another try!

</comment><comment><USER91> If only a complete Firefox was made available for desktop Android...

</comment><comment><USER92> The onty thing I am missing is Lockwise quick access button plugin. Now if I have to search for password, I have to open separate tab.

</comment><comment><USER93> I like the text underlining options. But I wish the default CSS styling for <a> tags used text-decoration-skip-ink: none; .

</comment><comment><USER94> Firefox folks, I would _love_ to buy some FF stickers/swag. Is there anywhere I can do that?

<comment><USER95> Looks like they used to have one, but it's been closed since 2016. [https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/the-gear-store-s-last- day/74...](https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/the-gear-store-s-last-day/7426)

I imagine it either cost too much to run or didn't bring in enough to justify keeping it going unfortunately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER96> Finally, numeric separators!

</comment><comment><USER97> I would have wished a world where both the chromium project and Mozilla would collaborate to a unified JS compiler instead of having two separate implementations. How faster would have JS been? How more featureful and less buggy?

BTW chrome 78 will be released today too!

<comment><USER98> On the contrary, I'd say that competition has been good for all involved. For such a maligned language that was born in a little over a week, JavaScript is better and faster than it has any right to be.

The amount of resources that have gone into improving JavaScript is amazing. I just wonder what some other languages would look like now with that kind of attention.

<comment><USER88> Only a week? And I would slap python 3 right on top of that. Despite the language being inherently messy and fully dynamic (similar to js), there are tons of static analysis tools, compilers, alternate run times, IDEs, etc.

Edit: the "only a week?" question was genuine, it wasn't meant to be tongue in cheek.

<comment><USER99> " _There was a lot of internal pressure to pick one language as soon as possible. Python, Tcl, Scheme itself were all possible candidates. So Eich had to work fast. He had two advantages over the alternatives: freedom to pick the right set of features, and a direct line to those who made the calls. Unfortunately, he also had a big disadvantage: no time. Lots of important decisions had to be made and very little time was available to make them. JavaScript, a.k.a. Mocha, was born in this context. In a_ matter of weeks _a working prototype was functional, and so it was integrated into Netscape Communicator._ "

[https://auth0.com/blog/a-brief-history-of- javascript/](https://auth0.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-javascript/)

Looks like it was pretty quick but maybe not just one week. Looks like Python was actually considered, but bear in mind that this was 25 years ago. Python 3 certainly wasn't out yet and the available tool ecosystem was much more limited.

<comment><USER100> Do some elementary, Wikipedia-level research — Python was at 1.3 then if I recall correctly. As I've written many times, the management order was "make it look like Java", so none of the languages you mentioned was practical. None was practical anyway in terms of portability and safety from Windows 3.1 to Mac CodeWarrior to a number of Unixes that still mattered to Netscape sales. See/hear also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1905155](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1905155). See also [https://devchat.tv/js-jabber/124-jsj-the-origin-of- javascrip...](https://devchat.tv/js-jabber/124-jsj-the-origin-of-javascript- with-brendan-eich/) — transcript below the fold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER101> What about DNS over HTTP? Do I still have to use Nightly for that?

<comment><USER102> Settings -> Click "Settings" under network settings (bottom of "General" section) -> Check "Enable DNS over HTTPS" -> Change provider (if you want a different one).

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> Is there a theme for Firefox that makes it look more like Chrome?

<comment><USER19> [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- GB/firefox/search/?platform=Li...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- GB/firefox/search/?platform=Linux&q=chrome&type=statictheme)

</comment></comment><comment><USER104> Thanks for all of the hard work, Mozilla. You guys are heroes.

</comment><comment><USER105> Pinch-to-zooooooooom!!!!!!!!!! Finally. I will definitely try Firefox again for a week or so, and see how it manages, battery-wise, compared to Safari.

<comment><USER106> I just tried here and it's not working. Do I need to change any settings?

<comment><USER107> Pinch-to-zoom is still incomplete on Mac

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER108> I'v been constantly trying to switch to FF from Chrome to help Firefox market share a little bit. However there are always some issues which makes me switch back to Chrome.

Currently I'm on Firefox for over the month and I did document those things that bugs me. To be fair I should create such list for Chrome too, but I don't get that moment of frustration that often.

Here's the list for Firefox. After some items I thought it would be better to write down dates instead of sequence numbers.

Tldr: The most common issue is with unresponsive tabs which cannot be reloaded/refreshed and leads to re-typing search term / closing, reopening tab / killing firefox.

\</comment><comment>----

1\. Searching google.. loading.. it is faster to open chrome then, try to copy twice the URL (which doesn't copy/ paster), type in the search term manually and process seach results than wait them appar on firefox. Reopening tab helps on FF tho.

2\. Sometimes opening a url where server is cold, I get blank page after waiting. Refresh wont help.

3\. CTRL + F sometimes won't work until deleting some chars. Chrome handles this without issues.

4\. Opening site in new tab - Firefox hangs. Cannot switch to other tabs, cannot close tab. End task via taskmgr helps.

5\. Opening site in some tab - Firefox shows loading, loading, loading. Only closing tab, opening new one helps - site loads instantly.

6\. Cannot open link in Dynamcis 365 grid.

2019-09-25: 5. repeats itself. Oh, dumb me, I was in a debugger, hitting a breakpoint.

2019-09-25: Loading, loading, loading.. reopening tab.

2019-09-25: reading text on community.dynamics.com. Suddenly, text gets distorted

2019-09-27: Viewing [https://support.microsoft.com/en- us/help/3142345/microsoft-d...](https://support.microsoft.com/en- us/help/3142345/microsoft-dynamics-365-onpremise-cumulative-updates) and opening article numbers. To go back, must press back button 3 times (history gets filled). Only 1 in chrome.

2019-10-01: Callstack in a huge javascript file? Firefox just can't cope that. It just hangs. Must wait very long

2019-10-01: Scrolling javascript file in debugger. Just empty window, no text rendered. Scrolling here and there or clicking fixes it.

2019-10-01: Javascript debugging frustrating. When I want reload page, I have continue debugger. Now it feels like firefox hangs and I have to close debug tools to refresh my page. Maybe patience could help here.

2019-10-03: Firefox slowing down my browser.. yeah, browsing huge file at [https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Sample-Quick-start- for-650db...](https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Sample-Quick-start- for-650dbcaa/sourcecode?fileId=182557&pathId=290186690). But it won't let me go back, won't let me refresh, i'm a victim and can't go back to my google results...

2019-10-07: Opening page.. loading... opening other page from same domain works. Refresh on first page - still loading. Close tab, open new one - works.

2019-10-07: Looks like refresh is just broken. Long running tab is loading. Loading.. loading... luckily it did load after all, well at least I thought so, because page kinda rendered. Only that it wasn't working. And then I was back to the grey "Loading" page. The issue for me here is that I can't force to reload the URL in URL bar.

2019-10-11: Opening webpage from URL. Great, site doesn't open. F5 doesn't help. Cannot switch to different tabs. Thank you for closing many windows and tabs. Closing with X doesn't work. After killing FF with task manager, you restore your session - excellent. And now no problem opening that page. Doh.

2019-10-13: Searching something via url bar... well google never opens and F5 doesn't help. And pressing ENTER doesn't help. Re-searching on new tab works.

2019-10-13: Some tab that leaks memory should be reloaded. Well waiting after CTRL+F5 and waiting and waiting... eh, closing and reopening seems to be faster.

2019-10-14: Cannot copy from from a Dynamics 365 readonly field. Which is <label>. This actually bugs me often. Can copy on chrome.

2019-10-21: Not googling on new tab page, loading, nothing happens. New tab works.

2019-10-21: Writing github issue... scrollbar doesn't work. Well actually tab doesnt respond. Oh i'm probably opening link in new tab that loads, loads, loads... Well, killing firefox is the only way I can "unstuck". How can I love FF? :( Looking forward to write these things down for Chrome in November - maybe it happens to other browsers too? However credit to FF or GitHub - <USER3> - my text wasn't lost in GitHub issue input field!

2019-10-21: Search. It just doesn't search on some pages (Dynamics CRM). Chrome search works better in these cases.

2019-10-21: Cursor invisible when over Firefox. Probably OS issue, happens to Chrome too.

2019-10-21: Dropdown list doesn't work as intended. Typing chars doesn't search (jump to) matched item.

</comment><comment><USER109> New version gives SSL_ERROR_UNKNOWN_CA_ALERT on my client certs. Guess I have to go back to Chrome now...

<comment><USER110> Just import your CA

<comment><USER109> It's already installed, that's not it.

<comment><USER110> Does FF use a different cert-store than os? I've frequently had to fiddle with os/app cert-stores to get them to trust. Not just import the cert but the signer too, some times on both sides. I'll likely hit this issue when I upgrade.

<comment><USER111> It does have it's own cert store. You can test your sites with testssl.sh [1] to see if they validate correctly. It only depends on openssl and bash. If you have your own self signed CA/certs, then you would have to import them into FF.

[1] - [https://github.com/drwetter/testssl.sh](https://github.com/drwetter/testssl.sh)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


EmacsWiki: Emacs On Android - <AUTHOR> http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsOnAndroid <comment><AUTHOR> Have anyone ever tried this? If it's usable (putting key combinations on a keypad), I want to ditch my iPhone and switch to Android.</comment>


Free of Freemium, Things Are Starting To Look Up At Ning - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.forbes.com/taylorbuley/2010/08/20/free-of-freemium-things-are-starting-to-look-up-at-ning/ <comment><USER2> Does that mean that this massive spam ring, which Google hasn't bothered to deindex and which Ning hasn't bothered to delete, is going to go away?

[http://www.google.ca/#hl=en&q=ning+tax+preparation+bette...](http://www.google.ca/#hl=en&q=ning+tax+preparation+better+tax+preparation)

Because if so, I'm all for it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Couple things looked strange in this article:

"generally accepted 5% to 10% conversion rate" - where did he come up with that? I was under the impression most successful freemium products (Evernote, DropBox, more I can't remember right now) were doing more like 1%?

Also, was Ning really freemium before this shift? I thought they were closer to just being free, period. Could be wrong on that.

I was surprised to see them shift all the way to the other direction of 100% paid. A true freemium model (free plan limited by hits, users, whatever to keep them small) seems like it would have been better.

</comment><comment><USER4> It may be that they found limitations in the market size, not the pricing model.

When you get "$119 million of funding", having 35,000 paying customers is just not going to cut it.

Since its most likely a niche market, they might not have the network benefit of a larger market that freemium utilizes. Maximizing the revenue from each customer is much more important when the market is smaller.

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting article, this point jumped out at me though:

"Since ditching free, 35,000 Ning networks have signed up for paid plans. . . those numbers mean Ning wooed nearly 12% . . . more than double its previous conversion rate."

This isn't an accurate assesment.

That 12% uptick rate was one time, and based on Ning forcing the hand of their communities.

I'm curious to see how Ning markets themselves in the future, if nothing I'm sure lots of those communities that paid the uptick realized how beholden they were to Ning . . .

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the excellent point re: one-off effects. Here's how I got the 12% number: 35,000 of 300,000 non-paying accounts chose to ante up, which is 11.66%.

Based on my reporting, I think the overall conversion rate might actually be more than that. Off hand, Ning has 50,000 total paid users and an estimated 265,000 non-paying ones (though not for long). That suggest to me that 50k/315k or 15.87% of Ning customers are paying customers.

<comment><USER5> Your numbers make sense to me.

An interesting follow-up might be how they're planning to attract new communities moving forward.

Freemium to is all about lead gen, they just got their revenue bump from freemium despite cutting it out of the equation - eg those 35,000 came from free accounts right?

12% is a huge closing ratio, forget for freemium.

I imagine a big part of those huge conversion numbers is because the communities had ample time to gain traction, some financial incentive tied to that traction that validates the cost, etc.

Let's say they convert their next 300,000 leads at the same impressive 12% ratio to paid - where do those leads come from?

I applaud the move to "paid" at some levels, but I question that they're going to be able to pull it off without a solid free option - their 30 day free trial isn't going to suffice.

<comment><USER6> What an interesting thought, and one that only crossed my mind for a moment: What if this free-to-paid transition becomes a _tactic_? Given the traction 'free' affords, could there be a business model in switching business models?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If I remember correctly, Ning raised their last round at a ~$400M valuation. As a freemium Facebook competitor with Pmarca involved, you can sort of understand, but no one is going to pay >400M for a B2B social network maker.

<comment><USER8> People who put $119m into Ning either believe there will be a bigger sucker to sell it to (hey, AOL is still around) or are the kind who reads Wired & TechCrunch seriously and get star struck when a Valley celeb attaches their name to a company. That's really all there is to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I looked at Ning some time ago for players of the small RPG I made. The service seemed redundant with the site, storefront, email accounts, and forum I already have, which are very cheap.

I think Ning is enterprise software of a social sort. As a result, they might fall into a narrow slice of the market: not too small, but not too big.

EDIT: The title should read _...are things starting to look up at Ning?_

</comment><comment><USER10> They're not rid of those freeloading networks just yet. They extended the deadline to opt in to a paid plan to August 30th this morning.</comment>


Gmvault v1.7-beta, Gmail backup simply: The initial version I wanted to build - <AUTHOR> http://geekomotion.posterous.com/3-months-later-gmvault-17-beta-the-first-rele

<comment><USER3> I decided I'm leaving Gmail at some point in the future, here's why: Yesterday I wanted to comment on a video on Youtube. I clicked the 'reply' button, and a message came up, telling me that I needed to create a YouTube channel (or something) on order to be able to comment. So I quickly filled the mandatory fields and hit save. The next thing I saw was a message from Google telling me that my account had been locked because I am under 13 years of age. My Gmail account! My account where I have all my precious data. Because I had a typo in a field somewhere on YouTube! I understand that the US law requires these things, but why on earth would a typo on YouTube kill my personal Email account? Now I uploaded an image of my passport onto their servers to proof that I'm over 13. If that doesn't work out, they'll delete _all my data_ in 29 days.

I can't explain how fed up I am about that. When I'm entering any date fields on my Gmail account, I'm always cautious. But this was YouTube. Enough rant.

Thanks for this tool! When my account comes back up, I'll use it to keep the data safe (I do have it in imap of course). And then at some point in the future I'll look for an alternative to Google.

<comment><USER4> That rant should also be directed at US law, which is pretty clear about what Google needs to do in this situation. I suppose the problem is integrating YouTube with Google accounts, but you could have just as easily muffed a field in Gmail and had the same issue.

What should Google do when you state you are under 13? If they pop up a message saying "Are you sure? All this cool stuff is going to go away if you say that you are under 13." it breaks the intent of the law and child advocacy groups would rightly eat Google for lunch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> In case anyone misses it, the advantage of this over other IMAP solutions is that it preserves information specific to Gmail - most importantly - <USER2> aren't converted into IMAP folders (and therefore emails aren't duplicated needlessly).

<comment><AUTHOR> couldn't have said it better. In addition to emails, chats are also backed up with v1.7-beta

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is a great opportunity to suggest new features/wishes for this tool. Please let me know what you would like to have to v2.0

<comment><USER6> Thanks for your work on Gmvault - really helps with my peace of mind.

I'd love to see:

\- Better support for multiple accounts - at the moment I have to specify separate data directories manually every time I want to re-run a backup of each of my accounts. Would be great if Gmvault worked this out for me, and could run a backup on multiple accounts in a single run.

\- Some way to read my backed up emails easily without re-importing them to Gmail - a mini mail server, a web-based UI, etc.

\- A way to export to some other format if I want to migrate away to Gmail - mbox, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the support. You can backup multiple accounts in one data directory (Gmvault-db) with the option --multiple-db-owner. When you restore though all the emails from this Gmvault-db will go to one Gmail account. If you want to have the possibility to restore each account individually, then you have to use a separate gmvault-db dir for each account. In the roadmap for v2.0 I have some tasks to add a better support for managing multiple accounts. As you said all the accounts will be incrementally backed up automatically onced configured. v2.0 will provide a GUI and one feature should be to allow users to browse their emails. A clean way to export emails in standard format (MailDir and maybe mbox) is since this morning also in my roadmap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The #1 reason I want Gmail backup is to be able to migrate in case something goes wrong with Gmail. Does Gmvault make this possible? I don't see any documentation about exporting from Gmvault to another IMAP server, or to a common format like Maildir or mbox so that I could run my own server.

<comment><USER8> I use OfflineIMAP to back up Gmail and Google Apps mail. I have it set up to run every evening from cron, backing up a Gmail account as well as a couple Apps accounts. It uses Maildir format.

[1] <http://offlineimap.org/>

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I'm currently using OfflineIMAP until I find something better. But it's really not a perfect solution: it downloads emails multiple times (once per label), it doesn't restore to Gmail terribly well, it's pretty slow, and it crashes sometimes. If Gmvault adds some sort of export facility, I'd switch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As of circa 19:00 GMT, 2012-08-16, the Github repository is unavailable.

<comment><AUTHOR> This was because of the planned Github downtime.

<comment><USER9> Thanks! I'll try again later.</comment></comment></comment>


An History of Nvidia Stream Multiprocessor - <AUTHOR> http://fabiensanglard.net/cuda/index.html <comment><USER2> Fabien, how come you skipped Volta? (Presumably because it wasn't interesting for Display, but it's a huge step up from Pascal)

The most interesting thing to me in the progression of NVIDIA's compute offerings is that until Volta, the "SIMT" claims were just a programming model and the hardware was actually just like any other SIMD hardware (though with automatic mask stacks). In Volta, they finally added "we can run different ops at different program counters".

For the casual reader, the hot chips 2017 presentation is probably the easiest skim:

[https://www.hotchips.org/wp- content/uploads/hc_archives/hc29...](https://www.hotchips.org/wp- content/uploads/hc_archives/hc29/HC29.21-Monday-Pub/HC29.21.10-GPU-Gaming- Pub/HC29.21.132-Volta-Choquette-NVIDIA-Final3.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> > Since Intel proved that there is still room for miniaturization with the 7nm > of Ice Lake, there is little doubt Nvidia will leverage it to shrink its SM > even more and double performance again.

Intel calls their process 10nm and it's weird to mention it since it was a total disaster.

</comment><comment><USER4> The SVG doesn't render at all right in Firefox, for me.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for telling me, I had no idea. It looks like Firefox and Edge don't render in the same way Inkscape/Chrome do.

It seems converting the whole SVG from "Object to Path" fixed the issue everywhere.

<comment><USER4> I know next to nothing about SVG; do you think this was a mistake in the SVG, or is it a bug in Firefox's rendering? If the latter, ideally, we would file a bug report, although i don't actually know how you do that for Firefox these days.

<comment><USER5> It think it is a bug in Firefox rendering since Inkscape and Chrome render it properly.

If I remove the "writing-mode:tb-rl" firefox renders it properly. It seems FF does not support that attribute.

I have kept both versions of the SVG and intended to fill a bug report.

[http://fabiensanglard.net/cuda/g71.svg](http://fabiensanglard.net/cuda/g71.svg) [http://fabiensanglard.net/cuda/g71_org.svg](http://fabiensanglard.net/cuda/g71_org.svg)

I have this weird guts feeling it will be closed as "we know. we don't support it yet. Come back later". So I abandoned the idea.

<comment><USER4> Interestingly, a documentation overview says that tb-rl is an allowed value:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/SVG/Attribute/P...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/SVG/Attribute/Presentation#attr-writing-mode)

But the detailed documentation it links to does not:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/SVG/Attribute/w...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/SVG/Attribute/writing-mode)

I had a look in Bugzilla and couldn't find anything specific to tb-rl, but did find an ancient meta bug for writing-mode which links to millions of other bugs:

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm curious about the addition of Tensor Cores. It sounds like both the regular Shader Units and Tensor Cores can carry out GEMM, just that the latter are more efficient at it. I'm guessing that for ML applications, both the Tensor Cores and Shader Units are used.

Are tensor cores idle during 3D gaming? How do they differ from the regular Shader Units? Why are they more efficient?

<comment><USER7> > Are tensor cores idle during 3D gaming?

The tensor cores are used for real-time raytracing, ML-based anti-aliasing during gaming, and other features. The Turing whitepaper has a lot of information on that.

[https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/design- vi...](https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/design- visualization/technologies/turing-architecture/NVIDIA-Turing-Architecture- Whitepaper.pdf)

A more generic answer to this question is that everything NVIDIA puts in their GPUs is for the gaming market. Other use cases are incidental.

<comment><USER8> Between the 30% framerate hit and the (to me) barely-perceptible visual difference, real-time raytracing still feels like a gimmick.

<comment><USER9> The new Minecraft stuff is the very first time I've seen raytracing produce graphics that make my brain conceive this could be a "realistically lit" scene, and it doesn't even take advantage of things like significant amounts of reflection and re-reflection. HOWEVER, I see zero benefit to the actual game from that.

<comment><USER10> In the case of Minecraft no new graphics feature is really going to benefit the "actual game", but players who obsess over their created spaces might really appreciate having better lighting that they can control through things like reflectivity. It's something you'd have to poll the average teen-who- still-plays-Minecraft about though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The title led me down this somewhat interesting rabbit trail of "why an?": [https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/everything- you...](https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/everything-youve-ever- wanted-to-know-about-historic-and-historical)

<comment><USER5> Fixed. Thank you!

<comment><USER11> Oh, sorry, wasn't saying it was wrong. People seem split on it. Just curious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > This fragmented design reminds of the Pre-Tesla layered architecture, > proving once again that history likes to repeat itself.

So true.

<comment><USER13> On the Hardware Wheel of Reincarnation [1] we are definitely swinging back into the realm of special-purpose processors and processor extensions all over the place. The gigahertz scaling free lunch has been dead for over a decade. We're still adding more transistors, but finding it harder to speed up day-to- day serial code. So, instead we're adding dedicated hardware for the common, hard stuff and throwing special-purpose chips into every nook and cranny of everything around the periphery of the main thread on the main CPU.

[1] [https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/w/wor.htm](https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/w/wor.htm)

<comment><USER14> We are also inventing new ways to do computation. Massive deep neural nets require different hardware, and it seems there's plenty of room to improve and experiment there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wish I understood more of this, what a cool field of engineering.

</comment><comment><USER16> Nice comparison. If I could offer one bit of feedback: I think that graph at the end should be TFLOPS rather than GFLOPS.

<comment><USER5> Good catch! Fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> One of the things I had a fit of laughter was after reading that Jensen used to work at AMD before!!

<comment> david-gpu I heard from a first-hand account that in the late nineties Jensen tried to sell nVidia's IP to ATI. They refused, even though the offer was good. The rest, as they say, is history.

<comment><USER18> Didn't he want to be made head of ATI at the time though, as part of the deal?

<comment><USER3> That was AMD. They wanted to merge with Nvidia for their graphics IP, but didn't want to accept the condition, so they bought ATI eventually.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


India just passed net neutrality laws to ban 'any form' of data discrimination - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2018/7/11/17562108/india-department-of-telecommunications-trai-net-neutrality-proposal-approval <comment><USER2> From the article: > compares to ambulances that can legally disobey traffic rules

I continue to find it sad/funny that law governing the internet is made by analogy.

<comment><USER3> Most of the people who approve these laws are not necessarily internet literate to understand what the future holds for Internet. An analogy of this sort helps them understand what this means why some traffic can/should be given preferential treatment despite the law saying not to.

With the context of it, it makes sense for the future. Laws are made to be followed for years to come. Considering for "critical IoT services" or "specialized services," which could take precedence in near future this is okay to be added in the rules for now until we face it. And this analogy is quite okay if you consider speed limits as internet speed and every car as the content packet.</comment></comment>


Is the Universe a Simulation? (2016 Debate) - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/is-the-universe-real-61ff508d32aa <comment><AUTHOR> [https://youtu.be/wgSZA3NPpBs](https://youtu.be/wgSZA3NPpBs) : the YouTube video link

</comment><comment><USER2> It's exactly the same as debating whether God exists.</comment>


Qualcomm Details Hexagon 680 DSP in Snapdragon 820: Accelerated Imaging - <AUTHOR> http://anandtech.com/show/9552/qualcomm-details-hexagon-680-dsp-in-snapdragon-820-accelerated-imaging

<comment> TD-Linux Ugh, it really bothers me how the partitioning in the die shot is 100% made up (it says so in the small text).

It looks neat and all, but the Hexagon has existed for a while in a number of phones and I've seen pretty minimal usage of it. Would more ARM cores be a better use of die space? Also, why not implement the video codecs on it and drop the fixed function hardware?

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like Anandtech updated the slide of the die shot.

HVX is designed to handle significant compute workloads for image processing applications such as virtual reality, augmented reality, image processing, video processing, and computer vision. This means that tasks that might otherwise be running on a relatively power hungry CPU or GPU can run a comparatively efficient DSP instead

<comment> TD-Linux You're right, they did. However it's still made up - you can clearly see the four CPU cores underneath the "LTE / Adreno" section.

Also looks like they posted some actual benchmarks. The numbers do look pretty impressive. I'd also like to see some results compared to shaders - some of them (histogram) are not a very good fit, but many of the other convolutions would be.</comment></comment></comment>


Covid-19 still has the same exponential growth despite France mass quarantine - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@hartator/covid-19-still-has-the-same-exponential-growth-despite-france-strict-mass-quarantine-115c751dc9bc <comment><USER2> Hmm...ourworldindata shows the doubling time as having increased to 10 days in France, new cases declining and the curve flattening, so not sure where this person is getting their data and/or analysis, but it seems clearly wrong.

[https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus](https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus)

<comment><USER3> The article just counts the total number of cases, without mentioning the number of tests, right?

Say on day one you test 10 persons and get 1 positive. Then on day two you tests 100 persons and get 10 positive.

You can say it's 10% positive in both cases: the virus doesn't spread. Or you can say the number of positive was multiplied by 10 in only one day: wow, "exponential growth", the number of positive cases is "soaring".

So, yeah, like most of the mainstream coverage around covid, it's just BS. Put the highest numbers along with a few dramatic words in the headline, and you're done, you wrote an article. Just fill the article with whatever, who cares.</comment></comment>


Show HN: I built a UWP app to control TP-Link smart plugs - <AUTHOR> I spent the last few weeks building a UWP app for Windows 10 that finally made it into the Windows Store. The biggest challenge was that UWP seems to have limitations with the .net version for UWP has a different API, particularly around the UDPClient API.
Shameless plug, it's available here https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9PCD9X9M1P5C
Any ideas on what additional features you would like to see? I want to implement an energy monitoring report for those plugs that support it. If anyone has advice about a good free report generator compatible with UWP I'm all ears.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Sorry, can I ask what a UDP app is?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a Universal Windows App. Apparently it was the "future" of windows development for awhile, but now it's taken a back seat to "legacy" interfaces like winforms.

<comment><USER2> Oh gotcha! Sorry, posted that somewhat late at night for me haha.

Did you use Tuya's API to control the smart plug?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice work.</comment>


Uncompromising - Kieran Healy - <AUTHOR> http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2011/09/01/uncompromising/ <comment><USER2> The third paragraph has the core observations.

First quote: "When people talk about _designers_ , an "uncompromising" vision is perfectly compatible with cutting products down to their essentials, focusing them entirely on some narrow set of functions, or making them do one thing perfectly."

One sentence later: "But when people—especially salespeople—talk about _customers_ , the phrase "no compromises" is the claim that the product will do whatever the customer wants, even if different customers want different things. It's the promise—or pitch—that everyone can have their cake and eat it."

I'll finish with a quote from John Nance. It's about programmers, but it also applies to designers and similar creative people: "They don't teach office politics in school. They should, but that's a different story all together. A programmer has to be quietly focused doing mental gymnastics to produce clean working code. It's difficult and takes all your energy. There's no time to run around to see who's throwing you under the bus. The games account service plays has consequences."

[http://johnnance01.wordpress.com/2010/06/15/never-trust-a- pr...](http://johnnance01.wordpress.com/2010/06/15/never-trust-a-programmer/)</comment>


Pronouncing SQL: S-Q-L or Sequel? (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://patorjk.com/blog/2012/01/26/pronouncing-sql-s-q-l-or-sequel/ <comment><USER2> That's one of the strange ones to me: I read somewhere on the web just once that one guy pronounced it 'squeal' \- one syllable. It was instantly burned into my brain.

'Mysql' is thus 'my-squeal'.</comment>


Interesting Non-Software "Startup" - Wave Power Generator - <AUTHOR> http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1030/ I'm pretty sure most everyone here is (like me) interested in software startups, but I found this link and thought it would be interesting to those with entrepreneurial bent. What I found so interesting is that the idea is so simple and easy -- why didn't I think of that!? <comment><AUTHOR> It also figures that the site goes down two seconds after I post this. Dern you Reddit!! ::shakes fist:: Here's a direct link to the company making the product: <http://www.swellfuel.com/></comment>


Glowscreen: LCD monitors hacked to use incandescent lamps - <AUTHOR> http://glowscreen.org/glowscreen_howto_en.html

<comment><USER2> Seems like something from "Brazil" (the movie, not the country).

</comment><comment><USER3> wow! finaly we get a real-world quality for digital things.</comment>