Max Howell, author of Homebrew, on being rejected for a job at Google - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejecting-Max-Howell-the-author-of-Homebrew-for-not-being-able-to-invert-a-binary-tree/answer/Max-Howell?srid=hosEd&share=1 <comment><USER2> Dupe of a discussion not even a day old: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15981338](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15981338)

</comment><comment><USER3> One of the replies by a Googler explains the rejection succintly:

 _" I suspect that you are awesome as a developer in a certain place, but that Google—at least as a software engineer—wouldn't be the right fit for you. They really do want computer scientists. The ability to figure out what to build isn't valued all that highly, because that's not fundamentally the responsibility of the software engineer."_

What irks me is that a lot of companies have imitated Google's hiring process without ever stopping to consider whether it's right for them. Do they want engineers who are computer scientists rather than engineers who can figure out what to build?

In Google's case they explicitly don't want the latter and hire accordingly. The company is structured to make this work -- there are product decision makers who understand software and can feed work to the CS-focused engineering teams.

My feeling is that most other companies would be much better off hiring engineers with a more user-oriented mindset, yet they end up explicitly filtering that out because they want to hire like Google.

<comment><USER4> Another interesting example is Shazam, which listens to 10 seconds of music and identifies the song. When I encountered it, I knew immediately that its implementation must be based on a fourier analysis of the sound to generate a fingerprint. That's because FA was a required part of my engineering curriculum.

No matter how good a programmer I was otherwise, without knowledge of FA I'd probably hack around for years with one inadequate ad-hoc solution after another. If I was really clever, I may even actually reinvent FA, badly.

This is where having proper engineering/mathematical training pays off. Just being a great programmer is just not enough.

For another minor example, I was given the minor job once of printing what was on the graphics screen on the printer. I knew that constructing a coordinate transform matrix was the answer, and had it running in a couple hours. A coworker, an excellent programmer, who had never heard of matrix math, was completely astonished at this and thought it was just black magic.

<comment><USER3> Yet if you look at the engineering team at a company like Shazam, I'd bet a small minority of them actually work on song fingerprinting.

Shazam is an app company. Most of the people there will be working on UIs, serving requests fast enough, integrating with partner APIs, and other standard software development where they never once need to feed audio packets into libfftw or whatever.

Your other comment seemed to suggest that you feel the Boeing model should apply here, and the people who don't work on the math-heavy product core should be considered technicians. Is that the right interpretation?

<comment><USER5> They also need a decent database to find the song from a five second sample occurring anywhere in the whole up to say 8 minute song, for their whole song library

<comment><USER6> Also in some cases have access to not well known artists altogether.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've never worked at Google but my read on them is that they're an algorithm company, not a product company. They tend to hire algorithm nerds and pass on folks who, like Max Howell, can design and build useful products. As a result, their core, algorithm based, functionality is successful, but they fail at new product design over and over, creating and retiring flawed products ad infinitum.

<comment><USER8> I did work at Google and, IMO, your analysis isn't that far from the truth. Plus every project is massively overstaffed on engineers and massively under- staffed on project and team managers, which is by design because, you know, SWEs at Google "don't like to be told what to do" and they will "organize themselves"...

<comment><USER9> And yet, Max Howell wouldn't see himself as a PM. Even if that would be where he could be the most help to Google! He'd want to be an engineer who makes up for his slight deficiencies in academic Computer Science with an excellent understanding of what Google's customers want.

Apologies to Max and Google if I misrepresented what you wanted out of this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> He seems like the kind of guy that would be set up to fail at such a giant corporation anyways. Especially if his peers would sneer at his lack of grasp abou comp sci. Getting shit done is not exactly what multi billion dollar enterprises are about. And making users happy is practically antithesis to googles MO. So I think they made the right call.

<comment><USER11> Well, he did join and then leave Apple. If there's ever a Quora answer about that, I'll gladly read it :)

[https://github.com/apple/swift-package- manager/commits/2e8db...](https://github.com/apple/swift-package- manager/commits/2e8dbe950f64fb5417a5c279138ec659c528443e/CODE_OWNERS.txt)

(Huge Homebrew fan here! Good API design is such an underappreciated skill.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'd rather Apple hire him and give him the resources to make a native MacOS package manager. If Apple are serious about Pro users, and their recent round table on the MacPro suggests they might be, then allowing researchers to easily install the tools they need is essential.

<comment><USER13> He was hired by Apple and also recently he has left that job

<comment><USER12> Ah, interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Google's concerns are mostly for the long haul. Get it right, get it maintainable.

Homebrew is awesome, but it doesn't meet the first of those criteria. Maybe the second, but who knows.

Should probably have got the job though.

</comment><comment><USER15> Maybe for a better fit for product manager role.

</comment><comment><USER16> Let's be real, nobody wants to use Homebrew. It just fills a niche for a tool that's missing on MacOS. People use homebrew because they search "apt-get yum for Mac" and it's the first thing that pops up.

In other words, the day that Apple bundles a native CLI package manager with macOS, nobody is going to stick with Homebrew for its amazing UI/UX.

I don't think we should be praising this guy for being a usability mastermind. I think homebrew is successful because he was someone willing to do the grunt work of building an apt-get clone on Mac. Paradoxically this actually reflects poorly on him because a talented developer prefers to spend time on more intellectually stimulating projects, not grunt work.

<comment><USER17> Homebrew was not the first. There was Fink and MacPorts before it. I would guess it became prominent because of the UX? Sold my mac before Homebrew was around.

<comment><USER18> Homebrew, at the time, was the first to try and build against the libraries that came with MacOS. For a lot of packages this was a huge time saver as it would be compiling a third the amount of code that MacPorts was churning through.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Internet-outragism I am going to use this term. Thanks homebrew guy</comment>


Synack Raises $7.5M Putting Bounties on IT Security Threats - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/24/synack-raises-7-5-million-putting-bounties-on-it-security-threats/

<comment><USER2> Just wanted to point out...

         Kaplan and his co-founder chief technology officer Mark Kuhr
         previously worked at the National Security Agency as senior
         analysts

Yes, that little fact is going to follow them around for life. It also puts this quote into an ironic light:

         "We call them security researchers, but ultimately they're
         'white hat' hackers," says Kaplan. "They're hacking for good."

This company does not clearly state what their relationship is with western intelligence agencies. Not even as much as a hint of an ethics statement or information about how long they hold disclosure or how this is handled. One should assume that 'white hat' for them and 'hacking for good' may mean the exact opposite. With that I'm a little surprised the irony of Google Ventures money being used for this is not highlighted more. Google complains along with others about the destabilisation of the tech industry at the NSA hands and yet funds a company that may very well help with that?

</comment><comment><USER3> congrats!</comment>


CSS Inlining for Emails in Django (django-inlinecss) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/roverdotcom/django-inlinecss

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm curious to hear what people are currently doing.

I used to inline the CSS as more of a onetime build-step type thing, but found it to be a real pain.

The main downside to this approach is rendering is quite slow, but emails should probably be fired off in a task queue anyway, so meh.</comment>


Try Objective-C - <AUTHOR> http://www.codeschool.com/courses/try-objective-c

<comment><USER2> I tried, but I must say, I don't like the syntax anymore. I used other languages for too many years, like Ruby, and they are simply more useable for me. Nevertheless it is a powerful language, and devs who want to write apps for iOS should really learn it very well, I think.

</comment><comment><USER3> I once had an idea to try Objective-C, but it seems Objective-C is of absolutely no use to anyone not using Apple products.

It seems the only use of Objective-C outside Mac world is GNUstep, which seemed too buggy to use (though maybe I've missed something?..).</comment>


Next.js 9.2 - <AUTHOR> https://nextjs.org/blog/next-9-2 <comment><USER2> As a Next.js user, this is a big release! I'm constantly impressed with how many new features and improvements get rolled out.

The only thing that's (slightly) concerning to me is the rate of change. It's a double-edged sword. There are features/patterns in Next.js that made sense 6 months / a year ago but are now not preferred. An example would be API routes and dynamic routing improvements.

These are definitely welcome (and good!) changes, but it makes a lot of old examples become out of date fast and it feel like "churn" \- even when the features are helpful.

Maybe that's just the cost of doing JavaScript in 2020.

<comment><USER3> > There are features/patterns in Next.js that made sense 6 months / a year ago > but are now not preferred

Do you have an example of what changed? We haven't really made any breaking changes for quite some time and have been improving on the existing feature set. Smaller bundle sizes with no code changes etc are part of this.

If you take the getting started readme of Next.js 3 years ago it still works today.

<comment><USER3> We're very committed to introducing only the necessary changes and features. On top of that we have an extensive integration test suite to ensure no features are broken when upgrading.

<comment><USER2> I was intentional about saying "not preferred" instead of "not supported". You are correct, there have not been any breaking changes, which is very helpful.

When new features and changes roll out (like CSS support in 9.2), they are _good_ improvements. I'm simply stating the rate of change is drastic. Which, as mentioned, is both good and bad.

Here's a solid example. If I were trying to integrate a Firebase API to my Next.js app before API routes, the recommendation might have been to run a monorepo where one app is Next.js + custom server and the other is a Node.js API (deployed with now).

Next 9 and API routes made that unnecessary. Now you can just embed an API route under /pages to talk to Firebase.

Now, if you search for "nextjs firebase example" you might find three or four different ways of doing it on Google. As you said, they all still _work_, but they're not idiomatic Next. It can be hard to dumpster dive through Spectrum chats and GitHub issues to find the new "recommended way" of doing things.

This is a very minor gripe. You're doing amazing work, Tim!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> next.js is such a joy to work with, congrats on the new version! It's constantly improved, the team is very responsive on github, looking forward to getStaticProps and getServerProps to make offline website generation even better.

<comment><USER5> I started using the development preview of getStaticProps and was really impressed with the implementation. Being able to combine static and dynamic resources in an app so easily is a gamechanger. Keep your landing pages statically generated and make the logged in parts of the site dynamic! Or statically generate your blog and build a API-driven routed section of your site with ease!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice that they've added CSS Module support. I've been using them for my react projects and find them a good solution when you don't need lots of dynamic styling.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's really disappointing that Next continues to push forward with all these innovations that I'd love to take advantage of, but can't for the single reason that it doesn't support nested layouts or routing. Every page transition requires blowing up the entire layout, you can't have a persistent header for example. And there's no way (that I've found yet) to build any kind of skeleton loading screen during transitions.

This is a really basic issue that negates all the good they've got and it's frustrating.

<comment><USER8> I wrote a little naive hook for pulling this off in our app: [https://gist.github.com/SirensOfTitan/6067c1c1aa791287361578...](https://gist.github.com/SirensOfTitan/6067c1c1aa7912873615780ee519c74b)

...essentially we listen for route changes in our top level layouts using that hook to coordinate which parts of the page to keep active and which to show spinners on.

I'd imagine there are more robust ways to do this too: I think I saw a plug-in that uses element ids to figure out how to morph the page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have been a web dev 25 years. It is nice to see JavaScript based backends mature. One day we will have Ruby on Rails or Django of JavaScript world :)

Next.js examples use npm, but I have seen a lot of new projects to go with Yarn. Is this battle yet decided?

<comment><USER10> The npm client largely resolved the issues Yarn was created to solve. I used Yarn for a while, but eventually switched all my projects back to npm.

<comment><USER6> The gap has closed but afaik yarn is sill a bit faster</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the coolest free Web-API you used? - <AUTHOR> I want to build some sort of showcase/tutorial project. Therefore, I look for a free API. Would love to work with something with geospatial data (e.g. live traffic data).<p>What is the coolest free Web-API you came across so far? <comment><USER2> Not the coolest exactly, but I've used Unsplash's API to generate random high quality images for projects a surprising amount of times:

[https://source.unsplash.com/](https://source.unsplash.com/)</comment>


Christianity and Neurology - <AUTHOR>

I remember reading something about a fundamentalist sect of Christianity being "at war" with neurology instead of evolution in terms of being something "blasphemous" to the concept of a soul.
However, after thinking about it, what exact threats would strong AI or an entirely material soul have on Christianity? Actually, the alternative viewpoint that many fundamentalists (that immaterial components functions fully with a material organ, and then consequently leave after death) makes no sense at all from a theological perspective, and I really don't see exactly why certain Christians have a problem with this. I'd imagine that if there was a God in control of heaven, he could probably just copy aspects of the material "unit" into something not material.
Does anybody know what exactly is so nerve-shattering about the concept of an entirely material personality (and with that, strong AI?) <comment><USER2> I love what science-fiction author and orthodox Roman Catholic John C. Wright said recently:

[http://johncwright.livejournal.com/255380.html?thread=763381...](http://johncwright.livejournal.com/255380.html?thread=7633812#t7633812)

"I do not value a human because of the biological fact that they share my genus and species, no. The biological fact is indeed indifferent to the more profound moral fact: I value Man because he is _Imago Dei_ , the image of God.

"Spock of Vulcan is not a member of my species, but if he were real, I would value him, and say he has rights, and protect his life, and so on. I value Vulcans because they are also _Imago Dei_ , rational creatures as God is. For that matter, R2D2 is an intelligent being, capable of moral decisions, and great bravery, and yet nothing in his biology -- he is not, properly speaking, even a living thing -- makes him human. He clearly has a soul, however, or whatever you want to call the thing that makes for courage and humor and loyalty. The robot is also _Imago Dei_."

</comment><comment><USER3> Based on my experience, some people (ugh weasel words) can not cope with the idea that humans might be made of the same mental or physical patterns as both other animals and inanimate objects. The notion that there is something 'holy' about each person that transcends our physical selves is pretty central to the Abrahamic religions.</comment>


What I learned selling my Reddit accounts - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@Rob79/what-i-learned-selling-my-reddit-accounts-c5e9f6348005 <comment><USER2> Wow, that seems really small scale to me. First of all, just like HN, it's possible for a young/karma-less account to hit the front page, in that there are no inherent barriers. The main difference -- besides interestingness of the content, of course -- is whether or not that post gets enough valid upvotes to get noticed on the subreddit's top links...after which it continues to snowball up the karma points.

So why would marketers need to buy accounts that looked real? I know that Reddit has some ability to detect karma-rings and suspiciously upvoting patterns...but I can't recall many past instances where Reddit itself uses heuristics and an automated system to tell if a given upvote came from a geniune users, based on the user's quality of past posting.

While the history of a user who posts something will be visible to all other users...it's rare that people take the time to comb through someone's history...it happens occasionally in partisan forums (i.e. if you post in r/sandersforpresident in a concern-trolling way)...but so many Reddit users are pretty casual that most reddit posting histories consist of quick quips and comments...just generate 50 of those posts, not all in one day or in one subreddit, and that would throw off most scrutinizers.

But that's besides the point. _Users who upvote_ can't be seen by the public, and neither can their histories. So why bother paying a premium price for a single, established account, when it's easy enough to create new accounts and divvy up the upvoting?

In contrast, such a system wouldn't work on Twitter, where the identity of the account and the followers it has is critical to making something stick...i.e. paying for 10 minutes of write access to Ashton Kutcher's account is going to be a better ROI than having 10,000 twitter bots to retweet your astroturf.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder, if those folks are so bad at marketing, where is the $120 coming from? Is this a new venture for them that's doomed to failure unless they get better at it?

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder how much established HN accounts sell for - another reason to opt for a real name policy.

<comment><USER5> On HN? That seems like a terrible idea to me.

<comment><USER4> I don't, but I am using my real name voluntarily. People are generally more civil when using their own name.

You won't sell a account based on your real name unless you are crazy.</comment></comment></comment>


McDonald's plans to bring AI voice technology to its drive-thrus - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2019/09/10/mcdonald-plans-to-bring-ai-voice-technology-to-its-drive-thrus/ <comment><USER2> AI voice technology is bad enough on the phone with <insert megabank here> without physically waiting for the car in front to stumble through trying to get the machine to understand that they want bbq sauce instead of ketchup.

</comment><comment><USER3> Now we can use machines to get our orders wrong.

</comment><comment><USER4> lets start handing written notes to human employees. that cuts the Ai voice surveillance out of the picture, and makes it clear as crystal what you want for junkfood. or even provide a keypad matrix like the junkfood vending machines, so employees only have to concentrate on cooking and getting the order from the grill to the correct customer.

if McD cant do that then, i can go elsewhere and forget about them, but i did that a long time ago. What does thier food taste like anyways is it still the same?

<comment><AUTHOR> That doesn't solve the problem of a driver in a car.

And we're not discussing the quality or whether or not you like their food. We're talking about replacing people with continuous speech recognition. Many people choose to and enjoy eating there. If you don't, that's fine too.

<comment><USER4> so does it taste the same as it used to some time ago? and i dont see why a driver in a car is incapable of providing a meal order by keypad. perhaps you could elaborate on your opinion?</comment></comment></comment>


SAT essay section: Problems with grading, instruction, and prompts (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2013/10/sat_essay_section_problems_with_grading_instruction_and_prompts.single.html <comment><USER2> I was a student at an SAT prep center during high school and worked there for a year during college. The strategy we recommended for essays was to build a chart with one book, one quote, one historical event, etc. The best choices were broadly applicable across different essay topics.

Students would then write multiple practice essays referencing the same sources over and over. In 25 minutes, there's no time to come up with something original. It's better to have a go-to set of sources that you can mold to fit the essay topic at hand.

<comment><USER3> That is actually a very good idea!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I remember when I took the SATs I did quite well on the reading and math, but not so hot on the writing. I remember feeling that the grading of the essay wasn't made clear at all- Should I throw out unnecessary college-level vocabulary to sound smart or write to a casual reader? Should I make appeals to emotion or cite studies?

I remember one prompt I got was "All leaders deserve their positions of leadership," and I thought, "Well they used the word ALL so really the most logical refutation would be merely a counter-example (e.g. Hitler) but now I have to drag out this reasoning into this unnatural 5-paragraph contrivance."

</comment><comment><USER5> Reminds me of [http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/04/30/2227243/grading- soft...](http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/04/30/2227243/grading-software- fooled-by-nonsense-essay-generator)</comment>


Bird, Lime and Spin Receive Cease-And-desist Letters from SF City Attorney - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/16/bird-lime-and-spin-receive-cease-and-desist-letters-from-sf-city-attorney/amp/ <comment><USER2> I joined the supervisor hearing today late, but there was important context there that is missing in this article.

\- They mentioned several companies that were waiting for permits to launch, and applauded companies like Scoot (which is planning to launch e-bikes) and Waybots for working with them.

\- They mentioned that SFMTA was first contacted about these scooters to in February and immediately began working on a permit process which is due to begin next month. That's light speed for a government agency.

\- The only reason there was a sudden rush in deployment was that one company (Bird or Lime) decided to jump the gun and launch on St. Patrick's Day. The others that deployed didn't want to lose first mover advantage. At least one of these three hadn't even contacted SFMTA until after deployment.

\- Lime did not even send a representative to the meeting at all. Apparently they decided to just contact TechCrunch after the fact.

The supervisors were rough on them and Aaron Peskin even had the nerve to call them "techbros", but they brought this on themselves by trying to use the old "move fast and break things" play that this city has seen before.

<comment><USER3> I'm confused on why a launch with proper permits and communication with the city would change the situation. All the same complaints about clutter, bad riders, and sidewalk/road disruption would still be valid.

The idea of an "ownernless" vehicle is flawed. They seem cheap, and so they are a treated like trash. Only if the companies picked them everyday to charge, repair, and redistributed would this work. That maygive them some intrinsic value, and people might respect them enough to not properly park and care for them. However, this is not the case. No one wants a business whose model is to litter the city with trash.

<comment><USER4> > I'm confused on why a launch with proper permits and communication with the > city would change the situation.

Level playing field? It sounds like several companies did the right thing and worked with the authorities to make sure they didn't cause trouble, and then the three in TFA jumped the gun and launched anyway.

As a governing body, you can't allow that precedent to stand. If "ignore regulations and do it anyway" becomes an optimal strategy then everyone will do it and your commons will be tragic.

<comment><USER5> Everyone already does it. It is the optimal strategy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The two largest complaints in cities with scooter sharing are (1) users riding on the sidewalk because they don't feel safe on the road and (2) users parking on the sidewalk because all street space for storing personal mobility devices is allocated to 4,000 lb cars. A climate conscious city can get more people using zero emission vehicles like bikes and scooters and solve the issues above by (1) creating protected bike lanes so scooter users of all ages and abilities feel safe riding on the street and (2) converting one or two car street parking spots on every block to bike and scooter parking.

However, street parking has been a 3rd rail of local politics in American cities. Demographics are pointing to change: last year SF added 8,500 residents but car registrations dropped by 1,800. More protected bike lanes, less personal cars, more ride sharing/autonomous cars and more scooters is the future - most boomer politicians running American cities today just don't get this yet - they and their friends live in highly appreciated SFHs,have a personal car and a place to store said car, maintain a low prop13 tax rate, and reminisce of 1974 when people were moving out of cities and they could always find free parking right in front of their favorite restaurant. But the demographics are changing, our streets will transform as a result and for the sake of our planet, it couldn't happen soon enough

<comment><USER7> The government is attempting to do its function and protect the populace.

These companies have done things which violate the government's rules.

Imagine a bug where you fix it incorrectly and it spawns Two more bugs. That is what is going on here, and being discussed in this post.

How should technology companies work with governments when both:

A- deployment of their tech is most likely to violate the law, and

B- the Market Opportunity is most likely to be spoiled by a competitor deploying first

What should that company do? Break things and ask for forgiveness? Budget for lawsuits and ship first? Or adhere to the law, working with the system?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Infuriating, I'm a huge fan of these services. I initially thought they would just be toys, but they've removed any uber/lyft around the city for me - they're both faster and cheaper, they park just like bicycles, they don't cause any noise pollution, and they completely eliminate last-mile carbon output.

Sometimes SF is an infuriating place.

<comment><USER9> The city is just trying to ensure that the vehicles don't end up abandoned by riders all over the place. This has been a problem with bike and scooter services in many cities globally.

They are giving the companies plenty of time to respond with a plan to address that issue. They're not going to be shut down. They just need to be more responsible for the impact on public places, because we humans are sadly too self-focused to b conscientious.

Hell, the city will probably build more bike racks to accommodate them.

<comment><USER10> I think it's bigger than that. There's a massive FUD meme around dockless technology: the only time it's in the news is to show the random landfills a few of them end up in, ignoring the 99% that have made millions of lives easier. Dockless bikeshare went from 0 to 200 million riders in just two years, in a country where everybody already owned a bike. This is a technology that makes cities more accessible in a way you can't imagine til you experience it. But people point to a few left out of place and tell us it's going to kill our grannies.

<comment><USER11>
      a few left out of place

Dockless bikes are, by definition, _all_ left out of place.

<comment><USER12> If only people could store them with ease at the side of the street; perhaps paying a fee while they use the land.

You could travel around the city, leave your bike there, and come back and continue your journey!

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

<comment><USER11>
      store them with ease at the side of the street; perhaps paying a fee while they use the land

Then it's no longer a _sharing_ model; it's a "I want 24/7 control of a bike but only pay for while I'm riding it and park it anywhere without consequences" model.

Which would be handy, but it wouldn't scale well from a business standpoint.

<comment><USER12> For what it's worth that is exactly how car sharing works in my city and it's doing well, and growing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've seen these pop up all over the bay and in LA recently. More often than not they end up immediately abandoned all over public spaces as soon as they run out of batteries or the first free ride is over. Bird particularly seems the worst. The scooters are really under powered and have tiny batteries with seemingly nobody maintaining or charging them, so they just end up laying around. You also get completely inexperienced riders with zero safety equipment driving around in the streets causing issues. It's just another example of a short sighted attempt to arbitrage the public well being for private profit.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is rich coming from SF, where homeless tents, needles and human excrement are abound:

"creating a public nuisance on The City's streets and sidewalks and endangering public health and safety."

<comment><USER15> You're comparing people with mental disabilities and drug problems to highly educated individuals who shipped a product to the public haphazardly to make a quick buck. They should have known better.

<comment><USER16> That's true, but I don't think the comparison has anything to do with the people who cause the problems. The comparison is the significance of the public nuisance and health hazard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Worth pointing out that not all electric scooter companies chose to disregard city regulations. Waybots has made the choice to work with cities to get approval before launching. Seems like a better approach, and one likely to give them a big advantage long-term. I believe they're still the only legally operating electric scooter sharing company in the US (currently live in DC where they got permission to launch).

</comment><comment><USER17> These scooters are all over my neighborhood. Most of the time they are parked reasonably. Sometimes they fall over. But they suffer from the "dog shit" problem: there are enough inconsiderate riders who leave the scooters in stupid places that it's going to piss people off. You don't notice the well- parked scooters.

The big issue I see with them is that the people riding them are often unsafe. They don't come with helmets. I've also seen some pretty reckless driving, both in traffic and on the sidewalk.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think you're going to see cities acting much more quickly to clamp down on services like this. They have realized that Uber and Airbnb got the proverbial elephant's nose under the tent, by the time they got around to trying to regulate them it was too late.

FWIW, I think dockless bike/scooter share is a great idea, but having seen what a mess it has become in China, there do need to be some ground rules so that pedestrians aren't having to step over piles of them to walk down the street.

<comment><USER10> Have you seen piles of them on the street yourself? I never have, in Beijing, Shanghai, or Xiamen. People are 99% considerate; the 1% who aren't make for better photos. The frictionless utility of dockless has brought so much ease and joy to these cities that any marginal, occasional mess appears far outweighed to me, and anyone I've ever talked to.

<comment><USER19> I live in Beijing, and the bike and scooter shares are _everywhere_ , including blocking sidewalks and in huge piles and it's absoultly great. They've been a terrific improvement. It's great to use them, and it's great to see so many other people using them.

Yeah, they're kind of a pain to deal with them sometimes, but it turns out you can just move the bikes, and walk or ride around the piles. I have yet to see anyone get stuck in a pile. And somehow even people that don't use the bikes seem to be able to lend some value to the idea that other people do (this was very strange to me at first, having grown up in the Bay Area).

Beijing _is_ pretty much the perfect city for them though... completely flat and ridiculous spacious and open (except parts of the old city). I can see it being more painful in tighter cities. But they'll figure the piles problem out; it's already gotten better, and the net benefit has been pretty large.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I hope Seattle follows SF's example, as unlikely as that is in the local climate.

Seattle's current adoption of bike sharing is, in large part, an effort to reduce carbon emissions and too make more use of our roads. I am 100% for doing both of these things, but I think Bike Share programs are not the best path. Deals where University of Washington Medical Center provides employees (noticeable) extra pay for biking to work, and removing minimum parking laws in more areas are the best way to move away from car transport. Even the downtown toll will be more effective at reducing car rides than bike share programs. Bike shares pollute sidewalks, are too slow for any distance more than two miles, and too heavy for going up Seattle's hills. In addition I believe they encourage the dangerous (and locally illegal) practice of biking without a helmet. Finally, I think Seattle's DoT has higher expectations for bike share programs than will actually pan out. I wish data on their usage was more public.

<comment><USER21> There is no danger to others in biking without a helmet.

The helmet issue is mostly something to try to get at biking people, it is not a public health issue. That why all warning are worded along the line: "helmet prevent head injuries" (like knee pad limit knee injuries), and not "helmet improves general outcomes".

Most studies agree that head injury absent a car strike are rare and are compensated by the long term benefits over the population. The most dangerous thing in a bike is the surrounding cars.

<comment><USER18> This, this, this. Nobody, and I mean nobody, wears a helmet when cycling in the Netherlands - not five-year-olds and certainly not adults, and absolutely everyone cycles everywhere. Yes, people do die of bike injuries, but the number is surprisingly small, something like 160 people per year out of a country of 16 million.

<comment><USER22> The UK with a much much bigger population than the Netherlands and worse cycling provision has 102 fatalities - sound's like you have a problem.

<comment><USER23> The UK has a much bigger population but far few people actually regularly cycling. A quarter of the population in the Netherlands commutes by bike. Compared to the UK they have approximately 1/4 the population but the average person bikes 10x more.

[https://www.cbs.nl/NR/rdonlyres/9F9F3F71-9324-46D3-AD7E-076C...](https://www.cbs.nl/NR/rdonlyres/9F9F3F71-9324-46D3-AD7E-076C59F8392D/0/2015factsheetnederlandfietsland_ENG.pdf)

[https://www.cyclinguk.org/resources/cycling-uk-cycling- stati...](https://www.cyclinguk.org/resources/cycling-uk-cycling-statistics)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't understand how these companies don't get that a public space is meant to be used, not abused.

If they want to disseminate their vehicles around public spaces so much better but they _must_ at least coordinate with the administrators to do it in an orderly fashion.

IOW, get a permit, pay rent and install sidewalk parking racks. Public free ones are for occasional individual use.

</comment><comment><USER25> Jalopnik tried to use Bird and came away with a pretty dim view of the experience:

[https://jalopnik.com/i-tried-san-franciscos-electric- scooter...](https://jalopnik.com/i-tried-san-franciscos-electric-scooter- share-and-it-wa-1825275906)

</comment><comment><USER26> It's interesting, I wouldn't have thought this is a business that could work. Expensive scooters left on sidewalks. Bikes get stolen constantly and are a lot bigger, and could have a tracking device on it.

What keeps them from being stolen and the GPS disabled?

<comment><USER27> I think the bigger problem with the business model is that the things break down constantly. I usually have to check >5 of them to find one that works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I haven't used these yet but I'm very happy with Jump electric bikes, which seems more appropriate for med-long distances and a lot cheaper ($4hr vs $9-10hr for Bird)

</comment><comment><USER29> Where do they source their scooters from? they seem pretty high quality, you'd think they were pretty expensive. I'd like to buy one myself.

<comment><USER30> Bird and Spin both use this model: [https://www.alibaba.com/product- detail/Xiaomi-MI-M365-electr...](https://www.alibaba.com/product- detail/Xiaomi-MI-M365-electric-scooter-folding_60679640505.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Just landed in SF an hour ago. I had read about the controversy, but I hadn't expected to see the scooters everywhere so far. Soma, FiDi, and North Beach. Some had headlights on that made them obvious in the dark. It's a very visible phenomenon, partially because I thought that anything like that left on the sidewalk in SF got stolen.

(Neither for nor against - just an observation)

</comment><comment><USER32> So who recharges all these things? Do they credit people if they bring it to a charging station, or what?

<comment><USER33> They were paying gig economy workers to collect them after 8pm, charge 10-30 at a time in their apartments, and redistribute from 5-8am. They paid some of these people to show up today and talk about how great it pays. I really wish they could talk to some Uber drivers from 2010.

<comment><USER34> I wouldn't call chargers gig economy workers when Bird only credits $5/per scooter. That's not an income.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Was a fan too. I haven't seen any knocked over

</comment><comment><USER36> I think the biggest problem is they make you look like a douchebag but feel like a hipster.

That's a wreckless combination the world isn't ready for.

</comment><comment><USER37> Major props to the SF Transport authority who is moving fast, breaking business models and generally acting like the adult in the room.

Looks like SF is in good hands.

NB I thought Bird, Lime and Spin in the title was a firm of lawyers or maybe PR people. Could you adjust the title to "e-scooter rental startups get cease and desist orders from SF City" or something. :-)

</comment><comment><USER38> So they are going to allocate city resources to seize and impound them? NIMBYs win again.

</comment><comment><USER39> SF is a city thriving with homelessness, drug abuse on the streets, dangerous needles and human shit everywhere. Glad to see they are spending time on things that matter.

Among other things, on 6th street there are people sleeping in the middle of the sidewalk, peeing on walls, camping in front of liquor stores and barbecuing illegally on the sidewalk (!) in broad daylight. Yet the fabulous city administration considers electrical scooters to be the topic of the day.

</comment><comment><USER40> I definitely support the need to regulate these services. On the one hand, I have often wanted such a service in SF. That I should not have to worry about parking or racking is a key requirement. At the same time, it doesn't seem fair to allow private companies to litter the streets with junk. Partnership with government is crucial. I am quite happy with the way things are turning out - they launch first, government reacts quickly to regulate them, and now they work with the government to figure out solutions. The other alternative - them getting permits first - would never work fast enough in practice.

</comment><comment><USER41> I don't understand the appeal of services like these. If I had billions of dollars to start companies strictly for ironic/satirical purposes, I'd start one for sunglasses sharing. For those who find it too much of an onerous burden and a logistical nightmare to maintain and store a pair of sunglasses in between uses.

Seriously though, why rely on the vagaries of supply and demand on somebody's network, and their maintenance diligence and so on, for a thing that you can own so cheaply, and always have there when you need it? It just has never made sense to me.

The exception of course is for tourists who didn't bring their scooters or bikes along. I have considered it in that case... though never actually did it. I just walked.

<comment><USER18> Really?

1\. No money down: a decent bike is $700+, a bike share is $3 per ride or under $100 per year

2\. No maintenance: someone else keeps the tires full and the chain lubed. If something breaks, you just park the bike and get another one.

3\. No theft: bikes get stolen when they are parked. When a bike share is parked, it's not your problem.

4\. No parking hassles: finding a safe place to park your bike in the city is tough. Many buildings don't provide bike storage. Try carrying your bike up and down from a 5th floor walk-up every day.

5\. One-way trip: you rode to work this morning, and now it's raining. No problem, take the bus home.

Don't believe me, just ask New Yorkers, who are taking an average of 40,000 rides per day on the city's 12,000 citibikes.

<comment><USER41> Yeah I know about Citibike, Velib, Capital Bikeshare, and the Nike ones in Portland, all of which are part of how I ended up accumulating enough experience of the topic to end up baffled that they're actually popular. But from your comments I realize it's about avoiding a commitment. And I'm not trying to sound as judgmental as that probably sounds. It's to enable you to NOT own a bike. But for reference here's how I've dealt with your five issues:

1\. My current bike cost $550 new, 6 years ago, so that would've been less than $100/yr, if I hadn't replaced parts and spent more. But I get unlimited rides. And it'll last another 20 years if I'm not a fad-follower and don't get reckless or unlucky.

2\. I do it myself, that way I'm the one in control of when it fails to get done.

3\. Always lock it. Never had a problem. Having a cheap $550 bike probably helps.

4\. Yep America's like that. I carry mine up & down from the 3rd floor. If I move I'll choose not to live above the 3rd floor. Or maybe I'll live on the 5th floor after all, and become a bad-ass with huge calves and five flights of endurance.

5\. I wear rain gear.

<comment><USER42> This is a silly argument. Some people don't want to do the thing you do. They are willing to pay for it. You do want to do the thing you do. You're willing to pay for it.

<comment><USER41> You would probably find it less silly if you stopped mischaracterizing it as an argument.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What technical reasons are there to have low maximum password lengths? - <AUTHOR> https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/33470/what-technical-reasons-are-there-to-have-low-maximum-password-lengths/33471#33471 <comment><USER2> Note also that an enforced length limit is sometimes an externally visible code smell of not performing proper password hashing, and instead storing the plaintext password in, i.e., a char(8) db column.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like how the story ends: The Internet is full of chimpanzees.

So true :-)</comment>


Ask HN: How to handle getting upset at work? - <AUTHOR> I often get upset at work after making a mistake. No matter how small the mistake is.
For example, I reply to an email but I was mistaken/didn't reply in the way the recipient wanted.  They cc'd in my boss saying "I think my original email was very clear."
It was a Friday afternoon and I was in tears.  I decided to go home and sleep on it, thinking I'd feel better in a day or two.
It happened to be a long weekend, and by the time Tuesday rolled around I couldn't face going back into work.  I resigned and never went back to the office.
Obviously, looking back on things this seems to be something of an over-reaction.  I went to a doctor and a therapist and got a clean bill of health.
I don't expect most people's experiences are quite as extreme as mine, but I wondered what techniques people have for when they make a mistake at work (big or small) or have some other negative experience. <comment><USER2> Getting annoyed at work used to happen to me reasonably often (startups = intense..). I actually built a very simple web app that had mindfulness exercises to help me calm down and be less annoyed by little things in the moment.

If you want to check it out: [https://app.getserenity.app/](https://app.getserenity.app/)

I made it a web app so that it was convenient to use at work without having to go find a conference room or somewhere quiet to cool down. You can just pop it up on your phone or laptop.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe a case of impostor syndrome? We all make mistakes, yours may seem way worse because you replay it in your head and think of the worst case scenario and everyone is embarrassed of you. What helps me is that I try to think of all the benefits that I add to the company, if they're going to fire me over a measly mistake then shame on them :)

Of course, this is easier said than done. I have pretty bad anxiety and it took a lot of bad moments for me to realize "hmmm wait, I do a lot of good work here"

</comment><comment><USER4> Your initial action was the right one: step away from the problem, reset, and give enough time for the body's response to dissipate.

However, when you step away you need to have tools and support systems that allow you to escape the negative thoughts so you can walk back in after without fear. Everyone has different tools for this so I hesitate to recommend any one in particular as it is more just important that you find the tools that work for you and have them available.

</comment><comment><USER5> Did the place you resigned from put lots of pressure on you? Were you afraid of the consequences? Matters like this need to be taken seriously, try finding out the root cause of why you acted like this, it could be your past. But remember it is okay to cry and let your feelings out and do what you think to protect your mental health. Try to understand the reason why you feel like this then act on it. Get help from a mental health professional if required.</comment>


Ciao, Chrome: Firefox Quantum Is the Browser Built for 2017 - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/firefox-quantum-the-browser-built-for-2017/ <comment><USER3> On my end, I never actually stopped _using_ Firefox after Chrome came out. I had Chrome installed and used it mostly for testing and validation of web code, but my day-to-day was Firefox. I had my extensions configured and setup in it and my large collection of bookmarks was there (I guess I was just too lazy to import them into Chrome). I think the main reason I _stuck_ with Firefox was because I used Android and the Firefox browser on Android supported my extensions -- the most important being uBlock Origin, so the browsing experience was better even though the overall performance wasn't great -- and since my bookmarks were synced, it just worked out better for me that way.

I ran Developer edition, so I received the updated that killed most of my extensions earlier than most and I realized that the _main_ reason I used Firefox _was_ because of my collection of extensions -- many of which now didn't work. So I abandoned Firefox on all but mobile earlier this year and switched to Vivaldi (chromium based)[0].

Now that my most important extensions are available (though still haven't found uBlock Protector), I've started using Quantum again. I'm _really_ enjoying the fact that HTML5/Flask autoplay can be disabled in "about:config" (and that it works, unlike the myriad of extensions I installed for Vivaldi claiming to do the same but which mostly broke things like gifv playback and random non-YouTube video sites that would still autoplay or would simply refuse to play). Firefox Quantum _is_ faster and I'm back to being a (mostly) happy Firefox user, again. Last night I removed the icons for Opera and Vivaldi from my task bar to keep me from accidentally starting them due to muscle memory (and therefore adding bookmarks in a place where I will lose them).

[0] No, I don't have a thing against Google, I just preferred the high-degree of customization that Firefox/Vivaldi gave me over Chrome. I don't like Chrome's opinionated configuration panel -- I'm a developer and I like knobs to turn. Though Vivaldi lacked the conveniences of syncing things between my various machine so I ended up on Opera rather regularly.

<comment><USER4> As an avid Vivaldi user, I was impressed with what Firefox Quantum had to offer. I hadn't used Firefox since Chrome became dominant, it was interesting to see what Firefox had to offer compared to the Chromium-based ecosystem.

Personally, I would consider Firefox Quantum to be a step up over Chrome, but it's still missing much of the customization that I grew to love under Vivaldi. Simply being unable to change keybindings or the speed dial selection were enough to draw me back to Vivaldi, but I'll be keeping a keen eye on Firefox development from now on.

I do agree however, the lack of syncing is a major drawback to Vivaldi, and one I hope they will add in the near future.

<comment><USER5> You can customize what pages are displayed in the quick dial screen (and pin them, so that they stay there), but you cannot change the images and reorder sites by dragging (you need to re-enter the URL in some further tile).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm surprised at the success of Mozilla's PR push for this. It seems the time is right for this. Probably helps that tech sites seem to compete to have an article on every "current" topic.

<comment><USER7> Mozilla is running Firefox adverts in my city. I don't remember seeing browser adverts since the initial chrome push.

<comment><USER8> Does Chrome spam on the google home page count?

I've heard that is one of the most valuable ad spots in the world and I've seen a lot of Chrome ads there.

<comment><USER9> > I've heard that is one of the most valuable ad spots in the world

Yeah since they literally won't sell that spot, I'd say it's worth billions of dollars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I bet it was 2009 since I last used firefox, other than testing for reported bugs in it. I've been using it exclusively since the Quantum launch, and I really enjoy it.

I liked the idea of having real browser diversity before, but it wasn't practical for me. Now it's practical and awesome.

<comment><USER11> Same for me. I tried to switch back to Firefox a couple of times in the past and couldn't do it. Performance wasn't there and the UI would often hang without response.

But Quantum changed everything. I've been using Nightly since this summer and it's wonderful. I now use it as my default browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The speed increase in Firefox has been something I haven't seen in a browser update for years.

<comment><USER13> It reminds me of Phoenix (to become Firefox), and how much of an improvement it was over the Mozilla browser. It makes me wonder where things went wrong, as I recall the Firefox of ~2005 being snappier than the one of ~2015. The only discrete drop in performance that I can remember was the addition of the AwesomeBar (which was worth it, but it really annoyed me at the time that just typing in an address became sluggish). Of course, my memory about these things could be completely wrong, and in any case web 2.0 gradually took over and websites accreted JavaScript faster than the hardware could improve, so comparing today with 10-15 years ago isn't really fair... Well, congrats to the Firefox developers, because it really is a pleasure to use again.

<comment><USER14> > It makes me wonder where things went wrong, as I recall the Firefox of ~2005 > being snappier than the one of ~2015.

If you visit any page made in 2005 with any recent browser it will be unbelievably fast. Pages became more bloated in the last decade because they could.

<comment><USER15> this + stuck js + single threading..

chrome's day-one multiprocess support was really the big shift since it allowed js bloat to not kill your session, which in turn allowed more js bloat to exist, which in turn made ff slower..

<comment><USER16> Yeah, when you think about Chrome's being selling points - a browser that won't crash just because one tab does, sandboxing, and responsiveness - it's literally all just from their multiproc architecture. It bought them _so_ much to have that from the state.

But, like Firefox, they now have a big codebase to maintain and it's not so easy to get massive perf improvements because changing up architecture is painful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > I can't use the Conde Nast CMS in anything other than Chrome, so I can't > switch completely.

Highlight of the article tucked in at the end there.

<comment><USER18> You'd think that a technology-oriented magazine like wired would at least try to aim for cross-browser compatibility in their infrastructure. But why bother, make your CMS Chrome-only a policy and free yourself of extra testing.

And it's not only wired. I've come across a lot of internal sites and intranets that are poorly tested on anything but Chrome. I know, it's not exactly the same thing as the old IE/ActiveX but it still grinds my gears when it happens.

<comment><USER19> If Firefox had a larger market share, it would be easy to make the argument for cross-browser compatibility. But when Firefox is not even 12% of Chrome's usage globally [http://gs.statcounter.com/](http://gs.statcounter.com/) and likely much less for your customers it's difficult to appeal to ideals

<comment><USER8> Oh come on.

We've been pushing this since IE6 ruled. :-)

Cross browser compability should be easier than ever so it should just be a matter of being a professional developer.

<comment><USER19> There are a different and arguably smaller set of warts in 2017 compared to 1999 but that doesn't mean that it's easy to reproduce the exact layout, pixel for pixel, across Firefox, Edge, Opera, UC Browser, Safari, Chrome and other browsers in use.

<comment><USER20> There is a difference between "it works" and pixel-identical results. Those are probably impossible due to font rendering differences anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Offtopic: 'ciao' doesn't mean only 'goodbye' as the author seems to imply given the title. It means both 'hello' or 'goodbye'. It is similar to the Hawaiian 'aloha' when used as a greeting.

<comment><USER22> I'm Italian and agree with you. This said, I'm reasonably sure that in countries like Brazil ciao is only used as good bye, so maybe this explains the confusion. FWIW, I've also saw it written as "chao", which made me rofl.

<comment><USER23> Brazilians spell it "tchau" (due to ch representing /ʃ/ rather than /tʃ/ in Portuguese -- like German sch for /ʃ/ and tsch for /tʃ/).

<comment><USER24> Like any other Portuguese speaking country, it is not Brazilian specific. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I find something is off with Firefox Quantum, possibly the font rendering and it hurts my eyes.

Running Chrome 62 on OSX 10.11.6 and it is fine.

I had similar problems with Chrome on Windows after they implemented DirectWrite with anti aliasing.

<comment><USER26> I switched from chrome to Firefox because of the font rendering on Windows. It seemed to do a better job particularly on those effete sites with thin fonts and weak contrast. Haven't noticed any disimprovement in quantum but I'll watch out for it.

<comment><USER27> I had the same problem, try the Font Rendering Enhancer extension for Chrome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The welcome resurgence of Firefox makes Apple's ban on third party browser engines on iOS even less justifiable. This is about control, not security.

<comment><USER29> It does give them enviable control, but the security is a valid point. A browser engine has a wide surface area for attack vectors as it features multiple parsers and a JS engine.

<comment><USER30> Right, but does a monoculture actually help that in any way? It's not like Apple is always at the forefront of innovation with WebKit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Firefox is a great browser, but what bothers me:

\- Design: On Windows it integrates better but on MacOS the header is just somehow ugly. Chrome just feels more stable in this point. Also the scrolling to top when Chrome goes over the 0px line and bounces back - that's just a nicer behaviour.

\- Clearing history and cookies: I yet didn't manage to find a fast solution to do this in Firefox.

Please, dear Firefox team, if you read this, improve it and you got me back!

<comment><USER32> There is a "forget" toolbar item (which you probably need to add from the customise menu) which makes it very easy to clear history and cookies

<comment><USER31> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Anyone have thoughts on the opt-out telemetry default?

I had to read the privacy notice they open on start to find out that telemetry was enabled by default.

<comment><USER34> My gut reaction was to be suspicious of Mozilla, but then I remembered that they're Mozilla. They're probably just trying to figure out which features are confusing for users.

It's strange because we do this type of tracking in all facets of webapps, but desktop apps trigger our suspicion meter.

<comment><USER35> Mozilla's pretty careful about what goes into the default telemetry, too. Most of it is info that isn't very identifying (stuff like "how many cores do you have" or "how many times did this specific kind of jank occur for you")

FWIW in Firefox nightly (maybe also beta?) if you flip the privacy.firstparty.isolate then the fact that websites can talk to each other is severely reduced; basically third party iframes get their own set of cookies for each domain they're embedded in, so tracking iframes know about each other less. Flipping this pref will log you out of everything though (only the one time), and some sites don't work with it (nothing major so far, and you can file a bug. In many cases it's the site relying on iframes in a weird way).

<comment><USER36> Any comments on the cliqz experiment? Sending visited URLs doesn't sound very careful.

<comment><USER30> Sending data by itself isn't commonly seen as an attack vector with things like TLS in place and working, as far as we know. At least, Google has been sending browsing history with no additional encryption as part of Chrome Sync since its inception and there we don't know of data leaks during send so far either.

And at the server where it's sent to, it gets disconnected from the IP address and intermixed with other people's browsing history. So, it's not stored in personally identifiable form and therefore not vulnerable there either.

Mozilla has also made an official statement that neither they nor Cliqz store personally identifiable information as part of this, so doing it anyways would be misleading of consumers, i.e. breaking the law.

Not to mention that it would violate German privacy laws (which is where it's currently being tested), if they collected personally identifiable information without clearly notifying the user and at least some checkbox that the user has to tick.

It's easy to spin this, so that it sounds like Mozilla is doing pure evil here, but it's just not the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It's really so great to see Firefox actually competing with Chrome on performance. I had to stop using Firefox a few years ago, when visiting most websites would spin up my fans, use all my battery and still be slow.

I've been using Firefox now for about a month, and it's become my main browser. I'm really loving Firefox again, and hope they keep this up.

Maybe time for a donations? [https://donate.mozilla.org/](https://donate.mozilla.org/)

</comment><comment><USER38> I tried Quantum and it crushed the battery of my MacBook Air. Activity Monitor showed much more energy usage than chrome. Anyone experience the same?

<comment><USER39> There seem to be a bug with MP4 video processing it eats CPU and battery like crazy (for me both on macOS and Win7), but otherwise, the new FF is great.

<comment><USER40> You can use [1] to force YouTube videos being streamed as H.264 instead of VP8/9\. This helps with the battery issue (at least on YouTube).

[1]: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/h264ify/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/h264ify/)

<comment><USER41> I think browser makers (or whoever it needs to be) should offer an option to save battery over a little bit of extra bandwidth. Maybe even make it the default.

<comment><USER20> youtube's logic selects the codec, not the browser

<comment><USER42> No, it's a negotiation wherein the client submits its list of supported protocols and the server chooses between them.

<comment><USER43> And since FF supports both, it's YouTube which is choosing the codec, as the8472 wrote.

<comment><USER44> And what vim_coder and ConputerGuru meant was that Firefox would present a spoofed list of supported codecs to YouTube to force selection of the higher bandwidth, lower-powered codec.

Just because Firefox technically supports a format doesn't mean it has to disclose that format to external servers for selection.

<comment><USER43> Having custom behaviors for specific sites is a terrible practice. Browsers are complex enough as they are without an extra layer of hacks.

<comment><USER42> Who said anything about custom behavior for custom sites? A simple "on battery? X264/265 only" is what's being discussed here.

<comment><USER20> That does not work because the browser that does not know how much it can reduce the presented feature-set without actually breaking the site. Some content is vpx-only.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I never left Firefox, and started when it was Phoenix (beta). I've always been a Firefox and/or native browser guy. On my desktop (Windows10) it's FF with Edge backup. On my laptop (macOS), it's FF and Safari backup. I see each browser as having certain natural incentives and they run this way:

Native browsers (Safari/Edge)- tend to try their best to grant a good user experience all around for the device you bought, so they should never be discarded. Pretty safe for people to just stick to these as a result.

Firefox- user focused on customization, privacy, features (Send to Device, RSS toolbar feeds, etc).

Chrome- focused on Google's best interests. No real privacy guarantee since that's in their profit incentive. Mostly a marketing backed browser, shiny Google adverts on Google services insisting Chrome is what you want.

I tend to recommend native browsers or Firefox, if the user has the inclination towards being a power user. I really can't see a purpose to Chrome, and it's hard to separate truth from fiction because there's a massive boatload of corporate Google fanboys out there that promote everything they create.

I'm more of the anti-profit incentive type, and prefer people simply do what they want to. It's worth considering if no one would build Google Chrome without a for-profit incentive (and it's highly unlikely it would exist without Google existing), then how could it possibly improve things for the better? It doesn't, it serves Google's best interests. Everything that does, are temporarily mutually aligned interests.

Most people don't see this for what it is, and think Google is their friend.

</comment><comment><USER46> Kudos to Mozilla for the new Firefox. I really like it!

Though I'm quite sure I won't switch from Safari, since I don't want to exercise my fans anymore. Tried Firefox Quantum and it really feels fast, but it's still on top of my "significant energy" battery list. When I think about it it would be really hard to beat a native GUI browser with something made for cross-platform, so I feel a bit desperate.

<comment><USER47> I think it is more that many of the safari folks work at a hardware company where people will file bugs and show up at their offices if need be when battery life is affected for said hardware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> "built for 2017" but doesn't support pinch to zoom on a mac

<comment><USER49> I really miss the back/forward arrows on the swipe gestures too - the gesture works but it feels wrong not to have that visual feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Am I the only one on HN that dosen't see any significant difference in performance vs Chrome 62 ? and developer tools in Chrome are still superior. I am using both browsers on my ultrabook with mobile low power processor and on my desktop with flagship intel i7 and I don't see any reason to switch to firefox completely.

It seems that Mozilla just uncovered how to make PR/marketing successfully after years of failures in this department. Good because competition is good for end-users.

It's shame that Mozilla is doing things like this though:

"I stopped using firefox since they are delivering cliqz with every 100th download which will analyze and store your browsing history" [1]

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15771719](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15771719)

<comment><USER51> >significant difference in performance vs Chrome 62

Firefox without WebRender is still slower than Chrome. The difference is noticable if you compare it with the old versions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I really want to switch back to FF, especially because of the containers extension, but on macOS (i7 + 16gb ram) the fan spins like crazy and the overall feeling is that it is definitely slower than Chrome. Does anyone else have this experience?

<comment><USER53> Happened to me once, but definitely not a constant occurrence

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Used Nightly for a few weeks before and after Quantum.

Definitely a huge improvement. The web response showed it. But I went back to chrome for the last few days. For 2 windows / 20 tabs it's definitely faster in just enough places to make a difference.

<comment><USER55> I really like Quantum's UI, but for some things (esp Google Inbox) it's significantly slower than Chrome.

<comment><USER54> I wasn't even asking for fancy + perf. Even average website would take a second to show their tab.

I don't have a recent machine, but chrome (even stable) has no issue at all flying with my x200.

I wonder how firefox perf will evolve with more and more rewrites (rust modules etc)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I wish there was a way to import passwords in to Firefox Quantum.

<comment><USER10> I did! for me it was hidden in the bookmarks menu. When I imported bookmarks from Chrome, it grabbed passwords and history as well. This would have been a blocker for me as I don't really know any password.

<comment><USER56> It looks like import password is only available on Windows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Unfortunately, at this point I am just too comfortable with Chrome's inspector. It might seem like a small thing, but I have a dozen other 'small things' to familiarise myself with every day, so reacquainting myself with Firebug is likely to never become a priority. At this stage it'll take something stupid on Chrome's behalf to encourage me to make a move.

Having said that, I might start using FF as my non-work browser again.

<comment><USER58> Took me a bit to switch from Firebug to Chrome's inspector when Chrome became better a number of years ago.

Took me not as much to switch back.

You can do it. It just takes some getting used to and perhaps a few compromises until the next updates are released, but it'll encourage Google to actually play nice with the web again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Think it's time I tried switching back to Firefox it sounds like. Adblock on my mobile browser is probably what's going to do it for me.

</comment><comment><USER60> I'm all into the "switch firefox on again" and removed my chrome from my quicklaunch. It's fast as a browser should be, and I trust mozilla a lot more than google.

Yet, webkit/blink powers today a lot more than google chrome. I think headless mode & nodejs(v8) integration (e.g. nwjs/electron) is still a major missing feature to call it "a browser build for 2017"

<comment><USER61> Firefox has headless mode.

I'm not sure why "use the JS engine from Chrome" is a good requirement for a non-Chrome browser, or what do you mean by "nodejs(v8) integration"?

<comment><USER62> probably a backend or binding or whatever they call it for node in the same way ChakraCore from Microsoft can be.

[https://github.com/nodejs/node-chakracore](https://github.com/nodejs/node- chakracore)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> So many articles praising the new Firefox. Feels good but I am wondering now, or let's say 2018 when ff will for sure be faster than chrome, will Google change the annoyng notification they show you when you open Google that says browse Internet faster try Chrome? Will they change that to Firefox?

</comment><comment><USER64> Except for video playback.

Makes my mac catch fire and still stutters.

edit: downvotes? you guys using some build I'm not? Because I'm on nightly.

<comment><USER65> just realized this today as well. The video player is a complete disaster, even with forced h264 extension.

EDIT : this is really really weird. I'm pretty sure youtube played perfectly fine yesterday on firefox (mac os x here too). Call me paranoid, but could it be possible that they altered something to have the video stutter on firefox in the meantime ??

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Can someone help me understand why this browser will improve my day to day life as a developer?

I like Chrome Dev Tools, they fulfill the vast majority of my needs and Postman covers the rest. I just don't exactly understand the gains for a developer to switch when the contextual switch is high.

</comment><comment><USER67> And yet 95% of the time I try to watch YouTube in Firefox, it just hangs, never actually playing. Yet Chrome works flawlessly every time.

I'm not saying Google is doing anything malicious here, I think it's more of a "we put a lot more effort into making YouTube work" kinda thing.

<comment><USER68> YouTube is now written in Polymer, a library made by Google that uses the Web Components specifications, which currently only Chrome supports natively[1], so they have to rely on polyfills on the rest of the browsers, so it's understandable that YouTube can perform bad on browsers other than Chrome.

[1]: [https://caniuse.com/#search=web%20components](https://caniuse.com/#search=web%20components)

<comment><USER69> > which currently only Chrome supports natively

Firefox Nightly supports it, too, but Google still uses the polyfill there, and not even their normal polyfill, but a significantly slower one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> I'm still extremely sad that Firefox OS was sidelined and Mozilla appears to be permanently stuck on "faster browser tech" instead of innovating on open standards where it actually matters (like mobile phones, social data standardization, etc).

<comment><USER71> To counter this, Firefox is the only desktop browser that supports VR out of the box.

In fact, Mozilla has an entire team dedicated to emerging technologies[0] and you can see what that team is focusing on on their website.

[0] [https://research.mozilla.org/](https://research.mozilla.org/)

Disclaimer: Associated with Mozilla (Foundation), not Firefox (Mozilla Corporation).

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> On my machine (nMP with dual FirePro D700's) there's a noticeable "stall" when Quantum navigates to a page.

This isn't there on Blink or WebKit.

I'm not sure how to go about trying to get it looked at.

<comment><USER73> I had the same problem; I tracked it down to a problem with my particular macOS user account most likely caused by me changing the home directory name post-facto. ([https://support.apple.com/en- au/HT201548](https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT201548)) I made the change because I didn't want my full name as the account name. The problem didn't present itself prior to (IIRC) updating to macOS Sierra.

To determine whether this is the cause for your particular problem, create a fresh new macOS user account, log into it and see if you can replicate the slow-down there. If there's no slowdown, it's probably this bug.

To work around the problem, I created a temporary admin account and logged into it. I then renamed my current account, created a new one with the correct details, then transferred most of my stuff from the old account to the new one, including the full contents of Library. Last step, chown the new profile directory:

      sudo chown -R youruser /Users/youruser

<comment><USER72> I've always had the same 4 letter username and homedir so I'm not sure this is it.

It's a really annoying issue because the "stall" is like 0.75-1 second every time I navigate anywhere.

<comment><USER73> I was only able to hypothesise the cause, as that happened to correlate well in my minuscule sample size; your data point appears to have invalidated that. I regret not being able to isolate the cause properly.

I would still run the user account experiment — your described symptom matches _exactly_ what I experienced. It should only take a few minutes to make an account, log into it and run Firefox.

What I do know:

* The problem started after a major macOS version upgrade, almost certainly Sierra.

* The problem occurred on my desktop and my laptop, but not my wife's computers that saw largely similar install history but more plain-vanilla usage patterns.

* The contents of the Firefox profile directory do not matter; the problem occurs with a completely fresh profile.

* The contents of the ~/Library directory do not seem to matter; creating a new user account and moving the entire contents of ~/Library back fixed it.

* The problem could not be replicated within any other user accounts on the same machine where the problem occurred.

* I was unable to create a faulty user account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Apparently they still didn't fix the issue with edit boxes and dark themes on linux.

There are two things that keep me on Chromium - that, and the ability to appify a website.

<comment><USER75> The dark text boxes can be fixed by doing a bit of configuration editing[0], not ideal I'll admit but it goes a long way to making it usable on linux.

[0] [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/firefox#Unreadable_inpu...](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/firefox#Unreadable_input_fields_with_dark_GTK.2B_themes)

<comment><USER74> Or they could just fix the bug, and show they give a damn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> With all this push for Quantum, I wonder what the extension landscape is like. I've heard people complain about FF dropping support for old extension APIs (absolutely no idea if this is true - just murmurs). As a Dev, would now technically be a good time to consider building an extension for Firefox?

<comment><USER77> I switched to quantum and the only complaint is that I can't use Video Speed Controller on it. [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed- contro...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed- controller/nffaoalbilbmmfgbnbgppjihopabppdk)

That application is so useful, everyone I know who has tried it gets used to it and can't live without it.

<comment><USER78> Video Speed Controller is MIT licensed: [https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed](https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed)

So you could have a go at porting it to Firefox: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add- ons/WebExtensions/Po...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add- ons/WebExtensions/Porting_a_Google_Chrome_extension)

<comment><USER78> I correct myself. There's no need to port it because it has already been ported:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/videospeed/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/videospeed/)

<comment><USER77> Doesn't work with quantum

<comment><USER78> Works for me. Tested on YouTube and Vimeo.

<comment><USER77> whoa you're right, yahoo

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> I don't know what's up with the memory usage claims, but on OS X it eats 2x as much as Chrome :o

<comment><USER30> Maybe see what memory usage is like in a new Firefox profile. That'll be essentially like a factory-reset Firefox, but you can always switch back to your old profile, if it does not change anything.

Type "about:profiles" into the URL-bar and from there it should be mostly self-explanatory.

<comment><USER79> I wiped out Firefox and observed this memory hungriness with a completely clean install with no add-ons whatsoever versus a Fully configured Chrome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> Anyone use LastPass? It seems like a deal breaker when it comes to Firefox. On my phone, where I really don't want to be typing 16 digit passwords, I can't get it to play nicely with Firefox mobile. If I can get it working, I can really try switching back.

<comment><USER81> Personally I replaced it by bitwarden.

Free and open source alternative to last pass.

Work flawlessly as a Firefox Android/desktop extension or as it's own app in Android.

<comment><USER80> Working flawlessly would be a nice upgrade from LastPass. Thanks for the suggestion!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I always used all four major browsers, as I do need to do web development occasionally.

However Firefox has always been the default browser since the days it was Netscape Navigator.

Mozilla is the only organization whose agenda is done in the name of the consumers.

</comment><comment><USER65> wish i could zoom the page with pinch on the trackpad like i did with chrome..

</comment><comment><USER82> I really want to love the new Firefox, it's really great... Except I can't debug promises in JavaScript, and JavaScript debugging seems very subpar compared to chrome.

</comment><comment><USER83> Does it still kill the battery on the Mac or has that been fixed?

</comment><comment><USER84> One thing holding me back : No websocket monitor in dev tools. And the extension that was offering this in the previous version no longer works.

</comment><comment><USER85> > Conde Nast CMS

> they are partnering with political activists to block sites that they deem > to be "fake news."

> I'm a pretty heavy user of Chrome profiles .. definitely doesn't feel as > well thought out in Firefox.

... and any extension incompatibility complaints

These are kind of secondary, or have little to do with the new browser itself. They are not really an argument against an everyday tool that is faster, more customizable and more practical out of the box.

</comment><comment><USER86> I'm a pretty heavy user of Chrome profiles .. definitely doesn't feel as well thought out in Firefox.

<comment><USER87> As someone who's not really used Chrome aside from browser testing (which used to involve a lot of cursing because flexbox min sizing was broken), can you explain what Chrome profiles offer over e.g. container tabs? Are you using them as separate cookie jars, to install different extensions or something else?

<comment><USER88> they allow different sets of extensions (and cookie jar and so on) and they are basically segregated by window (no tabs with different profile in the same window).

In the end they are different from containers in the general purpose (they are geared towards having a multi user experience more than firefox's multi identity/privacy) but chrome's take is much less frustrating to manage in my experience because you can't open the wrong type of tab involuntarly.

That said I switched to firefox and this (and lack of U2F 2nd factor auth) is the only pain point so far

<comment><USER87> > That said I switched to firefox and this (and lack of U2F 2nd factor auth) > is the only pain point so far

You should be able to flip "security.webauth.u2f" depending on your release channel. If not available yet, I think it will be soon in any case.

<comment><USER89> None of the sites where I've been using U2F works.

Some/many sites are sniffing the user agent.

And as far as I have googled, there may be a bug in Mozilla's implementation (or maybe a different interpretation of the standard) that they are currently fixing.

<comment><USER35> It's not a bug in Mozilla's implementation.

Google has a JS u2f library that relies on an implementation specific detail of Chrome's U2F impl. Lots of folks use this library.

<comment><USER89> Hm, that's not good. Is that implementation detail something Mozilla might replicate?

<comment><USER35> Not easily IIRC. Google is aware of that bug so I think we're going to just wait.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> Probably irrelevant but I found default Bengali font rendering is broken on FF Quantum.

<comment><USER91> FF always had issues with rendering fonts. It generally over-sizes them. It's not a huge deal most of the time, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> It needs Websocket inspector. Is it there? Couldn't find it.

</comment><comment><USER93> Night Mode!!!

<comment><USER93> Ugh, the journalist jumped the gun, there is no native night mode.

Firefox, hear my plea, help my night browsing eyes, I have too large a screen in my VR dome, and your browser, alongside all others, is still blinding, and I do not trust your add ons with all of my data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER94> 2017 ? :/

</comment><comment><USER95> After years of being a Chrome user, I've been trying to work myself off of Google's infrastructure as much as possible. Firefox is great, but I was very disappointed to learn that they are partnering with political activists to block sites that they deem to be "fake news."

Edit:

makeee below posted a good source describing what Mozilla is currently doing, which appears to be limited to "researching" the problem of fake news.

I would love to support Firefox so I hope they come up with something more innovative than blocking (which they do _not_ appear to be doing now - I stand corrected) or labeling (which has its own problems).

As I mentioned below, browsers, search engines, or social networks should not be, IMO, attempting to block or de-rank websites based on political activism, regardless of the source.

<comment><USER96> Source? Can't find anything online that indicates they are partnering with political activists to block websites.

<comment><USER97> [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/08/08/mozilla- information...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/08/08/mozilla-information- trust-initiative-building-movement-fight-misinformation-online/)

<comment><USER96> Thanks, although link doesn't support anything in parent commenter's claim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER98> Keyword searches have become unreliable in Quantum for me; it often goes to the homepage of the search site instead. If this affects you too please file a bug report, thanks!

<comment><USER61> Why don't _you_ file a bug report?

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> This is bullshit.

<comment><USER100> Could you please not post unsubstantive comments to HN? We ban accounts that do that, and you've posted good things in the past so I don't want to have to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER101> Great pr, but Quantum sounds like they finally ported some of chrome 1's tech over. It's great that they're multiprocess now, but it seems more like they've caught up after 9 years, not like they're ahead much. And the UI is still off on macOS.

<comment><USER30> In a lot of ways, yes, Firefox had a lot of technical cruft that they got rid of with this release and in those respects have now mainly just caught up with Chrome.

But Mozilla has been optimizing around this technical cruft for so long now that not having this technical cruft anymore leaves them with the architecture of Chrome plus those optimizations.

And they are innovating on top of it as well. They packed in a written-from- scratch CSS engine into this release, which utilizes parallelism. That's something we haven't yet seen in other browsers.

In a few releases from now, we should also get WebRender, which essentially makes it so that Firefox renders webpages in the way that video games render things. So, if you've ever wondered why your graphics card can pump out cinematic space battles at 60 FPS, but your browsers stutters when playing a flimsy CSS animation, this will mostly fix that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER102> I'll stop using Chrome for work (UX Engineer) and personal use when safari mobile, chrome for iOS, and chrome for Android will each become Firefox.

A browser I'm the only one using, has no use for me.

<comment><USER103> I'm not sure what you mean. Do you mean that you want Firefox mobile to be the default browser?

Firefox mobile is available on Android and also on iOS, though the iOS variant is only a wrap around Safari because of Apple's walked garden.

<comment><USER102> I mean that I work with my browser and I write web applications.

Chrome is more than dominant, so I'll use Chrome because my users use - <USER2> the most part - Chrome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> Someone has deleted my comment. Why? I will say it again. Firefox 57 is faster, with better UI design, i love dark theme option and it works under old Os X Mavericks perfectly. Waiting for High Sierra optimization (is very heavy on cpu) and will use it exclusively.

</comment><comment><USER105> Now if they only did respect user privacy!

Still every Firefox user gets a never-expiring google cookie by default, a practice that is going on now for many years! Also cookies are accepted from everywhere and last forever by default without user consent, overriding the freedom of internet users in a brutal and privacy destroying way.

It is a great bigbrotheristic marketing lie by mozilla to obscure this anti- privacy behaviour with glorious blabla about how they respect privacy, when in fact they help the trackers to track you even better, doing so since many years.

Cookie privacy must be handled more restrictive by default, e.g. there is no reason to save any cookie after the browser has been closed if user did not explicitely set that for a site.

Hopefully some journous finally check the facts before mindless re-babbling of mozilla propaganda.

<comment><USER106> This is disingenuous. I assume you're referring to the safe browsing service, which is run by Google and protects users from phishing and malware sites. In Firefox the requests made to Google's safe browsing are sent using a completely separate cookie jar that is isolated from the rest of the browser, so that even if Google is tracking the requests to its safe browsing service it wouldn't be able to identify you on the basis of the unique cookie alone. Of course if you're still uncomfortable with this you can always turn it off.

I don't know where the claims for permanent cookies comes from. Cookies have expiration dates like all other browsers and can be cleared by the user. I in fact use an add on that clears cookies on tab close except for a set of whitelisted sites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER107> I wish they had some better UX designers. Hit the download button and I get a .bz2 file with no install scripts whatsoever.

        $ tar jxvf firefox-57.0.tar.bz2
        $ cd firefox
        $ mkdir /usr/local/firefox
        mkdir: cannot create directory '/usr/local/firefox': Permission denied
        $ sudo su
        Password:
        # mkdir /usr/local/firefox
        # cp -rv * /usr/local/firefox/
        ...
        # ln -s /usr/local/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox
        ln: failed to create symbolic link '/usr/bin/firefox': File exists
        # mv /usr/bin/firefox /usr/bin/firefox.bac
        # ln -s /usr/local/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox

Why couldn't they go the extra mile and give me a .deb file I can just click and install or dpkg -i, like Chrome does? Make it absolutely frictionless -- lubricate the whole process -- if you want people to use it instead of Chrome.

<comment><USER108> This is kind of a strange complaint. You're using Linux but you don't want to use the version packaged by your distro, yet you're uncomfortable opening a standard tarball and following the intructions within? Yet you're complaining that Mozilla didn't go the extra mile for your obscure situation.

<comment><USER107> I'm used to the assumption that my package manager is out of date. It usually is (e.g. it still has only OpenCV 2.4). I have a huge pile of PPAs to solve that ...

<comment><USER109> I on Fedora and the latest version is available via dnf. But still I use nightly, and all I had to do to j install it was untar it into my opt directory and symlink the binary.

<comment><USER110> > I on Fedora and the latest version is available via dnf. But still I use > nightly, and all I had to do to j install it was untar it into my opt > directory and symlink the binary.

What is your strategy with updates? Do you give yourself permission to write to opt or do you run Firefox Nightly as root once a day so it can update iself? I tried the latter for a few weeks and grew tired. I can't wait for containers to come to Firefox stable (which is the feature I am looking forward to the most in nightly).

<comment><USER71> I mean, it doesn't _have_ to be in your /opt/ folder, you can put it anywhere and add it to your $PATH. I did however give myself permissions to /opt/nightly/, where my binary and the rest of its files are.

<comment><USER110> I think official deb and rpm repositories would still be nice.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fractal Gears - <AUTHOR> http://brm.io/gears/ <comment><USER2> This would be an awesome screensaver

+1 while really cool, this isn't really a fractal. More like a 'gear cloud'

<comment><USER3> Thinking of the negative space generated by the space-filling algorithm rather than the individual shapes might help see the fractality. This link uses a similar algorithm and discusses measuring fractality of the output [http://paulbourke.net/texture_colour/randomtile/](http://paulbourke.net/texture_colour/randomtile/)

<comment><USER2> I see, that makes sense now. Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is this quasi-fractal? The gears are not made of gears so it's not exactly fractal.

<comment><USER5> "Fractal" has always meant "self- _similar_ " not "self- _identical_ ". There are subtle and some not-so-subtle differences within all of the repeating shapes in a Julia or Mandelbrot set.

<comment><USER6> In the most classical meaning, "fractal" stands for "an object with a fractional fractal dimension". Since there is a clear cut on the level of details, the fractal dimension of this image is integer (i.e., precisely 2).

Nevertheless, it's totally cool!

<comment><USER7> Just for nitpicking, there are "fractals" with integer fractal dimension.

Example: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_curve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_curve)

<comment><USER6> The boundary of the dragon curve got a fractional dimension, therefore it qualifies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can you make it keep an arrangement up for longer?

I don't have time to properly think about any one arrangement before it's disappeared and moved on to the next one.

<comment><USER9> untick autoShuffle in the controls.

<comment><USER10> Not available on mobile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The fact that I cannot zoom is infuriating!

<comment><USER10> Author must be still editing it, I can zoom in now (Android).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Cool. If the author is viewing this, could you set a min threshold for the tooth count?

<comment><USER13> And a _max_ threshold - make really thin gear teeth, allowing a greater range of scaling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> any way one can save the animation?</comment>


Ask HN: Would you buy a fast-loading, accessible website template in HTML/CSS? - <AUTHOR> Are there any opportunities in designing (and selling) website themes that are fast-loading and accessible and written in plain html and css (not Wordpress, or a CSS framework)?<p>In another Ask HN on web design [1], posters say  don't offer design services. But presumably, even when you're developing the backend, you need to reach for a front-end design or template - either free or for sale. The market for HTML/CSS themes is completely saturated though - is it fruitless to pursue this avenue?<p>[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18945658 <comment><USER2> Looks to me like the going price for static templates is $20-$50.

[https://themeforest.net/category/static-site- generators](https://themeforest.net/category/static-site-generators) [https://themeforest.net/category/site- templates](https://themeforest.net/category/site-templates) [https://jekyllthemes.io/premium](https://jekyllthemes.io/premium)

<comment><USER3> I'm glad you've point the OP to themeforest, I've purchased a few themes in the past. One thing I will say is that sometimes it's worth re-implementing the code as the code can be quite bad, YMMV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In my opinion, there is without doubt a market, but your main challenge is going to be marketing your themes.

In a professional context, paying $29 or $50 or even $up-to-a-couple-of- hundred for a base/starting theme is a no brainer _if_ it's good enough, and you're convinced it'll not be a nightmare to adopt/extend/maintain in the future.

That "convincing" bit is hard...

Like pickpuck points out, ThemeForest will be one of your major competitors, so you'll need to work out good answers to two fairly difficult questions:

1) How are you going to differentiate your themes from free or inexpensive ones from ThemeForest?

2) How are you going to compete on marketing - SEO/Word Of Mouth/developer "mindshare" against ThemeForest (and al the other longstanding well-SEO-ed theme suites in Google)?</comment>