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IMHO Open Source Software is a public good, and should be mostly funded like other public goods: through government grants.

GitHub charging its users, who themselves are mostly OSS developers (and not end users) doesn't seem like a sensible solution.


While I agree with the sentiment, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_amnesia likely leads to them forgetting it (unless they continue to use it well beyond that age range).

In Firefox with ublock origin, I got in the console:

"Loading failed for the <script> with source “https://uncrossy.com/js/cookieManager.js”." looks like a false positive in the ad blocker. Allow-listing the site fixed it.


Both of these comments have a kernel of truth.

Yes, you must do more than average to get promoted.

But also yes, if you do more and more and don't get the rewards you want, don't just continue. Either scale back again, or modify your strategy, or apply this strategy elsewhere.


Sounds like in countries like Denmark, they are already on their way to becoming the most prevalent.

Hope we'll develop vaccines against those too.


In my EU country Gardasil 9 is the most common HPV vaccine nowadays. This protects against 9 most common strains. I would assume the same is true in other countries. We have gone from HPV 16/18 -> +6/11 -> +31/33/45/52/58 protection with 2/4/9-valent vaccines.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPV_vaccine


The thing is there's not much incentive to develop a vaccine against something that's just a nuisance.

> who are the consumers of the software produced at industrial scale?

Basically every company that does anything non-trivial could benefit from tailor-made software that supports their specific workflow. Many small companies don't have that, either they cannot afford their own development team, or they don't know that/how software could improve their workflow, or they are too risk-averse.

Heck, even my small family of 4 persons could benefit from some custom software, but only in small ways, so it's not worth it for me to pursue it.

Once we're at the point where a (potentially specialized) LLM can generate, securely operate and maintain software to run a small to medium-sized business, we'll probably find that there are far more places that could benefit from custom software.

Usually if you introduce, say, an ERP system into a company that doesn't use one yet, you need to customize it and change workflows in the company, and maybe even restructure it. If it were cheap enough to build a custom ERP system that caters to the existing workflows, that would be less disruptive and thus less risky.


A custom ERP solution won't work because of audits, you need standard solutions at large scale. That's why even Google uses oracles ERP

We need every approach that's viable. Batteries are part of the solution, and will be in future. But I don't see why we we should assume they're better in every way than this approach


A principle in engineering is that for any market niche, only a few, or even one, technology persists. The others are driven to extinction as they can't compete. It's the equivalent of ecology's "one niche, one species" principle.

There are far more technologies going for the hours scale storage market than will survive. Sure, explore them. But expect most to fail to compete.


This is not true for batteries at all. Just take a look at [1]. Many of these battery chemistries are in wide use. Batteries have several performance metrics: total storage, peak/avg power, round-trip efficiency, lifetime, capex, opex,etc. The relative value of these metrics is different for different applications, so we end up with many different types of batteries being used.

Grid level batteries have another very important metric. The actual possibility of buying a particular types of batteries from friendly nations. Simpler technologies like this CO2 battery have a huge advantage here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battery_types


Of course it's true for batteries. There's a huge number of potential battery types, most of which never make it out of the lab, never mind to market. Most on your list there are in are in tiny niches.

To steelman the point you're making: perhaps the short term storage niche will fracture into smaller niches, in which different technologies could coexist. This also happens in ecology. For example, in one simple experiment with bacteria, it was found two species coexisted, but on closer examination it was found one species persisted in the top of the flasks, the other in the bottom.


The definition of "market niche" must do too much work for my liking to make this true.

For example, for the market niche "getting people from one location to another" there are quite many technologies, like walking, bicycles, scooters, cars, trains, ships, airplanes, helicopters etc., none of them evolved as a clear winner that displaced the others.

You might say, that's a whole market, not just a market niche, but it's also a niche of the larger transportation market.

When we look at something like grid-scale energy storage, how do we know if it's a winner-takes-all niche? Maybe constraints such as availability of space, availability of funding, weather, climate, grid demands etc. create sub-niches with their own winners. Or maybe not, but how can we known?


There are a few factors at play here, I think

* Many breakthroughs from the first research stages never make it into medical application.

* Many breakthroughs are touted as some kind of "novel treatment", but when they get into the hands of the doctor, they talk about it as chemotherapy, because it kills cancer cells. So you might not even notice that you're getting something novel.

* Many breakthroughs take decades until they actually land in mainstream treatment.

* Many breakthroughs are specific to some kinds of cancer.

That said, in most developed countries, survival rates/times for cancer have been steadily improving for decades.

It's a bit like with solar cell and battery tech breakthroughs: you hear about them all the time, but it takes 20 to 30 years until they make it to production. But both have been improving steadily for an impressively long time.


They also have the "extensions that can do real ad blocking" angle.


Indeed, manifest v2 support alone is a killer feature that will keep me on FF as long as they support it.

It definitely helps that it's also a great (though imperfect) browser.


The wider point here is that you can only use FF as long as Mozilla can fund it and Mozilla can only fund it as long as Google funds them. At some point, it will be cheaper for Google to pay monopoly fines than funding Mozilla.


Fines aren't a way to just buy your way out of obeying the law. At some point if they persist in monopolistic activities then they will get broken up.


I don't think the FTC prioritizes that right now


I don't think they've prioritized that ever in recent memory, or they would have already been broken up a long time ago.


The last time that happened was almost half a century ago afaik. I highly doubt Big Tech entities will get broken up in our lifetime


There's penalties other than fines for abusive monopolies.

Fines are only the slightest punishment.


I can't remember the last time a monopoly got punished properly


Yes, although they can't go all in on that because it doesn't help monetization...


Have you tried Brave?


Brave is adware.


Technically, both Chrome and Firefox are adware too, since Google's main business is ads, and Firefox/Mozilla get a lot of money from Google to display Google as a search engine in Firefox (an ad :) )


Firefox doesn't sell BATs, in-browser notification ads, or new tab takeovers. The closest you can get is a pinned site in the new tab page (new installs only) and ads in Pocket, or whatever they're calling that new tab thing these days.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/advertising/solutions/

https://brave.com/brave-ads/browser/


Calling Firefox adware is a stretch at best, and disingenuous at worst. Adware doesn't mean that the software survives because of one advertisement that that user can turn off.


Only if you opt-in to that misfeature, last I checked. It's opt-in, not opt-out.


I don't know, Brave says it's every third new tab. https://brave.com/brave-ads/browser/


Looks like I'm getting a ProtonMail ad every few new tabs. I never noticed because I've never looked at the new tab page. Doesn't noticeably slow it down to have the ad there, luckily.


So, to reiterate: Brave is adware.


The new tab ads can be disabled with 2 clicks.


I love how quickly the goalpost moves from "No ads" to "Only opt in ads" to "Ads can be disabled with two clicks."

Quit coping and just admit it, Brave is adware. If you like it, that's cool, totally your choice. It's fast, performant adware. But it's adware all the same.


Firefox has ads in the same places.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy


whataboutism gets you nowhere. Brave is still adware.


As is Firefox, and Chrome.

So really, there's no point in singling it out.


It's strange you're so adamant to label Brave adware while dismissing concerns that Firefox engages in very similar "adware" practices.


It might be adware but I’ve actually never noticed the ads!

Also it’s the only browser on my phone that I can use to browse the web without ads…


When we're talking about reasons to switch browsers, then saying they both have the same behavior is not whataboutism. It's extremely important context to the complaint.


Been running it since 2021. The adblocker is simply great. A d keeps getting better.


and*


It's good enough when some terrible lazy web designer only tested on Chrome. It does nothing to protect against the future when Google decides they are sick of people trying to get around their Ad Block ban and change the license because no one has any real alternatives anymore.

Also blocking is not as good as intentionally poisoning with something like Ad Nauseum


What’s the current licensing mode? Can they fork their own version at that point in time and develop it open source ?


No Chromium fork developer not called Microsoft have the resources to maintain a web browser engine.

But focus on the license overlooks a more important threat. Google made Web Environment Integrity so services could require approved devices, operating systems, and browsers. Resistance led Google to remove it from desktop for now. But they kept something like it in Android. And they will try again.


Chromium uses the BSD license. Google could take Chromium closed source tomorrow without needing to change the license.


A few years ago. Crashed constantly and didn’t support tagging bookmarks.


Never crashed once for me.


I've been using Chrome with uBlock Origin Lite and not even once I found a case when this version of uBlock was behaving differently (as less efficient) than the "full" uBlock Origin

Maybe I'm just lucky, but even this argument is quite ... meh


I've found it a bit like "what car did you drive in to work with today" in that any typical current and working car is not going to be a stark difference to a high end car in terms of how fast you get there... but you'd definitely notice a piece of crap with a donut, broken heating, and screeching brakes causing you problems if that's what you were comparing instead.

I.e. I can count the number of times I said "wow, uBO Lite didn't make this site usable but loading up Firefox with uBO and it worked fine" on one hand. At the same time, if I ever look and compare how much is actually getting blocked, uBO is definitely blocking way more. Doing a side by side compare of dozens of sites it becomes easier to see minor differences I wouldn't otherwise have noted, but may not have mattered as much.


I commented about this a few weeks ago here about this, but essentially: v2 allows you to block things you can't see, but you still probably don't want, like folks hiding cloud analytics behind CNAME cloaking to allow it to appear as a first-party site rather than Google Analytics, for example.

You won't "feel" this in your day-to-day browsing, but if you're concerned about your data being collected, v2 matters.


Does it not still suck at blocking YouTube video ads? As in, you get a delay before videos start playing.


That's not sucking at blocking thats YouTube intentionally adding a delay to make it seem like their experience is degraded when it isn't. If you turn the slider up to full it only happens very rarely.

I'm sure this will all change eventually though and YouTube has a loophole planned so ad blocking on manifest 2.0 is impossible.


I'm not really sure of the actual mechanism, but on Firefox with a fully updated block list the delay doesn't seem to happen for me. Whereas I could never quite get rid of it on Chrome. This was a while ago, though, when they first introduced it.


I use uBlock Origin with Firefox on Linux, and it seems like that delay happens maybe on 30% of the YouTube videos for me, with no rhyme or reason to which ones. And reloading the same video multiple times show consistent behavior if it loads fast/slow, not sure what's going on.


I don't even have this issue with uBlock Origin Lite on mobile Safari. I'm fully browser-based on mobile for YouTube these days. No ads, no delay.


There are a lot more Manifest V2 only extensions than only Adblockers.


How's that work for you on Android? Firefox on Android with uBlock is the huge win.


I have a device wide adblocker


Doesn't work for Prime Video ads. Tbh I don't mind that too much.


chromium-ungoogled works perfectly fine with "extensions that can do real ad blocking" ;)


Ungoogled Chromium is maintaining Manifest V2 support in the fork?


AFAIK Manifest v2 is still part of the chromium codebase, and there is an intention to continue supporting it, depending on how difficult that turns out to be.


If you initiate a military conflict with another nation, the proper thing to do is to declare war first.


Even better, we should all wear colorful coats and form a nice big line in an open field before we fight too! There are rules! Are we not gentlemen?


You jest, but even in the age of modern warfare, countries still actively declare war and formally notify the other country, even if a bit late, with a formal declaration. The notable exceptions being of course the USA and the USSR and Russia, which like to call their wars "police actions" and "special military operations".


I would contend that we live in an era of “5th Generation” undeclared wars between powers. I don’t personally draw a line between a missile attack and a shipment of fentanyl or cocaine which will kill citizens all the same.


the redcoats didn't wear colorful coats and form nice big lines because they were stupid. They beat Napolean using similar tactics. And they didn't lose to the US because of these tactics.

Maybe you should reflect on why people who have lead others in combat have decided that there should be rules to war before you declare that rules of war are a bad idea.


The Red Coats lost quite a few battles to their aged tactics against the Patriots. So much so that officers complained about the ungentlemanly conduct routinely in their correspondence.

As far as our modern, temporary notion of “rules of war,” go, it’s because it suited the victor and gives them what they feel is an edge and an air of superiority. I don’t say this to be smug either, just look at how well the Geneva Suggestions worked out for the North Vietnamese or the Taliban. They ignored the and won.

Like it or not, the modern nation-state’s notions of Rules of War are going to quickly become a bygone relic of a simpler time, as was a formal British fighting line.


Ah, yes, the USA is the underdog here, they cannot win at war unless they ignore the conventions of war.


Arguably, yes?

Had the US somehow magically lost WWII, the firebombing atrocities would almost certainly have had a few Air Corp generals executed by the victor.

We could just as well look at the systemic atrocities committed against the Vietnamese civilian population and yet we still lost that war.

Excepting the Gulf War, how far back to we go to find something America has won (somewhat) cleanly?


> Arguably, yes?

No.

The USA is the strongest military power in the world. They are not the underdog. If they resort to war crimes or unfairness, it's not because they are the underdogs; it's because this is what top dogs do. Let's not make excuses for them.


Your statement presumes that the US fights dirtier than others.

Who is this magical war-winning nation that only fights fairly?

I'm not saying one can't win without war crimes, I'm saying it simply doesn't ever seem to happen.


Do you also make fun of people who condemn war crimes?


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