isaacaggrey

From email to Republic Wireless customers:

> Republic Wireless will soon be launching our new product, Relay, a device that gives families a safer way to stay in touch. It’s as simple to use as a walkie-talkie, but works wherever a cell phone works, includes location tracking, and will in the upcoming months have other fun features such as music, games, and voice assistant functionality.

Could someone explain how Edge is performing so well or any references to what they have done in this regard? Has the Edge team already implemented this streaming and tiering compiler technique?

> We present a novel approach for real-time facial reenactment of a monocular target video sequence (e.g., Youtube video). The source sequence is also a monocular video stream, captured live with a commodity webcam.

Wow, this is impressive. Thank you for sharing! If that made its way on Hacker News on its own already, it surely deserved it.

For those who didn't go to the link, there's a short video demonstrating the technology -- one example shown is a YouTube video of George W. Bush being modified real-time by a webcam stream reenacting the facial expressions of the source user superimposed over the target.

Worth noting: Requires "Access [to] your data for all websites"

On the add-on site, it fortunately does note why:

> Privacy: Markdown Here accesses and modifies web content when you activate it. It can, in theory, access other web content, but does not. It also makes no Internet requests whatsoever. Your data is modified when and where you choose, and does not leave your browser.

Is this a limitation of WebExtension APIs that necessitate this? Perhaps there is an opportunity for more granular WebExtension APIs.

> Highlights one of the big issues in (Linux) desktop

Huh? How is this any different in other operating systems?

I'm also a happy customer of Simple and also similarly curious about any major differences. In fact, it seems like Simple is better in every way at the moment: https://www.simple.com/features

I can't speak to personal experience since I've only dabbled in Rust, but I have followed it for quite a while and lately I have read more and more how how Rust forces you to structure your data and program in such a way that is more maintainable.

Manishearth's response [1] plus Cargo [2] hits on a lot of great things about Rust.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13268955

[2]: http://doc.crates.io/

Ubuntu is an example of doing both an increasing number (by year.month) and marketing name. Recently: 16.10 (Yakkety Yak), 16.04 (Xenial Xerus), etc.

However, it seems Canonical keeps the codename out of their official press release: https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/10/13/canonical-releases-ub...

Do you really think a desktop mail client is where Mozilla should be investing?

Memory usage is closely being watched as part of the 10s transition. Of course, e10s is not a free lunch, but according to early claims [1] it's 20% more than non-e10s Firefox and half the usage of Chrome's multi-process implementation.

[1]: http://www.erahm.org/2016/02/12/are-they-slim-yet/

In Scrum, speed and efficiency are traded for predictability and consistency (whether or not those trade-offs are worth it is another conversation).

It's worth noting that I agree with your point and also don't believe Scrum is a panacea, but I am starting to understand its appeal from a business perspective.

Any time a sprint commitment must be broken the decision rests on the team's product manager who is best (or _should_ be best) suited to understanding the tradeoff between sprint completion and a potential emergency bug situation. If the PM decides it's not worth it, then that's on them. It's worth noting, you may want to include a wide enough distribution so it's known that you noticed but PM didn't want you to work on it in order to cover yourself.

As for how to account for that work in your velocity, I don't believe it is realistic to size a story for fixing a potential issue (not to mention the difficulties in sizing bugs anyway [1]). However, it is possible (or at least a bit easier) to size a story for research that answers a specific question as its acceptance criteria -- in this case, the acceptance criteria for this article's situation would've been something like 1) "will latency continue to rise?" and 2) if so and it is unacceptable, what is the cause and add an implementation story to the backlog"

Some may say "well, how do you know how what is causing the issue", and if no one really can figure it out the answer to the research story question and the bug has manifested itself as an emergency, then sure your velocity will tank as you break the sprint(s), but it's up to the team/business to understand how to remove outliers for an accurate velocity.

[1]: http://www.agileforall.com/2010/05/agile-antipattern-sizing-...

> Java SDK

Hardly. See Joda Time (it only took 10 years for java.time to catch up) and Apache Commons (the situation is much better now, but who hasn't turned to Apache Commons due to shortcomings in Java's standard library?).

In any case, I definitely agree with the frustrations of trying to find libraries for Ruby.

Great work, yegg! I like the direction this is headed. Perhaps for the header, it can collapse/hide the row with "Meanings | Images | Videos | Products" under the search bar until you scroll back to the top to make it a bit less huge? Perhaps you could even shrink it a bit to the height of the bar when it collapses as well.

You're talking semantics. Sure, the branding is non-free (you can't distribute the same version obviously), but your four freedoms aren't diminished in any way [1].

[1]: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

> That was a joke ;)

I found your article interesting in light of the popular traffic piece you mentioned, but ending it with jokey suggestions after a fairly serious analysis doesn't really make it clear if you're joking or not.

But hey, maybe @themodelplumber and I are the only two who thought you were serious.

It seems that W3Fools has changed recently since it was popularized in 2011, but the page used to have a very lengthy list about the recommended bad practices or flat out inaccuracies of W3Schools.

> I get that Chrome added a JIT javascript compiler, but hasn't Firefox since added that in response?

In addition to what @ergo14 said, Firefox had a JIT compiler called SpiderMonkey before Chrome was even released [1]. With that said, I'm sure there's cross-pollination both ways between OdinMonkey (Firefox's current JIT compiler) and Chrome's JIT compiler in V8.

[1]: http://ejohn.org/blog/tracemonkey/

Fair enough. :) As I said in my original post, if DDG's privacy is not a selling point for someone, then I agree with you; bangs are hardly a reason to stick with DDG.

> I would gladly trade that for the additional mental steps of deciding which service to search and what the bang shortcut is for that service.

There are hardly any mental steps plural, if any mental step at all. Give it a try and see if there's a bang that doesn't make sense.

Examples:

!g - Google

!b - Bing

!gm - Google Maps (also !gmaps)

!bm - Bings Maps (also !bmaps or !bingmaps)

!d - Dictionary (also !dict and !dictionary)

!t - thesaurus (also !thesarus)

!gi - Google Images (also !gim)

!gh - GitHub (also !github)

!yt - YouTube (also !youtube)

!cpp - C++ reference from cplusplus.com

!hn - Hacker News Search

!aur - Arch Linux User Repo

!trulia - Trulia

!domain - domain name search

...etc

> I think we have indeed seen Firefox go from approximately 30% share at the end of 2009 and beginning of 2010 down to less than 20% today.

I don't disagree that Firefox lost marketshare over the past 3 years. Interestingly enough, the peaks you list are nowhere near Firefox 4's release date (March 2011), while Google's advertising for Chrome began near those points [1]. Both StatCounter and Net Applications show this trend (decline after Q4 2009).

Whether or not StatCounter or Net Applications is more accurate is an argument I don't want to pursue (page views vs unique visitors, country weighting to remove bias vs no weighting to preserve data integrity, etc.).

> I know many others share this opinion, as well. The numbers above support that very strongly.

I'm willing to bet if Firefox continued to look like version 3.6 yet took the same performance/behavior from every version along the way it would be in the same position. Chrome has simply been the superior browser to get things done, but that can actually be questioned now with a more competitive browser landscape.

> Before then, the focus was on usability, and providing a good browser. Since then, however, the priorities have clearly shifted,

How so?

> It's a bad situation, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

Who's pretending? I'm quite aware of Firefox/Mozilla's position as an underdog (in fact, I'm concerned). I'm just wondering why you feel the need to reiterate your dislike given that if someone has not been convinced to move from Firefox to another browser by now, then either they don't know other options (unlikely) or they clearly still appreciate something about the Firefox or Mozilla community and ecosystem that goes beyond the growing pains that pushed you away.

Mozilla did wonders breaking the IE monoculture and they are doing solid work now keeping the other major players honest, if not competitive by offering a solid contender now. In the end, I want Mozilla to be successful because I believe Mozilla matters: https://brendaneich.com/2013/02/why-mozilla-matters/

[1]: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10422101-71.html

Using bangs, you can skip a step. I suppose if you're using Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" in your URL bar I suppose there is little difference. However, I find there is a bit more effort when you get outside the simple realm of products or celebs.

For example, if you want to search HN, you can just `!hn searchterms` rather than search "hnsearch searchterms", then click. As someone who searches a lot of different resources frequently, the little bit of time saved is helpful.

If DDG's privacy is not a selling point for someone, then I agree with you; bangs are hardly a reason to stick with DDG.

> Firefox's declining market share over this period is very good evidence

The only evidence we have is that Google's marketing team has been very effective at advertising Chrome. :-P

> Many of us long-time Firefox users have actually found the past three years to be the worst so far, in terms of design.

I'm not sure why you think you can speak for many Firefox users.

> rush to copy Chrome in appearance and behavior

I'll quote myself from a different discussion [1]:

Outside of manilla folder-like tabs and a panel menu, Chrome is given far too much credit in innovating the direction of browser UI. Tabs on top is an objectively better UI choice [2]. The download manager is an original Firefox design [3] and almost anything else that other browsers have adopted (tabs on top, start page tiles, etc) is all from Opera.

> now it's declining because it's providing a worse experience, and the recent changes clearly haven't been helping the situation.

FWIW, Firefox has held steady over the past year hovering around 20% according to Net Applications [4], and they even had a small uptick in the past month. In any case, I am confident Firefox lost users because of Chrome's superior performance and snappy behavior, not because of UI changes. I think projects like MemShrink [5], Project Snappy [6], and the revived Electrolysis [7] will go a long way towards improving Firefox's performance. Will those changes be too little too late? Who knows. Will the upcoming Australis design be the last straw if your theory holds true? That's up for debate.

I've recognized your handle on other Mozilla/Firefox related posts on HN and your comments seem to be universally negative [8]. Have you had a bad experience with the community? I understand strong dislike for a company or product, but it just seems...difficult to hate on such an underdog like Mozilla. :-P

/says self-declared Mozilla fanboy

[1]:http://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1fhgak/mozilla_plea...

[2]: https://blog.mozilla.org/faaborg/2010/06/24/why-tabs-are-on-...

[3]: http://limi.net/articles/safari-downloads/

[4]: http://www.netmarketshare.com/

[5]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink

[6]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/Snappy

[7]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

[8]: https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=firefox+P...

> because you either need to use a 3rd party repo or some AUR wrapper to auto-update the aur package.

The other option is to `chown` the package directory, and Nightly will handle auto-updating. I only run on a 1 Mbit connection and I hardly notice when Nightly chooses to download the update on my Arch box, even while I'm actively browsing.

> its a 60MB update daily

The entire binary is ~32-33MB...I've never received an update that large.

> Note that DuckDuckGo doesn't use Diffie-Hellman for its key exchange,

Source?

> but [Google seems] to be doing amazing work behind the scenes to get the incumbents on board with free codecs.

Huh? By not nuking H.264 support in Chrome like they publicly promised they did anything but get the rest of the industry on board with free codecs, but perhaps I am not aware of the work Google has done recently to influence free codec adoption.

What codecs or work are you referring to?

It appears their client is open source, but I agree that they are not open source in the expected way (i.e., can't self-host): http://blog.filerock.com/2012/12/were-going-open-source/

FWIW, repeating 'ab' 8 times as a password gives 'centuries' worth of crack time (i.e., 'abababababababab').

(I am very impressed by the password checker though; it's difficult to cover all scenarios)

I'm not sure if it's because they are demo versions (and my experiences echoes esrauch's), but every rich text editor you listed except YUI Editor actually does _not_ map the Tab key to insert a tabstop or spaces.

[1]: http://ckeditor.com/demo [2]: http://www.tinymce.com/tryit/basic.php [3]: http://try.sencha.com/extjs/4.1.1/docs/Ext.form.field.HtmlEd...