Yes, sorry! We're investigating, but my current theory is we got overloaded because I relaxed some of our anti-crawler protections a few days ago.
(The reason I did that is that the anti-crawler protections also unfortunately hit some legit users, and we don't want to block legit users. However, it seems that I turned the knobs down too far.)
In this case, though, we had a secondary failure: PagerDuty woke me up at 5:24am, I checked HN and it seemed fine, so I told PagerDuty the problem was resolved. But the problem wasn't resolved - at that point I was just sleeping through it.
I'll add more as we find out more, but it probably won't be till later this afternoon PST.
Having worked at Mozilla a while ago, the CEO role is one I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. Success is oddly defined: it's a non-profit (well, a for-profit owned by a non-profit) that needs to make a big profit in a short amount of time. And anything done to make that profit will annoy the community.
I hope Anthony leans into what makes Mozilla special. The past few years, Mozilla's business model has been to just meekly "us-too!" trends... IoT, Firefox OS, and more recently AI.
What Mozilla is good at, though, is taking complex things the average user doesn't really understand, and making it palpable and safe. They did this with web standards... nobody cared about web standards, but Mozilla focused on usability.
(Slide aside, it's not a coincidence the best CEO Mozilla ever had was a designer.)
I'm not an AI hater, but I don't think Mozilla can compete here. There's just too much good stuff already, and it's not the type of thing Mozilla will shine with.
Instead, if I were CEO, I'd go the opposite way: I'd focus on privacy. Not AI privacy, but privacy in general. Buy a really great email provider, and start to own "identity on the internet". As there's more bots and less privacy, identity is going to be incredibly important over the years.. and right now, Google defacto owns identity. Make it free, but also give people a way to pay.
Would this work? I don't know. But like I said, it's not a job I envy.
It is us, developers, who convinced our management to purchase GitHub Enterprise to be our forge. We didn't pay any heed to the values of software freedom. A closed source, proprietary software had good features. We saw that and convinced our management to purchase it. Never mind what cost it would impose in the future when the good software gets bad owners. Never mind that there were alternatives that were inferior but were community-developed, community-maintained and libre.
The writing is in the wall. First it was UX annoyances. Then it was GitHub Actions woes. Now it is paying money for running their software on your own hardware. It's only going to go downhill. Is it a good time now to learn from our mistakes and convince our teams and management to use community-maintained, libre alternatives? They may be inferior. They may lack features. But they're not going to pull user hostile tricks like this on you and me. And hey, if they are lacking features, maybe we should convince our management to let us contribute time to the community to add those features? It's a much better investment than sinking money into a software that will only grow more and more user hostile, isn't it?
"without losing face"? What culture are you referring to? The Western companies I have worked at do not discourage such questions -- in fact, it's often the sign of someone very senior when they ask a seemingly 'dumb' question that others have taken for granted.
>> He says he could begin to block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that’d bring in another $150 million, but he doesn’t want to do that. It feels off-mission.
> It may be just me, but I read this as “I don't want to but I'll kill AdBlockers in Firefox for buckerinos ”.
Yes, that does seem like a pretty uncharitable interpretation of that quote. I read it as "we won't do it, even though it would bring in $150M USD".
It's true that this place can be cryptic, and that has downsides—specifically, it can be confusing to newcomers, even to some newcomers who would make ideal HN users. That sucks.
But there's a key that unlocks most of the puzzles. That is to understand that we're optimizing for exactly one thing: curiosity. (Specifically, intellectual curiosity, since there are other kinds of curiosity too.) Here are links to past explanations about that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
We try to elevate things that gratify curiosity: creative work, surprising discoveries, deep dives, technical achievements, unusual personal experience, whimsical unpredictability, good conversation, etc. And we try to demote things that run against curiosity, especially repetition, indignation, sensationalism, and promotion.
It gets complicated because you'll also see plenty of repetition, indignation, sensationalism, and promotion on HN—alas! This is the internet after all. But the site survives because the balance of these things stays within tolerable ranges, thanks to two factors: an active community which cares greatly about preserving this place for intended purpose (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html); and an owner (Y Combinator) which pays us to work on the site full time and mainly just wants us to keep it good, to the extent possible.
If you really want to figure this place out, the way to do it is as a reader. Hang out on the site, look at the mix of articles that make the frontpage, spend time in the discussion threads (hopefully the interesting sectors and not the flamey ones!), and over time your eyes will adjust.
What doesn't work—and this is good because we want it not to work—is approaching HN as a platform for promoting content. If you (<-- I don't mean you personally, but anyone) mainly care about "how can I use this thing to get attention for my startup/blog/project/newsletter", then you're operating in 'push' mode rather than 'pull' mode (or, even better, 'idle' mode). In that case you won't be curious because you're too focused on what you're wanting for extraneous reasons—and if you aren't in a state of curiosity, this place won't make sense. At least we hope it won't!
The thing people miss in these “replace juniors with AI” takes is that juniors were never mainly about cheap hands on keyboards. They’re the only people in the org who are still allowed to ask “dumb” questions without losing face, and those questions are often the only signal you get that your abstractions are nonsense.
What AI does is remove a bunch of the humiliating, boring parts of being junior: hunting for the right API by cargo-culting Stack Overflow, grinding through boilerplate, getting stuck for hours on a missing import. If a half-decent model can collapse that search space for them, you get to spend more of their ramp time on “here’s how our system actually fits together” instead of “here’s how for-loops work in our house style”.
If you take that setup and then decide “cool, now we don’t need juniors at all”, you’re basically saying you want a company with no memory and no farm system – just an ever-shrinking ring of seniors arguing about strategy while no one actually grows into them.
Don’t let the “flash” name fool you, this is an amazing model.
I have been playing with it for the past few weeks, it’s genuinely my new favorite; it’s so fast and it has such a vast world knowledge that it’s more performant than Claude Opus 4.5 or GPT 5.2 extra high, for a fraction (basically order of magnitude less!!) of the inference time and price
For years I've thought about doing an "art project" to make people more aware of the fact they are being observed – but I never actually got up and did it.
The idea was to seek spots in the city where public web cams are pointed at, and paint QR codes on the ground at those spots (using a template), linking to the camera stream. So when curious passerbys scan the code, they see themselves in a camera stream and feel "watched".
It's kinda frustrating that Mozilla's CEO thinks that axing ad-blockers would be financially beneficial for them. Quite the opposite is true (I believe) since a ton of users would leave Firefox for alternatives.
Introducing a separate charge specifically targeting those of your customers who choose to self-host your hilariously fragile infrastructure is certainly a choice.. And one I assume is in no way tied to adoption/usage-based KPIs.
Of course, if you can just fence in your competition and charge admission, it'd be silly to invest time in building a superior product.
I got contacted by our rep a couple weeks ago, who informed me of this news. I thought it was a disaster and it really pissed me off. The rep couldn't even explain the reasoning well. It basically summed up to "because we can" and "where are you going to go?". He was shocked to find out that I didn't like it.
We currently self-host on kubernets/aws. The thing that really got to me isn't the new charge per se. It's the fact that GHA has a ton of problems. I can hold my nose and deal with them when it's free. But now that you're squeezing me, at least you could have created something like GHA 2.0 and added a charge for that. Instead, there are vague roadmap promises which don't even include things that I care about. Specifically:
- Jenkins had better kubernetes integration years ago. It's crazy that GHA can't beat that.
- "Reintroducing multi-label functionality" - yeah, so they first broke it. They did supply "reasons", which looked like they never talked to a customer. [1]
- Still no SDK of any kind.
- "Actions Data Stream" - or you can just fix your logging.
There are dozens more complains, which are easy enough to find. This kind of an approach just makes me want to make sure that I don't use GHA again. Even if I end up paying another vendor, at least I'll be treated as a customer.
- OpenAI has always had some of the strongest prompt understanding alongside the weakest image fidelity. This update goes some way towards addressing this weakness.
- It's leagues better at making localized edits without altering the entire image's aesthetic than gpt-image-1, doubling the previous score from 4/12 to 8/12 and the only model that legitimately passed the Giraffe prompt.
- It's one of the most steerable models with a 90% compliance rate
Updates to GenAI Showdown
- Added outtakes sections to each model's detailed report in the Text-to-Image category, showcasing notable failures and unexpected behaviors.
- New models have been added including REVE and Flux.2 Dev (a new locally hostable model).
- Finally got around to implementing a weighted scoring mechanism which considers pass/fail, quality, and compliance for a more holistic model evaluation (click pass/fail icon to toggle between scoring methods).
If you just want to compare gpt-image-1, gpt-image-1.5, and NB Pro at the same time:
Hey, I created htmx and while I appreciate the publicity, I’m not a huge fan of these types of hyperbolic articles. There are lots of different ways to build web apps with their own strengths and weaknesses. I try to assess htmx’s strengths and weaknesses here:
It’s another excellent hypermedia oriented library
Edit: the article is actually not nearly as unreasonable as I thought based on the just-f*king-use template. Still prefer a chill vibe for htmx though.
I will die on this hill, because I'm right. Painters put on the first layer in saturated colors like this, then add detail, highlight and shadow. The base layer stuck to the statues, and the rest was washed away.
This whole thing just won't go away because many people are operating outside their area of expertise on this subject.
Painters layer paint, starting with a saturated base color. These archaeologists are simply looking at the paint that was left in the crevices.
As someone who had to drop out of school in the 2008 crisis (family trouble), I owe a good chunk of my learning to the first era of online teaching.
Those courses that were basically “we’re a top university and we let someone record the class from the back” were a literal life changer. Honestly, that was all I wanted.
Everything that came after has been substantially worse. Work is gamified, teachers spend more time building an audience than creating the product… it’s all horribly tainted by profit.
If we went back to recording lectures by the worlds best and putting it online for free with attached books and exercises, we could improve the world a lot.
HN is hard to game on purpose. So stop looking for the levers and participate, that's all there is to it. I've made friends here, have been helped by people on projects that I was busy with, did the reverse, found friends and business partners and spend way too much time. HN is a very interesting slice of the online world, a place that is unlike the rest, sometimes a bit dry but always interesting and extremely useful. If you're looking at it to try to understand it then you might as well try to understand a rat or a mouse. You won't understand it because it isn't there to be understood, it just is, like any other organism.
The root of HN is a thing called 'startup news', that was changed very quickly and since then HN has been a focal point for techies of all sorts but also lots of other people from all walks of life and from a large variety of countries. It isn't 'one thing' to everybody that participates, just like a hammer is a different thing for a carpenter than it is for a masoner or a farmer.
The fact that after being a member for a couple of years you have this question indicates a lack of participation, not a lack of understanding.
> He warns that developers of apps like Signal and WhatsApp could technically fall within the legal definition of "hostile activity" simply because their technology "make[s] it more difficult for UK security and intelligence agencies to monitor communications.
Sounds like Let's Encrypt would also fall under that.
This has got to stop. If you want to stop criminals, then focus on their illegal activites, not the streets they walk on. I walk on them too. And don't use CP as a catch-all argument to insert backdoors.
Their big problem here is that previously, it was hard to find people with the same opinion as you. If you couldn't find someone in the same village who wanted to start a rebellion, it probably wouldn't happen. Today, someone can post a Telegram group message and make thousands of people rally to a town square. I see the dangers, and I see why governments think they are doing this to protect the people. No one wants civil war. That is still not a strong enough reason to call road construction a hostile activity.
I'm back in Sweden after 12 years abroad. Time to read up on which parties are sane and which aren't when it comes to technical infrastructure.
The article is missing this motivation paragraph, taken from the blog index:
> Graphics APIs and shader languages have significantly increased in complexity over the past decade. It’s time to start discussing how to strip down the abstractions to simplify development, improve performance, and prepare for future GPU workloads.
It sometimes blows my mind how questions which essentially boil down to "How do I best manipulate you for personal gain?" can be asked in such an unabashed fashion.
> The juniors working this way compress their ramp dramatically. Tasks that used to take days take hours. Not because the AI does the work, but because the AI collapses the search space. Instead of spending three hours figuring out which API to use, they spend twenty minutes evaluating options the AI surfaced. The time freed this way isn’t invested in another unprofitable feature, though, it’s invested in learning. [...]
> If you’re an engineering manager thinking about hiring: The junior bet has gotten better. Not because juniors have changed, but because the genie, used well, accelerates learning.
I have used Firefox as my default browser through thick and thin for damn near two decades.
If Mozilla killed andblocking extensions I’d switch to Helium Browser in a heartbeat since they’re maintaining manifest v2 support for uBO and even ship it OOTB.
I don't think formal verification really addresses most day-to-day programming problems:
* A user interface is confusing, or the English around it is unclear
* An API you rely on changes, is deprecated, etc.
* Users use something in unexpected ways
* Updates forced by vendors or open source projects cause things to break
* The customer isn't clear what they want
* Complex behavior between interconnected systems, out of the purview of the formal language (OS + database + network + developer + VM + browser + user + web server)
For some mathematically pure task, sure, it's great. Or a low-level library like a regular expression parser or a compression codec. But I don't think that represents a lot of what most of us are tasked with, and those low-level "mathematically pure" libraries are generally pretty well handled by now.
(The reason I did that is that the anti-crawler protections also unfortunately hit some legit users, and we don't want to block legit users. However, it seems that I turned the knobs down too far.)
In this case, though, we had a secondary failure: PagerDuty woke me up at 5:24am, I checked HN and it seemed fine, so I told PagerDuty the problem was resolved. But the problem wasn't resolved - at that point I was just sleeping through it.
I'll add more as we find out more, but it probably won't be till later this afternoon PST.