Live data from Hacker News

Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments

techcrunch.com

121–130 of 177 posts

Re: Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments

#121
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://wiby.me

I am learning Svelte, so I typed that in: https://wiby.me/?q=svelte Two links came back: "Facts on Farts" "NiceJewishMom.com" Not a good first impression.

In it's defense, svelte is actually a word that appears on both of those pages.

Re: Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments

#122

Hey all, Patrick here & one of the mentors for the Mozilla Builders "fix-the-internet" incubator https://builders.mozilla.community/ . We have 3 different offerings for this Summer. All incubator style, meaning you meet weekly or biweekly with mentors and we really try to help drive you from point A to point C. 1. $75k investment in a startup. MUST be serious about wanting to build something awesome and put in the ha…

Hi Patrick, I've been prototyping end-to-end encrypted 3D printing over webRTC. Would decentralizing remote 3D printing fall under the banner of fixing the internet?

Re: Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments

#123
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if browsers didn't allow JS calls to other domains without a user prompt it would solve almost all the woes ads/trackers bring. I'm willing to give up whatever optimizations the current silent behavior allows. I'm sure Google would do everything to stop that from ever being standard though.

What would stop people using a CNAME record to point ads.example.com to a third party ad server? I don't think there would be a way to use cookies to track people across different sites, but the ad servers could still use ip addresses and browser fingerprinting to check if its the same user.

PiHole and uBlock origin support so called “deep CNAME inspection” that defeats approaches like that.

Re: Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments

#124
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, this is one measure directly at odds with democratizing the Web. You wrote a brilliant app but lack a license? No audience for you. Also, if you have to produce an MVP to the same building code as a house with 50 years of expected use requires, this is death to all but exceptionally well-funded innovation.

Software is bigger than just the web. You can be your own lawyer or your own medical doctor without a license, but it’s generally a bad idea. Even lawyers know better than that and hire other lawyers to represent them. > Also, if you have to produce an MVP to the same building code as a house with 50 years of expected use requires That is not an MVP.

Not all lawyers are specializing in the same area in which they need a representation in court; this is how an accomplished OS kernel engineer may hire someone to build a good Web frontend.

If everything you build should be built to last in order to ever be exposed to public, the rate of experimentation will slow down a lot, so finding a product-market fit would become very hard. Look at the glacial pace of progress in, say, light aviation where Cessnas with engines from 1980s still rule, because certification of a new engine is so hard.

Re: Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments

#125

Can someone please sue Apple for anti-trust violations on the grounds that forcing me to copy and paste all my fucking links instead of setting a default browser on iOS is a direct attack on health competition in the web browser space?! The fact that this issue has gone unresolved for this many years is completely unacceptable.

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That, historically speaking, is not enough. People will find a away to screw up advertising, whether intentionally or not, so long as there is revenue to earn. Perhaps things have gotten better but when I used to dig into that code for work some years ago it was near negligent incompetent. If you are going to recommend regulation the only thing that works, as exemplified by every other profession, is credentials: lic…

I mean I would agree with your position if most institutions were able to produce competent software engineers and didn't cost a life. And even if they did, I wonder how many of them work for an ad network while they certainly can work at any other job with good pay. On the other hand, other industries with certification and oaths are much more shady. You can't hammer ethics through academics. If anything, current ac…

I think you misunderstood what I am suggesting.

Re: Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are describing the Fission project [1]. You can enable it in nightly builds. It does break some things, crash a bit more often etc. [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Project_Fission

Better many, many years late than never, I suppose. Good resource!

It took Google several years to implement in Chromium as well. They just happened to have the convenience of having it ready when Spectre was revealed.

Re: Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would stop people using a CNAME record to point ads.example.com to a third party ad server? I don't think there would be a way to use cookies to track people across different sites, but the ad servers could still use ip addresses and browser fingerprinting to check if its the same user.

PiHole and uBlock origin support so called “deep CNAME inspection” that defeats approaches like that.

pretty easy to defeat that CNAME inspection: switch to ANAMEs

everything will end up pointing at some random AWS IP address, and you can't filter that

Re: Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments

#129
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software is bigger than just the web. You can be your own lawyer or your own medical doctor without a license, but it’s generally a bad idea. Even lawyers know better than that and hire other lawyers to represent them. > Also, if you have to produce an MVP to the same building code as a house with 50 years of expected use requires That is not an MVP.

Not all lawyers are specializing in the same area in which they need a representation in court; this is how an accomplished OS kernel engineer may hire someone to build a good Web frontend. If everything you build should be built to last in order to ever be exposed to public, the rate of experimentation will slow down a lot, so finding a product-market fit would become very hard. Look at the glacial pace of progress…

> If everything you build should be built to last in order to ever be exposed to public

I suspect this becomes more true the closer you get to the metal. As a web developer I have never seen web application code that is built to last, at least in the corporate world. I know its possible to build software in this space that is built to last, because web standards are solid and almost always backward compatible.

Developers in this space are more interested in employable criteria, such as well known named frameworks and tools from NPM. I have heard all kinds of excuses to justify that behavior as somehow credible, but its never based on evidence. The reasoning and excuses always ultimately exist solely to serve the needs of the developer and not the business or product, which is an ethics violation. The near universal presence of that behavior does not make it qualified.

Re: Mozilla goes incubator with ‘Fix The Internet’ startup early-stage investments

#130

This is completely tangental but I think it is wrong to see the internet as needing another feature in order to be complete. I think we really need a ground up re-think of data. I remember diligently cataloging my movie preferences in LoveFilm, a UK Netflix competitor (when Netflix was a movie-by-mail company). I think I rated thousands of movies. I did the same in Netflix, certainly hundreds of films before they cha…

(As someone who did the same with Netflix and was really devastated they changed their UI there, you can at least go to your rating history and they still--last time I checked--give you the old ratings in their old format, so you can scrape that page and then have not lost your rating effort. I don't say this to in any way disagree with you: just to try to help a fellow ratings-keeper.)
Post reply on HN