But it really seems like an own goal if true.

This will sadly still put a major damper on adoption of open source apps, while giving a false sense of security that apps from the Play store are safe.

Years down the road, the low usage of apps installed from outside the Play store will be used as an argument for removing the functionality completely.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45815947

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# Comments: 0

Seems like a fair deal, since he also got a ton of publicity out of it.

It will be interesting to see how many users will decline to opt-in to Personalized ads. Meta will probably still try a range of dark patterns to keep users from making that choice.

It's very easy to install and does not require a DB. As a bonus, it stores everything as files which can be read and edited manually. It does require python.

It would be pretty great if Firefox development could be supported by direct donations too. Although maintaining a browser is probably orders of magnutide more expensive than Thunderbird.

Some banks or government services allows you to buy a physical token to generate TOTP, and that comes in handy if the app doesn't work.

Wikipedia sums it up nicely, with citations: -- The motion of such dowsing devices is generally attributed to the ideomotor phenomenon,[7][8][9] a psychological response where a subject makes motions unconsciously. Put simply, dowsing rods respond to the user's accidental or involuntary movements.

The scientific evidence is that dowsing is no more effective than random chance.[10][11] It is therefore regarded as a pseudoscience. -- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowsing

For an entertaining time, check out the late James Randi and his debunking of dowsing

Its somewhat of a reference book and very accessible

If you have one or more integrations to external systems, where you cannot control your test data, it becomes much harder to write stable E2E tests.

Some don't have test environments, some have too few. Most don't allow you to setup data easily either way.

You can, of course, mock the external systems, but if they play a large enough part, your tests start looking more like integration tests again, but with the added overhead of something like browser automation.

It's a hard balance to strike.

There's a bit of a false dichotomy in some comments, where Mozilla Rally is preventing or hampering Mozilla from improving Firefox. They can and should do both at the same time, especially if both are positive things.

It doesn't mean all their initiatives are equally good, and that we shouldn't still criticize the bad ones. But this seems benign at worst, and could possibly do some good. it's completely opt in, transparent, and with very strong user control over the data.

Instead of chastising them for all their other shortcomings yet again, I prefer to be happy that this might benefit ethical research.