I watched the steady decline as the bros slowly took over. I tried commenting, only to be flagged and downvoted. I tried sharing articles, only to have them flagged. Starting with Gamergate, and then accelerating with Musk's purchase of Twitter, and metastasizing into its current form when leaders in the community (Andreesen, Thiel, Sacks, Rabois, Calcanis, Horowitz, Palihapitiya, Maguire, Zuckerberg, Altman, etc) decided that fascism was worth protecting their crypto deals. And it's time to accept that this is the reality of Hacker News today (and it's time to forget what it once was).
This is quite literally one of the most significant cybersecurity fails of all time.
And yet, right now, it's not on the Hacker News home page. But an article about how many supernova explode per year is. An article about how to "win an argument" with a toddler or similar set-in-stone-thinker is. The number one submission is about a "back-of-a-napkin" probabalistic calculator.
So let's just say it like it is...
If you're going to be forgiving, you can say that Hacker News is consistently gamed by the bros who have taken over the tech industry. If you're in a less forgiving mood, you can say that Hacker News is the Pravda for the bros of the Venture community.
"Oh... it's hard with an algorithm!!!"
Total BS. Hacker News is making a choice. Hacker News made a choice a long time ago. Hacker News continues to make the same choice.
For what it's worth, I also made a choice and walked away from this place. You all can do the same.
I love that it took facial expression software for people to understand this. All anyone had to do was talk to a dozen internationally competitive athletes to understand this. Happiest competitor is the one who wins. Second happiest is the one who finishes third. Third happiest is second. Fourth happiest are all the finalists who didn't medal and didn't take fourth. And fourth place... Yeah. Fourth place SUCKS.
This is the exact sort of feedback shared privately among experienced entrepreneurs - it's just finally accessible to everyone. From my look at the reviews I'd say it's about 80% true to my experience.
You can understand why, here on Hacker News, we might have interpreted your statement that she "directly authored many foundational pieces of Mozilla and (arguably) the internet" as claiming that she contributed code, rather than just drafting some legal docs and marketing pieces.
But its defenders constantly say "Mozilla is a non-profit" and when pressed, note that Mozilla Foundation is the sole owner of Mozilla Corporation.
You can't have it both ways: either it is subject to Foundation=good presumptions as defenders invoke, or it is not. If not, then its comp may not be excessive at the top, but it sure jumped in 2017 while market share dropped -- and anyway, if it is a for-profit, it needs to act like one to make more money and avoid layoffs!
The double standard here just stinks. I am bound by NDAs from when I was at Mozilla, but since then I've observed and heard enough to call bullshit, and I am.
Then you should have posted this in every single reply where you stated Mozilla Corporation is NOT a non-profit. Or else you look ( and I presume you are before this reply ) that you are defending their status.
MoCo doesn't get the goodies. It's a cash generator (in theory, probably not so much at the moment) for MoFo, and money has to flow only in that direction as I understand it.
It's not treated as a non-profit in any way, which is why it could do multi-million dollar partnerships and pay competitive tech salaries without the kind of scrutiny or restrictions a 501(c)-anything would have.
No, sorry -- it is encumbered as a for-profit to pay taxes, but it cannot operate as a for-profit wholly owned by private investors or public shareholders would (I'm not saying that is good or bad). It is different. It's like many sports stadia/teams, universities, hospitals: for-profit wholly owned sub of a non-profit.
As I just noted in my last reply, this is abused via double-think to defend Mozilla as a "non-profit" when that wins social status, and denied (as you do) when trying to spiff Mozilla as a commercially-savvy for-profit. Sorry, you cannot have it both ways.
One thing I think is clear from its history, including when I was there (but not based on any NDA'ed info): Mozilla has not been able to act aggressively as a commercial player. Just one example: KaiOSTech is the lineal descendent and successor to FirefoxOS, going to 200M+ smart-featurephones globally, even winning a Google investment. Mozilla dropped FirefoxOS (twice, painfully).
>Mozilla has not been able to act aggressively as a commercial player. Just one example: KaiOSTech ...
I am just speculating here, but would this involve significant compromise on Mozilla's core values - specifically privacy? For example one of their investors and partners is Reliance Jio (the reason why KaiOS is the second most popular mobile OS in India) who brag about monetizing the data of their subscribers as a fundamental business model and strategy. The reason i was excited about FirefoxOS was that i was hoping that they would do the same for mobile operating systems as they did for the World Wide Web. Personally, i trust KaiOS devices even less than Android in that regard.
AFAIK privacy had nothing to do with it. Mozilla did not want to keep investing, it lost hope in getting traction and had no other mobile-to-scale play, so it pulled back to focus on desktop. Confirmed in private comms from multiple execs.
it's funny how FirefoxOS still feels modern. Thinking about it, I have a 10 year old browser on my old smartphone, which also feels modern. Not really much has happened since HTML5. We got a datepicker?, wait, that was HTML5, so I guess nothing new has been added. Instead web dev's build their own web components using poor performing web frameworks. Speaking for myself I spent two weeks making a freaking window menu for a web app, yeh, I know window menus are not good UI, but it's what people are used to, and I made it work with keyboard and screen readers.
The browser market is worth around 5 billion, but that is only if you count bribe money from Google. You could double that number from showing ads directly. But you could make two orders of magnitude more if you had an actual business model (that did not resolve around ads, although ads can be used as a complement). Quick hanging fruit: Micro transactions, in (web) app purchases... Instead I have to walk around with a plastic card with numbers on it, the only security is the last 3 numbers, that are also printed on the plastic card. There is no encryption, no digital signing, freaking ston-age! And we pay 2-5% plus a monthly fee to use it, wtf!
The cloud business is a slow growing market, but I expect it to explode in maybe 10 years or so. Other companies, like Microsoft also thinks so, and are investing heavily in the cloud. But what is the main UI to access "the cloud"!? The browser... With "the browser" you become a middleman between the platform players and the content providers.
Normal users don't care what stack they are on, it's just that the native UI elements are better then the browser components. So native apps usually performs better then web apps. And are nicer to use.
Browsers are not just for documents any more. (most corporations still use word documents and pdf, sigh). Ever since browsers got scripting capabilities developers want (including myself) to build apps in the browser. Just look at electron. Developers want to build front-ends using browser technology!
Just like gfx cards give the developer the ability to draw triangles, the browser gives you divs. But a gfx card can paint billions of triangles per second, while the browser can only handle a few hundred DOM elements.
Another low hanging fruit are app to app integrations. On a native platform you can copy content from one app to another app, you can save a file in one app, and open it in another app, but not so much in the browser. Although modern browser can make use of the system clipboard, data is sent from one app -> to the device -> then back to the other app. It should instead go directly from (cloud) server to server.
Sorry for the random ramblings, I'm just a web developer trying to re-invent the wheel.
(I'm also looking for a job where I can play with this crippled browser tech, or a PO role where I can just point in the right direction and smarter people take care of the execution)
I was curious so I put together a chart comparing Baker, Eich, James Cook (the treasurer, not the explorer), and a baseline of 500k with a 10% raise per year:
I think your point is the most important one. This is not "Compensation of Highest paid executive at Mozilla vs Firefox market share" as Eich says. This appears to be a misleading graph of how much one guy has been paid. His salary went way up in 2016, unsurprisingly (shortly after Eich was fired), and Firefox has continued its downward slide from when Eich was there.
1. The increase was in 2017, reported per IRS regs in Mozilla Foundation's Form 990 filing (which must list all comp to board members even if they work for the for-profit Mozilla Corporation subsidiary).
2. The "one guy" is Mitchell Baker, and she is chair of both foundation and corporation boards.
But nice try attempting to pin blame on market share slide these last almost six years on me.
In your Twitter thread you claimed it was a "chart for top job" at Mozilla. Will you now say that was false, that Baker was not the highest paid employee for the duration of that chart?
Don't be dense or try "gotcha" games with me: Mitchell is chair of both boards, hirer and firer of CEOs, she has the top job. I'm told Mitchell is now acting CEO too, so: hat trick!
Also you didn't acknowledge your 2016 blunder, or retract your scurrilous insinuation that I'm to blame lo these past almost six years for continued and even accelerating decline, not to mention loss of FirefoxOS to KaiOSTech. Please do better, or save it.
> your scurrilous insinuation that I'm to blame lo these past almost six years
Ooh, "scurrilous"! I'm struck where I stand! If only I had actually said you were to blame for the last 5-6 years, you might have something. I said Mozilla continued its downward slide from when you were there, not that you were to blame for that.
> even accelerating decline
Your chart doesn't show an accelerating decline in the last six years, so you don't have much to go on there either.
In fairness to you, you did say "top job", and I quoted you as saying "chart of Compensation of Highest paid executive", which is what dman said at the top of the thread. Baker was not the highest paid executive for the duration of the chart, but I shouldn't have claimed you said that. So I do apologize for that. I also apologize for misgendering Baker.
It really wasn’t clear to me at all until I read this comment. I interpreted the tweet (and GP) to mean “this chart tracks CEO pay at Mozilla, regardless of who the CEO is.” Seeing this comment completely changed the perspective for me, so it was helpful.
"I find it difficult to distinguish what tech is doing to the valley and SF from what Wall Street has been doing to New York and London for decades."
I couldn't have said it better myself. And sadly the author doesn't see anything wrong with the statement while for many of us - this sums up EVERYTHING that is wrong.
That's a misunderstanding: I am not saying there's nothing wrong with what is happening (and my personal beliefs are very much to the contrary). My point is rather than much of the criticism of tech seems to be a criticism of capitalism. So if you want to have a debate about inner cities, poverty, etc, by all means, let's have it, but it's not a tech phenomenon.
Many of us in SF would like to PREVENT this city from turning into a place like NYC. Yes... there is a problem with capitalism (or, more accurately, with unfettered "market driven" capitalism). But there are two other problems which you ignore. First - in the Bay Area the problem isn't just capitalism, it's also the behaviors of those working in startups. These behaviors make startups in particular (and tech in general) a very (VERY) easy target. Second - do we want homogeneity in our lives? Do we want SF to be just like NYC? Is there something different and special about SF that deserves preservation?
I watched the steady decline as the bros slowly took over. I tried commenting, only to be flagged and downvoted. I tried sharing articles, only to have them flagged. Starting with Gamergate, and then accelerating with Musk's purchase of Twitter, and metastasizing into its current form when leaders in the community (Andreesen, Thiel, Sacks, Rabois, Calcanis, Horowitz, Palihapitiya, Maguire, Zuckerberg, Altman, etc) decided that fascism was worth protecting their crypto deals. And it's time to accept that this is the reality of Hacker News today (and it's time to forget what it once was).
This is quite literally one of the most significant cybersecurity fails of all time.
And yet, right now, it's not on the Hacker News home page. But an article about how many supernova explode per year is. An article about how to "win an argument" with a toddler or similar set-in-stone-thinker is. The number one submission is about a "back-of-a-napkin" probabalistic calculator.
So let's just say it like it is...
If you're going to be forgiving, you can say that Hacker News is consistently gamed by the bros who have taken over the tech industry. If you're in a less forgiving mood, you can say that Hacker News is the Pravda for the bros of the Venture community.
"Oh... it's hard with an algorithm!!!" Total BS. Hacker News is making a choice. Hacker News made a choice a long time ago. Hacker News continues to make the same choice.
For what it's worth, I also made a choice and walked away from this place. You all can do the same.