Hacker News: Fice

Racket v9.0

Fice — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 13:35:27 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.racket-lang.org/2025/11/racket-v9-0.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46023460

Points: 335

# Comments: 126

New comment by Fice in "Radicle: Open-Source, Peer-to-Peer, GitHub Alternative"

Fice — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 10:38:41 +0000

> We need a way to embed project metadata into .git itself, so source code commits don't mess up with wikis and issues.

Fossil (https://fossil-scm.org) embeds issues, wiki etc. into project repository.

New comment by Fice in "Guix on the Framework 13 AMD"

Fice — Sun, 18 Feb 2024 03:39:24 +0000

Vulnerabilities such as spectre are only relevant if you run untrusted non-free software. Also these vulnerabilities show that sandboxing is not effective on current CPUs, and specific mitigations does not solve the problem in general.

New comment by Fice in "Guix on the Framework 13 AMD"

Fice — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 14:46:22 +0000

They can't distribute firmware blobs simply because FSF and GNU do not in principle participate in distribution of any non-free programs.

Also consider that if a manufacturer can distribute opaque firmware updates to your system, it practically has remote control over it, е.g. Intel can activate a backdoor in specific CPUs when needed by publishing a microcode update.

New comment by Fice in "Orgzly Revived: a community-maintained version of Orgzly"

Fice — Fri, 16 Feb 2024 11:45:09 +0000

As a Russian I'd rather call it the Putin's war.

New comment by Fice in "WebP is so great except it's not (2021)"

Fice — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 17:24:57 +0000

From my own experience, JPEG quality and compression efficiency can differ a lot depending on the encoder implementation. It would make more sense to compare specific encoders rather than formats in general.

In 2014 (WebP was released in 2010) Mozilla claimed that the standard JPEG format is not used to it's full potential [1] and introduced mozjpeg project that is still being updated [2]. I wonder how it compares today with current WebP implementations.

[1] https://research.mozilla.org/2014/03/05/introducing-the-mozj... [2] https://github.com/mozilla/mozjpeg

New comment by Fice in "Who makes the most reliable new cars?"

Fice — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 08:45:05 +0000

Of course, no one will be making cars intentionally unsafe, but the law is also a risk factor, the risks of getting fined, jail time or licence revocation count too, and these risks can be made higher.

New comment by Fice in "EU data regulator bans personalised advertising on Facebook and Instagram"

Fice — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 02:14:43 +0000

Advertising does not simply suggest you something that you might need, it often tries to manipulate you into needing something, and with the amounts of personal data being collected and advancements in machine learning this manipulation becomes dangerously effective.

What Tracking Does to the Parent-Child Relationship

Fice — Sun, 24 Sep 2023 23:43:15 +0000

Article URL: https://www.freerangekids.com/what-tracking-does-to-the-parent-child-relationship/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37638223

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by Fice in "mCaptcha: Open-source proof-of-work captcha for websites"

Fice — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 02:30:36 +0000

Telling computers and humans apart is a wrong goal. Every request comes from a computer that is commanded by some human. And why shouldn't users be allowed to use automated user agents when they don't do it for spamming or anything malicious?

CAPTCHA is essentially a proof-of-work variant where challenges are designed to be solved by humans rather than computers, and same as any PoW it works by means of consuming some limited resource (human time, processor time, energy).

New comment by Fice in "Simutrans Turns 25"

Fice — Sun, 04 Sep 2022 20:23:46 +0000

There is also Simutrans-Extended (https://bridgewater-brunel.me.uk/) — a fork that adds even more detail and realism to the simulation and tries to achieve better game balance.

New comment by Fice in "Permacomputing Wiki"

Fice — Wed, 22 Jun 2022 00:56:26 +0000

> Human-sized computing: a reasonable level of complexity for a computing system is that it can be entirely understood by a single person (from the low-level hardware details to the application-level quirks).

"Personal Mastery: If a system is to serve the creative spirit, it must be entirely comprehensible to a single individual."

Dan Ingalls. Design Principles Behind Smalltalk, 1981. http://worrydream.com/refs/Ingalls%20-%20Design%20Principles...

New comment by Fice in "Russia considers legalizing piracy of software from sanction countries"

Fice — Sat, 05 Mar 2022 10:37:32 +0000

Can a vendor be held responsible for anything an unauthorized pirated copy of their software does?

New comment by Fice in "Russia considers legalizing piracy of software from sanction countries"

Fice — Sat, 05 Mar 2022 09:03:10 +0000

You don't. That's a way to punish all users of pirated software.

New comment by Fice in "Russia considers legalizing piracy of software from sanction countries"

Fice — Sat, 05 Mar 2022 08:54:22 +0000

Software vendors can deliberately leak "pirated" copies of their programs to Russian torrent sites with backdoors and other malicious code added. That could be an effective countermeasure.

New comment by Fice in "A GitHub repository was public-viewable"

Fice — Sat, 05 Mar 2022 00:53:24 +0000

Using git is no big deal, but storing the repo on Github means sharing the information with a third party (Microsoft) even if the repo is kept "private".

New comment by Fice in "RIPE NCC executive board resolution on provision of critical services"

Fice — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 13:49:52 +0000

Disruption of the Internet service will be very damaging to Russian anti-war protests.

New comment by Fice in "Neuroscientists have recorded the activity of a dying human brain"

Fice — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 22:48:31 +0000

Our perception of time is very subjective: it is affected by our age, by what we are doing, and it is known that it can be significantly altered by consuming certain substances. We learned from others that there was time before we were born, but do we feel that? In my own subjective perception of time the moment of my birth seems to be infinitely far in the past, and I can't be sure that the final moment of death will be a finite point approachable by consciousness.

New comment by Fice in "Google Tag Manager, the new anti-adblock weapon (2020)"

Fice — Mon, 21 Feb 2022 11:08:08 +0000

> Crazy how evil Google is.

And the even worse evil are the website owners who betray their own users by placing third-party trackers on their own sites.

New comment by Fice in "Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web"

Fice — Mon, 31 Jan 2022 23:19:10 +0000

This is not enough if we don't stop DRM (which Firefox also supports).

DRM essentially means: only allow access with a program that implements certain required measures to restrict user's control over their own computer. Using content decryption blobs to restrict user's access to media streams handled by their own computer — is only a beginning, Web DRM will be eventually extended to allow more restrictions, including those to make it much harder to interfere with the display of ads.