Hacker News: MikeHolman

New comment by MikeHolman in "New speculative attacks on Apple CPUs"

MikeHolman — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 03:21:06 +0000

I worked on a browser team when Spectre/Meltdown came out, and I can tell you that a big reason why Firefox and Chrome do such severe process isolation is exactly because these speculative attacks are almost impossible to entirely prevent. There were a number of other mitigations including hardening code emitted from C++ compilers and JS JITs, as well as attempts to limit high precision timers, but the browser vendors largely agreed that the only strong defense was complete process isolation.

I'm not surprised to see this come back to bite them if after like 7 years Apple still hasn't adopted the only strong defense.

New comment by MikeHolman in "DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome"

MikeHolman — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 20:41:56 +0000

I think Meta would make the most sense. Funnel people to facebook, instagram, etc. Get all that juicy tracking data and boost additional ad revenue.

Doesn't really seem like much of a win for consumers though... it's just trading one personal data hungry megacorp for another.

New comment by MikeHolman in "RCE Vulnerability in QBittorrent"

MikeHolman — Sat, 02 Nov 2024 16:13:03 +0000

Strongly disagree. 45 days to allow the authors to fix a bug that has been present for over a decade is not really much added risk for users. In this case, 45 days is about 1% additional time for the bug to be around. Maybe someone was exploiting it, but this extra time risk is a drop in the bucket, whereas releasing the bug immediately puts all users at high risk until a patch can be developed/released, and users update their software.

Maybe immediate disclosure would cause a few users to change their behavior, but no one is tracking security disclosures on all the software they use and changing their behavior based on them.

The caveat here is in case you have evidence of active exploitation, then immediate disclosure makes sense.

New comment by MikeHolman in "FedEx Accused of Largest Odometer Rollback Fraud in History with Used Vans"

MikeHolman — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 18:20:57 +0000

I'm sure this isn't something at the exec level, but it seems possible someone somewhere in middle management who oversaw used van sales wanted to increase their revenue numbers and thought cheating the odometer would be an easy way to boost their numbers.

New comment by MikeHolman in "Now Reddit are coming for the individual personal subreddits"

MikeHolman — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 18:11:02 +0000

Why should reddit have to freely support a third-party client that doesn't provide revenue for them?

The only reason is that the status quo is they have in the past freely supported these use cases, but it doesn't seem that unreasonable for commercial use API access to cost money.

New comment by MikeHolman in "The False Promise of ChatGPT"

MikeHolman — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 20:01:46 +0000

I totally agree. The Chinese Room and, in general, philosophical arguments about the limits of AI always seem to come down to the belief of human exceptionalism.

New comment by MikeHolman in "AdGuard publishes the first ad blocker built on Manifest V3"

MikeHolman — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 19:38:21 +0000

>If enough of us do this with personal websites, more and more people will stop using Chrome and start using Firefox. You don't even have to cut Chrome users off from the content -- just annoy them a little, and suggest Firefox.

It's a nice idea, but your personal website doesn't matter. Most people go to a Google website at least a few times a day, and they already tell you to switch to Chrome for the best experience. And almost all of the top non-Google websites also have a vested interest in less adblockers, so none are going to riot over this.

New comment by MikeHolman in "FBI is hiding details about a raid on Americans’ safe deposit boxes"

MikeHolman — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 20:58:33 +0000

The point is that it is much more land efficient for us to directly eat plants than to route the plants through animals first. Cattle use 99% of the calories we feed them for their own functioning. Only 1% actually make it into the meat that we eat.

I wasn't proposing any specific solution, just stating that eating animals does in fact contribute more CO2 than eating plants. And I have no problem with carbon taxes, in fact I'm in favor. A carbon tax could certainly cover this case if it taxes the CO2 that animals emit.

New comment by MikeHolman in "FBI is hiding details about a raid on Americans’ safe deposit boxes"

MikeHolman — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 00:30:54 +0000

Beef is an extremely carbon inefficient source of calories. They require a large amount of land, either directly or indirectly (e.g. from corn fields). Pastures and farmland are not effective carbon sinks. Most land used by cattle was earlier forestland or other land that served as a carbon sink. For example, one of the major causes of rainforest destruction in Brazil is cattle ranching.

New comment by MikeHolman in "Tell HN: We are trying to get tail calls into the WebAssembly standard"

MikeHolman — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 18:47:30 +0000

The compiler absolutely can implement tail calls, I don't know why this keeps getting thrown around. Adding a high-level directive in the spec doesn't enable the compiler to do anything, it just enforces it. The only thing preventing it is browser vendors wanting the .stack property to stay well behaved, but that isn't required by the spec and certainly isn't relevant for non-browser targets.

New comment by MikeHolman in "MIT researchers propose Brazil-sized fleet of “space bubbles” to cool the Earth"

MikeHolman — Wed, 29 Jun 2022 17:46:32 +0000

Even if we did somehow get the political will to fund a project of this magnitude, it could never work. The bubbles would get blamed for every single snowstorm, unseasonably cold day, and any other weather that happened after it was put in place.

I don't think it would last a year before it was taken down, regardless of whether or not it did what it was supposed to do or was responsible for any meteorological event.

New comment by MikeHolman in "Why does this code execute more slowly after strength-reducing multiplications?"

MikeHolman — Sun, 29 May 2022 18:06:47 +0000

Scheduling plays a part, but it is definitely more about vectorization.

New comment by MikeHolman in "PartialExecuter: Reducing WebAssembly size by exploring all executions in LLVM"

MikeHolman — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 18:22:37 +0000

Wasm has the same security risk as executing JavaScript in your browser, except with less risk of XSS type security issues because wasm modules are better encapsulated.

New comment by MikeHolman in "What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped"

MikeHolman — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 21:17:43 +0000

The civilian casualties are obviously tragic, but they are not beyond the scale that we've seen in recent wars the US has fought.

New comment by MikeHolman in "Adversarial image attacks are no joke"

MikeHolman — Mon, 29 Nov 2021 19:59:57 +0000

If the adversarial image is intended to cause car accidents or bodily harm in some way, then the people printing the t-shirts and the people wearing them are already breaking the law.

And if they actually do hurt someone, I imagine they would be criminally liable.

New comment by MikeHolman in "Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres"

MikeHolman — Wed, 21 Jul 2021 19:53:26 +0000

They definitely aren't all at the same level right now, but I'm happy for the competition. Hopefully it will drive innovation.

New comment by MikeHolman in "Alien Dreams: An Emerging Art Scene"

MikeHolman — Fri, 02 Jul 2021 22:29:29 +0000

That's like saying it's not the painter generating any Art, the gallery curating the art through their lens of critical artistic appreciation is the Art.

New comment by MikeHolman in "V8 Sparkplug – A non-optimizing JavaScript compiler"

MikeHolman — Thu, 27 May 2021 18:40:26 +0000

IR is usually represented as a sort of linked list of instructions where you can easily move around instructions, add/remove them, and replace higher level instructions with lower level instructions as you go through compiler passes. At the end, the IR is a linked list of machine instructions, which gets written out to a code buffer as the last step.

Bytecode is usually a buffer of high level instructions that is compact and fast to read (for the machine). Good for interpreting and holding the semantics of a program in a format that is more efficient than the source code, but it is usually not a good format for running compiler passes.

New comment by MikeHolman in "“Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” asks Goldman Sachs (2018)"

MikeHolman — Mon, 17 May 2021 16:28:27 +0000

That completely misses the point. The problem is that companies won't do the research to find cures -- because cures don't make money.

You can't go to India for a cure that doesn't exist.

New comment by MikeHolman in "“They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”"

MikeHolman — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 19:55:11 +0000

As someone who used to maintain a large C++ codebase, people usually bug-dump static analysis results rather than actually submitting fixes, but blindly "fixing" code that a static analysis tool claims to have issue with is not surprising to see either.

If the patches were accepted, the person could have used those fixes to justify the benefits of the static analysis tool they wrote.