Hacker News: PyroLagus

New comment by PyroLagus in "There are too many screens, time to go back to gauges"

PyroLagus — Sun, 19 Jan 2020 20:52:47 +0000

You shouldn't check calls or texts while driving regardless of the type of phone, and on a smartphone you can at least have it announce who is calling or who sent the text (and even read the text for you.) You can also tell the phone to accept the call and put it on speaker (although that's technically also unsafe, but so is having a conversation with another person in the car while driving.)

New comment by PyroLagus in "Mozilla lays off 70"

PyroLagus — Thu, 16 Jan 2020 17:11:31 +0000

Why would it matter whether the CEO can code?

New comment by PyroLagus in "Mozilla lays off 70"

PyroLagus — Thu, 16 Jan 2020 16:35:05 +0000

That just sounds terrible for both SEO and accessibility.

New comment by PyroLagus in "The struggle to name lab-grown meat"

PyroLagus — Mon, 16 Dec 2019 23:31:41 +0000

Lab-grown diamond faced the same issue, but now it's considered diamond just the same by the FTC, so I'm not sure what the farmers are hoping for.

New comment by PyroLagus in "Return-oriented programming-based CSGO, BF3, BF4 cheat"

PyroLagus — Sun, 27 Oct 2019 11:35:19 +0000

Apex Legends wants to do that at least. I think it's a pretty clever idea.

https://kotaku.com/apex-legends-will-make-cheaters-play-agai...

New comment by PyroLagus in "Return-oriented programming-based CSGO, BF3, BF4 cheat"

PyroLagus — Sun, 27 Oct 2019 11:30:36 +0000

> I've got no problem with people writing hacks for games; with the shit that gets released these days I expect it would often be far more rewarding than playing the game itself.

Hacks in singleplayer games are fun. Hacks in multiplayer games are not. If someone thinks the game is shit and unrewarding, they should just not play it and not ruin it for everyone else.

New comment by PyroLagus in "Return-oriented programming-based CSGO, BF3, BF4 cheat"

PyroLagus — Sun, 27 Oct 2019 11:27:59 +0000

It's not petty. Hacks in multiplayer games ruin the game for everyone else, and the hack developer hopes that the hack will stay undetected forever. That's not proud. It's more like "I hope you can use this to be assholes and ruin the game for all other players as long as the game exists."

Also, this is just a game, but if it was ransomware and the dev said "hopefully this ransomware will be antivirus undetected for ever", you'd probably have a different opinion, no?

New comment by PyroLagus in "Artificial blood developed for patients of any blood type, researchers say"

PyroLagus — Mon, 07 Oct 2019 16:00:42 +0000

> including your own blood previously stored

Wait, really?

New comment by PyroLagus in "Google Is Uncovering Hundreds of Race Conditions Within the Linux Kernel"

PyroLagus — Thu, 03 Oct 2019 18:18:32 +0000

So lock-free datastructures such as ring buffers are like roundabouts, huh?

New comment by PyroLagus in "Ask HN: Will getting a PhD lead to a more interesting life?"

PyroLagus — Mon, 30 Sep 2019 14:02:45 +0000

Value isn't always apparent immediately. Quantum theory seemed largely useless, but now it's useful in computing.

New comment by PyroLagus in "Google to stop showing news snippets for French users"

PyroLagus — Sat, 28 Sep 2019 21:41:09 +0000

Opting out is a trivial technical matter. You could even completely opt out of their search engine indexing if you so desire.

New comment by PyroLagus in "Google to stop showing news snippets for French users"

PyroLagus — Sat, 28 Sep 2019 21:35:41 +0000

But they were always able to opt-out of the snippets quite easily. What they wanted was to have the snippets AND to get paid on top of that.

New comment by PyroLagus in "Google to stop showing news snippets for French users"

PyroLagus — Sat, 28 Sep 2019 21:29:25 +0000

Well, to be fair. Everyone on here just reads the headlines and then the comments.

New comment by PyroLagus in "Google to stop showing news snippets for French users"

PyroLagus — Sat, 28 Sep 2019 21:11:29 +0000

If the news site uses AdSense, which quite a few do, then yes. But I'm not sure if Google's extra profit is that significant. Especially when compared to the benefits the news sites get.

New comment by PyroLagus in "Open-Source Seeds"

PyroLagus — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 18:04:03 +0000

> GMO that don't produce viable seeds so I have to buy seeds from you every season.

This is literally DRM for plants, isn't it?

New comment by PyroLagus in "My Talk at Microsoft"

PyroLagus — Mon, 23 Sep 2019 14:00:08 +0000

> HTML and CSS are content, not software (they're not executables) - they're like DOC or PDF.

Well… https://keithclark.co.uk/labs/css-fps/

You could also argue that DOCs and PDFs are software.

New comment by PyroLagus in "Reinventing Home Directories – systemd-homed [pdf]"

PyroLagus — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 20:38:56 +0000

> I'm going to pass on this one. How is /etc not 'extensible'?

Without commenting on systemd-homed, since I haven't watched the talk yet; regular users can't modify /etc. Granted, most applications have user local configuration or a command line option to specify a config file, but not all. That said, I suppose you could always user namespace overlay mount a custom directory over /etc to add custom files to it.

New comment by PyroLagus in "Why Go and Not Rust?"

PyroLagus — Mon, 16 Sep 2019 18:48:13 +0000

Also, even disregarding security issues. Maybe you just don't want your video game to crash during a boss fight? Memory safety isn't just important for security; it can also prevent lots of annoying bugs.

New comment by PyroLagus in "Why Go and Not Rust?"

PyroLagus — Mon, 16 Sep 2019 18:39:51 +0000

GUI is definitely an open problem in Rust, but to be fair, cross platform GUI is hard. In all of programming, it seems that Qt is about the best that we have when it comes to cross platform GUI, and I don't think most Rust developers care enough about Windows to write and maintain native Windows-only GUI libraries. C# (or I guess F# or any of the other .NET languages) is definitely a better fit for Windows UI programming.

New comment by PyroLagus in "Why Go and Not Rust?"

PyroLagus — Mon, 16 Sep 2019 18:00:36 +0000

I wonder if it is actually more complex. Emergent complexity is a thing, and one only needs to look at Go (the game; pun definitely (not) intended). The rules are dead-simple; you can learn them in under a minute. But to actually play the game well, you have to learn a lot more. You have to memorize openings, learn to identify and utilize patterns, etc. There is a lot of "meta-play" going on, and you could say that high-level Go play is full of abstractions. In fact, you won't have a chance without the abstractions. If you only see individual stones rather than shapes, you're done for. I think the same applies to languages like Go. You don't have generics, but if you want to effectively re-use code, you need abstractions. The difference now is that in languages like Rust, you have predefined and marked abstractions, while in Go, you define them yourself and need to recognize them yourself. Granted, Go also makes certain kinds of abstractions difficult or impossible to manually define within the language, so you may end up with copy-pasted code, but I imagine even that will be manually abstracted through naming and such.

The Rust iterator is a pretty simple abstraction in my opinion. It's essentially a lazy list. You see an iterator used, you know what you're getting. You see the map function used, you know it's the same as a for loop over all the elements. A fold/reduce is just a for loop over all elements with a result variable that gets returned. I really don't think using iterators is any more complex than a for loop, and with a for loop, you actually have to look through it to identify the pattern used and find out what it does. I'd say having to manually check for patterns is more work, but I couldn't say which one is more complex; maybe neither is.