Hacker News: deeringc

New comment by deeringc in "WebUSB Extension for Firefox"

deeringc — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 19:21:42 +0000

I see this slightly differently. Before, if I wanted to be able to do something like flash firmware onto some device I would have to download some random C++ application and install and run it on my local machine. As well as having access to all of my USB devices, it also had access to everything else on my system's user context. I didn't have a way of running that code and only giving it access to a single USB device and nothing else. Now, I can avoid installing anything at all. I visit the project page and opt-in to some flashing flow that's running in a sandboxed env. When the app requests it, the browser asks me for permission and I get to choose exactly which USB device I want to give it access too. That's picking exactly the minimum "outside" access I want to give it, nothing more. It doesnt get to read/write other USB devices I didnt choose. I doesnt get to read/write to my filesystem. It doesnt get to call system APIs. It doesnt get to set itself to start at startup. It doesnt get to install an auto-updater. For me, this is a better security posture than installing random win32 apps.

New comment by deeringc in "BarraCUDA Open-source CUDA compiler targeting AMD GPUs"

deeringc — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 10:34:52 +0000

I really like the minimal approach you've taken here - it's refreshing to see this built completely from the ground up and it's clearly readable and for me, very educational.

But help me understand something. BarraCuda does its own codegen and therefore has to implement its own optimisation layer? It's increbibly impressive to get "working" binaries, but will it ever become a "viable" alternative to nvidia's CUDA if it has to re-invent decades of optimisation techniques? Is there a performance comparison between the binaries produced by this compiler and the nvidia one? Is this something you working on as an interesting technical project to learn from and prove that this "can be done"? Or are you trying to create something that can make CUDA a realistic option on AMD GPUs?

New comment by deeringc in "BarraCUDA Open-source CUDA compiler targeting AMD GPUs"

deeringc — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 10:05:05 +0000

> /* 80 keywords walk into a sorted bar */

https://github.com/Zaneham/BarraCUDA/blob/master/src/lexer.c...

New comment by deeringc in "Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun"

deeringc — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 09:34:45 +0000

Instant SEPA is free - see Instant Payments Regulation (IPR) — Regulation (EU) 2024/886.

New comment by deeringc in "The Codex App"

deeringc — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 12:35:15 +0000

So, this certainly was a valid argument. But it seems to me that the whole value proposition behind these agentic AI coding tools is to be able to move beyond this. Are we very far from being able to define some Figmas and technical specs and have Codex generate the UIs in 5 different stacks? If that isn't a reality in the near future, then why should we buy AI Tools?

New comment by deeringc in "Spain to ban social media access for under-16s, PM Sanchez says"

deeringc — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 11:51:23 +0000

It's possible to build an identity system that can assert certain properties about a person (eg. "older than 16") without revealing any other details about that person. Similarly, it's also possible to build such a system where the identity system can attest these details without knowing which website is being accessed. That way, the social media site (or whatever other "adult" service) can validate the user is old enough, while the identity system doesnt track who is using what.

New comment by deeringc in "France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc."

deeringc — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 09:22:57 +0000

There was also Nortell

New comment by deeringc in "Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage"

deeringc — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 10:28:40 +0000

Doesn't Apple have an ARM "Architectural License" arising from being one of the original founding firms behind ARM, which they helped create back in the 90s for the Apple Newton. That license allows them to design their own ARM-compatible chips. The companies they bought more recently gave them the talent to use their existing license, but they always had the right to design their own chips.

New comment by deeringc in "Google Antigravity"

deeringc — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 19:52:03 +0000

It's interesting to think that Google's Antigravity is a forked version of MSFT's VS Code, which uses a browser engine built by Google, which they forked from Apple, which they forked from KHTML.

New comment by deeringc in "Users only care about 20% of your application"

deeringc — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 12:43:44 +0000

I would have expected that consumer GPUs still have higher volume, but that Datacenter GPUs have much, much higher margin and therefore significantly higher revenue and profit. Is that not the case?

New comment by deeringc in "Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year"

deeringc — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 09:30:21 +0000

It also seems like a really bad decision from Slack's POV.

1) They should know that this is unaffordable for a nonprofit like this. By doing this, they will almost certainly lose them and their thousands of aspiring teenage developers as users. The chance of actually booking that 200K are next to 0.

2) Microsoft learned a long time ago the value of getting young developers using your software to learn. Once those teens start working, maybe starting their own companies or choosing which tools to use at their future empoyers, if they know Slack they are very likely to pick Slack. This is a very short sighted shakedown attempt that wont work in the short term but will drive people away in the medium term.

New comment by deeringc in "Ten years of JSON Web Token and preparing for the future"

deeringc — Mon, 26 May 2025 14:02:09 +0000

JSON Web Tokens are part of the JSON Object Signing and Encryption (JOSE) family of standards which are really just containers for cryptographic primitives in a web-friendly representation. Most people are aware of JWS (signed payloads) but there are also JWE (encrypted payloads) and JWK (key payloads). If you're building any sort of cryptographic system that needs to represent encrypted/signed values or keys, you can use JOSE to represent these primitives without having to reinvent the wheel. By far the biggest use of JOSE is in authentication systems where JWS are used as signed bearer tokens but that's just one application and there are many others. They arent perfect, but they filled an important gap when they were created and made it much easier to deal with crypto at an application layer compared with all of hte binary formats that are used in things like TLS.

New comment by deeringc in "Ten years of JSON Web Token and preparing for the future"

deeringc — Mon, 26 May 2025 09:45:58 +0000

Enterprise customers often have split tunnel VPNs or proxies (with PAC configs) where part of the traffic may go through a VPN and another part goes directly. So for example a customer admin might configure an app that does email and webRTC so that the real time traffic (media and the associated signalling) goes directly and the email traffic goes via some TLS intercepting proxy for some compliance reason or DLP. This can result in one application having multiple public IPs for different network requests, even while they are on one internal network (not even jumping between networks like you say). That isnt something that the application author can control, it's the customer admin that decides to do that.

New comment by deeringc in "Millions are visiting the European Alternatives site. What trends are we seeing?"

deeringc — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 15:39:13 +0000

Whenever they have, they have been bought by larger and richer (mostloy US) tech companies. Look at Deepmind, Skype, Nokia, Tandberg, etc... Arm is another (although Japanese rather than US-owned). There are also many cases where European founders base their companies out the States for access to higher funding (eg Stripe, Spotify). Another factor is that US multinationals have a large presence across Europe in terms of employment - if a large component of the top tech talent of Europe is employed by US companies then they are less likely to build large European companies.

New comment by deeringc in "Limbo: A complete rewrite of SQLite in Rust"

deeringc — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 20:00:53 +0000

I agree on a level that SQLIte is a master class in testing and quality. However, considering how widely used it is (essentially every client application on the planet) and that it does get several memory safety CVEs every year there is some merit in a rewrite in a memory safe language.

New comment by deeringc in "Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update"

deeringc — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 02:26:32 +0000

I don't think dual core was that rare in 2007. Conroe was released the year before. For gamers, dual core was the standard at that point (at least from what I remember of the time).

New comment by deeringc in "C++ String Conversion: Exploring std:from_chars in C++17 to C++26"

deeringc — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 21:06:59 +0000

I believe the impl you link to is not fully standards compliant, and has an approximate soln.

MSFT's one is totally standards compliant and it is a very different beast: https://github.com/microsoft/STL/blob/main/stl/inc/charconv

Apart from various nuts and bolts optimizations (eg not using locales, better cache friendless, etc...) it also uses a novel algorithm which is an order of magnitude quicker for many floating points tasks (https://github.com/ulfjack/ryu).

If you actually want to learn about this, then watch the video I linked earlier.

New comment by deeringc in "C++ String Conversion: Exploring std:from_chars in C++17 to C++26"

deeringc — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 10:01:05 +0000

There's also the new Ryu algorithm that is being used, which is probably the biggest speed up.

https://github.com/ulfjack/ryu

New comment by deeringc in "C++ String Conversion: Exploring std:from_chars in C++17 to C++26"

deeringc — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 09:57:23 +0000

You might want to watch this releavnt video from Stephan T. Lavavej (the Microsoft STL maintainer): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4P_kbF0EbZM

New comment by deeringc in "Manifest V2 phase-out begins"

deeringc — Fri, 31 May 2024 09:28:57 +0000

Any reason it needs to be a chromium fork, and not simply FF?