Hacker News: floil

New comment by floil in "Vomit: Clean up Claude 5's token output with a separate LLM"

floil — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 17:57:39 +0000

I'm unfamiliar with claudish and the example helped show the problem. But! There was something uncomfortably familiar in the Claudish example -- this is the way human programmers write when they're deep in the weedy details, and writing the changelist description afterwards as if coming up for air. Overuse of parentheses in nested lists especially, as if the English text needs to bend to the strict needs of a C++ parser.

The rewrite did seem to lose the important fact about the ensure- pattern being idempotent.

New comment by floil in "Google fixed more Chrome bugs in June than over the past two years, thanks to AI"

floil — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 19:02:23 +0000

This is correct (I worked on chrome in 2008) it's important to remember that chrome's renderer was webkit, an existing c++ stack.

Chrome's stability innovation was to run different tabs in different processes, and the security innovation was then to sandbox those processes.

Rust would have been super nice but it wasn't an option then, and of course let's remember that Rust was developed by Mozilla specifically with the goal of making safer browsers.

New comment by floil in "What we learned making a plastic injection mold with a Chinese mold maker"

floil — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 16:09:15 +0000

And to connect it back to the original post: the moments that make me cringe the most in Grand Designs are the ones where the owner decides, as a cost-cutting measure, to manage the project themselves despite not having prior domain experience. Whereas the author of this article successfully engaged an expert early on, and saw it pay dividends, despite the up front cost.

New comment by floil in "“The most beautiful of all printed books,” the Kelmscott Chaucer"

floil — Sat, 05 Aug 2023 21:03:43 +0000

> leafing through the book with gloves

Rare books are typically handled with bare hands rather than gloves. Gloves increase the risk of damage.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/09/arts/rare-books-white-glo...

New comment by floil in "Engineers develop water filtration that removes “forever chemicals”"

floil — Sun, 30 Apr 2023 18:41:52 +0000

My interpretation: the paper describes a system that works for a starting concentration of 200 parts per billion, or higher. This is unrealistic because, in real world contamination scenario, you would expect to see a starting concentration of around 1 part per billion.

New comment by floil in "Read “Gravity’s Rainbow” fifty years later"

floil — Thu, 06 Apr 2023 07:14:28 +0000

I've read the book twice, decades apart, and it gave me great joy each times in very different ways.

I can see how this text causes some to experience the opposite of joy.

Both experiences are valid. But like there's not some big conspiracy of people who claim to like this book or this writer as a facade. They say it's great because, for them, it's a wonderful and meaningful experience.

New comment by floil in "Why is a browser extension required to access research papers?"

floil — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 16:32:14 +0000

Chrome browser extensions aren't really compiled, though I suppose they can be obfuscated. If you install this extension you ought to be able to find it in your Chrome profile directory and look at the manifest and JS source.

(former longtime chrome engineer here)

New comment by floil in "Overkill objects for everyday life"

floil — Sun, 30 May 2021 19:17:55 +0000

Both the KitchenAid and the Hobart use a planetary action which is not the best for kneading bread. A better idea is to find a small spiral mixer where the bowl rotates and the mixer blade spins in place. I have a Haussler Alpha and it's great for tough doughs, and seems appropriately overbuilt.

New comment by floil in "Site Isolation in Firefox"

floil — Wed, 19 May 2021 02:03:44 +0000

Site Isolation launched in Chrome in 2018, but the work started in earnest in 2012 -- see the below check-in. The idea in Chrome dated to before the Chrome 1.0 launch; it was the subject of Charlie Reis's PhD dissertation and he interned on Chrome pre-public launch.

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/c6f2e67ab40...

Site isolation proved to be the biggest refactor in Chrome's history, and was one of the motivating reasons for the webkit/blink fork. Making site isolation work touched a huge host of features, since handling iframes out of process has a way of making simple things incredibly complicated.

The example I always gave was: imagine how the "find text in page" browser feature would be implemented. With the entire document in-process, it was a simple for loop. With the document and its subframes sharded across multiple processes, it is now a distributed search problem that requires handling of out-of-order results and stitching them into a traversal order. What's more, to achieve Chrome's security goals, you want to avoid introducing functionality that would allow the [presumed-compromised] process of the outer document to query the contents of the inner document via the find in page feature. So you can't simply do this as a peer-to-peer query between the renderer processes; it needs to be coordinated by the main browser process.

Congrats to the Firefox team on this milestone.

New comment by floil in "Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards"

floil — Tue, 18 May 2021 20:52:44 +0000

It's not a whole new level. An aspect of Quadro differentiation has, since ages ago, been based on selectively disabling features that the consumer gpus silicon was capable of. It's the same strategy here.

This makes sense to Nvidia because it creates a segment differentiation and will allow them to charge more for the higher hash rate parts.

New comment by floil in "Surviving Disillusionment"

floil — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 18:04:41 +0000

As someone who walked away from programming two years ago, reading this stirred something in my heart that I honestly haven't felt since quitting. I've been frankly surprised that I haven't had the desire to code in that time, but it turns out I am nostalgic about the times when coding was a fun process of self discovery.

This article gives me the inkling of a way back to get back to there. Thanks to whoever shared it.

New comment by floil in "Chromium's Impact on Root DNS Traffic"

floil — Fri, 21 Aug 2020 06:20:24 +0000

Fairly certain this feature is more then ten years old.

New comment by floil in "Design Docs at Google"

floil — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 22:14:46 +0000

Here you go: https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents

New comment by floil in "Bike crash left Spokane man unconscious, so his Apple Watch called 911"

floil — Wed, 25 Sep 2019 04:46:47 +0000

When I was a kid, my next door neighbor was an ultra-marathoner and the fittest person I'd ever met. He died suddenly one day of a heart attack while out on a run.

New comment by floil in "Adventures in Curling"

floil — Mon, 02 Sep 2019 07:46:24 +0000

Read it as "both decelerate more slowly and rotate more slowly" and it's an accurate description of what happens when you sweep in front of a curling stone.

New comment by floil in "In California, giant Stratolaunch jet flies for first time"

floil — Sun, 14 Apr 2019 20:25:10 +0000

Can confirm. The whole group working on that effort has been laid off.

New comment by floil in "Google has added DuckDuckGo as a search engine option for Chrome users"

floil — Wed, 13 Mar 2019 16:17:42 +0000

Fwiw: this has always been the case, since Chrome 1.0.

What is phonetics? A 20 minute guide

floil — Sun, 30 Dec 2018 22:04:26 +0000

Article URL: https://christiandicanio.blogspot.com/2018/12/what-is-phonetics-20-minute-guide-for.html?m=1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18791630

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by floil in "Show HN: Fancy fonts you can use almost anywhere"

floil — Mon, 17 Dec 2018 20:49:03 +0000

In chromium, the glyph attack defense works by normalizing to a "confusability skeleton" -- the ICU library actually does the normalization. Even within latin-1 this does some mangling: m gets normalized to rn, w to vv, etc. The query rewriting is a different problem, but it's possible it uses the confusables list as an input.

New comment by floil in "A look at home routers, and a surprising bug in Linux/MIPS"

floil — Sat, 15 Dec 2018 18:10:04 +0000

For myself, I switched everything over to Google WiFi's, precisely because they auto-update, and having worked previously on a security-focused team at Google, I trust them to have a competent security team and actually stay on top of the patches. I don't miss fussing with manually updating router firmware. Life is too short.

On the other hand, my Nest thermostats were bricked after a software update this week, so maybe today I'm starting to see a crack in my "auto update is best" dogma...