Hacker News: greggman

New comment by greggman in "In Pursuit of Production Minimalism"

greggman — Fri, 03 Aug 2018 03:18:18 +0000

I agree with the points being made here but there's also that issue that your custom creation is the next employee's 3rd party solution.

New comment by greggman in "Adventures in vulnerability reporting"

greggman — Fri, 03 Aug 2018 02:35:40 +0000

Hackerone and some issues with it are brought up in the article.

New comment by greggman in "Better slow than sorry – VirtualBox 3D acceleration considered harmful"

greggman — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 07:02:12 +0000

love the ignorant downvotes. I wrote the chrome GPU subsystem. if you have evidence that I'm wrong post it. otherwise your just spreading FUD

New comment by greggman in "Better slow than sorry – VirtualBox 3D acceleration considered harmful"

greggman — Tue, 31 Jul 2018 23:38:18 +0000

your post is FUD. that issus was solved immediately and the actually bug listed had nothing special to do with graphics and is just a bug like a bug in javascripy or the browser in general. a bug that was fixed. If you're going to off WebGL based on that bug then you'd better turn off your entire browser

New comment by greggman in "Better slow than sorry – VirtualBox 3D acceleration considered harmful"

greggman — Tue, 31 Jul 2018 23:34:41 +0000

Chrome itself doesn't have these issues. In particular it doesn't support features that would raise these kinds of issues. For one it's not supporting all of desktop opengl it's only supporting the subset that needed for WebGL. All of if is massively validated , shaders are rewritten, bound checked, memory cleared, clamps added, etc...

New comment by greggman in "Some Amazon Reviews Are Too Good to Be Believed – They're Paid For"

greggman — Tue, 31 Jul 2018 03:38:19 +0000

I hate it too but rather than just complain is it a solvable problem?

Reply All had an resent episode about it

https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/124#episode-player

first they had fake reviews. Amazobn required actual purchases so companies would pay people to purchase and return. you can't ban returns otherwise there would be no negative reviews.

how can this be solved? some kind of reputation system? how would you lose rep?

I love to hear your ideas?

New comment by greggman in "A new security header: Feature Policy"

greggman — Mon, 30 Jul 2018 15:13:22 +0000

I actually wish it was the default to have to ask for permission for mic and camera everytime. one extra click doesn't seem overly burdensome to me. I'd even prefer that for native apps.

New comment by greggman in "A History of Individually Wrapped Cheese Slices (1979) [pdf]"

greggman — Mon, 30 Jul 2018 15:05:47 +0000

the issue is culture. customers want this. it seems fancy/nice/luxury/high-class. so companies are not going to gut their own sales. If you want it to change imo you need to change the customers' minds so they actually want less wrapping.

corps have changed by PR. no demand = no sales = change.

New comment by greggman in "A History of Individually Wrapped Cheese Slices (1979) [pdf]"

greggman — Mon, 30 Jul 2018 11:19:38 +0000

This topic brings up the issue of wrapping in Japan. Japan is notorious for having excessive wrapping. Individually wrapped cookies in a box with a plastic tray to hold each cookie. The bottom half of the box is sealed with a plastic tear off cover. The top of the box slides over. Then the entire box is wrapped in paper. If you purchase if they will then put it in a branded paper bag. If it's raining they will then put that paper bag in a plastic bag to protect it from the rain. That's 6 levels of wrapping.

It's a cultural thing AFAICT. Sure people speak out once in while but it seems unlikely to change without some major major concerted national PR effort against it, getting celebrities, politicians, etc all on board pushing for months or years and possibly even organizing boycotts until things change. But, if someone wants to do their part of make a small dent here well, here's a project you can try to take on.

New comment by greggman in "The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?"

greggman — Mon, 30 Jul 2018 11:08:49 +0000

As far as I understand the point is supposed to be the blockchain is distributed trust. The longest chain = proof of most work = the truth. The only reason someone can't basically change the entire history of the blockchain is because no one has 51% control of the chain. The only reason no one has 51% control of the chain in bitcoin is because so many people are mining it to earn coins.

But, for medical records there is no such incentive. Therefore anyone can easily change the records or add new ones and claim everyone else who has a shorter chain has the wrong chain (which will be like no one since there is no incentive to mine).

So I'm probably just informed how blockchain is supposed to help here. Without the distributed trust there's no plus to blockchain. And without the incentive to mine that generates millions of miners there is way to have the distributed trust.

I'm happy to be wrong but I haven't see an explanation how this issue is solved for all these non virtual currency uses cases.

New comment by greggman in "The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?"

greggman — Sun, 29 Jul 2018 23:20:51 +0000

How does block chain solve this problem any more than a plain old text file with your medical history?

IIUC the only thing keeping bitcoin's blockchain trustworthy is millions of people mining new coins and therefore distributively verifying the blockchain. Who would be doing that for your medical records and what would their incentive be to do it?

New comment by greggman in "Adobe Flash’s Gaming Legacy and My Efforts To Save It"

greggman — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 23:00:13 +0000

how is MacOS to a much less extent?

New comment by greggman in "The year Mexico legalised drugs"

greggman — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 21:10:39 +0000

they didn't forget. The department tasked with prohibiting alcohol consumption lobbied to ban other things so they'd continue to have jobs.

New comment by greggman in "New York Could Become First Major U.S. City to Cap Uber and Similar Vehicles"

greggman — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 20:53:12 +0000

Subways not running between 1am and 5am seems like a good thing to me if it means they can use that time to maintain the tracks and stations.

The trains and subways in Tokyo are amazing, clean, on time but they stop at 1am and start up around 5am. That sucks for you if you don't want to cab it home after around 12am. As a night owl I love it though as it means there are tons of night venues that are open until at least 5am and I just add the cab fare into my "entertainment budget" if I don't intend to stay out all night.

New comment by greggman in "The last thing libraries need is Silicon Valley “disruption.”"

greggman — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 20:42:25 +0000

I haven't been to a library in 30 years or so but it used to be that the list of people who borrowed the book were written in a piece of paper in the book itself.

So yes, I can imagine when it was normal to be able to know who borrowed a book last.

This was also common in Japan as it's important to the plot of the movie "Whispers of the Heart" (English title)

New comment by greggman in "Is WebAssembly the Return of Java Applets and Flash?"

greggman — Fri, 27 Jul 2018 01:32:21 +0000

It is and it isn't. Unity is great but it's got like a min 5MB download for just a spinning cube. Flash (because the plugin was built in) started instantly and had built in support for streaming. Unity can stream, after the 5MB engine download, but for whatever reason it's not common.

New comment by greggman in "Secret History of Silicon Valley (2009)"

greggman — Thu, 26 Jul 2018 11:20:10 +0000

From my POV (maybe I'm just looking in a different direction?) I see way more people programming out of intellectual curiosity and fun than ever before. As just one example the 2018 Global Game Jam had 8,608 game created in a weekend. The Unity community is HUGE. The Processing community, the Open Frameworks community, the Three.js community. Not seeing a lack of people doing programming for curiosity and fun.

New comment by greggman in "The security model of WebAssembly"

greggman — Thu, 26 Jul 2018 11:00:48 +0000

I'm not following you at all. What does loading images have to do with WebAssembly? How will you get webassembly to block based on loading an image? Every API in the browser works on events.

New comment by greggman in "Apple's iPhones Trail Samsung, Google Devices in Internet Speeds"

greggman — Thu, 26 Jul 2018 04:05:40 +0000

it is happening now. If iOS Safari doesn't support something its basically no go period. other browsers even on other platforms are effected because web developers can't use the new apis given that 20% of the market has zero choice.

New comment by greggman in "Page Lifecycle API"

greggman — Thu, 26 Jul 2018 00:58:07 +0000

the left half isn't talking to the right.

the webassembly / webgpu / webvr people are trying to bring multi gigabyte games to the web and the page lifecycle people are trying to make it so every time you put that.tab in the back you have to wait several minutes for the data to reload.