Hacker News: howinteresting

New comment by howinteresting in "GoFetch: New side-channel attack using data memory-dependent prefetchers"

howinteresting — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 22:53:32 +0000

Good communication has always been a part of making sure your work is influential.

New comment by howinteresting in "GoFetch: New side-channel attack using data memory-dependent prefetchers"

howinteresting — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 22:52:44 +0000

The M1 and M2 don't have that bit.

New comment by howinteresting in "California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment"

howinteresting — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 18:40:10 +0000

A human driver at what percentile?

I think AVs need to be better than p95 or so to be socially accepted.

New comment by howinteresting in "Vivaldi on iOS"

howinteresting — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 21:34:42 +0000

It's not just about the engine itself, it's about things like supporting extensions. Safari's content blocker API is less powerful than Firefox's on desktop/Android, for example. I don't know how much of that is a technical engine limitation versus an Apple policy decision.

New comment by howinteresting in "D.C.'s ban on cashless businesses takes effect"

howinteresting — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 02:48:42 +0000

That's Axios for you. I'm sure it appeals to some people.

New comment by howinteresting in "Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux?"

howinteresting — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 21:13:19 +0000

If a company doesn't want at least some element of that, the solution is very simple: drop below a USD $10B valuation by spinning off parts of the company. Note that I said TEN BILLION DOLLARS. A "decacorn". That is an unfathomable amount of money. If you've created a company worth that much you've won at capitalism.

If governments had a good track record I'd advocate for that. No need for strawmen like five year plans, I think competition is a wonderful thing.

My underlying, strong belief is that corporations are legal fictions created primarily to benefit society, Milton Friedman's philosophy notwithstanding.

New comment by howinteresting in "Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux?"

howinteresting — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 20:21:23 +0000

I generally think any company with a >10 billion (2023 US) dollar valuation should be forced to do things that may not directly benefit them but benefit society. Having to publish open specifications for all their proprietary integrations is a pretty easy, relatively low-cost example.

How to make this work in practice is a really interesting question. Community and employee representatives on the board would be a good start. But I think just having the requirement that open specifications be made available, and writing that into legislation, would be great.

New comment by howinteresting in "Influxdb made the switch from Go to Rust"

howinteresting — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 16:24:32 +0000

While one can bring a lot of nuance to the conversation, most imperative languages do not have the &/&mut separation that Rust does and are therefore bad. &/&mut is basically essential to writing correct code in an imperative language.

New comment by howinteresting in "Google assigns a CVE for libwebp and gives it a 10.0 score"

howinteresting — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 18:28:58 +0000

Thank you.

New comment by howinteresting in "Control Center on macOS is always re-rendering its SwiftUI causing 1% CPU load"

howinteresting — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 16:10:54 +0000

It's just another reminder that Apple, like all other big tech companies, is full of mediocre software teams working on unreasonable deadlines.

New comment by howinteresting in "Google assigns a CVE for libwebp and gives it a 10.0 score"

howinteresting — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 16:05:22 +0000

Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. You can start your project in C and release it on an AS IS basis, and we can make fun of you for it, object to its use in professional contexts, and so on.

New comment by howinteresting in "Google assigns a CVE for libwebp and gives it a 10.0 score"

howinteresting — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 16:02:55 +0000

While yes, that's theoretically possible, do you have data to establish this? For example, having small sections of the code be marked as unsafe would allow for greater scrutiny of those sections. Also, unsafe access is more annoying to perform in Rust than in C or C++, so maybe that would have acted as a deterrent (or at least the code would have been profiled to make sure that unsafe access was worth it).

https://security.googleblog.com/2022/12/memory-safe-language... shows improvements at scale.

New comment by howinteresting in "iPhone 15 teardown reveals software lockdown"

howinteresting — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 06:02:39 +0000

Do you sincerely believe what Apple is doing is the least restrictive means to achieve that goal?

New comment by howinteresting in "Ian's Shoelace Site"

howinteresting — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 17:47:29 +0000

I found this site and switched to the secure knot many years ago, and my shoelaces have literally never come undone since. One of those quality of life improvements that I now take for granted.

New comment by howinteresting in "Platform that enables Windows driver development in Rust"

howinteresting — Sun, 24 Sep 2023 19:38:45 +0000

> Rust type system doesn't help when the data resides in a shared memory segment accessed by multiple processes.

This isn't quite true. You can provide a safe abstraction that involves cross-process locking APIs. https://github.com/elast0ny/shared_memory/blob/HEAD/examples... is an example using a mutex guard.

Rust's type system helps more in some cases than others, but you can get at least some help from it almost all of the time.

New comment by howinteresting in "Profile of Sabine Hossenfelder"

howinteresting — Sun, 24 Sep 2023 19:33:08 +0000

Thanks, Captain Obvious.

The fact that both sides think they're correct has absolutely no bearing on who is actually correct. For that we must turn to evidence. The evidence in favor of trans healthcare and identities is overwhelming, and the evidence presented by the other side is laced with non-evidenced religious beliefs like "someone being cis and unhappy is a better outcome for society than someone being trans and happy".

New comment by howinteresting in "Profile of Sabine Hossenfelder"

howinteresting — Sun, 24 Sep 2023 00:53:24 +0000

You've strung a lot of words together that are not attached to reality. Plenty of people are acting very scientifically with regard to trans people—there are hundreds of studies in this regard. "Correlation is not causation" is the beginning of the conversation about the relationship between the two, not the end. (Observational data plus a solid theory is a very powerful way to establish causation.)

The idea that social acceptance of transness is causing more people to identify as trans is is not entirely without merit, but needs to be thought about critically. It is true that people who have low-key gender dysphoria would treat it with increased salience if they became more aware that trans people exist, but that is very clearly a good thing. Society should generally allow people to be true and happy to their selves.

Moreover, while the general direction of social progress has been encouraging, the magnitude of it has been relatively small. We have a very long way to go before we can even begin to control for social stigma as a factor in trans suicidality rates. This last point is evidenced by comments in this very thread.

New comment by howinteresting in "Profile of Sabine Hossenfelder"

howinteresting — Sat, 23 Sep 2023 21:46:07 +0000

The difference between the two sides is that one is correct and the other is not, and that what "normal" (uninformed lay) people think is not really relevant.

edit: Your response has no actual content in it.

New comment by howinteresting in "Profile of Sabine Hossenfelder"

howinteresting — Sat, 23 Sep 2023 20:41:46 +0000

This is a plague among high-IQ people like physicists, quant people and engineers (speaking as someone who has consistently tested 2.5-3 standard deviations above the population average). They're good at pattern matching which is rewarding in those fields but think they can just think through areas outside their expertise without engaging with the literature.

New comment by howinteresting in "Profile of Sabine Hossenfelder"

howinteresting — Sat, 23 Sep 2023 20:38:03 +0000

"On the other side there are those saying that it’s saving the lives of minorities who’ve been forced to stay in the closet for too long. And then there are normal people, like you and I, who think both sides are crazy"

I think this fragment speaks for itself. It is not "crazy" to care about suicide rates or suicidal ideation. It is "crazy" to not care about that.