Hacker News: jandem

New comment by jandem in "Hardening Firefox with Anthropic's Red Team"

jandem — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 12:35:50 +0000

Here's a write-up for one of the bugs they found: https://red.anthropic.com/2026/exploit/

New comment by jandem in "Is WebAssembly Memory64 worth using?"

jandem — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 08:02:55 +0000

Crypto miners written in JS existed long before WebAssembly. Back then people also compiled large C++ code bases to (highly obfuscated) JS code and out of these heroic efforts grew asm.js which then evolved to WebAssembly. WebAssembly is a much better compile target than JS with more low-level types and primitives, but it's very similar to JS code in what it can and can't do in the browser.

Compiling a C++ application to megabytes of JS code doesn't make the result any more open-source or non-DRM than compiling the same thing to WebAssembly (you could translate Wasm to the equivalent but slower JS code).

New comment by jandem in "Optimizing the Ion compiler back end"

jandem — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 06:08:41 +0000

Nice to hear from you! Yes it was a very reasonable choice back then, before (enormous) asm.js and Wasm functions.

The compiler wasn't really designed for these huge graphs, but fortunately a lot of the issues can be fixed incrementally and it's still holding up well.

New comment by jandem in "ElonJet Is Now Suspended"

jandem — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 18:12:23 +0000

The point is that Musk has been talking a lot about being a free speech absolutist. He even said this last month:

> My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk

And now he's banning accounts. That doesn't make sense for a free speech absolutist.

New comment by jandem in "Thunderbird 91.0"

jandem — Thu, 12 Aug 2021 14:15:31 +0000

I think part of this is just time to get used to something new? You might notice some improvements too, for instance only after I started using Fastmail I realized the Gmail UI can be pretty slow and heavyweight although I never noticed this before.

New comment by jandem in "Stealing private documents through a bug in Google Docs"

jandem — Mon, 28 Dec 2020 18:48:37 +0000

This behavior is defined in the HTML spec, here:

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/browsers.html#crossor...

New comment by jandem in "Google users locked out after 15 years' use"

jandem — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 14:01:05 +0000

> With Fastmail or another provider, you're trusting another corp.

You're trusting a corp that offers customer support, a service you pay them for. With Gmail you're completely on your own because you're only a small cog in the massive data mining machine. That's a pretty big difference.

That said, it's a good idea to set up a custom domain with a trusted registrar.

New comment by jandem in "Google users locked out after 15 years' use"

jandem — Mon, 02 Nov 2020 12:53:58 +0000

I migrated to Fastmail a few weeks ago. I'm really happy with it and I wish I had done it years ago. Many features. The web interface and apps feel a lot faster than Gmail.

Pro-tip: use a custom domain so that you can easily switch e-mail providers in the future without vendor lock-in. It's also very easy to add aliases in Fastmail.

> Plus after the import is finished, it will still periodically bring over any new emails received to the Gmail account.

Another option is to let Gmail forward your email to the new address.

New comment by jandem in "Firefox's JIT is getting significantly faster"

jandem — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 17:38:06 +0000

> It’s a big deal and everyone who contributed should be super proud.

Thanks! We actually haven't really analyzed Speedometer (and most other benchmarks) yet with Warp so I expect this number to improve the coming months. The design seems to be holding up well and we're really excited about building on this.

Cranelift code generator ships in Firefox for aarch64

jandem — Thu, 03 Sep 2020 10:08:57 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/bnjbvr/status/1301422660476383233

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24362501

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

SpiderMonkey Newsletter 5 (Firefox 78-79)

jandem — Fri, 03 Jul 2020 15:05:02 +0000

Article URL: https://mozilla-spidermonkey.github.io/blog/2020/07/03/newsletter-5.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23724621

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by jandem in "Memory in JavaScript – Beyond Leaks (2019)"

jandem — Mon, 22 Jun 2020 11:47:29 +0000

SpiderMonkey dev here. Does this reproduce for you with a clean profile? Because I just tried this with 78.0b9 too and for the first one, Local (original), I get 6.7 ms in the Web Console, very similar to what I see in Chrome. I didn't look at the other ones.

SpiderMonkey Newsletter 4 (Firefox 76-77)

jandem — Mon, 11 May 2020 16:07:06 +0000

Article URL: https://spidermonkey.dev/blog/2020/05/11/newsletter-4.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23143595

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New Sandboxing Approach in Web Browser Increases Security

jandem — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 16:19:53 +0000

Article URL: https://cns.utexas.edu/news/new-sandboxing-approach-in-web-browser-increases-security

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22414404

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

SpiderMonkey Newsletter 2 (Firefox 73)

jandem — Mon, 13 Jan 2020 16:07:52 +0000

Article URL: https://spidermonkey.dev/blog/2020/01/10/newsletter-2.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22035621

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by jandem in "Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision"

jandem — Thu, 19 Dec 2019 16:24:13 +0000

For background, see http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/04/26/synchronous-text/

1Password X 1.17: New brain, new menu, and even more accessible

jandem — Thu, 05 Dec 2019 08:36:20 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.1password.com/1passwordx-december-2019-release/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21710818

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by jandem in "The Bytecode Alliance: Building a secure, composable future for WebAssembly"

jandem — Tue, 12 Nov 2019 18:42:36 +0000

> So why aren't people just shipping straight up LLVM intermediate language VMs and instead go through wasm?

This is answered in the WebAssembly FAQ: https://webassembly.org/docs/faq/#why-not-just-use-llvm-bitc...

Firefox blocked 450B privacy invasions in less than 4 months

jandem — Tue, 22 Oct 2019 13:25:49 +0000

Article URL: https://www.fastcompany.com/90419899/firefox-blocked-450-billion-trackers-in-less-than-4-months

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21323324

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by jandem in "How to pack a Norwegian sandwich, the world’s most boring lunch"

jandem — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 07:19:03 +0000

> They all looked glum, and said "There is no alternative".

Most people that I know here in the Netherlands prepare lunch at home and bring it to work or school. I work from home now and still usually eat simple sandwiches for lunch so at least for me it's not about "no alternatives".

It gives me more time to go outside or stop working early - I honestly don't want to spend (at least) an hour going out just to have lunch and then a similar ritual in the evening for dinner.