Hacker News: jbosh

New comment by jbosh in "How do wombats poop cubes?"

jbosh — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:55:30 +0000

The pun in the title is just world class.

New comment by jbosh in "Hellishly Slow Level 13 Deflate Compression"

jbosh — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 04:31:21 +0000

I love it. So much in computers is trade offs and this was a fun read exploring it.

It would be interesting to see some economics of what 8,000% increase in encoding time takes to make that money back in terms of storage or bandwidth. I also wonder how brotli/lzma would compare here. Are there some obscene modes on those that had similar results?

New comment by jbosh in "Stop Using JWTs"

jbosh — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 19:13:38 +0000

The author made a good point here about running trackers and ad ops (think Google analytics or ad words). I'd guess if you don't run those, it'd just be supply chain attacks that could exfiltrate secrets.

This seems like one of those scenarios where you make different trade offs depending on your threat model. The author's threat model sounds similar to a news site where they track and advertise so they're forced to run semi-trusted js.

New comment by jbosh in ".NET 10"

jbosh — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 00:08:25 +0000

Have you tried csharpier? It's got some wrinkles but kept things pretty consistent.

New comment by jbosh in "HTTP/3 is everywhere but nowhere"

jbosh — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 13:26:46 +0000

How much does http/3 help for server to server traffic? Seems like larger websites can use a CDN or load balancer to do termination and then use http 1.1 to the back end. Is that good enough with large pipes and a high number of connections?

New comment by jbosh in "HMD Key – A lightweight, affordable smartphone"

jbosh — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 18:07:50 +0000

Would a project similar to wine/proton help to cover that gap?

New comment by jbosh in "Microsoft should be terrified of SteamOS"

jbosh — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 14:29:25 +0000

The funny thing with wine is that as the market grows for Linux, more and more bugs will be fixed. I could see a tipping point where even the elusive Adobe Creative Cloud runs on Linux.

New comment by jbosh in "One surprising psychosis treatment that works: Learning to live with the voices"

jbosh — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 15:09:58 +0000

I had exactly this! I kept having flare ups and couldn't figure out the pattern until we tore up a bathroom and discovered mold. Suddenly I realized my lungs hurt everytime I had people come stay over. They'd use the spare shower, it'd excite the mold and then I'd need an inhaler. Cheap hotels also put my lungs into a tizzy. Definitely worth checking cause mold is everywhere.

New comment by jbosh in "Bird wings inspire new approach to flight safety"

jbosh — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 13:17:25 +0000

So you're telling me if United goes out and gets a bunch of paper bags to attach to the wings it will reduce drag by 30%? Are there industrial materials that can do this on a 747 and sustain hundreds of hours of flight? I have so many questions. Exciting to see.

New comment by jbosh in "The England museums averaging fewer than one visitor a day"

jbosh — Wed, 29 May 2024 18:21:14 +0000

I'm just imagining Husker McGumbo, the great golden potato of 1923 who road a wagon train from the Yukon to be the first potatoes in the new world.

New comment by jbosh in "Galois/Counter Mode and random nonces"

jbosh — Wed, 29 May 2024 11:13:12 +0000

XSalsa and XChaCha do something extremely similar. In order to extend the nonce space by 128 bits you basically run a round of ChaCha against 128 bits of your nonce. Those 128 bits represent 96 bits of nonce and 32 bits of counter. Because you know you'll never encode more than 1 full block of data, the counter won't overlap. 256 bits of internal state become the key for the next round of ChaCha plus the remaining 64 bits of nonce and you get to use the full counter space because nonce just became the key.

The paper is also extremely approachable.

https://cr.yp.to/snuffle/xsalsa-20110204.pdf

I wonder if processes like this extend cryptographically in most symmetric ciphers. To add more nonce, encrypt your nonce, output becomes key for next round, add more nonce, repeat. Like all things crypto though, your search space could absolutely collapse if the cipher doesn't have the right properties.

New comment by jbosh in "Falling in love again with disposable cameras"

jbosh — Tue, 21 May 2024 13:07:18 +0000

But have you thought about the shareholders?

New comment by jbosh in "The England museums averaging fewer than one visitor a day"

jbosh — Sun, 19 May 2024 11:56:58 +0000

I love the prospect of going to the least popular items on this list. The volunteers sound super passionate and not having to fight lines is wonderful.

New comment by jbosh in "A low budget consumer hardware espionage implant (2018)"

jbosh — Wed, 15 May 2024 09:42:53 +0000

Hard part there is getting the wear and tear from oils in your hand to look identical.

Although maybe most people don't pay attention to that.

New comment by jbosh in "Garbage Collectors Are Scary"

jbosh — Sun, 12 May 2024 15:44:25 +0000

Sweet mama speed. Although from what I understand it is more legacy speed cause you're losing all your time to fetching the memory anyway. But when processors were slower it was a meaningful amount.

New comment by jbosh in "Garbage Collectors Are Scary"

jbosh — Sun, 12 May 2024 14:16:57 +0000

The fact that msvc generates the unaligned loads for every avx instruction but gcc didn't gave me so many headaches. Most people worked on PC or Xbox and I was on the Playstation team. "oh boy, another one of these..."

New comment by jbosh in "Garbage Collectors Are Scary"

jbosh — Sun, 12 May 2024 14:14:57 +0000

C++, it was an in house engine to make everything fit in memory on PS3. Removing fragmentation gave ~10% of usable memory back.

New comment by jbosh in "Garbage Collectors Are Scary"

jbosh — Sun, 12 May 2024 12:01:32 +0000

So scary. I was working on a garbage collection bug for a AAA video game one time for months. It'd crash once a day on a tester machine and we'd add more and more prints to try and narrow it down.

Finally got enough information and realized that the padding of a specific object was wrong (GC expected 16 bytes, object was 12 bytes). This caused dozens of other corruption bugs to disappear that we didn't even think were GC related.

New comment by jbosh in "Recompilation: A New Way to Keep N64 Games Alive [video]"

jbosh — Fri, 10 May 2024 23:09:23 +0000

Downloading random exes from the internet is real scary. Jamming this into another tool feels like a better way to go.

New comment by jbosh in "Moviecart – Full length color movie and audio cartridges for stock Atari 2600"

jbosh — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 13:45:12 +0000

This is exceedingly cool use of cartridges. Just as a thought experiment I've often wondered if some of the cartridge based consoles could be expanded considerably. Along the lines of this project, would it be possible to throw an arm chip in a cart and send these as h.264? I'm not at a computer but would love to see how differently some modern codecs compress.