Hacker News: justinrstout

New comment by justinrstout in "Gender markers are useless, so why not abolish them?"

justinrstout — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 04:17:26 +0000

Makes a lot of sense especially in light of the chaos that the state of Kansas just inflicted onto its citizens this month.

New comment by justinrstout in "The Origins of Wokeness"

justinrstout — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 19:17:36 +0000

This article never takes up the cause of the minorities who are being harassed and killed on a daily basis, but spends a lot of time whining about having to show even a modicum of empathy by using more inclusive language. For this reason it reeks of self-centered willful ignorance.

New comment by justinrstout in "Nokia sues Amazon, HP over video compression technology"

justinrstout — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 17:42:55 +0000

FWIW we currently have this in the AV1 codec which is royalty-free and has a better quality/size ratio than h264.

New comment by justinrstout in "Halo system link still holds up more than 20 years later"

justinrstout — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 00:56:10 +0000

In fighting games we still have to worry about _network_ latency, as high ping will cause frequent rollbacks. A more accurate way to think about it is that rollback netcode enables very low _input_ latency which makes online feel more like offline, compared to previous implementations that literally delayed controller input while playing online.

Humans cannot react to anything in 20ms, it's closer to 200ms. We consider a move faster than about 18 frames to be effectively unreactable in the heat of gameplay. At 60 FPS that is 300ms.

New comment by justinrstout in "How Big Oil Misled the Public into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled"

justinrstout — Sat, 12 Sep 2020 04:02:58 +0000

In my city we can buy milk in glass bottles for a $2 deposit that’s credited when the bottles are returned to the place of purchase. This program is available at virtually every mainstream supermarket here.

New comment by justinrstout in "Optimising for Concurrency: Comparing the BEAM and JVM virtual machines"

justinrstout — Wed, 13 May 2020 19:34:31 +0000

"Concurrency primitives" here is probably referring to Java's fundamental mutex system as used with `synchronized`, `wait()`, and `notify()`. Java's thread pools and concurrent data structures are built on top of these and as you noted are relatively straightforward to use correctly, as they take care of the actual coordination of threads for you.

New comment by justinrstout in "Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous"

justinrstout — Tue, 14 Aug 2018 13:44:02 +0000

This article makes a lot of unsubstantiated claims and is very light on actual data. For example a blatant assertion like "Amazon’s Kindle and other methods of online reading have revolutionized how Americans consume text." has no support in the article itself. For what it's worth I know only a few people that use e-books; the majority purchases and reads plain old paper books. Likewise, "...now viewers stream movies or TV shows with Netflix...now Spotify and YouTube are more commonly used to hear our favorite tunes....". This is unsubstantiated. Nearly all of the video content I want to watch is not available on Netflix; and anything that is is liable to disappear at any time. Just last month I purchased VHS tapes, DVDs, and Blu-rays to get content I wanted, so if the writer isn't going to go to the effort of researching and presenting information, then my anecdotal experience completely contradicts this thinkpiece.

New comment by justinrstout in "NBC News launches a twice-daily Snapchat news broadcast"

justinrstout — Wed, 19 Jul 2017 20:51:14 +0000

This feels like a natural extension of stories, where previously it was a sequence of short videos shot by your friends, now it's a sequence of slightly longer videos shot by a professional news organization. So in the short term I'm sure it will draw in more eyeballs to watch more ads, but long term it seems like it does nothing to bridge the gap between the traditional "social" functions of Snapchat with the news content delivery aspect; they almost feel like two separate apps.

As for the show itself, it's ok. It's a really quick flyover of the daily headlines; reminded me a lot of a radio news headline briefing you might hear on NPR or similar, just with video added. I think it's unfair to hate on it because it's "too short, too high-level, too vapid, etc.". Of course it's not hard-hitting original in-depth journalism but it's a convenient way to get the headlines quickly, on-demand, anywhere, without waiting for a dedicated TV or radio program. Especially in these days of heightened political interest, it's hard to argue that it's better for someone to remain completely ignorant of U.S. and world affairs rather than consume news in a format that may not be the most detailed or the most interesting to you personally.

Side rant: I can't help but feel personally offended whenever I read an article or comment that assumes I have a "low attention span" just because I'm a Snapchatting millennial. The variety of social backgrounds encompassed by the term "millennial" is so broad that blanket insults like "low attention span" border on outright ageism.

New comment by justinrstout in "Twitter shares drop as Salesforce reported to be out of the bidding process"

justinrstout — Fri, 14 Oct 2016 18:09:22 +0000

Technically, a "pump and dump" is the opposite of what's being described here. This would be a "poop and scoop".

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/poopandscoop.asp

New comment by justinrstout in "Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox"

justinrstout — Fri, 23 Sep 2016 16:48:26 +0000

Theodore Ts'o wrote about a similar Firefox issue back in 2009: https://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/03/15/dont-fear-the-fsync/

New comment by justinrstout in "Emacs v. Vi Is Rooted in the Love of Lisp"

justinrstout — Mon, 06 May 2013 02:51:14 +0000

I'm not sure it's very constructive to explain the editor wars in a short, non-technical blog post. This article provides little useful technical information and a lot of extraneous verbal fluff. The comparisons to various philosophical works were particularly pretentious and painful to read. It doesn't seem like this article contributes anything substantial to the debate.