Hacker News: kaslai

New comment by kaslai in "FFmpeg School of Assembly Language"

kaslai — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 08:51:33 +0000

All the little tricks that the CPU has to speed things up, like branch prediction, out of order execution, parallel branch execution, etc, are mostly more expensive than just not having to rely on them in the first place. Branch prediction in particular is not something that should be relied on too heavily either, since it is actually quite a fragile optimization that can cause relatively large performance swings with seemingly meaningless changes to the code.

New comment by kaslai in "TwitchAdSolutions – Blocking Twitch Ads"

kaslai — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 16:09:36 +0000

I got ad-free Twitch years ago with Twitch Prime. And then they added ads back in for Prime users. How long will it be until they start adding ads back in for Turbo users?

New comment by kaslai in "Aztec monks with 1/55 HP no longer die when picking up or dropping a relic"

kaslai — Sat, 15 Apr 2023 16:41:42 +0000

I think the original intent was referring to the fact that given the same operand, the order of multiplication and division shouldn't matter, e.g. A * X / X should give the same result as A / X * X, but in reality they can give different results when done by a computer due to precision limits, overflow, etc.

New comment by kaslai in "The Only Three Classes That Mattered from My College Degree"

kaslai — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 16:09:50 +0000

This is why I think that the trade school model of teaching software development should really be developed further. Having been in charge of hiring software developers a number of times in the past, I have found that a Bachelors in Computer Whatever barely tells me anything about whether you can actually program. The most it tells me on paper is that you have seen some amount of code at some point in your life and know a few buzzwords.

This isn't to say that a College degree is worthless, but it is not a job training tool, and the sooner that people realize that the better. I would love to see a world where software development is treated more like some of the trades. Rather than insisting that all applicants have a BS in Computer Science or equivalent, we should hire promising kids fresh out of High School (Or college) and fund their 1 year education in programming + apprenticeship. I feel like that would lead to a healthier industry as a whole, and bring a lot more highly talented individuals into the world of programming.

And no, web dev bootcamps are not what I'm talking about. They are closer to my ideal than a college, but they have a lot of other problems that keep them from being useful in general.

New comment by kaslai in "T-Mobile Reaches Agreement to Acquire Mint Mobile for Up to $1.35B"

kaslai — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 16:12:15 +0000

It's one of those things where if it works in your area, it works great. I've been on MVNOs for a decade now and the worst I've ever experienced was sometimes my data rate would drop to a couple mbps in crowded areas, but that's never been a material problem for me. I happily spend the $10-15/mo and get service that exceeds my needs. Sure it won't work for everyone in all cases, but you shouldn't discount MVNOs out of hand just because they are second class networks.

New comment by kaslai in "Made in America is back, leaving US factories scrambling to find workers"

kaslai — Mon, 10 Oct 2022 05:43:53 +0000

Yes and no. Real wages in US manufacturing have been on a steady decline for a long time now, and the cost of manufacturing goods overseas has been steadily increasing. After factoring in all associated costs with importing goods from a place like China, the difference in cost might even tip towards made in the US being cheaper in the long run. That said, a lot of countries other than China do still have cheap slave laborers that we depend on to give us cheap stuff, and we just can't compete with that using our domestic work force. Also if the local workers unionize and push wages up more towards what they would be had they kept pace with inflation, then local goods will be far more expensive. The cost of a new factory would certainly inflate a lot of short term prices too.

All that said, I know a lot of people that would be willing to pay a substantial premium for well made goods that were produced domestically. Everyone has experienced just how terrible the goods we source from overseas often are, and if paying double or triple for something means that you get a useful lifespan that's 5 times longer, a lot of people are willing to pay that. There are also a lot of people that would happily pay for goods that they know for certain weren't made in a Sri Lankan sweatshop.

New comment by kaslai in "Mozilla claims Apple, Google and Microsoft force users to use default browsers"

kaslai — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 21:07:18 +0000

Every time I click a link in email, IRC, Slack, Discord... At least 100+ times a day, easily.

New comment by kaslai in "100k Stars Chrome visualization experiment"

kaslai — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 02:58:21 +0000

100k probably just isn't as dense as you'd intuitively expect. As a sense of scale, 100,000 pixels is just shy of 5% of the pixels on a typical 1080p screen, so even with a radius of a few pixels per star, there will still be quite a bit of negative space given all the overlap.

New comment by kaslai in "Using files with browsers, in reality"

kaslai — Mon, 21 Mar 2022 17:49:53 +0000

I think a "web app" should definitely be able to have some sort of more properly integrated filesystem API, but a "web page" has no business having access to such a thing. There just hasn't been a line drawn in the sand between the two, so every "web page" has all the capabilities of a "web app" by default.

Personally I wish there would be a meaningful line drawn between the two so that users could have a nice shorthand for allowing web pages to "upgrade" into apps which have access to things like WebGL and filesystem access. Such a thing would only have any meaning to power users and privacy oriented people though, and the general trend in browser design has been to spurn such users in favor of reducing friction for everyone else at all costs.

New comment by kaslai in "Google “hijacked millions of customers and orders” from restaurants – lawsuit"

kaslai — Mon, 14 Mar 2022 15:54:22 +0000

While this isn't directly Google's doing, they do enable it for other services too: when I was on a road trip, I realized that I was going to need one additional hotel stay before getting home, so at 1 AM I was shopping around for a hotel on my phone and found a place that looked decent enough. I looked up their web page to get their phone number (since I don't trust the Google side-bar) to call them and everything seemed normal enough.

I clarified what their pet policy was over the phone and they said I was fine to bring the pets I needed to bring. They said that bringing a large dog and a cat was fine, so I thought everything was good. When I got there, the person handling check-in complained that I was violating hotel policy, as they only allowed one pet and only small dogs were allowed. I was confused as I had specifically asked when booking if they would be allowed and I was assured that it was fine. Thankfully we were allowed to keep the reservation given that we were keeping the animals crated while in the room.

When I got home, I compared the phone number in my dial history to the one on the hotel's website, and I noticed that they were different. After a lot of confusion, I tried replicating my steps to navigate to the hotel's website on my phone and realized that I had actually clicked on an "Ad" link on Google to get to the website, rather than the organic result. The webpages were almost identical, with the only difference being the phone number. Presumably the "Ad" link was put up by a booking site to funnel phone traffic away from the legitimate site.

Presumably because I was tired, I either didn't notice it was an ad, or I figured that it would be equivalent to the organic search result, but it could have potentially caused me to have to find a hotel that accepts big dogs with vacancy at 11 PM in a city I don't know, in addition to wasting my money since the reservations weren't refundable at that point.

tl;dr: Booking sites use Google ads to steal organic traffic intended to go directly to hotels and caused me to unintentionally violate a hotel's pet policy

New comment by kaslai in "TikTok streaming software is an illegal fork of OBS"

kaslai — Sat, 18 Dec 2021 15:41:49 +0000

It's important to honor the GPL here because these are the terms that the code was licensed to TikTok under. By violating the terms of the license, TikTok forfeits their right to use the code.

This is intended to protect the freedoms of the whole world, more or less. The GPL is intended to make software free and open for everyone, regardless of what their purpose of using the software for is. Free, Libre, Open Source Software is very valuable at this point, and the GPL generally mandates that you contribute back to the pool of FLOSS if you seek to benefit from it, making FLOSS even more valuable for everyone.

There is nothing forcing a company like TikTok to use GPL'd code in their software. Lord knows they have enough money to engineer a similar solution from the ground up, but they chose to use GPL'd code so they need to play by GPL rules.

New comment by kaslai in "TikTok streaming software is an illegal fork of OBS"

kaslai — Fri, 17 Dec 2021 16:58:10 +0000

The GPL requires that any derivative work of GPL licensed code must also be licensed under the same (or compatible) license as the original GPL'd code. This is the "viral" aspect of the license. It applies even if the only interface between your code and the GPL code is dynamic linking, and not a single line of the GPL'd code is in your application.

There are acceptable ways to bundle GPL code with closed source software in a single distributable, however it must be made clear which parts of the distribution are licensed under the GPL and the GPL license must be clearly present. Even in the most charitable reading of the situation, TikTok violated this basic requirement.

New comment by kaslai in "Cocaine Paraphernalia Ads in the 70s"

kaslai — Tue, 23 Nov 2021 14:50:03 +0000

In the US, 95% ABV Everclear is readily available in most states. 75.5% ABV Everclear is available in even more. It's the easiest way to get near azeotropic food safe ethanol for making extracts.

New comment by kaslai in "PayPal raises fees for most domestic transaction types to 3.49% + $0.49"

kaslai — Tue, 05 Oct 2021 06:25:28 +0000

Yeah I definitely missed it and it caught me by total surprise today. I imagine many are in the same boat.

This also comes after they've adjusted their policy so that they keep all fees even after a payment has been refunded. They're getting less and less attractive every month.

New comment by kaslai in "PayPal raises fees for most domestic transaction types to 3.49% + $0.49"

kaslai — Tue, 05 Oct 2021 06:20:13 +0000

Ah, thank you for the links. I searched prior to posting but the title on [2] is very non-descript. I was expecting a lot more outrage considering the size of this hike is pretty massive for merchants that process a lot of smaller transactions.

New comment by kaslai in "PayPal raises fees for most domestic transaction types to 3.49% + $0.49"

kaslai — Tue, 05 Oct 2021 05:16:06 +0000

I have seen absolutely zero coverage about this change so I wanted to make sure people knew about it. The change seems to have happened on August 2nd according to archive.org [1]. I checked my PayPal records to verify this was true and sure enough I've been paying the higher rate in fees starting after July.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210727095034/https://www.paypa...

PayPal raises fees for most domestic transaction types to 3.49% + $0.49

kaslai — Tue, 05 Oct 2021 05:14:00 +0000

Article URL: https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28755702

Points: 337

# Comments: 243

New comment by kaslai in "Rust Weird Expressions"

kaslai — Sat, 15 May 2021 05:43:10 +0000

I depend on a mountain of C and C++ code to not only not crash, but to also not have any subtle memory errors which might allow a packet from the internet to run arbitrary code on my machines. Failures of that sort are disturbingly common.

New comment by kaslai in "Basic Telemetry for Audacity"

kaslai — Fri, 07 May 2021 17:46:09 +0000

My personal take is that this type of telemetry is fine. I just don't want to give potentially unbounded, hard-to-audit access to my telemetry data over to the likes of Google. If your application provides a means of learning _what_ is getting sent, and you make it opt-in, and you only send it to infrastructure you completely control (within reason, I'm not going to complain if it's a VPS or something), then there shouldn't really be any controversy.

I don't hate Google. I just don't want my desktop applications to even be capable of telling Google about my computer usage if I can at all help it.

New comment by kaslai in "Can you tell an assembly language when you see one?"

kaslai — Sat, 24 Apr 2021 22:47:23 +0000

Hm, yeah I hadn't considered the possibility of the machine itself having aliased instructions. That's some interesting info, thank you.