Hacker News: magila

New comment by magila in "NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions"

magila — Sat, 10 May 2025 01:22:40 +0000

My experience is that discrimination in hiring is never openly advocated for obvious reasons. Instead you get what could be called "stochastic discrimination" where there is pressure to "increase diversity" without elaboration on how that should be achieved in the face of a not so diverse pool of qualified candidates.

New comment by magila in "The GPU, not the TPM, is the root of hardware DRM"

magila — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 04:26:31 +0000

Watermarking was a problem when Widevine L1 was first introduced. Pirates seem to have found a way to scrub the watermark from their releases. Either that or someone is burning a _lot_ of cash on playback hardware judging from the rate of 4K WEB-DL releases.

New comment by magila in "Reaching the Unix philosophy's logical extreme with WebAssembly"

magila — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 20:40:54 +0000

The WASM Component Model

https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model

New comment by magila in "Block YouTube ads on AppleTV by decrypting and stripping ads from Profobuf"

magila — Sun, 27 Aug 2023 12:58:57 +0000

Source? I've seen a variety of claims about the revshare split on youtube, but I've never seen any official source of those numbers.

New comment by magila in "Cloudflare Registrar now supports .dev domains"

magila — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 18:07:48 +0000

I've never quite understood this idea that Cloudflare is an MITM. An MITM is by definition a covert intermediary. Cloudflare is a service provider that's deliberately employed by a site operator. If CF is a MITM then so is AWS, GCP, and every other CDN service provider.

New comment by magila in "Numbering Should Start at Zero"

magila — Sun, 16 Jul 2023 19:40:03 +0000

Great, now you've messed up all the other math that uses the modulo operator. The mathematical operators behave the way they do for well established reasons that long predate the invention of computers. It's going to be a tough sell to get everyone to adopt a wholesale refactoring of modulo arithmetic (and likely number theory in general) just for the "convenience" of one based indexing.

New comment by magila in "Numbering Should Start at Zero"

magila — Sun, 16 Jul 2023 14:06:23 +0000

In fact the vast majority of algorithms which involve doing computation on indexes beyond increment/decrement are naturally implemented with zero-based indexing. When using ones based indexing you end up having to convert to zero based, do the computation, then convert back to one based.

Another common example of this is circular buffers. Computing the bounded index from an arbitrary index is simply i % c with zero based indexing, but becomes (i-1) % c + 1 with one based indexing.

New comment by magila in "Asus Zenfone 10"

magila — Fri, 30 Jun 2023 01:44:26 +0000

I'd be willing to overlook a lot for a new Android phone with dimensions similar to the Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact. The market for small Android phones is extremely thin right now. There are only two phones which can run Android 13 and are less than 145 mm tall, and they're both less than a year away from EoL (Pixel 4a and Pixel 5).

New comment by magila in "XTS-210 25hp rotary engine; 1/5th size/weight of diesel piston engines"

magila — Sat, 29 Apr 2023 22:51:43 +0000

It's also not a turboprop if it's using a ducted fan. Chuck keeps using that word, I do not think it means what he thinks it means.

New comment by magila in "CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg"

magila — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 14:00:36 +0000

Eh, not really. Most "battery breakthrough!" press releases are about some new exotic chemistry while most mass produced battery improvements in the last 20 years have come from incremental improvements to existing chemistries and better packaging.

New comment by magila in "Lessons from America’s astonishing economic record"

magila — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 01:20:16 +0000

As someone with a chronic condition who has had to make many appointments with specialists over the years, 6-12 months is a gross exaggeration. IME the typical wait time to be seen by a specialist in the US is between 2 and 3 months. The worst I've seen is 4 months.

New comment by magila in "Direct evidence of the use of multiple drugs in Bronze Age from human hair test"

magila — Fri, 07 Apr 2023 22:51:45 +0000

Drug prohibition in the US was motivated more by hate for black/brown people than sky daddies.

New comment by magila in "Cigna saves millions by having its doctors reject claims without reading them"

magila — Sun, 26 Mar 2023 13:36:55 +0000

It still doesn't make sense. This whole ordeal has taken place over about 6 months. If anything, forcing me down the surgery route has pulled their costs forward in time, not pushed them back.

New comment by magila in "Cigna saves millions by having its doctors reject claims without reading them"

magila — Sat, 25 Mar 2023 19:11:53 +0000

I also have Crohn's and am going through this right now. Months of delays and denials for a new drug lead to two hospitalizations. I'm currently on TPN (IV nutrition) while I taper my Prednisone dose as low as possible prior to surgery.

The funny/sad thing is: between my hospitalizations, TPN and related home health care, and surgery, this is all going to cost my insurance far more than the drug they were denying would have. One would hope this provides them with motivation to better judge the necessity of treatments, but I'm not holding my breath.

New comment by magila in "Amazon to lay off 9,000 more workers after earlier cuts"

magila — Mon, 20 Mar 2023 17:16:39 +0000

I honestly can't tell if you're serious.

New comment by magila in "Linux Intel WiFi driver broken with 5&6GHz bands for longer than three years"

magila — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 20:25:56 +0000

Qualcomm's Atheros descended chips are generally the best bet for Linux support, especially for use in an AP. In other words you want a chip supported by the ath10k or ath11k driver depending on which generation of wifi you want. 10k = 802.11ac, 11k = 802.11ax.

New comment by magila in "Suing to protect right of incarcerated people to receive physical mail"

magila — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 20:30:38 +0000

My understanding is that most people opt to waive their right to a speedy trial after consulting with a lawyer. The reason is invoking the right guarantees the prosecutor will go hard in the paint pressing the maximum possible charges and generally making the defendant's life as unpleasant as possible.

New comment by magila in "Fix Intel CPU Throttling on Linux"

magila — Sun, 05 Mar 2023 04:06:04 +0000

If Intel wanted to use power/thermal limits for market segmentation they'd be locked down like the turbo frequency tables on non-K CPUs.

New comment by magila in "Mercedes-Benz previews its operating system MB.OS"

magila — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 01:00:13 +0000

Mercedes' reputation for reliability is mostly a legacy of the 60s and 70s. Their cars from that era were absurdly overbuilt, especially the diesel powered models. You will still find diesel MBs from the 70s on the road today, some of them having racked up 500k miles or more.

New comment by magila in "Eggspensive"

magila — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 22:30:34 +0000

In the US "pasture raised" is the key phrase to look for. That means what most people think when they read "free range". Neither "cage free" nor "free range" means much in the US.