Hacker News: silotis

March in Servo: keyboard navigation, better debugging, FreeBSD support, and more

silotis — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 14:12:12 +0000

Article URL: https://servo.org/blog/2026/04/30/march-in-servo/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47962807

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

New comment by silotis in "California high-speed rail price tag jumps to $231B, nearly 7x 2008 estimate"

silotis — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 21:04:55 +0000

At this point it's extremely unlikely the needed funds will be secured for the foreseeable future. Even if the federal government were willing to contribute, spending $100+ billion of federal tax money on a regional rail project would be a hard sell to say the least.

Most likely the Bakersfield to Merced segment will be the only segment completed. It will end up as a white elephant racking up operational losses until Sacramento finally decides to pull the plug.

New comment by silotis in "Firm boosts H.264 streaming license fees from $100k up to staggering $4.5M"

silotis — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 19:18:42 +0000

*Claimed to still be valid.

If you're just hosting videos on your website you are probably using High Profile which was standardized in March of 2005, i.e. more than 20 years ago. That doesn't stop VIA and MPEG-LA from claiming they still have relevant patents, but that claim is dubious and hasn't been tested in court.

New comment by silotis in "H.264 Streaming Fees: What Changed, Who's Affected, and What It Means"

silotis — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 13:01:28 +0000

MPEG plays a clever game with their standards. A standard like MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 Part 10 (aka H.264) doesn't just refer to one standard but rather a whole series of standards published over an extended period. Patents are pooled by standard with deliberate ambiguity over which parts of the standard each patent actually covers.

This lets patent holders spread FUD over whether earlier parts of the standard are actually patent free even after 20 years have passed since the original publishing.

In the face of patent holders threatening a costly legal battle, companies choose to continue paying licensing fees even on standards which plainly should be out of patent protection.

New comment by silotis in "The SpaceX IPO: retail investor notes"

silotis — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 21:23:26 +0000

So far only the Nasdaq-100 has gone along with SpaceX's special weighting chicanery. The biggest fund which tracks the Nasdaq-100 is QQQ. Suffice to say, if you have money in QQQ you should be re-considering that position.

New comment by silotis in "Tesla is committing automotive suicide"

silotis — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 20:05:12 +0000

The EV1 was a regulatory anomaly. The tech wasn't there yet for mass market adoption.

New comment by silotis in "Servo 2025 Stats"

silotis — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 12:50:31 +0000

The increased activity came from Igalia who started working on Servo in 2023 with support from the Linux Foundation. Prior to that the project was effectively dead in the water with no sponsored development.

New comment by silotis in "ChatGPT Health"

silotis — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:29:06 +0000

Unless you're paying for a concierge doctor, MDs frequently will not spend the time to give you useful advice. Especially for relatively minor issues.

New comment by silotis in "Toll roads are spreading in America"

silotis — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 20:56:17 +0000

Roads are rivalrous because too many people using them causes a traffic jam. Seriously go read the Wikipedia article on the subject.

New comment by silotis in "Toll roads are spreading in America"

silotis — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 20:37:06 +0000

"Public good" is a term of art in economics which means a good is both non-excludable (it is impractical to control who benefits from it) and non-rivalrous (one person benefiting does not prevent others from also benefiting).

Roads are clearly rivalrous and while it's often impractical to prevent non-payers from entering a toll road, one can certainly record them and met penalties after the fact to discourage it.

So no, roads are not a public good.

New comment by silotis in "Notes by djb on using Fil-C"

silotis — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 18:27:04 +0000

I was thinking less about the DB data itself and more about temporary allocations that have to be made per-request. The same is true for most server software. Even if arenas are used to reduce the number of allocations you're still doing a lot more memory management than a typical cryptographic benchmark.

New comment by silotis in "Notes by djb on using Fil-C"

silotis — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 21:13:42 +0000

This depends heavily on what problem domain you're talking about. For example, a DBMS is necessarily going to shuffle a lot of data into and out of memory.

New comment by silotis in "Notes by djb on using Fil-C"

silotis — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 19:05:15 +0000

Cryptographic software is probably close to a best case scenario since there is very little memory management involved and runtime is dominated by computation in tight loops. As long as Fil-C is able to avoid doing anything expensive in the inner loops you get good performance.

New comment by silotis in "US cities pay too much for buses"

silotis — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 23:18:13 +0000

That's less a matter of price sensitively and more that other countries usually have price controls on healthcare. That's why doctors make so much less and drugs are so much cheaper outside the US: it's literally illegal to charge more.

New comment by silotis in "Pixel 10 Phones"

silotis — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 18:53:36 +0000

The problem is for many years now the smallest phone available has been getting larger and larger. This has lead small phone enthusiasts to cling to their old phones as long as they can stand it until they are forced to step to a larger model.

New comment by silotis in "I tried living on IPv6 for a day"

silotis — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 21:15:55 +0000

If your ISP issues you a routable IPv4 address then not much. Otherwise IPv6 lets you avoid CGNAT and all of the issues that come with that.

New comment by silotis in "Fast"

silotis — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 21:13:03 +0000

These days ACH settlement runs multiple times a day. The biggest source of delay for ACH transfers is your bank delaying release of the funds for risk management. ACH transfers can be reversed even after they have "settled" and if the receiving bank has already disbursed the funds then they have to eat the cost of reimbursing the sender. Reversals are more likely to happen soon after the transfer completes, so delaying release of the funds makes it less likely the bank will be left holding the bag.

New comment by silotis in "GLP-1s are breaking life insurance"

silotis — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 19:55:51 +0000

> Medical insurance companies often already go out of their way to pay early to save in the long run

Literally LOLed when I read this. Health insurance companies might pay lip service to this and make some token gestures like free preventative care, but in my experience health insurance companies frequently shoot themselves in the foot by denying care that later ends up costing them even more when the patient's untreated condition worsens.

New comment by silotis in "Windows 10 EOL"

silotis — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 17:46:42 +0000

> Because at the time those vulnerabilities could be exploited by executing malicious javascript in a browser to steal passwords

"could be" is doing a lot of work here. AFAIK there has never been a PoC or active exploit which actually exfiltrates sensitive data from a browser using these vulnerabilities. Anyways, browsers have long since implemented software mitigations.

IIRC the real criteria for W11 support has to do with TPMs. Microsoft really wants to have secure boot on all Windows systems.

New comment by silotis in "Being fat is a trap"

silotis — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 13:56:07 +0000

Yep. I have IBD and have to track calories to keep my intake _up_. It's shocking how much food you have to eat to get much more than 2k a day.