Hacker News: yoklov

New comment by yoklov in "New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson"

yoklov — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 17:05:51 +0000

Caves of Qud had it right all along.

New comment by yoklov in "Train Your Own LLM from Scratch"

yoklov — Tue, 05 May 2026 15:29:06 +0000

I'm not sure using pytorch counts as "from scratch" anymore. I'm not saying you should avoid the stdlib or anything crazy, but at the point where you're pulling in for-purpose libraries it really doesn't seem like "from scratch" to me.

New comment by yoklov in "Rust Library for End-to-End Encrypted Secure Messaging"

yoklov — Thu, 19 Aug 2021 20:47:26 +0000

Oh, so, I recently had opportunity to play around with this some, a bit over the past week. My initial questions were along the lines of:

1. What's the point? In end-to-end encryption situations usually the concern is around data storage (perhaps), but for just sending messages typically TLS is enough (or seems it, anyway, from my perspective as a non-security engineer)

2. The codebase seems to have separate C, Rust, and Elixir versions. Are they interchangeable, or do they serve different purposes?

Of these I only have rough answers. For the first, it seems like this solves the problem where, say, a single TLS connection isn't enough to get the data all the way to where it's needed (perhaps you need to go over bluetooth, or do multiple steps of HTTP, etc).

And for the second, well, I'm not sure. I think the C implementation might be equivalent, and be being replaced by the Rust one?

New comment by yoklov in "Show HN: Mongita is to MongoDB as SQLite is to SQL"

yoklov — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:02:20 +0000

Yeah, a big benefit of SQLite is the fact that it's embeddable, and easily can be communicated with from any language that can FFI out to C (which is to say, essentially any language)

This... Loses that.

New comment by yoklov in "EA will be releasing the C&C Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert source code under GPL3"

yoklov — Thu, 21 May 2020 03:33:32 +0000

No real reason to call nintendo out here, every console i know of has been that way for many generations.

New comment by yoklov in "Understanding Duolingo’s quiet $10M raise"

yoklov — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 05:13:02 +0000

What are your recommendations for japanese, out of curiosity

New comment by yoklov in "Little known features of iTerm2"

yoklov — Mon, 02 Mar 2020 05:39:14 +0000

It is something I miss a great deal when on other OSes

New comment by yoklov in "Why does WebAssembly need the relooper algorithm, instead of gotos? (2019)"

yoklov — Mon, 24 Feb 2020 02:08:44 +0000

Sounds like much more work than implementing a wasm vm+runtime. Besides, isn’t it owned by a company who is notoriously litigious against reimplementations?

New comment by yoklov in "Why does WebAssembly need the relooper algorithm, instead of gotos? (2019)"

yoklov — Sun, 23 Feb 2020 23:41:55 +0000

a single existing implementation is a problem, not a feature for the web platform

New comment by yoklov in "Half of the websites using WebAssembly use it for malicious purposes"

yoklov — Thu, 09 Jan 2020 11:17:37 +0000

Can you not disable wasm? That seems like an oversight that should be fixed if so.

New comment by yoklov in "Your cyberpunk games are dangerous (2015)"

yoklov — Mon, 06 Jan 2020 21:17:47 +0000

GURPS is way to crunchy (numbers focused) for me, personally, but I'm seconding the Sprawl recommendation.

Hack The Planet is another great modern cyberpunk RPG, based on the Forged in the Dark rule set.

New comment by yoklov in "Firefox considering off-by-default preference for loading user.js files"

yoklov — Mon, 06 Jan 2020 12:48:48 +0000

I think it’s just pref/user_pref and such. Despite the name it is not a js file and is not parsed like one. I think the file extension is entirely vestigial.

New comment by yoklov in "The Unum Pattern"

yoklov — Fri, 30 Aug 2019 21:13:21 +0000

For anyone else who was a little confused, this seems to be entirely unrelated to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unum_(number_format)

New comment by yoklov in "Wasm vs. PNaCl Performance Benchmark"

yoklov — Sun, 25 Aug 2019 23:28:45 +0000

Neither really. It doesn’t have direct access to a canvas API or to the DOM, but you can proxy calls through javascript. There’s a plan to allow avoiding this overhead, but it’s fairly early.

New comment by yoklov in "Google and Mozilla are failing to support browser extension developers"

yoklov — Fri, 02 Aug 2019 01:22:11 +0000

I think there’s a certain degree to which needing to implement spectre mitigations (e.g. site isolation) threw a wrench into some of the plans for improving the baseline of the extension apis.

disclosure: I work at mozilla, but not on this.

New comment by yoklov in "Google and Mozilla are failing to support browser extension developers"

yoklov — Fri, 02 Aug 2019 01:18:51 +0000

I think it’s not 500 deletes, but it’s certainly not great. There is definitely an index. If you can repro this, you should file a bug for it, I’ve noticed it being slow too, but couldn’t repro it recently. If you file a bug for this, you can CC me (tcsc at mozilla dot com).

New comment by yoklov in "Practical Networked Applications in Rust, Part 1: Non-Networked Key-Value Store"

yoklov — Wed, 24 Jul 2019 05:26:07 +0000

It depends on what I'm doing, but generally yes I'll write it in Rust unless I think it's a bad fit (e.g. if it's something that's better off as a shell script or whatever I'll just use that instead).

New comment by yoklov in "Give Firefox a chance"

yoklov — Tue, 25 Jun 2019 12:00:47 +0000

Being a global persisted key value store, about:config has a lot of things stored in it that.... do not necessarily make sense syncing, hence it being opt-in. Sync is guilty of this too, and will store things like your last sync time in about config, for example. Clearly not meaningful to sync directly.

A checkbox like you describe was actually discussed in the past, but at this point it’s unlikely. The current design of letting any synced machine change any pref on any remote machine (effectively) has dubious security implications, and has gained an additional hoop you must jump through in nightly.

New comment by yoklov in "Give Firefox a chance"

yoklov — Sun, 23 Jun 2019 21:46:15 +0000

Hmm, I don't think many have requested we sync user{Chrome,Content}.css. It's possible we'd accept a patch to sync them (I'd be for it, at least), but it's not trivial since we don't already have file syncing code.

Syncing them with dropbox and symlinking does sound to me to be the most reasonable.

Glad you're satisfied other than that!

New comment by yoklov in "Give Firefox a chance"

yoklov — Sun, 23 Jun 2019 18:55:45 +0000

The storage is more limited for synced extension data than for unsynced data.

IMO this is quite unfortunate, and is mostly a consequence of the implementation of extension storage sync being done separately from the rest of sync (which in retrospect was a mistake, but at the time that wasn't clear). Also, the limits are copy-pasted directly from the limits chrome places on sync, so it's possible there are compatibility concerns as well.

For config (assuming you mean prefs in about:config), you can add your own prefs to be synced with about:config. If you add a new boolean pref with a value of true using the pattern `services.sync.prefs.sync.` it will be synced. e.g. to sync `browser.foo.bar` you'd create `services.sync.prefs.sync.browser.foo.bar`.

Disclaimer: I work on Firefox sync.

[0]: In the future this may be more complex, and you may need to flip an additional pref to get this behavior for non-default prefs.