HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Excavator

124 karma · joined March 27, 2014

submissionscomments
Excavator··on The perfect TV
So something like BenQ ST550K then?

http://www.benq.se/product/DigitalSignage/st550k/specificati...

Or the Philips BDM4065UC but with more HDMI ports?

http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/philips_bdm4065uc.htm

Excavator··on Fertility Rates: Empirical View
Firefox on Android, HTC Sensation, works fine. I don't have access to a desktop at the moment but do you perchance have Tracking Protection active? That might be helping.
Excavator··on Thomas Quick: The serial killer who wasn't
As I remember it, these stories were mostly due to the "psychologists" basically cheering him on, same with the media. This is an example of our abhorrent mental health system as much as our legal system.

Didn't they also manage to pull in some medium somehow?

Excavator··on Thomas Quick: The serial killer who wasn't
Perhaps that's why so many people appear to be addicted to aspirin, one every morning.
Excavator··on Thomas Quick: The serial killer who wasn't
Seems to be needed given how people handle prescription drugs.

Way too many people ignore doctors orders and stop taking their prescription drugs once they "feel well" and then they keep it around in case they or someone they know "feels ill".

Excavator··on Thomas Quick: The serial killer who wasn't
It varies, usually you have all the papers laid out in a room. You're then free to pick just the ones you'll vote on or you can do like some and take one of each.

Parties will often also send voting blankets in the mail so you can somewhat secretly bring your own papers from home. The only issue there is that some places sets up the voting stands in such a poor way that people almost can see what you're doing anyway.

Another issue that has occurred during the past couple of elections is that the RF/AFA frat boys decided to stand guard at the entrance of some voting places, trying to stop people who intended to vote for SD.

Excavator··on Government Open Source Office deal set to provide major savings
> MS has really picked up the ball with their cloud versions integrated into Office365, which IMO, are better than Google Docs at this point.

Which parts of their product have you been using exactly? One can't even deselect cells in Excel, instead it will add the same cell a second time (while adding another layer of the darkening effect).

There have been other things but thankfully those haven't been stupid enough to get stuck in my head like that one.

Excavator··on A simple puzzle to tell whether you know what people are thinking
Spiral of Silence¹ is basically the same idea, as I read it.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_of_silence

Excavator··on Quantifying and Visualizing the Reddit Hivemind
There's these two for HN:

http://blog.datadive.net/which-topics-get-the-upvote-on-hack...

http://insightmine.com/hacking-y-combinator/

Excavator··on The Final Leaked TPP Text Is All That We Feared
The ones who listen to what they "will do", complain about what they do, then promptly forgets during the buildup to the next election.

The ones who follow "the line" and are afraid of getting ostracized by their peers.

The ones who value pocket change now over future prospects.

Excavator··on NPAPI Plugins in Firefox
Well, the folks behind Vimperator sound optimistic at least.

https://github.com/vimperator/vimperator-labs/issues/264

Excavator··on NPAPI Plugins in Firefox
> We need to get away from this whole "The browser is a poor man's operating system" model anyway. Let the browser do a great job of browsing hypermedia and then hand off to specialized programs when we want to do something outside that paradigm.

Sounds like you're really gonna love WebAssembly then.

https://blog.mozilla.org/luke/2015/06/17/webassembly/

Excavator··on Reddit’s Plan to Recover from Its Meltdown
For reference:

http://www.reaxxion.com/9552/reddit-and-imgur-staff-team-up-...

http://web.archive.org/web/20150610212104/https://imgur.com/...

Excavator··on Show HN: Uncanny Valley – Interactive WebGL and WebAudio Demo
I currently have a single die CPU+GPU, the AMD A10-7850K, as I'm having some issues with the PCI-E ports that I have yet had time to troubleshoot. Good to know where the issues lie at least, thanks for the explanations!

In regards to working properly: It does work as in the videos as long as the aspect ratio is "correct".

Excavator··on Reddit’s Plan to Recover from Its Meltdown
Dox? From what I've understood a user got annoyed with them removing images so a collage¹ were created using the pictures from the, now removed, Imgur "meet the team" page².

1: http://www.reaxxion.com/9552/reddit-and-imgur-staff-team-up-...

2: http://web.archive.org/web/20150610212104/https://imgur.com/...

Excavator··on Reddit’s Plan to Recover from Its Meltdown
As I see it, the issues are mainly caused by SRS being allowed to police the site. Not only closing "venting chambers" but also causing a lot of backlash and increasingly severe behaviour due to their harassment. Harassment on the level of harassing or threatening family, friends, and co-workers of their target.
Excavator··on Show HN: Uncanny Valley – Interactive WebGL and WebAudio Demo
Tested in Firefox (41), and Firefox Nightly (44.0a1) under up-to-date Linux with Skia.

This breaks for me when the viewport is higher than its width, which is how I normally have it. It breaks by not drawing the head and only drawing the bits that overlay the eyes.

Also getting some warnings in the console, unsure if it's due to the site or the browsers implementaion:

PROGRAM_INFO_LOG: warning: sampler arrays indexed with non-constant expressions is forbidden in GLSL 110 warning: Variable sampler array index unsupported. This feature of the language was removed in GLSL 1.20 and is unlikely to be supported for 1.10 in Mesa. warning: Variable sampler array index unsupported. This feature of the language was removed in GLSL 1.20 and is unlikely to be supported for 1.10 in Mesa. [···] repeats

Excavator··on Show HN: Blueprint3D – Design interior spaces in 3D with WebGL
Very nice, some nits though:

A slightly bug-ish thing with the zoom. One can continue zooming (moving the "focus point"?) even after it visibly stops zooming due to collision, making for a sorta confusing experience.

Both right-click and middle-click behaves like left-click when over an item, is this intentional?

Items can be hovered & selected through walls and moved the same way but there's no visual indication in regards to what's happening. There should be something like the red "can't move", except white or a transparent "item", visible through walls in these cases.

Excavator··on Efficiency up, turnover down: Sweden experiments with six-hour working day
In Sweden "work" entails 8hours + 1hour set aside for obligatory break time. Is it different in the states?

Also, I can't see how 6hours would mean no stretch/brain breaks.

Excavator··on The likely end of DownThemAll
Giorgio's post on the matter: https://hackademix.net/2015/08/22/webextensions-api-noscript...
Excavator··on Ask HN: What would you want in an ideal web browser?
For a history tree, something like FromWhereToWhere¹ and Session History Tree²?

A roadmap like this?: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/Roadmap Curious why you want one though?

For an automation API, would the RemoteDebug APIs³ work, or perhaps the command-line⁴ API for Firefox? See node-firefox⁵ for an example of using the RemoteDebug API to automate some functions in Firefox.

What makes you perceive the V8 team as more committed than other teams?

You can use your GitHub login to sign in to Mozilla's Bugzilla⁶, is that not enough of an integration for you?

1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/fromwheretowh...

2: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/session-histo...

3: https://kenneth.io/blog/2015/03/12/remotedebug-one-year-late...

4: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Command_Lin...

5: https://github.com/mozilla/node-firefox

6: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/

Excavator··on Stop pushing the web forward
You might be interested in the in the works WebAssembly, if you haven't heard of it already.

https://blog.mozilla.org/luke/2015/06/17/webassembly/

Excavator··on D3.js visualization of a lambda calculus
Other things you ought to take a look at:

Sauerbraten in JS, called Bananabread¹, and jor1k an OpenRISC emulator running Linux². Although the latter uses a relay for networking.

1: https://developer.cdn.mozilla.net/media/uploads/demos/a/z/az...

2: https://s-macke.github.io/jor1k/demos/main.html

Excavator··on D3.js visualization of a lambda calculus
Probably due to the horrible way animations are set up with setTimeout:

    var step = -1;

    function nextval() {
        step++;
        return 3000 + (20*step);
    }
    setTimeout(function() {

        graph.removeLink("31", "31_1");
        keepNodesOnTop();

    }, nextval());
There are 9687 setTimeout on that page.
Excavator··on Firefox makes click-to-activate Flash the default
Don't even need all that. Just, right-click the icon and click "Remove from Toolbar/Menu".
Excavator··on Ellen Pao Is Stepping Down as Reddit’s Chief
In so far as I can remember he had good relations with many on the staff and even ended up with a special icon next to his username.

The /r/SubredditDrama posts in regards to the incident are correct as I remember it:

Part I - violentacrez: https://archive.is/7ygdr

Part II - CreepShots: https://archive.is/8AVd8

Part 2 above ends with a link to VAs alleged last comments with an alt:

http://i.imgur.com/E8fCA.png

Excavator··on New Performance Tools in Firefox Developer Edition 40
You already have an API in the remote debugging interface:

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/03/firefox-developer-tools-wo...

Excavator··on New Performance Tools in Firefox Developer Edition 40
> Firebug's console is multiline which is handy for typing in short scripts. However that means that commands run only with CTRL-Enter. I prefer Firebug.

Like with most similar consoles the Firefox dev tools allow you to create newlines with Shift+Enter

Excavator··on Wifi Skeleton Key has 270M active users, now valued at $1B
Fun stuff. classes.dex in the apk has some interesting strings:

    select * from js_injection where name=?
    select * from pwd where hid>=? and hid<? order by hid

    CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS local_ap_info ( hid integer primary key autoincrement, ssid text, bssid text, security_level text,
     pwd text, x_user text, x_pwd text, stat text, lati text, longi text, type text, html text, create_dt text, last_update_dt text)
	
    CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS private_ap_info(ID integer primary key autoincrement,ssid text,bssid text,security_level text,
     pwd text,hid text,create_dt text,last_update_dt text,last_update_opr text,wkflg char(8))
	
    CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS unlock_ap(id integer primary key autoincrement,ssid text,bssid text,security_level text,
     pwd text,uploaded integer(1))


Cleaned up your sqlite commands:

    sqlite> .tables
    pwd
    sqlite> .schema pwd
    CREATE TABLE "pwd" ("password" TEXT NOT NULL );
    sqlite> SELECT * FROM pwd;
    a30e502c125899a41cb562a7a36b4bd0 c58675db0ba9266fb5307982e4368ab0 5631e619f6e280c0740704a25a8298f6 ...
	
Looks like it may not be fully seeded on install?

Edit:

Getting a different result for the database in the apk:

    $ sqlite3 ap8.db 
    SQLite version 3.8.10.1 2015-05-09 12:14:55
    Enter ".help" for usage hints.
    sqlite> .tables
    android_metadata  ap_info           js_injection      pwd             
    sqlite> .schema pwd
    CREATE TABLE pwd(hid integer primary key autoincrement,pwd text);
    sqlite> select * from pwd;
    1|df5b74fb19b8b150bcf07bbb4e43456d
    2|a1b574f8cf46c461f1e15fa52e3b2110
    3|c8c28c03de3e02d7814d86b14dfcf1f5
    4|7635726149e6d0f0e8f3e9224b8109dc
Most "pwd" are 32 chars long, some are 64 chars, and a few are 96 chars for some odd reason.

ap_info, and js_injection tables are empty so you'd have to get at it after syncing to their servers.

Excavator··on Multiprocess Firefox
As far as I understand it, Firefox already have separate JS heaps since a few years back via the compartments model¹.

1: https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/category/compartments/

Edit:

A quick, 100% scientific™ test:

  Content processes: 50
      Sum: 1858.6
      Max:   42.72
  Average:   37.172

  Content processes: 10
      Sum: 791.96
      Max:  88.96
  Average:  79.196

  Content processes: 5
      Sum: 624.1100000000001
      Max: 137.68
  Average: 124.82200000000003

  Content processes: 1
      Sum: 453.89
      Max: 453.89
  Average: 453.89
Based on running the following script on a freshly generated about:memory profile:

  var max = 0;
  var sum = 0;
  var vals = $$('span[id^="Web Content"][id$="explicit"] span.mrValue');
  for (let vi = 0; vi < vals.length; vi++) {
  	let v = parseFloat(vals[vi].textContent);
  	sum += v;
  	max = Math.max(max, v);
  }
  console.log('Content processes:', vals.length);
  console.log('Sum:', sum);
  console.log('Max:', max);
  console.log('Average:', sum/vals.length);
This is with ~400 tabs opened but in "unloaded" state. Only 5 pages were actually fully loaded.

50 processes caused stuttering when scrolling in the tab bar. 10 & 5 processes felt smooth and allowed tab titles of background tabs to load in quickly during startup. 1 process took forever to actually load in the tab titles of background tabs on startup.

Setting changed via: about:config?filter=dom.ipc.processCount

← PreviousPage 2 of 6Next →