HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

afiori

3,756 karma · joined January 23, 2019

This about had been empty long enough; I will use it for a book recommendation: Unsong, by Scott Alexander

http://unsongbook.com/

My guess is it will be the weirdest book you will have ever read.

If it is not, please, I am curious about what is your weirdest book :)

submissionscomments
afiori··on Iran strikes leave Amazon availability zones "hard down" in Bahrain and Dubai
Considering how hard US military bases and radar systems have been hit (and those are not city-sized target) I am unconvinced that even AMZN's pocket change could realiably protect against the kind of attacks we see in this war
afiori··on The future of version control
being able to customize the chunking/diffing process with something analogous to an lsp would greatly improve this. In my experience a particularly horribly handled case is when eg two branches add two distinct methods/functions in the same file location (especially if there is some boilerplate so that the two blocks share more than a few lines).

a language aware merge could instead produce

>>>> function foo(){ ... } ===== function bar(){ ... } <<<<<<

afiori··on The future of version control
iirc ours is always the commit the merge is starting from. the issue is that with a merge your current commit is the merging commit while with a rebase it is reversed.

I suspect that this could be because the rebase command is implemented as a serie of merges/cherry-picks from the target branch.

afiori··on JPEG Compression
With Cathode ray TVs only a single pixel at a time is on, it relies on our eyes having bad enough temporal resolution, if you have Superspeed eyes you will see just a coloured line/pixel moving on screen
afiori··on Recursive Problems Benefit from Recursive Solutions
Just like many languages have annotations for inlining functions they could have annotations for tco. From an usability pov i would like annotations for must, must not, should, and should not. Where the "must" versions error if the compiler can't do the optimization
afiori··on White House plan to break up iconic U.S. climate lab moves forward
based on recentish interviews (or book?) it was likely genuine in the sense of not being performative, but apparently she knew it was both false and the wrong thing to say but said it anyway out of loyalty to Biden.
afiori··on White House plan to break up iconic U.S. climate lab moves forward
Intra-party elections should definitely be some variant of ranked-choice voting. To at least try to avoid the current fractal polarization.
afiori··on Making WebAssembly a first-class language on the Web
The web part is the security model and the tradeoffs between security and performance. PNaCL was in browsers but not "web" for this reason.

Like the assembly part means low-level and meant as a compilation target, not CPU instructions.

So websssembly is an assembly language for the web, like webgl is opengl for the web and webgpu are gpu APIs for the web. And behold none of those can access DOM APIs

afiori··on Temporal: The 9-year journey to fix time in JavaScript
{"$temporal_type":"PlainYearMonth","$data":"........"}
afiori··on Iran war wreaking havoc on shipping and air cargo, could create global delays
The us is indeed very interested in how many innocents its enemies kill.

70 years of bombing random coutries an causing caos and military dictatorships show that is might not apply inward.

afiori··on Iran war wreaking havoc on shipping and air cargo, could create global delays
> Why would the US and Israel resort to X?

> That’s how you end up with wide scale civilian deaths.

Has Israel ever shown restraint wrt civilian deaths?

afiori··on RFC 9849. TLS Encrypted Client Hello
Then they would drop the connection with esni
afiori··on TikTok will not introduce end-to-end encryption, saying it makes users less safe
Agree, but a significant point missed in the article is that of data vulnerability. with E2EE the company db is useless to an external attacker.

For some companies (eg facebook, google, tiktok) i would be mostly worried about the company itself being untrustworthy. For others I would be mostly worried about the company being vulnerable.

afiori··on TikTok will not introduce end-to-end encryption, saying it makes users less safe
because most implementations are not going to be like that.
afiori··on Don't use passkeys for encrypting user data
Also a password could be the passkey, the passkey protocol is basically a way to send to a server an authenticated public key. The client could deterministically convert passwords to key-pairs and authenticate with those
afiori··on What Is OAuth?
Imo the need to register an app with an oauth provider is a plus
afiori··on Farewell, Rust for web
not really in-topic but constant-time crypto primitives are considered hard for any compiled language with a lot of optimizations
afiori··on Zero-day CSS: CVE-2026-2441 exists in the wild
I am pretty sure that the issue is that they either admit to being so l stuck as a vassal beholden to Google, or they pretend to be enterprising and forward looking with many promising projects
afiori··on Modern CSS Code Snippets: Stop writing CSS like it's 2015
Without a lot of discipline it is very easy to end up with a css with lots of unclear and hard to guess effects. Eg consider the case of <A type=1><B><A type=2></A></B></A> where A and B are complex templates. Any selector with the " " operator on A risk expanding to the inner A even if it was intended only for the outer. Similarly a :has selector might catch a descendant of the wrong element.

@scope fixes a lot of this, but it is a complex problem. With tailwind you mostly have to worry about inheritance

afiori··on Total surface area required to fuel the world with solar (2009)
Even ignoring all non renewable consumption in growing the corn to be turned into ethanol it is still going towards an incredibly polluting infrastructure.

While each solar panel is a small step towards more and better electrification

afiori··on I write games in C (yes, C) (2016)
I enjoyed the pragmatic historical definition of OOP given in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo84LFzx5nI where essential it can be seen as subtype polymorphism
afiori··on Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)
The premise of the article is the desire to avoid accidental collisions, especially from newly installed system binaries.

In such cases you might get errors like sl being both a version control system and the steam locomotive

afiori··on FORTH? Really!?
Probably prefix notation would work better, but I suspect that there would be a stronger effect from predictable and reasonable declinations/suffixes/prefixes at a grammatical level.
afiori··on Data centers in space makes no sense
IIRC the methane is produced at launch site with considerable pollution
afiori··on Data centers in space makes no sense
Sure but if it was a good idea we could do it on earth too and datacenters could stop gurgling a city worth of water
afiori··on Pretty soon, heat pumps will be able to store and distribute heat as needed
This should depend on the frequency of the switching, if it is every few seconds it should behave sorta the same
afiori··on The Codex App
Neither it means that McDonald's should aspire to be a chef
afiori··on Typechecking is undecidable when 'type' is a type (1989) [pdf]
The paradox is about the set of all sets that do not contain themselves, or a theorem that such a set does not exist.

In the context of the paradox you need to call it a set, otherwise it would not be a paradox

afiori··on US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private
Vibes are a perfectly solid ground to refuse to engage with something.
afiori··on US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private
Things like this combined with the countless ways to hide "feature flags" in a giant codebase makes me feel that anything less than "the entire app was verified + there is literally no way to dynamically load code from remote (so even no in app browser) + we checked 5 years of old versions and plan to do this for the next 5 years of update" is particularly meaningful.

Still very important but my issue has never been with zucks inability to produce solid software, rather in its intentions and so them being good engineers just makes them better at hiding bad stuff.

← PreviousPage 4 of 34Next →