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gcpon Some frustrated publishers are sitting out Google’s GDPR meetings

It would seem that having to be GDPR compliant would dis-proportionally favor large companies with a lot of lawyers and engineers to implement the needed features company-wide.

If this is not working out for Google, perhaps it's because the business is fundamentally incompatible? But I have problems believing that. The outcome would be too good :-)

gcpon Some frustrated publishers are sitting out Google’s GDPR meetings

I wonder what the longer term consequences are.

OK, sure it's nice that right now every site or company I ever had any interaction with no longer feels like they can keep my email on file to continuously spam me.

But this state won't last right? I assume that everything I sign up for in the future will have a load of legalese to circumvent this as much as possible?

gcpon HTTP headers we don't want

God yes. Especially because it's so often ENTIRELY AND UTTERLY WRONG.

gcpon HTTP headers we don't want

Browser vendors can't clean up User-Agent because the websites sniff it and break if it's "wrong" (for any random value of wrong).

I'm sure there's a Bugzilla bug about the "X11; Linux x86_64" in the headers, and I'd be terrified to open it.

gcpon Google embraces, extends, and extinguishes

Microsoft...is becoming a good citizen of the technology community

By displaying deceptive ads about competitors in their flagship product?

Get out.

gcpon Google embraces, extends, and extinguishes

slow web page loads on mobile devices

Mostly slow because they need to display a lot of...Google Ads?

gcpon Google embraces, extends, and extinguishes

The problem is that they push "standards" but the implementation of the standards often does not function as written.

Typically standard bodies avoid this by requiring two independent implementations, but the market situation really means that the standard is what Chrome implements, and nothing else.

gcpon Cloud TPUs in Beta

"You can’t change the tax status of your Google Cloud Platform billing account."

I think this is what tripped me up before. I closed my business years ago but it was completely impossible to get Google to fix this. Now it fixed it "by itself".

Just a warning to everyone before signing up with your main Google account :-)

gcpon Appropriate Uses for SQLite

Are you thinking of WebSQL? I don't remember a SQLite interface client-side in any browser.

Well, yes and no. The whole problem with WebSQL was that it effectively meant using SQLite and never anything else that wasn't completely bug compatible.

So the whole problem with WebSQL was that it was, de facto, a web standard built around giving an SQLite interface client-side.

gcpon Appropriate Uses for SQLite

IndexedDB may be backed by SQLite. I think it likely is in Firefox?

gcpon Cloud TPUs in Beta

Interestingly, GCP now appears to be available to individuals in Europe. It wasn't like that before, no idea when that policy got changed. Before, GCP wasn't even a consideration compared to AWS (which always handled that).

gcpon ARM immediate value encoding (2014)

ARM, like other RISC architectures MIPS and PowerPC, has a fixed instruction size of 32 bits. This is a good design decision

So good that they got rid of it in their new chips.

gcpon Qt 5.10 released

wxWidgets wins because of native widgets, a handier license, and no moc etc requirements.

I think Qt wins in all other domains though. Documentation, extensiveness and quality of the non-GUI stuff, etc.

But not having native widgets kinda sucks. You can see that when you make that compromise, the question comes why not to use Electron (which is a competitor of those two in reality).

gcpon Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with General Reinforcement Learning

...and this attitude causes quite a bit of them to not be reproducible even when people try with the same resources.

gcpon Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with General Reinforcement Learning

At least in computer chess such experiments were typically demonstrated by winning the World Championship. (And sometimes they failed...cough Deep Blue cough)

gcpon Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with General Reinforcement Learning

You can convert winning percentages to centipawns, so that's not a problem.

gcpon Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with General Reinforcement Learning

There are too many details missing for the results to be reproducible.

Does it even qualify as a tech demo if the result only exists in DeepMind's lab?

gcpon Mozilla Files Cross-Complaint Against Yahoo Holdings and Oath

I mean there were 2 more years left in the deal IIRC? (2014-2019). 750M more or less probably means quite a bit to Firefox development. If it gets killed in the marketplace before the money ever shows up, getting it then might be a bit late to save the browser landscape.

gcpon Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with General Reinforcement Learning

Your comments about Stockfish, Komodo etc are entirely subjective. "It's pretty well regarded". No it's not.

You can't disconnect the search part from the discussion, as the search selectivity is ALSO learned by the neural network.

gcpon Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with General Reinforcement Learning

The problem is that it isn't entirely clear whether this produces equal quality results. You might end up on a lower optimization plateau.

gcpon Mozilla Files Cross-Complaint Against Yahoo Holdings and Oath

Could also go bankrupt before the suit is decided.

(cough Netscape cough)

gcpon Ask HN: Firefox vs. Chrome security

please counter with facts

I already did. Much of the stuff you mentioned has always been enabled and had nothing to do with telemetry. This is most obvious with the update checks. And yes, you DO need to send information to know which add-ons to update. Probing every installed add-on to see if there's an update amounts to sending over the list of installed add-ons. Let's be forthright about that.

I quoted an article from one of the Telemetry engineers explaining that now LESS data is collected by default.

I think that's a good enough rebuttal to your claim that there has been a change of direction to collect more.

gcpon Ask HN: Firefox vs. Chrome security

I'm objecting to the fact that you are calling this a change and that it supposedly collects more data. My understanding is that it is the opposite. Much of the stuff that you list is the update check and the update checks for add-ons, CA revocation checking etc, all things that have always been on by default and that can now actually be disabled more easily.

I have no idea where you pull the "this seems to include what URL's you're browsing; this could be a security risk for apps like Dropbox and OneDrive" stuff from. The only place I know of that these could potentially be recorded is a crash report, and this has always been the case if you allow it to send crash reports back because they contain the stack contents.

gcpon Ask HN: Firefox vs. Chrome security

For sure. But he doesn't go into any details where he think the advantage would lie, which I think conflicts with calling it a "major weakness".

gcpon Ask HN: Firefox vs. Chrome security

Firefox does NOT do any this, as far as I know. What is the source of this FUD?

A public discussion was started to get to know how people felt about privacy conserving telemetry collection that would be opt out by default. There was massive negative feedback (duh). The feature did not ship in 57.

https://medium.com/georg-fritzsche/data-preference-changes-i...

"instead we always collect LESS data on Firefox release."

gcpon Ask HN: Firefox vs. Chrome security

A rather arbitrary claim with nothing to back it up. For sure, Firefox made more security improvements in 2016 than it did in some of the years where they did feature it.

gcpon Ask HN: Firefox vs. Chrome security

Coincidentally it not being worth their time coincided with Mozilla not sponsoring the contest any more. You can make of that what you will.

gcpon Ask HN: Firefox vs. Chrome security

One major weakness of Firefox, relative to Chrome and Edge, is its use of sandboxing and process isolation to limit the impact that security flaws can have. Next year Mozilla will be working to improve these areas.

Firefox has been shipping with a sandbox for a while, let alone e10s. Is that an old post?

gcpon Intel to Develop Discrete GPUs, Hires AMD's Raja Koduri as Chief Architect

You simply don't ship

That's totally an option for our product, great idea! Why did I never think of this!

No seriously we are shipping, using OpenCL and it gives about a 20 times performance advantage for most users regardless if they have AMD or NVIDIA hardware. If something that's actually better than OpenCL comes along (or if AMD RTG goes out of business) I'll switch to it no heart broken.

But that hasn't happened yet.

gcpon Intel to Develop Discrete GPUs, Hires AMD's Raja Koduri as Chief Architect

So you're admitting that the problem is quality tooling, not lack of C++?