Hacker News Reader

gcpon Intel Gears Up for FPGA Push

You know, we would all like faster synthesize and P&R cycles, but when people complain about the tooling being shit, that's not what they're complaining about. (Mostly)

gcpon Intel Gears Up for FPGA Push

The sore point of FPGA development is that not only the tooling is beyond terrible, it's also effectively a strong lock in. Changing designs is all but easy, even IF your design is not tied to specific hard fabric on the FPGA.

So you got terrible tooling and then a lock in into that tooling.

Not very appealing. Why the f--- would anyone use FPGA's unless they're the only option?

gcpon Intel Gears Up for FPGA Push

I got a Xilinx Spartan DEV board sitting in a drawer too. The board is great but Xilinx's tooling has negative value for me, so it'll stay there.

Tooling is 100% the thing keeping FPGAs back.

gcpon Behind the Masq: Yet More DNS and DHCP Vulnerabilities

Taking control over dnsmasq seems potentially very useful even if it is running sandboxed. They're not a complete solution.

gcpon Behind the Masq: Yet More DNS and DHCP Vulnerabilities

To be honest, a compromised dnsmasq can do quite a lot of harm even if it is running in a sandbox. The rest of the system expects to trust the output.

gcpon MILA and the future of Theano

It's the feature I hate the most. It made sense for them because having all your history reside with Google fuels their engines. It makes no sense for the user and gives worse results when trying to find something back.

gcpon iPhone 8 Plus: The best smartphone camera we’ve ever tested

Because the Pixel was the previous best device.

gcpon iPhone 8 Plus: The best smartphone camera we’ve ever tested

They re-reviewed the Pixel with an updated, improved test protocol and the iPhone 8 is being compared to that.

DXO makes the equivalent of Lightroom, they're not a bunch of hipsters.

gcpon iPhone 8 Plus: The best smartphone camera we’ve ever tested

They re-reviewed the Pixel with a new test protocol, and the iPhone 8 is being compared to the results from that new test, whereas you're quoting the old values: https://www.dxomark.com/google-pixel-camera-review-retested-...

gcpon iPhone 8 Plus: The best smartphone camera we’ve ever tested

Voice calls are pretty much the least used feature in smartphones for me. Certainly way, waaay below taking photos.

gcpon iPhone 8 Plus: The best smartphone camera we’ve ever tested

I think the actual dxomark tests are, but the pics in the article are prettier custom takes for the audience?

gcpon PulseAudio under the hood

Like MMAudio, DirectSound, Kernel Streaming, WASAPI?

AudioTrack, OpenSL, whatever-the-Android-8-thing-is-called?

gcpon PulseAudio under the hood

The issue with the volume is one of your desktop environment, not of PulseAudio.

gcpon PulseAudio under the hood

./mach bootstrap && ./mach build

gcpon PulseAudio under the hood

This is the better option (aside from fixing your PA config in the first place, which I'd heavily recommend instead). apulse can get into issues with Firefox's sandboxing. It supports PulseAudio and works with ALSA too, but ALSA-pretending-to-be-PA won't work.

But really, fix your PulseAudio instead.

gcpon Why Keccak is not ARX

I have no idea what you mean.

gcpon GraphQL Patent Infringement Issues

Microsoft hasn't demanded royalties for things covered under their patent license (duh).

That article is just another reminder why one cannot afford to give Facebook a pass on this.

gcpon Vivaldi 1.12 released

Given that Firefox is shipping this, are we looking at a reversal of the "Opera had it first" meme? :-)

gcpon GraphQL Patent Infringement Issues

Yes, but those companies don't use toxic patent licenses like Facebook does.

No false equivalence should be made here. Facebook needs and deserves to be called out over it as much as possible.

gcpon GraphQL Patent Infringement Issues

That's the direct consequence of Facebook's patent license.

gcpon GraphQL Patent Infringement Issues

I don't get what you are saying entirely, but companies like Microsoft and Broadcom, of all places, have given patent licenses with their open source work that were not as one-sided as Facebook's was.

If Microsoft and Broadcom are better OSS+patents citizens then you are, you have a serious problem.

gcpon W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

Mozilla still gets money from Google for search.

No.

gcpon Why Keccak is not ARX

Bad press can kill a primitive even if it's incorrect. The Keccak guys had this happen to them with Noekeon.

They're still sore over it, presenting this about 10 years later: https://www.cryptolux.org/mediawiki-esc2010/images/7/7a/Noek...

To be honest, if I'd design something this elegant, and nobody considers if because of an irrelevant attack, I'd be very sore and alert for it happening again, too.

gcpon Why Keccak is not ARX

The nuance that's being made here is that the public cryptanalytic results we have are from researchers that need to publish. However blackhats (be it government or private) have no such need. Thus, they do not care if the analysis is elegant or neat.

This means that ARX functions will have less published analysis, but may still be successfully attacked.

This isn't even a new argument they're making here. It's been well understood that simple cipher designs are better, because they are easier to understand. If you can understand it well, yet not break it, that gives confidence. If you don't understand it, it might break as soon as you do.

gcpon Why Keccak is not ARX

I think there's an implication here of "less likely to be broken by public research".

gcpon W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

The users picked by collectively not giving a fuck.

gcpon W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

which is an active protection of the user against malware.

You should look at how Mozilla implemented EME then. The CDM is sandboxed, in a much stricter sandbox than the rest of the browser even. So no, the CDM potentially being dangerous (for privacy or security) isn't actually that much of an issue.

Of course, someone might at some point claim that the privacy features harm the copyrights protection, at which point choices will have to be made.

History provide ample evidence that Mozilla will make the choice their users ask for (which is, by the way, not necessarily the choice some users will voice the most loudly).

gcpon Western Digital Ships 12 TB WD Gold HDD: 8 Platters and Helium

The Barracuda Pro 10TB is reportedly pretty quiet. I'd hope so, as I've got one coming in.

gcpon How Eve Players Pulled Off the Biggest Betrayal in Its History

imperium.news

As explained elsewhere, don't expect to find 100% objective reporting anywhere.

gcpon How Eve Players Pulled Off the Biggest Betrayal in Its History

imperium.news and /r/eve

The metagame of Eve is such that you can't really find objective reporting, though. It extends far beyond the game.