Hacker News Reader

howinterestingon GoFetch: New side-channel attack using data memory-dependent prefetchers

Good communication has always been a part of making sure your work is influential.

howinterestingon GoFetch: New side-channel attack using data memory-dependent prefetchers

The M1 and M2 don't have that bit.

howinterestingon California suspends Cruise's autonomous vehicle deployment

A human driver at what percentile?

I think AVs need to be better than p95 or so to be socially accepted.

It's not just about the engine itself, it's about things like supporting extensions. Safari's content blocker API is less powerful than Firefox's on desktop/Android, for example. I don't know how much of that is a technical engine limitation versus an Apple policy decision.

howinterestingon D.C.'s ban on cashless businesses takes effect

That's Axios for you. I'm sure it appeals to some people.

howinterestingon Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux?

If a company doesn't want at least some element of that, the solution is very simple: drop below a USD $10B valuation by spinning off parts of the company. Note that I said TEN BILLION DOLLARS. A "decacorn". That is an unfathomable amount of money. If you've created a company worth that much you've won at capitalism.

If governments had a good track record I'd advocate for that. No need for strawmen like five year plans, I think competition is a wonderful thing.

My underlying, strong belief is that corporations are legal fictions created primarily to benefit society, Milton Friedman's philosophy notwithstanding.

howinterestingon Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux?

I generally think any company with a >10 billion (2023 US) dollar valuation should be forced to do things that may not directly benefit them but benefit society. Having to publish open specifications for all their proprietary integrations is a pretty easy, relatively low-cost example.

How to make this work in practice is a really interesting question. Community and employee representatives on the board would be a good start. But I think just having the requirement that open specifications be made available, and writing that into legislation, would be great.

howinterestingon Influxdb made the switch from Go to Rust

While one can bring a lot of nuance to the conversation, most imperative languages do not have the &/&mut separation that Rust does and are therefore bad. &/&mut is basically essential to writing correct code in an imperative language.

howinterestingon Google assigns a CVE for libwebp and gives it a 10.0 score

Thank you.

howinterestingon Control Center on macOS is always re-rendering its SwiftUI causing 1% CPU load

It's just another reminder that Apple, like all other big tech companies, is full of mediocre software teams working on unreasonable deadlines.

howinterestingon Google assigns a CVE for libwebp and gives it a 10.0 score

Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. You can start your project in C and release it on an AS IS basis, and we can make fun of you for it, object to its use in professional contexts, and so on.

howinterestingon Google assigns a CVE for libwebp and gives it a 10.0 score

While yes, that's theoretically possible, do you have data to establish this? For example, having small sections of the code be marked as unsafe would allow for greater scrutiny of those sections. Also, unsafe access is more annoying to perform in Rust than in C or C++, so maybe that would have acted as a deterrent (or at least the code would have been profiled to make sure that unsafe access was worth it).

https://security.googleblog.com/2022/12/memory-safe-language... shows improvements at scale.

howinterestingon iPhone 15 teardown reveals software lockdown

Do you sincerely believe what Apple is doing is the least restrictive means to achieve that goal?

howinterestingon Ian's Shoelace Site

I found this site and switched to the secure knot many years ago, and my shoelaces have literally never come undone since. One of those quality of life improvements that I now take for granted.

howinterestingon Platform that enables Windows driver development in Rust

> Rust type system doesn't help when the data resides in a shared memory segment accessed by multiple processes.

This isn't quite true. You can provide a safe abstraction that involves cross-process locking APIs. https://github.com/elast0ny/shared_memory/blob/HEAD/examples... is an example using a mutex guard.

Rust's type system helps more in some cases than others, but you can get at least some help from it almost all of the time.

howinterestingon Profile of Sabine Hossenfelder

Thanks, Captain Obvious.

The fact that both sides think they're correct has absolutely no bearing on who is actually correct. For that we must turn to evidence. The evidence in favor of trans healthcare and identities is overwhelming, and the evidence presented by the other side is laced with non-evidenced religious beliefs like "someone being cis and unhappy is a better outcome for society than someone being trans and happy".

howinterestingon Profile of Sabine Hossenfelder

You've strung a lot of words together that are not attached to reality. Plenty of people are acting very scientifically with regard to trans people—there are hundreds of studies in this regard. "Correlation is not causation" is the beginning of the conversation about the relationship between the two, not the end. (Observational data plus a solid theory is a very powerful way to establish causation.)

The idea that social acceptance of transness is causing more people to identify as trans is is not entirely without merit, but needs to be thought about critically. It is true that people who have low-key gender dysphoria would treat it with increased salience if they became more aware that trans people exist, but that is very clearly a good thing. Society should generally allow people to be true and happy to their selves.

Moreover, while the general direction of social progress has been encouraging, the magnitude of it has been relatively small. We have a very long way to go before we can even begin to control for social stigma as a factor in trans suicidality rates. This last point is evidenced by comments in this very thread.

howinterestingon Profile of Sabine Hossenfelder

The difference between the two sides is that one is correct and the other is not, and that what "normal" (uninformed lay) people think is not really relevant.

edit: Your response has no actual content in it.

howinterestingon Profile of Sabine Hossenfelder

This is a plague among high-IQ people like physicists, quant people and engineers (speaking as someone who has consistently tested 2.5-3 standard deviations above the population average). They're good at pattern matching which is rewarding in those fields but think they can just think through areas outside their expertise without engaging with the literature.

howinterestingon Profile of Sabine Hossenfelder

"On the other side there are those saying that it’s saving the lives of minorities who’ve been forced to stay in the closet for too long. And then there are normal people, like you and I, who think both sides are crazy"

I think this fragment speaks for itself. It is not "crazy" to care about suicide rates or suicidal ideation. It is "crazy" to not care about that.

howinterestingon Profile of Sabine Hossenfelder

Better to remain silent, etc.

howinterestingon Profile of Sabine Hossenfelder

https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/new-randomized-trial-show...

howinterestingon Valve is a wonderful upstream contributor to Linux and the open-source community

There's the whole dialectic in history between structural and contingent factors.

Valve and PC gaming is massively, massively contingent. It could very easily have been a much worse player at the helm.

howinterestingon I hacked macOS

You got downvoted because you didn't consider for even a second the game theoretic result of judging products based on the number of CVEs they've had.

howinterestingon Yazi: Fast terminal file manager based on async I/O

This is Rust, which is a language that doesn't have data races (though other kinds of races are certainly possible).

For an application like yazi async is likely a much more pleasurable experience to write code in than trying to manage threads and cancellations by hand.

howinterestingon Block the Blue – Twitter Verified Blocker

Sucks. That's just how Bayes' theorem is sometimes.

howinterestingon We built the fastest CI and it failed

Yes, but Bazel requires an all-in commitment and also tons of work to fit the rest of the world into it.

howinterestingon We built the fastest CI and it failed

I think there is certainly some value to that (the other posts don't appear to be fully grasping the complexity of the problem), but Earthly feels closer to an open source consultancy project than venture capital funded startup.

howinterestingon DJI Virtual Flight (iOS) has been broken for five months

I think you can frame it as a neutral tradeoff in the abstract, but Dark Souls is a monumental piece of cultural heritage and is clearly and unequivocally better than gacha games.

howinterestingon Block the Blue – Twitter Verified Blocker

You're voting with your wallet. Other people are allowed to vote to block you based on your vote. It's not a big deal.