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nightpool

5,321 karma · joined September 19, 2010

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nightpool··on Why Quadratic Funding Is Not Optimal
(10 billion, surely?)
nightpool··on How we decreased GitLab repo backup times from 48 hours to 41 minutes
Why are you making a new account for each comment? You seem to be deliberately avoiding HN's moderation system
nightpool··on Show HN: Tesseral – Open-Source Auth
Wow, that's super helpful, thanks.

However, that doesn't change my opinion that one-org-per-session and one-org-per-user is a terrible way to design an auth/auth system and Tesseral—a library/service that is trying to Get Auth Right—shouldn't design such a limitation into their system from the beginning

nightpool··on Show HN: Tesseral – Open-Source Auth
> You don’t want org1 to have access to the data that user x has access to in org2

Of course not—I'm not sure why you'd think I mean that?

I'm just saying that if I open a link to `https://datadog.com/alert/12389` and `https://datadog.com/alert/12500` and the alerts are for different orgs, my auth cookies should be able to tell that I, as user X, have access to both orgs without having to "switch contexts" or re-auth.

nightpool··on Compiling a neural net to C for a speedup
You're thinking about the cells as toggles on a stateful grid, TFA is thinking about them as pure functions that take in an input state and output a new state (with "off" being the default).

From that perspective, there's no point in "killing" a cell, it's simpler to only write out the 0 -> 1 and 1 -> 1 transition cases and leave all of the other cases as implicitly 0

nightpool··on Show HN: Tesseral – Open-Source Auth
That feels needlessly confusing and not a great way to handle large orgs. Datadog does a similar thing—I need to completely switch contexts to start working in a separate organization and there's absolutely no way to open tabs from two orgs side by side. Not to mention, any link to a dashboard or alert will fail until I go and select the right org from the dropdown (and if I don't know what org the link is in from context, I have no way to find it).

I don't think new auth services should encourage this pattern and I highly recommend that you remove this restriction as soon as possible before it becomes even more baked in. Your downstream services should have access to all of the orgs a user belongs to right from the beginning, using a comma-separated list or multi-value headers or something similar. Don't shard user IDs in this way.

nightpool··on The Ingredients of a Productive Monorepo
I think you might just have a badly architected backend. get rid of your microservices first and then we'll see how you're feeling
nightpool··on CSS Minecraft
Truly incredible from an HTML perspective, but I think also a testament to how catchy and simple Minecraft is as a concept... a few minutes of noodling around in here and I already built myself a cute little tree and a hill: https://i.imgur.com/PjlDWo5.png
nightpool··on Fast Allocations in Ruby 3.5
It doesn't sound like YJIT is being abandoned at all. Reading between the lines, it sounds like they want to invest most of their new development right now into a less-experimental architecture that's closer to other JITs and is easier to develop, but that they consider this a somewhat risky endeavor and aren't sure whether this investment is going to pan out in the long run. So they're going to try ZJIT out, but YJIT and the ideas behind it are by no means abandoned. They're just taking a pause to see if a rewrite will make it easier to maintain or produce better results in the long term.
nightpool··on Fast Allocations in Ruby 3.5
The sibling comments mention that C is used in a lot of places in Ruby that incur cross-language overheads, which is true, but it's also just true that in general, even ignoring this overhead, JIT'd functions are going to be faster then their comparable C functions, because 1) they have more profiling information to be able to work from, 2) they have more type information, and (as a consequence of 1&2) 3) they're more likely to be monomorphized, and the compiler is more able to inline specialized variants of them into different chunks of the code. Among other optimizations!
nightpool··on Storefront Web Components
The link has been updated to the docs now, thanks dang!
nightpool··on SDB Scans the Ruby Stack Without the GVL
Thanks for the reply! I'm sorry for coming off as too harsh.

> Yeah, sometimes, the compiler may compile a 64-bit memory access into two instructions, such as Rust, but it's not Ruby. It should be fine not consider this.

This sounds like it probably depends on the compiler or toolchain used. So Ruby compiled with LLVM would have issues with this approach, but Ruby compiled with GCC might not. Also it would be interesting to see whether yjit would affect this—it has hand-tuned assembly for 64-bit memory access.

nightpool··on SDB Scans the Ruby Stack Without the GVL
This looks AI-generated and very misleading.... definitely decreases my trust in the linked library, which is unfortunate given that the overall approach seems novel and interesting. The intro starts off by saying SDB is better than rbspy because it doesn't have errors related to data races. But then in the body of the article, it says "Data races may occur if the Ruby VM updates the stack while SDB is reading it", but says that's fine because similar issues occur in other profilers. That sort of trivial contradiction (along with the vague language, overly verbose / repetitive intro and summary, and rando citations (an MIT course lecture??)) feels like the hallmark of a predictive language model with no actual understanding of the code it's explaining.
nightpool··on What is HDR, anyway?
You are replying to the article's author.
nightpool··on Past, present, and future of Sorbet type syntax
As a meta comment (responding to your question about downvotes): This is a very, very frequent topic of discussion any time Shopify, Stripe, Github or another huge Ruby shop make a technical post that's interesting to Rubyists. It's very annoying to have to retread the exact same discussion over and over again just because some people have to make this comment every time Ruby is even tangentially mentioned. So people aren't downvoting because they blindly disagree, they're downvoting because this is an uninteresting comment to leave on this article specifically.
nightpool··on Past, present, and future of Sorbet type syntax
What parts of a C# approach do you think Ruby should adopt? The syntax? I don't think anyone thinks of C# as having a particularly good or noteworthy type syntax or features—anything you can find in C# you can probably find in most other typed languages. I'm curious what specifically you think C#'s typing system is better at than e.g. Typescript, Python or Rust
nightpool··on Reservoir Sampling
I loved the graphics!

However, I'm not sure I understand the statistical soundness of this approach. I get that every log during a given period has the same chance to be included, but doesn't that mean that logs that happen during "slow periods" are disproportionately overrepresented in overall metrics?

For example, if I want to optimize my code, and I need to know which endpoints are using the most time across the entire fleet to optimize my total costs (CPU-seconds or whatever), this would be an inappropriate method to use, since endpoints that get bursty traffic would be disproportionally underrepresented compared to endpoints that get steady constant traffic. So I'd end up wasting my time working on endpoints that don't actually get a lot of traffic.

Or if I'm trying to plan capacity for different services, and I want to know how many nodes to be running for each service, services that get bursty traffic would be underrepresented as well, correct?

What are the use-cases that reservoir sampling are good for? What kind of statistical analysis can you do on the data that's returned by it?

nightpool··on Unity’s Open-Source Double Standard: the ban of VLC
> Everyone is pretty clear about something like the MIT license

I don't think this is really true. I think people are often upset or surprised when their MIT-licensed programs are used in ways they don't agree with, or they reuse MIT-licensed programs in ways that violate their license terms (e.g. it takes many companies many, many years to realize they have to actually include a way for users to view copyright notices).

Open source software is built on many different fuzzy notions of community and collaboration, encoded into an imperfect-but-legally-robust set of protocols that try to establish common language for people to build on. These protocols have proven very, very successful in encouraging collaboration and minimizing exploitation, but there's still a regularization/compromise process that's necessary so that everybody has a common ground to work from.

For another perspective, think about them like security software—I personally might not know why TLS uses DH key exchange, or how it works, but if I threw it out in hopes of making thing simpler, things would probably go pretty badly for me when someone else notices.

nightpool··on Unity’s Open-Source Double Standard: the ban of VLC
> What this practically means, is open to interpretation.

Is it? It seems very straightforward to me—just use a DLL. The LGPL even says explicitly that it's fine as long as you use a shared library.

The situation gets trickier for Android or Xbox games I guess. I'm curious how Unity complies with the LGPL provisions there. But for any normal desktop platform this should be trivial to comply with.

EDIT: ah, upthread they mention this is only a provision for the LGPLv3. I would expect that the LGPLv3 is pretty rarely used for this reason.

nightpool··on Possibly a Serious Possibility
There's a lot of doubt, actually. Peter responds to this possibility in a lot of detail in the debate I linked:

    Even if WIV did try to create COVID, they couldn’t have. As Yuri said, COVID looks like BANAL-52 plus a furin cleavage site. But WIV didn’t have BANAL-52. It wasn’t discovered until after the COVID pandemic started, when scientists scoured the area for potential COVID relatives. WIV had a more distant COVID relative, RATG-13. But you can’t create COVID from RATG-13; they’re too different. You would need BANAL-52, or some as-yet-undiscovered extremely close relative. WIV had neither.

    Are we sure they had neither? Yes. Remember, WIV’s whole job was looking for new coronaviruses. They published lists of which ones they had found pretty regularly. They published their last list in mid-2019, just a few months before the pandemic. Although lab leak proponents claimed these lists showed weird discrepancies, this was just their inability to keep names consistent, and all the lists showed basically the same viruses (plus a few extra on the later ones, as they kept discovering more). The lists didn’t include BANAL-52 or any other suitable COVID relatives - only RATG-13, which isn’t close enough to work.

    Could they have been keeping their discovery of BANAL-52 secret? No. Pre-pandemic, there was nothing interesting about it; our understanding of virology wasn’t good enough to point this out as a potential pandemic candidate. WIV did its gain-of-function research openly and proudly (before the pandemic, gain-of-function wasn’t as unpopular as it is now) so it’s not like they wanted to keep it secret because they might gain-of-function it later. Their lists very clearly showed they had no virus they could create COVID from, and they had no reason to hide it if they did.

    COVID’s furin cleavage site is admittedly unusual. But it’s unusual in a way that looks natural rather than man-made. Labs don’t usually add furin cleavage sites through nucleotide insertions (they usually mutate what’s already there). On the other hand, viruses get weird insertions of 12+ nucleotides in nature. For example, HKU1 is another emergent Chinese coronavirus that caused a small outbreak of pneumonia in 2004. It had a 15 nucleotide insertion right next to its furin cleavage site. Later strains of COVID got further 12 - 15 nucleotide insertions. Plenty of flus have 12 to 15 nucleotide insertions compared to other earlier flu strains.
....

    COVID’s furin cleavage site is a mess. When humans are inserting furin cleavage sites into viruses for gain-of-function, the standard practice is RRKR, a very nice and simple furin cleavage site which works well. COVID uses PRRAR, a bizarre furin cleavage site which no human has ever used before, and which virologists expected to work poorly. They later found that an adjacent part of COVID’s genome twisted the protein in an unusual way that allowed PRRAR to be a viable furin cleavage site, but this discovery took a lot of computer power, and was only made after COVID became important. The Wuhan virologists supposedly doing gain-of-function research on COVID shouldn’t have known this would work. Why didn’t they just use the standard RRKR site, which would have worked better? Everyone thinks it works better! Even the virus eventually decided it worked better - sometime during the course of the pandemic, it mutated away from its weird PRRAR furin cleavage site towards a more normal form.

    COVID is hard to culture. If you culture it in most standard media or animals, it will quickly develop characteristic mutations. But the original Wuhan strains didn’t have these mutations. The only ways to culture it without mutations are in human airway cells, or (apparently) in live raccoon-dogs. Getting human airway cells requires a donor (ie someone who donates their body to science), and Wuhan had never done this before (it was one of the technologies only used at the superior North Carolina site).
nightpool··on Possibly a Serious Possibility
I highly recommend that you read through https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-r... and watch the underlying debate (starting here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1vaooTKHCM), it does a really good job of laying out the arguments for and against lab leak in a very thorough and evidence-based way like you're asking for here.
nightpool··on Trust Me, I'm Local: Chrome Extensions, MCP, and the Sandbox Escape
It doesn't need it if this vulnerability is the only one you're worried about (remote websites), but it'd be nice to have it before letting it use e.g. your Github account. This is how VS Code extensions work, for example, and it's pretty nice
nightpool··on Trust Me, I'm Local: Chrome Extensions, MCP, and the Sandbox Escape
I mean, the core security vulnerability explained here is that MCP does not expose / allow for any kind of authentication or user consent before accessing your computer's most sensitive resources, like a terminal or list of private Slack messages. Spotify, 1Password, or other services on your computer that use `localhost` do not have the same issue.

This would be a non-issue if some kind of simple origin-authenticated token exchange was built into the protocol itself.

nightpool··on I should have loved biology too
Why would you opine on the way the words are pronounced if you've never seen them before and clearly did not take the time to look them up at all?
nightpool··on I should have loved biology too
FWIW, I did a quick search of our local slack and found 2x the the number of instances of "segue" compared to "segway". And most of the instances of "segway" (around 60%) refer to the actual device, with only a handful of mistakes (around 4). So I'm not sure that this spelling is more common in a corporate environment—maybe do a search for yourself and see!
nightpool··on I should have loved biology too
(Unless you're riding a motorized vehicle, the word is segue, not Segway)
nightpool··on AMP and why emails are not (and should never be) interactive
It really, really isn't.
nightpool··on A New ASN.1 API for Python
https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/de.rub.nds/asn1-tool links to https://github.com/tls-attacker/ASN.1-Tool which redirects to https://github.com/tls-attacker/ASN.1-Attacker, so that seems like it's the new name for the tool you're looking for.
nightpool··on It's easier than ever to de-censor videos
Easier said than done if you're using a proportional font though
nightpool··on Restructuring Announcement
what microblogging site do you think Tumblr is a clone of? and outdated compared to what, exactly?
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