HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

paulrouget

2,839 karma · joined February 24, 2010

submissionscomments
paulrouget··on The time is right for a DOM templating API
There is no data!

https://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.x...

Good old time.

paulrouget··on James Webb Space Telescope reveals that most galaxies rotate clockwise
It split. The counter part is antimatter. And there’s more matter than antimatter.

So it’s a similar question. Where does this asymmetry come from.

paulrouget··on James Webb Space Telescope reveals that most galaxies rotate clockwise
Because measurements confirm a homogeneous and isotopic universe. A spherical universe would imply a special point, the center, which would go against these cosmological principals.
paulrouget··on WASM Wayland Web (WWW)
That's something I was thinking a lot about back when I was working on Servo. Wasm + a protocol to talk to WebRender (expose display lists [0] to the wasm runtime). Some sort of "mini web", a minimal runtime that would do just enough that most web APIs could be re-implemented and shipped from the webpage directly. The DOM, the CSS parser, the layout engine, … could just be shipped as wasm modules.

Kind of defeat the purpose of view-source, but nowadays, it's a lost battle already.

And I didn't think too much about sandboxing, accessibility, network or whatnot. Just a fun idea…

[0]: https://github.com/servo/webrender/blob/c4bd5b47d8f5cd684334...

paulrouget··on What Firefox trains are we in?
Lot of people were saying that back then.

But… the 3.6 -> 4.0 release was just such a pain. We spent more than a year trying to cram too many features in v4.

Clearly feature-based releases were just not cutting it, especially as Chrome was shipping new versions fast.

For the longest time people were saying it was the wrong move, but really - that was absolutely necessary, and proved out to be the right thing to do. The Stable / Beta / Alpha ("aurora", was that the name?) channels massively improved our yield :)

paulrouget··on The 1871 Samuel Morse Statue (2014)
The story of the Telegraph is mind blowing. It was such a revolution, it changed our world. I can't recommend that book enough: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Victorian_Internet
paulrouget··on Equinox.space
Hey :) I see you guys everywhere nowadays. Congrats, and happy to see you keep on doing amazing things!
paulrouget··on Scale of the Universe
I think it's some sort of a reference to the CMB.
paulrouget··on Niagara Launcher
And it's so simple. Very easy to fork and tweak the hell out of. I added a better fonts, a 3rd swipe gesture (from top) and some random little tweaks.
paulrouget··on Fly through your shell history
How does it compare to https://atuin.sh/ ?
paulrouget··on Dumbphone Finder
Because I want my phone to be as basic as possible. No notifications, no icons, just plain text menu.

Android can be configured to be so bare that my phone is just a black screen with 5 menu items: music, signal, map, text, phone.

Personal preference.

paulrouget··on Dumbphone Finder
Correct.

I need a small phone that just do basic stuff. But sadly Signal and Spotify are what I consider basic.

paulrouget··on Dumbphone Finder
I tried for years to use these type of phones.

I need Signal… so it had to be an Android phone. I also need a good map app, and Spotify.

I tried many of these phones, and they all had 2 main problems: poor build quality (random shutdown, compass failing, random android bugs), and bad bluetooth, making it impossible to use headphones (I even tried to use wired headphones, but then, there's no wired earbuds with active noise cancelling).

The only phones that were "good enough" were the 4" Unihertz Pocket and the 3" Jelly.

But the bluetooth situation was unbearable (cracking noises, sync issues), and some hardware problems just made me anxious (couldn't rely on the phone to wake up, or going on a hike).

I just ended up getting a Zenfone 8, which is a massive phone, but considered the smallest. It's way too big for me, and does way too many things. But… there's no other options sadly.

paulrouget··on This year in Servo: over 1000 pull requests and beyond
Alright, you don't have to engage. I thought maybe I missed something before my time.

For others and historians :) … some efforts were made I think around 2008 (by Brad L. and/or Mark F. … I don't remember so well). A shortlived GTK widget was attempted at some point.

But this lead to nowhere because… well, it's hard to bend Gecko that way, because, again, Gecko was not designed to be embedded. And also because leadership was not pushing into that direction.

About the "not designed that way", what I mean is this:

We had many abstractions for sure to make it multi-platform (and that was amazing achievement, really) but embedding requires mechanisms to hook the event loop and the rendering pipeline into the embedder, in an agnostic way. Which is the part that was missing in Gecko.

Webkit had a proper, well designed, embedding story.

We didn't.

paulrouget··on This year in Servo: over 1000 pull requests and beyond
I have a very difficult time parsing your words. I'm sorry.

I'm just saying gecko was not embeddable and was never designed to be so. There has been some efforts, and all failed.

As far as I know! … so I'd be happy to be corrected, I'd love to hear more about the history of gecko.

And you seem to know things I don't know, so I'm just asking what you are referring to. Out of curiosity.

> Gecko had, by the time that Servo was conceived, undergone refactoring that knowingly made it more difficult to embed

What kind of refactoring are you talking about?

And back to your original statement:

> Gecko was originally conceived to be embeddable by design

What are you talking about here?

paulrouget··on This year in Servo: over 1000 pull requests and beyond
XULRunner was not Gecko embed. It was Gecko embedding stuff.

There was never a proper embeddable gecko.

There has been an attempt for a gtk widget, but it never matured.

paulrouget··on This year in Servo: over 1000 pull requests and beyond
In the case of Thunderbird and seamonkey, Gecko was not embedded, but was the "embedder".

For a short time, there was some attempts (native cocoa and gtk widget) to embed gecko, but it was really not meant to be, it was really hacky and never matured.

Gecko was never designed to be embedded. Really.

paulrouget··on This year in Servo: over 1000 pull requests and beyond
> Gecko was originally conceived to be embeddable by design

Which part? And… what do you mean by embeddable in that context?

paulrouget··on This year in Servo: over 1000 pull requests and beyond
I was part of Mozilla back then. I think we were already talking about making Gecko embeddable in __2003__.

But then… looot of things happened, other priorities, competition, bad decisions, etc etc.

paulrouget··on Pencil Talk
> Is there an explanation of the shape

Some pencils have this particular flat shape to prevent them from rolling (artists and workers sometimes use inclined desks / surfaces).

paulrouget··on Comets that 'bounce' from planet to planet could spread life across the universe
His potential clues of CCC (the cyclic universe) in the CMB turned out to be incorrect.

So as of now, this theory is not supported by anything.

paulrouget··on Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation
> My personal hope is they push hard on the modularity angle

It is strongly designed that way (the component model and the embed layer).

paulrouget··on UHZ1: NASA telescopes discover record-breaking black hole
If you consider the observable universe as the upper limit and the plank length as the lower limit, we're much closer to the observable universe (10^-35 meters -> 10^27).

One could argue that Plank length is not the most best lower limit.

paulrouget··on Scientists simulate backward time travel using quantum entanglement
Incredible book.

In french it's Les Trous Noirs Et L'Oncle Albert.

I read that book when I was ~14 years old. I can't overstate how incredible that book was. Having a grasp of what special relativity was at that age really made me feel like I could learn anything just by reading the right books. I never stopped reading about astrophysics since then. And I'm now 40+.

paulrouget··on Floorp – A customisable Firefox fork from Japan
It's just that they made it in Japan. No need to overthink it :)
paulrouget··on Archaeologists discover oldest wooden structure
The logs are "joined transversely by an intentionally cut notch".

And I don't think researcher would just confuse bonfire and modified wood :) That's their expertise.

Read the (peer reviewed) research paper. You'll see how serious the research is: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06557-9

paulrouget··on NASA clears the air: No evidence that UFOs are aliens
Then a "dimension" would not be a dimension as defined by math and physics.
paulrouget··on NASA clears the air: No evidence that UFOs are aliens
Dimensions have a strict definition. Under those strict definitions we can draw conclusions that are 100% true. Math tell us things that can't be invalidated in the future.

If it turns out there is "something else", it would not be a dimension as defined by math and physics.

paulrouget··on NASA clears the air: No evidence that UFOs are aliens
Extra dimensions are just scifi stuff. Physics would break appart if there were any "big enough" dimensions. Gravity & electromagnetism would not behave the way they behave (inverse square laws).
paulrouget··on Run a macOS VM on Apple Silicon from a double-click with Vimy
Well there's no easy way to make it work. I need to compile to Intel, not run Intel code. I would need to setup a whole toolchain + homebrew. No idea how to have all of that setup correctly.
Page 1 of 7Next →