HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

gred

1,417 karma · joined October 3, 2013

submissionscomments
gred··on CPNG, a backwards compatible fork of PNG
It's a Java system, so not quite so simple. Maybe it's worthwhile to create some Java bindings? Recent JDKs make it feasible to swap out the underlying zlib implementation, so swapping out zlib-madler with zlib-cloudflare or zlib-ng might provide the best cost/benefit.
gred··on We don't have official RSS feed support for now, but we're working on a solution
My first quick scan of your comment gave me the impression that you were sarcastically asking for the date bug to be replicated in the new system for "backwards compatibility" purposes. Glad to see, upon reviewing, that I was wrong :-)
gred··on Air traffic controllers pushed to the brink
$132k is great pay. You get to retire at 56 with a nice federal retirement package, plus an extra supplement to top things up until you are eligible for social security (which you're not initially, since you get to retire so damn early). Is it a hard job? Certainly. But I'm sure a significant number of retail jobs are nearly as stressful. And the union has your back, making sure you get a decent number of decently-sized breaks, overtime pay for overtime work, etc.
gred··on CPNG, a backwards compatible fork of PNG
> these days, generating or decoding PNGs is the bottleneck almost nowhere

Anecdotal, but I'm familiar with a system which spends ~50% of CPU cycles on PNG encoding (most of which is actually spent in zlib compression).

The other approaches I've seen involve creating performance-focused forks of zlib (e.g. zlib-chromium and zlib-cloudflare). This has benefits beyond PNG encode / decode:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/improving-zlib-cloud...

gred··on Air traffic controllers pushed to the brink
> Pay is not attractive

That's not my impression at all, based on discussions with FAA employees.

From a quick online search:

> ATC 2022 median pay: $132,250 per year

https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/a...

gred··on No new boss at NSA until it answers questions on buying location, browsing data
My guess is that this will probably require a Constitutional Amendment to shore up the fourth amendment (call it 4A++).
gred··on Custom Events in the Blocky World: Using JFR in Minecraft
> Monitoring invocations of a REST API

Yep, we use custom JFR events to track API calls and correlate them to other built-in JFR events and statistics (garbage collection, memory use, allocations, CPU use, deadlocks, etc).

gred··on Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers
I suppose it's the last little fig leaf being blown away (by the combined blast of two thousand NVIDIA Tesla A100 cooling fans).
gred··on Ubuntu squeezes more performance than Windows 11 on new AMD Zen 4 Threadripper
Interesting thought, but you might be missing the hardware perspective. I switched from Windows to Linux this year, and the biggest issue has been drivers and hardware compatibility: audio available via headphones but not (laptop) built-in speakers, occasional display issues depending on the monitor setup, occasional WiFi issues. If hardware innovation stopped, Linux could catch up easily... but it won't, so there is a constant driver treadmill that manufacturers mostly handle for MS on the Windows side, but Linux has to handle somewhat alone. Perhaps the manufacturers will start to help out more and more on the Linux side too, as more users demand compatibility.
gred··on Roman coins discovered in the waters of Sardinia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_(Roman_coin)
gred··on 2023 Hugo Awards
I think that's the context, though. Going back as far as a decade ago, the Hugo Awards were leaning "inclusive". There were some reactionary campaigns. Regardless, the trend has continued. Not everybody is happy about it, and not everybody sees a Hugo Award as a reliable indicator of quality these days.
gred··on 2023 Hugo Awards
https://gizmodo.com/the-hugo-awards-were-always-political-no...

https://www.npr.org/2015/08/26/434644645/how-the-sad-puppies...

gred··on Ask HN: What outdated tech are you still using and are perfectly happy with?
HTTP 1.1
gred··on Detroit wants to be the first big American city to tax land value
I hope they do try it. If they do, one of two thing will happen. Either it will fail dramatically, in which case the LVT muppets can finally shut up about it... or it will succeed, all of our cities will migrate to this new utopian taxation scheme, and the LVT muppets can finally shut up about it.
gred··on Covid has broken the social contract between parents and schools
This article is UK-centric, but something similar is happening in the US: https://fortune.com/2023/08/11/school-chronic-absence-record...

Test results also show significant decline in the US: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-pandemic-has-had-deva...

My wife and I had just started sending our daughters to public schools when the pandemic hit (kindergarten and pre-k). We were excited about some of the special programs available in our school district. But the public schools handled the pandemic so much worse than many of the private schools, some of which stayed in-person throughout the pandemic, sending students home in clusters of just 6 to 12 when someone got sick... when nearby public school districts were closing down entire districts at a time on the strength of a single student's illness. We moved our girls to a private school that stayed in-person, and I don't think we're coming back anytime soon. We're pretty happy where we are, and I expect that public schools will need to spend significant resources managing their social and academic pandemic fallout, leaving less time for students who have not (yet) fallen behind.

gred··on Ohio Prison System Bans Java Computer Manual, but Allows Hitler’s Mein Kampf
The only thing beyond the pail is the mop.
gred··on 53% of parents say climate change affects their decision to have more kids
This gives me and my descendants a competitive advantage!
gred··on That people produce HTML with string templates is telling us something
It's not just HTML -- same thing for SQL, JSON, XML. Java is doing some interesting work in this area: https://openjdk.org/jeps/430
gred··on When will global warming hit the landmark 1.5 ºC limit?
Thanks! As mentioned in a sibling response, I think I'm in the "invent our way out of it" camp, but even here there are the both top-down approaches (e.g. geo-engineering) and the bottom-up approaches (residential solar, commercial solutions which do not rely on government subsidy), and I hope that we can find successful bottom-up approaches... mainly because bottom-up approaches conserve individual agency while top-down approaches are more likely to be used as political and civil cudgels against the majority of the population.
gred··on When will global warming hit the landmark 1.5 ºC limit?
Thanks for the reference. I watched some of his Joe Rogan episode to get a sense of his thesis, and it sounds like he's hoping for either litigation or a popular opinion shift to open the door to government intervention (taxes or policy) which significantly alters the incentives around emissions. He seems to mix realism (acknowledging that there are probably deeper desires at play, not just societal or governmental conventions) and wishful thinking (government policy as climate deus ex machina, countries imposing their climate agendas on other countries via war within 30 years). I suppose I belong to what he calls the "invent our way out of it" school of thought... also possibly very naive!
gred··on Severance payments at Wikimedia Foundation
Hire PHBs, win PHB prizes.
gred··on When will global warming hit the landmark 1.5 ºC limit?
Are there any environmentalist schools of thought which accept human nature for what it is, make pessimistic (realistic?) assumptions about the (un)likelihood of global coordination on this topic, and use that as a starting point for research, modeling and recommendations? So much of what makes its way into politics and mainstream media on this topic seems to be naive pipe dreams, mindless posturing, or political opportunism. The scientists seem to often make the same mistake.
gred··on Io uring
This made me chuckle, as part of the cohort described above. I read your comment, thought to myself "what on earth is he talking about? there's nobody on my radar who might fit that bill", checked the name, and immediately thought "oh yeah, that guy." :-) I'm not on Facebook, so I haven't seen any of those stories though.
gred··on SQLite 3.42.0
> Enhance the JSON SQL functions to support JSON5 extensions

Wait, what's JSON5??

> Object keys may be unquoted identifiers.

> Objects may have a single trailing comma.

> Arrays may have a single trailing comma.

> Strings may be single quoted.

> Strings may span multiple lines by escaping new line characters.

> Strings may include new character escapes.

> Numbers may be hexadecimal.

> Numbers may have a leading or trailing decimal point.

> Numbers may be "Infinity", "-Infinity", and "NaN".

> Numbers may begin with an explicit plus sign.

> Single (//...) and multi-line (/.../) comments are allowed.

> Additional white space characters are allowed.

Oh crap, the levees have broken!

gred··on TS to JSDoc Conversion
It always makes me chuckle when a bunch of non-contributors come out of the woodwork to provide their opinion on a change which will affect them not at all.
gred··on Ask HN: Paychecks from a failed startup?
For what it's worth, I "took the loss" in a similar situation. The owner put everything he had into the business, it legitimately failed, and I didn't want to kick him while he was down. My financial situation was such that it didn't hurt me too badly. I could imagine pushing harder if the situation had been different, either on my end or on his.
gred··on Red Hat layoffs spark calls to unionize, CEO wades in
Yeah, I think I'm happy with outsized rewards for outsized contributions.

You guys feel free to spend time worrying about how to split the pie equitably, I'll be over here making more pie (and demanding a share).

gred··on SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas
Yeah, a few weeks ago they launched two in just one day. "Dozens", indeed :-)
gred··on Microsoft tests Windows account menu error badge when Microsoft Account not used
It's all the little things. I just set up my first Linux / Windows dual boot laptop to ease my way out of Windows, but my day 1 experience with Linux involved disabling IPv6 so that I could get onto WiFi + internet, disabling the HiDPI daemon so that my screen resolution changes would persist across restarts, and wearing headphones most of the day because the laptop's external speakers don't work out of the box. The Apple-like "everything-included" model might work well for desktop Linux, but the Windows-like "BYO everything" model is still quite rough... and I don't see that changing because it's mostly hardware / driver-related, and there's a constant churn of new devices, chips and accessories.
gred··on uBlock Origin 1.48 adds readiness status, code viewer, and other fixes
var internetExperience = uBO ? Experience.NICE : Experience.DIE_A_LITTLE_INSIDE;

var internetSafety = -10;

internetSafety += windows ? -5 : 3;

internetSafety += uBO ? 4 : -9;

internetSafety += uMatrix ? 13 : -99;

← PreviousPage 6 of 12Next →