Hacker News Reader

overthrowon Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads

If you compress data, it will be smaller and require less i/o to load, so it will load faster. That's ESPECIALLY true on HDDs, but even on SSDs there are decompression algos that run faster than SSD bandwidth. The uncompressed asset cargo cult is hurting everyone who plays their games, no matter what kind of disk they use.

overthrowon Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads

That can be solved on first load with a texture cache. Shader caches are pretty universal at this point. Texture caches aren't (afaik), but I think they should be.

overthrowon Tech bosses are letting dictators censor what Americans see

Certain groups? I think everyone in government, in all parties, would oppose that education - because their own propaganda would become less effective too. Do you think those in power would ever go out of their way to help people learn about gerrymandering, ranked choice voting, or the pitfalls of a two-party system?

overthrowon Standoff over 95-year-old judge shows downside of lifetime jobs

In case you didn't click through, the wikipedia article has a whole section about the US.

overthrowon Standoff over 95-year-old judge shows downside of lifetime jobs

Here's your vocabulary word of the day:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerontocracy

A gerontocracy is a form of oligarchical rule in which an entity is ruled by leaders who are significantly older than most of the adult population.

overthrowon Almost three quarters of the golden age of Hollywood has been lost

> And what of that stuff is worth a rewatch or considered culturally significant?

In some cases you won't know until decades later, when one of those videos becomes "lost media" and people start looking for it.

That's why, as long as people are willing to buy hard drives to store everything, we should let them save as much as they want for the future. Because you never know.

overthrowon Astral

I worked on a 50k-100k loc python codebase where the linters took a full minute to run if you deleted your cache. And I did try to optimize it. I wouldn't be surprised if that's normal.

overthrowon Astral

Sentry had a natural path into cloud services because error monitoring has a server-side component to it.

Serious question, what is the path for a linter? Where else are people paying for linting as a service?

overthrowon Microsoft plugging more ads into Windows 11 Start Menu

https://react-etc.net/entry/microsoft-office-rewrite-to-reac...

> Microsoft Office rewrite in React.js nears completion

Seems like even Microsoft is hedging their bets when it comes to Windows.

overthrowon Coinbase CEO: we're preparing to go to court with the U.S. SEC

Your quotation is not what he said. Here's the full paragraph from the original source:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/02/gary-gensler-on-meet...

> “Everything other than bitcoin,” Gensler told me, “you can find a website, you can find a group of entrepreneurs, they might set up their legal entities in a tax haven offshore, they might have a foundation, they might lawyer it up to try to arbitrage and make it hard jurisdictionally or so forth.” In other words, there are people behind these cryptocurrencies using a variety of complex and legally opaque mechanisms, but at the most basic level, they are trying to promote their tokens and entice investors. (Bitcoin, because of its unique history and creation story, is fundamentally different from other crypto projects in this respect.)

overthrowon Coinbase CEO: we're preparing to go to court with the U.S. SEC

Gensler has publicly said “everything other than Bitcoin” is a security.

https://cryptoslate.com/sec-chair-gensler-confirms-everythin...

Is that not a clear enough answer? I'm not saying Coinbase has to agree - but there's no way they didn't know he said this.

overthrowon Coinbase CEO: we're preparing to go to court with the U.S. SEC

Gensler has publicly said “everything other than Bitcoin” is a security.

https://cryptoslate.com/sec-chair-gensler-confirms-everythin...

I'm not saying Coinbase has to agree with that decision, but it's a little silly they're posturing to the public like they're unaware. It's not exactly a secret.

If they disagree then going to court is probably their only move.

overthrowon Samsung considers moving to Bing as default search engine

I think the smarter move would be to integrate GPT-4 into Bixby. That's what finally got me to use Bing... it could probably get people to use Bixby too.

overthrowon iOS 17 will reportedly set the stage for sideloading apps on iPhone

If Meta pulled from the official app store, their install rate would go to 0 overnight. And a third-party developer would quickly swoop in and take over the #1 search result for the word "Facebook" (plenty of such apps already exist), so oblivious users would still end up ahead.

Sure they could offer a sideloadable app on their website somewhere, but nobody will find it or use it. If your grandma searches for facebook and the top result says "Friendly for Facebook" instead of just "Facebook", do you really think she'll notice the difference let alone go on a wild goose chase of googling for alternative app stores and clicking through scary warnings?

overthrowon iOS 17 will reportedly set the stage for sideloading apps on iPhone

You're dreading giving other people the freedom to make one choice, and yourself the freedom to make a different choice (yours being the default option from the factory btw), and everyone gets the privacy/control tradeoff they want?

overthrowon US savers get savvy ditching and switching banks

> "It's a competitive market," Jeremy Barnum, chief financial officer of JPMorgan Chase told investors on Friday, as the firm reported that average deposits had fallen 8% from a year ago.

Meanwhile:

https://www.chase.com/personal/savings/savings-account/inter...

0.01% interest rate

They're still better off keeping rates low and shafting the 92% of customers who stayed behind. I think too many people are permanently un-savvy for the market to ever truly be competitive.

overthrowon Stop Building Closed Ecosystems

What would you say is state of the art for Rust-native text rendering on the web?

I'm aware of ab_glyph, used by e.g. https://www.egui.rs/ but it looks noticeably non-native to my eyes. For one there seems to be no hinting. So text ends up blurry at 96dpi, and since a glyph stroke is thinner than a pixel the text always appears slightly faded, never able to reach fully black or white.

I wish these libraries would just use native APIs on each platform to render text, then all these problems would already be solved by the OS/browser. Though I'm not sure if the web has good APIs for that.

Maybe there's something better in Rust these days that I missed?

overthrowon Valve Restricts Accounts of 2500 Users Who Marked a Negative Game Review Useful

Does Windows Defender not flag stuff like that as malware and immediately remove it? Seems like it should.

Once upon a time Microsoft wasn't afraid to stand up to corporate-sponsored malware. https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-will-wipe-sonys-root...

I guess that's changed?

overthrowon ESA’s Juice lifts off on quest to discover secrets of Jupiter’s icy moons

Your question got me curious so I did some googling.

The current international agreement is (best I can tell) UNITED NATlONS: GENERAL ASSEMBLY RESOLUTION AND PRINCIPLES RELEVANT TO THE USE OF NUCLEAR POWER SOURCES IN OUTER SPACE [December 14, 1992]

https://csps.aerospace.org/sites/default/files/2021-08/Princ...

I only skimmed, but it says this:

> In order to mlnlmlze the quantity of radioactLve materzal in space and the risks Involved, the use of nuclear power sources in outer space shall be restrxcted to those space mLssions which cannot be operated by non-nuclear energy sources in a reasonable way.

and

> (a) Nuclear reactors may be operated: (i) On interplanetary missions; (ii) In sufficiently high orbits as defined in paragraph 2 (h); (iii) In low-Earth orbits if they are stored in sufficiently high orbits after the operational part of their mission.

So it seems like nuclear reactors are restricted, but not completely banned. For an interplanetary mission to Jupiter, it would probably be allowed.

overthrowon Could Ice Cream Possibly Be Good for You?

What a great idea, somehow I never even considered it. Any recommendations? Otherwise I know what I'm researching this weekend!

overthrowon Could Ice Cream Possibly Be Good for You?

I'd probably eat a lot more ice cream if it had maybe 20% the amount of sugar. Every so often I buy a pint and immediately regret it. It just gives me an uncomfortable sugar rush. I guess I'm getting old.

overthrowon Joe Rogan Issues Warning After AI-Generated Version of His Podcast Surfaces

That is really well done. The only thing that gives it away (to my ears at least) is it's missing the trademark stutter/repeating words.

(Not hating on Rogan, just listen to any real clip and you'll see what I mean, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvswhogSiY0)

EDIT: I listened longer and the AI actually is throwing in some "uhh"s and pauses. They don't sound completely naturally but it's still really impressive

overthrowon We achieved a 6-fold increase in Podman startup speed

The liability excuse is a lie told to you by companies trying to increase their profits.

Who is liable if you tweak the software on your 2023 Mercedes? The same person who is liable if you tweak the hardware on your 1987 Chevy. There's plenty of precedent on how to deal with this.

overthrowon East Asian character emojis ㊗ 🈶 🈯 🈳 (2016)

🆗

overthrowon The U.S. cracked a $3.4B crypto heist and Bitcoin’s anonymity

Yep, nobody cares if you have money unless you spend it.

overthrowon The U.S. cracked a $3.4B crypto heist and Bitcoin’s anonymity

Bitcoin chose a certain set of tradeoffs, and other coins choose differently. It has its advantages. There's no need to project such negativity onto other projects for making different design choices.

overthrowon A systematic critique of Bitcoin's value proposition

Seizing overseas fabs to attack a private industry would be a historically unprecedented, diplomatically suicidal move. It wouldn't stay secret for more than an hour, and they'd have to stay and operate the fabs for years to manufacture enough chips. Then of course while that's happening, the rest of us would use that time to prepare a mitigation, not sit around on our ass for 5 years waiting.

But sure, I guess they could try.

overthrowon FTX stored private keys to crypto assets in plaintext, without access controls

You're pushing the jeans analogy a little further than I intended. Every analogy has its limits.

Is it a security? A commodity? I don't know! But neither does the US government. The CFTC and SEC are fighting a turf war. The CFTC calls them commodities. The SEC calls (most of) them securities. The IRS has created a brand new category called "digital assets". Who is right? If the government can't tell you, I sure can't.

I can infer there must be some legal justification for the current treatment. Even if you think Coinbase is playing fast and loose with the law, the old school players like Fidelity also don't charge sales tax on bitcoin, and I guarantee you they're not going to risk their core business over crypto. I am curious now how their lawyers would answer some of your questions.

Anyways it's been an interesting conversation, thanks for sticking around after the thread died. You've given me some stuff to think about.

overthrowon A systematic critique of Bitcoin's value proposition

> a law appropriating tens of billions to create a crypto deterrent would crash prices on its own

Doubt that. All that would happen is driving the industry underground or overseas. It wouldn't be the first time a government overplayed its hand and failed to acknowledge that bitcoin is a global technology.

https://data.nasdaq.com/data/BCHAIN/HRATE-bitcoin-hash-rate

That isn't slowing down. I have exactly 0 faith that governments across the world could start from scratch and cooperate to outpace and then surpass the private sector in a chip fabrication project, no matter how many billions they throw at it.

overthrowon A systematic critique of Bitcoin's value proposition

Sounds a lot like VTSAX. But somehow people still buy food and shelter even though they could put their money in VTSAX instead and get 7% returns.

Either way less spending sounds good to me. We could use a world with more saving and less consumerism.