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rdwon AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

False dichotomy. There is a third alternative: a non-abusive advertising model takes over the industry.

It's certainly plausible. All pre-internet advertising avoided tracking of individuals. There exist even now advertising agencies that cannot possibly serve up malware to their customers. Arguably Google achieved its great success by being a less-abusive advertising platform in its day.

rdwon How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

There's a huge additional burden on the customer to select the right device, do special steps on purchase to remove the manufacturer's crapware, avoid mucking up the internals by installing the wrong software.

If you value your time at zero, and there have definitely been times in my life where I have, then this is a fine tradeoff to make. But I think a lot of the busy professionals who are bemoaning the touch bar aren't thinking about how they'll spend a few weekends trying different driver versions, or that they'll miss out on an important deliverable because their computer restarted itself in the middle of uploading the file. Externalities!

rdwon How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

It's an SSD. I suspect there's some sort of middleware that's scanning every file, like antivirus or something. That kinda thing adds up quickly.

rdwon AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

AdBlock Plus is already doing this: https://adblockplus.org/acceptable-ads

It might just lead to escalation, it has so far. The point is there is a plausible way forward. It's the story of countless industries, just because it hasn't happened yet for this one doesn't mean it won't ever.

rdwon AdNauseam: Fight Back Against Advertising Networks and Privacy Abuse

It creates opportunity for disruption. The established players see their costs go up and effectiveness go down. A new player comes in who has non-obtrusive ads, and sees outsized success. Everyone else either dies off or fast-follows.

I'm curious how The Deck is doing these days, seemed like they could have been that player.

rdwon How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists

I think a lot of Mac users are forgetting how awful the Windows ecosystem still is. One gets used to everything mostly working and think that that's how it is on the other side, too.

Meanwhile, one guy I know bought a new Windows laptop to replace his flaky older one. On the new computer, audio doesn't work. Programs load slowly (~10 minutes to start up software that takes 10 seconds for me). It turned out the flakiness of the old laptop wasn't its age or power, it was the software. Lots of folks have stories like this. There's still a huge amount of uncertainty in that world.

rdwon Small payments sharply diminish gap in responses to partisan factual questions

This is not really true in California, at least, where we've voted ourselves a bunch of tax increases via the proposition system.

rdwon Ask HN: If you use keybase.io regularly, for what do you primarily use it?

Sharing secrets with remote co-workers. It's easy enough to use that I can expect pretty much anyone to be able to figure it out in real-time.

rdwon The TRIBES Engine Networking Model (2009) [pdf]

https://github.com/lidgren/lidgren-network-gen3

This is a very mature library. Supports Unity despite not having an asset store package.

It's got the same sort of channels/reliability model that enet and RakNet have, just implemented in C#.

rdwon The case against native engines

I've done a bit of game development for the Web. Unless things have changed very recently, a major performance bottleneck is draw calls. It feels a lot more like a mobile platform (< 100 draw calls) than a desktop platform (1000 draw calls). Unfortunately, it's quite an effort to reduce draw calls without making graphics compromises, curious how well Construct 2 does there.

If you have the data, I'm curious to know what proportion of games are fillrate bound vs draw call bound vs cpu bound.

rdwon Web Credits Spec

Is it just me or does JSON-LD's use of urls as keys feel very XML/SOAP-Y?

rdwon Nxweb – Fast and Lightweight Web Server

Took me a bit of searching to figure out the 200/121 numbers. The answer: "first measurement is for inprocess handler, second is for inworker handler"

rdwon Amazon has no idea how to run an app store

Apple has tools to see whether your app is loading external content and modifying itself, though. I think you can deceive them by making it seem as though it does so in an allowed manner (e.g. no code execution) during review, but they'll definitely know that your app has the theoretical capability.

rdwon Swift: Commonly Rejected Changes

That's a ternary, not an if expression.

rdwon How Eye Tracking Will Change Gaming

I have an eyeX and the precision is not as high as a mouse. I don't think it can ever be, the eye is just not that controlled itself.

Having low latency from the device seems even more important to me.

rdwon Can Cinder, the World's Most Precise Griddle, Replace Sous-Vide?

Sous-vide is better for some dishes because the temperature is controlled, and generally low. If you want a rare steak, the temperature should be 120 F (http://www.seriouseats.com/2015/06/food-lab-complete-guide-t...). A pressure cooker, because it relies on steam, will always cook above 212 F. That's awesome for a lot of dishes (chili! http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/pressure-cook...), but for many meat preparations it's overcooking.

One dish that I have directly compared sous-vide against more traditional techniques is pork shoulder. My "traditional" technique is oven-cooking, a process that takes 6 hours at 325 F. In sous-vide, the shoulder takes longer, more like 24-72 hours, but the temperature is lower, 135 F (http://sousvidely.com/sous-vide-pulled-pork/). Also, it's in a bag. The sous-vide version is better in many ways -- it's got more juice and color and tastes fresher -- and it's way easier because I don't have to turn and baste it every 2 hours.

But yeah, I don't love the consumables of sous-vide. I reuse bags and water whenever I can.

rdwon Can Cinder, the World's Most Precise Griddle, Replace Sous-Vide?

http://www.seriouseats.com/2015/08/the-food-lab-complete-gui...

http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2010/02/the-best-buffalo-...

This one made the news when it came out, because it's totally fun and great:

http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2010/05/the-burger-lab-h...

rdwon Can Cinder, the World's Most Precise Griddle, Replace Sous-Vide?

Not enough new tech involved! Consider getting a Searzall to solve that problem: http://www.bookeranddax.com/searzall/

rdwon Oculus Rift

It does but this is because you can't easily wear glasses under the devkit.

rdwon How We Moved Our API From Ruby to Go

This is totally a great explanation, thanks! This sort of thing is why I hate working on platforms (but also why it's so in-demand).

rdwon How We Moved Our API From Ruby to Go

This bit jumped out at me: "200 API servers ... to serve 3000 requests per second". That's only 15 RPS per server. Is that normal for Rails?

rdwon Meet Improbable, the Startup Building the World's Most Powerful Simulations

Can anyone explain to me what it actually is? Everything I've read about it is through this sort of know-nothing journalistic filter.

They often focus on the "kill a monster and it stays dead" angle, so that seems like a real aspect of the system, but it's not an advance. Other companies have aimed at this "persistent virtual world-building toolkit" target before, from Second Life to Blue Mars to Metaverse to Metaplace. What distinguishes Improbable from these other ideas?

rdwon OpsDash Self-hosted server and service monitoring

Interesting! Does it come with source?

rdwon Starting today, wireless carriers have to unlock your phone

It has not been that easy, in my experience.

Apple did not sell an unlocked iPhone 6 until last month, and I think they may have done the same locked-only-for-a-few-months thing with the 5s. I don't recall seeing earlier iPhones for sale unlocked at all, you had to do something illegal to them up till surprisingly recently -- maybe the 4, not sure?

I think the legislation is responsible for the easier access these days; I've wanted to buy unlocked phones since 2005, but haven't really been able to until this year.

rdwon “Why does a car like the Tesla still have old-style fuses?”

On top of this, mechanical circuit breakers would have vibration issues when mounted in a moving vehicle. If it's too vibration-resistant, it might not trigger under overcurrent conditions. If it's not vibration-resistant enough, the car flakily breaks on bumpy roads.

Solid-state circuit breakers do exist, and would solve the vibration problem, but some quick Googling didn't turn up anything that looked at all inexpensive.

rdwon Tobii and SteelSeries Release Consumer Eye Tracker

It has a depth limit, as well. It's truly a 2x2x2 cube. In my current setup, I can lean forward quite a bit, till the monitor is a little too close for comfort, but I cannot lean back at all. In playing with it, I've noticed that there's sometimes a bit of latency in the edge detection; I'll lean back, do some eye-ing for a second or two and then all of a sudden it cuts off. It gives me the impression that they're not actually enforcing a cube per se, but that their technique has increasing error rates outside of a sweet spot, and they have an errors-over-time cutoff.

I have a lot of sympathy for the difficulties in the implementation. The eye moves only a tiny amount, so you need a high-resolution camera to detect where it's looking with any accuracy (this is why they require USB 3). If the camera is already pushing the limits of inexpensive consumer camera technology, you can't easily expand its field of view without compromising accuracy.

Here's a paper that talks briefly about the technology: http://www.tobii.com/eye-tracking-research/global/library/wh...

rdwon Tobii and SteelSeries Release Consumer Eye Tracker

I have an EyeX. The eye tracking is very effective -- spookily so. Imprecise but low-latency, which is the right tradeoff to make. It can be faster than mousing, if the UI is set up just right.

The main limitations that keep me from using it:

- Mac is not supported.

- Very small active area. You basically have to keep your head within about a 2x2 foot cube. You can't lean back, on an armrest, or even slump.

rdwon Allocators in Rust

I was curious about Rust's support for within-application custom allocators, it looks like this is still under discussion: https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/244

rdwon Box acquires MedXT

MedXT is YC 2013.

Congratulations to Reshma and Cody, they've been working extremely hard on producing a very impressive product.

rdwon Printing Lenses on the Form 1+ 3D Printer

Very impressive stuff, but looking at the models raises a question in my mind. Why do the parts look like they have about an inch of supporting, sprue-like structure beneath them? Wouldn't it be better to have them be closer to the surface so as little material is wasted in the supports as possible?