HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

wrren

559 karma · joined May 4, 2015

submissionscomments
wrren··on Omarchy Is Not A Distro
We seem to have arrived at a set of assumptions that states that if a large number of people like something that we don’t, or don’t subscribe to some cultural norms that we doggedly adhere to, then there has to be something sinister afoot.

The out of box experience with Omarchy is highly functional, aesthetically pleasing and challenges users to lean more on keyboard shortcuts than they’d typically be used to. That’s clever because once you’re whizzing around with these shortcuts you feel accomplished, productive, and that generates loyalty towards the distro.

None of this is a bad thing, anything that makes Linux more accessible and interesting is good. Bucking trends that were making Linux harder to adopt or less culturally relevant is good too.

wrren··on America Lost the Mandate of Heaven
To be fair, losing your job in America is a lot scarier than in most countries; especially when your whole industry is affected and your skill set has become obsolete. There’s not much of a social safety net to catch you.
wrren··on How much Anthropic and Cursor spend on Amazon Web Services
They have their own models, the Nova series, although my experience has been pretty mixed with them.
wrren··on How Figma’s multiplayer technology works (2019)
Elixir's Phoenix LiveView + PubSub covers a lot of these bases out of the box.
wrren··on AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected
AI companies are hugely motivated to show beyond-human levels of intelligence in their models, even if it means flubbing the numbers. If they manage to capture the news cycle for a bit, it's a boost to confidence in their products and maybe their share price if they're public. The articles showing that these advances are largely junk aren't backed by corporate marketing budgets or the desires of the investor class like the original announcements were.
wrren··on How Riot Games is fighting the war against video game hackers
You don't need a driver to read that kind of data anyway, so your concerns are moot. Once you install any application on your PC, there's not a lot that it can't access.
wrren··on A story on home server security
I’d recommend using something like Tailscale for these use cases and general access, there’s no need to expose services to the internet much of the time.
wrren··on Trump wins presidency for second time
You forget that America is the cause of many countries’ problems, see the Middle East and South America for prime examples.
wrren··on Steam games will need to disclose kernel-level anti-cheat on store pages
That's an incredibly naive perspective. KLA represents a real risk to companies, as something going wrong can crash player computers instead of just game processes; this is a PR nightmare if/when it happens on a large scale. Not to mention the cost of hiring engineers capable of building kernel components in the first place, it's a niche skillset that's not cheap to hire for.

Games companies don't turn to KLA out of laziness, it's out of absolute necessity, especially for games like FPS' where it's impossible to fully secure the game using pure server-side methods. Machine learning has been tried, it's too prone to false positives and misses more subtle cheats that still negativel impact the the player experience. Anti-Cheat used to exist purely in user mode and then, guess what?, cheats moved into the kernel where they couldn't be detected or stopped. Anti-cheat had to follow in order to remain effective.

The alternative was conceding the space to cheaters and watching games that players love, and that required massive resources to develop and maintain, degenerate into a hellscape of cheating that real players refuse to play.

wrren··on US prosecutors recommend Justice Department criminally charge Boeing
I don’t think millionaires losing some money is sufficient punishment for hundreds of lives lost. What’s so crazy about prosecuting individuals?
wrren··on Intel Brags of $152B in Stock Buybacks. Why Does It Need an $8B Subsidy?
It doesn't need it, it wants it in exchange for setting up fabrication capacity in the U.S, where it would otherwise be uneconomical to do so.
wrren··on Microsoft, OpenAI sued for ChatGPT 'privacy violations'
In this case I think it's a little different. People are saying that they don't want to have their own productive or creative output used to undermine their own standard of living. That's not the same as simply not wanting to have your job automated away by someone else's business innovation.
wrren··on Elizabeth Holmes ordered to pay $452M restitution
Well, yes. But I'd say that the direct harm caused by her particular brand of fraud, combined with how utterly ham-fisted it was, also plays a part.
wrren··on Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
I'd consider myself to be one of these developers. I don't blog, I don't Tweet, and my public GH contributions are sparse at best. I'm a fairly senior engineer in a large company. What bothers me about this post is the idea that I must be lagging behind on using the newest technologies just because I don't Tweet about it?

Conferences, in my experience, are mostly a waste of time. I can usually watch the keynotes online after the fact if I care to. I'm not interested in joining discussion groups and posting; like the vast majority of people, I'm content to lurk, but I'm not blind!

So yeah, I'd be very comfortable challenging a light-visible developer on pushing/using new technology and generally being aware of the landscape. I just don't care to talk about it constantly.

wrren··on Rate The Landlord: Anonymously share information with tenants like you
It's depressing how poor most of the ratings are. Landlords really don't have to put any effort in at all.
wrren··on Valve bans 40k Dota 2 accounts using honeypot patch
VAC probably sets up a hardware breakpoint conditioned to trigger when the start of that memory region is read. When triggered, a function registered via AddVectoredExceptionHandler will be called. It probably just sets some flag somewhere indicating that the memory region was accessed before resuming flow. You can guard entire pages of memory using a similar approach (https://dzone.com/articles/memory-access-breakpoint-large).
wrren··on I turned down $500k, pissed off my investors, and shut down my startup (2016)
I wouldn’t consider those things to be a waste of time at all…
wrren··on When you get locked out of your Google account, what do you do? (2021)
This is one reason why I decided to switch to ProtonMail a couple of years ago as the account backing most of my internet services.

Given that I pay them money, I figure they’re at least somewhat invested in keeping me happy as a customer. Google clearly don’t give a shit.

wrren··on Heresy
Your conflating harming people with causing them anger is very much part of the problem. 'Harm' used to mean something much more severe; now it basically means anything at or above pissing someone off.

The same concept creep has occurred when it comes to the word 'violence' too. As a society, we long ago drew red lines at behaviours that are violent or harm people, but thanks to these deliberate redefinitions, extreme responses are somehow justified to utterly non-consequential speech, because people accept that speech can cause 'harm' or is 'violent'.

It's such a cheap rhetorical trick that does nothing but chill public discourse while doing nothing to positively impact the lives of the people it's ostensibly supposed to protect.

wrren··on HTTP Feeds
I like this idea, however I think the event ID being encoded in the response body places constraints on what each element looks like. Perhaps it would make more sense to encode the last ID/feed position in a response header and have the client submit that in a subsequent request header? That would decouple the feed position from any one element or the response structure itself.
wrren··on AWS us-east-1 outage
Looks like their health check logic also sucks, just like mine.
wrren··on ChaosDB Explained: Azure's Cosmos DB Vulnerability Walkthrough
Not a great comparison. A researcher does not work for a company, a researcher is basically a mercenary; they'll go where the money is. If a company pays too little relative to its peers, or fails to pay out too often due to fine-print in the T&Cs, researchers will go elsewhere. That's a serious loss for Microsoft given the kinds of vulnerabilities and their impact that a researcher can find if they're focusing on your platform.
wrren··on Senior developers are leading the great resignation movement
I appreciate the effort that goes into articles like this, but they always seem to be based on the unproven hypotheses of the author. I'd appreciate more it if authors would reach out to the community via, say, LinkedIn and survey developers on their seniority and reasons for resigning, then building an article around those results.
wrren··on Generate Elixir/Phoenix Boilerplate
That’s really not what it is. Live View is a replacement for most of what you can do with JS, but isn’t great for everything. The browser connects to the server via web socket and a process is started to manage the DOM state. Diffs are sent to the browser in response to various events such as clicks on elements or PubSub broadcasts.
wrren··on Microsoft admits to signing rootkit malware in supply-chain fiasco
Literally no part of this comment is true. They’re not hidden and they’re not malicious.

They’re also very much required, because a user mode anti-cheat is trivially circumvented by a kernel mode cheat. The only way to defeat cheats is to wage continuous war with them, adapting to their tactics and stamping them out. It’s like collecting trash; trash will keep accumulating, your goal is to keep homes and streets clean in spite of that.

wrren··on “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”
Key Performance Indicator. The implication is that some Huawei engineers are rewarded for contributing to the kernel.
wrren··on Sorry everybody, I failed with you
I feel sympathy for the maintainer here, but at the same time I feel as though they've cultivated a very unhealthy relationship with the users of this project. If the users aren't paying you, you really don't owe them anything and you certainly don't need to apologise for prioritizing your own mental health and happiness over users' demands.

It's a different story if you're being paid to do some work, then you hold a degree of responsibility, demarcated by contract, for the thing you're working on. In the case of open source, however, that's not the case and it's absolutely your right to minimise or drop your support for a project at any time.

wrren··on Facebook faces ‘devastating’ EU-to-US data transfer ban
The difference is that, as an E.U citizen, the governments and agencies that might access this data, along with the laws that allow for that access, are ultimately accountable to me and my fellow citizens. If my data is transferred to the U.S, I have no ability to influence how it's used at all, I effectively have no rights.
wrren··on Discord's new UX design is harmful to the visually impaired and colorblind
Harm now means 'negative to any extent'.
wrren··on My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community
This guy sounds like a practiced predator, he ought to be in jail.
Page 1 of 3Next →