News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

kragormonkey

Re:Why are conversations limited to about four people? on Wednesday September 12, 2018 @09:43PM (#17975253)
Paper seems paywalled. How are you reading this? Any mirror?
> Any better UI ideas?

Reddit has pre-collapsed comments, which seem reasonable. But that will collapse the whole thread, which is undesirable.

> it practice it attracts attention to the down voted comments.

I'm more interested in the premise of this question.

(a) Is really this true, and backed up by HN-scraping of some sort?

(b) Do we want it to attract less attention? Sometimes they attract insightful replies explaining a common misconception.

In short: what problem are we trying to fix? Has this really reduced the quality of threads by much? By what metric and by how much?

Re:YouTube stars heading for burnout on Sunday September 09, 2018 @11:13PM (#17949161)
I wonder if this is specific to YouTube in any way. E.g., I'd stop visiting xkcd if Randall didn't keep uploading regularly. Most open source projects (including mine) turn into GitHub graveyard because we can't provide even the most basic maintenance and support. Lots of traditional-media pop stars have also famously burnt out.

In general, it is hard work to cultivate a proper institution that spreads out the load and makes this sustainable. And the skill for managing that is never really taught anywhere. Most "lone artists" don't even realize it's needed until it's too late. And that's where most of this frustration stems from. Culturally we focus too much on that one "big break", or the "eureka moment".

Re:Myths about /dev/urandom (2014) on Saturday August 18, 2018 @03:02AM (#17787263)
I don't see how this is political. In that link he presents actual problems that have arisen from non-blocking versions. I'd call that a technical justification.

I don't necessarily agree with his justification, but that's also a difference in technical opinion. The only way I'd fault him is if I can come up with a an approach that addresses his concerns yet he still refuses to accept them.

Full disclosure: I've actually interacted with him on a few occasions. IMO calling him risk/change-averse would be an understatement, which partly explains this stance. While at times frustrating for us, this is exactly the quality you want in someone maintaining such a critical part of the kernel.

Wrapping around sides isn't easy because chips are cut from a single large wafer pretty late in manufacturing. The sides aren't exposed until the end.

Besides, it won't help much. Usually when people want to shrink chips, it's often because shorter links. This means lower latency (ie faster) and lower heat loss. Wrapping or stacking doesn't help those.

Re:How a Hacker Proved Cops Used a Stingray to Find Him on Sunday July 01, 2018 @05:30PM (#17437725)
I thought I was imagining that! If somebody knows a good JavaScript profiler, I might send a screenshot of that to the author. Hopefully they will choose a better outlet next time, or fix the Politico site.
Re:Mozilla Project Fusion: Tor Integration into Firefox on Saturday June 02, 2018 @01:33AM (#17212907)
Do you have any idea why it's unsafe? In theory, public site should even be able to see your IP. How would they blacklist you?

Edit: nvm, found the answer by pricechild below.