roca

76 ms·

811.
by roca 6y ago
To sustain an independent, cutting-edge, competive browser engine you need several hundred excellent engineers working full-time, at least. No-one's been able to do it with less.
812.
by roca 6y ago
There isn't anything in there about "employees publicly speak out". Some board members (not employees) stepped down but IIRC they did not actually speak out and call for Brendan to resign.
813.
by roca 6y ago
He wasn't CEO when he made the donations in 2008, of course. Nor was he CEO when the donations came to light in 2012. Everyone at Mozilla knew about them when he was appointed CEO. > I suspect (based on board members' and Eichs
814.
by roca 6y ago
> if Eich wanted to be a contributor to that cause he could have done so silently. He did not deliberately publicise his donation. It was not publicly known until 2012 when someone dug up the records. > Eich very explicitly brought hi
815.
by roca 6y ago
Mainstream scientists regularly write papers about things they cannot "formally prove". For example here is a Nature paper suggesting, but not proving, that SARS-Cov-2 had a natural origin. https://www.nature.com/a
816.
by roca 6y ago
The conspiracy theory presented in this paper is that mainstream medical journals around the world are "strictly censoring" evidence that COVID19 was developed in a lab.
817.
by roca 6y ago
In the current environment, why would Western scientists be worried about funding issues if they prove the virus was manufactured in a Chinese lab? The US government would probably bombard them with money.
818.
by roca 6y ago
The beam-racing compositor is a cool idea. It seems to me, however, that it could create visible jitter for applications that use traditional vsync-driven frame timing --- e.g. an animation of vertical motion would see a one-frame latency c
819.
by roca 6y ago
I was lucky enough to be at that talk in '98. I distinctly remember the "what the hell is going on" vibe at the start. It felt like a Christopher Nolan movie.
820.
by roca 6y ago
I am not at all sure I want my mind copied. It is very hard to destroy or even contain all copies of information. Thus, I find it very plausible that if a copy of my mind is created, at least one copy will be effectively enslaved or torture
821.
by roca 6y ago
You're implicitly assuming that accepting the Wager means "losing" your one and only life. OK, it depends on your utility function, but most religious and techno Wagers don't require immediate martyrdom.
822.
by roca 6y ago
You seem to be assuming that everyone uses Java or .NET and C++. That seems wrong to me.
823.
by roca 6y ago
I can have cyclic graphs with mutable data without writing any unsafe code: https://docs.rs/petgraph/0.5.1/petgraph/ "Specific buffers/caches" is ambiguous. For embedded systems there are crate
824.
by roca 6y ago
"In the wild" one hardly ever has to write unsafe Rust data structures and algorithms. > If the motivation to bring a new tool is pronounced as "let's make it safe", why should we allow the argument to fallback i
825.
by roca 6y ago
And modern C++ features makes some memory errors more likely, e.g. dangling references from lambda captures and string_view/span. I'm not optimistic about the safety of modern C++. Most people who really care about safety long ago
826.
by roca 6y ago
"Sometimes" and "kind of" are doing a lot of work there. In reality most Rust code hardly ever needs to be unsafe and the existence of unsafe code in libraries you use hardly ever has any impact on the security and s
827.
by roca 6y ago
It is very very easy for self-publishers to publish plain static HTML content on the Web. A good modern solution is Github Pages, but there have always been good solutions for this. Yes, people have gravitated to centralized platforms for v
828.
by roca 6y ago
btrfs supports zero-copy file and block cloning which is very good for some applications, e.g. rr.
829.
by roca 6y ago
This comes up so often I wrote an a blog post explaining why it won't work that I can refer to every time it comes up. Here it is: https://robert.ocallahan.org/2020/05/why-forking-html-into-s...
830.
by roca 6y ago
It's a good article, but in my experience explaining this stuff over and over again in HN and other fora, people don't actually want to know. They have their narrative and they're sticking to it.
831.
by roca 6y ago
None of this logic follows. Paper [0] categorizes bugs in unsafe Rust code. "There will be some bugs in FFI code" does not imply "no benefit to using Rust if there is C++ FFI". Many projects, including Firefox, have foun
832.
by roca 6y ago
If you care about security, it is much easier to write non-exploitable code in Rust than in C++, and you can hire accordingly. Actually, the people who are really experienced at writing secure code in C++ understand that they can't do
833.
by roca 6y ago
> So a lot of mistakes that are used as boogeyman to convince people to use Rust are barely problems you really face. The Chromium team does not believe you. https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/memor
834.
by roca 6y ago
Rust and Swift are not in the same arena as C++ and Zig. The former offer memory safety and the latter don't --- a critical distinction, since the main reason Rust exists is to provide memory safety in contexts where C++ has traditiona
835.
by roca 6y ago
Here we see Mozilla's dilemma: half the Internet calling for Mozilla to focus on Firefox, the other half calling for Mozilla to diversity away from Firefox (which is implicitly what people are calling for when they call for Mozilla to
836.
by roca 6y ago
As a former Mozilla distinguished engineer, this is absolutely correct.
837.
by roca 6y ago
Sorry, yes, you're quite right.
838.
by roca 6y ago
I think the same would be true of LibreOffice for example.
839.
by roca 6y ago
Yes! Rust's error handling story is excellent. You can still swallow errors if you want to but you have to manually write unwrap() so it's much more visible.
840.
by roca 6y ago
For applications like Web browsers the "inner loops" approach to optimization isn't nearly enough. Execution of important benchmarks smears out over huge amounts of code. If executing straight-line code in your favourite lang

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