AndrewStephens (u/AndrewStephens)

AndrewStephens commented on Cassette tapes are making a comeback? theconversation.com/casse... · Posted by u/devonnull

Cassettes were never the best for audio fidelity but I always really liked the physicality of pushing the play button to move the heads into position. In some ways the inability to easily skip around a recording made listening a different experience than a CD or streaming.

Which is why I wrote a web component[0] that wraps an html audio element in an interface that mimics a (cheap) tape player.

[0] https://sheep.horse/2025/3/a_cassette_audio_control_for_the_...

AndrewStephens commented on Uninitialized garbage on ia64 can be deadly (2004) devblogs.microsoft.com/ol... · Posted by u/HeliumHydride

kragen · 8 days ago

You mean, in 01999? I'd have to see that, because my recollection of that time is that JIT was generally considered unproven (and Java slow). That was 9 years before Chrome shipped the first JavaScript JIT, for example. The only existing commercial products using JIT were Smalltalk implementations like VisualAge, which were also slow. Even HP's "Dynamo" research prototype paper wasn't published until 02000.

Or do you not count Merced as "shipping"?

AndrewStephens · 8 days ago

Wikipedia tells me that Merced shipped in May 2001, which matches my recollection of not actually seeing a manufacturer’s sample until about then. That box was the largest computer I had ever seen and had so many fans it sounded like an engine. It was also significantly slower than the cheap x86 clones we had on own desks at running general purpose software.

JIT compilation was available before but became the default in Java1.3, released a year earlier to incredible hype.

Source: I was there, man.

AndrewStephens commented on Uninitialized garbage on ia64 can be deadly (2004) devblogs.microsoft.com/ol... · Posted by u/HeliumHydride

kragen · 8 days ago

That is not what happened.

EPIC development at HP started in 01989, and the Intel collaboration was publicly announced in 01994. The planned ship date for Merced, the first Itanic, was 01998, and it was first floorplanned in 01996, the year Java was announced. Merced finally taped out in July 01999, three months after the first JIT option for the JVM shipped. Nobody was assuming that JIT compiled languages were going to dominate the new century at that time, although there were some promising signs from Self and Strongtalk that maybe they could be half as fast as C.

AndrewStephens · 8 days ago

By the time IA-64 actually got close to shipping Intel was certainly talking about JIT being a factor in its success. At least that was mentioned in the marketing guff they were putting out.

AndrewStephens commented on Uninitialized garbage on ia64 can be deadly (2004) devblogs.microsoft.com/ol... · Posted by u/HeliumHydride

Joker_vD · 8 days ago

Raymond Chen has a whole "Introduction to IA-64" series of posts on his blog, by the way. It's such an unconventional ISA that I am baffled that Intel seriously thought they would've been able to persuade anyone to switch to it from x86: it's very poorly suited for general-purpose computations. Number crunching, sure, but anything more freeform, and you stare at the specs and wonder how the hell the designers supposed this thing to be programmed and used.

AndrewStephens · 8 days ago

I remember when IA-64 was going to be the next big thing and being utterly baffled when the instruction set was made public. Even if you could somehow ship code that efficiently used the weird instruction bundles, there was no indication that future IA-64 CPUs would have the same limits for instruction grouping.

It did make a tiny bit of sense at the time. Java was ascendant and I think Intel assumed that JIT compiled languages were going to dominate the new century and that a really good compiler could unlock performance. It was not to be.

AndrewStephens commented on Datacenters in space aren't going to work taranis.ie/datacenters-in... · Posted by u/mindracer

mbesto · 16 days ago

Datacenters in space is about circumventing nation states masked as ambitions to generate more power.

Follow the rationale:

1. Nation states ultimately control three key infrastructure pieces required to run data centers (a) land (protected by sovereign armed forces) (b) internet / internet infra (c) electricity. If crypto ever became a legitimate threat, nation states could simply seize any one of or all these three and basically negate any use of crypto.

2. So, if you have data centers that no longer rely on power derived from a nation state, land controller by a nation state or connectivity provided by the nation state's cabling infra, then you can always access your currency and assets.

AndrewStephens · 16 days ago

This is the only "advantage" I can see with space-based datacenters. Crypto will remain a joke but putting devices beyond the reach of ground-based jurisdictions is a libertarian dream. It will probably fail - you still need plenty of ground infrastructure.

AndrewStephens commented on Ask HN: What is the purpose of all these AI spam comments? · Posted by u/GaryBluto

AndrewStephens · 17 days ago

If there is one thing I have learned in my years in the internet it’s that there is no minimum reward below which people won’t bother to be dicks.

Farming karma on HN to boost stories seems the most likeliest reason for this - an enterprise which would maybe net 3 figures in advertising dollars. But also it could just be someone wasting everyone’s time for fun - who knows?

AndrewStephens commented on Space: 1999 – Special Effects Techniques catacombs.space1999.net/m... · Posted by u/exvi

nocchedure · 20 days ago

I think Space: 1999's greatest achievement was its design. The whole aesthetic, from Alpha's styling to the clothing, is simply gorgeous, and easily surpasses the visuals of many series that followed.

That, and the funky theme, of course.

AndrewStephens · 20 days ago

I strongly agree.

The actual plots of Space1999 were pretty laughable but I don’t think the production design has ever been beaten, even it today’s shows. The sets and vehicles look fully functional, even the clothes look perfectly wearable despite being very 70s. Contrast this with Star Trek, with weird consoles and uniforms that look uncomfortable.

The theme is, of course, beyond reproach. I like to imagine the producers couldn’t decide between epic sci-fi chords, funk, and jangly surf guitar so the composer just said screw it and did all three.

AndrewStephens commented on The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting kevinboone.me/fingerprint... · Posted by u/ingve

beeflet · 23 days ago

People have been hacking on this "if" for a while, and I suspect we will break through to the other side eventually, probably by the end of the decade. The problem is really just that cryptocurrencies like monero want to minimize their use of scripting, because transactions with scripts are a heuristic that can be used to de-anonymize you. But payment channels require some sort of timelock, in bitcoin this is done with HTLC script.

There have been a number of proposals, I think the oldest is DLSAG: https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/595.pdf There are other ones based on time-lock puzzles, but those have always been kinda crappy.

It may be possible with some ZK magic I'm unfamiliar with. But the core of the problem is that we need to find a way to make a transaction valid but only after a certain block height, and make it so that validators can't learn any specific heuristics about the transaction (like what the block height is exactly).

>But my point is that even if a magical technical solution existed tomorrow then the same sites that collect data for ads would continue to do so for the much more valuable data on paying users.

Sure, but after the micropayments revolution there will also be a change in the types of sites people use, enabled by the new form of monetization. You could rely more on people posting things like videos to their personal blogs and interlinking them instead of having to shack up with one of the few sites large enough to support ad-funded monetization. The internet would have a basic spam-resistance function, so it would be less reliant on the existing players to gatekeep (for example, email, forum moderators, etc).

I think it would be more competitive. Let's say you have a site like twitter that says "now that there are micropayments, we will charge you 1 cent per pageview AND force you to login and collect your data", well then you will have a competitor like xcancel.com which can charge 2 cents per pageview and not require login. The market would decide what the best model is. Right now proxy sites like xcancel have to do it for free. Even if they wanted to run ads, the ad market isn't competitive in the same sense because it is more profitable for larger players.

I think you mention in your blogpost that no one would want to support micropayments because of piracy. I consider this a massive advantage of the micropayment system. It's pro-piracy by default. If you look at the origins of ad-funded sites like youtube, they started out as hubs of (light) piracy. The content of social media sites should be pirated and mirrored: they are just getting rich off of network effects in the first place. If you combine micropayments with some sort of bittorrent-like system, this could be very powerful. Imagine a decentralized archive site, where you take advantage of TLS to archive a verifiably timestamped version of a page, and anyone else can send you money that is conditional on you providing them a copy of that archive in return.

Micropayments don't fund the development of new intellectual work, but they let you recoup the cost of bandwidth. He who does not host, also does not earn. If you want to fund the development of new work, I think you need patronage. We are already seeing this with a lot of videographers from youtube depending mostly on sites like patreon and donations from dedicated fans. In a micropayments world, you wouldn't have sites like patreon taking a cut. Aside from just having ~0.1c micropayments-per-pageview, you could have very easy p2p "mini-payments" on the order of ~$1 in exchange for donation rewards.

With less money in the annoying ads economy, google and others would have less power to alter the web standards to their whim, and we could claw back features that enable fingerprinting. I don't know, that is just my dream.

AndrewStephens · 22 days ago

Thank you for your lengthy reply but I still disagree. Both the technical problems and non-technical problems seem intractable to me. If cryptocurrency was going to fix this it would have done so by now.

> I think you mention in your blogpost that no one would want to support micropayments because of piracy. I consider this a massive advantage of the micropayment system. It's pro-piracy by default

If I am selling my content at 5 cents a page, what stops somebody cloning my page and selling it for 4 cents? What stops Google from summarizing my content, discouraging people from clicking through to my site? Is Google even allowed to spider my site if I charge for it, and what stops them if not?

That is the type of piracy I was talking about and I think it is just one of the many serious fundamental problems micropayments have.

AndrewStephens commented on The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting kevinboone.me/fingerprint... · Posted by u/ingve

beeflet · 23 days ago

I think it is a technical problem. If you could integrate payment channels on top of private cryptocurrencies that would be enough. Even without the lightning network and just direct 1-to-1 payment channels, it would work.

The article you lists assumes a "conventional" credit card system with chargebacks, massive fees, etc. which makes micropayments ecosystem impractical in the first place. Proposals for micro-payment systems usually describe a way top enable low-fee payments.

The author doesn't take into account modern cryptocurrency tech like payment channels. I really doubt that payments have a natural fixed floor of 10s of cents - Payment providers charge these fees simply because they are in a natural monopoly position, thanks to lock-in and regulation. The need to control fraud is caused by regulatory requirements, which are in turn caused by monopolization.

Despite being technologically less efficient, even traditional cryptocurrency payments are cheaper than bank transfer fees due to competition and low regulation.

Secondly, you assume that no one wants to do micropayments. The infrastructure doesn't exist for it yet. If you don't build it, they will not come.

As for browser fingerprinting, it can be solved on the client side with enough effort. Look at tor browser. Just have a system where cookies, WebGL, etc. are opt in on a browser level in the same way that WebUSB is. Artificially limit the performance of javascript to prevent bench-marking. I think it is possible to solve this architecturally.

Check it out!

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Payment_channels

https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf

Also, there are GNU Taler/Chaumian cash type systems that inherit the efficiency of centralized systems with an added privacy benefit.

AndrewStephens · 23 days ago

> If you could integrate payment channels on top of private cryptocurrencies that would be enough.

That “if” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

But my point is that even if a magical technical solution existed tomorrow then the same sites that collect data for ads would continue to do so for the much more valuable data on paying users.

AndrewStephens commented on The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting kevinboone.me/fingerprint... · Posted by u/ingve

notatoad · 24 days ago

The PPV model has been tried a bunch of times, and it always turns out that the rate people are willing to pay per view is not a rate that is high enough to be a viable revenue source for the content owners.

it takes a lot of $0.10-$0.25 views to make up for the loss of a $5/month recurring revenue stream that might last for years.

AndrewStephens · 24 days ago

I wrote about this exact problem last year. To anyone who disagrees, would you pay me 5 cents to click on the following link?

https://sheep.horse/2024/11/on_micropayments.html