Hacker News Reader

Rhapsoon Memory access is O(N^[1/3])

You have to cool memory when it reads or writes, so accessible memory scales with surface area, not volume. O(N^0.5) becomes the new floor.

If it turns out the universe is holographic, then you have the same bound. This might just be enforment of the holographic principle...

Rhapsoon I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

That is wonderful to hear. Thank you for sharing this.

Rhapsoon I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

Assuming this message is in good faith, I appreciate your concern for my mental health.

I appear to have attracted the trolls, which is ok. That happens when you stand up to them. I don't tolerate bullies going ignored. I'm serious, but not as upset as you may be concerned.

Rhapsoon I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

If it is a joke, it seems more like mockery than good humor.

> I understand humor might be too foreign and loose for people on HN but trust me, there was no maliciousness in their comment.

Adding your own mockery doesn't help with my perception of the situation.

Malice isn't required to do harm and it's absence doesn't really change my opinion on the situation.

Rhapsoon Graceful Shutdown in Go: Practical Patterns

And i believe that so much that I don't even consider graceful shutdown in design. Components should be able to safely (and even frequently) hard-crash and so long as a critical percentage of the system is WAI then it shouldn't meaningfully impact the overall system.

The only way to make sure a system can handle components hard crashing, is if hard crashing is a normal thing that happens all the time.

All glory to the chaos monkey!

Rhapsoon Accountability Sinks

Honestly is is just like Insurance. You understand the value of things you are protecting (and simple compliance has a value to you in penalties and liabilities avoided) and make sure it costs more than that to break into your system.

At a corporate level, it is contractually almost identical to insurance, with the product being sold liability for that security, not the security itself.

Rhapsoon We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads [video]

Hey, make an artificial intelligent entity significantly more capable than any individual human, then be surprised you have a goal misalignment with your superagent.

We gave AI legal personhood in the 1800s and we were doomed from there

Rhapsoon TPSV, an Alternative to TSV (and CSV)

The poor delimiter special characters in the ascii table never get any love.

Rhapsoon The Tranhumanist Cult Test

More than that, "singularity" isn't even an exciting term. It is a boundary beyond which the model being used obviously cannot predict behavior.

I personally think the singularity happened back in the 90s and its just been very disappointing instead of the rapture that was imagined.

Rhapsoon People are just as bad as my LLMs

Lower quality is fine economically as long as it has a good enough reduction in cost to match

Rhapsoon Second death reported in growing measles outbreak

As an immunocompromised person who lost measles resistance, this is terrifying.

Vaccines don't only protect you.

I went on an immunosuppressant during covid, i was suposed to re-up MMR beforehand, but we had a major nationwide vaccine shortage at the time (all plants re-tasked to produce covid vaccines) so i couldn't. This doesn't seem a fun way to die. I guess I just mask up and hope.

Rhapsoon Differentiable Logic Cellular Automata

I wish John Conway was still around to comment.

Rhapsoon The Demoralization is just Beginning

Not fungible.

Rhapsoon The Demoralization is just Beginning

Helium? Finite supply that is only going down until we get off planet.

It seems like the actual value of gold is that it is useless, and thus not used up, and all the easy gold is extracted. We could just use numbers instead.

Rhapsoon The Demoralization is just Beginning

With the current communication capacity, "transport" isn't horribly relevant. Free exchange of any currency backing substance would be as bad as bitcoin for fraud. So why bother moving it? Oil changes owners all the time without going anywhere.

Rhapsoon The Demoralization is just Beginning

If you are trying to pin a currency to a standard, gold isn't great. Its value is almost entirely speculative and it lacks meaninful intrinsic value at this point. If you demand to leave fiat currency, an aluminum or steel standard might make more sense. Rare earth metals, or even just petroleum would be my proposal. Maybe someday we will have a duterium pinned currency.

Rhapsoon Ask HN: Best Security Practices for Activists?

https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2025/01/23/activists-...

Is a start.

It gets complicated because we are getting to the point where using signal is itself being seen as probably cause for investigation: https://kmlawfirm.com/2023/02/28/its-not-what-you-say-its-ho... so I encourage everybody who doesn't need such security to use signal anyways, if only to add protection to the vulnerable.

Pay attention when you scan signal QR codes: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/rus...

Rhapsoon Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding

Right, but did they? It being easy doesn't mean data scientists moving fast and breaking things bothered while they were already doing something illegal.

Rhapsoon Declaring a National Energy Emergency

> (a) The term “energy” or “energy resources” means crude oil, natural gas, lease condensates, natural gas liquids, refined petroleum products, uranium, coal, biofuels, geothermal heat, the kinetic movement of flowing water, and critical minerals, as defined by 30 U.S.C. 1606 (a)(3).

They hide the fun stuff at the bottom. Solar and wind don't count!

Rhapsoon Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn't illegal without proof of seeding

Unless they actively modified a bittorrent client, even leeches upload and share some chunks.

Rhapsoon AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

I don't think you made it to the last paragraph either:

> I know many interviewers also didn't get it, and it became just "do you know the trick to my puzzle". That pattern of failure is a good reason to deprecate white board interviews, not "I don't write on a whiteboard when i program in real life".

Rhapsoon AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

Do I? yes. I also teach my students that the goal of an interview is to convince the interviewer you are a good candidate, not to answer the questions correctly. Sometimes they correlate. Give the customer what they need not what they asked for.

Do I see others doing so? sadly no.

I feel like a lot of the replies to my comment didn't read to the end, I agree the implementation is bad. The whiteboard just isn't actually the problem. The interviewers are.

Unless they change mentality to "did this candidate show me the skills i am looking for" instead of "did they solve puzzle" the method doesn't matter.

Rhapsoon AI killed the tech interview. Now what?

Yeah, very bad fit. Surprised they made an offer.

Folks getting mad about whiteboard interviews is a meme at this point. It misses the point. We CANT test you effectively on your programming skillbase. So we test on a more relevant job skill, like can you have a real conversation (with a whiteboard to help) about how to solve the problem.

It isn't that your interviewer knew all the languages, but that the language didn't matter.

I didn't get this until I was giving interviews. The instructions on how to give them are pretty clear. The goal isn't to "solve the puzzle" but instead to demonstrate you can reason about it effectively, communicate your knowledge and communicate as part of problem solving.

I know many interviewers also didn't get it, and it became just "do you know the trick to my puzzle". That pattern of failure is a good reason to deprecate white board interviews, not "I don't write on a whiteboard when i program in real life".

Rhapsoon Reviewing the cryptography used by Signal

With that level of nihilism/skepticism why would paying for the privilege give confidence you are not a product? Only a similar pile of words keeps them from double-dipping and making you both customer and product.

Rhapsoon Reviewing the cryptography used by Signal

I think you missed the point. WhatsApp and Telegram don't offer the safety or security Signal does.

They removed SMS to preserve that safety and security. It isn't a for profit business. We are the ones motivated to help them get adopted. if donations don't correlate with increased users Signal actually can't tolerate growth.

Do whatsapp or telegram have the same models? Can you tell if you are the customer or the product with them?

Rhapsoon Programming with chronic pain

Ironically, chronic pain drove me the other direction.

Programming gave me "I forgot I have a body" levels of engagement with a problem. It was a way to actually find relief from pain. My addiction to programming was very useful in my development.

I was lucky in so many ways. My pain wasn't caused by the kinematics of my body, instead it was a heart condition, cancer, Celiac and Crohn's and I have managed to cure a nontrivial part of it over the years (heart surgery, diet change, immunosuppressants).

Ultimately i do not recommend the "cause yourself so much pain you seek refuge in flow state and become an expert" method. It results in a lot of maladaptive behaviors, damaged relationships and needing a lot of therapy (but also the money to pay for the therapy).

Rhapsoon Reviewing the cryptography used by Signal

I enthusiastically recommend using signal for normal communication. So long as using a private messenger is reserved for "illicit" use cases, that meta information of using it is itself a dangerous to the users.

https://kmlawfirm.com/2023/02/28/its-not-what-you-say-its-ho...

I'll be blunt and say I don't trust governments to "do the right thing" so the only way past this is to normalize using it for all use cases and doing so protects vulnerable people.

Rhapsoon Big tech has disrupted the social contract

It turns put you can generally trust banks... to follow laws!

Rhapsoon Federal data is disappearing. On Thursday, meet the teams working to rescue it

Sure, most Biden/Harris supporters are ultimately "centrists", like most trump supporters. They spend their life struggling to juggle costs of living and responsibilities of adulthood. They participate in a society that demands they use all of their energy physical and cognitive to just survive and they reasonably outsource their judgement regarding larger scale policies and politics to trusted leaders of their community. They then believe and do what those leaders tell them.

The other type of Biden/Harris supporter has the privilege of time and energy to spend examining the situation critically and recognizes them as just supporting further corporate control behind the guise of bureaucracy instead of "strong men". But they vote/evangalize for them anyway because at least they don't actively advocate for harming people out of spite.

Rhapsoon An Anonymous Investor Is Spending Millions to Make Underwater Homes

For me, asteroid belt settlement seems the most useful/reasonable. The motivation is simply that there is so much space for expansion. Space colonization is really just about humans keeping access to exponential population growth. Antarctic and deep sea settlement don't make sense because they offer relatively limited growth potential in comparison. They do make sense as practice/training for the next few thousand years of the average human condition.