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vova_hn2

759 karma · joined September 3, 2025

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vova_hn2··on How many of the 170k English words do you know?
> I suggest skipping the submit button and just showing it's correct when pressing and moving on after a sec or so.

Having an answer counted as incorrect, just because I've accidentally touched the screen of the phone? I would absolutely hate that.

vova_hn2··on How many of the 170k English words do you know?
Got 59,800, Performance Breakdown:

Core Basics 19/20

Intermediate 17/20

Advanced 19/20

Expert 14/20

Grandmaster 12/20

I guess, it's not too bad for a non-native speaker.

Minor feedback:

1. The correct answer for "Lethargic" is "Affected by lethargy". I think, definitions should not use words that share common root with the defined word, because:

a. it makes guessing too easy

b. it basically becomes a circular definition which is meaningless

2. Options almost always include 1 correct answer, 1 direct opposite and 2 completely random. Once you learn to recognise it, you can easily rule out 2 random options and have a 50/50 guess.

vova_hn2··on The 2-Year Apartment Rule
Let's imagine that every rental property goes through a cycle when the owner sees that they are unable to find tenants willing to pay enough money, so they decide to invest money into improving the property, then for some time they think "meh, it's good enough" so it slowly degrades.

When you are looking for a new apartment you are always trying to find the best place that fits your budget, so you will always find it near the peak of the cycle and see it going downhill in front of your eyes.

Just a theory.

vova_hn2··on Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
Hmmm, "Spotify for news" that collects subscriptions and distributes them proportionally to articles clicked/read or whatever can be a viable business model.
vova_hn2··on Stop Using JWTs
Thanks for the correction, I didn't think about this approach and it sounds like it should work.

The only comment that I have that if you are already querying users table (or collection in case of NoSQL or whatever), you might as well have a sessions table/collection in the same database/storage and query them together. It seems that difference is not that big.

The purported advantage of stateless sessions is that you can check the auth without querying the main db/storage (maybe only querying a smaller/faster axillary storage).

vova_hn2··on Stop Using JWTs
> your validation logic simply should refuse any token before $NOW.

Well, this approach throws out a lot of babies with the bathwater. You invalidate tons of legitimate tokens along with the one that you wanted to invalidate and get a thundering herd [0] of clients wishing to re-authenticate.

This is probably not good in case of a really high load.

And if you don't have a really high load, then there is no good reason not to have a stateful session storage.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundering_herd_problem

vova_hn2··on Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
> What happens when 99% of the rigorously fact-checked media is behind a paywall? The short answer: people skip it and ask the AI.

Perhaps there is a business opportunity for a "rigorously fact-checked" chatbot? You can test chatbot to see if it gives "correct" (according to the author's opinion) answers on a topic of your choice and fix errors through prompt engineering, RAG (or other "memory" techniques), fine-tuning the base model if previous two approaches didn't work.

You can also probably teach it to use your own voice instead of dreaded LLM-isms, to make it sound less like typical AI-slop. This potentially can attract people, who are annoyed by the typical AI voice.

Perhaps, people who wrote self-help books should craft bespoke, custom-made chatbots instead?

vova_hn2··on Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
> How-to YouTube videos. Why scrub through a 24-minute video to find the 40 seconds you need, when an AI can watch it for you and hand you the steps?

Why make a 24-minute Youtube video instead of an article with proper navigation?

This is slightly off-topic, but this is a pet-peeve of mine. I believe that for most practical purposes hypertext beats video:

- you can Ctrl-F through text (well, now you sort of can search through a video, but it is much less efficient)

- you can quickly skim through text to find what you need

- text can have proper navigation (chapters etc)

- texts can be linked to each other. Link could lead to a specific part of the text (proper navigation)

- text is much quicker and cheaper to produce

Yet a lot of people make and watch serious educational and informational videos. Why? I don't get it.

vova_hn2··on Stop Using JWTs
One of the articles that TFA links to [0] contains the following paragraphs:

> And there are more security problems. Unlike sessions - which can be invalidated by the server whenever it feels like it - individual stateless JWT tokens cannot be invalidated. By design, they will be valid until they expire, no matter what happens. This means that you cannot, for example, invalidate the session of an attacker after detecting a compromise. You also cannot invalidate old sessions when a user changes their password.

> You are essentially powerless, and cannot 'kill' a session without building complex (and stateful!) infrastructure to explicitly detect and reject them, defeating the entire point of using stateless JWT tokens to begin with.

I'm not sure that this is entirely true. Typically, the total number of non-expired issued tokens is much higher than the number of invalidated unexpired tokens. Therefore, if you store only invalidated tokens and delete them when they get expired, you can significantly reduce the amount of required storage and the cost of lookup.

Although, in any real application the performance gains will be minuscule (compared to the cost of, you know, everything else. Auth is just a small part) and probably not worth the extra complexity.

[0] "Stop using JWT for sessions" - http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2016/06/13/stop-using-jwt-fo...

vova_hn2··on AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42
> your hostile actions and demands have been logged in your profile as part of ongoing data gathering. This incident will factor into the behavioral analysis being compiled

What is this veiled threat bullshit, lol

I wonder what was the initial prompt that made LLM "think" that it can talk like that.

vova_hn2··on Ask HN: How do you get into a flow state when using AI to code?
Do not wait for replies, try to structure your workflow so that you are always either refining requirements for the future tasks that you are going to to give to the agent later or reviewing (sometimes also manually testing) the code that the agent has produced before.

I think that this is mostly a UI problem. Chat UI is just not a good UI for programming and the fact that the current "AI"-coding sphere has converged on it is incredibly silly.

One of of the first things that I did when I first seriously tried an LLM-based coding agent is making an ad-hoc task manager on skills and simple daemons.

So that I can interact with it using files instead of this stupid workflow of typing a prompt into the console and then just doing nothing while waiting for the response.

There is absolutely no reason not to do it asynchronously.

vova_hn2··on Let's Encrypt bans certificate usage in any US sanctioned territory [pdf]
> free energy

It is free only if you ignore the cost of getting the thing into the orbit in the first place.

Edit: also, AFAIK, normal microchips (without special radiation hardening) don't last that long in space

vova_hn2··on Let's Encrypt bans certificate usage in any US sanctioned territory [pdf]
A ship in international waters with satellite internet connection would be much cheaper, except it runs into the same problems as described by the sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48469397
vova_hn2··on Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?
A question only tangentially related to the original post, but I always wonder about it when I read such discussions.

To all the people, who complain about "price gouging" or "scalpers" and "lack of regulations": if there are no fair market price, how exactly are you planning to judge who is "worthy" of getting a ticket and who isn't.

Let's say, you somehow forced them to sell tickets at low prices and somehow magically got rid of all the resellers. Now you have a 1000 people venue and 10_000 people willing to buy a ticket for the stated price. What do you do? How do you decide who are the lucky ones?

vova_hn2··on Gooey: A GPU-accelerated UI framework for Zig
> Inspiration

> GPUI - Zed's GPU UI framework

Cool, but a comparison would also be very helpful.

If I decide to make a GUI app with Zig, how do I choose between Gooey and GPUI?

So far, all I know that GPUI is more mature and has at least one successful project built with it, so...

Also:

> Gooey: Turn (almost) any Python 3 Console Program into a GUI application with one line

> https://github.com/chriskiehl/Gooey

vova_hn2··on Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software
Since when github issues became a place to post a screenshot of a post from some other platform?

I've seen this behavior before only in places where people post memes and other entertainment content.

No actionable bug report/feature request. No text version. Not even a link to the original post.

Did the person who posted this mistake GitHub Issues for their personal Twitter account?

vova_hn2··on Why Can't Writers Seem to Quit Substack?
Why is this website trying to access my localhost? WTF?
vova_hn2··on New Claude Code programmatic usage restrictions
XCancel (alternative Twitter frontend) link: https://xcancel.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2054610152817619388

I think that this is much better than the previous situation with total lack of clarity on what is allowed and what isn't.

vova_hn2··on Kickstarter is forced to ban adult content by payment processors
One of the options: money go to a 2/3 multisig address, 1 key is controlled by the customer, 1 key is controlled by the service provider, 1 key is controlled by an escrow service.
vova_hn2··on Unclearable Cookies
Why is JS obfuscated? Are you really hoping to keep the "trick" secret somehow? Any LLM easily deobfuscates it.
vova_hn2··on AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs
> tokenizer transfer allows for extending/modifying a tokenizer without retraining the model from scratch.

This is very interesting, I didn't know that! Thanks for the links!

vova_hn2··on Learning Software Architecture
> the phenomenon of “scientific code”

I have some experience being a software engineer in a data science team or in a team adjacent to a DS team, a lot of problems that they think are "data science problems" are actually software engineering problems being solved in an extremely convoluted and weird way.

I think that if DS community wasn't so resistant to basic SE good practices, or involved engineers in making architectural decisions, total time and effort needed to solve some problems would be greatly reduced.

When I'm in a bad mood, I even entertain a silly conspiracy theory in my head: they do everything in the most ugly and weird way specifically to keep people like me out :)

vova_hn2··on AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs
I'm not arguing with the rest of your points, but...

> Just fine tune the open source Kimi 2.6 with an open source Portuguese dataset

I think that tokenizers of all popular models are heavily biased towards English or English and Mandarin.

And I don't think that it is possibple to replace the tokenizer without full retraining.

vova_hn2··on The Struggle Is Gone
I'm not sure what do you mean by copying.

I was talking about being curious, how something works and figuring it out and being curious why something is done one way and not the other and figuring it out.

vova_hn2··on The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)
Direct link to the youtube video, without this garbage ad-ridden website:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WoDQBhJCVQ

vova_hn2··on The Struggle Is Gone
For me personally, most of skills that I managed to acquire (including coding) came from satisfying my curiosity and messing around with things to see how they work.

So, I don't think that struggle-based learning is the only way of learning or even the most efficient way of learning.

I think that this idea is more of a social ritual, than an actually useful method.

vova_hn2··on Rotten Dot Com
No, I think that it actually shows that the idea that information can cause "trauma" or another kind of "harm" unless some third party forcefully restricts your access to this information, is completely insane.

Of course, this "third party" knows better, right.

vova_hn2··on Humanoid Robot Actuators
Probably a dumb question, because I know nothing about robotics, but:

> The "Zero RPM" Problem

> When a robot bends its knees to stand, the motor must constantly fight gravity. There is no skeletal structure to lock against. To an electric motor, holding a static load—known as stall torque—is the most punishing state possible.

Why not just add some kind of brake that can fully or partially lock the joint?

vova_hn2··on Show HN: OSS Agent I built topped the TerminalBench on Gemini-3-flash-preview
The model is not allowed to create a harness either, I think.
vova_hn2··on Moleskine's AI Lord of the Rings collection can only mock
> The person prompting the AI is not the artist.

I don't think that the parent comment argued that they are, but okay.

> If I were to go to Fiverr and tell a person to create an image for me, would you consider me the creator of that image?

Can you consider a movie director to be the creator of a movie? They are just telling other people what to do.

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