Hacker News: ajb

New comment by ajb in "Samsung running a TensorFlow lite model on 960x540 image to track you"

ajb — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 13:34:19 +0000

If your building or other construction is unsafe for the public, the local authority has the right to make it safe, if necessary by demolishing it; if you are insufficiently responsive to a notice that you must make it safe. Maybe tech companies need that kind of incentive before they will care enough not to subject their customers to this kind of abuse.

Daddy long-legs–a weird and wonderful railway

ajb — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 09:20:03 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.railwaymuseum.org.uk/daddy-long-legs-a-weird-and-wonderful-railway/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50219508

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by ajb in "UUIDv7: Timestamps aren’t time-ordered and other oddities"

ajb — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 20:40:35 +0000

Yeah this is what pick-up "artists" call a "neg" - a negative judgement made purely so the recipient feels, at some level, that their credibility is on the line. In this case, for clickbait. I always either don't read such an article or come here to read the comments instead.

New comment by ajb in "Using Claude to reduce the attack surface of code"

ajb — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 08:36:00 +0000

There's a lot of lobbying against open models on the grounds of a) China and b) open models mean we won't be able to prevent a hard takeoff.

New comment by ajb in "A 'Ludicrously Ugly' Bridge Is Exhibit a That Britain Has Lost Its Mojo"

ajb — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 00:05:15 +0000

It's " a major element of a £237m scheme to upgrade Oxford rail station". Most likely it is more expensive than it should be, but not to that extent

New comment by ajb in "Woman who rescued injured crow keeps getting 'thank-you gifts' from birds [video]"

ajb — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 06:45:52 +0000

Well, it has been shown that birds have twice the density of neurons to mammals, and their brain is larger as a proportion of body mass: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517131113

So their brain can be equivalent to a much larger primate.

New comment by ajb in "Woman who rescued injured crow keeps getting 'thank-you gifts' from birds [video]"

ajb — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 06:36:18 +0000

This makes the assumption that crows can identify people only by the face. It's quite likely they could recognise something else.

New comment by ajb in "Janas: Run LLMs larger than RAM by streaming experts from SSD"

ajb — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 16:34:53 +0000

Well, it's not my field, but pci5.0 x4 drives are the fastest I found with a quick Google. So 24 of those would top out at ~400 GB/s. That's also where HBF starts out, for one device. The higher grades are faster, but maybe NVMe will be as fast by the time they are out.

But the win here on servers is almost certainly power. High speed signals are power hungry, and the power scales with the length of the wire. HBF is designed to go in the same package as the GPU, so the distance is much shorter than with discrete drives.

New comment by ajb in "Hittite royal archive found in Turkey"

ajb — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 12:56:06 +0000

"Another notable document is a letter from Hittite generals in western Anatolia appealing to the king for reinforcements in men, horses and chariots to fend off enemy forces. "

I had assumed they had to wait for clay to dry before it could be carried anywhere, which seems incompatible with using them for urgent military messages. I wonder if there was a way to transport them while soft, or if this was just the archival copy of a message sent by other means.

New comment by ajb in "Janas: Run LLMs larger than RAM by streaming experts from SSD"

ajb — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 01:59:45 +0000

When High Bandwidth Flash comes out, most likely: https://chipsandcheese.com/p/hot-chips-2026-applying-high-ba...

New comment by ajb in "“Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more holistically"

ajb — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 21:19:04 +0000

One of the few mathematicians not fazed by all this is Doron Zeilberger, who has given his computer (which he names Salosh B Ekhad) co-author status since 1990. He is a bit of a contrarian, but a serious mathematician. He co-invented/discovered Wilf-Zeilberger pairs. Some of his opinions:

On the Leiden declaration: https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/Opinion196.html

On proof: https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/Opinion174.html

New comment by ajb in "House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k"

ajb — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:55:44 +0000

Hmm having said that, the nearest borehole record shows chalk doesn't start until 26 feet down: https://api.bgs.ac.uk/sobi-scans/v1/borehole/scans/items/423... Before that it's sand, gravel, etc. Odd. Record from 1896, but it won't have changed.

New comment by ajb in "House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k"

ajb — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 15:18:57 +0000

That's because London is on clay. The Reading guy was mostly on chalk (and was himself an engineer). It sounds like the water table was a long way down as well. Soft clay or waterlogged sand are more like digging a hole in a bowl of custard. There are a lot of things that can go wrong - in the case of clay, even if you don't collapse the hole the clay can expand for years afterwards ("heave").

New comment by ajb in "All I wanted was a custom domain email"

ajb — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 08:45:18 +0000

Interesting. TBH surprisingly few accounts require you to actually send from the same email; mostly they use various mechanisms based on what they sent - a URL, or ticket ID in the subject, or in the from address, etc. I have not actually yet run out of aliases in the standard proton account, but I'll bear in mind that they have simplemail too.

New comment by ajb in "All I wanted was a custom domain email"

ajb — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 08:39:57 +0000

Yes, I was referring to their doc here: https://migadu.com/procon/#no-mailbox-2fa-yet

New comment by ajb in "All I wanted was a custom domain email"

ajb — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 22:40:57 +0000

Protonmail doesn't have unlimited addresses for sending, which is one of his requirements. It has catch-all , which means you can receive from an arbitary number, so it's okay for one -email-per-vendor, but if you ever need to send via one of those addresses then you have to use up one of your 10 or 20 allowed addresses.

This is because like most other vendors, they do price discrimination based on number of users. Which is no doubt why the other large vendors were also ruled out.

One vendor who doesn't do this is Migadu. I don't use them as they lack 2FA support, but they are one of a small number of businesses who make their proposition easy to evaluate quickly, as opposed to making you swipe through a pitch before you get to the facts. This is so unusual that I remember them despite evaluating them multiple years ago.

New comment by ajb in " prevents me from logging into Vanguard"

ajb — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 23:48:21 +0000

There's an inherent insularity to security groups or fraud teams; they have to have a professional suspicion of everything. This can go wrong and end up being NIH or gratuitously customer-unfriendly.

Also, for finance specifically : " A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him." - Keynes

New comment by ajb in "NASA asked several former SR-71A staffers to help secret restart"

ajb — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 07:57:28 +0000

I guess I'm the past, rulers old enough for that also usually collected enough other health issues to be largely inactive. I can think of a few cases where countries had to wait a year or so for the old ruler to die, but not another case where they were still active while demented. Maybe Ivan the terrible? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_the_Terrible_and_His_Son_...

New comment by ajb in "Sustainable energy without the hot air (2008)"

ajb — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 16:50:42 +0000

Oh, very interesting. Not sure it's working correctly though: set everything to ambition level 4, which takes us to net zero minus 4. Then, the following knobs have no effect: efficiency, nuclear power, carbon intensity, solar (!) and wave & tidal. That can't be true, so I think it's buggy

New comment by ajb in "Booted up in 1993, this server still runs – but not for much longer (2017)"

ajb — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 09:42:23 +0000

Great story! Was expecting it to be Bernie Madoff's, not Sears lol