Hacker News: jstanley

New comment by jstanley in "Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin"

jstanley — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 07:25:31 +0000

The extension can declare which websites it can access, but the other commenter was looking for the ability for the user to declare which websites it can access.

New comment by jstanley in "Dear people who work at the airport"

jstanley — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 18:30:02 +0000

Easy to fear what you merely imagine.

Did you know that for train and bus travel in the UK bags are not scanned? And we don't have people bombing trains and buses all the time.

Some museums look in bags and some don't and I'm not sure there's a statistically significant difference in how frequently they get bombed.

New comment by jstanley in "Principia Mathematica is modern and insightful"

jstanley — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 07:21:51 +0000

What hasn't aged well? I don't think any of it is dated to any particular time period.

New comment by jstanley in "London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces"

jstanley — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 06:22:29 +0000

Do you even have crackheads in London? I was familiar with "crackhead" only as an American concept.

New comment by jstanley in "50k Boat Names"

jstanley — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:09:30 +0000

There are 101 boats called freedom but they're all the same boat because they're not de-duplicated.

UK charities count the cost of Beacon CRM cyberattack

jstanley — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 14:06:28 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/08/05/uk-charities-count-the-cost-of-beacon-crm-cyberattack/5283305

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49221943

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by jstanley in "U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, a sudden reversal"

jstanley — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:43:45 +0000

> The numbers are as good as they can get

That doesn't mean they don't warrant error bars.

Error bars aren't there to show that you didn't do a good job collecting the data, they're there to show your level of uncertainty.

New comment by jstanley in "Iowa-led states ask OpenAI to keep their bots on a leash"

jstanley — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 09:20:14 +0000

You think you would be better off if the industrial revolution were stopped in its tracks?

New comment by jstanley in "Iowa-led states ask OpenAI to keep their bots on a leash"

jstanley — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 12:59:46 +0000

Because nobody did it on purpose?

New comment by jstanley in "Decades-old fish sauce at abandoned factory in Canada finally being removed"

jstanley — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 15:53:21 +0000

Do you have an encyclopedic knowledge of which terms are regulated and which ones aren't?

Don't you think it would cause more confusion if people expecting to buy a Jamaican beef patty instead have to buy a "Jamaican beef-inside-pastry product" ?

New comment by jstanley in "Clockwise/Spiral Rule (1994)"

jstanley — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 18:26:20 +0000

I can get behind deliberately misspelling as "genious" when using it sarcastically.

New comment by jstanley in "The C ``Clockwise/Spiral Rule''"

jstanley — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 18:25:52 +0000

Oops, my mistake!

New comment by jstanley in "Clockwise/Spiral Rule (1994)"

jstanley — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 17:58:33 +0000

> How do you make an std::array of a given type?

std::array isn't a thing in C, so you don't.

New comment by jstanley in "The Maxwell Conjecture Is False (GPT 5.6 Sol)"

jstanley — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 15:52:18 +0000

We call a proof that is not tautological "wrong".

New comment by jstanley in "The Religion of Speed"

jstanley — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 11:15:34 +0000

> * measurements, when executed correctly, are objective with numeric evidence, thus some people are wholly incapable of measuring things for the same reasons some people cannot introspect

I don't understand what you're trying to say. What are the reasons some people can't introspect? Is it even true that some people can't introspect?

New comment by jstanley in "Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude"

jstanley — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 11:01:08 +0000

> You already correct yourself and revise your speech in an append-only rolling edit.

No, I think before I speak and say what I planned to say. What do you do, sir?

New comment by jstanley in "Show HN: How far do I have to go to run into 100k people?"

jstanley — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 21:07:29 +0000

Doesn't work outside the US sadly.

New comment by jstanley in "Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude"

jstanley — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 19:40:09 +0000

It's so bizarre to me that people want to do this.

Can't you type faster than you speak? Doesn't your speaking inhibit your thinking? Aren't you self-conscious talking out loud? How are our experiences so different?

New comment by jstanley in "How Unix spell ran in 64 kB of RAM (2025)"

jstanley — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 10:18:31 +0000

> giving each hash function it’s own bit table is equivalent to having one bit table with a number of bits equal to that of the sum of the numbers of bits in each hash function.

This is incorrect, although I also initially had the same incorrect intuition, see my (downvoted) comment in the same thread.

By way of illustration: imagine the limit case where you have the same number of bits as hash functions, so there's only 1 bit per hash function. If you have a separate table for each hash function then every input hashes to the same thing so all inputs are indistinguishable.

But if you put all hash functions in the same table that has a number of bits equal to the number of hash functions, then each hash function only sets 1 bit chosen at random based on the input, instead of always setting the same one.

New comment by jstanley in "How Unix spell ran in 64 kB of RAM (2025)"

jstanley — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 10:30:42 +0000

Seems to me that as long as the total number of bits is the same it makes no difference whether each hash function has a separate table or not.

EDIT: Although, https://chatgpt.com/share/6a67336b-8600-83ed-9671-fab769b485... - it is in fact ever so slightly less effective if you have a separate table for each hash function

EDIT2: In the limit, if the number of hash functions equals the number of bits, then we can see that inserting one element would set all bits in the case where we use separate tables, but only 50% of bits if they use one big shared table.

So the false positive rate is higher if they use separate tables.